The Freedom of Dwelling Outside of Categorical Thinking

   

There is much that resonates with me in the lead essay by Ferguson and Witcher.  Their work in that piece is to gather together thinkers who we might not normally associate with classical liberalism in order to demonstrate the ways that the tradition defends liberty for the racially oppressed, going back at least to the eighteenth century.  The fact that these thinkers come from diverse backgrounds that span the gamut from an enslaved teenage girl—Phillis Wheatley—to a still-influential European intellectual—Adam Smith—is a testament to the centuries old capaciousness and strength of the liberal tradition. My co-respondents have also provided great insight into the lives and liberty-oriented work of writers as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jane Jacobs.

While my overall response to this work is positive, I do have a critical response to the move of describing some of these thinkers as “libertarian”.  In his essay, Lucas Morel writes of Zora Neale Hurston that she was “a natural libertarian, favoring that form of government that governed least precisely because no form of government could”.  And Sandefur begins his essay by promising to show us “Douglass’s broader libertarian commitments”.  While both Hurston and Douglass certainly held views that resonate with some libertarian commitments, I have hesitations about drafting them posthumously into libertarianism.  Why is this?

We—and here I mean scholars as well as everyday people outside of the academy—like to know how to place or categorize people and their political views.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this, as we are the kinds of creatures who need to make meaning.  But in our current time of hyper-polarization and fragmentation, the tendency to categorize that which is not readily labeled, seems to me to work against rather than for real freedom.  While I understand what Ferguson, Witcher, and my co-respondents are trying to do—and agree that there is some real utility in doing it—I want to argue for the importance of striking a careful balance between highlighting intellectual resonances with the classical liberal tradition versus nudging thinkers into intellectual pigeon holes.  I realize that the latter is not the intent of the other respondents, but that could become the result when their essays are read by others seeking to quickly judge who to place in the libertarian basket.

As an African-American woman writer and intellectual, the work and thought of writers such as Wheatley, Douglass, Hurston, and many others, has already been liberating to me because they are not easily placed within today’s political categories.  Re-defining them as “libertarian” doesn’t feel helpful, especially as I think about how to present those writers to others—whether Black, white, Asian, and so on—as examples of diversity of thought within the Black intellectual tradition.  I think, for instance, of a hypothetical conversation I might have with an African-American student who is working through her own political thinking.  She has been raised in a twenty-first century America that provides more openness and opportunity than ever, but where the Democratic party and its liberal policy agenda still attract the majority of Black Americans.  And while Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, and Ian Rowe are increasingly visible, there is still a palpable hesitation in the Black community to identifying as “conservative”.

So it is within this larger societal context that I sit down to talk with this young woman.  She is, perhaps, a student of mine, and I’m eager to show her models of Black thinkers, many whom she has heard of, who defied the political silos we place ourselves in today.  I want her to understand that the school textbooks and even the college courses tend to highlight limited dimensions of quite complex Black thinkers so that those thinkers appear to be consistently left, liberal, even radical in their politics.  Likewise, it is important to me that she understand that an author like Phillis Wheatley has been unjustly branded as an assimilationist who embraced her own subjection.  I will do this first by presenting, in brief, the complexity of their thought, and next by recommending some of their best writings.  The last thing I am inclined to do is to say: “You know many of these writers were really more libertarian than anything else.  We could easily place them within the libertarian tradition.”  I do not think that this would be a compelling approach, nor do I think it would best represent Wheatley, Douglass, Hurston, or others. Perhaps, paradoxically, these writers’ strength for libertarians is more in celebrating their brave individuality than in trying to argue for their adopted membership into libertarianism. That is, if one really desires more people to think for themselves, placing these great figures before them—in all of their complexity and irreducibility— is more important than claiming them for the libertarian cause.

In this sense, I resonate most with Ikeda’s approach, where he sets out to “point out the strong classical-liberal elements in [Jane Jacobs’] writings”.  Here there is no attempt to describe her as an unacknowledged libertarian. Instead, the focus is on aspects of her writing that support classical liberal thinking.  Here I will also say that while “libertarian” and “classical liberal” certainly overlap, they are not the same thing and do not have the same connotation among intellectuals or in the general public.  Thus it matters whether one seeks to highlight the aspects of Hurston’s writing that resonate with a “classical liberal” approach to thinking about the individual and the state versus signing her up as a “libertarian”. The former is more capacious than the latter.

At the end of the day, however, though my comments have focused on critique, I support the spirit of what is at work in the lead essay and in my co-respondents’ writings.  There is far too much group-think, and the standard assumptions about Black Americans’ politics are intellectually stifling.  We do need to see that a fairly diverse group of writers have provided models for how to live as critically thinking individuals in the midst of great pressures to succumb to the facile categories of thought all around us from social media to presidential politics.

We need more forums where Hurston’s fearless originality of thought are made known; where the classical education and classical influence on writers like Anna Julia Cooper and Martin Luther King, Jr. are made clear.   Cooper, for instance, continues to be under-read and under-appreciated. But those scholars who are writing about her today tend to anachronistically describe her as an “intersectional” scholar, while completely ignoring the fact that she was a quite conservative and very faithful Christian.  The strength of this forum on the classical liberal tradition’s efforts to fight racism is that it makes us take another look at writers who are too often presented in a uni-dimensional way that reinforces today’s truncated ideological and political categories.  But let’s do this in a way that preserves their beautiful individuality rather than harnessing them within yet another political corral.