Conservative Liberal Socialism and Politics of a Complex Center

wrote the conservative-liberal-socialist manifesto and gained considerable sympathy for it, at least among those (including myself) concerned with the struggle against communism. Now that communism is all but dead, has the great cause of conservative-liberal-socialism died with it? Some think so, but they take too narrow a view of the significance of Kolakowski’s manifesto. The larger cause to which that manifesto contributed was a certain form of politics of the center, which I will call interchangeably the politics of a complex or a principled center. This cause, I certainly hope, is not dead. It is in fact now facing its most ambitious task. But it is under perpetual threat, not only from various fanaticisms and extremisms, but also from other petty, small-minded and cynical forms of the politics of the center. What is the politics of the center? Is it the politics of the middle class, which some have considered essential to democratic stability? Is it the politics of the median voter, the inevitable winner in certain very simple voting situations? Do we need to adopt the Aristotelian or the Confucian doctrine of the mean? It can be any of those. But at bottom, politics of the center is an effort to move away from extremes, however defined. It is also a battle against violence, destruction, and their influence in politics and in life generally, against war and revolution, but also against coercion. The center plays an important role in ethics and politics in a number of distinctive ways. In this essay I want to sketch the case in favor of politics that searches for and aims to create a morally and institutionally complex center, distinct from the center that is simply a balance of power. We can trace a long and only intermittently glorious history of the politics of the center in action, including the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the United States Constitution of 1787, but also the altogether less glorious French regime established in 1830 with Louis Philippe as king, and Guizot as chief political mentor, trying to establish a “juste milieu” between reaction and revolution. More recently politics of the center has been best exemplified by those who created, reformed, and maintained the welfare state, avoiding the extremes of pure free-market capitalism and full state socialism (the work of a combination of Christian Democrats, Ordo Liberals, and Social Democrats in Europe, and New Deal Democrats with their allies in the United States). This is in many ways a glorious history to be sure, but it also leads to the not-so-glorious current state of democratic politics in the United States, as vividly described for us by Lowi, among others. More recently still, the politics of the center has had a significant appeal to dissident groups and the anti-communist opposition in communist countries. Kolakowski put forward a conservative liberal-socialist manifesto speaking in favor of an ideologically and morally complex center. Writing in 1978, he included a historical prediction: that his movement would never develop a mass following. Arguably it did, however: in the form of the trade union Solidarity, at least in its most complex incarnation of 1980–81. Under the pressures of partisan politics after the collapse of communism, Solidarity has split into various combinations of its components, and conservative-liberal-socialism has returned to power in Poland only occasionally in the guise of coalition governments. But meanwhile in the West the politics of the center takes new forms. We find it in the international Communitarian Network, or the efforts to build a new program for the center left, a new Third Way. The classical ideal of the center and of moderation, is represented best by Aristotle and Confucius, with their identification of virtue as a center between extremes, and of vices as those extremes. The degree to which contemporary politics of the center is, or ought to be, Aristotelian or Confucian, I leave to the side in this essay. I want instead to sketch a politics that pursues a different ideal: a complex center, reflecting and favoring moral, ideological, and institutional complexity. What is good about the politics of a complex center? If we want to build a better world when we face moral complexity (multiple conflicting ends and ideals) and complex constraints, we need to be prepared to develop a complex program full of hybrids. If we want to maintain and enhance uniqueness of persons, cultures, institutions, and natural locations, then we must both protect and promote complexity. Liberal Conservative Socialism and the Politics of a Complex Center