On the Various Kinds of Liberalism

Chapter 3 sets out the core commitments of liberalism as understood in this project. Many have doubted whether liberalism is in fact a coherent ideology as opposed to a loose collection of attitudes adopted as historical circumstances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demanded. It is argued here that liberalism is indeed a coherent political ideology, but its coherence depends on appreciating that it is the child of medieval constitutionalism. The fundamental principle of the liberal ideology is the commitment to the rule of law, which is seen as a natural extension of natural law theory’s rejection of absolutism. But this restored coherence comes at a price. Classical liberalism’s insistence on the complete value neutrality of government policy is rejected. A core claim of natural law liberalism is that there is no neutrality on those “values” associated with the United Nations Human Development Index, nor need there be. This means that the traditional dogma of classical liberalism, i.e., that the right is prior to the good, must be dropped. In line with the results of Chap. 2 , “right” is defined in terms of the “practically reasonable”, and what is practically reasonable is defined as “a non-defective response to a good”. However, recognizing that facts can speak to values is the beginning of a response to Weberian disenchantment.