Up Toward Liberalism

...It's too crude, Rosenblum argues, to think that liberals must exclude the genuine regard for communal life that their opponents often tap...

...As Gutmann shows, liberals have always insisted on the equality of persons...

...Rights here serve as barriers against state interference, marking and safeguarding the boundaries between different institutions...

...The root idea is this: The very idea of having a right against the state requires that there be some extrapolitical social space in which to stand...

...In fact Mill himself urged that democratic control of the workplace would and should be extended to the workers...

...it's only formal equality, not substantive equality, or only equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes or starting points, and so on...

...But take for instance the suggestion that liberals should care only about equality of opportunity...

...But (I tell you three times) it's true anyway...

...I don't tend to believe that academic books make all that much of a political difference...

...Even in public life there's room for the hero: Instead of merely voting, heroic citizens put their whole selves on display, challenging their opponents more forcibly and rallying others to their cause...

...any more than it's impossible to win a footrace when your opponent has a head start...

...No doubt there have been limits placed on that equality: It applies to men, not women, propertyholders, not the poor...

...But modern society has many extrapolitical settings: the market, the church, science, and so on...

...Romanticism and Liberalism Nancy Rosenblum's Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal SUMMER • 1989 • 357 Political Theory Thought is meditative, nuanced, deft on matters of moral psychology, and in my view those qualities more than compensate for its lack of philosophical rigor...

...if we all occupied the same roles, we'd be far more similar than we are now...

...The government, "so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all...

...Gutmann's argument here tells against another antiliberal refrain, one repeated numbingly for centuries but best represented these days in the work of Benjamin Barber...

...and, she argues, any romantic worth his salt would eschew them also, would see in them just those romantic excesses that ought to be chastened...

...She constructs an exchange between liberalism and romanticism, to see what each has to learn from the other...

...So Gutmann places the Fabian socialists squarely in the context of the liberal tradition and persuasively demonstrates the deep continuity between their work and that of their predecessors...

...That might mean antiliberals are on to some deep truths...

...tired of the family, she can go to a public rally...

...Gutmann argues that the typically liberal strands of Rawls's view in fact impel it toward democratic socialism...

...He well understood why one might hanker after the ancients, and think that something very valuable had been lost...

...For what she's discovered is that romantic longings for wholeness and sincerity are diametrically opposed to romantic longings for endless variety...

...in Liberalism Reconsidered), democracy is better thought of as government by discussion, and many liberal "limits" serve the end of democracy by ensuring that discussion and assembly remain open and vibrant...

...But there have always been good liberal arguments against such limits...

...liberalism is a laundry list of limits on the rights of democratic majorities...

...Focusing on Constant's celebrated lecture on the liberty of ancients and moderns, Holmes rebuts the everyday charge that liberalism is presociological or prehistorical, that liberal theorists move in a ghostly intellectual world where individual rights are perennially available...

...The world war, he urged, was the ultimate absurdity of self-deluded liberals...

...So, for instance, Holmes explores Constant's ambivalent response to Rousseau...

...And it was in this context that insincerity could be a signal virtue: Lying to one's neighbors could maintain one's autonomy, while sincerity could mean being turned in by a stranger...

...So a radical democrat should reject liberal limits...

...But Thoreau, Rosenblum urges, shows us how to make room for heroic displays in liberal society...

...So individuality itself depends on the availability of a wealth of different social experiences...

...History of Liberalism Stephen Holmes's Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism is an extremely rich account of liberalism, perhaps unfortunately packaged as a narrow scholarly monograph...

...This class needed some new ideas to justify its rise, to assist it in radically restructuring society...

...The image often accompanying this position is that of a race: it's fair, the argument goes, for everyone to run the race with the same rules, but it's not fair to insist that everyone cross the finish line at the same time, or run at the same pace...

...Such arguments have been made by John Stuart Mill and Georg Simmel: Rosenblum's contribution is to realize how well they serve romantic ends...

...For surely part of the fairness of a race lies in everyone beginning at the same starting line...

...New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984...

...Rosenblum's is another liberalism, in part because political theorists are now quite clear (or should be) that liberalism is a tradition, a family of disagreements, and not a single view...

...But why would it be a deep error to try to reclaim the ancients...

...Liberals championed capitalism when it seemed to them to further the interests of ordinary men and women: Indeed, capitalism might be thought superior to bastard feudal relations or onerous apprenticeships...

...Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, I've learned ruefully, is one of those books everyone knows the contents of, even though few have actually read it...

...And Holmes is no anachronistic pursuer of the timeless wisdom of political theory...

...Liberal society isn't, in fact, composed of solitary individuals...

...Fighting for their privileges and profits, mouthing the rhetoric of the common good and social order, they were "without the vision to perceive that the thing they called humanity was no other than the greed they served...

...So it seems that any viable conception of equality of opportunity must include some version of equality of starting points...

...Each social setting will draw on and develop a different facet of her rich personality...

...In the second half of her book she turns to Rawls's theory of justice...

...Quite the contrary, he argues: The very possibility of liberalism hangs on large-scale social change, in particular the progress of social differentiation, the emergence of increasingly separate social institutions and roles...

...First comes heroic individualism...

...But as Gutmann has argued elsewhere (notably in "How Liberal Is Democracy...

...instead we should ask what features of the social structure make them possible...

...This was heady stuff for our undergraduate: He wasn't quite aware yet that such an argument might be controversial...

...They were right: And in a country as emphatically liberal as ours, it's hardly judicious for leftists to disavow those resources...

...After all, he'd already run into much the same sort of thing at college...

...It could lead only to the overheated climate of Robespierre's France, where the noble term citoyen was perverted by a self-appointed secret police composed of informers...

...Her own earlier arguments undercut this stale juxtaposition...

...Rosenblum develops three different strategies for meeting romantic complaints...

...Ayn Rand even described big business as America's most persecuted minority...

...Their studied desire to be nonconformists should assure liberals that they're safe...

...But then the very schism that threatens wholeness, the public/private distinction, indeed the social differentiation that honeycombs modem society, can serve romantic ends...

...Liberalism came, then, as a new ideology to fit the needs of a new world...

...Liberalism, with its traditional emphasis on the formal impersonality of public life, must strike such individuals as barren...

...Liberals turned against capitalism when it seemed to them to be shackling ordinary men and women...

...SUMMER • 1989 • 355 Political Theory What follows is a brief sampling of some recent books prominent in this renaissance...

...Quite a lot, it turns out...

...Again, though, it's a capacious tradition...

...Some will think this version of liberalism is too far removed from Laski's, that whatever the demerits of his lumbering Marxism Laski was right in spying out an unholy alliance between liberalism and capitalism...

...I'd pick a quarrel with her reading of Thoreau: I think he mocks both liberalism and heroism even as he endorses them...

...Here are just some of the things Smith actually says about capitalism...

...Attempting in the name of the ancients to repoliticize everyday life would in this new context be a disaster...

...Next come shifting involvements...

...These three books are only a sample of a broader literature, and I've had to compress them greatly here...

...Equality in the Liberal Tradition The first half of Amy Gutmann's Liberal Equality is an exploration of the role played by equality in the liberal tradition...

...And the division of labor is radically dehumanizing...

...The labor market is coercive, since masters "can hold out much longer" in protracted disputes thanks to their savings...

...And I would place libertarianism within the bounds of the liberal tradition...

...The romantic wants bold displays of self...

...But I also learned that despite their honorable pedigree, despite how frequently they've been repeated by extremely intelligent people, they might be just plain wrong...

...So he moved to debunk it, suggesting for instance that the ancients' famed obsession with political participation was nothing but a solution to boredom, a boredom induced by the lack of other things to do...

...So the line went, in history classes, philosophy classes, sociology classes, and more...

...The undergraduate decided to skip that day's chocolate bar, plunked down his money, hiked over to the gorge, and started reading...

...In the end, liberal emancipation was nothing but the right of wealthy people to earn more money and squander more wealth, cheerfully oblivious to the plight of those around them...

...Celebrants of free speech and vigorous disagreement, often controversialists themselves, liberals argue with one another about the best rendition of liberal principles...

...Still, he thought, it must be a deep error to try to reclaim the world of ancient politics...

...If you spend eight hours a day on the job, taking orders from a manager or foreman, acting as what Aristotle and Marx alike would call an animate instrument of production, then what will become of your self-respect...

...The history of liberalism, he urged, wasn't "a conscious and persistent search" for representative self-government, universal suffrage, free association, individual autonomy, and the like...

...For no typically liberal doctrine is altered in her hands...

...In Holmes's hands, Constant's reactions to the political predicaments of postrevolutionary France become a springboard for offering a vibrant new account of liberalism, treading what looked like drearily familiar ground and generating new insights...

...Liberalism, they thought, gave them plenty of resources for criticizing the structure of the modern workplace...

...liberalism usually promises civil peace and private happiness...

...Indeed it's not always clear where Constant stops and Holmes begins...

...it had exhausted whatever political vitality it had decades before...

...The liberalism on the rise, in large part as a result of the work of these authors, isn't the ideological smokescreen for the bourgeoisie that concerned Laski...

...Fellow tradesmen "seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices...

...Liberalism was a theory about presocial individuals who magically popped into the world pursuing their self-interest...

...Modem individuals, in her view, are susceptible to a characteristically romantic set of longings, for wholeness, spontaneity, selfexpression, warmth, and the like...

...This suggestion isn't novel, of course, but Gutmann places it emphatically at the heart of the liberal tradition...

...One of Rawls's primary goods is the social bases of self-respect...

...Nancy Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought...

...Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism...

...Gutmann must be right, I think, that it's easy for liberals to argue against certain limits to equality...

...Democracy is a matter of popular sovereignty...

...The rich are incurably vain, striving "to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves...

...So followed a galloping tour through the Puritans and Locke, Smith and Bentham, and countless other figures...

...The 356 • DISSENT Political Theory refrain: Democracy and liberalism are, in the last analysis, opposed...

...I don't know why Gutmann chose in her Democratic Education (Princeton University Press, 1987) to identify herself as a democrat, not a liberal...

...In private society, individuals can be as dismissive of traditional norms as they choose...

...The Greeks simply didn't have that: In their lives as in their theories, the polis pervaded virtually all spheres of life...

...rather, "these were the ends its more ultimate purposes caused it to serve...

...Perhaps I should add that in his Principles of Political Economy and the later "Chapter on Socialism" John Stuart Mill picked up many of these same themes, urging that his contemporaries were slavishly addicted to the rights of private property, and giving such utopian socialists as Charles Fourier extremely respectful consideration...

...in fact he didn't know enough to realize that the subtitle was a giveaway...

...At its core, though, was whatever noxious privilege would serve the bourgeoisie...

...Having some interest in political theory, he picked up a copy of Harold Laski's The Rise of Liberalism: The Philosophy of a Business Civilization (1936...

...Still, her argument is more antiromantic than she lets on...

...Those strategies shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, but they also shouldn't be romantically celebrated...

...That there might be liberal arguments against capitalism will strike readers brought up on the likes of Laski as fanciful at best, wholly misinformed at worst...

...Still, the odds are that he'll be wealthier...

...As romantic individuals, though, they're hardly likely to become fascist leaders with surging mobs behind them...

...Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980...

...Yet there has also been something of a renaissance of liberalism, brought on in part by impatience with the portrait offered by its critics...

...And it's not impossible that I'll end up wealthier than Bush, Books Discussed in this Essay Amy Gutmann, Liberal Equality...

...No doubt: But the image itself tells against the easy separation of equality of opportunity from equality of starting points...

...claiming to be about the rights of all, it really forwarded the rights of those with money and was blind to workers and the poor...

...But her argument doesn't depend so strictly on her exegesis...

...It's a shrewd argument, maybe too shrewd: No self-respecting romantic would be deterred by the thought that her actions were destructively excessive...

...True, antiliberal polemics are still big business in political theory...

...Not that Marxists were in charge of the university...

...Still, if liberalism can salvage 358 • DISSENT Minilion everything that's sane and defensible about romanticism, that's more than good enough...

...Though she sometimes describes these as transforming liberalism, they're better described, I think, as supplementing liberalism...

...Rawls is officially agnostic about the choice between capitalism and socialism: he wants principles of justice that could guide either sort of economic order...

...their independence of mind coheres nicely with traditional liberal sentiments...

...He finally becomes "incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation [or] of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life...

...The undergraduate was me, natch, and I headed off to graduate school to work in political theory...

...Fnally comes communitarianism...

...Gutmann's own interest in the egalitarian tradition lies in extending its commitments to democratic participation in everyday life...

...A new economic order, he learned, arose at the end of the Middle Ages, in the fifteenth century, and thrust the middle class into prominence...

...Workers have various strategies for salvaging their self-respect in the face of various forms of oppression...

...Instead—and it's a noteworthy achievement— she brings to bear new justificatory resources, new arguments and considerations that liberals can draw on to assuage romantic longings, to "bring them home" to the very liberalism they initially found repulsive...

...The book cost a quarter...

...Not that liberals want a social world in which we're all compelled to be alike: This is a common charge among conservatives, although I don't know of any liberals who have come close to it...

...It also might mean they're repetitive and boring...

...Constant himself, it turns out, was tremendously sympathetic to romantic critiques of modern society as phony, cold, impersonal, insincere, a world where men disappear, leaving nothing but masks behind...

...Liberals rightly eschew some of the demands current communitarians are making...

...And it's characteristic of recent liberals to downplay or even deny any such alliance...

...To translate back to the market, if I begin my adult life penniless and George Bush begins with millions, we can both strive to make more money...

...There's no reason to believe that libertarians or American "conservatives" would fare particularly well in an argument with leftist liberals (assuming the latter aren't quite extinct yet...

...Granted, libertarians continue to press the merits of laissez-faire capitalism...

...It's full of expressive associations, and provided individuals aren't stuck in them against their will, liberals have no reason to complain about them...

...Historians might raise quizzical eyebrows at the thought that we have much to learn about our political dilemmas from an exploration of the days of Napoleon, the Bourbons, and the like...

...Rosenblum explores further communitarian possibilities, but I think she means to reject them decisively...

...So we shouldn't ask, with Robert Nozick, what features of the self give rise to rights...

...I want then to close by trying to dispel the suspicion that Laski was right about that much...

...There I learned the finicky baroque variations that have been played on this antiliberal theme...

...The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become...

...they can put themselves on display in the service of idiosyncratic visions...

...Then as now, that was a fantasy of journalists and politicians wholly out of touch with university life...

...It's a far more subtle, incisive tradition, one surely worthy of attention and respect — indeed, as I'll urge below, one especially worthy of the respect of leftists...

...Yielding control of the workplace to the workers would serve as a public acknowledgment of their dignity...

...So presto...

...Laski conceded that liberalism had introduced some worthy emancipations...

...In Laski's hands, liberalism seemed to have a mind of its own, frequently outwitting the confused mortals who championed it...

...The romantic wants expansive self-development and hates the thought of being stuck in some rut...

...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987...

...SUMMER • 1989 359...

...What can liberals say to them...

...But one didn't have to be any sort of Marxist to be an antiliberal...

...He didn't know that Laski was a maverick Marxist...

...Laski finished his study on a bitter but urgently apocalyptic note...

...If Smith and Mill said these things, perhaps we should reevaluate our conception of the tie between liberalism and capitalism...

...and so on...

...Still, he'd say, antiliberalism has been around at least as long as liberalism, and hasn't changed all that much...

...Still, the revival of liberalism in the academy could provide political ammunition for those seeking to state anew the case for democratic socialism...

...some of them are surveyed elsewhere in this issue...

...The romantic can dance from one social setting to another: Tired of absorption in commerce, she can head to the family...

...Again, though, they should suggest a vision of liberalism far removed from Laski's, far removed from the wooden and one-dimensional account fastened on by antiliberals...