Liberal Skepticism, Epistemic Humility, and the Idea of Progress

Striking the Right Balance Between Fear and Hope

In his Mémoires,[1] Raymond Aron returns at some point on the reception of his most influential book, The Opium of the Intellectuals (L’opium des intellectuels in French), and how it has been criticized by many commentators for its “skepticism.” Aron flags in particular a paragraph that has generated misunderstandings (I translate from French):[2]

“Maybe it will be different in the future. Maybe the intellectual will no longer be interested in politics the day he discovers its limits. We should welcome this uncertain promise. We are not threatened by indifference. Men are no short of occasions and reasons to kill each other. If tolerance is the daughter of doubt, we should teach people to doubt models and utopias, and to reject prophets of salvation and disasters. We should wish for the coming of skeptics if they are to shut down fanatism.”

This last sentence as often be quoted out of context. So, Aron feels the need to repeat himself almost thirty years later:[3]

“However, to me, skepticism did not mean losing all faith or total indifference to the public thing (“la chose publique”): I was wishing that men of thought, once they have been freed from the secular religion, were no longer prone to justify the unjustifiable. I was confessing that they would maybe become disinterested in politics if they were aware of its limits. In our world, where opportunities and reasons to kill each other proliferate, doubting models and utopias is at least likely to reduce the number of persons impatient to kill their fellows in the name of their faith.”

There is no doubt that this kind of paragraph helps to explain why Aron is sometimes associated with the so-called “Cold War liberalism” with people like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper.[4] They express in a very condensed way some core and recurrent ideas of Aron’s intellectual legacy: that history is not deterministically determined but rather consists in a large range of probabilistic possibilities, that politics as a practice is a necessity that should be governed by the “ethics of responsibility”, that as a consequence we should always be aware of the limits of our ideas and of the uncertainties that surround our actions

.It has been suggested that Aron’s conception of politics makes him close to the “liberalism of fear” as famously characterized by Judith Shklar.[5] On the latter view, what justifies the core political principles of liberalism (the separation of powers, the rule of law, the distinction between a private domain and a public space) is the awareness that men can commit atrocities and cause tremendous suffering if political happens to be concentrated in their hands. No utopia, no ideal, no model of the good life is underlying this version of liberalism. It is, quite the contrary, the fear that someone might want to impose their conceptions on everyone else at any cost if given the possibility that motivates the definition of institutional constraints making sure that no one is in the capacity to coerce everyone else in the name of their fantasies.

The association of Aron’s liberalism with the liberalism of fear is superficially well-grounded. Both are based on a form of skepticism toward any pretense to determine how people should live their lives. In both cases, this skepticism can be understood in terms of epistemic humility or modesty. There are differences, though. Shklar’s liberalism of fear seems to be relying more on consequentialist considerations, especially on the idea that what is driving liberal principles is the recognition of a summun malum that we should avoid as much as we can. On the other hand, Aron was more acutely aware – in a true Weberian fashion – of the complexities of politics. The exercise of political power can have disastrous consequences, but we have to recognize that it is also unavoidable. Even though institutions can help to mitigate the risks, politics must also be framed by an ethics of responsibility. In other words, rules cannot be a substitute for the responsibility of men and their ability to harness their passions.

The liberal skepticism of Aron and Shklar surely strikes a chord for anyone who has been confronted, directly or even indirectly, with the atrocities of 20^th-century totalitarianism. More broadly, Cold War liberalism is understandably a reaction to the dangers of political fanatism that have become obvious (if they were already not) during the previous century. What strikes me however is that many intellectuals continue to defend liberal democracy against contemporary forms of populism by relying on the same core ideas. I think this is at least a partial mistake.     

Consider Trump’s case in the US. Trump’s track record offers plenty of reasons to believe that his populism could possibly turn into a form of a soft authoritarianism, maybe similar to Orban’s in Hungary, if he were taking back the presidency. As such, this is surely a strong argument in favor of doing everything needed, within the bounds of democratic rules, to prevent him from accessing power again. A typical skeptical liberal strategy here is to point out the constitutional risks associated with a second Trump presidency. This strategy does not depend on the claim that opponents of Trump have a better model of society or that their values are superior. It only affirms that a Trump presidency carries a significant risk of undermining the democratic foundations of American society, in turn raising the specter of political fanatism and its dire consequences. Hence the appeal to the Constitution and to the Rule of Law (and the law, period) to neutralize Trump.

All reasonable persons (at least, in the Rawlsian sense) will agree that no one should be above the law, a candidate to the presidential election being no exception. The problem is that this constitutional-legal strategy today has a very weak persuasive force toward many citizens. People are less sensitive to the rhetoric of fear simply because most of them in Western societies have no direct or even indirect memories of the consequences of authoritarianism. This can be tracked in polls: populations whose countries have not been submitted to an authoritarian regime for a while tend to be less supportive of democracy (or more supportive of a form or another of authoritarian regime) than citizens who have recently experimented with authoritarianism.

The bottom line is that fear and skepticism, while still rationally relevant, have less emotional appeal to justify the principles and institutions of liberal democracy. More exactly, fear has changed side. Populists of all sorts routinely use fear as a weapon to attract voters. Fear has both cultural and economic origins. People are told by populists that they should fear that their traditions and values will disappear because of immigrants and globalization. They are told that new practices are conducive to criminality and dangers. They are told that inequalities are increasing, that they will become poorer than the poor, and that the economic system if not the whole society will collapse. In the face of all these claims and supposed one-size-fits-all remedies to address them, skepticism should obviously remain the appropriate stance. Aron’s call for epistemic humility and awareness of the limits of politics is more than ever relevant. But it explodes against the wall of the psychological reality. Asking for skepticism is asking too much from many, if not most, persons.

Is there a way out? The lessons of the past should not be forgotten and therefore liberal skepticism is still as relevant today as it was before. But you cannot ground the open society only on it. More than ever, you have also to argue and credibly show that a society that is economically and politically open is conducive to progress for everyone. It has to be shown that economic competition, cultural diversity, and political pluralism work to the benefit of all. The challenge is that this is not obvious in contemporary liberal democracies. More worryingly, that may not be true. Anyway, fear and skepticism are not enough to justify liberal principles. A conception of progress that is shared and endorsed by a large majority is also needed. If you want to convince people that they should disregard populists, you should not (only) remind them that populism can lead to authoritarianism, you should make the case that an open society is a society of actually positive-sum games. Or, in other words, rather than fear, counts on hope.        

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[1] Raymond Aron, Mémoires (Robert Laffont, 2003[1982]).

[2] Ibid., p. 330.

[3] Ibid., p. 330.

[4] See in particular Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On `Cold War Liberalism’,” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 45–64.

[5] Ibid.