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The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Part II)

Tumbling Liberal Defense

An awareness of the depth of the critique ranged against liberal theory is what has inspired its late flowering in our own time. Viewed in a wider historical perspective, it is astonishing to see the revival of concepts and modes of thought that received opinion had long declaimed as outré. Even ideas that in liberal circles had not had much play since the eighteenth century, such as the social contract, began to assume a new prominence. A rediscovered pride in the liberal understanding of individual rights, especially by contrast with the dismal record of individual protection within any more expansive construction of rights, led to a new appreciation of the centrality of liberal political order. Protections for the individual and, limitations on the power of government became the currency of political discussion. Even liberal political economy, so long disdained as laissez faire, acquired new respect and influence. The political counterpart is found in the universal embrace of liberal democracy as the only legitimate political model around the globe. Yet there has been something enormously brittle about this liberal reju­venation, a brittleness that ultimately is the source of the sense of crisis that has reached into public consciousness.

The problems become visible in the work of the greatest liberal theorist of the generation, John Rawls. His A Theory of Justice, despite the deficiencies so frequently seized upon, did provide the theoretical justification of principles so long absent from liberal practice. This is the explanation of the impact of the work. He seemed to have squared the liberal circle. Rawls had overcome the two most bedeviling problems afflicting every attempt at a rational articulation of liberal convictions. The first was how to construct a public order that did not presuppose a level of virtue in the citizens that liberal politics itself did not produce and could not sustain. Liberal democracy could not presuppose virtue because it had no uncontested criterion for good and bad; it could hardly promote a particular form of the good without incurring the kind of controversy it sought to avoid. Rawls delineated the requirement with unprecedented clarity in his insistence that “the concept of right is prior to that of the good” (A Theory of Justice, 31). The liberal order can be founded on an understanding of what is right, apart from the competing and conflicting conceptions of the good that humans hold, and thereby established on a basis that no minimally rational individual can reject.

The second related challenge was to find a means of giving concrete content to the moral principles that defined the liberal order. All previous accounts of morality that had escaped the Scylla of contestable foundations, such as Kant’s, had perished on the Charybdis of formalism without practical guidance. It was not enough to find a formulation of what is right that could not be rejected without self-contradiction: there must also be a substantial connection with the liberal political order it is intended to support. This lack of specific guidance infects, in Rawls’s view, all the more substantive conceptions of morality, including the Aristotelian, the theological, and the utilitarian. Moral principles are themselves in need of a further set of principles to guide their application. If one wants to be virtuous or God­fearing one still has to know what is right in those terms.

These two interrelated problems seemed to have been solved in Rawls’s conception of the original position in which human beings meet to formulate the principles that ought to govern their relations with one another. “The crucial thing,” he observes, “is not to use principles that are contested” (585). This is accomplished through the thought experiment in which we meet behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing who we are, what our position will be relative to others, or how our particular conception of the good will be defined. Most important of all, he explains, “I have avoided attributing to the parties any ethical motivation. They decide solely on the basis of what seems best calculated to further their interests so far as they can ascertain them” (584). The considerations made in this egalitarian anteroom to politics, which is reminiscent of nothing so much as the egalitarian opening and conclusion of the Republic in the underworld, are all of a prudential nature that presuppose little more than a rational interest in furthering one’s own interests.

It is not the individuals who meet that are just but the situation that defines their encounter. “The original position is defined in such a way that it is a status quo in which any agreements reached are fair” (120). There may be a generalized sense of justice that must be conceded to the moral pioneers, but nothing hinges on it. All that is necessary is that they be people who at least are concerned to further their own interests and aware that this will involve some degree of conflict with the self-fulfillment of others. The arrangements they work out will reflect their general sense of justice because the settlement will be “everyone’s best reply, so to speak, to the corresponding demands of others” (119). For each one the decision will simply reflect the best arrangement of principles that will serve their individual self-interest.

Rawls has been much criticized by communitarians for deriving everything from such an ideal convention of “unencumbered” selves (516).15 But he appears to be doing no more than projecting the self-understanding of liberalism back to its beginning. In that sense, we are “mutually disinterested” (129), without many strong ties of affection to one another or at least no such attachments can be assumed. We do have different and often conflicting conceptions of the good; this is the problem that has prompted the develop­ment of the liberal construction. It makes eminent sense to concentrate, as Rawls suggests, on the “primary goods” — rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth — that together with a sense of self-worth constitute those things that everyone will desire irrespective of their ultimate goal. The agreement he maps out aims, therefore, at the just distribution of those instrumental goods.

Individuals, intent on whatever their own understanding of the good turns out to be and ignorant of their social position, would choose to be governed by principles that all would accept irrespective of their eventual status determination. Their interest would dictate that they endorse the most fundamental of all liberal principles. In its simplest formulation, the first principle is that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others” (60). This is the first principle, Rawls insists, in the order of priority because it represents a distribution of the most significant primary good: the equal liberty to pursue all other goods. It is the basis for the self-esteem that is derived from “the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties” (544), the only way of ensuring equal treatment.

The second principle, which has provoked far greater comment, is often taken as indicative of Rawls’s fundamentally egalitarian leanings. His own personal politics aside, however, the second principle can just as easily be read as a more traditional liberal justification of social inequality. Again in its simplest formulation, the principle is that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (60). Rawls later underlines the insistence that inequalities must be justified in terms of their benefits to the least-advantaged members of society. But this is no more than the resistance that liberal society has always felt was needed against an extension of its own first principle of equality in liberty. Friedrich Hayek makes essentially the same case, in very different tones, when he asserts that the advantages of a few do not injure but rather promote ultimately the welfare of all (The Constitution of Liberty, 88).

Taken together, the two principles provide a fair equality of opportunity that maximizes the well-being of all, not simply a majority, and can be presented as the scheme that is most likely to win the acceptance of all. The principles constitute, Rawls concludes, the best foundation for “consti­tutional democracy” whose major institutions and practices can be derived from them. “My aim has been to indicate not only that the principles of justice fit our considered judgments but also that they provide the strongest arguments for freedom” (243). The guarantees of individual liberties and the rights of political participation, as well as the rule of law, are all more securely grounded in the ordered principles of justice that all must acknowledge. Avoiding both a dogmatic assertion of ungrounded principles and a reduc­tionist admission that all principles are mere preferences, Rawls’s principles rely on “weak and widely held presumptions” that can be expected to win general acceptance. “Surely, our liberties are most firmly based when they are derived from principles that persons fairly situated with respect to one another can agree to if they can agree to anything at all” (244).

It is perhaps not unfair to detect in that “surely” the germ of self-doubt that disturbs the whole system. Even the weak stipulations that seem to have made the smooth emergence of agreement possible may turn out not to have been weak enough. Toward the end of the book Rawls reflects on the possibility of individuals who do not find acting from a sense of justice good for them, and concludes that “it is rational to authorize measures needed to maintain just institutions.” To those who must be thus compelled “one can only say: their nature is their misfortune” (576). Agreement, it turns out, cannot be counted on to reach all or to form a seamless social whole. There will continue to be expressions of dissent, both with and without malice aforethought, and no amount of liberal thinning of the presuppositions can evoke harmony from the parts.

The problem of pluralism returns with renewed centrality to Rawls’s later writings and effects the most profound critique of the achievement that had earlier seemed so secure. The fabled priority of the right over the good, the very cornerstone of A Theory of Justice, dissolves before the admission that liberal order is not based on the right that is compatible with every conceivable conception of the good. Some formulations of the good cannot be contained within liberal democracy, and the struggle to eject such representations can be won only at the cost of the liberal claim to universality. The suspicion is confirmed that liberal order has not escaped connection with a particular affirmation of the good. It was only that Rawls’s skillful construction had temporarily obscured that realization.16

An awareness of the problem was certainly present in A Theory of Justice. He not only contemplated the possibility of individual perceptions of the good incompatible with the thinnest of liberal definitions but also recognized that even those who embraced the liberal order would have to do so in the realization that not all of their aspirations for the good could be satisfied. Not knowing what their conceptions of the good will be, their agreement commits them not to press their moral or religious convictions beyond what is compatible with a like liberty for all. “They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by a teleological principle of justice” (328). The preservation of autonomous freedom, it seems, is the highest value, for which everything else may be risked but which itself must never be placed in jeopardy.

Nothing bespeaks the confidence of the liberal tradition so much as Rawls’s inability to see that such an absolute vision of liberty could be open to question. And nothing announces so loudly the crisis of confidence that has overtaken it as the revision of Rawls’s thoughts on this issue. He now recognizes that there is a very specific conception of the person and the human good that underpins the theory of justice. The conception is of the autonomous moral person characterized by the two powers of “a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good. A sense of justice is the capacity to understand, to apply, and to act from the public conception of justice which characterizes the fair terms of social cooperation . . . . The capacity for a conception of the good is the capacity to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of one’s rational advantage or good” (Political Liberalism, 19). But if free rational autonomy is the highest goal, then the whole process of the original agreement has been stacked against any alternative human ideal. What then happens to the priority of the right over the good, the principle that had been the core of the liberal claim to public legitimacy? “The answer,” William Galston shrewdly remarks, “is that the priority of the right is subtly reinterpreted as the priority of the public over the nonpublic” (Liberal Purposes, 148).

The question that is begged, of course, is why should I go along with an arrangement that may patently undermine my highest ideal, such as trust in God or faith in the truth? It is most significant that Rawls does not attempt to philosophically defend his democratic perfectionism (which is Galston’s term). That is the project that has collapsed in the recognition that his defense serves after all a particular vision of the human good. All he can do is point to the “overlapping consensus” concerning respect for the autonomy and dignity of persons that has historically emerged in liberal democratic societies as the justification for his position. He then takes his own failure to find a rational justification as conclusive that no such attempts at a coherent articulation of the meaning of justice will be successful. “Philosophy as the search for truth about an independent metaphysical and moral order cannot, I believe, provide a workable and shared basis for a political conception of justice in a democratic society” (“Justice as Fairness,” 230; Political Liberalism, 10).

Rawls revises his earlier theoretical account of justice as fairness to em­phasize it “as a political conception that is practical and not metaphysical or epistemological.” Now liberal democracy rests not on its claim to represent the truth about human nature or the human condition but simply on the fact that it has successfully enabled certain concrete societies to live with the not-insignificant philosophical differences that pervade them. Justice as fairness then “presents itself not as a conception of justice that is true, but one that can serve as a basis of informed and willing political agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons.” There is something poignant and autumnal about Rawls’s appeal that “we try, so far as we can, to avoid disputed philosophical, as well as disputed moral and religious, questions” (“Justice as Fairness,” 230).17

The problem, as he himself acknowledges, is that there may well be certain issues or values whose importance outweighs the social and political agreement.18 If there is no neutral state basing itself on the weak stipulations that all can accept, then it is inevitable that the public order will diverge from some of the profoundly held convictions of its members. The public order must tilt toward certain metaphysical or theological positions, causing the probability of conflict to become high. The discomfort is palpable in Rawls’s response to those who compel us to articulate our own philosophical or religious premises. “This happens whenever someone insists, for example, that certain questions are so fundamental that to ensure their being rightly settled justifies civil strife . . . At this point we may have no alternative but to deny this, or to imply its denial and hence to maintain the kind of thing we had hoped to avoid” (Political Liberalism, 152).

Rawls’s assurances, that the reason for bracketing such disputes about prin­ciples in order to avoid the imposition of political power, begin to ring hollow. Absent a rational resolution of differences, he admits, “the only alternative to a principal of toleration is the autocratic use of state power” (“Justice as Fairness,” 230). The crux of the matter is, however, that it is precisely the protection of differences that has been the basis for toleration. What are we to do when that policy itself puts in jeopardy our fundamental principles? What can we say when toleration becomes intolerant? The argument that liberals have been trying to avoid the introduction of state power to settle the disputes is scant consolation when the liberal consensus itself is the instrument of repression. The yoke of tyranny is just as oppressive when imposed by a smiling liberalism as it is when inflicted by the brute force of autocracy.19

The fate of Rawls’s justification of liberal principles is shared by the many other serious and impressive efforts of the past generation to find a noncon­testable foundation to morality. The foundations turn out in the end to be noncontestable only within a liberal context. The arguments presuppose the conclusions they seek to prove. This circularity is transparent in the similarly Kantian construction of Alan Gewirth. He skillfully uncovers within the per­formative assumptions of all human action a “deontic” morality that cannot be denied without self-contradiction. Since all voluntary and purposive ac­tions presuppose the value of voluntariness and purposiveness, as well as their supporting conditions, we are already committed to a morality of respect for the rights of all potentially voluntary and purposive agents. Gewirth believes he has escaped from the all-corrosive “why” because his Principle of Generic Consistency has been drawn forth from the agent’s own purposive striving. Rejecting it would not only expose him to inconsistency but also reveal his indifference to his own good. “Consequently, the agent must care about being rational and avoiding self-contradiction if he is to engage in action, as against going through motions that he emits with no control exerted by him for purposes he regards as good” (Reason and Morality, 194-95). The elegance of the demonstration is undeniable, but can cogency alone suffice to keep us on the strenuous path of duty?

 We recall Socrates’s argument that the tyrant is of all men the least powerful because he was unable to do anything to advance his own good, and all that he did made him worse (Gorgias 466). What of the many human beings today who cannot find a reason to be serious about their own good, who without being responsible toward themselves can hardly be responsible for others, and whose actions are driven by blind impulse from one self-destructive behavior to another? [Alan]Gewirth’s principle presupposes the rational purposiveness it seeks to demonstrate. His principle says nothing to those who are not yet convinced that they ought to be purposive and should respect the liberal institutions of rights that are its expression.

Gewirth is peripherally aware of the problem and wonders aloud about the possibility that democratic majorities may “fail to endorse the redistributive justice of the supportive state” to implement the full recognition of rights (Reason and Morality, 321). In extreme cases, such as starvation, we can bypass the democratic process entirely; in the ordinary course of events, the process of “moral education” will render such emergency measures unnecessary. But what if the educational efforts are less than successful? No answer is forthcoming to this disturbing possibility. Nor can much confidence be placed in the “deontic” principle that recognizes others as deserving of rights only to the “degree to which he approaches having the generic abilities constitutive of such agency” (142). This renders predictably the rights of the fetus minimal but more alarmingly establishes the Principle of Proportionality by which certain individuals could be virtually excluded from the class of prospective agents. The defense of liberal “reason and morality” turns out to be merely a rationalization of liberal agents for liberal agents by liberal agents.

The deontological eschewal of any foundation in nature or reality (meta­physics as it is derisively termed) condemns us to wandering within the artificial biosphere of liberalism. We have not yet been able to take a breath of fresh air. This is true of the other promising and brilliant rearticulation of liberal thought from the 1970s, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. Nozick returned to the oldest of all liberal thought experiments, the state of nature, in order to find the structure that connected us all to the liberal state. In a condition of anarchy, human beings would inevitably begin to form and join mutual protection associations. They would recognize the benefits to be derived from having some reliable means of resolving disputes. Since such protective agencies cannot coexist, the dominant one would have to compensate individual and independent agencies for its monopoly over the enforcement of justice. In this way, a state comes into being that is fair because it at no point deprives anyone of the freedom enjoyed in the state of nature.

Much of the book is taken up with a response to Rawls and others who desire more than this minimal state. In a brilliant libertarian refutation of redistribution, Nozick argues that there is no justification for a more extensive state. Any efforts in the direction of “end-state” results could be obtained only at the cost of real invasions of rights “historically” acquired, and it would entail continuous political intervention in order to maintain the particular state of distribution desired. So the only state that can be justified without violating anyone’s rights is the minimal state, although Nozick concedes that people may voluntarily agree to submit to a greater degree of government control for the sake of the benefits of living together. In principle, however, the minimal state is Utopia because it is a stable association in which “each person receives his marginal contribution” (Anarchy, State and Utopia, 302). That is, the state receives more of a contribution from each than they are likely to take out of it, and each receives more in return than they could obtain in any other association to which they could imagine belonging. The result is a stable exchange.

It is also infuriatingly glib as a conclusion, as most tellingly indicated by Nozick’s own subsequent abandonment of this style of argument. There was, of course, always more to his argument than its style, as we will see later, but its reach here did little more than restate the most elementary liberal self-understanding. The exchange or contract model of liberal society, while it may have served as a convenient metaphor for public order, did not really explain how a state comes into being and maintains itself over time. All the significant questions concerning fidelity and trust in agreements are simply begged. The social contract is not like an economic exchange, in that it is perpetual and irrevocable even when the terms have changed. Nozick’s book is one more signpost that points to the inability of the liberal construct to explain itself in any neutral terms.

The collapse of the foundational project within liberal theory has become so commonplace that it virtually amounts to a consensus. Indeed it is the starting point for all further discussion within the liberal context. While surrendering any claim to the objective status of individual rights, liberal theorists and liberal societies continue to insist that rights must be taken with absolute seriousness. The approach is exemplified by Ronald Dworkin who flatly rejects any “ghostly metaphysical” basis for rights, yet insists that they do not rest simply on the conventions adumbrated by legal positivism. People do have rights other than those explicitly created by the legislative process, and these rights are not derived from any conception of human nature. By examining the actual practice of judicial interpretation of rights, Dworkin discovers that the assumption of some extralegal foundation plays no role. Judges are quite capable of taking rights seriously, expanding and applying them simply on the basis of a constructive interpretation of the legal tradition.

But what then is the source of the rights presupposed by the legal tradition? Dworkin’s answer is that we cannot get back beyond that point. Rights continue to be natural in the sense that they are not merely the product of convention, but they are also not dependent on some incorrigibly shaky definition of what human nature is. The only reliable basis for rights is the recognition that they are the indispensable condition for all political agreements concerning what we owe to one another. Commenting on Rawls, Dworkin observes that “the right to equal respect is not, on his account, a product of the contract, but a condition of admission to the original position”(Taking Rights Seriously, 181). His development of Rawls is the assertion that it is not the contract that establishes rights, but the rights that establish the conditions for contract. These are rights we possess “not by virtue of birth or characteristic or merit or excellence but simply as human beings with the capacity to make plans and give justice” (182).

Dworkin has gone on to clarify this precontractual priority of rights by distinguishing between internal and external skepticism. The internal skeptic questions the rightness of certain claims from within the perspective of a moral universe; the external skeptic raises metaphysical objections concerning the possibility of any moral truth. External skepticism neither adds nor subtracts anything to the struggle for the right moral or legal interpretation and can thus be safely neglected. All we need is the reassurance that our internal debates are in no way threatened by such metaphysical suspicions. “I hasten to add,” Dworkin concludes, “that recognizing the crucial point I have been stressing — that the ‘objective’ beliefs most of us have are moral, not metaphysical, beliefs, that they only repeat and qualify other moral beliefs — in no way weakens these beliefs or makes them claim something less or even different from what they might be thought to claim. For we can assign them no sense, faithful to the role they actually play in our lives, that makes them not moral claims. If anything is made less important by that point, it is external skepticism, not our convictions” (Law’s Empire, 83).

Once reassured of the reality of our convictions, we can accompany Dworkin in his overview of “law’s empire.” It is a sophisticated and inspiring conception of law as integrity, in which successive decisions are made on the principled basis that draws on the best interpretation of the whole tradition. Now that any appeal to an external natural law is out, the two plausible alternatives are conventionalism and pragmatism, a slavish attachment to strict construction and original intent or a risky invitation to all forms of judicial freethinking and arbitrariness. Dworkin avoids both of the pitfalls in his common-law model that retains the protected expectations of conven­tionalism and the flexibility of pragmatism by insisting that the resolution of conflicts must be on the basis of principles internal to the tradition of political morality as a whole.

The crux of the matter is, however, that we have not been able to avoid any appeal to what itself legitimizes the tradition. Moral and legal disputes have themselves proved so divisive that we have not been able to find a means of resolving them in the usual manner. We have not been able to begin with a set of rights that define the conditions for the conversation, because it is precisely the nature of those rights themselves that are in dispute. The common-law tradition historically rested on the natural-law tradition, and it has been the disappearance of the latter that has provoked the crisis of the former.20 Dworkin’s method of internal debate leaves us with no means of clarifying the very principles that constitute the tradition, so when a dispute arises there is no means of settling it through an expansion of the underlying principles. One cannot simply assert that the bedrock is the right to “equal concern and respect” when it is precisely the grounds for equal concern and respect that are at issue. How else are we to determine whose claim is to take priority when they come into conflict?

The nonfoundationalist approach represented by Dworkin and now widely practiced has the advantage of avoiding sterile philosophical debates that cannot reach a conclusion. By directing us back to the common-law tradition it reminds us that men do not have to explicate all of the grounds of their judgments before reaching well-founded conclusions. If we cannot resolve our theoretical differences we can return in the best liberal spirit to the development of a practical consensus. But it cannot paper over the crack of nihilism that has fissured the liberal tradition. Nor are we likely to be much reassured by Dworkin’s aspiration that behind all the muddle of practical judicial interpretation in the empire of law stand the philosophers, “the seers and prophets” of law. “It falls to philosophers, if they are willing, to work out law’s ambitions for itself, the purer form of law within and beyond the law we have” (Law’s Empire, 407). They are the ones who weave together the tattered ends of law and reveal it in its pure integrity.

So far, of course, they have kept it pretty much to themselves, otherwise we would not have the kind of wrenching conflicts that have forced us to confront our own nakedness. On the other hand, if the philosophers themselves are just as much at a loss, then a nonfoundationalist approach will serve little better than any other. It will merely disguise the nihilism that lies deep within itself but that is brought to the surface in the palpably self-serving character of its justifications. Like the pattern of bioethical professionals on hospital staffs, the cumulative effect will be to allow people a cover for doing pretty much whatever they want to do anyway. At the end of the day, one suspects that the nonfoundational approach is one that really believes in very little. How, otherwise, could one reach the kind of conclusion advocated by Richard Flathman, that the right to an abortion includes the right “to demand an abortion from a medically competent individual who personally believes that abortion is morally wrong?”21 If one can be compelled to commit what one regards as murder, then we have entered a realm that is, in Dworkin’s chilling phrase, “beyond the law.”

This even takes some of the jaunt out of that most impish of nonfoundationalists, Richard Rorty. The abyss of liberal coerciveness implied in the readiness to treat liberal principles as an invitation to creative interpretation is wickedly concealed in his playful rhetoric of irony. How can any interpre­tation be challenged if the principles do not really stand for something else? If their only basis is the fact of their historical emergence, what privileged status does any one formulation have over all the alternatives? Who is to say that the rights of one may not be sacrificed for the rights of another? What is the necessity even for maintaining a consistency of principle? Why should we be slaves of conventions historically inherited anyway? Rorty’s term, liberal ironist, is intended to describe the kind of individual who can keep these kind of questions under his hat. More and more, however, it begins to sound like the brave whistling in the dark of a man who cannot repress the monsters of unanswered questions.

“Putting on a brave face” is a pathetic metaphor for the fate of the liberal tradition. No amount of rhetorical brilliance can disguise the note of pleading in Rorty’s efforts to convince us and himself not to take the questions seriously. It is a scintillating piece of bravado that almost succeeds in “joshing” us out of our philosophical earnestness, were it not for the patent contradiction with the sense of solidarity he wishes to put in its place.22 He is convinced, with Foucault, that the quest for truth has been at the source of the cruelty that human beings have inflicted on one another, and so he welcomes the ironist critique that undermines truth itself as a project. Solidarity must now be based, Rorty is convinced, on the feeling of sympathy with the sufferings and needs of others. But why should we give way to this feeling rather than any others, especially in the absence of any good reasons? What indeed will solidarity mean when we do not truly know what it is that is appropriate to all others?23

Rorty recognized the abyss of the centerless self in the example of Heideg­ger, for whom there was no contradiction between writing great books and betraying his colleagues (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 111, n. 11). Or there is Rorty’s recognition of Smith in 1984 as a plausible account of the kind of society “in which the intellectuals had accepted the fact that liberal hopes had no chance of realization” (183). But perhaps the most touching passage of all is where Rorty imagines what he would say when the secret police come to torture the innocent. He or we will not be able to say anything. We can only remember Sartre’s remark on such an occasion, that then “fascism will be the truth of man.” It is, Rorty admits, “a hard saying . . . that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions” (Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii).24 The question is whether there is anything at all that would make Rorty shout “No!”

That is the decisive question, for the collapse of the liberal efforts at theoretical self-articulation is of concern only to the extent that it presages a more profound inner collapse of conviction. It is one thing to not be able to justify what one believes, it is quite different if one no longer believes anything. The two are clearly connected and mutually reinforce one another. The whole arduous effort to develop a nonproblematic account of liberal order has been motivated by the concern that the underlying morality may be in danger of draining away. A gnawing anxiety that little of substance may remain lurks behind the urgency to plug the theoretical cracks. This accounts for the sense one often gets from liberal writers that if only they can make it all coherent then our political problems will be solved. Unfortunately, the problems lie deeper.

We cannot ignore the contingent relationship between theory and practice. Just as the disassembling of theory does not necessarily lead to the disap­pearance of liberal practice, so the reassembling of theory will not necessarily lead to the restoration of liberal practice. Their relationship is reciprocal and complex. Both must be taken into account if we are to get the full measure of the long liberal crisis that is upon us. We must be willing to confront at the deepest level the possibility contemplated by Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky: that nihilism had become not only the intellectual but also the existential truth of liberalism. What is it that keeps liberal democratic societies together if we cannot philosophically account for it? Or have we reached the point where liberal societies have awoken to their own incoherence and are already headed down the path of disintegration?

Many of the most perceptive liberal critics have concluded that the tradition is now bankrupt. “Liberalism as a doctrine implicitly presupposed,” observes John Gray, “what contemporary cultural pluralism destroys or diminishes, a single cultural tradition as undergirding the institutions of civil society. Those who welcome cultural diversity (as I do) must be ready to confront the task of maintaining civil society without much help from the resources of the cultural tradition which gave it birth and sustained it to maturity” (Liberalisms, 214). Increasingly, in the view of Gray and many others, we cannot rely on any core liberal conviction to sustain a public order. We are thrown back upon the continuity of social conventions and the enclaves of traditional communities as the only solidities that remain. The universalism of liberalism as an ideology is abandoned, and we acknowledge the extent to which it has been tied to the peculiar historical conditions of its genesis and development. Philosophy is replaced by history.

Within such a setting the task of the theorist ceases to be that of searching for new evocative formulations of liberal principles. There are no noncircular justifications of the priority of liberty that do not presuppose the primacy they wish to establish. Nor is there any way of moving from abstract principles of liberty to political practice without presupposing the more concrete ex­periences of liberal politics. But most devastating of all is the vacuum that is revealed by this failure of explanations. There are no liberal convictions that can be articulated because there are no liberal convictions period. All that exist are the liberal practices themselves as a precious historical bequest, and it becomes the task of the theorist to bend all his efforts to the work of sustaining them. The liberal theorist becomes, according to Gray, a “political Pyrrhonist” who works to salvage what can be saved from liberal skepticism. This may include the rendering of plausible accounts of liberal political morality, but it will not extend to “the vain project of constructing a liberal doctrine. Indeed, if his inquiries have a practical aim (and they need not), it will be to protect the historical inheritance of liberal practice from the excesses of an inordinate liberal ideology” (264).

There is an admirable modesty in this approach that focuses on repairing the habits and institutions that have constituted liberal politics. A tone of refreshing realism about politics has been sounded in the acknowledgment of the need for restraint, especially in regard to the abstractions that have defined the liberal ideals. It is true that the liberal order has been a victim of its own success and that any more success could destroy it altogether. But for all the laudable respect for historical traditions that we find voiced by writers across the political spectrum today, there is also a sense of weariness and resignation that feels uncomfortably like the last gasp of an exhausted political movement. No longer able to explain itself, liberalism reverts to taking care of the inheritance bequeathed to it by its ancestors.

One wonders how well liberalism will be able to take care of what it no longer understands. How long will it be able to sustain an order that does not arise from its own convictions? One cannot simply jettison “the myths of universal humanity and personhood”25 without affecting the concrete institutions and practices that such general notions underpinned. The flight from theory, itself a perennial proclivity of liberals, cannot abolish the ques­tions and conflicts to which theory had sought a response. Disputes about the meaning and application of liberal principles will return, except now they will not find even a partially coherent account to control them. The failure of the liberal philosophical enterprise to date does not mean that no philosophical account of liberal democracy is possible. It means only that the form in which the search was undertaken is unlikely to yield fruitful results. The demonstration of an alternative approach is the principal object of this book. But before we proceed we must first establish that a liberal ethos exists that can be theoretically explicated. We must respond to the deepest challenge that has been mounted against the liberal consensus: that it does not exist. Is nihilism the truth of the liberal soul?

 

Notes

15. Michael Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self” in Political Theory 12 (1984); and Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

16. Michael Sandel has expressed the problem with great clarity:

“If the good is nothing more than the indiscriminate satisfaction of arbitrarily-given preferences, regardless of worth, it is not difficult to imagine that the right (and for that matter a good many other sorts of claims) must outweigh it. But in fact the morally diminished status of the good must inevitably call into question the status of justice as well. For once it is conceded that our conceptions of the good are morally arbitrary, it becomes difficult to see why the highest of all (social) virtues should be the one that enables us to pursue these arbitrary conceptions “as fully as circumstances permit” (Liberalism and the Limits, 168).

A similar identification of the ambiguity of Rawls was voiced by George Parkin Grant:

“One may be glad that Rawls has inherited the noble belief in political equality, and the belief that ‘the free and rational person’ is ‘valuable’ in a way quite different from members of other species. But in an era such as ours, we cannot help hoping that he will tell us why it is so. His writing is typical of much modern liberal thought in that the word ‘perso’ is brought in mysteriously (one might better say sentimentally) to cover up the inability to state clearly what it is about human beings which makes them worthy of high political respect. Where Kant is clear concerning this, Rawls is not.” (English-Speaking Justice, 33)

17. Rawls is not of course alone in preferring such reticence. Bruce Ackerman is even stronger in endorsing liberal detachment:

“When you and I learn that we disagree about one or another dimension of the moral truth, we should not search for some common value that will trump this disagree­ment; nor should we try to translate it into some putatively neutral framework; nor should we seek to transcend it by talking about how some unearthly creature might ‘ resolve it. We should simply say nothing at all about this disagreement and put the moral ideals that divide us off the conversational agenda of the liberal state.” (“Why Dialogue?”)

18. Brigitte and Peter Berger have sought to uncover a middle ground of consensus in the abortion debate, but they readily acknowledge that the issue may be seen as outweighing the call for civil harmony:

“In view of this perception of the issue by large numbers of Americans, the accusation by [the pro-choice side] that these people are engaged in ‘single issue polities’ missed the point entirely: Given this perception, what single issue could be more important than a million murders per year?”

(The War over the Family. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1983, 67). The scale of the issue is perhaps best captured by the title of a popular treatment by John Powell, Abortion: The Silent Holocaust. Allen, TX.: Argus, 1981.

19. The contrast with Lincoln’s assessment of the situation when he confronted the arguably more overt conflict regarding slavery is instructive. He recognized that the issue could be settled politically only if it was first settled philosophically. “Whenever this question [of slavery] shall be settled, it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained” (Roy B. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol 4. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 17).

20. On this background, see Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983; James Stoner, The Common Law and Liberal Theory. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992.

21. Richard Flathman, Toward a Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 203. It should be noted that Flathman does retain the possibility of asserting a pacifist defense for noncooperation, although it remains a highly “qualified” avenue of escape from liberal compulsion.

22. Richard Rorty proposes to discourage the raising of philosophical questions about the source of order as a necessity imposed by the irreducible pluralism of contemporary liberal societies.

If one’s moral identity consists in being a citizen of a liberal polity, then to encourage light-mindedness will serve one’s moral purposes. Moral commitment, after all, does not require taking seriously all the matters that are, for moral reasons, taken seriously by one’s fellow citizens. It may require just the opposite. It may require trying to josh them out of the habit of taking those topics so seriously. There may be serious reasons for so joshing them. (“The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,”In The Virginia Statute for Relgious Freedom, ed. Merrill Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan, 257-82. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 272.)

23. The same incredible sense of an impossible high-wire balancing act could be discerned in Rawls’s earlier construction, as Michael Sandel perceptively discerned Discussing the difference principle, Sandel observed that the assumption that all assets are at the disposition of society to redistribute “fairly” undermines the independence of the deontological self it was intended to protect.

“Either my prospects are left at the mercy of institutions established for ‘prior and independent social ends’ . . . which may or may not coincide with my own, or I must count myself a member of a community defined in part by those ends, in which case I cease to be unencumbered by constitutive attachments. Either way, the difference principle contradicts the liberating aspiration of the deontological project. We cannot be persons for whom justice is primary and also be persons for whom the difference principle is a principle of justice.” (Liberalism and the Limits, 178).

24. Compare this with Albert Camus’s meditation on the existential discovery of an order of moral limits in the act of revolt against injustice

“What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renuncia­tion. . . . He means, for example, that “this has been going on too long,” “up to this point yes, beyond it no,” “you are going too far,” or, again, “there is a limit beyond which you shall not go.” . . . Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right. . . . When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical.” (The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage, 1956,13, 17)

25. Ibid., 236.

 

This excerpt is from The Growth of the Liberal Soul (University of Missouri Press, 1997). It is the second of three parts with part one and part three available; also see “Utopian Forgetfulness of the Depth: part one and part two.”

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David Walsh is the Chair Board Member of VoegelinView, President of the Eric Voegelin Society, and Professor of Political Science at Catholic University of America. He is the author of a three-volume study of modernity: After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (Harper/Collins, 1990), The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Missouri, 1997), and The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge, 2008). His latest book is Politics of the Person and as the Politics of Being (Notre Dame, 2015).

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