CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL IDEOLOGY ∗

ALAIN DE B ENOIST
_____________________

In “Critique of Lib eral Ideolog y,” Alain de Benoist uses the term “libe ralism”
in the broa d Europ e a n sens e of th e ter m that applie s not just to American
liber alism but ev en mor e so to American libert arianis m and mainstr e a m
cons er v atis m , insof ar as all thre e share a com m o n hist ory and com m o n
pre mis e s .—Transl.

Not being the work of a single man, liberalism was never presented in
the form of a unified doctrine. Various liberal authors have, at times,
interpreted it in divergent, if not contradictory, ways. Still, they share
enough common points to classify them all as liberals. These common
points also make it possible to define liberalism as a specific school of
thought. On the one hand, liberalism is an economic doctrine that tends to
make the model of the self- regulating market the paradigm of all social
reality: what is called political liberalism is simply one way of applying the
principles deduced from these economic doctrines to political life. This
tends to limit the role of politics as much as possible. (In this sense, one
can say that “liberal politics” is a contradiction in terms.) On the other
hand, liberalism is a doctrine based on an individualistic anthropology, i.e.,
it rests on a conception of man as a being who is not fundamentally social.
These two characteristic features, each of which has descriptive and
normative aspects (the individual and the market are both described as
facts and are held up as models), are directly opposed to collective
identities. A collective identity cannot be analyzed in a reductionistic way,
as if it were the simple sum of the characteristics possessed by the
individuals of a given community. Such an identity requires the
collectivity’s members be clearly conscious that their membership
encompasse s or exce eds their individual being, i.e., that their common
identity is a product of this composition. However, insofar as it is based on
individualism, liberalism tends to sever all social connections that go
beyond the individual. As for the market’s optimal operation, it requires
that nothing obstruct the free circulation of men and goods, i.e., borders


Alain de Benoist, “Critique de l’idéologie libérale,” in his Critique s—Thé o ri qu e s
(Lausanne, Suisse: L’Age d’Homme, 2002), 13–29. The translator wishes to thank Alain de
Benoist for his permission to translate and publish this essay, Michael O’Meara for
checking the translation, and Arjuna for his help with French idioms.
must be treated as unreal, which tends to dissolve common structures and
values. Of course this does not mean that liberals can never defend
collective identities. But they do so only in contradiction to their principles.
* * *
Louis Dumont has shown Christianity’s role in Europe’s passag e from a
traditional holist society to a modern individualistic society. Right from the
start, Christianity presented man as an individual who, prior to any other
relationship, has an inner relationship to God and who thus sought
salvation through personal transcendence. In this relationship with God,
man’s value as an individual was affirmed, and by comparison the world
was necessarily degraded or devalued. Moreover, the individual was made
equal to all other men, who also have individual souls. Egalitarianism and
universalism were thus introduced on a higher plane: the absolute value
the individual soul receives from its filial relationship with God was shared
by all humanity.
Marcel Gauchet takes up the theme of a causal link betwe en the
emergence of a personal God and the birth of an inner m an , whose fate in
the beyond depends solely on his individual actions, and whose
independence is already present in the possibility of an intimate
relationship with God, i.e., of a relationship that involves God alone. “The
more remote God become s in his infinity,” Gauchet writes, “the more the
relationship with him tends to become purely personal, to the point of
excluding any institutional mediation. Raised to the absolute, the divine
subject has no legitimate terrestrial counterpart other than intimate
presence. Thus the original interiority leads directly to religious
individuality.” 1
The Pauline doctrine reveals a dualistic tension that makes the
Christian, in his relationship to God, an “otherworldly individual”: to
become Christian implies in some way giving up the world. However, in
the course of history, the “otherworldly” individual gradually contaminated
worldly life. To the extent that he acquired the power to make the world
conform to his values, the otherworldly individual progressively returned
to the world, immersing himself in it and transforming it profoundly.
The process was carried out in three main stages. Initially, secular life
was no longer rejected but relativized: this is the Augustinian synthesis of
the two cities. In the second stage, the papacy secularized itself by
assuming political power. Finally, with the Reformation, man invested
himself completely in the world, where he worked for the glory of God by
seeking material success that he interpreted as the very proof of his
election.
In this way, the principle of equality and individuality—which initially
functioned solely in the relationship with God and thus could still coexist
with an organic and hierarchical principle structuring the social whole—
was gradually brought down to earth, resulting in modern individualism,
which represents its secular projection. “In order for modern individualism

1
Marcel Gauchet, Le dés e n c h a n t e m e n t du mond e (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 77. In
English: The Disench a n t m e n t of the World: A Political History of Religion , trans. Oscar
Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
to be born,” writes Alain Renaut explicating the these s of Louis Dumont, it
was necessary for the individualistic and universalist component of
Christianity “to contaminate,” so to speak, modern life to such an extent
that gradually its representations were unified, the initial dualism was
erased, and “life in the world was reconceived as being able to conform
completely to the supreme value”: at the end of this process, “the
otherworldly individual became the modern worldly individual.” 2
Organic society of the holist type then disappeared. In contemporary
terms, one passed from community to society, i.e., to common life
conceived as simple contractual association. The social whole no longer
came first, but rather individual holders of individual rights, bound
together by self-interested rational contracts.
An important moment of this evolution was the fourteenth century
nominalism of William of Ockham, who held that nothing exists but
particular beings. Another key moment was Cartesianism, which
philosophically established the conception of the individual later
presupposed by the legal doctrine of the rights of man and the intellectual
perspective of the Enlightenment. Beginning in the eighteenth century,
the emancipation of the situated individual from his natural attachments
was routinely interpreted from the perspective of universal progress as
marking the acce ssion of humanity to “adulthood.” Sustained by this
individualistic impulse, modernity was characterized first and foremost as
the process by which local and kinship groups, and broader communities,
are gradually broken down to “liberate the individual,” and dissolve all
organic relations of solidarity.

* * *
From time immemorial, to be human meant to be affirmed both as a
person and as a social being: the individual dimension and the collective
dimension are not identical, but are inseparable. In the holist view, man
develops himself on the basis of what he inherits and in reference to his
social- historical context. It is to this model, which is the most common
model in history, that individualism, which one must regard as a
peculiarity of Western history, directly comes to be opposed.
In the modern sense of the term, individualism is the philosophy that
regards the individual as the only reality and takes him as the principle of
every evaluation. The individual is considered in himself, in abstraction
from his social or cultural context. While holism expresses or justifies
existing society in reference to values that are inherited, passed on, and
shared, i.e., in the last analysis, in reference to society itself, individualism
establishes its values independently of society as it finds it. This is why it
does not recognize the autonomous status of communities, peoples,
cultures, or nations. For it sees these entities as nothing but sums of
individual atoms, which alone have value.
This primacy of the individual over the community is simultaneously
2
Alain Renaut, L'ère de l'individu. Contribution à une histoire de la subj ectivité (Paris:
Gallimard, 1989), 76- 77. In English: The Era of the Individual: Contribution to a History of
Subj ec tivity , trans. M. B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
descriptive, normative, methodological, and axiological. The individual is
assumed to come first, whether he is prior to the social in a mythical
representation of “prehistory” (the anteriority of the state of nature), or
simply has normative primacy (the individual is what is worth more).
Georges Bataille asserts that, “at the basis of every being, there exists a
principle of insufficiency.” Liberal individualism, on the contrary, affirms
the full sufficiency of the singular individual. In liberalism, man can
apprehend himself as an individual without reference to his relationship to
other men within a primary or secondary sociality. Autonomous subject,
owner of himself, moved solely by his particular interests, the individual is
defined, in opposition to the person, as a “moral, independent,
autonomous and thus primarily nonsocial being.” 3
In liberal ideology, the individual possesse s rights inherent in his
“nature” entirely independent of social or political organization.
Governments are obligated to guarantee these rights, but do not establish
them. Being prior to all social life, they are not immediately correlated to
duties, because duties imply precisely that social life already exists: there
are no duties toward others if there are no others. Thus the individual
himself is the source of his own rights, beginning with the right to act
freely according to the calculation of his private interests. Thus he is “at
war” with all other individuals, since they are supposed to act the same
way in a society conceived as a competitive market.
Individuals may well choose to associate with one another, but the
associations they form are conditional, contingent, and transitory, since
they remain dependent on mutual assent and have no other goal than to
better satisfy the individual interests of each party. Social life, in other
words, is nothing but an affair of individual decisions and interested
choices. Man behaves like a social being, not because it is in his nature,
but because it is to his advantag e. If he no longer finds it advantag eous,
he can always (in theory at least) break the pact. Indeed, this rupture best
expresses his freedom. In opposition to ancient freedom, i.e., the
possibility of participating in public life, modern freedom is, above all, the
right to withdraw from public life. This is why liberals always tend to define
freedom as synonymous with independence. 4 Thus Benjamin Constant
extols “the peaceful pleasure of private individual independence ,” adding
that “men, to be happy, need only to be left in perfect independence, in all
that relates to their occupations, their companies, their sphere of activity,
their dreams.” 5 This “peaceful pleasure” is to be understood as the right of
3
Louis Dumont, Hom o æ q u alis. Gen è s e et épa n o uis s e m e n t de l'idéolo gi e éco n o m i q u e
(Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 17.
4
Certain liberal authors, however, endeavored to distinguish independence and
autonomy, while others (or the same ones) endeavored to differentiate between the
subject and the individual, or even between individualism and narcissism. Unlike
independenc e, autonomy is compatible with submission to supra- individual rules, even
when they come from a self-grounding normativity. This is, for example, the point of view
Alain Renaut defends (L'ère de l'individu , 81- 86), but it is not very convincing. Autonomy
is indeed quite different from independenc e (in certain connections, it even represents
the opposite of it), but that is not the essential question. The essential question is to know
what, from a liberal point of view, can force an individual to adhere to any limitation of his
freedom, whenever this limitation conflicts with his self-interest.
5
Benjamin Constant, De la lib erté des Anciens co m p a r é e à cell e des Modern e s (1819).
secession, the right to be constrained neither by duty of membership nor
by any of those allegiance s that, in certain circumstance s, can indeed
appear incompatible with “private independence .”
Liberals insist particularly on the idea that individual interests should
never be sacrificed to the collective interest, the common good, or the
public safety, concepts that they regard as inconsistent. From this idea it
follows that only individuals have rights, while communities, being only
collections of individuals, have none of their own. Thus Ayn Rand writes,
“Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression
‘individual rights’ is a redundancy.” 6 Benjamin Constant also affirmed that,
“Individual independence is the primary modern need. Consequently, one
never should ask it to be sacrificed to establish political freedom.” 7 Before
him, John Locke declared that “a Child is born a Subje ct of no Country or
Govern m e n t ,” since, having become an adult, he is “at liberty what
Government he will put himself under; what Body Politick he will unite
himself to.” 8
Liberal freedom thus supposes that individuals can be abstracted from
their origins, their environment, the context in which they live and where
they exercise their choices, from everything, that is., that makes them
who they are, and not someone else. It supposes, in other words, as John
Rawls says, that the individual is always prior to his ends. Nothing,
however, proves that the individual can apprehend himself as a subject
free of any allegiance, free of any determinism. Moreover, nothing proves
that in all circumstance s he will prefer freedom over every other good.
Such a conception by definition ignores commitments and attachment that
owe nothing to rational calculation. It is a purely formal conception, that
makes it impossible to understand what a real person is.
The general idea is that the individual has the right to do everything he
wants, so long as his use of his freedom does not limit the freedom of
others. Freedom would thus be defined as the pure expression of a desire
having no theoretical limits other than the identical desire of others, the
whole of these desires being mediated by economic exchange s. It is what
Grotius, the theorist of natural right, already asserted in the sevente enth
century: “It is not against the nature of human society to work for one’s
own interest, provided that one does so without wounding the rights of
others.” 9 But this is obviously an irenic definition: almost all human acts
are exercised in one way or another at the expense of the freedom of
others, and it is, moreover, almost impossible to determine the moment
when the freedom of one individual can be regarded as hindering that of
others.
In fact, liberal freedom is, above all, the freedom to own. It does not
reside in being, but in having. Man is called free insofar as he is an owner
—first of all, an owner of himself. The idea that self- ownership

6
Ayn Rand, “Collectivized ‘Rights’,” in her The Virtue of Selfishn e s s : A New Conc e p t of
Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1964), 101.
7
Constant, De la libert é de s Anciens.
8
John Locke, Seco n d Treatis e of Civil Govern m e n t (1690), ch. VIII, in Two Treatis e s of
Governm e n t , ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 347.
9
Hugo Grotius, Du droit de la guerr e et de la paix (1625).
fundamentally determines freedom will later be adopted by Marx. 10
Alain Laurent defines self- realization as an “ontological insularity whose
primary goal is the search for one’s own happiness.” 11 For liberal writers,
the “search for happiness” is defined as the unhampered freedom to try
always to maximize one’s best interest. But immediately we encounter the
problem of understanding “interests,” especially since those who take
interests as axiomatic seldom care to speak of their genesis or describe
their components, any more than they wonder whether all social actors
are at bottom driven by identical interests or if their interests are
commensurable and compatible. When cornered, they tend to give the
term a trivial definition: for them an “interest” become s synonymous with
a desire, a project, an action directed towards a goal, etc. Anything can
become an “interest.” Even the most altruistic or disinterested action can
then be defined as egoistic and interested, since it corresponds to the
voluntary intention (the desire) of its author. In reality, though, it is clear
that for liberals, an interest is defined initially as a material advantage
which, to be appreciated as such, has to be calculable and quantifiable,
i.e., to be expressible in terms of the universal equivalent which is money.
It should, therefore, be no surprise that the rise of liberal individualism
initially entailed a progressive dislocation of the organic structures of
existence characteristic of holist society, then a generalized disintegration
of the social bonds, and finally a situation of relative social anomie, in
which individuals were increasingly estranged from and even enemies of
one other, which is part and parcel of the modern version of the “war of all
against all” that is generalized competition. Such is the society Tocqueville
described in which each member, “retired to the sidelines, is like a
foreigner to all the others.” Liberal individualism tends everywhere to
destroy direct sociability, which for a long time impeded the emergence of
the modern individual and the collective identities that are associated with
him. “Liberalism,” writes Pierre Rosanvallon, “to some extent makes the
depersonalization of the world a condition of progress and freedom.” 12

10
Besides supporting the “mechanism” characteristic of liberal ideology, which is given
a fundamental epistemological value, Marx himself adheres to a metaphysics of the
individual, which led Michel Henry to see him as “one of the leading Christian thinkers of
the Occident” (Michel Henry, Marx [Paris: Gallimard, 1991], vol. 2, 445). The reality of
Marxist individualism, beyond its collectivist façade, was established by many authors,
beginning with Louis Dumont. “Marx’s entire philosophy,” Pierre Rosanvallon writes,
“can . . . be understood as an effort to enhance modern individualism. . . . The concept of
class struggle itself has no meaning outside the framework of an individualistic
representation of society. In a traditional society, by contrast, it has no significance” (Le
libér alism e éc on o m i q u e . Histoire de l'idé e de m arch é , [Paris: Seuil, 1989 } , 188- 89). Marx
certainly challenged the fiction of Hom o eco n o m i cu s that developed beginning in the
eighteenth century, but only because the bourgeoisie used it to alienate the real
individual and bind him to an existence narrowed to the sphere of self- interest alone.
However, for Marx, self-interest is merely an expression of a separation between the
individual and his life. (It is the basis of the best part of his work, namely his criticism of
“reified” social relations.) But he by no means intends to substitute the common good for
private interests. There is not even a place for class interests.
11
Alain Laurent, De l'individualis m e . Enquêt e sur le retour de l'individu (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1985), 16.
12
Rosanvallon, Le libéralis m e éc on o m i q u e , vii.
 * * *
Liberalism is nevertheless obliged to recognize the existence of the
social. But rather than wonder why the social exists, liberals are instead
concerned with how it is established and maintained, and how it functions.
After all, society for them is nothing more than the simple sum of its
members (the whole being nothing but the sum of its parts), merely the
contingent product of individual wills, a simple assembly of individuals all
seeking to defend and satisfy their private interests. Society’s essential
goal, therefore, is to regulate exchange relations. Such a society can be
conceived either as the consequence of an initial rational voluntary act
(the fiction of the “social contract”) or as the result of the systemic play of
the totality of projects produced by individual agents, a play regulated by
the market’s “invisible hand,” which “produces” the social as the
unintentional result of human behavior. The liberal analysis of the social
rests, thus, either on contractualism (Locke), recourse to the “invisible
hand” (Smith), or the idea of a spontaneous order, independent of any
intention (Hayek).
Liberals developed the whole idea of the superiority of regulation by the
market, which is supposed to be the most effective, most rational, and
thus also the most just means to harmonize exchange s. At first glance, the
market is thus presented above all as just a “technique of organization”
(Henri Lepage). From an economic standpoint, it is at the same time an
actual place where goods are exchanged and a potential entity where in
an optimal way the conditions of exchange—i.e., the adjustment of supply
and demand and the price level—are formed.
But liberals do not wonder about the origin of the market either.
Commercial exchang e for them is indeed the “natural” model for all social
relations. From this they deduced that the market itself is also a “natural”
entity, establishing an order prior to any deliberation and decision. Being
the form of exchange most in harmony with human nature, the market
would be present at the dawn of humanity, in all societies. One finds here
the tendency of every ideology to “naturalize” its presuppositions, i.e., to
present itself, not for what it is, in fact a construction of the human spirit,
but as a simple description, a simple transcription of the natural order. The
state being correlatively rejected as an artifice, the idea of the “natural”
regulation of the social by means of the market can then be imposed.
In understanding the nation as a market, Adam Smith brings about a
fundamental dissociation between the concept of space and that of
territory. Breaking with the mercantilist tradition, which still identified
political territory and economic space, he shows that the market cannot by
nature be contained within specific geographical limits. The market is
indeed not so much a place as a network. And this network is destined to
extend to the ends of the earth, since its only limit in the final analysis lies
in the ability to exchange. “A merchant,” Smith writes in a famous
passage , “. . . is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in
a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade;
and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together
with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another.” 13
13
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Caus e s of the Wealth of Nations , 2 vols.
These prophetic lines justify the judgment of Pierre Rosanvallon, who sees
Adam Smith as “the first consistent internationalist.” “Civil society,
conceived as a fluid market,” adds Rosanvallon, “extends to all men and
allows them to transcend national and racial divisions.”
The main advantage of the concept of the market is that it allows
liberals to solve the difficult problem of how to make obligation part of the
social pact. The market can indeed be regarded as a law—a principle
regulating the social order—without a legislator. Regulated by the action
of an “invisible hand,” which is inherently neutral because it is not
incarnated in concrete individuals, the market establishes an abstract
mode of social regulation based on allegedly objective “laws” that make it
possible to regulate the individual relations where no forms of
subordination or command exist. The economic order would thus have to
establish the social order, both orders being conceived as emerging
without being instituted. The economic order, says Milton Friedman, is
“the nonintentional and nondesired consequence of the projects of a great
number of people driven solely by their interests.” This idea, abundantly
developed by Hayek, is inspired by the formula of Adam Ferguson (1767 )
who referred to social facts that are “the result of human action, but not
the execution of any human design.” 14
Everyone knows the Smithian metaphor of the “invisible hand”: In
commerce, the individual “intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as
in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which
was no part of his intention.” 15 This metaphor goes far beyond the
altogether banal observation that the results of a one’s actions are often
quite different from what one expected (what Max Weber called the
“paradox of consequence s”). Smith indeed frames this observation in a
resolutely optimistic perspective. “Each individual,” he adds, “always
makes every effort to find the most advantage ous employment for all the
capital at his disposal; it is quite true that he envisions his own benefit, not
that of society; but the care that is given to finding his personal advantage
leads him naturally, or rather necessarily, to precisely prefer the kind of
employment that is most advantageous to society.” And further: “All while
seeking only his personal interest, he often works in a much more
effective manner for the interest of society than if his purpose really were
to work for it.”
The theological connotations of this metaphor are obvious: the “invisible
hand” is only a secular avatar of Providence. It should also be emphasized
that, contrary to what is often believed, Adam Smith does not assimilate
the very mechanism of the market to the play of the “invisible hand,”
because he utilizes the latter only to describe the end result of the
confluence of commercial exchang es. Besides, Smith still accepts the
legitimacy of public intervention when individual projects alone fail to
realize the common good.
But this qualification would soon disappear. Neo-liberals now dispute the
very concept of the public good. Hayek prohibited any comprehensive
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) , vol. 1, book III, ch. iv, 426.
14
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Soci ety , ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), third part, section II, p. 119.
15
Smith, The Wealth of Nations , vol. 1, book IV, ch. ii, p. 456.
approach to society on principle: no institution, no political authority ought
to set objectives that might question the efficiency of the “spontaneous
order.” Given this view, the only role that most liberals agre e to allow the
state is guaranteeing the conditions necessary for the free play of
economic rationality to work in the market. The state can have no goal of
its own. It exists only to guarantee individual rights, freedom of exchange,
and respect for law. Equipped more with permissions than with
prerogatives, it must in all other domains remain neutral and renounce
proposing a model of the “good life.” 16
The consequence s of the theory of the “invisible hand” are decisive,
particularly at the moral level. In some passages, Adam Smith indeed
rehabilitates the very behaviors that previous centuries always
condemned. By subordinating the social interest to individual economic
interests, Smith makes selfishness the best way to serve others. While
seeking to maximize our best personal interest, we work—without
knowing, indeed without even having to want it—for the interest of all. The
free confrontation of egoistic interests in the market “naturally, or rather
necessarily,” allows their harmonization by the play of the “invisible
hand,” thus making them contribute to the social optimum. Thus there is
nothing immoral in seeking one’s own interest first, since in the final
analysis the egoistic action of each leads, as if by accident, to the interest
of all. It is what Frederic Bastiat summarized in a formula: “Each one, while
working for himself, works for all.” 17 Egoism is thus nothing but altruism
properly understood. By contrast, it is the schemes of the public
authorities that deserve to be denounced as “immoral,” whenever, in the
name of solidarity, they contradict the right of individuals to act according
to their own interests.
Liberalism links individualism and the market by stating that the free
operation of the latter is also the guarantor of individual freedom. By
ensuring the best return on exchange s, the market in effect guarantee s
the independence of each agent. Ideally, if the market’s performance is
unhindered, this adjustment takes place in an optimal way, making it
possible to attain an ensemble of partial equilibriums that ensure an
overall equilibrium. Defined by Hayek as a “catallaxy,” the market
constitutes a spontaneous and abstract order, the formal instrumental
support for the exercise of private freedom. The market thus represents
not just the satisfaction of an economic ideal of optimality, but the
satisfaction of everything to which individuals, considered as generic
subjects of freedom, aspire. Ultimately, the market is identified with
justice itself, which leads Hayek to define it as a “game that increase s the
chance s of all the players,” stipulating that, under these conditions, losers
would be ill-advised to complain, for they have only themselves to blame.
Finally, the market is intrinsically “pacifying” because, based on “gentle
commerce,” it substitutes the principle of negotiation for conflict,
16
With respect to the role of the state, this is the most current liberal position. The
libertarians known as “anarcho- capitalists” go further, since they refuse even the
“minimal state” suggested by Robert Nozick. Not being a producer of capital, though it
consumes labor, for them the state is necessarily a “thief.”
17
Frederic Bastiat, Harmo ni e s éc o n o m i q u e s (1851). This is the well-known thesis that
Mandeville defends in his Fable of the Be e s : “Private vices, public virtue.”
neutralizing both rivalry and envy.
Note that Hayek reformulates the theory of the “invisible hand” in
“evolutionary” terms. Hayek indeed breaks with any sort of Cartesian
reasoning, such as the fiction of the social contract, which implies the
opposition (standard since Hobbes) between the state of nature and
political society. On the contrary, in the tradition of David Hume, he
praises custom and habit, which he opposes to all “constructivism.” But at
the same time he affirms that custom selects the most effective and
rational codes of conduct, i.e., the codes of conduct based on commercial
values, whose adoption results in rejecting the “tribal order” of “archaic
society.” This is why, invoking “tradition” all the while, he criticizes
traditional values and firmly condemns any organicist vision of society.
Indeed, for Hayek the value of tradition derives above all from what is
spontaneous, abstract, impersonal, and thus inappropriable. It is this
selective character of custom that explains why the market was gradually
imposed. Hayek thus thinks that any spontaneous order is basically “right”
in the same way that Darwin asserts that the survivors of the “struggle for
life” are necessarily “the best.” The market order thus constitutes a social
order that prohibits by definition any attempt to reform it.
Thus one sees that, for liberals, the market concept goes well beyond
the merely economic sphere. The market is more than a m echanism for
the optimal allocation of scarce resources or a system regulating the
pathways of production and consumption. The market is also and above all
a sociological and “political” concept. Adam Smith himself, insofar as he
turned the market into the principal agent of social order, was led to
conceive human relations on the economic model, i.e., as relations
between merchandise. Thus a market economy leads quite naturally to a
market society. “The market,” writes Pierre Rosanvallon, “is primarily a
way of representing and structuring social space; it is only secondarily a
decentralized mechanism for regulating economic activities through the
pricing system.” 18
For Adam Smith, generalized exchange is the direct consequence of the
division of labor: “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or become s in
some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is
properly a commercial society.” 19 Thus, from the liberal perspective, the
market is the dominant paradigm in a society that defines itself through
and through as a market society. Liberal society is only a realm of
utilitarian exchange s by individuals and groups all driven solely by the
desire to maximize their self- interest. A member of this society, where
everything can be bought and sold, is either a merchant, or an owner, or a
producer, and in all cases a consumer. “The superior rights of consumers,”
writes Pierre Rosanvallon, “are to Smith what the General Will is to
Rousseau.”
In the modern age, liberal economic analysis will be gradually extended
to all social facts. The family will be assimilated to a small business, social
relations to a network of competing self- interested strategies, political life
to a market where the voters sell their votes to the highest bidder. Man

18
Rosanvallon, Le libéralis m e éc on o m i q u e , 124.
19
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations , vol. 1, book I, ch. iv, p. 37.
will be perceived as capital, the child as a consumer good. Economic logic
is thus projected onto the social whole, in which it was once embedded,
until it entirely encompasse s it. As Gerald Berthoud writes, “society can
then be conceived starting from a formal theory of purposeful action. The
cost- benefit analysis is thus the principle that rules the world” 20 Everything
become s a factor of production and consumption; everything is supposed
to result from the spontaneous adjustment of supply and demand.
Everything is worth its exchange value, measured by its price.
Correlatively, all that cannot be expressed in quantifiable and calculable
terms is held to be uninteresting or unreal. Economic discourse thus
proves profoundly reifying of social and cultural practices, profoundly
foreign to any value that cannot expressed in terms of price. Reducing all
social facts to a universe of measurable things, it finally transforms men
themselves into things—things substitutable and interchangea ble from the
monetary point of view.
* * *
This strictly economic representation of society has considerable
consequences. Completing the process of secularization and
“disenchantment” of the world characteristic of modernity, it leads to the
dissolution of peoples and the systematic erosion of their distinct
characteristics. On the sociological plane, privileging economic exchange
divides society into producers, owners, and sterile classe s (like the former
aristocracy), through an eminently revolutionary process that Karl Marx
was not the last to praise. On the plane of the collective imagination, it
leads to a complete inversion of values, while raising to the pinnacle
commercial values that from time immemorial had been regarded as the
very definition of inferior, since they were matters of mere necessity. On
the moral plane, it rehabilitates the spirit of self- interested calculation and
egoistic behavior, which traditional society has always condemned.
Politics is regarded as intrinsically dangerous, insofar as it concerns the
exercise of power, which is considered “irrational.” Thus liberalism reduces
politics to the guarantee of rights and managem ent of society solely by
technical expertise. It is the fantasy of a “transparent society” coinciding
immediately with itself, outside any symbolic referent or concrete
intermediation. In the long run, in a society entirely governed by the
market and based on the postulate of the self- sufficiency of “civil society,”
the state and related institutions are supposed to decay as surely as in the
classless society imagined by Marx. In addition, the logic of the market, as
Alain Caillé shows, is part of a larger process tending toward the
equalization, even the interchang eability, of men, by the means of a
dynamic that is observed already in the modern use of currency. “The
juggling act of the liberal ideology,” according to Caillé, “. . . resides in the
identification of the legal state with the commercial state, its reduction to
an emanation of the market. Consequently, the plea for the freedom of
individuals to choose their own ends in reality turns into an obligation to

20
Gerald Berthoud, Vers une anthro p ol o gi e gén ér al e . Modernité et altérité (Genève:
Droz, 1992), 57.
have only commercial ends.” 21
The paradox is that liberals never cease affirming that the market
maximizes the chance s of each individual to realize his own ends, while
affirming that these ends cannot be defined in advance, and that,
moreover, nobody can better define them than the individual himself. But
how can they say that the market brings about the optimum, if we do not
know what this optimum is? In fact, one could just as easily argue that the
market multiplies individual aspirations much more than it gives them the
means to achieve them, that it increases, not their satisfaction, but their
dissatisfaction in the Tocquevillian sense of the term.
Moreover, if the individual is always by definition the best judge of his
own interests, then what obliges him to respect reciprocity, which would
be the sole norm? Liberal doctrine would no longer base moral behavior
upon a sense of duty or the moral law, but upon self- interest, rightly
understood. While not violating the liberty of others, I would dissuade
them from violating mine. Fear of the police is supposed to take care of
the rest. But if I am certain that, by transgressing the rules, I incur only a
very small risk of punishment, and reciprocity does not matter to me, what
prevents from violating the rules or the law? Obviously nothing. On the
contrary, taking into account nothing but my own interests encourage s me
to do so as often as I can.
In his The ory of Moral Sentim e n t s (175 9), Adam Smith writes frankly:
. . . though among the different members of the society there should
be no mutual love and affection, the society, though less happy and
agre eable, will not nece ssarily be dissolved. Society may subsist
among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of
its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in
it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it
may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices
according to an agre ed valuation. 22
The meaning of this passag e is clear. A society can very well economize—
this word is essential—on any form of organic sociality, without ceasing to
be a society. It is enough for it to become a society of merchants: the
social bond will merge with the feeling of its “utility” and the “mercenary
exchang e of good offices.” Thus to be human, it is sufficient to take part in
commercial exchanges, to make free use of one’s right to maximize one’s
best interest. Smith says that such a society will certainly be “less happy
and agreea ble,” but the nuance was quickly forgotten. One even wonders
if, for certain liberals, the only way to be fully human is to behave like
merchants, i.e., those who were formerly accorded an inferior status (not
that they were not regarded as useful, and even necessary, but for the
very reason that they were nothing but useful—and their vision of the
world was limited by the sole value of utility). And that obviously raises the
question of the status of those who do not behave like that, either because

21
Alain Caillé, Splend e ur s et mis èr e s des scien c e s soci al e s . Esquiss e d'une mythol o gi e
(Genève: Droz 1986), 347.
22
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentim e nts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976), 86.
they lack the desire or the means. Are they still men?
* * *
The logic of the market actually imposed itself gradually, beginning at
the end of the Middle Ages, when long- distance and local trade started to
be unified within national markets under the impetus of the emerging
nation- states, eager to monetize and hence tax formerly untaxable forms
of noncommercial intra- community trade. Thus, far from being a universal
fact, the market is a phenomenon strictly localized in time and space. And,
far from being “spontaneous,” this phenomenon was in fact instituted.
Particularly in France, but also in Spain, the market was by no means
constructed in spite of the nation- state, but rather thanks to it. The state
and the market are born together and progress at the same pace, the
former constituting the latter at the same time as it institutes itself. “At
the very least,” Alain Caillé writes, “it is advisable not to consider market
and state as two radically different and antagonistic entities, but as two
facets of the same process. Historically, national markets and nation-
states are built at the same pace, and one is not found without the
other.” 23
Indeed, both develop in the same direction. The market amplifies the
movement of the national state which, to establish its authority, cannot
cease to destroy methodically all forms of intermediate socialization
which, in the feudal world, were relatively autonomous organic structures
(family clans, village communities, fraternities, trades, etc). The bourgeois
class, and with it incipient liberalism, sustained and aggravated this
atomization of society, insofar as the emancipation of the individual it
desired required the destruction of all involuntary forms of solidarity or
dependence that represent as many obstacles to the extension of the
market. Pierre Rosanvallon observes:
From this perspective, nation- state and market reflect the same type
of socialization of individuals in space. They are conceivable only
within the framework of an atomized society, in which the individual
is understood to be autonomous. Thus both the nation- state and the
market, in both the sociological and economic sense of these terms,
are not possible where society exists as an encompassing social
whole. 24

Thus the new form of society that emerged from the crisis of the Middle
Ages was built gradually, starting from the individual, from his ethical and
political standards, and from his interests, slowly dissolving the coherence
of political, economic, legal, and even linguistic realms that the old society
tended to sustain. Until the sevente enth century, however, state and civil
society continued to be one and the same: the expression “civil society”
was still synonymous with politically organized society. The distinction
begins to emerge in the eighteenth century, notably with Locke, who
redefines “civil society” as the sphere of property and exchanges, the

23
Caillé, Splend e urs et misèr e s , 333- 34.
24
Rosanvallon, Le libéralis m e éc on o m i q u e , 124.
state or “political society” being henceforth dedicated to protecting
economic interests alone. Based upon the creation of an autonomous
sphere of production and exchange s, and reflecting the specialization of
roles and functions characteristic of the modern state, this distinction led
either to the valorization of political society as the result of a social
contract, as with Locke, or to the exaltation of civil society based on the
spontaneous adjustment of interests, as with Mandeville and Smith. 25 As
an autonomous sphere, civil society create s a field for the unrestricted
deployment of the economic logic of interests. As a consequence of the
market’s advent, “society,” as Karl Polanyi writes, “is managed as an
auxiliary of the market. Instead of the economy being embedded in social
relations, social relations are embedded in economic relations.” 26 This is
the very meaning of the bourgeois revolution.
At the same time, society takes the form of an objective order, distinct
from the natural or cosmic order, which coincides with the universal
reason to which the individual is supposed to have immediate access. Its
historical objectivation initially crystallizes in the political doctrines of
rights, the development of which one can follow from the time of Jean
Bodin to the Enlightenment. In parallel, political economy emerges as a
general science of society, conceived as a process of dynamic
development synonymous with “progress.” Society henceforth becomes
the subject of a specific scientific knowledge. To the extent that it
achieves a supposedly rational mode of existence , and its practices are
subject to an instrumental rationality as the ultimate principle of
regulation, the social world falls under a certain number of “laws.” But due
to this very objectivization, the unity of society, like its symbolization,
become s eminently problematic, the more so as the privatization of
membership and attachment leads quickly to the fragmentation of the
social body, the multiplication of conflicting private interests, and the
onset of de- institutionalization. New contradictions soon appear, not only
between the society founded by the bourgeoisie and remnants of the Old
Regime , but even within bourgeois society, such as class struggle.
The distinction between the public and the private, state and civil
society, was still acute in the nineteenth century, generalizing a
dichotomic and contradictory view of social space. Having extended its
power, liberalism, henceforth promoted a “civil society” identified with the
private sphere alone and denounced the “hegemonic” influence of the
public sector, leading it to plead for the end of the state’s monopoly on the
satisfaction of collective needs and for the extension of commercial modes
of intrasocial regulation. “Civil society” then took on a largely mythic
dimension. Being defined less and less in its own terms than in opposition
to the state—its contours fuzzily defined by what was theoretically
subtracted from the state—it seemed more an ideological force than a
well-defined reality.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, adjustments had to be
made to the purely economic logic of society’s regulation and
25
Bernard Mandeville, The Fabl e of the Be e s (1714).
26
Karl Polanyi, La grand e transf or m a tio n. Aux origines politiqu e s et éc o n o m i qu e s de
notr e tem p s (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 88. In English: The Great Transfor m a ti on: The
Political and Econo mi c Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).
reproduction. These adjustments were less the result of conservative
resistance than of the internal contradictions of the new social
configuration. Sociology itself arose from real society’s resistance to
political and institutional changes as well as those who invoked a “natural
order” to denounce the formal and artificial character of the new mode of
social regulation. For the first sociologists, the rise of individualism
hatched a double fear: of “anomie” resulting from the disintegration of
social bonds (Émile Durkheim) and of the “crowd” made up of atomized
individuals suddenly brought together in an uncontrollable “mass”
(Gustave Le Bon or Gabriel Tarde, both of whom reduce the analysis of
social facts to “psychology”). The first finds an echo among counter-
revolutionary thinkers in particular. The second is mainly perceptible
among the bourgeoisie concerned above all with protecting itself from the
“dangerous classes.”
While the nation- state supported and instituted the market, antagonism
between liberalism and the “public sector” grew in tandem. Liberals never
cease fulminating against the welfare state, without realizing that it is
precisely the market’s extension that necessitate s ever- increasing state
intervention. The man whose labor is subject solely to the market’s play is
indeed vulnerable, for his labor might find no takers or have no value.
Modern individualism, moreover, destroyed the organic relations of
proximity, which were above all relations of mutual aid and reciprocal
solidarity, thus destroying old forms of social protection. While regulating
supply and demand, the market does not regulate social relations, but on
the contrary disorganizes them, if only because it does not take into
account demands for which one cannot pay. The rise of the welfare state
then become s a necessity, since it is the only power able to correct the
most glaring imbalances and attenuate the most obvious distresse s. This
is why, as Karl Polanyi showed, every time liberalism appeared to triumph,
it has been paradoxically assisted by the addition of official interventions
necessitated by the damage to the social fabric caused by the logic of the
market. “Without the relative social peace of the welfare state,” Alain
Caillé observes, “the market order would have been swept away
altogether.” 27 This synergy of market and state has long characterized
(and in certain regards continues to characterize) the Fordist system.
“Social protection,” concludes Polanyi, “is the obligatory accompaniment
of the self- regulating market.” 28
Insofar as its interventions aim at compensating for the destructive
effects of the market, the welfare state in a certain manner plays a role in
“de- marketizing” social life. However, it cannot completely replace the
forms of community protection destroyed by industrial development, the
rise of individualism, and the expansion of the market. Compared to these
old forms of social protection, it indeed has as many limitations as
benefits. Whereas the old solidarity rested on an exchang e of mutual
services, which implied responsibility for all, the welfare state encourages
irresponsibility and turns citizens into dependents. Whereas the old
solidarity fell under a network of concrete relations, the welfare state

27
Caillé, Splend e urs et misèr e s , 332.
28
Polanyi, La grand e transf orm a ti o n , 265.
takes the form of an abstract, anonymous, and remote machinery, from
which one expects everything and to which one thinks one owes nothing.
The substitution of an impersonal, external, and opaque solidarity for an
old, immediate solidarity is thus far from satisfactory. It is, in fact, the very
source of the current crisis of the welfare state which, by its very nature,
seems doomed to implement only a solidarity that is economically
ineffective because it is sociologically maladjusted. As Bernard Enjolras
writes, “to go beyond the internal crisis of the welfare state
presupposes . . . rediscovering the conditions that produce a solidarity of
proximity,” which are also “the conditions for reforging the economic bond
to restore synchronism between the production of wealth and the
production of the social.” 29

* * *
“All the degradation of the modern world,” wrote Péguy, “i.e., all
lowering of standards, all debaseme nt of values, comes from the modern
world regarding as negotiable the values that the ancient and Christian
worlds regarded as nonnegotiable.” 30 Liberal ideology bears a major
responsibility for this “degradation,” insofar as liberalism is based on an
unrealistic anthropology entailing a series of erroneous conclusions.
The idea that man acts freely and rationally in the market is just a
utopian postulate, for economic facts are never autonomous, but relative
to a given social and cultural context. There is no innate economic
rationality; it is only the product of a well-defined social- historical
development. Commercial exchange is not the natural form of social
relations, or even economic relations. The market is not a universal
phenomenon, but a localized one. It never realizes the optimal adjustment
of supply and demand, if only because it solely takes into account the
demand of those who can pay. Society is always more than its individual
components, as a class is always more than the elements that form it,
because it is that which constitutes it as such, and that from which it is
thus logically and hierarchically distinct, as shown in Russell’s theory of
logical types (a class cannot be a member of itself, no more than one of its
members on its own can constitute the class). Finally, the abstract
conception of a disinterested, “decontextualized” individual who acts upon
strictly rational expectations and who freely chooses his identity from
nothing, is a totally unsupportable vision. On the contrary, communitarian
and quasi- communitarian theorists (Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel)
have shown the vital importance for individuals of a community that
necessarily constitutes their horizon, their epi st e m e — even to forge a
critical representation of it—for the construction of their identity as well as
for the satisfaction of their goals. The common good is the substantial
doctrine that defines the community’s way of life and thus its collective
identity.
The whole current crisis arises from the contradiction that is
29
Bernard Enjolras, “Crise de l'Etat- Providence, lien social et associations : éléments
pour une socio- économie critique,” Revue du MAUSS, 1 er semestre 1998, 223.
30
Charles Péguy, Note conjointe sur M. Desc arte s et la philos o p hi e carté si e nn e in Note
conjointe (Paris: Gallimard, 1935).
exacerbated between the ideal of the abstract universal man (with its
corollary atomization and depersonalization of all social relationships) and
the reality of the concrete man (for whom social ties continue to be
founded on emotional ties and relations of proximity, along with their
corollaries of cohesion, consensus, and reciprocal obligations).
Liberal authors believe society can be based solely on individualism and
market values. This is an illusion. Individualism has never been the sole
foundation of social behavior, and it never will be. There are also good
reasons to think that individualism can appear only insofar as society
remains to some extent holist. “Individualism,” writes Louis Dumont, “is
unable to replace holism completely and reign over all society. . . .
Moreover, it cannot function without holism contributing to its life in a
variety of unperceived and surreptitious ways.” 31 Individualism is what
gives liberal ideology its utopian dimension. Thus it is wrong to see holism
as only a doomed legacy of the past. Even in the age of modern
individualism, man remains a social being. Holism reappears the moment
liberal theory posits a “natural harmony of interests,” in effect recognizing
that the common good takes precedence over private interests.

Alain de Benoist

31
Dumont, Hom o æ q u alis.