Table Of ContentLIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Liberalism and Its
Discontents
Patrick Neal
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Vermont, Burlington
© Patrick Neal 1997
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997
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1098765 4 3 2 I
06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97
For Granny, Mom and Diane
Three Extraordinary Women
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Part I Neutrality and the Good in Liberal Theory
2 Introduction 3
2 Liberalism and Neutrality 15
3 A Liberal Theory of the Good? 34
Part II Rawls and Political Liberalism
4 In the Shadow of the General Will: Rawls, Kant and Rousseau
on the Problem of Political Right 51
5 Justice as Fairness: Political or Metaphysical? 71
6 Does He Mean What He Says? (Mis)Understanding Rawls'
Practical Tum 98
Part ill Alternative Liberalisms
7 Perfectionism With a Liberal Face? Nervous Liberals and
Raz's Political Theory 135
8 Dworkin on the Foundations of Liberal Equality 162
9 Vulgar Liberalism 185
Index 206
Acknowledgments
With good luck, there will be other books to write, but I'm not taking any
chances. So I shall not pass up this opportunity to publicly acknowledge and
express my thanks to the friends, teachers, colleagues and students who have
helped in various ways to teach me how to think and write about the matters
discussed herein. Robert DiClerico and William S. Haymond, at West
Virginia University, made me love the study of ideas. Ed Andrew, Christian
Bay, Asher Horowitz, Ron Replogle, Joe Fletcher and Brad Adams at the
University of Toronto, helped me learn how to study them. David Paris and
Ted Eismeier, at Hamilton College, taught me the appropriate way to treat
ideas, by helping me learn the art of teaching. Alan Wertheimer and Bob
Pepperman Taylor, my friends and colleagues in political theory at the
University of Vermont for the past eight years, have been not only intellec
tual instructors but also, and perhaps more vitally, sources of constant
support and encouragement. I also wish to acknowledge the help and support
of Candace Smith, Fritz Gaenslen, Tom Rice, John Burke, Richard Alway
and Charley Bockway. I am grateful as well to the students I have known
in a decade of teaching; they have been my companions in thinking through
the ideas and issues raised in this book, and have been more than liberal in
their willingness to bear my inadequacies.
The essays comprising this book were written over nearly a decade, a time
during which I quite literally grew up, at least to the degree I am likely to.
I have no way to fully express my gratitude to my wife Diane and my
children Brendan, Derek and Laura, my teachers in life's ways and wonders.
I am grateful to the following journals for their permission to reprint the essays
which appear here. My thanks to Polity, for chapters 2 and 6; Canadian Journal
of Philosophy and the University of Calgary Press for Chapter 3; Review of
Politics for Chapter 4; Political Theory and Sage Publications for Chapters
5 and 9; Social Theory and Practice for Chapter 7, and Legal Theory for
Chapter 8. I am also grateful to the Graduate College of the University of
Vermont for financial support which aided in the preparation of this material.
"Liberalism and Neutrality," Polity, vol. 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1985), pp. 664-84.
"A Liberal Theory of the Good?," Canadian Journal ofP hilosophy, vol. 17,
no. 3 (September, 1987), pp. 567-82.
"In the Shadow of the General Will: Rawls, Kant and Rousseau on the
Problem of Political Right," Review of Politics, vol. 49, no. 3 (Summer,
1987), pp. 389-409.
Vlll
Acknowledgments IX
"Justice as Fairness: Political or Metaphysical?," Political Theory, vol. 18,
no. 1 (February, 1990), pp. 24-50.
"Does He Mean What He Says? (Mis)Understanding Rawls' Practical Turn,"
Polity, vol. 27, no. 1 (Fall, 1994), pp. 77-112.
"Perfectionism with a Liberal Face? Nervous Liberals and Raz's Political
Theory," Social Theory and Practice, vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring, 1994),
pp. 25-58.
"Dworkin on the Foundations of Liberal Equality," Legal Theory, vol. I, no.
2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 205-26.
"Vulgar Liberalism," Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 4 (November, 1993),
pp. 665-90.
Part I
Neutrality and the Good
in Liberal Theory
1 Introduction
Nearly half a century ago, Lionel Trilling wrote, "It has for some time
seemed to me that a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism
might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of
general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal
ideas and assumptions of the present time."1 This book is an attempt to enact
a version of Trilling's program. Many of the reigning ideas of liberal political
theory are challenged and criticized, though for the most part the spirit
animating these criticisms is itself liberal.
Trilling referred to the "primal imagination" of liberalism as comprised
of "an essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies
the awareness of complexity and difficulty." With a prescience which stands
out in retrospect, he remarked with some foreboding upon the inevitable
discrepancy between this "essence" and its "particular manifestations,"
noting especially the "impulse to organization" which has come to characterize
the manifestation of liberalism as the orthodoxy of rule in the modern
bureaucratic state. This impulse, he said, "did not suit well" with the "lively
sense of contingency and possibility, and of those exceptions to the rule which
may be the beginning of the end of the rule" he took to bespeak the essence
of the liberal spirit.
Trilling was still enough of a modernist to say "did not suit well" rather
than "betrays," and the difference between the verbs marks the difference
between a still hopeful, if chastened, liberalism and a more cynical rejection
of it, which has come to be known under the label of post-modernism. I am
not sure which perspective is the more defensible, though I believe the issue
between them is of vital significance to us. Trying to think clearly about the
question of, as it were, whether the letter betrays the spirit, has led me to
think about things other than liberalism, and these other things now seem to
me to cast a shadow on the place ofliberal ideas within a more comprehensive
order of reflection. But this perspective and concern is largely absent, at least
consciously, from the chapters which follow. Herein, I set out to think
critically about the reasons offered by leading liberal thinkers in support of
the political morality they affirm, and would have us affirm. When I began
to think and write about these matters I had a somewhat inchoate notion that
their "completion" would be marked by some sort of decision or judgment,
one which would answer with finality the question "Liberalism-Yes or No?''
This turns out not to be so, though I hope that a reader moved by the desire
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