The Sectarian Conundrum of Political Liberalism (Part 4)
What About Sectarianism with a Right to Exit?
This is the fourth and final post of a series about the “sectarian conundrum” of political liberalism. See the first, second, and third posts.
It may be worth starting this last post of the series with a reminder about what I call the “sectarian conundrum of political liberalism”:
Sectarian Conundrum of Political Liberalism. According to political liberalism, legitimacy depends on the public justification of laws and rules. But a liberal society may need to be sectarian, i.e., to restrict the requirement of public justification to only a subset of the population. In this case, rules and laws can never be fully legitimate.
Until now, we have explored three tentative solutions to this conundrum. First, the solution provided by a revised version of Rawls’s political liberalism; second, the solution of the convergence approach to public reason; third, the solution of multilevel social contract theory. I’ve argued that none of them is fully satisfactory. The last solution I want to contemplate can be seen as a mix of the convergence approach and multilevel social contract theory in the sense that it is looking for a modus vivendi (as the latter) grounded on the convergence of reasons toward an agreement on how to act (as the former). But in a way, it is more radical than those two solutions, at least at the political level, as it implies the endorsement of a fully polycentric mode of self-governance that may lead to a complete rethink of the role and status of the state.
My main reference here is the idea of the “liberal archipelago” put forward by Chandran Kukathas in his book with the same title.[1] Kukathas provides in this book a provocative account of what liberalism is all about. It starts with the more and more commonly accepted ideas among liberal philosophers that liberalism cannot consist of a definite theory of justice because people disagree as much on conceptions of justice as on conceptions of the good. Kukathas returns to the old idea that the virtue of toleration is at the heart of liberalism. A liberal society is a society that tolerates a great diversity of ways of living, independent of the judgments that people may make about the value of these ways of life.
Toleration is however not the primitive in Kukathas’s account. What makes toleration (instead of justice or diversity) the core virtue of the liberal society is the absolute priority accorded to freedom of association and its correlate, freedom of conscience. Freedom of association is the fundamental right to choose with whom you want to live, cooperate, and exchange. Crucially, freedom of association is also freedom of disassociation. If you’re free to associate with whoever you want, that implies that you’re also free to not associate or to stop to associate with someone. Association is guided by interests, passions, but more fundamentally, by conscience, i.e., principles that we hold about what is right and what is good, principles that we may eventually discover and assess when we take the “moral” point of view. A basic axiom of the liberal society, according to Kukathas, is that we are free to endorse the principles we want, to live as our conscience tells us we should, and so to choose with whom we live. Importantly, though, is liberty of conscience can never justify forcing others to abide by our principles to make their social realization possible. It’s a purely negative liberty. Hence, you’re never justified in forcing others to live a certain way on the ground that this is the only way to preserve a way of life or a community.
To understand the basic implications of these basic ideas, let’s compare two imaginary societies as described by Kukathas, Panoptica and Mytopia.[2] Panoptica is made of a number of associations placing on individuals the minimum restrictions required to ensure peace and stability. People may live almost as they wish and can express dissent and disagreement. However, they do not have the right and the effective possibility to leave their association. Though the rules of their associations impose few restrictions, they have no choice but to abide by them. The situation in Mytopia could not be more contrasted. Mytopia is also constituted by a myriad of associations, but these associations are more like communities enforcing strict moral rules that severely impede people’s freedom. Individuals do not have in these communities a right of expressing dissent. However, they have a right to exit. They can leave at will their communities to form a new one, or eventually enter an existing one (if its members agree). According to Kukathas, Mytopia, not Panoptica, conforms to the canons of the liberal society because it respects the “sanctity of disagreement”. What matters is not the content of social rules and whether they respect individual’s freedom, but whether people have the right to escape and to conform to the rules of their choice.
Kukathas’s conception of the good (liberal) society is fundamentally based on what I would call an “impossibility triangle”. You just cannot have agreement over a conception of justice, moral diversity, and social unity at the same time. Even though Kukathas does not view diversity to be valuable in itself (contrary to other liberal authors), it is – as Rawls and others have suggested – essentially a fact that prevails in societies that value freedom. In these circumstances, imposing a conception of justice would entail social instability. The alternative – fostering a stable agreement around a conception of justice – necessarily entails a denial of diversity. In this sense, the Rawlsian ideal of the well-ordered society is impossible.
In my view, Kukathas’s account of the liberal society in terms of an archipelago is not so much a way to overcome sectarianism than a demonstration that sectarianism is not an issue for liberalism. In this sense, it attempts to dispel the sectarian conundrum in quite a different way than the approaches I’ve previously discussed. Sectarianism is not an issue as long as individuals have the right to settle on the kind of sectarian associations they want to live in. Politically, this view leads to conceiving the role of the state as the role of an (not the only one) umpire in case of conflicts between associations and communities. It doesn’t have however any legitimacy in promoting a conception of the good life, a conception of justice, to foster equality, or to be the guardian of some cultural heritage. Though he doesn’t explicitly discuss this implication of his theory, I think Kukathas’s account lends itself easily to the idea that the state should be organized as a polycentric system of governance, where associations are free to establish the rules they want within a general framework guaranteeing global stability. Individuals would then “vote with their feet”, choosing the rules that appeal the most to them. While each component of such a polycentric liberal state could be – and would surely be – sectarian, the society would not be as it could welcome any way of life.
There are many aspects of the archipelago view of the liberal society that are worth discussing, something I can’t do here. There are obvious concerns, like the fact that the formal right to exit is obviously not a guarantee that individuals have the effective possibility to exit. The opportunity costs of exiting might be too high, or individuals may have been raised in a cultural matrix that makes it impossible for them to even conceive the possibility of living under different rules. Kukathas discusses this objection in detail and provides answers that I regard as mostly convincing. He’s right for instance asserting that the view (defended by Brian Barry for instance) that we should make sure that the costs of exit are not “too high” is hardly tenable. However, a different concern that he doesn’t tackle explicitly is the (also obvious) problem of externalities. By freely choosing rules and ways of life, associations would without any doubt generate externalities. This is indeed what happens at the level of the well actual archipelago that is the international system of nation-states. Kukathas implicitly implies that the role of the polycentric state would be to regulate these externalities. But doing so would necessarily lead to interference with the choice of rules and, indirectly, with people’s free choices to associate. A liberal society may grant priority to freedom of association, but it appears that this freedom cannot be absolute. The risk is then to reintroduce sectarianism at the level of the state, on the ground that some ways of life are generating (positive or negative) externalities.
This may not be an insurmountable problem as long as we make sure that the kind of externalities the state is legitimate in dealing with are “material” externalities – externalities that affect people’s material well-being. What we don’t want is that the state tries to correct “moral” externalities, i.e., individuals’ discontent with the fact that others are leaving in ways that they don’t approve of. In this sense, the state in a polycentric liberal society should strictly conform to what Kukathas calls the “politics of indifference.”
Many – but not all – liberals would approve of this ideal. But there are important difficulties that confront it. The politics of indifference is undoubtedly in tension with the zeitgeist, which is more friendly to what we can call the “politics of recognition” and the related “identity epistemology” that supports it. This is not an objection per se, but it is nonetheless a relevant consideration with respect to the kind of liberalism that is feasible starting from the society in which we are living. A more serious problem I think however is that Kukathas’s conception of the liberal society is not mere fantasy and that, where it has been implemented, it has led to mixed results, even from a liberal point of view. In a recent book, the historian of ideas Quinn Slobodian discusses the fate of various experiments to establish “libertarian enclaves” liberated from the constraints of state-regulated democratic capitalism.[3] The problem is not that these enclaves have often dispensed with democracy – Kukathas is clear that liberalism and democracy don’t imply each other, but rather they often have realized racist ideals. In other words, in political and economic practice, attempts to implement the idea of the liberal archipelago have often been motivated by views of human nature that are in conflict with the humanist and universalist premises that ground liberalism in most of its forms. This may be a practical implication of a view that gives freedom of association a quasi-absolute priority, neglecting other liberal ideals. If so, this is a high price to pay to solve the sectarian conundrum.
[1] Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2007).
[2] Ibid, p. 98-101.
[3] Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, 1er édition (UK USA Canada Ireland Australia India New Zeeland South Africa: Allen Lane, 2023).