Duncan Ivison

What can we learn from the new scholarship on the history of liberalism? Does it help re-cast current debates within liberalism and with its rivals? Does it deepen our understanding of its origins in productive ways, or undermine our confidence in its capacity to orient us for the future? It doesn’t have to do any of this - good history is valuable just in being good history. But I think it is worth posing the question. I won’t be able to provide a complete answer here. But what I hope to do is provide an overview of some of the different historical approaches to liberalism as a means of exploring how the questions they raise might shape our thinking about liberalism’s future.

This Handbook is an attempt to provide a state-of-the-art discussion of liberalism today, when so many anxieties and challenges are being expressed about its future (and its past). Some chapters tackle broad, meta-level questions about the coherence and justificatory limits and possibilities of liberalism; others tackle conceptual issues; still others specific institutional, cultural, historical, and political questions. What the book makes clear is not only the abundance of challenges facing liberalism, but also the diversity and shape-shifting nature of liberalism itself - historically, conceptually, and normatively. In this chapter I provide a taxonomy of different ideal types of liberalism that I think characterize the field today, and which are discussed at various points in the book. I also identify three cross-cutting themes that emerge across the chapters: the complacency of liberalism, the self-undermining of liberalism, and the insufficiency of liberalism. For some, these are fatal flaws, for others, a call for renewal. What isn’t in doubt, as will hopefully become clear, is the sense of liberalism remaining a site of productive debate and concern for contemporary politics.

Trust is a crucial condition for the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic institutions in conditions of deep diversity and enduring injustices. Liberal democratic societies require forms of engagement and deliberation that require trustful relations between citizens: trust is a necessary condition for securing and sustaining just institutions and practices. Establishing trust is hard when there is a lingering suspicion that the institutions citizens are subject to are illegitimate or undermine their ability to participate and deliberate on equal terms. The promise of participation, the appeal to deliberation and inclusion, in other words, is experienced as a form of bad faith. In this paper, I offer four conditions required for democratic trust and discuss them in relation to a series of examples of both democratic mistrust and attempts at rebuilding trust.

From Andrew Vincent (ed.) Political Theory: Tradition and Diversity, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 154–71

This chapter argues that the duty to aid the deprived is not merely a charitable one, dependent on the discretion, or the arbitrary will, of the giver. The chapter examines whether deprivation is better alleviated or remedied through the duties of corrective justice and also argues that the perspective of corrective justice is important, but not sufficient when it comes to dealing with deprivation. It argues that non-domination cannot serve as a first-order principle of justice. It is too minimalistic, since it would not require duties of justice where deprivation exists. The chapter further analyzes two different strategies of justification that attempt to circumvent the use of the concept of incomplete positive duties and the problems related to it. It outlines an institutional approach that is not based on the prior presence of power, but on the creation of institutions to fulfill preexisting duties.