Differences that Matter among Contemporary Liberals

Liberals in the broad philosophical and historical sense clearly share some important commonalities, but contemporary liberals also differ on important theoretical and practical issues that makes distinguishing them with descriptive adjectives or even different names more useful than simply lumping them all together as more or less the same in their views, and then contrasting them as a team with conservatives and communists. There are liberals and liberals, as John Dewey pointed out in 1930 in Liberalism Old and New. Instead of rejecting the concept as hopelessly confused, Dewey criticized and proposed a reconstruction of classical liberalism’s still-influental framework, calling for a “new” and improved liberalism that had a better empirical basis and more inclusive aims. Today’s so-called “liberals” include an even wider range of thinkers than they did in Dewey’s time, but they do not see themselves as members of a single team, though many of them have replied to the same texts and to one another.

For example, in A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls attempted to bridge Isaiah Berlin’s two alternative formulations of liberalism, whereas in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick rejects Rawls’ bridge in favor of Berlin’s preferred libertarian individualist position. Rawls himself certainly knew Dewey’s name when he gave the Dewey Lectures he called “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (1980), intended in part as a reply to Nozick, which he later revised as the basis for Political Liberalism (1993) after a series of critical interchanges with Jurgen Habermas. Pragmatism was in intellectual eclipse in the 1970’s, which may be one reason why Rawls said nothing about Dewey’s pragmatist “new liberalism” in his works of that period. In contrast, utilitarianism was still very influential, which is why Rawls said a lot about its inadequacies as a reconstructed form of liberalism (as Dewey had earlier) in comparison with Kant’s classical views (which Dewey found inadequate).

Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill continue to be frequently cited as authorities or at least territorial signposts by a wide range of contemporary “liberal” thinkers who hold importantly differing views, perhaps because each of these earlier thinkers expressed some ideas that are closer to contemporary libertarian individualism and some that are closer to “social welfare” liberalism. However, these differing aspects of their views do not flow together seamlessly. For example, the libertarian aspects of Mill’s On Liberty do not match up very well with the social welfare emphasis of Utilitarianism. Thus, treating Kant’s and Mill’s bodies of work as unified within themselves is as misleading as treating as members of the same team all of those contemporary “liberals” who find Kant’s and Mill’s views insightful in some way.

At the left end of the democratic political spectrum, most of Rawls’ best-known feminist critics have argued for views similar to Dewey’s “new liberalism,” whether they knew Dewey’s work or arrived at some of the same conclusions by a different route. (Dewey predicted in 1930 that women would remake philosophy when they finally gained admission to the discipline, and he was right about that.) Many of these feminists’ political views developed in conversation with democratic socialists, some of whom knew Dewey’s writings, including the founders of Students for a Democratic Society. For example, Naomi Scheman and Catherine Mackinnon clearly belong on the left end of the democratic political spectrum, though neither would call herself a liberal. In fact, Mackinnon describes the book that made her famous as “post-Marxist” and explicitly rejects what she characterizes as liberal views of the state, including both Rawls’ and Nozick’s differing “liberal” views as well as those of Kant, and perhaps even Mill’s proposals for transforming what he called “the subjection of women.” Instead of calling herself a “Marxist” feminist, however, Mackinnon carefully described herself as a post-Marxist radical feminist, in that she was calling for a rethinking of gender relationships as well as political and economic institutions.

In spite of philosophical and historical roots in liberalism—roots shared by Karl Marx as well as the great conservative theorist, Edmund Burke—some of the most important current lines of political controversy, theoretical and practical, divide libertarian individualists, mainstream liberals like Rawls and Habermas, democratic socialists, feminists who hold a wide range of anti-conservative views, and post-eclipse pragmatist thinkers of various kinds. Why gloss over these differences?

Though Martha Nussbaum has not rejected the “liberal” label for her feminist political philosophy, which clearly shows the influence of all of these earlier thinkers, those who refer to it as “capabilities theory” say something clearer and more useful about it than those who group it with Rawls and Nozick, or even with Kant and Mill. She acknowledges the importance of these differing theorists’ work, as well as Aristotle’s and Mackinnon’s, but she frames her co-development of capabilities theory with economist-philosopher Amartya Sen in terms of feminism and empirically based democratic philosophy.

Moreover, there has been a recent revival of Dewey’s and Jane Addams’ “new liberalism” by contemporary “pragmatist liberals” or “progressives” working in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, educational theory, cultural studies, and religious studies who draw extensively on Dewey, Mead, Addams, and Royce. In many cases, their pragmatism works very well with Nussbaum and Sen’s capabilities theory, if this is understood broadly, transactionally, and contextually. Both approaches oppose libertartian liberalism as well as certain aspects of Rawls’ work. In contrast, Robert Talisse opposes Dewey’s “new liberalism,” advocating Rawls over Dewey in order to advance what he calls “Peircean liberalism,” although his view owes more to Cheryl Misak’s original contributions than it does to Peirce’s actual political views. (Peirce was a conservative on political and social issues, though not on knowledge and science.) Thus, contemporary pragmatists who do political philosophy generally advance some kind of liberalism, one could say, but the differences among them as pragmatists help to explain and clarify their wide differences as “liberal” theorists.

Some of us pragmatist “new liberals” or progressives feel a certain outrage toward other contemporary “liberals” because their adoption of some the kinds of methods Dewey, Mead, and Addams developed without the kind of acknowledgement they routinely offer to Aristotle, Kant, and Mill amounts to engaging in a kind of invasion of intellectual property. However, those of us who know all of these “great books,” as well as influential works by many “contemporary liberals,” have an additional and more important concern. In a world that needs philosophical help with real problems in living, the slow pace of many current political thinkers toward re-discovery of some of the better methods, concepts, and insights of the classical pragmatists sometimes seems intolerable. This is why we try to teach critically and improve on the classical pragmatists’ texts in accessible ways, as we simultaneously address the important issues of the day.