Fish Do Not Aspire to Wetness

Misunderstanding Liberalism

Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Today’s disheartening resurgence of authoritarianism, xenophobia, race-baiting, brazen sexism and religious zealotry, not to mention homicidal rampages in the name of ethnic identity, makes rallying to the defense of a beleaguered liberalism into an intellectual and moral imperative. Even Alexander Lefebvre, a delightfully entertaining Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sidney, acknowledges in an aside that “liberal institutions and values are threatened worldwide.”  But his stylishly chatty and evangelizing new book aims to defend liberalism against a threat less grimly consequential than those making newspaper headlines.  The danger to which he draws our attention is more bookish and professorial than blood-dimmed and existential.  In making his eloquent case for liberalism, he says little about the malignant movements of the far right thriving on political confusion and division in the United States and the European Union.  Instead, he concentrates his hostile fire on a fashionable but unjustifiably cramped interpretation of the teachings of his philosophical hero, John Rawls.   

The mission he sets himself is to present Rawls’ thought in a new light and thereby overturn “the reigning orthodoxy of how to do political philosophy within the Anglophone academy.”  The orthodoxy with which he takes issue is the idea that liberalism is an exclusively and narrowly political doctrine focused on organizing political institutions to guarantee the equal rights and liberties of all members of the community.  He invites us to look beyond its strictly political aspirations and appreciate liberalism’s promise of personal fulfillment through fair and generous treatment of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues and the strangers we occasionally meet.  

The charm of Lefebvre’s approach to Rawls lies in how he transforms the dense and conceptually innovative analysis of A Theory of Justice into a frolicking, page-turning “work of self-help for liberals.”  While his capsule riffs on Locke, Montesquieu and Tocqueville are unremarkable, his discussions of Rawls’ works display a subtlety that could only come from years of serious thought and study.  But what sets him apart from other lifelong Rawlsians is how he sees Rawls less as a systematic thinker than as a spiritual guide for ethical living. 

Boiled down to essentials, Lefebvre’s contribution to the massive critical literature on Rawls’ work is a new way of reading “the original position,” the celebrated thought experiment whereby people choose the principles of justice that govern society from behind a veil of ignorance, that is, without knowing their social status, capacities or beliefs.  It is a mistake to reduce the system of liberal values associated with the original position to an abstract rationale for antipoverty programs and civil rights law, he explains.  Interpreted correctly, Rawls’ philosophy is more personal and intimate than that.  As “a hymn to a liberal way of life,” Rawlsian liberalism is functionally a “religious discourse intended for spiritual edification.” Its primary aim is the “transformation of the individual.”  Admittedly, thinking through the implications of the original position for social policy may also excite and guide supporters of transfer programs.  But, at a deeper level, Rawls’ thought experiment is “a spiritual exercise” designed to foster personal development and ethical living.  

Individuals who take Rawls’ thought experiment seriously, Lefebvre tells us, will become better human beings, more tolerant, considerate, kind, generous, grateful, civil, self-aware, self-deprecating, impartial, empathetic, reciprocal, autonomous, lighthearted, in love with human diversity, at peace with contingency, and able to quiet their futile rage at society as they find it.  He describes these postures and proclivities as “perks” or selling points of a genuinely liberal lifestyle.  He never suggests that we should strive to become wholly and truly liberal, in Rawls’ sense, simply for the psychological dividends it affords.  But a central purpose of his book is to “reveal liberalism as the fun, rewarding, and fulfilling way of life it can be.”  If you embrace liberal principles unreservedly, you will have a chance to become “a full and complete human being.”  If you take Rawls’ liberalism to heart, it will “upend your life” in the very best sense. 

Lefebvre came up with this surprising approach to his hero under the influence of Pierre Hadot, a distinguished and highly original French historian of ancient philosophy. Hadot argued that ancient philosophers were less interested in theoretical coherence than in forming the character of their followers through spiritual exercises.  Lefebvre takes this idea and runs with it.  He reads Rawls the way Hadot reads Seneca, as a shaper of souls, encouraging personal transformation through self-examination and the internalization of demanding moral norms.  The epiphany that inspired Liberalism as a Way of Life is this: “the original position ... is a spiritual exercise, equal to any from antiquity.”  If you spend time thinking seriously about how society’s benefits and burdens should be distributed from a scrupulously impartial point of view, you will have a chance to achieve “purity of heart, grace, and self-command.”   

This is only half of Lefebvre’s argument, however.  To the idea of liberalism as a demanding spiritual exercise that can help us overcome selfishness and partiality, he adds the concept of liberalism as a way of life into which we are all born today and from which we cannot escape, as hard as we may try.  Viewed together, these two principal themes of the book, “spiritual exercises” and “a way of life,” create a challenging puzzle. How can liberalism be both “the culture of our times” and an “escape hatch” from “conformist tendencies” of really existing liberal democracies?  How can it be a hegemonic Zeitgeist and a way to cure ourselves from the sick spirit of the age? 

Because the concept of “a way of life” has a volkisch feel to it, conveying a sense of cultural idiosyncrasy and exclusivity, it is not usually associated with liberalism, which, as an offshoot of Enlightenment political thinking, is more closely aligned with the authority of Reason and respect for individuals as individuals regardless of the cultural traditions into which they were born.  Yet Lefebvre makes a witty and persuasive case that Rawlsian liberalism, in particular, is not adequately described as a merely political project supporting a system of fair cooperation among people with different values.  It is better understood, he argues, as a comprehensive guidebook on how to behave morally in every “nook and cranny” of our personal and professional lives.   

Leaders of the University of California Free Speech Movement in a courtroom in Berkeley, California in 1965. © Universal History Archive/Getty

To understand the distinction between a narrowly political liberalism, which Lefebvre rejects, and a capacious or comprehensive liberalism, which he endorses, we need to revisit a shopworn controversy over the evolution of Rawls’ thinking after A Theory of Justice (1971).  Forty or fifty years ago, numerous commentators accused the later Rawls, whose writings were first collected in Political Liberalism (1993), of being a lapsed Rawlsian.  They charged him with shifting his focus from the plight of the poor, which had been his great treatise’s central concern, to the problem of peacefully reconciling diverse ethical and especially religious views in his subsequent work.  He disappointed many of his progressive readers by shifting his emphasis from equalizing material resources to promoting sectarian toleration.   

Since nothing in A Theory of Justice suggested that a just society should enforce religious homogeneity or punish ethical disagreement, attempts to cite Rawls against Rawls were never particularly convincing.  Nor is there anything contradictory about a liberal state that regulates my property while leaving my conscience alone.  Indeed, this particular fusion of government intervention in one sphere and government forbearance in another is the trademark of an influential liberal tradition.   

Classical liberalism was shaped by at least two battles, one against aristocratic privilege and the other against religious persecution. As a consequence, classical liberals simultaneously affirmed unflinching principle (legal equality) and permissive laxity (every person being allowed to seek their own salvation in their own way). Rawls’ formula for this traditional mix of normative consensus and normative dissonance is more or less the following. The way the government should treat its citizens and the way citizens should treat each other is a question on which we must all more or less agree. But on how people should live, what personal ideals they should pursue, and what loyalties they should honor, individuals, not public authorities or democratic assemblies, must decide.  Rawls draws attention to this dualism with his well-known contrast between the right and the good, that is, between principles of justice on which we must agree and can be legally enforced, on the one hand, and comprehensive moral ideals about which citizens may freely disagree and which cannot be coercively favored or enforced, on the other.   

Lefebvre occasionally flirts with the idea that the later Rawls parted company with the earlier Rawls.  But he does not ultimately disagree with the basic framework just described: he does “not object to political liberalism on normative grounds.”  What bothers him is the idea of an impenetrable “firewall” between liberalism as a purely “political” doctrine that governs “the public sphere” alone and the moral principles and sensibility that teach us, for example, how we should behave among family and friends.  Fairness and reciprocity in private life are just as worthy of being called “liberal” as the redistributive programs of the modern welfare state.  That is basically what Lefebvre means when he says that “liberalism” is not merely a political doctrine but “is and can be a way of life.”  

His generously buoyant style shows how much he enjoyed writing this book and sharing his occasionally offbeat ideas.  But Lefebvre struggles to clarify the paradox at the heart of his book.  On the one hand, liberalism is the spirit of the age that ensnares even those who try to disentangle themselves from it: “Love it or hate it, we all swim—we positively marinate—in liberal waters.”  On the other hand, a genuinely liberal life is an unreachable ideal that may inspire our efforts as self-improvement but can never be achieved by imperfect human beings who are doomed, “for now and the foreseeable future,” to inhabit fundamentally illiberal societies. 

To grasp the underlying problem, we need to revisit the charming nursery-school story with which he begins the book.  Canadians, Australians, Americans and indeed “most citizens of liberal democracies” dwell in liberalism the way fish inhabit the water.  Just as fish have no concept of water because they have nothing to contrast it with, so Canadians, Australians etc. exist in a social world so imbued with liberal commitments and sentiments that they don’t even notice their pervasive liberalism: “liberalism now saturates the background (and not only the public or political) culture of our times.” The reason liberalism is not appreciated as it should be, paradoxically, is that it “is the water we swim in.”  Liberalism is so ubiquitous “that it has performed that special trick of disappearance achieved only by omnipresence: to have become invisible by infiltrating everything.”  That is why “[w]e are liberals and we don’t even know it.” 

The self-evident implausibility of this analogy provides the master key for unlocking the principal mystery of the book. Fish do not aspire to wetness.  They do not need spiritual exercises to realize their natatorial destiny.  No one needs to teach fish what an aquatic way of life “can look like, why it is worth striving for, and how to start cultivating it straight away.”  Yet aspiring liberals, whose concept of liberalism is sharpened by plentiful experience with illiberal ideas and behavior, need to be evangelized into embracing their inner liberal.   

They need encouragement from political philosophers like Lefebvre because the water in which they swim is not liberalism.  As it turns out, “[o]ur societies are not, properly speaking, liberal.”  Lefebvre calls the “murky and treacherous waters” in which we actually swim “liberaldom,” a social and cultural milieu that is “manifestly illiberal,” characterized by (his words) racism, patriarchy, injustice, jingoism, populism, consumerism and partisan polarization.  Not liberalism but liberaldom is to the citizen what water is to the fish.  Because people “get their values” from the social milieu in which they are raised, the residents of “our societies” have naturally internalized moral reflexes and sensibilities far from what Rawls had in mind.  

Such is the switcheroo at the heart of this admirably ambitious book.  First, Lefebvre tells us that liberalism “is the water we swim in.”  Then, with equal self-assurance, he says the opposite: “That we live in liberaldom and not liberalism is obvious.”  In the societies of his concern, it turns out, “liberal values are currently held in low regard.”  That is why aspiring liberals “need to swim upstream against the currents of the age.” 

So what is Lefebvre getting at?  How does he extricate himself from this labyrinth of his own making? 

Taken on its own, his claim that “liberalism has seeped into our pores so as to profoundly and personally shape who we are” raises an obvious question: Who are “we”?  His answer is: inhabitants of liberal democracies from the 1990s until today.  However recent, “the takeover by liberalism over the past thirty years of the background culture of contemporary liberal democracies” is now complete. 

The narrow geographical location and historical time frame specified by Lefebvre mean that the thoroughly liberal culture that he extols is, at best, a tiny spot in human history.  Nevertheless, even though liberalism has flourished only during brief periods in a few places, wherever it exists, he claims, it is utterly hegemonic: “liberal beliefs … have spread only recently and to only some parts of the world. But in those parts, these liberal values are so widely and commonly accepted that most people consider them nothing more than common sense.” 

Given the grave threat to liberal values and institutions posed by Trump and many others, that is a reassuring thought.  But is it true? 

What exactly do we observe when we inspect self-declared liberal societies up close?  We find “individuals and communities [that] are formed and deformed by institutions of a crumbling liberal democracy.”  This is what he means when he admits that the water in which we swim is liberalism's corrupt twin, “liberaldom,” where liberal values are professed but not followed and where “injustice is not a problem at the margins but instead wrecks the core of liberal democratic societies.”  To illustrate the reality of our societies, Lefebvre cites the TV series, The Wire, suggesting that what “liberal democratic citizens” refuse to face is not their latent liberalism but the scandalous cruelty and injustice next door.   

After repeatedly insisting that liberalism is ubiquitous and pervasive, Lefebvre casually confesses that it exists only in scattered “pockets” of the societies he knows best.  That such liberal enclaves can be pretty modest comes across in the examples he adduces.  To provide evidence that citizens of liberal democracies today tacitly support the core values of Rawlsian liberalism, Lefebvre directs our attention away from The Wire and toward Parks and Recreation.  What makes his endearing account of this satirical series so remarkable is his admission that liberals, in the community that the sitcom depicts, are radical outliers, entirely out of sync with their fellow townsfolk: “they alone resist materialism by giving priority to love and friendship.”  The clear implication is that becoming liberal is “a lifelong task” that can be accomplished only by a select few who refuse to acquiesce in or conform to the bankrupt social customs and norms of their societies. 

So which is it?  Is liberalism the water in which everyone swims? Or do liberals have to swim against the current?  To further complicate this tangled storyline, Lefebvre points out that aspiring liberals in today’s liberal democratic societies, far from being oblivious to their liberalism, are constantly being made painfully aware of it by the unrelenting attacks of antiliberals.  (Consider the knee-jerk Republican smearing of Kamala Harris as “dangerously liberal.”)  That many disgruntled inhabitants of liberal democracies are violently hostile to liberalism is perfectly obvious.  Some religious groups are appalled by secular humanism.  White supremacists, for their part, are opposed to “the liberal idea that all humans deserve equal respect regardless of their identity.”  That is why, after announcing that “we” live in a “liberal monoculture,” Lefebvre has to confess that nothing of the kind exists.  Liberalism, at best, is one “option” among others.   

Keeping in mind his simultaneous affirmation and denial of liberalism's “hegemony,” and if we ignore the stilted philosophical jargon, we can read the following passage as Lefebvre’s veiled comment on January 6: 

Adherents of various [MAGA-adjacent] comprehensive doctrines will conclude that there is no continuing place for them in a liberal society. Worse, from their point of view it would be rational to opt out and oppose liberalism—comprehensive or political—bide their time, and perhaps even when opportunity strikes, use the power and purse of the state to advance their conception of the good (if, that is, they become convinced they cannot hope to win the cultural war without resorting to state power). 

The implication of this passage for Lefebvre’s thesis is profound.  TINA, in this case, the idea that “there is no alternative” to liberalism, generates resentment and foments violent rebellion.  Rather than eliminating racism, public norms against using racial slurs merely stoke pent-up hatred of political correctness by groups that thunderously applaud racist innuendo.  In other words, the myth of a “liberal monoculture,” which our author takes to be a source of social stability, is a pressure cooker waiting to explode.  

Lefebvre has two answers to such criticisms.  He borrows the first from Hadot.  What matters in a philosophy is not conceptual coherence, but its ability to encourage readers and listeners to embrace an ethical way of life.  Pointing out contradictions in the presentation, therefore, is beside the point.  His goal is to improve “our prospects for happiness and fulfillment.”  Effective criticism would have to prove not that the book failed to be coherent but that it failed to be “transformative.” 

The second answer is less facile.  It is the suggestion that “our culture,” while superficially illiberal (racist, patriarchal etc.) is “latently” liberal.  His aim is to plow up the illiberal crust of our societies and disinter “a shared sensibility underpinned by liberalism.”  By bringing our hidden liberalism to light, he hopes to teach us “to more deeply cultivate the kind of person our liberal world has already made us.”  

Even after adamantly denying it, Lefebvre keeps trying to demonstrate that “we” are liberal top-to-bottom in a variety of ways.  First, he summarizes a few of his favorite TV series.  Second, he points to the lip service cynical politicians pay to liberal norms even when they pursue illiberal policies.  Third, he claims that persistent attacks on liberalism demonstrate liberalism’s unchallenged cultural hegemony. 

This last claim brings us to one of the strangest passages in the book where Lefebvre concocts an explanation for the alleged addiction of would-be liberals to step-incest porn, “far and away the most popular genre” on Pornhub, “the internet’s tenth most visited website.”  This fringe topic fits into his overall argument, he explains, because it illustrates, once again, that virtually everything in “our” societies must be explained in relation to liberalism.  But how does the public’s clandestine obsession with “sex between family members who are not biologically related to one another” help make this point.  It does so, according to Lefebvre, because the irresistible appeal of step incest porn stems from the thrill it provides of seeing the rules of liberal meritocracy nakedly trashed.  Dramatizations of step incest, he argues, violate what he bizarrely considers a cardinal principle of liberal meritocracy: that sexual rewards must be distributed according to talent, effort and achievement.  Meritocracy produces losers as well as winners and losers, presumably bereft of sexual partners, are magnetically attracted to watching depictions of sex with a step mother or step son where meritocracy’s sad losers are finally allowed to “win.” It is their way of savoring an ignominious overthrow of the meritocracy that has humiliated them so cruelly.  This is Lefebvre’s explanation for why incest porn feels especially racy and is so riveting to watch.  Such a belabored argument nicely illustrates how far he is willing to go to prove that liberalism enters unbidden into every nook and cranny of our lives. 

But let’s return to Lefebvre’s idea of what political philosophers should do to help the rest of us lead ethical and fulfilling lives. Although we citizens in liberal democratic societies implicitly and unknowingly “support liberalism and are unable to nominate an alternative conception of the good for themselves,” we nevertheless “hesitate to fully plunge into our own values.”  The philosopher’s task is to overcome this chronic timidity, “to help orient citizens in the ideas and values of their own political culture” to which they have thus far paid little heed.  If they will not spontaneously take the “plunge,” the liberal philosopher must give them that proverbial nudge.   

Lefebvre sincerely hopes that his readers will “unlearn the ugliest affects and affectations of our polarized culture.”  He is qualified to help because the “remit of political philosophy” includes the obligation “to tell us who we are” and what “we,” deep down, really believe.  While fish don’t need to be taught to appreciate the water, complacent citizens in liberal democracies which are “crumbling” and riven with injustices, urgently need to be reminded of the blessings they take for granted, including “the emancipation of women,” “friendship between the sexes,” “unprecedented longevity,” “Wikipedia,” and “olive oil in every supermarket.” 

The principal flaws in Lefebvre’s approach are easy to spot.  There is no reason to think that drawing attention to allegedly latent values will promote ethical living.  If liberalism has really “become invisible by infiltrating everything,” why is it being constantly attacked from all sides?  Since “who we are” depends on moral principles that fluctuate wildly according to time and place, why are philosophers, rather than cultural historians, best equipped for specifying the morality that, here and now, “permeates our private, personal, and professional lives”?  Similarly, the seventy million votes that Donald Trump received in 2020 prove that what Lefebvre considers the fundamental liberal norm against being “an asshole” holds sway over only one-half of the country at best.  Finally, the truism that antiliberalism “is intelligible only when viewed in relation to liberal values and ideas” fails to demonstrate that liberalism is “hegemonic.”  It certainly does not show that liberalism’s enemies “get their values” from liberalism. 

Lefebvre’s account of liberalism, including his ingenious interpretation of Rawls, is vividly presented.  But his claim that liberalism is “a set of ideals, values, attitudes, practices, relationships, and institutions that have become the water, the only water, in which so many of us swim” is false on his own account.  Moreover, the task of showing the relevance to everyday life of basic moral norms of fairness and reciprocity may be easier than he assumes.  After all, American political culture today is probably more liberal in the private sphere (acceptance of nontraditional families) than in the public sphere (panic over the Great Replacement, massive tax cuts for the rich).  Admittedly, defenders of liberalism from the formidable forces arrayed against it must choose their battles.  Making an academic school of “political liberalism” the main enemy to defeat is perfectly welcome and worthwhile.  Given a world on fire, however, it is unlikely to be everyone’s first choice. 

Stephen Holmes teaches at New York University School of Law.