Centers of Progress, Pt. 19: Philadelphia (Liberal Democracy)
As the “cradle of liberty” and headquarters of the American Revolution, Philadelphia helped humanity to discover the benefits of liberal democracy.
Chelsea Follett —
Today marks the nineteenth installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.
Our nineteenth Center of Progress is Philadelphia, nicknamed the “cradle of liberty” and the “birthplace of America.” This early U.S. capital is where the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. It is also the place where a new form of government was debated and put into practice. Previously, the prevalent form of political organization was monarchy. But the Founders of the American republic attempted to create something new.
Today, Philadelphia is the largest city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and forms the heart of the eighth-largest metropolitan area in the country. The city is a major cultural center, known for its historical monuments such as the Liberty Bell, its famous cheesesteak sandwiches, the University of Pennsylvania, and cultural icons such as the famous “Rocky Steps.” The historic Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “The principles debated, adopted and signed in Independence Hall have profoundly influenced lawmakers and policymakers around the world,” according to UNESCO.
William Penn, an English Quaker, founded Philadelphia in 1682 as the capital of his new “Pennsylvania Colony.” The city’s name means “brotherly love” in Greek. It pays homage to an ancient city, in what is today Turkey, which is referenced in the Bible. Ancient Philadelphia served as an early center of Christianity. The Quakers, a Protestant denomination, were known for promoting pacifism and for their opposition to slavery. The latter was a particularly radical position at the time. Initially, about 7 percent of Philadelphian households owned slaves. It is estimated that by 1767 that figure grew to fifteen percent of Philadelphian households. In 1712, the Pennsylvania Assembly—which met in Philadelphia—banned the import of slaves into the colony. That decision was overruled by the British government under Queen Anne in early 1713. The next year (1714) and again in 1717, the Pennsylvania Assembly tried to limit slavery in the colony. Each time, the British government in London rejected the decision.
Penn founded the Pennsylvania colony as a “Holy Experiment” to be governed by Quaker values. Its laws differed from those in the other American colonies in notable ways. Pennsylvania guaranteed religious freedom, promoted education for girls as well as boys, and sought to rehabilitate prisoners by teaching them a trade, rather than simply punishing the offenders. The death penalty in Pennsylvania was reserved for those convicted of murder or treason at a time when in Britain people were put to death for a wide variety of trivial offenses. Penn, who kept at least twelve slaves, proposed before the Pennsylvania Assembly legislation that would have freed Pennsylvania’s slaves and given the latter property in a new township. Alas, his proposal was voted down.
Abolitionism, universal education, and enlightened penal practices were not the only radical ideas spreading through Philadelphia in the 18th century. Many colonists grew increasingly frustrated with their lack of political representation in the far-off, yet micromanaging, Britain. Enlightenment ideas inspired the discontented colonists to embark on an experiment that would change the world. In 1774, representatives from 12 of the 13 British colonies in America convened in Philadelphia. They formed the First Continental Congress. (The colony of Georgia did not dare send a representative as it was struggling in a war against local tribes and could not risk losing British military assistance).
The First Continental Congress endorsed the boycotting of British goods and militia-raising, but its most significant decision was to call for a Second Continental Congress. While no war against Britain was yet officially declared, George Washington (1732–1799), who was one of the delegates from Virginia, bought new muskets and military apparel. He also placed an order for a book on military discipline. As he walked the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia, the future president sensed that war was imminent.
Several events escalated the conflict. In 1775, British forces attempted to seize a Massachusetts armory. Local militiamen resisted. It is not clear which side fired first, but the resulting violence left 90 Americans and 273 Britons dead. Americans then besieged the British-held city of Boston. Those events—the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and the Battle of Bunker Hill—are often seen as the start of the American Revolution.
However, at that point, the conflict between the colonists and the British still resembled a civil war, not a revolution. Many colonists wanted a resolution to the violence that did not involve separating from Britain. Rather, they wanted to receive better political representation in the British parliament. In January of 1776, the English-born American writer Thomas Paine (1737–1809) published a pamphlet titled Common Sense that argued for independence from Britain and for the formation of a liberal democratic republic. Paine published that work in Philadelphia and soon sold more than 100,000 copies. It energized public support for a break from Britain and experimentation with the republican form of government. The Founding Father and second U.S. president John Adams (1735–1826) famously opined: “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” The printing presses of Philadelphia thus catalyzed the American Revolution.
Philadelphia then hosted the Second Continental Congress. Although the Second Continental Congress met in several other places as well, it was in Philadelphia that Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. A Virginian, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), drafted the document while staying at a brick mason’s house in Philadelphia. The document laid out the rebel colonists’ reasoning for wishing to separate from Britain and spelled out several ideals of the new nation. The United States of America became the first country founded on Enlightenment principles, including human rights and consensual government. The Declaration’s most well-known passage reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Many of the ideas expressed in the document came directly from Enlightenment philosophers. For example, it paraphrased the “father of liberalism” John Locke’s belief in the rights to “life, liberty and property.” The young American republic did not always live up to its own ideals—most glaringly in the case of slavery. The founding ideals have nonetheless inspired countless Americans to strive to create a freer society with greater legal equality. The country’s founding values thus ultimately helped to bring about the end of slavery (1865), the expansion of the voting franchise to all races (1870) and women (1920), and the right to marriage for interracial couples (1967) and same-sex couples (2015). In other words, the Declaration of Independence’s eloquent statement of Enlightenment ideals has continued to resonate across generations and to encourage progress.
It is unsurprising that Philadelphia served as the headquarters, if not the official capital, of the new nation during the war. It was the young country’s most populous city. As with so many other Centers of Progress, a relatively large population helped the city thrive and act as a cultural hub. While Philadelphia had only about 40,000 residents, it would have felt crowded compared to other towns in the colonies. If you could visit Philadelphia during the American Revolution, you would enter a prospering city of shops and brick rowhouses, abuzz with the latest news about the war.
You might have run into the scientist, newspaperman, and statesman Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), one of the most prominent proponents of the Revolution. He also helped to shape Philadelphia. He first moved from his hometown of Boston, governed by Puritans, to the relatively tolerant Philadelphia at the age of 17, to seek work in the printing industry. (He had previously apprenticed for his brother’s newspaper, which the Boston authorities soon banned). In 1729 Franklin began the Pennsylvania Gazette, which became one of the top papers in the colonies. He founded Philadelphia’s Library Company in 1731, thus pioneering the concept of a lending library at a time when books were often prohibitively expensive. Membership subscriptions funded the library. In 1751, Franklin also founded the Pennsylvania Hospital, funded by charity (including financial support from many of Philadelphia’s wealthiest families) and a grant that Franklin secured from the government to match private donations. The hospital served patients free of charge, and Philadelphia soon became the medical capital of the colonies that would later become the United States.
Once the revolution began, the threat of seizure by the British loomed large in Philadelphians’ minds. In autumn of 1777, those fears came to pass. The British occupation of the city has been called “one of the greatest blunders of the Revolutionary War.” As the Philadelphians suffered from wartime shortages, the occupying British officers gained a reputation for living in luxury and for illegal looting. As Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker diarist residing in Philadelphia at the time, described the situation: “How insensible do these people appear, while our Land is so greatly desolated, and Death and sore destruction has overtaken and impends over so many.” In 1778, as the American forces grew stronger thanks to aid from France, the British recalled their troops from Philadelphia. In 1783, the war ended in a victory for the rebels.
Toward the end of the American Revolution, Pennsylvania abolitionists—including many Quakers and Presbyterians motivated by their religious values—helped abolish slavery in Pennsylvania by passing legislation in Philadelphia in 1780 that phased out the practice. Soon after, several other U.S. states (New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) followed suit with legislation modeled closely after Pennsylvania’s. Continuing its central role in the young republic, Philadelphia served as the official U.S. capital between 1790 and 1800 while Washington, D.C. was constructed.
By being the “cradle of liberty” and headquarters of the American Revolution, Philadelphia helped humanity to discover the benefits of liberal democracy. The ideas at the heart of the new form of government proved so successful that today representative liberal democracies can be found throughout much of the world. Philadelphia was also a notable early center of anti-slavery abolitionism, Enlightenment values, medical science, and culture. It is for these reasons that Philadelphia is rightly our 19th Center of Progress.
Côte D’Ivoire’s Land Reforms Are Unlocking Jobs and Growth
“Secure land tenure transforms dormant assets into active capital—unlocking access to credit, encouraging investment, and spurring entrepreneurship. These are the building blocks of job creation and economic growth.
When landowners have secure property rights, they invest more in their land. Existing data shows that with secure property rights, agricultural output increases by 40% on average. Efficient land rental markets also significantly boost productivity, with up to 60% productivity gains and 25% welfare improvements for tenants…
Building on a long-term partnership with the World Bank, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire has dramatically accelerated delivery of formal land records to customary landholders in rural areas by implementing legal, regulatory, and institutional reforms and digitizing the customary rural land registration process, which is led by the Rural Land Agency (Agence Foncière Rurale – AFOR).
This has enabled a five-fold increase in the number of land certificates delivered in just five years compared to the previous 20 years.”
Progress, Classical Liberalism, and the New Right | Podcast Highlights
Marian Tupy interviews Tyler Cowen about the New Right, the relationship between freedom and progress, and whether classical liberalism is equipped to meet today's political challenges.
Tyler Cowen —
Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.
Let’s start with the basics. What is classical liberalism?
Everyone has a different definition. I can tell you mine. If you believe in capitalism, limited government, free trade, sound money, free speech, toleration, and want to do your best to bring about peace, I would consider you a classical liberal.
Now, which of those get emphasized and to what degree? You’ll find differences of opinion.
What distinguishes classical liberals from conservatives and American liberalism?
These words can be so confusing. When I hear the phrase “American liberalism,” I think of a turn that happened in the 1930s with the New Deal and somewhat earlier with the progressive movement, where people who were broadly liberal fell in love with the idea of expanding government as an alternative means of realizing liberal ends. American liberals and classic liberals have a fair amount in common. They both believe in democracy and some form of capitalism. But American liberalism has much more faith in government, does less public choice analysis, and is less suspicious of concentrated power.
Conservatism used to be simpler than it is today. We’re now in the age of Trump, who I would say is not conservative at all. The conservatism I grew up with was religious. It was socially conservative, with particular views on abortion, gay marriage, and social norms, and it often wanted to use the government to enforce those norms. Furthermore, it tended to be hawkish on foreign policy. Now, it’s all so muddled. I’m not sure who it is I should call a conservative. In many ways, the people I used to call American liberals have become the new conservatives. They want to bring us back to what America was under Obama and undo some of these recent Trump revolutions.
What about practical differences? For example, in your article, you note the different way in which classical liberals and non-classical liberals perceive the use of force and the power of the state.
Classical liberals recognize that some government coercion is necessary to enforce property rights and finance some number of public goods. You can debate what those goods are, but there’s going to be some coercion. You’re just very suspicious of that coercion, and you want to keep it to a minimum because you think it corrupts both individuals and institutions.
So classical liberals are not comfortable wielding power, but don’t classical liberals need a strategy to dismantle the administrative state or greatly reduce its power? Otherwise, classical liberal efforts in politics will always be ineffective.
Well, first, the word strategy always makes me nervous. The notion of an aggregate strategy in the sense that maybe the Democratic or Republican party would have one is a mistake. The classical liberal vision has never been, well, we’ll keep on electing our governments for 20 years in a row, and by the end of the 20 years, they’ll have made all the changes we want. Frankly, I don’t think that’s realistic. In history, there are these periodic classically liberal moments. The American Revolution and the collapse of communism would be two of the most visible. They come along every now and then, and they achieve tremendous good when they happen. They’re motivated by classically liberal ideas, but they’re not some kind of continual rule where you just push everything you want through by force. Every now and then, you get your way, and I’m prepared to live with that. I don’t think we’re going to do any better. But still, those revolutions, like the abolition of slavery, can do so much good. We should just totally be on board with trying to bring them about.
Classical liberalism and the industrial revolution seem to be coterminous over the last 250 years. How much of a credit do you give to classical liberalism for the Great Enrichment?
Quite a bit.
Look at the recent example of Poland. It was very poor when communism fell. Now, it’s approaching the living standards of England. It will bypass Japan in a year or two if trends continue. It’s not exactly classical liberal, but it kept capitalism and trade, and it’s part of the EU. Ireland, when I was a kid, was thought of as a third-world country. In some sense, it was. Now, it’s a stable democracy at Western European living standards. What’s making it work is this mix of capitalism, democracy, and toleration.
We must also explain the mechanism through which classical liberalism in economics produces prosperity. Is it simply that classical liberalism gives people the freedom to do what they please with their lives?
While that’s broadly true, I’m not satisfied.
If you look at Latin America, which has seen a lot of liberalization, there’s still some way in which they have failed to solve their human capital problems. I’m not saying I blame classical liberalism for that, but I’m also not sure liberalism has solved that problem. It’s partly social. It has something to do with family relations and family structure. Some East Asian economies that were more interventionist did very well on that problem, but Mexico hasn’t, even though Mexico, in some dimensions, had a smaller government. So, there’s this other element, you could call it culture, family, or society, where you’ll do much better if you have the right cards in your hand.
There are alternative explanations for the Great Enrichment out there. For example, you have somebody like Gregory Clark, who emphasizes the importance of higher IQ amongst the upper classes in England. You have Joe Henrich, who discusses the role of the Catholic Church in banning cousin marriage and basically creating the nuclear family. You have Max Weber and the Protestant work ethic. Why not those other explanations? Why classical liberalism?
Well, I have particular opinions about each of those. On Greg Clark and IQ, I’m simply not convinced by his data. If you look at England today, especially northern England, it seems somewhat below average in conscientiousness. Where did all those genes go? Did they all go to the United States? I’m not sure.
However, I don’t think it’s correct to say classical liberalism is at the root of the success. If anything, classical liberalism was a result of earlier successes. It was a kind of luxury good that people figured out once they got a bit wealthier and a bit more educated.
There’s something fundamental that happened in England that started being measurable between 1620 and 1640 before classical liberalism was that big. It’s some mix of relatively free labor markets, protection from outside invaders, a strong enough nation-state, enough market incentives, something else cultural, hard to put our finger on, and they just got some economic growth that didn’t stop. They get a scientific revolution. And then intellectually, they do great things with that. Classical liberalism is part of the intellectual explosion from the scientific revolution. But the economic growth predates it, in my opinion.
Let’s bring it back to the United States and talk about the techno-optimist titans of Silicon Valley who have risen to prominence over the last few years. Are they classical liberals? And why do you think they have moved from their previously held center-left position?
Well, they’re generally very eclectic thinkers. I’m not sure they were ever center-left in the traditional sense. I think just being in California and having to live under the reign of the woke led to an intellectual rebellion. But I don’t think there’s any easy categorization of where they have ended up as a group. As a group of people, if I had to generalize, they simply change their minds a lot based on data. It’s mostly a good thing. I’m not sure many will ever be classically liberal with capital C and capital L, but they’ve all been exposed to classical liberal ideas and have learned a lot from them.
Many classical liberals are wondering if the cooperation of the Silicon Valley titans with the Trump administration will lead to greater rent-seeking or move society toward greater freedom. What is your impression?
In general, sincerity is underrated as a political motive. However, if you’re asking me to predict what we will actually get from the Trump administration, in some key areas, we will get more freedom. We will also have more corruption and rent-seeking. We’re going to get the bundle of both.
Increasingly, both left and right deny that we Americans are better off today than in the past. Conservatives point to the 1950s, while progressives point to the 1970s as the golden age. Are they right?
No. They’re just wrong. I lived in the 1970s; it was fun, but it was much worse than today. There’s no serious comparison. And I don’t just mean life expectancy, but actual crime rates, what you could afford to buy, how much you could travel. Again, it’s not close.
Let’s assume that we are right that life in America today is much better than it was. We still have to explain why the public perception is so negative.
My thinking is that people prioritize bad news, and we are living in a hyper-competitive news environment. If you want to grab those eyeballs, you have to offer them the worst possible news first. Do you agree?
I agree with that, but I would add that there are a bunch of things that have gotten worse. Deaths from addiction have been rising substantially for quite a while. Teenage mental health is harder to measure, but I suspect it’s worse than it was, say, 20 years ago. A lot of what we build is uglier than in the earlier part of the 20th century. So, some of the negative impressions are true. I just think it’s easier to focus on the bad things than the good ones.
If the news cycle continuously delivers bad news and ignores the good news, is that a market failure? Or is it simply a reflection of human nature?
People often want to read about the bad as a kind of talisman so that they feel protected and that their expectations cannot be dashed on the rocks. Individually, that might be rational, but collectively, the result is people are too pessimistic about their society.
If you write a book saying things are fine, it’s not going to be a best-seller, even if you’re correct. One reason why is that when people have something good, they become anxious because they’re afraid of losing it. So, the way they protect themselves psychologically from that fear is to anticipate that loss and play it out in their minds. Then they feel they’ve done what they can to protect against it. They use things like books and clicking on media stories as a way of producing those psychological defenses.
Critics say that classical liberals are temperamentally incapable of putting up much of a fight when faced with threats from the far left. How do you answer that criticism?
The far left does not rule many countries. There are plenty of things they do in media and academia that are bad, but the American center has done pretty well against the far left. I don’t like a lot of what the far left has done, but it’s not like they’ve taken over everything. It’s just this Trumpian talking point to justify using power to restructure society and the economy toward their own ends. It’s not nearly as bad as those people would have you believe.
It was very interesting that the right in the United States had a complete meltdown right at the time when they were beginning to get some serious successes in public policy, such as, for example, a reversal on Roe v. Wade, a greater degree of educational freedom, and so forth.
Yeah, there’s this tendency on the right to tell people that Harvard is totally corrupt and worthless, and we could just destroy it, and nothing would be lost. I would say that many of the charges against Harvard are correct, but at the end of the day, there’s tremendous value coming out of Harvard, and you don’t want to wreck that.
The current right is not able to bring itself to that point. They’ve talked each other into a state of negative emotional fervor. There’s just this massive collective cognitive defect. You see it also with vaccines. They just all have to be so terrible. They’re killing all these people through heart conditions when we know scientifically that Covid is more dangerous for your heart than the vaccines are. It’s the same pattern again and again. It’s destructive politically and even personally. You see a lot of people on the right driving themselves crazy with these different worries. And often, there is something to the worry, but they just go off the deep end with it.
Is the future of American universities Hillsdale College, meaning not taking any government money? It seems to me that so long as Harvard and other universities take government money, they will be subject to political pressure. That cat is out of the bag.
I don’t think there’s room for many Hillsdale colleges. If you have a small number, they can raise a lot of money on the grounds that they don’t take government money, and I’m all for that. That’s a great business model. But you can’t have 50 schools doing the same thing. There are not enough right-wing donors to go around. So, I think the current model of Harvard will remain. Harvard and other such schools will just be tortured for decades to come, and they’ll be less effective, and their energies and attention will be drained. And that’s all unfortunate. I don’t favor torturing them, but I do recognize that, in large part, they’ve brought it on themselves by viewing themselves as an agent of political change.
Another criticism levied against classical liberals is that liberalism is so free, so open, and so tolerant that it is vulnerable to people who seek to destroy it. How should classical liberals deal with people who refuse to play by civilized rules?
Freedom does mean that Marxists and Kanye West will have freedom of speech. You’ve got to deal with that. You’re not going to get more of what you want by trying to ban those people; it will be used against you. So, there’s this perpetual struggle for more liberty or less liberty. I’m mostly optimistic. I worry about a major war coming to the world, but if that does not happen, the chances are quite good that we will end up as a somewhat freer society over the next several decades.
If you live, for example, in Britain and you encounter men marching through the streets calling for Sharia or advocating for the slaughter of the Jews, is there a space for more than just offering better arguments? In other words, are we destined to live with people who, if they gained power, would bring out the end of the freedoms we cherish?
Well, ethnic enclaves, in some instances, can be quite harmful. I sometimes say the problem with Northern England is it doesn’t have enough suburbs and enough cars. If you have Muslim migrants from, say, Pakistan, put them in the suburbs. It’s what the US has done. We don’t have Pakistani ethnic enclaves. Pakistani per capita income here is quite robust. Assimilation has gone pretty well. I know there are some other differences between the two societies, but this ideal of the European city, where you’re in the center, everything’s walkable, and everyone’s together, can be pretty crummy when you take in a lot of migrants quickly. Northern Virginia is a much better model than, say, Bradford or Birmingham.
Why are Americans so much better at assimilating foreigners than Europeans? Is it the nature of the immigrants themselves, how they are being assimilated, or a combination of the two?
Well, it might be both, but if you take people from India in America, I believe the median household income is $150,000, which would be the highest for any group in human history. The second wealthiest group would be Iranian Americans, who are, I think, in the range of $120,000-$130,000 a year. Some of those are Jews, but mostly they’re Muslims. So it’s selection from within those groups.
Also, the fact that America is more religious than Western Europe actually makes us more hospitable to Muslims. Protestantism and Islam have some funny things in common. And we have freer labor markets. And the US is just a big country where it’s easier to spread out. Suburbs and cars are very healthy things that help people ease their way into a new country. I would say it’s all those factors and more.
Is the fact that we are getting the top of the crop the reason why we are doing better in terms of assimilation?
Well, we’re not always getting the top. There’s a lot of evidence that there’s not, on average, much positive selection from Mexico. We’re getting a typical selection. Many Mexicans have come, and it’s not really the elites who move here; they live in Mexico City. But even then, assimilation has gone reasonably well. It’s been a bigger problem with Central Americans than with Mexicans. So there are a lot of complex factors here, but it seems we do assimilation better even when we don’t have positive selection on our side.
I would also like you to address a criticism of classical liberalism made by Patrick Deneen, who believes that classical liberalism is unsustainable because it depletes the moral and cultural capital it inherited from pre-liberal traditions. So, as classical liberalism progresses, it undermines the very conditions—such as trust, civic virtue, and shared norms—that allow classical liberalism to function in the first place.
What do you think about that?
What’s the evidence? The forms that trust takes always change. We live in a world where you stay in an Airbnb or walk into an Uber and don’t think twice about it. That’s a form of trust. At the same time, the people who live across the street from me, I couldn’t tell you what their names are. I do kind of trust them just because they’re in the neighborhood, but who knows?
If you ask, “Do we see the Western world collapsing because there’s not enough trust?” I don’t see that. I do see a huge problem in our politics, and I don’t know how to fix that, but I also see a lot of ways in which trust keeps on going up.
Open Societies and Closed Minds | Podcast Highlights
Marian Tupy interviews Matt Johnson about historicism, progress, and how tribalism and the “desire for recognition” are testing the foundations of open societies.
Matt Johnson —
Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.
So Matt, could you tell us who Karl Popper was and what this big book is about?
Popper is mainly known for his scientific work, especially his ideas around falsifiability. He published a book called The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945. He started writing it right after the Nazi annexation of Austria. It’s a very powerful and clarifying set of principles for anybody interested in liberal democracy and the broader project of building open societies around the world today.
So, why talk about liberal democracies and openness? It is our conjecture here at Human Progress that openness is very important. Have you ever thought or written about the connection between openness, liberal democracy, and the scope and speed of human progress?
That’s been a major theme of my work for a long time. I think there is a strong connection between the development of liberal democracy and open societies throughout the 20th century and human progress. Liberal democracy, unlike its authoritarian rivals, has error correction mechanisms built in. It allows for pluralism in society. It allows people to cooperate without the threat of violence or coercion. There’s also the economic element: Liberal democracy facilitates free trade and open exchange because it’s rule-based and law-bound, which are important conditions for economic development.
Human Progress also assumes that there is some directionality in history. We can say that living in 2025 is better than living in 1025 or 25 AD. But you begin your essay by raising the dangers of what Karl Popper called historicism, or a belief in the inevitability of certain political or economic outcomes. Can you unwind that for us? What is the difference between acknowledging the directionality of human history and historicism?
Popper regarded historicism as extremely dangerous because it treats human beings as a means to an end. If you already know what you’re working toward—a glorious worker state or some other utopia—then it doesn’t matter how much pain you have to inflict in the meantime. You’re not treating your citizens as ends whose rights must be protected; you’re treating them as raw material, as characters in this grand historical story.
The second concern is that historicism is anti-scientific because you can hammer any existing data into a form that fits your historicist prophecy.
Marx wrote that the unfolding of history is inevitable. In his view, leaders were just responsible for making that unavoidable transition easier. That’s the central conceit of historicism. If you take a Popperian view, you’re much more modest. You have to ground every policy in empirical reality. You have to adjust when things don’t work. You’re not just birthing a new paradigm you already know everything about. You don’t know what the future holds.
Stalin would say, anytime there was a setback, that it was all part of the same plan. It was all just globalist saboteurs attacking the Soviet Union, or it was some part of the grand historical unfolding that moving toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. There’s no sense in which new information can change the course of a government with historicist ideas.
That differs from a general idea of progress. We have a lot of economic data that suggests that people have escaped poverty at an incredible rate since the middle of the 20th century. We’ve seen democratization on a vast scale around the world. We’ve seen interstate relations become much more tranquil and peaceful over the past several decades. I mean, the idea of Germany and France fighting a war now is pretty much inconceivable to most people. That’s a huge historical victory, it’s unprecedented in the history of Western Europe.
So, there are good reasons to believe that we’ve progressed. And that’s the core difference between the observation and acknowledgment of progress and historicism, which is much less grounded in empirical reality.
Right. The way I understand human progress is backward-looking. We can say that we are richer than we were in the past. Fewer women die in childbirth. Fewer infants die. We have fewer casualties in wars, et cetera. But we don’t know where we are going.
Yeah, absolutely. There were moments during the Cold War that could have plunged us into nuclear war. It makes no sense to try to cram every idea into some existing paradigm or prophecy. All we can do is incrementally move toward a better world.
This brings us to another big name in your piece: Frank Fukuyama. Tell me how you read Fukuyama.
Fukuyama is perhaps the most misread political science writer of our time. There are countless lazy journalists who want to add intellectual heft to their article about some new crisis, and they’ll say, “well, it turns out Fukuyama was wrong. There are still bad things happening in the world.” That’s a fundamental misreading of Fukuyama’s argument. He never said that bad things would stop happening. He never said there would be an end to war, poverty, or political upheaval. His argument was that liberal capitalist democracy is the most sustainable political and economic system, that it had proven itself against the great ideological competitors in the 20th century, and that it would continue to do so in the future.
I think it’s still a live thesis, it hasn’t been proven or disproven. I suppose if the entire world collapsed into totalitarianism and remained that way, then yeah, Fukuyama was wrong. But right now, there’s still a vibrant democratic world competing against the authoritarian world, and I think that liberal democracy will continue to outperform.
You use a phrase in the essay I didn’t quite understand: “the desire for recognition.” What does it mean, and why is it important to Fukuyama?
The desire for recognition is the acknowledgment that human desires go beyond material concerns. We want to be treated as individuals with worth and agency, and we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for purely abstract goals. Liberal democracies are the only systems so far that have met the desire for recognition on a vast scale. Liberal democracies treat people as autonomous, rational ends in themselves, unlike dictatorships, which treat people as expendable, and that’s one of the reasons why liberal democracy has lasted as long as it has.
However, there’s a dark side. Because liberal democracy enables pluralism, people can believe whatever they want religiously and go down whatever political rabbit holes they want to. And, oftentimes, when you have the freedom to join these other tribes, you find yourself more committed to those tribes than to the overall society. If you’re a very serious Christian nationalist, you might want society organized along the lines of the Ten Commandments because that, in your view, is the foundation of morality. So, pluralism, which is one of the strengths of liberal democracy, also creates constant threats that liberal democracy has to navigate.
I noticed in your essay that you are not too concerned. You note that democracy is not in full retreat and that, if you look at the numbers, things are not as dire as they seem. What is the argument?
If you just read annual reports from Freedom House, you would think that we’re on our way to global authoritarianism. However, if you take a longer historical view, even just 80 years versus 20 years, the trend line is still dramatically in favor of liberal democracies. It’s still an amazing historical achievement. It’s getting rolled back, but in the grand sweep of history, it’s getting rolled back on the margins.
Still, it’s a dangerous and frightening trend. And you’re in a dangerous place when you see a country like the United States electing a president who is expressly hostile toward the exchange of power after four years. So, the threats to democracy are real, but we need to have some historical perspective.
So, we are more liberally democratic than we were 40 years ago, but something has happened in the last 15 to 20 years. Some of the trust and belief in liberal democracy has eroded.
How is that connected to the issue of recognition?
In the United States, if you look at just the past five or six years, there has been a dramatic shift toward identity politics, which is a form of the desire for recognition.
On the left, there was an explosion of wokeness, especially in 2020, where there was a lot of authoritarianism. People were shouted down for fairly anodyne comments, and editors were churned out of their roles. And on the right, there’s this sense that native-born Americans are more completely American than other people. All of these things are forms of identity politics, and they privilege one group over another and drive people away from a universal conception of citizenship. That’s one of the big reasons why people have become less committed to pluralism and the classic American idea of E pluribus unum.
Have you ever thought about why, specifically after 2012, there was this massive outpouring of wokeness and identity politics? Some people on the right suggest that this is because America has begun to lose religion, and, as a consequence, people are seeking recognition in politics.
I think it could be a consequence of the decline of religion. I’ve written a lot about what many people regard as a crisis of meaning in Western liberal democracies. I think, to some extent, that crisis is overblown. Many people don’t need to have some sort of superstructure or belief system that goes beyond humanism or their commitment to liberalism or what have you.
However, I also think that we’re inclined toward religious belief. We search for things to worship. People don’t really want to create their own belief systems; they would rather go out there and pick a structure off the shelf. For some, it’s Catholicism or Protestantism, and for others, it’s Wokeism or white identity politics. And there were elements of the woke explosion that seemed deeply religious. People talked about original sin and literally fell on their knees.
We also live in an era that has been, by historical standards, extremely peaceful and prosperous, and I think Fukuyama is right that people search for things to fight over. The more prosperous your society is, the more you’ll be incensed by minor inequalities or slights. The complaints you hear from people today would be baffling to people one hundred years ago.
I also think the desire for recognition gets re-normed all the time. It doesn’t really matter how much your aggregate conditions have improved; when new people come into the world, they have a set of expectations based on their surroundings. And it’s a well-established psychological principle that people are less concerned about their absolute level of well-being than their well-being relative to their neighbors. If you see your neighbor has a bigger house or bigger boat, you feel like you’ve been cheated. And this is also the language that Donald Trump uses. It’s very zero-sum, and he traffics in this idea that everything is horrible.
You raised a subject that I’m very interested in, which is the crisis of meaning. I don’t know what to make of it. Everybody, including people I admire and respect, seems to think there is a crisis of meaning, but I don’t know what that means.
Is there more of a crisis of meaning today than there was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago? And what does it really mean? Have you thought about this issue?
You’re right to question where this claim comes from. How can people who claim there is a crisis of meaning see inside the minds of the people who say that they don’t need religion to live a meaningful life? There’s something extremely presumptuous there, and I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be quantified.
People say, well, look at the explosion of conspiracism and pseudoscience. And there are people who’ve become interested in astrology and things like that. But humanity has been crammed with pseudoscience and superstition for as long as we’ve been around. It’s very difficult to compare Western societies today to the way they were a few hundred years ago when people were killed for blasphemy and witchcraft.
And look at what our societies have accomplished in living memory. Look at the vast increase in material well-being, the vast improvements in life expectancy, literacy, everything you can imagine. I find all that very inspiring. I think if we start talking about democracy and capitalism in that grander historical context, then maybe we can make some inroads against the cynicism and the nihilism that have taken root.
Marian Tupy speaks with writer and political thinker Matt Johnson about historicism, progress, and how tribalism and the “desire for recognition” are testing the foundations of open societies.
