critiqueofliberalism

The Conservative Critique of Liberalism

John Skorupski

University of St Andrews

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1. Philosophical Liberalism and Liberal Order

There is a philosophical critique of liberalism that hangs together, can properly be said to be conservative, has a considerable tradition behind it, and is interesting and important. But it takes some effort, historical and philosophical, to locate it.

A first task is to dispel some terminological haze. ‘Liberalism’ has come to mean many, often incompatible, things. American critics of ‘liberalism’ and French critics of ‘(neo-)liberalism’, for example, have quite different things in mind. Critics of ‘liberalism’ in one sense may themselves be ‘liberals’ in another. Likewise with the word ‘conservatism’. It can denote (1) a tough-minded version of liberalism that places emphasis on free exchange, a small but strong state, private initiative and individual responsibility. This, or something in this area, is what people mean by ‘neo-liberalism’. Then (2) there is a practical, down-to-earth attitude which we can call practical conservatism. Practical conservatives see virtue in keeping the show on the road – conserving and when necessary refreshing institutions and habits that work, whatever they are. They know that sometimes ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’1 But they may well take pride in having no philosophical view, unless it be an anti-abstract one. Importantly, they make no universal claims; what works is what works here. Finally (3) there is conservatism in the sense of an attitude that sees continuity, community, tradition and hierarchy as organic elements of a good society, and gives ethical grounds for doing so. In this chapter we shall be interested mainly in (3), but also in (2) in so far as it incorporates an anti-

universalistic attitude.

Distinguished from these two conservative views is another outlook, viscerally hostile to liberalism, but which it is misleading to think of as either ‘conservative’, or ‘left’ – it is too out of sorts with modernity, or the ‘Enlightenment’, to be either. I shall come back to it in section 5.

What then is liberalism? We should distinguish two levels. At an intellectual level liberalism is a set of ideas that hang together as a moral and political philosophy; at the political level it is a political ethos that provides a framework for policy. At both levels it is a broad church with left and right wings. Our concern is with

conservative criticisms from outside the broad church, not the debates of left and right within it; and our focus will be on the underlying philosophical issues, that is, on philosophical liberalism.

I shall refer to the policy-framing level of liberalism as the liberal order. It comprises (i) equal liberty for all citizens, of which an essential element is the right to act as one chooses subject to a law that protects the equal rights of others; (ii) a distinctive and special protection of liberty of thought and discussion, and (iii) the entrenchment of these principles, either in an effective legal framework that codifies them in basic laws or constitutional safeguards guaranteeing equality of every citizen under law, or (perhaps) in a common law tradition that effectively does the same.  1 Tancredi’s remark to the Prince, in The Leopard (Lampedusa, 1960, p. 27). More sententiously: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” Burke, 1967 (1790), p. 19

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Behind the liberal order have stood ideas that flow from a long philosophical tradition. They can be traced back to natural law theorists, and philosophers such as Locke or Montesquieu. However, while important elements of liberalism were present in early modern Europe they came together in the specific unified form, which I shall describe as philosophical liberalism,2 only after the French Revolution. One

important feature of this new outlook is that liberals came to recognize dangers on the left as well as on the right, and to seek principled grounds on which to distinguish themselves from both. Another is that they took on board philosophical and romantic critiques of the Enlightenment. By the same token, it was also in the nineteenth century that significant criticisms of philosophical liberalism emerged on the left as well as on the right.

With this context in mind we can set out the philosophical liberalism that

conservatives reject. Think of it as comprising three principal tenets, intertwined and all contested by one or another kind of philosophical conservative:

? Individualism in ethics. This is the view that all value and right reduces to value of or for individuals, or to the rights of individuals.

? A doctrine of equal respect for all human beings based on the belief that all are equally capable of self-governance.

? A doctrine of liberty of thought and discussion based on belief in the unrestricted autonomy of reason – that is, the rational capacities of individual people – as the sole and sufficient canon of objective truth.

It is easy to pay lip service to these theses; taken seriously they are strong doctrine. Their shape and strength will become clearer as we consider criticisms. However, before coming to them let me note some other limits that I am placing on the liberalism that critics target.

First, I have not included the right to democratic participation as a defining part of liberal political order. We may think that democratic rights of participation in collective self-government follow from the basic philosophical outlook of liberalism that I have just described; alternatively, that if they do not then they should simply be added to the liberal order on good grounds of their own. Either way we tend to think of ‘liberal democracy’ as a package deal. However the idea that liberalism and

democracy are necessarily linked is quite a recent development. It is not obvious that liberalism entails democracy or indeed that democracy entails liberalism.3 Many liberals have worried that democracy might turn out to be incompatible with liberal order, and if it is, they have been ready to prefer liberalism to unrestricted democracy. The view that democracy could be inimical to liberty was influential at least to the end of World War II, deriving, earlier, from the Federalist Papers, then Tocqueville’s account of democracy in America and, later and more dramatically, from the experience of political cataclysm in early twentieth-century Europe.

To highlight the conceptual distinction between democracy and liberal order, imagine a meritocracy in which the ruling class is selected on a self-perpetuating basis  2 Or ‘classical’ liberalism – where by the word ‘classical’ I refer to the philosophical liberalism that emerged at this time, not to an economic theory of free markets. (See, for example, the distinction Mill makes, in On Liberty, ch 5, para. 4, between the liberty principle which he there argues for, and the doctrine of free trade which, as he says, rests on different grounds; compare his nuanced discussion of laisser-faire in the Principles of Political Economy, Bk V, ch. 11.) 3 In the 1920s Carl Schmitt’s aim was to “rescue democracy from its overlay of liberal elements” (quoted in Holmes 1993, p. 49).

 3  by open examination, with no discrimination by class, gender, race etc. It nonetheless runs a liberal state. It honours the tenet of equal liberty by placing no restriction on entry to the examination and promoting strictly according to talent, and it entrenches negative liberty and liberty of thought and discussion. Hegel’s conception of the role of the civil servant estate within his ideal constitution is not so far from this. He was highly critical of the philosophical liberal’s first tenet – liberal individualism – and of democracy; but he was nonetheless a proponent of liberal order, though a

conservative one. An interestingly similar standpoint seems to be evolving in some intellectual circles in China.4 So conservatives may approve liberal order without approving either philosophical liberalism or democracy; philosophical liberals may reject democracy in whole or part; and democrats may reject liberalism.

True, one can argue that the liberal’s philosophical thesis of equal respect

creates at least a prima facie case for unconditional equal rights of political

participation. And at the empirical level one can argue – contrary to evidence brought up by those who disagree – that once the right social conditions have been reached, democracy is not only a stable long-term setting for liberal order but also a reliable one. I myself find both these arguments quite plausible. Here however we are

focusing on the conservative critique of philosophical liberalism itself, and this will not require us to examine its relationship to democracy, except at the very end.5

Turning to a second point: I take philosophical liberalism to hold that the three normative theses outlined above are quite simply correct, hence in principle

universally applicable – relevant to all societies at least in respect of setting goals for social development. Importantly, this epistemological claim is quite compatible with empirical recognition that the historical and social conditions for liberal order must be right. Still the historicism of a liberal like Mill in this regard, however striking, is very different to the standpoint of a practical conservative, who endorses and works to maintain the liberal political order only as ‘what works here.’ For a philosophical liberal, liberal order is universally the ideally best order; it’s just that a process of development must take place for a civil society that can maintain it successfully to emerge. In contrast, a practical conservative may well simply regard the three liberal theses as what we have come to accept, our historically-arrived-at consensus, the tenets that have come to form the cementing allegiances of our society. This anti-universalistic stance will reject or at least eschew the third thesis in its unrestricted liberal version. It is sceptical or agnostic about the claims of natural reason as a canon of truth. In so far as it defends liberal order it will endorse freedom of thought, but not the epistemological underpinnings a philosophical liberal provides for it. Practical conservatism can defend established and continuous liberal traditions; it just does not make any universal claims for them. This is likely to make a difference at the level of policy: a practical conservative might well be against liberal intervention, for example, in cases where even a historically minded liberal favours it.

We could make objectivism about the truth of the three tenets explicit as a fourth tenet of philosophical liberalism; however as just noted it is implicit in the

third. Note also that on this account of philosophical liberalism the rather popular idea that liberalism is based on rejection of the objectivity of values is misguided. A better picture is that non-objectivist forms of liberalism are a strategic retreat from classical  4 See Daniel Bell and Li Chenyang (eds), 2013. A number of papers in this volume make the case for varying degrees of liberal meritocracy. 5 I consider what arguments for and against democracy can be made from a liberal standpoint in Skorupski 2013.

 4  liberalism. Many critics from both right and left have attacked the objectivity of liberal values in sceptical, subjectivist or voluntarist terms, and many liberals,

bending to the strength of these epistemological gales, have tried to adapt by finding ways of defending their liberal convictions without committing themselves to their objectivity. We shall come back to this.

Finally, something should be said at this point about the influential ‘political liberalism’ of John Rawls. Seen from the standpoint of the classical liberal tradition Rawls’ liberalism is something of an outlier. In part this is a matter of its content, focused as it is on a strongly egalitarian theory of justice. Rawls fits into the liberal broad church by the priority he gives to liberty in his two principles of justice;6 however in so far as his influence has contributed to the impression that a particular theory of justice is a constituent of liberal order as such, that impression should be corrected. Beyond the debateable minima already implied by the entrenchment of negative liberty, no further, more committal, theory of justice is constitutive of liberal order: indeed this is clearer than the analogous claim that democracy is not constitutive of liberal order.

It is also interesting that in so far as Rawls defends his account of justice on the grounds that it makes explicit the overlapping consensus to be found in Western societies, he adopts the methodology of practical conservatives.7 Practically

conservative, too, is his claim that the very question of whether philosophical (in Rawls’ terms “comprehensive”) liberalism is objectively true should be set aside, i.e. not appealed to in the derivation of ‘political liberalism’. Both these moves distance him from the philosophical liberal.

Two further elements of Rawls’ political liberalism are likely to trouble a

philosophical liberal: the doctrine that the state should not support any comprehensive conception of the good, and, even more, the doctrine of ‘public reason,’ according to which citizens and their representatives, when engaged in political deliberation and decision (including voting), should not appeal to ethical ideas with which other citizens cannot reasonably be expected to agree. Both these stances seem

unnecessarily limiting from a classical-liberal standpoint, and in the second case, potentially illiberal. At any rate they are not constitutive of liberalism as discussed here, and their plausibility is beyond our remit, since our assessment of the conservative critique of liberalism concerns the powerful criticisms it makes of philosophical liberalism, which Rawls’s political liberalism explicitly eschews.

2. The critique of philosophical liberalism (i) individualism

So let us turn to liberal individualism. This is the doctrine that attracts the greatest and most widely-shared hostility, on the left as well as the right – in both cases on behalf of an alternative conception which has come to be labelled ‘communitarian’. In its conservative version it is more precisely described as the rejection of liberals’ ethical individualism in favour of an ethics of conservative holism.

To get to the core of this debate we must eliminate some red herrings. The first of these identifies ethical individualism with egoism and perhaps an egoistically based contractarianism about the state, or about morality. Well, holding this kind of  6 Rawls, 1971, §§39, 82. 7 However some question how much justificatory weight he places on that defence. See Mulhall and Swift, 2003, pp 478 – 81,

 5  view does not disqualify you as a liberal, but as a matter of fact no notable

philosopher of liberalism has held it. Hobbes, who did hold this view of the state, is sometimes described as a liberal, but it is unclear why. Locke, in contrast, can surely be described as at least a liberal ancestor, or proto-liberal; however his version of the social contract does not rest on egoistic foundations but on a substantial theory of natural rights. True, some liberal philosophers , such as T. H Green, have founded their liberalism on a kind of ethical egoism, in the formal sense of the word ‘egoism’, but their conception of the true interests of the self is very far from the picture of selfish self-interest – and their metaphysics has been hostile to contractarianism. In fact contractarianism was treated on all sides with a good deal of hostility in liberalism’s nineteenth-century heyday.

Another red herring is the idea that liberalism favours ‘negative’ as against ‘positive’ liberty. Two points here. In the first place, though negative liberty is unquestionably crucial to liberal order, the negative liberty that a liberal order

institutes is not a liberty to do as one likes, without any external constraint. To refer again to Locke:

Freedom is not, as we are told, A Liberty for every Man to do what he lists … But a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions,

Possessions, and his whole Property, within the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of

another, but freely follow his own.8

This Lockean, as against Hobbesian, conception of negative liberty is the very essence of liberal law.

But second, it is a mistake is to think that liberal individualism is necessarily concerned with negative rather than positive liberty. Classically, it is concerned with both. In Kant’s original formulation of this contrast9 ‘positive liberty’ refers to

autonomy – where by autonomy Kant means acting from recognition of how reason requires one to act. Some subsequent liberal philosophers, starting with Schiller and going on through Mill, wanted to enrich or supplement Kantian autonomy in their ideal of a fully developed individual, but they didn’t want to give it up. Autonomy in Kant’s sense is central to the classical liberal ideal of the person. If a conflict emerges within liberalism between negative and positive liberty, the former understood as a property of liberal order, the latter as an ideal of the person, it centres on the idea that negative liberty may legitimately be constrained by law in order to foster the

development of the capacity for autonomy – as argued against Mill by T. H. Green. We arrive at the real issue when we turn to the characteristic holist claim that individuals abstracted from community are mere abstractions. This claim can be ‘metaphysical’10 but its core is normative and psychological. It is at this point that conservative criticism of liberal individualism demands to be taken seriously.

Human beings are social animals. They gain their actuality and satisfaction from social identities which confer obligation, standing and fullness of life.

Communal obligations arise from the collectivities to which a human being belongs – family, church, corporation, ‘platoon’ – certainly nation and state. Crucially, they are inherently and essentially agent-relative – you have obligations to your family, or  8 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, §57. 9 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, IV 446-7. 10 As it was for both idealist and positivist critics of liberal individualism. See Skorupski 2012.