When I first looked into this insightful book of John Safranek titled The Myth of Liberalism, I was struck by the introductory sentence that he cites from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It is indeed one of those short, pithy statements that tells us, in a few words, what the book is about. In reflecting back over these lines, we realize that what is laid down for our consideration is the basis for the truth of what is proposed. It does explain what our contemporaries are systematically determined to impose on our private and public lives. The book explains how, in their own minds at least, contemporary scholars and jurists justify what they relentlessly promote. Yet, what they present and argue—this is the book’s value—cannot really be valid. The book goes into great detail to explain why no settled proof of liberal propositions is ever found.
This book essentially maintains that the many sequential “justifications” of contemporary liberalism, on careful examination, are simply incoherent. Their basic “self-evident” propositions always require corrections. These recurrent flaws make the justifications less than evident, self or otherwise. They cannot sustain themselves before reason, whatever rationale that they offer for their on-going claim that they do make sense, at least to themselves. Indeed—and this is what the book is about—the ever new “reasons,” designed to replace or supplement the previous inadequate ones, are also continually rejected as inconsistent with reason. Each last “reason given” could not itself be substantiated.
...The initial passage from Hegel reads as follows: “The right of the subject’s particularity, his right to be satisfied, or, in other words, the right of subjective freedom, is the pivot and center of the difference between antiquity and modern times.” What does this sentence tell us? First, we are each subjects. We are each “particular,” not generic, beings. So far, Aquinas would have no problem with Hegel’s formulation. The word “right” means that our particularity belongs solely to us; no one, not even God, can interfere with it. We can only give it to ourselves. It is not a gift. It is a “right.” What constitutes the essence or foundation of this “right”?
A “right” is a claim against others, what they “owe” us because of what we say that we are. We thus have a general “right” to be “satisfied.” If we are not “satisfied,” someone is violating our dignity, our “right” to our unique particularity. The “right” to be satisfied is but another way of saying that we have a “right” to our “subjective freedom.” That is, no one else, nothing else, can interfere with what we freely desire. It is the sole “absolute” in a world of no absolutes. Every moral, political, and social issue comes back to this principle. Desire is what constitutes our “particular” being and grounds our freedom. If we freely “desire” it, we have a “right” to it.
Finally, we are told that this “subjective freedom” constitutes the difference between classic/medieval and modern times. Classic/medieval freedom was based on reason, logos, not desire, on what is, not on will. Freedom is based on reason, not desire....