Chapter 2: Autonomy theory

So what is liberalism? A key principle or aim of liberalism is individual autonomy. According to Professor John Kekes,

the true core of liberalism, the inner citadel for whose protection all the liberal battles are waged [is] autonomy … Autonomy is what the basic political principles of liberalism are intended to foster and protect. [1]

Professor Joseph Raz explains that,

One common strand in liberal thought regards the promotion and protection of personal autonomy as the core of the liberal concern. [2]

Similarly, Professor Bruce Ackerman writes of liberalism that,

The core of this tradition is an insistence that the forms of social life be rooted in the self-conscious value affirmations of autonomous individuals. [3]

And Professor Kok-Chor Tan defines liberalism as,

an individualistic political morality...concerned primarily with protecting and promoting the autonomy of individuals. [4]

But this then raises another question. What do liberals understand by the idea of individual autonomy?

According to liberal autonomy theory, a fully human life is one that is self-determined. What matters therefore is that individuals have a life and a self which are variously described as self-created, self-defined, self-authored, self-chosen or self-directed.

Here, for instance, is how Professor Raz defines liberal autonomy:

A person is autonomous if he can become the author of his own life.[5]

From a chapter description of the same work we get the following definition:

Autonomy is an ideal of self-creation, or self-authorship [6]

Professor Alan Ryan defines liberal autonomy in a similar way,

The essence [of liberalism] is that individuals are self-creating... [7]

As a final example, Professor Wayne Sumner connects the "traditional liberal value of autonomy" to the,

liberal conception of the person as self-determining and self-making [8]

Let’s say that you are a liberal who believes in this. What then becomes your political aim?

Your aim will be to remove impediments to individual autonomy. Whatever defines us in important ways that we do not choose for ourselves will be thought of negatively as something limiting and oppressive that we must be liberated from.

Liberals therefore have a strong motivation to launch campaigns to “reform” society. Over time the influence of liberalism on Western societies has been radical, arguably more radical than anything that has gone before.

This transforming effect on society has been presented to the general public by liberals in the most positive terms, as a progress toward freedom, equality and justice. When put this way, liberalism can seem difficult to challenge, even by those who sense that something is wrong with the direction of modern Western societies.

But if we go back to liberal autonomy theory, and look in detail at what it logically requires, then a more obviously negative picture emerges, one that is very much open to criticism.

What, after all, are the impediments to autonomy which liberalism seeks to abolish? They are those aspects of our own self and existence which we do not get to self-determine. And there is a lot that we don’t get to self-determine, including what we inherit as part of a tradition and what is given to us as part of an inborn human nature.

What is most significant to us as individuals has often survived over time as aspects of a tradition or of human nature. Therefore, liberalism has often found itself having to make what matters most not matter.

In this way liberalism has diminished our lives rather than liberated them.

But what exactly does liberalism not allow to matter? This is what now needs to be looked at more closely.


Next chapter: Sex distinctions


[1] John Kekes, Against Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 14-15.

[2] Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 203, quoted in Kekes, 217.

[3] Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 196, quoted in Kekes, 217.

[4] Kok-Chor Tan, Toleration, Diversity, and Global Justice (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p.2 (location 62)

[5] Raz, 204.

[6] Oxford Scholarship Online, The Morality of Freedom, 14 Autonomy and Pluralism, Abstract, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/philosophy/9780198248071/acprof-9780198248071-chapter-14.html (August 2010)

[7] Alan Ryan, “Liberalism” in Goodin and Pettit, A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell), quoted in Kekes, 217.

[8] Wayne Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 218-219, quoted in Kok-Chor Tan, Toleration, Diversity, and Global Justice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 49.

Chapter 1: What is shaping the West?

What has brought us to the way we are now? What can explain the rapid changes in Western societies?

To answer these questions you need to know the world view of the Western political class. It is the belief system shared by the Western political class which determines what is thought to be moral and legitimate, which then, over time, drives society in a particular direction.

But what orthodox view is shared by nearly all members of this class?


Liberalism as orthodoxy

The Western political class shares a commitment to a liberal political philosophy. There are very few politicians, academics, writers or intellectuals whose beliefs are not based on an underlying liberalism.

That’s why an American professor of politics, Steven Kautz, is able to state that,

The political philosophy of liberalism ... is in some sense our political philosophy: we are somehow all liberals. [1]

The political writer James Kalb observes that,

Liberalism so surrounds us that it is hard to imagine an alternative. Even those who see difficulties with it almost never reject it fundamentally, but attempt to reinvent it in some way or another. [2]

Professor Appiah of Princeton University describes liberalism as encompassing,

... nearly all members of nearly all of the mainstream political parties in Europe and North America. [3]

Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, tells us that,

Contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question. [4]

Another prominent political philosopher, Professor John Gray, believes that,

We are all liberals nowadays ... It sometimes seems as if the spectrum of ideas in political life ranges from the sovereign consumer of the neo-liberal right to the sovereign chooser of the egalitarian left. [5]

According to Dr Phillip Cole, a senior lecturer in politics,

normative political philosophy at present simply is predominantly liberal political philosophy [6]

And Professor John Schwarzmantel, who teaches politics at the University of Leeds, holds that,

Contemporary liberal-democracy is an ideological society, where a particular version of liberalism prevails ... [which] has been able to ... capture if not public enthusiasm then at least acceptance as ‘the only game in town’. This then gives rise to a very impoverished spectrum of ideological and political debate... [7]

Next chapter: Autonomy theory


[1] Steven Kautz, Liberalism & Community (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 28.

[2] James Kalb, The Tyranny of Liberalism (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), x.

[3] Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xi.

[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

[5] John Gray, “What liberalism cannot do,” New Statesman, 20 September 1996, 18.

[6] Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000), xi.

[7] John Schwarzmantel, “Hegemony and Contestation in Post-ideological Society,” Paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Uppsala, 13-17 April 2004.