“When one publishes a book it becomes a public property; the author’s only responsibility to his reading public, if any, is to make it as good a book as he can and he is the final judge of that. But the teacher has further responsibilities. To some extent, students are a captive audience; and to some extent they are dependent upon their teacher, who is something of a model to them. His foremost job is to reveal to them as fully as he can just how a supposedly self-disciplined mind works. The art of teaching is in considerable part the art of thinking out loud but intelligibly. In a book the writer is often trying to persuade others of the result of his thinking; in a classroom the teacher ought to be trying to show others how one man thinks—and at the same time reveal what a fine feeling he gets when he does it well. The teacher ought then, it seems to me, to make very explicit the assumptions, the facts, the methods, the judgments. He ought not to hold back anything, but ought to take it very slowly and at all times repeatedly make clear the full range of moral alternatives before he gives his own choice.” —C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959)
When I teach my course, Freedom and Social Control, I begin with the Enlightenment and the birth of classical liberalism, grounding my students in John Locke’s conception of liberty and the individual. This ties into the second set of lectures, where I cover the sociology of Max Weber and make the observation that Protestantism—especially in its Reformation emphasis on the direct relationship between the individual and God—helped cultivate a cultural shift toward personal conscience, freedom, and responsibility, from centralized religious authority, which later informed classical liberal ideas.
By challenging the authority of the Catholic Church and promoting vernacular scripture, Protestant reformers encouraged literacy, independent moral judgment, and the notion that individuals could interpret truth for themselves. These ideas resonated beyond religion, nurturing an intellectual climate that valued limited government, private property, and individual rights. Thus, Protestant individualism contributed to the philosophical foundations of classical liberalism by reinforcing the moral and social importance of autonomous persons capable of self-governance.
However, before reaching that point, in the first lecture set, I necessarily trace that intellectual lineage forward to the twentieth century to set up the second set, focusing especially on Friedrich Hayek. I contrast this in the same lecture set with exploration with another tradition—the radical democratic ideas that emerge from Karl Marx, developed later through thinkers such as Abraham Maslow and Erich Fromm.
In this way, I frame the course as an extended conversation between two great conceptions of freedom: the negative and the positive. The negative conception of liberty—freedom from coercion—finds its clearest expression in the classical and neoclassical liberal traditions (the latter often perceived as modern conservatism and right-wing thought). The positive conception—freedom to realize one’s potential—finds its voice in the radical humanist and socialist thinkers. My goal has always been to bring these two visions into sharp relief and let students weigh their strengths and weaknesses.
My goal is not to tell them what to think about these competing viewpoints, although following C. Wright Mills’ lead in his 1959 Sociological Imagination, I do let them know what I think. Mills argues that a responsible teacher should present competing viewpoints fairly, avoid indoctrination, and help students understand the range of possible interpretations. But, after doing this, the teacher ought to make clear where he himself stands, rather than pretending to be a neutral observer. Mills believed this transparency strengthened intellectual honesty and encouraged students to think critically rather than defer to covert authority, or what philosopher Sandra Harding critiques as depoliticized thought. Importantly, Mills adds that students should always be free to reach their own conclusions; the teacher’s job is to clarify, not to coerce.
This essay concerns how the point at which I make my standpoint clear has shifted over time and why. Politically, I’ve long considered myself a civil libertarian. I believe deeply in the US Constitution and, above all, the Bill of Rights—especially the First Amendment. This has not changed over the course of my life. On economic questions, though, I’ve historically leaned toward the democratic socialist side, believing that liberty must have a material foundation if it’s to be meaningful for everyone. For twenty-five years, this balance has shaped the way I teach Freedom and Social Control. I have, over time, become increasingly skeptical of democratic socialism.
I want to begin with the flow of the first lecture set and how I have modified it over time to make the materials more accessible to students, and how the addition of materials to accomplish this persuaded me to change my views.
After syllabus day, I introduce students to brief, accessible excerpts of foundational texts. They read concise summaries of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom that I photocopied from a volume of The Great American Bathroom Books, pre-smartphone collections published in the early 1990s that offered a page or two of great works to read while otherwise occupied. These selections distill complex ideas into approachable forms for freshmen and sophomores. Along with this, they read an excerpt from Hayek’s 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty. On the radical democratic side I have them read an Karl Marx’s Preface to an Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy and an excerpt from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.
A few years ago, to make these ideas even more accessible, on the liberal side, I supplemented these readings with Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” especially effective in illustrating Hayek’s warnings from The Constitution of Liberty. Fiction engages students’ imaginations in ways pure philosophy often cannot. On the other side of the debate—the positive liberty, democratic socialist side—I assign George Orwell’s Animal Farm and summarize in class Nineteen Eighty-Four, although I bring in Orwell after the second lecture set to bring out the implications of Marx and Weber’s observations (the third lecture concerns corporate statism and media and propaganda). Orwell’s novels dramatize how collectivist and illiberal ideals can curdle into authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
If you are familiar with Orwell’s writings, you probably know where this is going. Over time, I noticed something intriguing: Vonnegut and Orwell, both hailing from the tradition of democratic socialism or at least left-liberal, social-democratic humanist, combined with strong anti-authoritarian instincts, critique bureaucratic control and enforced equality characteristics of really-existing socialism. They are criticizing extreme interpretations of egalitarian ideals, forced equality by coercive government, and more broadly, the desire among some humans to create a perfectly engineered society—in short, a utopia.
Thus, as I continued teaching these pairings, something unexpected happened: the course began to change me. Where I once viewed the “negative liberty” tradition with suspicion, I began to see the force of its arguments more clearly. Hayek’s defense of individual freedom and his warnings about centralized control started to resonate more deeply. Orwell, whom I had long regarded as a critic of totalitarianism from the democratic socialist traditions, began to sound more like an ally of liberal skepticism than of socialist idealism. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the additions of these fictional works altered my own political outlook.
While my students only have me for one semester, and I doubt their political views shift as dramatically, the course functions as a laboratory for testing these great ideas against each other, a standard pedagogical practice in the humanities. Freedom and Social Control combines humanist and social science interests (history, political theory, and sociology) in the spirit of the program’s curriculum—founded as a critical historical social science department—draws mostly progressive students, just as such disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields in this area tend to attract progressive professors. While I have identified as a democratic socialist in the tradition of Orwell, I am not a progressive. I have never felt comfortable identifying with progressivism, which strikes me as managerial and technocratic, more concerned with systems than with individuals.
That discomfort first surfaced in another class I teach: Foundations of Social Research. Early in that course, I cover the philosophy of science and introduce students to various logical fallacies—both formal and informal. One fallacy that has always stood out to me is the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” the error of treating an abstraction as if it were a concrete reality. When I began thinking through examples of this fallacy, I realized how often political and social arguments on the left make this mistake. They take the category of “group” and attribute to all individuals within it the average or assumed attributes of the group as a whole. I have critiqued that view in several essays on this platform (as well as critiquing progressivism and the rise of the corporate state and technocratic control).
That insight opened a crack in my earlier convictions. I began to see that certain progressive frameworks—critical race theory and policies that preceded that standpoint (affirmative action) and that conceptually informed subsequent DEI initiatives—often rely on this same fallacy. They reify the group (an abstraction) and, in doing so, obscure the individual (the concrete). Recognizing that was, in retrospect, the beginning of my shift. As I reworked my course readings in Freedom and Social Control, perhaps unconsciously, I found myself highlighting this individual-versus-group tension more sharply. Over time, the cumulative effect of reflecting on all this revealed to me that some of the assumptions I had carried for much of my life were wrong. Teaching this course—designed to clarify my students’ thinking—ended up clarifying my own.
There is another piece to this. Over the years of occasionally teaching Law and Society, I added a text by Michael Tiger, Law and the Rise of Capitalism, published in 1977, which traces the eight hundred years of Western European legal history, showing how law and legal ideology, the trench work by lawyers for the merchant class in feudal courts, helped the bourgeoisie rise to power. When I think about the great argument between capitalism and socialism in the light of that book, I increasingly see capitalism not as a theory invented by anyone and forced on the masses, but as an organic historical process, the results of which Europeans found themselves living in. In Tiger’s interpretation, capitalism begins, perhaps humbly, with disputes over property rights, contract, and debt, which were slowly disentangled from the web of feudal obligation. From those early legal and economic claims grew a body of precedent and practice that began to privilege exchange over status, contract over custom.
By the time we reach what world-systems theorists, in particular Immanuel Wallerstein, who conceptualizes the period of capitalist consolidation as the “long sixteenth century” (roughly 1450 to 1620), capitalism emerges as a world system. The rise of the English Parliament, the expansion of trade, and the first bourgeois revolution in England in the seventeenth century mark crucial turning points. The French Revolution, often cited as the great bourgeois revolution, was dramatic, but the English case was more decisive in institutionalizing bourgeois power. The American Revolution, therefore, is not so much a bourgeois revolution in the same transformative sense, but rather a war of independence fought by colonists who were already capitalists in practice—agrarian in the South, commercial and proto-industrial in the North. They sought not to invent capitalism, but to secure it from imperial interference.
Climbing out of the weeds of digression, all this suggests to me that capitalism’s rise was evolutionary, not revolutionary. It was an organic emergence rather than an ideological project. It did not spring from a single mind or manifesto but from countless adaptations, negotiations, and unintended consequences. In this respect, and here I get to the point, capitalism differs profoundly from Marxist revolutions, which are typically, if you will, idea-first transformations—intentional efforts to reshape society according to a teleological blueprint. This is precisely the danger Orwell and Vonnegut dramatized in their fiction: the attempt to impose a rational plan on human life, assuming people are infinitely malleable and that human nature can be remade by social design. (Weber sees technocratic control as emergent from liberal rationalization, but I will leave his critique to one side for now. I have covered that development on this platform, so you can look for that elsewhere. I note here that I do cover this paradox in the second lecture set in Freedom and Social Control.)
This brings me to a tension within Marx himself. I’ve long wanted to separate Marx’s scientific insights from the political systems that later claimed his authority. Marx, to my mind, occupies in social science the place Darwin occupies in biology: he offers a paradigm, a framework for understanding the objective processes or structural dynamics of change. Unfortunately, where Darwin’s theory was absorbed into science, Marx’s was absorbed into ideology. Because Marx identified as a communist, his ideas became inextricably tied to a political project that distorted his method. For many years, my democratic socialist sympathies caused me to argue that Marx’s politics and his science were inseparable—that to divorce his communism from his analysis was to betray his intent. Now I have my doubts, however convenient that may sound. I am now coming to the posiiton that, not only that they can be separated, but that they should be if we are to extract from Marx’s writings the scientific paradigm he developed to explain his early emphasis on alienation and the estrangement of man from his species-being.
Marx’s materialism gives us a way to analyze historical processes and the deeper social structures that drive them. However, many of his followers’—as well as his critics’—political interpretations often proceed from an “unconstrained” view of human nature, the assumption, as Thomas Sowell put it, that human beings are infinitely perfectible and that the “right” institutions can produce new men. Whatever the voracity of their interpretations, Marx’s critics are correct that this assumption, in practice, has led to tyranny. Marx himself, I continue to insist, was more constrained in his understanding of human nature. He saw history as structured by material forces and class relations, and he accepted the Darwinian view of human evolution.
This view is reinforced in what is considered Marx’s least deterministic work, his 1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. There, Marx discusses transformations in the eighteenth century, particularly its revolutions and political, albeit contingent, maneuvering. Yet, his determinism surfaces when he asserts, in so many words, that men make history under circumstances not of their own choosing—a phrase that Christopher Hitchens many years ago invoked to argue that Marxism is non-deterministic. However, to say that “men make history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing” implies a powerful determinism: the material context defines the limits of action. The strength of this formulation is that it considers both human agency and structural forces, but it is hardly a refutation of the thesis that there are constraints on human action. One may argue that it moves the locus of determinism from human nature to social structure, but in the final analysis, it is human beings who make history in an emergent and, for the most part, unintentional way.
So I am left with a paradox. Marx’s scientific method is deterministic in structure, even if his moral hope is not. The tragedy of Marxism is that this determinism, when turned into political doctrine (which it need not be), breeds the illusion that conscious revolutionaries can override human nature and emergent history, that human reason can redesign society from above, through coercion. This is not to say capitalism is not coercive—the exploitation of human labor is certainly a form of coercion, achieved through emergent social relations butressed by law and state—but the reality is that what is organically emergent, however sustained by its attendant superstructure, is very different from what is constituted anew from political imposition. The result of socialism, again and again, has been the substitution of one ruling class for another, justified by a utopian faith in the malleability of man, an faith that is really not found in Marx’s scientific writings.
To put it more simply, the capitalist story, despite its inequalities and moral compromises, has a different character than the really existing socialist regimes established by a revolutionary vanguard. Capitalism emerged without design—at least not an overarching design implemented by a cadre of capitalist theorists appealing to the authority of Adam Smith. Rather, capitalism emerged from the friction of markets, the gradual reform of institutions, and the unplanned coordination of self-interested actors. That process, for all its chaos (to be sure, Marx is right to record in the final chapter of Capital, Volume I, that there was a bloody appropriation of the means of production), has proven more durable than any revolution built on the dream of human perfectibility.
Looking back, I see that Freedom and Social Control has been more than a course title. It has been a description of my own intellectual journey. I began teaching it as a way of staging a great debate for my students. In the process, I discovered that the most liberating act in the life of the mind is the willingness to let evidence, experience, and history revise one’s convictions. Risking being accused of putting on airs, in an age when universities often confuse moral certainty with moral seriousness, this kind of openness is increasingly rare. Here I can express humility: I myself fell into this trap (make of that what you will). Yet I can see that my journey to enlightenment, still ongoing, is the essence of what liberal education was meant to achieve: the emancipation of thought from orthodoxy, whether of the left or the right. If my students take anything from my course, I hope it is this—that freedom, in every sense, begins with the courage to think for oneself.
Afterall, it’s not called the conservative arts or the progressive arts. It’s called the liberal arts. For a reason.
freedom and reason 