I don’t doubt, for example, that many individuals have embraced some or all of these liberal premises while at the same time believing in God, or in the binding character of Scripture, or in the sanctity of the family and the congregation, or in the national state as the best form of political order, and so forth. Of course, one does not have to accept the liberal axiom system as a closed and complete system.
#Liberas be like free#
It is still the free and equal individual, who takes on obligations only after reasoning about them and choosing them, that is the basis for liberal political theory and for liberal public discourse. Indeed, since the 1990s, many liberal political theorists have sought to distance themselves from the Enlightenment rationalism of earlier liberal thought.īut these trends have made little difference. Attempts to alter the foundations of liberalism are well known. The axioms of the liberal-rationalist system have dominated discourse wherever liberalism has advanced in Europe and America up until our own day. These fundamental axioms are important not only for understanding a certain stream of early-modern political rationalism. Obligation Arises from Choice. Human individuals have no obligations to political institutions until “by their own consent they make themselves members of some political society.” The Free and Equal Individual. Human individuals are by nature in a state of “perfect freedom” and “perfect equality.”ģ. Availability and Sufficiency of Reason. Human individuals are capable of exercising reason, which “teaches all mankind who will but consult it.” By reasoning, they are able to discover universal truths that hold good across all human societies and in every historical time frame.Ģ.
The axioms on which the liberal system is founded are these:ġ. By “rationalist,” I mean that this kind of political thought is intended to imitate a mathematical system, which begins with axioms taken to be self-evident and proceeds by supposedly infallible deductions. I take “liberalism” to refer to a political tradition descended from the principal texts of Enlightenment rationalist political philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant. And it is far better equipped to avert the complete collapse of political order and to maintain the free institutions of these nations. This position is closer to the spirit of the traditional constitution in both America and Britain than the liberal political theories of our day. I want to sketch an alternative viewpoint that I will call conservative democracy. There are other alternatives to liberal democracy.
Liberals often claim that the only alternatives to liberal democracy are Marxism and fascism.