Doing without Liberalism

Abstract

AN THE INSTITUTIONS of liberal democracy subsist without liberalism? There has been much wishful thinking on this question of late, even (one might say especially)'among liberals.' Indeed it is a symptom of the crisis of liberalism that to so many minds it now seems possible to pluck out liberalism, and yet preserve all that has been achieved in and by liberal democracy, under the protection of its limited governments and on the basis of its liberal consensions.2 Another symptom is the wide appeal of the argument that this possibility is a necessity, because liberal principles have lost their footing in reason or science, and hence their former power to justify and persuade. The burden of this argument is that the institutions to which we are accustomed in the liberal democracies, on which we are in practice wholly dependent, and without which neither a secure nor a good life is conceivable to most of us, must be divorced from their original roots in liberal political philosophy, so that they may be formed anew, on other principles, into a coherent, legitimate, working whole.3 It is to this possibility or necessity that Max Weber's thinking on the crisis of liberalism is addressed, in one of its most significant but neglected strains.4 To bring out this,strain is the purpose of the present essay. The concern of Weber's regime politics is to make liberal democracy such a working whole, or to form a political community of