Gerald Gaus and the Open Society

This is a guest essay by Dr Edward W. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business at Wheeling University, and Executive Director of its Institute for the Study of Capitalism and Morality. Ed is author of a trilogy of important books on freedom and flourishing: “Capitalism and Commerce”, “Champions of a Free Society”, and “Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society”. He also has numerous other publications, including several published on this site. (Please see the list after the end of this essay.) 

 

Gerald Gaus’s The Open Society and Its Complexities (2021) is a response to three theses advanced by Friedrich A. Hayek regarding the Open Society. Hayek’s first thesis is that human beings are not made for a free society. Human evolved psychology makes us xenophobic, parochial, and egalitarian in ways that conflict with the diversity and impartiality of an Open Society. The second thesis is that the operation of institutions in the Open Society is so unclear that we cannot rationally evaluate, critique, or justify that type of society. The third thesis is that the Open Society cannot be governed. Because it is a complex, multidimensional, and dynamic system with many linear, nonlinear, and inextricably related intersections and feedback connections, it is an extremely hard or impossible to predict the effects we will have on society by intervening in it. These theses are pessimistic about the Open Society. Gaus’s achievement is to critically re-examine these theses and to argue that Hayek’s program underestimated the potential resources of human morality and the Open Society to deal with the challenges he perceived.

Gaus begins the book with three questions inspired by Hayek: Are human beings psychologically and morally suited to the Open Society?  Is the Open Society too complex to be morally justified? Is the Open Society too complex to be governed? The structure of the book follows those questions through three major parts: the evolution of a normative species; diversity and self-organized complexity; and the complexities of self-governance. Gaus’s project is therefore both philosophical and interdisciplinary. He draws upon moral philosophy, evolutionary theory, economics, political science, social psychology, complexity theory, and the study of institutions.

 

Although, in his book, Gaus provides an explanation of the emergence and maintenance of cooperative social arrangements, an important philosophical question remains: How should we evaluate the moral principles that have evolved, and what justifies the rights and institutions that make an open society desirable? An explanation of how moral dispositions and cooperative practices emerged does not, by itself, establish that those dispositions or practices are morally justified.

 

Toward the end of this essay, I explain how Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl’s theory of individualistic perfectionism, particularly their account of individual rights as metanormative principles, offers a complementary and underpinning philosophical foundation.  They argue that a neo-Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing supports a political order that protects individual liberty without requiring everyone to pursue the same conception of the good life.

The Evolution of Human Moral Behavior

 

The first part of the book explores the evolution of human moral behavior. Gaus rejects a simple picture of human beings as either selfish maximizers or altruistic cooperators. Instead, human beings are highly social creatures possessing capacities for reciprocity, cooperation, punishment, norm enforcement, moral learning, and cultural adaptation. This evolutionary perspective matters because the Open Society is not merely a political invention imposed upon human beings. It emerges from capacities that human beings have developed over long periods of social interaction. The implication is significant: liberal society must be understood as a dynamic social order whose functioning depends upon actual human capacities for cooperation and norm-following.

 

Gaus cites formal models and empirical evidence to show that the Open Society is grounded on the moral foundations of human cooperation originating in our distant evolutionary past, but has built upon them a complex and diverse society that requires rethinking both the nature of moral justification and the meaning of democratic self-governance. Instead of providing a traditional argument for the Open Society, Gaus offers an evolutionary account showing that the Open Society has advantages over alternative arrangements that will cause it to prevail. The features of the Open Society that foster cultural evolution have to do with diversity and complexity.

Diversity and Complexity

 

The second major theme is diversity. Gaus’s Open Society is much more diverse than the relatively homogeneous liberal societies often imagined by classical liberal theory. Individuals possess different values, preferences, identities, projects, moral perspectives, and notions of the good.

 

This second part takes up Hayek’s second thesis—that the Open Society is too complex for the practice of moral justification. Gaus endorses Hayek’s criticism of social contract theory, proposing instead a self-organization model of moral justification. According to this model, moral justification is not a matter of deriving principles from a hypothetical contract or a single collective choice, but rather emerges from socially interdependent decisions. Publicly justified rules aid self-governance through a process of continuous contestation and mutual adjustment.

 

Diversity can generate additional diversity. Gaus describes this as autocatalytic diversity. Interactions among different individuals and groups can create new choices, institutions, occupations, lifestyles, associations, and forms of cooperation. Diversity therefore becomes a source of further complexity. 

 

Freedom does not simply permit people to choose among an existing menu of alternatives. Their interactions can generate new alternatives. The social order is consequently not merely a system in equilibrium. It is evolutionary and generative. Gaus’s central concept is self-organization. A complex social order does not require a central designer. Individuals respond to one another, learn, imitate, compete, cooperate, and adjust. Order emerges from these interactions.

 

This is closely related to the Hayekian concept of spontaneous order, but Gaus develops the idea in a more systematic and contemporary framework. The Open Society is a complex adaptive system in which individual actions can generate patterns that no individual actor planned.

 

Public Justification and Polycentric Governance

 

Importantly, Gaus does not conclude that because an order is spontaneous it is beyond evaluation or governance. The third part of his book explores how self-governance can operate within complex systems. 

 

Gaus’s account of public justification is also important. In a diverse society, people will not share a comprehensive conception of the good. Therefore, political legitimacy cannot depend upon everyone sharing the same moral or religious worldview. Instead, social rules must be justifiable to people with diverse normative perspectives. Gaus’s approach attempts to explain how shared rules can emerge without requiring a centralized agreement on ultimate values. His self-organization model suggests that free and equal individuals can sometimes converge on common rules even when they value those rules for different reasons. 

 

This is an important development within liberal public reason theory because it shifts attention away from designing an ideal social contract and toward understanding how actual processes of argument, adaptation, coordination, and institutional evolution can generate publicly acceptable norms. Gaus’s libertarian neutralism embraces perspectival diversity and interspectival justice which involves rational bargains and compromises.

 

Gaus’s discussion of polycentricity extends the analysis from moral norms to institutions. Rather than imagining governance as a single hierarchical state directing society from above, Gaus emphasizes multiple centers of decision-making. Institutions can experiment, learn, compete, cooperate, and adapt.

 

Gaus’s primary target is what he terms the "synoptic delusion"—the belief held by political philosophers and central planners that society can be understood as a simple causal mechanism that can be designed, predicted, and optimized from the top down. Gaus demonstrates that an Open Society is a Complex Adaptive System. In complex systems outcomes emerge from linear and non-linear interactions among heterogeneous, rule-following agents.  Cause and effect are decoupled and even small policy interventions often produce unforeseen, unintended consequences.

System-wide order self-organizes from the bottom up rather than being commanded from above.

Consequently, ideal political theories (such as Rawlsian egalitarianism or strict libertarian utopianism) fail because they assume a static, predictable social model. They demand a level of institutional knowledge that no central authority or philosopher can possess. Crucially, Gaus argues that moral diversity is not a problem to be eliminated, but an engine of social discovery and resilience. Gaus describes diversity in the Open Society as autocatalytic. Free societies grant individuals room to experiment with diverse ways of living and thinking. This diversity drives innovation, specialization, and economic complexity. Increased complexity expands the range of possible social roles and moral perspectives, which in turn generates even greater diversity.

Instead of searching for a single, ideal standard of justice, Gaus argues that the Open Society relies on flexible, self-organizing moral rules that allow diverse agents to live together productively despite moral disagreements. Polycentric governance and decentralized rule-evolution allow society to adapt dynamically to unforeseen challenges.

 

His discussion draws upon the insights associated with Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School. Polycentric institutions can emerge from self-organized networks and can provide mechanisms for solving collective action problems without requiring comprehensive central planning. Thus, Gaus’s liberalism is not simply about limiting government. It is about understanding the architecture of a complex social order in which governance itself can be decentralized.

According to Gaus, the Open Society is characterized by three key features: autocatalytic diversity, unbounded technological innovation, and individual autonomy. These features make the Open Society a complex adaptive system that is difficult to control from the top or center but is resilient and adaptive from the bottom up. Gaus argues that the freedoms of our highly networked society are difficult to extinguish and that its ideals can be vindicated via grassroots exploration and consent. This is a cautiously optimistic argument about the long-term prospects for the Open Society, grounded in an evolutionary analysis of morality as a complex adaptive system.

 

Gaus’s approach is distinctively interdisciplinary, drawing on evolutionary analysis, primatology, anthropology, moral psychology, analyses of complex systems, experimental economics, and studies of norms. This methodological breadth reflects his pivotal role in the re-founding of “moral science” as an explicit form of social inquiry and his championing of philosophy, politics, and economics as a way of injecting empirical and strategic insights into traditional philosophical debates. His detached attitude toward morality, assessing it as an admirable but pragmatic mechanism, contrasts with the more prescriptive tone of much contemporary political philosophy.

Underpinning and Strengthening Gausian Complexity with neo-Aristotelian Perfectionism 

While Gaus’s analysis of social complexity is well done, an exclusively evolutionary defense of liberalism faces weaknesses. Evolutionary processes can sometimes select for illiberal, tribal, or authoritarian social structures if those structures offer short-term survival advantages. If moral rules are merely evolved social conventions, it becomes difficult to explain why an open society is good, rather than merely complex and adaptive.

 

 Evolutionary persistence does not establish moral validity. A disposition may have contributed to the survival or reproductive success of a group without being ethically defensible. Favoritism toward one’s own group, for example, may have supported cooperation among insiders while encouraging hostility toward outsiders. Likewise, an institution may endure because it benefits powerful participants rather than because it respects the rights and flourishing of everyone subject to it.

 

 Spontaneous order should not be treated as automatically just. Self-organizing processes can generate beneficial arrangements, but they can also operate within institutions that permit coercion, exploitation, or rights violations. The fact that a social pattern emerges spontaneously does not establish that it is morally legitimate.

Gaus’s dependence on formal empirical models, game theory, empirical evidence, evolutionary adaptation, and the social sciences displays his tendency to disregard or underrate traditional normative political philosophy. He appears to reject the traditional goal of political philosophy which is to determine or identify the best political order. An evolutionary theorist, like Gaus, should at some point judge what has evolved. 

Rasmussen and Den Uyl supply the necessary normative foundation. They remind us that social systems ultimately exist for the sake of real human beings striving to live meaningful, perfectible lives. Grounding the defense of the free society in human self-direction ensures that classical liberalism remains anchored in a firm defense of individual rights, preventing it from being reduced to pure pragmatic functionalism.

 Rasmussen and Den Uyl provide the missing normative anchor through their distinction between normative and metanormative principles. Normative principles guide individual moral conduct—they tell us how we ought to live. Metanormative principles, by contrast, regulate the conditions under which normative conduct could take place. Individual rights are metanormative principles: they establish the political and legal framework within which each person can pursue his or her own conception of the good life without being coerced by others. The linchpin of their argument is self-direction. Human flourishing is an objective, individualized, agent-relative achievement that each person must attain through his or her own practical reasoning and choice. Self-direction is both a necessary condition for, and an operating condition of, the pursuit and achievement of human flourishing. Because flourishing requires self-direction, and self-direction is thwarted by coercion, individuals possess natural rights to the conditions of their flourishing—rights that are grounded not in convention or utility but in the very nature of human beings as rational agents.

The complementarity between these approaches is structural. Gaus’s evolutionary-epistemic framework explains how the Open Society emerges, functions, and remains fragile. Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s neo-Aristotelian perfectionism explains why it is worth defending and what its moral limits are. Spontaneous orders—markets, evolved legal rules, decentralized coordination—create conditions of prosperity and peace that no central planner could replicate. The spontaneous order of the market does not guarantee that anyone will flourish. It merely creates the space within which flourishing is possible. This is exactly what metanormative rights do. They do not guarantee success or even provide the conditions that make such action possible. The spontaneous order of general rules and the teleological structure of human action are not opposed but mutually supporting. The evolved rules of a free society create the conditions under which individual practical wisdom can operate effectively, while the metanormative framework of rights protects the sphere within which that wisdom is exercised.

Yet, the two approaches also differ in important respects. Gaus’s framework is fundamentally procedural and social. Moral justification emerges from the self-organization of diverse agents converging on shared rules. Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s framework is teleological and individualistic. Rights are grounded in the nature of human flourishing as an objective good that each person must achieve in his or her own way. Gaus is more optimistic than Hayek about the capacity of evolved moral psychology to sustain the Open Society. Rasmussen and Den Uyl are more confident that a robust ethical foundation can be articulated without imposing a particular conception of the good on others. Gaus’s account risks leaving the Open Society normatively underdetermined and vulnerable to the objection that if some other arrangement produced more prosperity or coordination, it would be justified. Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s account supplies a non-consequentialist ground: the right to self-direction is justified because self-direction is a necessary condition for human flourishing, and human flourishing is the ultimate standard of value.

 Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s metanormative framework provides the normative foundation that Gaus’s evolutionary account presupposes but cannot itself generate. Gaus shows that the Open Society is grounded on evolved moral foundations. Rasmussen and Den Uyl show why those foundations are not merely contingent facts but expressions of a deeper teleological structure. The Open Society is an emergent order that creates the conditions for human flourishing, and human flourishing is the ultimate end that justifies and limits political power. Liberty and flourishing are not opposed but interdependent. Liberty is the political condition for flourishing, and flourishing is the moral purpose of liberty.

In an age of polarization and skepticism about liberal institutions, this synthesis offers a defense of freedom that is both empirically grounded and ethically robust. Gaus’s evolutionary-epistemic framework explains the fragility and complexity of the Open Society; Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s neo-Aristotelian perfectionism explains why it deserves our understanding and our defense. Together, they articulate a vision of a free society that emerges spontaneously yet serves the ultimate end of human flourishing.

 

Conclusion

 

The relationship between Gerald Gaus’s The Open Society and Its Complexities and Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s Norms of Liberty and The Perfectionist Turn illustrates the potential value of integrating evolutionary social science with neo-Aristotelian political philosophy. Gaus demonstrates how evolved moral capacities, cultural development, and self-organized complexity can help sustain an open society characterized by cooperation and diversity. Rasmussen and Den Uyl provide a complementary and underpinning ethical foundation by explaining why individual rights should protect the conditions necessary for self-directed human flourishing.

 

The resulting synthesis recognizes that an open society requires both an understanding of how cooperative social order develops and a defensible account of the principles that should govern it. Evolutionary success alone cannot determine moral legitimacy, while abstract principles alone cannot explain the full complexity of social life.

 

Individualistic perfectionism supplies a philosophical standard for evaluating the moral and political institutions that evolutionary processes produce. Metanormative rights protect the freedom necessary for individuals to pursue diverse forms of flourishing, while the insights of spontaneous-order theory help explain how those individuals can cooperate peacefully without a centrally imposed plan.

References

Bates, Winton. 2025. “How Can the Study of Human Nature Help Us Reach Normative Conclusions in Political Philosophy”. Freedom and Flourishing  (Oct. 31).

 Den Uyl, Douglas J., and Rasmussen, Douglas B. 2016. The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

 Gaus, Gerald. 2011. The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Gaus, Gerald. 2016. The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gaus, Gerald. 2021. The Open Society and Its Complexities. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A., 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 Hayek, Friedrich A. 1973. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 Popper, Karl R. 1945. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

 Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl, Douglas J. 2005. Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Other essays by Ed Younkins on this site:

Younkins, Edward W. “What Contribution did David L. Norton Make to our Understanding of Ethical Individualism?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 18, 2025.

----------------------------“How can dialectics help us to defend liberty?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 8, 2025.

---------------------------“How can Austrian Economics be reconciled with the Neo-Aristotelian philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. October 2, 2025.

----------------------------- “Can Polarized Moral Politics be Bridged by a Neo-Aristotelian Philosophy of Freedom and Flourishing?” Freedom and Flourishing. December 13, 2025.

----------------------------- “Does Humanomics Need a Moral Anchor?” Freedom and Flourishing. January 22, 2026.

----------------------------- “Is Character Education Compatible With Individualistic Perfectionism?” Freedom and Flourishing. February 27, 2026.

 ----------------------------- “Are Spontaneous Order and neo-Aristotelian Arguments for a Free Society Compatible?” Freedom and Flourishing. March 19, 2026.

----------------------------- “Are Spinoza’s Philosophy and Neo-Aristotelian Philosophies of Freedom and Flourishing Compatible?” Freedom and Flourishing. June 4, 2026. 

----------------------------- “The Architecture of Freedom: Randy Barnett’s Natural Law Case for a Free Society” Freedom and Flourishing. June 26, 2026.

----------------------------- “Robust Political Economy and Neo-Aristotelianism: Complementary Visions of Freedom and Flourishing” Freedom and Flourishing. July 10, 2026.

------------------------------ “Is Ayn Rand’s Philosophy Consistent with Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics?” Freedom and Flourishing. July 26, 2026.

-------------------------------"Henry B. Veatch’s Neo-Aristotelian Defense of Reality, Reason, and Rights” Freedom and Flourishing. August 30, 2026.

-------------------------------- "Behavioral Economics and Human Flourishing: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective” Freedom and Flourishing. October 4, 2026. 

What does "Hillbilly Elegy" tell us about J.D. Vance’s daimon?

 

J.D. Vance, Vice President of the United States, identifies himself as a post-liberal conservative. Since he is only a heartbeat away from becoming president, I have been thinking that I should read his latest book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, to see if it sheds any light on how he would be likely to use the powers of the presidency.

However, I decided that I should read Hillbilly Elegy first - and am glad that I eventually managed to read it, a decade after its publication.  I didn’t manage to get past the Introduction when I first attempted to read it a few years ago, but I now think it deserves its status as a best seller.

In this essay I will discuss the problem I saw in the Introduction before outlining what I see as the book’s strongest point. I will conclude that the book shows us Vance’s values and aspirations clearly, but offers only a glimpse of what David L. Norton would call a daimon.

The Introduction

In the Introduction, Vance discusses social problems of people who identify as hillbillies - working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish (Ulster) descent whose ancestors settled in the Appalachian Mountains. At one point he writes:

“When I mention the plight of my community, I am often met with an explanation that goes something like this: “Of course the prospects for working-class whites have worsened, J.D., but you’re putting the chicken before the egg. They’re divorcing more, marrying less, and experiencing less happiness because their economic opportunities have declined. If they only had better access to jobs, other parts of their lives would improve as well.”

Vance goes on to say that he held that opinion himself during his youth. He acknowledges that the opinion makes sense in terms of stresses associated with loss of security of employment in the industrial Midwest. However, he then goes on to claim that experience has taught him that “this story of economic security is, at best, incomplete”.

In support of that claim, Vance only cites one example. He mentions his personal experience of working alongside a young man “with every reason to work – a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way – carelessly tossing aside a good job …”. He suggests that the young man displayed a lack of agency – a feeling that he had little control over his life and a willingness to blame everyone but himself.

Vance seems to be suggesting that such attitudes are a characteristic of hillbillies and “distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America”. Perhaps hillbillies are particularly prone to this kind of learned helplessness, but Vance doesn’t make a strong case in support of that view.  

In Vance’s defence, however, he does acknowledge that his book does not pretend to be an academic study of the problem of declining upward social mobility. He states his primary aim is “to tell a true story of what that problem feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck”.

 That is where the value of the book lies.

The strongest point

The point that comes through strongly in the book is that the messages that individual children receive from influential family members can help them to avoid adopting low aspirations, even when they are born into dysfunctional families and live in communities where most children grow up to perceive that the deck is stacked against them.

The story of Vance’s childhood is largely about the negative influence of his mother, whom he watched repeatedly succumb to addiction, being more than offset by the positive influence of his maternal grandmother and grandfather (Mamaw and Papaw) his elder sister, Lindsay, his natural father, and his Uncle Jimmy. To his credit, Vance doesn’t attempt to present himself as being particularly smart.

The picture that Vance paints of Middletown Ohio, where he grew up, is complex. He contrasts the mores of his grandparents – “old fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking” - with those of his mother, which he describes as “consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful”. He suggests that “increasingly, the entire neighborhood” has been adopting his mother’s mores. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that there were many intact families and peaceful homes in Middletown and that many of his childhood friends have been able to build successful lives there.

This story does not fit easily into either the cultural decline or economic decline explanations in the passage quoted above. Mamaw and Papaw’s mores were presumably reinforced by the stability offered by Papaw’s Armco steel job. And Vance’s mother’s addiction problem is not obviously attributable to either lack of economic opportunity or cultural factors. Towards the end of the book, Vance suggests that his mother’s problems were largely personal: “She tried to find happiness in love and work, but she listened too much to the wrong voice in her head”.

Mamaw nurtured in J.D. an aspiration to better himself, combined with a degree of optimism about his own potential. That is a valuable gift, but it is not the same thing as a daimon. An aspiration to get ahead is generic. Almost anyone can hold it, and it doesn’t say what one is to become. Norton’s daimon, by contrast, is unique and individual. The question for the rest of the book is whether Vance’s aspiration ever acquires that specificity.

Vance achieved well enough at high school to be admitted to Ohio State University but was terrified by the prospect of having to cope with “the unstructured college experience”. He joined the Marine Corps at the suggestion of his cousin Rachael, a Marine Corps veteran.

According to Vance, the Marine Corps taught him to live like an adult. He suggests that by the time he commenced study at Ohio State, the Marine Corps had also “instilled in me an incredible sense of invincibility”. It certainly instilled work habits that enabled him to graduate from college with grades high enough to gain admittance to Yale Law.

Yale Law doesn’t seem to have presented Vance with huge academic challenges. He portrays his experience there as akin to a kind of finishing school where he learned to network and had the good fortune to meet Usha, who became his wife. He credits Amy Chua, one of his professors, with providing sound advice on how to pursue career goals without destroying his relationship with Usha.

The daimon question

As explained by David L. Norton, your daimon is your innate potentiality – a unique “ideal of perfection”. Self-actualization is the process of discovering your daimon and living in harmony with it. Norton describes that as the feeling of  “being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do”, as well as the feeling of being where one must be, and wholeheartedly doing what one must do. I have previously discussed David L. Norton’s explanation of daimon in an essay entitled, “Do you live in harmony with your daimon?”  The concept of daimon has been further discussed by Ed Younkins in his review essay on Norton’s books.

 Many of the things that are important to J.D. Vance are evident from a reading of Hillbilly Elegy. It is obvious that he considers it important to identify as a hillbilly as well as a Yale graduate. The importance to him of family and close personal relationships comes through strongly. It is clear that he regards personal agency, self-reliance and hard work as important values. He views his development of self-confidence as an important achievement.

However, I don’t think any of those things could be said to constitute a supreme aim or guiding principle. As noted above, Norton describes living in harmony with one’s daimon as a feeling of being where one wants to be and doing what one wants to do, as well as being where one must be and wholeheartedly doing what one must do. Does Vance describe anything like that? The closest he comes in the middle of the book is the Marine Corps, but what he reports there is a new confidence, an “incredible sense of invincibility”, rather than a calling. His account of Yale is dominated by networking, credentials and careerism.

A memoir is only indirect evidence, of course. Norton’s daimon is neither the actual person nor a product of the actual person, so Vance may have a daimon the book doesn’t reveal. I can only report what the book shows.

Perhaps we see a glimpse of Vance’s daimon in the final pages of the book. At that point he introduces us to Brian, a kid from Appalachian Kentucky who reminded J.D. of himself when he was fifteen years old. Brian had experienced many instances of childhood trauma and his hope of a normal life had evaporated. Vance writes:

“We do need to create a space for the J.D.s and Brians of the world to have a chance. I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

If J.D.’s daimon is to give people like Brian a better chance in life, the book can’t tell us whether his political career serves it. Vance writes that “there is no government that can fix these problems for us”, but he also says that public policy can help. The test is therefore what he does with the power he holds, not what he wrote a decade ago.

So what does Hillbilly Elegy tell us about J.D. Vance’s daimon? It tells us a good deal about his values: family, agency, self-reliance and hard work. It shows the aspiration Mamaw nurtured in him. It offers little that could be called a vocation until the final pages, where his concern for children like Brian hints at an aim that may be more than personal ambition.

I’m not sure Hillbilly Elegy sheds much light on how J.D. Vance would use the powers of the presidency. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. Perhaps Communion will tell me more.

What kind of Politics is Consistent with Consent of the Governed?

 

I have been thinking about the kind of politics that is consistent with consent of the governed since reading Max Borders’ book Underthrow: How Jefferson’s Dangerous Idea Will Spark a New Revolution. The book was published in 2023, but I have only recently read it.

The second chapter of the book is entitled “Politics is the Pathology” but Borders' target is contemporary politics. He argues that contemporary politics “brings out the worst in all of us”. He then goes on to argue for social action – a different kind of political activity - which will promote consent of the governed.

A question which the book raises for me is whether underthrow initiatives can be successful in bringing about substantial movement toward consent of the governed without some support from within contemporary political systems.

What does consent mean?

Consent of the governed figures prominently in Borders’ book. He quotes from the United States Declaration of Independence, which asserts that governments “derive their just powers from consent of the governed” and that when government becomes destructive of individual rights, which include “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government”.

I understand that the American revolutionaries saw election of representatives as the primary vehicle for consent. That view of consent appears to have much in common with the concept of ‘government legitimacy’ as described by modern political scientists who focus on procedural rules such as the existence of free and fair elections. It also appears to have a lot in common with the concept of ‘tacit consent’ as described by John Locke:

John Locke wrote:  

“The difficulty is, what ought to be looked upon as a tacit consent, and how far it binds, i.e. how far any one shall be looked on to have consented, and thereby submitted to any government, where he has made no expressions of it at all. And to this I say, that every man, that hath any possessions, or enjoyment, of any part of the dominions of any government, doth thereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of that government, during such enjoyment, as any one under it; whether this his possession be of land, to him and his heirs for ever, or a lodging only for a week; or whether it be barely travelling freely on the highway; and in effect, it reaches as far as the very being of any one within the territories of that government” (Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis, London: A. Millar et al., 1764, Second Treatise, Chapter VIII para 119).

However, Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration, held that no generation has a right to bind following generations. On that basis, he argued that every constitution and law naturally expires at the end of 19 years. He added: “If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.”

Would endorsement of a constitution by a majority of voters every 19 years constitute consent of the governed? It might come closer to that ideal than any constitution for any country on earth at present, but a substantial minority of citizens could still claim that they have not given consent to some, or all, of the constitutional provisions agreed to by the majority.

Borders argues that consent of the governed means “a real, contractual civil association that a sovereign person selects in a governance market”. I will outline his ideal model of consent after considering the case he makes that we should be concerned about consent.

What is so important about consent?

Borders makes a powerful moral point by asking questions:

• “if you could choose nonviolent means of achieving social goals such as poverty relief, wouldn’t you?”
• “if it is possible to help the poor (and for the poor to help each other) without resorting to violence, isn’t this something we ought to do?”

He also suggests that it is immoral to impose monolithic systems upon people who prefer to live in a different political, cultural, or economic niche.

The implication is that if any of the current activities of government can be undertaken without resort to the coercive powers of the state (violence) then it is immoral for those activities to performed in a manner that requires citizens to submit to those coercive powers.

Throughout the book, Borders links lack of consent of the governed to a set of interconnected problems in liberal democracies.  These include expansion of authoritarian control; partisan tribalism and civil conflict; an unhealthy focus on national sensationalism; and weakening of community and civil society.

Borders advocates that monolithic systems should be peacefully underthrown rather than violently overthrown.

So, what does underthrow entail?

 Borders has borrowed the concept of “underthrow” from Michael P Gibson, who suggests: “We can underthrow the state one contract at a time.”

The approach to underthrow that Borders develops in this book is based on the framework for utopia that Robert Nozick developed in Part II of Anarchy, State and Utopia. Borders suggests that Nozick’s framework – a scaffolding hospitable to pluralism – can serve as a strategic construct for subversive innovation:

“In reordering Nozick’s premises into a strategic framework of niche creation I call subversive innovation, I look around at the authoritarian powers in our midst. Then, I seek out weak joints or legal gray areas to exploit, in which one might apply a liberatory strategy or recruit new constituencies through entrepreneurial means. Carving niches means experimenting with new governance systems, however modest, hoping that these systems prevail in competition. Such is the delicate dance of dissidence.”

Subversive innovations that Borders mentions in this book include Uber, Airbnb and Bitcoin. The discussion of subversive innovation overlaps considerably with that in The Social Singularity (which I discussed here) and The Decentralist (discussed here). In Underthrow , however, the author also discusses Balaji Srinivasan’s proposals for start-up societies and proposes a program to create a “network state”.

Borders ends this book by urging people to join him in creating a society that will work toward establishing consent of the governed. He views the Freemasons as providing a model for the values-based association of like-minded people that he has proposed.

The political context

I wish Max Borders every success in his ongoing Underthrow activities. I admire his enthusiasm as a political entrepreneur who is seeking “to help people of conscience become a countervailing force”.

Before going further, I should clarify why I have referred to Max as a political entrepreneur. The main reason is that I propose to refer below to a series of essays about political entrepreneurship that I wrote last year. However, I think the description is apt because Max’s innovative endeavours encompass aspects of both economic and political entrepreneurship.

In the epigraph to my essays on political entrepreneurship, I quoted Don Lavoie’s understanding of the links between economic entrepreneurship and culture:

“Entrepreneurship necessarily takes place within culture, it is utterly shaped by culture, and it fundamentally consists in interpreting and influencing culture.”

From Lavoie’s perspective, “entrepreneurial acts are the readings of, and contributions to, different conversations”. In the third essay, I suggested that political entrepreneurs respond to public discourse, using it as a basis for policy innovation.

While developing the line of reasoning leading to his proposals for establishing a society of like-minded individuals Borders is highly critical of the contemporary politics in liberal democracies. I share his concerns about interest group politics (see this essay about the incentives that political entrepreneurs are faced with, this essay about the information constraints facing political entrepreneurs, and this essay about the erosion of norms of political behaviour).

However, as noted at the outset, I find it difficult to see how it will be possible to bring about substantial movement toward consent of the governed without some support from within contemporary political systems. As Borders recognises, subversive innovators face huge difficulties in competing with social insurance programs that are funded by compulsory tax payments.

Perhaps substantial public support for economic freedom (policies that are more consistent with consent of the governed) will return if the current trajectory of many liberal democracies lead to deepening economic crises. Deepening economic crises do seem likely but policy change leading to greater economic freedom will depend on election to government of political entrepreneurs who support greater economic freedom. In the absence of enlightened political leadership, economic crises may well result in deepening authoritarianism.

I concluded my consideration of what kind of political entrepreneurship is required to promote greater liberty by noting that, unfortunately, important reforms in the rules of the game made in some countries during the 1980s and 90s did not become deeply entrenched. Political leaders obtained sufficient electoral support to implement market-friendly policies, but there does not seem to be much evidence that members of the public improved their understanding of the benefits of free markets in any of the countries in which reforms were undertaken.

That led me to consider how the anti-market bias of public opinion could be reduced and to note the historical role of political entrepreneurship in social movements in promoting liberty. I ended by endorsing the view of Ed Younkins that it is through the “numerous interactions with individuals” during their everyday lives that advocates of liberty can “transmit the freedom philosophy to the general public”.

Max Borders’ political entrepreneurship seems to me to be a positive step toward establishing a broadly-based social movement that will enable substantial steps to be taken toward making consent of the governed a reality. Hopefully, one day that movement will become sufficiently influential to enlist the support of political entrepreneurs within government that will be necessary to enable citizens to opt out of coercive collectivism.

Conclusion

Max Borders makes a compelling moral case that we should prefer peaceful, voluntary paths to social goals over means that require citizens to submit to the coercive powers of the state, and underthrow offers a model for how such paths might be built one contract, one niche, at a time. But the question I raised at the outset remains: can underthrow deliver substantial movement toward consent of the governed without support from within contemporary political systems?

The experience of market-friendly reforms in the 1980s and 90s suggests that action within contemporary political systems can be helpful. The reforms occurred because political entrepreneurs won sufficient electoral support to legislate change, but those changes did not become deeply entrenched, in part because the public's underlying understanding of why free markets serve human flourishing was never substantially improved. Subversive innovation of the kind Borders proposes may be one of the more promising ways of closing that gap: niches that actually work can teach by demonstration in a way that political argument alone cannot.

Rather than viewing underthrow and electoral political entrepreneurship as rival strategies, I see them as potentially complementary: subversive innovation can demonstrate what consent-based alternatives look like in practice, while political entrepreneurs working within existing systems can widen the legal and political space in which those alternatives are permitted to grow.

What can Libertarians Learn from Foucault?

 

Before reading Mark Pennington’s recent book, Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom, it would not have occurred to me that libertarians could learn anything from the social theories of Michel Foucault. Pennington has persuaded me that some beliefs associated with Foucault, and postmodernism more generally, are not devoid of merit. As will be discussed below, however, the beliefs that he identifies as postmodern differ somewhat from the collection of beliefs that I have hitherto associated with postmodernism.

Pennington claims that liberals who are concerned about over-government can learn from Foucault about “multiple sources and potential forms of this ‘over-government’ in modern societies and how these threats to freedom have been neglected by, and in some cases resulted from, the dominant strands in liberal thought”.

The author aims “to enunciate the elements of a postmodern liberalism, and to show how this perspective might engage in a productive conversation with Foucault in ways that expose the illiberalism of contemporary societies and the dominant forms of social science and political philosophy that contribute to this state of affairs”.

Before considering Pennington’s claims about what liberals can learn from Foucault and the potential for liberals to engage productively with his ideas, I need to clarify how Pennington is able to argue that some of Foucault’s views are worthy of consideration and what Pennington means by “postmodern liberalism”.

Foucault’s views

 The main problem I have with the postmodernist movement is its disrespect for reason, truth and knowledge. Stephen Hicks suggests that Foucault’s views illustrate the direction and tone of the postmodern intellectual world:

“Michel Foucault has identified the major targets: “All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.” Such necessities must be swept aside as baggage from the past: “It is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth, or Knowledge”.” (The sources of the quoted passages are cited in Hicks, 2004.)

Hicks explains that Foucault reduces knowledge to an expression of social power and urges that we play the brutal power politics game on behalf of the traditionally disempowered.

Pennington recognizes that Foucault has often been accused of undercutting the basis of his own critical analysis:

“If all knowledge is reflective of an arbitrary ‘will to truth’, then what of Foucault’s own truth claims?” 

More specifically:

“If all truth claims are understood as merely a way of exercising power over others, then how are people to know which if any of the ‘intolerable’ practices they find themselves in are worth challenging or resisting, let alone what might replace them.”

However, Pennington observes that there are many Foucaults, “reflected in the shifting emphases, styles of analysis and reinterpretations of his own words”:    

“Towards the end of his life … notably in essays such as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, Foucault softened the power/knowledge coupling, adopting a stance that does not deny that there are better and worse forms of argument or that there are some more or less valid forms of knowledge; rather, he emphasises the importance of uncertainty, of keeping all truth claims under scrutiny, and of being aware of the routinised social processes that might block that very scrutiny.”

If postmodernism is characterized by the idea that truth claims merely reflect the exercise of social power, perhaps it could be said that towards the end of his life, Foucault’s views became somewhat less postmodern.

 Postmodern liberalism

In outlining the elements of “postmodern liberalism” Pennington notes:

“This ‘postmodern’ liberalism has not previously been coherently articulated, but strands of it are detectable in the writings of F. A Hayek, those of Deirdre McCloskey, and elements of the contemporary Austrian school of economics, as well as in the context of political philosophy apart from Hayek in the works of Michael Oakeshott, Gerald Gaus, and Chandran Kukathas.”

I have considerable knowledge of the views of some of those authors and great respect for all of them. I am not comfortable with their views being labelled as postmodern, even though some of them might not object to that label.

Pennington seems to me to be distancing “postmodern liberalism” from postmodernism when he acknowledges that it is possible to assess “the comparative plausibility of competing narrative explanations” and “social scientific truth claims”.

In his concluding chapter Pennington notes that the elements of “postmodern liberalism” include, among other things, a “philosophy of social science sceptical of socio-economic positivism and the efforts of conscious control it fosters”.

It seems to me that Pennington’s philosophy of social science could appropriately be labelled “unpretentious liberalism”. It stands apart from the pretence of knowledge and scientism associated with socio-economic positivism, without endorsing postmodernism’s disrespect for reason, truth and knowledge.

I hope the book will attract many readers who identify as postmodernists and that they will be captivated by the concept of postmodern liberalism. However, those who (like me) are allergic to postmodernism, may find the book easier to read if they substitute the words “unpretentious liberalism” whenever they see “postmodernism liberalism”.

Should libertarians attempt to influence culture?

Before considering what libertarians can learn from Foucault, it seems appropriate to acknowledge that there is nothing new about the idea that libertarians should take an interest in culture.

That is apparent in the consideration of interactions between culture and political institutions in a discussion between Chris Matthew Sciabarra and me entitled, “Should Libertarians be Attempting to Influence Culture?” which published on this blog in September 2024. The discussion began by considering John Stuart Mill’s concerns about the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling” and moved from there to considering Sciabarra’s interpretation of Ayn Rand’s view of power relationships. Sciabarra presented a Tri-level Model of Power Relations which was first derived from his reconstruction of Ayn Rand’s critical analyses of social problems, outlined in Part Three of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Sciabarra, 2013).

In introducing his discussion of Rand’s view of power relationships, Chris Sciabarra commented:

“Winton suggests that Enlightenment humanism has been preoccupied with reason and reality, while postmodernism has been preoccupied with the use of power. Hence, it is startling that Rand, who most certainly placed herself in the reason and reality camp, also emerged with a critique of power relations.”

The question under discussion provoked responses from several libertarians and classical liberals. The response of Douglass Rasmussen, joint author of Norms of Liberty (Rasmussen and Den Uyl, 2005) is pertinent to this essay:

“Is there not a difference between saying libertarianism qua political philosophy should attempt to change culture and saying that a libertarian concerned in advancing libertarianism should attempt to change culture? The former concerns what the political/legal order should do, and the latter concerns what individuals should do.”

As I see it, attempting to understand the consequences for liberty and individual flourishing of interactions between culture, markets, social movements and government regulation does not obviate or preclude attempts to define the nature of a political/legal order that can ensure that individuals can flourish in different ways without colliding.

Foucault’s liberalism

 From my perspective, one of the most interesting aspects of Foucault’s philosophy, as discussed by Pennington, is his account of discourses as a kind of spontaneous order phenomenon.  Foucault challenges the role of individual or collective agency in the operation of power regimes. Power works through chainlike or network effects. As people adopt certain discourses they influence the actions of others.

Power does not emanate from a single point in a network. It emerges from diverse and at time contradictory attempts by actors to assert their place in society. There is no identifiable author of power relations. As Pennington puts it:

“The discourses and disciplines producing people’s patterns of thought, positionality and interests are largely unintended consequences of the multiple attempts to affect the conduct of others.”

 Thus, while power relations may appear to have a coherent structure, there is no single purpose, intention, or meaning that underlies that structure.

States of domination arise when a set of discourses align or crystalize with each other and with the juridical power of the state. Scientific discourses can pose a problem where people come to be classified relative to various norms (e.g. as deviant, perverted, insane) and subjected to discipline (which may include social punishments). In addition, bio-power operates through interventions to change social, economic or environmental conditions in the name of improving population health or providing security.

Pennington suggests that “it is with Foucault’s concept of bio-power and especially its economic manifestations where the most significant possibilities for a dialogue between the Foucauldian and postmodern liberal perspectives lies”. Late in Foucault’s career he “seems to favour an environment that preserves a ‘pluralism of rationalities’ so that people might remain alert to the possibility of multiple ways of their being governed and not being frozen into a particular classificatory grid and the roles and positions it creates”.

In my view, Foucault’s decentred account of power relations is often more plausible than theories which reduce the exercise of power to holding of positions in political office. A decentred account is consistent with the conclusion of my recent series of essays on political entrepreneurship. Even though it is possible to identify the policies adopted in some countries with the ideologies of authoritarian political leaders, I suggest:

“The problem of ensuring adoption of government policies that more consistently advance economic and personal freedom cannot be reduced to the question of how to elect better political entrepreneurs to national leadership positions. Institutional change is a complex process involving social movements, media organizations, and interactions between individual citizens, as well as local and national politics.”

I concur with Pennington that Foucault’s view of power relations provides support for an unpretentious liberalism which is deeply skeptical of economic and philosophical approaches which presuppose that the welfare of the population can be secured by a form of expert rule.

In Part II of his book, Pennington uses his theoretical lens to examine complex networks of institutional, physical, and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures associated with social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and crime and punishment. He critically examines various overlapping systems of power - some focused on managing populations and others focused on guiding individuals. (In this paragraph I have relied on Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, to help translate the technical Foucauldian phrasing in Pennington’s summary – words including “dispositifs”, “bio-political” and “pastoral” - into plainer English.)

These systems share three features: (1) an excessive faith that social and economic life can be understood and controlled with scientific precision, (2) a belief that some central “steering” intelligence can identify and fix deviations from expected patterns, and (3) a bureaucratic, top-down way of handling risk. The author demonstrates that these features tend to shrink the space in which individuals can act freely.

Conclusion

So, what can libertarians learn from Foucault? Pennington's answer, as I read it, is not that libertarians should adopt postmodernism's skepticism of reason and truth - that skepticism, taken to its logical end, undercuts the very possibility of arguing for freedom over domination. Rather, what is valuable in Foucault is his decentred account of power: the recognition that domination need not flow from a single source or a deliberate design, but can emerge from the unintended convergence of discourses, institutions, and expert classifications. This is a lesson that liberals have sometimes neglected, having focused their concern about over-government on the formal power of the state while overlooking the more diffuse mechanisms in social justice, public health, ecological policy, and criminal justice that narrow the space for individuals to govern their own lives.

What Pennington calls postmodern liberalism – I prefer to call it "unpretentious liberalism" - captures what is worth taking from this encounter: a liberalism skeptical of the pretence of expert knowledge and socio-economic positivism, without embracing postmodernism's disrespect for reason and truth. Pennington's Foucault, particularly the later Foucault of "What Is Enlightenment?", is compatible with this project because he does not deny that some truth claims are better than others - he simply insists that we remain alert to the ways power can masquerade as expertise, and that we preserve a plurality of ways of being governed rather than being frozen into a single classificatory grid. That, it seems to me, is a genuinely liberal insight, however unfamiliar its Foucauldian packaging may be to libertarians who have, like me, generally kept their distance from postmodern thought.

References

Hicks, Stephen R. C., Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004).

Pennington, Mark, Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Rasmussen, Douglas B., and Den Uyl, Douglas J, Norms of Liberty (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, Second Edition (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013).