Contemporary Theories of Liberalism

Public Reason as a Post-Enlightenment Project

Gerald F Gaus

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761961390, 9780761961383
• eBook ISBN: 9781446228531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

`The author has provided us with a masterful overview and critique of liberal theorizing of the past quarter-century. While dealing exhaustively and fairly with each of a variety of broadly liberal approaches, Gaus also presents a compelling argument for his own preferred "justificatory" approach. His analyses range across familiar territory - Berlin, Gauthier,

Baier, Habermas, social choice theory, Rawls, and so on - and are always

illuminating and, taken together, provide both the newcomer and the old-hand much to ponder? - Fred D?Agostino, University of New England, Armidale

`[A]ll that man is and all that raises him above animals he owes to his reason? - Ludwig von Mises

Contemporary Theories of Liberalism provides students with a comprehensive overview of the key tenets of liberalism developed through Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Rawls to present day theories and debates.

Central to recent debate has been the idea of public reason. The text introduces and explores seven dominant theories of public reason, namely, pluralism, Neo-Hobbesianism, pragmatism, deliberative democracy, political democracy, Rawlsian political liberalism and justificatory liberalism.

As a proponent of justificatory liberalism, Gaus presents an accessible and critical analysis of all contempoary liberal political theory and powerfully illustrates the distinct and importsant contribution of justificatory liberalism.

Contemporary Theories of Liberalism is essential reading for students and academics seeking a deeper understanding of liberal political theory today.

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Liberalism and Reason

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CONTENTS

1.1 Freedom, reason and the ‘Enlightenment View’

1.2 Free reasoning and diversity of beliefs: challenges to the Enlightenment View

1.3 Liberalism and public reason

1.4 Seven Post-Enlightenment liberalisms

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1.1 Freedom, reason and the ‘Enlightenment View’

Freedom and truth

The liberal tradition in politics is, first and foremost, about individual liberty.¹ Although its roots go far back in the history of political thought, liberalism emerged as a distinct political theory as a call for freedom of speech and of thought. As one eminent political theorist observed, freedom of thought ‘is an idea which emerges slowly in the West in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and yet today, in the eyes of the liberal, it is this liberty which is most precious of all’.² Right from the outset, the liberal case for freedom of conscience has derived from devotion to human reason.³ In Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty on Unlicensed Printing (1644), John Milton argued for freedom of conscience and of the press by appealing to reason and truth. ‘Truth’, Milton argued, is ‘our richest Merchandise’.⁴ ‘Let her [i.e., truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to worse, in a free and open encounter?’⁵ Given freedom of speech and thought, truth will win out because, unlike superstition and error, which varies from group to group and time to time, truth appeals to our universal, shared, reason. Hence, proclaimed Milton, ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’.⁶ Over two hundred years later (1859), John Stuart Mill again appealed to truth and reason in his case for freedom of thought and speech:

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.⁷

Mill is struck by our fallibility: no matter how much we have thought an issue through, we can never be certain that we are correct – it is always possible we have fallen into error. Such fallible creatures, Mill insists, can only suppose their beliefs approach the truth if those beliefs are subject to criticism in free debate. Like Milton, Mill believes that true opinions are more likely to be embraced in free discussion because they appeal to our reason.

Milton and Mill advance classic statements of a basic liberal theme: given freedom of thought, speech and inquiry, our common human reason leads us toward increasing agreement on truths and rejection of falsehoods. Sometimes this is put in terms of the ‘free marketplace of ideas’: in a free competition of ideas, the truth will eventually win out, and the longer the competition goes on, the more truths will be uncovered. Underlying this is the conviction that while we are all subject to various sorts of biases, superstitions, and errors, these differ from one person (or group) to another. My biases and superstitions may appeal to me and some like-minded bigots, but they are unlikely to gain universal acceptance because not everyone shares my biases and superstitions. But, the liberal insists, the powers of reason are shared and universal. Reason is what unites us. In the words of a twentieth-century liberal, ‘[a]ll that man is and all that raises him above animals he owes to his reason’.⁸ Overall reason selects the case for what is true rather than what is false. The exercise of our reason, then, leads us to agree. Mill – and here he speaks for much of the liberal tradition – was thus convinced that one aspect of social progress was convergence on an increasing body of truths.

Science and truth

According to this traditional liberal view, when we employ our reason we can achieve objectivity: we can see the world as it truly or really is – that is what is meant by saying that we discover the truth. Although Mill and his followers are always cautious about claiming that they have fully grasped the truth – remember, Mill stresses our fallibility – there is no doubt that Mill believes that on a wide variety of issues there is indeed a truth to the matter that can be uncovered through free, rational, inquiry. For liberals science is the ideal or model of a truth-centered inquiry that produces consensus under conditions of free inquiry. The aim of science is the pursuit of truth. According to what has been called the ‘realist’ presupposition of science, the world investigated by science is real and independent of people’s theories about it, and can be known.⁹ Scientific hypotheses seek to describe and explain this world: they are true when they do so – when they accurately describe the world as it really is. Debate among scientists is thus debate about what is true. On some views, the scientific method – e.g., the formulation of testable hypotheses, reliance on observations and recordable data to test these hypotheses – is justified because it is the best way to discover the truth. The progress of science is the progress in the discovery of truths about the world. Thus, according to liberal proponents of this conception of the scientific endeavor, the free inquiry of scientists structured by the norms of scientific inquiry leads to the discovery of truth – knowledge of the way the world really is. Consequently, free inquiry relying on the norms of science produces convergence of scientific opinion – convergence on the truth about the world.

According to this conception of reason, which dominated the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the free inquiry of scientists produces agreement because (1) the truth is the same for everyone, (2) reason is a shared capacity of all human beings, and (3) the norms of good reasoning are universal. Thus, people reasoning correctly about the world will arrive at the same answer. Any premise p that is true for one person is necessarily true for all others; if the inferential rule ‘(p & [p→q])→q’ is valid for one person, it is necessarily valid for all. The true and valid results of one person’s reasoning are thus necessarily true and valid for all. Moreover, as John Passmore, a historian of philosophy notes, ‘Enlightenment philosophers’ were convinced that ‘mankind had in the seventeenth century lit upon a method of discovery [the scientific method], a method which would guarantee future progress’.¹⁰

Though science has been the paradigm of free, rational inquiry, the liberal’s devotion to the pursuit of truth through the exercise of reason is by no means limited to natural science. The application of human reason, liberals have insisted, will lead to advances in social science, political philosophy and social policy. According to Ludwig von Mises, a great twentieth-century liberal,

[T]he essence of liberalism is just this, that it wants to have conceded to reason in the sphere of social policy the acceptance that is conceded to it without dispute in all other spheres of human action.... Problems of social policy are problems of social technology, and their solution must be sought in the same ways and by the same means that are at our disposal in the solution of other technical problems: by rational reflection.¹¹

Even regarding personal lifestyles convergence of opinion may be expected. Mill is famous for endorsing the pursuit of individuality, and the freedom of each to choose a life that suits her, so long as she does not harm others.¹² But here too Mill suggests that reason may eventually lead to some convergence:

As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them.¹³

To Mill, then, individual lifestyles are ‘experiments’: some types of living will be ‘proved practically’ while in other cases the experiment will fail, and so rational people will come to reject it. The language of ‘experiments’ indicates that even the choice of lifestyles can be understood on the model of science, where we can expect that the free use of human reason will produce convergence of opinion.

Universal reason and morality

Liberals influenced by this view of reason believed that free exercise of human reason produces convergence of moral and political views. Morality, many liberals have believed, can be derived from rationality. That is, liberals have sought to show that reason itself tells us all what moral beliefs are justified; since, as we have seen, good reasoning is the same for everyone, this seems to imply that rationally justified moral beliefs will be the same for all. The most famous attempt to derive universal morality from reason is that of Immanuel Kant. For Kant, it is ‘a necessary law for all rational beings that they should always judge their actions by such maxims as they themselves could will to serve as universal laws’.¹⁴ This principle of morality arises from ‘pure reason’ and tells us that morality is inherently universal.¹⁵ An act is moral, says Kant, only if the principle or ‘maxim’ on which it is based could serve as a universal law for all rational beings. Thus theft and murder are immoral because the maxims ‘steal when you want something’ and ‘murder those you do not like’ could not be willed as laws for all rational beings; we cannot accept a society in which everyone acted on these principles. With Kant, then, we see the quintessential attempt to derive morality from rationality, and by so doing show that all rational creatures would converge on the same, universalizable, moral code.

Of course Kant and other Enlightenment liberals recognized that people often disagree on matters of science or ethics. But such disagreement must have its roots in mistaken beliefs or irrationality: some have arrived at the wrong answer. The process of enlightenment was the only remedy for this – the increasingly better use of reason to uncover truths about the natural, social and moral realms. The ideal model was Newtonian physics: just as our common reason had uncovered the laws of matter and motion, so too could it be expected to uncover the laws of human nature, society, morals and politics. Each field was awaiting its Newton: ‘in the eighteenth century there was a fairly wide consensus that what Newton had achieved in the region of physics could surely also be applied to the regions of ethics and politics’.¹⁶ As a contemporary philosopher observes:

It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment, an aspiration the formulation of which was its great achievement, to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would replace authority and tradition. Rati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Liberalism and Reason
• 2 Pluralistic Liberalism: Making Do Without Public Reason?
• 3 Hobbesian-inspired Liberalism: Public Reason Out of Individual Reason
• 4 Collective Reason: Deepening the Social Roots of Public Reason
• 5 Deliberative Democracy: Public Reason and Political Consensus
• 6 Political Democracy: Public Reason Through Aggregation
• 7 Rawls’s Political Liberalism: Public Reason as the Domain of the Political
• 8 Justificatory Liberalism and Adjudicative Democracy: Public Reason and Umpiring
• Index