30 2. Liberal conceptions of the self Alexandre Lefebvre As the dominant social and political ideology of the past 200 years, the term “lib- eralism” contains multitudes. 1 Indeed, nearly every good book or article on it starts with an acknowledgment of its plurality. As Gerald Gaus states at the outset of his “Liberalism” entry for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Liberalism is more than one thing. On any close examination, it seems to fracture into a range of related but sometimes competing visions” (Gaus 1996). The same is true for how liberalism conceives of the self: we must speak of dif- ferent conceptions rather than a single one. In this chapter, I distinguish three and map them onto three historical periods. The first is the perfectionist self of the long nineteenth century, when the founders of liberalism argued that a liberal state should seek to produce liberal citizens, understood as free and generous persons. The second is the political self of the mid-to-late twentieth century, when liberalism withdrew its perfectionist ambitions and positioned itself as an institutional framework for citizens to pursue their own conception of the good (within reasonable limits). The third is the comprehensive self of the early twenty-first century, which blends the previous two conceptions. Here, as per the nineteenth century, liberalism is acknowledged to have a far-reaching conception of the self; yet as per the twentieth century, the state is not seen as entitled to use its power and resources to promote it. THE PERFECTIONIST SELF Today we live in a golden age of histories of liberalism (Bell 2016; Conti 2020; de Dijn 2020; Fawcett 2014; Freeden 2005; 2015; Luce 2017; Moyn 2023; Rosenblatt 2018; Selinger 2020). 2 In part, these works are motivated by the fact that liberalism is under attack worldwide. It is only natural to want to trace the origin of its ideals and institutions at such a tumultuous moment. But there is also a more academic moti- vation, which is to challenge what we might call “traditional histories” of liberalism. Traditional histories identify distant historical periods as the birthplace of liberal- ism, whether in the ancient world (Strauss 1995), Christianity and the Reformation (Holland 2019; Manent 1996; Rawls 2007; Siedentop 2014; Taylor 2007), or the early modern period (Israel 2001; Macpherson 1962; Shklar 1984). The new histo- ries, by contrast, tend to be nominalist or contextualist, meaning that they look to 1 I thank Duncan Ivison and Melanie White for their helpful comments on this chapter. 2 For further discussion, see Chapter 4. Alexandre Lefebvre - 9781839109034 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 10/18/2024 04:38:38AM via Sydney University