Two Kinds of Liberal Skepticism

And How to Articulate Them

I’ve written recently several posts on liberalism. Across my readings and writings, I’ve come to realize that many liberal thinkers exhibit two different kinds of skepticism toward the institutions based on which society should be organized. These two forms of skepticism are not mutually exclusive but the fact of entertaining both at the same time severely restricts the range of economic and political arrangements that are acceptable from a liberal perspective.

The first kind of liberal skepticism is about the pretense of thinkers to design the institutions of the ideal society or to identify principles of the good life justifying these institutions. Let’s call it skepticism about design. It takes significantly different forms from one liberal writer to another and also differs in strength, from moderate to intense. This is the kind of skepticism that Raymond Aron expresses in many of his writings, as I’ve discussed in a previous post. We can also find it out in the work of two other thinkers who are often opposed to each other, John Rawls and Friedrich Hayek. Rawls exhibits this kind of skepticism in his “political turn.” Rawls’s motivation for reinterpreting justice as fairness as a political theory of justice is that, by its very nature, a liberal society cannot gather a consensus on a comprehensive doctrine or conception of the good. For Rawls, the stability of the liberal society, and thus the justification of liberal principles of justice, requires that these principles can be endorsed by all “reasonable” comprehensive doctrines. Rawls is thus deeply skeptical of the pretense of basing the liberal society on a set of values constituting the good.

Rawls’s skepticism is nonetheless moderate because he does believe that it is possible to design the institutions of the just society based on a set of principles of justice over which an overlapping consensus can be established. Rawls even claims to know what these principles are. At least as far as the distributive aspects of the liberal society are concerned, Rawls’s political liberalism pretends to know how the “well-ordered society” should be organized. This of course puts Rawls in deep opposition with liberal thinkers such as Hayek or Robert Nozick. Hayek is critical of any attempt to identify distributive principles. The market order doesn’t presuppose any just distributive pattern. In the Hayekian perspective, justice is not located in a particular distribution of resources or primary goods but in fact in following rules that have spontaneously evolved. Hayek’s skepticism about design is indeed maximal. Any “constructivist” attempt to design the economic institutions of society is doomed to failure. Political design is not rejected outright,[1] but it is limited to the provision of a framework within which social and economic practices can spontaneously evolve.

I now switch to the second kind of liberal skepticism. In a recent essay, Eric Schliesser has labeled it “Platonic skepticism,”, i.e., a belief that “in democratic public life opinion will predominate and truth will not rule.”[2] Let me rename it skepticism about the majority. It is widely shared among liberal thinkers, though again it takes different forms with different intensities. Skepticism about the majority was at the heart of 19^th-century liberal thinking when the priority was to find mechanisms to harness democracy and avoid the tyranny of the majority over the minority. Alexis de Tocqueville, James Madison, and John Stuart Mill are among the most illustrious thinkers to have reflected on this risk – and the last two to have proposed political mechanisms to mitigate it.

Though liberalism’s general skepticism toward democratic institutions has receded in the 20^th century, it remains a concern for many liberal writers. Hayek’s discussion of “demarchy” and James Buchanan’s emphasis on unanimity rule are two of the most important instances of skepticism about majority at its highest level. Public reason liberals are however not in rest. Though Rawls is in no way skeptical of democracy,[3] his version of the idea of public reason leads to a principle of ideal citizenship that demands that voters refrain from using a large range of reasons in the context of public deliberation. Other public reason liberals as Gerald Gaus[4] are less keen on imposing such restrictions and rather tend to emphasize the epistemic advantages of democratic mechanisms as the majority rule.

Though it is always a somehow perilous exercise, it might be interesting to map liberal thinkers along the two dimensions corresponding to these two kinds of skepticism. The graph below is an attempt to construct such a mapping, though a very tentative one.

Irrespective of this mapping, it is interesting to reflect on the implications of the two kinds of liberal skepticism. Skepticism about design entails a rejection of the pretense of philosopher-kings, experts, and in general, any (group of) individual(s) to fully design the institutions of the society based on principles or ideals. This rejection is based on either (or both) an account of the adverse consequences or the sheer impossibility of design. It tends to favor a view according to which a liberal society must rely on an economic and political framework favoring and regulating competition. Skepticism about the majority suggests that this framework should be isolated from the capriciousness of opinions and passions that largely determine the popular vote.

Obviously, the economic and political framework of the liberal society doesn’t fall from the sky. A fair question is therefore how and by whom this framework must be established. Liberal thinkers have not always been clear about this. A liberal-conservative answer is to argue that the framework is mostly inherited from evolved rules and traditions. The liberal-constitutional answer consists of admitting the possibility of designing a set of general principles separating political functions and organizing economic and political competition. The liberal-technocratic answer appeals to a mix of expert and popular decision-making. These answers are not mutually exclusive, and all tolerate a high degree of democracy. They all remain committed however to rejecting “populist” conceptions of democracy according to which political legitimacy emanates from the general will expressed by the majority vote, as well as any form of authoritarianism where the few claim to have authority to alienate the many in the name of some ideals.  

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[1] See F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

[2] I’ve discussed Eric’s essay in a previous post.

[3] Indeed, in Rawls’s writings, liberalism and democracy are deeply intertwined, if not conceptually identical. See John Skorupski, “Rawls, Liberalism, and Democracy,” Ethics 128, no. 1 (October 2017): 173–98.

[4] 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).