For several decades, Cass Sunstein has been one of the most prominent and prolific legal scholars in the United States. A onetime faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School, Sunstein co-authored, with Richard Thaler, the 2008 book “Nudge,” which advocated for government policies that pushed citizens to make certain decisions without restricting their choices. (One example: Asking people who are getting their driver’s licenses whether they would like to be organ donors rather than leaving them to sign up for it on their own.) The next year, Sunstein joined the Obama Administration. He ran the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which essentially made him the government’s chief overseer of federal regulations. (Sunstein, a friend of Obama from their time in Chicago, was initially the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories that painted him as an overzealous nanny-state enforcer, but he ended up disappointing progressives who thought he was too deferential to the free market.)
Sunstein has written a new book, called “On Liberalism,” which is a defense of the idea of liberalism at a time when Sunstein believes it is under threat from both the right and the left. The book barely mentions Donald Trump or contemporary politics, however, and instead provides a defense of a general liberal belief system, which Sunstein breaks down into eighty-five features. Sunstein’s conception of liberalism is quite capacious; it includes New Deal liberals and so-called classical liberals, including Friedrich von Hayek and Robert Nozick, as well as politicians such as Ronald Reagan.
I recently spoke with Sunstein, currently a professor at Harvard Law School, about the book and our current political moment. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how to understand the origins of the conservative movement, his confidence that the Supreme Court is committed to liberal ideals, and his friendship with a man whom many liberals consider a war criminal: Henry Kissinger.
You have chosen to write a book about liberalism at a time when liberalism is under threat without really talking about what those threats are. It’s more of a positive case for liberalism. Why did you decide to write this particular book?
Partly it’s temperamental. Probably that’s the fundamental answer. To say that there are these people and they have names and they are doing and saying awful things would be, for me, unpleasant.
Even if it’s the President?
Even in the event that it’s the President, that’s right. I feel a little bit that it would date the book and cheapen the analysis if it was calling out the President or calling out some contemporary prominent person. But I think the more fundamental and more truthful answer is that talking about the President makes me grumpy and talking about John Stuart Mill or John Rawls makes me the opposite of grumpy.
Liberalism refers to many things. What liberalism are you talking about in the book?
This is not liberalism of the left, and not liberalism of the neoliberal sort associated with a particular set of right-wing views, but instead a commitment to freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law. That’s the holy trinity of the liberal tradition. Freedom is cashed out most importantly in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but it also includes private property. Pluralism is on our currency. It also means respect for people who have diverse ethnicities, diverse religious convictions, and diversity in their sense of what kind of life is good.
Even though the book isn’t about liberalism in the sense of modern American political liberals, it did seem that you were both trying to explain why you have some sympathy with that form of liberalism, but also that when it comes to the larger tradition, you have affection and respect for a much broader category of liberals. Is that accurate?
It’s completely correct. I almost called the book “Big-Tent Liberalism,” which means a form of liberalism that includes Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, and that includes Mill and Robert Nozick, who was a libertarian. It is a wide range of people who intensely disagree with each other. And that is what the book is fundamentally celebrating: the liberal tradition that unites these diverse figures. What surprised me in the writing is that I spent much of my career arguing with right-of-center liberals and being skeptical of some of the views of Hayek or people who I would call overenthusiastic free marketeers. But, doing the book, I came to see them as brothers and sisters. The fundamental values that they speak for are ones I’m honored to share. And, in a time when illiberal and anti-liberal thinking is riding high, to see the free marketeers, the anti-government liberals, as allied in their insistence on freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law is, I think, a step forward.
