On Liberalism

Given the general ennui of our political moment, and of our apparent inability to deal with the rising tide of illiberalism, a reader suggested that it might be a good idea to highlight Bret Devereaux’s ode to Liberalism. I quite concur.

Instead, what I mean when I say liberalism is its original (and broadly international) meaning: the political philosophy which first emerged fully in the early modern period and which places individual freedoms – liberty – as its central, defining value. This is the ideology of the Declaration of Independence and the political theory upon which – however imperfectly – the United States was predicated. You may fairly ask why I am using a term that is going to be confusing to some folks and the answer is: there really isn’t a better one (‘libertarian,’ as we’ll see, means something related but different). Though at the same time, American political vocabulary seems to be undergoing a shift where the The Left is more comfortable claiming ‘progressive’ or ‘socialist’ as a label, while at least some factions on the right are more comfortable openly aligning as anti-liberal (or illiberal), which is leading the term ‘liberal’ to shift back to its original meaning. I don’t want to get too sidetracked by political terminology for the American political system, so I’ll put my own preferred terminology in a footnote.¹

So let’s talk about it: what is liberalism, this political philosophy upon which the United States was founded? And perhaps equally to the point, why do I think that liberal principles remain crucial to organizing human affairs? Now I have kept trying to reorganize my thoughts here in a way that I like and I have not yet succeeded, so this may be a bit more of a ramble than usual – we’re going to have to walk through a bit of pre-modern societies, a bit of Greece, a bit of Rome, and also a bit of early modern Europe before we get to what I think the core of this idea is, which is the value of liberalism today, particularly with reference to the United States.

It was entertaining in graduate seminars in the 1990s to interrogate liberalism and highlight the merits of its critics and its challengers. It’s somewhat less entertaining today, but I suppose that every political system must carry and contend with the seeds of its own destruction… but then it is that threat of destruction that reminds us of the virtues of the system.