Liberals in a Troubling Time
Looking to Principles from the Past
By Erik Matson
In 2025, the Western veneers of pluralism, tolerance, peaceful commerce, and the rule of law appear thin.
The shadow of war stretches westward from the Russia–Ukraine conflict. China and Russia flex their nuclear muscles, as does the United States in return. The Trump administration deploys a disproportionate amount of naval assets to the Caribbean, ostensibly to police drug traffickers from Venezuela. Terrorist bombings in India and Pakistan have tensions running high. Years of war in Gaza transform the geopolitics of the Middle East.
The open use of domestic political power to persecute and silence political opponents becomes commonplace. Issues of election integrity spread worldwide. Freedoms of speech, press, association, and exchange falter. British police harass, arrest, and imprison people—even comedians—for posting content that causes offense. German law enforcement levies fines for untoward online conduct. The US censorship apparatus appears to be in some retreat; but proposals to proscribe free expression have by no means lost their popular appeal. People are unsure what exactly to make of concepts such as “the deep state” and “political weaponization,” yet many increasingly accept that they signify something real and important.
What should classical liberals do in these troubling times?
Part of the answer is that we need to remain serious about our basic principles and convictions. Classical liberalism offers the world a message of hope and reciprocity. The good of the one—individual or nation—need not come at the expense of the good of many. The peaceable pursuit of interests within a set of established rules protecting property and enforcing contracts facilitates cooperation and yields astounding material abundance.
We know the world can be a better place because, in so many places, it is so much better than it was in recent history. The concentration of power corrupts. Protecting the freedom of all to pursue their interests their own way serves the common good of humankind.
These insights are fundamental—but easily forgotten. They must be reintroduced and applied to novel policy contexts and challenges each generation. But it is also important for us today to deal with thornier issues of political coherence and stability. We must focus more concerted attention on how to preserve the underlying social structures that we take for granted in our higher-level discussions of policy reform.
The basic point can be made with some reflections on constitutions. Policymaking always occurs within some kind of constitution. In some cases, constitutions are written documents. But in all cases, constitutions necessarily rest upon or within a deeper bed or substrata of rules and procedures including shared beliefs, conventions, and traditions.
In the case of written constitutions, there must be a degree of consensus over how words are to be interpreted. Behind that consensus, there must be a shared opinion that the words have authority, even if there are occasional disagreements and disputes concerning their meaning. If the body of people do not believe that a constitution is morally and politically legitimate, if they are not already to some extent practicing the principles that the constitution conveys, the political order will not cohere. The American founders clearly understood this. John Adams explained that the US Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people.” John Witherspoon argued that “even the best constitution will be ineffectual and slavery must ensue” without a cooperative populace.
Classical liberal philosophy has much to say about desirable public policy. In some cases, liberals step back to ponder the logic of constitutional rules guiding policymakers—hence the fields of public choice and “constitutional political economy” pioneered by James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and others. But sub-constitutional matters are largely neglected, and for understandable reasons: they are not easily captured by common analytical strategies of contemporary classical liberal theorists. Sub-constitutional matters, moreover, foreground the messy historical realities and contingencies of the quasi-liberal civilizational order of the Western world.
Public choice theorists can discuss the kind of constitutional order that individuals might select behind a veil of ignorance. But they neglect to tell us why, where, and how individuals would gather for a “constitutional moment” in the first place. The ethical conclusions one might derive from veil-of-ignorance experiments are worth pondering, but they shed no light on the issue of implementation. A theorist might proffer an ideal set of constitutional rules, but he cannot use the same analytical tools to specify the deeper conditions that would actually bring such a constitution forth in the pages of history.
The tendency in classical liberalism to focus on higher-level policy issues can be traced to the 18th century, when the English word liberal was first used to describe a definitively political outlook by Scottish intellectuals, including William Robertson, John Witherspoon, and especially Adam Smith.
The 18th-century classical liberals developed much of their philosophy in response to what came to be called “mercantilism.” Mercantilism itself had emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries in an effort to influence the workings of a new and emerging kind of political unit: the nation state. Early proponents of liberal philosophy developed their perspectives against the misguided mercantilist aspirations for national power and plenty. Liberals argued that mercantilist economic policies impoverished rather than enriched the nation, and that hegemonic expansions of empire were unsustainable and immoral.
In engaging with mercantilism, the 18th-century liberals in Britain began from a presupposition of regularized institutions of authority, which were essential for their efforts, but, in turn, could not be completely justified in terms of the focal liberal principles of liberty, equality, and justice.
The perceived possibility of something approaching a classically liberal polity in history took shape against a framework of political authority that was assumed but not yet fully explained. The historical manifestation of a quasi-liberal state of affairs was a product of a complex mess of contingent factors. This is the central tension of the liberal outlook. “Liberty,” as David Hume articulated the tension, “is the perfection of civil society,” but “authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence.”
The point is not to criticize the early classical liberals. They were obviously aware of the presuppositions of their discourse. The point is merely to say that classical liberal discourse consciously developed to discuss and critique existing public policy, not the emergence and preconditions of the establishment of a polity. Some classical liberals, of course, have treated sub-constitutional matters at different points in time, so I do not wish to overstate the point. But the traditional emphasis of liberals on matters of policy rather than formative issues of polity is apparent when we consider the academic discipline with which classical liberalism is most closely associated—economics. Arguably the most important work in the history of classical liberalism is a work of political economy. The title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, not An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Liberal Nation.
As the preconditions of a regularized political order waver, as they seem to be wavering today, focusing on the kinds of policy measures that would serve the good on the assumption that the preconditions obtained becomes marginally less important. It, by no means, is unimportant, so long as the political order continues to cohere to some extent; but it does become less important. The relatively more urgent task is attending to the eroding preconditions or sub-constitutional elements of our order.
Attending to these preconditions should involve a more concerted effort at recovering and promoting the philosophical and religious resources from which our liberal convictions historically grew. It should involve an effort to take religion more seriously as a formative political force not fully extricable from the political outcomes we wish to achieve. (Recall Adams’s contention that the Constitution was made for a “moral and religious people.”) It should also encourage us to overcome our aversion to practical politics and adapt to the murky realities of compromise, coalition, and the constructive use and reform of extant political power, without which the liberal changes we hope to effect will never come to pass.
Erik W. Matson is the Gibbons Fellow in Economics at the Catholic University of America and Co-Director of the Adam Smith Program at George Mason University.