Guest Post: Liberty through Consensus?

Academic homogeneity and the two souls of liberalism

A guest post by Federico Tabellini, a PhD student in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

With the publication of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government in the latter half of the seventeenth century, liberalism emerged as a disruptive philosophy in Europe. Over the following one hundred years, this disruption would take concrete form in three revolutions that defined the trajectory of political modernity: the British Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution.

While what motivated them was a shared commitment to the liberal ideals of liberty and equality, each interpreted these ideals in distinct ways. The British and American Revolutions embraced the protection of individuals’ negative rights and autonomy against abuse by the state. Paradigmatic in this sense is the passage in the American Declaration of Independence citing the pursuit of happiness, rather than happiness itself, as a fundamental right of citizens.

In contrast, the French Revolution saw the state as an instrument for establishing positive rights through affirmative public policies and wealth redistribution. This approach drew on ideas external to the liberal tradition of the time, such as the Rousseauian notion of democracy as a collective expression of the “will of the people.”

These contrasting accounts of liberty and equality — one emphasising limited government and negative rights, the other advocating for state intervention to secure positive rights — form the foundation of the divide between classical and high liberalism, the two major strands of liberal thought.

Until the early 20th century, classical liberalism was the dominant strand. Classical liberalism underscores the importance of formal equality before the law, rejects social justice as a legitimate aim of the state, and emphasises the role of civil society and the market in producing economic prosperity and opportunities for individuals. Additionally, it views economic liberties as fundamental rights, placing them on par with civil and political liberties such as freedom of speech and political representation. However, unlike right-libertarians like Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard, classical liberals are not opposed to some form of economic safety net as long as it adheres to the principle of formal equality under the law. Classical liberalism is associated with the political philosophy of John Locke, Adam Smith, the American founding fathers, David Hume, and later figures such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

In the interwar period, the changes brought about by the maturation of the Industrial Revolution led to a new rise of socialist ideas in the West, weakening the political and intellectual dominance of classical liberals. By posing themselves as a mid-way between the two, high liberals emerged as the new dominant strand of liberal thought. Unlike their classical cousins, high liberals prioritise civil and political rights over economic rights, advocating for a more expansive role for the state in addressing inequality. Their focus on substantive equality over formal equality leads them to assert that equal opportunities encompass the material and social resources necessary to realise them. Consequently, high liberals support wealth redistribution by the state to achieve their substantive definition of equality. High liberalism is associated with thinkers like Thomas Hill Green, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and many others. Today, high liberalism forms the ideological foundation of the modern welfare state and largely dominates academic political theory.

This article explores the causes and consequences of high liberalism’s ascendancy in academic circles by comparing two tales.

The first tale tells us that high liberalism’s intellectual rise to prominence derives from its philosophical and moral superiority to classical liberalism. In this tale, classical liberalism naturally evolved into high liberalism, fulfilling its true potential.

The second tale tells a different story. In this story, high liberalism’s hegemonic position in academia results not from its intrinsic moral qualities but from a combination of social, political and institutional factors that favoured it and continue to favour it over classical liberalism.

A tale of intellectual evolution and moral progress

The story of liberalism, as commonly taught in Western universities — whether explicitly or implicitly — unfolds as follows:

Once upon a time, there was classical liberalism. This early iteration of liberalism championed formal equality and liberty, opposing the premodern monarchical and feudal order while laying the groundwork for capitalism, free trade, and the Industrial Revolution. These developments brought unprecedented economic prosperity but also stark inequalities. Classical liberalism, according to this narrative, focused too narrowly on formal equality and failed to address the more profound inequalities rooted in arbitrary factors like family background, social environment, inheritance, or sheer luck.

Enter high liberalism, the corrective force that expanded upon classical liberalism’s shortcomings by emphasising social justice and championing the universal welfare state. This phase of liberalism, as the story goes, reached its intellectual zenith with John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971. Rawls’s book constituted a much-needed revitalisation of liberal theory during a period of stagnation, propelling it further along an evolutionary path toward progress – never mind that Friedrich Hayek [1] and Milton Friedman [2] made milestone contributions to liberal theory in the previous decade.

The narrative continues: formal equality, while a necessary starting point, is ultimately insufficient and less fundamental than substantive equality. Under the most recent and radical forms of high liberalism, that starting point can sometimes even become an obstacle, and the goal of substantive equality legitimises the state to engage in actions that explicitly break formal equality, as in the case of affirmative action.

Classical liberals reject this narrative of progress from classical to high liberalism. They argue that high liberalism’s focus on substantive equality overlooks critical issues. Substantive equality demands coercive redistribution of wealth and resources by its very nature. Yet because individuals differ in skills, character, and personality, the effects of such redistribution are inevitably temporary and require constant adjustments, creating a perpetual cycle of intervention. Even more troublingly, the nebulous definition of substantive equality compared to formal equality leaves it open to arbitrary interpretations. This ambiguity empowers experts and bureaucrats to determine what counts as legitimate redistributive policies, often without transparency or democratic accountability.

The impossibility of achieving the goal of substantive equality and the infinite number of existing differences between individuals fuel a tendency in high liberal theory toward an ever-expanding number of positive rights, which in turn can be used to legitimise the ever-expanding bureaucratic state required to fulfil them politically. Meanwhile, the assignment of lower status to economic liberties by high liberals makes them blind to the reduction in individual freedom brought about by the encroachment of the state on individuals.

Because of these and other reasons, classical liberals see the shift from classical to high liberalism not as a story of progress but divergence. On one side, the clearly defined and easily enforced principles of negative individual liberties and formal equality; on the other, the ever-shifting goalpost of social justice which sacrifices the very things liberalism was originally designed to protect while fostering the unchecked expansion of an economically unsustainable and democratically unaccountable bureaucratic state.

However, if the claim that high liberalism represents an improvement over classical liberalism is highly debatable, so too are the alleged causes of its rise to dominance – particularly in academia and political theory. An alternative tale for this rise emerges if we step away from the theoretical debate within liberal theory and look at the actual social, political and institutional conditions in which liberal scholars operate.

A tale of ideological and socio-institutional alignment

Traditionally, scholarly consensus has been understood as emerging naturally through a fair and reciprocal vetting of ideas within the framework of academic inquiry. According to this perspective, consensus arises from “good” ideas prevailing in a relatively objective intellectual marketplace. I shall refer to this as the rational selection hypothesis.

A different view sees not the inherent quality of ideas but rather the dominant ideological ethos in a scholarly community as the primary driver of academic consensus. This means that it is not good ideas that define consensus but consensus that labels some ideas as ‘better’ than others. Under this view, academic consensus tends to align with the existing predispositions of the ideological majority within the scholarly community. I shall call this the ideological alignment hypothesis.

Rather than alternatives to one another, these two hypotheses describe two intertwined social processes leading to the production of scientific knowledge about the world. As with any community, the academic community naturally tends towards forming a consensus around specific interpretations of the world in all realms of thought, from metaphysics to ethics. This is true even for the postmodern trend in contemporary social sciences, whereby an initial rejection of all ethical metanarratives soon became, not without irony, an all-encompassing metanarrative centred around Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian notions of power [3].

The question is not whether we should strive for an academic world reflecting the rational selection interpretation. Everyone agrees such a world is normatively desirable. The question is to what extent the current state of affairs approximates it.

The validity of the rational selection hypothesis rests on what sociologist Robert Merton called the principle of organised scepticism [4]. This is the notion that through the disinterested reciprocal vetting of ideas, a scientific community can reach a relatively unbiased consensus approximating objectivity. Crucially, for Merton, an essential precondition for organised scepticism is a configuration of social and professional incentives and disincentives that make the challenging of orthodoxies roughly as likely as their reinforcement. Other authors, such as Karl Popper [5] and Jonathan Haidt [6], have further stressed that a sufficient degree of viewpoint diversity within an academic field is vital to the actual deployment of organised scepticism.

Such conditions do not seem to be present in an academic environment where classical liberals are significantly underrepresented compared to high liberals and where the general ideological ethos in the broader social sciences and humanities favour the latter. About nine out of ten scholars in the social sciences today identify with the political left [7], up from roughly three out of four in the late 1950s [8]. The numbers are similar among academic philosophers [9].

In this context, three factors suggest that the principle of organised scepticism has been compromised and, thus, that the prominence of high-liberal values in political theory is the primary product of ideological alignment rather than rational selection.

First, and most obviously, political theory’s left skew [10] has resulted in more scholars who ideologically align with the high liberal strand of liberalism, leading to fewer contributions reflecting classical liberal viewpoints and a general disaffection for arguments and evidence supporting the classical liberal strand.

Second, the progressively more extreme left skew in the broader social sciences and humanities from the 1950s onward has resulted in a substantial body of scholarship outside of political theory that is highly critical of the individualistic and market-centred tenets of classical liberalism while being more accepting of the egalitarian and state-centred principles of high liberalism.

Third, high liberals produce theories that align more closely with the ideological foundations of academic and political institutions, which in contemporary liberal democratic regimes tend to prioritise equality and social welfare over individual responsibility and freedom. Scholars who reinforce this perspective are more likely to gain institutional support and prestige, whereas those challenging it from a classical liberal angle face potential career disadvantages [11].

In summary, high liberals have benefitted from (1) their majority position in academia, (2) a more favourable social and intellectual environment in the broader social sciences and (3) their value alignment with existing power structures.

Now, let us entertain the idea that the presence of these three factors was ultimately uninfluential and that the real source of the current consensus around high liberal views derives from the unbiased analysis of its core tenets by scholars. That is, let us presume the rational selection hypothesis is ultimately correct. An empirical justification or falsification of such a statement goes beyond the scope of this article. However, we can use a reversal test to demonstrate that, ceteris paribus, given the presence of the above-mentioned factors, even if the classical liberal strand were to present the stronger arguments, the result would still be an academic consensus favouring high liberal values. To see why this is the case, consider what would be required to produce a scholarly consensus around the core tenets of classical liberalism.

First, the majority of political theorists would need to champion arguments that contradict their preexisting ideological inclinations.

Second, they would need to do this in a broader academic environment hostile to the ideas they decided to embrace.

Third, they would need to do so in a socio-political environment that would likely penalise them in terms of career prospects for this decision.

While this reversal test does not prove that classical liberalism is normatively superior, it does suggest that, regardless of the merits of each strand of liberalism, the extant ideological, academic and sociopolitical conditions favour the high liberal strand independently from its intrinsic normative value.

The future ahead

In recent years, the increasingly prominent position of the illiberal left in the broader social sciences [12] outside of political theory has led to harsher criticisms of many of the tenets of high liberalism, substantially blaming it for not going far enough in its commitment to substantive equality. One of the consequences of this is an ongoing process of radicalisation of the positions of many high liberals on issues such as race, gender and identity. In this context, the language of inclusion, equality and diversity is increasingly used to suppress heterodox voices [13].

To counteract this trend, academia must urgently embrace freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity as its core values. Incidentally, these are values that high liberals themselves espouse. Their commitment to substantive equality should compel them to ensure that academia provides a real pluralistic environment where ideological minorities can freely challenge the orthodoxy without being ostracised or penalised for it.

Alternatively, the solution can come from classical liberalism itself. One possible approach involves reducing the entanglement between academia and the state, transforming higher education into a true marketplace of ideas. Universities would be fully privatised and would need to obtain their funding entirely from donors and students, the latter of which could perhaps be granted state-financed vouchers they could spend at the university of their choice. Some universities would pursue ideological neutrality, some would continue their left-leaning agendas (and retain their DEI and ‘curriculum decolonisation’ policies), and some would embrace classical liberal or conservative agendas (for example, by featuring more classical liberal or conservative authors in their curriculum). Each would attract a broader or narrower base of support, but every student and scholar would have a chance to express themselves freely and pursue their true potential. Perhaps more importantly, in this new academic ecosystem free from ideological monopolies or structural biases, the rational selection hypothesis could become a more accurate depiction of the real functioning of the broader social sciences.

Notes

[1] Hayek, Friedrich A. von (2011). The constitution of liberty: the definitive edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

[2] Friedman, Milton (1992). Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press.

[3] Bertens, J. W. (1995). The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. Psychology Press.

[4] Merton, Robert K. (1973) [1942]. The Normative Structure of Science. In Merton, Robert K. (ed.), The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[5] Popper, K. R. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row.

[6] Haidt, J., & Lukianoff, G. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin Press.

[7] Honeycutt, N., Jussim, L. (2023). Political Bias in the Social Sciences: A Critical, Theoretical, and Empirical Review. In: Frisby, C.L., Redding, R.E., O'Donohue, W.T., Lilienfeld, S.O. (eds) Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology. Springer, Cham.

[8] Goodman, L. H. (1959). Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thie - Lens, JR. The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis. The Free Press, 1958. The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 324(1), 188-189.

[9] See, e.g. Peters, U., Honeycutt, N., De Block, A., & Jussim, L. (2020). Ideological diversity, hostility, and discrimination in philosophy. Philosophical Psychology, 33(4), 511–548.

[10] See note 7.

[11] For empirical studies that touch on this issue, see e.g., Kaufman, E. (2020). Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship. Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology; Adekoya et al., (2020). Academic Freedom in the UK. Policy Exchange; Honeycutt and Freberg (2017). The Liberal and conservative experience across academic disciplines: An extension of Inbar and Lammers. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(2), 115–123; Shields and Dunn (2016). Passing on the right: Conservative professors in the progressive university. Oxford University Press.

[12] Jussim, L. et al. (2023). The radicalization of the American academy. In: Zúquete, J. P., The Palgrave Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism, Volume 2. Springer Nature.

[13] Ibid.