Mathis Bitton reviews Liberalism as a Way of Life

Alexandre Lefebvre. Liberalism as a Way of Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2024. 304 pp.

12 September 2024

Contemporary philosophers often reduce liberalism to a set of procedures—ways of making decisions, allocating power, or distributing rights. Proponents praise this approach for its impartiality, while opponents deplore its artificial claims to neutrality. Neither side seems to contest the idea that liberalism might have something more—something spiritual—to offer its adherents. In Liberalism as a Way of Life, Alexandre Lefebvre not only shows otherwise, but does so by drawing on the man whom critics often hold responsible for the cold-hearted proceduralism of liberal thought: John Rawls.

In this elegant book, Lefebvre makes two central claims, one descriptive, the other normative. First, for those of us who live in liberal societies, liberalism acts as “the source of [our] values: not just of [our] political opinions, but of who [we] are through and through” (p. 5). We do not merely live in liberal lands—with “constitutions, rights, . . . voting, and the like”—but lead liberal lives (p. 12).

Second, liberalism contains all the resources necessary for us to lead good lives. When Rawls speaks of society as a “fair system of cooperation,” he does not merely refer to a way of organizing ourselves but also to a way of being in the world (p. 25). This “way of life” provides its own set of heroes (for example, Leslie Knope), ideals (for example, “reciprocity” or “liberality”), moral sensibilities (for example, a “hatred of cruelty”), and even spiritual exercises (including Rawls’s own original position) (pp. 146, 179).

Lefebvre’s argument is provocative and thorough. Nonetheless, the book leaves two important questions unanswered. First, Lefebvre does not relate the liberal “way of life” to economic or political structures. Yet institutions do not merely translate values such as “reciprocity” into realities, but breathe meaning into these concepts in the first place. Rawls himself shows that his view of cooperation only makes sense in the context of a “property-owning democracy” or “liberal socialis[m].”[1] By contrast, the very form that Lefebvre chooses—he calls the book a “self-help” manual—ignores the interplay between structures and values, reducing the political realm to a therapeutic exercise in self-care (p. 13).

Second, Lefebvre does not explain the relationship between liberal and illiberal sources of meaning. He convincingly argues that liberalism is enough to lead a good life, but one wonders whether illiberal influences are necessary to lead the best life. As laudable as reciprocity, liberality, or the original position remain, do these values and “spiritual exercises” even come close to religious encounters with the divine, Nietzschean dreams of greatness, or Jacobin revolutions? If not, then Lefebvre fails to refute a weaker claim on behalf of anti-liberalism—not that liberalism has nothing to offer, but that liberalism sacrifices the great on the altar of the good enough. Along these lines, in The Last Man—the addendum to The End of History—Francis Fukuyama claims that the greatest threat to liberalism comes from its own inability to satiate our thumos, our desire to “seek out struggle and sacrifice . . . to prove that the self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal.”[2] If so, does liberalism as “a way of life” require us to forget part of what makes us human? Lefebvre leaves this concern unaddressed.

Ultimately, these worries should not distract us from Lefebvre’s accomplishment. To liberals, he offers an unbeaten path; to critics, he offers a worthy opponent who takes the spiritual dimension of life seriously. Liberalism as a Way of Life deserves to be read widely.

[1] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. xiv, xv.

[2] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992), p. 304.