Reappraising the Scottish Moralists and Civil Society

Abstract

Michael Sandel and others have faulted liberal constitutionalism for its "proceduralism," its "bracketing" of divisive moral issues, and its pursuit of the "unencumbered self." As a contemporary diagnosis, there is much to be said on behalf of these criticisms. Yet in recounting the story of liberalism's development as the deliberate and inevitable pursuit of moral individuality, these accounts fail to consider the anticipated benefits-as well as the costs-of modern constitutionalism that were evident to eighteenth-century thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith. We will see that classical liberals like Hume and Smith did not defend liberal constitutionalism in the name of the "unencumbered self." Instead they saw liberal neutrality, the separation between public and private, and the relegation of religion to a private matter of civil society as the best way to accommodate sectarianism, ethical pluralism and the religious conflicts of the post-Reformation world. Only by challenging contemporary presumptions of liberal teleology and by understanding classical liberalism's development as the product of eighteenth-century encounters with the perils of pluralism can we fully reckon the advantages and disadvantages of liberal constitutionalism. These lessons of classical liberalism suggest both the presumptive virtues of liberalism and the dangers of communitarian efforts to encourage shared purposes and a thicker public life in the modern polity.