Place-Based Liberalism

Abstract

Place-Based Liberalism envisions the local political community as a fundamental site of liberal political power, identity, and normativity. An effective liberal institution must be to some extent federalist — that is, involving decentralized subnational political jurisdictions that are decentralized to some degree — and the most theoretically and practically attractive form of liberalism requires citizens having the right relation to both the local and national polity. The following seven chapters develop various aspects of this program. The first chapters develop moral grounds for the project. Chapter 1 focuses on Rawlsian political liberalism, which I interpret as seeking the most stable liberal democratic constitutional form. Chapter 2 develops the value of political solidarity. Chapter 3, on civic friendship, partly combines these themes: the value of civic friendship, which is a kind of solidarity, may itself be built into the Rawlsian stability framework. Chapter 4 develops possible practical implications of these arguments, and specifically defends promoting greater local sovereignty in a federalist political system. Local sovereignty is most powerful and defensible when citizens generally have mobility rights: that is, the ability to move among a diverse set of local jurisdictions. Chapter 5 theorizes the sufficiency conditions for mobility rights in terms of the necessary resources for mobility and the range of options necessary for mobility. Chapter 6 theorizes the underlying account of autonomy embodied by mobility rights. Chapter 7 connects place-based liberalism to the contemporary crisis of loneliness, arguing that broadly communitarian ideals could be embodied in place-based liberalism compatible with an appropriately-interpreted principle of liberal neutrality. These chapters may be themed in different ways. Chapters 4 and 7 are the most relevant for contemporary political discourse. Chapters 1 and 3 each concern Rawlsian political liberalism, and chapter 4 may be viewed as a direct upshot of those discussions. Chapters 2 and 3 pursue the related concepts of political solidarity and civic friendship. Chapters 5 and 6 may respectively be of independent interest to theorists of consent and autonomy, and jointly form what I believe is the most sustained focused discussion in the literature of the conditions for mobility or exit rights. These chapters also jointly make the case that place-based liberalism genuinely satisfies, through mobility rights, the minimal conditions of liberal justice. Chapters 2 and 7 focus on the freestanding political values of solidarity and social health. This sets them apart as yet another pairing, but the stability of liberal institutions and the values that those institutions achieve are related concerns. Citizens must see their state as valuable if it is to be stable. The best way to achieve this is for the state to in fact achieve a wide array of substantive, political, and social values. The background perspective of the dissertation is instrumentalist and practical. As I foreground in chapter 4, liberalism is widely believed to be in a moment of crisis. We must not simply resist threats to liberalism, but also reassess the basic foundations and institutions of liberalism in response to those threats. I do not directly argue for liberalism’s value here, but instead presuppose that a broadly liberal form of democratic constitutional government is, so far as we currently know, by far the best way to arrange a state — but only if liberalism can sustain itself at all. I do, however, attempt to directly and indirectly answer a variety of critiques of liberalism, mainly by showing how capacious a place-based form of liberalism can be regarding ideological, religious, social, and communitarian pluralism. Liberalism can only succeed if liberal citizens flourish. Place-based liberalism makes room for a very wide array of flourishing ways of life, while preserving the fundamental liberal commitment that individuals must not be oppressed by their society.