Nearly 30 years ago now I dropped out of a PhD exploring the communitarian critique of liberalism. My interest in liberalism continued through articles, chapters, book reviews and especially blog posts, but I never wrote anything major, original or influential. From the early 2010s my express ‘liberal’ output dropped further as higher education policy took over my life.
All of this is background to my surprise at being included in The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Party: Intellectuals and the Liberal Party of Australia, a study of six politically engaged liberal/Liberal intellectuals – Peter Coleman, David Kemp, Greg Melleuish, Margaret Fitzherbert, Louise Asher and myself. Along with Melleuish, I was never an MP, but I had several advisory stints with Liberal governments. I was on the winning side in some internal discussions but ultimately failed to achieve my policy objectives.
Geoffrey Robinson, author of The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Party, is an academic at Deakin University. His book is old-school academic work – and I mean that in a positive way, that an academic’s first priority should be to understand their subject matter, not to denounce or to advocate. For someone whose previous book was called Being Left-wing in Australia he shows restraint.
Robinson gets some important distinctions right. He recognises that the people in his study have ‘been “anti‑foundationalist”, suspicious of attempts to justify political practice by reference to a higher truth’. Compared to libertarians, there is no attempt to derive beliefs from a foundational principle, such as property rights. Compared to some conservatives (BA Santamaria gets a mention), none of his subjects think that in their politics they are on a mission from God.
I class myself as a value pluralist, taking this from Isaiah Berlin in my youth. There is no one principle that always trumps all others. Sometimes we must make hard choices, tragic trade-offs. Liberalism and democracy are two sets of ideas about how to make these choices, liberalism at the individual and group level, democracy at the group and state level.
While Robinson gets the non-foundationalist angle right, I don’t agree with all his characterisations. Despite discussing my self-identification as a ‘classical liberal’, in the book’s last chapter he says that ‘Norton was at heart a neoconservative, but without [Peter] Coleman’s enemies’.
By that latter point I think he means that I do not usually pursue culture wars debates. In the 1990s, when I know Coleman slightly (Robinson quotes from my 1995 Coleman interview for Policy magazine), he was very concerned with ‘political correctness’, what was later called ‘woke’. I haven’t focused on these matters; they don’t match with my style or strengths. Perhaps I have acquired fewer enemies than Coleman as a result; hatred of me probably peaked early on, in my student politics days.
I don’t think Robinson clearly defines ‘neoconservatism’, or how it differs from non-neo conservatism or liberalism. In the original American sense, as popularised by Irving Kristol and people in his circles, I take it as accepting the democratic and liberal institutions of the United States but with ‘conservative’ concerns about civil society, personal virtue and the dangers of radical change.
As the communitarian part of my never-finished PhD suggests, I was interested in the sociological aspect of liberal societies. This was one reason I wrote my honours thesis on the American neocons (the bigger reason was that I wanted a particular supervisor whose expertise was in American politics). The sociological angle at least partly places me in ‘classical’ liberalism, rather than other variants of liberalism with a stronger focus on self-expression and individual autonomy as ends in themselves.
In this, Robinson identifies the influence of early John Gray and of Chandran Kukathas (the latter was my PhD supervisor). They made arguments supporting non-liberal institutions within liberal societies. This form of liberalism maintains that individuals within non-liberal groups and associations should be free to leave, but also that these groups and associations can exclude people who do not share their characteristics, beliefs or practices. This finds a place for self-governing communities of indigenous populations (in Australia or elsewhere), often favoured by the left, but also religious schools and communities, often favoured by conservatives. Robinson observes, in a section discussing Kemp’s schools policy, that often in Australia ‘school choice’ is more about cultural identity than creating a consumer market. I agree with this.
Liberal societies, including Australia, often provide homes to widely divergent groups, making tolerance and its manifestation in manners, civility, important liberal virtues. While I could sympathise with aspects of Coleman’s campaign against ‘political correctness’, it wasn’t a bad thing that speech norms around race, gender and sexuality evolved to be more polite. This doesn’t mean that rudeness or even ‘vilification’ should be illegal, but it does mean that people trying to enforce their preferred norms is part of how civility is put into practice.
Robinson also correctly notes my 1990s and 2000s interest in social capital. This was in part an attempt to conduct the communitarian debate at a more empirical level. One reason I no longer wanted to pursue a career as an academic political theorist, my original career goal when I enrolled in a PhD, was that it was too divorced from the social sciences.
Perhaps Robinson sees the more sociological aspects of my intellectual history as ‘neoconservative’. But classical liberals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are much closer to front of mind in my policy work. Hayek’s influence on me was the importance of decentralised knowledge and the institutions that can tap into it (or can’t, the basis of his opposition to socialism). Friedman is known for his support of monetarism and small government, but for me his more important contribution was how markets can be applied to the welfare state. While big government poses risks to liberal institutions, Friedman’s ideas point to ways in which a welfare state and a liberal society can have synergies.
Hayek and Friedman’s influences are apparent in my main policy cause of the 2010s, the demand driven system of funding higher education. Robinson notes that Kemp and I stood against the broader right on this issue. The latter’s criticisms are not baseless, but working out who can benefit from higher education is a classic Hayekian knowledge problem best resolved at a local level. I think students and universities are better placed to make higher education enrolment decisions than either Canberra bureaucrats or columnists for The Australian.
I would see the first-generation neocons as allies at the time, but I don’t think ‘neoconservative’ reflects my main intellectual influences or my policy priorities. Since my honours thesis days ‘neoconservative’ has also acquired baggage I don’t want. The original neocons were cold war warriors against communism, as I was, but I want to avoid the current connotation of supporting military force to create liberal democracies in the Arab middle east (some old-fashioned conservative scepticism about radical change would have helped avoid this mistake).
Further, while I admire some conservative thinkers – especially Michael Oakeshott, discussed in Robinson’s book as a major influence on Peter Coleman – the contemporary conservative movement is going in the wrong direction. While things are not nearly as bad in Australia as in the US, some ‘conservatives’ now stand for the opposite of what conservatives stood for in my youth – prudence replaced with recklessness, politeness replaced with transgressive offence, respect for institutions replaced with tearing them up. No thanks.
While I don’t fully agree with Robinson’s account – and I will leave it to the other living subjects of his book (Coleman passed away in 2019) to respond to his anlaysis of their thinking – to me his book is a thorough account of a sadly very niche group, intellectuals from the Liberal side of politics.
Andrew Norton 