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The theory and practice of liberalism
Pergamon
Hirlory of EuropeanIdem, Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 753756, 1994 copyright 0 1994 ElsevierScienceLtd 0191-6599 (94) Eeol4-6 Printedin Great Britain.All rightsreserved 0191-6599/94 $7.00 + 0.00
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LIBERALISM RICHARD BELLAMY *
What’s the Matter with Liberalism?, Ronald Beiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), vii + 19 pp., $25.00. Pat-Libe~lism: Studies in Political Thought, John Gray (London: 1993), vii + 358 pp., $39.95.
Routledge,
There is a growing feeling amongst political theorists of both left and right that the triumph of liberalism has proved something of a pyrrhic victory. For the normative individualism that lies at the heart of liberal doctrine, whereby only individual lives, preferences and states of mind can claim intrinsic value, stands accused of undermining the commitment to a public culture supportive of autonomy upon which this form of agency relies. Rather than opposing liberalism to communitarianism, the search is now on for some form of viable communitarian liberalism that locates the liberal individual within a certain kind of historical and moral community capable of fostering the sorts of choices that are intrinsic to the liberal conception of human flourishing. In this respect, the debates of the 1990s have come to bear a curious resemblance to those of the 189Os, and it is interesting to note that writers of that period who rethought liberal values in more social terms-such as T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, John Dewey and firnile Durkheim-have all come back into vogue. Whether the attempts by recent writers to theorise a coherent and viable form of liberal community will prove any more successful than those of a hundred years ago remains to be seen. Gray’s book is presented as a sequel to his collection Liberalisms: Essays in PaiiticalPhilosophy (London: Routledge, 1989). In that earlier volume, he argued that all forms of foundational liberalism, be they based on rights, contractarian, utilitarian or A~stotelian arguments, all failed to show that a liberal regime was the only rationally acceptable or morally legitimate form of social organisation for human beings, He contended that there was a grave danger that an excess of liberal theory would undermine liberal practice by calling into question the historical inheritance of liberalism embodied in the institutions and conventions of civil society without being able to put anything in its place. There was a certain degree of self-criticism involved in this thesis. Gray made his name in the 1980s as a prominent philosopher of the New Right. However, there was always a tension between between
the libertarian and the conservative elements of New Right doctrine, the radical individualism of the first and the more holistic and
*School of Economic and Social Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7T3, U.K.
753
754
Reviews
traditionalistic thinking of the second. In many ways, his recent work can be seen as an attempt to square that particular circle and to show that the former only proves coherent within the context of the latter, and hence needs to undergo some modification. Like Liberalisms, this book brings together a number of essays, articles and reviews, to which he has added a substantive epilogue supposedly pulling it all together and offering a new coherent statement of his current position. On the whole, this is a more uneven collection than the last, lacking its thematic unity and including a number of relatively slight pieces, such as book reviews and journalistic commentaries from obscure American conservative publications. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, on thinkers, contains three particularly informative pieces on three of the inspirers of Gray’s new enterprise-Hayek, who he portrays as a conservative; Oakeshott, who he reads as a liberal; and Berlin, whose views on value-pluralism are central to Gray’s own views. This list nicely reveals the tensions within Gray’s theory, whereby the whiggish Hayek and the Tory Oakeshott are forced to patch up their considerable disagreements and trade their ideological allegiances. Rather than resolving the political and epistemological differences between these thinkers and the dichotomies that often characterised their own work, Gray’s attempted synthesis tends to reproduce them. For example, for all his criticism of foundationalist attempts to ground liberalism, Gray does not feel entirely happy to leave the survival of liberal ideas up to the vagaries of the judgement of history, Yet in reaching for Berlin’s argument for liberty as the logical entailment of an objective plurality of values, a view he supplements with Raz’s arguments for an autonomy promoting culture consisting of worthwhile options, he is surely building a foundationalist case of his own. The moral and social ontology running through this work may be more like Hegel than Kant-an interpretation that gains support from his latest book (After &New Right, London: Routledge, 1993), in which he comes close to advocating the need for the Hegehan ethical state to regulate and promote a flourishing civil society-but it is no less metaphysically grounded for that, rather more so in fact. The attempt to deny this simply lands him into all sorts of contradictions which are reminiscent of the antinomies between the social evolutionary and the Kantian constructivist elements of Hayek’s philosophy, and which surface less clearly but for similar reasons in both Berlin and Oakeshott on occasion. The second section, critiques, is largely concerned with attacking academic Marxism, and musing on the failures of socialism and the inadequacies of liberalism to repare the damage it wrought in Eastern Europe. Gray is a brilliant critic, and the attacks are particularly sharp. The musings are less successful, however. To blame the shortcomings of either ‘actually existing’ socialism or liberalism on the hubris and culpable ndivety of their intellectual supporters is to overstate the influence of the latter and to understate the difficulties of historical practice, in which not everything is spontaneous order. Gray, again like Hayek, also fails to appreciate that socialism too is a tradition and not just the abstract construct of an intellectual elite. In the West, at least, it arose and developed piecemeal as a response to the problems of capitalism and an unregulated civil society. Indeed, it is hard not to regard Gray’s recent writings as little more than a libertarian academic’s belated rediscovery of the worth of the social democratic
Reviews
755
institutions that brought the West the social prosperity and fostered the liberal values of the post-war years. Unfortunately, there is little consolation as one sits amongst the ruins of the British welfare state and economy in saying ‘I told you so’. In fact, to find Gray hailed by what remains of the social democratic establishment that he derided for a decade as a guru for the 1990s only adds to this reviewer’s depression at the current state of British politics. The final section, questions, concludes the collection with a new essay, ‘What is Dead and What Is Living in Liberalism’. I have already commented on the uneasy synthesis that Gray presents there between the appeal to history and the appeal to objective foundations of one sort or another. Ironically, the reason for this is well brought out in the title, since for Gray what is living in liberalism is precisely what he comes close to saying is now dead, killed by liberal philosophers, namely liberal civil society. What a pity he did not read some Benedetto Croce! Apart from getting Croce’s famous phrase right, he would have confronted precisely this dilemma in the Italian thinker’s writings. Yet, as I remarked at the start, there is a depressing sense of dkjcj vu about a great deal of what passes for contemporary political philosophy. Beiner’s book covers similar themes, but from the Left. Beiner adopts a hermeneutic view of political theory. He makes rather large claims for this approach, regarding himself as engaging ‘with the grand questions of human nature and human destiny’ by offering an interpretation of some of the dilemmas confronting citizens of modern liberal societies which ‘make sense of the practical choices that compose our lives and our aspirations’. Such a phenomenology of the post-modern condition would certainly have been exciting. What we get, however, is a more pedestrian run through of some of the standard issues of the liberal-communitarian debate, on which Beiner takes a roughly neo-Aristotelian perspective in which the right must depend on the good. He combines this analysis of contemporary liberal philosophy with occasional bursts of moralising about American society highly reminiscent of Marcuse, in which he rails against the Philistine consumerism of liberalism and its belief in the sovereignty of individual preferences. Whatever the merits of such views as sociological analysis (not much in my opinion, and in any case Beiner offers no evidence for his assertions beyond the anecdotal), they cannot he regarded as anywhere near an accurate characterisation of the liberal tradition apart from the recent writings of the libertarian wing of the New Right, Liberals do not deride culture or the constitutive ties of family and community, nor the provision of a supportive environment within which individuals might enjoy them. But they rightly discriminate between cultures which oppress individuality and the possibilities for self-criticism and those that do not. However, Beiner contends that this commitment has degenerated into a general belief that individuals ought to have a degree of freedom to pick and choose that undermines the ability of any culture to sustain itself. In his opinion, ‘this precisely is the quandary of liberal community’. In a sense, while Gray accuses liberalism of theorising too much and so heads off towards a ‘Post-liberalism’ in which the liberal way of life is just one historical form of flourishing among many, Beiner accuses liberals of theorising far too little. The problem, as he puts it, is neither that they lack a theory of the good, nor that the liberal self is ahistorical or asocial. Rather, ‘the problem is quite simply that the liberal good, as defined by the bourgeois
Review
756
civilization of the last few centuries, is not good enough, and that liberal community defeats the possibility of a sense of meaningful collective purpose’. As both the books under review show, at the heart of the current critiques and attempted reformulations of liberal political philosophy lie differing interpretations of the relationship between liberal theory and the liberal practices of contemporary societies. Although there is an element of truth in Beiner’s and Gray’s contrasting interpretations of this relationship, both are mistaken in important respects. Liberal societies have failed the liberal ideal in the extent to which they have extended a substantive degree of equality and liberty to their citizens. Huge disparities in wealth and power, concentrated in complex public and private economic and bureaucratic organisations, have undermined the liberal aspiration to secure a social order that reflects the autonomous choices of individual agents. In so far as he recognises this fact, Beiner’s thesis is more accurate than Gray’s, Moreover, Beiner is also correct to point out that the tendency of contemporary liberals to renounce all metaphysical commitments and attempt to argue from a neutral plateau capable of being all things to all people proves utterly vacuous. As Gray has shown, such arguments fail to found anything. But, as Beiner contends, this inadequacy surely reveals a lack of rather than, as Gray believes, an excess of theorising. However, both are wrong to attribute the empty proceduralism and instrumentalism of current liberal practice to the vacuity of liberal theory. If anything, it is the other way around, with the abstract formalism of so much recent liberal philosophy representing a capitulation to trends within contemporary liberal societies. On the one hand, these theories ignore the forces shaping our choices and the limits of our ability rationally to control or harmonise them. In so far as they do engage with such issues, it is in an abstract and utopian manner that is largely irrelevant to the social and political contexts within which people actually lead their lives, On the other hand, the abandonment by contemporary liberals of the metaphysical and moral commitments of the liberal tradition for putatively neutral principles that purport to be capable of mediating between all points of view has neutralised the critical bite of liberalism and its crucial ability to discriminate. 1990s liberal theory compares badly with the liberalism of a hundred years ago on each of these issues. It lacks both the sociological awareness and the ethical basis of these past thinkers. To say this is not to argue that we can simply return to the classics of the liberal tradition for answers to our current concerns. We cannot, and to that extent certain fundamental assumptions of liberalism have to be rethought. In so far as Gray’s post-liberalism acknowledges the need for this rethinking, his analysis has far more to offer than Beiner’s efegaic desire to recreate the Greek polis. But it does suggest that if liberalism is to have a future as a political discourse liberal theorists must retain the historical sensitivity, sociological awareness and moral and epistemological foundations which Beiner advocates as necessary for an adequate political philosophy and which have hitherto distinguished the liberal tradition. Richard University of East Angiia
Bellamy
Hirlory of EuropeanIdem, Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 753756, 1994 copyright 0 1994 ElsevierScienceLtd 0191-6599 (94) Eeol4-6 Printedin Great Britain.All rightsreserved 0191-6599/94 $7.00 + 0.00
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LIBERALISM RICHARD BELLAMY *
What’s the Matter with Liberalism?, Ronald Beiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), vii + 19 pp., $25.00. Pat-Libe~lism: Studies in Political Thought, John Gray (London: 1993), vii + 358 pp., $39.95.
Routledge,
There is a growing feeling amongst political theorists of both left and right that the triumph of liberalism has proved something of a pyrrhic victory. For the normative individualism that lies at the heart of liberal doctrine, whereby only individual lives, preferences and states of mind can claim intrinsic value, stands accused of undermining the commitment to a public culture supportive of autonomy upon which this form of agency relies. Rather than opposing liberalism to communitarianism, the search is now on for some form of viable communitarian liberalism that locates the liberal individual within a certain kind of historical and moral community capable of fostering the sorts of choices that are intrinsic to the liberal conception of human flourishing. In this respect, the debates of the 1990s have come to bear a curious resemblance to those of the 189Os, and it is interesting to note that writers of that period who rethought liberal values in more social terms-such as T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, John Dewey and firnile Durkheim-have all come back into vogue. Whether the attempts by recent writers to theorise a coherent and viable form of liberal community will prove any more successful than those of a hundred years ago remains to be seen. Gray’s book is presented as a sequel to his collection Liberalisms: Essays in PaiiticalPhilosophy (London: Routledge, 1989). In that earlier volume, he argued that all forms of foundational liberalism, be they based on rights, contractarian, utilitarian or A~stotelian arguments, all failed to show that a liberal regime was the only rationally acceptable or morally legitimate form of social organisation for human beings, He contended that there was a grave danger that an excess of liberal theory would undermine liberal practice by calling into question the historical inheritance of liberalism embodied in the institutions and conventions of civil society without being able to put anything in its place. There was a certain degree of self-criticism involved in this thesis. Gray made his name in the 1980s as a prominent philosopher of the New Right. However, there was always a tension between between
the libertarian and the conservative elements of New Right doctrine, the radical individualism of the first and the more holistic and
*School of Economic and Social Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7T3, U.K.
753
754
Reviews
traditionalistic thinking of the second. In many ways, his recent work can be seen as an attempt to square that particular circle and to show that the former only proves coherent within the context of the latter, and hence needs to undergo some modification. Like Liberalisms, this book brings together a number of essays, articles and reviews, to which he has added a substantive epilogue supposedly pulling it all together and offering a new coherent statement of his current position. On the whole, this is a more uneven collection than the last, lacking its thematic unity and including a number of relatively slight pieces, such as book reviews and journalistic commentaries from obscure American conservative publications. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, on thinkers, contains three particularly informative pieces on three of the inspirers of Gray’s new enterprise-Hayek, who he portrays as a conservative; Oakeshott, who he reads as a liberal; and Berlin, whose views on value-pluralism are central to Gray’s own views. This list nicely reveals the tensions within Gray’s theory, whereby the whiggish Hayek and the Tory Oakeshott are forced to patch up their considerable disagreements and trade their ideological allegiances. Rather than resolving the political and epistemological differences between these thinkers and the dichotomies that often characterised their own work, Gray’s attempted synthesis tends to reproduce them. For example, for all his criticism of foundationalist attempts to ground liberalism, Gray does not feel entirely happy to leave the survival of liberal ideas up to the vagaries of the judgement of history, Yet in reaching for Berlin’s argument for liberty as the logical entailment of an objective plurality of values, a view he supplements with Raz’s arguments for an autonomy promoting culture consisting of worthwhile options, he is surely building a foundationalist case of his own. The moral and social ontology running through this work may be more like Hegel than Kant-an interpretation that gains support from his latest book (After &New Right, London: Routledge, 1993), in which he comes close to advocating the need for the Hegehan ethical state to regulate and promote a flourishing civil society-but it is no less metaphysically grounded for that, rather more so in fact. The attempt to deny this simply lands him into all sorts of contradictions which are reminiscent of the antinomies between the social evolutionary and the Kantian constructivist elements of Hayek’s philosophy, and which surface less clearly but for similar reasons in both Berlin and Oakeshott on occasion. The second section, critiques, is largely concerned with attacking academic Marxism, and musing on the failures of socialism and the inadequacies of liberalism to repare the damage it wrought in Eastern Europe. Gray is a brilliant critic, and the attacks are particularly sharp. The musings are less successful, however. To blame the shortcomings of either ‘actually existing’ socialism or liberalism on the hubris and culpable ndivety of their intellectual supporters is to overstate the influence of the latter and to understate the difficulties of historical practice, in which not everything is spontaneous order. Gray, again like Hayek, also fails to appreciate that socialism too is a tradition and not just the abstract construct of an intellectual elite. In the West, at least, it arose and developed piecemeal as a response to the problems of capitalism and an unregulated civil society. Indeed, it is hard not to regard Gray’s recent writings as little more than a libertarian academic’s belated rediscovery of the worth of the social democratic
Reviews
755
institutions that brought the West the social prosperity and fostered the liberal values of the post-war years. Unfortunately, there is little consolation as one sits amongst the ruins of the British welfare state and economy in saying ‘I told you so’. In fact, to find Gray hailed by what remains of the social democratic establishment that he derided for a decade as a guru for the 1990s only adds to this reviewer’s depression at the current state of British politics. The final section, questions, concludes the collection with a new essay, ‘What is Dead and What Is Living in Liberalism’. I have already commented on the uneasy synthesis that Gray presents there between the appeal to history and the appeal to objective foundations of one sort or another. Ironically, the reason for this is well brought out in the title, since for Gray what is living in liberalism is precisely what he comes close to saying is now dead, killed by liberal philosophers, namely liberal civil society. What a pity he did not read some Benedetto Croce! Apart from getting Croce’s famous phrase right, he would have confronted precisely this dilemma in the Italian thinker’s writings. Yet, as I remarked at the start, there is a depressing sense of dkjcj vu about a great deal of what passes for contemporary political philosophy. Beiner’s book covers similar themes, but from the Left. Beiner adopts a hermeneutic view of political theory. He makes rather large claims for this approach, regarding himself as engaging ‘with the grand questions of human nature and human destiny’ by offering an interpretation of some of the dilemmas confronting citizens of modern liberal societies which ‘make sense of the practical choices that compose our lives and our aspirations’. Such a phenomenology of the post-modern condition would certainly have been exciting. What we get, however, is a more pedestrian run through of some of the standard issues of the liberal-communitarian debate, on which Beiner takes a roughly neo-Aristotelian perspective in which the right must depend on the good. He combines this analysis of contemporary liberal philosophy with occasional bursts of moralising about American society highly reminiscent of Marcuse, in which he rails against the Philistine consumerism of liberalism and its belief in the sovereignty of individual preferences. Whatever the merits of such views as sociological analysis (not much in my opinion, and in any case Beiner offers no evidence for his assertions beyond the anecdotal), they cannot he regarded as anywhere near an accurate characterisation of the liberal tradition apart from the recent writings of the libertarian wing of the New Right, Liberals do not deride culture or the constitutive ties of family and community, nor the provision of a supportive environment within which individuals might enjoy them. But they rightly discriminate between cultures which oppress individuality and the possibilities for self-criticism and those that do not. However, Beiner contends that this commitment has degenerated into a general belief that individuals ought to have a degree of freedom to pick and choose that undermines the ability of any culture to sustain itself. In his opinion, ‘this precisely is the quandary of liberal community’. In a sense, while Gray accuses liberalism of theorising too much and so heads off towards a ‘Post-liberalism’ in which the liberal way of life is just one historical form of flourishing among many, Beiner accuses liberals of theorising far too little. The problem, as he puts it, is neither that they lack a theory of the good, nor that the liberal self is ahistorical or asocial. Rather, ‘the problem is quite simply that the liberal good, as defined by the bourgeois
Review
756
civilization of the last few centuries, is not good enough, and that liberal community defeats the possibility of a sense of meaningful collective purpose’. As both the books under review show, at the heart of the current critiques and attempted reformulations of liberal political philosophy lie differing interpretations of the relationship between liberal theory and the liberal practices of contemporary societies. Although there is an element of truth in Beiner’s and Gray’s contrasting interpretations of this relationship, both are mistaken in important respects. Liberal societies have failed the liberal ideal in the extent to which they have extended a substantive degree of equality and liberty to their citizens. Huge disparities in wealth and power, concentrated in complex public and private economic and bureaucratic organisations, have undermined the liberal aspiration to secure a social order that reflects the autonomous choices of individual agents. In so far as he recognises this fact, Beiner’s thesis is more accurate than Gray’s, Moreover, Beiner is also correct to point out that the tendency of contemporary liberals to renounce all metaphysical commitments and attempt to argue from a neutral plateau capable of being all things to all people proves utterly vacuous. As Gray has shown, such arguments fail to found anything. But, as Beiner contends, this inadequacy surely reveals a lack of rather than, as Gray believes, an excess of theorising. However, both are wrong to attribute the empty proceduralism and instrumentalism of current liberal practice to the vacuity of liberal theory. If anything, it is the other way around, with the abstract formalism of so much recent liberal philosophy representing a capitulation to trends within contemporary liberal societies. On the one hand, these theories ignore the forces shaping our choices and the limits of our ability rationally to control or harmonise them. In so far as they do engage with such issues, it is in an abstract and utopian manner that is largely irrelevant to the social and political contexts within which people actually lead their lives, On the other hand, the abandonment by contemporary liberals of the metaphysical and moral commitments of the liberal tradition for putatively neutral principles that purport to be capable of mediating between all points of view has neutralised the critical bite of liberalism and its crucial ability to discriminate. 1990s liberal theory compares badly with the liberalism of a hundred years ago on each of these issues. It lacks both the sociological awareness and the ethical basis of these past thinkers. To say this is not to argue that we can simply return to the classics of the liberal tradition for answers to our current concerns. We cannot, and to that extent certain fundamental assumptions of liberalism have to be rethought. In so far as Gray’s post-liberalism acknowledges the need for this rethinking, his analysis has far more to offer than Beiner’s efegaic desire to recreate the Greek polis. But it does suggest that if liberalism is to have a future as a political discourse liberal theorists must retain the historical sensitivity, sociological awareness and moral and epistemological foundations which Beiner advocates as necessary for an adequate political philosophy and which have hitherto distinguished the liberal tradition. Richard University of East Angiia
Bellamy