Society Protects Itself
Australian society is moving to protect itself from antisemitism
One of the great pairings of intellectual history is that of Friedrich Hayek, the liberal Austrian economist who fled to England before the Second World War but was eventually enticed to migrate to America, and Karl Polanyi, the socialist Hungarian economist who fled to England before the Second World War but was eventually enticed to migrate to America. Hayek taught that the market economy ensured the freedom of the individual and that socialism was the “road to serfdom.” Polanyi taught that socialism was “the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.”
Many a graduate student has been assigned to write an essay on Hayek-versus-Polanyi, always by teachers who much preferred Polanyi. I don’t think any Hayekian ever assigned students to read and refute Polanyi. It’s a one-way street, making the inevitable conclusion of any Hayek-versus-Polanyi essay that whenever the market economy goes feral, society will protect itself by muzzling the market.
Socialist university professors love that message, and their impressionable students lap it up.
But Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation actually espouses a general theory of what he called “the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature,” not a specific argument against the marketization of life. The market is not the only force that can threaten the disintegration of society, and that society might organize itself to subdue. Different disintegrative forces have arisen at different times, and Polanyi’s argument is at heart a conservative argument for social protections, not a progressive argument for social redistribution.
In today’s Australia, two disintegrative forces are at the forefront of political debates: antisemitism and immigration.
A key node in Australian (as in American and British) antisemitism is the university system. These days it is difficult for antisemitism to flourish in business or government, because those sectors require a certain degree of conformity with civil norms, which forces antisemitism (and other antisocial behaviors) underground. But in universities and the arts, individual self-indulgence is at its peak, and although very few academics are antisemitic, those who are face relatively little push-back.
You can say things in a university lecture hall that you could never get away with in a corporate conference room. Call it “academic freedom,” and you can even convince otherwise sensible people to keep quiet about your intellectual indiscretions. For despite the widespread academic support for socialism and the primacy of society, the last thing most humanities and social science academics want is society policing what they teach.
That is exactly what Australian society is now seeking to do with regard to the teaching of antisemitism. This week I was asked by the Australian Financial Review to provide a counterpoint to an article in their newspaper that criticized the government’s forthcoming “university antisemitism report cards.” The article, written by the human rights lawyer and political campaigner Greg Barns SC, called the antisemitism report card idea “an affront to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.”
Barns worried that “academics are self-censoring” as “critical aspects of campus life, aspects that go to the importance of free thinking, are to be surveilled and scored.” And he’s right. Academics have begun to self-censor their previously overt antisemitic language. Universities are being surveilled and scored by an independent commission headed by a retired senior academic administrator and constitutional lawyer. A commission that was appointed with full bipartisan support.
That’s what it means for society to protect itself.
As I write in my response, scholar-activism is not illegal, and academic freedom ensures that it can’t be stopped. The Higher Education Support Act actually requires that all publicly-funded universities have enforceable free speech protections. As a result, students and staff at our universities are generally free (within the limits of the law) to condemn Israel, admire terrorism, glorify genocide, and for that matter call for the revolutionary overthrow of the Australian government.
Universities, however, are expected to impose “reasonable and proportionate regulation ... to foster the wellbeing of students and staff”. That includes Jewish students and staff. The new antisemitism report cards will evaluate universities on how well they are discharging that duty. Student activists (and the academic activists who goad them on) have a legal right to hold abhorrent opinions. But society has a moral responsibility to shame them for expressing those opinions out loud.
You can read my full article on campus antisemitism at:
Universities don’t condone sexist, racist, homophobic, or white supremacist teaching, even though all of them are potentially protected by academic freedom. If Nazi students wanted to rally on campus, they could not be prevented from doing so (as long as they did not violate hate speech laws). Communist students routinely do rally on campus, and are not suppressed.
But the rest of us don’t have to like it. We can legitimately ask universities what they are doing to educate students and staff about the obligations of citizenship in a liberal and open society. And if the universities won’t combat antisemitism on their own campuses, we are all justified in condemning their inaction. The report cards won’t prevent unpalatable speech; they will “name and shame” it.
As someone who is routinely named and shamed for my unpopular views, I won’t shed a tear to see someone else take the heat on this one. I’m proud to stand up for what I believe is right. Let them stand up too, and find out whether or not they really are “on the right side of history.”
Now on to another unpopular view — or at least, a view that is unpopular among my academic colleagues. Levels of immigration in Australia are exceptionally high. Excluding a few pathological guest-worker economies, they’re the highest in the world. That’s a policy choice, and although it is a policy choice that is opposed by the majority of the Australian electorate, it is a policy choice that Australia’s political parties do not seem willing to reconsider.
The Labor Party is ideologically committed to very high levels of immigration, the Greens even more so. The Liberal Party has pledged to tie immigration levels to new home construction, which might mean a one-third reduction in immigration levels but would still leave Australia as the most immigrant country in the world. The Nationals and even One Nation advocate similarly modest reductions.
So much for democracy giving people what they want. But it gets worse. While Australia’s immigration debate focuses on overall levels of immigration, no one is talking about the composition of the immigrant population. Permanent migration with a pathway to citizenship has the potential to promote social integration as people put down roots in their new home country. But most immigration to Australia is on short-term temporary visas, whether on actual work visas or on work visas thinly disguised as student visas.
Many such “short-term” immigrants stay in Australia for upwards of five years on a succession of student, post-study work, and working holiday visas. When their visas run out, they can appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal for a review of the decision — a review that typically takes a full year. If their appeals are unsuccessful, they can apply for asylum (another year), then when the asylum claim is rejected, appeal the rejection (another year).
All told, it is generally possible to arrive in Australia on a 2-year study visa for a restaurant industry qualification and stay in Australia for 5-10 years on a succession of student and bridging visas as appeals are heard. Roughly 450,000 people (or 2% of the entire adult population of Australia) are currently in the country on bridging visas while awaiting administrative review. These visa appeals constitute one-third of the entire caseload of the Administrative Review Tribunal.
It is, frankly, a ridiculous situation, and it has a very simple solution: require all student, graduate, and working holiday visa applications to be made from offshore. When international students and working holidaymakers finish their programs, they should go home. If they want to pursue another stay in Australia, they should apply from their home countries — where they do not have standing to appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal.
Making repeat visa applicants apply from offshore would prevent visa abuse, discourage non-genuine students, unclog the Administrative Review Tribunal, and establish a fairer system in which everyone wanting to come to Australia would be judged on the same basis.
You can find my full argument at:
MacroBusinesss | To Reduce Net Migration, Accelerate the Outflow
Combined with a streamlined process for evaluating frivolous asylum applications lodged by people from safe countries, this one reform would rapidly reduce the number of temporary residents in Australia, without preventing any legitimate applicants from entering the country.
The intuitive approach to excessive immigration is to reduce the intake. That could and should be done, but it requires politically difficult reforms. Accelerating the outflow of those who abuse the system should be a no-brainer. Even politicians should be able to understand the logic (and the electoral benefits) of reducing excessive immigration by ejecting those who seek to abuse the system — while keeping the door open for legitimate students and future citizens.
Many social scientists who read (and assign their students to read) Polanyi’s The Great Transformation seem oblivious to the real message of the book. It is an argument for socialization, not for socialism as such, and definitely not for communism. The great heroes of Polanyi’s “double movement” of society protecting itself were the working class and the land-owning class; in other words, the lower and upper classes. Both were threatened by the rise of the market economy, and both served the interests of society by resisting it.
The villain of the book was the urban middle class, which Polanyi held responsible for “the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighborhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers, the deterioration of craft standards, the disruption of folkways, and the general degradation of existence including housing and arts, as well as the innumerable forms of private and public life that do not affect profits.”
In other words, the villain was us.
Very few of the readers of this newsletter will be hourly wage-earners, though through a quirk of personal friendships more than might seem likely will be stewards of the land. All the rest will be, like me, members of the middle class of liberal professionals. We are, of course, part of society. But in Polanyi’s theoretical system, we are not the protectors of society. We are reformers, constantly in conflict with those who want “social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature.”
Lest you be left in any doubt as to where Polanyi’s true sympathies rested, here is the crucial paragraph of The Great Transformation, the one in which he summarized the basic argument of the book:
Let us return to what we have called the double movement. It can be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods. The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market—primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes—and using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods.
If, like me, you read The Great Transformation in graduate school, under the influence of teachers who loved Polanyi’s socialism but maybe hadn’t closely read Polanyi’s actual text, it might be time to read it again. And if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who instinctively loathes socialism, you also might give it a look in. It is a nuanced book for a complex world. It is much more realistic than Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (which was published in the same year), and much more relatable.
I don’t fully agree with Polanyi’s analyses, and I have a lot of sympathy for Hayek’s. But I have a lot more respect for Polanyi than many of the scholars who pretend to have read him, and who only admire him as a standard-bearer for Brand Socialism. At least those who embrace Hayek really do agree with his precepts and policy prescriptions. I suspect that many self-professed Polanyians would shudder to encounter the ghost of the old man, were he to wander into their seminar rooms today.
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