Abstract
Liberalism is in perennial need of rescuing from its detractors, underminers and mockers. Far from being the “winning ideology”—the broad family of conservatisms may have a stronger case for that accolade—its adherents have time and again had to renew their intellectual and political efforts to ensure its survival, let alone its prospering. Its most artful rivals are those who masquerade under its name—misappropriators such as neo-liberals and libertarians and, more recently, “muscular liberals”—but it is also beset by ostensible boundary problems with its neighbours on the ideological map, from anarchists to socialists to Whiggish or “wet” conservatives. Alan Ryan’s collection of essays, written over forty years, is a brilliant exposition and defence of the optimal range of the multifarious liberal tradition. The book’s strength is threefold. First, it lies in Ryan’s stubborn but beautifully crafted insistence on retrieving liberalism as a powerful humanist creed whose rivulets course through a multitude of thinkers and perspectives. Second, he rightly portrays liberalism as a complex and imbricated set of ideas that defy the binary reductions of Marxists, post-structuralists or philosophical communitarians, to name but a few hostile or sceptical simplifiers. Third, it centres on the extraordinary metamorphosis of liberalism as a field of beliefs that weds a notion of individual development of the kind advocated by Mill with a pronounced sociability streak to which we owe the advanced welfare state. It is no surprise, then, that the anti-liberal neo-liberals are at the forefront of the latter’s dismantling.
Ryan is an unashamed intellectual writing for, and about, intellectuals (and why not?). His heroes are Locke, Mill, and Dewey and on a slightly lesser level Hobbes and Rawls. Tocqueville, Rousseau, Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell and Isaiah Berlin get a qualified look-in. He is keen to discover positive or extenuating factors in the thinking of each and every one of the political philosophers he addresses. In true liberal fashion, consequently, Ryan’s writing radiates a fundamental empathy towards complex political theories combined with an ability to pare them down to their elemental problematics. Even of Hobbes—whose introduction by Ryan into a book on liberalism exudes a whiff of philosophical licence—he insists that “many things about his political philosophy would sustain a form of liberalism” (182) and he cites Hobbes’s discussion of resistance to the sovereign as opening up a chink of succour for dissenters and revolutionaries. That may be so, but only if liberalism is detached from its own more mature instances, and if we do not insist on a threshold of liberal components, in default of which a theory does not pass muster for membership of the liberal family. But would that super-liberal, Mill, have considered Hobbes to be a kindred spirit even at the margins?
It is, indeed, when turning to Mill that Ryan’s mastery of that standard-bearer of liberalism is compelling. Chapter 15, “Mill in a Liberal Landscape,” could serve as an enlightening introduction for those who know little about Mill, but it is concurrently the distillation of intensive contemplation of Mill’s ideas that advanced scholars can well appreciate. Mill’s benign paternalism is singled out, a paternalism that Mill himself of course identifies in On Liberty as a good reason for remonstrating with or entreating individuals. His espousal of a developmental individuality is crisply contrasted with Rawls’s contractual minimalism. And Mill’s emphasis on sociability alongside individuality, although hardly as prominent as socialists would have it, puts paid to the artificial distinction between liberals and communitarians introduced by American political philosophers in the 1980s. One aspect of that is teased out in Ryan’s telling observation in another chapter: “Unlike Rawls and Dworkin, the communitarian liberal insists that liberalism needs a community of liberals to flourish” (103). But the general feature of liberalism that Ryan identifies in his more detailed discussion of “The Liberal Community” was one amplified by the British new liberals and by John Dewey a generation or two after Mill. Human beings were mutually interdependent, and their individuality thrived on that underpinning. Anyone au fait with European liberalisms and their history—and Ryan is certainly one of those—knows better than to perpetuate liberalism as one arm of an exaggerated dichotomy. In another essay on Mill, Ryan correctly attempts to sink a particularly resilient canard, namely that liberals are, or can be, neutral about individual conceptions of the good (262). That point could do with further elaboration. Not only do liberals promote very clear conceptions of the good and entertain red ideological lines they refuse to cross, but the very concept of neutrality is itself part of an ideological arsenal that is peculiar only to some liberals. Yet at the same time Ryan is absolutely right to deny that Mill’s liberalism was perfectionist, allowing as it did multiple individual paths of development (296).
There is one area of Mill critique where Ryan has missed an opportunity. In his discussion of harm, it is simply over-rationalizing to maintain that “views we dislike are far from harming us” (288). Dislike is anyhow too moderate a term for our (justified or unjustified) reaction to some views, but Mill was the product of a pre-psychoanalytical age. We would now recognize that emotional or psychological harm can be dehumanizing no less than physical coercion—an argument that libertarians overlook to this very day—and Mill’s unremitting support of the freedom of speech cause can no longer entirely do the work he assumed it would do.
Ryan’s insights into the array of thinkers that he regards as having contributed to liberalism are legion. He is particularly good at exposing and rephrasing philosophical truths, or possibly “truths,” in an arresting manner in reaching to the heart of an argument: Popper as a classical liberal, Tocqueville as a theorist of the “soft totalitarianism” of an isolating crowd, Dewey as a liberal socialist, not just a “pragmatist.” But Ryan’s account of liberalism is not only that of its most prominent articulators but about the concepts that form its building blocks. Tolerance, the inviolability of the individual conscience, and property as a rational safeguard of personal sovereignty and autonomy are marshalled in liberalism’s defence, but in a measured way. Ryan persuasively takes issue with Berlin’s “Two concepts of liberty”—which of course should be “conceptions”—and identifies a third, as did many liberals a century ago. Positive liberty is not only self-mastery with its concomitant emergence of a monistic “real self” but the enabling and enlargement of choice.
Of course, the exact nature of liberalism is not only contested; it is indeterminate. Ryan is wedded to counting “the blessings of a literary high culture” (88), as was Mill, in matters philosophical and political as well. His guiding advice is to “think of the history of ideas as an ideal conversation across the centuries in which we aim to be good listeners as well as good questioners” (280). The kind of liberalism that Ryan advances through his variegated writings possesses the aura of intellectual and ethical allure. The cost of that approach, though, is that the broader traditions of liberalism are excluded. The view of liberalism that emerges from these pages is an elitist one, sidestepping the “less ideal” popular, journalistic and party-political expressions of that ideology, all of which are crucial participants in the “making of modern liberalism.” Without those additional narratives concerning the vernacular, the story of liberalism must remain incomplete and its context depleted. Notably, Berlin himself, when surveying the main developments in political thinking at mid-twentieth century, ignored the chief achievement of liberalism in that century: the advanced welfare state whose ultimate anchoring in legislation had occurred at that very historical moment. But that is not Ryan’s metier, for he inhabits the highly respectable, and self-respecting, world of political philosophy and he may as well have been voicing his own views when he notes that “Mill passionately wished his countrymen to acknowledge some form of intellectual, moral, and spiritual authority, one they could acknowledge freely and intelligently” (307).
The one unpleasant surprise, from a liberal standpoint, is Ryan’s qualified defence of the death penalty. It flies against the principled belief of many liberals that here is a red line liberals ought never to cross. Given as a lecture in an American context—the only Western nation still to kill convicts—a more powerful message would have been in order.
Ryan’s style is old-fashionedly Oxonian. That is not a criticism, for it entails the careful mulling over problems and their discursive assessment from a number of different angles, often with painstaking care and resembling a conversation with oneself or with a silent interlocutor. It does, however, demand patience and it does not always follow the rules—if that is what they are—of succinctness. But in so doing Ryan is impressively erudite and displays enormous responsibility towards the thinkers he confronts, challenges or praises. This may not be liberalism at its most typical, but it is liberalism at its best.