Like tales about vampires who keep coming back, claims that liberalism destroys society never seem to die. From John Ruskin and Karl Marx to Robert Bellah and Phillip Blond, the critics of Mill-style liberalism have accused it of atomizing society. They consistently misunderstand how political individualism and free markets relate to social cohesion.

The distinctive institutions of a liberal order are the technological project (transforming nature to serve human needs and interests), a more or less free- market economy, limitation of government to protect individual rights, the rule of law, and an emphasis on personal autonomy. This culture is the greatest force in the modern world; it has vastly improved the material conditions of life and institutionalized individual freedom.

Curiously, this culture is hardly understood even by those surrounded by it. There are two reasons for that. First, defenders of the liberal order have often unwittingly adopted the framework of their enemies, who in turn have defined liberalism by the silliest things that Jeremy Bentham, Ayn Rand, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick have said. Second, and even worse, the use of “social science” to explain human relations has blinded scholars to the true sources of this philosophy. Having abandoned Weber for Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and deconstruction, social scientists totally miss the spiritual roots of the liberal order. They presume a secular outlook in which religious belief is just another misguided epiphenomenon, and who wants to base a liberal order on that?

In fact, there are two competing grand narratives about the liberal order. The first is that of John Locke and Adam Smith, which emphasizes not only freedom and technological progress but also the sentimental and religious foundations of human endeavor. As Locke writes in the Second Treatise:

God, who has given the world to men in common, has also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience… . it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational … not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious … . for it is labor indeed that puts the difference of value on everything… . of the products of the earth useful to the life of man nine tenths are the effects of labor…

The second narrative is that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, which stresses equality and attempts to rebut the Lockean account. It posits that far from satisfying genuine human needs, the arts and sciences are expressions of pride (or amour propre) and have led to consumerism and the loss of community. The Lockean social contract is characterized as one in which the rich and powerful coerce the less fortunate into institutionalizing inequality.

From the socialists Owen, Fourier, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Saint-Simon, and Marx in the 19th century to a whole host of other writers in the 20th century and perhaps President Obama now, thinkers in this tradition have sought “more equal” opportunity, a “fairer” distribution of wealth, and the reorganization of society into smaller communities. They disagree on exactly how to transform the present system and fail to provide an explicit account of how the new structure will function. They, like Blond, describe what a new economy should accomplish but not how. What one senses above all in these writers is an adversarial relation to whatever they take the present system to be, a moral critique in which it is necessary to identify both “bad guys” and “victims.”

What the critics see—and also what they miss—is that a liberal order is in its economics, politics, and law a civil association. In the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s terms, a civil association has no collective end, but exists to provide the context in which individuals pursue their personally chosen objectives. An enterprise association, by contrast, which was the form of social organization in the classical and medieval worlds as well as in many undeveloped nations today, has a collective goal that subsumes the individual. It is community as enterprise association for which the critics of liberalism, including many clergy, yearn.

But is a free society really so atomized and alienating? Going back to Locke, and as we are reminded by

Tocqueville, the real defenders of the liberal order have acknowledged that a civil association functions best when it rests upon a larger culture within which individuals voluntarily choose to join subsidiary enterprise associations such as a family, church, or local organizations. These sub-enterprise associations provide the spiritual capital—especially but not exclusively drawn from the Judeo-Christian heritage—that allows a liberal order to work. It is this spiritual capital that nourishes the free and responsible, inner-directed, autonomous individual. It is the smorgasbord of faiths in America, as opposed to state-sponsored religion in Islamic countries or the virulent secularism in Europe, that allows liberalism to flourish.

The drive to turn all of society into an enterprise association comes from people who have not made the transition to individuality. There is a whole complicated history behind this, but what is important is to recognize that the most serious problem within modern liberal societies is the presence of failed or incomplete individuals. Either unaware of or lacking faith in their ability to exercise self-discipline, incomplete individuals seek escape into the collective identity of communities insulated from the challenge of opportunity. These are people focused on avoiding failure rather than on achieving success. Incomplete individuals identify themselves by feelings of envy, resentment, self-distrust, victimization, and self-pity—in short, an inferiority complex. Anti-Americanism abroad and lack of faith in American Exceptionalism at home are the clearest manifestations.

Having little or no sense of individuality, they are incapable of loving what is best in themselves; unable to love themselves, they are incapable of loving others; incapable of loving others, they cannot sustain life within the family; in fact, they find family life stultifying. What they substitute for love of self, others, and family is loyalty to a mythical community. Instead of an umpire, they want a leader, and they conceive of such leaders as protectors who will relieve them of all responsibility. This is what makes their sense of community pathological. What they end up with are leaders who are themselves incomplete individuals and who seek to control others because they cannot control themselves. They prize equality and not competition, and in place of a market economy and limited government, we get economic and political tyranny.

It is not the institutions of a liberal order—technology, markets, limited government, the rule of law—that are responsible for the social pathologies we witness. Original sin undoubtedly accounts for some of our troubles, and it cannot be overcome by techniques of social control derived from soft sciences that are often masks for private political agendas. But beyond the weaknesses intrinsic to human nature, the social ills of our time more directly reflect the conscious, systematic destruction of our spiritual capital by the ever-expanding role of government fueled by utopian delusions. The source of these evils lies not in political and economic freedom, but in past failures at social engineering and the attempt to obfuscate those failures with even more ingenious applications of state power. 
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Nicholas Capaldi is Legendre-Soule Distinguished Chair in Business Ethics at Loyola University, New Orleans and author of John Stuart Mill: A Biography.

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