According to Alexandre Lefebvre, professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney and author of the new book Liberalism as a Way of Life, the allegory that best captures the liberal self-conception was given to us by the late David Foster Wallace, during his commencement speech at Kenyon College. I suspect you know it, but if not, here’s the truncated version: two younger fish are swimming by an older one. When the older fish politely asks, “How’s the water?”, one of the younger fish looks at the other and says, “What the hell is water?” Lefebvre would say the water is liberalism; I’m one of the younger fish.
This metaphor—liberalism as the water we swim in—dwells at the heart of Liberalism as a Way of Life. I write “we” because the book begins with a wager: there is a good chance that if you’re reading this, you are a liberal. That is, the norms you take for granted, the values you cherish, and even your basic way of being in the world have been comprehensively shaped by the tradition of liberalism.
What makes Lefebvre so confident of this? Because in his view once you know what you’re looking for (in this case, liberalism) you’ll find it everywhere: moral taboos, social mores, popular culture, art and fiction, institutional codes, educational philosophy, attitudes toward relationships, sex and love, parenting norms—these collectively comprise what Lefebvre calls our post-1960s “liberal monoculture.” And he ventures that anyone, like me, who has come of age in a liberal democracy in the past fifty years has likely been shaped, partially if not universally, by it.
A mix of moral and political theory, interpretive social science, self-help and religious exhortation, Liberalism as a Way of Life takes a different tack from other recent defenses of liberalism, which tend to fall into one of three genres: you make the case negatively by playing up the evils of illiberal authoritarianism, you wax lyrical about how good we in the 21st century have it, or you finger-wave your fellow liberals into a state moral contrition. (Please don’t misunderstand; each of these certainly has its place, but one naturally wearies of listening to the same old songs.) Assuredly, Lefebvre partakes in a bit of each, but his underlying aims and overarching style differ. Rather than forewarn, lecture or scold, he is looking to edify and elevate. Or put another way: he hopes to help liberals (like me—and most likely you) to not just better know ourselves, but to become, in contemporary parlance, the best version of ourselves. This might sound trite. I assure you it’s not.
Two figures form the foundation of the work. First and foremost is John Rawls—whom Lefebvre views as the patron saint of liberalism. What Lefebvre takes from Rawls is the idea that liberalism is not a “thin” political ideology, concerned solely with the “basic structure” (to invoke Rawls’s arid language) of our legal and political institutions, but rather a complete way of life, replete with a distinctive conception of the good, along with its own moral and spiritual virtues.
To some this may sound strange. Rawls is widely associated, at least among political theorists, with “political liberalism”—i.e., the view that liberalism is not “free standing,” but instead rests upon other “comprehensive doctrines” (Rawlsian speak for worldviews) for substantive moral content. Yet, political liberalism was the creation of the later Rawls, not the Rawls of A Theory of Justice. In that earlier work, which Lefebvre treats as the authoritative liberal text, Rawls elaborates what he takes to be the public philosophy—i.e., the moral values and social norms endorsed by actual citizens—of liberal democratic societies, as well as the ideal ethical character of the committed liberal.
It was only under pressure from communitarian critics in the 1980s, alive to the moral and religious pluralism of the time, that Rawls revised (some would say softened) his earlier thesis. This shift in Rawls’s thought—from comprehensive to political liberalism—has had ambivalent consequences, thinks Lefebvre. While he believes that political liberalism, understood as a normative theory, has a lot going for it, he also believes that as a descriptive account of 21st-century liberal democracies, it couldn’t be more wrong.
Recall Wallace’s metaphor: most of us, says Lefebvre, are not political liberals whose constitutive identities derive from, say, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam or some other metaphysical worldview, but are instead comprehensive liberals. In other words, while it might have been true in the 1980s that ordinary citizens’ liberal commitments were informed by supplementary traditions, among those of us under 45 there’s a reasonable likelihood that our identities and values derive principally from liberalism. We are, in Lefebvre’s words, “liberal all the way down.”
In the debates raging around contemporary liberalism today, this thesis places Lefebvre in an interesting position. According to anti-liberals on both the left and right, liberalism lacks moral substance—producing atomistic individuals who, in pursuit of untrammeled freedom, reduce reality to the subjective self while simultaneously emptying it of moral content—though it certainly does not lack scope. Indeed, for critics like Patrick Deneen, liberalism insidiously pervades the “anti-culture” we all inhabit. (We are fish swimming in water so contaminated that it will eventually kill us all.) By contrast, among political liberals, the substantive thinness of the doctrine is said to be one of its great virtues, for it’s precisely this feature that permits liberalism to function as an even playing field for the comprehensive doctrines (Catholic integralist, Unitarian, utilitarian, eco-socialist, etc.) that crowd a free and pluralistic society. (Here the preferred metaphor is water—i.e., liberalism—conceived as a neutral substance that affords the peaceful coexistence of diverse marine life.)
Lefebvre thinks the anti-liberals are right about the scope, but wrong about the substance, of liberalism. Yes, liberalism is the water we swim in, inordinately shaping both the public and private cultures of 21st-century liberal democracies; from our obsession with rights talk, to our moral outrage at bigotry, to Dave Chappelle’s irreverence, to social etiquette on the subway, to the fictional sheroes our entertainment raises up (Lefebvre sees Leslie Knope, Parks and Rec’s plucky do-gooder, as the greatest liberal who never lived), we are awash in a sea of liberalism. Anti-liberal critics therefore have the sociology correct. But far from being morally vacuous or subjectivist, Lefebvre insists that liberalism contains within it the resources to animate and realize the most laudable of moral lives and even the most profound of spiritual conditions. Hence Lefebvre’s pert solicitation: “Dive in. The water is just fine.”
By contrast, political liberals, says Lefebvre, are wrong on both counts. Not only do they get the sociology wrong, failing to see just how omnipresent liberalism has become, but by stressing the thinness of liberalism, they regrettably reinforce the impression that liberalism cannot stand on its own. Worse, they blind their fellow liberals to the moral and spiritual riches of their own tradition. They are like the young fish who takes for granted the very thing—water—that gives them life.
Not all will be convinced by this argument, especially in its loftiest form. But for this Rawlsian liberal at least, Liberalism as a Way of Life was genuinely illuminating, as it served to recast aspects of my life that, owing to my self-conception, have long remained obscured. After all, “liberalism,” as Lefebvre writes, “may be at the root of all things us.”
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It was in a philosophy class that I was first introduced to the word liberalism. It’s not that I’d never heard it before, but it meant nothing to me, and so had no place in my vocabulary. That changed when, in a course on political theory, I became acquainted with the illustrious “liberal-communitarian debates.” These took place in the 1980s, and they were essentially about Rawls—or rather Rawlsian liberalism. The concern of “communitarians” (a term, incidentally, few identified with) like Sandel, Taylor, Walzer and MacIntyre was that Rawls’s liberalism did not, could not, account for the attachments and commitments of flesh-and-blood human beings. In Sandel’s famous phrase, Rawls presupposed an “unencumbered self” without a constitutive identity, and thus without substantive content.
Although these communitarian critics didn’t seek to do away with liberalism (with the exception of MacIntyre), they nevertheless held that it required supplementary resources—moral, political, cultural, religious—to animate both a good life and a good society. Call this position liberal+, as in one must be a “liberal plus something else” (exemplified by Michael Walzer’s recent case for “liberal” as an adjective).
As someone who, at the time, felt bereft of a constitutive identity and suffering from a severe lack of moral direction, I found the communitarian critique of liberalism immensely compelling. (To a large extent, I still do.) Between the ages of seventeen and 23, I was a testament to the anti-liberal critique of liberalism: like many teenagers, I had fled from all forms of dependency, chased pleasure and popularity and mistook my self for the center of the universe. At the height of my waywardness, I dropped out of university—the result of (deluded) artistic aspirations and (very real) academic failure. This prompted a period of self-searching and a characteristically liberal personal crisis: Who am I? What do I believe in? What do I stand for? For the first time in my life, these pretentious philosophical questions became urgent obsessions and, two years later, I returned to school.
I became a card-carrying communitarian after reading Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life by the late Robert Bellah, et al.—a classic work of American social theory, which powerfully inventories the social and spiritual ills of excessive individualism. For my part, I became convinced that liberalism lacked the resources to shape a full and morally serious life.
And yet I struggled to square this reading with my own experiences, and with the moral examples of those I knew and loved. Certainly, my own history exhibited some of the failures of an “unencumbered self”—a nihilistic lack of moral purpose, an unthinking dismissal of authority and tradition, fear of both commitment and the expectations of others and that tragic mix, seemingly more common in the age of social media, of public grandiosity and private insecurity. But the same did not seem to be true of many around me, who conducted their lives with probity, personal conviction and concern for the needs of others. I understood, on a gut level, that I was not leading the life I ought to be, and when I began to reform myself in earnest, I was amazed to discover that an ethical framework, once nowhere to be found, seemed to emerge unbidden from within me.
None of this would surprise Lefebvre, for he would say the critique of liberalism that I accepted obscured from view the depth and enormity of the tradition that, unbeknownst to me, had constituted my very identity. Indeed, his great insight is that this failure to see ourselves clearly is endemic among contemporary liberals (or at least those like me). Further, it’s because we liberals are blind to our constitutive identities that we so often struggle to defend ourselves in the face of criticism. I imagine him saying to my twentysomething self: You learned to see yourself through a fun-house mirror forged by your critics; no wonder you didn’t like what you saw! The book’s central ambition could be summed up, then, as forging a different mirror for us to gaze into—one that brings to light the distinctive values and virtues of the liberal worldview we take for granted.
These are threefold: reciprocity, fairness and freedom. While obviously central to liberal institutions—constitutions, human rights, the rule of law, public reason—they are also, Lefebvre insists, encoded in the moral fabric and background culture of liberal democratic societies. Here we can see the debts to Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism shine through; it is Rawls, after all, who suggested that these are not merely the ultimate values liberals ought to have, but those we already do. I suspect some self-identified classical liberals would disagree. But for this liberal at least, Rawls’s notion of society as a system of fair cooperation makes deep intuitive sense—grounded, as it is, in my upbringing.
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I was born at the end of history, on June 16, 1989. Reflecting upon my childhood, the word that comes to mind is idyllic. Part of this has to do with the youthful optimism and naivete through which I experienced the world (to be sure, the result of economic and cultural privileges I took for granted). And another no less important reason for my wistfulness stems from the sense that certain norms, values and sensibilities were largely taken for granted—both in my home and in the wider society. Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism, whatever its flaws, did in fact capture something of my childhood experience.
When my sister was in elementary school, she was (what was then called) a “tomboy.” She cut her hair short, played roughly with the boys and refused to wear anything “girly.” My parents’ response? They let her do what she wanted. Why? Because as liberals they wanted her and me to have the freedom to make our own decisions—to lead our lives by our own lights. They still do.
Another example: if there was one slice of dessert left over, my parents would split it between my sister and me. In our home, favoritism was absent, prejudice prohibited and discrimination called out. To presume that one of us, she or I, should receive discrepant treatment owing to our gender (or any other arbitrary characteristic) would have violated a sacred principle—that of fairness—that lay at the center of our moral universe.
Another: whenever I came home from school, I would immediately take off my shoes—that was our family’s custom, and my mother would have a fit if my sister or I violated it. Yet, whenever we traveled elsewhere, near or far, we always made sure to adapt to (and delight in) the local customs. So, when visiting family in London, we left our shoes on, and when staying with cousins in Australia, we went barefoot. The principle behind this innocuous norm is that you show respect to others by following their customs when in their home (so long as doing so isn’t harmful).
One more: when I was thirteen or so my father and I watched the 1997 film Con Air, starring Nicolas Cage and John Malkovich. Cage plays an honorable army vet named Cameron Poe who has been sentenced to jail for unintentionally killing a man while defending his wife, and Malkovich plays a murderous but brilliant psychopath (appositely named “Cyrus the Virus”) who masterminds a prison break and plane hijacking. I was totally taken by the character of Cyrus; the fear he instilled in his enemies, his ruthlessness, cunning and guile, his macho charisma—these impressed me, and I said so. My father turned to me, his face solemn. Cyrus the Virus, he explained in an unusually sober tone, was unworthy of admiration or praise, because his entire life was devoted to cruelty and harming others. He was, my father bluntly put it, a “bad man.” Unsettled by the swift shift in mood, I simply nodded in response. What I see now, which I did not see then, was that I was learning to swim.
Of course, these examples are just the tip of the ethical iceberg. Don’t judge others. Read widely. Stay informed. Pursue personal growth. Broaden your horizons. Be curious about and learn from other cultures. Question. Reflect regularly. Follow your heart. Be sociable, but take time to yourself. Put yourself in others’ shoes. Work hard. Have fun. Seek balance. Avoid dogmatism and zealotry. Make yourself useful. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Be respectful and civil. Try to make the world better. Be kind. These were some of the unspoken moral maxims of my household (although they were not thought of as such, for another of our maxims was “don’t be moralistic”).
While they may not be unique to liberalism, and while they perhaps reflect a distinctly 21st-century North American sensibility, each of these axioms naturally flow out of the liberal values of reciprocity, fairness and freedom. For they embody, in principles and norms, a certain way of being in the world, grounded in trying to treat every person (including oneself) as a self-authenticating source of valid claims—as having dignity, as being worthy of respect and as having the right to pursue one’s own good in one’s own way. As Lefebvre would put it, they reflect a way of life distinctive to liberalism.
The problem with the communitarian critique of liberalism, then, is that it will lead you to miss all of this. Instead of seeing a substantive commitment to individual autonomy, you will instead see moral skepticism; instead of a desire to respect and learn from others, you will instead see cultural flippancy and agnostic frivolity; and instead of a fair system of cooperation grounded in the liberal value of reciprocity, you will see a cold contractual system, grounded in the nihilistic rejection of community. At least that’s what happened to me.
Seeing liberalism as not merely the political ideology governing our legal and political institutions, but also as the conception of the good that shapes our individual intuitions and instincts, enables liberals like me to appreciate the constitutive identity and tradition we’ve inherited, and to challenge the self-conception that regrettably blinds us to ourselves. Moreover, it usefully clarifies key components of our shared culture—for instance, why slurs have become our swear words, why protecting the vulnerable from harm has become a kind of holy mission for liberal elites, and why nothing repulses us more than cruelty. These follow from the institutionalization of liberal morality in public and private life.
In fact, Lefebvre also helped me to see that liberal contempt for Donald Trump may derive less from his failure to defend and support liberal institutions than the fact that he violates, on a near daily basis, a core liberal maxim: don’t be cruel. In other words, we liberals might fear Trump because he threatens the political institutions and norms we hold dear, but we loathe him because he’s an asshole.
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Liberalism may comprise our official public morality—it may be the water we swim in—but according to Lefebvre our societies are also home to other currents: the corrupting forces of “capitalism (with its individualism, materialism and instrumentalism), democracy (with its latent populism), nationalism and internationalism (with their patriotism and often jingoism), and meritocracy (with its calculations of worth and reward) as well as openly illiberal forces (such as racism and patriarchy).” On this view, I—a good and well-meaning liberal—was corrupted not by liberalism but by the “illiberal hybrid” that comprises our social order.
Lefebvre’s term for this mixed constitution is liberaldom—a witty play on “Christendom,” when Christianity was the official religion of Western Europe. (Lefebvre styles himself after Kierkegaard, who offered a searing critique of priestly Christianity in nineteenth-century Denmark).
An uncharitable interpretation of this argument would see Lefebvre as absolving liberalism of any wrongdoing, instead placing the blame for liberalism’s current woes—staggering inequality, declining social trust, institutional sclerosis, chronic polarization, mass social isolation, to list only a few—at the feet of nonliberal forces. There is admittedly some evidence for this reading. Channelling Tocqueville, Lefebvre suggests that liberalism (the good guy) is principally oriented to leading a life that is “free and generous” (the meaning of the Latin root, liber) in the face of the temptations and coercions produced by (the bad guys) capitalism, democracy and nationalism. Of course, a socialist would reply that divorcing liberalism from capitalism may be possible in theory but is much less easy to do in practice. Meanwhile democrats and nationalists might respond that democracy and nationalism (romanticism too, I might add) have historically been pivotal to moderating and tempering liberalism for the better. So, if the argument is that the current crisis of liberalism is a purely exogenous affair, I am not persuaded.
But I think it better to say that Lefebvre is actually not interested in doling out blame at all but is instead absorbed in raising up the virtues of liberalism for the purposes of moral-spiritual elevation. Liberalism as a Way of Life aspires to paint such a compelling picture of the liberal faith that we, his fellow liberals, will want to live up to it—not out of shame, but because of its inherent appeal. This is a strategy of attraction rather than promotion (or condemnation).
I mentioned earlier that two figures form the foundation of the work. The first is Rawls, the second is Pierre Hadot. Less known to Anglophone readers, Hadot was a twentieth-century French philosopher who made a name for himself challenging modern ideas about the nature and purpose of philosophy. Today, we unthinkingly associate the discipline of philosophy with logic, rational argument and “critical thinking” (thus students commonly treat it as training for law school). For Hadot, this is a profoundly myopic view. An expert in ancient philosophy, Hadot argued that for Plato and his contemporaries, philosophy was chiefly a matter of self-cultivation and spiritual enlightenment; one became a philosopher in order to become a certain kind of person, embodying certain virtues—and one did this by means of particular “spiritual exercises.” In Hadot’s famous phrase, philosophy was less a mode of inquiry than a “way of life.”
Lefebvre takes from Hadot the idea that liberalism, far from being a thin and abstract ideology, is in fact a broad tradition, which contains its own ideals of moral and spiritual excellence. But he also goes further. Lefebvre makes the case that Rawlsian liberalism has buried beneath its dry prose powerful spiritual exercises that liberals can use to overcome the pathologies of liberaldom.
In so doing Lefebvre intriguingly upends the liberal-communitarian debate by reading Rawls’s famed “original position” neither as a descriptive account of the liberal self (as communitarians see it) nor as a thought experiment devised to make a point about justice (as political liberals see it), but rather as a normative spiritual exercise that liberals can use to better realize their own values. Have you noticed yourself regularly prioritizing your own good at the expense of others? Do you suffer from treating your own problems as more real than those of others? Do you struggle to consider how your actions affect others? Lefebvre’s counsel is clear: work on adopting the original position in your everyday life.
In turn, Lefebvre offers a more convincing explanation for the moral waywardness and spiritual despondency experienced under liberalism: it is that people like me have failed to heed our own liberal values; that is to say, we’ve lost our way, not because no path is available to us, but because we’ve strayed from that laid out before us. Liberal values, though all around us, Lefebvre wisely points out, are not fully realized without a struggle.
To lead a life of reciprocity, fairness and freedom is hard, and not simply because the corrupting forces of capitalism, democracy and nationalism (or racism or sexism or colonialism, etc.) are constantly beckoning, but equally because they are in themselves profoundly morally demanding. As Rawls appreciated far more than most liberals today, envy, jealousy, entitlement, pride and spite—what Lefebvre calls the “gremlins of the soul”—are constituent parts of the human condition, and thus come for us all. Hence liberal vices are no less real than liberal virtues.
We liberals may profess a noble creed, but we all too often live something very different. We sing the praises of fairness, yet rig the educational and economic systems. We preach tolerance and love, yet condescend and condemn. We lecture on reciprocity, yet reward greed. We talk of justice, yet pursue narrow self-interest. We call for peace, yet support war. You may sense a familiar liberal-moralism in this litany. It is to Lefebvre’s great credit that he largely manages to avoid this. A culture of shaming can only achieve so much. A different strategy is to appeal to enlightened self-interest, or to the prizes that a good life promises.
While he never does so explicitly, my own reading of Lefebvre sees him as prescribing distinct liberal virtues for distinct liberal characters. For the woke liberal (controversially, “wokeness,” for Lefebvre, is a particular strain of liberalism), he encourages the cultivation of curiosity, humor and openness to difference. For the libertarian, Lefebvre proposes deeper meditation on the values of fairness and reciprocity. And for left-liberals like myself, who tend to be college-educated winners of the meritocratic rat race, he advises we work on diminishing our pride, snobbery and hypocrisy. Cultivating these virtues, he assures us, will not only make us better liberals, but will make us happier, more fulfilled human beings.
He is, therefore, calling for a project of liberal purification; what we need, Lefebvre insists, is not another ocean but cleaner, purer waters to swim in.
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The anti-liberal critic would say that liberalism’s moral incoherence makes this task impossible (the water is too contaminated, too toxic, to be saved). The liberal+ critic would say that the only way this kind of reconciliation can be accomplished is to prop up liberalism with some other conception of the good (liberalism here functions as the “H” in H2O—it is a necessary but not sufficient element). I tend to think history undermines the anti-liberal’s argument (liberalism’s past successes should not be dismissed), yet gives some credence to the latter. Liberalism emerged out of Protestantism, and there are reasons to think it continues to rely upon a Christian metaphysical, moral and social substratum. Even Rawls, the paragon of liberalism, wasn’t a “liberal all the way down”; he was brought up in a social order that was scarcely a “liberal monoculture” but rather studded with alternative worldviews and traditions.
In my view, the uniqueness of the liberal tradition, which is also the source of its great instability, lies in its attempt to reconcile opposites. The liberal can be, and often is, both respectful and irreverent, ironic and serious, deep and shallow, morally committed and morally uncertain, altruistic and selfish, independent and social, rational and emotive, coolly calculating and genuinely caring. To be a committed liberal is to constantly inhabit these polarities, and to struggle daily to balance them in one’s conduct and consciousness, while pragmatically adapting to extenuating circumstance, in order to better realize the values of reciprocity, fairness and freedom.
So, the question arises: Is liberalism alone sufficient to muster liberal virtue? Is appealing to the enlightened self-interest of liberals enough to cure the ills of liberaldom? Is the intrinsic appeal of a life that is “free, fair, and fun,” as Lefebvre amusingly puts it, sufficient to inspire liberals like me (and most likely you) to rise to the historically unprecedented moral heights our public morality presupposes? Lefebvre is of the view that if only we liberals could see the richness of our tradition, we will be roused to realize its highest ideals. But is he right?
Charles Taylor refers to this as the problem of “moral sources”: What resources does a tradition have to encourage its adherents to live up to their own values? Liberalism, being metaphysically indifferent, can offer no spiritual succor. What solace can it give the sick and dying? What redemptive narrative can it provide for the desperate? What moral direction can it give to those who find not oppressive conformity, but comfort, in time-honored ritual, habit and custom?
I ask these questions not in a spirit of skepticism but one of genuine curiosity. I am persuaded by Lefebvre that liberalism is a way of life, and even a good one at that. But liberalism is by no means the only good way of life. And while I suspect that liberalism is morally and spiritually sufficient for some, I am quite confident this is not the case for all. Lefebvre, it must be said, does not deny this; his goal is merely to make the case for liberalism’s virtues—and in this he brilliantly succeeds. But we liberals lapse much too easily into myopic self-congratulation, so I want to stress the following: whether or not liberalism needs other comprehensive doctrines to stand—whether or not liberal+ critics are right—a liberal society is better with nonliberal comprehensive doctrines and constitutive identities in it.
Lefebvre remarks, “Bravery, solidarity, loyalty, filial duty, compassion, oneness with nature, noninstrumental concern for nature, enthusiasm, and forgiveness are not well nourished by a culture centered on reciprocity. Piety, deference, and self-sacrifice fare even worse.” For some, a world without these virtues and the constitutive identities they entail is nothing to lament. Speaking as a liberal, I disagree; it would be a profound mistake—profoundly unliberal—to force all other peoples to become liberals all the way down. The human story is long, and human experience vast. There are many commitments worth making, many ways to lead a good life, many forms of flourishing. We liberals forget this at our peril.
Art credit: James Sillett, “Goldfish.”
According to Alexandre Lefebvre, professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney and author of the new book Liberalism as a Way of Life, the allegory that best captures the liberal self-conception was given to us by the late David Foster Wallace, during his commencement speech at Kenyon College. I suspect you know it, but if not, here’s the truncated version: two younger fish are swimming by an older one. When the older fish politely asks, “How’s the water?”, one of the younger fish looks at the other and says, “What the hell is water?” Lefebvre would say the water is liberalism; I’m one of the younger fish.
This metaphor—liberalism as the water we swim in—dwells at the heart of Liberalism as a Way of Life. I write “we” because the book begins with a wager: there is a good chance that if you’re reading this, you are a liberal. That is, the norms you take for granted, the values you cherish, and even your basic way of being in the world have been comprehensively shaped by the tradition of liberalism.
What makes Lefebvre so confident of this? Because in his view once you know what you’re looking for (in this case, liberalism) you’ll find it everywhere: moral taboos, social mores, popular culture, art and fiction, institutional codes, educational philosophy, attitudes toward relationships, sex and love, parenting norms—these collectively comprise what Lefebvre calls our post-1960s “liberal monoculture.” And he ventures that anyone, like me, who has come of age in a liberal democracy in the past fifty years has likely been shaped, partially if not universally, by it.
A mix of moral and political theory, interpretive social science, self-help and religious exhortation, Liberalism as a Way of Life takes a different tack from other recent defenses of liberalism, which tend to fall into one of three genres: you make the case negatively by playing up the evils of illiberal authoritarianism, you wax lyrical about how good we in the 21st century have it, or you finger-wave your fellow liberals into a state moral contrition. (Please don’t misunderstand; each of these certainly has its place, but one naturally wearies of listening to the same old songs.) Assuredly, Lefebvre partakes in a bit of each, but his underlying aims and overarching style differ. Rather than forewarn, lecture or scold, he is looking to edify and elevate. Or put another way: he hopes to help liberals (like me—and most likely you) to not just better know ourselves, but to become, in contemporary parlance, the best version of ourselves. This might sound trite. I assure you it’s not.
Two figures form the foundation of the work. First and foremost is John Rawls—whom Lefebvre views as the patron saint of liberalism. What Lefebvre takes from Rawls is the idea that liberalism is not a “thin” political ideology, concerned solely with the “basic structure” (to invoke Rawls’s arid language) of our legal and political institutions, but rather a complete way of life, replete with a distinctive conception of the good, along with its own moral and spiritual virtues.
To some this may sound strange. Rawls is widely associated, at least among political theorists, with “political liberalism”—i.e., the view that liberalism is not “free standing,” but instead rests upon other “comprehensive doctrines” (Rawlsian speak for worldviews) for substantive moral content. Yet, political liberalism was the creation of the later Rawls, not the Rawls of A Theory of Justice. In that earlier work, which Lefebvre treats as the authoritative liberal text, Rawls elaborates what he takes to be the public philosophy—i.e., the moral values and social norms endorsed by actual citizens—of liberal democratic societies, as well as the ideal ethical character of the committed liberal.
It was only under pressure from communitarian critics in the 1980s, alive to the moral and religious pluralism of the time, that Rawls revised (some would say softened) his earlier thesis. This shift in Rawls’s thought—from comprehensive to political liberalism—has had ambivalent consequences, thinks Lefebvre. While he believes that political liberalism, understood as a normative theory, has a lot going for it, he also believes that as a descriptive account of 21st-century liberal democracies, it couldn’t be more wrong.
Recall Wallace’s metaphor: most of us, says Lefebvre, are not political liberals whose constitutive identities derive from, say, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam or some other metaphysical worldview, but are instead comprehensive liberals. In other words, while it might have been true in the 1980s that ordinary citizens’ liberal commitments were informed by supplementary traditions, among those of us under 45 there’s a reasonable likelihood that our identities and values derive principally from liberalism. We are, in Lefebvre’s words, “liberal all the way down.”
In the debates raging around contemporary liberalism today, this thesis places Lefebvre in an interesting position. According to anti-liberals on both the left and right, liberalism lacks moral substance—producing atomistic individuals who, in pursuit of untrammeled freedom, reduce reality to the subjective self while simultaneously emptying it of moral content—though it certainly does not lack scope. Indeed, for critics like Patrick Deneen, liberalism insidiously pervades the “anti-culture” we all inhabit. (We are fish swimming in water so contaminated that it will eventually kill us all.) By contrast, among political liberals, the substantive thinness of the doctrine is said to be one of its great virtues, for it’s precisely this feature that permits liberalism to function as an even playing field for the comprehensive doctrines (Catholic integralist, Unitarian, utilitarian, eco-socialist, etc.) that crowd a free and pluralistic society. (Here the preferred metaphor is water—i.e., liberalism—conceived as a neutral substance that affords the peaceful coexistence of diverse marine life.)
Lefebvre thinks the anti-liberals are right about the scope, but wrong about the substance, of liberalism. Yes, liberalism is the water we swim in, inordinately shaping both the public and private cultures of 21st-century liberal democracies; from our obsession with rights talk, to our moral outrage at bigotry, to Dave Chappelle’s irreverence, to social etiquette on the subway, to the fictional sheroes our entertainment raises up (Lefebvre sees Leslie Knope, Parks and Rec’s plucky do-gooder, as the greatest liberal who never lived), we are awash in a sea of liberalism. Anti-liberal critics therefore have the sociology correct. But far from being morally vacuous or subjectivist, Lefebvre insists that liberalism contains within it the resources to animate and realize the most laudable of moral lives and even the most profound of spiritual conditions. Hence Lefebvre’s pert solicitation: “Dive in. The water is just fine.”
By contrast, political liberals, says Lefebvre, are wrong on both counts. Not only do they get the sociology wrong, failing to see just how omnipresent liberalism has become, but by stressing the thinness of liberalism, they regrettably reinforce the impression that liberalism cannot stand on its own. Worse, they blind their fellow liberals to the moral and spiritual riches of their own tradition. They are like the young fish who takes for granted the very thing—water—that gives them life.
Not all will be convinced by this argument, especially in its loftiest form. But for this Rawlsian liberal at least, Liberalism as a Way of Life was genuinely illuminating, as it served to recast aspects of my life that, owing to my self-conception, have long remained obscured. After all, “liberalism,” as Lefebvre writes, “may be at the root of all things us.”
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It was in a philosophy class that I was first introduced to the word liberalism. It’s not that I’d never heard it before, but it meant nothing to me, and so had no place in my vocabulary. That changed when, in a course on political theory, I became acquainted with the illustrious “liberal-communitarian debates.” These took place in the 1980s, and they were essentially about Rawls—or rather Rawlsian liberalism. The concern of “communitarians” (a term, incidentally, few identified with) like Sandel, Taylor, Walzer and MacIntyre was that Rawls’s liberalism did not, could not, account for the attachments and commitments of flesh-and-blood human beings. In Sandel’s famous phrase, Rawls presupposed an “unencumbered self” without a constitutive identity, and thus without substantive content.
Although these communitarian critics didn’t seek to do away with liberalism (with the exception of MacIntyre), they nevertheless held that it required supplementary resources—moral, political, cultural, religious—to animate both a good life and a good society. Call this position liberal+, as in one must be a “liberal plus something else” (exemplified by Michael Walzer’s recent case for “liberal” as an adjective).
As someone who, at the time, felt bereft of a constitutive identity and suffering from a severe lack of moral direction, I found the communitarian critique of liberalism immensely compelling. (To a large extent, I still do.) Between the ages of seventeen and 23, I was a testament to the anti-liberal critique of liberalism: like many teenagers, I had fled from all forms of dependency, chased pleasure and popularity and mistook my self for the center of the universe. At the height of my waywardness, I dropped out of university—the result of (deluded) artistic aspirations and (very real) academic failure. This prompted a period of self-searching and a characteristically liberal personal crisis: Who am I? What do I believe in? What do I stand for? For the first time in my life, these pretentious philosophical questions became urgent obsessions and, two years later, I returned to school.
I became a card-carrying communitarian after reading Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life by the late Robert Bellah, et al.—a classic work of American social theory, which powerfully inventories the social and spiritual ills of excessive individualism. For my part, I became convinced that liberalism lacked the resources to shape a full and morally serious life.
And yet I struggled to square this reading with my own experiences, and with the moral examples of those I knew and loved. Certainly, my own history exhibited some of the failures of an “unencumbered self”—a nihilistic lack of moral purpose, an unthinking dismissal of authority and tradition, fear of both commitment and the expectations of others and that tragic mix, seemingly more common in the age of social media, of public grandiosity and private insecurity. But the same did not seem to be true of many around me, who conducted their lives with probity, personal conviction and concern for the needs of others. I understood, on a gut level, that I was not leading the life I ought to be, and when I began to reform myself in earnest, I was amazed to discover that an ethical framework, once nowhere to be found, seemed to emerge unbidden from within me.
None of this would surprise Lefebvre, for he would say the critique of liberalism that I accepted obscured from view the depth and enormity of the tradition that, unbeknownst to me, had constituted my very identity. Indeed, his great insight is that this failure to see ourselves clearly is endemic among contemporary liberals (or at least those like me). Further, it’s because we liberals are blind to our constitutive identities that we so often struggle to defend ourselves in the face of criticism. I imagine him saying to my twentysomething self: You learned to see yourself through a fun-house mirror forged by your critics; no wonder you didn’t like what you saw! The book’s central ambition could be summed up, then, as forging a different mirror for us to gaze into—one that brings to light the distinctive values and virtues of the liberal worldview we take for granted.
These are threefold: reciprocity, fairness and freedom. While obviously central to liberal institutions—constitutions, human rights, the rule of law, public reason—they are also, Lefebvre insists, encoded in the moral fabric and background culture of liberal democratic societies. Here we can see the debts to Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism shine through; it is Rawls, after all, who suggested that these are not merely the ultimate values liberals ought to have, but those we already do. I suspect some self-identified classical liberals would disagree. But for this liberal at least, Rawls’s notion of society as a system of fair cooperation makes deep intuitive sense—grounded, as it is, in my upbringing.
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I was born at the end of history, on June 16, 1989. Reflecting upon my childhood, the word that comes to mind is idyllic. Part of this has to do with the youthful optimism and naivete through which I experienced the world (to be sure, the result of economic and cultural privileges I took for granted). And another no less important reason for my wistfulness stems from the sense that certain norms, values and sensibilities were largely taken for granted—both in my home and in the wider society. Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism, whatever its flaws, did in fact capture something of my childhood experience.
When my sister was in elementary school, she was (what was then called) a “tomboy.” She cut her hair short, played roughly with the boys and refused to wear anything “girly.” My parents’ response? They let her do what she wanted. Why? Because as liberals they wanted her and me to have the freedom to make our own decisions—to lead our lives by our own lights. They still do.
Another example: if there was one slice of dessert left over, my parents would split it between my sister and me. In our home, favoritism was absent, prejudice prohibited and discrimination called out. To presume that one of us, she or I, should receive discrepant treatment owing to our gender (or any other arbitrary characteristic) would have violated a sacred principle—that of fairness—that lay at the center of our moral universe.
Another: whenever I came home from school, I would immediately take off my shoes—that was our family’s custom, and my mother would have a fit if my sister or I violated it. Yet, whenever we traveled elsewhere, near or far, we always made sure to adapt to (and delight in) the local customs. So, when visiting family in London, we left our shoes on, and when staying with cousins in Australia, we went barefoot. The principle behind this innocuous norm is that you show respect to others by following their customs when in their home (so long as doing so isn’t harmful).
One more: when I was thirteen or so my father and I watched the 1997 film Con Air, starring Nicolas Cage and John Malkovich. Cage plays an honorable army vet named Cameron Poe who has been sentenced to jail for unintentionally killing a man while defending his wife, and Malkovich plays a murderous but brilliant psychopath (appositely named “Cyrus the Virus”) who masterminds a prison break and plane hijacking. I was totally taken by the character of Cyrus; the fear he instilled in his enemies, his ruthlessness, cunning and guile, his macho charisma—these impressed me, and I said so. My father turned to me, his face solemn. Cyrus the Virus, he explained in an unusually sober tone, was unworthy of admiration or praise, because his entire life was devoted to cruelty and harming others. He was, my father bluntly put it, a “bad man.” Unsettled by the swift shift in mood, I simply nodded in response. What I see now, which I did not see then, was that I was learning to swim.
Of course, these examples are just the tip of the ethical iceberg. Don’t judge others. Read widely. Stay informed. Pursue personal growth. Broaden your horizons. Be curious about and learn from other cultures. Question. Reflect regularly. Follow your heart. Be sociable, but take time to yourself. Put yourself in others’ shoes. Work hard. Have fun. Seek balance. Avoid dogmatism and zealotry. Make yourself useful. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Be respectful and civil. Try to make the world better. Be kind. These were some of the unspoken moral maxims of my household (although they were not thought of as such, for another of our maxims was “don’t be moralistic”).
While they may not be unique to liberalism, and while they perhaps reflect a distinctly 21st-century North American sensibility, each of these axioms naturally flow out of the liberal values of reciprocity, fairness and freedom. For they embody, in principles and norms, a certain way of being in the world, grounded in trying to treat every person (including oneself) as a self-authenticating source of valid claims—as having dignity, as being worthy of respect and as having the right to pursue one’s own good in one’s own way. As Lefebvre would put it, they reflect a way of life distinctive to liberalism.
The problem with the communitarian critique of liberalism, then, is that it will lead you to miss all of this. Instead of seeing a substantive commitment to individual autonomy, you will instead see moral skepticism; instead of a desire to respect and learn from others, you will instead see cultural flippancy and agnostic frivolity; and instead of a fair system of cooperation grounded in the liberal value of reciprocity, you will see a cold contractual system, grounded in the nihilistic rejection of community. At least that’s what happened to me.
Seeing liberalism as not merely the political ideology governing our legal and political institutions, but also as the conception of the good that shapes our individual intuitions and instincts, enables liberals like me to appreciate the constitutive identity and tradition we’ve inherited, and to challenge the self-conception that regrettably blinds us to ourselves. Moreover, it usefully clarifies key components of our shared culture—for instance, why slurs have become our swear words, why protecting the vulnerable from harm has become a kind of holy mission for liberal elites, and why nothing repulses us more than cruelty. These follow from the institutionalization of liberal morality in public and private life.
In fact, Lefebvre also helped me to see that liberal contempt for Donald Trump may derive less from his failure to defend and support liberal institutions than the fact that he violates, on a near daily basis, a core liberal maxim: don’t be cruel. In other words, we liberals might fear Trump because he threatens the political institutions and norms we hold dear, but we loathe him because he’s an asshole.
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Liberalism may comprise our official public morality—it may be the water we swim in—but according to Lefebvre our societies are also home to other currents: the corrupting forces of “capitalism (with its individualism, materialism and instrumentalism), democracy (with its latent populism), nationalism and internationalism (with their patriotism and often jingoism), and meritocracy (with its calculations of worth and reward) as well as openly illiberal forces (such as racism and patriarchy).” On this view, I—a good and well-meaning liberal—was corrupted not by liberalism but by the “illiberal hybrid” that comprises our social order.
Lefebvre’s term for this mixed constitution is liberaldom—a witty play on “Christendom,” when Christianity was the official religion of Western Europe. (Lefebvre styles himself after Kierkegaard, who offered a searing critique of priestly Christianity in nineteenth-century Denmark).
An uncharitable interpretation of this argument would see Lefebvre as absolving liberalism of any wrongdoing, instead placing the blame for liberalism’s current woes—staggering inequality, declining social trust, institutional sclerosis, chronic polarization, mass social isolation, to list only a few—at the feet of nonliberal forces. There is admittedly some evidence for this reading. Channelling Tocqueville, Lefebvre suggests that liberalism (the good guy) is principally oriented to leading a life that is “free and generous” (the meaning of the Latin root, liber) in the face of the temptations and coercions produced by (the bad guys) capitalism, democracy and nationalism. Of course, a socialist would reply that divorcing liberalism from capitalism may be possible in theory but is much less easy to do in practice. Meanwhile democrats and nationalists might respond that democracy and nationalism (romanticism too, I might add) have historically been pivotal to moderating and tempering liberalism for the better. So, if the argument is that the current crisis of liberalism is a purely exogenous affair, I am not persuaded.
But I think it better to say that Lefebvre is actually not interested in doling out blame at all but is instead absorbed in raising up the virtues of liberalism for the purposes of moral-spiritual elevation. Liberalism as a Way of Life aspires to paint such a compelling picture of the liberal faith that we, his fellow liberals, will want to live up to it—not out of shame, but because of its inherent appeal. This is a strategy of attraction rather than promotion (or condemnation).
I mentioned earlier that two figures form the foundation of the work. The first is Rawls, the second is Pierre Hadot. Less known to Anglophone readers, Hadot was a twentieth-century French philosopher who made a name for himself challenging modern ideas about the nature and purpose of philosophy. Today, we unthinkingly associate the discipline of philosophy with logic, rational argument and “critical thinking” (thus students commonly treat it as training for law school). For Hadot, this is a profoundly myopic view. An expert in ancient philosophy, Hadot argued that for Plato and his contemporaries, philosophy was chiefly a matter of self-cultivation and spiritual enlightenment; one became a philosopher in order to become a certain kind of person, embodying certain virtues—and one did this by means of particular “spiritual exercises.” In Hadot’s famous phrase, philosophy was less a mode of inquiry than a “way of life.”
Lefebvre takes from Hadot the idea that liberalism, far from being a thin and abstract ideology, is in fact a broad tradition, which contains its own ideals of moral and spiritual excellence. But he also goes further. Lefebvre makes the case that Rawlsian liberalism has buried beneath its dry prose powerful spiritual exercises that liberals can use to overcome the pathologies of liberaldom.
In so doing Lefebvre intriguingly upends the liberal-communitarian debate by reading Rawls’s famed “original position” neither as a descriptive account of the liberal self (as communitarians see it) nor as a thought experiment devised to make a point about justice (as political liberals see it), but rather as a normative spiritual exercise that liberals can use to better realize their own values. Have you noticed yourself regularly prioritizing your own good at the expense of others? Do you suffer from treating your own problems as more real than those of others? Do you struggle to consider how your actions affect others? Lefebvre’s counsel is clear: work on adopting the original position in your everyday life.
In turn, Lefebvre offers a more convincing explanation for the moral waywardness and spiritual despondency experienced under liberalism: it is that people like me have failed to heed our own liberal values; that is to say, we’ve lost our way, not because no path is available to us, but because we’ve strayed from that laid out before us. Liberal values, though all around us, Lefebvre wisely points out, are not fully realized without a struggle.
To lead a life of reciprocity, fairness and freedom is hard, and not simply because the corrupting forces of capitalism, democracy and nationalism (or racism or sexism or colonialism, etc.) are constantly beckoning, but equally because they are in themselves profoundly morally demanding. As Rawls appreciated far more than most liberals today, envy, jealousy, entitlement, pride and spite—what Lefebvre calls the “gremlins of the soul”—are constituent parts of the human condition, and thus come for us all. Hence liberal vices are no less real than liberal virtues.
We liberals may profess a noble creed, but we all too often live something very different. We sing the praises of fairness, yet rig the educational and economic systems. We preach tolerance and love, yet condescend and condemn. We lecture on reciprocity, yet reward greed. We talk of justice, yet pursue narrow self-interest. We call for peace, yet support war. You may sense a familiar liberal-moralism in this litany. It is to Lefebvre’s great credit that he largely manages to avoid this. A culture of shaming can only achieve so much. A different strategy is to appeal to enlightened self-interest, or to the prizes that a good life promises.
While he never does so explicitly, my own reading of Lefebvre sees him as prescribing distinct liberal virtues for distinct liberal characters. For the woke liberal (controversially, “wokeness,” for Lefebvre, is a particular strain of liberalism), he encourages the cultivation of curiosity, humor and openness to difference. For the libertarian, Lefebvre proposes deeper meditation on the values of fairness and reciprocity. And for left-liberals like myself, who tend to be college-educated winners of the meritocratic rat race, he advises we work on diminishing our pride, snobbery and hypocrisy. Cultivating these virtues, he assures us, will not only make us better liberals, but will make us happier, more fulfilled human beings.
He is, therefore, calling for a project of liberal purification; what we need, Lefebvre insists, is not another ocean but cleaner, purer waters to swim in.
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The anti-liberal critic would say that liberalism’s moral incoherence makes this task impossible (the water is too contaminated, too toxic, to be saved). The liberal+ critic would say that the only way this kind of reconciliation can be accomplished is to prop up liberalism with some other conception of the good (liberalism here functions as the “H” in H2O—it is a necessary but not sufficient element). I tend to think history undermines the anti-liberal’s argument (liberalism’s past successes should not be dismissed), yet gives some credence to the latter. Liberalism emerged out of Protestantism, and there are reasons to think it continues to rely upon a Christian metaphysical, moral and social substratum. Even Rawls, the paragon of liberalism, wasn’t a “liberal all the way down”; he was brought up in a social order that was scarcely a “liberal monoculture” but rather studded with alternative worldviews and traditions.
In my view, the uniqueness of the liberal tradition, which is also the source of its great instability, lies in its attempt to reconcile opposites. The liberal can be, and often is, both respectful and irreverent, ironic and serious, deep and shallow, morally committed and morally uncertain, altruistic and selfish, independent and social, rational and emotive, coolly calculating and genuinely caring. To be a committed liberal is to constantly inhabit these polarities, and to struggle daily to balance them in one’s conduct and consciousness, while pragmatically adapting to extenuating circumstance, in order to better realize the values of reciprocity, fairness and freedom.
So, the question arises: Is liberalism alone sufficient to muster liberal virtue? Is appealing to the enlightened self-interest of liberals enough to cure the ills of liberaldom? Is the intrinsic appeal of a life that is “free, fair, and fun,” as Lefebvre amusingly puts it, sufficient to inspire liberals like me (and most likely you) to rise to the historically unprecedented moral heights our public morality presupposes? Lefebvre is of the view that if only we liberals could see the richness of our tradition, we will be roused to realize its highest ideals. But is he right?
Charles Taylor refers to this as the problem of “moral sources”: What resources does a tradition have to encourage its adherents to live up to their own values? Liberalism, being metaphysically indifferent, can offer no spiritual succor. What solace can it give the sick and dying? What redemptive narrative can it provide for the desperate? What moral direction can it give to those who find not oppressive conformity, but comfort, in time-honored ritual, habit and custom?
I ask these questions not in a spirit of skepticism but one of genuine curiosity. I am persuaded by Lefebvre that liberalism is a way of life, and even a good one at that. But liberalism is by no means the only good way of life. And while I suspect that liberalism is morally and spiritually sufficient for some, I am quite confident this is not the case for all. Lefebvre, it must be said, does not deny this; his goal is merely to make the case for liberalism’s virtues—and in this he brilliantly succeeds. But we liberals lapse much too easily into myopic self-congratulation, so I want to stress the following: whether or not liberalism needs other comprehensive doctrines to stand—whether or not liberal+ critics are right—a liberal society is better with nonliberal comprehensive doctrines and constitutive identities in it.
Lefebvre remarks, “Bravery, solidarity, loyalty, filial duty, compassion, oneness with nature, noninstrumental concern for nature, enthusiasm, and forgiveness are not well nourished by a culture centered on reciprocity. Piety, deference, and self-sacrifice fare even worse.” For some, a world without these virtues and the constitutive identities they entail is nothing to lament. Speaking as a liberal, I disagree; it would be a profound mistake—profoundly unliberal—to force all other peoples to become liberals all the way down. The human story is long, and human experience vast. There are many commitments worth making, many ways to lead a good life, many forms of flourishing. We liberals forget this at our peril.
Art credit: James Sillett, “Goldfish.”
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.