High Liberalism, Market Democracy, and Basic Liberty
Sam Arnold, Post Doctoral Fellow at Stanford's Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University
“High liberalism” and “market democracy”—two rival interpretations of liberalism—part ways primarily over the proper place of economic liberty within a liberal framework. High liberals (like Rawls and JS Mill) subordinate economic liberty to other values, such as distributive justice and basic liberty. Market democrats (like John Tomasi) reject this subordination of economic liberty. Using high liberal premises, they argue that thick economic liberties are crucial for the development and exercise of moral personality, and therefore count as basic liberties alongside freedom of expression, religion, assembly, the political liberties, and all the other usual suspects. In this paper, I argue that both camps are wrong. After reconstructing the high liberal filter that sorts basic from non-basic liberties, I show that thick economic liberties do not pass this filter—bad news for market democrats. But I also show that several familiar civil and political liberties fail to pass this filter, too—bad news for high liberals. Either we keep the filter and live with an implausibly short list of basic liberties, or we return to the drawing board and devise a new foundational account of basic liberty.