Realm of Lesser Evil [Paperback]

From the title you might think this is some wan attempt to write a Fu-Manchu-style gothic thriller, or else a parody of one. Instead, it's an excellent polemic about what liberalism on both the right and the left have in common. ("Realm of *the* lesser evil" might have been more apt, as well as being consistent with the original French version.) Jean-Claude Michéa (J-CM) points to the origins of liberalism as a reaction to the civil and religious wars of the XVIIth Century. Such conflict led thinkers like Hobbes to believe that selfishness was the natural state of humankind; law and commerce were seen as the way in which to prevent further wars of "all against all." In particular, J-CM points out that trade was seen as a way to promote peace -- so the political and economic aspects of liberalism, which today are emphasized by the left and the right respectively, were intertwined from its earliest days. Some other interesting observations J-CM makes include:

@ the difference between the Renaissance Humanists' notion of tolerance (based on empathy) and that promoted by liberalism (exemplified by Milton Friedman's ideal of indifference);

@ how liberalism, including the notion of homo economicus, fallaciously assumes that all humans have a selfish nature, rather than the more realistic view that wherever there are humans, there will always be some selfish ones (i.e., although J-CM does not use these terms, liberalism rests on a confusion between universal and existential quantifiers);

@ the paradox that although markets are supposed to arise naturally (from human selfishness), people are constantly in need of being reminded to accept the verdict of the market and to behave according to its laws; and

@ how liberalism's ideal of free and fair competition leads to a return of "war of all against all" in the economic sense, and no less paradoxically considers this war as the foundation of a utopia, sc. of unlimited growth.

My main reservation about the book is that it is a deliberately extreme argument, trying to follow the ideas of liberalism to their logical conclusions. J-CM describes it as being in the spirit of Callicles, the pupil who tries to be even more of a sophist than his master Gorgias (in Plato's dialogue of that name). As a result, it ignores some of the paradoxes and impurities of reality. E.g., J-CM insists that liberals want to encourage people to avoid making judgments based on morality; yet he seems to overlook that Americans are the Westerners most tied to religion-based moralizing even as they are the most enthusiastic liberals. (Indirect comments of J-CM suggest he would think such American moralizing to be insincere, but I think he'd be wrong about that in many cases.) Minor irritations I had with the book included the rather tedious Chap. VI, which attempts to blend psychoanalysis and anarchism, and J-CM's tendency to include sarcastic comments about other intellectuals without footnoting to the work in which they made their supposedly outrageous remarks. Fortunately, the translator seems to have tried to clarify some of his allusions in this edition.