What's the Matter with Liberalism?

By Ronald Beiner

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520328709

Ronald Beiner

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WHAT'S THE MATTER

WITH LIBERALISM?

WHAT'S THE MATTER

WITH LIBERALISM?

RONALD BEINER

University of California Press

Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

Copyright © 1992 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beiner, Ronald, 1953-

What’s the matter with liberalism? I Ronald Beiner.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07793-8 (cloth)

1. Liberalism. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. Political ethics. 4. Civil rights. 5. Citizenship. 6. Social justice.

7. Socialism. I. Title.

JC571.B45 1992

320.5'1—dc20 91-29453

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 @

Contents

Contents

Prefatory Note

1. Prologue: The Theorist as Storyteller

2. Liberalism

3. Moral Vocabularies

4. The Language of Rights and the Language of Good

5. Citizenship

6. Socialism?

7. Epilogue: The Limits of Theory

Index

Prefatory Note

This little book was mainly put together during a time of remarkable revolutionary upheavals in Europe. The Central European revolution was hailed in the liberal, market-oriented West in a self- congratulatory mood. The self-congratulation was thought to be warranted because, first, the West had won a certain kind of war that had been waged in the preceding four decades, and second, because the economic dynamism of liberal societies was deemed to be the decisive mark of superiority of the West over the East in the winning of this war. One of the intentions of this book was to question whether uncritical self-congratulation was the most suitable way in which to receive the great changes in the socialist world. The appropriate questions for us have in fact already been formulated by one of the leaders of that revolution:

The post-totalitarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society. Is it not true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-tótality have some connection with the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity? With their willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization? With their vulnerability to the attractions of mass indifference? And in the end, is not the greyness and the emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system only an inflated caricature of modern life in general? And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies?¹

Earlier versions of chapter i were presented at Queen’s University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Dayton; a version of it was published in the Queen’s Quarterly. Earlier versions of chapter 2 were presented at Osgoode Hall Law School and McGill University; a version of it was published in Law and the Community: The End of Individualism? edited by Allan C. Hutchinson and Leslie Green (Toronto: Carswell, 1989). An earlier version of chapter 3 was presented at a meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and is to be published in volume 34 of NOMOS, edited by John Chapman and William Galston. An earlier version of chapter 4 was presented at the University of Toronto Law Faculty. An earlier version of chapter 6 was presented at a private discussion group attended by Rebecca Comay, Dieter Misgeld, and Graeme Nicholson. A collage of various sections of the book, entitled The Liberal Regime, is to be published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review; versions of it were presented at Harvard University and the Chicago-Kent College of Law. I am grateful for the use of material published elsewhere, grateful to the individuals and institutions that invited me to speak, and not least, grateful to the audiences that received and criticized what I presented. I have received very generous financial assistance toward the completion of this project from the Connaught Programme in Legal Theory and Public Policy, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, all of which I thankfully acknowledge. I must also express my deep appreciation for my good fortune in being able to conduct these studies in an environment so wonderfully conducive to work in political philosophy as the University of Toronto. I owe a debt to all of my political theory colleagues, but in the completion of this project I have received particular help and encouragement from Joe Carens. Huge thanks must go to Brenda Samuels, Anna Apuzzo, and Mary Wellman for their tireless work on the manuscript. Finally, my companions on this voyage of writing should not go without mention: Ann, who dragged me to the resting-place of John Stuart Mill, aptly enough, to write chapter 5; and Zimra, citizen of the twenty-first century, whose claim to a better world gives a special impulse to these reflections.

Avignon

November 1990

1 Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, in The Power of the Powerless, ed. John Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 38-39.

1. Prologue: The Theorist as Storyteller

Political philosophers in the twentieth century have on the whole been a curiously self-abnegating lot. The majority of them have deliberately abstained from the large and deep speculations on the good society and the good for humanity that characterized the great tradition of Western thought. Political philosophers, at least those of the analytical variety, have confined themselves to the modest enterprise of conceptual analysis—theoretical clarification of the concepts that figure prominently in political life. Philosophers within the Continental tradition have shown less abstinence, but where they did dare to pronounce on large, substantive questions of human nature and the essence of politics, they tended to reiterate well-established theories already on offer within the tradition. Of course, there are exceptions. But it is striking that even Jürgen Habermas, who is committed to offering a comprehensive theory of the rational society, can say in his book Legitimation Crisis that we can expect no guidance from metaphysically grounded theories of ethics or from substantive theories of human nature. And with the influence of French poststructuralism gaining ground, an even more radical renunciation of traditional philosophy is demanded, and even a minimal appeal to shared rationality is rendered suspect.

Certainly within Anglo-American modes of thought one strains to think of any serious effort to formulate an original statement of the good for humanity. There are many who will say that now this has all changed. In recent years, with the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and works of a similar kind, vitality has once again returned to political philosophy, which once more offers guidance on the major questions of political life. However, it seems to me that however ambitious the work of Rawls may appear, it is in fact no less self-restricting and self-effacing than other work in the analytical tradition. One of the reasons for this is the insistence

on offering a guide to practical affairs—cutting theoretical speculation down to the need for practical decisions on the immediate questions of daily life. This is a conception of theory that Rawls shares with most other contemporary political philosophers. Indeed, the conception of political philosophy most prevalent in the Anglo-American world today is that of recommending policies: the function of the philosopher is to supply clever arguments for favoring one set of policies rather than another. Cutting theory off more sharply from immediate practice would restore to theory its freedom of speculation—something always indispensable to original works of theory.

In many cases philosophers have failed to produce important reflections on moral and political life not for want of ability but because they believed it did not befit the philosopher to pronounce on what is important and essential in human life. In other words, they deliberately forsook such reflections on account of theoretical scruples. They were persuaded that such modesty was appropriate to the philosophical vocation.

Let us compare what may be considered appropriate to a great work of literature. The great novel or great drama often succeeds in disclosing what it means to be a human being, what is worthy or unworthy in human life, what is ennobling and what is degrading in human affairs; and the best literary characterizations may present us with exemplary human types.¹ It is not surprising, indeed it is only natural, if novelists, poets, and dramatists aspire to some major insight into human nature and the defining features of a significant human life. Why should the philosopher now aspire to less? Here the reply will come that the literary artist can allow himself or herself this indulgence because his or her preoccupation is with the world of imagination, not with the establishment of truth, whereas the philosopher’s enterprise is one of cognition and requires that one set one’s standards by the satisfaction of demonstrable claims to propositional validity. The literary imagination, it 1

will be said, can allow itself a rich array of possibilities in conceiving human experience; philosophy, however, must discipline itself to the strict requirements of truth, and accordingly must be wary of the merest hint of extravagance. Therefore literary authors can indulge themselves in a way that philosophical authors cannot.

But is this the case? Distinguished works of literature have the force that they do because they seek to give us some unified and compelling vision of ourselves; that is, they attempt to uncover some important truth about ourselves. The work of literature, when it fulfills its highest potentialities, enters truth-claims, and the imaginative effort is at the same time a cognitive undertaking. The real achievement at which it aims is not the mere conjuring of possibilities, but the securing of a knowledge of human existence. Again, we pose our question: Why should philosophy aspire to less? Literature in this traditional and noble sense has not been abandoned; why, then, should theorists and political philosophers voluntarily abandon substantive philosophical anthropology (the philosophy of humanity, or a systematic theory of human nature)?

Let me give an example of the kind of theory that has been purposely neglected. For Aristotle it was possible to discern a set of ethical capacities having a reality on a par with our physical capacities. These are both natural and habitual. We are born with a range of native endowments, physical and ethical, but these can (and must) be developed through exercise and deployment in practice. On the basis of Aristotle’s ethics, one could extrapolate an analogy between physical fitness and ethical fitness. No one would think to assert that we are all born with identical physical endowments, or that all such endowments are identically desirable. Some are better endowed than others. There are people who have a capacity for swift running that I can never hope to emulate. But this is not simply a matter of native endowment. Muscles that are rot exercised will atrophy. Capacities can be trained to a certain extent, and the point of physical fitness is to develop one’s inborn capacities to their full employment. Aristotle’s writings on ethics suggest a parallel with ethical life. Ethical fitness is a combination of native endowment and trained practice. Just as a muscle must be exercised in order to reach its full potential, so an ethical capacity (such as justice or prudence or capacity for friendship) must be put into practice in order to realize one’s human potential as an ethical

being.2 And just as some people will always have the ability (latent or developed) physically to outrun me, so there are some people who naturally outrun others in their capacity for moral insight. Ethical fitness means exercising through habituation our natural ethical endowments, just as physical fitness consists in developing our muscles to their natural potential. Ethical life, for Aristotle, is a matter of developing our innate endowments to a state of maximal fitness. We have little difficulty in distinguishing when someone has attained a state of full physical well-being; ethical theory looks for an analogous standard of ethical well-being, and the latter standard should be no less accessible to the normal intelligence than is the former.

Physical fitness is a normative concept, no less normative than ethical fitness in our sense. In fact it would be odd to omit normative terms from the description of someone’s physical condition; such terms arise when we say a person is overweight, out of shape, or sluggish, for example. Why shouldn’t the description of a person’s ethical condition be likewise normative? Just as we can say that it is undesirable when someone is obese, unfit, and sufficiently out of shape that he or she cannot ascend a flight of stairs without panting, so we can say with no less legitimacy that it is undesirable when individuals become So ethically unfit that they are incapable of sustaining friendships, or when they corrupt their own moral ends in order to satisfy base impulses such as stinginess or greed. The way the person of practical wisdom exercises his or her capacities for ethical insight in situations of praxis is, on this understanding, fundamentally no different from the way the person of physical strength flexes his or her muscles in the appropriate context. (Needless to say, our exemplar here is not Arnold Schwarzenegger!) So, in one case as in the other, it is entirely unexceptional that we can derive practical norms from the description of ordinary capacities and the situations in which they are commonly exercised.

Now this is precisely the kind of theory that contemporary philosophy regards as unfeasible. Why should we now abstain from such reflections? To be sure, Aristotle assumed that the students of

his ethics would already be equipped by upbringing and the ethos of their community to be receptive to his characterization of ethical well-being. Contemporary philosophy makes no such assumptions. But the primary reason why such an ethical theory meets with skepticism is that it presupposes a substantive theory of human nature—an account of the virtues that conduce to an excellent human life.

As I argued earlier, literary works, even today, do not flinch from such normative claims. Let me give a specific example of how important works of literature depend upon normative truth: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a masterpiece of storytelling about the diversity of urban living-spaces and the dissolution of this diversity. The implication is that, collectively, we are paying a fatal price for the homogenization of the human habitat. The work owes its force to the validity of this descriptive truth-claim. Either our situation is like that or it isn’t, and the literary creation loses an essential dimension if it is a misdescription. I need not go so far as to claim that this kind of message exhausts the novel; I need merely establish that it accounts for an important part of the literary power of the work. The novel asserts that human beings risk losing themselves if they so reconstruct the conditions of their existence that Tokyo becomes indistinguishable from Los Angeles, that one city becomes absolutely the same as and continuous with another city, except for the name of the airport. This is not very different from the sort of claim offered by the traditional political philosopher or philosophical anthropologist. In fact, in certain respects Calvino’s truth telling bears affinity with some aspects of Aristotle’s theory: if certain conditions are not present or are removed, human ethical life atrophies; in particular, virtues that flourish in the polis perish in the megalopolis.

In support of my argument that works of literature assert normative and cognitive claims to validity, I will cite the testimony of Iris Murdoch, who is both novelist and philosopher:

I think that though they are so different, philosophy and literature are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities. They are cognitive activities, explanations. Literature, like other arts, involves exploration, classification, discrimination, organized vision. Of course good literature does not look like analysis because what the imagination produces is sensuous, fused, reified, mysterious, ambiguous,

particular. Art is cognition in another mode. Think how much thought, how much truth, a Shakespeare play contains, or a great novel. It is illuminating in the case of any reflective discipline to see what kind of critical vocabulary is directed against it. Literature may be criticized in a purely formal way. But more often it is criticized for being in some sense untruthful. Words such as sentimental, pretentious, self-indulgent, trivial and so on, impute some kind of falsehood, some failure of justice, some distortion or inadequacy of understanding or expression. The word fantasy in a bad sense covers many of these typical literary faults. It may be useful to contrast fantasy as bad with imagination as good. … In condemning art for being fantastic one is condemning it for being untrue.3

Murdoch’s point is that the imagination is itself a cognitive faculty, that the efforts of the imagination are a form of cognitive exertion, and that one immerses oneself in a literary work not simply to derive enjoyment or to be entertained, but often in order to come to a better understanding. Many philosophers today, particularly in France (poststructuralists and practitioners of deconstruction), would wish to relax the distinction between philosophy and literature in order to reduce the cognitive claims of philosophy. My aim is exactly the opposite: to liken philosophy to literary activity in order to elevate the cognitive claims of literature.

Let there be no mistake about the kind of normative claims that I am ascribing to philosophy and literature. The literary work, in its evocation of exemplary types, does not offer direct practical injunctions of the form, Live your life thus. Rather, it recommends, Reflect on life in the light of these truths about our common situation. The case is the same with works of theory such as Aristotle’s Ethics. It too does not contain specific practical injunctions of the form, Live your life thus. It, too, suggests rather, Reflect on life in the light of these truths about our common situation.

To put this point another way, so its implication will be clear: I am urging both more modesty and greater ambition on the part of theorists—more modesty with respect to specific practical recommendations, greater ambition in general reflection upon the nature

of humankind and the ends of society. I do not believe it is the place of the theorist to tell us, for instance, whether we should be optirg for a unilateralist or multilateralist nuclear disarmament policy; tlat is a matter not for theoretical decision but for common deliberai on among citizens. On the other hand, however, I believe it is witlin the competence of theory to inform us of the general implicatbns of a state of affairs where the means of defense of a society'sway of life is so remote from the experiences and imaginative capacities of its members that such public deliberation is rendered nerly meaningless. The anxiety of many theorists to supply answers that would be of immediate practical relevance impairs their abiity to address questions of the more far-reaching kind.

What I am appealing for is a return to the sort of full-bodied philosophical anthropology that can specify the basic moral and political leeds of human beings, and a repudiation of the formalistic preocupation with rights, interests, and rational preferences. The latte have been the staple of liberal political philosophy. What we need is political philosophy that will no longer take human subjects is the supreme arbiters of their own interests and preferences, bit will try to illuminate needs and desires of human life that the ¡ubjects themselves may have failed to acknowledge. This is what great literature has always achieved, and philosophers today cai take assurance from their own great tradition that philosophical literature can match this achievement and give it rational groundilg. This, then, is an appeal for the broad, substantive, mode of theory practiced by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Rousseai, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche—each of them possessing a living literary power that is not merely accessory to their philosopiical claims, but lies at their source. Tied in with this is the fact that many great works of philosophy, and especially political philosopiy, have also been works of literature: Plato’s Republic, Rousseai’s Emile, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Political philosophy,at its best, can be like a story that reminds us of forgotten needs ani longings; literature, after all, is the supreme embodiment of the tremendous power of memory and recollection. Just as art preserve our most cherished experiences, so philosophy restores to collectve consciousness our rational needs and desires.

Let rre restate these issues in a way that brings them closer to immetiate political reality and at the same time highlights the

ideological context that forms their background. The widely assumed if not absolutely prevailing view within contemporary liberal society is that there is no need to adjudicate between competing substantive conceptions of what is good. Indeed, it would be prejudicial to our rights and liberties as individuals to do so, for such decisions are the prerogative of the individual consumer. Everyone is free to determine what are his or her preferred objects of consumption, and the function of the political system is to guarantee fundamental rights in the context of free consumer choice. Such a system does not discriminate between competing conceptions of what is good; it is neutral. (In this respect, Rawls’s theory mirrors contemporary ideology; society sees to it that there is fair distribution at the level of primary goods; beyond that, it is up to the rational consumer to design his or her preferred plan of life—a singular determination of the good.) But this neutralist presumption is clearly false. If it does not discriminate between substantive consumer choices, it does privilege the consumer model itself, and this is a particular conception of human life and society that is deeply partisan and has been intensely contested, both in theory and in practice. As a social theory it is anything but neutral in its basic philosophic assumptions about the nature of human beings and the purpose of social life. From republican political thought we are familiar with the opposition between bourgeois and citoyen, most sharply formulated in the political writings of Rousseau. To forgo a substantive theory of the human good in favor of consumer freedom is already to exclude an entire way of life postulated upon nonconsumerist conceptions of human fulfillment, and so to favor a particular vision of the human good, thereby contradicting the neutralist presumption. Thus, paradoxically, to say there is no need to adjudicate between rival conceptions of the good is already to yield, by default, to a particular vision of personal and political good, namely that of consumerist liberalism.4 To take a fairly ob-

vious example: if I consider the automobile to be the curse of modern society, it is not sufficient for me to opt out simply by not purchasing one; I am already, by necessity, implicated in a form of society that is subject to the imperatives of the motorized style of life, for instance, the expenditure of considerable public revenues on the construction of highways. Again: consumerism is not neutral; it favors those goods that facilitate that whole way of life.

Political philosophers in search of more concrete modes of theorizing than that available in, say, John Rawls or Robert Nozick have taken up the cause of storytelling. Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue, where the categories of narrative and storytelling figure prominently, is one notable example of this new tendency