Liberalism and Its Discontents PDF
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LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS Liberalism and Its Discontents Patrick Neal Associate Professor of Political Science University of Vermont, Burlington © Patrick Neal 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms <>f any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act ir. relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-14364-1 ISBN 978-1-349-14362-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-14362-7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 1098765 4 3 2 I 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 For Granny, Mom and Diane Three Extraordinary Women Contents Acknowledgments viii Part I Neutrality and the Good in Liberal Theory 2 Introduction 3 2 Liberalism and Neutrality 15 3 A Liberal Theory of the Good? 34 Part II Rawls and Political Liberalism 4 In the Shadow of the General Will: Rawls, Kant and Rousseau on the Problem of Political Right 51 5 Justice as Fairness: Political or Metaphysical? 71 6 Does He Mean What He Says? (Mis)Understanding Rawls' Practical Tum 98 Part ill Alternative Liberalisms 7 Perfectionism With a Liberal Face? Nervous Liberals and Raz's Political Theory 135 8 Dworkin on the Foundations of Liberal Equality 162 9 Vulgar Liberalism 185 Index 206 Acknowledgments With good luck, there will be other books to write, but I'm not taking any chances. So I shall not pass up this opportunity to publicly acknowledge and express my thanks to the friends, teachers, colleagues and students who have helped in various ways to teach me how to think and write about the matters discussed herein. Robert DiClerico and William S. Haymond, at West Virginia University, made me love the study of ideas. Ed Andrew, Christian Bay, Asher Horowitz, Ron Replogle, Joe Fletcher and Brad Adams at the University of Toronto, helped me learn how to study them. David Paris and Ted Eismeier, at Hamilton College, taught me the appropriate way to treat ideas, by helping me learn the art of teaching. Alan Wertheimer and Bob Pepperman Taylor, my friends and colleagues in political theory at the University of Vermont for the past eight years, have been not only intellec tual instructors but also, and perhaps more vitally, sources of constant support and encouragement. I also wish to acknowledge the help and support of Candace Smith, Fritz Gaenslen, Tom Rice, John Burke, Richard Alway and Charley Bockway. I am grateful as well to the students I have known in a decade of teaching; they have been my companions in thinking through the ideas and issues raised in this book, and have been more than liberal in their willingness to bear my inadequacies. The essays comprising this book were written over nearly a decade, a time during which I quite literally grew up, at least to the degree I am likely to. I have no way to fully express my gratitude to my wife Diane and my children Brendan, Derek and Laura, my teachers in life's ways and wonders. I am grateful to the following journals for their permission to reprint the essays which appear here. My thanks to Polity, for chapters 2 and 6; Canadian Journal of Philosophy and the University of Calgary Press for Chapter 3; Review of Politics for Chapter 4; Political Theory and Sage Publications for Chapters 5 and 9; Social Theory and Practice for Chapter 7, and Legal Theory for Chapter 8. I am also grateful to the Graduate College of the University of Vermont for financial support which aided in the preparation of this material. "Liberalism and Neutrality," Polity, vol. 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1985), pp. 664-84. "A Liberal Theory of the Good?," Canadian Journal ofP hilosophy, vol. 17, no. 3 (September, 1987), pp. 567-82. "In the Shadow of the General Will: Rawls, Kant and Rousseau on the Problem of Political Right," Review of Politics, vol. 49, no. 3 (Summer, 1987), pp. 389-409. Vlll Acknowledgments IX "Justice as Fairness: Political or Metaphysical?," Political Theory, vol. 18, no. 1 (February, 1990), pp. 24-50. "Does He Mean What He Says? (Mis)Understanding Rawls' Practical Turn," Polity, vol. 27, no. 1 (Fall, 1994), pp. 77-112. "Perfectionism with a Liberal Face? Nervous Liberals and Raz's Political Theory," Social Theory and Practice, vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 25-58. "Dworkin on the Foundations of Liberal Equality," Legal Theory, vol. I, no. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 205-26. "Vulgar Liberalism," Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 4 (November, 1993), pp. 665-90. Part I Neutrality and the Good in Liberal Theory 1 Introduction Nearly half a century ago, Lionel Trilling wrote, "It has for some time seemed to me that a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time."1 This book is an attempt to enact a version of Trilling's program. Many of the reigning ideas of liberal political theory are challenged and criticized, though for the most part the spirit animating these criticisms is itself liberal. Trilling referred to the "primal imagination" of liberalism as comprised of "an essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty." With a prescience which stands out in retrospect, he remarked with some foreboding upon the inevitable discrepancy between this "essence" and its "particular manifestations," noting especially the "impulse to organization" which has come to characterize the manifestation of liberalism as the orthodoxy of rule in the modern bureaucratic state. This impulse, he said, "did not suit well" with the "lively sense of contingency and possibility, and of those exceptions to the rule which may be the beginning of the end of the rule" he took to bespeak the essence of the liberal spirit. Trilling was still enough of a modernist to say "did not suit well" rather than "betrays," and the difference between the verbs marks the difference between a still hopeful, if chastened, liberalism and a more cynical rejection of it, which has come to be known under the label of post-modernism. I am not sure which perspective is the more defensible, though I believe the issue between them is of vital significance to us. Trying to think clearly about the question of, as it were, whether the letter betrays the spirit, has led me to think about things other than liberalism, and these other things now seem to me to cast a shadow on the place ofliberal ideas within a more comprehensive order of reflection. But this perspective and concern is largely absent, at least consciously, from the chapters which follow. Herein, I set out to think critically about the reasons offered by leading liberal thinkers in support of the political morality they affirm, and would have us affirm. When I began to think and write about these matters I had a somewhat inchoate notion that their "completion" would be marked by some sort of decision or judgment, one which would answer with finality the question "Liberalism-Yes or No?'' This turns out not to be so, though I hope that a reader moved by the desire 3
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