It is all the more important to appreciate the liberal insight at this juncture of our civilisation, when our appreciation is inevitably tinged with a sense of loss. A de-natured late-liberalism, shaping itself ideologically even to the point of religious persecution, and indistinguishable in some ways from the Marxism it once combatted, parts company from classical liberalism precisely here. The liberal tradition used to defer to a point of transcendence within the individual, something which social identity could not account for, something which gave the individual an independent view upon society. This was not in fact a view “from nowhere”; it was precisely a view from “the conscience”. By instructing the individual that conscience had precedence over every social demand, the liberal tradition did not throw him back upon the chances of an untutored imagination. It presumed that conscience had a source beyond both society and individual, that it was more than an echo of social claims, more than a projection of individual dreams. It presumed this because of its monotheistic faith, which lay at the heart of its logic. Until the early years of the twentieth century Augustine’s now controversial thesis, that there can be no “right” in a society which does not acknowledge the right of God, appeared to be the uncontrovertible bedrock of a liberal society. A polytheistic society negotiates multiple claims with no cohesion but what it imposes on them, so that, in effect, it enforces its own sovereignty. Late-liberalism, one may say, in taking up the banner of “pluralism”, has made itself self-consciously polytheistic again.
Oliver O’Donovan Freedom and its Loss The Westminster Abbey Gore lecture 2002
