Radical Liberalism: Charles W. Mills’s Challenge to Liberalism’s Haters

At this point, the actual moment of Occupy Wall Street seems an eon ago, and reading an article that uses Occupy for an opening hook produces a feeling almost of quaintness. Or wistfulness: “The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement provides an opportunity unprecedented in decades to build a broad democratic movement to challenge plutocracy, patriarchy, and white supremacy in the United States.” That was Charles W. Mills in 2012, in the essay I’ll be talking about today, “Occupy Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism (And Why They’re All Wrong).”[1]

The title may have been merely an opening gambit, however: the “occupation” metaphor was perhaps not the most apposite choice for describing what Mills wanted to do, and he quickly moves on from that figure to a more customary set of verbs—“I am going to argue for the heretical thesis that liberalism should not be contemptuously rejected by radicals but retrieved for a radical agenda,” or, later, “we need to try to justify a radical agenda with the normative resources of liberalism rather than writing off liberalism.” But in at least one sense, Mills really did mean that liberalism should be occupied by radicals: in order to prevent liberalism from being used by the wrong kinds of liberals, radicals needed to take up space within the concept, blocking by their presence any entry or re-entry of non-radicals.

Mills’s first reason for advocating for this “retrieval” or “occupation” has to do with the location he believes liberalism holds in the broader culture of the United States. “Liberalism has always been the dominant ideology in the United States,” he writes, and a little later, he advocates for “positioning [ourselves] in the ideological mainstream of the country and seeking its transformation.” I would like to return to this claim about liberalism’s dominance a little later post, but Mills also makes the even stronger argument that the left is wrong to find in this dominance a source of pessimism. “My aim is to challenge the radical shibboleth that radical ideas/concepts/principles/values are incompatible with liberalism,” he asserts.

It should be said that Mills is not trying to refute any of the critiques of liberalism lately made by people like Domenico Losurdo (though he does find C. B. Macpherson’s notion of liberalism as possessive individualism to be something of a fabrication), but rather that he feels that while historically correct, these critiques are often read as if they have proven that there is something intrinsically corrupt about liberalism that “rule[s] out the development of emancipatory, radical liberalisms?.”

But just what is radical liberalism? Surely (and Mills well knows this), many self-identified radicals would regard this phrase as a contradiction in terms—if not antipodal, radicalism and liberalism are in their eyes certainly inimical. Here is where Mills stakes his first substantial argumentative claim in the article. He defines “radicalism” by insisting that

the whole point of the “new social movements” of the 1960s onwards was that the traditional left-right political spectrum, predicated on varying positions on the question of public vs. private ownership, did not exhaust the topography of the political. Issues of gender and racial domination were to a significant extent “orthogonal” to this one-dimensional trope. So I will use “radicalism” broadly, though still in the zone of progressive politics, to refer generally to ideas/concepts/principles/values endorsing pro-egalitarian structural change to reduce or eliminate unjust hierarchies of domination.

“Radicalism” means something like “emancipatory,” then, and it is not such a great concession on the part of self-identified radicals to admit that there might be something like an “emancipatory radicalism.”[2] But Mills is also, almost in passing, making the case that gender and race are equally capable of serving as the basis for an emancipatory project, that class is not the only dimension along which emancipation can proceed.

What Mills’s case for the possibility of a radical liberalism devolves into, then, is not so much whether liberalism can have emancipatory aims—as he points out, “liberalism has certainly recognized some kinds of oppression: the absolutism it opposed in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the Nazism and Stalinism it opposed in the twentieth century,” and “Such values as ‘freedom,’ ‘equality’ (moral egalitarianism), and ‘fraternity/sorority’ classically emblematic of the liberal tradition have not usually been seen as problematic by radicals, and have indeed been emblazoned on radical banners.” It is instead whether or not liberalism’s emancipatory aims can be genuinely universal, or if its history of advancing the freedom of some while drawing a line of exclusion to limit or deny the freedom of others is “the result of an immanent conceptual logic.”

Mills’s arguments against what he calls the “internalist” critique of liberalism are mostly deflationary retorts rather than positive affirmations; they are variations on “where’s the beef?” in the radical condemnation of liberalism’s supposedly fatal flaws. Again, Mills does not argue that liberalism has, on balance, pursued genuinely universal applications of the rights and freedoms it has fought for; he is not defending actually existing liberalism or the liberalism that has actually existed. But this means that the arguments he engages are never particularly strong; not exactly straw men, they are nonetheless hyperbolized and tendentious. The position he stakes out is the relatively safe one that liberalism’s most fanatical critics have no way to prove conclusively that liberalism logically can’t overcome its history.

One of his better arguments, in my opinion, emphasizes how liberalism itself has changed—or rather, since he prefers to think of multiple liberalisms existing simultaneously in different sociopolitical niches, how a new liberalism has emerged. “Marxism’s original critique of liberalism,” he writes, is not fully applicable to the liberalism that exists today: “Lockean rights-of-non-interference centered on private property, ‘negative’ rights, are indeed deficient as an exclusivist characterization of people’s normative entitlements, but such a minimalist view has been contested by social democrats (some self-identifying as liberals) for more than a century.”

But his best argument—and as Liam Kofi Bright noted, one of his most significant interventions in political philosophy—is the rejection of an intrinsic bond between liberalism and idealism/naivete. Crucial here is Mills’s rejection of “the hegemony of Rawlsian ‘ideal theory,’” but also, and even more, the tendency of liberalism’s critics to mistake Rawlsian thought experiments with attempts to describe how liberal societies could work. Mills replies that Rawls was not foolish enough to believe that the figures in his “intellectual devices” were “real human beings,” but on the other hand Rawls was just foolish enough—Mills contends—to think of those “real human beings” as able to simply step out of “the legacy of such practices [racism, gender oppression] as manifest in illicitly accumulated wealth and opportunities.” Ideal theory—at least of the Rawlsian variety—is not so naïve as to deny the existence of injustice, but it is ingenuous enough not to know very much about it and timid enough not to try to find out.

As [Ann] Cudd points out, A Theory of Justice ‘leaves injustice virtually untheorized,’ operating on the assumption ‘that injustice is merely the negation of justice.’ But radically unjust societies—those characterized by major rather than minor deviations from ideality—will be different from just societies not merely morally but metaphysically.

For Mills, this is not a particularly obscure insight, but it requires paying far less attention to the mainstream of liberal thought and attending to the contributions of marginal voices of liberalism—especially African American and feminist liberals.

In future posts, I hope to dig in to the specific insights Mills has regarding the intersections of class on the one hand and race and gender on the other. Obviously, at a time when many radicals and progressives are mounting fervid critiques of anything but a class-first politics, these insights have great value and will, I hope, have equally great interest to readers.