LIBERALISM UNDER SIEGE / Vol. 92, No. 1 (Spring 2025)
- Social Research An Int'l Quarterly
- Apr 8
- 5 min read
Liberal commitments to upholding civil liberties and relying on representative democratic procedures may seem incompatible with an effective response to an emergency like a pandemic. At the same time, the high stakes of pandemic policymaking and disagreement about the best way to respond arguably highlight the importance of other liberal commitments—for example, commitments to incorporating experts, data, and scientific knowledge, and to deliberatively engaging with divergent views about policy. Is the streamlined decision-making that enables an effective emergency response consistent with upholding these liberal commitments? An examination of that question in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic response suggests that a streamlined policymaking process in which states are given pandemic response power can be consistent with upholding these commitments.
Findings from behavioral economics and psychology potentially identify expanded paternalistic roles for government. There is an urgent need for clear conceptual guardrails that spell out empirically verifiable conditions under which these paternalistic interventions may be justified. This article advocates a framework that defines mistakes only as errors in two components of decision-making: characterization and optimization. It also discusses empirical strategies for identifying mistakes.
A coup is a short, sharp intervention, like the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. A siege is a slow protracted affair, like the Federalist Society’s decades-long campaign to seize control of the US judiciary. Both coups and sieges can pose serious threats to basic institutions of liberal democracy. In resisting those threats, liberal democracies are handicapped by their own liberal democratic commitments.
Conspiracy theories exhibit a paranoid epistemology—assuming intrigue and cover-up for which there can be no evidence, rather than seeking evidence to establish suspicion. A form of collective rationalization, they derive their appeal not from their explanatory power, but from their emotional and existential benefits. Like miracles, conspiracy theories are not failed attempts at genuine explanation, but the corruption of explanation masquerading as explanation. Thus, the standard liberal recipe—greater openness and better access to information—might exacerbate the problem rather than ameliorate it.
Liberalism has been under attack since its dawn in the eighteenth century. Early and late the attack has come from tyrants wishing to keep people as children or slaves, or at best cowed. After a true liberalism’s brief fashionability in the early nineteenth century, however, the attacks started coming also from socialists and New Liberals, espousing a new statism. From socialists the promise was equality of income at the finish line; from social democrats it was equality of opportunity at the starting line. Yet neither is achievable in substantial magnitude. Only equality of permission is, tomorrow afternoon. And equality of permission, alone, is what has made us very rich and reasonably virtuous.
Are crises of liberalism always the same, or are they always different? Or, if it is a little of both, what is to be learned by stepping back to compare the contemporary prosecution of liberals, and their strategies of self-defense, with the configurations of prior rounds? To answer this question, this essay looks at our own time in comparison to the most recent era when political theorists clashed over whether to ditch liberalism—that of the later Cold War and shortly after. Ultimately, it is the differences among crises that stand out and help inform proposals about how to rescue liberalism from crisis one more time.
Many people today think liberalism should be rejected because of its failure to consider the ethical claims of nonhuman animals. I argue that this rejection would be a mistake. The core ideas of liberalism, ideas of freedom, self-determination, and the reciprocal treatment of fellow citizens as ends in themselves, are central, indeed indispensable, to an adequate theory of justice for animals.
In this article, I ask three questions of the liberal. In each, I fill in philosophical detail around a certain sort of complaint raised in current public debates about their position. In the first, I probe the limits of the liberal’s tolerance for civil disobedience; in the second, I ask how the liberal can adjudicate the most divisive moral disputes of the age; and in the third, I suggest the liberal faces a problem when there is substantial disagreement about the boundaries of the rational and the reasonable.
Liberals in the United States today champion distinctive policies on the interpretation and importance of civil liberties, on the need for checks and balances within a democracy, and on the case for ensuring people’s social securities. But is this just a shopping list of policies? Or is it a unified package? It will assume a unified and persuasive profile if the ideal of liberty is understood in the manner of the American founders and of the long republican tradition on which they drew. That ideal points us toward a republican—a small r republican—construal of liberalism.
The essay argues that liberalism is presently under siege institutionally but has no persuasive intellectual critics. The essay lays out the components of liberalism as a preface to arguing that these have not been intellectually challenged so much as institutionally subverted. The components are an emphasis on fear, commitment to separation of church and state, acceptance of modernity with a regime of individual rights such as freedom of religion and of employment, emphasis on the individual’s capacity for self-creation, and, finally, emphasis on the need to check disparities in social power such as those enjoyed by big business. The critics examined are the Republican Party and the movement known as integralism. The latter’s intellectual implausibility has not hindered it having a surprising hold on judges and legislators.
Can liberalism underpin a feminism worthy of the name? The prevailing answer seems to be no. Yet feminist critics of liberalism still do not engage fully with liberalism’s most promising feminist articulations. This article considers arguments from prominent feminist thinkers who persist in their conviction that liberalism is inadequate for feminism. I argue that liberalism is feminist in its vision of social justice and—more significantly—in its commitments to democratic legitimacy. By wrongly maligning liberal arguments as hopeless, liberalism’s feminist critics forfeit a powerful tool for pursuing feminist justice, and they forfeit a necessary tool for promoting justice on terms of civic respect for—and democratic community with—those who do not yet endorse feminism’s vision of social justice.
From Adam Smith onward, a liberal tradition of economics has described the market system as both wealth creating and liberty enhancing. Modern economics has formalized this description in “neoclassical” models of markets populated by rational agents. However, there is growing evidence that individuals’ decisions often reveal inconsistent preferences. I review three influential books that present this evidence as a challenge to liberal justifications for the market. In response, I argue that individuals, whether neoclassically rational or not, can value the market as an institution that allows them to get whatever they want and are willing to pay for. This justificatory strategy illustrates how liberalism might benefit by disengaging itself from rationality.