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Liberal fundamentals: invisible, invasive, artful, and bloody hands

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Abstract

Returning to liberalism's Scottish Enlightenment precursors suggests that the liberal order might best be described by the tension between its assertions about the smoothing natural harmonies within the social order and its doubts about whether those harmonies can appear spontaneously and therefore require aggressive projects of reform and correction. Although committed to the inevitability and inexorability of progress, such doubts led Scottish Enlightenment figures to strategies that even today continue to mark liberalism's effort to purify modern progress of tragedy's taint. We continue to justify apparent social failings as necessary to the natural order, regarding them instead as advantages in a Providentialist manner (Smith and Hume). We preserve our faith in commercial society by aggressively reforming and correcting those inside and outside others who resist the inevitabilities we have embraced (Millar). We accept the disorders and instabilities inherent in modern market society, but replace our hope in the automaticity of adjustment with a belief in the capacity of the state or some form of international governance to resolve tensions in some higher-order liberalism (Steuart). We call for a moral revival to restore values that our contemporary liberal institutions cannot possibly sustain (Ferguson). In sum, maintaining liberalism's idealised vision of itself in the face of these necessary limits and ill consequences calls forth the purificatory zeal of the fundamentalist. If we wish to move past a response that offers us more liberalism and more zeal as a solution to the problems of liberalism, we need something that is both within and beyond liberal fundamentals: a liberalism that accepts truths beyond itself; that looks to multiple ontologies for political and ethical resources; and that accepts plural and multiple versions of virtue and progress negotiated between liberalism's fundamentals and varying local ideals and conditions.

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Notes

  1. Kordela (2007: 17) uses Lacan's term ‘real’ to point to the impossible but necessary gestures constitutive of the modern symbolic order — gestures that must be hidden as part of suturing the cracks or wounds in that order. Similarly, Edkins (1999: 113) uses the ‘real’ to indicate an ‘antagonism’ that ‘prevents closure of the social field, a totalization that is always already impossible’.

  2. As we were at the ABRI-ISA Conference, Rio de Janiero, Brazil, 22–24 July, 2009.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Beate Jahn, Rose Shinko, Ron Krebs, Patrick Jackson, Taylor Long, participants in the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium, especially Joan Tronto, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and Amanda Peterson and Emma Van Emmerik for editorial assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics, Ithaca College, 325 Muller Center, New York, 14850, Ithaca, USA

    Naeem Inayatullah

  2. Department of Political Science, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, Minnesota, 55105, St. Paul, USA

    David L Blaney

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  1. Naeem Inayatullah
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Inayatullah, N., Blaney, D. Liberal fundamentals: invisible, invasive, artful, and bloody hands. J Int Relat Dev 15, 290–315 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2011.33

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