Shades of Gray

...For Gray, Rawls is just the latest figure in this tradition—a theorist whose originality derives largely from his unconvincing claim to have left such pretensions behind...

...For early liberals like Hobbes and Locke, the goods of social peace and economic prosperity are endangered by the irrational enthusiasm of those in possession of divine truth...

...Liberal governments certainly require fewer sacrifices than other political systems, but this is not the same as saying that political systems should strive to attain complete indifference to the good...

...Fortunately, other statements in his book—particularly those having to do with religion—reveal that modus vivendi liberalism actually presupposes a more substantive (though half-hidden) highest good...

...From the comprehensive view of human nature and God on which Locke’s doctrine of toleration is based, to the sublime constitutionalism of Kant and the economistic antistatism of Hayek, liberal thinkers have been more inclined to pursue quasi-theological ambitions than to take sober account of the contours of the human condition...

...No such consensus is possible, according to Gray, and liberal political philosophers have proved themselves blind to this fact time and time again...

...But liberalism has another face—one that Gray believes is far more responsive to political life...

...No wonder it found favor in the American academy, where the reigning liberal orthodoxy is forever looking to show that its partisan commitments correspond to the moral order of things...

...When he tries to tell us what that good is, however, he can say only that it is realized by "the application of value-pluralism to political practice...

...When we differ deeply as to the content of the good, an appeal to rights will not help us," Gray writes, for "different views of rights spring from different views of the good...

...This distinction is what enables Rawls to claim neutrality for himself while defending the most moralistic of political programs...

...A society organized on the principle of modus vivendi is one in which different groups reach an agreement to disagree about the good— and in which such an agreement requires no significant sacrifice or compromise...

...There is no way to speak about politics without talking about the good...

...Hence a genuinely liberal government must be based on the truth that "the good life comes in many varieties" and thus also on the truth that "the search for a rational consensus on the best way of life" is futile and even politically dangerous...

...It becomes clear early in Two Faces of Liberalism that, despite his spirited criticism of contemporary academic liberalism, Gray's ultimate ambition is to out-Rawls Rawls...

...But why does Gray think liberalism needs to go beyond toleration, when pluralism appears to issue in a rather intolerant dismissal of religion...

...Political practice, however, gives us reason to doubt it...

...As a "political project, not a moral ideal," it does not enforce "any supreme good...

...In the real world of terrorists and death camps, ethnic hatreds and demagogic dictators, such indifference is both careless and morally irresponsible...

...Even Ralph Nader's ill-fated campaign attacked corporate America not for the sake of mischief, but rather from a conviction that doing so would serve the common good of the nation...

...John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, stands among the most potent critics of the agnostic liberalism of Rawls and his many epigones...

...Like many postmodernists, then, Gray stands against those, like Rawls, who would transform us into moral clones of themselves to further a single view of how we should live...

...The answer is that, in the end, the good to which Gray is committed demands it...

...First articulated by Hobbes and Hume, and revived by Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, this form of liberalism sees politics as the means by which people with deeply divided views can live with one another...

...From its origins in seventeenth-century Europe, liberalism has always had a problem with piety...

...Understood in this way, liberalism is a political theory that recognizes the ineradicable fact of "value pluralism...

...These pluralistic insights lead Gray to propose the ideal of a modus vivendi—a truce among irreconcilable views that does not presuppose its own view of the good...

...But holding up pluralism as a good makes as much sense as being passionately committed to apathy...

...In its Lockean form, classical liberalism proposes to defuse this danger with the doctrine of toleration, which teaches that people of other faiths have an equal right to worship God as they believe He demands...

...As we watch the sorry spectacle of one of our most gifted philosophers becoming enmeshed in this bundle of contradictions, we can only hope that the flight to neutrality in political theory is a fad that will soon fade...

...Despite superficial similarities, the difference between the classically liberal notion of toleration and Gray's modus vivendi liberalism is profound...

...But Rawls is unrepentant...

...Or at least this is what Gray would like us to believe...

...Hitler and Stalin did more damage in pursuit of their monistic visions, but for Gray, the underlying impulse is the same for Rawls as it is for Hitler and Stalin...

...We get an answer of sorts in the peculiar passages of Gray's book in which he suggests that modus vivendi liberalism is so consistently neutral that it won't even defend liberal government against its enemies: "Human rights can be respected in a variety of regimes, liberal and otherwise," so there is no reason to think a liberal democratic order is inherently preferable...

...That, at any rate, is what Aristotle believed...

...Gray's liberalism thus succeeds where Rawls's fails: It is thoroughly neutral with regard to the good...

...As he writes at a particularly revealing moment, he intends his liberalism to insure that different ways of life are "accorded respect...

...tyre scored points against Rawls for his neglect of the good as a topic of philosophical discussion and debate...

...But if our politicians demonstrate Aristotle's acuity, many of those who spend their lives theorizing about politics tell us something different...

...And respect cannot be guaranteed by mere toleration...

...For the pluralist, argument and debate do not "yield consensus on the good life" so much as perpetual disagreement about the good...

...For Gray, Rawls's attempt to find a "rational consensus" produces an anti-political legal-ism...

...But the attempt to realize this good of equal respect ultimately leads him, paradoxically, to disrespect certain goods—namely, religious ones...

...What would such a genuinely indifferent politics look like...

...Though liberal societies should foster agreement about rights, they must remain impartial about the good...

...Which is to say, Aristotle was right...

...In Political Liberalism (1993), for instance, he claims that moral rights are based on an "overlapping consensus" of citizens with radically different "comprehensive views" of what is morally good...

...In Enlightenment's Wake (1995), Endgames (1997), and the acclaimed study Isaiah Berlin (1996), Gray developed an attack that has now reached a culmination in Two Faces of Liberalism...

...Gray himself seems to admit as much when, in a moment of startling inconsistency, he writes that "like any political philosophy, modus vivendi articulates [its own] view of the good...

...Gray's hostility to a politics that is oriented toward the good thus turns out, after all, to be motivated by a concern for the good of equal respect for all views of the good...

...Hence, unlike the classical liberals who could be satisfied with toleration because they wished only to secure the good of peaceful coexistence, Gray is led to pluralism by comparatively higher hopes...

...Rawls is able to appeal to supposed agreement on morality only by suppressing the fact that "no contemporary society contains a consensus on fairness that is deep or wide enough to ground a 'theory of justice.'" As Gray sees it, Rawls's "fundamentalist" liberalism is the latest in a long line of theories that have tried, unrealis-tically, to base politics on a shared view of the best way of life...

...It aims merely at "reconciling conflicting goods...

...Instead of thinking through the relative truth and error in each partisan view of the good, as Aristotle tried to do, Rawls practiced a form of political theory that was deeply disingenuous—employing philosophical argument to justify the views of left-wing Democrats while claiming political neutrality...

...It should come as no surprise that religion is the key to Gray's deepest intentions...

...Whatever one makes of this strangely sanguine view of illiberal politics, there can be little doubt that Gray is articulating an anti-political view of human social life...

...After all, doesn't every political community hold up certain beliefs, actions, and ways of life and demand that the comprehensive views of its citizens conform to this collective standard...

...If anything, his insistence on his own neutrality has grown more strident...

...Where classical liberalism allows individuals and groups to believe that their faith grants them knowledge of the best way of life (deviations from which are merely tolerated), pluralism teaches that, strictly speaking, there is no best way of life...

...it is rather that he has a vision of the good...

...The problem, as Gray sees it, is not that Rawls fails to defend his half-hidden vision of the good...

...Listening to the arguments of politicians today, one finds at least some evidence that he was right: Republicans are convinced that the good of the country requires the encouragement of personal initiative and individual responsibility, while Democrats believe in the goodness of a radically egalitarian society...

...It teaches that the religious person's life is, as Gray puts it, based on an "illusion...

...In the years following the publication of A Theory of Justice, such thinkers as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MaclnDamon Linker is a writer in New York City...

...Only in theory can political communities afford this kind of indifference to their own good that Gray holds out as an ideal...

...At least since the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971, mainstream academic political theory has neglected questions of the good...

...Modus vivendi liberalism abandons this impulse...