Book Review: “The Narrow Corridor” by Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson

I’m back from quarantine with another book review. Daron Acemoglu & Jame Robinson’s best-known book, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty” was a highly influential and persuasive defence of democracy, that I certainly found useful and informative in doing the research for my first book (“Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder.”) Now they’re back with a follow-up, “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty”, a 500-page behemoth that aims to perform the same service for liberalism. I regret to inform everyone, however, that “The Narrow Corridor” does not reach the same heights of the original, and in fact is a genuine slog to get through. Despite my genuine admiration for Acemoglu & Robinson’s academic work, I can’t recommend this book, and this blog will tell you why.

Acemoglu & Robinson’s central thesis is that the long-run success of states depends on the balance of power between the ‘state’ and ‘society’. If states are too strong, you end up with a Despotic Leviathan that is good for short-term growth but is brittle and unstable. If society is too strong, Leviathan is Absent and societies suffer under a pre-modern war of all against all. The ideal place to be, according to Acemoglu & Robinson, is the ‘narrow corridor’ where state and society are balanced, producing a ‘Shackled Leviathan’ that is able to grow state capacity and individual liberty simultaneously. The trick is to navigate into and stay in the narrow corridor (which one clever twitter user has already dubbed the ‘birth canal of liberalism’) against the centripetal forces pulling this delicate balance apart.

To their credit, Acemoglu & Robinson support their thin thesis with an extensive, and one might say exhaustive, set of case studies. And this is where the problems start. Although the authors’ selection of studies is broad and includes many non-Western cultures, the vast bulk of the book is little better than a potted history of civilisation, a tendency that gets worse in the second half where the authors cover so many unrelated topics (e.g. racial politics in the US, #metoo, the origins of Al Qaeda and the War on Terror, globalization, automation and the rise of the Nazis) that it covers none of them well. It falls into the trap of so much mediocre writing of mistaking description for analysis. So while their history of the world might be of interest to a first-year political science or economics student, it does not stand up as a serious work of scholarship.

Liberalism for dummies

From the reviews I’ve seen online, “The Narrow Corridor” is popular with neoliberals, even though the text itself ostensibly defends some version of a social democratic welfare state. The reason, I suspect, is its simplistic definition of what liberalism is and how it operate, and its almost Fukuyama-esque assumption that there is only a single stable evolutionary pathway that societies can take in the long-run. Acemoglu & Robinson are stuck in the tired dichotomy of Hobbes and Locke. In other words, the State is a despotic Leviathan that is necessary to provide order and prevent a war of all against all. The only way to constrain the state’s despotic tendencies is through individual rights, and some soft notion of ‘civil society’ that is never fully explained or developed.

Acemoglu & Robinson valorise the idea of Liberty, but their definition of it is deeply constrained. Throughout ‘The Narrow Corridor’, liberty is to be understood solely as ‘negative freedom’: restraints on what the state can and cannot do with regard to individuals and their property. The authors are curiously uninterested in the development of the individual, or the pursuit of happiness, in a way that might lead to demands for positive liberty. Instead, rights are a constraint on the despotic tendencies of the State, and individuals benefit from the growth in state capacity (so long as it does not become overmighty). One can easily see how such a worldview (“capitalism lifts people out of poverty”) may be sympathetic to neoliberalism’s core claim to rule.

But this is more than just an ideological objection. In “The Narrow Corridor” it is not individuals but the State which is the primary ontological entity. But what is the state, and where does it come from? Acemoglu & Robinson have a unfortunate and deliberate tendency to label everyone living outside a modern, Weberian nation-state as ‘stateless’, without any consideration of how governance emerges slowly and organically from within pre-existing structures. A State has police and bureaucrats, we are told: there is either the modern state form, fully formed and rational-legal in its orientation, or there is despotism. No other form of governance is worth consideration. As a result, Acemoglu & Robinson ignore the many forms of social organisation in history that were not states, and claims a great many things to be states which were not. Italian city-states which were legally part of the Holy Roman Empire and Muhammad’s early Islamic ummah are States; but the Islamic Caliphates and post-colonial governments in Africa and Latin America are not.

A dash of chauvinism

Acemoglu & Robinson rightly critique narrow works of history that focus solely on structural factors to explain the rise of civilization (looking at you, Jared Diamond), and prefer history that is messy and path-dependent. They claim this resurrects the role of ‘agency’ in history. But this is not the agency of individuals - there is no methodological individualism in “The Narrow Corridor”. The people who matter, the people with agency, are ‘state-builders’: law-givers, prophets and conquerers who stand astride world history as heroes. Despite their central thesis being one of constant tension between state and society, Acemoglu & Robinson specify almost no dynamic mechanisms in their theory: no classes, no divergence of interests, no means of production. States evolve over time, allegedly, yet in their cosmology they also emerge fully-formed from the hands of Great Men. After that, all that matters is that coalitions and inclusiveness are good and polarisation and social conflict are bad. Neoliberals in suits with technocratic cabinets are the ideal way to govern a state, forever.

Like all liberals, therefore, Acemoglu & Robinson propose a universalistic and trans-historical ideal of what constitutes a good state. The challenge they, and all liberals face, is to explain why this apparently successful social equilibrium is so difficult to achieve. It’s unclear what actually determines the balance of power between state and society: is it ideology, religion, economics, geography, or culture? At one point or another, all of these factors are thrown into the mix, but it’s hard to escape the impression that the authors have fallen into the trap of relying heavily on ‘cultural’ explanations for the success and failure of states.

In “The Narrow Corridor”, the archetypes of a successful Shackled Leviathan are ancient Athens, Italian city-states and the United States. What constrains the growth of state power, we are told, is the formation of society on the basis of free, smallholding peasant farmers. It’s an argument, I suppose. But while in some societies landowners are the fountainhead of liberty, in other societies are different times landowners are the chief centres of reaction and despotism. ‘Labour coercion’, we are told, undermines the growth of liberty, yet both ancient Athens and the United States were slave-holding societies. Privatisation is good until it isn’t. The lack of consistency is an inevitable result of the sheer number of stories being told and the lack of a coherent framework linking them together.

The other twinge of cultural chauvinism in “The Narrow Corridor” is that Acemoglu & Robinson really, really don’t like pre-modern forms of social organisation. In this book, any form of social governance which is not a Weberian rational-legal nation-state is by definition part of the ‘cage of norms’ which holds societies back, explains their failure to build states and undermines their economy. Peoples aren’t allowed to develop their own forms of self-governance based on kin networks, reciprocity, religion and custom - all that must be swept aside in the name of progress, most likely by some conquerer or law-giver with the public’s best interests at heart. Non-liberal cultures, we are told, oppress people and keep them impoverished. Better for everyone if social interactions are anonymised and conducted solely on the basis of self-interest.

In the final analysis, Acemoglu & Robinson’s account of the rise of Shackled Leviathans in the West is so simplistic it could come out of a Ben Shapiro book. Only in the West, we are told, did societies inherit the twin boons of Roman law and the ‘Germanic’ proto-democratic practice of tribal assemblies. It’s as if two millennia of war, feudalism, imperialism, colonialism and the Cold War never happened. Western political and economic institutions had a complex evolutionary history, and yet modern liberal States have the same cultural toolkit as the fifth century Franks (in much the same way, it must be said, that the Chinese Communist Party is ascribed the same cultural toolkit as the Qin Empire, 2500 years earlier). The glaring and obvious errors in many if their takes on European history makes the reader suspect that they’re picking and choosing their lessons from other parts of the world as well.

Bad Economists

Acemoglu & Robinson struggle the hardest, as most liberals do, when it comes to explaining the rise of China. They often come across as admiring and envious of the economic usefulness of the Despotic Leviathan and its capacity to organise short-term economic growth - although they are typically silent on the reasons for this (land redistribution, the suppression of labour and the concentration of capital might be among them). But they argue, weakly, that this is unsustainable and that China, under the rule of the Communist Party, can never pose a long-term challenge to the cultural West. Moreover, their unwillingness to theorise about civil society and social movements mean they have no prescriptions for the Chinese people to get out of this perceived trap.

Innovation, we are told, requires creativity and creativity requires liberty. That’s a hell of a claim, but it constitutes the sum total of their argument for the inferiority of despotism. At various points, we are told that government regulation of any kind is no different from despotism, and that free markets are the only road out of poverty. No form of social organisation that is not universal liberalism can deliver sustainable improvements in quality of life. But this is, empirically not true. Any even in the liberal West, States had a long history of despotic growth behind them before they became philosophically modern.

Conclusion

“The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty” is a book by liberals for liberals. It won’t convince anyone else of its central claims, and the longer the book goes on the more unfocused and self-defeating it becomes. Acemoglu & Robinson wanted to write a book about everything and ended up writing a book about nothing. No matter how extensively sourced or research, the authors offers no guidance to the future or wisdom about the past that one could not pick up from reading newspaper columns. A pity.

Book Reviews: “The Dream of Reason” & “The Dream of Enlightenment” by Anthony Gottlieb

Having finished writing my second book (tentatively title “Evolutionary Politics” and due to be published later this year, stay tuned), I’ve shifted my reading habits away from theoretical biology and radical theory to lighter and more mainstream pastures. So while in self-isolation this last few weeks (hello, Disaster Socialism), I’ve had the pleasure to read the first two volumes in Anthony Gottlieb’s history of Western Philosophy, “The Dream of Reason” (first published in 2000) & “The Dream of Enlightenment” (first published in 2016). Gottlieb, a former editor of The Economist, is a superb writer and his prose is light, economical and easy to parse. For anyone looking for a high-quality introduction to the field, I can highly recommend these books.

They are, however, very much histories of Western philosophy of the ‘dead white man’ variety. Gottleib apes Hegel (who devoted 800 pages to the ancient Greeks in his history of philosophy and 400 pages to the moderns) in his choice of subjects. The first volume, “The Dream of Reason” is less a history of philosophy up ‘to the Renaissance’ as advertised and more an introduction to Greek thought, with the majority of its time spent on the giants of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The second, “The Dream of Enlightenment” covers the pre-modern philosophers from Descartes to Hume, and a third volume covering Kant and beyond is reportedly on its way. Gottlieb combines brief biographical sketches of each thinker, to put them in their social context, with an in-depth discussion of two or three of their main philosophical arguments. Each subject is well-described, but the total absence of women or any thinker from outside Western Europe is glaring.

That said, Gottlieb is on the whole a fair and impartial biographer. He has little to say about the preservation and development of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought by early Christian and Muslim philosophers, but at least the key figures are name-checked. Gottlieb is definitely a little too fond of Plato and Leibniz (both of whom he describes as geniuses despite their odd beliefs), and too critical of the Greek Heraclitus, and the French philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau. He prosecutes some of the ingrained prejudices of a liberal philosophical education, notably an rejection of moral relativism, a defense of free will and scepticism of a probabilistic universe, but these are generally minor digressions from the flow of his story-telling and easily forgivable.

A bunch of WEIRD-os.

Gottlieb’s biographical sketches demonstrate a point that perhaps the publishers who selected his book titles might like to disguise: very few of the heroes of the Western canon had a firm grasp on what Reason or the Enlightenment even were. The degree to which these founders of Western philosophy constituted a collections of weirdos, prophets and sages cannot be underestimated. Very few participated in formal education or empirical research, and most spent their time focused on questions of what we might think of today as theology and mysticism. Gottlieb notes how much of later Christian thought is infused with the mysticism of earlier Greek thinkers such as the numerology of the Pythagoreans, the Orphic belief in souls and Plato’s music of the spheres.

Descartes and Leibniz were also very much of this mould. Descartes, of course, is largely responsible for the metaphysical tendency in Western thinking that sees the mind and body as separate entities; two centuries later, Leibniz constructed an elaborate system of ‘monads’ in which material entities are merely imperfect reflections of abstracted pure entities. For these thinkers, Ideas were not only real entities but in some way more real than the material world which could be observed, sensed and experienced. Reason was not merely a tool, but a fragment of divinity that provided the only source of True knowledge, including about moral and ethical subjects. In these terms, many of Gottlieb’s subjects were effectively panpsychics - an equivalently absurd modern revival of such beliefs. In contrast, empiricists such as Democritus, Epicurus and Hume come across as eminently sensible.

Never go full Euclid

Gottlieb’s heroes are not the pragmatists who looked at human society with a sceptical eye, but proto-scientists such as Euclid, Galileo and Newton, and to a lesser extent Aristotle - whose system of syllogistic logic and biological investigations get a generous treatment. Gottlieb often comes across in awe of the power of the scientific method to produce knowledge that is both true and useful. But unlike many modern rationalists (“With a Capital-R”), he is cautious - or sensible - enough to recognise that a full embrace of scepticism would make some of the cultural and ethnical assumptions of Western philosophy untenable. Even though Descartes “I think, therefore I am” forms part of a system of mystical nonsense that is no longer explicit, we still rely on it to know anything at all.

Many of Gottlieb’s pre-modern subjects were obsessed with geometry, logic and the potential of the new ‘mechanical’ sciences (in much that same way of some modern analytic philosophers) - and he is fond of calling out the flaws of treating all knowledge this way. The ‘great’ philosophers tend to be such committed synthesisers of ideas that they embraced conclusions that appear absurd, monstrous or unintelligible. This includes Hobbes and Locke, two figures whom modern students of social science are most likely to know from their political philosophy. Hobbes was so committed to materialism that he believed, like the ancient Greeks Democritus and Epicurus, in a material God. And as anyone who has read Locke knows, his prose is so dense with definitions and exceptions that his work is less theory and more encyclopaedia. Despite their later reputation as the originators of modern liberalism and the social contract, both men were thoroughgoing authoritarians - as many men who think think highly of their own abilities tend to be.

The philosopher I personally enjoyed reading about the most was the thinker I had previously known the least - Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s reputation as a mystic is well deserved, but he was certainly less conventionally devout than Hobbes, Leibniz or Newton. It is a mistake, says Spinoza, to think of laws of nature - be their divine, philosophical or mathematical - in the same way as human laws. To note patterns in nature is not to infer a patriarchal law-giver, but this is just what modern psychologists would label an agency bias. Natural laws cannot be otherwise than as they are - they are descriptive, not prescriptive. Nothing, therefore, could be considered good or evil, sacred or profane other than in the human mind.

Spinoza was a European Jew, and one of the few uncritical supporters of liberal democracy in pre-nineteenth century philosophy. Positive traits and behaviours tended to increase the happiness of individuals and societies, but they are merely guideposts, not divine commands. For Spinoza, the mind and the body were one, and the body was subject to natural laws of cause and effect. Human beings are free to the extent that they can sometimes - but not always - understand the constraints imposed on them by natural laws. Spinoza was therefore something of a modern Stoic, resigned to the study of a world that was difficult, if not impossible to change.

Conclusion

For all our modern sophistication, much of modern Western philosophy is built upon a foundation that was first fixed in place more than 2500 years ago. What is remarkable in reading Gottlieb, quite frankly, is how little the pre-Enlightenment philosophers added to the diversity of opinions held by the ancient Greeks. For all their modernity, they were human beings just the same and ran up against the same limits to their imagination. The value of intellectual histories such as these therefore lies not in parsing how the ancients answered the big questions, but the way in which they highlight that some questions can never have satisfactory answers at all.

Sex is real. So is gender. The anatomy of propaganda.

I’ve tried to resist entering ‘the discourse‘ when it comes to analysing whether famed author JK Rowling is a TERF - a ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’. For the record, Rowling’s actions suggest those of a TERF. Kat Blaque’s video embedded below addresses this better than I ever could:

Instead, I want to turn a critical eye to one element of Rowling’s now-infamous January tweet about a UK employment discrimination case that can teach us a useful lesson about how propanganda works.

Sex essentialism 101
I’m not going to go over all the myriad ways Rowling’s tweet oversimplifies and misrepresents the details of Maya Forstater’s failed legal challenge - the full text is available here and I recommend everyone take the time to read it. This was clearly a test case intended to set a legal precedent, and it fell over at the very first hurdle. Instead I want to focus on the line ‘sex is real’ because it’s a slick and in my opinion powerful bit of disinformation. The idea that gender critical feminists - and from hereon out I will try to use their preferred terminology - are simply defending the empirical proposition that ‘sex is real’ (and are not just, say, disguising anti-trans bigotry) is likely to become an enduring feature in this little culture war.

The phrasing demonstrates how propaganda can simultaneously set up a straw man about the position of so-called ‘gender theorists’, while obscuring the true position of the sex essentialists. No one of any consequences who supports trans rights says that sex isn’t real. The default position - accepted by academics, activists and, I would dare to add, broadly understood by the lay public - is that sex and gender refer to two separate English-language concepts and that which one to use to depends on the context. Gender typically refers to socially-constructed rules, norms and expectations which attach to categories of people on the basis of their behaviour and appearance. Sex, on the other hand, refers to bimodally distributed clusters of biological traits which are usually - but far from exclusively - linked in some way to reproductive function. It’s not that sex isn’t real, it just that it isn’t meaningful in many social contexts. When I listen to or read the works of trans people, they constantly and repeatedly emphasise that they are keenly aware of the ‘reality’ of biological sex. For many, though not all, trans and non-binary people, this reality is the cause of significant distress and their experiences are to a significant degree shaped by the effort it takes to manage the incongruence between their sex characteristics and gender identity.

Here’s the thing. The true position of gender critical feminists is in fact that gender isn’t real. That’s what they won’t - or can’t - admit, because it’s so extreme. They either believe that a social construction can’t be ‘real’ (at all!); or that any incongruence between sex and gender is the result of mental disorders deserving of sympathy, but not respect; or that the only relevant social category in (almost) all circumstances is sex. Either way, references to a person’s gender in ordinary English usage can refer to their biological sex and only their biological sex. As self-proclaimed critics of gender, they’re attempting to argue that socially constructed categories aren’t or shouldn’t be real, and that therefore attempting to modify or reform them in any way impossible and perverse.

If gender critical folks had their way, it would be linguistically impossible for anyone to identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, and their personal identification and social role would have no consequences. A trans woman would be treated by society for all intents are purposes as a man and a trans man as a woman. The medical, psychological and social evidence is that this position - long the historical default - causes harm to trans individuals, and enforces hierarchical and rigid notions about gender relations that end up also causing low-level anxiety for the vast majority of cis people. In the words of the British judge, it is a belief incompatible with the rights and dignity of other citizens.

By obfuscating their true position, gender critical feminists are attempting to hide the absolutism inherent in their nugatory beliefs. They’re sex essentialists in exactly the same way that self-proclaimed hereditarians are ‘race essentialists’ and the Stalinist/nazbol crowd are ‘class essentialists’. It’s a neat dogwhistle, because the lay reader (perhaps including JK Rowling?) is unlikely to recognise the trick being played on them. And it’s also a perverse bit of psychological projection, because they end up portraying their opponents - not themselves - as the defenders of an indefensible, unscientific position.

When does sex matter?

The essence of any good faith debate over the relevance of sex and gender centres around identifying the contexts in which each system of categorisation is most relevant. The progressive position, which I hold, is that for most social purposes gender is the most relevant categorisation, and that therefore there is wide scope for this system to be critiqued, challenged and reformed - or even abolished if we chose to. The reactionary position - shared by conservatives and gender critical feminists alike - is that sex is the most relevant categorisation more often than not, and that as a result that options of critique, challenge and reform are limited. Instead, (cis-) women must organise on the basis of sex in order to achieve social power and status equal to (cis-)men.

The first, and far and away most significant, context in which sex is the most relevant category is when it comes to health and medical treatment. A trans man may need to see a gynaecologist, and trans women may need to check for prostate cancer. Many diseases and health conditions affect sex characteristics differently, and it is in everyone’s self-interest that trans individuals, though socially and culturally of their chosen gender, receive medical treatment and advice best suited to the biological characteristics they actually possess. A menopausal cis woman, an intersex individual and a trans person may all require hormone treatment. In this way, “Good morning ma’am, have you experienced any discomfort in your penis?” is a perfectly logical English construction.

Secondly, we should recognise that romantic and sexual attraction is built in complicated ways on both sex and gender. Most people describe being attracted to some weighted combination of social performance and sexual characteristics, and some people are highly attracted to combinations of traits that are uncommon or transgressive. Some people may be highly motivated by the opportunity to reproduce and limit their choice of partners to those they can produce viable offspring with - ending relationships with infertile partners who they are otherwise attracted to. Some may be attracted to a person of the opposite gender but draw the line at same-sex genitals. But others may be totally comfortable with a feminine penis or male vagina. Many people will believe that what matters most is chemistry, personality or some other abstract quality. Since every adult human is entitled to full and absolute autonomy in their choice of partner - and to interfere with that choice is a crime - then people for whom some arbitrary sexual characteristic is a deal-breaker will always be able to act on those desires with any adult human who’d have them! Plenty of people have sexual desires that are considered socially questionable in some form or another.

Finally, we come to the vexed issue of sports. Sport is segregated in the interest of an abstract social goal of ‘fairness’. Sex and gender are merely being used as proxy variables for this goal. Defining what does, and does not, constitute an unfair competitive advantage is a complicated sociological question and by a process of trial-and-error most societies with professional athletics have prohibited a variety of chemical interventions while allowing unlimited funds to be spent on training, facilities and athlete development. Whether sex or gender, both or neither, are relevant to fair competition is as yet an open question. One trans athlete may outperform a cis person, but how much of that advantage is due to their biochemistry and how much is due to the social encouragement and development opportunities they might have received pre-transition? The burden of evidence is heavy, given both the statistically tiny number of trans athletes and the general physical exceptionalism of most athletes. Even if trans women were shown to have longer bones and wider shoulders than cis women on average, we would have no statistical reason to believe this difference would also exist among professional athletes. It’s also hard to avoid the impression of racial bias in these discussions, as many of the most exceptional trans- and intersex athletes (including notably Caster Semeya) have been non-caucasian.

The most plausible resolution to me right now seems to be a convergence on testosterone standards (in some sports) under which both trans- and cis- women can compete fairly, while excluding most cis-men, doping (cheating) athletes and athletes with rare medical conditions that might give them an unfair advantage. The widespread availability of hormone treatments also means any excessive innate biochemical advantage can be treated and reversed, if desired. Such tests would be simple for professional sports to apply, while amateur sports (where widespread blood testing might be infeasible) could continue to rely on gender as a low-cost proxy.

Gender rules

Once we accept the proposition that ‘gender is real’, we can subject it to serious criticism and debate. Many people - both cis and trans - are at ease with their gender roles; others think gender hierarchies should be deconstructed and rebuilt in more fluid or egalitarian ways; others are simply gender abolitionists, believing that all social norms, rules and behaviours based on stereotyped characteristics should be abolished entirely. All of these arguments and propositions are prima facie valid, because social structures can be remade by social beings however we’re able. Sex essentialists would take all these options from us, because they reduce behaviour to fixed biological traits that cannot be changed.

Nowhere is the debate between sex essentialists and gender realists less productive than when it comes to ‘women’s spaces’ such as bathrooms, refuges and prisons. The radical argument that everyone with a penis poses a threat to everyone with a vagina at all times makes sense within the gender critical framework, but appears puritanical and impractical as a guide to public policy to most people. On the other hand, gender realists argue that violence against women is a product of patriarchy - toxic socialisation which causes male-identified individuals to feel entitled to have access to or control women’s bodies. Whenever people in womens’ spaces - either cis or trans - are identified as predators then those individuals should be treated as the criminals they are, and sanctioned on the basis of their behaviour, not their identity or gender performance.

These are sometimes difficult questions. But when lay people appear uncertain or uncomfortable about these issues, and become susceptible to gender critical propaganda, it’s likely not because their instinctive beliefs about sex and gender are being called into question. It’s because they don’t know - and likely have never even thought before - about how those beliefs should apply in particular edge cases. That’s totally normal. But the propagandandist exploits that ambiguity and uncertainty to drive a wedge between people and their beliefs, whereas the activist is there to help and guide the public through unfamiliar terrain.

The problem with liberal feminism is its liberalism, and that's OK

Growing up as a 90's kid, the 'liberal feminism' of the Spice Girls era was a dirty word. Cultural conservatives, who dominated the airwaves then as they do now, lambasted the perceived decadence of Gen X and millennial women. But the opinion of the radical feminists who taught me political and social science at university wasn't much better - they lamented then, as they do now, the superficiality of many modern day feminists who take the victories of the past for granted. Paradoxically, the version of woman-centric politics embraced by the vast majority of both women and men was treated by most commentators as politically irrelevant, and beneath serious notice.

Liberal feminism gets a bum rap. It's lack of a political edge is precisely why it’s so ubiquitous in culture. I suspect, though I can't prove, that the anti-feminist politics of the 2000s stems in part from the relative invisibility of liberal feminism, in a way that both prefigured and reflected the broader populist backlash against the neoliberal assumptions of the era. But as with modern liberalism as a whole, liberal feminism is a richer intellectual tradition than it's often given credit for and offers a coherent - if perhaps insufficient - response to the problems facing women as individuals under capitalism.

It’s not all bad

Liberal feminism shares all the same features, faults, history and values of liberalism as a whole. It would be incorrect to simply stereotype ‘libfems’ as a superficial modern gloss on an older, more radical tradition - an inferior copy, branded and corporatised. Liberal feminists including Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill (yes, that JS Mill) long preceded the twentieth century, but fought for the fundamental rights of women using arguments and tactics that were considered extreme for the time. For all its contemporary blandness, liberalism was once a radical tradition – indeed, THE radical tradition. We may have reservations about the extremism of Lenin and friends - but the bolsheviks learnt how to be revolutionaries from liberals, sometimes literally.

Liberal feminism, like many ideologies that grew up in and around the current Western cultural and ideological context, is fundamentally oriented around answering the central paradox of that ontology: if all people are in some sense supposed to be equal, how is it that some are more equal than others? At its best, egalitarian feminism argues that sex and gender are arbitrary social categories and that social rules, norms and structures should be set up in such a way that these categories play no role in outcomes for individuals. Wherever there is evidence that individuals and groups do not experience broadly equitable outcomes, laws and social programs should be put in place to rectify the disparity. So far, so Rawlsian.

But liberalism is a broad church. Many mainstream feminists, particularly of the white, upper/middle-class variety, are centrally focused on equality of opportunity and concern themselves with more equitable representation at the highest levels of government, corporate and cultural power. Rather than quotas and viewpoint diversity being a necessary remedy for structural inequality, they become an end in themselves. But this blindspot is shared by all liberals, for whom an open and broadly representative ruling class is more important than questioning the existence of ruling class in the first place. Like all liberals, libfems can be shockingly dismissive of or tokenise the concerns of poor women of colour and ignore entirely the issues facing women in developing economies.

At its more conservative leaning end, we even find 'classical liberal' or self-described 'equity' feminists – such as Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers – who focus on freedom solely in the negative sense: so long as legal, state discrimination is impossible (a battle won, they claim, by the suffragettes), then everyone is responsible for their own fate in life. Whether naivete or willful blindess, the effect is the same. And, similarly, a shallow, libertarian emphasis on personal choice can produce a feminism that is consumerist and marketed as a lifestyle ‘girlpower’ brand while reinforcing existing gender relations.

Radicals and Liberals

Radical feminists, including myself, who operate within universalist traditions claim that the social position of women cannot be understood solely as a deviation from the liberal universal ideal - an error, soon to be fixed. Rather, patriarchy – a social hierarchy of subordination based on sex and gender – is universal to the human experience and exists outside of capitalism – it significantly pre-dates bourgeois economics and has been seamlessly incorporated into it. This gendered social structure has to be critiqued in order to understand the social roles of men and women: it’s a feature, not a bug. Of course, radicals disagree – often vehemently – as to whether the patriarchy is orthogonal and unrelated to other economic and political structures, whether it strictly co-evolves with them (as socialist feminists and social reproduction theorists hold), or whether those structured interact in complex and multifaceted ways (i.e. intersectionality, the broadest conceptual approach). But all agree that liberalism can't – or won't – deal with this more fundamental inequality. on its own.

Excluded from this typology are the anti-liberal feminists - the sex essentialists and difference feminists - who believe that there are intrinsic differences between men and women, and that the goal of feminist politics is not to eliminate or alleviate those differences, but to organise politically on the basis of sex in order to obtain power for women as a group. This is a shallower and more pessimistic form of identity politics, which shares significant similarities with both reactionary understandings of gender, and other supremacist formations who seek defence against, dominance over or separation from other groups. There's a reason beyond just their common enemies why TERFS/gender critical feminists, conservatives and lesbian separatists often work together – it's because they share common beliefs about the essential nature of sex and the incommensurability of gender categories. But individual men do not oppress individual women: rather, men and women (but mostly women) are both defined by and oppressed by a social structured (‘patriarchy’) that is created and enforced by both men and women (but mostly men).

Feminist politics and ideology is complex, and often seems like a labrinthine minefield to those, such as myself, on the outside looking in. It may be that this attempt to understand its various currents through the lens of other philosophical traditions is reductionist and incomplete. But for me, at least, it’s been helpful to understand how feminism relates to the broader struggle.

Disaster Socialism

Australia is on fire. There’ve been bigger bushfires in the past, to be sure; bushfires that have killed more people or burned more hectares or done more damage. But the scale of the current crisis is hard to understate. Amidst an ongoing severe drought and the hottest December on record, most of the east coast is burning; significant towns have lost power and all connections to the outside world. Major cities from Melbourne to Brisbane are choking on ash, highways are closed and the summer tourist industry has been devastated. Canberra, which has so far been spared the fires themselves, had the worst air pollution in the world this week thanks to the ambient smoke and haze.

Regardless of whether any one extreme weather event can be proved to be caused by climate change, the 2019 bushfires foreshadow things to come. This year may (or may not) be a statistical outlier, but we know for certain that there will be more years like this - and with increasing frequency. This is not a once-in-a-generation natural disaster, it’s a generational disaster. Whatever costs the opponents of taking action on climate change imagine would come with switching to low-carbon energy generation, the cost in terms of lives, healthy, property and foregone economic activity from this year’s bushfire’s alone is almost certainly higher. The question is not, and has never been, how much will climate change will cost us - but who will pay for the sins of our past.

And here’s the bad news. I think it’s time we all finally acknowledged that green, left-liberal politics have conclusively failed to prevent or manage the crisis. We’ve spent more than a decade arguing over carbon pricing; and yet another UN climate conference (COP25) collapsed in acrimony just a few weeks ago. Sure, there are a few bright spots where having fair-minded people in positions of government or corporate power has made a difference, but it’s time to admit that more protests, more marches, and begging for more virtuous leaders is just wasting everybody’s time. For all I admire Greta Thunberg, and I really do, her style of activism offers no solution other than the failed liberal education fallacy - a giant exercise in consciousness-raising rather confronting the structural barriers to change head on.

It’s time to try something new. It’s time to try something different. It’s time to try ‘disaster socialism’.

Disaster Socialism for beginners

Most readers of a progressive persuasion are likely to be familiar with Naomi Klein’s theory of ‘disaster capitalism’, from her seminal (and prescient) 2007 work “The Shock Doctrine”. Klein noted that capitalist structures rarely let a good disaster go to waste; that in crisis mode people will tolerate radical political and economic steps that would have previously been unthinkable or impractical; allowing conservatives to ratchet society another few steps to the right every few years. Attached as they are to norms and institutions, left-liberals appear flummoxed and ineffective. Rather than being threatened by the natural disasters which its reckless exploitation makes more likely, Klein argued that capitalism ultimately benefits from them - a thesis with terrifying implications are we face more recurrent climate change-caused disaster events. As the dirtbag left might say, if you think a political right who ignores the climate emergency is bad, just wait until you have a right-wing that recognises and responds to the threat seriously.

I would therefore offer the following working definition of disaster socialism: the practice of taking advantage of a major disasters to promote socialist policies that a population would be less likely to accept under normal circumstances. It hardly needs noting that in the phenomenon of (largely volunteer) firefighters risking their lives to protect others against nature, we already have a sphere of human social and economic life in which altruistic, pro-social behaviour is the norm. Disaster socialism is not just good politics - it’s an absolute necessity to prevent the damage wrought by these bushfires being used as an excuse for further loss of community in rural Australia, the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities and the transfer of public lands into the hands of private developers.

So rather than another wasted decade attempting to legislate a carbon price from the top down, progressive parties should adopt a platform that re-orients Australian civic and economic life around the prevention, management and response to natural disasters. The sad reality is that this is a transformation that will happen to us regardless - climate change makes it so. Liberal and neoliberal politics will be unable to achieve this end without relying on increasingly militarised and authoritarian solutions. We have an opportunity here, and now, to orient our climate change adaption policies instead around spontaneous self-organisation, community solidarity and social cohesion. If you want climate action, in other words, it has to be a ‘Green New Deal’ that blends climate mitigation and adaption with socialist organising - you cannot be a green and support the maintenance of the economic status quo.

High, high hopes

What might a programme of disaster socialism look like? To begin with, I’ll note that I’m not qualified to talk about how firefighters are recruited and paid in Australia - a topic that has long been fraught with political landmines. But I will suggest that it become foundational tenet of labour law that every employee in the country - and not just federal public sector workers - be entitled to a minimum of four weeks paid leave every year to participate in firefighting or other emergency services or disaster relief public work. In this way, every employer contributes to the defence of the broader economy. We need to build-up a core of well-trained and well-equipped professional firefighters, and support them with a massive cadre of willing and able civilians. We need to have permissive social structures in place such that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of men and women can mobilise themselves out of the cities to defend the countryside from disaster. Like an army reserve without the military overtones, we need to set up policies and programs that bring familiars people with the Australian demi-wilderness, teaches them how the land floods, how it burns, and how we’ll need to live as our continent continues to get hotter. Wherever possible, indigenous communities and indigenous knowledge should be involved in that effort.

We can also use disaster socialism to fund a program of massive re-investment in Australia’s rural and peri-urban communities. The reality is that the almost total urbanisation of our country is a legacy of more than half a century of underinvestment in our regions. A massive, whole-of-nation effort will be required to rebuild after each disaster, and to pre-adapt our rural towns to the threats they face, and to better connect them to national infrastructure so disasters can be responded to more effectively. Funding and workers for such efforts will in turn create a demand for more rural housing and infrastructure, leading to a virtuous cycle of development. Subsidies that make solar panels and better insulation accessible for middle-class homes in the suburbs are one thing, but public programs that make environmentally-friendly living the norm across the country should be our goal.

Disaster socialism also provides more opportunities to regulate. Acknowledging that each of these areas is politically sensitive, shifting our political narratives away from economic growth towards disaster prevention could help ease the passage of stronger regulation of land-use, the approval process for resource extraction projects and the management of water. The state needs to have an active, ongoing presence in disaster-affected communities across the country - progressives cannot become stereotyped as urban elites who descend on the regions only to protest economic developments that offend our aesthetic sensibilities - or worse, to promote mega-projects over the objections of residents. We need to work with local progressives to provide them the tools they need to manage and defend their communities on their own, from the bottom-up.

The movement in society

Finally, and I cannot emphasise this enough, we do not have to wait to capture the state to begin implementing our programme of disaster socialism. Progressive leaders have done a good job in responding to these bushfires, but I would humbly suggest that Anthony Albanese buying supplies for volunteer firefighters in his personal capacity, while good optics, is not a sufficient institutional response. The Labor Party - and other progressives parties and movements - should play leading role in connecting members in cities with disaster-affected communities, and in managing the flow of aid and volunteers. The union movement is also critical here, and I’ve actually seen the unions take a high profile role over the past several weeks in supporting their members who have been on the front line in fighting the fires.

The world is changing around us. As an Australian, you just have to open your eyes or smell the wind to see that current circumstances are not normal. To all my fellow progressives who put a higher value on the climate than on economic transformation, I would ask you this: what have you got left to lose? Social democratic government has been tried, it failed. Liberalism offers you no hope and a whole bunch of centrists are going to ultimately endorse authoritarian solutions to the climate crisis. Why not try socialism? We might fail - the scale of the problem may be too large and too complex for any conventional political movement to handle. But we have a theory of the case - that by building community solidarity we can not only respond more effectively to shared threats, but that we can also act more decisively to reform those social structures which have contributed to the current crisis in the first place.