A crisis in liberal thinking?

Many of the ways of thought that Europe has exported claim universal applicability: that was perhaps one reason why they travelled well. Christianity was the first universal mode of thought that Europe exported; science, technology, and the ideology of markets have been among the hardiest travellers. European political ideologies mostly share the universal aspirations of their Christian ancestry and have also travelled well. Liberalism and socialism have colonised large parts of the world. Both claim universal scope and propose accounts of progress and justice that do not stop at national or other boundaries. From the start, human rights and proletarian revolution (in varied and contested forms) were thought of as human and not merely as national goals.

At present nearly all liberal and socialist political practice takes place within and in subordination to the boundaries and categories of states and of national interest. This restriction is often seen by liberals and socialists as a transitional stage, which will (or at least ought to) be followed by a new international order in which the goals of liberal or socialist thought are no longer subordinated to national or other boundaries and interests.

Some writing by liberals and their critics questions liberalism's long-standing internationalist commitments. It suggests that the subordination of social and political categories to those of states and especially of nation-states and nationalism (or to other and perhaps narrower loyalties) is ineliminable, and even that liberalism's claim to universal justification and application is unfounded. I shall look at some of these suspicions and ask whether they can be dispelled or whether they must be recognised as limitations of liberal thinking. I shall not discuss parallel issues within socialist thinking.

Many challenges to liberal universalism are directed against ‘deontological liberalism’ and its claim to identify universal, invariant principles of justice that should have global reach. This universality, which has traditionally been part of the appeal of liberal thinking, is now sometimes cited as evidence of its inadequate and abstract conception of morality and its reliance on conceptions of the human subject that abstract from social and historical context. Many such criticisms revive and rework the charges of empty formalism that Hegel first levelled against Kantian Moralität.