THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL
by David Walsh
Chapter One: Crisis of Liberal Politics
Part 1
David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.
In one sense liberal theory and politics have always been in a state of crisis. Even in its earliest appearance in the reflections of John Locke and his contemporaries, in their uneasiness with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there was hesitation about the foundations. The American framers at Philadelphia and afterward frequently sounded their uncertainties as to whether their historical experiment in self-government was destined to survive. The advent of mass democracy in the nineteenth century, when "liberalism" became both a movement and a creed, provoked the most profound misgivings in such leading theorists as Tocqueville and Mill. And our own century has witnessed the global confrontation with totalitarianism that has made it the century of the fall and rise of the liberal tradition. So what is different about the present crisis? In what way is liberal democracy, that most defyingly durable of all modern political forms, particularly in danger today?
Perhaps there is nothing more to the alarms than the outbreak of one more of the perennial bouts of liberal self-doubt. True, there are well-recognized social, political, and economic problems. Rates of family breakdown in the advanced liberal democracies have reached catastrophic proportions, especially for the millions of children who are deprived financially and impoverished emotionally as a consequence. The epidemic of indulgence and escape, whatever the choice of narcotics, testifies to a society that is deeply unhappy and with few resources for dealing with the vicissitudes of the human condition. A new callousness toward human life is everywhere in evidence, from the explosion in violent crime to the unthinking cruelty to which human beings are exposed at every stage from conception to death. The collapse of civility is widely deplored in everything from the coarseness of popular culture to the aggressiveness of interpersonal relations in everyday life.
Within this social maelstrom the ministrations of political figures appear particularly ineffectual. Liberal politicians of course share the moral disorientation of the social world from which they come. They are, moreover, used to operating within a fairly narrow range of instrumental policy choices. Nothing in their experience prepares them for confronting the advanced process of spiritual disintegration they witness at work in their societies. At best they can help at the margins by enforcing the law and targeting programs of assistance for those who can be helped; they can neither compel nor transform the majority whose creature they ultimately remain. At worst they accelerate the process of disintegration through the recurrent competition for votes that can only be obtained by overpromising what can be achieved. The resulting disillusionment and cynicism ends by fueling the very process they sought to arrest.
Along with these self-made cycles of destruction has been the additional layer of autonomous economic cycles with all of their wrenching readjustments in human terms. Central to liberal political philosophy has always been the philosophy of economic growth in one form or another. It is no secret that the relative quietude of liberal societies is purchased in considerable measure through a growing economy. Political conflicts over wealth can be less divisive when the fund available is an expanding one, rather than one that is static or contracting. But growth always includes decline and instability, which translates into real human dislocation and suffering. The difficulty is that governments have neither mastered the self-discipline nor risen to the challenge of educating their citizens concerning the principles of action required to confront economic uncertainty. Such powerlessness is exacerbated when the global economic interdependence makes evident the limits of their control.
Yet a few problems do not make a crisis. Taken individually the difficulties faced by the liberal democracies are no greater than the historic challenges they have overcome, such as the totalitarian confrontation or the upheavals of the industrial and social revolutions. They are difficulties that could be overcome through the application of a determined common sense. If politics has raised exaggerated expectations, lower them; if economic adjustments have to be made, make them as rationally and as compassionately as possible; if family breakdown is a problem, legislate in ways that encourage the formation and stability of family life. Such steps would not, of course, eliminate the problems nor would they be free of costs, but they would clearly be a movement in the required direction. No insuperable obstacles lie in the way of the appropriate action, if we will to undertake it.
Therein lies the difficulty. We find ourselves lacking the necessary resoluteness of will that would enable us to overcome the problems before us. It is not that the solutions are unavailable, but that we are unable to avail of them. A peculiar ambivalence, a conflict of inclinations grips us, and we are unable to shake free of the desuetude that overwhelms us. We cannot take action because we are not yet willing to undergo the painful reorientation. Like Saint Augustine's "Lord, make me pure, but not just yet," or the alcoholic who is ready to quit after "one more drink," we are not yet serious about the changes we need to make. Deep down we are still attached to the problems that plague us, and we have not yet felt that we really need to change.
Anatomy of the Crisis
Liberal society does not yet realize the depth of the crisis within it. In popular lingo, we are still "in denial." Yet the marks of the crisis are widely in evidence, from the incapacity to take effective action in the public policy arena to the profound moral conflicts that rend the liberal soul. A paralysis of action everywhere arises from the "interminable" and "incommensurable" disputes that cleave liberal society into a multiplicity of hostile camps.1 Common sense is decreasingly in evidence because we share less and less of a common understanding of things with one another. With the decline in what is common, there is less of a community between human beings. Pluralism, multiculturalism, and difference are the watchwords. Liberal politics does come to resemble Alasdair Maclntyre's notorious description of it: "civil war carried on by other means" (After Virtue, 253).
This disappearance of a shared social and political world means ultimately the disappearance of the liberal ethos itself. That is the first leg of the crisis. The common self-understanding constitutive of liberal democracy is itself in danger of extinction to the extent that a multiplicity of private viewpoints overshadows it. A profound crisis of confidence, the equal of any that it has historically faced, is now shaking liberal order to its foundations. Unsure of what it believes and uncertain of the grounds for what it holds, liberal democracy is vulnerable to the centrifugal forces that it has for so long held within itself. Without a liberal center "things fall apart and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
What makes the crisis determinative is that the corrective centripetal forces have all but disappeared. It is not the pressures to disintegrate that are the core of any social or political crisis, for such forces are always present. It is the absence of any countervailing forces of union, a shared conception of the common good, that enables the destructive powers to appear so strong. This is the case today because liberal principles no longer seem to possess a core of their own; it has been lost in the process by which the present crisis of pluralism unfolded. There is little possibility of a reassertion of unifying dogma, because it has been the inexorable logic of the liberal orientation itself that has led to the present disintegration. Liberal pluralism cannot stand apart to impose coherence on the very incoherence it has brought forth.
The collapse of the liberal center has been the work of liberal principles themselves. That is the crucial second leg of the crisis. Not only is there a hollowness at the heart of the public order, but it is a vacuum that has been largely self-created. The ethos of neutrality so studiously cultivated by liberal theory and liberal practice is what has evacuated the soul of its politics. By extending the principle of neutrality far enough, liberal conviction has finally been unable to resist the last step. It has become neutral regarding itself. There can be no dogma that all must accept, because that would be an illiberal imposition contrary to the freedom of choice that the liberal construction is intended to promote. The only foundation to liberal political order must be the aggregation of the private valuations of the individuals who compose it. There can be nothing approaching a shared worldview, because being liberal means precisely that we do not have to share a worldview.
Such is the "strange death of liberal" society that seems to loom before us.2 Gone is the confidence that a community of free and equal individuals is a sufficient condition for the emergence of a good political order. We are no longer convinced that there is a universal human nature that can be relied upon to draw the vast majority in a common direction, toward their common good. In the absence of a shared nature there seems to be less justification for treating one another as equal — equal in what? — or for regarding rights as anything more than a social convention. Like Justice Holmes, we are inclined to believe that there is nothing more to the rights of man than what men will fight for, in much the same way that "a dog will fight for a bone."3 Finally, having lost the sense of a human core that will form the basis of agreement and constitute the basis for the acknowledgment of fundamental rights between human beings, we lose the liberal faith in reason. We can no longer indulge the expectation that the historical trend of politics is progressive. Nothing justifies our sanguinity that the future will be better than the past.
The central ideas of the liberal creed have taken a beating, and without them it is doubtful that liberal politics can be sustained. That is the situation in which we find ourselves, and the problem that the present study is a modest attempt to address. Without the liberal faith in a common human rationality, however vaguely defined, can we continue to enjoy political institutions that presuppose it? The protection of a sphere of individual liberty that cannot be invaded by others, public or private, is based on the assumption that this is the best way for human beings to flourish. But if human flourishing has itself become an empty concept, of what value is the liberty that protects it? If we take happiness or satisfaction as the overriding political goal then the line between public and private may be redrawn quite differently. Constitutional limitations become much less significant if we are aiming at a society of "contented slaves."
Nor is there any compelling reason that we should endure the cumbersome and untidy exercise of political liberty. Self-government is only of value if human beings must attempt to govern themselves in order to reach their full human stature. If there is no common growth in self-responsibility to be attained, then there is little purpose in the inefficiency of participatory politics. Public order can be obtained in a less costly manner. There might even be methods of checking the abuse of power by public officials. Why is it necessary for the people to be consulted? Only if we believe that it is somehow essential to being human is it necessary to encourage the free-flowing chaos of self-government. Unless humans are essentially self-governing beings, there can be no case for self-governing societies.
With the disappearance of the view of humans as rational beings there dissolves also the liberal faith in the progress of reason. However variously formulated, liberals have always held to some form of belief in the capacity of men to improve collectively and individually. It is bound up with the notion of reason itself, that we can learn from our mistakes and that in history advances do occur. The amplitude of meliorism, from Utopian expectations of a change in human nature to more sober assessments of the incorrigibleness of humanity, was united around a core confidence in the ability of reason to guide human existence and at least to build incremental improvements in the political realm. Without a faith in the human capacity for self-improvement it seems unlikely that the experiment in self-government can be sustained. The inevitable failures and disappointments will eventually engulf it.
All the major elements of the liberal worldview appear to have lost their footing. The value of private liberty has been put in doubt, the need for self-government appears less compelling, and the likelihood that reason can guide political agreements seems ever more unlikely. In place of the confident self-evidence of liberal principles is a gnawing sense that the dissolving process has occurred from within. There can be no solution because it has been the extension of the liberal impulse itself that has undermined the foundations. The very success of a liberal order is ironically what encouraged the peeling of successive layers, only to end by discovering after the last layer had been pulled back that the onion itself had disappeared. No one step or layer appeared indispensable, but the cumulative effect was conclusive. Nothing could survive the withering skepticism of analysis.
If the test was that one cannot be compelled to accept any principle whose truth cannot be conclusively demonstrated to everyone, then one could not be compelled to accept much. Yet that has been the logic of the liberal starting point. In the slow but inexorable march toward a neutrality beyond all objections, the very heart of the liberal impulse itself has been lost. For it turns out that even the most expansive expressions of tolerance harbor a residue of cruelty, in the forms of behavior they exclude. We are pushed to go one step further in the application of our liberal principles of choice. We must acknowledge that there are no limits on what consent can authorize. We must accept even intolerance in the name of tolerance. It is at that point that liberal politics has stepped over the abyss from which it cannot easily recover, because the principles that guide it have been the very ones that have pushed it over the edge.
The quest for an impregnable foundation to justify and guide the exercise of liberal authority has proved illusory. Every principle adduced has become in turn a petitio principii, itself in need of justification and ever vulnerable to the corrosive "Why?" Even when that question is answered there still remains the problem of the application of any standard in social and political practice. The disputes that may have been settled at the level of abstraction begin all over again. We discover that the consensus we appeared to have reached did not extend beyond appearance. The meaning of the standard to guide the application of liberty in concrete is itself replete with the same uncertainty and conflict that prevailed in the philosophical debate. The confusion of philosophy has merely been transferred to politics.
It is this utter failure of any formulation of liberty to shape a concrete consensus of interpretation that has crystallized the crisis of the liberal tradition. The crisis has become self-conscious. That is the third leg, added to the collapse of the center and the self-induced nature. Now all three elements are present in the awareness that the more liberal we have tried to be, the more incoherent we have become both intellectually and politically. The crisis has arisen, not from a failure to apply liberal principles but from a too consistent application. The ever more rigorous search for a neutral foundation has evacuated all foundations; the injunction against cruelty has progressively removed even the barriers that define cruelty itself; the ever widening demand for popular participation increases the sense of alienation from a process over which the individual has no control. The unfolding of events and reflections has now made the crisis transparent. We recognize that it is specifically a crisis of liberal order itself, not attributable to any extraneous factors.
That recognition is the outer limit of our present awareness politically and intellectually. It is what is behind the more pragmatic political mood that has prevailed in the liberal democracies. The search for new political paradigms, the experimentation with new labels, neoliberals or neoconservatives, testifies to nothing so much as the defunctness of the old orientations. There may not be a clearly formulated direction to take their place, but there can be no further implementation of the outmoded conceptions of the past. The extension of liberal principles into welfare-state liberalism, as it occurred in this century, has reached its limits.4 Having successfully responded to the most pressing social needs, the continued expansion of such efforts has begun to threaten the exercise of liberty itself. The welfare state ceases to serve the welfare of its beneficiaries when it has transformed them into its wards and can no longer recognize the harm it has done. An order of liberty presupposes some limits that lie beyond even benevolent control.
The parallel intellectual straining of the limits of liberal principles has reached an equivalent transparency, collapsing in the recognition that the quest for foundations impregnable to skeptical critique is an impossible enterprise. There are no foundations beyond foundation. Some of the most impressive contemporary liberal theorists have both reached and exemplified this recognition in their own writings. A revival of liberal theoretical reflection that reached a high point in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has reached a dead end. A line of reflection that seemed to be full of promise, both theoretically and politically, has suddenly ended in the desert. Moreover, it is a landscape that bears striking resemblance to the desert of nihilism against which the liberal tradition has attempted to define itself.5 The conclusion toward which both the practical and the theoretical extensions of the liberal impulse point is that very vacuity of purpose it all along sought to avoid. 
[This is the first of five parts. Part 2 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
1. Alasdair Maclntyre's After Virtue had the kind of broad public impact that it did because it was a forceful intellectual expression of a social situation that was becoming widely self-evident. He summarized the "catastrophe" that has overtaken modern civilization.
The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture — and subscquently of our own — lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. In a world of secular rationality religion could no longer provide such a shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action; and the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject. (50)
A recent survey of the social fault lines is provided by James Davison Hunter in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.
2. This is the title of a famous book by George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914, which recounts the collapse of the Liberal political party in England just before the Great War.
3. It is not at all comforting to discover that the most influential American jurist of the century had concluded that there was "no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand" (quoted in Walter Berns, The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy, 162-63).
4. For an account of the way in which welfare-state liberalism is the outgrowth of the earlier laissez-faire liberalism, see the classic argument by L. T. Hobhouse in Liberalism. John Dewey represents a parallel call for the expansion of liberal formulations to include a more energetic role for government planning and intervention. See his Individualism Old and New, Freedom and Culture, and Liberalism and Social Action.
5. I am indebted to the work of several liberal critics of liberalism for this portrait, especially John Gray, Liberalism and Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy, and William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues and Diversity in the Liberal State.
Bibliography
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 2nd ed. South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice.Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 1971.
