Liberal Warfare

The Impossible Modus Vivendi

Consider the two following propositions:

(1) Persons must live by the principles, values, and rules of way of life X.

(2) It is wrong to impose on persons any way of life X, Y, Z…

Obviously, propositions (1) and (2) are mutually exclusive – one contradicts the other. If you accept (2), you have therefore to accept the negation of (1), i.e., (2) —> non-(1). Now, it can be argued that (2) entails proposition (3):

(3) Society should be organized along rules and principles such that persons are free to choose their way of life among a fairly wide range X, Y, Z…

Since (2) —> (3), (1) and (3) also are mutually exclusive, hence (3) —> (1). However, it is plausible to contend that (3) implies something like proposition (4):

(4) Organizing society as stated in (3) entails promoting a set of principles (e.g., public justification, pluralism), values (e.g., tolerance), and rules (e.g., basic individual rights) constitutive of a way of life.

It follows that (4) seems to imply (1), i.e., (4) —>  (1). As, apparently, (2) —> (4), it follows that (2) —> (1). But we asserted from the start that (2) and (1) are mutually exclusive. We have a genuine paradox!

I don’t pretend that there is anything deep in this paradox. Indeed, we could argue that the paradox is merely the result of my shallow use of words and expressions like “way of life.” Arguably, the way of life mentioned in (1) and the one mentioned in (4) are not the same. The former refers to rules and practices that determine how people should live and what they should believe. The latter “merely” states that people who disagree on how to live and what to believe should coexist in a specific way. But is it really so much different? Can we imagine that rules and principles of coexistence have no effect on how persons will live and what they will believe?

Here lies what I think is a deeply ingrained ambiguity in liberal thought. From their emergence, liberal views have always navigated between the level of first-order moral theories and second-order political doctrines. Of all the liberal thinkers, John Rawls was among the most lucid on this. His political liberalism is precisely an attempt to constitute once and for all liberalism as a political doctrine that is neutral (or as neutral as a liberal society can permit) regarding ways of life. If it succeeds, the above paradox is just an illusion. Unfortunately, things are not so straightforward. In Political Liberalism, Rawls explicitly states that his political liberalism reflects the “fundamental political ideas viewed as implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society.”[1] This is a crucial concession, for it implies that the principles of justice and, beyond, the principles of political legitimacy that regulate the use of coercion in Rawls’s theory, hold conditionally on the fact that individuals far and large endorse the democratic public political culture. It’s true that a public political culture doesn’t fully determine individuals’ normative beliefs and practices. But this culture and the institutions that materialize it already define a way of living that, for instance, separates the public domain from the private sphere. According to this historicist reading of Rawls’s political liberalism, there is no claim that any society should adopt Rawls’s principles of justice, only societies that are already de facto democratic.

Political liberalism is not the only strand of liberal thought concerned with this problem. John Gray makes a similar point in his criticism of Isaiah Berlin’s agonistic liberalism.[2]  Berlin famously argues for the special status of negative liberty compared to positive liberty. Gray notes however that the priority given to negative liberty fits uneasily with Berlin’s value pluralism. Berlin’s argument seems to be that negative liberty offers the guarantee to individuals to be able to choose how to live and to decide which are the values that really matter to them, in a context where no rational comparative assessment can be made between values. Gray contends how that value pluralism seems to forbid such a prioritization. Moreover, since pluralism doesn’t only apply to the comparison between individual values but also between sets of values constitutive of ways of life, there is no rational argument to claim the superiority of one way of life over another. It follows, according to Gray, that the justification of values, principles, and rules is fully relative to the antecedent fact that individuals have adopted a particular way of life. Elsewhere, Gray expands on the implications of what he calls the “pluralist view:”[3]

“The pluralist view defended here involves the abandonment, not only of any democratic project, but also of the liberal project, even as that is found in such agonistic liberal theorists as Berlin and Raz. The liberal project of stating, and enforcing, universal limits on governmental power, especially when it is coercive, amounts to the prescription that a single form of political order be everywhere installed regardless of the cultural traditions and ways of life of its subjects. That political orders should be vessels for the transmission of ways of life across the generations, and that the forms of government may legitimately vary according to the cultures of the peoples they serve, are propositions rejected by liberals, new and old. Yet, they are implied strong value-pluralism.”

I don’t want here to discuss whether Gray’s account of “strong value-pluralism” is plausible or not. Note however that the historicist interpretation of Rawls’s political liberalism as well as Gray’s pluralist view escape the above paradox by simply negating propositions (1) and (2) at the same time. Or, more exactly, they accept a modified version of proposition (1):

(1’) Persons must live by the principles, values, and rules of way of life X in a context where they, as a matter of fact, already share a set of fundamental values and principles that entail X.

This historicist-relativist proposition entails that there is no viewpoint, no Archimedean point so to speak, from which a society’s rules, institutions, and principles could be assessed. Now, proposition (1’) is of course debatable and we could argue – as I think is the case – that even if we accept value pluralism, there is a case for a philosophical defense of primitive liberal principles based on fundamental values as individualism and moral respect (grounded in an even more fundamental conception of the person) that, ultimately, support liberal rules and institutions. However, I want to ask here what the right liberal attitude is if we grant proposition (1’) in a growingly illiberal context. Gray argues that his pluralist view implies that we cannot look for more than a modus vivendi where competing ways of life somehow peacefully cohabitate, not based on liberal institutions, but on a precarious and context-dependent arrangement. A difficulty here is that nothing guarantees that the arrangement will be stable and mutually beneficial. Two problems should be distinguished here.

First, what if some political communities (likely to be, in our case, under the authority of a state with significant military capacities) threaten the ways of life of other political communities? This is the situation where liberal democracies are today, or are likely to be soon. Autocrats like Xi or Putin despise the liberal way of life, its political culture and institutions as well as its social and cultural mores. The question is not whether Chinese or Russians have the “right” to live under a non-democratic regime. As a matter of fact, they do. For our liberal democracies, what matters the most is that there is a real risk that autocratic powers will attempt to destroy the liberal way of life where and when they can. Raymond Aron, in his article “Democratic States and Totalitarian States” written less than two years before the start of WWII, notes that totalitarian regimes are by nature “revolutionary” while (liberal) democracies are “conservative.” The nature of the totalitarian way of life, so to speak, based on the intense suppression of inner conflicts, makes them bellicose outward. In this context, Aron argues that democratic regimes should be able to “display the same virtues” (“être capable des mêmes vertus”):

“Against regimes that claim that strength is the only rule, regimes that pretend that they are heroic and that democracies are weak, I think it paltry to perpetually talk of pacifism. That only contributes to reinforcing in fascist leaders’ views the opinion that indeed, democracies are decadent.”  (my translation)

Today’s autocratic regimes are not totalitarian in the 20^th meaning of the word. But the external threat they represent is as important as a century ago. The question is whether a modus vivendi of the kind discussed by Gray is possible, over the long run, in a context where some ways of life, supported by a warfare state, have the “revolutionary” tendencies Aron is alluding to. If the threat is real, is it not reasonable to think that liberal states can legitimately or even should eliminate the threat if they can? More than a modus vivendi, what we have is a state of nature where, as soon as other ways of life are perceived as a threat, war becomes legitimate.

The second problem concerns inner disagreements within ways of life. Political communities are not homogenous. The rise of populism is a symptom of this problem which nature is completely different from the previous one. Where populism succeeds, as in Hungary or Slovakia, liberal democracies are progressively turned into “illiberal democracies.” In a recent article in The New Statesman, Gray interprets Trump’s election as the victory of illiberal democracy. However, Gray’s pluralist view (first stated almost 30 years ago) is silent regarding how people seeing their way of life destroyed from the inside should react. In his New Statesman article, Gray blames “hyper-liberals,” i.e., progressivists who were mostly focused on cultural issues such as transgender identity. Whether the diagnostic is correct or not, it’s not clear what genuine liberals who reject identity politics, who view cultural issues mostly belonging to the sphere of private choice, who firmly believe in democratic institutions holding at the same time officials and popular sovereignty in check through finely-tuned political institutions, who think that political, civic, and economic freedoms often go hand-in-hand, should ultimately do. Sure, they should continue to fight along the rules of the democratic game. But what if these rules are twisted by those who don’t mind eradicating a way of life that has fostered human flourishing over the past two centuries?

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[1] John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 223.

[2] John Gray, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought, Revised edition (Princeton University Press, 2020).

[3] John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, 1er édition (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 211.