ABSTRACT
As it manifested itself in the writings of its principal exponents, during its moment of ephemeral hegemony in contemporary political philosophy, the new liberalism was recognizable by virtue of its exhibiting a family of commitments and presuppositions, not all of them shared by every one of its theorists, but having resemblances enough in common to represent a distinctive and in some respects novel contribution to the liberal intellectual tradition. The new liberalism was an outlook, or a framework of categories, more than it was a doctrine, or a substantive philosophical position. Central among these categories were the notion of the person, conceived as the bearer of rights and the originator of plans of life and conceptions of the good; the idea of justice as the supreme regulative ideal for the assessment of political and social institutions; the conception of political philosophy as having a jurisprudential or legalist character, in that its agenda was the specification of the constitutional structure of political life, with its attendant basic liberties; and so on. Often, though not always, the philosophical inspiration of
the new liberalism was Kantian. The Kantianism of the new liberals – of Rawls and his disciples, and of Dworkin, in his pre-hermeneutic phase at any rate – was, however, of a metaphysically neutered variety. It lacked altogether the apparatus of phenomenal world and noumenal selfhood by which the Kantian conception of universalizability, and thereby the political principles it supposedly generates, are accorded a universal authority. Instead, in all of the new liberals implicitly and in the later Rawls programmatically, the philosophical perspective that animated the new liberalism was a relativized Kantianism. It was a Kantianism relativized to yield a conception of the person disembedded from any cultural tradition that was found uncongenial to conventional liberal opinion. In emptying its construction of the person of any constitutive cultural identity, communal membership or ethnic allegiance, the new liberalism effectively relativized the Kantian subject, so that it became a rights-bearing cipher. The role of this cipher, as it can now be interpreted in the wake of the new liberalism, was that of a device whereby the warring cultural identities of latter-day United States could be passed over or suppressed. By voiding its central conception of the person of any constitutive history or community, the new liberalism was an historically highly specific, topical and local, response to the cultural wars of identity by which its parent culture is chronically convulsed. And, in seeking a history-purged and culture-blind resolution of conflicts and disorders arising from a moment in the history of its parent culture, the new liberalism showed itself to be distinctively, and indeed peculiarly American.
