Saving Liberalism

What role for Catholic Social Teaching?

Just recently, I had the pleasure of reading Francis Fukuyama’s new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents. I should note that I first became aware of this book when it was reviewed alongside my own book, Cathonomics, by the Irish Times.

In his book, Fukuyama makes the case for classical liberalism against assaults from both right and left. In this short essay, I want to address some of these arguments, and hopefully map out a route forward with the help of Catholic social teaching.

First things first. We need to define what we mean by liberalism. Fukuyama defines it as “the doctrine that first emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century that argued for the limitation of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction.” Liberalism is fundamentally predicated on freedom, law, and equal individual rights.

Liberalism comes with great strengths. It is pragmatic, in these sense that it allows people with different worldviews to live together in peace - it is no accident that it emerged on the scene after the ruinous wars of religion in Europe. It also offers a moral grounding, in the sense that it respects the dignity and conscience of each person - especially when it comes to the ability to make free choices.

But these strengths come with a flip side. The great weakness of liberalism is that it does not offer any conception of the good life. It says simply that all people are free to pursue their own ends, as long as those ends do not conflict with the rights of others. This pursuit of one’s own conception of the good, the placing of individual rights over the good itself, spans the libertarianism of the right to the Rawlsian egalitarianism of the left. It is all-pervasive. But as Fukuyama notes, it creates only a thin sense of community. It is shallow. Even worse, in the reasoning of Brad Gregory, it replaces the good society with the “goods society” - in the absence of any higher goods, peoples’ ends become the mere consumerist satisfaction of material preferences.

This points to a darker side of liberalism. Here, I am leaning on the work of David Wootton, who criticizes what he calls the Enlightenment paradigm - the paradigm associated with liberal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith. In Wootton’s telling, this paradigm holds that human beings have insatiable appetites for power, pleasure, and profit. These appetites are “without limit and without end.”

As I document in Cathonomics, there were three distinct turns made under this paradigm. First, the turn toward the autonomous individual away from notions of the common good. Second, the turn from balance and moderation to mastery and maximization. Third, the turning of what were traditionally vices into virtues in the sense that they would lead to good social and economic outcomes.

Thus, Thomas Hobbes argued that because of insatiable desires, people are inclined toward a war of all against all - and this can only be tempered by ceding sovereignty to an all-powerful state. John Locke argued that private property rights were central, and the purpose of government was to protect these rights - hence the need once again for a social contract. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, denied the existence of a common good, and emphasized instead the greatest happiness of the greatest number. John Stuart Mill argued that utilitarianism worked best in a liberal society. David Hume argued that the right constitution could harness self-interest toward good ends. Adam Smith made the same argument for economics, with his famous invisible hand.

I would argue that when liberalism goes wrong, it is because this darker side tends to dominate. It is easy to see how liberalism can degenerate into libertarianism and neoliberalism. Libertarianism is predicated on the idea of self-ownership and insists on absolute property rights - with the role of the state limited to the protection of these rights. Neoliberalism comes out of a different tradition - that of neoclassical economics, and by extension, utilitarianism. It says that the highest goal is economic efficiency and efficiency is best attained by unleashing the productive power of the private sector through self-interest and market competition. Just like libertarianism, it seeks to curtail the role of the state.

I have argued in Cathonomics and in Commonweal that neoliberalism has failed dramatically, even on its own terms. One the past five decades, it has failed to deliver its much-touted goal of high productivity and long-term growth. Instead, it has left in its wake massive inequality, an environmental crisis, and a hollowing out of the working class. This is leading to massive social and political dysfunctions - and even contributing to the backlash against liberalism itself.

But as Fukuyama ably demonstrates, liberalism has also degenerated on the left - once again by excess deference to individual autonomy and unlimited desires. This sometimes centers on the zeal for individual self-actualization, divorced from any conception of the common good. In the words of Tony Judt, it often seeks the “unrestrained freedom to express autonomous desires and have them respected.” It can also find form in identity politics - the shift away from issues of class and material status to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. In more extreme versions, this rejection of liberalism strips rationality of all meaning, denies the existence of universal values and universal rights, and sees everything as subjective.

Is there a way out of this conundrum? Some say yes, and propose radical solutions. These are the so-called post-liberals who think that liberalism itself needs to be jettisoned. I’m referring here to people like Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule. These thinkers want to re-orient society around a more objective account of the good, a higher good, sometimes equated with the Catholic tradition. But I think this is a blind alley. For a start, there is no case within modern Catholicism for this kind of “integralism” - the Catholic Church has long made its peace with liberalism (more on this below). More fundamentally, when rejecting liberalism, these thinkers are quite shy about elaborating which rights of which people should be curtailed. And needless to say, they are relying on liberal procedural protections to make their very arguments against liberalism!

My view is that the best of liberalism - its emphasis on dignity and rights - is worth preserving. Here, I think it is instructive to look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Consider the framing of Article 1 of the Declaration:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Now strictly speaking, this is not a liberal document. The Declaration reflects a cross-cultural agreement on what rights might look like in the modern world. But it is certainly compatible with liberalism at its best - with an emphasis on dignity, rights, reason, and conscience.

As Mary Ann Glendon has demonstrated, there was also a strong Catholic influence on the Declaration. This reflects the intertwined notions of human dignity and the common good (note the “acting in a spirit of brotherhood” phrasing).

A key point about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is that it elevates not only civil and political rights, but also social and economic rights. Here are the rights enumerated in Article 25:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.”

Liberalism has certainly taken economic rights seriously. As Glendon demonstrates, these “second-generation” rights that went into the Declaration often came from European and Latin American countries, with Christian Democratic and dignitarian traditions. But economic rights were once important in the United States too - Franklin Roosevelt elevated “freedom from want” as one of his famous four freedoms and proposed a second Bill of Rights to codify economic rights. Even so, the Anglo-American tradition - wedded to its Lockean vision - never really played up economic rights to any significant extent.

How does this fit into Catholic social teaching? There are clear overlaps with the view of rights proposed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Catholic Church was a bit late to the game when it came to human rights. This is because in the nineteenth century, liberalism had a strong anti-Catholic - and especially anti-clerical - hue. So the Church allied with the forces of reaction, condemning the basic rights associated with liberalism - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion.

All of this changed with the pontificate of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. In his 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII enumerated a list of rights that overlapped to a substantial degree with those of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here is how he sets it up:

“Any well-regulated and productive association of men in society demands the acceptance of one fundamental principle: that each individual man is truly a person. His is a nature, that is, endowed with intelligence and free will. As such he has rights and duties, which together flow as a direct consequence from his nature. These rights and duties are universal and inviolable, and therefore altogether inalienable.”

This is quite similar to the opening of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. It too is based on human dignity and conscience. Note too the emphasis on duties - in Catholic social teaching, we have duties as well as rights, and indeed, every legitimate right is attached to a corresponding duty.

Interestingly, the very first rights that Pope John XXIII lists are not political rights. They are, rather, economic rights. This flips the Anglo-American order on its head. These are the first rights listed:

“Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of illhealth; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age; enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood.”

So directly after the foundational right to life comes economic rights. This is not too surprising. The Catholic tradition has always emphasized attending to the common good and meeting the needs of all through the principle of the universal destination of goods (the notion that the goods of creation are destined for all people). Hence economic rights are in some sense a better fit with Catholicism than political rights.

Yet in a pretty profound break with prior teaching, Pacem in Terris also affirms political rights:

“[Man] has a right to freedom in investigating the truth, and—within the limits of the moral order and the common good—to freedom of speech and publication, and to freedom to pursue whatever profession he may choose.”

This was drawn out further in the conciliar document, Gaudium et Spes, promulgated in 1965:

“The present keener sense of human dignity has given rise in many parts of the world to attempts to bring about a politico-juridical order which will give better protection to the rights of the person in public life. These include the right freely to meet and form associations, the right to express one's own opinion and to profess one's religion both publicly and privately. The protection of the rights of a person is indeed a necessary condition so that citizens, individually or collectively, can take an active part in the life and government of the state.”

This is quite remarkable, given what the Church was saying a century earlier.

Why have I gone into a detour about the Catholic conception of human rights? Because I think it can offer some guidance on how the best of liberalism can be preserved, while tamping down on its darker impulses.

Central here is the emphasis on economic rights. This can help prevent the degeneration of liberalism into libertarianism or neoliberalism. It can also help undo some of the damage wrought by these ideologies. And by protecting people from the vagaries of the market economy, and giving people the right to share in economic development, an emphasis on economic rights can help protect liberalism from attacks from within, including by those who seek to channel the grievances of the disenfranchised.

I would argue that a more Catholic conception of rights can also reduce some of the temptations on the left. Specifically, the emphasis on dignity, duties, and the common good - including the universal common good - can act as a bulwark against excessive reductions into individualism, group identity, and subjectivism.

So yes, liberalism is worth saving. There is simply no appealing alternative in the world today. But we should be under no illusions about its flaws. I have argued that to correct the course, liberalism’s worthwhile political rights must be balanced with economic rights, and rights themselves must become more attached to duties. In this, liberalism’s future might be found in a most unlikely place - in the Catholic social tradition.