Liberalism
Freedom, Pluralism, Security, and the Rule of Law
All over the world, freedom is under a lot of pressure these days. So is pluralism. So is the rule of law.
I have a book coming in about two weeks, called On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom. It’s available here: https://www.amazon.com/Liberalism-Cass-R-Sunstein/dp/0262049775/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.WBPh1PeZJLVnrDteLU0fzeAtZPCgyk_SlR7Zw-zFykJVEiCMK-o-Ay0K7OHOpP--Ly2MDdjBd0fuNmIeWT8bPKMDjU0HOXCj1UFSPQQJH1LOWfEJk51Vh4astXMI98Ma0L308J2THrBdWxhhtGGcGr6V2ydmIBEOdY3K7uh-8hwaUxzcBXe7Zpj2ji7Ww8drNWK8Mp_KnZ2d4LqLTFfpLNyqfNNxxRbKQpilkrV65C0.6EMmKtUc0jpICXPtNT4eEX93mM6RCGnCSY3ED3Fw9us&qid=1738852419&sr=8-6
I am keenly aware that a book on liberalism, from a law professor who tends to focus on behavioral economics, might not be entirely expected; I certainly did not expect to write it. So I thought I would say a few words about its unlikely origins.
The book began, you could say, in the 1980s, when some people on the left at the University of Chicago (I am thinking of one person in particular) were attacking liberalism as the source of a variety of ills: colonialism, racism, sexism, economic inequality. I thought those attacks were based on a misunderstanding of liberalism.
Back in the 1980s, I had countless conversations with my friend, colleague, and next-door neighbor, Steve Holmes, about these attacks. I have heard or read similar attacks, from the left, in the decades since, and perhaps more than ever in the recent past, when “liberalism” and “neoliberalism” were said to be the same thing.
You could say that the book began about five years ago, when some people in the extended world of behavioral economics began to criticize nudges and nudging as “illiberal.” They suggested approaches, supposed to be more friendly to freedom, that were “liberal.” I am not sure that I would have done the book without these criticisms. I think that nudges and nudging are liberal, too, and was baffled by the objection, which somehow got under my skin.
You could say that the book began in around 1971, when I first read Orwell’s 1984. That is a book, I thought and think, about certain forms of antiliberalism or postliberalism. I was especially haunted by what I saw, even back then, as a kind of eroticism in the book, and also by this sentence: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.”
I thought, and think, that Orwell captures something fundamental about some forms of antiliberalism (its cruelty, its harshness, its absence of kindness).
You could say that the book was informed more recently by the “woke left,” especially in its illiberal forms, and also by some of the American right’s (to me very surprising) enthusiasm for Putin and for Viktor Orban’s conception of illiberal democracy. Also I have been reading a fair bit about Hitler’s rise; he didn’t like liberalism at all.
In 2019 or so, I was asked to comment on a talk by Yoram Hazony, which I took to be an attack on liberalism. Hazony, whom I liked very much, exposed me to right-of-center antiliberalism, or so I would characterize it. Developing my comments on his talk, I produced a paper called, Has Liberalism Ruined Everything? — it was published here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-019-00342-y
In 2022, I started to write notes to myself on liberalism, in numbered paragraphs (like this). I was modeling the document after Hayek’s great essay, Why I Am Not A Conservative. https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf
I was not sure what I would do with those notes, if anything. They seemed too informal to be the basis for an academic piece, and too formal (and far too long) to be published in a magazine or a newspaper.
On a lark, I sent the document to two people, both of whom liked it far more than I expected. One of them said: “Publish it in the NY Times!” I thought that there was no chance that they would be interested, but they were. And here we are, with those numbered paragraphs: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/opinion/cass-sunstein-why-liberal.html
I got a lot of responses to that oped. A bunch of people on the liberal left said that they liked it a lot, because it distinguished liberalism from the illiberal left. (These were people who thought that a form of progressive illiberalism, and a left-of-center orthodoxy, were too powerful on some campuses.)
A bunch of people on the right also said that they liked it a lot, because they considered themselves part of the liberal tradition. One said this: “I am a liberal because I am a conservative. Liberalism is what I want to conserve!”
Some people wanted me to do a book, and so I did. At one point the title was: “Big Tent Liberalism.” That’s not a good title, but it captures what I have in mind. The liberal tradition includes Ronald Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it is defined by John Rawls and Friedrich Hayek (different thinkers, to say the least).
Despite fierce internal disagreements, and the size of the liberal tent, liberals agree on crucial things, including freedom, pluralism, security, and the rule of law.
One of the themes of the book is that liberalism is not a thing to recover. It is a set of principles, and it has to be made, not found.
As liberals understand it, security is bound up with freedom from fear. Liberals don’t want boots stamping on people’s faces. They don’t want people to be afraid. FDR’s embrace of the Second Bill of Rights, and his Four Freedoms, have everything to do with that goal.