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Against fusionism
Liberalism needs liberals
Janet Bufton
July 07, 2025
Fusionism is a trap. Judith Shklar can tell us why, as I outline in a new piece at Liberal Currents.
Fusionism is the argument that liberal neutrality means that liberalism needs another, non-liberal political philosophy to fill in its gaps. It insists that because liberal institutions can’t take sides, liberal people have to be rudderless, with no useful conception of a life worth living or the type of person we should want to be, unless we also wed ourselves to another philosophy.
This was the basis for insisting that libertarians must ally themselves with conservatives: conservatives provide the values and morality, and libertarianism provides the institutions. That libertarians fell for it is maddening. It concedes that morality has to come from politics. That gives away the game. It is just what liberalism rejects.
Liberals’ morality does not and cannot come from our political philosophy. But that’s only a problem for non-liberals. Liberals can recognize which type of morality support liberalism, though and, if they want to fight for liberalism (they should), pursue those morals in the private sphere.
It might sound like a quibble, but there is all the difference in the world between the two. The latter insists on a sharp line between public and private that the former insists is fuzzy or impossible to maintain. That’s just the mistake Shklar identifies in those who tie morality so closely to politics as to risk making the former dependent on the latter:
these critics cannot grasp that the liberalism of fear as strictly political theory is not necessarily linked to any one religious or scientific doctrine, though it is psychologically more compatible with some rather than with others. It must reject only those political doctrines that do not recognize any difference between the spheres of the personal and the public. Because of the primacy of toleration as the irreducible limit on public agents, liberals must always draw such a line. This is not historically a permanent or unalterable boundary, but it does require that every public policy be considered with this separation in mind and be consciously defended as meeting its most severe current standard.
The important point for liberalism is not so much where the line is drawn, as that it be drawn, and that it must under no circumstances be ignored or forgotten.
It matters a lot that so many liberals got this wrong. Some are trying to hold the pieces of fusionism together and hope the glue dries. Others tried to port in a sort of pragmatic centrism that insists there are good ideas on the left and the right. (Libertarians should have an argument against a basis in such centrism ready: it’s the same argument Hayek made against conservatism.) No matter how they reacted, it’s obvious that when fusionism fell apart, too many liberals really were left feeling rudderless.
We never should have allowed this to happen. We should never let it happen again.
Recs
It’s been a minute since life let me get my fingers on a keyboard. Here’s some good stuff.
Liberty Fund hosted a really wonderful symposium in remembrance of David Boaz.
Jonathan Blanks and Aaron Ross Powell talked about the importance of equality to liberty.
Matt Zwolinski wrote about the importance of focusing on an end goal of liberty and not simply opposing the government—even if you think the government is the biggest threat to liberty.
I enjoyed this episode of The Curious Task podcast about the left-wing history of free trade.
Coming soon: an airing of grievances at Isabel Paterson, lots more about Judith Shklar, and a review of Quinn Slobodian.