Patrick Deneen: Why liberalism failed

Here's a positive way to end 2017. Patrick Deneen, an Associate Professor of Politics at Notre Dame, has written a book called Why Liberalism Failed. I have ordered it and will review it once it arrives. But from the publicity it is clear that Deneen has a political philosophy that is similar in parts to that of James Kalb and myself, as I hope you'll recognise from the excerpts of an online interview below. It's heartening to see this happening within academia, where it will hopefully have some influence.

Patrick Deneen

The first thing that Deneen usefully recognises is that Western politics is dominated by two variants of the same liberal philosophy. He calls them classical and progressive:

Camosy: When you say that “liberalism has failed,” you don’t mean that liberalism-as opposed to conservatism-has failed. Can you say more about what you mean by liberalism?

Deneen: By “liberalism,” I mean the political philosophy and the resulting political institutions, practices and beliefs that dominate the governments and societies of much of the western world. Its founding fathers were philosophers like John Locke, and in the United States, the architects of our Constitutional order. But I also include in their number those considered to be “progressives,” such as John Stuart Mill, or in the United States, John Dewey.

Most of our political debates pit “classical” against “progressive” liberal visions, holding the two views as diametric opposites and thus circumscribing the whole of our political imagination.

He also believes that liberalism has gradually unfolded over time, but that its very success has led to its failure:

What I seek to describe is a gradual but accelerating “realization” of a set of philosophical beliefs that have transformed practices, making us more fully liberal over time, and as a result, giving rise to a slow realization that its success leads to its own set of systemic failures. My thesis is that liberalism has failed precisely at the moment that it has succeeded

Deneen recognises that liberalism is not just a neutral position but an ideology based on a view of man as being an atomised, autonomous individual:

Camosy: Why do you think so many liberals fail to understand that liberalism, rather than a neutral political and ideological space, is a particular ideology and worldview?

Deneen: Liberalism has shrouded its substantive commitments behind a veil of neutrality, although some of its classical and contemporary philosophers and defenders are forthright about those substantive commitments...

...liberalism advances by positing the belief that humans exist in a state of nature as autonomous, disconnected, wholly free and rights-bearing creatures.

But what is claimed to be merely a description of human nature over time becomes an aim and goal of liberal society itself, gradually but ineluctably shaping people in the image of what it merely claims to describe. Thus, we increasingly see a liberal people defined by absence of interpersonal commitments, whether marriage, family, children, or memberships in longstanding cultures or a religious community.

Further, where commitments are taken on, they are subject to perpetual revision - whether through divorce in the matter of marriage, abortion in regard to children, or church shopping or the rise of “Nones” in the case of religion. Such people are driven above all by demands of consumption and money-making, claiming the right to self-definition while abandoning any longstanding cultural practices of self-limitation, which become increasingly regarded as unjust and unjustified limitations upon one’s freedom and autonomy.

More ironically still, a massive growth of the state is required to make this experience of individualism possible, thus enthralling purportedly free subjects to a pervasive political order.

He believes that Roman Catholic culture in the West is no longer clearly an alternative to liberalism, but tends to divide along classical vs progressive liberal lines:

Camosy: How have Roman Catholics-and even Roman Catholic moral and political theology-accepted certain aspects of liberal ideology? What might this mean for the Church as liberalism fails?

Deneen: Tragically, at least in America but perhaps more pervasively in the West, Catholicism has come increasingly to be defined by and experienced as the two political iterations of liberalism, whether “classical” or “progressive.” Rather than offering a distinct alternative, many Catholics have come to understand their faith through the lens of these dominant expressions of liberal philosophy.

...Catholicism rejects both anthropological individualism and collectivist statism, but today we are divided into Catholic tribes who by default advance one or the other as a central political project.

Deneen holds that liberalism has destroyed genuine cultures, which then have to be replaced more formally by state organisation, which then means that politics becomes a matter of contesting for the levers of the state. He wants in the longer term to return to more traditional, non-statist ways of life:

I argue in my book that liberalism advances an “anti-culture”: whether through blandishments of the market or the power of the state, it seeks to weaken and eviscerate culture and replace it with a homogenous anti-culture of “free” people who consume pre-packaged, monetized “popular culture,” but no longer live in actual cultures of memory and tradition.

Inasmuch as we see deep instability and forms of systemic failure in our politics, this dysfunction occurs not in spite of an otherwise healthy culture, but to a great extent because of the destruction of culture and its replacement with an anti-culture. As cultural norms, practices and forms of belonging are eviscerated, informal codes must be replaced by legal systems and state enforcement of legalized directives.

From what I've read so far, it is possible that Deneen will not go beyond the concept of "cultural communities," but I'll have more to say on this once I've read his book.

Regardless of this, I am hopeful that the book will have a very positive effect in breaking down the liberal hegemony within academia. It's so timely as well - there is an audience out there now for intelligent and principled criticisms of the liberal ideology.

Tim Farron: the cure for liberal tyranny is liberalism?

Tim Farron was, until recently, the leader of the British Liberal Democrats. He is a serious Christian as well as a serious liberal. But he is starting to think that things are going wrong. Seriously wrong.

He gave a speech last month in which he acknowledged that liberalism has become an orthodoxy:

Liberalism has apparently won. Even members of the Conservative and Labour parties call themselves liberals today. Let’s be honest, you can’t work in the media without being a liberal. Even most of the journalists who write for the right wing press are in truth liberals.

Despite my best efforts, the Liberal Democrats have not won. But irrespective of my efforts, Liberalism has.

The problem for Tim Farron is that the dominance of liberalism has led it to impose itself on society to the point that it is becoming difficult to be a serious Christian:

My observation is that for many years now our culture has considered that the absence of faith is the neutral position, and that the holding of a religious faith is eccentric. In other words, an absence of faith is the standard assumption around which we build our social structures, and if you have a faith we will consider you to be eccentric in the whacky and harmless sense… so we will tolerate you, as long as you remain on the edges.

What appears now to be happening is that while the absence of faith is still thought to be the neutral position, holding a faith is only considered to be tolerably eccentric if it is merely cultural. But if your faith actually affects your world view in any way that puts it at odds with the mainstream, then your faith is considered to be malign and intolerable.

Tim Farron believes that modern liberalism is becoming a "respectable tyranny" and that,

my hypothesis today is that in this country and across the world, Liberalism will eat itself. Is eating itself. May already have eaten itself.

He notes too that liberal secularism leads to a narrow concept of human life, that it "reduces everyone down to either consumer or regulatory units...We’ve been atomised."

What is his solution? He argues that liberals should go back in time, to the liberalism of J.S. Mill, in which there would be a pluralistic society in which different world views would be tolerated. He also argues that Christianity in particular should be tolerated as liberalism rests on certain philosophical beliefs drawn from Christianity (i.e. that liberalism puts itself at risk if it discards Christianity).

I don't think he grasps the problem adequately in making these arguments. There is a logic to the core beliefs of liberalism which sets it at odds with Christianity.

The liberal starting point sounds OK for establishing pluralism. One of the core liberal beliefs, after all, is that individuals should be free to pursue their own goods as long as in doing so there is no interference with the right of others to do the same.

But to make this work it helps if liberals look on their preferences as being subjective or private. That way their preferences don't infringe on the validity of what others might choose. Let's say, for instance, that I choose as a man to marry a woman. If I am a liberal, it would be awkward if I asserted that this represents an objective good, i.e. a preference that is rightly ordered. If I were to do so it would suggest that marrying someone of the same sex is not a valid choice. I would be invalidating someone else's preferences and identity, a violation that would draw down on me the liberal moral reproach that I was being "bigoted" or "intolerant" or "prejudiced".

Similarly, it suits a liberal culture if there is thought to be nothing in the nature of reality itself to limit what I might choose to do or to be. That then means that these is less to limit my autonomous choice, which is a marker of human status and dignity for liberals. It is better from the liberal point of view if I am a blank slate so that I can be wholly the author of my own life. Better if there are 1000 sexes rather than just two. Better if race is just a social construct. Better if there is no natural law to constrain or to guide my moral choices.

Remember too that for liberals a progress toward a society where there is "equal freedom" to pursue our subjective goods is a matter of social justice, of equal dignity, of human flourishing, and of realising the ultimate ends of humanity. It is the source of hope, of liberation and of meaning. Many liberals will therefore think it offensive, or demoralising or deeply unjust if anyone violates liberal precepts. In particular, liberals will want to push forward with the liberal agenda, so that they can see "progress" being manifested in society. And "progress" will eventually catch up with those who are holding out.

So those initial core beliefs, which sound as if they might allow for pluralism, have an inner logic which drives toward an intolerance of whatever violates liberalism itself. The end result is that you can choose anything...as long as you choose liberalism.

And Christianity can't be made to fit easily into an acceptable liberal framework. After all, Christians do not see morality as merely a subjective preference. The Christian attitude is not that anything you choose is equally good, as long as it is not coerced. A Christian will assert instead that there is a moral order, external to the individual ("prior" to the individual) which provides the framework for our moral choices. We become free to the extent that we are not subject to moral evil.

Imagine if a Christian agreed to the liberal standard, and assented to the idea that moral choices are just subjective preferences, in which no matter what we choose we could just as morally have chosen something else. Surely that would be demoralising, in the sense that it would undermine Christianity as a serious belief about the nature of existence.

This does not mean that the only acceptable social framework for a Christian is a theocracy. Christianity existed for a long time with a distinct role allotted for church and state. But the concept of politics that would best fit with Christianity would be one in which a community recognised that men have a given biological, social and spiritual nature and that the aim is to best understand each of these and then attempt to integrate them into a way of life.

How to decide how to do this? Well, through the life of a community at different levels, including the political, over time. What would happen in practice is that a generation would inherit a particular tradition, i.e. an understanding of a way of life, and would then seek to influence it for the better, through a debate about philosophy and religion, through culture and education, through the care of parents for their children, and to some extent through reforms to governance and law.

Every community will make mistakes along the way. None will harmonise the different aspects of the nature of existence perfectly. It will always be a work in progress, with real improvement taking place over generations. The more a community gets it right, the more likely it is to establish solid foundations.

Liberalism doesn't allow the process to work well. How, for instance, can you try to encourage the better masculine qualities of men, and then integrate these into family and social life, if you start with the assumption that men are blank slates and that masculinity itself is a false and oppressive social construct? You never get out of the starting blocks, but are forced instead into low level debates about whether sex distinctions even exist and whether they should be tolerated if they do.

Tim Farron knows where things are heading. He can see that Christianity will be increasingly marginalised within liberal modernity. That it will be tolerated only if it becomes "cultural". He is wrong, though, to think that things can be put right by rewinding liberalism so that it becomes tolerant again. Liberalism will just spring back according to the logic of its first principles. If you repair it, it will set to work in a predictable way, just as it did before. It needs replacing.

What comes next matters too

Which philosophy is currently dominant in the West? I've collected a few quotes from political philosophers in which the answer is clearly stated to be liberalism. Here is another, this time from Dr Phillip Cole, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of the West of England. According to Dr Cole:

normative political philosophy at present simply is predominantly liberal political philosophy

I doubt if liberalism will retain this orthodox status forever. However, it's important to keep in mind that the demise of liberalism won't necessarily mean a revival of traditionalism. Liberalism could be replaced by something else just as damaging.

I was reminded of this after reading a column by Giles Fraser, an Anglican minister. In this column, Fraser states clearly that he is not a liberal:

All of which presents an opportunity to clear the decks and say why I am not a liberal. No, I'm not a conservative either. I'm a communitarian. Blue labour, if you like. But certainly not a liberal.

His understanding of liberalism is pretty good:

What I take to be the essence of liberalism is a belief that individual freedom and personal autonomy are the fundamental moral goods.

Fraser is right that liberals put the moral goods of individual freedom and personal autonomy first. One of the problems with this, as I see it, is that it then leaves the good of the community undefended, and the good of the community is important for individual well-being, as we are social creatures who derive important aspects of our identity and our sense of belonging from the communities we belong to.

Fraser criticises liberalism from a different perspective, a socialist one. He wants the community to hold to a moral vision of equality and redistribution and this communal good is then to trump any individual ones:

So, do we think the state ought to have a substantial vision of shared values, perfectly at ease with the language of right and wrong, and at times not at all uncomfortable about imposing that vision through taxation and legislation? Or do we think that the state ought to butt out and let us all get on with living our lives as we see fit?

Just to be clear. I take it that socialists are happy with the former, using the levers of government to shape (impose, if you like) a fairer, more redistributive society.

Fraser observes correctly that individual choice often reduces itself to relatively trivial aims:

From the 80s onwards, popular culture morphed from an angry insistence on a fairer society (the Jam, the Specials etc) into a me-first relativism that is all about sex and shopping.

Fraser then discusses what community means for liberals (though his description seems to best fit classical or right-liberals):

For liberals the word community means little more than co-operation for mutual advantage. Here, individuals exist fundamentally prior to community. There is no such thing as society, and so forth. Liberals are doing it for themselves and rely on the invisible hand of self-interest to do the community work for them. This sort of philosophy has little to offer those who are trying to eke out a living in the tower blocks of south London. It is a philosophy that has demonstrably failed. For socialists, Christians and other religious denominations, the community precedes the individual in so far as the individual is shaped by and responsible to something wider than itself.

It's true to say that the individual is shaped by community and responsible to something wider than himself, but I'm not sure that I'd therefore claim that philosophically the community precedes the individual. The stronger the sense we have of the individual, then the stronger the sense we ought to have of the community which gives the individual the setting for his social commitments, for his self-fulfilment, for his identity, for his love of people and place, for his connection to culture and heritage and so on.

It is not as if you have to choose either individual or community: if you choose individual then you should also choose to defend community rather than seeing community as something the individual has to be liberated from.

It's likely that in coming years some of the attacks on liberalism will come from those who wish to replace it with a socialist view of the common good, which will boil down to the state replacing the functions of the family and also redistributing wealth in the name of equality.

It's important that we maintain our own traditionalist criticisms of liberalism, so that those who blanch at the socialist vision aren't forced back to liberalism as an alternative.

A bubble on the stream

There aren't too many political magazines you can buy on the newsstands here in Australia. One of them is called The Monthly. It's a mostly left-of-centre magazine that tends to run long articles by established writers. I've rarely found the articles interesting enough to respond to.

It seems that I'm not the only one to find the magazine uninspiring. Guy Rundle is an independent-minded Australian leftist. He's an editor of Arena magazine and he writes occasionally for the Guardian. Rundle wrote a critique of The Monthly last year. Having listed the feature articles of one edition of the magazine, he commented:

I’m sure that all these will be well-written and also that none of the ideas in them will be particularly challenging.

And, as the world seems to be coming apart at the seams, there seems a marginality to the concerns, a degree of preciousness in the approach...

That’s the core of the magazine, and there’s something missing, i.e. a core. From global economics, to what appears to be the meltdown of West Asia, from a critical account of Ruddism ... to the changing nature of identity … The Monthly seems to be missing a great deal of it. In the early period of Warhaft’s editorship there were essays by Anne Manne, which constituted the closest the publication came to mixing some Big Ideas into among the reportage ... Apart from the PM’s contributions of course...

All well and good, but aren’t there any other bloody ideas around, except those that flow from the PM?...

When the world is in face-masks, General Motors is asking to be nationalised, the Taliban is marching on Islamabad, the Chinese are calling for a new global currency, more live organ transplants are the result of cash transaction than donation, and the newspaper appears on the verge of winking out of existence, etc etc the failure to take on Big Ideas becomes unignorable, a gaping hole. To not recognise that the left-liberal ideology, really a late Whitlamism, of a well-connected elite is simply a bubble on the stream, is to miss a great historical opportunity...

That relative absence of ideas applies, I hasten to add, not only to the absence of writers further left than a leftish-centre, though their absence is striking — no Jeff Sparrow, Katherine Wilson, Mark Bahnisch, John Quiggin, Geoff Boucher, Larissa Behrendt, Humphrey McQueen, Terry Janke, Mark Davis (the Gangland one), Julie Stephens, David McKnight, Anita Heiss and that’s right off the top of me head — but no interesting classical/neo-liberals either — Jason Soon, Andrew Norton, Charles Richardson, Rafe Champion — or genuine conservatives like Mark Richardson, John Carroll, Pierre Ryckmans. No longer critical pieces from the likes of Christos Tsiolkas, Owen Richardson, David Bennett, Eve Vincent, Bob Ellis, Germaine Greer, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Mischa Merz, Gig Ryan … and on and on. Even leaving out people whose writing is too academic or activist you can field a pretty impressive team.

I would dare to suggest that a contents at least partly drawn from the above would render a publication with more punch than the current line up. Doubtless some of these people have been asked and declined (and some have got the occasional guernsey), but I know that most would jump at the dollar-a-word fee. Some are overexposed and you’d use them sparingly — certainly more sparingly than the limited roll-call of the existing Monthly contributors — but so many of the existing writers are, compared to the above lot, so goddam tepid.

I thought this interesting. First, Rundle gets the political spectrum right. He lists a series of writers on the left, and then some writers he calls classical or neo-liberals (i.e. right liberals) and then a few writers he terms genuine conservatives, namely myself, John Carroll and Pierre Ryckmans. (John Carroll is the author of the excellent work Humanism: the Wreck of Western Culture.)

Interesting too that Rundle correctly describes left-liberalism as an ideology; that he sees its followers not as underdog outsiders but as part of a "well-connected elite"; and that he views left-liberal ideology not as a universal and final truth bringing us to the end of history but as a bubble on the stream.

Note too that Rundle perceives the world to be "coming apart at the seams". There seems to be a growing perception across the political spectrum that all is not well with the West and that there are signs of decline.

There are shifts occurring in politics. Yes, they are happening more slowly than many of us would like. But think back to the late 1980s, early 1990s (if you're old enough). Back then left-liberalism utterly dominated Australian politics. It stood as a monolith that few were willing to openly criticise. If you wanted to be thought of as a good person you were supposed to embrace orthodox left-liberal views.

It's not that left-liberalism has entirely lost this status. It's still the largest single current of thought in the political class. But it's not as monolithic as it once was. It's not thought of as being as natural or eternal a source of political authority as it was in the late 1980s. Even in its Scandinavian heartland, mainstream left-liberalism has lost its monopoly on politics.

We don't know what opportunities this changing political landscape will eventually bring to traditionalists. I expect that there will be, at least, waves of opportunity that we need to try to put ourselves in a position to catch and make use of.

What does a liberal think unites us?

I like Theo Hobson for one reason only. He is a liberal who says what is usually left unsaid.

Some background info on Theo: he is an Englishman who writes a column on religion for the left-liberal Guardian newspaper. It's not surprising that he got the job. He has the vaguest kind of allegiance to the Anglican Church, but at the same time strongly supports the secular liberal order in the UK.

In a recent column, Theo imagined Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats leader, giving the following speech:

In the past decade, religion and secularism have been coming into conflict in a new way. On one side, some religious groups feel hard done by, as if their rights are denied by the secular state. And on the other side, many secularists feel that faith communities are given too much leeway.

There's a conflict between the churches feeling they are losing their rights to follow their beliefs in a public setting and secularists who think the churches are given too many exceptions to liberal principles. How does Theo want Clegg to answer the conundrum? The imagined Clegg speech continues:

I think that the Labour government has got the balance wrong: it has been over-respectful of the claims of religious institutions, and has allowed the principle of secular liberalism to get rather lost.

Well, that's a clear answer. The churches lose out. Why? Because the ruling ideology of the UK is liberalism. Clegg is imagined continuing his speech as follows:

many of us in the party, myself included, feel that the whole idea of an official national church is outdated. We as a nation are bound together not by Anglicanism, or any other form of religion, but by liberal values. Maybe it's time to be honest about that – even if it means a process of constitutional change.

Now of course our change of emphasis will be accused of being anti-religious, as if we want religious believers to be persecuted by the secular state. But this is wrong. All we seek is a reassertion of liberalism as the nation's common ideology.

Isn't that just swell. According to a liberal like Theo, the one thing that is allowed to unite the residents of the UK is liberal ideology. That must make the 5% of the country committed to liberal ideology feel just great.

Theo goes on to describe the UK as a "liberal nation" and in another column he writes:

We need to clarify our national story. Liberalism is what unites us, and this must be made explicit. It is, in effect, our national creed...

We need a revolution that makes our latent national identity explicit. What unites us is not Anglicanism, or any form of Christianity; it is liberalism. That does not make us anti-religious, but it does make us suspicious of any form of religion that is at odds with liberalism.

We need to get a bit fundamentalist about the superiority of liberalism.

So religion is OK if it is not "at odds" with liberalism, liberalism being held to be the superior creed. Of course, any serious kind of religion will inevitably find itself at odds with liberalism, since modern liberalism holds that the source of morality is in the self and its desires and that the highest aim of man and society is to achieve an equal measure of individual autonomy.

(Nor is a political ideology like liberalism much of a basis for national unity. First, it's non-distinct. Liberalism is the orthodoxy in all the Western countries. So someone who is a liberal in England is not distinct in his identity from a Canadian, a Swede or a New Zealander. Second, it requires a level of group think that more traditional national identities don't require. Third, it's shallow, as it doesn't connect people as deeply as kinship, history, culture, language and religion. Fourth, the trajectory of liberalism is toward internationalism and open borders, making it even less suitable as a vehicle for maintaining a national entity.)

Once Theo has pronounced liberalism to be the superior creed, much else follows. For instance, Professor Robert Trigg has written a report which complains that when there is a clash between freedom of religion and other human rights, the freedom of religion is usually held to be secondary and sacrificed. Theo replies:

Trigg has a point: why should one human right trump another? If the right to religious freedom is real, then why should it have to bow to some other right as a matter of course? ... He is right that the current orthodoxy is to limit the right to religious expression: it must not interfere with other rights, so it is only fully operative in the private sphere.

What Trigg's argument proves is that, when it comes to pondering the place of religion in society, the language of rights is a mistake. There is no such thing as "human rights" in relation to religion. Some may say that there is no such thing as human rights at all, but the concept is generally benign: for example talk of the human right not to be tortured motivates opposition to the practice. In relation to religion, by contrast, the concept of human rights is simply not helpful...

... religious liberty is the creation of the liberal state, and it's a non-absolute condition: religious forms that are deemed reactionary, or illiberal, will necessarily be curbed. The classic example is the proscription of Roman Catholicism in early modern England. Was this illiberal, a denial of the Catholics' rights? Sort of, but to say so gets things the wrong way round. The old illiberal form of religion had to be banned, for relative liberty to be allowed to grow...

Does this mean that the liberal state has the right to curb whatever forms of religious expression it wants? Quite simply, yes. It must protect the new space it has created, of relative religious freedom, from reactionary religion. It must decide what is tolerable and what is not – we must trust our elected representatives to draw these ever-shifting lines.

Some interesting admissions here. Theo doesn't really believe in the notion of human rights, though he supports the concept when it serves the liberal cause. He states bluntly that there are no human rights when it comes to religion.

As there are no rights when it comes to religion, other secular rights are to rule in society. Religion is to vacate the public square.

Catholicism is held by Theo to be an illiberal religious form.

The liberal state, according to Theo, has the right to curb whatever form of religious expression it wants. We are supposed to trust our elected representatives to draw the ever-shifting lines between what is to be permitted and what isn't.

(The lines shift not because church beliefs change but because liberalism continues to push its principles in more radical directions. So a church belief that is acceptable today might not be considered so in 20 years time. The churches are expected to keep adapting to the "superior" creed of liberalism.)

So Theo is an honest liberal. He doesn't try to hide liberal rule behind claims of neutrality. He wants liberals to be out and proud. He wants liberal ideology to be recognised as the state creed. Nor does he attempt to uphold a pretence of liberal toleration. He expects that liberals in power will curb, on principle, that which is illiberal.

But there is a lot in the life of man which is illiberal, not just in the realm of religion, but in our national identity, our family life, our relationships, our moral beliefs and our masculine and feminine identities.

We can reject these things or we can reject liberalism. Theo has made his decision, but I'd like to think as the failures of liberalism mount that many others will choose differently.

Chapter 1: What is shaping the West?

What has brought us to the way we are now? What can explain the rapid changes in Western societies?

To answer these questions you need to know the world view of the Western political class. It is the belief system shared by the Western political class which determines what is thought to be moral and legitimate, which then, over time, drives society in a particular direction.

But what orthodox view is shared by nearly all members of this class?


Liberalism as orthodoxy

The Western political class shares a commitment to a liberal political philosophy. There are very few politicians, academics, writers or intellectuals whose beliefs are not based on an underlying liberalism.

That’s why an American professor of politics, Steven Kautz, is able to state that,

The political philosophy of liberalism ... is in some sense our political philosophy: we are somehow all liberals. [1]

The political writer James Kalb observes that,

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 some way or another. [2]

Professor Appiah of Princeton University describes liberalism as encompassing,

... nearly all members of nearly all of the mainstream political parties in Europe and North America. [3]

Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, tells us that,

Contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question. [4]

Another prominent political philosopher, Professor John Gray, believes that,

We are all liberals nowadays ... It sometimes seems as if the spectrum of ideas in political life ranges from the sovereign consumer of the neo-liberal right to the sovereign chooser of the egalitarian left. [5]

According to Dr Phillip Cole, a senior lecturer in politics,

normative political philosophy at present simply is predominantly liberal political philosophy [6]

And Professor John Schwarzmantel, who teaches politics at the University of Leeds, holds that,

Contemporary liberal-democracy is an ideological society, where a particular version of liberalism prevails ... [which] has been able to ... capture if not public enthusiasm then at least acceptance as ‘the only game in town’. This then gives rise to a very impoverished spectrum of ideological and political debate... [7]

Next chapter: Autonomy theory


[1] Steven Kautz, Liberalism & Community (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 28.

[2] James Kalb, The Tyranny of Liberalism (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), x.

[3] Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xi.

[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

[5] John Gray, “What liberalism cannot do,” New Statesman, 20 September 1996, 18.

[6] Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000), xi.

[7] John Schwarzmantel, “Hegemony and Contestation in Post-ideological Society,” Paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Uppsala, 13-17 April 2004.

The void in American politics 1950

Liberalism has been an orthodoxy in the political class for a long time. Even in the year 1950, often portrayed as a more conservative period, liberalism was the reigning orthodoxy. In that year, Lionel Trilling's book The Liberal Imagination was published. Trilling observed that:

In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.

Trilling thought that there were impulses to conservatism, even strong ones, in the population, but that these weren't articulated and so didn't challenge the liberal stranglehold on political ideas.

Why point this out? First, it helps to explain why Western society has veered so radically down a liberal path: there was no well articulated challenge to the liberal orthodoxy to hold things back.

It's also important that we remind people that the Western political establishment is and has been a liberal and not a conservative one. If things have gone wrong it is because liberals were at the helm. If conservatives have been at fault it's for not articulating a principled opposition to liberalism of both the classical (right) and social democratic (left) varieties.

Does this justify the left-liberal bias on campus?

It's a common complaint of conservatives that universities have a left-wing bias.

Jere P. Surber is a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver. He is a left-liberal who agrees that the arts faculties are strongly biased to the left. But he thinks that there are three good reasons for this.

Before I summarise these three reasons, just a quick point on terminology. Surber distinguishes between a "liberalism" which dominates the arts faculties and a "conservatism" which dominates the business faculties. By "liberalism" is meant what we would call in Australia "left-liberalism". And the "conservatism" in the business faculties is really a kind of economic liberalism, a right-liberalism.

So why does Professor Surber think it natural and reasonable for the arts faculties to be dominated by left-liberalism?

1) Envy

It's best if I let Professor Surber explain this one:

First ... virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation. There's no secret that the liberal arts are the lowest-compensated sector of academe, despite substantially more advanced study  ... You don't have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people's political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests. It's real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.

I don't mean to suggest that issues of conscience beyond the confines of crass self-interest don't play an important role for many in the liberal arts, but their basic economic condition virtually assures that those in the liberal arts will be natural-born liberals. Who, after all, would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced—doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives—receive vastly more compensation ...

Every time I read this I'm left speechless. If Professor Surber were working in Australia he'd be on $135,000 a year. He'd also enjoy some perks of the job, such as frequent trips overseas for academic conferences. Yet, in his mind, he's not getting what he's entitled to, given his splendiferous level of education ... because someone else is getting more.


2) The evidence of history

According to Professor Surber, it is left-liberals who study history; therefore it is left-liberals who discover the truth that history is all about the struggle against oppression; therefore the only respectable intellectual position is that of left-liberalism:

A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history. Most (although, of course, by no means all) prominent historians of politics, literature, the arts, religion, and even economics have tended, as conservatives claim, to be liberally biased. Fair enough. But if you actually take the time to look at history and culture, certain conclusions about human nature, society, and economics tend to force themselves on you. History has a trajectory, driven in large part by the desires of underprivileged or oppressed groups to attain parity with the privileged or the oppressor.

Consider the Greek struggle against Persian tyranny, the struggles to preserve the Roman Republic, the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages, the American and French revolutions, the abolitionist and civil-rights movements, and now movements on behalf of other groups—women, Latinos, homosexuals, and the physically impaired. As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a "right side of history," Obama said­—the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.

If you don't study history, whether because it doesn't pad quarterly profits, isn't sufficiently scientific or objective, or threatens your own economic status, then you won't know any of that. But most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn't any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.

They are liberal by deliberate and reasoned choice? This is myth making. The embarrassing truth for left-liberal professors is that liberalism is a long-standing orthodoxy that most Western intellectuals fall into. The idea that every professor just happens to end up agreeing with the orthodoxy after a process of "deliberate and reasoned choice" is incredible.

Note too that Professor Surber wants things both ways. He wants to hold to the pretence that intellectuals adopt liberalism via "deliberate and reasoned choice" rather than it being the orthodoxy, whilst at the same time claiming that liberalism is the only "intellectualy respectable way" to interpret history, i.e. that there can only be a liberal orthodoxy.

To rephrase this: we are supposed to accept that there can only be a liberal orthodoxy, but that it is accepted not as an orthodoxy but via the deliberate and reasoned choice of each intellectual. Yeah, sure.

Note too just how reductionist Professor Surber's understanding of history is. History is nothing more than the movement to overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition. This is obviously a reading backward of the political programme of the liberals of today into centuries past.

It also provides more evidence of the relatedness of left-liberalism and Marxism. It was, after all, Marx who wrote that, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Isn't Professor Surber as a left-liberal pushing a similar idea?

And look at where Professor Surber's reductionism leads him. The Middle Ages gets reduced to the peasant uprisings; the history of America to the civil-rights movement. There is a view of man embedded in all this. Professor Surber assumes that the ideal man, who contributes to the trajectory of human history, is the one who agitates against privilege. So if German peasants have any historical meaning it was in their uprising against the landowners.

But this is a very limited view of man. I would like to think that a man might conceivably be measured by his strength of character, by the quality of his loves and attachments, by his productive contribution to society, by his success in raising children to adulthood, by his cultivation of knowledge, by his appreciation of culture, by the quality of his spiritual life, by his creativity and inventiveness, by his virtue, by his appreciation of the ordinary pleasures of life, by his ability to perceive beauty and goodness and so on.

If we have a more sophisticated view of man, then we can look at past societies and see more than occasional agitations for political reform.

3) Values

Professor Surber's final argument is that professors in the humanities,

have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition 

It is this "open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate" that helps to explain why so many professors in the arts faculties are left-liberals.

If only. As I've already discussed, Professor Surber does not think in a complex way about the human condition but in a remarkably and disastrously reductionist way. Nor does he have an "open perspective" on "what kind of values can be considered legitimate". He told us earlier in his essay that there was only one "intellectually respectable" way to look at history, namely via left-liberal values. And later on he tells us that there is considerable agreement in the arts faculties "on what constitutes the good life," based on "some sort of a broadly liberal point of view."

I don't see how you get from this insistence that left-liberal values are the politically correct ones to the idea that left-liberals are unique in having an "open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate".


(Hat tip: David Thompson)

Schwarzmantel 1

What's a neo-Gramscian Marxist to do these days? John Schwarzmantel, a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Leeds, has a plan. As it happens, an interesting plan.

He wants social change. So he looks at society today and asks what the dominant ideology is. His answer? Liberalism. He sees liberalism as having "ideological hegemony".

He then sets out what he hopes is an effective "counter-ideology" to liberalism.

A vulgarised liberalism?

Schwarzmantel believes that liberalism as a philosophy is based on a vision of a society of fully self-determining individuals. In its vulgarised, ideological form, however, it presents itself in terms of individual choice and the free market.

I'd accept much of this. Notice, though, that Schwarzmantel emphasises here a free market, right-liberalism as the reigning ideology. This makes it sound as if left-liberalism is, at best, the junior partner in the making of modern society.

Nor is it such as surprise that a philosophy which emphasises individual self-determination should then make individual choice one of its ideological planks. This doesn't seem like a corruption of the original vision to me, but a kind of logical fulfilment.

Here's Schwarzmantel himself:

... it is liberalism which is the dominant ideology (p.1)

... the dominance of liberalism as ideology has been purchased at the expense of its theoretical sophistication and intellectual depth ... (p.3)

... What passes for liberalism is a rather crude ideology of individual choice, individual rights and an uncritical view of what one author calls 'market-driven politics' (Leys, 2001) ...

... liberalism as a critical ideology has in its vulgarised 'ideological' form lost that critical edge, and abandoned its vision of a society of fully self-determining individuals ... (p.4)

Narrowing of politics?

One thing that concerns Schwarzmantel is that liberal ideology has succeeded in discouraging a commitment to the public sphere.

Liberalism (I claim) has won out as an ideology, an ideology which sees fulfilment above all as lying in the private sphere. As Benjamin Constant noted in his famous lecture on the liberty of the ancients and moderns, 'our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence' ... the dominance of contemporary liberalism as ideology has given liberalism a strong push towards attitudes valorising the private sphere, primarily that of consumption, and maintaining a detached, even cynical, attitude to public spheres of political activity. (p.5)

I think he's right. This is a problem not only for neo-Gramscian Marxists seeking new mass political movements, but also for traditionalists seeking to organise opposition to modernist politics.

He also believes that people have lost interest in politics because liberalism itself has swallowed up the opposition in the act of becoming hegemonic:

Traditional conservatism is not a strong contender ... the same is true of statist socialism in the period following the collapse of the USSR ... So what then is left, as ideological planks on which parties in liberal-democratic systems base their appeal?

The answer is various versions of liberalism ... Liberalism ... has absorbed the critique of other historically influential ideologies, at times taking on board a dose of social democracy to reduce the harshness of classic liberalism of the Manchester school. By the same token, those ideologies critical of liberalism, like conservatism, have entered on liberal terrain by abandoning or downplaying their own distinctive traditions ...

Other formerly more critical ideologies have adapted themselves to this vulgarised liberalism, which has been able to present itself as an ideology of freedom, choice, diversity, and thus capture if not public enthusiasm then at least acceptance as 'the only game in town'.

This then gives rise to a very impoverished spectrum of ideological and political debate ... this reduces the interest and attraction of politics and the public sphere. (pp. 5-7)

Although I don't agree on all particulars here, it's a better analysis than we usually get from the left. There's a recognition that mainstream conservatism has effectively given up a principled opposition to liberalism  (and has become part of the liberal orthodoxy); there's a recognition too that traditional conservatism is one of the possible principled alternatives to liberalism (if it were more prominent).

There's a lot more of interest in Schwarzmantel's article, but I'll leave this for a future post.

The closing of politics?

On the surface it seems as if we have a choice in politics. We have a right-wing party, the Liberals, who are portrayed as the establishment, conservative option. Then we have a left-wing party, Labor, who are supposed to represent the dissenting, idealistic, reforming outlook.

But this view of the two parties is false. The reality is that both parties are committed to the one political theory, namely liberalism. Liberalism has dominated not only Australian but also Western politics for so long that it has become a political orthodoxy.

What this means is that the Liberal Party is not a genuinely conservative option. As its name suggests, it follows a liberal politics which is anything but conservative in its consequences. Nor is Labor a party of dissenting outsiders. Labor follows the established political orthodoxy just as much as the Liberals do.

The long-established dominance of liberalism has led to a closing of politics throughout the West. Debate about first principles is rare. We are supposed to accept that the fundamental issues and the general direction of society have already been settled. All that is left are the technical questions of how best to implement what has already been decided.

This has not gone unnoticed. John Gray, a professor of politics at Oxford University, has lamented that:

We are all liberals nowadays ... It sometimes seems as if the spectrum of ideas in political life ranges from the sovereign consumer of the neo-liberal right to the sovereign chooser of the egalitarian left.

Alasdair MacIntyre, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, puts it this way:

Contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question.

Steven Kautz is a professor of political science at Michigan State University. He writes:

Classical and contemporary liberal teachings ... dominate our political discourse. America is still now, or perhaps now more than ever, somehow a liberal regime ... we are somehow all liberals.

Finally, Professor Appiah of Princeton University has observed that liberalism encompasses:

nearly all members of nearly all of the mainstream political parties in Europe and North America.

So it all comes down to liberalism. And here we have a problem.

What liberals claim is that we are made human by our ability to self-determine our own lives. Therefore, the aim of society is to maximise individual autonomy (and distribute it equally).

Obviously, liberals put all of this in the most positive terms. They see themselves as working toward individual freedom and human equality (the equal freedom of each individual).

This sounds pretty good. Until, that is, you look at the details of what liberalism logically requires.

The liberal aim is a self-determining individual. Therefore, whatever I don’t determine for myself is thought of negatively as an impediment to my freedom, as an oppression from which I must be liberated.

But this rules out a lot of the more significant aspects of life. I don’t, for instance, get to determine for myself whether I am born a man or a woman. Therefore, our sex isn’t supposed to matter in a liberal society. Sex distinctions are considered to be artificial social constructs. Masculinity and femininity are often condemned as oppressive. The liberal ideal is to show that we are uninfluenced by the fact of being a man or woman rather than expressing the better qualities of manhood or womanhood.

The liberal approach to sex distinctions has been taken furthest in the Scandinavian countries. Jens Orbeck, speaking as a minister in the Swedish government, announced that it was official policy in Sweden that “male” and “female” had no real, natural existence:

The government considers female and male as social constructions ...

In Norway the government has set up organisations to create a gender-neutral society:

The goal in contemporary Scandinavia is to make gender not matter ... "Gender is losing meaning," explains Jørgen Lorentzen, [who] is a member of the prestigious Norwegian Men’s Commission. The Commission was established to advise the government on how men can make the transition into a gender-neutral society.

And yet our sense of ourselves as men or women is inescapably part of our self-identity. So is it really a freedom to be liberated from being a man or a woman? Is being gender-neutral really what brings us to a sense of fulfilment?

It’s the same when it comes to forms of communal identity. Liberalism recognises only the individual parts of society: millions of autonomous, choice making individuals. The only significant connection of these individuals to each other is through the state: we show our social nature in a liberal society by supporting state action to redistribute autonomy more equally.

Liberalism is so oriented to the autonomous individual that it doesn’t have a strong sense of the value of the communities that individuals form, whether these are families, neighbourhoods or nations. Some liberals even see communities negatively as a threat to individual freedom and autonomy. Steven Kautz, an American academic quoted earlier, is a classical liberal. He reminds his readers that:

We have been taught by our classical liberal ancestors to think of ourselves as free individuals above all, rather than as children or parishioners or citizens, or as members of a racial or ethnic group - or, indeed, as members of any other communities ...

... the idea of community is always somewhat suspect for thoughtful liberals

... there are no natural bonds between human beings, and so there is no natural community. Indeed, the family is not simply natural, according to some of the founders of liberalism.

According to Kautz we become free individuals when our membership of communities no longer matters. And yet our communal identity is often an inseparable part of our self-identity. It doesn’t seem to be a true freedom to lose this identity, instead it seems alienating.

Liberals have an especially hard time accepting their own ethnic identity. Liberals want to be self-determining, but our ethnic identity is not something we choose for ourselves but something we inherit. It is therefore logical for liberals (but not for the rest of us) to stridently reject their own ethnic identity as backward or immoral.

These are just a few examples of what liberalism takes from people in the effort to create individual autonomy. The general problem is that liberalism is radically reductive: it makes a single good, autonomy, the organising principle of society, rather than recognising and attempting to balance a range of important goods.

And yet liberalism is the established political orthodoxy in the West. This means that we can’t rely on established institutions to put things right. The political parties won’t help, nor will the universities or the media. If we want to open up politics we have to start where we can, by not accepting the orthodoxy at face value, but by questioning the first principles from which liberal policies logically flow. It is this taking of a principled political stance of our own which will bring change.

Have conservatives been captured?

Most intellectuals are liberals of one stripe or another. So much so that it's possible to speak of liberalism as being the orthodox belief of the modern West. Professor John Gray recognises this when he writes that,

We are all liberals nowadays ... It sometimes seems as if the spectrum of ideas in political life ranges from the sovereign consumer of the neo-liberal right to the sovereign chooser of the egalitarian left. ("What liberalism cannot do", New Statesman, 20th September 1990)

Professor Alasdair MacIntyre puts it this way,

Contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question. (Whose Justice? Whose rationality?)

How did liberalism become an unquestioned orthodoxy? In part, by capturing what was supposed to be the conservative opposition. What John Stuart Mill recommended as a liberal strategy back in 1840 has been effected. Mill didn't think it practicable to persuade conservatives to identify as liberals. So he suggested that conservatives be encouraged to believe that liberal opinions were themselves conservative.

What could be done about the conservative classes of society? Mill wrote that his fellow liberals should,

ask themselves if they are content that these classes should be, and remain, to a man, banded against them; and what progress they expect to make, or by what means, unless a process of preparation shall be going on in the minds of these very classes; not by the impracticable method of converting them from Conservatives into Liberals, but by their being led to adopt one liberal opinion after another, as a part of Conservatism itself. (On Coleridge)

What we see today in mainstream politics is a captured conservatism, just as Mill wanted it to be, one that is unfit to provide a principled opposition to liberalism.

It's no use, therefore, simply supporting conservatism or conservative parties as they are. If we're serious about challenging liberalism, the first thing we have to do is to return to a clear point of distinction between conservatism and liberalism.

In other words, we have to answer this question: what political beliefs would make someone a principled conservative rather than just another member of the liberal orthodoxy?

I'd suggest the following. First, a principled conservative would want people to be free as they are really constituted, namely as men and women, as members of distinct communities and traditions, and as moral beings. He would not accept the liberal idea that we are made free through a radical autonomy in which we self-create who we are.

Second, a principled conservative would not accept that freedom is the one, reductive, organising principle of society. He would consider freedom to be one important good to be held in balance with other significant goods, such as love and loyalty, family and country, courtesy and charity, beauty and grace, and honour and courage. These virtues are not always to be sacrificed to the good of individual freedom.

Third, a principled conservative would recognise the existence of a common good. He would not see society just as an immense set of individual goods needing to be harmonised with each other. He would recognise the importance to individuals of the distinct community and tradition they belong to; therefore, he would accept as a significant common good the well-being of his own community and tradition and the common purpose of maintaining their existence through time.

If I have struck in the right places a serious liberal would flinch when reading the above. And the point should be to strike in the right places - not in order to shock or deliberately offend liberal sensibilities (that would be unserious), but to find the most effective point of distinction to finally drag conservatism out of the liberal orthodoxy.

A subversive twist

I've read some more of Kasey Edwards's book Thirty Something & Over It. In my last post I looked at the feminist aspects of the book. But there's more to it.

I've often criticised liberalism for limiting people to relatively trivial life aims. Liberalism limits us to those spheres of life which we can pursue as self-defining, autonomous individuals.

The most obvious areas in which we can seek fulfilment as an autonomous individual are careers, travel, education, shopping, entertainment and the various kinds of hedonistic pursuits.

Kasey Edwards was raised within a liberal culture. She therefore sought to define herself, and find meaning, primarily through career, money, dining out and retail therapy. It's clear that another plank of her life philosophy was a commitment to feminist politics: she was on the women's team battling it out with men in the workplace.

So what happened? She hasn't dropped the liberal intellectual framework. On the other hand, she has very much decided that the liberal life aims aren't enough. They don't provide an adequate source of meaning and fulfilment in life.

The book is a record of her efforts, as an intelligent and well-meaning woman, to battle her way through to an alternative.

It's not surprising that the liberal intellectual framework is still in place. People don't generally let go of an older justification for their life before a new one is ready to be put in its place.

In the first chapter, therefore, we are treated to a dose of liberal autonomy theory - but with a subversive twist. Ordinarily liberals argue that women who commit to motherhood are following a merely biological destiny - something predetermined rather than self-determined.

Kasey Edwards doesn't challenge the liberal idea that we should avoid what is predetermined. But it's not motherhood that she thinks of as being predetermined for her but careerism.

It all begins with Kasey's brother telling her,

"you need to experience a life that is outside the one that was prescribed for you."

He says that for our entire lives, both Emma and I have done exactly what was expected of us. We are overachieving 'good girls', and now we're bored with it. We've reached the point where we need to live our own lives, not the ones that were set out for us.

... What I've achieved to date has been like an inheritance. I inherited a life path as a result of my family and society. I went to university and studied business communication. I landed a job in public relations, moved on to a better job in online communication ... no matter how hard it got, there was always a predetermined course to follow.

I've always done what was expected of me - what my parents wanted, what my teachers wanted, what my bosses wanted. And society supported this path and reinforced my compliance ... When I stare into the face of my inheritance, it feels like contemplating a death sentence.

Kasey Edwards is trying to think her way out of her predicament still using the principles she was raised with. It is now careerism which is rejected as violating liberal autonomy by being predetermined. It's a reasonable argument at one level: for most young women the predetermined course these days would be the careerist one.

If this gets Kasey Edwards to the next stage I'm all for it. But it's not a helpful position in general. If we set out to self-determine by rejecting what we inherit, then every generation would have to set itself against what it was raised with. You would have a generation of careerist women followed by a generation of stay at home mothers in a continuing cycle.

What is inherited or predetermined has to be judged on its own merits. If Kasey Edwards has found that career status isn't sufficiently fulfilling, then maybe that's not because it was a predetermined path laid out for her by society, but because it really, objectively isn't meaningful - at least not just by itself.

There's another way that a liberal culture persists in Kasey Edwards's way of thinking. She spends much of the book assuming that she could put things right if only she found what she really wanted. If she knew the right desire to pursue and fulfil as an individual, then she would find meaning.

This kind of "right desire" or "authentic want" proves elusive. She undertakes a personality test to find out what would be the most appropriate career for her and the results show that she had chosen correctly in the first place - but without finding contentment.

(Her friend Emma also stays for a while within the sphere of individualistic liberal pursuits. She jettisons career ambitions in favour of hedonistic pursuits involving much alcohol and casual sex. But she gets sick, catches the HPV virus and has a cervical cancer scare.)

Kasey is perceptive enough though to begin to reach beyond the limits of liberalism. But it's a battle for her to make progress in accepting other sources of identity and meaning, such as those involving family. Her gradual transformation is an interesting one which I'll cover in a later post.

Manne's conservative moment?

Most Australians would know Professor Robert Manne as a left-wing academic and political commentator. He wasn't always associated, though, with the left. Back in the 1980s, he was thought of on campus as a right-wing anti-communist.

As late as 1998, he was still not easily categorised as a leftist. I was looking through some old files and I found a newspaper column he wrote in that year. Given some of his more recent, politically correct forays into politics, I was surprised by its contents.

His column is titled "Why Australia's cultural orthodoxy must be resisted" (The Age, 25/05/1998). The orthodoxy he wanted resisted was the liberal one:

Since the 1960s all Western societies have been caught up in one of history's most profound revolutions - the progressive liberation of the individual from those age-old social obligations to family and community, which once put severe limits on individual freedom and autonomy.

No one has captured the essence of this cultural revolution more deftly, than the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn in his Age Of Extremes. This revolution, he writes, is "best understood as the triumph of the individual over society or, rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past have woven human beings into social textures ... the world was now passively assumed to consist of several billion human beings defined by their pursuit of individual desire.

Both Arndt and Ackland belong to the generation that fought for, observed the triumph of and experienced the benefits of the '60s cultural revolution of modernity. Concerning this revolution, this generation - my generation - is now beginning to divide.

One part still looks on the progressive emancipation of the individual from the ties of family and community obligation, and from all restraints on the gratification of individual desire, as an unambiguous good. Their instinct is to close their eyes to the mounting evidence of consequent social disintegration and harm. Yet another part is beginning to feel anxious about certain unexpected or unintended consequences of the revolution in which they once invested their energies and hopes.

Professor Manne sets out the basic "first tier" point of contention in politics very clearly. I don't think he's right, though, in claiming that the "profound revolution" began in the 1960s - it goes back much further in time. Nor did his generation end up dividing between those who supported this revolution as an unambiguous good and those who felt anxious about its unintended consequences. A few public intellectuals have put up some moderate opposition, but overall Manne's generation have continued to go along with things. Manne himself has fallen into line.

It's really up to a new generation to make a more decisive break with the liberal orthodoxy.

So we are friendless by nature?

I've now read the second chapter of Professor Steven Kautz's Liberalism & Community. If you remember, the book is intended to be a defence of classical liberalism.

Once again, I found it an extraordinary read. Kautz sets out the foundations of classical liberalism so openly that the flaws in the theory are strikingly clear.

Kautz begins the chapter by reminding the reader that liberalism has become an orthodoxy:

Classical and contemporary liberal teachings ... dominate our political discourse. America is still now, or perhaps now more than ever, somehow a liberal regime ... (p.23)

Why is "community" such a problem for us, here and now? The short answer is liberalism. The political philosophy of liberalism, its critics and friends agree, is in some sense our political philosophy: we are somehow all liberals. (p.28)

Why has a liberal orthodoxy brought about a lost sense of community? Kautz argues first that liberalism overwhelmed other traditions which once upheld a positive sense of virtue:

Liberalism ... has prevailed in this century in America, overwhelming those elements of the American political tradition that once tamed our individualism and materialism. If liberal America once found needed moral sustenance in various religious and republican traditions of virtue that have long since been abandoned, as many argue, then it must now find a way to reconstitute those indispensable moral supplements to the material comforts that liberal politics provides. (p.28)

It's Kautz's second argument which is really striking. Kautz explains that the "moral pyschology" on which liberalism is based is inevitably hostile to community:

It should not be surprising, even to partisans of liberalism, that a world dominated by liberal individualism has given rise to longings for lost community. Classical liberalism is a doctrine of acquisitive individualism, and teaches that man is by nature solitary and selfish, not political or even social: the most powerful natural passions and needs of human beings are private. Human beings are not friends by nature.

This harsh moral psychology is, at any rate, the fundamental teaching of classical liberalism. As a result, the idea of community is always somewhat suspect for thoughtful liberals. Liberals are inclined to view partisans of community as either romantic utopians or dangerous authoritarians.

If there is no natural common good, beyond peace and security, then invocations of the spirit of community are either foolish or fraudulent, impossible dreams or wicked ideologies. (p.28)

Kautz goes on to write in a similar vein:

Classical liberals ... seem to believe that we could be content to live alone, because there are no natural bonds between human beings, and so there is no natural community. Indeed, the family is not simply natural, according to some of the founders of liberalism. And even if there were certain natural passions or sentiments that might, in favourable circumstances, bring human beings together in a natural community, these passions are overwhelmed, in most circumstances, by the strongest human passion, the desire to preserve oneself and to live in tolerable comfort in a world of human enemies ...

In short, the most urgent human good ... is the security of our bodies ... I repeat: our classical liberal teachers have taught us that human beings are in the decisive respect friendless by nature, and we have constructed a world on the basis of this understanding. It is not surprising that we feel lonely, now and then. (p.29)

Liberal politics is, as a result, a politics of fearful accommodation among natural foes who somehow reconstitute themselves as civil friends ... (p.29)

This "moral psychology" ought to have been challenged, and marginalised, long ago. It is way too pessimistic an account of human nature. We are asked to believe the following:

i) humans are by nature solitary and selfish
ii) other humans are to be regarded primarily as a threat to my life
iii) the primary good is to be left alone, in physical security, to pursue acquisitive wants, in other words, to accumulate material goods
iv) any invocation of community is either utopian or authoritarian

I think back to my childhood and early adulthood in Melbourne, a city of several million souls. I remember a whole set of naturally occurring communities: those of family, suburb, parish, city, state and nation. I remember people acting supportively toward each other, on the basis that you should "help your mates", or that men should act courteously toward women, or that you should help out a fellow Australian, or that you should help the less fortuntate and so on. I remember too a range of goods that were held to be more important than acquisitive wants: loyalty to friends, love for women, a culture of family life, masculine character and achievement, an appreciation of the arts, and a love of nature to name a few.

Melbourne was, at that time, a settled community and the primary experience of life was not fear of those you lived amongst. If anything, the opposite was true: people were generally honest and helpful in their dealings with each other.

So there is no compelling reason, in my own life experience, to retreat into a private world of acquisitive individualism - a world in which community is feared as a danger to my liberty of person or property.

We lose too much in this retreat, including a freedom to participate in the more significant aspects of life.

Breaking the orthodoxy

I met a dear old lady in the supermarket today. I overheard her complaining about the difficulty of buying Australian goods, even fruit and vegies. It turned out that she wasn't pleased either at Australia transforming itself through mass immigration. She asked me the obvious question about this: "Why is it happening?"

This was a question I first asked myself more than ten years ago. I wanted to know why no-one in politics had resisted the drift toward cosmopolitanism. And what I discovered was something I hadn't expected, namely that all the main political movements shared the same underlying political principles. That was why they all agreed on the project of multiculturalism.

It seemed audacious to assert this idea - that there has been a longstanding orthodoxy in Western politics which hardly anybody in official politics has thought outside of.

So I'm always grateful when others recognise the same thing. It's especially pleasing when the other person is a political bigwig, such as Richard Blandy, a director of a business centre at the University of South Australia. He wrote an article for today's Australian newspaper in which he notes that,

Until the past quarter of a century, a liberal democratic model, a social democratic model and a communist (Marxist-Leninist) model of how liberty, equality and fraternity should be achieved have each possessed considerable political momentum.

The communist (Marxist-Leninist) model was abandoned by China, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1980s.

The democratic socialist model is now under siege in the European Union from the combined impacts of globalisation, European Union enlargement and the evident economic success of "le modele Anglo Saxon" in recent times.

So Blandy recognises that the three main political movements in the West over the last 200 years - classical liberalism, social democracy and communism - have all been attempts to enact the same underlying principles of "liberty, equality and fraternity".

The three models are certainly very different, which gives the appearance of choice in politics. But they all assume the same underlying principles, which is why the Western political class is so united on important issues like multiculturalism, feminism and the like.

It is to try to clarify this situation that I have called the underlying principle that of "liberalism", with the three variants being those supported by right liberals (who Blandy calls liberal democrats but who are often called classical liberals); left liberals (social democrats); and radical left liberals (communists).

If we recognise all three as being variants on the same liberal principles, then the orthodoxy which exists is brought to the surface. It is then easier to challenge people to think outside the existing political framework - something we need members of the political class to do if we are not to continue to follow liberal principles to their self-destructive ends.

The ethics of identity

I’ve started reading a newly published book called The Ethics of Identity. It’s of particular interest as it discusses in a very open way the liberal attitude to gender and ethnic identity.

The author is a Princeton professor, Kwame Anthony Appiah (who is of mixed ancestry, with a father from Ghana and an English mother).

For today, here is a brief review of the preface to the book.

Professor Appiah begins with the observation that liberalism “is not so much a body of doctrine as a set of debates”. When I read this I was reminded of the way that liberalism has managed to “frame” the way that politics is discussed and debated in the West.

If a set of liberal debates is typical of Western politics, then it’s little wonder that conservatives often find it difficult to intervene and express their own point of view. The conservative viewpoint lies outside of the framework of debate.

Therefore, when conservatives look at politics we have to be willing, at times, to reject both points of view. To be true to what we really believe, we have to try to collapse the existing framework of debate. In effect, we need to establish different polarities – different points of contest.

A second useful observation made by Professor Appiah is that liberalism has captured mainstream politics in the West. He writes that liberalism encompasses “nearly all members of nearly all of the mainstream political parties in Europe and North America” and he even adds that liberal issues should concern us “even if, mirabile dictu, you do not find yourself disposed to think of yourself as a liberal at all” (mirabile dictu means wonderful to relate).

Professor Appiah, then, freely admits that liberalism has achieved near monopoly status amongst the political class. Yes, we do get to choose between different parties at election time – but the mainstream parties are all fundamentally liberal in their political outlook.

So we shouldn’t place too much faith in the mainstream “right-wing” parties, as these parties have accepted an essentially liberal world view.

Which brings us to the final and most important part of the preface. When Professor Appiah sets out his basic argument he writes that, “First, the measure of my life, the standard by which it is to be assessed as more or less successful, depends, if only in part, on my life’s aims as specified by me. Second, my life’s shape is up to me.”

He later adds “I start always from the perspective of the individual engaged in making his or her life, recognizing that others are engaged in the same project”.

Now this is very familiar. It is the basic liberal principle that what matters is that we are left unimpeded to create ourselves - to author our own lives - according to our own individual will.

Professor Appiah is following this principle when he claims that the measure of a life is the ability of an individual to determine the shape of his own life and his own life’s aims.

The professor considers this view to be “unexceptional”. But conservatives ought to jump in here and object. As a liberal, Professor Appiah is concerned above all to uphold conditions of autonomy. But this leads to a distorted focus.

Traditional societies did not focus on issues of autonomy in measuring the success of a life. What was important was the fact that a man was a good father, or a good churchman, or a good Englishman, or a virtuous man.

These roles or aims may not have been “self-selected” as part of a project of self-authorship. They may simply have been considered a natural inheritance or a customary understanding of “goodness” in life.

Yet they represent more significant aspects of life than those things we can determine individually, such as our career, our place of residence or our lifestyle.

And there is a further problem with Professor Appiah’s focus on self-authorship as the measure of a life. There are important parts of our self-identity which we don’t get to choose. We don’t get to choose, for instance, our race, our ethnicity or our sex.

Which is why liberals often view such forms of identity negatively as being restrictions on individual autonomy. This is exactly the issue Professor Appiah wishes to explore.

He does not simply assume that individuals are blank slates, as some liberals do. He recognises that “we make our lives as men and as women, as gay and as straight people, as Ghanians and as Americans, as blacks and as whites.”

For Professor Appiah, this raises the “conundrum” of whether such “identities represent a curb on autonomy”.

He declares in the preface that he writes “neither as identity’s friend nor as its foe”. He is certainly not its friend by conservative standards. He asserts, for instance, that identity is socially constructed rather than being hardwired into us.

He also uses typically negative liberal language at times to describe identity. He writes of “the encumbered self, laden with all the specificity of its manifold allegiances” and he worries that ethnic identity might “harden into something fixed and determinate” (putting it outside the realm of individual choice).

Still, there are signs in the preface that he is willing to take the claims of identity more seriously than most liberal philosophers.