I think the point of the postlberals is that *some* moral infrastructure is inevitable. Whether or not one wants to call it a religion is beside the point. No government can exist without fundamental commitments about what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful, or at least principled limits on what is acceptable. Take, for example, Locke's view of religous tolerance. It depends on the idea that the government has no jurisdiction over religion and that citizens are free to enter or leave religious communities as they wish free of government coercion. But what about children? Is it not contrary to Locke's idea of freedom that children, in certain religious traditions, must undergo rituals that either change their bodies without their consent (e.g., circumcision) or are juridically committed to a religous authority they did not explicitly choose (e.g., Catholic baptism). One way that the secular state may secure the childrens' religious liberty is to legally ban such rituals. But how is that not taking sides on a metaphysical/moral question about which some religions offer an answer?
Yes, that is the point of the post-liberal critique. And yes, whether it is a religion is beside the point, so much so that it distracts from the interesting point. So I agree there. But what I'm interested in these days are non-neutralist or quasi-neutralist liberalisms that rest on substantive value assumptions. It turns out that's most liberals historically. The neutralitarian strand of liberalism is limited to a much smaller number of figures and is only dominant in the US.
“No government can exist without fundamental commitments about what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful, or at least principled limits on what is acceptable.”
I think the strong form of this is without the disjunctive form, and it’s closer to the “no alternative” argument that Kevin seems to have in mind.
I find pointing out and naming the argument distinctly helps. However, isn’t this exactly what the postliberal argument wants? That is, the argument is supposed to be a retort to liberalisms when they claim neutrality. So, to ask a postliberal “which values and what impositions are inevitable” is just to further the conversation they want to have.
If you view postliberals as trying to have conversations with liberals, then you're right. But, in my experience, tons of postliberals are utterly uninterested in conversations with liberals.
Yes! The postliberals I'm familiar with (perhaps a non-representative sample) often seem to be arguing as follows. They make good arguments to the effect that it's impossible for the state to be fully neutral on questions of value, the good life, morality, etc. (True!) But they then seem to assume something like an "in for a penny, in for a pound" principle, and so to treat these arguments as a reason to reject the idea that there's anything in the ballpark of neutrality worth treating as an ideal. In effect, they presuppose that the only interesting neutrality principles are extremely strong and general ones, so that once they're disposed of, there are no principled objections to treating state institutions as having the legitimate function of inculcating highly specific, sectarian moral visions (whether on the right or the left).
This approach fails to engage with what are, to my mind, the most plausible, attractive versions of ideals of neutrality.
This is a false dichotomy. Liberalism doesnt claim to be one mere concrete order which maintains homogeneity through repression, which I take the second horn to be. It claims to be true. This political liberalism or neutralist liberalism that you advocate isn't possible. There needs to be a rich conception of reality the good life etc even stronger than perfectionist libs care to admit. This comes very close to being a religion. Libs will categorize Coke the company as a religion so it isn't improper to call liberalism a religion. It is a totalizing way of life which cannot just like the church in the medieval ages allow dissent or even non adherence in the so called private sphere. A couple of years ago, I had been institutionalized for a mental illness due to my trauma history; when I was there I shared various biological and demographic markers. When I told the dr I chose not to be sexually act as a young fit adult male, the last thing on his mind was tolerance and respecting my choices in my private life. In a time of great need, he more or less said that it wasn't a meaningful way to live life and that it is understandable even probable that I would want to kill myself. He wanted to help me change. When I went through the complaint process, the nurse who I reported it to laughed at me implying that it didn't happen or I was in the wrong. There was no further way to appeal. I was institutionalized so if I went to court there would be no likelihood that they would take my word against the hospitals word. These people have no desire to live in peace with us. I am not a violent person so I dont plan on trying to overthrow them or commit violence. I am just looking to move someplace else; the place were I was born and raised won't even let me go to the hospital in peace and will tell me that they are respecting me. Fuck them. It is simply not possible to have a meaningfully pluralistic society even in the private sphere; if there are not deep wide ranging agreements on how society works even in the deepest parts of people's private lives people cannot live together in peace. Unless there are deep common bounds even language breaks down. Wittgenstein showed this in his later works. Liberalism doesnt currently burn "heretics" because they dont need to. Even historically libs have been willing to burn "heretics," in Unnatural Frenchmen one can see quite a few examples of liberals murdering people because they chose not to be sexually active. I understand the appeal of a pluralistic open society with private spheres so people can do what they chose even if they dont harm others but it simply isn't possible and it has never existed.
My impression is that, to the extent a state enforces or might enforce laws that touch and concern normative human affairs, the state coercively imposes some values over and against others. And since every state makes and enforces laws that touch and concern normative human affairs, every state commits itself to promoting some values and demoting others. Every state mechanism of coercion is and must be normatively valenced, if you will. This would be a banal observation but for the fact that genuine disagreement about fundamental moral matters not only exists in our liberal republic but is rife to the point of endangering effective governance. Why does this matter to the postliberal? Unless we equivocate about concepts like fairness and justice, we have to say that liberalism at least implicitly presupposes ubiquitous if not universal consensus about fundamental, action-guiding moral principles, a state of affairs that does not currently obtain.
Kevin, thanks again for taking the postliberal and integralist arguments seriously. I see three main issues with your account above.
1. Postliberalism Is Not Inherently Integralist
Integralism seeks some level of church-state cooperation or state subservience to church or some use of state power to uphold religious truths. Postliberalism, on the other hand, is much more broad. It is simply a rejection of the liberal order. I think you could safely put all right-wing ideologies into the postliberal camp. For instance, Italian fascism is a hard rejection of liberalism, but it was not integralist (it put the state above the Church). Thinkers like Spangler and Evola were hugely influential in right wing thought, and neither was religious in the traditional understanding of the word. I highly recommend Matthew Rose's "A World After Liberalism" for an accounting of modern anti-liberal, anti-Christian thought. The point is, I think it would be more accurate for you to treat postliberalism and integralism separately, as integralism is either a subset of, or in a venn diagram with, postliberalism.
2. The No Alternative Objection Is Not the Primary Argument of Postliberals.
Postliberals broadly have a positive accounting of their position, and see liberalism (or an excessive liberalism) as a deviation from the healthy and normal politics that proceeded it. So rather than arguing from liberalism to some alternative, they argue from first principles to a rejection of liberalism. This is an important distinction, as you cannot defeat the first-principles arguments by taking down a No Alternative Objections account. This is not the place to present all arguments from first principles, but I would point you broadly to Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas's political writings (among countless others in the Western tradition, up until the time of Locke, Hume, Mill, when modern liberalism seemingly took shape).
3. Even If the No Alternative Objection Were the Primary Argument of Postliberals, It Has More Force Than This Post Indicates
The postliberal No Alternative objection is that 'All political regimes, no matter what shape they take, must, by their very nature, make *truth/value* claims imposed through some level of coercion.' I think your failure to distinguish between postliberalism and integralism hurts your case here, because you are tackling the more narrow claim that 'All political regimes must impose *religious beliefs* through some level of coercion.' It doesn't help that you also conflate "values" with "religion."
I think we can both agree that there are values that are not primarily religious. For instance, the truth/value claim that a state should stay neutral in religious matters. Or the truth/value claim that the ideal form of government is democratic. Or that a constitutional order should be upheld. On this charge, liberalism is just as beholden to truth/value claims and coercion as postliberal regimes.
However, the case is even worse for liberalism, because it not only makes truth/value claims that are discoverable via natural reasoning and require no religious pre-commitments, it also makes religious claims, specifically those derived from a broadly Christian ethos. These would be the claims that all men are created equal, that all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, for instance.
And it gets worse. Not only is the academic/ideological version of liberalism religious in certain of its claims, liberalism in practice is every bit as religious as a hard integralist state, with the power apparatus coercing people to abide by the conclusions of feminism, transgenderism, pan-sexualism, and so forth.
Conclusion
Postliberalism is broader than integralism and therefore requires distinct treatment from integralism, which this post failed to provide. Further, the no alternative argument is not the primary argument of postliberals. But even if it were, this post fails to adequately address it, as liberalism is as committed to truth/value claims as postliberalism, and even as committed to certain religious claims as integralism, at least in practice today.
Hi Blake, thanks for the engagement! I don't think my post implies that I'm focused on integralism. I am thinking in terms of views that include the Rose book. Second, let's say that the main postliberal *objection* to liberalism is the No Alternative Objection. I know postliberals all have accounts of a substantive good and that they bring that theory to the table to critique liberalism, often some form of Aristotelian-Thomism. But in popular rhetoric, the No Alternative Objection is what people lead with in order to sell post-liberal ideas.
On your final point, it seems at times you're arguing for a large {y} (you allow values in the set). But then you equate liberalism with a religion, for which there is now no need, since you let values in {y}. That's good because liberalism is not a religion, and certainly not in virtue of the fact that it shares commitments with Christianity or that Christianity introduced assumptions liberals took on.
I also think you've misunderstood the liberal tradition. Neutralist, post-metaphysical liberalism is only a minor strand in the liberal tradition. And these non-neutralist views are manifestly not "every bit as religious" as a hard integralist state. For instance, Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism defense of liberalism is miles away from being a religion. Societies do enforce value commitments - no liberal I know of denies this - and our society is becoming less liberal because elites are adopting more aggressive forms of egalitarianism. But the idea that our society is as coercive as societies that once burned heretics alive is far-fetched.
I agree with you that some form of the No Alternative objection is an important argument for debates between liberalism and postliberalism, even if I would say that it is neither the primary argument For postliberalism, nor the primary argument Against liberalism. I also assumed you had integralism in mind with all the references to religion in the post, but granted your main point seems to apply equally to broader postliberal considerations.
I was trying to address liberalism in stages, from 1) broad value claims coupled with coercion to 2) quasi/soft religious claims coupled with coercion, to 3) hard religious claims coupled with coercion. As you say, the first category is fairly uninteresting, as all regimes do this (unless you try to take a true neutralist/pluralist position). But categories 2 and 3 are more narrow. I still think category 1 is worth addressing insofar as it concerns objections from liberals to postiberalism that hinge on the mistaken belief that the problem with postliberalism is that it envisions government coercion for value claims. So if both liberals and postliberals agree that this is normal governance, we can move on to your main argument.
The main argument now becomes, I think: There are many alternatives to value-neutral liberalism that are not postliberal, so merely asserting the falsity of value-neutral liberalism doesn't prove postliberalism. To that, I think everyone must agree. At that point, we have to start looking at substantive claims for value-liberalism and postliberalism, and then comparing the two in light of reason.
A few final notes: I think we can agree that certain strands of value-liberalism do make religious claims, i.e., claims that are not discernible via natural reasoning and therefore require belief/faith/supernatural revelation/religious pre-commitment. Among these I would include the soft religious claims that all men are created equal, and the beliefs of being endowed by God with inalienable rights. This is category 2.
But I would also include category 3, which include claims like gender is a social construct, women and men are the same in every respect, there is no such thing as man and woman, etc. These claims are not only not discoverable by natural reasoning, they are flatly contradicted by it. As such, I would call these "religious" claims (which I know you disagree). At the very least, they are not held dispassionately, but with a religious fervor. While the coercive measures taken certainly fall short of burning at the stake (for now), they are still given coercive power through punitive measures such as job loss, reputational damage, fines, etc., enacted through public, quasi-public, and private entities.
And a final point about the coercive measures taken: Our society still fines, jails, and even executes for violations of value judgments. So I'm not sure it's true to say we are not as coercive as societies that burned at the stake. That being said, we do not currently burn for violations of what I have called liberal "religious" beliefs.
I think the point of the postlberals is that *some* moral infrastructure is inevitable. Whether or not one wants to call it a religion is beside the point. No government can exist without fundamental commitments about what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful, or at least principled limits on what is acceptable. Take, for example, Locke's view of religous tolerance. It depends on the idea that the government has no jurisdiction over religion and that citizens are free to enter or leave religious communities as they wish free of government coercion. But what about children? Is it not contrary to Locke's idea of freedom that children, in certain religious traditions, must undergo rituals that either change their bodies without their consent (e.g., circumcision) or are juridically committed to a religous authority they did not explicitly choose (e.g., Catholic baptism). One way that the secular state may secure the childrens' religious liberty is to legally ban such rituals. But how is that not taking sides on a metaphysical/moral question about which some religions offer an answer?
Yes, that is the point of the post-liberal critique. And yes, whether it is a religion is beside the point, so much so that it distracts from the interesting point. So I agree there. But what I'm interested in these days are non-neutralist or quasi-neutralist liberalisms that rest on substantive value assumptions. It turns out that's most liberals historically. The neutralitarian strand of liberalism is limited to a much smaller number of figures and is only dominant in the US.
“No government can exist without fundamental commitments about what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful, or at least principled limits on what is acceptable.”
I think the strong form of this is without the disjunctive form, and it’s closer to the “no alternative” argument that Kevin seems to have in mind.
I find pointing out and naming the argument distinctly helps. However, isn’t this exactly what the postliberal argument wants? That is, the argument is supposed to be a retort to liberalisms when they claim neutrality. So, to ask a postliberal “which values and what impositions are inevitable” is just to further the conversation they want to have.
At any rate, I found the post very helpful!
If you view postliberals as trying to have conversations with liberals, then you're right. But, in my experience, tons of postliberals are utterly uninterested in conversations with liberals.
Ah, fair enough!
Yes! The postliberals I'm familiar with (perhaps a non-representative sample) often seem to be arguing as follows. They make good arguments to the effect that it's impossible for the state to be fully neutral on questions of value, the good life, morality, etc. (True!) But they then seem to assume something like an "in for a penny, in for a pound" principle, and so to treat these arguments as a reason to reject the idea that there's anything in the ballpark of neutrality worth treating as an ideal. In effect, they presuppose that the only interesting neutrality principles are extremely strong and general ones, so that once they're disposed of, there are no principled objections to treating state institutions as having the legitimate function of inculcating highly specific, sectarian moral visions (whether on the right or the left).
This approach fails to engage with what are, to my mind, the most plausible, attractive versions of ideals of neutrality.
This is a false dichotomy. Liberalism doesnt claim to be one mere concrete order which maintains homogeneity through repression, which I take the second horn to be. It claims to be true. This political liberalism or neutralist liberalism that you advocate isn't possible. There needs to be a rich conception of reality the good life etc even stronger than perfectionist libs care to admit. This comes very close to being a religion. Libs will categorize Coke the company as a religion so it isn't improper to call liberalism a religion. It is a totalizing way of life which cannot just like the church in the medieval ages allow dissent or even non adherence in the so called private sphere. A couple of years ago, I had been institutionalized for a mental illness due to my trauma history; when I was there I shared various biological and demographic markers. When I told the dr I chose not to be sexually act as a young fit adult male, the last thing on his mind was tolerance and respecting my choices in my private life. In a time of great need, he more or less said that it wasn't a meaningful way to live life and that it is understandable even probable that I would want to kill myself. He wanted to help me change. When I went through the complaint process, the nurse who I reported it to laughed at me implying that it didn't happen or I was in the wrong. There was no further way to appeal. I was institutionalized so if I went to court there would be no likelihood that they would take my word against the hospitals word. These people have no desire to live in peace with us. I am not a violent person so I dont plan on trying to overthrow them or commit violence. I am just looking to move someplace else; the place were I was born and raised won't even let me go to the hospital in peace and will tell me that they are respecting me. Fuck them. It is simply not possible to have a meaningfully pluralistic society even in the private sphere; if there are not deep wide ranging agreements on how society works even in the deepest parts of people's private lives people cannot live together in peace. Unless there are deep common bounds even language breaks down. Wittgenstein showed this in his later works. Liberalism doesnt currently burn "heretics" because they dont need to. Even historically libs have been willing to burn "heretics," in Unnatural Frenchmen one can see quite a few examples of liberals murdering people because they chose not to be sexually active. I understand the appeal of a pluralistic open society with private spheres so people can do what they chose even if they dont harm others but it simply isn't possible and it has never existed.
excellent.
I guess I'm a bit puzzled by the "not interesting" hand-wave: what makes something "interesting"?
My impression is that, to the extent a state enforces or might enforce laws that touch and concern normative human affairs, the state coercively imposes some values over and against others. And since every state makes and enforces laws that touch and concern normative human affairs, every state commits itself to promoting some values and demoting others. Every state mechanism of coercion is and must be normatively valenced, if you will. This would be a banal observation but for the fact that genuine disagreement about fundamental moral matters not only exists in our liberal republic but is rife to the point of endangering effective governance. Why does this matter to the postliberal? Unless we equivocate about concepts like fairness and justice, we have to say that liberalism at least implicitly presupposes ubiquitous if not universal consensus about fundamental, action-guiding moral principles, a state of affairs that does not currently obtain.
Kevin, thanks again for taking the postliberal and integralist arguments seriously. I see three main issues with your account above.
1. Postliberalism Is Not Inherently Integralist
Integralism seeks some level of church-state cooperation or state subservience to church or some use of state power to uphold religious truths. Postliberalism, on the other hand, is much more broad. It is simply a rejection of the liberal order. I think you could safely put all right-wing ideologies into the postliberal camp. For instance, Italian fascism is a hard rejection of liberalism, but it was not integralist (it put the state above the Church). Thinkers like Spangler and Evola were hugely influential in right wing thought, and neither was religious in the traditional understanding of the word. I highly recommend Matthew Rose's "A World After Liberalism" for an accounting of modern anti-liberal, anti-Christian thought. The point is, I think it would be more accurate for you to treat postliberalism and integralism separately, as integralism is either a subset of, or in a venn diagram with, postliberalism.
2. The No Alternative Objection Is Not the Primary Argument of Postliberals.
Postliberals broadly have a positive accounting of their position, and see liberalism (or an excessive liberalism) as a deviation from the healthy and normal politics that proceeded it. So rather than arguing from liberalism to some alternative, they argue from first principles to a rejection of liberalism. This is an important distinction, as you cannot defeat the first-principles arguments by taking down a No Alternative Objections account. This is not the place to present all arguments from first principles, but I would point you broadly to Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas's political writings (among countless others in the Western tradition, up until the time of Locke, Hume, Mill, when modern liberalism seemingly took shape).
3. Even If the No Alternative Objection Were the Primary Argument of Postliberals, It Has More Force Than This Post Indicates
The postliberal No Alternative objection is that 'All political regimes, no matter what shape they take, must, by their very nature, make *truth/value* claims imposed through some level of coercion.' I think your failure to distinguish between postliberalism and integralism hurts your case here, because you are tackling the more narrow claim that 'All political regimes must impose *religious beliefs* through some level of coercion.' It doesn't help that you also conflate "values" with "religion."
I think we can both agree that there are values that are not primarily religious. For instance, the truth/value claim that a state should stay neutral in religious matters. Or the truth/value claim that the ideal form of government is democratic. Or that a constitutional order should be upheld. On this charge, liberalism is just as beholden to truth/value claims and coercion as postliberal regimes.
However, the case is even worse for liberalism, because it not only makes truth/value claims that are discoverable via natural reasoning and require no religious pre-commitments, it also makes religious claims, specifically those derived from a broadly Christian ethos. These would be the claims that all men are created equal, that all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, for instance.
And it gets worse. Not only is the academic/ideological version of liberalism religious in certain of its claims, liberalism in practice is every bit as religious as a hard integralist state, with the power apparatus coercing people to abide by the conclusions of feminism, transgenderism, pan-sexualism, and so forth.
Conclusion
Postliberalism is broader than integralism and therefore requires distinct treatment from integralism, which this post failed to provide. Further, the no alternative argument is not the primary argument of postliberals. But even if it were, this post fails to adequately address it, as liberalism is as committed to truth/value claims as postliberalism, and even as committed to certain religious claims as integralism, at least in practice today.
Hi Blake, thanks for the engagement! I don't think my post implies that I'm focused on integralism. I am thinking in terms of views that include the Rose book. Second, let's say that the main postliberal *objection* to liberalism is the No Alternative Objection. I know postliberals all have accounts of a substantive good and that they bring that theory to the table to critique liberalism, often some form of Aristotelian-Thomism. But in popular rhetoric, the No Alternative Objection is what people lead with in order to sell post-liberal ideas.
On your final point, it seems at times you're arguing for a large {y} (you allow values in the set). But then you equate liberalism with a religion, for which there is now no need, since you let values in {y}. That's good because liberalism is not a religion, and certainly not in virtue of the fact that it shares commitments with Christianity or that Christianity introduced assumptions liberals took on.
I also think you've misunderstood the liberal tradition. Neutralist, post-metaphysical liberalism is only a minor strand in the liberal tradition. And these non-neutralist views are manifestly not "every bit as religious" as a hard integralist state. For instance, Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism defense of liberalism is miles away from being a religion. Societies do enforce value commitments - no liberal I know of denies this - and our society is becoming less liberal because elites are adopting more aggressive forms of egalitarianism. But the idea that our society is as coercive as societies that once burned heretics alive is far-fetched.
I agree with you that some form of the No Alternative objection is an important argument for debates between liberalism and postliberalism, even if I would say that it is neither the primary argument For postliberalism, nor the primary argument Against liberalism. I also assumed you had integralism in mind with all the references to religion in the post, but granted your main point seems to apply equally to broader postliberal considerations.
I was trying to address liberalism in stages, from 1) broad value claims coupled with coercion to 2) quasi/soft religious claims coupled with coercion, to 3) hard religious claims coupled with coercion. As you say, the first category is fairly uninteresting, as all regimes do this (unless you try to take a true neutralist/pluralist position). But categories 2 and 3 are more narrow. I still think category 1 is worth addressing insofar as it concerns objections from liberals to postiberalism that hinge on the mistaken belief that the problem with postliberalism is that it envisions government coercion for value claims. So if both liberals and postliberals agree that this is normal governance, we can move on to your main argument.
The main argument now becomes, I think: There are many alternatives to value-neutral liberalism that are not postliberal, so merely asserting the falsity of value-neutral liberalism doesn't prove postliberalism. To that, I think everyone must agree. At that point, we have to start looking at substantive claims for value-liberalism and postliberalism, and then comparing the two in light of reason.
A few final notes: I think we can agree that certain strands of value-liberalism do make religious claims, i.e., claims that are not discernible via natural reasoning and therefore require belief/faith/supernatural revelation/religious pre-commitment. Among these I would include the soft religious claims that all men are created equal, and the beliefs of being endowed by God with inalienable rights. This is category 2.
But I would also include category 3, which include claims like gender is a social construct, women and men are the same in every respect, there is no such thing as man and woman, etc. These claims are not only not discoverable by natural reasoning, they are flatly contradicted by it. As such, I would call these "religious" claims (which I know you disagree). At the very least, they are not held dispassionately, but with a religious fervor. While the coercive measures taken certainly fall short of burning at the stake (for now), they are still given coercive power through punitive measures such as job loss, reputational damage, fines, etc., enacted through public, quasi-public, and private entities.
And a final point about the coercive measures taken: Our society still fines, jails, and even executes for violations of value judgments. So I'm not sure it's true to say we are not as coercive as societies that burned at the stake. That being said, we do not currently burn for violations of what I have called liberal "religious" beliefs.