Damon Linker interviews Alexandre Lefebvre in Notes from the Middle Ground:
DL: Thanks for being here, Alex. One reason I enjoyed your book so much is that it’s such a departure from the tired, bone-dry proceduralism of the Rawlsian liberalism I imbibed in graduate school during the 1990s. Liberalism, we were taught, is “political, not metaphysical.” It isn’t a “comprehensive view” of the good. Rather, it shows how people holding such comprehensive views can come together and do politics without reference to such bigger, deeper, or higher commitments. Your account of the liberal tradition is very different and maintains that liberalism, rightly understood, is a “way of life,” which sounds pretty comprehensive to me. Would you say that’s a fair characterization of liberalism?
AL: Thanks for the invitation, Damon. So, those “bone-dry” kind of liberals you mention are still around, publishing in the top journals in the field. And to be fair, they’ve done important work. Starting in the early 1990s, partly in response to liberal democracies becoming more multicultural, they insisted that decent liberal democratic countries must be as inclusive as possible. The state shouldn’t be in the business of favoring or prescribing a particular worldview (whether religious or secular) but instead provide a framework for all its citizens to flourish.
That’s a worthy ideal, don’t get me wrong. But we have to ask: Is it accurate? Does this notion of a “neutral” liberal society, so dear to liberal philosophers, politicians, and pundits, reflect what liberal democratic societies are nowadays?
More here.