Michael Bonner: Liberalism cannot justify its own assumptions
Appealing solely to liberal principles fails because such appeals are inherently circular.
Imagine that the elites of the old Soviet Union had known nothing about communism.
What if they had never heard of Marx or Lenin and had known nothing of Das Kapital or What Is to Be Done? Versions of such questions have been asked before, and they sound absurd. And yet, the same kind of absurdity may now be found in the West. The regnant ideology from Hawaii to Helsinki and from Aberdeen to Athens is hardly ever mentioned, nor do Western elites ever seem to invoke the names of its theorists. When was the last time a European or American statesman mentioned John Stuart Mill or John Rawls? And when have our elites spoken of anything other than the vague abstraction that they call ‘values’?
The ideology to which I allude is, of course, liberalism. Its nineteenth-century heyday was ushered in by the British Liberal Party and the adolescent American and French republics. The early twentieth century seemed to see its death; the world after 1945, its resurrection; and the ‘end of history’ of the 1990s, its final triumph. In more recent years, those with ears to hear detect either the liberal death knell or the toot of the liberal cavalry horn. Which one you hear depends entirely upon partisan obedience, since there is no political party anywhere in the West that does not profess to stand for personal freedom—the primary liberal shibboleth.
That would seem to amount to an interminable disagreement, perhaps even a liberal civil war. And yet, everyone seems to agree that something has gone wrong with liberalism. We are either too liberal or not liberal enough. Liberalism, depending on whom you ask, is either the cure or the disease. As Homer Simpson said of alcohol, liberalism is both ‘the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems’. Commentators, academics, and politicians regularly declare that the post-Cold War liberal order—emphasising individual rights, free markets, open societies, democratic institutions, and international norms—is unravelling. Some, such as Anne Applebaum, say that it is already gone.
It seems to me that liberalism’s most ardent partisans have lately made a very poor case for their beliefs. Political scientists and politicians are notably divided as to whether liberalism is a political philosophy or the absence of a political philosophy. Some speak of liberalism as though it were synonymous with modernity or the values of the Enlightenment. Liberalism, as others say, means that the state is above the ideological fray, mediating among competing worldviews and visions of the good life. Something like this idea is associated with Sir Isaiah Berlin and his assumption of value pluralism. For Berlin and others who follow this line of thinking, human values cannot accordingly be reduced or subsumed into a single principle, and many of them are equally valid. If this be true, then human beings must be free to choose among those values. Those who espouse this idea hold that liberalism is essential to harmonious living in the contemporary West, while their opponents see it as moral relativism or ambivalence that erodes human culture.
Geoff Russ: Canada's weak classical liberal foundations
Classical liberalism remains more of a long-running aspiration in Canada than a movement to restore lost realities.
To be blunt, few ideas are actually less self-evident than the theory that ‘all men are created equal’ or that everyone has ‘natural and imprescriptible rights’, as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Rights of Man and the Citizen, respectively, declare. We see similar boldness in our own time in the language of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its ‘recognition’ of the ‘inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’. Nor is it obvious that human beings are free by nature. On such assertions all other liberal freedoms and rights repose, and we assert them sometimes very loudly, but assertion is not proof. If there were any convincing rational proof, we would know by now. But the proofs offered by the likes of Hume, Kant, and Rawls fail to convince anyone who is not already a true believer.
To put that another way, one of the main problems with contemporary liberalism is that it is poorly understood. Many avowed liberals would, I think, be surprised to discover two things. The first is that liberalism emerged as a political theology. The earliest liberals’ assumptions about human freedom and equality are built on a foundation laid by mediaeval Western Christianity.
We can understand liberalism’s emergence from the Christian vision of freedom by examining what British academic and commentator John Gray called the four ‘elements’ of liberalism. Liberalism, he says, is individualist, egalitarian, universalist, and meliorist—a formulation that Francis Fukuyama has also adopted. But it seems to me that we should add a fifth: liberalism is also secularist. Altogether, then, liberalism asserts the primacy of the individual over the collective; it confers on all people the same moral status by virtue of an emphasis on unconstrained choice and free will; it presupposes the moral unity of the entire human species; it distinguishes between a secular and a religious realm; and it affirms that society and politics are not immutable and static but susceptible of improvement.