ABSTRACT
It is characteristic, and perhaps definitive, of liberalism that it should seek to ground the historical contingencies of liberal practice in a foundation of universally valid principles. No aspiration is more peculiarly liberal. For it is distinctive of liberal thinkers to deny that there is within the diversity of forms of government and society disclosed to us in history a legitimate variety of frameworks for human well-being. Accordingly, if, say, the feudal orders of medieval Europe are conceded any legitimacy, then it can derive for the liberal mind (as for the Marxist theorist) only from their role as necessary stages on the way to a form of life having universal authority. Liberalism, which in its applications to personal conduct aims for toleration and even pluralism, is in its political demands an expression of intolerance, since it denies the evident truth that many very different forms of government may, each in its own way, contribute to an authentic mode of human well-being. From the first, liberalism has always strenuously resisted this commonplace observation, since it cannot but undermine the claim to universal authority of liberalism as a political faith — a claim which exhibits the structural similarity of liberalism to the evangelizing Christianity of which it is the illegitimate offspring. No liberal can accept (without thereby ceasing to be a liberal) that liberal practice expresses and embodies only one among many ranges of often conflicting and sometimes incommensurable varieties of human flourishing. For the liberal, then, a liberal society is not merely one of the options open to human beings, but a moral necessity. All non-liberal societies stand condemned, together with the excellences and virtues which they harboured. Because of its universalizing doctrinal zeal, liberal thought has always sought to elevate liberal practice into a set of principles, and then to demonstrate the unique claim on reason of those principles. In other words, more perhaps than any other intellectual tradition in western political thought (save the aberration of Marxism) liberalism has constantly tried to transform itself into an ideology. It is an upshot of the essays collected in this volume that this project of a liberal ideology is a failure, and can be nothing else.
