Issues in and around Liberal Theory: What is Liberalism?

Résumé du document

“In this essay I shall propose a theory about what liberalism is”. Dworkin's project is here clearly exposed. And, as most political thinkers when they try to define a coherent theory at the fundaments of actual political movements, “I face an immediate problem. My project supposes that there is such a thing as liberalism”, liberalism as “an authentic and a coherent political morality” (L, 113). And thus, he widely opens the dark and sticky abyss of skepticism, particularly threatening to the so-called political liberals, and in which all their opponents – from socialists to conservatives – seek to precipitate them armed with their absolute doctrines. Indeed, liberalism as a political banner has been applied and endorsed by an extraordinary diversity of thoughts, acts, men, ideas, parties through time and space: and if with Dworkin we go through some of the recent ones, we might then be lead to the thesis of liberalism as a variable package of causes assembled by interest – so what if we go back to the 18th century?

Extraits

[...] Dworkin's undertaking to “propose a theory about what liberalism as a coherent political morality targets mainly its avatars from New Deal to Post-Vietnam War Liberalism. But looking back at Mill's text On Liberty and its exegesis by Isaiah Berlin, the quest is open for a constitutive principle from the origins of one of the main political movements since the 19th century in the Western world “that has remained roughly the same over some time, and that continues to be influential in politics”. [...]

[...] Indeed, think' he says in his essay on Bentham[ ‘utility or happiness much too complex or indefinite an end to be sought except through the medium of various secondary ends' [ ]In J.S.Mill's writings happiness comes to mean something very like ‘realization of one's wishes', whatever they may be.”(FEL, 181) Mill thus pursues as an end that every one could equally realize one's wishes, in their variety, valuing diversity and individuality: and the protection of liberty is a fundamental medium among others to the equal chances of fulfilling one's vision of happiness. This is where the constitutive principle raised by Dworkin reconciles the two theorists and the liberal political movements. [...]

[...] Meditations on First Philosophy. “Strains in and around liberal theory: an overview from a strong voluntarist perspective”. Flathman, Richard. [...]

[...] Is not the only indexical denomination of Deal liberalism” tending to certain skepticism? And while classical liberalism has been identified as bound to liberty, and a thinker like Berlin underlines that the liberty defended as such is “liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience”(FEL, 125), Dworkin brings up equality as the “nerve of liberalism” deduced and seems to ironically throw us into the skepticism he announced he would fight. However, Dworkin pretends finding a constitutive principle to liberalism as a political morality without selling off the concept of political theory, which should keep its constitutive morality through the accidents of history. [...]

[...] He deplores the loss of clarity of the movement since the Vietnam War: apparent contradictions, lack of differentiation with the conservatives and reluctance to assume a liberal identity. This leads him to look for a constitutive principle to link back the observed current liberalism even dissolved to that New Deal liberalism. He wants thus to face the skeptical thesis: “liberalism has been used, since the 18th century, to describe various distinct clusters of political positions, but with no important similarity of principle [ ]at different 115). [...]