On New Year’s Day, 2000, Nobel laureate James Buchanan challenged his fellow classical liberals to save the “soul” of liberalism. “People need something to yearn and struggle for,” he wrote. “If the liberal ideal is not there, there will be a vacuum and other ideas will supplant it.”
Twenty years later, Buchanan’s fears seem prescient. Contempt for liberalism is growing at both ends of the ideological spectrum—from the nationalist right and progressive left. Illiberal ideas and attitudes have seeped into the American mainstream, dismissing not only market liberalism but even more basic principles, like respect for the autonomy and dignity of the individual. At one extreme we see the resurgence of white nationalism; at the other, the renunciation of First Amendment principles.
Now is the time for any liberals left to answer Buchanan’s challenge—to save the soul of liberalism by reclaiming the liberal ideal.
The first step is to name it. The liberal ideal is the good society: a pluralistic and tolerant society in which intellectual and economic progress are the norm, and where individuals and communities flourish in a context of openness, peaceful and voluntary cooperation, and mutual respect.
It was this liberal ideal that animated the American Founding, arguably the first great liberal experiment. This is why in his book “The Conservative Sensibility,” George Will writes that “American conservatives are the custodians” of that tradition. They are seeking, Will reminds us, to conserve the Founding principles, the self-evidentiary truth that all men are created equal, and that the role of government is to secure the rights that follow from that truth. Will’s conservatism, in other words, is a liberal conservatism that invites the openness and “whirl and fluidity of modern life — people, ideas, and capital flowing hither and yon.”
The second step is to remind ourselves and others that liberalism is the modern world’s greatest achievement. As Deirdre McCloskey argues in her “Bourgeois Virtues” trilogy and her recently released “Why Liberalism Works,” since 1776 liberalism “produced increasingly free people,” wave after wave, including, “slaves, lower-class voters, non-Conformists, women, Catholics, Jews, Irish, trade unionists, colonial people, African-Americans, immigrants, socialists, pacifists, women again, gays, people with disabilities, and above all the poor from whom most of us descended…”
Liberalism, McCloskey argues, is the mother of the “Great Enrichment”—the 3,000 percent increase in material abundance over the last 250 years. Far more than pragmatic materialism, the Great Enrichment is a story about liberalism’s highest values. Dignity and respect for the common person—the person who offered other common people his wares at a reasonable price—were the catalyst that tapped humanity’s creativity, ingenuity, and productive capacity.
Bundled with other liberal principles such as the rule of law, private property rights, and broad enjoyment of civil liberties, the liberal sensibilities of equality and dignity left dramatically improved conditions, longer lifespans, and more space for economic, scientific, and cultural experimentation in its wake.
But reclaiming the liberal ideal also requires that we take its critics seriously. Contemporary critics on the left and right will point out that liberalism’s professed commitment to equality before the law tends to privilege those who already have power. Material abundance, they argue, creates new forms of oppression. Patrick Deneen, for example, argues that far from liberating women, the global marketplace has subjected us to a “far more encompassing bondage,” leaving a degraded culture in its path.
Liberal social scientists and commentators are no doubt forming their counterarguments in their head. No, we admit, we haven’t yet achieved the liberal ideal, but with every step forward—the abolition of slavery, the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and Gay Rights Movements — the liberal ideal has guided our steps. And though the marketplace presents challenges, it also creates viable exit options for those seeking to escape the grip of traditional expectations.
But if we liberals leave this mental conversation there, we will not succeed in addressing Buchanan’s challenge. The critics of liberalism are casting a vision — a vision of a society that is stable, controlled, fair, and certain. What is our response?
Liberals — whether we identify as left-of-center, classical liberal, or conservative — must recapture the animating spirit of liberalism. We can do this, in part, through practice: by valuing discourse over echo-chamber snark, truth-seeking over tribalism, scholarship over partisanship. Along the way, we must also draw attention to the marvels of liberalism — the human flourishing that is made possible whenever and wherever liberal principles have taken hold.
Most importantly, we must acknowledge that the liberal project is incomplete. Working toward the liberal ideal—toward a world that embraces openness and individual freedom and rejects nativism and strong-man authoritarianism—is the most important work we can be doing. To paraphrase another Nobel laureate, F.A. Hayek, we must once again make the building of a liberal society an intellectual adventure; a deed of courage.
Emily Chamlee-Wright is president of the Institute for Humane Studies.
