Is Liberalism Now an Essentially Contested Concept?*

^*I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for helping to fund this research. Thanks are also owed to Clifford Ando, Doug Cooper, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Aleksandar Pavkovic, Joe Peschek, Capsar Sinnige and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions on how to improve this article. An earlier version of the argument was presented to the Departments of Politics at Nottingham University and York University.

Abstract

In contemporary English-language political theory, conversations between liberals and their critics have been largely superseded by arguments among those placing themselves under the liberal umbrella. As the debate among those calling themselves liberals has widened, so the meaning of liberalism and construction of the liberal tradition have become increasingly contested. It is therefore appropriate to consider whether liberalism is now an essentially contested concept. Gallie's original argument about essentially contested concepts is reconstructed and evaluated and a number of contemporary approaches to liberalism are considered in its light. The significance of the passage of time is examined, and some of the theoretical and practical changes that might have contributed to liberalism becoming essentially contested are outlined. The consequences for critical thinking and fundamental criticisms of society and polity are raised, and it is suggested that liberalism provides normative resources for a society to continuously question, and potentially remake, itself.

Notes

^*I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for helping to fund this research. Thanks are also owed to Clifford Ando, Doug Cooper, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Aleksandar Pavkovic, Joe Peschek, Capsar Sinnige and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions on how to improve this article. An earlier version of the argument was presented to the Departments of Politics at Nottingham University and York University.

¹ As reported on the BBC news, Tuesday, November 23, 2004. See < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4035659.stm>.

² A decade ago, Richard Bellamy observed that “Today all major groupings employ the liberal language of rights, freedom and equality to express and legitimize their views and demonstrate a corresponding general acceptance of liberal conceptions of democracy and the market. From New Right conservatives to democratic socialists, it seems we are all liberals now.” Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 1. Bellamy makes this observation as part of a critique of liberalism, contending that “liberalism's recent mutation from ideology to meta-ideology is indicative of its current theoretical and practical bankruptcy.” Ibid., p. 2. The argument adduced here, by contrast, suggests considerable fecundity in contemporary liberal theorizing.

³ As Marilyn Friedman observes, “There is not merely one liberalism; rather, there are many liberalisms. Equality; rights, autonomy, justice, and liberty are all variously interpreted by liberals themselves. Liberalism is [not] … monolithic or homogenous …” “Cultural Minorities and Women's Rights,” in Autonomy, Gender, Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 182.

⁴ W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LVI:X (1955–1956), pp. 167–198.

⁵ I focus on the responses of theorists who see some value in the idea of essential contestedness rather than those who deem it incoherent. Although he does not cite Gallie, Keith Dowding makes this latter sort of argument about essentially contested concepts in Rational Choice and Political Power (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991), pp. 167–173.

⁶ As the editors, Avital Simhony and David Weinstein, repeatedly do in their introduction to The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

⁷ Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 54.

⁸ Ibid., pp. 76–77.

⁹ Ibid., p. 77.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 3, Note 2.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 140.

¹² (1) Appraisive, referring to a valued achievement; (2) internally complex; (3) variously describable; (4) persistently vague or open-ended; (5) used competitively—error theory possible to here (according to Gallie); (6) heir of original exemplar; (7) debate progresses achievements of 6.

¹³ Freeden also questions Gallie's assumption that appraisal is necessarily positive, proposing instead that “essentially contested concepts … may equally signify disapproved and denigrated phenomena.” Freeden, op. cit., p. 56.

¹⁴ Gallie, op. cit., p. 172; emphasis original.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Glen Newey, “Philosophy, Politics and Contestability,” Journal of Political Ideologies 6:3 (2001), p. 252.

¹⁷ Gallie, op. cit., p. 180.

¹⁸ Thus the criteria would be re-ordered in the following way (keeping Gallie's numbering): (1) appraisive, referring to a valued achievement; (2) internally complex; (3) variously describable; (5) used competitively—error theory possible to here; (4) persistently vague or open-ended; (6) heir of original exemplar; (7) debate progresses achievements of 6.

¹⁹ Gallie, op. cit., p. 180

²⁰ Ibid., p. 193.

²¹ Ibid. In “Homer's Contest,” Nietzsche contrasts competition in which rivals strive for mutual annihilation with that in which the competition contributes to the welfare of all. C. D. Acampora (ed.) (Urbana, IL: North American Nietzsche Society, 1996). As Peter Bergmann puts it, with his celebration of agonism, Nietzsche praises “the competitive process itself rather than the creative resolution of competition,” Nietzsche, “The Last Antipolitical German” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 61. Jeremy Waldron disagrees with Gallie about this, suggesting that the deepening and enriching function can occur without participants to the debate being aware of themselves as part of that debate. See Jeremy Waldron, “Is the Rule of Law an Essentially Contested Concept (in Florida?),” Law and Philosophy 21:2 (2002), p. 162.

²² Just as he questions the idea that an essentially contested concept must refer to a valued achievement, so Freeden challenges Gallie's requirement that the debate over the concept's meaning be productive. “[I]t is quite conceivable that such a concept may be impoverished during competition over its interpretation, that some aspects of its meaning may be lost or abandoned, or that the level of debate may be of low quality.” Freeden, op. cit., p. 60. He is thus rejecting what I call the agonistic element of Gallie's analysis, which lends it a distinctive normative spin.

²³ William. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 10–11.

²⁴ He acknowledges that Gallie has other criteria, but the ones he discusses suffice for his purposes. Connolly, ibid., p. 41, Note 2.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 11. Freeden follows Connolly in this, describing criteria one to four as “the most important characteristics of essentially contested concepts.” “Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 2:2 (1994), p. 142. Although as we have seen, he is sceptical about the “valued” part of the first criterion.

²⁶ John Gray, “On Liberty, Liberalism and Essential Contestablity,” British Journal of Political Science 8:4 (1978), p. 390.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 391.

²⁸ Freeden, 1994, op. cit., p. 145.

²⁹ Waldron, op. cit., p.158.

³⁰ Gallie, op. cit., p. 180.

³¹ Ibid., p. 177.

³² Ibid., p. 180.

³³ Connolly, op. cit., pp. 12–22; Gray, op. cit., p. 393; Newey, op. cit., pp. 246–247.

³⁴ Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 27.

³⁵ Gallie, op. cit., p. 184.

³⁶ John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 223, Lecture VI, Section 4. See also The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 11, 14, 57, 141.

³⁷ Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Compare Rainer Forst's observation that current theories of liberalism attach different weight to the individualist, pluralist and proceduralist aspects of their liberalism. Contexts of Justice: Political Philosophy Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), p. 32.

³⁸ Consider here Freeden's critique of Rawls's suggestion that “the same equality of the Declaration of Independence which Lincoln invoked to condemn slavery can be invoked to condemn the inequality and oppression of women.” Freeden is correct to find this approach abstract, ahistorical and insensitive to context, treating “equality as a simple generalizable and deductive principle.” Freeden, 1998, op. cit., p. 246. But this is precisely where I take the self-renewing normative resources of liberalism for social critique to lie.

³⁹ As Friedman says, “… there is no reason to presume that the actual practices of a liberal society necessarily provide for all its members the values to which liberalism is committed in principle.” Op. cit., p. 198.

⁴⁰ Compare David Johnston's claim that “Liberal theory is as capable of producing radical criticism today as any school of political theory has been in the past. In order to realize its potential as an effective critical tool, however, liberal theory stands in need of revision and renewal, a new sense of direction.” The Idea of a Liberal Theory: A Critique and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 10.

⁴¹ Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in J. Butler, E. Laclau and S. Zizek (eds), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), p. 13.

⁴² Ibid., p. 39; emphasis original. Cf. pp. 40–41. In a similar vein, Chantal Mouffe writes that “… the declaration of human rights, does indeed imply a reference to universality. But this universality is conceived as a horizon that can never be reached. Every pretension to occupy the place of the universal, to fix its final meaning … must be rejected. The content of the universal must remain indeterminate …” The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 146–147.

⁴³ “The Challenge of Reimagining Citizenship and Belonging in Multicultural and Multinational Societies,” in Catriona McKinnon and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds), The Demands of Citizenship (London: Continuum, 2000), pp. 220–221.

⁴⁴ Charles Taylor, “Cross Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 181. See also David Miller's, “Communitarianism Left, Right and Centre,” in Don Avnon and Avner de-Shalit (eds), Liberalism and its Practice (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 170–183. More generally, Miller provides a useful discussion of communitarianism's internal pluralism.

⁴⁵ Charles Taylor, “Communitarianism, Taylor-made: An Interview with Charles Taylor,” Australian Quarterly 68:1 (1996), p. 4.

⁴⁶ John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 5, 21. See also his Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 131, 156.

⁴⁷ Cf. Raymond Geuss, “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” Political Theory 30:3 (2002), p. 333.

⁴⁸ Gray, 2000, op. cit., p. 104. Cf. pp. 2–6, 138–139. See also his Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 52–53.

⁴⁹ Gray, 2000, op. cit., p. 20.

⁵⁰ Susan Okin, “Humanist Liberalism,” in Nancy Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 39–53.

⁵¹ Susan Okin, Gender, Justice and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 107.

⁵² Ibid., Chapter 3.

⁵³ Richard Rorty, “Post-Modernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), pp. 583–589; “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in J. Rajchman and C. West (eds), Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 3–19; Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

⁵⁴ Gray, 1995, op. cit., pp. 153, 155, 157, 170–178. As his overview of Rorty's work in Gray, 1997, op. cit., pp. 55–60, indicates, Gray does have some positive things to say about Rorty too.

⁵⁵ David Scott, “Culture in Political Theory,” Political Theory 31:1 (2003), p. 93.

⁵⁶ Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 11, Chapter 1, Section 3.

⁵⁷ Gray, 2000, op. cit., p. 134.

⁵⁸ Ibid., pp. 132–133.

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 5–6.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 133.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 68.

⁶² Ibid., p. 133. See Section 3.1 of Gerald Gaus's Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (London: Sage, 2003) for further doubts about Hobbes's suitability as a source for Gray's position.

⁶³ This issue is raised by Freeden, 1998, op. cit., pp. 141ff. Yet it strikes me as curious that one would be reluctant to call Locke a liberal on these grounds while claiming that thinkers are espousing ideologies if they do not see themselves as doing so. This seems to be as much the case for thinkers such as Oakeshott and conservatives more generally, as it is with those in the Marxist tradition. Of course the issue here is not the anachronistic use of language as such, for the term ideology was coined early in the 19th century. Rather the question is what seems to underpin the anachronism worry—that writers would not describe themselves in these terms.

⁶⁴ As Freeden reports, “Only in his Autobiography, written in the 1860s, did Mill refer to advanced liberalism to suggest a doctrine not identical with Liberal party beliefs. He also referred in a number of his writings to Continental liberalism as a topic of interest to him.” Ibid., p. 143, Note 3.

⁶⁵ Kymlicka, op. cit., p. 75; Taylor, 1996, op. cit, p. 4; Taylor, “The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion,” Journal of Democracy 9: 4 (1998), p. 154; Gray, 2000, op. cit., p. 26.

⁶⁶ Gray, 1978, op. cit., p. 385.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 393. Cf. Newey, op. cit., p. 257.

⁶⁸ Gray, ibid., p. 393. He seems to offer this as a corrective to another of his criticisms of Gallie, for he claims that Gallie neglects the fact that when disputants disagree about politics, they are not having just a conceptual disagreement: there is also a substantive disagreement at stake. Ibid., p. 391. Newey puts this point even more strongly, suggesting that Gallie is attempting to displace political disputes into the philosophical arena in op. cit., pp. 245, 252.

⁶⁹ Gray, 1978, op. cit., p. 394.

⁷⁰ Ibid., p. 395.

⁷¹ Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

⁷² Rawls, 1993, op. cit., p. 29, Note 31.

⁷³ Gray, 1995, op. cit., p. 10.

⁷⁴ As Avnon and De Shalit observe, “… in societies with a weak or non-existing liberal tradition, which have only recently emancipated themselves from authoritarian regimes, liberalism has become the rallying cry around which new political orders are being assembled.” “Introduction: Liberalism between Promise and Practice,” in Avnon and de-Shalit, op. cit., p. 1. Cf. Thomas Nagel, “Rawls and Liberalism,” in S. Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 62.

⁷⁵ As Bellamy says, “Political debate is currently suffused by the language of rights. All the main political parties, most pressure groups and individuals of almost every ideological persuasion make their demands and define our identity as citizens in terms of rights.” R. Bellamy, Rethinking Liberalism (London: Pinter, 2000), p. 162.

⁷⁶ Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

⁷⁷ For his denial, see Rawls, 1993, op. cit., p. xix, Note 6. On the impact of the liberal-communitarian debate on Rawls's thinking, see Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 206–210 and “Liberalisms and Communitarianisms: Whose Misconception?” Political Studies XLI:4 (1993), pp. 654 − 656. Tom Spragens also sees Political Liberalism as partly a response to Rawls's critics. See his “Justice, Consensus and Boundaries: Assessing Political Liberalism,” Political Theory 31:4 (2003), p. 589.

⁷⁸ Compare Iris Marion Young's remark that “If liberalism means only a commitment to the postulate that all persons are of equal moral worth and that just politics requires a rule of law, civil liberties and procedures of democratic decision making, then I am happy to claim membership in the group, as does today much of the rest of the world, including all the theorists called communitarian.” “Reply to Tebble,” Political Theory 30:2 (2002), p. 287.

⁷⁹ Gerald Gaus, “Liberalism at the End of the Century,” Journal of Political Ideologies 5:2 (2000), pp.179–199.

⁸⁰ Gallie, op. cit., p. 196.

⁸¹ This aspect of essentially contested concepts is picked up by Alasdair MacIntyre in “The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts,” Ethics 84 (1973–74), pp. 1–8.

⁸² Glen Newey, “How Do You Like Your Liberalism: Fat or Thin?” London Review of Books, June 7, 2001, p. 3.

⁸³ Cf. Waldron, op. cit., p. 152 and Freeden, 1998, op. cit., p. 67.