Conserving a Virtuous Liberty

Samuel Gregg has written a powerful assessment of the challenges facing the free society today—clearly the “true friends of liberty” have many causes to be worried. Triumphant illiberal forces on the left and right alike have little use for constitutions, free government, or even the American tradition itself. The growing strength of these forces is evidence, as Gregg rightly warns, that “the habit of free association is weak in America, and so are the institutions of civil society to which this habit gives rise.” It certainly seems like Alexis de Tocqueville’s darkest prophecies are coming true. 

But why are American institutions so weak in the face of illiberalism? In no small measure, it is because of our inability to connect the case for liberty to a larger, transcendent vision of life’s ultimate purpose. The liberal spirit of toleration the West cultivated for 250 years or more has degenerated into a kind of public relativism that cheapens freedom itself. If Americans are to rise to the challenges Gregg outlines, we must instead embrace a public philosophy that identifies liberty and virtue both as spiritual goods worth preserving. Society only flourishes when the institutions that make it up are free to embody a coherent account of the Good Life and shape their members according to it. How to preserve liberty, then, is not simply an economic or political concern, but first and foremost a moral one.

Daniel Klein shows in a recent Law & Liberty essay that the word “liberal” became endowed with a distinctly political meaning first by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in the mid-eighteenth century. But before the term took on an association with limited government or free markets, Klein writes, it “had a long, rich history as a non-political word in moral discourse.” In the West, this ancient sense of liberality undergirds our tradition of self-government as both political independence and the pursuit of personal moral excellence.

Read more in Law & Liberty.