Liberalism is about Sameness, not Liberty
Since the wave of republican revolutions from the 1700s to the 1800s the geoculture (the set of dominant norms of the modern world-system) has been dominated by liberal ideology. The major selling point of liberalism has been that it is about liberty; that it is the political ideology most concerned with putting human beings in charge of their own destiny. There is however a truth about liberalism and liberty that is embarrassing for liberals and which they have gone to great lengths to cover up in their propagandistic endeavors. Liberalism is not about liberty; it is about sameness.
A key argument of liberal philosophers has been that the autonomy human beings possess in virtue of being human beings makes a political order based on liberty the ideal one. Because humans naturally tend toward autonomous self-development and critical thought which expands our happiness and diminishes our suffering the social order ideal for human beings must be one in which that autonomous development is facilitated to the fullest extent. So as the 19th and 20th centuries wore on liberals more and more advocated constitutional democracy, civil rights, and separation of powers that checks executive authority. The basic idea was that this liberal democratic form of government would act to safeguard human autonomy, rather than diminish it as most governments in history did.
Liberalism thus counted itself as a defender of human liberty against fanatical ideologies such as communism, fascism, Jihadism, and illiberal forms of conservativism. However, there is a reason why liberal social theory, even the most radical forms such as the Jacobinism of the French Revolution and Rousseau's directly democratic and majoritarian general will, makes use of what is called social contract. The social contract is a tacit agreement that justifies political authority. Liberals have always insisted that political authority is essential to liberty. This is because the liberal idea of liberty derives from an idea of fundamental sameness, or homogeneity.
According to liberals, human nature is prone both to autonomy and repression. Human beings are just as likely to dominate each other for their own benefit as they are to cultivate voluntary cooperation among each other. Thus, there needs to be an enforceable norm of sameness where human beings are all guaranteed access to similar treatment and opportunities. Of course, enforcing that standard then requires a coercive political machine, the state.
Thereby, just as much as liberalism emphasizes liberty, it has had to emphasize state sanctioned order out of the other side of its mouth, in fact more. The development of liberalism in the 19th century United States, for instance, included the creation of a 'progressive' movement which advocated against the wealth inequality and poverty generated by 19th century robber baron capitalism and the working-class insurrections lighting up the country in opposition to the robber barons. This is because, as Gary Gerstle points out, law and order was an axiom for the progressives. For them as bad as the robber barons were, it was the legal order of individual rights guaranteed by economic private property and wealth, which allows all people, at least in principle, to take part in the riches of the commercial economy.
If property rights were to be abolished, then there would be nothing protecting the rights of capitalists from the unruly mob who would promptly eradicate those rights in a lawless orgy. According to the progressives the working class and the poor deserved to share in the common liberty and wealth generated by the commercial economy so there must be state supported programs to reduce the level of poverty and the plunder of national wealth by robber baron oligarchs. However, the capitalists also deserved to take part in this wealth and liberty, meaning that a rule of law which upholds their property and wealth, even if they were to be prevented from achieving robber baron status, was just as necessary as the construction of a social safety net for the poor. There was thus not to be any room for the radical fantasies of Anarchists and communists in which property and the class stratification of social wealth were to be abolished in a general social uprising of the working class against the capitalist class and the capitalist state.
This point can be made for even the most radical forms of liberalism. In the 20th century anti-colonial nationalism in the Arab world allowed for the creation of so-called Arab Socialism. These movements including Nasser's movement of free officers in Egypt, Algeria's FLN, as well as the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'ath were not actually 'socialist'. They had no interest in creating a classless association of free producers.
Actual socialism would have required the ultimate liquidation of their national communities as a world of free and equal association among all human beings could not logically respect national boundaries. Instead, the Arab Socialists were interested in national independence in which all members of the national community were to be citizens cultivating an egalitarian ethos. True, an egalitarian Arab republic could not allow wealth and property to be amassed in a way that created significant inequality among the people, thus political economy was to be managed by a tutelary political dictatorship. However, property is not to be abolished as it can be used to generate wealth for the Arab citizen.
Thus, even a military autocracy aimed at subordinating all citizens to collective national development would have to tolerate private property as long as it was in the virtuous interests of the citizens. As such tendencies to the left deemed to be a threat to national interests, such as the communist movement, were repressed and marginalized with the force of political dictatorship. Thus, moderate and radical forms of liberalism require a coercive political power (the state) which enforces a common standard of rights, obligations, and opportunities on individuals. Liberty just isn't the highest value for liberals.
While the homogenous standard of rights and obligations will obviously guarantee individual liberty in some form, it also necessarily eliminates individual liberty in other areas. If individual liberty is in violation of the homogenous standard, then it should be as ruthlessly crushed as violations of the homogenous standard for explicitly repressive purposes. There are no obligations, without rights, but equally there are no rights without obligations. The liberal need for homogenous social order alongside individual liberty explains why no liberal society has ever actually extended rights to every social group that makes them up.
In all existing liberal societies peoples racialized as non-white, women, queer people, ect. have variously faced and continue to face marginalization by liberal culture and politics which they have to fight for their lives to overcome. The United States even to this day remains the land of freedom and opportunity only for a very specific section of its population, not even for all of its citizens, never mind noncitizens. Liberals have attempted to narrate this reality as a corruption of the liberal order by those who are insufficiently respectful of the homogenous standard of rights and obligations. This is the argument made by most civil rights activists, politicians, and international humanitarian institutions since WWII.
According to this narrative the political should be nothing, but a continued civil rights struggle to ensure that one day the liberal order will have perfected itself to the degree that there are no systemic violations of human rights and just social obligations. The problem with this narrative is that it ignores what it means for rights to come with obligations. Even in such an idealized liberal order individuals would not be totally free, and this is so in more than just the trivial sense that they wouldn't be free to harm the freedom of other individuals. Individuals in such an order would only be free because they have obligations.
I only have rights as an individual because I tacitly agree to be governed by the political order which ensures that everyone else respects my rights. It's not that I and others freely decide the structure of our lives, it's that we all have some specific area of our lives where we get to make decisions and some specific areas where we have to defer to politically sanctioned authorities. What the liberal human rights discourse aims to sell us on is the idea that somehow, if we just perfect the liberal order enough through struggle and strife, that the sanctioned political authorities will be so in line with this discourse that they won't systematically abuse their power. It's worth asking whether that's really plausible given that liberalism sells itself as the most practical framework for political engagement.
If the liberals are right that human beings have a tendency to seek power in order to dominate then why would we think that any number of civil rights will prevent systematic violations of them? Social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein once noted that for all the rights currently enumerated in the legal structures of liberal societies there are pages and pages of documentation by civil rights watchdogs detailing human rights abuses. Even if there were no such violations in the perfect liberal order, somehow, the presupposition of access to those rights is subordination to the political power which enforces them. This is why human rights are legal guarantees, rather than informal social norms.
In this way, to paraphrase the great (liberal) German philosopher Hegel, liberalism can't say what it means or mean what it says on liberty. The ambiguity between liberty and order is a permanent, universal, and insurmountable feature of the liberal order and liberal ideology. By contrast the central value of Anarchism is freedom. According to Anarchists it is not the case that humanity should be boxed within a homogenous standard of rights and obligations. The autonomy inherent in human beings in fact demands a spontaneous and creative application of standards according to the needs of freely cooperating individuals.
For Anarchists order is not something that is imposed by a tacit agreement and the authority it legitimizes. Instead for Anarchists order is a spontaneous byproduct of cooperation among autonomous individuals. This is the case for socialists more broadly who seek the disappearance of distinctions between ruling and subordinate classes through the free cooperation of producers. Anarchists, in particular, are so attached to this vision of spontaneous order that, unlike other socialists, they reject any attempt to transform society from above.
According to Anarchists creating a free society is a matter of breaking down the coercive forms of social order to make way for spontaneous forms. For Anarchists defending against domination and exploitation is not a matter of imposing a homogenous order on both dominator and dominated. It is a matter of empowering the dominated to dislodge all forms of domination. This is the basis for the slogan that Anarchy is order.
Sources
Democracy, Zack
Liberalism, Freedan and Steers
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x61N--fjtS8&t=33s&pp=ygUld2hhdCBpcyBsaWJlcmFsaXNtIHBvc3QtY29tcHJlaGVuc2lvbg%3D%3D
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Gary Gerstle
Racism, Rattansi
Gender, Erickson-Schroth and Davidson
Arab Socialism, Usenmez
Anarchism, Honeywell
