Liberalism and Its Critics

But such is the nature of the human mind, that it always lays hold on every mind that approaches it; and as it is wonderfully fortified by an unanimity of sentiments, so it is shocked and disturbed by any contrariety. — David Hume, “Of Parties in General,” Essays Moral, Political and Literary

Human beings disagree. Within and across all societies people display differences of outlook or inclination when confronted by questions about matters of fact or of value. Indeed, they differ over the very nature of such questions: over whether or not matters of fact are questions of value. Over some of the most important questions, their disagreements have manifested themselves in violent conflicts: in wars and in civil wars. Over less important issues, their disagreements appear as more or less amicable debates about policy and practice. What is to count as an important issue is itself, of course, an important issue.

Perhaps none of this is really so surprising. For all our disputes reflect our preoccupation with what might be called Socrates’s question: the question of how one should live. And that, Socrates (or Plato) tells us, is no trifling matter. (Republic 352d)

Plato, as a philosopher, had his own answer to offer. But moral and political theorists continue to disagree and to put forward different answers to the great question of practical philosophy. It is at once difficult and all too easy to categorize philosophers and their answers.

Nonetheless, in order to assess a contemporary debate among philosophers about some of the fundamental questions of moral and political philosophy, I propose to distinguish two kinds of answers. The answers are characterized by their attitudes toward the fact of human disagreement.

The first kind of answer is troubled by the existence of disagreement, by the plurality of values evident in a society. And it says, in effect, that the good society must be one in which there is agreement about substantive (as against mere procedural) values. The polity is thus seen as a community, united by a shared moral outlook and sustained by institutions that embody its moral values. To the extent that (fundamental) values are plural, the polity is in danger, for if there is no shared conception of human ends or purposes, of what is to count as rational choice, or of how life should be lived, community will break down. And the individual will be left rootless, alone, and unable to seek the good life in any meaningful sense.

The second kind of answer also recognizes the fact of human disagreement. And it acknowledges that disagreement can lead to conflict that threatens the very survival of society. But, unlike the first kind of answer, it does not suggest that any probable polity must be a community that shares a substantive moral view of the proper ends of human life. Rather, it emphasizes that human ends must be chosen. And the proper function of the polity is to provide the forum within which to prevent or settle the conflicts that might arise because people choose otherwise incompatible ends. In this picture the polity is an association of individuals or communities, joined not so much by a shared view of the proper ends of life as by agreement to coexist in peace, according to certain norms, despite their differences. Political association, on this view, is an artifice and the product of individual will. (For a fuller discussion of this see Patrick Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy.)

The conflict between these two kinds of answers has been brought into sharp focus in a recent controversy in Anglo-American social and political theory. The publication (in 1971) of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice generated a new interest in (and a considerable literature on) substantive questions of political theory. It also brought to the fore a series of critics who have given louder voice to the challenge that no liberal, individualist answer to the fundamental questions of political theory can be coherent or plausible. Some have gone further. They would assert that no political society whose institutions are imbued with individualist presuppositions can endure, let alone flourish. Those who see greater coherence in the liberal stance disagree.

This controversy is very much a current one. And an examination of its literature should afford us a clearer picture of the debate between liberalism and its critics: of the character of the arguments put against the liberal stance, of the quality of those arguments, of the adequacy of the liberal response, and, perhaps most importantly, of what work needs to be done by those approaching social and political theory from a liberal point of view.

A recent book offers some clues as to what most concerns the critics of liberalism. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life by Robert N. Bellah, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), warns that while Americans appear to cherish freedom as their most important value, their “individualism” and lack of any “common conceptions of the ends of the good life” tend to isolate them from one another “and thereby undermine the conditions of freedom.” Without a public philosophy that aims directly at securing the public good, this individualism, already grown “cancerous,” will spread and destroy what little remains of America’s public culture. What individualism does is encourage the pursuit of private success at the expense of any concern for the preservation of “a more genuinely integrated societal community.” This is already evident in the “extreme fragmentation of the modern world”; what is not so evident to Americans, Bellah and his colleagues argue, is that it is this fragmentation “that really threatens our individuation; that what is best in our separation and individuation, our sense of dignity and autonomy as persons, requires a new integration if it is to be sustained.”

Habits of the Heart is not a work of philosophy in any conventional sense. Written by self-conscious followers of Tocqueville, it focuses on the morés, opinions, and attitudes (the “habits of the heart”) of the American people. It is cast as a report of and commentary on some 250 extended interviews conducted with white, middle-class, professional Americans. The conclusion it reaches on the basis of this curious sample is that Americans share few common values and are unable to offer “adequate” reasons for holding them. Part of the problem is the very language of individualism which, as “the primary American language of self-understanding, limits the ways in which people think.” Thus even when not seeking purely material goods, Americans dissatisfied in the context of their “damaged social ecology” find the “allure of the packaged good life” too strong to resist.

As a work of political philosophy Habits of the Heart is scarcely worth a second glance since it contains little more than assertion, and nothing approaching a sustained argument. As social theory it is of no value for much the same reason. And it has little of interest to say about the way out of our present “predicament” except to warn, somewhat melodramatically, that we hover on the “very brink of disaster,” “slide toward the abyss,” and that “unless we begin to repair the damage to our social ecology, we will destroy ourselves long before natural ecological disaster has time to be realized.”

What this book does offer, however, is evidence of the persistence of what we might call the communitarian crie de coeur: that a society composed of a diversity of moral traditions, embracing different values, united only by individualist principles or norms, is no kind of society at all. And it indicates clearly that, for communitarians generally, the most favored solutions to our ills involve the creation of institutions concerned directly to sustain and preserve traditions and communities.

For a more rigorous and sustained analysis of the inadequacy of individualism, however, we must look elsewhere: to the philosophical writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer.

In his widely discussed book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981; revised edition 1986), MacIntyre offers grim counsel: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” The demise of what he calls the “tradition of the virtues” has led to our being governed not by any rational moral tradition but by a politics that amounts to little more than “civil war carried on by other means”: the barbarians no longer strain against our frontiers but “have already been governing us for quite some time.” After Virtue presents a philosophical history of Western moral theory that depicts the advent of the Enlightenment as the crucial chapter in the demise of a rational moral tradition. In this period, MacIntyre suggests, morality rightly understood was transformed, fragmented, and ultimately displaced. For this period saw a “change of belief” that was manifested, not only in the secularization of Protestantism, but also in a change in “the modes of belief.” These social and philosophical changes raised key questions about the justification of belief, especially moral belief. “Morality” became “the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct that were neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own.” And it was when moral theory was distinguished from theological, legal, and aesthetic doctrine that the project of an independent rational justification of morality became the central concern of Northern European culture.

MacIntyre’s thesis is that the breakdown of this project provided the historical background against which the predicaments of our own liberal individualist culture become intelligible. And he offers two critical observations. First, that the project of justifying morality had to fail because of its very nature. And second, that it is the very fact that we continue to engage in this hopeless undertaking that constitutes our predicament. It is implausible to expect that social arrangements be assessed from some disinterested, impartial, external point of view and still hope that they be judged by standards that have genuine moral or aesthetic worth.

Thus, in a more recent article (“Moral Arguments and Social Contexts,” Journal of Philosophy, 80, October 1983) he observes: “Only within a community with shared beliefs about goods, and shared dispositions educated in accordance with those beliefs, both rooted in shared practices, can practical reason-giving be an ordered, teachable activity with standards of success and failure.”

The evidence he offers to defend this account of “our predicament” is, once again, the existence of disagreement or, as he puts it, “intellectual and social dissensus.” He, for one, is troubled by the fact that Lester Thurow gives us one explanation of our economic ills while Thomas Sowell offers us another — for we seem to have no clear standards by which to decide between them. And the persistence of disagreement about such issues as nuclear armament and abortion, for MacIntyre, further indicates that liberal society has no shared moral first principles by which its conflicts can be resolved.

Michael Sandel’s much less ambitious book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), expresses some similar concerns, but also defends the claim that the problem with liberalism lies in its aspiration to make justice its first principle. For, as he makes clear in a later article (“The Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory, 1984), he thinks that a polity governed by principles of procedural justice is neither a coherent nor a plausible ideal.

Sandel’s book appears initially as a study of Rawls’s political theory; but to so describe it would be misleading. For he takes Rawls as the proper focus for study only because the crucial presuppositions of liberal theory can, he thinks, be found in Rawls’s theory of justice. Thus Sandel makes many more general claims about liberalism in the conclusion, which is reprinted in a collection, edited by him, entitled Liberalism and its Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). What liberalism asks of us, he says, is that we view ourselves as creatures of a certain kind, related to our circumstances in a certain way: as separate selves, independent of the real interests and attachments we may have at any moment, “never identified by our aims but always capable of standing back to survey and assess and possibly to revise them.” From this perspective, he says, liberalism asks us to construct principles of justice, and requires us to accept allegiance to these principles as the first of the virtues. Such a demand could only be made in a world without any objective moral order: “Only a world ungoverned by a purposive order leaves principles of justice open to human construction and conceptions of the good open to individual choice.”

What Sandel finds deeply implausible in all this is that liberalism’s requirement that the self be independent is no mere psychological matter. It is not simply asking us to summon the detachment necessary to stand outside our values and ends. Rather, it insists that we regard ourselves as the bearers of selves distinct from our values and ends. This is an epistemological claim. But once the bounds of the self are no longer fixed by its “constitutive” attachments, it is no longer possible to distinguish clearly between the public and private dimensions of individual life. For what kinds of selves (public? private?) are individuals without interests or attachments? It becomes impossible to describe the liberal polity as an association of private selves. And as a contractual association it is impossible to say what the terms of its agreement might be since we cannot even identify the character of the contracting parties, let alone specify what bargains they might strike in constructing a political order.

This distancing of the self from its ends is the root of liberalism’s difficulties, in Sandel’s argument. For it fails to recognize that the self is not an independent construct but, in some important sense, a political construct.

“By putting the self beyond the reach of politics, it makes human agency an article of faith rather than an object of continuing attention and concern, a premise of politics rather than its precarious achievement.”

Similar charges are laid at the door of liberal theory by Charles Taylor. Less rigorous and consistent than Sandel and less interesting and imaginative than MacIntyre, Taylor is nonetheless widely regarded as a significant critic of liberalism. Two volumes of his Philosophical Papers, containing several essays criticizing liberal individualism, were published recently: Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Taylor’s fundamental charge is that liberal theory gives priority to the individual’s choice of ends and, thus, places individual rights above the claims of society. The unwarranted assumption of liberal thought, in Taylor’s view, is that man can be regarded as self-sufficient, rational and autonomous, independent of society. Indeed, liberalism conceives of man “atomistically” and is, for this reason, unable to adequately explain the fact of human sociability.

This failure has more important implications. Because liberal institutions are founded on a mistaken account of man, those institutions themselves have an “atomizing” effect on individuals. For, by focusing so much on individual “rights,” liberal institutions fail to consider the importance of sustaining the capacities that make individual choice possible. To do this, in his view, would require institutions that were concerned much more to ensure that the social context within which individuals operate is one that helps to nurture these capacities.

These three critics of liberalism share a common pedigree. All consider themselves to be challenging liberal individualism from the standpoint of a superior moral tradition: an Aristotelian tradition that emphasizes man’s social and political character, and stresses his rootedness in his own peculiar historical traditions. For Sandel and Taylor, this also means viewing the modern world of liberalism in the light of Hegel’s criticisms of market society. All three repudiate the idea of reconstructing society or institutions in accordance with first principles chosen through some philosophical construction embodying the assumptions of a voluntarist ethics.

In this last respect, they share something with yet another critic of individualism, Michael Walzer, a philosopher who approaches moral and political theory not as an adherent of the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues but as a democrat suspicious of philosophical construction. Walzer, it must be noted, does not describe himself as a critic of liberalism. But there are good reasons for regarding him as one. In his widely discussed book, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) he states clearly his view that “The appropriate arrangements for our own society are . . . those of a decentralized democratic socialism.” And an important chapter of that book was included among a series of essays critical of liberalism, in the volume Liberalism and its Critics, edited by Sandel. Moreover, in another much discussed essay (“Philosophy and Democracy,” Political Theory, 1981) Walzer puts forward an argument that is essentially a critical attack on the claims of liberal political philosophers who seek to reconstruct social institutions in the light of philosophical principles.

As a democrat, Walzer argues for a brand of pluralism which holds that there are many communities and that the answer to the question “What is the appropriate structure for the community and its government?” must be different for each different society. He is suspicious of philosophy, which, he thinks, aspires to recast each and every political community in the same mould, and thus deny the importance of each society’s historical and cultural particularity. For Walzer, moral values are not universal but local; they are manifested in the “understandings” or “social meanings” we share. What (liberal individualist) philosophers wish to do is judge all social arrangements by extra-social standards. (See, on this, the interesting exchange between Walzer and Ronald Dworkin in the New York Review of Books in 1983. The exchange followed Dworkin’s highly critical review of Spheres of Justice in that journal on April 14, 1983.)

Walzer’s own theory inclines him to favor institutions that extend the use of democratic decision procedures— particularly within the United States. And it also makes him hostile to what he considers the undue incorporation of philosophical principles into the law, whether by interpretation or amendment. (Once again this offers a clear contrast with Ronald Dworkin’s defense, from a putatively liberal point of view, of a principled judicial activism through the moral philosophical interpretation of the law.) For Walzer, this route can lead only to authoritarianism or tyranny: philosophical construction will, more often than not, lead to the imposition on an unsuspecting community of alien and, ultimately, dislocative standards.

Thus far the communitarian manifesto; how, and how adequately, has liberal individualism replied? In my view, the communitarian case is a weak one. And this is most evident in the fact that none of the critics of liberal individualism has put forward a theory of social institutions to describe how the aims of community might be realized. (Walzer’s book makes some attempt to fill this need, but in the end deals more with why different social goods ought to be distributed by different criteria, than with the question of how this might be done.) Moreover, they have failed to recognize the extent to which liberal societies do exhibit a remarkable amount of consensus: how much the reconciliation of conflict is sought peacefully, through established channels, in which arguments, and not weapons, are deployed. Indeed, the communitarians have not seen that the liberal commitment to the peaceful resolution of disagreement, through reasoned debate in public forums, is a commitment to a substantive public morality.

Nonetheless, the liberal response has not been a strong one. This is so for two reasons: first, in seeking to accommodate many of the claims of the communitarians, some liberal theorists have moved too far across into the communitarian camp; and, second, in failing to address important questions of social theory, liberal theorists have themselves failed both to show the inadequacy of communitarian assumptions about the operation of social institutions and to offer an account of what kinds of institutions would sustain the liberal polity.

Richard Rorty, for example, has recently emerged as a self-proclaimed defender of liberalism in several short political philosophical essays articulating the political implications of a Deweyan (and Heideggerian!) pragmatism. (See, for example: “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy, 80, October 1983; “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” Praxis International, 1984, and his collection of essays, Consequences of Pragmatism, Essays: 1972-1980, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982— particularly the Introduction and chapters 1, 11, and 12.) For Rorty, liberalism is to be defended not by some abstract, external standard but rather because it is “ours”: the product of the Western intellectual and historical tradition of which we are inescapably a part. And as such we should “celebrate” it. What we cannot do, in his view, is offer an ahistorical, philosophical justification for liberalism. The inadequacy of this stance becomes apparent as soon as one asks why we should “celebrate” or embrace liberalism, for, in Rorty’s terms, no answer can be given. When Rorty does try to offer reasons why liberal social institutions are “better” he thus lapses into incoherence, as he is forced to maintain that they are better, not by any standard “but just better in the sense that they seem clearly better than their predecessors.”

Rawls, however, has tried to defend the liberal point of view without endorsing Rorty’s pragmatism. His most recent published paper (“Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1985) is presented, in part, as a response to the criticisms of Walzer and Sandel but cast as a reinterpretation of his own political philosophy. The most important point he makes is that his is a political conception of justice, and one which is in no way dependent on any particular metaphysical conception of the self. Although this point does not come out clearly enough in the article, Rawls holds out the possibility that the metaphysical incoherence with which he is charged is not present in his theory because the bargaining parties in the Original Position are not selves or persons but citizens. While it may be implausible to ground a political theory on a conception of a person as a “disembodied subject” (to use Sandel’s terminology), as an agent independent of his interests and attachments, it may not be so implausible to ground a theory on such a conception of a citizen. For it is precisely the claim of liberal theory that a citizen cannot ask that his private or personal interests be favored, or even considered, in the construction of public standards. Unlike persons, all citizens are, from the point of view of a liberal public philosophy, identical. Whether or not such a move will do enough to rescue Rawls from the other charges laid against his theory is another matter.

One charge that he cannot escape, however, is that of having moved too far into the communitarian camp. For one point he concedes in this recent essay is that the task of political philosophy is primarily to theorize about the institutions of existing political society. Thus he also redefines his theory, not as a critical endeavor to evaluate existing institutions against particular moral standards, but as an interpretative endeavor to describe those institutions. The movement of his thought in this particular direction was perhaps already evident in his Dewey Lectures (“Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy, 1980); and further evidence of this change is to be found in his recent Oxford lecture “Political Philosophy in a Democratic Society” (June 1986, not yet published). If the opponents of the communitarian philosophical outlook concede that they can only describe but never defend the moral first principles implicit in the institutions of their society, then there can be no case for liberalism. For liberalism is nothing if not a universalist moral philosophy, which maintains the superiority of one type of answer to the great question of political philosophy.

One other writer who has attempted to say how liberalism might be defended requires consideration. James Fishkin, in his book Beyond Subjective Morality: Ethical Reasoning and Political Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), tries to confront the charge that liberal theory is unable to offer satisfactory resolution of moral problems because, lacking as it is in any normative commitment to substantive ends, its reasonings lead only to subjectivism. Fishkin’s point is essentially that the abandonment of absolutist claims need not push liberalism into a relativist position. What he calls for is a change in our expectations about the character of an objective morality. What precisely this means, or would involve, at this point remains obscure. (He is, I believe, writing another book dealing with this question.)

The most concerted effort to deal with the communitarian challenge from a self-consciously liberal (even if not classical liberal) point of view has, undoubtedly, been that of Ronald Dworkin. The most important recent works to be consulted are his collection of essays, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1985) and his treatise on legal philosophy, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, and London: Fontana Press, 1986). What Dworkin succeeds in showing is that in any polity in which there is disagreement over the character of the good life, any commitment not to simply enforce one conception of the good requires an attendant commitment to respect certain individual rights. The single most glaring inadequacy of the communitarian philosophy has been its failure to offer any nonauthoritarian solution to the problem of dealing with human disagreement. It is not enough to decry the absence of a tradition of the virtues, without considering whether or not such a tradition can have place in the modern world, and what kinds of institutions might secure such a tradition.

But Dworkin’s response to the communitarians is not wholly adequate either. For while he is on strong ground when arguing that any society in which individuals are allowed to pursue their own conceptions of the good must also recognize certain individual rights, he is on weaker ground when specifying those rights. Although he accords to individuals various liberties such as freedom of speech and freedom of worship, he gives no special recognition to the right to hold property. Yet it remains obscure why laws invading speech, for example, injure us more seriously (as Dworkin maintains)—than do laws restricting rights of property. For limiting property rights by allowing government to override our choices (even if in the name of the public interest) constrains us from pursuing certain conceptions of the good no less than does limiting our right to speak.

These failings make clear the tasks confronting liberalism’s defenders. What liberals need is to develop arguments explaining why, if the question of how life should be lived is an important one, the appropriate social institutions are those that accord to individuals, not just particular liberties, but freedom to choose in some less restrictive sense. This, as John Gray has suggested in his recent book, Liberalism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986) would take us away from the “revisionist” liberal agenda that has dominated the twentieth century.

If this is to be done successfully, then what will be needed, more specifically, is argument showing why giving significant place to a conception of liberty that emphasizes the importance of property rights is, first, not incompatible with recognizing some of the values communitarians defend and, second, essential if individuals are allowed to pursue their own conceptions of the good life. Some important work, developing the first of these two kinds of arguments, has been completed by Harvard Government Professor Stephen Macedo, whose dissertation on the liberal virtues and the liberal theory of community offers perhaps the first substantial classical liberal response to communitarianism.

(Elements of Macedo’s argument appeared in his earlier paper, “The Public Morality of the Rule of Law: A Critique of Ronald Dworkin,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, volume 8, number 1, 1985.) Work on the second argument, articulating the importance of property for liberal community, is perhaps even more urgently needed.

The position classical liberals would defend in responding to the communitarian critique is, in the end, an uncomplicated one, for it simply asserts that the good society is one in which the individual is free, not merely to speak or worship or enter politics, but to act. Constructing arguments to show this, however, will require from liberal scholars more substantial and persuasive reasoning. It will require us to show more fully what Tocqueville stated more simply, that:

Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing. There is only one thing else that better deserves the name: that is virtue. But then what is virtue if not the free choice of what is good?

Chandran Kukathas is the R. C. Hoiles Postdoctoral Fellow of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.