The concepts of ‘checks and balances’ and a self-regulating mechanism, which organize all the ideological constructions of liberalism, must be understood first of all as the philosophical materialization of this original distrust of the moral capacities of humanity. If the desire to subject human conduct to an ethical ideal taken as universalizable is indeed the crime that contains all others, then it is in fact impossible to try and establish tranquillity and civil peace without first neutralizing all conceivable forms of moral temptation, whether these are religious or otherwise. In this sense, being ‘modern’ basically means being convinced that the new resources of Reason (of which Science offers the privileged model) are from now on capable of resolving this problem by indicating the lines of a double strategy. On the one hand, removing all traditional figures of political authority, and on the other, gradually placing the collective existence of individuals under the control of impersonal and ideologically ‘neutral’ mechanisms whose free play will be able to produce automatically the entire political order that is desired, without ever having to appeal to these individuals in their guise of subjects. As we know, for liberals there are just two mechanisms, and two alone, that possess this providential property — the two parallel and complementary clockwork mechanisms of Market and Law. From the moment that this massive historical transfer has been effected, modern freedom can thus be recognized in its constitutive double dimension, both juridical and economic. It can be defined, on the one hand, as the right to do anything that is not forbidden by positive law (as in Montesquieu’s formula), and on the other, in a more discreet fashion, as the right to do anything that does not contravene the rules of the Market. (61-62)
Jean-Claude Michéa | The Realm of Lesser Evil
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