Western Liberalism at Twilight ( ? )

Annotation The chorus of doubts concerning the continued viability of the Western liberal tradition itself, in both ideational and institutional aspects, has grown much louder over the past several years. Can this tradition be said to be in a time of twilight – that time that falls? It is this question that would be explored in this paper. While searching the confirmation of the position, indicated in the title of the paper, author turns to contemporary ideological sources of Western liberalism. Such concepts as capitalism, socialism, justice, democracy are considered in this context based on the works of two thinkers, John Rawls and Fred Dallmayr. By stressing ideal justice and ignoring concrete injustice, Rawls’ ideas seem strange even apart from the present crisis. The subsequent evolution of his thoughts is estimated by the author as the transition from daylight to twilight. It has manifested in Rawls’ refusal to apply his principles of justice to the international arena, his condescending attitude toward underdeveloped countries. The atmosphere of The Law of Peoples is still redolent of the assumption of American hegemony. The author wishes to extract from Dallmayr’s book for present purposes is above all his commitment to a version of socialism. But what neither Dallmayr nor Rawls and other liberal thinkers will gainsay is that central to the twilight zone in which we are wandering is the heavy hand of global capitalism. The next problem is that the modern liberal democratic theory has always professed to make the assumption of equality, but it has never fully embraced it. The most important conceptual element in accounting for this failure is the notion of majority rule. The author mentions three difficulties with the idea of majority rule: the problem of time and the problem of the identity of the human units who compose the majority, and the problem of information. He analyzes the recent political evolutions of both the United Kingdom and the United States, and France as well, which have certainly given Western liberalism a badname in many quarters.

Coast of the United States, especially California -including, I am sure, that (in Trump's words) "third rate politician" Speaker Nancy Pelosi (even though she herself grew up on the East Coast in Baltimore, of all places). These are not the kinds of people of whom the President is terribly fond. Soon after that interview, I myself was in San Francisco, and I could see why. The occasion was the annual conference of the North American Society for Social Philosophy, and was held at an institution that is well known for promoting social justice initiatives, the University of San Francisco; the host was a former Doctoral student of mine, Jeff Paris, now the dean of arts and sciences at that institution. A Jewish man serving as an administrator at a Catholic university committed to social justice, and moreover presiding over discussions of social and political philosophy -that is far more than the American President seems able to take, even assuming, as was not at all clear from his reply to Tucker Carlson, his interviewer, that he understands what social and political philosophy is.
I am confident that every reader of this journal not only knows what social and political philosophy is, but also knows what Western liberalism is, at least in some general way. It consists of a group of ideas and of institutions accompanying those ideas that in both cases -ideas and institutions -bear family resemblances to one another. The British Parliament, the United States Congress, and the French Assemblée Nationale have many common features and some distinctive features. John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are all usually considered to belong to the Western liberal tradition -the doubters about Rousseau's place in it are probably more numerous than the doubters about the other two, but no matter for now -but of course their dominant sociopolitical ideas differ from one another in important respects. In any case, there is no question in my mind but that the chorus of doubts concerning the continued viability of the Western liberal tradition itself, in both ideational and institutional aspects, has grown much louder over the past several years. Can it be said to be in a time of twilight -that time that falls, as an old German saying puts it, "zwischen Wolf und Hund" -between wolf and dog? Or can we know? It is this question that I would like to explore here.
First, I would like to make a brief reference to the debacle that is the general scene of liberal institutions in many parts of our world. It will be brief because it is well known to anyone who follows current events. I do this simply in the interest of completeness. I can begin with the United States in impeachment mode. So many lines have been crossed, so much contempt has been shown for past practices in Washington, there has been so much loss of morale in some of the most important government agencies that it would take a very long time to document all of this. But then, although I am not among those who draw a sharp line between abstract and empirically-oriented analysis and who believe that philosophy should confine itself to the former, we would have very little time for philosophy at all if we were to stick strictly to the baleful facts of our current American political situation, which is clearly in a state of malignancy. Then we have the U.K., in which long-standing precedents have been smashed and the Brexit situation has been such that, when I was preparing this essay, it was still not at all clear how it would evolve during the next several days even three years after the original referendum. The situation in Hungary, a country with theoretically Western liberal institutions, is dire because the party headed by Victor Orbán controls such a sizable legislative majority that it has been able to take increasingly repressive measures while striking a tone of ultra-nationalism that includes a very strong dose of anti-semitism. Brazil, which has gone through other strongly authoritarian periods in its recent past, is rapidly becoming a basket case under Balasario. Turkey and the Philippines are other putatively democratic states with highly autocratic rulers. But, as I have said, all of my readers know the score -even those who have had no musical training -so there is no need for me to continue.
Turning now to some more strictly philosophical aspects of the question of Western liberalism's current and future status, I propose to begin by considering the work of two writers, John Rawls, who obviously exerted a great deal of influence on socio-political thought in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, and Fred Dallmayr, for reasons that I shall explain later, and, briefly, my take on the place of socialism in today's world, and then to inquire into the meanings, today, of two putative pillars of Western liberalism: democracy and majority rule. I shall return at the end to the current historical scene.
Then, John Rawls. About two years ago I gave a talk to a graduate class in Xiamen, China, in connection with a conference held there, that I entitled "Do You Remember Rawls? Reflections on Our Past Utopia." Readers might wonder whether the Chinese students knew enough about Rawls in the first place in order to be able to remember him. Fear not: Almost all of them, plus two of their professors who were in attendance, had heard a series of lectures, mainly if not exclusively on A Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1971), given by a visiting German professor earlier in that academic year. As my title, the first part of which was meant as a play on the old Scottish song. "Do ye ken John Peale?", implies, I identify Rawls, however major a role he played, and in some circles still plays, on the philosophical scene in the United States and indeed in many other parts of the world, with the historical past, and in fact with a utopianized version of that past. This was not a new insight on my part. As I pointed out in that paper and feel that I need to point out here again, I wrote a review of A Theory of Justice that was published in a special issue of the Yale Law Journal dedicated to the philosophy of law which, as far as I know, was one of the first two reviews of that book to appear after the very first published review by Stuart Hampshire in The New York Review of Books. The other early review was by Joel Feinberg and appeared in the same Yale Law Journal issue; he and I consulted in advance in order not to overlap. Of these three earliest reviews, mine was certainly the most skeptical about Rawls' accomplishment. Here are a few sentences from what I wrote there: "A Theory of Justice does not strike one initially as a book that belongs to our historical era…..As Professor Mazor points out at the beginning of his book review [of another book] in this issue, law and our other institutions are in a situation of full-fledged crisis. A Theory of Justice leaves us in a world in which we are in one sense very much at home, because it is essentially our own world -though defanged, purified, and rid of all crises. Even with his commitment of fairness, Rawls evidently expects his ideally just society to exhibit many of the differences of wealth, power, and status to which we are accustomed -though no doubt they would be diminished, differently distributed with respect to specific individuals, and experienced differently. But by stressing ideal justice and ignoring concrete injustice, Rawls' book seems strangely apart from the present crisis, and I for one find this aloofness very disquieting" (McBride, 1972).
As you can see, I believe that those words from 48 years ago have been vindicated with the passage of time. Now, I do not deny that Rawls experienced his share, perhaps more than his share, of serious tragedies -the death of a brother from a disease that he had contracted from John Rawls and the latter's combat involvement in World War II being the two that stand out in his biographies -but these facts do not detract from the utopian atmosphere that in the last analysis pervades A Theory of Justice. In fact, they may help to explain it: the longing for the stability and at least modest prosperity that constituted the promise of a bourgeois childhood in between-the-wars Baltimore. (For purposes of reference, were he still alive today he would be 99 years old.) What is interesting about the subsequent evolution of Rawls' thought is that it roughly resembles the transition from daylight to twilight to a sort of wolf-like ending as we move through his middle-period essay collection, Political Liberalism (Rawls, 1993a), on to The Law of Peoples (Rawls, 1993b). I have written elsewhere about The Law of Peoples, which disappointed many even of Rawls' followers for a number of reasons, beginning with his refusal to apply his principles of justice to the international arena, the focus of that book. His condescending attitude toward underdeveloped countries is another. But I do not have the space to rehearse those analyses here, other than to say that the atmosphere of The Law of Peoples, while no longer utopian, is still redolent of the assumption of American hegemony -America as the only remaining "superpower" -do you remember that? -which still prevailed at the time of its initial publication in 1999.
But I do wish to say a little about Rawls' "twilight" book, Political Liberalism. As the blurb on the back cover says (but please be assured that I have read more of it than just the blurb), in Political Liberalism Rawls "changes and revises the idea of justice as fairness he presented in A Theory of Justice, but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way." That is pretty straightforward and, unlike so many book jacket blurbs, what it says is true. (I once wrote a review of a book that focused primarily on its blurbs, which were written by very well-known philosophers, including Habermas, and were "over the top".) To his credit, Rawls was out in front of many Western liberals, in both senses of that term, in appreciating the challenge to liberalism posed by religious fundamentalisms, which espouse what he calls "comprehensive doctrines" that are regarded, at least by their adherents and seemingly even by Rawls himself in many instances, as "reasonable." Rawls' response to this heightened awareness on his part is, among other things, to draw a distinction between the narrowly "rational" and the broadly "reasonable" and to claim that, while the political liberalism of Kant and Mill, the two figures whom he names, is a comprehensive form of liberalism, his own political liberalism is not comprehensive. He repeatedly emphasizes that his theory is political, not metaphysical. An "overlapping consensus", to use another of his favorite expressions in this book, is the best we can hope for in modern pluralistic societies that house various communities, including but not only those of the religious sort, which espouse incompatible comprehensive doctrines but which should be able, or so Rawls hopes, to work together on political matters. A Theory of Justice, while to my mind and the minds of other critics wrongheaded and deficient in significant ways, was exciting; Political Liberalism -I mean the book -is simply not very exciting. There is a lesson to be learned here -perhaps several lessons. Perhaps the most important lesson is that a challenging comprehensive theory, if accompanied by a modicum of plausible arguments in its defense, will stimulate the thinking of others despite its flaws -for there will always be flaws -in a way in which a retreat from such a theory never will.
By way of contrast, I call attention to a thin book published last year by Oxford University Press: Fred Dallmayr's collection of essays entitled Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World. One of the blurbs on this book's back cover reads as follows: "This book exhibits Fred Dallmayr's many strengths -a trans-temporal and trans-cultural breadth of textual knowledge, a critical yet compassionate attunement to the ills of our era, and a clear but not despairing recognition of the shortcomings of current social and political theory. It radiates a quiet, self-assured, seasoned wisdom that is both intrinsically valuable and highly useful for rethinking our crisis-ridden institutions and the related habits of thought, notably traditional liberalism, that are becoming increasingly incapable of supporting them" (Dallmayr, 2019).
Here, once again, it seems to me, we encounter a blurb that is honest and true. Well, it was written by me. Dallmayr's name, I would venture to surmise, is not as widely known as that of Rawls, but he has been a prolific writer at once interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan. For a number of reasons, not the least of which being the title of this book, but also including his career-long ties to Indiana, I have selected Dallmayr as an appropriate foil to Rawls. He taught political science at Purdue University early in his career, with a brief interim stint at the University of Georgia, and has occupied a named chair at the University of Notre Dame, straddling the departments of political science and philosophy, ever since then, now as professor emeritus. He was born and grew up in Germany and has spent most of his life in the United States. He was strongly influenced in later years by some time spent in India.
Dallmayr was a teenager during the Second World War, when Rawls was in the military. Their birth dates are separated by only about 7 ½ years, but the differences in their worldviews are stark. If you look in the indices of Rawls' books, at least of those that are in my possession and probably the rest as well, you will not find any reference to Dallmayr. If you look at the index of Post-Liberalism, you will find no reference to Rawls, either. What a pity! What I wish to extract from Dallmayr's book for present purposes is above all his commitment to a version of socialism. One of his chapters begins with a brief analysis of a recent book by Axel Honneth entitled The Idea of Socialism. Honneth's own approach, which Dallmayr generally applauds but finds somewhat too optimistic in light of current circumstances, is useful in making distinctions among diverse varieties of socialism particularly in the Nineteenth Century. Dallmayr seems to agree with Honneth's claims that the Marxist version as it evolved, while very important as a starting-point, became too strongly pervaded by an excessive emphasis on economic factors and a tendency to endorse historical determinism. But what neither Dallmayr nor Honneth nor one of Dallmayr's favorite contemporary authors, Charles Taylor, will gainsay is that central to the twilight zone in which we are wandering is the heavy hand of global capitalism, which in its earlier stages was so brilliantly critiqued by Marx and exerts such a decisive influence on our world.
When the flag-bearers of Western liberalism have anything at all to say about capitalism, what they say tends to be muted while taking its existence for granted. One reason for this is the assumption, widespread among liberals, that capitalism and "democracy" exist in tandem. I will get back to this assumption shortly. But let me first return one last time here to the Western liberal flag-bearer whom I have singled out, John Rawls. Of course the single most salient principle in A Theory of Justice, the difference principle, is primarily (though not exclusively) economic in nature, and there Rawls says, without much elaboration, that one possible institutional structure for implementing it could be a socialist one. (As many readers no doubt know, Rawls expresses a kind of preference for what the one-time British Labor Party theorist J. E. Meade called "property-owning democracy.") But neither in the index to Political Liberalism nor in the fairly extensive notes that I once took on it can I find a single reference either to "capitalism" or even to the "Market" (terms that are not entirely co-extensive, as Honneth among many others has pointed out). And the only reference to capitalism that I have been able to find in The Law of Peoples occurs in a curious footnote in which Rawls cites a pejorative remark by Michael Walzer about the rootless world of the political economist (Walzer, 1983) and then says, in parentheses, "or of global capitalism, I might add." Well, at least he acknowledged that there was such a thing! But just what is capitalism, global or otherwise? And what is its relationship to liberalism, Western or otherwise? There are, of course, those who say that the two phenomena, capitalism and liberalism, go hand in hand. Now, it is true that the flowering of the Western liberal tradition as it is commonly understood -from Locke onward, let us say -and the development of capitalism in a form recognizable to us today occurred over roughly the same historical period, beginning in the seventeenth century, more or less. No such periodization can be precise, and we can trace the roots of both back to earlier times, as Marx, for example, does with respect to capitalism in the section on the so-called "primitive accumulation of capital" that concludes Volume One of the book by that name, Capital (Marx, 1990). Locke, who, like Wilt Chamberlain centuries later, notoriously consented to engage in capitalist acts (do you remember Robert Nozick, who used the high-salaried Chamberlain as an example? (Nozick, 1974)), and whose entire Second Treatise of Government is focused above all on the defense of free, open-ended property accumulation, does not hesitate to invoke the authority of predecessors, notably Richard Hooker. So, then, should we regard liberalism, or at least Western liberalism, as -to use Marxian terminology -capitalism's ideological superstructure? I suspect that there are many self-defined liberals who hope not, who do not want to see their cherished beliefs accompany capitalism into the dark night into which, many say, it is headed -who, in other words, do not want to see liberalism thrown to the wolves.
One promising vehicle for avoiding this fate is to use what was once a neologism, namely, neoliberalism. It has had currency in Europe for some time, but in the United States not so much, at least in the past. However, I have seen it creep more and more into our American literature of late. Neoliberalism, like liberalism, has been defined in various ways, but I think that there is a sort of core understanding of its current usage, which centers on the advocacy of deregulation, privatization (a word which, as I love to recall, had only a highly pejorative dictionary definition prior to the time of Margaret Thatcher), and the so-called "free market." If we accept this understanding of the word, it seems to me that the practices associated with it, which underwent a resurgence in the late decades of the last century, are truly falling under darker and darker shadows, and this for many reasons, particularly because of the threats to humanity posed by climate change and the increasing polarity between the rich and the poor in many parts of the world. There are many self-styled liberals who eschew neoliberalism, and not only in California.
As for liberalism proper, if we can speak of such a thing, it seems to me to be inextricably bound up, at least in people's minds, with freedom, of course, but also and at least equally with the idea of democracy. As we all know, that word has roots in a culture that existed centuries before the modern era; it meant rule by the δημος, a constitution whose administration, as Pericles is reported to have said in his funeral oration, favors the many rather than the few. Modern democratic theory has supposedly developed in the same spirit, with all kinds of variants to be sure. But, just as Pericles was in fact one of the few, οι ολιγοι, whom he characterized as "unfavored" but who nevertheless managed to run the show during Athens' Golden Age, so, for example, Locke, as I have already noted, profited handsomely from the slave trade and other forms of trade, Jefferson was a slaveowner who, poor fellow, was forced to allow his slaves to be sold upon his death in order to pay off his debts rather than emancipating them, and so on. Modern liberal democratic theory has always professed to make the assumption of equality, but it has never fully embraced it. The same can certainly be said of modern liberal democratic practice.
It seems to me that one of the most important conceptual elements in accounting for this failure is the notion of majority rule. In many ways, the locus classicus for seeing the depth and ultimately the intransigence of this idea is Locke's Second Treatise, although it is traceable back to Hobbes and, I am sure, many others. Hobbes, in his crucial paragraph about the generation of commonwealth, wrote with rather uncharacteristic vagueness about the reduction of all men's wills to one will "by plurality of voices" (Hobbes), Locke, on the other hand, is less vague than usual when, in a comparable paragraph, he explains how, as he puts it, "the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest." His explanation is thoroughly mechanistic: Since the community, being one body, must move one way, so, he says, "it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority." So in assemblies, he continues, "the act of the majority passes for the act of the whole, and, of course, determines, as having by the law of nature and reason the power of the whole" (Locke, 2012: 96). And Locke carries this supposed logic even further in his chapter on the extent of the legislative power when, in a very brief paragraph acknowledging the need for taxation, he says that, while an individual must pay taxes, "still it must be with his own consent -i.e., the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves or the representatives chosen by them" (Locke, 2012: 140). (This is a crucial text, incidentally, for a once very well-known book by a Locke scholar who was one of the early intellectual voices of the modern conservative movement in the United States, Willmoore Kendall, entitled John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule. Kendall taught William Buckley at Yale and eventually became so controversial that Yale paid him off to resign his tenured position). "His own consent, i.e., the consent of the majority" -just give that some thought. Give some further thought as well, if you will, to the underlying wobbly logic that asserts that determination by "the greater force" is the law of nature and reason. This may well be regarded as the Achilles heel of the theory of Western liberalism.
But the difficulties with the idea of majority rule go far deeper than the dubiousness of this dogma. I would like to mention three of them here, namely the problem of time and the problem of the identity of the human units who compose the majority, and the problem of information. As for time, it is evident that, since in any community there will be constant births and deaths, comings of age and events of the opposite kind, so the composition of the majority and the minority will be constantly changing. As for the human units, as I have put it, Western liberalism's conception of them tends towards oversimplification, atomism. This, not coincidentally, is one of the criticisms that have frequently been levelled at Rawls from the outset. He of course rejected this criticism, relying in part, as time went on, on his claim that his theory was political and not metaphysical. But in fact it is impossible to avoid having underlying assumptions about the nature of the basic elements, in this case humans who choose, of a grand theory like his -even if one does not articulate these assumptions and pretends that they make no claims about the nature of the reality to which they refer. Yes, majority rule is at times a practical expedient for initiating or sustaining collective action, but as a "doctrine," to use Kendall's expression, it leaves a great deal to be desired.
Then there is the matter of information. There have always been complaints made, in would-be democracies, about the ignorance of voters and remedies for it proposed -such as John Stuart Mill's inclination to give the more educated a larger share of the vote. Some of these complaints have been biased in racist and classist ways, as I was reminded by a report given in my class one day about anti-Black prejudice among women suffragettes in the nineteenth century. But in fact it is in our own time that the dangers of disinformation among voters are in certain respects greater than ever, given the insidious possibilities of new techniques to bring this about that have been created through social media. The meaningfulness of majority rule becomes ever more dubious when a substantial (or even a relatively small) portion of the electorate is making decisions based on lies that they have been induced to believe.
So much for major difficulties with majority rule in theory. However, majority rule in practice is not a panacea for avoiding the descent into darkness, either. I am not thinking now of the many occasions when the views of a majority, even of a large majority, turn out in retrospect to have been in one way or another mistaken. One way in which liberal institutions attempt to cope with potential problems stemming from narrow majorities is of course to up the ante by requiring larger margins, such as 60%, for certain purposes. But when majority rule comes to be treated as an article of faith, the results can be catastrophic. One of the clearest recent examples of this, one that I mentioned early in this paper, is the saga of the Brexit vote and its aftermath in the U.K. It was a popular referendum, not even a normal piece of legislation, and the margin of victory was narrow. But Teresa May, when she assumed the post of Prime Minister, kept insisting that Brexit meant Brexit, so that she had a duty to implement it, and then there occurred a new election with a new Prime Minister and still further delay. This new Prime Minister Johnson, as some readers may recall, was originally elected by a majority of the members of the Conservative Party who bothered to vote in a mail ballot -roughly 2%, if I recall correctly, of the British electorate. Majority rule indeed! As Jean-Paul Sartre once said in the title of an essay that he wrote concerning an upcoming election in France, "Elections, piège à cons" -elections, trap for fools.
In any event, the recent political evolutions of both the United Kingdom and the United States, and probably France as well, have certainly given Western liberalism a bad name in many quarters. Even if he did not understand what the expression meant, Mr. Trump is probably one sort of Western liberal, and to most of his fellow citizens -in other words, to a majority, according to the polls -not of the most inspiring sort. To many, there is the scent of fascism, or at least of proto-fascism, in the air -the polluted and ever more gaseous air that deniers of climate change seem to think is just fine. I was impressed by the atmosphere of one session of recent meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, SPEP, that I attended in Pittsburgh. It was entitled "Understanding and Combating Fascism," and was intended mainly, I think, to elicit discussion of Jason Stanley's book on that topic. Stanley was unable to attend, but the other speaker, Elisabeth Anker, spoke on fascism in a global era in a way that raised doubts about Trump's credentials and inspired audience questions and comments to the general effect that, yes, we are in fact already living in a fascist environment, It depends, of course, on what one understands by "fascist." But I have recently been reminded of some of the circumstances of Mussolini's road, which was gradual and not all at once, in a class reading of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1989). There are many differences between that situation and our own, of course, but there is still cause for alarm, if not in the United States right now then at least in some other countries that I named before and no doubt in others waiting in the wings. Let me add, though, with respect to the United States, a reflection based on a news clip that I saw recently, that when a United States Senator (in this case Senator Kennedy of Louisiana) publicly denounces the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, that Western liberal from California, as being "so dumb that it sucks," we are in deep trouble, deep danger. We have come to expect almost anything of that kind from our Chief Executive, but it seems that the poison is spreading.