Introduction

Liberalism today enjoys a widespread and nearly unchallenged consensus in the West and is a major force even outside the West. Its ascendency and consequent dominance since the Second World War has been remarkable, resulting in a situation where any alternative to liberalism seems almost unthinkable. Society today is so thoroughly permeated by liberal habits of thought that nearly everyone, including most self-described conservatives, accept basic liberal principles.

Nevertheless, in spite of its tremendous success, liberalism is at bottom incoherent and therefore fundamentally at odds with basic reality. Such an ideology becomes inhuman and destructive. It is important, then, to oppose liberalism and to articulate an alternative that is coherent and accepts the basic features of reality that liberalism rejects.

Before proposing such an alternative, however, it is important first to understand liberalism at a fundamental level. This is important for two reasons: first, when dealing with a foe as formidable and resilient as liberalism, arguments that do not attack it at its foundation will be ultimately ineffective as liberalism finds ways to adapt itself to apparent contradictions that remain superficial; second, when one attacks liberalism, one is liable to adopt liberal principles himself if he does not fully understand its basic commitments; the upshot is that one perpetuates liberalism in the long run even while claiming to oppose it by strengthening the consensus around its fundamental tenets.

This essay is therefore my effort towards a deeper understanding of liberalism. I attempt to lay out the basic principles of liberalism as well as some of the central features of its contemporary expression. The essay is not meant to be an exhaustive account of liberalism, but rather its aim is to clarify the relationship between certain key attributes of modern liberalism on the one hand and its underlying principles on the other in order to demonstrate how the former – which on a superficial analysis may often seem to contradict liberalism’s principles – follow logically from the latter. For this reason, I devote particular attention to attributes that may appear most counter to liberalism’s principles of freedom and equality and how liberalism attempts to resolve these tensions. Finally, I discuss how the contradictions inherent in making equal freedom society’s ultimate end culminate in a tyrannical and even totalitarian state. The thoughts expressed in this essay owe a lot to James Kalb’s influence and—while not consciously intended this way—might be considered something of a précis of his work.

Principles of Liberalism

Liberalism is based on two fundamental principles: freedom and equality. A third, neutrality, is important to liberalism’s contemporary self-understanding and can be regarded as an entailment of the twin principles of freedom and equality.

Freedom

The first principle of liberalism is freedom or liberty (not equality, as some mainstream conservatives suppose). In modern parlance it is often characterized as personal or individual autonomy. Man ought to be free to pursue his own vision of the good without the government, or society, or other individuals or institutions imposing their own conception of the good upon the individual. Therefore, man ought to be free of external constraints to which he did not consent since such constraints might conflict with his view of the good life. Because men disagree on what is good and true and because ultimate truth cannot be proved (so the argument goes), it is unjust for society to coerce man into abiding by a vision of the good to which he does not assent. Therefore, society ought to be organized upon the principle of freedom, whereby each individual can choose for himself his own vision of the good by which to live. In this way, society minimizes unjust coercion and conflict and allows every individual to pursue his own happiness and to follow what he believes is good and right.

Of course, the reader will recognize that the modern individual living in a liberal society is anything but free from external constraints. We will examine later how liberalism reconciles its favored constraints with its commitment to freedom.

Equality

Liberalism’s second principle is equality. Equality is not an independent principle in its own right, but follows from liberalism’s prior commitment to freedom: because freedom does not refer to any standard outside itself – to do so would be to presuppose a conception of the good that is not consented to and thus would violate liberalism’s first principle – it has no way of judging one man’s conception of the good superior to another’s. Therefore, different conceptions of the good must be regarded as each equally valid for an individual pursue.

Because there is no substantive content to the liberal conception of freedom, liberalism must treat the various conceptions of the good as reducible to the desires that one might happen to have: for example, the desire to worship God can in principle be treated no differently from the desire to eat ice cream for every meal, because to allow that the former might be more important than the latter would be to assume a particular conception of the good (i.e., one that assumes that God exists and is worthy of worship), the very thing that liberalism aims to prescind from. The principle of equality requires then that desires are treated equally and liberalism becomes the project of achieving equal preference satisfaction for individuals.

Equality acts as a limiting principle upon freedom: goals conflict, and man’s actions can limit the freedom of others, so for a society to function, man’s freedom cannot be unlimited. In one sense then, it is true—as some mainstream conservatives suppose—that freedom and equality are in conflict. However, the true function of equality is to preserve freedom by ensuring that one man does not use his freedom to restrict the freedom of others. Liberalism thus says that you can do what you please, insofar as you do not infringe upon the equal rights of others. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Or more colloquially: “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Freedom is liberalism’s ultimate good, while equality functions as its principle of justice.

Neutrality

As liberalism claims to treat all comprehensive visions of the good as equally valid, it claims that it is neutral with respect to visions of the good. While such a claim might seem ludicrous to conservatives and anti-liberals, it nevertheless is key to the self-understanding of late-stage liberalism: if liberalism were not conceived of as being neutral, some visions of the good would be favored over others, and the principles of freedom and equality would be vitiated. Public reason with respect to policy decisions and the like must be conducted on the basis of neutral principles accessible to all and which do not presuppose some disputed conception of the good (e.g., reasoning based upon religious principles).

The aim of liberalism might then be said to ensure that everyone is equally free to pursue his own vision of the good through the principle of public neutrality.

We can envision the liberal principles of freedom, equality, and neutrality as a sort of unholy trinity: freedom begets equality because the liberal conception of freedom has no reference to anything outside itself, so there is no standard by which to judge competing theories of the good; thus, they must all be treated as equal. From freedom and equality proceed neutrality: if society were to favor one vision of the good over another, then competing visions of the good would not be treated equally and the freedom of men to pursue conceptions of the good not favored by society would be curtailed. Thus, neutrality is a necessary entailment of freedom and equality as understood by modern liberalism¹.

Definition of Liberalism

With these principles in hand, we are ready to formulate a definition of liberalism:

Liberalism is the political doctrine that society should be so organized so that all men are equally free to pursue their own visions of the good. Society should constrain men’s free actions only insofar as they infringe on other men’s equal right to this freedom.

Other traditionalist writers have formulated their own definitions of liberalism. James Kalb has pithily described it as the idea that society ought to be organized to ensure the “equal preference satisfaction for individuals”. Bonald defines its fundamental principle as “personal autonomy guaranteed by public neutrality toward different private principles” and elsewhere as “procedural neutrality between competing comprehensive doctrines of the good”. Mark Richardson describes it as maximizing personal autonomy by removing unchosen constraints. Zippy defines liberalism as the political doctrine that securing liberty is what justifies the exercise of political authority. All of these formulations are variations on the same theme, that ensuring equal freedom should be the primary aim of government. Importantly, liberals themselves characterize liberalism in such terms, defusing any charge of concocting a strawman².

Liberalism and Rationalism

In the real world, liberalism supplements the abstract principles of freedom and equality with practical mechanisms to secure equal freedom for all—to the extent possible—in the face of conflicting claims, since freedom and equality do not give rise to any sort of order by themselves. These mechanisms should themselves be established according to neutral principles, so that society does not impose its own conception of the good in distributing justice.

The favored approach for modern liberalism to distribute equal freedom is in accordance with rationalist principles. In this context, rationalism refers to the perspective that things ought to be ordered according to impersonal, universal, explicit, and comprehensive rules. The paradigmatic model for such a system of rules is the scientific enterprise, which is likewise regarded as consisting of objective, universal laws. Such a system does not appeal to any controversial transcendent vision of the good but merely to procedural rules that facilitate the efficient distribution of equal freedom, so it is not itself seen as imposing a controversial vision of the good on society, in a similar way to how the established claims of science are regarded as non-controversial and neutral.

Because such rules constructed along rationalist lines are impersonal and universal, they are regarded as being neutral: they do not appear to favor one person over another according to particularist prejudices and they treat everyone the same. Procedural mechanisms formulated according to rationalist principles allow society to prescind from questions about substantive goods and judge everything according to formal criteria, also presenting an appearance of neutrality. That the rules be explicit and comprehensive is important in being seen as rational: ordering principles that cannot be fully articulated or grasped—e.g., a transcendent ordering principle—appeal to something beyond man’s ken and are therefore suspected of imposing a conception of the good on society since they are thought not to be rationally demonstrable, thereby opening themselves to challenge. Likewise, rules that are non-comprehensive imply that certain areas of life involve substantive public goods—i.e., things that are good independent of our individual desiring or choosing them—that cannot be assimilated to the rationalist project of reducing everything to formal criteria. The role rationalism plays in contemporary liberalism and how it manifests in concrete circumstances will become clearer throughout the rest of the essay.

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1. The reader might question the inclusion of neutrality as a key principle of modern liberal thought: it does not seem to play the central role it once did in liberalism’s self-understanding; indeed, sometimes it is now even attacked by the modern left. I will address this briefly in a later part of the essay. ↩︎
2. For example, from “The Unexpected Persistence of John Rawls”: “I might believe that the best life requires solitary contemplation, while you are committed to unbridled hedonism, and yet despite these differences, we can nevertheless agree that we should each have a bundle of rights that protects our ability to pursue these incompatible visions—not least because they protect us each from interference by the other. Instead of trying to resolve the deeper questions that divide us, Rawls suggested that we focus on the shallowest possible bases of agreement, in order to achieve what he called an “overlapping consensus.” Or, by the same author in “Illiberal Liberalism”: “The basic formula for liberal toleration is extremely simple. Like everyone else, you think that your way of life is right and that others have it wrong. But at the same time, you recognize that others think that their way of life is right and yours is wrong. Based on this realization, you agree to refrain from trying to impose your way of life on others, and in return they agree to refrain from imposing their way of life on you.” For a final example, see “Individual Autonomy is Not the Enemy of a Humane Liberalism” for the central role autonomy plays in liberalism. These examples were all taken from articles I happened to come across at the same time I was finalizing this essay draft, many others could be added. Mark Richardson documents such examples of liberals’ self-understanding of liberalism at his blog. ↩︎