Liberalism as a Way of Life: Freedom, Generosity, and the Crisis of Meaning
What happens when liberalism stops feeling like a victory and starts feeling like an exhaustion?
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director (acting) Eli Karetny speaks with philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre about liberalism not merely as a political doctrine, but as a lived way of life.
Against the backdrop of rising populism, nationalism, and post-liberal regimes, Lefebvre revisits the liberal tradition—from Locke and Mill to Rawls and Berlin—to argue that liberalism has always contained a moral and existential core. Drawing on John Rawls’s early work and Pierre Hadot’s idea of philosophy as spiritual exercise, the conversation explores freedom and generosity as liberal virtues, the tension between neutrality and perfectionism, and why liberal societies struggle to defend themselves against more overt visions of the good life.
Moving between political theory, international order, nationalism, and spirituality, Karetny and Lefebvre ask whether liberalism can still offer meaning without becoming imperial, moralistic, or coercive—and what liberals stand to lose if they fail to recognize the depth of their own commitments.
Below is a slightly edited transcript of this conversation.
Transcript
Eli Karetny
Not long ago, a triumphalist spirit infused Western discourse with proclamations of liberal democracies’ victory in the ideological battles of the 20th century—a victory that represented the end, or purpose, of history itself. But something happened on the way to implementing that purpose, for we liberals have lost our vitality, no longer celebrating victory. Instead, we’re confronting what commentators across the political spectrum see as a crisis of liberalism.
Critics on the left and right have exposed the weaknesses of our ideas, our values, our habits, culture. We stand naked, without purpose or meaning—believing only in our own self-interest, or believing nothing at all. Is this the endpoint of our liberalism, of modernity, of history itself? Or can liberal thinkers save us by doubling down on our own hegemonic tradition? Can philosophers remind us of what makes liberalism so deserving of our commitments?
The shoehorn challenge posed by the hard left and the radical right got nothing on the liberals who boldly, bravely announce: there’s more here than you realize. There’s more to our own belief system than you think. There’s a way of life here to embrace—not only because it offers us freedom and fairness, but because it has the resources to help us become our best possible selves.
Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Eli Karetny. I teach political theory and international relations at Baruch College, and have for years been the deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. With our director, John Torpey, on leave this year, I have the privilege of serving as the Institute’s interim director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast.
Here with me today is Alexandre Lefebvre, professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is originally from Vancouver, Canada, and he got his PhD at Johns Hopkins University. Alex’s book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, was named the best book of 2024 by The New Yorker, Australian Book Review, Persuasion, and Australia’s Ministry of Pop Culture. His current project, provisionally titled Soul Crafters, investigates how populist and authoritarian regimes—from China and Russia to India and “MAGA America”—actively shape their citizens’ views of the good life.
Welcome, Alex. Thank you for joining us on International Horizons.
Alexandre Lefebvre
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Eli Karetny
Your book has really struck a nerve with liberals whose self-confidence has waned in the face of challenges coming from all sides. Certainly, with this liberal—let’s start at the level of principles. Let’s give some content to the ideology, to the waters we all swim in. What holds together all the different liberalisms you discuss?
And just to give a little bit of reference: you write about the early modern liberalisms of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu, Kant. You make reference to 19th-century classical liberalism, Cold War liberalism, social democratic liberalism, and contemporary neoliberalism. So what are the core principles at play here, and why does it represent a good way of life?
Alexandre Lefebvre
So let me not dance around the question, because the easy academic dodge is to say liberalism is a multicolored coat with all of these different colors. I want to say that there’s two main ideals—or both political principles, but also qualities of character, let’s say—at the heart of liberalism.
And it goes back to the very origin of the word liberal and liberalis in Latin, which is, on the one hand, to be someone who is free, and, on the other hand, to be someone who is generous. And if I had to nominate the two kind of core principles of liberalism, it would be that: freedom and generosity. Or, if you want to stick to the roots of the word: liberty and liberality.
And that was at least how the founders of liberalism understood themselves—trying to recover these qualities, both politically but also psychologically, in the 19th century, given all the new challengers on the scene: modern life, capitalism, democracy, just the general standardization, and what we would today call the enshittification of everything. And just trying to recover a sense of gravity to our souls, as it were, through those two qualities of character.
In the later evolution of liberalism, it gets obviously complicated. I put a lot of—I put all my bets on, in one sense, the Rawlsian idea of fairness: that that is something liberals should sign up to, if at a minimal level, which is a commitment to a society as a fair system of cooperation. And that’s where the book takes me.
That said, I’ve tried to make the definition capacious, but it won’t quite cover liberals of all stripes. I once had lunch with Michael Freeden, who is a political historian at Oxford—recently retired—but he’s kind of the great historian of liberalism of our times. And he wrote Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction, amongst other pieces.
And he said that, look, Alex—I remember he was eating his toast at the time—and he said, “Alex, liberalism is like a room full of modular furniture,” you know? Like furniture you can just move—like corporate rooms, where you just move bits and pieces here and there. And he says that the complexion of liberalism will totally depend on what bit of furniture you move to the center of the room.
So if you park freedom right at the center of the room—pretend that’s a couch or whatever—then all the other furniture has to arrange itself in its orbit. And that would be, say, a libertarian, maybe a neoliberal tradition. Or you could have a more robust kind of social-democracy aspect as your centerpiece—call that the kitchen table, whatever you want.
But there’s this kind of family—orbit of concepts that always gets rearranged according to the different emphasis. But I put my chips on fairness.
Eli Karetny
Are there non-liberal pieces of furniture that can be part of the assembly and still retain a liberal space—let’s say aristocratic honor or excellence, these kinds of ideas?
Alexandre Lefebvre
Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s so much to that question. You’re squeezing the furniture metaphor, all right.
I think you can definitely have not-illiberal, not-pro-liberal concepts in the orbit of liberalism. So, for example, let’s take your notion of honor. Honor is a tricky idea that tends to get a little bit starved out in liberalism, because it often depends on relations of asymmetry, such that honor goes to one person and not to another, and then you get the whole Rousseau scene of psychological chasing after goods, etc., etc. Whereas liberalism tries to—kind of, to use a trite metaphor that’s still kind of true—tries to level the playing field.
So if you want social relations structured according to loyalty, it’s going to be an uphill battle in a liberal environment, and you’re going to have to make place and try to carve that out. But certain thinkers have tried to do that. Sharon Krause, for example, wrote the terrific book called Liberalism with Honor. But it’s something Tocqueville was very interested in and concerned with: honor. But it’s something liberalism has to work uphill to try to do.
But there are, of course, certain values that really are starved out in liberalism that are genuine human excellences. I think we would acknowledge that they’re human goods. They just find it really hard to get a foothold in liberalism. I think of things like self-sacrifice, piety, loyalty—it can have a tough time in liberalism—and other things.
So it definitely has a certain atmosphere that will favor—change the metaphor again—give a kind of hothouse environment for certain plants, but not for others.
Eli Karetny
So when I come back to Rawls, who you mentioned—he’s essentially the hero of the book in many ways—let’s talk a little bit about his framework and how it provides a way of kind of calling the essence of liberalism, and, at the same time, offers a way of life to liberals who care not only about self-interest, but also about self-development, maybe even self-elevation—not to say perfection. So say a little bit about both his framework and the way of life that you see embedded in it.
Alexandre Lefebvre
So let me start off with what no one on this podcast needed to hear, but: John Rawls was the major political philosopher of the 20th century—born in Baltimore, where I did my PhD, which is a nice little touch for me—and then educated at Princeton, and then worked at Harvard for his life.
So what Rawls really tried to do—this is the way Thomas Nagel puts it; I think it’s right—Rawls’s big achievement, as a syncretist, as trying to hook up traditions, was to try to combine American-style liberalism, with its more freedom-oriented aspect, with European social democracy. And these were taken to be traditions that were, if not anathema to one another, then they just didn’t play nicely together.
And so what Rawls tried to do with a tradition that stressed freedom, on the one hand, and another that stressed equality, was to try to reconcile them with his idea of fairness. And so: providing a society that would be, as I said a moment ago, set up and run and maintained as a system of fair cooperation from one generation to the next—allowing individuals to pursue their own conception of the good in life and their own ends, but also with an infrastructure that would provide opportunity for everyone to do so, and guarantee respect for persons, such that I see you doing your thing, you see me doing my thing, and we both kind of affirm that in their various qualities.
So that was what Rawls tried to do.
Rawls had two major—there’s early Rawls and late Rawls, which is—this is gonna sound pedantic, but it’s very important for the question you asked. So the early Rawls was much more comfortable with allowing for the idea that liberalism might become a pretty robust ethical framework: by which it’s not just how we behave as citizens, but it’s how we comport ourselves just as people in our everyday lives—as colleagues, as friends.
And he had some great—he’s not known as a subtle psychologist, but I think that’s undeserved. And the back end of his great work, A Theory of Justice, really has a lot of stuff on moral development and how we acquire, through childhood, through adolescence, a commitment to liberal values that isn’t just notional and abstract, but is lived and embodied and really felt, and it’s emotionally resonant. So that was the early Rawls.
And he concluded his great work with this kind of hymn to—at least this is the way I read him—this kind of hymn to what it means to live as a liberal person: someone who is free and also generous.
And I think for him, he tried—he’s a crypto-theologian. He was going to be a minister, and then lost his faith in the Second World War. But I don’t think he ever lost that impulse: that we strive for something beyond ourselves, something redemptive. And I think he found that, in his own way, in the liberal tradition of political thought anyways. And he tried to restore that in his great early work, A Theory of Justice.
So short version, that’s that.
Then in his later work, he received a challenge—which would occur to anyone, but a philosopher—that dismantled his whole edifice, which is like: basically, “Hey Jack”—how he was known to his friends—“Hey Jack, what if people don’t want to live according to liberal principles? What if they don’t want to be all kind of like low-key Kantians along the lines you lay out?” He’s like, “Oh no, that’s right, maybe.”
And so then he had to recast his whole system so that liberalism may be an ethical framework, but for most other people it can also just be a political set of commitments. And he called that version of liberalism political liberalism.
And the goal was to try to reconcile a liberal political order with deep pluralism—with the fact that we have committed Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people of various moral philosophies in any mature society—and how do we get them on board if they don’t recognize themselves in this kind of liberal ethos as a character, as a set of character qualities? So that was his later work.
So liberalism becomes less comprehensive, certainly, and I think that that is where he sort of left off. And what my book tries to do is, for those of us who want to recover that prior vision of liberalism as a way of life—
Eli Karetny
Who were the voices that he was responding to? Just as clarifiers—who were the loving critiques that he took?
Alexandre Lefebvre
Yeah, I forgot his name. We can put this in the show notes. There’s a—sorry, I’m just—it’s for listeners. It’s early-ish morning in Sydney, and so my Rawls brain only kicks in at like 11 a.m. I’ll get you the name.
He has a specific interlocutor in mind, and he uses a specific term of criticism to fault himself on his earlier model, which is that he says, ultimately, his work in A Theory of Justice—he still approved of it, he still thought it was good—but he called it, quote-unquote, “unrealistic.”
And by “unrealistic,” that word was meant to refer to that he didn’t think it would actually achieve sufficient buy-in by a sufficient number of people who believe in different ends of life, different faiths, so as to be able to reproduce itself indefinitely. So that’s why he had to recast the whole edifice of his theory: to try to provide a more stable account of liberalism, which is to say one that would achieve wider buy-in.
Eli Karetny
Is part of your project to recover the possibilities of his initial theory—of A Theory of Justice—to say that, in fact, it may be more realistic than he thought?
Alexandre Lefebvre
I think it’s—yeah. I think the times, yes, absolutely. Short answer, yes.
I think there’s a very important development that happened. So A Theory of Justice published ’71. Political Liberalism was published ’90/’91—’93. But between that time, especially 1971 and 2025—on the cusp of 2026—I think what we have gone through is a large number of people living in Western democratic societies are no longer theist.
If you look at the numbers, the biggest growing category of religious faith is precisely people who don’t profess a religious faith. So in the U.S., I think right now it’s like 30%, and Australia is like 40%. Then you get countries like the U.K.—I think it’s like 60 now, almost. And New Zealand’s like downright godless at like 80—or I don’t know what it is.
So I think that people have lost theism as a consciously affirmed framework. But, of course, we still live in a theistic kind of orbit. Whether these concepts have a tremendous half-life—we live secularized versions of Christianity all the time.
And I think that’s what Rawls was picking up on, and trying to—how to make a secular version, let’s say, of Reformed Protestant Christianity. And that was A Theory of Justice. He would deny that, I’m pretty sure. But I think retrospectively we can look at a certain kind of cultural set of attachments that he had to a faith that he lost, and trying to recover its best ethical bits and best bits that would allow for flourishing, both for himself but also wider.
So I think that between now and then we lost religion. And I don’t know if there’s a God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart—I don’t think there is—but I definitely think there’s a God-shaped hole in our society, and that liberalism is a thing that I think ended up rushing in to fill that, though most people don’t have that word available. They know what the word means, but they think it’s just a political thing.
But what I’m trying to say is: hey, wait a minute, your liberalism may run quite a bit deeper than you suspect, and it may go down not just from your citizenly comportment, but go tip to tail. And it’s just how you comport yourself in friendship and marriage and love, as a co-worker, etc., and just as a kind of unconscious framework that you navigate the world with.
And I’m happy to talk about examples of how I think that plays out, but that would be the big difference. So I’m trying to recover early Rawls for a changed time, which is when a lot of people have lost faith, but still have a framework—they just don’t know the word for it.
And I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone adopts a liberal way of life. My book—I should admit—I didn’t make this sufficiently clear in my book, but I need—I’ll just do it here and at any opportunity: my book is written for liberals to commit to a liberal way of life. I’m not trying to convince conservatives or Christians or Muslims or whatever—people who have some other framework—to switch. They do their thing. That’s that.
Maybe that might be the liberal in me, but they’re good in some sense. What I’m trying to do is get people who are already liberal to recognize the depth of their liberalism and commit to that because—not because they have to, with a capital moral imperative—but rather because I think it’s a good, fun, rewarding, and worthy way of living.
Eli Karetny
Wow. So much I want to ask you about in the context of that answer, and I’m going to go off script—though first to say I want to come back to the spiritual kind of element in Rawls’s work and what you call spiritual exercises. But I want to hold off for a minute to ask a few questions about—we—this is the podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. So I want to ask at least a few questions looking at liberalism from that dimension, from the perspective of internationalism.
But I do want to first say, just in response to your answer: had Rawls been taught to me in graduate school the way you’re presenting him, I would have spent a lot more time, energy, and heart with him, sincerely. I kind of passed over him in the way he was presented.
I’m remembering now: it was kind of Rawls versus Nozick. Maybe Nozick was the thinker you had in mind? Is that—
Alexandre Lefebvre
No, no. It wasn’t. It was a pretty minor thing. Anyway, I’ll get you the name, but it was a minor thinker. Wasn’t a big luminary. Wasn’t a Michael Sandel. It wasn’t Nozick.
Eli Karetny
I see, I see. But I remember there was a kind of the social-democratic Rawls—the original position, the veil of ignorance—and the libertarian critique. And that was that. That felt kind of boring and flat. But had this richer, more comprehensive Rawls been presented to me, I would have really spent a lot more time with him. And here’s an opportunity to do that.
So your book is great on so many levels, and one of the things it’s done for me is it’s going to bring me back to Rawls.
Alexandre Lefebvre
That is a great compliment. Thank you. And if any listeners out there: Rawls is a very touching man. If anyone—reach out to me by email, if you want—I’ll send you his autobiography. It’s not published. It’s ten pages, and it’s very touching. Anyways, just shoot me an email, dear listener, and I got you.
Eli Karetny
I appreciate that. And yeah, listeners, take Alex up on that.
In another podcast, I remember me mentioning something about—or actually it was in the book, right—where, in the Harvard archives, there’s this very short autobiography, right, where he also asks himself questions—or questions that weren’t asked of him—and then answers, which happened.
Alexandre Lefebvre
So those—you’re remembering right, but you’re smooshing. Those are distinct pieces.
So he has the autobiography, which is called just Jack. And then he had this weird interview that he gave to students—well, he gave a normal interview to students, but then he went home and just wrote down and answered questions that he wished the students had asked him, which are very revealing, interesting questions, because they’re all theological questions. They’re like: “What about meaning?” “What about meaning at the deepest kind of level of human orientation?”
Oh, and sorry: the other bit of Rawls weirdness—he had many copies in the Rawls archive of A Theory of Justice. They boxed all this stuff and ordered it, but he would take fresh notes on different editions of A Theory of Justice. So you have his own annotations in different iterations on his own books.
One of them is just such a lovely artifact, because he kept on adding different epigraphs that he wished he had put into A Theory of Justice. None of Rawls’s work—articles, books—have epigraphs. But he collated them. He seemed to be “epigraph-curious,” as it were, and he just had this list of, like, I don’t know, 30 potential epigraphs from all kinds of different people—some from scientists, some from philosophers, some from theologians.
Oh, and the epigraph for my own book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, is drawn from one of the epigraphs he didn’t use—which is a joke. I can tell the joke; it’s a ten-second joke. He stages a little philosophical dialogue between two people. One is called the optimist, and the optimist says, “This is the best of all possible worlds.” And then next line, the pessimist replies, “I know, right.”
Very weird mordancy on the part of—I don’t think he was known as a kind of—that’s salon-level wit, which Rawls was not known for.
Eli Karetny
There were a lot of great jokes and anecdotes and use of pop culture in your own book—whether it’s David Foster Wallace talking about the old fish passing by the two young fish, which kind of reminds us all that we swim in the waters of liberalism, whether we know it or not; or your use of Borat; or The Good Life, which I think is a fantastic show. In any case, you really do an amazing job in the way you find important lessons and meaning in even our liberal pop culture.
So I want to ask a few questions about looking at liberalism from a more international perspective. You had mentioned earlier that part of Rawls’s project was to bridge an American, more freedom-centric version of liberalism and a European social-democratic tradition of liberalism. Maybe you could say a few words about how it is that liberalism lands in different places on the political spectrum, depending on where you’re looking.
You mention in your book that in the U.S., liberalism is associated with a more progressive left, and liberals are criticized from the right as tax-and-spend do-gooders, in your words. Whereas in Europe, liberalism may land on the center-right, and liberals are criticized from the left as—again, in your words—heartless, small-government individualists.
I find that really interesting, and maybe you could say a few words, and maybe also point out some other places where liberalism lands differently and the discourse surrounding it sounds very different.
Alexandre Lefebvre
Yeah. So you’re right: it depends. When you say the word—if someone declares, “I am a liberal”—it really depends on the patch of land that they’re saying that on, because it means quite different things. So that’s what I tried to bring out.
I’m a citizen of two countries. I’m Canadian and Australian. Here in Australia, it means you’re center-right. And in Canada, it kind of—I don’t know now—but it kind of means that you’re center-left. Carney is kind of changing that up to mean kind of more center, center-right. But yeah, so it depends on where you’re standing.
In part, that’s because we’re exactly where we started: the liberal tradition is so very capacious, and it has all these different inflections according to what bit of furniture—or central concept—you park at its center.
I think that your question pushes me towards geography, but my natural response to this is history a little bit. I just think that we live—I think it’s an indisputable fact that today we live in a golden age of histories of liberalism. There’s so many good works coming out on this right now. There was kind of a boom five years ago, and now, but there’s still great stuff coming out.
Two books that I’ve learned so much from are Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism, and also Samuel Moyn’s Liberalism Against Itself. Those are two books that try to show how the evolution of liberalism is always in response to certain crises or challenges within liberalism itself.
So we take for granted, for example, the term classical liberalism, and we think that people of the 19th century called themselves classical liberals. But if you think about it for one minute, that doesn’t make any sense. No one who is the originator of a tradition calls themselves a classical whatever. Original gangsters don’t call themselves original gangsters—they’re just straight-up gangsters, right?
So when the 19th-century liberals were crafting their tradition—which is when it was created—they were just liberals, straight-up. But the term classical liberal is itself an invention of the early 20th century—people freaked out by New Dealism, the socialist bent of American development and also European liberalism. And then they tried to do a retrospective historicism campaign—polemical but effective—to recover, to plant their vision of liberalism back in the 19th century.
So you get born an idea of free-market individualism as the heart of the tradition, when really it’s just a later add-on, retrospectively read back.
Or you get Cold War liberalism. Moyn talks about Cold War liberalism. And very understandably, Cold War liberals were freaked out by the Soviet Union. They were freaked out by its central planning and its heavy-handed infrastructure, but they were really worried about its perfectionism—in the sense that the Soviet Union really wanted to create the Homo sovieticus, a new kind of man with a new set of values. And they were like, “Fuck that.” That is terrifying state engineering. We don’t want that.
And so then they created a Cold War liberalism really centered on institutions being a prophylactic between state power and individual freedoms, and so really narrowed the scope of liberalism to mean basically individual liberty as against a state imposition. So here you have people like Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper—you’ve got a whole bunch of people in that tradition.
So liberalism just keeps on getting reinvented according to certain crises. And I suppose what I tried to do, in my own little way, was to reassert a certain strand of liberalism that had been forgotten about, but that I think is core—not just to the tradition, which I think is true—but also core to the lives that we live right now: our liberalism may be very, very present in it without us being aware of it.
So that was my attempt. It’s not really answering your question as to why it changes, but the short answer is simple: liberalism contains multitudes, and depending on your orientation, you can definitely find a strand of the liberal tradition to defend your commitments. So if you want to be a free-market kind of guy, you can do that. You can find a tradition that defends that within liberalism. If you want to be an almost crypto-socialist, you can do that as well.
Eli Karetny
I am tempted to jump into Isaiah Berlin now, but I want to hold off for a minute, because his work has been very influential for me. And there are some important ideas there that I want to bring out.
Alexandre Lefebvre
If you want to go for it, I’d be happy to defer to you for a bit, but this is your podcast.
Eli Karetny
I want to get there in a roundabout way. I want to first ask you about still looking at things from an international perspective, a question I don’t think you talked about in your book: how national sovereignty and the liberal values of peace and cooperation factor into your conception of liberalism.
Ever since Kant, liberals who focus on questions of international peace talk about the importance of regime type, and they emphasize that liberalism—and sometimes it’s associated more with democracy than liberalism, and there’s a tension there, and maybe a complementarity there as well—but to say liberal democracy produces institutions that are conducive to international peace and security.
And some—many of them not in the political theory space, but in the international relations world—they go even a few steps further when thinking about questions of national sovereignty and international cooperation.
I’m thinking here—first, within the world of philosophers—a liberal philosopher who you didn’t mention in the book: Jürgen Habermas. He talks about the completion of the modern project, and he sees the universal principles of liberalism pointing to, eventually, global constitutionalism—something like that—a global liberal order. No hidden conspiracies here—more like what H. G. Wells called an open conspiracy.
But there are others—not Kantians at all—thinking here of the Hegelian thinker Alexandre Kojève, whose work influenced Fukuyama’s End of History thesis. He claimed that a universal state was the only way to satisfy what he called the human struggle for recognition on a universal basis.
So my question is—and there’s lots of questions bound up here—but let’s start with the question of the nation-state: is the nation-state the best way to house the liberalism you have in mind?
Alexandre Lefebvre
There’s a lot of depth in that question, and you’re more competent to answer a lot of it. But let me cut in at it this way.
So I’m right now—my work is turning towards non-liberal stuff right now, and an author that I’m very interested in—I bet you’ve probably read him—is Yoram Hazony. He’s the director of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He runs the National Conservatism conference every year. And he wrote a book that got a lot of airtime—on Ezra Klein a couple months ago, and on Ross Douthat, like a few weeks ago—The Virtue of Nationalism.
And his pitch is kind of—he kind of takes Habermas as his poster boy for everything that’s wrong with the hegemonic world. And he basically says that liberalism is imperialistic. And he wants to say, there’s no difference in kind between the Catholic Church, the Roman Empire, jihadists, and liberals, because all of them want, in their various ways, to spread or impose a universal set of norms—where there would be certain light cultural differences between governing entities, maybe different fast foods or whatever, but basically we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.
Whereas he wants to contrast that mindset with what he calls the nationalist mindset, which is one of real, deep pluralism. And I agree with that. I think the nationalist mindset—it might—it’s not internally pluralist. Like countries like Israel, Hungary, Russia—name a kind of nationalist country—they know what people in those countries should be like. But it is internationally pluralist, in that I don’t think—I don’t see China or Hungary having an ambition to spread the Chinese or Hungarian way of life all across the world in the way that liberals very often do.
So I think that sometimes it sounds polemical to say that liberals are imperialist. And it feels like a straw man. But other times, if I squint a little bit, I see that as not altogether groundless or baseless. How does that scan with you?
And so they want to say that it’s just a very aggressive revival of a natural-justice program, and that basically nation-states become administrative units towards some bigger liberal game plan. For some it would be more heavy-handed. I think Habermas has a more robust apparatus in mind. Fukuyama, at least back then, thought that global picture would evolve by each nation-state arriving at that conclusion on their own terms, because that was just the bent of history.
So, yeah. How does that scan for you?
Eli Karetny
That’s a fantastic setup and a kind of transition into an Isaiah Berlin discussion. But let me say: in graduate school and at our Institute, I was moving in the direction of what Hazony sees as a kind of imperialistic liberalism—although, of course, I didn’t then see it, nor do I really see it now, as imperialistic, but certainly universalistic.
A lot of the UN practitioners, NGO people that I know in the human rights world, and the academics that have gone in that direction, very much embrace the Habermas framework—a Kantian framework—where a supranational framework, where nations are, like you say, and like he says, ultimately administrative units of a kind of global system.
I think I’ll answer from their perspective, because I no longer fully embrace it. But from their point of view: a great mentor of mine, Thomas Weiss—former UN official, taught at Brown, then came to the Graduate Center, and was our Ralph Bunche Institute director for many years—his response, very practical, is: it’s a system of international laws and cooperation, and there’s no domination, there’s no imposition, from the point of view of a hegemonic power imposing order. It’s a cooperative framework oriented towards primarily collective security, but ultimately beyond just security—a kind of global governance framework.
So this is not either Fukuyama or a kind of hard neoconservative imperial version. The neocon version, certainly imperialistic. But the UN—kind of UN at its best—or an idealized Habermasian supranational framework wouldn’t be imperialistic in the way neoconservatism was, because there’s no militaristic dominating power enforcing order on others against their will. It’s a cooperative framework.
But—I’ve been swayed by liberals like Isaiah Berlin. I think Berlin’s liberal pluralism, which contains a justification for liberal nationalism, is a way of taking what’s true in the Hazony position.
So I kick it back to you and say: what are the key differences between a liberal pluralist version of nationalism and the universalist direction?
Parenthetically: I had a really interesting conversation with Hazony on Zoom when I was on a sabbatical year in Israel immediately after October 7—that’s a story in itself. He saw an exchange I had with—of all people—Bronze Age Pervert on X, and he was shocked at the way I was curious about BAP’s Nietzscheanism. So he invited me to a Zoom. We had a long Zoom where we talked about BAP and Nietzsche, basically.
Alexandre Lefebvre
But anyway, he thought he was—sorry, because Bronze Age Pervert is beyond the pale. Like, that—that’s part of—
No, right. Okay. Yeah. No, I should—sorry. I know Hazony is not a “no enemies to the right” guy. He’s very much not that, and especially now with—what’s it called—bro-kerism, the Fuentes crap—yeah, I mean, just coming out swinging against that.
Okay, but look: the power of Hazony’s argument—the power of any argument when you know it’s really powerful—is its opponents start adopting their terms, and then they’re done for.
So like: I hear Hazony talk, and he talks about liberalism as imperialistic. And I’m like, “No, no, it’s not. I don’t want to be imperialistic.” And then I think for a moment: what is the imperialism he’s actually talking about? And I’m like, “Fuck yeah, I’m imperialistic.” I do believe in human-rights norms, and I do believe in their universality, and I do believe in respect for persons.
So it’s a very interesting thing of me kind of wanting to take liberalism out of the box that he put it in and situate it elsewhere, but then realizing that the box he put it in is actually, first, probably appropriate, and second may be awesome—and something I affirm. So I think that’s a very interesting power of his argument, to make me kind of reevaluate that way. Does that make sense?
Eli Karetny
I think so. We could say a little bit more about that. I’m hearing an interesting liberal justification for a certain kind of imperialism. Well, I think that goes back to John Stuart Mill and other liberals, right?
Alexandre Lefebvre
So let me take a concrete example—I’m working a little bit on this right now—so I’m about to take a trip to Hungary, spend a couple months there. We’re going to work on the conservative coalition building up there, because it’s sort of a clearinghouse of who’s who of non-post-liberal thought.
And one of the main areas I want to look at is Hungary’s natalism policy. Do you know anything about this? Interesting.
Okay, so Hungary is like every country in the Western world: it has a very low birth rate, well below replacement. But unlike most Western countries, it absolutely refuses to shore that up with immigration. So it wants to keep Hungary for Hungarians. It has a declining birth rate, and it doesn’t want to admit non-Hungarians to solve that problem.
So there’s only one solution left, which is to bump up the birth rate as quickly as possible. So they have an extremely aggressive—wrong word—or favorable, generous set of policies around encouraging families to have children. So if you’re a woman in Hungary and you have two kids, you no longer pay income taxes for the rest of your life. If you have three kids, you get a sweet deal on a minivan. I’m not kidding—that’s actually. If you have four kids, you get generous home loans—very generous home-loan setups. And there’s special incentives if you’re married, if you have kids when you’re young, etc., etc.
Now, those policies—they’re not punitive at all. They’re incentivizing policies. But they are very consciously skewed towards favoring a certain way of life for certain kinds of people. First of all, you have to be basically heterosexual and married. You have to have a large number of children.
Second, women have to get back into the workforce to make it work for them, because they need that—only then do they get the income-tax break that they’ve acquired.
It blocks out certain kinds of nationalities in Hungary from really gaining from this. The Roma in Hungary really can’t do this, because they’re kind of off-book in so many ways, and they won’t be able to reap the official rewards.
So all of these things are very aggressive ways that Hungary has tried to establish a pro-natalist policy.
I wonder if it would be vulnerable—European courts, European governance—to being challenged because of its perceived attack on LGBTQ stuff, or its discrimination against Roma people—how that could be used by an international governance like the EU to withhold funds from Hungary, etc., etc.
So liberal imperialism doesn’t have to be bayonet-style. It could be through these much softer coercive mechanisms that forbid nations from pursuing policies that they find integral—not just to their own maintenance, but to remaining the kind of people that they are: namely, Hungary seeing itself as a pro-family, pro-big-family kind of country. Does that make sense?
Eli Karetny
That makes a lot of sense. So where are you, then, on the question of liberal states using the instruments of state power to further certain policy objectives? Because it sounds like we’re veering out of the liberal space. Is it different when international institutions are doing it, versus the liberal state doing it to its own citizens?
Alexandre Lefebvre
I think yes, that’s an important distinction to draw. I think liberals haven’t come up with a good answer to this yet. They want to draw lines and distinctions that, in reality, are at best muddy, but really almost nonexistent.
So liberals want to say that the state should be fastidiously neutral as to the ends of life, and it shouldn’t promote certain ways of living over others. Okay, on paper, I get that. It doesn’t establish a state religion, so at a super high level, that makes a lot of sense.
But then, of course, the liberal state, in all kinds of ways, supports—and not punishes, but disincentivizes—ways of living that it either wants, that are desirable or undesirable.
So, for example, funding for museums, for PBS in the U.S., the ABC here—if we just left them to market forces, they’d be done for. But the liberal state recognizes a certain value in these—a certain conception of culture—and it funds those. So there’s no liberal state that is not at least lightly perfectionist.
And then what troubles me is that post-liberals—let’s call them conservatives, roughly—then pounce on this to basically say, “Well, the liberal state is totally not neutral. Let’s just replace it with a hardcore version of our conception of the good life. So let’s become integralists.”
So someone like Adrian Vermeule will say: “Look, the liberal state is so thoroughly promoting a liberal way of life that it’s no different”—it’s ethically different, but it’s not formally different—than the kind of vision that I have of common-good constitutionalism, reintegrating church and state, etc., etc. And that troubles me a lot.
So I think liberals need to mark that distinction between a liberal state saying, “No, we’re pluralist and we’re neutral,” and then also admitting that it’s clearly not pluralist and neutral—without going whole hog and saying, “We should recommit to the old Aristotelian project of common ends of life that the state should fund and support.”
Eli Karetny
Wow. So much good stuff there, and we don’t have time to get into much of it. But one thing that strikes me: you said “post-liberal slash conservative,” and kind of conflated those two. Do you not distinguish one kind of conservative from another—Burkean conservatives and libertarian conservatives, maybe still within the liberal world—versus post-liberals who have left the liberal orbit? Is that a wild distinction to make?
Alexandre Lefebvre
Oh, definitely, yeah. I think that distinction is meaningful.
There’s two directions I want to go here. The first direction—this is my new work, and I don’t want to force the conversation, but I think it’s relevant—is: I’m trying to come up with an elegant theory, which is to say a theory that explains a lot with a little.
My theory is that all the non-post-liberal countries around the world that, prima facie, look totally different—I’m talking India, Israel, MAGA, Russia, Hungary, China, and more and more Brazil—sometimes they look totally different on paper. Like, what the hell would unite these things, besides being post-liberal, besides being anti-liberal in some sense?
But that’s a negative explanation. What I want to try to say is that all these countries are, in fact, united by their willingness to recover maybe the oldest tendency of political philosophy: to use the state to promote certain visions of human flourishing.
So MAGA has a definite idea—it’s fractured, different strands—but it has an idea of what it means to be an American. Russia definitely has an idea of the Russian soul with its deep history. China has an idea of what it means to be this Confucian-come-Marxist-come-Legalist subject, and they’re trying to fit that together. Hungary—Orbán says that being Hungarian is the most beautiful task in the world. Israel is more and more becoming kind of a—this sounds too harsh, but—kind of theocratic state. Iran’s been there for a while.
So all of these countries are basically repudiating this stance that liberals claim for themselves—neutrality and pluralism. And they’re saying, “Fuck that. We know how people like us—the Chinese, the Hungarian, whatever it is—Israelis, Jews—should live. We have the resources to further that. So why the hell aren’t we doing that? Let’s do it.”
And that’s what I want to say unites all of these non-liberal things. It’s a return to—China wouldn’t see it this way—but it’s a return to Aristotle: the priority of the polis—the political organization—is to promote the good life. Boom. No fuss, no muss. It’s a positive explanation that could account for the attraction of these things.
When critics—big-platform critics, like Anne Applebaum or Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley—look at these places, they just see kleptocracy or repression from the top, or else populations that are prejudiced assholes that cling to their guns and religion, etc., etc. And I just don’t think that—that descriptively can’t be true. These regimes couldn’t have the popularity and stability they have if it was simply negative in that way.
So what I’m trying to do is furnish a positive explanation for why these post-liberals are eating liberal lunch on a daily basis. And I want to try to say it’s the return of the idea of the good life. The good life might be abhorrent for liberals, but it’s still—say what you like—it’s still an ideal.
Eli Karetny
If there’s something legitimate about that, what should liberals learn from it? How does that translate into liberal state policy where we don’t lose our liberalism?
Alexandre Lefebvre
Yeah, that’s the big question.
First thing: the minimum standard of any scholarship or journalism should be to describe your opponents in ways that they could potentially recognize themselves in. I just don’t think that any post-non-liberal subject reading an Applebaum or a Snyder book would say, “Yeah, that’s me. I am a sadopopulist,” or whatever. That’s just not right.
So descriptively, liberals need to get in the headspace of recognizing the human value, worth, and seriousness of their opponents. Step one.
Step two: you’re totally right that liberals are hamstrung, because they cannot go down that path. It is core to their commitment as liberals that they can’t push a liberal way of life—or can’t promote ends of life—in the way these other regimes have absolutely no scruples in doing.
And I guess what I would say—I don’t have a firm answer yet; this is where I’m working it out—I need a stump speech here. But what I would say is: liberals think it’s almost natural or normal that the state should allow its individuals freedom to figure out what the good life is for them. We need an ounce of historical perspective to notice how irregular and exceptional that is.
No political organization—maybe the Ottomans at some point in time—but really, no political organization except liberalism has refrained from pronouncing on the good life. And that takes civilizational labor to maintain—and maintain a commitment to.
So I think what would need to be done here is to recover a sense of tolerance and pluralism as deeply important to one liberal conception of the good life—not just it’s nice for other people, but it’s central to who I am as a person and my orientation, and my own good, that I support these ideals.
So try to recover a sense of the ends of life through the kinds of attitudes that maybe Berlin had: affirming negative liberty, but also recognizing the value of nation-states and traditions. Berlin was always such a flirt with romanticism—those are the guys he loved—but he’s like, “No, no, I can’t.” It was like The Last Temptation of Isaiah.
Eli Karetny
That’s great.
So I want to respond in two directions. One is to say: respectfully, part of what you said started to sound like a social-justice-warrior, woke liberalism—commitment to fighting the good fight in terms of DEI or pushing liberal values—and that it doesn’t work. Where does your vision differ?
And the other thing I want to say about Berlin—he has this line about why he was so drawn to romantic thinkers. He said something like: more drawn to the enemy because the enemy gets behind the defenses. And that resonates with me.
I wrote my dissertation on Strauss. I’m fascinated by right-wing thinkers of all different kinds. Nietzsche has always been really drawn to me. But how to maintain your liberalism and still incorporate some of the really important wisdom on the right?
But I wonder, with Cold War liberalism—Berlin’s version—if the role of the enemy is part of the problem. Liberalism at war—there’s purpose and meaning and commitment. But if you need an enemy, what kind of liberal are you?
And then the other thing: in grad school my dissertation supervisor was Corey Robin, and he strongly influenced thinking about conservatives as counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries—even liberals. I was told over and over that even Berlin was a liberal counterrevolutionary. I don’t believe that, but there’s something to it that I’m still struggling to reconcile: that liberal flirtation with a certain kind of conservative way of thinking—maybe blocks us from, or changes the nature of, our liberalism and becomes something else. I don’t know. I kick it back to you.
Alexandre Lefebvre
No, it’s good.
First: it’s the danger of thinking out loud on a podcast. I think I misspoke. I need to work on my messaging. I’m not a progressive in the standard sense. This wasn’t a pitch for DEI or social-justice-warrior stuff.
Let me reset the answer. Liberalism is in a uniquely hamstrung position in respect to the global culture war. It’s not that they bring a knife to a gunfight—it’s that they can only bring a knife to a gunfight. It’s not like they forgot their gun; they just can’t bring the gun.
And the reason they can’t is because these other regime types—whether that’s China, Russia, whatever—have no problem just saying, “We know the good life. We’re gonna do that.” Liberals can’t do that. If you call yourself a liberal, you absolutely cannot do that, and you have to have some breathing room between state power and ethical goods and human flourishing.
So it can’t pursue that path.
What I tried to write my book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, to do is to suggest—these were the early days when Trump 2 was a question mark—what I wanted to say is: liberals, wake up. If we lose the liberal political framework—if this becomes displaced as the hegemonic option of political organization in the West—we liberals are going to lose a whole lot more than just a political framework. We’re going to lose the whole basis for our ethos, our vibe, our character, the grounding of our existential orientation.
I didn’t want to catastrophize it, but I think liberal hegemony means a whole lot more than just legal and political dominance on the part of liberals. And so what I wanted liberals to do is recognize where their way of life comes from, why it might be good, and why it might be imperiled at this moment in time.
So when I observe now that perfectionists all around the world are eating liberal lunches and could be coming for us, I don’t have the answer—because there’s no “there, there” that the liberal state can promote in the way these other regimes can. But there is certainly something liberals can lose should the liberal state be displaced.
And it would be no less of an existential loss than the catastrophe of disestablishment was for the Christian faith. Losing hegemonic Christianity would be of the same order. Does that make sense?
Eli Karetny
So enter the other hero of your book: Pierre Hadot. So maybe say a few words about who he is, why he’s been so influential to you, and the idea of spiritual exercises. Where are we getting spiritual exercises? What makes them spiritual? And how could this be part of this puzzle?
Alexandre Lefebvre
Okay. So at the beginning I said Rawls needed no introduction; this other guy might.
His name is Pierre Hadot. He died maybe 10, 15 years ago. He was a historian and philosopher and classicist in France, and he’s the guy that reoriented the study of ancient philosophy towards realizing that it was not so much just a body of knowledge or philosophical ideas or arguments, but really: what philosophy meant back then was to commit oneself to a certain way of life—to live wisely—and a certain vision of human flourishing that comes with that.
And basically, all of ancient philosophy is a set of arguments to try to get people to that state of being, depending on what camp you are. Stoics will have one vision, Platonists another, but they’re all sharing this framework that philosophy means living well.
And what Hadot then tried to do is reread the whole ancient canon that way, and suggest certain modern revivals of it, when philosophy went towards a different direction—more theoretical, more abstract, more a professional practice.
So: “philosophy as a way of life” is his slogan.
And then he came up with this other big concept called spiritual exercises. Spiritual exercises are day-to-day practices that people can do voluntarily in order to bring themselves to the kind of person they want to become.
Religions are paradigmatic here, because they have zillions of spiritual exercises within any particular religion. Christians have prayer, repentance, confession, fasting, ascetic exercises—you name it—and all of these are trying to bring us more and more into the image of Christ. Judaism has its own set. All the religions have it.
But philosophy has it too: to dialogue with a friend, to keep a journal. So what he tried to do is recreate ancient philosophy as grounded, in so many respects, on these daily practices that people could do—reflect on death, etc., etc.
Fast forward 2,500 years, and we get to liberalism. If I claim that liberalism is a way of life, then it most certainly has to have spiritual exercises in it—or if it doesn’t quite have them, then we need to build some up quickly—because we need devices, techniques for people to be able to commit themselves to the body of thought and practice that they already profess.
So how to get people to become better liberals?
So what I tried to do in the book is—I jokingly call it a self-help book for liberals, but it is not. It is no joke. It’s an open conspiracy, to use your earlier term. And I tried to furnish some spiritual exercises for liberals to do.
Right now, this part of my book—people liked it, in criticism of it—but I think it’s a bit cute. It works, but I think I could have been more expansive.
So what I do is: I use Rawls, and then I try to locate spiritual exercises in Rawls. I nominate three of his main concepts—original position, reflective equilibrium, and public reason—as spiritual exercises: things that aren’t just theoretical heuristics, but that people like you and me can do on a Friday night if you’re bored, or on a Saturday morning when you’re recovering, to try to become the kind of liberals we want to be.
I like that part of my book. I think it’s smart in the pejorative way that I basically found these things in Rawls and reread these core concepts that everyone thought worked one way, in this different spiritual direction. But I do think it was a bit too Rawls-confined. I wish I could have furnished broader spiritual exercises within liberalism than just going back to Rawls’s text and rereading those concepts.
But I did what I did, and it’s an invitation for further readers or lovers of liberalism to go create their own spiritual exercises, because that can definitely be done.
Eli Karetny
I take you up on that invitation. I like this part of the book. I wonder if in the next book, in Soul Crafters, you’ll work out some of these exercises even more.
Alexandre Lefebvre
Yeah—not for liberals, but I’ll look at the more powerful ones that these other regimes have.
Eli Karetny
So I know we’ve already over time, and I’ll conclude with this. Maybe this is too personal, but in the spirit of being transparent: I’m not a liberal all the way down in the way that you talk about.
In my spiritual life—what I now recognize as my spiritual life—I didn’t even know I had a God-sized hole in my liberalism until some experiences—hard to talk about because they’re strange and mystical—led me down a path. From my fascination with Nietzsche, that took me to Strauss, was redirected towards Jung and Rudolf Steiner, and then ultimately I landed in practicing and studying Kabbalah.
This is to set up a question about your second spiritual exercise, reflective equilibrium, where it’s an exercise towards greater self-knowledge and self-coherence.
In my practice—rooted in both Kabbalah and universalized Kabbalah and anthroposophy—a lot of the work is about aligning the will with your higher self: a kind of divine element within that recognizes deficiencies within the soul related to egotism, and what the Kabbalists call the will to receive—the will to receive in order to receive.
By reorienting that will away from an egotistical will to receive, towards a posture of bestowal and giving to others, we can better the soul, patch its deficiencies, better receive and retain divine light. We can discover our spiritual destiny and align ourselves with a higher purpose.
Now, in that, there’s still—I don’t need the God concept. I don’t necessarily need a creator concept, although those things are useful and also maybe true.
But my question is: in your conception of liberalism, is there a liberalism that’s ready to do these spiritual exercises? Is there a conception of a higher and lower self? You talk about akrasia as a weakness of will. So is there a high/low, strong/weak dynamic? And if so, are the weaknesses for us liberals hypocrisy and inconsistency—or are the weaknesses that each soul has its own weaknesses we have to figure out and patch?
Alexandre Lefebvre
Okay. Good. Last question—this will sail us out.
First: I don’t mean to say that people who are not so liberal “all the way down”—by that I mean someone whose principles and vibe come from liberalism—that’s the addressee of my book. But people like you, who have something else in their back pocket, who claim a different tradition: I don’t want to say you’re not just as deeply liberal as me. In fact, you’re probably a richer person than me because you’ve got this other thing going on that you synthesize with your liberalism.
So I’m not trying to say it’s a deviation from liberalism to believe other stuff—to be a Christian, a theist, a Kabbalist, whatever. I’m trying to write for people for whom that option isn’t live, because it’s not like I could wake up tomorrow, Sunday morning, and just say, “Fuck it, I’m a Kabbalist.” That’s not how human belief works. It takes a lot of work—self-training, etc.—to come to that transformation.
What I’m saying is: liberals can be just as well off with just their liberalism. So that’s the first thing.
Second: you’re asking a very good question—do liberals believe in a higher and lower self? Yes. My vision—hard yes. Absolutely.
But I would call it—higher/lower skews in a direction I don’t like. I would call it a good or a shitty self. Like a self as you are and a self as you want to be. “Higher and lower” gets theological very quick. Berlin uses that language too, so maybe it’s safer than I think it is, but I don’t want a transcendent element to my liberalism, because I don’t think liberalism can support that very well.
So I would say: there’s definitely a notion of a worse self and one that you want to become.
And what I’ve landed on—and I didn’t say this in the book—is: I think that everyone basically spends most of their life trying to dodge the main moral commitment that their moral system makes on them. So you’ve got to figure out what the main moral commitment of your moral system is.
For liberals, the main moral commitment—the really tough one—is to be a generous person. Being a free person may be hard, but I think it’s less difficult than being genuinely generous—not just with your wallet, but with your attention, your hermeneutic generosity, not leaping down people’s throats, etc., etc.
And that’s the thing I think liberals need to work on. Historically, liberals have emphasized the free bit of their doctrine, not the generous bit. But that’s no surprise, because the free bit is easier. So most of our lives, liberals are just like, “Yeah, I’m free,” and they forget the responsibility, generosity, receptivity part.
Christians, on the other hand, have a different core belief at the heart of their system: love. So when I think of a shitty Christian, I think of someone who is very judgy, because the demand of non-preferential love is so exorbitant and difficult that the natural relapse is judgment.
Or take Confucianism. I think the main moral demand it makes is harmony—to balance difference within structures that are sometimes hierarchical. And I think the main character deficiency of Confucianism would be authoritarianism: to avoid the claim to harmony by dominating and setting order that way, rather than letting things be in their place.
So my point is: everyone tries to dodge the main moral claim made on them. So we’re all shitty in our distinctive ways because we’re all trying to be good in our distinctive ways, if that makes sense.
So then: the direction of work. I think the main character failing of liberalism is individualism, because it’s so tempting, it’s so easy.
And this brings me to spiritual exercises. You want to talk about reflective equilibrium and original position. The important one for me would be the original position. If you listen to this, read the original position one—that one’s good. The other two work, but they’re fuzzier.
But the original position: Rawls really, I think, deeply believed this. And he said, look, everything about us, at some level, is just chance. Like I’m a white, heterosexual dude who lives in Australia—that has nothing to do with me. That’s just forces I was born into or swept me away, and here I am.
And so what Rawls says is: the main existential mission for liberals is to try to recover a sense of who they are outside the contingencies that befall us.
We have this idea of liberals as always about positionality—“as a white man raised in a lapsed Catholic family”—and we dig, dig, dig. Rawls goes the other way: no, set that stuff out. Pretend it’s like clothing you’re taking off to finally get to your true body.
And he asks us to consider the social world—and our own psychology—outside all the predicates that we think make us ourselves. Why? Because we want a release from the egoism of the self, this yapping little subject that’s always trying to hustle and play games to realize positional power.
He’s like: fuck that. If you do that, you’re going to be led not just to socially unjust ends, but towards a damaging psychology—the one that Rousseau outlined with amour-propre.
So the whole goal of a liberal way of life is to step back from who we are, not be so gripped by the meanness of me, and try to set out how I would look at the world if I weren’t shaped and captured by all these nasty forces.
I think that’s a really powerful, redemptive vision of what it means to be a liberal person. Very difficult to achieve, because we are so hell-bent on claiming our individuality in this narrow way. And he’s like: no, man. We’ve got to step back from that.
Eli Karetny
I love that. That’s a great place to end. When I learned that in grad school, when I had zero spiritual practice, it landed flat. It felt like I was being asked to strip away the things about me that are most meaningful, and I was left with a neutral, meaningless self.
And now when I hear it—when I hear you say it—now maybe because I meditate and I have spiritual concepts that mean a lot to me, it sounds like a secularized expression of a deeply spiritual idea: not stripping away yourself, but ascending above a lower self, an embodied self, to an almost God’s-eye perspective—a higher, universal vantage point. So what once felt flat now feels very spiritual, with secular language. It’s interesting.
Alexandre Lefebvre
I have the same experience. I’m 46. I came to Rawls at 40. For most Rawlsians, they’re captured in their tender 20s. But you and I—we’re wise old men. We’re the old fish who have come back to check out the Rawlsian water.
Eli Karetny
That’s great. That’s perfect.
Alex, thank you so much. This has really been great. Not only did you leave me with a lot of good stuff to think about, but you left me with some work to do—and work that I’m going to really enjoy doing. So thank you very much.
Alexandre Lefebvre
My pleasure.
Thank you. This is a great convo. You.