Liberalism: The Arguments For and Against

It is too confident in reason. The belief that arrangements can be redesigned by argument underestimates how much settled institutions know that nobody can articulate.

Its individual is not how people actually experience themselves. People are born into families, communities and obligations they never chose, and a theory that treats these as voluntary describes nobody.

From socialism

Formal freedom without substantive means is empty. This is the most powerful criticism and it produced the shift to modern liberalism. A right to property is worth nothing to a person who has none; freedom of contract between very unequal parties is the freedom of the stronger.

It protects the distribution it found. By treating existing holdings as rights, liberalism converts an unequal starting point into a set of entitlements, and calls interference with them a violation of liberty.

Political equality does not survive economic inequality. Equal votes coexist with grossly unequal influence, which is chapter 60's structural power and chapter 840's ethical decay of democracy.

From communitarians and feminists

The unencumbered self does not exist. Liberalism's individual is imagined as choosing their attachments, when in fact people's identities are constituted by attachments they never chose. Sandel and MacIntyre press this.

The public and private division protects domination. Liberalism confines the state to the public sphere and treats the household as private, with the result that inequality and violence within the family are outside politics. The feminist reply that the personal is political is aimed exactly here, and it is an important criticism in India, where personal law governs marriage, divorce, inheritance and guardianship.

Neutrality is not neutral. A state that claims to take no view about how people should live in fact embeds one, since the arrangements it treats as normal advantage some ways of living over others.

From postcolonial and Indian critics

It universalises a particular history. The rights, the individual and the market were formulated in a specific European experience and were exported by force to societies with different structures.

Liberal states practised the opposite abroad. The same states that developed constitutional government at home governed colonies without consent, without representation and without rights, and the contradiction was not incidental but simultaneous.

Its individualism misdescribes caste. A doctrine built on individuals treats a hierarchy that operates on birth groups as a series of private preferences. Ambedkar's position is the sharpest form of this criticism and belongs in an Indian answer: he accepted liberal constitutional forms and insisted they were insufficient, because political democracy without social democracy, that is, without liberty, equality and fraternity as principles of social life, rests on nothing. His warning that India was entering a life of contradictions, with equality in politics and inequality in social and economic life, is the criticism in one sentence.

The assessment an answer should reach

Notice what the criticisms have in common: almost none of them argues for abolishing rights, courts, elections or toleration. They argue that these are insufficient, and they differ about what must be added. That is the honest summary and it is what a strong answer says.

The socialist criticism was answered from inside, by the shift to modern liberalism, which is why chapter 580 matters here.

The communitarian and feminist criticisms remain live, and the public and private division in particular is not settled.

The postcolonial criticism is historically unanswerable and does not by itself show that the institutions are unsuitable, which is a distinction Ambedkar himself drew when he adopted liberal constitutional forms and demanded that social democracy be added to them.

A worked example

A community runs a school and refuses admission to children of one caste, saying that its members are free to associate as they choose and that the school is private.

The liberal defence available. Freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the right to run one's own institutions are liberal principles, and a state that overrides them is deciding how people should live.

The liberal answer to that defence. The children excluded are individuals whose equal moral worth is the first principle of liberalism itself, and the exclusion is on a ground of birth, which is exactly what liberalism was formed to attack. Freedom of association does not include a right to impose a disability on somebody else.

The communitarian point. Both parties are appealing to freedom, which shows that liberalism's own vocabulary does not settle the case without a further judgment about which attachment matters more.

The Ambedkarite point, and it is the decisive one for India. A rule of formal equality that leaves an inherited hierarchy in place will be defeated by that hierarchy, using liberal freedoms as its instruments. Which is why the Indian Constitution does not stop at prohibiting state discrimination: article 15(2) reaches access to shops, public restaurants and places of public entertainment; article 17 abolishes untouchability; and article 25(2)(b) permits the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character. Those provisions are liberalism modified by an accurate reading of the society it was being applied to.

Distinctions that carry marks

What these arguments are NOT

They are not mostly arguments for abolishing liberal institutions. Almost every critic keeps rights, courts and elections and argues that they are not enough.

"Liberalism failed" is too crude. The record on limiting arbitrary power is the strongest single argument in political theory, and an answer that ignores it is unbalanced.

The socialist criticism is not a live objection to modern liberalism in the same form. It was answered in part from inside, which is why the two criticisms must be dated.

Ambedkar is not an opponent of liberalism. He adopted its constitutional forms and demanded that social democracy be added, which is a criticism from within.

Quick revision

1. In favour: it limits power, and the institutions that actually do so are liberal in origin; it forbids sacrificing a person for a larger benefit; toleration is the only workable arrangement in a plural society; free discussion is how anything is found out; it is self-correcting; and the record of liberal states on living standards and on government killing its own people is the strongest empirical argument.
2. Conservative criticism: it dissolves the fabric it inherits, over-trusts reason, and describes nobody's actual experience of family and community.
3. Socialist criticism: formal freedom without means is empty; it protects the distribution it found; political equality does not survive economic inequality.
4. Communitarian and feminist: the unencumbered self does not exist; the public and private division puts the household outside politics; neutrality is not neutral.
5. Postcolonial and Indian: it universalises a particular history; liberal states governed colonies on opposite principles at the same time; and its individualism misdescribes caste.
6. Ambedkar: political democracy without social democracy is a life of contradictions, equality in politics and inequality in social and economic life. This is criticism from inside liberalism, and the Constitution answers it with articles 15(2), 17 and 25(2)(b).
7. The honest summary: almost every criticism says liberal institutions are insufficient rather than wrong.

Test yourself

1. State the strongest arguments in favour of liberalism. That it has actually limited power, since constitutions, enforceable rights, independent courts, free elections and a free press are liberal in origin and exist nowhere else in that combination. That it alone forbids sacrificing an individual for a larger benefit. That toleration is the only workable arrangement where people disagree deeply about religion and about how to live, which is India's condition. That free discussion is how anything is discovered, on Mill's argument. That it is self-correcting, as the shift to modern liberalism shows. And that the societies adopting it have produced longer lives, higher living standards and fewer people killed by their own governments.

2. State the socialist criticism and say what became of it. That formal freedom without substantive means is empty: a right to property is worth nothing to a person who has none, and freedom of contract between very unequal parties is the freedom of the stronger; that by treating existing holdings as rights liberalism converts an unequal starting point into entitlements; and that political equality does not survive economic inequality. It was answered in part from inside liberalism, since it is precisely what produced the shift from classical to modern liberalism, the enabling state and the welfare programme. The criticism therefore has to be dated: it is decisive against classical liberalism and only partly effective against the modern form.

3. Explain the feminist criticism of the public and private division. That liberalism confines the state to a public sphere and treats the household as private, with the result that inequality of power, unequal distribution of work, and violence within the family fall outside politics altogether. The claim that the personal is political is directed at exactly this. It has particular force in India, where personal law governs marriage, divorce, inheritance and guardianship, so that the arrangements affecting women most directly are placed in the sphere the state is said not to enter.

4. What is Ambedkar's criticism, and why is it a criticism from within? That political democracy cannot survive without social democracy, meaning liberty, equality and fraternity as principles of social life; that India was entering a life of contradictions, with equality in politics and inequality in social and economic life; and that a formal equality laid over an inherited hierarchy will be defeated by that hierarchy. It is a criticism from within because he adopted liberal constitutional forms, rights, courts, elections and the rule of law, and demanded that they be supplemented rather than replaced, which is what articles 15(2), 17 and 25(2)(b) do.

5. What do the criticisms of liberalism have in common? That almost none of them argues for abolishing rights, courts, elections or toleration. They argue that these are insufficient, and they differ about what must be added: social obligation for conservatives, material means for socialists, recognition of constitutive attachments for communitarians, entry into the private sphere for feminists, and social democracy for Ambedkar. That is why the honest assessment is not that liberalism failed but that liberal institutions are necessary and, on their own, not enough.