Freedom from Fear and the Specter of Perfection – Liberal Currents
Liberals are going through one of their reflective moments. Competing forms of illiberalism are openly discussedeven in polite companyto a degree unprecedented since the end of World War Two. Any lingering hubris following the collapse of the Soviet Union has been fatally punctured by the rise of forces that really might spell the end of the liberal order in the West. Despite that, there is a prevailing sense that liberals have yet to really rise to the challenge. Several prominent liberals have offered reiterations of liberal values that, while well-meaning, have nevertheless felt glib and woefully ill-matched to the scale of their task, reading as if they could have been written in the more certain times of the 1990s when the future was still theirs. The worry is not just that liberals have yet to adequately respond to their illiberal opponents, but that they are absolutely stumped as to how to respond at all. Deer and headlights come to mind.
Alan Kahans Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism joins several other recent volumes in approaching liberalisms current malaise through reminding us of its history.[1]Liberalisms past has become one of the most consequential areas for the debates as to its future. Though hardly the stuff of op-eds, what these studies nevertheless tell us in their different ways is of the utmost importance: that a lack of proper historical sense has left liberals and their critics alike with an emaciated view of what liberalism is. Enemies of liberalism end up mistaking modern neo-liberalism or contemporary identity politics as the total sum of liberal thought; its supporters seem adamant on fighting for a liberalism devoid of what have been its historically most attractive and promising features. Not knowing what they are fighting for, liberals do not know how to fight for it.
Kahan begins from but extends the insight of 20thcentury Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar that liberalism is primarily concerned with eradicating fear as the great impediment to human freedom. While Shklar was concerned chiefly (but not exclusively) with fear of the extensive cruelties made possible by the emergence of the modern state, Kahan sees liberalism as a response to a series of different fears throughout history, each response building upon rather than demolishing that form of liberalism which came before it. To distinguish these he employs a metaphor from computing, differentiating between liberalisms as if software versions (liberalism 1.0, 2.0 ). Though somewhat ungainly, it does nonetheless highlight how subsequent versions of liberalism have developed previous iterations in response to new wants or problems while at the same time both transmitting their bugs into the future or creating new flaws in the process. Not all software updates really count as progress (as any user of Microsoft Words newest comment feature will attest). It is a conceit of software developers if they believe version 2.0 is always better than 1.0. At some point bugs become features that cannot be unpicked without unravelling the entire code. And eventually any software package will find itself obsolete, either outpaced by its rivals or unable to offer its users what they want.
On Kahans telling, liberalism emerged initially in the 18thcentury (1.0) as a response to the fear created by the religious fanaticism of the Wars of Religion, though he equivocates as to whether this is to be counted as liberalism proper or some form of proto-liberalism (surely beta-liberalism?). Liberalism 2.0 followed, which feared the forces of revolution and reaction equally in the 19thcentury. Later in the same century but extending into the next came the fear of poverty (2.0), which was then itself followed by the fear of totalitarianism following the Second World War (3.0). Two decades into the twenty-first century the animating fear for liberals is the rise of populism, and the prospects of there being a liberalism 4.0 depends on whether it can successfully renew itself once more to meet this new challenge.
The upshot of Kahans story is that successive updates to liberalism responded to the problems of their times by stressing and strengthening the political and economic pillars of liberalism but did so at the cost or neglect of its third pillar: morality. When at their best, liberals have attempted to found freedom on all three pillars, with free governments and free markets working together with moral and religious institutions and arguments to keep liberalism stable. Indeed, Kahan contends that historically it has been the moral pillar that has been most central because few thought that liberal political or economic institutions could endure without some level of agreement as to the sort of lives individuals should and should not live. A republic cannot exist without certain kinds of morality, as Benjamin Constant put it. And yet since the last quarter of the 19thcentury, liberals have responded to the problems of their day by separating out these pillars. Increased emphasis was placed on its political and/or economic foundations while gradually relying less on moral justifications, until we reach a point in the later twentieth century when it seems perfectly reasonable to cast liberalism as completely neutral on questions of the good. Liberalism is not a way of life. It is and should be only a political and economic doctrine. Our predicament, Kahan argues, is that liberalism needs all three pillars if it is to successfully respond to their populist opponents. Liberals must learn to talk morality once more. Whether they can do so, and can do so in time, is the question.
No doubt there will be some who will quibble with Kahans historical story. It is, of course, true that not all liberals thought of their project in negative terms of avoiding fear, and even where this could be plausible they nevertheless might have not been so united in their views of which fears ought to concern us. Kahan knows this. Which in part is why he uses the subtitle of the book to flag the purposeful incompleteness of the history it tells. Others will surely want to debate the periodisation Kahan employs. Where Hobsbawm thought the nineteenth century long, Kahan treats it as all-too-short, for instance. But this feels somewhat besides the point. This is history told with a contemporary purposeas a call for liberalism to regain its moral backboneand should be judged on that basis.
In the parlance of contemporary political philosophy, what Kahan is calling for is the return of liberal perfectionism. To be a political perfectionist isalong with such disparate luminaries of the Western political tradition as Aristotle, Saint Aquinas, Spinoza, Marx, and T. H. Greento build an account of politics on an objective account of the good for all human beings. Only the latter was a specifically liberalperfectionist in thinking that it was liberal answers to what is of value in human life that ought to inform our politics, and while there have been others (the late Joseph Raz chief among its contemporary proponents, though Kahan finds his account wanting in several regards) it is certainly a minority sport in academic circles. Liberal neutrality has been and, in many ways, remains the dominant position. And yet it appears to be so blatantly counter-intuitive. Or, put the other way around, there is something deeply and instinctively appealing in perfectionism. Why, after all, would you not want politics to take an interest in helping people to live good lives? What reason could you possibly have for thinking the state should recuse itself from what surely are among the most important questions humans ask?
Liberal responses to this have ranged from the pragmatic to the principled to the philosophical. So-called Cold War liberalsthe likes of Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Judith N. Shklarremind us of the dangers to individual freedom that follow when you give the state the power and authority to intervene in matters of value and meaning. Better to leave these to individuals to work out for themselves in the private sphere. Principled arguments have tended to insist that such paternalism violates individuals natural rights, autonomy, or their equal dignity in some way or another. After all, no one has the authority to tell us how we should live. Anti-perfectionism is given a fillip too by those varied philosophical or metaphysical arguments that reject the very notion of there being an objective way of life that is good for all individuals. Without such an account of universal human flourishing in sight, there is nothing for politics to try and perfect.
Part of the value of Kahans book lies in it adding further support to the thought that liberal neutrality is not just peculiar as a political position but that it is historically peculiar within the liberal tradition also. Almost everything that liberalisms critics today take to be characteristic of liberal politicsthe list is familiar: thin over thick values, atomism or individualism, rights rather than duties, maximising individual freedom at the expense of community, prioritising economic freedom over social goods, lack of concern for the moral lives of individuals, neglect of tradition and place, etc.turn out to be very recent acquisitions. Even if, and this is a big if, it does capture the character of contemporary liberalism, it cannot possibly capture the entirety of the liberal tradition. Liberals have not always thought this way. They need not think this way in the future either.
So, lets have it out. Ditch neutrality; moral and religious cards on the table.
Whether liberal perfectionism is the answer to the rise of populism we have been looking for depends very much on what sort of answer it is we want. This is far from a simple question, and likely depends as much on judgements as to what is politically feasible within what might turn out to be a fairly limited timeframe as anything else. Kahans ambiguity on this issue is therefore unsatisfying but understandable. At points Kahan speaks as if the fourth wave of liberalism ought to aim at winning populists over. Liberalism 4.0, we are told, must find a way to reduce the fears of populists, overcome their cultural alienation, and regain, to the extent that it is possible, legitimacy in their eyes. Elsewhere he talks of reconciliation between liberals and populists, which, in implying the possible compatibility of liberalism and populism, is quite a different prospect altogether.
Either way, there is good reason to be skeptical that re-adopting perfectionism will get us very far. For one, if what Kahan is hoping for is that once liberals begin talking in a moral register once more this would lead to greater convergence on the nature of the good life then that seems fanciful. Philosophers (in the broadest sense) have been debating this issue for millennia now and while it would be going too far to say that no progress has been made, any progress there has been should give us little hope that ethical unanimity is just around the corner. Many of todays illiberals are academics (e.g. Hazony, Deneen, Vermeule) and so presumably know what liberals themselves think are the strongest arguments we have so far come up with in defence of liberal ways of life. And yet Maybe the best, most irrefutable argument for liberalism that can only be rejected on pain of irrationality is being written by someone somewhere at this very moment. Wait just a few more weeks, months, or years (academic peer review runs at glacial speeds) and it will be ours. But even if this is true, do we really think the illiberals among us will be so easily converted? It is wishful thinking to suppose that others moral beliefs are held in place solely or even predominantly by rational persuasion (self-deception when the same thought is applied to our own beliefs). Some satisfaction might be gained by being able to label our opponents irrational, but that gets us nowhere politicallyand may indeed serve to make them our disagreements even more intractable.
There is little reason for thinking if liberalism did morality that would make understanding or reconciliation more likely either. Liberalisms critics tend to alreadythink of it as a form of perfectionism, as a politics that promotes specifically liberal ends and actively works to undermine more traditional ways of life. It is no revelation to them that liberalism was once a perfectionist creed; the only surprise in accounts like Kahans is the claim that it ever stopped being so. Indeed, the issue is usually not so much that liberalism is perfectionistits opponents are usually perfectionists also, often from religious motivesbut that liberals have the wrong account of human flourishing (emphasising individual autonomy over tradition, or community, or the common good, or God, etc.). What we need is to re-orientate society to the true (non-liberal) conception of the good life. In their pursuit of a false view of the good liberal societies make people worse rather than better. Hence the significance of the trans-gender rights movement as what liberalisms antagonists take to be the latest iteration of liberalisms foundational but erroneous commitment to ensuring that the individual is free from all unchosen impediments. Our identity must be ours to determine; not even nature can impede the autonomous individual in choosing what he/she/they are. That this issue has become so totemic for illiberals of liberalisms moral corruption makes it hard to share Kahans hope that a perfectionist liberalism would not still be experienced as alienating by its opponents.
Kahan is far from alone in thinking that the way forward for liberalism lies in it recovering its moral backbone. Similar conclusions are reached by Helena Rosenblatt and Samuel Moyn in their own historical diagnoses of the origins of liberalisms current predicament. Too often, however, there is a failure to take seriously enough the problems with attempting to dust off an earlier liberalism and make it fit for the twenty-first century. The heyday (and, it turned out, twilight) of moral liberalism was the New or Social Liberalism of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, and often it is this that people have in mind when they propose that liberalism needs to rediscover how to sing in a moral key. And yet there were reasons, some of them very good reasons, why this Social Liberalism fell dramatically out of favour following World War One.
Its optimism in the power of rationality, as well as in human nature itself, while rarely nave is nevertheless harder for us to accept (despite Steven Pinkers best efforts). The sort of moral and creative agency liberals envisaged was possible for individuals in the Victorian era, and which would keep Western societies on the path of individual and collective progress, looks almost idealistic today now we are as aware of how technological advancements can hinder individual freedoms rather than enhance them. Maybe the dawn of an AI revolution will dramatically unleash individuals potential, but we have been made such promises before (including by the Social Liberals themselves). And liberal notions of the good have come under decades of assault from those who believe it to be inextricably linked to the sins of imperialism and various forms of exclusion and discrimination. Faith in liberalism as a form of life would require a reckoning with those critiques, and a willingness to do so is severely hampered when the incentives of our public spaces (including universities) are hardly conducive to such enquiries.
If liberals can neither win populists round nor achieve reconciliation with them then liberals must find a way to defeat them. That is quite a different sort of answer altogether, and it is to Kahans credit that he takes that thought seriously. However, it remains unclear why perfectionist liberalism has the advantage over neutrality if that is the objective. We need to be alive to the possibility that the re-moralisation of liberalism could itself become a source of fear, and not just for illiberals. Ours are, after all, societies that have become quite used to the thought that morality and God are not areas in which the state ought to stray, and that our individual freedoms in large part depend upon it not doing so. Moreover, as long as people believe liberal moralising smacks of racism, sexism, and various other forms of bigotry, then we should expect it to meet resistance among those groups who think liberal universalism undermining of their chances for social justice.
Then there is the issue that a perfectionist liberalism will need to start being much more specific about precisely which sort of lives it values and which it does not, and potentially which it will use state resources to support and which it will not. This is a judgemental liberalism. Once you start saying that people must be free not to live as they wish but to live as they should that is going to exclude a great number of ways of life which neutral liberalism makes room for. What looms is not state-level intolerance of certain experiments of living; it is liberalperfectionism, after all. Nevertheless, and as best exemplified in the work of John Stuart Mill, a liberalism that simultaneously restricts the use of state power for moral or religious ends while maintaining that there are still better and worse lives (based on whether they pursue the higher or lower pleasures in Mills theory) is neither a reassuringly stable position, nor a particularly inclusive one. Alienation from a society that judges what you value as inferior, or possibly outright immoral, is still something one can quite reasonably fear even if those judgements are not backed up by state power.
Liberalisms turn to neutrality did not come from nowhere. If it began in an earlier period, then certainly it was given further justification as Western societies became radically pluralistic throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. We can overdo the moral homogeneity of previous times, but ours are the most diverse societies in which liberalism has ever sought legitimacy. Part of the reason why moral neutrality so often seems the only viable option for liberals is precisely because such pluralism as it exists today has undercut the conditions of at least greater regularity in peoples moral and religious beliefs that makes political perfectionism at all plausible (and which could only be recreated through means liberals would judge as themselves thoroughly illiberal). Kahan interprets this as abandoning the moral pillar of liberalism, but that is not right. Better to think it a thinning out of liberalisms ethical commitments precisely so that it can still enjoy moral legitimacy across as broad a base of the population as possible, or a reimaging of what can morally legitimate the liberal state for autonomous individuals in conditions of such radical pluralism. This is still liberal morality, just for very different sorts of societies. Defeating populists and their illiberal associates must include pressing in the strongest possible terms just how fundamentally estranged they are from the realities of modern societies, and which explains the air of reactionary authoritarianism that consistently surrounds them. Theirs is not a solution for societies such as ours. Yet that same line of attack explains why liberal perfectionism remains such a problematic option also.
If this all sounds defeatist, it is not intended to. The point is that matters are not so simple as reversing to take a missed turn. Kahan and others know this, of course. And it is a significant virtue of Kahans analysis that he shows why this cannot be the case (Moyn gives the greatest impression that an older strand of the liberal tradition becomes readily available to us once we disavow the dominant Cold War liberalism). Reminding us of the richness and complexity of the liberal tradition, and in doing so of the potential that it retains, is a vital task to undertake, but it is a job half-done if that potential is not then cashed out in terms fit for the twenty-first century.
[1]Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea(Princeton University Press, 2014); Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023); Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century(Princeton University Press, 2018).
Featured image is The FDR Memorial, by Courtney McGough
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Freedom from Fear and the Specter of Perfection - Liberal Currents