The curious genealogy of the New Man

Cross-posted at Political Arguments.

How did the Left give up on structural challenges to social injustice and turn to the moralistic condemnation of "greed" and the romanticized appeal to "solidarity"? The question is immediately provoked by a re-reading of G.A. Cohen's If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, but it really goes to the heart of the contemporary incarnation of the New Left of the 1960's. The anti-globalization crowd is the most glaring example. Regardless of the merit of their politics, why are they so often articulated as individual moral mandates, as opposed to calls for institutional change?

Read more!The argument that the problem of capitalism can be traced to the operation of the social structure, not to the sinful nature of human beings, was most famously advanced by Marx (although its antecedents are in Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville). Even in his early work (which, in my opinion, makes explicit the true motives for Marx's animosity towards capitalism, and thus gives the lie to his later disavowal of socialist morality) Marx traces the alienation of man-from-man, and the inability of human beings to achieve "species-being" to the structural requirements of rights, property, and the market. Change the structure, not the person, to achieve emancipation.

It was from Marx, and Marx's impact on the understanding of social injustice, that John Rawls must be seen to derive his claim that the relation among social institutions, not the actions of individuals, is the proper subject of social justice. Against this view stood a long tradition, traceable to Plato and Aristotle, that saw no sense in arguing for the virtue of social practices.

But today the attacks on Rawls's liberal egalitarianism come from the left, not the right. G.A. Cohen, Rawls's foremost critic on this account, recognizes the oddity of the political alignment. Cohen, of course, does not "give up" on social structure, but he complements it in a way that I find historically curious. In an interview for Imprints, he said,

I'm a little anxious about it, because I remember that one of the things for which I had contempt as a young Marxist was the view that socialism requires a transformation of the human heart. I now think that there is much truth in the Christian objection to Marxism that it does not address the problem of people's attitudes to one another at a deep enough level. There's only so far that you can go by having the optimal coercive structure for society. The problem of incentives, which is central to modern economic thinking about how to organise societies, proves that. The existence of that problem vindicates what I used to think was the namby-pamby claim that people's attitudes must change if we are to bring about a truly egalitarian society. The social designer with nothing but coercive mechanisms at his or her disposal cannot achieve equality.

I agree with Cohen on the confluence of Marxism and Christianity—though not on the broader claim that a reasonable degree of equality requires a pervasive social ethos. But I think that this confluence should cause "individualists" about justice to row back with full force and change streams.

Unless, of course, these are the waters that Marx was seeking. It is not a coincidence that all Marxist regimes, from the Siberian tundra to the beaches of Cuba, have sung loud praises to the "New Man" and have not hesitated to craft him through individual, not only institutional, coercion. But again, the Church also sang loud praises to the Saints by the soft light of the bonfires.