The Four Causes of Liberalism
For most of our lifetimes, American conservatives have defined themselves in opposition to "liberals" — a term basically interchangeable with "progressives," "the left," and even "Democrats" in common parlance. But liberalism? That's a different matter, as anyone might learn in Political Theory 101. There, the term "liberalism" describes the shared political philosophy of both conservatives and progressives, the bedrock upon which America, and indeed much of Western civilization, was built.
Though they lambasted liberals for decades, American conservatives generally didn't seriously question liberalism — that is, until the trifecta of Obergefell, Brexit, and Donald Trump provoked a comprehensive reassessment and realignment on the right.
The clarion call for this reassessment came in the form of Patrick Deneen's 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, which proved a minor sensation in political-theory circles and has continued to shape the conversation ever since. Deneen charged that liberalism, the 400-year-old political philosophy and cultural program dedicated to the "unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals," was at last running aground on the rocks of its own contradictions. Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism, published that same year, also marked liberalism — with its "vision of free and equal human beings, pursuing life and property and living under obligations that arise from their own free consent" — as its bête noire. Mark Mitchell's The Limits of Liberalism combined elements of both critiques, asserting that due to liberalism's commitment to the "free and unencumbered individual," it must reject tradition — the formal, tacit knowledge of a concrete community that can shape and constrain the individual. Accordingly liberalism, "in attempting to eradicate any limit beyond individual choice, has denied the reality toward which any healthy tradition points." It is thus "incoherent and self-destructive."
Seeing in these critiques of liberalism the reactionary sentiments they had always suspected the right of harboring, progressives lost no time in pouncing on the new rhetoric. Centers for "illiberalism studies" cropped up to chronicle the global slouch toward authoritarianism, while books with titles like The Rise of Illiberalism and The Twilight of Democracy drew links between liberalism's critics and authoritarian dictators. Writing in The Atlantic under the headline, "The Illiberal Right Throws a Tantrum," Adam Serwer conjured up the specter of a coming regime
where rigged electoral systems ensure that political competition is minimal, the press is tightly controlled by an alliance between corporations and the state on behalf of the ruling party, national identity is defined in religious and ethnic terms, and cultural expressions are closely policed by the state to ensure compliance with that identity.
Meanwhile, a chorus of self-avowed "post-liberals" emerged, hosting conferences, publishing journals with names like Postliberal Order, and blasting away at "Conservatism, Inc." for its decades-long slavish collaboration with the enemies of civilization. Within the conservative movement — and especially its new "national conservative" wing, spurred by Hazony — the debate over liberalism and post-liberalism has proven bitter and divisive.
Of course, if the post-liberals are correct — if mainstream conservatism has quietly imbibed fundamental premises that lead inevitably to the worst excesses of the far left — this internal debate cannot simply be shelved: The liberalism wars really do matter, and conservatives will need to clarify what they think of liberalism going forward.
Unfortunately, clarity has been hard to come by thus far, with friends and foes of liberalism locked in futile shadowboxing matches for much of the past six years — sometimes expending more energy lampooning one another than in resisting their shared foes on the left. Defenders of liberalism come across as convinced that the fundamentals of constitutional democracy — the rule of law, the separation of powers, respect for citizens' basic rights, free and fair elections — are at stake. Many post-liberals indignantly reply that they have no interest in upending the rule of law, rolling back fundamental freedoms, or suspending democracy. Many, in fact, have sought to position themselves as advocates of a more authentic democracy against what they see as the dictatorship of liberal elites. Liberalism, for them, is as much a metaphysic as it is a system of government.
Faced with such discourse, one may be tempted to dismiss the debate as mere semantics: "Liberalism" simply means different things to different people, and it matters little whether we agree on the word, so long as we all agree that the rule of law is good and moral anarchy is bad. But words carry weight — especially those words in which entire civilizations have invested. Both liberalism's champions and opponents recognize this. Indeed, liberalism's list of putative accomplishments is so long, it's no wonder so many pundits and politicians on the left and right would like to range themselves under its banner. Conversely, for post-liberals, liberalism's illustrious reputation gives their attack on it a frisson of transgression: Had Deneen titled his book Why Expressive Individualism Failed, it is unlikely he would have catalyzed a movement.
As a concept and a tradition, then, "liberalism" matters too much for us to ignore the debate. But if the debate is to be of any use, we must know what it is we're talking about. To that end, I propose using one of the oldest tools of conceptual analysis in the Western tradition: Aristotle's four causes.
The term "cause," as most philosophers will tell you, is misleading to modern ears; we might almost speak better of "four explanations" or "four definitions." For Aristotle and the long scholastic tradition he inaugurated, these were four ways of talking about what a thing is or how it operates: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. Put concisely, the first tells us what something is made out of; the second how it is put together; the third what sets it in motion, or brings about change; and the fourth, toward what goal or purpose it acts. A tree, to take a concrete example, is made out of cellulose and other organic compounds (material cause); formed into roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves (formal cause); and animated by photosynthesis and other cellular processes (efficient cause) with the aim of growing to maturity and reproducing its kind (final cause).
What, then, are liberalism's four causes?
A SOCIETY OF INDIVIDUALS
Let us begin, then, with liberalism's account of the material cause of politics: What is political society made of? Here, the answer seems clear and unequivocal: "the free and equal individual," to use Hazony's words. Though historian Helena Rosenblatt insists that liberalism was anything but individualistic for its first several generations, the focus on independent individuals is, for many of liberalism's critics as well as some of its defenders, one of its most essential features.
In Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Hazony offers "all men are perfectly free and equal" as the first premise of Enlightenment liberalism. Such individuals are taken to be not merely the preconditions, but the constitutive elements of, political society. As Deneen declares, "the most basic and distinctive aspect of liberalism, is to base politics upon the idea of voluntarism — the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals." Mitchell amplifies the point:
The autonomous self — independent and free from any obligations that have not been expressly chosen — occupies this future land. Choice is the coin of this realm, and the story these people tell each other is one characterized by the steady march toward independence, toward liberation from the strictures of tradition, custom, and even liberation from nature and God. This new emancipated self represents the ideal of what has come to be called "liberalism."
We who have been formed by liberal society and its institutions are so apt to take for granted the primacy of the individual that we might reasonably ask what else political society could possibly be made of. But a quick glance at ethnography and history — as well as perhaps a more sober consideration of everyday experience — offers a ready answer: clans and tribes.
As Hazony has argued persuasively, for most societies throughout history, familial and tribal loyalties have been so strong and so primary that individuals have reflexively conceived of themselves as part of collectives, bound by mutual dependence and loyalty. Indeed, as a matter of historical fact, almost every state we know of came into being not by some mythical social contract of independent individuals, but by tribes forging alliances. Even today, our politics is far more tribal than we like to pretend. As a causal element in the formation of political society, individuals just aren't important for any but liberal theorists.
Many liberals may respond by insisting that their purpose is not to offer a genealogy, but a normative account of political society — an account of how such a society is supposed to understand itself. Here, of course, we risk leaping ahead to the fourth of Aristotle's causes, concerned as it is with purposes. Still, there is an important point here: Whatever agglomerations the individual may find himself in, united by the pressures of circumstance or interest, we may still feel that it is the individual, not the group, who is of ultimate significance and value, and thus the proper object of political society's attention and concern.
Although the practical expressions of this conviction — the idea that voting should be done by individuals rather than guilds, for instance, or that laws should act directly and only on individuals as opposed to families or larger collectives — may be relatively new, the roots of this intuition are far older than liberalism itself. They date back to the advent of Christianity at least, and in some measure to the Judaism that preceded it, which called societies to what theologian Oliver O'Donovan calls a "self-abdication instilled by their monotheistic faith...direct[ing] their members to become critical moral intelligences...answerable directly to God." On this account, individuals are clearly not considered "autonomous" — such a mutation of liberalism would have to await the death of God. But this standpoint afforded a perspective from which to relativize any earthly bonds upon individuals: Each person in the polity was understood to be irreducibly unique and of equal worth and dignity.
Over many centuries, this insight ripened into the fruit of natural rights and ultimately equality before the law. Of course, given that everyone comes into the world with very different material, physical, and mental advantages, this original equality cannot prevent the emergence of very real inequalities, which politics can hardly afford to ignore. The debate over what to do with these inequalities — whether to permit them in the name of freedom or to mitigate them in the name of justice — has been one of the great internal debates of liberalism. But all participants in this debate are heirs to the idea that, in a fundamental sense, political society should understand itself as essentially constituted of, concerned with, and answerable to, free and equal individuals.
CONSENT TO THE RULE OF LAW
So much for what political society is made out of — but what is it made into? What holds it together? What is it, really? Nearly all moderns will answer, with John Adams, "a government of laws, and not of men."
Is this liberalism? The answer depends on whom you ask. Most post-liberals will insist that they have no quarrel with the idea of the rule of law, even as some of the most radical will slyly suggest that we no longer live under any real rule of law (and that in such "post-constitutional" moments, only a strongman can save us). The shrillest critics of "illiberalism," meanwhile, appear to harbor a stout conviction that the essence of illiberalism is authoritarianism. They celebrate such basic constitutional norms as the rule of law, separation of powers, and consent of the governed as liberalism's greatest achievements. Extolling the blessings of liberal democracy, these critics also recognize that democracy is no guarantee of liberty or good governance — that democratic majorities may vote into power oppressive and self-serving regimes. On this conception, liberalism consists above all in the restraint of power by law, and of lawmaking by constitutional law.
The idea of the rule of law, of course, is hardly new: Hammurabi was wise enough to see four millennia ago the advantages of putting down in writing certain generic rules of conduct for his people, as opposed to ruling through a succession of disjointed decrees. But when we speak of the rule of law, we usually have in mind the idea not merely that rulers rule by law, but that they themselves are also ruled by law: that is, that they themselves cannot claim to be above the law or change it at will.
Given the obvious difficulties of designing a system of power strong enough to be used but limited enough not to be abused, this intuition took most of the last 2,000 years to harden into what we would consider adequate institutional form. The Greeks, Romans, and medieval Christians all deserve considerable credit for their contributions, but two of the most essential achievements — the ideas of a constitution and the separation of powers — developed during the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.
According to constitutionalism, law itself must be seen as regulated by a more fundamental law, outside of which even society's highest living authorities do not have a right to act. And according to the separation of powers, society's constitution must contain and be maintained by distinct instruments of political power, none of them absolute, with each supporting the others when they are functioning properly and acting as a check on them when they step out of line. This idea also had classical antecedents, but it was substantially developed in the early modern period by theorists such as Montesquieu, who is often hailed as one of the fathers of liberalism.
To these ideas of law, constitution, and separated powers, we must add a fourth: consent. To count as a liberal regime, it is not enough for there to be laws handed down from on high, even if they are all scrupulously constitutional and subject to judicial review. Under a liberal regime, laws must also reflect the consent of the governed, or they are no laws at all. Laws must, in this sense, be understood along the lines of a covenant or contract, a great act of corporate promise-making by which we have bound ourselves.
Here, too, we find that if this is liberalism, it goes quite a long way back. From the earliest days of the English Parliament in the 13th century, we find the principle "what touches all should be approved by all." Summarizing the received tradition of Christian jurisprudence in 1593, Richard Hooker declared that "human laws, whatever kind they may be, have their force by consent" — a dictum that John Locke would enthusiastically cite a century later. (Quote from a translation by the author published by the Davenant Press in 2019.)
Hooker precedes this dictum with the observation that "we do consent to be commanded whenever the society we belong to has previously consented and has not revoked this consent by some universal agreement." That is, consent is not given by each generation, much less each individual, but operates at the level of an entire society, so that a form of tacit but sincere consent might be grounded in immemorial custom. Liberals might balk at such a malleable notion of consent, but we should be candid enough to recognize that the American political order depends on it: After all, unless you immigrated to America as an adult, you never personally consented to the Constitution or the laws already on the books, and Thomas Jefferson's suggestion of a new constitutional referendum every 19 years has mercifully never been taken seriously.
To be sure, we do, in some formal sense, consent to new laws, and if we still do so through representatives, as Englishmen in Hooker's day did, we at least have somewhat more choice over who those representatives are. Many have also seen the gradual expansion of democracy and the embrace of such measures as the ballot referendum as key achievements of liberalism, progressively converting "consent" from metaphor into reality.
It is here we encounter another great internal debate of liberalism. For if one prizes the stability of the rule of law and the protection of minorities, direct democracy can seem dangerously illiberal. Yet if the accountability of law to the people at large matters most, the more direct the democracy, the more liberal the polity. Both sides of this debate, however, operate within the basic premise that political society is governed chiefly by law that represents the society's own acts of self-binding.
A CULTURE OF PERSUASION
A liberal political society, then, must consist of free and equal individuals knit together by bonds of law that reflect the consent of the governed. It must also be upheld by distinct governing powers within a carefully balanced constitution. But if it is to be a living thing, rather than merely a beautiful artifact, it must, like all things, have a principle of motion. What is, then, the efficient cause of political society on a liberal account — the means by which it accomplishes its ends and brings about change?
The answer follows readily from what we have just said about consent. For if the liberal ideal is a society held together by consent, then I ought not do anything, and we ought not do anything together, unless we have agreed to it — ideally by virtue of rational persuasion, since that is the freest form of action available to us. Emotional manipulation may perhaps be resorted to in a pinch to stir up the democratic will, but liberals will frown on it in principle, since we often regret decisions made under the influence of strong emotion.
The opposite of persuaded consent is coercion, and liberal societies have prided themselves, therefore, on their attempts to minimize coercion's scope and severity. Of course, coercion can never be banished altogether from political life: If a just law has been passed in a way that can plausibly claim to represent my consent, and I refuse to obey that law, society may have to constrain me by force. But pre-modern societies tended to use force both much more frequently (punishing a wide range of vices we have now decriminalized) and much more brutally (with a long list of offenses meriting capital punishment, many others mutilation or scourging, and some, such as treason, outright torture) than we do today.
This shift was part of a liberal revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, as society rapidly developed a much more sensitive conscience about inflicting pain upon one's fellow man or depriving him of liberty. Crucial figures in this transformation were Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Beccaria, followed of course by the extraordinary abolitionist movement of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. This shift was not merely the result of a growing squeamishness among the population; it also had deeper theological, philosophical, and cultural roots. For again, if one is not going to resort to brute force to hold society together and keep it running, one must have a plausible alternative. For liberalism, that alternative is persuasion.
Through most of human history, it was assumed that the large mass of human beings were beyond the reach of persuasion, lacking the rational faculties to judge for themselves how they should act and thus only capable of being moved by fear or love — fear being by far the cheaper and easier tool to wield. A key challenge to this assumption came with the Protestant Reformation, which, with its doctrine of justification by faith, insisted that in the realm of the spirit, simply going through the motions out of fear of hellfire or the Inquisition was of no use; one must exercise a sincere, personal, rational faith.
In service to this end, the Reformers embarked on the first mass-literacy campaign in history, seeking to equip all members of society with the tools to form their own religious judgments. Although wary monarchs sought to limit the political implications of this movement, the resulting culture of persuasion rapidly changed the conditions of political discourse, rendering it necessary for even powerful autocrats like Henry VIII to secure broad public support through propaganda campaigns.
By the 18th century, the culture of persuasion began to aggressively roll back the frontiers of the culture of coercion. People increasingly believed that, within a society of rational, literate citizens, it ought to be possible to secure obedience to existing laws and propose new laws by appealing to shared convictions and motives. This new culture, as Montesquieu argued, made possible moderate government in place of despotism. And as people became accustomed to less coercion, a mild dose of it would suffice to produce effects that would have formerly required brutal punishments: "In countries where penalties are gentle," he wrote, "the citizen's spirit is struck by them as it is elsewhere by heavy ones."
At the heart of this general lessening of penalties was religion. Religious toleration was the first but hardest-won frontier in liberalism's emergence, and though often framed as a pragmatic capitulation to the fact of irreducible pluralism, it also had deeper theological roots. From the Protestant perspective, works are powerless to save; only personal faith matters in the eyes of God. Works, of course, can be coerced. But faith? Not directly, to be sure, and any attempts to indirectly coerce or manipulate it were increasingly seen as compromising its authenticity. First Protestants, then Catholics grudgingly conceded that as evil as false religion is, it is best cured through preaching and persuasion, not punishment. And if this could be true of even so grave an evil as idolatry, perhaps society might try the same approach with other evils, tolerating them as long as they did no immediate harm and hoping to overcome them by the diffusion of knowledge.
A feedback loop of liberalization thus commenced: As society became more open to toleration and more hostile to coercion, any attempts to coerce conformity met with stiff opposition, convincing authorities that such measures would do more harm than good, and that government should take a more hands-off approach. This in turn further strengthened the culture of toleration. What began as a prudential accommodation — forbearing from coercion where it seemed ineffective — gradually hardened into a principled conviction that certain errors, indeed certain areas of life, were simply beyond the reach of coercion as such.
FREEDOM WITHOUT VIRTUE
With this shift to a principled stand that many areas of human decision are simply "not the government's business," we find ourselves on the terrain of liberalism in its fullest, final-cause sense. This would have been no surprise to Aristotle, for whom the final cause was the "cause of causes," the aspect of any thing that determines its meaning and reality. The final cause concerns the end or purpose of a thing — that for which it exists, toward which it forms its material, and which sets it in motion. It is here, then, that we should look if we are seeking the essence of "liberalism" as something sui generis and distinct from its pre-liberal components.
What is the final cause of political society, according to liberalism? Sure enough, it is here where the fiercest critics of liberalism fixate their attention. Hazony argues: "It is a premise of Enlightenment liberalism that the only legitimate purpose of government is to enable individuals to make use of the freedom that is theirs by nature." This freedom is taken to be directionless or amoral: Liberalism, charges Deneen, conceives of human beings "as rights-bearing individuals" who can "fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life." Thus, the fully mature form of liberalism, as Mitchell writes, sees government as merely a "procedural framework that creates the maximal space for individuals to determine their own good." Under such a regime, the law, once understood as a pedagogue of virtue, has been stripped down to the minimalistic function of maintaining order and preventing harm.
There is no question that many contemporary liberals, whether theorists or ordinary citizens, do think and speak as if this were true. And it is certainly not hard to find fault with such a conception of politics' purpose. On this account, the purpose of political society is quite simply to make as much space as possible for the pursuit of any purpose. From an Aristotelian standpoint, this presents us with a nonsensical spectacle: an infinite end, a purposeless purpose.
On the other hand, it is evident that few liberals actually believe this, or pursue such a vision of politics with any consistency. Most of today's liberals have no problem advocating a role for government in pushing society toward what they consider a more just and virtuous order, and in excluding and prosecuting those regressive views and actions that are seen as hostile to that order. In the past, liberal theorists often invoked the "harm principle" to limit government's scope to policing direct material and bodily harms. Today, we see that the harms that most consume our political attention are elusive psychological harms — harms to dignity or identity. Discrimination based on sexual orientation, like my neighbor's religious beliefs, in Jefferson's witty dismissal, "neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg," but to many contemporary liberals, it betrays an evil eminently worthy of government attention.
From this standpoint, we are nearly all of us post-liberal, and perhaps always have been. After all, as Helena Rosenblatt has shown, throughout liberalism's history, "most liberals were moralists. Their liberalism had nothing to do with the atomistic individualism we hear of today." Most recent scholarship on the American founding has come to the same conclusion, exploding the fatuous dichotomy of late 20th-century scholarship between supposedly rival strands of liberalism and republicanism among the founders. We may be tempted to conclude, then, that final-cause liberalism is a mere phantom of our imaginations.
Against this, however, we may place the stubborn sense that there is something about our political ideas, institutions, and rhetoric today that differs from those times we like to call "pre-liberal," and that it probably has something to do with the notion of "rights." In fact, much of the debate around liberalism today fixates on rights language, with post-liberal critics mocking the idea that government exists only to protect individual rights and liberalism's defenders clutching the pearls of rights in a swoon of shock that anyone could be so retrograde as to deny we have such things. The term has also muddied the historical waters, as scholars sampling the past for the origins of liberalism have found high concentrations of rights language in specimens from the American founding, in 17th-century Protestant jurisprudence, and even in 12th-century Catholic canon law. Just how far back does liberalism go?
To answer this question, we must highlight the inseparability of "natural rights" and "natural law" that was axiomatic for most Western political thought until the 20th century.
Human nature being what it was, it was long believed morally incumbent upon us to act in certain ways and not others. Clearly, whatever we had a duty to do by nature — worship our Creator, speak the truth, etc. — we had a right to do by nature, and no government could justly deprive us of that right. Indeed, a well-ordered political society would seek to equip as many members as possible to exercise such rights as fully as possible — through the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, and the like.
Within such a vision, the final cause of political society was still the pursuit of virtue; there was, properly speaking, no right to do wrong. However, as attention increasingly shifted from communities to individuals as the constituents of society, this pursuit became more irreducibly pluralistic. Meanwhile, as the notion of consent assumed the foreground, the fact that many citizens disagreed with their authorities about what virtue required of them became more of a problem. And as rational persuasion was valorized as society's preferred means of locomotion, it was increasingly conceded that although many individuals might tend to abuse their natural rights toward wrong ends, they should not be coerced into using them properly. By this means, on many accounts, Christianity's natural rights helped midwife liberalism into being.
IS LIBERALISM REAL?
At the conclusion of this tour of its four causes, we appear to have distilled liberalism's essence as a distinctive anthropology and political theory. On this account, political societies in liberalism's understanding are fundamentally made up of individuals, and nothing but individuals, atomized and shorn of their distinguishing relational qualities so that they may be thought of as equal and interchangeable, free and unconstrained. This raw, unformed matter is then united through the consent of these individuals, expressed first and foremost in a constitution and then in a stable but revisable framework of laws developed by the people's representatives within this constitutional order. Formed of the people, by the people, and for the people to protect their lives, maximize their liberty, and facilitate their pursuit of happiness, political society limits itself to as minimal a deployment of coercion as possible, tolerating and indeed celebrating difference, and trusting that the best paths to happiness will be discovered in the free and spontaneous exchange of ideas and experimentation with lifestyles.
This description matches well enough the governing consensus of the society we now inhabit, and it is certainly possible to find political theorists explicitly advocating something like this composite picture. On closer inspection, however, the appearance of coherence disintegrates. Even today, a majority of citizens in the citadels of liberalism would have significant misgivings about embracing every aspect of this description without qualification. Most of us intuitively recognize, for example, that although we are individuals, we also belong to families and larger structures of identity. Most of us also recognize that we have an obligation to follow laws we did not consent to and thus (at least in America) retain some sense that an appeal to a transcendent God lies behind earthly political structures. Most of us have ideas of fundamental moral rights and key virtues that the laws ought to promote, and we differ widely over what evils should be tolerated and how they should be suppressed.
This hodgepodge, far from simply indicating the befuddlement of the median voter, turns out to be the norm among most theorists and politicians who have called themselves "liberals" or are hailed as such today. Some, like Thomas Hobbes, were certainly material-cause liberals but had no problem with coercion. Others saw society in thoroughly communitarian, solidaristic terms while promoting a renunciation of violence and the resolution of differences in society by peaceful negotiation. A great many theorists and statesmen, including John Adams, dedicated their lives to perfecting the structures of formal-cause liberalism without any notion that in doing so they were renouncing the ideal of a politics of virtue. And today, we see plenty of libertines committed to celebrating an amoral politics of expressive individualism with little concern for the niceties of constitutional structures and the separation of powers.
Even within each of our four categories, we find that liberal politics is not so much a matter of either/or, but of more or less. We may grant the vote to individuals qua individuals but recognize the political salience and collective liberties of families, neighborhoods, religious communities, trade unions, and the like. The idea of the rule of law itself usually consists of a delicate balancing act of consent and unchosen obligation. Although liberalism may mean a general move away from coercion to persuasion, the decision about what to criminalize and how to punish will often be a prudential one. And although final-cause liberalism is often referred to as "anti-perfectionism," among liberals there is a wide spectrum of aspirations short of perfection: One may certainly renounce the ideals of communal righteousness that guided John Calvin's Geneva while maintaining that there is a moral minimum necessary for a functioning and free society.
Perhaps then, with liberalism, as with everything else in politics, the most important four words are "up to a point," as George Will famously remarked. Christopher Wolfe has argued as much in his excellent book Natural Law Liberalism, claiming that "preserving and strengthening [liberalism] may mean moderating it, and the vice of contemporary liberalism is to place such a great emphasis on the chief animating principles of liberalism, liberty and equality, that insufficient attention is paid to other human goods, including truth, family, and piety."
Against this argument stands the conviction of so many of both liberalism's friends and foes that such inconsistency is just a matter of half-heartedness or muddle-headedness. For them, "liberalism" really does name a determinate essence, a historically unfolding reality progressing toward a fully mature form by a kind of inner necessity. For its friends, this means that liberalism has a universal normative force: that all peoples everywhere must in the end bow to its nexus of demands. For its foes, it means that because many of these demands now seem immoral or absurd, the entire notion of liberalism must be torn from the roots — however deep those roots turn out to go.
For essentialists of both stripes, the word "liberalism" itself is secondary. They are undeterred by Rosenblatt's demonstration in The Lost History of Liberalism that none of the early modern liberals, from Locke to Adam Smith to Jefferson, called themselves "liberals" or thought in terms of the concept, and that when the term was coined — in early 19th-century France — it meant something quite different than it does at present. They are convinced that, though the name "liberalism" may be new, the thing itself is real, and that it must be either embraced or rejected. "Trying to remain partly liberal," as Deneen puts it, "is like being 'a little pregnant' — there is no such thing."
On this account, the greatest evil of liberalism is its dogmatism. Writing at Postliberal Order, Edward Feser sees prudential balance as inimical to liberalism, which tends "to see such restraint [on government], not as the contingent counsel of prudence, but as the requirement of inflexible principle." Hazony concurs: "Liberalism is not a form of government at all. It is a system of beliefs taken to be axiomatic....In other words, it is a system of dogmas." Indeed, Hazony's revival of nationalism is meant in large part as a declaration of independence from what he sees as the universalizing ideological imperialism of liberalism. For him, liberalism is an epistemology, an Enlightenment rationalism that has routed the forces of an older empiricism, claiming to have discovered the basic truths about human nature — namely that it is the same always and everywhere, consisting merely of choice-maximizing individuals. On this basis, Hazony believes liberalism claims the authority to impose its will on all peoples around the globe who stubbornly cling to laws and traditions that differentiate members from non-members. Liberalism in this telling is the universal acid, destined to destroy every bond of union and mark of distinction.
Again, most post-liberals have no quarrel with many ideas that have been taken up into the liberal project: the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of conscience, the rule of law, etc. But rather than supporting a moderate liberalism that would advocate these things "up to a point," they consider such prudent moderation to be the hallmark of post-liberalism. Feser writes: "Liberalism tends to approach these institutions in a doctrinaire manner, whereas for the postliberal, determining their scope and limits is largely a matter of prudential judgment."
Here, we seem to have arrived at a semantic impasse: Some like to speak of a "moderate liberalism" consisting of prudent restraints on government, protections for individual rights, and reasonable accommodation of pluralism, while others label this virtuous mean "post-liberalism." Does it matter?
RETRIEVING LIBERALISM FROM DOGMATISM
I believe it does, and that we should reject the dogmatic, essentialist version of liberalism for two reasons. The first is that I am committed to the liberal ideal of a culture of persuasion rather than coercion, wherever possible. And if you want to persuade rather than simply conquer liberals who have gotten a little too drunk on their own punch, what better way to do so than to critique the tradition from within?
Many excellent scholars have recently sought to do exactly this. Rosenblatt argues persuasively that the liberalism focused purely on the protection and proliferation of individual rights is largely a mid-20th century Anglo-American invention. "For centuries before this," she observes, "being liberal meant something very different. It meant being a giving and a civic-minded citizen; it meant understanding one's connectedness to other citizens and acting in ways conducive to the common good." Likewise, Keegan Callanan has argued that Montesquieu, often ranked high in the pantheon of early liberals, stands as one of the most effective and devastating critics of the kind of ideological, universalizing liberalism we see today.
The second reason for rejecting liberal essentialism is that it commits the exact error it lays at liberalism's door: rejecting historical empiricism in favor of a historicizing rationalism. If we are committed to empiricism, we ought to care what actual self-described liberals thought and said throughout the centuries. If we are going to conscript those who did not use the term (such as Locke) into the narrative of liberalism, we ought to take their own qualifications and nuances seriously, rather than silencing them under necessitarian logic of an unfolding liberal idea marching ever onward until its final expression becomes its own self-contradiction and the cause of its destruction. (Here, many critics of liberalism seem to have adopted the Hegelian and Marxian logic that they most fiercely oppose.)
An empiricist reading of liberalism, by contrast, might see it as a series of distinct reforming tendencies drawn from religious and secular sources, the product of both theory and practical experience joined in different combinations over recent centuries — some more stable and some less so. It might also recognize technology's role in the changing plausibility structures of different versions of liberalism: While the dignity of the individual may have played an important role in earlier Christian liberalism, the idea of essentially autonomous, independent individuals did not become particularly plausible until 20th-century technologies liberated people from millennia-long structures of mutual dependence and new industries catered to individual tastes and whims.
Before liberalism was a noun, it was an adjective — liberal — that described a form of virtuous behavior. And like almost all virtues (according to Aristotle), it consisted in moderation, a balance between extremes. To be liberal was to be generous rather than stingy. But it was also to be prudent rather than prodigal. The liberal man sought to share as much, and give away as much, as he sustainably could without destroying himself or corrupting the beneficiaries of his liberality. Just so in politics. "The spirit of the legislator should be that of moderation," wrote Montesquieu; the "political, like moral good, lying always between two extremes."
On a collective level, a liberal society was one that sought to progressively share the powers of government as widely as possible, and to give rights and freedoms to its citizens as much as it sustainably could without destroying the bonds of nationhood or creating a society of degenerate dependents or profligate libertines. This balance required a great deal of trial and error, and there is little doubt that the most recent trials of liberalism have ended in fairly egregious errors: rampant depression, anxiety, and addiction; declining life expectancies and birth rates; gender dysphoria; loss of cultural cohesion; and moral decay.
Although rationalist philosophers certainly added several tributaries to the overflowing river of liberalism throughout the past few centuries, liberalism was, at bottom, a great series of experiments making falsifiable empirical claims: that religion will flourish more under a regime of religious liberty than one of suffocating establishment; that commerce will flourish under freer trade; that knowledge will grow through more open debate. At some point, like many successful empirical doctrines, it hardened in many quarters into an ossified dogmatism. Some of its proponents seemed to think that more is always better, in defiance of everything we know of human psychology and the natural world. Such dogmatism is always the death of philosophies — and the death of the societies they animate.
If it is to live again, liberalism will have to reexpose itself to the light of investigation and experimentation. To this task, its critics have as much to contribute as its apologists. But to complete it, both will need to set aside the war of words and return to the study of history.