The Tyranny of Liberalism
Understanding and Overcoming
Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance,
and Equality by Command
Wilmington, Delaware
UXORI DILECTISSIMAE
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Decline and Fall
1. Liberal Tyranny
2. Principles
3. Institutions
4. Through the Looking Glass
5. Are Objections to Liberalism Overstated?
6. Irrationality and Self-Destruction
Part II: Up from Tyranny
7. Blind Alleys
8. Putting It Back Together
9. Faith and Authority
10. Bringing It All Back Home
11. Looking Forward
Notes
Index
Introduction
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT THE TYRANNY OF LIBERALISM: WHAT IT IS, HOW IT comes about, what its implications are, and what to do about it.
Such a theme is unusual enough to call for explanation. To many readers it will seem odd to hear of the “tyranny of liberalism.” After all, they will say, liberalism has always stood against tyranny, and in any event is too moderate and diverse a tendency to have any very definite consequences, let alone tyrannical ones.
Still, man is rational, at least to the extent that how he thinks has consequences. To understand human society we must be able, among other things, to talk about particular ways of thinking and to identify their effects. This book is intended as an exercise in that activity. It will be successful if it identifies a reasonably coherent and enduring tendency of thought that can be called “liberalism,” if it articulates liberalism’s sources and tendencies, and if it draws a persuasive connection between those tendencies and basic trends in social life. We need not claim that basic tendencies of thought determine everything to claim that they exist and determine some important things.
To say there is a “tyranny of liberalism” is to say that a particular way of understanding political, social, and moral life, one that treats freedom, equality, and satisfaction of preferences as final standards, has become overwhelmingly dominant in serious public discussion and in the self-understanding of major institutions. That way of understanding life is closely associated with ways of thinking characteristic of the modern natural sciences, so much so that many persons take for granted that liberalism is simply equivalent to moral and political rationality. Indeed, liberalism is allied with interests and institutions that benefit from it and increasingly try to bring all social relations in line with its standards of rationality and justification.
The argument of the first half of this book is that such an approach to political, social, and moral life excludes too much. It takes an overly technological approach to social life and has no way to deal with the natural tendencies, particular connections, and higher goals that are an essential part of human existence. Liberal assumptions and ideas cause social authorities to lose touch with human reality, to supplant and suppress informal and traditional institutions such as the family, and eventually to overreach and become tyrannical, self-contradictory, and self-destructive. The common good, along with justice and liberty, demand a basically different approach. The second half of the book attempts to outline such an approach, one that makes much more room than liberalism now permits for tradition, religion, particularity, and transcendence. It includes a defense of the reasonableness of such things, and indeed of their necessity for a rational way of life.
Liberalism so surrounds us that it is hard to imagine an alternative. Even those who see difficulties with it almost never reject it fundamentally, but attempt to reinvent it in one way or another. Complaints that liberalism is not really free, equal, or democratic end not in its abandonment as misconceived and unworkable, but in proposals for some more authentic form of freedom, equality, and popular rule, and thus in a call for a more liberal liberalism. In contrast, traditionalist concerns about cultural degradation and deterioration of fine-grained social order are treated as secondary matters and handled by appeals to creativity, therapy, or ad hoc stopgaps.
Many readers are therefore likely to reject out of hand complaints about liberalism in general. In many cases their objections must be answered before the discussion can proceed in a way that makes sense to them. However, each will have his own objections, and they cannot all be dealt with first. In addition, those sympathetic to my point of view would be puzzled and bored by a presentation that starts off dealing with objections rather than giving a positive account of the matters under consideration. For the benefit of more sympathetic readers, I have laid out the discussion in the way that seems most natural to me, putting my positive account first and answering objections later. Those less sympathetic may want to change the order in which they read the book, and refer early on to sections dealing with objections they find crippling. In particular, those who want to know what specifically I mean by “liberalism” and why I treat it as a continuing and coherent active principle may want to refer to “What is Liberalism,” “Transformations,” and “Importance of Principles” in chapter 2 and “Ideas Have Consequences” in chapter 5. The latter chapter also deals with other objections—for example, claims that liberalism cannot be tyrannical because liberal government deals only with a narrow range of human concerns, or that to reject liberalism would be morally indecent.
Responses to objections can of course themselves meet with objections. In the case of a topic that has been discussed as voluminously as liberalism, the more important the point the more varied and complex the arguments are likely to have become. A comparatively short essay that covers a vast territory can hardly do more than lay out main lines of argument in the hope of initiating discussions that may be fruitful. Even that effort is likely to fall far short in the eyes of those who approach the matter with fundamentally different perspectives and commitments. Most readers of this book will (like myself) have been raised in a liberal society, surrounded by liberal influences, schooled in liberal ways of thinking, and affected by the political and social developments of recent decades. Each, then, has the basic knowledge needed to judge my descriptions and interpretations for himself. I hope that those who remain unsympathetic, while voicing whatever criticisms they think decisive, will consider whether my efforts advance discussion by clarifying and connecting a number of common objections to the understanding of political, social, and moral life now dominant. Naturally, I hope also to find sympathetic readers whose thoughts this book can clarify and systematize. It is for such readers that this book is first of all meant.
Part I
Decline and Fall
CHAPTER ONE
Liberal Tyranny
“THE TYRANNY OF LIBERALISM” SEEMS A PARADOX. LIBERALS SAY THAT they favor freedom, reason, and the well-being of ordinary people. Many people consider them high-minded and fair to a fault, “too broadminded to take their own side in a quarrel,” too soft to govern effectively. Even the word “liberal” suggests “liberty.” How can such an outlook and the social order it promotes be tyrannical?
The answer is that wanting freedom is not the same as having it. Political single-mindedness leads to oppression, and a tyranny of freedom and equality is no less possible than one of virtue or religion. We cannot be forced to be free or made equal by command, but since the French Revolution the attempt has become all too common and the results have often been tyrannical.
Tyranny is not, of course, what liberals have intended. They want government to be based on equal freedom, which they see as the only possible goal of a just and rational public order. But the functioning of any form of political society is determined more by the logic of its principles than the intentions of its supporters. Liberals view themselves as idealistic and progressive, but such a self-image conceals dangers even if it is not wholly illusory. It leads liberals to ignore considerations, like human nature and fundamental social and religious traditions, that have normally been treated as limits on reform. Freedom and equality are abstract, open-ended, and ever-ramifying goals that can be taken to extremes. Liberals tend to view these goals as a simple matter of justice and rationality that prudential considerations may sometimes delay but no principle can legitimately override. In the absence of definite limiting principles, liberal demands become more and more far-reaching and the means used to advance them ever more comprehensive, detailed, and intrusive.
The incremental style of liberalism obscures the radicalism of what it eventually demands and enables it always to present itself as moderate. What is called progress—in effect, movement to the left—is thought normal in present-day society, so to stand in its way, let alone to try to reverse accepted changes, is thought radical and divisive. We have come to accept that what was inconceivable last week is mainstream today and altogether basic tomorrow. The result is that the past is increasingly discredited, deviancy is defined up or down, and it becomes incredible that, for instance, until 1969 high school gun-club members took their guns to school on New York City subways, and that in 1944 there were only forty-four homicides by gunshot in the entire city.1
Human life is harder to change than are proclaimed social standards. It is easier to denounce gender stereotypes than to make little boys and little girls the same. The triumph of liberalism in public discussion and the consequent disappearance of openly avowed nonliberal principles has led the outlook officially established to embody liberal views ever more completely and at the same time to diverge more and more from the permanent conditions of human life. The result has been a growing conflict between public standards and the normal human understandings that make commonsense judgments and good human relations possible.
The conflict between public standards and normal understandings has transformed and disordered such basic aspects of social life as politics, which depends on free and rational discussion; the family, which counts on a degree of harmony between public understandings and natural human tendencies; and scholarship, which relies on complex formal rules while attempting to explain reality. As a consequence, family life is chaotic and ill-tempered; young people are badly instructed and badly raised; politics are irrational, trivial, and mindlessly partisan; and scholarship is shoddy and disconnected from normal experience. Terms such as “zero tolerance” and “political correctness” reveal how an official outlook deeply at odds with normal ways of thinking has become oppressive while claiming to have reached an unprecedented level of fairness and rationality.
In a society that claims to be based on free speech and reason, intelligent discussion of many aspects of life has become all but impossible. Such a state of affairs is no passing fluke but a serious matter resulting from basic principles. It is the outcome of rationalizing and egalitarian trends that over time have become ever more self-conscious and all-embracing until they now make normal informal distinctions—for example, those between the sexes—seem intolerably arbitrary and unfair. Those trends have led to the politically correct managerial liberal regime that now dominates Western public life and makes demands that more and more people find unreasonable and even incomprehensible.2
What defines that regime is the effort to manage and rationalize social life in order to bring it in line with comprehensive standards aimed at implementing equal freedom. The result is a pattern of governance intended to promote equality and individual gratification and marked by entitlement programs, sexual and expressive freedoms, blurred distinctions between the public and the private, and the disappearance of self-government. To implement such a program of social transformation an extensive system of controls over social life has grown up, sometimes public and sometimes formally private, that appeals for its justification to expertise, equity, safety, security, and the need to modify social attitudes and relationships in order to eliminate discrimination and intolerance.
The last are never clearly defined, but in practice they turn out to include all attitudes and distinctions that affect the order of social life but cannot be brought fully in line with market or bureaucratic principles, and so from the standpoint of those principles are simply irrational. “Discrimination and intolerance” are thus held to include those attitudes, habits, and ties—sex roles, historical loyalties, authoritative cultural understandings, religious commitments and teachings—on which independent, informal, traditional, and nonmarket institutions and arrangements normally rely in order to function and endure.
Because such arrangements operate on principles that are regarded as irrational, and because they are difficult to supervise and control in the interest of rationality and equal freedom, they have no place in advanced liberal society and are edged out as the social order progresses. The normal functioning of the institutions of liberal society has precisely that effect. Social-welfare programs reduce the need for institutions and ties other than the state bureaucracy and various market and contractual arrangements, while “inclusiveness” abolishes the relation between the workings of society and any specific religious, cultural, or sexual standards. Only rational formal institutions remain functional and authoritative. What were once traditional social institutions with definite form, function, and authority become personal pursuits that each can make of what he wishes so long as all others remain free to participate or abstain as they will. Marriage and family are replaced by “relationships” and “living together”; religion becomes a freeform pursuit of individual fulfillment; and inherited culture becomes an optional consumer good, a matter of personal style or group assertiveness.
Such tendencies make it impossible to deal reasonably on their own terms with issues of identity, such as sex, kinship, ethnicity, and religion. Those distinctions play no role in the liberal understanding of rational social functioning, so they are understood as pure principles of irrational opposition and hatred: absolute, unbridgeable, and impossible to reconcile with a peaceful, just, and efficient social order. The consequence is that they must effectively be abolished—trivialized, conceptually dissolved, canceled through reverse discrimination, or kept from entering into thought at all.
Under the regime of liberalism, the way in which people have traditionally understood themselves and others now can have no bearing on their relations to each other, at least to the extent that those relations have substantive consequences. Who you are can have no connection to how things are with you, except to the extent that “who you are” refers to your relation to institutions liberalism accepts as authoritative. A man and woman have to be the same, but a Harvard and state-university graduate can be different. The result is the forcible imposition on everyone of a wholly abstract and radically depersonalized order that abolishes the connections and distinctions by which human beings have always lived in favor of more formal ones such as wealth, education, and bureaucratic position. Factually considered, that new order is unequal and unfree, but it is able to pass itself off as an indisputable application of neutral principles to which no sane and moral person could possibly object.
Advanced liberalism has become an immensely powerful social reality. Liberal standards for human rights and government procedures are widely viewed as universally obligatory, at least in principle, and no competitor has comparable general appeal as a way of organizing social life. The technically rational organization of the world to give each of us as much as possible of what he wants is quite generally accepted as the correct guiding ideal for politics and social morality. Pluralism, the fight against discrimination, and an ethic of “caring” are accepted as political, social, and moral imperatives. And administrative and therapeutic intervention in all aspects of social life is considered the self-evident means of vindicating them. Such views are especially strong in the societies that have been enduringly successful in modern times, and among the intelligent, well-educated, and well-placed, most of whom believe them a matter of simple justice and rationality and can conceive of no other legitimate outlook. Concerns about self-government, moral traditions, and inherited loyalties do not carry anything close to the same weight. To make a serious issue of such concerns is regarded as a sign of ignorance or psychological or moral defect.
In spite of serious chronic problems that no one knows how to attack—extraordinarily low natality, rising costs of social-welfare programs, growing immigrant populations that do not assimilate—basic change seems unthinkable. No matter how pressing the problem, only analyses and solutions compatible with liberal positions are allowed in the public square. Almost all serious discussion is carried on through academic and other institutions that are fully integrated with the ruling order, and in any case antidiscrimination rules make wholehearted subscription to principles such as inclusiveness the only way to avoid legal and public relations problems that would make institutional life impossible. Genuine political discussion disappears. What pass as battles between liberals and conservatives are almost always disputes between different stages or tendencies within liberalism itself.
So dominant is liberalism that it becomes invisible. Judges feel free to read it into the law without historical or textual warrant because it seems so obviously right. To oppose it in any basic way is to act incomprehensibly, in a way explicable, it is thought, only by reference to irrationality, ignorance, or evil. The whole of the nonliberal past is comprehensively blackened. Traditional ways are presented as the simple negation of unquestionable goods liberalism favors. Obvious declines in civility, morality, and cultural achievement are ignored, denied, or redefined as advances. Violence is said to be the fault of the persistence of sex roles, war of religion, theft of social inequality, suicide of stereotyping. Destruction of sex and historical community as ordering principles—and thus of settled family arrangements and cultural forms—is presented as a supremely desirable goal. The clear connection among the decline of traditional habits, standards, and social ties; the disintegration of institutions like the family; and other forms of personal and social disorder is ignored or treated as beside the point.
Many people find something deeply oppressive about the resulting situation, but no one really knows what to say about it. Some complain about those general restrictions, like political correctness, which make honest and productive discussion of public affairs impossible. Others have more concrete and personal objections. Parents are alarmed by the indoctrination of their children. Many people complain about affirmative action, massive and uncontrolled immigration, and the abolition of the family as a distinct social institution publicly recognized as fundamental and prior to the state. Still others have the uneasy sense that the world to which they are attached and which defines who they are is being taken from them.
Nonetheless, these victims and their complaints get no respect and little media coverage.3 Their discontent remains inarticulate and obscure. People feel stifled, but cannot say just how. They make jokes or sarcastic comments, but when challenged have trouble explaining and defending themselves. The disappearance of common understandings that enable serious thought and action to be carried on by nonexperts and outside formal bureaucratic structures has made it hard even to think about the issues coherently. The result is a system of puzzled compliance. However ineffective the schools become, educators feel compelled to inculcate multicultural platitudes rather than to promote substantive learning. No matter how silly people find celebrations of “diversity,” they become ever more frequent and surround themselves ever more insistently with happy talk.
Attempts to challenge the liberal hegemony occasionally emerge but always fail. No challenge seems possible when all social authorities that might compete with bureaucracy, money, and expertise have been discredited, co-opted, or radically weakened. When populist complaints make their half-articulate way into public life they are recognized as dangerous to the established order, debunked as ignorant and hateful, and quickly diverted or suppressed. Proponents of the standards now current always have the last word. Freedom, equality, and neutral expertise are the basis of those standards, and when discussion is put on that ground it is difficult to argue for anything contrary. Rejection of equal freedom and of expertise is oppressive and ignorant by definition, so how could it possibly be justified?
At bottom, the problem with the standards that now govern public life is that they deny natural human tendencies and so require constant nagging interference in all aspects of life. They lead to a denatured society that does not work and does not feel like home. A standard liberal response to such objections is that our reactions are wrong: we should accept what we are told by those who know better. Expertise must rule. Social attitudes, habits, and connections, it is said, are not natural but constructed. They are continually revised and reenacted, their function and significance change with circumstances, and their meaning is a matter of interpretation and choice. It follows that habits and attitudes that seem solidly established and even natural cannot claim respect apart from their conformity with justice—which, if prejudice and question-begging are to be avoided, can only be defined as equality. All habits and attitudes must be conformed to egalitarianism and expertise. To object would be bigoted or ignorant.
But why should we trust those said to know better in such matters? Visions of an emancipated future are not necessarily wiser than nostalgia for a virtuous past. If all past societies have been sinks of oppression, as we are now told, it is not clear why our rulers are likely to change the situation. They understand the basic problems of life no better than the Sumerians did. They are technically more advanced, but technology is simply the application of means to ends. Tyrants, who know exactly what they want, can make good use of technique, and if clever they will pass their actions off as liberation.
Advanced liberalism fosters an inert and incompetent populace, a pervasive state, and commercial institutions responsible mainly to themselves. Alas, the state generally botches large-scale undertakings, commerce is proverbially self-interested, and formal expertise is more successful with small issues that can be studied in detail than with the big issues that make life what it is. Experts can treat appendicitis, but they cannot give us a reason to live. They can provide the factual content of instruction, but they cannot tell us what things are worth knowing. Why, then, treat their authority as absolute?
We should not accept the official, and “expert,” debunking of ordinary ways of thought. While popular habits and attitudes can be presented as a compound of prejudice and self-interest, so can official and expert views. Both expertise and the state are immensely powerful social institutions. They have their own interests, and there is no reason to trust them any more than drug companies or defense contractors in matters that affect their own status and position. Expertise is only a refinement of common sense, upon which it continues to depend for its sanity and usefulness. Thought depends on habits, attitudes, and understandings that we mostly pick up from other people and that cannot be verified except in parts. It cannot be purified of habit and preconception and still touch our world. Ordinary good sense must remain the final standard of judgment. Good sense, however, is the business not of experts and officials but of the public at large.
In fact, advanced liberal society is reproducing the error of socialism—the attempt to administer and radically alter things that are too complex to be known, grasped, and controlled—but on a far grander scale. The socialists tried to simplify and rationalize economics, while today’s liberals are trying to do the same with human relations generally. The latter involve much more subtle, complicated, and fundamental aspects of human life. Why expect the results to be better? A look at what is on television or a conversation with an older schoolteacher is likely to suggest that the attempt to reconstruct life on abstract content-free principles has actually made life worse. The test must be experience. If the people in charge of affairs are so competent and intelligent, why the increasing cynicism about politics? Why the decline in so many aspects of social and cultural life?
We need not accept, as inevitable social change, what the state and its experts decide for us. When major institutions persistently act in ineffective or destructive ways while praising themselves for unprecedented justice and rationality, there is evidently something wrong with the outlook guiding them. For a better way of life to become possible we need to free ourselves from the views that are now conventional and find a different perspective. The problems of public life today go too deep for technical fixes. A fundamental critique of the principles accepted as authoritative is necessary so that our life together can fall more in line with what people find natural, comprehensible, and satisfying. The intention of this book is to promote such a critique and to explore alternatives.
CHAPTER TWO
Principles
LIBERALISM ESTABLISHES A GENERAL SCHEMA FOR LIFE IN SOCIETY THAT has thoroughly triumphed in the West and finds substantial acceptance elsewhere. Informal, tradition-based resistance to its claims has weakened and grown ever more inarticulate. Explicit movements of opposition—populism, radical Islam, East Asian authoritarianism—remain influential in some places, but they are locali-zed and fall far short of the power, determination, and universal ambition of the radical antiliberal movements of the last century, such as Marxism and fascism.
So successful is liberalism, both politically and intellectually, that its triumph has led to a practical, and sometimes explicit, belief in the end of history.1 In this sense, history is understood as the story of struggle against the oppression that preceded the coming of the advanced liberal state, the form of human association whose universal unconditional validity, manifested by enlightened judicial decisions and international human-rights conventions, makes history and particular culture irrelevant.
WHAT IS LIBERALISM?
Such triumphalism would be impossible if liberalism were not a well-defined system that has become altogether dominant in Western political thought and public life. The overwhelming dominance of liberalism must reflect great strengths, including a persuasive set of fundamental principles deeply rooted in modern Western life. Before discussing those principles, however, it will be helpful to expand on what I mean by “liberalism.”
From the perspective adopted in this book, liberalism is equivalent to the political, social, and moral understandings now most authoritative in the West. The term thus refers to the present Western governing consensus regarding the appropriate means and ends of government and social organization, to the abstract understandings behind that consensus, to the institutions and practices to which it gives rise, and to the liberal political and intellectual tradition that has led to all those things, at least when its history is recounted from an American perspective. That tradition begins with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and extends through classical liberalism to John Rawls and beyond. It provides the common ground for American political discussion. At times the term “liberal” is also used, if there seems no danger of confusion, to refer more specifically to those who stand most clearly for liberalism so defined, and who are best able to claim to be enlightened and progressive and to dominate serious discussion of social and political issues.
The dominant features and tendencies of the system to which the liberal tradition has led can be illuminated by referring them to a very simple principle: equal freedom. As an ultimate standard, equal freedom rests on a denial of the political relevance of realities that transcend human experience and precede human choice. In the broad sense, all mainstream Western politicians are liberal today. Each claims to accept popular consent as the basis of government. Each promises above all to promote some combination of freedom, equality, and the satisfaction of preferences, in the form of prosperity, opportunity, security, consumer and worker protection, and so on. Other goals, such as “national greatness,” “traditional values,” or “God’s will,” are mentioned on occasion, but they are mainly symbolic, clearly subordinate, and opportunistically put forward. They also attract severe criticism in academic circles and the mainstream media unless they are clearly used as synonyms for liberalism and put forward for the purpose of co-opting alternative understandings of politics and bringing them into its service. As an example, “religion in politics” is thought good when the civil-rights movement does it but not when the prolife movement does it, precisely because the goals of the former movement are those of liberalism, while those of the latter are not.
DEVELOPMENT OF LIBERALISM
The current situation is the outcome of a movement of thought and social change that has been at work for centuries and is still sufficiently coherent and functional to be treated as an important factor forming the social world around us. That movement has combined an emerging commitment to equal freedom as the standard for public life with an evolving set of beliefs and arrangements that have grown out of the interaction of that commitment with inherited institutions and understandings. As time has passed, established beliefs and institutions have come to assert the basic commitment to equal freedom ever more directly and comprehensively—that is what it means to say that liberalism has been progressive—until the movement has gone to extremes that are hard to recognize as such because they are so much in line with what has already been achieved.
Growth
The gradually expanding role of freedom and equality in political and social life can be traced back to the High Middle Ages. The first developments were gradual and unconscious. Freedom has long been an ideal in the West, where slavery largely disappeared before modern times and the position of the middle classes has been improving since the end of the Magyar and Viking raids in the eleventh century. The Protestant Reformation and its emphasis on individual conscience and the priesthood of all believers brought the ideal of equal freedom closer to self-awareness. Hobbes and Locke, with their analysis of society as a contract among individuals for material benefit, introduced liberalism as a distinct outlook that made the ordinary practical concerns of individual men the basis of social order. The Enlightenment developed and spread the view that social standards are human creations to be judged by reason and re-created at will. And at length, the American and French Revolutions and the founding of liberal political parties made general extension of freedom and equality an explicit goal of practical politics, a status it has retained ever since, either in a radical Continental form or an initially more moderate Anglo-Saxon form.
The century just past saw liberalism achieve its final triumph at the level of public principle, a triumph that has led to radicalization and the exclusion of inconsistent views from public life. The First World War signaled the end of religion and tradition as stated principles of order in Europe. The conception of legitimacy that finally vanished in those years depended on customs and religious establishments that were no longer accepted as the basis of politics. With the fall of the great monarchies of Central and Eastern Europe, authority could no longer be viewed as divinely ordered or simply as part of the way things were. Instead, it had to base itself on the will of the governed. In the absence of God and natural order, the will of man became the source of all authority.
What followed displayed the implications of man’s enthronement. The Second World War meant the victory of egalitarian economic concerns over attempts to appeal to particularities that make men and societies what they are: race, nation, the state as an aesthetic or organic whole. That victory was inevitable. Divorced from rooted popular belief in a higher order in which man’s need for explanation could find satisfaction, the particularities for which the Axis fought were too arbitrary to ground a stable and coherent social order. Particularism that stood for nothing substantial beyond itself lacked direction and resorted to violence as a substitute for transcendence. In the absence of a believable God the Axis concocted ersatz deities out of blood, thunder, and whatever national symbols were at hand. Not surprisingly, the attempt did not work. Equal satisfaction of wants and a corresponding conception of equal human dignity seemed compellingly rational by comparison, and Allied victory meant the end of the European Right as a serious force.
Since 1945, Western public life has been based on the practical supremacy of economics and the principle that social order exists to get men what they want rather than to express an essence or ideal. The sixties completed the establishment of that principle by purging from public life remnants of older ways of thinking—for example, the notion that the social order should retain a grounding in Christian tradition. Before the sixties an appeal to Christianity could be a unifying move. Churchill could describe the fight against Hitler and later against communism as a fight for the survival of Christian civilization. Afterwards such references were declared divisive, a sign that governing elites no longer recognized Christian tradition as even residually authoritative.
The fall of the Berlin Wall demonstrated the definitive victory of liberalism over other principles thought progressive by marking the end of order based on collective rather than individual purposes. In the West, similar tendencies led to the decline of the traditional working-class economic Left and its replacement by a new lifestyle and multicultural Left. The death of socialism was the triumph of the principle that society is a field of impersonal technical rationality oriented toward the satisfaction of arbitrary individual desire. That triumph was also inevitable. Once wants had become the standard of goodness, and whatever could not be reduced to sensation and desire had been put radically in doubt, men became dubious of “the will of the people” and other invisible attributes of collectivities. They wanted proof before giving up their particular desires, and found the shopping mall a more compelling vision than New Soviet Man.
The year 1989 also meant loss of faith in History, refuted by the triumph in history of a radically abstract and individualistic and therefore ahistorical principle. History, with a capital H, had abolished its own significance and could no longer serve as a substitute religion. As a result of these developments—the death of God, the reduction of the human essence to desire and technological reason, the dissolution of “the people,” the end of history as a meaningful process—no substantive conception of the common good can be presented as authoritative in present-day public life. Values are thought to be simply a matter of individual wants, and maximum equal satisfaction is the only moral principle recognized as binding. What remains of history, from a liberal standpoint, is a sort of endgame in which the implications of maximum equal satisfaction as a supreme principle are perfected at home while some combination of social evolution, transnational organization, electronic communication, global capitalism, and Western military power brings down whatever barriers remain to the establishment of a comprehensive liberal system throughout the world.
Maturity
The goal of today’s liberalism is a universal, technically rational system for the equal satisfaction of desire that is to constitute the sole publicly authoritative form of human association. Ethnic and gender distinctions are to be deprived of all effect, religion banished from public life, and a worldwide order established—based on world markets and transnational bureaucracies—that eliminates local distinctions and transcendent attachments in the name of human rights, international economic development, and collective security.
That goal can be understood in a variety of ways. Understood politically, it means the twin sovereignty of world markets and transnational bureaucracies as rational means for maximizing equal satisfaction of desire. Understood morally and even theologically, it implies a religion of individual man as the source of value, the doctrines of which are equality, autonomy, and hedonism. Such principles are accepted, if not always explicitly, by all significant public authorities throughout the West. Responsible leaders in church, state, and the academy now view cooperative effort toward a world ordered by them as their foremost responsibility. Dissent is all but criminal, since the alternative is thought to be poverty, tyranny, and bloody chaos. Romantic or populist gestures in opposition usually amount to little but political grandstanding and never achieve anything substantive.
The denial of public respectability to nonliberal principles, such as deference to traditional religious and moral beliefs, has led to peremptory demands for the full realization of liberal freedom and equality. Principled resistance has collapsed, and institutions have to be brought fully in line with maximum equal freedom to the extent possible. The demands go beyond economic welfare to substantive equality of position and status, or at least dissociation of inequalities from characteristics that are neither purely individual nor relevant to the functioning of liberal institutions. “Affirmative action,” the requirement that underrepresented groups be equally included in major social activities and roles, is one such demand. “Political correctness,” which requires that every group be given an equal share of respect, is simply the application of affirmative action to intangible aspects of social position. Although novel in some respects, it is a natural consequence of principles that have been long in the making and by now are well established. Complaints about it are utterly ineffective because they ignore the broader setting that makes it inevitable.
Transformations
While liberalism today can seem monolithic—if it did not, the concept of “political correctness” would make no sense—a striking feature of the liberal tradition has been its reversals on particular issues. The opposition between successive stages of liberalism has led some observers to deny that they can reasonably be treated as part of a single continuing tradition.2 Points that once seemed basic have dropped from view: the respect for private property, the division and limitation of power, the recognition of an inviolate private sphere where the state has no business. How can an order be liberal, some ask, in which social planners reconstruct morality, or democratic, if government reconstitutes a people it finds lacking? Nonetheless, such transformations have been brought about by the same principles that have always made liberalism what it is. No change in fundamental principle has been needed, only a change in what institutions enjoyed general acceptance and what seemed possible.
The ultimate basis of liberalism is rejection of moral authorities that transcend human purposes.3 To make contract the basis of social order, in accordance with the liberal myth of the social contract, is to make human goals the final standard of what we are to treat as good. A consequence of that standard is acceptance of the equal value of wills and their goals: if there is no authority higher than individual desire, then there is no standard by which to judge one desire better than another. Such thoughts have always been central to liberalism, at least implicitly, but their practical implications have depended on the setting and its possibilities. The evolution of the latter has been the evolution of liberalism.
Liberalism has always followed a path between conservative deference to whatever is established and the radical demand for aggressive social reconstruction. A view that makes individual preferences and equal freedom the standard must largely accept existing habits and expectations, at least until institutional change and reeducation have brought them more in accord with ultimate ideals. The combination of simple ultimate standards with willingness to defer closing the gap between ideal and reality has contributed enormously to the durability and success of liberalism, and to its ability to achieve profoundly radical results through step-by-step methods. It has enabled the classical liberalism of private property, parliaments, limited government, and equal laws first to overthrow the ancien régime and then to develop gradually, without change of ultimate principle, into today’s socially radical big-government liberalism. As the source of liberal guilt, this combination has even supplied a motive for steady long-term support for liberal goals.
Early liberalism emphasized opposition to religious and hierarchical institutions that obstructed the equal right to do as one chose. It insisted on religious freedom and the abolition of formal privilege, so that property rights could replace status and established religion as a principle of social order. The result was the creation of a public realm in which, in principle, each could equally do what he liked. Rather than abolishing inequality and subordination, however, the effect was to limit these conditions to private life, the role of which expanded because of the new limitations on public action. The “private life” that was exempt from liberal standards was not private in function. It included economic and family life, as well as religion, scholarship, and the arts, and thus constituted by far the greater and more important part of social life.
The social order was therefore able to go on much as before, based on established sex roles, class distinctions, unequal property, and particularistic cultural and religious norms. Nonetheless, the liberal principle of equal freedom deprived such institutions of the secure legitimacy they possessed in earlier, more particularistic and hierarchical forms of society, in which they had been viewed as organic parts of an order established by God, nature, or history. They hung on mostly because they seemed necessary for social functioning, and once the possibility arose of replacing them they became hard for liberals to accept. The growth of the bureaucratic state seemed to reduce the role of particular cultural connections and to offer a way to reduce economic inequalities and sex distinctions. That possibility made it very difficult for liberals to continue to accept the sanctity of property, social arrangements that limited the equal freedom of women, or the privileging of the habits and preferences of whatever historical community happened to be dominant.
Establishment of formal equality was therefore followed in due course by government initiatives designed to advance equality substantively. These included the provision of social insurance, the promotion of economic opportunity, and the redistribution of wealth, leading eventually to the modern welfare state. Since then, the ambitions of the state have become ever more extensive, until today they have come to include suppression of whatever is thought to interfere with the equality and technological rationality of the social order, even such traditional constituents of personal identity as sex and historical community.
The attempt to reorder fundamental aspects of human life in the name of equal freedom has made government sovereign over social life. Arrangements that develop of themselves without official sanction—traditional family arrangements and ethnic ties, for example—are regularly suppressed in favor of those that can be designed, supervised, and reconfigured as needed to bring them in compliance with liberal principles. A tradition that once called for small government, property rights, individual responsibility, and bourgeois morality has come to demand guaranteed security, sexual freedom, and compulsory transformation of habits and attitudes in the interest of tolerance and inclusiveness.
The continuities of principle are nonetheless more basic than the changes. Those who claim that today’s liberalism betrays liberal values by denying some favored freedom—free speech, free enterprise, free association, or whatever—overestimate how free, equal, and rational earlier forms of liberalism were. In all societies there are human distinctions that enable some to tell others what to do, and liberalism has always had to deal somehow with the contradiction between the demand for equal freedom and the human necessity for hierarchy and restraint. In classical liberalism the distinction between public and private enabled political life to be free and equal by restricting inequalities to what was considered private life. In contemporary liberalism, the concepts of human rights and expertise serve a similar function by restricting inequalities to the prepolitical process through which the content and application of human rights is determined, and to professional or economic settings thought to be determined by neutral technical considerations. Now as before, some people—whether husbands, clergymen, factory owners, social scientists, federal judges, or diversity consultants—tell others what to do and believe. In each case the compulsion is squared with equal freedom by treating it as a prepolitical matter of natural social institutions, human rights, or technical expertise, and by labeling people who question it as crazy, ignorant, or immoral.
Some continue to claim that welfare-state liberalism is an abandonment of the true liberalism of laissez faire, or that affirmative action and political correctness are an attack on the liberal principles of individual merit and free speech. Nonetheless, the great majority of those who call themselves liberals have come to accept politically correct managerial liberalism. It dominates the liberal tradition’s institutional mainstream and seems consistent with the most basic long-term tendencies of the tradition and liberal society at large. That situation supports viewing the liberal tradition and its principles of freedom and equality as a coherent whole, and the thought of thinkers like John Rawls as the legitimate continuation of earlier thinkers such as Locke and Mill.
POWER
An outlook that seems as firmly entrenched and apparently unavoidable as liberalism must have supports that go far beyond historical happenstance. One important support is the connection between liberalism and power. Every general political outlook is concerned with power, and liberalism could never have triumphed if it were not closely related to what confers it in the modern world. The relation between liberalism and power is at the heart of the position it now holds.
As a Standard
To a large extent, the strength of liberalism comes from applying to social and moral life the technological method of defining what is wanted and rationally organizing resources to achieve it. Modern bureaucracy and industrial organization apply that method directly to social functions and economic production, and modern markets, which enable desires to find their most efficient satisfaction through the medium of money and contract, also facilitate its activity. Present-day liberalism, more than any other approach to government, is fully integrated with such institutions. Their success enables liberal societies to out-compete others, and the association of liberalism with technique gives it the weight and prestige that comes with the success of modern natural science and industry.
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