So welcome everyone tonight to this Publius symposium. This has become an annual event at the law school. The Constitutional Law Center selects a book from the preceding year that we think raises important questions roughly in the area of constitutional law, although that’s rather loosely defined, not according to its original intent, but instead more of a, let’s say, a living Constitution approach to what that means.
And tonight, and then we, so we invite the author of the book to come and speak to us a bit about the book and then invite several folks, usually from Stanford, to comment on the book. Tonight it’s my special privilege to welcome Professor Cass Sunstein to be our honoree for the Publius Symposium.
And it’s a special pleasure because of how long my association with Cass goes. He and I were baby law professors together at the University of Chicago where we bonded, but also disagreed on many things, and we’ve kept in touch ever since. Just a bit of brief biography, but I don’t wanna spend a lot of time biographizing our speakers.
But so Cass is a graduate of Harvard Law School. He clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. He served in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice for several years in the early 1980s. Began his teaching career at University of Chicago for, I guess probably longer than any other place, shifted to Harvard.
He is, he was the head of the regulatory review operation under president Barack Obama, and then later was an advisor to the Biden administration on immigration policy. He has written more books than I, I, I, there is no one, I think, who has written more books with the possible exception of, of of, Franklin W. Dixon, the author of the Hardy Boy mysteries.
And so I’m not even going to attempt to, to name them, but I will say that there’s at least one creditable study that finds that Cass, by a considerable margin, is the most cited legal academic among other legal academics, which is a considerable tribute. But tonight he’s going to be talking about his most recent book, which is entitled Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.
I’ll let him describe the book, but after he speaks, we’ll hear from Professor Josh Ober and Professor Russell Berman both here from Stanford. And I may or may not, depending on the time, add a few words at the end of all of that. So please join me in welcoming Professor Cass Sunstein.
It’s an incredible thrill to be here, and I have some personal words first. When I was a baby law professor at the University of Chicago I developed admiration multiplied times 7 million for Michael McConnell. First and foremost because of his brilliance and originality, which persuaded me that on the establishment clause, the Supreme Court, he was demonstrating, was wrong.
And he had a different account, which was, oh, thank you for that. Thank you for that. So there was brilliance on that and originality. But I also wanna say one other thing, which was personal kindness. My now big daughter, there was a struggling pregnancy my wife had, and it was very tough. And he and his family prayed every night for baby Ellen as they called her. And I’ll never forget that. That’s emblematic of Michael McConnell as well as an unforgettable life moment.
Having said that, I am experiencing a state of intimidation for two reasons, which are slightly overwhelming. The first is I’m staying at the Stanford Park Hotel. How many of you have been at the Stanford Park Hotel?
And you know that you go from one room and there’s a Stanford grad who, like, won the Olympic gold medal yesterday, and then you go to another room and there’s someone who was a Supreme Court Justice, and then there’s another Stanford grad. Then there’s another as a Stanford grad who’s a Supreme Court Justice, and then there’s another who discovered that the Earth, it goes around the sun. And then there’s another who sat underneath an apple tree and thought of gravity, and it’s just a stream of things and people, and they all went to Stanford. And then there’s John McEnroe a huge picture. He’s mad, he’s of course he’s mad. He’s John McEnroe. So that’s noteworthy.
The book I’m about to discuss got a review very recently. Now it’s exciting to get a review. This review is called “Listless Liberalism.” So I’m coming to terms with listlessness-gate, and there’s a point to the objection from Listlessness. I’m going to try to meet it by redoing the book for you in a way that has four new chapters.
The first is called Unhinged. Take that, reviewer. The second is called Origins. The third is called Manifesto, and the fourth is called Fire. I should say preliminarily, that the form of liberalism I’m going to be honoring is a big tent and accommodates diverse conceptions of what’s right and what’s good.
And the goal of big tent Liberalism is to insist that human beings can agree on certain things from theoretically diverse foundations and amidst uncertainty or tentativeness, about the right foundations, and that is not an accidental happy fact. It’s at, at the core of liberal commitments to pluralism.
Unhinged, chapter one.
We have a time machine. One of the pictures right near my room is the inventor of the time machine who’s a Stanford ‘28 graduate, and it hasn’t gone to market yet, but there we are. Our time machine is taking us back to 1933 and, in particular, March 27th, 1933, in which there’s a headline in the paper of record back then, the New York Times, saying “Hitler is supreme under enabling act.”
That’s noteworthy. Under the headline, it says, chancellor preeminent over cabinet is now practically the German government. Under that, this is very specific, a;l legislative powers have been transferred to regime free to refashion national life. That’s a fact. Is there a theory that underlies the fact?
There is indeed. And it comes from a person, Carl Schmitt, who’s enjoying a moment both on the left and the right, a German theorist who is being celebrated in Europe and in North America, who offered the theory. He urged the real fuhrer is always a judge, one who wants to separate the two from each other or put them in opposition to each other would have the judge be either the leader of the opposition or the tool of the opposition, is trying to unhinging the state with the help of the judiciary.
Hashtag, see what he did there? The notion of a judge being separated from the executive as an opposing party, the leader of the opposition or the toll of the, the tool of the opposition. That’s not a powerful substantive move, but it is a powerful rhetorical move.
Separation between leadership and judgeship creates a leader of the opposition, and that’s what unhinges the state. Schmitt’s target is simultaneously liberalism and the separation of powers contending. He did that. It’s characteristic of blindness, about justice, of the liberal way of thinking about law that it sought to make out of criminal law.
A great liberating charter, the Magna Carta of the criminal. So much for the liberal way of thinking about law in Schmidt’s view, the F’s action in a, an act of murder is true judging. It is not subject to law, but is in itself the highest justice. This is a horror movie, but it’s also real. And what was being said in the 1930s can be found in various forms.
Today we might oppose in chapter one, Unhinged, Carl Schmidt and James Madison, who insisted that the separation of powers was a bulwark against tyranny. What Madison must have known, but what he never said is that the word separation of powers is a misnomer. It’s a they, not an it. It’s separation of powers, not separation of powers. That’s implicit in Schmitt’s complaint about the unhinging of the state.
There are six separation of powers, each of them fundamental to liberalism as a lived reality. The first is courts cannot exercise legislative authority. That’s a prohibition, and it’s closely associated with self-government, obviously, but also liberty insofar as democratic control is a bulwark of the same.
Second, courts cannot exercise executive authority. How poignant that is today is not so clear, but it ought to be poignant every day, that if the executive is not willing to do what courts want, then there is a safeguard against freedom. Judicial objection to a person or a cause causes exactly nothing to happen. Sorry, existing sitting or former judges in the room. Judges need the executive too, and that’s a safeguard of self-government and of freedom.
Third, separation of powers: Legislatures can’t exercise judicial authority. Hamilton was keen on this, insisting on the necessity for someone lacking the sword or the purse to interpret federal law, constitutional and statutory, and the disability on the legislature from owning the the adjudicative power is designed to ensure that there’s confinement in the operation of law by both constitutional restriction and by meaning of laws as ascertained, not by those who enacted them, but as ascertained by someone who’s outside the system.
It’s also the case that the legislature lacks executive authority, which is a fundamental safeguard of liberty. The legislature might be very steamed up and eager to get particular persons in trouble, but the separation of legislative and executive power ensures that the executive power is a safeguard against a steamed up legislature, endangering persons.
I haven’t got to what is now the main event, but it’s very important to see that what Madison was on top of was what President Roosevelt later called Freedom from Fear. And Schmitt was on top of that in a different way, that the separation of power is precisely because of its unhinging, instantiates, a form of freedom from fear. People are able to go about their business knowing that at least there’s a structural bill of rights that provides a measure of protection against what might otherwise have happened on some March 27th elsewhere.
The fifth of the sixth separation powers, this all is pretty straightforward, is the executive lacks judicial authority. And for those who think that these days are concerning days or the prior days were concerning days, the fact that the executive needs the judiciary as green-light-giver is the constitutional embodiment of that great dictum from a recent Nobel Prize winner who’s not on the walls at the Stanford Park Hotel because he didn’t graduate from Stanford or indeed any college.
His great line, and yes, we’re talking about Bob Dylan, is “sometimes even the president of the United States must have to stand naked,” and that’s not a kind of gruesome picture of elderly male nudity. It’s instead a conception of relative powerlessness on the part of the executive. Granted by the denial of judicial authority to the executive, the denial that Carl Schmitt hated most.
The prize winner of the six were in Olympic times, if the six contenders for the Olympic gold, the separations of power are all swimming or running, the one who gets to the finish line first, is the denial of legislative power to the executive. That’s intended to ensure that one person, with awesome power granted to that person on principle, must ask the legislature, broadly speaking, for authority to do anything.
That’s a bit of an overstatement. There are things the president can do on his or her own. Nonetheless, it’s approximately right that the legislature needs to give an imprimatur to the legisla, to the executive, and that is a safeguard of that form of democracy that the Constitution creates. And also crucially, a safeguard of liberty, which was what Madison was most centrally concerned with.
That’s the chapter unhinged.
Now, chapter two, Origins, I’m not sure how many of you have read 1984 in the last period. 1984, I remember, as being a kind of quintessential liberal text. With an opposition between our hero Winston, who loses, the speaker for individual agency and pluralism, and Big Brother et al. being the anti-liberal victor.
The book’s much more complicated than that. Orwell got anti-liberal wisdom. The power of the book is his internal emotional ambivalence. One of Orwell’s chief villains offers this warning: “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.: That’s horrifying. But Orwell couldn’t have written it the way he did without a spark of sympathetic engagement.
Consider the novel’s chilling last words, “but it was all right. Everything was all right. The struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” What makes those words unforgettable is that every reader sees the terror in it, but also appreciates the, okay, that’s the power of 1984.
More than in any time since World War II, liberalism is under a lot of pressure. Even siege. There’s a lot of marching up and down. People are cheering. Many of them seem to hope to have found Big Brother. On the right, some people have given up on liberalism. They are in the academy. They hold it responsible for the collapse of traditions and values, disrespect for authority, immorality and criminality.
On the left, and I might say this project originated at the University of Chicago long ago as a response to the left, some people despise liberalism. They see it as old and exhausted and dying and listless. They think it lacks the resources to handle entrenched inequalities, corporate power, and environmental degradation. They refer to neoliberalism with disdain. Have you noticed?
Fascists don’t like liberalism at all. So do populists who think freedom is overrated. In ways large and small, anti-liberal is on the march. Among historians, its standard defined the origins of liberalism in French, German, and British thinkers. A while ago, but not that long ago, but before there was the word liberalism, there was the word liberal, which referred to character traits, openness of spirit, generosity, a commitment to the common good.
The accompanying noun was liberality, not liberalism. During the middle ages, Christian values were connected and inextricably intertwined with liberality. The term liberal was associated with the opposite of a focus on one’s self-interest in 1628. Words that maybe make ones go down, tingle down the spine in the best way.
John Dunn said, “Christ is a liberal. God hears that people should find new ways to be liberal.” John Winthrop in his city on a hill speech in 1630 argued the difficult times required extraordinary liberality in which colonists would bear one another’s burdens. John Locke, counted often as the first liberal philosopher, contended that children should learn to be liberal and kind.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, people didn’t speak of liberalism, but the word liberal was everywhere. It meant open-minded, tolerant, free from bias, prejudice, or bigotry. Liberality became closely associated with the idea of religious toleration, a central concern in the late 18th century in 1790, George Washington wrote, as mankind becomes more liberal, they were more be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil gov, civil government.
That’s an astounding sentence. He’s offering an insistent signal of respect for pluralism and also associating more liberal with a conception of equal protection of the laws. That’s right there. In Washington’s words. The idea of liberalism arose in France probably around 1811. It did that in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when some people tried to concretize the best understanding of what the French Revolution was about in a way that had a Ian feature, it was drawing on traditions not slapping them.
Benjamin Constant did that with the book, with a stunning title, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments. That’s not humble. The book called for popular sovereignty and also for a set of freedoms, freedom of thought, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Constant insisted on the importance of separation of church and state.
Seven years later, a philosopher published a book called Historical Depiction of Liberalism. It was Young. This was an attempt at a history of liberalism. Since that time, we’ve seen a ton of twists and turns. There’s free market liberalism, a la Hayek. There’s New Deal liberalism a la Roosevelt. There’s libertarian liberalism a la Robert Nozick. There’s redistributive liberalism a la John Rawls. Liberalism is a big tent, but it’s also a fighting faith.
Next chapter, a manifesto, and this is going to be in numbers, numbered paragraphs. I might lose track. You can fill in the gap or think in your mind, he’s lost track, and maybe smile fondly rather than pityingly.
Liberals have a holy trinity: freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law. The first central commitment of liberal thinkers of all kinds. They may understand freedom, pluralism, and rule of law in different ways, but those stand at the heart of liberal commitments.
Two. Liberal authoritarianism is an oxymoron because liberals believe in freedom and pluralism. They reject authoritarianism in all its forms. Contrary to what’s urged in Hungary, illiberal, democracy is illiberal and ought to be opposed for that reason.
Three. Liberals know that reasonable people differ on many things, including the nature of the good life and which God to worship, if any. They seek to make space for those disagreements.
Four. Liberals cherish and do not just acknowledge pluralism. They want to allow people to learn from each other and from experiments in living. I was in China a few decades ago and my right shoe broke down. That’s a problem, and it needed to be fixed. I asked my host, how do I get it to be fixed? And there was a guy on the corner, a Chinese guy, who had a tiny, tiny business of fixing shoes, and he fixed my shoe. He also had a little in English, and he discussed how there was some opportunity, modest in China for people to start their little businesses. He was experimenting and if you had seen the, the pride and joy on his face as he discussed his experimented, how that was going, you would see something that John Stuart Mill captured by cherishing experiments in living. Liberals want people who disagree with each other to find a way, not only to live together, but to smile, or at least to nod respectfully at their differences.
Five. The liberal emphasis on pluralism is part and powerful to the liberal. Commitment to freedom from fear. Liberals know that those who reject pluralism, render people unfree and insecure, and sometimes in prison or kill them.
Six. There are a lot of people in Europe, North America, and elsewhere who consider themselves leftists, who may or may not qualify as liberal. There are people in North America, Europe, Europe, Europe and elsewhere who see themselves as right of center. They may or may not embrace liberal commitments. You can at once be a liberal as understood here and right of center, you can be a leftist and illiberal. There are illiberal conservatives and illiberal leftists. If you are committed to pluralism, the rule of law, and freedom, emphatically including freedom of speech and freedom of religion, you can join the liberal tent regardless of your views on capital punishment or abortion or on tariffs or on free trade.
Abraham Lincoln was a liberal. This is what he said in 1854. If the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government to say that he true shall not govern himself. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man that is more than self-government, that is despotism, no one is good enough to govern another without that other’s consent.
I say this is the leading principle, the sheet anchor of American government. See what Lincoln did there? He associated the notion of self-government and the attack on monarchy with the attack on slavery, urging that each is about no governance of one’s self without one’s consent. He identified self-government as a founding practice with self-government as part of the attack on slavery.
The liberal commitment to markets is associated with that move by Lincoln. In markets, you get to start a little company on the street, even if the government is insistent that it has a monopoly over the means of production.
Eight. While liberals have not always been committed to democracy, they have always been committed to freedom.
Some liberals are nervous historically about democracy, but insistent on freedom. Lincoln had it right. He captured the underlying logic of liberalism and linking freedom in individual life with freedom. As citizens, nine liberals are committed to individual dignity. They see people as subjects rather than objects, and they prize the idea of agency.
At least one person in the room, and I’m not gonna out her, is an undergraduate who’s studying behavioral economics, and I promised her that I would give her some behavioral economics data and I’m going to redeem the promise. Right now, we have data suggesting that people’s preference for individual agency is such that they will, in settings in which real money is at stake, insist on retaining their agency, even if they’ve learned that if they give it up, they’ll make more money. So if you have a population who learns in real time, you delegate decision making to some other, you’ll make more money, people say, I’m gonna have to make a lot of money by delegating decision making to others that my agency has intrinsic value and to give it up is something I won’t do lightly because it’s my all.
That is a data point suggesting that the liberal insistence on individual agency beats in the human heart, even when the economic consequences of insisting on individual agency aren’t good. Liberals agree with Lincoln. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. That’s why they regard Mill’s great work The Subjection of Women as helping to define liberalism’s essence. So Mill wrote the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and is now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.
Ten. Liberals insist on reason-giving in the public domain. They see reason-giving as a check on authoritarianism. Let’s not see that as abstract words on the page, but part of the lived reality of American citizenship for the past 70 years at least, where reason-giving has been fundamental to constitutional and administrative law. Because of the liberal commitment to, to reason giving, public power can never be exercised on the ground that the king says, so the President says so, or even the people say so.
Twelve. Are you gonna trust me that this is 12? Liberals do not believe their own approach is frozen in time. They emphasize that liberalism is being made not found in their view. Liberalism is no rock. It is constantly growing like a tree.
Thirteen. What John Dewey said of the United States is also true of liberalism.
Be the liberal, be the evil, what they may, the experiment is not played out. United States are not yet bayed. They’re not a finished fact to be categorically assessed.
Fourteen. William F. Buckley, I confess, was a hero of mine as a kid. He was stylish, he was funny, he was witty, he was warm, he was charming. He, he was irresistible. And he seemed to know everything. He said in a famous introduction to his magazine, the National Review, that his preferred form of conservatism, quote stands for history yelling, “stop.” That’s stylish and charming. It’s funny, liberals get that, but instead they ask history to explain its plans. And if the explanation is good enough, they’re prepared to whisper, go.
Last chapter. Fire. Some people think that freedom is incompatible with order. They think that people won’t choose well. They see freedom as a threat when freedom of speech is shut down. That’s a common reason many people think that the rule of law is incompatible with security and they suspend the rule of law in its name.
Of course, many people value liberty because they seek to return to retain their authority. The rights that liberals prize are an outgrowth of Lincoln’s principle, the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to religious liberty, the right to do process of law, the right to private property–think of my shoemaker who had some–itself associated when we can sheet anchor. If you can’t own things, you are vulnerable to the power of others. Above all, the government.
Early on, liberalism was full of fire. You can’t read Mill’s On Liberty without feeling that fire. Listen to this one. “If all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he if he had the power would be justified in silencing mankind.”
That’s the conceptual origin of the greatest sentence written by any Supreme Court Justice: “compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard,” a liberal sentence written in the 1940s in the midst of World War II.
Consider also what Constant said back in 1815. Adhere, if you would, the fire. “Political freedom would be a thing of no value if the rights of individuals were not sheltered from violation. Any country where these rights are not respected is a country subjected to despotism. Whatever the nominal organization of government might be.
Modern liberalism is quieter. John Rawl’s Theory of Justice has a gentle final line, fire free purity of heart. He writes, “if one could attain, it would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self command.” From this point of view, it’s a nice sentence. It falls softly. It would be extreme to say that over half century after Rawl’s book, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, the best, best don’t lack conviction. But it wouldn’t be extreme to say that some current accounts of liberalism really are listless and defensive. They seem tired, passive, and nostalgic.
In law and politics, as on the basketball court, I grew up worshiping the Boston Celtics. The best offense is sometimes a good set, a good defense. You know, Bill Russell, the greatest winner in the history of any sport. Great defensive center.
But the defining feature of liberalism has always been its youth, its energy, and its fierceness. Its delight in human agency–Footnote to behavioral economics articles–Its openness to novelty and surprise. Its high spirits. Its opposition to cruelty. Its capacity for indignation. Its persistent optimism. Its continuing adventures in self definition. Its refusal to despair. Its sense of mischief, its commitment to experiments in living. Liberalism is full of two things, fire and hope. Fiery and hopeful people are remaking it every day. Thanks.
So the goal of Cass Sunstein’s highly readable and thoughtful and far from listless book is an account of liberalism that is spirited, hopeful, forward-looking rather than wistful, nostalgic, or defensive. It’s grounded per its title, in the fundamental value to every human being of individual freedom. So Sunstein offers what is indeed a big tent liberalism, utilitarians, deontologists, religious and secular capitalists and socialists, all comfortably accommodated.
The tent includes figures, often taken as conservatives, some of whom have described themselves as such, Buckley, Reagan, Thatcher, Gorsuch, and others who did not describe themselves as such. Hayek and Friedman, better often taken as that. As well as a wide range of those who would be defined by most people as liberals, Constant, Mill, Lincoln, Dewey, FDR, MLK, and Rawls.
But Sunstein’s liberal tent has some limits. There are no authoritarians in it. That is, certainly no Nazis or fascists. But also no Marxists, although Habermas is allowed. I’m not sure about others of the Frankfurt School. That would be interesting to ask. Special targets of the book are illiberals, anti-liberal and postliberal, both on the left and the right.
The Postliberal at least are imagined as potentially persuadable. What is it, Sunstein’s Liberals ask, that post liberals are post. Since they depend on the practices of freedom, even if they don’t value it as such. Among the heroes of the book are J.S. Mill, fiery, and his collaborator and later wife Harriet Taylor, per Friedrich Hayek’s surprising passion project on their correspondence.
One of the treats of the book is sort of getting to visit Hayek on Mill and Harriet Taylor, but especially important is Mill’s celebration of experiments in living This slogan and Mill’s elucidation of it gives Sunstein traction on two issues. The first is the value of pluralism with its attendant commitment to toleration of experimentation itself and toleration of those who undertake bold experiments.
And next is the possibility of progress. Progress is possible, both because the results of successful experiments can be emulated and because Sunstein’s sort of liberals are eager to learn from other people. Indeed, even non-liberal Sunstein’s liberals are strikingly friendly and outgoing as a lot. It’s not, I think, coincidental that the first chapters 85 thesis of which we got 15, the, the ultimate one and it was the final one this evening, concerns historical progress. Against Buckley’s famous dictum that the conservative stands to thwart history, yelling stop, Sunstein suggests, as he noted, that liberals ask history to explain its plans, and if the explanation is good enough, they’re prepared to whisper, go.
So my first question is: Why did Buckley and why does Sunstein accept Marx’s Hegelian notion of history as going someplace, perhaps according to an explicable and desirable plan? And if it is not going someplace in particular, would liberals have anything to say? And if so, what would that be?
Sunstein is concerned throughout the book with the relationship between freedom and social order. He makes exactly the right point, also central, for example, to Thomas Hobbes, but too easily forgotten, that without security, that is freedom from fear, and welfare, that is freedom from want, neither individual freedom to do what I please in recognition of others’ rights, nor alternatively political freedom, speech assembly, self-government is practical.
So the question then is what kind of order, with FDR, again, ditto Hobbes. Sunstein is in favor of a strong central government, one that is capable of securing the right kind of order.
And for Sunstein, this is ideally done through an extension, indeed, the uni universalization of Roosevelt’s second bill of rights. Of course, that conception of order requires a lot of regulation established and operationalized by a large expert administration and an administration that is not partisan or the creature of any political party.
And as is worked out in Sunstein’s earlier work, it allows for nudges, that is the practice as he calls in some of that earlier work, libertarian paternalism. Now, this of course raises a question, just how firm can those nudges be before they become illiberal coercive? For example, could a liberal government legitimately nudge citizens to take religion, if not any particular religion more seriously, or to move their kids out of public schools into experimental charter schools, or to marry at an earlier age and so on?
Now, obviously at some point, nudging will become coercive shoving, but without bright lines, how do we know when the line has been crossed?
Now, my personal concern in this domain concerns civic education. How can schools, and in my case, especially universities, whether public or private, you know, how far can we go in nudging our students as democratic citizens or potential citizens, nudging them to master a body of civic knowledge, say history, political thought, social science, or nudging them to learn certain civic skills, civil discourse, fair bargaining, or nudging them to adopt civic dispositions, respect and recognition of others?
How far can we go before the paternalism of our practice tips into coercion? And this is really, this is not a rhetorical question. This is a very live issue for schools and universities, including Stanford’s right now.
So one last set of issues. Sunstein is very clear that liberal authoritarianism is an oxymoron. This seems to leave democracy, or call it republicanism anyway, self-government under law by a self-defined and diverse body of citizens as the only political alternative for liberals. I think that’s right. But I’d like to hear Sunstein say more about the tensions between democracy and liberalism. These exceed the familiar worry that about majoritarian tyranny. For that, enumerating rights is certainly the correct solution as Sunstein emphasizes.
But democracy as self-government by citizens also requires a defined citizen body within a bounded territory. The citizen body is necessarily self-defined per the well-known democratic boundary. Problem and self-definition leaves many persons living within the jurisdiction of its bounded territory outside the citizen body.
Now that can open the way to authoritarian solutions, as in the Trump administration’s ghastly current activities, or to neglect of the political role of borders and formal citizenship, as in the Biden administration’s very lax policies. So a more general question, is the boundedness of the democratic, of democratic citizenship itself a problem for the liberal universalism that Sunstein calls for?
And finally, might there be a problem with the multiplication of rights, especially inalienable and inviable human rights? If every right you hold imposes duties on me, should I worry that the multiplication of rights ultimately will impose duties that eventually overwhelm my capacity to fulfill those duties or indeed my willingness if I’m not a saint? And back to democracy, might that might, that multiplication and therefore overwhelming my capacity or willingness to fulfill my duties might that ultimately imperil my doing the fundamental, my, my, my fulfilling the fundamental civic duties that sustain the democratic political rights that in turn keep authoritarianism at bay, and therefore enable liberalism to be a lived experimental practice, not just a hopeful aspiration?
So I just wanna conclude by thanking Cass Sunstein for such a clearly written, readable account of one of the most important questions of our time. What is liberalism? How can it be sustained in a dynamic rather than a static equilibrium, providing for order preserving common goods, while expanding the range of what is possible for us to imagine and to bring about together?
I’ll join Josh in thanking Professor Sunstein for this wonderful book. It’s a delight to read, shows broad erudition, offers a panegyric of the indisputable desiderata of, of liberalism. But listening to you today, I realized that I guess I wanna push back.
It’s not only liberals who can smile. I think that was one of your characteristics. Nor is it only liberals who can recognize the virtue of civility and disagreement. I think there’s a, there’s a slippage in your book between the broad conceptual history of the term liberal, the, the and on the other hand, the indisputable association of the term liberal today with a certain field within the political spectrum.
An anecdote my late colleague in comparative literature, Richard Rorty, in a department discussion about the role of the university and the purpose of intellectuals, was quite clear when he said that the purpose of intellectuals was to take students from conservative religious backgrounds and turn them into modern liberals, secular liberals. There is a slight authoritarianism, you know, built into that, that I think is not foreign to liberalism as we know it.
With all the praise that I would like to heap on the book, et me, let me make a few points here. I think you cast a very wide net, a wide net of a range of intellectual historical figures, which is therefore a delight to read, but I think it may be too wide. Is there really a common denominator, a convincing, a compelling common denominator among the various figures that you present? You talk about Kantian liberals and you talk about utilitarian liberals, and you know, if we’re gonna put them all in the same bag, maybe we needed more definitional clarity.
Are we all liberals now? Is there anybody outside of the liberal field except for, as Josh noted, Hitler, Stalin, Schmidt, and Marx? Is everybody else liberal? Buckley? Is everyone from Cruz to Sanders liberal? In which case we’re using the term liberal in a way that’s at odds with its significance in contemporary political debates.
At times, your notion of liberal is anyone who is not totalitarian. This means that people we would call conservative or socialists or populists today also fit into your, your liberal category. One is your crown witnesses for liberalism is Abraham Lincoln, that wonderful quote from I believe 1854.
Another is FDR. How close are they really significantly in American history? What are we doing to American history if we’re seeing them as identifiable? Unless your point is that Lincoln and FDR embody that liberalism that leans toward the strong state, in which case you are surprisingly turning into a statist as a liberal. The, and that, and as a good Hegelian, you find the state to be the source of freedom.
What did you do to the libertarians? There were two, there are two lodestars at the beginning of your preface, I believe. The commitment to freedom and the commitment to pluralism, I wanna push on those two points in particular.
The projects, the primacy of freedom in your account of liberalism means that equality is at least a secondary aspect of the liberal project, liberalism. Liberalism, as Josh pointed out, has had a checkered history with equality, indeed, even with the notion of the universal franchise.
The two thinkers you mentioned in passing as outside liberalism. Again, Marx and Schmidt. Both illiberal. Each prioritize versions of equality, social equality for Marx, racial equality for for Schmidt. Neither of those end up very, very very well. But liberalism struggles with equality consistently.
Liberals want free speech, no doubt, right? Egalitarian radicals want to suppress harmful language. That’s a dividing line that, that, that Marx Western politics since 1793 or 1848 until today in this very school. Where is equality in your liberalism? Why did you write a defense of freedom and not a defense of equality?
That’s a conscious choice on your part. I think part of your answer would be in the opportunity chapter where you give that fascinating story of Connie Converse, one of the delights of the book. Thank you for that. But I think that it means that you want to find a system that finds the lost Einsteins, that’s the term you use, the truly gifted.
So where are you just in terms of policy, in terms of educational policy on meritocratic testing, on meritocratic admission to institutions of higher education? How many Converses have been excluded here? What about gifted and talented tracks in secondary education? Another hot button issue.
Now, the second reference point you note as a core to liberalism is pluralism. The suggestion is that the state should retain a neutrality toward competing worldviews, especially traditions and religion First Amendment. But this mandated values neutrality, I believe, tends to expand out of the governmental space. It’s not just the restriction on Congress and ends up shaping liberal culture more generally, particularly in the university, hence a resistance to endorsing any specific cultural tradition, including the tradition that led to the university and its liberalism. Ironically though, in your own discussion, you present what is nearly exclusively an Anglo-American material, so is the liberalism that is at stake in your account, and that presents itself sometimes as an expression of a universal rationality, not in fact just one particular tradition.
This is the tradition of Northwestern Europe, Europe, Western culture. We, if it is that particular tradition, should we owe more to it than we should? We owe more allegiance to it than, excuse me, listless neutrality. Can liberals champion their own liberal tradition in a pluralistic world against alternative traditions?
Thank you.
Fantastic comments. So maybe we can go at them by talking about something you all know about. Maybe a couple of you don’t. So I could see the spark of recognition when reference was made to Connie Converse, who was, of course the great folk singer, and I’m seeing the recognition here of the 1950s, who Taylor Swift says that without Connie Converse, there would be no Taylor Swift.
And Joni Mitchell, of course, was preceded by Connie Converse. And Bob Dylan reluctantly owns up to the fact that Converse was there first. And the Beatles, you know, they lionize her and she’s a hero. First singer songwriter.
You’re looking puzzled because I’ve mostly been lying. Connie Converse was a real person. She was a brilliant singer-songwriter. She did appear on national television. She didn’t make it anywhere. She gave up and became a kind of academic, editing an academic journal, and she disappeared at the age of 50. No one knows what happened to her. She was revived quite recently. Because she was heard on the radio by probably a Stanford student who was about 18 years ago, 18 years old, and thought, who is this person?
She’s incredible. And he inaugurated a Connie Converse revival. And she’s now becoming something like what she would’ve become if I hadn’t been lying, if I’d been telling you the truth. She’s becoming a, a hero of the early days, and that tells you something. So this is a partial answer to the equality question.
Liberals think that the actual tale of Connie Converse is a violation of liberal principles, that either because she was female or because she didn’t have an economic opportunity, she didn’t benefit from a great liberal principle, which is careers open to talents. And that’s an idea that liberals prize and it’s associated with liberty.
It’s also as a conception of equality. Now liberals have, people who count as liberal, and this is in response to Professor Berman, have very diverse conceptions of equality. And that’s okay. So there are liberals who are libertarian, who believe in certain forms of equality including career and equality careers open to talent, no caste hierarchies, but if some people end up super rich and other people don’t, that doesn’t violate liberal principles according to libertarians.
And there are others like Rawls who don’t have that view and, and liberalism as such, as agnostic among competing conceptions of equality. And that’s something to celebrate even as we celebrate the intense internal debates among liberals about the right conception of equality of, there’s a great point about the capaciousness of, of liberalism, and whether that’s something to, to worry over.
I, I gave a, I was at a, to an event at Hungary not long ago on this book, and the discussion was substantively similar to this, but the thought was not, liberalism is innocuous and kind of agreeable. It was, instead the liberalism defended here is horrible and the source of what ails us. So among extremely courteous and very intelligent Hungarian interlocutors who were followers of a certain view that’s very prominent in Hungary, the notion is that the kind of respect for freedom and pluralism that is central to liberal liberal tradition is on the run intellectually as well as sociologically. And that’s a very, a very good thing.
In the United States. I, I don’t like to mention names because there’s something, you know, just by nature, I, I, it feels like a battle is brewing. But Professor Deneen, for all I know, is a great person and who has some values that are, should be universally honored. He really cares about things that ought to be care, cared about. He hates liberalism. He, he thinks it is the source of 1,001 evils that the United States and Europe are facing, and we need to get rid of it. And he’s not a Marxist, he’s not a Schmidttian, but he, he has a view and that that view has prominence. It has growing, growing prominence. And so the capaciousness doesn’t mean that there’s, there’s no fight to be had. There is, and maybe more of a fight now than some of us that hope, we hope we would need to have. There’s more of a, an intellectual fight now that’s, that’s necessary.
I’ve covered not nearly enough of the many terrific points you raise. I’d say that liberals of course acknowledge that illiberal and non-liberal and anti-liberal and postliberal smile, but liberals are anti-anti-laughter.
Okay. Okay. For Professor Ober, there’s so many great points there also. Let’s start with nudges, which is near and dear to my heart. Do you all have all night? You’re ready to be here till 4:00 AM?
So nudges are interventions that preserve freedom of choice, but that steer people in particular directions. So a GPS device is a nudge. If you think that it’s taking me to San Francisco and I want to go to Los Angeles, you can switch. Or if it’s tailoring you how to get to San Francisco in a way that you don’t like because it’s not a pretty enough or familiar enough route, you can reject what it’s saying, but it is nudging you to take this route.
If you go to a grocery store, there are nudges everywhere. They may tell you, this has shrimp in it, this has peanuts, this has a lot of salt, this has a lot of sugar. That’s a nudge. It preserves freedom and it’s an educative nudge. Just as a GPS is an educative nudge. There are architectural nudges. If you go on websites, they might have certain things very prominently and large font that are designed to say, this one you should do. That might be self-serving and against your interests. It might be a very good thing because the other ones wouldn’t see your circumstances. Your relationship with Stanford, if you have one, has a bunch of architectural nudges. There might be automatic enrollment in a retirement plan, that’s very typical. There might be automatic associations with students and faculties, but you can opt out. Those are all nudges. So nudges as either educative or architectural interventions that put the chooser in the driver’s seat but either inform you of something or automatic you into something. They are consistent with liberal principles ’cause they’re freedom preserving.
I think what Professor Ober is concerned about is a nudge that maybe offends some other liberal principle, like if people are nudged by automatically being white. If you wanna say you’re not white, you have to go to a special form and say, not white. Or if the political process as you’re automatically voting for a particular political party, that’s how you role the registered. And if you want to vote for someone other than that one, you have to register that that’s the person you want instead. So automaticity might offend liberal principles and there could be an educative thing that offends some liberal principle, like, you know, something that would endorse some political point of view and in a place where that would be elicit, maybe the university.
And there we’d need a set of liberal constraints on what nudges can promote. And, and we need that. We need a bill of rights for nudges, just as we need a bill of rights for other things. And that would be upbeat about non-prohibitive things, nudges aren’t prohibitive, but be nervous about even freedom, preserving things that buck up against a liberal commitment, like to freedom of speech or something.
There are a couple other points. I think I just wanna say one, which is I believe in the second bill of rights and the strong central government, but I honor liberal concerns about that. So the idea that there should be a right to education, a right to freedom from monopolies, a right to freedom from desperate conditions of the sorrow.
Roosevelt thought Montesquieu was for that, that’s a component of the liberal tradition. It’s my favorite. But those who think that that way lies madness and that private charity and self-help are, are better. Those who think that are my brothers and sisters and under the big tents, we will, look at each other, a little bit of sc but also with fondness and recognition.
Thank you. And we’re going to turn to the audience for questions here in just a moment, but I’m going to try to prime the pump by throwing out one question to Cass. I too love the book. The thing I probably love the most about it is, is that is the timeliness because I think, you know, Cass and I are both, we’re about the same age.
Most of our time together on, and participation in public life has been a time when there’s been a struggle between what I would call left liberals and right liberals, where, you know, left liberals are focusing much more on egalitarianism, loving of social change, maybe not so keen on traditional value, where right libertarian, right liberals, you know, focus more on the market, more on on equality of opportunity and merit and are rather fond of traditional values. On the, on the whole, that’s been the struggle. And I think that’s been, you know, it’s, it’s, those debates have seemed extremely important, but today, those struggles as I, as I think this book exemplifies pale and significance to the, the struggles between liberals, whether left, whether left liberals or right liberals against those who are not who don’t value liberal values at all.
And my real question for Cass, and I think maybe this is my, I think the weakness in the book, if it has a weakness, is that I, I would like to to see more self-reflection about how perhaps liberalism has brought about its own problems. Like, why is it that it is in the heart of liberalism that some of the more illiberal things in modern American life have come about?
Why is it that it’s in universities that we’ve had, we have refused to, we’ve started not hiring people onto faculties unless they sign onto a diversity statement, which is basically a loyalty oath to a particular ideology? Why is it that students coming out of universities express the highest levels of intolerance toward thought and speech that is, that they don’t agree with? I could, I could go on, but I don’t, I assume there must be explanations for why the most liberal institutions turn out to be the seed beds of the postliberal and anti-liberal results that you I think quite rightly warn us against.
It’s, it’s a really great question. And it’s kind of a sociology question about what happens to left liberal institutions that become illiberal. I’m, I’m gonna take a crack at it and I’ll tell you how I’m gonna take a crack at it. There’s one person interested in behavioral economics, at least in the room, and she knows who she is.
I’m gonna speak to all of you. I did some empirical work a number of years ago on outrage. Outrage, and it involved, bear with, stay with me for a moment, with outrage at corporate misconduct. And what we found in a massive study of regular Americans sorted in juries is if people are outraged, like, on a scale of zero to eight, at six in their individual capacity, the jury comes in at seven. There’s a severity shift. A group of people are kind of outraged, come in, really outraged. Now, why is that? It’s that a group of people who tend to think something, let’s say climate change is a serious problem after they talk to each other, will think we’re all gonna die because of climate change tonight. People end up spurring each other partly because of how information is exchanged, partly because of how people influence each other, reputationally, to get more and more upset. So outrage breeds more of the same. Now we found that high outrage bred high outrage, low outrage bred low outrage with dollars, punitive dollars.
Everybody got higher that if the jury wanted to award a damage award of a million dollars, the indivi, median individual, the jury came in at 2 million. If the median individual was a hundred million, the jury came in at 200 million. Always went up. Now we know that groups tend to end up in a more extreme position in line with their pre deliberation tendency with dollars.
Something weird happened. They’re all going up. And I think what’s what we concluded, and we have data supportive of this, is that if you have a group of people are mad at corporate misconduct, the side that wants more punishment is at an advantage. And the sign that wants less punishment kind of feels a little bit scared and in retreat.
So the more outrage people with respect to dollars, they just have a rhetorical upper head. And I think that’s what’s happened in the left. And maybe some of us have seen it in real time, where if you’re a group of people who think that racism’s bad and sexism’s bad, that’s very true. And then they talk to each other about some particular thing and they end up thinking something sincerely.
That is aproduct of something like the outrage machinery, where the particular position that falls out is a more extreme version of what they started out thinking and they haven’t encountered counter arguments that have legitimacy and haven’t we all seen this where people end up who were, let’s say, left liberal thinking?
And I know there’s a diversity of views in the room, but at least one group of left liberal people end up thinking something absurd, like you should say. I agree with you citing a, an oath of support for diversity to be hired. You know, I get, I get it, I get how that came about, but it’s an absurd thing.
And it came about as a result of some process like this where those asking for the signature have a rhetorical upper hand and those nervous about it. Feel a little bit like maybe they’re wrong or maybe they’re racist or something, and they should self silence. A lot of self silencing on the part of, and I’ve seen this at institutions, I’m not gonna name them, where people on the moderate left self silence because they don’t want, what’s the point?
You don’t wanna look like maybe you’re kind of racist or sexist and people on the right self-silence, because then they might be characterized in a way that wouldn’t be great for their next six months. And so I think it’s, this is, I think, inadequate, but it’s part of the story that it’s about the, the, the iron logic of social interactions rather than something intrinsic to liberalism.
So as you have questions, if you would please come to the microphones that are in the aisles and and speak into them. Make sure that they’re on too. That’s that’s sometimes a little bit tricky. I, I just, my quick reaction to what Cass just said though, I, I think your further research, and I’ve read a lot that you’ve written upon this, is that even a little bit of heterogeneity tends to break the cycle.
That it doesn’t actually take you know, 50% to to break it. But a certain and this leads me to think that maybe one of the crusades that liberals should be on within the university is to hire more conservatives.
I, I must say, I think what you just said is completely right, that there are some universities where some fields have only people on the left, and that’s terrible for, for them. I mean, first and foremost, it’s terrible for students. But for the people on the left, it’s terrible. So Mill said something like, he who knows, only his side knows basically nothing.
Hi thank you professors for all of you, like for the wonderful talk today. And from my perspective, I think we talk about two livos liberalism today. The first is a civic virtual livo liberalism. We talk about liberal citizens should be kind and open to differences. We also talk about institutional level liberalism.
We talk about democracy, rule of law, separation of power due process, these kind of things. And I want to ask you a question about the geopolitical level of liberalism. So from my perspective, I think the liberalism in geopolitical level is used as a hydrological weapon pen to distinguish friends and enemies.
The Trump administration always say like, the liberal countries should be cooperate together to resist the authoritarian countries, and we should export the liberalism as automated goodness to these countries and see the people living in this countries. I grew up in authoritarian country and I support the liberalism.
So for me, I think it’s okay, but I know like for a lot of people living in authoritarian countries, they will regard this as a higer hege. And I, from my perspec perspective, I also think like it is kind of contradictor with the pluralism principle of the liberalism. So I have two questions. The first one is, what’s your opinion about the liberalism is being used as a ideological weapon domestically and on a geopolitical level. And secondly do you think the liberalism should tolerate some non-liberal political orders? Thank you pr. Thank you. Okay, great. Le let’s suppose there’s a, a planet of Mars where there are four countries, let’s say two of them are liberal.
This is going to have a point. One is extremely powerful and one is moderately powerful. And then there are two other countries which have the same power, and the first two are liberal and the second two aren’t liberal. Now, it might be that on Mars, all four countries have to get along and for the liberal countries to use their liberalism as a, a hegemonic.
Term or something is in no one’s interest. So there’s a question of what the liberal countries ought to do to ensure that things are okay on Mars. And then there’s the question, what the liberal countries ought to do to help the people in the two countries. What form the illiberalism takes is like, is a critical question.
If people are being tortured and imprisoned for no reason or being shot, that then there’s a, an imperative. But how one responds to the imperative is not a straightforward question. It might be that there are strong responses that result in lots and lots of people getting healed, including the people in liberal countries.
Is, is this clear that the word hegemonic is rarely used as a statement of praise? So what? I wouldn’t say that the on Mars, the liberal country, hurray, it should be hegemonic. But we might say that it rightly deploys, let’s say, principles of the rule of law as argumentative measures designed to persuade.
But it shouldn’t be bombing the Martian illiberal countries. And it shouldn’t be humiliating them because humiliating people’s terrible. And it’s also counterproductive. So this might be a little abstract, should I say, when I, when I’ve dealt as occasionally I have with people in Russia and China, I felt it very important to honor the amazing traditions and achievements of those nations.
In a way that is sincere. So what the Soviet Union did in World War ii, that heroism and sacrifice that’s, you know, the world to say, the world benefited that from that is an understatement. And people in Russia are rightly, you know, insistent that, that be recognized. And what the, the Chinese, you know, we, the United States and China have some challenges together, but what, what the nation of China has done and has any country in the history of the world, had the economic advances of China in the past decades.
And those aren’t abstractions. Those are things that lift people out of terribleness to opportunity in decent lives. So the, the, I mean, that’s a, a direction that allows for maybe humble and what, we all have a lot to learn from each other. So I, I was in a non-democratic country not long ago, and they were, it was very formal.
It was formal engagement. And then at lunch they got informal and they said democracy can’t work. And they said, you can’t plan. This was a country that’s doing well in multiple ways. And say you’re, it’s not gonna work for you because you, it’s gonna be Obama and then Biden and Trump, and then Biden and then Trump.
It’s too, it’s just jumping all over the place. We don’t have that. And IL they, I gave some responses and I learned a lot from them. Now they knew a ton of things. I didn’t.
Just thank you everybody for a lovely event and I look forward to reading the book. I haven’t read it yet in Sohar as it’s a makeover for liberalism and meeting this sort of disdainful use of neoliberal that term neoliberal. I wanna sort of tie together what Professor McConnell was asking and the sort of question about civic education because how do liberals create more liberals if, if, if we exist in a an economic and social environment and a political geopolitical environment where outrage does sell and does win and has arguably more power than its historically had.
That’s an empirical question I’m not willing to answer. But is it with a pat on the back and a friendly smile that liberals create more liberals or is there a role for education in this process? And I think, I just wanna tie it to one other question that was asked about. This idea of history and its sort of progression through time.
I think these are related questions. ’cause liberalism, it sounds like to me you’re talking about an intentionality towards a broad tent, an intentional sort of acceptance of others. And I wanted to know if that’s, if that is the sort of driving, if that’s the driving force of this ship, if that’s where it’s going somewhere.
And how it intentionally sort of creates that community in a world that presents more challenges to it than it might have had in the, in the past few decades. Centuries. So thank you. There’s a lot there. So I live in Concord, Massachusetts, which is where I went to Middlesex school by the way. You did?
You and me. Both of us. Yeah. I just, I should mention that. Yeah. Okay. Amazing. So we shouldn’t just be talking the two of us about Middlesex and our Russell and our common teachers. And would you all be interested in that? So, so my, my kids go to, my daughter goes to Con Concord Public School, and there’s a ton of history.
It has. You would expect it in Concord, wouldn’t you? It has. I can’t tell whether the teachers are left or right. They’re teaching about American history and they’re teaching about the constitution and separation of powers, and they’re making, even to say they’re making. All citizens. Sounds a little grading in my ear.
Maybe it’s because I think it sounds liberal, sounds left. They’re making people who are honoring American traditions that are instantiated in the Declaration of Independence and in the articles of condemnation, the Constitution, they teach all that stuff and that’s that that marks the, the kids. That’s, that’s a good thing to do.
So your comment about diversity statements, which I generally agree with, made me think of the Overton window, which is there are things that are out of bounds. So for example, my guess, if I had to forecast the number of professors at Stanford that believe in the flat earth theory or Holocaust denial is pretty low.
Is there any, does it make sense in liberalism? To have an Overton window where there are things that are out bounds. Okay. Well, under the, I’m, my lawyer’s instincts are kicking in here. So if you say by my book, you’ll never lose your hair, that’s both self, self-evidently it’s unlikely. And, and also fraud.
If, if I said, if you don’t buy my book, I’m gonna burn down a building in circumstances in which there’s a clear and present danger that that’s not protective. So I’d want to, I’d want to build up from what I think is a, you know, very well thought through tradition of freedom of speech. That’s not adequate for you.
If someone says, the Holocaust didn’t happen or the earth is flat, that’s okay. Liberals say, bring it on. Let’s talk about that. So things that are super wrong or super offensive are genuinely permiss generally and genuinely permissible even on campus. So if people say things that many would find offensive, and I’m reluctant to say some of those things for obvious reasons, think of something really bad by your lights.
If someone says that at Stanford, that’s okay, and but it would be okay to deny a professorship to somebody who advocates spider. Oh, not because their viewpoint is wrong, but because the factual predicate is so weak. So if you say, I am not gonna hire a physicist who thinks that, and then fill in the blank, it’s not because you disagree with the point of view, it’s just incompetent.
What would be viewpoint neutral? If you have a English professor who says the real meaning of Hamlet is that the Soviet Revolution was good and hasn’t really been completed, that’s not competent. So it’s, it seems to me that one of the cardinal aspects of liberalism is a willingness to live in society with disagreement.
And that would preclude, for example refusing to accept the outcome of an election. That, that’s that, that’s a you have to live with that disagreement that the voters have spoken a different way. But I wanna zero in on a couple things, a, about agreement and disagreement in society and tie together.
Some of the comments at the end with, with one of your points. ’cause I think there’s a contradiction. You said that studies have shown that there’s a preference for individual agency and that people would like to keep their agency even if it means losing more money. Well, let’s, let’s talk about that because I think that we see today in society a absolute subordination of individual agency to the power of the network.
I think that we see in the Epstein network, many, many people, many honored professors, brilliant minds, subordinated their own academic interests in favor of getting a lot of money for their program and universities chasing money from donors are. Distorting what the universities would wish to do, but for the money that’s going to name a building or name a program.
And this ties together, I think the fact that I’ve spoken to a bunch of students on their college choices and they don’t say, I’m gonna get the best education. They say, I’m gonna make the best network by going to this college, and I’m gonna do a startup, and that’s why I want to go there. That which is, so let’s just put a question mark at the end of that.
I I will. No. So, so the question is, isn’t there a, a real problem that we have created groups in our society with SHIs or men or performative obligations, and on the right side, it’s wearing your lapel pin with a, with a flag or something like that? Is it really true that, that we have a preference for individual agency when the SHIs dominate our society so heavily.
What I’m thinking as you talk about networks, and since I’m staying at the Stanford Park Hotel, I’m thinking I really need to go to Stanford, but I’m not sure my SATs are good enough. So, Michael, you write me a recommendation or maybe I have some outside at, that’s a lovely note upon which to end this event.
But I, there’s several, I I, we are going over time now, but I’d like to have, have a few more questions, but maybe quick ones. Oh yeah, I can start. I’m Catherine. I’m a student at Harvard Extension School. I primarily study genocide. So what struck me about liberalism is the idea that you are imparting these the, the freedom so the idea of freedom and, and these nudges that exist.
So I guess I was wondering, it seems that it works very well internally, but it starts to break down externally. So at what point do does this awareness of others and awareness of other people’s thoughts and versus. At what point does this does a difference of opinion then? Ex expend sorry, I’m not speaking clearly.
At what point does it drive a need to act? So when you’re looking at liberalism and the way that it’s used in other countries in the world and when atrocities start to occur at what point is it a nudge versus at what point does it become a coercive push as some of the other professors there, it should say poorly phrased?
No, it’s, it’s beautifully phrased, so, and I completely get it. So we we have a division of labor in my family, so my wife ambassador. Power investors who have the power literally wrote the book on genocide. So I defer to her on all these, on all these matters. I think with fear and trembling, what she’s saying is that with respect to atrocities at least, and there’s a toolbox of, of things that one can do and that there are things that are potentially effective that are softer than things that are potentially effective, that are harder.
And that’s all I’m gonna say about that. Even shorter, perhaps. In your talk professor, we heard you drew extensively from the examples of historical figures who had direct experience with Illiberalism. So my question is, do you think the current skepticism towards liberalism is in part a result of amnesia of catastrophes that haven’t in the 20th century?
And to what extent? The revival of liberalism entail experience with Illiberalism besides the theoretical knowledge of liberal principles themselves. I think that’s a great point. So there are rights that we can all think of that are a product of, you know, the right conception of rights where we might be deontologists or utilitarians or something else.
But as a matter of lived experience, if you read the, either the Constitution or the declaration or the universal Declaration of Human Rights, rights come out of lived experience of wrongs. And it might be that some of the liberal stuff comes out with real experience of terribleness in liberal societies and those objections to those think practices are things liberals have to take on board ’cause they’re fair.
Now are they objections to liberalism? In my view, no. But there are objections to something for Illiberals to live in an illiberal society would be to produce as you’re suggesting a revision of opinion. Yes, I understand. Thank you.
In the heart of Silicon Valley, I want to ask about nudges and when they become the liberal data allows us to architect choice. Given the amount of data that’s collected, processed the amount of information that we’re inundated with. When do nudge just become a liberal? Okay, so Thaylor and I define nudges as things that make people better off as judged by themselves.
So if people are nudged to save for retirement and then say, great, I’m glad. Then there’s a check. If they’re nudged, not like dollars, but like a check mark. If they’re nudged to save for retirement and they think, what are you doing to me? I need the money now. Then the, the libertarian paternal would say, well, ask for the money now You get it.
All you have to do is press a button. But if that’s not there, then there’s a problem. So we’d wanna know, are the people being nudged favorably disposed of the thing? If not, there’s a problem. It might be okay if they aren’t favorably disposed, but they can exit like that. If they’re being nudged in a direction that violates independent liberal principles, then they stand condemned for that reason.
There’s a lot of manipulation out there that maybe could be confused with nudging, particularly by private sector. And we need an account of what manipulation is that distinguishes them from nudges. If one person on the panel has written a book on that topic, don’t be surprised. So would everyone please join me in thanking Cass and our and the other speakers for an extremely stimulating conversation.