Just how many forms of liberalism are there?

While both proponents and critics often speak of “liberalism” as though it was a unity (and, yes, mea culpa!), there are numerous plausible forms of authentic liberalism. These different forms need not cohere. Well known, for example, is the distinction many make between small government “classical liberalism” and big government “modern liberalism.” There is the divide between those who argue, following John Rawls, that liberalism necessarily includes a commitment to secular foundations, and those, such as the left-liberal Christians at Sojourners (or, more classically, James Madison), who argue that liberalism can be, or even must be, founded on religious commitments.

There are many more divisions, even among liberals on the same side of the classical/modern divide.

The existence of multiple forms of liberalism is important not only to those who identify as liberals, but also to critics of one or another form of liberalism. “Postliberal” critics of liberalism, for example, often identify and respond to only a strict subset of liberalisms. In his recent book, Yoram Hazony expressly limits his consideration of liberalism to “Enlightenment liberalism.” So, too, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst contrive an idiosyncratic liberalism for their wide-ranging criticisms in The Politics of Virtue. Yet one cannot be said to reject “liberalism” simpliciter if criticisms apply only to a subset of authentic liberalisms.

Even more significantly, given the range of plausible liberalisms, rejecting the simplistic liberal/postliberal dualism may suggest that there are robust forms of liberalism—or at least sets of liberal postulates—that even postliberals can embrace, or even that many postliberals want to embrace. Critics may reject some forms of liberalism but not others. Recognizing this may help move the discussion away from a sterile and overly broad discussion of “liberalism” simpliciter and toward a discussion of what postulates in different forms of liberalism may be malignant, and what postulates in other forms of authentic liberalism may be benign.

How Many Liberalisms Are There?

So just how many liberalisms are there? Calculating the number depends on the assumptions one makes. Based on the assumptions I articulate below—and readers can replace those with their own assumptions and estimate their own numbers—I suggest a reasonable approximation of the number of plausible liberalisms ranges from 22 to 57.

The reason for the variation in the number of possible liberalisms is that liberals (and, hence, postliberals too) can, as it were, “mix and match” the set of postulates that their liberalism embraces. Calculating the number of “combinations” of these postulates depends on how many possible liberal postulates there are, and how many of those possible postulates an authentic version of liberalism must include.

The actual counting is easier to understand than the abstract statement above. We first must identify the set of liberal postulates, then identify how many postulates an authentic version of liberalism must affirm.

What are the postulates that liberalisms affirm? I start with a list I derived from liberal postulates Larry Siedentop suggests in his book, Inventing the Individual. I then fill out his list by identifying a couple of additional plausible liberal postulates. In all, I identify a total of six main possible liberal postulates. A liberal need not agree with all six of these postulates. It is the “mix or match” quality of these postulates for different forms of authentic liberalism that results in the large number of plausible liberalisms.

Also, as I noted in the introduction, one form of liberalism can embrace versions of liberal postulates that contradict other forms of liberalism. For example, if a liberal asserts that the principle “Respect for Persons” is necessarily based on the religious postulate of the imago dei as articulated in the Scriptures, then that liberal necessarily rejects the claim that “Secular Foundations” is a necessary postulate of liberalism. Both forms of liberalism may identify “Respect for Persons” as a fundamental postulate, but different forms of liberalism may identify different, even contradictory foundations and implications of the postulate. (Note the implication: a postliberal objection to liberalism based on rejecting liberalism’s “Secular Foundations” would not in fact apply to forms of liberalism based on “Religious Foundations.”)

Drawing on Siedentop, and adding a couple of additional possible liberal postulates (with a grateful nod to Professors Ben Peterson and Dave Reiter for help with this) I propose an initial list of leading liberal postulates:

1. Ontological individualism (or, the denial of the existence of any truly corporate person or body): A more narrow version of this might be titled “methodological individualism.” This is the idea that even social aggregates can be accurately described only by identifying and explaining actions taken by individual persons. Note that, contrary to the many wrong-headed criticisms of methodological individualism, methodological individualism does not​ entail the claim that individual behavior is unaffected by the group in which one finds oneself. Methodologically individualist theories can account for people being affected by phenomena like “mob psychology.” It’s just that accounting for this behavior posits that the “mob” be understood as a plural “they” and not as a unitary “it.” This postulate denies the existence of any real organic social unities of people.

2. Respect for Persons: This is a broad liberal commitment on which liberals disagree profoundly as to its basis and its implications. For most classical liberals, “respect for persons” rules out economic redistribution to achieve bare economic equality across society. Yet for left-liberals, “respect for persons” invites redistribution to achieve economic equality (even modulated by Rawls’ “difference principle”). So, too, for some liberals, legalized abortion and euthanasia violate the “respect for persons” principle. For other liberals, the principle requires legalized abortion and euthanasia. Even more broadly, Tocqueville argues that aristocratic and monarchical societies can better protect liberal values such as free thought and free speech than can democratic societies. (“Liberal Monarchism” anyone?)

3. Secular Foundations: Many liberals, most famously John Rawls, insist that “freedom of conscience” depends on political society having secular foundations. Others, such as James Madison, argue that freedom of conscience can only be defended as a God-given right. Similarly, Rawls takes a commitment to “Public Reason”—a very important concept in Rawls’ liberal society—as an implicit commitment to “Secular Foundations.” There are, however, some religious liberals who argue that a commitment to “Public Reason” is fully consistent with affirming orthodox Christian beliefs. That is, that the Faith is fully accessible to, and fully consistent with, “Public Reason.”

4. Cosmopolitanism: This can include the subordination of national interest to global claims. Or this can be a version of free borders, or the claim that a nation’s policymakers should not prefer a nation’s citizens in policymaking to citizens in other nations, etc. It can also include “globalization” in the form of a commitment to the free flow of capital and labor across national borders. And it might include a commitment to one or more international organizations.

5. The Separation of a Private Realm from a Public Realm: Only those actions that are defined as “public” are subject to political or social regulation. Those actions deemed “private” are off limits. Think, for example, of the slippage between a “privacy” right and “autonomy” in the Supreme Court’s 14th Amendment substantive due process jurisprudence. Some liberals—J.S. Mill, for example—might anchor this postulate in the postulate of “Respect for Persons.” For others, it is free-standing.

6. A commitment to a robust system of Private Property: (even if this commitment is not absolute). This can extend from strong property rights advocated by classical liberals like Hayek (called “neoliberalism” by numerous commentators today), to weaker forms of property rights, as in Rawls’ society, which includes a commitment to private property, albeit with a strong redistributivist component.

This list need not exhaust the set of possibilities. Some may add to the list, or subtract, or combine or divide postulates differently. That’s all fine. Also important to note is that a liberal need not adhere to all six of these postulates. They can mix or match. For example, Philip Pettit’s Republicanism revolves around a singular, obsessive commitment to “nondomination” (or what I would call “respect for persons”). In Pettit’s theory “non-domination” is the sedes doctrinae, or the singular “seat of doctrine,” for his liberalism. Rawls, in contrast, asserts at least two or three of these postulates, depending on how one counts: methodological individualism, respect for persons, and secular foundations.

The Combinatorics of Liberalisms

Now that we have a list, even if malleable, we can generate the number of plausible liberalisms. The point is not to generate a precise—or faux precise—enumeration. Rather, it’s to provide a sense that we’re dealing with more than a small number of plausible liberalisms.

Recognizing the existence of liberalisms (plural), rather than a single liberalism, reveals the possibility of an overlapping agreement between right-liberals and religious postliberals.

If we assume that a system of liberalism can be sufficiently identified by a commitment to one or more of the postulates above, then the set of liberalisms equals the set of all combinations on a set of 6 elements. This gives us 63 different plausible forms of liberalism if we allow a plausible form of authentic liberalism to affirm just one of the above postulates.[1]

I am, however, open to the complaint that defining an authentic form of liberalism as holding only one of the above postulates is too promiscuous a standard. Pettit’s non-domination, for instance, may seem too thin for an authentic form of liberalism. One might think that a reasonable form of authentic liberalism would be committed to at least two or three or four of the above principles.

It is not difficult to account for that complaint, however. We can calculate the number of possible liberalisms no matter the number of postulates one thinks an authentic version of liberalism might affirm.

If commitment to two (or more) of the above postulates would be sufficient for a form of authentic liberalism, then there would be 57 different possible liberalisms. If one believed a commitment to three or more of the above principles were necessary for an authentic form of liberalism, then there would still be 42 available forms of liberalism. Finally, if we required a commitment to four or more of the above principles, then there would still be 22 different liberalisms. (And then seven, and one.)

That said, if our combinatorics of liberalism included subvariants of the different principles, our count of possible versions of liberalism would increase quickly, and the number of possible liberalisms would be even larger than estimated above.

The Upshot of Numerous Different Liberalisms

Beyond the abstract exercise in elementary combinatorics, there is, I would suggest, relevance to the enumeration and identification of different forms of liberalism. From whatever number one wishes to identify as the set of possible authentic liberalisms, one can then create, as it were, an index of the coverage of different forms of anti-liberal criticism. This, in turn, can help identify common ground between some forms of liberalism and some forms of anti- or postliberalism. Contrary to the implication of liberalism treated as a singular concept, with various forms of liberalisms, the possibility exists of otherwise neglected intersections between some forms of liberalism and liberalism’s critics.

Take, for example, the issue of religion and liberalism. “Left” liberals typically argue that “Secular Foundations” is a fundamental aspect of liberalism. (Although even there, left-liberals such as the Sojourners and some Quakers may disagree.) In contrast, many “right” liberals argue not only that robust forms of liberalism do not require “Secular Foundations,” instead, stable, authentic forms of liberalism actually require “Religious Foundations.”

Recognizing the existence of liberalisms (plural), rather than a single liberalism, reveals the possibility of an overlapping agreement between, say, right-liberals and religious postliberals.

For example, if one believed that a robust liberal system must be committed to at least three of the six candidates for liberal postulates identified above, then the total number of possible liberalisms would be 42.

Say then we want to identify the liberalisms within this set that do not affirm Secular Foundations. Given the six possible liberal postulates identified above, the number of those possible liberalisms that include the postulate of “Secular Foundations” would be 25. The number of liberalisms that do not include “Secular Foundations,” however, is 17.

An argument against liberalisms with a commitment to Secular Foundations would apply only to 59.5% of forms of liberalism (again assuming a commitment to at least three of the possible liberal principles).

While that’s a sizeable number of liberalisms, nonetheless, a still significant 40.5 percent of liberalisms that include three or more of the above postulates would not include Secular Foundations among those sets of postulates. That is, there are seventeen authentic forms of three-or-more-postulate liberalism to which an objection based on Secular Foundations does not apply.

Again, the point of the combinatorics isn’t some sort of faux precision of the decimal-pointed counts. The point is that combinatorics helps articulate the intuition that a robust number of authentic forms of liberalism exist that are not inherently committed to Secular Foundations.

To be sure, one could argue, as does Hazony, that while there may be liberalisms that are not committed to the principle of Secular Foundations, as an empirical or historical matter, modern liberalism—that is, the liberalism with which we are wrestling in this day and age—is​ in fact committed to Secular Foundations. Therefore, the argument goes, as a practical matter, to reject liberalisms committed to Secular Foundations is in fact to stake the heart of modern liberalism.

Nonetheless, as Hazony also points out, many contemporary liberal political theorists do not include Secular Foundations in their account of liberalism. (I might add that this fact is perhaps more historically true than Hazony recognizes.) It is not immaterial to a discussion of liberalism and postliberalism that even a definitive rejection of Secular-Foundations liberalism simply does not stake the heart of liberalism per se. That is, along with Hazony and many postliberals, a significant residuum of authentic liberalisms share a commitment to Religious Foundations and reject liberal systems based on the conceit of Secular Foundations.

The point of this exercise is not to set up a “whack-a-mole“ problem for postliberals in which, when one objection is asserted against one form of liberalism the liberal defender can always point to another form of liberalism that does not share that postulate. Rather, the point is that the liberal/postliberal dualism is too simplistic. The dualism requires that we see disagreement where there may in fact be agreement, or at least where they may be some agreement. Depending on the postulate(s), many forms of postliberalism may actually be consistent with some forms of authentic liberalism, and vice versa. Recognizing areas of overlapping agreement can change the nature of the dispute going forward rather than creating disagreement where none really exists.

[1] How do we identify the number of subsets with a certain number of elements Y that can be formed out of a set of 6 elements? Let X be the number in a set, and Y be the number of elements uniquely selected from that set. The designation “XcY,” or where X and Y are natural numbers and X ≥ Y is read “X choose Y.” And is calculated as (Y!)/(Y-X)!(X!), where X! is read “X factorial” and is calculated as the product of (X)(X-1)(X-2) . . . (2)(1).

The set of possible combinations of liberal principles if we allow liberalism to be reasonable defined by a commitment to just one of those principles would be: 6c6 + 6c5 + 6c4 + 6c3 + 6c2 + 6c1 = 1 + 6 + 15 + 20 +15 + 6 = 63.