Paul Piccone as libertarian? A Canadian proof and Rothbardian critique.

• Author: McConkey, Michael

Telos ironically seconded some of the criticisms made by libertarian economists like Friedman, von Hayek or von Mises, against corporate statism, because, in part, they paralleled comparative critiques frequently made by Western Marxists, traditional anarchists, ordinary workers or disserved citizens. Believing in the importance of individual life and collective liberty enjoyed with the happiness implied by economic opportunity, cultural personal integrity, and individual freedom, Piccone respected the possibilities implied by trusting in individuals, markets, and less interventionistic governments.

--Timothy Luke, "'Americanization' of Critical Theory"

Timothy Luke should know, having been a firm comrade in arms with Paul Piccone through the most intellectually fervent and turbulent years of Telos's long, winding journey under Piccone's editorship. His view, however, is probably not the general perception of the journal and its iconoclastic editor from either the left or the right (or the "none of the above," for that matter). Nevertheless, I argue here that despite some serious shortcomings in Piccone's "critical theory," he does deserve a wider appreciation than he receives from libertarians and others.

Piccone was no obvious libertarian: for him, a confused critique of liberalism fueled a communitarian populism that always threatened to drag him into a fatal contradiction with his own stinging critique of Marxism. His New Class analysis was both somewhat embarrassingly exceptionalist and overly generalized. And for all of his jettisoning of the crude and unhistorical Frankfurt school analyses, he clung too firmly and too long to both the dialectic of rationality and the cultural-industry analyses, leaving his value to libertarians somewhat diminished.

Yet, despite these problems, Piccone had some keen basic libertarian instincts, and, more important, through his theory of artificial negativity he developed an insight into the operation of the modern bureaucratic state and its intrinsic weaknesses that libertarians should study and ponder. Not only does this theory provide original insight for libertarian scholars, but it has acute strategic relevance for libertarian activists with long time horizons and sophisticated analyses. Piccone discovered that the centralized bureaucratic state's strength was also its Achilles' heel, constantly threatening to cripple it.

In the bulk of this article, I sketch how this idea emerged and identify its theoretical implications. I then use it to appraise the Canadian federal state, the one I know best. In the conclusion, I present a Rothbardian-influenced critique of some of Piccone's lapses from libertarianism.

The New Left and the Early Telos

In July 2004, Paul Piccone, the longtime editor of the ever-controversial journal Telos died of cancer. Because I had personally interacted with him only briefly for a few days during one of Telos's notorious symposia, I was surprised by how great a sense of loss and disappointment I felt upon hearing of his death. In part, my feeling reflected Piccone's personality, hugeness of spirit, and frenetic charisma that certainly lived up to his reputation. I was also struck by a worry that he will be too easily forgotten. The man certainly had a reputation for alienating people personally and professionally--I heard one commentator refer to Piccone's editorial style as the "Tony Soprano school of editing"--and his relentless pursuit of his analyses, however unconventional and indifferent to anybody's sacred cows, surely did not endear him to many.

Nevertheless, libertarian scholars should give Piccone more attention than he usually receives--which is generally almost none. I do not claim that he was a libertarian, though he was close to one; it would have been fascinating to see if he continued along that path had he not died at the relatively early age of sixty-four. Yet even if he was not a libertarian--or at best an obscure genus of one--he had much of value to offer libertarians. Indeed, in some ways his analysis of the state is much more sophisticated than many libertarian treatments, which sometimes seem to reduce the state to a monolithic leviathan. Built into the very logic of Piccone's critique of the state is a revelation about its Achilles' heel: the state's very strength is also its weakness.

Although such an insight may appeal to the appetite for poetic justice in all of us, I know of no one else who explored the nuances of that dynamic more incisively than did Piccone. Moreover, aside from his work's intellectual merits, how can any red-blooded libertarian not love the man's indefatigable irreverence? He embodied the very spirit of critical thought; he was as unrelenting an independent thinker as anyone can hope to find, and he had a startling capacity to fish around in the intellectual dustbins and consistently emerge with surprising gems. Although his solutions may not be entirely satisfying, the dynamics that he framed are still with us and show every sign of persisting.

If for no other reason libertarians might remember and appreciate Piccone for his single, most consistent life work: for three decades, he guided the most independent theoretical journal in the English language, long before the Internet allowed almost anybody to set up a journal. As he was fond of observing, the only government or university money Telos ever received was a small start-up grant from the philosophy student association at the State University of New York-Buffalo in 1968. The journal was thereafter an entrepreneurial endeavor operated according to sound business practices. This management culminated in Telos's being probably the only scholarly journal in contemporary history whose editorial board members built the publication's offices with their own hands.

As exceptional as the journal's business history may have been, its intellectual contribution is Piccone's real legacy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it introduced through translation the largely unilingual North American audience to the writings of the critical and Western Marxists. In this way, Telos played a major role in the emergent New Left--the movement Murray Rothbard was so excited about at that time-providing thousands of readers with their first exposure to the writing of Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, and the pre-Marcuse cult Frankfurt school. It was largely through these texts made available by Telos that the New Left was able to develop its critique of what was called "orthodox Marxism" in its Leninist, Trotskyist, and Kautskyian forms, with their common emphasis on strong central states, "economic" reductionism, and dismissal of concerns about culture and consciousness, which were seen as mere bourgeois, superstructural epiphenomena. Piccone not only was the leader in this project, as head of the editorial board, but personally did a great deal of the actual translating.

In the later 1970s and the 1980s, Piccone and Telos--as a general rule, they moved together intellectually--took a new turn, which was typically irreverent and uncommonly abstract. After playing a central role in introducing the Frankfurt school ideas of the "one-dimensional man" who lives in the "totally administered society," Piccone and Telos now turned their critical acumen against that very analysis.

Bureaucratic Rationality and Artificial Negativity

The Frankfurt school's Weberian-style "dialectic of reason (or Enlightenment)," Piccone argued, was indeed the logic of the modern world, driven by endless technocratic social engineering in the form of nation building, the welfare state, and what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the "culture industry." Notwithstanding the truth in this view up to a point, however, even as the Frankfurt school thinkers were advancing their most mature articulation of the theory, Piccone argued that unfolding real-world events were already eclipsing it. This critique of the Frankfurt school's classic analysis came to be called, rather archly, the "artificial-negativity thesis." As cumbersome and inaccessible as the moniker may seem, the critique's gist is easy to express.

Max Weber and the Frankfurt school had been correct at one level, Piccone argued: the Frankfurt school, informed and inspired by Weber's vision of the "iron cage of rationality," argued that the same Enlightenment-inspired reason that initially served to liberate humanity from superstition and arbitrary, illegitimate authority eventually gave rise to complex bureaucratic systems of social control that reenslaved us. Because rationality, in the Frankfurt school's view, tended to privilege means over ends, ethical standards were compromised in the interest of technological and bureaucratic instrumentality. The resulting instrumental reason and its implicit logic seeped into the larger culture, where genuinely individual artistic forms were displaced by technological and bureaucratic ones of cultural mass production, such as motion pictures and big-band music. In this way, culture was reduced to an industry, subject to the same instrumental rationality as any other industry: even in our leisure life we became cogs in the machine no less than we were in the factory or the office. This "culture industry," with its relentless homogenization of subjectivity, would be the final nail in the coffin of the free individual.

The result for Western civilization was what Herbert Marcuse called "one-dimensional man" and Adorno called "the...