He is interviewed by Rémi Carlu.
L’incorrect. “There is no liberal politics sui generis, there is only a liberal critique of politics,” said Carl Schmitt. On the contrary, you say that liberalism is an ideology, and even the ultimate ideology. How would you define it? How did the liberal conception of freedom reverse the classical conception of freedom?
The classical definition of freedom (in the Latin, libertas) was the condition of self-rule, achieved through the cultivation of classical and (later) Christian virtues and discipline. It was not “doing as one wished,” but rather required the cultivation of the kind of character by which both individuals and citizens more broadly do what is right and good. This required a political, social, economic and religious order that assisted humans in the self-discipline necessary to achieve this hard-won condition of self-rule, including the taming of our instincts, desires, and passions.
Thus, in the classical and Christian tradition, the inability or unwillingness to discipline these lower elements of our nature resulted in a condition of slavery. So, both Plato and St. Paul could talk about the person who submitted to vice or sin as one who is “enslaved,” while those who master those base features of our nature as achieving a genuine kind of freedom.
Of course, the modern definition of “liberty,” arising from liberal theory and, later, liberal practice, reverses these definitions. Freedom is defined both by Hobbes and by Locke (in their “state of nature” scenario) as the condition of being to do as one wishes, to “dispose of one’s property and one’s self” as one likes. Liberty comes to be defined as the absence of external and internal constraint. Because this form of liberty is destructive, it must be restrained at some level by law; but because this form of liberty is according to our nature, it must be enjoyed and expanded to the greatest extent possible. Liberal polities come into existence explicitly to expand the empire of this modern liberty....