Francis Fukuyama 1

Francis Fukuyama 1

The Pragmatic Case

The pragmatic argument for liberalism needs to be understood in the historical context in which liberal ideas first arose. The doctrine appeared in the middle of the 17th century towards the conclusion of Europe’s wars of religion, a 150-year period of almost continuous violence that was triggered by the Protestant Reformation. It is estimated that as much as one-third of central Europe’s population died in the course of the Thirty Years War, if not from direct violence then from the famine and disease that followed upon military conflict. Europe’s religious wars were driven by economic and social factors, such as the greed of monarchs eager to seize Church property. But they derived their ferocity from the fact that the warring parties represented different Christian sects that wanted to impose their particular interpretation of religious dogma on their populations. Martin Luther struggled with the Emperor Charles V; the Catholic League fought the Huguenots in France; Henry VIII sought to separate the Church of England from the Rome; and there were conflicts within the Protestant and Catholic camps between high and low Church Anglicans, Zwinglians and Lutherans, and many others. This was a period in which heretics were regularly burned at the stake or drawn and quartered for professing belief in things like “transubstantiation,” a level of cruelty that is hardly understandable as an outgrowth of economic motives alone.

Liberalism sought to lower the aspirations of politics, not as a means of seeking the good life as defined by religion, but rather as a way of ensuring life itself, that is, peace and security. Thomas Hobbes, writing in the middle of the English civil war, was a monarchist, but he saw a strong state primarily as a guarantee that mankind would not return to the war of “every man against every man.” The fear of violent death was, according to him, the most powerful passion, one that was universally shared by human beings in a way that religious beliefs were not. Therefore the first duty of the state was to protect the right to life. This was the distant origin of the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the US Declaration of Independence. Building on this foundation, John Locke observed that life could also be threatened by a tyrannical state, and that the state itself needed to be constrained by the “consent of the governed.”

Classical liberalism can therefore be understood as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity, or, to put it in slightly different terms, of peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies. The most fundamental principle enshrined in liberalism is one of tolerance: you do not have to agree with your fellow citizens about the most important things, but only that each individual should get to decide what they are without interference from you or from the state. Liberalism lowers the temperature of politics by taking questions of final ends off the table: you can believe what you want, but you must do so in private life and not seek to impose your views on your fellow citizens.

The kinds of diversity that liberal societies can successfully manage are not unlimited. If a significant part of the society does not accept liberal principles themselves and seeks to restrict the fundamental rights of other people, or when citizens resort to violence to get their way, then liberalism is not sufficient to maintain political order. That was the situation in the United States prior to 1861 when the country was riven by the issue of slavery, and why it subsequently fell into civil war. During the Cold War, liberal societies in Western Europe faced similar threats from Eurocommunist parties in France and Italy, and in the contemporary Middle East the prospects for liberal democracy have suffered due to the strong suspicion that Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt do not accept the liberal rules of the game.

Diversity can take many forms: in 17th century Europe it was religious, but it can also be based on nationality, ethnicity, race, or other types of belief. Byzantine society was riven by a sharp polarization between the Blues and Greens, racing teams in the Hippodrome that corresponded to Christian sects professing belief in Monophysite and Monothelite doctrines respectively. Poland today is one of the most ethnically and religiously homogeneous societies in Europe, and yet it is sharply polarized between social groups based in its cosmopolitan cities and more conservative one in the countryside. Human beings are very good at dividing themselves into teams that go to war with one another metaphorically or literally; diversity thus is a prevalent characteristic of many human societies.

Liberalism’s most important selling point remains the pragmatic one that existed in the 17th century: if diverse societies like India or the United States move away from liberal principles and try to base national identity on race, ethnicity, religion, or some other substantive vision of the good life, they are inviting a return to potentially violent conflict. The United States suffered such conflict during its Civil War, and Modi’s India is inviting communal violence by shifting its national identity to one based on Hinduism.