Abstract
Raymond Geuss’s Not Thinking Like a Liberal is a thoughtful, erudite, and gently contemplative book. It serves as a powerful testament to the impact that magnetic individuals and youthful educational regimes may wield over a scholar through the course of their lifetime. But it also challenges us to ask what has gone wrong with liberalism, its visions and reputation, when a learned and cultivated scholar such as Geuss can assuredly and calmly announce that he is “not thinking like a liberal”? Throughout, the text offers vital clues as to why Geuss—a reflective and judicious thinker but the product of an intense and iconic, if partisan, training—can map his social and cultural journey of discovery as outside the orbit of liberalism, when in so many ways his own rich deliberations are the epitome of a liberal mindset. His education at an American Catholic school—reflecting probably “the very last afterimage of the late-Habsburg world” (p. 99)—was formed by currents that produced an aversion to certain kinds of liberalism and set the early scene for his emergence as a philosopher of social thought. One of those currents relates to the directing and filtering power of the American political and philosophical context, curiously paired in the book with one of its stark opposites—an ostensible European predilection for proclaiming the esoteric, often obscured, nature of knowledge. Another relates to the elitism endemic to so much philosophical thought, focusing as it does only on presumed superior forms of analysis and discourse. Consequently, its practitioners are prone chiefly to include as the objects of their study the essays and cogitations of those they deem to be the finest or most salient minds, rashly designating them as representative of an entire genre of political debate. They do so while dismissing the broader and less cogent articulations of political thinking in a society as hors de combat.
Liberalism, however, is far from being solely the preserve of philosophers, nor can the latter offer conclusive insights into the many tracks and trails of that intricate and multi-faceted ideology in action. The fine-print of argument with which philosophers are conversant is not matched by a parallel interest in the fine-print of regular and ubiquitous political discourse, in the byways as well as the highways of how people actually think politically. Yet those wider vistas are indisputably intrinsic to the plural and fluid manifestations of the thought-patterns that breed and sustain the abundance of theories and ideologies, of which liberalism is such a notable instance. The lessons of liberalism may be gleaned not only through the sophisticated arguments of John Stuart Mill or John Rawls, and not only through Great Texts, libertarian economic policy, or legal minimalism. They could have been gathered from an acquaintance with L.T. Hobhouse, whose exemplary and defining Liberalism, the exposition of a humanist, social, and crucially influential liberalism, does not get a mention in Geuss’ listings (Hobhouse, 1911). Had he done so, he might have appreciated that thinking like a liberal has its attractions within several European political traditions that stretch way beyond economism and legalism. Nor do the lessons of liberalism have to be located in professional or philosophical treatises to begin with. They may be discovered in the cultural and social abhorrence of the death penalty, or of torture, or of the cruelty that some rule-following entails. Alternatively, they may be deduced, say, from the kind of mature literature directed in recent times at teenagers, a literature saturated with the need for human compromise, the dignity and normality of loss, the reasonable challenge to authority, and the curiosity about diverse ways of living. And they permeate parliamentary debates, newspaper editorials and public campaigns for governmental accountability. All those, too, is how liberal dispositions are crafted and disseminated. Liberalism still suffuses significant layers of our societies, but we have to know where to look for it and which guises it assumes.
As was the case with that eminent but historically selective liberal, Isaiah Berlin, Geuss displays no recognition of liberalism’s diverse and manifold trajectories. Just as Berlin ignored the crucial rise of the British welfare state—anchored in liberal soil—in his commissioned post World War Two accounts of politics and culture (Berlin, 1950), Geuss says nothing about the emergence of a powerful social liberalism in the 20th century (p. 120). Of course, his personal formative impressions both concerning liberalism and the study of political theory were forged in the United States at a time when a sovereign calculating individual was believed to be a viable construct and when Arrow’s rational decision theory was associated with liberal choices. No less significantly, the United States did not experience the flowering of a humanistic and communal welfare ethos comparable to the one beginning at the time to characterize parts of Western and Northern Europe. As a series of reflections on how liberalism was approached and taught at several major centers of learning Geuss’s narrative rings true. But for a book written in the 2020s one could have hoped for a fairer reappraisal of the evolution and vibrancy of liberal thought and for a cultivation of the historical nuances that any political tradition evinces. After all, even as a “specific theoretical doctrine” (p. 28), as Geuss disapprovingly encounters it, liberalism has a mottled and tangled history, moving through a series of staging posts, sometimes in sequence, sometimes in overlapping mode, and sometimes displacing one another: natural rights theory, free-market enterprise and self-help, the dynamic development of individuality, and the extolling of human sociability as an inseparable ingredient of individual progress (Freeden, 2015). Geuss has not shaken off the early molding of his ideas—a testimony to the power of his schooling but also to the inculcation of stereotypes that belief systems superimpose on their assumed counterparts. His knowledge of liberalism has been the victim of stark fault lines. “The instruction in my school took direct aim at the conception of the sovereign, self-transparent individual which was central to all forms of liberalism” (p. 33). All forms? That is itself an ideological caricature that Geuss finds hard to discard.
Geuss is no Marxist, no conservative, no populist, no longer even a Catholic, but he has casually absorbed the silhouettes imposed on liberalism by its various detractors, including at close range his charismatic teachers Béla Krigler at his high school and Sidney Morgenbesser at Columbia University. Undoubtedly, and not without reason, liberalism has been battered by radicals who associate it with class complacency. It has been excoriated by decolonizers who have exposed its collusion with economic exploiters under the aegis of exporting progress and civilization. It has been upstaged by constitutional lawyers who regard liberalism as a thin legalistic and formal ordering of individual-state relations. And it has been ridiculed by conservatives who disdain its “airy-fairy” pursuit of the good as well as the right. Imperfect political theories and ideologies—and there are no other kinds—can be dismissively reduced to their worst or unreal features and, when those are taken to consist of their chief characteristics, we are confronted with the very decontextualization that Geuss otherwise so commendably contests. But that is not the typical decontextualization from the concrete minutiae of time and space in which universalizers indulge. It is a decontextualization of a different order, severing the ligatures that hold together a complex and fragile cluster of ideas and attitudes, and in so doing downgrading the crucial internal balances and bonds that preserve liberalism’s humanist attractiveness. Consequently, Geuss’s laudable appeal to the legitimacy of alternative understandings—convincingly diverging from the recurrent insistence of philosophers on fixed truths and winning arguments—loses some of its traction.
Geuss regards his book as a particular ethnographic and autobiographical account, rather than a polemic against liberalism. But liberalism is strongly intertwined with a diverse raft of specific cultures, ethnographies and social practices, without which it becomes as abstract as Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.” In the last resort, liberalism is none other than a parochial ideology masquerading as a universal one. Its current variants have branched out to inhabit several ideational and institutional parishes and provinces, while claims to universalism are straitjackets hampering a sympathetic account of its worldly refinements. Geuss is inclined to impose on liberalism exactly what he resists in his own approach. He deflects the monolithic certainties subscribed to by aspects of religious belief—which he forsook—on to his portrayal of liberalism, now assuming an ersatz religious “persona” as a repository for incontrovertible convictions. The religiously-inclined young Rawls injected similar certitudes into his liberal philosophy. For Geuss, however, those liberal certitudes are to be rejected, not retained. But such certitudes are only shared by some sub-groups of the liberal family. That differentiation among liberalisms is not part of Geuss’s narrative. He assembles economic, philosophical, judicial, and political liberalisms, and all too frequently allots them one-liners. Thus, “standard liberal principles” are marshaled in the service of finance. Non-interference in the affairs of others (p. 23) is identified as a political imperative, even though Mill’s famous principle appears flawed by today’s probing standards. For in Mill’s hands non-interference in self-regarding areas relates only to the barring of physical force or moral coercion, while it fails to recognize that remonstrating or entreating—which Mill clearly permits in Chapter One of On Liberty (Mill, 1960)—are exercises of emotional power and hence forms of intervention. As for the “entirely sovereign individual” (p. 8) that Geuss credibly calls out as a fantasy, he insists on locating that atomistic illusion at the core of liberalism, when it is rather culled from a particular line of liberal thinkers insufficiently attuned to its continuous evolution, and by now typical of libertarians, not liberals. That would be disappointing for historically-minded students of liberalism who regard that older static view as a scholars’ fiction and the notion of standard liberal principles as fixating on the dry bones rather than the supple body. That could be repaired by cultivating a greater awareness of liberalism’s complexity and indeterminacy, an awareness of intricacy that in other matters Geuss impressively brings to his narrative.
What about the notion of rights in a liberal setting? Geuss is justified in maintaining that “our usual conception of ‘rights’” is closely associated with the notion of the sovereign individual subject (p. 164) but his penchant for tolerance does not stretch to encompass liberalism. Yes, of course the sovereign individual in the abstract may be a major building block of the liberal tradition. But that individual hasn’t reigned supreme for quite a while, being at best a residual category. Individual sovereignty underrates the constraints liberalism imposes on members of the polity in the name of order and morality when opting, as Locke had it, for liberty rather than license. Moreover, Geuss discounts the integration of group rights into recent liberal thought, and he underestimates the internal critique of extreme individualism rife among several liberal currents, as well as liberals’ recognition of the right of society to serve as an enabler of collective flourishing alongside the promotion of personal rights—no maverick quirk of marginal liberals but at the heart of the liberal welfare state. On the other hand, Geuss is warranted, albeit while doing so reluctantly, in using the term “rights” in everyday discourse, but there is no need to validate that merely in order to be more “understood to others,” as he argues. Ordinary language is a normal and legitimate repository of political thinking no less than, say, natural rights theory, and a right is above all a ranking device that signals the specific priority of whatever it is made to safeguard. Its role as a rhetorical intensifier is itself fundamental to the political dimensions of language.
The frequent references to free markets constitute another missed opportunity. Of their relation to liberalism Geuss plausibly writes that “people like me believe that the connection is not fortuitous.” But that does not imply that it is invariably central and that it is not mitigated by further elements of the liberal credo. In fact, Geuss goes on to recognize that others hold that this connection “is a misapprehension, based perhaps on a confusion of liberalism and neo-liberalism, and that only the latter is inherently aimed at justifying free markets and expanding their use as much as possible” (p. 24). Quite. Liberalism is ill-served by interpreting markets solely as a forum for personal gain, material benefit, and exploitation. Since the 19th century liberals such as Richard Cobden and John Bright have been animated instead by markets as enabling unfettered human exchange, the opening up of opportunities, and the dismantling of boundaries—thus furthering the liberal pursuit of mutual cultural enrichment and comprehension. If only Geuss had opted for that more shaded distinction—appreciative of liberalism’s multiple paths and branches in which crass commercialism is an outlier—he could have dissociated himself from the ideological rigidities that prevent the rounded evaluation that liberalism deserves. But his tantalizing sotto voce, while welcome, is left to fade out.
As Geuss himself admits, he plumps for a doctrine conceived as an ideal-type (p. 28), despite his strong reservations about abstraction. Ideal-types, however, are dysfunctional tools incapable of penetrating the knotty and messy intricacies of liberal discourse and it is a mystery why a scholar of Geuss’ caliber goes against the grain of his own intellectual temperament by occasionally giving way to such analytical crudities. That internal tension accompanies the book throughout. Thus, the catastrophe of Brexit has affected Geuss deeply. But that cultural and economic cut was administered to the liberal flesh, not inflicted by liberals. It was wielded by conservative and nationalist scalpels when those ideologies donned the mantle of what in recent international relations literature is preposterously referred to as the defense of the “liberal world order.” Brexit was indeed a critical failure of what Lionel Trilling would have called the liberal imagination. Nonetheless, to view Brexit as “the passing of liberalism” (p. xi) is both premature and myopic—just look at the waves of outrage still emanating from passionate liberal ranks in the UK. And underlying all that is a puzzle: why is Geuss bemoaning the demise of a worldview he has sharply decried and from which he has excluded himself?
There is another demanding issue at play here. It relates to the morphological features emblematic of the open-mindedness of most liberal persuasions. Those features generate an endemic internal plasticity, quite distinct from the specific liberal endorsement of pluralism in world views and lifestyles. That very conceptual indeterminacy is itself a defining characteristic of the liberal outlook and patently in tune with Geuss’s Weltanschauung. Indeed, rather than the staccato terseness of doctrine Geuss ascribes to liberals, their beliefs and ideological variants exhibit a constitutive unfixity that shape ever-changing patterns. The meanings of core liberal concepts are afforded legitimate interpretative leeway within ethical boundaries—that leeway is a key constituent of the liberal sensibility. Inventive and imaginative fluidity, alongside intellectual problem-solving and a commitment to improvement, are built into liberal ways of understanding and processing ideas and policies. They surround the substantive values that liberals hold dear, translating them into political visions that are far from wholly predictable, allowing the liberal tradition to evolve in unforeseen ways, adding as well as discarding components over time. What remain constant are a focus on notions of liberty—albeit shifting ones, pride in individual accomplishments, respect for a protected space for individuals to grow, and an ingrained sense of fairness, channeled through the persistent drive to address mutating cultural and political environments. True, liberalism possesses its own red lines and no-go areas that cannot be traversed—all of them in the domain of the preservation of life and dignity—but swirling around them is a mutually interdependent yet undulating field of experiments in enhanced living, subject to continual critical re-evaluation and recontextualization.
Tellingly, Mill’s intermittent and complicated discussion of the “harm principle” allows in certain cases for the intervention by others in “sovereign” decisions undertaken by individuals: There is no hard and fast line, nor a simple principle. Hobhouse and his colleague J.A. Hobson—two of the most important liberal voices of the 20th century—balanced individual liberty with social interdependence. In his chapter, “The Heart of Liberalism” Hobhouse wrote: “Mutual aid is not less important than mutual forbearance, the theory of collective action no less fundamental than the theory of personal freedom” (Hobhouse, p. 67). Hobson took this even further, referring specifically to sovereignty. Liberalism, he argued in 1909, was now formally committed to combining individual opportunities for self-development with “a just apprehension of the social, viz., the insistence that these claims or rights of self-development be adjusted to the sovereignty of social welfare” (Hobson, 1909)—that is, to a collective benefit, not to a self-governing individual. For that reason it is incumbent on the assiduous scholar of liberalism not to rule out from the liberal purview those forms of communitarian anarchism (not communist anarchism, as Geuss has it (p. 121)) that laud reciprocity and social cooperation. Once again, the morphological fluidity of boundaries—within ideologies as well as between them—deserves to be recognized and addressed.
Part of the problem lies in Geuss’s rather sniffy attitude to ideology in general, a continental Ideologiekritik-inspired approach that surfaced in some of his previous writings. That view denigrates ideology as distorted by power, specifically by the power of self-serving interests. For Geuss that clearly corrodes liberalism as well. In acknowledging the significant disciplinary distinction between politics and ethics, Geuss favors their separation. This is entirely defensible, but he does that for the wrong reasons: not—as a student of political thinking would conclude—because the questions the two disciplines ask of their respective domains are legitimately different, but because he sees the liberal tradition as contaminated by ideology’s distasteful features, producing a harsh and doctrinaire filtering of the social world. Another part of the problem, ironically, emanates from Geuss’s disengagement from his earlier Catholicism. As already noted, he sees its dogmas mirrored in liberalism’s own canons. That implicit parallelism prevents him from accepting, conversely, that liberalism has an ethos as well as a doctrine. Geuss cites Foucault approvingly in contending that an ethos “designates a set of dispositions and habits of mind and action which are centered around investigating the world around us, reflecting on experience, and questioning the beliefs people hold and the claims they make . . ., and, if necessary, criticizing them” (pp. 169–170). It is difficult to conjure up a more apt characterization of the spirit of liberalism itself, as distinct from some of liberalism’s rudimentary institutional programs!
There is much to relish in this engrossing book. Geuss offers valuable critical insights about some of the standout portrayals by liberals of their own beliefs and principles. He follows Robert Paul Wolff in querying Rawls’s formula that accepts inequalities as long as they benefit the worst off (pp. 117–118), exposing it as a de facto affirmation of an unequal society rather than a genuine redistribution of life-chances. He is also quite right in arguing that liberal “claims to neutrality were . . . often just excuses for making a choice. . . and so hiding it from scrutiny” (p. 37). After all, neutrality between different opinions and tenets is not itself a neutral value, but a particular preference generated by certain strands of liberal thinking. There is, he properly asserts, no “point of neutrality on which we can all agree” (p. 167), which rather puts paid to Rawls’s glorification of the US Supreme Court as a supra-political exemplar of public reason (Rawls, 1996). Such concealed elements are common to all political theories and ideologies. As often as not they are not deliberately obscured but unconscious or unnoticed. Take for example the anarchist disdain of power, when—to the contrary—aggressive direct action is the modus operandi of so many anarchists, and not just a means to power’s elimination.
Geuss’s introspective style of discourse is deeply appealing. Here is a scholar brimming with curiosity and devoid of arrogance, amidst a life journey searching for answers and finding them wanting, yet all the while hanging on to insights that may be untangled, retrieved, even reassembled, from discarded and obscuring beliefs. His intellectual Odyssey, steeped not only in philosophy but in classics and poetry and imbued with a love of language, navigates, sometimes precariously, between often incongruous incarnations of Scylla and Charybdis. Heidegger, Adorno, Marcuse, Celan, Nietzsche, Picasso, to name but a few, exercise negative or positive polarity on Geuss’ profoundly Europeanized mind. Those rich pickings have seeped into Geuss’s American (and later British) backdrops and have fashioned a fertile and original kaleidoscope, uniquely distinct among contemporary political theorists. If Geuss is difficult to classify, if his scholarly concerns cannot be filed in boxed schools of thought, if his modesty exudes a refreshing charm, that is entirely to his merit and to the benefit of his readers.
