15
Liberalism
On the surface, liberalism would seem to be a philosophy that embraces
materiality, but it does so to only a limited extent. Certainly, liberalism gives up on
religious virtue and asceticism in favor of the political modus vivendi that allows us to
focus our energies on consumption. But ultimately, I will argue, liberalism contains the
same Platonic prejudices against materiality that prevents it from developing a
satisfactory theory of justice along the lines of ethical consumption.
Liberalism shares with Plato the fundamental move of deriving principles for the
organization of politics from a rationalistic thought experiment that creates a city-in-
speech rather than reflecting on the material practices of existing peoples. The state of
nature stories of the liberal tradition are thus the old methodology of The Republic
wrapped up in the new scientific language of the Enlightenment. And yet, it is obvious
that the liberal tradition has created arguments about justice that appear to have served us
well to a certain point. The emergence of Utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, and other
liberal theories of justice has been correlated with the spread of justice through the last
200 years or so. Yet, this correlation, I will argue, is largely spurious. Liberalism has
promoted justice, but more through it’s less recognized producerist incarnation (one with
strong themes of justice as ethical consumption) than its more popular rationalist one.
Yet, as foreshadowed in the introduction, even producerist liberal justice does not work
so well anymore to ground claims for greater justice. Thus, my goal in this section is to
explain this failure and give a brief account of its source.
Liberal social contract theorists (especially Locke) share with Plato not only the
enterprise of founding a city in speech but also an underlying metaphor based on
craftsmanship. Plato begins many of his dialogues with the fundamental move: what if
moral knowledge is like a techne, the knowledge of a craftsman? In Gadamer’s summary
of this move, “Does man project himself on an eidos of himself in the same way that the
craftsman carries within himself an eidos of what he is trying to make and embody in his
material” (1994, 315). If this is the case, then moral knowledge can be an object of
scientific inquiry just like the knowledge of a doctor. But the metaphor goes much
deeper. If moral knowledge is a techne, modeled on the knowledge of craft, then the
Convention