Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
People look for orientation. They can find it in those who offer them a vision of the good life. In politics, in Germany and beyond, those were for the last few decades above all the Greens and the left. With the New Right and the postliberals, offers now come from the right as well. Illiberal visions of the good life are even enforced by the state, in Xi's China and Orbán's Hungary, for instance. That the competition has taken up the good life so successfully has alarmed liberals.
Some liberals, such as Alexandre Lefebvre, already see a liberal way of life embedded in the culture of the present. Whether that is so depends heavily on what one understands by liberalism. Others, such as Samuel Moyn and Helena Rosenblatt, accuse liberals of having abandoned their tradition of moral enthusiasm. That may hold above all for the market liberals of the Chicago School; Milton Friedman probably has to accept the charge of having neglected morality and the good life. Of Gertrude Himmelfarb or Hannah Arendt, however, no such thing can be said. As a corrective, in any case, yet others, Joshua Cherniss and Alan Kahan for instance, want to revive the virtues of liberalism, the pursuit of the good life in a liberal manner.
Do liberals need such a vision of the good life of their own, of liberal virtues and ideals? I think so. If only in order not to lose the competition of ideas in society, against right and left. But also more fundamentally. As important as a liberal organisation of the state is, and as keenly as people feel its absence, on its own it is not enough to win people over to liberalism. That too is why liberals need such a vision, not just privately for themselves, but as liberals. They even have to make the case for it.
It would be wrong to think that liberalism is an order of the state that, for publicity reasons, still needs a worldview, an idea of the good life, bolted on. Rather, the competition’s offer casts light on an existing liberal omission. Human freedom is a lived freedom that shapes the whole of life. Of course, protecting the individual from excessive coercion by the state is central to that. But it is not everything. A tradition of reflecting on the good, free life belongs to it as well.
Not for nothing did Wilhelm von Humboldt formulate, alongside a theory of the minimal state, an idea of free self-realisation. For people long for a good life. They do not draw their own life on a blank sheet of paper but assemble it from what their world offers, adapted more or less to their needs. And how they live it is how a “society” acts. No more and no less. A society many of whose members live with a liberal temperament is a liberal society.
For the politically seasoned liberal, this is the point, if not before, where alarm bells ring. Doesn’t that contradict the neutrality on worldviews that liberals ought to have? That very much depends. Perfectionism, that is, enforcing or enabling virtues and a good life by means of state intervention, does contradict neutrality and seems to me fundamentally illiberal.
For the state exercises coercion, which, if need be, it enforces by force, whatever it wants to promote. The liberal wish for as little coercion as possible is therefore not compatible with shaping people’s lives according to a worldview. At least where that goes beyond the absolute minimum needed to uphold the liberal order of the state. But wanting to inspire enthusiasm for one’s own vision of the good life, to campaign for it, and to convince others of the rightness of this worldview does not contradict liberal neutrality. For that neutrality applies to the state, not to individual people and their societies.
That does not dispel the worry about the tyranny of the majority. Mill describes the problem of intolerance without state intervention. So caution is needed in private criticism, exclusion, and persuasion too. Tolerance is, after all, a liberal virtue. In private, however, that only means not converting others to one’s own worldview by pressure. As long as there is room for deviation, room to try things out, wanting to convince others of one’s own view of the world is no problem. Creating that room is part of the liberal good life as well.
The second problem liberals classically associate with a vision of the good life is pluralism. Pluralism means that there are different values people follow, and that these contradict one another, that is, they cannot be reconciled without loss. Proposing a vision of the good life (or a selection of such visions) does not contradict that. Of course, the liberal does not have the one template here to which all people conform. And no single life can, if pluralism is right, realise all values. But a life can nonetheless follow certain liberal virtues, realise liberal visions of the good life, keep away from less valuable ways of spending one’s time.
What the right and the left imagine as life under late-modern capitalism, pure, unbridled consumption, egoistic excess, is no liberal ideal. Nor is it, as most people experience in their everyday lives, the reality of capitalism. And against all criticism, liberals should probably insist: consumption per se is not bad, but it is not everything either. Having more material possibilities is valuable, and material progress is wonderful. It just takes more to make a life a good life.
What might liberal virtues look like? Some virtues we share with other political currents. Solidarity matters, the left has recognised that. Courage and reliability matter, the conservatives have recognised that. Liberals, however, value these virtues only where people practise them voluntarily. Coerced actions cannot be virtuous, Aristotle already knew that.
Besides the shared virtues, however, there are also genuinely liberal virtues. Creativity, the power to create, the realisation of one’s own, authentic view of the world are all three liberal virtues in their own right. Tolerance of ambiguity too, being able to bear contradictions in oneself and one’s surroundings, is a liberal virtue. Only liberals know the full creativity of markets and of free, undirected research. Of exploring and creating. Perfecting oneself instead of fulfilling the dreams of others.
These virtues are realised, for instance, in people who recognise problems and then find the solutions themselves, build them, create them together with others. Without waiting for instructions from above, on their own responsibility, with the people around them in view. The entrepreneur who develops a revolutionary vaccine; the artist who realises himself in his art against majority opinion; the teacher who enables her pupils to realise their own talents and put them to use for others, instead of mastering standardised tests. They all live liberal virtues.
A sketch like this can only be one of many liberal ideas of a good life. It is clear that we must make far more offers of this kind. Must spell them out in detail and in practice. That is not a task of a few weeks, but with the fourth issue of ævum we want to do our part in giving it the attention it needs.
