Swimming in Liberal Waters

There are two assumptions upon which Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life depends. The first is that it is possible to take liberalism, a philosophy of social organisation, and remake it in miniature within the soul of the individual using a therapeutic vocabulary. The second is that this effort can be undertaken without ever substantially accounting for, or confronting, those who have identified liberalism as responsible for what they perceive to be the degradation of their society and who have responded with bigotry and violence. The first assumption risks much of what makes a philosophy of liberalism meaningful; the second risks failing fully to consider the reasons why liberalism is under threat.  

While setting out the shape of his argument, Lefebvre – a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney – concedes that, in 2024, the dream of a world organised by liberal principles could appear to have ‘had its day’. His counterpoint, and the book’s premise, is that liberalism in fact underpins and constitutes our understanding of ourselves as individuals and social subjects. ‘As a society,’ he writes, ‘we wouldn’t know what to do without it. And the real insight I want to work toward is that without it, we wouldn’t even know who we are as individual people.’ For Lefebvre, this is reason enough to believe that liberalism may well survive.  

Lefebvre begins by citing a parable deployed by David Foster Wallace in his famous Kenyon College commencement address (Foster Wallace’s most irritatingly over-quoted piece of writing, his project of revivifying profound ideas deadened by cliché showing itself, in this instance, to be too easily reducible to cliché) about two younger fish who are asked by a passing older fish, ‘How’s the water?’ ‘What the hell is water?’ they respond. For Lefebvre, liberalism is the water in which we swim. It is the oft-unnoticed background to our culture against which we understand ourselves. In this picture, liberal institutions and formations have endowed us with a wealth of moral and social commitments that shape our perspectives, actions, and tastes, thus allowing his readers to share a common sensibility that, with some effort and attention, they can deploy in the service of self-improvement. Presumably, pursuing this endeavour collectively would lead to a more liberal and tolerant society – although that is, Lefebvre tells us, outside the ambit of the book.  

For the reader who accepts the book’s premises, there is much here to like: Lefebvre’s clarity and straightforwardness; his efforts to stay grounded in the particulars of individual experience; the moral qualities of liberalism for which he advocates (generosity, freedom, fairness, tolerance); and the stimulating rarity of an academic trying to develop a practical framework for how to live. The narrowness of the argument makes these things possible. But, reading the book, I was drawn more often to its omissions and contradictions than its inclusions and conclusions. Lefebvre succeeds insofar as, at nearly every turn, I felt the need to answer him, to summon and interrogate my own feelings of sympathy, antagonism, and bafflement. As much as I found his picture of liberalism appealing, I was never entirely convinced that this ideology – which, as Lefebvre has it, infiltrates every element of our social, political and personal lives – can be transmuted into a self-help manual.

Lefebvre’s central thesis (emphasised and reiterated with eager consistency) is that ‘liberalism can be the basis for a personal worldview, way of living, and spiritual orientation’. There is no need to be ‘liberal plus something else’; it is not necessary to bolster liberalism with an additional belief system or ideology. Lefebvre refers to this as being ‘liberal all the way down’ and prosecutes his argument with reference to political philosopher John Rawls, historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot, and numerous artifacts of mostly American popular culture. According to Lefebvre, liberalism, understood as the notion that ‘society should be a fair system of cooperation’, is enough to form the foundation of a good and moral life.  

Lefebvre’s liberalism is expansive, in the sense that it encompasses our personhood, but structurally minimal. Lefebvre cheerily and provocatively categorises Liberalism as a Way of Life not as a political book, but ‘as a work on ethics, living well, and a genre I want to lean into, self-help.’ As a work of self-help, it is refreshing in its relatively humble propositions for transformation. Lefebvre is concerned not with how we might get ahead, but rather with how we might properly and generously acknowledge ourselves and others, given the competitive and individualised society in which we live. I think Lefebvre would prefer this to be seen as an act of resistance rather than concession to the capitalist ideology he recognises as having curtailed liberalism’s flourishing. Nevertheless, the use of the self-help genre seems somewhat at odds with the notions of tolerant and communal liberalism he espouses, being as it is a category often associated with society’s neoliberal atomisation and the reader’s desire to find ways to outcompete their fellow citizens. (For Lefebvre, these are decidedly illiberal tendencies – he credits ‘disastrous decisions by liberals’, not liberalism itself, as being partially responsible for the rise of neoliberalism.) And while he works to hold this contradiction at bay, there is something awkward about a book that draws so deeply on a Rawlsian structural vision of social equality focusing almost entirely on personal improvement.

Liberalism’s flirtation with self-help – or with the ethical and eudaimonic schemas that self-help both derives from and supplants – could be seen to stretch back at least two centuries in the Anglophone world. Stefan Collini describes a social convention, emerging in post-Napoleonic Britain, ‘which insisted on the inadequacy of merely constitutional or legal changes when unaccompanied by the necessary qualities and habits of the people’. This was most evident, and perhaps remains so, in the notion of ‘national character’, with foundational liberal thinker John Stuart Mill declaring that ‘the laws of national character are by far the most important class of sociological laws’. The British came to believe, for instance, that games like cricket were instrumental in developing the kind of patience, resilience, and ingenuity that endowed individuals with a distinctly British superiority, the kind that ultimately facilitated and justified military victories, imperial expansion, and colonial governance. Lefebvre’s liberalism places him in opposition to this attitude, but his chosen form, self-help, assumes it, incorporating into politics a model of personal virtue constructed by rigorous habit.   

Mill’s American contemporary, the extravagant showman P. T. Barnum was identified by Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), as a pioneer of reducing the spiritual ‘ideal of self-improvement’ into ‘a cult of compulsive industry’, valuing ‘the good opinion of others not as a sign of one’s usefulness but as a means of getting credit’. This principle went on to become general, the dominant culture, hollowing out the concept of virtue until it was indistinguishable from the mere appearance of success, the map subsuming the territory. For Lasch, Barnum’s rhetoric was a key ingredient in the development of a collective attitude that reached its apogee in the second half of the twentieth century, inaugurating an overwhelmingly ‘therapeutic’ climate that coincided with the increasing inadequacy of a liberal intellectual framework. Americans hungered ‘not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security’. This is the logic upon which much self-help material has since depended. It is anaesthetising.  

Today, self-help is the genre you are most likely to see your fellow passengers reading on the train, and can be sorted broadly into the therapeutic model (read this and you’ll feel better), the Barnum model (read this and you’ll succeed), or a blend of both. Lefebvre positions himself within the therapeutic strain, explaining that his book ‘seeks meaning and fulfilment by diving deeper into the mainstream culture we inhabit as opposed to seeking it elsewhere’. This is an ambitious proposition, and it could be argued that Lionel Trilling attempted something similar in The Liberal Imagination (1950). However, Trilling’s argument is not that our culture reveals liberalism’s coherence or foundational role in guiding our social and cultural preferences, but rather that great works of literature are often in tension with ideals held by liberal democrats.  

In an introduction to Trilling’s classic of postwar literary criticism, Louis Menand writes:  

Trilling himself proposes that: ‘The sense of largeness, of cogency, the transcendence which largeness and cogency give, the sense of being reached in our primitive minds – this we virtually never get from the writers of the liberal democratic tradition of the present time.’ This might begin to explain why Lefebvre engages so little with literature (his preferred text is the sitcom), despite forcefully reiterating that liberalism generally permeates our cultural productions.  

Where the emergence of liberalism, as told by Collini, Lasch, and Trilling, is associated with the psychological flattening of citizens into a series of perfectible narcissistic or nationalistic archetypes, Lefebvre insists that liberalism entails a therapeutic logic thick enough to furnish us with a complex and complete moral conscience – offering a blueprint for bettering ourselves and our societies, if only we paid enough attention. He remains aware, of course, that the liberal tendencies ingrained in our habits and attitudes are often out of step with the conditions that shape our existence; and much of Liberalism as a Way of Life is spent reconciling this contradiction.  

While, as I’ve said, the book advocates for a model of liberalism based on collective tolerance, Lefebvre states that his project is not about how to fix illiberal societies that masquerade under the guise of liberalism, but rather ‘about how liberals can live well’ within such societies. To show how this can be done, the book culminates in a series of ‘spiritual exercises’ that the reader can undertake if they wish to more fully inhabit this liberal way of life. 

In his mildly ironised tone, Lefebvre tells us that liberalism, according to Rawls, allows us ‘To see the world with the eyes of god … All it takes is one simple exercise.’ He is speaking of the first spiritual exercise, in which we are asked to imagine ourselves among a group of anonymous individuals with whom we must organise the ‘highest-order principles of right and justice for your society’. However, we are doing so without the knowledge of where we will be placed in the consequent hierarchy. The idea is that if we did not know where we would sit in this society, we would ensure it was arranged to minimise or eradicate inequality. The exercise is meant to demonstrate Rawls’ notion of the original position, whereby we realise how a just world would operate, and attempt to act as often as possible from this point of view.  

The second spiritual exercise works towards ‘reflective equilibrium’, which entails ensuring that we remain morally consistent and coherent by bringing into alignment the ‘components of our moral life’. Lefebvre asks that we ‘[b]egin by listing a series of high-level general convictions’ regarding what constitutes injustice, and then recalling a ‘specific incident when you felt you or someone you know [was] treated unfairly’, before interrogating the assumptions that underlie the judgment of unfairness, along with asking a range of questions about how we responded and how such treatment could have been prevented. We are then asked to gather our thoughts and consider how we might deduce from them a coherently aligned ‘conception of justice’.  

The third and final spiritual exercise asks us to practice public reason. For this, Lefebvre tasks us with trying to comprehend a point of view that is unfamiliar or with which we disagree within a framework of values we might share with our interlocutor. He gives the example of his browsing Breitbart News and, despite vehemently disagreeing, trying to understand the far-right outlet as sharing his vocabulary of public reason.   

These exercises are sound enough in that they invite us to examine our hypocrisies, our failures to live up to our own commitments, or our incapacity to hold consistent commitments to begin with. In keeping with the book’s thesis, they treat our moral and social shortcomings as symptoms of the fact that our notionally liberal society actually inhibits the achieving of liberalism. Lefebvre’s ideal readers, he believes, are ‘would-be liberals in liberaldom’. In liberaldom, liberalism is compromised by the material conditions and ideologies with which it is inevitably blended (capitalism, meritocracy, democracy, racism, nationalism, patriarchy, etc.), meaning that we are prevented from living truly liberal lives. The term liberaldom is inspired by Kierkegaard’s notion of Christendom, the arrangement of society under which citizens can consider themselves Christians without living authentically Christian lives. Christendom, in fact, actively diminishes and oppresses the kind of spiritual pursuits it professes to uphold.  

Lefebvre explains that if you, the reader, reject the possibility of social change achieved through public reason – a foundational tenet of liberalism – then it follows that you instead are committed to a fundamentally hierarchical model in which the powerful majority uses every tool at their disposal to ensure that the political minority never sees power. In that case, he says, the book is not for you. But if such a worldview repels you, then you are open to a life and society imbued with liberal values, and thus open to his argument. The effect of this direct address is not so much to discourage fascists from reading on, as it is a strategy to convince otherwise doubtful readers that they are open to liberalism, a liberal in this circumstance being anyone reluctant to dominate their enemies through force.

Because Lefebvre wishes to take as his subject the cultural water in which we swim, he spends significant time presenting popular culture (mostly American) as evidence for the proliferation of liberal values. Among the objects of analysis are Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, Borat, Queer Eye, Billy on the Street, Louis C. K., and Dave Chappelle. Some of this is written about in the tone of an unsettlingly energised substitute teacher who, straddling a backwards-facing chair, wishes to convince you that political philosophy isn’t as stuffy as all those other nerds would have you believe – ‘I am serious about Leslie [Knope of Parks and Recreation] being a singularly compelling representation of the liberal spirit’; ‘Bear with me. The Good Place is the rarest of things: a television show that makes moral philosophy cool and popular.’ 

These examples are used to illustrate the harder edged philosophical assumptions that saturate our context. For instance, taking up Judith Shklar’s belief that the origin of liberalism is found in the ‘hatred of cruelty’, Lefebvre proposes that:  

A sitcom set largely in the afterlife, The Good Place achieves this through portraying a universe in which a character’s qualities are measured by the good or harm that they have done to others, while entirely avoiding ‘deep religious and metaphysical questions’. (Towards the end of the book, Lefebvre again suggests that liberals don’t often ‘worry about deep metaphysical questions like the design of the cosmos or the endurance of the soul’. I wondered whether this specified lack was the only characteristic distinguishing his liberalism from a generic Christian moral framework.) For a political philosophy to find its moral apotheosis in a mildly intellectually provocative, reasonably funny sitcom with a handful of enjoyable performances feels more like an indictment of that philosophy’s artistic and human possibilities rather than an affirmation of its value. The smalltown version of moderately progressive civic politics performed by Parks and Recreation – which follows Leslie Knope, a perky liberal optimist working her way up the chain of local government – at least acknowledges the inevitable hypocrisies of liberal democracy when put into practice, but is still inevitably unsophisticated in the faith it ultimately places in personal qualities to overcome structural injustice. 

The Good Place and Parks and Recreation, two central pillars of Lefebvre’s cultural analysis, are not bad shows, but with their reductive insistence on good-heartedness as an organising principle, they have less to say about how we struggle through the world than television comedies like 30 Rock, Seinfeld, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – shows which understand that people are driven not just by an appreciation of the systems they need to survive, but by a loathing for them. My claim here is similar to a critique made by Stanley Cavell (a philosopher whom the book cites admiringly) of Lefebvre’s key intellectual influence, John Rawls. Cavell suggests that Rawls fails to provide enough room for Freud in his theory of justice:  

This inevitable antagonism between citizens and the institutions that constrain them is nowhere fully accounted for in The Good Place or Parks and Recreation – which tend to resort to a sentimental hopefulness that conceals this antagonism, and the violence the antagonism begets – and nor is it paid proper attention in Liberalism as a Way of Life.  

Referring to Jonathan Lear’s excellent book, Freud, Lefebvre compares the work of reflective equilibrium, the core of the second spiritual exercise, to the work of Freudian psychoanalysis: 

This is only partially true of psychoanalysis. Lear himself describes it as the process of learning to bring fearful and anxious habits of mind, those of which we have previously been unconscious, into our conscious awareness, finding a language with which to mourn our suffering. This may be a type of fluency, but it does not read to me as the kind of pure correspondence between intention and action to which Lefebvre aspires.  

Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips provides a fuller definition:  

The goal of psychoanalysis is not to bring all our thoughts into alignment, but to face the fact that our thoughts can never be entirely aligned, will forever be at war with one another. Despite Lefebvre’s attempts to invite Freud in, Cavell’s critique of Rawls applies here too. 

The strangest and perhaps most telling sequence in Liberalism as a Way of Life is one in which Freud’s absence is conspicuous: an exploration of the prevalence of step-incest pornography. ‘Call me naïve,’ Lefebvre writes, after citing a series of statistics about the overwhelming popularity of step-incest porn:  

Freud would no doubt call him naïve. The reason Lefebvre gives for the prevalence of this unseemly genre is that the taboo being broken is not incest, but rather merit, that the sexual reward achieved in the videos has nothing do with a person’s qualities, but simply to do with their ease of access to the sexual conquest. 

This is a startlingly reductive reading, yet indicative of the book’s weakness when it comes to confronting the complexly hostile relationships citizens have with their societies. To his credit, Lefebvre acknowledges that the connection between liberaldom, which he abhors, and liberalism, which he acclaims, is that liberaldom both causes and manifests the internal contradictions that plague the aspiring liberal’s mind: 

However, this is recognised more as a superficial flaw rather than being fundamental to the relationship between individuals and their societies. Freud describes this dynamic in Civilisation and its Discontents: 

Freud, with his hilariously placed ‘perhaps’, is here engaging in his frequent stylistic quirk of combining caveat with hyperbole, but he nevertheless makes a powerful point. Is he right about the fundamental nature of the incest taboo? Who knows. But what he is right about is that upon entering civilisation, we are party to a bargain that requires us to repress our desires, sexual and otherwise, in order to win our society’s protection, and that this has a profound effect on our psyche.

If anything, Lefebvre’s rhetorical move seems to prove Freud’s point. The incest taboo is so powerful that Lefebvre feels obliged, entirely unnecessarily, to raise it only to deny it, unable to attend to the reasons why, in his telling, of all the possible ways that pornography might find to subvert the taboo of merit, it has landed on step-incest.  

Cavell’s articulation of the practice of acknowledgment is an obvious source for Lefebvre’s argument, because the former provides a powerful vocabulary for thinking about the ways in which we connect with one another, and achieving the kind of tolerance and generosity that is central to Lefebvre’s picture of liberalism. Indeed, Lefebvre justifies his frequent use of the collective first person by referring to Cavell’s sense of acknowledgement as the means by which we can understand ourselves and others as exemplary members of a community. That is to say, there are ways I might claim to speak on behalf of another – to talk about ‘we’ and ‘us’ – that act as an invitation to test what we have in common. 

Essential, however, to Cavell’s notion of acknowledgment is a vision of moral perfectionism that depends on the individual as seeing themselves as part of a community. This is something Lefebvre repeatedly gestures towards, before returning his focus to the self-help model, centring the refinement of the individual. The two are never quite reconciled. Lefebvre argues, reasonably, that he wishes to achieve the realistic rather than the utopian. ‘Ideally,’ he accepts, ‘collective and individual perfectibility would go hand in hand. This is a long-term project, however, and I’m writing for the meantime: self-help for liberals in liberaldom.’ Lefebvre understands that liberalism must be spoken about in social terms: if we are to consider ourselves tolerant and fair, we must be doing so in relation to other people. However, the book is so exclusively attentive to the development of personal dispositions, that it seems at times to wish to remove the ideal liberal subject from the society of which they are supposedly a part, the society that has made them liberal.  

Lefebvre tells us that ‘liberal values and virtues are hegemonic in civil society, and for liberals all the way down, in private life too.’ But if this is the same society that Lefebvre describes as liberaldom, this claim begs the question: all good that takes place within liberaldom is a manifestation of true liberalism, while all evil is the work of a deceptive imposter. So can liberalism be separated from liberaldom? 

This problem of disentanglement is why Cavell’s critique of Rawls as not leaving enough room for Freud also applies to Liberalism as a Way of Life. Freud shows us that we struggle to be truly liberal not simply because we haven’t conducted the right spiritual exercises, but because we cannot help but resent the system that promises to set us free. We resent liberalism because, absent any other ideology, it reserves its highest praise for those who are able to restrain themselves most completely, those who can remain entirely tolerant, entirely forgiving, entirely rational. 

I am left to conclude that liberalism, despite its many qualities, is not enough. Yet it can be useful, transformative even, when supplemented with a substantial moral or spiritual framework, not least because the fundamental premise of liberalism, the conviction upon which it depends, is the enthusiastic acceptance of a wide variety of moral and spiritual beliefs. The danger of a purely liberal mindset is the danger of a career in sales. The salesman and the liberal risk being reduced to form in search of content, having developed the capacity to hawk their wares regardless of what those wares achieve, or how circumstances shift around them.   

Reading Liberalism as a Way of Life in 2024 feels at times like an exercise in nostalgia. Perhaps liberalism was once the unidentified water in which we happily swam. Today there are, in fact, significant and influential populations within nominally liberal democratic societies who do not have to be shocked into recognising the liberalism of their background culture. Consider the success of Reform UK; the Southport riot; the rise of Alternatif für Deutschland; the lengths the French left had to go to defeat the far right in this year’s snap elections; the endurance of Donald Trump’s popularity; the widespread admiration of commentators like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan; the mainstreaming of transphobia; the ubiquitous social media comments on countless news stories vaguely and viciously decrying wokeness as the root of all our ills. This illiberalism is shaping global politics, and can largely be credited, to some extent or other, to many of those who swim in liberal waters noticing the water and deciding that they hate it. Lefebvre professes that these haters are not among his intended audience, but they are members of our liberal community, and if we are to move forward liberally, then we must be able to account for them.  

Viewed in a flattering light, liberalism is a noble and worthy pursuit, among the last realistic hopes with which to resist the rising tide of fascism, and Lefebvre taps into this spirit. An ideology built on tolerance and generosity is precious and deserves to be defended. But a powerful defence would go beyond sketching a lifestyle to which we might aspire, and would instead include the complex, and sometimes antagonistic, impulses for which any liberalism should make room.