On Enoch's "Shameless Liberalism: a Vision"

[Today’s post is a copy of an invited commentary on “Shameless Liberalism: a Vision” by David Enoch (Oxford). I won’t quote from it because my audience will have read the paper, and I don’t have permission to do so yet. But in most places this should not prevent understanding of what I am up to.—ES]

It’s good to be back at EIPE. The last time I was here I acted frivolously and said nice things about Derrida. Jack Vromen and Fred Muller were not so happy with me. And I have not been invited back for a long time. So, I will be better this time. I won’t mention Derrida again today, although I will mention Foucault. But no frivolity, I promise. But I do start with a modest joke.

When I was reflecting on my somewhat irritable reaction to David Enoch’s manifesto, “Shameless liberalism,” I was reminded of an old Jewish joke about a Jewish Rabbi shipwrecked on a desert island. When his rescuers arrive a couple of years later, they discover he has built three huts during his isolation. One is his home. The other two? “This is the synagogue I go to,” he explained, “and that is the one I don’t set foot in.” I call myself a liberal (well actually a ‘skeptical liberal’), but despite the fact that liberalism is a dwindling creed, my initial response to the paper was that I wouldn’t want to be associated with shameless liberalism. This is unexpected to me because David appeals to one of my intellectual exemplars, Judith Shklar, throughout.

My unease has partly to due to with three vibes.[1] First, in the paper, David repeatedly exclaims he does not care about the “history of philosophy.” (p. 2; p. 31) By contrast, I care a lot, in part, because I tend to think that this history helps you diagnose how you got in the present mess. David uses ‘crisis.’ In fact, he recognizes a “political crisis” (p. 1-2) and an “intellectual crisis” (p. 2) for liberalism. I return to this in a moment.

But the second vibe is that I incline to the thought that the embrace of shamelessness is not especially noble. I am actually rather reactionary, I fear, in thinking that a bit more shame wouldn’t be so bad in our age. After all, shame is how imperfect, passionate beings like ourselves honor a higher and common law. Martin Luther King Jr appeals, as Meena Krishnamurthy has shown (here), to this feature of shame in his Letter from Birmingham Jail.[2] MLK Jr is no liberal and the idea predates liberalism (it’s manifest in Plato’s Laws, for example), but it’s also part of the DNA of liberalism. For, I am in rare agreement with Rawls and Kant on this very point. In Theory of Justice, Rawls notes with evident approval that “Kant speaks of the failure to act on the moral law as giving rise to shame.” For shame is a proper self-regarding emotion.

I’ll only hint at the significance of this in what follows because David might just re-label his position, ‘mostly sincere liberalism;’ I put it like that because he acknowledges in a footnote acknowledging Bernard Williams that he is okay with disguising one’s real views for political purposes.

The third vibe I recoil from is connected, in that David understands the role of political philosophers as being the ethical experts. He is right to suggest this echoes J.S. Mill. But this is the least attractive part of Mill’s political philosophy and it helps partially explain how Mill mistakenly defended imperialism and was so mediocre at actual politics. I suspect that the self-perception of moral superiority always hinders liberals in political life. But on David’s view that is irrelevant even if he might also say correctly that in some contexts embracing one’s firm moral convictions could be a pragmatic benefit.

So much for set up.

One might have thought that the intellectual crisis of liberalism was caused by the perceived responsibility of liberalism for political failures like the environmental crisis, the Wall Street and bank bailouts, the rise of oligarchy, the role of liberalism in ongoing neocolonialism, or, say, the unease many feel living in a multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan society. If I understand Enoch’s meta-philosophical position, he wouldn’t have to disagree with this perception. He could say something like, “there is nothing wrong with liberal fundamentals: but liberals have made pragmatic mistakes or have been unwise politically and that explains the perception.” I don’t think that response would be very fruitful, and since I have been tasked to comment on the paper he did write, let me devote myself to that task.

David and I agree that Rawls’ so-called ‘Political Liberalism’' is an intellectual cul-de-sac. David’s diagnosis of it is that it has disarmed liberals from defending what they really believe and to encourage an obsession with the scope of disagreement (and to presuppose pluralism, and so on). I kind of agree with all of that, but in response he retreats into a position that it is actually rather close to the structure of the program of Rawls’ Theory of Justice. On this view, liberal political philosophy is about ethics (or morality) and the basic institutions of society, that is akin in spirit to what David calls “system design.” (p. 17)

When in Theory of Justice, Rawls defends a similar strategy (although with different tools), Rawls makes a distinction between “constitutive rules of an institution, which establish its various rights and duties, and so on, and strategies and maxims for how best to take advantage of the institution for particular purposes.” And he justifies his own practice with an explicit appeal to Bentham and Adam Smith as predecessors of this strategy (and a footnote to Elie Halevy.)

It’s important to note that Rawls is not marking the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory. Rather, he is drawing on an older distinction. Rawls doesn’t give the strategies and maxims a name, but in the famous 1979 Biopolitics lectures, Foucault reminded us that this was known as a part of the ‘art of government.’ (If you trace down Halevy that’s also clear in him.) The phrase is now wholly unfamiliar, for there are traces of it in the distinction that older economists still deploy among normative, positive, and the art of economics.

Now, prior to Rawls, liberals agreed on very little, but they thought that the normative project and the art of government were an integrated package. (This is the pay-off of Foucault’s 1979 lectures.) And until political philosophers got in the habit of talking only to each other in the modern university – and wealthy donors inspired by Parfit – this remained so. So, what did liberalism lose by being professionalized into a moral/ethical discipline in the middle of the twentieth century?

In so doing, it lost sight of what had made liberalism a relatively successful intellectual and political program. Before Rawls and the effort to turn political philosophy exclusively into ethics/moral philosophy, Liberalism always presupposed an appeal to the moral and self-interested commitments of an agent. [Notice that this point is orthogonal to David’s disagreement with so-called political realists.] So, when I qua liberal defend open borders and criticize our contemporary mercantilists on tariffs, I appeal to your self-interest -- (y)our country and likely you individually will be a lot richer if you allow for open borders, and it will help pay for our welfare state and so so-- and your ethical conception, it’s the right thing to do to welcome needy strangers. This is, in fact, the genius of liberalism: we liberals, think of agents as simultaneously being creatures of desire and conscience. Or as the economists would say (and ruin the insight), liberals are alert to making systems incentive compatible. Or as we in PPE land might say, liberalism is a win-win project.

These self-interested aspects of liberalism are hidden away in David’s formulation of the “the liberal fundamentals.” That’s no surprise because while self-interest is surely compatible with some of his ethical principles and values, its clearly not meant to be part of the project qua political philosophy. To insist on them as integral to or constitutive of liberalism would be a kind of category error, or a professional blunder. By contrast, because I think of the narrowing of political philosophy to ethics as an effect of hyper-specialization or the advanced division of epistemic labor, and perhaps my background in philosophy of science, I see it as a kind of Kuhn loss not to include self-interest or the possession of property into the fundamentals of one’s liberal political project.

A Marxist might diagnose my diagnosis as follows: when liberalism is unwilling to defend the class interest of the bourgeoisie it has euthanized itself. Luckily, the situation is not so gloomy. There is a win-win scenario. I am happy for David to criticize liberals enchanted with political liberalism as a program. And I try to convince the younger generation that the only way we will tackle the great political challenges of our age is with a liberal program and mass movement that promote solutions that simultaneously and systematically appeal to our moral aspirations and our passionate nature. And sometimes we can visit each other’s huts and read and discuss Shklar together.

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[1]What follows is a kind of immanent criticism. Another, more externalist critique, is well captured by

Alexander Douglas

in his Substack (here):

[2] Meena Krishnamurthy "Martin Luther King Jr. on democratic propaganda, shame, and moral transformation" Political Theory 50.2 (2022): 305-336.