Six

This chapter assesses the problem of liberalism. Liberal society is based on a principle of freedom: each person has a claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties. The problem was that liberalism had been so extraordinarily effective at specifying the conditions of a free society that it could produce an answer to every political question. One almost forgets the whole point of a free society was to let people decide important questions in their own lives. The new America is founded on a different principle. This can be called the principle of unreality: everyone can pursue their own happiness so long as they refrain from imposing it on others as something real—as something valid for all. One way to think about the principle is to note that a society may be richer in human possibilities if it allows for the existence of illiberal ways of life, but in that case it is the value of diversity or experimentation that is being pursued, not the values defended by those ways of life. Citizens must be at liberty to adopt and abandon different values, to enter or exit different experiments in living. The state must recognize and enforce this right to enter and leave.