The Diversity of Comprehensive Liberalisms

Comprehensive Liberalisms

The distinction between ‘comprehensive’ and ‘political’ liberalisms, explored in the previous chapter, has become central to contemporary political theory. My aim in this chapter is to examine various ‘comprehensive’ liberalisms, with particular care to identifying in what sense they are comprehensive. As I have argued elsewhere (Gaus, 2003: ch. 7), the distinction between political and comprehensive liberalisms is elusive. Rawls repeatedly describes as ‘comprehensive’ ‘philosophical’, ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ ‘doctrines’ (1996: xxv, 4, 36, 38, 160) or ‘beliefs’ (1996: 63). Indeed, so often does Rawls characterize comprehensiveness in terms of moral, religious and philosophical doctrines or beliefs that a reader may be tempted to conclude that a doctrine is comprehensive if and only if it is moral, religious or philosophical. But though it is tempting to understand ‘comprehensive conceptions’ in this way, it would be wrong. Rawls is clear that ‘the distinction between the political conception and other moral conceptions is a matter of scope; that is, the range of subjects to which a conception applies and the content a wider range requires’ (1996: 13). Comprehensive and general doctrines cover a wide range of topics, values and ideals applicable to various areas of life. Even given the terms of Rawls's own analyses, rather than conceiving of comprehensive liberalisms as all relying on a fully comprehensive doctrine, it is better to conceive of them in terms of a spectrum of theories, from those that rely on something like a fully comprehensive view to those that rely on, say, only a general theory of the right. In this chapter I shall focus on the following versions of comprehensive liberalism:

• liberalism as a secular philosophy;
• liberalism as a philosophy of the good life;
• liberalism as a political theory derived from a specific moral theory;
• liberalism as itself a distinctive theory of the right or justice.

Liberalism as a secular philosophy is a distinctly radical conception, which in some ways is the paradigmatic ‘fully comprehensive’ liberalism. On this view, human reason leads to convergence on a theory of human life in society, which includes a metaphysics, an epistemology, as well as theories of morality and politics. On the other hand, liberalism as a theory of right is much more cautious about the extent that human reason converges; its more modest versions shade off into Rawlsian political liberalism. Thus I shall argue that the ‘comprehensive’ liberalism of A Theory of Justice (1971) was a distinctly ‘partial’ comprehensive view, which was not as comprehensive as many other varieties of liberalism.

Liberalism as a Philosophical System

John W. Chapman (1965) argues that all political theories are inherently comprehensive as they combine an account of social reality, epistemology, psychology and ethics to provide political diagnoses and prescriptions. Liberalism certainly has been understood as a political theory in this sense, a truly comprehensive liberalism – an overall theory of [Page 101]inquiry, social life, as well as the good life and political justice. I have argued elsewhere (Gaus, 2000b) that liberal theory over the last hundred years has been characterized by recurring debates about the psychologies, value theories, epistemologies and theories of self and society, as well as principles of justice that must or may form part of a truly liberal comprehensive philosophy. I shall focus here on two core aspects of this debate about liberalism as a comprehensive philosophy: whether there is a distinctively liberal epistemology or social metaphysics.

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