The Liberalism of Fear

My review of a new collection of essays on politics and political philosophy by the late Bernard Williams will appear in the next issue of The Philosophers' Magazine:

Bernard Williams was working on a book about politics when he died in June 2003. In the Beginning Was the Deed gathers together several of the essays which Williams had intended to turn into a single, book-length argument. Such is his consistency of vision here that this collection gives us a very clear idea of what that book might have looked like had Williams been able to finish it before his death.

In the Beginning Was the Deed takes its title from a line from Goethe’s Faust, quoted by Wittgenstein in On Certainty. Wittgenstein mentions Goethe in a discussion of the status of certain of our fundamental beliefs – for example, the belief that material objects exist. He termed such beliefs “propositions that stand fast” and, in his view, it makes no sense to try to call them into question, as the epistemological sceptic might. This is because they don’t serve as “foundations” in the way that, in other contexts, hypotheses do. Hypotheses are, by definition, revisable; if they turn out to be false, they can be replaced. However, basic beliefs are not susceptible to revision, says Wittgenstein; our commitment to them is “animal” and they are an essential feature of the ways in which we act and behave.

But what does all this have to do with politics? Williams observes that Wittgenstein’s “primacy of practice” thesis, as it is sometimes described, is often taken up by “communitarian” critics of liberal political philosophy who are sceptical of the attempt to derive rules of justice or human rights from fundamental moral principles. Now, he shares some of that scepticism towards theory-building in political philosophy, and endorses Wittgenstein’s anti-foundationalist account of beliefs about material objects. Yet Williams is nevertheless uneasy about the way in which the insight that fundamental beliefs cannot be justified except by reference to practice is applied to politics. Often, he says, the results of that application are “distinctly conservative”. We must remember that “practice is not just the practice of practice, so to speak, but also the practice of criticism.” One of the things “we do”, in other words, is sometimes criticize our own society. But it’s not clear, if we emphasise, as many communitarians do, the claims of local and traditional ways of going on, that there is any point of leverage in such an account for social criticism.

Much of In the Beginning Was the Deed is concerned, therefore, with clarifying what Williams thinks is the correct political moral to draw from Goethe’s line and Wittgenstein’s reflections on it. And what emerges is not a kind of “communitarian relativism”, but something closer to what the political philosopher Judith Shklar called the “liberalism of fear”.

On Williams’ conception of it, the liberalism of fear operates with the “only certainly universal materials of politics: power, powerlessness, fear [and] cruelty”. And it recognises a handful of basic human rights that stand against such things. What’s interesting about these fundamental rights, in Williams’ view, is that they don’t seem to require any elaborate philosophical articulation. They are self-evident in the way that what used to be called “natural rights” were said by their defenders to be self-evident. And that’s important if claims on behalf of human rights are to avoid the criticism that they merely reflect the preferences of a “liberal culture”.

That is a familiar objection, and it is one to which certain ways of trying to legitimate liberal values seem peculiarly vulnerable.Williams considers the work of John Rawls and others, in which an attempt is made to derive human rights from moral principles. He notes that such “constructivist” derivations of human rights appear to rest on a particular conception of the person as a bearer of rights; one which places considerable emphasis on the value of autonomy.

Now, an obvious problem with tying human rights so closely to an idea of autonomy is that lacking the ability to be an autonomous agent seems to deprive of you of the protections those rights are meant to afford. Williams acknowledges a possible reply to this which would say that the relevant conception of a person is normative and thus that the theory requires merely that people be treated as if they were autonomous when engaing in moral discourse. But this still leaves unanswered a deeper question concerning an assumption which Williams thinks many liberals make, including Rawls: that the “practice of morality” conceived along liberal lines (and entailing the controversial notion of the autonomous person) is the only alternative to overt coercion. And if that’s right, then it follows that ethical understandings other than the autonomy-based one must, almost by definition, involve an indifference to the giving and taking of reasons.

Such a view, Williams thinks, is not only “wildly ambitious”, it is also “imperialistic”. What leads liberals to think that the autonomy-based account is, as it were, the only game in town is the lack of a properly developed historical sense. That the liberal way of legitimating fundamental rights seems more likely to gain general acceptance than any other is a historical fact and not the consequence of any intrinsic feature of the theory. Consequently, it is a central tenet of the liberalism of fear that liberals must accept that their doctrine, like any other, takes as its starting point the “kinds of life among which it finds itself”. They must accept, in other words, that “in the beginning was the deed”.

Williams applies this general point to in a very interesting way to the problem of toleration; that is, to the problem of finding principles that will allow different moral outlooks to co-exist in a framework of mutual respect. He distinguishes two models of toleration: a “moral” model, which he associates with Rawls, and a “political” one, which he defends.

The moral model appeals to the value of autonomy, with the risk, as Rawls put it, that it will sometimes appear to be little more than a “sectarian doctrine”. On the political model, by contrast, the desirability of toleration flows not from the controversial good of autonomy, but from the idea that state power ought not to be used to compel people to choose one way of life rather than another. If, Williams argues, we take a view about the restriction of state power in such circumstances, then “toleration as a practice will ... follow”.

This reflects a more fundamental distinction between what Williams calls “political moralism”, which he eschews, and “political realism”, to which he aspires. His “realism” entails a conception of political authority that owes a good deal to Hobbes. On this view, anyone claiming authority over a group must meet the “Basic Legitimation Demand” by offering a solution to the “first” question of politics: the securing of order and the conditions of cooperation. And it is quite possible that a government could satisfy this demand without being liberal. That it sometimes seems to us as if only a liberal government could conceivably be legitimate is, once again, a matter of history, having to do with certain distinctive features of the modern world.

Williams used to insist on paying his friend Isaiah Berlin the compliment of not taking him at his word when he protested that he’d given up  philosophy in favour of the history of ideas. But, like Berlin, he took an excessively modest view of his own contribution to political philosophy, once remarking that it consisted largely in “making [himself] a nuisance to all parties”. This splendid book is a reminder that he did a great deal more than that.