Liberalism and Particular Attachments

Particularity as a main goal of liberal freedom and a core element in liberal moral development against illiberal arguments about deracination

A few weeks back, Vice President J.D. Vance denounced liberalism in a speech at the Claremont Institute. I was not surprised by his lines of attack. Vance described America as “a particular place with a particular people,” and characterized liberals as “hell-bent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.” He is not alone. In recent days, Illiberal thinkers from Patrick Deneen to Viktor Orbán have argued that liberal universalism is a deracinating project, a totalizing force that seeks to obliterate particular attachments, erase chthonic connections to culture and place, and reduce human beings to interchangeable units. In the second Trump presidency, the rhetorical lines of battle have been set: liberals are hopelessly lost in abstract reasoning about rights that few find compelling. Liberalism’s opponents are attuned to normal people’s intuitive longings for kith, kin, culture, place, and nation.

These characterizations completely miss the value of particularity to liberals, and the way in which liberal universalism develops in the first place–not in opposition to particularity, but through it. While liberalism calls for legal and political equality, these are requirements of states. Few prominent liberal thinkers apply this impulse to individuals, The priority most¹ liberals place on particularity is expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that individual passions are to be treated “reverently, one by one,” John Stuart Mill’s call for people to cultivate their own individual or communal conceptions of the good through “experiments in living,” and John Maynard Keynes’ love of fine art, disdain for proletarian tastes, and denunciation of the “leveling” of individuals. Even John Rawls, that most comprehensive of liberal philosophers, was clear that his political principles were not to apply to people’s “free and flourishing” internal lives or associations. Particular attachments are not just permissible for liberals; their cultivation is among the core aims of freedom.

Our family ties, whether given or chosen, along with our religious beliefs, convictions, and life paths, are profoundly important to us. Critics sometimes charge that liberalism tolerates such a broad range of associations, behaviors, and beliefs because it views them as unimportant, mere consumer choices. I have never found this characterization persuasive. To take an example, if faith was really as insignificant as soda brand, forced conversion would not be so morally repugnant to liberals, and religious freedom would not have been a core objective of liberalism from its earliest days. So too for intellectual freedom. As Zena Hitz has argued, our intellectual lives are "unutterably important;” they are inner places at which our irreducible humanity is revealed and upon which communion with others can grow. Liberals agree. They demand the freedoms of faith and conscience, as well as space for varied family and associational lives, precisely because these things are so important as to be constitutive of who we are.

There is another way that particular attachments matter to liberalism: for many thinkers, they are an important source of moral development. Liberals of both the empirical and Kantian varieties are clear on this point. For Mill, people with uncultivated moral lives are likely to be selfish, though they are capable of expanding their circles of empathy outward from egoism to the “sympathetic selfishness” of small groups to the ties of community, “cosmopolitan nationalism,” and beyond. This process takes place through sympathy or fellow-feeling, which are in turn developed in one’s own particular relationships. Rawls believed that our moral commitments expand from “rational self-love” outward through our particular relationships with family, peers, and community members.

But particularity does not always inculcate liberal values. Our love of family, community, or nation may harden us against those outside the circle rather than broadening our sympathies; illiberals celebrate this possibility as natural and desirable, at least at certain stages. Our particular relations, then, are the sites at which moral development takes place, but something more is needed for the Millian and Rawlsian visions to be realized. It is our disposition that determines whether we will, through them, connect to some broader whole.

Isaiah Berlin’s concept² of “empathetic imagination” points to the sort of disposition I have in mind. Berlin, drawing on the 18th century Italian humanist Giambattista Vico and the 19th century liberal German nationalist Johann Herder, believed that it is possible to understand ways of living that are radically different from our own through the process of imaginatively entering into others’ experiences and discovering that they exist within a shared “human horizon” of intelligibility. This process depends on particular encounters—with a specific other person, a foreign culture, even a past society such as Homeric Greece—but it also requires the imaginative capacity to inhabit the lives of these others, and the empathetic pull to want to do so in the first place.

The results are profoundly transformative. Exercising empathetic imagination does not erase our distinctive features, but it renders otherwise-hard boundaries of difference fluid, It allows us to be, in the theologian Tara Isabella Burton’s startling phrase, “broken open by the strange.” In our porous state, we co-mingle with others and we discover that they are recognizably human, and therefore intelligible to us. Our sense of who matters expands outward, driven by the knowledge of shared humanity imparted by a particular encounter. And we often begin to feel sympathy for the wants and needs of the specific person with whom we have connected, and others like them, as we draw parallels with our own experiences. Liberal moral development proceeds from this point.

Liberalism’s critics clearly understand empathetic imagination’s power to kickstart moral development. There is a reason that contemporary right wing figures as diverse as Elon Musk and evangelical Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey denounce purportedly “toxic” or “suicidal” empathy. They know that empathetic imagination can connect and cultivate fellow-feeling between people, even those who are vastly different in important ways. And they understand that it is accessible to everyone, drawing less on abstract principles of justice than on the cultivation of basic human impulses toward curiosity, compassion, and generosity.

Recent history offers examples of what happens when people exercise empathetic imagination in their particular relationships. Same sex marriage went from a fringe cause when Andrew Sullivan published “Here Comes the Groom” in 1989 to the law of the land in a single generation. The single largest factor driving changes in opinion was knowing a gay person. The activists behind Health4All, California’s movement to extend Medicaid coverage to undocumented immigrants likewise found that personal conversations aimed at “helping people see the full humanity of others whose lives they don’t fully see or understand, as well as the ways in which their lives, hopes, and dreams are intimately connected” were their most powerful tools for durable persuasion.

Critics like Musk and Stuckey might argue that these anecdotes support their arguments: empathy, they claim, leads us to substitute soft-heartedness for concrete ideas of right and wrong. Such responses do not engage with the fact that empathetic imagination is only a starting point for liberal moral development. When we bring this disposition to our particular encounters, our sense of who matters expands outward with the knowledge that we and our interlocutors are part of the same human whole. We must still discover and exercise principles of right and wrong (Mill and Rawls propose detailed theories of justice, while situational judgment between competing values is a central element in Berlin’s pluralist liberalism), but we cannot rule certain people to be beyond the bounds of humanity and therefore unworthy of moral consideration. The moral frameworks built on this foundation may not be to the liking of liberalism’s critics, but they are moral frameworks nonetheless.

The process of liberal moral development therefore works not in spite of particular attachments, but through them. And particularity is not merely instrumental to liberalism; it is also among its central raisons d'être. Liberalism is not a philosophy that demands individuals abandon all special preferences, though it does require that we treat all people as fellow human beings deserving of a universal baseline of care and consideration. It is not a project devoted to deracinated “humanity” but to the kaleidoscopic diversity of specific humans and the bonds they form, networks of roots which are richer and more various than those who would pare them back imagine. As Mill writes, “It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation… by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating.” This is the vision at liberalism’s heart: not a faceless, bloodless Cosmopolis, but tangle upon tangle of particular human bonds winding inward, outward, and crossways, alive to themselves, to each other, and to the great forest where they grow.

1. Liberal and protoliberal skeptics of the particular can be found, particularly among French Enlightenment cosmopolitans like Denis Diderot, who spoke of being a stranger “nowhere in the world,” but these are a minority strain in liberal philosophy. Their beliefs are also clearly at odds with certain elements of modern liberal politics of which illiberals are critical, such as multiculturalism.

2. “Empathetic imagination” is the term I am using for a capacity/exercise thereof that Berlin referred to in various terms, including “empathy and imagination” and “imaginative insight.” “Empathy and insight” combined into one capacity is, in my view, the clearest way to refer to what Berlin is talking about—an interest in, and ability to, enter into the experiences of others imaginatively.