Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Welcome to the year 1819. You are sitting on the benches of the Royal Athenaeum in Paris, where Benjamin Constant is lecturing on the conceptions of liberty of antiquity and of the moderns. We have travelled here because this is the beginning of the debate between classical and modern liberty, a debate rekindled in recent years in the wake of the return of postliberalism. We are in precisely the period in which terms such as „individualism" and „liberalism" first arose, and in which, according to the postliberals, the world set off intellectually down the wrong path. But first things first.
How far is the liberal committed to the ideal of neutrality, that is, to the pursuit of a state that treats all conceptions and philosophies of life alike? Or does a liberal society require a politics that formulates certain basic expectations of the individual, expectations he must be encouraged, enabled or (one hardly dares say it) even educated by society to meet? And that thereby forfeits part of its neutrality?
The current political landscape and the rise of postliberalism have given this debate a new shape. Listen to postliberals such as Adrian Vermeule, and liberalism fails because it cannot transmit any values to a society. Vermeule’s plea for „Common Good Constitutionalism” in particular is an appeal to let politics and constitutional jurisprudence be guided by value judgements, rather than trying to grasp the intentions of the framers and with them a „true meaning” of the constitution. Vermeule wants to be many things. Just not neutral.
But the dividing line between liberalism and postliberalism does not run cleanly along the border of the debate over neutrality. After all, the current critique of liberalism also takes offence at the sheer preponderance of liberal values that has shaped politics in Western countries over recent decades. Patrick Deneen’s call for regime change advances this point (though it ends up somewhere else). The right-wing populist competition poaches with this critique in the liberals’ own electoral milieu. The appeal to free citizens from the grip of a liberal state forever issuing instructions goes down well. The impulse inherent in liberalism anyway, to impose as few rules on people as possible, is used successfully by right-wing populists as a vote-winner.
Let me say it at the outset: I consider the substantially innovative share of postliberal political theory to be exceedingly modest. Patrick Deneen’s books and essays are a considerably less rewarding combination of Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (the convincing part of Deneen’s argument) and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue or Leo Strauss’ writings on classical and modern political theory (the unconvincing part). This is garnished with ostentatiously displayed Leninism on the question of how a postliberal political project might actually be put into practice (down to the chapter heading „What Is To Be Done?” in Regime Change, which harks back to Lenin’s essay of March 1902).
For MacIntyre, Strauss and Deneen, the Enlightenment is the source of fundamental political problems, because it destroyed the classical philosophy of virtue that had dominated from antiquity into the early modern period. It is precisely the connection to this debate that makes Alexandre Lefebvre’s essay on soulcraft and liberalism so interesting: it represents an attempt to integrate this critique of liberalism into liberal theory.
But what follows from this very old debate for how liberals should behave on the question of the neutrality of the state? The radical libertarian answer is that the state should keep out of people’s thinking altogether: forming citizens is not its task, neutrality between different conceptions of life is to be applied strictly. Anyone who holds this view dogmatically has perhaps reached a point at this stage of the essay familiar from the Famous Five novels of one’s childhood: you pick a particular course of action. Following it, the story now continues on page 87, where the plot goes on with homeschooling by Salafists and MAGA fanatics (even if libertarians will raise their own children far more sensibly).
Anyone who makes it less easy for himself has to keep grappling with the question of exactly where the line is to be drawn. And of how militant democracy is actually to be arranged in education policy: during the Cold War the Federal Republic knew the so-called routine vetting of tenured civil servants, after the social-liberal coalition introduced the so-called Radikalenerlass, the decree on radicals, in 1972 to combat left-wing extremism. This practice, not free of excesses, the Federal Republic of the post-Cold War period no longer knew, but it did know teachers such as Björn Höcke or Karlheinz Weißmann. Have we thrown out the baby with the bathwater?
Back to the Athenaeum. Constant opened his speech with a discussion of his country’s „happy revolution”, whose radical representatives had, however, misunderstood the meaning of the word liberty. Among other things, the revolutionaries’ impulse to impose an ancient conception of liberty on modernity was to be condemned. That conception was not suited to the present, since the constant political participation of the citizenry through direct democracy had been possible in a slave-holding state such as Athens, where the citizen was not distracted by time-consuming work. For the modern age, which holds slavery to be morally reprehensible, other, representative routes were needed. But Constant did not consider the classical conception of liberty desirable either: it understood liberty as participation in the political process, not as the autonomy of the individual and his protection from an arbitrary state. The classical conception of liberty did, however, involve constant surveillance of the citizen’s virtue, since his political maturity depended on it. The censors in Rome and the ephors in Sparta were everywhere and intruded even into the privacy of the family: the citizen was politically involved, but also exposed to permanent judgement by guardians of virtue and thus subject to the complete authority of the community. The reality of the classical philosophy of virtue, whose death MacIntyre, Strauss and, less eloquently, Deneen laid at the Enlightenment’s door. Constant was one of the chief perpetrators. One of Constant’s most pointed sentences: what matters is not in the first place who governs, but how much is governed (and rather a little less than too much).
All of this was not only a reckoning with the radical representatives of the French Revolution, but also with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s fondness for the supposedly so desirable social order of Sparta. Perhaps Constant also wanted to shield himself from criticism, for as an office-holder he had joined in diligently during the revolutionary period in the attempt to educate the population towards virtue and liberty, as Helena Rosenblatt’s book Liberal Values on Constant makes clear. And one might add that the claim that it did not much matter who governed under which form of state was of course an excellent strategy for political survival in a time of radical changes of regime.
Constant’s speech was a vehement plea for the position that the state should please leave its citizens alone as far as possible and on no account get the idea of educating them into citizens through publicly staged pageants of virtue. With that he fell in with a position of the time that became more prominent during the Restoration: away from politics, and towards a concentration on economic progress. This was a position held in particular by economists such as Jean-Baptiste Say.
But it is not that simple. Right at the end Constant came to speak of one of the points most important to him: the education of the citizen. Constant did want to limit the role of the state. In the realm of political and moral ideas, however, he certainly saw a role for it.
Constant was not alone in this. The liberals of his time and of the following decades devoted a remarkable share of their time to questions of education. François Guizot became not only an intellectual forefather of liberalism (with considerable influence on his student Alexis de Tocqueville), but equally the great educational reformer and founder of the modern French school system. He saw his country’s difficulties as grounded partly in the fact that on the moral level there was little to hold together a society deeply split between Jacobins and reactionary representatives of the Restoration. Tocqueville himself, in one of his most famous parliamentary speeches on 27 January 1848 on the eve of the revolution (the occasion of the famous volcano remark), came to speak of morality and of how far the decay of public morals also encouraged the decay of morals in private life.
What becomes clear is that liberalism in the nineteenth century did not turn away from „soulcraft” as radically as its critics claim. What may have changed more is the vocabulary.
The great majority of liberals hold a non-neutral picture of the citizen. It does not come easily to liberals to say that the state should play a role in the world of ideas in the early years of its citizens. Yet so it is. And yes, this role is necessarily negotiated democratically and imposed on the minority by the majority, let us call it what it is. Liberals throw themselves into this fight to ensure that the educational ideal enforced through the state’s monopoly on violence corresponds as far as it can to the values of criticism, scepticism and self-questioning, of tolerance and openness to the world. Anyone who sees a contradiction in this fails, in his view of the world, to meet the complexity of a contradictory world.
Liberals defend the individual against all concentrations of power. The state is one such accumulation of power, but not the only source of unfreedom. A free society is most likely to be realised by having different concentrations of power break each other up. The state is the concentration of power that dissolves, for example, that of the family and of religion, just as concentrations of power such as religions, families, firms, trade unions and many others hem in the power of the state. Liberals today have to some extent unlearned this relation to the state. Too often and by too many the role of the state in education is seen through the lens of a critique of a supposedly woke and linksgrünversifft nanny state, a state gone to seed with the left and the greens.
Liberals in the West have in this respect also shown a high degree of persuasive power and political effectiveness over recent decades. That is the preponderance of liberal values Lefebvre writes about. This success is today in danger and must be defended anew every day.
To formulate fundamental convictions (repressed, however, because they cause discomfort) matters more than ever at a time when institutional liberalism is in danger of being usurped by right-wing populists. The attraction of today’s right-wing populism feeds not least on the wish of many not to be educated towards virtue by a state perceived as ideological. That is an impulse that brings right-wing populists and neutralist liberals of the libertarian variety together. That this is playing with fire for the latter becomes clear from the fact that today’s right-wing populists (as we see when we read Deneen or Vermeule and listen to politicians such as J.D. Vance or Alice Weidel, Tino Chrupalla and Björn Höcke) are in truth not concerned with more individual authority over one’s own soul at all. What concerns them is replacing the liberal virtues represented today by the state with premodern illiberal virtues, which are to go on being enforced by the state. That is the true meaning of the term „regime change” in Deneen’s manifesto.
The impression cannot be avoided that liberalism today is thoroughly confused on the question of neutrality, because the public is so heavily bombarded with postliberal and other right-wing populist demands, and these make an impression not least on liberals themselves. One can only hope that this political trend can still be reversed.
