Can John Rawls be a good life coach? If you’ve ever read Rawls, you must be inclined to answer “no.” However, in the hands of a lively and lucid interpreter like Alexandre Lefebvre, Rawls’s theory yields unexpected ethical force and insight.
Many of us—political theorists and non-academics—tend to assume that liberalism is about politics, not about ethics. This book sets out to correct that assumption, arguing that liberalism can and should be a way of life for most individuals in Western cultures. Lefebvre supports this argument with three claims, which I will expand on and evaluate below. Throughout, Lefebvre takes Rawls as his guide as the “moralist we need right now” (23). There is also a large supporting cast, including Pierre Hadot, Tocqueville, Mill, Kierkegaard, as well as numerous references to American pop culture.
1. Our liberal culture: according to Lefebvre, liberalism used to play a narrowly political role in our lives, with religion serving as our ethical standard. In the past several decades, liberalism has come to pervade our culture and has become the basis of our private morality, displacing religion for many secular individuals in the West. His argument here is intended to make the case that liberal citizens can adopt liberalism as a way of life—that is, it is not a chimera or unattainable ideal.
Obviously much of Lefebvre’s descriptive claims about “our” liberal culture depends on who he includes in the “we.” Lefebvre has an audience in mind of liberal-minded fellows who like to watch a good deal of TV (see 15–16 for a list of shows) that expresses certain liberal tenets such as fairness, reciprocity, generosity, freedom, toleration, and the like. I certainly like these TV shows as well, but I became concerned about an insular description of “our” liberal culture after realizing how much of the descriptive evidence he uses draws on a narrow slice of pop culture. Much of the culture Lefebvre references is consumed by an American, educated, wealthy, white audience, which considerably narrows the scope of the “we.” There is a lot of culture expressing different perspectives and values and appealing to other ethnic, economic, and educational backgrounds. Some of this culture embodies a religious perspective (not his audience), but some of it expresses a more traditionally conservative meritocratic and individualist liberalism.
I was reminded of Patrick Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed) in this context. Like Lefebvre, Deneen in part draws on American liberal culture, even though he is critical of liberalism while Lefebvre is celebratory. However, he comes to a very different conclusion as to what liberalism is. For Deneen, it consists in the valorization of autonomy. My reaction to the cultural analysis of both works is the same—both seem to capture part of the truth of our liberal culture, but not the whole of it. A more capacious examination of the tensions or conflicts internal to liberal culture, for example, would be welcome in these types of analysis.
2. Our failure: our liberal culture provides the ideals of a liberal life, but we fail to live up to these ideals. Lefebvre cites the example of “liberal hypocrisy,” according to which liberals in blue states profess egalitarian ideals but then resist policies of “egalitarian housing, taxation, and education” that would bring these ideals about (118). Lefebvre does not think that mere selfishness is to blame for our failure. At the same time, capitalism, democracy, nationalism, meritocracy, and racism all have played a role in preventing us from living up to our best selves (117). Possibly liberalism itself has had some “qualified” role to play as well (119).
In this analysis, Lefebvre gives short shrift to the positive contributions of capitalism, democracy, nationalism, and meritocracy to the success of liberalism. Capitalism and meritocracy can be engines fueling individual creativity and initiative. Democracy can build our capacities for reciprocity and generosity. Nationalism can encourage us to escape from our egos and think about the common good. Of course, the book focuses on the individual, rather than these general forces. But individuals exist within what G. W. F. Hegel calls our “ethical life,” those objective institutions that shape us and are shaped by us. I would have liked to see more attention to these institutions which have in my view a greater scope and possibility for reform than the appeals to culture that Lefebvre relies on.
3. Spiritual exercises: it is not until the final section of the book that we get an analysis of the ethical principles of the liberal life, as well as the case for that life. In addition, in this section Lefebvre offers us three sets of “spiritual exercises,” drawn from Rawls, to help us become a better liberal: (a) placing ourselves in the “original position” encourages us to become impartial, autonomous, less prideful, and “ironic” (175); (b) undertaking a “reflective equilibrium” exercise teaches us to gain humility and coherence among our views, and to avoid hypocrisy; (c) adopting the perspective of “public reason” helps us tolerate and even take “delight” in others, and give our sublunary life a grand purpose (177).
Much of the analysis here is excellent and I wish Lefebvre had expanded it. Particularly noteworthy is the use of part three of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, “Ends”, to flesh out the liberal way of life.
However, there are places that Lefebvre takes Rawls that I’m not sure he’d go. For example, the “original position” spiritual exercise asks us to “shed the partial self to ascend to the impersonal self” (185) and adopt an “ironic” posture toward life (189). Lefebvre seems to resuscitate Michael Sandel’s view of the “unencumbered self,” a view that Rawls repudiated. But in addition, I worry that Lefebvre does not acknowledge the tensions within liberalism that Rawls himself was attuned to. For example, in the chapter on reflective equilibrium, Lefebvre argues that the “liberal way of life is uniquely unified … we alone are whole, and not riven by tensions between our personal and public moral commitments” (212). How does this strong claim about the unified liberal self square with the ironic self? Doesn’t irony require a division in the soul to be ironic about?
Let me offer a final example of something Rawls wouldn’t accept, namely, on the matter of religion or transcendent truth. Lefebvre argues that “we” liberals “are not so much relativists or even agnostics as indifferentists … the metaphysical truth of a worldview is irrelevant and unconvincing” (231). Liberals care about this world, not the world beyond or the world to come. However, Rawls struggled with his own faith, brought religious categories such as redemption into his own philosophy, and set out to devise a political liberalism animated not by indifference to religion but committed to the protection of it through an overlapping consensus.
What is true of even the “political, not metaphysical” liberal like Rawls was even more true of prior liberals, such as Locke or Kant or Green. These liberals, far from being indifferent, thought that fundamental analyses of human nature, the nature and end of reason, and the meaning of life were necessary features of a liberal project. I worry that indifference to the cosmic context of human life leaves liberalism vulnerable to the illiberal left and right that do wrestle with the transcendent (239). Can liberal culture be maintained based on such indifference?
Lefebvre’s book offers an innovative application of Rawls—no mean feat given the immense body of scholarship on him—and makes a compelling case for liberalism at a time when it continues to need defenders. My main concern is that he vitiates his project by constraining his vision of liberalism to a narrow slice of liberal culture.
