Phillip W. Magness
– July 2, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research
This essay was originally part
of a May 2020 forum on intersectionality and liberty, hosted by the
Cato Institute. We are republishing it in light of the discussion’s
relevance to the current debate over critical race theory (CRT). In his
contribution, Magness addresses the question of whether concepts from
CRT such as Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework are
compatible with the study of economics. Here Magness argues that CRT
imports strong ideological biases against free-market economics, and
suffers from internal inconsistencies that make it poorly suited for
tackling the problems of racial and other forms of discrimination.
Although it remains a point of widely varying emphasis across the
past two centuries, a clear strain of anti-discriminatory thought
undergirds what may be broadly summarized as the classical liberal
philosophical tradition. Its applications extend to race, gender, and
religion, and generally aim to center the epistemic humility of
toleration within its consideration of individuality. This approach was
succinctly summarized by eighteenth-century liberal Whig forebearer
Charles James Fox, who noted “Persecution
always says, ‘I know the consequences of your opinion better than you
know them yourselves.’ But the language of toleration was always
amicable, liberal, and just: it confessed its doubts, and acknowledged
its ignorance.” Such an approach prioritized assessment “from actions
and not from opinions,” as distinct from prejudicial forms of reasoning
that render value judgements out of fixed prior assumptions about an
individual’s associations, characteristics, or identity.
Although the specific occasion of Fox’s comment was a plea for
religious toleration, its principle forms the basis of a broader
recognition of the interrelation between discriminatory injustices and
state institutions. We find a similar recognition in Adam Smith’s indictment of
the colonial slave owner who employed political leverage to entrench his
institution with a complex system of subsidies and discriminatory laws.
Indeed, Fox himself would
lead a two-decade parliamentary campaign to dismantle this system’s
sustaining lifeblood from the transatlantic slave trade. A common
current flows through Richard Cobden’s intentional
pairing of abolitionism and free market theory under the banner of
Exeter Hall liberalism. Cobden’s economic program was branded the “dismal science” by its adversaries specifically
from the threat it posed to entrenched racial and class hierarchies. So
pronounced were these sentiments that the proslavery radical George
Fitzhugh assailed the
liberal maxim of laissez-faire in 1851 for making “war with all kinds
of slavery” on account of depriving the state of its tools of
hierarchical enforcement. And make war upon slavery they did.
The same liberal tradition provided one of the few consistent voices against progressive eugenic planning in the early twentieth century. Ludwig von Mises chastised Keynes in 1927 for unwittingly opening the political doors to mass atrocity by presumptively elevating this new “science” to a function of state policy. Friedrich A. Hayek’s withering dissection of
the racial totalitarian Nazi regime a decade later explored the
devastation wrought by the same intolerant lines of reasoning.
We find lesser-known manifestations of the liberal anti-discriminatory current in newspaper editor R.C. Hoiles,
who took a nearly solitary stance against Franklin Roosevelt’s Japanese
internment program, and who campaigned against the segregation of
Mexican-American students in 1947 as part of an important case precedent for Brown v. Board. In
the postwar era, classical liberalism provided a basis for scholarly
investigation of the symbiosis between state power and racial
discrimination, as seen in W.H. Hutt’s dissection of the South African Apartheid regime, Gary Becker’s empirics-driven formalization of an economic theory of discrimination, the public choice subfield’s investigations of discriminatory political institutions, and liberal constitutional theorizing around a non-discriminatory generality norm.
I suspect that Jacob Levy would join me in lamenting how the
principles of toleration and non-discrimination have languished from
underdeveloped attention in some libertarian circles. Yet I also
question a presumptive claim from his lead essay that “[w]e
astonishingly manage to forget that in the United States racism has been
a source of statism, that state power has been expanded to enhance and
entrench racial domination.” Clearly as the foregoing examples
illustrate, cognizance of this very problem runs deep within the last
two and a half centuries of the liberal intellectual tradition. Levy
nonetheless proceeds from the belief that a gap exists in classical
liberal theory’s treatment of racial and other forms of discrimination.
His argument, then, holds that that this gap may be filled with what he
describes as the “essential insights” of intersectionality analysis.
First posited by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s,
intersectionality has become an immensely fashionable epistemic
framework in academic discussions of race, gender, and other social
identities, particularly as they interact under discriminatory or
oppressive circumstances. Yet it also has come under fire for its own
ideological baggage, and particularly its association with a number of
far-left activist causes, including overt hostility to free-market
economic theory. While Levy largely discounts these charges as a
caricature of a mode of analysis he finds useful, they nonetheless
warrant consideration when assessing the relationship between
intersectionality theory and classical liberalism.
That brings us to the question of what intersectionality theory has
to offer to the same classical liberal tradition. If it is a largely
innocuous device for understanding how “racism and misogyny work and
interact at a social and cultural level,” as Levy contends, such
considerations might be expected to augment the aforementioned
anti-discriminatory current to liberal thought. But if, as its critics
often charge, intersectionality theory serves primarily to import
anti-capitalist, Marxist, and other far-left ideological priors into
social scientific analysis, an obvious tension emerges between it and
the liberal tradition. Indeed, that tension would be tantamount to a
complete inversion of the conscious historical links between
anti-discriminatory toleration and free market theory, dating back to
Fox, Smith, Cobden, and Hayek.
In attempting to answer these questions, I will note that it is not
my intention to dispute whether the problems of discrimination may be
interpreted through the framework of intersectional theory. Obviously
they can, and they are with great frequency in the academic literature
on race and gender. Rather, we must ask whether an intersectional
framework is a necessary tool for understanding the interacting
effects of discriminatory experiences, to the extent that any tradition
that attempts to grapple with these problems will come up short in the
absence of that framework. And we must also consider both the robustness
of intersectionality as an analytical tool and its vulnerability to
epistemic or ideological baggage, as the concept’s critics allege.
Between Two Intersectionalities
Before turning directly to these issues, it is helpful to develop a
functional definition of the concept of intersectionality. In doing so,
allow me to suggest that there are actually two forms of the concept at
play in the associated academic literature, including Crenshaw’s
original presentation. For convenience of this discussion I will
designate them as its elementary and compound forms.
Elementary intersectionality offers a relatively straightforward
observation. Drawing on the analogy of a traffic intersection in which
cars flow from multiple directions and, should a collision occur, the
quickly compounding effects that follow, Crenshaw presents the term as
a mental model for understanding social interactions as well.
Elementary intersectionality thus asserts that interactions traversing
multiple social identities (race, class, gender, religion, sexuality,
politics, and so forth) will produce distinct modes of experience that
are different from the experience of any one of those identities when
viewed in isolation. This in turn shapes how a social encounter is
received by its participants, especially in face of discrimination
against one or more component social identity. “[T]he intersectional
experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism,” she explains.
As a result “any analysis that does not take intersectionality into
account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which” a
member of multiple identity groups (Crenshaw uses the example of an
African-American female) experiences discriminatory subordination.
Crenshaw’s claim here is fairly innocuous in its elementary form and
rings true as a simple descriptive observation. This elementary usage is
also consistent with what Levy refers to as intersectionality “rightly
understood” in his essay. But that “truth” is also banally so, even to
the point one might legitimately wonder whether its basic insight is
significant enough to warrant so much ink—or whether such interactive
complexities were not already a matter of other human intuitions long
before the specific coining of the term.
Intersectionality’s academic fashionability likely derives from the
path dependency of the scholarly literature it emerged from, as Levy
also acknowledges. Crenshaw first presented the concept as a corrective
to the shortcomings of earlier feminist theory, which in her critique
had placed the white middle-class female experience at the center of
feminism to the neglect of other identities, including overlapping
experiences that diverged from this archetype. This critique may be
entirely appropriate given where mainstream feminist theory stood at the
time of Crenshaw’s original article. Its extension to other modes of
analysis becomes another matter, particularly given that the
intersectionality literature has long since expanded its reach beyond
the mid-century feminist genre typified by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Here we also begin to encounter the concept’s limitations.
Outside of the normative philosophical universe of critical theory,
social scientists have long used a fairly similar conceptual tool to
place the study of compound social interactions of almost all types on a
firmer empirical basis. Levy’s lead essay openly acknowledges this
similarity by way of comparison. But multivariate regression analysis
aims not only to quantify the effects of multiple variables upon an
observed social phenomenon—it also provides a testable approach for
discerning correlations between those terms.
Teasing out the compounding effects of multiple interacting variables
is arguably the great challenge of this line of empirical analysis, and
it carries with it a benefit that casual intersectionality theorizing
often lacks: scientific falsifiability. Of course a related challenge is
the limitations of empirical approaches in assessing variables that are
not easily quantified, which is where Levy proposes the parallel value
of qualitative intersectional analysis. But “difficult to measure” does
not mean “impossible to measure.” And in this elementary form, even a
charitable interpretation of intersectionality theory begins to look a
lot like armchair multivariate regression wherein weak or missing data
are made up for by injecting unfalsifiable normative speculation about
how race, gender, and other identity categories interact with
each other.
Let us turn then to the second form of intersectionality theory
though, which I again refer to here as compound intersectionality for
purposes of convenience. Whereas I’m somewhat inclined to agree with
Levy that conservatives have caricatured the elementary
intersectionality claim as delineated above, their charges against the
concept gain greater salience when redirected to the compound form.
So what do I mean by compound intersectionality? Here I refer to the scholarly literature, including subsequent contributions by Crenshaw,
that takes the relatively uncontroversial if also mundane elementary
iteration of the concept then extends it to a universal mode of
socio-political analysis and, with it, socio-political activism.
Examples of compound intersectionality theory abound in the scholarly
literature, often taking the form of sweeping denunciations of disliked
beliefs, concepts, and social institutions. In most forms it functions
as a normative identification strategy to imbue the characteristics of
racism, sexism, white supremacy, and other bigotries onto the
oppositional target of the activist’s political agitation. Generalized assaults on “late capitalism,” “market ideology,” or the trendy pejorative moniker “neoliberalism”
are commonplace in this literature, as are blanket denigrations of
prominent thinkers and liberal intellectual traditions—Milton Friedman
(frequently deemed an “architect” or “guru” of “disaster capitalism”), Friedrich A. Hayek (also a “chief architect”
of “neoliberalism”), Public Choice theory, and libertarianism in
general—as irredeemably tainted by white supremacy, even in the absence
of tangible evidence for this charge. Marxist ideology and its many
schismatic derivatives from the critical theory world are often baked
into this same literature, as are overt activist strategies, making the heavy normative baggage of this mode of analysis an unavoidable feature. In fact, a prominent subset of
the compound intersectionality literature is even explicitly devoted to
protecting the concept from the supposed corrupting incursions of
“neoliberal” hierarchies and “knowledge economies,” which are depicted
as existential threats to the activist objectives of a supposed
intersectional “political project.”
In its ubiquitous academic deployment, compound intersectionality
theory functions as an epistemic trump card wherein the vantage point of
an identity group or groups is invoked in the place of weak evidence to
establish a social scientific claim as “true,” or to shut down and
exclude a competing viewpoint with stronger evidence. We see this
pattern frequently in arguments that seek to dismiss salient criticisms
of a weakly attested normative proposition on account of presumptive
observations about the critic’s own race, gender, class, religion, or
other identity category.
While it may be tempting to dissociate these ideological
manifestations from the core of intersectionality theory, simply
returning to Crenshaw reveals a frank admission that an ideological
project lay at the root of its elementary form. “Recognizing that
identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect
thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking
about categories at all,” she explained in a 1990 expansion of
the concept. “Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better
acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means
by which these differences will find expression in constructing group
politics.” It offers no use to pivot back to the elementary form of the
concept as a means of avoiding the substantial ideological baggage and
far-left political activism of its compound iteration, as the two are
inextricably linked in its original formulation.
In noting this conundrum, one need not embrace the oversimplified
formulations of its underlying critique that come from the
editorializing of the political right. Such arguments are still heavy on
political rhetoric and uncharitable to the intersectionality concept,
even as they touch upon very real problems with its compound form.
A more robust and intellectual criticism of the operative mechanisms
may instead be found within scholarly criticisms of the broader critical
theory framework. A handful of pertinent examples come to mind. Adam
Martin’s assessment of “the New Egalitarianism”
identifies two characteristics at play in much of this literature, and
compound forms of intersectionality theory seem acutely susceptible.
First, such contributions are often intentionally obscurantist, which is
to say they adopt an intellectual style to “evade critical scrutiny” of
their claims. Harry Frankfurt applies the moniker “bullshit”
to this style of argumentation, differentiating it from an outright
deception by noting that the academic bullshitter is characterized by a
disregard for truth in the service of a narrative or persuasive aim.
With its already tenuous relationship to falsifiability in the
elementary form, compound intersectionality seems particularly
susceptible to sliding down the obscurantist slope of purposeful
indulgences in cluttered exercises of proprietary jargon that attempt to
imbue its baser political aims with an air of
intellectual sophistication.
The second feature of such literature, as Martin notes, is its
epistocratic tendencies, achieved by self-invocation of the
intersectionality literature as an arbiter of its own validity.
Intersectionality’s origins within a relatively narrow slice of
literature on mid-century feminism may render it particularly vulnerable
on this count, as seen in Crenshaw’s “discovery” of what may in its
elementary form be little more than a prosaic approximation of
quantitative analysis, minus the social scientific validation of
empirical testing. When shifted to its compound iteration, the process
of self-validation becomes an acroamatic exercise, which is to say that
intersectionality theorists adopt a posture of preemptively excluding
viewpoints that emerge exogenously to the intersectional literature,
including older and competing conceptual frameworks for the study of
race, gender, and compounding interactions involving social identity.
The very act of contestation of an intersectional claim, including its
built-in ideological implications, thus becomes discountable by casting
it as an untrained “misunderstanding” of what intersectionality means.
The combination of the two, obscurantism and epistocracy, thus functions
to elevate a weak and ideologically loaded social scientific claim into
a position of being politically unassailable.
As a final consideration, the compound and politically loaded form of
intersectionality theory carries with it the distinct risk of crowding
out more conceptually robust attempts to provide substantive
understanding of the problems of racial and other forms of
discrimination, including their overlapping effects. Perhaps this
subject will elicit further discussion in the responses, but two
potential avenues warrant brief mention. The first is within the
classical liberal line of anti-discriminatory theory noted at the outset
of my response essay, and perhaps most recently explored through the
public choice literature on the operation of discriminatory non-market
institutions. The second is to turn to the economic literature on race,
and particularly the evolution of different barriers to
economic and social life as experienced by persons facing
discrimination. Such discussions, drawing upon a multitude of methods
and intellectual traditions outside of the critical theory world, offer
meaningful insights for combating the harms of both explicit and soft
bigotries. Social scientific analysis of this subject suffers though if
competing and exogenous attempts to grapple with the problem of
discrimination are pushed aside by or subordinated to the pronounced
ideological activism of the intersectionality literature.
On Intersectionality and Classical Liberalism: Is there a common thread?
Returning to the question of what room, if any, exists for
commonality between intersectionality and classical liberalism, allow me
to offer a few observations in light of the foregoing discussion.
First, I agree with Levy that the elementary form of intersectionality
is largely non-objectionable when presented in isolation. It has also
been uncharitably depicted in conservative editorializing, at least when
understood as that same isolated elementary form. My one caveat, and
where I likely diverge from Levy on the point, is that the elementary
version of intersectionality just isn’t all that profound of an insight.
It is perhaps a convenient neologism for a common intuitive
observation. Insofar as classical liberal theory is concerned, its
isolated form does not necessarily conflict. But our sympathies for the
least well-off, and our legitimate desires to grapple with the
persistent problems of discrimination and bigotry in social
interactions, would be much better served by tapping the long and
vibrant intellectual tradition of liberal toleration and its many
anti-discriminatory extensions.
Compound intersectionality presents a much trickier set of problems
vis-à-vis the same liberal tradition due its ideological baggage.
Insofar as the compound form is an inextricable and consciously
projected political activist iteration of its elementary framing—and as
we’ve seen Crenshaw treats it as such—it may be irreconcilable.
Multiple prominent intersectionality theorists, expounding the
compound form, have made no effort to conceal their own hostility to
classical liberal thought and thinkers, to free market economics, to
capitalism, to “neoliberalism”—whatever that is other than a derisive
term for the aforementioned concepts —and to libertarian perspectives as
a whole. And even more so, much of this hostility takes the form of
invoking unfalsifiable esotericism to “detect” hidden strains of racism,
sexism, white supremacy, and other contemptible bigotries in the DNA of
that which the intersectionality literature derides for political
reasons. In its most abusive manifestations, this serves little other
purpose than to preemptively discredit any external scrutiny that might
otherwise challenge the accompanying ideological propositions of the
compound form by casting them outside of the realms of respectable
dialogue. Whether classical liberal thought may still incorporate
intersectionality theory, or at least its compound forms, may therefore
depend on considerations beyond our control, as much of the
intersectionality literature has already adopted an explicit rejection
of the very same proposition.
This concluding thought will likely be unwelcomed among those who see
greater hope for constructively adapting intersectional analysis to
liberal philosophy. But it needn’t rest on my own pessimism toward
the concept.
Crenshaw herself has effectively rendered the same judgement in her most recent book.
That book amounts to a broadside against the very notion of economic
sciences. “The emergence of economics as a discipline…” she contends,
“suppressed the study of socially constructed institutions” by reducing
human behavior to “the sum total of autonomous actions by universally
interchangeable rational and self-interested acquisitive subjects.” This
caricature is rendered all the more astounding in her identification of
what she sees as a primary culprit for this supposed trend, namely the
emergence of the public choice subfield.
This mid-twentieth century outgrowth of classical liberal economic
theory might strike the independent observer as uniquely suited to the
study of socially constructed institutions and the harmful incentive
structures therein, including discriminatory collective action.
Crenshaw, however, preemptively dismisses it. And she does so by
adopting the above-mentioned patterns of obscurantist deflection and
self-referential curation to exclude this line of analysis entirely.
Drawing explicitly upon the conspiratorial historical falsifications of Nancy MacLean,
Crenshaw contends “the ‘public choice’ paradigm…linked attacks on a
broad range of public institutions (especially public education) with
the preservation of American apartheid.” She continues, declaring that
“the core logic of an entire academic subfield,” public choice, is
“implicitly constituted around assumptions of white supremacy, even as
it disavowed any racial intent and animus.”
If you still hold out hope that classical liberal thought can be
constructively reconciled with intersectionality theory in a way that
meets Crenshaw’s own terms, I can only suggest that you are likely being
as dismissive of underlying problems with intersectionality as the
political right is with intersectionality itself.
Reprinted from Cato Unbound
Phillip W. Magness is a Senior
Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He
holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public
Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston).
Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching
public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions
including American University, George Mason University, and Berry
College.
Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States
and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of
slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and
measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains active
research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic
thought. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings
have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the
New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
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