Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T10:49:46.741Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Defending Liberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1982

William Galston*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

The much-discussed contemporary revival of political theory in the Anglo-American intellectual community has for the most part been a revival of liberal theory. This should not have come as a great surprise. Most Anglo-Americans are, in one way or another, liberals; all are deeply influenced by the experience of life in liberal societies. Liberal polities have come under attack from within as well as from without, giving those who think them worthy of defense both the motive and the occasion to clarify the grounds of their partisanship.

It is less often remarked that in one decisive respect, the revival of liberal theory remains rooted in the climate of moral skepticism that it has supplanted. Most contemporary liberal theorists are deeply mistrustful of what John Rawls has called “perfectionism”—the philosophic attempt to identify superior ways of life or traits of character and, once having identified them, to use them as the goals of political life. Contemporary liberal theory consists in the attempt to combine this skepticism about theories of the good life with the belief in philosophically defensible principles that regulate relations among individuals.

It is my thesis that this defense of liberalism is fundamentally misguided. No form of political life can be justified without some view of what is good for individuals. In practice, liberal theorists covertly employ theories of the good. But their insistence that they do not reduces the rigor of their theories and leaves the liberal polity unnecessarily vulnerable to criticism.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ackerman, Bruce. 1980. Social justice in the liberal state. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Barry, Brian. 1973. The liberal theory of justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Gerald. 1971. Paternalism. In Wasserstrom, Richard (ed.), Morality and the law. Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth, pp. 107–26.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1978a. Liberalism. In Hampshire, Stuart (ed.), Public and private morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 113–43.10.1017/CBO9780511625329.007CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1978b. Taking rights seriously. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Galston, William. 1980. Justice and the human good. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1962. Leviathan. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Husak, Douglas. 1981. Paternalism and autonomy. Philosophy and public affairs 10:2746.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1964. The metaphysical principles of virtue. Ellington, James, trans. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1970. On the common saying: ‘this may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice.’ In Reiss, Hans (ed.), Kant's political writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 6192.Google Scholar
Kelly, George. 1969. Idealism, politics and history: sources of Hegelian thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, state, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rawls, John. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.10.4159/9780674042605CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rawls, John. 1975. Fairness to goodness. Philosophical Review 84:536–54.10.2307/2183853CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rawls, John. 1980. Kantian constructivism in moral theory. The Journal of Philosophy 77:515–72.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1979. What's wrong with negative liberty. In Ryan, Alan (ed.), The idea of freedom: essays in honour of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175–93.Google Scholar