Liberalism: The Arguments For and Against

In one line

Liberalism is defended as the only doctrine that takes each person seriously and the only one that has reliably limited power, and it is attacked from four directions: for producing atomised individuals, for protecting formal freedoms while ignoring real ones, for pretending to be neutral when it is not, and for exporting a Western model as though it were universal.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: liberalism is supported on the grounds that it protects the individual against arbitrary power, that it alone has produced constitutional and limited government, that toleration is the only workable arrangement in a plural society, and that free discussion is the condition of finding out anything; and it is criticised by conservatives for dissolving the social fabric, by socialists for protecting formal liberties while permitting substantive inequality, by communitarians and feminists for resting on an abstract individual who does not exist, and by postcolonial critics for universalising a particular Western experience.

The arguments in favour

1. It protects the individual against power. The historical record is the strongest thing liberalism has. The institutions that actually limit governments, constitutions, enforceable rights, independent courts, free elections, a free press, are liberal in origin, and they exist in no other tradition in that combination.

2. It takes each person seriously. On no other account is it true that a person may not be sacrificed for a larger benefit. Utilitarianism permits it, chapter 660 shows how, and collective doctrines permit it more readily.

3. It is the only workable arrangement in a plural society. Where people disagree deeply about religion and about how to live, the alternatives to toleration are suppression or civil conflict. India, with several religions, many languages and a deep caste hierarchy, is the case that makes the argument concrete rather than abstract.

4. Free discussion is how anything is found out. Mill's argument at chapter 610: a silenced opinion may be true; if false it may contain part of the truth; and even a wholly false opinion keeps a true one from becoming dead dogma.

5. It is self-correcting. Liberalism's own commitments to criticism and to evidence let it change, which is what the shift to modern liberalism at chapter 580 actually was. Ideologies that treat their own doctrine as settled cannot do that.

6. It has delivered. The societies that adopted liberal constitutional arrangements have generally produced higher standards of living, longer lives, and fewer people killed by their own governments than those that did not. That is a claim about the record, and it is the argument that persuades people who are unmoved by the philosophy.

The arguments against

From conservatism

It dissolves the fabric it depends on. Liberalism inherits a society held together by family, religion, custom and shared obligation, treats all of these as optional attachments, and then relies on the social trust they produced. Chapter 360's Burke is the classical statement.