Liberalism as a Way of Life in the Twenty-first Century?

We have previously discussed what the Ancients can teach us.  As it turns out, they can teach us much.  But things get more dire by the day.  Anyone and everyone can make a list of our pathologies.  A week of reading the news shows us that as a polity, society, and culture we are in a deep hole but keep digging steadily.  Is there a way out?  The philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre has written an interesting study of Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024) in which he shows how a return to a Liberalism that is true to our humanity might give us hope, primarily because Liberalism is as “the water in which we swim” rather than the pale political partner of an even paler but more effective conservatism that rules us.  Perhaps.

The dictionary definition Liberalism is “a social and political philosophy based on support for of advocacy of individual rights, civil liberties, and reform tending towards individual freedom, democracy, or social equality.”  Most would include each of these as essential components of the liberal worldview.  The devil lies in the details of what these terms mean.  The argument has continued from John Locke up to the present.

Most conservative critics of Liberalism fall in line with Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame, who has written at length about the failure of Liberalism in Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future (2023).  Deneen’s antipathy to Liberalism as it is practiced is not always misguided.  In both books he hits a few nails without bending them.  He is correct that liberal members of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) are insufferable know-it-alls who understand very little despite their valuation of (their) “expertise” above all other traits.  This, of course, applies equally to conservative members of the PMC, including Patrick Deneen.  But Deneen is also exceedingly exercised by the decline of his conception of traditional marriage.  As I understand his argument, marriage is the union of one man and one woman (a view which is also ascribed to God).  Marriage is also a civil institution of great significance to the partners in a marriage and their family and to society at large.  This seems to have been ignored by Deneen, but I would be happy to be corrected.  These benefits should accrue to all marriages, period.  That they do in much of the world today is a signal advance due to Liberalism, and any political scientist should recognize this without question.

Critics of Liberalism on the other side of the divide include Raymond Geuss, who we discussed previously in On Not Thinking Like a Liberal in the 21st Century:

When it comes to Liberalism, the fantasy at its core is that each of us is an “entirely sovereign individual.”  However, according to Geuss, this is best currently viewed as a reaction to “massive anxiety about real loss of agency in the world…which is perfectly justified in the world we live in, and so the fantasy is clearly connected to the satisfaction of a real need.”  But, of course, Liberalism “does not serve only as an imaginary consolation for frustrated needs…it actually does effectively and palpably benefit some powerful economic actors.  The benefits of Liberalism are by no means imaginary for CEOs, the fossil fuel industries, and they thus have a very strong incentive, and ample resources, for contribute to maintaining it in existence and to strengthening its hold on the population.”  Indeed, Margaret Thatcher told us 40 years ago that “There is no alternative” to (the liberal mutant that is known as) Neoliberalism.  So far, that has been the case.

Geuss makes the better case against liberalism, as shown in Not Thinking Like a Liberal and his “little” but powerful Cambridge University Press book A Philosopher Looks at Work.  The philosopher who comes from a thoroughly working-class background is unusual, indeed.  He provides needed perspective.

Alexandre Lefebvre makes a very good case for Liberalism as a way of life.  His foundational argument lies in the work of John Rawls, including A Theory of Justice (orig. 1971) and Political Liberalism (orig. 1993).  According to Lefebvre, Rawls expects that people of good will are necessarily both decent and reasonable.  Remember this was before mutant neoliberalism took over our politics, and then society.  Neoliberalism was covered here recently in a discussion of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. [1]

Rawls is undoubtedly correct about people of good will being decent and reasonable.  In Lefebvre’s words, this makes him a “superb moralist” who is “able to discern the existing tendencies of a society, along with the self-conception of its members, and lead them in promising new directions.”  And that great “joys and benefits come from living this way.”  As Lefebvre puts it:

For my part, the idea for this book occurred to me only after reading the past paragraph of A Theory of Justice over and over.  There after five hundred pages of analysis, Rawls steps back to ask what was at stake in his theory.  His answer is extraordinary.  “Purity of heart,” “grace,” “self-command,” and even a semidivine perspective on the world (an ability to see it “sub specie aeternitatis”) are to be won…this is not the standard fare of political philosophy.  It is the language of soulcraft.

A Theory of Justice was ultra-successful due to its timing and its subject.  Back when more people read books, and my large land-grant University Bookstore sold actual books plus a limited selection of branded apparel and other junk (instead of only the latter as it does these days), Rawls was everywhere.  A Theory of Justice was “the first systematic philosophical work on justice to be published in decades, and at the moment when the United States was reeling from the Vietnam War and civil rights movement.”  Thus:

The quality and timeliness of A Theory of Justice go a long way to explaining its impact and popularity.  But perhaps there is an additional reason.  At its core, Rawls’s great book is inspired by a simple and easily grasped idea.  Society…should be conceived of and run as a fair system of cooperation (emphasis in original).

Hence, one possible explanation for the popular appeal of A Theory of Justice: it reflects the image that most citizens of liberal democracies have (or at least publicly profess) of themselves.

Rawls isn’t oblivious to real-world injustices.  Nor does he think that citizens of liberal democracies wear rose-colored (or worse, ideologically tinted) glasses.  Still, he bases his theory of the assumption that his fellow citizens do in fact recognize that the key purpose of their main public institutions is to ensure that society is seen and remains a fair system of cooperation…that the purpose of a legal constitution is to establish equal and reciprocal rights, the job of the police is to protect them, and progressive taxation is meant to ensure a level (enough) playing field.

Rawls does not define liberalism…he takes a different tack: to set out the conception of society that liberalism grows out of.  He defines…the soil (that is, a fair system of cooperation) and not the fruit (that is, liberalism itself)…making liberalism the dependent variable has advantages.

Yes, to all this, especially Liberalism being dependent on the soil, as something that should be viewed as autochthonous, perhaps a relationship between a base leading to a superstructure with reciprocal relationships in each direction.  But the immediate response to Rawls in the twenty-first century must include the following.  Society is not a fair system of cooperation, if it ever was.  As the Neoliberal Dispensation has hardened, society has become an unfair system of competition that most people seem to believe is fair.  It is not.

The primary tenets of Rawls’s conception of society require that: (1) the social order is not fixed or beyond human judgement but is designed and maintained for the mutual benefit of all; (2) society is not held together by a common good or shared belief such as Greek polis/cultivation of certain excellences, medieval Christian kingdom/saving souls, and modern fascism/securing the good of an exclusive people; and (3) reciprocity is essential in that citizens see themselves as self-interested and other-regarding while seeking their own advantage and honoring fair terms of cooperation.

Chapter 5 outlines “Six Ways Liberalism Shapes Us (and Vice Versa).”  The section entitled Liberal Practices: Life in the Meritocracy is perhaps the most important.  This provides an object lesson in how Liberalism affects our background culture “when it links up with a different ideology or social system to make a surprising, frequently illiberal hybrid.”  These include neoliberalism as a fusion of liberal and capitalist values.  Another is the current faux populism, which is completely unrelated to populism in the United States a hundred years ago, that holds out society as a fair system of cooperation, but for its members only.

The typical liberal of the twenty-first century, either notionally liberal or notionally conservative, believes that his or her status – wealth, position in society, the vision of being correct in all things – is earned.  One needs to remember that Michael Young’s dystopian novel The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) required the rise of Neoliberalism to come true.  As noted by Lefebvre:

Full-fledged meritocracy, where anyone (emphasis in the original) can rise or fall, requires equal rights and real equality of opportunity.  These are uniquely liberal ideas and institutions, and however much meritocracy ends up derailing liberalism, it can only grow on that soil.

Meritocracy owes another crucial debt to liberalism: its notion of selfhood.  Meritocracy’s motto – you can make it if you try – depends on a prior liberal principle: that individuals are not defined by their social ascriptions (such as race, sex, class, or religion), and are free to formulate and pursue their own interests and conception of the good.

Under the mutant Neoliberalism that makes up Lefebvre’s “Liberaldom,” a regime that is the analog of our Christendom in which very few follow the Jesus of Matthew 25:45 [2], those at the top of society’s pyramid can fail only upwards unless they make a concerted effort over the long term to do otherwise.  One need only look around, locally, nationally, and internationally to see the truth of this.  And this leads paradoxically to The Meritocracy Trap described by Daniel Markovits:

People who are required to measure up from preschool through retirement become submerged in the effort.  They become constituted by their achievements, so that eliteness goes from being something that a person enjoys to being everything he is.  In a true meritocracy, schools and jobs dominate elite life so immersively that they leave no self over apart from status.  An investment banker, enrolled as a two-year-old in Episcopal School and then passed on to Dalton, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, Harvard Business School and finally to Goldman Sachs (where he spends his income on sending his children to the same schools), becomes this resume, in the minds of others and even in his own imagination.

This is no way to live but it is alluring.  Such “dream hoarding” is the necessary concomitant of the virtue hording of the PMC, both liberal and conservative.  This hypocrisy and heresy of Liberaldom has used liberal freedoms to “pave the road to injustice” in a society that is not a fair system of cooperation.  It is just the opposite.  The question arises, “Is Liberalism to blame for Liberaldom?  Probably.  Liberal critics such as Isaiah Berlin “decried the perfectionist and progressivist tendencies of nineteenth-century liberals as “protototalitarian,” which led to a libertarianization of what Liberalism stood for.  This was easy for Isaiah Berlin to do, and he and his fellow liberals were wrong.

Liberalism as a Way of Life ends with a series of recommended spiritual exercises on how to live a good life as a liberal in the illiberal world Liberaldom.  These bring St. Ignatius and Marcus Aurelius to mind.  The references to John Rawls throughout the book include terms such as “citizen,” “good will,” “decent,” and “reasonable.”  These are critical, and unless they define us in the coming years, nothing will change for the better.  It has been said that “consumer” is neoliberal for “citizen.”  This is true.  Our politicians are most concerned with our role as consumers and have essentially no use for us as citizens.  The questions we must ask are whether the economy if for people or are people for the economy.  Rawls presupposes that those who disagree can do so as reasonable citizens.  We have lost the genius of reasonableness, if we really had for any sustained period in recent history.

Examples or our unreason in the West are legion: Failure to accept the inevitable outcome of the Cold War (other than nuclear annihilation) with grace and magnanimity for more than a few weeks followed by the looting of what was left of the Soviet Union, NAFTA, various and sundry wars of choice in what has been mistaken for a “unipolar” world, the neoliberalization of scientific research and every other human endeavor that mandates the market as the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured.  This instrumental, neoliberal view of the world and our place in it is making our world uninhabitable.

Unless and until we become decent and reasonable citizens of good will, we, all of us, will continue to only exist through the end of the world as we know it as an unfree people.  A true liberal world in which people are the measure of all things will be necessary to avert catastrophe, if this is still a possibility.  This, of course, will require at a minimum a healthy social democracy that transcends Neoliberalism and the implicit political economy of Liberalism:

For (ostensibly) free and equal democratic citizens to remain free and equal democratic citizens, certain kinds of values need to be upheld.  Freedom in a liberal democracy calls for…individual rights, domestic tranquility, and tolerance.  Equality in a liberal democracy calls for…fairness and a distribution of resources so that everyone can make effective use of their freedoms.  These values are political not because they are “in” our public institutions.  That mistakes the effect for the cause.  Rather, public institutions in liberal democracies exist to promote values that keep us free and equal.  And when we reason with one another using the only kind of values that citizens can reasonably be expected to share – political values enshrined in public institutions – we express and embody a role-specific moral duty of citizenship.  We give and take, civility, trust, and respect.

This is a tall order that neither Liberaldom nor Neoliberalism can fill.  But it would lead to cures of our many ills.  Is this pie-in-the-sky where the following is one of the great ledes in history?  Possibly:

Perhaps I’m too jaded about our “greatest democracy in the history of the world” two-party system, but I have a hard time getting too worked up about gerrymandering and how it will increase political polarization when both parties are largely bought and paid for by the billionaire class. (emphasis added)

But we must begin somewhere, and renewed appreciation of what we are supposed to be is the first step.  Alexandre Lefebvre makes a good case for Liberalism as the way to a good life for all.  There has not been space to discuss his reliance on Pierre Hadot, who is also important in the argument here for Philosophy as a Way of Life.  And then there is this: In a better world, the rich will still be rich.  Contrary to their fears, leveling is not always down, and everyone does better when everyone is better off, horizontally and vertically.

And finally, one example of reasonableness we have lost, in a letter from President Eisenhower to his brother Edgar Newton Eisenhower on November 8, 1954 (the frequently quoted excerpt is in bold, but the entire paragraph is necessary to appreciate his fundamental conservative liberalism):

Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions.  I oppose this – in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one.  But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it.  The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything – even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution.  This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government.  Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.  There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas.  Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

If only.  Reasonable men and women are not the found only in any party, sect, or grouplet.  But when they are found, all are citizens of good will and decent people.  We could use a few more of those these days.

Notes

[1] Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) by Wendy Brown is perhaps the best single book on how Neoliberalism took over in the so-called Global North.

[2] “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” (King James Version)