Postliberalism without Despotism

Feser argues that postliberal politics can and should be committed to many goods claimed as “liberal,” but an Aristotelian-Thomistic account of reality gives postliberals a more stable foundation.

The rule of law; constitutional constraints on government; the separation of powers; free and fair elections to determine who holds public office; the market economy; free speech and the critical evaluation of ideas that it makes possible; due process; and so on.  Defenders of liberalism point to the benefits of these institutions as an argument for their creed.  They also sometimes speak as if to criticize liberalism is ipso facto to advocate doing away with these institutions – as if being postliberal entails favoring dictatorship, totalitarianism, a police state, socialism,and similar political bogeymen.

It is hard to know what to say about such silliness other than that it is very silly indeed.  The late Michael Novak drew an important distinction between liberal philosophy and liberal institutions.  Institutions like the ones just named are often thought of as paradigmatically liberal.  This is not quite right, since, at least in some form or other, they predate modernliberalism.  But it is true that liberalism has made these institutions central to its understanding of political life, and has deeply influenced the modern world’s understanding of them.  All the same, the institutions themselves are different from the various systems of liberal political philosophy that might be used to ground and interpret them (such as the systems of Locke, Smith, Mill, Hayek, or Rawls).

Of course, a critic of liberal political philosophy might reject one or more of the institutions in question wholesale, and certainly would not accept them in quite the forms liberalism advocates.  The point is that he need not reject them in all their forms.  For example, one might see the value of elections as a means of determining who holds office, without accepting Locke’s assumption that political authority is a product of consent rather than having any natural basis.  One might see the value of free debate without entirely endorsing Mill’s particular justification of it, or taking the right to free speech to be as absolute as he andother liberals do.  One can acknowledge the advantages of market mechanisms while disagreeing with Smith or Hayek about exactly which sorts of interference with market outcomes are justifiable.  One can acknowledge Rawls’s point that modern polities need to be sensitive to the problems posed by pluralism, without accepting his view that it is possible or desirable for the state to be neutral between all reasonable comprehensive doctrines.  And so on.

Aristotle, after all, was no liberal, yet he famously advocated a mixed regime, with a democratic component alongside the aristocratic and monarchical components.  Aquinas was no liberal, but he acknowledged that not every vice can effectively be combated by force of law.  Bellarmine and Suarez were not liberals, but they did take popular consent to be the source of the specific form of government adopted by a state (even if it is not the source of the state itself, which is a natural institution). Other Scholastics developed theories of natural rights, and noted some of the advantages of free enterprise, without becoming Lockean or Smithian liberals.

Does this mean that the postliberal is, after all, advocating more or less the same system as the liberal, and merely replacing the underlying philosophical basis of the system?  Absolutely not. For one thing, the different principles in light of which a postliberal will understand institutions like constitutional constraints, free speech, the market economy, and the like, will inevitably entail different interpretations of the scope and limits of these institutions.

Suppose, for example, that one’s postliberalism is informed by Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory.  In another Postliberal Order article, I have explained the implications of this approach for the right to free speech.  As I argued there, on the one hand:

As rational social animals, the fundamental way we remedy [error] is precisely through the give-and-take of rational debate and moral criticism.  Part of how we discover what is true and good is by freely discussing different opinions, and finding out which, in the long run, have the better arguments in their favor.  Hence, our fallibility and propensity to moral error not only shouldn’t make us quick to limit the right to free speech, but on the contrary, should make us more reluctant to do so… There is at least a strong presumption against limiting free speech even when we judge what a speaker says to be erroneous or evil.

However, and on the other hand, I argue that this presumption can be overridden, so that the right to free expression is not absolute.  For example, since pornography appeals to our passions rather than to our intellects, there is no basis in our rational nature for a right to produce or use it (the way there is a basis in our rational nature for the liberty freely to debate ideas).  Moreover, pornography is destructive of the stability of the family, and thus of the basic cell of the entire social order, which gives governing authorities compelling grounds for suppressing it.  Hence, while liberals will fret over whether banning pornography would offend against the individual autonomy they idolize, a postliberal need have no such worries.  

I also argue in the article referred to that ideas that are not merely wrong, but positively subversive of the very possibility of free and rational debate, can also, in principle, be suppressed by the state.  Of course, it may well in practice be better to rely on counterarguments against such noxious ideas rather than legal suppression.  But this brings us to another key respect in which a postliberal rationale for, and conception of, institutions like constitutional constraints, free speech, the market economy, etc. are bound to be different from those of the liberal.  Liberalism tends to approach these institutions in a doctrinaire manner, whereas for the postliberal, determining their scope and limits is largely a matter of prudential judgment.  

Hence, the postliberal might allow that given actual, concrete cultural and historical circumstances, it might be better in practice for the state to refrain from giving special public recognition to the Catholic Church; or that, given concrete economic circumstances, it may be better in practice for the state to refrain from some particular intervention in market outcomes; or that given concrete political and cultural circumstances, it might be better in practice for the state to refrain from suppressing some particular subversive political ideology.  The difference is that the liberal will tend to see such restraint, not as the contingent counsel of prudence, but as the requirement of inflexible principle.  Postliberals will see it instead as stemming from judgments that might be revisited if and when conditions change.

All the same, a postliberalism grounded in Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory would make such contingent prudential judgments in light of deeper unchanging principles, rather than in an arbitrary or ad hoc manner.  It will acknowledge that there are absolute limits on what might be done to individuals by the state, given their nature as rational social animals.  And it will be sensitive to our fallen condition, and thus to the fact that there are dangers in excessive state power just as there are dangers in too great an emphasis on individual autonomy.  To reject the limits the liberal would put on state power is not to reject all limits. Whether to reject despotism in favor of limited government is thus not what is at issue between liberals and postliberals.  What is at issue is exactly where those limits should be drawn, and why.