ABSTRACT
Liberalism, liberal theory, and “the liberal state” have been the free-floating foils for a great deal of contemporary political theory, and the adjective “liberal” is often synonymous with “theoretically weak,” “politically unsavory,” or both. Liberalism is said to be particularly toothless when it comes to political action. First, it is theoretically weak: Critics charge that liberals favor weak-kneed reformism and parliamentarianism over radical and revolutionary modes of political action only as an afterthought, simply because liberal theory offers such ineffectual resources for thinking about action. This leads to more trouble: On the one hand, the only real model of agency liberal theory has to offer is the Homo economicus, for whom politics is merely one of the instruments that makes one’s pursuit of one’s selfish interests possible. If, on the other hand, liberals think about some actual norms to guide political action, they hold forth on abstract principles such as “public reason,” which really means that politics, for a liberal, is all talk and no action.
