Liberalism: Managerial Liberalism

Economic doctrines and practices advocating the maximisation of freedom for private actors in the market — and the minimisation of socioeconomic rules and interventions by political authorities.

In the United States, the term ‘liberal’ implies ‘political liberalism’ and thus ought to be translated as ‘progressivism’. The concept of economic liberalism, in contrast, is ambiguous. Let us simply say that economic liberalism is preferable to a paralysing social-statism, but in itself is positive only when serving a higher political will and operating within a protected, self-centred economic space.

To designate liberalism as the enemy often reveals a badly understood para-Marxism — a tendency which also touches the ideologues of the romantic Right, ignorant of economics and imitative of the Left. Nothing is ever black or white, and liberalism doesn’t comprise a single bloc. Properly speaking, it’s not even an ideology but rather a method, a practical economic technique. To its credit, liberalism brings to the economic realm the spirit of initiative, of competition, responsibility, efficacy, and selection. Negatively, it fosters a cult of the short-term, is indifferent to ecology, to biopolitics, and to the people’s destiny, etc.

The error of dogmatic anti-liberalism is to demand everything of it. But liberalism cannot be more than a limited doctrine, in need of correction and completion. Applied to a European autarkic space, liberalism ought to be, domestically, subject to the general political economy and, internationally, protected from global free trade.

Liberalism arises from the realm of means, not ends. It’s necessary to respect its practical efficacy but at the same time to balance it with social and economic policies subject to larger political objectives. The intervention of sovereign power in the liberal economy must not be directly economic, administrative, or fiscal — but political. It ought to be a matter of laying down general rules, establishing the major aims of industrial policy, ensuring market freedom, favouring dynamic enterprises, protecting the domestic economy — without paralysing economic actors with excessive regulation and taxation.

In this sense, we can talk of managed liberalism, which is a far cry from the EU’s bureaucratic, regulatory free-trade globalism, combining, as it does, the negative aspects of both unregulated transnational capitalism, on the one hand, and a technocratic, corporatist socialism, on the other.

(see autarky of great spaces; economy, organic)