What Liberalism Is Not

On Not Straw-Manning Liberalism

May 30, 2026

Charity and Fidelity

In ‘What Is Liberalism?’ I offered a characterisation of liberalism in terms of five tenets: (1) the centrality of freedom as a political value; (2) a form of egalitarian individualism; (3) a strong emphasis on individual rights, especially in connection with protecting individual freedom; and (4) certain principles of social ordering, e.g. the rule of law, private property, free markets, and forms of citizen political participation, and (5) a broader ethos that both gives expression to the previous four tenets and that helps to sustain their realisation over time.

This characterisation aims, on the one hand, to be charitable in understanding the liberal tradition. It seeks to bring out why liberalism is plausibly found attractive by its supporters and worthy of respectful consideration by its opponents. And, on the other hand, it is also intended to be faithful to the historical reality of liberal thought, striving to accommodate the diversity of perspectives that are plausibly classifiable as liberal. This ecumenical approach opposes the temptation to identify liberalism either with one’s favoured version of liberal doctrine or with what one takes to be the dominant ideology that goes by that name in contemporary political life.

The former move is evident in Ludwig von Mises’ remark that if liberalism is compatible with the nationalization of railroads, mines and other economic enterprises or with protective tariffs, then “nothing is left of liberalism but the name”.(1) Indeed, such is the priority that von Mises accords to capitalism and private property within his conception of liberalism, that he is willing to say of fascism that the “merit it has won for itself” in standing up against Bolshevism and Communism “will live on eternally in history”, while at the same time deploring fascism’s commitment to violence as a defective long-term basis for pursuing political power. (2)

The latter move, of identifying liberalism with what one regards as the dominant ideology that goes by the name today, which we can call the presentist fallacy, is often committed by prominent ‘post-liberal’ thinkers. Both moves are to be resisted in the name of reflecting the diversity of liberal thought, including the fact of deep disagreements among thinkers who are, nevertheless, indisputably liberals.

The Presentist Fallacy

The presentist gambit is often in the service of a crude and unappealing interpretation of liberalism, one focussed on the pathological deformations to which liberal doctrine is vulnerable. In this vein, “post-liberal” critics such as Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, and John Gray impute to contemporary liberalism a fanatical devotion to the relentless expansion of the scope of human choice in the face of all obstacles, whether biological, ethical, social, or legal.

Vermeule characterizes the goal of liberal progressivism as the “never-ending celebration of the overcoming of unchosen constraints”. (3) Echoing this view, Deneen writes of liberalism as a project of systematically dismantling the “guardrails” – set by objective values and traditional institutions such as the family – that structured choice within an older, classical ideal of liberty. In their place, “a flattened world arose: the wide-open spaces of liberal freedom, a vast and widening playground for the project of self-creation’”(4) Similarly, Gray writes of a “hyperbolic version of liberalism” that aims to “emancipate human beings from identities that have been inherited from the past. Human beings must be free to make of themselves whatever they wish… The liberal West is possessed by an idea of freedom. Any curb on human will is condemned as a mode of repression”. (5)

The quotations above from Vermeule, Deneen, and Gray come from writings published in 2023. But students of intellectual history will recognise in them the echo of a long tradition of demonizing liberalism as an expression of unbridled egoism. This is especially so with respect to Catholic critics, such as Pope Leo XIII, who condemned liberalism for proclaiming every man as a law to himself and conferring on them a “boundless licence” that conflicts with obedience to God and subverts morality. (6)

Vermeule, Deneen, and Gray are all conservative critics of liberalism, but a straw man approach is also to be found among critics on the left who caricature liberalism (often under the label of “neo-liberalism”) in a similar fashion as propagating a selfish, atomised conception of human beings, unintegrated into a background web of values and social relations that shapes their identities and commitments, and a laissez-faire approach to economic and social life that is the ideological handmaiden to a harsh and unrestrained capitalism.

Straw-Manning

This straw-manning of liberalism should be rejected on the grounds of both fidelity to history and interpretative charity. When we carefully examine the specific moral and political issues on which a critic like Vermeule diverges from contemporary liberals, such as whether abortion or same-sex marriage should be legalised, there is no compulsion to ascribe to all his liberal opponents a commitment to the in-principle limitless expansion of the scope of human choice.

This extreme and barely coherent doctrine may fit some self-styled liberals, but hardly most liberal thinkers, least of all the more sophisticated among them. The latter have always understood that the strength of the case for respecting free choice – from the choice of one’s occupation to the choice to drive the wrong way down a one-way street – is not uniform and depends on a background of values that confer greater significance to some free choices (which occupation to pursue) over others (which direction one drives). Indeed, Joseph Raz, one of the two most important liberal philosophers of our times along with John Rawls, went so far as to claim that freedom is inherently parasitic on other values: “Freedom [is] a distinct value, but one which is intimately intertwined with others, and cannot exist by itself”. (7)

Of course, there are obviously complex and delicate line-drawing questions to be confronted in addressing an issue like the permissible forms of marriage. But liberal supporters of same-sex marriage are hardly committed, in virtue of the “deep logic” of their liberalism, to endorsing all other free exercises of marital choice, such as polygamous or inter-species marriages.

The same holds for some other doctrines that have been defended by avowedly liberal thinkers throughout history, such as slavery and eugenics in previous generations and, in our own day, the transhumanist project of overcoming the limitations of our human, and even our biological, nature. None of these reprehensible or outlandish views are plausibly interpreted as products of the ineluctable unfolding of liberal commitments, no more than the defence of slavery follows from Aristotelian ethics or burning heretics at the stake or repudiating democracy is integral to Catholic doctrine.

Given human fallibility, we should acknowledge that all moral and political outlooks are capable of generating extremist or pathological variants, but we should resist identifying them with those variants if more charitable interpretations meet the threshold of fit with historical reality.

Mistaking the Part for the Whole

There is also a more sophisticated version of the presentist fallacy. This involves a failure to distinguish adequately between a liberal thinker’s overall political commitments and the concerns they prioritise in their writings and public interventions, perhaps as a reflection of their personal intellectual interests or as a practical matter of responding to the political exigencies of the moment.

So it may be that, for example, in response to grave threats posed by the rise of authoritarian ideologies, either domestically or abroad, some liberals have chosen to emphasise upholding civil and political rights, such as the rights to free speech or to political participation, rather than socio-economic rights, such as the right to adequate health care or to employment.

But these judgments about which components of their outlook to foreground at a specific time and place should not obscure the fact that their commitments are not thereby restricted to those components, even if they offer a clue to the relative priority they assign to them, whether in the abstract or in concrete circumstances.

The failure to register the distinction between liberal thinkers’ overall outlook and the specific issues they highlight in a given context mars Samuel Moyn’s assessment of at least some of the intellectuals he revealingly classifies as “Cold War liberals”. (8) For example, Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” is primarily an exercise in conceptual hygiene. It advances an austerely “negative” conception of liberty focussed on the absence of external interference, one that deliberately does not encompass all of the dimensions of human self-fulfilment. These other values are not thereby negated or diminished, they are simply distinguished from liberty.

Contra Moyn, this does not “cut off” Berlin and his followers from Romanticism’s perfectionist insights about individual self-fashioning. Nor does it deny the state’s potential role in fostering the Romantic ideal. After all, Berlin’s well-known value pluralism itself has a Romantic provenance and the essential thrust of a value pluralist scheme is to oppose shoehorning the entire spectrum of human values within one value, including that of liberty.

On this reading, then, there is absolutely no paradox in the fact that Berlin upheld a negative conception of liberty while simultaneously endorsing the ethical and political insights of Romanticism regarding human fulfilment through individual self-fashioning. On the contrary, the two go together, insofar as negative liberty imposes principled constraints on the state’s promotion of individual and collective perfectionist ideals, preventing the perfectionist project from lapsing into “forced to be free”-style tyranny and oppression.

We see this perspective emerging in Berlin’s 1955 appreciation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, published three years before he delivered his famous lecture on ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’:

Mr. Roosevelt was providing a vast safety valve for pent-up bitterness and indignation, and trying to prevent revolution and construct a régime which should establish greater economic equality, social justice and happiness, above all, human happiness – ideals which were in the best tradition of American life – without altering the basis of freedom and democracy in his country. (9)

On the Right Side of History

It is worth noting two more specific ways in which liberalism has been caricatured by would-be critics. Many critics, such as John Gray, attribute to liberalism the optimistic historicist thesis that the laws of societal evolution are such that, whether inevitably or on the balance of probabilities, liberal values will triumph in the long-term. This picks up on the hackneyed rhetorical trope, common among some liberals, that their views are “on the right side of history”. But historicism is not a commitment inherent to liberalism, even if it has been endorsed by some liberals. (10) If anything, it jars with the emphasis that liberalism places on the centrality of freedom as a personal and political value. After all, in virtue of that freedom we have genuine agency in shaping our individual and collective lives rather than being the mere playthings of impersonal historical forces.

The misguided attribution of Whiggish historicism to liberalism is sometimes justified on the basis that liberals, or at least some of them, believe that their political principles are objectively true or justified, as opposed to being merely culturally relative or matters of subjective conviction. This objectivism is taken to saddle these liberals with the historicist thesis that societies are destined to converge on liberal principles, that the “arc of the universe”, in Martin Luther King’s resonant phrase, bends towards liberal justice.

A self-styled liberal, Richard Rorty, insisted on abandoning as pointless claims to ethical objectivity, tracing them in part to a misguided historicist fantasy of efficacy:

We resent the idea that we shall have to wait for the strong to turn their piggy little eyes to the suffering of the weak. We desperately hope that there is something stronger and more powerful that will hurt the strong if they do not - if not a vengeful God, then a vengeful aroused proletariat, or, at least, a vengeful superego, or, at the very least, the offended majesty of Kant’s tribunal of pure practical reason’. (11)

But the attribution of historicism to liberalism simply on the grounds of a commitment to ethical objectivity is misguided. To begin with, many liberals, such as Ludwig von Mises, Bertrand Russell, John Rawls, and Bernard Williams, reject (or forswear reliance upon) the idea of objective ethical truth. Recall the dictum of Joseph Schumpeter, quoted approvingly by Isaiah Berlin in the concluding pages of his famous lecture, that “[t]o realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian”. (12)

But, in any case, it is not true that belief in objective ethical truths commits one to the historicist hypothesis that these truths will be increasingly embraced and acted upon over time. Belief in the objectivity of liberal principles entails only far weaker commitments than their eventual historical triumph. One such commitment is that if these principles are gradually converged upon over time – a big “if” – one potential explanation is that people have increasingly appreciated the objective case for embracing these principles.

This is an example of what David Wiggins has called a “vindicatory explanation”, in the same way that the truth of the equation “2+2=4” potentially forms part of the explanation of why a given pupil came to believe that equation. By contrast, no vindicatory explanation would be credible in the case of a world steadily converging on racist or sexist ideologies. But from the potential availability of such an explanation, no automatic inference can be drawn that such a convergence is inevitable or even likely, whether in ethics, arithmetic or any other domain of objective truth. (13)

Rampant Individualism

A second prominent caricature of liberalism is that its individualistic focus renders it overly concerned with the interests, including the interests in freedom, of individuals, and the consequent individual rights that flow from these interests, and neglectful of the common good of the political community as a whole. This is the milder, and more credible, version of the complaint that liberalism is an egoist’s charter.

Now, this familiar line of thought trades on the slipperiness of the notion of the common good, but the following three points can be made in response. First, individual freedom and interests and the individual rights to which they give rise are seen as possessed by all relevant citizens or human beings, so in that sense they are “common” goods. In recognising the moral significance of my own interest in freedom, for example, I must also recognise the equivalent interests of others. In insisting on the fulfilment of the duties associated with my own rights I must equally acknowledge duties that have their source in the rights of others and that I may be the subject of these duties.

Secondly, we can proceed to a more technical, Aristotelian understanding of the common good. On this view, a common good, such as a shared language, benefits each and every member of the community (by enabling them to communicate), benefits them in the same way (by providing a uniform means of communication), and does so in a non-rivalrous fashion (one person’s using the English language, for example, in no way inherently competes with another’s use of it).

Again, liberalism can give a central place to this understanding of the common good. Consider the panoply of institutional arrangements that secure the rule of law in a society. These constitute a vital common good, one that serves everyone’s interests in having a legal system that respects their rational autonomy, serves that interest in a uniform way through upholding certain formal and procedural requirements, and its serving some people’s interests in this way is not inherently in competition with serving anyone else’s interests in this regard.

It is often asserted that there is a mutually exclusive and antagonistic relationship between individual rights and the common good. Ronald Dworkin’s regrettably popular meme, that rights are ‘trumps’ against the common good, has been a cause of much confusion on this point. This antagonistic view of the relationship between rights and the common good often trades uncritically on an aggregative, utilitarian conception of the common good – one that involves both “winners” and “losers”, leading to the risk that some will be unjustly sacrificed on the altar of the common good. Individual rights are then introduced as a way of addressing these morally unacceptable implications of advancing the common good.

But we have good reason to reject these utilitarian interpretations of the common good. Moreover, with an Aristotelian account in their place measures to protect rights can be seen as forming part of the common good, e.g. establishing a police force or a universal health care system serves the common good by enabling each and every person’s rights to security and health to be upheld. (14)

Thirdly, liberals need not regard individual interests and rights as exhaustive of their political outlook. Instead, they can also accord an important place to a liberal ethos that includes virtues and ideals that go beyond anything that is purely self-interested or that can be demanded as a matter of rights, including forms of civility, patriotism, mercy, public-spiritedness, and toleration. This ethos, too, can be understood as a vital common good that liberals should seek to advance.

This aspect of liberalism gives the lie to the accusation that the egalitarian individualism of liberalism necessarily renders it insensitive to the need for positive measures in support of these ideals and virtues and the social forms that sustain them. Instead, the liberal is faced with the challenge of devising practically effective ways of cultivating a liberal ethos in ways that pay due respect to liberalism’s own commitments to the centrality of freedom, individualistic egalitarianism, and the full suite of liberal rights. (15)

In Conclusion

None of the foregoing is to deny that some thinkers, officials, and activists, plausibly described as liberal, have been guilty of an exaggerated valuation of free choice, historicism, and lack of appreciation of the common good. But, on a charitable view, none of these errors should be interpreted as hard-wired into the liberal creed, as opposed to being errors and deformations to which liberalism, along with other political outlooks, may be susceptible.

The liberal approach to political morality stands in need today of revitalisation and ongoing critical examination. Caricatures of liberalism offer nothing to these endeavours, least of all to would-be “post-liberal” critics who often have valuable and insightful things to say, but who are too easily able to be dismissed by liberals as merely succeeding in decapitating a straw man. (16)

What is needed, instead, is greater interpretative charity all round. This would not only bring greater clarity at the level of philosophical theory, it would also lead to more constructive dialogue between liberals and their critics, thereby helping to ameliorate the ideological polarisation that disfigures contemporary political discourse. Arguably, academics have a serious responsibility to act as role models in this respect for the wider democratic culture.

Setting Out for Ithaka

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