Liberalism: What it is and Why it Matters
Note: The following has been adapted from an original post by the author on The American Liberal
Liberalism has often been considered the most successful political ideology in modern history, coinciding with vast and measurable improvements in human welfare, but recently new threats have arisen in the form of various anti-liberal populist and nationalist movements, which have gained some notable victories in liberal democracies in Europe and America. At the same time, some who self-apply the label ‘liberal’ have at times advocated decidedly illiberal ideas and policies, making the job of those who would defend liberalism from its critics that much more onerous. In the wake of these upheavals, we liberals must cogently recapitulate the core principles of our philosophy and contextualize its role in contemporary society in order to defend it both from the external and internal challenges it faces.
First, just what do we mean by ‘liberalism?’ It should be noted that what we mean here is not identical with the more narrow colloquial use of the term common in America, often referring to anything that happens to be advanced by the Democratic party, or a different but similarly constrained usage prevalent elsewhere in the world referring to a more conservative take on market economics. Liberalism is considered here as a broader, more comprehensive philosophy of government from which both of these more narrow traditions sometimes borrow.
Liberal philosophy has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment, but has precedents reaching as far back as ancient Athens. As with many broad ideological categories, liberalism is not so much a single philosophy as it is a family of philosophies united by their possession of some number of shared principles. Liberal philosophers have given different accounts of these principles and come to divergent conclusions about their particular implications. It would hardly be possible to do justice to them all. As our aim is not historical study but defending the liberal tradition, I shall simply try to articulate a broad, non-rigorous bird’s-eye-view conception of liberalism worth defending today.
One of the most central and foundational principles of liberalism involves a general consideration from moral philosophy about what sorts of things matter ethically. Liberalism takes the individual to be the primary object of moral concern. This is not to be confused with egoism or opposition to community and collective action. What is meant here is that what ultimately matters is the good of individuals—those autonomous, sentient beings who have the capacity to experience happiness or suffering, rather than such alternative candidates for moral ends as “The good of the party,” “The will of the king,” “The faith,” “The race,” etc. Liberalism takes as a fundamental principle that the greatest moral good is the flourishing, well-being, or happiness of sentient individuals, and that just political systems are established to further this end.
Next, we come to the namesake of liberalism. Liberalism holds that liberty is necessary for, or at least strongly conducive to, the individual’s achievement of happiness. Just as happiness or well-being is the primary moral good, freedom is the primary political good. Any political system calculated to improve the flourishing of its citizens must secure the freedom of individuals to pursue their own happiness. This principle is immortally enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, in the phrase, “inalienable rights…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
From this very general principle, many particular consequences follow, though exactly which liberties count as legitimate or important is a subject of dispute. Liberal societies have enshrined various freedoms into their constitutions and political cultures, but a few are largely agreed upon, such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to vote for one’s leaders, freedom to own property and to engage in commerce.
Of these, the freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental. It was considered of such great importance by the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill that he wrote, “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Free expression holds the place it does in liberal philosophy precisely because it creates the framework wherein debate can occur from which truth can be uncovered and by which other freedoms may be argued for and gained. It was this particular feature that Martin Luther King extolled in his “Mountaintop” speech calling for America to live up to her promises when he said, “Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.” Despite the brutal violations of this right by Bull Connor and others, its existence as a norm enshrined in the constitution and in the body politic allowed for King to make this argument, to organize, and to march on Washington in protest. Likewise, the success of numerous other reform movements has been predicated upon the right to freedom of expression.
Notions of equality are also central to the liberal project. Though individuals differ in myriad ways, in natural endowment of abilities, in wealth, ethnicity, or circumstances of birth, we are all alike in the way that matters most, our ability to experience happiness or flourishing on the one hand and suffering on the other. All have an equal stake in the achievement of happiness, thus all ought to possess equal rights under the law and equal access to public opportunities.
The principle of secularism, or separation of state and religion holds an important place in liberal government as well. Government should not impede the private practice of religion, nor should religious dogma impede the public practice of good governance. Reason and empirical science form the basis for good government policy capable of bettering the welfare of citizens.
Another important feature of liberalism is skepticism. Knowledge of the fallibility of human reason entails that previous errors must be able to be corrected by amendments to the constitution and the laws. Skepticism regarding the accumulation and concentration of power means that distribution of power is an important element of the liberal theory of government. Separation of governmental powers among different institutions, with each forming a check to the others, is one practical instantiation of this principle which serves as a safeguard to the freedom of the individual and a bulwark against government corruption. Democratic accountability in the form of representative, deliberative legislative bodies guards against the the tyranny of the few over the many. Constitutionally enumerated civil liberties, along with independent courts capable of striking down laws which violate them, guard against the tyranny of the many over the few.
Another notable feature of the liberal ethos is the open, pluralistic society. What binds a liberal society together is not base tribalism, or ethnic or religious nationalism, but a notion of civic virtue underpinned by a shared commitment to the principles previously enumerated. Liberal patriotism is a patriotism of ideals, capable of extending beyond the boundaries of race, religion, or national origin. Trade and immigration are not seen as threats to a nation’s greatness, but only serve to enhance the overall prosperity, knowledge, and cultural wealth of a nation.
One oft noted characteristic of liberalism is its generic or abstract character. Liberalism has been criticized on this basis as being sterile, cold, not respective of cultural distinctions and notions of group belonging, but I believe this generality in fact to be one of its greatest benefits. Liberalism at its root seeks to understand political freedom with respect to a notion of the individual, abstracted from all morally irrelevant particulars. This conceptualization is intentionally thin, meaning to capture the idea expressed above—that it is the sentient individual which is the seat of moral concern.
Liberalism intends to set out a framework for the freedoms of individuals purely in virtue of their moral status as sentient individuals such that, from these general conceptions, questions of freedom in more particular circumstances can be adjudicated. A woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, for example, can be said to be a special case of the individual right to bodily autonomy. Not all individuals are women, or are capable of pregnancy, but all individuals have the same stake in bodily autonomy. Similar situations obtain for other rights. Defining liberalism in generic terms, in virtue of something all individuals share, allows liberalism its ethical universality and provides a unifying message that cuts across race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and other such factors ancillary to one’s core nature as a sentient individual of moral value, and unrelated to one’s moral character.
This family of principles thus forms a certain framework through which particular policy questions can be answered, and a set of general premises upon which one can base public policy arguments. We can ask, does a proposed policy tend to enhance the freedoms and opportunities available to the individual citizen? Does a proposed structural government reform promote the sort of governance necessary to reliably and sustainably effect these ends?
Within this framework, the question of what sort of general freedoms apply to individuals as such is debated. One purported distinction which forms the basis of much of the debate is that between negative rights and positive rights. While there are various definitions available, negative rights can be understood as those rights which impose a negative duty on others, i.e. a duty to refrain from doing something, while positive rights are those which impose a positive duty on others, i.e. require something to be provided. Examples of the former are rights like the right to life or the freedom of expression, which require that others refrain from killing or censoring. Examples of the latter would be your right to an attorney or the right to healthcare, which require that the government provide counsel or healthcare for the indigent.
The distinction itself has been questioned both on theoretical and practical grounds, but it does help to illuminate a bifurcation within the liberal tradition between what could be termed its “right” and “left” wings. There are those who accept negative rights but who are skeptical of positive rights, often on the basis that the imposition of the taxes required for the state to provide these rights entails a weakening of the negative right to property. This group comprises various libertarian and fiscally-conservative-but-socially-liberal types. As one moves further leftward within the liberal tradition, more positive rights are included in the canon and property rights are not conceived as absolute, but amenable to exceptions in cases where other rights conflict. Most liberal democracies have in fact enshrined examples of both sorts into their constitutions or statutes, and the unconditional enforcement of many of the standard fare negative rights as a practical matter requires the provision of a system of courts, police, and lawyers—effectively a positive right.
There are as many positions as to the taxonomy of rights as there are liberal philosophers, none without objections. I do not intend here to provide such a comprehensive taxonomy, but to sketch a general framework, a manner of thinking that serves to approximate what I think to be a more promising understanding of individual rights. It begins not with an abstract notion of rights and duties, but with an understanding of freedom based on the first-person lived experience of individuals.
Freedom, from this perspective, is the real ability to choose those things which one values and to live the life one desires, not merely the absence of interference. In order for the freedom to do X to be of any tangible value in the lives of individuals, achieving X must be a real opportunity or power, or capability for that individual, otherwise one might well say that Tantalus is free to drink from the water whenever he likes, or that one is free to sprout wings and fly, provided no other individual or state power is preventing them from doing so. Interference from others can thwart an individual from achieving their desires, but so can structural or natural impediments. Little can be done about the latter, but structural socioeconomic impediments can in many cases ameliorated by political action. An attempt to understand freedoms as real capabilities has been undertaken by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who provides a non-exhaustive list of candidate capabilities in her Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, an interesting and worthwhile read for those interested in liberal theory. These understandings of freedom point us in a more leftward direction, seeking to liberate the individual not only from unfreedom imposed upon individuals by state power, but also from unfreedom imposed by private powers or by the consequences of poverty or other structural impediments to self-determination.
A system of political rights can be assessed on this basis by empirical means. Measuring things like freedom and well-being across nation-states is a necessarily imperfect science, but a nonetheless valuable one in which political scientists have made great progress. Various indices such as the Human Development Index, the Freedom in the World report, and others give us means of comparing political systems, and more targeted research into the individual conditions of well being give us better ideas as to what core human freedoms should be valued most highly as political ideals.
The process of refining our understanding of freedom and well-being is a deliberative human process, always imperfect and subject to error, which highlights the importance of the interacting liberal principles previously enumerated—the skepticism of power, deliberative, participatory legislative bodies, checks and balances and the rest. The process of liberal reform is sometimes gradual and imperfect, but tangible and durable over time.
This is precisely what we’ve seen through the history of liberal thought and reforms. To borrow an idea from Dr. King, the moral arc of liberal societies is long, but it bends toward freedom and justice. Once a society enshrines in its character and constitution liberal norms, it affords itself the levers by which generations of reformers to come will be able to effect change. America is a good case study in this phenomenon. Certain basic liberal ideals were enshrined in its constitution and founding philosophy: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” “All men are created equal,” the freedoms of speech, religion, the press, assembly, and petition, the right to privacy, trial by jury, and other protections. Though these principles were not all implemented at the time of their adoption, and are not perfectly realized even now, they have formed the basis for the great reform movements that have defined successive generations of American life. Similar trends have been seen in other countries adopting liberal constitutions, from Western Europe to Asia.
It is a testament to the power of these core liberal ideas that the greatest liberatory reforms in our history have come about not by overturning these fundamental principles, but by recapitulating them, calling out the hypocrisy in the failure of government to live up to them, and taking them to their logical conclusions, thus enlarging their reach. It was thus that Frederick Douglass argued against slavery, excoriating the hypocrisy of a nation who would proclaim liberal principles of equality and liberty while allowing bondage and subjection within its borders. King did the same in the next century, saying:
All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.
Likewise Susan B. Anthony on women’s suffrage:
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government - the ballot.
In the great progressive leaps forward of both the distant and recent past, from abolition to civil rights to the rights of women and LGBT individuals, we find appeals to liberal principles at the very heart of the rhetoric of these reform movements.
Though we have come far from where we started, we have many mountains yet to climb. A thoroughgoing liberalism along the lines expressed above can make the case for continuing radical changes to the status quo, including sweeping criminal justice reform, drug legalization, universal basic income, universal healthcare, humane immigration reforms, sex workers’ rights, death with dignity, as well as structural government reforms such as electoral system reforms, an end to the practice of gerrymandering, and more. The core principles of liberalism thus provide us with a map of unrealized and partially realized reforms, and a flexible but powerful blueprint for continual progress toward a freer, more just, and happier world.