REVIEW: ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’ by Alexandre Lefebvre
Have you ever thought about how Westerners’ tastes in pornography provide a critical lens into the "ethical consensuses of our liberal age"? If so, you are not alone. While I can’t say that such an analysis has ever crossed my mind, Alexandre Lefebvre is with you, examining in Liberalism as a Way of Life that the reason step-family porn titillates us—oh, by the way, that’s the most popular category, by far—is because it brings those "ethical consensuses … about desert and effort, love and friendship, consent and desire … into a gray zone of negotiation and thrill."
Reservations about this conclusion aside, this is an ingenious case study in Lefebvre’s ambitious project to show that cultural left-liberalism already serves as a near-complete ethical system for Westerners who are "liberal all the way down." That is, whose sense of right and wrong is minimally shaped by forces like religion. What millions of Westerners do to serve their base impulses, free from others’ (or God’s) watchful eyes might tell us quite a lot about what principles and norms really shape our expectations and behavior.
Lefebvre, a Canadian professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, uses this and a few other examples to demonstrate that liberalism is already the water in which we all swim, or the air we breathe. By liberalism, Lefebvre mostly means the imperatives sketched by the leading political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls: that society ought to be generally free, fair, and cooperative. The basic guiding principles of contemporary Western societies are essentially "you do you" and "don’t be a jerk." Those are normative arguments we expect to resonate when raised; in Rawlsian terms, they serve as touchpoints of "public reason." Our most popular comedy, social commentary, and yes, porn, emerge from and play off implicit liberal values in order to surprise, inform, and excite us.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Free Beacon
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow.
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