Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (10 page)

The markings on the previous sheets thus begin to show dissonance with those on the new top sheet. Individual and group rights were compatible as long as there was only one group—society as a whole, and as long as that society was infused with the idea of harmony between the parts and the whole, as postulated by the fourth layer. But in a society of many groupings, what should happen if one group identity clashes with another? Or if discriminatory practices that liberals considered illiberal, based say on patriarchy or on belief, took place inside those groups? Did the old first layer right to private space extend to groups who would consequently be entitled to do as they pleased inside their own domain? Could liberals tolerate the illiberalism of group practices in their midst solely in the name of diversity and group self-determination? And what would the appropriate reaction be if some groups—for example, some indigenous or aboriginal people—engaged in special demands to have the weight of their voices increased, in view of their past and present invisibility, employing the discourse of victimhood?

Moreover, what if two groups picked and chose different liberal principles from the multilayered tapestry that liberals have woven? What if anti-abortionist pro-lifers push back the right to life to include foetuses at any stage of development? And pro-choicers insist on women’s right to decide on what happens inside their bodies, relying on liberty and self-determination—all available in layer one—or on privacy as manifested in layer three (as did the US Supreme Court in
Roe vs. Wade
1973)? Such indeterminacy and inconclusiveness cut liberalism down to size as its analysts recognize that, like any ideology, its conceptual arrangements cannot offer decisive and permanent solutions to major social and political issues when conflict among them seems intractable.

Liberalism developed as a theory outlining relations between the state and its members. With the increasing blurring of distinctions such as /files/08/23/91/f082391/public/private, governmental/non-governmental, civilized/abusive mass electronic discourse, and with the emergence of ‘private’, segmented, or circumscribed publics who insist on their exclusivity, liberalism faces deep problems concerning its individuality-enabling and harm-forestalling framework assumptions. An ideology whose principles preclude unambiguous answers may reflect the state of knowledge that we have, and even current understandings of reasonableness, but it does not offer the assured conclusiveness that most ideologies fallaciously flaunt, and in which liberalism has joined during its more self-confident phases.

A liberal deficit in democracy?

Although liberalism has displayed its ability to reinvent itself from time to time, the richness and variety of the traditions under the family name ‘liberalism’ are often compromised. The potential of that richness is still there but its conceptualization and implementation are far from optimal. Large chunks of the first layer were assimilated into the term ‘liberal-democracy’ but eventually the ‘liberal’ prefix faded out. Democratic practices are largely thought of as egalitarian, participatory, and inclusive, and they are part of the constitutional equipment of many states. But giving a voice to all people does not necessarily ensure that it is a liberal voice, and we have yet to witness a full-scale revolution that was liberal, from the French through the Bolshevik revolutions, let alone to lesser upheavals such as the various so-called ‘Arab Springs’. As Europe democratized in the second half of the 20th century the resounding call was for democratic Europe, not for liberal Europe. Even current appeals to human rights focus on basic first layer rights concerning life, liberty, and dignity, often at the expense of social and cultural rights. The problem is not only the danger that basic rights are mistaken for a fully-fledged liberalism but that in political rhetoric they have come to be disassociated from liberalism altogether. Thus, the grating phrase ‘muscular liberalism’ is flaunted by conservatives who wish to enforce certain liberties and constitutional practices on some non-‘Western’ societies but have a truncated interest in the third and fourth layers of liberalism.

Beyond that, the frequent paring down of liberalism to basic constitutional practices and rights is not entirely surprising. The third layer, with its personalist stress on self-development, has run up against numerous cultural and epistemological perspectives that regard social context as the driving force of human conduct. It has, for instance, become theoretically outmoded among those poststructuralists and post-Marxists who explain social life as embedded in hegemonic discursive practices, that is to say, in the manner in which dominant forms of political and social language control human thought and conduct. The commitment of liberals to the primacy of individual agency is side-lined in such theories. But more than that—as global views loom large—the aspirations of the third layer are held to be a luxury unattainable for most people on this planet who are bereft of basic rights pertaining to adequate food, shelter, and protection from violence. Hence that layer speaks to very few.

The fourth layer’s antiquated and rosy-eyed assumption of benevolent regulation and social harmony disappears under closer scrutiny, as societies display ever-greater fragmentation coupled with the legal surveillance of their members, from speed cameras, to Internet tracking of consumption patterns, to electronic tagging. Theories of benign social evolution have also gone out of fashion, while the costs of bringing welfare and well-being to all have proved astronomical, made further unsustainable by waves of human envy and suspicion and by large-scale disasters, whether avoidable or not. Slenderer instances of those liberal features still exist within the broad confines of humanist liberal ideology, but the 1990s’ claim of Francis Fukuyama that liberal democracy has emerged victorious sounds as hollow as George W. Bush’s promise over a decade ago to bring ‘freedom and democracy to Iraq’. In particular, as will be argued in
Chapter 7
, the unfortunately named ‘neoliberalism’ has discarded the third and fourth liberal sheets, and has partly re-written the second liberal sheet of free trade, leaving a heavily thinned-out sheaf that has little bearing on the complexity, diversity, and ethical force of the liberal heritage.

Chapter 4

The morphology of liberalism

The permeable boundaries between ideologies

Any analysis of liberalism would be incomplete without looking at its structure. That will help us to determine how liberalism’s durable, as well as its more transient, features can identify it as a member of a distinctive ideological family. In so doing this chapter complements the approach offered in
Chapter 3
. We can observe the growth, changes, and diseases of a tree over a long period, and we can study its enduring biochemical properties and shape. Both tell us different things about the same plant. By thus doubling our perspective on liberalism we can attain a fuller understanding of what it encompasses.

The morphological approach examines the detailed structure of an ideology in order to ascertain the typical patterns of argumentation it contains. Specifically, it investigates the minutiae, the micro-components, of the ideology in question with an eye to detecting the configurations of the political concepts it employs. All ideologies, liberalism included, appeal to central ideas and concepts they wish to promote or defend, but each ideology orders its ideas and concepts in a different, and distinctly identifiable, pattern. If, as suggested in
Chapter 3
, the layers of liberalism are disjointed and patchily linked rather than seamlessly continuous, the morphological approach explores which features of liberalism compose a recognizable conceptual profile. It helps to validate the claim that the various liberalisms that can be historically and empirically observed are nonetheless part of a broad liberal family that displays considerable continuity. After all, the label ‘liberal’ applied to various instances of political thinking suggests a common or overlapping denominator, unless—as will be argued in
Chapter 7
—liberal features are deliberately misdescribed. If there are common components, all cases of liberal thinking will display them. If they do not display them then, whatever label they may be given, they do not belong to the ideology that has come to be termed ‘liberalism’.

We can now elaborate on what was suggested in
Chapter 1
. The morphological continuity of liberalism takes into account numerous permutations and decontestations within the liberal family. They allow for considerable internal flexibility among liberalisms and consequently for the durability and adaptability of that ideology as a whole. That flexibility is attained through two features that the morphological approach reveals. First, the spatial arrangements that obtain among the concepts assembled in an ideology allow for many combinations and variants. Ideologies arrange their main ideas in close proximity so that they are mutually reinforcing. For example, liberty, progress, and democracy have been closely bound together in liberal thought since the middle of the 19th century, ensuring that it is difficult to argue for the one without the others. At the same time, different variants of the same ideology also create distance between their favoured concepts and other concepts they regard as harmful to the views they wish to promote. Thus in many cases liberals have disassociated economic liberty and human welfare from each other, especially in layer four liberalism and—with contrasting consequences—in rival ideological offshoots such as neoliberalism and libertarianism.

Second, the variable weighting of the ideational components of an ideology elevates the significance of one of its concepts in relation to another. For example, though all liberals heavily emphasize personal choice and liberty as central characteristics of liberalism, one version of liberalism wishes to bestow greater importance on human sociability and mutual responsibility, while another insists that the end-product of liberalism is a legitimate and consensual constitutional order. So while two instances of liberal thinking may contain similar ideas, the order of priority and import of those ideas can be reshuffled.

All that does not overrule the evidence of liberalism’s historical diversity and the partial manifestations of different liberalisms, but it offers a key to decoding political discourses. In doing that it becomes easier to allocate the worldviews and the meanings that political debates carry to a distinct ideological grouping. Of course, there are hybrid and truncated instances of such discourses that may straddle the boundaries between liberal and non-liberal patterns. Liberals will share some elements of their thinking with extensive neighbouring ideological families such as conservatism, socialism, or anarchism—though not necessarily the same ones. Both conservatives and liberals value social stability. Socialists share with liberals a commitment to increasing the life chances of the members of a society, but they do not go about it in the same way, often preferring to change radically the divisions between social classes or even to annihilate them, and they have a dim view of excessive private property. The liberal concern for well-being, individual development, and equality of opportunity is not easily distinguishable from a social democratic attachment to those values. Anarchists have a very strong conception of human liberty but they do not share liberals’ ideas about constitutional government.

The boundaries between ideologies are not rigid but permeable and it is up to us as students of liberalism to decide on whether the movement of ideas across those boundaries is eroding the difference between any two proximate ideologies, or whether the migration is limited, so that sufficiently clear differences are retained. In most cases it is possible to say of a belief system or a set of political discourses that they either occupy space within the liberal domain or they do not. If one can discern a durable use of the term ‘liberal’, there is a prima facie case for checking it for continuities, however mindful we should be of allowing leeway for newer variants as well as the discarding of older ones. By analogy, dwellings across our planet contain kitchens of very different kinds, but they are still recognizably kitchens. Kitchens may have changed considerably over the centuries but they still share the common elements of food preparation sites attached to sources of heat and water. Liberalisms, too, share common components even though they have been adapted to greatly changed circumstances and priorities.

The liberal core

What, then, are the liberal commonalities? What are the ideas to be found in all liberalisms, irrespective of their spatial position or their relative weight within each manifestation of liberalism? As suggested in
Chapter 1
, ideologies are composed of core concepts that have considerable durability. That means, first, that their persistence can be empirically ascertained by examining different instances of a given ideology and, second, that deprived of such a core concept, that ideology would not be recognizable, or mutate into a member of a different family. We can illustrate that with the concept of
liberty
, or
freedom
. Unsurprisingly, liberty is a valued core feature of liberalism that runs through its multiple versions. Unsurprisingly, if we were to remove the idea of liberty from any such version, liberalism would forfeit an absolutely crucial distinguishing element. It is simply unimaginable to entertain, and empirically impossible to find, a variant of liberalism that dispenses with the concept of liberty. But nor is it the case that any ideology that refers to liberty is ipso facto liberal.

Of course, to state that the concept of liberty is indispensable to liberalism is only the beginning of a long story. To announce ‘I am free’ is an incomplete statement that hangs in the air. All it does is to suggest that I am not being constrained by someone else or something. It immediately draws in a further question: ‘by whom?’ or ‘by what?’ Are other people the potential constraint? Do laws constitute a major constraint on individuals? Are there additional constraints that prevent me from being free? Perhaps poverty, so that I don’t have the means to realize my choices? Perchance ignorance, so that I cannot make informed choices? Maybe preventable ill-health, which renders me too unwell to act on my free desires? Possibly the lack of meaningful work, so that I cannot exercise my abilities? Or discrimination on grounds of gender, race, religion, or ethnicity, so that I am barred by social prejudice from living a good life? All those, too, act as constraints on my liberty and we have noted them when discussing layer four liberalism.