“All men are brothers.” (Women too, of course.) If asked to agree or disagree with this statement, taken in a normative sense, most people would agree. At the moment, Ukrainians might make an exception for Russians, and Israelis and Palestinians for one another—though even they, if they listened to the better angels of their nature, might come around.
Why quote this old saw here? Because I have long felt that these four words are a complete and adequate political philosophy. A brother or sister shares most of one’s genes and usually a good many of one’s early formative experiences. It’s a tie that binds. Of course, most people are not literally our brothers or sisters. But the point of that archaic-sounding phrase “the brotherhood of man” is to jog our moral imaginations, to remind us that even if we don’t share parents with most other humans, we share with all of them something even more important, something that binds us to them even more strongly: a capacity for suffering. Remembering that makes it harder to be indifferent or cruel.
The most influential move in modern political philosophy is just such an appeal to our imaginations. In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls, having defined fairness as the chief virtue of liberal societies, asks how we might all agree on what’s fair. He answers that, when deciding on a society’s basic rules, we should imagine ourselves all in exactly the same position: not, in this case, sharing genes or memories or capacities, but rather sharing a kind of pristine ignorance. He calls this the “original position.” Its moral force comes from our equality of situation. None of us knows anything about him- or herself, and therefore none of us has any special interest in pushing any particular rule or policy. The situation forces us to choose the good of others as well as our own: the only rules that we would have any reason to agree to are those that everybody else would also agree to, since they, too, are behind the same veil of ignorance as ourselves. It may sound simple, but it’s not easy to imagine oneself without any individual characteristics—interests, appetites, hopes, or fears. It’s just as hard, perhaps, as seeing unlovable strangers as brothers.
A Theory of Justice took the world of academic political philosophy by storm. And yet, the years since its appearance have seen the triumph of paleoconservatism, neoconservatism, and far-right populism. Evidently the rest of the world has not been paying sufficient attention to political philosophers. Fortunately, the latter have not been discouraged. Books explaining or vindicating liberalism have poured forth in a steady stream over these decades, rebuking recalcitrant reality. Two new Rawls-based contributions, one concerned mainly with moral psychology, the other with social and economic policy, both lively and persuasive, may not completely vanquish the conservative juggernaut but ought to slow it down a bit.
Alexandre Lefebvre, in Liberalism as a Way of Life, cleverly adapts Kierkegaard’s complaint that the nineteenth century was not living genuine Christianity but rather a stuffy, spiritless simulacrum he called Christendom. According to Lefebvre, the right name for our twenty-first-century way of life is not liberalism but “liberaldom.” Liberaldom is liberalism corrupted by illiberalism, a “craven capitulation to unliberal values”: inequality, meritocracy, consumerism, national chauvinism, religious bigotry, the residues of racial and sexual discrimination.
To help denizens of liberaldom overcome the “self-satisfaction and sanctimony” to which we are prone, Lefebvre offers a series of spiritual exercises—“practices an individual undertakes to bring about a comprehensive change in their way of living”—to help morally serious liberals cultivate the liberal virtues: impartiality, integrity, intellectual coherence, detachment, generosity, among others. Lefebvre’s vivid, sometimes lyrical descriptions of these virtues, usually pegged to one or another luminous passage from Rawls, are the best part of the book. The exercises, inspired both by “reflective equilibrium,” Rawls’s prescribed method for achieving moral clarity, and by the classical philosopher Pierre Hadot, include meditation, observation, examination of conscience, reframing one’s perspective, mastering one’s passions, and more. They are not quite as subtle or rigorous as Buddhist spiritual exercises, but then Buddhism has had a 2,500-year head start.
If Liberalism as a Way of Life aims to edify, Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler aims to clarify. It begins with an excellent hundred-page precis of Rawls’s theory of “justice as fairness.” Recall that Rawls proposed a method for fairly choosing a society’s basic structure: we are to imagine ourselves into anonymity, without any but the most generic, universal purposes, powers, and predilections, and then ask what sort of world such a creature would choose. Rawls thought he had a good idea, in the shape of two fundamental rules. First, everyone should have the same basic freedoms: religion, speech, assembly, travel, choice of work, choice of spouse, and so on, which may not be infringed upon except to prevent infringement upon someone else’s freedoms. Second, inequalities are justified only to the extent they improve the lot of the society’s worst off.
The second rule, known as the “difference principle,” is, along with the original position and the veil of ignorance, one of Rawls’s two great original contributions to political philosophy. It is meant to cut the Gordian knot of inequality and incentives. In a morally stunted neoliberal society (i.e., ours), people are assumed to work hard or innovate or otherwise do socially useful things only for the sake of money or power. Rawls, taking the world as he finds it, does not appeal to idealism but rather to our choice of the difference principle in the original position. For Rawls, as for Deng Xiaoping, to get rich is glorious, but only as long as your doing so makes the worst off in your society better off. He is similarly permissive about markets: they have their virtues (except where they fail consistently, as in health care, the environment, and other public goods), which should be balanced against everyone’s basic right to a living wage and some degree of self-management at work.
If this, or several other Rawlsian prescriptions, sounds utopian, Chandler offers plenty of evidence that other rich democracies manage it quite well without bankrupting themselves or even falling behind the United States in any important respects. For a philosopher, Chandler has read a remarkable amount of social science, and his footnotes teem not only with citations but also with supplementary discussions of the policy proposals in the main text. All his suggestions—about tax policy, environmental policy, health care, education, immigration, race, workplace democracy—are sensible, and some of them are bold. Random selection of officeholders has been discussed in recent decades, but without much elaboration; Chandler fleshes it out, arguing that it can supplement, if not yet substitute for, elections. American campaign finance probably can’t be fixed unless the conservative justices of the Supreme Court have a road-to-Damascus revelation; but if they do, the “democracy vouchers” Chandler describes—$100, say, to every voter, to give to a party or candidate of her choice—might well be the best way to pay for the electoral circus. And his cautious but enthusiastic endorsement of a universal basic income demonstrates (once again) that it’s a serious proposal, worthy of consideration in a humane, enlightened—free and equal—polity.
Why do these two excellent books yield so little hope—to me, at least? Perhaps because neither author betrays much awareness of the extraordinary obstacles in the way of a just society. Like other forms of self-cultivation—Buddhist meditation, Christian asceticism, Stoic virtue, yoga—Lefebvre’s spiritual exercises can produce supremely valuable results, as can Chandler’s Rawlsian reflections. But I doubt either can produce profound political change.
America is a plutocracy. That does not mean only that wealth distribution is wildly uneven. It means also that nearly every major institution or process in our society is, if not directly for sale, then subject to financial constraints that make the influence of rich individuals and corporations difficult, and often impossible, to resist. Politicians at every level, who must begin, immediately upon taking office, to devote roughly half of their time to fundraising for the next campaign; university presidents and deans browbeaten by billionaires; public-television executives desperate to sell prestige for pennies; federal regulators who hope to exchange their meager salaries for more generous ones from some company their agency now regulates; newspaper editors badgered by their publishers because some corporation has threatened to sue, even with no hope of winning, in the knowledge that the newspaper cannot afford a suit; gigantic asset-management funds that now control an astounding 40 percent of the world’s wealth, including an increasing share of the physical and social infrastructure on which modern life depends; predatory private-equity funds, which use tailor-made tax laws to profitably destroy functioning companies, including hospitals and nursing homes, at great cost to employees, customers, and patients—these are just a few of the pressure points. The methods of social control through financial power in America are exceedingly numerous and intricate. The result is that very little gets done that the plutocracy—big business and the very rich—does not want done.
Neither liberal virtue nor reflective equilibrium will change this. The reason is not that a society of virtuous and fair-minded people would have no effect on the despotism of money; of course it would. The reason is that as soon as the spread of virtue and a spirit of fairness among the citizenry threatens to fundamentally restructure social relations, the plutocracy will find a way to outlaw them or give them a bad name. That is not a joke or a conspiracy theory. They’ve done it before. Early in the twentieth century, battered by two decades of populist and socialist agitation, and perhaps also concerned about the effect of the papal social encyclicals on the large number of Catholic immigrants, the business class launched an intensive campaign to indoctrinate the population in the blessings of “economic freedom” and unfettered competition and in the dangers of foolish talk about solidarity and cooperation. The new ideology of market fundamentalism sought to protect business from even minimal government interference, as well as from labor unions, which were held to be a violation of workers’ rights and contrary to their best interests. This view was promoted through books, pamphlets, magazines, advertising campaigns, lectures, documentary films, radio and television, research institutes, academic programs and appointments, and, of course, ceaseless congressional lobbying. Naturally these activities were expensive, but they were amply financed by the National Association of Manufacturers, the Foundation for Economic Education, the American Liberty League, the National Electric Light Association, and many other industry groups, right-wing foundations, and wealthy individuals and families. All through the New Deal and the Great Society, they never let up, and their efforts were finally crowned with success by the election in 1980 of the Great Oversimplifier, Ronald Reagan, at which point they began to sabotage the New Deal’s legacy in earnest. Today, in full control of one of our two national parties, most state governments, and the Supreme Court, this wrecking crew is still hard at work.
Trying to understand the plight of contemporary liberalism without reference to this decades-long—and ongoing—business-sponsored propaganda blitz (described in great detail in Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s important 2023 book, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market) would be like trying to understand the decline of literacy without reference to advertising or television. And hoping to reverse it without sustained, well-resourced, society-wide cooperation by a large and determined anti-plutocratic majority is a pipe dream. For the struggle ahead (if there is one—currently around half of American voters seem eager to be governed by an authoritarian plutocrat, who has promised to make short work of liberal virtues and ideals) we will need, even more than spiritual discernment or philosophical clarity, inexhaustible indignation, wide-ranging solidarity, and dogged perseverance.
Liberalism as a Way of Life
Alexandre Lefebvre
Princeton University Press
$29.95 | 304 pp.
Free and Equal
A Manifesto for a Just Society
Daniel Chandler
Knopf
$32 | 432 pp.
