Regular readers know (recall) that I believe the second wave of liberalism+ has ended and that it may not survive the present darkness. (In brief: first long wave: 1776-1914; second wave: 1945-2009. Some readers will say, good riddance, and to you I say, I hope you do better.) The present crisis is much visible in our daily politics (and headlines), shifting public norms, and the rising confidence of regimes and thinkers who, again, openly espouse hierarchical, ethnic, zero-sum, eugenic, and violent solutions to present conflicts.* While there is much urgent, practical work to be done to salvage institutions that may be at the core of a renewal, some reflection away from daily politics is also required. This also requires attention not just because we need polities that make minimal decency possible,** but also because we need (or so I assume today) properly functioning liberal institutions to meet humanity's great challenges -- environmental disaster, genetic engineering, ethnic conflict, -- ahead. To reflect on our shortcomings is a means of being liberal as well as a path toward its possible renewal. This is the second post (recall) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, and here).
What follows, then is the start of an attempt to display the existential challenges to liberalism that arise from within. I do not offer solutions to these challenges and so invite readers to chime in. In earlier posts, I discussed self-inflicted wounds such as (i) For profit media; and (ii) the financialization of the economy.
Today i focus on (iii) the Embrace of Revealed Preferences/The Rejection of a Philosophy of Life. One striking feature of the second half of the second wave of liberalism is that its most prominent advocates were economists and ('ethics first') political philosophers (or both). Jointly, their prominence conveyed the message that the point of a liberal project is protecting rights in order to make and re-distribute money. Of course, making money is not the end of the story, it is taken to be an instrument for the pursuit of one's private welfare and the embrace of (what a Rawlsian may call) private, nonpublic values and individual life-plans. Liberalism was seen as an important political and economic doctrine, not a philosophy of life.+ This has two important consequences, first, liberals embrace state-neutrality with respect to fundamental values/goods; and, second, we have a tendency to promote the idea that public speech and justification must be articulated in terms of public reason (with respect for fairness, principles of freedom, equality, and justice, etc.).
By contrast, critics of liberalism appeal to shared, action-guiding projects: the health of the nation, submission to the divine plan, a green future, a post-revolutionary communist/socialist paradise, social harmony, traditional values, etc. Obviously, these projects are often incompatible with each other. And liberals are often tempted to argue from the pluralist reality of conflicting values in societies with advanced division of labor (and so conflicting interests) and a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds to the prudential idea that state neutrality is required. We may even add that conflicting values are epistemically fruitful in preventing the dogmatic and premature embrace of any ideology.
But this stance generates a tactical and a philosophical challenge. The tactical challenge is that critics of liberalism are left to articulate profound shared action-guiding projects, while liberals are left to point to statistics of rising GDP. Now, one may argue that the rejection of shared projects is a feature of liberal political ideology not a bug. And one may claim that rising GDP is often a sign of the removal of famines, the reduction of poverty, increased life expectancy, lower crime, etc. So, it's not as if the liberal's pointing to such statistics is morally worthless. But tactically, the liberal is left with uninspiring politic projects, especially in a context where by historical standards modern societies are already fairly wealthy and not very likely to suffer famine or violent crimes. (Yeah, go read your Pinker!)
The philosophical challenge is the articulation of a liberalism worth having that is both a shared, action-guiding project and does not violate core liberal commitments (the harm principle, the avoidance of cruelty, individual autonomy, non-dogmatism, freedom, justice, etc.). For, shared visionary projects are action-guiding (recall this post critical of Jacob Levy). The articulation of such shared projects, means rejecting a relatively recent, second-wave liberal dogma, nicely articulated by Shklar, "liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make." (Again, I pick Shklar because in many ways she is least like the problematic version of liberalism I am rejecting.) I think this claim is a mistake, even if I grant Shklar and her followers that creating political conditions and institutions in which cruelty is avoided a crucial and difficult enough task as it is.
The first sentence of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, asserts, as an axiom, that flourishing of others is necessary to us.** He goes on to describe how such flourishing is possible and what objective conditions for it are. In particular, he draws a sharp contrast between what people imagine is worth attaining and what are true means toward flourishing. The liberal enterprise is, thus, from the beginning concerned with articulating shared projects, the institutions that may facilitate them, and an embrace of ideas that imply that people's flourishing is an objective state of affairs.++
Now, one may worry -- as Shklar evidently did -- that if one asserts that joint flourishing is an objective state of affairs worth promoting that one then may provide "public authorities the unconditional right to impose beliefs and even a vocabulary as they may see fit upon the citizenry." This is a reasonable fear and most of the critics of liberalism who promote a shared project do so to some degree (even if some will abhor an unconditional right). But Shklar and modern liberals ignore, that there is a half-way station between imposing approved beliefs/vocabulary and being neutral.+++
What matters is that (again echoing Smith) individuals have the security, capabilities, dispositions, and options to make meaningful choices of the sort that will allow them to flourish jointly. Today, in the context of this post, I do not offer a substantive program (which would have to draw on more recent social science and moral psychology). (Such flourishing will probably involve good health, mutual recognition, lack of fear, the opportunity for love, capabilities for meaningful choices, cultural development, etc.) Rather, all I point out here is that within constraints, the state can promote indirect incentives conducive to joint flourishing and virtue, while generating strong, indirect disincentives that prevent mutual misery while not encroaching on people's individual freedoms.*** What such a liberalism worth having is, is something that, for now, I must leave -- and this is a political invitation, my dear reader -- to your imagination.
*This is not suggest there are no important differences among the enemies of liberalism. But that for another post (recall for example this piece and this one; this one, and this one amongst others.)
+See, for example, Judith Shklar's "The Liberalism of Fear;" Shklar is in many ways least like the ones (Rawls, Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, etc.) I have in mind here.
**Strictly speaking Smith speaks of 'happiness,' but that word has been debased. So, I pick a word that conveys what he intends to say.
++That's compatible with the content of beliefs that individuals may have being a subjective affair.
+++I ignore here the not entirely unfair criticism of liberals that state neutrality is, de facto, not so neutral.
***Shklar is correctly critical of the liberalism of personal development (which she associates with the liberalism of Locke and J.S. Mill). My liberalism is not far removed from theirs, but can be more aptly be described as a historically self-aware, liberalism of collective development.
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