by Tim Sommers
By all accounts, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, is odd. For one thing, as Stephen Holmes points out, Lefebvre oscillates between saying that liberalism is so pervasive and all-encompassing that “Love it or hate it, we all swim…in liberal waters” – and emphasizing the need to evangelize and perform spiritual exercises to grasp the real meaning of deep liberalism. But as Holmes memorably puts it, “Fish do not aspire to wetness.”
Here’s another bit of oddness. Lefebvre calls a spin-off article advertising the book “Rawls the Redeemer.” This is a bit like calling the Pope a secularist.
The thrust of Lefebvre’s argument seems to be this:
“Liberals too quickly adopt [a] narrow institutionalist definition [of liberalism] and assume that liberalism is an exclusively legal and political doctrine. Liberals, in other words, fail to recognize not just what liberalism has become today (a worldview and comprehensive value system) but who they are as well: living and breathing incarnations of it.”
This is not a book review, but to the extent that this adequately captures Lefebvre’s project, I am going to explain what I think is wrong with it and what the limit is on liberalism as a way of life. Let me start with what Lefebvre would no doubt describe as a narrow institutionalist definition of liberalism.
Liberalism is the view that the first principle of justice is that everyone is entitled to certain basic rights, liberties, and freedoms – such as freedom of religion, of conscience, of speech, assembly, the rule of law, and the right to participate as an equal in political and social life. People are not entitled to quantitatively “the most liberty possible” – or even “the most liberty compatible with like liberty for others.” It’s not clear what that could even mean. How do you quantify, or weigh, the freedom to swing your arms against the freedom to publish attacks on the government or the freedom to hang out with whoever you want? What people are entitled to as a matter of justice is a set of liberties adequate to allow them to develop, revise, and pursue their own understanding of the good life, the good, and justice. Roughly, liberalism is about, as Mill put it, everyone having liberties adequate to ensure their own right to pursue their own good in their own way.
Here’s a tempting, but mistaken way to justify liberal basic liberties. Call it the autonomy argument. The liberal liberties are the liberties required for people to be free and autonomous. We prioritize them because we prioritize freedom and autonomy. They reflect our political judgment that autonomy is the most important political value.
This won’t do, of course, since there is no general agreement that autonomy or freedom is the highest good. In fact, I suspect that the majority of people in the United States today do not think that the freedom to choose is of higher value than securing what they choose. For example, religious people committed to a particular faith do not value being able to choose any faith whatsoever more than they value practicing the particular religion of their choice. A liberalism that depended on everyone agreeing ahead of time that liberty is more important than anything else would be a nonstarter.
Here’s another way to make the same mistake. The basic liberties are required to protect tolerance and diversity. That’s true enough. But it doesn’t follow that the highest good of any political community is its promotion of diversity and tolerance. If, for example, one values the political liberties above all others, one need not value them because they value political tolerance so highly. More likely, a person will value most the political ends they want to, and are able to, pursue because of their political freedoms. (This is how liberalism ends up tolerating, at least up to a point, the intolerant.)
Put another way, liberals defend tolerance not because tolerance is, in and of itself, the most important thing. They defend tolerance as necessary to protect their own interests.
Liberalism prioritizes tolerance and autonomy, then, precisely because it recognizes deep and irresolvable disagreements between people over fundamental matters – like what is most important? Autonomy or tolerance or something else? It recognizes that for a variety of reasons – epistemic and otherwise – reasonable disagreement is likely to persist and even widen. Since there is no agreement on the good and justice overall, liberalism says, we look for enough overlap to agree on basic principles that will allow for everyone to pursue their own good in their own way while preserving a fair social order.
In A Theory of Justice, for example, Rawls argued for a particular view of justice – “Justice as Fairness” – which (to slightly oversimplify) is that everyone should have certain basic rights, liberties, and freedoms, fair equality of opportunity, and a certain share of income and wealth. Some people believe, mistakenly, that Rawls changed his overall view in his last major work, Political Liberalism. For the most part, this second book just had a different subject matter. It was about political legitimacy and not justice. (It’s a pretty standard to view legitimacy as related to, but less demanding than, justice.) Political Liberalism did fix up Rawls’ initial “quantitative” account of the basic liberties in response to criticisms by Hart, among others. However, for our purposes, the most important thing Political Liberalism did is defend Rawls’s conception of liberalism as a freestanding view.
Rawls thought that one of the defects of A Theory of Justice is that it failed to distinguish between political theories of justice which remain neutral about questions about what makes for a good human life and comprehensive views that revolved around what makes for a good human life.
In Political Liberalism, Rawls wrote “…that the history of religion and philosophy shows that there are many reasonable ways in which the wider realm of values can be understood so as to be either congruent with, or supportive of, or else not in conflict with, the values appropriate to the special domain of the political as specified by a political conception of justice.”
“Political liberalism,” he wrote, “aims for a political conception of justice as a freestanding view…[which] does not deny there being other values that apply, say, to the personal, the familial, and the associational; nor does it say that political values are separate from, or discontinuous with, other values. One aim, as I have said, is to specify the political domain and its conception of justice in such a way that its institutions can gain the support of an overlapping [moral] consensus.”
One of Rawls’ great regrets was that he never had time to work on what he thought came next, which was writing more substantively about moral psychology and the good life. It might seem hard to believe, but Rawls said that he thought people would just agree with his theory of justice – and then he could move on to the next thing. Instead, he spent the rest of his life improving his theory of justice and explaining why it must be political to be liberal in the right way.
Rawls acknowledged in a couple of places that you could adopt liberal values as part of a more comprehensive moral view; i.e. liberalism as part of a way of life. But it’s hard to see how liberalism alone gives us much to go on. Especially since, as I’ve argued, you don’t even get arguments for autonomy or tolerance out of liberalism itself. And even if you could, a focus on autonomy and tolerance for their own sake would leave us with a donut theory of what is valuable. No matter how good the rest of it is there’s always a hole in the middle. I mean, we want to be free, but free to do some things not specified by the mere admonition to be free. And we should tolerate the views and beliefs of others (up to a point), but we should also have views and beliefs of our own.
Liberalism is no substitute for a comprehensive view of justice and our own good. It’s not a way of life.
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