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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
I'm Sari Hanafi, I'm professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut, former president of the International Sociological Association and a Fellow of the British Academy.
I want to talk to you about the concept of symbolic liberalism, which is the subject of my book, 'Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology'.
Symbolic liberalism is a contradiction in which individuals espouse classical liberal principles, yet act in politically illiberal ways.
In an era of deepening polarisation, social scientists often reproduce the very injustice they seek to challenge, taking entrenched positions while dismissing alternative per perspective.
This has exacerbated the pathologies of late modernity, authoritarianism, economic precarity, and environmental destruction, now all unfolding in a climate where reasonable debate seems increasingly impossible.
By examining key flashpoints of contemporary polarization, we can critique how symbolic liberalism inflates the universality of rights while simultaneously narrowing the space for dialogue, rather than maintaining a rigid ideological stance.
I call for a dialogical turn, a renewed public sphere where diverse conceptions of the good engage in a genuine conversation and meaningful intellectual discourse.
Why should I critique liberalism while liberal democracy has been under considerable strain in the oldest democracies such as US and Europe?
My reply is twofold. First, even if liberalism has not been intrinsically successful in many places so far, I don't see any serious alternatives.
Second, I come from the Arab region where we have yet to experience liberalism, at least since our independence. Thus there are different repertoires of critique whether a critic comes from pre-liberal context or post-liberal one.
My critiques in this book are more in tune with liberal values, understood in a specific way that guides me in my reflection on how to mitigate symbolic liberalism, proposing a liberal society with a more dialogical turn, what I call the Dialogical Liberal Project, that echoes what I call Dialogical Sociology.
Both will find a kind of balance between collective and individual political liberal ideas and act seriously against social inequality and in favor of the conception of justice, while allowing the plurality of the conception of the good.
This entails searching for common ground and building bridges between so polarised and divided groups.
It also implies welcoming complex, multidimensional and multilayered theorsation of the pathologies and uncertainties of our late modernity.
But first, we should define what we mean by liberalism. Classical liberalism upholds the importance of civil rights and individual rights such as freedom of expression and freedom of religion.
Contemporary political liberalism is heavily influenced by the thinking of John Rawls, the American philosopher. Even if Rawlsian political liberalism is a normative theory for governance and society, I defend it as a thin theory, a theory with some core values - justice as a fairness with its two egalitarian and different principles, and differentiation between the conception of justice and the pluralistic conceptions of the good.
Other than that, I will provide a critical assessment of when it went wrong as a thick theory adopted, theorised, and implemented.
In my view, the symbolic liberal project distorts the definition of justice by deflating the concept of social justice, while the economic, social, and cultural chasm between big cities, symbolic elites, and peripheral populations grows ever deeper.
This project also inflates the conception of the universality of human rights, and considers only one possible conception of the good, a hegemonic one, that is sometimes packaged as an inherent part of the conception of justice.
Symbolic liberalism inflates the conception of the universality of human rights, seeing them not as abstract concepts but as concrete ones with little input from local cultures where they are implemented.
A hegemonic conception of the good imposed on others clearly violates the principle of plurality on the conceptions of the good in political liberalism.
This has created incommensurable tensions between morality, how people resolve problems when different conceptions of the good enter into conflict, and codified norms, the privileged side for symbolic liberals to impose their conception of the good.
All that will be aggravated with excessive identity politics under subculturally fragmented and polarised society.
Sociology will be dialogical when it disentangles its commitment to civil society into two levels. The level of mediation, or soft normativity, and the level of strong normativity.
In the first level, sociology provides scientific scientific research that is important for public reason debates and for social movements. It is a moment of soft normativity, as the very scientific questions themselves have normal presuppositions, as Max Weber reminds us.
It entails the possibility of providing knowledge to governments and organisations whose actions we don't always agree with.
This sociology believes that despite the inconmmensurability of some modes of reasoning and political, cultural, and religious traditions, actors can engage with each other through dialogue and reach sometimes overlapping consensus.
This is not only in line with the theories of Rawls and Habermas, but also with Durkheim's vision of a sociology that promotes social cohesion.
Mediation level is always in respect of what is construed as universal social justice, including the universal declaration of human rights and social welfare rights.
The second level is a strong normativity, where sociology not only engages with civil society or the civil sphere, but also takes a position in favor of marginalised groups against hegemonic power and defends those value dear to sociology.
I'm worried when sociology analytically conflates the two levels, or offers no distinction between providing scientific knowledge or scientific thinking, and position taking or policy formulation, or worse, neglects the first level and become incapable of engaging with all the strata of society.
Being dialogical would involve all sectors, from urban planners who will reorganise a city to make different socioeconomic social classes and cultural groups live together, to the social scientists, journalists and artists fostering spaces of encounter of these groups.
In my second part of this book, I examined four themes to show how they have been addressed by symbolic liberals and how the dialogical project can mitigate their effect.
These are first, polarisation in academia around the question of Palestine; polarisation around the question of secularism and religion in France, Iran, and other places; polarisation around the question of sex and gender diversity in the West and in the Middle East; and finally, the tension between the Swedish state's ideals and the implementation of the country's Care of Young Persons Special Provisions Act, which allows for children at serious risk to be removed from their parents.
There is not enough time to explore all these case studies in this talk, so I will focus on the last one: how Sweden approaches the tensions between the rights of families, the rights of individual children and the rights of the state to intervene in these spheres.
Many scholars have argued that familial authority is being eroded by both the liberal state and the forces of neoliberal and emotional capitalism.
To explore the consequences of this, I look at the numerous cases of compulsory child removal from the biological family in Sweden. One should know that according to the 2020 Swedish official statistics from the National Board of Health and Welfare, 3,486 children adolescents were taken from their families and rehomed in the care sector without their families' consent.
This practice is known as 'compulsory care'. This number seems like a significant one for a country of 10 million inhabitants, and it was larger in the precedent years.
My objective was not only to unfold the striking contrast between the practice and theory of the Swedish Child Protection System, but to seek some explanation of the context.
It is important to show the extent to which there is intolerance in the current debates on the importance of family, rather than dialogue and reasoned debate about how the rights of different parties can coexist.
I advance the hypothesis that Swedish symbolic liberals in the social services, with conscious or unconscious silence or justification for media, academia, and the political field, are imposing their hegemonic and deculturalised conception of the good over society to the point that lawyers went to the European court to sue the Swedish social services.
Let me be clear. I have no nostalgia for the traditional family. I'm also sensitive that some of this removal is absolutely necessary. However, I do believe that because we are in the neoliberal age, the family is a salient social structure for protecting individuals vis-à-vis the coercion of the state and the market and providing materials and also emotional support for their offspring.
The way in which the neoliberal state uses its authority and that of the school or social service over the family's authority and instead of complementing it is problematic.
We should not undermine institutions, at least in the level one of our commitment to civil society, that are "seedbeds of virtue".
The family has traditionally been a force for stability, socialisation, and the nurturing of moral behavior. Filial love is not only important when facing state and societal violence, but also as indispensable energy for collective action connecting politics of sensibilities and social conflict, as Adrian Scribano shows us in Latin America.
In conclusion, by exposing certain pathologies of our late modernity, we can see how some are related to bad implementations of the political liberal project and others to its basic Rawlsian variation of liberalism.
I call for the need to have a critical assessment of both.
I'm not fetishizing any conceptions. But I want to see humanity in a conversation about universal concepts and values that come together.
My analysis aims to be part of this conversation. Thank you.