Commitment, scholarship, and classical liberalism.

• Author: Shearmur, Jeremy
• Position: Reflections

The relationship between one's work as a scholar and one's personal concern for--indeed, commitment to--a particular political agenda is an issue that might well have worried many classical liberal scholars. In this article, I seek to shed some light on this issue.

The problem may arise in various ways. We may be struck, for example, by the gap between certain scholars' commitment to liberty and the liberty for which they have provided really telling arguments. Alternatively, we ourselves might have received paternalistic advice from a dissertation adviser, a department chairman, or a dean that to get on in the academic world, we should put our personal agenda--the things about which we care deeply--to one side and, to phrase the matter bluntly, should make our mark instead by contributing to the "normal science" of our day (Kuhn 1962). It is no consolation to discover that those who occupy other positions in the political spectrum face the same sort of problem (Jacoby 1987).

I am concerned here with a specific aspect of the issue: What are we to make of a commitment to liberty given that our claims to knowledge are fallible and that we are always hostage to empirical argument and philosophical contestation? Must we retreat into what one might call a cautious accountant's view of political philosophy in which a ringing commitment to liberty and an enthusiastic espousal of commercial society and voluntary activity are replaced by a statement that perhaps in some circumstances human freedom might be a good idea? Obviously, if writers such as Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Murray N. Rothbard had held such a view, they probably would not have made much impact on the world.

But what of human fallibility and, in light of it, the problems of enthusiasm about values? One response might be to deny that we should be concerned about fallibility. Indeed, one way of reading the work of Mises and Ayn Rand and some of Hayek's methodological writings might support such a response.

This approach, however, is mistaken. In very broad terms, those who take it are beguiled still by what was historically a misunderstanding of the epistemological status of Euclidian geometry. This misunderstanding offered deductive argument to striking conclusions from what seemed self-evident premises. Not only did it lead to the adoption of the axiomatic form of proof in other areas, but it led also to a more general quest for foundations of knowledge to serve as the basis for such an enterprise.

I do not deny that certain things seem undeniable--for example, that I am having certain experiences at the moment. It certainly appears to me that I am using a word processor, and so on. Moreover, we cannot imagine anyone's wishing seriously to contest many kinds of claims about the world and about morality. To deny certain assumptions--about logic, about the conditions relating to argument, and so forth--would lead us into self-contradiction. We might wish to explore just what claims of this kind can be made and how well they stand up to skeptical questioning; indeed, those of us with an interest in philosophy have doubtless spent many enjoyable hours in such exploration. Here, however, I shall not engage in such discussion but rather shall comment about what we can expect to get out of it.

In the light of what we know about valid inference, the discovery of seemingly undeniable truths does not do us much good. If a claim is problematic, we do not gain much from the knowledge that it follows validly from something else that seems more obvious. All such a derivation does is to inform us that, in fact, our premises were not as obviously true as they had seemed, for our very derivation has informed us that they turn out to contain some problematic content--indeed, the very thing from which we started! Accordingly, although obvious truths and certain things that we cannot deny without fear of self-contradiction surely exist, they cannot help us much in convincing others of the correctness of other claims they are currently contesting.

In our situation--the human situation--our views about the world and our substantive ideals are always likely to be on the line. Our ideas always stand open to criticism, and we may discover in the light of dialogue with others that whenever we deal with significant issues, ideas that we had assumed to be uncontroversial are in fact problematic. This condition shapes our problem about values and our commitment to them in our position as scholars in the public realm. How can we enter the public realm of scholarship with the kind of commitment that writers such as Mises and Hayek showed to liberty and to free markets, given that such a commitment remains always open to challenge?

I suggest that we treat our values as constituting the core of a research program (Shearmur 1991, 1996, chap. 1). This program typically would consist of matters that we find morally attractive and rationally compelling. At any time, we face open questions and issues that we cannot immediately resolve, but our research program offers us suggestions and theoretical tools to deal with those questions and issues. In some cases, we will be on a roll: the sort of thing we have to say will be clear, and showing the strength of our approach will be exciting, challenging, and highly satisfying. In other cases, we will be on the defensive: our critics or our own critical scrutiny of our tradition may raise interesting and difficult problems. Our task is to perform well over time, to show that our approach produces valuable results and also that we can do better than those pursuing other research programs. Along the way, we may find that the critical work of historians, economic or social theorists, or philosophers poses challenges to the core of our ideas, and some of us clearly should try to meet such challenges. We can continue to work within our research program even while admitting, at any point, that we have not yet answered every question and not yet resolved every issue.

The big advantage of such an approach is that it offers a way of combining commitment--indeed, passionate commitment--with an acknowledgment of our fallibility. We are putting ourselves on the line and explicitly opening ourselves and our program to the competition that we regard as so necessary elsewhere. That we should take such an approach is one of the key themes of my book Hayek and After (Shearmur 1996), in which I also apply it to an evaluation of Hayek's work. Such an approach also offers us an important critical tool. It suggests how we might appraise the extent to which a program or a particular thinker within it is succeeding and then identify what would need to be done in order to make the approach more...