Modus Vivendi Liberalism: Theory and Practice (review)

Political philosophy rests on a paradox: in seeking to ground political legitimacy in a coherent set of stable principles, it preempts the political contestation through which governing principles are precariously established. The moment political philosophy recognizes this paradox is the moment it gives birth to the liberal tradition, which has since become its predominant project. Despite their different political conclusions, both Locke and Hobbes postulate the impossibility of resolving moral conflict as the very principle justifying political order. Thus liberal doctrine emerges as the philosophical form of the political paradox.

Nevertheless, liberal theory continues to search for principles to govern political life under conditions of radical moral pluralism. An important recent venture in this search is modus vivendi liberalism (MVL), first proposed by John Gray in Two Faces of Liberalism (London: Polity Press, 2000), who claims that the liberal tradition is split between an aspiration to establish universally binding principles of toleration and a more modest project of securing peaceful coexistence in the absence of such principles. Gray's argument in favor of the latter has sparked controversy, but his thesis has gained adherents who take their own approaches to defending it. David McCabe's Modus Vivendi Liberalism: Theory and Practice is an instructive recent example of particular interest to rhetorical scholars, not because liberal doctrine can correctly specify the presumptive normative background for contemporary public discourse, but because it evinces the contentious rhetorical constitution of this background.

In systematically refuting the major efforts to ground liberalism in universal principles, McCabe comes admirably close to granting rhetoric a central role in liberal democracy; however, in claiming for MVL the status of a meta-ethics, he obscures and undermines the force of his own insights into the problem of political justification. In chapter 1, McCabe poses the problem confronting liberal theory, which, he explains, must defend a model of political association that maximizes individual autonomy while minimizing conflict in a way that can be justified to citizens themselves. McCabe shows that these requirements are internally linked: a polity committed to the freedom of its members cannot establish itself by violating this freedom. Thus liberalism imposes a "justificatory requirement," which entails powerful constraints on its doctrinal provisions. The implication, which McCabe does not draw, is that this doctrine is subsumed by the justificatory requirement, which already captures the main features of liberalism—the harm principle and the prohibition on state paternalism. From a rhetorical vantage, liberal doctrine is an account of justification that abjures reference to a universal moral authority—that is, a theory of persuasion. If justification involves more than the agreement of citizens but must satisfy any critic "whose doubt about liberal principles is . . . rooted in a quite different set of authoritative ideals," no theoretical defense of liberalism can meet this challenge without courting self-contradiction (7). McCabe endorses MVL as the sole remaining alternative.

In chapter 2, McCabe specifies the internal connection between value pluralism and the defining liberal claim that political arrangements must be assessed in terms of their implications for human well-being. The problem, he explains, is that there is no principled way of adjudicating among competing value frameworks, yet well-being presupposes embeddedness in them. Different frameworks prioritize different objectively desirable goods, but since these goods cannot be compared according to some neutral criterion, the frameworks they underpin are both divergent and rational. In McCabe's gloss, pluralism reflects the uncombinability of many human goods, the incommensurability of such goods, the noncomparability of value frameworks grounded in such goods, and the objective appropriateness of divergence among goods and frameworks.

The liberal commitment to promoting citizens' well-being is thus central to justifying the liberal state to critics situated within value frameworks that promote their well-being but reject pluralism. McCabe argues that most efforts to resolve this dilemma violate either liberal premises or the justificatory requirement. Typically, the violation consists of either introducing universal evaluative criteria that conflict with value pluralism, or impugning the rationality of those who reject...