Much ink has recently been spilled (some of it mine) by conservatives debating the nature and relative merits of liberalism, especially as it relates to America. The debate has been infuriatingly inconclusive, in part because the parties have allowed a preoccupation with semantics (e.g. the meaning of liberalism) to prevent a treatment of the substantive issues (for example, the proper scope and limits of government power). Over 20 years ago, John Finnis wisely wrote the following:
It is . . . a mistake of method to frame one’s political theory in terms of its ‘liberal’ or ‘non-liberal’ . . . . Fruitful inquiry in political theory asks and debates whether specified principles, norms, institutions, laws and practices are ‘sound’, ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘reasonable’, ‘decent’, ‘just’, ‘fair’, ‘compatible with proper freedom’, and the like—not whether they are liberal or incompatible with ‘liberalism’.
If one wants to get past the seemingly unending semantic debates over the meaning of liberalism—which in my view are in principle unresolvable by argument (see above and here)—to the far more interesting and important substantive issues, Mathew D. Wright’s A Vindication of Politics is an excellent place to look. Although Wright considers in depth many of the subjects central to the liberalism-conservatism debate, the words “conservatism” and “liberalism” are conspicuously—and refreshingly—absent from the text.
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