Casson Douglas - Liberating judgment: fanatics, skeptics, and John Lockes politics of probability

Introduction

The Great Recoinage

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF LIBERAL SELF-GOVERNMENT is by no means inevitable. It is a complicated, contingent, and ultimately provisional undertaking. This observation might seem commonplace, yet it is also commonly ignored. Enchanted by the belief that liberal democracy is the result of the effortless proliferation of universally accepted principles, its supporters have underestimated the difficulty of fostering stable and just communities both at home and around the world. They have failed to see that government based on free and equal participation cannot simply be decreed, and have thus overlooked the many ways in which such polities can falter. Perhaps such overconfidence was predictable. In the wake of international liberal ascendancy, it has been tempting to assume that everyone embraces the same political aspirations.

Yet this costly self-assurance is not only the result of the proliferation of regimes claiming to be liberal democracies. It also stems from the way in which modern liberalism has come to understand itself as primarily a set of political axioms that can be universally endorsed. All rational individuals, it is assumed, can agree on a set of basic commitments: a hostility toward tyranny, a faith in toleration, an insistence on representative government and the separation of powers, a commitment to free inquiry in the arts and sciences, a conviction that the common good is served through regulated private ownership, and most importantly, the belief that governments are human creations that derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. These commitments seem so familiar that it is difficult to imagine that anyone could object to them. In the context of such a consensus, it would seem that liberal democracy could be justified and sustained simply by the articulation of its principles.

By assuming that political justification rests solely on abstract principles, however, we have tended to overlook the dangers and excesses to which liberalism is especially vulnerable. We have ignored the ways in which liberal institutions can foster the very conditions that threaten their continued viabilityconditions characterized by isolating egoism, thoroughgoing materialism and secularism, and the uncritical pursuit of a narrowly self-interested freedom. Such conditions can undermine shared political commitments, breeding both debilitating skepticism and violent fanaticism.

The liberal emphasis on intellectual and moral autonomy can make citizens especially susceptible to the perils of radical subjectivity and disconnectedness. Cut off from a shared sense of place or tradition, they risk stumbling into the Tocquevillean nightmare in which each man is narrowly shut in himself and from that basis makes pretense to judge the world. Modern liberalism seems to foster a skepticism concerning the possibility of genuinely shared standards of judgment. This type of skepticism isolates citizens from one another and undermines their ability to form stable and lasting communities. Given the capacity of liberalism to fracture and isolate individuals, it is not hard to understand the continuing allure of religious and ideological movements that promise to clarify political ambiguities by offering members a sense of certainty that transcends the doubts and disagreements that pervade liberal culture. These movements cannot simply be dismissed as the last gasps of an atavistic faith or the predictable symptoms of socioeconomic deprivation. They continue to appeal to individuals living in a world shaped by liberal institutions and practices because they respond to an inextinguishable desire for transcendent assurance, a desire that liberalism often seems to suppress or ignore. In fact, the restlessness and uncertainty that characterizes liberal democratic culture seems at times to nurture a type of fanaticism that promises clarity by imposing uniformity.