Liberalism, an Ideology

Abstract

Contemporary literature has highlighted various shortcomings that liberalism—in its specifically philosophical formulation—suffers from when attempting to understand its own exceptional status as a historically situated reality within modernity. Added to this is the fact that the self-understanding professed by the liberal community –i.e., the reconstruction of the tradition that is said to have shaped it over the past centuries- is deeply affected by a kind of selective memory or historical myopia. However, none of these critiques seem particularly useful for an approach that aims to be normative—that is, for an assessment that seeks to philosophically evaluate the credentials of liberalism as a justification for our so-called “liberal” institutions. If we wish to undertake such an assessment, we must connect the acknowledgment of the anomalies within liberal historical consciousness to a philosophical argument of deeper scope. In this sense, the aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to present both deficiencies as “symptoms of the same illness,” namely, the lack of historical consciousness that is constitutive of liberalism, and (ii) to suggest that both deficiencies (and, along with them, liberal anti-historicism) can be challenged—from a strictly philosophical standpoint—if we contextualize them within the framework of so-called Ideologiekritik, a philosophical “program” that possesses the minimal resources required to outline a normative critique of liberalism, understood, in this case, as an ideology.