liberty

An update on the progress of Liberty Central (it should go live today or over the weekend), which samizdata seems positive about even if rather depressed about the possibility of it making any effect

The mass of the population of Britain is nescient, complacent, and has no interest in the abstractions of liberty, or the threats from power assumed only to be threats to others, to bad people. Many people are happy to claim the status of an 'ordinary' person, with "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" from officialdom, while being paradoxically susceptible to fears of everything else. Passively concerned with material welfare, security against virtual risks, and gossip, they graze and are milked as the livestock of the state.

This is Foucault's concept of governmentality in action. Not, pace his fans on the left, a neo-liberal order, but a post-liberal order in which the foundational institutions of liberalism - liberty and individuality, rule of law, the separation of private and public life, a civil society and a political sphere distinct from one another - have ceased to have a meaning for even the bulk of the middle-classes.