Chomsky on Classical Liberalism, Freedom, & Democracy

begin by saying something about liberalism which is a very complicated concept I think it's correct surely that liberalism grew up in the intellectual environment of the empiricism and the rejection of authority and Trust in the evidence of the senses and so on however liberalism has undergone a very complex evolution it has a social philosophy over the years if we go back to the classic sort was what I regard as a classic say for example Humboldt limits of state action which inspired Mill and as a true libertarian liberal classic if like the world that Humboldt was considering which was partially an imaginary world but the world for which he was developing this political philosophy was a post feudal but pre capitalist world that it was a work it was a world in which there is no great divergence among individuals in the kind of power that they have and what they command let's say but there was a tremendous disparity between individuals on the one hand in the state on the other consequently it was the task of a liberalism that was concerned with human rights and equality of individuals and so on it was the task of that liberalism to dissolve the enormous power of the state which was such a an authoritarian threat to individual liberties and from that you develop a classical liberal theory and say Humboldt or Mill sense well of course that is pre capitalist he couldn't conceive of an era in which a corporation would be regarded as individual that's it or in which such an enormous in which enormous disparities and control over resources and production would distinguish between individuals in a massive fashion now in that kind of society to take the Humboldt in view is a very superficial liberalism because while opposition to state power in an era of such divergence conforms to Humboldt conclusions it doesn't do so for his reasons that is his reasons Lee the very different conclusions in that case namely I think his reasons lead to the conclusion that we must dissolve the authoritarian control over production and resources which leads to such divert against as among individuals in fact I think one might draw a direct line between classical liberalism and the kind of libertarian socialism which I think can be regarded as the as a kind of an adapting of the basic reasoning of classical liberalism to a very different social Europe now if we come to the modern period here liberalism has taken on a very strange sense if you think of its history now liberalism is essentially the theory of state capitalism of state intervention in a capitalist economy well there's very little of relation to classical liberalism in fact classical liberalism is what's now called conservatism I suppose but this new view I think really is it my my my view at least the highly authoritarian position that is it's one which accepts a number of centers of authority and control the state on one hand agglomerations of private power on the other hand all interacting with individuals as malleable cogs in this highly constrained machine which may be called democratic but given the that the the actual distribution of power is very far from being meaningfully democratic and cannot be so so my own feeling has always been that to achieve the classical liberal ideals for the reasons that led to them being put forth in a society so different we must be led in a very different direction oh it's superficial and erroneous to accept the conclusions which were reached for a different Society and not to consider the reasoning that led to those conclusions the reasoning I think is very substantially I'm a classical liberal in this sense but I think it leads me to be a kind of an anarchist let me get begin by referring something that I've already discussed that is if it is correct as I believe it is that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work for a creative inquiry for for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of course of institutions then of course it will follow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be real that means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion that exist in any existing society ours for example as a historical residue now a federated decentralized system of free associations incorporating economic as well as social institutions would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism and it seems to me that it is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into position of tools of cogs in the machine in which the creative urge the that I think is intrinsic to human nature will in fact be able to realize itself in whatever way it will I don't know all the ways in which it will power and oppression and terror and destruction in our own society and that certainly includes the institution's you mentioned as well as the central institutions of any industrial society namely the the economic commercial and financial institutions in particular in the coming period of the great multinational corporations which are not very far from us physically tonight those are the basic institutions of oppression and coercion and autocratic rule that appear to be neutral after all they say well we're subject to the democracy of the marketplace still I think it would be a great shame to lose or to put aside entirely the somewhat more abstract and philosophical if you like task of trying to draw the connections between a concept of human nature that gives full scope to freedom and dignity and creativity and other fundamental human characteristics and relates that to some notion of social structure in which those properties could be realized in which meaningful human life could take place and in fact if we are thinking of social transformation or social revolution though it would be absurd of course to try to draw out and detail the point that we're hoping to reach still we should know something about where we think we're going it's a sort of an absolute basis if you press me too hard I'll be in trouble because I can't sketch it out but some sort of an absolute basis ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities in terms of which a real notion of Justice is grounded and I think that our existing systems of justice I think it's too hasty to characterize our existing systems of justice as merely systems of class oppression I don't think that they are that I think that they're that they embody systems of class oppression and they embodies elements of other kinds of oppression but they also embody a kind of a groping towards the true human humanly valuable concept of justice and decency and love and kindness and sympathy and so on which I think are real well you see I think that in the intellectual domain of political action that is the domain of trying to construct a vision of a just and free society on the basis of some notion of human nature in that domain we face the very same problem that we face in immediate political action for example to be quite concrete a lot of my own activity really has to do with the Vietnam War and a good deal of my own energy goes into civil disobedience well civil disobedience in the United States is an action undertaken in the face of great on sideral uncertainties about its effects for example it threatens the social order in ways which let's say Mike one might argue bring on fascism that would be very bad for the for America for Vietnam for Holland and for everyone else so there's a that is one danger in undertaking this concrete act on the other hand is a great danger and not undertaking it namely if you don't undertake it the Society of indochina will be torn to shreds by American power and in the face of those uncertainties one has to choose a course of action well similarly in the intellectual domain one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose our concept of human nature is certainly limited partial socially conditioned constrained by our own character defects and the defects of the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist yet at the same time it's of critical importance that we have some some direction that we know what impossible goals were trying to achieve if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals and that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge while remaining very open to the strong possibility and in fact overwhelming probability that at least in some respects were very far off the mark are just the success of libertarian socialists more and yzma's whoever really depend on a fundamental change in the nature of man both in his motivation his altruism and also in his knowledge and sophistication I think it not only depends on it but in fact the whole purpose of libertarian socialism is that it will contribute to it it will contribute to a spiritual transformation precisely that kind of great transformation in in the way humans conceive of themselves and their ability to act to decide to create to produce to inquire precisely that spiritual transformation that social thinkers from the left Marxist tradition from Lexington Luxembourg say on overthrew anarcho-syndicalist have always emphasized so on the one hand it requires that spiritual transformation on the other hand the its purpose is to create institutions which will contribute to that transformation well I have my own idea as to what a future society should look like I've written about them I mean I think that we should the most general level we should be seeking out forms of authority and domination and challenging their legitimacy sometimes they are legitimate that is that they they needed for survival so for example I wouldn't suggest victory the Second World War the forms of authority we had a totalitarian society basically and I thought there was some justification for that under the wartime conditions and there other forms of so so for relations between parents and children for example involved forms of coercion which are sometimes justifiable but any such any any form of coercion and control requires justification and most of them are completely unjustifiable now at various stages of human civilization it's been possible to challenge some of them but not others others are too deep-seated or you don't see them or whatever and so at any particular point you try to detect those forms of Authority and domination which which are subject to change and which do not have any legitimacy in fact which often strike at fundamental human rights and your understanding of fundamental human nature and right well what are the major things say today there are some that are being addressed in a way the feminist movement is addressing some the civil rights movement as dressing others the one major one that's not being seriously addressed is the one that's really the core of the system of domination that's private control over over resources and that means an attack on the fundamental structure of state capitalism I think that's in order that's not something far off in the future you asked the chairman of the board and he'll always tell you that he spends his every waking hour laboring so that people will get the best possible product at the cheapest possible price and work in the best possible conditions and so on and so forth now there's an it's an institutional independently of who the chairman of the board is that he'd better be trying to maximize profit and market share then if he doesn't do that he's not gonna be chairman of the board anymore if he were ever to succumb to the delusions that he expresses he'd be out now he can hold those delusions as long as he performs his institutional role and the same is true across the board so for example you can be take say Walter Lippman specialized class the experts some of them are candid enough to tell you the truth like Henry Kissinger who defined an expert as a person who is capable of articulating the consensus of people with power that's what made him an expert that's true if you want to be an expert part of the specialized class you have to be able to serve the interests of objective power that's an institutional role that has to be played and if you do that you can be in it if you want to be a journalist let's say you have to Accord to the needs of the institutions and the institutions have very definite needs the point is that no one would even make it to a high decision-making position in the media whether as columnist or managing editor or whatever unless they had already internalized the required that you can terrorize they believe them the number of things you have to believe to make it to top managerial positions you have to believe that the United States is unique in history and that it acts from benevolent motives not benevolent motives are not properties of states whether it's the United States or any other one they don't have this is a meaning that unites given a four I mean it acts because of the interests of groups that have power within it's like any other Society but anyone who believes this truism is already excluded you have to believe that whatever the United States does is defensive if we bomb South Vietnam we're defending South Vietnam if the Russians invade Afghanistan that's not defense now of course you know if you I suppose if you go to the little they'll tell you they're defending Afghanistan they're defending it against terrorists supported from the outside and of course there's a you know we know that there's though in fact he can tell you they were invited in and there's a kind of an element of truth to all of that but if we naturally dismiss it as nonsense on the other hand when we create a government in South Vietnam to invite us in and we attack the population of South Vietnam and weeble to drive them into concentration camps to separate them from the guerrillas who we concede they're supporting and so on we're defending South Vietnam and anyone who doesn't agree with this is not part of the system you're equating the Soviet Union in the United States and and the genes of Patricks and others would say of course that's the fundamental fallacy of dr. Chomp his approach is that he is saying there is a moral equivalence in attaining the kind that's a that's that's in these notions are in fact inventions of the gene Kirkpatrick's and other reactionary gene duysts the Soviet Union in the United States are at opposite poles among contemporary political systems what I'm saying is that even though they are at opposite poles in some respects they behave alike and that's that's for deep-seated reasons that have to do with the exercise of power and institutions and so on and you're just not into it immoral you do admit that we that we are our free society that we're admitted I insist upon it I insist that we are a free society and that Soviet Union is a dungeon and therefore we have completely different methods of population control on the other hand democratic state can't use those mechanisms you can't force anybody you can't force people therefore you have to control what they think since since power is still concentrated but in different hands in our society largely in private ownership and you can't control people by force you'd better care what they think so that's why you have to have other forms and in fact more sophisticated forms of indoctrination I didn't interview once with Edward Bernays who was considered the pioneering figure in American business public relations and he talked through there about the engineering of consent that's his phrase but he thought it's a wonderful thing in fact he described it as the essence of democracy he said if the consider the government but presupposes that efforts at persuasion it trying to persuade people to see things your way out of the picture the picture is certain people are in a position to persuade and the essence of democracy is that they have the freedom to persuade now who has the freedom to persuade well who runs the public relations industry it's not the special interests they're the targets of the public relation industry public relations industry is a major industry closely linked to other corporations and those are the people who have the power to persuade that's the essence of democracy and they must engineer the consent of others there were for example you know people who really believe in democracy people who take eighteenth-century value seriously people who really might merit the term conservatives that much abused term are against concentration of power they remember that the after all the the the doctrines of the Enlightenment held that individuals should be free from the coercion of concentrated power what kind of concentrated power that they were thinking about was the church and the state and the feudal system and so on and that you could sort of imagine a collective population of relatively equal people at least equal white male property owners who would be not controlled by those private powers but in the subsequent period a new form of power developed namely corporations with highly concentrated power over decision making in the in economic life that is they can control over what's produced which distributed what's invested and so on and so forth is very narrowly concentrated this is why the vice president of the laura's corporate leaders say the public mind is the bleep mine might have funny ideas about democracy which say that we should not be forced simply to rent ourselves to the people who own the country rather and own its institutions rather we should play a role in determining what those institutions do that's democracy if we were to move towards democracy and I think democracy even in the 18th century sense we would say that there should be no mail distribution of power in determining what's produced what's distributed what's invested and so on rather that should be but that's a that's a problem for the entire community but the political system is also unusual we're the only major industrial democracy that doesn't have a political party which is basically labour based we only have one political party with two factions it's the business party we have two factions of the business party called the Democrats and the Republicans and that's unusual in fact these these this perception is transmuted in an odd way into political terminology so for example in the 1980s each election in the 1980s the Democrats have been accused of being the party of the special interests and then they hotly deny it and they say no they're not the party of the special interest but who are the special interests well take a look behind the rhetoric and you find that the special interests are women labor youth the elderly ethnic minorities the poor farmers in fact it's the entire population to point-b the entire population or the special interests now if you look closely there's one group that's never identified as being among the special interests that's corporations and that's correct there the national interest and both parties are basically beholden to them just a whereas the special interests have to be marginalized the population so everyone denies that they represent the special interest that is the people and they don't say who they do represent but there is somebody their group notably lacking in this list of special interests and in fact it's the group with anyone with its head screwed on nose has inordinate power in controlling economic decisions and setting the parameters for political life and controlling the ideological system and so on they are not among the special interests ratification would mean a system in which there are two positions presented to me the voter I go into the polling booth and I push one or another button depending on which of those positions I want that's a very limited form of democracy a real really meaningful democracy it would mean that I play a role in forming those decisions making creating those positions that those positions reflect my active creative participation at it not just me but of course everyone that would be real democracy has not very far from that but we're even departing from the point where there is ratification when you have stage-managed elections with the public relations industry determining what words come out of people's mouths you in fact they're going beyond to the point where we are even then even the element of ratification is disappearing because you don't expect the candidate to stand for anything candidates decide what to say on the basis of tests that determine what the effect will be across the population somehow people don't see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy contemptuous yeah suppose I'm working on running for office and I don't tell people what I think or what I'm going to do I tell them what the pollsters have told told me is going to get me elected that's expressing utter contempt for the electorate that's saying okay you people are going to have the chance to push your buttons but once you're done I'll do exactly what I intend which is not what I'm telling you in a capitalist democracy you have the problem and it is always perceived as a problem that the popular general population has a method of participating in a decision-making they can participate in politics the state is not capable of stopping them you can't shut them up you can't hook them in jail you can't keep them away from the polls and so on and it's striking that that has always been perceived as a problem to be overcome it's what's called the crisis of democracy too many people organizing themselves to become to practice it to enter the public arena that's a crisis we have to overcome boarding to a certain view but it has always been understood by I would say even the mainstream of democratic theorists that when the voice of the people is heard you're in trouble because they're always going to make the wrong decisions the stupid and ignorant masses as they're called are going to make the wrong decisions so therefore what we have to have what Walter Lippman back in 1920 or so called manufacture of consent we have to ensure that actual decision-making actual power is in the hands of what he called a specialized class that's smart guys you know we're going to make the right decisions and we've got to keep the general population marginalized because they're always going to make mistakes marginalizing meaning reduce them to apathy and obedience allow them to participate in the political system but as consumers not as true participant that has allowed them a method for ratifying decisions that are made by others but eliminate the methods by which they might first inform themselves second organize third act in such a way as to really control decision-making that is the ideas our leaders control us not we control them because well more democracy is a value in itself so quite apart because democracy is a value doesn't have to be defended anywhere in freedom has to be defended that's just it's it's part of it's an essential feature of human nature that is people should be free that should be able to participate they should be uncoerced and so on that's what it is all values in themselves well why do you think if we go that route us I think that that's the only hope that I can see that other values will come to the fore I mean if the society is based on controlled by private wealth it will reflect the values that in fact does reflect the value that the highest the only real human property is the desire for profit is green and the desire to maximize personal gain at the expense of others now any society that made that small society based on that principle is ugly but it can survive a global society based on that principle is headed for massive destruction and that's what we are we have to have a mode of social organization that reflects other values that I think are inherent in human nature that people recognize and that would be able to see exactly I mean what are human beings I mean in your family for example it's not the case that in the family every person tries to maximize personal gain at the expense of others if they do it spends pathological it's not the case that if if you and I are say walking down the street and we see a child needing a piece of candy and we see the nobody's around we don't spend we happen to be hungry we don't steal it if we did that would be would be pathological I mean the idea of care for others and concern for other people's needs and concern for a fragile environment that must sustain future generations all of these things are part of human nature these are elements of human nature that are suppressed in a social and cultural system which is designed to maximize personal gain what I think we must try to overcome suppression and that's in fact what democracy could bring about it could lead to the expression of other human needs and values which tend to be suppressed under the institutional structure of a system of private power and private profit what do we do about it I mean I don't want to leave people on a wholly negative analysis although I believe in facing reality for ordinary people it's extremely hard and that's why you need organization what is if a real democracy is going to thrive if the real values that are deeply embedded in human nature are going to be able to flourish and I think that's necessary to save us if nothing else it will be it's an absolute necessity that that groups form in which people can join together can share their concerns can articulate their ideas can gain a response can discover what they think can discover what they believe what their values are this can't be imposed on you from above you have to discover it by experiment by by by effort by trial by application and so on and this has to be done with others furthermore surely central to human nature is a need to be engaged with others in cooperative efforts of solidarity and concern that can only happen homes by definition through group structures and unless such a little organization political and other civic or there's all sorts of trade of citizens of ways in which people can associate with one another and I think what I would like to see is a move towards a society which is really based on purl upon proliferating voluntary organization with eliminating as much as possible structures of hierarchy and domination and the basis for them and and control and becoming the means by which we govern ourselves by which we control our lives does this do you believe that by nature human beings yearn for freedom or have do we settle in the interest of safety and security and conformity do we settle for order these are really matters of faith rather than knowledge on the one hand you have the Grand Inquisitor who tells you that what people would humans crave is submission and therefore Christ is a criminal and we have to vanquish freedom that's one view you have the other view of say we're so in some of his moments that people are born to be free and that their basic instinct is the desire to free themselves from coercion Authority and oppression it's the answer to which you believe is more or less where you stake your hopes I'd like to believe that people are born to be free but if you ask for a proof they couldn't give it to him person works on order let's say a craftsman produces something on orders or under coercion we may admire what he does but we despise what he is because he's a machine and we want people to be human he found exactly the same thing in Adam Smith and every one of the reasons Adam Smith was very critical of division of labor and he has certain old the division of labor at the beginning of wealth and Native Nations would have ego on it criticizes at the end and he criticizes because he says if we let division of labor continue we will reduce people to creatures as stupid and as ignorant as it's possible for a creature to be because they'll simply be carrying out mechanical operations under command and a very limited domain and what you are you know your intelligence your understanding your your human characteristics come from your capacity or from the options available to you to carry out independent productive creative activities work included maybe in free association with others because we're social beings but not under external coercion and and he said any civilized societies might have to prevent this from happening in the 18th century and the sort of in the Enlightenment and the period of early modern libertarian revolutions people like for example villain from Humboldt and Rousseau thought about the exactly these questions they were both they both understood in some sense it was hard to formulate it clearly and coherently at the time but they both grasped the idea that languages are basically infinite that they're expressions of human creativity in fact that's a leading cartesian idea which came to them right through the rationalist and romantic traditions and they were also both interested deeply interested in human liberation and they did in fact try to connect these things pretty much the way suggests by suggesting that it at some core level part of human nature is a which is reflected on the cognitive side in things like language is the capacity to produce and understand and articulate and express new thoughts without limit and without control so the crucial fact about language use is that it's not determined by our situation it's coming out of us as freely willed action in some sense and continually novel and so on and to express thoughts and ideas that are new to oneself and to other people but that are intelligible and appropriate and so on this is a core aspect of human nature pour in the nature again was later called about the point of an instinct for freedom that is a need to become involved in free creative activity free creative work so for sehun Volta one's work is sort of the core of one's existence you want to be involved in creative honest work in association with others but voluntary Association and not under external control these things have mostly been forgotten so the as the market systems of the 19th century developed they eliminated all of this they would have appalled Adam Smith no doubt you know the market systems that developed because they when you get the people I same office and Ricardo and so on the conception of human beings as freely creative active people with intrinsic rights due to their nature disappears and people become nothing more they have no values other than value as and what they can sell in the market their labor power if you can't sell your labor power in the market you have no right to live this way it was discussed because there's nothing to a human being other than what can be attained by sale of labor power within a market system under what become basically totalitarian structures corporate structures and so on so the modern extensions of classical liberalism are very anti libertarian and these I than the ideologies change and no the intellectuals change and so on so this tradition has pretty much been well if not wiped out at least marginalized but it's there and it certainly can be revived it stayed alive and for example in the anarchist tradition and in parts of the libertarian left in the United States you find traces of it as late as real traces as late as people like John Dewey who probably didn't know any of these things but just came out of it from another source and you know the same point in his conception of democracy is a value because it opens the opportunities for people to freely liberate themselves as they must do it's their sort of core it isn't in the contemporary world he'd be hard put to find much discussion if it's unfortunately but I think it should be reviving that he's very significant it's an interesting question actually I mean Marx himself was complex figure the early Marx so you read that philosophical manuscripts and so on do you know this is coming straight out of the French French and German Romanticism so the kinds of ideas you find expressed in Humboldt and then the more libertarian side of Rousseau Brazil himself was very split but if you take the libertarian as part of Rousseau V second discourse on inequality and home bold and so on all of this was that's the background that which Marx grew up and if you read the philosophical and manuscripts of the early period they're immersed in this so his theory of alienation comes out of this work the coerced labor is alienating and counter to human nature precisely for these reasons for the Humboldt Egan reasons when you get to the later Marx you know it's not it's it's sort of like a scholarly debate about whether he changed his mind or just started talking about other things but anyway you don't find it any longer and by that time Marx Marxism does become exactly as you say very detrimental to this so you get this idea with you you do find it Marx but it couldn't have believed that human nature is just a historical product and people are just malleable they're made what their culture turns them into you get this even people like Gramsci it was one of the more libertarian and Marxist but this idea that humans are simply formed by the environment and they are nothing but clay you know passive clay in the hands of their molders that's an idea which is very attractive to radical intellectuals because they think they're going to be the molders of course and that leads right to the Leninist version of Marxism and it does become a kind of orthodoxy and the earlier views of are either forgotten or marginalized although they're certainly there in Marx and they certainly are in the tradition that he came from I mean the Marxists and the behaviorists are right in the same ballpark leave these kind of Marx's the in fact it's and it's a tragedy and a catastrophe that the left has been has accepted the idea of humans as historical products simply reflections of their environment because what follows from that of course is that there's no moral barrier to molding them any way you like and if humans have no inner nature if they don't have an inner instinct for freedom you know if it's not fundamental that their nature to have free creative productive work under their own control if that's not part of their nature then why you know there's no event there's no moral reason for allowing them that space you could just mold them into being what you think they ought to be and you can be the Central Committee or you can be you know the managers of the corporation or directors of a fascist state or whatever intellectuals have mostly moved in one or the other of those directions overwhelmingly either they're in fact this was foretold in one of the maybe the only prediction of the Social Sciences that ever came so dramatically true was the Coonans discussion of this in the late not in the late nineteenth century he was argument of Marx as well before Leninism but he predicted very perceptively that the rising class of intellectuals were just kind of becoming identified as a class and modern modern industrial society he predicted that they were essentially going to go in one of two directions there would be some who would believe that the struggles of the working class would offer them an opportunity to rise and take state power in their own hands and at that point he said they would become the red bureaucracy who would create the worst tyranny that humanity has ever known of course all any interests of the workers that's one direction and he said the others would recognize that you're never going to get power that way and the way to get power is to associate yourself with what we would nowadays call state capitalism and just become the servants of its ruling class and then you become the managers and the ideologues and so on for the state capitalist system and as he put it those people will beat the people with the people stick they'll talk about democracy but they'll really be beating people with the stick of democracy which they'll turn into a mechanism of coercion do you think you can get power by by exploiting popular struggles and there are others who see that you don't get power by just associating yourself with the people already have economic power and that's largely domine and I think there's a very accurate description of the century that followed him on the 150 years before the Bolshevik Revolution but he predicted its form very precisely and also its ideological background and he also predicted quite accurately what happens in the modern state capitalist industrial societies and looking at it now from the retrospective a hundred years we can see I think we can see this development very clearly and it also explains an odd fact about 20th century intellectual life namely how easy it's been for people to shift from one position to another so the same person who's a Stalinist apologist one year is a super American patriot you know the next year supporting every atrocity working and working in Hoover Institute and you know associated with most reactionary institutions that transition which sometimes is called the God that failed change which was sort of authentic in the early years like people like cilona and others you know there was something else empathetic about it it became a joke I mean it's because when people within the in fact we're seeing it in Russia right now the the worst connoisseurs are now the ones who are most passionate about the you know the free market and investing and enriching yourself and so on that they've made the transition very easily and that goes way back and I think the reason is there's no transition it's just a different estimate as to where power lies but the same ideology the ideology is you think the people with the people stick I mean we're going to do it in fact if you look at modern acket democratic theory in the West it's remarkably similar to this it's remarkably Leninist in its character tendencies in modern democratic theory in the West so in an academic world it would be the strands of political science that developed from the thinking of people like Harold Lasswell and others one of the founders of modern contemporary political science and in the general sphere the Wilsonian intellectuals the so-called progressive intellectuals of whom maybe walter Lippmann was the most striking example in the United States progressive intellectual in the 1920s if who'd of all of these people developed theories of democracy and they're quite interesting the very Leninist and their character the conception is that in a democracy there's two classes of citizens there's the general public who Lippmann calls ignorant and meddlesome outsiders and Lasswell says they're too stupid to we should not be overcome by dogmatism about the common man who's too stupid to be able to do anything that's the standard view so there's these people the ignorant and meddlesome Outsiders which is maybe 80% of the population and then there are the responsible men the wise men you know the smart people the people with integrity and honor the intellectual aristocracy whatever you call them and they have to rule they're the ones who make the decisions who do the thinking and so on and the role of the masses the ignorant and meddlesome Outsiders is to show up every couple of years decide which of the smart guys is going to be their leader and then go home they have nothing more to do that's a democracy and then you have variation this is the way Lippmann put it the general public are to be spectators not participants their only participation is lending their weight to one or another representative of the dominant class and then going home that's an election and the spectrum extends from about there that's the liberal side over to the more reactionary side now where you get people like say Reaganites people call themselves conservatives they're learning authentic conservative would be appalled by their positions they're really statist reactionary and their view rate the Reaganites we're very striking in this respect their view is the people shouldn't even be spectators because it's none of their business what the state is doing the idea is we have to the state has to be so powerful and so private that the ignorant Outsiders can't even see what's going on now if you look at the modern world this is happening a very dramatically so one of the major things that's happening now is the transfer of real power away from parliamentary institutions and towards a transnational system of private power transnational corporations and their own institutions like the IMF and GATT and the World Trade Organization and the World Bank and the executive meetings of the g7 you know big seven rich countries that's a system of decision making which is completely separate from public from the public public has no idea what's going on there's almost no way of figuring out what's happening in a guy council I mean I doubt if there's one American minion who knows what was decided in the last and the and was in the GATT treaty yeah I mean you have to be a specialist you know who goes and those how to go to specialize documents even he had a picture of and a lot of it you can't even find because it really is secret well that's the in effect transnational corporations themselves or you know almost the you know unimaginable attack on democracy we're absolutely appalled someone like Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson because they are totalitarian institutions completely absolutist absolutely unaccountable public has nothing to say about them internally they're completely hierarchic they're kind of like the economic equivalent of super fascism and they kept they're also undermining free trade it's called trade but it's a joke

Channel: understandingpower

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Keywords: Democracy, Noam, Chomsky, Classical, Liberalism, Freedom, Libertarian, Socialism

Id: vq9irdLcZmU

Length: 45min 18sec (2718 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 26 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/coerciblegerm]

Which they do.

[u/as_an_american]

Does Chomsky put this in writing anywhere, specifically the connection of Humboldt and the early classical liberals and libertarian socialism?