Liberal Soulcraft
Liberalism is in trouble. It will take a concerted act of will to save it.
Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Alexandre Lefebvre’s excellent new book “Liberalism as a Way of Life.” Alexandre will also be joining us on a coming episode of The Good Fight podcast.
To make sure you don’t miss Yascha’s conversation with Alexandre—or any of the other exciting conversations with some of our deepest thinkers we have in store for you—please make sure to add The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app today.
In his late masterpiece, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville pinpoints the moment when the old order of things started to collapse. It wasn’t on August 8, 1788, when the king summoned the estates general of his kingdom. Nor was it the storming of the Bastille a year later. It occurred long before, and while the exact calendar date is lost to history, it was far more significant than those noisier events. It was the day when one (smaller) landowner looked sideways at another (larger) landowner.
“I ask you to imagine the French peasant of the eighteenth century, or even the peasant you know today, for he remains forever the same,” says Tocqueville in setting up the scene. The encounter he then narrates is a masterpiece of perspective—of the old order viewed by the new and the former lord by his now-emancipated equal:
This little corner of the earth that he can call his own fills him with pride and independence. Yet now the same neighbors arrive to take him away from his field and force him to work somewhere else for no pay. . . . And when he returns home and wants to put the remainder of his grain to his own use—grain that he planted with his own hands and watched grow with his own eyes—he cannot do so unless he sends it to be milled in mills and baked in ovens owned by these same men.
Part of the income of his small farm goes to paying [his neighbors’] rent, and that rent is perpetual and irredeemable. No matter what he does, he encounters these vexatious neighbors along his path, interfering with his pleasure, impeding his work, eating his produce.
This scene, as depicted by Tocqueville, boils down to one furious question: “Who the fuck do you think you are?!” And once asked by enough people with enough passion, the old regime is doomed. The aristocrat who once commanded respect is scorned as a parasite. Inequalities that were seen to serve a common good are condemned as irrational and punitive. Most significantly, the social fabric frays into mutual hatreds—“a cascade of contempt” in the words of a contemporary. The moment all of this happens is when the regime becomes ancien, a word that in French means both previous and old.
Have we reached a similar tipping point today? Many smart observers seem to think so. Governance in many liberal democracies is mired in dysfunction, inequality continues its relentless march, environmental catastrophe is the new normal, mass migration destabilizes international politics, and ideological polarization generates alternative epistemic realities. With respect to my own argument, to say that liberalism is on its way out would mean that a critical mass of citizens in liberal democracies no longer believe in it as a fair system of cooperation. And frankly, that might seem like an accurate reading of the landscape. The far left speaks as if it had lost faith that liberalism, in anything resembling its present form, can be rehabilitated. Captured by capitalism (and for some critics, racism and patriarchy too), utopian possibilities no longer seem to inhere in it. The far right launches a frontal attack, denying that society should be understood in terms of fair cooperation in the first place. Populist and authoritarian rhetoric is defined by a politics of suspicion, and its main message is that liberal elites are busy giving our stuff to them while taking away from me and mine. When you see the world like that, pretending that so-called liberal societies are even trying to be fair systems of cooperation is like bringing a picnic basket to a global and intergenerational knife fight.
But let’s take a page from Tocqueville. His approach is to always look at the mores of a society—moeurs in French, a word that spans the values, customs, embodied practices, and ways of living proper to a society. A glance, expectation, courtesy, or flash of anger is where the regime and its future (or lack thereof) lies. My claim is that liberalism is the water of our times: Not only does it saturate the public and background culture, but it has percolated down to the bedrock of mores—which is to say, that in idea and emotion, ambition and deed, so many of us are liberals through and through.
And here’s the thing about mores: they have a duration all of their own. Anchored as they are in one’s self-conception and routines, they can be stubborn and resilient. Where, then, do we find ourselves? Yes, the future of liberalism can look bleak. For the privileged behind their computer screens, dire newspaper headlines and the roiling anger of Twitter do not augur well. And for less fortunate citizens, depredation and humiliation seem like features rather than bugs of the system. But to take up Tocqueville’s point of view and judge the present by its mores, next time you’re out shopping, try an experiment: cut someone off in line and see what happens. Or if that seems too risky, ask yourself the following set of questions: How would you feel if someone more powerful told you to keep quiet? How about if they told a stranger the same? How much schlock on Netflix (comedy, action, romance, or drama—it doesn’t matter) do you consume about people finding their true path against all odds? How would you react if you learned your kid is a bully at school? When you get a parking ticket (and can afford it), do you think to yourself, “Oh well, it’s going to pay for something”? Are you OK, honestly, if lower-income housing were to be built in your neighborhood? If your collected answers to the above questions are, roughly speaking, “angry,” “still angry,” “too much,” “with alarm and shame,” “I guess,” and “yes,” it should tell you something about yourself. Liberalism has a hold on you.
While writing my book Liberalism as a Way of Life, I frequently joked that I had to hurry, lest liberalism be over and done with. Truth is, I’m not so sure. When has liberalism not been in crisis? “Pick any decade since the 1930s,” observes the historian Edward Fawcett, “and you will find an anxious liberal checking liberalism’s vital signs or pronouncing the patient dead.” To this I’d add that the voices most loudly proclaiming the demise of liberalism today never liked it much to begin with.
What I am confident about, however, is that liberaldom—the hypocritical, self-satisfied cousin of liberalism, that bears the same relationship to true liberalism as Christendom did to the actual teachings of Jesus Christ—is unstable. It combines moralism from the podium of correct opinion with hypocrisy and inequity on the ground. That is a recipe for resentment, a cascade of contempt for our day. Who knows, maybe the doomsayers are correct? Maybe the current order will come crashing down suddenly and spectacularly, thanks to God knows what proximate cause (the war in Ukraine? COVID-27? Rampant inflation? A Tucker Carlson presidency?). My sense, though, is that liberaldom will limp along for decades, bleeding support daily while the tectonic plates of mores continue to shift against the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation. The last fifty years of the ancien regime were ones where no one, no matter where they stood in the social hierarchy, believed in it. Don’t mistake as optimism, then, my uncertainty as to whether the end is nigh. Mine is a longue durée view of history based in the belief that while liberaldom has staying power, it will eventually end in one of two ways: liberalism or illiberalism.
Throughout my book, I have presented what philosophers call an “intrinsic” rather than “instrumental” argument for the value of a liberal way of life. I have claimed that it is a good way to live, period, regardless of its beneficial effects on our societies. Yet those effects exist, and an instrumental case for the good of a liberal way of life can be made. Indeed, it must be made, for liberaldom will be the death of us. Be liberal for yourself then, by all means, but do it also to set a lived example of how much life this regime still has and show how far from exhaustion it is. This is what the present moment requires: for liberals to not just promote their values but live up to them too. That alone will kindle faith in all reasonable citizens (liberal all the way down or not) in our world and help liberaldom to inch toward liberalism rather than slump into illiberalism. The stakes for us liberals couldn’t be more personal. Liberalism is the source of my soul. My wager is that the same is probably true of you.
Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney.
Excerpted from LIBERALISM AS A WAY OF LIFE Copyright © 2024 by Alexandre Lefebvre. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
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Every time you say you are a liberal, you have to explain what you mean by that. Such diversity of meaning should allow for a big tent--and maybe one day, it did--but today it causes an almost constant need to explain and defend oneself. It all gets too complicated. Somehow, "liberals" need to agree on three or four principles as core and tell themselves and the rest of the world that is it period. Quite and illiberal approach? Maybe. But maybe necessary anyway.
"Captured by capitalism (and for some critics, racism and patriarchy too), utopian possibilities no longer seem to inhere in [Liberalism]."
But was Liberalism ever about "utopian possibilities"? Liberalism, as best I understand it, promises people opportunity to freely chart their own course through life. That in itself is fairly revolutionary (with the long view of history in mind), but little if anything about it promises utopia as an outcome.
Utopianism, rather, appears to be a far Left, or Leftist, aspiration: one in which societies basically mandate proportional economic and/or racial outcomes in all spheres of society. And, more or less by definition, the only way to achieve those ends is through illiberal means. Liberalism and Utopia, therefore, may be inherently opposed to one another; but, seeing as how any expectation of a Utopia on Earth is clearly childish, that's probably a good thing.
"How would you feel if someone more powerful told you to keep quiet? How about if they told a stranger the same?"
I think these are good questions, and I'd add some more. How would we feel if our elders told us that they would decide on our marriage for us (and, if we refused, that we would face threats of banishment from the family and/or physical violence)? How would we feel if we were told that our profession in life was predetermined by our birth, and that not only was there nothing we could do about that but in fact that we might place ourselves and our family in danger by questioning the established order of things? How would we feel if we were told there was only one spiritual/religious understanding of the world and that if we questioned it, we would face excommunication or death?
The fact that Liberal societies have largely evolved beyond these issues is, in my experience, largely taken for granted even by the most vociferous critics of Liberal societies. And that just goes to show: the main threat faced by Liberalism may be a loss of perspective on just how much it has accomplished and just how important it remains.