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What Liberalism Means

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Ronald Beiner
Ronald Beiner
Affiliation:
Political Science, University of Toronto
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Extract

My purpose in this essay is to give an account of the kind of robust social criticism that I associate with the very enterprise of theory and to explain why the liberal philosophy that prevails in the contemporary academy is averse to this sort of social criticism. My purpose, then, is both to explore a certain conception of radical socialtheory and to defend this conception against familiar objections posed by those who represent the dominant liberal political philosophy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Winter 1996 , pp. 190 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1996

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References

1 Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1992), p. 145.

2 Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2,Philosophical Papers, (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1985)Google Scholar;Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983)Google Scholar;MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986)Google Scholar;MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar;Sandel, Michael J., Liberalism and the Limits of justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar;Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler, Ann, and Tipton, Steven M., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1985Google Scholar); Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979).Google Scholar

3 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar;Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar;Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977)Google Scholar;Dworkin, Ronald, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar;Ackerman, Bruce A., Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar;Larmore, Charles, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).Google Scholar

4 Hayek, Friedrich A., Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960)Google Scholar;Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)Google Scholar;Oakeshott, Michael, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).Google Scholar

5 It must be noted that not all contemporary liberals are “neutralist” liberals; indeed, the axiom of “neutralism” has been strongly contested by a group of authors who have come to be called “perfectionist” liberals. Among the important works in this category, see Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar;Macedo, Stephen, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)Google Scholar;Galston, William A., Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gutmann, Amy, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).Google Scholar Needless to say, I have much greater sympathy for the antineutralist version of liberalism common to these works, although they still fallshort of the horizon of critical reflection that I am demanding. It seems fair to say that perfectionist liberalism is situated somewhere midway between the liberal neutralism that is the primary focus of mycritique, and the more ambitious vision of social criticism that is being defended in this essay. (Cf. Galston, Liberal Purposes, pp. 43–44.)

6 Beiner, Ronald, What's the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 8 n. 4.Google Scholar

7 MacIntyre, Alasdair, “The Privatization of Good: An Inaugural Lecture,” Review of Politics, vol. 52, no. 3 (Summer 1990), pp. 344–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 I owe this formulation to Stephen Newman.

9 An extreme illustration of this point is the fact that the prime agent of the Islamic persecution of Salman Rushdie is (at least officially) not the Iranian state, but an institution within “civil society,” namely, the 15 Khordad Foundation, which put up the bounty for Rushdie's execution. For Mill's views, see, for instance,Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, ed. David, Spitz (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975), p. 15Google Scholar, where he writes that what concerns him is the “disposition ofmankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others” (my italics). The tendency that worries Mill is advanced, he says, both by legislation and “by force of opinion.”

10 The “fact of pluralism” is John Rawls's phrase: see Rawls, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 17, no. 4 (Fall 1988), pp. 259, 275.Google Scholar

11 Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 165.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 153n.

13 It is not uncommon for liberals to argue that the philosophical rationale for the market economy is a moral conception, namely, a certain kind of egalitarianism that sees market society as having emancipated individuals from the hierarchical ascriptive roles and relationships characteristic of a preliberal, premodern social order. One such argument is offered in Booth, William James, Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, Part 2. This isconsistent with my argument above in regard to the logical priority of liberalism as a moral vision over capitalism as a vision of the economy.

14 This is the basic structure of argument in Rawls, Political Liberalism; Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity; and Larmore, Charles, “Political Liberalism,” Political Theory, vol. 18, no. 3 (August 1990), pp. 339–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, Rawls insists that his “overlapping consensus” theory is not a “modus vivendi” conception, and to this extent would want to distance himself somewhat from Larmore's version of liberalism.

15 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Rorty, Richard, “The Priority of Democracy toPhilosophy,” in Rorty, Philosophical Papers, vol.1, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 175–96.Google Scholar See the criticisms of Rorty's political philosophy elaborated inmy article,“Richard Rorty's Liberalism,” Critical Review, vol. 7, no. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 15–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Grant, George, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965)Google Scholar; see esp. ch. 5. Grant's book was a major theoretical manifestofor Canadian nationalism in the 1960s. Although Grant himself conceived his argument on behalf of nationalism as an expression of his commitment to conservatism, or more strictly Anglo-Canadian Toryism, the book also had a very large impact upon Canadian nationalists on the Left, who of course had their own reasons for hostility to the imperialistic thrust of Americanism.

17 Consider, here, Leszek Kolakowski's acute remarks concerning the looming extinction of the Celtic languages; see his Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 23. See also my commentary on Kolakowski: “Thin Ice,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 5, no. 3 (August 1992), pp. 65–70, where I discuss the complexities of judgment concerning modernity and antimodernity.

18 Rushdie, Salman, “Is Nothing Sacred?” in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 415.Google Scholar

19 Cf. ibid., p. 261 (Rushdie quoting Italo Calvino): “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.”

20 As concerns sexual life: in an unpublishedessay entitled “Borrowed Truths: Sexuality, Authenticity, and Modernity,” Leslie Green argues that it is to the credit of liberal society that it takes sex “off the high-tension wires,” and turns decisions about sexual life into matters of taste and mere preference, stripping them of any “cosmic” meaning. Here too, it may be replied, one pays a price for this banalization of sexuality.

21 Macedo, Liberal Virtues, p. 278.

22 Gray, John, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1986), p. 82.Google Scholar

23 Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 190.

24 Here I can actually cite the authority of John Stuart Mill, who agrees that this is the proper function of theory: “The first question in respect to any political institutions is, how far they tend to foster in the members of the community the various desirable qualities, moral and intellectual” (Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, ch. 2).

25 My source for biographical information concerning the painting is Webb, Peter, Portrait of David Hockney (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988), pp. 109–10.Google Scholar For reproductions of the painting and preliminary studies, see ibid., plates 87–90 and 112.

26 It is a central aspect of my argument in this essay that the decisive measure of one's liberalism is the extent of one's philosophical commitment to modernity. This will have what will appear to many to be a paradoxical consequence (but one that I willingly embrace), namely, that authors like Charles Taylorand Jurgen Habermas who offer strong defenses of modernity in their recent work are to that extent to be categorized as liberals–in contrast with, say, Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, who throughout their work are consistent critics of modernity.

27 For notable examples of works representingthis tendency, see Rawls, Political Liberalism;Dworkin, Ronald, Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986), ch. 6;Google ScholarDworkin, Ronald, “Liberal Community,” California Law Review, vol. 77, no. 3 (May 1989), pp. 479–504;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; and Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.”

28 In its least penetrating version, the communitarian critique of liberalism seems to issue in the suggestion that the failings of liberalism can be remedied by a heightened collectivist consciousness; for me, the demand for a heightened collectivist consciousness does not pose a sufficiently radical challenge to liberalism. Hannah Arendt once remarked that “just as socialism is no remedy for capitalism, capitalism cannot be a remedy or an alternative for socialism”(Arendt, , Crises of the Republic [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972], p. 220)Google Scholar; and I am tempted to say that the same applies to the quarrel between liberals and communitarians.

29 Beiner, What's the Matter with Liberalism? p. 15. In chapters 1 and 7 of the book, I try to make the case that it is not the chief purpose of theorists to offer immediate guidance on questions of policy. Rather, the aim of theory at its best is to offer grand visions of moral and political order in the light of which we can engage in ambitiously critical self-reflection about the character of our society. It is not the purpose of this essay to argue that the standard by which contemporary political philosophies should be judged is the ambitiousness with which they presume to legislate political practice from the heights of philosophical insight; the purpose, rather, is to argue that they should be judged according to their ambitiousness in enlarging the space of critical reflection (which is certainly not the same thing as presuming to direct political practice). Therefore, I cannot agree with John Dunn that “[t]he purpose of political theory is to diagnose practical predicaments and to show us how best to confront them”(Dunn, , Interpreting Political Responsibility [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1990], p. 193).Google Scholar I do agree with him, however, that political philosophy as it is dominantly practiced today reflects “its radical domestication, itscomplete subordination to the dynamics of an existing ideological field” (ibid., p. 195).

30 To cite one example: in “Do We Have a Right to Pornography?” (in A Matter of Principle, pp. 335–72), Ronald Dworkin severely criticizes Bernard Williams's philosophical premises, yet he has no desire at all to contest the validity of the practical recommendations that Williams seeks to draw from these premises.

31 An instructive case is Judith Shklar's “liberalism of fear” (see, for instance, her article ofthat title in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Rosenblum, Nancy L. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], pp. 21–38)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, since Shklar's liberalism, even though it is richer and more interesting than the neo-Kantian liberalisms that have been so influential, shares the decisive flaw common to all contemporary liberalisms. For Shklar, a society that does not torture, maim, oppress, degrade, or humiliate its members, or particular groups within it, meets the only relevant standard of political desirability. It is true that even this minimalist standard offers some scope for criticizing existing liberal regimes; yet it is very easy to think of societies that meet this standard and nonetheless embody in their social order a prettycrummy way of life. Shklar's conception of what it is to do political theory discourages her from passing judgment on these “cultural” concerns. Exactly the same considerations apply to Isaiah Berlin.