‘We Cannot Give One Millimetre’? Liberalism, Enlightenment and Diversity
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12000 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | John William Tate |
| Subject Matter | Article |
‘We Cannot Give One Millimetre’? Liberalism,
Enlightenment and Diversity
John William Tate
University of Newcastle, Australia
This article challenges a prominent interpretation of the liberal tradition which seeks to divide that tradition, fromits
origins, into two competing strands,one committed to reason (however defined) as a normative ideal, and the other,
involving no such ideal,centred on a commitment either to negative liberty or the political management of diversity.
This dichotomous account seeks to enlist the inaugural figures of John Locke,Immanuel Kant and in one case John
Stuart Mill as the origins of that part of the liberal tradition committed to reason.This article will show that such claims
have no foundation in the most inaugural figure cited,and that, as a consequence, liberalism,from its origins, has had
a far deeper commitment to negative liberty and diversity than to any necessary connection with reason.
Keywords: liberalism; Enlightenment; Isaiah Berlin; William Galston; Danish cartoons
One year after the Danish cartoons affair, the Danish Prime Minister (now NATO
Secretary-General) Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in an interview in the Danish newspaper,
Jyllands-Posten, was asked if he had any reservations about his decision, during that affair,to
support the principle of freedom of the press in relation to Jyllands-Posten’s publication, on
30 September 2005, of twelve cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. Rasmussen was
unrepentant, justifying the position he took at that time not only in terms of freedom of
speech and the press but expanding it to a defence of the European Enlightenment as a
whole. As he put it:‘The Enlightenment ... has been the driving force behind European
development and decisive for why we have come as far as we have. Therefore we have
something here ... with regard to which we cannot give one millimetre’ (Hansen, 2006,
cited and translated in Rostbøll, 2009, p. 626).
Certainly, liberal ideals of freedom of speech and the press were central to the Danish
cartoons affair, just as they were central to the Rushdie affair that preceded it. But to what
extent must such liberal ideals be associated with the Enlightenment? Such questions go to
the heart of liberalism itself. Is there an inextricable connection between liberalism and
what came to be understood as Enlightenment values, centred on reason (however
defined)? If so, does this connection mean that liberals cannot accord equal respect to
values, lifestyles and commitments that arise from non-rational sources, such as religion,
centred on faith or revelation? And if this is so, is this link between liberalism and reason at
the consequent expense of the capacity of liberals to affirm a full range of diversity within
liberal democratic polities?
This article considers these questions in relation to the contemporary political philo-
sopher who has given most credence to the idea that there is an intimate link between at
least one part of the liberal tradition and Enlightenment reason – William A. Galston.
Galston argues that the liberal tradition, from its very orig ins, has been characterised by a
dichotomy between ‘two quite different variants of liberal thought based on two distinct
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doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12000
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013 VOL 61, 816–833
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
principles’ (Galston, 2002,p. 20).The first concerns the pr inciple of autonomy, at the basis
of which Galston ascribes a set of rational commitments, centred on ‘liberation through
reason from externally imposed authority’, and ‘sustained rational examination of self,
others and social practices’ – commitments that are associated with the Enlightenment
(Galston, 2002, p. 21, p. 24). In this variant, therefore, reason is understood as an important
condition of autonomy.
The other ‘variant’, stemming from the Reformation and its concern to regulate rival
religious differences, involves no such commitment to autonomy, but rather a commitment
to the political management of diversity for the sake of civil peace (Galston, 1995, pp.
525–7; 2002,p. 21,pp. 24–5). Galston insists at Note 4 below that this dichotomy between
two competing variants of liberalism, centred on autonomy and diversity, is‘deeply rooted
in the historical development of liberalism’,and as we shall see, he identifies the first of these
variants, centred on autonomy, with the foundational figure widely perceived as inaugu-
rating the liberal tradition, at least within the English-speaking world – John Locke.1
Further, Galston insists that this first liberal variant, with its emphasis on reason as a
precondition of autonomy, undermines the capacity of this sort of liberalism to affirm a full
range of diversity within liberal polities, because it denies equal respect to choices and
commitments that arise from non-rational sources, and so fall short of that autonomy:
To place an ideal of autonomous choice ... at the core of liberalism is in fact to narrow the
range of possibilities available within liberal societies.In the guise of protecting the capacity for
diversity, the autonomy principle in fact exerts a kind of homogenizing pressure on waysof life
that do not embrace autonomy.2
This dichotomy that Galston imposes on the liberal tradition has had significant influence
within the contemporar y literature (see Crowder, 2007; Kukathas, 2000, p. 98; Macedo,
2000, p. 208), although none that I know of has sought to question it in terms of the
foundations of the liberal tradition itself, as this article will seek to do.Others have endorsed
something akin to Galston’s dichotomy (see Gray,2000, pp.1–2, p. 105).Galston’s dichotomy
has also been explicitly invoked in one of the most prominent analyses of the Danish
cartoons affair, offered by Danish political scientist, Christian F. Rostbøll, who sees within
Galston’s‘two variants’ of the liberal tradition the competing perspectives of the protagonists
on each side of the cartoons affair (Rostbøll, 2009,pp. 626–7).Yet Galston’s dichotomy did
not emerge ex nihilo. We shall see that it has deep roots within the work of Galston’s
intellectual predecessor, Isaiah Berlin, and Berlin’s dichotomy between ‘positive’ and ‘nega-
tive’ liberty.We shall consider both Galston’s and Berlin’s dichotomies in conjunction.
By identifying one half of the liberal tradition with Enlightenment ideals centred on
reason, Galston’s liberal dichotomy has given much credibility to the view, advanced by
some critics of liberalism, that liberalism contains an inherently rationalist bias against values
and commitments arising from non-rational sources, such as religion, and is therefore not
as neutral, impartial or tolerant towards such commitments as it might otherwise claim. For
instance, Stanley Fish states:
‘Tolerance’ may be what liberalism claims for itself in contradistinction to other, supposedly
more authoritarian, views; but liberalism is tolerant only within the space demarcated by the
operations of reason; any one who steps outside that space will not be tolerated, will not be
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