Abstract
I consider the problem of political pluralism for (Rawlsian) political liberalism: that not everybody agrees on fundamental political principles. I critically examine three defenses of liberal principles in situations of political pluralism—the realist defense, the pragmatic defense, and Gerald Gaus’ “justificatory liberalism”—all of which I find wanting. Instead, I propose a dialectical approach to justifying political liberalism. A dialectical approach is based on engaging (ostensibly) contradictory positions through conceptual investigation of key concepts claimed by both sides. Through such dialectical engagement, I seek a way to deal with contradictions between liberal and non-liberal philosophies as conceptual issues, rather than as antagonisms beyond reason. The ambition is to contribute to a more robust liberalism capable of defending itself in contexts of political pluralism. As an example, I apply this dialectical approach to the disagreement between political Islam and political liberalism on the issue of public religion.
Introduction
No society, E. H. Carr once noted, “can exist unless people submit to certain rules of conduct” (Carr 2001, 41). Why people should submit to such rules, Carr goes on to suggest, is the fundamental issue in political philosophy, which is supposed to provide reasons why political societies are or are not legitimate—and consequently deserve or do not deserve our allegiance. As such, political philosophy is intimately connected to legitimacy: one of the primary motivations for doing political philosophy is to meet what Bernard Williams has called the Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD), which holds that “the state has to offer a justification of its power to each subject” (Williams 2005, 4, emphasis in original). 1
The demand that a political society should be able to justify its own existence—a singularly modern idea when expressed as radically as in the BLD—creates certain challenges with respect to political order. To sustain a political society through pure coercive power, all that is needed is an effective monopoly on violence (no small feat in itself, of course). Sustaining a political society through legitimacy, however, is something entirely different. Legitimacy-based political order requires a citizenry that (more or less explicitly) recognizes the political society of which it is a part as in accordance with certain fundamental ideals, such as freedom, justice and equality. John Rawls’ political liberalism—the focal point of the discussion in this essay—is perhaps the most discussed liberal attempt to meet the BLD. Rawls’ liberalism is a concretization of the idea that “[t]he exercise of political power is legitimate only if it accords with a constitution of essentials of which all free and equal citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse” (Gaus 1999, 261).
In this essay, I (re)consider the well-known “problem of political pluralism” for this liberal project: the existence of fundamental disagreement on basic political principles within the citizenry. This problem is a thorny one for political liberalism, whose entire thrust as a political philosophy is towards building a framework for co-existence that everyone can reasonably accept, regardless of particular differences. Although some of the main traditional contenders to liberalism, such as communism and fascism, have faded from the public imagination—leaving political liberalism as the “default” ideology in much of the (Western) world—liberalism still finds itself in an embattled position. 2 New ideologies that are at least partly anti-liberal, such as populist nationalism, are gaining ground in the USA and Europe (Müller 2016), and globalization is bringing liberalism into contact with traditions of political thought, such as political Islam, that challenge liberal principles.
As might be expected of an ideology that celebrates tolerance and freedom of conscience (including political conscience), self-defense in the face of adversaries is not political liberalism’s strongest suite. In the first part of the essay, I consider two defenses of political liberalism in the face of political diversity: the “realist” defense that champions a coercive enforcement of liberal principles, and the “pragmatic” approach that mounts a modus vivendi defense of liberal principles. I argue that neither of these alternatives is satisfactory for the liberal project.
To be internally consistent with itself, liberal political principles will have to be freely embraced by (most) citizens so that (ideally) each individual is, in Immanuel Kant’s phrase, her own universal lawgiver: “not merely subject to the law but subject to it in such a way that it must be viewed as giving the law to itself” (Kant 1996, 81). This, I argue, necessitates a justification of liberalism in the face of alternatives, in line with Gerald Gaus’ idea of a “justificatory liberalism” (Gaus 1999). In my estimation, however, Gaus does not succeed in establishing a reason-based defense of liberalism. The last part of the essay is devoted to sketching out and providing an example of what I believe is a promising approach to establishing such a defense.
My approach to justifying liberalism is dialectical, a form of argument that is based on the premise that two ostensibly contradictory theoretical positions—in this particular case, (a certain kind of) political Islam and (a certain kind of) political liberalism—can be reconstructed as different interpretations of the same concepts, such as “religion,” “liberty,” and “democracy.” Furthermore, the reconstruction that constitutes the dialectical process is itself the beginning of a new theoretical position that is not reducible to the original positions, and represents a progression from a lower to a higher level of reflection. The ambition is, through engagement with one’s adversaries, to end up with a more robust theoretical position—in this case, a more robust political liberalism—that incorporates the possibly valid points of critique of liberalism that the other positions contain.
Rather than attempting an abstract, general defense of liberalism as such, the dialectical approach starts in the concrete with actual disagreements and points of tension between liberalism and its alternatives. In this essay, I focus on the relation between religion and state, and try to work out and make explicit the exact differences that constitute the disagreement between political liberalism and political Islam on this issue. This process ends up in the elaboration of a theoretical position—as it turns out, a form of liberalism with deep historical roots—that actually incorporates elements from both the liberal and the Islamist position under consideration.
The contrast between (a particular branch of) political Islam and a more loosely defined liberal tradition on the issue of religion and state illustrates, I believe, the fruitfulness of a dialectical approach to justifying liberalism. It is a difficult case with seemingly insurmountable differences, one party arguing in favor of a secular state, the other party in favor of a theocracy. Once we start unpacking this antagonism, however—in particular, once we gain an understanding of what both sides actually mean by the term “state religion”—things get interesting. The difference does by no means disappear—there are real, fundamental divergences between political liberalism and political Islam—but the nature of the difference becomes clearer and we get a sense of how liberalism can be argued as the more “reasonable” of the two, thereby fulfilling the BLD.
Engaging seriously with political Islam on the issue of religion and state goes beyond simply defending liberal principles: it also has the potential to alter (mainstream) liberal ideas on religion’s role in society. In particular, such engagement represents a possibility to re-learn some of the lessons of previous generations of liberals: that the distinctions between reason and faith, and between liberal political principles and religion, are not as clear-cut as many liberals would like to believe—and that it serves us well to confront this openly and honestly. I am certain that similar lessons on other issues could be learned and incorporated into a more robust political liberalism by engaging with other non-liberal traditions, turning the problem of political pluralism into an opportunity for self-reflection.
Part I: The problem of political pluralism
The problem of political pluralism emerges from the intersection of two important concerns: that a political society is legitimate, and that it is recognized as legitimate. The first concern is, of course, a necessary condition for legitimacy. The second concern is a necessary condition for a legitimacy-based order, that is, a stable polity that is not based on coercion alone. 3 This second condition effectively holds that, if we want a society that meets the BLD, pluralism cannot be total. This is the essence of what I refer to as the problem of political pluralism.
Rawls’ political liberalism is intended to be precisely such a check on pluralism. In a nutshell Rawls solves the issue as follows: unity in the political sphere—the basic principles of which reasonable people can agree upon—and pluralism in the “non-political” sphere, where agreement is neither necessary nor to be expected (Gaus 1999, 262; Quong 2005; Rawls 2005, 38). Or more precisely, as Jonathan Qoung (2005) has helpfully explicated, Rawls admits different kinds of differences in the non-political and political spheres.
In the non-political spheres Rawls is open to what Qoung calls “foundational differences,” in which “the [antagonists] do not share any premises which can serve as a mutually acceptable standard of justification” (Quong 2005, 303). In the political sphere, however, only “justificatory differences” are allowed, in which “the [antagonists] do share premises that serve as a mutually acceptable standard of justification, but they nevertheless disagree about certain substantive conclusions” (Quong 2005, 303). The question, of course, is why would we not expect foundational disagreement in the political sphere?
Qoung defends Rawls by pointing out that “reasonable disagreements [in the political sphere] in Rawls’ theory are by definition justificatory disagreements” (Quong 2005, 303, emphasis added), due to the manner Rawls has conceptualized “reasonable.” As such, Rawls’ theory is internally consistent, and foundational differences in the political sphere cannot arise as long as we assume “the fact of reasonable pluralism” (Rawls 2005, 144). Critics of Rawls’ theory will, however, be unimpressed by Rawls’ ability to define away political antagonisms. Only at the end of his essay does Qoung bring up the elephant in the room: [w]ithout an independent justification for [Rawls’] definition of reasonableness, Rawls’s theory may seem to be preaching only to the converted. It may only be convincing to those people who are themselves already convinced of the virtues of [Rawls’ idea of] reasonableness (Quong 2005, 323).
It is important to note that critics such as Mouffe and Campos are not critics of a liberal society based on freedom and tolerance, arguably the “key themes” (Maffettone 2004, 546) of Rawlsian liberalism. Nor are they less concerned with combining “pluralism and social unity” (Maffettone 2004, 542) in a way that accords with the ideals of freedom and tolerance. Instead, the nature of the critique of Rawls’ version of political realism is usually that he fails at what everybody is trying to do: to find political common ground in modern pluralism. It is worth considering the alternatives that grow out of this critique and what kinds of problems they themselves run into.
The realist and the pragmatist defense of liberal principles
Most critics of Rawls belong to a strand of political thought that takes a more pragmatic approach to political unity. Mouffe, for instance, while skeptical of denying fundamental political differences by theoretical edict, agrees that “a liberal democratic society requires the existence of a consensus on a certain number of basic institutions” (Mouffe 2005, 227); it is, however, “completely mistaken to present those limits as being grounded on morality or on rationality” (Mouffe 2005, 227): I certainly do not want to argue in favour of a total pluralism, but I consider that the exclusions linked to the limits of pluralism [i.e. the limits specified by Rawls’ term “reasonable”] need to be recognized for what they are (that is, as exclusions that do entail a form of oppression) instead of being concealed under the veil of rationality (Mouffe 2005, 227). Instead of trying to eliminate dissent, we should envisage the category of the ‘adversary’ as central for democratic politics. Contrary to ‘enemies’ who do not have any shared principles and whose confrontation is of an antagonistic nature, ‘adversaries’ have different interpretations of shared principles and they fight for their interpretation to become hegemonic. This struggle among adversaries […] is what democratic politics is really about and one should never try to put an end to [it] (Mouffe 2005, 228).
For those who are uncomfortable with any kind of coercive exclusion from the political sphere—whether based on criteria of “reasonableness” or unquestioned adherence to certain fundamental principles—but still looking for political unity, “pragmatic liberalism” offers an alternative. 5 A third way of justifying why one should accept liberal principles is not because they are inherently reasonable, or because “this is just the way we do things around here,” but because it is prudent (Galston 1994, 1842). Political liberalism, on this view, is “a kind of necessary modus vivendi within cultures that have lost […] moral or religious coherence” (Campos 1994, 1823). Once citizens realize that they will never completely agree on all questions of importance, they can at least agree to disagree, and try to get along.
Pragmatic liberals share the realists’ opinion that “disagreement on all aspects of society’s organization, including its organizing principles and matters of value, is a permanent feature of social life that cannot be ignored, wished away or solved” (Lynch 2009, 73). Not only that, but denying and suppressing political diversity is highly problematic in itself: Rawls’ insistence that political convictions be deeply held by all or almost all citizens is […] a response to the age-old political task of securing political stability […]. Although his purpose is noble, by insisting on deep rather than prudential acceptance of political liberalism, Rawls unwittingly does injustice to a wide range of significant comprehensive views and is thus himself guilty of the kind of coercive, exclusionary use of power that he seeks to avoid (Galston 1994, 1858). [t]he alternative is to acknowledge the reasonableness of comprehensive views that consider political beliefs an integral part of people’s comprehensive beliefs [i.e. that do not accept the liberal distinction between the political and the non-political] and, as a consequence, to recognize the fact that some citizens will accept […] liberal democracy on a prudential basis only (Galston 1994, 1858). [t]he fact is that we are already committed before God, Man, and History for the promulgation of Islamic constitution and the introduction of Islamic way of life […], and no going back on our words is possible. Whatever the hurdles and howsoever great they may be, we have to continue our march toward our goal of a full-fledged Islamic state (Mawdudi 2009, 88).
Justifying liberalism
Given that “the free use of human reason leads us to sharply disagree in the domain of the political” (Gaus 1999, 260), political liberalism will be coercive. This coercion is (partly) hidden in Rawls’ work because he—a bit too conveniently I think it is fair to say—starts from the assumption of “reasonable pluralism” rather than with pluralism as such. This starting point effectively obscures the deeper philosophical issue of justifying the exclusion that takes place when we move from pluralism to reasonable pluralism. After all, to simply “call the anti-liberals [such as political Islamists] ‘unreasonable’ is a rather disingenuous way of stating that such views cannot be admitted as legitimate within the framework of a liberal democratic regime” (Mouffe 2005, 223).
Realists such as Mouffe, of course, do not really believe in justifying this exclusion as much as simply acknowledging it. In the end, this means abandoning reason for decision at the fundamental level. Even if we cannot give any independent reasons for the superiority of liberal values we can still, as Karl Popper phrased it, “fight for the open society against its enemies” (Popper 2012, 307). Some liberal thinkers, however, aware of these difficulties, aspire nonetheless to both acknowledge political pluralism and justify political unity. Gerald F. Gaus’ “justificatory liberalism” (Gaus 1999) is an interesting line of thought that I think points in the direction liberalism needs to move—although Gaus himself does not quite get there.
Gaus’ solution is to define the political “as those matters on which human reason converges, and so necessarily generates constitutional principles that satisfy the [BLD]” (Gaus 1999, 266). 6 This is of course no solution at all, however, unless he can also show that human reason must converge on certain constitutional principles, which he does not. Instead, his argument is based on combining political pluralism with “the need to provide practical resolution of our political differences” (Gaus 1999, 282), which necessitates that we at some point must “submit to the authorative judgdement of [an] umpire” (Gaus 1999, 282).
Gaus’ umpire, however, is not reason, but an already-existing constitution that “empowers government to act to interpret abstract […] principles that we reasonably interpret differently” (Gaus 1999, 281). Gaus gives an example based on the US Bill of Rights: “[a] government is unjust if it enacts legislation that oversteps these bounds [of the constitution] by, say, seeking to establish a [public] religion” (Gaus 1999, 281). But now Gaus has assumed what was to be discussed, namely how to justify adherence to such constitutional essentials: why is a government unjust if it seeks to establish a public religion, as, for example, political Islamist advocate? If we are not to end up with a simple “because!”—in short, if we are to justify liberal constitutional principles—we need to specify why things like a public religion is unreasonable. This, I think it is fair to say, political liberals have not done. And this is the task we now turn to.
Part II: A dialectical approach to justification of political principles
In this section, I provide a brief theory of dialectical reasoning, and how it could be employed in situations of political pluralism. My main concern in this section is how this form of reasoning, associated with thinkers like Socrates, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, 7 can be applied to political value conflicts (for more thorough discussions of this kind of dialectical thinking, see e.g. Westphal 1998 or Warren 2008). The driving force of the kind of dialectical inquiry I envision is to engage theoretical positions through mutual self-examination of one’s own fundamental concepts and ideas, turning justification and defense of political principles into an occasion for re-evaluating what, exactly, one believes in—what one means by concepts such as “freedom” and “justice.” In the final part of the paper, I offer an application of this reasoning to a particular case: the disagreement between political liberals and political Islamists on the issue of a public religion.
Ideological conflict as conceptual conflict
Deciding between competing understandings of the same issue through reasoning necessitates a good deal of common understanding. This common ground is partly epistemological—an (implicit or explicit) consensus on what counts as good reasons, valid arguments, and so forth—and partly in the form of some overlap in conceptual horizons: the fundamental categories through which the issue is understood.
Philosophers have used different terms for this conceptual horizon, such as “background” (Searle 1995, chap. 6), “paradigm” (Kuhn 2012, chap. 2), “inescapable framework” (Taylor 1989, chap. 2), or “world view” (Weber 2004, 103). Regardless of the particular term one prefers, the main point—now ubiquitous in modern philosophy—is that we human beings inescapably relate to the world, to ourselves, and to others through conceptual lenses of which we might be more or less conscious.
Kuhn, famously, pointed out that even when we seemingly have an external standard of reference, such as when observing physical objects, we still rely on a shared conceptual framework in order to agree on what we are seeing: “a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself” (Kuhn 2012, 113). Kuhn’s scientific paradigms are but one example of a general phenomenon that extends also to political philosophy and ideology. Before Kuhn, Karl Mannheim, known as the founder of the sociology of knowledge, argued that having different ideologies—being, say, a liberal, a Marxists or a fascist—amounted to comprehending the world very differently, even incompatibly (Mannheim 1997). Ideological divisions, Mannheim argued, reached all the way down to the very meaning of words.
Just as a Aristotelian and a Newtonian physicist would not mean the same thing when speaking of “force”—and a Newtonian and an Einsteinian physicist would not mean the same thing when speaking of “space” and “time”—a liberal and a Marxist would not mean the same thing when speaking of concepts like “liberty.” 8 A Lockean liberal for whom “private property is […] the natural expression and realization […] of individual freedom” (Scruton 2017)—and who sees the chief end of political society to protect that property (Locke 2009, 97)—might find it absurd to learn that Marxists envision a society without private property as the final emancipation of man. 9
The issue, of course, is that word the “liberty” has different meanings and different relations to other values in different political philosophies and ideologies. It is not the case that liberals believe in liberty and Marxists believe in something else. It was not freedom that Marx sought to abolish but the oppression of the working class, which, according to him, was ideologically justified by “bourgeois” concepts of freedom, such as we find in Locke and in the liberal constitutions in Marx’ own time (see e.g. Marx 1994: 17–20).
Real freedom, Marxists have always argued, is economic freedom, which, for classical Marxism/socialism at least, rests on ownership of the means of production. Consequently, universal emancipation means communism and collective ownership of land, factories, and resources—the exact opposite of the liberal conclusion. Obviously, if a consensus on fundamental political principles is ever to be obtained among liberals and Marxists, a consensus of meaning must be established first. (And foreshadowing a second point: such a consensus would change the ideological positions involved, insofar as the content of an ideology is partly defined by the meaning of its central concepts.)
That people use the same word to mean different things in political discourse obviously makes communication difficult, but I would contend that the fact that everybody claims to be the proper interpreters of the same values such as “freedom” actually carries a good deal of hope. This transforms at least some political value conflicts into conceptual conflicts. And if we can translate (at least some of) our fundamental ideological differences into conceptual issues, then we can potentially handle these difference within the domain of reason.
Dialectical argument
What I have portrayed above would be a case of what Mouffe calls a “conflictual consensus”—“consensus on ethico-political values, dissent about their interpretation” (Mouffe 2005, 121)—which is a form of “agonistic” relation that a democracy is supposed to be able to handle. How, however, should we handle them? If we want to handle such disagreement through reasoning and deliberation, the circumstance that we lack a consensus on meaning is an obvious obstacle. How can we talk to each other if we use words differently? And in what sense can we really be said to have a consensus on, say, the importance of human liberty if we have deeply conflictual interpretations of “human liberty”—especially when these differing interpretations translate into radically different visions for political society?
It seems that focusing less on the expression of values and more on their interpretation—less on the use of words, such as “liberty,” “equality,” and “democracy,” and more on the meanings of those words—could be fruitful. Once we realize that these political values are conceptualized very differently in different ideologies, we can no longer take their meaning as self-evident. This circumstance necessitates self-reflection—“reasoning through cross-examination and the constant repositioning of one’s thought” (Brincat 2014, 590)—which is the driving force of dialectical argument.
Most theoretical positions have internal inconsistencies or contradictions as they are often referred to in dialectical parlance (we will find such contradictions in both liberalism and Islamism in the next section), which often come to light only when confronted with alternative ways of thinking. 10 The working out of these contradictions usually has a transformative effect. At the end of a truly dialectical process, neither side rarely find themselves in the exact same theoretical position they had at the beginning. Conversion is, of course, a possibility—so is synthesis. At the very least one can expect more robust versions of the original positions, even perhaps amounting to new positions, insofar as fundamental parts of one’s conceptual apparatus may have been altered in the process.
The possibility of progress in political–philosophical argument
A crucial premise for dialectic reasoning is that reasoning, if done properly, can move subjects not only towards a common understanding, but also—as an integral part of that process—from lower to higher levels of understanding. A higher level of understanding entails a better grasp of issues that could not be properly dealt with within a lower-level paradigm. One example from the natural sciences is how Einsteinian physics—the higher-level position in this example—can account for the discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury that Newtonian physics—the lower-level position—could not account for, by changing the fundamental conceptual apparatus of physics. 11
When comparing positions in political philosophy, the situation is more complicated than in the case of physics in (at least) two important ways. First, in the Einstein–Newton example there exists a clear criteria, common to both paradigms, can serve as an “umpire” in Gaus’ terms, namely the purpose and principles of physics itself. Neither Einstein nor Newton, presumably, would dispute that part of the purpose of physics is to account for the movement of planetary bodies, and that any theoretical innovation that allowed for a better account of this movement, without sacrificing (indeed, in Einstein’s case improving) explanatory power in other areas, would constitute an advance.
Second, paradigms in physics are directed towards a physical reality that, in the long run at least, serves as an arbiter that rewards good theories and punishes faulty theories. Political philosophy works rather differently. How to best conceptualize “space” and “time” will have to be worked out through combining reasoning and experimentation, but there is no scientific experiment that can be run to decide on the best conceptualization of “freedom.” When it comes to conceptual disagreements in political philosophy, reason has to carry the burden on its own. Thus, any progressive development in political philosophy will primarily be an internal movement in reason itself. The dialectical expression of this would be that the relation between a higher and a lower level of understanding in political philosophy is such that the higher-level position understands—not some external reality—but the lower-level position better than the lower-level position understands itself (Skjervheim 1996, 274).
That it is possible to gain understanding in political philosophy such that one might conceivably at some point in a larger process of intellectual maturation look back at previous positions one used to hold as inadequate in comparison to the position one now holds, is, I would think, uncontroversial. The first complication, then, seems more urgent to address. Do we have a (or several) dialectical yardstick(s) of progress in political philosophy as we arguably have in physics? Do we have a set of criteria rooted not in a particular political–philosophical position, but in the very purpose of political philosophy itself, that might serve as a common standard for this practice? Perhaps we do.
I began this essay by connecting political philosophy to the idea of political legitimacy. The purpose of political philosophy, I claimed, is to establish the contours of the politically legitimate: what can be justified as just, fair, reasonable, and right when it comes to political institutions and practices. Even if particular ideas about what is just, fair, reasonable, and right are likely to be contested, it is difficult to contest the very ambition of justifying political institutions and practices in the first place. Indeed, I would like to entertain the notion that abandoning this ambition in political philosophy is like abandoning the ambition of explaining physical phenomenon in physics—it would mean, in effect, abandoning the practice itself.
Everyone who argues from and for a political–philosophical position—be it liberalism, Marxism, Islamism, or any other “ism”—has, regardless of any other disagreements they might have, implicitly or explicitly agreed that political institutions and practices should be justified; that these institutions and practices should be backed by argument and not simply by force. Even the most hard-nosed political realists who believe the Hobbesian dictum that “before the names of Just, and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power” (Hobbes 2012, 66) cannot completely escape justification. They too feel the need to argue the supposed futility of political argument and its surrender to power, which then turns into an (implicit) justification of any political order as long as it is powerful enough.
This commitment to justification, then, can form a criterion of internal coherence of a political–philosophical position: does the position accommodate the demands that justification, and therefore political philosophy itself, places upon us? The specification of these demands and the answer to this question will be crucial components of this justificatory strategy in practice.
One way to cash this out is to consider the implicit assumption about human nature involved in the claim that political institutions and practices should not merely exist, but also be justified. This is actually, I would contend, a very specific claim about human liberty. First, it is a claim that institutions and practices are, in some form, under our collective control; that the laws, rules, and norms that govern these institutions and practices are social constructs that can sensibly be critiqued and not immutable natural laws (which, of course, cannot be sensibly critiqued in the same way). Second, it is a claim that that such critique is possible; that the individual human being in some way is ontologically detached from his political (and social) surroundings in such a way that he or she is capable of taking a critical stance towards those surroundings. In short: The practice of political philosophy is built a liberal concept of human freedom as a private sphere for reflection of self-definition—which is the basis for, among other things, adopting an autonomous stance on political arrangements. Only against this background understanding of human freedom does the practice of philosophy and the BLD become sensical.
Of course, the liberal concept of freedom could be accepted as a condition for political philosophy and yet devalued in particular political–philosophical positions. Human liberty (in the liberal sense) could be recognized as real, but not worthy of political protection and nourishment. Would this make the particular political–philosophical position theoretically incoherent? Perhaps not, but I would argue that maintaining such a position would make the practice of political philosophizing incoherent, in the sense that it would undermine its own foundation. To politically argue against the conditions of possibility of political argument is to rebel against the project of political philosophy no less than to abandon the quest for explaining physical phenomena is to rebel against the project of physics.
Either way, and to return to a previous point, I know of no political philosophy that actually speaks against human liberty in theory. Even notoriously illiberal philosophies, such as Marxism and fascism, both claim the mantle of human liberty—and so, as we will see, does political Islam. This raises the possibility of a liberal critique that is also an immanent critique of these positions that holds them responsible to their own ideals. Can these non-liberal positions make sense of the concept of freedom they profess to champion? And if they do have valid points to make concerning the proper interpretation of human liberty and its place in the larger scheme of political values, how should this point be incorporated into liberalism?
This latter question brings up the final issue I should address before moving on to the last part of the essay. The kind of theoretical engagement I have sketched out in this section, and that I will attempt to apply in the next section, would inevitably be a self-examination of political liberalism also. The ambition behind this project is not merely to chart the unclear boundaries between liberalism and its alternatives, but to help build a more robust form of liberalism through self-critique. Dialectical justification does more than merely stating liberal values as self-evident; it also challenges and develops the political position it justifies. We now turn to the ideological fault line between liberalism and Islamism, and the issue of religion’s place in public life, in this spirit of both defending and self-critically examining the liberal position.
Part III: Liberalism and Islamism—an application of the dialectical approach
Not all political philosophies would agree with Gaus and political liberals on the separation of church and state. One such philosophy—or rather family of philosophies—is Islamism, defined as “contemporary movements that attempt to return to the scriptural foundations of the Muslim community, excavating and reinterpreting them for the application of the present-day social and political world” (Euben and Zaman 2009, 4). Specifically, I will rely on the influential Islamism of the already-introduced Mawdudi as a counter-example to liberal thinking on this point, with the occasional reference to other thinkers in this tradition.
First, we need a working definition of religion. My preference is for Yuval Noah Harari’s simple definition of religion as “a system of norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order” (Harari 2014, 209, emphasis removed). One should resist a mystical interpretation of the term “superhuman.” This term simply emphasizes the very important point that religion—as a system of norms and values—is a system of norms and values that claims to be eternal, unchangeable, and in an important sense raised above “human whims and agreement” (Harari 2014, 210). The essence of being religious is to concede that certain things are beyond human construction. If you truly believe that “thou shall not kill,” then no human assembly can through agreement make it okay to kill people.
The question of a public religion, then, is a question of whether the state should enforce a system of norms and values founded on a belief in a superhuman order. Immediately, certain problems arise. Should the state enforce the system or also the belief in its superhuman, that is, eternal, character? And in what sense can a belief even be enforced? The liberal standpoint, as I understand it, is that even if the state has to at least partly enforce a system of norms and values—say by banning murder, protecting free speech, etc.—it is not the role of the state to enforce beliefs in these values or their superhuman character. Not because liberals themselves do not believe in these values or their superhuman character, but because of a fundamental tenet in the liberal belief system itself: that each person must embrace whatever values he or she embraces freely and unenforced.
In sum, the liberal argument against public religion is rooted in the fundamental concern for individual autonomy that in many ways forms the backbone of this tradition—the liber part of liberalism—rather than any principled objections to religions and superhuman systems of norms and values. Indeed, liberalism itself is, arguably, such a superhuman system of norms and values and could be labeled a “religion” on the definition employed in this essay, something I will get back to below.
Let us now look at an argument in favor of public religion that explicitly opposes the liberal argument. In his essay The Islamic law (2009), Mawdudi raises the issue of freedom from an Islamist point of view. He begins by acknowledging freedom as an important part of being human: there is [a] sphere of our life in which we possess a certain amount of freedom. This is the moral and social sphere of our life in which we are bestowed with a free will and independence of choice in respect of individual as well as collective affairs and behavior (Mawdudi 2009, 91).
It is not the fact of human freedom on which Islamism and liberalism diverge, but on the proper place of this fact in the grander scheme of things. Even this divergence is not as straightforward as one might think, however, and involves some dialectical difficulty. Human freedom and independence, Mawdudi argues, can hardly justify our getting away from the guidance of our Creator and His laws. It [freedom] is only to give us a choice of either leading our lives as the obedient subjects of God—an attitude consistent with the real order of things—or being disregardful of His commandments and thus rebelling against Him and our own true nature (Mawdudi 2009, 91).
Freedom, for Mawdudi, is a dangerous gift that gives us the possibility of going astray as well as choosing the right path. Already at this point tensions with the Western liberal tradition are mounting, as the latter would certainly consider freedom more of a value in itself, rather than simply a precondition for having values. Freedom is not, however, a straightforward issue within liberalism either. It is a long-recognized problem in this tradition that freedom in itself is a rather abstract value. It is only when freedom is combined with insight that it can turn into a concrete existence—a concrete individual, say—worthy of praise. Freedom spent in the service of ignorance or, worse, evil is for the liberal as well as for Mawdudi a misuse of a precious gift.
Such misuse can be dangerous, not only for the individual, but for society as well. Presumably, many of the Germans who supported the Nazi regime did so voluntarily—at least initially. As liberals, we can celebrate their freedom to follow their own convictions, but also lament their illiberal choice. Exercising freedom in the service of unfreedom is a paradoxical thing to do, but certainly within the scope of possible uses of human liberty. If we want to borrow a phrase from Mawdudi, is not “rebelling against our own nature” a good expression for this confused use of human freedom to bring about unfreedom?
The larger point I am trying to convey is that the liberal state rests on a shared belief among its citizenry on the inherent value of the things that liberal political principles aim to nurture and protect, such as freedom. Now, given: that these liberal values are “superhuman” in the sense that their normative status cannot be abolished through human agreement (i.e. that, for instance, the question of whether freedom is an essential part of a good, decent and meaningful life is not a question that can be settled through processes like voting); and that a liberal state should be based on legitimacy (i.e. that the BLD applies and that each citizen should embrace liberal political principles as expressive of their own conscience rather than simply as the law of the land); then liberal states have “public religions”—namely liberalism itself.
If liberal states in fact have (or should have, given the BLD) a public religion, then the difference between a liberal and an Islamist state, obviously, cannot be that the latter has a public religion and the former does not. Some may protest on this point, arguing that “liberalism” and “Islam,” although they both denote superhuman value systems, do not belong in the same category—that liberal values are products of reason while Islamic values are products of faith. I am actually not entirely unsympathetic to this line of argument, given that we also reconsider the distinction between reason and faith, which I attempt in the next section. For now, however, I think it is very fruitful to consider the perhaps surprisingly close similarity between political liberalism and political Islamism on the issue of public belief systems.
For Mawdudi, Islam, just as liberalism in liberal states, is the value source that underpins the social contract in Islamic states: All those persons who […] surrender themselves to the will of God are welded into a community and that is how the “Muslim society” comes into being. This, this is an ideological society—a society radically different from those which spring up from accidents of races, color or country. This society is the result of a deliberate choice and effort; it is the outcome of a “contract” that takes place between human beings and their Creator (Mawdudi 2009, 92).
Reason, faith, and faith in reason
Since both political Islamism and political liberalism rely on shared belief systems among the citizenry—a state of affairs captured in Mawdudi’s “Muslim society” and Rawls’ “reasonable pluralism”, respectively—there is a temptation to see Islamism and liberalism as two competing and ultimately irreconcilable political paradigms. Islamists and liberals can tolerate each other as long as they are not in direct political competition, but as soon as these worldviews are pitted against each other, one of the sides will have to yield, either to force or to argument.
The problem is that liberals and Islamists argue in seemingly very different ways. For many liberals, “reason” is the only acceptable mode of argumentation in the public sphere. If, like Gaus, one sees an absolute distinction between “reason” and “faith,” then Islamists such as Mawdudi are a priori disqualified from being taken seriously in a liberal public discourse. Depressingly, this seems to leave force as the only remaining option to deal with this particular “unreasonable” political difference. If, as I argued in the previous section, however, the liberal state is ultimately also based on faith—that is, faith in liberal values such as individual liberty—then perhaps liberals should be less strict about the reason–faith distinction. Karl Popper, speaking of anti-liberalism in general and fascism in particular, certainly thought so: Since an ‘uncritical’ rationalism is inconsistent, the problem cannot be the choice between knowledge and faith, but only between two kinds of faith. The new problem is: which is the right faith and which is the wrong faith? [The] choice with which we are confronted is between a faith in reason and in human individuals and a faith in the mystical faculties of man by which he is united to a collective (Popper 2012, 271). If we look back upon all previous efforts that have ever been made to discover the principle of morality, we need not wonder now why all of them had to fail. It was seen that the human being was bound to laws by his [sic] duty, but it never occurred to them that he [sic] is subject only to laws given by himself but still universal and that he [sic] is bound only to act in conformity with his [sic] own will (Kant 1996, 82, emphasis in original). Those who enter into this contract undertake to recognize God as their sovereign, His guidance as supreme, and His injunctions as absolute law. They also undertake to accept, without question or doubt, His classification of good and evil, right and wrong, the permissible and prohibited (Mawdudi 2009, 92).
Instead of independent thinking, we have “the Book and the Messenger” that “prescribe a code of life called the shari’a” (Mawdudi 2009, 92). The shar’ia is a set of “directives for the regulation of our individual as well as collective life,” that “embraces all the various departments of human life,” such as “religious rituals, personal character, morals, habits, family relationships, social and economic affairs, administration, rights and duties of citizens, judicial system, laws of war and peace, and international relations” (Mawdudi 2009, 94). A lot of shar’ia would not be completely alien to Western liberals, such as the insistence that relations of exchange should be “the outcome of the free will of both the parties” (Mawdudi 2009, 99). Some of the shar’ia, such as the prohibition of alcohol, has been the law in Western countries—although not usually justified by liberal arguments. Certain parts of the shar’ia, however, are downright illiberal, for instance “the principle that men are protectors and in charge of women” (Mawdudi 2009, 99).
Such statements as the latter provoke horror in us liberals, and it is worth the effort to think about why for a second. If Mawdudi had said that adults are the protectors and in charge of their children, our horror would be less. It is not the idea that some human beings are in charge of other human beings that affronts our liberal sensibilities, but the outright rejection of the liberal telos of human existence—independence and autonomy—for half the human population. It is easy to see that in Mawdudi’s ideal state, women would not be free—he states so plainly. It is perhaps less obvious that neither would the men. The entirety of their existence, in a sense no less than that of women, would be regulated by the shar’ia, which is to be accepted and followed “without question or doubt.”
And herein lies the rub. Not only is this way of thinking distinctly illiberal, it also betrays a potential internal incoherence that is prevalent in Islamist thought. Consider one example from Ayatollah Khomeini, the ideological architect of an actual Islamic republic. In his thesis on Islamic Governance, Khomeini argues that the purpose of an Islamic political revolution is to “attain the […] freedom of the Muslim people” (Khomeini 1970, 24). The “freedom” envisioned in Khomeini’s Islamic republic, however, seems completely devoid of the concern with individual autonomy that sits at the core of the liberal understanding of freedom.
The ambition of Khomeini’s Islamic governance is to “produce integrated and virtuous human beings who are walking embodiments of the [divine] law” (Khomeini 1970, 20). Integrity and virtue are qualities we want in people in liberal states as well, and the aim of public education in liberal countries is, at least in part, to produce good citizens who have internalized liberal values—and in that sense are embodiments of our “divine law.” The liberal demand, however, is that this process takes the form of autonomous appropriation by each individual. This necessitates a freedom of conscience that extends to critique of fundamental values and beliefs in a sense that Khomeini does not allow. This he makes clear in another treatise on the subject, in which he writes that Islamic laws “cannot be changed, modified or contested” (Khomeini 1985, 7, emphasis added).
Islamists like Mawdudi and Khomeini obviously have a notion of “freedom” that does not include certain aspects that most liberals would consider fundamental, notably the ability and possibility to think for oneself and to critique prevailing social and political arrangements. One way to think of this is as one of those antagonistic differences between liberalism and Islamism that go “all the way down.” If, however, we want to continue the philosophical engagement with Mawdudi and Khomeini, we could point to an internal inconsistency in their project. After all, Mawdudi and Khomeini themselves criticize existing social and political arrangements (for not being Islamic enough), and in doing so exercise a kind of individual autonomy and intellectual freedom they deny others. It would not be too much to ask, from a philosophical standpoint, that they at least explain why their own freedom should not be extended to the citizens of their republics.
Justifying liberalism: Concluding remarks
The premise of this essay is that a liberal state needs to justify itself to its own citizens. In situations of political pluralism—as opposed to situations of “reasonable pluralism”—this is a considerable challenge. I have considered one such challenge, in particular: defending the liberal stance on public religions against political philosophies, represented by Mawdudi’s political Islamism, that disagree with that stance. The main issue I wished to explore is the possibility of, if not completely resolving such disagreement, at least finding ways for liberalism to engage radically different ideologies through reason rather than force. I have called this a dialectical approach to political pluralism.
The dialectical approach differs from the realist and the pragmatist approaches I considered in part I that both, in their own way, deny the possibility of justifying liberal principles, substituting dialogue for force or tolerance. This denial, I have argued, violates the BLD and the very spirit of liberalism itself, making intellectual engagement between different ways of thinking, in the last instance, an impossibility. Once we reopen the project of justifying liberalism and begin to engage alternative political philosophies seriously, we will probably find that we have much to learn, about ourselves as well as about others. Fundamental differences will surely remain, but that is no reason to stop talking.
For instance, in part III, I argued that once we begin to reflect on what a “public religion” in fact means—a superhuman value system—a considerable stretch of common ground between political liberalism and political Islamism becomes visible. Yet, a gulf remains between liberalism and Islamism when it comes to the importance of individual appropriation of this value system. There is plenty of overlap between the morality of the shar’ia and liberal morality, but in the end this is of limited consolation as long as the political Islamists insist on an unquestioning acceptance of the shar’ia (or indeed of any value system).
Liberalism as a public religion is a religion with a rather peculiar characteristic: it allows, and even encourages, doubt. Why? Because only by allowing doubt can such a religion be true to its own dogma of individual autonomy, and only by encouraging doubt can it create the possibility of true faith in its liberal values. This is an enormous gamble: the liberal state, by allowing and encouraging doubt in its own moral foundation, has no guarantee that its citizens will conclude that the liberal values that allowed and encouraged their self-examination in the first place are worth preserving—fascism, Marxism, and Islamism are perfectly possible outcomes of the free exercise of human reason. That, however, is what liberal faith in the end amounts to: faith in reason.
I imagine the realists at this point will want to point out that one cannot justify faith in reason. The world is simply divided into people who believe “in reason and in human individuals,” (p. 16) to quote Popper—and who consequently agree on liberal political principles emanating from that belief—and people who do not have this faith, and will only agree to liberal principles on more precarious grounds such as prudence or fear of punishment. Across this boundary, communication and agreement will remain, at best, partial.
True as that might be, I would argue that it is not “completely mistaken to present those limits [between liberals and non-liberals] as being grounded on morality or on rationality,” as Mouffe maintains. In fact, I think liberals actually have a good case for claiming to be championing reason as they are championing liberal principles. If we think of reason as an alternative to force and indoctrination as a way of integrating society, then a liberal society, where the right of every single individual to think for him/herself is politically protected, is surely a reason-based society if anything is. In this sense, one can make the rather bold case that reason demands a liberal society—whether one listens to reason’s demands is of course another matter.