Critics of liberalism have long charged it with lacking a sense of community, continuity, and meaning. They assert that Aristotle’s wise dictum “man is a social animal” has little place in liberals’ “me first, last and always” worldview. This critique has come in right-wing and left-wing flavors.
Right-wing post-liberal thinkers like Patrick Deneen have charged that liberalism’s individualistic anthropology has bled into its libertine assault on traditional mores. At a more metaphysical level in his essay “Progress and Memory: Making Whole Our Historical Sense,” Deneen charges liberals with “living in the present” by rejecting the past. Liberalism “begins with a radical critique of the ancestral…That which has bequeathed us from the past is understood to be a form of generational oppression, arbitrary rule of those who happened to be born before we were. Liberalism inaugurates a project in legitimacy that can only be conferred upon a human institution when that institution has been chosen.” On this reading, liberalism’s libertinism not only makes us feel disconnected from our communities in the here and now. It also radically breaks us off from the past; a selfish rebuke of Burke’s sage insistence that the social contract exists between the living, the dead, and future generations. Deneen’s solution is a return to a conservatism that would heal the divide between past, present, and future. How this tranquil language of metaphysical harmony squares with Deneen’s recent calls in Regime Change for the titular dramatic regime change remains a mystery. Only radical conservative commentators like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh are enlightened enough to solve it.
On the left, it has largely been so-called “communitarian” critics who have charged liberalism with lacking a sense of community, continuity, and ethical meaning. These include the late Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Charles Taylor. Of these, Taylor’s commentary is without a doubt the most systematic and sustained. Reflective liberals would be wise to examine his thought for several reasons. The first is the depth of his insights into the problems that emerge with liberalism, and secular modernity more generally. Whatever criticisms you can make of him, Taylor is a deep soul, and his work is never anything less than edifying. Second and more importantly, Taylor is a representative figure. Beginning as a careful critic of liberalism and bourgeois thought, Taylor increasingly made peace with liberal democracy, even if he continued to stress its existing flaws.
On the left, it has largely been so-called “communitarian” critics who have charged liberalism with lacking a sense of community, continuity, and ethical meaning.
This is revealing because, unlike the post-liberals, almost all the left-wing communitarians (except MacIntyre) eventually came around to supporting various flavors of liberal egalitarianism. I’d argue this is because left communitarians share a fundamental commitment to human equality and the sacredness of each life that one does not find in post-liberalism, but which is integral in liberal thought (even if often in a skewed and distorted way). Hence, Taylor’s thought is useful as a sympathetic but critical look at what liberalism is missing, and it provides insight into what is needed to rejuvenate the tradition. This is increasingly necessary as a way of responding to right-wing critics like Deneen. That is of course if liberals are willing to listen.
Atomism and the Malaise of Modernity
Taylor is a Canadian Catholic philosopher who works out of McGill University. Always a man of the left, he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the moderate socialist New Democratic Party several times. Despite not quite crossing the finish line, he has remained a major influence on Canadian leftists like former NDP leader Jack Layton, who was an enthusiastic student of Taylor’s at McGill.
Early in the 1970s, Taylor made his name as a political philosopher through a critique of what was memorably termed “Atomism” in his 1979 paper of that title. Taylor charged that liberal social contract thinkers construed society as little more than a voluntarily created artificial vehicle for the pursuit of individualistic ends. This built upon their thin view of human beings as competitive atoms isolated from one another who pursue their self-interest first and foremost. The meaning of life on this vision was little more than the gratification of material desires through competitive acquisition. What Taylor considers a wrongheaded anthropology gave rise to doctrines like utilitarianism and many forms of capitalist dogma, which became profoundly influential and worked to rebuild society on an impoverished image of human nature.
These critiques were given more muscle in Taylor’s major works. In 1975, he released Hegel—a pathbreaking book which reintroduced the German philosopher to English-speaking audiences. This was followed up with the shorter Hegel and Modern Society, which contains important objections to Hegel’s critique of liberalism and modernity. In Hegel and Modern Society, Taylor acknowledged there were serious problems with conservative critiques of liberalism and modernity, like Hegel’s. Most sought to return to a kind of conservative, “organic” social unity. Taylor stressed how industrialization and the extension of economic rationality into all spheres of life, coupled with the rapid advancement of technology, meant all resets to “visions of man in communion with nature, and nature as expression of Spirit, which the Romantic era spawned…” were doomed to failure. Despite this, Taylor warned that the desire to overcome atomism and build a less alienating kind of society remained very strong. Liberals were naïve to assume otherwise. That which is “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d’ by modern society, hemmed in by modern conformity, stamped out by the great machine of Utility, repressed by the ‘system,’ is human nature, or rather the creative, expressive potential of man.”
In 1991’s The Malaise of Modernity, Taylor revisits these themes and describes liberalism as a contributor (one amongst many) to our modern feelings of dissatisfaction. In “Atomism” and the Hegel books, the emphasis is on our sense of connection with others. In Malaise, Taylor worries that individualism can and has led to a loss of meaning: people “no longer have a sense of a higher purpose, of something worth dying for. Alexis de Tocqueville sometimes talked like this in the last century, referring to the ‘petits et vulgaires plaisirs’ that people tend to seek in the democratic age. In another articulation, we suffer from a lack of passion. Kierkegaard saw ‘the present age’ in these terms. And Nietzsche’s ‘last men’ are at the final nadir of this decline; they have no aspiration left in life but to a ‘pitiable comfort.’”
Taylor thinks that we can keep many of the social and political benefits of normative individualism in our societies if we are willing to break with the harshness of absolute, methodological individualism, especially at the economic level.
Nevertheless, Taylor reiterates that there is no going back to the “older moral horizons” which subordinate the individual to a “hierarchical order in the universe” which was “reflected in the hierarchies of human society.” Pre-modern societies cruelly “locked” people “into a given place, a role and station that was properly theirs and from which it was almost unthinkable to deviate. Modern freedom came about through the discrediting of such orders.” Taylor thinks that we can keep many of the social and political benefits of normative individualism in our societies if we are willing to break with the harshness of absolute, methodological individualism, especially at the economic level. We need to realize that human beings are social animals and not competitive egoists who are mostly in it for themselves.
The payoff, according to Taylor, is that this perspective maintains respect for liberal rights to freedom of expression and religious toleration by recognizing that a more cooperative socio-economic system is required to sustain support for them. In societies defined by economic precarity and anxiety, we all too rapidly retreat to nationalistic and tribal chauvinisms for succor. In a subtle jab against neoliberal dogmas, Taylor notes how many liberals think like communists insofar as they imagine that modern society must be run according to a single principle. They simply swap the dogmatic commitment to “planning under the general will [for] that of free-market allocations.” By contrast, society ought to be oriented by multiple different principles: “market allocations, state planning, collective provision for need, the defense of individual rights, and effective democratic initiative and control.” In the short run, market efficiency might be curbed by paying attention to the other “four modes,” but in the long run, “justice and freedom, would suffer from their marginalization.”
All this vindicates Taylor’s longstanding worry that in the absence of a tolerable liberal modernity, the romantic yearning for older, conservative forms of order and hierarchy could readily resurface and gain momentum.
This is an important point for several reasons. Firstly, already in the early 1990s, we see Taylor conciliating with liberalism and recognizing that its accomplishments ought to be carried forward—provided they are properly situated and balanced. But second and far more importantly, Taylor’s sage warning that liberal justice and freedom would be compromised by an overemphasis on market logics to the exclusion of all other concerns was widely ignored by neoliberal politicians and thinkers. Inequality was allowed to soar, political power was permitted to concentrate ever more firmly in oligarchic hands, towns and communities were gutted as jobs left and never came back, and worse. All this vindicates Taylor’s longstanding worry that in the absence of a tolerable liberal modernity, the romantic yearning for older, conservative forms of order and hierarchy could readily resurface and gain momentum. Liberals would not be in this mess if we had listened.
Taylor Contra the Post-liberals
In his more recent work, Taylor offers highly sophisticated resources to defend liberalism, and modernity more generally, against its enemies.
In A Secular Age, Taylor takes to task those conservatives who see liberalism and modernity as fundamentally breaking with Christianity. The story is more complex and is, in fact, one of continuity rather than breaks. Some forms of Christianity internalized pre-modern social imaginaries that conceived the cosmos as a hierarchy with God on top as King of the Universe and all other creatures being his subjects. This in turn was mapped onto their vision of the proper society, predicated on what Taylor in Modern Social Imaginaries calls “hierarchical complementarity.” Much like the universe was a hierarchy with God at the summit, so too were all human societies microcosms of the cosmological “Great Chain of Being.” To this day, many conservatives remain enamored with versions of Christian which center a worldview that is in fact pre-Christian, while dropping the more specifically Christian innovations that Nietzsche rejected as the origins of modern egalitarianism from liberalism to democratic socialism.
To this day, many conservatives remain enamored with versions of Christian which center a worldview that is in fact pre-Christian, while dropping the more specifically Christian innovations…
This is because pre-modern vision always sat uncomfortably with the core tenets of Christianity. This included the conviction that all individual souls were equal before the throne of God, which overlapped with the idea that the salvation of a peasant’s soul mattered as much as a King’s. Eventually, these ideas morphed into the various forms of Protestantism that laid the religious foundation for liberal egalitarianism and even secularism. As Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, it has often been “noted how secularization went along with intensification of religious faith. The ‘message and driving force behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation ‘was that ‘religion was on its way to becoming a matter of intense personal decision.’ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a ‘new Christianity of personal commitment which was evolving in an increasingly secularized society.’” Equal individuals were entitled to make private choices about intensely personal issues like religious faith for themselves; indeed, to make an inauthentic choice was conceived as failing to take faith sufficiently seriously. Imposing a worldview on them would inherently bastardize it through inauthenticity. Eventually, this evolved into tolerance for those who chose to have no faith at all, contributing to the emergence of secular societies.
Taylor’s story also profoundly troubles the claims of those, like Deneen, who want to criticize liberal metaphysics as some kind of fall from pre-liberal ideas. Let alone figures like Adrian Vermeule, who flirt with seeing it as borderline Satanic rebellion. From Deneen and Vermeule’s perspective, liberalism breaks from Christian realism in seeing nature as mere matter and motion, which exists just to be manipulated to satisfy human desires. This is related back to the political egalitarianism of liberals, who saw society as a similarly artificial creation which could be reworked in line with human interests, thereby viewing social hierarchies as anything but natural. In his critical book Post-Liberalism, Matt Sleat describes how:
In A Secular Age, Taylor challenges the conventional account which assumes the rise of modern secularism required viewing belief in God and an interest in nature ‘for its own sake’ as inherently incompatible. According to Taylor (2018:113), the shift in our understanding and stance towards nature was over-determined by multiple independent reasons, yet many accounts overlook the extent to which this new interest in nature was being exhibited by Christians for theological reasons. One such reason was an evangelical turn in the late twelfth century, which sought to bring Christ into the world as the site of his incarnation-directing attention away from a purely transcendental spiritual realm and legitimizing focus on this world.”
The message that comes from Taylor’s story is simple: no matter how many issues of First Things whine about the trans agenda and flirt with fascism as a possible cure, there is no pre-liberal and pre-modern utopia they will return to. Thinking otherwise is undialectical and ahistorical. Liberalism, and modernity generally, emerged in part out of Christianity. Modern egalitarian ethics were inspired by the Christian revolt against hierarchical social imaginaries. Liberal individualism owes much to the emphasis on authentic faith and the importance of the private soul. Much like the scientific and instrumental approach to nature and human biological existence also drew stimulus from Christian nominalism. One can still choose to reject all of these as vulgar heresies and perversions of true faith. But what one cannot do is simply reject them as mistakes that emerged ex nihilo.
The High Ethical Demands of Modernity
In his most recent big book, Cosmic Connections, Taylor brings many of these complex themes together in a symphonic, if messy, fashion. He also offers some intriguing material for those liberals who wish to defend the ethical seriousness of our creed. That is, provided we are willing to turn away from vulgar forms of liberalism that think with Margaret Thatcher that there is simply no alternative to capitalist dogmatics.
Taylor describes a “history of ethical growth” that has occurred. In the modern era, this has involved extending the idea of human worth to all individuals equally. The result is stress on the “needs and rights of individuals. Individual human beings come to be endowed in the regnant ethic with rights to freedom, to recognition of and respect for their ‘identity,’ to new levels of help and concern on the part of society and government. And along with these grows the demand for equality, and nondiscrimination between individuals.”
The right is appealing not because it makes higher demands of us, as the highfalutin rhetoric of figures like J.D Vance sometimes suggests. When Vance warps ideas of ordo amoris to suggest putting ourselves first and second, it appeals because it asks so little of us.
This sense that all individuals matter equally increases the “raising of ethical standards” and increases the sense that there is a gap between how society operates and how it ought to. The political right often tries to narrow this gap precisely by a lowering of ethical standards and insisting that we owe special or even exclusive obligations only to those who are worthy, or who look like us, or who belong to “our” country. The right is appealing not because it makes higher demands of us, as the highfalutin rhetoric of figures like J.D Vance sometimes suggests. When Vance warps ideas of ordo amoris to suggest putting ourselves first and second, it appeals because it asks so little of us. One might adapt G.K Chesterton and say that the populist right insists that liberalism has been tried, found hard, and ought to be given up as a consequence.
Taylor insists that the solution to liberals’ woes lies precisely in trying harder to live up to our ethically demanding creed.
Taylor insists that the solution to liberals’ woes lies precisely in trying harder to live up to our ethically demanding creed. A failure to do so is one of the reasons Trumpism has gained ground. If ordinary people realize that liberals do not intend to live up to their principles, liberals cease to look principled at all and are little more than smugly self-righteous.
Taylor is unambiguous about where the problem lies:
…There are other ways in which steps forward, as measured by the demands of the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights], can generate very bad consequences which worsen or degrade the lives of the many while improving the lot of elites. The Industrial Revolution as enabler of the rigid development of capitalism certainly increased the well-being of capitalists as well as many landlords, but at the cost of impoverishment of the many, both in terms of living standards, and in those of living conditions: ugly, overcrowded, polluted surroundings in the new cities, until democratic action by nonelites succeeded in winning some economic gains for workers; and until the social-democratic institutions and policies which tamed early capitalism were undermined by globalization and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century, which laid the conditions in which the present wave of xenophobic populism is now sweeping the democratic world.
What the liberals and socialists of the 19th century knew, we have forgotten and been forced to remember. Markets have their place. But left to its own devices, capitalism corrodes the support upon which liberalism rests by making a mockery of liberals’ claims that they really care about liberty, equality, and solidarity for all. Liberalism is simply not coextensive with capitalism, and in some cases, it may well be necessary to choose between them. The oligarchs of America have made it very clear where their loyalties lie. Liberals ought to remind ordinary people that our loyalties lie with them.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, amongst other books.
Image made using “Charles Taylor (cropped),” by Makhanets licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Any other images used are in the public domain.
