I agree; liberalism's criticisms have been inconsistent. It has simultaniously been criticised as too relativist and too universalist, too pluralist and also totalitarian. That wouldn't be a problem if these were different critics coming from different angles, but if you look at say, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermule, they often switch between these different critiques.
My problem is specificially with the post-1945 synthesis of 'Rights-Progressive Guardianship Liberalism', the idea that ever-greater progression of individual rights is 'the Right Side of History' and 'guardians', like judges, are tasked with ensuring 'the Right Side of History' never loses and democracy is acceptable only so far as it does not 'go backwards' from cultural leftism.
So my criticisms are the elitist character, the imposed moral universalism, and the smug teleology of 'Right Side of History'. It is UNIVERSALISM, not relativism, that fills me with dread, but it’s not limited to just liberalism, even though because it's what I know it is what I am conditioned to most despise.
I do think a different type of liberalism, a 'Democratic Subsidiarity Pluralism', would be ideal, but whether that counts as 'liberalism' is up for debate. If that would be classed as 'liberal', I'm a liberal, but I am resolutely opposed to post-1945 'Rights-Progressive Guardianship Liberalism'.
Thanks for these thoughtful comments. I agree that the trend of ever-expanding individual rights, superintended by technocratic guardians such as judges, has been very problematic for liberalism and democracy. I discuss it here https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vjtl/vol52/iss5/2/. This also raises the broader theme of integrating liberalism more fully with genuinely robust democratic processes, which I hope to discuss in future posts. 'Democratic Subsidiarity Pluralism' sounds good to me.
I think it’s a great piece. My own take in lectures I give is that liberalism is a unique answer to the problem of modernity: how to maintain a political order in light of diversity, individuality and social complexity.
Liberalism goes (generally) bottom-to-top while absolutism goes top-to-bottom.
Individualism is not the result of liberalism but rather liberalism grapples with it a social condition and a moral aspect of our social world.
One feeling i get while reading this is that you put the bar for legimate critique of liberalism quite high. For example, critics shouldn't go off of the "progression of history" point even though this, like you say too, is a reasonably common viewpoint to hear.
There's a balance between on the one hand being charitable as a critic but on the other hand as the critiqued party to not call fallacy or parody too quickly. If charity is needed all around, does that also apply to the critique of liberalism?
So the underlying question for me is: what counts as legitimate critique?
A different point: if I were to attack liberalism I would attack the neutrality principle - the idea that governments shouldn't prioritize one conception of the good life over others. In your list of what liberalism is, I don't see this principle or something too similar. Do you see the neutrality principle as central to liberalism?
I think it's perfectly ok to criticise liberals who engage in fallacies like historicism, and to point out that this fallacy has a big presence among some liberal thinkers. But my objection is to saying this view about history is essential to liberalism. Regarding neutrality, I am strongly opposed to it also. Neutrality gets identified with liberalism because it is central to the views of thinkers like Rawls and, in a different guise, Dworkin, Nagel etc. But this ignores the fact that another major strand of liberalism totally rejects neutrality and sees the point of the state as advancing human flourishing - liberals like Mill, TH Green, Lionel Hobhouse, Joseph Raz etc. But I probably should have said more about this in the first paper. Thanks for your comment.
Thanks for clarifying about the neutrality principle.
You are probably right that some critics attack a straw man version of liberalism but what I'm trying to say is that in the kind of counter critique you are making here, you risk the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
So for example if I make a scathing critique of liberalism based on my objections to the neutrality principle, you could say: "the neutrality principle is not central to liberalism" thus dismissing the critique. But to some liberals (e.g. Rawls) the neutrality principle IS central. So liberalism means different things to different people. Some of the critiques might not apply to what you understand liberalism to be, but they do apply to what some other people understand liberalism to be. Just because they don't apply to your definition of liberalism doesn't make their critique fallacious.
I still think you make an important point though, it's just interesting to think further into this. Charitability is important, but so is scoping it sounds like. In a diverse tradition like liberalism, you have to be precise about what you're critiqueing and it might be more valid to attack specific building blocks rather than the tradition as such. Then again, you might want to attack the "vibe" of it all in a cultural philosophy kind of way... It's interesting to think about what counts as critique and what doesn't
Yes, the 'No true Scotsman' problem is always a risk. But does Rawls think neutrality is inherent to any form of liberalism, or to his favoured form of liberalism? I suspect the latter (which is why he calls his view specifically *political* liberalism). Whether a state should be neutral regarding conceptions of the good is heavily contested by paradigm liberals, e.g. Rawls v Mill, and for this reason does not seem to be an inherent feature of any liberalism. Finally, a critique of some liberal's arguments for neutrality can have great value even if it doesn't amount to a critique of liberalism as such. All that said, if someone really thinks all true liberals hold to the neutrality principle, I'm open to hearing the argument.
"true liberals" as such is tricky. It's a broadly lived political ideology which has many different meanings and all those meanings are potentially valid targets of critique. An academic could try to make the end-all-be-all definition, but if people in practice use it differently, who gave that academic authority over the concept?
That's to say, any attempt to attack or defend liberalism necessarily also involves commiting to a definition of what exactly it mean and any attempt to (re)define it is not just descriptive but also normative. That's not necessarily bad, but it opens up a different register of debate. Not whether or not someone makes a logical fallacy in mis-identifying the truly central aspects of the concept, but in whether or not someone's critique of that specific version of liberalism has any bite. Of course if someone's attacking a version of liberalism no one holds it's still a strawman, but e.g. if I attack "progression of history" liberalism, and at least some people hold that version of liberalism, I don't think "that's not true liberalism" is a good response.
If you attack "progression of history" liberalism you don't need to attack it on the basis that any form of liberalism is committed to the progression of history. You can just attack those liberals who defend that view. You presumably agree that liberals differ among themselves on various issues, therefore, on pain of contradiction, not everything that liberals say is an essential feature of liberalism.
I agree; liberalism's criticisms have been inconsistent. It has simultaniously been criticised as too relativist and too universalist, too pluralist and also totalitarian. That wouldn't be a problem if these were different critics coming from different angles, but if you look at say, Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermule, they often switch between these different critiques.
My problem is specificially with the post-1945 synthesis of 'Rights-Progressive Guardianship Liberalism', the idea that ever-greater progression of individual rights is 'the Right Side of History' and 'guardians', like judges, are tasked with ensuring 'the Right Side of History' never loses and democracy is acceptable only so far as it does not 'go backwards' from cultural leftism.
So my criticisms are the elitist character, the imposed moral universalism, and the smug teleology of 'Right Side of History'. It is UNIVERSALISM, not relativism, that fills me with dread, but it’s not limited to just liberalism, even though because it's what I know it is what I am conditioned to most despise.
I do think a different type of liberalism, a 'Democratic Subsidiarity Pluralism', would be ideal, but whether that counts as 'liberalism' is up for debate. If that would be classed as 'liberal', I'm a liberal, but I am resolutely opposed to post-1945 'Rights-Progressive Guardianship Liberalism'.
Thanks for these thoughtful comments. I agree that the trend of ever-expanding individual rights, superintended by technocratic guardians such as judges, has been very problematic for liberalism and democracy. I discuss it here https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vjtl/vol52/iss5/2/. This also raises the broader theme of integrating liberalism more fully with genuinely robust democratic processes, which I hope to discuss in future posts. 'Democratic Subsidiarity Pluralism' sounds good to me.
I think it’s a great piece. My own take in lectures I give is that liberalism is a unique answer to the problem of modernity: how to maintain a political order in light of diversity, individuality and social complexity.
Liberalism goes (generally) bottom-to-top while absolutism goes top-to-bottom.
Individualism is not the result of liberalism but rather liberalism grapples with it a social condition and a moral aspect of our social world.
One feeling i get while reading this is that you put the bar for legimate critique of liberalism quite high. For example, critics shouldn't go off of the "progression of history" point even though this, like you say too, is a reasonably common viewpoint to hear.
There's a balance between on the one hand being charitable as a critic but on the other hand as the critiqued party to not call fallacy or parody too quickly. If charity is needed all around, does that also apply to the critique of liberalism?
So the underlying question for me is: what counts as legitimate critique?
A different point: if I were to attack liberalism I would attack the neutrality principle - the idea that governments shouldn't prioritize one conception of the good life over others. In your list of what liberalism is, I don't see this principle or something too similar. Do you see the neutrality principle as central to liberalism?
I think it's perfectly ok to criticise liberals who engage in fallacies like historicism, and to point out that this fallacy has a big presence among some liberal thinkers. But my objection is to saying this view about history is essential to liberalism. Regarding neutrality, I am strongly opposed to it also. Neutrality gets identified with liberalism because it is central to the views of thinkers like Rawls and, in a different guise, Dworkin, Nagel etc. But this ignores the fact that another major strand of liberalism totally rejects neutrality and sees the point of the state as advancing human flourishing - liberals like Mill, TH Green, Lionel Hobhouse, Joseph Raz etc. But I probably should have said more about this in the first paper. Thanks for your comment.
Thanks for clarifying about the neutrality principle.
You are probably right that some critics attack a straw man version of liberalism but what I'm trying to say is that in the kind of counter critique you are making here, you risk the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
So for example if I make a scathing critique of liberalism based on my objections to the neutrality principle, you could say: "the neutrality principle is not central to liberalism" thus dismissing the critique. But to some liberals (e.g. Rawls) the neutrality principle IS central. So liberalism means different things to different people. Some of the critiques might not apply to what you understand liberalism to be, but they do apply to what some other people understand liberalism to be. Just because they don't apply to your definition of liberalism doesn't make their critique fallacious.
I still think you make an important point though, it's just interesting to think further into this. Charitability is important, but so is scoping it sounds like. In a diverse tradition like liberalism, you have to be precise about what you're critiqueing and it might be more valid to attack specific building blocks rather than the tradition as such. Then again, you might want to attack the "vibe" of it all in a cultural philosophy kind of way... It's interesting to think about what counts as critique and what doesn't
Yes, the 'No true Scotsman' problem is always a risk. But does Rawls think neutrality is inherent to any form of liberalism, or to his favoured form of liberalism? I suspect the latter (which is why he calls his view specifically *political* liberalism). Whether a state should be neutral regarding conceptions of the good is heavily contested by paradigm liberals, e.g. Rawls v Mill, and for this reason does not seem to be an inherent feature of any liberalism. Finally, a critique of some liberal's arguments for neutrality can have great value even if it doesn't amount to a critique of liberalism as such. All that said, if someone really thinks all true liberals hold to the neutrality principle, I'm open to hearing the argument.
"true liberals" as such is tricky. It's a broadly lived political ideology which has many different meanings and all those meanings are potentially valid targets of critique. An academic could try to make the end-all-be-all definition, but if people in practice use it differently, who gave that academic authority over the concept?
That's to say, any attempt to attack or defend liberalism necessarily also involves commiting to a definition of what exactly it mean and any attempt to (re)define it is not just descriptive but also normative. That's not necessarily bad, but it opens up a different register of debate. Not whether or not someone makes a logical fallacy in mis-identifying the truly central aspects of the concept, but in whether or not someone's critique of that specific version of liberalism has any bite. Of course if someone's attacking a version of liberalism no one holds it's still a strawman, but e.g. if I attack "progression of history" liberalism, and at least some people hold that version of liberalism, I don't think "that's not true liberalism" is a good response.
If you attack "progression of history" liberalism you don't need to attack it on the basis that any form of liberalism is committed to the progression of history. You can just attack those liberals who defend that view. You presumably agree that liberals differ among themselves on various issues, therefore, on pain of contradiction, not everything that liberals say is an essential feature of liberalism.