Self-Conscious Liberalism
Benjamin Ball on Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life
In the mid-19th century, Soren Kierkegaard let loose on the Christian institutions of his day. Accusing them of having left the religion of Jesus and true Christianity behind, Kierkegaard claimed that the Danish clergy had embraced “Christendom:” a “counterfeit,” where the religion is play-acted, while its essence is a distant memory, discarded, with only limited impact on the life of its alleged adherents.
A little less than two centuries later, Alexandre Lefebvre continues in the Kierkegaardian tradition, but with a different target. In his new book Liberalism as a Way of Life, citing Kierkegaard’s Christianity/Christendom binary, Lefebvre argues that liberalism is pervasive in the values we all already live by, and while that’s a good thing, we must be wary of liberaldom: liberalism compromised, play-acted, and ultimately corroded. To protect its vision, liberals must: see themselves as liberals, self-consciously realize their values, and be able to articulate themselves as such lest the tradition be assumed, then confused, then lost.
Lefebvre lists the many pernicious forces with which liberalism has compromised to become liberaldom: racism, patriarchy, vicious forms of elitist meritocracy, and capitalism. Curiously, however, Lefebvre also lists democracy as among the forces corroding the goods of liberalism, claiming it spawns “a latent populism” that both compromises and lowers the standards of the liberal ideal.
This worry is not original or unique to Lefebvre. Alexis de Tocqueville worried that democracy in America could corrode the best of its liberal vision, leading to conformity, mediocrity, and atomized individualism. Lefebvre takes Tocqueville’s criticism at face value and sees liberalism as its cure, the check on democracy’s worst habits. Lefebvre’s liberalism promotes the values and virtues of reciprocity, freedom, and fairness, which as a way of life offer both a north star towards which democratic procedures strive and boundaries that reign in an otherwise unchecked will of the majority.
The implication is that democracy on its own has the potential to corrode those liberal values and virtues, leading to the at best unsatisfying compromise that is liberaldom. But this allegedly tense, oppositional relationship between democracy and liberalism belies an overly restrictive view of democracy, ignoring that it, too, might be understood as “a way of life.”
Liberalism as a Way of Life, Alexandre Lefebvre. Princton University Press, 2024. 304 pages. $25.95 (hardcover)
The Life of Liberalism
Lefebvre introduces liberalism as the answer to the perennial question: where do we get our values from? His answer might be surprising given that liberalism as a “political theory” is typically understood as a theory informing the direction of the state, its institutions, or legal structures, not how one lives one’s life from day to day. However, Lefebvre argues that liberalism can, and does, also provide a comprehensive vision of the good life here and now.
Lefebvre’s wide selection of examples to illustrate his point speaks to a dedication for finding, retrieving, and preserving the liberalism of the everyday. (For instance, he evokes images of people coming together to clean up after a raucous Christmas beach party, he draws on the character Leslie Knope, the protagonist of the TV show Parks and Recreation who he views as a paragon of liberal virtue.) Lefebvre argues that we can see in our lives the ubiquity of liberal values, including the virtues of reciprocity, freedom, and fairness. In the media we enjoy and in the relationships we cherish, liberalism seeps through. Wherever we are committed to seeing others’ lives as equally important to our own or to respecting the freedom of others, we find liberalism shaping our way of life. The central image for Lefebvre, one he borrows from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, is that liberalism is the water we swim in—it shapes our legal and political institutions as well as the political and background culture of civil society and private life.
Liberalism as a Way of Life is primarily a call to practical self-recognition. In a section of the book dedicated to “soulcraft for liberals” Lefebvre outlines a set of spiritual exercises for liberals that draws heavily on the work of John Rawls. Lefebvre’s objective is less about introducing the reader to some novel set of ideas; instead, he aims to provide readers with useful conceptual frameworks and everyday practices that can help them live out the values to which they are already committed. In short, Liberalism as a Way of Life is a work dedicated to transforming passive desires towards liberal values into an active care and cultivation of them.
Lefebvre also examines liberalism’s history, and the figures that have shaped both it and Lefebvre himself. This is where particularly Rawls and Tocqueville become important, and it is with the latter where the tension between liberalism and democracy comes first and most clearly into play.
Democracy in America
Tocqueville published his assessment of American democracy, Democracy in America, in two volumes during the second half of the 1830s. His assessment is both optimistic and pessimistic, containing both an admiration for some aspects of democracy’s American iterations as well as fears of the moral consequences it has on citizens.
In his outline of democracy’s potential vices, as Lefebvre summarizes, Tocqueville not only accuses democracy of leading to conformity, mediocrity, and individualism, but also to crude materialism. Democracy makes its citizens into “like and equal men” whose freedom allows, if not encourages, them to act primarily out of self-interest and to become distracted by the material goods to which they all now have greater access. Tocqueville famously feared a tyranny of the majority and he worried that “the public” could be just as oppressive as the kings and despots they had overthrown. If anything, the public could be more pernicious, with its despotism coming not in the form of legible laws, but a covert cultural pressure that molds the lonely, unwitting, atomized citizen, stifling innovation, creativity, and what liberals hold so dear— freedom.
But it isn’t all bad news. Tocqueville takes the example of the New-England-small-town as the paragon of American democracy. In those towns, Tocqueville says, “the inhabitant...is attached to his township because it is strong and independent, he is interested in it because he cooperates in directing it, he places his ambition and his future in it, he mingles in each of the incidents of township life.” This, for Tocqueville, is democracy working well: where the freedom of individuals connects them, brings them into the joining of communities where citizens collaborate for a common end.
However, Lefebvre reads Tocqueville’s optimism in a very particular way. Lefebvre does not present Tocqueville’s picture of the New England town as an achievement of American democracy; instead, he says that the citizens of the New England town “learned how to become liberal in democracy, and despite the pressures of the age, live generously and freely” (emphasis mine). There is an interesting slippage here: when democracy is vicious, the vices are those of democracy itself, but when it is virtuous, it is because it has become liberal. Liberalism can combat the excesses democracy generates.
Lefebvre decries the idea that liberalism requires a prefix or modifier. Some conservative critics of liberalism have argued that liberalism only works as “Christian” liberalism. Ironically, Lefebvre implies that democracy can only function as “liberal” democracy, since it is in its liberalism that the necessary values of generosity, fairness, and freedom lie.
But what if this account of democracy is too anemic? What if democracy, understood differently, had the resources within itself to combat the ills that Lefebvre describes? What might that picture of democracy look like? To recall the title of Lefebvre’s book, could democracy constitute a way of life?
Proceduralist and Substantivist Democracies
In A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, Robert Talisse reviews a wide range of literature on democratic theory to make a distinction between two views of democracy. The first view is the proceduralist vision of democracy. The proceduralist view holds that democracy is a kind of procedure by which the “aggregation of individual preferences expressed in voting booths” forms a majority will, and other institutional frameworks work to ensure the smooth operations of that procedure. Proceduralist democracy is primarily about a kind of statecraft, and concerns structures that are instrumental; one advocates for them because they are the best way—when compared to government structures like monarchy or despotism—to achieve certain external goods.
The second view is the substantivist vision of democracy. The substantivist view holds that democracy has goods internal to it, and that the locus of democracy is in “civil society, in the free associations among citizens.” Substantivist democracy is primarily about moral questions and the formation of democratic citizens, their values, virtues, and education. Questions of statecraft and institutional formation remain important, but they are “democratic only in a derivative sense.”
When democracy is considered in merely its proceduralist form, one can see how Lefebvre’s characterization emerges. Reduced to just the presence of majoritarian structures, it is easy to see how individualism, materialism, conformity, or pernicious populism run unchecked without a liberal “way of life” to combat it. But if democracy is substantive, perhaps it stands a chance of combating those ills without reliance on something else as its “way of life.” Much, of course, depends on what its substance looks like.
There is no way for me to characterize the complex and often conflicting ways democracy has been understood as a way of life by its practitioners. But a good starting point is Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition. Stout, in keeping with the legacy of the American pragmatists, proposes a substantivist view of democracy where democracy is considered a tradition of virtuous practice aimed at goods in common. Democracy is both culture and activity; it has an “ethical life of its own” which “involve[s] strangers and enemies, as well as fellow citizens, in the verbal process of holding one another responsible.”
Democracy, on this substantivst view, is a kind of activity that is constituted by discursive practices, deliberations, contestations, and creative conversations between citizens. There are better and worse ways of being a conversation partner, and this is where virtue comes in: individuals in possession of democratic virtues such as being open minded, “pursuing justice where it leads,” having “the courage to speak candidly,” or, as Stout puts it, “the tact to avoid sanctimonious cant” – these democratically virtuous individuals will be better at doing democracy. In such virtues lie the substance of the substantive vision. Where democracy constitutes the core activity of ethical life, a moral culture must emerge that shapes the ability of citizens to engage in that activity well by developing in them democratic virtues.
In short, talk of democracy as consisting in merely the procedures of majoritarianism is a disserve to not only democratic theorists such the American pragmatists but to a possible form of ethical life wherein democracy is a way of life with its own moral content.
Another Contender in the Room
If we accept this vision of democracy — one located in the everyday, discursive practices between citizens — we might ask: what is democracy’s relationship to liberalism? I want to suggest that what advocates like Lefebvre love about liberalism is not lost; in fact, the very values Lefebvre rightly endorses rise to the surface as a direct consequence of the substantivist vision of democracy.
To make this point, consider Phillip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000). In it, he presents a fundamental idea about the nature of human relationship: “The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.” The idea of “another contender in the room with you” fits nicely into Stout’s vision of a substantive democracy. It implies a certain orientation towards the other as a contender. A “contender” here is distinct from a “competitor.” It is not meant in an agonistic sense, but in seeing the other person as a fellow striver in the process of the often difficult activity of deliberation. It is seeing the other person as worthy of completing the task beside you.
If you are to treat another person as someone with whom you can engage in discussion, a lot is immediately precluded, including the very vices Tocqueville says democracy will encourage. Crude individualism is ruled out if the central activity of democracy is social. A certain form of materialism is ruled out if the focus is between you and your fellow citizens. Material matters will be important to forming that relationship, but material ends will not be ends unto themselves. And, conformity can be combated if your fellow citizen has the place to challenge you, to open you up to forms of life you may not have considered.
Just as Tocqueville’s democratic vices will be precluded, Lefebvre’s liberal virtues will have found their place. The kind of cruelty to which liberalism is centrally opposed, as Lefebvre writes quoting the political theorist Judith Shklar, is precluded by democracy as such, because cruelty implies a distorted vision, failing to see the victim of your cruelty as another contender. Freedom, generosity, all of these core tenets of liberalism are already embedded in what it means to do democracy well. If Lefebvre’s characterization of liberalism’s core values holds true, in a meaningful sense “illiberal democracy” might be a contradiction in terms. To list democracy as among those ideologies that move liberalism towards the syncretist liberaldom is to fail to recognize the ways in which their moral content is mirrored.
In this way, democracy as a shared activity supplies itself with its ethical prerogatives, because they are necessary for the practice of democracy as such. Many of these tenants are similar to those “liberalism as a way of life” seeks to provide. There is no need to pit them against each other, at least in this respect. Substantive democracy is not among liberaldom’s causes; rather, those committed to democracy as an activity, as a theory of virtuous practice, may well be crucial players striving after liberaldom’s cure. They are an ally that liberals, those truly committed to freedom, fairness, and reciprocity, cannot afford to ignore.
Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life makes valuable contributions to our understanding of how the liberalism we might want is, in part, already here. It is a thorough and good-hearted defense of that same already-present liberalism and it straddles both history and the difficulties and distortions of our moment with deftness.
Any work that encourages its readers to consciously attend their cares is crucial to the formation of compassionate thinkers, considerate citizens, and wise human beings. Self-examination is both a liberal and democratic virtue, and it is one Lefebvre guides the reader to with skill. Lefebvre’s contribution to liberalism as a way of life is a valuable one, and he does justice both to his predecessors — from Tocqueville, to Rawls, to Shklar — as well as his fellow, present practitioners. Lefebrve’s liberalism is neither dull nor distant: it makes the life of liberalism feel alive, and it is that kind of playful but still thoughtful register that is desperately needed to bring hope and clarity in a fraught and dizzying political moment.
Benjamin Ball is currently a graduate student at Yale Divinity School. His interests include ethics, religious thought, pragmatism, political theory, democratic culture, and grassroots organizing. He studied American literature at Princeton University.
