As I describe in my new memoir, A Life of Freedom: The Making of an American Originalist, I have identified myself as a liberal since my junior year in college. I still. But at least in the past 10-15 years, I feel that liberalism as a political theory needs updating. During this same period, I noticed a growing schism among liberals that was difficult to pinpoint. In recent years, many people on one side of this division, some of whom I have known since my school days, have begun to avoid the label. I think it’s premature. I believe that libertarianism, with individual freedom at its core, remains a viable political philosophy that is superior to those offered by progressives or conservatives, most of which are not systemic. It is also at the heart of a liberal-based conservatism, as “national conservatives” think of it.
exist law and liberty, I have a short article titled “Liberalism Renewed” that discusses five possible areas where liberalism could develop further. I plan to develop these ideas into a future book. But because I write books first and foremost to discover what I think about ideas, the ideas remain highly tentative—I’ve listed them in order of decreasing confidence. That is, I am more confident in the former view than in the latter view.
We have to start from the beginning:
Liberalism in the 1970s was an internally contested intellectual project rather than a rigidly fixed set of policy positions. But unlike originalism, which benefited from two decades of internal intellectual debate among originalists, libertarianism has been largely frozen since the 1970s.
I think liberal theory needs to work in five different ways.
First, the need for a natural law ethics in addition to natural rights; Second, the need to distinguish between an ideal theory of liberalism and suboptimal liberalism in a world of governments and competing states; Third, the need for a liberal theory of citizenship and civil rights ; Fourth, the public-private binary needs to be separated from the government-non-governmental binary; Fifth, a more complete theory of corporate power and corporate rights is needed.
Let me say a few words about each.
You can read the rest here.
