Liberalism and the Moral Life.

Liberalism and the Moral Life,

THE CONTRIBUTORS to Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum of Brown University, are concerned to respond to the charge that liberalism is a desiccated doctrine, indifferent to moral and communal needs. Most of the 12 essayists would probably vote straight Democratic, but they understand "liberalism" in a broad enough sense that it's likely that many readers of this magazine would qualify as liberals. A liberal is approximately one who believes the chief justification of the state to be that it defends individual freedom.

That's the starting point for a variety of reflections, varying in quality, not eay to relate to each other, but in several cases rich, original, and stimulating. Expecting to disagree, I found myself again and again not so much "won over" as forced to see familiar questions in a new light.

In "The Liberalism of Fear," Judith Shklar argues that liberalism is "a party of memory rather than a party of hope." She contends that liberalism began as a reaction against states with grand ambitions, which were used to justify cruel practices. Since 1914, state torture and persecution have returned on a far larger scale than the old optimistic liberalism would have believed possible. This fact, she argues, only increases the pertinence of a purely negative liberalism, preoccupied with the simple prevention of state cruelty and the corrupting rule of fear. The evils formerly used in the service of religion are no less evil in the service of secular ideals. "We would do far less harm," she writes, "if we learned to accept each other as sentient beings, whatever else we may be, and to understand that physical well-being and toleration are not simply inferior to the other aims that each one of us may choose to pursue."

She replies sharply, undauntedly to the charge that liberal universalism overlooks local cultural values: "The Chinese did not really like Mao's reign any more than we would, in spite of their political and cultural difference from us." On the contrary, the relativism of this attack is "deeply illiberal, not only in its submission to tradition as an ideal, but in its dogmatic identification of every local pratice with deeply shared local human aspirations."

Charles Taylor denies that liberalism is anti-communitarian. Instead, he argues, liberalism can form the basis of community, because it makes possible a shared political affection that is not possible when the state serves the interests of only part of the populace while treating others with contempt. He perceptively distinguishes between the pleasures we can enjoy separately and those we enjoy as social experiences: "If we are lovers or close friends, Mozart-with-you is a quite different experience than Mozartalone." Reversing the charge that liberalism atomizes us, he holds that it fosters a civic amity all its own.

Here I can of course give only a smack of these arguments, but one of the best resists any summary at all: George Kateb's "Democratic Individuality and the Meaning of Rights." Taking off from the "Emersonian tradition," he pits "democratic individuality" against "oppressive sociality" and describes an imaginative freedom made possible by a liberal regime but transcending politics altogether. "Democratic individuality is not egotism," he writes; "its highest purpose is to establish a new sort of connectedness, but one that bears little relation to communitarianism in a strict sense or in any loose sense." Kateb's essay is less argument than lyric, but it beautifully suggests a state of mind, fugitive but ecstatic, that liberalism frees us for: a state of "enriched inwardness," endowed with "a greater lightness, tentativeness, irony, distance, playfulness, uncertainty, awkwardness, loosensess." As Miss Shklar defines liberalism in terms of a summum malum, Mr. Kateb offers its summum bonum.

Stephen Holmes brilliantly describes, and then demolishes, "The Permanent Structure of Anti-liberal Thought." It's possible to object that his composite of the critics of liberalism is a straw man, but one man's straw man is another's ideal type. The least you can say for him is that he pinpoints some common fallacies.

Anti-liberals, for example, tend to oppose liberalism to "the social." The term "social" is rarely defined usefully in their polemics, but is always implicitly good, in contrast to the allegedly "atomized" individualism of liberals. This is generally a rhetorical trick to cover for a collectivist or authoritarian agenda. The truth is that liberalism's "individual" is himself a social institution, presumed to be highly socialized (or capable of being so), but also presumed competent to choose voluntary affiliations without state coercion.

Anti-liberals also pose false alternatives: private interest versus public virtue, or base individualism versus noble community. "Anti-liberals invariably suggest that when people overcome their self-interest, they are necessarily acting in an admirable and public-spirited way. They assume, in other words, that the selfless--selfish scheme maps smoothly onto the good-bad scheme. But this leaves out of account the prominent place of selfless cruelty in human affairs." Fanatics and terrorists, for example, are often selfless communitarians, ready to kill and sometimes die for causes larger than themselves. "Those who overcome self-interest are not automatically benevolent or humane."

Again, liberalism is often accused of denying when it is merely differentiating. To ask a judge to ignore a defendant's religion is in no way to disparage the importance of religion in the defendant's own life, merely to affirm its irrelevance to the cause at hand.

Some of the other contributors do lean to collectivist, even socialist programs, but their arguments are less interesting, largely because they show no awareness of recent libertarian thought or simply fail to address its ideas with anything but the sort of rhetoric Holmes deflates. Most of the contributors show no sense of the importance of private property either as a right in itself or as a bulwark of other rights. But the book as a whole is redeemed by more than one insight that any political philosophy worthy of the name will have to reckon with.