A Thicker Liberalism

Responding to our discussion on liberalism (here, here, here, and here), Brad Lewis, a professor of Philosophy at CUA, offers a more thickly textured liberalism:

It's true that liberalism as a kind of normative philosophical theory assumes or promotes a thin anthropology.  However, why should one accept that that is all there is and can be for liberalism?  After all, the root of the word itself is simply "free."  Liberalism as a political theory is a theory of freedom.  Certainly we (Catholics, I mean) are not opposed to that.  In Caritas in Veritate (as in his earlier encyclicals, and all over the place in the writings of John Paul II) Benedict links freedom to truth.  The only real and authentic freedom is related to truth.  It's an insight of classical political philosophy (that begins with Plato and Aristotle) that there are tensions between political life and truth, that politics is not a realm in which the truth can simply hold sway, and that politics is therefore limited--it isn't, can't be, shouldn't be, about everything.  It should make possible a life devoted to the highest things, but it isn't that life.  Aristotle says on Nicomachean Ethics X.7-8 that politics isn't for its own sake.  This is the classical basis of the limits of the political.  Christianity recontextualizes this, of course, but the notion of limits is still there: the earthly city is not the heavenly city, although many people strive to live in both.  In so far as we say that liberalism is a political theory of freedom and understand human freedom in its fullest sense as connected to truth we can understand the limits of politics as following from this: liberalism is a theory of limited government by free people, free because they can govern themselves and are open to the truth that transcends politics.  Liberalism on this view describes a set of political institutions and goods (limited, representative government, elections, protections for basic human rights) necessary for a decent human life in the context of modern national states.  Those institutions are better and more stable when grounded in a deeper anthropology to be sure and Christianity offers precisely that.  Catholic social teaching offers it.  This, again, is to distinguish liberalism as a practical political theory from liberalism as an ideology.