Journal of Political Ideologies

ISSN: 1356-9317 (Print) 1469-9613 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjpi20

Editorial: Liberalism in the limelight

Michael Freeden
To cite this article: Michael Freeden (2010) Editorial: Liberalism in the limelight, Journal of
Political Ideologies, 15:1, 1-9, DOI: 10.1080/13569310903512134
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569310903512134

Published online: 05 Feb 2010.

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Date: 10 November 2016, At: 06:51

Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2010),

15(1), 19

Editorial: Liberalism in the limelight

A row broke out in the UK in October 2009 over the appearance of the leader of
the British National Party on the BBCs Question Time, a prestigious televised
political programme, located weekly in different parts of the country, in which
representatives of the major political groupings and occasional non-partyaffiliated individuals constitute a panel and answer questions from a studio
audience. Despite public demonstrations around the country against the extending
of an invitation by the BBC to an extreme right-wing party, its leader, Nick Griffin,
became almost the sole focus of attention of both the audience and the other
panellists in what is normally a wide-ranging and diverse programme. Following
the broadcast, the deputy director general of the BBC insisted that We remain
firmly of the view that it was appropriate to invite Nick Griffin on to the Question
Time panel this evening in the context of the BBC meeting its obligation of due
impartiality,1 given the level of support his party achieved in the last elections to
the European Parliament.
The debate surrounding that event is far more interesting and demanding than
the telecast itself, as it offers a striking instance of the complexities of ideological
structure in general and liberalism in particular on a number of different
dimensions. The contending decontestations of democracy, the relative standing
of reason versus emotion, the conceptual morphology of political concepts and the
proportional weighting of ostensibly ineliminable core liberal values are all part of
that contentious ideational melee. They operate on a dimension parallel to the
substantive ethical challenge of how societies and states should cope with hate
speech and racism, but methodologically and contextually they cannot be
separated from it.
The two most frequently used contentions in favour of allowing hate speech are
the argument from democracy and the argument from rationality. The argument
from democracy states that a duly elected politician representing a large number of
people needs to be accorded the usual privileges of the democratic system. In this
case the person in question headed a political party that obtained close to a million
votes. Ironically those votes were cast for the European Parliament, an institution
that for the BNP represents an assault on the particular notions of sovereignty and
independence they espouse, while to date the BNP has had no parliamentary
representation in the UK Houses of Parliament. The argument from rationality
states that extreme, ethically unacceptable or potentially dangerous views need to
be exposed and criticized in forums of open and measured debate so that they can
be seen for what they are and dismissed.
ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/10/0100019 q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569310903512134

michael freeden
The argument from democracy
Political concepts such as democracy are particularly complex ones. They are in one
sense super-concepts, not in terms of their content or significance but in terms of
their intricate internal structure, a structure that includes many components that also
exist as distinct concepts on their own. Democracy embraces a concept of liberty as
self-determination, a concept of equality as one person one vote, a concept of
participation (it requires some civil and political activity) and a concept of
community (it is a procedure or value that attaches to a group). Any specific use
of democracy will have to single out the particular ways in which these components
are decontested, as well as recognizing the shifting relative weight that each
component may be made to have vis-a`-vis the others. The above argument from
democracy not only privileges the voting process above other democratic
components, but detaches the concept of democracy from the elaborate pattern of
features contained by its optimal structure. It decontests participation merely as
voting, and it decontests liberty as unconstrained speech-acts for elected
representatives, presumably as long as they are not patently criminal. Such
decontestation is of course not illegitimate, but it is frequently done out of ignorance
of the other features of democracy. Here the act of voting trumps any consideration
of its motivation, or the specific circumstances under which it takes places. The act
is sanctified, as is the position of representative, whose persona is eclipsed in favour
of the procedural role of political spokesperson of a given electorate.
Other decontestations of democracy, therefore, need to be considered before we
can pontificate on whether there is a correct defence of Mr Griffins very public
performance. One counter-argument would be that in the societies where hate
speech is regarded as problematic (and not all societies do regard it as such)
namely what we may broadly term liberal democraciesvoting is a necessary but
not a sufficient feature of democracy. The equality component of democracy may
also include some form of equal respect and equal rights for all the members of
that society, and for all participants in the democratic process. In the case under
discussion even the equality component itself of democracy is contested, in the
sense that one person one vote does not do the equality work on its own. It is also
seen to clash with the participatory component of democracy, as the BNP
literatureand particularly their unguarded discourseappears ultimately to
limit participation to British white Christians. And it may clash with competing
understandings of what a democratic community comprises, as encapsulated in the
famous American phrase we, the people.
A second counter-argument, better-known in political theory debate, concerns
the relationship between democracy and liberalism. Over half a century ago, Jacob
Talmon wrote passionately about totalitarian democracy,2 in effect a type of
usurped populism in which states claim to act in the name of a unified public view
of the common good, while imposing it on the people in whose name they
pronounce it. Despite the serendipitous meeting of liberalism and democracy in
the mid-nineteenth century, illiberal democracy remains a logical sub-set, when
one person one vote is declared to be sufficient as well as necessary (it need not
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editorial: liberalism in the limelight

even be the outcome of vote-rigging, forcing or manipulation). And it is also a fact
that all the democracies on the planet endorse some illiberal practices. Beyond that
is the perennial issue of whether a democratic state can suicidally tolerate political
parties and groupings whose aim is to end the democratic process in some
significant way.
There is also a third counter-argument, rarely heard. Although free speech
should not be subdued, not all forms of speech, or its written counterpart, should
be accorded equal weight. A distinction needs to be made between voice and
recognition: though voice should not be silenced, it need not be granted the status
conferred on it by particularly salient forms of public acknowledgement. Political
thinking is fundamentally engaged in the distribution of significance or the ranking
of social aims and demands. Such ranking is anyhow inevitable in terms of the
value system to which a society subscribes, and the duty imposed by a democracy
not to block off various voices can be discharged without bestowing on them
identical qualitative acclaim.
The argument from rationality
The argument from rationality derives from the highest possible view of political
life as the good life, in this case one permeated by optimal standards of public
discourse. It is one to which we all might aspire, following as it does ideal-type
expectations of an informed and reflective electorate, much as deliberative
democracy and public reason models do. But it bears only partial relation to the
nature of political thinking in a society. In fact, it not only is an idealized view of
political debate but an impoverished and misinformed one as well. The political
languages of electorates, as of any other groups, are always a combination of
rational and non-rational components. Even the Millite liberal vision of public
debate was sensitized to its different layers and levels. While it sought reflective and
considered argument modelled on Mill himself, it was aware of the power of less
reasonable public opiniondismissed as mediocre at bestand of the restricted
location of original thinking among intellectual elites. It does not, therefore, serve
the purpose of those who contend that free speech ought to be unlimited in all
contexts to cite Mill on this issue, when all he could offer in the short and medium
term were islands of antagonism to counter the flow of popular discourse.
So one counter-argument here is that democracies have so far been unable to
provide the level of educationfor Mill such an important aimthat is required
for the careful production and airing of arguments surrounding the BNP problem.
Indeed, while this may seem to be an elitist argument, it is precisely the opposite:
Regrettably, to this very day only small minorities are given the opportunity to
train themselves in the skills needed to focus sharply on the issues at hand.
Perhapsit may be retortedsuch sharp focus is unnecessary and democratic
societies contain sufficient common sense to separate the chaff from the wheat.
But that runs against another counter-argument, relating to the reception of
political ideas and language. Even were rational debate to be produced effectively,
there is no guarantee that its consumption will be filtered through rational
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michael freeden
receptors. The exposure of an ideological position as irrational, or unreasonable,
offers no certainty that it will not take root. Arguments are not eliminated merely
because they are stupid. That is politics as seen once again through the lenses of
intellectual elites who claim, usually incorrectly, that they are above the fray.
A third counter-argument is that the public exposure of hate speech is conducted
not only to show that it is wrong, butthat was certainly one outcome of the Nick
Griffin debatethat it is ridiculous, or that its spokespeople are. Whether or not
we approve of such tactics, they are themselves clearly located on the emotional,
not the rational, level and thus fail in their self-declared aim to proffer rational
scrutiny.
There is also a fourth counter-argument, relating to the area where liberal thinking
and academic thinking coalesce. Much of the first kind of thinking, and much of the
second, is oblivious or even antagonistic to the expression of passion and emotion,
and suspicious of the ineliminable rhetorical devices through which political
language is conveyed. Despite a debate that has been going on for centuries about the
intricate relationship between reason, passion and rhetoric, the thin defence of
reason as the truth that will out has been very much on the agenda of free speech
absolutists and certain kinds of political philosophers over the past generation. It also
falls foul of recent psychoanalytical investigations of political discourse that
establish quite persuasively the biased selectivity people pursue in favour of their
existing beliefs.3 The diverse dimensions of actual political language and thinking
need to be factored far more seriously into the accounts and considerations of
political theorists and commentators. Those analysts are all too often out of touch
with insights that can finesse some standard abstract liberal positions.
The fifth counter-argument concerns the recognition of a significant
gap between the observer and the participant. The argument from rational debate
relies on belittling the difference between the disinterested onlooker and the
groups targeted by hate speech. While the rest of uswhoever that may bemay
be engaged in the luxurious intellectual exercise of allowing hate speech so that it
may be rationally defeated and exposed as both vicious and idiotic, that exercise is
at the expense and on the backs of certain groups of citizens and residents who are
the victims of such hate speech. They experience immediate harm in the form of
acute fear, offence and upset, to which many of the liberal-rationalists are not
exposed. The consequences of rational discourse are never neutral, even when
benign. Speech may shift between persuasion and menace, but it has effects. How
much harm, offence and anger are permissible before they reach an intolerable
critical mass? How long are targeted groups expected to endure harm until the
rationalists truth will prevail: six months? A year? A decade? The temporal
duration of effective rational persuasioneven were it conclusively possibleis
not brought into play by free-speech advocates. Quite a few political philosophers
assume the temporal instantaneousness of the impact of rational argument, much
as a mathematical proof is. But the percolation of any argument of that nature
happens in real time, if it successfully happens at all.
A sixth counter-argument relates to the BBCs self-defence in the name of
impartiality, a defence that demonstrates the impossibility of establishing what
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editorial: liberalism in the limelight

impartiality is. Is it counting a party with less than a million votes in an election,
seen in the UK as a minor one, as equal to that of a party with ten times that amount
in a national general election? Was the choice of the five panellists, four of whom
were known to be hostile to the fifth, impartial? Is the spread of questions from
the audience an impartial one? Can the selection of ideological belief systems be
impartial and can the choice of their representatives be impartial? We are
confronted with competing criteria of impartiality; the ranking of which criteria
should trump the others cannot itself be impartial, even if hypothetical substantive
impartiality on any of those criteria could be attained. And rational debate requires
that the BNP arguments be considered coolly and dispassionately, assessing their
possible pros as well as their well-known cons. This would of course be too
distasteful for most members of a reasonable public, as BNP discourse already
undermines the equal rationality attributes that rational societies believe their
members to possess. It would also impose a veil of ignorance condition under
which prior to such airing there would be no prejudicial interpretations of the BNP
ideology as are already in place.
The liberal balancing-act
Underlying the two families of argument and counter-argument, from democracy
and from rationality, is an internally riven liberal idiom. It is initially embodied in
two claims. The first claim is that liberalism necessitates free speech, and a liberal
system is duty bound to allow it under all circumstances. That is often translated
into the professional jargon of contemporary liberal philosophy, as distinct from
liberal ideology. In that mode it states an ostensibly universal liberal principle:
The liberal state is neutral about the content of public, let alone private, discourse.
The second claim, related to the first, is that liberalism is centrally about toleration
and liberals must be prepared to allow the expression of distasteful arguments.
Indeed, a recent book on liberalism has expressed that as follows: people have to
be free to hate, or they are not free at all. It is uncomfortable to hear people
spouting opinions we find reprehensible. But liberal societies are not designed to
maximize comfort.4 Alongside those two positions is a third, sometimes more
implicit than explicit: In liberal societies, minorities are accorded the full means
of expression and self-defence. Hence they do not require additional protection,
which merely smacks of a patronizing paternalism.
These claims can attract a considerable number of counter-arguments. The first
is obvious and historically well-rehearsed: Free speech has always had some limits
in liberal practicesignified by the famous distinction between liberty and
licenceand is regulated by shifting boundaries of criminality as well as morality.
The second goes to the heart of the morphological approach to liberalism, a
morphology that indeed permits all these claims and counter-claims to be trotted
out in defence of one reading of liberalism or another: liberalism (like
democracy) does not denote a single or monolithic idea but is a package of goods
(concepts and values) that intersect loosely with one another within a constraining
framework of a preferred and pre-eminent conceptual core. Specifically, with
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michael freeden
regard to the case in hand, one of liberalisms core components is individuality, a
concept frequently decontested as personal flourishing and its enablement.
If it wishes to maintain its range and complexity, liberalismlike any ideology
is an ideational structure that requires the optimizing, not maximizing, of its
components, because its core concepts may ultimately end up in a zero-sum
relationship. If any single liberal goodliberty, individuality, progress, restricted
power, or rationality, to mention some core liberal conceptsbegins seriously to
encroach on the others it needs to be curtailed from that point on. Individuality and
liberty may clash when certain conceptions of each concept are brought into play;
certainly some kinds of free speech interfere with individual flourishing, just as
some kinds of cultural individuality may express themselves by limiting free
speechwe might think here of the phenomenon known as political correctness.
If free speech is permitted to trump any other liberal value with which it might
conflict, it will expand to take up too much liberal space, causing the contraction of
the other values.
The third argument, evoking the harm principle, is well-known and has been
employed in relation to hate-speech. The harm principle has been central to liberal
discourse, constituting as it does a constraint on permissible actions if they hurt
others. It contains, however, a number of dimensions. First, continuing the previous
counter-argument, if individuality-cum-individual flourishing is a core liberal
concept, it must be protected inasmuch as it is in the power of societies to safeguard
it. Hate speech is harmful to liberal principles, because it undermines rationality as
well as individuality. So liberalism itself as an ideological system is damaged,
something about which liberals may be concerned. Second, hate speech is harmful,
contrary to the folk adage Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will
never hurt me. Individuals who subscribe to that adage, however, are likely to be
emotionally deficient or inhibited. In the nineteenth-century liberal language of
Mill, the harm principle related mainly to physical harm, or to the intellectual and
moral mediocrity of public opinion that needed to be offset. But Mill also referred
to harmful conduct as that deemed to produce evil to someone else.5 Since then,
insights from psychology and psychoanalysis have become common, and we now
recognize that emotional and psychological harm can be just as damaging and
dehumanizing, and that the targets of such harm also require protection. It is of
course also the case that some degree of irritation and offence may be suffered
without serious ill consequence. But that rule is subject both to psychological and to
cultural appraisal. As with the distinction between thick and thin, we are not faced
with a border but an area. Borderline cases do complicate the possibility of such
assessment but boundaries are fluid and change over time and space, and there are
of course areas sufficiently distant from the border to make such appraisal easier.
As for the freedom of minorities to express and protect themselves through the
democratic process, that is a repetition of the liberal feminist position that attracted
such criticisms from socialist and radical feminists a generation ago. This recognition
that formal barriers to expression and participation have been lifted overlooks the
serious additional barriers that still persist in impeding the freedom of speech and
action of many minorities. There is a significant sense in which such freedoms are not
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editorial: liberalism in the limelight

culturally, socially or economically available. Many developed societies with
substantial minority populations have shifted from being minority-hostile to
minority-blind and then to minority-insensitive. But even insensitivity is a weak form
of harm.
What then of liberalism itself? Is it in fact a generously tolerant ideology,
eschewing any preference for the expression and implementation of values?
Well, up to a point. In Louis Hartzs famous The Liberal Tradition in America we
find this seemingly surprising sentence: Surely, then, it is a remarkable force:
this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life.6 In his equally celebrated
The History of European Liberalism, de Ruggiero writes: We are to-day so much
accustomed to the idea of the Liberal State that we do not notice its paradoxical
character. . . . The State, the organ of coercion par excellence, has become the
highest expression of liberty.7 Dogma and coercion: is that the same liberalism
that has produced the enticing cocktail of voluntarism, choice, agency, selfdevelopment, free speech and open-mindedness? Indeed it is, nor does that
condemn it as illiberal: no liberalism is immune to elements of coercion and
dogma; otherwise it would cease to be a robust political creed. Like any political
theory or ideology, liberalism possesses red lines it will not cross and nonnegotiable principles over which it will not bargain: human rights, the primacy of
liberty, the sanctity of constitutional arrangements and the prevention of harm.
The boundaries of all of those are vague and one of the features that make
liberalism what it is is the very acknowledgement of that vagueness and the
willingness, not to dispense with red lines, but to reposition them occasionally.
If that seems a trivial distinction, it is not. Liberalism is replete with such fine
points that elude many other ideologies. Students of ideology should not
therefore be surprised that liberalism, like any ideology, has its substantive no-go
areas. It displays, to paraphrase Rousseau (hardly a liberal himself), what in
effect is a second-order intolerance about first-order intolerance, though one
debate within liberalism concerns the moment when such a second-order reaction
itself acquires a first-order status. The question always is, as understandings of
the composition of the complex liberal package change, which feature do liberals
stamp with the imprimatur of non-negotiability? That is far from an open-andshut case.
There is also another kind of argument offered in support of voicing hate
speech which takes us back to the distinction between voice and recognition,
now reformulated as voice and toleration. It is an argument from pragmatism
that contends that as long as hate speech is marginal in a liberal society, it can
be tolerated in the sense of being ignored rather than enabled. That pragmatic
argument apparently aligns itself against an ideological point of view, yet it too
is thoroughly ideological. For dignifying an unacceptable perspective by
offering it major political space and positioning it among central
representatives of established ideologies in a programme such as Question
Time is a very active form of toleration. Although it does not signify the
substantive endorsement of voice, it is a significant move in recognizing it
structurally.
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michael freeden
Additional ideological aspects
There are a couple of things we can learn from this case more generally as students
of ideology. First is the problem of the different levels on which an ideology is
found to be either attractive or repulsive. A party political programme is not one
that constitutes the main draw of an ideology. Few voters, even educated ones,
examine the small print of a manifesto, or follow the details of speeches. What they
absorb is a mood, a framework, or the issue that speaks to their own hearts most
powerfully. This is not quite the distinction between reason and emotion referred
to above; rather, it is one between a micro and a macro appeal. The micro appeals
of the BNP are various, ranging between racism directed against non-English
groups, strong forms of English or British independence (particularly from
continental European influence), homophobia, anti-Semitism or concern over
unemployment. The idea of an exclusive national identity may hold all of those
loosely together, but taken on their own the fragmented parts could easily be
found in other ideological families. Certainly homophobia is endemic in some
religious positions, anti-Europeanism and discourses of national sovereigntycum-superiority are widespread in more moderate ideologies, and concerns about
rampant immigration have become part of a national rhetoric. What makes the
BNP beliefs so salient, whether positively or negatively, is the sheer rawness of the
combination of their discrete features, unassuaged by their proximity to other
components that may be found in more wide-ranging ideological morphologies.
Second, we have the BBC programme as political spectacle. That too has
multiple elements. The build-up to the programme was considerable in view of its
controversiality and it catapulted the BNP into the public eye in two ways: both as
a party whose message was in some way of central concern to the British public
and as a party that had now attained acclaim as a new member of the high politics
family of organizations. Prior to the broadcast, small demonstrations held outside
BBC regional offices were monitored and photographed by police, some of them
holding assault weapons. The visualand effectiveimpression was that the
authorities put those demonstrations on a par with any others and regarded them,
not their object, as potentially subversive. The televised programme put Griffin on
a physically elevated podium in which he sat at the same level as the other four
panellists, locking him into the company of some seasoned politicians as well as a
well-known cultural critic. Griffins actual behaviour sent out a series of mixed
and confusing messages. Even when the public was laughing at him, he clapped
and attempted to joke, in an effort to defuse criticism, to alleviate the threat
embodied in his views or to demonstrate his apparent common touch.
In ideological terms this was a switch of emphasis from the message to the
messenger: fake conviviality is itself an endeavour to substitute emotional appeal
when intellectual persuasiveness is weak. Finally, not only was an extreme
right-wing ideology under examination but so was liberalism itself, and its
capacity to respond effectively when its values were being challenged.
All that is part and parcel of the paradox of liberalism. It is both a remarkably
robust ideology and an unusually vulnerable one. Its robustness is partly structural;
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editorial: liberalism in the limelight

its complexity is such that damage to one of its components may not be
catastrophic, as it has sufficient additional systemic capacity to survive the odd
explosion or implosion. It is also robust in that its appeal is couched in terms that,
on reflection, are often attractive. But the support of its own principles is spread
unevenly across the range of concepts that constitute it. It is at its best when
aroused emotionally in its own defence, such as when a violation of human rights
affronts common decency. It is, often paradoxically, at its weakest when it resorts
to the rational underpinning of its values, because its subscription to the reflective
and fair maxim of audi alteram partem disables it from the kind of decisions that
political systems need to deliver when the other side is not a member of the liberal
family. The Nick Griffins of the world are out to destroy liberalism; they certainly
are sent to test it and they sometimes gnaw at its edges; but they may also goad
liberals into improving the quality and sophistication of their defences.
MICHAEL FREEDEN

Notes and References

1. Available at http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?storycode 44510, accessed 1 November 2009.
2. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952).
3. See M. Engelken-Jorge, The anti-immigrant discourse in Tenerife: assessing the Lacanian theory of
ideology in this issue.
4. R. Reeves and P. Collins, The Liberal Republic (London: Demos, 2009), pp. 23 24. See also M. Freeden,
Liberalism in the twilight zone, Public Policy Research, 16(2) (2009), pp. 110113.
5. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London: J.M. Dent, 1910), pp. 7273.
6. L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p. 9.
7. G. de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 353.