Liam Bright on liberalism

Liam Bright has a thoughtful blog post up, articulating (briefly) his critique of liberalism as an ideology.  It’s well worth reading – I’ve been complaining for some time now that radical left critics of liberalism often severely underspecify their critiques, basically relying on the fact that most everyone on the radical left agrees that liberalism sucks, so it’s enough to label something ‘liberal’ and the critique is done.  Liam’s post is much clearer than most about what he takes liberalism to be, and why he rejects it, and this is good!

Still, I am a liberal, and in this post I want to defend liberalism against Liam’s critiques.  Specifically, I take my own politics to pretty closely align with the position articulated in the later works of the late, great Charles Mills, which Liam discusses and links to in his post.  Mills’ work, I take it, both articulates a damning and far-reaching critique of ‘actually existing liberalism’ (most notably in ‘The Racial Contract’), and argues that we nevertheless should not reject liberalism as such, wholesale, but should rather aim to transform ‘actually existing liberalism’ in a more emancipatory direction.  For Mills, the key to this argument is that there is not one unitary thing called ‘liberalism’.  Rather, there are many elements of liberalism, which can be assembled together in many different ways to construct many different liberalisms.  For example, liberalism’s schedule of rights, protections and freedoms (itself very historically variable), has, in actually-existing liberalism, typically been available only to very narrowly defined sets of social actors, picked out using politically-constituted boundaries of race, gender, class, etc., such that the bulk of humanity is excluded from the egalitarian space of rights that characterises the full liberal polity.  For Mills, though, such exclusionary politics are not an intrinsic feature of liberalism as such (though, to be clear, neither are they intrinsically opposed to it) – rather, they are features of the specific forms of liberalism – racial liberalism, patriarchal liberalism, etc. – that have actually been instituted historically.  The task of ‘radical liberalism’, Mills argues, is to transform the institutions of liberalism so that the full benefits of liberalism – historically enjoyed only by a minority of humanity – are extended to humanity as a whole.

The above is obviously a bit crude as a summary – there’s much more that could be said about Mills’ project – but it’ll do for now as a general overview of the position I’m defending.  On to Liam’s critique of liberalism.  Liam has three specific criticisms of liberalism as he understands it.  I’m going to very quickly quote them, then discuss them out of order.  It is of course worth reading Liam’s full post to get a more elaborated sense of his position.

First critique: “I do not believe that anything like the public reason / private sphere of activity can be made to work.  I think the state has to in fact take a side on contentious issues, there is no neutral position or viable overlapping consensus or anything of the sort”

Second critique: “The notion of private property used to undergird the notions of self-governance and a private sphere… contains within itself the seeds of the destruction of the liberal order.”

Third critique: “I rather suspect that high-income-lifestyle liberalism will either always be reliant on shifting the ultra-exploitation elsewhere or shall have caused ecological collapse well before it has time to transition out of this.”

I’ll expand on each of these points a little as I go, but these are the basic arguments against liberalism of the post.

Now, these three criticisms aren’t all of the same kind.  I take critiques two and three to be, as it were, counterfactual-empirical political-economic claims.  That is to say, Liam is arguing that there are defining features of liberalism as a political system that have predictable political-economic consequences that are sufficiently appalling to warrant the rejection of liberalism as a whole.  Critique one, by contrast, is more of a philosophical-political objection to the principles of liberalism itself.  I’m going to discuss these issues in reverse order, taking the political-economic points first, then discussing the political-philosophical one.  The short version, to foreshadow, is that I think Liam’s political-economic objections are really objections to capitalism, not liberalism, and that these aren’t the same thing.

So, on the first political-economic argument, Liam is arguing for something like the following bundle of claims: Liberalism’s schedule of individual rights, etc., is centrally undergirded by private property rights, in the context of a market economy; private-property-based market economies have an inescapable tendency towards the concentration of power and wealth in oligopolistic structures; oligopolistic power structures will in turn undermine emancipatory politics, including the apparently most desirable features of liberalism itself; therefore any desirable form of liberalism is self-undermining.

I think this is wrong, because it claims intrinsic or lockstep connections between features of liberal capitalism that can (and should!) in fact be disaggregated.  Here I think it is important to emphasise that liberalism and capitalism are not identical phenomena, nor are either unitary.  In particular, I want to emphasise what I take to be two dubious steps in this argument.

First, there is the claim that property rights are absolutely central to liberal rights in general – that upholding liberal rights without upholding individual property rights does not make sense as an ideological or institutional project.  I think this is wrong – or at least not clearly right.  It’s certainly true that many of the most prominent representatives of liberal political philosophy have connected individual rights in general to a model of self-ownership that builds property relations in at the foundations of their philosophical apparatus.  But do we have to do this?  I don’t see why.  It doesn’t seem obvious that (for example) liberal checks and balances within governance structures, or the rights to privacy, or freedom of assembly, or freedom of religion, or freedom of speech, or freedom of the press, or equality before the law, etc., can only make sense in a political-economic institutional structure that is centred around private property.  It seems to me that one can relatively easily imagine legal-political institutions that centrally enact some forms of collective ownership of property but that nevertheless protect the other major liberal rights and institutional structures. A case can of course be made against this (Hayek and Friedman, among others, make such a case!) but a case would have to be made.

So that’s my first claim: that Liam overstates the necessity of the connection between private property rights and other liberal rights and principles.

My second claim is that, even if we grant that private property rights within a market society are an ineradicable part of the liberal institutional package, Liam is wrong to argue that oligopolistic capture of state institutions is an inevitable consequence of private property rights.  I take it to be historically clear that market capitalism has strong tendencies towards oligopoly, state capture, etc.  But again it is important that we analytically disaggregate our institutions.  Liberalism is not identical with capitalism; capitalism is not identical with market society; all three categories are internally varied; and it is therefore far from clear that the negative features of capitalist society that Liam criticises follow directly from the institution of private property.  In fact, markets are extremely common historically – there were market societies long before there was capitalist society, or liberal society – and it seems to me to be a clear analytic mistake to attribute characteristics of capitalism to the consequences of markets in general.  Moreover, market socialism – and market anarchism – are major forms of left politics, and the central claim of these traditions is that a non-capitalist market society can be constructed that does not exhibit the kinds of concentrations of power that Liam objects to.  Obviously many leftists in turn object to this position, on grounds similar to Liam’s, but my own view is that these market socialist and anarchist traditions have a lot to recommend them.  At any rate, I don’t believe they should hastily be counted out, so to speak.

So – I think that Liam’s argument that liberalism is inseparable from private property, which is in turn inseparable from oligopolistic market power and state capture, makes at least two very substantial argumentative leaps, which I am personally unpersuaded can be cashed out.  Of course, Liam is being brief because it’s a blog post!  I’m not suggesting that it’s a problem with the post that it doesn’t show its workings in this area!  I’m just noting what I take to be an undermotivated set of inferences, given what I take to be reasonable background commitments.

Ok.  Liam also objects to liberalism on the political-economic grounds that actually existing liberalism is characterised by core-periphery relations of exploitation and domination, and massive environmental degradation, and he is sceptical that liberalism can be disentangled from these political-economic catastrophes.  Again, I want to stress that to my mind liberalism and capitalism are not the same thing.  I think it would take me too far afield to try to discuss what are intrinsic versus non-intrinsic features of capitalism in this post – though I have written about the question of whether capitalism is capable of tackling climate change on the blog before.  Again, I mainly just want to flag that these steps in the argument don’t strike me as clear-cut at all, and would at a minimum need quite a lot of heavy lifting to cash out.

Ok.  So my claim so far has basically just been that Liam’s post moves very quickly in its political-economic claims, leaping from liberalism as a political project to negative features of capitalism as a world-system in a way that in my view elides the very many potential points of institutional disaggregation between these two sets of phenomena.  That’s the political-economic side of things.  I’m aware that this is all incredibly telegraphic, but moving on for now.

The other side of Liam’s argument is the more directly philosophical-political one.  Here I’m going to quote Liam again at greater length.  First here’s Liam’s summary of the relevant dimension of liberalism:

Here we see liberal political thought gradually emerge as a response to the civil wars in England and the wars of religion on the European continent. The diagnosis the intelligentsia of the day came up with was something along the lines of — these disastrous wars were caused by making control of the state a zero sum conflict over the ability to realise the most important goods and avoid the most disastrous evils. As such, we should reconceive the role of government to avoid its capture being so high stakes. Rather than a means of securing the good, it should exist to keep the peace between potentially fractious citizens and groups thereof. Part of doing so involves dividing up matters into those of private conscience versus those of public reason. Matters of private conscience are for the individual to freely decide and for others to respect in their wishes. Matters of public reason are those for which we need some way of deciding on social action that does not override what is for properly for the individual — initially and usually conceived, to be clear, as the propertied male head of a household. Privately we ought develop virtues of tolerance and mutual respect to enable the “live and let live” required for this to work. And publicly notions of private property and a sphere of action and protected rights that should be relatively free of state or other- imposition are developed. This goes well with notions of democracy (among the people who really count) as embodying the commitment to public reason delivering results that treated all perspectives equally, not a priori favouring one religious subset over another.

And here’s his critique:

I do not believe that anything like the public reason/private sphere of activity can be made to work. I think the state has to in fact take a side on contentious issues, there is no neutral position or viable overlapping consensus or anything of the sort… What made it seem plausible that this was a solution to the problem of the wars of religion was that in fact very substantive consensus did exist among the various dominant Christian sects, and where that agreement wasn’t there they didn’t really feel the need to respect the rights of outsiders (go back and reread Locke’s letters on toleration if you don’t believe me). Or, at least, substantive consensus existed among the restrained class of people that liberalism was willing to consider full persons worthy of consideration. Now we have expanded that class massively, as we surely must, and perhaps with broader social changes bringing more diversity, it is simply no longer tenable to seek to govern in light of a minimalist neutrality. What I think it leads to are just bad faith illusory politics where people must pretend procedural objections when really substantive objections are at stake….

I think this is a clear articulation of a common radical left critique of liberalism, and I think it’s fundamentally misguided as a matter of principle.  In my view the liberal compromise Liam describes in the first quote is an extremely important and valuable political achievement, and rejecting it in favour of a society explicitly organised around a specific notion of the common good would be a political regression at best, and actively dangerous – potentially catastrophically so – at likely worst.  I think we on the left need to be really, really careful when we start articulating these kinds of rejections of liberalism.

My own academic research is in political economy, not political philosophy, so I expect the following to be somewhat clumsily articulated, but let me try to take this step by step.  Following Rawls, Liam summarises the liberal position as emerging from horrifying wars of religion, in which societies were torn apart and countless people killed by the effort of different religious factions to control the state, and thereby institute their vision of the common good using the levers of the monopoly of the legitimate use of force.  The liberal compromise was the idea of (a quite limited degree of) religious tolerance, in which the institutions of state would permit (some measure of) pluralism of religious worship within the polity, in exchange for a degree of ‘privatisation’ of that worship – religious communities would forgo the goal of attempting to impose their own religious preferences on the entire population, in exchange for the entitlement to worship as they pleased within a delimited private sphere.  Obviously (as Liam says) the degree of actual tolerance this settlement represented was limited – but still.  The basic idea is that the state would permit some measure of pluralism within society, refraining from wholesale imposing the preferences of the specific ruling class of the moment on society as a whole, and that this was the route to a peaceful polity in which people and communities with different visions of the common good could nevertheless peacefully coexist.

This settlement in turn then serves as a model for a broader vision of the liberal polity, in which a major function of state institutions is to mediate between many different subcommunities’ and individuals’ vision of the good life in a way that permits diverse pursuit of different visions of the good life within the polity, without any one such vision coming to dominate any other.  More broadly, the goal of the liberal polity, in this understanding, is to enable individuals to pursue their own vision of the good life as they please, without state power infringing on that pursuit of the good life, except when individuals’ pursuit of their own goals infringes on the rights of others to pursue their own lives as they in turn see fit.

Now, if you have this understanding of the role of the liberal state, then you need to constantly make a set of judgements about what categories of state action constitute protecting individual liberty, versus what categories of state action constitute infringing individual liberty, and for whom.  There is the famous ‘paradox of tolerance’, whereby a tolerant state has to make a decision about whether to be tolerant toward intolerance.  If a tolerant state is too tolerant towards intolerance, the argument goes, then intolerance will gain the upper hand within the state itself, thereby ultimately destroying the tolerance that the state sought to protect.  Therefore, the argument goes, tolerant states must be intolerant of intolerance.

Thinking in this kind of space, there are at least two ways in which a state that narrates its function in these terms to itself could go badly wrong.  On the one hand, the state may ‘tolerate intolerance’ in a way that destroys the liberalism and pluralism of the society it sought to protect.  On the other hand, the state may choose to suppress ‘intolerance’ in ways that in fact suppress completely legitimate political, religious, cultural, etc. activity.  There is, in other words, a constant task of making substantive political judgements about what kinds of activity are protected by the liberal state and what kinds of activity are suppressed by it, and this is itself a substantive political judgement: a substantive political judgement about what constitutes ‘formal’ freedoms.

I take it that this kind of thing is what Liam means when he says that “the state has to in fact take a side on contentious issues, there is no neutral position or viable overlapping consensus or anything of the sort”.  Even if we understand the liberal state in terms of this project of a politically ‘neutral’ defence of individual rights, the determination of what counts as politically neutral is itself always and everywhere political.

Ok – I agree with this point!  The boundary of the private sphere and the limits of pluralism within a liberal governance structure are political matters that are politically contested, and the institutions of ‘neutral’ liberal mediation are likewise politically constituted by actors with substantive interests struggling to shape the polity.  This is all true!  But I don’t think it follows at all from this point that the liberal political project is illusory or (intrinsically) bad faith.  It means it’s political.  But a pluralist sphere of freedom of individual or community action can be and is still constituted by means of this political process.

To return to the issue of religious tolerance, and stating the obvious: there is, of course, a massive difference between a polity in which substantive fights take place over the specific limits of liberal religious pluralism, versus a polity that is run as a theocracy.  The fact that the construction of the limits of liberal pluralism is never itself apolitical or neutral does nothing to diminish the massive difference between these two categories of governance.  And I think this kind of point is often dismissed or ignored by radical left critiques of ‘liberal formalism’.  It’s true that no formalism or proceduralism is ever just formal or procedural.  But this doesn’t mean that formal rights or mediating procedures are functionless or valueless – quite the reverse!  It means that they are sites of contestation, like everything else, but they are specifically sites of contestation because of how important they are in, yes, protecting individual and community rights.

So this is my core objection to Liam’s post on liberalism.  When Liam says that we should give up on the political project of liberalism, on the grounds that liberal institutions are nothing more than a bad faith facade, and instead orient to some kind of common good, I object both analytically and politically.  Analytically, I think that the idea that liberal proceduralism is nothing but a bad faith facade is a mistake, for the reasons I’ve just outlined.  Politically, I think that pluralism, at both an individual and a community level, is an active political desideratum.  Our political goal should, in my view, be the traditional liberal one of enabling everyone to live their life as best they see fit – to flourish in their own terms, provided doing so brings no harm to others.  Self-consciously constituting a polity around a shared common good is, in my view, in important ways in tension with that goal.