Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
That liberalism gets blamed for all sorts of things is nothing new. But when of all things the timid reform politics of social democrats and conservatives is stylised into a liberal catch-all, one should at least pause. For the writer Nils Schniederjann, precisely this technocratic-seeming „deliverism" of the grand coalition has become the occasion for an essay analysing liberalism's wrong turn. He describes vividly the exhaustion of a liberal politics that increasingly hides behind practical constraints, expert panels, and administrative reason instead of addressing questions of the good life.
But perhaps the current crisis points to a different problem: it is not liberalism as such that is exhausted, but a liberalism that understands itself almost exclusively as institutions and procedures. The Canadian philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre recently formulated a thesis as simple as it is provocative: we are more liberal than we believe. Liberal ideas of fairness, equality, respect, or individual autonomy have seeped deep into our lifeworld. Our upbringing, our working lives, and our moral intuitions, even how we shape our relationships and our sexuality, are impregnated with liberalism.
For most people, liberalism is therefore not merely a form of government but their form of life, even if most of them may not be aware of it. And there are good reasons for this. Liberalism originally wanted to be more than a theory of just institutions and procedures. It understood itself as an answer to the question: what does it mean to lead a good life? Freedom, fairness, reciprocity, and the ability to change perspective were not merely political principles. They were virtues whose practice changed the person himself and enriched his life.
It is precisely this ethical dimension that liberalism largely lost over the course of the twentieth century, as the historian Samuel Moyn recently observed to striking effect. Today it speaks convincingly about basic rights, constitutions, and procedures, but hardly any more about why a liberal way of life is humanly worth striving for. It defends freedom without saying what character freedom can and perhaps even should bring forth. It protects pluralism without explaining why a life of fairness and mutual recognition in a diverse state might be more fulfilling than one determined by monocultures and self-interest.
Here may lie one reason for the present discontent. Technocracy is not the opposite of liberalism but its truncated form: a liberalism that preserves procedures but can hardly explain any more why people should identify with them. Lefebvre speaks in this context of „liberaldom”, following Kierkegaard’s critique of „Christendom”. What is meant is a society that calls itself liberal and professes liberal values, but whose economic and social practice lives up to these claims less and less. The crisis then consists not in our having become too liberal, but in our no longer recognising the socio-moral preconditions of liberalism.
Schniederjann’s charge that liberalism today lacks a vision of the good life is therefore not plucked from thin air, but it is foreshortened in terms of the history of ideas. When his idea of a good life aims, say, at strengthening „clubs and associations, the pub scene, and church congregations”, he is even taking up an originally liberal idea. As early as 1979, the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf had spoken in a slim volume titled „Lebenschancen” (Life Chances) about the meaning-giving role of „ligatures”. The maximisation of options for action, according to Dahrendorf, could only succeed if „deep cultural bonds” continue to exist which „enable people to find their way through the world of options”. The anomie of modernity, for which Schniederjann blames liberalism, had been identified by the liberal philosopher almost fifty years ago as the greatest threat to freedom.
The constitutional scholar Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, too, is known for his bon mot that the „liberal state lives on preconditions” that it „cannot itself guarantee”. A liberalism that takes itself seriously therefore does not follow a Thatcherite logic à la „there is no such thing as society”, but must become conscious of its social preconditions. In this respect it is no wonder that the crisis of liberalism runs in parallel with growing affective polarisation, culture-war struggles over interpretation, and the road into post-literate society. Increasingly, the preconditions of the liberal state no longer hold, partly because liberalism’s good life is being lost in algorithmic spirals of outrage and digital loneliness. Put in Marxist terms: not class but technology has become the principal contradiction of bourgeois society.
What remains open is what a way out of the crisis of liberalism might be. A reactivation of the good life is undoubtedly necessary, but should it come „top down” or „bottom up”? For Schniederjann, who speaks of our having to „let the state hold us to our duties again”, the answer seems clear. Paradoxically, though, this dream would probably lead to more technocracy, not less. All those states that prescribe a „good life” top down are marked by technocratic economic policy: China, India, or Hungary under Orbán. The „good life” prescribed here with nationalist bombast leaves economic questions aside. „The state takes care of things”, they like to say in those states, but the promise of the benevolent Leviathan is here merely technocracy through the back door. Schniederjann’s wish for a stronger parliamentarism is not compatible with that good life from above.
More promising, and not only in this respect, is a good life that emerges „bottom up”. One can call it „civic culture”, „high trust society”, or „lifeworld”. The crisis of liberalism is due not only to a deficient state, but also to a decline of bar culture, a loss of interpersonal trust, and a retreat of civic engagement. That a good life begins first among friends, in the family and the neighbourhood, in involvement at one’s children’s school or in the sports club, is something a „good life from above” ignores. Perhaps the discursive recourse to the technocratic argument is not a consequence of liberalism but of a depoliticised society. And this depoliticisation in turn is a consequence of the false feeling of recent decades that the corporatist social-democratic state will, if need be, somehow sort everything out for you. But the good life that is being lost behind digital loneliness and polarisation between the sexes is one the population may have to win on its own, first and foremost.
