Critics of liberalism have never been in short supply. In our day Simon Heffer, Peter Hitchens, Melanie Philips, Roger Scruton, and John Gray have each produced intelligent and challenging critiques of our age’s dominant ideology. Only the last of this quintet could claim to be making his critique from within the ideological fold, however. For the most part, when liberalism is criticised, it is by those who are irreconcilably opposed to it in principle, so blunting their critique.
Mark Garnett, a politics lecturer at Leicester University, is from the John Gray fold of critics. His short and entertaining study of modern liberalism’s in-built contradictions is fuelled not by a loathing of liberalism but by a disappointment at what it has become.
Taking his cue from Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated 1958 lecture on liberty, which drew a distinction between negative freedom (the absence of obstacles imposed by other people) and positive freedom (the possession of attributes and resources that allow us to enjoy our negative freedom), Garnett focuses on what he calls ‘fleshed-out’ and ‘hollowed-out’ liberals.
The first acknowledge the need for positive freedom. They are motivated by a vision of human well-being, treating freedom as a means rather than an ends, and shaping policy and culture accordingly.
The latter have tacitly abandoned this original vision of human flourishing in favour of ‘public-choice theory’, in which everyone is assumed to act out of short-term self-interest. A hollowed-out liberal is one who praises and protects the process of liberalism without any real sense of what the ensuing freedom is for.
The result is the snake of the title – a beast that, having done away with all ideas of collective flourishing, has nothing left to feed on but itself. Garnett examines briefly the parlous state of the media, politics and public services to support his thesis. His evidence is persuasive but too brief and too polemical to be convincing.
Nevertheless, he makes a number of telling points, not least in his observation that had Mill or Milton seen where their passionate defence of liberty would lead, they would have been horrified. “If by some medical miracle Milton were still living… and heard his passionate defence of the printed word being used to justify the contents of today’s tabloids, his only consolation would be his inability to read them.”
Garnett’s argument is, in some respects, a modern reworking of Paul’s idea of permissible and beneficial freedom in 1 Corinthians. The difference – that Paul was writing to the body of Christ whereas Garnett is writing about a diverse and historically contingent society – is an important one but does not affect the relevance of his short book to Christians.
All too easily we turn liberty into a god. When it fails us, as false gods so often do, we need the courage to turn our back rather than argue we need more of it. The long and fearfully dark shadow cast by 20th century totalitarianism means that, as a society, we are unlikely to commit this act of deicide in the near future (and when Garnett suggests IQ tests as a ‘satisfactory indicator of competence’ to vote, we will be glad of it).
Yet, the dehumanising spirit in so much of our press; the shallow, PR-driven nature of so much political ‘debate’; the apathetic yet arrogant tendencies of much of the electorate; and the slow erosion of a ‘public service’ ethos should give us cause to question our present attitudes to liberalism and freedom. As Garnett warns, ‘the longer we go without changing our ways, the more dramatic the transformation will have to be.’
The Snake that swallowed its tail: Some contradictions in modern liberalism by Mark Garnett is published by Imprint Academic (2004)
This review first appeared in Third Way.
