Forcing the Free to Be Correctly Free

Extract

Liberalism can be understood in considerable part as a reaction against the religious wars of Europe from the end of the Middle Ages through the early modern period. Unfortunately, liberalism itself was so profoundly shaped by the conditions of its birth that it became a perpetuator of the same narrow fanaticism that fueled the fires of the Spanish Inquisition and burned Servetus in Calvin's Geneva. Eamonn Callan's article, “Political Liberalism and Political Education,” is a forceful reminder that liberalism is still a carrier of the same virus of fanaticism that insisted on celebrating masses of Reason in Notre Dame de Paris while setting up guillotines to behead the members of religious orders who refused to disband. That is the same virus of fanaticism that manifested itself in the claim to grasp scientifically the laws of history, a claim that led to the liberation of man via Gulag. Oh, I know, Gulag and the guillotine are out of fashion with rationalistic liberators at the moment. Nevertheless, it is the coercive power of the modern sovereign state produced by the same rationalism that Callan wants to use to force us all to be free.

From the perspective of liberalism as the religion of immanent divinity, the Reason of rationalism, Callan sees that John Rawls, in Political Liberalism, is a backslider, objectively a traitor to liberalism, even if not subjectively so. In Political Liberalism Rawls tried to move further away from his roots in rationalistic dogmatism and further toward his roots in pragmatism. Callan shows there is no tenable halfway house of the kind Rawls imagines.