Tensions within liberalism

Comments on a couple of provocative recent essays

A lot is currently being written about the status and nature of Western liberal ideas and liberalism. These have been prompted by everything from covid (and responses), international developments (especially Russia and China) through to ongoing culture wars within Western countries. A couple of less mainstream articles have recently caught my eye. My interest in them is, given what I have been writing about, mostly about their descriptions of the intellectual structure of, and tensions within, liberalism. But their cultural commentary and conclusions are also worth a read.

Matthew Crawford, philosopher and motorcycle mechanic, has published a provocative essay titled (likely by editors) Covid was liberalism’s end game. Regardless of whether you agree with his conclusion, his analysis is worth reading. He identifies two strong, but opposing, strands of liberal thought, “two rival pictures of the human subject”, that he associates with John Locke and Thomas Hobbes:

The Lockean one regards us as rational, self-governing creatures …. and underwrites a basically democratic or majoritarian form of politics. … The second, rival picture insists we are irrationally proud, and in need of being governed. This Hobbesian picture …. needs us to think of ourselves as vulnerable, so the state can play the role of saving us. It underwrites a technocratic, progressive form of politics.

This is an interesting description of opposing poles of thinking within the Western liberal tradition. Notably, it is one that doesn’t line up with traditional ideological distinctions. For example, the Right has tended to be Hobbesian on law and order or security issues, while the Left has been more Hobbesian on economic issues and, more recently, public health.

A different take on the fundamental tensions within liberalism is provided on the Flat Caps and Fatalism Substack, within a very interesting and somewhat meditative essay titled Lost cheeses and impersonal cruelty. It takes cheese-making as an extended metaphor for good political thought or practice.

There is a lot in the essay worth considering, again regardless of whether you agree with the conclusions. The key connection with Crawford’s analysis that I want to highlight is how it follows Judith Shklar in distinguishing three strands of liberalism:

There is the ‘liberalism of natural rights’, which seeks to ensure that human civilisations accord with what it believes are universal principles. The language of the Universal Declaration, which phrases human rights in absolute and exception-less terms, is an example.

There is also the ‘liberalism of personal development’, which asserts that freedom is necessary for personal and social progress. This strand can be seen in the ‘progressive’ parts of the left and in economic liberals who emphasise development and growth.

The third is the '“liberalism of fear”, that:

starts with an ‘assumption, amply justified by every page of political history, … that some agents of the government will behave lawlessly and brutally in small or big ways most of the time unless they are prevented from doing so’. It is a liberalism that refuses to offer a summum bonum, a greatest good, to which all should strive. Instead, it proposes a summum malum, a greatest evil, that all must seek to avoid.

This take on the intellectual architecture of liberalism parses distinctions in a very different way to Crawford’s account. While the outcomes of the “liberalism of fear” line up with the Lockean strand in Crawford’s account, Locke’s accounts of individual rights and freedoms underpin significant parts of the liberalisms of “natural rights” and “personal development”.

My first article on Twitter and the philosophical assumptions behind free speech happens to give a nice example of the interconnectedness of some of these ideas. Freedom of speech is clearly a Lockean ideal, rather than a Hobbesian one, on Crawford’s distinction. However, my article pointed out that freedom of speech has been motivated both as a right (aka by the “liberalism of natural rights”) and as a check on government power (aka by the “liberalism of fear”). This helps explain how such different conceptions of liberalism can co-exist and why there are tensions and competing strands of thought.

Both of these essays have got me thinking as, while I agree that there are fundamental tensions in liberalism, I have typically attributed them to a different distinction. On the one hand, there is the focus on individual rights and freedoms, limits on government power and rational debate - a procedural liberalism - associated with Locke, JS Mill and others. On the other side is the Enlightenment confidence in the universality of liberal ideals and the perfectability of human societies - which I’d associate significantly with Rousseau, Kant and others. Both are built on similar conceptions of humans as rational, self-governing creatures.

This particular tension again runs through the heart of a range of Western ideologies. It is most obvious every time an organisation, government or society attempts to spread norms of human rights and limited government by coercion or force. The United Nations is often one expression of this, as was the attempt to bring democracy to Iraq via the US invasion.

This distinction between Enlightenment confidence and a procedural liberalism lines up fairly well with Shklar’s division between the liberalisms of natural rights and person development on one side and the liberalism of fear on the other. But there are also commonalities with Crawford’s account. Enlightenment confidence has a habit of struggling when it collides with messy realities. The tempting solution then is often to look to Hobbes’ Leviathan - the powerful state - to solve the problems.

I don’t know that any of these three accounts of tensions within the intellectual architecture of Western liberal thought is more than partially right. Each has some advantages in explaining our cultural, political and intellectual landscape. To better understand them, using our approach here at Humble Knowledge, will require a closer examination of the different epistemic attitudes underlying the different positions. But that will have to wait until I can get back to completing the Brief Epistemic History of Western Thought series.

In the meantime, I recommend reading both essays: Covid was liberalism’s end game and Lost cheeses and impersonal cruelty. I’ll be surprised if you agree with everything in them, but they should get you thinking!