Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism

András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, Stephen Holmes, András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, Stephen Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000479546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of IIliberalism is the first authoritative reference work dedicated to illiberalism as a complex social, political, cultural, legal, and mental phenomenon.

Although illiberalism is most often discussed in political and constitutional terms, its study cannot be limited to such narrow frames. This Handbook comprises sixty individual chapters authored by an internationally recognized group of experts who present perspectives and viewpoints from a wide range of academic disciplines. Chapters are devoted to different facets of illiberalism, including the history of the idea and its competitors, its implications for the economy, society, government and the international order, and its contemporary iterations in representative countries and regions.

The Routledge Handbook of IIliberalism will form an important component of any library's holding; it will be of benefit as an academic reference, as well as being an indispensable resource for practitioners, among them journalists, policy makers and analysts, who wish to gain an informed understanding of this complex phenomenon.

Part ITheoretical Perspectives

DOI: 10.4324/9780367260569-1

1THE ANTILIBERAL IDEA

Stephen Holmes

DOI: 10.4324/9780367260569-2

Introduction

While definitions cannot be true or false, word choice can be more or less illuminating. Indicating what it is not, illiberalism might conceivably refer to any non-liberal, for example feudal, pattern of thought or behaviour. Reminding us of what it is against (and up against), by contrast, antiliberalism has more pungent connotations (see Rosenblatt 2021). It draws attention helpfully to the essentially derivative, adversarial, and aggrieved nature of the illiberal mindset that preoccupies us today and that, indeed, has played a thunderous role in European politics starting in the nineteenth century with the Counter-Revolution in France (Berlin 2013) and the Slavophile resistance to Westernization in Russia (Walicki 1975).

Liberalism itself refers to a sprawling and historically evolving set of normative priorities, problem-solving practices, and institutional alternatives (Holmes 1995). Antiliberal proselytizers and politicians, as a consequence, adopt shifting intellectual guises and rhetorical airs depending on the version of political, economic, and cultural liberalism that they view as malignantly dominant and ripe for toppling at any given time and place. But the antiliberal mentality also displays certain timeless features that permit us to treat its various colourful instantiations as belonging roughly to a single movement or school of thought (Holmes 1993). Antiliberals of every stripe, for example, have “disdained the liberal habits of tolerance, dissent, debate, [and] openness” (Stern 1971, xx).

Before attempting to sketch out the permanent structure of antiliberal thought, we should acknowledge that hostility to liberalism is either politically anodyne or politically calamitous depending on contingent historical circumstances. It just so happens that today, in 2021, the antiliberal sensibility has emerged as a newly aggressive force in global politics, putting at risk the stability of liberal democratic regimes and the international institutions built by the West after World War II. This leap into deadly political prominence cannot be traced to any internal evolution of antiliberal thinking, however. It is due solely to a shift in the political winds. Domestic political weakness in the two most celebrated exemplars of liberal politics and economics, the US and the European Union, has arguably been the most decisive factor in the soiling of liberalism’s global reputation. Be this as it may, the first two decades of the twentieth century have provided fertile ground for the rise of anti-establishment leaders and parties able to attract mass support by openly celebrating xenophobic and authoritarian nativism (Holmes and Krastev 2019). Social, economic, demographic, and technological factors have also conspired to prevent liberal forces from mounting an effective and coherent response. But while the political success of the new antiliberals is recent and dismaying, the stock slogans they repetitiously cite are anything but new.

Anti-individualism

An important trademark of antiliberal thought is the belief that the many obvious flaws of liberal societies today are due to genetic defects in liberalism itself, not to a failure to realize liberal ideals in practice. Rather than viewing classical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism, reasonably enough, as sometimes inadequate to address the burning problems of the present, they view it as the unique source of the problems of the present. So what is the gravamen of the antiliberal case? As it turns out, a single alleged mistake of liberal thought and practice has borne the lion’s share of antiliberal animus. Liberalism’s principal sin is having failed to place the member/nonmember distinction at the centre of the moral universe (MacIntyre 1984, 25).

Among the many tiresome antiliberal platitudes, in fact, none is more shopworn than the conceit that liberalism “atomizes” society and destroys all meaningful “social bonds” (Gentile 1946, 65; Maurras 1972, 103; Unger 1975, 229; Sandel 1982, 180). Aiming to destroy all allegiance to particular ways of life, we are told, liberalism has created a world of strangers with no sense of common fate or purpose. Under the sway of liberal ideas, vital social relations have been purportedly desiccated by petty and arid individualism. A warm, solitary, and emotionally satisfying communal order has yielded to a chilly, egoistical, and morally hollow one. The attribution of such a preposterous agenda to practical-minded supporters of religious toleration, the separation of powers, competitive elections, public budgets, habeas corpus, the abolition of torture, civilian control of the military, the decriminalization of blasphemy, freedom to move within and between countries to practice one’s profession, exemption from testifying in court against a spouse, co-education, and the right of citizens to examine and criticize their government without fear of retribution (to name a few basic liberal causes) may seem far-fetched. The bogus claim that liberalism atomizes society is all the more absurd given that this is what totalitarian – not liberal regimes – do by encouraging their citizens to denounce each other to the secret police (Arendt 1958, 318). Nevertheless, it does contain a distorted echo of the truth. For a central strategy that liberal reformers first developed in the age of Europe’s religious civil wars was to encourage individuals to see themselves and each other as individuals rather than as generic and interchangeable representatives of an ascriptive group. Promoting individualism was a not altogether unsuccessful attempt to de-escalate violent conflict among hostile sectarian or clan or tribal groupings each of which demanded selfless and unwavering allegiance from their members in order to prepare the latter to kill and die for the community.

Hostility to liberal individualism and the apotheosis of a presumably redemptive community, taken together, constitute the enduring core of the antiliberal mindset. Expressed obscurely in attacks on a nonexistent liberal atomism, resentment of really existing liberal individualism is the existential stance that ties together antiliberalism’s various camps and manifestations. Resentment against asocial individualism provides the emotional drive behind all-too-familiar antiliberal jeremiads against liberalism’s non-discriminating universalism, rootless cosmopolitanism, spiritually vacuous materialism, intellectual and social pluralism, non-hysterical openness to legal immigration, non-prudish acceptance of untraditional families, moral skepticism, humanitarianism without borders, decadence, permissiveness, philistinism, and hostility to tradition. To understand antiliberalism, therefore, we need to start by explaining the centrality of individualism to the liberal idea.

Liberal individualism, first of all, is not asocial. It has nothing to do with egoism, selfishness, greed, or the priority of crass and calculating materialism over moral attitudes, allegiances, and values. Liberals do not conceive society as a culturally and morally barren network of consumers and producers where naked egoisms haggle and brawl. Liberal individualism, to repeat, is an ethical imperative. It instructs us to regard others primarily as individuals rather than treating them as if they were nothing more than members (or exemplars) of rival religious, racial, national, or cultural factions. We might even hypothesize that antiliberal ideas appeal especially to people who find meaning not in their multiple surprising relations with other individuals as individuals but only in joining an exclusive group where the difference between members and nonmembers not only reflects a tendentious hierarchy of greater and lesser human value but also becomes the main organizing principle of life. Antiliberalism’s elective affinity with white nationalism, racism, and anti-immigrant or religious bigotry reveals the pivotal role played in antiliberal political movements by atavistic solidarities at war with liberal individualism in precisely this sense. After the Nazi cataclysm, most antiliberals became less explicit about invoking racial solidarity as a “cure” for the pathology of post-ethnic individualism. But they continue to urge their followers, when hearing the words community and solidarity, to put all their critical faculties to sleep. They draw a sharp contrast between the noble community and base individualism as if the social realm were a comely and blameless domain where immoral behaviour was unknown and collective passions or group loyalties never produced savage conflict or any other unwelcome consequences.

The Social Nature of Humans

The opposition between individualism and communitarianism is abstract and ideological. The antagonism that matters, politically and concretely, is between one racial, sectarian, or national community and another. Contrary to what communitarians deceitfully imply, the fact that aims and allegiances are shared does not make them morally inspiring. Immoral behaviour is not defined by any lack of a social dimension. Admittedly, individuals shorn of mutual sympathy and the ability to communicate might occasionally inconvenience each other. But mass atrocities always involve the moral-emotional solidarity of murderous identity groups. The zealots of belonging most eager to bloody their hands in the name of their group focus obsessively not on the individuality of those they kill but on their victims’ non-membership in the oh-so beloved community.

The deepest psychological root of anti-individualism is arguably the fear of death and the understandable desire of most humans to identify with some “we” which will survive after the individual “I” has returned to dust. To compensate for the brief life span of individuals human cultures typically invite their members to see themselves as belonging inseparably to a community of faith or blood that spans generations. Because such membership gives individuals a feeling of conquering death, it also provides the motivational basis for “heroic” killing and dying in wars against a rival race, group, sect, or country. Historically, as a result, the greatest threat to social trust and cohesion comes not from “corrosive individualism” but, on the contrary, the collective antagonisms of belligerent groups. It is much easier to be viciously cruel when acting for the sake of a partisan faction, a proselytizing faith, or a nation-state than when pursuing one’s own paltry interests and views. There would be no terrorism or nationalistic wars or camps for the extermination of “inferior breeds” without a large measure of selfless devotion to social groupings.

Liberals are not pacifists because they support the idea of defensive war. But they deny that the most intense and complete realization of life’s meaning is achieved in the heroic life-and-death struggle of members of a national army against an enemy force attempting to kill them (Schmitt [1932] 2007). A classic expression of liberal resistance to communitarian warmongering occurs in a passage from the Spirit of the Laws where Montesquieu denounces those who claim that a military conqueror of a foreign state has the right to kill its inhabitants:

What has led them into this mistake is, that they imagined a conqueror had a right to destroy the state; whence they inferred that he had a right to destroy the men that compose it: a wrong consequence from a false principle. For from the destruction of the state it does not at all follow that the people who compose it ought to be also destroyed. The state is the association of men, and not the men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain.

Montesquieu [1748] 1949, 135

This distinction between the citizen as a member of a conquered community and the individual person whose existence transcends his or her membership in any and every group is the aspect of liberalism that most irritates antiliberals such as Carl Schmitt who glorify the mortal clash of hostile nations.

The utopian aspiration to completely eliminate factionalism, sectarianism, and race hatred from the repertoire of human motivations has never played a major role in the political activism of liberal parties. The human species survived for hundreds of thousands of years only by clustering in kinship groups each of which offered a fragile form of collective security in a hostile environment full of ravenous beasts, both human and inhuman. These organized communities survived because they managed to harness the energy and allegiance of their members to the purposes of the group. That unthinking tribalism has been to some degree “hard-wired” into the human psyche by the ordeals of pre-history is therefore a commonly floated – if ultimately unprovable – claim (Haidt 2013). Be this as it may, liberalism, because of its commitment to a realistic distinction between the desirable and the likely, aspires not to eradicate but rather to domesticate and demilitarize tribalism or the tendency to identify emotionally with an exclusive group locked in real or imaginary combat with another.

Putting aside for the sake of argument the desirability of detribalization, no attempt to achieve it can ever f...