The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Part I)

In one sense liberal theory and politics have always been in a state of crisis. Even in its earliest appearance in the reflections of John Locke and his con­temporaries, in their uneasiness with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there was hesitation about the foundations. The American framers at Philadelphia and afterward frequently sounded their uncertainties as to whether their historical experiment in self-government was destined to survive. The advent of mass democracy in the nineteenth century, when “liberalism” became both a movement and a creed, provoked the most profound misgivings in such leading theorists as Tocqueville and Mill. And our own century has witnessed the global confrontation with totalitarianism that has made it the century of the fall and rise of the liberal tradition. So what is different about the present crisis? In what way is liberal democracy, that most defyingly durable of all modern political forms, particularly in danger today?

Perhaps there is nothing more to the alarms than the outbreak of one more of the perennial bouts of liberal self-doubt. True, there are well-recognized social, political, and economic problems. Rates of family breakdown in the advanced liberal democracies have reached catastrophic proportions, especially for the millions of children who are deprived financially and im­poverished emotionally as a consequence. The epidemic of indulgence and escape, whatever the choice of narcotics, testifies to a society that is deeply unhappy and with few resources for dealing with the vicissitudes of the human condition. A new callousness toward human life is everywhere in evidence, from the explosion in violent crime to the unthinking cruelty to which human beings are exposed at every stage from conception to death. The collapse of civility is widely deplored in everything from the coarseness of popular culture to the aggressiveness of interpersonal relations in everyday life.

Within this social maelstrom the ministrations of political figures ap­pear particularly ineffectual. Liberal politicians of course share the moral disorientation of the social world from which they come. They are, moreover, used to operating within a fairly narrow range of instrumental policy choices. Nothing in their experience prepares them for confronting the advanced process of spiritual disintegration they witness at work in their societies. At best they can help at the margins by enforcing the law and targeting programs of assistance for those who can be helped; they can neither compel nor transform the majority whose creature they ultimately remain. At worst they accelerate the process of disintegration through the recurrent competition for votes that can only be obtained by overpromising what can be achieved. The resulting disillusionment and cynicism ends by fueling the very process they sought to arrest.

Along with these self-made cycles of destruction has been the additional layer of autonomous economic cycles with all of their wrenching readjust­ments in human terms. Central to liberal political philosophy has always been the philosophy of economic growth in one form or another. It is no secret that the relative quietude of liberal societies is purchased in considerable measure through a growing economy. Political conflicts over wealth can be less divisive when the fund available is an expanding one, rather than one that is static or contracting. But growth always includes decline and instability, which translates into real human dislocation and suffering. The difficulty is that governments have neither mastered the self-discipline nor risen to the challenge of educating their citizens concerning the principles of action required to confront economic uncertainty. Such powerlessness is exacerbated when the global economic interdependence makes evident the limits of their control.

Yet a few problems do not make a crisis. Taken individually the difficulties faced by the liberal democracies are no greater than the historic challenges they have overcome, such as the totalitarian confrontation or the upheavals of the industrial and social revolutions. They are difficulties that could be overcome through the application of a determined common sense. If politics has raised exaggerated expectations, lower them; if economic adjustments have to be made, make them as rationally and as compassionately as possible; if family breakdown is a problem, legislate in ways that encourage the formation and stability of family life. Such steps would not, of course, eliminate the problems nor would they be free of costs, but they would clearly be a movement in the required direction. No insuperable obstacles lie in the way of the appropriate action, if we will to undertake it.

Therein lies the difficulty. We find ourselves lacking the necessary resolute­ness of will that would enable us to overcome the problems before us. It is not that the solutions are unavailable, but that we are unable to avail of them. A peculiar ambivalence, a conflict of inclinations grips us, and we are unable to shake free of the desuetude that overwhelms us. We cannot take action because we are not yet willing to undergo the painful reorientation. Like Saint Augustine’s “Lord, make me pure, but not just yet,” or the alcoholic who is ready to quit after “one more drink,” we are not yet serious about the changes we need to make. Deep down we are still attached to the problems that plague us, and we have not yet felt that we really need to change.

Anatomy of the Crisis

Liberal society does not yet realize the depth of the crisis within it. In popular lingo, we are still “in denial.” Yet the marks of the crisis are widely in evidence, from the incapacity to take effective action in the public policy arena to the profound moral conflicts that rend the liberal soul. A paralysis of action everywhere arises from the “interminable” and “incommensurable” disputes that cleave liberal society into a multiplicity of hostile camps.¹ Common sense is decreasingly in evidence because we share less and less of a common understanding of things with one another. With the decline in what is common, there is less of a community between human beings. Pluralism, multiculturalism, and difference are the watchwords. Liberal politics does come to resemble Alasdair Maclntyre’s notorious description of it: “civil war carried on by other means” (After Virtue, 253).

This disappearance of a shared social and political world means ultimately the disappearance of the liberal ethos itself. That is the first leg of the crisis. The common self-understanding constitutive of liberal democracy is itself in danger of extinction to the extent that a multiplicity of private viewpoints overshadows it. A profound crisis of confidence, the equal of any that it has historically faced, is now shaking liberal order to its foundations. Unsure of what it believes and uncertain of the grounds for what it holds, liberal democracy is vulnerable to the centrifugal forces that it has for so long held within itself. Without a liberal center “things fall apart and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

What makes the crisis determinative is that the corrective centripetal forces have all but disappeared. It is not the pressures to disintegrate that are the core of any social or political crisis, for such forces are always present. It is the absence of any countervailing forces of union, a shared conception of the common good, that enables the destructive powers to appear so strong. This is the case today because liberal principles no longer seem to possess a core of their own; it has been lost in the process by which the present crisis of pluralism unfolded. There is little possibility of a reassertion of unifying dogma, because it has been the inexorable logic of the liberal orientation itself that has led to the present disintegration. Liberal pluralism cannot stand apart to impose coherence on the very incoherence it has brought forth.

The collapse of the liberal center has been the work of liberal principles themselves. That is the crucial second leg of the crisis. Not only is there a hollowness at the heart of the public order, but it is a vacuum that has been largely self-created. The ethos of neutrality so studiously cultivated by liberal theory and liberal practice is what has evacuated the soul of its politics. By extending the principle of neutrality far enough, liberal convic­tion has finally been unable to resist the last step. It has become neutral regarding itself. There can be no dogma that all must accept, because that would be an illiberal imposition contrary to the freedom of choice that the liberal construction is intended to promote. The only foundation to liberal political order must be the aggregation of the private valuations of the individuals who compose it. There can be nothing approaching a shared worldview, because being liberal means precisely that we do not have to share a worldview.

Such is the “strange death of liberal” society that seems to loom before us.² Gone is the confidence that a community of free and equal individuals is a sufficient condition for the emergence of a good political order. We are no longer convinced that there is a universal human nature that can be relied upon to draw the vast majority in a common direction, toward their common good. In the absence of a shared nature there seems to be less justification for treating one another as equal — equal in what? — or for regarding rights as anything more than a social convention. Like Justice Holmes, we are inclined to believe that there is nothing more to the rights of man than what men will fight for, in much the same way that “a dog will fight for a bone.”³ Finally, having lost the sense of a human core that will form the basis of agreement and constitute the basis for the acknowledgment of fundamental rights between human beings, we lose the liberal faith in reason. We can no longer indulge the expectation that the historical trend of politics is progressive. Nothing justifies our sanguinity that the future will be better than the past.

The central ideas of the liberal creed have taken a beating, and without them it is doubtful that liberal politics can be sustained. That is the situation in which we find ourselves, and the problem that the present study is a modest attempt to address. Without the liberal faith in a common human rationality, however vaguely defined, can we continue to enjoy political institutions that presuppose it? The protection of a sphere of individual liberty that cannot be invaded by others, public or private, is based on the assumption that this is the best way for human beings to flourish. But if human flourishing has itself become an empty concept, of what value is the liberty that protects it? If we take happiness or satisfaction as the overriding political goal then the line between public and private may be redrawn quite differently. Constitutional limitations become much less significant if we are aiming at a society of “contented slaves.”

Nor is there any compelling reason that we should endure the cumbersome and untidy exercise of political liberty. Self-government is only of value if human beings must attempt to govern themselves in order to reach their full human stature. If there is no common growth in self-responsibility to be attained, then there is little purpose in the inefficiency of participatory politics. Public order can be obtained in a less costly manner. There might even be methods of checking the abuse of power by public officials. Why is it necessary for the people to be consulted? Only if we believe that it is somehow essential to being human is it necessary to encourage the free-flowing chaos of self-government. Unless humans are essentially self-governing beings, there can be no case for self-governing societies.

With the disappearance of the view of humans as rational beings there dissolves also the liberal faith in the progress of reason. However variously formulated, liberals have always held to some form of belief in the capacity of men to improve collectively and individually. It is bound up with the notion of reason itself, that we can learn from our mistakes and that in history advances do occur. The amplitude of meliorism, from Utopian expectations of a change in human nature to more sober assessments of the incorrigibleness of humanity, was united around a core confidence in the ability of reason to guide human existence and at least to build incremental improvements in the political realm. Without a faith in the human capacity for self-improvement it seems unlikely that the experiment in self-government can be sustained. The inevitable failures and disappointments will eventually engulf it.

All the major elements of the liberal worldview appear to have lost their footing. The value of private liberty has been put in doubt, the need for self-government appears less compelling, and the likelihood that reason can guide political agreements seems ever more unlikely. In place of the confident self-evidence of liberal principles is a gnawing sense that the dissolving process has occurred from within. There can be no solution because it has been the extension of the liberal impulse itself that has undermined the foundations. The very success of a liberal order is ironically what encouraged the peeling of successive layers, only to end by discovering after the last layer had been pulled back that the onion itself had disappeared. No one step or layer appeared indispensable, but the cumulative effect was conclusive. Nothing could survive the withering skepticism of analysis.

If the test was that one cannot be compelled to accept any principle whose truth cannot be conclusively demonstrated to everyone, then one could not be compelled to accept much. Yet that has been the logic of the liberal starting point. In the slow but inexorable march toward a neutrality beyond all objections, the very heart of the liberal impulse itself has been lost. For it turns out that even the most expansive expressions of tolerance harbor a residue of cruelty, in the forms of behavior they exclude. We are pushed to go one step further in the application of our liberal principles of choice. We must acknowledge that there are no limits on what consent can authorize. We must accept even intolerance in the name of tolerance. It is at that point that liberal politics has stepped over the abyss from which it cannot easily recover, because the principles that guide it have been the very ones that have pushed it over the edge.

The quest for an impregnable foundation to justify and guide the exercise of liberal authority has proved illusory. Every principle adduced has become in turn a petitio principii, itself in need of justification and ever vulnerable to the corrosive “Why?” Even when that question is answered there still remains the problem of the application of any standard in social and political practice. The disputes that may have been settled at the level of abstraction begin all over again. We discover that the consensus we appeared to have reached did not extend beyond appearance. The meaning of the standard to guide the application of liberty in concrete is itself replete with the same uncertainty and conflict that prevailed in the philosophical debate. The confusion of philosophy has merely been transferred to politics.

It is this utter failure of any formulation of liberty to shape a concrete consensus of interpretation that has crystallized the crisis of the liberal tradition. The crisis has become self-conscious. That is the third leg, added to the collapse of the center and the self-induced nature. Now all three elements are present in the awareness that the more liberal we have tried to be, the more incoherent we have become both intellectually and politically. The crisis has arisen, not from a failure to apply liberal principles but from a too consistent application. The ever more rigorous search for a neutral foundation has evacuated all foundations; the injunction against cruelty has progressively removed even the barriers that define cruelty itself; the ever widening demand for popular participation increases the sense of alienation from a process over which the individual has no control. The unfolding of events and reflections has now made the crisis transparent. We recognize that it is specifically a crisis of liberal order itself, not attributable to any extraneous factors.

That recognition is the outer limit of our present awareness politically and intellectually. It is what is behind the more pragmatic political mood that has prevailed in the liberal democracies. The search for new political paradigms, the experimentation with new labels, neoliberals or neoconservatives, testifies to nothing so much as the defunctness of the old orientations. There may not be a clearly formulated direction to take their place, but there can be no further implementation of the outmoded conceptions of the past. The extension of liberal principles into welfare-state liberalism, as it occurred in this century, has reached its limits.⁴ Having successfully responded to the most pressing social needs, the continued expansion of such efforts has begun to threaten the exercise of liberty itself. The welfare state ceases to serve the welfare of its beneficiaries when it has transformed them into its wards and can no longer recognize the harm it has done. An order of liberty presupposes some limits that lie beyond even benevolent control.

The parallel intellectual straining of the limits of liberal principles has reached an equivalent transparency, collapsing in the recognition that the quest for foundations impregnable to skeptical critique is an impossible enterprise. There are no foundations beyond foundation. Some of the most impressive contemporary liberal theorists have both reached and exemplified this recognition in their own writings. A revival of liberal theoretical reflection that reached a high point in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has reached a dead end. A line of reflection that seemed to be full of promise, both theoretically and politically, has suddenly ended in the desert. Moreover, it is a landscape that bears striking resemblance to the desert of nihilism against which the liberal tradition has attempted to define itself.⁵ The conclusion toward which both the practical and the theoretical extensions of the liberal impulse point is that very vacuity of purpose it all along sought to avoid.

The Irony of Liberal Nihilism

The irony is that it was precisely the confrontation with totalitarian nihilism that provoked the contemporary rejuvenation of liberal convictions. We have difficulty remembering the extent to which the liberal ethos died in the period between the two world wars. The Great War had discredited the nineteenth-century brand of liberal politics that had seemed so helpless to avoid the conflagration. Social and economic upheavals that reached a crescendo in the Great Depression seemed to have sealed the fate of liberal economics. Even the historically stable democracies of the West appeared to be in a prerevolutionary state. Communist and fascist movements were not exclusively a German or Italian or Slavic phenomenon. Ideological mass movements were to be found in most of the countries of Europe and the Americas.

The realization of the destructiveness of such movements if they were to attain power was the shock that jolted liberal democracies back to life. Suddenly, liberals discovered that they were unarmed, militarily and spir­itually, against far more vigorous opponents. Faced with movements that inspired fanatical commitment, with members that were willing to kill and be killed for the cause they overwhelmingly believed in, liberal democracies discovered the depth of their own ambivalence. Having drifted along as the danger mounted before it, liberal societies and liberal intellectuals suddenly awoke to the realization that history was about to pass them by. Without any apparent deep, sustaining convictions they were no longer a match for the more vital revolutionary forces of the day.

Something of the shock that stirred the liberal democracies into life on the eve of the Second World War can be sensed in T. S. Eliot’s lecture “The Idea of a Christian Society.” The craven capitulation of the Western powers before the demands of Hitler at Munich was the event that brought home the depth of the problem. It made clear the severity of the liberal crisis to “the many persons who, like myself, were deeply shaken by the events of September 1938, in a way from which one does not recover; perhaps to whom that month brought a profounder realization of a general plight.” More than a political crisis, he understood in the events of Munich the eruption of a spiritual crisis, for they had cast “a doubt about the validity of a civilization.”

We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled around anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?⁶

The crisis revealed failures beyond any errors in government and called for a response beyond the purely political. Betrayal and humiliation could be surmounted only by contrition and repentance. Eliot called in his lecture for the revival of the idea of a Christian society as the only adequate spiritual support for the superstructure of a liberal political order. This is a call that was to be echoed by many thinkers in the postwar period. The confrontation with totalitarianism had convinced them that liberal democracy needed, if not a religious foundation, something approaching a political creed if it was to have the inner strength to withstand its implacable ideological opponents.⁷

More broadly, an effort at energetic rearticulation was undertaken, largely inspired by the impression that liberal principles had never been adequately defended. The suspicion that liberal order had declined because it had never been elaborated with sufficient force or consistency gave rise to an impressive succession of liberal retheorizations. Some of them, such as Karl Popper’s 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies, were not the most felicitous in the judgments hurled across the centuries of the history of philosophy, but there was no denying the depth of commitment to the defense of the “open society” — however ill defined.

A similar predilection for conviction over logic characterizes Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between positive and negative freedom. He makes it clear that the dangers of the misuse of positive freedom to justify all manner of totalitarian abuse, invoking Rousseau’s unfortunate dictum of “forcing men to be free,” are so great that he would prefer to yield the intellectual defense rather than surrender the defense of principle. Berlin quotes approvingly Schumpeter’s nostrum: “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.”⁸

Even more impressive is the great restatement of classical liberal principles that we find in Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek, too, had begun with the critique of the ideological alternatives to the liberal tradition. His Road to Serfdom was one of the earliest and most trenchant warnings of the inevitably totalitarian nature of socialism. The Constitution of Liberty was likewise a pioneering defense of liberal political philosophy and one of the first to demonstrate the intellectual and moral credibility of that tradition. Hayek anchored his account in the notion of the rule of law that applies equally to all, thereby guaranteeing the equal enjoyment of liberty by all:

“The conception of freedom under law that is the chief concern of this book rests on the contention that when we obey laws, in the sense of general abstract rules laid down irrespective of their application to us, we are not subject to another man’s will and are therefore free” (153).

Anything else is merely the discretionary activity of authority that, by definition, is arbitrary and unlimited by any rule. He shows how this principle can provide the connecting thread that weaves together all the major elements of the liberal worldview: economic, social, political, and historical. It is again powerful testament to the vitality of the liberal faith that inspires it, although it stops short of a more philosophic articulation of the sources of that faith itself. We must after all be convinced that we ought to follow the rule of law and that the liberal values are themselves worth defending.

The following generation took up this challenge of a more philosophical defense of liberal ideas. For the past twenty years we have witnessed a proliferation of increasingly sophisticated approaches to the justification of liberal principles. Dominating the conversation has been John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which probably deserves most of the accolades heaped upon it for the simple reason that it is the only work that outlines a comprehen­sive philosophy of liberal order. Most of the others focus on more specific problems within the whole, but Rawls is the one who defines the whole and thereby identifies what the problems are.

Within contemporary Anglophone philosophy where all of the emphasis has been on discrete technical analyses of problems—in the expectation that somehow, somewhere, someday all of the solutions will accumulate into a whole — Rawls provides an invigorating rediscovery of the power of theory. Analytic liberal philosophers were not condemned to deal with ever more fragmented aspects of problems. They could now envision what a liberal theory might look like, even if Rawls was not right on many of the specifics of obligation, contract, natural justice, and so on. The need for additional nuance and refinements did not obviate the success in constructing a whole. Almost for the first time since Mill and perhaps even longer, the liberal tradition acquired intellectual credibility. Its principles had not simply been cobbled together by history and common sense; now they cohered.

The success of Rawls naturally inspired emulation. While there have been few grand theorists, there has certainly been a much higher, more serious, and less purely technical level of debate in the past two decades. Works such as Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia attracted well-deserved attention as expositions of what a minimal, libertarian justification of liberal principles might look like. Alan Gewirth, in Reason and Morality, provided a persuasive account of the way in which a revised Kantianism could provide the noncontroversial foundation long sought for liberal morality and politics. Ronald Dworkin, in Taking Rights Seriously and Law’s Empire, carried forth Rawls’s emphasis on the primacy of rights — especially “equal concern and respect” — to show how it constitutes the guiding principle of the liberal legal order.

With the many other examples that could also have been cited, it is evident that we have been living through one of the great periods of liberal theorizing.⁹ To the formidable array of liberal talent must also be added the even more extensive range of individuals who sought the renewal of liberal democracy from other sources. Dissatisfied with the atomistic indi­vidualism inherent in liberal thought, the communitarian perspective has been effectively articulated by such thinkers as Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. Jacques Maritain and the natural-law theorists, who have included such impressive recent representatives as Alasdair Maclntyre and John Finnis, have continued to mine the Thomist tradition for a more substantive foun­dation. Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Hans Gadamer, and (somewhat more idiosyncratically) Hannah Arendt sought in the encounter with classical political philosophy the reorientation that would ultimately rejuvenate liberal democracy. The revival of an intellectually powerful conservatism, as in Michael Oakeshott and others, has been clearly directed toward the reconceptualization of liberal ideas and practice. And perhaps just as significant has been the steady stream of returnees from the social left, bearing every conceivable banner from socialism to postmodernism, who regard a reformed liberal ethos as the best practical hope of realizing their ideals.

Yet despite the formidable range and depth of efforts reaching back more than half a century, we are still no closer to a consensus on the meaning and justification of a liberal order. Indeed, we seem to have slipped further away from it. The crisis of the liberal tradition has mounted. While repairs and reju­venations have occurred, the secular movement has continued down toward disintegration. This is all the more disheartening in light of the resilience and fortitude that liberal societies have demonstrated in the struggles they have endured. It is surely one of the supreme ironies of history that, having won the third great war of the century, the Cold War, the liberal democracies now suffer from a growing crisis of confidence in their own values. Contrary to the briefly famous fantasies of the “end of history,” our situation more resembles the repeat of history in the slow decline of Rome after the defeat of Carthage.¹⁰

Liberal philosophy has, of course, always been prone to becoming a victim of its own success. Its self-understanding has from the start been defined by the opponent to which it is opposed. First it was feudalism and aristocratic privilege, then it was absolutism and arbitrary rule, and in our own time the forces of totalitarian democracy. Deprived of a foe, it seems perennially inclined to relax its discipline and unwind toward a state approaching chaos; faced with an enemy, it initially appears weaker than it is and is perpetually inclined to tempt aggression. The inability to maintain anything like an equilibrium, in other words, is a problem that lies deep within the nature of the liberal ethos. The failure of the enormous range of efforts, theoretical and practical, that we have surveyed is not surprising. The propensity of the liberal tradition for crisis cannot be resolved through argument. Its roots lie deeper still.

Neither the periodic reinvigorations of liberal society nor the continuing struggle to find an intellectually compelling justification have been sufficient to stop the endemic unraveling tendencies of liberalism. The instability is not purely institutional or conceptual. As a consequence, the remedy cannot lie simply in institutional, social, or political reforms or in the development of arguments of impenetrable brilliance. Liberals typically have behaved as if such steps were indeed all that was needed to bring about Utopian perfection or something very close to it. But it is not enough to have a clear and compelling argument, for that will not lead irresistibly toward the transformation of politics. Nor will the reform of laws and institutions lead willy-nilly to political improvement, unless they are accompanied by an underlying improvement of the spirit of those who operate them. The most crucial dimension of any order, Montesquieu recognized, was the “spirit of the laws.”

It is the neglect of this spiritual or moral dimension that is the source of the liberal instability. Alternating between license and discipline, coherence and incoherence, it has suggested to many critics that liberal politics is bereft of any existential core. Such a judgment hardly stands up to the formidable resilience we have just acknowledged. But it does point at least to the right level of analysis. It is not that liberal order lacks a moral or existential foundation in the lived experience of both masses and elites. Indeed, it is one of the principal objects of this study to demonstrate the presence and significance of such a living consensus as the only foundation upon which we can rely. The problem more specifically is that liberal theory and practice studiously avoid attending to their own existential roots. It is almost as if the neglect is willful; more in the manner of a flight from reality, it is uncomfortable with contemplating. That, of course, is an existential and not simply an intellectual error, as the most perceptive critics of the liberal orientation have long understood.

The question is whether the flight from the spirit so characteristic of the liberal ethos can be reversed. Is there a possibility of an existential turning around that would reorder the nature of liberal politics? Or is the unraveling process that we have seen proceed apace, despite the periodic reversals, destined to reach its denouement? The question ultimately is an attempt to probe the condition of the contemporary liberal soul. What is the state of its resources? Having endured so much, does it now have within itself the capacity to rise again from the ashes of its own dissolution?  Or is it to suffer the final irony of its history that, having defeated the totalitatian emperor, it now finds that it too is without clothes?

Liberalism Without Clothes

Enemies, like friends, come to resemble one another. The difficulty is that their long-standing enmity prevents them from recognizing the extent to which they have become alike. A first step in any attempt to understand the nature of contemporary liberal order is to break free of the received patterns of thought. Any political science worthy of the name cannot afford to take the categories of ideological conflict for granted. While the world has been divided into ideological blocs for much of the twentieth century, this does not mean that we have been living in the rhetorically different “worlds.” Totalitarianism has not been a phenomenon in one corner. We have not lived through a gnostic war of good and evil, light and dark. Rather it has been a struggle against a common enemy — the evil of totalitarianism — that has infected different parts to different extents. The less seriously infected have mercifully been able to rally the forces of resistance that seem eventually to have exhausted the disease, but no segment can claim immunity from its effects. Western liberal democracy has demonstrated its moral superiority to the totalitarian ideologies, but that must not be allowed to conceal the degree of Western responsibility for the horror. Besides the efforts of heroic resistance there have also been the shameful episodes of collaboration with all the butchers of the twentieth century.¹¹ The moral darkness of totalitarianism has also made itself felt not infrequently in the liberal West.

Viewed in this context, the suspicion of nihilism as the truth of the liberal tradition comes as no surprise. It is only shocking to liberals themselves who had always assumed that they stood for something more. In this sense, the crisis of liberal politics that has culminated in the recognition of its own nakedness is a blessing in disguise. It enables liberal intellectuals and societies to come to grips with their identity with a clarity unique in their history. They must now confront not just the nihilism of their opponents, but the beam of darkness that has lain hidden in their own souls. Perhaps they might even begin to reflect on the degree of their own collusion in the evil of the century we are leaving behind. Instead of triumphalism, we might begin to revise our understanding to see our own role in the events as that of accomplices, as much in need of repentance as those whom we opposed. Finally, we might begin to understand the modern civilization itself from which both of us have sprung and recognize that the fatality of power without purpose has been the common darkness from which we have all suffered.¹² The possibility of breaking free from its influence begins with such an understanding of its appeal.

Like the rest of the modern world, the liberal tradition can only overcome its own nihilism by going through and beyond it. This is the prescription of Nietzsche who called himself “the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, how­ever, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself” (The Will to Power, 3). It was this willingness to confront the problems at their deepest level, in the soul of modern man, that enabled the most clear-sighted, such as Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, to foresee the disasters that lay in the future.¹³ At the height of the liberal nineteenth century, Nietzsche understood the extent to which ” ‘moral man’ is dressed up, how he is veiled behind moral formulas and concepts of decency” because he cannot bear to appear naked (The Gay Science, 295). But the truth was that the clothes of his morality had completely worn out. Nothing was more insubstantial than “the most threadbare and despised ideas [of liberalism]: equal rights and universal suffrage” (Will to Power, 396).

Nietzsche seems to harbor a particular scorn for the very unreflective capacity of the liberal tradition that enables it to soldier on when the whole world seems to be crumbling around it. This was best exemplified for him in the “English twaddle (niaiserie anglaise)” of John Stuart Mill and his compatriots. Mill’s conception of liberty, “Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you,” struck Nietzsche as the height of vulgarity, of the herd mentality. It bore no resemblance to the real world where a Corsican’s honor would demand a vendetta, and the probability of getting shot would not deter his efforts at revenge in the slightest (Will to Power, 488). The liberal guarantees of equal freedom would work only among a people that no longer believed in honor. They could be controlled by manipulating the small pleasures and pains of their petty existence.

The picture of this oppressive liberal apocalypse was brilliantly captured in Nietzsche’s portrait of “the last man.” When Zarathustra has failed in all his efforts to rouse his listeners to the new life he proclaims to them, he finally tries to insult their pride by portraying their future as the “most contemptible” of men. They are men who are no longer men, having turned away from struggle with the great questions. All that they can do is blink mindlessly. They do not want to know:

What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? More like an ineradicable swarm of flea beetles, they have turned away from all that is challenging and difficult.

Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.

One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor ci­nch: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

“Formerly, all the world was mad,” say the most refined, and they blink.

One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled—else it might spoil the digestion.

One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.

“We have invented happiness,” say the last men and they blink. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 18)

The portrait is chillingly close to the kind of cocooned existence that has become the unquestioned goal of liberal democratic societies today. Insulated from all the risks and pains of human existence we become satisfied with our measured quality of life, until we are prepared to go all too “gently into that good night.” We know the seductive appeal of comfort and, most telling of all, are not shocked by the response Zarathustra receives. “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra,” they shouted.

The truth, of course, is that this is not a mere aberration of liberal as­pirations. It is a logical outgrowth of the modest range of virtues that a liberal ethos promotes. In place of the old ideals of heroism, self-sacrifice, and honor, there are the more moderate practices of restraint, consideration, and caution. The difficulty is that the contraction of the virtues to those of the liberal gentleman was a process of shrinkage likely to continue, until all that was admirable in human character had shriveled up. In the absence of the supererogatory ideals, of the hero and the saint, there was no counter­balancing pull against the seductive enervations of materialism.

This was a problem noted by many of the leading nineteenth-century liberal theorists, including, it should be noted, John Stuart Mill. Alexis de Tocqueville comes closest to Nietzsche’s contempt for the impoverished range of aspirations in the newly populous bourgeoisie. What they most needed was not humility but pride, a more enlarged idea of themselves. “I would willingly exchange several of our small virtues for this one vice” (Democracy in America, 2:262). Tocqueville too contemplates the depressing prospect of a society of petty hedonists. In a passage that sounds remarkably like Nietzsche’s castigations against the soul-destroying effect of equality, he concludes with an unforgettable metaphor of the process:

“The reproach I address to the principle of equality is not that it leads men away in the pursuit of forbidden enjoyments, but that it absorbs them wholly in quest of those which are allowed. By these means a kind of virtuous (honnête) materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate, the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of action (ressorts).” (141)

The problems were, as Tocqueville suspected, and as Nietzsche made searingly clear, deeper than the influence of equality. The disappearance of the great overarching virtues of the Western moral tradition was itself only a symptom of the much deeper crisis of the spirit engulfing the modern world. The very foundations of morality had collapsed. This was the news that Nietzsche’s prophet proclaims and valiantly struggles to overcome, even though he is greeted with incomprehension. Like the madman who bursts into the marketplace in search of God, he encounters only derision from the passersby. They do not understand the enormity of the moment or of their own responsibility within it. Even though they are themselves the murderers of God, they have not yet asked themselves:

“What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? . . . Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? . . . What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our weapons. Who will wipe this blood off?” We are not yet ready to contemplate the question that the murder of God forces upon us: “Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?” (Gay Science, 181-82).

Nietzsche understood the enormity of the modern secular experiment, the creation of a human order in which the question of God had become obsolete, because he realized the degree to which our whole moral tradition had depended on divine authorization. In contrast to the glibness with which the idea of a rational moral order was endorsed by liberal intellectuals, he was among the very few who foresaw the crisis of morality that would unfold. The death of God meant the advent of nihilism. All of Nietzsche’s efforts were directed to awakening his contemporaries to this realization and struggling courageously, if tragically, to find a means of confronting it.

He understood that the abandonment of faith in God would put all the greater pressure on morality. But it would soon collapse. “Every purely moral value system (that of Buddhism, for example) ends in nihilism: this is to be expected in Europe. One still hopes to get along with a moralism without religious background: but that necessarily leads to nihilism. — In religion the constraint is lacking to consider ourselves as value-positing” (Will to Power, 16). Now we are constrained by the realization of our own responsibility for positing values. There can be no grounding or authorization beyond the discretionary impositions of our own will. Opposing what he considered the typically English assertion of George Eliot — that morality can survive unaffected by the loss of God — Nietzsche insisted on the wholeness of Christian morality. When they continue to insist that good and evil remain intuitively self-evident to them:

“we merely witness the effects of the domin­ion of the Christian value judgments and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem” (Twilight of the Idols, 516).

No one can deny that the Inquisitor’s complaints have justification or that his motives are laudably humanitarian. However, as the conversation between the cardinal and Christ continues, it becomes apparent that the old man has not created a higher order of justice or that he knows what genuine love for mankind is. What he constructs is not a realm emancipated from all misery, but the greatest hell imaginable. It is a world in which men have lost their humanity, they have been stripped of the very thing that makes life itself worthwhile. Having stepped outside the “conventional” restraints on what is permissible toward human beings, he has not reached a fuller reality in which the welfare of all is fully protected. He has set forth on a sea of control that has no boundaries, because any possible boundaries would have to be built on the shifting sands of his own arbitrary will. He cannot care for man because there is no longer any means of knowing what it is that makes man worthy of care. Without the parameters of his nature, neither the ruler nor the ruled can know what counts as human.

Even the pride of Nietzsche’s overman seems to depend on a notion of what a human being ought to be. In its absence can there even be overmen? The awareness of the inner contradiction of creating our own values in utter freedom is brilliantly exposed in the self-justifying protests of the Inquisitor. He is eager to have his love for humanity measured against that of Christ. The very lack of confidence in his own rightness is laid bare through the insistence that he is the one who is perfecting the work of the Savior. But the deceptiveness of his defense finally becomes transparent in the admission that “We are no longer working with Thee, but with him [the tempter] — that is our mystery” (The Brothers Karamazov, 305). It is not love of mankind that has sustained him, nor any desire to perfect the work of God, but the will to persist in the spirit of revolt that will hear no voice beyond its own.

Alyosha, Ivan’s brother, is the one who declares that the ostensible purpose of the tale, to render a critique of Christ, has been reversed. “Your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of Him — as you meant it to be” (309). Indeed, the silent unaccusing presence of Christ is widely conceded as the most effective presentation of Jesus in any literature other than the Gospels. Its significance here is that it establishes the most profound connection between Christ and the defense of human freedom. The relationship between liberty and Christianity is complex and will be explored further below, especially by means of a fuller reflection on the “Legend”; here it is sufficient to note the connection that is revealed when the defense of freedom is pushed to its limit. When the attack against it comes from the most radical perspective, the nihilistic overturning of all values, only the spiritual truth of Christ is sufficient to withstand the assault.

When the value of human freedom itself is put in question, liberal modes of argument are themselves badly exposed. Freedom is for liberals the starting point for argument, not a premise that stands in need of its own support. What can they say against an opponent that rejects the self-evidence of their foundations? What response can be made to the assertion that freedom is the root of human unhappiness? What can one say to someone who does not see that without freedom one cannot be humanly happy? Arguments are of no avail because the opponent has already crossed into a realm where “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” What can one say when rational argument is no longer possible?

All that remains is the silent witness of existence. What cannot be demon­strated can still be lived, and the force of that living still contains the possibility of stirring to life the reality that lies dormant within the other. The witness of Christ is that he is the Suffering Servant who “will not crush a bruised reed or quench a nickering flame.” Dostoyevsky understood, as no one before him had so clearly, that Jesus is not only the spiritual redeemer of mankind but also its political emancipator. Through the restraint in the manner of his communication with us, Jesus shows the importance of the free response of faith that he awaits. Through his willingness to suffer all the consequences of human freedom, including his own crucifixion, he makes unmistakably clear the value he places upon it. Through the unconditioned love of God for man, human freedom is made possible. Dostoyevsky powerfully conveys all this in the unspeaking forgiveness of Christ, made piercingly real to the Inquisitor in the kiss of Jesus at the end of their conversation.

Unconditional forgiveness is the reality that underpins human freedom. Without the readiness to forgive, freedom would have a limit or value that when exceeded would justify its elimination. A serious commitment to freedom can be sustained in the face of the most powerful opposition only if the power of love is even stronger. The integrity of the person, which is what the struggle over freedom is all about, depends upon a transcendent love nowhere evidenced so clearly in history as in Christ. That is the discovery yielded by a contemplation of the most devastating attack, theoretically and practically, that can be made against it. Those who have rediscovered human freedom on the far side of nihilism affirm its spiritual foundation. The question now is whether the liberal tradition itself can rise to the truth of liberty discovered outside of it. The examination must begin with the contemporary liberal thinkers who have sought a way out of the nihilism within and surrounding their own liberal convictions.

Notes

1. Alasdair Maclntyre’s After Virtue had the kind of broad public impact that it did because it was a forceful intellectual expression of a social situation that was becoming widely self-evident. He summarized the “catastrophe” that has overtaken modern civilization.

“The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture — and subscquently of our own — lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. In a world of secular rationality religion could no longer provide such a shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action; and the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject.” (50)

A recent survey of the social fault lines is provided by James Davison Hunter in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.

2. This is the title of a famous book by George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914, which recounts the collapse of the Liberal political party in England just before the Great War.

3. It is not at all comforting to discover that the most influential American jurist of the century had concluded that there was “no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand” (quoted in Walter Berns, The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy, 162-63).

4. For an account of the way in which welfare-state liberalism is the outgrowth of the earlier laissez-faire liberalism, see the classic argument by L. T. Hobhouse in Liberalism. John Dewey represents a parallel call for the expansion of liberal formulations to include a more energetic role for government planning and intervention. See his Individualism Old and New, Freedom and Culture, and Liberalism and Social Action.

5. I am indebted to the work of several liberal critics of liberalism for this portrait, especially John Gray, Liberalism and Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy, and William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues and Diversity in the Liberal State.

6. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1940,  5. A more philosophic elaboration of the same conclusion emerges in John Hallowell’s Decline of Liberalism As an Ideology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1943, although characteristically Hallowell is proposing the rejuvenation of liberal democracy ten years later in The Moral Foundation of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.

7. See, for example, Jacques Maritain, Man and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951; Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951; and Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

8. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969,172. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

9. Other notable examples of liberal theorizing certainly include Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986; Richard E. Flathman, The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981; Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, and  William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues and Diversity in the Liberal State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991; a representative example of the high level of recent symposia on the character of liberal order is R. Bruce Douglas, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good, New York: Routledge, 1990.

10. The thesis that liberal democracy represents the end point of political devel­opment in light of the disappearance of its last ideological rival has been developed by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.

11. Western knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust, it has been established, was extensive, but it is only with the Stalinist holocaust that Western cooperation rose to the level of active participation. This was in the shameful forced repatriation of approximately two million Soviet citizens who were in the West after the conclusion of hostilities, as part of an agreement with Stalin. Those that did not commit suicide along the way were immediately dispatched to the Communist concentration camps.

12. The air of foreboding that hangs over modern civilization began to receive pro­found expression in the nineteenth century, especially with the pessimism of Schopen­hauer and Nietzsche, as well as in the more historical reflections of Tocqueville, Burckhart, and Spengler. Even an American thinker, such as Orestes Brownson, could detect the connection between nihilism and totalitarianism then being forged. See Gregory Butler, In Search of the American Spirit: The Political Thought of Orestes Brownson, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. In our own century it has become commonplace to view the horror of the totalitarian convulsion through its relationship to the modern civilization that has produced it. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968; Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics and From Enlightenment to Revolution; Albert Camus, The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage, 1956; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago. Trans. Thomas Whitney. 3 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1974-1978.

13. See Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism. Trans. Edith M. Riley. New York: New American Library, 1950; David Walsh, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990.

14. The experience that transformed Dostoyevsky is recounted in Dostoyevsky, Fyodor.The Diary of a Writer.Trans. Boris Brasol. Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1979, 209-10. In After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990, I have tried to show how such experiences are the means by which large-scale shifts of moral orientation, a growth of the soul, actually occurs.

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

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