Review: “Obedience is Freedom” by Jacob Phillips

“Denial, as Jacob Phillips deftly shows in his fascinating and staggeringly original new book Obedience is Freedom, is precisely what the liberal-left excels in, substituting for a world of limits and constraints a schizoid universe where subjectivity is all that counts.”

In a footnote to his 1861 work Considerations on Representative Government, the philosopher John Stuart Mill famously referred to the Conservatives as “the stupidest party.” Accounting for his remark to the Conservative member of parliament John Pakington, Mill explained how he “never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid.” His intention, he averred, was merely to “say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”

Mill’s comment was dreadfully conceited. It was wrong then. Today, however, it could not be more untrue. If any ideology has a monopoly on ignorance, it is liberalism. More often than not, the people and parties that now embody it are custom-bound, homogenizing, insensitive to beauty, and indifferent to meaning and truth. Far from being hamstrung by a hostility to innovation and a propensity to enjoy instead of exploit, intelligence is most conspicuously present on the Right.

This is not necessarily altogether good news—witness the rise of neo-reaction and other more feral sections of the New Right—but it is a reality which liberals would do well not to deny. Denial, however, as Jacob Phillips deftly shows in his fascinating and staggeringly original new book Obedience is Freedom, is precisely what the liberal-left excels in, substituting for a world of limits and constraints a schizoid universe where subjectivity is all that counts.

With the “authorised platforms and credential system” dominated by identity politics, Phillips self-consciously places his work “outside” the ruling ideological paradigms. Invoking the “intellectual fecundity of more off-beat realms of discourse in the UK and the US” as inspiration, Obedience is Freedom is utterly unique, a work of outsider theory and dissident scholarship that finds its closest counterpart in the philosophically-informed political interventions of the para-academic Left of the late-noughties.