An interview with political theorist Alexandre Lefebvre, whose important new book offers a comprehensive, spiritual defense of liberalism against its enemies and opponents
An excellent interview filled with thoughtful ideas, Damon; thanks much for sharing it. I can tell this is a serious book of ideas, but how scholarly is it, in terms of its engagement with the literature on comprehensive or perfectionist liberalism? I'm hardly up to date on this literature myself, so it might be that I'm missing what's in front of my eyes because I'm stuck in the liberalism-communitarianism debates of the 80s and 90s, but I clicked through the Princeton site to look at its index, and while I see a lot of engagement with Rawls, Laramore, and other major figures, I see no Galston or Rosenblum or other liberals that very explicitly talked about their liberalism as a religion or a source of virtue or a way of life. (I do see that Macedo gets a shout-out, so that's counter-evidence, I suppose.) Anyway, I guess I'm just asking: from a pedantic and perhaps dated political theory point of view, how does it stack up?
It's very scholarly in the footnotes, though that doesn't mean he'll cite exactly the authors and books you'd like to see. There's lots of Rawls and Shklar and Rosenblatt and Hadot and many others. Though I don't see Galston and Rosenblum. Not that I looked that closely.
Excellent interview. Important perspective. However...
In the following paragraph Lefebvre addresses (and Damon seems to join him) “the predicament we find ourselves in today—the current state of the culture war,” but misses the whole game. Liberals and conservatives absolutely need each other. Neither can see reality without the other. Some kind of ideology will occupy my mind, unless I am being impacted by ways of seeing I don’t have. Calling for liberals to be “generous” without asserting this first ends up being contemptuous.
“How we work our way out of this impasse is anyone’s guess. You’re far more competent and better placed to say. I reckon, though, that liberals need to take a first step and remember one of the pillars of their way of life: generosity, in this case, a hermeneutical generosity, a genuine civility let’s say, that would refrain from ever making those with different (yet still reasonable) worldviews feel as if they were held in contempt or had no place in our society. Liberals need a spirit of charity, to borrow a word from a different creed.”
This is a thoughtful and illuminating interview and perspective in many ways. However, I do find it a bit puzzling that AL’s take on liberalism seems, from this interview at least, to completely ignore the context of our capitalist society. My sense is that liberalism has become the privilege of those of us with “agency.” That is, we of the managerial elite and on upwards, those us who climb the ladders of “making it in America” that we have created and have imposed stringent gateways upon (like professional licensure, etc.). We partake of the many resulting opportunities and benefits of capitalism’s enormous capacity for creating wealth and comfort, while we essentially relegate many tens of millions of our fellow citizens and aspirational citizens, to the vagaries and immense vulnerabilities of the extraordinarily exploitative side of capitalism.
Capitalism as we know it and practice it is based on keeping the majority of people struggling just to get by. It leaves them often wary, anxious, fearful, resentful, under-educated, underemployed, over-leveraged financially, and so on. Our elite liberal capacity to be ever-so-generous of spirit and all of that, is structurally limited by how capitalism treats our fellow citizens.
Context matters. Socio-economic-political structures and systems matter. Liberalism at this point is a bit of a facade even as it is a gift of agency to we elites. This can easily be seen as well in the almost empty formalism of our democratic processes, where “the vote,” the mechanism most basic and remote from actual democratic engagement, is endlessly manipulated, suppressed, denied, and debased by, well, we elites who control such things.
Liberalism has a fine tradition and I’ve enjoyed it very much myself. But I also understand why so many now are grabbing onto the leadership of someone like Trump. He promises agency and power to the left-out. But it’s not the agency we think of as elites. It’s the agency to take power by whatever means necessary — especially, indeed, by exploiting the facade that liberalism has created and exploited.
One might well add that under current circumstances, any "charity" or "generosity" demonstrated by the managerial elites carries the unmistakable whiff of condescension.
Batya Ungar-Sargon (a liberal herself) has much to say about this.
So, too, does Buddhism. Ego is a more intractable problem than this interview suggests.
I was always taught that Liberalism was basically a tool kit of rights, laws and traditions that evolved to prevent religious and other disagreements from constantly metastasizing into armed conflict. Under this arrangement, governing was a mostly tedious business of lawmaking and budgets and most of life was lived outside the purview of government in families, communities, faith organizations and the other intermediate social institutions that are essential to life in ways that unlimited personal choice is not. The writer posits that the post 1960s decline in religious faith has led many people to adopt a broadly liberal attitude towards not just government but life in general. I am concerned that this is really an effort to define "post 1960s liberalism" as "liberalism" and therefore exclude people with disfavored views from the liberal umbrella. For example, in say, 1960, one could oppose elective abortion, no fault divorce, legal recognition of gay relationships and the entire category of gender rather than sex in the law but still be a liberal in good standing. What changed? Why is that person now not liberal in the broadest sense as long as they subscribe to the basic tenets of our constitutional order? How does this version of liberalism come off continually shoving change down people's throats, often by non democratic means, and then attacking people who won't get with the program as being illiberal? Taken to an extreme, I could see this definition of liberalism become not merely a device to allow diverse peoples to agree to disagree but a virulent form of anti-culture that seeks to liberate the the sovereign individual from all obligation outside the self. That's no way to run an airline!
That's easily solved. Just create an acronym for those who cling to (ostensibly) illiberal traditions. How's "CPMJ+" (Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews [& other Theists])? Add them to the list, along with "AAPI," "LGBTQIA+," and "Latinx." <snark>
I enjoyed this exchange. The questions touch on what I feel is the double-edged nature of liberalism as a moral worldview (rather than as a proceduralism handbook).
I agree liberalism is a project that has a rich spiritual-ethical tradition. Charles Taylor's big book A Secular Age traces in detail how and why liberal values emerged, and makes a good case for the profound good it has achieved (even though, as a Catholic believer, he thinks secularism is a precarious foundation for those moral achievements).
But the blindspot in Taylor's book, in a lot of scholars' view, is that he ignores how all of the moral goods fostered by secular liberalism––human autonomy, reason, freedom––derived their contours and substantive meaning by being defined against the unreason and unfreedom of "savage" peoples. The values of liberalism, emerging across the same centuries that Euro-Christians colonized almost all of the globe, have often been weaponized such that "saving," "helping," and "developing" non-Western peoples is very hard to distinguish from colonizing and extracting resources from them.
So its the internal difference in liberalism that, it seems to me, has to be accounted for. The label of liberalism might not stretch far enough to include, say, the anti-imperialism of William James and the hawkishness of self-proclaimed liberals like, say, Sam Harris (of late applying the "barbarism versus civilization" trope to castigate anyone the least bit queasy about Gaza). Are the "strident" liberals really in the same camp as, say, the liberalism of Amnesty International?
Please... Sam Harris is about as much of a liberal as Father Coughlin (who did, after all, call his publication "Social Justice").
Meanwhile, the problem with the "anti-colonial" worldview is that it creates an Oppression Olympics (and a class of arbiters) to adjudicate all claims to be "more indigenous than thou." Ironically, that might be merely a further hubristic turn in secular liberalism -- an extension of the same mindset that gave us colonialism, now chasing its own tail.
Harris calls himself a "classic liberal." He's right in the longer historical trajectory Linker and Lefebvre are talking about in this interview. He avows the Enlightenment values and liberal economic principles that fused in the nineteenth century. But, as I was flagging in my post, those values––tolerance, individualism, property rights, etc.––were not at odds with various kinds of racist and imperial projects (spreading "freedom" to unfree peoples, developmental civilizing, etc), either in the 19th C or today.
That's why Harris and others who call themselves "classic liberals" share so many policy views with conservatives. Liberal values that Father Coughlin would abhor (no state promotion of religion, hostility to natural law jurisprudence) can still be mobilized to invade Iraq or justify war crimes when the perpetrator counts as a civilized country.
The Global South is not very secular but is still anti-colonial. The liberalism of the West claims to disavow colonialism but liberals often lose their nerve when confronted with various kinds of neo-colonial projects––for example the Bush administration's project to use 9-11 as an opportunistic change to bring the Middle East under the aegis of a Pax Americana. Whatever the rhetoric of Twitterers, there is not an Oppression Olympics that actually translates into policy when the rubber hits the road.
My point was that liberalism has not come to terms with its mixed record when it comes to how its values and its historical achievements have played out internationally.
Oy, vey! I was thinking of Sam Francis (definitely a Coughlin disciple)! Mea culpa!
I'll stand by what I wrote about the "anti-colonial" Oppression Olympics. In that regard -- ironically -- though I'm not an atheist, I suppose I might have much in common with Sam Harris. ;-)
(Liberalism is about viewing political "self-determination" as an individual, rather than collective, attribute. Therefore, FWIW, in terms of Israel/Palestine, my view (as a liberal) is similar to the "spiritual Zionism" of Judah Magnes, who advocated for a single (liberal) State. Unfortunately Magnes was run out of Israel by the combined efforts of political Zionists and their (proto-Palestinian) terrorist adversaries, and shortly thereafter, he died in New York of [literally] a broken heart. That might signal liberalism's deepest vulnerability. IMHO, this won't be over until al-Aqsa is emblazoned with the words, "This House shall be a House of Prayer for all people.")
After services, I can meet Sam Harris for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. ;-)
Damon, your liberalism is so disappointingly parochial DNC. What you call "restiction of transgender rights" I call a staunchly liberal defense of the right of women to free association. And no mention at all of left restrictions of rights, such as the recent spate of blue-state laws that declare that parents turning down "gender affirming care" for their child is the legal equivalent of child abuse. This is as anti-liberal a law as I can possibly imagine.
This is an eye-opening concept: That, far from a "golden rule" framework for constructing a philosophy of a good life, that we have the opportuntity to build such a life around "freedom and generosity." The 1st really is, still, a kind of spiritual-game-theory-of-survival wherein we avoid acting in a way we wouldn't like to be acted upon; the 2nd, as an ideal anyway, invites us to ask "what decision here leads to the most freedom afterwards?" and "what decision would be the most generous?" Find the path that optimizes both parameters and you might be onto something.
I still like Etzioni's "new golden rule" ("do unto your social order what you would have that order do unto your autonomy") but I intend to order AL's book. Thanks Damon!
This is an interesting analysis (and an important discussion) -- but it overlooks the consolidation of secular hierarchies ostensibly based on rationalism or "expertise" (e.g., the highly regimented organization of health care) -- which have become, by far, the most salient manifestations of hierarchy in contemporary societies. It doesn't account for the condition observed by Kafka, or for "Brave New World."
The Enlightenment Deists (or even Spinoza) -- hinging the self-determination of the individual on "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God" -- were not atheists (even halfheartedly), despite a long-standing leftist tendency to imply that they were merely at a way-station along that road.
There's also a crucial difference between equality of opportunity (regardless of ethnicity), and the latter-day (race-conscious) notion of "equity," that the discussion here doesn't even attempt to address.
In the end, we're left with more questions than answers -- and whether this is, in itself, spiritually satisfying (let alone compelling or politically viable) is one of those open questions. ;-)
An excellent interview filled with thoughtful ideas, Damon; thanks much for sharing it. I can tell this is a serious book of ideas, but how scholarly is it, in terms of its engagement with the literature on comprehensive or perfectionist liberalism? I'm hardly up to date on this literature myself, so it might be that I'm missing what's in front of my eyes because I'm stuck in the liberalism-communitarianism debates of the 80s and 90s, but I clicked through the Princeton site to look at its index, and while I see a lot of engagement with Rawls, Laramore, and other major figures, I see no Galston or Rosenblum or other liberals that very explicitly talked about their liberalism as a religion or a source of virtue or a way of life. (I do see that Macedo gets a shout-out, so that's counter-evidence, I suppose.) Anyway, I guess I'm just asking: from a pedantic and perhaps dated political theory point of view, how does it stack up?
It's very scholarly in the footnotes, though that doesn't mean he'll cite exactly the authors and books you'd like to see. There's lots of Rawls and Shklar and Rosenblatt and Hadot and many others. Though I don't see Galston and Rosenblum. Not that I looked that closely.
Excellent interview. Important perspective. However...
In the following paragraph Lefebvre addresses (and Damon seems to join him) “the predicament we find ourselves in today—the current state of the culture war,” but misses the whole game. Liberals and conservatives absolutely need each other. Neither can see reality without the other. Some kind of ideology will occupy my mind, unless I am being impacted by ways of seeing I don’t have. Calling for liberals to be “generous” without asserting this first ends up being contemptuous.
“How we work our way out of this impasse is anyone’s guess. You’re far more competent and better placed to say. I reckon, though, that liberals need to take a first step and remember one of the pillars of their way of life: generosity, in this case, a hermeneutical generosity, a genuine civility let’s say, that would refrain from ever making those with different (yet still reasonable) worldviews feel as if they were held in contempt or had no place in our society. Liberals need a spirit of charity, to borrow a word from a different creed.”
michael johnson
This is a thoughtful and illuminating interview and perspective in many ways. However, I do find it a bit puzzling that AL’s take on liberalism seems, from this interview at least, to completely ignore the context of our capitalist society. My sense is that liberalism has become the privilege of those of us with “agency.” That is, we of the managerial elite and on upwards, those us who climb the ladders of “making it in America” that we have created and have imposed stringent gateways upon (like professional licensure, etc.). We partake of the many resulting opportunities and benefits of capitalism’s enormous capacity for creating wealth and comfort, while we essentially relegate many tens of millions of our fellow citizens and aspirational citizens, to the vagaries and immense vulnerabilities of the extraordinarily exploitative side of capitalism.
Capitalism as we know it and practice it is based on keeping the majority of people struggling just to get by. It leaves them often wary, anxious, fearful, resentful, under-educated, underemployed, over-leveraged financially, and so on. Our elite liberal capacity to be ever-so-generous of spirit and all of that, is structurally limited by how capitalism treats our fellow citizens.
Context matters. Socio-economic-political structures and systems matter. Liberalism at this point is a bit of a facade even as it is a gift of agency to we elites. This can easily be seen as well in the almost empty formalism of our democratic processes, where “the vote,” the mechanism most basic and remote from actual democratic engagement, is endlessly manipulated, suppressed, denied, and debased by, well, we elites who control such things.
Liberalism has a fine tradition and I’ve enjoyed it very much myself. But I also understand why so many now are grabbing onto the leadership of someone like Trump. He promises agency and power to the left-out. But it’s not the agency we think of as elites. It’s the agency to take power by whatever means necessary — especially, indeed, by exploiting the facade that liberalism has created and exploited.
Context!!
One might well add that under current circumstances, any "charity" or "generosity" demonstrated by the managerial elites carries the unmistakable whiff of condescension.
Batya Ungar-Sargon (a liberal herself) has much to say about this.
So, too, does Buddhism. Ego is a more intractable problem than this interview suggests.
I was always taught that Liberalism was basically a tool kit of rights, laws and traditions that evolved to prevent religious and other disagreements from constantly metastasizing into armed conflict. Under this arrangement, governing was a mostly tedious business of lawmaking and budgets and most of life was lived outside the purview of government in families, communities, faith organizations and the other intermediate social institutions that are essential to life in ways that unlimited personal choice is not. The writer posits that the post 1960s decline in religious faith has led many people to adopt a broadly liberal attitude towards not just government but life in general. I am concerned that this is really an effort to define "post 1960s liberalism" as "liberalism" and therefore exclude people with disfavored views from the liberal umbrella. For example, in say, 1960, one could oppose elective abortion, no fault divorce, legal recognition of gay relationships and the entire category of gender rather than sex in the law but still be a liberal in good standing. What changed? Why is that person now not liberal in the broadest sense as long as they subscribe to the basic tenets of our constitutional order? How does this version of liberalism come off continually shoving change down people's throats, often by non democratic means, and then attacking people who won't get with the program as being illiberal? Taken to an extreme, I could see this definition of liberalism become not merely a device to allow diverse peoples to agree to disagree but a virulent form of anti-culture that seeks to liberate the the sovereign individual from all obligation outside the self. That's no way to run an airline!
That's easily solved. Just create an acronym for those who cling to (ostensibly) illiberal traditions. How's "CPMJ+" (Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews [& other Theists])? Add them to the list, along with "AAPI," "LGBTQIA+," and "Latinx." <snark>
I enjoyed this exchange. The questions touch on what I feel is the double-edged nature of liberalism as a moral worldview (rather than as a proceduralism handbook).
I agree liberalism is a project that has a rich spiritual-ethical tradition. Charles Taylor's big book A Secular Age traces in detail how and why liberal values emerged, and makes a good case for the profound good it has achieved (even though, as a Catholic believer, he thinks secularism is a precarious foundation for those moral achievements).
But the blindspot in Taylor's book, in a lot of scholars' view, is that he ignores how all of the moral goods fostered by secular liberalism––human autonomy, reason, freedom––derived their contours and substantive meaning by being defined against the unreason and unfreedom of "savage" peoples. The values of liberalism, emerging across the same centuries that Euro-Christians colonized almost all of the globe, have often been weaponized such that "saving," "helping," and "developing" non-Western peoples is very hard to distinguish from colonizing and extracting resources from them.
So its the internal difference in liberalism that, it seems to me, has to be accounted for. The label of liberalism might not stretch far enough to include, say, the anti-imperialism of William James and the hawkishness of self-proclaimed liberals like, say, Sam Harris (of late applying the "barbarism versus civilization" trope to castigate anyone the least bit queasy about Gaza). Are the "strident" liberals really in the same camp as, say, the liberalism of Amnesty International?
Please... Sam Harris is about as much of a liberal as Father Coughlin (who did, after all, call his publication "Social Justice").
Meanwhile, the problem with the "anti-colonial" worldview is that it creates an Oppression Olympics (and a class of arbiters) to adjudicate all claims to be "more indigenous than thou." Ironically, that might be merely a further hubristic turn in secular liberalism -- an extension of the same mindset that gave us colonialism, now chasing its own tail.
Harris calls himself a "classic liberal." He's right in the longer historical trajectory Linker and Lefebvre are talking about in this interview. He avows the Enlightenment values and liberal economic principles that fused in the nineteenth century. But, as I was flagging in my post, those values––tolerance, individualism, property rights, etc.––were not at odds with various kinds of racist and imperial projects (spreading "freedom" to unfree peoples, developmental civilizing, etc), either in the 19th C or today.
That's why Harris and others who call themselves "classic liberals" share so many policy views with conservatives. Liberal values that Father Coughlin would abhor (no state promotion of religion, hostility to natural law jurisprudence) can still be mobilized to invade Iraq or justify war crimes when the perpetrator counts as a civilized country.
The Global South is not very secular but is still anti-colonial. The liberalism of the West claims to disavow colonialism but liberals often lose their nerve when confronted with various kinds of neo-colonial projects––for example the Bush administration's project to use 9-11 as an opportunistic change to bring the Middle East under the aegis of a Pax Americana. Whatever the rhetoric of Twitterers, there is not an Oppression Olympics that actually translates into policy when the rubber hits the road.
My point was that liberalism has not come to terms with its mixed record when it comes to how its values and its historical achievements have played out internationally.
Oy, vey! I was thinking of Sam Francis (definitely a Coughlin disciple)! Mea culpa!
I'll stand by what I wrote about the "anti-colonial" Oppression Olympics. In that regard -- ironically -- though I'm not an atheist, I suppose I might have much in common with Sam Harris. ;-)
(Liberalism is about viewing political "self-determination" as an individual, rather than collective, attribute. Therefore, FWIW, in terms of Israel/Palestine, my view (as a liberal) is similar to the "spiritual Zionism" of Judah Magnes, who advocated for a single (liberal) State. Unfortunately Magnes was run out of Israel by the combined efforts of political Zionists and their (proto-Palestinian) terrorist adversaries, and shortly thereafter, he died in New York of [literally] a broken heart. That might signal liberalism's deepest vulnerability. IMHO, this won't be over until al-Aqsa is emblazoned with the words, "This House shall be a House of Prayer for all people.")
After services, I can meet Sam Harris for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. ;-)
Damon, your liberalism is so disappointingly parochial DNC. What you call "restiction of transgender rights" I call a staunchly liberal defense of the right of women to free association. And no mention at all of left restrictions of rights, such as the recent spate of blue-state laws that declare that parents turning down "gender affirming care" for their child is the legal equivalent of child abuse. This is as anti-liberal a law as I can possibly imagine.
Open your eyes wider, please.
This is an eye-opening concept: That, far from a "golden rule" framework for constructing a philosophy of a good life, that we have the opportuntity to build such a life around "freedom and generosity." The 1st really is, still, a kind of spiritual-game-theory-of-survival wherein we avoid acting in a way we wouldn't like to be acted upon; the 2nd, as an ideal anyway, invites us to ask "what decision here leads to the most freedom afterwards?" and "what decision would be the most generous?" Find the path that optimizes both parameters and you might be onto something.
I still like Etzioni's "new golden rule" ("do unto your social order what you would have that order do unto your autonomy") but I intend to order AL's book. Thanks Damon!
The “reciprocity” concept sounds like the golden rule, by a different name.
This is an interesting analysis (and an important discussion) -- but it overlooks the consolidation of secular hierarchies ostensibly based on rationalism or "expertise" (e.g., the highly regimented organization of health care) -- which have become, by far, the most salient manifestations of hierarchy in contemporary societies. It doesn't account for the condition observed by Kafka, or for "Brave New World."
The Enlightenment Deists (or even Spinoza) -- hinging the self-determination of the individual on "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God" -- were not atheists (even halfheartedly), despite a long-standing leftist tendency to imply that they were merely at a way-station along that road.
There's also a crucial difference between equality of opportunity (regardless of ethnicity), and the latter-day (race-conscious) notion of "equity," that the discussion here doesn't even attempt to address.
In the end, we're left with more questions than answers -- and whether this is, in itself, spiritually satisfying (let alone compelling or politically viable) is one of those open questions. ;-)