Rethinking the Liberal Tradition

A key concept on which our understanding of democracy relies is freedom. Yet freedom has recently also become something of an embarrassment to the global Left, a notion more easily appropriated by the Right, in its defense of individual rights in contrast to shared social norms. I would like to reflect on what a robust idea of freedom for the Left might look like, and why it is necessary to recover it, rather than trying to do away with it. And I want to raise that question in a way that urges us to reflect on both micro-history and macro-history: how world historical events shape and constrain the lives of individuals who happen to be caught up in them, and how existing political institutions try and fail to promote certain moral ideals. To make progress, we must engage with two different kinds of failures: that of socialist states to deliver on the freedom that they promised, and that of the liberal capitalist institutions to expand freedom beyond privileged elites and beyond a handful of core Western liberal societies. Indeed, while many people think about socialist ideas as promoting concepts of equality and justice and of liberal ideas as focused on freedom, the socialist tradition from Marx onwards in reality promotes the same ideas of freedom that are philosophically at the core of liberalism. It just radicalizes them even further and, in some ways, shows the limitations of liberal theories in the way in which, for example, concepts of freedom are limited to specific categories of people: citizens of a certain state or members of a particular social class.

However, we must not engage with either socialism or liberalism as pure systems of thought.

My suggestion is rather to start thinking about contradictions in the experience of freedom: the tension between the moral ideals we are committed to and the interpretation of these ideals by existing institutions.

Consider the example of freedom of movement. I remember the first time I travelled in the West with my grandmother. I was about eleven years old, and it was the first time Albanians were allowed to travel outside their state. The discourse had shifted: we had always been told that we could not travel because our state didn’t let us travel, or we didn’t have a passport. But then the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War came to an end, and state socialism was abandoned. Almost overnight, the state began to grant passports to everyone. And yet we discovered that having the passport wasn’t enough: you also needed a visa for which your own state was not responsible, and that turned out to be the responsibility of another state. Very suddenly, all the impediments to freedom of movement, which we had always internalized by being told that we couldn’t travel because we weren’t allowed to travel, were externalized. We discovered that we also could not travel because another state would not allow us to travel. But if freedom of movement matters, it matters both in emigration and in immigration: both to leave your country and to enter another country. If I am told I am free to leave my lecture hall but go out into the corridor and notice all the doors are locked, am I really free to move? Just when the Eastern socialist states were no longer shooting their citizens at the border, Western capitalist countries began to send boats to patrol their seas. Migrants were still dying. Only the color of the uniforms had changed, and the flags under which the crimes were perpetrated.

I mention migration because it is such a salient issue in contemporary liberal democracies, and because it is a good prism through which to explore what is wrong with prevailing outlooks on freedom: when it is freedom for some but not for others. But also because it is a prism through which to examine the relation between freedom and progress more broadly, a point to which I will return. We are so integrated with each other that the effects of an injustice suffered in one part of the world are now experienced everywhere: migration is only a consequence of that. And so the idea that we can simply close borders, or realize freedom in one place, in one state or group of states, for only one group of people, is incoherent. We need to think of freedom as global freedom, and of democracy as global democracy. How do we do that?

The crisis of democracy we are witnessing has brought to light a curious tension. On the one hand, it has challenged globalization theories that diagnosed (and often celebrated) the end of the state and the death of sovereignty. On the other hand, it has revealed its distance from the only conception of sovereignty that makes the state morally appealing and democratically legitimate: popular sovereignty, the notion that we are equal authors of the laws we are required to obey.

The modern ideal of democracy is based on a very distinctive account of legitimation, different from those prominent in the ancient world, where the community was the source of moral norms, or in the medieval to early modern period, where we appealed to the divine right of kings. The modern concept of legitimation is one tightly connected to freedom and is invoked to explain why individuals who are born free and equal sacrifice the lawless freedom of the state of nature in exchange for the freedom acquired in association with others, in a civil condition governed by laws. This idea of democratic legitimation also explains why, in circumstances of emergency, the state, and the state only, has the authority to temporarily suspend or restrict those fundamental freedoms it exists to protect: the freedom to move, to associate with others, or to vote in elections.

Most of these freedoms are, in theory, guaranteed in the founding legal documents of most existing liberal democracies. Most, if not all, have been suspended or restricted as part of the emergency measures invoked to tackle the crises we have recently gone through: financial insecurity, health emergency, war, and so on. Emergencies are usually short-term phenomena, but they signal something important about the long term. Emergency rule sets a precedent for the concentration of power in the hands of a few – scientific experts, data-controlling agencies, economic and political elites – who will continue to rely on the authority of the state to demand the obedience of all but offer protection only to some.

This is why the question of freedom is connected to the challenge of rethinking the foundations of democracy in light of our historical experiences. The failure of socialism in Eastern Europe has taught us that some freedoms—the freedom of speech, of thought, of protest, of association, of movement—should not be negotiable. But we must couple a robust protection of these first-generation freedoms with robust guarantees on social freedoms as well: the freedom to flourish, to realize people’s moral potential. In other words, these first-generation freedoms must be meaningful. Freedom of thought is important, but what does it amount to when people have no access to culture? What does it mean when all our thoughts are disciplined by the flow of data through algorithms that enable private corporations to make a profit?

Therefore, a meaningful engagement with freedom requires rethinking the foundations of democracy. To this end, we must revisit the relationship between liberalism and capitalism and think of the pair as a historical phenomenon, with all the promises and failures it has entailed.

This is no easy task. Liberalism is a broad church. Liberalism is also not the same as capitalism. Capitalism is a set of political and economic relations; liberalism is a set of ideas. While capitalism would not be capitalism without the support of liberal theories, not all liberal theories support capitalism. Progressive liberals from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have been critical of capitalism; indeed, they have often defended alternative forms of social organization such as property-owning democracy and liberal socialism.

This puts liberalism in a curious position: to the extent that liberalism travels with capitalism, it is a historical phenomenon. To the extent that it departs from it or qualifies it, it is a social ideal. Liberalism has a core idea, freedom, and it has a core promise: freedom from fear. For progressive liberals, the question is: should the failure of capitalism be considered a failure of liberalism? And if liberalism ought to be understood as an ideal rather than the reality under which we live, to what extent do the historical encounters between capitalism, socialism, fascism, democracy, theocracy, and populism challenge the liberal project as a whole?

As I see it, liberalism cannot deliver freedom from fear because liberal societies in their encounter with capitalist economic structures produce pathologies of their own, pathologies that are different from the fear of despotism or intolerance that liberalism opposes, yet destructive in their own right.

Socialists are fond of explaining liberal pathologies in connection to the material conditions in which ideas develop. But even before the socialist critique, the tensions of the project, including in its ideal form, were clear to liberalism’s most acute observers. The intellectual origins of liberalism are in the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the combination of three elements: a moral anthropology, a theory of economics, and a theory of politics. All three helped liberal visionaries articulate a distinctive account of what power was and how it should be exercised; they contributed to the liberal utopia that we are still waiting to realize. Yet on all three counts, early critics of liberalism noted the tensions that made liberal promises no more than that.

Take the anthropology of liberalism. Many approved of the liberation of individuals from the yoke of authority and celebrated the emergence of a new ideal: that of civil society. This was based on the role of doux commerce” (as Montesquieu called it) and the overall contribution of trade to material prosperity and peaceful relations between human beings. Yet alongside the celebration of the centrality of the individual (the private vices/public virtues discourse) there were also important critiques of commercial society that circulated in the eighteenth century and listed all the destructive psychological dispositions that the project encouraged: selfishness, greed, envy, distrust, competition for inessential and luxury goods, exaggeration of appearances, desire to impress, need for external recognition, rivalry, indifference to the fate of the most vulnerable, exploitative behavior.

Now, take the relationship between economic theory and the theory of the state. As many early critics observed, while liberals admired commercial society, they needed the state to guarantee its functioning. Liberals were proud to have discovered human rights as a result of the universal ideal of citizenship celebrated during the French and American revolutions. They also credited themselves with the end of corporate representation and the destruction of authority structures such as the nobility and the church. But this universal ideal was constantly threatened by the conflict between the demands of commercial society and those of the state. On the one hand, the state is necessary to guarantee private property and the kinds of rights and obligations that enable commercial society to function. On the other hand, as many early liberals noticed, the state relies on taxation and the contribution that the rich make to its finances in order to preserve order and stability. But depending on the extent of taxation and of the welfare measures necessary to ensure that inequality does not threaten stability, this can be so politically divisive as to destroy the universal ideal of civic solidarity. The old divisions of class and status return, only in modern form. To deal with the threat, the state outsources some of its problems to the international credit and debit system, which is usually able to patch up domestic inequality at the price of global anarchy.

This leads to a third source of fear that is distinctive to liberalism. Classical liberals sought to limit the role of the state but celebrated civil society as a spontaneous, non-hierarchical structure where everyone is equal. This was part of a stage theory of history defended by many proto-liberals, including Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar. For Smith and others, history is basically the history of material relations as articulated through different systems of production: hunter-gathering, pastoral, agricultural, culminating in the superiority of commercial society. But such a narrative of hope, together with the stage theories of history on which it is grounded, is inherently hierarchical. The price of liberal hope in the triumph of civil society was the condemnation of alternative forms of life (e.g., the hunter-gathering and agricultural ones) as inferior stages of historical development. This leads to the aggressive attack on people wedded to these forms of social organization as primitive, backward, and in need of liberal re-education. Here too, liberalism produces its own distinctive fear, which is the fear of colonialism and empire. This is no collateral damage, no inconsistent application of liberal norms (say, in the form of advocating certain rights and liberties for people on one side of the world while denying them to others). It is a crucial component of the liberal mission to bring the virtues of civil society to people who are otherwise unable to realize them.

Liberals often brush aside the history of colonialism as if it had nothing to do with their ideals. But the fear of colonialism (and of neo-colonialism in the form of debt dependency or subservience to international institutions hegemonized by Western liberal countries or humanitarian intervention) is not an unfortunate byproduct. It is the result of a theory of history in which the liberal capitalist society is the final stage of a process that culminates in liberating backward people from their own stupidity and oppression.

All these elements speak to a more general question concerning the liberal understanding of freedom and its relationship to power. Liberals seek to limit the power of the state, of religious authorities and of any form of collective organization that threatens individual freedom. But in its efforts to disperse power, the liberal project generates its own distinctive power structures, its own set of fears, and its own kind of unfreedom. Liberal power structures are anonymized rather than personal, they are spontaneous rather than planned, and the psychological attitudes that consolidate them breed selfishness and indifference rather than outright aggression. But that does not mean that the fear of liberal capitalism is any less concerning or any less pervasive than the fears that liberalism seeks to abolish. If anything, it may be more pernicious. Where power is dispersed, spontaneous, and anonymized, it is even more difficult to fight.

The Right has been successful in shaping the agenda and convincing us that the conflicts we experience are reducible to a liberal cosmopolitan versus communitarian cleavage. So far, the Right has been successful because it has been able to persuade citizens that the problems of capitalism are reducible to problems of political membership. If you solve the question of who belongs, you will have solved the conflicts of our time. But migration, as I mentioned earlier, is not a source of problems, but rather a symptom of the crisis. If the question of political progress is the question of how to avoid the errors of the past, exclusion cannot be the solution. A progressive alternative must begin by challenging the terms in which the relation between freedom and democracy is mobilized in everyday political discourse, especially by the Right.

Here is where the failure of the contemporary Left lies. The question of political progress is now seen as a question of abstract law and rights, of who shapes and enacts laws, of who is included and who is excluded. In other words, it has become a question of regulating the terms of political membership or group membership, rather than empowering marginalized social groups whose boundaries of oppression do not neatly overlap with those of the nation-state. Migration is perceived as a problem because political membership is seen as the solution. Cultural wars are so salient because they are about policing the boundaries of a social group. If the Left does not move beyond the question of rights and culture to rethink the link between democracy and capitalism, it is hard to see how any proposed solution will not end up being exclusive in some way (and therefore playing into the hands of the right) in the long run.

So how does change happen? How does progress occur? Here I find myself in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, I believe in the project of the Enlightenment as the intellectual work of critique, of highlighting moral double standards, of pointing out the contradictions between the ideal of freedom and its institutional reality. I also believe that freedom is connected to moral agency: it is neither the freedom of the long-gone socialist world nor that of the struggling capitalist world but an awareness of our moral responsibility to others, the duty to engage with the past, and to acknowledge what we owe future generations in a way that promotes effective democracy, both economic and political, at the global level.

On the other hand, I am a materialist. We live in a world of injustice replicated by anonymous social structures, where existing institutions reflect dominant patterns of power relations both within states and between states. So, if we don’t collectively change material incentives, if we don’t democratize the market, if we don’t transform political institutions, there will always be a gap between how the world appears to us and how it should be. Morally speaking, a world made of the asymmetries we experience—in the distribution of power, of opportunities to move, of material resources, of the production of knowledge—is not a free world. And a world in which not everyone is free is a world that cannot be truly free for anyone.

Cover image: View of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt that celebrates the Four Freedoms articulated in his 1941 State of the Union address, Roosevelt Island, New York City, United States of America, North America (Photo by MLTZ / Robert Harding RF / robertharding via AFP)

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