## 1. The Debate About Liberty


### 1.1 The Presumption in Favor of Liberty



"By definition," Maurice Cranston says, "a liberal
is a man who believes in liberty" (1967: 459). In two ways,
liberals accord liberty primacy as a political value.



(i) Liberals have typically maintained that humans are naturally in
"a *State of perfect Freedom* to order their
Actions...as they think fit...without asking leave, or
depending on the Will of any other Man" (Locke, 1960 [1689]:
287). Mill too argued that "the burden of proof is supposed to
be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction
or prohibition.... The *a priori* assumption is in favour
of freedom..." (1963, vol. 21: 262). Recent liberal
thinkers such as as Joel Feinberg (1984: 9), Stanley Benn (1988: 87)
and John Rawls (2001: 44, 112) agree. Liberalism is a philosophy that
starts from a premise that political authority and law must be
justified. If citizens are obliged to exercise self-restraint, and
especially if they are obliged to defer to someone else's authority,
there must be a reason why. Restrictions on liberty must be
justified.



(ii) That is to say, although no one classifies Hobbes as a liberal,
there is reason to regard Hobbes as an instigator of liberal
philosophy (see also Waldron 2001), for it was Hobbes who asked on
what grounds citizens owe allegiance to the sovereign. Implicit in
Hobbes's question is a rejection of the presumption that
citizens are the king's property; on the contrary, kings are
empowered by citizens who are themselves, initially, sovereign in the
sense of having a meaningful right to say no. In the culture at large,
this view of the relation between citizen and king had been taking
shape for centuries. The Magna Carta was a series of agreements,
beginning in 1215, arising out of disputes between the barons and King
John. The Magna Carta eventually settled that the king is bound by the
rule of law. In 1215, the Magna Carta was part of the beginning rather
than the end of the argument, but by the mid-1300s, concepts of
individual rights to trial by jury, due process, and equality before
the law were more firmly established. The Magna Carta was coming to be
seen as vesting sovereignty not only in nobles but in "the
People" as such. By the mid-1400s, John Fortescue,
England's Chief Justice from 1442 to 1461, would write *The
Difference Between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy*, a plea for
limited monarchy that arguably represents the beginning of English
political thought (Schmidtz and Brennan, 2010: chap. 2).



Hobbes generally is treated as one of the first and greatest social
contract thinkers. Typically, Hobbes also is seen as an advocate of
absolute sovereignty. On Hobbes's theory, Leviathan's
authority is almost absolute along a particular dimension: namely,
Leviathan is authorized to do whatever it takes to keep the peace.
This special end justifies almost any means, including drastic
limitations on liberty. Yet, note the limitations implicit in the end
itself. Leviathan's job is to keep the peace: not to do
everything worth doing, but simply to secure the peace. Hobbes, the
famed absolutist, in fact developed a model of government sharply
limited in this most important way.



Paradigmatic liberals such as Locke also maintain that justified
limitations on liberty are fairly modest. Only a limited government
can be justified; indeed, the basic task of government is to protect
the equal liberty of citizens. Thus John Rawls's
paradigmatically liberal first principle of justice: "Each
person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of equal
basic liberty compatible with a similar system for all" (Rawls,
1999b: 220).


### 1.2 Negative Liberty



Liberals disagree, however, about the concept of liberty, and as a
result the liberal ideal of protecting individual liberty can lead to
different conceptions of the task of government. Isaiah Berlin
famously advocated a negative conception of liberty:



> 
> I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of
> men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is
> simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If
> I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to
> that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond
> a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be,
> enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of
> inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the
> air, or cannot read because I am blind...it would be eccentric to
> say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the
> deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which
> I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if
> you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings (Berlin, 1969:
> 122).
> 



For Berlin and those who follow him, then, the heart of liberty is the
absence of coercion by other agents; consequently, the liberal
state's commitment to protecting liberty is, essentially, the
job of ensuring that citizens do not coerce each other without
compelling justification. So understood, negative liberty is a matter
of which options are left to our discretion, or more precisely, which
options are foreclosed by the actions of others, and with what
warrant, and this is so regardless of whether we exercise such options
(Taylor, 1979).


### 1.3 Positive Liberty



Many liberals have been attracted to more 'positive'
conceptions of liberty. Although Rousseau (1973 [1762]) seemed to
advocate a positive conception of liberty, according to which one was
free when one acted according to one's true will (the general
will), the positive conception was best developed by the British
neo-Hegelians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
such as Thomas Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet (2001 [1923]). Green
acknowledged that "...it must be of course admitted that
every usage of the term [i.e., 'freedom'] to express
anything but a social and political relation of one man to other
involves a metaphor...It always implies...some exemption
from compulsion by another..."(1986 [1895]: 229).
Nevertheless, Green went on to claim that a person can be unfree in
another way, a psychological rather than political way, if he is
subject to an impulse or craving that cannot be controlled. Such a
person, Green argued, is "...in the condition of a bondsman
who is carrying out the will of another, not his own" (1986
[1895]: 228). Just as a slave is not doing what he *really*
wants to do, one who is, say, an alcoholic, is being led by a craving
to look for satisfaction where it cannot, ultimately, be found.



For Green, a person is free only if she is self-directed or
autonomous. Running throughout liberal political theory is an ideal of
a free person as one whose actions are in some sense her *own*.
In this sense, positive liberty is an *exercise-concept*. One
is free merely to the degree that one has effectively determined
oneself and the shape of one's life (Taylor, 1979). Such a
person is not subject to compulsions, critically reflects on her
ideals and so does not unreflectively follow custom, and does not
ignore her long-term interests for short-term pleasures. This ideal of
freedom as autonomy has its roots not only in Rousseau's and
Kant's political theory, but also in John Stuart Mill's
*On Liberty.* And today it is a dominant strain in liberalism,
as witnessed by the work of S.I. Benn (1988), Gerald Dworkin (1988),
and Joseph Raz (1986); see also the essays in Christman and Anderson
(2005).



Green's autonomy-based conception of positive freedom is often
run together with a notion of 'positive' freedom: freedom
as effective power to act or to pursue one's ends. In the words
of the British socialist R. H. Tawney, freedom thus understood is
'the ability to act' (1931: 221; see also Gaus, 2000; ch.
5.) On this positive conception, a person not prohibited from being a
member of a Country Club but too poor to afford membership is not free
to be a member: she lacks an effective power to act. Positive freedom
*qua* effective power to act closely ties freedom to material
resources. (Education, for example, should be easily available so that
all can develop their capacities.) It was this conception of positive
liberty that Hayek had in mind when he insisted that although
"freedom and wealth are both good things...they still
remain different" (1960: 17-18). To Hayek, wealth implies
capability in a way that freedom does not.


### 1.4 Republican Liberty



An older notion of liberty that has recently resurfaced is the
republican, or neo-Roman, conception of liberty, which has roots in
the writings of Cicero and Niccolo Machiavelli (1950 [1513]).
According to Philip Pettit,



> 
> The contrary of the *liber*, or free, person in Roman,
> republican usage was the *servus*, or slave, and up to at least
> the beginning of the last century, the dominant connotation of
> freedom, emphasized in the long republican tradition, was not having
> to live in servitude to another: not being subject to the arbitrary
> power of another (Pettit, 1996: 576).
> 



On this view, the opposite of freedom is domination. To be unfree is
to be "subject to the potentially capricious will or the
potentially idiosyncratic judgement of another" (Pettit, 1997:
5). The ideal liberty-protecting government, then, ensures that no
agent, including the government, has arbitrary power over any citizen.
This is accomplished through an equal disbursement of power. Each
person has power that offsets the power of another to arbitrarily
interfere with her activities (Pettit, 1997: 67).



The republican conception of liberty is distinct from both Greenian
positive and negative conceptions. Unlike Greenian positive liberty,
republican liberty is not primarily concerned with rational autonomy,
realizing one's true nature, or becoming one's higher
self. When all dominating power has been dispersed, republican
theorists are generally silent about these goals (Larmore 2001).
Unlike negative liberty, republican liberty is primarily focused upon
"defenseless susceptibility to interference, rather than actual
interference" (Pettit, 1996: 577). Thus, in contrast to the
ordinary negative conception, on the republican conception the mere
*possibility* of arbitrary interference is a limitation of
liberty. Republican liberty thus seems to involve a modal claim about
the possibility of interference, and this is often cashed out in terms
of complex counterfactual claims. It is not clear whether these claims
can be adequately explicated (Gaus, 2003; cf. Larmore, 2004).



Some republican theorists, such as Quentin Skinner (1998: 113),
Maurizio Viroli (2002: 6) and Pettit (1997: 8-11), view
republicanism as an alternative to liberalism. When republican liberty
is seen as a basis for criticizing market liberty and market society,
this is plausible (Gaus, 2003b). However, when liberalism is
understood more expansively, and not so closely tied to either
negative liberty or market society, republicanism becomes
indistinguishable from liberalism (Ghosh, 2008; Rogers, 2008; Larmore,
2001; Dagger, 1997).


## 2. The Debate Between the 'Old' and the 'New'


### 2.1 Classical Liberalism



Liberal political theory, then, fractures over how to conceive of
liberty. In practice, another crucial fault line concerns the moral
status of private property and the market order. For classical
liberals -- 'old' liberals -- liberty and
private property are intimately related. From the eighteenth century
to the present day, classical liberals have insisted that an economic
system based on private property is uniquely consistent with
individual liberty, allowing each to live her life --including
employing her labor and her capital -- as she sees fit. Indeed,
classical liberals and libertarians have often asserted that in some
way liberty and property are really the same thing; it has been
argued, for example, that all rights, including liberty rights, are
forms of property; others have maintained that property is itself a
form of freedom (Gaus, 1994; Steiner, 1994). A market order based on
private property is thus seen as an *embodiment* of freedom
(Robbins, 1961: 104). Unless people are free to make contracts and
sell their labour, save and invest their incomes as they see fit, and
free to launch enterprises as they raise the capital, they are not
really free.



Classical liberals employ a second argument connecting liberty and
private property. Rather than insisting that the freedom to obtain and
employ private property is simply one aspect of people's
liberty, this second argument insists that private property
effectively protects liberty, and no protection can be effective
without private property. Here the idea is that the dispersion of
power that results from a free market economy based on private
property protects the liberty of subjects against encroachments by the
state. As F.A. Hayek argues, "There can be no freedom of press
if the instruments of printing are under government control, no
freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom
of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly"
(1978: 149).



Although classical liberals agree on the fundamental importance of
private property to a free society, the classical liberal tradition
itself is a spectrum of views, from near-anarchist to those that
attribute a significant role to the state in economic and social
policy (on this spectrum, see Mack and Gaus, 2004). At the libertarian
end of the classical liberal spectrum are views of justified states as
legitimate monopolies that may with justice charge for essential
rights-protection services: taxation is legitimate if necessary and
sufficient for effective protection of liberty and property. Further
'leftward' we encounter classical liberal views that allow
taxation for public education in particular, and more generally for
public goods and social infrastructure. Moving yet further
'left', some classical liberal views allow for a modest
social minimum.(e.g., Hayek, 1976: 87). Most nineteenth century
classical liberal economists endorsed a variety of state policies,
encompassing not only the criminal law and enforcement of contracts,
but the licensing of professionals, health, safety and fire
regulations, banking regulations, commercial infrastructure (roads,
harbors and canals) and often encouraged unionization (Gaus, 1983b).
Although classical liberalism today often is associated with
libertarianism, the broader classical liberal tradition was centrally
concerned with bettering the lot of the working class, women, blacks,
immigrants, and so on. The aim, as Bentham put it, was to make the
poor richer, not the rich poorer (Bentham, 1952 [1795]: vol. 1, 226n).
Consequently, classical liberals treat the leveling of wealth and
income as outside the purview of legitimate aims of government
coercion.


### 2.2 The 'New Liberalism'



What has come to be known as 'new',
'revisionist', 'welfare state', or perhaps
best, 'social justice', liberalism challenges this
intimate connection between personal liberty and a private property
based market order (Freeden, 1978; Gaus, 1983b; Paul, Miller and Paul,
2007). Three factors help explain the rise of this revisionist theory.
First, the new liberalism was clearly taking its own distinctive shape
by the early twentieth century, as the ability of a free market to
sustain what Lord Beveridge (1944: 96) called a 'prosperous
equilibrium' was being questioned. Believing that a private
property based market tended to be unstable, or could, as Keynes
argued (1973 [1936]), get stuck in an equilibrium with high
unemployment, new liberals came to doubt, initially on empirical
grounds, that classical liberalism was an adequate foundation for a
stable, free society. Here the second factor comes into play: just as
the new liberals were losing faith in the market, their faith in
government as a means of supervising economic life was increasing.
This was partly due to the experiences of the First World War, in
which government attempts at economic planning seemed to succeed
(Dewey, 1929: 551-60); more importantly, this reevaluation of
the state was spurred by the democratization of western states, and
the conviction that, for the first time, elected officials could truly
be, in J.A. Hobson's phrase 'representatives of the
community' (1922: 49). As D.G. Ritchie proclaimed:



> 
> be it observed that arguments used against 'government'
> action, where the government is entirely or mainly in the hands of a
> ruling class or caste, exercising wisely or unwisely a paternal or
> grandmotherly authority -- such arguments lose their force just
> in proportion as the government becomes more and more genuinely the
> government of the people by the people themselves. (1896: 64)
> 



The third factor underlying the currency of the new liberalism was
probably the most fundamental: a growing conviction that, so far from
being 'the guardian of every other right' (Ely, 1992: 26),
property rights foster an unjust inequality of power. They entrench a
merely formal equality that in actual practice systematically fails to
secure the kind of equal positive liberty that matters on the ground
for the working class. This theme is central to what is now called
'liberalism' in American politics, combining a strong
endorsement of civil and personal liberties with indifference or even
hostility to private ownership. The seeds of this newer liberalism can
be found in Mill's *On Liberty.* Although Mill insisted
that the 'so-called doctrine of Free Trade' rested on
'equally solid' grounds as did the 'principle of
individual liberty' (1963, vol. 18: 293), he nevertheless
insisted that the justifications of personal and economic liberty were
distinct. And in his *Principles of Political Economy,* Mill
consistently emphasized that it is an open question whether personal
liberty can flourish without private property (1963, vol. 2;
203-210), a view that Rawls was to reassert over a century later
(2001: Part IV).


### 2.3 Liberal Theories of Social Justice



One consequence of Rawls's great work, *A Theory of
Justice* (1999 [first published in 1971]) is that the 'new
liberalism' has become focused on developing a theory of social
justice. Since the 1960s when Rawls began to publish the elements of
his emerging theory, liberal political philosophers have analyzed, and
disputed, his famous 'difference principle' according to
which a just basic structure of society arranges social and economic
inequalities such that they are to the greatest advantage of the least
well off representative group (1999b:266). For Rawls, the default is
not liberty but rather an equal distribution of (basically) income and
wealth; only inequalities that best enhance the long-term prospects of
the least advantaged are just. As Rawls sees it, the difference
principle constitutes a public recognition of the principle of
reciprocity: the basic structure is to be arranged such that no social
group advances at the cost of another (2001: 122-24). Many
followers of Rawls have focused less on the ideal of reciprocity than
on the commitment to equality (Dworkin, 2000). Indeed, what was
previously called 'welfare state' liberalism is now often
described as liberal egalitarianism. However, see Jan Narveson's
essay on Hobbes's seeming defense of the welfare state (in
Courtland 2018) for historical reflections on the difference.



And in one way that is especially appropriate: in his later work Rawls
insists that welfare-state capitalism does not constitute a just basic
structure (2001: 137-38). If some version of capitalism is to be
just it must be a 'property owning democracy' with a wide
diffusion of ownership; a market socialist regime, in Rawls's
view, is more just than welfare-state capitalism (2001: 135-38). Not
too surprisingly, classical liberals such as Hayek (1976) insist that
the contemporary liberal fixation on 'the mirage of social
justice' leads modern liberals to ignore the extent to which, as
a matter of historical observation, freedom depends on a decentralized
market based on private property, the overall results of which are
unpredictable.



Thus, Robert Nozick (1974: 160ff) famously classifies Rawls's
difference principle as patterned but not historical: prescribing a
distribution while putting no moral weight on who produced the goods
being distributed. One stark difference that emerges from this is that
Rawlsian liberalism's theory of justice is a theory about how to
distribute the pie while old liberalism's theory of justice is a
theory about how to treat bakers (Schmidtz, 2022).



The problem with patterned principles is that, in Nozick's
words, liberty upsets patterns. "No end-state principle or
distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously
realized without continuous interference with people's
lives" (1974: 163). To illustrate, Nozick asks you to imagine
that society achieves a pattern of perfect justice by the lights of
whatever principle you prefer. Then someone offers Wilt Chamberlain a
dollar for the privilege of watching Wilt play basketball. Before we
know it, thousands of people are paying Wilt a dollar each, every time
Wilt puts on a show. Wilt gets rich. The distribution is no longer
equal, and no one complains. Nozick's question: If justice is a
pattern, achievable at a given moment, what happens if you achieve
perfection? Must you then prohibit everything--no further
consuming, creating, trading, or even *giving*--so as not
to upset the perfect pattern? Notice: Nozick neither argues nor
presumes people can do whatever they want with their property. Nozick,
recalling the focus on connecting property rights to liberty that
animated liberalism in its classical form, notes that if there is
*anything at all* people can do, even if the only thing they
are free to do is give a coin to an entertainer, then even that
tiniest of liberties will, over time, disturb the favored pattern.
Nozick is right that if we focus on time slices, we focus on isolated
moments, and take moments too seriously, when what matters is not the
pattern of holdings at a moment but the pattern of how people treat
each other over time. Even tiny liberties must upset the pattern of a
static moment. By the same token, however, there is no reason why
liberty must upset an ongoing pattern of fair treatment. A moral
principle forbidding racial discrimination, for example, prescribes no
particular end-state. Such a principle is what Nozick calls weakly
patterned, sensitive to history as well as to pattern, and prescribing
an ideal of how people should be treated without prescribing an
end-state distribution. It *affects* the pattern without
*prescribing* a pattern. And if a principle forbidding racial
discrimination works its way into a society via cultural progress
rather than legal intervention, it need not involve any interference
whatsoever. So, although Nozick sometimes speaks as if his critique
applies to all patterns, we should take seriously his concession that
"weak" patterns are compatible with liberty. Some may
promote liberty, depending on how they are introduced and maintained.
See Schmidtz (2006: chap.6). For work by modern liberals that
resonates with Nozick's dissection of the dimensions of equality
that plausibly can count as liberal, see also Anderson (1999), Young
(1990), and Sen (1992).



Accordingly, even granting to Nozick that time-slice principles
license immense, constant, intolerable interference with everyday
life, there is some reason to doubt that Rawls intended to embrace any
such view. In his first article, Rawls said, "we cannot
determine the justness of a situation by examining it at a single
moment" (1951: 191) Years later, Rawls added, "It is a
mistake to focus attention on the varying relative positions of
individuals and to require that every change, considered as a single
transaction viewed in isolation, be in itself just. It is the
arrangement of the basic structure which is to be judged, and judged
from a general point of view" (1999b: 76). Thus, to Rawls, basic
structure's job is not to make every transaction work to the
working class's advantage, let alone to the advantage of each
member of the class. Rawls was more realistic than that. Instead, it
is the trend of a whole society over time that is supposed to benefit
the working class *as a class*. To be sure, Rawls was a kind of
egalitarian, but the pattern Rawls meant to endorse was a pattern of
equal status, applying not so much to a distribution as to an ongoing
relationship. This is not to say that Nozick's critique had no
point. Nozick showed what an alternative theory might look like,
portraying Wilt Chamberlain as a separate person in a more robust
sense (unencumbered by nebulous debts to society) than Rawls could
countenance. To Nozick, Wilt's advantages are not what Wilt
*finds* on the table; Wilt's advantages are what Wilt
*brings* to the table. And respecting what Wilt brings to the
table is the exact essence of respecting him as a separate person. In
part due to Nozick, today's egalitarians now acknowledge that
any equality worthy of aspiration will focus less on justice as a
property of a time-slice distribution and more on how people are
treated: how they are rewarded for their contributions and
*enabled* over time to make contributions worth rewarding.
(Schmidtz, 2006).


## 3. The Debate About the Comprehensiveness of Liberalism


### 3.1 Political Liberalism



As his work evolved, Rawls (1996: 5ff) insisted that his liberalism
was not a 'comprehensive' doctrine, that is, one which
includes an overall theory of value, an ethical theory, an
epistemology, or a controversial metaphysics of the person and
society. Our modern societies, characterized by a 'reasonable
pluralism', are already filled with such doctrines. The aim of
political liberalism is not to add yet another sectarian doctrine, but
to provide a political framework that is neutral between such
controversial comprehensive doctrines (Larmore, 1996: 121ff).
Rawls's notion of a purely political conception of liberalism
seems more austere than the traditional liberal political theories
discussed above, being largely restricted to constitutional principles
upholding basic civil liberties and the democratic process.



Gaus (2004) argues that the distinction between
'political' and 'comprehensive' liberalism
misses a great deal. Liberal theories form a broad continuum, from
those that constitute full-blown philosophical systems, to those that
rely on a full theory of value and the good, to those that rely on a
theory of the right (but not the good), all the way to those that seek
to be purely political doctrines. Nevertheless, it is important to
appreciate that, though we treat liberalism as primarily a political
theory, it has been associated with broader theories of ethics, value,
and society. Indeed, many believe that liberalism cannot rid itself of
all controversial metaphysical (Hampton, 1989) or epistemological
(Raz, 1990) commitments.


### 3.2 Liberal Ethics



Following Wilhelm von Humboldt (1993 [1854]), in *On Liberty*
Mill argues that *one* basis for endorsing freedom (Mill
believes there are many), is the goodness of developing individuality
and cultivating capacities:



> 
> Individuality is the same thing with development, and...it is
> only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce,
> well-developed human beings...what more can be said of any
> condition of human affairs, than that it brings human beings
> themselves nearer to the best thing they can be? or what worse can be
> said of any obstruction to good, than that it prevents this? (Mill,
> 1963, vol. 18: 267)
> 



This is not just a theory about politics: it is a substantive,
perfectionist, moral theory about the good. On this view, the right
thing to do is to promote development or perfection, but only a regime
securing extensive liberty for each person can accomplish this (Wall,
1998). This moral ideal of human perfection and development dominated
liberal thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and
much of the twentieth: not only Mill, but T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse,
Bernard Bosanquet, John Dewey and even Rawls show allegiance to
variants of this perfectionist ethic and the claim that it provides a
foundation for endorsing a regime of liberal rights (Gaus, 1983a). And
it is fundamental to the proponents of liberal autonomy discussed
above, as well as 'liberal virtue' theorists such as
William Galston (1980). That the good life is necessarily a freely
chosen one in which a person develops his unique capacities as part of
a plan of life is probably the dominant liberal ethic of the past
century.



The main challenge to Millian perfectionism's status as the
distinctly liberal ethic comes from moral
contractualism/contractarianism, which can be divided into what might
very roughly be labeled 'Kantian' and
'Hobbesian' versions. According to Kantian contractualism,
"society, being composed of a plurality of persons, each with
his own aims, interests, and conceptions of the good, is best arranged
when it is governed by principles that do not *themselves*
presuppose any particular conception of the good..."
(Sandel, 1982: 1). On this view, respect for the personhood of others
demands that we refrain from imposing our view of the good life on
them. Only principles that can be justified to all respect the
personhood of each. We thus witness the tendency of recent liberal
theory (Reiman, 1990; Scanlon, 1998) to transform the social contract
from an account of the state to an overall justification of morality,
or at least a social morality. This is not to deny, however, that
liberalism is, after all, essentially a view that there is such a
thing as minding one's own business, and that there is a sphere within
which we have the right to say "It's my life" while politely declining
invitations to justify ourselves. Liberalism is the idea that there
are limits to any need for public justification.



In contrast, distinctively Hobbesian contractarianism supposes only
that individuals are self-interested and correctly perceive that each
person's ability to effectively pursue her interests is enhanced
by a framework of norms that structure social life and divide the
fruits of social cooperation (Gauthier, 1986; Hampton, 1986; Kavka,
1986). Morality, then, is a common framework that advances the
self-interest of each. The claim of Hobbesian contractarianism to be a
distinctly liberal conception of morality stems from the importance of
individual freedom and property in such a common framework: only
systems of norms that allow each person great freedom to pursue her
interests as she sees fit could, it is argued, be the object of
consensus among self-interested agents (Courtland, 2008; Gaus, 2012;
Ridge, 1998; Gauthier, 1995). The continuing problem for Hobbesian
contractarianism is the apparent rationality of free-riding: if
everyone (or enough) complies with the terms of the contract, and so
social order is achieved, it would seem rational to defect, and act
immorally when one can gain by doing so. This is essentially the
argument of Hobbes's 'Foole', and from Hobbes (1948
[1651]: 94ff) to Gauthier (1986: 160ff), Hobbesians have tried to
reply to it.


### 3.3 Liberal Theories of Value



Turning from rightness to goodness, we can identify three main
candidates for a liberal theory of value. We have already encountered
the first: perfectionism. Insofar as perfectionism is a theory of
right action, it can be understood as an account of morality.
Obviously, however, it is an account of rightness that presupposes a
theory of value or the good: the ultimate human value is developed
personality or an autonomous life. Competing with this objectivist
theory of value are two other liberal accounts: pluralism and
subjectivism.



In his famous defence of negative liberty, Berlin insisted that values
or ends are plural, and further, the pursuit of one end necessarily
implies that other ends will not be achieved. In this sense ends
collide. In economic terms, the pursuit of one end entails opportunity
costs: foregone pursuits which cannot be impersonally shown to be less
worthy. There is no interpersonally justifiable way to rank the ends,
and no way to achieve them all. Each person must devote herself to
some ends at the cost of ignoring others. For the pluralist, then,
autonomy, perfection or development are not necessarily ranked higher
than hedonistic pleasures, environmental preservation or economic
equality. All compete for our allegiance, but because they are
incommensurable, no choice can be interpersonally justified.



The pluralist is not a subjectivist: that values are many, competing
and incommensurable does not imply that they are somehow dependent on
subjective experiences. But the claim that what a person values rests
on experiences that vary from person to person has long been a part of
the liberal tradition. To Hobbes, what one values depends on what one
desires (1948 [1651]: 48). Locke advances a 'taste theory of
value':



> 
> The Mind has a different relish, as well as the Palate; and you will
> as fruitlessly endeavour to delight all Man with Riches or Glory,
> (which yet some Men place their Happiness in,) as you would satisfy
> all men's Hunger with Cheese or Lobsters; which, though very
> agreeable and delicious fare to some, are to others extremely nauseous
> and offensive: And many People would with reason preferr [sic] the
> griping of an hungry Belly, to those Dishes, which are a Feast to
> others. Hence it was, I think, that the Philosophers of old did in
> vain enquire, whether the *Summum bonum* consisted in Riches,
> or bodily Delights, or Virtue, or Contemplation: And they might have
> as reasonably disputed, whether the best Relish were to be found in
> Apples, Plumbs or Nuts; and have divided themselves into Sects upon
> it. For...pleasant Tastes depend not on the things themselves,
> but their agreeableness to this or that particulare Palate, wherein
> there is great variety...(1975 [1706]: 269).
> 



The perfectionist, the pluralist and the subjectivist concur on the
crucial point: the nature of value is such that reasonable people
pursue different ways of living. To the perfectionist, this is because
each person has unique capacities, the development of which confers
value on her life; to the pluralist, it is because values are many and
conflicting, and no one life can include them all, or make the
interpersonally correct choice among them; and to the subjectivist, it
is because our ideas about what is valuable stem from our desires or
tastes, and these differ from one individual to another. All three
views, then, defend the basic liberal idea that people rationally
follow different ways of living. But in themselves, such notions of
the good are not full-fledged liberal ethics, for an additional
argument is required linking liberal value with norms of equal
liberty, and to the idea that other people command a certain respect
and a certain deference simply by virtue of having values of their
own. To be sure, Berlin seems to believe this is a very quick
argument: the inherent plurality of ends points to the
*political* preeminence of liberty (see, for example, Gray:
2006). Guaranteeing each a measure of negative liberty is, Berlin
argues, the most humane ideal, as it recognizes that 'human
goals are many', and no one can make a choice that is right for
all people (1969: 171). It is here that subjectivists and pluralists
alike sometimes rely on versions of moral contractualism. Those who
insist that liberalism is ultimately nihilistic can be interpreted as
arguing that this transition cannot be made successfully: liberals, on
their view, are stuck with a subjectivistic or pluralistic theory of
value, and no account of the right emerges from it.


### 3.4 The Metaphysics of Liberalism



Throughout the last century, liberalism has been beset by
controversies between, on the one hand, those broadly identified as
'individualists' and, on the other,
'collectivists', 'communitarians' or
'organicists' (for skepticism about this, though, see
Bird, 1999). These vague and sweeping designations have been applied
to a wide array of disputes; we focus here on controversies concerning
(i) the nature of society; (ii) the nature of the self.



Liberalism is, of course, usually associated with individualist
analyses of society. 'Human beings in society', Mill
claimed, 'have no properties but those which are derived from,
and which may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual
men' (1963, Vol. 8: 879; see also Bentham: 1970 [1823]: chap. I,
sec. 4). Herbert Spencer agreed: "the properties of the mass are
dependent upon the attributes of its component parts" (1995
[1851]: 1). In the last years of the nineteenth century this
individualist view was increasingly subject to attack, especially by
those who were influenced by idealist philosophy. D. G. Ritche,
criticizing Spencer's individualist liberalism, denies that
society is simply a 'heap' of individuals, insisting that
it is more akin to an organism, with a complex internal life (1896:
13). Liberals such as L. T. Hobhouse and Dewey refused to adopt
radically collectivist views such as those advocated by Bernard
Bosanquet (2001), but they too rejected the radical individualism of
Bentham, Mill and Spencer. Throughout most of the first half of the
twentieth century such 'organic' analyses of society held
sway in liberal theory, even in economics (see A.F Mummery and J. A.
Hobson, 1956: 106; J.M. Keynes, 1972: 275).



During and after the Second World War the idea that liberalism was
based on inherently individualist analysis of humans-in-society arose
again. Karl Popper's *The Open Society and its Enemies*
(1945) presented a sustained critique of Hegelian and Marxist theory
and its collectivist and historicist, and to Popper, inherently
illiberal, understanding of society. The reemergence of economic
analysis in liberal theory brought to the fore a thoroughgoing
methodological individualism. Writing in the early 1960s, James
Buchanan and Gordon Tullock adamantly defended the
'individualistic postulate' against all forms of
'organicism': "This [organicist] approach or theory
of the collectivity....is essentially opposed to the Western
philosophical tradition in which the human individual is the primary
philosophical entity" (1965: 11-12). Human beings,
insisted Buchanan and Tullock, are the only real choosers and
decision-makers, and their preferences determine both public and
private actions. The renascent individualism of late-twentieth century
liberalism was closely bound up with the induction of Hobbes as a
member of the liberal pantheon. Hobbes's relentlessly
individualistic account of society, and the manner in which his
analysis of the state of nature lent itself to game-theoretical
modeling, yielded a highly individualist, formal analysis of the
liberal state and liberal morality.



Of course, as is widely known, we have recently witnessed a renewed
interest in collectivist analyses of liberal society --though the
term 'collectivist' is abjured in favor of
'communitarian'. Writing in 1985, Amy Gutmann observed
that "we are witnessing a revival of communitarian criticisms of
liberal political theory. Like the critics of the 1960s, those of the
1980s fault liberalism for being mistakenly and irreparably
individualistic" (1985: 308). Starting with Michael
Sandel's (1982) famous criticism of Rawls, a number of critics
charge that liberalism is necessarily premised on an abstract
conception of individual selves as pure choosers, whose commitments,
values and concerns are possessions of the self, but never constitute
the self. Although the 'liberal-communitarian' debate
ultimately involved wide-ranging moral, political and sociological
disputes about the nature of communities, and the rights and
responsibilities of their members, the heart of the debate was about
the nature of liberal selves. For Sandel the flaw at the heart of
Rawls's liberalism is its implausibly abstract theory of the
self, the pure autonomous chooser. Rawls, he charges, ultimately
assumes that it makes sense to identify us with a pure capacity for
choice, and that such pure choosers might reject any or all of their
attachments and values and yet retain their identity.



From the mid-1980s onwards various liberals sought to show how
liberalism may consistently advocate a theory of the self which finds
room for cultural membership and other non-chosen attachments and
commitments which at least partially constitute the self (Kymlicka,
1989). Much of liberal theory has became focused on the issue as to
how we can be social creatures, members of cultures and raised in
various traditions, while also being autonomous choosers who employ
our liberty to construct lives of our own.


## 4. The Debate About The Reach of Liberalism


### 4.1 Is Liberalism Justified in All Political Communities?



In *On Liberty* Mill argued that "Liberty, as a
principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the
time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and
equal discussion" (1963, vol. 18: 224). Thus "Despotism is
a legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians, provided
the end be their improvement..." (1963, vol. 18: 224). This
passage -- infused with the spirit of nineteenth century
imperialism (and perhaps, as some maintain, latent racism) -- is
often ignored by defenders of Mill as an embarrassment (Parekh, 1994;
Parekh, 1995; Mehta, 1999; Pitts, 2005).This is not to say that such
Millian passages are without thoughtful defenders. See, for example,
Inder Marawah (2011). Nevertheless, it raises a question that still
divides liberals: are liberal political principles justified for all
political communities? In *The Law of Peoples* Rawls argues
that they are not. According to Rawls there can be a 'decent
hierarchical society' which is not based on the liberal
conception of all persons as free and equal, but instead views persons
as "responsible and cooperating members of their respective
groups" but not inherently equal (1999a: 66). Given this, the
full liberal conception of justice cannot be constructed out of shared
ideas of this 'people', though basic human rights,
implicit in the very idea of a social cooperative structure, apply to
all peoples. David Miller (2002) develops a different defense of this
anti-universalistic position, while those such as Thomas Pogge (2002:
ch. 4) and Martha Nussbaum (2002) reject Rawls's position,
instead advocating versions of moral universalism: they claim that
liberal moral principles apply to all states.


### 4.2 Is Liberalism a Cosmopolitan or a State-centered Theory?



The debate about whether liberal principles apply to all political
communities should not be confused with the debate as to whether
liberalism is a state-centered theory, or whether, at least ideally,
it is a cosmopolitan political theory for the community of all
humankind. Immanuel Kant -- a moral universalist if ever there
was one -- argued that all states should respect the dignity of
their citizens as free and equal persons, yet denied that humanity
forms one political community. Thus he rejected the ideal of a
universal cosmopolitan liberal political community in favor of a world
of states, all with internally just constitutions, and united in a
confederation to assure peace (1970 [1795]).



On a classical liberal theory, the difference between a world of
liberal communities and a world liberal community is not of
fundamental importance. Since the aim of government in a community is
to assure the basic liberty and property rights of its citizens,
borders are not of great moral significance in classical liberalism
(Lomasky, 2007). In contrast under the 'new' liberalism,
which stresses redistributive programs to achieve social justice, it
matters a great deal who is included within the political or moral
community. If liberal principles require significant redistribution,
then it is crucially important whether these principles apply only
within particular communities, or whether their reach is global. Thus
a fundamental debate between Rawls and many of his followers is
whether the difference principle should only be applied within a
liberal state such as the United States (where the least well off are
the least well off Americans), or whether it should be applied
globally (where the least well off are the least well off in the
world) (Rawls, 1999a: 113ff; Beitz, 1973: 143ff; Pogge, 1989: Part
Three).


### 4.3 Liberal Interaction with Non-Liberal Groups: International



Liberal political theory also fractures concerning the appropriate
response to groups (cultural, religious, etc.) which endorse illiberal
policies and values. These groups may deny education to some of their
members, advocate female genital mutilation, restrict religious
freedom, maintain an inequitable caste system, and so on. When, if
ever, should a liberal group interfere with the internal governance of
an illiberal group?



Suppose first that the illiberal group is another political community
or state. Can liberals intervene in the affairs of non-liberal states?
Mill provides a complicated answer in his 1859 essay 'A Few
Words on Non-Intervention'. Reiterating his claim from *On
Liberty* that civilized and non-civilized countries are to be
treated differently, he insists that "barbarians have no rights
as a *nation*, except a right to such treatment as may, at the
earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. The only moral
laws for the relation between a civilized and a barbarous government,
are the universal rules of morality between man and man" (1963,
vol. 21: 119). Although this strikes us today as simply a case for an
objectionable paternalistic imperialism (and it certainly was such a
case), Mill's argument for the conclusion is more complex,
including a claim that, since international morality depends on
reciprocity, 'barbarous' governments that cannot be
counted on to engage in reciprocal behavior have no rights
*qua* governments. In any event, when Mill turns to
interventions among 'civilized' peoples he develops an
altogether more sophisticated account as to when one state can
intervene in the affairs of another to protect liberal principles.
Here Mill is generally against intervention. "The reason is,
that there can seldom be anything approaching to assurance that
intervention, even if successful, would be for the good of the people
themselves. The only test possessing any real value, of a
people's having become fit for popular institutions, is that
they, or a sufficient proportion of them to prevail in the contest,
are willing to brave labour and danger for their liberation"
(1963, vol. 21: 122).



In addition to questions of efficacy, to the extent that peoples or
groups have rights to collective self-determination, intervention by a
liberal group to induce a non-liberal community to adopt liberal
principles will be morally objectionable. As with individuals,
liberals may think that peoples or groups have freedom to make
mistakes in managing their collective affairs. If people's
self-conceptions are based on their participation in such groups, even
those whose liberties are denied may object to, and perhaps in some
way be harmed by, the imposition of liberal principles (Margalit and
Raz, 1990; Tamir, 1993). Thus rather than proposing a doctrine of
*intervention,* many liberals propose various principles of
*toleration* which specify to what extent liberals must
tolerate non-liberal peoples and cultures. As is usual, Rawls's
discussion is subtle and enlightening. In his account of the foreign
affairs of liberal peoples, Rawls argues that liberal peoples must
distinguish 'decent' non-liberal societies from
'outlaw' and other states; the former have a claim on
liberal peoples to tolerance while the latter do not (1999a:
59-61). Decent peoples, argues Rawls, 'simply do not
tolerate' outlaw states which ignore human rights: such states
may be subject to 'forceful sanctions and even to
intervention' (1999a: 81). In contrast, Rawls insists that
"liberal peoples must try to encourage [non-liberal] decent
peoples and not frustrate their vitality by coercively insisting that
all societies be liberal" (1999a: 62). Chandran Kukathas (2003)
-- whose liberalism derives from the classical tradition --
is inclined to almost complete toleration of non-liberal peoples, with
the non-trivial proviso that there must be exit rights.


### 4.4 Liberal Interaction with Non-Liberal Groups: Domestic



The status of non-liberal groups within liberal societies has
increasingly become a subject of debate, especially with respect to
some citizens of faith. We should distinguish two questions: (i) to
what extent should non-liberal cultural and religious communities be
exempt from the requirements of the liberal state? and, (ii) to what
extent can they be allowed to participate in decision-making in the
liberal state?



Turning to (i), liberalism has a long history of seeking to
accommodate religious groups that have deep objections to certain
public policies, such as the Quakers, Mennonites or Sikhs. The most
difficult issues in this regard arise in relation to children and
education (see Galston, 2003; Fowler, 2010; Andersson, 2011) Mill, for
example, writes:



> 
> Consider ... the case of education. Is it not almost a
> self-evident axiom, that the State should require and compel the
> education, up to a certain standard, of every human being who is born
> its citizen? Yet who is there that is not afraid to recognize and
> assert this truth? Hardly any one indeed will deny that it is one of
> the most sacred duties of the parents (or, as law and usage now stand,
> the father), after summoning a human being into the world, to give to
> that being an education fitting him to perform his part well in life
> towards others and towards himself ... . that to bring a child
> into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to
> provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind,
> is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against
> society ... . (1963, vol. 18)
> 



Over the last thirty years, there has been a particular case that is
at the core of this debate -- *Wisconsin vs. Yoder*: [406
U.S. 205 (1972)]. In this case, the United States Supreme Court upheld
the right of Amish parents to avoid compulsory schooling laws and
remove their children from school at the age of 14 -- thus,
according to the Amish, avoiding secular influences that might
undermine the traditional Amish way of life. Because cultural and
religious communities raise and educate children, they cannot be seen
as purely voluntary opt-outs from the liberal state: they exercise
coercive power over children, and so basic liberal principles about
protecting the innocent from unjustified coercion come into play. Some
have maintained that liberal principles require that the state should
intervene (against groups like the Amish) in order to [1] provide the
children with an effective right of exit that would otherwise be
denied via a lack of education (Okin, 2002), [2] to protect the
children's right to an autonomous and 'open future'
(Feinberg, 1980) and/or [3] to insure that children will have the
cognitive tools to prepare them for their future role as citizens
(Galston, 1995: p. 529; Macedo, 1995: pp. 285-6). Other liberal
theorists, on the other hand, have argued that the state should not
intervene because it might undermine the inculcation of certain values
that are necessary for the continued existence of certain
comprehensive doctrines (Galston, 1995: p. 533; Stolzenberg, 1993: pp.
582-3). Moreover, some such as Harry Brighouse (1998) have
argued that the inculcation of liberal values through compulsory
education might undermine the legitimacy of liberal states because
children would not (due to possible indoctrination) be free to consent
to such institutions.



Question (ii) -- the extent to which non-liberal beliefs and
values may be employed in liberal political discussion-- has
become the subject of sustained debate in the years following
Rawls's *Political Liberalism*. According to
Rawls's liberalism -- and what we might call 'public
reason liberalism' more generally -- because our societies
are characterized by 'reasonable pluralism', coercion
cannot be justified on the basis of comprehensive moral or religious
systems of belief. But many friends of religion (e.g., Eberle, 2002;
Perry, 1993) argue that this is objectionably
'exclusionary': conscientious believers are barred from
voting on their deepest convictions. Again liberals diverge in their
responses. Some such as Stephen Macedo take a pretty hard-nosed
attitude: 'if some people...feel "silenced" or
"marginalized" by the fact that some of us believe that it
is wrong to shape basic liberties on the basis of religious or
metaphysical claims, I can only say "grow up!"'
(2000: 35). Rawls, in contrast, seeks to be more accommodating,
allowing that arguments based on religious comprehensive doctrines may
enter into liberal politics on issues of basic justice "provided
that, in due course, we give properly public reasons to support the
principles and policies that our comprehensive doctrine is said to
support" (1999a: 144). Thus Rawls allows the legitimacy of
religious-based arguments against slavery and in favor of the United
States civil rights movement, because ultimately such arguments were
supported by public reasons. Others (e.g., Greenawalt, 1995) hold that
even this is too restrictive: it is difficult for liberals to justify
a moral prohibition on a religious citizen from voicing her view in
liberal political debate.


## 5. Conclusion



Given that liberalism fractures on so many issues -- the nature
of liberty, the place of property and democracy in a just society, the
comprehensiveness and the reach of the liberal ideal -- one might
wonder whether there is any point in talking of
'liberalism' at all. It is not, though, an unimportant or
trivial thing that all these theories take liberty to be the grounding
political value. Radical democrats assert the overriding value of
equality, communitarians maintain that the demands of belongingness
trump freedom, and conservatives complain that the liberal devotion to
freedom undermines traditional values and virtues and so social order
itself. Intramural disputes aside, liberals join in rejecting these
conceptions of political right.