IDEOLOGY LECTURE FOUR

Is liberalism: For all or the few?

Daryl Glaser

LIBERAL UNIVERSALISM
Liberalism is an ideology that proclaims equal rights for all. Liberals may
differ amongst themselves about exactly what rights we have, but contemporary
liberals believe we all have equal rights to whatever rights we do have. And it is
a doctrine universalist in its ambition: it insists that all human beings
everywhere possess equal rights. Equal rights belong not just to citizens of a
particular state or to a particular group within a state (say, a particular class,
race or gender), but to all human beings globally.

To be sure, liberal universalists concede, a particular state may be charged

with securing the rights specifically of that portion of humanity constituted
by its own citizens and residents. To that extent the liberal state has a
particular responsibility to its ‘own’. But everyone, everywhere, is (according to
the liberals) at least morally entitled to belong to a state that secures the rights
that they enjoy as human beings. And where states do not secure those rights, it
is fit and proper that they should be subject to criticism, both from within their
own borders and from international organisations charged with monitoring
human rights observance. In extremis, some liberals think, a liberal state or
liberal group of states can interfere in the affairs of another state to ensure that
those rights are secured.

LIBERAL INDIVIDUALISM AND THE UNIVERSAL LIBERAL

‘SUBJECT’
If all human beings enjoy equal rights, it is moreover as individuals, and in
virtue of certain attributes that individuals everywhere possess, irrespective
of race, nationality, and so on. The liberal theory of equal rights is a theory
of equal individual rights, not of, say, the rights of groups or nations.

Liberals are not all individualist in exactly the same way. While liberal
philosophy is individualist, liberalism individualism can mean one or some
combination of several things.

[a] It can be a statement about human nature. According to some classic

liberals e.g. liberal social-choice theorists, individuals are essentially self-

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interested actors, and pursue their self-interest rationally. These facts, they
insist, must be built into our understanding of human behavior, and into our
thinking about how to maximize human welfare. Human welfare involves
realizing individual preferences, perhaps by maximizing the total quantity of
preference satisfaction across society. Achieving welfare also requires
harnessing self-interest for the purposes of achieving economic dynamism.

[b] For John Stuart Mill, individualism consisted primarily in a commitment

to the development of individuality, in the sense of realizing our talents,
potential and capacity for independent thought. It is about being a well-rounded,
free-thinking individual rather than a conformist or follower of the herd.

[c] For many liberals (e.g. followers of Immanuel Kant), moral

individualism involves treating individuals as repositories of moral value.
What matters is the rights and welfare of living, breathing individuals, not of
abstract groups. Individuals possess an inherent dignity such that they cannot be
treated as a means to achieving group ends. The subordination of individuals to
groups results in tyranny.

Where liberals (e.g. liberal economists or social-choice theorists) are drawing on

an individualistic theory of human nature to understand larger social processes,
they can be described as methodological individualists. Where they are
drawing on individualistic theory of human rights or of the value of human
beings, they are being moral individualists.

In none of these meanings is it assumed that human beings prefer to be

solitary than to associate in groups. Liberals may recognize the value of group
association, but classically they insist association must be voluntary. They also
insist that the value of a group must be measured by the value it brings to
individual members, counted one by one.

And while meaning [a] assumes self-interested human behavior, meanings

[b] and [c] do not. Many liberals fully accept that humans are capable of
altruism or of forming a sense of fairness and justice. Some who believe that
they are nevertheless think that human beings should not be forced to sacrifice
their own labour or holdings to advance the welfare of others; they should be left
to do so in a spirit of charity. Social liberals disagree, and countenance state
intervention. As citizens we can, they think, collectively decide to help the less
well-off, and may be morally obliged to so decide.

THE CRITICS OF LIBERALISM’S CLAIMS TO EQUALITY

AND UNIVERSALITY
But is liberalism the equality-respecting and universally inclusive doctrine
its exponents claim that it is?

And is its individualism and universalism plausible, either morally or as an

account of human beings in their diversity?

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Many of liberalism’s critics harbour doubts.

According to Marxists, the liberal ideal of legal and political equality serves
as an ideology of the ruling capitalist class. It throws up a smokescreen of
equal rights, but these rights are illusory. Equal rights are contradicted by great
material inequalities, and hence also inequalities in political power. Liberalism
seeks to persuade ordinary working people that they enjoy equal rights, thus co-
opting them into the capitalist system. But the rights conferred on them are
merely formal – on paper only, as it were – and lack real substance. There is no
equality between the big capitalist and an exploited proletarian. Moreover, the
language of rights assumes a world of selfish competing interests, rather than
social harmony. And the rights it is most concerned to guarantee are those of
property owners and parties to private contracts, i.e. those which underpin
private property and the market economy.

Feminists offer their own line of anti-liberal critique, or at least non-liberal

feminists do. One line looks like a transposition into the gender sphere of
the Marxist critique of liberalism. Some notable liberals, like John Stuart Mill,
championed gender equality already in the nineteenth century. So did ‘first-
wave’ feminists like the suffragettes. But the full achievement of legal equality
between the sexes in twentieth-century liberal democracies did not in itself end
male domination. It conferred formal, rather than substantive, rights on women.
Second-wave feminists complain that liberal regimes do too little to democratize
the private space of the patriarchal family. Capitalism also exploits women
economically, both as cheap labour and as unpaid labour in the household.

But third-wave feminists have added novel lines of criticism. One line is that
liberalism’s emphasis on equal treatment fails to recognize the distinctive needs
of women, for example those arising from their reproductive role. A second is
that the liberal emphasis on impersonal justice fails to appreciate specifically
female virtues, such as an interest in negotiated conflict resolution and in the
ethics of care. Liberal equality thus fails to acknowledge differences between men
and women. The liberal theory of justice is, for its part, too concerned with
abstract distributive ideals, rather than with supporting concrete struggles to
liberate people from immediate oppressions. Justice operates in a male voice,
privileging a certain kind of coldly reasoning autonomous subject over feeling
and caring human beings.

Postcolonial theory argues that liberalism, for all its egalitarian pretension,
is a doctrine of western imperialism. It carries a western view of human
nature and human flourishing, and imposes this view on the rest of the world. In
particular it imposes individualism on communally-minded non-western
societies, and rationalism on societies that attach more importance to sentiment
or affect. Above all, its claim to represent a higher civilization has justified
western intervention and domination, often by cloaking western self-interest in
humanitarian language. In the process liberalism has become complicit in the
crushing of non-western ways of knowing and living, not to mention in racism,
slavery and genocide. Liberalism has primarily benefited white westerners.

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Liberals have in the past have been overtly racist towards non-western peoples.
The liberal ‘subject’ (or individual) is, postcolonial theorists insist, the product of
the west, and idealization of that subject is designed to exclude non-western
people from full participation in the human community.

Those accusing liberalism of representing the few rather than the many are
not confined to the left. In later lectures we will look at rightwing populism,
a contemporary force whose critique of liberalism – and proposed
alternative to it - has recently gained more political traction than any
coming from the left. Its key premise is that western democracies have fallen
into the clutches of cosmopolitan urban liberal elites who sneer at their rural and
small-town hinterlands while exercising economic and cultural privilege.
Rightwing populists see themselves as mounting a popular rebellion on behalf of
native working classes left behind by globalization and rapid demographic
change.

To this extent, rightwing populism joins a long history of criticism of

liberalism from the right, including from various kinds of conservative.
Some conservative criticisms of liberalism overlap with ostensibly leftwing
ones, for example in their defence of national rights and native peoples against
global forces, and in their celebration of community.

LIBERALISM IN HISTORY
Part of the difficulty in assessing criticisms of liberalism is that liberalism,
like other ideological traditions, is both internally diverse and evolving.

We should distinguish two dimensions of this problem.

The first concerns the historical track record of liberalism.

The second concerns the philosophy itself, and whether there is something
in the inner logic of liberalism that predisposes it to be exclusionary in
practice.

As to the first, there is no question but that liberalism started out its
historical life as the preserve of western white men of the upper and
middle classes. More than that, emerging or proto-liberal regimes coexisted
over long periods with the practice of slavery and colonialism. The liberal subject
– the rational rights-bearing individual – was assumed to be an educated and/or
propertied white male household head. Others – the lower classes, colonial
subjects – were assumed to be racially or civilisationally inferior, and thus
incapable of benefiting from liberal equality; or as currently backward, and thus
requiring gradual induction into the benefits of liberal citizenship, under the
tutelage of the upper or colonial ruling classes. Many liberals assumed that
women, for their part, would be represented in the public sphere by male
household heads.

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Those who claimed liberal rights often claimed it specifically for the types
of people they were. They felt they were entitled to liberty and equality as, say,
Englishmen or Americans. Not only did American colonists seek liberty only for
themselves, but they sought, from their imperial overlords, a freer hand to
maintain slavery or dispossess native Americans. Others claimed equal rights for
all of humanity, and felt obliged to bring the benefits of their new liberal
civilisation to the still benighted – the key case here being the French Revolution
and, subsequently, Napoleon. Thus was born the liberal ‘civilizing mission’. But in
general liberals did not think that that meant conferring the franchise on the
propertyless or independence on the colonized.

These forms of domination and exclusion constituted liberalism’s ‘original

sin’. But a liberal could argue that these were not sins of liberalism but sins
against it. They attest to the hypocrisy of early dominant-class liberals.
That is, they constitute instances of dominant liberals not practicing what
they preached. They constitute, moreover, instances of those who benefit
from liberal rights and liberties refusing to share these benefits with
others. But this failure to share mattered precisely because there genuinely
were benefits to be derived from the enjoyment of liberal rights and
liberties. The original ruling-class metropolitan liberals were hoarding a
good thing.

This truth, liberals can insist, was well recognized by working classes and
women who fought for the franchise and legal equality. The same was true
of black diaspora subjects and, later, of colonized populations. Both Martin
Luther King and Ho Chi Minh invoked the American Declaration of
Independence. The Haitian revolutionaries of the 1790s were inspired by the
ideals of the French Revolution. These subordinate groups fought, with varying
degrees of success, for a right to partake of liberal rights and liberties. The
struggle to realise liberal rights continues in many parts of the world – wherever,
in fact, people are subject to formalized despotism or discrimination. It also
informs some of those struggling for the equal rights on newly identified political
subjects, like LGBTQI people.

EXCLUSIONARY LOGICS OR MULTIPLE LOGICS?

A separate problem is that of whether something in liberal philosophy
itself predisposes it to exclude certain groups. Certain critics will insist that
the exclusions practiced by historical liberalisms are inseparable from
liberalism’s inner logic as a philosophy, dominant ideology or hegemonic
discourse.

We have already seen the essence of the case – that liberalism grants formal
rather than substantive freedom; that its egalitarian promise is contradicted by
the logic of the market economy, to which it is committed; that it fails to address
private power; that its equal treatment fails to recognise legitimate difference;
that it is excessively abstract, impersonal and individualist, disrespecting local
and communal norms and personal affect.

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But the inner logics of liberalism do not necessarily point in only one
direction. Different liberals have developed its logics of equal individual
freedom in different directions.

As we saw in the previous lecture, some liberals [like TH Green and John
Rawls] have themselves acknowledged the limitations of purely formal
rights. And they have acknowledged that unrestrained market relations
can create intolerable inequalities of wealth and power. To that extent, they
effectively concede some truth in the Marxist critique of ‘bourgeois democracy’.
Hence, as we noted in the last lecture, social or egalitarian liberals both
positive liberty and distributive justice.

But what social or egalitarian liberals support is still, in the end, something
like a mixed economy attached to a liberal-democratic welfare state. There
is no decisive break with capitalism, and certainly no embrace of revolution.
So the strength of the Marxist critique of ‘modern’ liberalism depends on the
truth of the Marxist claim that the welfare state and liberal democracy do not go
far enough in addressing capitalist economic and political inequalities, and that a
superior socialist alternative is available. I will not here judge whether that
Marxist claim is true. I will simply note that, in liberal eyes, the full-blown statist
socialist alternatives constructed in the twentieth century look both more
authoritarian and less economically efficient than liberal-democratic welfare
regimes.

Other liberals have questioned liberal universalism and liberal

individualism.

Communitarian liberals [like Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer] argue

that accounts of the abstract individual fail to account for the way human
beings are embedded in communities and, normatively, it fails to account for
the extent to which their duties and obligations derive from group ties and
values rather than from abstract universal theories. There are, of course, non-
liberal communitarians too, including conservative ones. A version of strong, and
arguably non-liberal, communitarianism is present in African thought, expressed
in the ethics of Ujamaa or Ubuntu.

Liberal value pluralists (like Isaiah Berlin, Richard Rorty and John Gray)
insist that the proper basis of liberalism is not universal values but an
understanding that values are relative – different groups have different
values. Moreover, different values, even different liberal values, conflict, so that
not all values can be realized simultaneously. Liberalism must respect the value
of different ways of life, even (within limits) non-liberal ways of life; and they
must accept the tragedy of human existence, which is that there is no way to find
a universal consensus about ideal institutions.

Of course, all liberals recognize the fact of divergent interests and values, and all
liberal democrats seek to accommodate these differences – they are, after all,
famously advocates of freedom of belief, expression and association, and of a

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political and economic marketplace of competing ideas and goods. But many
liberals still believe that liberalism can provide an overarching framework of
ideal institutions within which this freedom and competition might find
expression; and they still believe it is necessary and possible to find some
underlying consensus about certain basic values, such that everybody in their
diversity is willing to treat the liberal state as legitimate, obey its laws and
observe its rules. Liberal value pluralists are skeptical about this; they believe
that the best that can reasonably be hoped for is a modus vivendi between
divergent ways of life.

Agonistic liberals like Chantal Mouffe actually celebrate political conflict, so

long as it does not get to the point where adversaries are treated as mortal
enemies. They prefer conflict, with its choice-enhancement and creative
potential, to oppressive consensus.

Liberal multiculturalists [like Will Kymlicka] complain that liberalism has

classically failed to recognize the value of group belonging, in particular of
belonging to ethnic, national and other cultural groups. It is thus not able to
accommodate new demands, in western democracies, for national self-
determination and group cultural rights, or the cultural heterogeneity
introduced by immigration. While liberalism claims to be culturally neutral, the
liberal state tends to treat the majority culture of a state as the universal
standard, such that all groups have to accede to its basic values and rules.
Liberalism has historically failed to take into account the extent to which
individuals need and flourish in groups. As a result, it has pursued policies of
assimilation that seek to erase legitimate cultural differences.

According to liberal multiculturalists, liberalism ought to welcome

multicultural diversity. A liberal state should make provision for group rights,
group autonomy and group representation. Group rights can be reconciled with
individual rights. The only proviso is that group leaders should not violate the
rights of group members, and that all should have the option of exiting a group.

---

These various liberal accommodations to cultural relativism and group

claims do not satisfy the more radical critics of liberal universalism. For
example, exponents of postcolonialism and radical black thought, like many
orthodox Marxists, consider multiculturalism to be a neoliberal sop to diversity,
designed to distract attention from class inequalities [according to Marxists] or
from the more subtle operations of racism [according to postcolonial theorists,
critical race theorists, privilege theorists etc].

Some Marxists, by the way, feel closer to liberals as fellow modernists and
universalists than they do to various fashionable anti-modern and
relativist trends of anti-liberal critique like postcolonialism and
poststructuralism. (See e.g. Vivek Chibber).

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And there are liberals (e.g. Brian Barry) who have pushed back against
liberal concessions to cultural pluralism, just as, as we saw in the previous
lecture, there are liberals (e.g. Hayek, Nozick) who have pushed back
against social or egalitarian liberalism. They want to hold fast to liberal
universalism.

Liberals have in turn pushed back against some radical anti-liberal

critiques, seeing them as authoritarian or totalitarian. Thus they accuse
Marxism of leading in practice to totalitarian states, and contemporary forms of
‘identity politics’ as leading to thought policing (in the shape of ‘political
correctness’). In short, they accuse these trends of illiberalism.

They also accuse some forms of cultural politics of a dangerous relativism,

of undermining the possibility of rational thought, scientific progress and
democratic dialogue. In short, liberals accuse some of these critics of
irrationalism.

But different liberals respond to liberalism’s critics in different ways. Some

liberals have attempted to accommodate what they see as well-founded
criticisms. Some egalitarian or multicultural liberals see themselves as
finding middle ways that reconcile liberal values of individual liberty with the
demands for substantive equality and group recognition emanating from old and
new lefts.

In a few cases liberals consider themselves more radical or progressive

than certain ostensibly radical critics. For example, Kymlicka thinks
egalitarian liberalism is more egalitarian than Marxism, because it is committed
to distributive justice rather than collective ownership. Some liberals accuse
certain leftists of aligning with regressive rightwing politics, e.g. cultural
conservatism, Islamism, or Russia’s President Putin, all in the name of anti-
imperialism.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Whatever its merits or failings, liberalism is currently an ideology under
siege. Ironically, though, and as noted earlier, the most effective challenge
to it has been launched from the regressive right rather than the
progressive left. We see evidence of rightwing populist advance and illiberal
backsliding in countries like the United States, Hungary, India and Brazil.

This has led some radicals to seek to defend secular modern liberal values
against these rightist forces; others blame the failures of liberalism for
providing regressive forces with openings. For example, they argue that
rightist forces have taken advantage of legitimate popular grievances generated
by neoliberal economics.

But then, the rightwing populists are also fighting against what they see as
the intellectual elitism of the academic and artistic intelligentsia of the

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west, and radical critics often find themselves in that class, along with
liberals. The populists argue that the ideologues of liberalism and Marxism alike
are trapped in a bubble of esoteric thought, cut off from ordinary people.

Could there be some truth in that? The fear of losing touch with the masses
is one that has long haunted intellectuals and radical ideologues.

Recommended further reading:

Gerald Gaus, Shane Courtland and David Schmidtz [2018], ‘Liberalism’, Stanford
Enclyclopedia of Philosophy.

QUESTION TO THINK ABOUT:

Can there be an ideology or doctrine that holds true for all societies
everywhere, or are human societies too diverse for that to be possible ?