Liberalism in Politics and Philosophy

One of the undeniably interesting elements of the fact that Britain now has in government members of the Liberal Democrats is the opportunity it opens up for discussion about the nature of liberalism. In a thoughtful, if, unsurprisingly, somewhat biased posting, Stuart White argues that there is an important distinction between the beliefs of some of the Liberal Democrat members of the current cabinet and the most important liberal political philosophers of the most 40 years. The suggestion White makes is that the standpoint of the recent liberal political philosophers is broadly egalitarian but that of the Liberal Democrat ministers is not. There are two pieces of evidence in his argument. The first concerns the paucity of reference to political philosophy in some books he takes to be particularly important in the recent history of the Liberal Democrats. The importance attached to these books is, however, far less evident than White suggests since, for example, such an undoubted social liberal as Simon Hughes can be (and has been) given support in his bid for the Deputy leadership of his party by Vince Cable, identified by White as an "economic" liberal. So it is not as evident as White thinks that positions can be read off from the books he cites to political actions and decisions.


The second reason White relies on concerns a specific policy matter. However, given that egalitarian ends are not evidently tied to specific modes of delivery this piece of evidence is not as solid as he thinks either. The more interesting element of White's position doesn't concern either of these alleged pieces of evidence. Rather, the interesting point concerns the fact that recent liberal political philosophy has no evident tie to market mechanisms since the "basic structure" as Rawls would put it is rather viewed through normative principles and mechanisms are then viewed in relation to them. Politicians, by contrast, do tend to begin from consideration of the "here and now" and then look at principles in relation to them. Is this a difference in focus between politicians and philosophers? Certainly Kantians generally should start from principle rather than an appeal to the given conditions since otherwise the dangers of sacrificing principle are obvious enough. The question remains whether this is a position that working politicians ever take and hence whether, if a "Kantian liberal" comes to support a Liberal government whether this support will not, inevitably, have to have a critical edge?

Coercion and the Social Contract

In a recent posting Tim Waligore has replied to an earlier posting of mine. In that earlier posting I was myself responding to a debate in the journal Political Theory that had specifically focused on questions of whether immigration controls were coercive but my posting prescinded from the specific debate over immigration controls to raise what I took to be a prior question about the nature of political justification and in that posting I suggested a contrast between "liberal" views and "republican" ones. In some respects, although this is not the point of Tim's reply, I now think the contrast wasn't entirely correctly described in that posting. As I pointed out in that earlier posting there was a model of political authority derived from Robert Nozick at work in the debate in Political Theory so it would make more sense to describe it as a contrast between "libertarian" and "republican" views rather than "liberal" and "republican". As I will explore on some other occasion there are good reasons for thinking that libertarian views are very far from being "liberal" in inspiration.


In any event, the contrast I was intending in this earlier posting was between a view of political authority that regards coercion as requiring specific additional justification over and above the basic rights of states and one that instead sees coercion as built in to the very nature of the right of states and this was the basis for my claim that the views in the Political Theory debate shared an underlying commitment to the same kind of political notions despite disagreeing over the question of whether immigration controls constituted a "coercive" act or not.


Tim's posting responds to this earlier one of mine in effectively two different ways. The first is to suggest that I moved rather too easily from the view of the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right to the account of the social contract (which is part of "Public Right") whilst the second response concerned instead the specific question of whether I had not, in my earlier posting, left aside the justification by which states relate to each other, left aside, that is, an important question of cosmopolitanism in my desire to prescind from the debate concerning immigration controls. I will tackle this question concerning cosmopolitanism and immigration controls in the next posting, concentrating in this one merely on the relationship between coercion and the state contract.


Tim is right that I was drawing on the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right when I discussed coercion in the earlier posting. In the "Introduction" Kant makes clear that right is connected to authorization to use coercion arguing: "if a certain use of freedom is itself a hindrance to freedom in accordance with universal laws (i.e., wrong), coercion that is opposed to this (as a hindering of a hindrance to freedom) is consistent with freedom in accordance with universal laws, that is, it is right" (Ak. 6: 231). So the central message that coercion is understood as a basis of right provided it meets the conditions given here is allowed.  Subsequently Kant goes on to talk about this "reciprocal coercion" in terms of strict right, so much so that he writes: "Right and authorization to use coercion...mean one and the same thing" (Ak. 6: 232).


Tim's point, however, is that it is a long way from this argument to construction of Kant's view of the social contract since the opening of the Doctrine of Right proper is with private right and that there is only one reference to the notion of a "social contract" in the province of private right. The context of the discussion of the contract in private right is the penultimate paragraph of Kant's account of acquisition in which it is made clear that any acquisition that occurs in the state of nature is only provisional. Here Kant does also add: "even if it is solved through the original contract, such acquisition will always remain only provisional unless this contract extends to the entire human race" (Ak. 6: 266).


This point connects to the question of cosmopolitanism to which I will return in the next posting. However it is worth pointing out, as a general matter of political theory, that the basis of the notion of the state was already given in the argument of the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right on which I was drawing in my earlier posting. This is made specifically clear in paragraph 45 of the Doctrine of Right where Kant writes that "insofar as" the laws of the state "are a priori necessary as laws, that is, insofar as they follow of themselves from concepts of external right as such" then its form is "the form of a state as such", the state in idea, the state "as it ought to be in accordance with pure principles of right". Hence the concepts of external right as such are sufficient to give us the norm by which we can test the behaviour of actual states. This being so I don't take it to be the case that the move I made from the argument of the "Introduction" to the Doctrine of Right to the notion of the social contract was, in itself, one that involved a conflation of levels. It is, however, a different matter whether some legitimate cosmopolitan replies to the argument I made in the earlier posting are not, all the same, available.

Democratic Peace

Within the context of current liberal IR theory the hypothesis of the liberal or democratic peace is widely accepted and often appealed to as a virtual established "law". Kant's authority is invoked in its defence since the democratic or liberal peace hypothesis is presented as an up-date of the republican peace theory provisionally outlined in the previous posting.

The basic claims of the democratic peace hypothesis are that democracies are unlikely to engage in wars with each other and that their existence generally promotes peace. However, the foremost exponent of the hypothesis, Michael W. Doyle, introduces a caveat that is often missing from discussion of it. This is to the effect that whilst democracies may be less likely to engage in wars with each other than with non-democracies they may in fact be generally aggressive towards non-democracies or overly wary of them. Doyle's research involves empirical discussion of a large number of wars dating from the early 19th century until today and includes some methodological claims that have been disputed. One of the problems with evaluating his claims includes the question of how one is to define when a "democracy" has been established. Included in the difficulty of this question is when a democracy can be regarded as stably in place. So some research, in opposition to the spirit,if not the letter, of Doyle's has claimed that "developing democracies" that are in transition from authoritarian rule to democratic governance are more likely to engage in warfare than settled authoritarian governments or democratic ones.

Allied to the claim concerning "developing democracies" is one concerning the relationship between "democracy" and the rule of law. A number of thinkers have set out the argument that the connection between democracy and peaceful intentions claimed by Doyle has been misinterpreted by him. The basis of this claim is that a state that has established a settled rule of law has created with this a basis for predicable behaviour externally as well as internally so that other states become less aggressive towards it and it, similarly, is more pacific in its relation to others. On the basis, it is then claimed, of the achieved rule of law and settled pacific relations, a transition to democracy becomes possible in a situation that guarantees continued peace. This argument would further suggest revision in both Doyle's original claim and the counter one concerning "developing democracies" suggesting that if a developing democracy emerges on the ground of a previous settled rule of law then it will tend towards pacific intentions and behaviour but not if otherwise.

Other historical problems abound, not least concerning the general tendency towards empire building by the UK during its development and the arguably aggressive policies of the US at different points of its history. Doyle gives a partial reply to these concerns in this article.

John Rawls also discusses Doyle's hypothesis in The Law of Peoples and describes it as "as close as anything we know to a simple empirical regularity in relations among societies". Despite this Rawls clearly points to behaviour by the US in which appeal to national security enables secretive decisions to conduct covert operations but suggests a convergence towards an asymptotic ideal will generally lead towards the pacific behaviour predicted in Doyle's hypothesis.

A divergence between the claims made by Doyle and the republican one of Kant is also apparent given that the democracies of today have large professional armies and are often funded through foreign debt so that they don't meet the conditions of the preliminary articles for perpetual peace. Doyle's own work, unlike that of some of his followers, is not one that supports the general view of perpetual peace being established between democracies and non-democracies however and, given the problems of ensuring that democracy develops in the right way and under the right conditions, is open to clear mitigation.

Republicanism (I)

The 1st Definitive Article for perpetual peace reads simply: "The civil constitution in every state shall be republican" (Ak. 8: 349). Two questions emerge in consideration of it: firstly, what is meant by "republican" and, secondly, how does it relate to the aim of perpetual peace?

The first question will be addressed in this posting. Kant speaks of a constitution that is republican as including principles that operate on three distinct levels. At the level of individuals there is a principle of the freedom of members of a society whilst at the level of subjects there is one of dependence on a single common legislation. The third level is that of citizens of a state where there is a principle of equality operative. Kant's general claim is that the "idea of the original contract" leads us to the notion of a republican constitution.

In articulating further the notion of this constitution Kant develops his argument in another extended footnote. The footnote begins by opposing a conventional "liberal" idea of freedom as "the warrant to do whatever one wants provided one does no wrong to anyone". This view of freedom is what Isaiah Berlin characterized as "negative freedom" and is captured well in John Stuart Mill's definition of freedom as "pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs" (On Liberty). Kant indicates however that this view amounts to an empty tautology.

By contrast to this view Kant defines freedom as "the warrant to obey no other external laws than those to which I could have given my consent" (Ak. 8: 350n). The reference here to hypothetical consent was not included in the "negative", "liberal" view of freedom and nor was the specific inclusion of external laws. The specific inclusion of the concept of law in the idea of freedom is subsequently followed up by the ways in which Kant characterizes equality. Equality within a state is "that relation of its citizens in which no one can rightfully bind another to something without also being subject to a law by which he in turn can be bound in the same way by the other" (Ak. 8: 350n). So the equality in question is one of reciprocal relation to the laws of the state. Kant intimates that there is no need to further specify the dependence of subjects since we have already covered it in what has emerged.

On the grounds of the egalitarian conception of citizenship Kant explicitly rules out the notion of hereditary nobility. The republican position advanced is one in which freedom is distinctively understood as emergent from a relation to law, not as something properly realized independently of law. This is the substantive difference between the republican view that Kant has advanced here and many "liberal" views. It remains to be assessed, however, what relation this puts a specifically Kantian theory in to the so-called "Kantian liberals", such as John Rawls and his followers on the one hand, or the more apparently "republican" views of Jurgen Habermas. A further point of interest is how to characterize Kant's form of republicanism by contrast to that which has been developed in contemporary political theory on the basis of response to the Renaissance account of Machiavelli. For a detailed description of this tradition and its place in contemporary political theory see this article. A notable feature of the contemporary revival of republicanism and assertion of its distinction from liberalism has been the general failure, despite the historiographical nature of its basis, to account for Kant.