America’s Epicurean Liberalism
Joshua D. Hawley
T
he a ncie n t Gr eek phil osopher Epicu rus taught that individual happiness was the aim of living and that pleasure was the
sum of happiness. He would have loved 21st-century America. Ours is a
distinctly epicurean culture, from our arts and literature right down to
our sports and popular entertainment. Self-fulfillment is our great national
ambition. The quest for individual self-discovery defines our ethics and our
notions of justice; it motivates our work, our play, and our relationships. In
virtually every quarter of our national life, individual happiness, as defined
by each person for himself, is the order of the day.
This is certainly true of our politics, and not by coincidence. A nation’s
public life always reflects its political regime, and the American regime
has been dominated for nearly a century by a set of ideas shot through
with epicurean influences. This creed celebrates individual liberty, which
makes it a form of liberalism. But it defines that liberty in relation to an
exceptionally radical ideal of individual self-fulfillment, which makes it
epicurean. In fact, it treats the two things — liberty and unobstructed selffulfillment — as virtually synonymous. Call it epicurean liberalism.
Perhaps the best working definition of this worldview was offered
by the Supreme Court 18 years ago in a case called Planned Parenthood
v. Casey. The Court had been asked to decide whether the Constitution
permitted states to impose certain restrictions on abortion. Ruling that
it did not, a three-justice plurality explained the Court’s judgment by
discussing their understanding of liberty. “At the heart of liberty,” wrote
Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, “is
the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the
universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters
Jo s h ua D. H aw l e y is the author of Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness.
He is a former law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
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Joshua D. Hawley · America’s Epicurean Liberalism
could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under
the compulsion of the State.” Liberty, in short, is fundamentally a matter
of personal choice. It is the right to choose one’s own life ends, but, more
than that, it is the right to total self-definition and self-discovery. Unless
the individual defines his own concept “of existence, of meaning, of the
universe” without interference from government — or, the Court might
have added, without interference from society — he cannot be truly free.
This is epicurean liberalism in its essence.
It is a widely embraced view, and not only on the left. Over the past 50
years, the conservative movement, too, has at times espoused the tenets of
epicurean liberalism. In opposing the growth of the state, some on the right
have resorted to a radical defense of individual liberty that sounds strikingly similar to the case many liberals have made in favor of government
expansion. Frank Meyer, the father of so-called “fusionism” — the effort
to link libertarianism and traditionalism — was one example. “Freedom,”
he wrote in 1962, is “the unrestrained power to choose.” Freedom is “not
necessity, but choice; not responsibility, but . . . choice”; not duty, “but the
choice” whether to obey; “not virtue, but the choice between virtue and
vice.” The ends the individual chooses, he concluded, are ultimately meaningful because they are embraced through one’s own volition.
This celebration of individual will is at the core of our public philosophy, and often provides the very grammar of our public conversation.
But it is also closely associated with a series of prominent dysfunctions in
contemporary America. Despite its emphasis on individual choice, epicurean liberalism has proved alarmingly compatible with big and intrusive
government. And while it has abetted the growth of the state, it has been
hostile and harmful to civil society. It seeks to use the state to protect or
to advance the will of the individual, and so wants as little as possible
between the individual and the state — too often leaving no room for
the mediating institutions of family, churches, civic associations, and
fraternal groups that keep society strong and free.
Epicurean liberalism’s hostility to civil society betrays a more profound defect still. The creed has virtually no ability to offer any coherent
account of what democratic life is for. Epicurean liberalism is an intensely individualistic worldview; it has precious little to say about the
nation, the public, or society — unless those things are simply collapsed
into the state. It provides little material with which to form an idea
of the public good or a sense of national purpose. Instead, it tends to
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shrink the common good down to the notion of individual material
equality, and if it offers any sort of national purpose, it is one focused on
achieving equality in that narrow sense. In fact, so long as individuals
possess the financial and other resources to choose their own life ends,
epicurean liberalism regards them as free, quite apart from any involvement in democratic life — such as voting, or being a member in good
standing of some community. Ultimately, this ethic does not see liberty
and self-government as necessarily connected. And as a consequence, it
offers no means of making self-government work.
How can it be that both defenders and opponents of the modern
activist state espouse the same basic philosophy of choice-centered
­individualism? Where did this attitude come from? And how does it relate to America’s founding principles and ideals? Like so much else that
influences our contemporary politics, epicurean liberalism emerged in
the Progressive period. It was the outcome of a clash between two competing visions of democratic freedom espoused by the two great leaders
of the Progressive era: Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The
result of their battle, which reached its peak in the presidential election of 1912, was a theoretical synthesis that neither antagonist fully
­anticipated — but that came to dominate American politics and public
life right through to the present day.
A mer ic a T r a nsfor med
The Progressive era was an age of revision. Settled ways of life passed
away, and settled ideas with them, as the country underwent a paroxysm
of transformative change. The upheaval was driven, in the first instance,
by the industrializing economy: Between 1860 and 1910, American manufacturing erupted, driving millions of laborers from farms to cities and
fundamentally altering the character of the American work force. In 1860,
most adult men worked for themselves, usually as farmers; by 1910, only a
third did. The era of the small, independent producer was over.
Meanwhile, the urban population grew sevenfold, swelled by the
largest influx of immigrants in American history (until our own time).
The immigrant boom placed acute downward pressure on wages and
strained cities’ social infrastructures. Paradoxically, while the economy
had never been more productive and per capita income had never
been higher, social inequality widened and cities became centers of
­devastating poverty.
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Joshua D. Hawley · America’s Epicurean Liberalism
To many Americans, it seemed as though these radical changes would
make it impossible to sustain the American republic as it had existed since
the founding. The American tradition from Thomas Jefferson onward celebrated the ideal of the yeoman — the independent laborer who worked
for himself, owned a piece of land, provided for his family and those
in his employ, and took part in the affairs of the town where he lived.
“Cultivators of the earth,” Jefferson once enthused, “are the most valuable citizens, they are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most
­virtuous.” Their independence and productivity, combined with their
public spirit, were, to Jefferson (and to many others after him), the qualities that made government by the people possible.
The American tradition had always regarded such free government
as a strenuous undertaking. It was the best means of protecting the individual’s natural rights, to be sure; in fact, it was the only certain way of
doing so. But free government could succeed only with the help of a particular kind of citizen — one who was competent and responsible, and
able to exercise authority with his own and other citizens’ best interests
in mind. Free government also required sound political institutions that
facilitated majority rule while simultaneously guarding against majority
tyranny. This was a tall order. But for the founding generation and most
Americans of the 19th century, liberty and republican self-government
belonged indissolubly together.
By the opening decade of the 20th century, however, the yeoman
ideal seemed increasingly out of reach, and the link between liberty
and self-government less certain. Groups as diverse as farmers in the
South and Midwest and young professionals in the country’s Eastern
cities worried that the sort of society the yeoman ideal presumed — a
roughly equal, open, upwardly mobile one, sustained by face-to-face
relationships and involved citizens — was becoming a thing of the past.
In a new kind of society devoid of many of these features, would liberty
itself survive? Indeed, what was liberty apart from this way of life?
The Progressive movement was born of these worries. Progressives began with the assumption that the changes ravaging American society would
indeed destroy the older way of life for good. Preserving liberty for the new
age would thus require a new approach to government and society. Beyond
that, however, they did not agree on much; they divided into several camps
early on, each espousing a rather different vision of American public life.
But eventually, two visions — two strands of Progressivism — came to
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stand out above the rest, proposed by the two most prominent political
figures of the period: Roosevelt and Wilson. Each man offered a sweeping
program of reform premised on a re-interpretation of America’s republican
political tradition.
V irt ue a nd t he Stat e
Roosevelt’s program came first. In 1901, an assassin shot William
McKinley in the Buffalo, New York, Temple of Music and elevated the
hero of San Juan Hill to the presidency. Within three years, the one-time
Rough Rider was proposing to the country the most ambitious program
of federal regulation yet devised. He justified it as a means of securing
liberty, arguing that the way to preserve self-rule in the industrial age
was to increase the size and power of the only institution capable of
checking large business interests: the national government.
Roosevelt wanted to use government to restore the independence
and self-mastery at the core of the yeoman ideal — to help create the
kind of citizen required for self-government, now that the conditions
of American life would no longer create such citizens on their own.
Roosevelt believed the industrial economy, if left unregulated, threatened to trap the working class in permanent poverty and to deny many
Americans the means, as well as the time, to participate in civic life. To
counter these dangers, he proposed regulations to guarantee laborers
a basic level of personal ­security: He wanted an eight-hour workday, a
minimum wage, new rules for worker safety, disability benefits for those
injured on the job, and federal cash support for farmers. Roosevelt also
favored old-age pensions to save the elderly poor from destitution; by
1912, the year of his famous campaign against Woodrow Wilson, he had
endorsed government-supplied health insurance for workers unable to
afford their own.
In addition to these measures to improve Americans’ standard of
living, Roosevelt believed government should encourage the social
­arrangements that allowed individuals to advance in life, particularly
the two-parent family. He proposed tax benefits for married couples and
federal subsidies for parents who had more than three children. As he
saw it, no amount of economic security would save the working class
unless “the strong and tender virtues of family life based on the love of
the one man for the one woman” flourished. Government, he believed,
could take a hand in promoting these virtues.
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Indeed, Roosevelt believed virtue was one of government’s proper
concerns. If democracy required certain characteristics in its citizens, as
the older yeoman ideal suggested, then government should work to preserve those virtues in the industrial era. Roosevelt famously explained
his corporate regulatory program to Congress by claiming that “we are
for manhood first, and for business as an adjunct to manhood.” Social
reformer Jane Addams would later summarize Roosevelt’s position with
a syllogism: “As the very existence of the state depends upon the character of its citizens, therefore if certain industrial conditions are forcing
[down] the standard of decency, it becomes possible to deduce the right
of state regulation.”
But while Roosevelt preached self-mastery, he believed individuals
could not rule their destinies on their own — not anymore. “This is
an age of combination,” he said. His grander project was to transmute
personal independence into collective independence, into collective selfmastery through the national state.
In Roosevelt’s view, the leading corporations had grown so powerful that they threatened to control the nation’s economy and to drown
out the people’s voice in government. The solution, however, was not to
break them up; the solution was to regulate them. Roosevelt’s trust-­busting
antics notwithstanding, he firmly believed giant corporations were a natural feature of the new economy; he also saw no hope of ­reversing their
growth. Instead, he maintained that “it is a matter of necessity to give to
the ­sovereign . . . some effective power of supervision” over big business. The
“sovereign” Roosevelt had in mind, of course, was the federal ­government.
“Within the Nation, the individual has now delegated [his interests] to the
State,” Roosevelt said. Government was the only entity capable of standing
up to the corporations; it was government that would act as “the representative of all individuals” and vindicate the people’s right to rule.
The state would be the chief agent of the people’s sovereignty; the
state would be the chief reformer of society; the state would ultimately
be the bond that linked one citizen to another in an ever more diverse
and pluralistic republic. This was Roosevelt-style Progressivism.
Fr eedom a nd t he Stat e
That strain of Progressivism found its chief critic in Woodrow Wilson.
As far as Wilson was concerned, the biggest problem with the Roosevelt
agenda was that it stifled individual freedom. “Freedom” was Wilson’s
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watchword, and he understood it as something inherently individual.
“There is no such thing as corporate liberty,” he said in 1912, in a direct
slap at Roosevelt. “Liberty belongs to the individual or it does not exist.”
Wilson’s rhetoric sounded more in keeping with the older American
tradition of yeoman independence, but in fact he, too, was a Progressive
revisionist. The liberty Wilson had in mind was of an altogether different
sort than that embraced by 19th-century Americans or the founders. As
a result, his return to individualism actually cleared the way for the new
epicurean liberalism, and the increasing statism that has accompanied it.
Wilson met Roosevelt on the intellectual field of battle in the presidential campaign of 1912. Whereas Roosevelt purported to offer a “New
Nationalism,” Wilson dubbed his platform the “New Freedom.” “Ours is
a program of liberty,” Wilson said, using a phrase that would become the
refrain of his campaign. “[T]heirs is a program of regulation.”
At least superficially, Wilson’s views often resembled those offered
by today’s conservatives. He rejected the idea that the expansion of government’s regulatory power meant an increase in the people’s liberty.
In fact, he believed just the opposite: Once government grew to regulate corporate trusts, railroads, and the food industry — as Roosevelt
wanted — “who is to guarantee to us that the government is to be
­pitiful, that the government is to be righteous, that the government is
to be just?” Wilson asked. In short, once the government looked after
society, who would look after the government?
The state and the people were not synonymous, Wilson contended. Government power was inherently coercive, and that was true
whether it was directed at corporations or at individuals. Wilson argued
that the growth of government, even if carried out in the name of the
people, would eventually suffocate the people by suffocating individual
choice. Liberty meant “the enlargement of the sphere of independent individual action,” Wilson said. “[T]he principal menace” facing democracy in
the industrial age was that “the disciplinary power of the common thought
should overwhelm the individual” — or, as he put it elsewhere, that the
power of business and government together would grow so mighty that
the individual would have no field of action left open to him.
Thus, as Wilson saw it, Roosevelt’s regulatory agenda was exactly the
wrong response to the leading problem of the era. Roosevelt would harvest individual liberty to feed a growing government, and in the process
make individuals dependent on the state. “The minute you are taken care
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of by government you are wards, not independent men,” Wilson warned.
He urged Americans to be wary of “big-brother government”: “I do not
want a government that will take care of me. . . . I want a government that
will make other men take their hands off so I can take care of myself.”
If Roosevelt’s attempt to secure popular sovereignty through national
regulation was coercive, Wilson found Roosevelt’s idea of government
as an agent of social reform downright paternalistic. Wilson had no
time for Roosevelt’s politics of virtue: “I want to frankly say,” he told one
­audience, “that I am not big enough to play Providence, and my objection to the other program is that I don’t believe that there is any other
man that is big enough to play Providence.” Who was Roosevelt, Wilson
wondered, to decide what virtues citizens ought to possess, or how society ought to be structured? “[W]e live our own lives, we know our own
lives, it is our lives that concern us, and we will tell government what we
intend,” he declared.
Wilson’s rhetoric was powerful and his critique potent. He accurately identified Roosevelt’s drift into statism and grasped its foremost
dangers. But his celebration of individual liberty was not quite the oldfashioned creed he made it out to be. While the founders’ republicanism,
and the yeoman ideal it represented, emphasized self-determination
through democratic self-government, Wilson believed liberty was most
­f undamentally about something else: individual self-development.
“What is society?” Wilson once asked in an academic essay. “It is an
organic association of individuals for mutual aid. Mutual aid to what?
To self-development.”
The revision was significant. The older idea of self-determination
­suggested that liberty required a certain way of life, or, more accurately,
that it was a certain way of life. Free government and personal liberty
belonged together. In order to be truly free, the individual had to be a
member of a free state. What is more, he had to acquire economic and
personal ­independence, participate in the affairs of his community,
and keep in repair the public institutions and private groups that made
free government possible. The principal job of government, in turn, was
to secure the people’s interests and protect their natural rights.
When Wilson spoke about liberty, by contrast, he did not speak in
terms of self-mastery or free government, but rather about individual
“force” and “energy,” which he aimed to release. “The hope of society,” he
wrote in 1898, “lies in an infinite individual variety, in the freest possible
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play of individual forces.” Liberty, understood as self-­development, consisted of the individual’s nurturing his own personality and cultivating
his inherent potential; it was about the individual’s coming to know
himself and following his passions wherever they led.
Wilson, then, did not admonish voters to acquire a certain set of virtues or see to their duties. He urged them to look inward and, when they
voted, to consider the things they wanted for themselves. “When you
ask which party you are going to support,” he told crowds late in the 1912
campaign, “you are asking this fundamental question, ‘By what means
and by which choice can we best serve ourselves?’ ” The question was
fitting, because Wilson’s conception of liberty severed the link between
personal freedom and self-government, and defined freedom instead as
the absence of constraint on the individual’s choices.
Wilson spent much of the 1912 campaign lambasting Roosevelt’s
program for interventionist government, but, ironically, his view of liberty invited a government every bit as frenetic as Roosevelt’s — just one
whose activism was in the service of advancing a vision of individual
self-fulfillment. “[T]he individual must be assured the best means, the
best and fullest opportunities, for complete self-development,” Wilson
maintained. Citizens’ ability to pursue their own ends was at the heart
of personhood, and therefore the measure of political justice. It was
akin to a natural right — the closest thing to a natural right, in fact, that
Wilson ever endorsed. But unlike the natural rights the founders wrote
about, the right to self-development was not easily limited. It was an
inherently subjective thing, for each individual to define. A government
charged with protecting it would have a broad warrant indeed.
Thus Wilson’s preferred government, like Roosevelt’s, was not (and
could not be) a constitutionally limited government. The state needed
to grow and change based on the needs of individuals in their pursuit
of fulfillment. “Political liberty,” Wilson instructed, “consists in the best
practicable adjustment between the power of government and the privilege of the individual.” He was openly skeptical of the constitutional order
the founders devised: “The checks and balances which once obtained
are no longer effective,” he concluded. They were too ­constraining; they
did not allow for the institutional growth and evolution necessary to
keep pace with the needs of the people. Wilson wanted to replace them
altogether, and sought instead a more unified ­government, under the
direction of a powerful executive able to respond swiftly to the people’s
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wants and to intervene where necessary to protect the individual’s right
to choose his own path in life.
Roosevelt, for one, was not impressed. “I profoundly disagree with
what seems to be the morality” of Wilson’s liberalism, he protested in
1912. Wilson’s repeated appeals to individual interests struck Roosevelt as
“base” and self-indulgent. And in fact Wilson’s politics did have a decidedly
­solipsistic character: In its focus on individual self-fulfillment as the essence
of liberty, and in its commitment to aiding the individual’s pursuit of that
fulfillment above all else, Wilson’s liberalism was an epicurean one.
Wilson had set out to resist Roosevelt’s collectivist revision of the
older, republican political tradition, but his critique swept well beyond Roosevelt’s program to implicate that older tradition itself. He
rejected Roosevelt’s virtue politics, but in the process rejected the republican idea that personal character and personal freedom were meaningfully
linked. He rejected Roosevelt’s ambition to reform society, but also jettisoned the notion that the health of civil society is related to liberty.
He criticized Roosevelt’s project to extend popular sovereignty through
government regulation, but ended up abandoning the older conviction
that personal freedom cannot exist apart from self-government. Wilson’s
­liberalism, then, marked not so much a recovery of yeoman individualism,
but a fresh and further departure — one that has led us to the present day.
T he New Or der
The clash of Progressive visions in 1912 shaped the century of American
politics that followed. The result was a new liberal synthesis that neither Roosevelt nor Wilson fully anticipated, but that swiftly swept the
field before it, driving institutional change and rearranging the way
Americans thought about political life.
The new liberalism was best described by another Roosevelt — Franklin
Roosevelt — during another campaign, 20 years after his cousin had faced
Wilson. In 1932, F.D.R. famously told the Commonwealth Club that
Americans possessed two sets of rights: rights to “personal ­competency,”
which, as he articulated them, sounded a good deal like Wilson’s rights
of self-development, and rights related to “acquiring and possessing
­property.” The second group were less important to Roosevelt; in fact, he
told his audience that government was obligated to make the second set
serve the first. It was government’s duty to ensure that “­existing economic
­organizations,” including private industry, served the people by enhancing
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their autonomy. Roosevelt would later describe the New Deal as a “satisfactory compromise” between his cousin Theodore’s New Nationalism and
Wilson’s New Freedom — and, in many ways, he was right. The New Deal
employed Theodore Roosevelt’s regulatory government in the service of
Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a free society. It was Rooseveltian government
for Wilsonian ends.
This hybrid epicurean liberalism soon became the favored dogma of
western political theorists. In 1935, with the New Deal well underway,
the dean of American philosophers, John Dewey, argued for nationalizing industry in order to guarantee individuals the quality of life they
needed in order to realize their “creative” potential. “We must . . . see that
socialized economy is the means, [with] free individual development as
the end,” he said.
But it was political philosopher Isaiah Berlin who made epicurean liberalism canonical. He discerned that this version of liberal thought was far
less dependent than past strands of liberalism on cultural homogeneity, or
on social consensus regarding the “good life.” Precisely because epicurean
liberalism taught that freedom consisted principally of autonomy, it was
highly compatible with moral pluralism and cultural diversity. To Berlin,
this was a profound virtue. “Pluralism” of individual pursuits and beliefs,
he wrote, “seems to me a truer and more humane ideal [of freedom] than
the goals of those who seek . . . a ‘positive’ self-mastery by classes, or peoples,
or of the whole of mankind.” Scores of later theorists and public figures,
not to mention Supreme Court justices, would echo his conclusion.
By the middle of the 20th century, epicurean liberalism was firmly
established as the reigning creed of the American regime. But it is not
the only, or the best, way to think about freedom.
A n Et hic of Self-Det er mi nat ion
To begin with, we might ask what exactly is gained by casting liberty as
self-development. This formula teaches us to be skeptical of identifying
the state with the people, which is surely right. It drives home the fact that
there can be no “corporate liberty” without individual liberty: Either the
individual is free or he is not. To speak of his finding freedom by submitting to the state, or to society, or to some other corporate thing is confused
(and dangerous) thinking.
Still, the ethic of self-development leads to a conception of liberty
that is radically solipsistic, even anti-social. It suggests that freedom
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is best pursued alone, as if the freest person on earth were Robinson
Crusoe stranded on his island. But this picture bears no resemblance
to how we actually live. Every person is born into a particular social
­setting — a family, a community, a nation — and is related to specific
other people. Liberty must have something to do with them, or else it
does not mean much for life as we know it.
Moreover, liberty as self-development implies that every individual
pursuit is as valuable as every other; the important thing is that the pursuit be freely chosen. But this claim jars with our intuition that some
pursuits really are more important than others, and that those that are especially important are somehow related to what it means to be free. The
Bill of Rights singles out certain such pursuits for protection, including
worship, association, and participation in the business of government.
Others have long been recognized in our culture: meaningful labor,
family life, teaching, and learning. Yet the ethic of self-­development
gives no pride of place to these pursuits, or to any pursuit apart from
what the individual may choose. As a consequence, it leads people to
make increasingly extreme demands against society in the name of individual autonomy and privacy. These demands have become familiar
subjects of litigation: Just this past term, the Supreme Court ruled that
a public law school was perfectly free to exclude a religious student organization because other students complained that the religious group’s
position on sexual ethics was inherently offensive and intolerant. Over
time, claims like these have multiplied, corroding our public discourse,
private associations, and the institutions of civil society.
Self-development, in sum, is a blind alley. For all the appeal individual liberation holds, the liberation that epicurean liberalism promises
has little relevance to how people actually live. Whatever judges may say,
none of us can define our own universe. And a public philosophy that
fails to help us live well in the universe we must accept is not a means of
liberation — it is a delusion.
But we need not follow the Progressives down that blind alley. The
error of epicurean liberalism — and of the competing Progressive visions
offered by both Roosevelt and Wilson — comes in their first premise:
that American life has changed so profoundly that the yeoman ideal,
and the tradition that informed it, are no longer relevant. On the contrary,
that ideal — rooted though it was in the era of the founding — reflects a
deep insight into the permanent nature of the human person; as such, it
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offers a promising departure point for thinking about liberty, society, and
the individual. That departure point is self-determination.
Self-determination, as our earlier republican tradition conceived it, involves freedom from arbitrary rule by outsiders in order that the ­individual
might rule himself and take a part in ruling his ­community. Rather than
a process of personal discovery, self-determination is an ­activity; it is the
work of governing and ordering one’s life so as to realize the fruits of
one’s abilities. In this sense, it is a demanding ethic — ­requiring not just
freedom from coercion for the individual, à la epicurean liberalism, but
personal discipline, planning, and hard work from the individual. For
only by acquiring these characteristics can the individual begin to exert
control over his own life.
The ethic of self-determination is also robustly social, and thus avoids
epicurean liberalism’s solipsism and drift toward isolation. It sees liberty
as connected to other people and to membership in a free state. Theodore
Roosevelt and the strand of Progressivism he represented may have assigned government too great a role in reforming society, but Roosevelt was
right to recognize that society and liberty go together. Self-determination
requires a certain social context. It requires, for instance, the rule of
law, including the protection of property and labor by the government.
More subtly, it requires healthy associations (like families and religious
­communities) and healthy institutions (like schools) to give the individual
purpose and identity and to equip him to make his way in the world. Such
associations and institutions can thrive only when the state is limited.
Finally, self-determination demands a particular type of political
­society: namely, self-government. In contrast to epicurean liberalism, liberty as self-determination regards personal freedom and democratic life as
intimately connected. Unless the individual has an active say in the laws
by which he is governed, after all, he cannot be called truly free. His liberties at any one moment will be dependent on the will of others.
But more than that, participation — in government, and in ­society — is
itself a form of freedom. The highest type of self-­determination is the ability
to join with other people to shape the course of a common life. Democratic
government is thus self-rule writ large. And democratic life is itself liberty.
Gen ui ne Libert y
Thinking of liberty as self-determination allows us to retain epicurean
liberalism’s focus on the individual and even its concern for individual
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Joshua D. Hawley · America’s Epicurean Liberalism
choice. But self-determination turns liberty outward, away from the self
and its passions, and toward society and civic life. It teaches that liberty
requires a certain sort of citizen, and it insists on a connection between
personal freedom and democratic participation.
Understanding liberty as self-determination, moreover, suggests a
noticeably different political agenda than the one produced by epicurean liberalism. Rather than focusing on how to liberate the individual
to pursue his own ends, the ethic of self-determination suggests that we
should ask how to strengthen the private associations and social structures that allow individuals to put their lives in order. In a word, how
can we strengthen civil society?
Seeing liberty as self-determination also provides a new perspective
on economic policy. Instead of asking how to ensure equality (as the left
usually does) or how to maximize growth (as the right usually does), the
ethic of self-determination presses us to work for an economy through
which the ideal of independence can be realized: that is, an economy
that allows every worker to support himself by his own labor and, in so
doing, improve his station in life. This ambition would require a new
emphasis on opening the labor market to low-skilled workers, as well as
new efforts to boost wages and improve social mobility.
Self-determination is merely a beginning — but our public philosophy is always a beginning. And an ethic of self-determination offers a
much more promising beginning than the epicurean politics of the past
hundred years.
It is long past time for a rediscovery of the original American
creed — the creed of yeoman citizen, the creed of self-determination.
It is a creed of liberty, but not of radical individualism; of virtue, but
not of state-imposed moralism; of self-government that is also limited
­government, in the practice of which the individual is truly free.
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