The Search for Habit in Classical Liberalism

In this article, I conduct two kinds of inquiry. The first is conventional—one might even say habitual—in both form and content: it takes the form of an argument and appears in the body of this article. The second disrupts traditional habits of scholarship by both using and interrogating a research strategy that has become the method of choice for students raised in the digital age: the use of the Search function to mine data from a digital archive. The results of this interrogation, as well as the meditations it has provoked, appear in the notes appended to the end of this article. Taken together, the two inquiries are designed to prompt further meditations, some of which appear in my conclusion, on the implications of the strategies scholars use to generate what counts as knowledge now.

A brief account of the archive I used for this article needs to appear before the notes because this archive has shaped the argument that unfolds in the main part of the essay. The archive consists of the approximately 1200 books contained in the Online Library of Liberty database. This database is sponsored and maintained by the Liberty Fund, which represents itself as a ‘private educational foundation established [in 1960] to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals’. ¹ In addition to maintaining the Online Library, the Foundation also sponsors conferences, publishes about 10 books a year, and produces video and audiotapes of conversations with ‘some of the most significant thinkers of our time’. As a tax-exempt educational institution, the Foundation does not engage in any explicit political action, and, although the addition of from 30 to 35 books a year suggests that some underlying principles inform the selection process, the Foundation’s librarian insists that no ‘ideological agenda’ is involved. ² The texts in the database cover roughly 5000 years, and include works, mostly in English translation, by Aristotle, Sophocles, Gaius, Cicero, Erasmus, and Plutarch, as well as American, British, German, and French authors from the middle ages to the present. There are a few selections from the Koran, but the collection overwhelmingly favors western writers, with a chronological bias towards the 18th and 19th centuries, and a generic bias towards prose, especially philosophy and the social sciences, over poetry or literature of any kind. ³

The founders and custodians of the Library of Liberty represent the collection as an authoritative source for understanding the two ideals that come together in liberalism: liberty and equality. ⁴ Deciding at the outset to limit my sources to the materials contained in this database has thus bound me to the invisible principles that inform the Library of Liberty’s texts. Rather than interrogate those principles or the selection that followed from them, I have embraced the delimitation of the archive because this has allowed me to bracket the question of what would otherwise have informed my own selection criteria and to focus instead on both what the database tells me about someone else’s ideas about how the word habit figures in the history of liberalism and the method by which I could find this out. ⁵ That the archive is digital is essential to both of these enterprises, for the twin features of a digital archive—its expansive scope and its searchable nature—have informed at every level the nature of the observations I offer here. ⁶

If one takes the Library of Liberty’s collection as an authoritative source for understanding liberalism, then it becomes clear that habit plays a complex role in the history of this concept. While some authors write about habit as a mechanism for self-discipline or social improvement, others associate habit with enslaving self-indulgence, dehumanizing or mechanical activity, and mindless subservience to tyrannical rules. ⁷ The etymology of the word provides one kind of explanation for this apparent contradiction. The OED presents a history in which the ancient Latin habitus or habere entered the English language without a distinction that was preserved in the French vernacular. In Latin, the counterparts of the English word habit could refer either to an external quality (‘outward appearance’, ‘fashion of body’) or to an internal disposition (‘mental constitution, character’). Thus, in English, the same word can refer to clothing or bodily comportment and to the innermost nature of one’s subjective being. ⁸ For that matter, whether ‘habit’ is an ‘art’, or a learned behavior, or somehow part of nature (or, as a compromise, a ‘second nature’) remains one site of chronic disagreement in the literature. ⁹

While the OED’s etymology provides one kind of explanation for the complex position habit occupies in the history of liberalism, another can be derived from the function this word plays in several of the texts that feature it. Some writers use the prevalence of habitual behaviors in a group of people, as opposed to exercises of consciousness, will, or reason, to explain why these groups remained in a state of ‘barbarism’ while other groups ‘progressed’. This is clearest in the work of Herbert Spencer, who, as we will see in a moment, yoked his treatment of habit to the newly scientific concepts of instinct and evolution, each of which was thought to follow determinate laws. ¹⁰ But it also appears in the late 18th century, when Sir William Jones used the Indian proclivity for habitual behaviors, which one might also call rituals, to justify what he considered to be their ineligibility for freedom or self-rule. ¹¹

Yet another perspective on the complex position habit occupies in liberalism comes from a historical analysis of changes within the problematic that (arguably) lies at the heart of liberalism. ¹² While liberalism might be said to be both a theory about individuals, which postulates an innate proclivity on the part of the individual to avoid pain and enhance pleasure, for example, and a theory about how individuals, living and working together, create supra-individual systems that acquire their own autonomous dynamics (like a rational market), the fact that these two theories are yoked together raises the question of how individuals relate to larger social units. For many of the late 19th-century scientists and philosophers who were interested in this question, and especially for the 20th-century sociologists who followed them, habit functioned as a switchpoint between individuals and the social. Habit (both the word and the concept) constituted one explanation for why—and how—individuals behaving in apparent isolation from each other could generate or participate in larger social dispositions. But it is also the case that changes in the way the concept of habit was framed reveal the scaling up of analysis within the social science disciplines—the shift of focus, as the social sciences more closely approximated the natural sciences and mathematics, away from individuals and toward the nature of sociality itself. ¹³

We can identify two significant shifts in the frames within which habit has been discussed. In the first, we see what might be called a metaphysical treatment of habit replaced by a moral-psychological treatment, and, in the second, this moral-psychological focus on the individual is supplanted by, or gradually metamorphoses into, a focus on the dynamics by which individuals generate—and interact with—collective social processes. In the passages represented in the Library of Liberty database, the metaphysical frame is best exemplified by St Thomas Aquinas’s work, although we also see it in Plato’s Dialogues, Pufendorf’s The Whole Duty of Man, and, somewhat anachronistically, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. These writers seek to understand the unchanging ontology of habit, its universal place in nature, especially human nature, and its definitive operations. A characteristic example is Plato’s definition-by-opposition: ‘Consciousness is opposed to habit, inattention, sleep, and death.’ The moral-psychological frame becomes clear in John Locke’s writing, especially Some Thoughts Concerning Education. For Locke, who was interested in the individual as an instance of  human nature rather than in human nature in the abstract, habit was the mechanism that could lead the innately blank individual to virtuous behavior. ¹⁴ Locke’s interest in inculcating moral behavior in individuals was linked to his interest in education, and it was his attempt to understand the mechanisms inherent in the educational process that began to open his moral-psychological frame to the interests in collective or social behavior that would eventually yield what I will call the frame of sociality.

This frame gradually emerged from the moral-psychological frame that dominated writing about habit in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries by way of the associationist philosophy developed by David Hartley and elaborated, in subsequent decades, by Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill (among others). Associationism supplied Locke’s sketchy description of the relationship between the child’s innate preference for pleasure over pain and moral growth through an internal mechanism: according to this theory, the recurrence of a link between one idea and another, or between a sensation and an idea, gradually teaches the child to associate the two, then to expect one when the other occurs. In this mechanistic psychology, habit can generate either beneficial or deleterious results and its operations become so routinized over time that they can eventually render the affect that once cemented the link superfluous. ‘As we proceed in the formation of habits’, John Stuart Mill writes, ‘and become accustomed to will a particular course of conduct because it is pleasurable, we at last continue to will it without any reference to its being pleasurable.’ ¹⁵ By the end of the 19th century, in the work of social theorists like Herbert Spencer and Thorstein Veblen, the operations of habit that could be observed in individuals were being identified in larger-scale social units—like ‘races’, nations, and even the human race. In such accounts, ‘habits of life’ could be transmitted across generations, and, in the ‘progress’ of the human race toward adaptation to the social state, resulted in the transformation of human nature itself. The mechanism that underwrote such changes was natural selection—the principle of evolution that had been articulated by Darwin’s Origin of Species. By the 20th century, most social scientists who investigated habit did so within the frame of sociality, rather than those of metaphysics or moral philosophy. For writers like Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu (whose works do not appear in the Library of Liberty), habit was less important than habitus, for the latter constituted a collective disposition that could indicate (if it could not precisely explain) the individual’s absorption into the greater whole.

As the English descendant of a Latin word that once looked two ways at once (inward, toward an individual’s disposition or the qualities of human nature, and outward, toward the body’s surface or clothing), habit generally lost its outward-oriented trajectory during the 18th century—the century that also gave birth to classical liberalism. During the following centuries, as liberalism was clarified and complicated, habit turned outward in a new way: no longer used to designate the outward clothing or deportment of the body, habit became part of an explanation of how individuals, living together in collective sociality, came to share certain identifiable traits, or dispositions. When Bourdieu used the Latin habitus to invoke this collective, but group-specific disposition, he was not simply returning to the Latin root of habit but giving a name to what seems like the endpoint of one teleological trajectory: a journey from the interior of the individual (whether as human nature or moral psychology) to interiors and behaviors that are somehow simultaneously individual and collective. As I have already said, the conjunction of the individual and the collective, which is implied by the word habitus, constitutes both the heart of classical liberalism and its definitive problematic. How can individuals be free and self-determining if they are also part of larger, autonomous collectives that are also (in many accounts) both rule-governed and rational? What if the wishes of a particular individual conflict with the wishes—or needs—of the collective (as they arguably do in matters like taxation, public health, and national security)? How do individual experiences, especially educational experiences, bring particular people into the collective sociality—and how do we account for educational institutions’ failure to bring everyone into collective agreement? If the word habit helps to address some of these issues, in other words, it fails to answer all of the questions that writers who have used it—in the name of liberal values—supposedly endorse.