The Winter of Liberal Democracy (Part 3)

The Prospects of Liberal Political Philosophy

This is the last of a three-part essay that I have originally inserted in an ebook titled The Winter of Liberal Democracy and Other Substack Essays. On top of this essay, the ebook contains a selection of essays that has been published on this Substack in 2024. It can be dowloaded as a PDF or EBUB.

If the future of liberal democracy is dark, what about the prospects of liberal political philosophy, i.e., the intellectual activity that consists in establishing the possibility and the justification of a society working along the lines of liberal principles and institutions? Though philosophy has probably never been responsible for any direct political change, it provides intellectual resources that may inspire and assist economic, social, and political actors. Indeed, the crisis of liberalism in the early 20^th century largely triggered a complete renewal of liberal thought that would, some decades later, largely contribute to the rise of neoliberal ideology.[23]

The most influential brand of liberal political philosophy is undoubtedly Rawls’s political liberalism. As the historian of ideas Katrina Forrester has argued, political philosophers are still working in the “shadow of (Rawls’s theory of) justice.”[24] A core feature of Rawls’s political philosophy is that it interprets itself as the expression of ideas and practices that are part of the underlying public political culture of Western liberal democracies. This is made particularly explicit in Rawls’s later writings that reinterpret the justice as fairness account as a “political” account.[25] That means that the justification of the liberal principles of justice takes place in a context where we assume that persons-qua-citizens are, for most of them at least, “reasonable.” They accept the Rawlsian ideas that society is a “fair system of social cooperation” based on reciprocity and that they all are free moral equals. Rawls contends that these ideas are encapsulated into the ways of life that prosper in liberal democracy and are de facto accepted by most citizens. The question Rawls asks – whether a well-ordered society where individuals follow just principles of justice is possible in spite of the fact that they disagree on every other matter than justice – is therefore formulated in the context where the public political culture is assumed to be “liberal.” Irrespective of what we can think of the way Rawls and his followers answer it, it's more and more doubtful that this question is relevant. The rise of populism strongly suggests that the norms and values of the liberal public political culture have been considerably weakened in many Western countries. It’s no longer possible to assume that they are widely shared. Otherwise, we would have a hard time explaining how a significant and increasing minority of citizens cast their ballots for candidates and parties that explicitly reject them.

For all its valuable contributions, Rawlsian political liberalism can hardly be the future of liberal political philosophy. We need a political philosophy that, while promoting liberal ideas, principles, and institutions, nonetheless faces the fact that those ideas, principles, and institutions are now controversial. Put differently, a normative stance pointing out that populism is dangerous or non-desirable because it promotes a form of democracy that isn’t liberal is unlikely to have an impact. The justification of liberal democracy needs to be argued for – again, not to be assumed. To do so will require a framework and arguments that appropriately reflect the conditions under which a growing number of members of Western countries have come to reject liberalism. Characterizing these persons as “unreasonable” will no longer do. This strategy may work when unreasonable persons count as a small number of outliers. Not when “unreasonability” is widespread enough to lead to a progressive change of political regime.[26]

What would this political philosophy look like? There are obviously many possibilities but if we want to keep with the broad framework of “public reason liberalism” where the legitimacy of political institutions and principles is tied to the possibility of publicly justifying them to persons that are conceived as free and moral equals,[27] I would argue for two major amendments, one “Tocquevillian” the other “Weberian.”

What I call the Tocquevillian amendment refers to the necessity of appropriately accounting for the cultural effects of the institutions of liberal democracy on individuals. So-called “post-liberal” critics of liberal democracy have argued, sometimes referring to Tocqueville, that liberal institutions are essentially self-undermining because they destroy the moral ground on which they are built.[28] Without subscribing to the strongest versions of this claim, a large literature in political science indicates that the effects of a “cultural backlash” are real and may at least partially explain the success of populist ideas and candidates.[29] On this basis, I would argue that we can identify a mechanism broadly based on Tocqueville’s discussion of the cultural effects of democratic equality in the second part of Democracy in America that needs to be considered seriously by liberal political philosophy.[30]

As Tocqueville argues, democracy – in contrast with aristocracy – entails an equalization of individuals’ conditions. Democracy puts in place a set of forces that tend to lessen the differences both in status and wealth between individuals. Democratic equality is in particular favored by the ascription of rights that define what Benjamin Constant called the “liberties of the moderns,” i.e., civic and economic liberties. Tocqueville observes that over the long run, democratic equality is susceptible to strengthening a kind of “individualism” that pushes individuals to retreat into their private spheres. The ultimate result is a general disinterest in public matters that fosters political passivity.[31] Democratic equality turns individuals into socially separated beings vulnerable to despotism, which can either take the form of the tyranny of the majority or a genuine despot. Nowadays, the traces of political passivity particularly transpire in the fact that citizens’ political preferences are highly malleable, as argued recently by the political scientist Larry Bartels in his account of populism.[32] That reflects a large disinterest in public affairs that translates into an unwillingness to invest the amount of resources to form well-informed political judgments.

Political passivity is also related to the fact that the equalization of conditions makes individuals less and less politically relevant. As Tocqueville observes,[33]

“As social equality spreads, a greater number of individuals are no longer rich or powerful enough to exercise great influence upon the fate of their fellows, but have acquired or have preserved sufficient understanding and wealth to be able to satisfy their own needs. Such people owe nothing to anyone and, as it were, expect nothing from anyone. They are used to considering themselves in isolation and quite willingly imagine their destiny as entirely in their own hands.”

Now, individuals who “imagine their destiny as entirely in their own hands” are easily proved wrong. Even more in complex modern societies, the fate of each and every individual is tied to decisions made by an incalculable number of persons, most of them they will never encounter. This realization creates unease because, as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek have acknowledged in their accounts of the open (or great) society, this goes against our intuitive understanding of the world. As the modern society grows in complexity, a tension keeps on strengthening. Individuals realize that their destiny is related in an indecipherable way to the destiny of others. They understand that they barely have any control over this, their agency counting for barely anything within the mass effects of modern society. This clashes with the “passion for equality” that is fed by democratic institutions. In particular, members of the population who no longer enjoy the benefits of the equalization of conditions may start to feel resentment toward an impersonal and complex society that deprives them at the same time of improving living conditions and of the ability to directly alter this state of affairs. Resentment is then more specifically directed toward other categories of the population that are seen responsible (elites, immigrants), and are ready to be exploited by populist political leaders.[34] In this sense, illiberal democracy is the logical conclusion of the process where a majority of individuals come to value equality more than freedom and desperately try to regain control over the course of their lives by controlling others’ lives.

In this Tocquevillian reading, this is individuals’ willingness to regain control over their destiny that largely accounts for the success of populist politics. This goes with the reformulation of popular sovereignty which is typical of populism. In liberal democracy, popular sovereignty is expressed through the institutions that organize political competition and strictly regulate the exercise of political powers. In other words, it is fundamentally tied to the constitutional nature of the regime. Illiberal democracy locates popular sovereignty in the majoritarian expression of the People. At the bottom, the discontent with liberal democracy is that liberal politics seems to provide no answer to individuals who implicitly conceive self-governance as being necessarily the expression of a general will embodied in the person of the political leader. The resentment created by the frustration of the passion for equality makes those individuals even more eager to redesign political institutions to recover sovereignty, even if this is at the cost of freedom.

This leads me to the Weberian amendment. Politics is a blind spot of many liberal theories, starting with Rawls’s “political” liberalism.[35] In a Weberian perspective, politics (or, maybe more appropriately, the political) is the domain of deep conflicts between values that escape rational resolution. The radical or tragic nature of politics is typically downplayed by liberal accounts such as public reason liberalism that implicitly relies on a strong assumption that I call the Natural Harmony Hypothesis:[36]

Natural Harmony Hypothesis – Underlying the moral world, there is a natural harmony of reasons such that human reasons are commensurate and convergent enough so they can publicly justify the rules of social morality.

The opposite of this view is the Weberian “battle of the gods” that sees political life as the realm of tragic choices that escape full rational justification. Friends and foes of liberalism tend to agree that the kind of radical Berlinian or Weberian value pluralism that grounds this view of politics is basically incompatible with liberalism.[37] This conclusion is benign in a world where, as a matter of fact, most individuals agree on a set of fundamental principles constitutive of the liberal public political culture. However, in societies where radical disagreements prevail, for instance, regarding the sources of popular sovereignty or the importance and content of basic liberties, it is problematic. Liberal political philosophy cannot dispense with an account that takes more seriously the “agonistic” nature of the political.

This account is necessary first to refute the claim that value pluralism leads to full-blown relativism, as argued by John Gray.[38] Gray’s “pluralism” puts liberal democracy, illiberal democracy, and autocracy on the same level and is unwilling (or unable) to recognize the special status of social moralities and political regimes that grant all individuals the status of free and equal moral beings. Even more seriously, this pluralism is silent regarding the means liberal regimes can justifiably use to defend themselves against inner and outer threats.[39] This account is also necessary to better characterize the kind of ethos that is constitutive of liberal politics. There may be a relation between the idea of public reason so central in contemporary liberal accounts and the Weberian “ethics of responsibility.” While the ethics of responsibility is a characterization of the liberal ethos that should animate political actors, the idea of public reason expresses a broader commitment to values of respect, understanding, and reciprocity that concerns all of us who, in one way or another, participates in the public political life. Public reason can be in this sense a response to the Tocquevillian political disengagement that has precipitated the winter of liberal democracy. That should engage liberal political philosophy to reconsider the relationships between the various forms of liberties (political, civil, economic) and how a liberal society can and should commensurate them.

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In his 1997 essay, Schlesinger wondered about the future of democracy. His dire predictions have largely been realized. We no longer live in a world where liberal democracy is the obvious uniquely justified political regime, even in the Western world. With historical hindsight, this outcome may seem to have been predictable. As Raymond Aron noted, however, while the human mind cannot cope with history without ascribing some form of necessity to it, this should not make us oblivious to the inescapable contingencies that affect its course, especially from the perspective of present actors. Liberal democracy has irremediably entered into its winter but whether we can exit it is ultimately up to us.

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[23] Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012).

[24] Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019).

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

[26] I make this point in the essay “Arguing with unreasonable Persons.”

[27] Besides Rawls’s political liberalism, I’m also referring to the body of work largely inspired by Gerald Gaus, in particular Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World, Reprint edition (Cambridge New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

[28] A prominent example is Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Reprint edition (New Haven London: Yale University Press, 2019). I discuss this book in essay §7 “The Parasitic Liberalism Thesis Revisited.”

[29] Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[30] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, ed. Isaac Kramnick, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).

[31] Ibid., p. 587-9.

[32] Larry M. Bartels, “The Populist Phantom,” Foreign Affairs, October 22, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/populist-phantom-threat-democracy-bartels.

[33] Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, p. 589.

[34] I discuss the relevance of resentment in a liberal perspective the essay “The Moral Failure of Liberalism.”

[35] John Gray, The Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

[36] This is discussed in the essay “Public Reason and the Irrationality of Politics.”

[37] See for instance Gerald F. Gaus, Contemporary Theories of Liberalism: Public Reason as a Post-Enlightenment Project, First Edition (London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2003).; John Gray, Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought, Revised edition (Princeton University Press, 2020).

[38] John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 2007).

[39] This is the subject of the essay “Liberal Warfare.”