- It is abstract because it is one-sided, and therefore ignores all the factors that
make people what they are. It is true that individual drive and initiative are among
the factors that mould us, but they are not the sole factors. Aspects of our social
and natural environment also play their part. - It is abstract because liberalism assumes that the relations between human and
nature (i.e. human nature) take the form of an exchange between individuals
through the market. This exchange takes away the particular facts of each
person’s context (whether they are rich or poor; men or women, etc.), and makes
it appear that the parties to the exchange are the ‘same’.
Why does abstraction allow repressive hierarchies to come slithering through the
back door? Treating people as property may mean that they can actually be owned.
Hence early liberals agreed with slavery, and Locke constructs an elaborate and
thoroughly unconvincing argument to suggest that slaves are individuals who are
captives in war – and instead of killing them, their owners generously agree to allow
them to live (1924: 127–8). Until the twentieth century, liberals regarded individuals
as men rather than women, since individuals were rational property owners, and
women were seen as neither. Although property was supposedly produced by labour,
in practice, liberals allowed some to work for others. Whole countries could be
owned as the property of those who made ‘profitable’ use of them, so that liberals
until relatively recently supported colonialism and imperialism.
What abstraction does is to drive sameness and difference apart. Abstraction
suppresses difference so that because everyone is an ‘individual’, they are deemed
to be all the same. In practice, of course, they are not, and therefore liberalism
argues that inequalities are justified because the wealthy are energetic; men are
rational; colonialists are ‘civilised’, etc. Liberalism either suppresses difference in
the name of sameness (those who are not ‘like us’ must be excluded), or it suppresses
sameness in the name of difference (because we are different, we are superior and
have nothing in common with ‘others’). One thing that liberalism cannot do is to
celebrate difference, since this would imply that difference is something that is
compatible with, and in fact indispensable for, sameness.
476 Part 4 Contemporary ideas
Robert Nozick, an extreme liberal, states in his Anarchy, State and Utopia(1974):
People generally judge themselves by how they fall along the most important dimensions in
which they differ from others. People do not gain self-esteem from their common human
capacities – self-esteem is based on differentiating characteristics: that’s why it’s self-esteem.
(Cited by Ramsay, 1997: 94)Democracy and the state
The analysis of identity and difference has important implications for our view of
democracy and the state. If people are to govern their lives, then the differences