Grammars of liberalism

Liberalism has been fundamental to the making of the modern world, at times shaping basic assumptions as to the nature of the political, and in other cases existing as a delimited political project in contention with others. Across its long history, liberal projects have taken a diverse range of forms, which resist easy reduction to a single logic or history. This diversity, however, has often escaped anthropological attention. In this introduction to our special section on Grammars of Liberalism, we briefly trace this historical diversity, interrogate anthropological approaches to conceptualising liberalism and offer a broad framework for studying liberalism that remains attentive to both continuity and difference. First, we argue for attention to how the political claims made by liberal projects unfold at the levels of values, their interrelations (morphology) and the underlying rules governing the expression and combination of values, and their intelligibility as liberal (grammar). Second, we argue for empirical attention to how values are expressed and liberal projects assembled across different social forms. We argue that this approach enables anthropology to grasp the diversity of liberal political projects and subject positions while still allowing scholars to approach liberalism critically and to interrogate its underlying logics. Le libéralisme a joué un rôle fondamental dans la construction du monde moderne, façonnant parfois des hypothèses de base sur la nature du politique, et dans d'autres cas, existant en tant que projet politique délimité en conflit avec d'autres. Au cours de sa longue histoire, les projets libéraux ont pris des formes diverses, qui résistent à une réduction facile à une seule logique ou histoire. Cependant, cette diversité a souvent échappé à l'attention anthropologique. Dans cette introduction à notre section spéciale sur les « grammaires du libéralisme », nous retraçons brièvement cette diversité historique, nous interrogeons les approaches anthropologiques de la conceptualisation du libéralisme et nous proposons un cadre general d'étude du libéralisme qui reste attentif à la fois à la continuité et à la différence. Premièrement, nous plaidons pour que l'on s'intéresse à la manière dont les revendications politiques des projets libéraux se déploient au niveau des valeurs, de leurs interrelations (morphologie) et des règles sous-jacentes régissant l'expression et la combinaison des valeurs, ainsi que leur intelligibilité en tant que libérales (grammaire). Deuxièmement, nous plaidons pour une attention empirique à la manière dont les valeurs sont exprimées et les projets libéraux assemblés à travers différentes formes sociales. Nous soutenons que cette approche permet à l'anthropologie de saisir la diversité des projets politiques libéraux et des positions des sujets tout en permettant aux chercheurs d'aborder le libéralisme de manière critique et d'interroger ses logiques sous-jacentes. Liberalism has been fundamental to the making of the modern world. Whether as a progressive ideology of individual emancipation, a governmental formation, a justification for capitalist expansion or a philosophical tradition informing both imperialism and anti-colonial resistance, liberal projects have sought to ‘re-order the world’ (Bell 2016) in diverse, if related, ways. Liberal doctrines have informed, and become crystallised through, modern projects of violent rule and civic resistance, and have given rise to institutions and ‘code[s] for living one’s life’ (Bayly 2011: 132) that are at once both extremely varied and related through the concerns and values that they express. As such diversity confirms, liberalism has become ‘the most dominant ethic of our age’ (Mahmood 2007: 148). Within this broad current of modern political culture, anthropology has predominantly focused on ‘late’ liberalism and neoliberalism, conceptualising them as phenomena of the late 20th century, situated within a longer history of global political economy and Western political thought. Such efforts beg the question of ‘late’ or ‘neo-’ liberalism’s relation to their historic and contemporary relatives. More generally, they prompt us to ask how our discipline should approach liberalism as a broader tradition of thought and practice. This special collection brings together ethnographies of ‘actually-existing’ liberalisms to propose a novel approach to the anthropological study of liberal ideologies and social formations. We borrow the epithet ‘actually existing’ from the state socialist notion of ‘real’ – as opposed to ‘ideal’ – socialism (cf. Brenner and Theodore 2002) in order to foreground the complex and often fraught relation between ideology and social practice. We propose to understand these ‘real’ liberalisms as emerging at the intersections of historically interrelated traditions of ordinary and expert political thought – ideologies, in the common sense of the word (see Eagleton 2007; Freeden 1996; Martin 2015) – and concrete social formations whose structural characteristics, social organisation and day-to-day construction in the flow of social reality are the traditional stuff of ethnography. The contributors to this volume highlight the diversity and interconnection of actually-existing liberalisms, moving beyond characterisations of liberalism as uniform or monolithic. They explore how particular articulations of liberalism are characterised by plural values and how such values inflect and temper one another, and gain substance, within specific social relations. Collectively, these contributions offer a perspective through which it becomes possible to compare different members of the liberal ‘family’. Liberalism is by no means a new subject of anthropological study. Anthropologists, however, have primarily approached liberalism through a narrowly critical (and, indeed, self-critical) lens, in relation to interrogating the global spread of ‘Western’ power. Focusing on democracy, citizenship, humanitarianism, neoliberal governmentality and multiculturalism, to name just a few topics (Ansell 2019), scholars have examined liberalism as a ‘dominant ethic’, critiquing the internal contradictions of liberal thought and practice, the ways in which liberal reason informs or becomes embedded in everyday social life, and the violence and exclusions emerging from these (for an overview, see Schiller 2015). Even when anthropologists recognise the heterogeneity of liberalism ‘on the ground’ (e.g. Ong and Collier 2005), they tend to ultimately equate liberalism with a fairly narrow set of ends – namely exploitation and domination. In turn, critical accounts have primarily focused on those dimensions of ‘actually existing’ liberalism that can be read as means to such ends, taking as given what should be an open ethnographic question: how exactly ideologies are formed, come to be articulated within and impact on particular social worlds. Historically however, liberalism, even in its most canonical iterations, has often been a demonstrably more plural, socially grounded and self-critical endeavour than such critical readings would suggest. There is a vertiginous amount of scholarship in both political theory and history of ideas, seeking to describe and theorise this diversity (e.g. Bell 2014, 2016; Freeden 2009; Jackson and Stears 2012; Losurdo 2014; Trencsényi et al. 2018). Several brief examples will suffice to demonstrate the diversity of liberal ideas. Despite Adam Smith’s famous call for a ‘system of natural liberty’, in The Wealth of Nations (2008 [1776]), for Smith self-interest and market competition emerge not as ends in themselves. Rather, in his broader work he positions them as vehicles for securing interpersonal recognition and moral alignment within a growing, increasingly mediated world, where virtuous deeds and interpersonal rhetoric have less of an effect in cultivating civic virtue (Smith 1976 [1759]; also Kalyvas and Katznelson 2008; Montes 2019; Tronto 1993). Similarly, Kalyvas and Katznelson (2008) demonstrate that for James Madison – often regarded as the father of the American Constitution – personal liberty was both essential and limiting to democracy. While Madison argued that personal liberty fostered pluralism in values and interests, which fragmented the power of organised factions pursuing domination, he also saw this individualistic fragmentation as constraining the capacity of democracies to strive for the common good. He thus championed a system of representative democracy, where representatives became legitimate arbiters of, and advocates for, visions of the common good, which could justly restrict individual freedom. In a similar vein, Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty (that is freedom from external constraint, and freedom to act on one’s intentions), and his defence of the former against the latter, is often read as emblematic of the deep liberal belief in the universality and paramount ethical importance of the autonomous, individual subject. Yet Berlin’s Two concepts of liberty (1969) was also a reflection on the intellectual and historical framings of liberty that had given rise to National Socialism and Soviet Communism, and an argument for tempering universalism – particularly the universalism found within liberal theories of human rationality. The relative value placed on either form of liberty was not to be determined in the abstract, but in relation to ongoing historical and sociological realities (Anderson 2016; Cherniss and Hardy 2018). Across these historical instances, liberal projects were defined by a multiplicity of values – such as self-interest, recognition and moral alignment, in Smith, or rationality and positive and negative liberty, in Berlin – which do not simply express a single overriding logic but counterbalance, inflect or qualify one another. Contemporary liberal ideologies that build on this intellectual heritage are similarly heterogeneous. To recognise this diversity, as we seek to do, is not to redeem liberalism, but to offer a more complex view of it, including how forms of exclusion, exploitation and domination arise from or are woven into the sincerely held visions of the good expressed within configurations of liberal ideas. This diversity of liberal ideas emerged and developed within specific historical settings and concrete political struggles, leading to complex patterns of variation, both within and across different contexts. For example, the liberalism that became – for a while – the dominant political force during the 19th century in Balkan countries such as Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria was above all a national liberalism, concerned less with the individual liberty that motivated Western European liberals than with securing national liberty from surrounding empires (Mishkova 2014). After the First World War, in most East Central European countries, now from liberalism a new and a by the of the a of and broader The Trencsényi and his of liberalism in the during this the project of national and In ‘the political, and of the opposed to this was a from the but a of history, liberal and individual in ways that were critical of both the social order and its and at a from concerns with political order was that argued for and as an to political and of liberalism in with one another, even within the of a single it is more to of the East Central European liberal tradition the in of with different to state from to the of from the critique of to an of democracy, with the but the ends of the few common We that anthropologists of such and liberalisms in a that is attentive to both their and the forms and dimensions of their The existing anthropological on liberalism and neoliberalism, in has given attention to the question of continuity and variation, but has often the former the latter, and of what it is that the or across different For example, a of work on and has notion of governmentality – a of or of power that individual and by shaping a through and et al. 1996; In this liberalism through, and is of thought and embedded in a range of and that how freedom and For however, this theory of a in which power is in of life’ and anthropologists to ‘the liberal subject – the individual – as the form of governmentality in the neoliberal world’ while within this it is possible to trace of liberal or liberal across the is that thus is to be the or to in the across different is not that this view is to continuity in different liberal projects of but also that the anthropology of liberalism should be to trace continuity of a different and explore the social and dimensions of liberalism that and of or even rule as the This is what including the work of Collier and have by the social and heterogeneity of through which neoliberal ideas also for an liberal in a of and and through the and of social liberal and of liberalism are not made in these but are the for liberalism’s and historical Focusing on the of these – on what remains liberal across – this approach us to study liberal of and social as by or particular liberal and however, or how these different or one another. 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