Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. His latest book is On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Cass Sunstein explore critiques from the left and the right, what different strands of liberalism can teach us, and why John Stuart Mill has the answer.
We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our new series on Liberal Virtues and Values.
That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.
This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we’ll feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I really enjoyed thinking with you about the nature of liberalism. I realized that trying to explain liberalism involves two tasks, the first of which is perhaps more difficult than the second. It involves explaining to people what liberalism is, but the more difficult part is explaining to people what liberalism isn't. What do you think are some of the main misconceptions about what liberalism is that have become prominent in our political discourse and help explain why so many people are skeptical about liberalism?
Cass Sunstein: Some people on the left think that liberalism means markets are the best thing in the history of things and that if you have free markets, trade, open borders, and one world government, then that's fantastic if the one world government is respectful of markets. On the left, there's an identification of liberalism with inequality and unrestricted capitalism.
On the right, the thought is that liberalism and the playboy philosophy, according to Hugh Hefner back in the 70s, are the same, and that liberalism means everyone could have sex with everybody else, the family is terrible, and if you want to choose to put up a deep fake of someone doing something they never did that's sexual, that's freedom, and if you want to sleep with someone, go for it, regardless of anything else. The right identifies liberalism with a kind of promiscuity or license, and the left identifies liberalism with the sanctification of one conception of capitalism.
Mounk: Let's delve into each of these because I think you're right that those are in some ways the main lines of attack on liberalism from the left and the right respectively. On the left-wing critique—the attacks on neoliberalism—the idea is that liberalism worships a market which makes any constraints on inequality disappear, that it is standing in the way in some significant respect of a more equal society, a more redistributive society. As you point out, there are many flavors of liberalism, and liberalism itself is agnostic about much of economic policy. You can have a very redistributive politics like in Scandinavia. You can even have some things you might call socialism, like one of the forms of economic organization to which John Rawls was at least open.
At the same time, you make clear that there is a line—the moment you have monopolies, and the moment you have a state-run economy, that is probably when liberals get off board. Why is that the case? Where is the outer limit of how left-wing you can be and still remain a liberal, and what's your logic for saying that once you have a form of central planning, that is no longer compatible with a liberal society?
Sunstein: Okay, thank you for emphasizing the diversity of liberal views. I almost called the book Big Tent Liberalism, though no one else thought that was a good idea. You can be very pro-Ronald Reagan and be a liberal, or you can be very pro-Franklin Delano Roosevelt and be a liberal, just as you say.
If you believe in monopolies, that's illiberal. To your point, the idea that we would favor private monopolies—let's say over social media—is an illiberal idea. Liberals like pluralism and they like diversity, and monopolies aren't consistent with that.
If you have a state-run economy, liberals get off the train also because, for broadly Hayekian reasons—though you can reject Hayek himself and be a liberal—the relationship between freedom and pluralism and a state-run economy is, as the teenagers used to say, awkward.
A state-run economy is in itself going to be incompatible with liberal commitments to pluralism and diversity, and it is highly likely to run into liberal commitments to freedom. Occupational freedom—choice of what you're going to do in life—is a liberal idea. A state-run economy, à la communism or fascism, tends not to be open to talents, and that's something liberals cherish.
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Mounk: One of the things you say in the book is that you love Hayek, but you love Mill more than Hayek. You say Hayek has shaped your thinking, but John Stuart Mill has done so even more. I'm struck by the fact that even though I studied the history of political thought as an undergraduate and did a PhD in political theory, I don't think I encountered Hayek in any of my classes. I encountered the name, of course—he was a kind of figure somewhere in the general intellectual background—mostly dismissed negatively with a snide comment here or there. I'm not sure that The Road to Serfdom was assigned in any of my classes, or another word or page of Hayek's writing. I wonder whether some of the listeners to this podcast have had the same experience.
Perhaps we can do a very quick excursus and talk about that second love of yours. Especially after World War Two, it felt as though the war had proven the efficacy of central planning. The Soviet Union was a major player at that time, probably at one of its highest ebbs relative to the United States in the entire 20th century. Countries like Britain were in many respects run on central planning in the late 40s and 50s.
Most intellectuals were arguing that central planning was the future. Hayek comes in, and talks about not just about the inefficiency of central planning—which proved to be obviously right if you think about the trajectory of China over the course of the late 20th and early 21st century, for example—but also the reasons why it is incompatible with freedom in a more fundamental way. Do you mind giving us a two-minute précis of that argument?
Sunstein: A great pleasure. Let me tell you a story—a Hayekian story—and then we'll get to Hayek in particular. When I was in the White House, my job was to oversee federal regulation. We had ambitious plans for fuel economy standards, and one set of standards would run for approximately ten years.
As I recall, my reaction was that what is the appropriate fuel economy standard three years from now, four years from now, five years from now is extremely difficult to know—let alone eight, nine, or ten years from now. That's a Hayekian point for reasons we'll get to in a moment.
So I said we need a midterm review just to make sure that our ideas at Day One are consistent with how the situation is trending. We might be too unambitious with respect to fuel economy standards, or we might have overshot the mark or market.
Mounk: Presumably that's because there's a trade-off, and the extent and nature of the trade-off depend on the state of the technology, right? You could build a car today that's three miles a gallon—three miles a liter? I'm forgetting the right ballpark—but you could do that today, and it would be incredibly expensive. The car would cost $7,000 more, and the speed of the car would be severely impacted.
In five years, it may be that it only adds $500 to the price of a car. So depending on the state of the underlying technology, a different level of ambition is going to be appropriate. Is that the basic underlying thought?
Sunstein: Exactly. Thank you for that. How much fuel economy it is sensible to require depends on technology. Now let's get to Hayek. His great insight is in a paper called The Uses of Knowledge in Society from the 1940s. It was not really about freedom in the large—it was about how central planners can't know what markets know. The idea was that knowledge is really dispersed. If you're selling laptops, shoes, or tables, the amount of information out there about those things on the part of consumers, producers, and everyone else involved in the market is massive. Even if you have a central planner who's incredibly smart, completely honest, and well-motivated, they just can't know what markets know.
This is the point of the story: in one year—let's say 2025—you can't know what markets are going to know in 2035, and it's even going to be hard to know what markets will know in 2026. Hayek's argument was that knowledge is really dispersed in society. That is a plea for the use of markets and the price system, which he spoke of almost with awe and reverence. He called the price system a marvel. It adapts and adopts information, and it changes over time.
If it turns out there's some new technology with respect to AI or cars that comes in unanticipated, then the market is going to go boom with that, and the central planner is going to be clueless about what to do. That's Hayek's idea. I see that as fundamental to liberal thought. Hayek was the greatest exponent of it and a defining figure in the history of liberalism, but there were others—Adam Smith a little bit, though not as systematic as Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises as well. This is a strand of the liberal tradition that is pro-market. Notice we're not saying anything about neoliberalism or getting the government away—we're making a fundamental but mundane point about how knowledge is dispersed.
In The Road to Serfdom, his great book about freedom, Hayek said that governments engaging in central planning end up not being happy with freedom generally—that the road of the economic tool of central planning is a hazardous road. “Serfdom” is a better word than “tyranny” because it puts the spotlight not on the ruler but on the ruled.
We need to be careful about the prediction that central planning leads to serfdom. It's not the worst prediction in the world—but there are places that have central planning but also a high degree of freedom. You can do that. But the fundamental point Hayek made about the liberal order being one that accommodates freedom and pluralism through markets that serve zillions of people is something every student should understand.
Mounk: It feels to me like there are three kinds of argument at play here, and I want to disentangle them and think through the one I'm least certain about.
The first is just the economic argument that the system of supply and demand is this marvel, which is easy to overlook. What's marvelous about it is that it does these incredibly fine adjustments without any individual having to have heroic intelligence. Traders are very smart and shrewd people, but they look at what the prices of similar goods are at stores down the road. They have good information networks. They don't have to have an MBA, and they certainly don't have to do any advanced math. Yet by their agency, you have this efficient price adjustment mechanism which matches goods to people with much less waste than you would have in central planning. That argument is relatively clear and straightforward.
I think the second argument may have been mildly overstated by Hayek, as you said, and maybe in certain circumstances, at least for a while, you can avoid straight-out serfdom under central planning. But the basic logic is compelling to me—you do not want a society in which you're dependent on the goodwill of one person. Theorists like Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, who are worried about freedom as non-domination, should really be thinking a lot about this. If there is central planning, that means there is only one central planner. That means any participant in the economy is deeply dependent on their goodwill.
This is something that my grandparents and parents experienced in socialist Poland. When they fell afoul of the goodwill of the regime, they didn't just lose political positions or prestige in society—they lost their jobs and their place at the university. Thriving in society was dependent on one actor, and that actor was the government. Perhaps in some world you can have a government with that much power over every aspect of individuals’ lives—over their housing, jobs, and educational opportunities—and it restrains itself so that it never uses that power for ill. But absolute power corrupts absolutely in institutions as well as in individuals, and it is hard to think this is a sensible arrangement if you want to preserve freedom over time. It concentrates too much power in the hands of one set of actors. That is a core argument that I buy.
I think there is a third argument, which is more complicated—that you also take away some freedom by constraining economic activity. Doing this podcast provides me with some income, but the main reason I care about it is not that it helps me pay my rent. It is that I get to speak to Cass Sunstein and engage with my audience about interesting topics. If this were a system of central planning and somebody said, sorry, you need a permit to engage in that kind of work, it would not just make me a little less money each month—it would deprive me of a core intellectual outlet and form of engagement that I deeply prize.
Of course, that's true in all kinds of other ways. If you love teaching and the central planner says, unfortunately, your political opinions are such that we don't want to entrust you with teaching young minds, you may not just be out of a job or struggle to pay rent—one of your life’s purposes is being denied to you. The same is true at every scale. If you want to run a certain kind of store and there's a regulation that stops you, that might undermine your life’s purpose in some important way.
Here, I think, is an argument where a Hayekian strand does start to push in a slightly libertarian direction. Obviously, there are things on the other side. If regulation is needed so that you don't operate a hugely unsafe store in which half your visitors fall into a basement and die, we are going to recognize those things on the other side. But how much should we weigh that argument about the expressive quality of economic activity as something that should push us nearly in a libertarian direction in this respect?
Sunstein: I completely love that, and I thank you for it. I'll work with some stories. I was in China decades ago, and there were people repairing shoes on the street. I had a shoe that was a little broken, and one of the people repaired it and had some English. I talked to that person, who was making what at that time in China was a lot of money repairing shoes, and they didn't work for the government. I asked about that, and they said, with joy, we have an initiative now where small businesses can just go and fix shoes. They said, I really like doing it, and I'm making money, and I'm not working for the government. It wasn't art, but it was something that gave his life an energy that it wouldn't otherwise have.
A second story: I have someone in my family who has a regular job, likes it fine, and makes a living, but who wants to be creative. He's making movies, and the government doesn't have to authorize him to make movies. They're being made available, and he's good at it. My gosh, what a free country that he can make movies. I also have a friend who works for a consulting firm, likes it fine, but really wants to run a bookstore—that's her dream. You can tell when she talks about her consulting work that it pays the bills, but when she talks about the bookstore, she starts to smile.
Mounk: One of the interesting constraints in Germany is that you cannot compete on price in books. There's a very old law saying that every store has to offer the same book for the same price. I think there may be exceptions for books that are remaindered or particularly old. In this, I agree it is a sensible regulation because it allows more bookstores to persist. Otherwise, bigger bookstores would out-compete smaller ones. But this is—just because it's interesting—one of the constraints she likely faces.
Sunstein: Yeah, that's fascinating. I, as an author, may be speaking against my interest, but the idea of competing on price is a good thing, including for books as for apples—so price competition, hooray for that.
To your point, Rawls talks about careers open to talents. The tone suggests it is important, but not what makes his heart sing. I think Hayek—and you—are right to see careers open to talents as something that should make our hearts sing because it gives people, in all their diversity, an opportunity to do whatever it is they would get something from. It can be running something that has intellectual or artistic focus, or just something people really like to do. In illiberal societies, that is not present, or it is present much less. Both the left-wing and right-wing attacks on liberalism devalue careers open to talents.
So let's take Sweden—or rather, not the empirically existing Sweden, but what Jerry Cohen called “Swedenland,” some idealized form of Sweden. In this society, let's stipulate, you have a lot of free economic activity. Sweden has a higher number of billionaires per capita than the United States. You rein in regulation—you obviously have some regulation, but the state doesn't run wild. You don't have lots of needless regulation, as you now do in virtually every Western democracy. You allow for economic activity, but then you have strong taxes that redistribute a lot of money to the poorest in society, ensure great educational opportunities, and provide a good health system even for those who would not ordinarily be able to pay for it. That is presumably compatible with liberalism. How much further can you go? Is that the outer limit? Where does liberalism start to say you are infringing on the liberal society? Liberalism is not a binary—it is a question of degrees. Do any of these elements start to infringe on liberalism already? Do high taxes in themselves undermine economic liberty? How would you assess this? How much further might a left-wing liberal thinker want to go?
To be a liberal society, we need freedom of speech, freedom of religion, respect for pluralism, and respect for diversity. If Sweden, or Swedenland, is very redistributive, has high taxes, and lots of regulation, so far we have been able to check many liberal boxes. If regulation and taxes veer toward a command economy, then we start to look illiberal on the pluralism and diversity side. If it just means there is private property and people can start businesses, but the tax rate is super high—perhaps with very high corporate taxes—and there is a lot of redistribution from rich to poor, that is completely compatible with liberal principles.
John Rawls, the great liberal philosopher, was enthusiastic about something called the difference principle, by which economic inequalities have to be justified because they help people at the bottom. That is a fairly aggressive egalitarian-leaning principle, and many liberals don't agree with it. But if we have a Rawlsian Sweden, it can certainly fit within the liberal tradition. That is why we are talking about a big tent.
If we talk about fascist or communist systems—or systems that abolish private property, severely restrain freedom of speech, or do not allow people to enter occupations unless they get the state's permission, or have an occupational licensing system which is on steroids compared to what we observe in the United States—then we are either illiberal or pro tanto illiberal.
Mounk: All right, great. We have given thorough treatment to the left criticisms of liberalism and why you think they don't hold. Let's go to the right criticisms of liberalism.
I was struck, reading your book, remembering the time I had Sohrab Ahmari—who I think is a very interesting thinker—on the podcast to discuss and debate liberalism. Sohrab kept insisting that the definition of liberalism is maximizing autonomy and maximizing self-expression. We had an interesting back-and-forth. I tried to explain to him why, as a liberal thinker, I think that is not a helpful definition of liberalism, precisely because it implies that liberalism is opposed to any lifestyle or set of life goals—any conception of what makes your life worthwhile and important—except those that encourage the individual to maximize autonomy and self-expression in those ways.
In that respect, Sohrab's definition of liberalism spikes the football to create an easy opportunity to critique it from the right. It is rather telling of the post-liberal movement more broadly. Tell us about what the post-liberal critique is and why you don't buy it.
Sunstein: There's a passage from two psychologists who say that refutation of a caricature can be no better than a caricature of a refutation.
Mounk: I made a note of that line when reading it in your book and thought I need to use it more often.
Sunstein: Yeah, that's a good one, isn't it? It's kind of obscure, but it fits here—so thank you for that.
If you say that the liberal goal is to maximize autonomy, it would be good to know which liberal thinkers said something like that, and then to explain why that's the appropriate conception of liberalism. It isn't John Stuart Mill's conception of liberalism. It isn't Benjamin Constant's conception of liberalism. It certainly isn't Rawls's conception of liberalism. It isn't Philip Pettit's conception of liberalism. It isn't Joseph Raz's conception of liberalism.
It's fair to say that autonomy, understood as freedom, is important to the liberal tradition. Autonomy—it's not even clear what that means. Liberals believe that harm to others is forbidden, and many liberal thinkers think that motorcycle helmet laws, restrictions on smoking, and other forms of infringements on autonomy are permissible or required. The idea that liberalism means that prescription drug laws forbidding people to get medicines without a doctor's prescription are just fine—or even required—fits within liberal principles.
The identification of liberalism on the part of the right with maximization of autonomy is to construct a thing. I don't know why we call it liberalism—we should call it autonomism, I guess—but since no one holds it, autonomism has no subscribers. It is not the most useful set of objections to have. We could define conservatism or post-liberalism in ways that are tendentious, but that probably wouldn't be the most productive way to find a path forward.
Mounk: One somewhat prominent left-wing thinker claims that all of conservatism is just the desire to dominate, then goes through conservative history and says, look, all that these conservative thinkers wanted was just to dominate people. If you define conservatism that way, why would any decent person be a conservative? But that does not seem like a very fair way of describing what the concerns of Edmund Burke, for example, were.
To go a little bit further in this—I feel like sometimes the post-liberals are their own worst enemies because they don't actually put forward the most subtle version of a critique. But in the same way in which I try to voice some of the left-wing critiques of liberalism, let me try to voice some of the conservative critiques of liberalism.
I think there are two elements to this. One is to say that when you look at political philosophers, perhaps none of them fall prey to what you call autonomism, but when you look at some of our actual political practices, that can easily turn out to be the case. Liberal societies in the United States—and even more so perhaps in more secular places like Europe—have a huge amount of day-to-day disdain for religious people. They do not give a lot of space to accommodate people who want to opt out of certain forms of secular education that they find deeply challenging to their beliefs. It is much harder to homeschool children in Europe, for example, than in the United States.
To some extent, they even push toward undermining religious liberties in ways that are concerning. During the pandemic, for example, the state was quick to close down religious services and was stricter on religious services in some places than on people visiting restaurants—not to speak of the fact that participating in mass demonstrations was not discouraged in the same way in the summer of 2020.
The broader critique would be that while liberalism claims to be morally neutral, a lot of the reasons why our societies work are actually premised on a deeper set of small-c conservative principles about interpersonal care and community, which are slowly being eroded over the course of a liberal society. In practice, all of our cultural institutions tend toward encouraging people to seek forms of personal self-exploration and autonomy. As a result, we are slowly eating up the capital that has historically sustained and made successful liberal societies.
If you look at everything from the rise of loneliness, to people spending less time socializing, to the astonishing number of young women who are now on OnlyFans, all of these are symptoms of a decadent society that has slowly eaten up the capital of small-c conservative values that sustained it and is going off the rails.
Again, this is not my position—I am playing devil's advocate. I think that is the most subtle version of a post-liberal critique. Why do you think that does not cut the mustard? In what ways is that blaming any worrying aspect of our society on liberalism without liberalism actually being the cause of it?
Sunstein: Yeah, thank you. That was beautifully put. That, I think, is a worthy set of objections to something. Whether it's a set of objections to liberalism is a different point, but let's talk about it.
I think it has two forms. One is secularism as a thing, where there is contempt for or a lack of respect for religious activity and religious persons. That is occasionally real in Western nations, and it is horrible and illiberal. The objection to shutting down religious practices in the midst of COVID, or to singling out religious practices for regulation that similar gatherings were not facing—that is a liberal objection. Liberalism is the cure for, let's call it, secularism in its illiberal forms. Hooray for putting religious organizations at least on a plane of equality compared to their non-religious analogues. Hooray also for giving them special solicitude and requiring a particular burden of justification on restrictions on religious organizations.
The idea of contempt for people of faith—that is bad in a thousand ways. One of those ways is that it is illiberal. Then there is the empirical point, which David Brooks and Ross Douthat make, and Tocqueville worried over. There is a more fundamental concern, which is that liberalism, as you say, eats up or destroys the social capital—or non-liberal foundations—on which it depends. That is an empirical claim. The evidence for it is anecdotal and not systematic. Liberalism is not everything. In a family, the bonds of connection, religious commitments, or community attachments may have nothing to do with liberalism. They may be affective. To say that they reflect freedom might not be false, but it is not adequately descriptive of how parents feel toward their kids, or how Jews feel about temples. There may be affective or emotional attachments and commitments that liberalism does not create but needs. That is plausible.
I do not think we would want to say that liberalism particularly needs it—any society needs people with deep attachments and commitments, including to their neighbors and their nation. Liberalism may authorize or benefit from that, which is fair. The question whether liberalism eats them up is not readily answered with a yes.
If teenage girls are doing something disrespectful to themselves and potentially harmful in the long or short term, I would not see why we would blame that on liberalism. Liberalism is not Voldemort. It is not some villain from Star Wars. It is not (for the aficionado) the Sith. It is not the emperor, not Darth Vader, not Anakin in transformation. Liberalism does value freedom. To say that a society that values freedom ends up eating away at the affective or emotional commitments on which liberal societies depend sounds good, but I would wonder what the evidence is.
There are probably more mid-level or intermediate social forces that lead to the things people are rightly troubled by. To blame liberalism—the cautious way to put it—is not proven. The Scottish verdict, I think, is that the more accurate answer is that it is a speculation no more plausible than a range of other speculations which would take some abstraction ending in -ism and say that the fact that there is divorce, or that young boys and girls are struggling, is a product of that ism—social media-ism, or individualism.
Mounk: I think one of the interesting things is that there is a general kind of category error—a set of category errors—that are very tempting and that you can see cropping up in intellectual discussions again and again, of which this is characteristic. That is, when there is a dominant aspect of a system, to ascribe everything to that, and if you do not like it, to ascribe everything negative to that.
You see that on the left in many cases, where people blame capitalism for anything that is a product of the fact of material scarcity—which long pre-existed capitalism and which capitalism has actually helped to alleviate—or for any way in which people can ruthlessly pursue their economic self-interest. Those existed long before capitalism.
I remember an incident during the pandemic when people were arguing that we should open up to certain forms of economic activity again. They said, this is capitalism. Somebody found an example of a trading port in the 16th or 17th century that was starting to run out of food. They opened up the ports to get food in, and that was how the Black Death reentered—so it would have been earlier than the 16th or 17th century in that case. Certain basic forms of economic necessity have always existed throughout human history. They often lead to very difficult trade-offs and sometimes to contemptible behavior. It is a category mistake to blame capitalism for all of that.
In the same way, some of these post-liberal thinkers on the right attempt to say that if there is immorality, if there is social decay, if there are things we should be concerned about in our society, that is because of liberalism—because we live in liberal societies and liberalism is everywhere. It so happens that many of these post-liberal thinkers are deeply Catholic. If you go back to Catholic countries and regimes like France in the 18th century, you have a lot of public prostitution and other forms of immorality that they, perhaps rightly, would have objected to. The idea that those are all the product of liberalism, and that they would not exist were we not in a liberal society, is a similar kind of category mistake.
Sunstein: I think that's completely right. It is useful to put a spotlight on those aspects of liberalism that are inspiring and awesome—and there are many of them. The fact that people can take paths that lead them in directions that help their community do spectacularly well and that help their own life move in directions that make it worth living—that is a fantastic thing.
Lincoln talked about slavery as wrong because one person is subject to another, is owned by another, and said that is inconsistent with the sheet anchor of American republicanism. The idea was that America was created on the idea that everyone is a subject and not an object. The idea of self-government, in Lincoln's telling, was closely associated with the attack on slavery—that each of us gets to govern ourselves. That is a political idea. It is not an idea about how we relate to our church, or to our children, or how our children relate to us, but it is an engine of economic growth which, unless things are really not working well, will benefit people at the bottom of the economic ladder. We have seen that time and again.
To prize a liberal agency, as an engine for economic opportunity—that is right. To say that if resources grow, as they should, we will adopt, Roosevelt-style, a second bill of rights. Roosevelt's own second bill of rights included a right to a good education, a right to freedom from monopolies at home and abroad, and a right to protection against deprivation in case you are old, disabled, or otherwise struggling.
In my preferred version of liberalism, liberal societies are New Deal liberals. Hayek was there, by the way. Some Hayekians in the audience will squirm at this. When I say Hayek was there, I do not mean that Roosevelt was his absolute favorite. I mean that the provision of resources for people at the bottom was something that Hayek was keen on.
Mounk: So we have talked a lot about what liberalism isn't, and you have rightly transitioned into what liberalism is. Perhaps we can split this into two parts. First, how should we think about the broader liberal tradition? Then I will have a follow-up about what your individual version of liberalism is and what you put particular emphasis on.
To start more broadly, now that we have defined the negative space—now that we have seen what liberalism isn't, where some of the boundaries are, and why some of its critiques are wrong—what is the affirmative description of what this proud tradition actually consists of?
Sunstein: If we want two words, we would say freedom and pluralism. A liberal tradition is enthusiastic about freedom of speech, careers open to talents, and freedom of religion. The idea of property rights is congenial to the liberal tradition, built into it for the reason you gave—that if your property is not yours, then you are dependent on the government. That means the government can destroy you if it wants to. That means you are a supplicant rather than a rights-holder, and liberals do not like that at all.
The idea of self-governance is part of freedom. Pluralism means that if someone wants to spend their life with some kind of commitment—let's say it is a commitment to making movies, or a religious commitment, or making shoes—liberalism's foundations are very welcoming of that. Of course, there are limits. If you want your career to be terrorism or dealing illegal drugs, that is not allowed, and we need a liberal account of why. Liberals have tried to do that.
The idea I would like to highlight, which is less in the bloodstream of current thinking, is experiments in living. That is Mill's almost throwaway line in talking about liberalism and liberty, but the idea is really at the core of the liberal tradition. It fits with Hayek and economic freedom, and it fits with Mill, Raz, and Rawls with respect to autonomy. There are hard questions to be raised about which experiments in living are impermissible, but, for a while, let us not fuss about them. If you want to have a podcast, a bookstore, make shoes, or create a small construction company—that is what my dad did—liberalism allows it. He loved it. He did not like regulation much, but it was not illiberal in such a way as to constrain him. If you think, as my sister did, that I want to be a real estate agent because I like working with people and the idea of bringing people together with homes—that is a fantastic thing. Or if you want to be a doctor or a nurse because you care about helping people who are struggling with their health, or if you love animals and want to be a veterinarian—or work with a veterinarian because you could not get into veterinary school—that is liberalism. It is an experiment in living. If after a period of working for a veterinarian you think, I do not want to do this anymore, I want to try something else—become a paralegal, for example—that is precious. It is built into liberal societies and blocked in illiberal societies.
Liberalism's respect for freedom means you do not need permission slips for everything. I have traveled to multiple countries, including non-democracies, for various enterprises. I hear a lot from friends in non-democracies. They often ask me to do something—when I worked in our government and when I taught as an academic—and I could not. If someone wants to study at my university, I do not have the authority to say yes because I like them. If someone wants a visa, I worked in our government and had some role in regulation, but I could not give someone a visa. I simply lacked the authority.
No one has that authority except by going through the rules. People in illiberal countries are puzzled by that. They think surely someone in government knows a guy who knows a guy and can make it happen. In liberal society, you cannot do that. Maybe if you break the rules a little you can get someone to the top of the queue, but if you break the rules—at least in the government when I worked there—you get fired.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Cass discuss experiments in living, different approaches to human flourishing, and how we can live up to liberal ideals. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
