For a Liberal Pessimism

There are good reasons for liberal pessimism. Every liberal knows the sad arc of world history since 1992, the sudden vertiginous rise of liberal hopes, the long, bumpy descent into the grim present and its populism. There are, however, older and deeper reasons for liberal pessimism which are less evident. Liberals have been far too optimistic for far too long, leaving them ripe for disappointment. In particular, they have been too optimistic about the political fruits of education and the political consequences of a growing middle class. Properly understood, however, a more pessimistic view of the world might be grounds for optimism. A pessimistic liberalism with more limited objectives is a liberalism that can succeed where an optimistic liberalism is bound to fail; a liberalism that aims for “enough” can offer a moral foundation sturdier than a liberalism of absolute rights. Harry Frankfurt’s Theory of Sufficiency provides a way for liberals to express the pessimistic yet hopeful stance that the liberalism of the twenty-first century needs to embrace.

It may seem unnatural for liberals to adopt the pessimism traditionally associated with a conservative worldview. After all, optimism is the liberal inheritance: “We are reformers: we are on the side of progress… we infer, not that there is no more room for improvement, but… immense improvements may be confidently expected.” Thus wrote the prominent British Whig Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1833 and thus has been the liberal creed ever since  (“Sir James Mackintosh”, Edinburgh Review, July 1833, 162).  Although liberalism came into being with the seemingly modest goal of creating a society in which no one need be afraid, liberalism has always been firmly grounded in hope. More than that, liberal hopes have been undergirded by faith in progress. Liberals’ faith in progress is often traced back to the Enlightenment. This is based on a whole series of historical misconceptions, and correcting those misconceptions is a necessary starting point for correcting the liberal course today. 

Political theorists who discuss the Enlightenment often speak about a so-called “Enlightenment Project.” Use of that term in English-language publications began around 1980 and has spread rapidly since. Historians, however, rarely if ever use the term. They insist on the plurality of Enlightenment projects, distinguishing between the “radical” and the “moderate” Enlightenment, among English, Scottish, French, and German enlightenments, and generally challenging the idea that the citizens of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters were any more unanimous in their desires than the citizens of any other republic. 

But there are still important lessons liberals today can draw from the eighteenth century. Unlike most nineteenth-century liberals, most eighteenth-century thinkers did not believe that progress was inevitable, merely that it was possible. Despite famous exceptions like Condorcet, most Enlightenment writers were cautious in their optimism, and very conscious of the possibility of backsliding. They had high hopes, but were content with modest progress. Indeed, they considered modest progress a great achievement, and one that was by no means guaranteed. Twenty-first century liberals, I would suggest, can learn from this relative pessimism. 

Another important lesson can be learned from Enlightenment thinkers’ views on education. Perhaps the only area in which it actually makes some sense to talk about an “Enlightenment Project” is education. The philosophes were united in thinking that education was the key to the future, and they were resolutely pedagogical. They passed this attitude on to nineteenth and twentieth-century liberals. Again, however, eighteenth-century writers were much more restrained in their hopes than their successors. Most of the earlier thinkers argued that education, at least secondary education, was not for everyone (the philosophes debated this question fiercely). Sometimes this was a social question: educating the poor would only leave them dissatisfied in a world incapable of offering middle-class status to more than a small minority of people. This concern may well seem elitist and/or outdated. 

But the limits on education recognized by canonical Enlightenment heroes went much deeper. Kant, in What is Enlightenment, argued that the majority would never be enlightened, that is capable of thinking for themselves, not because of their poverty, lack of leisure, or social situation, but because they were afraid of freedom.There was an enlightened “public,” which one might hope to see grow, and which indeed has grown, but these were the “scholars” capable of contributing to debate through their writings. Most people preferred (and still prefer) to be fooled rather than to independently pursue the truth. Even Rousseau, in one of his more pessimistic moments in Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques, admitted that “the public is fooled. I see it, I know it. But it likes being fooled and would not like to be undeceived.” 

By contrast, nineteenth and twentieth century liberal thinkers, from Tocqueville to Dewey, adopted a wildly exaggerated optimism about the political and moral effects of both practical and formal education. Kant’s recognition that the spread of critical thinking would be forever limited to a minority was rejected by John Dewey. The many participatory-democracy theorists of today keep trying to reproduce Tocqueville’s idealized image of town-meeting America, undiscouraged by repeated failure. The eighteenth-century philosophes liked to appeal from the indomitable ignorance of the present to a wiser posterity. Nineteenth-century liberals thought they were that wiser posterity, and that future generations would be wiser still. Liberals at the end of the twentieth century thought this was true. The best that can be said is that it was not entirely false.

Since the French Revolution, education has been the great hope of both reformers and revolutionaries. Nineteenth and twentieth century liberals were convinced that the road to progress led through the school gates. Education was sometimes broadly construed: Tocqueville thought that the Americans of 1831 were the best-educated people in the world, not because of their (limited) formal education, but because they were the most learned in the arts of free association and local self-government (Democracy in America). They also possessed almost universal literacy, and this was the yardstick of progress for many liberals. In France Jules Ferry thought it was necessary to make primary education obligatory for girls, the better to emancipate them from the Church. Later the goal became not just universal primary education, but secondary school as well. Liberals led the way to raising school-leaving ages for all. Today, attempting to prove that education really is the key to improved political behaviour, liberals in Europe and America point to the education gap that divides populist voters from liberal ones: people who have gone to university are far less likely to vote for populists. 

It is easy to show that even this is hardly guaranteed. In Weimar Germany, the Nazis and other extreme nationalist groups found considerable support for their populist appeals among university faculty and students. When confronted with the fact that Germany, one of the most educated nations in the world, supported Hitler, all Dewey could find to say in response was that this showed that the Germans had received the wrong kind of education. If they had only followed his educational prescriptions, they certainly would not have done so. Variations on this fatuous response are frequently heard today. And even if it is true that university training is a moderately effective vaccine against populism, the dominant Enlightenment view that the spread of education beyond basic literacy faces insurmountable limits seems to have been proven correct as well. Over time, the educational bar it is necessary to clear in order to build a liberal public has risen ever higher—and the likelihood of a majority, much less everyone, clearing it has grown ever less. Neither universal elementary education, nor universal secondary education, have produced reliably liberal outcomes, and the spread of university education seems to have peaked. Indeed, today one increasingly hears remarks to the effect that too many people are going to university with regard to both professional prospects and intellectual abilities. But even if everyone went to university, we would likely discover that the misgivings of Kant and Rousseau are well-founded in a world of social media, fake news, and “critical thinkers” who decide to throw off the yoke of authority and refuse to vaccinate their children. The liberal posterity the Enlightenment hoped education would birth has not come to pass. If one expects education to guarantee a liberal world, pessimism is in order. As many Enlightenment thinkers recognized, education, while useful, is not a panacea. 

Alongside education, many eighteenth-century writers discussed the growth of the middle classes, which they considered grounds for optimism. That growth accelerated in the next century, and Macaulay and his fellow nineteenth-century liberals saw the rise of the middle classes as providing an ever-increasing source of support for liberalism. Macaulay wrote of the middle class that it “has taken its immovable stand between the enemies of all order and the enemies of all liberty. It will have reform: it will not have revolution: it will destroy political abuses: it will not suffer the rights of property to be assailed,” (“Speech in the House of Commons on the Reform Bill”, December 16, 1831). The idea that the middle class represents virtue, justice, the common good, the golden mean, and every other imagined political merit is of course far older than the nineteenth century or the Enlightenment: Aristotle sang the praises of the middle class in his Politics (1296b38). According to Aristotle, among many other virtues, only a large middle class can give stability to a constitution. 

Here, unlike with respect to education, few have ever seen reason to deny that the middle class could expand indefinitely (Marx did, but that was another of his wrong predictions). This optimism seems justified from a contemporary perspective: in the twenty-first century being “middle class” is not only the situation of the majority, but the desire of almost everyone. Regardless of objective circumstances, at least in America, most poor people and most rich people persist in describing themselves as middle class: in 2018 a survey found that 89% of Americans considered themselves middle class. America is not exceptional in this: 76% of Poles felt the same way in 2019.

Alas, the consequences of the growth of the middle classes have been far from what Aristotle, Macaulay, and their fellows expected. Liberal democracies have not become ever-more stable. Extremism, particularly nationalist extremism, seems to be a view held by quite a few middle-class people in many times and places. Seymour Martin Lipset argued that fascism in the 1930s was the extremism of the center, based on middle-class support, an argument that found considerable resonance. Today, middle-class people regularly support populist parties world-wide. Donald Trump won roughly 50% of the middle-class vote in the US in 2024.

Liberals thus have reason to rethink the social foundations of their optimism. Giving people a little property, just like giving them a little education, is not enough to make them liberals. There is no strong correlation between the rise of the middle class, liberalism, and progress, a classic (and classical) liberal understanding of history. Liberals cannot assume that the middle class will always be on their side. Property and education have proven to be much weaker supports than liberals assumed in the past and still overtly or tacitly assume today. So much for the fabled alliance of Bildung und Besitz, education and property, so dear to nineteenth-century liberals! 

This is not to say that greater education and a broader middle class have done nothing to advance the liberal cause. They have. But, as Schumpeter wrote of the political effects of universal education, “results are not zero. But they are small. People cannot be carried up the ladder.” Neither education nor property have done what liberals expected them to do. There is no reason to expect them to do so in the future. The natural liberal majority, the inherently liberal public, that liberals expected the spread of education and the wider distribution of property to produce does not exist today—and there is no reason to believe, in the year 2026, that it will ever exist. 

Is despair then all that is left for liberals and liberalism? To strengthen their besieged citadels—supra-national institutions like the EU, national supreme courts, constitutions—while knowing that sooner or later the illiberal barbarians will smash down the gates? 

The first thing liberals need to recognize in order to find a path out of despair is that the people of today are the people of tomorrow. There will always be momentary changes in public opinion that raise or dash liberal hopes, but we should recognize them as just that. There is no reason to expect the emergence of a permanent liberal majority, much less a 99.4% pure liberal public. The utility of pessimism is that it moderates hopes that might otherwise be ruinous. In order to avoid despair, liberals have to stop imagining that a 100%—or even 75%—liberal society is the way things are supposed to be, because with that expectation, reality becomes an unbearably gloomy prospect, and optimism becomes impossible. Real pessimism is in order if optimism requires achieving utopia. 

The second thing liberals need to recognize is how well-off we actually are. This is ironic, in a sense. Liberals have been losing elections for years by telling people they didn’t realize how well-off liberalism had made them—the defeat of Joe Biden in the United States is only one example of this. But liberals are doing much better than one might think from all the gloom and doom headlines. The socio-economic-intellectual and even popular basis of liberalism today is wider and deeper than it has ever been in the past. 

In Kant’s time the number of people whom he would have considered enlightened, critical thinkers probably did not attain 5% of the population. Today they are perhaps 25%. That is the percentage of the British population that David Goodhart identifies as “Anywheres”: people who place a high value on autonomy and mobility, are generally highly educated, tend to support meritocracy and expertise, are comfortable with immigrants and human rights talk, etc. The Anywheres are not exactly identical with liberals as such, nor are they the only critical thinkers, but the overlap is roughly good enough. Maybe there are fewer of them in some countries than in the UK, but they number far more than 5% of the population. Throughout the Western world, and beyond. Kant would have been astonished and delighted. 

Liberalism has not made the enormous progress the liberals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries confidently expected. But at the price of the immense holocausts of the twentieth century, and alongside the amazing progress of technology, wealth, and education that have taken place since Kant and Tocqueville wrote, it has made progress, perhaps even more progress than most Enlightenment writers expected. The cup is not half full, but it is not down to the last few drops, either. Twenty-five percent is a lot of people. Having one out of four voters committed to liberalism is actually a solid foundation for building a majority—provided one is capable of speaking a language that makes sense to those not already members of the tribe. 

Liberals therefore need to shake off the inclination to retreat into their citadels and reinforce the gates. They need to leave their rhetorical comfort zone, and engage with questions they have preferred not to discuss. This means being able to use not just political and economic but also moral and religious language, and furthermore moral language that makes sense to people who are not already liberals. I have made the case for liberalism’s need to return to the three-pillared (freedom, markets, and morals—or politics, economics and morality/religion) arguments of the nineteenth century. For all its misplaced optimism, the nineteenth century remains in many respects the pattern for the strongest moral (and other) arguments for liberalism. 

The liberalism of the nineteenth or even twentieth centuries cannot simply be cut and pasted onto the twenty-first, however. Today’s fears are different, and they call for different responses. Liberals need to find new moral, political, and economic vocabulary. They cannot simply repeat the mantras of John Stuart Mill, the Ordo-Liberals, Isaiah Berlin, or John Rawls, to name a few names commonly invoked in contemporary efforts to reconstruct liberalism. They were all, with the partial exception of Berlin, too optimistic by far. Below I will briefly outline what an appropriately pessimistic language of liberalism might look like. By “appropriately pessimistic” I mean one whose goals are more achievable than those of the nineteenth and twentieth-century liberal optimists, but are nonetheless utopian. Liberals must still aim to create a society which has never yet existed, that is, one in which all people are free from fear. But they must not aim at a society which cannot and will not exist, which was the goal of so many nineteenth and twentieth-century liberals who placed what turned out to be unwarranted hopes in property and education.

A longstanding weakness of liberalism has been its vulnerability to being outbid by its opponents, both right and left. This has put liberals at a severe disadvantage in the political game. You liberals say you are for equality? Well, we socialists will match your equality before the law and raise you an egalitarian redistribution of wealth. You offer the people a social safety net? Well, see the enormous welfare state we propose! You liberals may claim to be nationalists, as was the case in nineteenth-century Poland, Italy, and Germany, or patriots, as some liberals like to say today—well, we anti-semites/fascists/populists will offer far more nationalism than you liberals can stomach. In rebuttal, the language of the juste milieu adopted by nineteenth-century liberals, like the vocabulary of moderation, pragmatism, universalism, and professional expertise offered by liberals today, looks like a watered-down substitute for the unadulterated measures offered by illiberals of all sorts. All honor to the moderate and pragmatic among us, but without a certain amount of theoretical backbone, moderation and pragmatism appear illogical or timid, not to say cowardly. Liberals need a convincing vocabulary—and policy proposals that match—that can be applied politically, economically, and morally, one that has built into it a rejection of the illiberalism of right and left. 

The theoretical keyword of such a liberal vocabulary and policy agenda is sufficiency. People need enough, not the same. Sufficient money; sufficient education; sufficient opportunity; sufficient access to political power; sufficient freedom of speech; sufficient community; sufficient status; a sufficient feeling of national pride. In all these areas, “having less [than others] is compatible, after all, with having quite a bit.” When people judge their own well-being, “with respect to none of these considerations… is it essential for [a person] to measure his circumstances against the circumstances of anyone else.” If a person has enough resources to satisfy their needs, they have enough money, and “the same goes for rights, for respect, for consideration, and for concern.” 

The quotations come from the recently-deceased American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s 2015 book On Inequality (pp. 74, 65, 7), essentially based on articles from the 1980s. He does not relate his theory of sufficiency to liberalism, a word he never uses, probably because in the American context the word “liberalism” is strongly associated with the egalitarianism he rejects. Indeed, he claims that the doctrine of sufficiency “is not inspired or shaped by any social or political ideology.” But it ought to shape twenty-first century liberalism. 

As Frankfurt puts it, “from the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough. If everyone had enough money, it would be of no special or deliberate concern whether some people had more money than others.” The doctrine of sufficiency gives liberals morally plausible and convincing arguments with which to answer egalitarians, rather than merely pragmatic ones. This is crucial, for, as Frankfurt noted, “the widespread error of believing that there are powerful moral reasons for caring about economic equality for its own sake is far from innocuous. As a matter of fact, this belief tends to do significant harm.” This is because “to the extent that people are preoccupied with economic [or any other kind of] equality… their readiness to be satisfied” is “not guided by their own most distinctive interests and ambitions. Instead, it is guided just by the quantity of money that other people happen to have.” In short, when people think that equality is morally important, envy becomes justified, and this leads to resenting any and all inequalities as harmful and unjust. Thus the idea that people ought to have the same amount of money and many other goods “contributes to the moral disorientation and shallowness of our time” (On Inequality, pp. 9, 14).

A liberal society is one that encourages all kinds of people to flourish as much as they are able, without fear.  The results are inevitably diverse, which is to say: unequal. Liberalism requires a safety net, a floor, but rejects any ceiling on what people may accomplish. Democratic society presupposes equal status among individuals and among communities. Envy has existed in all times and places, but as Tocqueville and many others have pointed out, people are far more inclined to envy those they consider their equals, and today we all consider each other as equals. Thus in liberal democratic societies envy and resentment for diversity and inequality have unprecedented scope for rapid expansion. The very success of liberalism is therefore self-destructive: it creates the conditions for the envy and resentment that are deadly to liberalism to flourish. 

This, not the lack of values that conservatives allege, is the real reason that liberalism has often been its own gravedigger. Today liberalism is under assault from all kinds of envy and resentment, frequently cloaked as demands for equality. The attacks are not a temporary result of the economic dislocations caused by globalization, nor the social disorientation caused by the shrinking of traditional religious belief and expansion of LGBTQI+ parades. It has been a recurrent factor in our societies for the past century or more.

As liberalism has lost its connection to moral vocabulary, it has been increasingly unable to respond to resentment, provide relief to envy, and offer an alternative to the language of resentful victimization that the illiberal left and right so often use. The language of sufficiency, which implies corresponding political, economic, and moral/religious attitudes and policies, is a means of persuading people to accept a liberal government and a liberal society as legitimate. Of course, liberals will retain a vestigial hope that over time, nudged by education and experience, the people become ever more liberal—but this is not something to be counted on. 

The language of sufficiency, of enough, will not resolve disputes about abortion (although it may offer opportunities to compromise), and just what is “enough” offers a wide field for debate. But it has something to offer, in both theory and practice. The campaign slogans are obvious: “All children should have enough ______ ! Everyone needs sufficient _______!” But more than campaign slogans, the idea that as long as everyone has sufficient access to transportation, whether by bus, subway, or car,  it doesn’t matter if some drive 10-year-old Chevys while others drive a new luxury car, or if some live in McMansions while others have just a reasonable amount of living space, can help people focus on real needs, not inflated desires. It is a moral mistake to talk about “abundance,” because the word implies having much more than just enough. By contrast, in its minimalism (which of course can vary from one variation to another), the language of enough builds bridges to environmentalists and Greens, and for that matter to Christian thought. 

The theory of sufficiency still lets us criticize billionaires, not because they violate equality, but because they do harm, or because of other moral failings. Frankfurt himself wrote that “our basic focus should be on reducing both poverty and excessive affluence”—the latter because, in his view, it leads to giving individuals too much political power. This is actually an empirical question whose answer is unclear. The far stricter campaign finance laws of many countries as compared to the United States have not obviously resulted in improved political outcomes. Envy purifies the cloudy empirical data. It is further clarified by the idea that in a democracy everyone ought to have equal political power. But this is impossible. Taylor Swift’s voice will naturally be better heard than most people’s.  Instead of demanding the impossible, that all should exercise equal political power, that all should be motivated to participate in politics, that everyone should have equal opportunities, we can demand sufficient opportunities for all to participate, and for all to exercise some (enough) degree of political influence—if they want to. 

Morally, however,  billionaires pose a different problem: it seems they don’t know what enough is. They are financial gluttons—and gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Today the idea of stigmatizing and shaming the obese seems illiberal—except when it comes to those with excessively fat wallets. Unlike the physically obese, however, billionaires clearly want to be what they are. It is legitimate to question whether enormous wealth is a way for individuals to flourish, and such questioning has a long history. Should there be a “fat tax” on billionaires? This is what a wealth tax amounts to, if it is conceived as a device to create greater equality, and a sufficientarian view would argue against it. On the other hand, there is nothing in the theory of sufficiency to rule out a progressive income tax, not to bring everyone to the same level, but to require a sufficient contribution from each towards creating a society in which all have enough.

An important potential by-product of turning the liberal struggle with populism into a discussion about what is “enough” is that it helps to lessen liberal contempt for the kinds of people who support populism, a contempt that is highly counter-productive. This is a necessary and not an easy task. For an American liberal to refrain from contempt for a Trump voter, for a French liberal to refrain from contempt for a supporter of Marine Le Pen, for a Polish liberal to respect a supporter of Kaczyński, is an act of heroism equivalent to turning the other cheek. But the salvation of liberalism requires it. 

How does the theory of sufficiency help bridge the liberal/populist divide? Frankfurt himself gave a prescient warning of populism and of what provokes it that deserves quotation in full: 

Experiences of being ignored – of not being taken seriously, of not counting, of being unable to make one’s presence felt or one’s voice heard – may be profoundly disturbing. They often trigger in people an extraordinarily protective response, which may be quite incommensurate in its intensity with the magnitude of damage to their objective interests that is actually threatened. The classic articulation of this response is in the limitlessly reckless cry to “let justice be done, though the heavens may fall”
(Frankfurt, On Inequality, 86-7)

It is not the denial of an impossible equality, of no moral and little objective importance, that provokes rage and resentment, but the all-important denial of respect. Respect is about demanding that one be seen for oneself. In this we all have an equal right to recognition. When it comes to respect, the only way to make sure all have enough is to give everyone the same. Where liberals cannot offer equality, they can offer respect. Only by distinguishing equal respect for all from the egalitarian envy that superficially appears to make the same claim, can the resentment that overflows within today’s democratic societies be decreased enough for liberalism to acquire legitimacy among those who despise it. This is a necessity for a stable liberal society. 

The mere stability of a liberal society may seem to be a modest goal. Modest and perhaps pessimistic as it is, however, at the moment it appears quite utopian. Sounds like liberalism. And in fact, in the world of 2026, the goal is not modest at all. To build a world liberal enough to reliably protect us from the threat of populism and free us from fear would be a liberal revolution. To the barricades!

Featured image is "Kulturpessimismus," CC0 1.0 SynLLOER 2020.