Book Review: "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell

I am generally sceptical of the myth of meritocracy. That myth is largely how our current Western social institutions legitimise the inequality they produce, and is deployed in even fiercer forms to resist social policies to eliminate poverty. It is thus with some chagrin to report that I have only belatedly read Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 "Outliers: The Story of Success". First, the good news. "Outliers" is extraordinarily well written, compulsive to read, and crafts compelling anecdotes about the true nature of success. It challenges deeply help myths about the supposed genius of our culture's sporting, legal, and entrepreneurial heroes. 

Gladwell sets out to establish three core premises through which he wants to re-write the classical liberal narrative of success as the result of individual genius or talent:

• First, that success is more a matter of opportunity than talent, and opportunities are structured by social forces that are often hidden or obtuse in ways that are unintuitive or coincidental. 
• Secondly, that talent is largely a matter of having opportunities to practice (see #1). Gladwell popularised the so-called "10,000 hour" rule, which posits that extensive practice, not innate talent, distinguishes society's great artists, scientists and musicians from the rest of us. 
• Finally, Gladwell dives into the social and cultural factors that drive people to succeed, and argues that cultures which encourage "hard work" (see #2) produce more success.

For me, Gladwell fails to pull these arguments together into a cohesive whole. He proves his first point, but fails to establish a convincing factual or moral case for the second and third. 

Luck and Evolution

Gladwell is first and foremost a story-teller, and the strength of his arguments rests largely on the persuasiveness of his anecdotes. Fortunately, he leads with his best material. By exhaustively examining the relationship between coincidences such as birthdate and sporting success, Gladwell establishes a prima facie case that the artificial constraints imposed by society (in this instance, grouping players by birth year) create a selective pressure that advantages those born earliest in the selection period. It's not that those born earlier in the year are always going be slightly stronger, slightly taller and slightly faster than those born later in the year. Rather it's that the selection environment takes those minor, random differences and signal-boosts them, offering early opportunities for additional training and practice that mean that by the time these biological or developmental differences cease to matter, they've been supplanted by robust skill-based gradations.

Although Gladwell himself doesn't use evolutionary metaphors, the examples he provides offer compelling example after compelling example about how environment, rather than talent, shapes who succeeds. In Gladwell's narrative, the masters of Silicon Valley rose to prominence not because they're geniuses (most were talented, yes, but not academic standouts), but because they had the good fortune to be born in a time and place where they had opportunities to be ahead of the curve in practicing with a technology that would soon re-shape the entire economy. Gladwell's narrative history of the New York M&A legal scene is similar: the [predominantly Jewish] firms that became titans of Wall Street prevailed not because they were smarter, or better able to judge the financial markets, but because the prevailing cultural norms prevented more established WASP firms from gaining the skills and experience they would need to survive in the new neoliberal order. 

At times, Gladwell seems in awe of the talented individuals (both successful and unsuccessful) he interviewed for the book; but rather than hero worship, he accurately points out there is far more to individual success than general intelligence. Sociability and emotion intelligence matter too; as do the contacts, self-confidence and experience provided by some socio-economic backgrounds over others.  

Uneasy Bedfellows

Gladwell's alternative explanation for the success of these individuals is that practice and experience drive success. The distribution of opportunities to practice (for "10,000 hours") determines who are the standouts in a particular field. Unfortunately, the anecdote-driven nature of this claim undermines its persuasiveness. Gladwell cites a single study of musicians to grant his claim scientific weight, and it's worth noting that subsequent meta-analyses have failed to replicate the result outside the musical profession. 

The lack of a cohesive argumentative throughline becomes a particular problem in the second half of the book. It is here that Gladwell offers his case on what drives people to work hard on a task for the requisite 10,000 hours practice in the first place. Gladwell begins well by introducing the idea of cultural influences on behaviour through the often-cited work on Southerners in the US (Nisbett & Cohen) and the role of culture in airline crashes. But he then argues that some cultures are better equipped than other to produce individual behaviours that reliably produce success. My core problem is that, like so many others working in this space, Gladwell shifts the locus of success from biological to cultural factors without changing the essence of the story being told about why some groups succeed and others don't. 

Gladwell's chapter on "why Asians are good at math" is particularly egregious. Crafting a tale of pre-modern China as a capitalist, entrepreneurial idyll, he argues Chinese culture is supposedly adapted to reproduce behaviours of self-reliance, hard work and risk-taking. Even ignoring the atrocious lumping together of all of Asian economic and cultural history, his claim is also wrong on its historical face. While small-peasant landholding may have been the ideal during some periods in Chinese history, there were equally periods characterised by feudal, despotic or [in the later period, especially] market-dominated land-ownership. A more sophisticated version of Gladwell's argument could point to the emphasis on civil service exams in Confucian governance; the high population densities in the region; or the role of the immigrant experience in pushing parents to over-invest in their child's education. Instead, we get the laziest sort of innate cultural, 'just so' explanations.

Worse, perhaps, is the second-to-last chapter where Gladwell sketches a narrative of how we might equalise success. Like many boosters of charter (for non-American, read: private) schools, Gladwell believes that longer hours, more homework and stricter discipline can create a 'hard work' culture that lifts people out of poverty. While I'm amenable to arguments about extending the school day, by this point it's well understood that private schools are highly selective in taking students who are already gifted and/or driven, poorly serve those who aren't, and perpeutate a two-tiered system of education without actually improving outcomes (an issue addressed in Chapter X of my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age").

The Takeaways

While I would recommend "Outliers" as a reading experience, I would caution about overuse of its lessons. Gladwell chooses his anecdotes well, but they are ultimately just stories. While Gladwell focuses on understanding success, his book also (unintentionally or not) holds up a mirror to the origins of inequality. So while I while I applaud efforts to shift away from narratives of success rooted in individual merit, I would caution strongly against replacing them with either biological or cultural determinism. Culture is powerful, certainly, but no group is a monolith and every variation has both positive and negative attributes, depending on the skills demanded by society in a given historical moment. The question should not be how to create self-reliant strivers, but why we would want to structure our society so that only strivers succeed in the first place. 

Why I’m a radical feminist (but not THAT kind of radical feminist)

This is a long one. Stay with me!

Once upon a time, as a first-year political science undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, I was taught feminism 101 by Sheila Jeffreys. Jeffreys, perhaps the archetypal “radical lesbian separatist” was and remains controversial figure. But unlike many of my classmates (several young conservative women made a show of boycotting the compulsory course) I found a lot to like in her radical critique of gender relations. I’ve subsequently crossed paths with Jeffreys a couple of times professionally, in ways that have highlighted the problematic aspects of her attitude towards sex workers and trans individuals. 

This is a blog about feminism. While the composition of groups, classes and interests that make up a society is variable, there is one “identity” – gender – which is just about ubiquitous across humankind because it is built on top of a universal biological scaffold: sex* [see below]. While I personally believe we can build ideologies without reference to social identities, I suspect that this cannot be done satisfactorily without addressing gendered inequalities. Thus, while we can [in theory] debate socialism or capitalism without considering differences in race or religion, a separate critique of patriarchy is a necessary co-requisite to any progressive politics.

What follows is my effort to engage with these questions, noting that I am not a woman, am incapable of experiencing the female perspective, and have not seriously engaged with the key texts. In other words, nothing below counts for very much beyond my own perspective. 

Back to Basics

It is now broadly recognised that sex and gender refer in English to two distinct concepts: the former biological, the latter social. Importantly, sex itself is not a simple categorical concept but an index of variations (in primary or reproductive sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, endocrinal systems, neural structures etc) which may or may not co-vary in any given individual. While intersex individuals who defy traditional categorisation based on their chromosomes or primary sex characteristics are often considered the 'exceptions who prove the rule', people struggle to accept (as a recent special issue of Scientific American pointed out) that we are all sexual chimaeras to some degree. Each individual mixes stereotypically ‘male’ and ‘female’ biological and cultural traits as a result of our own particular genetic legacy, developmental history and social conditioning. We can take broad averages of particular traits, but the probability that any given individual has one hundred per cent of the biological markers statistically characteristic of their assigned sex is extremely low. 

Gender, on the other hand, is the set of social roles and expectations which are constructed around sex variability. It is likely that unequal social roles based on biological sex at least partially predate society, and even the human species itself; children seem innately tuned to pick up on and reproduce gendered behaviours. Much as minor genetic differences which vary with geography (such as in antibody expression) become associated with visible but unrelated ‘tags’ (such as skin colouration or cultural practices) which are in turn constructed into racialized social hierarchies, gender is a social construct based on superficial difference markers (e.g sexual characteristics) with complex links to ultimately irrelevant biological differences (such as chromosomal make-up or hormone regulation). Our mental desire to categorise reduces all this wonderful diversity into binary [oppressive] social roles with vast consequences: male and female.

I am a radical feminist because I believe that these constructed gender inequalities pre-date all other forms of social oppression (including race and class), and there is a credible argument that gender hierarchies are the model for all other forms of exploitation and hierarchy. I further believe that gender inequality is based first and foremost on the exploitation of reproductive capacity, which is largely (but not exclusively) determined by sex. Children were the original “capital good”: the input and output of all other forms of production. Women controlled that means of production by the contribution of their labour and men constructed elaborate norms and roles to unjustly seize most of that surplus value for themselves. The modern idea of gender is constructed, like Frankenstein’s monster, from a motley set of high-salience but low-information signals in order to build a hierarchical structure that (primarily) benefits men.

Power and Patriarchy

While not every human society is patriarchal, a sufficiently large percentage of them are that it is accurate to describe gendered inequality as being representative of our species. We are neither chimpanzee (enforcing male reproductive rights through violence) nor bonobo (using social sex and uncertain parentage as a social glue), but something in between. Monogamy has deep enough roots in our species to justify the hypothesis that biology heavily weights human cultural outcomes towards equilibrium norms that enforce and reproduce it (i.e. patriarchy). But we retain sufficient behaviourial flexibility to challenge and re-write those norms when conditions allow. As I have written elsewhere, we are behaviorial omnivores who balance precariously between established practice and experimentation with new social patterns. 

I am a radical feminist because (like a good Gramscian) I believe that these patterns of gendered behaviour are the result not only of the formal laws and rules that constitute society but implicit patterns of power between genders that are reproduced regardless of law. In other words, mere legal equality and the reform of discriminatory statutes so as to ensure equality of opportunity between the sexes is inadequate because gendered behaviours are embedded in a something more primal and powerful: cultural patriarchy. Discourses, beliefs and expectations about gendered behaviour will continue to reproduce the patriarchy even, perhaps especially, if laws and expectations are changed along socialist or capitalist lines to promise legal equality.

Over the years, I’ve have had senior colleagues of mine, both male and female, admit out of confidence in my discretion that they prefer to hire male over female staff. On the flip side, I’ve had well-meaning bosses offer to improve working conditions for women primarily by offering more family leave. No matter how far feminism has reformed laws in the global West, so long as expectations of the exploitation of female reproductive labour continue to be reproduced at home and through our culture, these gendered patterns of hierarchy and oppression will continue to find expression.

It’s in this regard that the critique of patriarchy also holds the potential to benefit men. While gendered roles and expectations undoubtedly offer men a privileged position, inhabiting those roles can be stressful (or dare I say, toxic) – especially when they are at odds with the legal structures of society. One interesting piece of research that bubbled up during the whole “Google Memo” fiasco was that gendered behaviourial differences may have increased in the West as formal equality became entrenched. This is not, it turns out, because women have become more stereotypically ‘feminine’, but because men have responded to their reduced relative status by increasing the practice of ‘masculinised’ behaviours. The liberation of both men and women from these stressful and harmful gendered expectations is the only just goal of a radical, emancipatory agenda.

Not THAT kind of Radical Feminist

Radical feminism has a bad reputation. Like all progressive movements, it has been prone to bitter internal sectarianism (e.g. regarding sex work and the place of trans individuals) over the past several decades. Some of these fights can be understood as manifestations of the authoritarian/libertarian axis, as I’ve written previously. Invariably, the losers of these arguments (like their Trotskyist forebears) continued to argue that they, and they alone, represent continuity with “true” radicalism while acting like puritanical asshats. Few take Trotskyists to be true representatives of socialism; nor should we treat TERFS or SWERFS as being truly representative of [radical] feminism. To be clear, if I am to describe myself as a radical feminist, it is as one who is both trans- and sex worker-inclusionary.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS) like Jeffreys and another Australian export, Germaine Greer, share with all authoritarian radicals the belief that when constructed but flawed social categories (i.e. gender) are abolished they will be supplanted by the "correct" essentialist, ones. Like Marxists who believe in the elevation of intransient class identity over bourgeois interests, they argue the abolition of gender will expose the permanent antagonism between biological (reproductive) sexes. For TERFS, the willing identification with and performance of gender roles (even as a transgression) merely reinforces the patriarchy, much like participation in the market reinforces capitalism.  TERF views have historically been disavowed even by other radicals including Catherine McKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem.

Even if the origin of biological sex differences in the brain prove hard to pin down, and gender identity (like all other personality traits) is understood as emerging from the complex interaction of genes, developmental and cultural factors, the left-libertarian instinct must be offering priority to the subjective lived experience of others and trust in their capacity to make (informed) decisions about their own wellbeing. Acceptance of trans- and gender-non conforming people is not only the correct liberal individualist thing to, but also one of the best tools radical feminism has to deconstruct and upend the fixed notion of gender categories that underpins the patriarchy.

In much the same vein, a (slightly larger) fraction of radical feminists take a strongly proscriptionary approach to prostitution and pornography. Sex worker exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs) have lobbied with conservatives, often successfully (as is the case with the so-called “Swedish model”), for the outlawing of the sex industry. I recognise as a socialist that as both sex and work, prostitution and pornography sit at the intersection of two very potent power relations: capitalism and the patriarchy. The intersection of these oppressions creates opportunities for exploitation, such as sex trafficking, that are unique in their odiousness.

However, the intersection of these patterns of oppression merely means that the democratisation of sex work is more necessary than in any other part of the economy. In prostitution and pornography, worker control of the means of production means first and foremost ensuring the enthusiastic consent of the participants. People, both men and women, may freely choose to be sex workers. The correct approach is not to critique their choices, but to make sure their decision is truly free, and not forced upon them as a result of material necessity (what I call in my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" ‘decision slavery’)

In the end, therefore, while the left needs to integrate a critique of patriarchy into our everyday work, we must root that critique in the same individualistic and democratic framework that we apply to other forms of hierarchy and exploitation. Progressives, especially men, must be equipped with the tools to fight and win these arguments, and not see them as being somehow separate from concerns about poverty and class.

Liberalism: Implied Consent and Personal Belief

As readers would know, "Politics for the New Dark Age" lays out a socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly endorses the modern, Rawlsian version of social contract theory, which posits that members of a society can be thought of as have an implied agreement with one another that establishes the ground rules for interaction. The social contract is a thought experiment, but the fact that it is merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful. Many other social and religious systems are of course based on fictions, but that does not stop them from serving valuable public purposes. What matters in evolutionary game theory for the success or failure of a given strategy is whether it is effective, not whether it is true, or good. 

The problem of implied consent

One of the classical problems with social contract theory is its reliance on implied, or what Locke called ‘tacit’, consent. In other words, there is not a literal contract to which members of a society give their explicit agreement, but rather a tacit understanding or expectation that individual behaviour will follow social norms. We are talking less about conscious consent and more about unconscious beliefs and practices. In the sense of cultural evolution, these are stable expectations about the behaviour of the self and others. It is philosophically challenging, to say the least, to reconcile implied consent with a philosophies grounded in the free will of individuals. Politics, and other similar works, take the view that tacit consent is legitimate since anyone, upon encountering injustice, is entitled to consciously challenge a norm and work actively to change it. Implied consent requires a right to dissent. Moreover, if we ever did stop to deliberate on the rules that should govern our lives, we would, after much time and effort, settle on norms that look very much like the ones we already have.

In evolutionary terms, the establishment of the rules and norms of society by the acquiescence of its members is not difficult to understand. Rules, norms and behaviours respond to selection pressures and the most useful strategies are imitated and replicated. Evolved cultural constructs exist outside the individual, and individuals are socialised into those constructs during the process of their formal and informal education. Moreover, since evolved cultural constructs must, by definition, be adaptive (or at least, neutral) in the context of their environment, they will tend to work [fairly] well most of the time for [most of] the members of that society. Note, further to my last blog,  that putting tacit consent in evolutionary terms does not impart evolved rules with independent moral virtue: everyone is free to try different strategies, and their success or failure will determine whether the proposed change or mutation is replicated into the next generation. A great many traditional norms have been challenged with positive net results: that’s progress in a nutshell.

Norms and the Self

One of modern philosophy’s most difficult challenges, in an era in which much of what individuals believe and how we act can potentially be explained in terms of biological and evolutionary processes, is deciding the basis on which a social rule can be considered valid. We are forced to revisit age-old questions of free will and determinism. If we throw out the abstraction of homo economicus, the universally rational utility-seeking individual, what is left? Most writers exploring this area draw heavily on cognitive psychologist and Nobel Prize in Economics winner Daniel Kahneman’s work showing that humans have [at least] two different modes of thinking: ‘System 1’, which is fast and instinctive, and ‘System 2’ which is slower, more energy intensive and deliberative.

It seems to me that the future of moral philosophy will revolve around interpreting the differing moral roles played by each of these systems. Already, perspectives differ wildly. Joshua Greene (author of ‘Moral Tribes’) believes that the only possible meta-morality for a diverse society occurs when Mode 2 reasoning dominates Mode 1 instincts. Jonathon Haidt (author of “The Righteous Mind”) argues that true moral principles lie in our evolved moral tastes and that Mode 2 thinking is a trickster, which exists primarily to rationalise and justify our innate preferences (a position also contemplated by Greene is his more critical moments). John Jost’s takedown of Haidt’s book rebuts this argument well.

My own perspective lies somewhere between the two extremes. I distrust the capacity of individuals to cognitively reason their way around their instincts and towards a moral solution that is also binding on others. But nor do I accept the conservative proposition (or naturalist fallacy) that because a System 1 moral system evolved (either genetically or culturally) in the past it is also necessarily adapted to solving modern social and political problems. Instead, I advocate for a dynamic political and social system which allows, and indeed encourages, mutant strategies to throw themselves into competition with the status quo and stand or fall on their salience to the voting public. In other words, explicit System 2 innovation creates the very variation and selection pressures needed for System 1 rules to be judged adaptive or maladaptive. 

How do we know what we know?

Where does that leave the individual? How sure can we be of the correctness of our own moral beliefs, and why? Let’s think of our personal beliefs from the perspective of the implied consent principle. The instinctive systems that we are equipped with by our genes and by our upbringing work perfectly well most of the time – up until the point that they don’t. We acquiesce to our in-build moral prejudices by acting in accordance with them, and if we ever stopped to think about our actions using our System 2 capabilities, we could and would probably construct elaborate arguments and philosophies justifying them in abstract or universal terms. Our System 2 thinking also gives us the capacity to override those instincts and adjust our behaviour upon encountering contrary signals of sufficient salience.

In other words, we give implied consent to our own moral beliefs. We do have choice and free will but don't [need to] exercise it most of the time. You could probably therefore place me in the camp of the philosophical compatabilists or self-determinists.

And that is why Chapter 16 of Politics, regarding moral aesthetics, is of such critical importance to the overall argument of the book. It’s always important to recognise that while we have innate ideological preferences, there exists the possibility of making different moral choices at any time. Regardless of whether we choose to act in accordance with our instincts, or in opposition to them, the decision to employ or not employ System 2 reasoning, and how we do so, is an aesthetic or personal one about which no universal moral laws can be drawn. Morality is at its root, a subjective art.

Evolution and Consequentialism

Although only implicit in Politics for the New Dark Age, my current research interests lean heavily towards evolutionary understandings of political and social science. In short, generalised Darwinism proposes that the evolution of species, the development of individual biological organisms, and the growth and spread of cultural norms, practices and beliefs are all controlled by the same processes of variation, selection and replication. Evolutionary approaches explain the emergence of order from anarchy, of function from randomness, and of cooperation from conflict. What such an approach seeks to understand is the success of strategies or decision-rules: ideas that transform information about the external environment into motivated action. So far, so good.

Philosophical conundrums

The key component of all evolutionary approaches is selection by consequences, or as it is commonly (and inaccurately) known, survival of the fittest. Strategies that are effective (or neutral) relative to their peer competitors will survive or even expand their frequency in the next generation, and strategies that are ineffective will reproduce or be copied less often. Thus, over time evolved strategies can converge on certain optimised mathematical equilibria. But doesn't an evolutionary approach to understanding social and political life then merely offer a justification for a utilitarian "ends justify the means" ethical philosophy? Since utilitarianism is the best-known school of consequentialist philosophy, isn't a model of social life governed by consequences hypocritical given my opposition to utilitarian governance and preference for liberal, democratic processes?

The short answer is no. Evolutionary models do not guarantee that strategies with the highest payoff will prevail. They suggest (at best!) that those strategies which are resistant to attack from alternatives can become dominant or 'fixed' in a population (an 'evolutionary stable strategy'). In the classic iterated prisoners' dilemma, for example, there are strategies that can perform better than the classic 'tit-for-tat' solution, by exploiting its short memory and capacity for forgiveness. But in a population-level model, exploitative strategies cannot do better than tit-for-tat in the long run, and cannot themselves work together to prevent being exploited by others.  

Many simplified or hedonistic forms of utilitarianism, predicted on the maximisation of some common currency such as utility or pleasure, do not concern themselves with the importance of procedure and social resilience to decision-making (but see "rule utilitarianism"). Often, inefficient social practices and norms make societies better off in the long run, likely because they allow competing signals to be taken into account or because they encode relevant information below the level of conscious awareness. Moreover, rapid variation in social and ecological circumstances may suddenly change the definition of fitness that a given strategy must produce. A decision rule that produce optimal results may not survive against a decision-rule that is less efficient but more robust in a variety of contexts, if the selection pressures are sufficiently strong.

What evolutionary thinking is not

There is a fundamental philosophical difference between ethics and material determinism: or in other words, between is and ought. Cultural evolution, like class analysis, may suggest what social and economic strategies ultimately prevail, but it is an entirely different question for us to ask what sort of strategies should prevail.

It’s impossible to use evolution as an ethical philosophy because the consequences of decisions can only be known as probabilistic likelihoods, and even then only poorly. Evolution is consequentialism under conditions of uncertainty: we have imperfect information about future events and our beliefs about the likely consequences of our decision-making are irrevocably tinged by our innate moral preferences and personal experiences. Under these conditions, as I have written in the past, the ethical thing to do to is to advocate for one’s beliefs as strongly possible and let the chips fall where they may. Each of us finds our own ethical should from within ourselves, and by own power and agency we can shape social outcomes to increase the likelihood of our preferred outcome. Importantly, by adding our power together with like-minded others, we can substantially change the probability of our preferred strategy becoming fixed in the population.

Two Critiques

Two critiques can be levelled against the evolutionary perspective from a progressive ideological worldview. Firstly, while an evolutionary understanding provides no ethical guidance for decision-making, it may imply that existing social norms and roles are already effective ways to govern a society. An evolutionary view can offer partial support to a conservative worldview, because any decision-rule that currently exists must be hypothesised to be effective for the society in which it evolved. Secondly, an evolutionary approach can be considered a rejection of enlightened humanism, since on its face it discounts the possibility that reason alone can improve society: it subjects human optimism about the future to structural forces of history and biology that are beyond individual control.

These critiques are valuable, but repeat the naturalist fallacy of basing what ought to be on the basis of what is. Evolved cultural norms and institutions can and should be routinely challenged by progressives using reason. Doing so creates the very selection pressures cultural evolution needs to operate - not challenging the status quo may allow poorly adapted (or unethical) norms to survive longer than necessary. Existing beliefs and practices may preserve biological or cultural prejudices that were adaptive, neutral or merely competitive in an earlier period in human history, but which have become maladaptive, harmful or illiberal today.

This goes to my earlier post about ethics, adaption and maladaption: how do we know if a particular social rule is worth preserving? We don’t! Social norms and institutions may be historically and culturally contingent; they may have no overall effect on social outcomes, or they may be maladaptive in modern contexts which they could not envisage when first evolved. The only way to know for sure is to seek to change them and see what happens.

Why ‘Libertarian’ Socialism

The introduction and promotional materials of Politics for the New Dark Age are fairly upfront about the ideological perspective I’m arguing from:

“[I]t articulates a holistic progressive ideology located at the nexus of two broad themes: first, the practical superiority of cooperative solutions in social problem-solving, and second, a liberal, rights-based understanding of the social contract predicated on the equal inherent dignity of all human beings.”

Throughout the book, I employ the common term ‘socialism’ to describe the first such theme, and likewise ‘libertarian’ for the second. Although the book shies away from debates about ‘-isms’ – because all such things have been written before and better – it’s fair to locate the book within the libertarian socialist tradition. Now, I could just as easily have employed ‘democratic socialism’ or ‘liberal socialism’; I don’t see sufficient difference to warrant splitting hairs. Regardless of terminology, at the core of my argument is the necessity of progressives putting the liberal democratic social contract back at the centre of our political and economic program, particularly in these times in which democracy is under conscious attack by those on the right who would prefer to see it fail.

Ultimately I elected to use the word ‘libertarian’ consciously, which connects best with the psychological roots of political behaviour that underlie my model. We are a social species: we achieve our greatest potential when part of an interdependent whole. Yet our individual attitudes towards freedom and authority are prior to the social constructs in which we operate. Libertarianism is “not anarchism, which seeks the destruction of all cooperative social institutions,", but a recognition that the objective of social cooperation is to maximise the freedom of the individuals that comprise that society to seek their own happiness. 

Five Reasons to be Left-Libertarian

So if we presume that our choice of particular words has value, what does ‘libertarianism’ as a concept do for us on the left? Here are some (interrelated) ideas:

1)      It correctly identifies our opposition as authoritarians – on both right and left.

First and foremost, libertarian self-identification makes it clear that those, on both the right and left, who would replace dynamic social interaction with hierarchy [and violence] are the primary opponents of social and economic progress. Hierarchy can be socially useful in some circumstances as a mode of organisation - otherwise we as a species wouldn't have a capacity for it. But decision tyranny is anti-thetical to democracy, equality and liberty; we don't accept it in our politics and we shouldn't accept it in our economics either. 

2)      Putting the individual first inhibits recourse to utilitarian and centrist arguments.

Secondly, and as I write in Chapter IV, liberal individualism prevents us from falling into the trap of utilitarian thinking (which is often closely related to, but distinct from, authoritarianism) which would put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the one. In the same way, it ensures that technocrats and centrists, who would impose public policy out of their own sense of the greater good, are prevented from doing so against the consent of individuals directly affected by their decisions.

3)      It disavows revolutionary instincts which put the social contract at risk

Equally importantly, a liberal or democratic socialism disavows the revolutionary, anarchist and/or separatist instincts of some political actors (including on the left). In chapter IV, I describe how the desire for social and conceptual cohesiveness can drive those with a low tolerance for compromise to seek to impose revolutionary change on others (through authoritarian and violent means), or separate themselves from society altogether. I note that this revolutionary tendency is an explicit part of traditional Marxism; and the same tendency for utopian thinking remains a problem on the left (and right) to this day.

Although Politics argues that the Manichean conflict between left and right is not to be feared, there is a limit to how far that conflict can be taken while maintaining a viable society. Fighting to advance social progress is one thing, ripping apart the social contract altogether in the name of one’s ideology is quite the other. Preserving the corrective and selective properties of the political ecosystem is key to ensuring that social equilibria are adaptive. So this tension, between fighting political battle  and the preservation of society as a whole is, I believe, the central challenge of all democratic politics. How hard can we seek to reshape social equilibria without destroying it?

4)      Focusing on choice and freedom allows a critical perspective on all forms of power, both political and economic, that oppress the individual

Libertarian, or democratic socialism, recognises the fundamental equivalency of all forms of power. The adoption of individualism renders choice and freedom the key determinants of a just society. While a classical liberal will recognise the essential need of all individuals to have the equal right to self-determination, the liberal socialist recognises that inequalities of wealth and power will make some individuals more free than others. What the libertarian socialist seeks is decision freedom and the end of decision slavery: the state wherein no individual is forced to choose between two undesirable outcomes purely as a result of material necessity. The ‘democratisation of the means of the production’ means precisely that: expecting the same standards of democratic accountability, transparency and participation in economic life as we routinely expect in political life.

5)      It requires permanent scepticism towards traditional forms of hierarchy and power, challenging social adaptations that can no long justify their usefulness

Lastly, from an evolutionary perspective, a critical or libertarian approach institutionalises a position of permanent intellectual scepticism towards all forms of traditional power. As argued elsewhere, one of the key challenges of a political activist with an evolutionary perspective on social and cultural institutions, is to question whether social norms and rules are functional and adaptive or maladaptive and harmful. While the conservative instinct is to see traditional or “common sense” rules as adaptive by default, a libertarian mindset does not accept the legitimacy of any source of authority that cannot continue to justify its ongoing existence. In this way, it acts as a permanent check against the ossification of social structures and a key driver of sustainable progress in the social status quo.