Henry—using his last name would be inappropriately impersonal for me—began studying Asian philosophy while a Marine in the Korean War. On leave and both physically and spiritually exhausted, he visited a local temple in search of solace. He soon found himself in the lotus position (the virtue of which, he told us with his deep-chested laugh, is that when you fall asleep, you roll around safely on the floor) and his life’s work.
He went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy, specializing in Asian thought, at the University of Washington and did post-graduate work in linguistics under Noam Chomsky at MIT. His academic research, often in collaboration with the University of Hawaii, Manoa’s Roger Ames, focused on translating and understanding Confucian texts and brought him international recognition in that specialized field.
I didn’t find Asian philosophy nearly so satisfying (I’m hopelessly Western and Platonic), but I appreciated the professor. Fortunately, Henry also taught courses that I did like, including ancient political thought and logic. He welcomed students who dropped by his office to discuss some difficult text or logic problem, enjoyed conversations over between-class cigarettes and after-class glasses of wine, and kept a public list of double-entendres for grad school recommendation letters (“I wish I could say more about this student’s promise…”). If you were lucky, you would catch a glimpse of the Bugs Bunny tattoo on his arm—another product of his time in the Marines.
Henry shuffled off this mortal coil last July at age 82. Before passing, Rowman & Littlefield’s Lexington Books published his final book, Against Individualism, as the first in a series on Philosophy and Cultural Identity. In it, Henry challenges the concept of the autonomous individual as well as the Western ethical systems, libertarian philosophy, and capitalist economic system that “foundational individualism” supports.
His aren’t the arguments of a faculty lounge Marxist stereotype; Henry impatiently dismisses collectivism in the prologue and elsewhere in the book. Instead, he advocates a Confucian understanding of the person as a replacement for Western individualist ideas and values.
As a tribute to my late teacher, let’s consider his critique of the ideas that many of us readers of Regulation cherish.
Individualism and the West / Western philosophy, he writes, is grounded on the notion that the person is an autonomous, rational, persistent self that has intrinsic moral worth. According to Henry:
The idea of the individual self, based on self-awareness that entails rationality, is one of the most deeply rooted constructs in the history of Western intellectual history. From its origins in ancient Greece in the tripartite nature of the soul, through the Judaic-Christian unitary version thereof, it has played a major role in shaping our sense of who and what we are, and how, therefore, we ought to live our lives, interact with our fellows, and shape the institutions in which we live together.
Under this view, infringing on individual autonomy is wrong and people’s freedom is morally limited only by the obligation that they not impose on others’ autonomy.
Any further human commitments and constraints upon the individual must be voluntarily accepted in order to be morally acceptable. This leads to the idea that government legitimacy rests in the social contract, under which citizens agree to surrender some autonomy in exchange for government-provided benefits. No other justification for government is acceptable under these precepts, writes Henry:
If we are indeed free, rational, and autonomous, why should we want to surrender our freedom to a state that will claim a monopoly on the use of coercion to secure compliance with its dictates?
He argues that all versions of Western moral and political thought are grounded on foundational individualism, whether Immanuel Kant’s deontology or the various versions of utilitarianism, or even Marxism, communitarianism, and feminist care ethics. The perfect form of this Western philosophy, he writes, is libertarianism, which he describes as “a coherent, consistent, and not, by logical standards, an unreasonable moral code and political position.”
He credits foundational individualism with having provided great benefit to humanity:
Americans have long been proud of the constraints the Bill of Rights places on the government to interfere in the lives of its citizenry, and rightly so; would that all governments the world over were similarly constrained. … Millions of people have benefited from the idea that human beings should be seen as free, rational, autonomous individuals, and the resultant gains in human dignity it has brought about are to be celebrated, and should not be lost.
However, he argues, world conditions are changing and the West’s individualist philosophy is no longer the positive force it once was. Natural resources are strained by population growth, wealth is increasingly distributed unequally, poverty threatens a greater percentage of humanity than ever before, and people are increasingly unhappy and angry. Foundational individualism is contributing to these ills, he claims, by advancing a false conception of human value and by obstructing corrective “social justice.”
Challenging the self / What’s so wrong with the concept of a morally valuable, rational, autonomous self? Henry makes two criticisms: experientially its existence has little support, and morally it leaves much to be desired.
Concerning the former, he invites readers to investigate themselves to evaluate the self. Strip away the physical body, the societal and familial roles, the various external and internal physical and mental stimuli, and memories, and what’s left? According to Western thought, Henry argues, this should be like peeling a peach: remove the skin and flesh, and one should be left with the pit—or in this exercise, the self.
However, he continues, when he strips away those facets of himself, he finds he’s left with nothing at all. Instead of a peach, the exercise is more like peeling an onion and finding there’s no core beneath the layers. He writes:
We seem incapable of describing the self we all supposedly possess, are hard put to describe what makes us a unique individual apart from others, or what criteria to employ in deciding whether another is the same individual over time; do not have strong intuitions or criteria for how to handle seemingly anomalous cases (Alzheimer’s patients, split personalities, extreme physical disfigurement, cases of self-deception, amnesia, etc.); or how to answer Hume’s logical question of what experience the experiencer can possibly have of the experiencer. All of this suggests, at the least, that the idea of autonomous individuals is at best a confused one. (Henry’s emphasis.)
But this problem is not his biggest concern; the “self” could be a useful fiction if it yielded a fully satisfactory morality. The deeper problem for Henry is that foundational individualism results in an incomplete and even detrimental morality.
If individual autonomy is the supreme moral value, then that value does not motivate an obligation to help others. People can (and many do) voluntarily aid the poor, injured, and other unfortunates, but they apparently are motivated by something other than foundational individualism. Further, a libertarian polis cannot obligate itself to help unfortunates through compulsory redistribution of wealthier citizens’ property; doing so would violate those citizens’ right to their property. As a result, the libertarian state has limited means to improve the lives of the weak and poor: it cannot pursue social justice.
Henry finds this constraint unacceptable. He writes:
Herein lies a fundamental conflict in all contemporary discourses on human rights grounded in the concept of the autonomous individual: To whatever extent we may be seen to be morally and thus politically responsible for assisting others in the creation and obtaining of those goods which accrue to them by virtue of having social and economic rights, to just that extent we cannot be altogether autonomous individuals, enjoying full civil and political rights, free to rationally decide upon and pursue our own projects rather than having to assist the less fortunate with theirs.
This deficiency is not merely a shortcoming of libertarianism, but outright morally harmful, Henry claims, because it defends selfishness on the part of the well-to-do. He goes so far as to quote rebukes from John Kenneth Galbraith and Huffington Post columnist Ian Fletcher:
John Kenneth Galbraith put a similar point succinctly when he said, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of the oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” More recently, a popular critic of libertarianism described it as “a notoriously selfish philosophy.”
He reserves his sharpest criticisms for capitalism. Like the concept of autonomy, he credits capitalism with historically benefiting humanity by encouraging productivity and growing “the economic pie” so as to provide everyone with “a larger slice.” But there is a limit to those gains, he claims, and humanity is increasingly exposed to the darker side of capitalism:
Based supposedly on competition, even at its best, capitalism must generate losers as well as winners. And as the winners win more, they grow fewer in number, while the losers increase.
This leads to an unfair distribution of the “rights” that libertarians cherish:
Those with a great deal of money to buy things will have far more “rights” with reference to real property, material goods, and services, than those persons living in abject poverty. “Freedom of the press,” the journalist A.J. Liebling once noted, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
The division between winners and losers leads to privation and violence, to the detriment of society, he claims:
Poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, hatred, violence, and more … cannot even be addressed properly, much less resolved, within the confines of a capitalist system.
And:
The growing maldistribution of wealth both within and between nations becomes starker, and as the policies and actions of the United States, adamant in pressing an unfettered capitalism on the rest of the world, are doing more to exacerbate than alleviate the gross inequalities that contribute measurably to the violence in so much of the contemporary world. Indeed, I believe the ongoing growth of poverty is not the sole, but certainly a major, cause of such violence.
And,
We all live in extant states characterized more or less by inequality, injustice, poverty, violence, and more, all of which seem to be clearly on the rise today.
And—well, you get the idea.
Economists reading this review are likely already pointing out the empirical and other problems with these claims—problems that I’ll discuss below. I was a bit disappointed to read my former teacher leveling criticisms that could be cribbed from any Bernie Bro’s blog (and more than a few Trumpists’). Fortunately, these are only a few sentences in a book that is generally thoughtful and intellectually charitable—and more reflective of the person I knew.
So let’s take seriously Henry’s criticism of individualism and capitalism, which he better expresses as follows:
When individual freedom is weighted more heavily (valued more highly) than social justice—defined broadly as a fair allocation of resources for everyone—the political, legal, and moral instruments employed by the rich and powerful in defending and enhancing that freedom virtually insure that social justice will not be achieved, and hence poverty not alleviated.
This criticism, he believes, cannot be made against libertarianism by other Western moral and ethical theories without their violating their own axiom of foundational individualism. On this point, credit him with having greater insight into the ideas of libertarianism’s Western critics than they do:
[Libertarianism] is simply this concept of the free, rational individual self taken to its logical limit, and thereby worthy of our close attention because all of us more or less pay allegiance to a similar vision of human beings. … I have not been impressed by any of the few [Western-grounded] supposed refutations of libertarianism I have heard or read thus far, no matter which specific individualist ideology is employed. If the libertarian claim to a moral high ground is to be denied, it will have to be done in a non-individualist way.
Confucius / To make this non-individualist challenge, Henry draws on the Confucianism that was the focal point of his academic career. So who was Confucius and what is Confucianism? Here is my thumbnail-sketch understanding:
The Chinese sage who we Westerners call Confucius was born Kong Qiu in the year 551 BCE in the Chinese state of Lu in the district of Zou, which lay directly across the Yellow Sea from today’s South Korea. The name “Confucius” is a Latinization of the honorific Kong Fuzi, meaning “Grand Master Kong”; in the East he is more commonly called Kongzi, (or, in an older Westernization, Kong-Tzu) which means “Master Kong.”
His father, a local military commander, died while Qiu was very young, leaving the family impoverished. Yet Qiu was well educated in the district’s commoner schools, which taught the classic texts, arts, martial skills, and mathematics in an effort to graduate “perfect gentlemen.”
Perhaps sparked by that education, he became a lifelong student and teacher of Chinese history, ritual, and social/moral philosophy. In essence, Master Kong was a conservative because he looked to tradition to discern how life should be lived. He also was a worldly, humanist sage; though he observed and advocated religious rites, his studies and teachings focused on how people can live well in this mortal world.
Even as he pursued his studies, Master Kong also worked his way up through public administration in Lu. The state was awash in political intrigue, officially under the jurisdiction of the ruling family of Zou but really controlled by three local aristocratic families. Those families periodically battled each other and dealt with infighting. Master Kong nonetheless was broadly respected for providing good service to the people of Lu, offering sound counsel to the rulers, and nurturing better relations between the three families. He rose in rank to become a sort of prime minister, and his reputation as both a sage and political adviser spread throughout Zou.
Ultimately, Master Kong broke with the flawed leader of the chief Lu family, following his own doctrine that if an adviser can’t improve the ruler’s virtue then the adviser should step aside so that someone else may try. He went into self-imposed exile, touring neighboring states. He returned to Lu late in life, spending his final few years teaching. He died in 479 BCE; his venerated tomb is in the modern city of Qufu in Shandong Province.
From ancient times until 1949, Master Kong’s teachings and those of his followers were widely revered in China, though they did wax and wane in influence as political rule shifted from one dynasty to another. Following the Communist revolution, Confucianism’s importance has been at an especially low ebb.
Role-bearing morality / Confucianism’s teachings are rooted in ancient texts that Master Kong consulted for moral enlightenment, as well as collections of his own insights and those of his early followers. These works do not analytically define a system of thought grounded in foundational axioms, Henry explains, but instead offer adages, short parables, and rituals intended to nurture virtue in readers and help them live better, more fulfilled lives. In essence, Confucianism follows Aristotle’s advice: If you want to become a good person, start by studying and replicating what good people do.
A central concept in Confucianism is the importance of properly fulfilling reciprocal relationship roles (shu). The most prominent of these are between a parent and child, between spouses, between older and younger siblings, between friends, and between ruler and subjects. Henry proposes replacing foundational individualism with this concept of the person as a role-bearer who should fulfill his roles well and who finds satisfaction in doing so.
Henry notes that people often switch ends of these reciprocal roles at different times in their lives and in different settings. For instance, the parent nurtures the child, but later in life the grown child will care for the parent; the teacher educates the student, but the student can then educate others. Importantly, for Master Kong these roles should not be fulfilled purely out of a sense of obligation (though the person who is attempting to become good may start with this sole motivation). To righteously fill a role, the role-bearer should want to graciously provide or appreciatively receive the benefits of the role. Just as important, the participants in these relationships must recognize that each particular relationship is distinct; a person should fulfill his duty to his spouse, or a teacher to his student, in a manner tailored to the specific spouse or student.
Concerning the government relationship, Henry explains that Master Kong believed that good governance should be both paternalistic and authoritarian—provided that the ruler is virtuous. According to Master Kong:
To govern means to make right. If you lead the people uprightly, who will dare not be upright? Employ the upright and put aside the crooked; in this way the crooked can be made upright. Go before the people with your example, and spare yourself not in their affairs. He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared with the North Star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn toward it.
Beyond the notion that the ruler and his advisers should be virtuous and benefit the citizens, Master Kong’s teachings offer few specifics on government policy. To sketch out a Confucian programme, Henry turns to two prominent Confucian disciples, Mencius (371–289 BCE) and Hsun-Tzu (298–238 BCE).
Both—and Confucians generally—believed that the state should provide for the basic welfare of people who are unable to provide for themselves. According to Master Meng,
Old men without wives, old women without husbands, old people without children, young children without fathers—these four types of people are the most destitute and have no one to turn to for help; the good ruler will give them first consideration.
Likewise, Master Hsun teaches:
In the case of the handicapped and helpless, the government should gather them together, look after them, and give them whatever work they are able to do. Employ them, provide them with food and clothing, and take care to ensure that none are left out. … The government must also look after orphans and widows, and assist the poor.
Master Hsun also believed government must engage in industrial policy for vital industries, telling rulers:
If you encourage agriculture and are modest in expenditures, nature cannot impoverish you. If you provide everyone with the goods they need and demand their labor only at the proper time, nature will not afflict them with illness. … [But] if you neglect agriculture and spend lavishly, nature cannot enrich you; your people will starve even when there are no floods or droughts, and will suffer sickness even before great heat or cold come to afflict them.
Henry praises such ancient Chinese policies as
governmental measures to accomplish [important tasks] such as rebuilding dikes and levees across long distances after harsh winters [and] seeing to the transfer of goods and seeds from a bumper crop area to one struck by flood or drought. … Well-organized social cooperation could lead to the recalcitrant East Asian earth surrendering a bounty sufficient to nurture the population and provide some material embellishments to human life as well.
Arguably, Henry over-reads the degree to which Confucians endorsed government intervention. Master Hsun advocated public labor “only at the proper time” and instructed government to be “modest in expenditures” My Cato colleague James Dorn recently told the story of Confucians’ opposition to government monetary authority during the Western Han Dynasty of 206 BCE–9CE (“Monetary Freedom: Lessons from the Western Han Dynasty,” Cato at Liberty, Oct. 17, 2017). Still, Confucians are more optimistic about the potential good that can come from government intervention than the Chinese sage who is better known among libertarians, Lao-Tzu (7th–6th century BCE).
However, beyond welfare and social coordination activities, and a discussion of how truth and reconciliation commissions can serve as a model for addressing some justice issues, Henry offers little on what government policies he desires or what specific political system should implement them. There is no description of a Confucian environmental policy, or a Confucian economics to replace capitalism, or a system of checks and balances to control evil or incompetent rulers, or a discussion of how virtuous rulers can be identified and empowered.
Reclaiming the self / Henry offers a bleak appraisal of the self, libertarianism, and capitalism. But are matters in the United States and the rest of the individualist West as grim as he claims?
Let’s start with the self. Economists and Westerners in general conceive of the individual as incorporating much more than a person’s societal roles; at the very least, each person has a distinct bundle of preferences, beliefs, values, expectations, risk tolerances, and other characteristics. These can evolve and even change entirely, but each person seemingly has a unique set of them—as underscored by the difficulty of trying to reach consensus on even the most innocuous of decisions that affect multiple people.
These aspects of the self seem to be more fundamental to the person than his or her relationship roles. Indeed, it’s difficult to conceive of how people can fulfill their shu without incorporating these parts of themselves. Nearly every role I fill results from my choosing—that is, my preferring—to accept that role, and how I fill all of my roles is shaped by my preferences, risk tolerances, values, etc. Put differently, I am not my relationship roles; rather, I exhibit myself through the relationship roles I assume and how I fulfill them, as well as my many other activities.
Life in the libertarian West / Even if the self exists, that doesn’t mean Henry’s criticism of foundational individualism fails. But do Western morality and economics produce the evils and misery he claims?
Empirically, it’s difficult to make his charges stick. Contrary to his explicit claim otherwise, not only has the rate of people living in extreme poverty fallen since the dawn of the Industrial Age according to World Bank data, but so has the number of those people even as the world population has grown seven-fold. This decline has been especially sharp since the 1970s, contemporaneous with a surge in economic freedom as measured by such organizations as the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Homicide rates and other violent crime rates in the United States and other developed countries (i.e., countries with developed capitalistic economies) have been falling since at least the 1990s according to data presented in Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin Group, 2014). In Europe, those declines are just the latest in a long downward trend dating back at least to the 15th century. Globally, war deaths, genocides, and internal displacements have plummeted since the end of World War II and are practically unknown in the developed world, again according to Pinker’s data. And, as has often been noted, liberal, capitalistic democracies and trading partners seldom go to war with each other.
Life expectancy has surged since the Industrial Revolution, especially in the West, according to data presented in UCLA economist Deepak Lal’s Poverty and Progress (Cato Institute, 2013). Childhood mortality has been declining since at least the 1960s according to World Bank data, with the developed world having the lowest rates. The number of undernourished persons around the globe has fallen since the 1990s according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, and in the developed world—especially the United States—obesity is a far greater health concern than hunger. Air and water quality have been improving in the United States since at least the 1990s, and economists have long noted the positive correlation between market-provided wealth and improving environmental quality.
By these and many other measures, human well-being around the globe is advancing in direct correlation with the expansion of economic freedom and the spread of foundational individualism. That well-being is highest in the world’s most libertarian, capitalist countries. (A collection of these data and commentary can be found on the Cato Institute’s HumanProgress.org website.)
So how can Henry’s argument go so wrong? Because Against Individualism assumes a false premise that undermines the book’s entire economic discussion and its broader worldview.
Beginning in the prologue and repeated elsewhere in the book, Henry characterizes market capitalism as necessarily having “losers as well as winners. And as the winners win more, they grow fewer in number, while the losers increase.” But market capitalism by definition is a system of voluntary exchange. People seldom volunteer to lose. Rather, they search for exchanges in which they best benefit, and as a result both participants in an exchange “win.”
In the West’s market economies, the pursuit of better exchanges has incentivized dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity, medical innovation, housing supply, transportation efficiency, and countless other advances. As a result, life expectancy has soared in the capitalistic developed world, and developing countries like India and China are increasingly turning to markets to the benefit of their underclasses. Even Henry, after repeatedly charging in the book that capitalism leads to poverty, tacitly concedes the opposite is the case when he laments that “an increasingly wasteful and life-numbing materialism [has] become ingrained in people’s lives, especially in the developed world.” (Also worth noting: people in developed nations tend to fare better on happiness surveys and measures of well-being than people in less-developed, less-capitalistic nations.)
The pursuit of better exchanges not only yields materially better outcomes, but often morally better ones—at least, better than some exchanges that supposedly exhibit “social justice.” Consider just one example: social justice advocates’ support of ever-stronger minimum wage laws. The empirical literature shows that raising the minimum wage reduces employment, and those reductions fall disproportionately on the poor and other disadvantaged groups. (See “,” p. 8.) Further, unemployment has long-lasting negative effects on a person’s wages when he does work. Repealing minimum wage laws and letting the labor market operate freely would thus benefit the poor and disadvantaged, yet social justice advocates continue to defend and demand stricter minimum wage laws.
A problem for Henry, and one for us / But even if life in the capitalistic West is much better and more just—and improving—than Henry claims, that doesn’t mean his advocacy of Confucianism is misplaced. Humanity could greatly benefit from Master Kong and his followers’ teachings on the obligations of parenthood, marriage, friendship, and political leadership.
But those teachings could also help lead people astray. As Henry acknowledges in the book, Confucian morality is primarily a family- and tribe-centered morality, elevating duties and faithfulness to kin and kith above others. Consider this from the Analects:
The Governor of She, in conversation with Confucius, said, “In our village there is someone called ‘True Person.’ When his father took a sheep on the sly, he reported him to the authorities.” Confucius replied, “Those who are true in my village conduct themselves differently. A father covers for his son, a son covers for his father. And being true lies in this.”
The troubling lesson is that a son’s moral obligation to his thieving father takes precedence over concern for the village or the crime victim. This tribe-first belief is only a brief leap away from the belief that one should advance one’s tribe by harming out-groups, perhaps while chanting “America First” or “Build the Wall” (or far more nefarious slogans from the 20th century). Confucianism’s lack of a foundational principle that each person has moral worth allows for some horrid—though unintended—applications of Master Kong’s teachings.
That said, Henry still has the obverse criticism for us libertarians: foundational individualism may give each person moral worth, but that conflicts with the seemingly meritorious idea that government should redistribute some wealth from the rich and powerful to the poor and weak. We libertarians can respond that people are free to—and should—help the poor privately. We can also note that some of the most prominent libertarian theorists—e.g., John Locke, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick—supported some form of public aid to the poor. The libertarian West does have many safety-net programs—the United States alone spends roughly $1 trillion a year on various government welfare programs—and there is no significant political movement to abandon them. (A visit to Cato’s webpage finds much more attention given to improving the safety net’s efficiency and incentives, than to ending it.) But these responses only beg Henry’s question: if foundational individualism is the West’s paramount value, can it be reconciled with a morality of social justice, especially in the public sphere?
There are, of course, libertarian philosophies that are not grounded in foundational individualism, and there are libertarian efforts to advance social justice using foundational individualist premises. (See, e.g., University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski’s “Bleeding Heart Libertarians” work.) And there are plenty of deontological, utilitarian, and other Western arguments for some ethic of common provision. But Henry can fairly argue that, as noble as these efforts are, they have not yet conclusively reconciled foundational individualism with social justice.
I take this as my former teacher giving us libertarians an assignment. Does foundational individualism require us to wholly abandon social justice? Do we relegate social justice to only the sphere of private morality? Or can libertarianism support a public ethic of social justice? Struggling with these questions would be a fitting memorial to Henry’s life and work.
