In a column in yesterday's Guardian, Terry Eagleton takes a number of well-known writers to task for their failure, as he sees it, to measure up to the 'nuanced analysis and moral complexity' that liberals are supposed to value. Though praising one of the achievements of the liberal state - its accommodation of a diversity of beliefs - he plainly doesn't identify himself as a liberal, so perhaps it will be thought beside the point for me to note that his column is itself rather short on nuance and complexity. But I will note it all the same, since that pair of intellectual virtues I take to be germane for others as well as liberals, including socialists with an attachment to fair-minded argument. I shall deal with four of Eagleton's own failures in the matter of nuanced analysis and moral complexity.
First, he lumps together supporters of the war on terror and those responsible for, as he puts it, 'the airy dismissal of all religion as so much garbage', as if the arguments being made today in these two broad areas of controversy have led people to the same combination of alignments there. This is an empirical simplification and plainly false. Even amongst those he names there are people arguing for atheism and the values of the Enlightenment who have not been that keen on the war on terror. There are certainly also supporters of the war on terror who are of religious outlook. A further complexity is that there are atheists, both supporters of the war on terror and not, who don't align themselves with the manner in which some other atheists now speak more or less contemptuously about religion and the religious.
Second, Eagleton says that 'socialists as well as Islamists reject the liberal state'. Another simplification. It may be true of some socialists, but it isn't true of all of us; and one of the great divisions within the left is precisely over this - the valuation of the liberal state.
Third, he conflates the neutrality of the liberal state vis-à-vis the beliefs of citizens with a lack of positive or passionate conviction on the part of liberals or liberalism more generally. This, too, shows a lack of nuance - to put it kindly. The liberal state is, or should be, neutral towards belief, but only to the point at which belief translates into action that is invasive of the health and the lives of others, the point at which action by one person becomes harmful to another. Such neutrality, however, is based on certain convictions and these are held most passionately indeed by many liberals, liberal socialists among them - convictions about what human beings are entitled to by fundamental right, and what sort of polity embodies those entitlements and offers everyone the best chance of a fulfilled life protected against the depredations of others.
Therefore when Eagleton says, 'Any honest liberal, however, will acknowledge that the neutrality of the state is a form of partisanship', he's right; but he should dump the 'however', and he should amend 'honest' to 'self-aware'. This is not a revelation or an unmasking. It is the simple observation that liberalism embodies some clear, non-neutral values, values to which the convictions of liberals can become attached.
Whether, finally, the liberal state predetermines, as is his claim, that individualism rather than cooperation should 'reign supreme in social and economic life' is a question that has not been definitively settled. By relying on this claim, Eagleton - like too many other socialists - spares himself the necessity of reflecting on the fact that the kind of programme of cooperation he would favour has yet to win a secure democratic mandate anywhere, such as would allow the testing of this particular claim of his about the limits of the liberal state.