, “Liberalism’s Divided: After Socialism and Before” (no date) which I’ve copied from pdf to Word and thence to html. I’ve left out footnotes. To read the entire article you need to go to the pdf.
But there is an older division within liberalism, one that was perhaps obscured for a century and a half but that is again becoming prominent. On one side of this divide lies a pluralist liberalism, hostile to the central state and friendly toward local, customary, voluntary, or intermediate bodies, communities, and associations. On the other we see a rationalist liberalism, committed to intellectual progress, universalism, and equality before a unified law, opposed to arbitrary and irrational distinctions and inequalities, and determined to disrupt local tyrannies in religious and ethnic groups, the family, the plantation, feudal institutions, and the provincial countryside. Today the tension between these two forms of liberalism plays out in debates among liberals about multiculturalism, freedom of association, federalism, and the family. Historically it was most evident in generations of debate about the multiplicity of institutions of jurisdictions in the ancien regime, and about the assault on those institutions by rationalizing, modernizing central states—most conspicuously the Bourbon, the Jacobin, and Bonapartist governments in France.
It has sometimes been thought that this distinction mapped onto the welfarist/libertarian divide. I will argue that this is precisely wrong. The pluralist/rationalist distinction crosscuts the economic one. Liberals of whatever economic stripe have to face the pluralist/rationalist tension and the choices it poses. As hard questions about, for instance, multiculturalism assume greater prominence than old debates over taxation, libertarians and welfarists confront much the same difficulties in much the same ways, just in virtue of being liberals and not nationalists, republicans, or something else. After socialism, as before it, liberals face a necessary tension and difficult choices between pluralism and rationalism.
II. Autonomy and Toleration
In political theory debates about multiculturalism and religion, a distinction between “toleration” or “autonomy” being the foundation of liberalism has gained a fairly widespread acceptance in the literature. The difference between these potential foundations matters when, to use political theorist Will Kymlicka’s language, we are discussing the right of illiberal cultural or religious groups to impose “internal restrictions” on their members. It also matters when we debate the justifiable boundary between state and parental decision-making over education. Should the state tolerate illiberal groups, groups that systematically try to restrain the autonomy of their members and discourage them from reconsidering and revising their beliefs? [Italics added by LA.] Should it restrain the urge to make cultural and religious groups into little liberal democracies?
Some liberal theorists suggest that the central liberal commitment to tolerating religious diversity requires that the liberal state show such restraint. Others have held that the liberal commitment to promoting the capacity for free individual choice requires the reverse. Political theorist William Galston has maintained that these debates illustrate a conflict between a liberalism with autonomy as its central value and a liberalism that values diversity, and has argued that the latter is more genuinely liberal. Kymlicka, by contrast, contends that the distinction here is between two kinds of toleration, a liberal one that values autonomy and an illiberal one that does not. Liberal feminist Susan Moller Okin has staked out a position on one edge of this debate, maintaining that cultural and religious minorities inculcate sexist views as well as practice sexist traditions, and that women’s freedom will be best served if these traditional communities become “extinct.” Following her earlier writings on the ways in which the family as currently constituted could be a threat to the liberal freedom and standing of women, she argues that cultural and religious groups similarly threaten the liberty of women (and children). [LA comments: Many people reading this would think that the concern being expressed has to do with radically illiberal groups such as Muslims; should the state allow Muslim customs, sharia law, restrictions on women, and so on? But I think that Levy is thinking at least as much about traditional Christian and conservative groups as he is about immigrant and Muslim groups.]
Political theorist Chandran Kukathas, at what is perhaps the other extreme within liberalism, articulates and defends a liberal vision defined wholly in terms of toleration and freedom of association, one that protects cultural and religious groups from almost all state intrusion, even if they refuse to educate their young and even if their traditions and practices are violent. On this account, liberty is threatened by the state and realized in the societies, associations, and communities that free persons join or find themselves in and do not leave. It seems to me—though I cannot argue the case fully here—that there is something irresolvable about the tension between these two schools. It is not the case that a correct understanding of one of the key concepts here—toleration, autonomy, diversity, or freedom of association—will dissolve the conflict. There are genuine moral and liberal goods defended by each of the two streams of thought, and these goods are genuinely in tension with each other. These goods, and this tension, are not only at stake in issues pertaining to cultural and religious communities. They also arise when we discuss voluntary associations, families, any of the array of groupings and institutions between the individual and the central state, or federalism itself more generally. [Emphasis added by LA.]
Moreover, I want to suggest that the autonomy/toleration dispute is not a new one, but one as old as liberalism itself. That is to say, the debate over autonomy and toleration is the latest episode in a very old argument.
It reiterates a part of what has long been disputed regarding whether the array of intermediate institutions, associations, and communities in a society—with their diverse internal practices, customs, and rules—should be regarded as friends or foes of liberal freedom. There is an enduring tension between seeing such institutions—and the loyalties they engender, and the traditions they pass on—as bulwarks against the state and sites where free people live their diverse lives, and seeing them as the sites of local tyranny that the liberal state must be strong enough to keep in check. One strand of liberalism insists that the liberal state must allow freedom to persons as they are, living the lives that they already lead. The other envisions eliminating or reforming those social institutions that stand as barriers to rational autonomy and individual self-direction. But the difference between these two strands of liberalism does not map onto the difference between market and welfare liberalism.
In the decades before economic questions became the dominant political questions, liberals argued about a wide range of issues that have more in common with such contemporary topics as culture, religion, and intermediate institutions than they do with redistribution. Were the so-called ancient liberties—the rights of cities, guilds, churches, parlements, and the rest of the corps intermediares—barriers against the power of absolutist monarchs, or feudal obstacles to the development of equal freedom?
Montesquieu and Burke thought the former, Voltaire and Paine the latter. Montesquieu and Voltaire similarly quarreled over how to view the attempts by enlightened despots to crush primitive habits and customs among their people. Should the British state respect the freedom of subject Indians to live according to their customs, or should it try to create for them freedom from these customs? Burke and Mill came down on opposite sides of this issue. Acton and Mill parted ways on whether a multiplicity of national identities within the state would aid freedom, by ensuring that loyalties other than to the state would exist, or would damage it, by keeping citizens divided against each other.
In general, Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, and Acton saw freedom as aided or instantiated by that which is local, customary, unplanned, diverse, and decentralized, while Voltaire, Paine, Kant, and Mill saw freedom as promoted by that which is equal, rational, planned, enlightened, and principled. This is not, as I shall make clear, to make the latter group into Jacobins or socialists, or the former one into reactionaries. We can recognize liberal freedom as a central political object for all of these thinkers, in a way that sets them apart from Robespierre or Joseph de Maistre. But we can also recognize the dangers to liberal freedom in embracing either liberal group’s line of thought to the exclusion of that of the other. The tyrannies of family, plantation, local government, and feudal institutions were too easily missed by those who focused only on the dangers posed by the central state. The tyrannies of revolution and empire, of coercive assimilation and state invasion, were often too easily glossed over by those enthusiastic to ecrase l’infame.
The tradition of Kant and Mill includes thinkers who fought for the abolition of slavery and for the extension of legal equality to women, against the local tyrannies of household, plantation, and state governments.
The line of thought represented by Montesquieu and Burke encompasses those who recognized the dangers of the assaults by successive French regimes on mediating institutions, of the nationalist idea that divisions of national identity should not exist in the same state, and of imperialism and coercive assimilation. Both of these traditions of thought capture a necessary aspect of a full liberal theory of freedom. Liberalism must be committed to checking centralized as well as local tyranny; it must also in some way be committed to both a diversity of free lives and a sense that these lives are freely chosen rather than imposed. But it is, and has always been, difficult to keep these commitments fully in mind simultaneously. An appreciation of the dangers of local tyranny characteristically leads to a kind of myopia about the central state, and vice versa.
Thus, Paine’s understanding of the evil of slavery stems from the same source as his deep misunderstanding of the French Revolution. Acton’s appreciation of the dangers that a powerful centralized state poses for liberty cannot easily be separated from his view that the Southern cause in the Civil War was freedom’s cause. Tocqueville did not see the family or slavery as clearly as Mill did, but, and for the same reasons, Mill did not see voluntary associations, religious groups, or the corps intermediares as Tocqueville did. Most of the thinkers in these traditions at least tried to pay attention to both kinds of concerns; none held as an axiom that only the state or only groups and associations could threaten freedom. And some came closer to integrating both kinds of concerns than others did.
But, with the possible exception of Benjamin Constant, none reached a particularly satisfactory balance, for reasons that may cast light on our current debates.
III. Liberal Freedoms
The tension between the two traditions discussed in the previous section (I will sometimes refer to them as the rationalist and pluralist styles of thought) has both a moral-philosophical and a social-institutional component.
The philosophical issue centers on the questions of who is entitled to freedom, and what sorts of lives they are entitled to create with their freedom. Are all persons entitled to have their choices respected and their lives left alone? Are persons as we find them in the world—culturally and socially influenced, holding many beliefs heteronomously and only because they were raised to believe them—already suited for liberty? Or is the moral case for freedom dependent on people having some level of autonomy or intellectual attainment? To put it another way: If persons are living lives into which they have been socialized, if they are making decisions solely on the basis of what tradition demands, or if they are unreflective about their choices, can they really be said to be living freely? And if their choices are not free to begin with, can one make a moral demand that these choices be respected by the state? We do not think that children, the insane, or the brainwashed are free in a morally desirable sense if they are simply left alone to follow their whims. Why, then, should we consider as free those who hold a religious belief simply because it was instilled in them while they were young? Or, for those whose initial choice to enter a restrictive community is freely made, what kinds of restrictions may they accept on their future freedom? If they may not sell themselves into slavery, may they give up all their goods and all or nearly all of their rights?
The social-institutional component of the tension concerns whether local and secondary institutions threaten or protect freedom. How effectively does institutional competition or rights of exit constrain associations, communities, or local levels of government? How much protection can intermediate institutions provide against the central state? How likely is it that a strong central state will act to protect individuals’ freedom against local tyranny rather than ally with the local tyrants? Here there need not be any disagreement at all about the nature of freedom or about who is entitled to it. But the disagreements at the level of social theory and political science can be at least as important as those at the level of moral philosophy.
The claims that have been made during the many iterations of the pluralist/rationalist debate about associations, communities, and such groups’ relationship to freedom might be laid out as follows. Groups and institutions may be understood as:
(1) instantiating freedom (they are the sites where diverse free lives are led; forming and living in such groupings is what free persons do with their freedom)
(2) protecting freedom (by standing as bulwarks against the central state)
(3) promoting freedom (by generating institutional competition)
Conversely, groups and institutions can be understood as:
(4) (necessarily) inhibiting freedom (by encouraging heteronomy—they socialize their members, constrain their thinking and their imagination, and bring them to lead traditional rather than selfdirected lives [as I will explain below, this claim is much less often the key issue dividing the two sides than we are led to believe if we conceive of the debate between the traditions as one between “autonomy” and something else]).
(5) (possibly) threatening freedom (by becoming sites of local tyranny—they may adopt internally illiberal rules, oppress their members, or give some of their members unjust power over others)
(6) undermining freedom (by teaching illiberal habits that will then be applied in the polity at large, or by acting as schools of servility and hierarchy) Claims (1) and (4) are directly opposed; we cannot think both simultaneously, at least not about the same institution or association.
Claims (2), (3), (5), and (6) could each be the case sometimes, for reasons that should not in principle turn on our views about claims (1) and (4). Claim (4) in particular is detachable from the rest, and is less important among liberals than we may be led to believe by the autonomy/toleration terminology. Nonetheless, the views often cluster: claim (1) with claims (2) and (3), claim (4) with claims (5) and (6).
Two other claims also sometimes cluster with these various ideas about freedom. One is the claim, linked with liberal equality, that having a plurality of rules and traditions (especially, but not only, when these are given legal force) clearly conflicts with universalism, egalitarianism, and the rule of law; I will call this claim (7). The arbitrary variations in liberties and privileges protected under the ancien regime; the changes in laws from one country, province, or state in a federation to the next; special governing bodies for ethnic minorities; religious exemptions from state laws—these and more have all been criticized for violating the requirements of equality, sometimes independently of any criticism of the content of the rules and traditions.
An important view on the pluralist side that often but not always goes with claims (1)–(3) is the claim that customs, traditions, local attachments, and so on are quite durable; I will call this proposition claim (8). If it is, as a sociological matter, very hard to deliberately break people away from their extant ways of life, then this may count as an independent reason for the state not to try to do so. Trying to break these patterns of behavior will provoke great conflict and resentment; it may badly disrupt the lives of the persons it is trying to aid; and, out of frustration, those trying to break these patterns may be drawn down the path of using ever more illiberal and repressive means. This was an argument of great importance to Montesquieu, who thought that the efforts of enlightened despots to rid their people of primitive habits tended to result in quite a lot of despotism without much enlightenment. But the argument also counted a great deal for Constant, who was much less attached to the corps intermediares for their own sake than Montesquieu was. And something like this argument underlies the reluctance of political and legal philosopher Joseph Raz, despite his overriding commitment to autonomy, to sanction state attacks on what he considers “valueless” communities and traditions that discourage autonomy. [article continues]