02 May 2019

Cass Sunstein on "Ism-ism"

More fully: Ismism, Or Has Liberalism Ruined Everything? (only 11 pages, download here).

Sunstein's piece was occasioned by the recent remarks of Yoram Hazony (see my thoughts on Hazony's recent book, The Virtue of Nationalism, here) at Harvard Law School. But Sunstein's essay has a much wider aim than Hazony. He observes that of late a variety of folks have identified "liberalism" with a whole host of contemporary pathologies:
There has been considerable recent discussion of the social effects of “liberalism,” which are said to include (among other things) a growth in out-of-wedlock childbirth, repudiation of traditions (religious and otherwise), a rise in populism, increased reliance on technocracy, inequality, environmental degradation, sexual promiscuity, deterioration of civic associations, a diminution of civic virtue, political correctness on university campuses, and a general sense of alienation.
Sunstein notes some issues with claims of this sort. First, rarely do the folks making them pause to define carefully the term "liberalism". And then, when they proffer a definition, it is often one that many self-described liberals would reject. And for a simple reason:
Within the universe of "isms," liberalism includes such a wide range of positions. John Locke thought differently from Adam Smith, and John Rawls fundamentally disagreed with John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant, Benjamin Constant, Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Raz, Milton Friedman, Ronald Dworkin, and Jeremy Waldron are not easy to put in the same category.
While he does not deny that there might be such a set of ideas as "liberalism", Sunstein concludes that the multitude of forms of liberalism in most cases make its ascription an act of interpretation, not one of identification.

But there's more. Simply identifying a thinker or policy or program as "liberal" is rarely the purpose of its ascription. Instead, liberalism often is presented as the cause of something bad: "These are often styled as empirical claims, with the apparent or implicit suggestion that 'liberalism' is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for an assortment of what are taken to be negative outcomes or trends." In other words, liberalism has agentic powers.

Yet, merely asserting the causal power of liberalism on the part of its critics doesn't fully describe the nub of Sunstein's essay. Instead,
The problem is that liberalism is not a person or an agent. It is a constellation of ideas. A causal explanation of negative outcomes or trends must depend on the identification and investigation of competing hypothesis and an encounter with the evidence. In the abstract, we cannot rule out the possibility that in some sense, liberalism is responsible for one or another trend, just as we cannot rule out the possibility that the real culprit is misogyny, racism, feminism, capitalism, atheism, rock music, political correctness, television, economic growth, modern birth control, the iPhone, Facebook, or the Internet. Even so, the idea that “liberalism” is responsible for lower marriage rates, the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, the stalling of Brexit, same-sex marriage, high rates of economic growth, low rates of economic growth, or speech codes on university campuses is puzzling and even reckless.
In short, it seems Sunstein agrees with what I've written here, here, and here in the context of "worldview thinking." Without a genuine and recognizable definition of liberalism, and a careful historical account of how we got from there and then to here and now, the assertion of a contemporary malady to liberalism may be little more than virtue-signalling to a particular audience.

Yet, just as I've challenged the easy dismissals of liberalism, those that fail to account for the many goods liberalism (by any definition) has delivered, I think Sunstein has cherry-picked from among liberalism's naysayers. There are, in other words, thoughtful writers who have done what Sunstein says hasn't been done. Consider, for example, de Tocqueville from the nineteenth century and more contemporary folks like Charles Taylor (here), George Marsden (here), Alasdair MacIntyre (here), Roger Scruton (here), and Oliver O'Donovan (various posts).

There are trenchant, historically detailed accounts of the genealogies of contemporary pathologies that should persuade a thoughtful reader that yes, liberalism of whatever flavor bears a measure of responsibility. Don't be taken by Sunstein's hand waving. The constellation of ideas associated with liberalism--not alone but in significant part-- have grown some bad fruit.

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