In the furtherance of my dialectical libertarian framework, I have drawn from many different thinkers and traditions. I have sometimes been asked if my approach was a form of eclecticism. To be an eclectic is often looked down upon because it suggests that a person has derived their viewpoint from a diverse array of incompatible sources.
In two recent essays, the independent left-wing writer Alex Strekal raises legitimate questions about the dangers of both eclecticism and dogmatism in social theory. Since my work is mentioned critically in one of those essays, I thought I’d use this opportunity to summarize Strekal’s points and to discuss the nature of my approach.
Left, Right, and Center
Strekal is correct to note that the current polarization in American politics has done nothing to alter the established political order or economic conditions. The system tends to destroy any efforts at serious reform, while heightening widespread distrust, giving rise to populist reaction against political elites who exploit that sentiment for their own gain. The heightened political battles in this election cycle—or in any election cycle—has not diminished the nightmarish growth in state power under both Republican and Democratic administrations for many decades now.
Social theorists of every kind have tried to grapple with these realities. Sometimes, their approaches are dogmatic in nature. Strekal argues that “there is … something limiting about strictly belonging to a sect of thought named after a person (such as Georgism, Trotskyism, or even Marxism), or otherwise just specializing in the thinking of one person, and there is the general trend of people putting themselves into sectarian groups and labels.” Indeed, it makes one sympathize with Marx, who is reported to have said: “I am not a Marxist.”
But Strekal equally rejects eclecticism or “syncretism,” citing Hegel’s well-known condemnation of those who cherry-pick aspects of this or that philosophy “regardless of their consistency or connection,” and who try to integrate the pieces in a way that is “altogether meaningless and inconsequential” (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 2, 400-401; quoted by Strekal).
I have never taken Hegel’s pronouncement as an opposition to learning from different traditions. I agree with Strekal unequivocally “that there is definitely value in being more heterodox than orthodox in one’s approach, of learning from a range of sources and drawing your own conclusions.” Indeed, there has been no thinker—dead or alive—who has not drawn from multiple and sometimes inconsistent sources in the genesis of their worldview, even if their mature systems have tended toward more orthodox forms in later years. Hegel famously drew from Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and the German Romanticists, but he was also greatly influenced by the ancient Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle. Marx was surely influenced by Hegel and the classical economists, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but he also drew heavily from Aristotle and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ayn Rand proclaimed an intellectual debt to Aristotle, and yet her influences were also wide and deep. They included not only Friedrich Nietzsche and such Old Right thinkers as Isabel Paterson, but also the Russian Silver Age thinkers to which she was exposed in her youth and especially in her education at Petrograd University.
How well any of these thinkers did in integrating their influences or creating a consistent worldview is up for debate. But there is no question that each drew from the vast intellectual history that preceded them—whether they acknowledged it or not.
Now, it is true, as Strekal maintains, that in drawing from “different schools of thought and approaches,” some thinkers “can potentially lapse into contradiction or incoherence,” perhaps even endorsing “a bland version of centrism.” Alas, here’s where Strekal’s commentary got my attention. He writes:
For example, Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s work attempts to square Hegel, Karl Marx, Hayek and Ayn Rand, which is a tall order to say the least, while framing himself as engaging in ‘dialectics’ between the left and the libertarian right. He also engages in syncretic mixtures between Rand and feminism. Sciabarra is ultimately Objectivist-influenced and tends toward liberal capitalism, but he is perhaps more willing to be friendly to socialists in dialogue than most liberal capitalists. But he’s selling syncretic intrigue centered on Rand and reframing libertarian capitalism.
At times or to an extent, another group Sciabarra orbits, the Center for a Stateless Society, has produced content trying to synthesize Proudhonian mutualism with Austrian economics and/or American-style movement libertarianism. This produced its own incoherences and institutional capture. This was most notable in the form of the “Left-Rothbardians” … who, along with Chris Sciabarra, engaged in what seems more like an appropriation of left-wing concepts and traditional anarchist ideas and iconography, for the purposes of bolstering anarcho-capitalism / a libertarian capitalist bias, or presenting half-baked olive branches to socialism without committing to anything but types of market socialism that can be integrated into capitalism or a free market libertarian view …
Stick-Figure Rand, Stick-Figure Sciabarra
Before addressing the substance of these comments, it’s important to set the record straight on my intellectual relationship with Ayn Rand, since Strekal sees me as “selling syncretic intrigue centered on Rand and reframing libertarian capitalism.”
Every thinking person starts from someplace. Even Strekal admits that despite his criticisms of libertarianism, “as a former libertarian,” he gives it “partial credit for engaging in something resembling systemic, non-partisan analysis and criticism.”
Most readers know that I began my intellectual journey “toward a dialectical libertarianism” with Rand’s works. Strekal is not a fan of Rand, to say the least. He condemns her as the fountainhead of an “ideological cult where you must abide by an elaborate checklist of beliefs.” He views Objectivism and Marxist-Leninism as “remarkably similar in form even though they have radically opposing content.” He asserts further that Rand’s worldview exhibits an orthodox dogmatism on par with totalitarian Stalinism. “Objectivism is … especially totalistic in nature,” according to Strekal, involving Stalinist “cult-like dynamics” that function as a secular religion.
Whatever one can say critically about any number of Rand’s stances, to my knowledge, Rand and her Objectivist followers never erected a gulag, never executed their political opponents, and never engaged in the genocidal slaughter of the Kulaks. So, a little balance here might be in order. Strekal maintains, however, that
Ayn Rand’s Objectivism effectively makes romantic capitalism a religion, it is not merely about practical economics but a complete metaphysical, epistemic, moral and aesthetic philosophy. Objectivism adopts an aggressively elitist classical liberal capitalism as morally correct, champions a crude interpretation of enlightenment rationalism, while worshipping Rand as a novel genius even though many of her ideas are her own restatements of other people’s ideas. Rand actually criticized the libertarian movement for being syncretic and too filled with whim-worshipping hippies, but she nonetheless was a major influence on it, while she clearly took some inspiration from Nietzsche but went out of her way to avoid that fact and distance herself from him.
Regarding Strekal’s criticisms of Rand and Objectivism, I’d like to say, “Read Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.” Heck, I’d throw in Marx, Hayek, and Utopia and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism for good measure. Apparently, 14 years ago, Strekal admitted to having “read a little bit of [Sciabarra’s] writting [sic] on dialectical libertarianism and objectivism and whatnot.”
If he had read Russian Radical, Strekal would have found a much more nuanced and complex portrait of Rand’s intellectual beginnings, a probing analysis of both the dialectical structure of her thought and the systematic character of her critique of power relations across multiple dimensions. He would have discovered more about Rand’s highly critical take on rationalism, and the ways in which her philosophy at its best avoids totalistic, and hence, totalitarian, implications.
Though my book offers a reconstruction of Rand’s worldview, rather than a critical exegesis, it still takes Rand and her orthodox followers to task on many issues, not the least of which is the view of Rand as sui generis. I explore Rand’s Russian intellectual roots and offer compelling parallels between Rand and many other thinkers, including Marx. Strekal might find those comparisons to be of particular interest, given his stated views.
I’ve spent many years of my professional life criticizing Objectivist orthodoxy. And as a co-founder and co-editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, I worked hard over the course of more than two decades to provide an intellectual forum that welcomed a diverse group of scholars—not just those sympathetic to Rand, but those who were profoundly critical of her, including such left academics as Slavoj Zizek, Bill Martin, and Gene Bell-Villada.
Rather than engaging with any of this work, Strekal links to a random interview of me conducted by Peter Jaworski published more than 22 years ago. That 2002 interview was featured on a Randian platform. Ironically, even in that interview, I warned readers of the danger of treating Objectivism “as a new catechism.” Still, it was incumbent upon me to consider the interests of the readers on that platform. Indeed, such consideration is itself an application of a dialectical principle. Dialectics is the art of context keeping. In exposition, it requires us to understand the context of the readers one is addressing, their interests and unique concerns. We don’t sacrifice principle to expediency when we tailor our message in ways that are understandable to audiences that have different contexts of knowledge and experience or even different values. I believe this is essential if we want to engage in meaningful dialogue with people holding disparate points of view.
That doesn’t make me an eclectic. But it does foster an ecumenical spirit helping to bridge vast intellectual gulfs.
Rejecting Mishmashism
In that interview from long ago, I suggested that Rand’s work was “a magnificent starting point” for me. Recognizing her “positive legacy” opened me up to “a wonderful world of intellectual exploration.” That lifetime exploration has been guided by another overriding principle. As I later put it:
Take what gems you can find in each writer and/or school of thought you are exposed to; criticize that which you reject (but PLEASE, OH PLEASE understand what you’re accepting and what you’re rejecting!), and MOVE THE F&*K ON!
So, my work is not about squaring Hegel, Marx, Hayek and Rand. It is not about squaring Rand and feminism—though Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, which I coedited, provided a forum for many different thinkers, left and right, who addressed the ways in which Rand’s thought differed from some forms of feminism, even as it has been an inspiration to many individualist feminists. Strekal apparently knows what individualist feminism is. He once hailed Wendy McElroy as “the individualist feminist queen.” McElroy was, in fact, a valued and important contributor to the Feminist Interpretations volume.
I should also note that my work is not about “engaging in ‘dialectics’ [note the sneer quotes] between the left and the libertarian right.” I identify as a dialectical left-libertarian, having rejected “capitalism: the known reality.” In fact, though I’m a philosophical anarchist at heart, I’ve been highly critical of the illiberal, socially conservative propertarian fiefdoms proposed by many in anarcho-capitalist circles. I’ve been just as critical of the illiberal tendencies on the “progressive” left.
For what it’s worth, my scholarly mentor was a Marxist, the great political theorist Bertell Ollman. I no more ‘appropriated’ Hegel or Marx or Ollman, than I did Hayek, Rand, or Rothbard. Rather, I learned from them. And while I can’t speak for every person who has ever written for Center for a Stateless Society—Strekal is on record for having repudiated left-libertarianism—I do believe that many of those who have published on that site are not simply extending “half-baked olive branches” to the socialist left. Many of its writers acknowledge the contributions of those thinkers, but they also appreciate the contributions of radical liberals who pioneered class analysis and various critiques of mercantilism, colonialism, and imperialism.
Going full circle, then, I agree with Strekal’s rejection of eclectic “mishmashism”:
Intellectual traditions can be useful and contain truth, and you should be free to investigate with an independent spirit, but not everything is equally valuable or especially valid, distinctions of principle and understanding nonetheless are necessary. Some people just muddy the waters or dwell in confusion, while others are insufferable ideological purist cliches whose entire personalities are crafted around radical political pretense. Sometimes you can take “the best of both worlds” from two traditions, but you can’t get a better world by just throwing paint at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s a pickle.
It’s a pickle, alright. And not even a Kosher dill one! And it won’t be digestible if you mix random ingredients into a pickling jar, expecting a tasty treat. It’s important to select the kinds of ingredients that complement one another in moving toward a well integrated by-product.
I don’t have the hubris to proclaim that my dialectical libertarian sensibility is a fully developed and fully integrated worldview. However, it is a methodological orientation that provides the basis for a broad, open-ended research project. Informed by libertarian ideals, it is focused primarily on exploring the personal, cultural, and structural practices and institutions that foster—or inhibit—freedom and flourishing. I have intellectually engaged with the works of many diverse thinkers and traditions, uncovering dialectical kernels of wisdom wherever I can find them. I don’t know all the answers, but I stand by the integrity of an active discovery process, which provides me with the tools to analyze interrelated social problems across time and the larger systems in which they are embedded. Viewing these problems from a variety of vantage points and on different levels of generality, I aim for a fuller grasp of their systemic complexity—and a greater understanding of our potential to resolve them.
This is not eclecticism. It is the essence of dialectical inquiry. It is also crucial to any worldview honorable enough to call itself “radical” (and those ain’t sneer quotes).
Notablog 