ABSTRACT
I begin my investigation with a question: What must be true for liberalism to be a possibility? I do not mean to ask what are the necessary conditions of a liberal society. That question opens up some fascinating lines of inquiry — it suggests questions about the demands made on the intellectual and moral capacities of human beings by the institutions of a free society, about the degree of moral conflict and diversity a free society can tolerate and the character of the moral consensus on which it none the less depends — and it leads on in a natural way to the question whether, as most classical and modern liberals suppose, freedom can become the normal condition of mankind, or whether, as (following Spinoza) I think myself, it is bound always to remain an exception in human affairs. Such questions are certainly intriguing, taking us quickly into disciplines of conjectural history and speculative sociology, but I do not aim to address them here. My question instead is a more centrally philosophical one: What must be true for liberalism to be a coherent and meaningful political ideal?
