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August 14, 2006
One strand of liberalism----the dominant one in academia?---stresses universality. Philosophers like Hobbes, Kant, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, purport to deduce the ideal regime from this or that set of a priori premises, are trying to accomplish the impossible --utopia, or a prescription for an ideal regime free of conflict.
Doesn't this kind of liberalism come to grief on the multiple value systems of a multicultural society? And more specificially, on the particularism of various cultures with their ethical plurality and the resulting value conflicts? So argued Isaiah Berlin.
Australia unlike Indonesia and Israel, does not solve its ethnic problems by more or less brutal partition --it favours the device of cultural and ethical pluralism. Does not political life demand that we make radical choices between rival goods and evils? Isn't there a tension or a contradiction between liberalism and value pluralism.
On the one hand, liberals are committed to the universality of basic liberal values---eg., a commitment to a minimum area of negative liberty for any decent human life, and in the hostility towards authoritarian systems of politics.On the other hand 'value pluralism is ' the idea that human goods are irreducibly plural, frequently incompatible, and sometimes incommensurable with one another. The contradiction arises here: when incommensurable goods clash, the choices we must make are problematic because there is no single right way of ranking such values or trading them off against one another. Yet liberalism assumes the universality of liberal values.
Today, amidst the war on terror, we find that this choice is framed in terms of them and us. Islam is the enemy within, a religion that insidiously undermines Western “values” and must be stopped. That implies dumping multiculturalism. Does cultural conservatism imply dumping liberalism?
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Where does the plurality come in? That is a marxist cliche. Hobbes is no pluralist: he basically starts with a few more or less obvious assumptions-- people need to eat, for one, and that without society men are at war (a bit more realistic than the likes of Locke and Rousseau)---then proceeds to construct a fairly workable political and economic Weltanschauung, without recourse to theology or metaphysics. It is the continentalist assumption that somehow Hobbes failed, when a Hobbesian politics (or Rawlsian) has never really been implemented: Jefferson perhaps had a Hobbesian (and agrarian) sort of perspective (more Locke really), but in many senses Hobbes is quite a socialist, and not liberal, though without the extreme statism of Marx. Yes the Sovereign of Leviathan has some problems: but in theory he merely enforces covenants freely consented to. Hobbes at least begins with some form of entitlement and biological realism, rather than from rather dubious Hegelian concepts.