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

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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 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

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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 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

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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 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