The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Liberalism 9781474468107

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T he E dinburgh C ompanion to C ontemporary L iberalism

T he E dinburgh C ompanion to C ontemporary L iberalism

General Editor Mark Evans

Edinburgh University Press

© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Copyright in the individual contributions is retained by the authors. Transferred to digital print 2013 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Goudy by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1359 5 (hardback) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgem ents....................................................................................................................................................... vii List of Contributors.................................................................................................................................................... ix

Part One: The Liberal Trajectory 1. Issues and Trends in Contemporary Liberalism............................................................................................... 3 Mark Evans 2. Twentieth-Century Liberal Thought: Development or Transform ation?................................................21 Michael Freeden

Part Two: Citizenship: Universalism and Particularism 3. Human Rights and Ethnocultural Justice........................................................................................................... 35 Will Kymlicka 4. Liberalism and C itizen sh ip .................................................................................................................................. 51 Andrew Vincent 5. The Sword of Faith and the Shield of Fear: Liberalism and the Power of the Nation........................63 Margaret Canovan 6. Liberal Citizenship and Feminism........................................................................................................................ 75 Andrea Baumeister

Part Three: Justice: Identity and Distribution 7. Liberalism and the Politics of Recognition.....................................................................................................89 Jonathan Seglow 8. The Essential Indeterminacy of Rawls’s Difference Principle.................................................................. 101 Rex Martin 9. Rawlsian Theory, Contemporary Marxism and the Difference Principle............................................. 113 Rodney G. Peffer

Part Four: Problems of Liberal Justification 10. Disenchantment and the Liberalism of Fear............................................................................................... 135 Peter Lassman 11. Pragmatist Liberalism and the Evasion of Politics..................................................................................... 148 Mark Evans

CONTENTS 12. Liberalism and Contingency................................................................................................................................162 Bruce Haddock

Part Five: Liberalism versus Republicanism? 13. Back to the Future: Pluralism and the Republican Alternative to Liberalism..................................... 175 Richard Bellamy 14. Accommodating Republicanism .......................................................................................................... 188 David Rasmussen

Part Six: The ‘Autonomous Individual’: Feminist Critiques and Liberal Replies 15. Liberalism, Feminism, Enlightenm ent............................................................................................................. 197 Kate Soper 16. Feminism and Women’s Autonomy: The Challenge of Female Genital Cutting................................ 208 Diana Tietjens Meyers

Part Seven: Liberalism Beyond the Nation-State 17. Civil Association: The European Union as a Supranational Liberal Legal O rd e r............................. 225 Robert Bideleux 18. The Idea of a Liberal-Democratic Peace........................................................................................................241 Howard Williams 19. Constructing International Community: Liberal Theory, Developmental Communitarianism and International E th ics................................ 253 Peter Sutch

Part Eight: New Directions for Liberal Thinking 20. Liberalism and Post-communism....................................................................................................................... 269 Richard Sakwa 21. Liberalism, Ecocentrism and Persons................................................................................................................287 Brian Baxter 22. Prolegomenon to a Liberal Theory of the Good L ife .................................................................................. 299 Mark Evans Bibliography..................................................................................................................................................................312 In d ex ............................................................................................................................................................................... 323

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the University of Wales Academic Support Fund for a generous grant that financed several conferences and seminar sessions at which early versions of most of these chapters were aired and discussed. Thanks are also due to the following for permission to include revised versions of articles they have published: to the editor of the Review of Constitutional Studies, published by the Centre for Constitutional Studies at the University of Alberta, for Chapter 3; to the editor of Journal of Political Ideologies for Chapter 5; to Kluwer Academic Publishers and Larry May and Marilyn Friedman, editors of Rights and Reason, for Chapter 8; and to the editor of Environmental Values for Chapter 21. My colleagues in the Department of Political Theory and Government at the University of Wales, Swansea have been very supportive of this project, not least in relieving me of teaching and admin­ istration at a crucial time in its gestation. I would particularly like to thank David Boucher, Bruce Haddock and Rex Martin for their advice and encouragement. Nicola Carr and the staff of Edinburgh University Press have been patient, cheerful and immensely helpful. Having taken on such a large volume as my first collaborative project, I could hardly have wished for a better team. My family, as ever, has been immensely supportive, too, and Anne in particular has never flagged in her encouragement during my many distractions and absences throughout the produc­ tion of this book.

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L I S T OF C O N T R I B U T O R S

Andrea Baumeister is Lecturer in Politics at the

Rex Martin is Professor of Philosophy at the Uni­

University of Stirling.

versity of Kansas and was, until 2000, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Brian Baxter is Lecturer in Politics at the U ni­

Diana Tietjens Meyers is Professor of Philosophy

versity of Dundee.

at the University of Connecticut.

Richard Bellamy is Professor of Politics at the

Rodney G, Peffer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego.

University of Reading.

Robert Bideleux is Reader in Politics at the U ni­ versity of Wales, Swansea.

David Rasmussen is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, Massachusetts.

Margaret Canovan is Professor of Politics at the

Richard Sakwa is Professor of Politics at the Uni­ versity of Kent at Canterbury.

University of Keele.

Mark Evans is Lecturer in Political Theory at the

Jonathan Seglow is Lecturer in Politics at Royal

University of Wales, Swansea.

Holloway and Bedford New College.

Michael Freeden is Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College.

Kate Soper is Professor of Philosophy at the U ni­

Bruce Haddock is Reader in Politics at the U ni­ versity of Wales, Swansea.

Peter Sutch is a Tutorial Fellow in the School of European Studies at the University of Wales, Cardiff.

Will Kymlicka is Professor of Philosophy at

Andrew Vincent is Professor of Politics in the

Queen’s University, Ontario.

School of European Studies at the University of Wales, Cardiff.

versity of North London.

Peter Lassman is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Birmingham.

Howard Williams is Professor of Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

IX

Part One T HE L I B E R A L T R A J E C T O R Y

1

I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN CONTEMPORARY LIBERALISM Mark Evans

literature. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that the ‘Rawls industry’ has swamped all other dimensions of liberal academic argument, it is never­ theless obvious that liberalism’s theoretical revival in the last quarter of the twentieth century was largely powered by the critical response to Theory. Even non-liberals have found it difficult to address the central questions of political theory without being expected to orient themselves with respect to ‘the Rawlsian position’. The influence of Rawlsianism - if only as a critical springboard - can be detected in most breaths of the resurrected tradition of political theorising. For anyone working in this tradition, it is thus profoundly disturbing to encounter the charge that the ‘revitalisation’ of liberal political theory as any­ thing more than an ‘academic’ preoccupation (in­ cluding the pejorative sense of that term) is actually illusory. In a series of excoriating critiques, John Gray charges that contemporary liberal theorising ‘has done little more than articulate the prejudices of an Anglo-American academic class that lacks any understanding of political life in our age.’3 In its contemporary philosophical guise liberalism lamen­ tably mistakes its own parochial, historical and cul­ tural specificity for an ahistorically and universally applicable mode of political discourse and analysis. Further, its concepts and concerns - indeed, the very methods by which it conducts its theorising and the forums in which it takes place - are peculiarly divorced from the actual politics even of those

Introduction For most contemporary liberal political theorists, it is a defining tenet of their historical self-consciousness that political theory was ‘reborn’ in 1971 with the publication of John Rawls’s magisterially weighty A Theory of Justice} After many years in which the grip of linguistic analysis reduced it to the supposedly impartial role of clarifying the meaning of political concepts (and which led one commentator to de­ clare the more substantive activity of normative position-taking in political philosophising to be ‘dead’2), this book triumphantly demonstrated to liberals that intellectual validity could, after all, be claimed for a philosophical theory that proposed what the content of political morality should be and how it might be justified. N o longer need the grand theorising of the just or good political society be taken up only by liberalism’s enemies - particu­ larly, in the years immediately before TheoryJs ap­ pearance, those to its left whose thinking shared none of its hesitation over position-taking (a point which demonstrates the overly parochial nature of liberals’ ‘death of political theory’ claims). Rawls’s importance lies not only in his restoration to liberals of a confidence that they were indeed justified in using philosophical argument for the substantive end of defending the liberal order. It lies also in the way in which both the specific principles of his theory and the way in which he defends them have generated a truly enormous debate and a vast

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MARK EVANS western societies in which liberalism is said to be the dominant political tradition. So for all of their hubristic pretensions to speak to the pressing poli­ tical problems of our times, liberal theorists - who have encouraged a wholly delusive perception that these can be all addressed within liberal terms of reference4 - ‘are reduced to talking with each other, and to no one else, about topics of interest to no one else, least of all in the liberal democracies they are supposed to be addressing.’5 Rather than a ‘rebirth’ political theory suffered a tragic ‘still birth’ in 1971.6 Given this conclusion, Gray proposes that perhaps political theory is not suited to substantive norma­ tive position-taking after all. Maybe it would be best for it humbly to retreat once again to the insular world of the ivory tower and engage, if not in the dextrous niceties of linguistic philosophy, then to the ‘modest exegesis of texts - like Mill’s Liberty, say whose charm is in their distance from the world, or any world we are likely to find ourselves in.’7 Now such a devastating critique is hardly likely to be accepted with alacrity in the massed ranks of contemporary liberal political theorists, who are much more likely than some of their linguisticphilosophical predecessors to be wounded by the charge of ‘practical irrelevance’. Doubtless there is a temptation to treat it with an instantly dismissive contempt. Yet despite the critique’s intemperance, there may be a lurking fear that there is something to its claims. For example, liberal thinkers who deal with what they regard as issues that affect all of their fellow citizens (and are therefore concerned to keep in view the ‘relevance’ of their ideas to the wider world) need little perceptiveness to sense that, out­ side of the academic community, their work may be completely inaccessible.8 Whatever their intentions to the contrary, they are indeed effectively talking only to each other. If ‘inaccessibility’ is simply a question of the technical difficulty of their writings, then there may be no great cause for concern. After all, political problems do tend to be extremely complex. We should not necessarily expect there to be any easy, publicly comprehensible ways of theorising them and their possible resolution. The actual business of politics requires no less technical understanding and expertise, unavailable to the citizenry as a whole,

than does the academic study of it. Moreover, pol­ itics is hardly alone in being a concern whose full comprehension is beyond all bar those few who have the time, resources and aptitude to master its detail even when it impacts greatly upon everyone. So when liberal political theorists decide to take, say, a Kantian approach to a concrete political problem the selection and justification of basic constitutional principles, for example - they are obviously not immediately vulnerable to the charges of unworldli­ ness and irrelevance simply by virtue of using ideas unknown to, and probably not fully appreciable by, those to whom the problem nevertheless applies. We might, of course, justifiably challenge the appropriateness of the approach taken and/or the proposed solutions to it. Certainly, this is what Gray attempts to do and there is obviously a serious debate to be had about the applicability of contemporary liberalism’s methodology and recommendations. But to reach any conclusion on this question substantive engagement with such theory is required; its rele­ vance to the practical problem at stake must be put to the test rather than denied straight away. And even if the results of such assessment are ultimately negative, it is still possible that the approach has thrown valuable light upon the concrete problem. There is no argument here, then, for abandoning contemporary liberal political theory’s normative ambitions. Gray’s critique, however, amounts to much more than just the ineffective charge that liberalism’s theoretical approaches are remote from the ‘real world of politics’. It urges that the very problems taken up by liberal theorists and those critics who debate with them in the same philosophical tradi­ tions are simply not the problems (or at least the prime or only problems) of the real world, either of liberal-democratic societies or of human commu­ nities more widely.9 Gray finds it deeply absurd that, for example, the journal Ethics - which is one of the foremost vehicles for contemporary liberal academic moral and political theory - should devote an entire issue to a discussion of the merits and drawbacks of market socialism.10 The contributors, he says, ‘might have done better to discuss the prospects of the restoration of monarchy in Russia - far less of an exercise in anachronism, and just conceivably a topic

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I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I B E R A L I S M it as nothing other than the genteel exchanges of philosophical claims between professional aca­ demics. By highlighting the issues, we can see di­ rectly how liberalism engages with the problems of practical political life today. And with the emphasis upon agenda-setting - the topics that can and should be addressed as well as what are currently being addressed - contemporary liberalism can be seen to be live: relevant, proactive, continuously engaged and adaptable. If the Companion does not ultimately address all the issues that Gray thinks to be so strikingly absent from contemporary western political theory, it may not be for want of space alone. Despite the claim favoured by some that liberalism is becoming a global doctrine and despite, too, the fact that its theorising of international relations touches matters of concern for everyone in the world, many contemporary lib­ erals are very wary (much more so than their pre­ decessors typically were) of any hubristic idea that all of their concerns are matters for humanity in its entirety. They recognise that ‘politics’ may not be exhausted by their account of it alone, so that some of the (sometimes rather bizarre) issues whose ab­ sence Gray observes (such as theism, theocracy, ‘Byzantinism’ and monarchism) are indeed best left to other traditions of political thought to address. Nor need it be thought that the ‘contemporary agenda’, wide-ranging though I believe it should be, is completely exhaustive of the issues that could legitimately warrant liberals’ concern now and in the future. Some issues in practice come to matter more than others at certain times (a feature which will be evident in the selection of themes covered in this volume). But precisely because its fluidity and flex­ ibility is emphasised, we need not think - as many of its critics seem implicitly prone to believe - that liberalism is somehow conceptually and/or morally incapable of addressing the topics with which it is not currently engaging. In short, the Companion hopes to present what will hopefully be compelling evidence that contemporary liberalism has not misidentified the relevant political concerns and that its approaches to their analysis are not naively misguided. Even if debates about such concerns may still rage and even if - as some of the chapters will show - it may be justifiably doubted

of some interest to those whose fates it might affect.’11 In more measured moments, Gray is happy to grant that some of liberal theory’s concerns do connect with the practice of liberalism. But he still wants to insist that there is much more to humanity’s political condition than liberal theory has allowed. The purpose of the Edinburgh Companion to Con­ temporary Liberalism is to demonstrate just how far liberal theory can stand from the kind of abstract, unworldly, trivial philosophical navel-gazing de­ picted in this caricaturising critique. I do not wish to deny that the Rawls-inspired strand of liberal theorising in particular has perhaps tended towards narrowness, both in terms of the issues discussed and the range of authors who have engaged with them. Without in any way wishing to belittle the value and importance of this body of thought, it has probably become all too easy to mistake its prominence as meaning that it signifies all that to which liberalism necessarily amounts today. ‘Contemporary liberal­ ism’ is often reduced to what Rawls and a select band of thinkers - such as Dworkin, Nagel, Scanlon and Raz - have to say. This phenomenon may well have softened liberalism up in the face of the kind of critique rehearsed above. Yet not only is it still unfair to say that Rawls, his interlocutors and their con­ cerns are divorced from what really matters in po­ litical practice, it is simply wrong to think that contemporary liberalism does not and cannot range far beyond the ‘Rawlsian ambit’. This Companion, then, will certainly engage with liberal theory’s ‘usual suspects’, but it will also show how liberalism can tackle issues that Gray’s critique might fool us into thinking are somehow out of its reach. To this end, the book does not simply present ‘contemporary liberalism’ in terms of a survey of what its main protagonists have said over the past thirty years or so. Instead, its guiding principle is to con­ ceptualise it as a set of issues and approaches that might be said to constitute liberalism’s current prac­ tical challenges and hence its current research agen­ da. After all, the importance of any one theorist ultimately rests upon the importance of the political problem she or he is addressing; only once that is recognised, perhaps, is the value of their work fully assessable. A n ‘issue-led’ account of contemporary liberalism shows how unilluminating it is to think of

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MARK EVANS The other tendency is a product of Rawls’s pro­ minence in contemporary debates and has already been alluded to. It identifies liberalism with the specifically anti-perfectionist politics of constitu­ tional-democratic justice that his work has popu­ larised and which has subsequently engaged so many in liberal political theory. Thus, it has become very easy to think it axiomatic that liberalism is about the ‘neutrality of the state’, ‘the priority of the right over the good’, ‘the politics of public reason’ and other leitmotifs of Rawlsian theory. Now we have already conceded that Rawls has inspired a very influential and perhaps attractive conception of liberalism. And I will shortly sketch how it frames many of the predominant themes in liberalism’s ‘post-Rawls’ re­ search agenda. But as Michael Freeden forcefully demonstrates in Chapter 2, it offers a very histori­ cally and culturally specific interpretation of liberal­ ism (and one whose Kantianism is, moreover, not nearly as faithful to its cultural roots as it likes to think). One consequence of this narrowing of liberalism’s definition has been to render it vulnerable to criti­ cisms that would comfortably bypass other members of the liberal tradition. Indeed, it often gives the impression of being blind to the existence of such a diverse tradition behind it. Chapter 2 therefore serves to remind contemporary liberals of its exis­ tence. In doing so, it suggests that one research task of liberal theory now is to open up possibilities of redefinition and perhaps retrieval of certain liberal self-images and commitments, lost from sight in the fog of Rawlsianism, which may be valuable resources for the doctrine’s defence and development. Neither tendency serves us well, then, in trying to characterise liberalism. But this claim does not rest upon any assumption that we can describe an ade­ quate, generally acceptable typology for it that is at once sufficiently expansive to cover all liberalisms but also sufficiently detailed not to become indis­ tinguishable from related but distinct political doc­ trines. In fact, it is probably best to treat liberalism as in essence internally contested. The ‘liberal label’ denotes a political identity to be regarded as one that is not permissively open-ended but which oper­ ates within certain conceptual and historical con­ straints, yet whose diversity within these boundaries

whether liberal theory is always the best-equipped to deal with them, there is still much theoretically and practically useful insight to be gained from it.

Contesting the Nature of ‘Liberalism’ One feature that the discussion thus far might seem to share with much contemporary political theory is the apparent assumption that ‘liberalism’ needs no explicit definition, as if it is enough simply to name it to convey what kind of politics is intended. Those who accept any version of Francis Fukuyama’s belief that liberalism’s ideals have morally triumphed over all others and that ideological conflict in the realm of ideas is now over may be particularly inclined to hold this assumption.12 Perhaps in earlier times, when this battle was still being fought, it was always necessary for liberals to be explicit and detailed about that for which they were fighting. When positions no longer need defending, they may no longer need demarcating. In fact, of course, liberalism’s meaning has always been contested by liberals themselves and even if we accept some version of Fukuyama’s controversial claim we should not delude ourselves into thinking that this particular contest is also over. We should be especially wary of two opposing tendencies in contemporary political theory’s definitional handling of ‘liberalism’. One, which may be particularly encour­ aged if one accepts that it now has no serious competition in the Enlightenment tradition of pro­ gressive politics (as socialism, say, once provided), equates liberalism with a few very general Enlight­ enment moral commitments centring around some notion of ‘equal individual freedom’. On this ac­ count, if it is going too far to say that we are ‘all liberals now’, then it is still the case that non-liberalism ends up being defined very narrowly in terms of doctrines such as fascism, ethnic nationalism and certain types of religious fundamentalism. In other words, ‘liberalism’ is little more than a label to cover all adherents to the general progressive standpoint opposed to these. From this perspective, it might therefore be thought difficult for any ‘reasonable’ person to argue against it. But with such a capacious definition ‘liberalism’ would no longer be able to stake specific political standpoints within the broad range of ‘progressivism’.

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I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I B E R A L I S M dependence and strong ties of mutually supportive obligations between people. Given the accelerating spread of what Richard Rorty calls the ‘human rights culture’, however,15 it is fair to say that liberals in general have increasingly employed the notion of ‘individual human rights’ as the conceptual device by which to express at least part of their moral commit­ ment. They are not, however, conceptually bound to do so; there are other ways of formulating the general commitment to equal individual freedom. Nor should it be thought that liberal individual rights are necessarily characterised and prioritised in a manner that would negate or trump any official support for social justice. Area (2) concerns how liberalism’s moral commit­ ments are cashed out in terms of political institutions and practices. As we might expect given the ob­ servations above, the liberal tradition has ranged from support for minimal or ‘night-watchman’ states presiding over loosely regulated free-market capitalist economies (sometimes now grouped under the head­ ing o f ‘libertarianism’16) to the kind of economically interventionist welfarist politics sometimes thought to be the preserve of socialism or social democracy.17 Once again, though, we can identify certain wide­ spread tendencies across the liberal spectrum. For example, liberals tend to support some version of representative democracy as being (a) the most ideal and/or efficient way in which citizens can be given a say in how they are ruled; (b) the most ideal and/or efficient way in which power can be held accoun­ table by those over whom it is exercised; (c) the best means by which the state’s power can be limited to those specific areas of social life in which liberal politics is deemed to be rightfully concerned. The argument for liberalism’s equal individual moral freedoms is reinforced by the commitment to democracy, for it emphasises how the exercise of political choice requires freedoms of expression and association (for example) to be rendered mean­ ingful. The idea that politics is also a limited activity, with realms of life being left free from direct political regulation, is a further consequence of the liberal account of freedom. Though the extent to which it is to be regulated is significantly variable within liberal thinking, liberals tend to support the general idea of a market economy in which private property is

should be celebrated rather than regretted. As most of the chapters implicitly demonstrate, ‘liberalism’ remains an invaluable shorthand term. But, while its various usages cannot be totally antithetical to each other without at least one of them being a misuse, we should not make the mistake of thinking there must be any thoroughgoing identity of views and commit­ ments behind them all.13 Leaving it, then, to the individual contributors to use the term as they wish, I will here confine myself to the identification of a few general themes and tendencies in definitions of liberalism, to preface the arguments in the rest of this introduction.14 It is important to note that the term can be used to characterise quite distinct topics or areas of concern in particular ways and that confusion between them may contribute to the vagaries of debating liberal­ ism’s nature. Three areas in particular are worthy of note: (1) liberalism as a political morality; (2) lib­ eralism as a form of political regime; (3) liberalism as a form of culture, or social order. Under (1), liberalism posits the individual as the fundamental unit of moral and political concern. Although this need not be incompatible with a strong commitment to a notion of community and the common good (and should not be thought to imply an unavoidable reliance upon an atomistic methodological individualism at the heart of its social-explanatory theory), liberal morality does not deliberately subsume the individual in, or totally subordinate it to, any collective unit. The liberal individual is held to be ‘equally free’ and the purpose of liberal moral and political society is, in the first instance, to protect and promote the interests of individuals as equally free beings. This is at the heart of the justifications for whatever constraints such a society will wish to place upon its members. How precisely this notion of equal freedom is to be inter­ preted is part of what fuels the ongoing contest over liberalism’s nature. The concept of ‘justice’ is often used nowadays as the peg upon which to hang this debate. And in their accounts of what justice de­ mands of people to facilitate the equal freedom of all, liberals can range from very individualistic moral­ ities, which emphasise political ‘non-interference’, to highly proactive theories of redistributive social jus­ tice that posit substantial degrees of individual inter­

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MARK EVANS allowable (if not necessarily to the exclusion of any form of public ownership). The capitalist character of the liberal order will obviously inform the nature of area (3), in which we can isolate two prominent features of liberal society. The first feature is civil society, the recognition that a significant part of public social life should be left free from direct state control, instead being the realm in which people may freely associate themselves for their various ends. This includes not just (significant parts of) economic life, but other institutional asso­ ciations, some perhaps devoted to providing services (private health-care providers, for example), others tied to particular projects or commitments (churches, charities, working people’s associations, and so on). The second feature consists of the cultural characteristics of ‘liberal-democratic individuality’. This phrase is designed to capture two aspects of the character-ideal that liberalism tends to hope, expli­ citly or implicitly, will flourish among citizens.18 First is the disposition to act towards others in ways that uphold the institutions and the ethos of liberal society: to be, for example, respectful, tolerant of disagreement and alternative lifestyles, prepared to cooperate with others to live under mutually accep­ table terms of social and political accommodation. Second is the idea that the interests of the individual are (within terms laid down by justice) to be cele­ brated. The fact that ‘people’s lives are their own to lead’ is something that liberal politics is designed to facilitate, proactively and/or through non-interfer­ ence. Many liberals (including Rawls, his ‘anti-perfectionism’ notwithstanding) favour the idea that individuals should freely develop their own, unique characteristics and capacities as the central project in the pursuit of the good life. This is not to say that liberalism’s ‘cult of the individual’ in principle favours egoism at the expense of other-directed social concerns. As contemporary liberals have arguably become more sensitive to what they regard as the expanding range of permissible differences in human forms of life, cultural pluralism has come to play a more prominent role in their thinking. Hence, liberals now tend to attach great significance to cultural (that is, collective) identities as crucial social resources in the constitution of

individual identities and projects. But, again, they tend to want to resist the possibilities of such iden­ tities swallowing up individual opportunities not to conform to them, and certainly to oppose any iden­ tity that fundamentally compromises the commit­ ments of liberal citizenship. The above is not meant to be an exhaustive description; it merely indicates some of liberalism’s prominent general characteristics. But this is enough to orient the rest of this introduction. For next, I first identify the main research interests in liberal think­ ing that followed in Rawls’s wake. We will then be in a position to see how the chapters of this volume might build upon that legacy and address the kinds of concerns that Gray’s critique would have us regard as alien to it. Finally, I suggest a further line of argu­ ment in support of the claim that there are still crucial issues with which contemporary liberal poli­ tical theory may substantively engage. Liberals, I contend, have nothing to be complacent about. There are good reasons to think hard about the longer-term viability of the liberal order.

Issues for a Contemporary Liberal Research Agenda In outlining the main themes in contemporary lib­ eral political theory to date, I don’t pretend to be offering an exhaustive account of liberal scholarship in the years since Theory’s publication. I hope instead simply to offer a sketch to place in context the directions in which this book suggests liberal thought may run hereafter. Bearing in mind the caveat that not everything even in today’s liberalism is reducible to ‘Rawls and his critics’, it is nevertheless easy for a schematic account such as this to tease out these themes in terms of debates raised by and generated from Rawls’s work. Two in particular can be traced in their current form back to Theory. The first concerns the content of justice: what is it that a just state should seek to secure for its citizens and by what principles does it distribute what G. A. Cohen has called justice’s ‘currency’?19 In defending a concep­ tion of distributive social justice, Rawls’s answers to these two questions were that ‘social primary goods’ were the raw material of justice, and that they should be distributed within the institutions and relation­

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I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I B E R A L I S M have already observed how Rawls propagated the image of liberalism as committed to a politics of impartiality or neutralism. For him, liberal politics was fundamentally about justice alone. Justice em­ bodied principles of ‘right’, to be justified largely upon the basis that they were acceptable by all to whom they applied. These were distinguishable from ‘conceptions of the good’, the various forms of life­ style from which individuals should be allowed to choose and which were not therefore the proper objects of political favouritism. Much interest was generated over Rawls’s revival of contractarianism as a method of derivation and justification. His use of the ‘original position’ and its assumptions about individual rationality and moral motivation generated an extensive literature, seeking to test the plausibility of the general idea that political principles could be derived from idealised bargaining between equally free, rational indivi­ duals.24 From the early 1980s, however, what be­ came known as the ‘communitarian’ critique of liberalism developed in reaction against this whole tendency, epitomised by Michael Sandel’s attack on Theory in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.25 Communitarians argued that contractarianism fun­ damentally misunderstood the nature of moral agency given its tendency to use ‘abstractive’ meth­ odologies, attempting to generate moral and political principles from hypothetical conceptions of ‘rational moral agents’ drawn in abstraction from any parti­ cular identities, commitments and social contexts. By ignoring the crucial fact that individuals were essentially social creatures, with their identities and moralities being the products of particular cultures, such theories were predestined to fail to generate conceptually and substantively adequate moralities. Hence, as exemplified by Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice, communitarians argued for what amounted to a hermeneutic political theory, deriving its moral principles from an interpretive analysis of concrete social understandings. Acknowledging the diversity of societies and social meanings, this approach con­ sequently leant towards (even if it often wished to resist a total capitulation to) a normative as well as an epistemological relativism.26 The debate between liberals and communitarians also broke off into separable questions about the

ships of society’s ‘basic structure’ according to his ‘two principles of justice’.20 Perhaps the most politically resonant attack on his theory came from Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. Capturing the ethos of the New Right (which in numerous western states during the 1970s and 1980s electorally eclipsed the kind of politics many believed Rawls to be defending), Nozick attacked the very concept of distributive justice and defended a rights-based, purely procedural ac­ count of the just state that largely served to protect individual property holdings from redistributive po­ licies.21 A t the same time, there was also renewed interest in the work of F. A. Hayek, who provided a far more intellectually rigorous defence of procedural against distributive social justice.22 Together, these authors contributed much to the revival of what many thought was harking back to a ‘classical liberal’ political theory (as we have already noted, people on both sides of the debate felt sufficiently embarrassed by this family connection to parcel off this revanchist classical liberalism under the heading of ‘libertarian­ ism’). It is a measure of where many academics’ sympa­ thies tended to lie that there was more extensive and innovative intellectual work done on the other side of the political spectrum. This embraced rather than jettisoned the notion of distributive social justice, and sought to contest Rawls’s specific characterisa­ tion of it. Indeed, it was precisely because of the fact that political ideas to the centre and left of the political spectrum were in electoral retreat that many thinkers became particularly concerned to bolster their philosophical credibility. Here, then, the de­ bate was posed around how best to pattern the distribution of whatever it was that justice demanded should be equalised. Amartya Sen’s seminal 1979 Tanner Lecture ‘Equality of What?’ set the tone for the debate, and helped to generate a plethora of rivals for Rawls’s claim that social primary goods were the proper focus for egalitarian policy.23 The second issue raised by Theory concerned the justification of political principles: how are they to be derived and what reasons could be given for accepting them? Committed to the idea that political principles should respect all citizens as equals and be at least the potential object of their agreement, we

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MARK EVANS manner that, on the one hand, doesn’t rest upon dubious claims about actual universal consensus in liberal societies on liberal principles yet, on the other hand, still holds out as plausible the possibility of genuine agreement. Particularly in so far as many (though emphatically not all) liberals have accepted the need for a Rawlsian ‘communitarian turn’, this debate has partially substituted for the more abstract notions of rational calculation favoured in the earlier contractarian debate.30 One of the possible limitations of the ‘commu­ nitarian’ school is that, ironically enough, some of its exponents have tended to use abstractly unspecific conceptions of ‘community’ which are, in fact, im­ plicitly homogenising. They suppress full recognition of diversity and conflict over values and practices, overly simplifying the project of hermeneutically obtaining a singular political morality for a commu­ nity. Many liberals have therefore paid close atten­ tion to theorising this diversity and the relevant sense of ‘community’ for the politics of a pluralistic society. Often, they now raise their concerns within the terms set by ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘the politics of difference.’ Feminist thinkers have been at the fore­ front of the project to expose and jettison from political theory concepts that they argue to be ‘difference-blind’ to the extent that they utterly fail to spot their own partiality. (Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference is representative of this trend.31) Many of liberalism’s critics in this regard tend to argue that the whole Enlightenment heritage, which liberalism is held to exemplify, un­ successfully masks its own particularity (western and/ or masculine and/or bourgeois) in a cloak of cosmo­ politan universalism. They want to displace from political thinking any abstractly conceptualised mor­ al concerns with ‘humanity’ (those which treat objects of moral concern only as ‘equal rational moral agents’, for example) and any other concepts which in fact represent a very particular, partial way of seeing the moral and political world. In reaction, we find a greater engagement by liberals with other cultures, seeking to understand and appreciate their differences in a quest to con­ ceptualise what might be necessary to establish a political order that can justly accommodate ‘differ­ ence’. As the chapters by Will Kymlicka, Andrea

content and justification of political morality.27 Part of the communitarian argument over political mor­ ality’s content attacked the impartialism cham­ pioned by Rawls, denying that the ‘right’ can be conceptually separated from the ‘good’. One sub­ stantive consequence of this was to give politics responsibility for promoting rather than avoiding the ‘good’ and, in some versions, communitarism was happy to bring into political thinking a direct concern with, for example, cultivating virtues of character.28 Although many communitarians did not reject liberal morality in toto, they tended to criticise the narrowness of what they perceived to be liberalism’s overly individualistic moral stance, con­ tending that it is ill-equipped to accommodate the importance of group identities and collective goods to political morality. Much liberal writing in recent times has thus been devoted to showing that liberalism is not as blind to such concerns as the communitarians believe. The complaints that it is insufficiently responsive to the demands of community have led, for example, to an increasing interest in what is often called ‘civic liberalism’. This frequently draws upon republican traditions of thought to postulate interdependence between liberal individuality and ‘good citizenship’, which rests upon the willingness and ability of citizens to participate in and uphold certain shared practices in liberal-democratic society.29 And, as his contribution to this volume shows, Will Kymlicka has been at the forefront of the attempt to establish the coherence and desirability of ‘group-based’ con­ cerns in liberal politics. Liberals have also been prompted to respond to the communitarian assault on their favoured justifi­ catory strategies. Rawls himself has led liberalism’s response; in his Political Liberalism he effectively localises his political theory in that he now believes that political justifications for liberalism need to be drawn from the shared ideas in the public political culture of a constitutional democracy (a strategy sometimes called ‘liberal communitarianism’, pro­ posing the dissolution of the antithesis). His recent work has given much prominence to the theme of ‘public reason’ as the source of justifications for liberal principles. Strenuous efforts are now made to explicate its notion of ‘reasonable agreement’ in a

10

I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I B E R A L I S M essential diversity. It contends that the Anglo-Amer­ ican philosophical liberalism, whose pre-eminence in contemporary liberalism has already been identi­ fied, has not displaced the myriad other forms of liberal thought and discourse. Future research on liberalism would do well to bear this in mind. Next, Will Kymlicka demonstrates how liberalism is capable of addressing many of the concerns raised by those critics who contended that it was concep­ tually incapable of catering for group- rather than individual-centred demands. He develops a case for ‘group rights’ as the centrepiece of an account of what he calls ‘ethnocultural justice’. The following four chapters analyse issues of the nature of liberal community and citizenship, and the particular un­ derstanding of ‘justice’, that emerges from his dis­ cussion. Andrew Vincent argues that liberalism’s account of citizenship - the centrepiece of many liberals’ arguments against the communitarian cri­ tique - sits extremely uneasily astride two contra­ dictory currents: a universalist cosmopolitanism which underpins liberalism’s moral principles and a highly particularist nationalism which actually grounds the criteria for citizenship in liberal states. By explaining the nature and implications of these currents, he puts this issue firmly on liberalism’s research agenda as requiring urgent attention. Mar­ garet Canovan’s chapter throws light on this pro­ blem from a different angle. She identifies two ostensibly very different liberalisms: the ‘Crusaders’ (those liberals who prioritise a universalist human rights agenda) and the ‘Sceptics’ (much more con­ tent with the conduct of a limited politics inside their own national boundaries). She argues that, their highly distinctive commitments notwithstand­ ing, both rely tacitly but crucially upon notions of nationhood. The suspicion that they share of ‘na­ tionality’ in politics may therefore be misplaced; again, it is shown that there is an intimate yet contentious relationship between liberalism and ‘the nation’, the nature of which requires much closer analysis than has been hitherto given. Andrea Baumeister then presents a comprehen­ sive discussion of various feminist critiques that have condemned liberal conceptions of citizenship for their apparent blindness to the political significance of difference. She argues, however, that Kantian

Baumeister, Jonathan Seglow and Kate Soper show, for example, this has resulted in liberal arguments which are much more sympathetically responsive to the kinds of concerns that critics may rightly have complained to have gone unrecognised in certain strands of liberalism but who wrongly charged lib­ eralism in general to be incapable of addressing. We also find a rejection of the apparent normative localisation of some communitarians and ‘difference theorists’ in the recent upsurge of interest in norma­ tive international relations theory. Concluding this brief summary, we should note how the heightened sensitivity to diversity contri­ butes to a further problematisation of liberalism’s justificatory project. Where, not so long ago, con­ tractarianism and ‘morals by rational and reasonable agreement’ seemed to be predominant themes, the debate has widened and fragmented as the ‘fact of pluralism’ (itself variably interpreted) has suggested to some that only a Hobbesian politics of modus vivendi is possible and, to others (the postmoder­ nists), that the whole philosophical project of liberal justification is redundant. Here again, there is a tendency to question liberalism’s supposedly Enlight­ enment-bound conceptions of morality and moral justification. From this overview, the following seem to emerge as contemporary liberalism’s main preoccupations: 1. the content of ‘justice’; 2. the justification of liberal political principles; 3. the conception of ‘citizenship’ and its relation­ ship to individual freedom, civic virtue and the requirements of civil order; 4. the conception of a liberal political commu­ nity as applicable to a pluralistic, multicultural society; 5. the defence of liberal (‘Enlightenment’) poli­ tical concepts and concerns in the wake of the challenge posed by pluralism and ‘difference’. We are now in a position to summarise the con­ tributions to this volume, seeing how they pick up, advance and supplement these themes. As already indicated, Michael Freeden’s opening chapter takes us through numerous academic char­ acterisations of liberalism’s nature to confirm its

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MARK EVANS liberalism may not fall foul of this deficiency and that, hence, feminist politics may not need to abandon paradigmatic liberal ideas. Jonathan Seglow’s chapter provides an account of one of the newer additions to liberalism’s reflections upon justice, which is implicit in Will Kymlicka’s notion of ‘ethnocultural’ justice: the idea that ‘recognition’ of one’s identity as well as ‘redistribution’ of resources is part of what justice requires. Having raised the question of ‘justice’, the follow­ ing two chapters take us back to its distributive aspect. Their analyses are crucially informed by Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, but they draw notice­ ably divergent conclusions over its import. Rex Martin agrees that it has been absolutely pivotal in liberalism’s debates about justice. He offers a rigorous account of how it is intended to work and then seeks to demonstrate that it is critically indeterminate in specifying particular institutional and policy recommendations. To the extent that it still takes the difference principle as one of its benchmarks, this conclusion indicates that liberal discourse about justice may have reached a theore­ tical logjam through which it is urgent for liberals to think. Rodney Peffer, on the other hand, is happy to argue that Rawlsian theory - with only a few mod­ ifications - can lead us in a definite political direc­ tion. However, he believes it is one that can justifiably be called Marxist and he sets out to defend the application of this label to his Rawlsian theory. He would stridently disagree with Gray’s claim, noted earlier, that reflections upon market socialism and the like are exercises in irrelevance and fantasy. But the striking point is the argument that this is where liberal justice may well lead us: reason enough for radicals not to be dismissive of it. The following three chapters turn us to the debate about the justification of liberal values. It is not implausible to suggest that the increased interest in, and perplexity of, the justification debate reflects a wider cultural anxiety about the status of moral and political principles, in a world of such plural values and moral outlooks that scepticism seems to be the irresistible conclusion even when one would so desperately wish otherwise. Peter Lassman’s chapter confirms that pluralism constitutes the distinctive problem of modern politics. But the problem is one

which, for liberals in particular, is compounded at the heart by controversy over how to understand ‘the fact of pluralism’ in the first place. His suggestion is that the project of liberal justification may best be advanced by the argument Judith Shklar puts for­ ward for an apparently modest ‘liberalism of fear’. In ‘Pragmatist Liberalism and the Evasion of Politics’, I evaluate Richard Rorty’s rather more laid-back and sanguine approach to the project, which is prepared to dispense with philosophical argument in support of liberal principles altogether. I argue that the ‘Rortyean view’ can and should be elaborated more fully than Rorty himself musters, to grasp just what consequences his notion of ‘contingency’ might have for liberal theory and politics. Bruce Haddock con­ tends, however, that the Enlightenment-inspired aspiration of achieving a universal morality justified by reason, challenged in the previous two chapters, can be kept alive. He proposes that a neo-Kantian practical reason can come into play whenever people are faced with moral dilemmas. It is upon this basis that we may be able to construct a case at least for some of liberalism’s fundamental principles. The perturbing uncertainties of ‘contingency’ in morals - principles ungrounded by reason - can be avoided. Pluralism, of course, poses practical problems of political organisation as well as theoretical ones of philosophical justification. For Richard Bellamy, liberal theory and practice as it stands is not well suited to resolve them. He forwards a robust case for a more participatory form of governance that draws upon the venerable republican political tradition. In light of this proposed revival of ‘republicanism’, David Rasmussen comments upon the recent debate between John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, which can be seen as an exploration of the possible accom­ modation by Rawlsian liberalism of republican po­ litical insights. As described earlier, many feminists have shared with postmodernists a pluralistic, ‘difference-inspired’ critique of the Enlightenment and hence the forms of moral and political thinking informed by it, of which liberalism is a paradigm. To combat some of the more drastic conclusions drawn from this, Kate Soper argues against a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment tradition. She shows that it was a good deal more sensitive to feminist causes

12

I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I B E R A L I S M lighting some issues fairly new to liberal research but which may become established preoccupations. In another example of new seams for liberals to mine, Richard Sakwa shows how strikingly varied liberal discourse has become in post-communist states, as the doctrine attempts to define and orient itself in a social and political context deeply unfamiliar to those which provide the backdrop of much liberal thought to date. Brian Baxter takes up the charge that liberalism is ill-equipped to face the challenges of ecologism and environmental politics. He con­ tends that ‘ecocentric’ theories are indeed likely to be inimical to liberal concepts and politics, but argues that these are not in fact desirable as they stand. He then presents a ‘personcentric’ argument which shows how liberalism may be reconciled to ecologist concerns. Finally, in the last chapter I address a question that many liberals once had no qualms in tackling but which the ‘Rawlsian ten­ dency’ has tried to push out of liberalism’s concerns: the articulation of personal ideals of how it is good to live, with a view to sanctioning their promotion by a liberal state under certain conditions. I note that this ‘perfectionist’ liberalism has been rehabilitated in Rawls’s wake, but it remains peculiarly reluctant to articulate any particular ideal of the good, an abstinence which I claim is neither necessary nor always desirable for liberals. Accordingly, I begin to sketch some of what I call ‘candidate conceptions of the good’ in an effort to reconnect liberal politics and the classical practice of ethical reflection on the nature of the good life. Amid all this it is difficult, I think, to spot too much ‘irrelevance’ and ‘triviality’ in the subjects covered, as we might be led to expect given Gray’s critique. They engage with real issues concerning the defence and promotion of the kind of politics that, after all, most people in the West - and, increasingly, beyond - wish to support. The argument that this Companion wishes to promote is that political theory is a vital component of the political project to defend or contest the liberal order. This claim is based upon the idea that the problems faced by the liberal order are sufficiently complex and perplexing to demand serious, rigorous philosophical reflection. That is what contemporary liberal political theory attempts to deliver.

than many contemporary postmodernists in particu­ lar allow. To persist with an ‘anti-Enlightenment’ theme in championing such causes today may there­ fore be to do violence to what is valuably progressive in that tradition. This is not to deny that cultural diversity, among other considerations, should rightly prompt liberals into a re-evaluation of some of their concepts. Diana Tietjens Meyers’s chapter is pre­ sented as an example of how this critical self-analysis may proceed. She provides a powerful, innovative argument for the need to rethink many standard conceptions of autonomy. She deals with exactly the kind of question upon which so many liberals stum­ ble: how to conceptualise ‘autonomy’ in light of the fact that women in some cultures appear autono­ mously to affirm the practice of female circumcision, which western liberals usually cannot imagine being supported at all by anybody in a genuinely autono­ mous way. Drawing upon material rarely utilised in liberal debate, this chapter indicates some of the new directions to be taken and sources to be pursued in liberal research. In the post-Cold War world, many traditional understandings of politics are becoming redundant as power increasingly slips from nation-states to regional and global sites. As an example of how political theory must innovate conceptually to keep pace, Robert Bideleux substantially adapts the liberal conception of civil association to characterise the institutional form being taken by the European Union, still very much in the process of evolution. Provocatively, he argues that in the context of European politics we must recognise that liberalism is decisively shedding its connections with democ­ racy. Howard Williams’s chapter switches our atten­ tion to the question of the global order and the normative goal of securing principles by which states may live together in peace. He assesses the utility of Kant’s thinking in this regard as a classical and quintessentially liberal starting-point from which contemporary reflections may proceed. A flavour of the latter is provided in Peter Sutch’s contribu­ tion, which goes on to articulate the concept of ‘developmental communitarianism’ as the justifica­ tory strategy that a liberal ‘law of peoples’ (to borrow Rawls’s phrase) may usefully adopt. The Companion ends with three chapters high­

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MARK EVANS To end this introductory chapter and to supplement the research agenda already mapped out above, I propose a further demonstration of the potential for relevant, serious-minded analysis in liberal political theory. This is designed to test its capacity for critical self-reflection and to put on its own menu the most fundamental challenges that liberal practice could actually face. It will outline yet more avenues for liberal theory to take, dispelling even more vigor­ ously the illusion that it is complacently trivial.

proceed too far without indulging in the speculative realm of crystal ball-gazing. (It would also obviously be perverse to persevere with contemporary liberal­ ism, as many chapters in this book argue we might, if one believed it to be so pitifully doomed.) But forcing liberals to analyse such negative arguments could strengthen their thinking and convictions, perturbing to the liberal imagination though they may be. Here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is particularly apposite to ponder the permanence of the liberal achievement. Confidence in liberal­ ism’s ability to adapt in the face of modernity’s problems, or at least to be able to cope with them better than any possible alternative, doubtless re­ flects the widespread belief (epitomised in Fukuya­ ma’s work) that it represents the pinnacle of a successful struggle by humanity to work out the most commodious form of political system. But I urge that contemporary liberal theory should not begin with this belief as an automatic presumption. Instead, it should commit itself at most to a continuous testing of such a proposition; it can never be taken for granted, for circumstances are too fluid to have blind faith in the ‘historical vindication’ of liberalism. So let us consider the argument that, though it may have beaten off many rivals to date, liberalism remains fundamentally flawed. There is no guaran­ tee, it says, that liberalism’s intellectual apparatus will be able to help us cope with all of the practical problems that the liberal political order may face. And those problems could threaten to overwhelm liberal practice. Note that this scenario can be imagined without believing that there is an alter­ native doctrine that, all things considered, will cope any better with liberalism’s predicament. For who can say whether the victor in the ‘battle of the ideologies’ will not still be tom apart as its panoply of moral ideals and political prescriptions founder in this deeply suboptimal social world of contradictions, complexities and antagonisms? To substantiate this idea, we can reflect upon how a historical awareness should jolt us out of any sanguine complacency concerning the fruits we might now think we can forever harvest from liberal society. A hundred years ago, the optimistic faith in the direction of rational human development had yet

Prospects for Liberalism and the Liberal Order Many of the contributions to this volume suggest or imply that, though the challenges it faces may indeed be perplexing, it is conceivable that liberalism has the resources to address them not only theoretically but also practically. That is to say, the challenges can be understood from within a recognisably liberal conceptual framework and the institutions and prac­ tices of a liberal social and political order need not have to undergo a revolutionary transformation for them to be tackled adequately. On this view some may argue that, though liberalism may not have all the answers to every problem or even the best answer in certain instances, it informs what is, on balance, the best standpoint from which to engage with politics in the modern world. It is hoped that this Companion will help readers to draw their own conclusions about the validity of this claim, ranging as it does across many of the issues by which liberalism should be judged. However, the test or thought-experiment I wish to sketch hypothesises deep internal tensions within the liberal ‘settlement’, which might plausibly threaten to destroy the very coherence of liberalism’s commitments. My proposal is that there is no reason why liberals themselves cannot describe such scenarios, which are not ne­ cessarily exercises in fantasy but which point to real potentialities. If they can face up to such possibilities and think hard about how to address them, then it is difficult to think of anything more serious for them to tackle. I hasten to note that I emphatically do not support the gloomily anti-Panglossian view that I shall construct to show how this test might be conducted, not least because no such exercise could

14

I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I B E R A L I S M be blithely ignorant of the problems these political currents cause within actually-existing liberal democracies (as manifest, for example, in the per­ sistence of racism and other forms of violent ‘hate politics’). But let us for the sake of argument deny that they constitute - or are likely in the foreseeable future to constitute - genuine systemic threats to the latter.33 They alone do not appear to have the strength to destroy liberal democracy as did fascism in many European states did during the inter-war years. A more relevant and hence perplexing theoretical challenge is this. Even if we grant the argument that liberalism does not now seem to have seriously credible, morally and practically superior rivals, it is possible that liberal commitments and practices may be tom apart from within. There are two ways in which this might happen:

to be darkened by the slaughter of the Somme, the bureaucratically managed genocide of Stalin’s purges and the Nazis’ Final Solution, and the spectre of global nuclear destruction. No such underestimation of the human capacity for evil is now likely to be accepted without grave reservation. Moreover, global capitalism is producing such profound institu­ tional and cultural changes at an ever-accelerating rate that it is increasingly difficult to think of many of the norms, artefacts and ‘certainties’ of our civi­ lisation as settled. Change is too dizzying, too dis­ orientating for us to feel ‘at home’ for long in any one manifestation of modernity; as Marx and Engels so presciently put it, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’32 Given all this, with what reason, exactly, could we hold firm to the beliefs that, whatever happens, liberalism’s ideals will be capable of remaining our moral inspiration? What follows is a selection of perhaps numerous ways in which ‘anti-liberal’ pos­ sibilities might be postulated. Where once the liberals’ ‘bogeymen’ were primar­ ily fascists and communists of various hues (and they may still threaten them in places, of course), it is nowadays more often the figures of the authoritarian nationalist and the religious fundamentalist who are seen as either the main threats to established liberal orders or as the actually-existing obstacles to the spread of liberalism in, say, post-communist societies. The basic themes of their anti-liberalism, however, have largely remained the same as their predecessors in liberalism’s gallery of rogues: the denial of basic liberties as the prime political concern, the prepa­ redness to subordinate individual interests to (illu­ sory) ‘common goods’, an overt discrimination between groups of people in a shameless abandon­ ment of equal respect, and a willingness to prefer coercion over persuasion in pursuit of such repressive political ends. It is obviously right to confront the challenges that movements such as nationalism and religious fundamentalism pose to the liberal order. A recog­ nition that liberalism may not be appropriate in all four comers of the world should not necessarily mean that we should automatically forego the mak­ ing of the case for liberalism in at least some parts of the globe where anti-liberal nationalisms and fun­ damentalisms currently hold sway. Nor should we

1. A t the level of ideals, some of its moral goals may be realisable only at the expense of some of its others. All of the goals may be thought to be valuable and we might have hoped that the victor in the battle of the ideologies might have been able to preserve them together. But our destiny is not so rosy; we cannot but endure significant moral loss because of the practical uncombinability of liberalism’s aims. Whatever doctrine emerges from the choices we will ultimately have to make may not deserve the name of ‘liberal’. 2. A t the level of practice, the kind of society that liberal doctrine supports ends up inadvertently subverting at least some of its aspirations. There is no way to fit the latter with the socio-economic order that the doctrine sup­ ports. Again, in crude terms, something will have to give way and what results may not warrant the liberal label at all. To illustrate just a few of the ways we might render vivid this conclusion in our thought-experiment, we can return to our division of liberal concerns into (1) a moral theory; (2) an account of the ideal political regime; (3) an account of the ideal social culture. In so doing, we can see how on this account some of the faults of which, it was argued above, liberalism’s

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MARK EVANS principles are incorrectly convicted may yet emerge as unintended consequences of its practice.

moralities of individual freedom and social justice may not be sustainable in the kind of world in which we find ourselves. Perhaps liberalism’s notions of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual projects’ can be preserved in the face of justice so conceived only if we in the rich nations undergo a radical reconceptualisation of our pre­ ferred or ideal individual modes of good living. If liberals become more prepared to lead lives that are much less exorbitant in their use of resources, they may be more capable of reconciling themselves to justice. I raise this point in the final chapter to indicate a possible twist in my argument about perfectionist liberalism’s theorisation of the good life. There I link it to the second concern that can be raised under the present heading: what needs to be done to preserve the global natural environ­ ment. It may be the case that Brian Baxter’s inge­ nious melding of liberal and ecological concerns will ultimately not demand enough of individuals (in fundamentally changing the way they live and the resources they use to do so) to do what is necessary to stave off the destruction of the precarious ecological balance between humanity and the earth. The con­ sequences of this catastrophe (even from the most ‘personcentric’ point of view) would be much more difficult to ignore in the way that many in the rich world are presently capable of physically and psy­ chologically isolating themselves from the demands of distributive justice.35

Challenges to the Morality of Liberalism Although I have already indicated that liberalism is by no means incompatible with the robust concep­ tions of community favoured by ‘communitarians’ (loosely defined), its central moral focus remains the individual and some notion of the interests of in­ dividuality. And the more pluralistic one’s concep­ tion of human nature, the more individualistic (that is, less communitarian) that notion may turn out to be. It could be argued (as I will suggest below) that modem capitalist society further ‘individualises’ its subjects by undermining the culture and indeed the physical constitution of traditional communities while creating no new ‘community’ in their places. Liberalism, it might then be contended, tends to reinforce such developments by favouring the inter­ ests of individual freedom over human collectives. Here, 1 shall mention just two moral issues that could place this doctrine - and its reinforcement of ‘in­ dividualisation’ - under intolerable strain. The first is the ongoing scandal of international distributive injustice: the billions who live in the most desperate, degrading poverty, a tragedy that seems to render them all the more prone to the other terrible catastrophes brought by war, weather and disease. We need not believe that redistribution of wealth from the rich nations alone would be enough to solve these problems altogether to recognise that they could be substantially alleviated if such redis­ tribution were to take place. But to the extent that liberalism seeks not to swallow up all individual projects and concerns is the extent to which it may not be sufficiently responsive.34 It may be that, to meet even fairly minimal demands of justice (such as satisfying basic needs), the richer nations would have to transfer such enormous amounts of resources that many of the kinds of lifestyle that liberalism is valued for accommodating would not be sustainable. Maybe justice would then require far more than the voluntary acts of charity, necessitating a coercive limitation upon people’s freedoms to live such com­ paratively expensive lives. Here, then, is the possi­ bility that liberalism’s accommodation between the

Challenges to the Political Principles and Institutions of Liberal Democracy It is as close as one gets to received wisdom in political science that the ‘formal’ constitutional paraphernalia of modern liberal democracy do not house the only, or even the main, sites of power. These are located instead in state and party bureau­ cracies, organised interest groups and other socio­ economic elites. Socialists in particular have always attacked liberalism for a blindness with regard to the power that capitalists wield over the liberal-demo­ cratic state. In contemporary politics, this charge has taken on a heightened perspicacity with the phe­ nomenon of ‘globalisation’. Alongside the develop­ ment of regional and genuinely global institutions,

16

I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I B E R A L I S M democracy). Democratic institutions thus begin to wither. Further, as social unrest intensifies (through industrial militancy and/or extra-systemic political protest and/or increases in crime rates due to the widening gaps between rich and poor, and the destruction of meaningful economic and social op­ portunities for the latter), the state becomes more authoritarian, undermining civil liberties as it at­ tempts to impose civil order (or at least contain the effects of disorder).37 In light of this, my suggestion is that in western states it is likely that the biggest threat to liberal democracy does not come from liberal theory’s tradi­ tional nemeses of ‘fascism’ or ‘religious fundament­ alism’. It lies instead in the drift towards an authoritarian form of economic libertarianism, as the competitive pressures of globalising capitalism increasingly subordinate politics to the satisfaction of its own exacting needs. (It might be suggested that certain South-East Asian capitalist states provide the none-too-enticing models for this.) As David Held points out, the New Right’s rise from the mid-1970s was a direct response to precisely the kinds of intractable pressures from which liberalism in its Keynesian welfare-state form suffered.38 It retrieved, as observed above, an earlier form of classical liberal­ ism as its inspiration, cutting away at least part of its later connections to democracy and certainly its commitments to social justice. The paradox of this, of course, was that it sanctioned a politics that also threatened the commitments even to its more mini­ mal conceptions of equal freedom, as the inequities of power in capitalism were exacerbated by economic ‘deregulation’ and the power of the state was strengthened vis-a-vis the basic civil liberties of in­ dividuals. It is, then, hard to suggest that even classical liberalism was being fully realised in this situation. The idea of ‘legitimation crisis’ prompts the thought that this drift to authoritarian economic libertarianism may not be entirely led ‘from the top’, either. If citizens become frustrated at the perceived failings of the liberal-democratic system and, in particular, disturbed by its inability to control rising crime rates and the other objects of the ‘moral panics’ that periodically seize such societies, they themselves may be tempted to support altogether

there is a growing realisation that the nation-state’s increasing dependence upon the support of capital is undermining its very existence as a meaningful political entity in so far as that capital is acquiring an increasingly multinational character. Now we could agree that a liberalism which is wholly ignorant of these facts, stubbornly clinging to the obvious fiction that real power rests solely with the ‘superficial’ structures of the nation-state, should not be entertained at all seriously. But the mistake which liberalism’s critics may continue to make is to believe that liberals necessarily peddle such naivety. In the same way that the defence of liberal politics need not be based upon the kind of philosophical beliefs that the communitarians rightly argue to be discreditable, so it need imply no ignorance of the realities of power and the limitations imposed upon its favoured institutions. Max Weber’s ‘competitive elitism’ offers one, albeit noticeably unenthusiastic, defence of liberal-democratic politics while conced­ ing many such limitations.36 However, it is always possible that these limita­ tions will profoundly undercut the possibility of liberal politics. The economic and institutional con­ straints of the contemporary capitalist world may place too much strain upon it to keep its aspirations alive. Take, for example, its commitments to uphold an extensive range of civil liberties and to promote social justice for its citizens. We could envisage something like a ‘legitimation crisis’ crippling its ability to meet them. Sketching this thesis briefly: the capitalist state is ever more beholden to the need to attract rather than repel multinational capital which can roam the world in search of the most profitable sites to invest. Forced into ever more exclusively ‘business-friendly’ policies and progres­ sively sapped by capitalism’s economic cycles of ‘boom and bust’, the state finds itself increasingly unable to fund its other commitments adequately, primarily those most directly demanded by citizens in the form of public services and welfare provisions. The citizens thus become disenchanted and embit­ tered. As part of its increasingly frantic attempts to control expenditure by reducing the number of in­ stitutions with the authority to spend at their own discretion, the state is forced to centralise political control (even where it promises the extension of

17

MARK EVANS what is thought to be the traditional liberal idea of it as a (political) capacity to influence others. They contend that power is the effect of all manner of social practices and relationships, ‘disciplining’ or even constituting subjects in society. As critics of capitalist society, they attack the forms of subjectiv­ ity produced by the social practices that liberalism upholds.40 Others, perhaps not always as prepared to give off the scent of cultural elitism that attaches to some versions of the previous argument, nevertheless urge that there is something about the way in which social space and time is nowadays constructed that turns individuals into withdrawn, privatised selves. Such people are increasingly unwilling and unable to reap those fruits of genuinely communal relationships that once were so central to ideas of the good life. Fukuyama himself resurrects the image of the Nietzschean ‘last man’ as the ominously possible paradigmatic character of modern liberal capitalist society, content with mediocrity now that funda­ mental social struggles for improvement are over.41 But this development need not be due simply to a lack of character and lazy contentment with every­ day life in capitalist consumer society. Such are the pressures of this life that the hedonistic retreat into the private realm becomes a perfectly understandable and, perhaps for some, existentially necessary reac­ tion. As republican thinkers remind us, the privatisa­ tion of the self may have direct political conse­ quences too. As Tocqueville influentially noted, democracy depends upon a culture of participation. If individuals are not prepared in significant numbers to engage in public political life at least to some degree, then the practices of liberal democracy will wither, leaving a vacuum to be filled, if only by default, by non-democratic institutions. In modern times, the phenomenon of power slipping to une­ lected bureaucratic ‘quangos’ may well be testimony to this (as well as to the anti-democratic tendencies cited in the previous section).42 More widely, such privatisation contributes to an increasing unwillingness to embrace social obliga­ tions, narrowing if not individualising altogether our sense of to whom our responsibilities lie.43 As men­ tioned above in indicating how liberalism has re­

more illiberal politics in the name of law and order. This fear, whose origins can be traced as far back as Plato’s critique of democracy in The Republic, finds its most disturbing expression in the spectre of the Weimar Republic’s fall and the willingness among many German citizens to accept (at least in its early stages) the Nazi dictatorship. The ultimate crisis of progressive politics on this view, though, may lie in an inability plausibly to recommend any of the radical alternatives to capita alism that might be necessary to secure and build upon the values that the present critique suggests liberal democracy might hope in vain to uphold in its midst. Socialism, for example, may just not be thought to be practicable. If some form of capitalism is regarded as unavoidable, and liberalism remains the progressive’s best ‘match’ for it, then progress^ vism has nowhere else to turn - and yet even a shrunken neoclassical liberalism may not be able to withstand the intensification of capitalist practices. The relationship of liberal-democratic politics to the exigencies of capitalism will, I suspect, become one of liberal theory’s most urgent concerns in the years ahead. Challenges to the Culture of Liberal-Democratic Individuality The economic realities of capitalism impact as much upon culture as they do upon political institutions. The third category suggests, then, that liberalism’s support for capitalism - which, as indicated in the previous section may be far from unalloyed enthu­ siasm even though there is no more preferable alternative - undermines its cultural ideals. For example, there are those who think that capitalist commodification tends to turn the project of ‘individual conceptions of the good’ into shallow simulacra of flourishing individuality, reducing it to mere hedonism and the shaping of one’s identity purely with respect to the fashions that are just insidious ways of manipulating the tastes of indivi­ duals as consumers.39 If it is not almost a new kind of slavery, these critics would certainly regard it as a travesty of liberalism’s ideal of free human develop­ ment. Many who argue in these general terms sup­ port a conception of power that ranges well beyond

18

I S S U E S A N D T R E N D S IN C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I B E R A L I S M case. In so doing, I think this can orient liberal thinking towards a maximisation of its own depth, strength and self-confidence. In setting an agenda for contemporary liberal research, this Companion is a contribution towards that orientation. Even those liberals who already feel confident enough to accept a Fukuyama-style verdict on liberalism’s moral superiority should not, then, regard this book as a final, definitive pronouncement of that victory. Liberal political theory does not come to an end even if one thinks that ‘history’ in Fukuyama’s sense has. There are always vexing issues to be addressed, some of which may move to the fore and supplant some of those emphasised here. And we must constantly remain alert to the possi­ bility that liberalism does not constitute the end of our ideational and institutional development. Conversely, however, awareness of liberalism’s problems - both actual and potential - need not commit one to the belief that continued support for liberalism necessarily represents some failure of ima­ gination by today’s political thinkers. If any of the anti-liberal possibilities described above do threaten us, it may take great effort to sustain liberal ideas and practices - and this is no small, meek undertaking. For liberalism’s morality and politics has inspired and sustained much hope through even the darkest periods of recent human history. Critical but con­ structive engagement with its problems is vital to the preservation of its legacy - and that is the project this book aims to keep alive.

sponded to the communitarian critique, there has been a renewed interest in ideas of ‘civic liberalism’ which are designed to address such fears. But there may be forces at work that would entirely undermine the stability of any such ideal in practice. Within civil society, therefore, an egoistic mentality is fos­ tered that causes the decline of many social institu­ tions and practices which formerly encouraged co­ operation and mutual support. Given the obvious unwillingness of many major liberal-democratic po­ litical parties to advocate an increased acceptance by the state of this social burden, this trend means that more and more social obligations go unfulfilled.

Conclusion It is not perverse to end this introduction to a further twenty-one chapters on liberalism with such dire anti-liberal possibilities. As I have insisted, painting such dystopian pictures does not commit one to affirming them. But by taking full measure of the problems it may face, I believe that liberalism can become more emboldened to analyse its own con­ dition honestly, and articulate, defend and refine itself as robustly as possible. As much as anything, this exposes the limitations of Gray’s critique: unless we are blithely indifferent to the fate of liberal civilisation it is surely strange to think of these questions as somehow divorced from our real-life political concerns. Taking them as seriously as they are stated in the hypotheses above may be overly melodramatic - but it is up to liberalism to argue that

Notes 1. Note that many wish to distinguish ‘political theory’ and ‘political philosophy’ and would doubtless stress that it is the fate specifically of the latter which such claims announce. For my purposes in this discussion, nothing significant hangs upon the distinction, which is far from universally recognised. 2. P. Laslett, ‘Introduction’, in Laslett (ed.) (1956), pp. vii, xiii. Cf. Berlin (1969), pp. 118-19. 3. Gray (1995a), p. 1. 4. Ibid., p. 16. 5. Ibid., p. 3. 6. Ibid., p. 2. 7. Gray (1995a), p. 17. 8. See Bertram (1997) for a discussion of the problems of

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

19

theoretical complexity and public comprehension in contemporary political theory. Gray (1995a), pp. 3-4, 11-13. See Ethics, 102 (April 1992). Gray (1995a), p. 4. See Fukuyama (1989), (1992). For a comprehensive discussion of how to characterise liberalism illuminatingly and substantively while at the same time doing justice to its diversity, see Freeden (1996), parts I and II. By ‘general themes’ and ‘tendencies’ I refer to features which occur in some form to a greater or lesser extent in most versions of liberalism; I intend nothing more specific than that.

MARK EVANS 29. For an example, see Dagger (1997). 30. See Rawls (1996) and, for commentary on this type of liberalism, Evans (1999). 31. Young (1990). 32. Quoted in Kamenka (ed.) (1983), p. 207. 33. Having warned against complacency, I don’t wish this point to be taken as ignorance of the activities of neoNazi movements and suchlike in contemporary wes­ tern democracies. Certainly, liberals should steadfastly resist them in theory and practice, for this is what will help to resist any future slide into fascist barbarism. I maintain that the latter is indeed unlikely, but I am primarily concerned here to divert attention to other possible anti-liberal trends. 34. Nagel phrases this problem in terms of balancing the impartial demands of morality with the partial con­ cerns of particular relationships and projects; see Nagel (1991). 35. See Singer (1993) for a cautiously optimistic assess­ ment about our ability to change our lives to meet such moral and ecological challenges. 36. See Held (1996), pp. 157-77 for a discussion of Weber’s political views. 37. For a summary o f ‘legitimation crisis’ theory, see ibid., pp. 240-53. 38. Ibid., pp. 253-63. 39. Classic statements of this kulturkritik, which blames the processes that liberal society has historically en­ couraged, are found in Marcuse (1964) and ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Adorno and Horkheimer (1986), pp. 120-67. 40. See Hindess (1996) for a discussion of the concept of ‘power’ in liberal political theory. I suggest in Chapter 22 that a Foucauldian rethinking of ‘power’ may benefit the concept of a perfectionist liberalism. 41. Fukuyama (1992), part V. 42. For illuminating discussion of Tocqueville in this regard, see Macedo (1989). 43. See Singer (1993), chapter 1 and passim, for discussion of this claim.

15. Rorty (1998), p. 170. 16. See Freeden (1996), chapter 7. 17. For examples of this type of liberalism, see ibid., chapter 5 and pp. 456-80. 18. A ‘character-ideal’ specifies certain dispositions, ap­ titudes and tastes which constitute what is deemed to be the ideal form that a person’s character could take. Anti-perfectionist liberals may be thought to eschew such notions, but in fact they tend not to: Rawls, for example, has no qualms over talking about the ideal characteristics of citizens. However, he attempts to avoid idealising forms of character outside of the political realm. Perfectionist liberals, as is evident in Chapter 22 of this book, do not accept this restriction. 19. See Cohen (1989). 20. See Rawls (1972), especially part one. 21. Nozick (1974). 22. See Hayek (1993). 23. A. Sen, ‘Equality of What?’, in Sen (1982), pp. 353— 73. Representative pivotal works in this debate in­ clude Dworkin (1981a) and (1981b), Cohen (1989) and Ameson (1989). 24. Other representative contractarian works include Scanlon (1986) and, for a more libertarian position, Gauthier (1986). 25. Sandel (1982). 26. See Walzer (1986) and, for a comprehensive discus­ sion of the liberal-communitarian debate, Mulhall and Swift (1996). 27. As Charles Taylor has argued, ‘the liberal-communi­ tarian debate’ was often presented in a manner which conflated the distinguishable questions of ‘ontology’ (such as those on the nature of the self and its relationship to society), which were centrally relevant to the justification debate, and ‘advocacy’, which specifically contested the content of political morality. See his ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, in Taylor (1995), pp. 181-203. 28. See, for example, MacIntyre (1985).

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2

TWENTI ETH- CENTURY LIBERAL T H O U G H T : D E V E L O P M E N T OR TRANSFORMATION? Michael Freeden

In this chapter I seek to investigate how liberalism was portrayed throughout the twentieth century in dedicated liberal literature, that is works primarily devoted to an exposition of the basic tenets of liberalism. On the surface many, though not all, of these works present themselves as ‘second-order’ overviews of liberal theory and ideology. Sometimes, as with the Rawlsian family of arguments, they intend both to offer a novel interpretation of liberal principles and, in parallel, to reflect given cultural understandings unconsciously and unintentionally. On the whole, though, writers about liberalism have tended to elucidate a tradition rather than depart from it. But this raises a fundamental methodological problem: when does a ‘secondary’ text become a ‘primary’ one? The response to that is: when we interpret it as itself an act of interpretation; and when we acknowledge that the role of the political theorist incorporates not only prescription and its investigation but also interpretation and its investigation. The analysts, chroniclers and popularisers of liberalism become pivotal to our understanding when we query its status as a transcendent moral position and explore it instead as a diverse and flexible set of readings concerning the epistemology of the political. Whatever else liberalism is, it is a cultural artefact, consciously intended to be adopted by large social groups. But rather than explore the Ideengeschichte of

liberalism in time-honoured conventional manner on a unidimensional sequence, we need to draw conclusions from the variable presentation of histor­ ical liberal narratives, or from their juxtaposition with non-narrative justifications of liberalism. The history of liberalism in the last century, and indeed in previous centuries, is not merely the reflection of its development, or evolution, or change, or perchance regression. It is not a single story to be told. We now recognise that all current theories are located in time as well as in space. But when we say that, we are not engaging in the simplistic assertion that ‘context counts’. Contexts are multi-temporal and multi-spa­ tial even with respect to one family of beliefs such as liberalism, and they generate both deliberate and unintentional meta-assumptions quite irrespective of whether liberalism itself contains views on universalism or relativism or, as we have now come to appreciate, multiculturalism. Moreover, individual liberals, and conventional social norms concerning what liberalism is, exercise choice over what con­ stitutes a context and over which contexts to select among the many contexts - existing or yet to be discovered or invented - in which liberalism may be located. A context, like a historical narrative, is not a reflection of events out there. It is an act of private or public imagination superimposed upon a set of per­ ceived, if fragmented, facts. This chapter will at­ tempt to identify more precisely not why and when

21

MICHAEL FREEDEN intellectual history. Behind it stands a broader agen­ da, whose task it is to provide an analysis of a family of political theories and ideologies. To do so we ought to come to terms with liberalism as a complex and elusive tradition of thinking about politics, and we may gain from locating the analysis on offer here squarely among the activities in which political theorists engage.

liberalism changes in terms of objective contexts, but what it is that has changed in the imaginative presentation of liberalism, and how different emphases on various aspects of liberalism reflect and transform the political understandings of some of its more salient, or representative, purveyors. Far too often, recent scholars of liberalism have confidently and stipulatively approached it as if that theory or ideology represents a clear and unitary moral position encompassing knowable and objec­ tive, or at least reasonable, standards of justice and human rights: a homogeneous model which could then be incisively contrasted with alternative ‘mono­ lithic’ theories such as communitarianism. This is not the issue under discussion here; nor is it the most challenging and rewarding question when examining liberalism. Rather, liberalism is that semantic field in which the political understandings of people who regard themselves as liberals, or whom others regard as liberals, may be investigated. It is a plastic, chan­ ging thing, shaped and reshaped by the thoughtpractices of individuals and groups, and though it needs to have a roughly identifiable pattern for us to call it consistently by the same name, ‘liberalism’, it also presents myriad variations which reflect the questions posed, and positions adopted, by various liberals. In the space available, some samples will be provided of the conceptualisations of liberalism dur­ ing this century, through examining a number of books on liberalism which were written as central textbooks, introductions, surveys, statements, or cri­ tiques. The assumption adhered to is that these books mirrored, moulded and disseminated broad understandings of what liberalism was, as well as carrying some unintentional baggage which has been left for us to unpack. Ultimately, in order for liberal­ ism to be comprehended we must observe it ‘at thought’ by exploring the mind-sets of some of its typical agents. The result, one would hope, would be an enriched and rather more subtle view than can be provided by attempting to construct a philosophi­ cally ‘ideal’ or ‘best-practice’ liberal moral theory. Those philosophical approaches necessarily lose in breadth and political applicability what they gain in internal cohesion and ethical persuasiveness. Nor is this chapter about ‘mere’ history, nor even ‘mere’

Liberal Movement: Evolution and Energy The twentieth century has witnessed three main modes of writing about liberalism: as a development of political thought over time; as a political mani­ festo against extremism, authoritarianism or conser­ vative complacency; and as a philosophical view of the rational and moral relationship between the individually unique and the socially common. In intricate and concrete argumentation, these modes often overlap. When in 1911 L. T. Hobhouse wrote his famous volume entitled Liberalism, he was writing a tract for the times, forged out of the successful battles fought by the new liberals, but it was a tract with a moral purpose: that of consolidating the reforms liberalism had undertaken from within. He did so by emphasising above all one aspect of liberal­ ism, offering it as an evolutionary body of thought which not only advocated progress as a social ideal, but was itself controlled by that same evolutionary law. This was not a particular liberal view of history, such as the much-mooted Whig interpretation of history, but rather a particular historical view of liberalism, which regarded it as a set of beliefs itself, crucially, subject to historical processes. In other words, one defining feature of liberalism, in sharp contrast to current philosophical liberalism, was that its theorists held to a specific interpretation of time as a central conceptual component of liberal ideol­ ogy. Time was not strictly sequential in its trajectory of human and social improvement, nor totally openended in accompanying human and social matura­ tion, but it nevertheless dictated that liberalism itself had to undergo steady transformation. In the past liberalism had experienced a process of growth which was now reaching its apotheosis by aligning itself with the development of a newly emerging social rationality, embodied in an integrated and organic

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TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIBERAL THOUGH T the modern world’.7 Movement in the first sense, as ‘an effective historical force’, is sustained by move­ ment in this second animated, living sense. Liberal­ ism is the release of dynamic biological and spiritual energy, a view reiterated by Guido de Ruggiero in his seminal The History of European Liberalism, when he identified liberalism as concerned with the free play of individual forces which have ‘vital importance and energising power’.8 The world is naturally active and vigorous and liberalism is above all an instrument for freeing this flowing human essence. This is no mere ‘exercise concept’ in Charles Taylor’s phrase,9 but the setting free of organic, non-static, life which will otherwise be suppressed. Unsurprisingly, well-being is for Hobhouse as important as liberty. Moreover, the identification of processes as natural indicates the typical ideological device of insulating funda­ mental ontological claims from the sphere of debate and contention. In adhering to that thought-practice liberalism is no different from other ideological families. Furthermore, although an understanding of twentieth-century liberalism should not be deter­ mined merely through the yardstick of some of its later manifestations, the contrast with Rawls here is striking. For if liberalism is ‘all-penetrating’, it pro­ vides both the common element enabling the ex­ pression of all human cooperative activity, a function allocated by Rawls to narrow political liberalism, and the comprehensive liberalism which Rawls firmly detaches from the political.

society and regulated by a benevolent and emphatically non-neutral agency - the state. Like Mill, and many previous liberals, Hobhouse’s story about liberalism begins as a historical-anthro­ pological narrative. It is one of social harmony and community undermined by later authoritarian poli­ tical arrangements. Liberalism dawns as a ‘destruc­ tive criticism’, a project of release in order to enable free, and natural, order and progress. Here are some of the recognisable liberal core concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there is a deeper and ulterior ontology of liberalism in opera­ tion. Hobhouse endows the idea of release with a specific complexion: ‘a movement of liberation, a clearance of obstructions . . . for the flow of free, vital, spontaneous activity’.1 The idea o f ‘movement’ is subtly and only half-consciously recruited to un­ derpin this specific understanding of liberalism. First, liberalism is a movement, to be sure: it is an organised body with, in J. A. Hobson’s words, an ‘active mission’2 directed towards the attainment of political objectives. Second, however, liberalism is a carrier of truth, which moves for Hobhouse in ‘an expanding circle of ideas’.3 When in Chapter II Hobhouse lists the types of liberty embraced by liberals, he con­ ceives them as spatial, embracing parallel activities such as civil, fiscal, economic and social, and located in arenas such as the personal, domestic, local, national and international.4 Similarly, Hobson could assert that ‘liberalism will come more definitely to concern itself with the liberation and utilisation of the faculties and potencies of a nation and a muni­ cipality, as well as with those of individuals and voluntary groups of citizens.’5 The liberty at the core of liberalism is hence conceptualised as undergoing movement both through space and through time, and is aligned with the concept of spreading and contagious progress. Thus it contains seeds of universalism, not in an analytical or intrinsic sense, but a historically and spatially contingent universalism, called forth ‘by the special circumstances of Western Europe’.6 Third, as the initial quotation suggests, movement suggests vital activity. We arrive now at the semantic kernel. Hobhouse instructs us that ‘the Liberal movement . . . is coextensive with life’; ‘Liberalism is an all-penetrating element of the life-structure of

Liberal Emotionalism Hobhouse unequivocally relates liberalism to human emotion on two levels. On the one he observes that the philosophies that have driving force behind them are those that arise . . . out of the practical demands of human feeling. The philosophies that remain ineffectual and academic are those that are formed by abstract reflection without relation to the thirsty souls of human kind.10 Liberalism opens the door by means of the rational method ‘to the appeal of reason, of imagination, of social feeling’.11 It is not only that human beings have emotions and imagination that demand respect

23

MICHAEL FREEDEN relations between rulers and ruled; and is able to turn this experience to the ends of the eleva­ tion of human society.17

in social arrangements, but that expressivism and spontaneity are defining features of life, and hence of the liberalism that enables life. Liberalism contains core rational attributes, but is nonetheless irreducible to the contemplative faculty. Reason and emotion coexist and support each other in a manner ruled out of court by most current manifestations of philoso­ phical liberalism. Hence Hobhouse’s support for forms of nationalism, for

The liberal spirit is possessed of a ‘lofty impartial­ ity’.18 A mid-century American review of liberalism refers to the liberal who ‘likes to preen himself on the triumphs of human intelligence and virtue’, and to the liberal tradition as a ‘call to adventure: the adventure of growing up, becoming autonomous, living spontaneously’ (and note, incidentally, the constructive tension between development, freedom and unreflectiveness).19 In describing liberalism as a mood, Laski identified a ‘flavour of romanticism’ in its temper. It tended to be ‘zealous’ for individual action, ‘subjective and anarchist, to be eager for the change which comes from individual initiative, to be insistent that this initiative contains within itself some necessary seed of social good.’20 Zeal, eagerness, insistence - these features of liberalism are necessa­ rily the attributes of an ideology whose reforming, even revolutionary, ardour is part and parcel of its appeal. For the over-critical Laski, the energising power of liberalism had become exhausted.21 It may be the case that the fervour of liberalism diminished upon attaining many of its initial goals, though the emotional aspects of its beliefs have never quite disappeared.

inasmuch as the true social harmony rests on feeling and makes use of all the natural ties of kinship, of neighbourliness, of congruity of char­ acter and belief, and of language and mode of life, the best, healthiest and most vigorous political unit is that to which men are by their own feelings strongly drawn.12 In addition, if ‘rational’ may be contrasted with ‘emotional’, it may also be contrasted with ‘unreflective’. Hobhouse also drew attention to these latter components of liberalism when he contended that ‘human progress, on whatever side we consider it, is found to be in the main social progress, the work of conscious or unconscious co-operation.’13 Indeed, in his later work Hobhouse was to associate the emergence of the ethical precepts of liberalism with fundamental psychological processes.14 Similar views on the evolution of liberalism were expressed by Laski, for whom it was ‘never direct and rarely conscious.’15 From another perspective, most twentieth-century liberals adopt an emotive idiom when addressing liberalism. For Hobhouse, liberalism aims at ‘a spirit of comradeship’; its vision of justice ‘kindles a pas­ sion that may not flare up into moments of dramatic scintillation, but bums with the enduring glow of the central heat’16 - hardly the predominant phraseology of current Anglo-American philosophy. De Ruggiero put this similarly:

Liberal Coherence and Liberal Diversity Throughout the twentieth century there has been a curious tension between the static and dynamic facets of liberalism. This problematic of liberalism may be redefined by asking whether it is a pliable structure or heavily rule-bound. The editors of The Liberal Tradition, published in 1956, stated that ‘at first sight, the most striking thing about the Liberal tradition is its intellectual incoherence . . . This is the strongest argument in favour of treating Liberal­ ism historically’. Considering liberalism as develop­ ing and changing allows such differences to fall into place.22 Coherence, however, is not the product of a narrative alone, because invented narratives are contingent and selective. It is importantly the pro­ duct either of the formulation of directive rules or the discovery of unintended patterns (a discovery

Liberalism possesses that kind of tact or flair . . . which in its highest manifestations is true poli­ tical sensitiveness, and serves to recognise every­ thing that is human - human strength and human weakness, human reason and human passion, human interest and human morality - in the

24

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIBERAL TH OUGHT liberal concepts of liberty, rationality, progress, in­ dividuality, sociability, a common good, limited and responsible power - in other words, a theory that, according to Hobhouse, undergirds every version of liberalism. De Ruggiero’s notion of history rested on similar conceptions of liberal movement, but his Hegelian historical scheme reshaped the liberal time-space relationship into a different pattern of coherence. His comparative treatment of liberalism permitted the postulation of multiple, interacting liberalisms, but his reading of the logic of liberalism was not, as with Hobhouse, through its diffusion in ever-expand­ ing circles but through convergence and conciliation of opposite liberal currents. Liberalism has to be understood ‘in the diversity of its national forms and the unity of its historical organism’.24 The progress which is liberalism’s lifeblood is not Hobhouse’s non-teleological ‘onward course’. For Hob­ house, a release of energy is not necessarily selfrealisation. For de Ruggiero, ‘a more comprehensive Liberalism would recognise the dialectical ground of the antithesis and would see resistance and move­ ment, conservation and progress, justified and vali­ dated in a higher synthesis which is political life in its concreteness’.25 The end-result for de Ruggiero is thus a single liberalism which can be retrospectively accounted for as the diachronic emergence of a civilising strain in modern societies, the ‘irresistible operation of civil society’.26 Its political persuasive­ ness crowds out rival arguments and secures victory in a multi-ideational world of really-existing compet­ ing viewpoints.

which itself may then be fashioned into a set of directive rules). If liberal history is not accidental or contingent, if liberalism is not a mathematical ag­ gregate of its historical parts, that is because history is understood as constituting the ineluctable design of liberalism. To write about liberalism is for Hobhouse, and no less so for de Ruggiero, always and necessarily to write about its history. They both conceptualise liberalism as the vehicle best encompassing the dynamic of individual and social life. Liberalism is a process and it evokes an activity, the activity of being self-directively spontaneous, inventive and imaginative. Process entails history; history is the intellectual coherence of liberalism, rather than being superimposed to account for it. By contrast, the liberal projects of Rawls or Ronald Dworkin prioritise rules as stasis, equilibrium and consensus over rules of change. The idea of a liberal constitu­ tion, to which they are wedded, is precisely such a device, creating inviolable space, such as a Bill of Rights or the two principles of justice, removed from the ravages of social time. From a slightly different perspective, the liberalism of foundational rules pri­ vileges mechanics, whereas the liberalism of creative expressivism privileges organics, both as growth and as human interrelationship. Hobhouse summed up his position as follows: The heart of liberalism is the understanding that progress is not a matter of mechanical contri­ vance, but of the liberation of living spiritual energy. Good mechanism is that which provides the channels wherein such energy can flow un­ impeded, unobstructed by its own exuberance of output, vivifying the social structure, expanding and ennobling the life of mind.23

The study of the historical forms of European Liberalism has shown us, through all the differ­ ences of the various national minds, a process of mutual assimilation, gradually building up a Eur­ opean Liberal consciousness pervading its parti­ cular manifestations without destroying their differences.27

Current philosophical liberals tend to concentrate on the channels while professing to have no view on the consequences of providing them, other than the tautological attainment of justice which has already been furnished by the very construction of the mechanical channels themselves. Hobhouse’s agen­ da consisted rather in attaching liberalism to an ideaenvironment formed through concepts such as re­ lease, movement, energy and vitality. That is his ‘thin’ theory of the good, which informs the core

Without such reconciliation, the liberal enterprise would be undermined by the damaging potential of its disparate currents. That argument was taken even further by Bene­ detto Croce. In a chapter revealingly titled ‘Liberal­

25

MICHAEL FREEDEN ism as a Concept of Life’ he, too, combined deveb opmentalism with a view of liberalism as coinciding ‘with a complete idea of the world and of reality,’ beginning in the world but going ‘beyond the formal theory of politics’. The very tolerance built into liberalism located it as the framework doctrine with' in which a dialectic competition among ideas could be resolved. It was characterised above all by this immanent process which removed it from the authoritarian fiat of otherworldly, externally iim posed, transcendental beliefs. History as struggle was endemic to liberalism, and struggle encompassed impulse and spontaneity.28 Nevertheless Croce was drawn into joining to that profoundly secular doc' trine an extra^rational, quasbreligious understanding of liberty, attached to human ‘vocations’ and ‘mis' sions’. He believed that ‘the liberal mind regards the withdrawing of liberty and the times of reaction as illnesses and critical stages of growth, as incidents and steps in the eternal life of liberty.’ As with Hegel, timelessness engulfed and superseded time in the last resort; moreover, this afforded a standpoint from which history manifested pathologies as well as normalities. The transcendental status of liberty returned to do the work of faith and underlying essential meaning, justifying the course taken by a non-transcendental history. That such liberal his' tories attained impartiality, as Croce claimed, is hardly borne out by the language in which that claim is expressed.29 A similar viewpoint, with different conclusions, is evident in Louis Hartz’s modern classic The Liberal Tradition In America. Liberalism has multiple facets, crucially situated not above politics but in it: ‘we know the European liberal, as it were, by the enemies he has made.’30 Whereas European liberals experb enced social diversity and conflict, the American variant acquired nomcontentious invisibility through a cultural and ideological uniformity, ‘on the basis of a submerged and absolute liberal faith’. Hartz identified a central ideological feature at work in the manner American liberalism decontested its basic premises, one involving ‘silent omissions as well as explicit inclusions’.31 Hence while American liberalism pre'empted political and ideational cotm petition, European liberalism had to fight its ground within a culturally and historically disputed space.

As Hobson noted, reviewing de Ruggiero’s book, ‘in each country the spirit of liberalism was largely formed by the practical tasks which the needs and interests of the dominant classes incited them to undertake’.32 Both Hobhouse and de Ruggiero subscribed to a concrete spatial universalism which is a function of time (as of course does Marxism) rather than a transcendental and spaceless universalism which is a function of atemporal reason. But de Ruggiero removed internal pluralism and unstructured open' endedness from liberalism as it emerged as a tele' ological worldwiew in a very real, and irreversible, sense. Hobhouse, to the contrary, voiced an increaS' ing postwar despair concerning the future of liberal' ism when he identified ‘arrest, retrogression or decay’ as part of the historic course of change and con' eluded: ‘Hence if progress means the gradual realisa' tion of an ethical ideal no continuous progress is revealed by the course of history.’33 There is none of that pessimism concerning the evolution of the hu' man mind in de Ruggiero’s 1927 deluded prognosis that ‘one may conclude that the omens are favour' able towards the capacity of the German people to win for itself that liberal education in politics which the old regime denied it’.34 Consequently, de Rug' giero was epistemologically unable to criticise liberal practices and beliefs in their current form because of liberalism’s inherent evolutionary capacity of self' development and improvement. These distinctions aside, the liberalism of Hobhouse and de Ruggiero is primarily about individual and social expression and development, and only secondarily about pluralism and difference, especially in view of its allegiance to the nation'State. By contrast, current liberal plural' ism, in some of its multicultural forms, applies a pre' formed, ahistorical, singular liberal morality to con' crete societies comprised of many components. It regards structural variety as a service concept for autonomy, rather than regarding temporal develop' ment as a service concept for individuality, socia' bility or welfare. What de Ruggiero noted about liberty and liberties ought to be said about the tension between liberalism conceived of as universal philosophy and as situated ideology. The one is ‘an abstraction, a concept intended to express the es' sence of human personality, exalted above all his'

26

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIBERAL THOUGHT dignity of human personality, and the construction of impenetrable boundaries which the state may not pervade. Liberal principles are, or ought to be, un­ touched by history, even by the experimental reason which many liberals see fit to encourage in people. Instead, they are to be secured to transcendental standards and eternal truths, beyond the contami­ nating reach of untrustworthy human judgement. Hallowell occupies a strange position in relation to the liberal epistemology of this century, both regressive and progressive. The notion of progress, so central to liberal values,38 had in his view become attached to a theory of evolution which, when applied to liberalism itself, undermined the absolute moral value of the individual. It did so by legitimat­ ing humanly directed change, especially through the German construct of the Rechtsstaat, which estab­ lished positive law - a law that was made and not found - as the guarantor of equality. One of Hallowell’s inputs into the liberal debate was to re-emphasise not its polysemic but its static character. Another was to distinguish between liberalism as philosophy and as ideology, a move of importance associated with the mid-century decline in prestige of the concept of ideology. However, the decline of ideology is not articulated in terms of the postwar debate over undesirable dogmatism versus com­ mended pragmatism, but in terms of undesirable pragmatism versus incontrovertible truth. Hallowell approvingly quoted C. E. M. Joad, for whom prag­ matism ministered

torical and empirical contingency’, the other a com­ plex of features ‘acquired one by one as circum­ stances dictate’. Each on its own is, tellingly, totally dispossessed of the Liberal spirit.35

The Renewed Search for Certainty The experience of totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s dramatically changed some interpretative lib­ eral paradigms. One of the most striking reformula­ tions of liberalism to emerge from the Second World War was John Hallo well’s The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology. His analysis constitutes a watershed in twentieth-century liberal self-conceptualisation mainly through its disentangling and counterposing of the historical and the ahistorical mode of liberal­ ism. If for Hobhouse and de Ruggiero liberalism embodies a vital growth impetus, Hallowed reversed this historical tendency to identify a move from something live and vigorous to something decadent and degenerate. Growth may also imply regression, especially once de Ruggiero’s Hegelian dialectic of progress is abandoned. ‘As a political ideology born of a particular historical period in a specific socio­ logical environment [liberalism] is subject, like all such systems of ideas, to development, decline, and death.’36 Significantly, and in contradistinction to Hobhouse’s anxieties concerning external impedi­ ments to liberalism, Hallowed attributed the death of liberal ideology to liberals themselves, for a man­ made belief system is subject to human fallibility. That fallibility has revealed itself in the forsaking of a parallel but morally and intellectually superior lib­ eralism, ‘integral’ liberalism, couched in the language of absolutes which would have prevented the in­ tellectual perversion of liberalism, particularly by Nazism. Hallowed’s version of liberalism embodied the typical disillusionment of postwar scholars with the fickle impermanence of legal systems, unless anchored in dictates of objective reason. The redis­ covery of normative foundationalism became promi­ nent in the American legal tradition, in its renewed anti-positivist appeal to natural law and its conse­ quent revival of the notion of universal human rights during the 1940s and 1950s.37 Liberal ontology therefore sought refuge in invoking new variants of traditional certitudes: the absolute value and

to human complacency by assuring human beings that right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, reality and unreality, are not external facts, features of the universe to which human beings must in the long run subject themselves, but are the products of human consciousness and, therefore, amenable to human desires.39 Hallowed proposed the following ideational com­ pound as liberalism’s epistemological base: first, a humanist doctrine that relinquishes anthropocentr­ ism and rejects intuitive judgement; second, a theory of human freedom that dismisses the view of indi­ viduals as autonomously capable of exercising their subjectively free wills; third, a conception of ration­

27

MICHAEL FREEDEN ality that subjugates individuals to the ‘dictates of reason’ and the external criteria of justice as obliga­ tion to transcendental law, accessed through an inner conscience. For a liberal, Hallowell imposed a particularly stringent limitation on value pluralism, for liberalism relies on ‘a common knowledge, or recognition, of values transcending individuals.’40 Nevertheless all this is a ‘theory of political order based upon individualism’, and it is identified as a ‘comprehensive Weltanschauung’.41 Contrast this with the Rawlsian view of rationality emerging volitionally from individuals and expressed in a reasonable, overlapping and public consensus over principles of justice, and moreover a view that now relegates individualism to a feature of comprehensive liberalism, a liberalism which is no longer specifically endorsed as necessary to a just social order. And contrast this with the Hobhousian faith in the evolution of social understandings of valued prac­ tices which release the potential and sustain the well-being of a community as well as those of its members.

factual thought experiments which translate the requirements of coherence and procedure, rather than growth and energy, into structural fundamen­ tals of liberalism. Is this, intriguingly, a parallel tendency to what Orton describes as ‘the queer double strain in nineteenth century liberalism. The rationalistic, system-making tradition in lais­ sez-faire theory never found common ground with the personalistic and humanitarian impulse’ - an inspirational, empathetic and energy-liberating hu­ manism?43 Hobson denied that ‘coldness and pla­ cidity of purpose belong essentially to Liberalism’, rather than ‘organic purpose’ and ‘free enthusiasm’.44 Is it also the case that what some feminists term the colder philosophical liberalism is a product of the Cold War that never got round to thawing? N ot for nothing has the end of the Cold War witnessed a reheating of liberalism under the impact of nation­ alism and the accompanying revalorisation of the emotional resonances that have always existed with­ in liberal discourse: the language of bonds, alle­ giance, sympathy. What nonetheless sustains the current philosophical variant is the predominant and overwhelmingly shared image of the American constitution as mediating between the presumption of the reasonableness emanating from human beings and the requirement of permanent, supra-political standards. This avoids the language of transcendent­ alism while attaining some of its ends. It is hence unsurprising to find Rawls describing the Supreme Court as ‘the exemplar of public reason’.45 Is that another way of asserting, as Hartz did, that ‘the absence of “opposing principles,” the fact that be­ neath its political heroics the nation was of the “same mind” on the liberal formula, settled in ad­ vance the philosophic question’?46 Only instead of the nation are we not referring to the academic community, sustained by its Justices with their pre­ sumption of expressing the vox popultf Indeed, Hartz had given the role of the Supreme Court, and the liberalism it sustained, a totally different and more persuasive gloss: ‘the Supreme Court had always been the Hebraic expositor of the American general will, building on the irrational acceptance of Locke the Talmudic rationality involved in his application to specific cases.’47 Moreover, Hartz was deeply cognisant of the emotive aspect of concrete liberal­

Ontological Minimalism and the Supra-Political Works such as Hallowell’s which began as manifestos against totalitarianism have been transformed into a richer and deeper philosophical position. The heri­ tage and motivation are plainly visible in late twen­ tieth-century liberal theorising, but so are the epistemological and conceptual modifications. One of the residues of this mode of thinking has been to reduce liberalism once again to a form of ontological minimalism, captured in the loose use of the inde­ terminate word ‘thin’. But one of the modifications it has undergone is the rediscovery of a Kantian-inspired autonomy, an autonomy unavailable or decentred in early and mid-century liberal thought. The two have combined in the revival of the privatepublic dichotomy as a moral statement about the inherent but socially indifferent good sense of in­ dividuals, detached from the impact of sustaining groups, the latter now perceived as more dangerous than formative.42 In addition liberalism has been absorbed into the dominant Anglo-American phi­ losophical practice of model-building and counter­

28

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIBERAL THOUGHT isms. The American version, he argued, possessed ‘the ideologic power of the national irrational liberal­ ism’ which, in the case of the New Deal, ‘was responsible for its whole pragmatic orientation, for its whole aversion to systematic social thought.’48 In view of the above, Croce’s reaction to critics of liberalism, who labelled it as ‘formalistic’, ‘empty’, ‘sceptical’ and ‘antagonistic’, is edifying. Rather than see these terms as referring to foundational categories whose generality enables the integration of all rea­ sonable ways of life, Croce saw them as embodying the essence of non-dogmatism in the spirit of modern philosophy. The liberal conception thus denied ‘first place to laws, casuistry and charts of duties and virtues, and places the moral conscience at its cen­ tre.’ This was ‘like modern aesthetics, which refuses models, categories and rules, and places at its centre the genius that is good taste, both sensitive and very strict.’ That approach was formalistic only in the sense that it shied away from imposing philosophical formulae and principles. The end result was strongly emotive and parti pris: ‘the liberal conception is not meant for the timid, the indolent and the pacifist, but wishes to interpret the aspirations and the works of courageous and patient, of belligerent and gener­ ous spirits.’ No wonder that Croce could refer to Hobhouse’s opus as ‘a beautiful English eulogy and apology for liberalism’ - language more apposite for a work of art than for the mechanics of a system of rules.49

reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doc­ trines is the normal result of the exercise of human reason within the framework of the free institutions of a constitutional regime’ - a philosophical anthro­ pology diametrically opposed to Hobhouse’s. Rawls’s overriding aim is for a political liberalism which provides not only justice but also unity in what would otherwise be a fissiparous, even Hobbesian, society. The difficulty with the core liberal concept of non-necessitarian development was that it had to allow for a choice which could include error. The risky model of development, even riskier when ‘ir­ reconcilable conflict’ is assumed to be socially la­ tent,50 was replaced with a more advantageous model of justice, stability and autonomy, which would eliminate unpredictable choice.51 De Ruggiero, too, had attempted to eliminate choice on a grander, supra-individual scale by positing a Hegelian neces­ sitarianism, but that variety had been extinguished as a fashionable archetype under onslaughts such as Karl Popper’s. Nor was HallowelPs transcendentalism acceptable to 1960s and 1970s Anglo-American philosophy. Hence the foundational assumptions of Rawls’s sys­ tem were couched in anthropocentric terms of em­ pirically attainable reasonableness, even though the outcome of this process was to all effects and pur­ poses equally invariable. Like the contract model, Rawls’s theory simulated open-ended liberal choice without, of course, offering it, through assuming both a pre-discursive rationality (the veil of ignorance) and a convergent reasonableness (the overlapping consensus). Rawls’s political liberalism was presented as a western paradigm, but one whose rightness would gain it universal recognition, moving from historicity to ahistoricity. Its universal appeal would not be forged out of competition over legitimacy with other ideological arrangements, as most liberals have mea­ sured their successes, earning their spurs on the battlefield of ideas, but as a non-pluralist procedural and moral necessity. Put differently, this liberalism employed a secondorder argument not over substantive goods, but over justifiable rules. Justification depended not on the nature of the political benefits available, but - and here lay its novelty - on the shared acceptance of those rules by all the members of the polity.52 Locke’s

The Rawlsian Project: A Paradigmatic Shift Looking back at liberalism from our vantage point, the unity of the Rawlsian project is conspicuous. In the early years of the twentieth century, as in much of the nineteenth, the growth model central to liberal conceptions of human nature was applied to liberalism itself. The development of liberalism was tantamount to the development of civilisation. After the Second World War that very capacity for change, with its newly highlighted contingency, lost its attractiveness, and was increasingly replaced with an appeal to independent immutable standards. Rawls himself commenced his argument in Political Liberalism with that problematic: ‘political liberalism assumes that, for political purposes, a plurality of

29

MICHAEL FREEDEN liberalism by contrast, had sought a limited general acceptability only as a prior arrangement to establishing relations of mutual and substantive trust, anchored in the norms of natural rights. Late twen­ tieth-century liberalism has, however, been charac­ terised as being that system of ideas which requires and attains general acceptance, even prior to the political implementation of those ideas. The only ideas which comply with this scheme are those concerning the public rules of moral engagement and interaction. In earlier versions of liberalism, acceptance had to be won through the substantive benefits that would accrue from the liberal way of life in the struggle with other political options. Moreover, the Rawlsian procedure was con­ structed to create boundaries and hence moral spaces in which individuals were responsibly reflective. Intentionally or otherwise, that accomplished three ends. First, it restored liberalism’s emphasis on the inviolability of individual space, rather than on the controlled permeability of space which organicist, communitarian liberals had encouraged. This was closely linked to a thinning of the sociability com­ ponent of liberalism and a resurrection of individu­ alism as an attribute of separate personal existence.53 Second, it focused on equality - a concept to which evolutionary liberal traditions could not fully subscribe because of the unpredictable dynamics of human relationships. The a priori rule-following of Rawlsian liberalism had to assume not only temporal stasis but relational stasis: equality as the participa­ tion of each and every member in decision-making and hence in justifiable and responsible action. Strikingly, this limited notion of equality was a non-voluntarist view of participation. Participation and sharing in responsibility had become the be-all and end-all of liberalism, rather than adjacent con­ cepts that could be put into practice by those who wished to participate.54 As an ethical exercise, this liberalism offers no space to opt out or to refrain from opting in. Obtaining the considered and uncon­ strained consent of all - a mechanical view of politics - becomes the heart of the liberal process rather than the attainment of a package of values. The extreme view of this position, outside current exemplars of the liberal family, was expressed by non-liberals such as Leo Strauss in his book Liberalism Ancient and

Modern: ‘liberal education is the necessary endeavour to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.’ The point, however, as Mill recognised, was that liberalism was shaped by a few and then disseminated to the many. Some of its substantive values might precede the full evolution of demo­ cratic consent and might not be entirely sustained by that evolution. As is the case with all ideologies, liberals wish to protect the values they most cherish. The problem with liberalism is that some of those values (such as self-determination or participation) are intrinsically dependent on the exercise of choice by all, and may be catered to instantly, and some (such as individuality or progress) are dependent on the exercise of good choices by as many as possible, but by less than all if unavoidable, and are timesensitive. Third, it disposed of change in the arena of political liberalism. Gone was the experimental at­ titude of Hobhouse and his colleague J. A. Hobson towards some of the decontestations of liberal va­ lues.55 Rawls assumed coherence rather than tenta­ tiveness. ‘We may’, he writes, ‘reaffirm our more particular judgements and decide instead to modify the proposed conception of justice until judgements at all levels of generality are at last in line on due reflection.’56 If there is experimentation, it is in order to iron out kinks in the overlapping public reason­ ableness of political liberalism, not experimentation that can provide different and contrasting views of liberalism’s values. Compare this with another mid­ century appraisal of liberalism: ‘as a form of social thought Liberalism has been empirical, scientific, mundane, and more or less skeptical-minded.’57 The sense of paradigmatic shift is palpable. Gone also were Hobhouse’s and Hobson’s anxi­ eties concerning an unknown liberal future.58 Raw­ lsian liberalism is curiously unperturbed, not only because logic, procedure and coherence are by defi­ nition emotionally neutered (though their outcomes are hardly value-neutral) but because moral conflicts are politically soluble. Certainty allows one to dis­ pense with some of the affective language in which liberalism has usually indulged. How can that nontranscendental certainty be sustained? Because the precarious nature of progress based on human rea­ son59 is eliminated at a stroke by removing liberalism

30

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIBERAL TH OUGHT - as a comprehensive doctrine, and hence bereft of the reasonable pluralism that a narrower political liberalism requires.63 Other theorists, as we have seen, have distin­ guished between good and bad forms of liberalism, but no one prior to Rawls proposed to regard liberal­ ism as a two-tier edifice. What has this done to liberalism? It has injected into it a spurious neutrality and dissociated it from gathering the fruits of the political process, hitherto a central aim of the liberal agenda. It has upset the delicate balance between essence and contingency so typical of liberal argu­ ment. And it has emaciated liberalism by relegating its comprehensive values to the status of equal contenders with other socio-political doctrines, thus undercutting the specific ideological appeal of lib­ eralism which its other proponents have been so eager to advance. That is another way of arguing that what are now termed the liberal virtues are excluded from the static preconditions concerning justice and pluralism. Maybe we should take Rawls at his word and stop calling his project liberal in a doctrinal sense altogether? Of course, liberalism continues to exist as a devel­ opmental and humanist theory. While universities have over the past two decades sent liberalism on a confusing trajectory, the ideology called liberalism is still a comprehensive and culture-bound set of con­ ceptual decontestations that operates, like any ideol­ ogy, to compete over the legitimate meanings of political language. Philosophical notions of liberal­ ism have not replaced historical, concrete, polysemic and hence ideological understandings. The former too may be seen in that latter light and simply serve as further evidence of the contingent and manifold guises liberalism adopts within the broad constraints of shared family resemblances.

from the impact of a temporal perspective. One pre-eminent consequence of this paradig­ matic change has been the drastic contraction of the natural habitat of liberalism, the political are­ na.60 The bulk of the liberal conceptual configura­ tion now spills over into a politics-free area, as Dworkin has reminded us,61 and individuals are literally abandoned to their own fates in the names of autonomy and self-determination. The result is a political liberalism that claims to be compatible with an indeterminate variety of reasonable comprehen­ sive social and political beliefs, as long as they accept the procedural ‘minimum-kit’ of democratic consti­ tutionalism. This has significant repercussions for liberalism. For in universalising political liberalism, the specific appeal of other doctrines is undercut either by excluding them as unreasonable or by reducing them - through revealing them as congru­ ous with political liberalism. Political liberalism thus becomes a particularly potent weapon that can out­ bid the attractions of other doctrines/ideologies by subsuming aspects of them into itself. The shrinkage of the political is thus both very modest and highly ambitious. To judge this enterprise as successful depends on whether one thinks such formulae work, or on whether one can demonstrate that such phi­ losophical liberals are unaware, or in denial, of their own surpluses of meaning. As 1 have argued else­ where, Rawls’s political liberalism contains almost all of the crucial attributions of meaning that typify the family of liberal concepts. His political liberalism has gone so far down the road towards a comprehensive liberalism that there is no turning back, no fork in the road that could lead on to a comprehensive socialism, conservatism or reasonable religious doc­ trine.62 It is therefore edifying to find Rawls’s most recent utterances redefining his theory of justice as fairness - hitherto understood to be a general theory

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Hobhouse (1964), p. 28. Hobson (1909), p. 91. Hobhouse (1964), p. 60. Ibid., pp. 16-29. Hobson (1909), p. 95. Hobhouse (1964), p. 15. Ibid., pp. 28.

8. De Ruggiero (1927), p. 359. 9. See C. Taylor, ‘What’s Wrong With Negative Lib­ erty?’, in Ryan (ed.) (1979), pp. 175-93. 10. Hobhouse (1964), p. 30. 11. Ibid., p. 66. 12. Ibid., p. 72. 13. Ibid., p. 71. See also Freeden (1998).

31

MICHAEL FREEDEN 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

See Freeden (1986), pp. 234-7. Laski (1936), p. 11. Hobhouse (1964), pp. 90, 127. De Ruggiero (1927), p. 390. Ibid., p. 437. Orton (1945), pp. 78, 303. Laski (1936), p. 14. Ibid., p. 171. Bullock and Shock (1956), p. xix. Hobhouse (1964), p. 73. De Ruggiero (1927), p. 90. Ibid., p. 361. Ibid., p. 437. Ibid., p. 347. Croce (1946), pp. 79-81. Ibid., pp. 84-5. Hartz (1955), p. 16. Ibid., pp. 7, 10. Hobson (1928). Hobhouse (1924), p. 30. De Ruggiero (1927), p. 274. Ibid., p. 348. Hallowell (1946), p. 1. For a discussion of these developments within the American legal profession, see Primus (1999), pp. 177-97. In the extreme case, progress is seen as the central structural principle of liberalism: ‘Progressivism is in­ deed a better term than liberalism for the opposition to conservatism. For if conservatism is, as its name in­ dicates, aversion to change or distrust of change, its opposite should be identified with the opposite posture toward change, and not with something substantive like liberty or liberality’ (Strauss, 1968, p. vii). Hallowell (1946), p. 88. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., pp. 21, 108-9. Kymlicka attempts to attach the (cultural) properties of groups to the promotion of individual identity-cumautonomy alone. See Kymlicka (1995). Orton (1945), p. 308. Hobson (1909), p. 92. Rawls (1996), pp. 231-40.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

32

Hartz (1955), p. 141. Ibid., pp. 208-9. Ibid., pp. 249, 307. Croce (1946), pp. 87, 106. Rawls (1996), p. xxvi. Rawls (ibid., pp. 72-8) attempts to distinguish be­ tween various types of autonomy in a discussion that is highly contentious. Suffice it to observe that his notions of rational and political autonomy, as distinct from full ethical autonomy, are posited on an unten­ able divide between political and comprehensive lib­ eralism, and on a blindness to the thickness of his notion of an autonomous person in the space occupied by political liberalism. See Evans (1999). See M. Freeden, ‘Liberal Community: An Exercise in Retrieval’, in A. Simhony and D. Weinstein (eds), Nori'lndividualist Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). This is notably the case for Locke, who in a little-noted comment on the transition from the state of nature to civil society notes: ‘This any number of Men may do, because it injures not the Freedom of the rest; they are left as they were in the Liberty of the State of Nature’ (Locke, 1991, section 96). This historically astute nonuniversalism is inconceivable in the Rawlsian project. See J.A. Hobson, ‘Character and Society’, in Parker (ed.) (1912), p. 96. Rawls (1996), p. 45. Neill (1953), p. 18. Hobhouse (1964), pp. 115-17; Hobson (1909), pas­ sim. Neill (1953), p. 21. Contrast this with Laski’s complaint that liberalism has been far too political, in the sense of espousing the ends of political, but not economic, democracy. For Laski, ‘it was inherent in the Liberal idea that men should use their political power for the improvement of their material position’ (Laski, 1936, pp. 158-9). R. Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’, in Dworkin (1985), pp. 181-204. See Freeden (1996), chapter 6. Rawls (1999), p. 614.

Part Two CITIZENSHIP: UNIVERSALISM AND PARTICULARISM

3

HUMAN R I G H T S AND ETHNOCULTURAL JUSTICE Will Kymlicka

issue for anyone who wishes to defend and promote the liberal project in the twenty-first century. But what exactly is the challenge which ethnocultural diversity raises for human rights? We can distinguish two separate challenges. The first is foundational. Some critics argue that the conception of human personhood and human needs underlying the doc­ trine of human rights is culturally biased. More specifically, it is ‘Eurocentric’, and in particular it exhibits a European commitment to individualism, whereas other non-western cultures have a more collectivist or communitarian understanding of hu­ man identity. On this view, given the depth of cultural differences around the world, the very idea of developing a single set of universal human rights is inherently ethnocentric, and involves imposing one culture’s view of human personality and human identity on other cultures. The second challenge is more modest. Some critics say that the idea of universal human rights is acceptable in principle, but that the current list of human rights is radically incomplete. In particular, it fails to protect minority cultures from various forms of injustice, and so needs to be supplemented with an additional set of what are sometimes called ‘collec­ tive rights’ (or ‘group rights’, ‘minority rights’ or ‘cultural rights’). Most discussions of cultural diversity and human rights have focused on the first, foundational, chal­ lenge. Here, however, I will focus on the second, since it is less explored. Many commentators tend to

I Introduction It is an honour for me to be giving this Lecture in the memory of John Rees,1 whose influential book on John Stuart Mill helped to clarify my understanding of liberalism and liberal democracy-2 Liberal democracy rests on principles of freedom and equality, but as Rees noted, it is not easy to specify or define these principles. He suggested, however, that these prin­ ciples are perhaps best illustrated or reflected in the doctrine of human rights - that is, the doctrine that each person has an intrinsic moral worth; that each person’s interests must be taken into consideration by the state; and that each person should receive certain inviolable protections against mistreatment, abuse and oppression.3 The articulation and diffusion of the doctrine of human rights is indeed one of the great achievements of postwar liberalism. This year represents the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it is impressive how far we have come in those fifty years in ensuring the protection of human dignity and human rights. Yet amid the anniversary celebrations there are an increasing number of scep­ tics and critics who attack the doctrine of human rights for neglecting the realities of ethnocultural diversity, and for being unable to deal with the conflicts which arise from this diversity, either with­ in a society or between societies. This is an issue which Rees did not foresee, and perhaps could not have foreseen. But it is an urgent

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WI L L K Y M L I C K A confuse and conflate the two challenges; they assume that any group which is demanding ‘collective rights’ must be doing so because they are ‘collectivist’ in their cultural outlook and attitudes, and so are, implicitly at least, raising the foundationalist chal­ lenge to the very idea of universal human rights. If we conflate the two debates in this way, it will seem that we need to revisit the foundationalist issue every time an ethnocultural group demands collective rights. This tendency to conflate the two debates is, I think, profoundly unhelpful. It is a source not only of philosophical misunderstanding, but also, and per­ haps more importantly, of political confusion which has prevented liberals from understanding and effec­ tively responding to ethnocultural conflicts around the world. So my aim is to discuss the second issue on its own terms. I will try to show why current con­ ceptions of human rights leave serious issues of ethnocultural injustice unaddressed, and why these issues of injustice are not reducible or dependent on the foundationalist challenge to human rights. I hope to show that these claims of injustice are relevant and urgent even for those of us who reject the foundationalist critique of human rights. Indeed, I think that we will only be in a position to effec­ tively address the foundationalist critique of human rights if we have first made sure that our conception of human rights deals satisfactorily with these issues of ethnocultural injustice. The discussion is divided into two main sections. In the first section, I discuss why human rights are insufficient for ethnocultural justice and may even exacerbate certain injustices, and hence why human rights standards must be supplemented with various minority rights. In the second section, I ask whether, if human rights are supplemented with minority rights, we can hope or expect to get greater agree­ ment on the transnational application of human rights. I argue that we can indeed hope for greater agreement on the principles of human rights, but that there will still be very difficult issues remaining about appropriate institutions for the enforcement of these rights. I will conclude with some broader reflections on the relationship between cultural diversity and human rights.

Individual Rights and Group Rights According to many commentators, human rights are paradigmatically individual rights, as befits the in­ dividualism of western societies, whereas non-Eur­ opean societies are more interested in ‘group’ or ‘collective’ rights, as befits their communalist tradi­ tions. I think this way of framing the debate is quite misleading. For one thing, individual rights have typically been defended within the Western tradi­ tion precisely on the grounds that they enable various group-oriented activities. Consider the para­ digmatic liberal right - namely, freedom of religion which Rawls argues is the origin and foundation for all other liberal rights. The point of endowing in­ dividuals with rights to freedom of conscience and freedom of worship is to enable religious groups to form and maintain themselves, and to recruit new members. And indeed according individuals rights to religious freedom has proven very successful in en­ abling a wide range of religious groups - including many non-western religions - to survive and flourish in western societies. Based partly on this example of religious toler­ ance, many commentators have argued that indivi­ dual rights provide a firm foundation for justice for all groups, including ethnocultural minorities. In­ deed, this was explicitly the argument given after the Second World War for replacing the League of Nations’ ‘minorities protection’ scheme - which accorded collective rights to specific groups - with the U N ’s regime of universal human rights. Rather than protecting vulnerable groups directly, through special rights for the members of designated groups, cultural minorities would be protected indirectly, by guaranteeing basic civil and political rights to all individuals regardless of group membership. Basic human rights such as freedom of speech, association and conscience, while attributed to individuals, are typically exercised in community with others, and so provide protection for group life. Where these individual rights are firmly protected, liberals as­ sumed, no further rights needed to be attributed to the members of specific ethnic or national mino­ rities:

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HUMAN RIGHTS AND E TH NO C UL TU RA L JUSTICE Ricans and Quebecois in North America, the C at­ alans and Basques in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, the Sami in Norway, and so on. Most countries around the world contain such national minorities, and most of these national minorities were involun­ tarily incorporated into their current state - a testa­ ment to the role of imperialism and violence in the formation of the current system of ‘nation-states’. Very few if any of these national minorities are satisfied merely with respect for their individual human rights, and it is easy to see why. I will discuss three examples where individual rights do not ade­ quately protect their interests: decisions about inter­ nal migration/settlement policies, decisions about the boundaries and powers of internal political units, and decisions about official languages. In each of these examples, and throughout the analysis, I will be using the term ‘human rights’ in an imprecise way. I am not referring to any particular canonical statement or declaration of international human rights, but rather to the constellation of individual civil and political rights which are for­ mulated in western democratic constitutions, and which many advocates of human rights would like to see entrenched and enforced as transnational stan­ dards of human rights. Some of these rights are included in the original Declaration, others in sub­ sequent conventions (such as the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), others are still being debated. In short, I am referring more to a particular public and political discourse of ‘human rights’, than to the actual list of human rights in any particular document.

The general tendency of the postwar movements for the promotion of human rights has been to subsume the problem of national minorities under the broader problem of ensuring basic individual rights to all human beings, without reference to membership in ethnic groups. The leading as­ sumption has been that members of national minorities do not need, are not entitled to, or cannot be granted rights of a special character. The doctrine of human rights has been put for­ ward as a substitute for the concept of minority rights, with the strong implication that minorities whose members enjoy individual equality of treat­ ment cannot legitimately demand facilities for the maintenance of their ethnic particularism.4 Guided by this philosophy, the United Nations deleted all references to the rights of ethnic and national minorities in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There is of course much truth in this claim that individual rights protect group life. Freedom of as­ sociation, religion, speech, mobility and political organisation enables individuals to form and main­ tain the various groups and associations which con­ stitute civil society, to adapt these groups to changing circumstances, and to promote their views and interests to the wider population. The protec­ tion afforded by these common rights of citizenship is sufficient for many of the legitimate forms of group diversity in society. However, it is increasingly clear that the list of common individual rights guaranteed in western democratic constitutions, or in the UN Declaration, is not sufficient to ensure ethnocultural justice,5 particularly in states with national minorities. By national minorities, I mean groups which formed functioning societies, with their own institutions, culture and language, concentrated in a particular territory, prior to being incorporated into a larger state. The incorporation of such national minorities is usually involuntary, as a result of colonisation, conquest or the ceding of territory from one imperial power to another, but may also occur voluntarily, through some treaty or other federative agreement. Examples of national minorities within western democracies include the indigenous peoples, Puerto

Internal Migration/Settlement Policies National governments have often encouraged people from one part of the country (or new immigrants) to move into the historical territory of the national minority. Such large-scale settlement policies are often deliberately used as a weapon against the national minority, both to break open access to their territory’s natural resources and to disempower them politically by turning them into a minority even within their own traditional territory.6 This process is occurring around the world, in Bangladesh, Israel, Tibet, Indonesia, Brazil, for ex­

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WI L L K Y M L I C K A ample.7 It has also happened in North America. The nineteenth-century Canadian Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, said of the Metis that ‘these impulsive half-breeds . . . must be kept down by a strong hand until they are swamped by the influx of settlers.’8 And the same process occurred in the American Southwest, where immigration was used to disempower the indigenous peoples and Chicano populations who were living on that territory when it was incorporated into the United States in 1848. This is not only a source of grave injustice, but is also the most common source of violent conflict in the world. Indigenous peoples and other homeland minorities typically resist such massive settlement policies, even with force, if necessary.9 One would hope, therefore, that human rights doctrines would provide us with the tools to challenge such policies. Unfortunately, there is nothing in human rights doctrine which precludes such settlement policies (so long as individual members of the minority are not deprived of their civil and political rights). There are other elements of international law which might be of some help, in exceptional circumstances. For example, UN Resolution Number 2189, adopted in December 1967, condemns attempts by colonial . powers systematically to promote the influx of im­ migrants into their colonised possessions. But this only applies to overseas colonies or to newly con­ quered territories, not to already incorporated na­ tional minorities and indigenous peoples. So it is of no help to the Metis or Tibetans. Human rights doctrines are not only silent on this question, but in fact may exacerbate the injustice, since the U N Charter guarantees the right to free mobility within the territory of a state. Indeed, ethnic Russians in the Baltics defended their settle­ ment policies precisely on the grounds that they had a human right to move freely throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union. It is important to remember that most countries recognised the bound­ aries of the Soviet Union, and so the UN Charter does indeed imply that ethnic Russians had a basic right to settle freely in any of the Soviet republics, even to the point where the indigenous inhabitants were becoming a minority in their own homeland. Similarly, human rights doctrines, far from prohibit­ ing ethnic Han settlement in Tibet, imply that

Chinese citizens have a basic human right to settle there. To protect against these unjust settlement poli­ cies, national minorities need and demand a variety of measures. For example, they may make certain land claims - insisting that certain lands be reserved for their exclusive use and benefit. Or they may demand that certain disincentives be placed on in-migration. For example, migrants may need to pass lengthy residency requirements before they can vote in local or regional elections. Or they may not be able to bring their language rights with them that is, they may be required to attend schools in the local language, rather than having publicly funded education in their own language. Similarly, the courts and public services may be conducted in the local language. These measures are all intended to reduce the number of migrants into the homeland of the national minority, and to ensure that those who do come are willing to integrate into the local culture. These are often cited as examples of the sort of ‘group rights’ which conflict with western individu­ alism. They are said to reflect the minority’s ‘com­ munal’ attachment to their land and culture. But in fact these demands have little if anything to do with the contrast between ‘individualist’ and communalist’ societies. Western ‘individualists societies also seek protections against in-migration. Take any wes­ tern democracy. While the majority believes in maximising their individual mobility throughout the country, they do not support the right of in­ dividuals outside the country to enter and settle. On the contrary, western democracies are typically very restrictive about accepting new immigrants into their society. None has accepted the idea that transna­ tional mobility is a basic human right. And those few immigrants who are allowed in are pressured to integrate into the majority culture. For example, learning the majority language is a condition of gaining citizenship, and publicly funded education is typically provided only in the majority’s language. Western democracies impose these restrictions on immigration into their country for precisely the same reason that national minorities seek to restrict inmigration into their territory - namely, massive settlement would threaten their society and culture.

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HUMAN RIGHTS AND E TH NO C UL TU RA L JUSTICE with the territory of a national minority, the degree of meaningful autonomy may be undermined if the central government usurps most or all of the sub­ unit’s powers and eliminates the group’s traditional mechanisms of self-government. And indeed, we can find many such instances in which a minority nom­ inally controls a political subunit but has no sub­ stantive power, since the central government has (1) removed the traditional institutions and procedures of group self-government; and (2) arrogated all im­ portant powers, even those affecting the very cultural survival of the group - for example, jurisdiction over economic development, education, language. (Con­ sider the plenary power of the American Congress over Indian tribes in the United States.) This usurpation of power is, I believe, a clear injustice, particularly when it involves seizing powers or undermining institutions which were guaranteed to the minority in treaties or federating agreements. Yet here again, it seems that human rights doctrines are inadequate to prevent such injustice. So long as individual members maintain the right to vote and run for office, then human rights principles pose no obstacle to the majority’s efforts to gerrymander the boundaries or powers of internal political subunits in such a way as to disempower the national minority. This is true even if the arrogation of power violates an earlier treaty or federative agreement, since such internal treaties are not considered ‘international’ agreements (the minority which signed the treaty is not seen under international law as a sovereign state, and so its treaties with the majority are seen as matters of domestic politics, not international law). N ot only do human rights doctrines not help prevent this injustice, but they may exacerbate it. Historically, the majority’s decisions to ignore the traditional leadership of minority communities and to destroy their traditional political institutions have been justified on the grounds that these traditional leaders and institutions were not ‘democratic’: they did not involve the same process of periodic elec­ tions as majority political institutions. The tradi­ tional mechanisms of group consultation, consensus and decision-making may well have pro­ vided every member of the minority community with meaningful rights to political participation and in­ fluence. However, they were swept away by the

The majority, like the minority, has no desire to be overrun and outnumbered by settlers from another culture. To say that the desire of national minorities to limit in-migration reflects some sort of illiberal communalism is therefore quite hypocritical. When the majority says that mobility within a country is a basic human right, but that mobility across borders is not, they are not preferring individual mobility over collective security. They are simply saying that their collective security will be protected (by limits on immigration), but that once their collective security is protected, then individual mobility will be max­ imised, regardless of the consequences for the col­ lective security of minorities. This is obviously hypocritical and unjust, but it is an injustice which human rights doctrines do not prevent and may even exacerbate.10 The Boundaries and Powers of Internal Political Subunits In states with territorially concentrated national minorities, the boundaries of internal political sub­ units raise fundamental issues of justice. Since national minorities are usually territorially concen­ trated, these boundaries can be drawn in such a way as to empower them - that is, to create political subunits within which the national minority forms a local majority, and which can therefore be used as a vehicle for meaningful autonomy and self-govern­ ment. In many countries, however, boundaries have been drawn so as to disempower national minorities. For example, a minority’s territory may be broken up into several units so as to make cohesive political action impossible (for example, the division of France into 83 ‘departments’ after the Revolution which intentionally subdivided the historical regions of the Basques, Bretons and other linguistic mino­ rities, or the division of nineteenth-century Catalo­ nia); conversely, a minority’s territory may be absorbed into a larger political subunit so as to ensure that they are outnumbered within the subunit as a whole (such as the Hispanics in nineteenth-century Florida).11 Even where the boundaries coincide more or less

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WI L L K Y M L I C K A majority in the name of ‘democracy’ - that is, the right to vote in an electoral process within which minorities had no real influence, conducted in a foreign language and in foreign institutions, and within which they were destined to become a per­ manent minority. Thus the rhetoric of human rights has provided an excuse and smokescreen for the subjugation of a previously self-governing minor­ ity.12 To avoid this sort of injustice, national minorities need guaranteed rights to such things as self-govern­ ment, group-based political representation, veto rights over issues that directly affect their cultural survival, and so on. Again, these demands are often seen as conflicting with western individualism and as proof of the minority’s ‘collectivism’. But in reality, these demands simply help to redress clear political inequalities. After all, the majority would equally reject any attempt by foreign powers to unilaterally change its boundaries, institutions or self-govern­ ment powers. So why shouldn’t national minorities also seek guarantees of their boundaries, institutions and powers? In a recent paper, Avigail Eisenberg details how the debate over Aboriginal political rights in the Canadian north has been seriously distorted by the focus on western ‘individualism’ versus Aboriginal ‘collectivism’. This way of framing the debate misses the real issues, which are the ongoing effects of colonisation - the political subordination of one people to another, through the majority’s unilateral efforts to undermine the minority’s institutions and powers of self-government.13

long in the modern world unless they are used in public life, and so government decisions about offi­ cial languages are, in effect, decisions about which languages will thrive, and which will die out.14 Just as the traditional political institutions of minorities have been shut down by the majority, so too have the pre-existing educational institutions. For example, Spanish schools in the American Southwest were closed after 1848, and replaced with English-language schools. Similarly, French-lan­ guage schools in Western Canada were closed once English-speakers achieved political dominance. This can be an obvious source of injustice. Yet here again, principles of human rights do not prevent this injustice (even when, as in the Southwest, there were treaties guaranteeing Hispanics the right to their own Spanish-language schools). Human rights doctrines do preclude any attempt by the state to suppress the use of a minority language in private, and may even require state toleration of privately funded schools which operate in the minority lan­ guage. But human rights doctrines say nothing about rights to the use of one’s language in government.15 On some interpretations of more recent interna­ tional conventions which include minority rights, public funding for mother-tongue classes at elemen­ tary level may under some circumstances be seen as a ‘human right’. But this remains a controversial de­ velopment.16 Moreover, mother-tongue education at the elementary level is clearly insufficient if all jobs in a modern economy require education at higher levels conducted in the majority language. Indeed, the requirement that education at senior levels be in the majority language creates a disincentive for minority parents to enrol their children in minor­ ity-language elementary schools in the first place.17 To redress the injustice created by majority at­ tempts to impose linguistic homogeneity, national minorities may need broad-ranging language poli­ cies. There is evidence that language communities can only survive intergenerationally if they are nu­ merically dominant within a particular territory, and if their language is the language of opportunity in that territory. But it is difficult to sustain such a predominant status for a minority language, particu­ larly if newcomers to the minority’s territory are able to become educated and employed in the majority

Official Language Policy In most democratic states, governments have typi­ cally adopted the majority’s language as the one ‘official language’ - that is, as the language of gov­ ernment, bureaucracy, courts, schools, and so on. All citizens are then forced to learn this language in school, and fluency in it is required to work for, or deal with, government. While this policy is often defended in the name of ‘efficiency’, it is also adopted to ensure the eventual assimilation of the national minority into the majority group. There is strong evidence that languages cannot survive for

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HUMAN RIGHTS AND E T H NO C UL TU RA L JUSTICE common language have been important tools in these nation-building efforts. There is no evidence that states intended to relinquish these tools when they accepted human rights conventions, and indeed no evidence that states would have accepted a conception of human rights which would preclude such nation-building programmes. Of course, human rights standards do set limits on this process of nation-building. States cannot kill or expel minorities, or strip them of citizenship or deny them the vote. But human rights standards do not preclude less extreme forms of nation-building. And if these nation-building measures are successful, then it is not necessary to restrict the individual civil and political rights of the minority. Where nation-build­ ing programmes have succeeded in turning the in­ corporated group into a minority even within its own homeland, and in stripping it of its self-governing institutions and language rights, then the group will not pose any serious threat to the power or interests of the majority. A t this point, there is no need to strip minority members of their individual rights. This is not necessary in order to gain and maintain effective political control over them. In short, human rights standards are insufficient to prevent ethnocultural injustice, and may actually makes things worse. The majority can invoke human rights principles to demand access to the minority’s homeland, to scrap traditional political mechanisms of consultation and accommodation, and to reject linguistic policies which try to protect the territorial viability of minority communities. In these and other ways, human rights have in­ directly served as an instrument of colonisation, as various critics have argued. However, I would not agree with those critics who view this solely as a problem of ‘western imperialism’ against non-Eur­ opean peoples. After all, these processes of unjust subjugation have occurred between European groups (such as the treatment of national minorities by the majority in France, Spain, Russia), and between African or Asian groups (such as the treatment of the Yao minority by the Chewa majority in Malawi, or the treatment of the Tibetan minority by the Han majority in China), as well as in the context of western colonisation of non-western peoples. These processes have occurred in virtually every state with

language (for example, if newcomers to Quebec are able to learn and work in English). It may not be enough, therefore, for the minority simply to have the right to use its language in public. It may also be necessary that the minority language be the only official language in their territory.18 If immigrants, or migrants from the majority group, are able to use the majority language in public life, this may eventually undermine the predominant status, and hence via­ bility, of the minority’s language.19 In other words, minorities may need not personal bilingualism (in which individuals carry their language rights with them throughout the entire country), but rather territorial bilingualism (in which people who choose to move to the minority’s territory accept that the minority’s language will be the only official language in that territory). Yet this sort of territorial bilingu­ alism - which denies official language status to the majority language on the minority’s territory - is often seen as discriminatory by the majority, and indeed as a violation of their ‘human rights’. These demands for extensive language rights and territorial bilingualism are often described as evi­ dence of the minority’s ‘collectivism’. But here again the minority is just seeking the same opportunity to live and work in their own language that the ma­ jority takes for granted. There is no evidence that the majority attaches any less weight to their ability to use their language in public life.20 One could mention other issues where human rights are insufficient for ensuring ethnocultural justice (public holidays, school curriculum, national sym­ bols, dress-codes and so on). But enough has been said, I hope, to make the general point. Moreover, it is important to note that the three issues I have examined - migration, internal political subunits and language policy - are all connected. These are all key components in the ‘nation-building’ pro­ grammes which every western state has engaged in.21 Every democratic state has, at one time or another, attempted to create a single ‘national iden­ tity’ among its citizens, and so has tried to undermine any competing national identities, of the sort which national minorities often possess.22 Policies designed to settle minority homelands, undermine their poli­ tical and educational institutions and impose a single

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WI L L K Y M L I C K A national minorities, and to ascribe it to western individualism is to seriously underestimate the scope of the problem. If human rights are not to be an instrument of unjust subjugation then they must be supplemented with various minority rights - language rights, selfgovernment rights, representation rights, federalism and so on. Moreover, these minority rights should not, I think, be seen as in any way secondary to traditional human rights. Even those who are sym­ pathetic to the need for minority rights often say that we should at least begin with human rights. That is, we should first secure respect for individual human rights, and then, having secured the conditions for a free and democratic debate, move on to questions of minority rights. When national minorities oppose this assumption, they are often labelled as illiberal or anti-democratic. But as I’ve tried to show, we cannot assume that human rights will have their desired consequences without attending to the larger con­ text within which they operate. Unless supplemen­ ted by minority rights, majoritarian democracy and individual mobility rights may simply lead to min­ ority oppression. As we’ve seen, various forms of oppression can occur while still respecting the in­ dividual rights of minorities. As a result, the longer we defer discussing minority rights, the more likely it is that the minority will become increasingly wea­ kened and outnumbered. Indeed, it may over time become so weakened that it will become unable even to demand or exercise meaningful minority rights (for example, it may lose the local predominance or territorial concentration needed to sustain its lan­ guage or to exercise local self-government). It is no accident, therefore, that members of the majority are often loudest in their support for giving priority to democracy and human rights over issues of minority rights. They know that the longer issues of minority rights are deferred, the more time it provides for the majority to disempower and dispossess the minority of its land, schools and political institutions to the point where the minority is in no position to sustain itself as a thriving culture or to exercise meaningful self-government. This is why human rights and minority rights must be treated together, as equally important compo­ nents of a just society. O f course, it would be an

equally serious mistake to privilege minority rights over human rights. In questioning the priority of traditional human rights over minority rights, I am not disputing the potential for serious rights viola­ tions within many minority groups, or the need to have some institutional checks on the power of local or minority political leaders. On the contrary, all political authorities should be held accountable for respecting the basic rights of the people they govern, and this applies as much to the exercise of selfgovernment powers by national minorities as to the actions of the larger state. The individual mem­ bers of national minorities can be just as badly mistreated and oppressed by the leaders of their own group as by the majority government, and so any system of minority self-government should in­ clude some institutional provisions for enforcing traditional human rights within the minority com­ munity. It is not a question of choosing between minority rights and human rights, or of giving priority to one over the other, but rather of treating them together as equally important components of justice in ethnoculturally plural countries. We need a conception of justice that integrates fairness between different ethnocultural groups (via minority rights) with the protection of individual rights within majority and minority political communities (via traditional hu­ man rights).23

The Enforcement of Human Rights Assuming that we can come up with some new theory which combines human rights and minority rights, would the existing level of opposition to transnational human rights standards diminish? Would we then get consensus on the enforcement of international standards of human rights? We can expect, I think, that the elites of some groups will continue to say human rights principles contradict their cultural ‘traditions’. I will return to this possibility in my conclusion. But my guess is that much of the current opposition to human rights would fade away. As I noted earlier, human rights are not inherently ‘individualistic’ and do not pre­ clude group life. They simply ensure that traditions are voluntarily maintained, and that dissent is not

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HUMAN RIGHTS AND ET H NO C UL TU RA L JUSTICE majorities are not going to give all groups the max­ imal rights demanded by the largest and most mo­ bilised groups (which may include secession). I see no way to overcome this problem. While minority rights are indeed essential, the solution is not to add a detailed list of minority rights to human rights declarations in international law. Instead, we must accept that traditional human rights are in­ sufficient to ensure ethnocultural justice, and then recognise the need to supplement them within each country with the specific minority rights which are appropriate for that country. As I will discuss later, international bodies can play a useful role in adju­ dicating minority rights conflicts, but this role is unlikely to take the form of adjudicating or enforcing a single codified international list of minority rights. This then leads to the second problem. If human rights and minority rights must be integrated at the domestic level rather than through a single interna­ tional code, can we find an impartial body to ad­ judicate and enforce these rights at the domestic level? Many people will naturally assume that these rights should be listed in a single national constitu­ tion which is then adjudicated and enforced by a single supreme court. Certainly most liberals have assumed that the supreme court in each country should have final jurisdiction regarding both human rights and minority rights. But in fact we find strong resistance to this idea among some minority groups, even if they share the principles underlying the set of human rights and minority rights listed in the national constitution. Consider the situation of Indian tribes in the United States. American constitutional law protects both certain minority rights for Indian tribes (they are recognised as ‘domestic dependent nations’ with treaty-based rights of self-government) and also a general set of individual human rights (in the Bill of Rights). This could be seen as at least the beginnings of an attempt to fairly integrate minority rights and human rights at the domestic level.27 But who should have the power to enforce these constitutional provisions regarding individual and minority rights? American liberals typically assume that the federal Supreme Court should have this power. But many American Indians oppose this idea. They do not want the Supreme Court to be able to

forcibly suppressed. To be sure, self-serving political elites who want to suppress challenges to their authority from within the community will continue to denounce human rights as a violation of their ‘traditions’. This explains the recent criticisms of human rights doctrines by the Indonesian and Chinese governments. But my guess is that if human rights doctrines are no longer seen as a tool for subordinating one people to another, but rather as a tool for protecting vulnerable individuals from abuse by their political leaders, then such opposition to human rights will increasingly be seen simply as a self-serving defence of elite power and privilege.24 So I would hope that we could gain greater international consensus on the principles of human rights. But this is not to say that we are likely to get consensus on the appropriate enforcement mechanisms of human rights/minority rights, either at the international level or even in the domestic setting. There are at least two major difficulties here. First, it is difficult to see how minority rights can be codified at the international level. Minorities come in many different shapes and sizes. There are ‘national’ mino­ rities, indigenous peoples, immigrants, refugees, guestworkers, colonising settlers, descendants of slaves or indentured labourers, Roma, religious groups, and so on. All of these groups have different needs, aspirations and institutional capacities.25 Ter­ ritorial autonomy will not work for widely dispersed groups, and even territorially concentrated groups differ dramatically in the sort of self-government they aspire to or are capable of. Similarly, language rights (beyond the right to private speech) will not be the same in India or Malaysia (which contain hundreds of indigenous languages) as in France or Britain. This is why international declarations of minority rights tend to waver between trivialities like the ‘right to maintain one’s culture’ (which could simply mean that respect for freedom of expression and association, and hence add nothing to existing de­ clarations of human rights) and vague generalities like the ‘right to self-determination’ (which could mean anything from token representation to full­ blown secession).26 Minorities are not going to accept the lowest common denominator, which even the smallest or most dispersed group seeks, but

43

WI L L K Y M L I C K A And why should they trust this court to act impar­ tially in considering their minority and treaty rights? For all these reasons, to assume that supreme courts at the national level should have the ultimate authority over all issues of individual and minority rights within a country may be inappropriate in the case of indigenous peoples and other incorporated national minorities.29 There are good reasons why American Indians do not trust federal courts either to uphold the minority rights needed for ethnocul­ tural justice between majority and minority, or to fairly determine whether the minority is respecting human rights internally. It is quite understandable, therefore, that many Indian leaders seek to reduce the role of federal judicial review. But at the same time they affirm their commitment to the basic package of human rights and minority rights which is contained in the U S constitution. They endorse the principles, but object to the particular institutions and procedures that the larger society has established to enforce these principles. As Joseph Carens puts it, ‘people are supposed to experience the realisation of prin­ ciples of justice through various concrete institu­ tions, but they may actually experience a lot of the institution and very little of the principle.’30 This is exactly how many indigenous peoples per­ ceive the Supreme Court in both Canada and the United States. What they experience is not the principles of human dignity and equality, but rather a social institution which has historically justified their conquest and dispossession. What we need to do, therefore, is to find impartial bodies to monitor compliance with both human rights and minority rights. We need to think crea­ tively about new mechanisms for enforcing human rights and minority rights that will avoid the legit­ imate objections which indigenous peoples and na­ tional minorities have to federal courts. What would these alternative mechanisms look like? To begin with, many Indian tribes have sought to create or maintain their own procedures for protecting human rights within their community, specified in tribal constitutions, some of which are based on the provisions of international protocols on human rights. It is important to distinguish Indian tribes, who have their own internal constitution and

review their internal decisions to assess whether they comply with the Bill of Rights.28 And they would prefer to have some international body monitor the extent to which the American government respects their treaty-based minority rights. So they do not want the federal Supreme Court to be the ultimate protector either of the individual rights of their members or of their minority rights. Needless to say, Indian demands to reduce the authority of the federal Supreme Court have met with resistance. The American government has shown no desire to accept international monitoring of the extent to which the treaty rights of Indians are respected. Indeed, the American government has jealously guarded its sovereignty in these matters, and so refused to give any international body jur­ isdiction to review and overturn the way it respects the treaty rights, land claims or self-government rights of indigenous peoples. And the demand to have internal tribal decisions exempted from scrutiny under the Bill of Rights is widely opposed by liberals, since it raises the concern in many people’s minds that individuals or subgroups (such as women) within American Indian commu­ nities could be oppressed in the name of group solidarity or cultural purity. They argue that any acceptable package of individual rights and minority rights must include judicial review of tribal decisions by the American Supreme Court to ensure their compliance with the Bill of Rights. Before jumping to this conclusion, however, we should consider the reasons why certain groups are distrustful of federal judicial review. In the case of American Indians, these reasons are, I think, ob­ vious. After all, the federal Supreme Court has historically legitimised the acts of colonisation and conquest which dispossessed Indians of their prop­ erty and political power. It has historically denied both the individual rights and treaty rights of Indians on the basis of racist and ethnocentric assumptions. Moreover, Indians have had no representation on the Supreme Court, and there is reason to fear that white judges on the Supreme Court may interpret certain rights in culturally biased ways (such as democratic rights). Why should Indians agree to have their internal decisions reviewed by a body which is, in effect, the court of their conquerors?

44

HUMAN RIGHTS AND E TH NO C UL TU RA L JUSTICE of their conquerors). But they want this sort of external monitoring to examine how well their minority rights are upheld by the larger society, not just to focus on the extent to which their own decisions respect individual human rights. This seems like a reasonable demand to me. These international mechanisms could arise at the regional as well as global level. European countries have agreed to establish their own multilateral hu­ man rights tribunals. Perhaps North American gov­ ernments and Indian tribes could agree to establish a similar multilateral tribunal, on which both sides are fairly represented. My aim here is not to defend any particular proposal for a new impartial body to monitor the protection of individual rights and minority rights. Rather, it is to stress again the necessity of treating individual rights and minority rights together when thinking about appropriate enforcement mechan­ isms. On the one hand, we need to think about effective mechanisms which can hold minority gov­ ernments accountable for the way individual mem­ bers are treated. I see no justification for exempting minority self-government from the principles of hu­ man rights - I believe that any exercise of political power should be subject to these principles. But we need to simultaneously think about effective me­ chanisms for holding the larger society accountable for respecting the minority rights of these groups. As I argued in the previous section, minority rights are equally important as individual human rights in ensuring ethnocultural justice, and so should be subject to equal scrutiny. Moreover, focusing exclu­ sively on the latter while neglecting the former is counter-productive and hypocritical. Minority groups will not agree to greater external scrutiny of their internal decisions unless they achieve greater protection of their minority rights. And since exist­ ing institutional mechanisms are typically unable to meet this twin test of accountability, we need to think creatively about new mechanisms that can deal impartially with both individual human rights and minority rights. I should emphasise again that in questioning the role of federal courts in reviewing the internal de­ cisions of tribal governments I am not trying to diminish the significance of human rights. On the

courts which prevent the arbitrary exercise of poli­ tical power, from ethnocultural groups which have no formal constitutions or courts, and which there­ fore provide no effective check on the exercise of arbitrary power by powerful individuals or traditional elites. We should take these internal checks on the misuse of power seriously. Indeed, to automatically assume that the federal courts should replace or supersede the institutions which Indians have them­ selves evolved to prevent injustice is evidence of an ethnocentric bias - an implicit belief that ‘our’ institutions are superior to theirs.31 Indian tribes have also sought to create new transnational or international procedures to help monitor the protection of their minority rights. The international community can play an important role, not so much by formulating a single list of minority rights that applies to all countries (for that is impossible), but rather by providing an impartial adjudicator to monitor the extent to which domestic provisions regarding minority rights are fairly nego­ tiated and implemented. From the point of view of ethnocultural justice, these proposals might be preferable to the current reliance on the federal Supreme Court. But it would be even better, I think, to establish international mechanisms which would monitor both the indivi­ dual rights and minority rights of Indian peoples. While the internal courts and constitutions of tribal governments are worthy of respect, they - like the courts and constitutions of nation-states - are im­ perfect in their protection of human rights. So it would be preferable if all governments - majority and minority - are subject to some form of international scrutiny. Many Indian leaders have expressed a willingness to accept some form of international monitoring of their internal human rights record. They are willing to abide by international declarations of human rights, and to answer to international tribunals for complaints of rights violations within their commu­ nities. But they would only accept this if and when it is accompanied by international monitoring of how well the larger state respects their treaty rights. They accept the idea that their tribal governments, like all governments, should be accountable to international human rights norms (so long as this isn’t in the court

45

WI L L K Y M L I C K A contrary, my goal is to find fairer and more effective ways to promote human rights, by separating them from the historical and cultural baggage which makes federal courts suspect in the eyes of incorporated peoples. History has shown the value of holding governments accountable for respecting human rights, and this applies equally to Indian tribal governments. But the appropriate forums for reviewing the actions of self-governing indigenous peoples may skip the federal level, as it were. Many indigenous groups would endorse a system in which their self-governing decisions are reviewed in the first instance by their own courts, and then by an inter­ national court, which would also monitor respect for minority rights. Federal courts, dominated by the majority, would not be the ultimate adjudicator of either the individual or minority rights of Indian peoples. The human rights movement has always set itself against the idea of unlimited sovereignty and pushed for limitations on the power of governments to mistreat their citizens. But we need to do this in an even-handed manner. We should hold the min­ ority accountable for respecting the human rights of its members, but we need also to hold the majority accountable for respecting minority rights, and we need to find impartial enforcement mechanisms which can do both of these together.

suggests a number of new avenues for future research - avenues which would depart dramatically from the existing patterns of research and debate. A t the moment, wherever there is a conflict between ‘local practices’ and ‘transnational human rights standards’, commentators tend to locate the source of the con­ flict in the ‘culture’ or ‘traditions’ of the group, and then look for ways in which this culture differs from ‘western’ culture. This tendency is exacerbated by the rhetoric of a ‘politics of difference’ or a ‘politics of identity’ which encourages groups to press their demands in the language of respect for cultural ‘difference’. My suggestion, however, is that we should not jump to the conclusion that cultural differences are the real source of the problem. Rather, in each case where a group is objecting to the domestic or trans­ national enforcement of human rights principles, we should ask the following questions: 1. Has the majority society failed to recognise legitimate minority rights? If so, has this cre­ ated a situation in which the implementation of human rights standards contributes to the unjust disempowerment of the minority? I have discussed three contexts or issues where human rights standards can exacerbate ethno­ cultural injustice if they are unaccompanied by minority rights, but it would be interesting to come up with a more systematic list of such issues. 2. Is there any reason to think that the existing or proposed judicial mechanisms for adjudicating or enforcing human rights are biased against the minority group? Have these judicial me­ chanisms treated minorities fairly historically? Is the minority group fairly represented on the judicial bodies? Were these judicial mechan­ isms consensually accepted by the minority when it was incorporated into the country, or is the imposition of these judicial mechan­ isms a denial of historical agreements or trea­ ties which protected the autonomy of the group’s own judicial institutions?

Conclusion I have argued that our aims should be twofold: (1) to supplement individual human rights with minority rights, recognising that the specific combination will vary from country to country; and (2) to find new domestic, regional or transnational mechanisms which will hold governments accountable for re­ specting both human rights and minority rights. If we manage to solve these two (enormous) tasks, then I believe that the commitment to universal human rights need not be culturally biased. Indeed, if we resolve these issues satisfactorily, then the idea of human rights can become what it was always in­ tended to be - namely, a shield for the weak against the abuse of political power, not a weapon of the majority in subjugating minorities. If the present arguments are at all valid, then it

My guess is that in many cases where minority groups object to transnational human rights stan­

46

HUMAN RIGHTS AND E T H NO C UL TU RA L JUSTICE dards, it will be for one of these reasons, rather any inherent conflict between their traditional practices and human rights standards. Where these problems are addressed, I expect that many minority groups will be more than willing to subscribe to human rights standards. I don’t mean to deny the existence of illiberal or anti-democratic practices within minority commu­ nities or non-western societies. But it’s important to note that at least in some cases the existence of such practices is itself the consequence of some prior ethnocultural injustice. That is, many minorities feel compelled to restrict the liberties of their own mem­ bers because the larger society has denied their legitimate minority rights. As Denise Reaume has noted, part of the ‘demonisation’ of other cultures is the assumption that these groups are naturally in­ clined to use coercion against their members. But in so far as some groups seem regrettably willing to use coercion to preserve group practices, this may be due, not to any innate illiberalism, but to the fact that the larger society has failed to respect their minority rights. Unable to get justice from the larger society in terms of protection for its lands and institutions, the minority turns its attention to the only people it does have some control over, namely its own mem­ bers.32 This tendency does not justify the violation of the human rights of group members, but it suggests that before we criticise a minority for imposing such

restrictions on its members, we should first make sure we are respecting all of its legitimate minority rights. In short, the current conflict between local practices and transnational standards may not be the result of a deep attachment to some long-standing ‘tradition’ in the local community, but rather the (regretted) result of some new vulnerability which has arisen from the denial of their minority rights. To be sure, there will be some cases where mem­ bers of a group really do object to the very content of the human rights standard on the grounds that it is inconsistent with their cultural traditions. Even if we solve the problem of minority rights and enforce­ ment mechanisms, we will still find some people rejecting ‘western’ notions of human rights. They will say that restricting the liberty of women or suppressing political dissent is part of their ‘tradition’, and that human rights theories reflect a biased ‘euro­ centric’ and ‘individualistic’ standard.33 These claims may come from minority groups, or indeed from large and powerful majority groups or governments, as in Indonesia or China. I do not want to enter into that debate and the issues of cultural relativism which it raises. As I said earlier, we are all familiar with that debate and I have little to add to it. My aim, rather, is to insist that this is not the only debate we need to have. On the contrary, we may find that such conflicts are fewer once we have properly dealt with the issues of ethnocultural justice.

Notes 1. I’d like to thank David Boucher for inviting me to give the Rees Memorial Lecture and for his hospi­ tality during my stay in Wales. I’d also like to thank David Schneiderman for encouraging me to write this paper, and for his helpful comments. Thanks also to John McGarry for his comments, and to Thomas Nagel and Ronald Dworkin for inviting me to discuss this paper in their Colloquium in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory at New York University in September 1997. (Editor’s note: Professor Kymlicka’s chapter was delivered as the J. C. Rees Memorial Lecture, commemorating the founding professor of the Department of Political Theory and Govern­ ment, on 23 February 1998 at the University of Wales Swansea. The opening remarks of that occa­ sion have been preserved.)

2. 3. 4. 5.

47

Rees (1985). Rees (1971), p. x. Claude (1955), p. 211. There are now several attempts to define a theory of ethnocultural justice in the literature, for example Minow (1990), Young (1990), Kymlicka (1995). It would take a separate paper to explain or defend any particular one. But for the purposes of this paper we can use a minimalist definition of ethnocultural justice as the absence of relations of oppression and humilia­ tion between different ethnocultural groups. A more robust conception of ethnocultural justice could be developed by asking what terms of coexistence would be freely consented to by the members of different ethnocultural groups in a Habermasian/Rawlsian set­ ting where inequalities in bargaining power have been

WI L L K Y M L I C K A

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

neutralised. For example, a Rawlsian approach to ethnocultural justice would ask what terms of coexistence would be agreed to by people behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, who didn’t know whether they were going to be born into a majority or minority ethnocultural group. Such a Rawlsian approach is likely to produce a more demanding conception of ethnocultural justice than the mere absence of oppression and humiliation, but the main claim of this chapter is that human rights are insufficient even to ensure this minimal compo­ nent of ethnocultural justice. See McGarry (1998). See Penz (1992) and (1993). I discuss these cases in Kymlicka (1996). MacDonald, quoted in Stanley (1961), p. 95. Gurr (1993). It would not be hypocritical to criticise minority demands to limit in-migration if one also criticised state policies to limit immigration - that is, if one defended a policy of open borders. But such a policy has virtually no public support, and is certainly not endorsed by most of the people who criticise minority demands. However, this raises an important limita­ tion on my argument. I am discussing what justice requires for minorities in the world as we know it that is, a world of nation-states which retain signifi­ cant control over issues of migration, internal poli­ tical structures and language policies. One could (with difficulty) imagine a very different world - a world without states, or with just one world govern­ ment. The rights of minorities would clearly be different in such a hypothetical world, since the power of majorities would be dramatically reduced, including their ability to impose relations of oppres­ sion and humiliation. My focus, however, is on what ethnocultural justice requires in our world. See also note 20. Cf. Kymlicka (1998). In cases where national mino­ rities are not territorially concentrated different me­ chanisms of disempowerment are often invoked. During the period of devolved rule in Northern Ire­ land (1920-72), for example, the Catholics were disempowered not so much by the gerrymandering of boundaries (although this occurred), but by the adoption of an electoral system (with single-member constituencies and plurality rules) designed to ensure unity within the Protestant majority while ensuring an ineffective Catholic opposition. This is another ex­ ample of how a rhetorical commitment to democracy and human rights can coexist alongside the oppression of a national minority. A related example is the law which existed in Canada prior to 1960 which granted Indians the vote only if they renounced their Indian status, and so abandoned any claim to Aboriginal political or cultural rights. In order to gain a vote in the Canadian political process

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

48

(a process they had no real hope of influencing), they had to relinquish any claims to participate in long­ standing Aboriginal processes of self-government. This transparent attempt to undermine Aboriginal political institutions was justified in the name of promoting ‘democracy’. Avigail Eisenberg, ‘Individualism and Collectivism in the Politics of Canada’s North’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, May 1995. A revised version of this paper will appear in Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender and the Construction of Canada, edited by Joan Anderson, Avigail Eisenberg, Sherril Grace and Ver­ onica Strong-Boag (Vancouver: UBC Press, forthcoming). On the necessity of extensive language rights for the survival and flourishing of linguistic minorities, see Kymlicka (1995), chapter 6. The view that language rights are not part of human rights was explicitly affirmed by the Canadian Su­ preme Court in MacDonald v. City of Montreal [1986] 1 SCR 460; Societe des acadiens du Nouveau-Brunswick v. Minority Language School Board no. 50 [1986] 1 SCR 549. For a comprehensive review of the current status of language rights in international human rights law, see de Varennes (1996). Low enrolment is then often (perversely) cited by majority politicians as evidence that most members of the minority are not interested in preserving their language and culture, and that it is only a few ex­ tremists in the minority group who are the cause of ethnic conflict. This is called the ‘territorial imperative’, and the trend towards territorial concentration of language groups is a widely-noted phenomenon in multilingual western countries. For a more general theoretical account of the ‘territorial imperative’ in multilingual societies, see Laponce (1987) and (1993). This is obviously the rationale given for requiring immigrants to Quebec to send their children to French-language schools. Here again, it would not be hypocritical to criticise minority demands regarding self-government rights and language rights if one applied the same standard to majorities. For example, one could imagine letting the United Nations determine the boundaries and language policies of each state. Imagine that the UN, in a free and democratic vote, decided to merge all countries in the Americas (North, South and Central) into a single Spanish-speaking state. If the anglophone majority in Canada or the United States would accept such a decision - that is, if they were willing to abandon their own self-government powers and language rights - then it would not be hypocritical to criticise the demands of Francophone, Hispanic or

HUMAN RIGHTS AND E T H NO C UL TU RA L JUSTICE

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

Aboriginal minorities in North America. But I don’t know any English-speaking Canadians or Americans who would agree to amalgamate into a single Spanish­ speaking state, even if this merger was supported by most countries in the Americas (and/or by most people living in the Americas). In reality, the anglophone majorities in both the United States and Canada zealously guard their right to live in a state where they form a majority, and their right to have English recognised as a language of public life. This defence of the boundaries and linguistic policies of existing na­ tion-states is as ‘collectivist’ as the demands of mino­ rities for protection of their self-government and language rights. And, in a different way, in the Communist bloc. See Walker Connor’s (1984) account of how Communist leaders dealt with the issues of settlement policy, gerrymandering and linguistic policies, all of which were key policy tools in the Communist approach to national minorities. For the ubiquity of this process, see Gellner (1983). See the related analysis in de Sousa Santos (1996). He argues that attention to the claims of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities can help develop a new ‘non-hegemonic’ conception of human rights which would retain its commitment to protecting the weak and vulnerable without serving as an instrument of western colonialism (for example on p. 353). As a general rule, we should be wary about the claims of elite members of a group to speak authoritatively about the group’s ‘traditions’. Some individuals may claim to speak for the group as a whole, and may say that the group is united against the imposition of ‘alien’ ideas of human rights. But in reality, these people may simply be protecting their privileged position from internal challenges to their interpreta­ tion of the group’s culture and traditions. In other words, debates over the legitimacy of human rights should not necessarily be seen as debates over whether to subordinate local cultural traditions to transnational human rights standards, although this is how conservative members of the group may put it. Instead, debates over human rights are often debates over who within the community should have the authority to influence or determine the interpretation of the community’s traditions and culture. When individual members of the group demand their ‘hu­ man rights’, they often do so in order to be able to participate in the community’s process of interpreting its traditions. For a typology, see my ‘Ethnocultural Minority Groups’, in Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, edited by Ruth Chadwick, (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, forthcoming). For an acute criticism of existing minority rights

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

49

declarations, see Donald Horowitz, ‘Self-Determina­ tion: Politics, Philosophy and Law’, in Kymlicka and Shapiro (eds) (1997), pp. 421-63. It is, at best, an imperfect beginning, in large part due to the Plenary Power which Congress arbitrarily asserts over Indian tribes. See Kronowitz (1987). Indeed, tribal councils in the United States have historically been exempted from having to comply with the federal Bill of Rights, and their internal decisions have not been subject to Supreme Court review. Various efforts have been made by federal legislators to change this, most recently the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, which was passed by Con­ gress despite vociferous opposition from most Indian groups. American Indian groups remain strongly op­ posed to the 1968 Act, just as First Nations in Canada have argued that their self-governing band councils should not be subject to judicial review by the Ca­ nadian Supreme Court under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They do not want their mem­ bers to be able to challenge band decisions in the courts of the mainstream society. See also the analysis in David Schneiderman, ‘Human Rights, Fundamental Differences? Multiple Charters in a Partnership Frame’, in Beyond the Impasse, edited by Guy Laforest and Roger Gibbins (Montreal, In­ stitute for Research on Public Policy, forthcoming). Joseph Carens, ‘Citizenship and Aboriginal Self-Gov­ ernment’ (paper prepared for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Ottawa, 1994). To be sure, some Indian tribal constitutions are not fully liberal or democratic, and so are inadequate from a human rights point of view, but they are forms of constitutional government, and so should not be equated with mob rule or despotism. As Graham Walker notes, it is a mistake to conflate the ideas of liberalism and constitutionalism. There is a genuine category of non-liberal constitutionalism which pro­ vides meaningful checks on political authority and preserves the basic elements of natural justice, and which thereby helps ensure that governments main­ tain their legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects. See Walker, ‘The Idea of Non-Liberal Constitutionalism’, in Kymlicka and Shapiro (eds.) (1997), pp. 154-84. Reaume (1995). As I said earlier, I do not think that the substantive interests protected by human rights doctrines are either individualistic or Eurocentric. However, it may well be that to talk of these interests in terms of ‘rights’ is a specifically European invention which does not fit comfortably with the discourse or selfunderstandings of many cultures. I don’t think we should get hung up on ‘rights talk’. What matters, morally speaking, is that people’s substantive interests in life and liberty are protected, but we should be open-minded about what institutional mechanisms

WI L L K Y M L I C K A best provide this protection. There is no reason to assume that the best way to reliably protect people’s basic interests will always take the form of a judicially enforceable constitutional list of ‘rights’. For a critique

of the language of rights as Eurocentric, see Turpel (1990). On ways to protect the substantive human interests underlying human rights without using the language of ‘rights’, see Pogge (1995).

50

4

LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP Andrew Vincent

sically committed to agency and individualism, then liberalism is the most succinct modern bearer of citizenship claims. This argument is problematic, as we shall see. If, however, we can accept the compound ‘liberal citizenship’, then there are further implications which follow from the intrinsic logic of both citizenship and liberal beliefs. These can be summed up in the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’. The argument for this claim is as follows: the core values of liberal citizenship autonomy, agency, individualism, liberty, rights, equality, justice and so forth - are universalising values. They contain an intrinsic logic which shows that when dealing with the justice, rights or free­ doms of human beings there are no rational grounds to stop at state boundaries. In other words, to think within the ontology of liberal citizenship is to think oneself into cosmopolitanism. This logic would account for the stress often laid on human rights, international justice, cosmopolitan democracy and the like by many liberal theories. Boundaries be­ come morally arbitrary in this context, since we are dealing with humanity as a single moral category. This consideration leads to the concept of ‘inter­ national’ or ‘global citizenship’. Now there are many problems here, not least the legal, moral, political and social implications of this concept. However, my central claim is that it is ‘concep­ tually’ natural for us (‘natural’ in the sense that it appears to be an unforced implication of the con­ cepts we use) to read cosmopolitanism into liberal citizenship. The impact of Kant’s thought upon the modern western intellectual psyche has been pro-

The central argument of this chapter is that liberal­ ism has a strong conceptual relationship with ‘citi­ zenship’ yet citizenship, in turn, has an ambiguous conceptual relationship with nationalism. ‘Liberal citizenship’ is thus at the interstice between two potentially contradictory forces. There are two theses implicit in the issue of liberalism and citizenship, which need to be exam­ ined. The first concerns the cosmopolitan implica­ tion of liberal citizenship; the second concerns the criteria for citizenship in liberal states. First, intuitively, we tend to see a close conceptual relation between liberalism and citizenship. This relation has deep philosophical roots, bound up with ideas of self-determination, autonomy and individu­ alism. The citizen is conceived as markedly different from the subject by dint of possessing, intrinsically, agency. Citizenship denotes choice, an opportunity or space to act. It thus links conceptually with freedom and agency. This intrinsic connection also combines with other fundamental ideas in liberal thought - conscience, rights, equality, free speech and so forth. Thus, there is a more than fortuitous connection between citizenship and liberalism. In the last two centuries, citizenship has been integrally part of a web of liberal values and beliefs. Second, citizenship has a complex and diverse etymological history which will be analysed here. In light of this chapter’s critical focus upon the link with liberalism, it might nevertheless be claimed that since liberalism, above all other social and political theories, embodies a belief in moral and political individualism and agency, and citizenship is intrin­

51

ANDREW VINCENT universe21 This argument alone made Stoicism at­ tractive to Christian thinkers like St Augustine. For Stoics, we dwell both in the community of our birth and the community of human argument, reason and aspiration. Our decisive moral values come from the latter, which is a moral, not a legal community. This does not deny the separateness of peoples, but it argues that such ‘separateness’ is relatively unimpor­ tant in comparison with the wider moral community. Thus, world citizenship should be our ultimate moral focus. The cosmopolitan view, developed under the aegis of Christianised natural law thinking, surfaces again most significantly (for the last century) in the work of Kant.2 For a modem Kantian, like Thomas Pogge, most cosmopolitan arguments contain, firstly, a commitment to individualism as against commu­ nities or tribes; secondly, a belief in universalism, namely that all humans are valued equally; and, thirdly, a sense of generality, that is that cosmopo­ litan concerns are not limited to specific regimes. Persons are of concern to everyone, wherever they are. Our fellow countrymen are no more or less important than anyone else in the world. Pogge also distinguishes types of cosmopolitanism. ‘Legal’ cos­ mopolitanism is committed to a concrete juridical or

found here. It is, therefore, a short step from being a good liberal citizen to being a good member of Amnesty International or being a proponent of international human rights. My own response to this is deeply ambivalent. The core intuition concerning cosmopolitanism is im­ mensely compelling, but it also contains some quite fundamental problems. The deepest problem relates to the link between nationality and citizenship. My discussion will first flesh out the cosmopolitan intuition. Secondly, it will examine the ambiguity of liberalism itself. Thirdly, it will review the diverse senses of citizenship and the ambiguous relation with nationalism. Overall, the chapter draws attention to a complex of ideas which form an unresolved subtext to much current, legal, moral and political thought. Hence it seeks to illuminate the dimensions of the problem and indicate an important topic for further research, one which liberals have tended to overlook but which exposes considerable tensions at the heart of their political thinking.

A Cosmopolitan Intuition As suggested, the central premise of this argument is that citizenship embodies a strong conception of agency which is, in turn, a central value for liberal­ ism. Citizenship - although a concept with a broader ambit - can therefore be seen as a very important element of the liberal perspective, a characteristic liberal motif. The ‘citizen’ can literally (and for­ mally) denote the individual person (agent) with basic legal or moral rights to life, freedom, con­ science and association. However, the central purpose of this section is to substantiate the argument that liberalism embodies, in turn, an underlying cosmopolitan impetus and that the logic of liberal citizenship would appear to be directed towards a global perspective. One of the first western philosophies to expound this cosmopo­ litan perspective was Stoicism. It involved a quite conscious rejection of the singularity and bounded citizenship of the Greek city-state. The citizen/barbarian distinction, common to such Hellenic thought, was anathema to Stoics. As Marcus Aur­ elius put it, ‘my city and my country, so far as I am Antonius, is Rome; but so far as I am a man, it is the

governmental order under which people will have

equal basic rights, as in international courts on hu­ man rights or international codes and covenants. Most commentators see the central problem here of jurisdiction, namely, will the courts be able to en­ force their rulings? ‘Moral’ cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, holds that all persons stand in certain moral relations to each other - mutual concern or respect is incumbent upon us. Every human being is therefore an ultimate unit of moral concern.3 Moral cosmopolitanism can, however, vary in its content with different moral positions. It can thus require simply leaving individuals alone and not harming them (which might equate with a more passive sense of civil citizenship), or taking a definite responsi­ bility for others, even distant individuals (which might entail strong civic duties). The basic ‘logic of citizenship’ argument would be this: citizenship, historically, has been used within states to equalise, generalise and regularise treat­ ment, thus preventing exclusionary practices within

52

LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP Nussbaum therefore contends that we should automatically educate ourselves and our children in a cosmopolitan mode of thought. In so doing, first, we will learn more about ourselves. Education which focuses within national boundaries en­ courages irrationality. To be ignorant of humanity is to be ignorant about ourselves. Second, we can only make headway solving international problems if we acknowledge global issues. The air that citizens breathe and the water they drink, for example, are not confined by national boundaries. Third, we should be troubled by the fact that our high living standards are not more widely available. We should therefore train children in a basic universalising ‘Kantian awareness’, otherwise we will nurture only hypocrites. Nussbaum remarks that if ‘we do believe that all human beings are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, we are morally re­ quired to think about what that conception requires us to do.’7 We should work to acquire knowledge that will enable us to consider these rights seriously. Fourth, nationalist writers often seek to encourage nationals to join hands across racial or economic divisions; why, asks Nussbaum, stop at the arbitrary boundary of the nation - ‘what is it about the national boundary that magically converts people towards whom we are both incurious and indifferent into people to whom we have duties of mutual respect?’8 Multicultural respect within a nation must lead to wider world respect. The ‘respect argument’, in nationalist writers, must carry us in this direction. These arguments of Nussbaum’s clearly illustrate the logic-of-citizenship argument, which Linklater as­ sociates also with Beitz, Pogge and Habermas. Some of these cosmopolitan ideas have been translated into deeply practical concerns. The liberal rights of the citizen to freedom, conscience, proce­ dural justice, speech, or to dissent, can also be seen as universal ‘human’ rights. Although there are pro­ blems with ratification and application, human rights have also been codified and translated into positive legal rights. So far the main obstacle to the full realisation of such rights has been persuading states to agree and work with the United Nations and International Courts. The global citizen is there­ fore one who simply acknowledges universal human rights and believes, either on a personal level or on

states. If citizenship, within the state, is used against exclusionary practices, why not extend it to ‘exclu­ sionary practices’ beyond state boundaries? An ex­ clusionary practice remains an exclusionary practice wherever it appears. What is so significant about state boundaries? Citizenship is thus embroiled in the logic of a universalising ethics which does not necessarily have to stop at the national boundary. Rights before the law, rights of participation and freedom, justice, the requirement for consent, and duties to promote a social good (all implicit within citizenship), are all potentially universalisable. Thus, for Andrew Linklater, recent theorists like Charles Beitz and Jurgen Habermas who appear to be engaging in this kind of reasoning ‘universalise ideas about consent and dia­ logue which are intrinsic to citizenship in the domes­ tic domain’ and ‘enlarge the meaning of citizenship by conferring rights of participation on every member of the species.’4 Moral universalism thus arises automa­ tically out of domestic liberal citizenship. One comparatively recent example of the above argument is deployed by Martha Nussbaum. Using a Stoic analogy, she contends that we should think of ourselves as surrounded by concentric circles: the self, the family, the neighbourhood, the city, the country and humanity. We cannot ignore our lo­ cality, but we must work to make all humans part of our community, drawing all the circles to the centre. For Nussbaum, we should therefore ‘recognise humanity wherever it occurs, and give its funda­ mental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance as respect.’5 She puts the point well when she states that I believe that . . . [the] emphasis on patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve . . . These goals . . . would be better served by an ideal that is any case more adequate to our situation in the contemporary world, namely the very old idea of the cosmopo­ litan, the person whose allegiance is to the world­ wide community.6 Even good nationalism ultimately subverts the values it upholds.

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ANDREW VINCENT and must take precedence over collective goals.9 Michael Walzer characterises this procedural liberal­ ism as

the institutional level of international courts and conventions, that he or she should accept the duties correlative to such rights. There is a major problem here, namely that statebased citizens have a rich panoply of well-established positive rights, whereas the global citizen’s rights are, in comparison, thin. One way out of this dilemma for some theorists would be to argue for an extension of international legal organisations, expanded interna­ tional courts of human rights and at the most ex­ treme end, an elected parliament at the United Nations. In the latter scenario, states which recog­ nised cosmopolitan citizenship would provide full diplomatic and economic support to the UN, pro­ mote arms control, uphold human rights, and pro­ vide generous foreign aid. These ideas are speculative, although not overly so. The fact that we have international commissions, like that on Global Governance with their report Our Global Neighbourhood, indicates that many take such ideas very seriously. As such the logic of global citizenship certainly shows little sign of diminishing in world politics. The discussion now turns to three crucial, over­ lapping ambiguities, which are often glossed over, in the above arguments. These are, first, the ambiguity of liberalism itself; second, the ambiguity of citizen­ ship qua liberalism; and thirdly, the ambiguous rela­ tion of nationalism, liberalism and citizenship. By explaining and analysing each, the nature of liberal­ ism’s problem here will become more fully apparent.

committed in the strongest possible way to in­ dividual rights and, almost as a deduction from this, to a rigorously neutral state, that is, a state without cultural or religious projects or, indeed, any sorts of collective goals beyond freedom and physical security.’10 This is a view that one finds, according to Charles Taylor, in writers like Rawls, Dworkin and Acker­ man.11 This conception of liberal society has no substantive view about the ends of human life. Rather, society is united behind an idea of equal respect. For Taylor, the roots to this procedural view are very deep. Kant is probably the single most important figure articulating this perspective. Hu­ man dignity focuses on autonomy and the ability of the individual to determine their own notion of the good life. Taylor has his own thoughts on the problems that this notion of liberalism has caused in the Canadian situation. For him, procedural liberalism enshrines a politics of equal respect which is hostile or indifferent to difference, because it insists on the uniform application of rights and is thus suspicious of any collective goal. Second, social or ‘new’ liberalism appeared in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s, although variants also developed in America with John Dewey, in Italy with writers such as Guido de Ruggiero, and in Germany in the writings of Albert Lange and Karl Vorlander. Social liberal thought was committed to collective welfare goals pursued through the state. It was thus statist, but not overtly nationalist. Essen­ tially, social liberals were reacting to certain themes present within classical liberalism, notions like ato­ mised individualism, the negative conception of liberty, the radically free market economy and mini­ mal state theory. They wished to replace these with a more socialised, holistic and developmental under­ standing of the individual, a more ‘positive’ concep­ tion of liberty linked to notions like self-realisation and self-development, a conception of a mixed economy and a more responsive, collectivised and ethical conception of the state. State intervention

Liberalism Is liberalism a clear doctrine such that we could postulate a particular understanding of a potentially cosmopolitan citizenship, as outlined in the previous section? The quickest response is ‘no’: differing conceptions of liberalism provide divergent re­ sponses to the question. There have been many typologies of liberalism and so, to survey such re­ sponses, the following argument draws a distinction between three types of liberalism: classical liberalism, social liberalism and cultural liberalism. First, the classical view (a predominantly proce­ dural view, certainly in its modem guise), which insists that individual rights must always come first

54

LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP might not share beliefs with social liberals about, say, the market. It only affirms that culture is immensely important for choice and that groups, as well as individuals, have rights. There is therefore nothing inherently to stop cultural liberalism from being assimilated with either an older variant of classical liberalism (one less overtly procedural, like J. S. Mill’s liberalism) or, alternatively, social liberalism. Cultural liberalism might thus legitimately share a classical liberal antipathy to distributive justice and the welfare state - especially if the existent cultures embody that antipathy. It therefore seems to have no specific economic or political content. Secondly, cultural liberalism arrests, but does not undermine, the argument for citizenship leading to cosmopolitanism. Because cultural liberalism tends to be more sympathetic to liberal nationalism, its universalising appeal is stunted. Thirdly, because social liberalism is statist and centralist in content, it is ideologically antipathetic to classical liberalism. It would also have little sympathy with cultural goods and group rights. Further and crucially, because it sees citizenship in the context of the state, it would also inhibit the force of any cosmopolitan argument. Fourthly, classical liberalism is intrinsically critical of the statism of social liberalism. It also feels deep unease with the cultural goods and group rights being pursued at the expense of individual rights and procedural justice. Thus classical liberalism is, oddly, most susceptible to the cosmopolitan thesis outlined in the previous section. It is, literally, much easier to universalise the generic negative individual rights of classical liberal­ ism - life, liberty, property. Yet, at the same time, most recent postcolonial writers see classical liberal­ ism as the expression, par excellence, of a particular historically oppressive community. In this latter scenario, minimal generic rights are no longer con­ sidered through the lens of cosmopolitanism, but rather through imperialism. This critical argument has, paradoxically, been applied to the treatment of internal minorities, even within the U SA , by Iris Marion Young. Rights-talk and notions of neutrality are conceived of as modes of group and cultural domination.

was premised upon the common good and the full realisation of human personalities. It implied a de­ licate balance between self-government and corpo­ rate government action. The new liberals were, in effect, developing the embryonic form of the Woffartstaat. Their arguments were rooted in evolution­ ary theory, social utilitarianism and philosophical idealism.12 Thirdly, cultural liberalism, which developed in reaction particularly to procedural liberalism. Cul­ tural liberals promote the conception of collective cultural goods, such as the French language for the Quebeckers. This view of liberalism has been devel­ oped by Will Kymlicka, among others and it claims that classical, procedural liberalism overemphasises individual rights against collective goals. For classical liberals, communities (and cultural goals) have no moral existence. For Kymlicka, however, group and individual rights are not necessarily opposed. He thus tries to defend group rights within the framework of cultural liberalism. The crux of his move is to suggest that when we exercise our liberty it ‘is determined by our cultural heritage.’13 Agency requires culture. Culture provides the content of choice, its norms and historical heritage. Thus, ‘the primary good being recognised is the cultural community as a context of choice.’14 Contrary to his perception of communitarians, Kymlicka thinks that we can ab­ stract ourselves from ways of life and criticise them. We can be thus ‘unencumbered’. We do not just discover views and we are not haplessly trapped by them. Cultural liberalism, therefore, distinguishes fundamental liberties from privileges and immu­ nities. Provided the exponents of collective goals and cultural goods respect the fundamental rights of minorities and individuals, they can still be consid­ ered liberal. This liberalism is seen as more sensitive to ‘cultural survivals’ and, for Taylor, is the most relevant model for contemporary porous and cultu­ rally diverse societies. Liberalism has to do more than let differences exist. It has to recognise the ‘worth’ of different cultures. Some very general claims can be made concerning liberalism and cosmopolitanism from this brief sur­ vey. First, cultural liberalism is the least politically distinctive of the three in that it tells us little about the nature of the state or welfare. Thus, it might or

55

ANDREW VINCENT on aspects of Sieyes’s use of the term ‘active citizen’. However, the active sense of the citizen also refers (in my use) to a more rigorous conception of political involvement, which was revealed at certain mo­ ments during the French revolution, and harks back to an older civic tradition. In my usage, the active conception conceives of the citizen as politically involved and identified with the wider community. Such an idea can be found - in differing formats - in the doctrines of Aristotelianism, some civic repub­ licanism and the later Rousseauist and Hegelian traditions. It can also be found implicitly in some recent expressions in communitarian thought. The active/passive divide bears some conceptual parallels with the distinction, made by Benjamin Constant, between ancient and modern liberty. Another way of formulating it is in terms of ‘civic citizenship’ and ‘civil citizenship’. The civic idea corresponds with the activist vision and the civil with the more passive tradition. The category of civic or active citizenship is the oldest view. The good of the individual citizen was seen as closely tied to the common good of the polis. It implied, say, for Aristotle, minimally, membership of a city-state, the possession of certain claims and duties, the duty to participate in the adjudication processes of the polis (at least in Athens) and, finally, an inner capacity for rational virtue, entailing the internalisation of communal norms - an art of both ruling and being ruled. The themes of political selfdiscipline, public spirit, a conception of the common good, unease with private gain and self-interest, and a belief in simplicity and piety of life were reasserted in the later civic republican tradition. Again, the active citizen was one who (mythically or not) gladly and intelligently participated in the promotion of the public good. The civic world of the small citystate was more overtly small-scale and defensive in its stance. Its citizenry, despite being mobilised to a common task were, nonetheless, premised upon a large body of non-citizen slaves and foreign workers. The spectre of civic citizenship developed once more with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth cen­ tury. Its ethos, though, was ‘more creative and protective, stressing liberation rather than de­ fence.’16 However it is couched, one major criticism of

Citizenship The upshot of the previous section is the suggestion that, given the profoundly contestable character of liberalism, the initial intuition concerning cosmo­ politan citizenship looks less secure. Indeed, some senses of liberalism might be at odds with cosmopo­ litanism. The same observation also applies to citi­ zenship itself, as this section will now demonstrate by surveying examples of both its theory and empirical practice. On the theoretical level, there are certain con­ ceptual parameters which reveal the dimensions of the concept. These parameters are active and passive notions of the citizen, the character of rights and duties and their correlativity. The origin of the terms ‘active’ and ‘passive’ is debatable, but they can be found in the writings of the Abbe Sieyes. (Sieyes’s use is not quite my present usage, although there are sufficient parallels to warrant discussion here.) For Sieyes, passive citizenship referred essentially to the natural and civil rights of individuals. Such rights concern the protection of all persons equally in their liberty and property. For Sieyes, despite the fact that all persons within a state possess passive rights, not all can take part in the ‘formation of public power’. Passive citizenship is thus available to all. A ctive

citizens, on the other hand, are those who ‘contri­ bute to the public establishment’ and can be likened to ‘true shareholders in the great social enterprise’. A t the time, active citizenship excluded women, foreigners and children, who were all regarded as ‘passive citizens’. However, within the class or group of ‘active citizens’ no one has more rights than anyone else. It is worth noting here that active citizens are not discussed by Sieyes primarily in the context of rights. Active citizenship, although it incorporated concep­ tions of political voting rights, also included a sense of higher vocation. Taking part in the ‘great public enterprises’ is seen more by Sieyes in terms of the performance of public duties. He thus remarks that, ‘it is a major error to envisage the exercise of public power as a right; it is . . . a duty. The officers of the nation are distinguished from other citizens only in having more duties.’15 In terms of the present discussion I wish to pick up

56

LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP it also incorporates political rights to vote or stand for office. The argument about political rights de­ pends upon how significant one regards them; it is arguable that such rights can still be viewed as quasi­ passive notions. As one recent writer has noted, ‘the occasional visit to the polling booth has seemed to many a pathetically inadequate definition of citizen­ ship.’18 Some writers, like Schumpeter, have of course made a virtue of this quasi-passivity. How­ ever, the intuition to grasp here is the point that political citizenship, as it has been conventionally understood, can be viewed as constrained, passive and perfectly in accord with classical liberal theory. In sum, citizenship in classical liberal thought is generally confined to a relatively narrow field, being defined in terms of constrained political rights to political involvement, combined with legal or civil rights of persons, their liberty and their property, which prohibit mutual coercion. Classical liberal thought on citizenship generally excludes rights and entitlements to economic and social resources. A well-established criticism of civil citizenship is that it is too minimalist. It ignores the socially and historically embedded (or encumbered) character of individuals and abandons any clear sense of perfec­ tionism, community and nationality. This is a char­ acteristic criticism made of deontological and consequentialist liberal individualism, to the present day, by communitarians. The citizen of deontological liberal individualism could be described as a ‘mini­ mal citizen’, essentially being the other side of the minimal state. Turning now to the parameters of rights and duties, the older tradition of civic or active citizen­ ship did not have such a rich vocabulary of rights at its disposal. Aristotelian-influenced proponents of active citizenship tended to speak more in terms of the duties of the citizen or what was due to the citizen. The assertion of the importance for citizens to perform their civic duty was not therefore neces­ sarily premised on any correlative right, rather what was due to and from the common good. Later ex­ ponents of a more active vision of citizenship, like T. H. Green, transformed this form of argument into the vocabulary of rights, although, characteristically, it was usually the vocabulary of social (ethicised) rights, not natural or human rights. Such socio-legal

‘civic citizenship’ is that, at its extreme, the citizen will be asked to participate continuously in every aspect of political life. The public realm would totally absorb the private realm of the individual. Liberals, from Constant to Isaiah Berlin, have been profoundly worried by such arguments as potentially undermining the value of individual liberty and privacy. Ralf Dahrendorf has referred to this com­ munal conception as the ‘total citizen’.17 The total citizen and the total state would be seen, in this argument, as two sides of the same coin. The civil citizen, on the other hand, is a product of the era of developing individualism and embryonic liberal thought. The citizen is understood as separate and, at least partially preformed, with desires, inter­ ests and often basic (natural) rights. The function of a constitutional legal order is to protect and uphold these fundamental interests or rights. Citizenship is thus conceived more negatively in terms of the legal protection of pre-existing rights to life, liberty and property. The private moralities of the individual are distinct from the formal but minimal public ethics of citizenship. For classical liberal theorists, although individuals may have lost some of the benefits of close communal life, nonetheless they gained from the privacy, modern liberty and new-found prosper­ ity of commercial liberal society. Later nineteenthand twentieth-century versions of this understanding of citizenship extends further into features like po­ litical representation. Civil citizenship, in my usage, is thus more con­ ventionally associated with classical liberalism, im­ plying negative rights (understood largely as ‘sideconstraints’) to protection of one’s person, property and liberty. The classical liberal view of citizenship thus favours limited political rule, a framework of laws and minimal welfare. Markets are the preferred technique for allocation of resources. Essentially, this is a more procedural view of politics. Politics does not pursue any particular social or moral goals. The consequences of this for citizenship are that indivi­ duals secure maximum negative liberty. They are left alone and free from coercion. The good citizen therefore upholds the rule of law and equal liberty for all. This is the conventional liberal Rechtstaat. However, this is not a purely passive conception within classical liberal thought. In my own reading,

57

ANDREW VINCENT rights were also usually conceptually tied - in the case of Idealist thinkers - to a conception of the common good. The civic citizenship tradition also embodied a strong correlativity thesis. Rights were premised on the common good. Such rights implied that the citizen had correlative duties to that good. Citizen­ ship was not just a juridical category or an indication of nationality. It implied rather the consciousness of the ends of human life as embodied in the institu­ tional forms of the public life. It was thus an ethical disposition, where the individual developed to a level of self-consciousness and ethical awareness inclusive enough to be identified with the public sphere of the whole community. The conception of definite individualistic rights was more characteristic of civil citizenship. Rights expressed, ontologically, the separate or independent identity of individuals. They were claims asserted against other individuals, groups or states. The more general of such rights - natural and human rights were fundamental claims to life, liberty, happiness, property, speech, opinion, association and so forth. Such rights correlated loosely with duties of forbear­ ance or non-interference, usually with the proviso that such rights did not overtly injure or harm others. They did not, characteristically, demand positive public action by any individual - except in the duty to discharge one’s debts and fulfil contracts. They were usually more negatively protective rights, im­ plying passive and relatively costless duties. This latter conception of rights is, to some extent, en­ capsulated in the categories of civil and political citizenship, discussed by T. H. Marshall in his locus classicus account of citizenship, Citizenship and Social Class. For Marshall, civil citizenship, which he saw developing from the early eighteenth century, im­ plied a comprehensive equality of rights to civil freedoms, which might broadly be called ‘constitu­ tional’ freedoms. Political citizenship, which devel­ oped gradually over the nineteenth century, concerned the extension of suffrage rights, namely the right to participate in the political process which determines the condition of one’s life. The problematic category in the Marshall schema is ‘social citizenship’. It was still deeply individualis­ tic and rights-orientated, but it also embodied col­

lective goals and claims to collective resources. Social citizenship, as it developed in the twentieth century, was more characteristic of a different species of liberalism - social liberalism. In many ways social liberalism was a hybrid of the civic and civil forms of citizenship. The social liberal case is essentially that individual citizens are morally justified in claiming a particular economic status and a right to resources, via the welfare state and social justice. The social liberal theorist therefore wants to extend arguments beyond civil and political rights to social rights. Marshall recognised that this created immense pro­ blems and strains for a liberal capitalist society problems which he never claimed to resolve. The more empirical approach to the citizenship issue raises a different range of problems. First, citizenship - despite all that has been said earlier - empirically is a technique of exclusion. The state is a state of a bounded citizenry. It is about closure. Citizenship creates the concept of a foreigner, an alien. Second, the character of citizenship changes between state traditions, even liberal-democratic states. This change is one that crucially cross-cuts the civic/civil distinction outlined above. The two best-known ways of conceiving the citi­ zen has been the jus soli and the jus sanguinis con­ ceptions. Jus sanguinis associates citizenship with direct descent and blood relations. If one can trace direct blood or birthright descent then citizenship is automatic. In jus soli citizenship follows prolonged residence or birth within a territory. There are usually combinations of these in most countries. Thus, in the UK since 1981, where one parent must be lawfully resident and settled, then birth in the territory gives citizenship. France and Germany offer purer examples of the two conceptions. Two phenomena affected the German case - the Prussian state and romanticism. The Prussian state view of the citizen was a corollary of the absolutist state in intrinsic conflict with the older, medieval Standestaat Territorial residence took precedence in the Prussian conception. The romantic movement provided more of a background ‘pattern of thought’. The aesthetic socio-historical idiom of romanticism was ideally suited for the misty formulations of ethnocultural ideas, namely conceptions of unique­ ness, inwardness, feeling over reason and organic

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LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP would be the bad citizen. Self-determination (in individuals or nations) was conceived in terms of the universal demand for liberty. The doctrine of the ‘citizen’ and the ‘citizen-nation’ moved hand-inhand. Republican ideology usually emphasised mili­ tary service as a key factor here. Schools and the army were engines of assimilation. Second- and third-generation immigrants in France became citi­ zens and were expected to save the nation militarily. National purpose and assimilation were reinforced in the Third Republic by the civilising mission of the French nation. French citizenship was therefore al­ ways a peculiar brand of chauvinism and universalism. Before the 1870s it was very much a liberal and radical push; after the 1870s it migrated to the right, reaching an ascendancy in the Dreyfus Affair. The left still, however, promulgated universalism through imperialism. Ethnocultural criteria did appear in France in the mid-1800s.20 As they developed, the French idea of the citizen lost some of its universalising aspect. In Arthur de Gobineau’s work citizenship and nation­ alism began to take on racial dimensions, a theme reflected in Taine, Renan and Thierry, particularly after the Franco-Prussian war. Still, the issue of citizenship has exercised the French Republican tradition, even to the present day. Whereas the Dreyfusard ethnocultural line of thought is still represented in the Front Nationale, republican thought remains motivated by an underlying, if semi-dormant, cosmopolitanism.

growth over conscious artifice. These latter ideas provided a frame for jus sanguinis, developing be­ tween 1871 and 1913. Before 1913, German citizen­ ship was a partly contradictory affair. The older Prussian absolutist model of the citizen - as member of territorial community - jostled with the ethno­ cultural ‘community of descent’ idea. It was the latter which won out, largely in 1913 with citizenship legislation which established the concept of Auslandsdeutsche. This legislation aimed at the preserva­ tion of the pure German Volkstum. Citizenship was severed from questions of residence. Blood and des­ cent now became critical. The difference between the Wilhelmine and the National Socialist ideas of citizenship was that in the latter there was a definite ideology of ethnocultural dominance, coupled with the desire to deprive groups of citizenship. In the Wilhelmine case, the ideology was not so well-developed and the desire was rather to prevent immigrants acquiring citizenship. As R o­ gers Brubaker comments, ‘remarkably, German citi­ zenship today remains governed by a law of the Wilhelmine period.’ He continues: As a result of this continuity across two world wars, three regime changes, and the division and reunification of the country, the marked restric­ tiveness of citizenship law towards non-German immigrants was carried over from the Wilhelmine Germany into the Federal Republic and, in 1990, into the new German nation-state. The 1913 system of jus sanguinis, with no trace of jus soli continues to determine the citizenship status of immigrants and their descendants today.19

Nationality, Liberalism and Citizenship How does citizenship link up liberalism and nation­ ality? The French case is particularly instructive here. French citizenship traditionally involved a core of universal human or natural rights. The declaration of 1789 speaks stridently of the rights of ‘man’ and ‘citizen’. The rights involved are ‘imprescriptible’ and ‘inalienable’, and governments are instituted to uphold them. Thus, ‘the end of all political associations, is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man’. The French National Assembly ‘recognises such “sacred” rights. It does not create them. All men are all born free and equal, with respect to these rights’; thus ‘civil distinctions can be

It is important to note here (in my reading) that we are still looking at a liberal state in Germany, but its citizenship is deeply exclusive and measured by blood descent. Something does not seem to be quite right here. The French case is more interesting yet for my purpose, namely the question concerning the universalising aspect of citizenship. In the French case, jus soli is predominant. The drive for citizenship was always state-centred and assimilationist. It was part of a revolutionary republican tradition. In its purest universalist reading, the only foreigner in France

59

ANDREW VINCENT founded only on public utility.’ Yet, at the same time as these assertions, the nation is also conceived of as sovereign. Thus, no individual or group are ‘entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it.’ So what is the relation between the nation and the universal cosmopolitan rights of man? The profoundly direct (but also equivocal) answer is that the nation is the will of the whole community of citizens and it embodies the imprescriptible rights of humanity within its own prescriptions. Law and government, as an expression of the national will, are only there to give ‘security to the rights of man and of citizens’. Thus, ‘the acts of the legislative and executive powers of government, [can be] . . . every moment compared with the ends of political institu­ tions.’21 The above forms the substance of my analysis of this question and my key theme. Particularistic nationalism and cosmopolitanism coexist, simulta­ neously, in liberal citizenship. Strikingly, it is actu­ ally possible to assert simultaneously an extreme chauvinism and an extreme cosmopolitanism. In the case of jus sanguinis, the particularism and inclu­ siveness comes to the fore unproblematically. Eth­ nocultural citizenship links easily with racism, nationalism and cultural liberalism. The liberal citizenship/nationalism connection is thus more ob­ vious here. However, jus soli, particularly in the French republican tradition, reveals more clearly the intrinsic ambiguity of liberal citizenship, namely its continual alternation between cosmopolitanism and particularism. Liberalism, generically, often represents itself as a form of historical emancipation from older political traditions - the conventional portrayal of status to contract or the release from the medieval Standestaat. Liberal citizenship sees itself as removing feudal shackles. It casts off the ‘subjecthood’ status of in­ dividuals under absolute monarchy or feudalism. Liberal rights theory thus rejects conceptions of status based upon birth or position. There is, there­ fore, an insistent ‘progressive Whig’ logic or dialectic to ideas of equality and freedom. Such ideas, it is suggested, cannot be checked by any hierarchical regime. Liberal citizenship identified equal rights with individuals as individuals. Citizenship is, there­

fore, a central motif within liberalism, and liberalism has always believed in equality of individual rights, regardless of race, gender, class or birth. In the French Republican tradition particularly, in the classical liberal tradition, there has been a strong leaning to some form of cosmopolitanism. Yet, co­ existing with this universalising dialectic is the na­ tion - usually read through the state. As Rogers Brubaker has put it: Almost all [states] claim to derive state power from and exercise it for (and not simply over) a nation . . . A state is a nation-state in this minimal sense insofar as it claims (and is under­ stood) to be a nation’s state: the state ‘o f and ‘for’ a particular, distinctive, bounded nation . . . How the state-bearing and state-justifying nation is culturally or legally bounded is irrelevant; that it is bounded is what matters.22 One has only to think of the commonplace usage of ‘citizenship law’, as directly synonymous with ‘na­ tionality law’, to see the truth of this point. The above observation creates an oddity in the liberal argument outlined above. In the context of the nation, the citizen has rights which are premised on the natural arbitrariness of birth, even in the jus soli and liberal settings. In one sense, closure is pragmatically necessary, for the purposes of military service, taxation and public administration. Yet the nation, birth, citizen relation is stronger than simple pragmatism. Given the history that liberalism re­ lates, and given its lurking cosmopolitanism, something strange is taking place. As Brubaker comments: [Citizenship] represents a striking exception to the secular trend away from ascribed statuses. And it is difficult to reconcile with a central claim perhaps the central claim of liberal political the­ ory: the idea that political membership ought to be founded on individual consent.23 The ascription of rights based on birth or blood descent is at odds with the panoply of liberal rights and liberal agency, in general, and yet they all coexist within liberal citizenship.

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LIBERALISM AND CITIZENSHIP more cynical appraisal of this would be Gray’s nicely sour observation of ‘Kantianism in one country’. For Ackerman, the poor Europeans would, however, be condemned to be ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. But note the problem in Ackerman’s view of the precise character of the national mission and liberal universalism. There are a number of liberal states where global citizenship can be seen as an extension of their own rights structures. Yet, different inter­ pretations of both liberalism and cosmopolitanism are inevitably involved. North Americans might well embrace generic liberal rights (on a civil level) but not widespread distributive justice (social and social-democratic rights) let alone specific cultural rights. Social rights and demands for widespread redistribution would be a universalisation of civil citizenship. Others might see distributive justice and social rights as a logical extension of human rights to life. If this happened, it would imply large transfers of wealth across the globe. However, since this latter conception has been to date reliant upon social liberal or social-democratic sovereign states, it is an unlikely international scenario. France, on the other hand, would give full legal rights within its Republican notion of citizenship. These would in­ clude civil, political and social rights. But this would not necessarily allow any special or cultural rights and would also imply an unacceptable level of im­ perial control. Thus the implications of ‘liberalism’ and ‘citizen­ ship’ seem to be inevitably linked - but the tensions and countervailing currents exposed here show just how the nature of this common fate remains pro­ foundly unclear.

Conclusion We can now appreciate exactly how liberal citizen­ ship is at the interstice between contradictory forces, incorporating both an embracing cosmopolitanism and an exclusive nationalism. There are, though, a number of forms of exclusion and some are more problematic than others. But still the exclusions of citizenship do not rest easily with the cosmopolitan dialectic. The nationalist/birth connection of citi­ zenship does not readily conjoin with the liberal narrative. The two theses discussed in this chapter the cosmopolitan implication of liberal citizenship and the potentially illiberal criteria for liberal citizen­ ship - present us with a dilemma. Another, possibly simpler, way of framing the unease here is through Veit Bader’s recent reflections on transnational ci­ tizenship. Bader, reflecting procedural and cultural liberalism, remarks that procedural liberalism ‘has underestimated the importance of communities and cultures.’ But cultural liberalism, which he describes as ‘communitarian liberalism’, has actively taken culture and nation on board, but to Bader has ‘not yet fully addressed the exclusionary effects of communities and cultures.’24 I would add to this the point that even procedural liberalism subsists with radical exclusion. A number of thinkers appear to want to address this dilemma. Bruce Ackerman, for example, has described himself as a ‘rooted cosmopolitan’.25 Lib­ eral universalism is seen to be virtually implicit within the United States Constitution. Conse­ quently, Ackerman is therefore provisionally per­ suaded to ‘embrace the American Constitution’. A

Notes 1. Heater (1990), p. 12. 2. Kant argued for the moral autonomy of states within a voluntary league of states committed to maintain peace. A liberal constitutional republic would thus be inclined, in his view, to international peace. Liberal theory, qua Kant, conceives of citizenship in terms of contract and consent. The citizen comes to the state ideally or actually with entitlements. The citizen will agree to limitations for the common good. Liberal citizenship is thus a bearer or vehicle of rights within the state. 3. Thomas Pogge proposes two forms of moral cosmo­ politanism: ‘institutional’ and ‘interactional’. Institu­

tional cosmopolitanism assigns moral responsibility (for example, maintaining and promoting human rights) to institutional schemes. It is dependent upon the existence and maintenance of human rights through institutions. Some argue, in this scenario, for supranational state-like institutions to be set up. Interactional cosmopolitanism is ‘ethical’ in the sense that it assigns moral responsibility to individual or collective agencies. Each person is equally a subject of moral concern. Note that there is no necessary link here between the institutional and interactional/ethical types. One could therefore believe in the institu-

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ANDREW VINCENT tional conception and not adhere to the ethical. Equally, one could be an ethical cosmopolitan and not believe in an institutional setting or, at least, a central world state. Therefore, even if one rejects world government, it does not lead to a rejection of moral cosmopolitanism. See T. Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitan^ ism and Sovereignty’, in Brown (ed.) (1994), pp. 89-

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

122. 4. Linklater (1992), p. 32. 5. M. Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in Cohen (ed.) (1996), pp. 2-17, at p. 7. 6. Ibid., p. 4. 7. Ibid., p. 13. 8. Ibid., p. 14. 9. This is close to Michael Sandel’s use of the term ‘procedural republic’ for this liberalism. See Sandel (1984). 10. Walzer, ‘Comment,’ in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), pp. 99-103, at p. 99; see also Habermas in the same volume, p. 123ff. 11. For Taylor, the ‘procedural’ view is best encapsulated in Dworkin’s early paper on ‘Liberalism’; see Taylor ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in ibid., p. 56. 12. The term ‘new liberal’ is immensely complex and contested. I have not attempted to examine it, but have largely taken for granted in this chapter that we can speak of its ideology and social theory. This is by no means an uncontroversial position. My own at­ tempt to summarise and assess some of the diverse

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

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accounts of the new liberalism can be found in Vincent (1990). Kymlicka (1989), p. 165. Ibid., p. 172. Quoted in Forsyth (1987), pp. 117-19. Kelley (1995), p. 91. Dahrendorf (1974). Heater (1990), p. 96. Brubaker (1994), p. 165. Ibid., p. 99: ‘The legal nationality conferred by the state and the ethnocultural nationality invoked by the “principle of nationality” are of course different things; the former may be conferred in utter disregard of the latter. Yet the thrust of the principle of nation­ ality was precisely to connect the two - not directly . . . but indirectly via the redrawing of po­ litical boundaries so as to make legal and ethnocultural nationality converge.’ Tom Paine’s translation of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens’ by the National Assembly of France (1789), in Ritchie (ed.) (1954), pp. 291-2. Brubaker (1994), p. 28. Debates about both nation­ ality and citizenship are also closely associated with distinct state traditions, although this is an even bigger issue. Ibid., pp. 31-2. See Bader (1997), p. 772. Ackerman (1994).

5

T HE S W O R D OF F A I T H A N D T HE S H I E L D OF F E AR : L I B E R A L I S M A N D T HE P OWE R OF T HE N A T I O N Margaret Canovan

former is cosmopolitan in its appeal as well as its aspirations, though it is particularly well represented among political thinkers in the U SA . The latter has always had a narrower academic base. On this side of the Atlantic it is particularly (though not exclu­ sively) associated with a school of political thinkers influenced by Michael Oakeshott.4 To provide a frame for these two different sorts of liberalism, I shall begin with some of Oakeshott’s own reflections on two contrasted styles of politics, which corre­ spond neatly to the versions of liberalism with which we shall be concerned.

When the terms ‘Liberal’ and ‘Liberalism’ first ar­ rived in English politics in the early nineteenth century, they indicated support for national libera­ tion in Greece and South America.1 The struggle of oppressed nations for freedom continued to be a liberal cause, so much so that liberalism has over the past two centuries been as closely associated with nationalism as internationalism.2 Revulsion against fascism after the Second World War weakened this association except in the case of anti-colonial move­ ments; liberals became more wary of nationalism, and the dominant strand in liberal political thinking during the past half-century has been cosmopolitan. Even so, we have recently seen a revival of liberal nationalism among philosophers who argue that liberal respect for individuals and their rights entails respect for the national identities those individuals value.3 Despite obvious tensions, therefore, liberalism and nationalism do have affinities. I shall argue that the connections go deeper than one might suppose and that even versions of liberalism that are explicitly hostile to nationalism rely for much of their plausi­ bility on tacit assumptions about the presence and efficacy of nationhood. I shall try to show that this is equally true of two sharply opposed contemporary versions of liberalism: on the one hand, the crusading liberalism of universal human rights, and on the other the sceptical liberalism of limited government. The

The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism Oakeshott was fond of dichotomous analyses of political styles. His celebrated contrast between ‘ra­ tionalism in politics’ and the practical activity of ‘attending to the arrangements’ of a society5 was followed by the more elaborate analysis in On Hu­ man Conduct of two opposed understandings of the modern state, as an ‘enterprise association’ (universitas) and in terms of ‘civil association’ (societas).6 Each of these contrasts carried the message that the former of the two types of politics was dominant in the modem world but that the latter was to be preferred. The contrast that concerns us here is a third variant on the same theme, elaborated in an

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MARGARET CANOVAN essay (published posthumously) on ‘The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism’. For the past five hundred years (according to Oakeshott), European politics has been marked by a tension between the two opposed styles named in the essay’s title. Although the two have mingled in practice, they can in principle be characterised as opposites.7 These two ideal types bear obvious resemblances to Oakeshott’s more familiar pair of antagonists, but the characterisation is more vivid than in the case of universitas and societas and the treatment considerably more even-handed than in the case of political ‘rationalism’ and its rival. Those who practice ‘the politics of faith’ (so Oakeshott would have us believe) approach the business of government with ambition and confi­ dence, for within this style ‘the activity of governing is understood to be in the service of the perfection of mankind.’8 Political action (it is assumed) can achieve such perfection in this world, though Oake­ shott stresses that the ‘perfection’ aimed at can be understood in many different ways. Seventeenthcentury projects for using the state to establish a godly commonwealth stand alongside the secular projects of the last two hundred years under the banner of the politics of faith.9 Interestingly, the projects Oakeshott had earlier called ‘rationalist’ fall within this category: ‘faith’ should be seen as the opposite not of reason but of scepticism. The most important political implication of this faith in the capacity of government to save mankind is that it justifies great increases in power. No legalistic re­ strictions can be allowed to stand in the way of such a crusade, with the result that government becomes an ‘unlimited activity’ and even a ‘godlike adventure.’10 The ‘politics of scepticism’ differs from this in ways that any reader of Oakeshott might expect. Political sceptics have lower expectations of government, together with greater suspicion of power. Instead of looking to power to save the world, they deny that it has any single overriding purpose. Rather, it is a matter of maintaining order, moderating the con­ flicts that continually arise in human affairs and trying to minimise concentrations of arbitrary power. Rule according to settled law is crucial, as is the gradual development and maintenance of institu­ tions that check power. Although such concerns

may seem unglamorous, ‘the sceptic understands order as a great and difficult achievement never beyond the reach of decay and dissolution,’11 so that a political system that can properly carry out these modest tasks is doing very well. Although these two styles of politics can be pre­ sented in ideal-typical form, Oakeshott maintains that they have been continuously intermingled with­ in European political traditions, and he even suggests that neither is sufficient without some infusion of the other.12 Despite this formal even-handedness his own preference for the politics of scepticism is clear. He preserves impartiality by arguing that in a poli­ tical climate dominated by the politics of faith, a modern ‘trimmer’ will add his intellectual weight to the beleaguered cause of scepticism.13 Following this long tug-of-war, our political vo­ cabulary is systematically ambiguous because it has been ‘obliged for nearly five centuries to serve two masters.’14 We inherit terminology marked by both styles and capable of being plausibly used for opposite purposes. Oakeshott himself chooses to focus on the ambiguities of democratic discourse to illustrate his point,15 but if we now turn back to liberalism we can, I believe, identify two sharply contrasted versions (both current within contemporary political thought and each boasting a proud liberal ancestry) which vividly illustrate Oakeshott’s contrasted styles. These are not the only sorts of liberalism there are, and I do not wish to imply that the rest could be fitted onto a spectrum of which these two are the ends. But I hope it will be agreed that both sceptical liberalism and the liberalism of faith - which I shall call crusading liberalism - are familiar presences not only in the liberal tradition but within the complex contempor­ ary discourse of liberalism. My characterisations of the two will verge on the ideal-typical, though illustrated with examples from specific thinkers.

Crusading Liberalism A large proportion of all those who have ever thought of themselves as ‘liberal’ could without undue distortion be assigned to this camp, and its roots are older than the term itself. But the first true manifesto of crusading liberalism was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, approved by

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T H E S W O R D OF F A I T H A N D T H E S H I E L D OF F E A R Whereas the academic representatives of crusading liberalism are linked more or less closely to politi­ cians, campaigners, UN agencies and NGOs, scep­ tical liberalism is much less conspicuous within the contemporary political arena and owes its continuing significance to the intellectual stature of its expo­ nents. Oakeshott himself, Hayek, Shklar and others stand in a distinguished line of sceptics that runs back through Tocqueville and Constant to Mon­ tesquieu.19 This sort of liberalism is essentially con­ cerned with limits: limits on power and on ambition in the uses of power. Mindful of the long history of misuse of political power, it is concerned (as Judith Shklar says) with ‘damage control.’20 Whatever their views on the universality or relativity of moral and political principles, sceptical liberals share the view that the liberal institutions of civil society are a fragile achievement, one that can be easily endangered by hubristic political projects. Like Oakeshott himself, they see themselves swimming against a political tide fed by torrents of crusading enthusiasm and trying to maintain the crumbling dikes that hold it in check. In doing so they lay particular emphasis upon the rule of law (according to Hayek, liberalism is ‘the same as the demand for the rule of law’; similarly for Shklar, ‘the rule of law’ is ‘the original first principle of liberalism’21) and they seek to remind their con­ temporaries that it cannot be taken for granted. There is little love lost between crusaders and sceptics within the liberal camp. To the former, the latter seem mere conservatives,22 while sceptics fear that their cherished heritage of liberal institutions is put at risk by the hubris of crusaders.23 Interestingly, however, there is one topic on which they are agreed: nationalism is anathema to both of them. Should a crusader and a sceptic find themselves stranded together in a snowstorm, they could generate a warm glow of mutual solidarity by denouncing the perni­ cious political influence of national feeling. True, their hostility has different grounds, but on both sides the hostility is pronounced. Crusading liberals object to the particularity of nations, which builds barriers against the universality of human rights. This is in a sense an argument against any kind of political demarcation, but non-national boundaries may at least be regarded as temporary matters of practical convenience. National boundaries are more formid­

the French National Assembly in 1789, and its most characteristic twentieth-century document is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Although there is more to crusading liberalism than the discourse of human rights, that discourse vividly illustrates the salient features of this kind of liberalism. In the first place, crusading liberalism is a political project.16 However abstract discussions of human rights may at times become, they are more or less closely linked to a movement with practical political aims. The liberalism of human rights is a crusade today, just as it was in the days of the nineteenth-century campaign against slavery. Secondly, crusading liberalism is a universalist creed. The notion of human rights clearly expresses the conviction that liberal principles do not lose their relevance at the borders of states or at the fringes of cultures. Despite the worries about cultural variation provoked by such claims,17 the dominant assumption is that a single moral and political order is right for all human beings: for those suspected of crimes in Sweden or in Saudi Arabia; for religious minorities in Ireland or in Iran; for political dissi­ dents in Canada or in China; for women in Australia or in Afghanistan. Thirdly, besides being a univers­ alist project, crusading liberalism is radical in its confidence that the world must and can be changed to conform to this universal order. Institutions and practices that contravene human rights have no justification, whatever the weight of established tradition and cultural sanctity supporting them. If the institutional traditions and culture of the U S armed forces contravene the rights of women and gays, then they must be changed, and if the entire historic culture of China or of Islam clashes with human rights, then they must all be changed as well. It is clear enough that crusading liberalism manifests the ambition and confidence described in Oakeshott’s account of the ‘politics of faith’,18 and (as we shall see later) it also harbours the quest for power that he found there. To shift one’s focus from crusading liberalism to sceptical liberalism is to enter a different (and very much smaller) world. Unlike the former, sceptical liberalism has never been a vast political movement but the business of a handful of intellectuals.

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MARGARET CANOVAN able obstacles, buttressed by the widespread belief that they have moral significance, so that our fellow nationals have special claims that trump the claims of other human beings.24 Similarly, the notion that national cultures and traditions have value in them­ selves often seems (from the crusading point of view) like an excuse to deny the universal rights of those traditionally victimised.25 Sceptical liberals have quite different reasons for disliking nationalism, which they associate with the populist enthusiasm and ‘ideologies of solidarity’26 that put liberal institutions at risk. In their view, it is a fundamental mistake to expect political institu­ tions to express the ‘identity’ of their subjects.27 By chasing the mirage of ‘self-government’ for members of a nation, nationalism undermines established political systems that may in themselves have been relatively benign, and replaces them at great political cost with others that exercise arbitrary power in the name of the nation. For the sake of national selfdetermination, many people who had enjoyed a relatively high degree of liberty under law as subjects of the Habsburg or of the British Empire, found themselves ‘liberated’ into subjection to local tyr­ ants. In any case, the mixed societies of the late twentieth century are inappropriate sites for nation­ alist fantasies. To quote John Gray:

be, and in each case the nation has to be smuggled in to stuff the gap. With convenient symmetry, the way this is done illustrates Oakeshott’s observation that neither of his two styles of politics is self-sufficient, for we shall see that sceptics need nationhood to provide an infusion of enthusiasm, while crusaders need it to give them a stiffening of realpolitik.

Sceptical Liberals and the Power Deficit Sceptical liberals are deeply suspicious of power and of grand political schemes that rely on expanding the role of government and mobilising the people be­ hind a common cause. But that concern with the dangers of excessive power leads them to overlook a power deficit within their own style of politics. They tend to underestimate the power that a limited government needs and to overlook the problem of where such power might be found. A t first sight their political ambitions seem modest - deplorably so to those whose politics is concerned with righting wrongs across the world. They have no grand schemes and do not expect perfection. Virtually all they ask is that arbitrary power should be re­ strained by known rules, and that established rights to person and property should be protected by an impartial judiciary and by fair and effective enforce­ ment of the law. In the words of John Gray, what they look for is a state that is ‘strong but small’.29 This may not seem much to ask. In criticising the excessive ambitions of crusaders, sceptics often imply that their own aims are much less demanding, some­ times even that they are really quite easy to attain. (Hayek says, for example, that his kind of liberalism is ‘an essentially modest creed’.30) But this is an illusion. The crucial point to bear in mind is that (despite their proximity to the more sceptical ver­ sions of conservatism) our sceptics are liberals and it is their liberal commitments that expose the power deficit in their thinking. If they were simply Hobbesian conservatives, asking nothing from politics but peace and order, then that ‘strong but small’ state might be easier to come by. Peace and order have on occasion been achieved by a wide variety of regimes in many different kinds of society: by traditional monarchies and military juntas, by oligarchic repub­ lics, and even by communism in its phase of Brezh-

The aspiration to make states correspond to com­ munities cannot be other than a dangerous illu­ sion. Where moral solidarity is lacking, where (as in all modern societies) there is cultural diversity rather than seamless community, the role of government is first and last that of preserving liberty in civil association under the rule of law.28 So far I have been attempting to establish two contrasted ideal types of liberalism corresponding to Oakeshott’s ‘politics of faith’ and ‘politics of scepti­ cism’, and to show that one of the few areas of common ground between them is that both are (for different reasons) hostile to nationalism. The remainder of the chapter will try to show that despite this hostility, crusaders and sceptics are both much more dependent on national attachments than they would like to admit. Each version of liberalism has a hole at its centre where a theory of power ought to

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T H E S W O R D OF F A I T H A N D T H E S H I E L D OF F E A R grave difficulties in providing the rule of law in particular regions where that legitimacy is not gen­ erally recognised, as the sorry history of British rule in Ireland demonstrates. This is not to say that regimes enjoying this recognition will necessarily provide equal justice - far from it. But to have even a sporting chance of enjoying the rule of law, we do need a government with legitimate power. Followers of Hayek or Oakeshott will object that the authority of the law should not be confused with popular support for the regime; all that is required is recognition of the authority of a system of rules and of judicial decisions in accordance with it.33 Oake­ shott himself might cite as an analogue the authority to adjudicate on the rules of cricket gradually ac­ quired by the M C C .34 But this implies popular acceptance of the system of rules and, crucially, trust in the judicial processes by which they are adminis­ tered and enforced. And that begs a vital question: under what political conditions is that impartial rule of law most likely? For this is the Holy Grail sought by republican thinkers from Cicero to Rousseau, who wanted ‘the government of laws, not men’, and who knew that such a government required a strong sense of shared, inherited public good and its accompany­ ing public spirit. Under modern conditions that public spirit, like legitimacy and consensual power, is most likely (though far from certain) where the polity is supported by a strong sense of collective identity - where it belongs to a people. Much as sceptical liberals may deplore populism, they can hardly deny that impartial law enforcement with minimum coercion is normally easier where the state enjoys the legitimacy of being generally regarded as our state.35 It may still be objected that my argument confuses a contingent historical cause with a necessary con­ dition: that although as a matter of historical fact the establishment of the rule of law in England owed a lot to collective national attachment to ‘the laws of England’,36 once established it became a practice that could be freely transferred elsewhere. In other words, while a strident national pride may have been crucial in enabling Coke, Hampden and their heirs to defend law and limited government against the Stuarts, the system has since become self-sustaining: wherever a state does provide the benefits of impar­

nevite immobilism. Neither social cohesion nor democratic politics is required. Indeed, if peace and order are really what you are looking for, then the power to enforce them may in some circumstances be more effectively achieved by non-democratic than by democratic means, whether by coercion, by traditional authority, or through a negotiated modus vivendi between powerful fac­ tions.31 But although sceptical liberals may be tempted by the Hobbesian politics of peace, in so far as they remain liberals they cannot accept such solutions, simply because most ways of establishing peace and order are not compatible with the rule of equal law. John Gray was deluding himself when, daringly dismissing the notion that democracy is necessary to ‘the practice of liberty’, he claimed that the ‘civil condition’ so much valued by sceptical liberals ‘is fully compatible with a variety of political regimes’, although it ‘presupposes always the rule of law and equality before the law.’32 Very few kinds of political regime and political society are in fact compatible with that ‘civil condition’, because the equal rule of law implies two very demanding conditions. The first is that the state enjoys a fund of consensual power, enabling it to enforce the law without employing a degree of coercion which would be inconsistent with the civil condition. The second is that it presides over a society sufficiently united to allow it to enforce equal law across the whole country. What this amounts to is a high level of identification of the polity with the population and vice versa, which in the condition of modern politics normally means nationhood. Let us look more closely at these two conditions. Consensual Power For the ‘strong but small’ state to generate its strength in a manner compatible with the rule of law, it must be recognised as legitimate by the mass of its subjects. Without that support the minimal liberal state is impossible; impartial justice is scarcely to be expected from rulers who have seized power in a military coup, or from a conquering army sitting on rifle butts. Even a state that is recognised by most of its subjects as their legitimate representative may find

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MARGARET CANOVAN tial justice, then popular consent will follow. Bhikhu Parekh argues, for example, that nothing by way of national cohesion is required because ‘the modern state is a self-sufficient institution. It has a commonly accepted structure of public authority, a set of pro­ cedures for taking collectively binding decisions, and a body of widely shared politico-legal values’, notably ‘the rule of law, equality before the law, respect for human dignity and common citizenship.’ Although this ‘self-sufficient state’ is a contingent product of history, it does not now need the support of national sentiment. Being a member means recognising its ‘politico-legal values’ and abiding by the laws. ‘N oth­ ing more is required of its members in order for it to remain united and stable.’37 For the increasing number of cosmopolitan indi­ viduals who move easily between different western liberal democratic countries, expecting much the same legal protections and offering the same minimal allegiance in each, this account may seem reasonable enough, and the national identity of the local po­ pulation may seem irrelevant. But we should not be misled by talk of ‘the modern state’ into supposing that there is something about the advent of the millennium that makes such ‘modernity’ easy to achieve without a background of nationhood. Most modem states (in the sense of states actually in existence today) are not ‘modern’ in this sense. As a matter of empirical observation, most UN members do not provide anything near enough to the rule of law to earn the consent of a sceptical liberal. Cor­ ruption, violence and arbitrary power are common­ place, even in many of the states that have formally liberal constitutions. Evidently a properly ‘modern’ state as understood by Parekh is one that does provide equal law, but we need to consider the role of nationhood or the lack of it in making that more or less likely.

obstacles a plural society poses to the achievement of impartial judicial treatment of (say) felonies. Sceptics like to claim that the minimalist state they favour is particularly suited to ethnically divided societies, because its modest ambitions allow con­ tentious issues to be depoliticised.38 But this is an implausible claim, perhaps betraying the confusion we noticed earlier between the conservative insis­ tence on peace as the political goal and the more demanding aims of liberals. A sceptical conservative could argue that, where a political entity (such as Bosnia) is sharply divided between hostile commu­ nities, then the best that can be hoped for is a minimal state based on negotiation between leaders of the contending factions, themselves holding power within their own patches as best they can. But that is not a solution any liberal could be content with, for it would certainly not imply equality before the law, especially for minorities in the various enclaves.39 Even in societies that are less radically divided, the Hobbesian concern for peace and order may well clash with the rule of law. For despite the sceptics’ image of the law as an umpire presiding impartially over communal divisions, in such cir­ cumstances everything to do with the legal process becomes politicised. Apart from the problems of staffing juries and making judicial appointments, the outcome of every contentious trial becomes a victory or defeat for different sections of society. The tensions surrounding the trial of O. J. Simpson in the U SA is perhaps sufficient comment on the notion that the rule of equal law can comfortably coexist with communal divisions, even in a deeply legalistic polity. For the equal rule of law to function, it is vital that the apparatus of justice should not be seen by its recipients as their law rather than ours. The notion of the law as impartial umpire above the fray may in some cases be a piece of unconscious post-imperial nostalgia, a regretful glance back to the days when relatively upright British officials admi­ nistered justice between the castes and religious groups of India, or when relatively professional im­ perial bureaucrats dealt with the multifarious nation­ alities of the Habsburg Empire. If so, two observations are apposite. In the first place, imperial systems have never been models of impartial justice, as anyone who fell foul of the imperial authorities

Equal Law If taken seriously, the sceptic requirement of equality before the law seems to demand a substantial degree of social unity. This is the case even if we leave aside all the problems of equal justice between rich and poor and men and women that would take us into crusading liberal territory, and consider only the

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T H E S W O R D OF F A I T H A N D T H E S H I E L D OF F E A R the product of a much more strident history. There is a good deal to be said for Michael IgnatiefPs distinc­ tion between ‘hungry’ and ‘sated’ nations,45 with the caveat that even the satisfied nations sometimes wake up feeling peckish. Sceptical Liberal distrust of nationalism is reinforced by the fear that even apparently innocuous forms of the virus are liable to flare up if given the slightest encouragement. Nevertheless, if the argument of this section holds, sceptical liberals cannot afford to be so fastidious, for they cannot easily do without some measure of national feeling to underpin the rule of law with the power of popular legitimation. Instead of dream­ ing of a polity untroubled by any such emotional stirrings, the far-sighted sceptical liberals would choose a polity that belongs to a ‘sated’ nation where the ‘pathologies of national sentiment’ are buried several generations deep in the past, and where the rule of law is cherished as a national heritage.

quickly discovered. Secondly, imperial regimes have in this century proved quite unable to attract enough popular consent to maintain peace and order, let alone the rule of law. In other words (as John Stuart Mill pointed out long ago40) the ideal venue for the kind of politics favoured by liberals is actually a polity belonging to a people bound together by the mutual sympathies of nationhood. A state in which there is a long-estab­ lished sense of collective identification with the polity, and in which state, government and laws are seen as ours rather than an alien imposition, provides a particularly favourable basis for strong but consensual government, a sense of public interest and support for the fair and impartial rule of law.41 This is an ideal never fully realised in practice, like the republican ideal of the polity of virtuous citizens united in their devotion to the patria. But the historical connection between liberalism and nation­ hood is not accidental. Sceptical liberals are inclined to take this background of nationhood for granted without reflecting upon its contribution to the in­ stitutions they value. Some critics might concede this last point but object that I am ignoring a vital distinction between nationhood and nationalism. They would argue that one can acknowledge a debt to nationhood while deploring nationalist ideologies and movements. This is (for example) the position that John Gray attributes to Isaiah Berlin. Unlike most other liberals of his time, according to Gray, ‘Berlin perceives that a liberal civil society cannot rest upon abstract principles or common rules alone, but needs a com­ mon national culture if it is to be stable and com­ mand allegiance.’ But (he continues) ‘in common with all liberal thinkers, Berlin repudiates the pathology of nationalist sentiment.’42 This position is attractive but simplistic. It may seem easy in principle to affirm nationhood while condemning ‘the pathology of nationalism’, but the line is not so easy to draw in particular cases (including Zionism, which Berlin supported).43 It is significant that the word ‘nationalism’ can itself refer not only to move­ ments and an ideology but also to the sense of nationhood itself, perhaps indicating the difficulty of distinguishing them.44 In practice, where a strong but civilised national sentiment exists it is normally

Crusading Liberalism and the Power Deficit If sceptical liberals find it hard to do without political faith in nationhood to support the power needed by their minimal state, a complementary point can be made about crusading liberalism. For crusaders can­ not find salvation through faith alone, and their good works take them into a world of realpolitik in which they find themselves relying to a degree not normally acknowledged on the power generated by nationhood. Power is not something that crusading liberal political theorists like to think about; as their critics (including sceptics) have observed, their pre­ occupations often seem more moral than political, and questions about the sources, limits and costs of power are rarely raised in their writings. But liberal­ ism of this kind is more than a set of moral injunc­ tions addressed to individuals; it is a political project. Crusaders want to see human rights recognised and protected across the world, and questions of political agency inevitably follow.46 Seeking to make the Marxist political project effective, Lenin hit on the notion of the powerful party: what collective actor or actors can (by analogy) bear the project of human rights? Having as little instinctive trust in professional politicians as sceptical liberals have in popular move­

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MARGARET CANOVAN sponsibility to act in defence of rights across the world. The experience that supports this claim goes back nearly three hundred years. The role of global stan­ dard-bearer for what later came to be called liberal principles was first played by Britain, in a secularisa­ tion of the responsibilities borne since the sixteenth century by the Protestant English as God’s chosen people.50 We can see the political mission evolving out of its more religious precursor in the poems of Thomas Tickell, who wrote in the days of Queen Anne:

ments, crusading liberals might be inclined to look first to the non-governmental organisations that have to such an extraordinary degree furthered hu­ manitarian projects across the world since the Sec­ ond World War. But however good they may be at famine relief, N GO s are not well suited to protect the human rights of individuals under threat from tyrannical regimes or ethnic militias. The former can simply refuse to admit them, while in the times of civil war and anarchy that breed the latter, N GO s themselves need protection, as events in Bosnia and elsewhere have shown. It is clear that political power is required. Calling for ‘humanitarian interven­ tion’,47 crusaders will turn next to international organisations that sprung up (like N GO s) in the second half of the twentieth century. Organisations of this kind (established by the more liberal nation­ states) have indeed transformed the conduct of international politics, and the ways in which they have modified older notions of state sovereignty should not be underestimated.48 Nevertheless, their inability (so far) to take the sort of decisive action crusaders often want has been cruelly exposed by recent events. If action is to be taken to guard human rights where they are most seriously under threat, it can be taken only by a political agent able to project power effectively, which means a powerful state or alliance of such states.49 It seems, then, that crusaders must compromise with political reality to the extent of calling on the power of states to further their cause. What is more interesting for our present purposes, though, is that only certain sorts of state will do. Power alone is not enough; it must be power of a certain kind, based not on the coercion of its own subjects but their support. So the state in question will need to enjoy popular consent (with the implications already indicated in relation to sceptical liberalism), and will need to be one in which public opinion supports the cause of international human rights to the point of being willing to send ‘our boys’ to fight for them. Under what circumstances are these conditions most likely to be fulfilled? History offers an answer: the kind of state most likely to function as the secular arm of crusading liberalism is one in which liberalism of that kind is perceived as a national mission, implying that the state and people concerned have a special re­

Her guiltless glory just Britannia draws From pure religion and impartial laws Her labours are to plead the Almighty’s cause Her pride to teach the untamed Barbarian laws.51 During the French Revolution Britain’s mission as the universal shield of liberty was challenged by France. In the consciousness of the revolutionaries who carried the banner of the Rights of Man across Europe, their universal mission of liberation became inextricably entangled with national pride. Interest­ ingly, this entanglement was not a foregone conclu­ sion, for at the start of the Revolution no one could have been more critical of nationalism than the Jacobins. Istvan Hont has shown, however, that despite Robespierre’s insistence that the Republic ‘was acting only on behalf of the peoples of the world . . . nothing was more striking than the turning of Jacobin republicanism into the most dra­ matic form of national patriotism.’52 In our century a similar fusion of power, patriotism and messianic fervour has made the U S A the favoured agent for the projects of crusading liberalism from Woodrow Wilson to the present.53 Some may argue that the U S A is peculiarly suited to the task of defending universal human rights precisely because it is not a nation, but instead a polity united by subscription to universal liberal principles. This case has been eloquently stated by John Schaar, who defends American patriotism as something quite different from the ‘parochial and primitive fraternities of blood and race’. It is instead a ‘covenanted patriotism’, which is ethically superior

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T H E S W O R D OF F A I T H A N D T H E S H I E L D OF F E A R even take a possessive national pride in overcoming the limitations of nationalism, like the ingenious nineteenth-century Frenchman who congratulated his fellow countrymen on their cosmopolitanism: ‘it is we who taught the nations of Europe to detach themselves from a narrowly national ideal and to march resolutely towards a human ideal.’58 A less strident example of the same phenomenon is the national pride Swedes feel in being (collectively) a shining example of internationalism. While this is (from a liberal point of view) an enormous improve­ ment on more obviously chauvinistic versions, it remains a form of nationalism. To sum up this section, then, in so far as crusading liberals leave the realms of pure faith and consider the conditions of political effectiveness, they must realise that despite the real difficulty of reconciling universalist humanitarianism with the exclusiveness of national attachments, liberal nations with a strong sense of their national mission as representatives of the ‘world community’ are their most useful allies.

to nationalism because it is ‘guided by and directed toward the mission established in the founding covenant’ of the Republic. Being committed to universal principles of liberty, equality and self-govemment, this kind of patriotism ‘is compatible with the most generous humanism’ and indeed ‘assigns America a teaching mission among the nations.’54 But this is a red herring. Nations vary a great deal and are by no means exclusively defined in terms of ethnic unity.55 What is much more crucial is the collective consciousness that enables a nation to act as a single body and, for all its internal divisions, the sense of being American is something that the U SA has in abundance. That collective identity gives the country a unique capacity to act on the world stage and to mobilise power proportionate to its size and resources. It is true that the U S A ’s peculiar suit' ability as a vehicle for the projects of crusading liberalism comes from the conjunction of national power with a universal mission. It may even be true, as Schaar implies, that belief in human rights is part of what it means to be an American. But crusaders inclined to argue that this is a redeeming feature should take note of the other side of the coin, which is a proprietary attitude towards such beliefs. Liberal principles tend to be experienced as American principles - seen by Americans as our principles, a legitimate source of national pride. Reflecting on the ideological quality of American identity, Benjamin Barber remarks that ‘the American trick was to use the fierce attachments of patriotic sentiment to bond a people to high ideals. Our “tribal” sources from which we derive our sense of national identity are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitu­ tion and the Bill of Rights.’ He admits, however, that ‘cosmopolitanism too has its pathologies and can also breed its own antiseptic version of imperialism.’56 The dilemma for those who favour ‘humanitarian intervention’ by the ‘international community’ is that nations cast as the representatives of humanity always have their own axes to grind.57 The unpalatable truth facing crusading liberals, in other words, is that their universal mission gains maximum political clout when it is in effect captured by a powerful nation and becomes part of that nation’s own identity and national pride. Such are the contortions of national identity that nations may

Conclusion I have argued that liberals are a great deal closer to national enthusiasms than most of them like to think, and that even those who are actively hostile to the nation and all its works find it hard to do without the political power it can offer. Nationhood offers sceptical liberals their best chance of a polity able to conduct its affairs according to the rule of law, while the most effective support crusading liberals can summon up in defence of human rights around the world is a sense of national mission - the U S Cavalry, in a manner of speaking. It might perhaps be thought that this conclusion adds weight to the arguments of the new ‘liberal nationalists’ I men­ tioned at the beginning of the chapter, and that liberals of all kinds should join them in celebration of (some versions of) nationalism. But that would be too hasty an inference, for the argument I have been presenting is of a quite different kind. One way of highlighting the difference is to say that the present argument is concerned with contingent political considerations to do with power and feasibility, whereas defenders of liberal nationalism normally argue their case on moral and philosophical grounds.

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MARGARET CANOVAN The standard arguments for liberal nationalism try to show that liberalism and nationalism are morally compatible, and even that liberal principles entail rights to national self-determination. These are not positions defended here. On the contrary, the reluc­ tance of so many liberals to acknowledge their debts to nationhood is entirely understandable, for the nation makes an uncomfortable bedfellow for either of the versions we have been looking at. Many nationalisms are, after all, explicitly hostile to liberalism in any of its forms; more crucially, even the most liberal version of nationalism is too irrational and populist really to suit the fastidious sceptics, and too narrow in its identity and commitments for the visions of crusaders. Re­ membering the tensions (as well as the links) between liberalism and nationalism is important, for two rea­ sons. Fittingly, one of these reasons recalls Oakeshott’s ‘politics of scepticism’, the other his ‘politics of faith’. The first is that both kinds of liberals need to come to terms with the political cost of their aspirations. The cost of the liberal freedoms valued by sceptics is a greater or lesser degree of the nationalist enthu­ siasm they deplore. For crusaders, the costs of effec­ tiveness under present conditions are considerably higher, amounting (if crusading aspirations were to be seriously pursued) to a new imperialism to be undertaken not by the ‘world community’ but by the United States. Whether or not the goal is worth such a price is another matter, but the question deserves more attention than it currently gets.59 But sceptical ‘realism’ about the genuine and serious political

dilemmas that nations pose for liberals in the con­ temporary world is not the whole story. There is a second reason for bearing in mind the tension as well as the link between nationhood and liberalism. I have argued that sceptics and crusaders alike rely on the nation’s capacity to mobilise and institutio­ nalise consensual power:60 power that can support equal laws at home and provide a launching pad for universalist projects. But although this dependence on national power is important and too little no­ ticed, it is a matter of political contingency rather than philosophical necessity. In principle, it may some day turn out to be the case that consensual power can be mobilised and institutionalised in other ways. It may be significant that some of the inter­ national institutions launched from national bases in the past half-century are showing signs of acquiring a legitimacy that enables them to some extent to mobilise power of their own. While deeply depen­ dent on nation-states (and especially on a few states with strong national identities and political and economic clout to match), these institutions are already far from negligible, since they constrain the activities of those same states. In the long term (who knows?) crusading liberalism may free itself from its national launching pad and build a home of its own, a political space station able to circle the globe in serene detachment from the blood and soil of nationality.61 A t any rate, as crusaders look for­ ward in faith to that day, sceptics are in no position to declare it impossible.62

Notes 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., pp. 27-9. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., pp. 130-1. I have pursued some of the intima­ tions of that discussion in Canovan (1999). 16. Judith Shklar acutely observes that, whereas her own ‘liberalism of fear’ is prompted by ‘memory’ - memory of the awful things that people have done to one another - the ‘liberalism of natural rights’ is prompted by ‘hope’; Shklar (1989), pp. 26-7. 17. See, for example, Renteln (1990).

1. Blease (1913), p. 12. 2. On mid-Victorian liberal enthusiasm for national selfdetermination (and on tensions between this and the Cobdenite tradition of a non-interventionist foreign policy), see Bradley (1980), pp. 97-104, 133. 3. See, for example, Miller (1995), Tamir (1993), N. MacCormick, ‘What Place for Nationalism?’, in Caney, George and Jones (eds) (1996). 4. Friedrich Hayek’s ‘Anglo-American’ as opposed to ‘continental’ liberalism belongs to the wider family of sceptical liberalism, as does Judith Shklar’s ‘liberal­ ism of fear’. 5. Oakeshott (1962), pp. 1-36, 123-7. 6. Oakeshott (1975a), pp. 200-6, 313-16. 7. Oakeshott (1996), p. 21.

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T H E S W O R D OF F A I T H A N D T H E S H I E L D OF F E A R 18. Cf. Donnelly (1989), Waldron (1993), pp. 23-4; Bobbio (1996), pp. 12-14, 30, 61-70. The volume edited by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Nussbaum and Sen (eds), 1993) forms a particularly inter­ esting illustration because its contributors are acutely aware of many of the objections to which this sort of project is open, but nevertheless mostly endorse it. 19. The most conspicuous recent British defender of sceptical liberalism has been John Gray; see, for ex­ ample, Gray (1993), especially pp. 314-20 (though, as we shall see below, in his most recent work Gray seems to have gone beyond liberalism altogether). See also O’Sullivan (1989) and (1997), especially pp. 748-54. 20. Shklar (1989), p. 27. 21. Hayek (1967), p. 165; Shklar (1989), p. 37. 22. Sceptical liberalism does indeed share a border with the more sceptical versions of conservatism, with a number of notable political theorists (including Mon­ tesquieu and Tocqueville) inhabiting the disputed territory. Even Hayek, who actually wrote an essay entitled, ‘Why I am Not a Conservative’, can be plausibly treated as one in some contexts. See, for example, Devigne (1994), p. 33. Oakeshott himself is most often categorised as a conservative, which is justified, but only with the qualification that he is an unusual kind of ‘sceptical liberal conservative, lacking both the emotional attachments of Burkean conservatives and the faith in capitalism of the “New Right” .’ Cf. Gray (1989), p. 199; Franco (1990). As we shall later see, however, where nationalism is concerned, there is a test that can distinguish between the more liberal and the more conservative aspects. 23. For example, Gray (1993), pp. 326-7. 24. For a classic critique of this last belief, see Goodin (1988). 25. See Donnelly (1989), pp. 119-20. 26. Shklar (1989), p. 36. 27. On the dangers of atavistic ‘tribal’ loyalties, see Hayek (1993), volume II, p. 143. In Hayek’s view, nation­ alism shares with socialism the dubious distinction of being one of ‘the two greatest threats to a free civilisa­ tion,’; ibid., volume III, p. 111. 28. John Gray, ‘The Politics of Cultural Diversity’, in Gray (1993), pp. 253-71. 29. Ibid., p. 270. 30. Hayek (1967), p. 161. 31. The classic view of nationalism from a sceptical con­ servative perspective can be found in Kedourie (1993); see, for example, Kedourie’s comments on Mazzini at p. 92. 32. Gray (1993), p. 318. 33. Hayek (1993), volume I, chapter 4. 34. Oakeshott (1975a), p. 154. 35. Cf. Beetham (1991), p. 127. On the relation between national identity and the ‘generalised trust’ required by modem civil society, see Seligman (1992), pp. 147—

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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82. Though strong, the connection is historically contingent. Bruce Haddock has drawn my attention to the counter-example of contemporary Italy, where long-standing dissatisfaction with the performance of the Italian state expresses itself in a popular support for EU institutions that seems to indicate a wish not to be ruled by one’s ‘own’ state. Might this be a harbinger of a new form of empire-by-consent? Helgerson (1992), p. 65, 81; Pocock (1957), pp. 3055. Parekh (1995), pp. 139-40. Gray (1993), p. 265; O’Sullivan (1997), p. 753. John Gray seems recently to have recognised this point, and has taken to describing his position as ‘pluralist rather than liberal’, seeing the appropriate arrangement for deeply plural societies not as a suppo­ sedly impartial legalism but as a kind of millet system with different laws for different communities related to one another by a process of political bargaining; Gray (1995a), pp. 126, 136-7. Mill (1972), pp. 391-4. Scruton (1990), p. 322; Miller (1995), pp. 90-3. Gray (1995b), pp. 99-100. Ibid., p. 117. Hutchinson and Smith (eds) (1994), p. 4. Ignatieff (1994), p. 189. Consider, for example, Robert Goodin’s assertion that since we all have ‘general duties’ to all other people, regardless of nationhood or citizenship, ‘if some states prove incapable of discharging their responsibilities effectively, then they should either be reconstituted or assisted.’ The choice of passive verbs conveniently dodges the tricky question of who is to do the ‘recon­ stituting’; Goodin (1988), p. 685. Cf. Ramsbotham and Woodhouse (eds) (1996), Harriss (ed.) (1995). For example, states that desire acceptance by Western clubs such as the Council of Europe or the EU find themselves under pressure to respect minority rights. This point was drawn to my attention by Richard Sakwa. Bhikhu Parekh suggests that ‘morally concerned citi­ zens’ from around the world might move into such situations and ‘stage well-publicised and carefully planned acts of a Gandhian type of non-violent resistance’, such as placing themselves between the warring parties in an ethnic conflict. This is a heroic idea, but could be effective only if it mobilised public opinion inside powerful states to pressure those states themselves to take action; Parekh (1997). Greenfeld (1992), pp. 60-6. ‘On the Prospects of Peace’, in Tickell (1822), pp. 135-6. Hont (1994), pp. 207, 219, 222. See, for example, Shue (1980). Schaar (1981), p. 293.

MARGARET CANOVAN 55. On the nature and variability of nations, see Canovan (1996), pp. 50-80. 56. B. Barber, ‘Constitutional Faith’, in Cohen (ed.) (1996), pp. 30-7, at pp. 32-3. Cf. C. Taylor, ‘Alternative Futures: Legitimacy, Identity and Alienation in Late Twentieth Century Canada’, in Cairns and Wil­ liams (eds) (1985), p. 215. As in the British and French cases, secular American universalist national­ ism owes a lot to a pre-existing sense of religious mission. See O ’Brien (1988). 57. Parekh (1997), p. 58. 58. Quoted in Newman (1987), p. 49. For a more sophis­ ticated contemporary restatement of similar senti­ ments, see Schnapper (1994).

59. Cf. Miller (1995), pp. 77-8. 60. So successfully, indeed, that such power has come to be taken for granted in nation-states, as if it existed by nature. This point is more extensively discussed in Canovan (1996). 61. For a vision of this kind, see Linklater (1998). 62. I have benefited from the criticisms and observations of the other participants at the ‘Liberalism at the Millennium’ conference organised by the Department of Political Theory and Government in the University of Wales Swansea. I am also indebted to John Horton for his characteristically incisive and helpful com­ ments.

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6

LIBERAL CITIZENSHIP AND FEMI NI SM Andrea Baumeister

differences, which are also more fluid than fixed in character, an appeal to a unified women’s politics is liable to prove just as exclusionary as the traditional liberal preoccupation with universality. Yet, while the dangers of exclusion are widely acknowledged, a number of feminists have recently expressed concern about the implications of such a rejection of all universal claims and norms. Not only does the anti-essentialist commitment to ‘radical otherness’ potentially undermine the idea of an effective fem­ inist politics, it also fails to recognise the important role appeals to universality and formal equality have historically played in the struggle by oppressed groups to be included in the realm of citizenship. In the light of these concerns feminists like Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum have reasserted the impor­ tance of women’s shared experiences and the con­ tinued relevance of universal standards in the struggle for equality for women worldwide.3 Faced with this lively debate among feminists, a number of writers have attempted to strike a balance between the claims of difference and the concerns which have traditionally given rise to the liberal emphasis on universality. One of the most influential examples of such an approach is Iris Marion Young’s model of a ‘heterogeneous public’.4 Although Young stresses that each social group has its own unique experiences, histories and social life, which can never be entirely understood or adequately repre­ sented by outsiders, she nonetheless recognises the potential appeal of liberalism’s commitment to uni-

Introduction One of the most striking features of contemporary feminist discourse has been the increasing disen­ chantment with traditional liberal conceptions of citizenship. Whereas early reforming feminists ap­ pealed to the liberal principles of equality and uni­ versality in their attempts to include women in the realm of citizenship, many contemporary feminists have criticised liberalism for failing to acknowledge the significance of difference and particularity. In the eyes of critics such as Pateman and Young,1 the traditional emphasis upon formal equality and uni­ versality encourages liberals to ignore the extent to which our identities are irrevocably shaped by the particularities and contingencies of our existence. Thus, whereas liberal conceptions of citizenship typically relegate difference, particularity and affectivity to the non-political private sphere, many contemporary feminists have sought to undermine this liberal public/private distinction in their attempt to assert the political significance of our unique and particular characteristics. This regard for difference and particularity has led some feminists to be sceptical of all universal claims. Thus writers such as Spelman, Harris, hooks and Flax not only reject liberal universalism but also question the validity of a general, unified women’s politics.2 For these feminist anti-essentialists gender is intrin­ sically bound up with other aspects of identity such as class and race. In the face of such multifaceted

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ANDREA BAUMEISTER versality and the equality as a justification for the inclusion of all in moral and social life. Yet, while Young’s model of a heterogeneous public overcomes many of the problems associated with earlier feminist reconceptualisations of citizenship, this chapter will argue that her model of group representation remains at odds with both her dynamic conception of the social collective and her commitment to deliberative democracy. Nonetheless, the manner in which Young combines an emphasis on universality at the point of participation with the recognition of the claims of difference in the allocation of rights and resources is, from a feminist perspective, rather at­ tractive. However, an attempt to strike such a balance need not imply a rejection of the liberal tradition. It is a rich and complex body of thought and practice which, in the final analysis, may not be as hostile to diversity as is frequently assumed. Indeed, careful reading reveals that questions of difference and particularity play a significant role in the Kantian strand of liberalism. The distinction Kant draws between perfect and imperfect obligations and the open-ended, context-responsive manner in which a Kantian approach determines specific obligations allows for the recognition of the complex relation­ ship between the public and the private and is sensitive to the demands for more effective repre­ sentation on the part of traditionally marginalised groups.5 These traditional Kantian concerns have continued to inform the work of contemporary Kantians such as Jurgen Habermas.6 This strand of liberalism, therefore, can provide a framework for citizenship which potentially enables feminists to resolve one of the most troubling tensions at the heart of contemporary feminist theorising.

and marginalised women. If, due to their capacity for rational thought, all human beings deserve equal rights and respect, then women, as beings capable of reason, are surely entitled to the same rights and privileges as men. Thus first-wave feminists, such as Macaulay and Wollstonecraft,7 employed liberal no­ tions of universal reason and formal equality to show that sexual differences should be seen as merely contingent and, in the final analysis, inconsequen­ tial. Ultimately men and women shared the same faculties and capacities. Women’s apparent failure to develop their rational faculties did not rest upon deep-seated biological differences between men and women but simply reflected the social norms and pressures placed upon them. N ot surprisingly, early feminists regarded education as a vital stepping stone in the campaign for the enfranchisement of women. If granted access to equal education, women would realise their rational faculties and develop the capa­ city for autonomous action. Once these goals had been attained women could not reasonably be de­ nied the vote. After all if the notion of self-sover­ eignty is to be meaningful it must surely include the right to self-governance in the political sphere. Yet, while many first-wave feminists actively advocated liberal ideals and endorsed the liberal vision of a common citizenship, the attainment of equal legal and political rights did not bring about the radical improvement in the position of women first-wave feminists had so confidently anticipated. In the light of this failure many second-wave feminists have questioned the values which underpin the liberal notion of individual rights in general and the liberal conception of citizenship in particular. They have argued that these commitments blind liberals to the significance of difference in their conception of both individual and citizen. A t the level of the self, feminist theorists such as Pateman have drawn attention to the manner in which liberals have attempted to abstract the in­ dividual from all social, economic and biological contingencies.8 Subsequently, the individual be­ comes disembedded and disembodied, giving rise to a unitary vision of the self - a self that is the same for all humanity. Hence morality is equated with impartiality, with recognising the claims of the other who is just like oneself. Thus, we are invited to

Women and Liberal Citizenship In their battle for equal rights for women many early feminists were clearly inspired by the liberal Enlight­ enment ideals of reason, progress, individual freedom and equal rights. For example, the notion of uni­ versal reason, central to the thought of liberal En­ lightenment philosophers such as Kant, provided early feminist thinkers with powerful arguments to challenge those social conventions which excluded

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LIBERAL CI TI ZE NS HI P AND FEMINISM women’s experiences, feminists fear that the liberal appeal to ‘generality’ and the subsequent public/ private distinction denies women an effective voice within the political arena. In this context they have drawn attention not only to the fact that historically women have been assigned to the private sphere, but also to the point that this genderisation of the public/ private distinction formed for many centuries the basis for excluding women from citizenship. Women were identified with the sphere of the particular and the affective, with nurture, reproduction, love and care, and, consequently, were seen as lacking in the qualities required for public life. Yet, if particularity is assigned to the non-political private sphere, then once women enter the ‘male’ public sphere the way in which they differ from men is seen as deviating from the norm. As Susan Mendus points out,12 equality then becomes defined in terms of the re­ moval of women’s ‘disadvantage’ or ‘disability’, with ‘disadvantage’ being determined by a model which is intrinsically male. In the eyes of critics such as Young, this margin­ alisation of women’s voices in the public realm is indicative of the limitations of the very ideal of ‘generality’. Given that different groups have differ­ ent experiences, histories and perspectives on social life, no one group can entirely understand the ex­ periences of another. Hence no one group can speak for another. To adopt, in the face of such profound diversity, a conception of citizenship based upon formal equality and impartiality is merely to privilege the dominant group. If all are given equal rights, but no one can speak for the other, the interests of the dominant group will prevail as the members of the dominant group will be able ‘to assert their experi­ ences of and perspectives on social events as im­ partial and objective.’13 So not only does the denial of difference allow privileged groups to ignore their own group specificity, it also disadvantages groups whose experience, culture and socialised capacities differ from this allegedly neutral standard. Given that, on Young’s analysis, the ostensibly neutral standards of the liberal public sphere merely reflect the experiences of the dominant group - white, middle-class, western males - the liberal appeal to formal equality and impartiality prevents the mem­ bers of groups such as women, whose experiences and

view one another as abstract, autonomous beings, unencumbered by the particularities of our existence. To act morally is to follow the norm of formal equality enshrined in a system of justice based on a network of formal rights and duties. However, for many feminists such an account of the individual ignores the extent to which our identity is irrevocably shaped by the particularities and contingencies of our existence. Here, a number of feminists have highlighted the impact our physical being has on our identity. As Pateman notes, if the individual is to be a universal figure, liberalism must ignore that ‘humankind has two bodies, female and male.’9 This, however, glosses over the political implications of women’s bodily capacities and passions. For feminists such as Pateman, the tendency to regard the ato­ mised individual as the norm has led liberal theorists either to view women and children as ‘deviant’ cases or to ignore or deny the interdependence between women and children.10 To many feminists, liberal­ ism’s failure to acknowledge women’s experiences has given rise to a discourse in which what consti­ tutes a proper person, a true individual, is represen­ tative of men’s experience and reasoning specifically, not women’s. Paradigmatically, the liberal individual becomes synonymous with the independent, proper­ tied male head of a household. Since this conception of the individual shapes liberal notions of citizenship, the exclusion of the perspective of all but one group has important political consequences, not only for women, but also for marginalised groups in general. Just as liberals seek to abstract the individual from all social, eco­ nomic and biological contingencies, traditional lib­ eral conceptions of democratic citizenship require the exclusion of particularity. For Young, liberal citizenship is therefore characterised by an appeal to an ideal o f ‘generality’.11 Citizens are expected to transcend their differences and act on the basis of the common good or the ‘general will’. This appeal to generality entails a sharp distinction between the public and the private sphere. Here the public realm is identified with normative reason and the pursuit of shared interests, whereas difference, particularity and affectivity are firmly relegated to the private non­ political sphere. Yet, just as the liberal notion of an abstract, disembedded, disembodied self excludes

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ANDREA BAUMEISTER perspectives differ significantly from those of the dominant group, from effectively participating in the public sphere.

unitary self that is relatively stable and unchanging and the belief that, although there are significant differences between men and women, this self is the same for all women and for all men regardless of class, race or sexual orientation. For anti-essentialists such feminist essentialism is as unsustainable as earlier liberal claims to universality: just as liberalism’s fail­ ure to acknowledge the significance of gender differ­ ences led theorists to presume that the experience of male adults can be taken as normative for humanity at large, so the focus on ‘women as women’ has given rise to a discourse in which the experiences of western, white, middle-class women have been con­ flated with the experiences of all women. Conse­ quently, just as liberal universalism defines difference in terms of a deviation from a standard that is essentially male, so feminist essentialism views dif­ ferences among women as a divergence from a standard that is defined by the experiences of Wes­ tern, white, middle-class women. Hence in Spelman’s opinion ‘the phrase “as a woman” is the Trojan horse of feminist ethnocentrism.’19 In the eyes of these writers, feminist essentialism treats the experiences of women who are subject to multiple forms of oppression as merely ‘addition’ problems: black women suffer from sexism plus racism, while working-class women are oppressed by sexism plus class structures. For Spelman and Harris such an approach not only forcibly fragments the experiences of black, poor and lesbian women, but also leads feminists to presume that the oppression women face ‘as women’ is best identified by studying the position of women who are not subject to other forms of oppression. This privileges the experiences of wes­ tern, white, middle-class women. For example, char­ acterisations of the dominant feminine stereotype as passive and dependent failed to recognise the ex­ periences of black women who have struggled against images of matriarchy and sexual permissiveness. In a similar vein the claim by many second-wave femin­ ists that the solution to women’s oppression was to be found in work outside the home ignored the experi­ ences of millions of women who had always worked outside the home, but for whom work had been a far from ‘liberating’ experience. Spelman and Harris conclude that instead of holding onto unsustainable notions of a deep, uni­

Radical Diversity and the Dangers of Fragmentation In order to remedy this marginalistion of women’s perspective many feminists have attempted to dis­ place the traditional liberal emphasis upon univers­ ality and formal equality with a notion of citizenship which recognises the political significance of differ­ ence and particularity. Initially this led them to focus on the differences between men and women in an attempt to highlight the political significance of women’s traditional experiences as mothers and carers. Writers such as Elshtain, Dinnerstein and Ruddick14 argued that the virtues of love, empathy, compassion and emotional sensitivity associated with women’s traditional role as mothers and carers15 have potentially important political implications and are indeed capable of laying the foundations for a better society. However, while such attempts to stress the political consequences of women’s experiences provide a forceful critique of liberal universalism and the liberal public/private distinction, an increasing number of contemporary feminists have argued that such attempts to formulate a ‘women’s politics’ con­ tinue to endorse a unitary vision of individual iden­ tity and ultimately still fail to take difference seriously. This regard for the wider implications of difference is informed not only by an increasing awareness of the experiences of African-American and other minority feminists, but reflects the general scepticism regarding all universal claims typical of postmodern thought. For writers like Spelman, Harris, hooks and Flax,16 concepts such as ‘gender’ and ‘woman’ are profoundly problematic unless they are ‘qualified by and seen in the context of race, class, ethnicity and other differences’.17 From this perspective the em­ phasis a ‘women’s politics’ places on the experience and identity of ‘women as such’ implies an unsus­ tainable essentialism. As Harris notes, the claim that the ‘biological and social implications of mother­ hood shape the selfhood of all or most women’18 rests upon two key assumptions: the supposition of a deep

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LIBERAL CI T I Z E NS HI P AND FEMINISM fragmentation which may not only threaten the viability of a wider feminist politics, but may ulti­ mately undermine the very notion of democratic citizenship. As Young notes,23 whereas theorists such as Spelman have tended to regard the categories of class, race and nationality as relatively fixed, the stability of these categories is just as doubtful as the appropriateness of the category of ‘women’. One possible response to this complex interaction be­ tween race, class, nationality and gender is to dis­ tinguish further between subcategories. Thus one could, for example, subdivide working-class women further according to race, religion, nationality, eth­ nicity, region and sexuality, or distinguish between the different attributes of an African-American gen­ der in relation to African-American men on the one hand and white men on the other. However, given that ‘any category can be considered an arbitrary unity’, such a strategy ultimately gives rise to an infinite regress which dissolves all ‘groups into in­ dividuals’.24 In the eyes of critics such a process of fragmentation is liable to undermine the wider sym­ pathies essential to a shared sense of citizenship. While cooperation for the common good and gen­ eral solidarity are widely regarded as important ele­ ments of democratic citizenship, a commitment to ‘radical otherness’ is liable to give rise to a focus on sectional interests.25 Indeed, in the absence of shared norms and standards, understanding and cooperation across group lines is likely to prove difficult, if not impossible. From the perspective of traditionally marginalised groups this failure to generate wider sympathies is potentially rather worrying. In the absence of a general sense of solidarity, not only may we lose any reason to hope that the dominant groups within society could cultivate feelings of obligation to take into account the perspective and needs of less powerful groups, but the possibility of solidarity between the latter may also recede. Indeed, the process of differentiation could lead to the fragmentation of wider political movements such as feminism. In the light of these fears a number of feminists have reasserted the importance of women’s shared experiences and the continued relevance of universal standards. In contrast to the anti-essentialist denial of a ‘generalisable, identifiable and collectively

tary and stable women’s self, feminists must recognise that women are enmeshed in many and often contradictory discourses of sexuality, race and class. There­ fore, in place of the objective, rational and universal standpoint central to the liberal disembedded and disembodied self, Spelman and Harris posit a vision of a radically embedded, subjective self. From such a perspective identities are seen as multiplicitous, con­ tingent and context-bound. Differences are always relational not inherent. Thus ‘the social agent is constituted by an assembly of subject positions that can never be totally fixed in a closed system of differences.’20 Since identity is always defined in a specific context vis^a-vis specific others, gender should not only be viewed as a relational concept, whose characteristics and attributes can only be identified by comparing the situation of women with that of men. The construction of gender attributes will also vary according to race, class and nationality. The task of feminist theorising is not to attempt to construct essences, but to explore these contingent relationships. Such an approach clearly has farreaching implications with regard to the political sphere. Given that what constitutes a woman differs across cultural and social contexts, a common wo­ men’s perspective cannot simply be regarded as a metaphysical given. On the contrary, ‘while some women share some common interests and face some common enemies, such commonalties are by no means universal; rather they are interlaced with differences, even with conflict.’21 Feminism, there­ fore, constitutes a complex network of different strands, which link discourses of gender to those of class, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Rather than a unitary political movement, it is therefore best regarded as the product of a complex, shifting and often difficult ‘patchwork of overlapping alliances’.22 While this vision of deep and radical diversity has been highly influential, not all second-wave femin­ ists have endorsed such an outright rejection of liberal principles. Indeed a number of feminists have expressed profound disquiet about the political im­ plications of a commitment to ‘radical otherness’. The basic worry here is that in the absence of any appeal to universally shared standards, an emphasis upon radical diversity will give rise to a process of

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ANDREA BAUMEISTER shared experience of womanhood’,26 feminists such as Okin assert that sexism does constitute ‘an idem tifiable form of oppression many of whose effects are felt by women regardless of race and class.’27 Thus, she claims that, if the findings of Anglo-American feminists about justice within the household are compared with the burdens and benefits in poor households, the injustices of gender are revealed to be quite similar: ‘in both situations, women’s access to paid work is constrained both by sex segregation in the workplace and the assumption that women are “naturally” responsible for all or most of the unpaid work of the household.’28 Not only does feminist anti-essentialism fail to recognise the significance of women’s shared experiences, it also underestimates the potential appeal of the lib­ eral universalist project. As Anne Phillips ob­ serves,29 historically the standards of impartiality implied by the liberal notion of a common humanity have been employed by many oppressed groups, including women, in their struggle for equality. Thus liberal notions of universality and formal equality have enabled oppressed groups to show that the manner in which they differ from the dominant group - be it in terms of gender, race or religion does not constitute a legitimate ground for excluding them from citizenship. For Okin and Martha Nussbaum,30 such an appeal to universal standards is today still likely to be the most effective tool for securing equality for women worldwide.31 A crucial problem is that the victims of oppression and dom­ ination frequently not only lack the intellectual and economic resources to challenge these injustices, but have often internalised the very values which op­ press them. According to Nussbaum and Okin, then, such deeply entrenched discrimination can only be challenged effectively by an appeal to universal standards. These can be employed to hold local government, aid organisations and international bodies such as the UN to account for their failure to improve the position of women.

influential contemporary feminist conceptions of citizenship. For example, in Iris Marion Young’s model o f ‘the heterogeneous public’ the commitment to difference and diversity is tempered by a recogni­ tion of the appeal of liberal values and preoccupa­ tions.32 Although Young stresses that each social group has its own unique experiences, histories and perspectives on social life, which can never be entirely understood or adequately represented by outsiders, she nonetheless retains a commitment to universality and the equality of moral worth of all persons. While the principle of equal moral worth provides a powerful argument in favour of the in­ clusion of all members of society in social and political life, the liberal commitment to formal pro­ cedural rules and basic rights safeguards minorities against the whim of the majority by setting limits to democratic deliberation and outcomes. However, although Young appeals to the value of universality at the point of inclusion, she stresses that ‘univers­ ality in the sense of the participation and inclusion of everyone in moral and social life does not imply universality in the sense of the adoption of a general point of view that leaves behind particular affilia­ tions, feelings, commitments and desires.’33 For her, the liberal ideal of ‘impartial reason’ (the ‘general point of view’) fails to recognise the significance of difference and particularity on at least three counts: it insists that all situations are treated according to the same moral rule and thus ‘denies the particularity of situations’; it tries to ‘master or eliminate hetero­ geneity in the form of feeling’ by abstracting the individual from the needs, inclinations and feelings which accompany particular situations; and, most importantly, it reduces the ‘plurality of moral judge­ ments to one subjectivity’ by abstracting the subject from the particularities which individualise her.34 Thus, while acknowledging the potential appeal of liberal values and preoccupations, Young contends that the scope and nature of these values must be reconceptualised to account for the political claims of difference and particularity. Since each group differs with regard to its experiences, history and perspective on social life, equality in terms of the participation and inclusion of all groups requires a specific set of rights for each group and for some groups a more comprehensive system than for others.

The ‘Heterogeneous Public’ This awareness of the potential strength of the traditional liberal emphasis upon universality and equality has been reflected in some of the most

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LIBERAL CI TI ZE NS HI P AND FEMINISM unified passively by the objects around which their actions are orientated or by the material effects of the actions of the other.’37 While the members of a series do not see themselves engaged in a common en­ terprise and hence do not identify with one another, their actions are constrained by the same set of material objects and collective habits which provide the background for the actions of each member of the series. For Young, the series of ‘women’ is con­ stituted by the ‘rules, practices and assumptions of institutionalised heterosexuality’ and the accompa­ nying sexual division of labour.38 While these gender structures both enable and constrain action, they do not define it and different individuals may adopt a whole range of strategies to deal with gender struc­ tures. Hence, although ‘no individual woman’s identity . . . will escape the markings of gender . . . how gender marks her life is her own.’39 On Young’s account, it is this serialised existence which provides the basis for women’s collective action. Groups of women are formed when women take up and reconstruct ‘the gendered structures that have passively unified them’.40 Such groups are unlikely to incorporate all women, but are usually socially, historically and culturally specific. Here she is careful to distinguish her conception of a social group from both interest and identity groups. Thus social groups are neither merely an ‘aggregate or association of persons who seek a particular goal’,41 nor are they the expression of an essential set of characteristics. Rather, social groups define them­ selves in relation to one another. Since group iden­ tities are the product of this process of differentiation, they are fluid and often shifting. Group membership, therefore, does not signify a shared set of attributes; it is the product of a sense of identification and affinity. But, while social groups are partially constitutive of their members’ identities, an individual is not wholly determined by her group membership. In many ways she remains independent from the group’s identity and can transcend and reject group membership. In a complex, plural so­ ciety this sense of fluidity is further reinforced by multiple group membership, which ensures that every social group has group differences cutting across it. However, while Young’s fluid, multi-layered con­

In place of the liberal emphasis upon formal equality, Young proposes a differentiated citizenship which guarantees ‘the effective recognition and representa­ tion of the distinct voices and perspectives of those of its constituent groups that are oppressed or dis­ advantaged.’35 Since dominant groups within society will always attempt to shape the public sphere in the light of their experiences and perspective, tradition­ ally marginalised groups, such as women, the poor, ethnic minorities and the old, should be granted additional rights to group-specific representation at the various levels of government, thereby increasing their opportunities for political participation. O p­ pressed groups should be provided with the resources to organise themselves, should be invited to analyse and formulate social policy proposals and should have the right to veto specific policies which affect groups directly. Young contends that, given the different experiences and perspectives of social groups, such measures are vital to promote justice. Thus group-specific representation for traditionally marginalised groups ensures greater procedural fair­ ness in the setting of the public agenda, allows for the recognition of all needs and interests in democratic deliberations and adds to democratic accountability by providing an ‘antidote to self-deceiving interest masked as an impartial or general interest.’36 Young’s heterogeneous public clearly offers a so­ phisticated model for a feminist reconceptualisation of citizenship which combines a recognition of the political significance of difference and particularity with a commitment to universality and equality of moral worth at the point of inclusion. Yet, despite its apparent strength, her model of group representation remains at odds with both her dynamic conception of social collectives and her commitment to delib­ erative democracy. Young offers a fluid and multi-layered conception of social collectives, which seek to acknowledge the worries expressed by feminist anti-essentialists while safeguarding the possibility of a women’s politics based upon collective action. Women should not, in the first instance, be conceived of as a unified social group but are best viewed as a series. While groups are self-conscious, mutually acknowledging collectives with a shared sense of purpose, a ‘series’ refers to ‘a social collective whose members are

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ANDREA BAUMEISTER ception of social collectives may allay many of the fears of anti-essentialists, her sophisticated unden standing of collective identity and action does appear to be at odds with her notion of group representation- The notion of a guaranteed right to group representation implies that groups can be readily identified, have a stable membership and are sufficiently homogeneous to be able to formulate a group response. A system which guaranteed oppressed groups the right to representation would hardly encourage them to recognise the contextual nature and fluidity of their boundaries. On the contrary, it would be in the interests of groups to remain distinct and to attempt to build a loyal, fixed membership. Therefore, group representation may not only be divisive, but it could also encourage precisely the ‘essentialism’ Young is so keen to avoid. The degree of division associated with group representation will in part depend on the wider mechanisms for democratic decision-making.42 In this context Young is keen to distinguish her model of communicative democracy from interest-group pluralism. Rather than simply assert their predeter­ mined interests, democratic deliberation requires that ‘participants discuss together the issues and come to a decision according to principles of jus­ tice.’43 Therefore the participants in democratic discourse must express their demands not as wants but as entitlements of justice. However, given the specificity of group experience, the various partici­ pants will not always be able to recognise the claims of others and a certain amount of conflict is inevi­ table. The manner in which such conflicts are to be resolved will largely depend upon the nature and character of the public standards that govern demo­ cratic deliberation. Yet here Young remains vague. A t times she suggests that these standards are local and do not entail an appeal to impartiality and the ‘general point of view’. Thus she contends that ‘the rationality of norms can be grounded only by under­ standing them as the outcome of discussion includ­ ing all those who will be bound by them.’44 But, if these standards are strictly local, then once negotia­ tion has broken down the decision-making process comes to a standstill. However, Young’s own appeal to universality at the level of participation indicates that such conflicts should be resolved by an appeal to

principles which are not merely local. She herself appears to recognise this when she maintains that only those claims ‘are normatively valid which are generalisable in the sense that they can be recognised without violating the rights of others or subjecting them to domination.’45 This suggests that the stan­ dards by which such claims are to be assessed are not merely local. Yet, although such an emphasis upon ‘generalisability’ would offer an effective route for the resolution of group conflict, it entails a commitment to impartiality that is at odds with the regard for particularity and partiality central to the notion of group representation. While Young could potentially overcome this tension by basing her defence of group representation upon an appeal to impartiality, this would place her conception of a ‘differentiated citi­ zenship’ back within the liberal tradition she rejects. However, such a return to liberal ideas should arguably neither alarm nor surprise feminists. Liberal­ ism is a rich and complex tradition which in the final analysis may not be as hostile to diversity as feminists frequently assume. Here, the distinction Kant draws between perfect and imperfect obligations and the open-ended, context-responsive manner in which a Kantian approach determines specific obligations are of particular interest. These traditional Kantian con­ cerns have continued to inform the work of con­ temporary Kantians such as Habermas. His contextresponsive conception of impartiality allows for the recognition of the complex relationship between the public and the private and is sensitive to the de­ mands for more effective representation on the part of traditionally marginalised groups.

Liberal Citizenship, Difference and Particularity From a Kantian perspective the imperative to treat humanity as an ‘end’ and never merely as a ‘means’ requires of us not only to abstain from infringing the rights of others, but also to take, as far as possible, an active interest in the well-being of others. This concern is central to the Kantian conception of imperfect duties. Therefore, while perfect obligations, such as non-coercion and non-deceit, address ques­ tions of justice, imperfect duties, like benevolence and charity, focus upon the specific circumstances of

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LIBERAL CI TIZENSHIP AND FEMINISM important to ensure de facto rather than mere de jure equality.48 While a formal system of rights may grant citizens formal equality, equal rights and liberties can be used differently and may impact upon citizens differentially depending upon their circumstances. Thus genuine equality can only be guaranteed if the specific needs and circumstances of particular others are taken into account. These considerations are akin to the concerns Kant addresses via the notion of imperfect duties. Furthermore, just as a contextresponsive reading of the categorical imperative differentiates between ancillary and fundamental principles of action, Habermas stresses the need to distinguish between the formulation and the appli­ cation of norms. While norms can be justified by reference to universal principles, the impartial jus­ tification of a norm requires careful attention to the specific circumstances of a given situation. To apply a norm impartially we must determine whether, in the light of all relevant facts, a specific norm is the most appropriate one in these circumstances. Within the context of citizenship the sensitivity of the Kantian tradition to specific circumstances and particular needs provides a potentially powerful the­ oretical framework for voicing the concerns that have preoccupied many contemporary feminists. For in­ stance, the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties enables a Kantian approach to be sensitive to the problems highlighted by feminists such as Young. While the emphasis on our common humanity which informs the Kantian notion of perfect duties provides a powerful justification for the extension of citizenship to all members of society and offers a clear set of standards for resolving potential conflicts between the demands of various citizens, the idea of imperfect duties ensures that a Kantian conception of citizenship will be sensitive to the specific needs and circum­ stances of particular citizens. From a Kantian perspec­ tive citizenship is not merely a question of granting everyone the same formal rights. It also implies an obligation to ensure that all individuals are in a posi­ tion to effectively fulfil their role as citizens. In the light of these considerations Habermas (and other contem­ porary Kantians) have stressed the need for greater political participation on the part of traditionally marginalised or socially disadvantaged groups.49 Just as imperfect obligations highlight human vulnerability

particular individuals. For Kant,46 such imperfect obligations are not supererogatory; they constitute a vital aspect of a balanced moral approach. However, whereas perfect obligations can be discharged by simply abstaining from certain actions, such as, for instance, coercion or deceit and are, therefore, universally applicable, imperfect obligations require time, presence, resources and an understanding of the particular situation and circumstances of the other. Consequently, imperfect obligations are context-specific. Once the principle of universalisability is combined with the recognition of particularity, indifference to the specific circumstances and needs of others is not permissible since it may constitute a threat to the agency of the other. This regard for difference and particularity is further underlined by the context-responsive reading of the categorical imperative advocated by modern Kantians such as O ’Neill and Herman.47 While the categorical imperative aims to rule out fundamental principles of action which could not consistently be adopted by all, it does not apply to ancillary prin­ ciples. After all since the particular considerations which inform our actions in particular circumstances vary widely, the more specific principles upon which human beings may act cannot be universally acted upon. While the categorical imperative rules out certain fundamental principles, it cannot, by itself, discriminate among more specific principles of ac­ tion. Consequently, the adoption of ancillary mo­ tives which could not be consistently adopted by all is not prohibited. Thus the categorical imperative merely provides us with a criterion against which to measure principles. It does not tell us which princi­ ples to select in specific situations and how to implement them. To work out what an obligation entails in a specific situation requires careful evalua­ tion of the various elements which influence the situation. The main purpose of the categorical im­ perative, therefore, is to provide a starting-point for this process of critical reflection. Kant’s concern with the specific circumstances of particular others and context sensitivity in the ap­ plication of norms have continued to inform the work of contemporary Kantians. Thus, for example, in his recent work Jurgen Habermas has argued that if the autonomy of all citizens is to be protected, it is

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ANDREA BAUMEISTER Rather than placing the burden on marginalised groups to claim their rights, the language of obliga­ tions reminds the powerful of the moral requirement to fulfil their duties. Consequently the powerful cannot simply ignore the needs and aspirations of traditionally marginalised groups. Furthermore, the open-ended manner in which an obligation-based approach establishes specific obligations is well-sui­ ted to capture the emphasis contemporary feminists have placed on the complex and multiplicitous nature of women’s identities. Whereas a rights per­ spective requires the prior establishment of a set of rights in order to function, an obligation-based approach can allow for obligations to be established as situations arise. All an obligation-based approach needs is a formula, such as the categorical imperative, which can be applied to specific situations in order to establish which obligations flow from these situa­ tions. A Kantian perspective therefore recognises that the nature and extent of the obligation to ensure the effective exercise of citizenship can only be established in response to the particular needs and circumstances of given individuals. The regard for particularity and human vulner­ ability already evident in Kant’s work suggests that this strand of liberal thought is potentially capable of providing a framework for a richer and more ba­ lanced account of citizenship. Undoubtedly the re­ sponses to the claims of difference and diversity advocated by contemporary Kantians remain proble­ matic. Habermas, for example, has quite rightly been criticised for advocating a model of communication which places an undue emphasis upon critical, ra­ tional argumentation, marginalising the speech pat­ terns of traditionally disadvantaged groups such as women.50 Nonetheless, the manner in which such an approach tempers its commitment to ‘universal­ ity’ with a recognition of ‘diversity’ suggests that such an account of liberal citizenship may enable feminists to resolve one of the most troubling tensions at the heart of contemporary feminist theorising.

and particularity, Habermas highlights the complex relationship between the public and the private sphere. Given that persons are individuated through the processes of socialisation, personal autonomy can only be safeguarded if the life-context within which an individual’s identity is formulated is also protected. This can only be achieved if all citizens participate in the formulation and interpretation of the rights and norms that safeguard individual autonomy. After all, unless all citizens participate in public debate and express their specific needs, there is a real danger that the specific needs of socially disadvantaged groups will be misunderstood. This in turn may undermine the capacity of such groups to pursue effectively their own conception of the good life. Thus for Habermas gen­ uine equality between men and women cannot be achieved unless women take part in the formulation of the criteria which determine what kind of treatment is to count as equal. Yet, since traditionally marginalised groups may require support to organise themselves and to effectively participate in the political process, Ha­ bermas acknowledges that some citizens may require special cultural and social rights. However, in contrast to Young, Habermas not only conceptualises such cultural and social rights as individual rights, he clearly grounds them in a liberal appeal to impartiality. There­ fore while, like Young, Habermas advocates a discur­ sive model of democracy, his approach avoids the tensions inherent in Young’s ‘heterogeneous public’. Although modern Kantians such as Habermas invoke the language of rights, feminists, in their struggle to secure greater participation for women, may find it advantageous to formulate their demands in Kant’s language of obligations. Since on Kant’s account those in power have a clear duty to assist those less fortunate, an obligation-based approach which firmly places the onus on those in positions of influence to take all steps in their power to ensure that every citizen is capable of effectively exercising her citizenship is liable to strengthen the position of traditionally marginalised groups such as women.

Notes 1. Pateman (1988); Young (1990). 2. Spelman (1988); Harris (1990); hooks (1981); Flax (1995).

3. Okin (1994); M. Nussbaum, ‘Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings’, in Nussbaum and Glover (eds) (1995), pp. 61-104.

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LIBERAL CI T I Z E NS HI P AND FEMINISM 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. For Nussbaum the commitment to the ‘radical other­ ness’ of different cultures has led some theorists to defend or at least condone many traditional cultural practices which systematically discriminate against women. Here Nussbaum cites two vivid examples of the approaches to which she objects. The first one refers to an American economist who cites the ex­ tension of the idea that menstruating women pollute the kitchen to the workplace as an instance of the integration of the values that prevail in the workplace with those that shape home life, an integration which he regards as lacking in Western countries. The second one refers to a French anthropologist who ‘expresses regret that the introduction of smallpox vaccination in India by the British eradicated the cult of Sittala Devi, the goddess to whom one used to pray in order to prevent smallpox,’ (Nussbaum, ‘Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings’, in Nussbaum and Glover (eds) (1995), p. 65). 32. Young (1990). 33. Ibid., p. 105. 34. Ibid., p. 100. 35. Ibid., p. 184. 36. Ibid., p.185. 37. Young (1995), p. 199. 38. Ibid., p. 204. 39. Ibid., p. 209. 40. Ibid., p. 210. 41. Young (1990), p. 186. 42. For an interesting discussion of the relationship be­ tween Young’s commitment to group representation and her model of communicative democracy see ]. Squires, ‘Group Representation, Deliberation and the Displacement of Dichotomies’, in M. Saward (ed.), Innovations in Democratic Theory (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 43. Young (1990), p. 190. 44. Ibid., p 116. 45. Ibid., p 107. 46. Kant (1963b). 47. O’Neill (1986); Herman (1985). 48. Habermas (1993). 49. Ibid. 50. See I. M. Young, ‘Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy’, in Benhabib (ed.) (1996), pp. 120-35. Feminists such as Warnke have also questioned whether it is possible to draw a sharp a distinction between the application and formula­ tion of norms as Habermas advocates (see Warnke, 1995).

Young (1990). Kant (1963b). Habermas (1993). Ferguson (1985);Wollstonecraft(1989). See, also,Kate Soper’s chapter in the present volume for a close analysis of early feminism’s relationship with the Enlightenment. Pateman (1988). Ibid., p. 8. Frazer (1996). Young (1989). Mendus (1992). Young (1989), p. 259. Elshtain (1981); Dinnerstein (1976); Ruddick (1989). Many of these early attempts to formulate a ‘politics of maternal thinking’ were influenced by Carol Gilligan’s work on moral development (Gilligan, 1982). For Gilligan not only the self but also the other person towards whom one is acting has to be viewed as radically situated and particularised. Thus, the generalised other of liberal theory is replaced by the notion of the concrete other. Spelman (1988); Harris (1990); hooks (1981); Flax (1995). Okin (1994), p 6. Harris (1990), p. 603. Spelman (1988), p. 13. Mouffe (1992), p. 28. Fraser and Nicholson (1988), p. 391. Ibid. Young (1995). As Young notes, it is, for example, simply misleading to assume that a working-class woman’s gendered experiences can only be properly identified by comparing her situation to that of work­ ing-class men. After all, gendered experiences such as sexual harassment cut across class lines. Ibid., p. 195. See, S. Mendus, ‘Time and Chance: Kantian Ethics and Feminist Philosophy’, Morrell Discussion Paper (York: Department of Politics, University of York, 1990). S. Benhabib and D. Cornell, cited in Okin (1994), p. 9. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 9. Phillips (1993). S. Okin, ‘Inequalities Between the Sexes in Different Cultural Contexts’, in Nussbaum and Glover (eds) (1995), pp. 275-97; M. Nussbaum, ‘Human Capabil­ ities, Female Human Beings’, in Nussbaum and Glover (eds) (1995), pp. 61-104.

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Part Three J U S T I C E : IDENTITY AND DI S T RI B UT I ON

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L I B E R A L I S M A N D T HE P O L I T I C S OF R E C O G N I T I O N Jonathan Seglow

automatically be resolved in favour of the latter. Rather, there must be some interpretive compromise on both sides so that recognition can be incorporated into the liberal canon.

I Liberals, it is said nowadays, are having trouble com­ ing to terms with the concept of recognition. They are not sure what it is and hence do not know how to evaluate it, whether to incorporate it into the liberal canon or eschew it altogether. And this is odd because recognition is always familiar to us. Or at any rate, less glibly, the concept of recognition is not a difficult one. It is the universal human need to have one’s identity esteemed and valued by others. It is a vital need because in order to be an effective agent in a liberal society, with a secure sense of one’s own identity, you require recognition - positive affirmation - from others. Politically speaking, recognition is the need to have one’s group identity publicly appraised and affirmed. But political recognition is in short supply among some groups in liberal societies. Many mem­ bers of minority cultures, in particular, do not receive the public recognition they deserve. And one reason for that is a lacuna in liberal theory itself: it does not recognise the importance of recognition in forming individual and social identities. In this chapter, then, I will argue for an agenda: that recognition should enter the normative constellation of liberalism (of some sort). I say ‘of some sort’ because there are certainly conflicts between recognition and orthodox liberal values such as freedom, opportunity and impartiality. But, as this volume amply demonstrates, the liberal identity is itself contested so there is no reason that conflicts between recognition and these values should

II We should begin by acquainting ourselves with the kinds of claims to recognition actually made by minorities, of different sorts, in a liberal society. The sorts of cases I have in mind include the following: • Should the children of recent immigrants be entitled to schooling in their mother tongue on the grounds that without it their language would swiftly die away, depriving the second generation of an important sense of orientation and identity? • Should racist (‘hate’) speech against specific minorities be outlawed on the grounds that it is not just offensive but threatens their fairly fragile public presence in a wider community not of their making? • Should a gay couple be entitled to a legally recognised same-sex marriage on the grounds that they should enjoy public recognition of their mutual commitment just like a mixed couple? • Should religious minorities enjoy exemptions and privileges with respect to dress codes at

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JO NATH AN SEGLOW work (for example, Sikh policemen who wear turbans or Muslim girls who wear the chador in place of a conventional school uniform)? • Should public resources be directed towards measures which benefit minority communities and only them (such as building cultural or religious centres)? • Should there be quotas which make it easier for under-represented groups such as ethnic mino­ rities and women to gain university places and certain jobs? • Should curricula in state schools be revised to promote a positive image of minority commu­ nities’ history and cultural achievements?1

I mentioned just now that those who claim recognition suffer from some sort of unchosen disadvantage and this idea is crucial to the liberal account of social justice. The crucial distinction is between unchosen circumstances, which people are not responsible for, and their own freely made choices, which they are. While we quite properly must bear the cost of our choices, we are not responsible for the unchosen circumstances which diminish our capacity to choose in the first place. Some people in society - the poor, the ill, the handicapped, the unemployed, for example - la­ bour under disadvantages which other members of society do not face and which prevent them from choosing how to live their lives. The basic prin­ ciple of the liberal theory of social justice is, therefore, that unchosen circumstantial disadvan­ tages should be compensated for, and in a way that enables each person to determine for herself how she should live her life. Two critical normative assumptions are made by this liberal account. First, all human beings are regarded (for the purposes of justice) as morally identical choice-making agents. Looking beyond the fact that someone is confined to a wheelchair, for example, we see that she is a person who wants to be able to determine how she lives her life. It is just the bad luck of being disabled which prevents her from doing this. The second assumption is that the circumstantial disadvantages which people face such as illness, handicap and poverty - are all contingent and not essential aspects of a person’s identity. By this I mean that people regard them­ selves fundamentally as choice-making agents. Very often, this is evidenced by the fact that a person would much rather be without the disabling aspect of her identity. Hence the compensation individuals receive in order to overcome their disadvantage has, whatever its specific form, the same generic purpose: to enable them to regain the capacity for being a choice-making agent. Can this account of social justice address the claims for recognition I listed earlier? There are good reasons for thinking it cannot. To begin with, the kinds of people who make claims for recognition do not regard themselves first and foremost as choice­ making agents. Rather it is a particular identity they

These cases are all quite different, and involve ‘cultures’ in the very broadest sense of the term to include ethnic groups, religions and genders. None­ theless, at the risk of distorting some particular cases I shall consider them all together as claims for recog­ nition made by ‘collectives’ or ‘groups’, or cultures in this broad sense. Now all these recognition claims are claims for justice too because each group suffers from some sort of unchosen disadvantage and that is what social justice aims to correct. They are not mere wants as when, for example, I demand that you recognise my ‘need’ for a million pounds. However, as claims of justice, they are all highly contentious from a liberal perspective. For they are claims for special treatment, for something extra in the way of rights or resources which other people do not have. This goes against the central liberal idea that the state should be impartial among different citizens whatever their particular identities and allegiances. The impartial liberal state does offer respect for each person’s abstract moral worth, but for it to recognise particular concrete identities appears to be a viola­ tion of impartiality. Put another way, the liberal state allows people to be different, but why should it actively sponsor such difference? To address these questions we need first to ex­ amine the theory of social justice of which liberal political theory typically avails itself. I shall sketch a simplified version of the account of equal opportu­ nities developed by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, and then we can assess whether it can address these sorts of claims to recognition.2

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L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E P O L I T I C S OF R E C O G N I T I O N looking at Charles Taylor’s essay, ‘The Politics of Recognition’.3

want recognised. Immigrant ethnic groups who de­ mand a more positive public evaluation of their culture, for example, want the culture to be recog­ nised, not their choice-making capacity. While they are in a disadvantaged position because of their cultural membership, they do not regard their culture as a disabling circumstance which merits compensa­ tion like the wheelchair-bound person. On the contrary, they want their culture positively affirmed and promoted. More generally, the liberal theory of social justice seems ill-equipped to deal with what we might call ‘ideational’ issues that relate to ethnicity and culture, gender and sexual orientation, religion and language, and so on. It seems better suited to addressing material disadvantages such as poverty, illness and handicap. Indeed, many ideational in­ justices may not appear to be injustices at all for the liberal theory. Is it an injustice for the children of recent immigrants not to be entitled to schooling in their mother tongue, for example? Is it unjust (as opposed to unfortunate) to have overwhelmingly negative images of some minority ethnic group dis­ played in the media? It is hard to see how the liberal theory can view these as injustices. This leads us naturally to ask whether the idea­ tional realms of culture, ethnicity and so on are really fit subjects for justice at all. If they were not, there would be no need to extend liberal social justice to accommodate them. But I think there are two very good reasons which show that ideational issues are injustices which liberalism must address. The first reason, which I discuss in the next section, hinges on the phenomenon of self-esteem. Drawing on Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, I will argue that it is only through having one’s substantive traits and attributes positively appraised by others, that one can esteem them oneself, and only yet only through self­ esteem that one can become a properly functioning agent. I then discuss in section IV how the public culture in a liberal society systematically privileges certain peoples’ identities and derogates others. We simply do live in societies that appraise some people’s identities more positively than others. This gives some groups much greater collective esteem than others which, since esteem is necessary for identity and agency, is an injustice. In the final sections of the chapter I will ask how liberalism might address this,

Ill The notion of recognition takes as central a person’s own view of what she is about, her identity. Identity involves taking a normative attitude towards one’s own substantive traits and abilities, what following Taylor I will call an agent’s self-interpretations. These self-interpretations are basic and constitutive of who I am: there is no prior autonomous self that can assess and revise them. To assume otherwise just pushes the question back a stage of what this auton­ omous self is. Thus as Taylor puts it, ‘to ask what a person is, in abstraction from his or her self-inter­ pretations, is to ask a fundamentally misguided ques­ tion, one to which there couldn’t in principle be an answer.’4 Now one’s self-interpretations are, in a fundamental way, formed by others. I have the self-interpretations that I do because I have inter­ nalised how others see me. The basic idea is that only through others’ recognition can one acquire an identity. But of course if that were the only way of acquiring an identity the individual person would merely be a locus for external social forces. So we must add a second, more individual, moment to personal identity which appropriates the internalised attitudes of others for its own purposes, and, no less critical, looks outwards and takes attitudes towards others. These two moments - self and others synthesise in the identity of a psychologically fully formed person. Hence identity is fundamentally a negotiated achievement. There is no pure self-making (that ignores the need for others’ recognition), but neither are persons constituted by external social forms.5 Others’ attitudes shape my very self-inter­ pretations, but at the same time I can revise them myself and project them outwards in the form of attitudes to others which in turn help to shape them and so on. From this complex and ever-shifting matrix, different persons’ identities are formed. In his important recent book on recognition Axel Honneth argues that there are three distinct dimen­ sions to the phenomenon: love, rights and solidar­ ity.6 The human infant who is loved by her parents develops basic self confidence; she has faith in her

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JONATHAN SEGLOW ability to express her needs and desires without being abandoned as a result. This capacity to trust one’s needs and desires is, Honneth argues, a precondition for self-realisation in any human community. I shall not discuss it here. When a person is recognised by her community as a bearer of rights, by contrast, she is recognised to share those universal features of personhood, such as agency, rationality and respon­ sibility, which make her able to assert claims upon others. Others’ recognition help enable people to become claimers of their own rights. Honneth calls this self-respect Finally, self-esteem connotes a posi­ tive relation to one’s own substantive, concrete traits and abilities. Against the background of a shared, yet open and plural, value horizon, individuals recognise each other as beings with positive traits and abilities which enable them to contribute to the common good. This final form of recognition enables indivi­ duals, operating in a nexus of approving others, to realise their own concrete identities. Honneth’s central insight is that to become a person with a fully formed, integrated, fulfilled iden­ tity requires recognition by others and this must include respect, esteem and love. As he summarises it:

This quotation highlights the fact that we cannot disassociate recognition as respect from the more substantive recognition which brings self-esteem. Both aspects (along with self-confidence) are neces­ sary to produce a person with a fully formed identity. Substantive recognition of one’s traits and abilities is not simply a welcome endorsement of what you think you are about. It is fundamentally necessary to become a properly functioning agent capable of forming intentions and pursuing projects in the first place. It is not an intrusion upon one’s autonomy, but rather a precondition of it. Let us consider the idea of self-esteem more closely. It is a central self-interpretive attitude and takes as its object the substantive empirical traits that a person has. Someone with a healthy sense of self­ esteem regards her concrete identity as morally valu­ able, as something worth having and developing. As a precondition for pursuing one’s ends, an adequate sense of self-esteem is a universal human need. O f course, a crucial source of self-esteem is success in one’s own projects. If I do well as a painter or a footballer, developing certain skills and attributes in the process, I generally significantly raise my self­ esteem. But here I want to focus on the converse, the way that self-esteem is a precondition, as much as a result, of engagement in projects. For a person will only engage in her own projects, developing her traits and abilities, if she thinks they are things worth developing, in other words if she has a degree of self­ esteem to begin with. As Honneth shows, this is not the same as self-respect which liberal theory is more familiar with.9 Self-respect involves recognition of one’s general capacity to make claims upon other people. An agent with self-respect is confident that she is entitled to pursue her own projects when others disagree that she should do so. But this confidence in one’s abstract moral worth is quite distinct from the value one places on one’s own traits and abilities, and projects as extemalisations of those abilities. Self-esteem involves a positive self-evalua­ tion of the particular person one is, self-respect that one shares the inherent dignity of all rights-bearing persons. When we claim that a person with self-esteem believes her own traits, abilities and projects are valuable and worth having we are making a claim

It is only due to the cumulative acquisition of basic self-confidence, of self-respect, and of self­ esteem - provided, one after another, by those three forms of recognition - that a person can come to see himself or herself, unconditionally, as both an autonomous and an individuated being, and to identify with his or her goals and desires.7 These three forms of recognition are not an extra bonus for agents who are already autonomous any­ way. Rather, they help create the self-interpretations which constitute any person’s identity. Thus: The connection between the experience of re­ cognition and one’s relation-to-self stems from the intersubjective structure of personal identity. The only way in which individuals are constituted as persons is by learning to refer to themselves as, from the perspective of an approving or encoura­ ging other, beings with certain positive traits or abilities.8

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L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E P O L I T I C S OF R E C O G N I T I O N they will suffer a deficit in their practical capacity to be agents in the public realm. In sum, the public evaluative status of collective identities has a crucial bearing on their members’ self-esteem and in turn on their ability to become properly functioning agents.

about the prior and independent value of those traits, abilities and projects. The more immediate and less significant decisions an agent takes are genuinely matters of taste where we can say of a person that, because she wills it, a goal is valuable for her. But in order to summon the motivation to pursue longerterm projects and goals, which are externalisations of her particular abilities, a person must perceive that they have independent value. I could not esteem myself as a good parent or a good doctor, for example, unless I believed that parenting and medicine were morally valuable goals. Some putatively valuable features of persons that are significant sources of self-esteem are individual, such as a talent at music or the virtue of generosity, but many others have an irreducible collective di­ mension which refers to (for example) gender and sexuality, ethnicity and religion, and linguistic and national aspects of one’s identity. These are all features of persons who belong to the relevant group and from which they take pride or, in our terms, esteem.10 O f course, like other largely unchosen aspects of identity these collective memberships may be more or less salient in a person’s life. But for many people a thriving culture or religion, say, is an important aspect of their self-interpreted identity and will contribute significantly to their self-esteem. On Honneth’s view, that self-esteem will in turn help fulfil an individual’s own identity and develop her capacity for agency. It follows, therefore, that if people need recognition in order to develop their identity and capacity for agency, they require it of these collective aspects as well as of their more individual traits and abilities. In other words, for people who do identify with these collective groups, a positive evaluation of them by others enables them better to be agents, that is effective pursuers of their own projects. This is true even where people are respected as rights-bearing citizens by the rest of the community. If ethnic minority X is generally re­ garded to be an uncivilised, backward tribal group, for example, then members of X who identify with it will suffer a lack of self-esteem and have demeaned individual identities. If the general view of women is that they should do nothing but raise children and (to use Mill’s phrase) ‘beautify and adorn the home’ then, independent of their legal status as citizens,

IV I now want to consider the role of the public culture in providing an orientating medium within which citizens conduct their lives. Sometimes liberals write as if individual choice and agency takes place merely within a thin ‘framework’ of rights and liberties with no further relevant values. This may be an ideal inspired by the ‘fact of pluralism’, but as a descriptive claim it is certainly incorrect. Even the most liberal societies contain thick, substantive public cultures which articulate a great many normative values and ideals. Notwithstanding the fact of pluralism, liberal citizens live by a set of shared ideas and values about how to live that help bind and integrate their community and serve as points of reference for individual members making their own choices about how to live. Because this culture is implicit and in the background we do not always realise its great power in orientating our ethical identities. But con­ sider the attitudes in this country to, say, the role of the Christian religion in public life (including its implications for free speech), the value and status of the family compared to other modes of human relationship, the importance of publicly funded health care, our history of Empire and conquest, the place of languages other than English in public life, and more broadly the degree to which immi­ grants must adapt themselves to our way of life. I hope that even this (almost) random list reveals the extent to which our public life is substantially normatively encoded. Shared values and attitudes, transmitted through many sorts of social relation­ ships and amplified by the media, help maintain a nation as an ‘imagined community’. Like all com­ munities, it takes a stand in moral space. The point is that whatever scope people have for individual choice in liberal societies they cannot but take their bearings from the public moral consciousness - the public culture - of the nation. O f course, this public culture is not some hypostatic entity standing over

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JO N A T H A N SEGLOW and above individual agents. It is woven from the fabric of our own attitudes. My claim is simply that its normative encoding means that a huge number of values and attitudes are privileged from the start and this unfailingly structures whatever choices people are formally free to make. Political societies which are conscious of themselves as such are integrated by shared norms and values which cannot but have a certain moral mass. Public cultures are, of course, revisable and re­ vised. They change in an evolutionary way. But the relevant distinction is between a conservative, theistic or nationalistic society where the public culture is seen to be an objective and unchangeable moral system and a liberal society where individuals can participate in the progressive redefinition of their public culture. (I will return to the latter ideal.) The relevant distinction is not between the former ultra-communitarian ideal and a purely procedural republic constituted merely by abstract values of freedom and equality in which individuals can choose to be whatever they like with no moral ‘externalities’. A perfectly competitive free market for values and ways of life is an ideal not yet realised and perhaps unrealisable. (Analogously, consider how supposedly value-neutral natural and social scientific research works through dominant para­ digms which orientate practitioners’ questions and findings.) In sum, a liberal public culture is sub­ stantive though revisable over time. Norms or values are not fixed and immutable but nonetheless they seep into the crevices within which individuals exercise freedom of choice.

personal agency. A theory of justice which addresses the problem of misrecognition, then, instead of merely respecting people’s abstract moral worth, should focus directly on the public evaluative status of significant collective identities. Policies of recog­ nition which raise that status should improve the collective self-esteem of members by legal means and by gradually shifting the attitudes of the public culture. As part of a liberal theory of justice, policies of recognition must of course be justifiable not only to the minority community which benefits from them but also to the majority of citizens who do not. The problem is that policies of recognition will very often involve a redistribution of freedom and opportunity between different groups, and those who lose out will demand some justification. The sorts of redistribu­ tions I have in mind include affirmative action policies which reduce the opportunity for those who do not benefit from them to gain jobs and places in education; restricting property ownership in a territory to those whose ethnic homeland it is (which erodes others’ rights of movement); abridging freedom of speech in order not to offend minority religions; and more general redirections of resources to fund minority activities (their own schools, cul­ tural events, etc.) which of course take away from resources that could be spent on everyone. The basic justification undergirding all these mea­ sures of recognition is an ideal of equality which aims to achieve a rough parity of the social bases of self­ esteem, as expressed in law and the public culture, for different social groups. Rather than set out and defend how that justification would work in full, which is beyond the scope of this chapter, I would like here merely to explore one aspect of it, and that is the issue of moral value. As I argued above, what disadvantaged groups want recognised is the moral value of their collective identities. And the majority who do not benefit from the kinds of policies of recognition I’ve just listed would be more willing to assent to them if they too appreciate the value of the way of life the policy is designed to benefit. Hence the value question is at the heart of the justification of a recognition-sensitive liberalism. We might argue that only objectively valuable collective identities merit official recognition. On

V When the theory of recognition is linked to the sociological truth about the normative encoding of the public culture we can more clearly see that members of certain collectivities have a case in justice for political recognition, and more specifically the kinds of measures I sketched at the beginning. The public culture contains a negative appraisal of certain religious, ethnic, cultural and sexual identi­ ties which can lower the self-esteem of those for whom that collective identity is important. That in turn has a negative impact on their own capacity for

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L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E P O L I T I C S OF R E C O G N I T I O N is encapsulated in the notion of authenticity and we would do well to analyse this first. Authenticity is ‘the idea that each of us has an original way of being human: each person has his or her own “measure” ’.13 Each person has their own particular, original accent on the human condition. Taylor encapsulates the idea of authenticity thus:

this view, collective ways of life that bear great moral value but which, nonetheless, are systematically devalued by the public culture should be recognised in the ways I’ve catalogued. Well, we might, but it isn’t promising because whatever moral consensus exists in a political community about the value of different ways of life is expressed by the public culture and yet this, as we’ve seen, denigrates them. The objective view would have to appeal to a more abstract, ideal account of values in order to generate the moral authority for recognition. But even sup­ posing this could be done - which I doubt - it would suffer from a further drawback: it would begin to lose touch with the self-interpretations of those groups who it seeks to benefit. For it is only by positively evaluating their identity as they perceive it that the self-esteem of demeaned groups is raised; their selfinterpreted account of the value of their identity may or may not have any connection with the objective one. Conversely, then, we could embrace a subjec­ tive account. In this instance any collective whose members believed that their way of life was insuffi­ ciently valued by the public culture would merit official recognition.11 This account has the advan­ tage that it perfectly tracks the normative self-inter­ pretations of collectives. Indeed, the justification for policies of recognition is assimilated precisely to their subjective feeling. But the subjective account would no longer be a justification for recognition: it would commit the state positively to recognise debased, harmful and valueless ways of life and would remove the evolutionary power of what Kymlicka calls the ‘cultural marketplace’ in helping them to wither away.12

There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.14 The authentic person tries to construct for herself a unique yet coherent and narratable life-project rather than being an unthinking social conformist.15 She will of course internalise others’ normative attitudes as her identity cannot but be part-formed by them. But rather than being captive to these attitudes she will use them as symbolic material to construct an identity that is her own. As a value claim, authenticity is the idea that particular identities have value just because of their particularity. They have objective value, but not because they can be subsumed by a moral universal (as when we claim that all persons have equal moral worth). Rather, authentic identities possess exemp­ lary validity; they are valuable just because of their authentic originality.16 Authenticity, in sum, wrests moral value from the singular experience of the subject. O f course, Taylor’s main concern is with cultural authenticity and cultural recognition. Straight after introducing the idea of personal authenticity, he goes on to claim that collective identities such as cultures also have their own particular way of worth or measure. Commenting on Herder’s notion of authenticity, Taylor writes, ‘Herder applied his con­ ception of originality at two levels, not only to the individual person . . . but also to the culture-bearing people . . . Just like individuals, a Volk should be true to itself, that is, its own culture.’17 However, Taylor says little more to defend cultural authenticity than this. The value of cultural authenticity is a simple deduction from personal authenticity.18 The

VI What we need is an account of the value of collec­ tive identities that does justice to their self-inter­ pretations while at the same time provides a firm moral basis for justifying policies of recognition. With these criteria in mind I want in the remainder of this chapter to examine Charles Taylor’s influen­ tial essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’. Although he does not use the term, Taylor presents a theory of the justice of recognition grounded in a particular ac­ count of the value of collective identities. That value

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JO NATH AN SEGLOW main reason for this, I think, is that Taylor sees the central constituent of cultures as language. People who share a culture speak the same language and thus language defines and demarcates different cul­ tures. Cultures, then, as formed and maintained by different languages, have their own authentic col­ lective identities.19 The norms and values of the public culture provide the medium by which cultural members evaluate their own collective identities. If the public culture system­ atically denigrates a minority culture then this de­ means its identity internally. Unfortunately, this is very often just what happens.20 The example of misrecognition which especially exercises Taylor is his native province of Quebec. His question is how can the Quebecois maintain their own authentic cultural identity?21 Taylor catalogues how the Quebec government introduced various policies of recogni­ tion the most important of which was the requirement that French-speaking parents send their children to French-speaking schools. The reason for this was the overriding good of suwivance of the authentic cultural identity of Quebec, constitutively defined by its being French-speaking. Taylor does not himself employ the concept of self-esteem which I borrowed from Honneth. But we can certainly translate his politics of recognition into those terms and say that the rationale for promoting Quebec culture is precisely that it gives the Quebecois a secure sense of self-esteem, and in turn identity and agency. The question is whether Quebec culture does have authentic moral value such that its claim for recog­ nition is justified when, clearly, members of other collective identities (Anglophone Canadians, for example) may not recognise the exemplary moral value of Quebec culture. This takes us to Taylor’s larger concern which is when and how different cultures should recognise each other’s moral value in general. And this is our concern too for we saw how public cultures are normatively encoded so as to privilege certain cultural identity. The problem is a particularly acute one when the ‘cultural gap’ be­ tween two groups is large - as it can be, for example with black and Asian cultures (whether immigrants or indigenous peoples) who demand the recognition from the white majority in Europe and North Amer­ ica when it is the latter’s identity that is privileged.

We (white Europeans) simply lack the perspective from which distortion-free judgements of the worth of alien cultures can be made. For Taylor, no purely impartial perspective exists, and the solution instead is to construct a shared cross-cultural language from which comparative judgements of the worth of different cultures can be made.22 By entering into dialogue with alien cultures, he argues, we enlarge the moral horizon from which we make judgements of worth and a more perspicuous understanding of the other culture becomes available to us. For both cultures, orientating beliefs which were deep yet implicit are suddenly brought to consciousness as they face the challenge of other values. What was previously strange and unfamiliar becomes clearer as new values reconfigure old attitudes and beliefs. The result is a ‘fusion of horizons’ where both sides develop a new vocabulary of comparison from which to make moral judgements of cultural worth.23 In approaching other cultures we presume that, unfamiliar though they are, their values have some objective status. ‘As a presumption the claim is that all human cultures that have animated whole socie­ ties over some considerable stretch of time have something important to say to human beings.’24 For It is reasonable to suppose that cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large num­ bers of human beings, of diverse characters and temperaments, over a long period of time - that have, in their words, articulated their sense of the good, the holy, the admirable - are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and respect even if it is accompanied by much that we have to abhor and reject.25 This, then, is the ‘starting hypothesis with which we ought to approach the study of any other cul­ ture.’26 If the starting hypothesis is redeemed, so that from our more enlightened perspective we see that a culture does possess authentic moral value, its claim to recognition is then justified.

VII Taylor’s essay has aroused much comment. The two main arguments made against him are, first, that

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L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E P O L I T I C S OF R E C O G N I T I O N a politics of recognition seeks to achieve a rough parity of the social bases of self-esteem for different social groups (where self-esteem is crucially depen­ dent on how one’s collective identity is appraised by the public culture). Since a positive evaluation of people’s concrete collective identities affects their very capacity for agency (the linkage we drew from Honneth), the former merit recognition to bolster their appraisive status in the public culture, provided that, as we have been exploring, the collective identity possesses exemplary moral value - a judge­ ment that can only be made post facto after a dialogic encounter. It is worth recalling too that the liberal theory of social justice, which I sketched at the beginning of this essay, also redistributes freedom and opportunity, as when for example better off people disproportionately finance the welfare state. The justification there is that the state should pro­ vide roughly equal opportunity for each person to exercise their capacities for choice and agency. The justification for political recognition is very similar, only that the primary focus is on the constitution and maintenance of the capacity for personal agency in the first place, and that the beneficiaries of recogni­ tion are people who esteem their own culture rather than people whose self-identities are primarily as free choosers. If we follow Honneth we should not see a morally great distinction between ‘free choosers’ and ‘culturally-encumbered peoples’, but whether that is so must await a full justification of liberal recogni­ tion. I’m not sure the misrecognition of those who regard themselves primarily as free agents as cul­ ture-bearing ones is really a kind of ‘tyranny’, as Appiah claims. For it is arguable that a measure of misrecognition - as when, for example, ethnic min­ ority citizens complain that policies of affirmative action denude them of the opportunity to compete for jobs or university places on their own merits - is simply a price worth paying for the undoubted benefits which recognition brings to those who do identify with their collective cultural identity. A p­ piah’s critique might also be put in terms of the public/private division so that the distinction is between those who wish publicly to assert their collective identity (the gay pride movement, for example) and those who regard their identity (for

there is no such thing as an authentic cultural identity since cultures are in fact internally plural and diverse, and second, that the state promotion of a particular cultural identity entailed by recognition is unfair since it privileges one form of life at the expense of others and hence derogates individual freedom and opportunity.27 These two objections are, of course, related. If there are no authentic cultural essences then there is certainly no justifica­ tion for politically recognising one culture at the expense of others. I think Taylor can be rescued from these objec­ tions, although not without modifying his position somewhat. I shall address the second problem and then the first, but, before doing so, let me mention briefly a particularly acute version of the second argument made by K. Anthony Appiah in his com­ mentary on the essay. Appiah agrees that many collective identities such as members of minority ethnic cultures do suffer from systematic low collec­ tive esteem. Hence ‘one form of healing the self that those who have these identities participate in is learning to see these collective identities not as sources of limitation and insult but as a valuable part of what they centrally are.’28 But, he goes on, some recipients of recognition might object that it is not they who are receiving it, but just some attribute of theirs - first language, skin colour - which they invest with no special significance. There are many people whose self-interpretations do not have a central place for an authentic collective identity. ‘It is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another.’29 The second - ‘freedom’ - objection to Taylor appears to take, therefore, two separate forms. One is that other people’s (non-beneficiaries) freedom and opportunity is limited by policies of recognition; the other is Appiah’s subtle point that the benefi­ ciaries of political recognition have their identity as autonomous agents misrecognised by being viewed through a cultural lens when their fundamental self­ interpretation is simply as free agents. I have already sketched the general justification for policies of recognition which very often redis­ tribute freedom and opportunity. Beginning from a fundamental commitment to the equality of persons

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JONATHAN SEGLOW example, their sexual identity) as essentially a private, non-political matter.30 But again, is it really tyrannical to have - to continue the example - the right to a same-sex marriage, or is it rather an opportunity which gay couples can take advantage of if they wish? I have written all along of ‘claims’ for recognition so perhaps the solution here is a kind of consent test which would prevent the introduction of policies of recognition which a majority of mem­ bers of the collective identity in question did not themselves desire. Finally, it is also worth recording, against Appiah’s critique, that there are already many other ways that the state misrecognises our self-interpreted identities which arise from less con­ troversial principles of justice. Unemployment or disability benefit, for example, was sometimes said (by the New Right) to demean its recipients by labelling them with a negative stereotype.31 Although the argument was over-inflated - since the positive relief brought by these benefits vastly outweighs the negative stereotype - the point re­ mains a valid one. And if that is true then cultural recognition of the kind Taylor commends does not uniquely misidentify its subjects: Appiah’s tyrannical effects may be an unfortunate by-product of all progressive policies of justice. It remains true nonetheless that if there are no authentic collective cultural identities then there is no case in justice to recognise them. This is the first objection made against Taylor. And it is also true that, compared to the brute facticity of being poor or disabled or unemployed (all collective identities), cultures are always amalgams, mongrel entities, the products of internal compromise and contestation and, indeed, prevailing legal norms. There are no pure, crystalline cultural identities waiting to be recognised by the public culture. There are few (if any) people in liberal societies who construct their social role from a homogeneous cultural script and nothing else. But in reply to this objection, we should ask, simply: what needs to be true in order that cultural identities merit recognition? The an­ swer is that, first, there are people who recognise each other as members of a shared cultural identity, and second, that that cultural identity is disadvan­ taged with respect to the public culture. The second answer I have already argued for. The first answer is

consistent with the truths that (1) people want to be recognised not just through their culture but often in other ways besides, and (2) that there is disagreement among cultural members about the proper interpre­ tation of their collective cultural identity. Problem instances of (1) occur when a person is politically recognised as being black, for example, when what she regards as much more central to her identity is that she is a doctor. This problem is a version of Appiah’s critique above, but it is worth pointing out here that there is no obvious inconsistency or in­ justice for the state to recognise doctors (some of whom are black) for the purposes of collective pay­ bargaining and to recognise, say, a black arts group which receives government money (and of which our doctor is not a member). Issue (2) is a problem because it seems to militate against the authenticity of cultures. Perhaps authenticity is the wrong term here for we need only really say that cultures are real and embody morally valuable human possibilities. In any case, we must be careful not to go too far in the other direction and implicitly contrast the inauthenticity of minority cultures with the authenticity of the public culture in a way that denies the justice of claims to recognition. The latter is the hegemonic strategy of cultural conservatives. In reality, neither the public nor minority cultural identities are more authentic or real than the other. Each borrows from the other and both are constantly reformed and revised. Demands for recognition made by members of minority cultures are best understood as challenges to the current self-interpretations of the public cul­ ture. For these reasons, I think Taylor’s dialogue between different cultures is best understood as one about the best - authentic - self-understanding of the public culture. This is given a recognition on all sides that no group of citizens possesses the authoritative and final interpretation of what their public culture is about and that minority groups have the right to participate in the progressive redefinition of the public culture just like everyone else.32 On this view dialogue is about reaching a public consensus on the self-interpretation of the political community and the value of cultural identities as part of that political community. The moral challenges which minority cultures inevitably bring to the public culture will always provide a rationale for dialogue

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L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E P O L I T I C S OF R E C O G N I T I O N become part of what a liberal theory of social justice tries to accommodate. A full justification of liberal recognition needs to elaborate further the key con­ cepts of recognition, identity, self-esteem, and the public and minority cultures. I shall conclude briefly by signalling three further issues which liberal re­ cognition needs to address. First, I have said nothing about illiberal cultures which deny their members freedom and choice. Illiberal cultures are especially problematic because they may be significant sources of self-esteem for (at least some of) their members. Should they, then, merit political recognition? I have argued only that the value of a culture is an emergent property of dialogic interchange and that harmful cultures do not merit recognition. But this takes us to the second problem which is separatist cultures who refuse to interact with the wider public culture but demand political recognition (group autonomy, for example, or separate schooling) none­ theless. Perhaps we should just say that entering into some kind of dialogue with the wider world is the price to be paid for political recognition (even if that transforms a group who wished to use recognition to insulate their collective identity in the first place). The third issue is the complex relationship I have glossed over between material social justice and cultural recognition. As Nancy Fraser effectively argues, these two forms of justice can conflict with each other.33 Race-blind equal opportunities poli­ cies, for example, would appear to conflict with recognition-based affirmative action policies that positively esteem a marginalised racial group. Here I will only say, banally, that a unified liberal theory of social justice needs to reconcile both sorts of claims. But my main point in this essay is not, I hope, banal: recognition should be incorporated into the liberal identity in the twenty-first century.

and I am suggesting that this process should be formalised and institutionalised. This more deliberative-democratic interpretation of intercultural dialogue in fact supplies two rather different justifications for rights to recognition. The first says that official recognition is justified when there is an appraisive consensus on cultural value. But since, in a complex, plural society, where the public culture is ever-revisable, such a consensus can only ever be regarded as the ideal aim not the concrete result of public deliberation, this first jus­ tification has its limits. The second justification explicitly links claims for recognition with public deliberation by regarding the rights granted to min­ ority cultures as participatory rights which enable them to enter into collective deliberation with their fellow citizens about the proper understanding of the public culture on terms that are fair. Rights to recognition, in other words, are recursively justified by the need for public deliberation itself. They help to foster a more secure sense of identity and status for minority groups, not just for their own sake, but to empower them to participate in the collective re­ definition of the public culture. The right to wear religious dress at work, for example, or the right to bilingual schooling do not just boost the self-esteem of members of minority cultures. Rather, they help to create citizens who feel secure and esteemed as members of the public culture too and are therefore better able to co-deliberate on what its identity should be.

VIII As I said at the beginning of this chapter my aim has merely been to argue for an agenda: that claims for recognition need not be illiberal but rather should

Notes Citizenship (1995) offers a very sophisticated defence of minority rights grounded in the Rawls/Dworkin account of justice. However, Kymlicka does not view these as rights which recognise the value of particular cultural and collective identities. Unfortunately, there is not the space to discuss Kymlicka’s theory in this chapter. But see the discussion in Seglow (1998), pp. 966-9 and the secondary literature on Kymlicka cited there.

1. Cf. the lists of ‘recognition rights’ in E. A. Galeotti, ‘Neutrality and Recognition’, in Bellamy and Hollis (eds) (1999) and Kymlicka (1995), pp. 30—1. 2. For the theory of justice explaining and underlying the choice/circumstances division, see Dworkin (1981a) and Rawls (1972), esp. pp. 83-90, 100-8, and for a discussion of Rawls and Dworkin, see Kymlicka (1990), chapter 3. Kymlicka’s well-known book Multicultural

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JO NATH AN SEGLOW 3. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), pp. 25-73. Taylor’s is perhaps the best known, but by no means the only, theory of cultural recognition on the intellectual market. See, for example, the important works by Tully (1995) and Young (1990). 4. Taylor (1989), p. 34. 5. Hence the recognition view cross-cuts the (false) dichotomy between the liberal autonomous self and the communitarian encumbered one. 6. Honneth (1995). 7. Ibid., p. 169. 8. Ibid., p. 173. 9. Rawls, of course, lists self-respect as ‘the most impor­ tant’ of his primary goods: see Rawls (1972), pp. 4406. For a brief critique of this see Seglow (1998), pp. 965-6. For a distinction between self-respect and self­ esteem similar to Honneth’s see Sachs (1981). 10. Although Honneth has been criticised for glossing over the more collective media of recognition such as group identity - see Alexander and Lara (1996), esp. pp. 133-5. 11. I. M. Young’s very interesting book Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) comes close to a wholly subjective account. She writes, for example, that ‘groups cannot be socially equal unless their specific experience, culture and social contribution are publicly affirmed and re­ cognised’ (p. 174) and she calls for a ‘politics [of difference which] asserts that oppressed groups have distinct cultures, experiences and perspectives on social life with humanly positive meaning’ (p. 166). 12. See Kymlicka (1995), pp. 107-9. 13. Taylor, in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), p. 30. 14. Ibid., p. 30. 15. This theme of self-sincerity links Taylor’s account of authenticity to that developed by another contem­ porary proponent, Alessandro Ferrara: see Ferrara, (1998), chapter 1. 16. For more on the idea of exemplary validity, see ibid., chapters 1 and 4-

17. Taylor, in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), p. 31. 18. Cf. K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Identity, Authenticity, Sur­ vival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduc­ tion’, in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), pp. 149-63, atp. 153. 19. Hence Taylor’s focus is somewhat narrower than our interest in the recognition of gender and sexual and religious identities. 20. Taylor in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), pp. 32-5. 21. Taylor states that it ‘is axiomatic for Quebec govern­ ments that the survival and flourishing of French culture in Quebec is a good’: Taylor, in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), p. 58. 22. For the philosophy behind this, see Taylor (1995). 23. A phrase Taylor borrows from Gadamer. See Gut­ mann (ed.) (1994), pp. 66-73. 24. Ibid., p. 66. 25. Ibid., pp. 72-3. 26. Ibid., pp. 66-7. 27. For examples of the first argument see Ferrara (1998), p. 17; Rorty (1994); and S. Wolfs ‘Comment’, in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), pp. 75-85. The best examples of the second are Cooke (1997) and Habermas’s ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Con­ stitutional State’, in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), pp. 107— 48. 28. Appiah, in Gutmann (ed.) (1994), p. 161. 29. Ibid., pp. 162-3. 30. This example comes from Miller (1995), pp. 133-4 who argues for a democratic public culture but is critical of Taylor’s politics of recognition. 31. Another example is the way that labelling people as criminals, by putting those charged with crime through the judicial process, helps make them into criminals. 32. A consequence of this interpretation of the public culture as ever-evolving is that no rights to recogni­ tion are justified forever, they are instead revisable as the self-understanding of the public culture changes through public deliberation. 33. Fraser (1995).

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8

T HE E S S E N T I A L I N D E T E R M I N A C Y OF R A W L S ’ S D I F F E R E N C E PRINCIPLE Rex Martin

allows for differences in income and wealth Rawls refers to it as the ‘difference principle’.1 A society that met this particular set of standards that is, which satisfied the goals set by equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity and the difference principle understood as mutual benefit - would be ‘thoroughly just’, in Rawls’s view. But to be ‘perfectly just’ it would also, at some point, have to maximise the level of income and wealth of the least well-off group in particular - say, the bottom one-fifth.2 This point about the maximising of the minimum is not intended to identify a benefit for everyone in the target group. Rather, the relevant effects here are the effects on a ‘representative’ person; they are effects on an ideal-type average individual in the bottom group.3 In the present chapter I want to focus attention on Rawls’s difference principle. In order to avoid con­ fusion and distraction, I will specify this focal project rather narrowly. Rawls is concerned principally to describe normal or standard patterns of just distribu­ tion (without regard to prior maldistributions). In other words, we are being asked to consider (at least as a first stage, in order to see what picture would result) what it would be like for a society simply to satisfy the difference principle and the other de­ mands of justice.4 Rawls typically states his difference principle as being itself closely attached to the principle of

I John Rawls is probably the leading theorist of justice in the world today (certainly the English-speaking world). For him justice is, or should be, a virtue of society, specifically of the political and social and economic arrangements in its ‘basic structure’. In Rawls’s view, what justice requires of these basic institutions, as a set, is not only that they exhibit (1) the principle of equal basic liberties and (2) that of equality of opportunity, but also (3) that they work together in such a way as to (a) encourage contribu­ tions that (b) increase the production of goods and services, which in turn are so distributed as (c) to improve continually the level of income and wealth of all the various income groups involved, when considered from the perspective of a representative person’s whole life, a normal life. We might, following Rawls, describe (1) equal basic liberties and (2) equality of opportunity as prior demands of justice and (3) the principle of mutual benefit as a secondary demand, one that is to be fulfilled in the context of fulfilling these prior de­ mands and without sacrifice by them. On this view, then, in a just or well-ordered society, inequalities in economic or social positions and attendant inequal­ ities in economic or social positions can be allowed indeed, should be allowed - subject to meeting these three conditions. Since the third of the conditions

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REX M A R T I N equality of opportunity: the two together make up, in his view, a single principle of justice.5 I want to begin, then, by examining the reasoning Rawls offers in support of this single but composite principle.6 First, he establishes the importance of the idea of equality of opportunity. We can assume here, for purposes of exposition, that a group of people are thinking seriously about the way societies are ar­ ranged respecting such matters as social and econom­ ic position and attendant income and wealth. They note that, typically, there is considerable inequality between persons and between classes in these mat­ ters. We can imagine now the following interior line of thought going on in the minds of the people in our group: each realises that inequality in position and attendant wealth may well be involved for the society they are in, but no one wishes to accept an inferior position for oneself, even though it might prove to be for the common good in a particular society. Each person sees, then, upon reflection, that it would be irrational from anyone’s point of view simply to take an inferior position as their lot in life. Nor could anyone regard it as desirable to be forced to take such a position. So, granting that inequality in positions is both highly likely (perhaps inevitable) and conceivably useful, each would want incomeand wealth-generating positions to be open to all on some principle of equality of opportunity. This establishes the point Rawls wants to make, that equality of opportunity is important and that we should want a principle specifying it. Then, next, in a series of further reflections on this very point, Rawls elaborates a set of ideas that, taken together, constitute an argument for the composite (or sec­ ond) principle of justice. There are, in my view, three main thoughts or ideas advanced here. Let me sketch them briefly and loosely, just to set the big picture in view. The first thought is that no person is responsible for that person’s own starting point in life. The second is that, in view of this first point, it makes sense for people (acting as members of a single political economy) to attempt to achieve a higher index of wealth and income for all representative persons at the various income levels there (higher, that is, than existed at some initial point of presumed equality). And the third thought is that, in doing

this, such a society should be concerned to reduce the inequalities in income and wealth that will arise between individuals and between groups of people. We can treat these three thoughts as steps in a single overall argument designed to justify the com­ posite principle of justice we are here concerned with and to specify both a precise notion of equality of opportunity and the content of the difference prin­ ciple. The argument we are examining, as Rawls initially states it, is an ‘informal’ or ‘intuitive’ argu­ ment.7 After we’ve canvassed the argument further, we’ll look briefly at what it would take (in Rawls’s view) for it to become a fully formal and conclusive argument. The argument starts with the idea of ‘democratic’ equality of opportunity - conceived as the taking of remedial steps, conscientiously, to reduce the initial inequality in advantages accruing to individuals from two main sources. The idea that dominates this particular discussion is that no one is responsible for - hence no one deserves - their own starting points, their natural endowment or the social posi­ tion into which they are bom and reared. Since equality of opportunity can never be strict or abso­ lute, Rawls introduces a further idea, the difference principle, to complement equality of opportunity and complete the initial line of argument. The difference principle adds two more ideas, two further remedial steps; it adds the principle of everyone’s continual benefit, which in turn is constrained by the idea that, where there are several mutually improving options available, we should choose that option which most reduces the resultant inequality in outcomes between the top-most and bottom-most groups. The object of this three-step process is to reduce, ideally to minimise, the gap between persons by taking account of both starting points and end results.8 The idea of collective asset, the name Rawls gives the argument just described, provides the rationale and justification for the main features of Rawls’s second principle of justice. It underwrites both equal­ ity of opportunity in its ‘democratic interpretation’ and the principle of distributive economic justice that is, the difference principle.9

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I N D E T E R M I N A C Y OF R A W L S ’ S D I F F E R E N C E P R I N C I P L E between the top-most and the bottom-most group. This iterated pattern continues until we reach an optimum point, at which no further mutually im­ proving moves are possible. A t this point we have minimised absolutely the difference in question, and those least well-off here have their greatest benefit. The leading ideas of this argument were sum­ marised (at the end of the previous section) under the name ‘the argument from collective asset’. Per­ haps calling it an argument may not convey the exact picture I have in mind. Let us call it instead, taking a hint from Rawls’s later writings, a ‘procedure of construction’.12 A procedure of construction is more like a constructive proof in mathematics - say, a geometrical proof - in which we get a result by making certain moves (constructing certain figures, making certain assumptions) than it is like a classical syllogism in which certain propositions simply fol­ low, by logical entailment, from ready-made pre­ mises. So the kind of argument I have in mind is itself best understood as a procedure of construction. Here a procedure is identified and then employed, by reference to certain leading ideas (which give the point of the procedure), to get a certain result; that procedure is iterated, repeatedly deployed, until the identified end point is reached. This point is the intended or optimum result (given the iterated pro­ cedure and its governing assumptions).13 What is curious about Rawls’s informal (or ‘col­ lective asset’) argument - as we actually find it in TJ (the heart of the discussion being at Chapter 2, section 13) - is that, while Rawls presents its gov­ erning concerns clearly enough (in what I have called three main ‘thoughts’) and while he presents its goal point equally clearly (as the ‘greatest benefit of the least well-off group’14), he never lays out the intermediate step (the procedure of construction itself) whereby, through repeated deployment, we can get from these concerns to the goal point. But once we actually ‘see’ the procedure of con­ struction in action, as I have tried to represent it in the previous section, the move from governing con­ cerns (as given in the three main thoughts) to goal point seems natural enough and even plausible. One point of the procedure is to show how in fact Rawls’s conclusion (for example, the maximin result) follows

II We get to the usual specification of the difference principle by reiterating the set of ideas just sketched. That is, we do so (assuming here a continuing conscientious effort at achieving ‘democratic’ equaL ity of opportunity) by repeatedly deploying the principle of everyone’s continual benefit as constrained by egalitarianism (thereby reducing differ­ ences in outcome between the top-most and bottom­ most group) up to the optimum point, where this difference is absolutely minimised and the least welloff are as well-off as they can be (without making any other group worse-off in the process). This particular iterated argument has a singular virtue; it explains a puzzling fact about Rawls’s exposition of the second principle that holds throughout his book A Theory of Justice (hereafter TJ). Repeatedly, Rawls seems to shift between talk­ ing about the difference principle as improving every­ body’s prospects and, alternatively, as maximising the benefits of the least well-off group. But the puzzle dissolves once we see that both these versions belong to one and the same story. Each formulation specifies a single feature of the overall argument; one for­ mulation emphasises the idea that drives the differ­ ence principle - the notion of everyone’s continual benefit - while the other emphasises the optimal result, the goal or end point of the entire argument. That goal can be stated in either of two distinctive ways: (1) as absolutely minimising the difference (measured in terms of income or wealth) between the top-most and bottom-most group, consistent with the realisation of everyone’s continued better­ ment; or (2) as achieving ‘the greatest benefit of the least advantaged’,10 that is, the greatest benefit for the least well-off group. Here we have a distinction without a difference; the two goal-point formulations (1) and (2) say the same thing.11 And here I come to the heart of my analysis, the main point I want to make. The difference principle can be represented as an argument that proceeds through a series of stages, each one of which embo­ dies a conscientious effort at achieving equality of opportunity and each one of which repeats the same theme: first satisfy the standard of mutual benefit (or efficiency) and then reduce differences in income

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REX M A R T IN from his premises, the governing considerations (the three main thoughts). In the present account, then, I’m suggesting that Rawls’s argument from collective asset is best under­ stood as constituted by three distinct things. It involves: (1) certain governing considerations which together model or specify a procedure of construc­ tion; (2) the repeated deployment of that procedure up to an identified end point; and (3) the actual reaching of that point by using that procedure. Is this argument, so understood, conclusive? I think not. But it becomes logically conclusive if we make certain simplifying assumptions. We must assume, as does Rawls, that we start from a hypothetical ‘zero point’ of strict equality. And, second, we must assume that chain connection (or something like it) holds. Chain connection means, roughly, that ‘if an advantage has the effect of raising the expectations of the lowest position, it raises the expectations of all positions in between.’15 Or, as Rawls redescribes the same idea, so long as the ‘curve’ of the least well-off class shows improvement, all the other classes do so as well.16 The point is that, without assuming chain connection (or something like it), we cannot guarantee ending up at the optimum or goal point while deploying the threestep collective asset argument and the procedure of construction identified in it. But with it we can. Chain connection is an idea Rawls himself uses and, with qualification, endorses. The qualifications have to do with whether chain connection holds in actual societies or would hold invariably in a just society modelled on the two principles. So under­ stood, chain connection is a description of actual social relations. The difference principle is not lo­ gically contingent on whether this actual relation holds or not.17 However, we are not in the present account using our variant of chain connection as a description of actual social relations. Rather, it is like the assump­ tion of starting from a position of strict equality in social primary goods. It is a simplifying assumption, a regulatory constraint designed to keep the collective asset argument (and the deployment of the proce­ dure of construction) in focus. The constraint re­ quires (1) that so long as the ‘curve’ of the least welloff group could possibly be higher it is also possible

that the curves of the other groups could be higher as well; and that (2) so long as reciprocal benefit is possible or feasible it is in fact sustained right on up to the optimum or goal point. Clearly, we are not talking here about actual social relations in a certain pattern but about a ‘logical’ situation that must be realised whenever such a pattern actually does hold. We might describe this situation, then, as the ‘presupposition’ behind chain connection: the presupposition that, so long as the benefit of the least well-off group could possibly be higher, that of the other groups could also be higher, right on up to the optimum or goal point. With the presupposition (or, if you will, the possibility) of chain connection, as we are using the idea here (as a simplifying assumption belonging to mathematics, not to social policy or, at least, not to a description of social reality) in place, as one of the background assumptions, we have completed our account of Rawls’s informal argument for the second principle. How would the argument fare as a formal argu­ ment? How would it do in the original position?

Ill Rawls’s contractarian method is very complex. I will be able to mention only a few of its main features here. One which is often emphasised - and that Rawls has continued to include even in his more recent writings - is that the ‘parties’ to the contract are placed, in the original position, behind a thick ‘veil of ignorance’. Here they are instructed in their subsequent reasoning to ignore their own particular traits (traits that distinguish them from all or most other people), to be unaware of (or, at least, to ignore) their actual place in society, to be unaware of their society’s place in history or in institutional evolution, and so on. Thus extreme uncertainty (as to starting points and outcomes for any given individual) would char­ acterise the deliberations in the original position setting, in which individuals are called upon to construct and then choose the principles of justice that they would prefer to govern the society in which they are to spend their entire lives. Given this high degree of uncertainty, we find that

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I N D E T E R M I N A C Y OF R A W L S ’ S D I F F E R E N C E P R I N C I P L E that inequality. The idea is that even after mutual benefit is assured one should continue to use equal shares (of primary goods) as a standing constraint on beneficial options, as a tiebreaker of sorts. Here, among available options, that efficient and mutually beneficial outcome which most reduces inequality is to be selected. To do otherwise would be to opt for a surplus of inequality, that is an inequality greater than is required to achieve compensating reciprocal benefit. It would be unsuitable, given the commit­ ment to equality (an initial benchmark and a con­ tinuing concern), to perpetuate or increase inequality unnecessarily. It is precisely where fundamental equality in start­ ing points is not fully and strictly achieved, or cannot be, that concern for reducing the inequality of resultant outcomes is in order. Thus, efficiency con­ strained by egalitarianism is a standard that each and all could appeal to in the original position. None would veto it. So the parties would endorse the principle that, where two or more feasible efficient schemes were available, that option should be se­ lected which most reduced the difference (when measured in terms of income and wealth) between the top-most and the bottom-most group.20 In sum, I think the collective asset argument would fare well in the original position construct. And, since that construct is hypothetical and is defined by a number of ideal features, it seems that the simplifying assumptions mentioned earlier - that we start from a position of strict equality and that a certain regularity condition (the possibility of chain connection) holds good - would be comfortably at home there. It important to see that Rawls nowhere repudiates the informal argument, the argument from collective asset. Indeed Rawls refers to TJ, section 13 (the very heart of the informal argument), as the one that defines the difference principle.21 And the most prominent argument that we do find in TJ, chapter 3 (the chapter devoted to the original position), the famous maximin argument, actually presupposes and builds on the argument from collective asset. We can put the line of reasoning in this wellknown argument quickly and intuitively as follows. Behind the veil of ignorance and given the high degree of uncertainty there, each individual thinks

Rawls’s collective asset argument fares rather well. For example, the transition from the idea that nobody deserves their starting points to the idea that people should use their natural endowments and their social origins (where these things are advantageous) in such a way that everybody benefits would surely go more smoothly behind the veil of ignorance than it would where people were already aware of their own and others’ natural endowments and social origins. This transition would certainly carry more conviction for the parties in the original position and would, presumably, be emphatically endorsed by them there. And, for a second example, the mutual benefit part of the collective asset argument would gain strong endorsement there, especially if we assumed a starting-point of strict equality. The argument would go as follows: the parties would have no reason to give up this equality in their choice of principles unless there were benefits for each and all, or at least for some of them (and no losses).18 Let me make the same argument now in somewhat different words. In the original position a certain amount of role-playing is allowed, individuals are allowed to assume certain standpoints and then to consider how things would play out in the delibera­ tions of the parties. One could assume, for example, that one was in a religious minority or in the least well-off economic class.19 Under such an assumption and behind the veil of ignorance, no one would prefer disadvantageous deviations (from equal or even from unequal shares) were they on the losing end, and hence would veto such deviations. Thus, only deviations advantageous to all would survive the veto (that is, only such advantageous deviations could achieve the unanimity required of conclusive delib­ erations in the original position construct). But it would be rational, in the eyes of each, to allow for mutually beneficial changes, where there were more benefits for each and all (or at least for some) and no losses. It follows, too, where persons have an equal status (as parties to the deliberation) and each has equal claim to shares of primary goods, that the parties would prefer a mutually beneficial outcome that reduced the difference in income between the top­ most and bottom-most group over one that increased

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REX M A R T I N the maximin argument then chooses between. It follows that, in order for the maximin argument to function at all, the principles which generate these characteristic outcomes must themselves be independently formulated and established, for other­ wise they could not give these well-defined results. Thus the maximin procedure must actually presup­ pose these outcome-giving principles, presuppose them as independent and presuppose them as well-established.23 The maximin argument provides no arguments for the two principles per se, either for the first principle (which we’ve merely taken for granted in this chap­ ter)24 or for the second (the arguments for which we have already canvassed). Accordingly, it adds noth­ ing new to the already established argument for these principles. Rather, it is an argument for preferring the two principles, already established on other grounds, over the most plausible of the utilitarian theories, the principle of average utility (a principle already es­ tablished in Rawls’s account, on its own grounds, at TJ, section 27). It is Rawls’s view that utilitarians and others, especially in the setting afforded by the original position, would allow the sacrifice or attenuation of some of the demands of justice, of the prior demands especially, or would do so for some people at least. Thus, the maximin argument doesn’t even focus on the second principle, let alone its difference principle part. Instead, it focuses on the loss of equal basic liberties of the sort enshrined in the first principle.25 And it is this fact that marks the primary ground, in Rawls’s view, for preferring the two principles over the principle of average utility.26 So much, then, for the usual reading of the maximin argument. It is based on a sort of optical illusion: that maximin is the argument for the two principles, in particular for the difference principle. On the contrary, the maximin argument is not an argument for the two principles per se; it neither formulates nor establishes them. Rather, it presup­ poses the two principles and the results they char­ acteristically give and argues that these results are preferable (under original position considerations, where maximin reasoning is at home) to those characteristically given by the principle of average utility. Most especially, and for the same reasons, it is

that, since they don’t know how or where they might end up, it behoves them all - behoves each of them to set things up (in the principles they select, each one having a veto there) so that the worst control­ lable outcome (for any one of them) is the best of a bad lot (the best, that is, of the set of worst out­ comes). This line of reasoning, which has its home in rational choice theory (and can be found in eco­ nomic theory and political science) is, as I’ve already indicated, sometimes called maximin reasoning (that is, reasoning literally on the principle of maximising the minimum). The standard line of interpreting Rawls’s difference principle (at what I have called its goal or optimum outcome) has been that it was supported justificatorily and was rationalised by max­ imin reasoning. This maximin line of reasoning was attributed to Rawls by his initial expositors (and often, then, they severely criticised him for holding to it) and more recent critics (such as Will Kymlicka, Jonathan Wolff and Andrew Williams) have con­ tinued to view maximin as the standard pattern of justification intended by Rawls for the difference principle.22 This line has, in the view of most, been encouraged by Rawls himself (and can be found clearly enough, they think, in TJ and later works). But, contrary to what most of his interpreters and critics suppose, Rawls does not claim that his differ­ ence principle is itself supported specifically by max­ imin reasoning. A t least, he makes no such claim in his published writings. Rather, maximin reasoning seems to have a secondary role in his account, as developed in TJ and thereafter. It is brought in only after his principles of justice have been formulated and established on other grounds; it is then employed by him to defend the whole set of these principles. Here, the main use of the maximin argument in Rawls’s hands is to rule out or to constrain utilitarian alternatives to his preferred principles of justice. We can see the force of the contention just made by noting a simple fact, that the outcomes, which the maximin argument ranges over, must themselves be generated somehow. They are in fact generated by the competing principles under review - by the two principles, on the one hand, and by the principle of average utility, on the other. It is these particular outcomes, two sets of characteristic outcomes, which

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I N D E T E R M I N A C Y OF R A W L S ’ S D I F F E R E N C E P R I N C I P L E not an argument for the difference principle in particular. That principle is hardly touched upon at all in the maximin argument, as we find it in TJ, Chapter 3. Indeed, the difference principle as such doesn’t have a face-off with the principle of average utility until TJ, Chapter 5, and there (in section 49) the argument has nothing to do with maximin. Thus, we must look elsewhere for Rawls’s argu­ ment for the second principle, in particular the difference principle. In Rawls’s theory, the argument specifically and peculiarly designed for the purpose of supporting the difference principle in particular is the one based on the idea of collective asset; it is an argument for reciprocal benefit of the sort that could be developed in the original position.27 It is this argument that Rawls later calls the ‘compelling’ one for the difference principle.28 A natural reading of Rawls’s difference principle, along the lines set by collective asset, is that (assum­ ing throughout a continuing conscientious effort at achieving ‘democratic’ equality of opportunity) it requires mutual improvement and that, where more than one pattern of mutual improvement is possible, society should select that one which minimises the difference in income and wealth between the top­ most and the bottom-most group. A consistent application of this principle would yield an optimum or goal situation where the well-being of the least well-off group (the bottom 20 per cent, say) was as great as it could possibly be. The ‘everybody benefits’ principle (as qualified by the egalitarian constraint) is fully compatible - in principle - with the optimum or goal point of maximising the well-being of the least well-off group. Indeed, that principle (through the specification and use of a procedure of construction) constitutes the principal argument for reaching that very goal point. Accordingly, then* is always a determinate directive that can be given to society by the Rawlsian differ­ ence principle: structure things via policies and suchlike such that mutual improvement leading ultimately to the greatest well-being of the least well-off group is achieved.

In the figure, xi is the axis line that measures well­ being for the better-off group (in terms of units of income, say) and X2 serves similarly as the axis for the less well-off group. The dotted line (running at a 45° angle) is the equality line; it represents the points of strict equality between the two groups. The space on and below the curve OP (correctly read as zero/P) represents the available economic options in a par­ ticular society, given its resources, reasonable expec­ tations of development and so on (and subject, of course, to the constraint of meeting the prior de­ mands of justice). The darkened line on OP is the Pareto-optimal ‘zone’; in it, no improvements for any group are possible without worsening the prospects of at least one other group. The point a, on the OP curve (and in the Pareto-optimal zone), is the point of maximum well-being for X2 within the available space. Now let us suppose, first, that we were on or under the curve 0a. From any given point within this space, the mutual-benefit egalitarian solution (if we assume certain regularity conditions) would intersect the OP curve at a (= the point of maximum benefit for the least well-off group, the Rawlsian goal or optimum point). However, suppose next that we were on or under the curve aP (but not at a or on the dotted line that runs perpendicular from a to the xi axis). Suppose, for example, that we were at point j on the ub line; here, the mutual-benefit egalitarian solution could not intersect the OP curve at a; rather, it would intersect that curve somewhere in the segment aP (but not at a). The only way we could get to a, once we were to

IV Now consider the problem, set forth in figure 8.1.29

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REX M A R T IN blem or as a practical one. Let us turn first to the theoretical problem. I will address the practical one subsequently. Collective asset (which includes the idea of mu­ tual benefit) is the argument for the difference prin­ ciple, in either its improving or its maximising version (as we find these versions in TJ at pp. 60 and 83 respectively). This means that it is the argument for the conclusion Rawls wants to draw respecting the optimum or goal point, the ultimate end of the whole process, so to speak. In the situation we are here contemplating, the preferred conclusion and the argument for it have come apart. They are literally incompatible. This is a serious problem for a theoretical, or ideal, argument to be in. There are, of course, ways to avoid this problem. And we are familiar with them from earlier discus­ sion (in section II). Thus, we conduct the argument starting from a standpoint of strict equality and we assume that the possibility of chain connection (as there defined) holds throughout. The so-called for­ bidden zone, then, merely specifies a case where this argument would not - logically could not - be applicable. It identifies a case where the presupposi­ tion behind chain connection fails to hold and thus identifies a zone in which the procedure of construc­ tion could not operate to effect its assigned end, could not so operate because one of the essential background assumptions for its proper use fails to hold in that entire zone. There is, then, a ‘theoretical’ solution of sorts to the theoretical problem. We achieve it by carefully seeing to it that our argument conforms to certain background assumptions; by doing so we necessarily avoid the problem posed. The theoretical solution envisioned here is ulti­ mately a very pricey one. It requires us to make some rather strong assumptions: (1) that we start from strict equality; (2) that the background presupposi­ tion (that chain connection is possible and thus realisable) holds good; (3) that we can readily iden­ tify a society’s feasibility curve and, on it, the point of the greatest benefit for the least well-off group and, thus, readily identify the zone where the presupposi­ tion (in (2)) holds and the zone where it doesn’t - so that we can stay out of the latter. These are, as I said, strong assumptions. Even so, we might admit them.

the right of the perpendicular, is to move in such a way as (at some point) to reduce the well-being of the members of the xi class, thereby violating the re­ quirement of everyone’s benefit. And this the mu­ tual-benefit solution, as I have portrayed it, would not allow. Thus, the whole area to the right of the perpendicular is a ‘forbidden zone’ for that particular solution. Indeed, within that area no satisfactory result is possible. There is no way the determinate directive (described at the end of the previous section) could be satisfied. One would have to choose either to satisfy the mutual-benefit egalitarian solution or the maximin one. The two are no longer compatible in principle and hence, to realise the one, we would have to give up on the other. Here we encounter the essential indeterminacy of Rawls’s difference princi­ ple. It is possible that a society could find itself in this zone (and to find itself there without prior injustice having occurred). Imagine, for example, that a so­ ciety is following a mutual benefit path (for example, the ub line in the figure). Such a society would be a ‘thoroughly just’ one, by Rawls’s standards; its being at j on that line would not be unjust, nor would it reflect past injustice. There are two rather obvious possible cases here. First, a society could already be at j (on the ub line, the line it had been following) when TJ is published and the inhabitants (members of a thoroughly just society up to then) start thinking things through in the light of its arguments. Second, a society (again, a thoroughly just one up to that point) wanders into the ‘forbidden zone’ through a typical and nonculpable ignorance of its full set of economic options (its own feasibility curve) at the time. It does so while at the same time staying on the ub line (up to point j). And we assume that the configuration of the curve doesn’t change significantly after that so as to redefine the ‘forbidden zone’ in the case at hand. For any society in the situation just described, the Rawlsian difference principle could not afford direc­ tion, could not specify a coherent goal for policy. In short, the difference principle, on Rawls’s usual understanding of it, is here inherently indeterminate. We can put the problematic now before us in two distinct ways. We can view it as a theoretical pro­

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I N D E T E R M I N A C Y OF R A W L S ’ S D I F F E R E N C E P R I N C I P L E any given society. Indeed, it could arise in fact for many societies in the real social world. Following good policies (policies of mutual benefit designed to ensure ‘thorough’ justice), even follow­ ing the best policies (policies of mutual benefit as constrained by egalitarianism, policies designed to assure, under a procedure of construction, the max­ imum benefit of the least well-off group), will not guarantee that a society will not wander off course. There is no guarantee that it will not, under real conditions of uncertainty (and risk), enter a zone in which the procedure of construction cannot operate to effect its assigned end. The problem, in short, could arise for a thoroughly just society.30 A society that found itself in such a situation - for non-culpable reasons and without having committed injustice - would discover that, so long as the situation could not be altered or could not realisti­ cally be expected to change in any significant way, it could no longer follow a coherent set of policy directives (as based on Rawls’s collective asset idea) for reaching Rawls’s preferred goal point. It could only act arbitrarily here - adhering either to the premises of the argument or to its conclusion but not both. For the conditions under which the proce­ dure of construction could operate, so as to hold the governing considerations and the end irrevocably together, would not obtain here. It is no longer possible, in such a situation, to coordinate a mutual benefit-egalitarian solution with the maximin one. To realise the one, we would have to give up on the other. This incompatibility in available strategies would be a serious practical problem for any justice-aspiring society to find itself in. There is no theoretical solu­ tion for the problem available to it, given Rawls’s argument or Rawls’s text. And yet it is a problem that requires to be resolved in a principled way. This is the dilemma, the deep incoherence, that Rawlsian theory necessarily leads to, or could lead to. It is a situation that Rawlsian theory has not con­ templated, but one that we, as friends of justice and perhaps of Rawlsian theory, need to think hard about.

But they may be more than mere assumptions. In Rawls’s account the ‘parties’ in the ‘original position’ are invited to reason with certain assumptions at hand. And they are invited to reason in earnest. For people so to reason, I would suggest, they must believe that these assumptions are applicable to their own case. Now take the third of the assumptions. If people reasoned in the original position, with such an assumption in place, then they could guarantee that by staying in the zone where the background assump­ tion held good they could employ the procedure of construction to reach the assigned end in view. But so to reason suggests that they know (or believe) the society they are here constructing (or evaluating) itself occupies, or can occupy, precisely such a zone. As a belief about social location this is, given the veil of ignorance, not the kind of belief that could be admitted into the original position. Clearly, if one were to call such a belief a matter of knowledge, it would be impermissible to entertain it in the original position. So we strike the offending belief out; we do not allow it to operate at all. But then the parties are forced to reason about matters of justice (matters of justice for them) that may not even be applicable to the society they inhabit, or may not be applicable to its expected or allowable course of development (allowable, that is, if a society is to be and remain a thoroughly just one). Indeed, reasoning in this way (reasoning without a well-founded belief as to sui­ table social location) may prove to be wholly un­ realistic. By developing the principles of justice under ideal assumptions we guarantee an impeccable theoretical result. A t the same time we guarantee, should the assumptions fail to hold in fact, that the so-called theoretical solution is inapplicable there. A certain set of working assumptions has become locked into the original-position argument pattern. Where these assumptions cannot hold there must be, for a certain zone of the suboptimal space, no the­ oretical solution available, not even in principle. We have, in fact, made it systematically impossible to solve the problem of what to do in that zone. There will always be such a zone. Thus, the situation envisioned could in principle arise for

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REX M A R T I N critical of arguments I have given in my works cited above, which I have found helpful in the develop­ ment of the present chapter. These studies are Lamont (1994) and Williams (1995). I cannot claim to have answered all the criticisms made, especially by Willliams, but these two studies did lead me to significant reformulations and to some new lines of thought, as sketched in the present chapter. Finally, for their assistance on the present chapter (or on earlier versions of it), I want to thank Prakash Shenoy (with whom I’ve been discussing, on and off since February 1994, the problem identified in sec­ tion IV) and Ann Cudd (with whom I’ve discussed one of Williams’s leading criticisms, that the efficiency-cum-egalitarianism presentation of Rawls’s difference principle fails to satisfy the standard of ‘contraction consistency’ - a criticism which I do not address in the present chapter and one which I do not credit, in the end). I have been helped too (especially in developing the argument of section IV) by students in my classes and by audiences, in both the U S and the UK, before whom I’ve pre­ sented earlier versions of this chapter. The present chapter is a shortened version of one I published in a volume of papers entitled Rights and Reason, edited by Larry May and Marilyn Friedman for Kluwer (2000).

A Postscript on Sources and Acknowledgements The present chapter draws on two main sources. First it is based upon my book Rawls and Rights (Martin (1985)), chapters 4, and 5 especially, and also chap' ter 8. Chapter 5 is, in turn, a longer version of certain sections of Martin and Shenoy (1983). I owe to Prakash Shenoy both the idea for the efficiencycum-egalitarianism presentation of Rawls’s differ­ ence principle and much of the formalism developed for it in the present chapter and in Martin (1985). In particular, I owe to him the idea that chain con­ nection (or, rather, something like it) must be assumed in society with n classes (where n > 2). And I owe to him the development of the egalitarian matrix in which, in a situation of n classes, we minimise (reduce as much as possible) the difference between the top-most class xi and the bottom-most class X2 . (Rawls’s own analysis on this very point, we may recall, was wholly confined to a two-class situa­ tion and did not take account of sub-optimal situa­ tions). Finally, the important appendix in Martin (1985) is entirely his work. Secondly, this chapter is also based upon my paper ‘Economic Justice: Con­ tractarianism and Rawls’s Difference Principle’, in Boucher and Kelly (eds) (1994), pp. 245-66. Let me mention as well two recent studies, both

Notes 3. It is important to bear in mind throughout that the difference principle is an aggregative principle; it concerns groups (in the example given, the bottom 20 per cent of wage earners); it does not concern individuals per se, i.e. people readily known to us by their proper names (ibid., p. 78). The same could be said of the other income groups (say, the top 20 per cent and so on). Our focus is always on an ideal-type average individual within that particular group, not on any given, single individual who happens to be there. 4. Rawls makes clear that the account of distributive shares that accords with the difference principle ‘be­ longs to strict compliance theory and so to the con­ sideration of the ideal scheme’ (ibid., p. 315). 5. See, for example, ibid., pp. 60, 83, 302-3. 6. Rawls refers to this composite principle as his second principle of justice at, for example, ibid., section 12; the first principle, of course, is his principle of equal basic liberties (ibid., pp. 60-1). And in his book there

1. See Rawls (1972), pp. 60-1 for the Rawlsian ‘first statement’ of the principles of justice, which I have tried to convey in the paragraph to which this note is attached. 2. See ibid., pp. 78-9, 319 for the distinction between thoroughly/perfectly just. Rawls adds, in each of these discussions, the proviso that the income expectations of the various groups are to be understood as making a positive functional contribution to one another, and as doing so in some accredited setting - in an open and competitive market, say. Thus, in a ‘perfectly just’ situation the contribution is such that no further improving ‘changes in the expectations of those better off can improve the situation of those worse off (ibid., p. 78). In a ‘thoroughly just’ situation, on the other hand, the key claim is that if the expectations of those better off were somehow ‘decreased, the prospects of the least advantaged would likewise fall’ from their present point (ibid., p. 78).

no

I N D E T E R M I N A C Y OF R A W L S ’S D I F F E R E N C E P R I N C I P L E

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

is a strict priority, of the first principle over the second: ibid., pp. 61, 302-3. Ibid., p. 78. The argument for this final thought, that we should manifest a continuing concern for minimising inequab ity, is a simple and appealing one. We apply the same standard to end points (or outcomes) that we had earlier applied, in the ‘democratic interpretation’ of the second principle, to starting-points. That is, we begin by conscientiously reducing - as we much as we can (all things considered) - the difference in starting points that accrue to individuals from the two main sources, from one’s natural endowment and from one’s initial social position, and then we repeat the same procedure with respect to outcomes. The rationale for doing this is that, since we can never reduce the initial differences to zero, it is permissible to reduce differ­ ences in outcomes as well. The idea of reducing differences in outcomes between two or more feasible options, available at a given time, is a natural com­ plement to the theme of equal opportunity with respect to starting points with which we began. In­ deed, it is one and the same idea applied to both starting points and outcomes. This thought, then, is a fitting completion to the pattern already established in Rawls’s first two thoughts. The egalitarian motif of ‘reducing’ - ideally of minimising - differences in income between the top-most and bottom-most group is expressed most clearly in ibid., section 17 (esp. p. 104). See also Rawls’s ‘Reply to Alexander and Musgrave’, in Rawls (1999) at pp. 246-7, including n. 7; and ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods’ in ibid., at p. 374, n. 12. Let me be a bit more precise here. Rawls calls the first two ideas - ‘democratic’ equality of opportunity and everyone’s continual benefit, when taken together in the way I have just described - the idea of ‘collective asset’. The folding of the third idea, of minimising inequalities, into collective asset is, in my view, part of Rawls’s overall account, though less explicitly so than the other two ideas. The development of, and main argumentation for, the collective asset idea is found in Rawls (1972), pp. 72-5, 101-4 (see also pp. 179, 523). To this main argumentation should be added his paper ‘The Basic Structure as Subject’, in Goldman and Kim (eds.) (1978), pp. 47-71, at sections 5, 7 and 8. (This paper is reprinted as Lecture VII in Rawls (1996).) See also Rawls (1999), pp. 246-8. For further discussion of the relationship of the collective asset idea to indivi­ dual desert, see Martin (1985), chapter 2, section 2. Rawls (1972), pp. 83, 302. For a proof of this contention, see the appendix in Martin (1985), pp. 197-201. See Rawls (1996), Lecture III and, for the quoted phrase, p. 93. The procedure has many similarities to what Gabriel

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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Sandu called a ‘logic game’ in his paper ‘Games in Logic’, presented at the conference on Logic and Ontology at the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania, in May 1998. For example at Rawls (1972), p. 83. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., pp. 81-3; see also Martin (1985), p. 199. See Rawls (1972), p. 82. Here I paraphrase Lamont (1994), p. 318. And Lamont, in turn, was describing one argument, which he thought successful, from Martin (1985) and my ‘Eco­ nomic Justice’ in Boucher and Kelly (eds) (1994). Rawls represents the reasoning of the parties in the original position as ‘part of the theory of rational choice’ (Rawls, 1972, p. 172). The parties there are taken to be rational (ibid., p. 25) and to lack envy (ibid., p. 143). Thus, under the assumption that ‘more is preferred over less’, the parties are simply concerned to ensure a suitable ensemble of primary goods (for themselves individually and their descendants), in the social world they will inhabit, under a rule that they all agree to and each could have vetoed (ibid., pp. 263, 270). Ibid., pp. 96-9 and section 33. Some of Rawls’s clearest statements of this line of argument, stressing (as a consideration in the original position) the continuing importance of the bench­ mark of equality in a condition of fundamental in­ equality in starting points, is found in his ‘A Kantian Conception of Equality’, Rawls (1999) at pp. 262-4; ‘Reply to Alexander and Musgrave’ in ibid., at pp. 246-7; ‘Some Reasons for the Maximin Criterion’ in ibid., at pp. 230-1; and ‘Distributive Justice: Some Addenda’ in ibid., at p. 165. Thus I think Pat Shaw is wrong to suggest that the difference principle is un­ concerned with equality: Shaw (1992), p. 76. Rawls (1999), p. 594 n. 55. For Kymlicka, see Kymlicka (1990), pp. 61-6. For Wolff, see Wolff (1996), pp. 168-87. See also Wil­ liams (1995), section III. A further point. Rawls says that certain considerations make the maximin argument appropriate and render it usable. The three most important of these are given in Rawls (1972), p. 154; the latter two could not be convincingly stated and invoked without relying upon background arguments, of the sort already familiar from the present chapter. For example, one of the considerations Rawls cites is that ‘the rejected alter­ natives have outcomes that one can hardly accept.’ But we could have no clear idea of what might be acceptable (or not) without relying upon the very arguments that would be made in favour of the two principles in the first place. Maximin, in sum, does not provide the background argumentation. That argu­ mentation must, then, be developed elsewhere; it is, specifically, in the argumentation for the two princi-

REX M A R T IN pies, and in inferences from these arguments. Maximin presupposes these arguments and could not work without them. Thus, a ‘straight’ maximin argument for the second principle, by-passing the existing argu­ ment from collective asset, simply could not be devel­ oped. 24. See Rawls (1972), pp. 60-1 and 302. Rawls signifi­ cantly recasts the first principle in his later writings see Rawls (1996), p. 291 (in a formulation that dates from 1982) and p. 5 (in a formulation that dates from 1993). 25. Rawls (1972), pp. 156, 158-9; see also section 49. 26. John Harsanyi, among others, has criticised Rawls’s argument here. His point is that the principle of maximising average utility would fare as well as Raw­ ls’s two principles under any sort of maximin test; see Harsanyi (1975). D. W. Haslett has argued something similar with respect to the principle of total utility; specifically, he has argued that the principle of max­ imising total utility would fare better under any sort of maximin test than Rawls’s difference principle, at least as regards the distribution of income and wealth - see Haslett (1985). I do not find Haslett’s argument convincing. Haslett fails to see that Rawls’s main focus, in the maximin test, is on liberties, not on income and wealth. Even on the latter point, Haslett fails to see that the judgement at each stage, as to which to select, is made from a standpoint that incorporates results from the previous stages; Haslett, on the contrary, treats each sequential choice simply on its own, without regard to where things stand as the result of prior choices. Finally, in Haslett’s own sample matrix, if the scheme of selection were the one advocated in the present chapter, where everybody’s cumulative benefit is constrained at each stage by egalitarian considerations, then the worst-off class would end with a higher index of income and wealth than that afforded by total utility and the resultant

27. 28. 29.

30.

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total wealth (of all classes) would be closely compar­ able with the result given by classical utility theory. Rawls is quite explicit on this point; see Rawls (1999), pp. 165, 246-7. See ibid., p. 230; see also p. 226. This figure is an adaptation of figures Rawls himself uses; see Rawls (1972), pp. 76-7, 81. Rawls’s justi­ fication of inequality (in income, wealth, social position) presupposes that representative members of the least well-off group are better off (or at least, no worse off) than they would be under a ‘hypothe­ tical initial arrangement in which all the social primary goods are equally distributed’, which would include that ‘income and wealth are evenly shared’: ibid., p. 62. This standard is met by all points in the so-called available space in the figure. If more than two classes were involved, we would have to repre­ sent their situation in a more complex way. I pre­ sume, though, that no significant difficulty is posed on this particular score for my account of the figure drawn here. One thing we mean when we say that Rawls’s theory is ideal is that it is strictly complied with. Its theoretical strictures are fully met. Thus, we would have strict compliance if a strategy of everybody’s benefit, as constrained by egalitarianism, was consistently fol­ lowed. The stipulation here is not that the strategy has been optimally followed (‘in the best way’ or with the best result); rather, it is merely required that the strategy be completely followed in all cases. My point, then, is that even if this were done, a society could still end up in the forbidden zone. A strict compliance strategy would not preclude this. A society that so acted would not be unjust. Thus, even if the principles of justice are strictly complied with, a problem of essential indeterminacy could still arise. The proble­ matic I am describing, then, is a real one for Rawls’s theory.

9

RA WL S I A N THEORY, C O N T E M P O R A R Y MARXI SM AND T HE D I F F E R E N C E P R I N C I P L E Rodney G . Peffer

politics, the full implications of that victory may still be very far from being recognised and worked through. If an authentically Marxist politics can be justified from a Rawlsian perspective, the idea of liberalism’s ‘triumph’ over Marxism is clearly problematised. To illustrate this argument, I will first summarise the key claims in my modified Rawlsian theory of social justice. I shall then seek to rebut some of the major reasons why critics have thought that Raw­ lsian concepts and prescriptions are inadequate for ‘justice’. This section will necessarily be incomplete in its coverage; there is simply not the space for a full airing of the issues and we should not doubt that the controversy over justice remains variegated and vig­ orous. But I hope at least to suggest how we might construct a case for saying that Rawlsian theory still stands up well in the debate about how ‘justice’ should be characterised; it would be vastly premature to proclaim the need for its supersession. Finally, I shall offer defence of the claim that my theory really can count as Marxist. I shall attempt to situate it in the general school of thought made up of contem­ porary liberal-egalitarians and what I shall call the liberal-socialist egalitarians (among whom we find certain contemporary variants of Marxism who reject the official hostility to morality of its ‘orthodox’ version and with which my theory has sufficient affinity to adopt the label itself).

In this chapter, my overall goals are to put the case for a Marxist politics today and to proclaim the utility to that case of Rawlsian theory - which is, of course, contemporary liberalism’s most influential contribution to the venerable debate about what ‘justice’ requires. In the history of modern progressive political thought, socialists have persistently at­ tacked liberalism for what they perceive to be serious deficiencies in their theorising of justice. Contrary to what many people appear to have concluded in the wake of Soviet-block communism’s collapse, I do not believe that the socialist challenge has been at all discredited. Indeed, I continue to defend the overall Marxist position I first elaborated in my 1990 book Marxism, Morality and Social Justice. However, a major theme of that work was that Rawls’s theory of justice need only be modified to yield the position I wished to defend. In other words, there need be no great moral gap between at least some versions of liberalism and the ostensibly much more radical politics inspired by Marxism. If valid, such a con­ clusion has at least two profound consequences. The first is that, even when it is granted that arguments for socialist politics carry greater weight in the justice debate, it need not be necessary to abandon liberal theory (at least in its Rawlsian form) to make them. The second is that, in so far as Rawlsianism may be thought to give voice to the liberalism that is widely regarded as having won the ‘battle of ideas’ in

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R Throughout this chapter, I shall leave aside ques­ tions of how to generate and justify principles of justice; I am concerned only to apply intuitive and analytical tests of the moral adequacy of those pro­ posed. Also, such is the enormousness of the various issues raised here that I can only outline positions and arguments, aiming to persuade readers to take them seriously enough to pursue further. The chap­ ter’s success in this aim may be gauged by the extent to which it shows how Rawlsianism, the staple diet of contemporary liberalism, can push us towards a radical politics that many assume to be completely anathema to the liberal project.

of capitalism); and [3] attempts to defend the Marxist’s basic normative political positions. The first of these positions is that socialism that is, democratic, self-managing socialism - is morally preferable to any form of capitalism as well as to any other form of (modem, mass, pluralistic) society possible under the conditions of moderate scarcity and moderate egoism. The second is that social and/or political revolution, if necessary (and sufficient) to effect the appropriate transformations, is prima facie morally justified.1 My strategy towards the end of creating such a theory has been to combine a slightly modified Rawlsian theory of social justice with a minimal set of Marxist empirical assumptions to create a theory that ade­ quately argues for the desirability of working toward a worldwide federation of democratic, self-managing market socialist societies. This outcome is not the one envisaged by Marx, of course. But I - along with many other thinkers who position themselves within the Marxist tradition today - reject the feasibility of Marx’s ‘higher stage’ of communism; the lower, ‘socialist’ stage of post-capitalist society can suffice for Marxism’s practical purposes. Furthermore, the ‘command economy’ model for socialism in mass, industrial societies has been sufficiently discredited for us to prefer a suitably regulated form of market economy as socialism’s best vehicle.2 Although I wouldn’t go so far as to call my theory a marriage of Marx and Rawls (since this would probably have to be a ‘shotgun wedding’), I am willing to call it an attempt to make Marx and Rawls seem ‘comfortable bedfellows’. As a first step in this direction, in the aforementioned work I surveyed numerous leftist or left-leaning objections made against Rawls’s theory, arguing that most of them were based on misunderstandings of his theory and/ or on faulty reasoning. However, I agreed that there were four legitimate objections which, although not requiring a complete rejection of his theory, neces­ sitated some relatively minor modifications. These resulted in the following claims:

A Modified Rawlsian Theory of Social Justice Since my explicitly stated aim has been to create an ‘adequate’ Marxist moral and social theory, I should first explain what I mean by that phrase. As I noted in the first paragraphs of my 1990 book: By a ‘moral and social theory’ I mean one that provides a set of moral principles or standards by which to judge social arrangements and, by so doing, provides criteria to decide between com­ peting sets of historically possible social arrange­ ments. Such a theory must contain enough of an empirical, social-scientific theory to determine which sets of social arrangements are real histor­ ical possibilities and - of those that are possible which best conform to the moral principles or standards propounded by an adequate moral theory . . . By an ‘adequate’ moral and social theory I mean one that is based on a correct set of em­ pirical, social-scientific theories and on an ade­ quate (i.e. correct) moral theory. By an ‘adequate’ or ‘correct moral theory I mean one that is most in wide reflective equilibrium with our considered moral judgements . . . By a ‘Marxist’ moral and social theory I mean one that [1] is informed by the spirit of Marx’s radical humanism and egalitarianism; [2] is based on the empirical theses centrally important to the Marxist political perspective (particularly, Marx’s theory of classes and class struggle and his analysis

1. There must be a minimum floor of well-being below which persons are not allowed to fall, and observance of this principle must take

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RAW LSIAN THEORY AND CO NTEM PORARY MARXISM Now let us consider my modified Rawlsian theory of social justice in full (the principles being listed in order of lexical priority), which I believe captures more clearly the sense of ‘justice’ than Rawls’s own two principles:

precedence over any other principle of social justice. 2. There must be at least approximate equality in the worth of liberty as well as strict equality of liberty per se. 3. The difference principle must take the social basis of self-respect - as well as material wealth - as a good to be maximised for the least advantaged. 4. Democracy must not be limited to the political realm but be implemented in the social and economic realms as well, most especially in the workplace.3

1. Everyone’s basic security and subsistence rights are to be met (that is, everyone’s physical integrity is to be respected), and everyone is to be guaranteed a minimum level of material well-being including basic needs (that is, those needs that must be met in order to remain a normally functioning human being and citi­ zen). 2. There is to be a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, including: a. freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of conscience and thought, freedom of move­ ment and free choice of occupation, the right to hold (personal) property, freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concepts of due process and the rule of law; b. the political liberties such as the right to vote and to run for (and hold) political office. These political liberties - including the rights to free political speech and as­ sembly - are to be guaranteed their equal worth. 3. There is to be fair equality of opportunity in the competition for social positions and of­ fices. 4. Social and economic inequalities are justified if and only if they benefit the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, but are not to exceed levels that will undermine (a) (approximately) equal worth of the liber­ ties required by due process, or (b) the good of self-respect. 5. There is to be an equal right to participate in decision-making processes within the social and economic institutions of which one is a member.6

One significant outcome of these arguments is that in his most recent book, Political Liberalism, Rawls has explicitly acknowledged three of the four mod­ ifications as being persuasive and, in effect, accepted them. As remaining points of dispute between us, this leaves only my suggested modification in favour of a principle of social and economic democracy (modification 4) and a disagreement over whether or not the difference principle governing fair dis­ tributions of material primary goods (income, wealth and leisure time) should be applied only within nations (Rawls’s position) or internationally (my view as well as the view of many other writers and theorists).4 However, part of our ongoing dis­ agreement over the former seems merely semantic in nature. Rawls’s stated reason for rejecting it is that, as a first principle of social justice, it would automati­ cally require some form of socialism and thus illegi­ timately prejudge the practical project of selecting a suitable regime for justice given the contingencies of the circumstances in question. I believe that this argument fails in so far as it is based on a non­ standard definition of socialism which obscures the fact that a society which has some significant degree of social and economic democracy need not be thought of as ‘socialist’ by definition. It is also at least logically possible that a capitalist society could be characterised as having a substantial amount of social and economic democracy.5 Hence it is wrong to think that the modification selects the best form of regime in advance of the evaluation of actual cir­ cumstances. (I shall return to the latter dispute shortly.)

Let us call these principles (1) the Basic Rights Principle; (2) the Equal Basic Liberties Principle; (3) the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle; (4)

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R the Modified Difference Principle; and (5) the Social and Economic Democracy Principle. As with any abstract theory, a number of caveats, clarifications and principles of application must be mentioned and I want to highlight a few that are important in the consolidation of my argument. One important gen­ eral point to remember is that Rawls’s theory applies specifically to a society’s ‘basic structure’ (the poli­ tical constitution and the nature and structure of the economy, including the provision of public goods, taxation and redistribution policies, and environ­ mental regulation). Together with the fact that at a micro-level, so to speak, many institutions, both public and private, will have areas of activity - such as competitions for positions, awards and prizes within which individual merit, effort or accomplish­ ment are legitimate criteria for awards, this point bears out the insistence by Michael Walzer (among others) that there are different spheres of justice which may have different criteria for just distribu­ tions of benefits and burdens. Clearly, this thesis could be perfectly compatible with Rawls’s theory, deliberately restricted in its scope of application as it is.7 And even though we are to decide on more and more specific questions and issues at each subsequent stage of Rawls’s four-stage decision-making sequence

(structured so as not to skew distribution according to the unearned or otherwise undeserved possession of certain attributes). Any theory that does not adequately take these points into account will not be judged adequate within this tradition.9 Let us briefly highlight some features of my first, second, third and fifth principles, saving the Mod­ ified Difference Principle for a more extended ana­ lysis in the next section. With respect to my first (Basic Rights) principle, it is evident that different conditions in the physical and mental health of individuals will mean that the resources allocated to meet people’s basic needs will not be equal in amount; no crude ‘uniformitarian’ equality is sought. Therefore, we must say that the equality in this principle is cashed out in terms of everyone posses­ sing an equal right to have their security and sub­ sistence rights met (or an equal right to be given the opportunity to meet their subsistence rights in the case of able-bodied and able-minded people). More­ over, when it proves not to be possible to meet everyone’s basic needs (as when, say, there are not enough hearts available to meet each need for a heart transplant), it could be consistent and perhaps ne­ cessary to invoke notions from other traditional canons of distributive justice to decide how distribu­ tion ought to proceed in such suboptimal circum­ stances. A t a more general level, to operationalise this principle social and political theorists must turn to social-scientific theory and research to determine how various types of societies (and governments) under various historical conditions can be expected to meet people’s subsistence and security rights. Moral and political theory shouldn’t hubristically claim to settle all such questions in advance.10 Discussion of my first principle is a good point at which to stress the ambition of my theory to have global applicability. I may be going against the normatively localising grain of much contemporary thinking about justice here, but one of the virtues of the Marxist account is that it forcefully illustrates the direct dependence of the achievement of justice in the developing world (surely, given the conditions there, justice’s most urgent priority) upon the beha­ viour of the developed world. Localised or relativised accounts of justice (favoured by many communitar­ ians) are thus deeply irresponsible in failing both to

— in which, after the choice of basic principles of

social justice in the initial original position, we have the constitutional, legislative and judicial stages - all choices are to be made on the basis of these prin­ ciples of social justice and are applicable only to public or publicly supported institutions.8 It should also be mentioned that Rawlsian theories and indeed all other theories of social justice devel­ oped within the contemporary liberal-egalitarian/ liberal-socialist tradition are motivated by a genuine concern for individual liberty/autonomy as well as for human well-being/flourishing. We should always keep in view the point that we should not select a conception of justice that overly compromises these considerations. One manifestation of this is that, when it comes to principles designed to govern and judge the distribution of material resources, we are concerned to develop a theory that, to a relatively high degree, is both ambition-sensitive (cap­ able of rewarding autonomous initiative over indo­ lent passivity, say) as well as endowment-insensitive

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R AW LSIAN THEORY AND CONTEM PORARY MARXISM These duties obviously require us to do what we can - including getting our governments to do what they can - to try to make sure that everyone in the world is raised up out of absolute poverty and that no one has their security rights violated. (Or rather, it requires us to do at least our fair share to accomplish these goals.) However, one of the reasons that I believe my version of his theory has a greater degree of clarity is that my Basic Rights Principle explicitly states that both people’s subsistence and security rights (the correlates of his duties not to harm and to aid the severely deprived) must be respected and protected and that this is the most important or basic principle of social justice which must thus take precedence over all others in the design of social institutions, policies and programmes.14 Let us turn now to the first part of principle 2, the Maximum Equal Basic Liberties Principle. To allay socialist suspicions that Rawlsian theory is some kind of bourgeois apologia, the nature of the property right as referring specifically to personal property must be stressed. We must keep in view the point that the right to own large-scale productive property - which is here opposed to ‘personal property’ - is not taken as one of the basic liberties. Whether there should be such a right can only be answered at the second (constitutional) stage of the Rawlsian four-step de­ cision procedure, after more empirical facts are known about the effects that such a right would have in terms of the realisation of the basic principles of social justice. This allows for the possibility of socialism on Rawls’s view (although a democratic form of market socialism), as he makes abundantly clear in his first book.15 Moving to the second part of this principle: as Rawls argues, guaranteeing people (approximately) equal worth of their political liberties would seem at a minimum to require full public financing of elec­ toral campaigns (at least in a society such as ours in which wealthy individuals, corporations and interest groups can disproportionately influence electoral outcomes) and perhaps other innovative electoral modifications.16 In short, the kind of democracy that it advocates will clearly not sanction those distor­ tions due to unequal wealth that capitalist democ­ racies (particularly the U S) typically experience. The primary moral thesis behind principle 3 - the

recognise how a society’s own behaviour and internal make-up can profoundly affect the prospects for justice in other societies and for refusing to include them in their theorising of justice as a result. Although it might be tempting to think that I diverge sharply from Rawls in terms of the theory’s relevance to the developing world, this would be a mistake. It may be the case that Rawls doesn’t go as far as he should in applying certain aspects of his theory to the relationships between the developed and developing parts of the world (governing the distribution of goods between rich and poor nations). Yet even an unmodified version of his theory has some important things to say about this issue. First, his distinction between the general and the special conception of justice as fairness is of the utmost importance because the general conception (which applies within developing societies) actually requires the difference principle to be applied to all the social primary goods (liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect) as a package. Therefore, it allows trade-offs between them. In contrast, the special conception (the more familiar two principles of justice, applying only to well-developed societies) lists the principles govern­ ing these goods in order of lexical priority such that any amount of increase in ‘lower-order’ goods (such as income and wealth for the least well-off) cannot be traded off for the least decrease in higher order goods (such as liberties or fair access to opportu­ nities).11 The reason that Rawls makes this distinc­ tion is precisely because he doesn’t want his theory to be committed to the absurdly heartless doctrine that liberties and fair access to opportunities can never be limited to any degree in any society, even if this were necessary, say, to save people from starvation. And he is genuinely concerned with ‘how the poorer and less technologically advanced societies of the world can attain historical and social conditions that allow them to establish just and workable institutions.’12 Although often forgotten in discussions of Rawls’s work, his theory of natural duties which posits, among others, the duties not to harm and of mutual aid (that is, the duty to aid those whose basic needs are not being met) has always been taken by Rawls himself to apply between individuals no matter whether or not they belong to the same societies.13

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle - is that persons of (approximately) equal talents and abilities ought to have (approximately) equal chances of succeeding in life (whatever their idea of success may be, within the constraints of justice already specified). In particular, such persons ought to have (approximately) equal chances in the competition for desirable offices, jobs and positions.17 In order to accomplish this goal at least two conditions must be met. First, there must be no discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference and so on. Second, everyone must be given an equal start ‘out of the gate’, so to speak, in the race for life’s favourable offices, jobs and positions or, more broadly, success. And to accomplish this it is reasonable to think that the minimum which must be done is that all children are given equal access to high-quality education from a very young age. Assuming that there are no natural differences in general intelligence and suchlike be­ tween racial and ethnic groups (which we have every reason to assume18), there probably would be no need for compensatory or remedial measures such as affirmative action programmes if these conditions were fulfilled since, presumably, there would be no statistical discrimination against any of the groups. However, in a society like ours in which such dis­ crimination clearly exists, there are - I submit strong moral arguments for such remedial pro­ grammes in the construction of a just society.19 Principle 5 - the Social and Economic Democracy Principle - is, admittedly, particularly vague as to what it requires given that regime selection is not to be made at the level of principle. Specifically, I do not take it in itself to be pre-emptively, definitionally endorsing socialism over capitalism, as we earlier saw Rawls mistakenly believing my theory to be doing. I completely agree with his claim that a theory of social justice should not prejudge the choice of social system until we take into account empirical, socialscientific information about how they actually per­ form or can be expected to perform under specified historical conditions. But I would submit that justice requires members of institutions to have some right to participate in social decision-making processes concerning matters that affect them and the institu­ tion. However, it doesn’t necessarily give everyone full voting rights with respect to every decision in

every institution in which they participate. Nor does it claim that there cannot be administrative hierar­ chies in such institutions.20 The essential distinction between socialism and capitalism, I maintain, is that in a socialist society the preponderance of large-scale productive enter­ prises (and investment capital) are socially owned and utilised primarily for the purposes of fulfilling human needs and for the public good. In capitalism these enterprises (and capital) are largely owned privately and are geared to maximise the profit of their owners. Whether it is empirically possible or likely that socialism or capitalism can or will better facilitate social and economic democracy cannot be read off from these institutional ideals alone. Many theorists, I think, assume that socialism is more likely to allow for social and economic democracy, even if some of them doubt that this would be a good thing or suspect that it may not concomitantly allow increased political democracy. But whether or not any society has (or will) meet the definitional criteria I have lain down for socialism is still a matter for debate, as is whether or not human needs can be adequately fulfilled and the public good accommo­ dated in various capitalist societies by trickle-down mechanisms and/or enlightened government poli­ cies. Here, at the level of practical application, would seem to be the place at which substantive disputes between liberals and socialists remain. Certainly, it is at this point that I would make my case for socialism. This concludes the summary of my modifications to Rawls’s theory, with the exception of the Modified Difference Principle (principle 4).

A Defence of the Modified Difference Principle The question we now need to take up is whether the Modified Difference Principle is sufficiently robust to take its place in a Marxist account. As space is limited, I will concentrate on some reasons to think that it is more ambition-sensitive and endowmentinsensitive than many critics, who have accordingly formulated alternative accounts of justice, realise. I claim that this could form the core of a fuller argument that the Rawlsian approach should still command our attention as an adequate characterisa-

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R AW LSIAN THEORY AND CONTEM PORARY MARXISM charge against Marxist accounts of egalitarian justice and one which I agree would, if valid, discredit this general approach). For one consequence of Rawls’s demand that the difference principle be applied lexically is that it can deflect the charge that it does not meet the Pareto optimality requirement and must consequently be rejected. This requirement holds that if someone or some group can be made materially better off without anyone else (or any other group) being made worse off, then this must be done (or allowed). Without this requirement, it seems that the ‘only-if clause of the difference principle’s claim (holding that material inequalities are to be allowed - by the background institutions, policies and programmes - if and only if they will maximally benefit the least well-off group) does not allow inequalities that would benefit a group of people which is materially more well-off than the least well-off (poorest) social group even when, for whatever reason, nothing further could be done to improve the life prospects of the latter. Now to deny an improvement in material well-being for someone if this won’t prevent a benefit from accruing to anyone else - specifically, in Rawls’s view, to the least well-off - does seem unjustifiable. And this is precisely what the lexical application of the differ­ ence principle is designed to prevent since it ‘goes all the way to the top’. So, for example, if every income level group has had its life prospects maximised in lexical order (as described above) and it turns out that something can still be done to improve the material life prospects of the wealthiest group, then the background institutions must allow for it. Of course, it is not easy to envisage clear-cut, concrete examples of this, certainly not any in which wide gaps would remain between the least advantaged and those above them. Although it is possible that the lexical application of the principle would result in greater inequalities between upper and lower income groups, in most real-world scenarios it still seems likely that its effect will be significantly to reduce inequalities. In any case, as a matter of principle this part of Rawls’s theory avoids the criticism that it violates the Pareto optimality requirement. Another charge against Rawlsian theory which accuses it of ambition-insensitivity says that, by counting talents and capacities as socially useful

tion of justice. I bolster this idea with an argument which shows that supposedly more ‘orthodox’ Marx­ ist thinking on justice does not yield self-evidently superior concepts for its own purposes. We might suspect that one Marxist reservation about Rawlsian theory is that, because it is ‘liberal’ in origin, it is not sufficiently egalitarian in the relevant way. So it is only fair to the difference principle to begin by reminding ourselves that Rawlsian theory demands (1) that the least well-off group be maximally benefited, not simply benefited (whatever that would mean), and (2) that the difference principle be applied lexically, that is after the life prospects of the least well-off group are maximised then the life prospects of the next least well-off group are to be maximised and so on.21 In the light of this, we can already sense the oddity of the standard Marxist charge that Rawlsianism is merely a species of capi­ talist ideology; we must not underestimate its poten­ tial as a sanction for strongly egalitarian policies. My claim that The Modified Difference Principle is (even) more egalitarian than Rawls’s original version is generated from the point that, for mine, the allowable economic inequalities are not to ex­ ceed levels that will (1) undermine (approximately) equal worth of the liberties required by due process, or (2) undermine the good of self-respect. I have previously noted that Rawls has recently accepted these points and I think he is able to do so because they are arguably already implicit in his own work. He thinks his difference principle compensates for any lesser worth of liberty among the ‘less advan­ taged’ given that it would be worth even less if the difference principle had not determined distribution. And self-respect, explicitly identified as a social primary good, depends in part upon mutual respect and social recognition, which may be less forthcom­ ing where there are widespread and large-scale in­ equalities.22 In this respect, my modifications do not seem to be leading us in a direction that Rawls himself would never be prepared to take. (Under what economic conditions people’s self-respect may be undermined is again an issue for the social and psychological sciences to decide.) Conversely, this direction should not be thought of as leading to the crudely ambition-insensitive policy of ‘levelling-down’ (the standard vulgar

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R resources rather than as vehicles for individual gain, it leads to the ‘slavery of the talented’. This claim holds that it is unjust to reward gifted individuals for the usage of their abilities only in so far as that would maximise the position of the least advantaged; their gifts are not being rewarded in their own right. It focuses upon the very heart of what might build the bridge between Rawlsian and Marxist justice: Rawls’s interpretation of that often-neglected liberal value of ‘fraternity’ as a conception of ‘democratic equality’, in which people agree to ‘regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset . . . [t]hose better circumstanced are willing to have their greater ad­ vantages only under a scheme in which this works out for the benefit of the least advantaged.’23 One interpretation of this position that may in­ advertently fuel the ‘slavery’ critique holds that Rawls rejects a crucial part of what G. A. Cohen calls the principle of self-ownership: ‘Because it is a matter of brute luck that people have the talents that they do, their talents do not, morally speaking, belong to them, but are, properly regarded, resources over which society as a whole may legitimately dispose.’24 N o great imagination is required to read into this a sanctioning of some kind of forced-labour policy, which would be the grossest violation of the stipulation that justice should facilitate, not crush, autonomy. But Cohen’s wording is unfortunately misleading if this is the reading it prompts. Neither Rawls’s theory nor my own deny people the right to choose how they use their talents. Society is not said to ‘own’ them in the sense of having the right to tell people how and when they should be employed.25 Strictly speaking, what society is primarily laying claim to is the wealth used to compensate for and/ or reward their employment. Rawlsian theory insists that people have no particular claim on this wealth simply by virtue of the talents they have chosen to exercise; a socially determined concern for a com­ mon good provides the distributive criterion instead. This might still sound too radically egalitarian for some liberals, which once led Cohen to think that perhaps Rawls was not a ‘proper’ liberal at all.26 But reflection on how people ordinarily think about justice can readily show that, on this score, Rawlsianism may not be all that out of the ordinary to many. For people often justify high rewards to in­

dividuals on the grounds that they are producing benefits for a wider society (capitalists in particular typically cite this argument when justifying the large pay rises they award themselves, implicitly conceding the inadequacy of any argument that says their talents demand such rewards regardless of the ben­ efits they supposedly bring). And many complaints about low rewards often proceed from the claim that the social benefit of the job in question is not being properly recognised. Even when people think they are judging the ‘intrinsic’ rather than instrumental (social benefit) value of someone’s talents, the cri­ teria they use often still implicitly rely upon some notion of those talents’ social utility. How else, we might wonder, could we ultimately judge what any talent is worth? Further, even what counts as a ‘talent’ rather than a mere ‘capacity’ may be at least partly determined by social utility; in capitalist ideology, after all, the idea that the market rewards talented effort and achievement necessarily relies upon the distinctly instrumentalist idea that what counts as ‘talented’ - rewardable - contributions is determined by what other people in the marketplace demand. O f course this is not to claim that people are therefore already thinking in terms of the difference principle and I don’t deny the fact that people also ordinarily use rival notions of justice as well. But I am saying that there is something in ordinary discourse about justice upon which Rawlsianism can latch to develop its case. Such a case should stress that (in particular) anti­ socialist criticisms of Rawlsianism usually assume (1) that individuals are gamering most of their material resources (income and wealth) by working (as either an employee or their own boss); (2) that individuals are usually materially rewarded due to their effort or socially useful contribution; and (3) that the level of recompense is usually correlated with natural talents and abilities, at least in a just or relatively just society. But in contemporary class societies these assumptions are highly dubious. In capitalist socie­ ties, members of the highest income/wealth socio­ economic group - that is the capitalist mling class and its ‘hangers-on’ - often inherit the great pre­ ponderance of their wealth rather than gamer it by their labour or effort. Moreover, the investment

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RAW LSIAN THEORY AND CONTEM PORARY MARXISM is able to command.28 Although Rawlsianism clearly poses a large chal­ lenge to capitalist thinking about justice, G. A. Cohen has claimed that socialists should still not be satisfied with the difference principle for another reason.29 He notes its familiar presentation as an ‘incentive principle’, sanctioning unequally large rewards to the talented rich on the grounds that they will consequently have the incentive to work hard and thereby generate wealth which will ‘trickle down’ to the least advantaged and benefit them more than would any other arrangement. (This, of course, has been the staple justification of regressive taxation policies since the Reagan/Thatcher days.) Leaving aside the debate as to whether the ‘trickle-down’ thesis actually holds (for if it does not, such a policy would clearly not be sanctioned by the difference principle), Cohen claims that the ‘incentive’ con­ struction of the difference principle’s operation relies upon certain assumptions that are incompatible with the attitude towards one’s talents that Rawls himself believes is required by justice. Simply put, a talented capitalist entrepreneur who is paid a particularly high salary as an incentive to create jobs which would not otherwise be created for the least advantaged is typically not unable to do the same job for a lot less. Rather, he is unwilling to do so and he is effectively using his socially valuable talents as his own ‘bar­ gaining chips’ to enhance his own personal gains at no extra benefit to the community. In other words, he is not treating his talents as ‘common assets’, for if he did he would not need incentives to work (in­ deed, he probably does not ‘need’ them at all, but is nevertheless able to claim so as he holds the rest of the community to ransom by threatening to with­ hold his talents if he is not paid more). It is hardly clear that Rawls would wish to depart from Cohen’s claim that the ‘incentive’ scenario described above involved an unjust rejection of community and its claims on the talents of its members. As we have seen, his own notion of democratic equality rests upon a specific understand­ ing o f ‘community’ whose members would reject such a selfish attitude to their own talents. Thus, it would be misleading to think that the difference principle sanctions such an incentive payment as being itself just. (Cohen would agree that if incentives were the

income they receive through rent, interest and di­ vidends (which normally dwarfs their salaried in­ comes, even if they are top corporate executives) is not earned in any socially useful, morally significant sense. As David Schweickart has argued, to allow capital to be used is hardly a genuinely productive act - since, at most, it requires signing some papers on the part of those who own it - even if the capital owner’s permission is legally required for its deploy­ ment within the socio-economic system in ques­ tion.27 And to claim that corporate executives, bank presidents and suchlike really deserve what they earn (because they are the only ones who can do the job or are really the best qualified) surely strains the limits of credibility. In an interesting ploy to disprove such widely accepted nonsense, the politically radical American entrepreneurs Ben and Jerry - of the highly successful Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlours - some years ago advertised the position of president of their corporation to the general public, requiring only a one-page letter of interest initially and then follow-up interviews. They ended up selecting an African-American man in his fifties who had only a high school education and had been employed as a janitor most of his life, with absolutely no ill effects for the corporation. One might agree that rewards at the ‘top end’ of capitalist society (including entertainers and sports stars as well as capitalists) far outstrip any plausible assessment of their talent’s worth, however this is assessed. But the claim that even individuals in the middle and lower classes usually get paid what they deserve for their work in market societies (on grounds, for example, that people normally receive an income commensurate with the productive value and relative scarcity of their work abilities and skills under equilibrium market conditions) is highly sus­ picious because of the general impact that nonmarket factors such as social custom, political reg­ ulation and the strength of organised labour (each of which may be connected with the others) have on the determination of remuneration by the ‘free mar­ ket’. In general, there are just too many counter­ vailing forces in the operation of the capitalist market to make us happy with the idea that the social value of people’s talents is appropriately re­ warded by the wage or salary that their labour-power

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R only way to get the talented to work and that their labours would indeed maximise the position of the least advantaged, then it would be justified. But this would be the application only of a principle to ameliorate injustice in an unjust world and not what full justice itself would mandate.) Admittedly, a Rawlsian might sanction incentives on the grounds that they would be necessary to attract people to careers that are socially necessary but exceptionally difficult or dangerous and hence unlikely to be chosen without them. To this I have two brief replies. One is to point out that this observation does not serve many of today’s incentive-claiming talented rich particularly well; they would doubtless still have picked their chosen careers even if the material rewards were somewhat less because they are not ‘dangerous’ or particularly difficult. Indeed, in a just society such incentives may be necessary to attract people to the kind of work which is very often exceptionally low-paid in capitalist society. Secondly, my rendering of Rawlsianism as a socialist doctrine consolidates within its terms the ideal of people freely choosing to dispose of their talents in a socially beneficial way. To be sure, some difficult and dangerous tasks may still require incentive payments, if other ways are not found for allocating them. But, in general, I don’t conceive of people needing huge incentives to work in a socially beneficial rather than selfish way in the just socialist society, certainly not to the kind of inegalitarian degree supposedly re­ quired in capitalist society. The ‘slavery of the talented’ critique has probably had most bite in the rather different criticism that since his difference principle and minimum floor requirement seem to assure the least well-off - in fact, everyone - a minimal income or set of material resources, Rawls’s theory is not sufficiently ambitionsensitive because it seems not to require anyone to do anything in order to be entitled to this income or set of resources; it encourages free-riding and hence discourages the formation of the kind of community just described above. There are actually two ques­ tions that must be distinguished here: (1) whether Rawls’s theory requires that this minimum income simply be given to anyone whether or not they are willing to do anything to earn it (assuming that they are able-bodied and able-minded and that such

opportunities actually exist); (2) whether this is a justified social policy (or principle of social justice) regardless of what Rawls’s theory says about it. Now I claim that (1) Rawls’s theory does not require such a policy; and (2) assuming that there are genuine opportunities for people to earn a living under decent conditions and with decent recom­ pense, a social policy (or principle of justice) that would allow such free-riders is not justified or at least not required.30 Admittedly, both Rawlsians and nonRawlsians have split over both of these issues such that, for example, I have been scolded by certain of Rawls’s former students for both (supposedly) mis­ interpreting Rawls and for being too much of a ‘puritan’ in rejecting such a policy. I have also encountered both Rawlsians and non-Rawlsians who have agreed with me on both points. Happily, Rawls is now on record as not requiring such a policy, since in his typescript ‘Justice as Fairness: A Restate­ ment’ he writes: Particular distributions cannot be judged at all apart from the claims (entitlements) of indivi­ duals earned by their efforts within the fair system of co-operation from which those distributions re­ sult. In contrast to utilitarianism, the concept of allocative justice has no application. There is no

criterion for a just distribution apart from back­ ground institutions and the entitlements that arise from actually working through the procedure [emphasis added].31 It should be noted, however, that to prevent ablebodied people from being free-riders when there are opportunities available for them to earn a decent living by their own efforts is neither an endorsement of the kind of movement to have ‘workfare’ replace ‘welfare’ underway in the U S (since the opportu­ nities may not be well-paying enough once one includes childcare and transportation expenses into the equation), nor an affirmation of the view that people must work if they are able-bodied (which I would regard as a genuinely puritan attitude). My only claim is that able-bodied people should not be supported by the state or society in general if they refuse to do anything to earn a living (assuming, again, that decent opportunities exist for them to

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R AW LSIAN THEORY AND CONTEM PORARY MARXISM tical perspective that is inclined towards impatience with regards to some types of ‘armchair’ reflection. The nub of Rawls’s argument is that social primary goods are all-purpose general resources in modem societies that can usually be utilised by individuals who have them no matter what their life plans are. Because they constitute a specific, limited set of goods, they should be easier to track in the process of distribution than the wider and more nebulous categories of (opportunities for) resources, welfare or advantage. In other words, policies of social justice may be easier to operationalise with a concept of social primary goods as their currency. This claim is reinforced by Rawls’s insistence that his theory is one of ‘pure procedural justice’ in which an outcome is judged to be just wholly in so far as it has arisen through the operation of just procedures. He writes that:

do so). If they can sponge off others while not doing anything illegitimate to gamer the material goods and services they need, the state or society has no business telling them that they can’t live their lives this way, as far as I’m concerned . . . at least if requiring people to do socially useful work is not absolutely necessary for society to meet the first (Basic Rights) principle of justice. I now want briefly to reflect upon the objection that Rawls’s notion of ‘social primary goods’ misidentifies what theories of social justice should be concerned to distribute (such as welfare or utility, or material resources). Space does not allow a full discussion of all of Rawls’s rivals, so I can only sketch the case for retaining his approach. I will, though, say a little more on ‘exploitation’, a category which many might think Marxism ought to prefer as the key term in its account of justice. Richard Arneson helpfully distinguishes between four alternative principles of justice, based around two different types of good to be distributed - ‘wel­ fare’ and ‘resources’ - and two types of ‘end-state’ based upon whether justice is concerned with the amount possessed of each good or merely with the opportunity to acquire them: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The great practical advantage of pure procedural justice is that it is no longer necessary in meeting the demands of justice to keep track of the endless variety of circumstances and the changing relative positions of particular persons. One avoids the problem of defining principles to cope with the enormous complexities which would arise if such details were relevant. It is a mistake to focus attention on the varying relative positions of individuals and to require that every change, considered as a single transaction viewed in iso­ lation, be in itself just. It is the arrangement of the basic structure which is to be judged, and judged from a general point of view . . . Thus the ac­ ceptance of the two principles constitutes an understanding to discard as irrelevant as a matter of social justice much of the information and many of the complications of everyday life.34

the Equality of Welfare Principle; the Equality of Resources Principle; the Equal Opportunity for Welfare Principle; the Equal Opportunity for Resources Principle.32

To this we might add a fifth, developed by Cohen and, because of his own political pedigree, one that may be of particular interest to socialists: 5. the Equality of Access to Advantage Principle.33 All five have been much discussed in order to ascertain which one does the best job of capturing what justice intuitively requires. Typically, their respective proponents all claim superiority over Raw­ ls’s approach in this regard. Important issues are undoubtedly raised in this debate and I accept that it would be premature to foreclose on it. But there may be a case for thinking that it should not pre­ dominate in the discourse about justice in the way it has done recently, particularly from a radical poli­

This is not to say that institutions should never be scrutinised for their justice-promoting abilities once they have been established. In his ‘Restatement’, Rawls talks of ‘pure adjusted procedural justice’, introducing the caveat that ‘certain rules for making adjustments must be included in the basic structure as a system of social co-operation so that this system remains fair over time.’35 These features are, I would argue, great strengths

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R of his theory since they make it more readily applic­ able to the workings of actual societies and less intrusive into people’s individual lives. On Rawls’s approach, so long as people act within the confines of justice and so long as what they are able to gamer for themselves is accumulated within the confines of the background institutions set up by the principles of social justice they - and their legitimate material holdings - are not to be interfered with. This may contrast with those theories of justice which do not have such in-built delimitations, for they may inad­ vertently sanction a political ‘micro-management’ of social and personal life that, apart from anything else, would conflict with the fundamental respect for individual autonomy and well-being identified ear­ lier as central to justice’s concerns. To consolidate this part of the case for Rawlsian theory, it is worth reflecting upon this claim of Am eson’s, who, having surveyed numerous compet­ ing theories of justice, concludes that their practical implications

in order to fulfil valuable human functionings.37 This approach is not easily classifiable as either welfarist or resourcist as, strictly speaking, it seeks to equalise neither. But it has the advantage of carrying our moral view to a very deep level of what is really (intrinsically) valuable in human lives. It keeps us focused on the fact that, due to differential natural talents and abilities, people differentially convert resources into valuable ‘functionings’ (or capabilities for such functionings) and that it is these with which theorists of justice should be primarily concerned. However, Rawlsian theory is not blind to this point. It does not cease to be interested in how people stand with reference to their primary goods once they have been distributed. A crucial consideration in selecting the best form of social and political order for Raw­ lsian justice is precisely which of the alternatives best allow people the chance to utilise these goods in pursuit of their own life-plans. My own case for socialism, indeed, would partly rest upon the claim that a socialist order is much more amenable to the process of converting ‘goods’ into ‘functionings’. And once that is recognised, the advantages of Sen’s approach diminish in so far as it is limited to covering only basic capabilities. Once these are achieved, it doesn’t tell us how to govern any further distribu­ tions of resources above the levels necessary for these purposes. Indeed, ‘capacities’ may simply cease to be useful beyond this basic level. As G. A. Cohen puts it, ‘capacities beyond the basic (Can I run a mile? Can I impress Ukrainians with my impersonation of Russians? Can I sew more quickly than you?) seem quite irrelevant to measurement, deprivation, in­ equality or anything else of urgent concern from the point of view of justice.’38 In any case, once we see that subsistence rights are cited as something that must be fulfilled by my Basic Rights Principle, Sen’s concerns with basic capabilities would already seem to be accommodated. No practical advantage over the ‘social primary goods’ approach is gained. Finally in this section we turn to ‘exploitation’, which many Marxists might wish to make central to any discussion of justice. Now there has been much discussion as to how ‘exploitation’ should be con­ ceptualised, led by John Roemer in particular, and there is no space here to enter this debate.39 Instead, I simply want to offer one definition of the term -

may be hard to discern, and may not diverge much in practice. Familiar information-gathering and information-using problems will make us unwilling to authorise government agencies to determine people’s distributive shares on the basis of their preference satisfaction prospects, which will often be unknowable for all practical pur­ poses. [So, for example], we may insist that gov­ ernments have regard to primary goods equality or resource equality as rough proxies for the welfarist equality that we are unable to calculate.36 If it is indeed fair to say that these rival theories will tend to converge upon similar concerns and recom­ mendations in practice, then the case for ‘social primary goods’ on the grounds of their theoretical parsimony is indeed strong. The substantive disputes about justice could then shift to the debate over which form of regime may best bear the concerns of justice (more on this in the next section). One noteworthy critic of Rawls who also opposes the ‘welfarist/resourcist’ axis is Amartya Sen, who has defended a ‘basic capacities’ approach, arguing that justice should seek to assure that people have the opportunity to exercise their basic human capacities

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RAW LSIAN THEORY AND CONTEM PORARY MARXISM possibility, capitalist exploitation is all-things-considered unjustified.) Further, I would also argue that not only does ‘exploitation’ need a fuller morality to supplement it, it can also be replaced or subsumed by one such as my Rawlsian theory. For the elements of ‘force’, ‘robbery’ and ‘loss of control’ in exploitation proper can all also stand condemned by specific components of that theory. ‘Exploitation’ adds nothing new or necessary to it.

which I take to be much more ‘orthodox Marxist’ than Roemer’s - and then sketch an argument which holds that ‘exploitation’ could not substitute for anything like my Rawlsian account of social justice in a plausible political morality. I contend that, for Marx, ‘exploited labour’ is (1) forced (because workers have no realistic choice but to sell their labour-power to capitalists); (2) unpaid in its yielding of surplus value or product (that is, the profit the individual capitalist accrues from the commodities produced by workers’ labour); also (3): the product of the labour is lost to the producer - it comes under the control of someone else.40 The question for theorists of justice here is what, exactly, is wrong with exploitation? We can answer this using a three-way distinction between types of exploita­ tion.41 First, we have simple exploitation, denoting the appropriation of surplus value, or the fact of the direct producers not getting back the full value of what they produce. Note that there is no reference to ‘force’ here, so the Marxist notion does not come under this heading. It highlights merely the transfer of value from producers and it cannot be considered even prima facie wrong because this could come about as the result of a genuinely free and fair agreement. Exploitation proper is forced, unpaid, sur­ plus labour, the product of which is not under the control of the direct producers. This brings in the crucial element missing from simple exploitation and I would say it is prima facie wrong. But it may not always be wrong. Imagine that the apologists for capitalism were correct in arguing that capitalism was necessary to promote the undoubted moral goods of meeting people’s basic needs, preserving their liberties and allowing for democracy. In this in­ stance, the moral harm suffered by exploited labour is outweighed by the moral benefits that only capit­ alism brings. So at the very least there must be more to the morality of justice than the category of ex­ ploitation if such judgements are to be made. This fuller morality would therefore allow us to identify instances of all-things-considered unjustified exploita­ tion, which is ‘exploitation proper’ that is not justi­ fied by its promotion of some other weighty moral concern. (Contra the capitalist apology, my Marxist theory naturally claims that, with socialism a real

'But Is This A M arxist Theory?’ Now I should make clear why I say that my overall moral and social theory is a Marxist theory and what is contained in its minimal set of Marxist empirical assumptions. To the first question, my answer is (as it has previously been) that it is not a specifically Marxist moral theory. This should not be surprising. Not even Marx’s implicit moral theory per se is a specifically Marxist theory. There is, in fact, no such thing as a specifically Marxist moral theory. There is, however, such a thing as a specifically Marxist moral and social theory, i.e. a theory which combines a moral theory with a set of empirical, social-scientific theses in order to judge alternative sets of social arrangements, programmes and policies. In fact, any moral and social theory that utilises a recognisably Marxist set of empirical, social-scientific theses and supports a recognisably Marxist set of normative political positions qualifies as a Marxist moral and social theory.42 However, since my 1990 book was published right at the time of the so-called ‘fall of communism’ in the Eastern Bloc - causing even some who thought it succeeded in its stated goal of creating an adequate (or, at least, more sophisticated) Marxist moral and social theory to call it an excellent exemplar of Hegel’s famous quip about the Owl of Minerva flying only at the end of the day - I find myself, upon occasion, having to defend the relevance of a the­ oretical project that still: 1. takes a minimal set of Marxist empirical as­ sumptions - in particular about the nature of capitalist society - as plausible and relevant (even though it is based on a slimmed-down

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R Marxism which jettisons some of its orthodox baggage); 2. argues for a kind of socialism, albeit a democratic, self-managing form of socialism based on a regulated market economy rather than a command economy,43 which, within welldeveloped societies, would be committed to protecting civil liberties as much as any bourgeois capitalist democracy; 3. defends socialist regimes and socialist revolu­ tions in the developing world as the only way to overcome the absolute poverty and extreme subservience characteristic of such societies, and forcibly confronts us with the possibility that ‘parliamentary’ politics may not be en­ ough even in developed nations to overcome capitalist resistance to the requirements of justice.

linist and post-Stalinist claims about how far Soviet-style communist regimes had actually progressed towards socialism and communism were complete travesties and misrepresenta­ tions of Marxist theory and should not be allowed to distort our understanding of what the theory sanctions in practice. 4. The struggle to establish and preserve social­ ism in various countries may be somewhat more likely to succeed in light of the theore­ tical work and institutional changes advocat­ ing and implementing market socialism as opposed to command economy socialism (which, whatever its role in industrialising the former Soviet Union and helping to defeat fascism in The Second World War - for which the world owes the former Soviet Union an eternal debt of gratitude - simply does not seem to be capable of adequately functioning in consumer-oriented, modem, mass socie­ ties). 5. Even the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ‘fall of communism’ in the Eastern Bloc does not necessarily herald the end of attempts to establish post-capitalist, or nascent socialist, societies or to preserve them where they still exist (such as in Cuba and China), especially in light of the fact that under the hegemonic domination of international capitalism, the plight of the world’s poor - as well as the world’s natural environment - has continued to worsen, with world capitalism showing neither the ability nor the inclination to solve these problems.

Thus, I want to comment very briefly on the con­ tinued relevance of at least some components of Marxist empirical theory as well as on the continued relevance of some kind of socialism as a worthy goal or ideal.44 My response to the charge that Marxist theory is now passe is as follows. 1. So many of Marx’s views have passed more widely into the social sciences and our modern world-views that perhaps we tend no longer to appreciate the true significance and lasting legacy of his thought and work. 2. As shown by continuing sophisticated devel­ opments of certain components of Marx’s economic, sociological and political theories by the Analytical Marxist tradition and others, it is only certain orthodox and dogmatic inter­ pretations of Marxism that have become otiose, not Marxist theory in general. 3. By Marx’s own definition, no society on this planet has ever become even a fully socialist society - that is, one which has fulfilled all of the requirements of Marx’s so-called first stage of communism, which include full democratic rights - let alone a full-fledged communist society (in which, ex hypothesi, there would be no political state as well as no social classes and no significant social conflict). Thus, Sta­

O f all these claims, it is most immediately important to substantiate the first one and I shall do so by stating the minimal set of Marxist empirical assump­ tions which, when combined with my modified Rawlsian theory of justice, yield the appropriate Marxist political conclusion: 1. As a result of the logic of the maximisation of profit, all capitalist societies - developed or developing - exhibit and will continue to exhibit certain economic and social problems (inflation, depression, recession, unemploy-

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

arms race. 8. The bureaucracies of such post-capitalist so­ cieties genuinely want to reduce or eliminate arms expenditures in order better to satisfy the consumer appetites of their own popula­ tions. 9. Without the economic, diplomatic, and mili­ tary pressure of the western capitalist powers such post-capitalist societies may well achieve significant democratisation (by either evolutionary or revolutionary means). 10. Socialist transformations can occur in the advanced industrialised countries of the West, and such transformations can lead to democratic forms of socialism; thus a world­ wide federation of democratic, self-managing, socialist societies is a genuine historical pos­ sibility.45

ment, poverty, failure to regulate environ­ mental pollution sufficiently, and so on) that can be solved only by the institution of a regulated, partially planned (but not neces­ sarily command) socialist economy. Even the mixed, welfare-state capitalist so­ cieties of the advanced, industrialised nations in the West exhibit severe social inequalities and - if sufficiently threatened by mass work­ ing-class movements for social equality - will almost undoubtedly exhibit severe repression. (The possibly irreversible decline of the Key­ nesian welfare state is evidence of how capi­ talist societies will inevitably ‘resolve’ the tensions between social justice and the logic of capital in favour of the latter.) The world capitalist system causes in the Third World both extreme inequality and suffering, on the one hand, and (often) ex­ tremely repressive regimes, on the other. So long as it is dominant on an international scale, the capitalist system will not allow the massive transfers of capital, technology and knowledge necessary to solve the Third World’s major social and economic problems. Such conditions in the Third World make for perpetual social instability since those who are severely oppressed and/or deprived will organise and, if necessary, fight to better their condition. The predictable response from the most powerful nations at the capitalist ‘centre’ (primarily the United States now and for the foreseeable future) is first to install and/ or aid those Third World regimes or military cliques that can best suppress these mass movements for radical social change and, second, if that strategy fails, to intervene either directly with its own military forces or indirectly through proxy armies and ‘lowintensity warfare’. However else we may characterise contem­ porary post-capitalist societies such as Cuba, it seems clear that they are not the primary cause of the many indigenous revolutionary movements in the Third World and do not bear the primary responsibility for the nuclear

Although these theses were put forward just before the fall of the Soviet Union, I don’t think that this development or any since then has decisively falsi­ fied any of them. The only one put into question at all would seem to be the ninth thesis since, although significant democratisation has occurred in most of the former so-called communist countries, this has been conjoined with a movement - by no means complete as of yet and certainly not completely successful - toward capitalism. On the other hand, it will be observed that the theses concerning the lack of ability of capitalism to solve the world’s socio­ economic problems have tended to be strengthened rather than falsified, not least in many of the former so-called communist countries of the defunct Eastern Bloc, where the movement towards capitalism has resulted in substantial increases in unemployment, poverty, social inequality, homelessness and lack of adequate health care accompanied by skyrocketing corruption, crime and gangsterism. Moreover, the theses concerning the potential ability of Third World socialist (or at least post-capitalist) societies to solve their basic social problems have also, I think, continued to be borne out, even though under contemporary world circumstances, post-capitalist societies such as Cuba and China have had to resort to market mechanisms and even foreign capital investment, usually in jointly owned enterprises.

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R (But this, of course, is no mark against these socie­ ties, so far as I’m concerned, since I support market socialism to begin with.) And it is also arguable that such societies would be able to do even better economically if the powerful capitalist nations especially the U S - were not constantly attempting to undermine them. Note that this set of empirical assumptions does not include dialectical materialism, orthodox or even reconstructed versions of historical materialism, or such lower-level empirical theses as the labour theory of value and the ‘collapse’ theory of capitalism. This is not to say that some of these theories - at least in their more sophisticated forms - are not plausible or arguably true. But it is to claim that the truth of these components of Marxist theory is not necessary in order for the basic normative political positions to be justified. Most emphatically, this set of empirical theses does not entail the view that socialism and/ or communism are historically inevitable, or that genuine, full-fledged socialist societies can be achieved within one or a few countries (in isolation from the rest of the world). Nor does it imply that Marx’s higher state of communism is historically possible (as opposed to a utopian impossibility that should not even be seriously considered when doing social and political theory). I recognise, of course, the prima facie oddity of conjoining these theses with Rawlsian moral and political theory. Yet that I should develop a theory which attempts to synthesise Rawls’s theory of justice and the salvageable components of the Marxist tradition should not, in fact, seem all that strange to anyone familiar with moral, social and political philosophy over the past thirty years or so. From the last third of the twentieth century this realm’s domi­ nant tendency in English-speaking societies, Scan­ dinavia and the Netherlands has been composed of liberal-egalitarian and liberal-socialist egalitarian theorists who, for the most part, take Rawls’s theory or similar theories of social justice to be basically correct. Most of these theorists also respect much of what Marx said and much of what he was trying to accomplish and they accept some, although certainly not all, of Marxist empirical theory as true. Moreover, most contemporary Marxist theorists involved in current debates in moral, social and

political philosophy within this general tendency are part of the Analytical Marxist tradition that has developed over the past twenty years or so. As such, they have no problem operating within the general analytic-philosophical paradigm that empha­ sises conceptual clarity and logical rigour or within the general framework of liberal egalitarian theory developed by Rawls. In fact, Analytical Marxists are an integral part of the current discussions specifically involving Rawls’s theory and similar theories of social justice. There is little (if anything) to distin­ guish them from the non-socialist liberal-egalitarians who participate in these debates, save their greater commitments to certain parts of Marxist empirical, social-scientific theory and thus to the idea that morally defensible forms of socialism are genuine historical possibilities which should be advocated or at least discussed as genuine options. It should be stressed, of course, that these theorists are all proponents of political democracy and civil liberties (which they believe can thrive in socialist societies under favourable circumstances) and, thus, critics of the kind of Stalinist political organisation that so illserved the socialist cause. In addition, most are advocates (if not always without reservation) of market socialism and opponents of command-econ­ omy socialism. So let me assert again that what divides contem­ porary egalitarian liberals such as Rawls from liberalsocialist egalitarians such as myself is not moral theory but differences in empirical beliefs and prac­ tical political convictions. It would be difficult to isolate any normative moral thesis that was univer­ sally agreed upon by those in one category and universally denied by those in the other. The first category is thus composed of theorists who don’t explicitly advocate socialism, but who could admit that a democratic-liberal form of socialism would be justified if certain empirical, social-scientific theses that Marxists put forward about capitalism and so­ cialism were true. This category includes not only Rawls but such figures as Ronald Dworkin, T. M. Scanlon, Norman Daniels, Thomas Nagel, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Brian Barry, Amy Gutmann, Bruce Ackerman, Jeremy Waldron, Henry Shue, Philippe Van Parijs, Samuel Scheffler and Susan Moller Okin. The second category - the

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RAW LSIAN THEORY AND CONTEM PORARY MARXISM enterprises (from seed capital provided by large socialist enterprises or the banks) and then sell them off to the public sector after they reached a certain level of productivity. But, as in Rawls’s propertyowning democracy, no one would be able to pass on significant levels of wealth to anyone else, although Roemer suggests they might be able to donate all or much of their wealth to their choice of socially approved charitable or philanthropic causes.48 A n­ other important view worthy of further attention is represented by Phillipe Van Parijs, who, even though a close associate of the Analytical Marxists, actually advocates an extremely egalitarian version of socialdemocratic, welfare-state capitalism.49 But despite these ‘second-stage’ disagreements, I think it justified to propose that the most plausible moral, social and political philosophy/theory must lie somewhere within the general confines that I think Rawlsian principles adequately map - and it is, in general form, liberal-egalitarian in moral theory and Marxist in political theory and action. What motivates my Marxist convictions above all is this final claim: if we are genuinely concerned about justice, then we should be firstly and profoundly concerned about the desperate plight of the vast majority of people in the developing world in particular. And I think that contemporary liberal debate should increasingly focus upon the liberal-egalitarians upon whom, if they ac­ knowledge the huge gap between the reality of global injustice and their own standards of justice, it should be incumbent to argue against what I take to be the fact that such injustice can be fully rectified only by anti­ capitalist revolutions, and genuinely socialist property relations and social policies, together with genuinely fair relations between the developed and developing worlds. Arguably, this may only occur with the trans­ formation of the major industrial societies of the North into socialist societies - a goal that the Marxist em­ pirical theses would also indicate is necessary for the achievement of justice within them as well.50

liberal-socialist egalitarians - includes such figures as: G. A. Cohen, John Roemer, Jon Elster (at least until recently), Kai Nielsen, Michael Walzer, David Mill­ er, William McBride, Roger Gottlieb, Jeffrey Reim­ an, David Schweickart, Nancy Holmstrom, Andrew Levine, Alex Callinicos, Norman Geras, Mark Evans and me.46 There is also a category of philosophers within this tradition who speak more sympatheti­ cally than the liberal-egalitarians of certain aspects of Marxism and/or socialism, but don’t explicitly or at least very strongly advocate socialism, so it is difficult to decide in which category they should be classified. This would include, I think, Robert Paul Wolff, Joshua Cohen, Allen E. Buchanan, Thomas Pogge, Richard Ameson, Will Kymlicka and Sharon Lloyd. (Hence my categories are useful terms of reference to guide us in the debate, but not strict and exhaustive classifications.) Here, we should recognise the complication that to rely simply on the categories of capitalism and socialism may not do justice - so to speak - to the richness and complexity of the institutional arrange­ ments suggested by these two groups of theorists when they propose how their recommended policies might best be implemented. For example, Rawls suggests that his theory of justice could be best implemented in what he calls a ‘property-owning democracy’, in which most large-scale productive enterprises would not be socially owned - hence, it is not a form of socialism - but in which all citizens would somehow own some productive property (pre­ sumably in terms of stocks and/or bonds), and in which significant wealth could be accumulated by one within one’s own lifetime but which could not be passed on to the next generation - or anyone else, for that matter - due to strenuous inheritance and gift taxes.47 Somewhat similarly, in John Roemer’s model of market socialism room would be made in the economy for entrepreneurs to make virtually unlimited amounts of money within their lifetimes if they could organise a series of successful economic

Notes 1. Peffer (1990), p. 3. 2. See Peffer (1990), especially chapter 10, for substantiation of these modifications.

3. Ibid, pp. 419-20. 4. Rawls (1996), pp. 7-8 n. 7, and Rawls (1999), pp. 558-9, Peffer (1994).

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R 5. See Peffer (1994), pp. 261-2 for more on the defini­ tion of ‘socialism’. 6. Peffer (1990), pp. 418-20; Peffer (1994), pp. 264-5. 7. See Walzer (1983). 8. See Rawls (1972), pp. 195-201 for discussion of the four-stage decision-making sequence. Of course, these restrictions upon the domain of Rawlsian justice do not deny that people’s conduct even within private institutions and situations is still subject to criminal and civil law. 9. These terms are coined by Dworkin (1981a), p. 311. See also G. A. Cohen (1989) and his ‘Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods and Capabilities’, in Nussbaum and Sen (eds) (1993), pp. 9-29, and Kymlicka (1990), pp. 75-85. 10. Although this is far from being uncontroversial, I believe that a strong case can be made for the view that, in the developing world, only certain socialist countries (such as Cuba and China) as well as the Indian province of Kerala (which has had a socialist government since shortly after the Second World War) have generally succeeded in fulfilling their populations’ subsistence rights. It seems clear to me that if one agrees that the empirical evidence shows the only way for developing societies to ensure that people’s subsistence rights are met is to institute socialism and if the empirical evidence shows - as I believe it does after having tracked Amnesty Inter­ national reports for the past twenty years or so - that under normal circumstances socialist regimes in the developing world generally do a better job of protecting their people’s security rights than capitalist Third World countries, then one should seek to support and promote such socialist regimes and movements as a first duty of social justice, rather than attempting to undermine and destroy them as the government of the United States has so often been guilty of and which, I’m ashamed to say, it is continuing to do with respect to socialist Cuba. 11. See Rawls (1972), pp. 150-2. 12. Rawls (1999), p. 537. 13. See Rawls (1972), pp. 114-18. 14. My continuing disappointment with Rawls’s attitude to global justice is due to the fact that in ‘The Law of People’, which he had actually intended to be an appendix to Political Liberalism, he has, for reasons I still do not understand, continued to refuse to apply his difference principle internationally. Although he does call for ‘standards of fairness for trade and other co-operative arrangements’ and for ‘certain provisions for mutual assistance between peoples in times of famine and drought’ (Rawls, 1999, p. 541) there is the question as to why this should only apply to ‘reasonably developed liberal societies’ and also why the difference principle itself shouldn’t be so applied. But, in any case, it seems clear that Rawls’s theory and

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

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Rawlsian theories in general - including mine - are relevant to the relations between the developed and the developing world and thus provide at least a starting point to a case for international justice. See Rawls (1972), pp. 270-4, 280-2. For philosophical perspectives on these issues see Pateman (1970), Cohen and Rogers (1983), Green (1985), Cunningham (1987). Rawls (1972), pp. 72-108. See Holmstrom (1994). See, for example, Sher (1975). See Peffer (1990), pp. 396-403. Rawls (1972), p. 83. See Rawls (1972), pp. 204-5, 440-6; Peffer (1990), chapter 9; and Peffer (1994). Rawls (1972), pp. 101, 105. Cohen (1986), p. 79. His concern here is, in fact, primarily with the ‘right-wing liberal’ or libertarian view espoused in Nozick (1974). One might want to think or hope that genuinely ‘fraternal’ (socialistic) individuals would choose to use their talents in whatever maximally socially ben­ eficial way they could. But it would surely be stretch­ ing credibility to think that every individual in a socialist society would always freely surrender all their talents to whatever task ‘society’ allocated them. Cohen (1986), p. 79. He recognises the oddity of this thought, produced by the claim that liberals were defined by acceptance of a full-blown principle of self-ownership, and retracts his characterisation in Cohen (1995), p. 116 n. 1. Schweickart (1993), p. 17. Even within a just society it would be dubious to assume that there will be a watertight correlation between people’s natural talents and abilities and their ability to gamer greater income and wealth under ‘unregulated’ social and economic conditions. This is because, even if all children were to be guaranteed equal access to high-quality education, quirks of their personalities and/or accidents of family circumstances (such as whether their parents or other family mem­ bers or close associates made them feel loved and secure), and the operation of blind chance in general, will affect whether or not particular individuals are successful. This is not to say that in presently existing societies there is no discernible correlation between natural talents/abilities and success, nor to deny that the correlation should and could be made much higher in a genuinely just society. It is only to say that the assumption that ‘the talented’ in even a perfectly just society will be able to parlay their talents into success (however they come to define it) is, to some extent, unjustified. See Cohen (1996). For a defence of the opposite position, however, see Van Parijs (1991).

RAW LSIAN THEORY AND CO NTEM PORARY MARXISM operating on the ultimately self-refuting notion that there is no such thing as rationality, or with those who merely claim that Marxist theory is irrelevant and/or illegitimate because it is (supposedly) based on grand historical meta narratives, the claim that all aspects of Marxism and all hope for socialism must be abandoned just doesn’t hold water. To say that Marxism and socialism are now irrelevant theoretical or practical political traditions is absurd given the quantity and quality of the theorising that they still inspire, which is due to the insights they offer into humanity’s most urgent political challenges. Given the popularity and influence of postmodernism within certain circles, it is vital to insist upon these points. 45. Peffer (1990), pp. 458-9. In fact, this set of assumptions is so minimal that, if they can indeed be adopted by nonMarxists/socialists, some would say that they are not Marxist at all. But because they originate within the Marxist tradition and continue to animate it, I see no good reason to withdraw the label from them - parti­ cularly when, as in my case, they are used to energise a particular political position opposed to capitalism for which Marxism has long held the banner. 46. Notice that this list of socialist theorists (who are, broadly speaking, within the analytic-linguistic tradi­ tion of philosophy) by no means exhausts the category of socialist or quasi-socialist theorists who participate in contemporary debates since it doesn’t mention: the Yugoslav Praxis school of Marxian philosophers and similar socialist humanists (such as Svetozar Stojonovic, Mihaelo Markovic, Gajo Petrovic); critical the­ orists (such as Jurgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Albrecht Wellmer, Thomas McCarthy, Richard Bern­ stein, Nancy Fraser, Doug Kellner and Stephen Best); Hegelian Marxists (such as Shlomo Avineri and Bertell Oilman); liberation philosophers (such as Enrique Dussel and Horacio Cerruti); Cuban political philo­ sophers (such as Thalia Fung, Olga Fernandez, and Pablo Guadarrama); other socialist philosophers from the developing world (such as Francisco Miro Quesada, Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez and Pablo Gonzalez Casanova); socialist feminists (such as Alison Jaggar, Ann Ferguson, Heidi Hartmann and Nancy Hartsock); socialist theorists who are primarily economists and only secondarily philosophers (such as Alec Nove, Branko Horvat, Jaroslav Vanek, Thomas Weisskopf and Robin Hahnel); world-systems theorists (such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin) or theorists of development ethics (such as David Crocker, Denis Goulet and Luis Camacho); radical sociological theorists (such as Claus Offe, Ernesto Laclau, Alain Touraine); social-democratic theorists (such as Michael Harrington, Robert Heilbroner and Cornell West); or the so-called Marxist amoralist theorists who argued that Marxism is in­ compatible with morality in general or at least with

31. Rawls (1990), p. 4 2 .1 would like to thank John Rawls for giving me permission to quote from this typescript in my work. 32. See Ameson (1989). Dworkin (1981a) and (1981b) also discusses many of the ideas within these principies. 33. See Cohen (1989). 34. Rawls (1972), pp. 87-8. 35. Rawls (1990), p. 42. 36. Arneson (1988), p. 89. 37. See Sen (1984), chapter 13, (1985),(1992), and ‘Capabilities and Well-Being’ in Nussbaum and Sen (eds) (1993), pp. 30-53; for commentary on Sen, see Crocker (1992). 38. Cohen (1994), p. 119. 39. See Peffer (1990), pp. 137-65 for my analysis of this debate. 40. Ibid., pp. 142-6. The fact that Marx often called this an example of ‘theft’ by capitalists is strong evidence that - perhaps despite himself - he did not think morality could only ever be an ideological phenom­ enon relative to and supportive of a specific mode of production, a ‘prop’ which would become increasingly redundant in post-capitalist societies. 41. This section follows ibid., pp. 146-7. 42. Peffer (1990), pp. 433-4. 43. The notion of ‘regulated’ market economy as an antonym for ‘capitalist economy’ is pivotal here, but would obviously need to be substantiated in a fuller account, not least because no capitalist economy is entirely unregulated and so cannot accurately be defined as being in opposition to regulation. In gen­ eral, what will distinguish the market socialist econ­ omy in this regard is the degree of regulation and, most signficantly, the ends to which it is put. 44. Here, we should also confront the claim by various postmodernists that it is no longer possible to take Marxism to be a serious theoretical tradition or soci­ alism to be a legitimate historical goal because they are based on so-called grand historical meta narratives. But the brief outline of the lower-level empirical claims still taken seriously by the Analytical Marxists and others given in this section should suffice to show how utterly bogus this claim is. For the parts of Marx’s theory still being utilised have nothing whatever to do with grand quasi-Hegelian claims about inevitable movements in history. Indeed, they are quite the opposite: they are the more concrete empirical claims that can be (and are) seriously discussed by social scientists, political thinkers and ordinary people inter­ ested in politics everywhere. To think politically we cannot avoid making certain assumptions about what social, economic and political institutions, pro­ grammes and policies will best accomplish given goals or support and promote certain values. So whether we are dealing with those postmodernist thinkers who are

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R O D N E Y G. P E F F E R justice in particular (such as Allen W. Wood, Richard Miller, Anthony Skillen and Andrew Collier). This last view is one that I spend over 100 pages critiquing and, I believe, decisively refuting in Peffer (1990). 47. See Krouse and McPherson (1988); Peffer (1994). 48. See Roemer (1994). 49. Van Parijs (1992).

50. I would like to thank G. A. Cohen and David Miller for comments on a previous version of this paper given at Oxford University as well as Neil Harding for comments on a version of it given at the University of Wales Swansea. I would especially like to thank Mark Evans for his incisive comments and his editorial help and suggestions.

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Part Four PROBLEMS OF LIBERAL JUSTIFICATION

10

D I S E N C H A N T M E N T AND T HE L I B E R A L I S M OF F E AR Peter Lassman

One consequence is that this leads to what we might call the ‘Weimar problem’; 3. that John Rawls’s Political Liberalism, the most systematic attempt to construct a liberal re­ sponse, fails in its attempt to provide a solution to the problem. Contemporary liberalism ought instead to present itself in terms of Judith Shklar’s idea of ‘the liberalism of fear’. This humble, cautious liberalism is probably the best that liberals can hope for in such a pluralistic social world. Fortunately, it is en­ ough to save us from conceding the bleakly negative possibility described in the opening quote.

The wars of this century with their extreme violence and increasing destructiveness, culminating in the manic evil of the Holocaust, raise in an acute way the question whether political relations must be gov­ erned by power and coercion alone. If a reasonably just society that subordinates power to its aims is not possible and people are largely amoral, if not incur­ ably cynical and self-centred, one might ask with Kant whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth?1

I The argument of this chapter is:

This chapter’s epigraph, taken from the introduc­ tion to the second edition of his Political Liberalism, can be read as a statement of the ‘esoteric doctrine’ or ‘inner citadel’ at the heart of John Rawls’s political philosophy.3 It is what motivates his project and the centrality of the discussion of Rawls’s work in con­ temporary political philosophy is a reflection of the insightful way in which it engages with the problem which all contemporary political philosophies face in light of the conditions of modernity first sketched by Max Weber. This claim, of course, appears to pre­ suppose that we accept Weber’s sketch as true. What I do think is true is that the picture of the modem world which Weber painted has been highly influ­ ential even, or especially, among those who deny its relevance or who fail to mention it in their work. In

1. that pluralism, in the sense of ‘the wide di­ versity and deep conflict among different con­ ceptions of ends prevalent in modem societies and different patterns of life and the institu­ tions that go with them’, is the distinctive problem which modern politics has to face;2 2. that before this topic became of central con­ cern for current political theory Max Weber had proposed an interpretation of the modern world in terms of value pluralism and ‘the disenchantment of the world’ which provides the (usually unacknowledged) foundation for most contemporary liberal debate. This ac­ count, however, raises serious problems for our understanding of modern liberalism, de­ mocracy and the legitimation of political rule.

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PETER L A S S M A N other words, it haunts much contemporary political thinking despite the negative assessment many thin­ kers make of it.4 Here, then, I simply want to stand by a recent statement made by Habermas: ‘I feel that Max Weber’s question regarding the paradoxes of rationalisation is still the best key to a philosophi­ cally and scientifically informed diagnosis of our time.’5 We shall shortly see how, despite itself, the Rawlsian viewpoint is shadowed by the Weberian sketch. Let us begin, though, by seeing how Rawls conceptualises his project of political philosophy as the positive response to Kant’s question.

always, however, remain and limit the extent of possible agreement.’6 This limitation may explain why, in his more recent work, there are several hints that he is troubled by the thought that his whole project cannot possibly succeed, that conflict will always undermine the possibility of agreement. He accepts that many will ‘regard it as obvious’ that ‘a just and well-ordered democratic society is not possible’. But this is a conclusion he thinks we must resist. One of the interesting reasons why Rawls feels that we can resist this conclusion is bound up with his concep­ tion of the nature of political philosophy itself. In some of his remarks on this Rawls is responding to critics such as Michael Walzer who have charged that his theory is too abstract, that it does not deal with the real problems of contemporary politics, and that its philosophical structure displaces ‘genuine politics’ and is therefore entirely at odds with the nature of democratic pluralist society.7 The thought here is that the problems of social and political conflict are unlikely to find their resolution in his kind of abstractive philosophical methodology. But Rawls himself has always expli­ citly argued the reverse. He states very clearly that in ‘political philosophy the work of abstraction is set in motion by deep political conflicts.’8 We turn to political philosophy when our ‘shared political un­ derstandings’ break down and ‘equally when we are torn within ourselves’. Abstraction from that which divides us is a way of finding grounds for ideas which might unite us and that is where we find the basis for a principled resolution of conflict. The emphasis on possible unity shows that Raw­ lsian political philosophy is not in the business of uncovering actual conflict-resolving consensus upon principles. Operating in the realm of the possible obviously includes acknowledging the possibility of failure, hence Rawls’s disquiet. Yet we ought not to accept the sceptical argument against the possibility of a conflict-resolving (or at least a conflict-mana­ ging) and well-ordered liberal-democratic society, in Rawls’s view, without first being clear about what the consequences would be ‘for our view of the political world, and even the world as a whole.’9 Rawls’s conception of the nature of political philosophy and, by implication, of the responsibility of the

II In the concluding paragraphs of his introduction to the second (paperback) edition of Political Liberalism Rawls refers to three kinds of conflict in modern societies, the confrontation with which is the main preoccupation of his political philosophy. The first derives from ‘citizens’ conflicting comprehensive doctrines’ (the organised sets of beliefs, values and goals by which people structure their lives); the second derives from citizens’ ‘different status, class position, and occupation, or from their ethni­ city, gender, and race’; while the third is a result of what Rawls calls the ‘burdens of judgement’ (the inevitable indeterminacies and consequent diver­ gent results of rational and reasonable normative deliberation in free societies). Rawls states that his theory of political liberalism ‘mitigates but cannot eliminate the first kind of conflict, since compre­ hensive doctrines are, politically speaking, unreconcilable and remain inconsistent with one another’. Nevertheless, Rawls argues that the prin­ ciples of political liberalism, ‘the principles of justice of a reasonably just constitutional regime’, are cap­ able of reconciling the second kind of conflict. Once we accept the principles of justice, preferably those of his own theory, this kind of conflict ‘need no longer arise, or arise so forcefully’. It appears, then, to be this kind of conflict whose non-resolu­ tion would plunge us into the amoral world of ‘pure’ power described in the opening quote. And it is the confidence that it can be transcended which stokes Rawls’s optimism. Unfortunately though, he thinks conflicts ‘arising from the burdens of judgement

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D I S E N C H A N T M E N T A N D T H E L I B E R A L I S M OF F E A R political philosopher means that we must be aware that the answer we give to general and abstract questions does have a bearing upon our ‘background thoughts and attitudes about the world as a whole.’ Thus, if we are convinced on abstract philosophical grounds that a just and stable democratic society is not possible then this will have a great impact upon ‘the underlying attitudes of the public culture and the conduct of politics.’ It is at this point that Rawls revealingly points to the case of the Weimar Repub' lie and to one of its most outspoken critics, Carl Schmitt. Rawls presents the Weimar Republic as offering us a particularly dramatic example of exactly what he fears. One of the reasons for the fall of the Weimar Republic and its replacement by Nazi dictatorship was that both the traditional elites and a large section of the intellectuals were unwilling to support it on the grounds that they could no longer believe that any form of democratic and liberal society was possible. Given what we now know of the terrible consequences of this particular political failure, Rawls urges that we

crucially impacts upon how we might develop pos­ sibilities for the avoidance of the Weimar problem.

must start with the assumption that a reasonably just political society is possible, and for it to be possible, human beings must have a moral nature, not of course a perfect such nature, yet one that can understand, act on, and be sufficiently moved by a reasonable political conception of right and justice to support a society guided by its ideals and principles.10

the diversity in conceptions of the good is an irreducible diversity, not only because no suffi­ cient reasons have been given, and could ever be given, for taking one end, such as the general happiness or the exercise of reason, as the single supreme end; but also because the capacity to develop idiosyncrasies of style and of imagination, and to form specific conceptions of the good, is the salient and peculiar capacity of human beings among other animals.12

Ill The variety of ways in which liberal theorists have responded to this problem is striking, indicating the variety within the liberal tradition. There are those, such as Rawls, Larmore, Nozick and Hayek, who have asserted the reality of moral pluralism while arguing, at the same time, for the possibility of a ranking of values so that one value, liberty, can take precedence. Others, such as Williams, Berlin and Hampshire, have stressed the ineliminable and often tragic character of value conflicts. For example, Hampshire has argued the case for a strong thesis that, on the basis of an analogy between moralities and natural languages, ‘nature has so designed us that, taking humanity as a whole and the evidences of history, we tend to have conflicting and divergent moralities imbedded in divergent ways of life, each the product of specific historical memories and local conditions.’11 For him

The vital moral and political need to believe in the possibility of justice, however, should not lead theorists to a wilful blindness over the true nature of the pluralism which divides societies and puts the question of justice on the political agenda. Thus the idea of moral and value pluralism has increasingly become a central concern for political theorists, especially liberal theorists, working in both what can loosely be called the Anglo-American and Con­ tinental traditions of political thought. Pluralism is therefore widely seen as a defining characteristic of modernity and as the most significant challenge to political philosophy’s search for conflict-resolving agreements. How it is to be conceptualised, then,

However, this second group’s acceptance of the reality (as they see it) of such conflicts has created problems for the coherence and tenability of their own defence of the value of liberalism. If the ex­ istence of plural and conflicting values is accepted as an unavoidable reality then it follows that the claims made for any particular political theory must be at best both severely limited and local in their applica­ tion. But the first group of theorists, in accepting that we are in some way faced with a pluralism of funda­ mental and conflicting values, are confronted by the problem of explaining how their own theory’s sup­

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PETER L A S S M A N free and equal citizens profoundly divided by rea' sonable though incompatible religious, philosophy cal, and moral doctrines?’15 There is some disagreement among advocates of pluralism concerning its historical status. Hampshire, as we might ascertain from his quotation above, sees pluralism as not being either a peculiarly modern or democratic phenomenon or an unexplained general fact of human existence. Moral pluralism and moral conflict are, for him, an essential product of the imaginative powers of human beings in general. But the idea that an irreducible plurality of values has transformed the way people think about how a specifically modern politics should be conducted is increasingly influential. Rawls makes this kind of interpretation of our moral history absolutely central for his account o f ‘political liberalism’. He argues that ‘modem democratic political culture’ itself is to be sharply distinguished from all that preceded it so that its ‘special nature’ accounts for, to a large extent, ‘the different problems of political philosophy in the modem as compared with the ancient world.’16 Rawls cites both Weber and Isaiah Berlin as offering important and influential accounts of the idea of the pluralism of values. These thinkers, however, provide ways of challenging his own aC' count of pluralism’s nature and hence his ideal solution to the Weimar problem. Let us, then, look first at Berlin’s ideas. Initially, Berlin appears to be equivocal on the question of the historical character of pluralism. In tracing the roots of the doctrine of pluralism to the Cynics and the Sceptics he seems to be saying that there is a perennial quality in the conflict between monism and pluralism in western political thought. But, in pointing to the importance of Machiavelli as the ‘first person to indicate a conflict of real values’, he also indicates the significance of a peculiarly modern quality to the recognition of pluralism.17 According to Berlin it was Machiavelli who was

port for liberal principles is able to escape from insoluble conflicts of value. From Rawls’s earliest work it is possible to observe a concern with how we might get out of this parti' cular bind. In his first published paper ‘Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics’ he asked if there existed a reasonable decision procedure which is suffb ciently strong, at least in some cases, to determine the manner in which competing interests could be adjudicated, and, in instances of conflict, one interest given preference over another; and, further, can the existence of this procedure, as well as its reasonableness, be established by ra^ tional methods of inquiry?13 In his most recent writings Rawls is concerned to work out his version of ‘political liberalism’ with the same set of problems in mind. The central problem which he now recognises as forcing him to modify the account of stability put forward in Part Three of his A Theory of Justice is what he terms ‘the fact of reasonable pluralism’. Pluralism is ‘reasonable’, he says, because it is the outcome that we should expect of people freely using their powers of moral reasoning under liberaLdemocratic institutions; it is, as we have noted, the product of the burdens of judgement. In other words, such is the nature of human value and value judgements in free societies that we should expect such conflict. Crucially, Rawlsian ‘reasonable pluralism’ is not itself supposed to be a claim about the truth of values (for that is something that can be reasonably contested between monists and pluralists), only about the reasonableness of the disputes that com stitute the fact that there are plural values.14 It is not officially, then, conceding the truth of the Weberian sketch of modernity (for that is just one of potentially numerous incompatible world' views it is reasonable to affirm). Support for the claim that Rawls inadvertently leans in Weber’s direction has yet to be adduced, but there is already an initial, fleeting point of convergence: both wish to accommodate, not suppress, pluralism. Rawls poses the challenge thus: ‘How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of

the first to make it clear that the very idea of a Christian commonwealth is a contradiction in terms: one cannot be a Christian and an heroic Roman citizen at the same time. Christians must remain humble, to be trampled on at times; R o' mans resist this successfully. This implies an

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D I S E N C H A N T M E N T A N D T H E L I B E R A L I S M OF F E A R all-embracing solution to all human problems which, if there is too much resistance to it, might need force to secure it, only tends to lead to bloodshed and the increase in human misery.

irreconcilable dualism. One can choose one life or the other, but not both; and there is no oven arching criterion to determine the right choice; one chooses as one chooses, neither life can objectively be called superior to the other.18

Berlin takes the idea of the pluralism of values to be central for his understanding of both the history of political thought and of his own liberalism, not in the sense that he has provided a general explanation for the existence of pluralism, but simply in the consequent necessity that we be reconciled with the basic fact of life that ‘values can clash - that is why civilisations are incompatible.’22 The plural­ ism of values implies the ‘clash of values’. If the reality of plural and conflicting values is ineliminable then it follows that there is no ‘perfect world in which all good things can be harmonised in princi­ ple.’23 The implication of this is, for Berlin, that the search for perfection or utopia is both incoherent and dangerous. This understanding of the pluralism of values coheres with Berlin’s depiction of the good society. The good society is to be understood as one in which maximum space is allowed for those forms of life which can be guided by a principle that competing values can be allowed to flourish within the terms of a shared social space. Berlin thinks that the form of society in which this is most likely to occur typically happens to be governed by the principles of liberal­ ism. The virtue of a liberal society resides in the fact that, while the impossibility of realising all relevant values remains an impossibility, it - more than any other kind of society - is one which recognises and is strengthened by the pluralism of values. It is one of the marks of a liberal society that it tolerates or even encourages value pluralism. It does not attempt to reduce the pluralism of values in the interests of any one particular value or set of values supported by the authority of the state. Clearly, for Berlin, the recognition of the reality of the pluralism of values (his ‘objective pluralism’) is itself to understand a truth about the nature of values. This is the main point of departure from Rawls, who wants his political philosophy to abstain from such truth-statements about what he regards as reasonably contested metaphysical and meta-ethical claims. Plainly, too, Berlin takes our awareness of the

This prompts a significant insight according to Rawls, which goes a long way in distinguishing modern liberal from premodem political thought. This is the claim ‘there is no social world without loss - that is, no social world that does not exclude some ways of life that realise in special ways certain fundamental values. By virtue of its culture and institutions, any society will prove uncongenial to some ways of life’. These values may be fully objec­ tive,19 but the harsh fact of life is that their full range is too extensive to fit into any one social world; not only are they incompatible with one another, imposing conflicting requirements on institutions, but there exists no family of workable institutions with sufficient space for them all. That there is no social world without loss is rooted in the nature of values and the world, and much human tragedy reflects that; a just liberal society may have far more space than other social worlds, but still, it can never accommodate all possible ways of life.20 For Berlin, as for Rawls, the reality of the pluralism of values is tied to the possibility of political philo­ sophy itself. He argues that if we ask the Kantian question, ‘In what kind of world is political philosophy - the kind of dis­ cussion and argument in which it consists - in principle possible? the answer must be ‘Only in a world where ends collide.’21 But the Berlinian thesis of pluralism (the now much-discussed ‘inner fortress’ of his thought) warns political philosophy that ‘the pursuit of a single, final, universal solution to human problems’ is a fundamental and dangerous error. It is essential to recognise that there are many ideals worth pursuing, some of them are incompatible with one another, but the idea of an

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PETER L A S S M A N be committed to the primacy of at least the value of liberty. In other words,

existence of plural and competing values as being itself a good. He seems to take this understanding as itself constituting an argument for liberalism because a liberal society will express this understanding more than any other.24 As pluralism implies that ‘since it is possible that no final answers can be given to moral and political questions, or indeed any questions about value’ theif

the mere fact that values are ‘plural’ . . . tells us nothing about which of the vast range of values known to us from human experience are the values we ought to choose for ourselves and our social institutions. Pluralism tells us that we must choose but not what to choose.29

room must be made for a life in which some values may turn out to be incompatible, so that if destructive conflict is to be avoided compromises have to be effected and a minimum degree of toleration, however reluctant, becomes indispen­ sable.25

Furthermore, it is notable that Berlin (despite his concern with the significance of Romantic and Counter-Enlightenment thinkers) does not discuss those twentieth-century theorists, such as Carl Schmitt, who having taken the argument for plur­ alism seriously saw it as the first step in the destruction of liberalism as a substantive normative standpoint. This may be explained by the fact that Berlin’s pluralism ultimately stops short of being absolutely ‘total’ in the sense that, after all he says, he still balances it with a belief in a universal human nature. His conception of it is thin enough to underdeter­ mine any one substantive moral doctrine but it is still capable of yielding the basic principles of a universal ‘minimum morality’.30 This theoretically prevents the concession of a total incommensurability of values and the relativising impossibility of critique levelled at any moral schema. Such a morality could further justify a liberal social order, and values/forms of life sympathetic to its principles, as an explanation of the liberal bias in Berlin’s view. But because this morality does not constitute liberalism in its entirety, it is in principle compatible with other forms of social order. The connection between liberalism and pluralism remains historically contingent; pluralists need not be liberals.31 It is, of course, a profoundly contentious point as to exactly how such a ‘minimum morality’ position can be defended from the kind of objective-pluralist per­ spective with which Berlin confronts us. An indica­ tion of the difficulty is clearly signalled when he equates the universal minimum-moral outlook with that of the less-than-global ‘western world’; as Perry Anderson says, ‘the universal shrinks with every step back to the local.’32 If this outlook is supposed to be that upon which the possibility of ‘justice’ - under­ stood loosely as the peaceful, principled resolution of

This suggests that those societies which respect this truth are preferable to those which do not. Furthermore, there seems to be an assumption here that not all values possess an equal survival value within a society which allows maximum space for value pluralism (those forms of life which are less tolerant of pluralism are perhaps more likely to be ‘squeezed out’, yet this may be cause for less regret than if other forms of life were to wither).26 In this sense value pluralism itself cannot pretend to be neutral with regard to outcomes even if its philoso­ phical outlook and political intent is neutral with regard to the initial support, or lack of it, given to ways of life supported by different values. Nevertheless, the connection between liberalism and pluralism is not as cast-iron as one might expect. Berlin insists that pluralism and liberalism are ‘not the same or even overlapping concepts. There are liberal theories which are not pluralistic.’ While defending the value of both he is clear that there is no logical connection between them. The con­ nection between pluralism and liberalism is one of ‘elective affinity’,27 grounded as much as anything in historical experience.28 But it could be argued that not only is there no logical connection between liberalism and pluralism but that they are actually incompatible. If pluralism is taken to mean that there is no one particular value or set of values which, when in conflict with other values, can always claim our allegiance then it must be incompatible with liberalism. As a distinctive doctrine, the latter must

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D I S E N C H A N T M E N T A N D T H E L I B E R A L I S M OF F E A R more than just the expression of our preferences, but who refuse to believe that it has its home in a harmonious cosmos (as Aristotle thought) or in G od’s plan.

conflict - is to rest, perhaps it is one that political philosophy has to construct rather than just assume is ready to hand. Here, then, is Rawls’s main difference from Berlin and his distinctive characterisation of the fact of pluralism is the key to the hope that the Rawlsian project will not founder on the same kind of justificatory paradox that underpins Berlin’s at' tempt to stand for a universal minimum morality. A t this point we need to ensure that we keep clear the distinction between (1) pluralism as a doctrine about the nature of value (Berlin’s position) and (2) the phenomenon of deep disagreement about the nature of the good (Rawls’s position, based upon ‘the burdens of judgement’). This is a move urged by Larmore, who originally coined the term ‘political liberalism’. The reasoning behind the latter is that pluralism, understood as a doctrine about the nature of the good, is itself a controversial doctrine. If this is so then pluralism cannot possibly stand as a support for ‘political liberalism’ which itself attempts to stand clear of all controversial philosophical and religious doctrines in search of the agreement upon principles which it posits as necessary for political resolution of the conflicts of value.33 The idea that reasonable people will tend to disagree about significant questions is not to be confused with either pluralism or scepticism. It is, according to Larmore, the fact of reasonable disagreement rather than the ‘doctrine of pluralism’ which lies at the heart of modem liberal political philosophy. Nevertheless, Larmore’s idea of reasonable disagreement shares with Berlin’s concept of pluralism the belief that they are both reflections of a pecu­ liarly modem reality. Despite his criticism of Berlin’s failure to distinguish pluralism from the persistence of reasonable disagreement he sounds much like Berlin in his argument that we are now reversing the belief embedded in our ‘intellectual tradition’ which ‘has been to a large and important extent rationalist’, that ‘reason is what brings us together.’34 On this account pluralism is a

For Larmore, liberalism too is very much a product of this intellectual milieu. It has ‘distinguished itself from earlier political philosophies by its refusal, ever more pronounced, to base the principles of associa­ tion upon a vision of God’s plan or of an ordered cosmos.’35 It is unsurprising, then, that the doctrines of liberalism and pluralism have seemed so closely entwined. And even though the Rawls/Larmore project wants to distinguish the former, in its epistemically abstinent ‘political’ guise, from the latter as a doctrine about the objective nature of value, Larmore concedes that both are ‘distinctively mod­ em in that they have something to do with the metaphysical-religious disenchantment of the world.’36 And this is itself a particular metaphysical standpoint on the nature of value. The suggestion, then, is that some version of ‘doctrinal pluralism’ is an idea that shadows moder­ nity and hence contemporary liberalism, even when the latter attempts to distinguish it from the separate thesis of pluralism as reasonable disagreement. As we saw with Berlin, it is this idea which makes the justification of liberalism so problematic. It is in the light of this suggestion that we can illuminate the problem of liberalism and pluralism by placing it into the context of W eber’s thought.

IV Weber was probably the first to take seriously as a basic feature of modernity the idea of a pluralism of conflicting values in a way which has a direct bearing on politics. Most of the themes concerning the question of incommensurability, disenchantment and tragic choices which are discussed by Berlin, Larmore, Williams, Hampshire and others were raised in his work. Although I do not want to claim that Weber carried out a systematic and satisfactory analysis it is instructive to take a brief look at his discussion of these topics because it starkly reveals some of the problems and dangers involved. Weber is therefore interesting because his problems remain, in

characteristically modern outlook. It is likely to appear attractive only against the background of metaphysical and religious disappointment. It recommends itself to those who continue to believe that value can be objective, something

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PETER L A S S M A N my view, to a large extent our problems. Although there is some controversy concerning the question of whether Weber can be classified as a liberal at all it seems to me that he was, at least, ‘a Liberal of a strange kind’.37 Weber’s problem was that he wanted to defend liberal values and institutions while, at the same time, his general philosophical outlook with its acceptance of disenchantment and pluralism as our fate led to a radical scepticism concerning our ability to produce, under modem conditions, a com vincing theoretical justification for them. In other words, in Weber’s account we have a defence of liberal institutions and values without the support of an explicit liberal political philosophy.38 A t the extremes this could be interpreted, for example, as either an early recognition of postmodern reality, the inevitable contingency of any ‘defence’ available to liberalism, as Rorty would argue, or as an example of the failure of the whole tradition, as Leo Strauss and his followers seem to urge. Weber’s account of the fate of politics in a world of plural and conflicting values is embedded in a ‘nar­ rative of modernity’. According to him we live in an increasingly secular, rationalised and ‘disenchanted’ world in which we are confronted with an opposition between the seemingly unstoppable development of the ‘housing for the new serfdom’ (the instrument tally rationalising bureaucratisation of social institu­ tions and practices) and the need for the individual to make choices between ultimately irreconcilable ultimate values, ‘the unending struggle between the gods.’39 On Rawls’s analysis, here is a key point of difference between Weber and Berlin. Eschewing any notion of objective pluralism, ‘Weber’s view rests on a form of value scepticism and voluntarism; political tragedy arises from the conflict of subjective commitments and resolute wills.’40 Rather than the apparent reification of values through the language of ‘objectivity’ (which also facilitates the notion of a thin objective morality that we have argued pluralists struggle consistently to defend), Weber’s outlook strips ‘reality’ right back to the bare fact of people’s different, clashing subjective opinions and wills. Furthermore, the deeper the process of disenchant­ ment the more intense the struggle between their contending viewpoints becomes.

There are doubtless numerous ways of rendering vivid the idea that Weber somehow haunts con­ temporary liberalism, including political liberalism, and why it is his pluralism - as opposed perhaps to Berlin’s - that informs the most disturbing challenges to it. But here are a few considerations that can contribute to it. First, Larmore is right that the peculiarly modem phenomenon of disenchantment has historically fuelled the politics of liberalism in so far as people have increasingly appreciated that politics in modem, diverse societies cannot rest upon any one ‘enchanted’ doctrine; to avoid outright conflict, it must accommodate a plurality of such. Second, this concession to the existence of plural values has a tendency (albeit not logically) to further the subjectivist account of value which the supre­ mely disenchanted (‘scientific’) practices of instru­ mental rationality promote as they burgeon in social life. Third, this renders increasingly irresistible a frankly Nietzschean view of politics, where subjec­ tive wills battle it out for power over each other with no grand metaphysical-moral story to be told by which to cloak the brute reality of the struggle. Fourth (and this is arguably where Weber himself ultimately stumbled), the case for liberalism - or any other political order - rests only upon individuals’ decisions to support it, with nothing independent to ground or validate them, a form of political existen­ tialism in other words. And if accelerating disen­ chantment is deepening pluralism, the prospects of conflict-managing agreements in decisions accord­ ingly recedes. The problem with Weber’s position looked at from some liberal points of view is that he was only able to offer two unacceptable solutions for the predicament of the individual under these condi­ tions. One is a re-enchantment of the world, which would mean a return to rule by what Rawls would call a fully comprehensive moral and philosophical doctrine. As Anderson stresses, First World War nationalism disturbingly seems to function in this role for Weber.41 Here, the arbitrariness of his decisionism propels the individual into a radical fatalism; the accident of birth within a particular national community is our chance to escape the gloom of disenchantment, to embrace the destiny of the nation as our own. The remaining sphere for

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D I S E N C H A N T M E N T A N D T H E L I B E R A L I S M OF F E A R with democracy’s claim to value and embody the collective will of the people, making ‘liberal democ' racy’ ultimately oxymoronic and - particularly when popular will runs against liberal democracy - doomed to implosion.43) It is in the light of this that we can see why, for Rawls, it might seem to be ‘a great puzzle to me why political liberalism was not worked out much earlier: it seems such a natural way to present the idea of liberalism, given the fact of reasonable pluralism in political life.’44 For him, liberalism has been forced to become political in the way in which he proposes because, under conditions of pluralism, it cannot assume that liberal ideas are the non'Controversial foundation of social and political life.45 It is, then, a direct development from the specifically modern form of post'Reformation religious pluralism. ‘For the modems the good was known in their religion; with their profound divisions, the essential condi' tions of a viable and just society were not.’46 This distinguishes the modem from the ancient world. ‘What the ancient world did not know was the clash between Salvationist, credal, and expansionist reli' gions.’ Crucially, this

freedom would be one in which the individual is thrown back on his or her own resources (the meagreness of which may encourage individuals to give up still more of their own ‘being’ to the ‘nation’s cause’). The other solution perhaps lacks some of the ominous portent of the first, but is ultimately no more satisfactory. In his later writings on political affairs Weber came to argue that in a modem democratic state the only acceptable response would be a mixture of charismatic rule backed up by a legal order as a form of rule. The problem here is that the legitimacy of this form of state is based entirely upon its success in being successful. There are ‘no other criteria for success beyond success itself.’42 And if regimes resting upon such bases are not ‘successful’ if, for example, they struggle to cope with social and political conflict - they have nothing upon which to fall back to argue that they are nevertheless legit' imate. (Compare this with a regime whose citizens widely accept its authority as being derived from ‘God’. It, too, may experience functional inefficien' cies but its lack of success doesn’t exhaust its legit' imating grounds and hence it is likely to be more stable.) The problems and tensions in Weber’s ac' count of the problem of the legitimation of political rule within a plural moral universe lead directly to the ‘Weimar problem’, the crisis of justification which liberalism faces as soon as the implications of pluralism become apparent and are thought through in a particularly radical direction. The ‘Weimar problem’ which follows from W e' ber’s diagnosis of the political crisis of our time is one in which the central debate concerns liberalism’s ability to cope with pluralism. A common conclu' sion reached is that it could not. According to Carl Schmitt, for example, all political theories contain an element of ‘surplus value’ of meaning. It is in their nature to claim a truth for themselves which they cannot possibly justify by rational means. In the eyes of many, and Schmitt is the most welLknown exponent of this view, liberalism is bound to oscillate between a self'interpretation of impartiality, or neu' trality mixed with proceduralism and a commitment to the more substantive values which it peculiarly embodies. (Schmitt’s particular complaint was that liberalism’s claims to be objectively valid conflicted

introduces into people’s conceptions of their good a transcendent element not admitting of compro' mise. This element forces either mortal conflict moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion, or equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. Except on the basis of these last, firmly founded and publicly recognised, no reasonable political conception of justice is possible. Political liberalism starts by taking to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent conflict.47 Political liberalism’s task is to seek self'justifica' tion in terms of ideas which, aside from those which reasonably divide them, all people qua citizens of constitutional democracies can nevertheless share. In other words, as the basis of political agreement, liberalism must try not to take sides in the wider, plural comprehensive doctrines of value. Hence the great significance he attaches to the role of political philosophy and its abstract constructivist methodoL ogy: it is, with hindsight, the obvious as well as morally and politically necessary strategy to ward

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PETER L A S S M A N off the Weimar problem. It helps us, too, to see that modernity need not treat pluralism as some kind of secular equivalent of the fall from grace. For Rawls, the pluralism of comprehensive doctrines is ‘not seen as a disaster but rather as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free in­ stitutions. To see reasonable pluralism as a disaster is to see the exercise of reason under conditions of freedom itself as a disaster.’48 A t once humble in its attempt to avoid grand ‘metanarratives’ and ambitious in its quest for poli­ tical agreement amidst reasonable pluralism, it is here - in the account of pluralism that grounds it - that we can begin to spot political liberalism’s problem. For, although Rawls does not see it this way, the above assessment of pluralism is itself a deeply controversial interpretation. After all one could equally see this version of modem history as a story of ‘error and illusion, or at least as the intensification of tragic conflicts of value.’49 Rawls, against the strictures of political liberalism, is already favouring one version of history and one attitude towards pluralism. Would those who do not accept this version of history be included among ‘the rea­ sonable’, those who in principle may endorse the principles of political liberalism?50

doctrine of the very kind which he is attempting to exclude. This profoundly suggests the possibility that there is no one way of characterising pluralism, as a grounding notion in any case for a liberal politics, which could command universal agreement. It has been frequently observed how, in other respects, Rawls’s doctrine falls back upon the kind of com­ prehensive liberalism he seeks to avoid in justifica­ tory arguments.51 What this argument suggests is that we should not be very surprised at this, because the account of pluralism with which the whole project starts already begins to show ‘comprehensive’ biases. The worry that we are doomed never to be able to deliver a form of theory which is not just ‘another controversial and partisan vision of the good life’ and which ‘will cease to be a plausible solution to one of our most pressing moral and political problems’ is at the heart of modern liberalism’s anxieties. Larmore has argued that if we are so condemned then political liberalism will ‘become just another part of the problem’. The conviction that ‘we can agree on a core morality while continuing to disagree about what makes life worth living’ may ‘turn out to be baseless. Liberalism may necessarily be just one more partisan ideal’52 - a fear which is most perturbingly captured in the context of the Weberian picture. The strong resemblance the problem has to that which contributed to the intellectual and political collapse of Weimar democracy dramatises this pro­ blem into much more than just a philosophical curiosity. What chance, then, do liberals have of warding off the Weimar problem without engaging in self-deludingly reassuring ‘reassessments’ of pluralism’s proble­ matic significance? I want to suggest that Judith Shklar’s idea of the ‘liberalism of fear’ indicates the way forward. It has some interesting similarities to Weber’s interpretation of the fate of liberal ideas under modern conditions and offers us a way of thinking about the predicament of modern liberalism which, while suitably pessimistic, is not unduly so. So if it has been valid to talk of the Weberian under­ current in contemporary liberalism, the extent to which the liberalism of fear can speak to it is a clear indication of its relevance. Further, Rawls approv­

V The paradoxical nature of modem liberalism resides in the fact that it, more than other political the­ ories, takes pluralism, understood both in terms of an interpretation of the sources of value and as reasonable disagreement, to be both a fundamental feature of the modern world and as a problem which it must cope with in order to establish its own legitimacy. One of the interesting features of Rawls’s attempt to construct a ‘political liberalism’ is that he sees pluralism as built into the nature of modem constitutional liberal democracy, the natural out­ come of the ‘burdens of judgement’. However, to take this example, Rawls fails to notice that in defining one of the criteria of ‘the reasonable’ in his account of pluralism and the constitutionaldemocratic citizen’s appropriate response to it as the ‘willingness to accept the burdens of judgement’ he is introducing into his theory a controversial

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D I S E N C H A N T M E N T A N D T H E L I B E R A L I S M OF F E A R lity in retreat or tries to calm the warring factions around her, she must prefer a government that does nothing to increase the prevailing levels of fanaticism and dogmatism. To that extent there is a natural affinity between the liberal and the 58 sceptic.

ingly notes that the idea has certain similarities with political liberalism too.53 However, it falls well short of the full political-liberal strategy - but herein may lie its strength. Shklar argues that ‘the liberalism of fear’ does not rest upon a theory of moral pluralism of the kind advocated by Berlin. It does not deny pluralism, though; rather, the point is that the case for liberal­ ism does not need to rest upon such metaphysical claims about the nature of value and suchlike.54 Here is the big difference between Rawls and Berlin on the one hand, whose liberalisms start with specific ac­ counts of pluralism, and the liberalism of fear on the other: all that the latter really needs to begin with is an account of the ‘summum malum, which all of us know and would avoid if only we could. That evil is cruelty and the fear it inspires, and the very fear of fear itself.’55 So for Shklar the ‘deepest grounding’ of liberalism as a distinct doctrine is to be found in the conviction ‘that cruelty is an absolute evil, an of­ fence against God or humanity. It is out of that tradition that the political liberalism of fear arose and continues amid the terror of our time to have relevance.’56 The fear which is to be prevented is the fear created by arbitrary and unnecessary force and by acts of torture and cruelty performed by states and their agents. Historical experience has shown us how such fears are not groundless nightmares; that self-same experience teaches us how liberal political practices and institutions have so often been the best hope people have had to remove cruelty and fear from political life. It is thus historical memory, as opposed to speculative metaphysics, with which the liberalism of fear should launch its case.57 The case for seeing how the liberalism of fear may address the fears raised by the Weberian picture of modernity and the Weimar problem is twofold. First, having explicitly eschewed reliance upon a Berlinian account of pluralism, Shklar notes that there is a ‘real psychological connection’ between liberalism and the kind of value-scepticism to which Weber gives paradigmatic expression:

Those who may be swayed by sceptical arguments of the sort that Weber prompts are nevertheless availed of a definite argument for liberal politics, precisely because it tries to derive the latter from a mutual concern or impulse - the avoidance of fear and cruelty - rather than a substantive (contested) metaphysical/moral doctrine. But those who have not succumbed to scepticism, who continue to hold other ‘comprehensive doctrines’, can be equally im­ pressed by the case for liberalism because, again, it rests upon a concern that is shareable not in people’s philosophies but in their psychological motivations. Hence Shklar argues that to embrace the liberalism of fear is not to embrace any form of normative or cultural relativism. It makes a universal and cosmo­ politan claim for liberalism while, at the same time, recognising its local origins and the infrequency of its full realisation.59 A crucial element in the liberalism of fear is what some take to be the excessive modesty of its ends. ‘Liberalism has only one overriding aim: to secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom.’60 Prohibiting interfer­ ence with the freedom of others is how liberal politics removes what sources of fear it can from people’s lives; beyond that, ‘liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make.’61 If some might think this is unduly cautious, Shklar has more than just historical memory to make us see the liberalism of fear as both judiciously prudent and no mean achievement in its own right. Some of us may nowadays be able to take the security of the liberal order for granted and hope for more adventurous and ‘imaginative’ politics. But our foreign news should surely remind us of the global prevalence of the most brutal illiberalisms. There may indeed be more morally ‘exhilarating’ liberalisms, but they are surely less urgent.62 There is another way of expressing reservations

scepticism is inclined toward toleration, since in its doubts it cannot choose among the competing beliefs that swirl around it, so often in murderous rage. Whether the sceptic seeks personal tranquil­

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PETER L A S S M A N about the apparently limited nature of Shklar’s lib­ eralism. Those who are troubled by the Weberian sketch of modernity may wonder whether, in its refusal to theorise substantive ‘positive’ goals for the social and political order, it tacitly grants free rein for instrumental rationality to dominate in modem society. But Shklar believes the liberalism of fear has two powerful responses here. First, if ‘instrumental rationality’ refers purely to political practices which pursue only ‘efficiency’ or ‘meansend calculation’, without questioning the rationality or desirability of whatever end to which they are put, then it does not apply to the liberalism of fear. For it has very definite, substantive ends in its desire to avoid the institutionalisation of fear and cruelty, and political practices are to be explicitly scrutinised with these in view. The second response has ‘instrumental rationality’ describing a politics that places all its confidence in procedures, without adequate attention to the ra­ tionality of the conduct and discourse of those who participate in and follow them. It trusts the mechan­ isms for creating consent and ensuring fairness, with­ out any attention to the character of the individual citizens or to that of the society as a whole.63 But Shklar, of course, wants the liberalism of fear to justify a liberal regime that may be little more than a modus vivendi, a political accommodation shared by people of diverse natures, tastes and goals mutually motivated by a fear of political cruelty. To invest politics with a more substantively rational goal, to take sides in the pluralism of possible forms of life, is to risk precisely the kind of totalitarian oppression which provides part of the historical memory psy­ chologically motivating the liberalism of fear. To think that this charge o f ‘instrumentality’ has any bite is to show ‘disdain for those who do not want to pay

the price of utopian ventures, least of all those invented by other people.’64 Space has allowed only a brief sketch of the liberal­ ism of fear. But perhaps enough has already been said to suggest the attractiveness of its politics, which admittedly may not be evident at first sight. We may also be able to appreciate the potential fruitful­ ness of its approach to justifying liberalism when the fact of pluralism, itself so variably interpretable, had apparently left all such ventures toppling into selfcontradiction. It concedes that we have to work from our own traditions and experiences in order to arrive at a form of self-understanding for our political ideas, even when we deliberate for universal ideals. This may make our political thought paradoxical but it does not make it incoherent.65 As a response to Kant’s question, with which this chapter began, the liberalism of fear suggests some­ thing very different in content to Rawlsian political philosophy even though it shares with Rawls the project of explaining what ‘should be the public philosophy in a reasonably just constitutional re­ gime.’66 But the difference is what can tip the scales of argument in Shklar’s favour. The exemplars of philosophy examined here proved unable to con­ vince us that they could answer the question, that they could avoid the Weimar problem. All that the liberalism of fear needs, though, is the fear that motivates the question - which perhaps receives its most acute expression with the Weberian sketch of modernity as its backdrop - to begin the political argument for liberalism. Under the conditions of modern pluralism, this is probably the best we can do. But the Weimar problem, and the existence of widespread cruelty still in the world, should leave us with no doubt that this argument is still very much worth pursuing.

1. Rawls (1996), p. plxii. 2. Richardson (1994), p. 238. 3. The idea of the ‘inner citadel’ here is drawn from Berlin: ‘the deepest convictions of philosophers are seldom contained in their formal arguments: funda­ mental beliefs, comprehensive views of life, are like citadels which must be guarded against the enemy. . . the inner fortress itself - the vision of life for the sake

of which the war is being waged - will, as a rule, turn out to be relatively simple and unsophisticated’: Berlin (1969), pp. 200-1. 4. Weber’s picture is one way of substantiating the notion of the ‘default’ position in political theory, an idea suggested by Mark Evans in Chapter 11 of this volume. 5. Habermas (1998a), p. 60.

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D I S E N C H A N T M E N T A N D T H E L I B E R A L I S M OF F E A R 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. Hennis (1988). For the idea of a ‘strange liberal’, see Boesche (1987). 38. See, for example, Eden (1982). Indeed, the uncen tainty about the classification merely reinforces the claim that Weber poses problems for liberals. 39. Weber (1994) p. 68; Gerth and Wright Mills (eds.)( 1991), p. 153. 40. Rawls (1999), pp. 463 n. 24. 41. Anderson (1992), pp. 193-7. 42. See, on this point, Dyzenhaus (1997), p. 12. 43. See Schmitt (1985); cf. Larmore (1996), chapter 8 for critical discussion. 44. Rawls (1996), p. 374. 45. Dyzenhaus (1997), p. 16. 46. Rawls (1996), p. xxvii. 47. Ibid., p. xxviii. 48. Ibid., pp. xxvi-vii. 49. Wenar (1995), p. 48. 50. Ibid. 51. For an example of such that Rawls himself concedes but which may be far more likely than he would hope, see Rawls (1996), pp. 152; cf. Evans (1999). 52. Larmore (1996), p. 151. 53. Rawls (1996), p. 374. 54. Shklar (1989), p. 29. 55. Ibid. 56. Shklar (1989), p. 23. 57. Ibid., p. 27. 58. Ibid., p. 25. 59. Ibid., pp. 29, 34. 60. Ibid., p. 21. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., p. 38. 63. Ibid., p. 33. 64. Ibid., p. 33. 65. See Michelman (1995) for discussion of this claim. 66. Rawls (1999), p. 622.

Rawls (1996), p. lx. See Walzer (1983); cf. Griffin (1994). Rawls (1996), p. 44. Ibid., p. lxi. Ibid., p. lxii. Hampshire (1983), p. 162. Hampshire (1989), p. 118. Rawls (1999), p. 1. Rawls (1996), p. 55. Rawls (1996), p. xx. Ibid., p. xxiii. Jahanbegloo (1993), p. 56. Ibid., p. 45. For the interpretation of Berlin as an objective plun alist, which sharply distinguishes him from Weber, see Gray (1995b). Rawls (1999), pp. 463 n. 24; cf. ibid., pp. 462-3. Berlin (1978), p. 148. Berlin (1991), p. 12. John Gray refers to Berlin’s ‘phenomenological certainties’ in Gray (1995b), p. 62. Ibid. See B. Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Berlin (1978). Jahanbegloo (1993), p. 44. For a version of this argument, see Raz (1986), chapter 14. This is a term used by Max Weber, taken from Goethe, to describe such relationships; see Gerth and Wright Mills (eds) (1991), pp. 62-3. Berlin and Williams (1994), p. 309. Crowder (1994), p. 303. Berlin (1991), pp. 80, 203, 205. Kekes (1993), p. 199. Anderson (1992), p. 245. Larmore (1996), chapter 7. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., pp. 166-7. Ibid., p. 167.

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PRAGMATIST LIBERALISM A N D T HE E V A S I O N OF P O L I T I C S Mark. Evans

clear that the prominence of the ‘Rorty debate’ reflects a widespread belief that he has thrown down an important challenge. After all, if he is right then the very need for liberal moral and political theory (or, indeed, any other kind) is clearly called into question. Thus, in a book devoted to mapping out new research agendas for liberalism, Rorty’s challenge can hardly be avoided. But as this chapter will contend, he has arguably not posed it in anything like the terms in which it could and should be presented. The full consequences for liberal politics in particular are not teased out and so he does not give us the opportunity to appraise the whole effect of ‘contin­ gency’ upon our thinking and our practice. One purpose of this chapter, then, is to develop a ‘Rortyean view’, a characterisation of aspects of his thought that is fuller than he himself provides but which does not depart in essence from his pragma­ tism. This view will allow us to depict and apprise more thoroughly the Rortyean interpretation of liberal moral and political commitments, which Rorty believes can survive the abandonment of the philosophical search for their foundations. The particular aspect of liberal commitment to which Rorty is obviously passionately attached is what he calls the ‘human rights culture’ (hereafter: ‘H R C ’).1 Now if we grant the point that we should be very wary of overly homogenising our conception of ‘the’ HRC, the chapter proceeds from the plau­ sible assumption that many who hold its commit-

I Despite the hostility that much of it bears to its object, the extent of the response to Richard Rorty’s intervention in liberal political theory is testament to the significance that so many commentators attach to it. Rorty believes that liberal convictions are utterly contingent upon the preferences of those in liberal cultures, that philosophy adds nothing useful to the holding and promotion of such con­ victions and is probably best abandoned, and that these considerations need not disrupt the way in which we ‘handle’ such convictions. He wants us to treat these claims as profoundly liberating, in that they say liberals can be freed from thinking they need (perpetually elusive) theoretical justifications - in particular the ‘foundationalist’ claims that purport­ edly establish their ‘truth’ - in order to entertain their principles. But, despite his constant reassurance to the contrary, the idea of ‘contingency’ and its rejection of ‘foundationalism’ strikes many liberals as being fraught with danger, leaving us teetering on the brink of nihilism, sidestepping all manner of issues in complacently claiming that ‘our’ liberalism can survive the embrace of contingency and the disengagement from philosophy intact. Some critics have felt that Rorty is so insouciant that his ideas are not, ultimately, worth taking seriously. Yet, unless (implausibly) the continued critical interest in him is merely the result of a popular desire among theorists to engage with what they regard as an easy target, it is

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P R A G M A T I S T L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E E V A S I O N OF P O L I T I C S him. If they did, he might well have obtained a deeper sense of what moral and political problems may open up, rather than disappear, with the aban­ donment of foundationalism. What may strike one as paradoxical about this indifference is that the pragmatist approach to hu­ man rights is motivated by the idea that, because the philosophical search for the ‘foundations’ of rights has proved to be so inconclusive, it is actually of little use in spreading acceptance of human rights around the world and should no longer detain us. Rorty’s concern, then, is explicitly practical: he wants to do what will best promote the HRC globally. Yet there is no real engagement with those questions about the justifiability of the coercive rights-enforcing actions which often accompany the actual political pursuit of the human rights agenda. He seems to rest content with an idea that a liberal-pragmatist society ‘will get accustomed to the thought that social policy needs no more authority than successful accommodation among individuals . . . It will be a society . . . that takes reflective equilibrium as the only method needed in discussing social policy.’5 This recommen­ dation gives us no insight into how the genuinely deep and persistent conflicts over human rights, either within a state or internationally, are to be tackled when ‘accommodation’ is impossible or un­ desirable. Two commentators, Guignon and Hiley, have written that what is most admirable in Rorty’s work ‘is the courage, integrity and clear-sightedness with which he bites the bullet and draws out the inevitable consequences of anti-foundationalism for moral and social thought.’6 Unfortunately, this cour­ age abruptly evaporates once the really tough ques­ tions of political justification are reached. In this respect, we have a bullet which Rorty has barely nibbled. The value of suggesting what account a suitably developed Rortyeanism may give of this problem is probably best grasped by thinking about the follow­ ing suggestion as to why his work has attracted so much attention. I propose that the Rortyean view articulates what might be thought of as a ‘default’ position in moral and political theory. That is to say, it represents the kind of philosophical outlook which many contemporary thinkers fear would have to be conceded if their alternative, opposed theories are

ments do so in a foundationalist manner. That is to say that they believe human rights claims are ‘true’, for they think such rights are objectively valid despite whatever certain people may think or prac­ tise to the contrary. Paradigmatic of this approach to rights is the American Declaration of Independen­ ce’s assertion that they are ‘self-evident’ truths.2 In more recent documents, the notion of ‘objective validity’ is conveyed by the idea that codifications of rights (such as the Universal Declaration of Hu­ man Rights) are designed to ‘recognise’ and ‘observe’ the rights, rather than to create them. In other words, such documents are posited as an acknowledgement of the independently grounded moral validity of rights.3 Such ideas, I suggest, are reflected in the way rights are popularly regarded by most of those within the H RC.4 If, as I will hereafter assume, the H RC is pro­ foundly foundationalist in outlook, it is hardly clear that Rorty’s pragmatist approach can allow it con­ sistently to stand in anything like its familiar form. The modified Rortyean view, then, will be designed to test just how conservative of the moral culture’s self-understandings Rortyean pragmatism might al­ low us to be. The centrepiece of this enquiry concerns not only what morality looks like from a Rortyean perspective about those we call ‘rights-violators’. It also focuses upon what many who share the H RC believe is politically sanctioned by the ‘truth of human rights’, namely that violations of human rights constitute objective moral wrongs which, in at least some circumstances, may be sufficiently bad to warrant, for example, the ‘humanitarian intervention’ by certain states in the affairs of others. The founda­ tionalist nature of human rights on the HRC view as interpreted here gives rights a seemingly authorita­ tive basis which is sufficiently ‘weighty’ to legitimise the use of force in their support. Whether Rorty’s anti-foundationalism can provide a suitable substi­ tute for the foundationalist rights-enforcing sanc­ tion, or whether it should not be perturbed if it cannot, are surely questions of considerable signifi­ cance. But here is where a charge of complacency against Rorty has real bite, for such questions of political justification - seeking reasons to justify the exercise of political power - do not particularly vex

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MARK EVANS This might immediately suggest that nothing really hangs upon the fact that the H RC tends to employ foundationalist moral concepts.10 Rorty might be happy to leave these in place, simply because it makes little difference one way or another to the H R C ’s promotion. This resolution of the possible conflict between the commitments to pragmatist contingency and the H RC is too quick, however. For Rorty doesn’t abstain entirely from meta-ethical claims; he actually adopts a provisionally non-cognitivist position, and this crucially underpins his practical recommenda­ tions. This position is evident in the way he attacks foundationalism, which he defines as a theory of moral knowledge holding that we draw values from non-moral premises: ‘to claim such knowledge is to claim to know something which, though not itself a moral intuition, can correct moral intuitions.’11 He rhetorically demands whether there is this kind of knowledge and argues that the extent to which the philosophical search for it contributes little or noth­ ing to the promotion of moral values is the extent to which we have reason to think there is no such knowledge.12 This claim is defensible by pondering the wide diversity of, and persistent disagreement between, the myriad accounts of moral knowledge and the related unpersuasiveness of any one of them to a significantly large number of rationally enquiring minds. Obviously this is not enough in logic to clinch Rorty’s conclusion that there is no one ‘cor­ rect’ morality at all (the phenomena of diversity and disagreement could be explicable in various ways). But he is only really interested in offering enough prima facie evidence in support of non-cognitivism to disarm those who think that continuing the search for moral knowledge remains the best way of pro­ moting moral values. Consequently, he urges the embrace of what is actually the classic non-cognitivist approach to moral revision as the most effective means to pursue this goal: the manipulation of sentiments to change the way people feel about moral matters.13 It could be objected that a non-cognitivist ac­ count cannot be objectivist about moral value: how can a value be objective if it does not exist inde­ pendently of people’s attitudes? Given the objectivist quality typically assigned to ‘human rights’ in the

shown to be unsuccessful.7 The worrying feature of the ‘default position’ lies in its apparent, complete reduction of fundamental moral values to a whimsi­ cal subjectivism that would destroy the point of moral and political theory and, more importantly, leave us just a ‘change-of-feeling’ away from sanc­ tioning the embrace of completely abhorrent values. It is a horror at having to accept that this is all there is to morality that so much philosophical labour is devoted to contending that this is not the case. The default position takes on a particularly sinister hue for many liberals in political thinking. As we shall see, nowadays they often argue that the justi­ fication for imposing their principles with political power rests upon some notion that the ‘receivers’ of such power can, in some way, consent to those principles.8 I suggest that Rorty, given his remarks on reflective equilibrium above, falls into this broad camp. Now one might not be concerned about imposing purely subjective and contingently held principles upon people if the latter could plausibly agree to them in some way. Yet if, as implied by the role of coercion in spreading the HRC, we cannot always rely upon such agreement in politics, where does the default position leave the argument for such political imposition? Rorty’s indifference to the questions raised thus far may make the ‘default’ position in his hands rela­ tively easy to dismiss. I think it poses a more per­ plexing challenge, not least because I argue that the Rortyean view can be made to do a better job of defending some aspects of the HRC. This allows us to take fairer and fuller measure - and hence to assess the limits - of a theory whose conclusions may be profoundly unsettling for many liberal political the­ orists.

II Rortyeanism asks us not to bother pursuing any philosophical questions whose resolution has no significant bearing on the practical pursuit of our goals (in this instance the spreading of the H R C ’s acceptance). For Rorty, meta-ethics falls into this category. ‘The difference between the moral realist and the moral anti-realist’, he writes, seems to be ‘a difference which makes no practical difference.’9

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P R A G M A T I S T L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E E V A S I O N OF P O L I T I C S 2. the reduction of moral judgement to a basis which is at least potentially inconstant, ren­ dering the content of morality unstable, adap­ table merely as our whims desire.

HRC, we may already have reached the point at which tensions surface between Rorty’s philosophi­ cal commitments and the standpoint of the HRC. Certainly, if we adopt what can be called a transcendentalist conception of objectivity, which natu­ rally attaches to moral realism in holding that there is a realm of facts ‘out there’, independent of our attitudes, we could agree that ‘objectivity’ should be purged from a Rortyean view. But it can be recast in conversationalist terms, in which ‘objectivity’ is achieved in the agreed outcome of a discourse over values which has conformed to certain ideal condi­ tions of validity (without any implication that the agreed outcome of moral conversation thereby iden­ tifies any of the cognitivists’ ‘independently grounded’ moral facts).14 Successful moral arguments create, rather than discover, what is objective. This is precisely in accord with Rorty’s claim that for prag­ matists

Rorty veers towards both in his provisional rejec­ tion of the H R C ’s foundationalist underpinnings and in his belief that a properly ironist view will always be disposed to treat our current moral vocabularies as revisable. But here is where we can develop a Rortyean view sympathetically in a way which mini­ mises the discrepancy with the HRC. Rorty asks us to think of moral values as ‘weintentions’,17 summaries of a community’s agree­ ments as to what should and should not be done within that community. Hence ‘the core meaning of “ immoral action” is “the sort of thing we don’t do” ’,18 or, better, what we would rather people didn’t do. Moral understandings evolve over time in a community’s practices as people work out for themselves commodious ways of living and, as Mar­ garet Macdonald (another non-cognitivist defender of rights) describes, they become ‘expressed in the life of the society and constitute its “quality” . They are conveyed by its “tone” and atmosphere as well as its laws.’19 A non-cognitivist could describe this in terms of socialisation imparting specific moral atti­ tudes to its subjects, furnishing them with an attitudinal moral perspective that reflects how those who share it feel about desirable and admirable forms of conduct and their obverse. Once developed, a moral perspective can quickly acquire the status of a set of social facts, impressed upon people by what are experienced as the external forces of socialisation and passed on as purportedly self-standing rules.20 Hence people are confronted by morality as an apparently supra-individual, ‘weighty’ and hence at least apparently objective phenomenon. But in this perspectivist analysis this feature is testament not to the actual, external existence of moral facts but to the content and depth of people’s socialisation into the conventions of morality. Applying this account to describe the HRC, it can be said that, in our socialisation into its perspective, we acquire an outlook in which rights are attributed to all: when we conceptualise ‘human being’ we conceptualise ‘rights-bearer’. ‘Rights’ are the summa­

the desire for objectivity . . . is simply the desire for as much intersub jective agreement as possible . . . Insofar as pragmatists make a dis­ tinction between knowledge and opinion, it is simply the distinction between topics on which such agreement is relatively easy to get and topics on which agreement is relatively hard to get.15 Yet if ‘objectivity’ in some form need not be denied to the Rortyean view altogether, it might still be feared from the standpoint of the HRC that the conversationalist variant is a very pale imitation of ‘real’ objectivity. The non-cognitivist underpin­ ning of the Rortyean view, so the fear runs, will always conflict with the way in which the HRC conceptualises its moral commitments.

Ill This concern arises from the common belief that non-cognitivism is driven towards these positions: 1. the explanation of the virtually ubiquitous realist terminology in moral discourse by an ‘error’ theory, which says we mis-describe the nature of our moral commitments when we express them in such a way;16

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MARK EVANS ries of our culture’s ideals of how all humans should be treated. Rorty calls moral judgements ‘ethnocentric’ to indicate their cultural particularity, draw­ ing one’s attention to the cultural specificity of such judgements and the beliefs that form them.21 As a ‘final vocabulary’ he thinks the discourse of rights has no non-circular means of defence.22 Any arguments in favour of them are going to be, in some way and at some level, question-begging, only working by as­ suming the validity of the very values that a dis­ putant is throwing into doubt. But, in response to concerns that this might be a deeply unsatisfactory feature of a final vocabulary’s justification, we might wonder whether other, if any, of our deep commit­ ments (to family, friends, personal projects, organisa­ tions) can ultimately be justified in non-questionbegging ways. Is there, for example, necessarily a non-question-begging justification to explain why I love my wife and have committed my life to her? Furthermore, is it necessarily appropriate to think that I need a non-question-begging justification for such a commitment? (Isn’t the sheer fact that I love her enough to justify my loving commitment to her?) A Rortyean, therefore, may be able to argue that there is no deficiency in any final vocabulary’s circular defence. As Rorty has frequently stressed, admitting to the epistemological relativism of the ‘ethnocentric’ ap­ proach does not necessarily entail a normatively relativistic configuration of the values held within any perspective. To see this point, it should be remembered that perspectives are unrankable with­ out adopting standards which are only available within a particular perspective. Outside of any moral perspective, from the morally vacuous standpoint of the world ‘as it is’, no moral evaluation of any kind relativist or otherwise - can be sanctioned. No grounds therefore present themselves from the perspectivist outlook per se as to why we must relativistically concede equal validity to all perspectives. Any insistence upon normative relativism has to be based upon an essentially coherentist claim that it would be internally inconsistent for the human rights perspective to be constructed without it. Clearly, Rorty finds no such grounds for this posi­ tion. He thinks it proper that people should make judgements about fundamental rules of human inter­

action;23 he just denies that there is any useful way of validating them from a transcendental perspective.

IV Thus far, we have seen how the Rortyean view could furnish itself with non-relativised moral prescriptions and has at its disposal a sociological explanation of why morality appears to have an objectivist, foundationalist quality. But the question remains as to whether a non-cognitivist should still recommend the replacement of the realist, objectivist language of morals, for the sake of ‘philosophical hygiene’. If so, then the view still threatens to destroy the form of discourse typically employed in the HRC. Simon Blackburn has argued that it is perfectly legitimate to employ realist-seeming terms when accounting for what are in fact only products of attitudes. We can be what he calls ‘quasi-realist’ in our moral judgements, projecting values on to the world from one’s moral perspective.24 Blackburn shares a broadly similar account of the purpose of thinking about morality to Rorty’s: we should not theorise about morality and ethics as if they are in the business of describing aspects of the world . . . To enter a moral claim is . . . to take up an attitude or stance, and centrally it involves making an emotional response to con­ templated events and states of affairs . . . Moral and ethical vocabulary . . . enables us to share our stances with others, to shape our sensibilities in light of opinion of others. In short, ‘the essence of ethics lies in its practical function’ - a natural ally, then, for the Rortyean view.25 More pertinently still, Blackburn’s ‘projectivism’ suggests a way of describing human rights from within an attitudinal moral perspective in terms that realists often think are reserved for themselves. Projectivism is a complex philosophical position and only some of its basic features can be outlined here; moreover, it is reasonable to assume that Rorty himself might part company with it at several key points. Enough, though, can be said to illuminate the proposal for its partial incorporation into the Ror­ tyean view.

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P R A G M A T I S T L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E E V A S I O N OF P O L I T I C S root of 144?’ - which would refer to how the con­ ventions within mathematics produce this result with an external question ‘why do we say 12 is the square root of 144?’, which would direct us towards the origins and nature of the conventions them­ selves. So P can legitimately answer ‘why is cruelty wrong?’ by referring to those features of cruel acts which make cruelty wrong from the moral perspec­ tive, rather than having to say that his attitudes to cruelty are what make it wrong. Within his moral perspective, it is actually the case that cruelty is wrong and using realist language to express this is a coherent way of stating what is the case in his outlook.27 Transferring this analysis to the projection of human rights: if we ask the ‘outside’ question ‘why do we say people have human rights?’, the reply should focus upon the attitudes people have about how they think humans should treat each other. From within the perspective, though, rights are projected onto people first as an act of valuation, to follow a distinction made by David Wiggins,28 which identifies what is felt to be sufficiently im­ portant about a human being to warrant a certain kind of morally obligatory respect, and then as a directive judgement (which holds that ‘because X is valued, Y ought to be done’), creating the rule embodied in the idea of people possessing a right to expect a certain kind of treatment with respect to the valued attribute.29 I suggest, then, that the Rortyean view’s provi­ sional non-cognitivism need not force the abandon­ ment of the realist, objectivist discourse of the HRC. O f course, like any other philosophical position, projectivism has its critics and some would urge that its usage of realist terms is too hollow to be accep­ table (I expand upon some of these doubts in the final section). This may be so - but it requires philosophical argument to prosecute such conten­ tions. And that is an activity which, it is now clear, Rorty abandons too quickly. Here, we have had to retrieve it on his behalf to tackle the problem of the H R C ’s foundationalist character. If the simple graft­ ing of projectivism onto the Rortyean view is not enough to satisfy the doubters, then this is all the more reason to keep philosophical enquiry alive.

Although Blackburn does not believe that values are intrinsically part of their objects, his key claim is that there is no bar to using the language of ‘percep­ tion of the actual’ in attributing moral properties to people because we speak of the perception of every single cate­ gory of thing and fact that we ever communicate. We speak of perception of numerical truths, truths about the future, truths about the past, possibilities, other minds, theoretical entities of all kinds . . .26 - mind-dependent features, in short. Further, he contends that realist language turns out to be a proper way of expressing commitment to that which we deem to be valuable. One way of grasping this claim is to see the realist-sounding language of the projectivist as expressions of how things indeed are from the standpoint of our perspective. Moral statements are properly statements from the ‘inside’, internal to one’s moral perspective. To believe that realist language ought to be abandoned because our moralising has its origins in attitudes is to step outside of the moral way of looking at things and confuses the language which is appropriate ‘intern­ ally’, within the moral outlook, with what is appro­ priate ‘externally’ from the moral ‘view from nowhere’ that we conceptualise as lying beyond all perspectives. Blackburn’s example of characterising cruelty illustrates this. If a projectivist, P, is asked ‘why is cruelty wrong?’, he is asked a moral question, which is properly understood to enquire as to what judgements are made within a moral outlook. If he were to answer ‘because it is not something I like’ making cruelty wrong because of the responses he has to it - a realist would swiftly point out the obvious anti-realist character of the reply. But P’s answer is not the one he has to give to a moral question. Answers in which attitudes figure are appropriate to ‘external’ questions about the nature of morality, such as ‘why do we say cruelty is wrong?’ But this is a different kind of question from the one asked within the moral view and we should not give answers to questions which are raised from different standpoints. A parallel would be to contrast an internal mathematics question ‘why is 12 the square

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MARK EVANS type of action to propagate human rights among others is to show coherentistically that the action would conflict with other principles within the hm man rights perspective to which a liberal ought to accord primacy. And that perspective, of course, is held utterly contingently, the product of nothing other than our affirmation of the values of our culture. From a non^cognitivist position, the force of the idea that action in support of human rights can trump other moral codes can only ultimately lie in the fact that the rights we embrace in the H RC represent firm, settled and passionately held attitudes as to how people should be treated. Some - perhaps many - liberals may agree with the argument that there is nothing philosophically inconsistent in merely possessing universalis tic moral attitudes nomcognitivistically. Yet they could still be pn> foundly perturbed at the contention that it is permissible politically to act upon these, to promote or even enforce any moral perspective among others who do not share it when it can have no indepen' dent warrant or authority beyond the contingent commitment they happen to have formed to it. They may ask themselves whether it would be appropriate for them qua liberals to do this given the ethno' centric provenance of their morality. It is clearly important to think hard about coher' ent plausible conclusions which could be drawn by liberals from the normatively anti'relativist insistence that all should respect human rights when made within such a contingent perspective. The liberal schema of universal human rights can readily be grasped as definitive of liberalism’s essence, expressing what it means to view humans as free and equal beings for whom cruelty is the worst thing that could be suffered. ‘We liberals’ can say that we feel so strongly about them that we are convinced that all should respect rights, even if others do not see things the same way. Thus, our primary commitment to rights rules out the possibility or need to admit the legitimacy and permissibility of any moral system which systematically denies them. Hence, liberals do not have to adopt a ‘live and let live’ attitude of tolerance to rightS'Violating systems. Indeed, if they were to be this sensitive to the views of other societies then they may well be abandoning

V

We now turn to the heart of Rorty’s own practical concerns: the business of promoting the HRC, most of all among those who actively reject it. A t this point, it is apposite to distinguish clearly between three types of justificatory argument: 1. Moral justification. With respect to beliefs, this is generally concerned to offer arguments as to why we should support certain moral princE pies and not others. With respect to our ac' tions, moral justification asks whether morality gives us warrant for acting in a particular way. It requires us to connect our actions to moral beliefs and assess their moral worth accord' ingly. 2. Political justification. This question specifically asks for a justification for the exercise of political power. When talking about the pO' litical imposition of a moral principle, it may not be enough to justify that action via a moral justification of the principle alone. The prin^ ciple may indeed be morally valid, but that may not suffice to make its forcible imposition justified. (It may be morally right, for example, to condemn adultery but many would not think that judgement sufficient to justify its criminalisation.) One consideration in the search for political justification may be the third argument. 3. The justification of political authority, the estab' lishment of the right of an institution (such as the state) to be the one to exercise power (separable from (2) in so far as the question of who should exercise power is distinct from that of which among our (moral and non-moral) ends can be promoted with political power). These are crucial distinctions yet Rorty’s political theory (if indeed it can be properly called that) has little grasp of them. Once again, we must see how we might construct his position to accommodate them. Instantly we should reiterate a point that helps to frame the disquieting character of the Rortyean view as a default position: the only way for non'COgniti' vism ultimately to preclude the acceptability of any

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P R A G M A T I S T L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E E V A S I O N OF P O L I T I C S be a project of sentimental education would be the effort to break down such discriminating divisions of humanity to forge an increasingly shared way of viewing and treating human beings. We can hope to encourage non-rights-respecters to make an ima­ ginative, sympathetic or empathetic identification with the plight of those who, from our perspective, are having their fundamental rights brutally vio­ lated.32 We can try to get others to see the awful consequences of rights-violations and to care that such should henceforth be avoided. That, as much as anything, is a powerful reason for keeping alive through historical narrative the memory of those terrible atrocities which have made us now so con­ cerned with human rights. Despite its status as a final vocabulary, the human rights perspective need not shut out all opportunity for critical reflection on the H R C ’s present content. This may further placate liberal concerns that some kind of cultural imperialism is being sanctioned here, for this point encourages an appreciation of the potential for refinement, improvement or transfor­ mation of our commitments even when we currently hold fast to them. Rorty warns us to be sensitive to how ‘redescription’ often humiliates in undermining the existing self-understandings of those whose views we seek to convert. But if it is acknowledged that redescription need not all be ‘one-way’ - that A might enrich her own moral sensibility from the dialogue she has with B even when she hopes that B may come to share her view - the potential for humiliation on either part may be lessened. However, the bottom line of the human rights perspective must surely be that, though the moral beliefs which supplement basic rights may be revisable, there is probably little left open for debate as far as the latter are concerned. Anyone whose views have to be redescribed in order to begin fostering a respect for human rights may well deserve to be humiliated, if that is how they feel when confronted by the viewpoint of the HRC.

much of their own fundamental commitment to human rights: what is the point, after all, of taking ‘human’ rights seriously if they are going to be prepared to acknowledge that some societies could quite acceptably ignore or violate them? One might hope that much of the concern about the promotion of the human rights perspective could be mitigated by adopting the essentially non-coercive, persuasive or ‘conversational’ approach to moral conversion that Rorty obviously prefers. Even if it is employed by bodies (states, quangos or international organisations) which wield political power it is arguable that no question of physical enforcement on their part necessarily arises if they adopt this ap­ proach alone in HRC-supporting policies - and of course the persuasive strategy need not be under­ taken only by political institutions (or at all - it could be left to private individuals and organisations such as churches and charities). If this is what Rorty has in mind, the lack of a specifically political edge to his theory might be more understandable. Certainly, there are potentially wide resources to pursue the persuasive-conversational strategy. We could start by noting that many of the world’s governments pay lip-service to international under­ standings of rights and can be charged with promise­ breaking, hypocrisy and illegality in international law to the extent that they actually violate rights (urging coherence, or consistency, between pro­ claimed and actual standards of behaviour). The tendency of human rights to gain support in the international community as agreed standards of mor­ al behaviour is a further crucial point which could be cited in favour of this perspective (‘since so many millions of people sincerely and fervently support human rights, isn’t this at least a good pro tanto reason for others to do so as well?’). Another part of the persuasive strategy for the liberal could be, in Rorty’s rather playful phrase, the telling of ‘long, sad, sentimental stories’ designed to shape the feelings and evaluative dispositions of those who do not (yet) share the rights perspective.30 As Rorty has observed, the perpetrators of such deeds typically assume not that human beings are not the sorts of creature who have human rights, but that their victims are not really humans at all.31 Ob­ viously, then, a decisive part of what would in effect

VI So far, liberals may be happy enough with the Rortyean view’s approach to the HRC. But in the realm of conversational persuasion, of course, we

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MARK EVANS have gone no further than the activity of moral justification. The critical political problem in spreading the H RC is, of course, that conversation is likely to get us only so far towards this end in many cases. And at the point at which persuasion ceases to be effective Rorty falls silent, even though he is pen fectly well aware that there will be those utterly unconvinced by our redescriptions alone. If there is nothing more that can be said to Nietzsche, Loyola or the committed, consistent Nazi, he throws up his hands and dismisses them as ‘mad’.33 But what do we do about such people thereafter? Do we leave the genocidal maniacs of the world alone as much as possible, to carry out their own ‘ethnocentrically determined moralities’? Although questions of rights enforcement can arise even within the boundaries of a liberal state (with respect, say, to a non-liberal minority), let us focus here upon the issue of humanitarian interven­ tion when one or more states uses force to punish and/or halt rights violations by another state against its own citizens. Since the end of the Cold War in particular there has been a growing recognition that the ‘international community’ has rights to act thus (grounded in international law) when basic rights usually, the specific right to life - are being violated on a systematic, widespread scale. This recognition, therefore, is undoubtedly part of the H R C ’s selfunderstandings - but it is strikingly absent from Rorty’s own account of it. In fact it would be unfair to single out Rorty for avoiding questions of the political justification of coercion. Non-cognitivist moral and political theory has always tended to dodge such questions. Because it treats questions of value as questions of attitude, it typically holds that ‘theory’ has no specially privi­ leged insight into what attitudes should be held and has consequently left the determination of what should be done to the actual business of political life.34 Moreover, many contemporary liberalisms from other traditions are also vulnerable to the charge of evading the ‘challenge of the political’. Chantal Mouffe, for example, has argued that Kantian poli­ tical theory (typified by John Rawls) seems to reduce the resolution of political conflicts to an ultimately consensual process of agreement formulation

through dialogue.35 Questions about what to do with those who won’t peacefully concur with the dialo­ gical outcome (the issue of political justification) and, if we are to turn to coercion, how to establish a body’s right to use power (the justification of poli­ tical authority) are not directly confronted.36 Part of Mouffe’s diagnosis of this feature identifies the ap­ plication to politics of the specifically philosophical techniques of Kantian ethics, with their emphasis upon the securing of agreement in public reason, as the reason why fundamental conflict is not squarely addressed. Rorty’s parallel problems with politics may likewise come from the application of his implicit meta-ethical Humeanism, with its emphasis upon sentiment manipulation through story-telling and suchlike, to what Mouffe insists is the agonistic, conflictual realm of politics. Yet such political quietism should be available least of all to Rorty, given his explicitly practical conception of theory. One would surely have ex­ pected a pragmatist to have been dismissive of traditional non-cognitivism’s attitude to political questions and have been similarly critical of the neo-Kantian ‘evasion of politics’ decried by Mouffe. So once again ‘the Rortyean view’ has to be developed out of Rorty’s own position to ascertain the character of a Rortyean politics that aims to cope with political conflicts beyond the illusion that persuasion and consensus is all we need. To focus upon the most disturbing aspect of this as a default position, I propose to pass fairly briefly over the question of how political authority is constituted. Let us assume that, qua liberal, Rortyeans would argue that consent is the key: institutions that right­ fully exercise power must in some meaningful way have gained the consent of their subjects to do so. This idea may already do considerable work in justifying humanitarian intervention. It can be pointed out in many instances that rights-violating states have freely joined the United Nations and officially support the documents of international law that require observance of human rights. Hence, it could be said that their free adherence to the inter­ national community implies acceptance of its right to force them to act according to its standards, or at least to punish them when they fail to do so.37 But let us concentrate upon the idea of a ‘rogue

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P R A G M A T I S T L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E E V A S I O N OF P O L I T I C S sense that there is no independent consideration to mandate such a policy - fails because, from the Rortyean standpoint, all moral positions - including that of non-intervention —are ‘arbitrary’. The case for saying that, despite the lack of full political authority, there is sufficient political justification for intervention rests upon the idea that, from the Rortyean liberal perspective, rights matter so much and express such deep-seated convictions about how people should be treated, based upon our reactions to the horrendous cruelty that has been inflicted upon millions throughout history, that objections and reservations about intervention can be outweighed. Even if this is ‘cultural imperialism’, no alternative rights-violating culture necessarily has to be toler­ ated by liberals on their own terms. It needs to be stressed that a belief that it is politically justifiable to impose certain human rights upon societies failing to respect them will not ne­ cessarily lead those of a liberal sensibility straight to the conclusion that they must do so. The claim that force is permissible where persuasion fails (and, qua liberal, we can assume that Rortyeans will exhaust the possibility of persuasion before turning to force) need not be configured to yield a conviction that force is obligatory. It might be that the moral costs of a justifiable enforcement would outweigh the moral gains. Nor does this claim entail that such interven­ tion should necessarily be a regular feature of a liberal state’s behaviour. We may admit to valid, non-moral reasons for not enforcing rights; it may be too difficult or otherwise impractical to force a rogue state into respecting them.38 Further, a quintessentially liberal sensibility will prevent liberals from blithely neglecting the concerns of imperialism al­ together. Their sensitivity to diversity can still lead them to tolerate some forms of social life even when they find them unfitting for humans as they con­ ceptualise them, and they will not treat all aspects of their own culture as fit to be embraced by others. All this notwithstanding, we still have the crucial point that Rortyean liberals are not necessarily forced to rest content in principle with a persuasive strategy. This is just as well because, whatever re­ servations they may have about particular instances of possible intervention, most who share the HRC are probably not prepared to rule it out in principle

state’ which has consciously broken with the standards of international law and has effectively ‘with­ drawn its consent’ from supra-national political authorities. This state has embarked upon systematic violations of human rights (a policy of genocide, say, against a certain group of the population). What are the pragmatically minded Rortyeans to do and what account can be given of what they do? The bald fact of the matter is that the only reason available to them for not advocating the use of force even in the absence of what they judge to be full political authority to do so (that is, the consent of the ‘rogue state’ to suffer the consequences of breach­ ing international law) would seem to be that it is prohibited according to the specifications of the values within their attitudinal perspective. And there is no compelling ‘internal’ reason why these values cannot be configured within this perspective to sanction a coercive strategy. This is the point, the crux of the default position, at which many liberals (and others) will throw their hands up in horror. How, they will want to know, can a liberal argue for the acceptability of such coercion when it is openly claimed that the princi­ ples in question are held purely contingently, of ‘ethnocentric’ origin and supported by nothing more than arbitrary attitudinal conviction? A t least with the liberal account of political authority, even if we accept the idea of ‘consent’ as a contingently held moral commitment, the fact that it sanctions coer­ cion only with some notion of agreement from the coerced suggests a less troubling, less imperialistic scenario. But how could the contingent liberal sin­ cerely, consistently make this claim about our atti­ tude to the rogue state? Surely, we are now in the realms of ‘might is right’, with a liberal ‘will-topower’ seeking to stamp its image upon others in a world that is, in itself, morally meaningless. Now the point of the default position is that this last proposition is indeed, in essence, the view with which it seeks to reconcile us. ‘Outside’ of the liberal moral perspective, this is how we must conclude things are. Yet the claim to be urged here is that this gives liberals no necessary reason within their moral perspectives to back away from such policies as humanitarian intervention against rogue states. For a start, a charge that this is purely ‘arbitrary’ - in the

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MARK EVANS that they could be acceptable to the targets of their policy, such reason-giving ‘justification’ is in fact ‘self-explication’. Liberals can think it admirable and probably necessary on their own terms to render their considerations clear and transparent to them­ selves and others, sincerely and rigorously. This, though, is as far as ‘justification’ can extend in this case.

always and everywhere. The moral mathematics or pragmatic costs may not always come out against coercion and - to take up another familiar reservation about intervention - it is hardly clear that a state cannot act against another to prevent, for example, ‘ethnic cleansing’ or genocide just because of its own dubious moral past. It may be more vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy if it fails to live up to its own moral standards, but this vulnerability need not constitute a reason for arguing against the appropriateness of an interventionist strategy. One does not have to deny that the United States (to take one example of a potential ‘rights-enforcing’ state) is very deeply flawed on such counts and that it is desirable to be vigilant over, and suspicious of, its actions (for liberals should be aware of disingenuous uses of the human rights banner) in order to agree that these factors do not constitute decisive bars against its ever rightfully using its power genuinely to prevent genocidal violations of human rights. This is particularly so if it turns out to be the only power capable of doing so.39 What, though, does ‘justification’ really signify here? From the Rortyean viewpoint it is clear that it can only ever be a question of the consistency of a principle and/or its practical consequences with the overall attitudinal moral perspective. (The notion of ‘wide reflective equilibrium’, in which the perspec­ tive’s convictions, their consequences and relevant background considerations are brought into a coher­ ent balance, illuminates how ‘justification’ might proceed.40) In the absence of any independent cri­ teria (objective moral truths), the liberalism of the view may always turn to persuasion first, hoping that its moral and political cases can be based upon reasons that the others in question can accept. But this commitment to giving reasons acceptable to others is now not, as it appears with Rorty himself, something with which we should rest content. Nor is it, as it appears to be in Kantian ‘public-justificatory’ liberalisms, a necessary precondition of all successful or legitimate political justifications.41 It is at best an aspiration, which may be consistently pushed aside when certain moral considerations pertain. In in­ stances such as humanitarian intervention, even liberals of the Rortyean hue will continue to give reasons for their actions. But without the assumption

VIII Thus far, it has not been the concern of the chapter to uphold this view against its rivals, merely to elaborate it as sympathetically as possible. But it is appropriate to conclude by reflecting on whether there is much point in taking this view seriously. If it is indeed a ‘default’ position, how urgent is the need to try to escape it? One important reservation about it is this: because it cannot ultimately help but explain human rights in terms of being reified, ethnocentric attitudes that one (albeit very large) group of people wishes to impose on others, it is just too brazenly advocatory of the imposition of the powerful’s preferred standards upon others for liberals ever to feel comfortable with it. The projectivist account of the H R C ’s moral discourse, according to this reservation, is ultimately too flimsy to reconcile liberals to this point; the ‘conversationalist’ idea of objectivity, for example, patently fails to accommodate those who haven’t agreed with the results of, or even participated in, the relevant ‘conversation’. It provides an all-too-fragile drape, easily blown away to reveal the realities of unadorned, shameless power. A deeper worry is that liberals may thus lose confidence in their own moral rectitude if they posit their belief-system as just one among many of the ‘warring gods’ in a disenchanted world. Incapable in principle of giving reasons why their morality is superior to others, liberals shrink from the battle to impose their views - and perhaps cede the ground to, say, a fascist doctrine whose very point is to impose order and leadership in a fragmented social milieu.42 This picture may be gleefully painted by foundationalists, who would urge that foundationalism is the only internally tenable form liberalism (and perhaps any other doctrine) could take.

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P R A G M A T I S T L I B E R A L I S M A N D T H E E V A S I O N OF P O L I T I C S making a pragmatic or provisional prior commitment to their values. Put bluntly, they are committed to them in the first instance because they are desirable; that they correspond to some independent moral reality is accepted on faith and, as such, the Rortyean can say, is incidental to the commitment - and therefore dispensable.43 So the Rortyean view beguilingly contends that the kinds of moral commitment we are all entitled to make depend rather less upon the nature of one’s meta-ethical beliefs than foundationalists in parti­ cular often urge. It can say to the foundationalist human-rights supporter ‘given that we share the same goals, the same language of rights, what profit is to be gained by continuing the dispute about the nature of values? We should be allies and not enemies.’ Thus, a case can be made to take the Rortyean view as seriously as other intellectual ap­ proaches to the spreading of the HRC around the world. As a ‘default’ position, its increased theore­ tical strength may make it either a tougher target for critics or, perhaps, a less troubling prospect for those who fear that those critics may not be able to argue convincingly against it. Of course it remains afflicted by serious doubts and we might eventually decide that the Rortyean view would be insufficiently cap­ able of handling its problems for us to persevere with it. But then, which of the rival views can credibly claim to be free of similarly extensive problems? Moral and political theory could well have a dangerous potential to frustrate or preclude moral and political action if we believe we must disen­ tangle all such problems before our morality’s call to arms can be answered. If it does nothing else, the Rortyean view suggests that this fear is, mercifully, misplaced: we can be foundationalist or anti-foundationalist and still affirm human rights in the way they are held in the HRC. Who needs philosophy to ground the conviction that a world where there is no genocide is better than one where there is, and that we ought to use whatever means we can to secure the former? What matter most of all, we might finally be able to agree, are the urgent moral and political demands of those who suffer so dread­ fully when the idea of human rights is contemp­ tuously cast aside.44

I believe that liberalism is indeed in trouble if it makes ‘public acceptability’ a precondition of its political legitimacy in such a divided and hostile world (as with Rawlsians and more authentic neoKantians), or if it does not push beyond Rorty’s own apparent evasion of politics. But the Rortyean view has deliberately abandoned these approaches. Hence, its ability to avoid the deliquescence of liberalism in the tides of contingency rests upon its propensity to maintain its convictions that respect for principles such as rights would make the world a much better place, even if there is nothing outside of such convictions to ‘ground’ them. To conclude, I suggest that there may be a smaller gap in this regard between the foundationalist and the Rortyean than the former might presume. For it can be argued that a foundationalist has great diffi­ culty in supporting principles in a way which avoids the kind of non-foundationalist commitment held by anti-foundationalists. A foundationalist who affirms the existence of human rights and the rectitude of whatever action may be appropriate in their pursuit must be convinced that he has indeed discovered the appropriate truths to justify the conviction. Some foundationalists are this confident, of course. But there are pitifully few who agree with any one of the particular foundationalist philosophies on offer; de­ bate rages on, apparently interminably. One could use this observation to urge that the foundationalist’s moral commitments persist without the compelling evidence that the facts indeed support them. (‘Given the criticisms of any one foundationalist position,’ so this critique runs, ‘does one still not need a good deal of faith to hold fast to one’s values?’) In the absence of secure proof, then, a founda­ tionalist might say that the search for ‘the truth’ has simply yet to be completed. But this again embodies a faith that there is such moral truth to be discov­ ered, which is hardly obvious given the wreckage of previous unsuccessful philosophical searches. More­ over, few - if any - foundationalists who continue the search believe that they must suspend all their moral commitments prior to the moral discovery they seek to verify. Yet, given that they typically do not regard themselves as morally impotent in the absence of secure knowledge, they must end up

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. D’Agostino (1993). The ‘conditions of acceptability’ typically include requirements that the agreement be reached freely and fairly, and be based upon ‘considered and critical reflection’, not instantaneous opinionatedness. Of course, these must themselves be regarded as purely contingent criteria from the Ron tyean perspective. 15. Rorty (1985), p. 5. 16. A view famously adopted on behalf of non-cognitivism by Mackie (1977), chapter 1, especially pp. 48-9. 17. Rorty (1989), chapter 3, especially pp. 59-60. 18. Ibid., p. 59. 19. M. Macdonald, ‘Natural Rights’, in Waldron (ed.) (1984), pp. 21-40, at p. 36. 20. For the concept of ‘social fact’, see Durkheim (1982), especially chapter 1. 21. Rorty (1985), p. 13. 22. The notion of ‘final vocabulary’ is discussed at Rorty (1989), p. 73. 23. See Rorty (1998), p. 170 for his conviction that a ‘human rights’ perspective constitutes a morally superior way of viewing and treating people. 24. Blackburn (1984), chapter 6, and (1993), especially chapters 8-9. 25. Blackburn (1996), pp. 82-100. 26. Blackburn (1993), p. 161. 27. Ibid., chapter 9, especially pp. 172-5. 28. Wiggins (1988), pp. 133-4. 29. One potential problem with this interpretation of projectivism is that Blackburn has recently contended that ‘non-cognitivism’ is actually an inappropriate term to characterise it (Blackburn, 1996, p. 82). He claims it is compatible with a notion of ‘best moral sensibility’, derivable thus: conceptualise one’s current moral perspective and all possible rival perspectives as akin to the structure of a tree in the following way. The ‘trunk’ contains all of those features that we would think any acceptable moral perspective would have to hold. It is this that provides the content of what he says we can legitimately claim to know as moral truth. Thereafter, the trunk branches out, in so far as we conceptualise the perspectives diverging in their attitudes from this shared core. Blackburn thinks it is possible to remove the possibility of branching: if my perspective branches out because I believe that A is better than B while I acknowledge the possibility of a perspective that says B is better than A, I have the following choices: I can stick to my current belief, in which case the alternative disappears from my ‘tree’ as a candidate for a suitable sensibility; or I concede its validity, in which case my branch should disappear. Alternatively, I concede the merits of both cases, in

Rorty (1998), p. 170. See Peterson (ed.) (1977), p. 235. See, for example, Brownlie (ed.) (1981), p. 143. Space does not permit a full substantiation of this claim and I do not wish to deny that different accounts may be given of how at least some people regard the notion of human rights. But I am more interested here in the specific question of how well Rorty’s thought can support this particular general account, rather than the separate issue of how widely accepted the latter is. (I think it is sufficiently familiar not to deny its presence in the HRC.) R. Rorty, T he Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’, in Malachowski (ed.) (1990), pp. 279-302, at p. 286. C. Guignon and D. Hiley, ‘Biting the Bullet: Rorty on Public and Private Morality’, in Malachowski (ed.) (1990), pp. 339-64, at p. 343. I am not claiming that all theorists regard this as the only ‘default’ position lurking in the wings and waiting for our philosophies to fail. I suspect, though, that this specific position frequently haunts much philosophic cal debate. For example Rawls (1996), p. 136: ‘Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason.’ Rorty (1998), p. 172. At ibid., p. 171, Rorty defines ‘foundationalism’ as a type of moral doctrine which tries to find independently verifiable truths (usually about human nature) from which our moral intuitions may be directly inferred. Although constructivism affirms the idea of ‘moral knowledge as well, it is clear that moral realism is really what is signified here; cf. the reference at n. 11. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., pp. 171-3. Ibid., p. 176 and passim. It is possible to argue that Rorty need not have gone as far as he does in provisionally adopting non-cognitivism because his sentimentalist approach to moral conversion is com' patible with the form of realism, defended by John McDowell, which holds that, although moral properties inhere in their objects independently of our attitudes, they can only be perceived when one is suitably disposed attitudinally. See, for example, his ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’ and ‘Projection and Truth in Ethics’, in McDowell (1998), pp. 131-50 and pp. 151-66, respectively.

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30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

which case I should improve upon my current belief that A is better than B: again, this branch should disappear. Now it must be a matter of considerable doubt as to whether this could plausibly yield a single set of moral truths, or whether the label of ‘truth’ is simply being used rhetorically to affirm a suitably refined set of attitudes. For this reason, we leave this issue aside in the present analysis. Rorty (1998), p. 185. Ibid., pp. 167-9. Martha Nussbaum is arguably the most prominent exponent of literature’s value in shaping people’s moral sentiments; see Nussbaum (1995). Rorty, ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’ in Malachowski (ed.) (1990), p. 288. In practice non-cognitivism has usually been aligned with some version of the liberal view that the consent of those subject to power legitimises its exercise. Mouffe (1993), chapters 3, 9. In a much-debated passage, Rawls concedes that im­ position of fundamental liberal values upon a steadfast anti-liberal (a violent religious fundamentalist, for example) may be necessary if the latter is incapable of accepting the principles (Rawls, 1996, p. 152). Although it is significant that Rawls’s theory does not recoil from the advocacy of coercion, this case appears to be sufficiently marginal and exceptional in Rawls’s mind not to need systematic analysis and justification (or so he thinks). My suggestion here is that politics may be a lot more agonistic and antag­ onistic than he presumes, and the coercive (as opposed to consensual) resolution of political conflict is far more central to everyday politics than Rawls believes. See, in this regard, Rawls (1999), pp. 529-64, where he sketches the possibility of an internationalist ‘law of peoples’, including a scheme of basic human rights. Although applicable to all humans, Rawls recognises that perhaps not all societies could agree to affirm such a law; in their case, he says, there is in principle no peaceful solution except a modus vivendi, ‘the domina­ tion of one side or the peace of exhaustion’ (ibid., p. 564). At this point, perhaps, we have nothing other than Rorty-type contingent attitudes by which to orientate political responses to such societies. This, of course, simplifies and glosses over a lot of issues. I merely sketch the outline of a possible argu­ ment, to allow swift passage to the particular problem I wish to address. See Parekh (1997) and Miillerson (1997), pp. 164-5 for some possible conditions for justifiable interven­ tion. A familiar criticism of interventionist actions by wes­ tern powers is that realpolitik produces hypocritical selectivity: for example, why attack Iraq for its inva­

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

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sion of Kuwait and not China for its occupation of Tibet? We need hardly be ignorant of the cynicism that doubtless enters into the politics of intervention to query which moral direction this point is supposed to take us. If the argument is that we should never sanction humanitarian intervention unless we consis­ tently apply the same moral considerations in every other like instance, one must wonder whether the proper object of moral concern hasn’t been entirely misplaced here. Would the Kosovar Albanians or the East Timorese thank us for leaving them entirely alone to their fate* appreciating that we are primarily con­ cerned that our own precious moral consistency might be impugned if we intervened on their behalf while continuing to tolerate the rights violations of the Chinese state? See Daniels (1996), chapter 2 for the concept of wide reflective equilibrium. I criticise the concept of public-justificatory liberalism in Evans (1999). Carl Schmitt famously offers a version of this critique, claiming that liberalism’s claims to embody objective moral truths conflicts with democracy’s claim that legitimacy is based upon the collective will of the people, thus making ‘liberal democracy’ philosophi­ cally oxymoronic and, in a fractured social world, practically unworkable. For analysis, see Larmore (1996), chapter 8. Isaiah Berlin observes that ‘the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood, or the absolute values of our primitive past’: Berlin (1969), p. 172. If this is so, then the need for foundationalist belief may not be dispensable, though some antifoundationalists would put this down to an inability to live without holding values in an erroneous manner. Certainly, a purely evaluative conviction may be vulnerable to dissolution through the waning of attitudes, but yet again there is not quite the unfavourable contrast with realist convictions that one might think. Crises of faith (sometimes term­ inal) in examples of the latter are, after all, familiar enough to challenge the foundationalists’ argument that their form of moral conviction is that much more insulated from doubt. I would like to thank John Torrance and Roger Crisp for comments on a distant ancestor of this chapter which helped to shape its current form. Thanks are owed as well to the participants at the 1999 University of Wales Swansea political theory conference at Gregynog, and in particular Bruce Haddock, for valuable discussion.

12

LIBERALISM AND C O N T I N G E N C Y Bruce Haddock

Liberals, or at least theorists concerned to defend liberal political positions, have in the last decade seemed peculiarly diffident about the foundational arguments which were once the stock-in-trade of liberal theory. Rawls’s defection from foundationalism in Political Liberalism is the most celebrated (and arresting) case of a phenomenon which is wider and deeper, going to the heart of what we might mean by normative political philosophy.1 Rawls continues to espouse a comprehensive liberal doctrine, but he is anxious to show that terms of political cooperation can be defended independently of the particular comprehensive doctrine he happens to endorse. Other theorists (Rorty and Gray have been pro­ minent here) defend the institutions and values of the liberal communities they happen to have grown up in, but for purely contingent reasons.2 Rorty’s liberal ironist can delight in the cultural diversity which confronts him, enriching the heritage through complex description rather than analysis. Sentimen­ tal stories may be said to enhance possibilities for self-understanding. They do not furnish rules to live by. Rules which purport to be theoretically defen­ sible are in fact simply arbitrary conventions which facilitate mutual enjoyment. But they do not facil­ itate everybody’s enjoyment. The pretence that ar­ bitrary conventions are necessary conditions for a just society is one of the principal foundational illusions that the liberal ironist is concerned to dispel. Gray’s position (at least in his more recent writ­ ings) is more straightforward. He simply asserts that attachment to liberalism is a function of loyalty to a

(purely contingent) national tradition. Liberals may express their loyalty in terms of doctrinal commit­ ments. But once they recognise the fragility of the assumptions they have made (regarding progress, rationality, personal autonomy and so on), they are bound to accept that the sources of their attach­ ment are cultural rather than philosophical. There may well be decisive practical reasons for endorsing liberal institutions and practices as the best means of preserving and developing the advantages which accrue from flourishing civil societies. But such a defence could never be more than conditional and certainly could not assume the guise of a deontological theory. Closer inspection, however, reveals that these retreats from foundational argument are far from clear-cut. Rawls is the most interesting case, since he accepts that the resources of comprehensive doctrines can be used to defend a liberal political consensus. His concern is to ensure that a particular political consensus should not be identified with any particular comprehensive doctrine. Clearly he is trying to walk a fine line here. As Leif Wenar has recently pointed out, a (supposedly) non-contentious notion of reasonableness is being asked to do a great deal of work.3 It is extremely difficult to distinguish theoretically between reasonable and unreasonable pluralisms, though in practice crude political judgements about what should or should not be tolerated are made all the time. Similar problems arise when we try to distinguish reasonable from unreasonable comprehensive doctrines. Is it simply the case that any comprehensive doctrine

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LIBERALISM AND C O N T IN G E N C Y tent of natural law’ for support.9 What he cannot allow, however, is that this ‘universal minimum content of morality’ (whatever it might comprise) should be specifiable in theoretical terms which could serve as a normative foundation for a variety of political settlements.10 Following Berlin, he insists that value incommensurability is an irreducible fea­ ture of pluralist societies.11 In this scheme of things, what we confront in the last resort is existential choice unaided by practical reason. The appeal to a ‘minimum content of natural law’ or a ‘universal minimum content of morality’ does no normative work here. Rorty makes fewer concessions to even a residual foundationalism. But it is worth noting in passing that when he claims that (for liberals) ‘cruelty is the worst thing we do’, he is invoking an evaluative criterion which is far from clear in its meaning and scope.12 Mill scholars have always recognised that the relevant sense of ‘harm’ for liberal theory needs to be specified carefully.13 And more recently John Kekes has argued that priority can only be accorded to the claims of cruelty at the cost of undermining the specifically liberal character of a state.14 The point to insist on here is that assertion of the significance of cruelty in liberal doctrine needs to be supported by argument. It is vacuous as a simple description of liberal sensibilities. What we see emerging here is a series of more or less reluctant adjustments to a minimal foundation­ alism, couched often in such broad terms that the idea of a foundation serves no normative function. This in itself is philosophically interesting, even if it impinges hardly at all on the more immediate prac­ tical concerns of political theorists. It is surely sig­ nificant that allusions to Hart’s ‘minimum content of natural law’ are often made in passing, as if discussion at the most general level could have no implications for the claim that liberal values are contingent. And it must be said that the way Hart presents his case rather encourages that view. The ‘minimum content of natural law’ is not a contentious conclusion to an elaborate argument, but a series of ‘simple truisms’ which afford reasons for adopting legal and moral practices.15 Hart’s concern in this section is with the viability of any legal system, rather than with the desirability of a liberal system or any other variant. In

which endorses a reasonable political consensus (for whatever reasons) is to be adjudged reasonable? Or is there something about the comprehensive doctrines themselves which distinguishes them as reasonable? Wenar argues that the conception of political rea­ sonableness Rawls invokes is comprehensive (Kan­ tian) rather than limited, excluding not only fundamentalists and fanatics from a reasonable prin­ cipled consensus but also Catholics, Hobbesians and Humeans.4 Wenar’s solution is to make the concep­ tion of political reasonableness even more limited, thus making it non-contentious from the perspective of comprehensive doctrines. But in that situation it is unlikely that comprehensive doctrines would gen­ erate the kind of principled support for a political consensus which would transform a modus vivendi into a principled agreement. It would also make Rawls even more vulnerable to critics who argue that political liberalism requires more rather than less foundational support.5 What is clear is that Rawls himself insists that some sort of bridge between a political consensus and reasonable comprehensive doctrines is indispensable to his position, citing Hart’s notion of ‘the minimum content of natural law’ as an example of the kind of argument he has in mind.6 Gray’s position is ambivalent in precisely the same way. He feels free to equate ‘a commitment to the preservation of civil society’ with ‘a commitment to the maintenance of civilisation.’7 And though he accepts that association on these terms ‘may be only one of the diverse forms of flourishing our species has achieved’, he nevertheless defends a form of civil society as not only ‘the best in our cultural inheri­ tance’ but also ‘the best that the species can presently reasonably hope for.’8 Having withdrawn from lib­ eral universalism, then, he continues to defend a position which is far broader than the discrete traditions which have sustained modem western political culture. Certainly civil society can be en­ dorsed from within these traditions but cannot be identified with them. And to specify even in the broadest formal terms what human beings as a species might ‘reasonably hope for’ surely takes us beyond the contingent theoretical resources of particular cultures. Like Rawls, Gray turns to Hart’s ‘minimum con­

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BRUCE HADDOCK The Concept of Law Hart treats (almost exclusively) liberal discussions of law within the broader context of legal order as such. My concern in this chapter is to reverse the direction of the argument in order to develop the normative implications of a formal legal framework. My claim is that reflection on the idea of a formal legal framework furnishes grounds for pre­ ferring certain forms of political or legal order to others. I do not claim that only liberal political orders are defensible, or that all forms of liberal order are desirable, only that there are philosophical grounds for preferring to manage public affairs in a context of liberal institutions and practices. What Hart focuses on in the brief passage on natural law which has been cited so frequently is the con­ tingent predicament in which all societies find them­ selves. Adapting arguments from Hobbes and Hume, he depicts a context which must inform the moral and legal reflection of all communities, anywhere. Indi­ vidual vulnerability to personal attack, relative equal­ ity (such that even the weak can threaten the strong through stealth), limited altruism, limited resources, limited understanding and suchlike put clear con­ straints on the kinds of institutions and practices which could (in principle) be devised to sustain social life. We can imagine situations in which these restric­ tions would not apply. We can fantasise about heaven on earth, where both resources and goodwill are superabundant. But whatever arrangements people in that happy situation might devise for their delight, we can assume that distributive and coercive proce­ dures would not be among them. Politics as we know it would simply not be necessary. A t the other extreme, as Hume argued, absolute scarcity renders conven­ tional institutions and practices redundant. Where starvation is a likely prospect, we cannot assume that the law of property would be greatly respected. As Hume expressed the point, in a dire emergency ‘the strict laws of justice are suspended . . . and give place to the stronger motives of necessity and self-preserva­ tion.’16 In the ordinary way of things, of course, we are not faced with such stark dilemmas, except in cases where regimes actually break down. What Hart asks us to consider is the normative impact of truths that are ‘contingent on human beings and the world they live in retaining the salient characteristics which they have.’17

We may say, at the very least, that recognition of mutual vulnerability commits us to the adoption of some rules of social cooperation. These rules may be many and varied and may in substance be wholly arbitrary. But that there should be some rules may be said to be a defining characteristic of a society. Given that societies with (necessarily) limited understand­ ing and scarce resources will have to make hard choices, we must assume that they will have author­ itative procedures for allocating resources. Govern­ ment of some kind will have to be carried on, even if a formal specification of institutional roles is not developed. But, of course, to recognise the necessity of government in certain circumstances is not to endorse any particular kind of government. Hart is concerned to do no more in his discussion of the minimum content of natural law than to set before his readers the general predicament to which all legal and moral schemes must respond; he is interested in questions of viability rather than desirability. And even Hume, whose discussion of justice has the conveniences of commercial society in mind, offers generic principles which all viable societies will have to endorse. On the face of it, little follows from the ‘three fundamental laws of nature’ which constitute justice for Hume.18 We can grant that all societies must sustain ‘stability of possession’ without specify­ ing precise terms on which property might be en­ joyed.19 Similarly, to move from possession to ‘transference by consent’ is simply to insist that there should be some procedural rules, not that any specific rules should be deemed to be appropriate.20 The third dimension of justice (‘the performance of pro­ mises’) is more fruitful.21 Hume himself may want to stress the utility of promise-keeping, but reflection on the constitutive role of truthfulness in any con­ ception of agency extends the discussion to the necessary requirements of intelligible agency. The key issue here is not how particular practices (like promising) might be justified but what makes practices possible. Following Wittgenstein and Winch, we have come to accept a capacity for rule following as a constitutive feature of human con­ duct.22 We know that things happen to people in the course of their lives and that we can make reasonable predictions about what people might do from a basis of crude generalisation. But doing things involves

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LIBERALISM AND C O N TIN G E N C Y speak. We also acquire a rudimentary understanding of how we should respond to other speakers. The use of a language is thus a social engagement which commits us to much more than a basic set of grammatical rules. Lyotard, among others, has stressed the insepar­ ability of speaking and listening.24 We know that societies devise complex ways (ritually and profes­ sionally) of limiting rights to speak about certain matters. If someone were systematically denied the right to speak on any occasion, however, they would effectively have been reduced to the status of a non­ person, irrespective of whatever else might happen to them. In this sense, some basic rights accompany language use. Rights can, of course, be forfeited through wrongdoing. But recognition of a prima facie case to be heard can be justified simply by focusing on the logic of conversation. It would be absurd to claim that everyone had a right to take part in any conversation, even in principle. I simply do not know enough about brain surgery or football to insist that my voice should be heard. Yet to be denied the right to participate in any conversation would be tantamount to being excluded from all human com­ munity. Such things may be thought desirable in exceptional circumstances, but they would always have to be justified in terms of some conception of human flourishing. Just how far this sort of reflection can take us is a much-disputed question. Few modern philosophers would want to follow Hegel’s attempt in the Philosophy of Right to defend the necessity of a specific institutional framework from a series of reflections on the character of human agency. Yet it may well be that what we should be worried about in Hegel is not so much the ambition of the project as the detailed development of the argument. Modem readers tend not to find the elaborate deductive structure of the Philosophy of Right helpful. It should be clear, how­ ever, that when he asks us in the compressed in­ troduction to reflect on what we might mean by agency, what we presuppose about human conduct when we make choices, how we should regard ourselves in relation to the cultures that sustain us, he is raising questions which any political phi­ losophy must respond to.25 It does not follow, of course, that these issues are always treated self-con­

applying criteria, and these criteria consist of (more or less formally acknowledged) social rules. It is important to stress that we do not need to be able to specify the rules we are following in order to be said to be following rules. Wittgenstein classically focuses on the grammar of a language as a framework of rules which enable us to speak. Children can use a language before they can analyse sentences. And we can imagine languages which have never been ana­ lysed by anyone. The users of such languages can nevertheless be said to be following rules even if the rules have not been formally specified. If they juxta­ pose sounds in a wholly arbitrary way they will not be understood. Children acquiring the language will be corrected by adults, though the adults may not be able to specify the linguistic rule which had been wrongly applied. We may expect the range of prac­ tical usage to be wide in a language which is wholly informal. But informal rules remain rules, specifiable in principle even if they have not been specified in practice. We simply cannot conceive of a language which is not (in some sense) rule-bound. It is surely significant that we assume that anyone could (in principle) learn any language. They may not be taught rules but they know how to carry on making meaningful sounds. The framework of rules implicit in any language may appear to be entirely neutral. Yet, as Winch has argued, a presupposition of truthfulness is a basic requirement of any language.23 People tell lies and deceive one another because it can be assumed that (on the whole) they mean what they say. He stresses, too, that using a language is a practical engagement in which commitments are made to other people. When children are taught a language they are at the same time inducted into the ways of a form of life. The rules which constitute the form of life could not be specified in abstract fashion. What we have, instead, is a series of overlapping practices, not all of them mutually supportive, which yield a sense of how to carry on, how to respond to other people, what to expect of oneself. Language is instructive to us here as an illustration of a natural practice. We do not choose to learn our first language, we may have little or no understand­ ing of the grammatical rules implicit in that lan­ guage, and yet we learn to correct ourselves as we

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BRUCE HADDOCK repudiate all rules and conventions without ceasing to make sense, even to ourselves.26 The intelligibility of our own conduct thus de­ pends upon the social dimension of the practices we are inducted into. We can envisage an esoteric practice, but it is clearly parasitic on the fact that we have been inducted into other practices naturally, much as our ability to construct private languages is parasitic on the fact that we already know what languages are.27 It is only because practices are held to be authoritative in some sense that we can be said to engage in intelligible activity. And this applies even if our concern is to revise radically the way a practice is carried on. The focus again is on how things are done, not on the specific goals that are pursued. The conception of rules defended here does not depend upon the self-conscious adoption of rules of conduct in particular communities. Our concern is rather with the necessary conditions of intelligible action. If we are to conceive of societies at all we must think in terms of rules which constitute prac­ tices. Of course, societies cannot be conceived in purely procedural terms. Cultures and subcultures will endorse different conceptions of a worthwhile life, often pursuing ends which are strictly incom­ mensurable. And if we focus on these different ends, it may be that we will have to accept that certain ways of life are incompatible. We may not be able to find any common ground between deeply held be­ liefs. No matter what we might say, however, about the constitutive values of particular communities, we still have to regard the practices within these com­ munities as instances of rule-following, even if it has never occurred to agents to describe their conduct in this light. They may think of themselves as marion­ ettes in a display of divine virtuosity, and we must refer to these beliefs when we reconstruct their conduct. But what they are actually doing is making decisions, appraising one another’s conduct in terms of assumptions and standards, correcting each other when they make mistakes, arguing, reproaching or punishing one another for failure to observe appro­ priate rules and procedures. The things they do can be done well or ill, with more or less good faith. But simply to say that they are doing something commits us to certain ways of conceiving of conduct.

sciously. For the most part, many basic presuppose tions will simply be taken for granted in order to proceed with more specific and practically compel­ ling questions. But it remains the case that presup­ positions are made which have different implications for practice. Our concern, then, before we consider the institu­ tions and policies we might happen to desire, is to explore the necessary requirements which enable practices to flourish. We must assume that these requirements will be very general indeed since we know from ordinary experience that different cul­ tures pursue all manner of ends in a variety of ways. Our focus should be on what people need to ac­ knowledge in order to attain any satisfaction at all rather than on the things they happen to want. We have accepted (following Hobbes, Hume and Hart) that recognition of mutual vulnerability commits us to establishing terms of social cooperation. If you do not accept this point, you can have no interest in normative political philosophy. The point may be put more strongly. If you regard social cooperation as optional or irrelevant, you will have fundamentally misconceived the idea of human agency. When we do things we apply and adapt rules and procedures, and these rules and procedures have a public (social) life even if they are not formally acknowledged. To say or do things deliberately is to apply criteria such that we might wonder whether or not we had said or done the right thing. Following a practice necessarily involves the possibility of mak­ ing a mistake. But it would make no sense to say that it was entirely arbitrary whether or not a mistake had been made. Practices are thus to be understood in terms of rules and conventions which are more or less ade­ quately observed. In relation to any specific engage­ ment, the rules and conventions are regarded as authoritative. Sometimes (as in a game) the engage­ ment is constituted by specific endorsement of a formal set of rules. You cannot play chess and repudiate the rules at the same time. The overlap­ ping (and largely informal) rules of social life are much more difficult to discern. In this case it makes perfect sense to suspend judgement about certain conventions while continuing to engage in coopera­ tive projects more or less normally. But we could not

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LIBERALISM AND C O N TIN G E N C Y understood within liberal theory. The point to focus on is that philosophical reflection on the necessity of a minimal foundation may furnish grounds for pre­ ferring certain political options to others. Hart himself offers us some help along these lines in the opening arguments of The Concept of Law, His modification of the received version of legal positi­ vism depended largely on his adoption of a rule­ following model of law as a practice. Following Wittgenstein and Winch, he sought to highlight the rules (formal or tacit) which enable agents to set themselves standards in the conduct of their business. A n agent can only ask herself what she ought to do (whether as a judge, a lawyer or a litigant) within the context of a practice constituted by procedural rules.31 This is not to say that the older view (endorsed variously by Hobbes, Bentham, Aus­ tin and others) of law as an authoritative command backed by coercive power is wholly redundant. This may well be how law is regarded by people who do not acknowledge the authority of a legal system or who see themselves as free-riders prepared to exploit the passive obedience of others, but it certainly does not help us to explain what makes conduct within a legal practice intelligible. Hart clearly expects his distinction between inter­ nal and external perspectives (or rule-following and habitual behaviour) to do a great deal of work for him, but he is very cautious about drawing out normative implications. This is perfectly intelligible given the overall thrust of his argument. He is interested in law as such, and not any particular variety of law which may have emerged in a given context. A theory of law that simply reflected the culture and values of a particular community would (in his terms) be no theory at all. His modification of legal positivism thus involved only a minimal retreat from the moral neutrality which was central to that theory. His conception of a ‘minimum content of natural law’ is conceived principally as a response to the contingent circumstances in which human life is lived. He avoids reference to substantive concep­ tions of the good life which had been the stock-intrade of the traditional theory of natural law. He accepts that a formally viable legal system may be morally reprehensible. The fact that legal rules are always grafted on to a moral context has (for Hart)

Oakeshott focuses on the quality of active engage­ ment in his characterisation of a practice as ‘a prudential or an authoritative adverbial qualification of choices and preferences, more or less complicated, in which conduct is understood in terms of a pro­ cedure.’28 The terms of reference here are so broad that it may be thought that nothing is ruled out. The conceptual clarification of what it means to carry on may seem to have no implications whatever for what we should actually do. But this formal distinction only holds while a practice is conducted within the recognisable terms of reference of rule following. To behave impulsively or wholly erratically is not to engage in a practice at all, even though observation of such behaviour may generate reasonably accurate generalisations. And Oakeshott himself, notably in Rationalism in Politics, highlights the ruinous conse­ quences which follow from misconceptions of hu­ man agency.29 To suppose that all right-thinking people will necessarily endorse the same collective goals, or that we can somehow stand outside all practices in order to assess the rationality or desir­ ability of a particular practice, or that liberation from the constraints of all conventions or traditions will somehow set us free, is to conceive of human life as it could not possibly be lived. Philosophy, in this scheme of things, can specify the conceptual limits of practical life, without telling us how we should actually live. The stress on procedural rules should not be misunderstood. The claim is not that a minimal framework is sufficient to sustain a polity, rather that the framework provides a basis for different modes of political flourishing. Following Oakeshott, the framework may be described as ‘the minimum condition of any settled association among indivi­ duals.’30 But no polity actually flourishes on the basis of minimal conditions alone. What is built upon this minimal (or ‘weak’) foundation will depend upon the specific (and contingent) features of a given political culture. The point, however, is that the contingent values of particular cultures may distort or constrain practices which can be shown to be constitutive of a flourishing political life. The terms of reference here are still very broad indeed. We are dealing with the possibility of human flourishing rather than preferences as these have often been

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BRUCE HADDOCK no implications for the specification of the formal requirements of a legal system. Hart makes the point emphatically in his insis­ tence that ‘the question what the criteria of legal validity in any legal system are is a question of fact’, stemming from the ‘rule of recognition’ which hap­ pens to be endorsed in the particular system.32 A rule of recognition may be complex (as in an elaborate juridical culture such as the United States) or for­ mally straightforward (whatever the Queen in Par­ liament enacts will be recognised as law in the United Kingdom) or simplistic (the tyrant’s will, Rex I in Hart’s example, will be taken to be law).33 Hart’s point is that we can make sense of each of these legal systems in terms of criteria furnished by a rule of recognition, though in each case the rule of recognition may be arbitrary. ‘Its existence’, Hart insists, ‘is a matter of fact.’34 What I want to suggest, however, is that it makes the world of difference that what we are talking about here is a rule. To be sure, the whim of Rex I constitutes a rule only in the most primitive sense. But recognising that it is the existence of a rule which makes public cooperation possible gives us grounds, all other things being equal, to prefer a rule which is more predictable in its operation rather than less. Hart’s description of his work in the preface of The Concept of Law as ‘an essay in descriptive sociology’ is thus seriously misleading.35 It is better seen as an exercise in normative theory extending beyond the normal confines of ideological dispute. Indeed the tension which some commentators have seen in Hart’s work between his conceptions of critical morality and analytical jurisprudence can be easily resolved if the normative dimension of analytical jurisprudence is acknowledged. The point to insist on is simply that the minimal criteria which enable us to identify a legal system will be more or less effectively embodied in actual legal systems. Quite how far this could take us in the critical amendment of legal or constitutional practices is an open (and contentious) question. But if it is accepted that predictability and transparency are essential to the furtherance of cooperative pursuits among autono­ mous strangers, then it is clear that we do have grounds for preferring certain institutional proce­ dures to others.

The crucial distinction at work here is between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ rules of obligation.36 It is perfectly possible to envisage a community in which dealings between people would be regulated exclu­ sively in terms of customary rules. Social ostracism clearly constitutes a powerful coercive constraint in contexts where alternative lifestyles are not avail­ able. In a purely customary society one is not faced with choices between options but with more or less reluctant compliance. But, as Hart makes clear, such arrangements of unofficial rules can only work in ‘a small community closely knit by ties of kinship, common sentiment, and belief, and placed in a stable environment.’37 Customary rules are simply given. As soon as we start wondering about their desir­ ability, we introduce hypothetical considerations which may be contentious. The need to accommo­ date change of any kind obliges us to make judge­ ments. Our concern here is with the most rudimentary level of social organisation. The point to stress is simply that a (hypothetical) customary society ceases to function effectively when alterna­ tive possibilities are made available. Disputes about ends have to be settled somehow (through fighting, ritual manipulation, social pressure or whatever). But it soon becomes evident that ordinary business re­ quires authoritative procedures. Practical judgements cannot be made in chronically uncertain situations. The introduction of these authoritative procedures (or ‘secondary rules’) constitutes, for Hart, ‘a step from the pre-legal into the legal world’.38 Note that the transition to a ‘legal world’ is not a choice in any ordinary sense. We may regard dif­ ferent legal rules as more or less useful or desirable, but we cannot reject the idea of legal rules without undermining our capacity to function as agents in complex contexts. The notion of returning to a ‘pre-legal’ situation is no more than a nostalgic fantasy. In an unfashionable speculative sense, we may be said to have crossed a divide between kinds of civilisation. The assumptions which enable cul­ tures to function at this level are not choices or preferences. They are, rather, the ‘presuppositions’ or ‘hinges’ without which we simply could not carry on.39 The claim that philosophical reflection on the necessity of a legal framework is at the same time a

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LIBERALISM AND CO N TIN G E N C Y Nor is there any suggestion that ‘true fictions’ are unchanging. What needs to be presupposed in order to make sense of ordinary experience will change with the variety of circumstances, but not as a matter of taste or fashion and some very basic assumptions may be more or less invariable. The point, however, is that we cannot specify what will be assumed to be invariable before critical enquiry begins. It would be very odd if someone (other than a mischievous philosopher) were to deny that things happen at some time in some place. And while we can conceive of a human world in which moral choices were somehow unreal, we would nevertheless be surprised (as a matter of fact) to learn that languages existed without an imperative mood. A t some level we picture human association as a matter of agents making choices which affect others, even if a capa­ city for making autonomous choices is not greatly prized within a particular culture. The significance of agency for an understanding of morality can be easily granted. What this concession may commit us to at the political or institutional level is much less clear. A t the very least, we must accept that intelligible agency depends upon stability of expectations. Stability, of course, can be attained in all sorts of ways. There are stable expectations in prisons and monasteries, yet it would be odd to regard either as models of social and political life. Leviathan also secures stability, but at a price modem liberals have been reluctant to pay. If we supposed, however, with Hobbes, that an anarchic and un­ predictable state of nature was the only alternative to authoritarian government, then we may accept that authorising a sovereign to lay down binding rules was a small price to pay for a measure of ‘commodious living’. In the ordinary way of things, we are not con­ fronting Hobbes’s dilemma. We are faced with more or less desirable options in viable political circum­ stances. What may be lost from sight is that stress on what is chosen may obscure the significance of an institutional context which makes choice possible. It is a paradox, as Oakeshott has pointed out, that ‘Hobbes, without being himself a liberal, had in him more of the philosophy of liberalism than most of its professed defenders.’42 Recognition of the overriding significance of stability in contexts in which agree­

justification of legal order should not itself be contentious. We can easily appreciate that a pure theory of legal order would not loom large in a society that happened to display an overwhelming consensus around a substantive conception of the good. But it clearly would not follow that legal order depended upon such a substantive consensus. In practical terms, we simply have to accept a plurality of de­ fensible values as a starting point for our reflections. Recognition of the contingency of values at this level, however, does not rule out the possibility that more binding philosophical reasons might be ad­ vanced in defence of a political order which made diversity manageable. Examples of the kind of argument I have in mind will be familiar to everyone from the canon of ‘classics’ of political philosophy. To be sure, the usual suspects among the classics constitute a motley crew. We find arguments ranging from the most abstract accounts of conditions of theoretical intel­ ligibility to detailed moral and political prescriptions for proper conduct in everyday life, informed by personal obsessions which are (in some cases) laugh­ able or contemptible. But this is just to recognise that classics of political philosophy operate at many different levels, and that matters of philosophical interest are sometimes concealed in the most un­ likely places. Whatever else might be going on in such texts, we nevertheless find attempts to specify what would need to be true about human beings living in communities if the ordinary things they take for granted are to make any sense at all. This, of course, is not necessarily what political philosophers always suppose they are doing, especially in cultures untroubled by the ‘burdens of judgement’.40 But we go back to them as philosophers precisely because certain sorts of problems necessarily arise when we take the justification of terms of social cooperation seriously. Oakeshott put the point nicely in a cele­ brated discussion of Hobbes. He defined philosophy as ‘the establishment by reasoning of true fictions.’41 Given the things we accept, there are certain notions which simply have to be held to be true. The point is not that we can give a list of these indubitable truths, rather that critical thinking depends upon presup­ positions which can and (at times) must be exam­ ined.

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BRUCE HADDOCK ment about ends cannot be expected does not commit us to Hobbesian measures. Stability of ex­ pectations may also be achieved in legal orders which guarantee basic rights.43 Philosophical interest fo­ cuses on the fact that we should have rights, not simply on the specific rights we happen to value. It remains the case, of course, that urgent and contentious theoretical issues are raised when we consider the sorts of rights that should be enshrined in a modern legal system. And at the policy level, too, it is by no means clear how a foundational commitment to agency should be translated into concrete proposals for educational and health provi­ sion, taxation and so on. Even theorists who share a broadly neo-Kantian approach to these questions will diverge widely in their views on the role of the state in specific areas.44 Philosophical agreement is thus much more likely on the priority of liberty than (say) the difference principle. What I am defending here is the idea of a spectrum which runs from political philosophy through ideology to policy questions, rather than a categorial distinction between philosophy and other modes of theoretical concern. Relations of entailment do not obtain along the spectrum; rather, we are dealing with compatibility in relation to what Rawls terms ‘lexical order’.45 The signifi­ cance of political philosophy at the level of policy is unlikely to be intrusive in consensual political cultures. But contentious issues (such as abortion in the United States or welfare in Britain) cannot be adequately handled without confronting (what still might properly be called) foundational ques­ tions. If we ask ourselves how the citizen should stand in relation to the state in a modern polity, we are inviting reflection at a number of different levels. We could be concerned with the obligation of parents to ensure that their children are educated and law-abiding or the obligation of the state to provide support for the destitute or wider questions of shared responsibility for the conduct of public life. It would be too much to expect a seamless web of doctrine to run through these questions. But the claim that philosophical discussion is irrelevant,

inappropriate or meaningless would surely cripple our critical endeavours. The implications of this view are wide-ranging and cannot be developed in any detail here. Even if the radical contingency of liberal values and institutions is granted, we are still left with the problem of explaining what it means to make hard choices in contexts where binding decisions have to be made. For the most part, we can accept that reasons which are regarded as compelling within a tradition may have little purchase beyond it. But traditions are no more self-contained than lan­ guage-games or forms of life. It is precisely when terms of reference are challenged that more basic forms of justification are called for. In these cases, we have to give reasons for our choices which extend beyond the values we happen to have. We do not have to presuppose that stark moral or theoretical dilemmas can always be resolved satis­ factorily, only that we have to appeal to (some­ thing like) practical reason whenever we are asked to give a public justification of our preferences. What makes liberalism distinctive is not so much the rationalism that critics have often focused on as the institutional procedures which have been de­ vised to facilitate agreement in pluralist contexts. My claim, then, is that a logic of practical reason is at work whenever hard choices are made. Where liberal theory goes astray is in treating the strong version of practical reason that has emerged in pluralist societies as the ideal form for the resolution of public disputes in any context. If my argument is correct a weak foundationalism, drawn from reflec­ tion on the necessary formal requirements for viable agency, can be seen to be at work in the positions of sceptical liberals even when they are reluctant to acknowledge the fact. To be sure, the idea of a philosophical foundation invoked here is very gen­ eral indeed. Most regularian polities could be de­ fended along these lines. And, of course, no polity is merely regularian. My contention, however, is that awareness of the necessary conditions for any polity to flourish does provide grounds for tempering more narrowly ideological preferences.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Rawls (1996). See Rorty (1989); Gray (1995a) and (1997). See Wenar (1995). See ibid., pp. 60-1. See Bellamy and Hollis (1995). See Rawls (1996), pp. 109, 161, and Hart (1961), pp. 189-195. Gray (1993), p. 328. Ibid., p. 328. Gray (1995a), p. 81. Ibid., p. 81. See Gray (1995b). Whether Gray is right to portray Berlin precisely as he does is, of course, another question. He draws attention (ibid., p. 14) to Berlin’s claim that ‘our conscious idea of man . . . involves the use of some among the basic categories in terms of which we perceive and order and interpret data.’ And he is clear that these ‘basic categories’ are neither empirical nor formal in any straightforward sense. Gray is happy to describe this as ‘a sort of quasbKantian transcendental deduction’ (ibid., p. 14), without dwelling on the implications this might have for radical value pluralism. In ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’, however, Berlin also describes these ‘basic categories’ as ‘universal - or almost universal - values’. See Berlin (1978), p. 166. And in all his later writings he was careful to distinguish pluralism from relativism. See his ‘Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth'Century European Thought’, in Berlin (1991), pp. 70-90. Berlin’s sympathy for the variety of modes of human flourishing was always coupled with recognition of the appalling cost of political folly, especially in the twentieth century. And he never wavered from the view that it was the responsibility of the political philosopher to specify the normative limits of a defensible pluralism. Rorty (1989), p. 146. See Rees (1985). See Kekes (1996). Hart (1961), p. 189. Hume (1966), p. 186.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Hart (1961), p. 195. Hume (1969), p. 578. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Wittgenstein (1968) and Winch (1958). See Winch (1972), especially pp. 61-3. See Lyotard (1993), pp. 135-47. See Hegel (1991). For further discussion see Haddock (1993) and my ‘Hegel’s Critique of the Theory of Social Contract’, in Boucher and Kelly (eds) (1994), pp. 147-63. See Wittgenstein (1969). See ‘Can There Be a Private Language?’, in Rhees (1970), pp. 55-70. Oakeshott (1975a), p. 55. See Oakeshott (1962) and, for discussion, Haddock (1996). Oakeshott (1975b), p. 62. See Hart (1961), pp. 54-60. Ibid., pp. 107, 245. See ibid., pp. 97-8. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. vii. See ibid., pp. 77-96. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 91. The terminology here is drawn from Collingwood (1940), pp. 3—77, and Wittgenstein (1969), p. 44. See Rawls (1996), pp. 54-8. Oakeshott (1975b), p. 25. Ibid., p. 63. See Martin (1993). Consider, for example, the contrasting positions of Rawls (1996), O’Neill (1996), Nozick (1974) and Hayek (1960). Rawls (1972), pp. 42-8. A useful distinction between the philosophy and ideology of liberalism is also mooted but not defended in detail in Croce (1973), pp. 235-43 and 263-7.

Part Five LIBERALISM VERSUS REPUBLICANISM?

13

B A C K T O T HE F U T U R E : P L U R A L I S M A N D T HE REPUBLICAN ALTERNATIVE TO L I B E R A L I S M Richard Bellamy

general laws which constrains and provides the basis for the operations of democratic institutions and the economic market. However, if different liberties em­ body incommensurable views of human flourishing, as pluralists believe, then a clash of liberties will place this doctrine in trouble. No metric will be available to adjudicate between different sets of liberties and show which combination most maximises freedom.4 Earlier liberals avoided this problem by holding to a historicist faith in the progress of society. A view still held implicitly and occasionally explicitly by many liberals today, this thesis assumes pluralism fosters autonomy and that an invisible hand reconciles the various heterogeneous ends pursued by individuals in mu­ tually supportive ways.5 Today’s complex and diverse societies render such solutions sociologically unten­ able as well as theoretically debatable.6 Different spheres of life and world-views generate competing and conflicting ethical codes, goals and commit­ ments. Worse, the very principles of liberalism can collide and are themselves subject to a plurality of incommensurable evaluations and interpretations. Witness the debates over issues such as abortion, freedom of information and social rights between rival factions within the liberal camp. Consequently, liberalism cannot hold the ring for such disputes. It is within, not above, the fray.

Contemporary societies are irreducibly pluralist.1 Their growing differentiation and complexity gem erate a variety of interests, ideals, cultures and values. This pluralism manifests itself in the wide range of ethnic, religious, ideological, occupational and other allegiances of citizens. The resulting diversity creates potential conflicts between groups of people holding different views and within single individuals. For differing ends, outlooks and evaluations may prove logically or practically incompatible and involve incommensurable types of moral claim.2 These tern sions are the lifeblood of current democratic politics and its greatest challenge. Clashes of opinion and interest provide the rationale for democracy, yet taken to extremes can make it totally unworkable. Liberalism presents itself as the appropriate poli­ tical form for such conditions. After all, its origins lie in the religious conflicts of early modem Europe and the class struggles of the centuries that followed. Liberalism tries to accommodate difference by pro­ tecting each person’s capacity to pursue his own good in his own way to the extent that is compatible with the similar pursuits of others. According to the standard liberal formula, this proposal involves seek­ ing the maximal set of equal liberty rights capable of being held by all.3 These rights are usually to be secured by a constitutional framework of universal,

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RICHARD BELLAMY To accommodate plurality requires an alternative approach, one I dub democratic liberalism. O f re­ publican inspiration, it eschews a pre-political con­ sensus on basic liberties for political negotiation aimed at a fair compromise. Instead of relegating the differences that accompany pluralism to the private and civil spheres, it gives them public re­ cognition. Republicans view liberty as a civic rather than a natural condition. Freedom only exists within a republican polity where self-government removes the possibility of domination by others through allowing citizens to ensure the laws respond to their various concerns and values.7 Within pluralist socie­ ties, these deliberations entail negotiating fair com­ promises between the different ideals and interests in play. Such reciprocal decision-making produces laws that recognise and reconcile the members of a pluralist polity, enabling them to live on an equitable basis with others. Though republicanism and liberal­ ism are historically entwined, with elements of both present in the political systems of most western democracies,8 coexistence should not be taken for complementarity or overlap. As I shall argue below, republican justifications and conceptions of liberty, rights and the rule of law differ from the liberal’s in important respects - most especially in relation to the role and nature of democracy.9 Republicanism issues in a democratic liberalism, where liberty and rights are intrinsic to and only achievable through democracy, not preconditions for the political pro­ cess as liberal democrats contend. The argument proceeds as follows. The next sec­ tion analyses the weaknesses of liberal democracy within complex and plural societies, while the suc­ ceeding section presents the democratic liberal alter­ native. I then present a defence of this proposed return to the liberties of the ancients against the charges that it is now both impractical and undesir­ able.

contract designed to legitimate the state’s monopoly of violence. According to this argument, free and equal citizens would only consensually submit to a polity that removed the uncertainties of the state of nature while preserving the most extensive set of equal natural liberties. Interference by the state or law is only justified to reduce the mutual interfer­ ences attendant upon social life so as to produce a greater liberty over all. The separation of powers supposedly fosters this aim by preventing any one from being judge in his or her own cause, thereby constraining the arbitrary and partial framing and interpretation of legislation. The rule of men is replaced by the rule of universal and equally applic­ able general laws.10 Two features of these arrangements are worth highlighting. First, as James Tully has observed, the normative consensus assumed by the ‘modem’ liberal conception of constitutionalism hypothesises a degree of uniformity among the constitutive peo­ ple.11 It assumes that behind different beliefs and customs lies a common human nature, a natural equality of status, and shared forms of reasoning sufficient to generate agreement on constitutional essentials. What divergences remain are supposedly eroded as historical progress leads to more homo­ geneous and less stratified societies that conform to a similar pattern of social and political organisation, and stand in contrast to the ranked societies and cultural particularisms of the past. Nation-building further strengthens this process. As co-nationals, the people share a corporate identity as equal citizens of the polity.12 Second, the rights-based approach goes together with a conception of freedom as non-interference and of the state as a neutral ringmaster, unconcerned with upholding any particular set of values.13 This understanding of the constitution encourages in its turn a purely preference-based picture of the econ­ omy and an interest-based account of democracy. In each case, what matters is the degree outcomes correspond to the uncoerced choices and express desires of those concerned. The conditions of pro­ duction and the protection of public goods enter with difficulty into this view of the economy. The first are assumed to be the result of voluntary con­ tracts, the latter left up to an invisible hand. Like­

Liberal Democracy Liberal democracy rests on a distinction between the state and civil society. Liberals standardly see con­ stitutionalism as a normative framework that sets limits on and goals for the exercise of state power. Traditionally, its principles are grounded in a social

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BACK TO THE FU TU RE technical, less amenable to general regulations, and hence harder to control through centralised demo­ cratic mechanisms. The range and scale of decisions handled by unaccountable specialised bureaucracies, and involving considerable technocratic discretion, expands. As the various areas of social life operate with increasingly distinct and largely self-validating cri­ teria, so they become more conflictual. They become ever more taken up with their own concerns and tend to interpret the world from their own perspec­ tive, generating incommensurable and incompatible claims. Reconciling such clashes by democratic horse-trading proves highly problematic. Clashes of interests appear more zero-sum, and their aggrega­ tion harder to legitimate and enforce because their relation to any given collectivity is unclear. Making and sustaining collective decisions is further com­ plicated by the spread of multiculturalism as im­ proved social mobility renders states more pluriethnic as well. Differences of beliefs and iden­ tities prove even less amenable to democratic bar­ gaining and the formation of stable and fair majorities than economic and social interests. As a result, the likelihood of conflict or the oppression of minorities rises. Liberals have responded to these failings of de­ mocracy as an instrument for interest aggregation and accountability by advocating the enhanced jur­ idification of politics.18 Worried by the destabilising effects of pluralism, they look to a legal constitution grounded in a consensus on rights and principles of justice to guarantee the polity stays just. Contem­ porary liberals suggest citizens can trim their diver­ gent substantive beliefs on the good to arrive at agreement on what is politically right.19 But this distinction proves elusive. How and when rights to privacy and to freedom of speech clash, for example, involve invoking notions of the presence and ab­ sence of constraints which may be normatively and empirically evaluated from a range of reasonably different perspectives, giving divergent answers in each case. In pluralist societies, the basic liberties and their interpretation become contested matters. In practice, therefore, liberal trimming entails the im­ position of a particular reading of liberalism and the judicial exclusion of dissident voices. Moreover,

wise, politics becomes a competitive market within which rival interest groups bargain with each other, and involves no or little attempt to evaluate the interests concerned. Its purpose is largely instrumen­ tal: to protect against incompetent or tyrannous rulers by allowing their removal, and to aggregate individual preferences through majoritarian or con­ sensus voting and encourage politicians to pursue policies that conform to them.14 Liberals accept that economy and democracy need regulating when they threaten the constitutional structure. However, identifying when such threats occur and who possesses the authority to remedy them proves problematic. Because the economy forms part of the private sphere, there are difficulties about whether the requisite interference is either legitimate or perpetrates an even greater intrusion into people’s lives than those it prevents. Such decisions cannot necessarily be left up to democratic governments, since interest groups may use the state’s coercive power to further their personal goals. This dilemma raises a further source of tension between the hypothetical consent underlying the constitution and the express will of the people. Liberals try to avoid this crux by treating the con­ stitution as a ‘higher’ law that provides the precondi­ tions for the ‘normal’ legislation arising out of democratic politics. They see judicial review by a court buttressed by a bill of rights as the best bulwark against the democratic subversion of the constitu­ tion.15 Pluralism erodes this liberal settlement. The social and economic complexity of advanced societies, and the consequent multiplicity of interests and values within them, render majoritarian decision-making more problematic, increase the difficulty of regulat­ ing the unaccountable power located in civil society and subvert the rights consensus upon which liberal­ ism rests.16 Increased functional differentiation re­ sults in a proliferation of autonomous centres of power.17 These centres are capable of making deci­ sions according to a variety of criteria specific to their respective domains, with unpredictable knock-on effects for other parts of the social and economic system. Citizens find themselves locked into a variety of these spheres, and get pulled in opposite directions by the inner logic of each. Problems become more

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RICHARD BELLAMY without democratic support the constitution and the courts risk appearing self-validating and being either practically impotent or obliged to adopt coercive measures. It remains to be seen if a more inclusive and political strategy is available.

agents or agencies with considerable power over others. For example, attempts to reduce the arbitrary hold men have traditionally exerted over women in marriage have been challenged on the grounds that they are too intrusive and themselves involve a greater degree of interference. Similar arguments have been used against laws to protect employees from unscrupulous employers. Even social liberals, such as L. T. Hobhouse, accept that the onus of proof rests on the proponents of state intervention to show that less interference is thereby created overall.22 Republicans by contrast, see debate about the legiti­ macy of interference per se as misconceived. They concentrate on providing a non-dominating envir­ onment where citizens can lead secure lives, plan ahead and live on a basis of mutual respect - con­ ditions which may require intervention.23 This view of liberty shapes the republicans’ dis­ tinctive linkage of the rule of law with the distribu­ tion of power and democracy. Instead of the constitution being a precondition for politics, poli­ tical debate becomes the medium through which a polity constitutes itself. This occurs not just in exceptional, founding constitutional moments, as some liberals grant,24 but continuously as part of an evolving process of mutual recognition. Domina­ tion and arbitrary power involve more than an infringement of the formal rule of law espoused by liberals. It is entirely possible to promote general rules based on whim or self-interest and that entail a gross curtailment of people’s freedom of action. The generality and universality requirements can also seem themselves arbitrary if employed to disqualify special rules that refer to properties that apply to only some groups - as when maternity leave for women or affirmative action policies are accused of being dis­ criminatory, or when such considerations are used to block any form of regulation which might seek to focus on particular contexts or outcomes.25 Such formal criteria appear particularly inadequate at tackling structural forms of domination, where dis­ crimination and selective blindness have been built into the institutions, norms, social and economic relations, and procedures within which the rules are framed. Contemporary liberal jurists try to get around these difficulties by adopting a more substantive

Democratic Liberalism Democratic liberalism harks back to a pre-liberal conception of constitutionalism that identified the constitution with the social composition and form of government of the polity.20 Much as we associate a person’s physical health with his or her bodily con­ stitution and regard a fit individual as someone with a balanced diet and regimen, so a healthy body politic was attributed to a political system capable of bringing its various constituent social groups into equilibrium with each other. The aim was to disperse power so as to encourage a process of controlled political conflict and deliberation that ensured the various social classes both checked and ultimately cooperated with each other, moving them thereby to construct and pursue the public good rather than narrow sectional interests. As Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit have shown,21 the heart of the republican approach lies in a different conception of freedom to the liberal’s. As I noted, liberty is a civic achievement rather than a natural attribute. It results from preventing arbi­ trary domination rather than an absence of inter­ ference tout court. Domination denotes a capacity to intentionally control and diminish an agent’s realm of choice, either overtly through various explicit forms of restraint or obstruction, or covertly by more subtle forms of manipulation and influence. Arbi­ trariness rests in the power to exert domination at whim, and without reference to the interests or ideas of those over whom it is exercised. Pettit notes that an absence of interference can be consistent with the presence of domination. Those with such power may simply choose not to wield it. Social relations will be adversely affected nonetheless. A good king may leave his subjects alone but they remain his subjects and will treat him with deference for that reason alone, regardless of whatever merit or demerit he may possess. Likewise, seeking to reduce interference may in given contexts be compatible with leaving certain

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BA C K TO THE F U T U R E to take the form of constructing a distinctive position through argument that seeks to accommodate at some level or another the various claims, values and interests at stake. How such compromises are to be achieved will vary according to the nature of the case. Thus, a compromise might take the form of a composite agreement in which each party gets some but not all of what it wants. This strategy usually proves easier when more than one policy is involved. Because groups often have rather different priorities with regard to a range of policies, it frequently proves possible for them to concede on issues they do not feel strongly about but others do in order to obtain similar concessions from them or other allies on the matters they regard as most important. Such pro' cesses are crucial to the logrolling and coalition' building practised by political parties. This practice does not entail that all views are reducible to inter' ests, as is sometimes assumed. In fact, these sorts of deals are more like bartering than normal bargaining. Indeed, they generally occur precisely because people hold a plurality of moral positions that lead them to evaluate goods and even what constitutes a matter of morality differently - much as beads can be ex' changed for gold when one group’s worthless shiny substance is another’s valuable commodity. The exchange entails incommensurability, since it might well not have taken place had it been conceived in standard ‘more or less’ terms, with all goods trans' lated into a single common currency. It also proves more responsive to intensity of feeling than a simple bargaining model. However, it will only work if those involved can avoid judging particular issues on their merits. When a compromise has to be reached on a single issue, such trade'offs cannot be achieved. Moreover, a mutual adaptation of views may be highly unsa' tisfactory, producing a result that nobody wants rather than something for everyone - precisely the situation critics who accuse compromise of incoher' ence most abhor. One way out of this dilemma, recently proposed by Robert Goodin, is an agree' ment on a second best.31 A notion adapted from economics, the basic idea is that modifications to one’s preferred option may be less desirable than obtaining one’s next best or an even lower ranked

view of the rule of law, identifying it with the upholding of rights by an independent judiciary.26 As I noted, this approach proves problematic. A political constitutionalism takes a different tack. Justice becomes identified with the process of polb tics. Political mechanisms not only ensure all are subject to the laws and that no one can be judge in their own case - the traditional tasks of the separa^ tion of powers - but also that the laws connect with the understandings and activities of those to whom they are to apply - the side benefit of dispersing power so that more people have a say in its enact' ment. Audi alteram partem forms the watchword of legal fairness, not the formal or substantive properties liberals associate with the law.27 ‘Hearing the other side’ within a pluralist polity implies respecting that people can be reasonably led to incommensurable and incompatible understand' ings of values and interests, and seeing the need to engage with them in terms they can accept. This criterion places constraints on both the procedures and the outcomes of the political process.28 It obliges people to drop purely selTreferential or self'inter' ested reasoning and to look for considerations others can find compelling, thereby ruling out arguments that fail to treat all as of equal moral worth. Political actors must strive for common ground through mm tually acceptable modifications. Because the clashes of principle and preferences associated with plural' ism preclude substantive consensual agreement, pO' litical compromise takes the place of a pre'political consensus.29 The type of compromise, and the style of politics needed to achieve it, depends on the issue and the character of the groups involved. Compromise is most familiar to us in ‘more or less’ contexts where we can ‘split the difference’ so as to converge on an agreed decision through incremental mutual conces' sions.30 Haggling over the price of a commodity such as a house or wage bargaining are typical examples. Such conflicts, however, are usually along a single dimension and involve a common denominator. As such, this procedure is unsuited to the conflicts associated with pluralism since it assumes commem suration. Compromises in ‘eithenor’ situations in' volving plural and competing values and interests prove more exacting but not impossible. They have

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RICHARD BELLAMY choice. A cheap sports car that pretends to be an expensive one may have less appeal than an unpretentious family estate, for example. Indeed, indivi­ duals or groups with conflicting first preferences may have shared second preferences. A compromise on an agreed second best may prove a more coherent and acceptable decision, therefore, than an attempt to combine first preferences in ways that transform them out of all recognition or involve inconsisten­ cies of various kinds. When a group makes a claim that involves special treatment or imposing burdens on others, they may have to compromise more unilaterally by appealing either to some norm of equity that the others also share, or to ideals or interests that their interlocutors can identify with through appeals to precedent, use of analogy or a fortiori arguments.32 Thus, a religious group seeking public recognition for its beliefs, say in state support for its schools, will be unlikely to get very far if it desires to set up a theocratic state. But they may be able to invoke a norm of equal treat­ ment by pointing to the existence of other publicly funded religious schools. Or, where state education has hitherto been secular, the claim might involve drawing a parallel with state support for some hu­ manist analogue to religious belief, such as the arts, in which the cultural aspect of religion is empha­ sised. Nonetheless, sometimes no compromise on sub­ stance proves possible. This dilemma often arises for purely practical reasons to do with the nature of the decision rather than because of any lack of good will among those making it - such as a choice between two somewhat different but equally good candidates for a post, for each of whom a sound case might be made. Only one can be chosen, and a compromise candidate does not always make sense. In such circumstances the compromise might have to be on accepting the outcome of a fair procedure, such as tossing a coin. Within purely procedural versions of democracy, the majoritarian principle can be seen as a compromise of this sort.33 Constitutional design has the task of shaping the political system so as to foster the form of democratic debate appropriate to the requisite kind of fair compromise. These considerations guide where de­ cisions are to be made, how groups should be re­

presented and the degree of autonomy particular bodies or sections of the community may claim. They are integral to a political constitutionalism, with its intimate linking of justice, the rule of law and the democratic dispersal and division of power. In the ancient ideal of mixed government, the favoured mechanism was to assign particular govern­ mental functions to different social classes. In con­ temporary societies, the answer lies in multiplying the forms of representation and the sites of decision­ making power. As I noted, the key lies in ensuring all sides get a hearing so that decisions can be justified to and accepted by all citizens. A notion linked to an ideal of equality of concern and respect, the aim is not only to render inputs more equitable, but also out­ comes.34 On the whole, this goal is more demanding than simply guaranteeing that everyone has their say or gets a piece of the action, important though these may be in attaining it. When the desired end is simply to ‘split the difference’, then the proportion­ ate weighting of interests or preferences may be all that is required. But the character of compromise is different in matters of principle, and equalising representation in this way may be either too much or not enough. Here the object will be to ensure equal consideration of the content and intrinsic importance of different values for particular groups of people, so that they seek solutions that are ac­ ceptable to a variety of different points of view. Instead of bargaining, participants in this sort of dispute must negotiate and argue. In the case of bargained compromises, preferences can be taken as exogenous to the system and democracy seen in largely instrumental terms. A negotiated compromise involves a more deliberative model of democracy that leads to preferences being shaped and ranked endogenously through the democratic process itself as otherwise inaccessible information regarding the range and intensity of the moral and material claims involved comes to light. Achieving this result re­ quires that groups reach a sufficient threshold to have a voice that people take seriously. With very small groups, that may involve more than propor­ tionate voting power; with others somewhat less will suffice.35 Within a more complex and differentiated social

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BACK TO THE FU TU RE power remains with the people or their representa­ tives.39 That position remains consistent with the acknowledgement of the standard liberal set of in­ dividual rights to freedom of expression, association, bodily integrity and the like. Indeed, it compels recognition of them.40 Yet it also allows the demo­ cratic balancing of their relative weight in relation to both each other and to additional values and inter­ ests according to the issue and the people involved. Diversity in the ethical reasoning of agents and of the moral relevance of given factors is naturally to be expected within pluralist and complex societies. Dispersing power helps both the appropriate mix of voices to be heard and the peculiar circumstances of particular contexts to be taken into account. Not only can general rules be tailored to a wide variety of objects and concerns, and their implementation and monitoring enacted to meet the special requirements of a given situation and constituency, but also - and often more importantly - specific norms can be established to meet special circumstances and rele­ vant differences. In consequence, the need di­ minishes for a judicially monitored principled constitution to frame democracy. Judicial review can track whether reasoned debate occurs, but need not substitute for an absence of such deliberation. As in a trial, the judge may advise on points of existing law and ensure debate is conducted in a procedurally correct matter, but like a jury the demos or its representatives will make the decision for themselves and may even overturn established precedent if the circumstances warrant it and make new law.41 This politicised account of justice suits a concern with domination and the fact of pluralism. Domina­ tion most commonly manifests itself through inhi­ biting or preventing groups or individuals from having a voice in the decisions governing their lives. When this occurs they are far more likely to find themselves oppressed by social structures that stunt or prevent their capacity to employ and develop their capacities or lead lives expressive of their beliefs and culture.42 For if political institutions constrain certain groups’ ability to influence both the issues that get discussed and how those that do get decided, they will lose status and standing, and become marginalised and ultimately exploited. Typically, oppression has manifested itself indirectly through

context centralised and hierarchical ways of distri­ buting power will be inadequate. Territorially based representation has to be supplemented by functional and cultural forms within particular sectors. Social and cultural interests are often territorially dispersed or located below any specific territorial unit. Em­ powering certain groups may require their represen­ tation within a specific location, or across a given sector, or in the case of vertical cleavages according to segment. Workplace democracy and parent gov­ ernors at schools are examples of the first, corporatist representation of unions, employer organisations and professional associations of the second, consociational representation for given ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural groups of the third.36 Such mechanisms allow minority opinions to have both a degree of autonomy within their own sphere com­ bined with a say in collective decision-making. On the one hand, all groups (those asking for special consideration included) are obliged to consult the broader interests and concerns of society as a whole. On the other, these same mechanisms operate as checks and balances on the purely self-interested or partial exercise of power. Democracy plays a central role in this system, protecting against arbitrary rule and enabling edu­ cative engagement with others.37 Decisions may be contested and the rationale behind them tried. Interests are not simply advanced and aggregated, as in liberal accounts of the democratic process. They get related and subjected to the criticism of reasons, transforming politics into a forum of principle.38 Positions can shift and common views emerge. De­ mocracy also operates within civil society as well as the state, acknowledging the power exercised by private bodies and the need to publicise them - a point liberal democrats tend to overlook by making too sharp a public/private distinction. Power is not simply devolved down in a hierarchical manner to lesser levels of the state, as in a standard federal system. It is dispersed among semi-autonomous yet publicised private bodies. In this way, politics shapes rather than being simply shaped by social demands. Paradoxically from a liberal perspective, a demo­ cratic liberalism contends that the rule of law de­ pends upon the rule of men. The only guard against arbitrary and dominating rule is if the law-making

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RICHARD BELLAMY the mechanisms of hegemony. A t the extreme, however, exclusion from politics may eventually lead oppressed groups to resort to extra-political means to put their case - a move that often lends legitimacy, albeit of a spurious nature, to the employment of outright force against them. Such has been the fate of indigenous peoples in colonial societies, of many ghettoised immigrant communities, of workers de­ nied the vote either in general elections or in the workplace, to name but a few well-known examples of this phenomenon. As these cases indicate, such domination involves not just an oppression of human beings but of a diversity of ways of life, values, interests and alle­ giances. In other words, it is linked to the denial of pluralism. Since these diverse attitudes and concerns are often related in their turn to different concep­ tions of the right and the good, the injustice their suppression entails is not fully captured by reference to a particular conception of justice that may perhaps unwittingly - itself embody aspects of the dominant position. Justice can only be done, there­ fore, by being seen to be done within a non-dom­ inating political structure that allows the various conceptions to confront each other so that their conflicts can be resolved through free negotiation.

their aim not so much a unified as a mixed polity. It was the insistence on the need for politics to con­ front the social reality of class and ideological strug­ gles that attracted the writers of the Federalist Papers, who adapted republicanism to the needs of a modern large-scale commercial society. As Machiavelli’s modem heir Max Weber appreciated, this feature also makes it suited to tackling the problems of pluralism.45 When republicanism is so conceived, the two standard criticisms of it prove misdirected. I shall take each in turn. Critics of republicanism’s practicality assume that the complexity of large-scale societies can only be handled by the market or a centralised bureaucratic state or - more usually - some combination of the two, with both social democrats and moderate lib­ ertarians falling into this last camp. However, de­ volved and more deliberative decision-making, far from being obsolete, has many advantages over these alternatives. Pluralism and complexity usually go together in the sense that what makes a problem complex is not simply its scale and the sheer number of factors involved, but the fact that it can be conceived and evaluated in numerous different ways. As such, complex problems resist decomposition into their component elements so that priorities can be hierarchically ordered. Different actors and observers may not agree on what these are let alone on what, or whether, they can be ranked on any given scale. It is precisely this kind of complexity that markets and bureaucracies often handle badly. Take the example of environmental issues, which typically display these characteristics.46 When discussing how best to handle acid rain, for instance, experts dispute both its causes and consequences. It has been traced to a number of natural and humanly produced emissions and associated with various sorts of damage to a wide range of objects and entities. Yet the extent to which particular damage can be attributed to any given cause is far from clear. Additionally, the hu­ man actors involved as both potential contributors to and victims of pollution are similarly varied - from private motorists and consumers, to a whole host of industrial and agricultural producers of one sort or another. Their concerns will be similarly diverse, and it is highly likely that each may be to some degree both polluter and polluted. Since they will almost

Two Criticisms Two criticisms are often ranged against schemes of the sort proposed. Modern complex societies are said to render a more participatory and deliberative pol­ itics together with any notion of agreement on common policies not only impractical but also un­ desirable. A political constitutionalism is said to be suited only to the small-scale and homogeneous communities that originally gave birth to the idea. Such criticisms are historically and substantively mistaken. They gain credibility from certain com­ munitarian views of republicanism. These latter tend to stress the supposed ethical and social unity of the ancient polity.43 However, the key issue for repub­ lican theorists from Aristotle to Machiavelli was class conflict and the difficulties of balancing the various interests of different social groups.44 Their view of politics was consequently less idealised and more realist than many communitarians appreciate,

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BACK TO THE FU TU RE in such decision-making negotiate a collective policy rather than engage in pluralist interest-group bar­ gaining if they are to arrive at a full perspective on the dimensions of the problem and prevent stalemate or distorted solutions, such as prisoners’ dilemmas. The way institutions operate will be crucial to achieving this, as we have seen. However, this feature gives rise to the second set of criticisms of republicanism. Some critics worry that this sort of institutional design amounts to social engineering and is driven by a misguided pursuit of an unobtain­ able agreement on an elusive common good that can only be attained through manipulation and covert coercion. The deliberative ideal is charged with assuming unity to be a prior condition of reasonable discussion, and with having consensus as its goal.49 With regard to the first part of the charge, certain theorists have argued that a deliberative democracy assumes a demos bound by a common fate and shared understandings.50 They note how constitutional set­ tlements motivated by this ideal - notably the U ni­ ted States Constitution - were simultaneously exercises in nation-building. Critics, however, point out the often exclusionary consequences of these projects, and in particular the marginalisation of those deemed not capable of joining in the conver­ sation - such as women workers, and members of non-western cultures. If a people are to subject themselves to often onerous burdens to generate collective benefits for others, then they will have to feel bound to them in some significant way. How far such bonds must rely on a common culture as opposed to mere functional interdependence and territorial contiguity is difficult to say. States display a bafflingly wide variety of mixes of these and other elements. Historical contingency probably plays the major factor. While starting from the status quo is inevitable, a political constitutionalism is not tied to any particular definition of the demos or the polity. On the contrary, both are explicitly seen as political artefacts fashioned by the people themselves. More­ over, it operates with a dynamic of inclusiveness that places the burden of proof on those wanting to exclude others or, via secession, themselves. They must show such choices to be consistent with a norm of equal worth and mutual acceptance, and that they do not cause even more damage to others than

certainly hold differing beliefs and values, how even members of a given group appraise their interests is going to vary greatly. We have here two basic aspects of political dis­ agreement: namely cognitive indeterminacy and conceptual essential contestability.47 Bureaucratic management will be highly inefficient and reductive in such instances. For there will be no clearly demarcated ends or interests to be served, and the relationships between the multifarious actors in­ volved cannot be tracked. As Hayek noted, admin­ istrators would have to be omniscient, omnipotent and unwaveringly angelic to carry out such a task. Markets sometimes fare better in offering a system of dispersed knowledge, but not when public goods or bads are concerned for the well known reason that the externalities involved are non-excludable. The price mechanism and the view that all values are mere subjective preferences are also insensitive to conviction-based or cultural difference. Moreover, market exchanges are rarely solely among individual consumers and entrepreneurs, but between private institutions that are themselves bureaucratically or­ ganised and suffer from the self-same managerial defects libertarians level at the state. By contrast, a political constitutionalism attempts to confront this complexity head on by bringing together the actors concerned in an effort at mutual understanding and accommodation. Devolved and deliberative decision-making enables appropriate ends and means to be fixed on by fostering coopera­ tion and coordination by multiple actors across a host of domains. Both the norms to be applied and their enforcement arise out of discussion, and could not be fixed in advance without introducing biases and oversimplifications of the problem with poten­ tially disastrous knock-on effects. Dryzek cites the resolution of a dispute over the construction of a dam and water supply system near Denver, Colorado as a successful instance of this approach.48 A plethora of federal and local agencies and groups were involved and produced an appropriate fair compromise in which the dam was built but substantial mitigating measures were instituted. The success of this ‘Foot­ hills’ decision led to the institution of a Metropolitan Water Roundtable to mediate future cases. It is of paramount importance that those involved

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RICHARD BELLAMY one’s particular practices, however, is perfectly con­ sistent with a universal principle of equal moral worth, and particular rules may be applied in as consistent and unbiased a manner as general ones. Universality and impartiality in these senses protect particularity by insisting that any case for special consideration must avoid subjecting others to dom­ ination. Arguments, such as those of sexists or racists that assert that certain people’s views or interests count for less than those of others will be treated as prima facie unacceptable, for example. A claim by a religious minority for public funding of its own schools will probably not be, since it asks for equal recognition rather than denying it. A political constitutionalism also allows for dif­ ferent styles of argumentation and suggests that as much attention should be paid to the different cultures of negotiation as to differences in the sub­ stance of what is negotiated.53 This need has long been recognised by students of diplomacy looking at international negotiations across cultures.54 Infrana­ tional pluralism means that domestic politics must also take such factors into account. Here too a problem-solving approach seems the most appropri­ ate, with symbolism and honour counting for as much as argument and strategic gains. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that any process of negotiation would be possible unless people saw the political norms framing the discussion as generating some form of common good. Civic freedom operates in this context as what Joseph Raz has called an ‘inherent public good’.55 That is a good the benefits of which are under the sole control of each potential beneficiary and which by their nature could not be voluntarily controlled and distributed by any single agency. For one cannot create such an environment except through the active collaboration with others, nor control the beneficial externalities that it gen­ erates so as to channel them only to certain others, though one could cut oneself off from them through one’s own anti-social and intolerant actions. Put another way, the condition of living as equals has to be desired in and for itself - as an intrinsic aspect of a certain kind of society - rather than instrumentally, since that would allow selective domination to acquire personal advantage. To the extent pluralist conflicts are rightly characterised as struggles for

benefits to themselves. But that leaves ample scope for the renegotiation of the terms by which citizen­ ship is defined and political structures operate. In­ deed, once it is understood that the reconstitution of a polity is an ongoing process, then there can be considerable openness and flexibility in how the constituent groups might relate to each other. With regard to the second part of the charge, I argued above that consensus need not and often could not be the goal of discussion, as certain theorists of deliberative democracy claim. They look for a ‘republic of reasons’ in which the most compel­ ling arguments prevail.51 However, pluralism renders such reasoning problematic, since more than one rationally compelling argument may be in play. That makes compromise necessary. Achieving a fair com­ promise also entails a change in the character of politics, but of a slightly different nature to one oriented towards consensus. It requires a move from a purely individualistic and instrumental politics to a more interactive and problem-solving model. Rather than viewing other people’s interests and values as mere constraints on getting one’s own way to which minimal concessions should be made, this approach leads to the search for solutions that attempt to integrate the various concerns of the parties in­ volved. This possibility need not rely on transcen­ dent criteria, however, merely a reciprocal understanding of the frameworks of other actors, the ability to engage with them and to seek agree­ ment on what is desirable even if this is based on differing views of why it might be. A t its heart, this conception of politics has an attachment to civic liberty, the guiding principles of which are non-domination, mutual acceptance and accommodation. What these conditions all point to is a vision of society in which all enjoy equal status. This implies universality and impartiality, in the sense that all persons must be treated as of equal moral worth and claims based on self-serving bias or prejudice should be ruled out. But that does not mean that all citizens must be regarded as having identical needs or the same values - quite the reverse. This supposition appears to arise from the belief that only general rules can meet these criteria, and that these will be blind to people’s particular concerns or convictions.52 A claim for respect for

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BAC K TO THE F U T U R E not). Secession or conscientious objection may still have to be options for groups or individuals whose values and convictions prove totally incompatible with those of the majority. Their reasons could not be, however, claims to superiority - that their values and interests are worth more than those of others - as was effectively argued by advocates of apartheid, for example. Rather, the case must be that such drastic measures are necessary to ensure equal worth and that otherwise their cultures and concerns might be totally eroded, as indigenous peoples seeking protec­ tion against a dominant post-colonial community have contended. Even here alternative solutions, such as greater autonomy or special rights, might be available to keep them within the polity.

recognition, then this goal should appeal to the parties concerned. Though this argument goes beyond the purely formal proceduralism advocated by thinkers like Habermas, who offer an entirely circular case for constitutional norms via the self-validating character of democratic discourse,56 it does not imply agree­ ment on substantive ends. Indeed at times it may be possible to do no more than agree to disagree and accept the authority of the democratic procedure itself. In these cases the majority principle acts as a means for resolving conflict in an authoritative manner when a compromise on substance cannot be achieved. Authority here rests on neither claims to superior reason nor coercion but the simple acceptance of the procedure as authoritative (in the sense of being ‘in’ authority) for the disputing parties. Here the authority of law rests on the legitimacy of the political system which generates it. Parties acknowledge that in some cases there may not be any ‘correct’ or ‘most just’ way of resolving a clash between incommensurable plural values, but that the ways of ending the dispute are acceptable. The procedural fairness of the process of justice can be more important than the favourability of, or consensus about, the outcome.57 A more political constitutionalism does not turn on the existence of a homogeneous community, therefore, as some communitarian theorists maintain and certain critics complain. The political system can operate as a public good for a plurality of social groups, without assuming they share other values (indeed, perhaps for the very reason that they do

Conclusion I have argued that to meet the challenges of the new millennium, liberalism needs to take a step back to the future and draw on the resources of the repub­ lican tradition. The resulting democratic liberalism employs the notion of a political constitution based around the dispersal of power and the mixing and balancing of social classes. It incorporates the liberal concern with freedom and justice into the demo­ crat’s desire to ensure that citizens have an equal say in influencing and holding to account the rules and rulers governing them. As such, it offers a means of both recognising and reconciling differences through negotiation of fair compromises that embody mutual acceptance and accommodation.

Notes 1. Much of this chapter’s argument emerged from an ESRC research project on ‘Sovereignty and Citizen­ ship in a Mixed Polity’ (R000222446) undertaken with Dario Castiglione of Exeter University. I am grateful for his comments, those of the editor and the participants at the Swansea ‘Liberalism at the Millennium II’ conference, to Richard Dagger and others at a seminar at All Souls College, Oxford, and to Cecile Laborde. I have also drawn on my Liberalism and Pluralism (Bellamy, (1999), especially chapter 5. 2. See Bellamy (1999), ‘Introduction’, and Kekes (1993) for a discussion of this problem. 3. For example, Locke (1991), Second Treatise, chapter

VI, para. 57; the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, especially Articles 1, 2, 4, 6, 14 and 16; I. Kant, ‘On the Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice” , in Kant (1991), p. 73; J.S. Mill, ‘On Liberty’, in Mill (1972), p. 75; and Rawls (1972), p. 60. 4. On this problem, see O’Neill (1979) and Gray (1989), especially chapter 9. 5. The locus classicus of this view is of course Adam Smith: Smith (1976), p. 456. But the thesis is far from being confined to economic liberals. See, for example, Mill (1972), pp. 73-4; Raz (1986), pp. 369-70, 394.

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RICHARD BELLAMY 6. I explore the breakdown of this social thesis and the related philosophical thesis in late nineteenth' and early twentieth-century thought in Bellamy (1992). 7. In employing this formula, I am referring to the neoRoman version of republicanism identified by Skinner (1998) and Pettit (1997), rather than the more loosely defined republicanism espoused by communitarians such as Michael Sandel, for example in Sandel (1996). 8. See Isaac (1988). 9. My main dissent from Dagger (1997) arises from his underplaying these differences. 10. See the references cited in note 3. 11. Tully (1995), chapter 3. 12. For example, see Locke (1991), Second Treatise, chapters II and VIII; Mill (1972), pp. 188-98; and R. Dworkin’s ‘Liberalism’, in Dworkin (1985), pp. 181-204. 13. Once again the examples cited in note 3 provide exemplary instances of this mode of thinking. 14. For an analysis of historical and contemporary models of liberal democracy, see Held (1996), chapters 3, 5, 6 and 7. 15. For examples from the left and right of the liberal spectrum, see Dworkin (1985), p. 197 and Hayek (1976), pp. 62-3. 16. These processes are naturally exacerbated by globalisation. Many liberal theorists believe this challenge can be met by extending liberal democracy in a cosmopolitan direction, for example Held (1995). However, the forces supposed to underpin this exten­ sion of liberalism have in reality given rise to the very kinds of diversity that make liberal democracy hard to sustain. For the same processes that drive globalisation have augmented functional differentiation in the economy and society and fostered multiculturalism. I have criticised the cosmopolitan liberal thesis, and provided an indication of how democratic liberalism can be extended to transnational political commu­ nities in Bellamy and Castiglione (1998). Despite global pressures, however, the state remains the pri­ mary locus of political authority and this chapter addresses that context. 17. The analysis that follows draws on Luhmann (1981) and Zolo (1992). 18. For example Dworkin (1995), pp. 2-11 and Rawls’s identification of public reason with judicial reasoning in Rawls (1996), Lecture VI. 19. Rawls (1996) offers the most sophisticated example of this approach. See Bellamy (1999), chapter 2 for a detailed critique. 20. For a brief history, see my T he Political Form of the Constitution: The Separation of Powers, Rights and Representative Democracy’, in Bellamy and Casti­ glione (eds) (1996), pp. 436-56. 21. Skinner (1998), Pettit (1997). 22. Hobhouse (1964), p. 71.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

See Sunstein (1993), pp. 3-4. For example, Ackerman (1991). See Hayek (1960), pp. 153-4. For example, Dworkin (1985), p. 2. Pettit (1997), p. 189. See too Hampshire (1991), pp.

20- 1. 28. See Gutmann and Thompson (1996), p. 57 and J. Cohen, ‘Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy’, in Benhabib (ed.) (1996), pp. 95-119, at pp. 100-1. 29. What follows draws on R. Bellamy and M. Hollis, ‘Consensus, Neutrality and Compromise’, in Bellamy and Hollis (eds) (1999), chapter 5, and Bellamy (1999), chapter 4. 30. I owe the distinction between ‘either/or’ and ‘more or less’ conflicts to Hirschman (1994), pp. 203-18. 31. Goodin (1995). 32. See Manin (1987), p. 353. 33. Singer (1974), p. 32 sees it as ‘a paradigm of a fair compromise’. 34. Beitz (1989), p. 155. 35. See Kymlicka (1995), chapter 7. 36. For examples of each of these mechanisms see, respec­ tively, Hirst (1994), Dahl (1985) and Lijphart (1968). I review the merits and weaknesses of these forms of pluralist politics in Bellamy (2000). 37. Pettit (1997), p. 30 and Skinner (1998), p. 74 n. 38 stress the first benefit but regard the second as a civic humanist rather than a neo-Roman concern, which smacks dangerously of ‘positive’ liberty. Putting history to one side, substantively I do not believe a weak ‘positive’ appreciation of the virtues of participation can be totally excised from republicanism. 38. See Sunstein (1991), pp. 3-34 for discussion of these points. 39. See Skinner (1998), pp. 74-6 for the history of this insight. 40. See J. Cohen, in Benhabib (ed.) (1996), pp. 102-5. 41. As Jeremy Waldron has recently insisted, we are sadly lacking a model of jurisprudence which takes legislation as seriously as judicial reasoning. Republicanism sup­ ports his plea for such an account. See Waldron (1999). 42. I’m here following Young’s distinction between dom­ ination and oppression, and the relation between the two; see Young (1990), pp. 37-8 and chapter 2. 43. For example Taylor (1995), pp. 141, 191-2, 302 n. 15. 44. See Bellamy, ‘The Political Form of the Constitution’, in Bellamy and Castiglione (eds) (1996). 45. Bellamy (1992), chapter 4. 46. I owe this example and much of the argument that follows to Dryzek (1990), chapter 3 . 1 have also drawn on Cohen and Rogers (1995). 47. See Mason (1992), chapters 1 and 2. 48. Dryzek (1990), pp. 73-4. 49. See, for example Young (1990), chapter 4. 50. For example, Miller (1995), pp. 150-2.

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BACK TO THE FU TU RE 51. Sunstein (1993), chapter 1. 52. See, for example, Young (1990), chapter 453. Young, ‘Communication and the Other: Beyond De~ liberative Democracy’, in Benhabib (ed.) (1996), pp. 120-35, at pp. 128-32.

54. 55. 56. 57.

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For example, Cohen (1991). Raz (1986), pp. 198-9. Habermas (1979), p. 90. See Lind and Tyler (1988) for empirical evidence to this effect.

14

ACCOMMODATING REPUBLICANISM David Rasmussen

Presently, there is a debate raging in political theory over two approaches to theorising justice: the deontological^ which holds that justice can be achieved by the establishment of specific principles and procedures as opposed to the achievement of a substantive common good as a goal or ‘end-state’, and the teleological, which conceptualises the achievement of justice as end - or goal-oriented, justifying whatever principles and pro­ cedures may be necessary as means to the realisation of that specific end. No doubt, both Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls would want to see themselves on the deontological side of this debate. In their own ways, they present their theories as proceeding from the acceptance of certain assumptions about the need to respect wide value-pluralism. These assumptions are held to be incompatible with the teleological ap­ proach, whose specified end - however characterised - is in some way reasonable to contest and disavow in the light of them. However, each accuses the other of a kind of latent Aristotelianism, which is one way of characterising ‘teleology’.1 The source of that accusa­ tion is clearly to be found in both thinkers’ attempts to accommodate the influential critique of liberalism by republicanism. They both want to acknowledge the connections between public political life and ‘private’ liberty upon which the critique insists, but without sacrificing an essential respect for individual liberty and diversity that liberalism aspires to typify. The accusation by one implies that the other has somehow failed in the attempted synthesis of liberalism and republicanism.

In the following I want to turn to that portion of the 1995 debate between Rawls and Habermas which focuses on the Ancients and the Moderns in order to clarify what is at stake in what I have called ‘accommodating republicanism’. Such is the significance of these two thinkers in modern political theory that it is useful to set out the ‘liberal republican’ debate at least partly in the terms sug­ gested by their exchange. We will see how ‘law’ turns out to be at the centre of this controversy, whether one wants to see it in the form of Rawls’s constitu­ tionalism or Habermas’s co-originality thesis. It will become clear that the question of the distinctiveness between the two may rest upon whether Rawlsian constitutionalism provides a genuine alternative to the co-originality thesis. This will be a crucial test of Rawlsian liberalism’s conceptual strength, if we grant that accommodating the republican insight is a necessary move for it to make. We will then be in a position to identify an important issue that should be placed on the liberal - republican research agen­ da.

Rawls and Habermas: ‘Ancient versus M odern’? The battle between Rawls’s ‘interpretative construc­ tivism’ and Habermas’s ‘argumentative constructi­ vism’ comes to the fore over Benjamin Constant’s distinction between the liberties of the moderns and the liberties of the ancients, and the claim that these

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ACCOMMODATING REPUBLICANISM private rights? Given that, as we shall see, Haber­ mas’s response involves a radical conceptual and practical extension of democracy, we may go on to ask how one might realise the substantive moral/political goal of justice as fairness while assuring the liberal goal of impartiality in a political process that is comprehensively democratic. Habermas’s solution is based on a notion of re­ ciprocity derived from the procedure of argumenta­ tion. He stresses how language, with which people reason and communicate with each other, is essen­ tially intersubjective. He urges that we must there­ fore think of ‘justified’ norms as being those which would emerge from free and equal discourse. The Habermasian thesis is that justice as fairness can only be achieved through an adequate notion of recipro­ city. In turn, such a notion can only be gained from the procedure of argumentation in which the actors in the political process mutually recognise the claims and counter-claims of one another. Here, we en­ counter the centrality to Habermasian political the­ ory of public will-formation - by which is meant democratic procedure - which can be reconstructed as a public and intersubjective process derived from the procedure of argumentation. The emerging thesis postulates the assumption that the norms of private, individual rights can only be derived from the pro­ cess of public will-formation; they are not prior to it. It follows from this that private and public autonomy are co-original, the consequence of which being that rights are democratically grounded from the outset. The point of this argument is the claim that for Rawls rights are not democratically grounded. Ha­ bermas believes the upshot is as follows: if Rawls had accepted his critique, which epistemically associates the reasonable and the true with the consequence that consensus and validity are linked from the outset,4 then he wouldn’t have had to use the original position as a device of representation. This is because he would have found that ‘the moral point of view’ is implicit in the socio-ontological constitu­ tion of the public practice of argumentation.’5 Further, Rawls would not have had to make the second step in his theory, that is the step to over­ lapping consensus, because the public practice of argumentation requires the ‘complex relations of mutual recognition that participants in rational dis­

should be nourished by the same root. Constant claims that ‘modem’ liberty - the liberties of private individuals - is best directed towards self-develop­ ment which, in his view, is most effectively achieved through free, collective political participation. (This is the exercise of ‘ancient’ liberty, the ideal which particularly attracts contemporary republicans.) Hence Constant calls for an efficacious combination of the two types of liberty.2 Habermas’s point connects ancient and modern liberty much more tightly than what, in Constant’s approach, is still an instrumental linkage of the two. He argues simply that what he calls ‘public’ and ‘private’ autonomy (analogues for ‘ancient’ and ‘modem’ respectively) are ‘co-original’; neither is prior to the other in any plausible conceptual sense. He thinks that Rawls finds himself defending the quintessential^ liberal position of prejudicing the liberties of the modems, the private rights of private individuals, over those of the ancients, the political rights of public individuals, or ‘citizens’. This is because the Rawlsian ‘political’ sphere, from which are drawn the shared ideas used to justify liberal politics (and which for Rawls, of course, prioritise individual liberties in the lexically primary first principle of justice), is already ‘given’ in his theory. It just appears, so to speak: a ready-made domain demarcating the sphere in which constitutional de­ mocratic politics thereafter takes place and from which reasons to provide public justifications for such politics are drawn.3 Now the republican critique says about liberalism the very thing that Habermas is here saying about Rawls, namely that liberalism functions to justify private rights above all else and, indeed, tends just to assume them, as being simply ‘ready-to-hand.’ Among other complaints, republicanism believes that this leaves liberalism fatally inattentive to how a society can establish and maintain the public conditions necessary for the kind of liberty-promot­ ing politics it favours. Given that republicans do not want to reject wholesale liberalism’s general ideals of just governance, we can conceptualise the heart of the liberal - republican debate as posing this ques­ tion: how does one retain the basic framework of liberalism while at the same time accommodating the republican critique of liberalism’s prioritisation of

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DAVID R A SM U SSE N course “must” accept (in the weak sense of trans­ cendental necessity).’6 In other words, Rawls should have built consensus fully into the first stage of the theory (the original position in which rationally choosing agents choose under reasonable procedural constraints) rather than adding it on in the second stage (the step to overlapping consensus as the achievement by justice as fairness - the outcome of original-position deliberation - of the right kind of stable public support). This would have enabled his political liberalism to escape both the arbitrariness of the second stage (for here ‘the philosopher can at most attempt to anticipate in reflection the direction of real discourses as they would probably unfold under conditions of a pluralistic society’7) as well as the implicit monological perspective of the first stage (for Rawls ‘imposes a common perspective on the parties in the original position through informa­ tional constraints and thereby neutralises the multi­ plicity of particular interpretive perspectives from the outset’8). In the Habermasian alternative, with its ‘speech-act’ view based on the nature of perfor­ matives from which one derives a certain intersubjective necessity, intersubjectivity - and its notion of reciprocity to guarantee impartiality - is written into the theory from the outset. In this sense, practical reason is actualised through mutual recognition: ‘we could say that precisely those principles are valid which meet with uncoerced intersubjective recogni­ tion under conditions of rational discourse.’9 ‘Con­ sensus’ need not be an afterthought, following in the wake of the construction of principles of justice. From Habermas’s point of view Rawls’s distinction between the private and the public, which underlies his distinction between the political and the com­ prehensive, is not only unnecessary but leads to undesired consequences, particularly when one fo­ cuses on liberties and rights. It runs against the historical insight that the ‘boundary’ demarcating the relative spheres is always shifting, due to the basic shifts in political will-formation (Habermas’s example is that of the welfare state’s development, which turned formerly private matters of welfare into public political concerns).10 From this perspective, Habermas thinks that Rawls would be better off subsuming this distinction under that of ‘legal reg­ ulation’ which would in turn be determined by the

democratic life of a political community. In other words, given such a scenario legal regulation would determine the distinction between the public and private in a democratic way in the sense that those under the law would be its own authors. The reigning question would then be: ‘which rights must free and equal persons mutually accord one another if they wish to regulate their existence by the legitimate means of positive and coercive law?’11 If one were to put the question that way it would follow that Rawls’s characterisation of a private domain, which contains the realm of the comprehensive as distin­ guished from a public realm that characterises ‘the political’, would be a lot less necessary than his political liberalism would have us think. Habermas would therefore shift the Rawlsian distinction be­ tween the private and the public, or the compre­ hensive and the political, to the domain of the procedure of legal regulation which would accord the right to equal ‘actionable subjective liberties’ as well as the public autonomy of its citizens. In brief, Habermas holds that legal procedure presupposes the subjective autonomy of its citizens, what Rawls would call the domain of private right. A t the same time legal procedure in a democratic society cannot be legitimate without the public exercise of democratic law-making. So private and public autonomy presuppose each other. Hence, one would infer from the argument that Rawls should have concentrated on the procedure of democratic law-making.12 He could have done this, it seems, without moving beyond the bounds of the procedur­ al towards teleology because Habermas’s democratic law-making entrusts even more responsibility in formulating norms than Rawls does to that political procedure.13 In his ‘Reply’, Rawls sets out a rigorously con­ structed rebuttal of Habermas’s characterisation and critique of his project. He contends that if one pays careful attention to the actual practice of designing a constitution in relationship to the process of govern­ ment it can be seen that private autonomy cannot be regarded as pre-political at all. The public political culture which grounds it is not just ‘given’, for there is a real, founding constitutional convention that se­ lects a constitution with its Bill of Rights and this ‘restricts majority legislation in how it may burden

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ACCOM MODATING REPUBLICANISM at stake, we may ask if the question of the co-relation of the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns, of private right and popular sovereignty, can be resolved independently of a contingent con­ stitutional history. In Rawls’s view it could be that ‘Habermas may have no objection to justice as fair­ ness but may reject the constitution to which he thinks it leads, and which I think may secure both the ancient and modern liberties.’20 Fair enough. Rawls is willing to concede that ‘he and I are not, however, debating the justice of the United States’ constitution as it is; but whether justice as fairness allows and is consistent with the popular sovereignty he cherishes.’21 However, Rawls is clearly sensitive to the inter­ pretation, and thus the critique, that Habermas gives of the liberalism he articulates. Hence, in support of his argument that individual rights are not pre­ political, and to some extent in support of his own more interpretative view, he cites an argument which Habermas uses against Charles Larmore. Larmore has argued that one right has to proceed and constrain democratic will-formation: ‘no one should be forcibly compelled to submit to norms whose validity cannot be made evident to reason.’22 Ha­ bermas interprets this as a denial of co-originality, meaning the establishment of a pre-political right against the state which is perceived under the cate­ gory of violence. Against this view Habermas pre­ sents a two-stage model which begins with the ‘horizontal sociation of citizens who, recognising one another as equals, mutually accord rights to one another. Only then does one advance to the constitutional taming of power presupposed with the medium of law.’23 Now Rawls believes that his own construction can be viewed in a similar way. Hence, he arrives at two conclusions, namely that Habermas’s position is not that different from his own,24 and that Habermas mistakenly unleashes a critique in his interpretation of liberalism.25 Habermas thinks that liberalism founders on the dilemma generated by the conflict between these two propositions: ‘no moral law can be externally imposed on a sovereign democratic people’ and ‘the sovereign people may not justly . . . enact any law violating these rights.’26 But for Rawls there is no true dilemma here: both proposi­

such basic liberties as liberty of conscience and freedom of speech and thought.’14 To be sure, then, rights ‘trump’ popular sovereignty, but only as pop­ ular sovereignty is expressed in the legislature in­ asmuch as those very rights are derived from a democratic process of constitutional foundation. Hence, basic liberties are ‘incorporated into the constitution and protected as constitutional rights on the basis of citizens' deliberations and judgements over time’ (emphasis added).15 In other words, and this is a distinctly American view, popular sovereignty is to be distinguished from ‘parliamentary supremacy’. Following Locke’s dualist idea of a constitutional democracy Rawls contrasts ordinary law-making by a legislature and the ‘people’s constituent power to form, ratify and amend a constitution’ in order to clarify the distinction. A parallel distinction is then drawn between ‘higher law of the people’ and the ‘ordinary law of legislative bodies’.16 It is important that the example which illuminates Rawls’s argu­ ment is historical, not abstractly conceptual. Follow­ ing Bruce Ackerman,17 he cites the three most significant, decisive innovations in American con­ stitutional history: the founding and initial develop­ ment of the constitution during the period 1787-91, the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the mid-1930s. Rawls observes that in these periods it was the electorate which ‘confirmed or motivated the constitutional changes that were proposed and finally accepted.’18 O f course, Rawls’s case, derived from historical interpretation and not purely from philosophical argumentation (hence the contrast between inter­ pretative and argumentative constructivism), is pre­ sented as reliant upon the development of the constitutional history of the United States. As such, he argues this reference proves that justice as fairness is a political notion rather than one derived from pre-political natural law. He insists that for him ‘the liberties of the moderns do not impose the prior restrictions on the people’s constituent will’19 - and to that extent he, too, thinks he can accommodate the republican critique. But does Rawls’s argument prove anything beyond something which is peculiar to the constitutional history of the United States? Or, to rephrase the issue

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DAVID R A SM U SSE N tions are correct and ‘simply express the risk for political justice of all government, democratic or otherwise; for there is no human institution - political or social, judicial or ecclesiastical - that can guarantee that legitimate (or just) laws are always enacted and just rights always respected.’27 It is quite conceivable that a single person could stand alone and be right to say that law and government are unjust. ‘N o special doctrine of the co-originality and equal weight of the two forms of autonomy is needed to explain this fact,’ Rawls writes. ‘It is hard to believe that all major liberal and civic republican writers did not understand this. It bears on the ageold question of how best to unite power with law and justice.’28 A t this point, we see Rawls making no attempt to do anything other than defend his position against the presumption of a liberal bias for private rights. But clearly he doubts that Habermas’s theoretical construction, such as the co-originality thesis, will guarantee the proper exercise of law and justice in practice. Equally, he questions the emphasis on the political in Habermas’s apparent claim that ‘the internal relation between the two forms of autonomy depends upon “the normative content of the mode of exercising political autonomy.” ,29 Rawls wants to know how we might justify the idea that it is incumbent specifically upon the political realm to provide the basis for private autonomy, given that activity in the institutions and practices of civil society could also provide a sufficient basis for it. He speculates that the origin of Habermas’s prior­ itisation of political activity is found in civic human­ ism (by which it is reasonable to assume that he means Aristotelianism). The crucially relevant fea­ ture here is that for civic humanism the greatest good is conceived of as active participation in political life, a paradigm of the teleological approach. For Rawls, this notion is really derived from a comprehensive doctrine. I take his critique of Habermas to be based upon the idea that it is reasonable that not everybody pursues the good defined specifically in terms of political life and activity. Non-political public pro­ jects and private interests and pursuits are equally reasonable. From the point of view of political liberalism, then, it would be inappropriate to assert one comprehensive view over others. Hence, for

Rawls, not everybody need pursue the good embo­ died in the politics of old as an intrinsic element of the good life today - but Habermas’s theory seems implicitly to curtail this possibility.

The Persistence of The ‘Teleological Question’ So Rawls’s reply to Habermas raises a very interesting point to which, to my knowledge, Habermas has yet to reply. I would contend that it can be used to formulate an urgent issue for the liberal/republican research agenda. His critique can be formulated as follows: if one asserts the co-originality thesis in the way that Habermas does, with its implicit assumption about the primacy of the political in the ancient as opposed to the modern sense, then one buys into a teleology which can only be justified through a comprehensive philosophical framework.30 If valid, it suggests that Habermas may have gone too far in his attempt to accommodate the claims of repub­ licanism; a crucial modern insight about the plur­ alistic nature of the good has gone unrespected. Rawls claims to get by his interpretative constructi­ vism what he contends Habermas does not get by his alternative argumentative constructivism. As I un­ derstand it, Rawls claims to be able to assert a merely political and non-comprehensive notion of demo­ cratic procedure through his use of the claims of a certain form of constitutional legal theory. It would be equally interesting to know if Habermas believes that Rawls, by relying on American constitutional­ ism, could successfully avoid a similar dilemma namely, the assertion of the teleological primacy of the public on grounds which depend too specifically (‘comprehensively’) on the particularities of Amer­ ican historical experience.31 Either way, the republican insight into the rela­ tionship between the public and the private may seem to be one that must be coherently adopted by any theory sharing the broad moral and political purposes of Rawls and Habermas. But, as their ex­ change shows, it is as yet far from clear that it can be accommodated without reliance upon the kind of teleological assumptions from which many contem­ porary political theorists - Rawls and Habermas included - emphatically wish to distance themselves.

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Notes 1. The appropriateness of the term ‘Aristotelianism’ may be questionable. I presume that its spirit is what Habermas invokes when he associates Rawls with a classical theory which legitimates its theory of justice by assuming the actuality of just institutions in chapter 2 of Habermas (1996). He also thinks that the fact that ‘the issue of principles of justice can arise only in the guise of the question of the just distribution of the primary goods’ is more consistent with ‘Aristotelian or utilitarian approaches than with a theory of rights, such as [Rawls’s] own, that proceeds from the concept of autonomy’ (Habermas, 1995, p. 114). Further, I assume that the term captures what Rawls means when he associates Habermas with civic humanism, which he does at Rawls (1996), p. 420. 2. See B. Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Corm pared with that of the Moderns’, in Constant (1988), pp. 308-28, at p. 327; cf. Habermas (1995), p. 129. 3. Habermas (1995), esp. pp. 126-9. 4. Ibid., pp. 119-26, especially p. 122. 5. Ibid., p. 127. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 121. 8. Ibid., p. 117. 9. Ibid., p. 127. 10. Ibid., p. 129; cf. Benhabib (1992), pp. 89-120. 11. Habermas (1995), p. 130. 12. Ibid., pp. 130-1. Habermas believes that ‘once the

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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concept of law has been clarified in this way, it becomes clear that the normative substance of basic liberal rights is already contained in the indispensable medium for the legal institutionalisation of the public use of reason of sovereign citizens’; ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 131. Rawls (1996), PP. 404-5. Ibid., p. 405. Ibid., pp. 405-6; cf. ibid., pp. 231-40. Ackerman (1991), chapters 3-6. Rawls (1996), p. 406; cf. ibid., pp. 233-5. Ibid., pp. 406-7. Ibid., p. 407. Ibid. Cited in Habermas (1996), p. 456. Ibid. Rawls (1996), p. 407. Ibid., p. 412. Ibid., pp. 411, 416. Ibid., p. 416. Ibid. Ibid., p. 419. Ibid., p. 420; cf. pp. 376-80. Habermas has recently had more to say about the distinction between the reasonable and the true in Rawls’s work. However, at the time of writing there remains much more mileage in their exchange; see Habermas (1998b), pp. 75-101.

Part Six T HE ‘ A U T O N O M O U S I N D I V I D U A L ’ : FEMINIST C R I T I Q U E S AND LIBERAL REPLIES

15

L I B E RALI S M, FEMI NI SM, ENLIGHTENMENT Kate Soper

women appeared a barbaric anachronism. For them, parity of treatment for the sexes was viewed as essential to bringing political practice into confor­ mity with liberal philosophy - and this view has been shared by all those who have subsequently carried forward the ‘equal opportunities’ campaign for an end to female subordination. What is essentially at issue for all such critics is the arbitrary and unjustifiable exclusion of women as proper candidates for the freedoms and rights claimed to be due to humanity at large: a line of objection which has in recent times been focused on the extent to which liberal humanist discourse has functioned historically as a cover under which both gender and racial difference can be safely ignored and the particular interests of a white, male and bourgeois elite be the better secured. But feminism has also been viewed as rooted in liberal-Enlightenment values in the further and re­ lated sense that in developing this immanent cri­ tique, it was doing no more than observing the selfcritical, constantly revisionist spirit of those values themselves.1 To point this out, however, is clearly to beg the question as to how self-critical this spirit can become before it turns heretical. A t what point does feminist criticism of liberalism cease to be immanent to it and become outright dissidence? One possible answer might be at the point when it casts doubt on the capacity of liberal-democratic institutions and political process to deliver the ‘free­ dom and equality’ for all individuals that liberalism

I Like many other intimate relationships, that of feminism and liberalism has from the outset been troubled by contention, but it has also proved to be very resistant to any final severance. By common consent, the modern feminist movement has its roots in the philosophical liberalism of the Enlightenment, but it has also since its origins constituted itself at least in part through an immanent critique of the partialities and hypocrisies of its humanist and ega­ litarian claims. Yet it has belonged within, even as it has conducted a continuous polemic against, the framework of liberal-Enlightenment thinking. This is so in two senses: firstly, in the sense that although they were highly critical of the patriarchal culture of the liberal Enlightenment, most of those arguing for female emancipation from the end of the eighteenth century until relatively recently have viewed that project as not only consistent with liberal principles but as requisite to their full implementation. For Wollstonecraft, it seemed only rational that a Lockean-liberal conception of rights and citizenship should extend to women on the same grounds and in equal measure as it did to men, even though in demanding that it should be, she was asking for an extension of rights and franchise that was totally unacceptable to the political culture of her time. From the perspective of the form of liberalism de­ fended by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor in the nineteenth century, the continued subjection of

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KATE SOPER abstractly professes to uphold and seek to advance. It is always debatable, however, at what point exactly this may be said to occur in any feminist critique of liberalism. Virginia Sapiro, to take but one example, has presented Wollstonecraft as challenging not just the masculinity of the liberal conception of citizen­ ship but also - and even more radically for her times - its rigid distinction between ‘public’ and private’ spheres. But Sapiro nonetheless seems to view such demands as capable of accommodation, at least in principle, within the existing framework of a liberal politics. Thus she writes that Wollstonecraft’s argu­ ment on democracy offered a ‘means of stretching the liberal temperament to incorporate into political thinking explicit concern for the quality of personal relations and day-to-day conditions of the lives of citizens.’2 On the other hand, one might be inclined to argue in the converse sense, that if Wollstonecraft can indeed be interpreted as launching an early ‘feminist’ assault on the private-public division, then she is not so much ‘stretching’ as directly contesting liberal sentiment.3 In other words, what seems raised here is how far liberalism, not only in Wollstonecraft’s time but also since then, is consistent with the dissolving or transcending of the public-private di­ vide that is called for in this form of feminist critique, or tolerant of its insistence on such a ‘politicising’ of the ‘personal’. But whether one reads Wollstonecraft as pushing the limits of liberal politics or as more radically breaking through these, there is little doubt that in the later argument of the socialist feminists, it is liberal political institutions themselves that are un­ der attack. In arguing that without the overthrow of capitalist exploitations and its class-based forms of oppression, female emancipation will always be par­ tial, more formal than real and tend always to be restricted to the more affluent and educationally privileged, socialist feminism would seem clearly at odds with liberal reformism. Even so, given that it clearly retains a commitment to some of the key emancipatory goals of the liberal Enlightenment (to those of freedom, parity of treatment, self-realisation and so on), one may still question whether socialist feminism really constitutes a decisive break with the immanent critique of liberalism’s essential mode of reasoning. After all, much of the dispute (if admit­

tedly not all of it) between liberal and socialist feminists would seem to be over means rather than ends: what is at issue is the capacity of liberal forms of polity to deliver on the emancipatory agenda rather than the agenda itself.4 In this sense socialist-fem­ inist critique remains ultimately consistent with the commitment to liberal goals and values even as it rejects the liberal conception of the procedures through which they might be realised. If this is right, then one might claim that the point of final rupture with the immanent feminist critique of liberalism has come only more recently in the form of the postmodernist rejection of the ‘foundationalist’ metaphysics and universal humanist commit­ ments of liberalism. For we are talking here of an attack on liberalism not for its political shortcomings in realising its professed Enlightenment commit­ ments, but of an attack directed against liberalism’s Enlightenment pedigree itself. Nor is it any accident that much of this critique has been formulated in terms of liberalism’s unfortunate inheritance of, and continued reliance upon, a so-called ‘Enlightenment subject’. In effect, there are two aspects of this critique corresponding to two related, but distinguishable, constructions to be placed upon the notion of the ‘Enlightenment subject’. In a first and more histor­ ical understanding, the idea refers us to the ideals of human subjectivity first promoted in the late seven­ teenth century and more fully elaborated in the historical period that we know of as ‘Enlighten­ ment.’5 Most prominent among these is the idea of ‘autonomy’: the liberated or Enlightened indivi­ dual is one who, in Kant’s phrase, ‘dares to know’, who is no longer in thrall to received ideas and externally imposed rules of comportment but thinks and acts in accordance with self-ordained principles - who prescribes the law unto the self. Self-mastery, independence, freedom from superstition and un­ thinking subservience to religious dictates, the ex­ ercise of reason in pursuit of self-chosen ends: these are the recommended qualities of the subject as first promoted in the writings of the Enlighteners. The subject in this conception is central to a normative theory about what it is to be a fully realised, auton­ omous human person, and in an important sense it is a historical category, referring us to one who comes to

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LIBERALISM, FEMINISM, E N LIG H TEN M ENT ‘autonomous’ individual as a delusion of the bour­ geois epoch itself. The objection here is not so much that this conception of the self as ‘sovereign being’ validated forms of independence whose enjoyment was systematically denied to women, but that it promoted a misguided ideology of personal autono­ my through which all individuals were encouraged to overlook their actual ties of dependency on others, and men, in particular, were enabled to justify their detachment from the sphere of domesticity and reproduction. Individuals are not only culturally embedded and embodied to an extent and depth that liberal humanist ideals of selfhood utterly fail to appreciate; they are, in virtue of being so, fragmented selves: the unified subject of the liberal-Enlightenment is a fiction as well as a masculine fetish. Postmodernist criticism of the Enlightenment sub­ ject in the ‘abstract’ sense, on the other hand, is directed not at the discounting or downgrading of specifically feminine values and attributes, but against what is said to be a mistakenly universalist and essentialist conception of humanity which lies at the heart of the Enlightenment and liberal-humanist projects. The problem is not (as a feminist such as Wollstonecraft supposed) that women have been irrationally and hypocritically excluded from the claims that are made about the human subject, but rather that this notion is itself a dangerous fiction: to invoke the idea of a universal humanity, so it is said, is to be guilty of a certain imperialism, to lend oneself to an anti-democratic impulse to over­ look cultural and personal difference. Going together with this feminist critique of the Enlightenment conceptual legacy there has also been a tendency for feminist historians of the eighteenth century to portray the ferments of the French Re­ volution in a very negative light, and to deny they had any positive role to play in the advance of female emancipation. In the argument of Joan Landes, the period is associated with the opening-up of the exclusively ‘masculine’ space of the ‘public’ and the dominion of a ‘reason’ which is again viewed as the exclusive attribute of the male.7 Women, we are led to believe, had little or nothing to gain from the process of liberalisation, and those of them who were calling for women to be included within the remit of the so-called ‘rights of man’ tend to be

be as a consequence of the new rationality and scientific understanding illuminating the period of the Enlightenment. One might note, in this com nection, the contrasts which scholars have drawn between conceptions of reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cassirer, for example, argues that, for the later century, ‘it is no longer the sum total of “ innate ideas” given prior to all experience which reveals the absolute essence of things. Reason is now looked upon as rather an acquisition than a heritage.’6 In a second and more abstract conception, on the other hand, the ‘Enlightenment subject’ refers us to a rather different theoretical entity, namely that al> stracted individual who underpins the cosmopolitan and humanist aspirations of the liberal-Enlightenment project. This is the subject stripped of the accretion of culture, the bare-forked creature, the human being conceived (in Wollstonecraft’s phrase) as ‘naked human nature’: the subject who is invoked, either implicitly or explicitly, as the ground of the project to unify the various tribes and nations of man. It invokes that ‘common humanity’ through which, or on the basis of which, it alone makes sense to aspire to liberal forms of solidarity and the realisa­ tion of universal values within the human commu­ nity. Even if these two conceptions of subjectivity are linked in the sense that it was thought that everyone, by virtue of possessing those attributes which are definitive of human nature, could in principle realise the ideal of autonomy, they are clearly distinguish­ able inflections, and corresponding to them, as sug­ gested, we find differing emphases in the feminist polemic. In their critical engagement with the ‘historical’ sense of Enlightenment subjectivity, feminist the­ ories have delivered a series of powerful arguments against the idealisation of autonomy, objecting that it makes a fetish of masculine attributes (or at any rate of those associated with male performance in patriarchal culture). They have relatedly claimed that this devalues other - ‘feminine’ or culturally coded ‘feminine’ - attributes which can contribute as much if not more to civilised culture and are there­ fore just as worthy of advancement. Most damningly of all, they have dismissed the very idea of the

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KATE SOPER relativism within feminism has been stated with sufficient potency for it to be rather pointless for me to add much further to it here. Those who have not been so convinced to date are unlikely to have their thinking on these issues altered by further restatements of the realist argument. But there is a somewhat different line of response, which has received less attention, and which I propose to develop in more detail here. In essence, what I shall be arguing is that critics of liberalism who see this as shamed or deeply flawed by virtue of its Enlightenment origins and conceptual sources are basing their argument on an extremely partial con­ ception of this theoretical and cultural legacy. In other words, the postmodernist feminist critique of liberalism is itself flawed to the extent that it is reliant on a distorted and caricaturised version of liberal-Enlightenment thinking on gender issues.14

dismissed as colluding in the maintenance of patri­ archal culture.8 Modernist feminists from de Beau­ voir onwards have been similarly charged by the postmodernists with perpetuating an ‘Enlighten­ ment’ - and hence, so it is implied, inherently ‘masculine’ - cultural perspective.9 As Pauline John­ son has pointed out, such feminists have presumed that the critique of the claims of transcendent reason has ‘established modern feminism on the path of counter-Enlightenment’ and that feminism now re­ quires a ‘fundamental break from the Enlightenment cause of reason and truth, which is exposed as nothing more than a distorted and disguised willto-power.’10 In some cases, in fact, the Enlighten­ ment and liberal humanism by association have been treated as if they were more or less synonymous with everything white, male, middle class and heterosex­ ual, and we have been invited to revile them accord­ ingly. Now, for the most part, where feminists have countered the postmodernist positions on the En­ lightenment subject, they have focused on the in­ consistencies of their anti-essentialist argument. They have sought to reveal the incoherence of denying any existential unity and autonomy at the level of subjectivity while seeking to expose cultural norms and ‘constructions’ as having negative con­ sequences for female emancipation and self-fulfil­ ment.11 They have pointed out that it makes little sense to advocate the politics of ‘identity’ while theoretically denying subjects any powers over their self-formation. They have insisted on the incompat­ ibility of a democratic politics of a kind purportedly being defended in postmodernist argument with respect for an indefinite plurality of cultural values and aspirations. They have, relatedly, taken issue with the extremely reactionary forms of traditional­ ism and fundamentalism that they see as licensed by the postmodernist refusal to recognise any essentialist or universalist position on human nature.12 Even Derrida, Spivak and other figures associated with the deconstructionist position have, in the light of this ethical problem, made some gestural moves towards acknowledging the necessity of a minimalist essentialism.13 Although I shall have a word more to say on these arguments in my concluding section, I believe the case against the incoherence of postmodernist

II In this context any attempt to offer a corrective to this version will necessarily have to be rather brief and synoptic. But a first point to be made is that the feminist dismissal of the liberal-Enlightenment is often based on an overly homogeneous conception of its thought and culture. As recent scholars of the period have been insisting, the scope and quality of Enlightenment thinking even within a single nation - let alone across Europe (and into America) - is a good deal more varied, complex and uneven in its development than is allowed for by this feminist rhetoric. In recognition of this, Dorinda Outram proposes in her recent study what she terms a ‘capsule’ conception of Enlightenment as containing sets of debates, stresses and concerns rather than representing a single, unified value system.15 The Enlightenment, according to Outram, presented it­ self as a series of processes and problems to those, like Kant and Mendelssohn, who attempted to define it. It was not so much a ‘modern paganism’ as a quest for a ‘rational Christianity’.16 It was a period obsessed with cultural difference, of continuous questioning and relativisation of European ‘civilisation’, and of critique of colonialism. Most contemporary com­ mentators also emphasise the disparate and uneven development of the ‘pockets’ of Enlightenment con-

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LIBERALISM, FEMINISM, E N LIG H TEN M ENT cem in the different countries of Europe and their emergence in non-European locations during the eighteenth century, most notably in America. Where once the Enlightenment was viewed as con­ fined to the argument of a few French philosophes towards the close of the century, the contemporary assessment favours a very long and geographically extensive Enlightenment, by no means local to Europe, and stretching temporally from the mid­ seventeenth right up to our own times - and even * beyond. As Habermas has famously pronounced, the task of Enlightenment has still to be completed if we are to be enabled to act as human beings. It is also important that those relying on the antiEnlightenment rhetoric recognise that there is ex­ tensive debate today about the role that women played in Enlightenment and the gains they derived from it. Margaret Jacob and other recent historians of Enlightenment have challenged accounts of its un­ remittingly patriarchal character, insisting on its overall positive impact for the feminist cause, and arguing that it represented a very significant advance on the oppression of the Church-dominated and Absolutist political orders which it supplanted.17 To deny that, Jacob suggests, is implicitly to align oneself with the position of the eighteenth-century enemies of the revolution and with a long tradition of right-wing rejection of its legacy.18 She acknowl­ edges that participation in the ‘public sphere’ re­ quired one to be both literate and in possession of adequate funds for club membership, theatre atten­ dance and so forth, and that this restricted it to the better-off among women.19 But she denies that there was any increasing ‘masculinisation’ of the ‘public sphere’ in any of the main centres of Enlighten­ ment,20 and rejects the currently fashionable view of the French Revolution as a defeat for women. Rather than imagining the French movement towards egalitarianism, leading to the contestations of the 1790s, as the signal of women’s first defeat in modern democratic politics, the evidence, when seen comparatively, suggests quite the opposite. The emergence of the public sphere put women’s rights on the western agenda just as it augured all the other struggles about the meaning and truthfulness of democratic politics with which we still live.21 Jacob’s Habermasian defence of the Enlighten­

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ment’s gains is open to the charge that it too readily abstracts from gender-blind or patriarchalist dimen­ sions of Habermas’s social theory. Indeed, my own position would be that you can endorse a broadly Habermasian position on Enlightenment while being a good deal more critical of Habermas’s general neglect of gender issues along lines discussed by Nancy Fraser and others. (Fraser has suggested that Habermas is guilty of a certain gender-blindness in failing to see how close a critique of the commodi­ fication of the cherished ‘symbolic’ realm of childrearing and nursing can come to rationalising female domesticity.22) All the same, I certainly think Jacob is right to remind the postmodernist feminist histor­ ians of the reactionary quality of the politics they risk endorsing in their dismissive position on the Enlight­ enment legacy. I think they should acknowledge, too, how problematic their own position looks in relation to the arguments of those seeking to advance female emancipation in the age of Enlightenment itself. One might briefly illustrate this point by reference to one of its better-known disputes - that between Wollstonecraft and Burke. From Burke’s perspective, Wollstonecraft is indeed an abstractor from cultural difference bent on denuding society of those distinc­ tions which are of its essence and which endow it with cultural richness. Thus, he professes, he cannot relate to ‘human actions and concerns, in a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in ail the nakedness and solitude of meta­ physical abstraction.’23 For Burke, it is what distin­ guished man from beast, culture from nature, that humanity is differentiated, its culture functioning as the sanctum of such difference: All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonised the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the senti­ ments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely tom off. All the super-added ideas, furn­ ished from the wardrobe of moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our

KATE SOPER naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order.24

the Enlightenment, (to the distress of the more feminist-minded) was in reality a period obsessed with the topic of sexual difference: its origin, nature and social implications. Indeed, it has been main­ tained that it is only in the period of Enlightenment that the issue of feminine difference - both corporeal and mental - begins in any serious sense to be addressed, and hence only in the Enlightenment, when women are recognised as possessed of a quite separate and sui generis sexuality, that the sex-gender distinction, with its acknowledgement of the differ­ ence between what is given by nature and what is socially cultivated, is seen as having application. ‘No longer would those who think about such matters’, writes Thomas Laquer of the eighteenth century, ‘regard women as a lesser version of man along a vertical axis of infinite gradations, but rather as an altogether different creature along a horizontal axis whose middle ground was largely empty.’26 Correlatively he argues that it was only then that sex was invented, that ‘science fleshed out, in terms presen­ table to the new epistemology, the categories “male” and “female” as opposite and incommensurable bio­ logical sexes’, and hence only then that the speci­ ficity of the female body was fully recognised with all its various discursive implications.27 In this connec­ tion he notes the influence on the eighteenth cen­ tury of Poulain de La Barre, who had challenged the notion of the inferiority of women on the ground that since sex difference was solely a matter of the body, there could be no social grounds to maintain it.28 Among the philosophes themselves, of course, there were many voices - most famously Diderot and Condorcet - who argued for political and legal equality for both sexes, and deplored the neglect of the education of women. Condorcet even went so far as to deny that natural differences between the sexes had any bearing on their rights of citizenship: why deny to women on the grounds of their suscept­ ibility to pregnancy what no one dreamt of denying to men cooped up for half the year with the gout? O f course, as Joan Scott has pointed out, C on­ dorcet was in something of a minority in pursuing this line on the issue of equality and natural differ­ ence,29 and I am not disputing the existence of the numerous other discourses on female difference which were prejudicial and in many cases deeply

For her part, Wollstonecraft was happy to plead guilty to these charges in a polemic against the ‘gorgeous drapery’ in which Burke had ‘enwrapped his tyrannic principles’: a polemic through which she seeks both to expose the principles themselves and to denude them of their rhetorical garb. For Wollstone­ craft, Burke’s eloquence masks a profound irration­ alism, a defence of bigotry in the name of reverence for cultural tradition, whose logical implication would be that slavery ought never to have been abolished. The Burkean doctrine would have us submit to this ‘inhuman custom’ simpy because it was the creation of ‘our ignorant forefathers’, who, ‘not understanding the native dignity of man, sanc­ tioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion.’25 N o doubt some will object to this association of the conservative Burke with contemporary defen­ dants of cultural relativism, given the difference in their motivations: Burke’s to preserve aristocratic privilege, the latter’s to check the normalising power of western discourse. But the comparison certainly serves to dramatise the tensions, and potentially reactionary implications, of these positions which we have been invited to view as a wholly positive rupture with humanist thinking. Moreover, the fact that certain parallels can be drawn here should give pause for thought to all those who would sponta­ neously acclaim Wollstonecraft’s contribution to feminist and democratic theory while subscribing to theoretical positions very much at odds with hers. In this connection, one might note how paradox­ ical it is, in view of the current emphasis on ‘differ­ ence’, that it tended to be the more progressive, and, if one could call them so, ‘feminist’ elements in the eighteenth century who were most resistant to re­ cognising any major natural, as opposed to culturally induced, divergences between the sexes. The con­ verse side of this paradox is that so far from obscuring or abstracting from the specific conditions of women,

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LIBERALISM, FEMINISM, E N LIG H TEN M ENT effeminacy, and regarded women as a threat to a ‘natural’ masculinity.33 In this connection, one might note, Tomaselli has questioned the tendency of much feminist theory to represent women as having been thought closer to nature. A t least in the period of Enlightenment, she suggests, culture the move away from nature - is represented as a (variously benign or malignant) emasculation. The more conventional Enlightenment emphasis on the difference of the sexes went together, of course, with the genderisation of mental faculties. Reason, presented in Kantian philosophy as the distinctive attribute of personhood, was viewed as a pre-eminently masculine possession, and in the writings of a number of eighteenth-century thinkers - notably Rousseau and Kant - women are depicted as by nature more capricious and emotional creatures incapable of attaining to a fully rational autonomy. But even Kant implies this is a deficit brought about by lack of education and inappropriate patronage. Kant has often been rebuked by feminists for his condescension. But when he remarks ironically in his essay on Enlightenment that ‘those guardians who have so kindly assumed superintendence over them’ will soon see to it ‘that the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind (and the entire fair sex)’34 his point is perfectly consistent with the sort of claims made by Wollstonecraft and others concerned in the per­ iod with improving female autonomy. But more importantly, perhaps, one must note how much there is in the culture and argument of the period which runs counter to any simplistic presentation of the liberal-Enlightenment as the site or time of the privileging of the type of reason which modern critics refer to as ‘masculine’, meaning by that a narrowly instrumental, overly logical and abstracted mode of cognition. We have only to consider the attention paid by theorists from the late seventeenth century onwards to the role of sensory experience, to the imagination, to the pos­ session and development of what was termed ‘sen­ sibility’ to the analysis of taste and aesthetic judgement, to the aesthetic as mediator between reason and the sense, to realise how much more there was to the Enlightenment discourses of the self.35 The Age of Reason ‘distrusted Reason,’ argues

offensive in their suggestions about female limitations and deficiencies. The point is, rather, that there was a much wider and more varied spectrum of arguments about gender and subjectivity than is recognised by the contemporary dismissive refer' ences to the Enlightenment subject. One might cite as one example here the extremely crenellated debate on the extent to which women had gained from the process of civilisation.30 There was some general agreement even among those critical of the contemporary treatment of women that the latter had only benefited in the progress out of savagery. For Catherine Macaulay, woman ‘in the barbarous stages of mankind’ had been reduced to a state of abject slavery; for Diderot, ‘the unhappy woman in the cities is far unhappier still in the midst of the forests’;31 and he, William Alexander and John Millar all thought that the degree of civility gained could be judged by the manner in which women were treated. Alexander additionally presented women as having - through their cultivation of beauty - also stimulated men to experience a romantic affection for a particular individual, a personalisation of attachments through which they had spared themselves the misery and barbarism of anonymous sexual relations. Such conceptions, however, did not sit easily alongside the recognition by these thinkers of the continued enslavement of women in their society - especially where this went together (as it did very notably in the case of Diderot) with a critique of the corruption and decadence of civilisation and a call ‘to return to nature’. Diderot tends to forget (or is necessarily forced to abstract from) his negative assessment of the condition of women in primitive society, in his praise of primitivism. ‘Ask civilised man whether he is happy. Ask the savage whether he is unhappy,’ he writes. ‘If both reply “N o” the dispute is settled.’ But, as Tomaselli points out, ‘to have asked a woman the same set of questions would have yielded, judging by Diderot’s own account, both a “no” and a “yes” .’32 Rousseau, on the other hand, viewed the turn to ‘Romantic’ love not as a source of commendable civility and liberation from barbarism, but as the enslavement of men. Though agreeing to the role of women in cultivating luxury and beauty, he saw the advance of culture as a progression in a deplorable

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KATE SOPER Addison’s or Carter’s is better interpreted as belong­ ing to a proto-Romantic reaction to the liberalEnlightenment rather than as contributing to its stock of ideas. Yet if we follow the contemporary disposition to think in terms of a ‘long’ Enlight­ enment, then we must view it as encompassing much pre-Romantic and Romantic argument on the self, directly opposed though such argument was to scien­ tific positivism, mechanistic conceptions of nature and the dogmatic pursuit of reason. Or, to put the point otherwise, Romanticism, which retains the core Enlightenment idea of a unitary subject pos­ sessed of autonomous agency - and which, after all, owes a great deal to the influence of two figures, Rousseau and Kant, usually deemed to belong uncontrovertibly to the Enlightenment - can be viewed itself as part of the unfolding process of Enlight­ enment self-criticism. One might argue, too, that there is something of this same Romanticallymediated Enlightenment rationality still at work in John Stuart Mill’s liberalism and that this gives a particular inflection to his argument on a range of topics, including that of female subjection.

E. L. Tuveson, ‘as it had been understood for many centuries - far more deeply than did any preceding period.’36 Another commentator goes on to claim: It would be mistaken to think of reason as the rallying cry of the Enlightenment thinkers except in so far as it was opposed to faith, and the Age of Reason as opposed to the Age of Superstition. If one’s gaze shifts away from the battles with Flnfame, then the ‘Age of Sentiments’, ‘Sentimen­ tality’, ‘Feelings’, ‘Passions’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘Love’ or ‘Imagination’ are apter titles for the movement of ideas in the eighteenth century.37 This is surely to overstate the case against reason, which remained the sovereign court of appeal, and was viewed by Condorcet, Voltaire and Diderot and most key thinkers of the age as of critical importance to controlling the flights of fancy and excesses of the imagination. But we certainly need to recognise the force of the point made earlier regarding the im­ portance of distinguishing between a typically se­ venteenth-century view of reason as ‘sum total of innate ideas’ and the more characteristically eight­ eenth-century Kantian - and liberal - view of it as committed to an unprejudicial ‘critique’ of ‘pure’ reason, and to sceptical investigation of the knowl­ edge claimed on the authority of ‘innate ideas’. We should recognise, too, that the tendency of some contemporary feminist criticism to equate Enlight­ enment with the exercise of a narrowly conceived ‘masculine reason’ is to abstract from the many nuanced discourses that went into its intellectual ferment. It is also to ignore the voices of those (such as Hume, Addison, Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Burke, Smith) who in the period itself did challenge the exclusive endorsement of reason. Among the women who did was Elizabeth Carter, acclaimed by Johnson as the best Greek scholar in the kingdom, who followed Addison in her scepticism about science and argued (as did Addison and Adam Smith) for the indispensability of the imagination as a source of empathy with others and the need to strengthen what Hutcheson called the ‘sympathetick sense’. It is not reason, she argued, but imagination which dis­ tinguishes us from the beast. Admittedly, it may be argued that a voice such as

Ill I have tried to show here that Enlightenment culture was a good deal more complex, and in a number of ways more sensitive to the limitations of its own universalising and rationalising claims, than glib postmodernist dismissals often allow. I have tried to show, too, that one rejects the period of Enlight­ enment and its legacy as radically unfriendly to the advancement of feminist demands only at the risk of appearing to opt for a theoretical perspective that shares more with Burke’s patrician defence of culture and custom than with Wollstonecraft’s attempts to strip away the veils of patriarchal privilege. It would, of course, be quite mistaken to present either Wollstonecraft in particular, or the voices of liberal-Enlightenment in general, as offering the last word on female emancipation. My plea here is only that they should be acknowledged as an important first step in the right direction, and that when feminists de­ nounce liberalism simply in virtue of its Enlight­ enment ‘rationalism’ or ‘humanism’ or conceptions of subjectivity, they are making use of an easy

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LIBERALISM, FEMINISM, E N LIG H TEN M ENT denial of this that has licensed some of the most callous political neglect of the miseries and oppres­ sions of others. Postmodernist feminists should therefore accept that in the end their critiques of liberal humanism make better sense and retain more internal coher­ ence if presented as a continuation of the immanent critique of Enlightenment first sounded in the dis­ course of Wollstonecraft and other proto-feminist liberal critics. Or if they do not agree to this, they should at least be ready to accept the full implica­ tions of their value-relativism and anti-realism, and thus accept that there are ultimately no objective criteria of female emancipation, and no grounds therefore on which to defend any projected vision of this as more or less ‘progressive’. To deny that there is any link between the discourses of ‘power’ and ‘oppression’ and specific extra-discursive condi­ tions of existence and forms of human experience, is to disown the political teleology associated with the feminist movement, whether this be given a more liberal or more socialist interpretation. A postmo­ dernist position can, in other words, escape the charges of being inconsistent in its treatment of liberal-democratic values, but only at the cost of licensing an indefinite and uncontrollable play of meaning such that any and every treatment of women might count, under some discursive regime or within a particular political context, as a further­ ance of feminist goals. The question then is: can this still count as a distinctively ‘feminist’ theoretical offering at all?

rhetoric rather than engaging in serious and discri­ minating critique. They are also, as suggested earlier in my brief remarks on the inconsistencies of the postmodernist defence of ‘difference’, frequently arguing in ways which are covertly reliant on liberal-democratic values themselves. What sense, for example, can we ultimately make of postmodern feminist critiques of the conflationist and Eurocentric tendencies of liberal humanism if not in terms of its failure to advance a more genuinely universal conception of the human community? How do we understand the charge that liberal approaches to emancipation are ‘ethnocentric’ or less than ‘democratic’ in the respect extended to ‘otherness’ or ‘difference’, if we do not presuppose a commitment to some minimally essentialist and universalist conception of human nature: unless, that is, we hypothesise a common suscept­ ibility to pain and humiliation in the absence of certain forms of respect and recognition? Liberalism in general, and liberal feminism in particular, are indeed open to the charge of having taken classbiased and culturally partial views of what is suppo­ sedly common to everyone. But it is one thing to expose this bias and partiality; it is quite another to condemn liberal thinking for its invocation of a shared structure of cognition, need and affectivity, since little sense can be made of the request for greater tolerance of other viewpoints and more recognition of specific identities and constituencies, unless some commonality of cognitive and emotional response to the world is presupposed. Indeed, it is the

Notes other. But I think there is enough shared commitment to these formal principles for the point to have some validity. 5. I put the point in these terms in order to leave open the question of the periodisation of Enlightenment, which it is not my intention to address in this chapter. Suffice it to note that there is still considerable dispute on both the temporality and the definition of Enlight­ enment. As Hulme and Jordanova point out, there are basically two approaches to the issue, the first con­ fining it more narrowly to the ideas of a group of (mainly French) intellectuals during the period dating from the death of Louis XIV (1715) to the events of the French Revolution (1789-94); the second ap-

1. As Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova claim of the Enlightenment period, since this was ‘in many of its aspects, highly critical, it was inevitable that, even as its identity emerged, it was subverted.’ Hulme and Jordanova (eds) (1990), p. 2. 2. Sapiro (1992), p. xiv. 3. Cf. my own discussion of Sapiro’s position in Soper (1997). 4. Obviously, this is a rather bald claim as it stands and much could be said in qualification of it. I would not want to deny that liberal and socialist feminists will differ on the ‘order’ of the agenda and the relative priority to be given to the items on it - especially those of freedoms, on the one hand, and equality, on the

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6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

proach, which is altogether broader, would emphasise the origins of Enlightenment in the work of Bacon, Newton and Locke in the seventeenth century and argue for a much longer Enlightenment - at least into the early decades of the nineteenth century, and even beyond: Hulme and Jordanova (eds) (1990), pp. 1-15. Although the recent Blackwell Companion to the Em lightenment focuses on the years 1720-80 (Yolton, et al. (eds), 1991), historians of the period today increas* ingly favour the idea of a ‘long’ Enlightenment. For a brief guide to the recent history of Enlightenment interpretation, see Outram (1995), chapter 1. Cassirer (1951), p. 13; cf. Pauline Johnson’s discussion (and illustration of this difference in respect of the concepts of reason employed respectively by Mary Anstell and Mary Wollstonecraft) in Johnson (1993) , pp. 3-12. Landes (1988). See Jardine (1985); cf. also the dispute between Timothy Reiss and Frances Ferguson in Kauffman (ed.) (1989) (where Ferguson defends Wollstonecraft against Reiss’s claim that her assertion of the rights of women was bound to prove ineffective because it was so immersed in the dominant discourse of Enlight* enment). See also Johnson (1993). See, for example, Evans (1985); Lloyd (1984), chapter 6. Toril Moi discusses and defends de Beauvoir against similar charges in Moi (1992). For a brief survey, see again Johnson (1993), pp. 3-4. Johnson (1993), p. 3. See Fuss (1989); Kate Soper, ‘Feminism, Humanism, Postmodernism’ and ‘Postmodernism, Subjectivity and the Question of Value’, in Soper (1990), pp. 228-45; and Squires (ed.) (1993), pp. 17-30 respec* tively; also Lovibond (1989) and (1994). Soper (1990), and ‘Postmodernism. Subjectivity and the Question of Value’, in Squires (ed.) (1993); see also Nussbaum (1992). See, for example, Derrida (1989), esp. p. 56f.; Spivak (1991) and the essays in Spivak (1993). In this respect I am pursuing the general line of response already opened up by Johnson (1993). I see my own survey here as offering further support for her claim that contemporary feminism is working within a distorted and partial version of Enlighten* ment and its commitment to reason. Outram (1995), p. 12. See ibid., chapter 3; cf. Margaret Jacob’s argument that the ‘two extremes of Spinozism, pantheism and ma* terialism, lurked in the underground on both Protes* tant sides of the Channel, but from Samuel Clarke to Johannes Stinstra, Betje Wolff, and Aagje Deken, godly Enlightenment - born out of their reading of the new science - seemed a sufficient antidote to dogmatism, enthusiasm, or absolutism’. Jacob (1994) , p. 98.

17. Ibid., pp. 95-113; see also the studies by Jacob, Phyllis Mack, Ruth Perry and Margaret Hunt in Women in the Enlightenment, in Women and History, 9 (1984) (rep* rinted in book form by the Institute for Historical Research and the Haworth Press, 1984). 18. Jacob (1994), p. 98 f. 19. Ibid., p. lOOf. 20. As Jacob points out, most historians now accept the importance for understanding of the eighteenth cen* tury of the category of the ‘public sphere’ (by which is intended the universe of ‘public opinion formation, informal sociability, intellectual interaction and net* working beyond the family and outside the formal institutions of the state), as they do the role of Habermas’s work in drawing attention to it, notably Habermas (1992). 21. Jacob (1994), pp. 106-7. 22. The Habermasian framework tends both to obscure the very material character of much child*rearing activity and the extensive permeation of family life by the systemic forces of power and money. Feminists have also accused him of failing to appreciate the dualised and gendered nature of welfare systems (which may reduce female dependency on the male breadwinner, but only at the cost of exposing women to a patriarchal and androcentric state bureaucracy). See Fraser’s ‘What’s Critical About Critical Theory?’, in Benhabib and Cornell (eds) (1987); cf. also the article by Linda Nicholson in the same volume. (Of course this type of feminist criticism is itself caught in a certain tension since it is reliant on a privileging of the ‘symbolic’, feminine-associated values and forms of human interaction in its overall critique of patriarchy, even as it is critical of Habermas’s failure to draw out the implications of his normative schema for feminist theory and practice.) 23. Burke (1961), p. 19. 24. Ibid., p. 90. 25. ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke’, in Wollstonecraft (1989), p. 14. 26. Laquer (1990), p, 148. Cf. Outram (1995), chapter 5, which also stresses the concern with female difference - and its contradictory implications in view of the Enlightenment emphasis on a universal human nature and human history, both validated by the possession of a single human form of rationality. See also the discussion of the concept of the ‘individual’ in Scott (1996), pp. 5-14. 27. Laquer (1990), pp. 149-50. 28. Ibid., p. 155-6. 29. Scott (1996), pp. 7-8. 30. As discussed in Tomaselli (1985). 31. Both cited in ibid., p. 109. 32. Ibid., p. 117. 33. Ibid., pp. 118-20. Cf. Outram (1995), pp. 88-9.

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LIBERALISM, FEMINISM, ENLIGHTENMENT which threatens them if they try to go alone’. Kant (1963a), p. 3. 35. See, for example, Tuveson (1960); Engell (1982); Taylor (1989), parts III and IV; Eagleton (1990), chapters 2-4. 36. Tuveson (1960), p. 24. 37. Yolton, et al. (eds) (1991), p. 446.

34. Kant (1963a), p. 3 (a more cutting translation of Kant (1991), p. 54). Kant continues: ‘After the guardians have first made their domestic animals dumb and have made sure that these placid creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are tethered, the guardians show them the danger

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16

FEMI NI SM AND W O M E N ’ S A U T O N O M Y : T HE C H A L L E N G E OF F E MA L E G E N I T A L C U T T I N G Diana Tietjens Meyers

euphemistic because the analogy with male circum­ cision suggests a relatively risk-free, minor procedure that does not interfere with sexual pleasure. Although one form of the female procedure is aptly analogised to male circumcision, most are not. On the other hand, the morally condemnatory language, ‘female genital mutilation’, prejudices the question of women’s autonomy vis-a-vis this practice. Since there is a presumption that a person who chooses to be mutilated does not choose autono­ mously, this language is question-begging in the context of my present topic. Moreover, I suspect that Euro-Americans are attracted to this language largely because they do not imagine that women like themselves have in the past consented to such ‘mutilation’ and that mothers in their own society today continue to authorise comparable procedures on their daughters. Consequently they fail to em­ pathise with contemporary women in other societies who make similar choices. Thus, I have sought terminology designed to avoid denying the pain and impairment often associated with female genital cutting but also to avoid presuming that women involved in the practice have no autonomy. Many Euro-Americans might doubt that there is any basis for ascribing autonomy to women whose cultures mandate female genital cutting. Yet, the feminist literature on female genital cutting provides ample evidence that many women exercise effective

Terminology for the multiform phenomenon I shall discuss is itself a matter of vexed controversy. Some scholars prefer the expression ‘female circumcision’ on the grounds that this is the expression preferred by women who are now subject to the practice. To adopt any other language, they maintain, would be to show disrespect for these women and their cultures and perhaps to engage in cultural imperialism. Other scholars opt for medicalised terminology — either ‘female genital surgery’ or ‘female genital operations’. Still other scholars prefer the expression ‘female genital mutilation’ on the grounds that no other language expresses the suffering inflicted by this practice and that other labels implicitly condone a cruel practice that sustains male dominance by ton menting women. I have adopted the expression ‘female genital cutting’ in order to address several concerns. On the one hand, I see the medicalised terminology and the culturally relative terminology as euphemistic. Although the medicalised expressions accurately represent the hygienic conditions of the hospitals in which some Euro-American and African female genital cutting is performed, they give the false impression that female genital cutting is usually a sanitary procedure performed with anaesthesia. U n­ fortunately, the procedure is seldom performed under safe conditions, and it never improves women’s health. The culturally relative terminology is also

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FEMINISM AND W OM EN’S AUTONOMY programmes may not be the most effective way to eradicate female genital cutting, they have proved to be the most effective way to promote women’s autonomous control over their sexuality and health. Finally, I consider how the cultural imperative of self-perpetuation entails both support for and lim­ itation of autonomy. If cultures are to meet the need for change in response to historical contingencies, they must ensure that cultural initiates have auton­ omy skills that enable them to adjust their tradi­ tions. Yet, if cultures are to survive, they must channel exercise of these autonomy skills into constructive critique framed by cultural allegiance, and they must discourage the development of autonomy skills which heighten discontent and precipitate defection. I argue that autonomy-aug­ menting educational programmes succeed by devel­ oping autonomy skills that cultures have systematically, but needlessly, suppressed. C on­ ceived as the exercise of self-discovery, self-defini­ tion and self-direction skills, autonomy-withinculture is not only intelligible, it is a morally defensible and politically viable conception of autonomy for an era of global feminism.

agency with respect to this practice. One striking finding is that autonomy is to be found among its accommodators as well as resisters, and that neither group can be presumed to enjoy greater autonomy than the other. If this is so, one cannot identify autonomy or lack of it simply by looking at what people choose or refuse. Autonomy must dwell in the process of deciding, not in the nature of the action decided upon. Moreover, students of female genital cutting regard it as essential to avoid the trap of conceding that resisters are western dupes and, as cultural outsiders, have no right to press for change, whereas accommodators are more authentically re­ presentative of their culture of origin and, as female insiders, confirm the legitimacy of the practice. To overcome this dilemma, one must resist the tempta­ tion to explain greater autonomy as a function of the reduced influence of cultures that mandate female genital cutting. Culture cannot be cast as the villain that paralyses some women’s autonomy, nor can it be cast as the hero that frees women into autonomous lives. Still, in acknowledging that some social con­ texts are more conducive to autonomy than others, students of female genital cutting spotlight the am­ biguous role of culture with respect to the question of women’s autonomy. My project is to explore the implications of these understandings of the relation between culture, female genital cutting and women’s agency for autonomy theory. I begin by surveying the reasons different cultures give for female genital cutting and the different types of female genital cutting. My purpose in exhibiting the enormous variation in this practice and in women’s responses to it is to undercut simplistic dismissals of women’s autonomy with respect to female genital cutting that rely on attention-grabbing horror stories and generalised theories of patriarchal domination. I then examine two kinds of autonomy theory - latitudinarian, value-neutral accounts and restrictive, value-satu­ rated accounts - and I argue that neither approach adequately addresses the phenomena of women’s autonomy regarding female genital cutting. To bring these phenomena into focus, it is useful to review a number of strategies for augmenting wo­ men’s autonomy regarding female genital cutting. I urge that, although culturally anchored educational

Cultural Contexts and Female Genital Cutting Among Euro-Americans, misapprehensions about culture and female genital cutting abound. For ex­ ample, many people associate female genital cutting with a single region, usually sub-Saharan Africa. But the practice is also found indigenously in North America, Asia and the Middle East, and immigrants have spread their practices far and wide.1 A related misconception is that female genital cutting is rooted in a single culture, but this is far from the case. A highly diverse array of cultures furnish a variety of rationales for female genital cutting. Many people are astonished to learn that, among middle-class white Americans in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century, clitoridectomy was a popular and medically certified ‘cure’ for hysteria, nymphomania, lesbian­ ism and ‘excessive’ masturbation.2 Curiously, though, there are cultural groups that practice female genital cutting today for the opposite reason: they

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D IAN A T IE T JE N S MEYERS believe that female genital cutting enhances wo­ men’s sexual desire.3 More typical, though, are ra­ tionales similar to those formerly current in the U S: many cultural groups maintain that female genital cutting reduces women’s sexual appetite, enforces norms of chastity and thereby protects family honour. 4 Repressing women’s sexuality is by no means the only, nor even the most frequent, reason given for female genital cutting. Gender regimentation is a prevalent rationale, as well. From this perspective, the purpose of female genital cutting is to ensure that the individuals assigned to dichotomous gender ca­ tegories have anatomically suitable genitals. In the U SA today, female genital cutting is a routine, though increasingly contested, medical in­ tervention when a condition called ‘ambiguous gen­ italia’ is diagnosed.5 Physicians and parents generally presume that left ‘untreated’ an elongated clitoris will have deleterious effects on a girl’s psychological development and will prove socially disabling.6 To the extent that this negative prognosis is warranted, it is because contemporary U S culture insists that there are only two kinds of people - males and females - and because this particular culture pre­ scribes genitalia conforming to restrictive norms for each category.7 Without ‘corrective’ demasculinising surgery, it is thought that a genetic female endowed with ‘ambiguous’ genitalia will be unable to attain a feminine identity. The theme of demasculinisation is also found in some non-western cultures. Anticipat­ ing Freud, those cultures view the clitoris as a mascu­ line organ and therefore regard excision as necessary to achieving a feminine gender identity.8 World­ wide, it seems, people believe that babies can be bom with ‘unnatural’, though not sexually or reproductively dysfunctional, genitalia. Whereas American culture currently mandates female genital cutting as a corrective for what it deems ‘abnormal’ genitalia, members of many other cultural groups regard female genital cutting as an indispensable rite of passage through which all girls must pass in order to attain the identity and the status of women. Some see female genital cutting as a test of courage and endurance that prepares the individual for labour pains and birthing.9 Others contend that female genital cutting physically puri­

fies the individual and enhances her fertility, for they believe that the clitoris can kill a man if it touches his penis or that it will kill the baby during child­ birth.10 Female genital cutting may be thought ne­ cessary to morally appropriate fertility, and morally sanctioned fertility may be thought necessary to producing socially and morally viable children.11 In one Sudanese community, ‘son of an uncircum­ cised mother’ is among the most derogatory epithets one can utter.12 Gender norms are associated with aesthetic standards as well as moral standards, and aesthetic considerations sometimes dictate female genital cutting. A woman who belongs to a culture that considers gaping orifices, including the mouth, distasteful asks, ‘which is better, an ugly opening or a dignified closure?’13 In some cases, religious doctrine is pivotal. Some cultural groups believe that Islam mandates female genital cutting and that Allah will not hear a woman’s prayers if she has not been cut.14 Another cluster of reasons concerns intercultural political relations. Within a local framework, cultur­ al identification is sometimes cited: whether wo­ men’s genitals are cut or not and, if they are cut, how they are cut may be an important way in which cultural groups inhabiting the same geographical region are differentiated.15 From a global perspective, loyalty to one’s cultural roots and repudiation of western influence are sometimes cited: female genital cutting was often seen as testifying to opposition to colonialism and more recently as affirming indigen­ ous tradition in the face of western contempt for non-western cultures and western economic and cultural penetration.16 Although cultural rationales for female genital cutting can be classified according to the broad themes of sexual repression, gender identity, and group cohesion, there is no uniformity whatsoever in the specifics. This heterogeneity is echoed in the variety of forms that female genital cutting takes. Many Euro-Americans believe that female genital cutting is a single procedure, but this is not true. In addition to western cosmetic procedures designed to ‘feminise’ ostensibly male genitalia, practices range from surma - that is removal of the clitoral prepuce to infibulation - that is excision of the clitoris, the labia minora and the labia majora and suturing the remaining tissue together to create a minuscule

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FEMINISM AND W OM EN’S AUTONOMY my vis-a-vis female genital cutting cannot rest on generalisations about the severity of the outcome, for the medical and psychosexual consequences vary substantially. Women’s autonomy with respect to female genital cutting cannot be ruled out on the grounds that no one could freely choose the endangerment and impairment resulting from these pro­ cedures, for the consequences are not always grave. Nor can one assume that the reasons women have for either accommodating or resisting female genital cutting are consistent across cultural groups. So a theory of women’s autonomy that is applicable to societies in which female genital cutting is practiced cannot rely on ascriptions of particular reasons to the women who are subject to this practise. The content of women’s deliberations cannot settle the question of their autonomy, for the reasons they invoke are not uniform. It is clear that some cultural groups pre-empt girls’ autonomy by cutting their genitals when they are young and helpless. However, female genital cutting is part of an adolescent initiation rite in many cultural groups. Although it is troubling that these girls may have little experience of their own genital eroticism and presumably have no experience of the interpersonal intimacies that this sexual responsive­ ness makes possible, it is doubtful that girls of this age altogether lack autonomy.20 Likewise, adult women participate in this practice as midwife practitioners, as mothers who arrange female genital cutting for their daughters and as postpartum mothers who request reinfibulation. It is important to bear in mind, as well, that during the nineteenth century many adult Euro-American women anxiously sought relief from psychopathology or sexual deviance and willingly underwent clitoridectomy. Whatever one may think of juvenile agency, these women’s agency must be analysed on its own merits. It is wrong, moreover, to assume that all female members of cultural groups that practice female genital cutting collaborate with this practice. W o­ men are not in the grip of totalising, internalised cultures which drive them to comply with a female genital cutting imperative. There are many instances of individual women persuading their families not to uphold the practice, and instances of women orga­ nising against female genital cutting are on the rise.

orifice.17 Correlated with this spectrum of outcomes is a spectrum of health risks in the immediate after­ math of the procedure and a spectrum of long-term consequences for women’s sexuality, physical health, and psychological well-being. Moreover, different groups perform the cutting procedure at different ages - some on infants or very young girls, some on adolescents. Adult women participate in this prac­ tice not only by authorising and/or carrying out the procedure but also, in groups where infibulation is the rule, by agreeing to reinfibulation after child­ birth. It is a mistake, then, to suppose that female genital cutting has the same impact on all affected women’s lives. Finally, it is necessary to dispel some prevalent misconceptions about culture. The misconception that most incenses non-western women is the ‘othering’ of the very idea of culture - that is the supposi­ tion that culture itself is a non-western phenomenon and that westerners are not themselves enculturated. Alternatively, westerners may acknowledge that everyone is enculturated yet assume that, unlike western cultures in which dissent is tolerated and cultural change is ongoing, non-western cultures are homogeneous and static.18 Nothing could be farther from the case. Members of a cultural group do not think and live in lockstep. Within cultural groups, interpretations of cultural beliefs vary, and so do interpretations of cultural practices. Drawing on the countless beliefs and practices that constitute a culture - beliefs and practices that are in some respects in tension with one another - and accenting and linking some of these beliefs and practices while de-emphasising or isolating others, people individua­ lise their cultural heritage. As a result, traditionalists often coexist, albeit uneasily, with nonconformists. Moreover, the survival of cultures depends on their capacity to modify their beliefs and practices to meet new contingencies, and their capacity to adjust depends in part on the internal variegation I have described.19 A seamless, timeless culture is a dead culture. This brief survey of the anthropological back­ ground of female genital cutting is sufficient to demonstrate the daunting complexity of analysing women’s agentic position with respect to this prac­ tice. Evidently, judgements about women’s autono­

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D IA N A T IE T JE N S MEYERS Although data about the prevalence of female geni­ tal cutting is disputable, it is quite possible that adherence to the practice is waning. Accordingly, to declare women who belong to cultural groups that practice female genital cutting devoid of autonomy would be to deny existing opportunities for choice and to erase the real, sometimes courageous, choices women have actually made. Women exercise agency, then, both by complying with and by resisting female genital cutting. A theory of women’s autonomy must take these realities into account, but it must also ask whether women have as much autonomy as they should have with respect to female genital cutting.

what their capacities and limitations actually are, and so forth - and they enact this introspective understanding of their ‘true’ selves in their lives. There is a good fit between their identity, their attitudes toward themselves and their conduct. C ol­ loquial expressions, such as ‘I feel at one with myself and ‘I feel right in my skin’ voice this sense of integration. As these idioms suggest, living autono­ mously is satisfying, sometimes exhilarating. Subjec­ tively, then, the value of autonomy stems from the fascination of self-discovery and the gratification of self-determination. Objectively, it rests on the dig­ nity of the distinctive individual and the wondrous diversity of the lives individuals may fashion for themselves. A second aim an account of autonomy should fulfil is to explicate the nature of the personal and social costs of suppressing autonomy. Individuals experience lack of autonomy as a sense of being out of control or being under the control of others whether other identifiable individuals or anonymous societal powers. A t odds with themselves, at odds with their behaviour, or both, non-autonomous in­ dividuals often feel anxious about their choices, contemptuous of themselves and disappointed with their lives. Alternatively, they may simply feel hol­ low, for they may feel they have been made into vehicles for projects that they do not disavow but that are not their own. In one way or another, nonautonomous individuals suffer from alienation from self. I would add, moreover, that societies that are not conducive to autonomy incur a moral loss since they thwart (or try to thwart) insightful social cri­ tique. When a society discourages self-exploration and self-expression, it discourages attention to symp­ toms of discontent and shields social ideologies and institutions from probing examination and opposi­ tional activism. Autonomy exposes the need for social change and equips people to pursue it. I shall not linger long over latitudinarian, valueneutral views for their weaknesses have been diag­ nosed and elaborated elsewhere. Briefly, rational choice views take people’s desires, values and goals for granted and identify autonomy with devising plans that maximise satisfaction.21 Hierarchical identification views subject first-order desires to scrutiny in light of second-order volitions and link

Female Genital Cutting’s Challenge to Autonomy Theory The phenomenon of female genital cutting presents two opposed temptations for autonomy theory. On the one hand, latitudinarian, value-neutral accounts of autonomy - whether rational choice models or hierarchical identification models - are attractive because they do not withhold respect from women who accommodate female genital cutting by impugn­ ing these women’s ability to make their own judge­ ments and choices. On the other hand, restrictive, value-saturated accounts of autonomy that deny that people can be both oppressed and autonomous are attractive because, in claiming that false conscious­ ness blocks the self-determination of women in cultures that mandate female genital cutting, they highlight the harsh personal cost of living under such oppressive social regimes. Neither of these ap­ proaches is ultimately convincing, however. Preliminary to characterising the weaknesses of these approaches, it is useful to review what an account of autonomy should accomplish. An ac­ count of autonomy aims principally to explicate an especially valuable mode of living. That mode of living is captured in a number of familiar expres­ sions: ‘she lives by her own lights’; ‘he is his own man’; ‘she’s always been true to herself; and the like. Autonomous individuals are not mere conformists. They need not be eccentric, but they do rely on their own judgement. They know who they are - what really matters to them, who they deeply care about,

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FEMINISM AND W OM EN’S AUTONOMY Babbitt is correct to say that the categories of Mister’s ideology provide no direct, authoritative way for Celie to assert her moral status, but it is evident that Celie is able to give her knowledge a proposi­ tional form and to encode her knowledge in intel­ ligible speech. Oppression deprives Celie of conventions - read­ ily available, generally accepted discursive formulae - through which she can articulate her convictions, protests and aspirations.28 To articulate their selfknowledge, oppressed people must resort to circum­ locution, devise figures of speech and work to re­ define the terms that frame intrapersonal understanding, interpersonal relations and moral reflection. Thus, they must summon extraordinary imaginative and linguistic powers if they are to gain a rich understanding of who they are and why their needs and desires deserve respect. Nevertheless, in light of her defiant self-recognition and her poignant self-assertion, it seems doubtful that Celie lacks an ‘adequate’ sense of self. I see no reason, then, not to trust her to sort out her own values and goals and conduct her own life. Still, it is undeniable that Celie’s social context is doing everything possible to stifle her autonomy and to defeat her. Likewise, women who demand reinfibulation because it is beautiful, because it is a pre­ condition for womanly virtue, because it is ‘our way’ or because the World Health Organisation is trying to force us to stop doing it hardly enjoy cultural environments that encourage them to do what they think is best for themselves. For this reason, I expect, Paul Benson would argue that attributing autonomy to these women betokens a ‘Pollyanaish’ confidence in their agentic capabilities. According to Benson, ‘certain forms of socialisa­ tion are oppressive and clearly lessen autonomy.’29 There are two forms that oppressive socialisation takes: (1) coercive socialisation that inflicts penalties for noncompliance with unjustifiable norms; and (2) socialisation that instils false beliefs which prevent people from discerning genuine reasons for acting.30 Autonomous people are ‘competent criticisers’ who can ‘detect and appreciate the reasons there are to act in various ways.’31 But oppressive socialisation systematically obviates and obfuscates victims’ rea­ sons for acting. As Benson puts it, oppressive socia­

autonomy to reconciling the two levels to achieve a harmonious whole.22 Both types of theory neglect the possibility that an oppressive social context could subvert people’s autonomy by imparting detri­ mental desires, values and goals or warping people’s second-order volitions. Such theories make no ade­ quate provision for ‘authenticating’ the concepts and commitments that structure one’s interpretations and propel one’s deliberations and choices. In con­ trast, restrictive, value-saturated accounts of auton­ omy, such as Susan Babbitt’s and Paul Benson’s, insist on the need to distinguish real from apparent desires and authentic values from spurious ones, and they draw these distinctions by placing constraints on what people can autonomously choose. According to Susan Babbitt, ideological oppres­ sion instils preferences and desires that do not ade­ quately reflect an interest in one’s own flourishing and that prevent one from pursuing one’s ‘objective interests’ even when one is aware that one has an option to pursue them.23 The problem, claims Bab­ bitt, is the individual’s ‘not possessing a sense of self that would support a full sense of flourishing’ - that is one has been deprived of a precondition for wanting to pursue one’s objective interests.24 Although the oppressed have non-propositional knowledge - that is, knowledge in the form of intuitions, attitudes, ways of behaving and so on - that adumbrates their objective interests, this knowledge is inexpressible within the existing ideological regime and is not translatable into autonomous action.25 Mute and subjugated, the agency of these individuals can only be salvaged through ‘transformative experiences’ that, as it were, upgrade their selfhood.26 I doubt that oppression renders people’s nonpropositional knowledge inexpressible. In fact, I think one of Babbitt’s examples amply demonstrates my point. Commenting on Alice Walker’s novel about domestic violence, The Color Purple, Babbitt claims that Celie’s knowledge that she is a morally worthy person is non-propositional and inexpressi­ ble. I would argue that Celie’s knowledge indeed stems from non-propositional sources, her feelings, attitudes and perhaps her intuitions. But, as Babbitt reports, when taunted by Mister - ‘You nothing at all’ - Celie trenchantly replies, ‘I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook . . . but I’m here.’27

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D IA N A T IE T JE N S MEYERS lisation limits in ‘well-organised ways what sorts of reasons to act people are able to recognise.’32 More' over, bi-directional integration - that is, mutual adjustment and reconciliation of first-order desires and second-order volitions about first-order desires is no guarantee of autonomy, for oppressive sociali­ sation could implant such deficient values that a person could have degraded first-order desires that would nonetheless be endorsed by second-order volitions.33 Internalised oppressive socialisation, it seems, can ‘shanghai’ a person’s entire life. Presumably, Benson would conclude that, because of their socialisation, the many women who do not repudiate female genital cutting have defective rea­ son-detection faculties - defective at least in so far as they are oblivious to the ‘decisive’ force of the reasons against this practice - and thus that they have been deprived of autonomy at least with respect to this choice.34 But I would urge that Benson’s grim assessment of the sinister potency of oppressive socialisation exaggerates the impact of socialisation generally. It just isn’t true that oppressive socialisa­ tion always decreases autonomy. Some people be­ come oppositional activists, and some of them flourish in that role. In cases of firebrand, adven­ ture-loving resisters, one suspects they would have had a hard time fitting in and living autonomously if they had been bom into a just society during peace­ time. Other people carve out lives that enact ‘in­ appropriate’ values in the interstices of the constraints that society imposes. They find pockets of lapsed surveillance or permissiveness within op­ pressive regimes and devise ways to express their unorthodox values and commitments in those spaces. Still others endorse at least some of the values upon which oppressive constraints are based and on balance accept the constraints and conform their lives to them. We find all of these possibilities represented in connection with female genital cut­ ting - women fleeing their homeland and seeking asylum to avoid having their genitals cut or to protect their daughters from cutting, women orga­ nising locally and nationally to modify or eradicate female genital cutting, women concluding that cul­ tural tradition and cohesion or getting married and bearing children are more important than bodily integrity. I would venture that there are women in

each of these groups who have experienced compar­ ably oppressive socialisation. Undeniably, they have more to overcome in order to attain autonomy than some other women, for they must mobilise extra­ ordinary introspective and volitional powers to figure out what they really want and to act on their own desires. But it is hard to believe that none of them chooses autonomously. The fact is that we are all immersed in a culture at a historical moment. How do we know that some of us have attained adequate selfhood and thus have the epistemic perspective needed to grasp what full flourishing is like? How do we know that some of us have highly developed, acutely sensitive reason-de­ tection faculties and thus have the epistemic skills needed to determine what cannot be a good reason to act or what is a dispositive reason to act? It seems to me that we would need far more consensus than we presently have (or are likely to get) about human nature and social justice before we could conclude that women who opt for compliance with female genital cutting norms never do so autonomously. We would have to be persuaded, in other words, that all women’s interests are such that this decision could not accord with any woman’s authentic values and desires under any circumstances. If we are prepared to acknowledge that a woman who has undergone oppressive socialisation but who rebels against its dictates may be accessing her authentic values and desires and acting autonomously, it seems to me that we cannot rule out a priori the possibility that a similarly socialised woman who chooses otherwise may be autonomous, too. In sum, restrictive, value-saturated accounts of autonomy are troubling because they homogenise authentic selves and autonomous lives. The para­ doxical effect of ahistorically, acontextually foreor­ daining what individuals can and cannot autonomously choose is to deindividualise autonomy. Yet, latitudinarian, value-neutral accounts of auton­ omy are troubling, too. On this view, failures of autonomy are failures to obtain and take into ac­ count relevant information, or they are failures to integrate one’s values, desires and the like into a coherent outlook and a feasible course of action. The paradoxical effect of neglecting the possibility that a well integrated, smoothly functioning self could be in

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FEMINISM AND W O M EN’S AUTONOMY and their awareness of their own sexual impairment. Likewise, health education can kindle cognitive dissonance by highlighting potential conflicts be­ tween women’s desire to bear children and their commitment to female genital cutting, which can reduce fertility.38 Programmes designed to elicit en­ quiry into the symbolic meanings that one’s culture attaches to female genital cutting have proved ef­ fective, too.39 An international organisation called Women Living Under Muslim Laws has developed educational strategies that encourage women to analyse and reconstruct their own identities within their cultures. Through education, this organisation seeks to debunk the myth of one universal Muslim identity and to offer women the opportunity to read and interpret Islam’s sacred texts for themselves.40 In discovering how differently women live under dif­ ferent Islamic regimes and how weak the tie between Islamic scripture and current religious doctrines re­ quiring female genital cutting actually is, many women realise that they could modify their beliefs regarding female genital cutting without sacrificing their religious beliefs. Intellectual and emotional space hospitable to envisaging a different conception of the ethics and aesthetics of womanhood is thus opened. Sometimes women become convinced that they can flourish as women with their genitals intact. Kenyan women and their families have created ‘circumcision through words’ rituals in which cultur­ al teachings about womanhood are transmitted and girls’ entrance into womanhood is celebrated, but the traditional cutting is eliminated.41 Sometimes wo­ men remain convinced that female genital cutting is necessary, but they alter the practice either by re­ ducing it to a symbolic pricking or by medicalising it.42 Sometimes they insist on upholding tradition. Hofriyati women whose husbands have returned from working in Saudi Arabia convinced that infibulation is contrary to Islam and that sunna is the religiously sanctioned form of female genital cutting have resisted the ensuing pressure to adopt the less extreme practice.43 In some cultural groups, the ritual surrounding female genital cutting not only confers the status of womanhood on the initiate but also creates lifelong social bonds among the girls who undergo the ritual together. Thus another important

need of rigorous scrutiny and drastic overhaul is to abandon the individual to the influence of a culture’s prevailing beliefs and practices. Such a view over­ simplifies self-alienation and blunts autonomy’s po­ tential to spur social critique. Neither of these approaches offers a compelling theory of individua­ lised autonomous living.

Autonomy-Augmenting Programmes and Female Genital Cutting Feminist students of female genital cutting have analysed a number of programmes that have en­ hanced women’s autonomy in regard to this practice. Moreover, they have proposed legal reforms, and they have documented the effects of social trends on female genital cutting. I shall briefly survey this literature with the aim of using it as a springboard for developing an account of women’s autonomy-within-culture. My reading of this literature suggests that educa­ tion is the least controversial and most effective approach to augmenting women’s autonomy regard­ ing female genital cutting, but the success of this approach depends on the nature of the educational programme. Again and again, scholars stress the need for grassroots participation in conceiving the aims of educational initiatives, in formulating educational agendas and in devising educational presentations and materials. Phrases like ‘education for critical consciousness’ and ‘emancipatory education’ imply the need for institutionalising self-determination at the founding and throughout the implementation of education programmes.35 This imperative has been put in practice through dialogic programme planning and dialogic ‘classrooms’ and also by adopting cul­ turally familiar media for ‘instruction’.36 Songs, plays and puppet shows followed by exploratory discussion sessions often replace lectures and rote learning. Experience shows that many women are receptive to information about the health risks associated with female genital cutting.37 Successful educational pro­ grammes often capitalise on women’s dissonant ex­ perience vis'd'vis female genital cutting. For example, health education can juxtapose women’s commitment to female genital cutting with their awareness of traumatic outcomes (sometimes deaths)

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D IA N A T I E T JE N S MEYERS task of educational programmes has been to create substitutes for the ‘age groups’ established by female genital cutting. In central Kenya, the social benefits formerly delivered by age groups - solidarity among women and consolidation of women’s social authority - are now secured by women’s self-help economic organisations. 44 In addition to such culturally attuned, participatory education, we also find more coercive legal and social forces at work. Female genital cutting is prohibited in a number of countries where the practice has been common. However, the history of crim­ inalising female genital cutting and disseminating information about women’s legal rights does not inspire confidence in this approach. Either these measures have had little impact or they have in­ tensified reactionary traditionalism.45 But legal sanc­ tions could take a different form. One scholar, Asma Mohammed A ’Haleem, proposes that laws be passed giving adult women the right to sue the practitioners who cut their genitals when they were children.46 As a precedent for her proposal, she points to the passage of parallel laws protecting women from compulsory marriage. Women who were adequately informed of these laws frequently went to court and sued to enforce their rights.47 Perhaps women would also avail themselves of rights to seek compensation from female genital cutting practitioners, which would discourage women from entering this trade and encourage practitioners to find other sources of income. It seems clear, however, that whereas legal measures produce mixed results, urbanisation and industrialisation predictably curtail female genital cutting. In Nigeria, for example, one report shows how the rise of western-style education has led to a marked decline in female genital cutting. Busy with book-learning and preoccupied by extracurricular activities, girls have no time at puberty for lengthy seclusion periods and ceremonies.48 As education, employment, and marriage increasingly take place away from girls’ communities of origin, the power of cultural tradition wanes and the incidence of female genital cutting plummets.49 I do not object to social and economic mobility provided that individuals welcome it and benefit from it, nor do I object to using law to bring about ameliorative social change. Still, it is important to

point out that these two strategies are not necessarily compatible with cultural perpetuation, and they do not necessarily ensure increased autonomy for wo­ men. Endowing women with the right to penalise female genital cutting practitioners pits women from the same cultural group against one another and pre­ empts the possibility of their working together to transform cultural norms and obtain economically viable employment. Some women may gain auton­ omy. But their gains may be made at the expense of other women’s autonomy, and relying on the na­ tional judiciary to make these gains may short-circuit cultural processes through which womanhood might be redefined without shattering all continuity with traditional conceptions of womanhood. While some women’s autonomy may be enhanced, their auton­ omy may be dissociated from their culture of origin. More obviously, social and economic mobility gained through geographic mobility often dissolves networks of mutual recognition and shared beliefs and practices that are necessary to sustain cultures. Migration often leads to assimilating prevalent norms in one’s new place of residence and work. Assimilation weakens, if it does not sever, one’s ties to one’s culture of origin. Some women who move to urban areas and marry into families with different cultural backgrounds gain greater autonomy by aban­ doning their own culture and becoming integrated into a more congenial cultural milieu. Others suffer a loss of autonomy. They find their cherished beliefs denigrated or derided; they experience a sense of dislocation and disorientation, and they are blocked from enacting values they consider authentically their own. What these observations show, I would urge, is how important it is to bear in mind the difference between eradicating the practice of female genital cutting and augmenting women’s autonomy with respect to female genital cutting.50 Ceasing to be subject to a cultural imperative mandating female genital cutting does not in itself constitute increased autonomy. The educational programmes I described may well try the patience of feminists who are (in my opinion, justifiably) appalled at the harm inflicted by female genital cutting. Yet, these programmes have a distinct advantage from the standpoint of autonomy, for they are designed to engage women’s autonomy

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FEMINISM AND W OM EN’S AUTONOMY practices. Thus, serviceable cultures nurture those autonomy skills that people need to get along within their existing cultural framework and those that they need to improvise adjustments when circumstances render long-standing cultural beliefs and practices untenable. However, in so far as cultures perpetuate injustice by selectively suppressing autonomy skills, I would insist that they are not merely regulating people’s capacity for judgement and discretion, but rather that they are impairing it. It seems to me that cultures do this in two main ways. First, cultures furnish repertories of concepts and interpretive schemas that focus perception and shape reflection. Thus, cultures lead people to notice some phenomena and overlook others, and they lead people to ascribe certain meanings to their experi­ ence and to disregard other possible meanings. Sec­ ond, cultures valorise some autonomy skills over others. Hence they commend child-rearing practices that nurture these skills and establish social struc­ tures that reward individuals who have them, and they let other autonomy skills languish. The fa­ voured autonomy skills are skills that enable people to function well in their cultural context, and the repertories of concepts and interpretive schemas provide input for these deliberation skills that is pre-selected and pre-processed in culturally conge­ nial ways. The disfavoured autonomy skills are skills that might lead people to question the adequacy of the culturally approved repertory of concepts and interpretive schemas and, perhaps, to condemn their cultural heritage. For example, middle-class Euro-American culture prizes means/ends rationality and vigorously culti­ vates the skills needed to pick goals with high satisfaction yields and to plot successful goal-directed campaigns. In this culture, however, valorised auton­ omy skills are gendered. Although child-rearing practices and reward structures do not extinguish means/ends rationality in middle-class Euro-Amer­ ican girls, their interpersonal skills are accentuated. I confess I do not know which autonomy skills are valorised in the innumerable cultures that practise female genital cutting. But I believe it is possible to infer which autonomy skills they devalue in women by examining the education programmes that aug­ ment women’s autonomy.

skills without exposing them to autonomy-disabling cultural alienation. In short, these programmes pro­ mote autonomy-within-culture.

Autonomy-within-Culture Michelle Moody-Adams points out that successful cultures must preserve people’s capacities for the ex­ ercise of judgement and discretion.51 ‘Any culture that worked to impair these capacities’, she adds, ‘would be creating the conditions for its own demise.’52 I agree that a viable culture cannot turn its adherents into indoctrinated automatons who cannot question cul­ tural beliefs and practices and who cannot instigate cultural change.53 Still, I find Moody-Adams’ view of autonomy-within-culture overly sanguine. A thriving culture must evolve, but it must persist as well. If cultures are self-perpetuating systems, they must have in-built mechanisms that shield their beliefs and practices from criticism so zealous and damning that it triggers cultural decline or foments mass defection. The slightest acquaintance with hu­ man history confirms that cultures need not depend on the justice of their beliefs and practices to secure the loyalty of their adherents. Indeed, cultures, in­ cluding the most unjust ones, may have a willing co­ conspirator in human psychology. People commonly exhibit a conservative bent - preferring the known over the unknown, even preferring the security of having more or less mastered coping with a known evil over the risk of being thrown off balance by whatever might succeed it. Still, this conservative disposition is to a significant degree culturally abetted. Cultures ward off the perils of internal dissension and disruption by circumscribing adher­ ents’ exercise of autonomy skills. Adroitly channel­ ling exercise of these skills where they are needed while limiting the scope of their application enables cultures to evolve and endure. Moody-Adams might reply that what I have de­ scribed is not impairment of capacities for judgement and discretion. On the contrary, she might say, cultures guide and modulate the exercise of auton­ omy skills, and rightly so. To some extent, I would not take exception to this rejoinder. No doubt, cultures exist because people cannot lead fulfilling lives without stable systems of shared beliefs and

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DIA N A T I E T JE N S MEYERS Successful educational programmes mobilise wo­ men’s introspection, empathy and imagination skills. One programme invited women to explore their feelings about their sexuality - their sufferings, their frustrations, and their disappointments, as well as their pleasures - and to sift through the possible meanings of these stirrings.54 In effect, this pro­ gramme encourages women to acknowledge the complexity of their emotional lives and to take their own subjectivity seriously. Another programme ca­ pitalised on situations in which local girls and wo­ men had become infected or died and invited women to empathise with the suffering of the in­ fected individuals and the grief of the families of girls and women who died. Instead of rationalising the pain and dismissing the sorrow as passing, women were freed to regard such suffering as significant and avoidable.55 Some programmes invite women to imagine the lives of women whose cultures are different but whose religion is the same as their own.56 Sharing a religion builds a bridge to empathy with these cultural strangers and provides a link that legitimates using empathic understanding of these other women’s lives to reflect critically on one’s own experience and culture. I suspect that these educational programmes owe their success to synergy among introspection, em­ pathy and imagination. Empathy with others can embolden one to confront and enrich one’s inter­ pretation of one’s own experience, and insightful introspection can facilitate empathy with other peo­ ple’s experience and equip one to interpret their experience sympathetically and respectfully. As evi­ dence, let me offer a sequence I have observed. Most middle-class Euro-Americans initially find it virtually impossible to empathise with an African mother who consents to and actively participates in the infibulation of her daughter. Yet these indivi­ duals typically find it easy to empathise with an American mother who consents to reconstructive surgery on a daughter whose genitals are considered ambiguous. N ot only does one assume that surgery in the U S will be performed under sterile conditions and that anaesthesia will be used, but also one is oneself imbued with the same image of an appro­ priately gendered female body that is guiding the American mother’s decision. Thus one can readily

and vividly apprehend the American mother’s dis­ tress about her daughter’s purportedly unnatural condition and her worries about the problems she expects her daughter will encounter if her ‘patholo­ gical’ genitals are left untreated. It is easy, then, to understand her decision to authorise surgery. Indeed, many middle-class Euro-Americans might find with­ holding permission to operate incomprehensible or irresponsible. Sometimes when I start a conversation with a middle-class Euro-American acquaintance by elicit­ ing empathy along the lines I have just sketched and by eliciting reflection on the reasons for the ease of this empathy, it proves possible for my acquaintance to transfer this understanding to the larger issue of female genital cutting. Sensitised to the role that western gender norms are playing in one’s empathy for the American mother, one now appreciates how potent culturally specific feminine bodily norms are, and one can sympathetically reconstruct how a vastly different set of norms could figure in an African mother’s feelings and decision about infibu­ lation. Thus empathy with a fellow cultural initiate and introspective reflection on how culture facil­ itates one’s empathy for this individual make it possible to empathise with a woman from a different culture and to interpret her subjectivity and choices charitably. Narrow categories and prejudicial values often distort or block introspection and empathy. Yet, opportunities to examine one’s subjective experience with supportive associates, to discover hidden simi­ larities between others’ experience and one’s own, and to talk about unorthodox ideas in a safe envir­ onment can correct and deepen both self-knowledge and insight into others. Introspection and empathy can expand one’s repertoire of concepts and inter­ pretive schemas beyond the culturally furnished stock. The educational programmes I have described suggest that this struggle for introspective and em­ pathic access and for language that adequately ex­ presses one’s new-found knowledge is best undertaken as an open-ended, collective endea­ vour.57 Not only does interaction with others expose individuals to novel viewpoints that may never have occurred to each of them separately, but also the sharing of conclusions and the process of reaching

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FEMINISM AND W OM EN’S AUTONOMY omy that alienation from one’s culture and isolation from other members of one’s cultural group can inflict. Still, I would be remiss if I did not acknowl­ edge that Babbitt and Benson bring out important dimensions of women’s autonomy with respect to female genital cutting, and these insights into wo­ men’s autonomy lend support to a skills-based, processual account of autonomy. Benson’s chief contribution to a theory of wo­ men’s autonomy over female genital cutting rests on his observation that oppressive socialisation com­ partmentalises critical skills and receptivity to rea­ sons.58 His example is a woman who exercises critical competence with respect to her education but not with respect to her appearance.59 Similarly, we have seen that cultures place female genital cutting be­ yond the purview of women’s introspection, empathy and imagination skills, yet they rely on women to exercise these very skills in other areas of life such as child-rearing. Although the importance of introspec­ tion, empathy and imagination for gaining autonomy over female genital cutting suggests that it would be a mistake to confine autonomy skills to critical reason­ ing and the need for cultures to deflect exercise of autonomy skills away from culturally destructive uses suggests that it would also be a mistake to suppose that only oppressive enculturation compartmenta­ lises autonomy skills, it is true that cultures’ selfprotective devices include compartmentalisation and that these devices can have deleterious effects on autonomy. Indeed, it seems to me that the success of the educational programmes I discussed is due in part to their effectiveness in decompartmentalising and redirecting autonomy skills that women already have. Babbitt claims that altered settings can prompt transformative experiences that enhance autonomy, and this view is borne out to some extent by the line of thought I have presented. I would take issue with her, though, when she allows that foisting a new set of opportunities on people is an ethical and effica­ cious way to increase their autonomy.60 That legal reforms and social or economic upheaval produce mixed results for women’s autonomy over female genital cutting raises doubts about the defensibility of manipulating the context of women’s choices. Since autonomy-augmenting educational pro­

them infuses these dissident views with an authority they might otherwise lack. It seems, in sum, that women who participate in these educational pro­ grammes gain intellectual tools and self-confidence, and that they license themselves to recirculate their discoveries and use them to refurbish or jettison traditional beliefs and practices. Introspection and empathy thus emancipate their imaginations. Beliefs and practices that once seemed degraded and abhor­ rent can now be pictured as constituting an honour­ able and fulfilling way of life. The capacity for imagination is complex, for it recruits subsidiary skills and orchestrates them. In­ trospection and empathy can spark imagination, as can dialogic and consensus-building skills. More­ over, imagination depends on the concepts one has at one’s disposal and the meanings one associates with phenomena. Prescriptive norms shape imagina­ tion. Thus, cultures can limit imagination by furnish­ ing an impoverished repertoire of concepts and interpretive schemas, by stunting the development of skills that contribute to imagination, or by deva­ luing imagination itself. My hypothesis, then, is that cultures that mandate female genital cutting either altogether devalue imagination in women or else value imagination in women only when it is serving specific approved purposes. In the latter case, cul­ tures may foster the subsidiary skills that imagination enlists only in so far as these skills promote the condoned forms of imaginative activity. A culture’s ultimate defensive weapon is to make alternative ways of life unimaginable or imaginable only as bizarre or loathsome specimens. There is no more effective way to galvanise cultural allegiance than to suppress people’s ability to imagine a pro­ foundly different life as a life they might gladly lead. There is no better evidence, I would add, that cultures typically perpetuate themselves by impairing empathy with cultural outsiders and thwarting ima­ gination of cultural alternatives than the fact that ethnocentricity and xenophobia are as rampant and virulent as they are. Whereas I am convinced that Moody-Adams overestimates the autonomy proficiency that viable cultures must secure, I am convinced that the two restrictive, value-saturated theories of autonomy I discussed earlier underestimate the damage to auton­

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D IA N A T IE T JE N S MEYERS grammes are typically developed by cultural initiates who rely on traditional modes of expression and appeal to traditional values, it is reasonable to sur­ mise that autonomy is best extended by avoiding cultural alienation and by building on women’s existing autonomy skills.61 Still, I agree with Babbitt that women’s participation in these educational programmes can be transformative, for breaking through the barriers erected by a culturally trans­ mitted cognitive system can radically reconfigure perception and open previously unthinkable vistas of reflection and choice. Successful educational programmes embody four assumptions about autonomy:

their values and commitments before they partici­ pate in such programmes. Understanding autonomy as I have proposed, then, makes sense of the claim that women who are subject to female genital cutting are not without autonomy. But this under­ standing of autonomy entails neither endorsement of female genital cutting nor resignation to its persistence. Since cultures that practise female gen­ ital cutting may have selectively nurtured and stifled women’s autonomy skills, and since these cultures may shield the issue of female genital cutting from exercise of autonomy skills, developing and coordi­ nating women’s autonomy skills and extending the range of application of these skills are key to augmenting their autonomy. Individuals may iden­ tify points of self-estrangement - doubts about values or tensions between private feelings and conduct - and decide to revise their convictions and openly oppose tradition. They may find them­ selves unconflicted about their cultural heritage and renew their traditionalist convictions from a broader perspective. Or they may pursue some nuanced, intermediate path, embarking upon a process of renegotiating and revitalising cultural traditions. Although no uniform outcome is guaranteed, the trend when the scope of women’s autonomy is expanded has been towards erosion of the practice of female genital cutting. This skills-based, processual view of autonomy insists on respecting people as self-determining agents and refuses to prejudge what values and practices autonomous people can endorse. Nevertheless, this view does not collapse into indifference to values or cynicism about social reform.62

1. Autonomy is best understood as socially situ­ ated - that is, as autonomy-within-culture. 2. Autonomy couples self-discovery and avowal with choice and self-redefinition. 3. Gaining autonomy consists of exercising a complex set of skills. 4. One’s authentic values and real desires are those that emerge as one exercises autonomy skills. From their inception, autonomy-augmenting pro­ grammes regard women in cultures that practise female genital cutting as self-determining indivi­ duals. Since it is obvious that these women have some degree of proficiency with respect to auton­ omy skills, such as introspection and empathy, before these programmes ever become available, it is clear that they have some understanding of what matters to them and how best to proceed in light of

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Toubia (1995), p. 21; Obiora (1997), p. 298. Gifford (1994), pp. 334, 361; James (1998), p. 1037. Ogbu (1997), p. 414. Obiora (1997), p. 298; Kouba and Muasher (1985), p. 104; Ogbu (1997), p. 414. 5. Diamond and Kipnis (1998); Fausto-Sterling (2000), chapters 3 and 4. 6. For documentation and critique of these attitudes, see Diamond and Kipnis (1998). 7. In the US today, we find gender parity where ambiguous genitalia are concerned. Cosmetic surgery is also routi­ nely performed on genetically male infants whose pe-

nises are considered too small or who lack testicles. It is worth noting, though, that gender symmetry is not necessarily the rule. Just as some cultures practise female genital cutting but not male genital cutting, others cut boys’ genitals to bring about a masculine identity (some­ times the cutting is as radical as infibulation) but do not cut girls’ genitals; see James (1998), pp. 1041-3. 8. Kouba and Muasher (1985), p. 103; Obiora (1997), p. 297. 9. Obiora (1997), p. 296. 10. Ogbu (1997), p. 415; Kouba and Muasher (1985), p. 103.

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FEMINISM AND W OM EN’S AUTONOMY 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

Boddy (1989), pp. 57, 60. Sussman (1998), p. 21. Boddy (1989), p. 52. Kouba and Muasher (1985), p. 104. Obiora (1997), p. 297; Ogbu (1997), p. 415; James (1998), pp. 1041-3. Toubia (1995), p. 37. Obiora (1997), pp. 288-9; Kouba and Muasher (1985), p. 96. Walley (1997), pp. 408, 420; Narayan (1997), pp. 1417. Meyers (1993), pp. 16-19; Moody-Adams (1994), pp. 305-7. An interesting complication concerns the potential for dramatic development of the individual’s erotic responsiveness over the course of time. In this connection, it is worth noting that throughout our lives we are obliged to make choices that, for better or worse, cut off other possibilities. Alas, we cannot always foresee what options we are eliminating, nor can we always appreciate just how desirable foreseeable, forgone options really are. Rational choice the­ ory’s requirement that choosers have full knowledge of the consequences of their choices is an ideal that usually cannot be approximated very well. Thus, a realistic theory of autonomy must work within the limits of human prescience. For development of this critique, see Babbit (1993) and Meyers (1989), pp. 77-8. For critique, see Meyers (1989), pp. 33-41 and (2000), pp. 169-72; Benson (1991), pp. 391-4. Babbit (1993), pp. 246-7. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., pp. 252-4. Ibid., pp. 252-3. Ibid., p. 253; emphasis added. Walker (1998), pp. 125-8. Benson (1991), p. 385. Ibid., pp. 388-9. Ibid., pp. 396-7. Ibid., p. 396. Ibid., p. 395. I want to acknowledge that Benson realises that oppressive socialisation does not necessarily rule out autonomy in all aspects of the victim’s life. He dis­ cusses the possibility that a person’s critical compe­ tence can be compartmentalised - that is, one can exercise critical capabilities in one arena but be unable to exercise these capabilities in another; ibid., p. 397. Kouba and Muasher (1985), p. 108; Obiora (1997), p. 361; Mugo (1997), p. 467. Mugo (1997), p. 467. Conventional educational methods do not seem particularly fruitful. In her role as English teacher, for example, Kathleen Walley gave her pupils the option of writing an essay about female genital cutting. Many students defended it as ‘our

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

221

custom’ and as keeping girls’ sexuality under control until marriage, but they also asserted that it was ‘bad’ because it was illegal and unchristian (Walley, 1997, p. 411). One student who had ‘enthusiastically in­ vited’ Walley to her sister’s genital cutting neverthe­ less declared that it was another way of ‘destroying’ women’s bodies (ibid.). As Walley observes, the stu­ dents’ arguments in favour of female genital cutting parrot local authorities’ pronouncements on cultural propriety, while their critiques parrot doctrines taught in the official Social Education curriculum (ibid.). I suspect that they saw the writing assignment as an academic exercise which called upon them to recite what they had learned, rather than as an opportunity to reflect and reveal what they personally thought. If such exercises contribute to their autonomy, it is only in virtue of maintaining their consciousness of dis­ parate views of female genital cutting. Perhaps they appropriate and individualise some of the ideas they have been exposed to in their private conversations and kvetching sessions. Obiora (1997), p. 361. Ibid., p. 362. Ibid., p. 361. Shaheed (1994), pp. 1009, 1011; Shaheed (1995), pp. 80, 86. James (1998), p. 1046. This cultural change highlights the importance of bringing men into the educational and cultural reconstruction processes. When and how women choose to do this varies greatly from cultural group to cultural group. Obiora (1997), pp. 368, 371-3; Gunning (1997), pp. 455-6. Boddy (1989), pp. 52, 319. Robertson (1996), pp. 616, 631. Obiora (1997), p. 357; Kouba and Muasher (1985), pp. 104-5. A ’Haleem (1992), p. 155. Ibid. Ogbu (1997), p. 420. Ibid., pp. 420-1. It might be argued that eradicating female genital cutting is objectively in the best interests of the cultural groups that practise it, for repudiating the practice would decrease disease and increase fertility. Although this may be so, I believe that social change that is disconnected from individual autonomy is, as often as not, counterproductive. It often proves cul­ turally destructive, for it alienates members of the group. But when it is culturally advantageous, it often sacrifices some members of the group and their inter­ ests to the interests of the larger social collectivity. Individual autonomy may not always be the most efficient way to promote cultural interests, but I am convinced that it is the most humane way to advance this goal.

DIANA TIETJENS MEYERS 51. 52. 53. 54.

Moody'Adams (1994), p. 307. Ibid. See Meyers (1993), p. 17. For discussion of the need to pay attention to sub' jectivity, see Gifford (1994), p. 338, and Meyers (1989), pp. 79-89. For related discussion of ‘outlaw’ emotions, see Jaggar (1997). 55. For related discussion of empowerment, see Okin (1998), p. 47; for related discussion of empathy, see S. Bartky, ‘Sympathy and Solidarity: On a Tightrope with Scheler’, in Meyers (ed.) (1997) and Meyers (1994). In an intriguing aside, Walley wonders whether incidents in which girls reveal ‘cowardice’ - in one cultural parlance, they ‘cry the knife’ - could be enlisted to reconstruct values (Walley, 1997, pp. 418-19). Might this ostensible cowardice be reinterpreted as resistance? 56. Shaheed (1994), pp. 1009-10. 57. For relevant discussion, see Scheman (1993), chapter

222

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

3; ‘Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory and Personal Identity’, in Meyers (ed.) (1997). Benson (1991), p. 397. Ibid. Babbit (1993), p. 256-7. More generally, I would urge that transformative experiences that do not engage autonomy skills are extremely hazardous. Cults specialise in transformative experiences, and some people who undergo transfer' mative experiences get converted into neO'Nazis in' stead of feminists. Although there is no way to immunise people against such ilbfated transforma' tions, autonomy skills are the best protection there is. I would like to thank Ken Kipnis for a pre'publication copy of the Diamond and Kipnis paper I have cited and for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. I am also grateful to Berel Lang and Sara Ruddick for their suggestions.

Part Seven L I B E R A L I S M BEYOND T HE N A T I O N - S T A T E

17

CIVIL A S S O C I A T I O N : T HE E U R O P E A N U N I O N AS A S U P R A N A T I O N A L LI BERAL L EGAL ORDER Robert Bideleux

democracy was preceded and made possible by sev­ eral decades of limited government, liberal consti­ tutionalism, the rule of law, and the separation of public and private as well as political and economic spheres. The liberal institutions, procedures, prac­ tices and patterns of conduct which paved the way for liberal democracy have subsequently helped to safeguard most western democracies against the perils of unconstrained majoritarianism. The essential point is that liberty is safeguarded not so much by democracy as such as by liberalism, limited govern­ ment and the rule of law, which long antedated and did not depend upon the existence of democracy. It might be objected that, when democrats and theor­ ists of democracy and democratisation talk about ‘democracy’, they are merely using that word as a form of shorthand and take it for granted that democracy must be buttressed by liberalism, limited government and the rule of law, without which a system based upon freely contested multi-party elec­ tions and a broad suffrage is unlikely to function well or survive for long. However, this shorthand is misleading, in that it appears to suggest that the crucial safeguards of liberty are the specifically de­ mocratic components - procedural democracy (pri­ marily the holding of regular elections), the political mobilisation of the demos and some form of repre-

It is widely recognised that the integration theories which have hitherto dominated studies of the Eur­ opean Union have failed to shed much light on the nature of the nascent supranational polity, as distinct from the processes that brought it about. Such theorising has latterly been going round in circles and repeating itself, without getting us much closer to a satisfactory conceptualisation of the order that is emerging in Europe. In order to gain a surer under­ standing of the new political order, it is necessary to draw upon and creatively adapt elements of main­ stream political theory. This chapter attempts to develop a different way of discussing and thinking about the emerging European order, using a language which owes rather more to the writings of two eminent liberal thinkers, Friedrich Hayek and Mi­ chael Oakeshott, than to integration theory.1 They would perhaps have been surprised, but I hope not too displeased, at the ways in which their ideas and concepts have been deployed.

Democracy and the Liberal Legal Order It has always been imprudent to treat the ‘liberal’ and the ‘democratic’ components of liberal democracy as if they were two halves of the same walnut. In most western states, as is well known, the advent of liberal

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ROBERT BIDELEUX sentative and/or participatory government - rather than the liberal elements. In fact, inasmuch as democracy has an in-built tendency towards unlim­ ited government, because majorities (however tem­ porary) generally hope and expect to get their own way and often resent any obstruction of their will by law courts, second chambers, heads of state and other checks and balances, democracy as such not infre­ quently poses major threats to the liberties which are in practice upheld by liberalism, limited government and the rule of law.2 ‘Liberalism’ here refers not only to the classic liberal political and economic doc­ trines, but also to the belief that societies - in the broad sense - should primarily be based upon and held together by impersonal law, interests, calcula­ tion and contractual relations of a Lockean kind, rather than by ‘primordial’ ties of religion, race, ethnicity and kinship. It will be contended that religious and ethnic collectivism are fundamentally at odds with the cosmopolitan, supranational liberal legal order which is being constructed by the Eur­ opean Union. These distinctions are of crucial importance. They enable us to see more clearly that the political performance and EU membership prospects of states such as Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Romania and Bulgaria are being impaired not so much by a lack of democracy (they actually have executives and legislatures which have been more or less freely and fairly elected by universal suffrage in multi-party contests) as by insufficient respect for minorities and for the rule of law, by inadequate constraints on the exercise of power by the state and its officers, and by the weakness or shallow roots of liberal doctrine and sentiment. Conversely, what has placed countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland at the front of the queue for membership of the EU is not a greater commitment to democracy as such, but rather their stronger commitment to the rule of law, their greater respect for the liberties of individuals, their stronger constraints on the power of the state, and their fuller understanding of the requirements of liberal governance. These same qualities also explain the greater success of their transitions to market economies.

The European Union as a Liberal Rather Than a Democratic Project The European Union, crucially, is a liberal project rather than a democratic one. It rests upon a supranational system of rules, regulations and laws engendered by judicial and quasi-judicial processes as well as by highly consensual negotiation-cumhorse-trading between liberal democratic states. Liberalism, rather than democratic theory, is the key to understanding what the European Union is and how it works. Admittedly, European federalists in the mould of Altiero Spinelli and Mario Albertini wanted European unification to assume the form of a supranational European democracy structured as a federal European state,3 but such a path has always been rejected by both public opinion and the powers that be. The constitutive treaties of the European Communities and the European Union have been ratified by the parliaments (and in some cases the electorates) of each of the member states, while successive treaties have acquired the status of a constitution or fundamental legal charter. Never­ theless, the Union does not rest upon direct demo­ cratic legitimation at a supranational all-Union level. The Union has a telos, but there is no nascent European demos standing above the separate demoi of the constituent member states, nor is there a transnational EU ‘public opinion’. There is very little articulation and aggregation of interests at a supranational level - only business interests are well organised in this respect.4 There are no truly ‘U n ­ ion-wide’ political parties fighting EU elections on transnational ‘European’ platforms and issues. Elec­ tions to the European Parliament are characterised by low and steadily declining turnouts and minimal public engagement with ‘European’ as distinct from ‘national’ programmes, policies, personalities and issues. Moreover, the U nion’s institutional design does not conform to the traditional separation of powers between legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. Rather, decisions evolve from intense bargaining within and across the policy-making institutions . . . The Union is not a traditional hierarchy with a clearly defined

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CIVIL A S S O C IA T IO N AND EUROPE not they are democracies.’ Thus it is not whether a polity ‘is a liberal democracy that most fundamen­ tally determines its legitimacy; it is how well it secures its citizens against the worst evils.’7 Post facto popular approval of what has been achieved has been a bonus rather than a precondi­ tion for the success and the legitimacy of an elitedriven integration project which has contributed so strongly to the peace and prosperity of Western Europe since the 1950s. The latter stands in marked contrast to the devastating and debilitating conflicts which resulted at least in part from the democratic mobilisation of ideological mass movements during the first half of the twentieth century. West Eur­ opean elites have in effect succeeded in putting the destructive genies of mass politics back into their bottles, thereby making Western Europe a much freer, safer and more prosperous place than it had been earlier in the twentieth century, and than south-eastern Europe and the former Soviet Repub­ lics still were at the end of it. The frameworks of EU law and regulation which increasingly govern the Single Market, environmen­ tal policies, health and safety provisions, the terms and conditions of employment, monetary policy, industrial policies, regional policies and agricultural policies have transformed the EU into a multi-tiered ‘regulatory federation’ which increasingly defines and upholds the rights and obligations of its citizens.8 The state-like institutional skeleton of the EU has fostered growing expectations that it should behave and grow ‘like a state’. Relative to other multi-tiered federal systems of governance, however, ‘the Eur­ opean framework has strikingly modest resources of its own. Consequently, there are major constraints upon the nature of the activity that can be pursued.’ In particular, there is very limited scope for redis­ tributive measures, which in turn virtually imposes the emphasis on regulatory governance.9 The EU is emerging as a legal federation, as an economic federation, and as a regulatory federation, but it lacks either the design or the wherewithal to discharge the classic Hobbesian and Weberian functions of a state - especially the monopoly of organised violence and it can and should be prevented from acquiring them. Within the European Union, political and civil

centre of political authority . . . As a result, Europe’s citizens have difficulty in identifying ‘who governs’ in the Union and cannot . . . dismiss them at elections. 5 Increased ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’ may be desirable in their own rights but they do not of themselves reduce the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Union. They skirt round rather than tackle the problem head on.6 As a polity, the European Union and its policy­ making processes have been based upon mutual accommodation of elites, rather than on specifically democratic procedures. It has been constructed, not by democratic mobilisation of peoples in support of ‘ever closer union’ and the ‘idea of Europe’, but rather by consensual negotiation and horse^trading between European governments and officials. There have been no great waves of popular support for a united Europe - certainly none that are even remo­ tely comparable to the periodic populist backlashes against the idea. From the outset, the construction of the European Communities and the EU has been the work of cosmopolitan elites pursuing their own elite agendas, rather than a response to popular demands for European integration. However, this elitism has been not a weakness, as many critics complain, but one of the Union’s strengths. If it had been necessary to wait for its peoples to voice demands for ‘ever closer union’, Western European integration would not have advanced nearly so far as it has done in so short a time. The crucial point is that European states would have had to devise ways and means of coexisting more peacefully and harmoniously, no matter what the subjective preferences, prejudices, bugbears or grievances of their citizens, in order to avert any potential return to the destructive interand intra-state conflicts and beggar-my-neighbour protectionism of Europe’s ‘Second Thirty Years War’ (1914-45). These matters were too important to be submitted to the vagaries of public opinion. In any case, as argued by John Gray, the current shrill and single-minded insistence on democratic legiti­ macy is somewhat over the top. In practice, forms of governance ‘are legitimate in so far as they meet the needs of their citizens. Those that fail in this will be judged by their citizens to be illegitimate whether or

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ROBERT BIDELEUX and Pacific countries, the Europe Agreements with former Communist states, the Euro-Med Partnership, international cooperation on environmental regula­ tion and the inchoate Common Foreign and Secur­ ity Policy: all have involved the creation of mechanisms and procedures through which the ex­ ternal economic and (increasingly) non-economic relations of EU member states can be continuously and intensively coordinated. Indeed, on most mat­ ters pertaining to external economic relations (espe­ cially foreign access to the Single Market), the EU Commission is empowered to act and to negotiate agreements on behalf of the member states. More­ over, as Michael Smith has emphasised, ‘the see­ mingly “domestic” concerns of market regulation, standards setting and competition policy’ have in­ creasingly become ‘the stuff of international poli­ tics’.11 The mounting importance of economic and regulatory matters in international relations and in regional security, together with the launching of the Single Market programme, has steadily increased the number and importance of the areas within which EU institutions have supranational competence to act on behalf of the member states. Even before the end of the Cold War, the security of the EU and its member states was becoming less and less concerned with traditional questions of war and peace and military capabilities, and increasingly to do with economic security, market access, fishing rights, en­ vironmental regulation, human rights, minority rights, immigration issues, drug trafficking and inter­ national crime. As argued by Michael Mann, during the 1990s Western Europe gained ‘the geopolitical security it has always wanted, as well as client states and even supplicant states between itself and any threat coming out of the East.’ So long as such conditions continued to pertain (and here both Mann and the EU were in danger of complacency), the EU would have ‘little need for efficient geopo­ litical decision-making’. The EU represents a ‘Lock­ eian heartland’ of civil association and contractual relations, although not far beyond its southern and eastern borders (for example, in the Maghreb, Egypt, Bosnia, Kosovo and south-eastern Turkey) one comes into more ‘Hobbesian’ terrain.12 The mere existence of the EU has helped to transform the very nature of European external

rights and liberties are being ever more deeply embedded in a strong supranational legal and constitu­ tional framework, albeit one which in the last resort can only be upheld by national law courts and national police forces - as the EU has no national-level courts or police of its own. This supranational legal order helps to safeguard rights and liberties against poten­ tial violation by various powerful actors, including the governments of member states which still control national armed forces, police forces, law-courts, na­ tionwide bureaucracies and other legitimate instru­ ments of enforcement and surveillance at that level. Contrary to the fears and alarmism of the Europhobes, the EU does not itself control or possess any such forces with which it could conceivably coerce those citizens, enterprises and member states who occasionally violate its rules and laws, although it has generated ever-growing political and economic incentives for compliance as well as penalties for non-compliance. The only conceivable direct threats to liberty within the European Union come from states, large companies, organised crime, terror­ ists and private security forces rather than from the European Union as such. The European nation-state has lost some functions while gaining others ‘in what had previously been more private and local spheres’, but overall ‘the bars of the cage have not changed very much. Citizens still need to deploy most of their vigilance at the national level.’10 So long as the British and the Scandinavians continue to hold out against the aspirations of some member states to create a strong supranational European army or a supranational European police force with a strong capacity for electronic surveillance of (and data banks on) EU citizens, the possibility of the EU becoming an Orwellian ‘big brother’ superstate will remain nothing more than a figment of the ‘black propaganda’ put about by prominent British ‘Europhobes’ such as Margaret Thatcher, Norman Lamont, William Hague and John Redwood. Even the external relations of the European U n ­ ion have become increasingly enmeshed in a supra­ national framework of rules and regulation. The Common Commercial Policy, the Common Exter­ nal Tariff, the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, the successive Lome Agreements with successive African, Caribbean

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CIVIL A S S O C IA T IO N AND EUROPE transnational capitalism and information/communications technologies can in many ways help to promote the geographical diffusion of the rule of law, liberal values and liberal democratic forms of governance. But it should be pointed out that they also give rise to market forces and concentrations of power which are increasingly beyond the control of the individual states or groups of states which remain the principal sites of democratic accountability. This growing democratic deficit afflicts states which are not members of the EU every bit as much as (and often more than) those within it, and therefore should not be simplistically or demagogically ‘blamed’ upon the EU. Indeed, during the 1990s the economies of many non-EU states were even more severely buf­ feted than those of EU states by global market forces over which their political and monetary authorities have little control. Public allegiance to the European nation-state persists, but this is increasingly out of kilter with the actual locus of economic and military power and decision-making, which has to a large extent shifted to higher levels (not just to the EU, but to N A TO , the W TO, the IMF, other interna­ tional agencies and giant transnational corpora­ tions). Moreover, inasmuch as the ‘national’ governments of the member states of the EU con­ trolled 52 per cent of GDP (on average) in 1993, whereas the institutions of the EU controlled a mere 1.3 per cent of their combined GDP, ‘democratic deficits’ actually pose much more of a problem at the national than at the EU level. Even though there has been a lot of influential wishful thinking about supranational forms of ‘cos­ mopolitan democracy’, much of it by eminent poli­ tical theorists,14 no one has convincingly demonstrated any way in which it might be possible to establish direct democratic accountability and control over governance at the supranational level. An important body of supranational ‘cosmopolitan law’ has already emerged (most notably in the form of European Union law), but ‘cosmopolitan democ­ racy’ remains a mirage. It is likely that any thorough­ going attempt to subordinate all supranational decisions, policies and regulations directly to detailed scrutiny and control by ‘sovereign’ national parlia­ ments would induce political paralysis or deadlock, while attempts to subordinate them to ‘sovereign’

relations. Much of what used to be regarded as foreign policy or international relations (especially the often bellicose relations between European states in the past) has been ‘domesticated’ and ‘civilianised’ becoming part of the civil order and internal relations of the EU, dealt with by institutions and mechanisms formerly associated with ‘domestic’ matters. The EU comprises a complex mesh of institutions, rules and laws which structure both the internal and external dealings of the EU as a whole and its individual member states, as a result of which there is ‘a constant rule-governed process of negotiation be­ tween actors which produces policy positions and international policy outcomes.’13 The scathing pub­ licity given to the Union’s inability to project im­ perialistic military might in the manner of the United States has diverted public attention from the large areas of consensus and joint activity in the Union’s external relations, and from the fact that the EU as a vast and economically powerful ‘civil association’ exerts enormous influence and ‘magnetic pull’ on the states and peoples lying to the south and east of its current borders.

From ‘Democratic D eficits, to ‘Cosmopolitan Democracy’? Many critics of the European Union regard the fact that it is a supranational liberal legal order, rather than a form of democracy, as a woeful deficiency. Yet in reality that is its greatest virtue. Critics decry the EU’s so-called ‘democratic deficit’, as if either its present constitution or even the very existence of the European Union were the intrinsic source of the said deficit. In fact, it is the development of mighty global market forces and global information and commu­ nications networks, rather than the increasingly federal character of the European Union, that pose the greatest threats to ‘sovereignty’ and democratic control and accountability. This is so, not only at the national level, but also indirectly at the EU level. Globalisation and the diminishing capacity of either national or EU parliamentary and executive institu­ tions effectively to control and hold to account the forces of global capitalism and global information and communications networks have created demo­ cratic deficits at all levels. This is not to deny that

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ROBERT BIDELEUX that increasingly govern their lives. The citizens of small and medium-sized states in other parts of the world have no such means at their disposal.15 Thus:

supranational elected bodies could lead to excessive centralisation of power and to a real possibility of the Orwellian ‘superstate’ so feared and berated by Brit' ish ‘Europhobes’. Although the overriding aim of European federalists in the tradition of Altiero Spinelli and Mario Albertini was to transcend the perils and defects of the European states system, the creation of a European superstate would merely reproduce many of those self-same defects (and others besides) on an even larger scale than before. That would be to jump out of the frying-pan into the fire. In a European ‘superstate’, whether unitary or fed­ eral, the police forces, the bureaucracies and the military forces holding sway over Europe would be even larger and even harder to subordinate at all times to democratic control and accountability than are their present-day ‘national’ counterparts. Thus, although the European Union and its member states do indeed suffer from democratic deficit, these would not be significantly reduced either by creating a European ‘superstate’ or by reasserting full national sovereignty and autonomy - even if either of these options were to be politically feasible. The European Union as presently constituted, far from being the intrinsic source of Western Europe’s democratic deficit, is the most promising means of limiting and mitigating the potential negative conse­ quences of the democratic deficits caused by the expansion of transnational capitalism, communica­ tions networks, bureaucratic ‘big government’ and transnational military bureaucracies beyond demo­ cratic control. As the doyen of American democratic theorists has emphasised:

except for the European Union, the prospects for even moderately ‘democratic’ governments of transnational political associations are poor. Even if transnational political systems are greatly strengthened, for a long time to come decisions are likely to be made by the delegates appointed by national governments. Thus the link between the delegates and the citizens will remain weak; and the democratic process will be even more attenuated. Dahl suggests that disgusted democrats should seek solace in enhanced participation and deliberation in the national and subnational democratic processes and institutions which could indeed exercise ‘what­ ever democratic control may be possible over the authority delegated to transnational decision makers’ and thus help to sustain a ‘healthy democratic political life within the large sphere of relative autonomy that democratic countries will still pos­ sess’, including increased local control over such matters as education, town and city planning, public amenities, and social and health services.16 Half a loaf is better than none. It is mainly at these lower levels that more ‘radical’ conceptions of democratic participation and control, including ‘electronic de­ mocracy’ or ‘cyberdemocracy’, are most relevant and realisable.17 It is sometimes claimed that the devel­ opment of electronic democracy offers a means of overcoming the EU’s so-called democratic deficit by creating a ‘wired-up Europe’ (or, through the next generation of information technology, a ‘wireless Europe’), by connecting the European Union’s citi­ zens directly to the EU institutions and one another, by-passing national governments. However, it is more likely that the new technologies will merely reinforce elite dominance and magnify the inequal­ ities of power and influence even further, because it is Europe’s elites that have the greatest resources for doing this and that are most adept and assiduous at deploying them to their own advantage.

The boundaries of a country, even one as large as the United States, have become much smaller than the boundaries of the decisions that signifi­ cantly affect the fundamental interests of its citizens . . . Thus the citizens of a country cannot employ their national government, and much less their local governments, to exercise direct control over external actors whose decisions bear criti­ cally upon their lives. The European Union, in Robert Dahl’s view, affords its citizens some mechanisms of indirect political and legal monitoring, regulation and control over the forces

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CIVIL A S S O C IA T IO N AND EUROPE described as ‘the most crucial problem of political organisation, namely how to limit the “popular will” without placing another “will” above it’.21 The exigencies of accommodating the ever-increasing political, economic and cultural diversity of the membership of a steadily expanding EU further ensure that it will have to remain a polity based on limited government, consensual negotiation and the rule of law - indeed, unless it is held together by an iron frame of law, it could burst apart at the seams. O f course, even this might not be enough. Never­ theless, the national and/or religious ties on which nation-states (whether liberal democratic or other­ wise) have hitherto implicitly relied to foster the active commitment and loyalty of citizens to their polities are being steadily loosened and eroded by globalisation, regional integration, multiculturalism, acceptance of difference and the growing fragmenta­ tion of political and cultural identities.

The EU Legal Order and Limited Government The French legal scholar L. Cohen-Tanugi has argued that two conceptions of democracy currently coexist in Western Europe: the Jacobin tradition of ‘elective democracy founded solely on universal suffrage’, and that of the constitutional state founded on higher principles of law, equity and procedure . . . Like other organisations of a fed­ eral type, the Community is building itself by law . . . European integration has promoted the ‘return of law’ and the promotion of a democratic ideal which does not draw its legitimacy solely from the law of the majority, but also from fundamental principles - those of the European Convention of Human Rights, for example - and from a system of judicial recourse largely open to citizens against national states.18

Squeezed between a globalised economy and aggressively introverted cultures, the political space is fragmenting and democracy is being debased - reduced, at best, to a relatively open political marketplace, which no one troubles to defend because it is not the object of any intel­ lectual or affective investment . . . The danger here is that [multi]culturalism, in the name of respect for differences, will encourage the forma­ tion of localised power that will impose an anti­ democratic authority within particular communities. Should that happen, political so­ ciety will become no more than a marketplace where communities locked into an obsession with their identities and internal homogeneity enter into loosely regulated transactions.22

In the words of J . Temple-Lang, each member of the EU now has two constitutions: its national constitu­ tion and the Community constitution, which it shares with other member states. Member states’ legislative, executive and judicial powers under their national constitutions can be exercised only within the framework and limits imposed by Community law.19 Ian Loveland, another legal scholar, contends that EC Treaties stand in marked contrast to our own domestic law-making process. They are not the product of majoritarian or even super-majoritarian law-making. Their every provision has been arrived at through a consensual negotiator^ process . . . The prospect of EC law being nar­ rowly majoritarian, and hence oppressive or irra­ tional, has been reduced almost to vanishing point. In that sense, it is a ‘higher’ form of law than can be produced by any of the EC ’s member states within their own legal systems.20

So far, however, global capitalism and regional in­ tegration have seemed incapable of fostering feelings of belonging and allegiance to replace those which they are helping to dilute and disempower at the level of the nation-state. In such circumstances, political order can only be maintained within the broader framework of a large and consensual polity whose laws are impartial in the specific sense of being incapable of being merely the expression of the interests and/or wishes of a dominant majority group

The European Union thus represents an original and constructive solution to what Friedrich Hayek

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ROBERT BIDELEUX and whose function is not to promote agreement on substantive goals and projects but rather to allow a great diversity of persons and states the maximum scope for defining and pursuing their diverse goals and projects while minimising the scope for friction and mutual interference. Significantly, in an article published in 1939, Hayek argued that ‘the abrogation of national sover­ eignties and the creation of an effective international order of law is a necessary complement and the logical consummation of the liberal programme’, if only because ‘an essentially liberal economic regime is a necessary condition for the success of any inter­ state federation.’23 Indeed, since the citizens of such a federation ‘will be reluctant to submit to any interference in their daily affairs when the govern­ ment is composed of people of different nationalities and different traditions’, it follows that ‘the govern­ ment in a federation composed of many different peoples will have to be restricted in scope.’ Since the full realisation of the potential economic benefits of such an entity would in Hayek’s view entail eco­ nomic and monetary union, there would have to be ‘less government all round’ if such a federation was to be practicable. Economic policy would then ‘have to take the form of providing a rational permanent framework within which individual initiative will have the largest possible scope.’24 Hayek’s linking of inter-state federation to limited government and projects for economic and monetary union presciently anticipated what were to become the most distinctive features of European Union governance. O f course, the European Union is far from being a perfect embodiment of liberal governance. Its ten­ dencies towards corporatism, clientelism, corruption and a ‘fortress Europe’ increasingly concerned with keeping out unwanted ‘aliens’ compromise its liberal­ ism. Nevertheless, its central emphases on the rule of law, the uniform adoption and enforcement of stable and predictable rules and the creation of an extended spontaneous legal order are bedrocks of liberalism on which a more completely liberal and cosmopolitan order is gradually being built. The horse-trading, deals and manoeuvres which take place at or prior to meetings of the European Council and the Coun­ cil of Ministers often appear unseemly and cynical. Yet they are intrinsic to the consensual adoption or

extension of uniform rules, regulations and laws which all the participants can live with and the placing of the EU ’s policies, functions and activities on an increasingly law-governed footing.

The European Union as an Oakeshottian ‘Civil A ssociation According to the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the proper business of government is ‘to try to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness.’ Therefore: the only appropriate manner of ruling is by mak­ ing and enforcing rules of conduct . . . which, in the circumstances, are least likely to result in a collision of interests . . . Thus governing is re­ cognised as a specific and limited activity; not the management of an enterprise, but the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises.’25 The rule of law is, in Oakeshott’s view, ‘a method of government remarkably economical in its use of power’ and, ‘while losing nothing in strength, is itself the emblem of that diffusion of power which it exists to promote’. It is ‘the greatest single condi­ tion of our freedom’.26 Oakeshott’s conception of civil association was put forward in contradistinction to ‘enterprise asso­ ciation’, in which the state is perceived as an orga­ nisation for the attainment of prescribed ends which are incumbent upon its citizens (as in the Thatcherite project to transform the UK into UK pic, of which we were all to have become compliant em­ ployees, as well as in the more overtly teleological ‘planned economies’). John Gray has incisively summed up Oakeshott’s conception of a civil asso­ ciation as ‘an association of persons who, having no ends or purposes held necessarily in common, never­ theless coexist in peace under the rule of law. On this account, the office of law is not typically to impose any particular duty or goal on men, but instead seeks principally to facilitate their dealings with one an­ other’.27 The distinctive feature of the Oakeshottian concept of civil association is that ‘the rules which

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CIVIL A S S O C IA T IO N AND EUROPE Hence values such as legality, morality and justice are ‘best regarded not as ends but as values embodied in the constraints governing all action . . . Even peace is better regarded as a constraint than as a purpose’, since it requires not the avoidance of all uses of force but rather an acceptance that ‘force is to be used only in authorised ways’.30 Thus purposive associations are constituted by the ends they serve or pursue, whereas practical associations are based upon the forms of conduct which they either authorise or prohibit. In these terms, international society and by implication most forms of international association cannot be ‘purposive’ (even though they are often seen as such), on account of the great diversity of goals and aspirations that exists among states.31 ‘International society’ is best conceived as an inclusive ‘practical association’ geared to the main­ tenance and observance of certain practices and rules of conduct designed to minimise the risks of armed conflict and to maximise the scope for peaceful coexistence between states engaged in the pursuit of widely differing goals, values, beliefs and projects.

constitute it are non-instrumental: they do not em­ body any specific project, but instead act as condi­ tions whereby individuals and groups pursue their own several and diverse projects. In its moral aspect, civil association is that mode of association which exemplifies in­ dividuality - the condition in which human beings accept and celebrate their autonomy . . . In its political dimension, civil association is characterised by the diffusion of power through­ out society - by a complex structure of counter­ vailing institutions of precisely the sort that is threatened by contemporary collectivist projects (of the Right and Left) of transforming govern28 ment into an enterprise association. Terry Nardin has drawn upon Oakeshott’s distinc­ tion between civil and enterprise associations to fashion a similarly useful distinction between ‘prac­ tical’ and ‘purposive’ conceptions of international society and of international associations:

Some international associations are purposive; they exist for the sake of pursuing various shared purposes; the rules they adopt and the ethic they foster are instrumental to the achievement of the purposes for which they were created. But inter­ national society as such - that inclusive society of states, or community of communities, within which all international association takes place - is not a purposive association constituted by a joint wish on the part of all states to pursue certain ends in concert. It is, rather, an associa­ tion of independent and diverse political com­ munities, each devoted to its own conception of the good . . . The common good of this inclusive community resides not in the ends that some, or at times even most, of its members may wish collectively to pursue but in the values of justice, peace, security and coexistence, which may be enjoyed through participation in a common body of authoritative practices.32

Practical association is a relationship among those who are engaged in the pursuit of different and possibly incompatible purposes, and who are as­ sociated with one another . . . only in respecting certain restrictions on how each may pursue his own purposes . . . Purposive association is a relationship among those who co-operate for the purpose of securing certain shared beliefs, values and interests, who adopt certain practices as a means to that end, and who regard such practices as worthy of respect only to the extent that they are useful instruments of the common purpose’.29 Admittedly, any association is created to serve a purpose and is in that sense purposive but: The purposes of practical association, however, are of an altogether different order from those served by purposive association . . . The values of practical association . . .are those appropriate to the relations among persons who are not neces­ sarily engaged in any common pursuit but who nevertheless have to get along with one another.

In Nardin’s view, international society has to take a form that is capable of accommodating culturally and ideologically heterogeneous states. This kind of in-

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ROBERT BIDELEUX international associations such as the EU, most of his insights can be applied to Europe as well. In practice, the participants in the EU are united not so much by engagement in common endeavours (however much they say they are!) as by their acceptance that they are members of an association defined by a common set of rules and laws designed to allow each of them to pursue their own goals and ambitions with the minimum of friction and mutual impairment.

temational society first emerged in Europe following the sixteenth^ and seventeenth-century wars of re­ ligion, when it became necessary to work out principles of coexistence among individuals and groups committed to different conceptions of truth and the good . . . Thus the kind of legal order that developed in Europe was shaped by the gradual discovery that, in the absence of agreement on ends, agreement on procedures is required if destructive conflict is to be avoided.’33

Given the existence . . . of significant differences of belief, value and interest, the expectation of . . . unity on the basis of shared purposes is sure to be disappointed. The basis of international association lies in deference to practices that embody recognition of the fact that we must coexist . . . with others with whom we some­ times share little beyond a common predica­ ment.36

Therefore, it is also necessary to reject all extreme claims that shared purposes [or values or beliefs] are a necessary condition of international order . . . International law, and especially customary international law, embodies the minimum principles of mutual accommoda­ tion required for the coexistence not only of separate states but of different kinds of states . . . It is through the experience of international association defined and directed by this common law that an appropriate international culture bridging other cultural differences is created.34

The fact that the European Union lacks a single centre of power, decision-making and authority but instead has a multiplicity of such centres has been conducive to the dispersal of power, authority and functions which Oakeshott regarded as the chief safeguards of liberty. Further, the fact that the Eur­ opean Union’s budget has not been allowed to exceed 1.27 per cent of the combined GDP of its member states has in effect forced it to remain an Oakeshottian ‘civil association’, even though some observers consider that it harbours (in my view unrealisable) ambitions to become an ‘enterprise association’ in certain sectors. The Single Market programme, the EU ’s growing social and environ­ mental regulation responsibilities and the project for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) are major extensions of the law-governed regulatory federation and civil association characteristics of the EU, rather than great leaps towards the creation of ‘big govern­ ment’ at the supranational level. Indeed, the Eur­ opean Union is governed by impersonal rules and laws to a far greater extent than any ‘really existing’ democracy. Contrary to the claims of British Europhobes, EMU is governed by stringent rules and a regulatory committee of bankers rather than by an emergent European superstate with major redistribu­ tive capabilities. The EU corruption scandals of 1998

Part of the attraction of the terms of reference employed by Oakeshott, Hayek and Nardin is that they eschew the impersonal pseudo-scientific abstrac­ tions involved in analyses of behaviour, forces, pro­ cesses, variables and correlations, and speak instead of conduct, society, law and individuals as moral agents who deliberate and make reasoned judgements and choices. As Nardin puts it, his concern is not with international relations understood as a system of causally or functionally related variables but with the arrangements of an international society constituted by the actions of thinking agents who must take each other into account in making decisions . . . and whose acts are understood as being shaped and guided by rules of conduct rather than laws of behaviour. 35 Although Nardin focuses on relations between states in the world at large rather than on regional

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CIVIL A S S O C IA T IO N AND EUROPE common purpose. The observance of rules by all will be important for each because the achieve­ ment of his purposes depends on it, but the respective purposes of different persons may be wholly different.38

and 1999 highlighted how little (rather than how much) power is wielded by individual commissioners and other officials. It is not only power that corrupts, so does powerlessness. The main virtue of the creation of a supranational liberal legal order which functions in the manner of an Oakeshottian ‘civil association’ rather than a more purposive, redistributive and potentially coercive ‘enterprise association’ is that it erects a strong supranational framework of rules and laws (a form of ‘governance without government’) which can regulate political and economic activities and power without fostering a European ‘superstate’ with more obviously Hobbesian, Weberian or Orwellian fea­ tures and potential. Another of the virtues of such a civil association is its ability to maximise the cer­ tainty, equity and transparency of the rules govern­ ing economic, social and environmental matters, above all through the equal application of its rules and laws to all. Rule certainty and stability of ex­ pectations lie at the heart of the Single Market programme and Economic and Monetary Union, from which Europe’s hitherto inflation-prone and relatively unstable less developed peripheries poten­ tially have much more to gain than do the already stable and disciplined ‘core’ states, which have been enjoying low levels of inflation and correspondingly low ‘risk premia’ on their interest rates for decades.37 In this situation, the case for redistribution of income from the ‘rich core’ to ‘poor peripheries’ and for an expansion of the European Union’s redistributive capabilities is correspondingly diminished. As emphasised by Hayek, the aim of the rules

This is the way in which the European Union has accommodated a diversity of states and peoples, assisting them to pursue their own very diverse purposes within a common framework of rules and laws which has maximised peace and prosperity and minimised the scope for friction and conflict be­ tween them. This has much more to do with the rule of law, consensual negotiation of mutually accepta­ ble rules and laws, negotiated accommodation of differences and ‘judicious’ interpretation of rules and laws by the (European) Court of Justice than with democracy as such. As Hayek remarked, ‘the ideal of individual liberty seems to have flourished chiefly among people where, at least for long periods, judge-made law predominated’.39 In making their judicial or quasi-judicial rulings, the task of the judges and of the EU Commission is not to ascertain, reflect or uphold the wishes of a demos or even of the fifteen separate demoi, but to endeavour to maximise the internal consistency and viability of the EU legal order and to minimise the scope for friction, conflict, malfunction and acrimony. The major political safe­ guard is not a democratic one involving the submis­ sion of the decisions reached and policies adopted after protracted and tortuous negotiation to various forms of popular and/or parliamentary approval or ratification. Rather, it is the fact those decisions and policies can rarely go forward without gaining ac­ ceptance (often reluctantly and only after a great deal of horse-trading) from fifteen separate states. One of the major implications of all this is that the current ‘eastern’ applicants for EU membership need neither expect nor be required to undergo major extensions of democracy as such. Indeed, procedurally, in most cases their parliaments and govern­ ments are as freely and fairly elected as their Western European counterparts. Rather, what they have to accept and adjust to is working within a political and economic environment which is much more exten­ sively and exactingly regulated by consensually ne­ gotiated and/or judge-made supranational rules,

must be to facilitate that matching or tallying of the expectations on which the plans of the in­ dividuals depend for their success . . . But all rules can achieve in this respect is to make it easier for people to find together and to form that match; abstract rules cannot actually secure that this will always happen . . . Indeed, the superiority of certain rules will become evident largely in the fact that they will create an effective order not only within a closed group but also between people who meet accidentally and do not know each other personally. They will thus . . . create an order even among people who do not pursue a

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ROBERT BIDELEUX over, government itself is ‘increasingly contracted out through various forms of privatisation and semi­ privatisation’.44 These momentous changes are in turn blurring the distinctions between what is public and what is private, between state and non-state, between internal and external, between what is military and what is civil, and even between war and peace.45 Such distinctions were crucial to the rise of limited constitutional government, civil so­ ciety and liberal democracy in the West, and the blurring of such distinctions is potentially a very ominous development. Indeed, armed conflicts now arise mainly within and across rather than between states, as the emergence of new privatised and transnationalised forms of organised violence erodes and in some cases completely disintegrates states. Thus the growing ‘privatisation of organised violence’ in the Balkans, Transcausasia, Africa and parts of Asia and the Middle East is a reversal of the process by which states emerged and, if allowed to continue unchecked, could bring about similar re­ sults in the West.46 However, it would be more appropriate to see this ‘privatisation of organised violence’ as just part of the more pervasive ‘privatisation of power’47 which has been in full flood since the neoliberal counter-re­ volution in economic policy and governance during the 1980s. Privatisation, economic liberalisation and the unfettered development of transnational capit­ alism and global communications has engendered autonomous market forces and concentrations of private economic power and influence whose com­ bined strength far exceeds that of any elected gov­ ernment. The vast daily financial flows on the world’s currency and stock markets periodically set in motion tidal waves which could even overwhelm the U S authorities and their Federal Reserve Board or the EU authorities and their European Central Bank. ‘Over $1 trillion flows across the world’s foreign exchange markets every day; over 50 times the size of world trade and dwarfing the collective foreign exchange reserves of the world’s richest states.’48 The genies of transnational capitalism have been released from their old ‘national power-con­ tainers’, which were much more amenable to na­ tional-democratic control than are the new global forces and regional power blocs. Yet any attempt by

regulations and laws - most obviously those goveming the Single Market, but also those now pervading almost every aspect of the EU ’s operations.40 Eur­ opean states which do not uphold liberal democracy, basic individual rights and liberties, market princi­ ples and the rule of law exclude themselves from potential membership of the European Union be­ cause of their consequent incapacity to discharge in full the essential requirements of EU membership. This is no longer merely a matter of choice or preference on the part of the current member states, but rather a sine qua non for the long-term survival and effective functioning of the European Union. Ian Ward has rightly pointed to ‘the role that law plays in determining who is “European” in the new Europe, and who is not.’41

Power and Governance in a Metamorphosing World The erosion of state power and autonomy, to which the emerging western neoliberal policy consensus of the 1980s and 1990s most powerfully contributed, has by no means been confined to the economic domain and the growth of transnational information and communications networks. Mary Kaldor has highlighted the degree to which the state has lost its former near-monopoly of the means of coercion, which has been ‘eroded from above by the transna­ tionalisation of military forces’ through membership of security organisations such as N A T O and the former Warsaw Pact,) and ‘eroded from below by the privatisation of organised violence’ as a result of the often interlinked emergence of private security services, paramilitary forces, mercenary armies, largescale gangsterism and arms/drug-dealing mafias, and the widespread disintegration and/or demobbing of regular armed forces engendered by proliferating instances of ‘state failure’ as well as by the end the Cold War (for example, in parts of Africa and the former Soviet and Yugoslav federations).42 The pri­ vatisation of organised violence is assuming less blatant forms in Western Europe and in the U SA , where private security guards now outnumber the police by two to one, but Kaldor warns that it is nevertheless taking place and that the West should beware of complacency in these matters.43 More­

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CIVIL A S S O C IA T IO N AND EUROPE anarchic) brave new world which has already ar­ rived. The study of these great bodies of thought and policy prescription might remain a valuable intellec­ tual exercise and of interest to historians, but it will offer precious little guidance either as to what is happening or to what policies might be effective in the future. In these changed circumstances, the quest for increased democratic control - whether national, supranational or ‘cosmopolitan’ - is the pursuit of a mirage. Demands that supranational regulatory bodies and rule-making organisations should be sub­ jected to democratic control and accountability, as well as the anxieties arising from the fact that they are not, often stem from mistaken assumptions con­ cerning the origin of most laws at the national level. As a result the so-called democratic deficit at the EU supranational level is misleadingly contrasted with supposedly ‘democratic’ processes at the national level. In fact, the executive branches of western governments have come to exercise inordinate con­ trol over the legislatures, with the result that parlia­ ments have become less and less effective as checks on the power of the executive.49 Moreover, only a small fraction of the huge volume of government business comes under the direct control and scrutiny of the elected parliaments in most western liberal democracies, especially under the secretive and oli­ garchic British system of ‘elective dictatorship’ (as Lord Hailsham so aptly described it). Every four or five years electorates have a fleeting opportunity to vote in a new ‘dictator’ for the next few years - that is the realistic extent of democracy in most western countries most of the time. What has made such systems of government more bearable and effective than any alternative system yet devised is not their (actually rather limited) elements of democracy. It is the very considerable heritage of liberal constitu­ tionalism, limited government, accommodation of cultural diversity and rule of law which has safe­ guarded western liberties whose origins long predated democracy as such and have usually helped to pro­ tect western democracies against the worst dangers of majoritarian tyranny. Fundamentally, as argued by Hayek (among others), few of the legal frameworks and other rules that regulate human conduct have ever been con­

democrats to put them back into ‘national powercontainers’ would precipitate a collapse of global capitalist trade, production and economic confi­ dence even worse than the one that occurred be­ tween 1929 and 1931. Quite simply, liberalised transnational capitalism has attained levels of eco­ nomic activity, specialisation, innovation and dyna­ mism which would be unsustainable in a world which attempted to reassert ‘democratic’ control over supranational economic forces, especially if that control were to be exercised by nation-states. Whereas it was still possible to reassert national control of economies and thereby promote various nationalist and etatist forms of autarkic or semiautarkic economic development from the early 1930s to the 1970s, these have ceased to viable options since the late 1970s. Thatcherites rant in vain against the erosion of ‘national sovereignty’ and state autonomy which they have misleadingly attrib­ uted to the development of the European Union but which was mainly a consequence of the neoliberal counter-revolution in economic policy and the ram­ pant globalisation which they themselves helped to unleash. The most that Europe can hope to do for now is to regulate, constrain and channel the liberated global market forces and the privatisation of power, both through the elaboration of supranational rules regimes of the sort maintained by the UN and the World Trade Organisation and through the suprana­ tional legal order created by the EU. The Single Market programme and the project of Economic and Monetary Union are therefore designed to promote ‘more Europe’ as well as ‘more market’ - more effective regulation at the EU level to compensate for the diminishing efficacy of regulation at the level of the nation-state.

Ways of Coping with Uncertainty and Friction Europe has now entered wholly uncharted waters. Several centuries of Western political and economic thought and prescription premised upon the exis­ tence of polities which are capable of exercising more-or-less effective jurisdiction over ‘their own’ bounded territories, economies, citizenries, societies and cultures have very little relevance to the (more

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ROBERT BIDELEUX sciously and deliberately devised, laid down or or­ dained by particular (far-seeing) parliaments, judici­ aries, governments or individual rulers. Rather, they have emerged ‘through a gradual process of trial and error’, to which the experiences and learning pro­ cesses of successive generations have contributed. Many rules have come into being because, in certain types of situation, friction is likely to arise among individual actors about what each is entitled to do, which can be prevented only if there are rules to tell each clearly what their respective rights and obliga­ tions are. The gradual, piecemeal, iterative elabora­ tion of such rules is one of the means by which mankind has learned to cope with the inherently incomplete, fragmented and dispersed nature of all human knowledge. Rules do not just restrict; they also empower and facilitate by fostering increased certainty, stability and security. For the most part our ‘actually existing’ rules, regulations and laws have emerged, not as the results of conscious gov­ ernmental or parliamentary decisions, but as the outcome of endless mutual adjustment of human be­ haviour, without the deliberate intervention of an ultimate arbiter - not unlike the continuous mutual adjustment of the spontaneous activities of indivi­ dual actors in market economies.50 In an increasingly ‘globalised’ and ‘regionalised’ world, laws, rules and regulatory regimes will increas­ ingly have to deputise or substitute for the everdiminishing scope for democratic control and ac­ countability as the (supposedly) standard means of safeguarding civil and political liberties and/or eco­ nomic prosperity. Hayek’s emphasis on the limits of our knowledge about the present (let alone the future) is even more appropriate to the new circum­ stances in which we now find ourselves. The best we can hope for is trial-and-error- improvisation and adaptation of rules that can continue to allow us to live, work and trade together with the minimum of friction and the maximum of mutual benefit in a shrinking and increasingly dangerous world. These ‘discovery processes’ are iterative and pragmatic rather than democratic. Indeed, one must be on one’s guard against nationalists, socialists, populists, neo-fascists and even some well-meaning democrats who pedal preconceived blueprints and panaceas for the future, because it is simply not possible to identify in

advance what will be successful and what will not, what will meet the paramount needs of the future and what will not, or even to specify in advance what those needs will be, as those who suffered several decades of Communist economic planning learned to their great cost. It will be safer to base the EU on the experimental, empirical liberalism of Hayek and Oakeshott than on the more controlling and pre­ scriptive rationalist versions of liberalism. Explicitly encouraging the EU to develop along more Oakeshottian lines, as a civil rather than an enterprise association, ought to be Britain’s distinctive contri­ bution.51

The Blessings of ‘Cosmopolitan Law’ Supranational European Union law has a particular advantage over the ‘democratic’ laws of liberal de­ mocratic states with multi-ethnic, multi-racial or multi-denominational populations (that is, all of Europe’s liberal democracies, with the possible ex­ ception of Iceland). No matter how liberal and democratic a liberal democracy might become, its laws are still likely to embody (or at least to be seen as embodying) the interests and preferences of the dominant national, ethnic or religious group(s), and to place (or at least to be seen as placing) various minority groups in disadvantageous positions. Spe­ cial protection of the group rights of ethnic and religious minorities rarely solves such problems, and more often than not entrenches divisions, conflict and perceptions of difference in ways that are coun­ ter-productive.52 By contrast, a major advantage of EU laws and regulations is that they do not reflect, nor are they based upon, the interests and aspirations of any ethnic, religious or national majority. It is arithmetically impossible for any single ethnic, na­ tional or religious group to dominate the law-making and governance of the European Union. The largest single nation/ethnic group makes up no more than one-quarter of the population and it is greatly under­ represented in the EU Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament due to the significant weighting in favour of small nations. Roman Catholicism, the European Union’s largest single religious denomination, does not enjoy special favour. Indeed, EU law-making and governance are

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CIVIL A S S O C IA T IO N AND EUROPE in no way directed against the national, ethnic and religious minorities ‘native’ to Western Europe, even though few (if any) of the member states can wholly escape accusations of racism and/or religious intol­ erance towards various categories of immigrants of non-EU origin. There are indeed mounting tensions between the European Union’s liberal-cosmopolitan aspirations and founding ideals and its increasingly exclusionary and intolerant stance towards immi­ grants from outside the EU, laying it open to charges of malfeasance and hypocrisy. Its main line of de­ fence must be the morally lame one that ‘political communities endure because they are exclusive, and most establish their peculiar identities by accentuat­ ing the differences between outsiders and aliens.’53 The EU has often been likened to the AustroHungarian Empire, which was similarly held together by a supranational rule of law, and within which no single ethnic group held an absolute majority. Never­ theless, the cosmopolitan universalism of the EU is a vast improvement on the ethnic particularism, paro­ chial narrow-mindedness and widespread religious bigotry and segregation which many Central Eur­ opeans have acknowledged as central characteristics of the Habsburg domains, which did have dominant (albeit non-majoritarian) ethnic groups with ethniccollectivist mindsets and a strongly collectivist domi­ nant religion. EU law, which has acquired ‘supre­ macy’ and ‘direct effect’ in the member states, is probably the only ‘actually existing’ legal framework in the world within which ‘cosmopolitan law-en­ forcement’ could be rendered fully operational.54 This supranational system of ‘cosmopolitan law’, rather than utopian conceptions of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’, offers the basis on which the EU can best help to defuse Europe’s potentially explosive ‘minority problems’. The essential point is that ‘minority problems’ can never be fully resolved with a framework of nation-states which contain hege­

monic ethnic and/or religious majorities. Such pro­ blems can only be resolved within a larger framework in which no one group can establish a privileged or hegemonic position, because every group has become a small minority. Thus Timothy Garton Ash is right to characterise the EU as a non-hegemonic liberal order, although (like so many Anglo-Saxon com­ mentators) he seriously misunderstands the political implications of EMU and misconstrues it as a threat to - rather than as an extension and reinforcement of - this supranational liberal legal order.55 The resultant shift of emphasis from unfettered sovereignty and democracy to a supranational liberal legal order that drastically circumscribes national sovereignty and ‘unlimited’ democracy, far from sig­ nifying some huge ‘sacrifice’ or ‘retrograde step’ (as many ‘Europhobes’ and the more blinkered demo­ crats would have us believe), is actually the major benefit that the EU can confer on its member states. The alternatives foregone are only illusions of na­ tional sovereignty and democracy, mere fig leaves which barely conceal the reality of inescapable de­ mocratic deficits at all levels, since national democ­ racies have succumbed to increasing executive branch control of the legislature and the media while Europe as a whole is falling increasingly under the sway of global capitalism, global information and communications networks, and an expanding trans­ national security alliance (N A TO ). The emerging supranational EU legal order cannot make good Europe’s growing democratic deficits, but it can mitigate the consequences and confer major com­ pensating benefits which would be unattainable within a more fragmented and fractious Europe of nation-states. My pessimism concerning the pro­ spects for liberal democracy is combined with a considerable optimism that this particular cloud has a very substantial silver lining.

1. I was first drawn to Hayek through my earlier work on centrally planned economies and to Oakeshott by Samuel Brittan’s columns in The Financial Times, but my understanding of both has been enhanced by several years of fruitful discussion with Bruce Haddock. He and Noel O’Sullivan drew my attention

to Terry Nardin’s use of Oakeshott’s distinction be­ tween civil and enterprise associations. Hayek (1993), volume 1, pp. 1-3. See Spinelli (1957) and Albertini (1999), passim. Merkel (1994), p. 38. Laffan (1999), p. 336.

2. 3. 4. 5.

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ROBERT BIDELEUX 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Lodge (1994), pp. 364-5. Gray (1998), pp. 149-50. Majone (1992), pp. 77-101. Bulmer (1993), pp. 375-6. Mann (1993), p. 130. Smith (1996), p. 253. Mann (1993), pp. 131, 135. Smith (1996), p. 259. For example, Held (1995) and (1996). This is a major reason why other regional blocs, most notably in Latin America, are seeking to emulate the European Union’s success. Dahl (1994), pp. 26, 32-3. This is the main theme of Tsagarousianou, Tambini and Bryan (eds) (1998). Quoted by Ladrech (1994), pp. 78-9. Temple-Lang (1996), p. 126. Loveland (1996), pp. 534-5. Hayek (1993), volume 1, p. 6. Touraine (1997), pp. 2, 4. Hayek (1939), p. 146. Hayek (1939), pp. 141-3. Oakeshott (1962), p. 189. Ibid., pp. 40-1. Gray (1989), p. 207. Ibid., p. 210. Nardin (1983), pp. 9, 14. Ibid., pp. 12-13. Ibid., pp. 14, 24.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

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Ibid., pp. 18-19. Ibid., p. 318. Ibid., pp. 222-3. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 324. Gros and Steinherr (1994), p. 76. Hayek (1993), volume 1, pp. 98-9. Ibid., p. 94. This argument is presented at greater length in Bideleux (1999b). Ward (1997), p. 79. Kaldor (1999), pp. 4, 5, 28, 91-6, 140. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., pp. 2, 29. Ibid., pp. 4, 5, 11. This apt phrase may have been coined by Bruce Haddock, from whom I first heard it. McGrew (1997), p. 6. Hayek (1993), volume 3, chapter 13. Hayek (1960), pp. 157-9. Bideleux (1999a), pp. 116-18. This is argued in more detail in Bideleux (1996), pp. 288-90, and in Bideleux and Jeffries (1998), pp. 40734 and 460-6. Linklater (1998), p. 1. Kaldor (1999), pp. 124-31, uses this in a more military and intergovernmental sense. Garton Ash (1998), pp. 59-64.

18

T HE I DE A OF A L I B E R A L D E M O C R A T I C PEACE Howard Williams

A n impressive literature has developed in recent years dealing with the topic of a ‘liberahdemocratic peace’. Indeed, a debate has raged in American political science journals such as International Secur­ ity and Comparative Political Studies about the validity of the hypothesis that the growth in the number of states with liberahdemocratic polities will lead to a more stable and harmonious international order. The debate is conducted in a most civil and fair way, with a great deal of emphasis being given to the empirical evidence for the truth or otherwise of the hypothesis. Nonetheless, lines have been drawn: some stand on the side of optimism and a whole­ hearted endorsement of the thesis, while others are more lukewarm and await more evidence. Yet others are entirely sceptical, doubting whether liberal in­ stitutions bring peace and whether or not interna­ tional peace is possible at all. It looks as though the debate is set to run and run as more evidence is gathered and greater subtlety is shown in the inter­ pretation of regimes and liberal theory itself. My object is neither to add to nor query the relevance of this interesting literature. I think the debate is most welcome, particularly as it demon­ strates the relevance of political theory to issues of international politics and security. My object is rather to examine the philosophical basis of this discussion. I want to travel down the path of demo­ cratic peace, not with the present preoccupation in mind of deciding whether or not such a democratic peace is on its way, but rather with the intention of

deciding what the argument looks like from Kant’s, or a Kantian, perspective. In the literature on demo­ cratic peace, Kant has been much referred to: it is true to say that he has become an emblem of the thesis. This is so to such an extent that authors need only cite Kant in their title to show that they are engaging with the debate. Others make play with Kant’s name to demonstrate their topicality, such as Christopher Layne’s title to his article on ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace’.1 The treatment of Kant in such articles tends to be quite cursory and the emphasis generally turns very quickly to the evidence. Here I want to alter this emphasis by attempting to measure the democratic peace thesis by Kant’s standards. We will find that there are intriguing differences of emphasis between current international peace theorists and Kant’s original argument, which tells us a lot about the priorities of liberal internationalism now, and Kant’s contrasting objectives for practical philosophy and humanity in general.

Michael Doyle The debate on the democratic peace has its origins in a resurgence of interest in Kant’s political philosophy and international relations which occurred in the early 1980s. One of the writers who most effectively caught on to this trend was Michael Doyle, who in two 1983 articles in Philosophy and Public Affairs highlighted Kant’s legacy to liberalism and intema-

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HOWARD WILLIAMS tionalism; these were distilled into the one key 1986 article ‘Liberalism and World Politics’ in the Amer­ ican Political Science Review} Although in the latter Kant is cited along with Machiavelli and Schump­ eter it is clear that Kant forms the centrepiece of Doyle’s argument. For Doyle Kant’s views on politics not only have a valuable policy component in that they show how American foreign relations ought best to be framed but they also have a significant empirical relevance in that Kant is ‘a liberal repub­ lican whose theory of internationalism best accounts for what we are.’ In contrast Machiavelli is ‘a classi­ cal republican whose glory is an imperialism we often practice.’3 Doyle’s object, then, is to put forward Kant’s political theory as a model of good practice for liberal-democratic states to follow. Doyle’s thesis has a moral and an empirical side to it. The moral side is naturally that policy-makers should be informed by Kant’s liberal international­ ism and the empirical side shows that where policy­ makers have been informed by Kant’s principles they have, in terms of promoting peace, turned out to be quite successful. In this liberal-democratic thesis, then, the behaviour of states that conform as near as possible to Kant’s model of a republic comes under close scrutiny. The number of wars they have been engaged in, their nature and their length are docu­ mented accurately and the results weighed very carefully. This meticulous research is a feature of Doyle’s work. The 1986 article has a three-page appendix where all the liberal regimes which have existed from 1700 to 1982 are listed and all the international wars since 1817 are given chronologi­ cally. Doyle rests some of his conclusions upon this evidence. As he states in the article’s abstract, ‘liberal states are different. They are indeed peaceful.’ But the evidence is that they are not always inclined to peace: ‘they are also prone to make war. Liberal states have created a separate peace, as Kant argued they would.’4 The evidence is therefore mixed but in no sense refutes the position Doyle believes Kant and other liberals to hold. Living by the rules outlined by Kant in his Definitive Articles to Perpetual Peace can pay in terms of the avoidance of war. Indeed Doyle seems to believe that even closer attention to Kant’s arguments might have paid off because he fears that in some respects the rulers of liberal-democratic

states may have been prone to be ‘trigger-happy’, contrary to Kant’s pacific recommendations. Where liberal-democratic states have become involved in wars to defend liberal causes this has often turned out badly. In so far as western democratic states have found liberal grounds for aggression Doyle thinks they have strayed from Kant’s conceptions.

Francis Fukuyama Further credence has been given to the democratic peace thesis by Francis Fukuyama’s writing on the End of History. Fukuyama is perhaps better known for the Hegelian connections of his thinking, especially the striking claim that there are no major progressive political developments yet to come in human his­ tory, but nonetheless he does draw very heavily upon Kant and the idea of a pacific union. However, Fukuyama gets to democratic peace via a very dif­ ferent route from Doyle. He is particularly struck by the notion of a struggle for recognition that occurs in human history, borrowing this from Hegel’s philo­ sophy (the idea of such a struggle figures quite prominently in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the earlier unpublished work from his Jena period (1804-6)).5 Fukuyama uses the notion of the strug­ gle for recognition - a struggle which affects all human individuals - as a means of dismissing all but the democratic republic as a legitimate form of government. According to him, the difficulty with all non-democratic forms of government is that they prevent the struggle for recognition, which always occurs between free human individuals, from work­ ing itself out in a non-destructive form. The beauty about the democratic mode of government is that it allows everyone to follow their own paths in a competitive way without preventing others from doing the same. Earlier, more authoritarian forms of government stand in the way of such an equal form of recognition. They are based upon forms of recognition which elevate one individual or a group of individuals above the rest. Fukuyama believes that societies which are properly democratic are nonantagonistic within themselves and therefore are also likely to be non-antagonistic towards each other. Like Doyle, Fukuyama provides his own list of

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T H E I D E A OF A L I B E R A L - D E M O C R A T I C P E A C E way of their seeking mutual recognition in the world. But Fukuyama believes that the growth of modem science and the technological improvement which follows from it means that human desire and human reason point in the same direction. Economic effi­ ciency flows from the adoption of liberal-democratic practices and rules. No state can afford to go it alone in the modern world economy. To flourish, states have to open their markets and encourage both trade and investment. In this respect, Fukuyama envisages a kind of economic determinacy which forces people towards greater democracy and the opportunity of peace. This argument seems very similar to the ‘guarantee’ of eternal peace which nature provides that Kant puts forward in the first supplement to Perpetual Peace.10 As evidence of Fukuyama’s opti­ mism about the applicability of his own peace thesis we can take the following: ‘In fact, such a Kantian liberal international order had come into being willy-nilly during the Cold War under the protective umbrella of organisations like N A TO , the European Community, the OECD, the Group of Seven, G A T T .’11 With Fukuyama the democratic peace theory ceases to be a hypothesis and becomes instead a reality.

democratic states in his writings.6 He sees the spread of democracies as part of the universal history of mankind which is leading to the worldwide recogni­ tion of all individuals as equals. Fukuyama is highly optimistic about this course of events. In his view, ‘the growth of liberal democracy, together with its companion, economic liberalism, has been the most remarkable macropolitical phenomenon of the last four hundred years.’7 In liberal democratic states no adults are in general excluded from the political process. They all equally are given the right to vote and can themselves usually stand for office if they wish to do so. This widening of participation in the political process takes the edge off the natural com­ petition for preference among individuals. The com­ petition does not disappear but is channelled in a civil direction. States that allow full democratic civil competition fall outside history and those who fail to allow it are regarded as still within history. They have yet to make the step to the condition wholly appropriate to human life. ‘The post-historical world is one in which the desire for comfortable self-pre­ servation has been elevated over the desire to risk one’s life in battle for pure prestige, and in which universal and rational recognition has replaced the struggle for domination.’8 Fukuyama believes that Kant foresaw such a con­ dition of universal peace in his political philosophy and therefore provided the basis for the development of a convincing liberal interpretation of this phe­ nomenon. So although it is Hegel who inspires his vision of the universal homogeneous state Fukuyama gains the idea of a democratic world peace from Kant. He is well aware that many of the liberal internationalist movements inspired by Kant, such as the League of Nations, have ended in failure. But he argues that ‘what many people have not under­ stood, however, is that the actual incarnations of the Kantian idea have been seriously flawed from the start by not following Kant’s own precepts.’9 Broadly speaking, Fukuyama believes the move­ ment towards peace and democracy represents an irreversible process. This does not mean that he thinks it is an inevitable outcome at any point in time. The leaders of states may make poor choices or fail properly to see the road ahead. Their desire for power and prestige may momentarily stand in the

‘Liberalism and World Politics' Clearly, the empirical tone of the debate is most marked in both Fukuyama and Doyle, focusing upon the factual reality or otherwise of Kant’s outline for perpetual peace. This is very flattering for Kant’s argument but I am not sure at all that it is the kind of reception he had in mind. A t the general philoso­ phical level it should be borne in mind that Kant is more often regarded as a transcendental idealist rather than a straightforward defender of empiricism. Kant was very impressed by the empiricist philoso­ phies of Locke and Hume but ultimately wished to differ with them about the importance of observation in the construction of human knowledge. Kant wanted to emphasise in his critical philosophy the active human part played in the production of knowledge as well as the passive part played by the absorption of data. This brings us to the most striking overall difference between the Doyle/Fukuyama approach to the growth of a peaceful world

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HOWARD WILLIAMS essay by themselves, and more than half when taken with the preliminary articles, this is a striking omission. Doyle does have a strong justification in that the three definitive articles represent the main positive points that Kant wished to highlight in his essay. These stipulate the requirements for (1) a republican form of government; (2) a federation of free states; (3) cosmopolitan law to be limited to the right of universal hospitality. These three definitive laws provide the backbone for Doyle’s argument and the first two are also highlighted by Fukuyama.13 Arguably, neither analyses in sufficient detail the ‘guarantee’ for perpe­ tual peace which Kant presents in the first supplement to his essay which would seem, dealing as it does with the course of history upon the development of peace, to have an important bearing on their arguments. Over­ looked also are Kant’s views on the role of the philo­ sopher, his discussions of morality and politics, and his reflections on the role of publicity in politics. Doyle’s account of Kant is therefore a highly selective one. But in those matters he chooses to discuss he is persuasive. Indeed, in very many re­ spects both he and Fukuyama get Kant right. Doyle in particular provides a highly accurate report of the kind of internal social and political structure it is important to have in order to ensure the most rapid progress towards peace, and his discussion of Kant’s cosmopolitanism is illuminating and valuable. Although Doyle’s Kantian argument has been called the ‘democratic’ peace theory, he himself sensibly stresses that Kant’s main emphasis is upon the re­ publican nature of the ideal form of government. In fact we can add that in his original account of the kind of rule most suitable for bringing international harmony in Perpetual Peace Kant is quite hostile to the democratic form. As he puts it:

order and Kant’s. In many respects Doyle and Fu­ kuyama play the role of passive spectators in obser­ ving the role of liberal republican regimes in bringing about peace whereas Kant’s main emphasis is on the role that the leaders of states and an enlightened public can play in realising the goal. Kant’s Perpetual Peace represents the most explicit kind of moral advocacy in which facts are cited to demonstrate that the author’s goals are not wholly unrealistic, whereas Doyle and Fukuyama’s work is directed more to showing the empirical feasibility of the goal of a democratic peace and thereafter its possible moral desirability. For Doyle and Fukuyama the lure of the democratic peace thesis lies mainly in its apparent present empirical validity whereas for Kant the allure of his thesis stands independently of particular pre­ sent facts. For him, we ought to aim for a world made up of free, republican states because this is the right thing to do even if present circumstances do not indicate with total clarity that this will bring lasting peace. Kant thinks that we have to work on the assumption that the thesis can be shown both mo­ rally as well as empirically to be correct. Doyle’s position is therefore not at odds with Kant’s argument for peace. The criticism that might legitimately be levelled at Doyle and Fukuyama is that they tell only part of the story. The part they tell is the one which is empirically reassuring. As Doyle eloquently puts it: Beginning in the eighteenth century and slowly growing since then, a zone of peace, which Kant called the ‘pacific federation’ or ‘pacific union’, has begun to be established among liberal socie­ ties. More than 40 liberal states currently make up the union. Most are in Europe and North Amer­ ica, but they can be found on every continent.12

Democracy, in the truest sense of the word, is necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about (and indeed against) the single individual without his consent, so that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people.14

It is interesting to note that Doyle draws his argu­ ment primarily from one section only of Perpetual Peace: this is the section in which Kant outlines the three definitive articles for a lasting peace. Doyle makes little use of the earlier section containing the three preliminary articles and hardly touches at all upon the various supplements and appendices which follow upon the definitive articles. As the supplements and appendices constitute more than a third of the

Kant’s republican ideal is intended to prevent all kinds of despotism, not only the despotism of one

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T H E I D E A OF A L I B E R A L - D E M O C R A T I C P E A C E sion that Kant rules out democracy as a possible form of viable government. Kant thinks there are essen­ tially only two forms of government: the despotic or the republican.17 It might be argued here that, in his critique, Kant has in mind a more radical kind of direct democracy than is now usual in western states. Yet still, I would argue, there are elements of Kant’s objections to democracy which have a bearing on the current practices of western democracies and on the application of Kant’s peace theory. Although Kant’s advocacy of the republican form of govern­ ment can be read as favouring the kind of represen­ tative democracy to be found in countries such as the United States, Germany and France it can also be read as a warning against tendencies towards a majoritarian style of democracy which, from time, to time, influence the government of these countries. Like Mill and Tocqueville, Kant fears the tyranny of the majority and believes a genuinely rational form of government has to be properly structured to prevent it occurring. For example, it is difficult to see how his republicanism might wholly embrace the kind of party politics now prevalent in western states. It is conceivable that Kant’s guidelines are compa­ tible with parties competing for representation with­ in legislatures and so with their success putting forward a certain legislative programme. However, it is difficult to see how Kant’s principles might be used to endorse parties competing for sole executive authority, particularly if that dominance were matched by an equal dominance in the legislature. Where a party uses executive authority to press through its own programme, and this programme is willed by a certain section of the population and not all, then the government must, according to Kant, tend towards despotism. It is true that most parties in western states are not monolithic structures and have their own internal representative features which mitigate the problem. But where such parties tend towards unity or uniformity the danger of straying towards despotism (as Kant understands it) must exist. Thus, peculiarly, from Kant’s stand­ point the more diverse, open, representative and pluralist a party, the more it will conform to his ideal of government should it gain executive power. The fact that Kant’s prescription for the ideal

individual who rules arbitrarily from the top but also the despotism of a group of people who might seek to rule arbitrarily from the bottom. In a republic, as Kant understands it, there has to be a proper separa­ tion of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary. N ot only are the rulers not allowed to make the law, they are also not allowed to interfere in the adjudication of infringements to the law. Law­ makers should not also be in a position to affect the actions of rulers in the execution of the laws, nor can they seek to influence members of the judiciary in the decisions they make. Equally, members of the judiciary are not under any circumstances to interfere in the work of the legislature and executive.

The First Definitive Article This very strict separation of powers rules out direct democracy as an ideal of government for Kant. Certainly, he is very much in favour of citizens developing political awareness and letting their views be known. He thinks that every citizen is as valuable as the next. He does not take an elitist view of politics, believing that political decision-making should be confined to those ‘in the know’. But he has a logical or technical objection to the idea of every­ one trying to have a hand in running a state. As he sees it, the people as a whole cannot rule themselves. N o one should be allowed to be a judge in their own cases. And where each branch of the polity is under the control of the people as a whole this can easily occur. Just as it would not be right if one individual sought to control each branch of government so also it has to be wrong if the people as a body seeks to control the executive, legislature and judiciary. We have to be ruled by our representatives. As Kant puts it, ‘any form of government which is not represen­ tative is essentially an anomaly.’15 If we expect rules to be fairly administered then those who are subject to them should not also at the same time be respon­ sible for making them. Although Doyle stresses this claim of Kant’s,16 there is a large gap in his presentation of Kant’s thesis in relation to democracy. While making no attempt to suggest that Kant is an enthusiast for democracy, he does not bring out the objections Kant has to it. We cannot, for instance, glean from Doyle’s discus­

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HOWARD WILLIAMS polity requires majoritarian tendencies to be kept in check has important implications for his peace the­ sis. Kant would regard states whose representative systems were liable to factional control as possibly more inclined to belligerence than other states where the republican model he outlines is more rigidly adhered to. Democratic states which allowed one party to control both the legislature and executive might be more prone to war than others, just as democratic states which allowed one set of opinions to predominate at the expense of others through inadequate public debate might be seen as less peace­ able. Doyle and Fukuyama’s optimistic approach to Kant’s thinking seems to overlook these possibilities which surely would have exercised Kant. It is very important for Kant that all citizens should regard the rulers as acting on their behalf, and with their authority, even if in many respects they disagree with the policies being pursued. Should political structures within a state systematically exclude one section of the population (which might be seen as occurring where some discriminatory political prin­ ciples are taken to their extreme) then they cannot be fully regarded as co-citizens. Subjects who are alienated in this way from their states are more liable to be indifferent to possible aggressive foreign poli­ cies and are possibly more likely to be used as ‘cannon-fodder’ in any war. Thus Kant’s liberal republicanism needs emphasising if the ‘democratic peace’ thesis is to be true to its origins.

possibility of a democratic peace. He thinks that such independent individuals who form a republic will be unlikely to seek war with other states, first because through their representatives they would be making decisions on their own behalf and, second, if there were costs to be borne, they themselves would have to bear them. In this respect Doyle believes that ‘the apparent absence of war between liberal states, whether ad­ jacent or not, for almost 200 years thus may have significance.’ In states where the Kantian features of a separation of powers, representative government and some form of adult suffrage have been absent there seems not to have been the same restraint shown in relation with other states. ‘Feudal, fascist, communist, authoritarian forms of rule’ do not, according to Doyle, have such a good record.19 What he finds particularly striking is the behaviour of liberal states (which best approximate to the Kantian model) when major wars actually occur. Not only do such states not fight wars with each other, they also tend, when forced, to concur in their view as to which constitutes the ‘bad’ side. As Doyle puts it, ‘when states are forced to decide on which side of an impending world war they will fight, liberal states all wind up on the same side despite the complexity of the paths that take them there.’20 Doyle is correct to emphasise how the behaviour of non-despotic states tends to point in the same direction. But it is doubtful that Kant would see this as proof of his contention. This is because even if the leaders of a republican state were to take the ‘wrong side’ in a world war (which Finland is alleged to have done at the time of the Second World War in some of the literature calling the democratic peace theory into doubt21) this would not absolve the leaders of all states from the duty of trying to hold to the project of perpetual peace in all their future actions. It is interesting that in Perpetual Peace Kant does not cite the behaviour of republican states to demon­ strate the truth of his plan; rather, he refers to such states from the standpoint of the example they might set to other states. He makes this clear in his com­ ments upon the Second Definitive Article where he states: ‘If by good fortune one powerful and enligh­ tened nation can form a republic (which by its nature is inclined to seek perpetual peace) this will provide

The Second Definitive Article What Doyle also perhaps glosses over in his writ­ ings, and the liberal treatment of Kant in general has to deal with carefully, is Kant’s attitude to the role of women as citizens. Essentially, Kant excludes all women from active citizenship, as he does all dependants including wage-workers, servants and the jobless.18 Far from being unfortunate prejudice which is readily dispensable in his overall account, he makes this stipulation on the grounds that to be in a proper position to have an enlightened and disinterested view of the rules that bind together a society you have to owe your existence to no one other than yourself. Such people, he thought, could not. This is absolutely pivotal in his account of the

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T H E I D E A OF A L I B E R A L - D E M O C R A T I C P E A C E the unrestricted sovereignty of states. The recom­ mendation that a pacific federation of free states be formed is one that flows from this initial objection. Kant holds that very little progress can be attained in international politics if the leaders of states behave as rulers of entirely self-contained and wilfully inde­ pendent territories who can declare war wherever they see fit upon any other sovereign entities. The very conception of an international politics based upon such wholly unrestricted sovereignty carries the seeds of its own destruction. As Kant sees it.

a focal point for federal association among other states.’22 A great deal of the discussion in the democratic peace debate has focused on the extent to which states with Kantian-style constitutions form a pacific union. Enthusiasts for the proposition have discov­ ered that states with liberal constitutions tend to keep the peace in relation to each other and those who question the peace theory suggest that there is a great deal of evidence that states with such consti­ tutions are still liable to war. Doyle’s thesis is that ‘liberal republics will progressively establish peace among themselves by means of the pacific federation (foedus pacificium) described in Kant’s Second Defi­ nitive Article.’23 In his view, ‘most liberal theorists have offered inadequate guidance in understanding the exceptional nature of liberal pacification.’ Where many fall down, he thinks, is in their inability to explain the way in which some liberal states tend also to get embroiled in war. In this respect, he claims that ‘Immanuel Kant offers the best guidance.’24 Kant is able to understand the tendency of liberal states to form with each other islands of peace and their tendency to be less at home with non-liberal states. Doyle understands Kant to be recommending in his Second Definitive Article neither a formal fed­ eration nor any institutionalised form of cooperation. Mainly, he is emphasising a disposition of states with republican constitutions not to attack each other militarily. But Doyle does go a bit further to suggest that Kant ‘appears to have in mind a mutual non­ aggression pact, perhaps a collective security agree­ ment.’25 This seems very close to what Kant suggests when he proposes that the ‘law of nations should be based on a federalism of free states.’26 But care is necessary here before we endorse Doyle’s interpreta­ tion in its entirety. Particularly important in the way in which Kant formulates the Second Definitive Article is its markedly counterfactual nature. He is not speaking directly of any empirical state of affairs, present or future, in the Article itself. He has in mind much more the intellectual presuppositions which form the basis for an effective international law. Indeed, I think the main thrust of the Article for perpetual peace is a criticism of prevailing concep­ tions of international law which ground that law in

the concept of a law of nations becomes mean­ ingless if interpreted as the right to go to war. For this would make it a right to determine what is lawful not by means of generally valid external law, but by means of one-sided maxims backed up by physical force.27 Doyle is highly conscious of the federative aspect of Kant’s peace plan but does not bring out this indictment of the traditional notions of state sover­ eignty which underlie Kant’s critique of interna­ tional law. He notes that Kant’s pacific union is not a single peace treaty ending one war, a world state, nor a state of nations. Kant finds the first insufficient. The second and third are impossible or potentially tyrannical. National sovereignty precludes reliable subservience to a state of nations; a world state destroys the civic freedom on which the development of human capacities rests.28 Now although it is indeed true that Kant rules out for the foreseeable future a world state resting upon a worldwide civil society, this is not because the pur­ suit of such a condition is morally wrong. In his view we ought to give up the total and arbitrary indepen­ dence of our national state and seek to approximate to a world state. Our present condition is not one of which we can be proud. What prevents us from attaining the condition of world statehood which reason prescribes is the sheer physical difficulty of coordinating government against the entrenched habits of the leaders of sovereign states, and over huge tracts of territory, some of which are not

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HOWARD WILLIAMS developed (in Kant’s day this was of course a much greater problem than it is now). In Kant’s view the former point poses the greatest difficulty. There is an irrational immaturity in the attitude of states’ leaders. They are prepared to drive humanity to destruction to retain their own standing as unrestricted sovereigns. The attainment of state sovereignty is indeed a great step forward in the development of the human race, but it is not an absolutely valid arrangement. As Kant sees it, state sovereignty attains its proper validity when it merges over into a wider international sovereignty of free states. The splendid majesty of the absolutely unrestricted sovereign state is an obstacle to world peace:

direct recognition of the kind of mutation of state sovereignty this might involve. In the kind of world Kant envisages no one state can prevail over an­ other; each has always to accommodate itself to the next as though they were neighbouring citizens within a civil society and state. But Fukuyama and Doyle both realise that in a peaceful condition of the Kantian variety state sovereignty cannot play the role it once did. Without clearly stating it both imply that the kind of unrestricted state sovereignty that once prevailed in international society has had its day.31

We look with profound contempt upon the way in which savages cling to their lawless freedom. They would rather engage in incessant strife than submit to a legal constraint which they might impose upon themselves, for they prefer the free­ dom of folly to the freedom of reason. We regard this as barbarism, coarseness, and brutish debase­ ment of humanity. We might thus expect that civilised peoples, each united with itself as a state, would hasten to abandon so degrading a condi­ tion as soon as possible. But instead of doing so, each state sees its own majesty (for it would be absurd to speak of the majesty of a people) pre­ cisely in not having to submit to any external legal constraint, and the glory of its ruler consists in his power to order thousands of people to immolate themselves for a cause which does not truly concern them, while he need himself not incur any danger whatsoever.29

One of the great virtues of democratic peace theory is its moral egalitarianism. Each human individual for the proponent of a democratic peace counts for as much as every other. Each individual, wherever they might live, is deserving of representation and of the right to elect that representative. With Fukuyama this moral egalitarianism is evident in his emphasis upon what he calls isothymia. Fukuyama defines the term in relation to its opposite megalothymia. This is the ‘desire to be recognised as superior to other people’, whereas ‘its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognised as the equal of other people.’32 His thesis is that the world must change, and is changing, to a situation where each person lives under a system of rule which fosters isothymia or equal recognition. He sees this happening, however, mainly within states. As what he calls ‘the universal homogeneous state’ becomes more widespread where such equal recognition is found this will have a beneficial effect upon peace and security amongst states. In drawing this picture of extending worldwide equality Fukuya­ ma’s inspiration is Hegel who, in his conception of the state, properly develops the idea of mutual democratic recognition. This is not incompatible with the Kantian per­ spective. However, it is important to bear in mind that for Kant there is a moral equality which both historically and geographically extends beyond the state. By definition human individuals, who are the only rational animals, are equal. It is an offence against our dignity to treat another human indivi­ dual or group as inherently unequal to us. In this

The Third Definitive Article

Fukuyama also does not realise the extent to which Kant’s Second Definitive Article implies a critique of the traditional notions of state sovereignty and international law. Kant wants to rewrite the rules of international society in a rational form whereas Fukuyama is more concerned to point out how international society has already taken on a rational form. He tends as a consequence to cham­ pion the changes Kant wants without fully realising how difficult they might be to achieve. In keeping with Kant, Fukuyama argues that ‘international law is merely domestic law writ large,’30 yet there is no

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T H E I D E A OF A L I B E R A L - D E M O C R A T I C P E A C E their own powers. They cannot extend their sover­ eignty in such a way. Rather, they should look to the host country to guarantee the property of their nationals while they are resident in those territories. The civil order of a foreign state is primarily its own responsibility. All other states can ask is that the liberty of their subjects should not be arbitrarily limited.

respect Doyle captures the spirit of Kant’s philosophy well. He sees that Kant’s cosmopolitanism leads to a different style of international politics from that to which we are now accustomed. Kant’s doctrine of right would provide no grounds for the western imperial project of the modern world, or for any missionary intention forcefully to ‘civilise’ non-western countries. Kant rules out a patriarchal approach to government both internally and externally.33 The development of societies outside Europe must possess a voluntary dimension. Natives have to play a part themselves in drawing towards civilisation. The most that European visitors can ask of the inhabitants of territories they arrive in is that they not be treated with hostility. This point comes out in Doyle’s interpretation of the Third Definitive Article to Perpetual Peace. ‘Hospitality’, says Doyle, ‘does not require extending to foreigners either the right to citizenship or the right to settlement, unless the foreign visitors would perish if they were expelled. Foreign conquest and plunder also find no justifica­ tion under this right.’ Imperialism of any kind is ruled out. ‘Hospitality does appear to include the right of access and the obligation of maintaining the oppor­ tunity for citizens to exchange goods and ideas with­ out imposing the obligation to trade (a voluntary act in all cases under liberal constitutions).’34 Doyle argues that liberal states, despite their inter­ nal liberal structures, have been prone to war with non-liberal societies. As he puts it, ‘the historical liberal legacy is laden with popular wars fought to promote freedom, to protect private property, or to support liberal allies against non-liberal enemies.’35 He suggests that Kant’s position would be at odds with this outcome. Partly, these wars have occurred because the leaders of liberal states have demanded more than hospitality for their citizens and subjects in their relations with other states. In seeking to promote the freedom and advantage of visitors to foreign territories they often have asked not simply for safe passage but that a certain form of life be respected which is contrary to native traditions. Kant believes we ought not to venture beyond peaceful persuasion in trying to advance the condition of other nationals in their own states. Similarly, liberal states are in no position to guarantee the property of their nationals abroad simply through the exertion of

The Guarantee of Perpetual Peace In one of the most interesting supplements to Per­ petual Peace Kant outlines what he describes as a guarantee provided by ‘the great artist nature her­ self.36 Here, he argues that the apparently unguided course of historical development tends in the direc­ tion of human improvement, often against our will. He cites a number of mechanisms that help to bring this about such as our competitiveness, self-inter­ ested pursuit of trade, the rivalry among nations and even war itself. Even when against our will, these forces can oblige us to enter into more peaceful relations with one another. Both Doyle and Fukuyama cite this mechanism of nature with approval. They commend Kant’s guar­ antee because it highlights an empirical process which can help underpin the liberal-democratic peace. For Doyle the guarantee works not because we are politically moral beings but through our less agreeable side. Our desire for advantage over others makes us into ‘asocial-sociable beings’ who are just as much inclined to rivalry as cooperation with them. Our paradoxical aim is to succeed in the eyes of others but also at their expense. However, we learn through sad experience that this is not the proper way to conduct human affairs. Under the pressure of insecurity and actual war we learn the advantages of republican government.37 Progress can occur in his­ tory both through our good and our bad side. Doyle is not quite sure how to handle this dialectical process. Whereas it might be argued that Kant is quite happy to see human short-sightedness and downright evil inadvertently playing a progressive role and this conflicting with the moral spirit within us, Doyle wants us to unify the two moral forces. Those who are entirely focused on their selfish interests are also playing a moral role. With Doyle the ‘hidden plan’ of

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HOWARD WILLIAMS nature complements our moral duty.38 However, with Kant the hidden plan steps in only where we fail in our moral duty. For him, the plan is not right in itself; rather it provides us with an incentive to do what is right. This is a significant point. Kant argues that we cannot depend on the guarantee from a theoretical standpoint. In other words, if we view the guarantee as a scientific prediction we cannot expect it to come true. As Kant puts it, ‘we cannot actually observe such an agency in the artifices of nature, nor can we even infer its existence from them.’39 However, the thesis possesses sufficient reality for us to entertain it from a practical standpoint: from the moral point of view we can assume it to make sense, at least sufficient sense for us to persist with a foreign policy based upon morality. We can rightly suppose that there are natural mechanisms at work which promote the aim of lasting peace. Despite the expressed aims of less scrupulous political leaders and their subjects, we can discern over the longer term underlying trends which appear to be taking the human race forward. Perversely, war itself might further these trends by bringing home to people the doleful effects of warfare. Societies who engage in this aggressive behaviour are forced to modernise quickly in order to employ the most modern means for engaging in war. But this modernisation takes place with a concomi­ tant growth in the potential and demand for freedom within the state. Self-interest is, above all, what brings the progressive mechanisms of war into play. The hard-nosed pursuit of economic gain may have peaceful consequences. Although primarily moti­ vated by the pursuit of profit those professionally engaged in trade and commerce come to dislike the disruption caused by wars. Over the long term Kant thinks that business prefers peace to war. Kant realises that such projections about the progressive mechanism of history are not subject to clear empirical proof. There are countless events which may tell in the opposite direction, but again no one can offer conclusive proof that the human race is bound not to improve. Kant’s object is not to create sufficient certainty from a scientific stand­ point but rather sufficient certainty from a moral standpoint. He thinks there is enough evidence to

justify us from a moral standpoint pursuing progres­ sive policies. Nature may help us some of the way but ultimately we have to choose to improve. Doyle and Fukuyama tend to overlook the voluntary side of human progress which forms the essential part of Kant’s guarantee. Both Doyle and Fukuyama are enthusiastic about the natural mechanism, especially Fukuyama who devotes several passages in his writ­ ings to the economic, social and political forces that drive us willy-nilly towards cooperation.40 Successful material acquisition under a free-market system re­ quires long-term peace and security. According to Fukuyama, a preoccupation with acquiring more consumer goods diverts people away from aggressive foreign policies and war. In keeping with Doyle and Fukuyama’s interest in the determinist side of Kant’s ‘hidden plan’ the literature on democratic peace concentrates heavily on the empirical verifiability of the perpetual peace thesis.41 This may not take us entirely off the Kantian track, since the more em­ pirical evidence for the thesis which exists the fewer excuses there can be for refusing to seek progress in external policy. However, in the light of Kant’s priorities the emphasis is still a little one-sided. His main purpose is to bring morality and politics into accord; only then will perpetual peace be achieved. The actual past course of events naturally plays a key role in conditioning the present, but so also must the intentions of policy-makers and those they represent.

Conclusion What does our examination of the liberal-demo­ cratic peace thesis advanced by Doyle and Fukuyama from the standpoint of Kant’s original peace theory tell us? Our first conclusion might justifiably be that there is more to Kant’s original view than the democratic peace theorists convey. There are ele­ ments in Kant’s argument, such as his powerful objections to forcible intervention in the affairs of other states, his views on property rights and the use of national debt to finance war, which are not fully considered. Just as Doyle and Fukuyama’s new inter­ pretations of Kant’s thinking have uncovered many valuable ideas we might legitimately claim that there is even more to be discovered which might not only

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T H E I D E A OF A L I B E R A L - D E M O C R A T I C P E A C E Although Doyle stresses once again the peaceful impetus brought about by overlapping economic interests,43 the optimistic Kantian picture has to be weighed against the ambiguous, if not entirely contrary, empirical evidence. It is true to say that Kant was not depending on the world economic system automatically to bring about peace. His whole philosophy implies that there has to be an effort of will to overcome our previous bad habits. His point is that the long-term contract - upon which trade and commerce rest - cannot function without trust and a sense of community. From an intelligible or logical standpoint war and trade are plainly at odds. But maybe Kant was not sufficiently alert to the way in which, in the short term, trade can in fact reinforce our bad habits. Empirically, the case for the moral worth of unrestricted commerce is not a strong one. There is an irony here in that contemporary democratic peace theory has strongly emphasised the empirical dimension of Kant’s thinking. Above all, the literature has concentrated on analysing the behaviour of states with constitutions approximating to the one recommended by Kant. Their conclusion is that in relation to each other such states behave well, but they do not tell us it is because of the convergence of economic interests of these states or the peaceful intentions of their rulers. From a Kan­ tian perspective, the main gap in the contemporary literature is its tendency to under-emphasise the moral side of Kant’s argument. Kant’s allusion to empirical developments is intended primarily to strengthen his moral argument rather than to pro­ vide a knock-down proof. Those who require knock­ down proof of the viability of the peace project before signing up to it are precisely those Kant was not aiming to attract to his argument. His ‘pitch’ for perpetual peace is made to those who already have moral intentions in politics. The primary pre­ mise for the success of his argument is goodwill The liberal-democratic peace will work only for those who aim to live in a morally regulated peace with others. Not surprisingly our comparison of peace theory then and now leads us to the conclusion that there is more to be said - and much more in international politics itself that can be done - to engender this goodwill, the basis of peace as theory and practice.

add to the democratic peace thesis but also provide insights in other connected areas of politics. Classical political theory, such as Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace, provides a permanent source of new insight into current national and international issues. But such sources have always to be treated criti­ cally. Kant would have himself emphasised that we have to judge what constitutes knowledge and un­ derstanding ourselves. There are no wholly reliable external authorities. Kant’s political writings should of course be treated with respect, but not slavishly followed. Doyle and Fukuyama are, each in their own way, critically receptive. I am not sure they go far enough. For a second conclusion that we might draw from our engagement with present and Kantian peace theory is that just as where Kant seems correct and affords insight so also where he seems mistaken he may equally lead us to think carefully and judge problems afresh. Two particular issues stand out as obviously problematic in his account: (1) the exclu­ sion of women from politically relevant roles; (2) his apparently optimistic view of the role finance and trade (operating through self-interest) can play in the forging of international peace. In terms of the first, it is clearly fair to say that, empirically, the facts run against Kant’s position. We can say this not only in the sense that since the end of the eighteenth century most democratic republics of the Kantian variety have extended the franchise to include women, but also in the more interesting sense that the involvement of women in politics has tended to add to the peaceful tendencies of poli­ ties.42 Evidence seems to suggest that women are less likely than men are to condone the use of violence to resolve international disputes. In terms of the sec­ ond, it might be argued that the extension of trade and financial interests in the international sphere has seemingly had as many drawbacks as advantages. Nineteenth-century imperialism, which was some­ times violent and rapacious, seems to have ridden on the back of financial and trade interests just as much as it was restrained by them. The seeds of wars seem often to lie in conflicts of economic interests. There seems to be no shortage of interpretations of twen­ tieth-century armed conflicts which provide grounds for hostilities in disputes over economic spheres of influence, markets and sources of raw materials.

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HOWARD WILLIAMS

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Layne (1994). Doyle (1983a), (1983b), (1986). Doyle (1986), p. 1151. Ibid. See Hegel (1969), pp. 213-17 and also Avineri (1972), chapters 3, 4. Jonathan Seglow’s chapter in the present volume also explores the notion of ‘re­ cognition’ as a concern for liberal political theory. Fukuyama (1992), pp. 49-50. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 281. Kant (1991), pp. 108-14. Fukuyama (1992), p. 283. Doyle (1986), p. 1156. Fukuyama (1992), p. 281. Kant (1991), p. 101. Ibid., p. 101. ‘By republican Kant means a political society that has solved the problem of combining moral autonomy, individualism and social order. A private property and market-oriented economy partially addressed that di­ lemma in the private sphere. The public, or political sphere was more troubling. His answer was a republic that preserved juridical freedom - the legal equality of citizens as subjects - on the basis of a representative government with a separation of powers. Juridical freedom is preserved because the morally autonomous individual is by means of representation a self-legis­ lator making laws that apply to all citizens equally, including himself or herself. Tyranny is avoided be­ cause the individual is subject to laws he or she does not also administer.’ Doyle (1986), p. 1158. Kant (1991), p. 101. Cf. Saage (1973), pp. 83-93; Kersting (1993), p. 382. Doyle (1986), p. 1156. Ibid., p. 1156. See Russett (1995), p. 168. Kant (1991), p. 104. Doyle (1986), p. 1158. Cf. Doyle (1983a), p. 226. Doyle (1983a), p. 225. Ibid., p. 227. This is my own translation; cf. Kant (1991), p. 102: ‘The Right of Nations shall be based upon a Federa­ tion of Free States.’

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 4L

42.

43.

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Kant (1991), p. 105. Doyle (1986), p. 1158. Kant (1991), pp. 102-3. Fukuyama (1992), p. 281. This is a fairly striking example from Fukuyama (1992), p. 283: ‘The United States and other liberal democracies will have to come to grips with the fact that, with the collapse of the communist world, the world in which we live is less and less the old one of geopolitics, and that the rules and methods of the historical world are not appropriate to life in the posthistorical one. For the latter, the major issues will be economic ones like promoting competitiveness and innovation, managing internal and external deficits, maintaining full employment, dealing co-operatively with grave environmental politics, and the like.’ What might be said from a Kantian perspective is that rulers should have attempted to overcome geo­ politics just as much before the collapse of commun­ ism as after it. Fukuyama (1992), p. 182. Cf. Williams (1983), pp. 129-37. Doyle (1986), p. 1158. Ibid., p. 1160. Kant (1991), p. 108. Doyle (1983a), p. 225. Doyle (1986), p. 1159. Kant (1991), p. 109. Contrary to Doyle’s view the supposition of progress in history is primarily a kind of heuristic device (Doyle, 1986, p. 1159) - but a heuristic device with a practical rather than theore­ tical importance. Fukuyama (1992), especially chapters 1, 5 and 6. Cf. Oneal and Ray (1997) and Mansfield and Snyder (1995). Note the conclusion of the second article: ‘In the long run, the enlargement of the zone of stable democracy will probably enhance the prospects for peace. But in the short run, there is a lot to be done to minimise the dangers of the turbulent transition’ (p. 38). Lisa Brandes, Public Opinion, International Security and Gender: The United States and Britain Since 1945, Yale University PhD dissertation, 1994. Cited in Russett (1995), p. 167f. Doyle (1986), p. 1161.

19

CONSTRUCTING INTE RN ATI ON AL COMMUNITY: LIBERAL THEORY, DEVELOPMENTAL C O M M U N I T A R I A N I SM AND I N T E R N A T I O N A L ETHI CS Peter Sutch

That these currents are present in liberal interna­ tional theory is highlighted in the recent critical work on John Rawls’s contribution to the debate.1 Rawls’s international relations theory is often viewed as falling between a rock and a hard place. He is either a failed liberal universalist who dilutes human rights in order to accommodate statism or a failed communitarian who relies upon covert liberal as­ sumptions in order to make international politics and justice compatible. One of the principal sources of this interpretation is mainstream liberal interna­ tional relations theory;2 perhaps this explains, in part, the hostile reaction to (or, more often, the sheer unwillingness to engage with) Rawls’s ideas or with the ideas of those thinkers who take a similar approach to questions of international justice. In exploring contemporary liberal international relations theory, this chapter falls into two parts. First, I want to suggest that the dominant liberal response to developments in world politics and international relations theory does not adequately show why international justice must be cosmopolitan in character.3 My principal concern is that the

Introduction This chapter offers a reading of liberalism’s normative theory of international politics. As the ideology of the dominant powers in the recent history of international politics and as the theoretical substructure that underpins the claim that human rights should be the guiding force in the future development of interna­ tional relations, liberalism undeniably forms a vital part of the world order. In trying to determine whether the expansion and (to use a very popular liberal characterisation of the process) ultimate universalisation of a liberal human rights culture really is a move towards international justice as liberals claim, an exploration of the way in which this process is justified in contemporary theory offers some very interesting insights. In particular, in this chapter it becomes clear that there are two distinct traditions in contemporary liberal international theory: the cosmopolitan strand which has been traditionally attributed to liberalism and a more particularistic norm-governed approach which is derived from liberalism’s often hidden, nonKantian (occasionally ex-Kantian) ancestry.

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PETER S U T C H account of the way it constructs or portrays inter­ national community. In doing so it must relinquish or radically reconstruct some of liberalism’s most prized goals. My reasons for making this argument stem from several sources: firstly, a belief that the justifications that liberals are obliged to construct for their theory are not strong enough to ignore the facts of pluralism in international politics; secondly, an uneasiness with the cosmopolitan-liberal assumption that sovereignty - one of the political cornerstones of international relations - is antithetical or irrelevant to justice; and thirdly, my belief that the assumption that sovereignty is hostile to concepts such as human rights which are thought by definition both universal and cosmopolitan in character is obscuring a very fruitful seam in liberal international relations theory. One of the most theoretically complete examples of constructivist cosmopolitanism is to be found in the work of Onora O ’Neill.7 It comprises both the latest and arguably the most sustainable form of theoretical justification for international justice. Her insistence that approaches such as those of Walzer and Rawls are neither liberal nor just gives my choice of her work as the example of liberal international relations theory particular pertinence. Here I intend to outline the three main claims motivating O ’Neill’s argument to highlight construc­ tivist cosmopolitanism’s basic position. While this cannot do justice to its sophistication, this exercise is useful because it shows how the cosmopolitan out­ look can be maintained within a constructivist jus­ tificatory strategy. The claims are as follows:

constructivist move from the requirement that prim ciples of ethics be universalisable to the requirement that principles of ethics be cosmopolitan is incomplete. What is missing is an appropriate conception of international community. I will then propose that the more cautious reaction of what I will term (in order to make a clear distinction between the types of liberal theory on offer) the constructivist and developmental communitarianism of thinkers such as Frost,4 Rawls and Walzer5 offers the invaluable link between international politics and constructi­ vist liberal theory that the liberal tradition needs if it is to take account of the problems and possibilities posed to it by the extension of its concerns into the international arena. The Hegelian liberalism of Frost, the communitarian liberalism of Walzer and the political liberalism of Rawls promise a genuine alternative to cosmopolitanism by (as Brown writing about the position of Frost notes) ‘starting from the position that the value that people and states quite clearly do assign to sovereignty cannot simply be dismissed as the product of defective powers of reasoning or some kind of persisting mass hallucina­ tion.’6

Constructivist Cosmopolitanism: Contemporary Liberal Internationalism Contemporary liberal international relations theory can best be described as ‘constructivist cosmopoli­ tanism’. Theoretically it is constructivist, showing the influence of liberalism’s engagement with con­ temporary debates in political philosophy. Politically it is cosmopolitan in that it maintains that the projects it has inherited from its Kantian origins still represent the only practical liberal solution to the moral problems of international politics. There is nothing particularly surprising about this opening statement. The extension of liberal values and prac­ tices to international relations is rarely regarded as anything other than an absolute good, yet there is nothing in constructivist liberal political theory that requires or necessarily underwrites cosmopolitan in­ ternational relations theory. In this chapter I suggest that a successful constructivist liberalism (hereafter simply ‘liberalism’), if it is to produce a political theory suited to world politics, must take proper

1. The basis of any theory of international pol­ itics must be relevant to all parties concerned; that is, the premises of international relations theory must be universalisable across the re­ levant domain.8 2. The actual circumstances of justice and injus­ tice in the modern world (understood by looking at the assumptions that agents make when acting) are more-orAess cosmopolitan in 9 scope. 3. Those theories that acknowledge the theore­ tical relevance of borders (sovereign, commu­ nal or moral) are inadequate.10

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CO N STRU CTIN G INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY responsibilities to non-citizens cannot automatically outweigh an appeal to justice.’13 But how does O ’Neill call the legitimacy of such boundaries into question? Essentially, she does so by suggesting that the requirement that practical reason be universalisable plus the fact that we are connected to all other agents on a more-or-less cosmopolitan scale requires a cosmopolitan approach to international politics. The ‘either-justice-or-sovereignty’ argument has been one of the principal reasons why liberal ideal­ ism (as it is often termed) now has little support in the study and practice of international politics. The alternative form of liberal international relations theory that I wish to outline is, 1 shall argue, appro­ priately universalist but not cosmopolitan - and, as such, seems to make more sense of both our actual commitments in world politics and the liberal drive for justice.

From these, O ’Neill concludes that constructivist cosmopolitanism is the only valid option. Now in the cause of brevity ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a political theory can be usefully explained via Thomas Pogge’s description of its core elements. He thinks that three elements are shared by all cosmopolitan positions: First, individualism: the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons - rather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural or religious communities, nations or states. The latter may be units of concern only indirectly, in virtue of their individual members or citizens. Second, univers­ ality: the status of ultimate unit of concern attaches to every living human being universally . . . Third, generality: this special status has global force. Persons are ultimate units of concern for everyone - not only for their fellow compatriots, fellow religionists, or such like.11

Universalisability and Cosmopolitanism

This quotation is particularly interesting because of the description of universality that Pogge offers. It is not simply a depiction of formal universality. The substantive liberal commitments to individualism and generality are incorporated into the description of moral universalism. This (sleight of hand?) is char­ acteristic of much liberal international relations the­ ory. My concern here is to ensure that this fact does not go unnoticed and to examine the pattern of argument that allows (or purports to allow) cosmopolitan the­ orists to link the formal criterion of moral universalisability with the liberal-cosmopolitan political project. What is instructive about O ’Neill’s theory is that its goal is to lay out fully the predicates of her thesis and to show the validity of her reasoning in so doing. So let me state my reading of O ’Neill’s work boldly. My principal contention is that claims two and three in her argument, which are not (in my opinion) defensible,12 illicitly ‘construct’ the con­ ception of international community which allows O ’Neill to suggest that principles of practical reason must be universalisable and cosmopolitan. The po­ litical core of O ’Neill’s cosmopolitanism (and that of liberal international relations theory more generally) is the claim that ‘once the legitimacy of treating actual state boundaries has been called into question, an appeal to sovereignty or to assumed lack of

The flip-side of my position is that, of O ’Neill’s three claims, only the first is truly stable. Its stability comes from its constructivist methodological basis and, to advance the overall argument, we should now grasp the meaning of ‘constructivism’, a vital part of con­ temporary liberalism’s armour, in this context. To construct a political theory is to avoid reliance upon discredited metaphysics, or contested truth-claims, or the revealed word of one culture’s prophets, and thus to avoid the criticisms of foundationalist reason­ ing that many fear threatened the paralysis of justi­ ficatory political philosophy. O ’Neill’s elegantly simple case for theoretical constructivism in ethics is that the reasons we give for selecting principles of international ethics must be relevant to all con­ cerned parties. For her: Constructivism in ethics . . . is not a novel philosophical method or procedure. To construct is only to reason with all possible solidity from available beginnings, using available and followable methods to reach attainable and sustainable con­ clusions for relevant audiences.14 The key to understanding O ’Neill’s work is the idea that principles of ethics must be accessible to the

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PETER S U T C H ‘relevant audiences’. O ’Neill’s case, put simply, is that any stretch of reason that cannot appeal to all relevant agents and is therefore not universal in its domain cannot be called ‘reasoned’. She goes on to show that, of the various conceptions of practical reasoning offered by many universalist and particularist thinkers, most do not meet even this basic standard. Arguments that employ ‘end-oriented’ rea­ soning, such as that used by ‘platonist’ thinkers who provide a conception of a specific, independently specified good ‘end’ as being ultimately the purpose of agents’ actions, will appear arbitrary unless the appropriate metaphysics is universally validated (ex­ tremely implausible in the light of the apparent diversity of human ends). Instrumental reasoning (again end-oriented) will appear ‘barefacedly’ arbi­ trary to those who do not share its contestably subjective conception of practical reason’s goal. Even ‘act-oriented’ reasoning (theorising the re­ quirements of action without reference to any spe­ cific end towards which it may be directed) of the particularist variety (communitarian norm-oriented) would appear incomprehensible to ‘outsiders’ (those alien to the particular context) even when those ‘outsiders’ fall within the relevant sphere of action.15 Remember that all O ’Neill is claiming here is that principles have to meet the requirement that they could be universalised to cover all relevant others. Her blanket rejection of all end-oriented and sourcederived conceptions of practical reason does not (on the strength of arguments made thus far) have to be accepted, but the requirement that they have to be accessible to all concerned does. O ’Neill argues that it is vital that we develop intelligible and abstract principles of action that can avoid the problems of relativism and idealisation. Here, ‘relativism’ and ‘idealisation’ are key notions in understanding the failure of much international and political theory. The main conclusions from her brief survey of con­ temporary thought are that particularistic relativism cannot adequately provide for the modem circum­ stances of justice and that much universalist writing appears arbitrary in that it relies upon idealised starting points. The simple case being made here is that, in accepting that foundational universalism idealises (makes up) its ethical starting point, we are not required to endorse relativism. We are not

allowed to pretend that all the world is a liberal utopia but neither are we allowed to pretend that there are no ethical and political issues that we genuinely share and that constitute the context of our actions. So to generate genuinely shared reason­ ing, one must operate with premises that are based upon considerations abstracted from agents’ actual situations, accessible to all because they really do apply to all. The question now is whether constmctivism sup­ ports cosmopolitan universalism. There are, O ’Neill claims, two senses in which principles may be for­ mally universal. The most elementary is if a principle ‘applies to or holds for all rather than merely for some cases in its domain.’ The second sense is where ‘the range of beings is seen as extensive: the scope of principles is inclusive, perhaps (more-or-less) cosmo­ politan.’16 O f these senses of universalism, the first definition is relevant to O ’Neill’s case that all those agents concerned must (potentially) be able to agree that the principles of practical reason adopted are rele­ vant to them in their shared condition. This, it must be noted, does not tell us which agents are concerned by what problem in any particular domain. The second feature is yet to be proven relevant, relying upon a heavily contested empirical and theoretical notion of how agents are meaningfully connected to one another across the globe. Indeed, it appears to rely upon a liberal individualist conception of agency that does not actually derive (and cannot be derived) from O ’Neill’s constructivism. This can be shown, I believe, by applying J. L. Mackie’s questions con­ cerning the status of ethics and universality to O ’Neill’s argument.17 Taking issue with the philosophical requirement that practical reason be universalisable, it is clear that O ’Neill is suggesting we must focus upon what is morally relevant and discount those aspects of our lives that are ‘arbitrary’ in some way. For her, local and bounded traditions and practices are examples of such arbitrariness and fall far short of the require­ ment of practical reason because they do not and cannot take adequate account of all relevant and connected others (the links between agents across such particularised contexts). This follows, she main­ tains, from the logical structure of moral reasoning

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CO N STRU CTIN G INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY structure of ethics. Rather, she is insisting that accounts of ethics that do not give ethical priority to individuals are subordinate to her cosmopolitan conception of ethics which clearly does. This is not a justifiable position for a constructivist to hold. O ’Neill’s claim is that particularist practices, value systems and politics are morally irrelevant, that the treatment of (for example) non-Muslims in a funda­ mentalist Muslim state and in a liberal state are relevantly similar. This argument employs all three stages of universalisation and, while it may be in­ tuitively powerful it is, as Mackie points out, a peculiarly liberal stance.21 The crucial point to note here is that what is hidden by the phrase ‘relevantly similar’ is the con­ struction or portrayal of the international political arena. O ’Neill does not make enough of her recogni­ tion that ‘connection will peter out at differing boundaries for different agents and in activities of differing sorts in different circumstances.’22 Rather, in order to underpin her cosmopolitanism O ’Neill claims that neither particularism nor Rawlsian lib­ eralism can provide principles relevant to the mod­ ern circumstances of justice. Her principal claim is that the modes of existence they privilege are not accessible, and cannot adapt to become accessible, to all relevant agents in world politics. For O ’Neill, anything less than an individual-centred, cosmopo­ litan conception of agency would be so restrictive that it simply could not generate principles of ethics that relate to the world as we know it. This critique of non-cosmopolitan reasoning relies upon her argu­ ment that we can abstract from all the contingencies and detail of political pluralism to a core of shared reasoning.23 Both this claim and the claim that we are in fact connected to all other human individuals as individuals (and not as, say, citizens of a state) are, though, highly contestable. For O ’Neill, the constructivist projects (that she convincingly shows to be necessary) share a common aim. It is ‘in the end no more, but also no less, than an attempt to work towards a result that is neither unattainable for those whose lives are both led using the categories and norms of restricted milieu and connected to those of others with differing categories and norms, nor unsustainable for what they could become.’24 However, I believe that the more limited

itself and not from some substantive, idealising lib­ eral-cosmopolitan standpoint. I do not believe that this is the case. Following Mackie’s seminal line of reasoning here is particularly enlightening. He be­ gins by posing the same question as O ’Neill (albeit in a different form), but when he explores the logical structure of moral reasoning he comes to a very different conclusion. Do the desires and especially the sufferings of other people, if known to me, constitute a reason for me to do something, if I can, or try to do something to satisfy those desires or to relieve those sufferings? It would be natural to say that they constitute some reason; how strong a reason, how easily over-ruled by other considerations, may be a matter of dispute.18 For Mackie, moral judgements are universalisable: any truly moral statement concerning an action is nonsensical if it cannot hold for any relevantly similar action. As he notes, the key to understanding the logic of morality is the idea o f‘relevantly similar’;19 he goes on to argue convincingly that there are three stages of universalisation that attempt to account for it. It is worth quoting him at some length here: There are . . . different kinds or stages of uni­ versalisation. In each of them a moral judgement is taken to carry with it a similar view about any relevantly similar case. But the first stage rules out as irrelevant only the numerical difference be­ tween one individual and another; the second stage rules out generic differences which one is tempted to regard as morally relevant only be­ cause of one’s particular mental or physical qua­ lities or condition, one’s social status or resources; the third stage rules out differences which answer to particular tastes, preferences, values and ideals. It is at most the first stage . . . that is built into the meaning of moral language: the correspond­ ing logical thesis about the second stage is more controversial, while that about the third stage would be plainly false.20 If this argument holds, and I believe it does, then O ’Neill is not merely outlining the necessary logical

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PETER S U T C H having chosen the term. The ‘communitarian/normoriented method’ of these thinkers is not an argu­ ment about the essential primacy of community over the individual but of the justice or injustice of the dominance of certain principles of international politics. Their disagreement with liberal-cosmopoli­ tanism does not focus upon the notion of universalisability but on the idea of the ‘relevantly similar’. In this regard, denying the reality of claims to sover­ eignty, self-determination or human rights does not make sense of international politics. To argue, for example, that sovereign borders and the rights of citizenship hinder the cause of international justice assumes that we are justified in including a strong notion of transnational community in our theory. The strong abstraction necessary to make this argu­ ment is not thought to be warranted. Rather, argue the developmental communitarians, we may abstract to the existent plurality of political communities and to the consensus upon principles of international justice implicit in the actions and norms they share. We can go on to show how important the norms of human rights and other liberal principles are to the existence of international politics only if this fact is clearly an uncontested assumption of world politics. This distinction makes a significant difference to claims to have legitimately reached broadly liberal principles of international justice. Indeed, as earlier demonstrated, it is hard to see how O ’Neill’s theory can reach the cosmopolitan conclusions she does without the aid of some strong liberal assumptions. The limited conclusions of the developmental com­ munitarians seem more suited to the realities of the pluralistic-yet-connected world. The liberalism of Walzer, Rawls and, to a more limited extent, Frost is a conclusion rather than an assumption and it is this fact, one that results from their general method, that marks them off from traditional liberal and cosmopolitan theory.

projects of developmental communitarianism take more than satisfactory account of this aim. In doing so, they can avoid O ’Neill’s criticism of particularism and build a bridge between the Westphalian, state­ centric system of international politics and liberal international relations theory, thus making the latter consistent with the realities of international politics and its development.

Introducing Developmental Communitarianism: Constructing an International Community I now wish to present three examples of the devel­ opmental communitarian method in international relations theory. One of the principal advantages of developmental communitarianisms is that they begin their constructivist projects by attempting to con­ struct a viable image of international community - of the ‘relevantly similar’. Although I cannot provide a full account of the conclusions of Frost, Walzer and Rawls, I do want to demonstrate some of the reason­ ing behind their positions. N ot only do they offer a construction of ethical principles, they also provide an account of how these principles become valued by the actors in world politics. This second task is a vital aspect of their constructivist project because it re­ fuses to assume that the first principles of practical reason have moral and political validity regardless of all other considerations yet it still maintains (con­ trary to O ’Neill’s opinion) the theoretical where­ withal to condemn injustice in world politics. I have chosen to label Frost, Walzer and Rawls as ‘developmental communitarians’ for two primary reasons. Firstly, I wish to stress how far removed are the justifications of their liberal ideas from those of liberal cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan liberals believe, as noted in the previous section, that the first principles of liberalism should apply to all in­ dividuals irrespective of their historical and political situation. For the developmental communitarians, however, the justifications of the first principles of liberalism are themselves contingent upon history, upon consensus or the shared development of a background justification for the principles of inter­ national politics. This I believe to be a vital point, and one which feeds into the second reason for my

Frost: Social Norms and Human Rights The basic tension in contemporary liberal interna­ tional relations theory is portrayed with appealing clarity in Frost’s Ethics in International Relations, which charts the development of the norms of sovereignty, human rights and democratisation.

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CO N STRU CTIN G INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY eral theorists are right to suggest that ‘it may be argued that the primary question for a normative theory of international relations is whether the system of sovereign states is a justifiable way of organising the government of the world.’ Yet he recognises that:

For Frost, the starting point for an analysis of inter­ national politics is the ‘modern state domain of discourse’, an image of contemporary practices that makes a realistic attempt to construct international community by recognising the tensions between the remnants of the Westphalian order and a postWestphalian system.25 He explains these tensions by referring to the settled norms that are shared within this practice. He lists those norms that he considers within the modern state domain of discourse under the subheadings ‘sovereignty’ norms (S), ‘interna­ tional law’ norms (L), ‘modernisation’ norms (M) and ‘domestic’ norms (D). Summarising them, Frost claims that that the following goods have the status of ‘settled’:

On reflection, what is striking about the foregoing list is the primacy of the first two items on the list. Most of the other settled goods are in some way derivatives of them . . . Thus any satisfactory background theory will have to justify the settled belief that the preservation of a system of sover­ eign states is a good.28 Frost’s general approach to the philosophy of international ethics, one that coheres with the cen­ tral tensions of contemporary international relations theory outlined above, really gets to the heart of the matter. He recognises that in order to follow the cosmopolitan line of reasoning one must question the settled status of S I - and for Frost so much in international politics only makes sense in relation to S I that to reject its importance would be to radically misunderstand the nature of international rela29 tions. The central point of Frost’s position could easily be misread as pleading a conservative case with the correlative argument that it is never going to be possible to challenge the settled status of S I. How­ ever, a more generous reading - and one that Frost’s more recent articulations of his theory appears to endorse30 - would argue that it is more a case of making any theoretical transition of norms justified in reference to S I to a system of norms justified (for example) in reference to D2 compatible with a practical (and just) transition from a world organised around S I to a world organised around D2. Captur­ ing this transition, rather than defining and defend­ ing the old international order or the potential transnational order, would seem to be a vital task, vital because it would be inappropriate to build an ethical theory suited only to an imagined or inde­ fensible theory of international politics. The resources within the developmental commu­ nitarian tradition of liberal theory are well suited to this task. The work of thinkers such as Walzer and Rawls has advantages over much cosmopolitan and

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. LI. L2. L3. L4. L5.

The preservation of the society of states. State sovereignty. Anti-imperialism. The balance of power. Patriotism. Protecting the interests of a state’s citizens. Non-intervention. Self-determination. International law. lus ad bellum. Ius in hello. Collective security. Economic sanctions (under specified circum­ stances). L6. The diplomatic system. M l. Modernisation. M2. Economic cooperation. D l. Democratic institutions within states. D2. Human rights.26

The first step in Frost’s procedure for looking into the background for the modern state domain of discourse is to start with what everybody knows. Essentially, this process leads to the creation of the above list of settled norms. It is important to remember that this seemingly comprehensive list is (or could be) made up of some strikingly different conceptions of what each of the norms calls for. It is also quite clear that there is a certain ‘tension’ between those goods that concern sovereignty and those that concern the rights of individual persons.27 Frost argues that lib­

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PETER S U T C H communitarian writing. Their work is constructivist in that it attempts to avoid the difficulties of philosophical foundationalism while actively combating the ethical scepticism that is often seen as a com sequence of foundationalism’s crisis in theoretical justification. It therefore attempts to theorise inter­ national politics on premises that are both philoso­ phically secure and able to be the object of some kind of consensus among the plurality of international actors. Such an approach, combined with a focus on the competing claims of sovereignty and universal rights, would suggest that their ideas really should demand the close attention of international relations theory. Rather than pursue Frost’s reading of contempor­ ary international relations theory here,31 I wish to turn to a brief examination of the work of Rawls and Walzer which, I maintain, follows a similar theore­ tical pattern to Frost’s. For Rawls, this theoretical and political process would, over time, lead the actors in the international sphere to realise indepen­ dently that toleration of reasonable pluralism is the chief virtue in international ethics. This realisation (in the most optimistic interpretation of Rawls’s ‘Law of Peoples’) would lead to the move from the modus vivendi of international law to a fully overlapping consensus on the value of toleration and thus to a new understanding of human rights suited to liberal­ ism at the turn of the millennium. In Walzer’s less confident brand of developmental communitarianism this process would lead (at the very best) to a shared understanding (and, more optimistically, a shared articulation) of a ‘moral minimum’ which could again equip liberalism with a normative stand­ point capable of tackling contemporary global chal­ lenges.

cerned to explore precisely those problems faced by international relations theory today. The liberalism that Rawls transplants from his Political Liberalism is a political mechanism for dealing with the question of pluralism in international politics and examines the guiding concepts of international relations theory, testing their legitimacy in the face of prevailing conditions of world politics. Similarly, the perceived difficulties in Walzer’s work have led to an insuffi­ cient examination of some very interesting ideas. Walzer’s work is either viewed as statist, commu­ nitarian and therefore relativist, or as failing even these standards and relying on covert and illegiti­ mate liberal principles. His use of ‘universal rights to life and liberty’ has attracted more than their fair share of criticism.32 However, his reworking of his ‘minimalist morality’ and its subsequent portrayal as ‘reiterative universalism’ as opposed to ‘covering law universalism’ gets right to the heart of contemporary international relations theory.33 The principal rea­ son why Rawls and Walzer are treated variously as failed universalists or failed particularists is because the aim of reconciling political life within an inter­ national system with an emerging global politics is inadequately conceptualised. Interestingly, O ’Neill herself criticises non-cosmo­ politan liberal theory - and particularly that of Rawls and Walzer - on many points. The most important here are her claim that Rawls can only make his law of peoples attack crucial problems in world politics by relying (covertly) upon idealised liberal assump­ tions about human agency and the suggestion (aimed at Walzer and MacIntyre) that any contemporary international political theory that takes account of pluralism when constructing an account of ethical universality is doomed to inaccessibility and thus political irrelevance. The idea, common to liberal literature, is that only a cosmopolitan account of universality provides principles of international jus­ tice. However, the developmental communitarian account of universality offered by Walzer and Rawls is not rendered ineffectual by its reliance upon normgoverned rather than a priori Kantian principles of practical reason and it does not rely upon concealed liberal assumptions to construct a useful theory of international justice. In particular Rawls, in moving towards the communitarian camp in an attempt to

Rawls and Walzer: Consensus and Reiteration Rawls’s Amnesty lecture ‘The Law of Peoples’ (here­ after: LOP) is often taken as an incomplete expres­ sion of ideas that have their roots firmly in liberal political culture. It is therefore viewed as tangential to the needs of international relations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Originally entitled ‘Constructivism and Universality’ the essay is con­

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CO N STRU CTIN G INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY shift towards a communitarian position. For Rawls, even though (or perhaps because) international politics is characterised by a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible social systems (what he terms the ‘fact’ of reasonable pluralism), human rights, or a version of that doctrine, can - and should - be supported by any legitimate state. We must remem­ ber that Rawls believes that the background condi­ tions are central to the construction of any principles of justice. The spur, if any, to greater cooperation or to justice in world politics must be seen to stem from world politics itself and not from Rawls’s liberal position. For this reason, he reconstructs the idea of human rights and its role in liberal international relations theory. For Rawls,

construct a conception of the relevantly similar and in modifying his Kantian predicates to make the liberal criterion of universality a realistic require­ ment in political theory, avoids both these criticisms and develops a redefined liberal international rela­ tions theory. O ’Neill’s case against Rawls is that his famous use of the modifier ‘reasonable’ in relation to the fact of pluralism illegitimately assists the work of his theory of justice. This, however, is not the case. A t the most basic level in Rawlsian constructivism there is a division between the Kantian and communitarian elements of his thought. For example, the regulative role of what Rawls calls Kant’s theory of ‘constitutive autonomy’ is abandoned in favour of the political value of a shared public life.34 In separating his constructivism from Kant’s ‘deeper’, comprehensive approach, Rawls notes that ‘the full significance of a constructivist political conception lies in its connec­ tion with the fact of reasonable pluralism.’35 A recognition of the importance of this ‘fact’ means that the in-built cosmopolitan universalism of con­ stitutive autonomy is replaced by the notion of what Rawls calls ‘doctrinal autonomy, a conception that gives full weight to the autonomy of all ‘appropriate conceptions of society and the person.’36 Here, Rawls rejects the notion that constructivism should provide universality (for which read cosmopolitan­ ism) from the start.37 The analytic idea of the reasonable links a very thin conception of practical reason with the idea of the relevantly similar, and tells us how and why peoples may enter into the political process in international politics. For Rawls an appropriate account of practical reason allied to a norm-governed framework (the construction of the relevantly similar) provides ‘both the form that practical reason requires for its application . . . [and] the context in which practical questions and problems arise.’38 The idea of the reasonable ensures that the conception of agency we use in our con­ struction is accessible to all in the relevant domain. It is precisely because Rawls must take account of all appropriate accounts of agency that he believes the cosmopolitan project to be insecure and he thus focuses upon peoples as politically organised rather than as individual agents. This move towards a particularist stance is indicative of Rawls’s general

The fact of reasonable pluralism is not an un­ fortunate condition of human life, as we might say of pluralism as such, allowing for doctrines that are not only irrational but mad and aggressive. In framing a political conception of justice so it can gain an overlapping consensus, we are not bend­ ing it to existing unreason, but to the fact of reasonable pluralism, itself the outcome of the free exercise of human reason under conditions of liberty.39 The idea implicit in the emerging political culture of international society is that societies capable of international cooperation are already contributing, and will continue to develop a workable system of human rights. The recognition that a plurality of states, some comprehensively liberal, some politi­ cally so, and some non-liberal or hierarchical can (and do) share political principles informs the inter­ national ethics of Rawls and Walzer.40 Neither of them believes that there exists an international consensus sufficiently robust to ground a cosmopo­ litan or egalitarian human rights project. Neverthe­ less both thinkers agree that a ‘minimal’ conception of universal rights plays an important role in world politics. In trying to reconcile human rights and pluralism, Rawls argues in favour of the develop­ mental potential of a constitutional (political) con­ sensus and Walzer for a minimalist morality formed out of repeated encounters with international pro­

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PETER S U T C H blems. For Walzer ‘the value of minimalism lies in the encounters it facilitates, of which it is also a product. But these encounters are not - not now at least - sufficiently sustained to produce a thick morality.’41 Similarly for Rawls the value of international justice stems from a consensus on a need to fix the political situation and put issues of justice beyond particularist interest, not upon any consensus strong enough to underwrite cosmopolitanism. For Rawls the basic principles of the law of peoples that have evolved historically as a modus vivendi are unsurprisingly traditional. But the key to Rawls’s project in LOP lies in his reworking of his seventh principle, that ‘peoples are to honour human rights.’42 The empirical claim that since The Second World War human rights have been on the agenda of international relations theory is supplemented by a justification of their prominence, as for Rawls the existence of liberal/cosmopolitan human rights is unstable in the sense that it lacks the normative justification appropriate to the international sphere.43 The idea of justification that Rawls applies to international relations is modelled on that found in Lecture IV of his Political Liberalism and he completes his sketch of a law of peoples by arguing for two further conditions that lend normative and practical stability to his project. The first of these two conditions is that the international order should be stable ‘in the right way’; that is, they pursue stability for reasons of justice rather than of mere accommo­ dation (modus vivendi).44 The second condition is that the law of peoples should ideally be the object of an overlapping consensus: people would ideally come to affirm the moral value of the law of peo­ ples.45 The conditions of stability and consensus represent the philosophical justification of the se­ ven-point law of peoples that Rawls argues is con­ sistent with both liberal and non-liberal perspectives. Elements of international law that are controversial (peculiarly liberal) in character (human rights for example) are likely to receive whatever justification they get from a variety of incompatible philosophical or doctrinal sources. It is here that the relationship between stability and consensus shows us the source and potential of Rawls’s theory. Stability is the goal of society, a condition in which we know that those with whom we share political space will comply with

the institutions of justice. Beyond modus vivendi exist conditions of society which, if the forms of consensus (constitutional or ideally overlapping) occur, offer the possibility of a greater transnational interaction. It is interesting to see how Rawls cashes out the relationship between the idea of stability and the differing forms of consensus in his international relations theory. Human rights, in Rawls’s ideal portrayal of a liberal international society, represent a ‘thick’ conception of rights founded upon speci­ fically liberal ideas. They signify that each person is ‘assigned a certain status, the status of members of some society who possess rights as human persons.’46 Yet human rights in the fully extended law of peoples represent a ‘minimum standard of wellordered political institutions for all peoples who belong, as members in good standing, to a just political society of peoples.’47 Rawls is acutely aware that much of international society does not hold a western individualist conception of the person and therefore assigns rights differently, and this fact alters his discussion of stability and consensus. The form of consensus reached between liberal and non-liberal states is likely to be analogous to the idea of constitutional consensus in Political Liberalism where a constitution satisfying certain basic principles establishes . . . procedures for moderating poli­ tical rivalry within society . . . Where there is agreement on certain basic political rights and liberties . . . there is disagreement . . . as to the more exact content and boundaries of these rights.48 Constitutional consensus arises, argues Rawls, as the only workable solution to endless destruction and strife, and can be thought of as the product of what Rawls calls the ‘dramatic shift’ in international law since the Second World War.49 The importance of this stage in Rawls’s theory is both its historicity and its dynamism, its potential. For him: A t the first stage of constitutional consensus the liberal principles of justice, initially accepted reluctantly as modus vivendi . . . tend to shift citizens’ comprehensive doctrines so that they

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CO N STRU CTIN G INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY perhaps even helps to explain the appeal of moral particularism.52

at least accept the principles of a liberal constitu­ tion. To this extent the [state’s principles] are reasonable if they were not before: simple pluralism moves towards reasonable pluralism and constitutional consensus is reached.50

In making his case Walzer contrasts ‘covering-law universalism’ with ‘reiterative universalism’. The central difference between them is neatly sum­ marised by Miller, who writes that

Let us just look at the three requirements Rawls places upon international society, his construction of international community, and see whether it seems reasonable to use these ideas to support a constructivist theory of international justice. The image of international politics that Rawls presents is one where:

‘covering-law universalism’ affirms the rightness of a particular way of life, and sees one nation as the bearer of that way of life . . . ‘Reiterative universalism’ . . . recognises that, subject to cer­ tain minimal constraints imposed on all, there are a number of radically different and valuable forms of life which flourish in different places.53

1. the fact of reasonable pluralism must lead to consensus upon the need to fix the political situation and put such issues beyond partiallarist interest; 2. the application of principles of justice pays heed to the guidelines of public reason. These guidelines and rules must be specified in re­ ference to forms of reasoning available to all; 3. (dependent on 1 and 2) those involved believe the principles are just and thus the consensus works effectively.51

Our main focus here is on the content of those ‘minimal constraints’ and upon their construction. For Walzer we cannot use an inaccessible account of agency to ground a ‘thick’ covering-law universal­ ism.54 Rather, reiterative universalism relies on something much weaker, on ‘overlapping expecta­ tions’ about the behaviour of others.55 Walzer’s ‘rights to life and liberty’ stem from reiterated claims made by significantly different agents over time and in response to specific problems in international politics. One reason why Rawls and Walzer are often sidelined in liberal international relations theory is that what they believe they are obliged to allow to stand as legitimate domestic arrangements can take many forms, some of which may not appeal to our liberal conception of legitimacy. As Walzer observes, ‘by democratic standards, most states throughout human history have been oppressive and illegiti­ mate, but those are not necessarily or even usually the standards by which they are judged by their own people.’56 Given this, plus the contestability of the foundational assumptions of liberal human rights theory, Walzer (and Rawls) want to promote inter­ national interaction while guarding against the uni­ versal imposition of what Walzer calls an ‘alien maximalist morality’.57 To this end, his primary principle that expresses moral minimalism in inter­ national affairs is self-determination, a concept ab­ stracted from its many reiterations or occurrences to signify the protection of the political liberty of

Rawls’s use of the ‘reasonable’, it would seem, is itself a move to ensure the accessibility of principles of international justice to those whose autonomy does not rely upon a politically western and ethically Kantian heritage. The aims of Walzer’s moral theory also explicitly engage with the problems of how we may link theories of international ethics with an appropriate conception of international society. His approach sums up much of what Frost and Rawls can be seen to be engaged in: Advocates of liberal enlightenment confront ad­ vocates of communal tradition; those who aspire to global reach confront those who yearn for local intensity. We all know one another’s lines . . . I want to argue from within what I, and many others, have taken to be the opposing camp; I want to take my stand among the universalists and suggest that there is another universalism, a non-standard variety, which encompasses and

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PETER S U T C H members of a plurality of communities.58 From here the rights to life and liberty develop to be repeated and reiterated at times of international and domestic tyranny. They do not (yet?) form a transnational moral Esperanto,59 but the political consequences of recognising such values are genuinely progressive. For Rawls, as for Walzer, the central idea is that the benefits of true stability only derive from a fair construction of principles of justice among consent­ ing and dependable parties. The rights this process makes explicit, argues Rawls, are politically neutral in the sense that they are not specific to western liberal culture.60

we would wish a theory of human rights to do. This charge is drawn from the long history of human rights theory that insists that it is possible to develop a conception of international justice from outside the practice of international politics. But to do so is to ignore the constitution of the international com­ munity and thus of the philosophical notion of the ‘relevantly similar’, thereby risking the alienation of liberalism from the real world of international rela­ tions. The power of human rights discourse is sig­ nificantly weakened if its justification belongs to one particular culture, even more so when it appears to foster the desires of the established hegemonic block. The liberalism of the developmental communitar­ ians offers a way beyond this problem. If the outline of this developing liberal discourse does fulfil the requirements of constructivism in ethics, then it is certainly time to admit the non-Kantian liberalism of Frost, Walzer and Rawls into mainstream interna­ tional relations theory. As for the practice: limited and progressive liberalisation of international poli­ tics may not be all we can hope for, but it may be all that we are justified in demanding.

Conclusion There is a lot that liberals do not like about the international relations theory of Frost, Walzer and Rawls. Prime among these dislikes are the limitations that these thinkers have to place upon the role of international justice. For example, it may appear that the human rights that non-cosmopolitan liberals develop have no teeth: they cannot do the work

Notes 13. O. O’Neill (1994), ‘Justice and Boundaries’, in Brown (ed.) (1994), pp. 69-88, at p. 85. 14. O’Neill (1996), p. 63. 15. Ibid., p. 51. 16. Ibid., p. 74. 17. As discussed in Mackie (1977). 18. Ibid., p. 78. 19. Ibid., p. 83. 20. Ibid., pp. 97-8. 21. Ibid., p. 98. 22. O’Neill (1996), p. 117. 23. See, for example, O’Neill (1988). 24. O’Neill (1996), p. 64. 25. Frost (1996), p. 79. 26. Ibid., pp. 111-12. 27. Ibid., p. 137. 28. Ibid., p. 112. 29. Ibid., p. 112 n. 7, pp. 229-30. 30. Frost (1997a), (1997b). 31. This task is completed in Sutch (2000), forthcoming. 32. See, for example, Doppelt (1980), Luban (1980). 33. Walzer (1994); see also Walzer (1990), p. 509. 34. Rawls (1996), pp. 98-100. 35. Ibid., p. 90. 36. Ibid., p. 98.

1. See, in particular, Rawls (1996) and (1999), chapters 24 and 25. 2. See, for example, Beitz (1979); P. Jones, ‘International Human Rights: Philosophical or Political?’, in Caney, George and Jones (eds) (1996); Moellendorf (1996); Paden (1997); and Pogge (1994). 3. Cosmopolitanism is a well-defined and well-under' stood tradition. For the purposes of this chapter, Brown’s analysis stands as a perfect example of what I have in mind: Brown (1992), pp. 23-51. 4. Frost (1996). 5. See, particularly, Walzer (1977) and (1994). 6. Brown (1992), p. 120. 7. O’Neill (1996). 8. Ibid., especially chapters 2 and 3. 9. Ibid., especially chapter 4. 10. Ibid., chapters 1 and 2. 11. T. Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty’, in Brown (ed.) (1994), pp. 89-122, at p. 48. 12. These points must be considered subject to all the controversy surrounding the empirical and theoretical debates over such issues as interdependence and glo­ balisation, and to the philosophical and political debates concerning the constitution of a moral com­ munity.

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CONSTRUCTING INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Cf. Rawls (1999), p. 532. Rawls (1996), p. 110. Ibid., p. 144; see also p. xxiv. The language is, of course, Rawls’s but the ideas are implicit in Walzer’s communitarianism and in early stages of Frost’s work. Walzer (1994), pp. 18-19. Rawls (1999), p. 540. Ibid., p. 542. Ibid. Ibid., p. 543. For a fuller account of stability and consensus, see Rawls (1996), Lecture IV, section 2. Ibid., p. 566. Ibid., p. 552. Rawls (1996), pp. 158-9. I am aware that there is no textual evidence to support the claim that this middle

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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level of consensus would play a role in international relations, but as a vital element of Rawls’s conceptual mechanism (and if appropriately modified) I think it is fascinating at least to attempt the transition. Ibid.; see also Rawls (1999), p. 535. Rawls (1996), pp. 163-4. Ibid., pp. 161-2. Walzer (1990), p. 509. Miller (1995), p. 10. Walzer (1990), pp. 522-3. Ibid. Walzer (1980), p. 128. Ibid., pp. 519-20. Walzer (1994), pp. 67-8. Ibid., p. 7. Rawls (1999), p. 552.

Part Eight NEW D I R E C T I O N S FOR L I B E R A L T H I N K I N G

20

LIBERALISM AND P O S T ­ COMMUNISM Richard Sakwa

priate for each specific country? And how can liberalism be established from scratch? The post-communist transitions have raised the most profound questions, not only about the current status of liberalism, democracy and economic mod­ ernisation, but also by forcing old issues once again to the fore. In a way post-communist transformation is a replay of the struggle for liberalism in Europe from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Similar fears about the dangers of excessive state power have been voiced, while the establishment of secure property rights was at the centre of the European and post-communist social revolutions. Indeed, post-communism forces us to rethink the relationship between the two faces of liberalism: political democracy and the market economy. Emer­ ging out of the command economy it is understand­ able that the predominant belief at the fall of communism was that without economic freedom all other freedoms, civil and political, are threatened. It was soon realised, however, that freedom (espe­ cially if confined to the economic sphere) is not the sum of liberalism. Following Jose Merquior, we can consider liberal­ ism as ideally comprising the following four elements: ‘(1) the (negative) freedom of not being subjected to arbitrary interferences; (2) the (positive) freedom of participating in public affairs; (3) the (interior) free­ dom of conscience and beliefs; and (4) the (personal) freedom of self-development for each individual.’3 This is a full-bodied liberalism drawing on all five

Introduction The last hundred years have been a troubled time for liberalism. An idea whose prospects seemed so bright in the last fin de siecle was drowned in the blood of the First World War and the left and right authoritarianisms that emerged out of that conflict. This has now all changed. ‘Suddenly’, Ernest Gellner notes, ‘the century of troubles and tribulations of liberalism is all over. A century that often looked as if it were to witness liberalism’s demise, in fact documents its almost embarassed triumph. It does not quite know what to do with it.’1 This victory was given intellectual form by Francis Fukuyama in his thesis on ‘the end of history’, arguing that with the fall of communism there was no longer any sustained programmatic universal alternative to liberalism.2 There has always been a type of liberal historicism that favoured the view of an evolution through stages in human affairs, rejecting cyclical theories (Spengler, Toynbee), or those that thought in terms of stasis and selfperpetuating order of a Chinese sort. Yet many impeccable liberals (like Dahrendorf) found Fu­ kuyama’s radical restatement of a liberal historicism profoundly offensive and - unliberal Some sort of victory for liberalism was, however, recorded with the fall of communism. The question was not only what to do with this victory, but for the post­ communist countries the problem remained: how to do it? Which liberal tradition is the most appro­

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RICHARD SAKWA leading liberals, the mistake had been to ally with the democrats from the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union (C PSU ) in the late 1980s.10 By 1995 he had become convinced that there was no basis for a liberal democratic society in Russia. The problem was no longer the power of selfish ruling elites, but the conservative people, above all the patriarchal-minded mass of peasants.11 It is this sort of contemptuous attitude towards their own people that has characterised Russian liberalism. Sogrin takes a more balanced view, arguing that while there were the preconditions for liberal democracy in Russia, the objective reasons for the failures and shortcomings of liberalism can be found in the specific liberal democratic model that was adopted and imposed by Russian liberals.12 N o distinction was drawn between liberalism and democracy, and only from around 1990 did liberalism begin to emerge as an autonomous political tendency.13 Even then, the liberal trend failed to develop into a genuinely popular movement and source of mass political action.14 Jerzy Szacki, a professor of sociology at Warsaw University, argues that while the philosophy of economic liberalism as such appealed only to a minority of dissidents, the political value of what he calls ‘protoliberalism’ as an alternative ‘neglected path of anti-communism’ actually increased.15 He argues that liberalism was a phenomenon of the western world with few roots in Eastern Europe, and that communism, far from suppressing indigen­ ous liberal development, artificially fostered it as its alternative political vision. As David Ost puts it, ‘when the enemy became the state, the opposition became liberals.’16 The fall of communism would allow the anti-liberalism of Catholicism, in Szacki’s view, to reassert itself (or, perhaps, any one of the numerous anti-liberal traditions of the area). He fails to realise that in modern pluralist societies even intrinsically authoritarian faiths can, if freely adopted by its members and when part of a broader patchwork of equally autonomous interests, strengthen the liberal heterogeneity of society. The argument, nevertheless, is an important one. Liberalism appeared less a systemic necessity and outgrowth of the society than an instrument with which to assault the party-state. Many have argued

of the liberal traditions identified by Jaguaribe (clas­ sical, conservative, social, sociological and neo),4 whereas the liberalism prevalent under post-commun­ ism is predominantly of the neo-liberal type. The ideologists of neo-liberalism are Von Mises, Hayek, Nozick and Milton Friedman, all condemning state regulation in favour of the unrestrained operation of market forces and a radical individualism: prioritising (1) and underplaying (2)-(4). While it is easy to condemn the excesses of neo­ liberalism, especially in a post-Thatcher/Reagan era, it is more difficult to sustain a defence of the rationality of the market and the enterprise as the most efficient allocater of resources while simulta­ neously condemning the neo-liberal demonisation of the state and the attempt to impose ‘the law of the jungle on societies whose stability was obtained thanks to the healthy effects of the welfare state.’5 These predicaments will be examined on the basis of developments in the post-communist world, primar­ ily in Russia and Poland.

From the Wreckage of Communism The emergence of political liberalism in Russia under Gorbachev in 1987-88 during ‘perestroika’ (‘restruc­ turing’) was as a distinctive addition to socialism; only later did it emerge as an autonomous force in its own right to triumph between 1991 and 1992.6 This triumph, however, was ambivalent. Nodari Simonia notes that ‘the defeat of the attempted coup in August 1991 was no victory for democracy. Political democracy was the dominant tendency, but there was neither the social nor the economic base neces­ sary for the establishment of democracy. A civil society had not yet been created.’7 He goes on to argue that ‘while the remnants of the ideological nomenklatura waged rearguard battles against Russian democracy, an economic nomenklatura moved into position to attain political power.’8 It is for this reason, according to Jerry Hough, that the end of communism in the U SSR , although no less of a revolution than the events of 1917 that had brought the Bolsheviks to power, was relatively bloodless.9 Within a year organised liberalism appeared to have exhausted itself, and since then has been at a low ebb. According to Lev Timofeev, one of Russia’s

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LIBERALISM AND POST-COM M U NISM itself into a political danger zone, where the risks were far greater than ever before.’20 The liberal ‘party’ in the anti-communist revolutions of 1989— 91 took the form of an inchoate social movement whose leadership was amorphous and its policies limited to the negative programme of opposition to the decaying communist regime. Its positive pro­ gramme was a transformative one that assaulted the society from which it sought to draw its democratic legitimacy: transformative legitimacy ran counter to democratic legitimacy. This was particularly the case in Russia. The main liberal ‘party’ in the December 1993 State Duma elections, Yegor Gaidar’s Democratic Choice of Russia (DVR), won 15.51 per cent of the party list vote, coming second to the 22.92 per cent for Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) (which of course is not a liberal party). Rather than organising as an autonomous force, liberals relied on the benevolence of President Boris Yeltsin and sought to use the state to promote their policies. They thus became the first ‘party of power’, until losing out in political intrigues and defeat at the polls. Indeed, it appeared that there were more liberals in the entourage of the relatively authoritarian Yeltsin presidency than in the parlia­ ment itself. For liberals like Gaidar, it was fear of losing power in 1994 rather than attempts to institutionalise their dominance that led them to activise their attempts to create a party to support their programme. The socalled democratic movement and the liberals asso­ ciated with the Yabloko party fared dismally in the regional elections between September 1996 and into early 1997, not winning a single governorship.21 Federal party politics counted for very little in these elections in the regions, and even less in the repub­ lics, especially where titular ethnic elites dominated political life. Regime-type systems have proliferated in the regions and republics where more often than not both liberalism and democracy have been com­ promised. In the December 1995 elections the combined liberal vote was only 16.2 per cent. Yet, as Steven Fish has argued, the reason for the liberals’ crushing defeat lies not in any profound anti-liberalism of the Russian people as such, nor in the institutional

that the social basis for liberal democracy was, quite simply, lacking in Poland,17 and if that was the case, then in Russia it stood no chance whatsoever. In Russia it was Andrei Sakharov who became the symbol of the liberal opposition to the regime, yet paradoxically it was Solzhenitsyn, usually charac­ terised as an authoritarian patriot, who advocated a gradualist strategy of self-liberation from commun­ ism18 while the ‘liberal’ Sakharov espoused a more revolutionary break with the past. It is out of para­ doxes such as these that post-communist liberalism was bom. In Hungary by 1998 the Prime Minister, Victor Orban, even went so far as to argue that certain elements of West European liberalism could not be ‘simply transferred’ to Central Europe, and the attempt to do so might often do ‘more harm than good’.19 Faced by rising crime rates the response is understandable, but his argument that the ruling Federation of Young Democrats-Hungarian Civic Party was now ‘much more than a liberal party’ suggested a deeper unease with liberalism itself. We should thus examine liberalism as a transforma­ tive challenge, a set of ideas and a complex of institutions.

Liberalism and Capitalist Transformation The central contradiction of post-communist liberal­ ism is that as an economic philosophy it was pre­ dominant, and its political ideals of civil rights, political pluralism, the separation of powers, toler­ ance and advocacy of non-militaristic solutions to domestic and foreign problems became the main currency of debate, but as an organised force it has tended to be weak. Politically Organised Liberalism The relationship between liberalism and mass de­ mocracy is at the best of times problematic, but in post-communist countries it has fallen prey to the technocratic temptation. In 1991 the liberal concept of a parliamentary constitutional state prevailed over residual notions of a socialist alternative. But, as in Germany in 1919, ‘politically organised Liberalism, the Liberal parties, played no part at all in this victory; and the victory drew Liberal democracy

271

RICHARD SAKWA framework, the electoral system, lack of resources or disunity among the liberal parties. Rather, he argues, the answer lies in the deficiencies of the liberals themselves, and in particular their poor organisation (consistently underestimating the importance of party organisation), unprofessional and miscon­ ceived campaigns, and the legacy of the behaviour of liberals in power.22 Organised liberalism in the December 1999 parliamentary elections was even more fragmented and disorganised, grouped around a number of leading personalities whose alliances were as fragile as the differences between them were minimal. The Right Cause (Pravoe Delo) grouping brought together some of Russia’s leading liberals, including Boris Nemtsov, Anatolii Chubais and Boris Fedorov, together with ‘the right-wing liberal’ Yegor Gaidar, ‘the odious architect of the attempts to implement “shock therapy” .’23 According to Buzgalin, the author of the just-quoted sentiments, Right Cause was dangerous for Russia because of the ‘communist fanaticism’ with which they sought to implement their plans. Few in Russia would forget the role that some of the members of Right Cause played in creating the system of oligarchical capit­ alism, accompanied by the immiseration of large sectors of society. All of this is true, yet the trajectory of post-communist liberalism has a more profound meaning.

right thinking, it is unclear what remains of a dis­ tinctively liberal agenda. Economic liberalism became the guiding principle of post-communist transformations. The reasoning behind ‘shock therapy’ was outlined by Leszek Balcerowicz, arguing against any evolutionary exit out of the old state-planned system in favour of a complete and radical institutional break with the past.25 The issue of sequencing was crucial for him, insisting that systemic market-oriented reforms had to be achieved during the period of ‘extraordinary politics’ of high political mobilisation early on in the process. A n even more robust defence of economic liberalism came from Vaclav Klaus, Prime Minister of the Czech Republic from 1991 to 1997, where he praised the virtues of the untrammelled market and con­ servative liberal principles,26 although in practice he presided over a semi-reformed system that allowed its own type of crony capitalism to emerge. Szacki’s warnings in this context about the shallowness of true political liberalism in the region need to be taken seriously. The balance drawn between eco­ nomic liberalism, liberal political ideas, the collec­ tive rights of the nation and the persistent support for many features of the old state socialist welfare system differed between states, but throughout the region none could avoid the dilemmas posed by these issues. Transformative Liberalism

Marketisation and Liberalism

These problems were particularly acute in Russia where, according to Sogrin, a ‘radical liberal’ ten­ dency predominated, characterised by a utopianism that ignored the character of Russian society and civilisation.27 From November 1991 liberals like Gaidar, Chubais and Fedorov dominated the Russian government. From 2 January 1992 they launched a ‘shock therapy’ economic reform with the liberal­ isation of some prices. The economic legacy of this period is still debated, but the immediate result was near-hyper inflation, a slump in production and a record deterioration in standards of living. More positively, queues disappeared and market principles began to be introduced in the economy. By the end of the year Yeltsin had sacrificed the liberal refor­ mers, and from December 1992 Victor Chernomyr­ din took over as Prime Minister. Andrei Kozyrev, the

Like the communist regimes that they replaced, the liberalism that emerged in the post-communist states was forced to create the grounds for its social ex­ istence by a massive act of economic transformation. Broader humanistic concerns were thus subverted by the economism implicit in this transformative mis­ sion. Bellamy has noted the shift from ethical to economic theories of liberal democracy,24 but under post-communism this has taken extreme forms. Pol­ itics has been subordinated to the alleged economic imperative of social transformation. Old tensions within the liberal tradition, above all between social liberalism, with its more positive view of liberty and state activism, and neo-classical liberalism, stressing the redemptive powers of the market, have burst out once again. T om between social democracy and new

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LIBERALISM AND POST-COM M U NISM While there is no doubt that Nemtsov is an economic liberal, in politics he is more of a national liberal with a statist bent. An admirer of Peter the Great, he noted in an interview in February 1997:

liberal foreign minister, stayed on until the Decem­ ber 1995 parliamentary elections saw the commu­ nists become the largest grouping in the Duma, but in the economic sphere only Chubais survived to mastermind the privatisation of the economy. This is one of the most spectacular shifts in ownership relations in history; today, less than a quarter of the national economy is in state hands. Mass redis­ tribution of ownership was accompanied by equally spectacular corruption. Chubais was appointed head of the presidential administration following Yeltsin’s re-election in June-July 1996, and was made a First Deputy Prime Minister in March 1997. This time, together with the other First Deputy Prime Minister, Nemtsov, he sought to end the domination of the ‘old economic nomenklatura’, to break up the huge natural mono­ polies and the utilities, and to pursue housing and pensions reform.28 Although yoked together, Chu­ bais and Nemtsov represent two very different trends in Russian liberalism. Chubais is a radical liberal, whereas Nemtsov represents a tendency dubbed by Sogrin as ‘national liberalism’ - although it is un­ likely that a direct reference is intended to Germa­ ny’s National Liberal party established in 1867, and whose left wing seceded in 1880. While respecting traditional liberal values of private property, the market, pluralism and political democracy, Russian national liberals sought to replace abstract or Wes­ tern liberal models with one more suited to Russian conditions. Disenchanted with Western democracy, national liberals began to favour authoritarian gov­ ernment to democracy. They regarded the social liberal idea of a universal welfare state as inappropri­ ate for Russia, favouring instead a carefully targeted social policy. A national liberal economic model equally rejects the monetarism of the radical liberals and favours a more active role for the state in national economic development and a degree of protection for national production.29 A representa­ tive of this tendency was Alexander Lebed, who sought to free the state from bureaucratic, nomenk­ latura and criminal dominance, forces that had usurped the fruits of reform by distorting the mar­ ket.30 National liberalism represented the adaptation of liberalism with a social conscience to Russian conditions.

I’m a liberal economist and support the idea of a strong state in politics. Yegor Gaidar, for instance, is a liberal in economics and a liberal in politics, in the bad sense of this word. In Russia, such liberalism is ruinous.31 He advocated using Russia’s financial resources to buy up the city and naval base of Sevastopol. ‘His­ torical justice should be restored by capitalist meth­ ods,’ he suggested. As Peter Rutland notes, ‘Nemtsov may be a liberal, but he is a liberal with a Russian face.’32 The same could be said of Sergei Kirienko, Prime Minister from April to August 1998, when he struggled to transform oligarchical capitalism into a more open version. His failure to deal with the legacy of nearly a decade of mismanagement led to the partial default of 17 August 1998, and his own dismissal six days later. The ‘Sin of Constructivism To achieve the desired socio-economic results and to generate market-oriented behaviour by economic actors, the post-communist state intervened on a massive scale in the early years of the transition, thus compromising, both politically and economically, many of the principles of the new ‘liberal’ order. This ‘sin of constructivism’, in the words of Szacki,33 is reminiscent in an inverted form, not surprisingly, of earlier ‘grand designs’ of the communist sort. The Polish sociologist Radzislawa Gortat also referred to ‘liberalism as constructivism’,34 describing how lib­ eralism in Poland was bom in a way that contra­ dicted its nature. Thus in its struggle to create capitalist institutions the Tadeusz Mazowiecki gov­ ernment relied on the authority of the state to achieve the desired results. The liberal reforms, lacking a social interest to act on its behalf, relied on an external agency to articulate an inevitably synthetic and derivative version of the social ideal. In the absence of social interests to articulate and promote the programme, the Balcerowicz plan of late

273

RICHARD SAKWA 1989, and the Gaidar model of social transformation in Russia from late 1991, could only be the creation of the state.35 It is welbknown that Hayek condemned Keynes’s advocacy of government intervention in the econ­ omy to correct the market as presumptious ‘con­ structivism’. As Bellamy puts it (following John Gray), Hayek distinguishes ‘between the notion of society as a spontaneous order embodying evolution­ ary reason, on the one hand, and constructivist rationalist theories of society, on the other.’36 In his Road to Serfdom of 1944, Hayek had condemned western governments for subverting the law and replacing it with legislation. But what spontaneous order could there be in post-communist conditions? Liberals were forced to adopt the guise of revolu­ tionaries and act not as the defenders of a sponta­ neously generated social order, but as a small sect of priests who claimed a privileged understanding of the laws of history and social development. Solutions were imposed upon society and not derived from society. This should be placed in context, and the notion of post-communist neo-liberal reformers as ‘Bolshe­ viks of the market’ should not be taken too far. In form, content and methods the differences are so large as to render analogies almost meaningless. As Andrzej Walicki notes:

Kolodko’s ‘Strategy for Poland’ document of 1994. The Balcerowicz group, it argued, had an ideological commitment to liberal doctrine, pursuing its pro­ gramme in a centralised, technocratic manner that treated the public as passive objects of transition. This was, according to Jerzy Hausner, an ‘imperative’ method of post-communist change, that gave way later to the ‘interactive’ approach favoured by Kolodko. The ‘interactive’ approach sought to ground ongoing processes of social change in a continuing discursive relationship between the authorities and the public. Rejecting the view that there was ‘no alternative’ to the transition to an Anglo-Saxon style economy, the ‘interactive’ approach recognised a variety of capitalisms and that the role of the state would be subject to negotiation rather than a priori rejected.38 It was this more interactive approach that was favoured by the liberal opposition in Russia, and in particular Grigorii Yavlinskii’s ‘social liberal’ Yabloko party. However, there appeared to be no devel­ oped alternative to radical liberal economic policies. Attempts to devise alternatives, even by the ‘demo­ cratic opposition’ in Yabloko, in practice failed.39 These social liberals emphasised the social basis of any viable political or economic order, while at the same time insisting that it had to be rooted in the national interest. They took the universal of liberal­ ism and sought to present them in a patriotic idiom. The behaviour of the radical liberals in power in Russia was characterised not only by constructivism but also by corruption, the denigration of patriotism, the rupture of relations with the former Soviet states, and by a narrow dogmatism that appeared to regard the dismantling of state capacity as the pinnacle of the liberal project. The social liberals promised to continue the reforms but in a more socially oriented way. They would remain tempted, however, by the sin of constructivism.

One of the most conspicuous characteristics of post-communist Poland is the omnipresent con­ tradiction between the radical, uncompromisingly anti-communist ideology and the principle of compromise that has enabled a smooth, peaceful transfer of power.37 The new authorities were revolutionary in their actions but liberal in their methods. Yet the charge of constructivism is accurate, and one that tainted post-communist liberalism (above all in Russia) with the stamp of illiberality, if not authoritarianism and hypocrisy. After the radical phase a reaction set in marked by a return to the politics of gradualism and a reconsi­ deration of the social values of reform. In Poland this took the form of the Finance and Deputy Prime Minister (from May 1994 to February 1997) Grzegorz

Constrained Liberalism Kryzstof Bielecki, the liberal Polish Prime Minister in 1991, has talked in terms of ‘constrained liberal­ ism’.40 Andrzej Rychard refers to what he calls ‘blockages’ in legitimation ‘which stem from the elite’s usage of outdated symbols and discourses in

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LIBERALISM AND POST-COM M U NISM the construction of liberal democracy’, failing above all to negotiate with, and often even to explain to, the populace over the strategies for reform. It instead struck hard during the breathing space offered by the period of ‘extraordinary politics’ to impose ready­ made solutions, often imported from abroad.41 He notes that ‘the communist order existed but was [indiscriminately] rejected while the post-communist order has not been shaped but is [naively] ac­ cepted’.42 The Mazowiecki government’s liberalminded Industry Minister’s statement during his confirmation hearings before the Sejm in September 1989 is instructive: ‘I represent subjects that do not yet exist.’43 The absence of any organised social force to carry out the liberal reforms translated into what Jadwiga Staniszkis called a ‘revolution from above’ in which the state promoted the (temporary) demobi­ lisation of society in order to achieve the economic conditions that would allow greater public inclusion. 44 Constrained liberalism has yet another and per­ haps more profound meaning. Janine Hole has ar­ gued that liberal discourse is itself part of the construction of a very specific type of democratic subject in post-communism.45 As she notes, ‘all states - indeed, all communities - are based on assumptions about who properly belongs in them’, and in Poland between 1990 and 1993 a very specific ‘liberal’ narrative became dominant that explicitly linked ‘private property, individual rights, and the “shock therapy” of the free market, and it implicitly constructed an ideal and quite fixed “citizen” of the new Polish democracy.’46 Bielecki himself, as Prime Minister in 1991, was the most radical of these liberal ‘identity-builders’. Not only was the state being rebuilt, but the notion of what made up the citizen was being reconstructed. Hole seeks to break away from traditional institution-centred discussions of transition to examine the change in subjectivities involved. She sums up her argument as follows:

to ‘fasten’ identities to fixed, naturalised subject positions inevitably disciplines those subjects and limits possibilities for political action. Further­ more, discourses that seek to attain totality, even a democratic totality, do so by covering over discursive instabilities, by mistaking a unified subject for a fluid ensemble of subject positions.47 Thus the liberal citizen was to be grounded in economic liberty, specifically private property as the basis for civil society and the emancipatory potential of economic empowerment. Post-commu­ nist liberals thus appeared to be more Lockean than Locke himself, ‘in implying not only that liberty will be achieved by acting on the right to property, but through property itself.48 A radical disjuncture was achieved in what had previously united Solidarity, the combination of social power and individual rights. In Poland and elsewhere social power was consigned to some non-liberal limbo, together with state activism in its entirety, while the liberal subject was constrained by an eviscerated model of what the citizen of this liberal utopia was to look like.

Liberalism and Post-communist Democracy Philippe Schmitter has noted that: Liberalism, either as a conception of political liberty, or as a doctrine about economic policy, may have coincided with the rise of democracy. But it has never been immutably or unambigu­ ously linked to its practice.49 This question is particularly acute in post-communist countries, where the very ‘givenness’ of a structured society is in question. Implicit in many discussions is the ‘Kirkpatrick principle’, the view that in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, so­ ciety can spring back into shape, whereas in the transition from totalitarianism, society is destroyed to such a degree that it has to become an object of the transition process itself. The fate of liberalism in the post-communist world is dependent on the ability of democracy itself to survive. This is nowhere more evident than in the sphere of party formation. Throughout the post­

The rise and fall of the Liberal movement in Poland illustrates the manner in which a vision or philosophy of government that assigns indivi­ dual civil and economic rights to its citizens is not inherently liberating or democratic for those sub­ jects. Rather, any discourse of authority that seeks

275

RICHARD SAKWA communist world the emergence of this quintessen­ tial aspect of a modem liberal democracy was a more protracted, fragmented and tenuous process than in the other ‘third wave’ democratising states in Latin America and Southern Europe. It might be noted that in America and elsewhere parties by no means developed at the same time as parliamentarianism and democracy. According to Kagarlitskii, the ‘plur­ alism of elites’ allowed capitalism in its ‘primary accumulation of capital’ phase to preserve liberal political institutions while keeping the people away from decision-making:

financial crash of August 1998 effectively wiped out the nascent middle class. As Kagarlitskii puts it:

The interaction of a harsh and authoritarian structure of executive power with a parliamentary elite was an ideal recipe for oligarchical rule, characteristic for the liberal-market capitalism of the nineteenth century.50

How can we explain this and in what terms can we describe it? There are three substantive approaches to the issue.

It was this sort of system, marked by a large number of ‘independent’ politicians elected largely due to their financial resources, that was created by what Kagar­ litskii calls the ‘liberal-authoritarian’ regime in Rus­ sia, a system that was ideal for the needs of the corrupted Russian bureaucracy, striving to gain for­ mer state property, and for western elites who sought a power strong enough to suppress any popular resistance to the ‘reforms’ while avoiding the open authoritarianism typical of Latin America. The sys­ tem also corresponded to national traditions, where nascent liberal institutions were always grafted on to the authoritarian Russian state, whether this was in the late Tsarist period or in the late Soviet epoch, and acted as no more than a supplement to funda­ mentally non-democratic systems.51 In Russia this tension has taken extreme forms. ‘Perestroika’ was a battleground between the liberal part of the nomenklatura and the nascent civil so­ ciety. If ‘perestroika’ was accompanied by the emer­ gence of ‘civil society’ movements dealing with local, environmental and civil rights issues, the triumph of the liberal nomenklatura and intelligentsia in August 1991 was followed very quickly by the stifling of this social insurgency. In addition, throughout the 1990s the status and material position of the liberal profes­ sions and intellectual life in general declined sharply, damaging the core supporters of liberalism, while the

In a recent article Fareed Zakaria has implicitly taken up Raymond Aron’s view that the concept of ‘con­ stitutional pluralism’ is in many ways more accurate than the formula of ‘liberal democracy’. Zakaria distinguishes between liberal democracy, defined as ‘a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion and property’, which he calls constitutional liberalism, and illiberal democracy. In the latter ‘democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been re-elected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms’.53 For Zakaria, the regular sta­ ging of relatively fair, competitive, multi-party elec­ tions might make a country democratic, but it does not ensure good governance. For him, constitutional liberalism

the retreat from communist ideology was accom­ panied by the centralisation of power in the hands of the local bosses. The organs of local selfgovernment, already very weak, were quite simply abolished until revived as part of the centre’s attempts to outflank the powerful regional bosses. In conditions of economic crisis enterprise admin­ istrations strengthened their control over work­ ers.52

1. Illiberal democracy

is not about the procedures for selecting govern­ ment, but rather government’s goals. It refers to the tradition, deep in Western history, that seeks to protect an individual’s autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever - state, church, or society . . . It is liberal because it draws on the philosophical strain, beginning with the Greeks, that emphasises individual liberty. It is constitu-

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LIBERALISM AND POST^COMMUNISM formalised but strongly operative practices - clientelism, patrimonialism, and corruption.’58 The notion of delegative democracy has clear applica­ tions to Russia, and has been used fruitfully in analysing regional politics.59 However, the concept has clear limitations when applied to Russia, ignor­ ing precisely the political consequences of imposing a capitalist economic system. It is the combination of political reform and economic transformation that allowed the whole process to be hijacked by sectoral and other special interests, not the flaws in the democratic method as such.

tional because it rests on the tradition, beginning with the Romans, of the rule of law.54 In practice, even relatively free elections in coun­ tries like Kazakhstan ‘have resulted in strong execu­ tives, weak legislatures and judiciaries, and few civil and economic liberties.’55 Zakaria argues that while constitutional liberalism can lead to democracy, democracy does not necessarily lead to constitutional liberalism. Thus the government of Hong Kong under British rule was epitomised by constitutional liberalism, protecting the rights of citizens and the rule of law, but it was far from democratic. The Central European post-communist states are nego­ tiating the passage to democracy more successfully than the former Soviet states, it is argued, because they went through a long phase of liberalisation without democracy in the nineteenth century that grounded the rule of law and property rights into social practices. The problem with this approach is that it assumes that history is destiny and provides no mechanism for a society to break out of ‘path de­ pendency’. It appears that if a country misses the bus of constitutional liberalism it has little chance of getting on the bus called democracy.

3. Regime democracy As Merquior noted of Brazil, the concentration of economic power ‘is a freedom-killing exercise’,60 an observation that is equally true of Russia and other post-communist countries. These countries do not lack freedom; they lack liberalism. The new freedom has allowed an oligarchical, corporate and corrupt capitalism to emerge. Regime-type politics are characteristic of all the post-communist states of the former U SSR (but not Central Europe). This covers not only features like enhanced powers for the executive, the prevalence of personalised leadership where the personality defines the contours of the political system, the manipulation of parliaments, weak judicial over­ sight, seamless links between the political and new­ ly-enriched socio-economic elites, the lack of distinction between public and private posts, and above all the lack of accountability of elected lea­ ders. The very nature of post-communism in this region has taken on the colouring of what postmo­ dernists call a ‘decentred’ politics. Although the powers of the executive everywhere have been en­ hanced, these are not classical presidentialist regimes of the Latin American type. Politics is too unstruc­ tured, institutions too fluid and the personages too constrained by the emerging class system and ethnic contradictions to allow the emergence of a defined balance of powers. Instead regime politics is defined by flux within the parameters of the exigencies of the transitional process itself: they are not arbitrary but neither are they ordered as part of a structured political order (Ordnungspolidk). Its codes are not

2. Delegative democracy In a similar vein, Giullermo O ’Donnell has argued that in weakly established democracies a leader can become so strong that he or she can ignore those who they are meant to represent. O ’Donnell characterises these countries as having ‘delegative’ rather than representative democracy, with the electorate alleg­ edly having delegated to the executive the right to do what it sees fit, ‘constrained only by the hard facts of existing power relations and by a constitutionally limited term of office’.56 Thus a government emerges that is ‘inherently hostile to the patterns of repre­ sentation normal in established democracies’ by ‘depoliticising the population except for brief mo­ ments in which it demands its plebiscitary support.’57 This sort of democracy is, according to O ’Donnell, underinstitutionalised, ‘characterised by the re­ stricted scope, the weakness, and the low density of whatever political institutions exist. The place of well-functioning institutions is taken by other non-

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RICHARD SAKWA formalised but they are recognised. The legitimacy inherent in the electoral process comes into contra­ diction with the functionality of the transformative impulse. In short, the political process in Russia and elsewhere lacks a subject, focused neither on person­ alities nor institutions but on fluid but ritualised relations between universally objectified processes of transition.

problematic, for Russia (and some other post-Soviet states) post-communism has once again raised the question that has racked the country for at least the last three hundred years: is Russia part of Europe or a separate and distinct civilisation sufficient unto itself? All of these countries, moreover, have been faced by the ‘Nuremberg question’, the degree to which the perpetrators of the crimes of the old regime can be brought to book.63 Whether there is a distinctively ‘liberal’ approach to this aspect of universalism is unclear, other than a commitment to the rule of law. Too often decommunisation became an aspect of the partisan persecution of political opponents. More broadly, the question is often posed whether any universal agenda of human and liberal rights is no more than a covert form of imposing Western values on other societies. Some post-communist leaders have explicitly argued that liberalism is not suitable for their societies at this stage of develop­ ment. Familiar arguments about distinctive paths and ‘third ways’ are being mobilised by post-com­ munist leaders (for example, President Islam Kari­ mov in Uzbekistan and the Mayor of Moscow, Yurii Luzhkov) and leaders of the developing countries (for example, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia). Both the ‘East’ and the ‘South’ are now joined by a series of common dilemmas that trans­ cend issues of globalisation and focus on the cultural and political identity of the nations themselves. The former Second and Third Worlds are still far from one, but when it comes to civilisational issues and developmental trajectories they do face some com­ mon problems.

Universalism and Post-communism Although the domestic sources of liberalism may be relatively weak in most post-communist countries, the international context is increasingly dominated by the political counterpart of globalisation, what we might call ‘universalisation’. It is under this nominal rubric that the most important questions of our day are discussed. This is the question of the extent to which the universal norms, as formulated above all in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are applicable to all countries, irre­ spective of their specific traditions. From this per­ spective globalisation can be challenged not so much from a ‘left’ perspective as from a universal one, in which a rich array of international and national organisations established in the postwar years can be mobilised to establish a set of international norms. In the European context the main instruments of this universalism are the Council of Europe (CE) and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O SCE). Russia joined the CE in February 1996, and on 20 February 1998 the Duma voted to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights, allowing Russian citizens to file appeals to the European Court. By that time there were already 800 com­ plaints from Russian citizens pending with the Eur­ opean Commission on Human Rights, the body that refers cases to the European Court.61 Universalism has reforged a link between moder­ nisation and development. While some Asian coun­ tries, as Huntington has noted, have been able to separate modernisation from westernisation, by adopting western techniques but not capitulating to western culture in its entirety,62 for post-commu­ nist countries this question is particularly acute. Although for most Eastern European countries the ‘return to Europe’ is not perceived as particularly

Post-communist Liberalism Liberalism is an extended meditation on the legit­ imate sphere of state activism and the proper scope for public authority. As with any living idea, answers are always in the process of being rethought. Liberal­ ism under post-communism becomes post-commu­ nist liberalism. Liberalism and the Post-communist State The opening of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has in effect become the slogan of the post-communist

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LIBERALISM AND POST-COM M U NISM minimalism, reducing the legitimate scope of state activity. In the post-communist world the anti-statist strain in liberalism became an over-determined as­ sault on the very existence of purposive state action, something that China managed to avoid because of its distinctive traditions and refusal to accept the agenda of ‘transition’ and liberal democracy. Gottfried Dietze has distinguished between ‘liber­ alism proper’, defined as ‘liberty without restriction’, and ‘proper liberalism’, a balance between personal liberties and social restrictions that allows the en­ joyment of the one with the public order of the other.69 Clearly, it is a vulgar ‘liberalism proper’ that has exerted a profound influence in post-communist Russia accompanied by the weakening of law en­ forcement, the privatisation of security (for those who can afford it) and lawlessness. There is a pre­ valent sense of lack of order and bespredel (absence of limits) that gives rise, as Fish notes, to the absence of rights (bespravie) - ‘albeit a very different form of bespravie than existed under the Soviet regime,’70 but an absence that in many ways is more substantive than earlier since it is experienced at the level of daily life in a personal way. The denigration of the state that had accompanied the assault against the communist order was perpetuated in a simplified ‘liberalism proper’ that disregarded problems of pub­ lic order and personal security. Post-communist lib­ erals discovered that the threat to individual liberty could come as much from an anarchic society as from an overweaning state or a sovereign people. The emergence of national liberalism was a response to this, but more common was support for neo-communist, nationalist and other quasi-authoritaran so­ lutions.

revolutions: as countries become democratic, he noted, people believed that ‘too much importance has been attached to the limitation of power itself. That (it might seem) was a resource against rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to those of the people.’ With the people in charge, there was allegedly no need for such caution: ‘The nation did not need to be protected against its own will. There was no fear of tyrannising over itself.’64 Mill of course goes on to argue that the limitation . . . of the power of government over individuals loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accoun­ table to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein.65 Zakaria quotes this argument approvingly.66 The peoples emerging from communism had learnt the bitter lesson that it is precisely the attempt to fulfil the entire potential of democracy that leads to absolute servitude. Since the French revolution de­ mocracy has been associated with undivided popular sovereignty, forgetting Tocqueville’s warning of the ‘tyranny of the majority’. These lessons are now taken to heart, but there are other processes that undermine the emergence of clear conclusions. As we know, the advance of democracy led to the emergence of a state that is far from minimal and a liberalism that embraced interventionism. While Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, with its anti-constructivist thesis that any state activism in the social sphere provides scope for the development of tota­ litarianism, became popular reading in post-commu­ nist countries, the experience of postwar democracy in Japan and the West demonstrated that ‘planned capitalism and the welfare state helped to avoid totalitarianism because they contributed decisively to the neutralisation of political movements that carry a model of totalitarian socialism.’67 Under post-communism ‘economic liberalism still takes on an extreme, virulent form at times, in which antistatism - one of the most lucid positions - turns into a generalised statephobia, often accompanied by antidemocratic sentiments.’68 The post-communist transitions coincided with the predominance of the globalisation paradigm, itself a recipe for state

Liberalism and Post-communist Social Democracy Under post-communism the focus has been on re­ storing the elements of classical constitutional lib­ eralism, the critique of political power and the attempt to impose restraints on despotism. With equal force post-communist liberalism has had to face the question of the social sources of despotism, the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and of the masses on the individual. In this context the social liberalism espoused by T. H. Green and his successors - an

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RICHARD SAKWA evolution that in the United States has redefined the very meaning of liberalism to denote interventionist welfare state policies - has been largely absent. Sogrin notes that at the basis of the reformist policies of Russian radicals ‘lay a simplified Western liberab ism, stripped off practically all the humanistic for­ mulae of the twentieth century.’71 The insouciance of the majority of post-communist liberals in the face of the social traumas of an almost unprecedented scale in peacetime did much to discredit the liberal idea in its entirety. Irving Kristol may well be right to argue that ‘a conservative is but a liberal attacked by reality’72 but we can with equal force argue that a liberal is but a conservative attacked by conscience. The problem under post-communism, however, is that this con­ science is not well-developed. What liberalism there is tends to emerge out of an abstract intellectualism rather than the commitment to the broad range of liberal values. The reconciliation between the so­ cialist striving for social justice and the liberal con­ cern with individual liberty has not yet been achieved, weakening both in the process. The very notion of equality, which in a sense could be re­ garded as the ground for both socialism and sub­ stantive (social) liberalism, has been delegitimated by the experience of Soviet socialism. A ‘radical liberal’ approach predominated that considered any attempt to achieve substantive equality of out­ comes, rather than simply ‘equal starting possibili­ ties’, as an outbreak of neo-Soviet ‘equalitymongering’ (uravnilovka).73 As far as Dzarasov was concerned, a group of ‘anarcho-liberals’ had come to power in Russia.74 While extreme liberals in economic affairs, they were at the same time destructive of the integrity of the state. He argued that capitalism was artificially foisted on Russia, and that the population does not recognise the legitimacy of property acquired in the course of ‘mafia-nomenklatura privatisation’.75 He insisted that Russia lacked the preconditions for a purely capitalist type of development. The Russian bourgeoisie in his view was never concerned with the good of the country, and that the backbone of the country was represented by hired labour (workers and employees in the trade unions), ‘honest’ entre­ preneurs and scientific-technical intelligentsia. It is

for this reason that he insisted that the ideology of Russia’s modernisation could not be liberalism but social democracy.76 Dzarasov emerged as the most cogent exponent of the view that social democracy was the only way forward for Russia, remaining loyal to a modified version of convergence theory, a compromise (synthesis) of capitalism and socialism, Marxism and liberalism. Russian liberalism, in his view, was sustained by its ability to convince people that all evil had arisen from communism, and that all things good came from the example and the recom­ mendation of the West.77 A turn away from the West, however, thus ran the risk of a rejection of liberalism in its entirety. It was only after successive electoral defeats and political marginalisation, according to Sogrin, that social liberalism from 1994 became prominent.78 The social liberals, in sharp contrast to the radical liberals, began to stress issues of social order, became supporters of ‘civilised nationalism’ and sought to bridge the gulf that had opened between liberalism and democracy.79 The problem, however, is deeper than this. While classical liberalism may well have advanced an individualistic view of society, today the main actors in advanced democracies are col­ lective: parties, trade unions, churches, lobby groups and the government itself. In Russia these collectives have not yet become ‘interest groups’ on the western model; their identity is still Soviet, focused on the internal management of their affairs rather than on the external advancement of their interests. The constituency for social liberalism remains passive and ideologised, rather than advocatory and struc­ tured. Benedetto Croce is the arch-exponent of a liberal historicism, reabsorbing the thinking of Giambattista Vico into mainstream liberalism, but he is also notable for his attempt to ‘re-moralise’ liberalism, endowing it with an ethical charge that was lacking in economic utilitarian approaches. Croce is ‘Fu­ kuyama with a conscience’. This trend is important in Russia, although lacking sustained formal expres­ sion. The conscience of liberalism remains abstract, while the transformative challenge is immediate and urgent; the liberal historicist tendency has triumphed at the expense of its ethical content. Neo-liberalism has predominated over ethical liberalism.

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LIBERALISM AND POST-COMMUNISM with a viable state. This is a harder task than might appear at first sight; how is it possible to reconcile liberal individualism with the collectivism that is an intrinsic part of nationalist discourse? In Russia the issue takes on particular force since the collectivist ethos is the core of tradition, of history and of politics. For Will Kymlicka there is not such a stark con­ trast between the two principles as some of liberal­ ism’s critics have suggested,84 but finding a balance between collective traditions and individual rights remains a problem in many communities. In Dage­ stan, for example, the enormous burden (both fi­ nancial and emotional) of traditional rituals marking the passage of each stage of life has led many to escape into the relative simplicity of the Wahhabi form of Islam. Throughout Russia the struggle be­ tween the abstract liberal principles embodied in the constitution of December 1993 and myriad forms of inherited collectivist communities (both Soviet and pre-Soviet) represents a profound reorientation of the culture. The tension between the two principles cannot be wished away, but at the same time it should not be exaggerated. As the burgeoning lit­ erature on identity formation suggests, cultures (like identities) are not stable unchanging entities but are in a constant process of adaptation and renegotiation with the challenges of modernity.85 Stephen Welch has made the same point with regard to the mut­ ability of political culture.86 The very resurgence of communitarian thinking suggests that liberalism cannot be reduced to the sovereign individual, and that communities can make enhanced claims on an individual without infringing the principles of liberal individualism. The problem, of course, is: at what point does communitarianism become collec­ tivism (in the negative sense of the term, that is when the community makes demands that under­ mine individual autonomy in threatening ways) ? At what point do the rights of the collective and the principle of collective rights lead to an anti-liberal collectivism? The rich vein of post-communist paradoxes does not end here. While few would now defend the concept of empire (and for early post-communist liberals it was clear that democracy and empire in the old U SSR were incompatible), the disintegration of

Liberalism, the Nation-State and Nationalism For Roland Axtmann, the only serious basis for liberal democracy is the nation-state, but at the same time, it was enlightenment and liberal values that sustained the nation-state.80 Liberalism is the most universal of ideologies yet, paradoxically, it is the most national in form - a feature recognised by John Stuart Mill, Jules Michelet and Giuseppe Mazzini as they became the intellectual proponents of liberal nationalism.81 An appropriate combination of lib­ eralism and nationalism, however, is far from easy, as the Frankfurt Assembly in March 1849 discovered to its cost. After the collapse of the Assembly the link between liberalism and nationalism in Germany was severed, opening the way to the horrors that fol­ lowed.82 Liberalism’s relationship with authority in pre-revolutionary Russia was equally ambivalent, espousing a progressivistic view of history while suspicious of the radical populism apd socialism that sought to make historical progress their own. N o­ where were these tensions more apparent than in the person of Paul Milyukov, the effective leader of organised Russian liberalism in the form of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). Liberal­ ism in Russia, it appeared, was subverted even before it had begun, unable to sustain itself as an indepen­ dent political force or to reconcile the democratic and liberal impulses. Ironically, it was Milyukov’s pragmatic application of liberalism to Russian cir­ cumstances that brought him down when in 1917 he embraced ‘state consciousness (gosudarstvennost) and sent off his ill-fated Note reasserting imperial war aims.83 More broadly, the democratic revolution in Russia was shorn entirely of liberal coloration and took an extreme Jacobin form. The tension between liberalism and democracy was to persist into the post­ communist era. Liberalism requires home grown liberals to pro­ mote it, specific socio-economic conditions to thrive, national cultures to be sustained, and char­ acteristic institutions and individuals to practise it. There is clearly a need for a new synthesis of liberal­ ism and nationalism under post-communism; if lib­ eralism remains too internationalist, it will fail to find a domestic constituency whose bonds of alle­ giance would forge a new synthesis of a free society

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RICHARD SAKWA the empire was not a sufficient, through probably a necessary, condition for the emergence of democracy. Only the republics appeared to be an appro­ priate vessel in which democratic institutions could be constructed. As Dankwart Rustow argued, stable borders are a prerequisite for democracy.87 Thus out of the detritus of empire nation-states were to be bom - this was one side of the liberal project - but no concessions were to be made to nation-state nation­ alism - the other side of liberalism. Even though Carlton Hayes had long ago argued that liberalism and nationalism were far from antithetical,88 man­ oeuvring between these two positions provoked many painful contortions. The commitment to de­ mocracy was an intrinsic part of the formal move­ ment for national rebirth in Russia, and this perhaps made the democratic project rather more resistant to both nation-state nationalism and ethnic national­ ism than in some other post-communist countries. Yet the susceptibility was there, as evidenced for example by the nationalist turn taken by the Russian Christian Democratic Movement despite its commit­ ment to ‘enlightened patriotism’. Another example is that of the Jews in Russia, traditionally associated with the country’s liberal and (especially in the pre­ revolutionary era) radical movements, who gradually associated more with Russian patriotic ideas. A c­ cording to Dmitry Shlapentokh, ‘the emergence of this strange and unknown political species, red-tobrown Jews, was indicative not so much of a trend among Jews as of a deep crisis in Russian pro-Wes­ tern liberalism.’89 Some key questions remain unanswered. Above all, can an effective Russian state of whatever type be constructed in the absence of agreement on Russia’s historical border, and can a liberal Russia be estab­ lished if the country retains imperial pretensions outside Russia itself? These are the questions faced by the national liberals in the most acute form possible, perhaps trying to reconcile the irreconcil­ able. The powers given up by the communist state, to paraphrase Hoffmann’s argument about the Eur­ opean Union, ‘have gone not to the new central institutions, but to the market.’90 The liberalism that was successful in reducing the state’s power, ‘has created a formidable anonymous new power’,91 char­ acterised by the eruption of crime and corruption.

The market, moreover, even in the best of times is not a source of loyalty and allegiance (except perhaps for the most rabid neo-liberals) but the source of enrichment (for some); people do not die for the market but they do for the state. The attempt to combine patriotism and liberal values gave rise to the national liberal tendency, yet no adequate synthesis occurred, leaving the field open to radical rejectionists of the whole new order. Alexander Prokhanov is one of the most eloquent of those who condemn Russia’s renewed westernisa­ tion. He insists that ‘today’s Westemisers in Russia are the liberals and radicals. They are criminals; they are destroying Russia.’92 A similar viewpoint is ad­ vanced by Alexander Tarasov when he details the deaths resulting from the events of 3-4 October 1993. ‘This’, he argues, ‘is what liberalism looks like in action.’93 The sentiment of pre-fascist Italian nationalist intellectuals who ‘viewed liberalism as too individualistic and horribly bourgeois, while democracy encouraged mediocrity and corruption’94 is shared by many citizens of the post-communist world. Many, while not rejecting liberalism as such, have adopted anti-western, and in particular antiAmerican, views; modernisation based on Western models has lost its attractiveness.95 In the early post­ communist years the neo-liberal economic reformers systematically dismantled Russia’s ties with its former partner republics, and the language of national in­ terests was alien to them as they pursued a globalising agenda. Nevertheless, liberals gradually came to appreciate the importance of national identity in the state-building endeavour. A de-ethnicised de­ mocracy did not necessarily mean a denationalised one. It remains to be seen what liberalism with a Russian face will really look like. Individualism and Civil Society The shift in post-communism is from the aspiration to achieve an organic collectivist society to an individualist ‘civil society’. Civil society was the slogan of the anti-communist revolution, of course, and its central features at that time were the ad­ vancement of negative liberty for the individual and a public sphere where these individuals organised in civil associations could gather to influence policy.

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LIBERALISM AND PO ST-CO M M U NISM consumerist version of citizenship has analogously withdrawn the subject from the full-blooded political community, but this time it is post-political. The social sphere vacated by the communist state has been filled not by political emancipation but by the tyranny of a corrupted neoliberal market.

Neither has yet been entirely achieved, and indeed the terrain of post-communist civil society has tended to take on some of the features of Hobbes’s ‘war of all against all’, a state of nature of pre-liberal and pre-contract societies. There is no guarantee that the free market on its own leads to a free politics. From the liberal perspective more broadly the relationship between the individual and the collec­ tive, the personality (lichnost) and the community, is not resolved in general, let alone in Russia. As David Ost puts it in the Polish context, ‘liberalism is no friend of community’, and he goes on to argue that liberals ‘are in crisis everywhere in Eastern Europe. It is not so much economic as political liberalism that is in danger.’96 ‘Negative liberty demands the creation of a social space in which the choices, preferences and will of each individual are sovereign.’97 The ‘political right to do wrong’ is not yet entirely conceded, either from the national or the ideological perspective. The agreement to disagree was the basis of the modern liberalism emerging out of the Reformation and CounterReformation, and the necessity of the principle has been amply confirmed by the ideological wars of the twentieth century. The balance between individual civil and human rights, state power and social responsibility is far from having been achieved in post-communist societies. There is another aspect to post-communist indi­ viduation, discussed above in the context of con­ strained liberalism. The process has sometimes been described as the transformation of the individual from ‘comrade’ to ‘citizen’. This is indeed part of the truth, but an equally profound parallel transfor­ mation is taking place: from ‘comrade’ to ‘customer’, in certain cases missing out the citizenship stage altogether, and certainly everywhere undermining the full political entitlements denoted by the con­ cept of citizenship. The will of the customer takes priority over the will of the planner, production takes the place of distribution, and interdependence is placed above independence - but where is the emancipation of which Merquior spoke? While re­ ligions hold that there is a natural subject situated within the religious community itself and indepen­ dent of the particularities of the state-society rela­ tionship (i.e. that this subject is pre-political), the

Conclusion: Systemic or Asystemic Liberalism Does liberalism lack profound roots in the societies themselves? Is liberalism a systemic prerequisite of post-communist societies, or was it imposed simply as a byproduct of the anti-communist struggle and as a function of aspirations to join the international system? If the former, then despite many tribulations it is here to stay, but if the latter, it is fragile and liable to be swept away by more militant rejectionist nationalist agendas. Was Szacki indeed right to argue that liberalism was a specific western phenomenon sustained only by the role it played in the anti­ communist struggle? He probably exaggerates the argument, especially since he fails to define what he means by liberalism, preferring instead to stress its situational character. Even in Russia liberalism has a long history, going back at least to Herzen and sustaining a vigorous literature over legal and local government reform, and under communism it was far more than an instrumental ideology to be discarded at the first opportunity. He is right to argue that political liberalism can accommodate various types of property rights, but underestimated the problems facing economic reformers in marketisation although this is not to say that neoliberal economic reforms were the only way forwards. Attempts to devise ‘third path’ strategies, however, like those of Gay and Alekseeva have not been convincing.98 It is not at all clear whether more gradualist and organic indeed, more liberal - methods would in the long run have secured the future for liberalism as well as the ‘illiberal’ methods actually implemented. Post-communist liberalism has, paradoxically, used the power of the state to implement its eco­ nomic programme - indeed, as Szacki would argue, hardly a demonstration of the triumph of liberalism. Political liberalism, however, has not been ne­ glected: the ‘universalist’ principles of the post-com­

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RICHARD SAKWA power communism of Gennadii Zyuganov and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). As Sogrin puts it:

munist international community have been rein­ forced by the attempts by all Eastern European states (including Russia) to return to Europe and the world. However, their implementation has often fallen far short of declarations, giving rise to an illiberal and constrained democracy of the regime system. The democratisation of liberalism has yet to be secured. A t the same time, the basic principles of liberalism individualism, tolerance, private property, pluralism, restraints on state power - have gained broader support than people like Szacki and others who insist on a primordial collectivism and authoritarianism in Poland or Russia would concede. The communist regimes did not simply perpetuate traditional pat­ terns of authoritarianism; communist authoritative­ ness was based on thoroughly modern principles. Indeed, in yet another of those paradoxes that mark the post-communist world, in the social sphere the communist period helped clear the way for liberalism by destroying the old aristocratic ethos of the old Russian and Polish ruling classes. However weak post-communist liberalism might be, in Poland it was able to force the adaptation of the post-communist communists to its programme, while in Russia it has defeated (so far) the great

Radical liberalism was able to destroy the supports of communism and helped Russia achieve a breakthrough into market relations. But it became increasingly clear that the radical liberal approach to reconstructing Russia on the classical Western model is nothing less than a utopia, and that in Russian conditions radical liberalism leads to the socio-economic polarisation of society and the poverty of the majority and enshrines the power of bureaucratic nomenklatura capitalism ." In its place a social liberalism emerged, but what was really required according to him was a national liberalism. The challenge perhaps is even greater than this: to combine the political constitution of liberty, the social basis for equal citizenship, the patriotic consensus for national integration, and the developmental basis to allow the conversion of constrained transformative liberalism into a gen­ uine emancipatory liberalism.

Notes 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

1. Gellner, ‘Introduction’, in Geilner and Cansino (eds) (1996), pp. 1-4, at p. 3. 2. Fukuyama (1989), (1992). 3. Helio Jaguaribe, ‘Merquior and Liberalism’, in Gellner and Cansino (eds) (1996), pp. 21-36, at p. 24; in the same volume see also Roberto Campos, ‘Merquior the Liberalist’, pp. 65-76, at p. 72. 4. Ibid., pp. 21-36. 5. Ibid., p. 32. 6. V. V. Sogrin, ‘Liberalizm v Rossii: peripetii i perspektivy’, Obshchestvennyie nauki i sovremmenosti, 1, 1997, p. 13. 7. Nodari A. Simonia, ‘Priorities of Russian Foreign Policy and the Way It Works’, in Dawisha and Dawisha (eds) (1995), p. 17. 8. Ibid., p. 18. 9. Hough (1997), pp. 1-2 and passim. 10. Lev Timofeev, ‘Bol’shaya rastrata, in lzvestiya, 26 February 1993. 11. Lev Timofeev, ‘Vse russko pechal’no’, in lzvestiya, 31 October 1995. 12. Sogrin, ‘Liberalizm v Rossii’, p. 14 (see note 6 above).

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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Ibid., p. 15. This is examined by Pantin (1997). Szacki (1995), chapter 5. Ost (1991), p. 91. See ibid. Solzhenitsyn (1974). Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, ‘Newsline’, 10 Au­ gust 1998. Schieder (1962), p. 39. See Russia Briefing, 12 February 1997, pp. 6-7. Fish (1997). Aleksandr Buzgalin, ‘Right Cause: You Are Not Right, Gentlemen’, Jamestown Foundation Prism, vol. V (14), part 6, 16 July 1999. Bellamy (1992). Balcerowicz (1995). Klaus (1997). Sogrin, ‘Liberalizm v Rossii’ p. 17 (see note 6 above). Rustam Narzikulov, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 11 March 1997. Sogrin, ‘Liberalizm v Rossii’ p. 21 (see note 6 above). Lebed’s ideas are outlined in lzvestiya, 24, 31 May

LIBERALISM AND POST-COM M U NISM

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

1996 and Za derzhavu obidnu (Moscow: Moskovskaya pravda, 1985). An analysis of his views is Vladimir Polushin, General Lebed - zagadbi Rossii (Moscow, 1996). Cited in Institute for East-West Studies, Russian Regional Report, vol. 2 (11), 20 March 1997. Ibid. Szacki (1995), p. 150. Radzislawa Gortat, ‘Liberalizm jako Konstruktywizm’, in Przegland Spoleczny 6, 1992, cited in Szacki (1995), p. 154. This is above all the argument of David Ost, ‘Shap­ ing a New Politics in Poland: Interests and Politics in Post-Communist Europe’, Programme on Central and East Europe Working Paper 8 (Centre for European Studies, Harvard University, 1991), pp. 4-5. Bellamy (1994), p. 420. For John Gray’s view, see Gray (1986), chapter 1. And for Hayek’s own sum­ mary of his position, see Hayek (1993), volume 1, p. 5. Walicki (1991), p. 106. Jerzy Hausner and Jacek Kuron, Strategia Negocjacyjina w Procesie Transformacji Gospodarki (Warsaw: Stefan Batory Foundation, 1994), p. 26. I am grate­ ful to Nick Spiro for drawing my attention to this debate. Andrei Kolesnikov, ‘Liberalizm umer, da zdravstvuet liberaliz!’, Novoe vremya, 12 (1997), p. 15, cites the case of St Petersburg when Vladimir Yakovlev re­ placed the ‘liberal’ Anatolii Sobchak as mayor but was soon forced to pursue similar policies. Jan Krzysztof Bielecki interviewed by Nick Spiro, London, 2 August 1996. This theme is explored in the doctoral dissertation by Nick Spiro, The Politics of Economic Transition: Shock Therapy in Poland, 1990-1991, University of Kent at Canterbury, June 1998. Rychard (1992), p. 144. Cited by Jadwiga Staniszkis in Staniskis (1991), p. 184. Ibid. Hole (1997). Ibid., p. 402. Ibid., p. 427. Ibid., p. 416. Zakaria (1997), p. 23. Boris Kagarlitskii, ‘Levye v Rossii: nadezhdy, neudachi, bor’ba’, in Svobodnaya mys’, 11, 1994, p. 33. Ibid. Boris Kagarlitskii, ‘Vremya neopravdavshikhsy nadezhd’, Svobodnaya mysl’, 3, 1997, p. 10. Zakaria (1997), p. 22. Ibid., pp. 25-26. Ibid., p. 28. O’Donnell (1994), p. 59. O’Donnell (1993), p. 1367.

58. O’Donnell (1994), p. 59. 59. For example, Vladimir Gel’man, ‘Regional’nye rezhimy: zavershenie transformatsii?’, Svobodnaya mysl’, 9, 1996, pp. 13-22; ‘Stanovlenie regional’nykh rezhimov v Rossii’, NG-stsenarii, 19 September 1996, p. 5. 60. As put by Roberto Campos in Gellner and Cansino (eds) (1996), p. 73. 61. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, ‘Newsline’, 20 Feb­ ruary 1998. 62. Huntington (1993) and his later book (1996). 63. See, above all, Borneman (1997); Kritz (ed.) (1995); Pogany (1998). 64. Mill (1972), p. 71. 65. Ibid., pp. 72-3. 66. Cited in Zakaria (1997), p. 30. 67. Jose Merquior, ‘A Panoramic View on the Renais­ sance of Liberalisms’, in Gellner and Cansino (eds) (1996), pp. 7-20, at pp. 11-12. 68. Ibid., p. 9. 69. Dietze (1985), p. 1; Fish, (1997), pp. 208-9, draws on Dietze to make the same point. 70. Fish (1997), p. 208. 71. Vladimir Sogrin, ‘Zapadnyi liberalizm i Rossiiskie reformy’, Svobodnaya mysl’, 1, 1996, p. 43. 72. Quoted by Merquior, ‘A Panoramic View on the Renaissance of Liberalisms’, in Gellner and Cansino (eds) (1996), p. 7. 73. Sogrin, ‘Liberalizm v Rossii’, p. 16 (see note 6 above). 74. Soltan Dzarasov, ‘Liberalizm ili sotsial-demokratizm?’, in Svobodnaya mysl’, 4, 1996, p. 28. 75. Ibid., p. 26. 76. Ibid., p. 31. 77. Ibid., p. 31. 78. Sogrin, ‘Liberalizm v Rossii’, p. 18 (see note 6 above). 79. Ibid., p. 19. 80. Axtmann (1996). 81. See Hoffmann (1995), p. 162. 82. The point is made by Robert Taylor, ‘Springtime for Hitler?’, in Prospect, March 1998, p. 13. 83. Stockdale (1996). 84. Kymlicka (1989). 85. For a particularly rich debate of the issue, see Rajchman (1995). 86. Welch (1993). 87. Rustow (1970). 88. Hayes (1949). 89. Dmitry Shlapentokh, ‘ “Red-to-Brown” Jews and Rus­ sian Liberal Reform’, in The Washington Quarterly, 21(4), Autumn 1998, p. 112. 90. See Hoffmann (1995), p. 165. 91. Ibid., p. 175. 92. Alexander Prokhanov interviewed, ‘Western Values are Cliches’, in Transitions, August 1997, p. 77. 93. Aleksandr Tarasov, ‘Striptiz liberalov’, in Svobodnaya mysl’, 10, 1997, pp. 106-114, at p. 110.

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RICHARD SAKWA 97. Gregory R. Johnson, ‘Modernity and Postmodemity in the Thought of Jose Merquior’, in Gellner and Can^ sino (eds) (1996), pp. 37-63, at p. 55. 98. Gay and Alekseeva (1996). 99. Sogrin, ‘Liberalizm v Rossii’, p. 20 (see note 6 above).

94. Richard Bellamy, ‘How Not to Make Italians’, in Times Literary Supplement, 22 December 1995, p. 12. 95. Sogrin, ‘Zapadnyi liberalizm i Rossiiskie reformy, pp. 32-3 (see note 71 above). 96. Ost (1991), p. 85.

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LIBERALISM, EC OC E NT RI S M AND PERSONS Brian Baxter

the call of liberals for the neutrality of the state with respect to substantive views of the good life. Indi­ vidual persons are to be allowed, as far as is compa­ tible with their all being allowed to do so, to pursue their own distinctive view of the good life. Each individual counts equally with all others, and no one’s view of the good life is to be accorded greater weight than those of other individuals. For the liberal, the heart of morality is this impartiality between persons. Different individuals will have different value commitments. Certainly, some may seek to attribute non-instrumental value to the non-human, natural world, and to seek to live lives in which the im­ plications of such valuing are worked out. But some may deny any such value, and seek to treat the non­ human world purely on the basis of what conduces to human well-being. For liberalism, such arguments about which values should command our allegiance are, of course, to be allowed and encouraged, and the possibility of persuading others to our view of things must always be left open (with some tricky issues about toleration’s limits remaining an ongoing mat­ ter of debate). De facto universal agreement on substantive values is, thus, compatible with liberal­ ism provided the possibility of disagreement breaking out is always left open by, for example, the main­ tenance of free speech, freedom of conscience and the rest. The view of values which is operating here is one which sees them as anthropogenic, originating in

I Throughout its long history liberalism has been concerned almost exclusively with matters of human well-being in so far as these are affected by social, economic and political arrangements. Until very recently virtually nothing has been said by liberals about the issue to which Green political theorising so vehemently directs our attention, namely that of human relations with the natural context within which all human action takes place.1 The reason for this neglect does not seem hard to find. It appears to stem from the fact that the fundamental value of liberalism is that of the pursuit by individuals of personal projects which they have freely chosen for themselves. Although on this planet these individuals com­ prise solely members of the human species, in fact for liberalism it is specifically personhood, in whichever species that is to be found, which is the crucial element. Persons are, by definition, entities able to exercise certain kinds of choice over the pursuit of their life-plans, and it is persons with which liberal­ ism has exclusively concerned itself. Non-human creatures and entities are noticed by liberalism pri­ marily as resources, for human persons. A t most the capacity for suffering which some of them possess has been regarded as a source of certain kinds of limita­ tions upon how precisely persons may put them to use - limitations we call, revealingly, ‘humaneness’. From this person-centred standpoint has emerged

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BRIAN BAXTER clearly needed in order to establish for individual human beings some compelling sense that acting in accordance with E will achieve for them, and the individuals about whom they care most, a form of human life which will be satisfying and fulfilling. Without some such claim ecocentrists will lack a connection between their fundamental value-postu­ late E and what Thomas Nagel has identified as the ‘personal’ standpoint,2 which always characterises the consciousness of self-aware beings such as our­ selves. Liberalism, by contrast, makes this connection quite straightforwardly, for its basic value postulate amounts to an endorsement of the importance of precisely that standpoint. It is true that, as liberalism also contends, we can, and must, also adopt the ‘impersonal’ or universal standpoint, which is what we do when we enunciate for general acceptance liberalism’s own fundamental value postulate. But for much of the time such impersonal conceptions are weak sources of human motivation and always run the risk of being trumped by the requirements of the ‘personal’ standpoint.3 The difficulty for the ecocentrist, of course, is that on the face of it principle E sets out precisely to eschew the ‘personal’ standpoint entirely and to bid people to adopt a point of view with respect to non­ human nature which completely leaves behind hu­ man interests and concerns, including their personal ones. Ecocentrism, then, needs a way of fusing the personal and impersonal standpoints. The view to be defended below is that the key to this lies in developing the concept, whose importance to liber­ alism has already been noted, of personhood and relating it to non-human nature. In the course of doing this, however, we discover that the apparently clear-cut distinction between anthropocentric (or personcentric) and ecocentric positions disappears, and that reasons can be found within the liberal perspective for endorsing at a fundamental level the kinds of value which Green theorists have so ar­ dently brought to political theorists’ attentions. The aims of liberalism and Green political theory turn out not to be so completely at odds as appeared to be the case at first sight, provided that Greens accept the abandonment of pure ecocentrism, and liberals ac­

human (person) acts of valuing, and as anthropocentric, with human well-being as the fundamental touchstone of what is good. Thus, even individuals who attribute intrinsic value to nature are inter­ preted as really finding a kind of ‘higher’ (aesthetic, spiritual, non-practical) instrumental value for hu­ man beings in the natural world. On this view, then, liberalism treats environmen­ tal concerns in the way it treats any other substan­ tive value positions: they are located within the structures of individual preference and left to the processes of liberal democratic politics for resolu­ tion. Whether they should lead to wholesale changes in human practices is a matter upon which liberalism, as such, has no view, save in one regard: it is committed to opposing any changes which threaten its fundamental value of individual choice of life-project. Only when such changes are neces­ sary to avert clear danger to the very survival of human beings (persons) would liberalism permit them, temporarily and reluctantly, until the danger is past. A t least some Green political theorists will be unhappy with this standpoint, for it appears to accord no fundamental value to the non-human world of nature. In particular, the position known as ecocentrism, to which many Green thinkers have given their allegiance, directly contradicts the liberal fundamental value postulate, for it enunciates the following rival basic proposition: [E] The non-human natural world has intrinsic value, independent of its instrumental impor­ tance for human well-being. In other words, ecocentrism rejects the liberal inter­ pretation of the attribution of intrinsic value to nature as really being the attribution to it of various ‘higher’ forms of instrumental value for human beings. However, ecocentrism is not the only possible basis for the development of a Green political theory. This is just as well, for ecocentrism faces rather severe difficulties which I will try to explore. These centre on the problem of establishing an intrinsic connec­ tion between principle E above and a conception of human well-being or flourishing. This connection is

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LIBERALISM, E CO C E N TR ISM AND PERSONS dividually or as a species (domestic animals in factory farms, for example). Also, the kind of interconnectedness between ourselves and non-human life-forms is important when we are considering our attitudes to non-human nature. The science of ecology suggests the connec­ tions are physical and biological, via ‘energy path­ ways’ for example. However, it is arguable that ecocentrists really need to establish interconnected­ ness between human beings and non-human nature at the level of value or meaning. The focus should thus be on the kinds of meaning - moral, aesthetic, religious, and so on - which non-human nature can have for people. Only thus is it going to be possible to establish the right kind of connection between prin­ ciple E and the concept of human flourishing, which is value-laden and permeated with a concern with meaning. One suggestion along these lines which Eckersley explores is the ecofeminist claim that at least be­ tween one group of human beings - women - and non-human nature there is a connection of mean­ ing.6 Women, with their nurturing, caring and lifegiving natures, are more ‘in tune’ than men are with natural processes. Thus they will find the caring and nurturing attitude to non-human nature required by the full recognition of E to be congenial and con­ ducive to their own fulfilment as women. There may be truth in the claim that human beings whose self-understanding involves caring and nurturing will find the forms of life enjoined by ecocentrists to be congenial in this way. But it is clear that this is a contingent fact about them, if it is a fact at all. There seems to be no incoherence in the idea of a being whose caring and nurturing instincts are directed only to its own kind, as is true of nearly all non-human forms of life, for example. And in the human case it is at least arguable that caring and nurturing comes most naturally, for both males and females, though on occasion for neither, with respect to their own offspring and relations.7 A more general kind of approach to the problem is explored by Eckersley via direct consideration of the concept, hotly debated between liberals and socia­ lists, of autonomy. According to her, the key move is to expand the concept of the ‘self whose autonomy is characterised in the classic Kantian terms as ‘living

cept Green arguments for a revised formulation of personhood.

II Before developing this position, however, we need first to consider some arguments explored by Robyn Eckersley,4 which seek to elucidate and defend the ecocentric position in a rather different way, one which might be seen as reinterpreting such key liberal values as autonomy by finding ecocentric versions of them. It is a feature of the suggestions she explores that they operate in such a way that the intrinsic value of non-human nature is directly con­ nected to human flourishing. Hence, if such argu­ ments work, then the above-noted difficulties faced by ecocentrism ought to disappear. As will now be contended, these arguments do not succeed and thus a different mode of reconciling the personal and impersonal standpoints will be required. Eckersley’s discussion begins with the observation that ecocentrism takes its cue from the ecologically informed philosophy of the internal relatedness of life forms within ecosystems, according to which ‘there are no absolutely discrete entities and no absolute dividing lines between the living and the non-living.’5 Acceptance of this viewpoint in turn leads to an ethic of general emancipation, according to which all beings should be permitted to fulfil themselves in accordance with their natures - a principle which will apply both to human beings and to non-human nature. We should note that such a principle clearly chimes with the liberal concern for human self-development embodied in its funda­ mental postulate even though, as we have seen, liberalism restricts its concerns in this regard solely to human beings. However, the ecological principle of intercon­ nectedness appealed to by Eckersley does not seem to be straightforwardly related to the principle of general emancipation which is supposed to unite human and non-human flourishing. For all that ‘interconnectedness’ shows, it seems possible for the flourishing of some beings to require that others do not flourish (parasites, for example); or for the flourishing of some beings to require only that others exist, but not that they should flourish, either in­

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BRIAN BAXTER in accordance with self-imposed principle.’8 What this expansion seems to mean is, in effect, accepting that non-human nature has its own capacity for autonomy. Non-human life-forms have their own ways of living and modes of being. Respect for autonomy in general thus requires respect for the modes of living of such beings and underpins the project of ‘general emancipation’ already alluded to above. The focus on autonomy, and the expansion of its application mooted by Eckersley, allow her to estab­ lish a link between principle E and human flourish­ ing. She argues that since ecocentrism is committed, by its acceptance of E and the expanded concept of autonomy, to the project of general emancipation for all creatures, it necessarily also supports the condi­ tions conducive to the exercise by humans of their autonomy. Giving this concept in turn what is in effect a socialist gloss, she then suggests that this commits ecocentrists to the pursuit of social justice in human societies.9 Now these ideas are not pursued very far by Eckersley and it is, of course, a serious problem with the suggestion she makes that it is not entirely clear what is meant by extending the Kantian sense of autonomy (the ‘following of self-imposed principle’) to creatures which do not seem able to impose principles upon themselves in any sense. Another attempt at elucidating how one might reasonably arrive at an extension of the concept of autonomy to non-humans, thus motivating accep­ tance of the general emancipation principle, is via what Eckersley refers to as ‘Autopoietic Intrinsic Value’ (AIV) theory.10 In her account of it, the key claim of AIV is that non-human nature is capable of being self-renewing and that self-renewing entities are ‘ends-in-themselves’. This is another of Kant’s classical characterisations of autonomous beings - beings which possess intrinsic, or non­ instrumental, value.11 Hence we should extend the concept of autonomy to non-human nature, even to entities such as ecosystems, for they too possess self-producing or renewing capacities. However, Kant’s argument to persuade autono­ mous agents to value the autonomy of others begins with the demonstration of the importance of one’s own autonomy, and then turns on the view of

autonomy as an exercise of rationality.12 This may not be the only possible concept of rationality, but it is one which excludes the attribution of autonomy to creatures believed to be devoid of the requisite kinds of rationality. Kant’s argument is that since we must value our own rationality, as a condition of the meaningfulness of our own existence, and since rationality is a matter of consistency - not making a distinction without a difference - we cannot value our own rationality without thereby committing ourselves to valuing the rationality of others, for to fail to do that would be making a distinction without a difference, and thus failing to value ra­ tionality.13 There is a problem about trying to rework this argument if we do not understand autonomy as an exercise of rationality, but instead regard it as synon­ ymous with the concept of self-renewal/production. Certainly one can intelligibly claim that we must each value our own self-renewing capacities, for we cannot have meaningful lives if we go out of ex­ istence. However, this in no way commits us to the valuation of the self-renewing capacities of other entities. We may, of course, value their self-renewing capacities for instrumental reasons of our own, but that does not amount to viewing them as possessing intrinsic values, and in any case is a value-attribution exercise which requires us to consider each case on its own (instrumental) merits. We are not committed to a blanket valuing of all self-renewing entities by our instrumental valuation of the self-renewing capacities of some of them. Thus Kant’s argument works, if it does, because of the peculiar logic of the concept of rationality. It is plain that this concept is not in­ volved in the idea of self-renewing/producing beings and so it is hard to see how we can be argued into accepting the intrinsic value of entities just in so far as they instantiate this concept.14 A further view, labelled ‘transpersonal ecology’ by Eckersley,15 does not aim at argument to convince us to accept E, she tells us, but rather attempts to produce psychological conversion to the ecocentrist viewpoint. It does this by developing an extended ‘sense of self. That is, in the manner adumbrated by Arne Naess, transpersonal ecologists seek to encou­ rage us to identify with non-human nature so that its flourishing and ours become one and the same.16

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LIBERALISM, E CO C E N TR ISM AND PERSONS There are some obvious problems with this idea, especially given that it is supposed to lead us to identify not just with aspects of non-human nature which possess a mentality and resemble us in various respects, such as primates and higher mammals, but also with entities which we can only grasp via the possession of quite sophisticated theory and which (on most views of the matter) are devoid of men­ tality, such as species and ecosystems. One can certainly care about such things: seek to preserve them, respecting and marvelling at them. But how feasible is it to identify with them, to regard them as in some sense part of ourselves? There is one way in which this might be con­ ceived to happen which I will now outline, although it is a way with which ecocentrists may not be entirely happy. It is possible to undergo an extension of the sense of self with respect to at least some entities devoid of mentality. People, for example, often seem to experience this with respect to their automobiles. However, it appears to be a condition of this happening that (1) there should be physical control of the entity concerned via the human body (the automobile is experienced as an extension of the human body); (2) the external appearance of the entity needs to be regarded as a direct expression of the human self in question (it ‘makes a statement’ about the owner). If one were to generalise this idea to the relations between the human self and non-human nature then it implies (1) that we identify with non-human nature in so far as it is viewed as an extension of our physical selves via our manipulation of it, which suggests in turn the necessity for artefactuality; (2) that we need to convert it into a symbolic expression of our personal psychology, again requiring that it be ‘made over’ by us. These ideas are, of course, central to the Hegelian/Marxist theme of the overcoming of alienation by praxis. On the face of it, these suggestions are unwelcome to the ecocentrist position because they look to be a version of the Enlightenment theme of rendering non-human nature entirely subservient to human purposes and needs when what is needed, according to ecocentrists, is respect for non-human nature because of its intrinsic value. But it may be feasible to argue that the Enlightenment interpretation of

the key ideas is not the only one available. This may not seem possible at first because we appear to be faced with two contradictory requirements: 1. that we ‘make over’ the world so that it expresses ourselves to ourselves and to others; 2. that we respect non-human nature by main­ taining its processes intact as far as possible. Here, (a) seems to imply that we countenance wholesale interference with non-human nature, whereas (b) seems to imply that this be kept to a minimum. However, it is arguable that in the con­ text of our present world, (b) is to be regarded as being as much a manifestation of human making and self-expression as would be the effort to convert the whole of non-human nature into a global garden city. This is because, on any account, wilderness will not continue to exist, species will not survive, the atmosphere and oceans will not remain unpolluted unless human beings make strenuous and protracted efforts to secure these aims. If we do successfully achieve them, then they can unproblematically count as manifestations of praxis. And, as is inherent in the very idea of praxis, we will have remade ourselves in the course of this ‘making over’ of our world. It is perhaps not too strained to suggest that it will be precisely a sense of our identity with non­ human nature, whose (continued) existence will then be in a clear sense our achievement and an expression of our values, which will then be attained. In a nutshell, a world which shows as few obvious effects of human artefactuality as possible will, in modern conditions, be the largest artefact we can achieve. Such an artefact will be conceivable by us as an extension of our (collective) personality and as something which reflects that personality back to us. Non-human nature and the human world will then have been totally fused. There are, however, various problems with this hypothesis. From the ecocentric point of view it perhaps still looks too anthropocentric, as if it in­ volved the claim that the only way in which we can be brought to recognise the value of non-human nature is by making it an instrument of our human personality. Also, the hypothesis posits an enlarged

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BRIAN BAXTER sense of self as the result of the implementation of the Green project. But it does nothing to show people why they should now embark upon such a protracted and difficult project in a situation where large numbers of them do not have such a wider sense of self. One point must be made at this juncture, now that we have surveyed various suggestions for establishing the connection between principle E and human flourishing. We have looked at ecofeminist argu­ ments, autopoietic intrinsic value theory and trans­ personal ecology. I have indicated why they should be regarded as not adequate to do the job required. However, it should be noted that they all seek to establish a connection between principle E and hu­ man flourishing by seeking to effect an identity, partial or whole, between human beings and non­ human nature. This suggests that the ecocentric/ anthropocentric distinction has ceased to have any real meaning. The defence of principle E turns out always to involve appeal to something of prime importance for human beings too, so that the idea of non-human nature’s having intrinsic value, irre­ spective of human concerns, has become very un­ clear. When we put non-human nature at the centre we find that we put ourselves there too. The real issue, therefore, is which of the ideological rivals has the most adequate conception of humanity, not whether ecocentrism is superior to anthropocentrism or personcentrism. As will shortly emerge, this also suggests a way in which the fundamental liberal value postulate may be interpreted so as to recognise and absorb the point of the ecocentric endeavour. However, before we reach that point we still need an argument to establish the connection between E and the concept of human flourishing which can give people the motivation to undertake the Green form of praxis. In the next section I will try to find such an argument.

tionary thought that the ‘ecological’ concept of the person ought to be developed out of existing con­ cepts of the person with which people are reasonably familiar.18 A concept which makes no contact with existing concepts is unlikely to have the appeal necessary to motivate action. The second is the question of how persons, as opposed to the animal species Homo sapiens, are to be shown to be part of nature. As members of that animal species we are interconnected with non-human nature. But what is the significance of that fact for the persons which we also are? To answer this question we need to say rather more about what a person is. The following char­ acterisation, drawn from the European tradition of philosophical and social-scientific thought to be found in thinkers such as Hobbes, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, picks out the features essential to personhood. Some of them are of direct relevance to our problem: A person is a self-conscious being, with the following abilities all being implicit in the posses­ sion of self-consciousness: 1. to formulate intentions and determine how to carry them out efficiently; 2. to develop a concept of self-interest and to pursue self-interest so conceived; 3. to commit itself to values and to criticise itself in the light of failure to realise those values to which it has committed itself; 4. to differentiate between itself and others of its kind; 5. to participate with others of its kind in creating a culture of shared values and the associated customs, traditions and institutions which em­ body those values.19 It is a corollary of these features of personhood that the prime focus of interest for persons is other persons of the same kind. For it is from them that the values, principles and conceptions come in the light of which the individual person formulates its projects, criticises and assesses itself.20 Thus it is natural for persons to regard the non­ person context within which they are embedded as

Ill The point made at the end of the last section is recognised in effect by Eckersley when she suggests that what is required is a new, ecological concept of the self, in which persons are related to, not set apart from, non-human nature.17 Two points immediately arise. One is the cau­

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LIBERALISM, ECO C E N TR ISM AND PERSONS On the face of it this looks to be a highly im­ plausible claim. Imagine that our world was made completely over into an entirely urbanised form, with monocultural agriculture to sustain it, with wilderness and wildlife existing only in zoos, genetic banks, on film and in virtual-reality theatres. This surely would be a description of a world in which human culture had become all-pervasive, rather than one in which it had become impossible. A t this point, however, the possibility arises of formulating what one might call the transcendental deduction of the category of culture.21 The key claim here is that the resources for human culture (the culture of a particular group of persons) must be non­ human (non-personal). This is because it is impos­ sible for there to be a source of culture which was entirely person-based. A world consisting only of persons would have no wherewithal to formulate values, principles or purposes. This in turn is because, as the analysis at the start of this section indicates, ‘personhood’ can only be formulated in purely formal terms. If, per impossibile, a group of persons were to exist who were only persons, and not embodied in some animal species located in some ecosystem on some planet, they could not generate culture because they could not generate anything. Persons require to be embodied to become determinate enough to develop the self-consciousness, intentionality, value and cultures which give them substantial existence.22 The content and meaning of their purposes and values then comes from their embodiment in a context of extra-personal nature. The categories which human beings have used to establish their particular aims and values are thus necessarily drawn from the animalian predicament of embodied per­ sons inhabiting a non-human natural context ‘mighty hunter, feeder of my people’; ‘great builder’; scientist (‘tamer of nature’); artist and priest (inter­ preters of nature’s meanings). Non-human nature, then, has to be viewed as a concrete matrix of opportunity and opposition to give specific content to human values and purposes, and to furnish the essential context within which human persons can ‘crystallise out’ a sense of what they are, derived from their joint construction of a culture of artefacts and symbols, necessarily using their experiences and interpretations of non-human nature to do so.

primarily, or essentially, vehicles for interpersonal interaction. Hence one might well argue that it is not anthropocentrism, conceived of as a viewpoint with its roots in Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment-phi­ losophical modes of thought, which is the main cause of human persons’ attitude of domination towards nature. Rather, if the above characterisation of persons is correct, then persons of whatever species, wherever they live in space and time, will tend to have that attitude towards the non-person world. Thus, if any attitude is the problem here it is the attitude referred to at the start of this discussion as ‘personcentrism’. If this charge is correct, then the question ob­ viously arises as to whether persons can ever avoid personcentrism. It might be the case, for example, that members of the human species could only avoid personcentrism by seeking to avoid being persons entirely, perhaps by trying to become purely ‘natural’ beings, like non-human animals, locked into some suitable ecological niche, living only for the moment and at the level of instinct. The cost of doing so would appear to be the destruction of the kind of mental life essential to personhood. However, as long as the above-noted abilities remain intact the suppression of their exercise will be a very tall order. The question which needs to be addressed, then, is whether it is possible for persons intelligibly to conceive of the non-person world as something more than a mere vehicle for interpersonal interaction. It would clearly be very helpful for the ecocentric case if it were possible to establish a link between non­ human nature and personhood which was intrinsic to and - at least in part - determining of the very nature of personhood. Further, this should ideally be an intrinsic connection whose recognition by per­ sons would lead naturally to humility before non­ human nature and a compassionate concern for its existence and well-being. The beginnings of an answer may well be found in ability (5) in the characterisation of persons noted above. Persons are essentially culture-creators. Is it possible to argue that non-human nature is essen­ tially that out of which culture is created? If it were so, then if non-human nature were to be removed there would be no person-created culture, and with no culture there would be no persons at all.

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BRIAN BAXTER have an interest in as wide a range of species and habitats continuing to exist as possible to provide objects of study, sources of data and arenas for the testing of theories. Arguably it is from many of the disciplines and subdisciplines in those sciences which directly study non-human nature that we are obtaining insights into our own nature as embo­ died persons. Many forms of art, too, need non­ human nature as a source of subject-matter and of design ideas, even in the practical design of artefacts. Obviously, this applies to landscape painting, but it is essential to the development of any art with a strong visual component, including architecture and dance. The endless variety of nature is essential here, as a continuing source of forms, designs and motifs. The example of the art of painting may help to elucidate and support this claim. Can paintings be made entirely out of the experience of other paint­ ings? It is certainly arguable that painters initially acquire the idea of what painting is from their encounters with existing paintings, encounters which they can then use as launching-pads for their own works.23 But it is clear that the painter needs to return unfailingly to non-human nature in order to replenish the wellsprings of painting. Even the de­ velopment of new schemata and new artistic voca­ bularies requires the painter to have encounters with non-human nature in order to provide the elements experienced under the schemata, and this is no less true of non-representational painting. In reply to these considerations the point might be made that such aspects of our own culture as appear to need direct confrontation with non-human nature conceived as such are by no means universal: not everyone is interested in them. Also, there are plenty of ingredients in our culture - many games, for example - which do not appear to need the con­ tinued flourishing of non-human nature to provide them with meaning and purpose. So are not these points too weak to establish the necessity for human culture of the existence of non-human nature? Surely activities such as those mentioned may fade away without there being any significant diminution in the cultural possibilities left to us? However, the existence of such cultural activities alerts us to the possibility of a Rawlsian-style defence of non-human nature,24 and thus takes us in the

This is the theme of ‘praxis overcoming aliena­ tion’ again, but with the additional claim now emerging that it is essential to culture and to personhood that what is alien should never be ‘made over’ in its entirety, for then the material out of which culture, and hence personhood, is made disappears and when that happens culture and personhood disappear too. However, isn’t this claim overblown? Even if the above argument is successful, does it not show only that persons need non-human nature to get culture under way? Surely, however, once cultural creation is initiated then there is no essential need for non­ human nature to remain as a sustainer of culture? Why should not the cultural life of persons achieved in the maximally person-transformed world outlined above simply continue for as long as there are human beings in existence? We need to try to show, then, that human cultures cannot be sustained purely from cultural materials by means of one, or both, of the following two processes: 1. reflection, exploration and experimentation internal to a culture; 2. encounters with other cultures: dialectical in­ terplay; absorption; collage. A culture is a more-or-less dynamic complex of interrelated elements encompassing the following categories: language, art, religion and philosophy, science and technology, economic and political systems, customs and traditions. (More rudimentary cultures will not have developed under science, but all cultures develop the other categories to a degree.) The first point to make is that many cultural activities under these headings do require a context of non-human nature directly in order to exist at all or to be fully intelligible. Within our own culture, for example, such widely popular activities as rambling, hill-walking, mountaineering, bird-watching and hunting need non-human nature (albeit a nature which is often extensively made over by human hands) to be feasible. Some scientific disciplines biology, ecology, ornithology, zoology and botany, for example - take non-human nature as their direct object of study. It is clear from the very idea of ‘sites of special scientific interest’ that such disciplines

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LIBERALISM, E CO C E N TR ISM AND PERSONS exploring all the ways in which one may lead a truly human life. Even if some such experiments in living have their pernicious aspects, they add to the sum total of our self-knowledge and may contain redeem­ ing aspects for human culture which would be otherwise unobtainable (for example, consider the way in which blues and jazz emerged out of the slave experience in the U SA ). The obverse of this point is that no single cultural formation can be entirely adequate to all the sides of our human personality. This is, of course, a central liberal theme but one which can be turned to good account by Green theorists concerned to defend the integrity and variety of non-human nature. The second reason is that any single culture which does not periodically, or continuously, re­ plenish itself hy the second process noted above namely, encounter with other cultures - runs the serious risk of becoming ‘played out’. The possibi­ lities of purely internal development are probably limited. A culture which does not receive jolts from either direct contact with non-human nature or from contact with other cultures faces the strong possibility of decay. A single, homogeneous world culture which we may be in the process of creating would, on this view, be a disaster for human cultural develor" nt as a whole. Hence, we need to sustain as mat. y averse experiments in living as this tiny planet will allow, including those which require healthy non-human natural environments within which alone they can develop. In a nutshell, then, the personcentric argument for the maximum diversity of non-human nature is that it is needed for the maximum diversity of human culture. The latter in turn is essential to the con­ tinued health of human cultural development. Re­ cognition of these points by liberalism requires no more than an interpretation of traditional liberal defences of the diversity of human cultures and subcultures via grasp of the implications of the necessarily embodied nature of persons. It is the latter which the defenders of Green political theory, such as ecocentrists, have securely grasped. Accep­ tance of it by liberalism enables the importance of the non-human world to be grasped from within the liberal tradition in a way which enables an argument to be mounted for the defence of the multiplicity of

direction of the absorption by liberalism of the main thrust of the ecocentrist argument. It is possible to argue that activities such as those mentioned are clearly part of the self-understanding and flourishing of those who take part in them. None of us can know for certain that they might not become part of our own conditions for flourishing, even if they are not so at the moment. Also, such people as find them essential to their sense of self are not members of a separate group of human beings. They are inter­ spersed among the general population and are the objects of caring feeling as children, spouses, parents and so on. Thus, even if these activities in our culture carry no meaning for a given individual, that individual may find himself caring for others for whom they are extremely important. So we all have an interest in maintaining the non­ human natural context within which such cultural activities are to be carried on. Rawlsian persons in the ‘original position’ would undoubtedly want to preserve as varied a natural context as possible to permit the possibility of engaging in such meaningconferring activities, for themselves or for those for whom they might care. More generally, many com­ plete forms of life, such as those centred on hunting and fishing, need the specific contexts and oppor­ tunities provided by non-human nature in order to exist. The customs, traditions, art-forms, social ar­ rangements and religious beliefs associated with such lifestyles depend, therefore, derivatively on such a context. Across the world, the spread of western cultural forms, the degradation of the natural envir­ onment and the sheer increase in human numbers are attacking the underpinning in non-human nat­ ure of such diverse ‘experiments in living’. However, it might be claimed that no human cultural form has to exist to secure human well-being and that diminution in the range of cultural forms is not necessarily a problem. For, after all, people are adaptable and within a generation or so the grand­ children of fisherfolk can happily exist as urban sophisticates."'5 Why, then, should there be as wide a variety of human cultures as possible, including those directly dependent on specific contexts of non-human nat­ ure? Two reasons may be given. The first is that the variety is needed in order to allow the possibility of

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BRIAN BAXTER that world. Pure ecocentrism is rejected in this version of liberalism, but a fusion of the personal and impersonal standpoints is achieved in a way which m aintains the strong m otivational impetus which is liberalism’s strong point. Further, non-hum an nature - on this interpretation of liberalism - is at least as central a concern as the human (person) welbbeing with which it is inextricably entwined.

the first round of arguments in the previous section be turned against such theories so as to argue for the possibility of, for example, patterns of urban organi­ sation within which very unecological modes of life may be sustained (for at least some of our loved ones may find these to be terribly important for their self­ understanding) ? Clearly, what is needed at this stage by the proponent of the personcentric argument for respect­ ing the variety of non-hum an nature’s world is a principle to deal with this objection. T his principle will require that the m aximum variety of human cultures is to be allowed com patible with the pre­ servation of that diversity of non-hum an nature which is needed to underpin cultures. T h at is, any culture which requires the eradication of the variety of nature is to be ruled out. Obviously, some cultures permitted under this principle will have features which are morally objec­ tionable on other grounds. However, the above principle at least allows the possibility of experiments in living which require a specific context of non­ human nature within which to operate, even if not all such experiments may be ones with which it would be in the moral interest of hum an beings to persist. T o put the point in another way, the person­ centric argument for the variety of hum an cultures does not preclude moral criticism, and attempted termination, of some of the experiments in living which natural variety makes possible. Thus from ecocentrism liberalism is able to ex­ tract an argument for claiming that hum an persons would do well to m aintain non-hum an nature in as rich and varied a form as possible, so as to provide the largest set of possibilities for contexts within which human culture can find its significance and resources. Since hum an culture as it has recently been developing has been extensively destroying non-person nature, hum an persons need to learn to restrain their cultural acts so as not to cut off the branch on which they are sitting. H um an culture must limit itself so as to preserve itself, for only then can human persons guarantee their continued flour­ ishing as persons, which is the fundamental liberal

IV It has, of course, long been a liberal theme that only within an economically dynamic capitalist system is hum an diversity properly catered for. T he trouble with this view of that diversity is that it is concep­ tualised too individualistically. Individual flourishing only occurs within cultural formations. Diversity of modes of flourishing, therefore, requires diversity of cultures and, as we have seen, that in turn needs diversity of non-human nature within which experi­ ments in living can take place. O n this view a single, homogeneous technosphere, of the kind which Green theorists fear that liberal-supported capitalism is setting in train, is an impoverished environment for persons, however materially well-off they may be. This line of argument suggests that the personcentric version of liberalism developed above may he used to formulate liberal reasons for moving away from un­ trammelled capitalism. In this respect, however, this version of liberalism has honourable antecedents within the liberal tradition for many liberal theorists, from Mill to Rawls, have cast doubt upon the necessary connection between the basic value pos­ tulate of liberalism and the capitalist system. There is, however, a point critical of Green p o­ litical theory in general, and the ‘greened’ person­ centric version of liberalism in particular, which emerges from these arguments for the diversity of environments within non-human nature and the diversity of cultures which they underpin. Such political theories, it may be claimed, seem them ­ selves to be aiming for a single, stable, ecologically defensible cultural formation. Do not such theories, like all totalising ideologies, foreclose on certain possibilities of hum an cultural development? C ann ot

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N o tes 13. This, at least, is my understanding of what Kant is saying in a notoriously difficult, though penetrating, discussion. 14. It has been argued by, for example, Regan (1988) that at least some nonTuman animals may be devoid of rationality and thus autonomy, in the Kantian sense, and yet still be worthy of moral consideration. He argues that those animals which are ‘subjects of a life’ possess rights of the same sort and to the same degree as do human beings. The concept of ‘preference autonomy’ applies to such creatures. Whatever the merits of this case it is clear, as Regan himself recog' nises, that it extends the scope of human moral concern to only a relatively few members of the non'human realm. It also rests upon a concept of a ‘subject of a life’ whose meaning and moral weight are likely to be highly controversial. Many may find it persuasive but it would be preferable if a concept of autonomy could be found which is applicable to non' humans and which did not lend itself to being morally trumped by the Kantian concept of autonomy, invob ving rationality, which applies only to human beings (as far as we know). 15. Eckersley (1992), pp. 61-3. 16. See Naess (1989). 17. Ibid., p. 54. 18. I am here endorsing the general immanentist position in moral and political debate espoused, for example, by Walzer (1983), p. xiv. 19. Different philosophers have stressed some of these elements more than others. Self-interest and means' end rationality (points (1) and (2)) were of particular importance to Hobbes and he gave a very specific account of how (5) is possible and why it is necessary. SelTconsciousness and the differentiation of oneself from others were of great concern to Kant. Point (5) was given a non'individualistic basis in Rousseau, a theme developed by Hegel and Marx and taken further in more recent socialist and conservative thinking. 20. This is a theme at least as old as Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and has been the focus of much of the discussion among recent communitarian theorists. 21. The allusion here is, of course, to Kant’s attempt to establish what is necessary for there to be the possh bility of experience. Here I try to establish what is necessary for there to be the possibility of culture. 22. These claims may gain plausibility from the arguments put forward by P. F. Strawson to establish the logically primitive nature of the concept of a person, in which a person is essentially conceived of as an entity to which

1. Brian Barry (1995) and Marcel Wissenburg (1998) are the two contemporary liberal theorists who have most clearly shown an awareness of, and willingness to engage with, the arguments of Green political theon ists. 2. See, for example, Nagel (1991), pp. 4-5: T he inv personal standpoint in each of us produces . . . a powerful demand for universal impartiality and equaL ity, while the personal standpoint gives rise to indb vidualistic motives and requirements which present obstacles to the pursuit and realisation of ideals . . . My claim is that the problem of designing institutions that do justice to the equal importance of all persons, without making unacceptable demands on indivf duals, has not been solved - and that this is so is partly because for our world the problem of the right relation between the personal and impersonal stand' points has not been solved.’ The problem identified by Nagel is here supposed by him to arise with respect to traditional political theories, but it plainly arises also for ecocentrism. 3. John O’Neill (1993, p. 159) offers an Aristotelian/ Marxist argument to connect individual human welL being and our capacity to appreciate disinterestedly the intrinsic value of the natural world (as in scientific study of it, for example). The latter is claimed, con rectly I think, to be our characteristically human capacity and thus in exercising it we are at our most fully and satisfyingly human. The argument, however, is open to the objection that, as Nagel has claimed, our ability to ascend to the level at which we can view the world from the impersonal standpoint of morality and science is, for most of us, a fitful and fragile business. The arguments developed later in this chapter might be seen as an attempt to connect the appreciation of the intrinsic value of nonTuman nature with indivn dual human welbbeing in a more robust way, via the conception of oneself as embedded in a culture. They are, therefore, intended as complementary to the Aristotelian/Marxist positions. 4. Eckersley (1992), chapter 3. 5. Ibid., p. 49. 6. Ibid., pp. 63-71. 7. As one of the commentators on an earlier version of this chapter noted, Eckersley is herself critical of the proposition that women are more ‘in tune’ with natural processes than men. 8. Eckersley (1992), p. 54. 9. Ibid,, p. 56. 10. Ibid., pp. 60-1. 11. This point is attributed to Fox (1990), p. 172. 12. Kant (1948), p. 91.

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BRIAN BAXTER both mental and physical attributes are to be ascribed. See Strawson (1959). 23. This is the theme of Sir Ernst Gombrich’s account of the history of western visual art in terms of ‘schemaand-correction’, presented in Gombrich (1977). 24- Rawls (1972), chapter 3. 25. Ted Benton has considered the claim that habitat protection, while it may be necessary to preserve the well-being of non-human animals, is not important in the human case because the direct relations of causal dependency which link habitat conditions, patterns of social life and individual well-being in the case of non­ human animals simply do not apply to humans (Benton, 1993, p. 174). He replies that human adaptability is neither limitless nor devoid of definite causal condi­

tions, even though we cannot say in advance of an analysis of a human community’s mode of life (especially the material culture) what those conditions will be (p. 174). Further, he makes a claim for the idea of an environmental right to preserve the ‘ecological integrity of a sufficient geographical terrain for the living of that social life’ (p. 175). These arguments are complementary to my own, which might be regarded as furnishing reasons why even people who are not themselves mem­ bers of a community whose culture is under threat may view such a threat as being directed towards them too. 26. I would like to acknowledge the very helpful sugges­ tions made by Mark Evans concerning the revision of this chapter for the present volume. Any faults which remain are, of course, my own.

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P R O L E G O M E N O N TO A L I B E R A L T H E O R Y OF T HE G O O D LI FE Mark Evans

in the basic principles to which anti-perfectionists would restrict their concerns. He argues that being autonomous is not sufficient to make a life good, for autonomy must be exercised in pursuit of valuable projects for it to have value. Believing that the options from which people autonomously choose their projects are, in general, socially defined and determined, Raz urges that to promote autonomy as a good, the liberal state may support those which are indeed valuable.4 By offering liberal politics this responsibility, his theory has significantly challenged anti-perfectionist liberalism’s efforts to equate itself with liberalism in toto. What is striking, though, about much of the interest Raz has renewed in the idea of perfectionist liberalism is that the acceptance of engagement in practice with certain conceptions of the good has not been matched with a parallel examination of them in theory. He himself says little about which ideals a perfectionist liberal state might be inclined to fa­ vour.5 Another liberal critique of anti-perfectionism, William Galston’s Liberal Purposes, also strives to restrict itself to a ‘minimal perfectionism’, hardly venturing beyond the modal assumptions about the good that anti-perfectionists might concede they need to make.6 George Sher’s Beyond Neutrality develops an account of the good centred upon the pursuit and achievement of ‘near-universal and nearunavoidable goals’ but it is noticeably reluctant to discuss in detail the possible content of these goals and their political ramifications.7 Peter Digeser’s Our

I The possibility and desirability of a perfectionist liberalism, which encourages a liberal state to favour one or more conceptions of the ‘good’ or ‘good life’1 over others, has been much debated in contemporary political thought ever since John Rawls popularised the opposing idea of liberalism as an essentially antiperfectionist doctrine. Sometimes, the perfectionist case rests upon the claim that liberalism’s funda­ mental political principles cannot be plausibly con­ ceptualised in abstraction from specific conceptions about how it is good for people to live.2 Alone, the ‘conceptual inevitability’ argument may not be en­ ough to win the day. Anti-perfectionists can admit that liberal political principles unavoidably lean towards certain ideas of the good and away from others. But they view this bias with regret, as some­ thing to be avoided as far as possible when promoting liberalism’s fundamental values.3 Hence anti-perfectionism can be recast as a politics governed not by an implausible commitment to ‘total neutrality’ but a tendency towards neutrality, going no further in fa­ vouring particular good-life conceptions than is ne­ cessary to secure the basic liberal political values. Perfectionist liberalism need not be so readily rolled over, though. Joseph Raz, one of its most prominent followers, rejects ‘abstinence-where-possible’ from good-life bias. He contends that a liberal state can and sometimes should actively promote certain good-life conceptions beyond those implicit

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MARK EVANS from it. It is hardly obvious, after all, that the mere fact that liberals used to indulge thus is a com pelling reason for their descendants to do so today. Contemporary perfectionist liberals are likely to share with anti-perfectionists a much deeper sensi­ tivity to human diversity than we find among their predecessors, who typically operated with detailed metaphysical beliefs about hum an nature which enabled such confident talk about the good life’s composition. G iven this sensitivity, such determi­ nate and prescriptive beliefs are now much more difficult to entertain. Perfectionists don’t go as far as anti-perfectionists in using ‘diversity’ as a reason for avoiding ‘good-life favouritism’ in politics. But they might nevertheless be reluctant to theorise concep­ tions of the good because of a doubt that any theory could meaningfully identify specific ideals in abstrac­ tion from the myriad options that are actually avail­ able in society. Perhaps the good life is something that is pluralistic in content, or heavily determined by particular social context and hence capable of formulation only by those to whom it applies as they reflect upon their own circumstances. O n this view, there would be little for philosophers to say about the good life which would carry any weight over and above the citizenry’s deliberations. T his might lead perfectionists towards what can be called a formal or ‘open-textured’ perfectionism, which is deliberately not given much content a priori. Instead, it specifies the form of the good in highly abstract, generalised terms alone, rendering it com patible with highly diverse substantive embodiments which individuals or groups must formulate for themselves. Those who adopt this approach may therefore insist that their distinction from anti-perfectionism largely comes in their practice, not the content of their theories. For the diversity-sensitive open-textured perfectionist, the most naturally liberal option could then be a ‘democratic perfectionism’ which would leave the deliberation over, and choice of, the perfectionist ideal’s content to the political arena itself. A s Raz notes,9 it is not difficult to appreciate how liberals might be swayed by these intuitions. But they are not strong enough to render it inappropriate for liberal political theory to formulate and examine candidates for perfectionist promotion. Even if we accept (as this chapter does) that the choice of

Politics, Our Selves? puts forward a Raz-type case for the liberal state actively supporting certain concept tions of the ideal self to aid individuals’ ‘self-crafting’ but once more provides little clue as to which of such conceptions might be worthy of the liberal state’s support.8 It is almost as if an extreme caution in deliberating upon the nature of the good life as a political concern, which is turned into a regulatory political principle by anti-perfectionists, also overcomes per­ fectionist liberal theorising. T he oddity of this char­ acteristic can be more fully appreciated when one looks back at earlier liberals such as John Stuart Mill, T . H. Green, Leonard Hobhouse or John Dewey. These thinkers offered substantive views on how it was good to lead one’s life which they freely inter­ wove with their political reflections. T he sharp disjunction between political thinking and reflec­ tions upon ideals of personal conduct, which char­ acterises so much contemporary liberal theory, is noticeably absent in many of its forebears. A lthough it will be suggested that they should decline to follow such precedents to the letter, this chapter urges that today’s perfectionist liberals can and should seek to retrieve something of this tradi­ tion’s spirit (thus it grants the perfectionist case as its starting point). It hopes to encourage a conversation about the good as something that liberals shouldn’t be afraid to join for fear of being thought ‘illiberal’, ‘arbitrary’, ‘authoritarian’ or worse. It proposes some elements of a perfectionist ideal that they could support, defending their liberal credentials and in­ dicating the role that liberal politics might play in promoting them. A s a prolegomenon, the chapter can do no more than indicate some of the possibi­ lities here (hence no irony should be read into the skimpiness of what is proposed!). But if its sugges­ tions seem fruitful, it can perhaps energise a more complete and rigorous discussion of the type that has unfortunately and unnecessarily become alien to contemporary liberalism.

II Before explaining how to rehabilitate good-life the­ orising in liberalism, we should reflect upon the possible reasons why perfectionist liberals shy away

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P R O L E G O M E N O N T O A L I B E R A L T H E O R Y OF T H E G O O D L I F E ceptions that all in the relevant domain could accept. Now, as indicated above, PL often contends that principles of liberal justice are not obtainable from anything other than a substantively, distinc­ tively liberal conception of the good. However, it is still possible and certainly desirable for it to preserve some morally and politically relevant distinction between ‘justice’ and ‘the good’ in the following sense. Principles of liberal justice have the specific function of organising basic social and political institutions and if they unavoidably express certain assumptions about how it is good to live, these nevertheless pertain to what are deemed to be people’s ‘essential’ interests (and it is the business of a theory of justice to propose what these may be). Because they are ‘essential’ the principles that these interests prompt have first claim on the state’s attentions. Familiarly, liberals generally assume that people’s primary interest lies at least partly in being equally free and hence they prioritise a scheme of basic liberties. But they regard these principles as providing only a framework of rules rather than what Rawls calls a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ which orien­ tates activity in many more, if not all, aspects of individual and social life.11 T he ‘gaps’ in the framework can be filled by conceptions of the good, which may be thought of as those ideals of how an individual might conduct her life, which projects to adopt and/or characteristics/virtues to acquire within the boundaries of justice. Q ua liberal, PL will not prioritise its favour­ itism in good-life ideals over the need to secure justice. But it rejects the idea that the politics of liberal justice automatically rules out all perfectionist concerns. We now need to consider what kind of perfection­ ism a liberal might consistently adopt. Here, it helps to think about how a liberal might understand ‘perfectionism’. T he term has been used in confus­ ingly vague and varied ways. It can be ‘tightly’ defined as a doctrine which holds the pursuit of human perfection or excellence (however that may be understood) to be the object of morality. A slightly slacker definition drops the exacting notion of perfection and describes the goal to be the devel­ opment of human beings’ potentials and capacities to a full and flourishing degree (again variously under­

whether to pursue perfectionist policies, and which ones, if so, should be left to a democratic process, it is only when political theory is thought to be solely in the business of identifying what principles must be adopted by the state that the case for abstinence from perfectionist enquiries seems compelling. Yet not even theorists of justice, the staple diet of all liberal political thought, necessarily view the fruits of their deliberations as claiming to be compulsory. Som e of them, at least, also restrict themselves to theorising what principles of justice might be adopted by a liberal-democratic citizenry. They recognise that there could be reasonable alternatives which might be embraced with equal validity.10 They do not think that their function is to prejudge, and circumvent the need for, citizens’ own choices. So in the way that theorists of justice use political theory to articulate and analyse the candidate com ceptions of justice to be offered up for approval or rejection by citizens themselves, I contend that perfectionist liberal political theory can also propose and scrutinise the possible candidate conceptions of the good which might be presented as political options. T o sketch one such candidate we need to clarify the main concepts it will employ. We must then attempt to characterise its possible content in a fashion which has substantive implications (i.e. leading to both a theory and a practice which is bolder on good-life questions than anti-perfectionism and the cautious perfectionisms described ear­ lier) but yet performs the delicate balancing act of remaining faithful to the liberal ethos.

Ill One way of thinking about the structure of a perfec­ tionist liberalism (hereafter: ‘PL’) is to reflect upon how it might diverge from anti-perfectionist liberal­ ism (‘A P L ’). A PL is typically constructed by sharply distinguishing ‘conceptions of the good’ and what we can call the ‘principles of liberal justice’, those fundamental values that a liberal state is centrally concerned to enforce. This distinction relies upon some version of the belief that the moral basis of the latter can be intelligibly described as being drawn not from any particular conception of the good alone but from something impartial with respect to such con­

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MARK EVANS stood).12 Contemporary liberal debate has tended to use the term more loosely still to denote a doctrine which simply advocates the promotion of a specific ideal, or set of ideals, of how it is good to live (with no necessary reference to either ‘perfection’ or ‘flour­ ishing’). Although we are proceeding with the assumption that PL will have more to say about the good than the potentially vacuous notion of an ‘open-textured’ perfectionism, to retain its liberal identity it still has to be in some way organised around a respect for human diversity. We shouldn’t expect it to be overly detailed in its prescriptions and thus the loose defi­ nition is probably the most appropriate (although, as I will later suggest, ideas of ‘flourishing’ are not necessarily absent). PL’s ideals are also likely only to be ‘partially comprehensive’ (again following Rawls13), declining to provide a complete, rigorously specific blueprint for all areas of life but focusing instead only upon certain aspects raised in the question of how to live well. Two final points before sketching a candidate PL. A potential misapprehension concerning the perfec­ tionist project is that it necessarily posits a universal ideal of the good, which is said to hold true invariantly and without regard to time or place. It will be clear, though, that many of my examples of PL’s concerns look very culturally specific. I suggest, then, that even if we wish to retain universalist application for principles of liberal justice (which not all liberals wish to do anyway) it would seem appropriate to make any perfectionist elements of a liberal doctrine much more context-sensitive and localised. Secondly, recognition of cultural variability plus an acknowledgement of the role that socialisation plays in the adoption of lifestyles strongly indicates that PL rests upon a theory of the self that stresses its malleability, or plasticity, over any intrinsic or es­ sential features. Instead, the self can be seen as much less determinately constituted in its intrinsic nature, awaiting instead the imprint of a culture for identityformation. PL therefore assumes that politics has some legitimate interest in influencing the forces of socialisation that shape the self. Political inter­ vention to encourage alternative influences upon the construction of one’s character need not be seen as qualitatively distinct in any significant way from the

other social influences already and inevitably exer­ cised upon it. Consequently, a view of power which admits that its effects can be ‘constitutive’ and not just ‘repressive’ would seem to be an invaluable conceptual tool for this type of theory.14 It helps to remove the automatic link between the exercise of power in the application of perfectionist policy and the idea that it is necessarily an act of repression, a link which might otherwise make liberals altogether more suspicious of the perfectionist case.

IV My candidate PL initially divides its concerns into two. I call them ‘self-pertaining’ and ‘other-pertain­ ing’ issues, distinguishing them from the terminology of ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ acts which is popularly used to explicate Mill’s famous harm prin­ ciple.15 The latter isolates what is and what is not of potential concern to the state, whereas the politics of PL has an interest in both self-pertaining and otherpertaining acts. By ‘pertaining’, then, I do not mean to identify aspects of life which in some way are either ‘of (political) concern’ only to ‘self or of ‘others’ too. Rather, a question about a ‘self-pertain­ ing’ aspect of life relates to how one is living one’s life regardless of its effect on others. That’s not to say a self-pertaining aspect of life doesn’t affect others and nor does it mean that others may not raise legitimate concerns about its effect upon them. If I ask the question ‘is X a good thing to do?’ part of the answer may well rest upon the effect that X has on others. But part of it can also refer simply to what good it does to the self alone - and this is the self-pertaining dimension. This aspect can be illustrated by thinking about the following: whether to work hard to gain quali­ fications and get a good job or reject hard work for a life of indolent pleasure; whether to produce and/or consume great poetry or pornography in the privacy of your own home; whether physically to live health­ ily rather than unhealthily; whether to be a wellinformed citizen willing and able to exercise one’s political rights competently, or know nothing about politics and care even less; whether to live in squalor or cleanliness; whether to lead a life that is harmo­ niously and happily balanced between work and play

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P R O L E G O M E N O N T O A L I B E R A L T H E O R Y OF T H E G O O D L I F E activities which do not fundamentally harm those who ‘witness’ them in a way that would make them matters for justice. In these instances people suffer no physical injury and their own ability to choose their own conception of the good need not be fundamen­ tally impugned, for example. Instead, they suffer ‘offence’, ‘embarrassment’, ‘revulsion’ or otherwise experience such activities as unwelcome nuisances.16 PL proposes that what effect they do have may nevertheless warrant state intervention. Perhaps under the influence of the general ten­ dency to neutrality, the ‘other-pertaining’ category has been drastically under-theorised in much recent liberalism and it might therefore immediately strike some liberals as too counter-intuitive to be some­ thing with which they should engage. But quite apart from the fact that this category is present in some extremely influential members of the wider liberal tradition,17 I think that its neglect is extraordinarily blinkered in another way. For it is a category that is familiarly operationalised as law in actual liberaldemocratic states. Whatever is or is not tolerated in purely private conduct, all such states will regulate non-harmful conduct in public spheres and spaces to a greater degree. To take one simple example: what­ ever sexual conduct is permissible in private, nearly all of it is prohibited as a public performance. And I think most liberals (including, if they are honest, anti-perfectionists) would regard the existence of some such restrictions as a good thing. I am not invoking the crass argument that what­ ever is actually done by liberal-democratic states must therefore be permitted by liberals’ political theory (plenty of such states’ activities are unsanc­ tioned and indeed condemned by the theory). But I am arguing that the fact that we have this category in political practice is a very strong prima facie reason for thinking that liberals can and should embrace it theoretically. I suggest most liberals believe that there are certain things which can be said and done in private which, even though they do not ‘harm’ anyone, are rightfully prohibited in public. They don’t want the state to forbid your viewing of ob­ scene material in your front room, your nudist pro­ clivities in the kitchen and your boorish, foulmouthed drunkenness when you’re at a friend’s house. But they do want it to forbid you from putting

or in which work is so onerous that life is constantly stressful; whether to regard sex as an activity to be engaged in freely and lovingly or as a commodity to be bought and sold; whether to live a life of druginduced stupor or alert and lively mental sobriety. Although all of these pairings may display otherpertaining aspects, particularly when questions of justice are involved (for example if the pornography in question is paedophiliac), PL can also reflect upon them as questions about the intrinsic quality of how one’s life is conducted, regardless of the effect upon others, when justice is no longer at issue (unlike APL, whose political concern ceases at this point). PL is concerned first to specify those respects in which politics may legitimately influence the life­ styles that people live from the self-pertaining per­ spective, and then to propose some principles by which the value of various ways of life might be determined. ‘Other-pertaining’ aspects of life are identified solely with the effect that they have on others. PL identifies which ones may rightfully become matters of political concern, again proposing standards by which to evaluate the effects to determine whether they should be permitted, regulated or prevented where possible. As we shall see, the kinds of beha­ viour which might pertain to others are not simply what might ‘harm’ them, which is the criterion for Mill’s ‘other-regarding’ acts. Let us assume that these are largely covered by the principles of justice. PL proposes that there are other respects in which people might justifiably expect or require certain forms of behaviour from each other and in which PL may grant politics a stake. To illustrate this second aspect, think of the following: drunken and foul-mouthed behaviour in the streets; public billboards displaying hard-core pornography; playing music very loudly at the ex­ pense of neighbourhood peace and quiet; advertising work in the sex industry as a career opportunity in job centres and school career offices; running a workshop in your own garage which generates un­ pleasant though not noxious or toxic smells that nevertheless disgust your neighbours; engaging in sexual intercourse on the upper deck of a crowded bus. Let us grant that there are instances of such

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MARK EVANS your obscene photos on a public billboard, from walking naked up and down the high street or from being drunkenly foul-mouthed at the bus stop. Transferring these activities into the public realm is what makes these acts of rightful concern to others. PL can therefore articulate a theory of ‘acceptable public conduct’ (very generally understood) to help identify what should fall into this category. Overall, then, PL seeks to support ways of life that are ‘dignified’ or ‘decent’, ‘worthwhile’ or ‘ful­ filling’. The ideal to inform this commitment could take one or both of the following forms: (a) a conception of what is good for people, specifically to encourage its adoption; (b) a conception of what is bad in people’s conduct of their lives (‘undigni­ fied’, ‘shameful’, ‘worthless’, ‘unfulfilling’) to discou­ rage its pursuit. This obviously implies by counterposition some notion of what is good for people, but it could be compatible with various conceptions of the good life and is thus perhaps not as tightly prescriptive as (a).

informed yet have not been willing to change their unhealthy ways. 2. A conception of psychological well-being Whereas it may be relatively easy to identify how it is good to live in terms of physical health given the availability of objective information on the subject, it may be more difficult to do so with regard to some questions of psychological health. Although we might agree that there are certain psychological disorders which can be diagnosed, the broader no­ tion of the ‘ideal state of mind’ is likely to be altogether more nebulous and variable than ‘ideal physical condition’ is for any one individual. I do not therefore envisage PL being too prescriptive in this regard (avoiding such banalities as ‘everyone should be happy and carefree!’ It would be absurd to have a state that campaigned against sullenness in the same way it campaigned against poor diet). However, there is some opportunity for it to posit certain psychological conditions which it is not good for people to experience and which its policies may sensibly address. Here is just one example to illustrate this possi­ bility. A wearily familiar refrain of many free-market libertarians in particular over recent years has been that the culture of competition in contemporary capitalist society, which has left people increasingly insecure in their jobs and often having to work ever harder to try to keep them, is nevertheless a good thing. They argue that such pressure increases pro­ ductive efficiency and hence brings material benefits to the economy. On this view it is good for employ­ ees in the sense that they are compelled to become more ‘effective’ in their work. Leaving aside the arguments that such employ­ ment trends do not unambiguously increase produc­ tive efficiency, PL could maintain that serious questions about the quality of life are raised in these practices regardless of their material effectiveness. It could conceptualise some elements of ideal psycho­ logical well-being to identify as undesirable certain levels of stress which, for example, exacerbate feel­ ings of alienation and distress, and destroy the capacity for a well-balanced personality to flourish (not least if longer working hours in such a stressful

V It is now time to begin delivering on the promise to sketch some definite content for PL. Here are three possible components. 1. The conception of physical well-being Liberal justice may invoke an obligation to provide adequate health care for all regardless of circum­ stances, but it does not demand that the state make everyone healthy. Nevertheless, the liberal state can (and often does) campaign to promote physical well­ being, even though many people’s conceptions of the good life (smoking, drinking, prolonged sunbathing, unprotected promiscuous sex, sloth) may be (some­ times knowingly) to their physical detriment. PL can affirm that people ought to be free to determine how to manage their own health, but it proposes that the state has a legitimate interest in informing people of the desirability of physically healthy lifestyles.18 The state may judge that ignorance over health matters leads too many people to misjudge what is good for them. PL allows it to propagandise for healthy life­ styles even with respect to people who are adequately

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P R O L E G O M E N O N T O A L I B E R A L T H E O R Y OF T H E G O O D L I F E Pupils are not only educated in certain academic disciplines; they are also schooled (if often only indirectly) in specific norms of conduct. Well-man­ nered, cooperative, trustworthy, respectful of authority . . . a whole set of virtues and vices are assumed in the ways they are expected to behave. When we focus on the increasingly popular notion of civic education in particular,19 we can see this project coalescing around a character-ideal of ‘good citizen’ as being the intended end-product. Now APL can reconcile itself to the idea of en­ couraging such characteristics in so far as they are valuable for strictly political ends alone. It might also reluctantly admit that fitting people for liberal politics could have knock-on or overspill effects upon other spheres of life.20 Thus teaching tolerance and equality of respect for the political arena might introduce the exercise of such virtues in people’s private relation­ ships. On my conception, PL might not do much more than APL to promote good citizenship but it may not have the same degree of reluctance about its overspill. It could regard it as good and justifiable for a politically mandated programme of civic education to encourage the development not just of good (tolerant, fairminded and reasonable) citizens but good people in general, who display the virtues of good citizenship in all their dealings with others. Of course, it would be desperately naive to expect education to yield exactly the same type of good citizen/person in all children. Nor, in all probability, should PL even want it to or regret that it does not. We might be pleased at the fact that no such method of socialisation is going to avoid the production of highly diverse characters, some of whom will be rude, dishonest, ruthless, uncooperative and so on. It is a good thing that we don’t have a society in which all such vices have been knocked out in one’s youth (quite apart from the value of variety, maybe many necessary and great things can only be done by people who display what we would ordinarily think of as unwelcome characteristics: ruthlessness, say). But still, this does not mean there is no moral worth or practical point in schools seeking to set such examples. There is no paradox in attempting to impart some character-ideals generally even when it is not necessarily to be regretted that some will not live by them.

environment disable a person from properly experi­ encing life’s other facets). Thus, (2) could be in­ voked as at least part of the justification for policies which attempt to regulate working practices against the interests of ‘economic efficiency.’ 3. The ethical character-ideal

This is the third and most broad category, which specifies ethical standards by which it is thought good for people to live. This can be subdivided into at least five (interlinkable) categories: 1. the virtues and skills which facilitate the re­ quirements of good citizenship; 2. the virtues and skills which facilitate autono­ my;

3. the qualities which comprise an appropriately fulfilling life for humans to lead; 4. the virtues which constitute admirable character and the qualities which constitute a dignified life (‘a life fit for a person to lead’); 5. The requirements that constitute socially ac­ ceptable conduct. I treat (2) - (4) as largely self-pertaining matters; (1) and (5) identify other-pertaining issues, though both draw upon, and have consequences for, the selfpertaining too. The first two categories might be thought of as those which primarily constitute the kind of char­ acter-ideal which is most directly favoured by liberal principles of justice (the conception of the good from which perfectionists might argue such principles are necessarily drawn). Category (1) specifies the virtues - the ideal dispositions and characteristics - that are required by citizens to discharge the social role of citizenship well: civility, toleration, fair-mindedness, cooperativeness, among others. PL may hold that, in its ideal of politics, public affairs should always be conducted with such virtues to the fore (and its ethic can be the basis for attacking political conduct which fails to exhibit them). But the liberal state would have the largest scope for directly promoting virtuebased forms of conduct in the kind of education it provides for its children and it is on this matter that I shall restrict my comments regarding this category.

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MARK EVANS Promoting autonomy (Category (2)) requires the encouragement of both the taste and the aptitude for autonomous choosing, and the provision of a social environment which facilitates it. PL could accept that the perfectionist liberal state should tolerate some ways of life which are not grounded in auton­ omy and, in the name of providing a variety of options, even allow it actively to sponsor some of them (for we mustn’t assume that the state cannot equally support mutually incompatible forms of life for individuals21). But its preference for autonomy implies the possibility that it views these as less good ways of living (note this is crucially distinct from viewing them as bad, even though it does not adopt a relativist or sceptical approach to how lifestyles might be evaluated). Non-autonomous lifestyles may have a harder battle to survive than their autonomous counterparts in a perfectionist liberal society where people are encouraged to choose for themselves. But this is not something that PL ne­ cessarily regrets.22 Realistically, PL must recognise that autonomy is always ‘bounded’ in numerous ways: choices are inescapably limited by one’s context. For example, in societies where one generally has to get a job to live a minimally decent life, employment opportu­ nities are often severely restricted in particular loca­ tions and contexts (if they are available at all). Practical limitations may mean that an autonomous good life is always going to be a matter of degree and/ or episodic in character. That does not mean, though, that one must always accept whatever lim­ itations happen to pertain. Some of the restrictions upon people’s choices may be intolerable and PL’s theory could therefore provide a guide to identify situations in which autonomy has become unaccep­ tably restricted. I discuss an example of this in section VII. An important corollary of this function is that PL can strive to widen and secure a range of valuable options from which people may choose their auton­ omous projects. This is the policy made familiar to us by Raz, whose perfectionism largely concentrates on the possibility that the state can subsidise various kinds of activity and lifestyle deemed to be worthy of people’s support (particularly when they may struggle to survive without such help).23 No one is forced by

PL to take up such options. If people want to live lazy, slovenly lives passively consuming vast quan­ tities of lager whilst watching pornographic videos, the state cannot forbid them to do so (it need not subsidise them, though; if people have no source of income but welfare payments, the liberal state may require them actively to look for work, or undertake training programmes, to qualify for such benefits). One consideration in identifying what might count as a valuable option is provided by Category (3). This retrieves from many prominent currents in the liberal tradition the idea that the good life for humans is one spent developing their potentials and capacities. PL could favour activities that are devel­ opmental (creative, intellectual, physically demand­ ing) rather than enervating. Once again, it is primarily in education that the perfectionist liberal state is most likely to be able to act in support of this ideal. It could, for example, attempt to gear a curri­ culum towards the development of a wide range of intellectual, creative, aesthetic, emotional and phy­ sical capacities well beyond the functional require­ ments of a ‘flexible labour market’ (‘personal transferable skills’), the kind of economic imperative that may come to inform education if the state does not take care otherwise. Category (3) may also facilitate a critique of the wider social and cultural environment to ascertain whether it is encouraging or frustrating the development of individuals in desirable directions. It may thus provide the grounds for a radical condemnation of a culture that, say, fosters banality and stifles creativity and fulfilment.

VI Category (4) has close links to Category (1), in which it was argued that PL would welcome the overspill of the good-citizenship virtues into people’s characters more generally. The notion of what counts as an ‘admirable character’ could, then, sim­ ply build upon what is implicit in the citizenship character-ideal. It is potentially very wide, ranging across large sets of ideal dispositions and character­ istics. To specify its content PL could, for example, follow Joel Feinberg in drawing upon Hume’s four­ fold categorisation of features which are (a) pleasing to us; (b) pleasing to others; (c) useful to us; (d)

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P R O L E G O M E N O N T O A L I B E R A L T H E O R Y OF T H E G O O D L I F E he conducted himself in these self-pertaining matters was widely thought to have been a poor example to set to the nation and that the public had a right to expect his behaviour, qua the leading public official, to be better. His adultery, lying to his family and the American people, the inappropriateness of the re­ lationship with a very junior employee barely older than his own daughter: these are not illegal activ­ ities, but a certain widely shared conception of the good nevertheless condemned them, and deemed them particularly improper for the leading figure in public life. We might have been similarly condemnatory of such behaviour if Clinton had been the chief ex­ ecutive of a burger bar company. But it is not clear that citizens have the same legitimate expectation of ethical conduct from someone who does not hold public office. Of course it is true that people are nowadays very cynical about politicians’ motiva­ tions, suspecting (sometimes rightly) some hypocri­ tical Machiavellianism behind their protestations of virtue. Also, too much genuine moral sincerity from their mouths can eventually sound just tiresomely sanctimonious and PL can recognise that the realities of political life may well make it no place for moral saints. But the very fact that there is a widespread cynicism about the moral quality of political life seems to imply some wish that it should really be more virtuous, and PL could give voice to that wish. If it is therefore thought right that political repre­ sentatives should display certain forms of conduct and avoid others to set suitable ethical examples in a way that would not be so publicly expected of the boss of M cClinton’s, then political theory may have a legitimately vested interest in scrutinising this specifically political concern. PL can posit possible ideals to inform these expectations of conduct. To conclude this section, I offer just a few remarks on the concept of a ‘dignified’ life which was in­ cluded in Category (4). I treat this as distinguishable from the notion of having an admirable character and, again, it would be surprising if liberals of any hue - if they reflected hard on their ethical commit­ ments - would want to resist adopting some such notion to put to political work. PL merely embraces this commitment openly and seeks to articulate it fully.

useful to others (inverting each to obtain the set of vices which could be discouraged). PL would then think it, on balance, good for people to be, say, clean rather than dirty ((a)); tactful and tolerant rather than rude and insensitive ((b)); prudent and moti­ vated to better oneself rather than reckless or indolent ((c)); trustworthy and cooperative rather than deceitful and unreliable ((d)) - the list could go on.24 Now as ideals for conduct in spheres of life stretching well beyond the political, these features may appear to be of no possible concern to any liberal politics - beyond, again, the kinds of char­ acteristics that state-sponsored education may try to inculcate in children. Certainly, liberals would find ridiculous the idea of a state enforcing rules requiring any such behaviour. But it is far from clear that an ethic governing such matters is and/or ought to be wholly absent from liberalism’s political morality. To explain just one possible reason why, we can add a sub-category to (4): (4a) The ethical standards of public officials. This issue has received practically no attention in contemporary liberalism, but it points to what I take to be a familiar way in which liberal politics may serve to promote substantive ethical character-ideals. It entails the identification of standards of conduct which, though their opposites are not to be legally proscribed, it is right for citizens to expect their public officials in particular to exhibit. These func­ tionaries have a responsibility, if not a duty, to support these ideals. If they fail to live up to them, they set inappropriate examples of self-pertaining behaviour to those whom they serve. The facts that they can be condemned for doing so and that citizens have some legitimate expectation that they should not behave thus give credence to the idea of a selfpertaining morality being a proper object of political concern.25 Popular reactions to the revelations concerning President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Le­ winsky illustrate this claim well. It is doubtless true that the charge of perjury, which led to Clinton’s impeachment and which is primarily a matter of criminal justice, is what concerned people upper­ most.26 Many people thought that his personal life did not affect his ability to govern. But still, the way

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MARK EVANS It is best illustrated by an example of Sher’s: that of drug addicts, living from fix to fix in excrementstained squalor, hopelessly dependent upon their dealers who ruthlessly take sexual advantage of them.27 O f course there may be questions of severe injustice in this situation which take priority in its condemnation. PL could also attack it for the loss of autonomy and opportunities for leading a genuinely fulfilled life. But on top of all this (if we are talking about rich addicts who continually affirm an autonomous desire both to take drugs and experience all that their effects entail), it could also judge such a life to be simply too degrading, undignified and unfit for humans to live. And, in self-pertaining judgements, it could employ this distinctive ethic of dignity in campaigns against its adoption.

typically sexual - that are other-pertaining even when no one else directly witnesses it (they think it permissible legally to prohibit certain kinds of consensual sexual activity even when done in the privacy of one’s own home because society’s moral fabric is supposedly damaged by them28). In its self-pertaining deliberations, we have seen that PL offers some recommendations as to how politics might encourage or discourage people to live privately in certain ways. But questions of legal prohibition have not here been broached. Only when certain activities move into the public realm are they raised - and this is a crucial part of what makes this a liberal conception. In so far as otherpertaining judgements inform permissible restric­ tions and prohibitions, it is largely informed by a conception of how it is bad to live and act in the public realm. Sometimes this draws upon self-per­ taining judgements about how it is good and bad to live for oneself. A t other times, it is only the location of the activity in the public realm that generates any negative evaluation of it. Given that sexual conduct is a significant topic in PL’s morality, we can use some examples of such to illustrate this point. With one important potential exception to be explained shortly I take it that PL would, in general, have nothing to say about any form of private consensual adult sexual activity that did not pose physical dangers to anyone else. But questions of public offence are clearly raised as far as sex in public is concerned. Thus, part of PL’s concern in Category (5) is to identify those types of activity which, although all well and good in private, are wholly inappropriate in public such that their public per­ formance may rightfully be punished. The important exception provides an example where a self-pertaining judgement is made about an act which directly contributes towards the for­ mulation of an other-pertaining judgement about that act when publicly performed. This is when sex is treated as a commodity, engaged in not for love or pleasure but for money: prostitution and pornographic modelling. Let us leave aside the very real problems of injustice in the plight of the (often very poor) women in the sex industry, which PL could happily admit removes any grounds for con­ demning the women. But this is not to say it cannot

VII Finally, Category (5). Here we should recall that other-pertaining judgements refer to phenomena which become political concerns because of how they affect other people in terms other than the harm they may cause them. Often, their effect is sufficient to justify legal restraint of the activity in question. We have already rehearsed the argument that it is consistent and desirable for PL to address otherpertaining questions, but is there a distinctively liberal way of isolating which issues they may ad­ dress? In other words, can PL identify them in a way that would distinguish the liberal from non-liberal approaches? Here is an inadequately brief reply which hope­ fully is enough to suggest a distinctively liberal slant to this issue. Although it has been the subject of much conceptual attack, the classical distinction between public and private realms of life can remain operational for liberals in a very obvious way. A ctiv­ ities done without the presence of non-participating others (in one’s own home, paradigmatically) are private in the way that the same activities done in the high street - publicly - are not. On this con­ ception, PL holds that other-pertaining activities have to be public: they really can or do physically confront other people who otherwise have no part in them. This is distinguished from those conservative views which argue that there are private activities -

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P R O L E G O M E N O N T O A L I B E R A L T H E O R Y OF T H E G O O D L I F E against whom some might take offence. I may be as disgusted at the sight of people wearing orange flared trousers and open-toed sandals as others are at the sight of explicit sexual imagery, but PL’s ethic is what identifies my sartorial tastes as inappropriate for the legally controllable category of public offence.

condemn the kind of work they do and this is where a self-pertaining judgement drawn from an ethic of dignity, as suggested in (4), might be made. Consider a woman who is forced by economic circumstance into prostitution. Aside from the jus­ tice questions, the ‘dignity’ issue can feature in the following way. Most of us basically have to sell our labour-power to live and many may have little meaningful choice as to what kind of job can be taken. This is an important way in which autonomy is always constrained, as observed in section V. Yet if the only option for an unemployed woman in a job market is to become a secretary or a clerk, we might regret the lack of choice but not consider that any truly damaging harm has been done to her dignity as a human being. However, if the only option left was to fall into prostitution, then a liberal is much more likely to judge that her life choices had become unacceptably limited and that there was something wrong with the socio-economic system that had left her with such dismal prospects. This is where the ethic of dignity informs an ethically and politically crucial evaluation. Now for the way in which this self-pertaining judgement feeds into other-concerned legal restric­ tions on the sex industry. Imagine that PL follows many liberals in thinking it desirable more fully to decriminalise prostitution and pornography for prag­ matic reasons. In such instances, it would still hardly require liberals to think it now acceptable to have explicitly pornographic advertising billboards, broth­ els in any part of a town (next to an infant school or old people’s home?) and advertisements for the sex industry in school careers centre advice packs and Job Centre vacancy boards. For PL, there may re­ main something in the ethical quality of prostitution and pornography, marking them out as less than fully dignified, which justifies their exclusion from the immediate, unavoidable public realm in which we all necessarily move. That lack of ethical quality gen­ erates sufficient offence for many to desire not to have to encounter it against their wishes in public. It is this perfectionist liberal ethic that says it is right for the law to try to spare us all (not just children and old ladies) the sight of streetwalkers, kerb crawlers and images of explicit sex on billboards or prime-time television, but not other types of person and activity

VIII O f course, all of this - and particularly, I suspect, some of the suggestions in the previous section - is eminently contestable. And it is right that it should be so. It should be recalled, after all, that this theory was not designed to settle questions that are in fact only properly decidable in the political realm itself. But this chapter has been designed to show that it is appropriate for perfectionist liberals not only to raise these questions but to venture some answers, elabor­ ating the assumptions upon which they are offered and attempting to structure them into a coherent ethical outlook. In so doing, it has hopefully forced liberals to think harder about some of the ways in which ethical judgements of this kind are made in practice and to evaluate for themselves whether despite what the tendency to neutrality might prompt them to think - it is in fact desirable for liberals to preserve them in their theorising. Still, it would be naive not to admit that serious reservations may remain about the whole project. There is no space to address them all, but I conclude with a few remarks in PL’s defence. I have not claimed that my version of PL is the only way of characterising a liberal theory of the good life, so the conversation I advocate might well lead away from some of the elements I have proposed. For example, I can well envisage an argument holding that the gist of the comments concerning the sex industry reflect an unnecessarily - illiberal? - ‘prudish’ attitude, unfairly denigrating its work. I am happy to concede the conversation on this matter is far from over. But one might also object that part of liberalism’s very point has been to try to reduce the state’s interest in such apparently paternalist matters and that PL threatens a dangerously reactionary reversal of this trend. O f course it is true that liberalism has mounted frontal assaults on many of the taboos and conformist norms that permeated western cultures

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MARK EVANS until fairly recently. Yet it is wrong to conclude from this that liberalism, as many of its enemies often charge, is necessarily committed to abolishing all such standards and expectations of behaviour. Lib­ eralism is certainly a politics of toleration - but one is usually said to tolerate when one puts up with some' thing that one doesn’t much like. This therefore assumes a standard of evaluation in itself, which PL can articulate. And I have argued that liberalism need not be (and in practice is not) open-endedly tolerant; there are limits. Such perfectionist judge" ments are familiarly operationalised in political praC" tice and, again, I insist that there is simply no compelling reason to think that, by reflecting upon this fact, liberals would wish to abandon such praC" tice altogether (they may want to alter some of its content, but that is a different matter). It is also incorrect to think that, by permitting in principle the possibility of perfectionist politics, one would inadvertently open the door again to the kind of bigotry that liberalism has worked so hard to undermine. This claim usually proceeds with a ‘slippery"slope’ argument: ‘legislating against public of" fence X is wrong because it would encourage legislation against Y and it would be wrong to legislate against Y.’ This argument implies that an anti"X policy in itself has no serious drawback (if it did have such, then we wouldn’t need to condemn it for the consequences it may have; its intrinsic flaws would suffice). In principle, though, this argument fails if one can show that we need not necessarily slide down the slope at all. And if antLX has much to commend it, then the argument in its favour could easily outweigh the slippery"slope argument. Given that we are to leave the final decisions about perfectionist ideals to democratic deliberation, there is always a danger that PL’s politics would simply legitimise the enforcement of existing illiberal majoritarian prejudices. There is a lurking worry about the tyranny of the majority here and perhaps a prudent (or, in Judith Shklar’s sense, a ‘fearful’29) liberalism, designed to reduce the opportunities for such unwelcome uses of power, would argue that, attractive though PL sounds in theory, we cannot trust those who exercise power to do so wisely enough to encourage it in practice. It is unclear, though, that this fear is enough to

justify APL. O f course PL could be abused but then so can, for example, the democratic ideal itself. Many dictatorships have cO"Opted ‘democracy’ to ‘justify’ the most terrible tyranny, but we don’t regard this as sufficient reason to abandon the ideal, only to be more vigilant about its operation. And the dangers of PL’s abuse can be lessened precisely through the careful theorisation of conceptions of the good, rather than abandoning the matter in its entirety to whatever instant, perhaps vulgarly prejudicial, opinions might be thrown into democratic debate. A properly thought"through PL, examined thor" oughly and its moral positions exactingly contested both by professional political theorists and by a democratic citizenry in the political arena, would seem to be the best guarantee we could hope for to avoid such tyranny. It may ultimately be the case that a liberal polity would decide against an active perfectionist agenda, in which case the articulation of such an ethic would appear not to be necessary. But because liberal" democratic states in practice do wander into perfec" tionist territory, it is surely more incumbent upon APL to say why it is not good for states to do so (without caricaturising PL by raising the spectre of some patently hideous Orwellian totalitarianism as their reason). To add a final, brief remark to hint at PL’s possibilities (and to suggest as"yet uncharted future paths for research into it): it may be that the better"off denizens of the rich, capitalist west may be ultimately unable to sustain their kind of materia" listic lifestyles for two reasons. One is that the demands of redistributive global justice will become so overwhelming that cosseted indifference will no longer be possible. The second is that the need to avoid environmental catastrophe will require noth" ing short of a profound change in the resource" ravaging lifestyles of the rich nations. Both points suggest the need to rethink fundamentally the ma" terially extravagant conceptions of human flourish" ing encouraged in such societies. And to the extent that political means may be required to facilitate these ethical changes, the attempted indifference of APL will clearly have to be abandoned. So it is obvious that PL has been pushed by the tendency to neutrality onto the defensive far too much. It would infinitely profit liberalism for it to

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P R O L E G O M E N O N T O A L I B E R A L T H E O R Y OF T H E G O O D L I F E become more emboldened, and to think harder and more openly about the way in which politics might

contribute to what is already that most challenging of projects: leading a good life in the modern world.

Notes 1. I use the terms ‘good’ and ‘good life’ loosely and somewhat interchangeably here. Sher (1997), pp. 37-44 discusses some of the vagaries of ‘conception of the good.’ 2. For example Galston (1991), part II. 3. See, for example, Rawls (1996), pp. 152, 199-200. 4. Raz (1986), chapter 14 develops most of the points summarised here. 5. Raz talks of values being grounded in ‘concrete social forms’, suggesting a rather conventionalist account of perfectionism’s content. Even if this conservative bent satisfies liberals - and I will suggest it may not - this is still too insubstantial a formulation for us to have much idea of where Raz’s perfectionism could lead us. 6. Galston (1991), p. 177. 7. Sher (1997). 8. Digeser (1995). 9. Raz (1986), p. 162. 10. See, for example, Rawls (1999), pp. 581-3. Rawls defends ‘justice as fairness’ as a morality for political fundamentals, but here recognises that it is only one of many ‘reasonable’ conceptions that might be adopted. 11. Rawls (1996), pp. 13, 175. 12. See Hurka (1993), pp. 3-4. 13. Rawls (1996), pp. 13, 175. 14. This quasi-Foucauldian approach to power as constitutively disciplinary of the self is discussed in Digeser (1995), chapters 1 and 4. Space permits no more than a mention of this conceptual possibility; its articula­ tion and analysis is, though, a highly promising can­ didate for perfectionist liberalism’s research agenda. 15. Although this specific terminology is F. H. Bradley’s rather than his own, Mill’s distinction is implicit in his On Liberty, Mill (1972), p. 78. 16. It might be argued that, for consistency’s sake, liberal­ ism needs to reconceptualise ‘harm’ in order to justify to itself the idea that these are proscribable offences. The problem with this is that it threatens to stretch the concept of ‘harm’ to breaking point. Quite apart from the fact that it is hardly clear that the coercive repression of something becomes permissible simply by dint of redefining a concept, expanding ‘harm’ to

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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include ‘offence’ does not remove any problems over arguing about the proscribability of offence; it just shifts them. Mill (1972), p. 167; Hart (1963), p. 47; Feinberg (1985). In one sense, this might be an other-concerned activ­ ity where the state (that is the taxpayer) shoulders the cost of treating illness. But it is primarily self-con­ cerned in that it is left up to individuals to decide whether they wish to lead healthy lifestyles. A familiar feature of American school life, civic education is now being incorporated into Britain’s national curriculum as well. Rawls (1996), pp. 199-200. Raz (1986), pp. 161-2, 425. For an argument urging liberals to reconcile them­ selves to the fact that their doctrine will unavoidably discriminate heavily against certain kinds of cultures in modem society, see Fitzmaurice (1993). Raz (1986), pp. 417-18. Feinberg (1988), pp. 277-81. If it is posited that immoral conduct by its public officials diminishes the polity as a whole, rather than just simply sets bad examples to individuals, then such behaviour arguably becomes other-pertaining too. On this account, we would all be directly tarnished ethi­ cally by the antics of our elected representatives, as a citizenry. Note, though, that certain forms of lie - such as perjury - are criminalised even though it is not clear that people are always and necessarily ‘harmed’ (in a classic liberal sense) by them. The wrongfulness of lying might therefore be derived at least in part from a substantive ethical character-ideal which is separate from the ‘harm’ considerations that are primary in grounding principles of justice. If it is right that types of lying remain criminalised (as with perjury), then perhaps we should admit that this is another example of perfectionist considerations in politics. Sher (1997), p.179. Famously argued by Devlin (1965), chapter 1. Shklar (1989).

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I NDE X

Baumeister, A., 11-12 Baxter, B., 13, 16 Beitz, C., 53 Bellamy, R., 12, 272, 274 Benson, P., 213, 219, 221n34 Bentham, J., 167 Benton, T., 298n25 Berlin, L, 57, 69, 137-42, 145, 146n3, 147nl9, 161n43, 163, 170n ll Bideleux, R., 13 Bielecki, K., 274-5 Blackburn, S., 152-3 Brown, C., 254 Brubaker, R., 59-60 Buchanan, A., 129 bureaucracy, 177, 182-3, 284 Burke, E., 201-2, 204 Buzgalin, A., 272

abstraction, 76-7, 80, 199, 201, 256 Ackerman, B., 54, 61, 128 Addison, J., 204 A ’ Haleem, A. M., 216 Albertini, M., 226, 230 Alekseeva, T. A., 283 Alexander, W., 203 alienation, 212, 291 Anderson, P., 140, 142 antkessentialism, 75, 78-82, 200 anti-foundationalism, 147-59, 162-3 antkperfectionism, 6, 8, 299-301, 303, 305, 310 see also impartiality; neutrality Appiah, K. A., 97 Aristotelianism, 56, 188, 192, 193nl, 297n3 Aristotle, 56, 141, 182 Ameson, R., 124, 129 Aron, R., 276 Augustine, Saint, 52 Austin, J., 167 authenticity, 95-8, 213-14, 220 authority, 154-6, 160n8, 167-8, 185 autonomy, 13, 24, 28-9, 31, 32n42, 32n51, 54, 84, 90-1, 116, 162, 180, 185, 189-90, 192, 1989, 200, 204, 208-20, 221n50, 222n61, 233, 261, 276-7, 289-90, 297nl4, 299, 305-6, 308 Axtmann, R., 281

Callinicos, A., 129 Canovan, M., 11 capitalism, 8, 17-18, 114-15, 117-18, 120-1, 125-9, 131n40, 134n43, 229-31, 236, 272-5, 280, 283-4, 296 Carens, ]., 44 Carter, E., 204 Cassirer, E., 199 categorical imperative, 83 Chernomyrdin, V., 272-3 Chubais, A., 272-3 Cicero, 67 citizenship, 10-11, 37-8, 41, 51-61, 61n3, 75-84, 197-8, 202, 227, 231, 283-4, 305, 306

Babbit, S., 213, 219-20 Bader, V., 61 Balcerowicz, L., 272-4 Barber, B., 71 Barry, B., 128, 297nl

323

INDEX civil association, 13, 63-4, 167, 225-39 civil society, 8, 25, 37, 162-3, 177, 192, 236, 247, 282-3 Clinton, B., 307 Cohen, G. A., 8, 120-2, 124, 129 Cohen, J., 129 Cohen-Tanugi, L , 231 communism, 49n21, 66-7, 113, 125-8, 238, 252n31, 269-84 communitarianism, 9-10, 16, 22, 30, 94, 100n5, 116-17, 182, 253-64, 281, 297n20 Condorcet, M. J. A. N., 202 consensus, 10, 28, 67-8, 71-2, 95, 98, 156, 162— 3, 169, 176-7, 179, 184, 189-90, 214, 231, 258, 261-2, 265n45, 265n48 conservatism, 32n38, 66, 68, 73n22, 94, 297nl9, 308 Constant, B., 56-7, 65, 188-9 constitutionalism, 49n31, 57, 179, 182-5, 188-92, 225, 237, 262, 276-7 see also constitution(s) constitution(s), 44-5, 168, 175, 177, 180-1, 185, 247, 262 see also constitutionalism constructivism as meta^ethical theory, 103-4, 107, 141, 188— 92, 253-7, 260-1, 264 as form of political doctrine, 273-4 contractarianism, 9, 29, 104 cosmopolitanism, 11, 51-3, 55, 60-1, 61-2n3, 71, 226, 229, 232, 239, 244, 248, 253-7, 260-2, 264n3 counter-Enlightenment, 12-13, 140, 200 Croce, B., 25-6, 29, 280 Cudd, A., 110 culture, 8, 18-19, 35-47, 47n5, 49n24, 93-9, 138, 162, 165-6, 183, 185, 199, 203, 208-20, 293-6, 306

186nl6, 189-90, 197-8, 200-1, 205, 225-39, 243-5, 263, 269-70, 272-3, 275-7, 280-1, 300, 303 deontology, 188 Derrida, J., 200 Dewey, J., 54, 300 dialogue, 98-9, 155-6 Diderot, D., 202-3 Dietze, G., 279 difference, ethics/politics of, 11, 46, 75, 77, 79, 80-1, 115-16, 205, 206n26 difference principle, 12, 101-10, 110n3, 115-16, 118-23, 130nl4 Digeser, P., 299-300 Dinnerstein, D., 78 Doyle, M., 241-51 Dryzek, J., 183 Dworkin, R., 5, 25, 31, 54, 90, 128 Dzarasov, S., 280 Eckersley, R., 289-90, 292, 297n7 ecocentrism, 13, 288-93, 295-6 ecologism (‘Green’ theory), 13, 16, 182-3, 287-96 education, 38, 40-1, 53, 76, 89, 96, 180, 215, 217-19, 221n36, 305-7, 311nl9 egalitarianism, 101-9, 112n30, 113-16, 119-20, 128-9 see also equality Eisenberg, A., 40 Elshtain, J. B., 78 Elster, J., 129 Engels, F., 15 Enlightenment, 6, 10-12, 76, 197-205, 205nl, 205-6n l, 206nl4, 263, 291, 293 equality, 6, 30, 35, 68, 71, 75-7, 80-1, 83-4, 94, 101-10, l ll n 9 , 115, 117-18, 121, 123, 1834, 198, 248-9, 280 see also egalitarianism essentialism, 78-9, 200, 205 ethnocentrism, 78, 152, 157-8, 205 eurocentrism, 35, 47, 49n33 European Union, 13, 225-39, 240nl5 Evans, M., 12, 129, 146n4 exploitation, 123-5

Dahl, R „ 230 Dahrendorf, R., 57, 269 Daniels, N., 128 de Beauvoir, S., 200 deconstruction, 200 de la Barre, P., 202 democracy, 7, 15, 16-17, 39-40, 42, 67, 82, 99, 115-18, 126-7, 136-7, 143-4, 175-85,

Fedorov, B., 272 Feinberg, J., 306

324

INDEX feminism, 11-12, 75-84, 197-205, 289 Ferrara, A., 100nl5 Fish, S., 271-2, 279 Flax, J., 75, 78 foundationalism, 27, 29, 148-51, 153, 158-9, 160nl0, 162-3, 167, 170, 198, 255, 260 Fraser, N., 99, 201 fraternity, 120, 130n25 Freeden, M., 6, 11 freedom, 6, 7, 23, 27, 35, 72, 76, 89, 93, 97, 145, 184, 198, 247-9, 269-70, 287 see also liberty/liberties French Revolution, 70, 201, 279 Freud, S., 210 Friedman, M., 270 Frost, M., 254, 258-9, 263-4 Fukuyama, F., 6, 14, 18, 242-4, 246, 248-51, 269, 280 fundamentalism (religious), 15, 161n36, 200, 257

Hallowell, J., 27-9 Hampshire, S., 137-8, 141 Harris, A., 75, 78-9, l l l n 8 Hart, H. L. A., 162-3, 166-8 Hartz, L., 26, 28 Haslett, D. W., 112 Hausner, J., 274 Hayek, F., 9, 65, 72n4, 73n22, 73n27, 137, 183, 225, 231-2, 234-5, 237-8, 239nl, 270, 274, 279, 285n36 Hayes, C., 282 Hegel, G. W. F., 26, 125, 165, 242-3, 248, 292, 293nl9 Held, D., 17 Herder, A., 95 Herman, B., 83 Herzen, A., 283 Hiley, C „ 149 history, theory(ies) of, 14-15, 22-3, 25-7, 242-3, 249-50, 269 Hobbes, T., 164, 166-7, 169, 283, 292, 297nl9 Hobhouse, L. T., 22-7, 29-30, 178, 300 Hobson, J. A., 23, 28, 30 Hoffmann, S., 282 Hole, J., 275 Holmstrom, N., 129 Honneth, A., 91-3, 97 Hont, I., 70 hooks, b., 75, 78 Hough, J., 270 human rights, 7, 35-47, 49n24, 49n33, 51-3, 579, 63, 65, 69-70, 148-59, 160n23, 231, 253, 258-62, 264 see also group rights; minority rights; rights humanitarian intervention, 70-1, 149, 156-7, 161n39 Hume, D., 164, 166, 204, 243, 306 Humeanism, 156 Huntington, S., 278 Hutcheson, F., 204

Gaidar, Y., 271-3 Galston, W., 299 Garton Ash, T., 239 Gay, W., 283 Gellner, E., 269 genital cutting, 208-20, 221n50 Geras, N., 129 Gilligan, C., 85nl5 globalisation, 16-17, 186nl6, 229, 231, 238, 279 Goodin, R „ 73n46, 179 Gorbachev, M., 270 Gortat, R., 273 Gottlieb, R., 129 Gray, J., 3, 4, 8, 13, 61, 66-7, 69, 73n39, 162-3, 1 7 0 n ll, 227, 232, 274, 285n36 Green, T. H „ 57, 280, 300 group representation, 10, 75, 81-2, 181, 185 group rights, 11, 34-47, 49n24, 49n33, 55, 238 see also human rights; minority rights; rights Guignon, D., 149 Gutmann, A., 128

identity, 8, 66, 75, 81-4, 89-99, 200, 205, 231, 291, 302 Ignatieff, M., 69 impartiality, 10, 24, 26, 68, 76-7, 80, 82-3, 90, 184, 288, 297n2 see also anti-perfectionism; neutrality

Habermas, J., 53, 76, 82-4, 85n50, 135-6, 185, 188-92, 201, 206n22 Haddock, B„ 12, 73n35, 240n47 Hague, W., 228 Hailsham, Lord, 237

325

INDEX imperfect duty/obligation, 76, 82-3 individualism, 7, 10, 35, 38, 52, 184, 255, 281, 282-3 individuality, 8, 16, 18-19 Islam, 210, 215, 281

law/legal system(s), 43, 156, 164, 167-8, 176-81, 185, 186n41, 190-2, 193nl2, 225-6, 231-9, 245, 248, 260-2, 303 Layne, C., 241 Lebed, A., 273 legitimation crisis, 17, 274-5 Lenin, V. L, 69 Levine, A., 129 libertarianism, 7, 9 liberty/liberties, 23, 26, 57, 67, 71, 101, 115-17, 119, 175-8, 186n37, 188-91, 225-6, 228, 236-7, 263-4, 280, 282-3 see also freedom Linklater, A., 53 Lloyd, S., 129 Locke, J., 29-30, 32n54, 191, 243 Loveland, L, 231 Luzhkov, Y., 278 Lyotard, J.^F., 165

Jacob, M., 201 Joad, C. E. M., 27 Johnson, P., 200 judicial review, 177, 181 see also Supreme Court justice, 7-9, 16, 22, 24, 29, 30-1, 35-47, 47n5, 76, 80, 82, 90-9, 101-9, llO n l, 110n2, 110lln 6 , 113-31, 135-8, 141, 143, 179-82, 185, 188-9, 233, 253-4, 257, 262, 264, 280, 301, 311n l0 justification, 11-12, 29, 94-5, 143, 154, 156, 158, 164, 189, 262 Kagarlitskii, B., 276 Kaldor, M., 236, 240n54 Kant, L, 51, 54, 61n2, 75, 83-4, 135, 146, 198, 200, 203-4, 207n34, 241-51, 252nl6, 261, 290, 292, 297nl3 see also Kantianism Kantianism, 4, 6, 28, 53, 75, 82, 83-4, 139, 156, 158, 163, 170, 203, 252n31, 253-4, 260-1, 263, 289-90, 297nl4, 297nl9, 297n21 see also Kant, L Karimov, L, 278 Kekes, J., 163 Keynes, J. M., 274 Kirienko, S., 273 Klaus, V., 272 Kolodko, G., 274 Kozyrev, A., 273 Kristol, L, 280 Kymlicka, W., 10-11, 55, 95, 99n2, 106, 129, 281

McBride, W., 129 Macaulay, C., 76, 203 MacDonald, J. A., 38 MacDonald, M., 151 McDowell, J., 160nl3 Machiavelli, N., 138, 182, 242 MacIntyre, A., 260 Mackie, J. L., 160nl6, 256-7 Mann, M., 228 market(s), 57, 120, 128-9, 175-7, 182-3, 229, 236-7, 243, 250, 269, 272-5, 282-2 Marshall, T. H., 58 Martin, R., 12, 110 Marx, K., 15, 292, 297nl9 Marxism, 12, 26, 69, 113-32, 280, 297n3 maximin reasoning, 103, 106-9, llln 2 3 , 119 Mazowiecki, T., 273, 275 Mazzini, G., 281 Mendelssohn, M., 200 Mendus, S., 77 Merquior, J., 269, 277, 283 Meyers, D. T., 13 Michelet, J., 281 Mill, J. S., 30, 35, 55, 69, 93, 163, 197, 204, 245, 278-9, 281, 296, 300, 302, 311nl5 Millar, J., 203 Miller, D., 100n30, 129, 263

Lamont, J., 110, l l l n l l Lamont, N., 228 Landes, J., 199 language, 38, 40-1, 48n20, 93, 96, 165 Laquer, T., 202 Larmore, C., 137, 141-2, 144, 191 Laski, HL, 24, 32n60 Lassman, P., 12

326

INDEX Pettit, P., 178 Phillips, A., 80 Plato, 18 pluralism, 8, 12, 26, 82, 93, 99, 135, 136-44, 162, 1 70n ll, 175-85, 189-90, 200, 257 ‘reasonable’, 138-9, 141, 144, 162, 261, 263 Pogge, T., 52-3, 61n3, 129, 255 political liberalism, 10, 29, 30, 31, 32n51, 135-8, 141, 143-4, 162-3, 188-92 political philosophy/theory, 3-6, 13, 19, 19nl, 22, 116, 135-6, 139, 149-50, 159, 162, 169, 241, 255-6, 259 politics, conception(s) of, 30, 57, 63-4, 69, 75, 139, 142, 156, 164 Popper, K., 29 post-communism, 13, 269-84 postmodernism, 130n44, 198-201, 205 practical reason, 12, 170, 255-6, 260-1 see also public reason; rationality; reason pragmatism, 12, 27, 148-59 praxis, 291-2, 294 progress, 13-14, 23-7, 29-30, 76, 162, 175, 24950 progressivism, 6, 18, 32n38 projectivism, 152-3, 158 Prokhanov, A., 282 public/private distinction, 28, 75, 78, 97, 181, 188-92, 198, 225, 302-3 public reason, 6, 28, 30, 263 see also practical reason; rationality; reason

Mityukov, P., 281 minimum morality, 140-1, 163, 167, 260, 262-3 minority rights, 35-47, 48n6, 48n20, 99n2 see also group rights; human rights; rights Mises, L. von, 270 Mohammad, M., 278 Montesquieu, C., 65 Moody-Adams, M., 217, 219 Mouffe, C , 156 multiculturalism, 10-11, 26, 35-47, 53, 177, 186nl6, 231 Naess, A., 290 Nagel, T., 5, 128, 288, 297n2, 297n3 Nardin, T., 233-4, 239nl nationalism, 11, 15, 24, 28, 51-61, 63-72, 142, 280-4 nationality, 11, 35-47, 51-61, 62n20, 63-72, 176 Nemtsov, B., 272-3 neutrality, 6, 31, 287, 299 see also anti-perfectionism; impartiality Nielsen, K., 129 Nietzsche, F., 156 non-cognitivism, 150-3, 156, 159, 160nl6, 160— ln29, 161n34 Nozick, R., 9, 130n24, 137, 270 Nussbaum, M., 53, 75, 80, 85nl4, 128, 161n32 Oakeshott, M., 63-7, 72, 73n22, 167, 169, 225, 232-4, 238, 239nl objectivity, moral, 150-1, 158 O ’Donnell, G., 277 Okin, S. M., 75, 80, 129 O ’Neill, O., 83, 254-8, 260-1 Orban, V., 271 original position, 104-5, 109, 189, 295 Ost, D., 270, 283, 285n35 Outram, D., 200, 206n26

Rasmussen, D., 12 rational choice theory, l l l n l 8 , 212-13, 221n20 rationality, 11, 28, 146, 162, 204, 290 see also practical reason; public reason; reason Rawls, J., 3, 5-6, 8-10, 12-13, 20nl8, 23, 25, 2831, 36, 54, 90, 101-10, llO n l, 110n2, 110n4, 1 1 0 -lln 6 , lll n 8 , lll n 9 , l l l n l 8 , llln 2 0 , llln 2 3 , 112n24, 112n26, 110n29, 112n30, 113-29, 130nl4, 135-9, 141-6, 147n51, 156, 160n8, 161n36, 162-3, 170, 188-92, 253-4, 258-64, 296, 299, 311nl0 Raz, J., 6, 184, 299-300, 306, 311n4, 311n5 realism, moral, 150, 152-3, 160nl3 reason, 12, 24, 26-7, 76, 199-200, 203-4, 206nl4 see also practical reason; public reason; rationality

Parekh, B., 68, 73n49 Pareto optimality, 107, 119 Pateman, C., 75-7 Peffer, R. G., 12 perfect duty/obligation, 76, 82-3 perfectionism, 13, 16, 64, 299-311, 311n5 personcentrism, 13, 287-8, 292-3, 295-6 personhood, 287-8, 292-4, 297nl9, 297-9n22

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INDEX Reaume, D., 47 recognition, 12, 89-99, 100n2, 100n3, 180, 205, 242, 248 Redwood, J., 228 Rees, J. Q , 35 Regan, T., 297nl4 Reiman, J., 129 relativism, 9, 116-17, 152, 171, 202, 205 republicanism, 12, 18, 175-85, 186n7, 188-92, 244-6, 249 rights, 7, 92, 94, 115-17, 123, 126, 165, 175-7, 181, 185, 189-91, 197, 216, 236, 275, 278, 283, 297n25 see also group rights; human rights; minority rights Rights of Man, 1789 Declaration, 59, 64-5, 70 Roemer, J., 124-5, 129 romanticism, 18-19, 24, 140, 204 Roosevelt, F. D., 191 Rorty, R., 7, 12, 142, 148-59, 160n4, 160nl0, 160nl3, 160n23, 162-3 Rousseau, J.-J., 67, 203-4, 292, 297nl9, 297n20 Ruddick, S., 78 Ruggiero, G. de, 23-9, 54 Rustow, D., 282 Rutland, P., 273 Rychard, A., 274-5

Shklar, J., 12, 65, 72nl6, 135, 144-6, 310 Shlapentokh, D., 282 Shue, H., 128 Sieyes, Abbe, 56 Simonia, N., 270 Simpson, O. J., 68 Skinner, Q., 178 Smith, A., 185n5, 204 Smith, M., 228 socialisation, 91, 151, 213-14, 221n34, 302, 305 socialism, 7, 16, 18, 113-15, 117-18, 122, 124-9, 131n46, 198, 279-80, 297nl9 Sogrin, V., 272-3, 280, 284 Solzhenitsyn, A., 271 Soper, K., 11-12 Spelman, E. V., 75, 78-9 Spinelli, A., 226, 230 Spivak, G., 200 Staniskis, J., 275 state, 68-70, 227, 231, 247-8 Stoicism, 52-3 Strauss, L., 30, 142 Strawson, P., 297-8n22 Supreme Court, 28, 43-4, 45 see also judicial review Sutch, P., 13 Szacki, J., 270, 272-3, 283-4

Sakharov, A., 271 Sakwa, R., 13 Sandel, M., 9 Sapiro, V., 198 Scanlon, T., 5, 128 Schaar, J., 70-1 Scheffler, S., 128 Schmitt, C., 137, 140, 143, 161n42 Schmitter, P., 275 Schumpeter, J., 57, 242 Schweickart, D., 121, 129 Scott, J., 202 Seglow, J., 11-12 self-esteem, 91-4, 100n9 self-respect, 92, 100n2, 100n9, 115, 119 Sen, A. K., 9, 124, 128 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 204 Shenoy, P., 110 Sher, G., 299, 308

Tarasov, A., 282 Taylor, C., 20n27, 23, 54-5, 91, 95-8, 100n3, 100nl5, 100nl9, 100n21, 100n23, 100n30 Taylor, H., 197 teleology, 188-90, 205 Temple-Lang, J., 231 Thatcher, M., 228 Tickell, T., 70 Timofeev, L., 270 Tocqueville, A. de, 18, 65, 245, 279 toleration, 145, 154-5 Tomaselli, S., 203 Tully, J., 176 Tuveson, E. L., 204 United Nations, 36-8, 53-4, 65, 68, 80, 156 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 35, 37, 65, 149, 278 universalisability, 254-7

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INDEX Wenar, L., 162-3 Wiggins, D., 153 Williams, A., 106, 110 Williams, B., 137, 141 Williams, H., 13 Winch, P., 164-5, 167 Wissenberg, M., 297nl Wittgenstein, L., 164-5, 167 Wolff, J., 106 Wolff, R. P„ 129 Wollstonecraft, M., 76, 197-9, 201-2, 204-5, 206n6, 206n8

universalism, 52, 59, 61, 71, 75—84, 140, 199-200, 239, 253-7, 260-1, 263,' 278 utilitarianism, 55, 106, 112n26, 163, 193nl Van Parijs, P., 128—9 Vico, G., 280 Vincent, A., 11 Voltaire, 204 Waldron, ]., 128 Walicki, A., 274 Walker, A., 213 Walker, G., 49n31 Walley, K., 221n36 Walzer, M „ 9, 54, 116, 129, 136, 254, 258-64, 297nl8 Ward, I., 236 Warnke, G., 85n50 Weber, M., 17, 135-6, 138, 141-5, 146n4, 147nl9, 147n27, 147n38, 182 Weimar ‘Problem’, 135, 137-8, 143-4, 146 Welch, S „ 281

Yavlinskii, G., 274 Yeltsin, B., 271-3 Young, I. M „ 10, 55, 75-7, 80-3, 85n23, 85n42, lOOnll Zakaria, F., 276-7, 279 Zhirinovskii, V., 271 Zyuganov, G., 284

329