Internal to what? A novel account of the task of political liberalism

Abstract

This paper advances a novel account of the purpose of Rawlsian political liberalism. To rescue political liberalism from traditional objections, the prominent ‘internal view’ of political liberalism conceives of it as merely meant to establish liberalism’s internal coherence; political liberals’ job is to show that legitimate and stable liberal institutions are possible despite ‘reasonable pluralism’ – pluralism about the good life and religion created by liberal institutions themselves. On this view, the scope of political liberalism only includes societies characterised by reasonable pluralism and reasonable pluralism arises only in ‘well-ordered’ ideal liberal societies, which are governed by reasonable liberal justice and inhabited only by reasonable citizens. Therefore, much existing first-order political liberal literature, including the very project of investigating the containment of the domestic enemies of liberal democracy, is effectively thrown out of political liberalism properly understood. We criticise this view by arguing that it misunderstands its own most central notion of reasonable pluralism. Reasonable pluralism is also a feature of non-ideal ‘minimally liberal’ societies and political liberalism should therefore include such societies in its scope. Consequently, the purpose of political liberalism should also include showing how non-ideal minimally liberal societies can move closer to a reasonably just society overwhelming populated by reasonable persons. The resulting view of political liberalism, which we label the view ‘internal to at least minimally liberal societies’, still sees political liberalism as defending liberalism’s internal coherence. Relatedly, we explain that it remains safe from the traditional objections the internal view was created to sidestep. In developing our revised internal view, we also propose an original methodological approach, according to which ideal and non-ideal theory are both important but largely independent projects within political liberalism.