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Agonistic Liberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

John Gray
John Gray
Affiliation:
Politics, Jesus College, Oxford University
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Extract

In all of its varieties, traditional liberalism is a universalist political theory. Its content is a set of principles which prescribe the best regime, the ideally best institutions, for all mankind. It may be acknowledged — as it is, by a proto-liberal such as Spinoza — that the best regime can be attained only rarely, and cannot be expected to endure for long; and that the forms its central institutions will assume in different historical and cultural milieux may vary significantly. It will then be accepted that the liberal regime's role in political thought is as a regulative ideal, which political practice can hope only to approximate, subject to all the vagaries and exigencies of circumstance. Nonetheless, the content of traditional liberalism is a system of principles which function as universal norms for the critical appraisal of human institutions. In this regard, traditional liberalism — the liberalism of Locke and Kant, for example — represents a continuation of classical political rationalism, as it is found in Aristotle and Aquinas, where it also issues in principles having the attribute of universality, in that they apply ideally to all human beings.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 111 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1995

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References

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2 There have, of course, been positivist exponents of the Enlightenment project who were in no sense liberals; it was against the greatest of these that John Stuart Mill directed his brilliant and unjustly neglected polemic August Comte and Positivism. I ignore these positivist followers of the Enlightenment project because their form of thought is atavistic and politically irrelevant. For the same reason, I pass over Marxist versions of the Enlightenment project.

3 See my Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), ch. 10, pp. 231–33Google Scholar. Rawls summarizes his later views in his book Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

4 I refer, of course, to the thought of Michael Oakeshott. For a provisional assessment of Oakeshott's thought, in which its debts to a formalist and legalist tradition of liberalism are judged to be its principal weaknesses, see my Post-Liberalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), ch. 4.Google Scholar

5 See my essay “Berlin's Agonistic Liberalism,” in my Post-Liberalism, ch. 6; and my Berlin (London: Fontana Modern Master, Harper Collins, 1995), ch. 6.Google Scholar

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17 The liberalism of Joseph Raz is akin to agonistic liberalism in having this communitarian dimension. On this, see my Berlin, ch. 4.

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