ABSTRACT
The recent theoretical literature in and around the ideology of liberalism is profuse, rapidly burgeoning, and sharply conflicted.1 Contemporary discussions reenact a by now richly diverse history of moral and political reflection.2 Complicating matters further, both recent writings and the tradition they continue are refractions of disputes in the wider and yet more controverted domains of general opinion and public policy. In the hope of making some overall sense of these multiplicitous phenomena, I begin with and then explore the deficiencies of a rough but I hope serviceable distinction between “agency”- and “virtue”- oriented liberal theories. This exploration will identify a few characteristics common to nearly all liberalisms, but its more salient outcome will be to underline that there is no liberalism as such, that the term refers to a diverse, changing, and often fractious array of doctrines that form a “family” only in the most extended of Wittgenstein’s famous uses of that term (1953, paras. 65-81). I suggest, moreover, that we extend the family further by appropriating into it elements from modes of thinking usually and on the whole rightly regarded as a-or illiberal.
