Working Definition episode 6: Liberalism, with Michael Ignatieff

[This transcript was generated by AI, so while I’ve checked it over, it may contain small errors.]

REBECCA

Hi, I’m Rebecca Lowe, and welcome to Working Definition, the new philosophy podcast in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts, with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.

Today I’m joined by Michael Ignatieff. He’s a university professor at the Central European University in Vienna, where he was previously the Rector. Other leadership roles include the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2008 to 2011. He’s also the writer of many great books, including Fire and Ashes, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, The Ordinary Virtues, and most recently, On Consolation. Today, he’s going to be talking with me about liberalism.

Thanks so much for joining me, Michael.

MICHAEL

Glad to be here, Rebecca.

REBECCA

So, you’ve written about liberalism. You are Isaiah Berlin’s biographer. You’ve run as a liberal candidate. And I think it’s fair to say that you also live it. I mean, knowing you, I think you are a liberal in your everyday life. That’s right, isn’t it?

MICHAEL

I — I try to be.

REBECCA

[Laughter] Okay, so I think there’s a question about what liberal means in different countries. Clearly it’s different. I’m in America at the moment, and if you say the word liberal, it has these different connotations from if I say it to somebody in England. I think it’s also the case in Australia, perhaps in Canada.

This seems to me a downstream question of the more theoretical question about what liberalism is, that we’ll come to in a moment. My guess is something like, though, what people understand by liberalism — even though it’s hard to define — it seems maybe that’s more steady across different countries. Whereas liberal feels like it has these different connotations.

Is that fair? Am I just making things too complicated?

MICHAEL

I think it’s important to start by noticing how differently this word sounds in different political contexts. Liberalism has always taken on the coloration of its environment and its history. One of the most dramatic examples of that was when I was in Paris in the 80s, when a lot of people were still socialists and communists.

And when they said to me, “Ah, vous êtes un libéral,” that meant I believed in the market red in tooth and claw, I was the most extreme kind of neoliberal, I really wanted to smash up what they called l’état providence, the state welfare system, all that stuff. Their vision of what it was to be a liberal, I simply couldn’t recognise it.

But that has to do with very deep things anchored in the French tradition. I’m a liberal in the Tocquevillian sense. There used to be — Benjamin Constant is a hero of mine. These are French liberals, but boy, they had really dropped out of sight by the 1980s. [laughter]

REBECCA

Do you think this is partly because the 80s in France are quite famous for being quite a time of high tax rates. So is it partly just because being a liberal means, you know, it’s not a very high bar to be in favour of the market when a country is quite so socialist leaning? Or is that just a bad reading?

MICHAEL

I just think it reflects the enormous intellectual and even moral ascendancy of the communist tradition and that tradition on the left, for whom a libéral is a defender of capitalism in ways that Marxism finds pathetic, historically ignorant, and morally repugnant. [laughter] And in some sense, I welcome the charge.

That is to say, I think liberalism has had a particular relation to the capitalist market because our first organising principle is liberty. And let’s go on from that. We actually think that there’s a strong connection between political freedom, moral freedom, and market freedom.

We think if you suppress market freedom, you get socialist brotherhood and unity, you get 80 years of communism. And we know that the suppression of market freedoms had devastating effects, or they’re all interconnected, devastating effects on political and moral freedom. In a sense, the communist-influenced left of the 1980s in Paris weren’t entirely wrong.

And so my view is that, you know, it’s a founding element of liberalism, really since Adam Smith makes it explicit in 1776, and David Hume is part of it too. And so I wouldn’t make that the exclusive definitional element of liberalism. I’d actually make liberty the definition. But from a primary commitment to liberty above all else, belief in market freedom follows.

Excuse me, there’s a cat in the way here…

REBECCA

Fantastic cat…

MICHAEL

I want to introduce you to Mimi, who has no views on liberalism, whatever, so she has to get out of here…

REBECCA

That’s a great opera name.

MICHAEL

That’s right.

REBECCA

So you say a primary commitment to freedom. Sometimes there’s this question, isn’t there, about — I think most people want to say that liberalism is value pluralist, so it embraces more than one value, some set of values. But there is this question about the role that freedom plays within that.

Is it the first value among equals? Is it the most important value? Is it related to other values in some sense that means that it is at the center?

MICHAEL

I think we’re value pluralists precisely because we put freedom first, if that’s not a contradiction. That is, we think liberalism is a political doctrine and liberalism — a liberal thinks that we just disagree about ultimate questions. And our preference, our ordinate, our defining preference is for liberty, but others in the political community will not see it that way. And so the business of politics is to adjudicate conflict.

And I think that — I’m a biographer of Isaiah Berlin, and I think Isaiah Berlin didn’t just emphasise the pluralism of values. What he was focusing on was the political problem that follows from that, which is that our disagreements are not just tactical. Our disagreements are not just strategic. Our disagreements are not even identity-based. They’re value conflicts, and a liberal’s approach to value conflict is to put liberty first.

But I don’t think liberals believe — certainly Isaiah didn’t believe that there was a grounded philosophical root that would justify the priority placed on liberty. I think some of the priority put on liberty is prudential. That is, it just, it produces a society where less people get hurt, less people suffer unmerited violence and oppression, would be the case.

But is there some, you know, granite-based philosophical principle that justifies the priority of freedom? I don’t think there is in liberalism, or certainly I haven’t come upon it. And so, you know, my sense of liberalism is that it’s a doctrine primarily concerned with one question, which is the risk to human beings of the abuse of power.

It’s a doctrine that believes the purpose of political order is to enhance the freedom of as many people as possible. And it believes that the chief threat to human freedom is power and its abuse. And so if you ask in a sentence what liberalism is to me, it’s power checking power to keep the people free.

That’s what it’s about. And that has, you know, would be how I would bring liberalism together as a political doctrine.

REBECCA

Yes, so some people make a distinction, like Samuel Freeman the Rawls scholar, for instance, makes this distinction between a philosophical conception of liberalism, and then liberalism as a way of organising institutions or something like that.

This sounds to me — I think it’s actually kind of combining the both, but I think it’s maybe more towards the second.

MICHAEL

Yes, I put a lot of emphasis on liberalism as a practical political doctrine because I’m actually, truth be told, not a political philosopher. I’m a historian of political ideas, and I’m sort of anti-foundational because I’m a historian. That is, I think the foundations of liberalism have shifted a lot over the last couple of centuries.

Locke, our founding father, had a deep religious faith, for example, and that grounded a lot of his what we would call liberal conceptions, but those religious conceptions don’t ground liberalism for the most part today. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is another question. But it just means I’m not anti-foundational so much as convinced that all foundations are historical.

REBECCA

I think there’s certainly a sense when we talk about liberalism, we can talk about it descriptively as a theory that’s evolved over time.

And when we talk about it in that sense, I think it’s perfectly fine to say something like, it’s a framework or a set of frameworks — a framework with some variants — aimed at addressing politico-philosophical questions, or something, with a central commitment to freedom.

And then we don’t have to do the foundational work in the definition. We can just say, hey, this is just a description of this as a…

MICHAEL

Right, right.

REBECCA

Something like that.

MICHAEL

I put a lot of emphasis on restraining power. I just think that that illuminates an issue that I think has not got the attention it deserves, which is that the liberalism of my lifetime is essentially Rooseveltian and Attleean liberalism. Franklin Roosevelt, Clem Attlee, the New Deal, ‘33 to ‘45, and then the creation of the British welfare state and the European welfare states.

The liberalism I grew up in is the liberalism created by what you could call the liberal state. Empowering, liberating to some point, but taking an ever greater percentage of the revenue of citizens in order to promote various social goals. And I think that for a long time liberalism didn’t ask tough enough questions about the size, scope, power and ambition of the liberal state.

And one of the reasons I put so much emphasis on power checking power to keep the people free is not merely that, in my view, the contemporary administration in Washington, and in Hungary, and everywhere else, is massively destructive to the checks and balances necessary to safeguard freedom.

But a second issue, not often talked about by liberals, is whether the liberal state has got too big, too bossy, too expensive, and ultimately too violative of freedom. And some of that exploded over COVID. You know, I was in favour of the COVID restrictions, because I just thought the science was clear and et cetera.

REBECCA

We also just didn’t have enough knowledge in the beginning as well. I think there was a knowledge problem. And sometimes in that kind of immediate collective action problem moment, even if you believe in bottom-up solutions more generally to collective action problems, if you just don’t have information, it’s hard to see how you don’t have some kind — you sometimes require some recourse to a centralised solution, I think.

MICHAEL

Yes, but at the same time, the anger about COVID restrictions — even when I think the anger is either scientifically misplaced or tendentious or something — there’s an issue there, which is what kind of state power does scientific knowledge about infectious disease warrant. What forms of restriction of freedom are justifiable?

And I don’t think anybody is entirely comfortable with the balance that the liberal state observed in that question. Some people felt that, you know, the COVID restrictions went on far too long, the state overreached, the state mishandled it in the sense that it came in too late. There’s been a recent report in Britain, savagely critical of the government. So all of this raises a problem for liberals.

We want to have a state that puts granite under our feet and protects us. But we don’t want a state that stomps out our freedom. And that’s an issue that exists for us separate from and distinct from our, I think, justified resistance to the destructive impact of right-wing centralisation of power in the United States and elsewhere.

REBECCA

I think this is a great point. Actually, I do think that we’re starting to cohere around something like an institutional theory of liberalism, in which power checks power, you have a good institutional settlement, you have transparency, and then you’re able to ask questions in the moment and afterwards about practices that have been undertaken. Something like that?

MICHAEL

Yep, indeed. So, that’s where I come down. I think this is a moment under which liberalism is kind of under siege.

REBECCA

Yeah.

MICHAEL

And, you know, we need to respond to that. But we need to respond to it honestly by looking at the liberal achievement very critically, and asking whether we always, whether we were on the side of freedom, or whether we gave the state too much power. That’s, I guess, what I’m...

REBECCA

There are sometimes these questions also, I think, about over-delegation. I’m quite interested in this, philosophically. I mean, you said some things about enhancing the freedom of the people or empowering the people. I think that certainly can be something the state can do legitimately, but it can go too far.

And it can go too far not just in the sense that harms might occur if the state overreaches. But also there are things that we should do for ourselves as the kind of creatures we are. Like, we should be involved in decision making, not just for epistemic reasons, but because it’s our right, because that’s what we do.

MICHAEL

Sure.

REBECCA

And that can sometimes be really difficult. Sometimes we want, particularly in difficult moments, somebody to come along and give an answer. But as liberals, we have to push against that, I think, while still collaborating.

It’s a question of how do you collaborate in such a way that you don’t over-delegate. I think that’s a really, really hard question at the heart of liberalism.

MICHAEL

Well, I think there’s a crisis of representation in liberal democracy, which I think you’re talking about.

I was a member of the House of Commons of Canada for close to six years. I was supposed to represent my constituents. We were in opposition the whole time, which was an unusual situation for the Canadian Liberal Party, which is by vocation a ruling party, a governing party. Just my luck to be in opposition the whole time.

But I caught a tremendous sense of disconnection between the people and the representatives. I caught a tremendous crisis of representation. You have to be an elected MP to understand just how poorly even the most conscientious MP represents his or her people. It’s a problem. And one of the things that I think liberalism wants to reinvent is ways of listening and learning from the people.

And also, this implies what you were saying, pushing power back down much more than we’ve done. The British state is ridiculously centralised.

REBECCA

Yes!

MICHAEL

The Canadian state’s very heavily centralised. Decisions are — we’re using the consent of the people to basically expropriate decision-making power from them. And that’s a hard problem to fix.

I mean, there’s some of the things that I’ve seen that seem to me and everybody talks about it, are the citizens’ assemblies that seem to me have a tremendous potential, especially with all the technologies that we’ve got. There just isn’t any reason why we can’t sit a lot of citizens down and listen to them much more carefully.

The current instrument we have is opinion polls, and they’re basically terrible.

REBECCA

I do think sometimes there’s a concern with citizens’ assemblies, at least how I’ve seen them be modeled. And I agree that with new forms of technology, then you could maybe get past some of these problems. But there’s a bit of a kind of selection problem, whereby the people who end up taking part in these things are people who have the time, or are interested in the things. And then you don’t get a kind of representative sample.

What you really ideally want, of course, is for everybody to be involved in all the decisions that affect them, or that they have a right to have a say in. But people are also busy and it’s hard to coordinate these things. So what we do is we delegate and then we get back to the delegation question. [laughter]

MICHAEL

Sure.

REBECCA

But I do think there’s some really interesting work going on, people trying to work out how it is that we come up with better ways of doing democracy for want of it.

Because some of the frustrations — I think many of the frustrations about democracy are not frustrations with democracy qua democracy. They’re with democratic institutions and how they’re designed. And these questions, like you say, of how they’re supposed to enable us to have a say, or to be freely participating.

And it doesn’t feel, I think, for a lot of people, as if that’s the case.

MICHAEL

I think that’s true. And I’d add something else, which is that we have a lot of self-governing institutions in our societies. You know, universities, for example.

REBECCA

Great example.

MICHAEL

And the attack by the current American administration on institutional autonomy and academic freedom has been one of the really shocking things I’ve seen in my life. And this is not — I know when professors say that, it sounds like I’m just speaking on behalf of my trade union. I’m actually making a different point.

You don’t have a free society, a liberal society, unless you have institutions that are self-governing. And this is an old idea that goes back to Montesquieu more than anybody. The idea that democracy is self-government. Democracy is a democracy of democracies.

REBECCA

Yeah.

MICHAEL

That is, you have lots of institutions, down to the PTA, private clubs, this and that, professional associations that govern themselves, provided they’re consistent with the law. And a government — a liberal government, leaves them alone.

And instead you’ve got the current administration basically saying, we’ll give you back the research funding that you’ve had for 80 years, provided you sign up to the following 15 items. And some of these are absolutely violative of First Amendment. They’re violative of everything that has defined academic freedom for 80 years.

And this isn’t — I guess I’m saying something obvious. This isn’t an attack on universities. This is also an attack on democracy, as I think liberals have done quite a good job in explaining.

One of the problems with the attack on universities is that far too many members of the general public think, oh, that’s a problem for professors. I didn’t go to university, it’s not my problem. Believe me, it’s everybody’s problem when free self-governing institutions are bullied, knocked around, closed, shut down, or subject to ransom demands, by the state.

And it’s the same problem also with the media. If you, as president of the United States, get up and basically ad hominem, or ad feminem, attack a journalist doing her job. One of the problems that happens is that people think, oh, that’s a problem for journalists. Uh-uh. That’s a problem for everybody. A free press is one of those independent, self-governing institutions, without which democracy simply ceases to function.

And we’re in the middle of the most radical attack on plural sources of counter power that I’ve seen in my lifetime. And the effect on me is to make me a ferociously committed liberal.

REBECCA

Yes.

MICHAEL

Because liberalism understands if you don’t have these counter powers, you have tyranny.

REBECCA

I think that’s right.

So actually, I think as well as describing the current situation really well, I think you’ve also given a list of things which seem like they are, or could be, kind of constituent parts of the liberal state.

You’ve talked about self-governing institutions, including the free press, including educational institutions. You talked about being consistent with the law, which kind of brings us onto a question of the rule of law, which some people would also typically say to be an essential part of a liberal state. You talked about democracy.

There are interesting questions about the relation between democracy and liberalism. I’m one of these people who thinks that they have to go together, though I think they’re separate. But Josh Ober, who I think you also know, he recently came on my podcast, and he’s a fantastic historian and political theorist. He has this quite unusual view, where he thinks that liberalism can be separate from democracy. He thinks democracy came first and can also stand alone.

I don’t share that view. I think probably his view of liberalism is too broad, which is why — he has quite a Rawlsian view of liberalism — which is why I think he thinks that democracy can’t necessarily hold it. I think if you take a much narrower view of liberalism, then you’re probably going to be aligning with some things he thinks are within democracy.

But do you think — could you have a liberal state that wasn’t democratic?

MICHAEL

I remember some passage of Rawls in which he kind of does a thought experiment about that. It’s a kind of benign monarchy in which there aren’t representative institutions but private freedom in the market is allowed, private this, private that.

I remember jumping back 200 years, a wonderful essay by David Hume. In which, he went after all the British radicals of the 18th century who said, well, you know, France is a tyranny because it’s a monarchy and doesn’t have democratic institutions, and Britain does. And he very smartly pointed out that in fact the French monarchy was a rule-bound legally-bound institution. It was not free government, but it was regular government, I think he said.

And I think Rawls and Hume are both doing this experiment. Can you have something that is liberal in the sense that the power is limited, but it’s not limited by democracy? Well yeah, maybe. But I have zero interest in living in a liberal society that is not a democracy, and do think they’re entailed one way or the other.

REBECCA

I struggle to see how the kinds of political rights and freedoms that seem to be necessary to liberalism, and necessary to a good society, could be in place if you didn’t have democratic institutions.

MICHAEL

I don’t see how those rights and freedoms can be protected unless you have democratic agency. And then there’s some moral reasons as well.

REBECCA

Exactly.

MICHAEL

The reason you have democracy is not simply as a kind of instrumental prudential set of practices that allow people to vote. It also is expressive of the unique moral importance of each one of us.

REBECCA

Yeah.

MICHAEL

And I think that when you’ve seen, as I’ve seen — and I think we’ve seen it on television — Afghan women in, whenever those first elections, coming out of the voting booths with their fingers purple, because when you vote it marks your finger so you don’t vote twice. And these women are holding up their thumbs, their fingers, in a way that indicates they understand exactly the symbolic importance of what’s just happened. A procedure has said to them, you matter.

And that aspect of democracy is, you forget that at your peril. And that’s why I don’t like — I think it’s ingenious of Josh Ober and other people to separate the two. But I just don’t think…

REBECCA

It’s also useful for thinking about what democracy is, right?

MICHAEL

That’s true.

REBECCA

I think that’s why his thought experiment is so important.

But I think one thing you just said — you said about the moral importance of each of us. And I think this also speaks to what I see anyway as liberalism’s inherent commitment to equality.

I think this central liberal idea, which is that we’re all equally free — because if I’m just free because I’m me, it doesn’t really mean anything. It then just comes back down to kind of power relations. I’m free because I’m me, but I’m free because I’m the same kind of thing that you are, therefore you’re free in the same way that I am.

I think this says that the kind of freedom that is the commitment at the heart of liberalism — even if we’re trying to take this quite descriptive sense of this as a theory that’s evolved across time — I feel like some kind of commitment to freedom being equally held is there. Which tells us something about relations between values. It might just be, I think some people want to say, that’s not really a commitment to equality, it’s a commitment to a kind of freedom.

I think it’s saying something about the interrelation between freedom and equality.

MICHAEL

But I would argue that the liberal idea of freedom is exactly as you describe it, but it is not committed to equality of outcomes in a social or economic sense.

REBECCA

Yeah.

MICHAEL

And this has been one of the huge historic arguments for 200 years. And it’s the battering ram that socialists and Marxists and Zohran Mamdani and everybody have made against liberalism forever, which is that you have a juridical conception of equality, a rights-based conception of equality.

REBECCA

And it’s a status — it’s a status focus on equality. It’s a relational sense in which…

MICHAEL

But the liberal response to that is that if you start using state power to level incomes, you end up pretty quickly in tyranny.

REBECCA

You just also get the Nozick problem of patterns.

MICHAEL

Sure.

REBECCA

You try to impose that, and then if people actually are free, the pattern disappears. You have the problem both of how do you impose it freely, and also you can’t maintain it. So it just, again, seems antithetical to the commitment to people being able to make their own choices. Being able to have their own needs and interests. Which mean that we require different levels of income, aside from just having the right to go and pursue that…

MICHAEL

That’s right.

But I think also the liberal problem with economic inequality is that it’s an inequality of power. The problem about the scandalous, astounding inequality of the world we’re in right now, where technologies are yielding these staggeringly disproportionate distributions to very few actors. The problem from a liberal perspective is that it confers inordinate and injust political influence and power, and also economic power, which is harmful, directly harmful to the rights and freedoms of others.

It’s not the fact that some people are richer than others that a liberal objects to! In fact, a liberal thinks that’s A, inevitable, not such a bad thing, and sometimes a reward for, you know, a lot of hard work. Fine. But the problem is power that then is used, economic power that is used, to purchase political influence and essentially oppress fellow citizens.

And so the liberal focus on power seems to me to be crucial. Because I think there are egalitarians out there who don’t like the fact that Elon Musk makes a trillion dollars. I don’t like it, but I don’t think — that’s not my problem. My problem is Elon Musk’s power and the way he uses it.

REBECCA

I think liberals — often in their attempts to persuade people who aren’t naturally of the disposition of understanding that some kind of equalisation of holdings is a bad idea, and also has dodgy moral underpinning. You can be opposed to the idea that somebody should come along and equalise holdings. But you can also be concerned about political rent-seeking of the kind that you’re talking.

MICHAEL

Yes, yes, exactly.

REBECCA

So Milton Friedman, for instance — I was recently reading Capitalism and Freedom, and he talks a lot about the relation between politics and economics. And he makes the point that under socialism, it’s really hard to organise, so it’s hard to instantiate political dissent, it’s hard to push for change. But he just doesn’t consider whether it’s the case that under capitalism there are any of those constraints!

Now, of course, it can be the case that there are many fewer constraints. But I don’t think you can really care about political rights unless, like you say, you at least ask the question about whether a really non-tight distribution of incomes has the risk of political rent-seeking. And then you can try to mitigate that thing.

Like you say, not because you’re concerned about the distribution, per se. But because you’re concerned about what that means for people’s access to political power.

MICHAEL

Yeah, I think, I mean, one way to think about this is to visualise it. In authoritarian societies, many of which are out there in the world today, power is stacked. That is, economic power gives you political power, gives you cultural power, gives you social power, gives you social prestige. It’s all in a single pipe.

And the liberal intuition about power is that the only way to guarantee the freedom of us all is to destack power. That is to do whatever we can to make sure that, you know, economic power is fine, you know, market preponderance is not necessarily a crime, except when it becomes a monopoly. And those who have inordinate or large amounts of economic power should not have correlative political power. And those who have political power should not get rich from the ownership of political power.

And then, you know, certain liberals also hope that we have a social system in which not all forms of social prestige and possibly cultural prestige and intellectual prestige go to those with money.

REBECCA

This comes back to Rawls, of course...

MICHAEL

We want a distribution of paths to merit and success that are not all funnelled into one system. And we are, we’ve got, when people call the current United States an oligarchy, what they’re trying to get at is the ways in which economic power confers political power, confers social power, confers cultural power, in ways that just mean there’s only one stack.

And it looks like Turkmenistan. I mean, this is not the way it ought to be.

REBECCA

That’s right. This does strike me, though, the way you talk about it — this is very Rawlsian. So first we have the commitment to political freedoms and rights. Then we have this concern about access to institutional positions. And then after that, we consider some sense of, like, distribution, or access to goods. But the lexical priority is in that order.

So you don’t get it the wrong way around, and think, no, we’ve just got to go in and try and equalise the money situation, and risk deteriorating people’s access to these more important goods like the protection of their rights, the protection of their freedoms. And like you say, their access to positions within the kind of political infrastructure.

MICHAEL

Yeah, yeah.

REBECCA

Rawls sometimes gets a bit of a bad rap these days. I have this view that Rawls is really underrated because — and whenever I say this to people, they think I’m crazy.

But so many philosophers are really down on Rawls. I think a lot of them just haven’t read Rawls very well. They want to find a way to be critical of him because he is still so influential. Everything is in the shadow of Rawls. So they want to find something new to say. So they say, well, Rawls didn’t do this. Rawls didn’t say this.

I mean, I disagree with quite a lot of Rawls, but I think he’s a genius. I think if there was a philosophical genius of the last century, I’d put Rawls above Wittgenstein.

MICHAEL

Well, that’s a major claim that I won’t even [laughter] — I will not comment on.

I mean, I think the contrast I always draw is between Isaiah Berlin who I loved, and I had very close relations with John Rawls for a while in the 50s and early 60s. But the contrast between a kind of intuitive, impulsive, historically minded guy who had a couple of really brilliant intuitions — that’s Berlin. And a man who is an absolutely relentlessly systematic thinker.

REBECCA

I love that. He brought rigour back to political philosophy. This kind of analytic method for the first time in…

MICHAEL

Yeah, the systematic character of it is one of the reasons that he will be read in the next century, because it’s a corpus and it speaks to such a range of things.

You’re telling me I sound Rawlsian, I don’t feel — I’m unapologetically Berlinian. I’ve never really seen myself as Rawlsian, although I talk about him all the time and have learned an enormous amount from him. And I think that some of what I’m saying about the destacking of power, I think, is a Rawlsian thing. And his sense of what has to come first, second and third and fourth is, I think, a very important part of this.

What is also striking, however, is that if you’ve been a practical liberal politician who puts your name on a ballot, Rawls is nowhere. In the academy and in political philosophy, he is still, I think, the reigning monarch of liberal thought. But if you move into the hurly-burly of the political arena, his influence is hard to see.

REBECCA

I had a quick question about Berlin, coming back to something you said earlier about conflicts of values. And then I wanted to finish by asking you a couple of questions about being a liberal in the political sphere, I suppose.

So, on the Berlin point, you noted about the conflict of values. I recently was rereading that Bernard Williams piece, Conflict of Values, in the nice Alan Ryan edited collection in honor of Isaiah Berlin. I love that book. And he talks about, on a classic Berlin view, values are plural, values are irreducible to each other, values can conflict.

And Williams agrees with this. But he also does this annoying thing of kind of setting aside the relevance of objective morality. He has some funny little line: I shall not pursue questions of that nature here. And I just wondered your take on Berlin and objective morality.

Because there’s that piece, I think his final piece for the New York Review of Books, where he explicitly says, look, I’m not a relativist. I’m talking about pluralism in a sense of multiple values. But I think there’s still a little bit of a question about the way he kind of grounds this objectivism. He says something to do with the nature of human beings, but then he says, but it could be like a bad kind of…

I mean, where do you stand on Berlin and objective morality?

MICHAEL

Well, I remember a kind of shocking afternoon, in which he performed the thought experiment of imagining how you would react to a person who, in conversation, would say, I really would like to stick pins in Rebecca Lowe.

I’d like to stick pins in Rebecca Lowe. And then you’d say, well, why would you want to do that? [laughter] And the man would say, well, I want to do that because I want to see what it feels like. And I’m, you know, very interested in, you know, if I push the needle in, what is the — does the skin resist if I push it?

And it was a — so there was a little example where Isaiah said, you know, basically if you had a conversation with a person like that, you would have reached the outer limit of the human. No, you would have gone beyond the outer reach. You would be dealing with a person who does not know what it is to be a human being. And that is a kind of frontier to moral judgement.

REBECCA

Right.

MICHAEL

He had a very strong view that there were some things you just should never do to another human being. And it wasn’t — it was probably a thin theory of the good, in the sense that it was, you know, don’t stick pins into Rebecca Lowe. [laughter] You know, don’t slap Rebecca Lowe.

REBECCA

Sounds quite right!

MICHAEL

Disagree with Rebecca, but don’t gratuitously humiliate her. And on and on. And I don’t think he was the slightest bit relativist about any of that.

What he thought was that, you know, he was obsessed, I think, with the conflict between equality and liberty. I mean, he just thought, because he watched the ascendancy of the liberal state through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, he strongly supported that. But he thought that there were moments where the promotion of equality by the liberal state impinged on liberty, and you couldn’t pretend that it didn’t.

And in that sense, politics was the adjudication of that battle. And in that sense, he thought as a liberal, his priority was liberty. He understood and accepted the validity of the equality claims, but he thought they were in conflict. And I’ve always thought that’s just correct. I mean, that’s the way it is.

It doesn’t make him a relativist. It simply means that all the good things that human beings want are not in non-contradictory relationship to themselves. They are objectively good things. Equality is objectively a good thing. You can’t have liberty without some equality. That’s another thing that seems as objectively true as we can make it. But these things conflict.

And so you’re into, and what I like about his view is, we’re into politics. Politics not just in the sense of official institutional politics, but the politics of personal life. That’s what it’s about. We talk, we argue, you come some of the way, I come some of the way. Or we say, Rebecca, I just can’t stand what you’re saying, everything seems to me completely wrong. But his sense of that was that this is life!

REBECCA

Absolutely.

MICHAEL

This is our life. But he doesn’t make him a relativist.

REBECCA

No, it seems to be deeply liberal. It’s saying, look, there are many ways to live your life, but there are some constraints. There are some bad ways. Sticking the pins in people, that’s a bad way. It’s not just bad because you’re doing bad to me by sticking the pins in me, but also it’s bad for you. Like you said, it’s not in line with being human. It’s not in line with the good.

I think sometimes people miss this about pluralism. They think pluralism means anything goes. I just don’t think that’s right. I think liberal pluralism is bounded by the good.

MICHAEL

Indeed.

REBECCA

It’s bounded by value considerations. There are multiple values, that doesn’t mean everything’s a value. And there are multiple ways to live your life, but that doesn’t mean that every way is a good way to live your life.

MICHAEL

Bingo.

REBECCA

Yeah, I think that’s right. So just a couple questions about, I guess, the moment and some political thoughts.

So, one thing, I was listening to this Philosophy Bites interview you did, and you were talking about how hard it is to be a politician. All of these kinds of things you come up against. So you have to do things that you might not have thought you would do. For instance, maybe you have to be economical with the truth. You have to do kind of myth-making. You have to make compromises. There’s the dirty hands problem, you talked about.

It strikes me that that’s going to be hard for any politician. But I think it’s going to be particularly hard for a liberal politician, somebody of a liberal disposition. Is that right? Did you find that particularly hard, do you think?

MICHAEL

I think so. I think it’s hard if you’ve done a lot of teaching of these dilemmas. Because you’re suddenly in the middle of them, and you can’t — it’s not as if you can do what many politicians do, which is pretend there’s no problem.

REBECCA

[laughter] Yeah, yeah, that’s right!

MICHAEL

You spent your whole life in a bunch of classrooms saying, there’s a problem! [laughter] And you’ve read, you know, you’ve had them read Walzer on dirty hands, and Sartre on dirty hands, and suddenly your hands are dirty. So I think in that sense...

I think there are liberals, however, who are just as ruthless as conservatives, just as ruthless as anybody else. But I do think there is one thing about liberal belief, which makes liberal belief and attitude towards political conviction distinctive. I think liberals are actually uncomfortable with the idea that politics could become a total identity.

REBECCA

Yes.

MICHAEL

Partly because liberals care so much about freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. And freedom is a very unruly and difficult master. If you take freedom seriously, then you’re constantly asking: should I go with the flow? Should I stand against the flow? You have a troubled conscience about what you do, partly because you don’t like the idea that your politics should become your identity.

There are socialists and communists and also some conservatives for whom it’s a willed and accepted identity. For a liberal, there’s always, or supposed to be, a distance between your beliefs and your identity. And the distance is the thing that allows you to examine your beliefs critically, and change them when they’re wrong.

And that’s, I think, a defining element of liberalism, for all liberals. A kind of self-distantiation from political conviction. Because political conviction is so dangerous.

REBECCA

That does bring us back onto another big Rawls question, though, about whether the purview of liberalism is just politics. Whether liberalism is morally comprehensive. But I think we don’t have time for that…

So I’m going to ask you one final question, inspired by a nice piece I read by you the other day, about revolution. I think you were counselling liberals against revolution — although obviously someone like Locke thinks that in certain circumstances there’s a right to revolution. Maybe I take him to be saying that it’s not just permissible, maybe sometimes it’s required.

So I was wondering, as a liberal in a kind of illiberal world, what should a liberal do? Particularly if they’re living in a place where they think things are becoming less liberal than they should be. How should liberals respond? What are the limits and what are the requirements?

MICHAEL

Well, I think liberals have always been, with the exception of Locke, and the exception of Jefferson and Madison. Very particular situations. But since the French Revolution onwards, I think liberalism is basically an anti-revolutionary doctrine, simply because of the violence, chaos, and radically unintended consequences of most revolutions, of which the French Revolution is the locus classicus. But not counter-revolutionary.

And that’s relevant to — we’re in the middle, I think, of a counter-revolution. We’re in the middle of an attempt to simply reverse the last 60 years of liberal hegemony, and replace it with centralised authoritarian rule that is destructive of the rule of law and destructive of the independence of institutions. And destructive possibly of the cultural and human achievements of the period — namely the equality that we’ve all benefited from.

So we’re in a very serious moment. And my instinct is that we need to — as someone who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam for nine years, I’m all in favor of people coming out in the streets when there’s some egregious violation of the Constitution, egregious violation of the rights of our fellow citizens. So direct action, certainly.

But I also think it’s tremendously important for us to rethink our principles. And I’m putting enormous emphasis in what we’ve been saying today to power checking power to keep the people free, because that’s the problem we’re faced — we’re faced with a regime that is simply seeking to overthrow the checks and balances on which our freedom depends.

And I think a liberal wants to come back very strongly to defend those — articulate the reasons why they’re so important.

REBECCA

Yeah.

MICHAEL

And commit in future, as I said at another point, to rethink the power and legitimacy of the liberal state.

That is, I don’t think if we get power again, I don’t want us to be running the liberal state we did. I want us to be rethinking much more critically. What are the limits of state authority and state action? What are the things that the state must do? And what are the things that the state must leave to markets and citizens and ordinary people? And I think all that is up for grabs in an important way.

So we’ve got lots of work to do.

REBECCA

I think one thing you’ve made me realise, which I hadn’t thought about sufficiently before, but the advantage of a historical kind of look at liberalism over time can show that liberals learn. It can show that liberals change their minds about things.

So I think you suggested that liberals have learned about the costs of revolution. You mentioned Vietnam. I think liberals over the last 50 years have also learned the costs of foreign intervention. And this seems to me right. If liberalism is about individuals being able to think about things, deliberate on things, collaborate with each other, then liberalism has to be growing. It has to be changing. It has to be something where we can attend to the conditions.

And it may be the case that more — attempts at philosophically cohering a set of principles, or a set of values, perhaps lose something about that live nature of liberalism, I wonder?

MICHAEL

Yeah, yeah — no, the history is very clear. Liberalism is created to meet specific historical challenges. It only survives if it meets the challenges of its time. There is no guarantee we’ll get through this with liberalism intact. It may be shattered and have to be rebuilt. But I’m pretty confident that a doctrine that has been around for 300 years has got a lot of life left in it.

REBECCA

I think I’ve ended all the other podcasts by asking the guest who has — who, they and me together, have failed to come up with a definition — what they’d say, you know, a little kid on the street comes and says, what is liberalism? But you gave really clear answers from the beginning.

I think we have two answers. We have it as a kind of historical — it’s a theory which has changed a bit across time, attended to the circumstances, but effectively it’s a theoretical framework focused on the central commitment to freedom. But also this institutional setup — something like liberalism is power checking power to keep the people free.

MICHAEL

To keep the people free!

REBECCA

It’s a pretty great answer.

Michael, thank you so much for being on my podcast.

MICHAEL

Pleasure.

REBECCA

Thank you.

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