On Critical Liberalism

The oldest branch of liberal thought remains its most emancipatory.

It asks how everyday practices affect freedom, often without our knowledge. It treats power with relentless suspicion while it praises good law. It rejects fundamentalisms, celebrates basic virtues, and recognizes the limits of reason. It aims, above all, to prevent and ameliorate harm.

Call this critical liberalism.

It’s easy to miss our radical heritage. In 1960, Sheldon Wolin found, to his surprise, that the liberal stereotype—arrogant, naive, and “bewitched by a vision of history as an escalator endlessly moving upwards towards greater progress”—had little grounding in the early texts.

The critical mode of liberal thought resists such stereotypes. It runs from Adam Smith through Sophie de Grouchy, Judith Shklar, and Amartya Sen. Montesquieu prefigures it; Jacob Levy and Elizabeth Anderson, in their different ways, are developing it still.

Critical liberals share an aim and a method. They aim at liberation from oppression, cruelty, and abuse. They pursue that aim through a perspectival critique that interrogates power from below.

Today, I want to explore how Smith inaugurated the tradition. He not only named the “liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice”; he also asked how it feels when these goods are withheld.

The real Adam Smith looks nothing like his caricature: apologist for avarice, patron saint of private equity. As Maria Pia Paganelli has catalogued, Smith denounced monopolies, protectionism, slavery, empire, colonialism, poor political representation, state religion, and academic sinecures, at a time when these pervaded British society. (How many are with us still?)

These concerns all share one feature: unjustified or unjustifiable authority.

Why did Smith famously call his Wealth of Nations (WN) “a very violent attack… upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain"? Because much of that system enriched the few at the expense of the many. Those new to Smith might be surprised by his suspicion toward unaccountable elites who collude in “silence and secrecy” to suppress wages and who seldom “meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

We can identify two sources of Smith’s suspicion. The first can be traced to what we’d now call rent-seeking: the interests of “those who live by profit” are “in some respects different from, and even opposite to” the public interest, because capitalists have strong incentives to reduce competition, seek subsidies, and exploit natural and human capital to whatever extent the market and law will bear. Smith’s elaboration in WN is worth quoting in full:

The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society…. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

On Smith's account, capitalists are no more or less public-spirited than the rest of us. But they warrant “suspicious attention” because they have both the financial and epistemic means to seek rents more effectively than others. Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, motivated factions—we know this story well.

Less well-known is the second source of Smith’s concern: the libido dominandi , or the love of domination. Where the rent-seeking concern derives purely from material self-interest, Smith’s analysis of domination looks to our natural sentiment. Dan Luban, Paolo Santori, Robin Douglass, and Jacob Levy have all recently highlighted how this explanation stands apart from—and indeed, sometimes works against—expediency.

That love of domination helps Smith explain where the theory and the reality of markets diverge:

Commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity…. The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody but themselves.

That “mean rapacity” and “monopolizing spirit” are matters of character, and cannot be reduced to the economic incentives or political connections of capitalists. And—crucially—capitalists are just normal people with extraordinary access to the tools of domination. Of the libido dominandi, this “love of domination and authority over others”, Smith notes, “I am afraid is naturall to mankind.”

The trouble with our impulses toward rent-seeking and domination lies in their ability to corrupt our sentiments, especially our natural sympathy.

One finds Smith's sympathetic outlook across his works, perhaps especially in his methodology. Smith the moral psychologist explains how resentment and fellow feeling operate; Smith the political theorist puts them to work in his readers. He trains his audience to inhabit perspectives and notice injuries that are easily missed. Observe how Theory of Moral Sentiments attends to the phenomenology of poverty, its invisibility and its misery:

The poor man… is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that, if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers. He is mortified upon both accounts... The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel. Those humble cares and painful attentions which occupy those in his situation, afford no amusement to the dissipated and the gay. They turn away their eyes from him, or if the extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spurn so disagreeable an object from among them. The fortunate and the proud wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery, presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness.

Across his works, we find Smith practicing his own moral theory in just this way, inhabiting multiple perspectives to sharpen judgment. His politics demand no less.

That's because the further we stand from suffering, the less we understand it. Perspectival distance compounds moral failure. “The fortunate and the proud” clearly can’t fathom how the poor man’s misery must feel to him. He becomes inhuman, something alien. Economic inequality in slaving societies produces the same effect. Smith’s lectures argue that the enslaved are treated worse in societies where slavers shape legislation. “[E]very law is made by their masters, who will never pass anything prejudicial to themselves”. Worse, economic growth actually undermines the basic sympathies needed to curb slavery. Growing inequality makes it harder for the slaver to see the suffering of the enslaved, such that “he will hardly look on him as being of the same kind”.

Thus: “Freedom and opulence contribute to the misery of the slave. The perfection of freedom is their greatest bondage". Smith concludes that if European wealth proved “incompatible with the happiness of the greatest part of mankind”, “the humane man” would wish that it never existed.

Adam Smith, "father of capitalism", rejected economic abundance where it bore the marks of a whip. He never lost sight of what makes commercial society so essential: freedom from domination and fear. This is “by far” the most important consequence of commercial orders, bringing liberty and security to those beset by conflict and a “servile dependency upon their superiors”. That promise of liberation was exactly what the enslaved had been denied.

Sophie de Grouchy, Smith’s translator and critic (and among the first to apply “ libérale” to his political economy), extends his analysis by examining how perspectival distance creates moral failures in both directions, harming both the dominated and those who dominate:

The powerful man and the worker in his employ are too far removed from each other to be able to judge one another. And because their respective duties seem to get lost in the distance between them, the one may oppress the other nearly without remorse, while the other will in turn cheat him with impunity, even believing that he is in this way bringing justice to himself.

Neither Grouchy nor Smith claims, as would some egalitarians, that inequality is itself unjust. Rather, they assert that its effects can encourage injustice. They worry that sympathy can grow weak enough that the grounds of equal dignity are lost.

Sympathy isn’t perfect. Fellow feeling is as fallible as any other faculty. It can bias us toward thinking that others feel exactly as we do. It can restrict concern to those who are just like us. In response, we should follow Smith in subjecting sympathy to its own perspectival assessment. Sympathy must be turned back on itself , filtered through a multiplicity of perspectives, especially those nearest to harm. We begin, as Shklar puts it, by asking “the likeliest victims, the least powerful persons". Even Smith’s idealized “impartial spectator” risks reproducing social prejudice. It's for this reason that, in ameliorating suffering, we must first understand “the situation which excites it", in Smith’s terms. “The first question which we ask is, What has befallen you?” We build our remedy from there.

Not all liberals are critical liberals. For all the power of John Rawls’s concern for liberty and the least advantaged, the Rawlsian apparatus—hypothetical representatives, veils of ignorance, idealized justification—poorly captures the many textures of in justice as experienced by real human beings (as Shklar, Sen, and others have noted well). Little in Rawls helps us understand our sentimental reactions to harm. Friedrich Hayek, for his part, illuminates how emergent orders and dispersed knowledge promote freedom, yet he defers to “rules whose rationale we often do not know” without offering the moral-sentimental grounds by which to judge those rules. If anyone should have foregrounded the local knowledge of oppression, it’s Hayek. Both authors make the same error: evaluating principles or rules without incorporating, at the outset, the actual experience of bearing their costs.

Nor are critical liberals alone in their emancipatory stance. They share commitments, for example, with some Marxists and neo-republicans. Note—just for fun—the striking family resemblance with the Frankfurt School. Both stress the limits of rational design; both avoid facile positivism; both share Smith’s worries about ordinary practices—exchange, hierarchy, administration—hardening into domination. When Max Horkheimer shows concern for turning “fair exchange into a deepening of social injustice, a free economy into monopolistic control, productive work into rigid relationships which hinder production, the maintenance of society's life into the pauperization of the peoples”, we begin to suspect shared parentage.

Yet emancipatory zeal carries its own risks. It becomes all too easy for the revolutionary, the humanitarian, and even the liberal technocrat to disregard the cries of those they would liberate. The Wealth of Nations famously warns against the “man of system” who treats people as so many chess pieces. Smith isn’t rejecting systematic reform; the book is nothing if not an excavation of the sometimes obvious, often obscure sources of immiseration that are within our power to change. Rather, as Jacob Levy has argued, Smith is stressing the need for reform to work with, and not against, human attachments, and cautioning against promises to sweep aside the social order. Smith would have us seek fewer Cromwells and more Wilberforces.

Here we arrive at the distinctively liberal element in critical liberalism: an orientation toward iterative reform—what Shklar called “damage control”—that is itself subject to critique. Where any institutions—markets, states, civic associations, trade unions, even organized religions—promote emancipation as recognized by the emancipated, we can encourage and even celebrate their work. Where their practices harm or protect harm, they should be opposed.

Critical liberals thus hold institutional commitments lightly, conditionally. They have no truck with utopian schemes. They recognize institutions as the work of human hands, with all the good and evil that those hands do. They hold every claim of authority to the same emancipatory scrutiny. A Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat gets ruled out by its violent means and ends; the institutions of liberal democracy—competitive markets, constitutional government, popular control—justify themselves by working in the opposite direction. Yet even their authority remains provisional. The provisionality is the point.

And sometimes we do best by doing less, not more. We often find ourselves complicit in the very harms we would remedy. Here, we should step out of the way. Not for nothing did Smith treat justice as the negative virtue of not injuring others. In quieter times, his attributed remark that prosperity needs little else but “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” could sound like libertarian pablum. In today’s context of capricious warfare, retrograde tariffs, and ceaseless attacks on the rule of law, it feels aspirational.

We can do great good by preventing harm. Working not toward redemption, but protection and restoration. Whatever critical liberalism lacks in revolutionary chic, it gains from the hope found in correcting this error, that injustice.

By such small means, we make ourselves free.

I'm grateful for the comments of Gordon Arlen, Janet Bufton, Kristen Collins, Paul Crider, Jacob Levy, Shal Marriott, Brandon Turner, Ming Kit Wong, and Emily Chamlee-Wright. I welcome yours, too.