The Liberal Man and the Masses (Pt. 3)

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.

I characterized in the previous part an opposition between two kinds of characters, the liberal man and the mass man. As I pointed out, these characters are ideal types that should not be granted too much normative significance. If the liberal society really was inhospitable to any type of character that doesn’t at least approximate the liberal man, then it is doubtful that it could pretend to the form of universality that it aims to manifest. Still, liberalism is more than a political doctrine with legal and constitutional implications. It also consists of an anthropology that promotes particular ways of life.[1]

Post-liberals like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule have been arguing that liberal institutions and their underlying anthropology are self-undermining.[2] The emphasis on autonomy erodes over the long run traditional institutions and values on which liberalism has slowly built over the previous centuries. The emergence of what John Gray labels the “hyper-liberalism” of the progressive left may be ...