I very much agree with all this, but I'm skeptical that an emphasis on opportunity, freedom, the room to find your own way and pursue your own happiness is sufficient to address what I suspect are rather deep and widespread feelings of insecurity and uncertainty at the moment. Such feelings must be responsible for current sour moods -- mustn't they? -- given the fact that material conditions in liberal societies are far from dire. In that context, without much faith in the future, words like "experiment" can sound an ominous rather than reassuring note. The Wikipedia example in this context sounds less like "look at the amazing solutions people come up with on their own" than "we can't even imagine how to do deal with what's around the corner."
There was a time in America similarly marked by deep insecurity and uncertainty, a time when long-standing liberal ideas and institutions no longer seemed adequate to many and so came under severe pressure (and for much better reasons than now) -- the Great Depression. FDR brought to actually dire circumstances an upbeat manner and the famous prescription that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." But he did more than that. He got busy doing something about it. Historians and partisans debate the efficacy, the constitutionality, and the justice of various aspects of this burst of legislative activity he called The New Deal. But, putting such debates aside, there was a broader enduring message behind it -- a lower-case new deal, if you will -- which is that ensuring the conditions under which Americans may thrive is very much the business of the federal government.
In doing so, he abandoned a thorough-going laissez faire, true, but he did not abandon free markets or individual rights. It would be more accurate to say that he saved them. Indeed, anticipating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights his wife would later shepherd through the United Nations, he purported to expand rights to include positive rights -- to work, shelter, education, health care, social security -- on the theory that a necessitous man is not truly free and that freedom includes "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear." (His Second Bill of Rights speech remains stirring; Cass Sunstein's book about it is a classic.)
This approach was anti-liberal for only the most doctrinaire market fundamentalists. For everyone else, the approach became so thoroughly associated with liberalism that "liberal" in the U.S. came to stand for just such policies, while economic libertarianism came to define the conservatives, those on the other side of the aisle. FDR himself helped ensure this development by constantly referring to himself and his policies and his party as "liberal."
This is all to say that maybe we don't need to work very hard to sell liberalism in theory if we can convince people anew that it will work for them in practice. Liberalism leaves a whole lot of room for a whole lot of different solutions to any problem we may face. But liberals need to address them, so that they can later boast, as FDR did in 1940, that they "met modern problems of extreme seriousness in the liberal spirit -- the do-something-about-it spirit."
Excellent comment. The author seems more of a libertarian than a liberal. The just-so story told by libertarians sounds wonderful. But then again all just-so stories sound wonderful. And whereas freedom to 'discover' is doubtless good, nor can a society be stable with no history or traditions to guide it.
This piece does a good job of deploying the classic liberal thesis - articulated by scholars like my mentor Ronald Dworkin - against the "post-liberal" crypto-religious obscurantism of scholars like Patrick Deneen and Robert George.
Without naming it, the author seems to be reaching for pragmatism as an epistemological and jurisprudential reference point - namely, the idea that the sensemaking pathway to "truth" lies through discovery, which is why free experimentation is so vital to human flourishing.
But is the proposed "muscular conception" of the liberal thesis as "muscular" as the author suggests?
The "dimensions vs. forms" distinction sounds a tad murky, quaint and not up to confronting the two main political-economic challenges before us: the growing inequality of social outcomes, nationally and internationally, and the threat of agentic displacement of humans by AIs.
I very much agree with all this, but I'm skeptical that an emphasis on opportunity, freedom, the room to find your own way and pursue your own happiness is sufficient to address what I suspect are rather deep and widespread feelings of insecurity and uncertainty at the moment. Such feelings must be responsible for current sour moods -- mustn't they? -- given the fact that material conditions in liberal societies are far from dire. In that context, without much faith in the future, words like "experiment" can sound an ominous rather than reassuring note. The Wikipedia example in this context sounds less like "look at the amazing solutions people come up with on their own" than "we can't even imagine how to do deal with what's around the corner."
There was a time in America similarly marked by deep insecurity and uncertainty, a time when long-standing liberal ideas and institutions no longer seemed adequate to many and so came under severe pressure (and for much better reasons than now) -- the Great Depression. FDR brought to actually dire circumstances an upbeat manner and the famous prescription that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." But he did more than that. He got busy doing something about it. Historians and partisans debate the efficacy, the constitutionality, and the justice of various aspects of this burst of legislative activity he called The New Deal. But, putting such debates aside, there was a broader enduring message behind it -- a lower-case new deal, if you will -- which is that ensuring the conditions under which Americans may thrive is very much the business of the federal government.
In doing so, he abandoned a thorough-going laissez faire, true, but he did not abandon free markets or individual rights. It would be more accurate to say that he saved them. Indeed, anticipating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights his wife would later shepherd through the United Nations, he purported to expand rights to include positive rights -- to work, shelter, education, health care, social security -- on the theory that a necessitous man is not truly free and that freedom includes "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear." (His Second Bill of Rights speech remains stirring; Cass Sunstein's book about it is a classic.)
This approach was anti-liberal for only the most doctrinaire market fundamentalists. For everyone else, the approach became so thoroughly associated with liberalism that "liberal" in the U.S. came to stand for just such policies, while economic libertarianism came to define the conservatives, those on the other side of the aisle. FDR himself helped ensure this development by constantly referring to himself and his policies and his party as "liberal."
This is all to say that maybe we don't need to work very hard to sell liberalism in theory if we can convince people anew that it will work for them in practice. Liberalism leaves a whole lot of room for a whole lot of different solutions to any problem we may face. But liberals need to address them, so that they can later boast, as FDR did in 1940, that they "met modern problems of extreme seriousness in the liberal spirit -- the do-something-about-it spirit."
Excellent comment. The author seems more of a libertarian than a liberal. The just-so story told by libertarians sounds wonderful. But then again all just-so stories sound wonderful. And whereas freedom to 'discover' is doubtless good, nor can a society be stable with no history or traditions to guide it.
This piece does a good job of deploying the classic liberal thesis - articulated by scholars like my mentor Ronald Dworkin - against the "post-liberal" crypto-religious obscurantism of scholars like Patrick Deneen and Robert George.
Without naming it, the author seems to be reaching for pragmatism as an epistemological and jurisprudential reference point - namely, the idea that the sensemaking pathway to "truth" lies through discovery, which is why free experimentation is so vital to human flourishing.
But is the proposed "muscular conception" of the liberal thesis as "muscular" as the author suggests?
The "dimensions vs. forms" distinction sounds a tad murky, quaint and not up to confronting the two main political-economic challenges before us: the growing inequality of social outcomes, nationally and internationally, and the threat of agentic displacement of humans by AIs.
Postliberalism promises to bring back "old-fashioned virtues" like honesty, yet when they get in power they deliver Trump-Orban levels of corruption.