4 - The Art of Liberal Politics

Summary

In Chapter 3 I argued that there is no principled reason to think that liberals cannot practice veil politics – the intentional use and manipulation of veils for political purposes. There I discussed the relationship between autonomy and an agent's own culture and history, and argued that the intimate connection between these factors opens the way for using veils for liberal purposes. This relationship also imposes special restrictions on how liberals can use veils. As laid out in section 3.4, relevant considerations include the notions of appropriate liberal content, translucency of veils, and some degree of consent (either actual or hypothetical) by the population to the veils.

The aim of this chapter is to add details to how a liberal version of veil politics can be implemented. That is, given the general theoretical understanding of the structure and function of veils (as presented in Chapters 1) and 2), and an account of the conditions under which a veil would be consistent with liberal principles (Chapter 3), we now turn to the practical problems of the art of politics – the issues that arise in using veil politics to create and sustain a liberal political structure.

A salient feature of liberal democracies is that they are citizen-based; government in such states is, as intoned by Lincoln, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”