Landmarks in the Evolution of Liberal Thought: Freedom, Plurality, Knowledge

ABSTRACT

In the past few decades, liberal and democratic thought has been subjected to attacks from the adherents of nationalism, populism, and social radicalism. Much of these attacks involve suspicions about liberalism’s association with the contents and purveyors of structured knowledge, scientific and humanistic alike. I suggest that an examination of the history of liberal beliefs may add to our understanding of what is at stake. Such an examination may reveal how liberal thought in the twentieth century shifted away from its earlier individualist and constitutional position towards the pluralist position that grants a special place to educated knowledge, to experts and professionals, and thus invites allegations of elitism. In particular, I focus on the differences between the ideas that conventional liberal authors elaborated during early modernity and the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and the version of liberal values and the polity based on them that were tacitly adopted during the mid-twentieth century, on the other hand. The examination involves highlighting the common denominators of mid-century authors on right, left, and centre, such as Laski, Popper and Hayek, as well as asking what in their shared worldview could attract allegations of elitism from later generations.

KEYWORDS:

• Enlightenment
• liberalism
• populism
• pluralism
• private sphere
• public sphere

Introduction

Over the past few decades Western societies have become concerned about the increasing appeal of populist movements, by the hostile attitudes that these movements express towards the values that underlie democracy, and by the contempt they occasionally show towards education, scholarship and science. These concerns have generated a solid body of research which mostly focuses on the activity and rhetoric of populist movements, on their demographic bases, and on the economic circumstances that make them successful.¹ To supplement this body of research, I suggest an additional approach, the aim of which is to identify what in the current configuration of liberalism may account for the reactions exemplified by populism.

As a preliminary answer, I describe the process liberalism has gone through since its origins in the Enlightenment. Personal liberty—perhaps the dominant political value of our era—has not always denoted the same thing. Different interpretations of the term have existed for long, allowing for a competition among several liberal positions. One such interpretation tacitly became ascendant, transforming liberalism’s contents. Initially taking a more strictly individualist position, earlier liberalism conditioned the enjoyment of liberty on the coexistence of a private sphere where individual discretion has scope, and an egalitarian body politic that makes collective decisions while giving identical standing to each participant. However, as early as the late eighteenth century, there were authors who, while sharing the liberal concern with personal freedom, took a more pluralist approach and challenged the mutual autonomy of the spheres. They proposed that the traditions, communities and associations of the private sphere should be regarded as the true locus of liberty. It was within the nebula of groupings made of such associations that people could enjoy a sense of autonomy. When compared to the richness of the plural private sphere, these theorists suggested, the state and the civic sphere could be understood as regrettable and even provisional necessities rather than as essential for complementing that private freedom.

The pluralist variant persisted for a time, aligning with traditionalist and conservative worldviews that seemed incompatible with the politics of enlightenment. Gradually, the pluralist argument gained momentum, benefitting from historical events that tested individualist liberalism’s insistence on the reciprocal autonomy of privacy and politics. During the twentieth century, liberal thought as a whole adopted several pluralist insights. Consequently, liberalism became invested in the availability of an expanding private sphere that could eventually push back civic politics. Rather than coexisting autonomies, the space where individuals pursue their own associations and contacts, and the space where citizens deliberate collectively, became hierarchic: the second was cast as a subsidiary of the first. Since it now ascribed less weight to the civic arena as the site of communal choice, liberalism attributed a greater role to the educational, intellectual and moral authorities that arise from the practices of the private sphere. While never renounced, constitutional equality thus came to be regarded as less important than accessibility to the services provided by professionals and experts. Appreciation for their guidance gained in value and became a central liberal tenet. The gap between liberalism’s earlier and later perceptions, as well as the implicit character of the move between the two, is one source of the unease that nourishes populism.

Individuality and the Two Spheres

The philosophical basis of liberal democracy took form over several centuries and in response to pressures in many different settings. The resulting complexity of this has led to internal tensions that pit different readings of liberal values against each other. Some intra-liberal divisions are today widely acknowledged: such is the one stemming from liberalism’s ability to nurture both the economic right and the economic left. The emphasis on individual rights, among which the sanctity of the individual’s private possessions looms large, was one of the philosophical mainsprings of capitalism. At the same time, by insisting on the fundamental equality of all individuals, and on the subsequent need for rights to be equitably allocated, liberalism was rendered favourable to measures aimed at correcting economic injustices, leading to a social-democratic position. Actual politics mirrored these conceptual discrepancies. Western parliaments were for decades split between parties that, while adhering to individual liberty as a core end, entertained opposing views about the material-distribution mechanisms necessary for securing that liberty.²

Less generally noted but still debated by political theorists is another intra-liberal division—that which separates those who defend liberty from a position based on moral intents from those who advocate the same liberty by referring to consequences. Deontological liberals such as Kant ground rights in our universal capacity to be rational. This capacity is seen in our ability to differentiate subjective desire from the objective world. When we realize the distance between our wishes and the external world, we also realize that others are similarly vulnerable and potentially rational. They are as erring and as wise as we are. We should therefore treat each person equally, performing only such actions as we would deem justified if performed by others. The liberal constitution echoes this insight by granting all citizens the same entitlements, regardless of how efficient the ensuing settlement is. As distinct from this line of thought, utilitarians like John Stuart Mill anchor liberalism to consequence rather than to intent. They argue that a regime of equal and identical rights secures an optimal measure of happiness, as it allows each person to define and act on their chosen life ends. The subjects of such a polity enjoy the conditions for accessing the highest utility—a sense of individual agency and organizing purpose, making for more confident and productive participants, thus increasing the prosperity and overall robustness of the commonwealth.³

These battles between capitalist and socialist liberals and between liberal deontologists and liberal consequentialists have obscured another fault-line. This division, which has existed from liberalism’s birth and overlays the other splits, distinguishes between constitutionalist individualists and pluralists. The first position pictures political society as an aggregate of anonymous and equal individuals who are all identically bound by the same legal stipulations. The second position pictures that society as a nebula of constantly-shifting voluntary groupings. These two positions are not universally incompatible and occasionally intertwine in the same tracts. However, when systematically pursued, they entail different routes to guaranteeing individual freedom, different attitudes to government, different visions of the relationship among governments, and different perceptions of the role that structured knowledge and those educated to pursue it play in society.

On the whole, liberalism’s initial configuration was closer to the individualist pole. This can be seen in John Locke, who provided the argument behind Britain’s Bill of Rights and the American Constitution. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke proceeds from an examination of the state of nature as the condition where our fundamental characters manifest themselves, since they have not yet been distorted by inequalities of wealth or sectarian affiliations. In nature, there is no hierarchy, making liberty and equality humanity’s default state. Every person is naturally free from coercion and therefore holds the rights to liberty and life, while drawing on natural resources for nourishment, thus holding a right to possession. Exiting the state of nature by creating fixed governing institutions can beneficently enable society to more easily resolve its occasional frictions. But as nature precedes government, people continue to hold their natural rights even under it. All citizens have identical and inalienable entitlements that enable them to administer their own affairs privately, free from external intervention. A private sphere is therefore an indelible feature of a free political society.

The move from the natural to the political condition can only be justified by the consent of free individuals, in the form of a contract. Enforcing compliance with its terms has to be continuous. Each of the contracting individuals should have equal access to the means that assure such compliance, making them all equal participants who jointly control collective enforcement. Interaction between equals who decide on enforcement does not occur in the state of nature, where there is no means of collective coercion. A political or civic sphere thereby forms alongside the private one, and the two spheres are mutually autonomous. If freedom is to be fully enjoyed, private life has to be shielded from government. And if government is to be immune to the discrepancies in competence and luck that permeate private life, then citizenship, the one space where all are literally equal, has to be allowed a special status. That status can be defined as sovereignty: the ability to overturn, while following structured procedures, the choices made in spaces where people are affected by inequalities.

The significance of the autonomy ascribed to the civic sphere can be gauged from Locke’s position on religious belief, as spelled out in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Religious freedom is an undeniable component of the private sphere’s independence: belief should largely remain a relationship between each person and God. Faith cannot be enforced, as that would result in external compliance rather than in genuine acceptance. Multiple religions may accordingly be allowed in the body politic. However, Locke does not extend this tolerance to all and excludes the Catholics in particular. The reason for this is that since in early modernity the Pope was a secular prince, allegiance to his authority meant that Catholics outside the papal state could not be trusted to respect the polity established in their country of residence. They were not as committed to the social contract as others were, and could therefore not be included within it. Despite the independence of the private sphere and the ensuing emphasis on the freedom of opinion and faith, sovereignty overrides such considerations for the sake of guarding a minimal equality of commitment.

The civic sphere’s unique importance recurs in the writings of other founding liberals. The idea of the separation of powers, as formulated by Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws (1748), complements Locke’s insights by establishing the mechanism through which rights can be retained. No branch of government is left on its own, thereby setting them for perpetual competition and limiting their ability to arbitrarily invade the private sphere. At first sight, Montesquieu appears to dissolve sovereignty by dividing it against itself. He was criticized for this by Rousseau, who accused him of dismantling something that cannot be dismantled: somebody always has to give the final order. Montesquieu, however, stresses the separation of powers because he perceives sovereignty as inescapably necessary and as a special space that requires its own attention. The power to police internally and defend externally is so central, that any viable measure of liberty depends on structuring it. That structuring does not detract from that power’s function but rather enhances it: one of the dividends Montesquieu expects from his power-division scheme is a broad sense of having a stake in the commonwealth within which one can live freely, and hence a more substantial commitment to maintaining it and fighting for it than may be had in an autocracy. If the civic arm protects individual liberty, that liberty contributes to the robustness of the civic arm.

John Stuart Mill, the chief liberal philosopher of the Victorian era, went further in asserting the civic sphere’s role. Privacy itself is hierarchic, as it involves the power that men exert over women, parents over children, and employers over their employees. In each such space, individual agency might be hampered by stronger actors. For liberty to be better grounded, people have to be protected in their homes, businesses, and everyday interactions. Policing and legislation are necessary for the private sphere’s autonomy. The state is thus tasked with regulating the depths of society, and should accordingly be closely monitored by society’s constituents. Assembled as citizens exerting identical leverage over shared decisions, these constituents form the one space where all are flatly equal, rendering their deliberations a final source of authority in a liberal polity. The “best form of government,” Mill asserts, “is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community.”⁴ Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Mill build systems where the final decisions reside in the grouping of anonymous and equal participants, distancing the space where they congregate from the practices of the private sphere—for the assurance of which that power exists.

These features of liberalism’s individualist and constitutional variant have an international as well as an internal dimension. The body politic is sovereign. Among sovereigns there is no other mediator that has obliging authority. If such a mediator existed, it would be the actual sovereign, who would be divesting the electorate of its power. War is therefore the horizon of the relations among sovereigns. This was clear to Locke who saw external protection as a main governmental function, as it was for Montesquieu who anticipated that a stronger international position would be achieved by the polity where individual discretion over private matters is facilitated by the separation of powers. Even when an eventual end to war is envisioned within individualist liberal philosophy, as it is by Kant in Perpetual Peace (1795), that end primarily relies on the separate constitutional civic spheres of each individual state. A constitutional state’s civic arena allows for rational conversation. Tensions can be staked out in the open and resolved rather than be forced out of sight by stronger actors to fester in the darkness and eventually erupt as violence. An assembly of constitutional states can similarly diminish war on the international level, as they will have few internal difficulties to air through aggression. Perpetual peace stems from an aggregation of civic spaces: they remain part of the liberal vision, granting them an autonomy that coexists with the independence of the private sphere.

Kant, it should be remembered, was wholly deontological, while Mill was a utilitarian. Locke based his argument on the state of nature which revealed our basic characters. Our motivations, the state of nature shows, primarily have to do with self-preservation, as in securing nourishment for oneself and one’s kin. This makes Locke simultaneously a deontologist, who relies on a background of universal morality that precedes any specific choice, and a utilitarian, who views human ends as legitimately selfish and anchored in the body. While preceding the debates over capitalism, socialism, and the welfare state, Locke can be read both as a capitalist who emphasizes the right to hold property, and as a proto-socialist who views the labour invested in obtaining goods as establishing entitlement to these goods.⁵ Thus, while varying on their interpretations of how we know and how we should distribute goods, Locke, Kant, and Mill converge on associating liberty with a polity that organizes itself to protect individuals in the private sphere, while establishing a matching and similarly autonomous civic sphere where joint existential decisions are made.

Pluralism: An Alternative View of Individual Freedom

All along, an alternative perception of liberty unfolded. Its differences from the individualist and constitutionalist variant of liberalism came to the fore during the French Revolution. In 1789, revolutionary France declared its adherence to the universal rights defined by Locke, while instituting a unified electorate and a legislative body that depended on the consent of identically-empowered citizens and obliged them all equally. Liberalism’s two spheres were given a concrete body. But even before the Revolution descended into its more radical phase, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) aired doubts about the service of the sphere division to individual freedom. Far from being a full-fledged regressive traditionalist, Burke leaned on Enlightenment thought and was earlier on favourable to American independence. However, he wondered whether an impersonal and impartial law, formulated by elected representatives in a faraway capital city, was better suited for assuring liberty as concretely sensed by actual people, than the familiar habits and time-honed local institutions that were presided by each region’s notables. Would not the armed extension of a democratically-legitimized sovereign carry over the visceral divisions that mark national debates into actual military behaviour? Would the overall consequences of destabilizing local practices and arming the populace not turn into a civil conflict where the stakes are not just material spoils over which one may compromise, but a means of implementing rival ideological visions over which no longstanding compromise would be possible?

The Revolution’s subsequent development into terror and war seemed to vindicate Burke, feeding the emergence of a principled stance against strict individualism. This was bolstered by the resentment that French incursions into the rest of Europe generated. The resulting social philosophies could still cherish individual freedom, but now had to anchor it to values and institutions that did not necessarily match those of the French republic. Rather than attempting to secure freedom by splitting society into two arenas, European thinkers suggested that the sense of personal agency would profit from a settlement in which the habits and practices that gradually formed from the shared life of private individuals should inform institutional behaviour. Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, linked human fulfilment to life within a reasonably-cohesive culture, where personal choice gains meaning and reward. In their different ways, Burke and Herder advocated the generative powers of the private sphere. The plurality of local customs, traditions, denominational affiliations, and regional bodies all continually resolved social problems, enabling mistakes to be corrected within the conceptual framework implicitly ascribed to by the participants on the ground and borne out by their lived experiences. Rather than the dead hand of the past, tradition was actually the evolving wisdom of vibrant communities: it knew what positive law, a creation of particular and hence limited individuals, could not know. Tradition was multiple, as it was shaped through many ages and responded to constantly changing conditions. Plurality delivered where the chimerical cohesion of reason and law mostly failed.⁶

For a while, these pluralist approaches to freedom were sidelined by the apparently clear-cut contest between Enlightenment and reaction. Positions that fell on neither side were reduced to one of these poles. Pluralist notions tended to eventually be catalogued along with authoritarian and traditionalist approaches, as they seemed to buck the enlightened drive towards legal equality and representative government. Sometimes, pluralism was deliberately co-opted into authoritarian positions. Hegel accepted ideas from Burke only to deploy them against Burke’s notion of liberty and its attendant suspicion of the unified state: Hegel turned the autonomy of the private sphere as in families, villages and trade contacts, into a necessary building block in a larger synthesis, at the apex of which stood the sovereign state.⁷ With pluralism thus interpreted, the choices seemed to remain those of individualist liberalism on the one hand, and reaction on the other. In the 1850s, Mill could still perceive himself as a representative of enlightenment politics battling for freedom against the forces of regression.

Nonetheless, pluralism continued to evolve. Asserting its liberal credentials by appealing first and foremost to personal freedom, it soon challenged the hegemony of the individualist and constitutional positions. In the 1860s, Lord Acton, broadly known for his denunciation of absolute power, criticized Mill for following a reductive French rationalism that equated freedom with a bureaucracy policing a collection of isolated individuals. Acton warned that the combination of disembodied legal entitlements, and the creation of institutions authorized to wield coercive clout equally over all, generated an artificial unity between rulers and ruled, effectively benefitting the rulers. To regain individual agency and autonomy, Acton suggested drawing on what he saw as the old Teutonic freedom enjoyed by tribes ruled through custom and habit.⁸ Rather than being authorized to legislate and enforce its rule over its entire territory and each of its subjects, government should be made to face a confounding labyrinth of traditions, groups, and local associations. The state’s ability to act arbitrarily would be curtailed by this network, while enabling people to experience control over their own lives. Acton’s position translated into support for the American South in the Civil War, with Lincoln invoking the Union’s sovereignty as grounds for annulling secession of the South. Government by and for the people necessitated a commonwealth in which all held the same entitlements, slavery had no place, and a final decision to deploy force could be taken by the level of governance that stood for the aggregate of citizens. This was exactly what Acton feared: a centralized power appealing to the law and abstract equality, while crushing locally-evolved practices, as imperfect as these happened to be. Like the French Revolution, the Civil War manifested the repressive potential of wholly individualistic liberalism.⁹

Similar pluralist analyses proliferated at the end of the nineteenth century. Otto von Gierke argued that stability and personal fulfilment depended on the availability of multiple arenas within which people operate, rather than on contracts between detached individuals. British authors like Frederic Maitland prized Gierke’s insights, particularly those pertaining to the role that denominational and collegiate associations could be assigned in mediating the world to ordinary people.¹⁰ Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Neville Figgis suggested that the Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages was a better inspiration for those seeking freedom than the territorial states of modernity. Crisscrossed by local rulers, guilds and estates, yet unified by a comprehensive and broad-focused faith, medieval Europe avoided strict borders and the arbitrary whims of sovereigns, enabling the myriad of private choices and communal affiliations to flourish.¹¹ In an Austria beset by ethnic conflict, Otto Bauer argued for confederating national groups into a renovated empire. Overlapping and intermingled nationalities could provide in modernity the concrete solidarity and countermeasure to arbitrary power that estates and guilds had furnished in the Middle Ages. This, Bauer added while emphasizing his socialism, necessitated abandoning the mechanical concept of the individual as a selfish will detached from any social commitment.¹²

With these various new proposals in the background, pluralism was available as a remedy for individualist liberalism’s flaws, which were made increasingly visible by the long crisis of the early decades of the twentieth century. At the end of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson placed American might at the service of an attempt to construct a world system based on Kantian principles. This attempt was not a resounding success, bringing into relief Burke’s and Acton’s warnings about overly individualist and juristic concepts of liberty. The new democracies enabled by Wilson’s work largely prioritized the particular wishes of their own constituents over any moral obligation. Militant dictators were voted in. Once in power, these rulers deployed the notion of sovereignty as based on popular will to disregard anything that did not match their own interests. They could efficiently mobilize the entire society to their ends because, through its gravitation towards the territorial state, modernity had weakened that layer of local customs and affiliations that had previously hindered such dangers.¹³ Another World War followed.

In the West, that war was widely cast as a contest between the free world and its totalitarian detractors. But if implementing the institutions based on the Enlightenment’s individualist aspirations had ended by facilitating autocracy and war, what was the free world fighting for? The pluralist variant of liberalism offered a believable answer: upholding liberty and opposing autocracy, it also valued the multiple associations and communities of private life, along with the habits and traditions involved in them. The West could confront tyranny not with the vision of separate territorial democracies that form an international level of governance, but with the prospects of a world composed of multiple private interactions whose reach bypasses the state. Liberty resided in municipalities, churches, cultural associations, and collegiate affiliations. Acton’s tracts were dropped by the Allied air forces over occupied Europe as a form of war propaganda, a statement of principles to contrast those of Nazism, and implicitly, Marxism.¹⁴ Planning for the postwar institutions, Western politicians and thinkers did not recycle the Kantian League of Nations. Instead, the nascent United Nations was to be a jigsaw puzzle composed of different political, professional, and area-specific bodies. Thus pluralism and globalism were to substitute individualism and internationalism.¹⁵

The Ascendancy of Pluralist Liberalism

This turn was mirrored by the political philosophy tracts of the period. Karl Popper famously described the West as held together by its commitment to the “open society,” a civilization that combats the closed society and its totalitarian manifestations across the centuries. The open society, Popper argued, is not defined by governments, courts, and parliaments. These are all auxiliaries for a broader dynamic characterized by allowing all opinions to be aired, examined, and criticized regardless of who voices them. Such a conversation enables philosophy and science to develop, ushering in the technological advance that gives more elbow room to each individual as it does to society overall. Rather than embodying liberty, formal rights are instruments in achieving the substantial expansion of freedom and agency gained through debate, exchange of opinions, and progress.

While Kantian in some of its core beliefs, Popper’s agenda replaced Kant’s idea of peace as emanating from a federal meeting of different electorates with an Actonian and confederate notion, where peace and liberty alike are served by letting the private sphere evolve and branch out to a degree that permits it to circumvent the civic arena. The open-society concept was broadly accepted as the shared grounds of most democracies, competing with the more individualist premises of Locke and Mill.¹⁶ Surveying the reception of his ideas in the closing months of the Second World War, Popper satisfactorily noted that his vision was endorsed by thinkers who between them covered the furthest reaches of the familiar opinion spectrum on the right and the left. In particular, he named Friedrich Hayek and Harold Laski as marking these two apparently opposing poles.¹⁷

Hayek, the Austrian-born economist, was considered a pioneer of neoliberalism. He saw the market forces as better placed to locate and serve human needs than governments, and accordingly advocated minimal regulation and a broad scope for the play of supply and demand. The market is impartial, as all are obligated by its rules. Its price mechanism provides an index of what different individuals may achieve together by actively adjusting their expectations to each other’s desires and abilities. However, Hayek did not view the market as a singularly unique activity or as the ultimate source of authority. Instead, he saw it as one of several intersubjective phenomena like language and law: they are all neutral sites that are open to contributions by all, are ruled over by none, and furnish structured arenas for further interaction. Echoing Burke’s notion of tradition as harbouring the profound social knowledge that individuals cannot access separately, Hayek stated that a binding law grows from the everyday give and take of private individuals rather than from codification in written edicts. The constantly-shifting fabric of habits that people create together (yet feel committed to) is the groundwork of wisdom that underlies the law and the market alike. These intersubjective phenomena, then, deliver both roughly-egalitarian justice and gradual change. Owing to the developmental and creative quality of these interactions, Hayek expected them to expand and bolster connections between individuals everywhere, diminishing the significance of borders and governments. A world civilization based on private interactions, he thought, was a tangible prospect.¹⁸

Across the ideological fence from Hayek stood Laski, a British Labour Party functionary who was, like Bauer, nominally a Marxist. Laski harboured a longstanding mutual dislike for Hayek that amplified their ideological disagreement. Laski, however, was also Figgis’s disciple and was therefore intellectually related to Burke and his successors, grudgingly acknowledging Hayek as a fellow Actonian.¹⁹ His socialism was tinged with pluralism. While demanding that the state tax the market and distribute the proceeds as services to make for a more equitable society, Laski tasked these measures with more than just compensating for the ill effects that economic competition had on people’s ability to use their legal rights. Allocative policies, he argued, should enable citizens the leisure and the peace of mind to engage in local, voluntary and collegiate associations. Freed by the welfare apparatus from excessive economic fear, citizens would create a web of affiliations whose ultimate scope exceeded the state, thereby overshadowing the prominence of the government as a decision-making sovereign. Through its law-enforcing and tax-collecting faculties, the government should thus act to enable the growth of a civilization that is expected to circumvent government.²⁰ This civilization should be handed its own institutional garb: Laski envisioned cross-border consulting offices based on the hands-on expertise gained by workers, administrators and researchers in various fields.²¹

Like trade in Hayek’s perspective, the multiple associations Laski envisioned would constitute a creative and dynamic private sphere where individual liberty would be fulfilled and where the prospects of global peace would be grounded. Contemporaries of various professional backgrounds and persuasions aired comparable ideas. The international-relations scholar David Mitrany looked for a process of global integration based on the many voluntary sites of the economy and culture rather than on governments, and aligned this with liberalism’s normative ends, regardless of his agenda’s propensity to bypass elected institutions.²² Similar notions were offered by Edward H. Carr, who was otherwise known for his harshly realist attitude to international affairs. By the 1940s, Carr favoured an eclectic collective security system controlled by the habits of increasingly prosperous modern societies.²³ Walter Lippman, who had earlier participated in Wilson’s project of building a world based on elected governments, moved during the succeeding decades towards supporting multilevel regional integration, while arguing normatively that modern liberty consisted in access to services rather than in controlling decision-making bodies.²⁴ As with Popper and Laski, the upshot was flanking the autonomous civic sphere by endorsing a pluralist attitude in which the private sphere is given space to expand into a complex globality.

While rarely discussed as a comprehensive shift, the widespread move towards a more pluralist interpretation of liberalism’s ends was to be long-lasting. Particularly, the association between personal autonomy and a layered private sphere made of multiple groups took hold as a main feature of free societies. By the later twentieth century, social and cultural diversity had acquired a central place among the values that Western polities ascribed to: the space where various communities and associations form and meet had become at least as crucial to freedom as the aggregate of anonymous voters protected by identical legal rights. Political scientists defended and normalized this paradigm. From their disparate national perspectives, comparative researchers such as Robert Dahl and Arend Lijphart retracted Acton’s steps in suggesting that the constant friction of different associations, groups and elites is not a distortion of democracy but another one of its features, as it provided an additional balancing mechanism to the formal one that separates the branches of government. Other scholars have gone even further by viewing the maze of groups and identities as more than a balancing instrument. The plurality of simultaneously coexisting communities that challenge and enrich each other is, instead, the point where democracy is fully expressed, giving that plurality a certain priority in our normative order and allowing it to stand up to the random majority of individual votes.²⁵ With the recognition given to the everyday sites where people communicate, the sensibilities elaborated through these sites become available for consideration by the entire society.²⁶ Relying on Figgis and Laski while addressing millennial concerns, William Galston argued that “liberalism is about the protection of legitimate diversity.”²⁷

Among political theorists, the pluralist view of liberty and its extension into globalism underlines positions that are otherwise perceived as critical of each other. By the end of the twentieth century, debates in academic political philosophy pitted those considered strict liberal individualists, such as John Rawls, against their so-called communitarian rivals, exemplified by Michael Sandel. The two sides presented their perceptions as reflecting our most cherished and essential characteristics as human beings, hinting that the contest between them was deeper than just an argument over institutions: it was, instead, a debate on human nature. Rawls argued for a list of minimal rights based on the interests that each individual would be forced to protect if faced with the necessity of formulating their own society’s basic rules, without knowing in advance how those rules would affect them personally. Sandel, in contrast, relied on insights from Aristotle and from common experiences to demonstrate the constitutive role that primary contacts, friendships and community take in determining our identities. These two theorists may be understood to be facing each other across the individualist-pluralist boundary, as Rawls upholds an apparently pure individualist position where individuals and their existential demands override all other considerations, while Sandel stands for group environments and their recognized leaders and spokespersons.²⁸

However, a second look tells a more complex story. Both Rawls and Sandel think of the principles they advocate as guidelines for a landscape characterized by the prominence of voluntary associations, groups, and cultural affiliations. This prominence is not a sociological fact to be reported and noted, but a normative end to be preserved. Rawls wishes to apply the fundaments of justice as deduced from his individualist approach to relations not only between citizens and the state, but also to those among associations, between them and the state, and among unevenly-sized and differently-defined ‘peoples.’ These groups, rather than either sovereign states or a world demos made up of all individuals, should be considered as the subjects of the correct political order.²⁹ Sandel, for his part, states that the communal involvement in the name of which he criticizes Rawlsian individualism does not shore up the patriotic virtue recommended by Aristotle or Machiavelli. Communities are not meant to foster cohesion within the state or supplement an international order made up of such states. Instead, the world’s political horizon is “a multiplicity of communities and political bodies,” with final decisions located nowhere.³⁰ Sandel and Rawls, then, see the expanding plurality of the private sphere as the actual locus of fulfilment and autonomy. Their argument is about how to better structure that sphere, with Rawls favouring handing out entitlements by referring to a thought experiment, and Sandel stressing that more attention should be given to the concrete, day-to-day ways in which people define themselves.

The Expanding World of Knowledge and the Elites

As liberalism has tacitly reformulated its ends to equate them with the existence of a heterogeneous and expanding private sphere, its perception of the relationship between democracy and knowledge has changed. Liberalism’s older, more classical and more easily-identifiable version, values observation and scholarship, using them as its bases, and tasking them with discovering truths about us that we usually find hard to access as lay persons. Locke turned to the state of nature because he looked for a perspective that transcended our ordinary perceptions. He implied by this that specialized knowledge of society exists and can be accessed by those who take the trouble to seek it. Kant’s idea of reason and Mill’s notion of complex utility similarly demand that the intense fears and desires involved in our ongoing struggles should be examined from a perspective developed to neutralize the pull of these feelings and gain a more ordered understanding.

However, while respect for educated knowledge certainly exists in this type of liberalism, this respect meets politics as its limit. If liberals accepted wholesale that some form of acquired wisdom applied to all activities, the constitutional polity they envisaged would have placed itself at the discretion of those who acquired that kind of wisdom, making most of that polity’s citizens their clients.³¹ As mentioned earlier, liberalism’s individualist and constitutionalist variant avoids this outcome by relegating a unique role to sovereignty and to the civic sphere made up of all adult participants. The contents of what occurs in the civic arena are a special field, that of politics. In that field, disagreements end by securing majorities that ground legitimacy for deciding among ends, not by providing a convincing professional observation that supports this or another actor. When deliberating, democratic citizens are not divided by status into the experts and the lay, because the civic arena where they meet structurally disregards such differences. Thus the urgency we sense about civic decisions cannot be legitimately denied or suspended from a position of better learning, information or expertise.

But things are different in liberalism’s pluralist variant. It suspects the shared sovereignty based on the autonomy of the civic sphere of placing collective choices in a completely directionless, chaotic space, increasing the arbitrary dimension of the commonwealth’s life, harming the sense of individual agency, and hampering each person’s discretion over their lives. Unless politics can be reined in by legality, truth, justice or science, individuals would be subjected to the changing and unaccountable whims of public bodies. Hence knowledge, education, and the status that attaches to them should be allowed to shape and structure shared decisions. For Burke, collective affairs are so complicated that realistically optimal choices within them are more likely to be achieved through the (admittedly flawed) wisdom of local elders, regional magistrates and those that age-old habit has made their recognized guides. At the background of this vision one can detect the role of the church and its clergy, and moreover, one may detect the idea of a clergy as the source of counsel for a lay society. Lay people respect and seek such counsel precisely because those who administer it are somewhat detached from common concerns and motivations, denoting benevolent impartiality.³²

Similar insights recur in Acton’s favourable perceptions of tribal gatherings and community elders. They appear yet again and are made more systematically explicit in Figgis’s description of medieval Europe. As an intricate society beset by material hardships and the quarrels these hardships gave rise to, historical Europe required the presence of a secular power. But this presence was fundamentally out of alignment with the civilization’s pervasive rationale: princes wielded lethal power and were therefore inimical to peace, truth, and the fulfilment gained from a life of pursuing these values. Accordingly, princes were partial constituents within a larger whole, whose main spiritual arbitrator was the Church. The Christian faith and the moral system derived from it unified the many sensibilities and ethical norms of the vernacular cultures. Acknowledged as the legitimate interpreter of these norms and trusted with integrating them into the wider community of all Christians, the Church stood back from actual power. It drew from this aloofness the authority to monitor and survey power, avoiding the divisive and arbitrary temptations that a princely position entailed. At the same time, the clergy could still influence princes as they, too, were at bottom Christian Europeans who adhered to the same culture as the rest of the continent.³³

Although several decades, two major wars, and a different personal setting separate Popper’s vision of the open society from Figgis’s main contributions, Popper, like Figgis, emphasizes the place of educated professionals in providing guidance and monitoring institutional power. Popper notes that the joint achievements that people are capable of when each individual participant is allowed to contribute as an equal to a shared conversation where all are exposed to criticism by peers, exceed these participants’ expectations and understanding. Science, as the characteristic outcome of such a conversation, was set on its own course of development once its principles were established. The procedures of disproof and validation are human creations that face every scientist as the given reality within which they can operate, and which they can, in their turn, somewhat impact through their innovations. By following these rules, several generations of scientists have managed to propagate knowledge beyond any single scientist’s prior capacity, giving rise to new scientific fields and subfields, to the new questions involved in these fields, and to the advances based on them. Through their engagement in such projects, scientists and scholars acquire the habits of respect for others, healthy doubt about their own ideas, and an optimistic spirit of progress that anticipates gradual but persistent improvement. As science constantly expands into new spaces through the multiplication of subfields and their derived technological products, the ethos that enables this process expands likewise. Consisting in equal respect for all and a readiness to revise one’s position if enough evidence is presented against it, this ethos is destined to develop further, as long as the conditions of the open society hold.³⁴

Popper deduces from this that science, scholarship and the state of mind associated with them will come to bear on politics, which in the open society means democratic politics. The open society’s formal institutions assure equal rights that protect every person’s ability to participate in the shared conversation, alongside a representative mechanism that serves as a forum for that conversation when it turns to collective decisions. However, Popper thinks that even this form of politics is flawed, as it involves a decision on the use of power. As this power can deliver death, the civic arena deals with a closure that is by its very nature alien to the open society. This discrepancy within the open society can be incrementally allayed by the evolving span of science and scholarship. While it cannot be dispensed with, political and civic authority will gradually be sidelined by the habits and innovations that originate in the pursuit of knowledge and those engaged in it. As a more rational outlook is disseminated, public discussion will forfeit some of its divisive pull. Politics will progressively be seen as a space for solving problems together, thus further encouraging its attention to professional counsel.³⁵ Once the potentiality of coercion and armed conflict recedes, the urgency of politics itself will likewise recede. The comprehensive ideologies that divided the world and contributed to the catastrophe of the World Wars will become obsolete. An overall peaceful order will emerge where wanton intrusion on individuals will be a thing of the past. Scholars, scientists, and thinkers will be its handmaidens, playing a role that Popper likens to that played in the past by the Church.³⁶

Hayek and Laski echo this perspective. Hayek expects the market and those versed in it to furnish the new ideas to which institutional politics will have to listen. Laski, for his part, pours the normative contents of what Figgis had favourably described as the role of the Church into a more modern vessel by anticipating a future in which the skills and insights grounded in the work of collegiate and professional associations will outflank and impact the decisions of elected assemblies.³⁷ The emerging pluralist variant of the mid-twentieth century thus cultivated the dynamics of privacy to ultimately envelop and overshadow the civic arena. In this process, pluralist liberalism allocates a progressively expanding role to the contribution of experts and professionals, while correspondingly relativizing that of equal citizens when assembled as such. The plurality of the private sphere is expected to generate the multiplicity of standpoints and opinions that, while feeding the growth of knowledge, will also counter the tendency of a too-homogenous civic body towards a collective selfishness that might appear as warlike jingoism.

In line with Popper’s expectations, millennial sensibilities identify professional instances as guarantors of a free society. The ethos of scholarship and science is simultaneously one constituent among the multiplicity of communities and interactions valued by liberals, and is regarded as instrumental for preserving that multiplicity. A main threat to it is the state itself: not a particular state, but the idea of a centralized seat of power that reduces all communities to subjects to a single law. Diversity requires advocacy to aid it against the civic arena. Several legal and regional-studies scholars warn that the existence of national borders is incompatible with democracy and with the liberal ends it rests on. An electorate that demands exclusive control over who enters or leaves its territory both denies those born outside these boundaries their universal right of movement, and depletes liberty’s prospects by narrowing down its own composition, possibly silencing those that find it difficult to express themselves within its boundaries.³⁸ As such, the demands for removing the final decision from the representative bodies are argued for in the professional terms of scholarly disciplines, with the experts who phrase them tacitly positioning themselves as significant social arbitrators. The multiplication of such suggestions along with their resonance with the public hints that significant parts of contemporary society entrust scholars, jurists, and the various authorities on the economy, health, and environment with securing the conditions for liberty. That public trust thus becomes attached to liberalism and democracy themselves.

A Diffused Backlash

Liberalism, then, progressively equates with its pluralist version. Democracy aligns with the watchwords of diversity and science, echoes of Burke’s traditions, Acton’s confederated tribes, and Figgis’s upholding of plurality and clergy. The points where pluralism might conflict with other elements of historical liberalism are largely suppressed, while any expression of the intra-liberal disagreement between pluralists and individualists is drowned out by the din of the battle between neoliberals and social-democrats, Rawlsians and Sandelians. The commonality between these contestants is easily overlooked, as is their convergence on a particular, pluralist interpretation of liberalism. Criticizing this commonality becomes difficult from a liberal position. The pluralist turn’s outcomes in policies, institutions and public climate do not encounter a liberal or democratic pushback that strives to resurrect Locke or Mill. These outcomes are instead confronted by populist movements, such as those perceived as responsible for such events as the secession of Britain from the European Union, the election of a maverick American president, the breakup of the big parties in such counties as France and the corresponding rise of street-level protests, as well as the slide of some regions towards authoritarianism.³⁹ These populist movements respond to local events and so voice disparate claims that do not converge into a single agenda.

However, to a certain extent these movements share the suspicion of educated elites and their appeals to diversity, plurality and the prospects of a worldwide civilization. These are all denounced for masking an effort to deprive ordinary people of their one source of influence, the vote. Populists target the perceived detachment of the globalist elites from everyday concerns and their alleged desire to curtail the powers of the elected institutions credited with channeling the people’s will. The populist dislike of educated bureaucrats and the structured forms of knowledge they rely on registers in hostility to the governmental, intergovernmental, and global agencies these experts operate, as in the reluctance to comply with the measures enacted to combat COVID-19.⁴⁰ The underlying allegation sustained by the populist sense of grievance can be called clericalism: the desire to shore up a meritocratic authority without civic accountability. Populists thus contest what Popper called the open society—that modern, World-War-Two era rendition of the ideal of a universal community in which all participate through voluntary interaction and in which coercive power, while still officially controlled by popular vote, recedes in significance.

As liberalism now roughly equates with pluralism, populist movements find themselves directly opposing liberalism itself, and are therefore considered inimical to democracy.⁴¹ Despite their ubiquity in terms of media coverage and notoriety, populists have not been successful or even reasonably persistent in regaining liberal and constitutionalist legitimacy. Instead, their arguments are noted for their lack of logical coherence and for their reliance on emotions, vague collective sensibilities, evocative propaganda and dog-whistling.⁴² All this may reflect populism’s actual character, but it can also be taken as an indicator of how far the monopolization of the language of liberalism by pluralism has gone, and how sophisticated it is: its opponents can draw on no solid terminology with which to express themselves, even while some of their points, such as the necessity of an autonomous civic sphere for personal liberty where sovereignty is held, had once been part and parcel of liberalism itself.

Some systematic criticism has nonetheless been voiced against the dominance in the West of agendas that prioritize a perpetually-growing private sphere, while implying a certain elitism organized around intellectuals, professionals and scholars. Since the 1960s, observers like Aaron Wildavsky and Christopher Lasch have noted that contemporary perceptions of political life increasingly waver on linking democracy to an empowered electorate. Instead, these theorists argue, democracy is more and more understood as denoting entitlement to services, which necessitates dependence on service providers. These critics point out that valuing the plurality of associations over the civic sphere, where equally-respected autonomous agents meet, ultimately shifts the social balance in favour of the educated elites and the meritocratic—and hence hierarchic—institutions where these elites are entrenched: such institutions both train the professionals who provide the services, and disseminate the values and nomenclatures that align with their newly-achieved ascendancy.⁴³ More recently, Joel Kotkin has tied the emergence of professional elites to the threat of what he calls neo-feudalism. The tendency shown by early twenty-first-century civilization towards steep economic inequalities, Kotkin writes, is matched by the teaming up between its stronger actors, such as in finance, the technological industries, the media, and selective academic institutions, which together normalize the balkanization of national societies into separate class, race, and gender identities. These multiple identities function like the estates, guilds, and localities of the Middle Ages: dispersed, overlapping and deterministically confining one’s horizons, they take apart the demos and weaken the possibility of a shared and autonomous civic arena, while pressing their individual constituents into dependence on guidance and counsel.⁴⁴ Such voices as Wildavsky’s, Lasch’s or Kotkin’s, however, are scattered, and do not build up into a distinct school of thought. Thus there seems to be no sustained intellectual opposition to liberalism’s advance towards pluralism, which lack further aggravates populist-liberal tensions.

Conclusion

I have argued that the current ubiquity of populism can be understood as responding to a centuries-long development within liberal thinking. Divided for long between its individualist and pluralist variants, liberalism shifted in the course of the twentieth century towards its pluralist side. The main axis of this development was the replacement of a position that conditioned liberty on the mutual autonomy of the private and civic spheres, by a position that views the civic sphere as merely instrumental for the liberty gained by the perpetual expansion of the private sphere. Strengthening its hold during the twentieth century, the latter theoretical orientation constructs the private sphere around collegiate associations, economic transactions, scholarly investigations, and cultural communities. The significance of the civic arena diminishes, weakening the link between personal liberty and participating in shared existential decisions. Correspondingly, the weight of the role of intellectual and professional guides increases. The acquired skills involved in law, medicine, finance and other fields are also seen as useful correctives to the less coherent trends and emotions that afflict electorates and political leaders. These professional elites re-enact the part of the medieval clergy, standing as a moral ballast for a complex civilization. In the dominant perceptions one encounters at the beginning of the twenty-first century, trusting such meritocracies features as a telltale sign of a liberal attitude. As the attempts to counter these pluralist sensibilities no longer have a recognizable basis in liberal thought, such attempts come across as hostile to liberalism and democracy, thereby conferring on populism and the antagonism it expresses towards structured knowledge their particular notoriety.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gal Gerson

Gal Gerson teaches political theory and the history of political thought at the University of Haifa’s School of Political Sciences. He is the author of several articles on liberalism, gender, and the interface between political thought and psychoanalysis, and several books, including Individuality and Ideology in British Object Relations (Routledge, 2021).

Notes

^1. See, among others, Brubaker, “Populism and Nationalism”; Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization”; Taggart, “Populism and the Pathology of Representative Politics”; and Taguieff, “Populism and Political Science.”

^2. Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism, 123–38.

^3. Fawcett, Liberalism, 33–38, 77–97.

^4. Mill, Collected Works, vol. 19, 43.

^5. Macpherson, Democratic Theory, 129–32.

^6. Pan, “J. G. Herder.”

^7. Brooks, Hegel’s Political Philosophy, 62–91, 96–113.

^8. Acton, Essays in the History of Liberty, 417.

^9. Clausen, “Lord Acton and the Lost Cause.”

^10. Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, 239–43; Runciman, Pluralism, 58–62, 89–149.

^11. Figgis, Divine Right of Kings, 38–65. See also Stapleton, Political Intellectuals, 43–44.

^12. Bauer, The Question of Nationalism, 225.

^13. Burnham, Machiavellians, 174–84.

^14. Tulloch, Acton: Historians on Historians, 8–9.

^15. Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism, 241–71.

^16. Ricci, Tragedy, 115–16.

^17. Hacohen, Karl Popper, 449–520.

^18. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 105–6; Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 223–26. For a discussion of the Laski-Hayek parallels, see Hoover, Economics as Ideology.

^19. Lamb, Harold Laski, 84.

^20. Laski, The State in Theory and Practice, 80–81; Laski, Reflections on the Revolution, 182.

^21. Morefield, “States Are Not People.”

^22. Mitrany, A Working Peace System.

^23. Carr, Mass Democracy, 61–79; Carr, Nationalism and After, 45–55.

^24. Goodwin, “The Promise of Expertise,”

^25. Dahl, Polyarchy; Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies.

^26. Dryzek, “Revolutions without Enemies”; Dryzek and Dunleavy, Theories of the Democratic State; Schlosberg, Environmental Justice.

^27. Galston, Liberal Pluralism, 23.

^28. Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.

^29. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 26–27, 69, 82.

^30. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 32.

^31. Gerson, Individuality and Ideology, 167.

^32. Harris, “Burke and Religion.”

^33. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, 203–7.

^34. Gerson, “Nature, History, and Politics.”

^35. Ibid.

^36. Popper, The Open Society, vol. 2, 24–25.

^37. Gerson, “Liberalism, Pluralism, and the Sphere Division.”

^38. Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion”; Mostov, Soft Borders; O’Leary, “What States Can Do with Nations.”

^39. Caiani and Graziano, “Understanding Varieties of Populism”; Guilluy and DeBevoise, Twilight of the Elites; Wilkin, “Fear.”

40 Eberl, Huber, and Greussing, “From Populism to the ‘Plandemic,”’ 272–84.

^41. Abts and Rummens, “Populism versus Democracy.”

^42. Stanley, “Thin Ideology of Populism”; Webber, “Understanding Populism.”

^43. Lasch, True and Only Heaven, 421–28; Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, 25–49; Wildavsky, Revolt Against the Masses, 29–51.

^44. Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, 1–18.