The Liberal Man and the Masses (Pt. 1)

Summary: I address in this three-part essay a constitutive tension in liberal thought between liberalism’s normative individualism on the one hand, and the fact that individualism and liberalism largely helped the emergence of a mass society. In the latter, individuals’ agency and values that are so relevant from a normative point of view barely count as anything in the complex web of causal relations. This creates the risk of a dissonance between individuals’ publicly stated and self-conceived normative significance and the observed and felt disempowerment in multiple domains of social life, starting with the economy and politics. The first part argues that normative individualism, rather than tolerance, pluralism, or public reason, is the core ideal of liberalism. In the second part, I claim that this normative postulate grounds the distinction between the liberal man and the mass man that has often appeared in liberal writings. The third part identifies the liberal man’s predicament, as his self-governance abilities are undermined in mass societies. This creates the conditions that can turn the liberal man into the mass man. The inability of contemporary liberal democracies to respond to this predicament may account for the rise of populist politics.

Looking at the history of liberal thought, one can single out a wide range of candidates for the title of “foundational liberal ideal,” i.e., the ideal on which all other liberal ideals, values, principles, and institutions are derived from. Tolerance is one of the most significant candidates. The origins of liberalism are very often located in the Lockean religious tolerance that emerged in the 17th century. Although this historical reconstruction is disputed and ultimately doubtful,[1] it remains that the ideal of toleration is central in “live‑and‑let‑live” versions of liberalism according to which a liberal society is one where a peaceful modus vivendi allows everyone to live according to their own values and conceptions of the good life. A good contemporary example is Chandran Kukathas’s liberal archipelago where tolerance, alongside freedom of association and conscience, is elevated to a principle.[2]

Individual rights, sometimes interpreted as “natural” rights, also very often serve as the normative primitive of liberalism. Robert Nozick’s ...