What Is It Like to Be a (Rawlsian) Liberal?

Some Comments on Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life

Liberalism is today mostly understood as a political doctrine that is essentially about how constitution and law should be designed to regulate the exercise of state power and to guarantee that institutions meet some fairness criteria. At least, this is how the kind of political liberalism promoted by John Rawls and his followers has shaped liberal ideas since the 1970s. This reduction of liberalism to a constitutional and legalistic doctrine has been criticized many times and, recently, appeals to reemphasizing the fact that liberalism also refers to a particular ethos have multiplied.[1] Alexandre Lefebvre’s book Liberalism as a Way of Life participates in this trend, taking however an original approach that sets it apart from the standard political philosophy literature on liberalism.[2]

As its title indicates, Lefebvre’s (a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sidney) book argues that liberalism is more than a political doctrine concerned with constitutional matters, it is also a way of life; or, to use Lefebvre’s expression, it is the “water” in which we all “swim in” without necessarily realizing it. This water percolates into our beliefs, habits, practices, perceptions, and everything else that determines how we behave daily. Traces of it can also be found in popular culture, especially TV series. There are even some individuals (a minority probably) who are liberals “all the way down.” They are liberal, they think as liberals, and they act as liberals, not only in the public space but also in their daily personal lives. Liberalism is not only a political doctrine, it’s a way to live your life. The originality of Lefebvre’s book is that it is conceived on the template of “self-help” books that invade the personal development section of bookstores. Its first part characterizes liberalism as an ethics of the good life but also points out that paradoxically, even though we are swimming in liberal waters, our society fails to live by its liberal ideals. We are living in “liberaldom” (a reference to Kierkegaard’s “Christendom”), “a mixture of liberalism and other ideologies and systems, including capitalism (with its individualism, materialism, and instrumentalism), democracy (with its latent populism), nationalism and patriotism (with their patriotism and often jingoism), and meritocracy (with its calculations of worth and reward), as well as openly illiberal forces (such as racism and patriarchy) dug into our institutions and attitudes.”[3] The second part is addressed to the liberal all the way down and provides advice for how to live as a liberal in a world that falls short of liberalism. Lefebvre identifies three “spiritual exercises” that can help liberals to thrive in liberaldom and, eventually, help them to make our world a better place to live.

Since I have long been convinced that a liberal society cannot properly function without a liberal ethos, I was really curious to read Lefebvre’s book. In the end, I found reading it very frustrating and even at times annoying. Still, I read the book until the end, and I’m glad I did. There is much with which I disagree, but the last three chapters that discuss the three spiritual exercises are inspiring, though, for reasons I will indicate below, I don’t think they give the perfectly right idea of what a liberal ethos could be. I don’t intend to do a full discussion of the book, and in the rest of the text, I will focus on my most fundamental disagreements.

Let’s start by noting the constitutive irony of this book. I said above that Rawlsian political liberalism has been criticized for making liberalism a political doctrine detached from considerations about how to live. However, Lefebvre’s main character and source of inspiration is no one else than… John Rawls himself. Only the readers who are up to date with the recent advancements in “Rawls studies” will not be surprised by this choice. As Lefebvre acknowledges, Rawls’s political turn in the 1980s has precisely been motivated by the observation that a liberal society is possible only if we separate the principles of a political conception of justice from the beliefs and attitudes that are constitutive of the many “comprehensive doctrines” that populates a society where individuals are free. Rawls’s thesis was that while the fact of pluralism makes it absolutely impossible to expect that individuals will endorse the same comprehensive doctrine (and, therefore, the same religious beliefs, for instance), they can – provided they are “reasonable” – still agree over principles of justice that emanate from a conception of society as a fair system of cooperation. A core element in this political thesis is that individuals’ judgments and beliefs are modular, i.e., there is no fundamental relationship between a political conception of justice and its principles, on the one hand, and the beliefs associated with a given conception of the good, on the other. We can have one irrespective of the other (up to certain constraints of reasonability).

This is exactly what Lefebvre disputes in his book. Individuals who are liberals all the way down endorse a conception of the good life that is tightly articulated to the liberal conception of justice. Indeed, Lefebvre’s thesis is that the liberal conception provides the essentials of the liberal water in which we swim. This natural environment favors the emergence of beliefs constitutive of a liberal ethic, making some individuals liberals from their toes to the top of their heads. The Rawls on which Lefebvre relies to defend his thesis is the Rawls of the third part of A Theory of Justice. In this part, Rawls develops a moral psychology that intends to show that individuals are naturally inclined to endorse values supporting the principles of his “justice as fairness” and that living under liberal institutions helps to realize this natural inclination. Rawls’s political turn precisely originates in Rawls’s later dissatisfaction with this general thesis.[4] But, clearly, for Lefebvre, this was a mistake to abandon it.

I’ve no qualms with Lefebvre’s heterodox reading of Rawls. It’s fairly original and refreshing. The third part of A Theory of Justice has been neglected and apparently, it was the part of the book Rawls was the most proud of, at least initially. What contributed to make the book annoying to me was that it’s not clear until half of the book that Lefebvre really only addresses readers who accept Rawls’s moral psychology. When the self-help part of the book starts, Lefebvre puts the cards on the table: his point is not to defend the characterization of the liberal ethic provided in the first part and, really, if you are not liberal all the way down Rawlsian fashion, then the book is not for you. Thank you for stating that clearly only now!

The point is not that the exercise is not interesting intellectually (it mostly is), nor even that the non-Rawlsian (at least from their toes to the top of the head) reader may feel deceived. It is rather that the narrow perspective taken on what it is to be liberal makes suddenly the whole enterprise pointless. For, how many of us really are Rawlsian liberals all the way down? As Lefebvre notes, we are living in liberaldom, a society where liberal ideas are entangled with a range of beliefs and values that have nothing to do with liberalism. But even those of us who view ourselves as (mostly) liberals don’t necessarily agree with Rawls, both his moral psychology and his principles of justice. To be fair, in the second part of the book, Lefebvre is explicit: the same exercise could be made for other kinds of liberals (e.g., “Cold War” liberals) or even libertarians. Fine. But really, was there not a way to take a less narrow view of what liberalism is to address a larger range of liberals who agree that liberalism is more than a set of principles about how to fix political and economic institutions? The problem is that, if this is not possible, then we may rightly worry that a liberal ethos doesn’t exist at all and, presumably, we fall back on the very problem identified by Rawls, i.e., that you can’t justify liberal institutions based on ethical principles and other comprehensive beliefs.

Consider the basic postulate, almost an axiom, based on which Rawls justifies the rest of his account, including the original position: that society is a fair system of cooperation. For the late Rawls, an individual qualifies as “reasonable” only if her comprehensive doctrine is compatible with this basic postulate. Commentators have noted that by building his political theory of justice on it, Rawls ends up making it a “comprehensive doctrine” after all.[5] This is not a problem for Lefebvre, quite the contrary actually. But is there any solid argument linking liberalism with the principle that society is a fair system of cooperation? Taken in a broad sense, maybe. But taken in the Rawlsian sense, definitely not. To start with, there is much to disagree with what “fair” means. Moreover, this principle downplays the fact that society is not only about cooperation but also about conflict, a fact that many liberals have emphasized both to justify the state and regulate its power. Anyway, the point is this. Why believe that Rawls’s comprehensive liberal doctrine is the only one in town, and if not, why believe that it can help really help to ground a liberal ethos?

It can be answered that when Rawls characterizes liberalism as an ethic that at the bottom views society as a system of fair cooperation, what he is doing is merely making explicit judgments that are tacitly underlying our public political culture and even our background culture. This is exactly what Rawls says he is doing in Political Liberalism and some Rawls scholars have argued that the same applies to A Theory of Justice.[6] However, it is widely acknowledged that in doing so, Rawls’s characterization of our public political culture is at best partial, at worst mistaken.[7] If I had to propose an alternative characterization that could be acceptable to a broader range of liberals, I would suggest that what can be constitutive of the liberal ethic is the requirement of public justification. For the most part, we are living in societies where it is widely acknowledged that, without any specific and valuable reason, it is wrong to coerce people to act in a way that they would not want to. Even people who are not openly liberal tend to implicitly accept this. Public justification is largely part of our political culture because we tend to recognize that others are our moral equals and that, if it is wrong to impose on me something without good reason, then it is wrong to do the same to them. This is a thinner principle than Rawls’s because it says nothing about fairness beyond that unjustified coercion is wrong. It also doesn’t stipulate that society is mainly about cooperation. Lefebvre touches on this in the last chapter when he discusses public reason as a spiritual exercise, but he doesn’t explore this possibility further.

This leads to another major disagreement. Some readers will be surprised to observe that in a book about liberalism, the expression “property rights” (nor even the words “rights” and “property” separately) appear. Now, that might be because Lefebvre implicitly associates property rights with capitalism, i.e., one of those systems that turn liberalism into liberaldom. This is problematic, however, and not only because many (most?) persons who think of themselves as liberals think that a system of property rights is needed to regulate conflict and permit cooperation. I said above that the requirement of public justification may be the constitutive principle of a liberal ethic. Obviously, we don’t have to publicly justify everything we do to others. As I explained in a preceding post, that’s because public justification stops where jurisdictional rights start. A constitutive feature of liberalism is the belief that there is a legitimate separation between the private and the public. Rawls would probably agree on this, as virtually all liberals. Maybe more contentiously, private property rights are part of those jurisdictional rights without which the private/public separation is nonexistent. I’ll not repeat the very strong economic arguments that indicate that a society without private property rights would be grossly inefficient, and so, unfair. I would argue however that the recognition of property rights is definitely part of both our public political and background culture. We all think in terms of what is mine and what is yours, including Rawlsian liberals.[8] This is not only part of our liberal culture, but also maybe of our nature.[9] You cannot have a proper account of what a liberal ethos could be without acknowledging the role played by our views about property. This is also part of the liberal way of life. I understand that this may not turn very well into the nice spiritual exercises that Lefebvre discusses. It may also be answered that the acknowledgment of property rights is implicit in any discussion about the fairness of distribution. But still, if there is water in which we are swimming, it is that most of the stuff around us is the property of someone and that this is one the basis of our freedom.

Let me finish with a quick remark on a short passage where Lefebvre criticizes meritocracy as one of liberalism's negative side effects.[10] Rawls’s criticism of meritocracy is well-known and Lefebvre essentially endorses it. He contends, plausibly, that the rise of meritocracy is tightly linked to the development of the liberal society. Meritocratic principles have bite only in a society where individuals have the formal and actual possibility to climb the social ladder, something impossible without a modicum of freedom. Rawls is far from being the only liberal to have criticized meritocracy. Hayek, in different terms, largely converged with Rawls’s critique. However, contrary to what Lefebvre seems to suggest, I don’t think that the liberal ethos can completely do without any notion of merit and deservedness – nor is it what Rawls said. I think that here, the proper liberal stance is to view merit as a useful fiction. It is fiction because any appropriate understanding of a market economy and society at large must lead us to recognize that social outcomes are largely determined by chance. We should all acknowledge that where we are today is the result of a myriad of factors that we cannot control, of random events that could not be planned. This clearly militates to avoid using merit as a public justification for interference with human affairs (Hayek’s conclusion) while at the same time making sure that those who suffer from bad luck are helped (kind of Rawls’s conclusion). Still, a liberal social order cannot be stable if individuals don’t believe that outcomes are justified within the rules of the game as agreed on. Elon Musk may not deserve his wealth, but still, because we acknowledge that the rules of market economies are mostly justified, he is still entitled to it (or at least part of it). We are not talking of “ontological” merit but rather of a kind of “institutional” merit that is artificially constructed with the social rules that we accept. Merit is fiction in this sense, a fiction we nonetheless can’t do without, as there is no obvious alternative that doesn’t lead us back to the aristocratic system where everything is settled in advance. The only other alternative is indeed not liberal at all: since nobody deserves anything, we should all be equal in every aspect – except for the Orwellian “pigs” who rule the system of course.

Ultimately, it’s not clear that there is a liberal way of life. There are probably many and they can lead to substantial disagreement. We should not expect from liberalism an answer on how to live. That would be a contradiction. There is nonetheless a real value in the kind of spiritual exercises that Lefebvre proposes in his book and that’s why I think it is worth a read. Different ways of life may nonetheless share a common ethos. Lefebvre’s book gives some indications on what he could be but is far from being the last word on the subject. Maybe a good place to start is to reflect first on the political ethos that liberals tend to adopt in the public sphere. This is probably less contentious and more urgent than searching for an elusive liberal way of life that permeates all aspects of our lives.

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[1] To mention only two recent examples, see e.g., Joshua L. Cherniss, Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century (Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021).; Nils Karlson, Reviving Classical Liberalism Against Populism, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023).

[2] Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press, 2024).

[3] Ibid., p. 117.

[4] See Paul Weithman, Why Political Liberalism?: On John Rawls’s Political Turn, 1st edition (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[5] John Skorupski, “Rawls, Liberalism, and Democracy,” Ethics 128, no. 1 (October 2017): 173–98, https://doi.org/10.1086/692947.

[6] Andrius Gališanka, John Rawls: The Path to a Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2019).

[7] For the anecdote, I’ve written a paper making this claim a couple of years ago. I’ve never been able to publish it in a decent philosophy journal. The main remark from editors and referees was always the same: we know this for all too long!

[8] Indeed, Rawls recognized the importance of economic incentives for the implementation of his principles of justice. There is hardly any incentive without any property right.

[9] Biologists have speculated on this. See for instance John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games, 1St Edition (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

[10] Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life, pp. 103-8.