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Sketching the Liberal Script. A Target of Contestations

June 2021

June 2021

Authors:

Michael Zürn

WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Johannes Gerschewski

WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer reviewed yet.

In this working paper, we aim to make the amorphous concept of “liberal script” more tangible, manifest, and concrete. We do so in three steps. First, we elaborate on the added value of the term “script” for the social sciences. While “script” has been used in other disci-plinary contexts, we translate it to the social scienc-es by delineating it from rival and more widespread terms like institution, order, practice, and ideology. Second, we map different methodological approach-es to the empirical study of what the liberal script is. We put forward a reconstructive approach that com-bines a sociological analysis with a philosophical fil-ter. Third, we engage into spelling out what the “liberal” in the liberal script could mean. We formulate theo-retical expectations about the content of the liberal script, its internal architecture, as well as its varieties.

First-Layer Principles

…

Tensions Within the Liberal Script

…

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Contestations of the Liberal Script

Michael Zürn and Johannes Gerschewski

Sketching the Liberal Script. A Target of Contestations

SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 10

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER SERIES

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Dr. Gregor Walter-Drop, Cordula Hamschmidt, Paul Geiling,

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Please cite this issue as: Zürn, Michael / Gerschewski,

Johannes 2021: Sketching the Liberal Script. A Target of

Contestations, SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 10, Berlin: Cluster

of Excellence 2055 “Contestations of the Liberal Script –

SCRIPTS”.

CLUSTER OF EXCELLENCE “CONTESTATIONS OF

THE LIBERAL SCRIPT ‒ SCRIPTS”

SCRIPTS analyzes the contemporary controversies about

liberal order from a historical, global, and comparative

perspective. It connects academic expertise in the social

sciences and area studies, collaborates with research

institutions in all world regions, and maintains cooperative

ties with major political, cultural, and social institutions.

Operating since 2019 and funded by the German Research

Foundation (DFG), the SCRIPTS Cluster of Excellence unites

eight major Berlin-based research institutions: Freie

Universität Berlin, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the

Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), as well as the Hertie

School, the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW),

the Berlin branch of the German Institute of Global and

Area Studies (GIGA), the Centre for East European and

International Studies (ZOiS), and the Leibniz-Zentrum

Moderner Orient (ZMO).

Cluster of Excellence

“Contestations of the Liberal Script – SCRIPTS”

Freie Universität Berlin

Edwin-Redslob-Straße 29

14195 Berlin

Germany

+49 30 838 58502

oce@scripts-berlin.eu

www.scripts-berlin.eu

Twitter: @scriptsberlin

Facebook: @scriptsberlin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Authors

Abstract

1 Introduction 3

2 Scripts and Familiar Concepts 6

3 How to Study the Liberal Script? 11

4 The Liberal Script – Architecture, Varieties, and Inner Tensions 14

4.1 The First Layer 14

4.2 The Second-Layer Components 16

4.3 Varieties of the Liberal Script 21

4.3.1 Family Resemblance 21

4.3.2 Tensions 24

5 Conclusion 28

References

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

AUTHORS

Prof. Dr. Michael Zürn is Director at WZB Berlin So-

cial Science Center and Professor of Internation-

al Relations at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since

2019, he is director of the Cluster of Excellence

“Contestations of the Liberal Script – SCRIPTS”,

funded by the German Research Foundation, to-

gether with Prof. Dr. Tanja Börzel, as well as leader

of the DFG research group “Overlapping Spheres

of Authority and Interface Conﬂicts in the Global

Order” (OSAIC). He is a member of the Berlin-Bran-

denburgische Akademie der Wissenschaten and

the Academia Europeana. His work focuses on the

emergence and functioning of inter- and suprana-

tional institutions and organizations as well as on

their impact on the global political order.

michael.zuern@wzb.eu

Dr. Johannes Gerschewski is Academic Coordina-

tor of the Theory Network at the Cluster of Ex-

cellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script –

SCRIPTS”. He is also a research fellow at the Global

Governance Department at the WZB Berlin Social

Science Center. His work focuses on comparative

regime research and the legitimacy of political

orders.

johannes.gerschewski@wzb.eu

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

Sketching the Liberal Script

A Target of Contestations

Michael Zürn and Johannes Gerschewski

ABSTRACT

In this working paper, we aim to make the amorphous

concept of “liberal script” more tangible, manifest, and

concrete. We do so in three steps. First, we elaborate

on the added value of the term “script” for the social

sciences. While “script” has been used in other disci-

plinary contexts, we translate it to the social scienc-

es by delineating it from rival and more widespread

terms like institution, order, practice, and ideology.

Second, we map dierent methodological approach-

es to the empirical study of what the liberal script is.

We put forward a reconstructive approach that com-

bines a sociological analysis with a philosophical ﬁl-

ter. Third, we engage into spelling out what the “liberal”

in the liberal script could mean. We formulate theo-

retical expectations about the content of the liberal

script, its internal architecture, as well as its varieties.

1 INTRODUCTION

In a Financial Times interview on the eve of the

G20 summit in Osaka, Japan (27 June 2019), the

Russian president declared that “the liberal idea”

had “outlived its purpose” as the public turns

against immigration, open borders, and multicul-

turalism. Viktor Orbán uses similar descriptors to

Putin in promoting his illiberal turn:

1 We would like to thank our fellow members of the Cluster of

Excellence SCRIPTS, the 2019–2020 BGTS cohort, as well as our

colleagues at the Global Governance Unit at WZB for stimulating

discussions. For providing intensive feedback, we are particularly

grateful to Tanja Börzel, Anne Menzel, Friederike Kuntz, Alexan-

dra Paulin-Booth, Tully Rector, Mattias Kumm, Christoph Möllers,

Gudrun Krämer, Rainer Forst, Stefan Gosepath, and Peter Katzen-

stein. For excellent research assistance, we thank Louisa Böttner.

2 https://www.t.com/content/670039ec-98f3-11e9-9573-

ee5cbb98ed36 (accessed 5 April 2021).

Let us conﬁdently declare that Christian democ-

racy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal,

while Christian democracy is, by deﬁnition, not

liberal. […] Liberal democracy is in favour of mul-

ticulturalism, while Christian democracy gives

priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal

concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration,

while Christian democracy is anti-immigration;

this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And

liberal democracy sides with adaptable family

models, while Christian democracy rests on the

foundations of the Christian family model; once

more, this is an illiberal concept.

Contestants of the liberal idea come not only from

the realm of politics. Liberalism, understood in

a dierent way, is also the target of contesta-

tion in scholarly discourse. Critical voices from

the Global South point, for example, to its com-

plicity with century-old structures of domination

(Chakrabarty 2000; Pitts 2005). In this view, lib-

eralism reinforces imperialism, colonialism, and

racist stratiﬁcation in world society. Not least, a

current critique of liberalism equates it with neo-

liberalism and points to a coalition between neo-

liberals and new conservatives that dismantled

structures of solidarity (Cooper 2017; Slobodian

2018). Not to forget those voices that declare the

end of liberal democracy since it has proven to be

inferior compared to the eectiveness of an au-

tocratic Chinese model that above all showcases

3 Viktor Orbán at the 29th Bálványos Summer Open University

and Student Camp, 29 July 2018, https://miniszterelnok.hu/prime-

minister-viktor-orbans-speech-at-the-29th-balvanyos-summer-

open-university-and-student-camp/ (accessed 5 April 2021).

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

eminent successes in reducing poverty and man-

aging growth (Daniel Bell 2006, 2015).

These various criticisms target dierent facets

of liberalism. For some, liberalism has become a

scapegoat for “postmodern” values that they seek

to attack, equating them oten with a “letist” and

cosmopolitan project detached from the expe-

rience of “normal” people. Others points to the

weakness of the liberal model by slowing down

necessary decisions in oering too many opportu-

nities for participation. At the same time, liberal-

ism is considered as the ideology that made dom-

ination over the wretched of the earth possible

(Fanon 1963). The amorphousness of liberalism

makes it an easy target for today’s authoritari-

an and populist leaders but also post-structural-

ist and post-colonial thinking. At the same time,

neoliberalism is criticized by many who consider

themselves as real liberals (e.g. Schmidt/Thatch-

er 2013). Similarly, practices of domination and

exploitation by liberal societies are criticized

not only by post-colonial voices but also liberals

(Hobhouse 1911). It seems that contestants of the

liberal script target not only liberal principles as

such, but they also challenge practices in seem-

ingly liberal societies from the point of view of lib-

eral principles. Without doubt, liberalism is today

an essentially contested concept (Gallie 1956) and

“resists easy descriptions” (Wall 2015: 1).

How do we know then that the mentioned contes-

tants from Orbán to Hobhouse really contest the

liberal script? The seemingly obvious needs to be

made transparent by providing the reasons and

reasoning behind such a judgment. This requires

the conceptualization of “contestation”, the “lib-

eral idea”, and the notion of a “script”. We deal

with the questions of what is a contestant and

what is a contestation in other contexts. In this

working paper, we want to focus on the “liber-

al” and the “script”. In doing so, we build on the

proposal for the Cluster of Excellence “Contes-

tations of the Liberal Script – SCRIPTS” (Börzel/

Zürn 2020).

To start, deﬁning the noun in the liberal script

seems to be the easier task. “Script” is a quite

speciﬁc term utilized for the purposes of our re-

search program. It carries much less historical and

political baggage than all the “-isms” that refer

to streams of political thinking or big theories. It

is also an abstract concept that explicitly aims to

empirically compare dierent scripts. In section

2, we discuss the meaning of script and propose

a deﬁnition which can distinguish it from similar

concepts in the social sciences.

Things get much more dicult when we move to

the qualiﬁer “liberal” and thus to a speciﬁc script.

The liberal script consists of a complex set of pre-

scriptive and descriptive statements about the

organization of society that come with a certain

epistemological set-up and some (but not com-

plete) enactment. Prescriptive or normative state-

ments refer to beliefs about how things should be;

descriptive or empirical statements refer to be-

liefs how things work and include beliefs about

causal relations. It, therefore, seems impossible

to ﬁnd a deﬁnition of the liberal script in the strict

meaning of the term. The liberal script cannot be

captured in a one-sentence deﬁnition that iden-

tiﬁes distinctly what is in and out. While it may

be possible to ﬁnd such a deﬁnition for speciﬁc

components of the liberal script, such as markets

or property rights, it is an insurmountable task to

do so for a complete script that brings together

several such components in a particular but vari-

ant relationship.

The problem is well known in the social scienc-

es in general. While it may be possible to deﬁne

what society is, it is hard to say in one sentence

what characterizes the US-American society – un

less we come up with a formal deﬁnition freed of

any meaning and all the relational elements of

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

society. For some speciﬁc research purposes, such

an operational deﬁnition like “the US American

society consists of the people with a US passport”

may be useful, but certainly not for the study of

the problems of American society. A similar op-

erational deﬁnition of the liberal script – say “all

the statements that contain the word liberal” –

would help very little to identify and categorize

the contestations of the liberal script. We, there-

fore, aim for sketching or characterizing the lib-

eral script by identifying components that stand

in a particular relationship with each other. Our

goal is a useful sketch, not a one-line deﬁnition

of the liberal script.

Since the liberal script certainly is more than one

liberal idea, a second diculty arises regarding

the relative importance of and the relationship

between dierent liberal components. The se-

mantics of the script varies depending on the con-

crete context. There is not one invariant liberal

script that remains unmodiﬁed in dierent times,

dierent societal contexts, or dierent areas in

the world. As Michael Freeden (2015: 22) puts it:

“There is no single, unambiguous thing called lib-

eralism.” The liberal script in 19th century England

is dierent from the liberal script in late 20th cen-

tury Sweden. The liberal script today has dierent

meanings in Uruguay than in South Korea.

Regarding this second diculty, we argue that this

variety of the liberal script does not preclude, but

rather suggest thinking systematically about the

commonalities. We propose thinking more thor-

oughly about varieties of one liberal script, i.e., a

class with a diering set of ideas that show signif-

icant commonalities and overlaps. This seems to

us a better solution than proposing distinct liber-

al scripts in the plural (e.g. Katzenstein 2020). The

classic conception of a deﬁnition requires spell-

ing out both the dierentia speciﬁca vis-à-vis the

species on the same abstraction level and the ge-

nus proximum at a higher level. If we aim to con-

ceptualize distinct liberal scripts in the plural, we

not only need to ﬁnd a sucient criterion that dis-

tinguishes a liberal from non-liberal scripts, but

also a criterion that has enough discriminatory

power to distinguish between liberal script A and

cases in which the variation constitutes another

liberal script B. As paradoxical as it might sound,

to speak of liberal scripts in the plural imposes at

least as many tasks in constructing them as using

the liberal script in the singular allowing for vari-

eties. In addition, it seems to preclude the ﬂexibil-

ity of working with family resemblance and over-

laps between the components within one liberal

script. In this paper, we opt for varieties, since it

makes it easier to capture the inbuilt ambiguity

of what liberalism is.

Speaking of a liberal script and its varieties does

not necessarily lead to an ethnocentric concep-

tion of liberalism. Shmuel Eisenstadt ([2002] 2017)

included the notion of “multiple modernities”

against a use of the notion of “varieties of mod-

ernizations” according to which the Western mod-

ernization constitutes the gold standard with de-

viations from it that are somehow deﬁcient. Our

understanding of varieties of the liberal script de-

ﬁes the notion of one original liberal script and

deviations from it. It considers dierent variet-

ies of the liberal script across time and space as

equal.

There is a third and related diculty in sketching

the liberal script. The authors of this discussion

paper are political scientists from Germany. Giv-

en the diversity of world society, this is quite a

speciﬁc perspective. It unavoidably raises the is-

sue of positionality. While this is an issue for all

conceptual discussions and observations in the

social sciences, it is especially sensitive when it

comes to the sketching of a contested concept

like liberalism. It is impossible to overcome the is-

sue of positionality for any conceivable set of au-

thors. Any of the components of the liberal script

and each of their relationships that we describe

may be rather a function of our position in world

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

society than expressing common understandings.

While this is true, it does not disqualify our argu-

ments as such. It needs a positive argument in

which way our positionality leads to what kind of

distortion in our argument. In the spirit of “double

reﬂexivity”, this paper thus invites challenges of

our characterization with a deconstructing intent.

The paper represents one attempt (among alter-

natives) for sketching the liberal script. For spe-

ciﬁc purposes, there may be good reasons to use

alternative sketches that substantially dier from

our approach. In this case, the paper may serve as

a background against which the crucial dierenc-

es can be identiﬁed and put forward.

This paper is organized as follows. We start sec-

tion 2 by discussing the concept of “script” and

how it diers from similar concepts like order,

ideology, practice, or institutions. In section 3,

we discuss dierent methodologies for sketch-

ing a script. We suggest a sociological approach

that is qualiﬁed with a philosophical check by

the observer. Section 4 aims to describe the lib-

eral script and its varieties by formulating ex-

pectations of what the current liberal script is

about. These expectations need to be adjusted

by systematic empirical explorations. We start

by identifying a ﬁrst layer of the liberal script,

understood as the justiﬁcatory basis for devel-

oping additional components. This ﬁrst layer is

based on the idea of individual self-determina-

tion and its derivatives. The additional compo-

nents that speak to societal, economic, polit-

ical, and cross-cutting issues of a liberal script

are then discussed in two ways: ﬁrst, as a set of

concepts that share a family resemblance as de-

scribed by Wittgenstein. Second, we carve out

the most critical tensions between many of these

concepts demonstrating how and why the liberal

script is dynamic over time and can come in many

varieties as a result of resolving these tensions.

2 SCRIPTS AND FAMILIAR CONCEPTS

We deﬁne a script as shared understandings

about the organization of society that are ex-

pressed in normative statements on how society

ought to be (Sollen) and empirical statements on

how it is (Sein) (Börzel/Zürn 2020). Scripts also

contain action repertoires for how to arrive from

Sein to Sollen, and vice versa. “Script” thus re-

lates to many of the widely used terms in social

sciences, ranging from political and social insti-

tutions, cultural norms and practices, ethical val-

ues, instrumental reasons, as well as routines and

habits. We are aware that “script” is not a broadly

used concept in the social sciences. It is no neol-

ogism, however. While it shares many similarities

with the mentioned familiar concepts, it also has

its distinctive features. In the following, we out-

line the dierent uses of the term and compare

the term scripts to similar concepts, arguing in fa-

vor of its advantages.

Literally, a script is nothing more than some-

thing written. In everyday language, a script is

used most oten in the context of movies and

theaters in which it refers to the written docu-

ment that details the dialogue and stage direc-

tions. In this sense, “scripts” refers to a structure

that constrains action: scripted action is remote-

ly guided action. This use of the term has an illus-

trious career in psychology. Schank and Abelson

(1977), for instance, refer to scripts as stereotyp-

ical knowledge structures that allow us to un-

derstand and act appropriately in a familiar sit-

uation, sometimes referred to as “schemes” or

“frames” (Mandler 1984). A script enables us to

“handle stylized everyday situations” (Schank/

Abelson 1977: 41). Oten, these behavioral scripts

comprise not only a one-time reaction but refer

to a sequence of actions. A script is, therefore,

a temporally ordered, sequential action stereo-

type. Gioia and Poole (1984: 449) have summarized

this understanding neatly: a script is for them a

“schematic knowledge structure held in memory

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

that speciﬁes behavior or event sequences that

are appropriate for speciﬁc situations”. Both the

sequential action stereotype and the schematic

knowledge structure make clear that scripts con-

tain a set of dierent statements that stand in a

given relationship to each other. Scripts consist of

more than just sentences or statements. They also

contain narratives and tell a story (see Koschorke

2012). Along this line, Benedict Wilkinson (2020)

has recently published a book about the stories

terrorists tell themselves with the title “Scripts of

Terror”. All these usages of the term come close

to and borrow from sociological role theory (see

Goman 1956; Mead 1934). They all point to a us-

age of the concept that accounts for actions on

the individual level. Individuals read and internal-

ize scripts that guide their actions.

There are also versions of the meaning of the term

that target the organizational level. In this usage,

scripts guide and constitute organizations and

groups. Marketing, management, and organiza-

tional studies have particularly focused on par-

ticular action stereotypes. Scripts are used here

as behavioral guidelines, explicating how to diver-

sify products, how enterprises should grow, how

employees should be trained, or what mindsets

are needed when starting new ventures (Drori et

al. 2009; Haley/Haley 2016; Lord/Kernan 1987).

Scripts are then understood as being an essen-

tial part of a behavioral and mental “success rec-

ipe” for organizations (Gioia/Poole 1984). In con-

trast, cultural studies have a looser, less rigid, and

less speciﬁed understanding of scripts. They focus

more on the construction of dominant narratives

as orientations for social groups. Prominent ex-

amples concern the construction of race or gen-

der (Jackson 2006) or “blackness” (Godreau 2015),

leaving more room for interpretation of what a

script entails as well as for actors’ improvisation.

The so-called Stanford School has developed the

version of the concept that focuses on the mac-

ro level of the world-society (Boli/Thomas 1999;

Meyer et al. 1997). Their “Western Script” con-

sists of dominant cultural systems and practices

of organizing society. It is deﬁned as “culture of

world society, comprising norms and knowledge

shared across state boundaries, rooted in nine-

teenth-century Western culture but since global-

ized, promoted by non-governmental as well as

for-proﬁt corporations, intimately tied to the ra-

tionalizations of institutions, enacted on partic-

ular occasions that generate global awareness,

carried by infrastructure of world society, spurred

by market forces, riven by tension and contradic-

tion, and expressed in the multitude ways partic-

ular groups relate to universal ideas” (Lechner/

Boli 2005: 6). Our understanding of scripts is al-

so located on the macro level and displays obvi-

ous similarities. Unlike the Stanford School, how-

ever, we adopt a generic concept of scripts that

we dissociate from the speciﬁc content of a giv-

en script. According to the Stanford School, there

is one Western Script that structures world soci-

ety. Competitors are missing. Behavioral devia-

tions from the script are therefore considered as

decoupling.

We can distill from the above discussion that

script is a multifaceted concept that contains fea-

tures that are of particular interest to us. First, it

brings together normative, cognitive, and behav-

ioral dimensions. Second, it may work on the lev-

el of society as a whole so that it helps identify a

knowledge structure about how society is orga-

nized, how it should be organized, also reﬂecting

on the relationship between these two dimen-

sions. Third, scripts are in a permanent contest

with each other. Scripts can change and adapt to

speciﬁc circumstances to succeed in the compe-

tition, leaving sucient analytical room for trac-

ing developments over time and space. In our un-

derstanding, a script ﬁnally speaks to the most

fundamental questions of a legitimate order of

society – how society draws boundaries and in-

cludes and excludes members, how it (re-)allo-

cates its resources, and what understandings

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

of temporalities it relies upon (see Börzel/Zürn

2020). Thus, the concept of scripts comes, fourth,

with a structure that allows its descriptions to be

organized. A script on the working of society as

a whole can be translated into subscripts about

borders, orders, (re-)allocation, and temporalities

that are of heuristic value.

A script and its subscripts are recurrent over time;

it is held by signiﬁcant groups so that it becomes

part of the public discourse; it competes with oth-

er scripts about the appropriateness of polities

and policies; it justiﬁes political arrangements

and polices. To the extent that a script becomes

dominant, it partially gets materialized in social

practices (Althusser 2014). But a script needs to

be kept analytically separate from practice. Dier-

ent scripts exist in parallel, but greed and other

selﬁsh motivations may be reﬂected in practices.

Our understanding of a script thus upholds the

distinction between ideas and activities and thus

also the social dynamics that can arise from gaps

between the two. Yet the concept is meant to be

analytically descriptive, even if we refer to norma-

tive elements of the script. We thus can describe

a liberal and a fascist script, although our norma-

tive beliefs are in stark opposition to the latter.

While we are well aware that the social scienc-

es rely on a broad portfolio of concepts that are

similar to scripts, we argue that “script” displays,

in addition to commonalities, some dierences

from those concepts. Important and similar con-

cepts in the social sciences are practices, insti-

tutions, orders, and ideologies. All of these refer

to a set of norms and injunctions for social pro-

cesses, and they are all about societal structures

that guide action for actors on dierent levels. Al

though these concepts are contested themselves,

we can identify some aspects of the common us-

age of these terms that dier in important as-

pects from what we want to capture with the term

“script”. None of these rival terms thus covers

identical terrain.

To start, neither “institution” nor “practice” can

be used to capture the macro level of societies. A

given institution and a given practice are always

part of a broader set of institutions and practic-

es in which they are embedded. Even if we use

these terms in the plural, they do not include an

idea of how dierent institutions and practices

relate to each other. Practices and institutions

do not focus on the macro structures of societ-

ies. Practices emphasize an activity-centered mi-

cro perspective or meso perspective, highlighting

instantiations of patterned actions of individu-

als and organizations. Schatzki (2001: 2) identi-

ﬁes the minimal core of practices according to

which an “array of activities”, in which the activi-

ties are embedded, depend on, and represent ex-

pressions of shared skills and implicit knowledge

(Reckwitz 2002). As such, practices can be seen as

“socially meaningful patterns of action which, in

being performed more or less competently simul-

taneously embody, act out, or reify background

knowledge in and on the material world” (Adler/

Pouliot 2011: 6). While practice theory argues with

emerging ﬁelds as the nexus between interwo

ven practices that constrain activities, practices

are “much more closely tied to individuals than

are the orders and order-establishing phenome-

na of much macro social thought” (Schatzki 2001:

5). Practices gain their distinctive take, speciﬁcally

by emphasizing that they “never possess the sui

generis existence and near omnipotence some-

times attributed to structural and holist phenom-

ena” (Schatzki 2001: 5). This is exactly the criticism

of the macro-systemic nature of a concept like

“script” as an order-instituting entity that moti-

vates practice theory.

While practice theory starts with patterned ac-

tivities, institutionalist accounts start from con-

straints on these activities. Institutions embody

“the rules of the game” and “the humanly de-

vised constraints that shape human interaction”,

as the famous deﬁnition of Douglass North (1990:

3) postulates. Institutionalists share an interest in

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

“formal rules, compliance procedures, and stan-

dard operating practices that structure the rela-

tionship between individuals” (Hall 1986: 19). In-

stitutions only develop independent explanatory

“bite” (Capoccia 2016) or a “distorting eect” (Im-

mergut 2006: 240) when they become more than

mere epiphenomenal intermediaries between ac-

tors’ strategies and the aggregation of their pref-

erences to macro outcomes. It is, therefore, safe

to say that they operate on a meso level. The

consensus deﬁnition of international regimes as

“principles, norms rules, and decision-making

procedures around which expectations converge

in a given issue-area” (Krasner 1983: 275) makes

this abundantly clear. International regimes are

secondary institutions in world politics based on

a few primary institutions like sovereignty that

reaches beyond the meso level (Hurrell 2007).

However, even these primary institutions are on-

ly part and parcel of the broader concept of the

global order.

“Order” is a term that social scientists oten use

to describe the interplay of institutions on the

macro level. The global order thus consists of dif-

ferent institutions and practices (Hurrell 2007). A

constitutional order, to use another example, is

one in which foundational and limitational insti-

tutions interact with each other (Krisch 2010). Or-

der – as much as scripts – thus works on the mac-

ro level. The notion of order, however, includes

an element of dominance. An order exists and an

existing order prevails over imaginations of alter-

native orders. At any given time and social space,

there can be only one order. While there may be

struggles about the right order, only one is ac-

cording to the logic of the concept present. You

may aim for a socialist order while living in a cap-

italist world, but the socialist order is not present

in this case. Since the concept of order includes

an element of dominance, proponents of the or-

der concept oten talk about a hybrid order to de-

scribe situations in which dierent ideas about

the right order not only compete but also fuse.

On the contrary, dierent scripts may and are ex-

pected to compete with each other at the same

time in the same social space. Scripts do not need

to be dominant to exist. Scripts are “imagined or-

ders”. Moreover, it is possible to describe a mere-

ly factual order without capturing the meaning of

its underlying norms and rules. To use an example

by Kratochwil (1989): An extra-terrestrial person

may describe an American Football game as an

order in which people alternate between a move-

ment of contraction and expansion. On the con-

trary, it is not possible to describe a script with-

out understanding the meaning of its norms and

rules to describe a script.

“Ideology” is the fourth rival concept. The concept

covers macro-structural features, focusing most-

ly on explaining, repressing, integrating, motivat-

ing, or legitimating social classes, the people, or

any other social group acting out of a position

of dominance or subordination. Ideologies pro-

vide cohesion to social groups and compete over

public recognition to “create public justiﬁcations

for the exercise of power” (Müller 2011: 92). A re-

cent approach to the study of political ideolo-

gies, therefore, comes especially close to our un-

derstanding of script. This more recent version

does not invoke the traditional and oten pejo-

rative understanding of ideology as losing touch

with reality or the blurring of real-world experi-

ences but sees it as the ubiquitous and inevita-

ble study of political thinking more generally. It

tries to evade the previous judgmental underpin-

nings, and, instead, deﬁnes political ideologies as

condensed and semantically frozen assortments

of concatenated concepts that structure politi-

cal thinking and that generally serve justiﬁcatory

purposes (Freeden 1996, 2006; Freeden et al. 2013).

We share with this new understanding of political

ideologies the explicit openness for comparative

research and its dedication to ideological mor-

phology, i.e., the relationship between dierent

elements (Freeden 1994). While some ideologies

– like communism – have formulated a detailed

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

action program, usually ruling out any variations

from a pre-set orthodoxy, others – like national-

ism – usually avoid particular reference to con-

crete actors and actions, allowing for more inter-

nal variety. Ideologies are, therefore, also open

for variations in space and time.

In spite of signiﬁcant similarities, we prefer to use

the concept of scripts over this very recent use of

the term “ideology” for three reasons. First, the

older concept of ideology is much more prevalent

(Gerring 1997). Ideologies are oten understood as

too abstract and vague, “something concocted by

spinners of dreams, otherworldly intellectuals, or

machinators of totalitarian design” (Freeden 2006:

4). With Marx and Engels as forerunners, politi-

cal ideologies are understood as nothing more

than distortions of reality, masking the mechan-

ics of an unjust and repressive rule. In modern po-

litical thought, the study of totalitarian regimes

particularly contributed to the negative image of

political ideologies. Ideologies were grand narra-

tives calling for single (and pure) truths on how

to mold whole societies, Manichean in their out-

look and with an intra-mundane and eschatolog-

ical appeal (Arendt [1951] 1966; Drath [1954] 1968;

Friedrich/Brzezinski 1956). The German histori-

an Bracher (1982) has aptly called the twentieth

century the century of ideological struggles. This

pejorative normative ballast that the term “ide-

ology” carries still casts a long shadow on the

study of political ideologies. It remains too oten

a polemical Kampbegri. Second, the concept of

script emphasizes its epistemological underpin-

nings. Most descriptions of ideologies overlook

this part. Scripts have an inbuilt semantic that

points to particular and very speciﬁc action rep-

ertoires for becoming knowledgeable. Third, our

concept of script contains a heuristic tool that

allows fruitful comparisons due to the need to

contain implicit or explicit statements about the

borders, the constitutive principles, the (re-)allo-

cation of goods, and the inscribed temporality of

a society. For these three reasons, we prefer the

term script over the term political ideology.

We deﬁne a script as a set of descriptive or em-

pirical and prescriptive or normative statements

about the organization of society, creating justiﬁ-

cations for the exercise of power. It pushes us to

ask questions about the internal coherence and

tensions within a script, about borders, orders,

(re-)allocation, and temporality, about the pro-

cesses of change and innovation within a script as

well as about internal and external contestations.

While there are overlaps to similar concepts in

the social sciences, scripts are speciﬁc in uniquely

bundling features, as sketched in Table 1.

Script Ideology Order Instuon Pracce

Commonality Contains prescripons about the organizaon

of society

Y Y Y Y Y

Dierences Applies to the macro level Y Y Y N N

Allows for parallel existence in the same social

space

Y Y N N N

Contains explicitly ontological statements and

comes with an epistemology

Y N N Y Y

Asks for authors Y Y N Y/N N

Provides a heurisc for comparave mapping Y N N Y N

Table 1: Five Similar Concepts: Commonalities and Dierences

Source: Authors’ own table.

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

3 HOW TO STUDY THE LIBERAL SCRIPT?

How can we grasp a speciﬁc script in method-

ological terms given the enormous variance in

time and space? Since the liberal script consists

of a complex set of statements about the orga-

nization of a society, the goal cannot be to oer

a deﬁnition in the strict meaning of the term. In-

stead, the liberal script can be captured by iden-

tifying components that stand in a particular re-

lationship with each other. This is no small task

given the varieties of the liberal script.

In general, one can distinguish four methodolog-

ical approaches to capture what a script entails;

each of them comes in several versions. A socio-

logical approach asks the question of what lib-

erals actually think, say or do. A philosophical

approach, in turn, aims at uncovering the inner

architecture of liberal thinking and its justiﬁca-

tions, distinguishing dierent components and

their relationship to each other. A historical ap-

proach looks at the genealogy of liberal ideas

over time and space and may identify temporal

layers. Last but not least, an interpretative ap-

proach that draws from all the methods identi-

ﬁed above comes up with a reasoned judgment

of the observer.

In order to reconstruct the liberal script, we sug-

gest a combination of two perspectives. First,

4 The sociological approach resembles what Duncan Bell (2014:

686) has described as a summative approach: “The liberal tradi-

tion is constituted by the sum of the arguments that have been

classiﬁed as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-pro-

claimed liberals, across time and space.” However, the sociolog-

ical approach also allows opting for a threshold of convergence

instead of the sum of all statements.

5 This is similar to Duncan Bell’s (2014: 686) stipulative approach:

“Stipulative accounts identify necessary (though rarely sucient)

conditions for a position to count as a legitimate exemplar of a

tradition. ‘Liberalism’ is typically constructed from interpretations

of the meaning and interrelation of core concepts, such as liberty,

authority, autonomy, and equality.”

6 This oten comes in the form of canonical approaches that

distil liberalism from exemplary writings from thinkers like Locke,

Kant, Mill, and Rawls (Duncan Bell 2014).

the sociological perspective could be employed

to identify the components of the liberal script.

Second, in line with the philosophical approach,

the relationship between these components and

their inner architecture can be reconstructed. Re-

garding the ﬁrst step, the components can be ﬁrst

identiﬁed as liberal when they are regularly and

convergently part of accounts by self-proclaimed

liberals or those considered liberals by others

(sociological account). Convergence could be ex-

amined, for instance, by using claim-analysis of

documents by liberal proponents. Claims-making

analysis is a method via which the claims of liber-

al speakers (self-proclaimed or ascribed) can be

analyzed as to the positions they take regarding

the organization of society, based on which justi-

ﬁcation, directed at what kind of addressees, and

in the name of which constituency the speaker

claims to speak (de Wilde et al. 2014; Koopmans

et al. 2005). This method would allow us to iden-

tify the beliefs of liberals about the features of a

well-organized society and their underlying be-

liefs about how society works. As a result of the

analysis of liberal speakers, one should be able

to get a grasp on the most relevant components

of the liberal script. This is the sociological part

of our understanding of the liberal script.

7 Formally speaking, we can distinguish four types of sociologi-

cal claims analysis: First, public statements by those who describe

themselves as liberals. The problem here is that we get many

false positives. Second, we can look at those who are described

by others as liberals. This however requires a time-intensive

two-tiered research process and creates distortions given the

strategic use of the term liberal in the public discourse depending

on the local context. Third, one can analyze the justiﬁcations of

those who exercise power in the name of a liberal order based on

Müller’s (2011: 92) account according to which ideologies do not

depend on sophisticated philosophical texts but on the “capacity

to fuse ideas and sentiments” to “create public justiﬁcations for

the exercise of power”. Fourth, one could analyze what liberalism

consists of in the eyes of critiques. Fith, one may analyze prac-

tices in liberal societies in order to uncover the underlying script

(Adler 2019).

8 In principle, “liberal speakers” could entail elite members as

much as “ordinary” citizens – academics as much as non-academ-

ics. The dierence would not be methodical, but rather in identify-

ing the proper text corpus and the conclusions that one is able to

draw from the respective empirical analyses.

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

Second, one may in a next step identify a philo-

sophical ﬁlter and analyze in what relationship

the components stand to each other. In this sec-

ond step, one would ask whether the component

claims can be reasonably defended as part of a

more or less coherent liberal script. This consis-

tency check possibly allows to exclude self-pro-

claimed pseudo-liberals such as Jörg Haider and

his FPÖ or Geert Wilders and his Freedom party by

identifying inconsistencies with the morpholog-

ical structure of liberalism (Freeden 2015: ch. 7).

We thus exclude statements by self-proclaimed

liberals that are contradictory to the internal logic

of the liberal script. In this way, we exclude scripts

that ask, for instance, for national liberty with-

out accepting limitations of executive state pow-

er. This second step is partly inspired by Freeden’s

(1994, 1996) proposal to focus on the morphology

of ideologies. The morphological approach aims

to impose a structure on ideologies and so en-

able scholars to identify their inner architecture.

To the extent that a script consists as an ideolo-

gy of “complex combinations and clusters of po-

litical concepts in sustainable patterns” (Freed-

en 2003: 51), it is not only necessary to identify

the individual components, but also the relation-

ship between these components. “Ideologies, lib-

eralism included, clump ideas together in certain

combinations that have a unique proﬁle, a dis-

tinct morphological pattern” (Freeden 2015: 33).

Figure 1 provides an overview of the proposed

9 It also helps us to include accounts that are not from self-pro-

claimed liberals but use the components of the liberal script

with a defensible morphology (in terms of liberal philosophy).

Social-democratic parties in Western Europe from about the 1960s

on are an example.

methodological approach to study the liberal

script.

We see two advantages in combining a sociolog-

ical with a philosophical approach. First, it al-

lows us to systematically compare scripts with

each other. By identifying a source on the basis

of which we can identify a script, we point to the

raw material from which any script needs to be

reconstructed. This source should not be biased

towards certain varieties of the script nor con-

ﬂate the desirable with the descriptive (Rector

2020). By identifying the raw material of scripts

via claims, we can describe the prescriptions of

given scripts from the point of view of the observ-

er. Moreover, the philosophical ﬁlter brings order

into fuzzy and oten convoluted raw material. It

disentangles core from secondary concepts and

detects conﬁgurations of interrelated concepts.

A successful script is always a “freeze-frame of

the meanings of the concepts employed” (Freed-

en 1994: 158) that locks in and de-contests mean-

ings of these concepts. As such, the philosophical

ﬁlter allows tracing the variety and changing con-

ﬁgurations of the employed concepts over time

and space. It also opens avenues to compare the

liberal script with competing alternative scripts.

The use of the philosophical ﬁlter has a sec-

ond merit. It provides a structure for describing

10 Take for example the nationalist script. According to Andrew

Vincent (2013: 463), the “regulative themes of nationalist ideolo-

gies” are constellations of six interrelated features whose individ-

ual weight depends on the concrete context and spatiotemporal

changes. The features that he identiﬁes are ethnicity, identity,

territory, sovereignty, culture, and prosperity.

“Menu” of methodological options:

- Sociological claim analysis

- Philosophical perspective

- Historically sensitive approach

- Interpretative judgments

Reconstructive

approach

Text analysis → spatiotemporal

convergence of claims by liberals

Philosophical ﬁlter → internal

consistency of claims

Figure 1: Methodological Approaches

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

scripts. Scripts are not alphabet soups, but they

are ordered. We propose distinguishing between

first-layer principles and secondary ones.

First-layer principles are components of the lib-

eral script that fulﬁll a double function: On the

one hand, they are claimed as desirable ide-

als, and, on the other hand, they serve as jus-

tiﬁcatory reference points for additional aspects

of the liberal script. The reference to individual

rights in the Declaration of Independence is an

example: “We hold these Truths to be self-evi-

dent, that all Men are created equal, that they are

endowed by their Creator with certain unalien-

able Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty,

and the Pursuit of Happiness […].” Because “these

Truths” are “self-evident”, there seems to be no

need for further justiﬁcation. They fulﬁll a simi-

lar function to an assumption in deductive theo-

rizing. The self-evident rights are used as norma-

tive reference points for the justiﬁcation of other

aspects of the liberal script. The outcome of col-

lective self-determination, for instance, shall not

violate individual rights, and it has to follow a

procedure, which provides each individual with

a voice. Assumptions thus oten serve as a justi-

ﬁcation of other components of the script. Sec-

ond-layer components are those that are strongly

associated with the liberal script, but oten justi-

ﬁed with reference to ﬁrst-order principles.

The enormous variety of the liberal script is cap-

tured in two dierent ways. A ﬁrst approach may

be labeled with Wittgenstein a family resem-

blance approach. We argue that dierent variet-

ies of the liberal script only have a partial overlap

of components with each other. Yet, if the over-

laps are suciently numerous, we talk about a

family resemblance structure between all the dif-

ferent varieties of the contemporary liberal script.

Moreover, the varieties that come close to full

11 We are aware that Freeden (1996: 75–91) proposes a three-tier

formation and distinguishes between core, adjacent, and periph-

eral concepts. He suggests that all political ideologies share this

morphology.

congruence form together what we call a nucle-

ar family. The family resemblance approach thus

allows drawing not only a line between the lib-

eral script and other non-liberal scripts, but also

between dierent varieties of the liberal script.

For example, forms of the liberal script that em-

phasize the concepts of tolerance, solidarity, and

self-determination may belong to a dierent va-

riety than forms that emphasize markets, princi-

ple of merit, and individual rights. However, the

overlap of components may still be sucient to

see them as part of the larger liberal family.

A second approach for capturing variety may be

labeled as the tensions approach. The more we

move away from liberal ﬁrst-order principles, the

more tensions between dierent components of

the liberal script become apparent. We will use

four signiﬁcant tensions and consider dierent

ways of resolving them to identify dierent vari-

eties of the liberal script. For instance, the ten-

sion between economic markets and social soli-

darity is resolved dierently in the Scandinavian

version of the liberal script than in the US version.

This move also helps to establish additional out-

side borders. Since the tensions are endogenous

to the liberal script, an utterly one-sided reso-

lution falls outside of the liberal script. A script

that dissolves markets entirely in favor of a ful-

ly equal distribution of goods falls outside the

liberal script as well as radical libertarianism in

which the individual freedom of the strong dom-

inate solidarity concerns.

In sum, we propose a reconstructive approach

that combines a sociological with a philosophi-

cal perspective. In a ﬁrst step, one needs to evalu-

ate convergence of claims brought forward by lib-

erals. In a second step, we apply a ﬁlter to check

for internal consistency and inherent contradic-

tions in order to rule out self-proclaimed pseu-

do-liberals. The second step focuses on the rela-

tionship between dierent components and thus

on the (changing) ﬁguration and constellations of

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

component concepts. In principle, this allows for

the identiﬁcation of dierent layers of the liberal

script as well as for the detection of internal va-

riety based on family resemblance structures as

well as for making visible internal tensions.

Within the scope of this discussion paper, we

are neither able to carry out a systematic claims

analysis nor do we engage in deep philosophical

thinking. In the remainder of the paper, we thus

oer our preliminary understanding of the liber-

al script that can lead to expectations for study-

ing the liberal script along the suggested lines.

These expectations need to be probed in more

systematic empirical explorations. The outcome

of this paper therefore is preliminary and current-

ly based on our own judgment and interpretation.

As a consequence, it unavoidably falls victim to

a certain positionality. However, our account is

ready for a thorough empirical examination by us-

ing sociological text analysis methods and care-

ful philosophical evaluations. At the same time,

the liberal script that we develop can be adjust-

ed and further developed on the basis of research

carried out in the Cluster.

4 THE LIBERAL SCRIPT – ARCHITECTURE,

VARIETIES, AND INNER TENSIONS

In the previous sections, we deﬁned a script as

shared statements on how to organize society

and laid out a strategy on how to determine what

makes a script liberal. We now want to explore

our expectations about the liberal script. In line

with our considerations, we ﬁrst identify the cen-

tral components of the liberal script. Given that

we do not perceive the liberal script as mere as-

semblages of concepts, we aim to sketch the re-

lationship between the dierent components. We,

therefore, introduce dierent layers, discussing to

what extent they are exclusive to the liberal script

before we then highlight inner varieties and ten-

sions that arise.

Two limitations need to be kept in mind. First, our

sketching of the liberal script refers exclusively to

its current shape. We only grasp regional variet-

ies but no historical developments of the liber-

al script. In addition, our discussion is based on

qualitative reading of works about liberalism and

aims to formulate expectations that only then can

be tested via claims analysis. A full analysis in line

with our reconstructive approach would demand

a comprehensive sociological claims analysis in

which we would consider what liberals them-

selves say is liberal. In the future, we might bol-

ster the choice of these components by a more

systematic content analysis of liberal speakers.

4.1 THE FIRST LAYER

We assume that the liberal script contains two

layers. The ﬁrst layer can be seen as the main

reference point of liberal thinking in our times. It

points to an abstract ideal that comes without any

institutional connotation and serves as the jus-

tiﬁcatory foil for the secondary concepts. Many

consider the existence of such a liberal core as

a necessary condition for a liberal script in our

times. We share this intuition. The second-layer

concepts are, to some extent, derived from the

ﬁrst layer and come equipped with some institu-

tional expectations. The notion of a ﬁrst layer or

even core of the liberal script is therefore dier-

ent from the idea of a gold standard. It points to a

necessary condition before something qualiﬁes as

a liberal script. It is open to the liberal equality of

all the scripts built on this core. It is thus especial-

ly in the conﬁguration with the second-layer con-

cepts that varieties of the liberal script gain trac-

tion and become more concrete. The liberal script

links together and bundles ﬁrst and second-lay-

er components, creating space for potential over-

laps and interdependencies.

In a review article, Steven Wall (2015) posits that

individual liberty might be the closest candidate

for a core principle of liberalism. To think of a

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

liberal script without thinking of liberty is mean-

ingless to him. In a similar attempt, Michael Freed-

en (2015: 55–70) distils the core of liberal thought

and argues that it consists of seven principles: lib-

erty, rationality, individuality, progress, sociabili-

ty, the general interest, and limited and account-

able power. In his assessment, liberty inhabits a

special status in this list since “if we were to re-

move the idea of liberty from any such version [of

liberalism], liberalism would forfeit an absolute-

ly crucial distinguishing element. It is simply un-

imaginable to entertain, and empirically impossi-

ble to ﬁnd, a variant of liberalism that dispenses

with the concept of liberty” (Freeden 2015: 58).

We agree, but submit with Bernard Williams that

liberty is a political value. It should not be equat-

ed with what Williams (2005: 78) calls “primitive

freedom”, i.e., the “simple idea of being unob-

structed in doing what you want by some form of

humanly imposed coercion”. Primitive freedom is

a “proto-political” value. The political needs to

be considered as well. The political can be equat-

ed with collective choice and the way one deals

with mutual disagreements and political opposi-

tion. Liberty thus refers not only to private free-

dom, but to authoritative limitations to liberty to

protect the liberty of others (Williams 2005: 83).

This authoritative source needs to be legitimized.

The key question for liberty as the ﬁrst-layer

principle of liberalism thus is how far a person’s

freedom should be extended or protected, which

in turn must be determined collectively. This is

based on an anthropological belief in the auton-

omy of individuals which translates into the right

of self-determination. According to the late David

Held (1995: 147), one underlying principle of liber

alism is the idea that “persons […] should be free

and equal in the determination of the conditions

12 Primitive freedom is for Williams the ratio of desires to

obstacles faced, leading to the paradox situation that you could

increase freedom by getting rid of obstacles or by reducing desire.

of their own lives, so long as they do not em-

ploy this framework to negate the rights of oth-

ers”. The idea that individual self-determination

depends on legitimate infringements on person-

al freedom has two implications that lead us to

two additional components of the ﬁrst layer. On

the one hand, this understanding presupposes a

distinction between a private and a public realm.

The dividing line between what counts as private

and as public can be subject to change, can shit

over time, and depends on political decisions. The

presence of a private realm that needs to be sub-

stantially protected is however part of the pack-

age (Rössler 2001). On the other hand, the value

of liberty for each individual presupposes the as-

sumption of equal moral worth of those individu-

als considered as liberal subjects, a group which,

of course, has become more inclusive only over

time. If there were not this a-priori form of qual-

ity, privacy could not be protected consistently.

Even politically curtailed personal freedom may

negatively aect the personal freedom of others.

The “art” of the political lies therefore in legiti-

mating the right cost of liberty, presuming that

the moral worth of one individual should not be

placed above others. Yet, it should be noted that

the equal moral worth of all at the same time

serves as a justiﬁcation for many dierent forms

of inequality within a liberal system as well.

To recall once more, this identiﬁcation of the core

refers to our times. With admirable clarity, Rosen-

blatt (2018), for example, shows that the origin

of the term “liberalism” is liberalitas. Liberalitas

originally carried connotations of personal gen-

erosity, civic-mindedness, as well as strength and

building of character. According to her study, lib-

erals used to be moralists and it is only over the

course of the centuries that liberalism has be-

come more and more politicized. Yet, we suggest

that today’s vanishing point is liberty, concretized

as individual self-determination under political

circumstances and coming with a private-public

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

distinction and the notion of the equal moral

worth of individuals.

Our conception of the ﬁrst layer leaves out fol-

low-up questions like how this individual free-

dom can be normatively grounded (e.g. via natural

rights, contract theory or principles of delibera-

tion), how it should be brought about, and what

kind of institutional embodiments it requires.

Our conception also does not say much about

the persons that possess autonomy and individ-

ual self-determination. Given that we formulate

expectations about the current liberal script, the

answer to the question needs to go beyond white

males with private property. The current liberal

script excludes any racial, gender, or class dis-

crimination in answering the personhood ques-

tion. In that respect, the liberal script has broad-

ened its notion of personhood over time. Still,

there are variations required for minimum age or

rights for persons labeled with mental health dis-

abilities. These questions about the normative

grounding of individual self-determination, the

inclusivity of the concept and especially its prac-

tical implementation and institutional embodi-

ment will help us account for varieties of the lib-

eral script – across and within regions.

Figure 2: First-Layer Principles

4.2 THE SECONDLAYER COMPONENTS

When we move to the second layer, we see much

more variation. The second-layer components

point to regularly converging components in ac-

counts of self-proclaimed liberals or those con-

sidered liberals by others (sociological account).

Conceptually, we use the family resemblance ap-

proach to capture these. We acknowledge a gen-

eral fuzziness (“Unschärfe”) of concepts and argue

based on Wittgenstein (1984: 278) that the second-

layer components constitute a “complicated net

of similarities that overlap and cross”. While we

argue that the ﬁrst layer remains the major grav-

itation center, the secondary components stand

in a family resemblance relationship with each

other. Family resemblance means that we do not

demand that all of these secondary components

need to be present to qualify a certain ﬁguration

of components as liberal. Instead, family resem-

blance argues that a certain number of compo-

nents suces in order to qualify as liberal. If the

overlaps are suciently numerous, we talk about

a family resemblance between all the dierent va-

rieties of the contemporary liberal script. More-

over, the varieties that come close to full con-

gruence together make one branch (the nuclear

family) within the larger family. The family resem-

blance approach thus allows drawing a line be-

tween the liberal script and non-liberal scripts (a

sucient amount of overlap), and between dier-

ent varieties of the liberal script. In this section,

we focus on spelling out the second-layer compo-

nents before we move to dierent families within

liberalism in the next section.

13 In the German original it reads: “Wir sehen ein kompliziertes

Netz von Ähnlichkeiten, die einander übergreifen und kreuzen.

[…] Ich kann diese Ähnlichkeiten nicht besser charakterisieren als

durch das Wort ‘Familienähnlichkeit’.”

14 In other words, family resemblance can be understood as an

m-of-n rule, with the logical operator OR between the individual

components (Goertz 2006: 27–68).

First layer:

• Individual self-determination

• Private-public distinction

• Equal moral weight

Second-layer components:

• Family resemblance structure

• Tensions within the liberal script

Juscatory

foil and

reference

point for:

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

We order the second-layer principles along polit-

ical, economic, and societal principles. In politi-

cal terms, we consider civil, political and social

rights, the rule of law, and collective self-determi-

nation as second-layer features. This view strong-

ly resonates with the historical development of

liberalism as political thought and political prax-

is. Liberalism ﬁrst turned against arbitrary pow-

er, whether exercised by monarchs or entities like

the church (Fawcett 2018; Rosenblatt 2018) in or-

der to establish basic civil rights, before people

demanded more political participation and so-

cial inclusion (Marshall 1950). It is oten claimed

that in 1814 the liberales in Spain were the ﬁrst to

adopt the word for their political struggle in reviv-

ing the constitution and re-establishing principles

of freedom, criticizing the serviles for their blind

obedience to the crown. With the advent of “new

liberalism” in the 19th century, liberals like J. A.

Hobson, Leonard Hobhouse, and later John May-

nard Keynes considered questions of social prog-

ress more thoroughly. Fundamentally rethinking

justiﬁcations for state interventions into the mar-

ket, social rights, ranging from social welfare to

education, became an integral part of the liberal

script (Rosenblatt 2018: 100–115, 184–207). As such,

we perceive civil, political, and social rights as im-

portant second-layer political components that

we expect to ﬁnd in a sociological claim analysis.

The refusal of external arbitrary intervention lies

at the heart of Judith Shklar’s (1989) work on “lib-

eralism of fear”. Advancing Isaiah Berlin’s dis-

cussion of “negative liberty” (Berlin [1969] 2017),

Shklar forcefully argues that the overriding aim

of liberalism is “to secure the political conditions

that are necessary for the exercise of personal

freedom”. To her, “every adult should be able to

make as many eective decisions without fear or

favor about as many aspects of her or his life as

15 In the Declaration of Independence, these fundamental rights

are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. In the Déclaration

des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, these rights are: “la liberté,

la propriété, la sûreté, et la résistance à l’oppression”.

is compatible with the like freedom of every oth-

er adult” (Shklar 1989: 21). The political conditions

that secure the absence of fear of arbitrary rule

are the rule of law and the separation of power.

Governments need to be both limited and con-

stitutional (Schochet 1979). This becomes obvious

when contrasted with illiberal and autocratic rule

(Linz 1975). It is not by coincidence that liberalism

has gained prominence and strength in the 20th

century by sharply delineating and demarcating

itself from autocratic alternative scripts, wheth-

er in their communist or fascist version (Müller

2011). These competing scripts had no inbuilt in-

stitutionalized guarantee for respecting individu-

al and minority rights, but rather start from group

identities and imagined futures that are rendered

in terms of absolutes. Instead, repression of devi-

ant behavior is both deﬁniens for autocratic rule

and explanans for its stability. Liberals, instead,

“share a distrust in power – be it the power of

the state, of wealth or of the social community”

(Fawcett 2018: 2).

From the ﬁrst-layer component of liberty and in-

dividual self-determination, we derive the right to

collective self-determination. In a liberal sense,

this right is based on the idea of self-legislation. It

starts from people’s individual autonomy, before

it then reaches out to a group’s right to self-de-

termination. Alien, foreign, or otherwise imposed

rule needs to be discarded. Instead, it must be the

prerogative of the individual members of the col-

lective to negotiate among themselves to what

extent liberty is expanded or contracted. In the

words of state theorist Hans Kelsen (1945), the ad-

dressees of the laws need to be identical to the

authors. It stands in sharp contrast to autocrat-

ic rule, in which addressee and author diverge. In

our sociological claim analysis, we have there-

fore good reason to expect that liberals state not

only the right to individual, but also to collective

self-determination. Collective self-determination

in turn is limited by the rule of law and the respect

for civil, political, and social rights.

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

In economic terms, the second-layer components

we propose are principles of property rights, mar-

ket exchange, and a broad notion of a principle

of merit. These components also resonate with

the rich tradition of classic economic liberalism.

The right to private property can be directly de-

rived from the notion of individual self-determi-

nation and belongs to the private sphere. Some

belongings and the right to control them are seen

as a necessary condition for a life of liberty. When

it comes to the right of private property, a clas-

sic philosophical distinction is drawn between a

Lockean justiﬁcation of property rights as inher-

ent natural rights, and, in contrast, proponents

like Benjamin Constant and Jean-Baptiste Say,

who perceived property rights as a social conven-

tion. While the latter view is closer to our under-

standing of economic liberty with a political bent

and therefore subject to negotiation and regula-

tion, Locke has argued that there are limits to pri-

vate properties. These limits are reached when

others are harmed. Irrespective of the philosoph-

ical justiﬁcation, we expect property to play a sig-

niﬁcant role in today’s liberal script that should

be mirrored in today’s liberal claims.

Markets are seen as the location which allows

trading entitlements of capital (Pistor 2019). In

some versions of liberalism, markets are seen as a

natural and emergent place of economic transac-

tions, self-regulated by an ecient prize mecha-

nism. In most understandings of the liberal script,

however, markets depend on a political and le-

gal environment that protects exchanges from

arbitrary interventions (Pistor 2019). Slobodian

(2018) has shown that even the “neoliberal Ge-

neva School” shares this concept of markets. Sim-

ilarly, the vast majority of 19th century liberalism

did not argue in favor of laissez-faire (Rosenblatt

2018: 80–86). Instead, the government had a right

to regulate any industry. As such, we do not per-

ceive laissez-faire as the economic derivative of

the ﬁrst-layer principle of liberty. Laissez-faire

and primitive freedom could be adequately

paired. As a suitable second-layer principle, we

suggest therefore market economy – under polit-

ical constraints that might legitimize government

intervention. To what extent this intervention in-

to the market is seen as rightful and justiﬁable is

as contested as the expansion and contraction

of liberty. The most extreme examples of the ex-

pansion of liberty and minimal intervention that

are either borderline to the liberal script or even

perceived as an aliud to it, are libertarian think-

ers like Robert Nozick (1974).

Markets as a platform of exchange for property

entitlements come with the notion that the (re-)

allocation of goods and wealth is driven by market

performance. Rewards and merits from econom-

ic activities must be deserved by performance. It

should be clear, however, that the underlying con-

cept “deservedness” has no clear-cut speciﬁca-

tion within the liberal script. One extreme concep-

tion is built on a 1:1 relationship between market

success and deservedness. It includes the right to

pass on wealth to future generations re-distribut-

ed to whomever the owner favors (e.g. tax exemp-

tions for foundations). Other conceptions consid-

er re-distributive corrections of market outcomes

not only as necessary for other reasons like sol-

idarity and social rights but justify it with unde-

served inequalities produced by markets. In these

cases, high tax rates with no exemptions and high

inheritance tax rates are seen as necessary to up-

hold the principle of merit.

Similar to the “Americanization” (Rosenblatt 2018:

245–64) of the liberal idea in the mid-20th century

and its tight coupling to democracy as a joint bul-

wark against totalitarian threats, we expect that

economic concepts loom large when assessing

today’s liberal script. Despite its rich conceptu-

al history, liberalism as of today is oten reduced

to the economic ideas of neoliberalism, as ex-

empliﬁed in the Vienna School with proponents

like Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, and Fried-

rich von Hayek and its “heir”, the Chicago School

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

(Harvey 2007; Slobodian 2018). Neoliberalism is

heavily criticized and pejoratively used – due to

its atomistic notions of individuals and exaggera-

tion of eciency, among other reasons – for being

a powerful tool of repression, domination, and ex-

ploitation in the hands of the wealthy and power-

ful, for dictating policies of national governments

and International Organizations, and for produc-

ing and widening social inequality. These critiques

stem oten, but not exclusively, from Critical The-

ory and let economic perspectives (Saad-Filho/

Johnston 2005). We do not want to reduce neo-

liberalism to a mere obsession with ideological

market fundamentalism nor do we make any at-

tempt to take sides in the normative debate. In-

stead, we acknowledge that the neoliberal project

goes way beyond such a simpliﬁed image, ranging

from family values to knowledge production and

philosophy of science (Cooper 2017; Plehwe et al.

2020). This means, in turn, that liberal econom-

ic concepts permeate other societal ﬁelds. In this

light, we expect that today’s liberal script is heav-

ily inﬂuenced not only by a political discourse,

but also by economic conceptions. This should be

mirrored in a sociological claim analysis.

For the societal sphere we consider the belief in

the diversity of lifestyles as an important sec-

ond-layer component. In the beginning of this pa-

per, we referred to the illiberal and populist pol-

iticians that use this societal value against the

liberals. For them, “liberal” means multicultural-

ism, open borders, and modern family arrange-

ments. The plurality of liberal lifestyles is per-

ceived as threatening tradition, prompting them

to call for an illiberal state. This criticism reveals

an important dimension of today’s liberal script.

Indeed, in the course of the 20th century “alter-

native categories based on gender, ethnicity, re-

ligion, and sexual orientation slowly worked

their way into mainstream liberal conscious-

ness” (Freeden 2015: 50). Identity politics have

gained a prominent place in today’s liberal script.

Connected through experiences of suppression,

discrimination, and injustice, minority groups as-

pire to raise greater awareness of their situation,

seeking to actively expand their individual right to

self-determination. As such, they point to the core

of what is liberal. It derives from the idea that

every person has equal moral worth and that no

person, including their respective lifestyle, should

be placed above others. As such, tolerance of dif-

ference is a tenet of liberal societies.

In most varieties of the liberal script, the principle

of tolerance towards dierent lifestyles not only

applies to all known parts of society but also to

unknown parts. Openness for new ideas, newcom-

ers, and new insights points to a second element

of the liberal script in the societal sphere. Open

societies let other people and cultures in as long

as they accept the liberal script. Open societies

are open to new insights as well as the emergence

of new identities. In this sense, liberal societies

are open societies. As Karl Popper (2013: 203) has

put it: “Arresting political change is not the rem-

edy; it cannot bring happiness. We can never re-

turn to the alleged innocence and beauty of the

closed society. Our dream of heaven cannot be re-

alized on earth. Once we begin to rely upon our

reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once

we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and

with it, the responsibility of helping to advance

knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implic-

it submission to tribal magic.”

Popper’s juxtaposition of a closed and open so-

ciety ﬁnally leads us to a cross-cutting sphere of

the liberal script. In this cross-cutting sphere the

idea of progress, the growing control of nature via

human reasoning, coexist with an epistemology

that emphasizes the permanent need to question

existing insights and ask for rational procedures

to produce knowledge. This epistemology on the

one hand involves an element of humility and

thus acknowledges the limits of rationality and

planning. On the other hand, the major promise

of liberalism is progress in the long-term. This

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

includes both material and moral progress. Ma-

terial progress is the outcome of competition of

private interests and rights within a politically

protected market environment. In many variet-

ies of the liberal script, private property and free

markets have a deontic quality. More important-

ly, almost all varieties of the liberal script see

it, in consequentialist terms, as the best way of

producing growth and wealth. Large parts of the

thinking of Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill, and

David Ricardo were adopted by the liberal script.

Accordingly, free competition in unbiased mar-

kets is producing the most ecient outcome, i.e.

most aggregate wealth, for each given state of

technology. Free markets, in addition, are seen

as the best driver for the development and dif-

fusion of new technologies. Since the industri-

al revolution, the liberal promise of wealth had

an almost uncontested appeal. If you want to be

wealthy and access to as many consumer goods

as possible, you need to live in a liberal society.

It has been the rise of the developmental states,

most recently the Chinese economy, which has

put a question mark to this link. The production

of wealth and technology also leads to control

over nature. Self-aware and self-conﬁdent peo-

ple and societies are not subject to the destinies

controlled by god and nature; therefore, liberal

societies have control over nature. Liberal societ-

ies may even exploit natural resources for wealth

and progress. It is only more recently that this

“right” of liberal societies has been qualiﬁed. At

least in some variants, it now reads that natu-

ral exploitation is possible to the extent that the

further development of technology promises to

repair it without damage for future generations

(Fücks 2015).

The liberal script also promises moral progress.

Systematic knowledge production in liberal soci-

eties is dependent upon an idea of social progress

(Forst 2019) and most likely leads to moral prog-

ress over time. Liberals perceive human nature

as rational and widely share an optimistic future

outlook that includes a notion of progress as a

“movement from less desirable to more desirable

states – ‘the idea of moving onward’ as Mill puts

it” (Freeden 1996: 145). This notion is so strong

that it was even used to deny the right to collec-

tive self-determination (Mehta 1999), though on-

ly as a temporary measure. As such, liberals place

heavy emphasis on free education and trust in the

general principles of Enlightenment (Wall 2015:

4–6). Moral progress depends on the absence of

closed rule, demanding instead an epistemic set-

up that is open and achieves progress through

competition for innovation. Liberals share a deep

distrust in ﬁxed, comprehensive, and absolute

truths, rather seeing knowledge as preliminary

and in a state of permanent revision, acknowledg-

ing epistemic uncertainty. Moral progress in this

sense is part and parcel of a critical and rational-

ist epistemology. It does not refer to deities, au-

thorities, or ideologies to solve problems, instead

acknowledging, as John Dewey (1935: 32) has put

it, “the central role of free intelligence in inquiry,

discussion and expression”.

In sum, we distinguish four spheres of second-lay-

er components of the liberal script. The societal,

economic, and political spheres contain elements

that are quite distinct from each other. The politi-

cal sphere refers to the liberal’s mistrust of power

concentration, demanding rule of law and sepa-

ration of power, the universality of human rights,

and the basal right to collective organization. The

economic sphere emphasizes not laissez-faire

and freedom at all costs, but a market principle

in which the government has a right to intervene,

to a greater or lesser extent. Relatedly, the eco-

nomic sphere underlines the right of private prop-

erty and merit principle. In the societal sphere, we

refer to toleration of dierent lifestyles and open-

ness to the unknown as the hallmark of liberal so-

cieties. The fourth cross-cutting realm adds sec-

ond-layer components that are more general and

reﬂected in at least one of the three other realms.

Figure 3 provides an overview.

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

4.3 VARIETIES OF THE LIBERAL SCRIPT

In the ﬁnal step of our analysis, we focus on vari-

eties. We use two dierent approaches to identi-

fy varieties within the contemporary liberal script:

(1) family resemblance and (2) inner tensions. We

would like to re-iterate that this contribution for-

mulates a preliminary set of expectations. These

expectations can and must be adapted on the ba-

sis of later empirical research.

4.3.1 FAMILY RESEMBLANCE

The methodological considerations of family re-

semblance allow us a ﬂexible approach to the sec-

ond-layer components outlined above. We argue

that varieties of the liberal script do not need to

touch upon all of the second-layer components,

needing only to allude to a suciently large num-

ber of them. The m-of-n-rule applies. We ex-

pect that when conducting a systematic socio-

logical claim analysis, coherent families emerge.

The families constitute clusters with sucient

16 For this working paper, we do not want to further specify the

m-of-n-rule, say for example that 5 of the 10 components need

to be present to qualify as an exemplar of the liberal script. This

would make our ﬂexible approach more rigid and would run

counter to the explorative spirit in which this working paper is

written.

conceptual overlap of the secondary components,

not denying marginal internal dierences and un-

certainties surrounding them. Yet, it should al-

so be explicitly noted that these families are all

anchored in the ﬁrst-layer principle. We propose

that the contraction or expansion of the ﬁrst-lay-

er principle of liberty, i.e., to what extent person-

al freedom is legitimately cut or extended, aects

the ordering of the second-layer principles.

More concretely, we expect to see four nuclear

families within the liberal script. First, we expect

to ﬁnd a neoliberal nuclear family starting from

the assumption that the ﬁrst-layer principle of

liberty needs, especially in the economic realm,

to be considerably expanded. At the same time,

the protection of the market needs to be de-polit-

icized and locked in institutionally. In this light, a

neoliberal understanding accentuates, above all,

the economic principles that we outlined above.

The right of private property, the merit principle,

and the market with its promise of eciency are

the hallmarks of this liberal nuclear family. Yet, it

is important to note that it should not be equated

with laissez-faire and complete state abstention

from markets. Even historically, classic liberals

did not uniformly subscribe to these practices. In

contrast, the idea of the state as the mere “night

Cross-cutting: Progress rational epistomology

Political: Rule of law and separation of powers collective self-determination

civil, political, social rights

Economic: Merit principle market economy property rights

Societal: Tolerance openness

Figure 3: Second-Layer Components

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

watchman” was from early on heavily contested

(Rosenblatt 2018: 105–8). Also, reducing today’s

variant of neoliberalism to laissez-faire would

simply be a misreading. Neoliberals of today do

not perceive the market as a natural datum, but

as a social and political product that needs to

be protected and held operational. In this sense,

state intervention and neoliberalism are not po-

lar contradictions, but the role of the political is

to “oppose any action that might frustrate the op-

eration of competition between private interests”

(Dardot/Laval 2013: 47). In the societal and politi-

cal sphere, it is this competition that needs to be

safeguarded.

The neoliberal variety does therefore not abstain

from political intervention, but includes the func-

tion of rule of law in maintaining a competitive

market that embodies potential for innovation.

As such, it shares the cross-cutting liberal opti-

mism for material and moral progress. This liberal

family does not only emphasize competition as a

driver for technological innovation, but also has

an elective anity to an open and rational epis-

temology for solving problems and questioning

authoritative answers. We therefore expect to see

a coherent cluster forming around the economic

components, the rule of law, progress, as well as

notions of a rational epistemology.

Second, we expect to ﬁnd an open society inter-

pretation of the liberal script. This nuclear fam-

ily shares the heavy emphasis on the core val-

ue of liberty with the neoliberal variety; however,

it is somewhat de-politicized. Personal freedom

should be expanded as much as possible. While

the neoliberal variety is characterized by eco-

nomic concerns, the open society understanding

is driven by societal tolerance and openness to-

wards dierent lifestyles. Marking a strong delin-

eation between the private and the public realm

and taking individual’s equal moral worth serious-

ly, it highlights a multicultural society, open bor-

ders and fair chances for immigration, diversity

of sexual orientation and an emphasis on LGBTQ

rights, as well as modern family conﬁgurations. It

demands a society that is generally open to dif-

ference and the unknown, with a strong emphasis

on civil rights. Will Kymlicka (1995) has coined the

term of “group-dierentiated rights” that goes be-

yond a mere toleration of minorities, but argues

in favor of an active accommodation and entitle-

ment for external protection of minority groups.

Highlighting the value of one’s own cultural mem-

bership, the right to collective self-determina-

tion, even below the national level, is stressed

in this understanding of the liberal script. In a

bottom-up sociological claim analysis of liberals,

we expect to ﬁnd a family resemblance structure

that revolves around secondary components of

societal tolerance and openness, augmented by

heavy emphasis on the political dimensions of

civil rights and collective self-determination.

Third, we expect to ﬁnd a social-democratic inter-

pretation of the liberal script. As opposed to the

two other nuclear families, the social-democrat-

ic variety emphasizes the dependence of freedom

on a conducive political environment. This means

that the general role of the political in making

freedom possible is increased (Williams 2001).

Historically, the social-democratic understand-

ing of the liberal script has its roots in the new

liberalism that emerged in the 19th century as a

reaction to the “social question” (Rosenblatt 2018:

220–33). Ironically, the new liberalism was a dia-

metrically opposed answer to the shortcomings

of then liberal thought compared to the similar-

ly named neoliberal answer a century later. Both

were responses to a perceived crisis of liberalism.

Yet, they fundamentally dier regarding the role

that markets should play. New liberals – like later

social democrats – justify the state’s active role in

curbing individual freedom to better protect col-

lective interests only in order to ultimately “guar-

antee the real conditions for achieving individual

goals” (Dardot/Laval 2013: 47). Welfare, labor pro-

tection, progressive income tax, unemployment

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

beneﬁts, social insurance policies, health sys-

tems, and access to education are only some of

the major policy areas of the social-democratic

understanding of the liberal script. At the end of

the 19th century, “most people now realized that

the state was morally obliged to step in on be-

half of the helpless and oppressed” (Rosenblatt

2018: 228). We argue that this social-liberal tradi-

tion can be perceived even today. Social and po-

litical rights serve as the backbone of this variety

of the liberal script. It also emphasizes the rule

of law, yet in a markedly dierent way than the

neoliberal script. While the latter sees the rule of

law as a function of guaranteeing market opera-

tions, the social-liberal variety sees it in the Po-

lanyian countermovement of social protection.

The social-liberal understanding also stresses the

market but does not assume it as a self-regulat-

ing entity.

Fourth, we expect to ﬁnd a nuclear family that

has deeper nationalist and conservative roots.

In the history of ideas, nationalism and conser-

vativism are routinely depicted as the ideolog-

ical antipodes to liberalism. But, similar to so-

cialism and the incorporation of socialist ideas

into the social-democratic nuclear family, liberal

ideas have merged with nationalist and conserva-

tive thought, producing a distinct right-wing fam-

ily as well. Yet, it should be noted that the prem-

ise of nationalism is that groups have intrinsic

value in themselves as well as having value to

their members (Kelly 2015: 329; Rosenblatt 2018).

In contrast, in liberal thought, the individual al-

ways comes ﬁrst, the group second. “National lib-

eralism” is therefore only reconcilable to the ex-

tent that it does acknowledge the prioritization

of the individual over the nation. All varieties of

liberalism akin to nationalism need to acknowl-

edge individuals as right bearers but emphasize

the value of a national identity based on shared

language, descent, geography, and political histo-

ry. Liberal key thinkers from Mill to Berlin saw na-

tionality as a “way of taming the more dangerous

and destabilizing tendencies of a democratic or-

der” (Kelly 2015: 338) as it ties together individuals

into a political entity. This legacy of viewing na-

tions as consolidators of power and stabilizers of

liberal government is stressed here. As such, this

family particularly underscores the political val-

ue of collective self-determination – sometimes

even to the detriment of human rights. Moreover,

the conservative perspective adds an emphasis

on tradition, status quo orientation, a sense of hi-

erarchy, and continuity, making it thus skeptical

about the intrinsic value of progress (Skorupski

2015). In societal terms, this nuclear family stands

in stark contrast to the cosmopolitan worldview

and downplays instead societal dimensions of

tolerance and openness (Fawcett 2018: 459–60).

Finally, national-conservative liberalism shares

with the neoliberal family the commitment to a

small but strong state and the economic princi-

ples of merit, markets, and property rights.

These four nuclear families are not mutually ex-

clusive. In empirical reality, we might ﬁnd political

positions that combine aspects of the four fam-

ilies. While we acknowledge that parts of these

families can be complementary to each other, we

maintain that the four nuclear families outlined

above are inherently coherent and empirically

frequent. It is no mere coincidence that in ma-

ny countries political party formations have crys-

tallized along these lines. In a systematical claim

analysis, we expect the secondary components to

converge into these main nuclear families. Yet, we

anticipate that further families beyond these four

might emerge as well.

4.3.2 TENSIONS

Most varieties of the liberal script are rooted in

dierent readings of the ﬁrst layer that lead to dif-

ferences in their substantiation in the second lay-

er. Dierent understandings of liberty, the distinc

tion between private and public, and the notion of

equal moral worth of involved individuals create

tensions. In the second layer, these tensions come

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

into the open. These tensions are a necessary part

of probably any script, but especially of the liber-

al script. Contestations of and struggles about the

meaning of existing concepts are part of the lib-

eral script and an open society. Moreover, these

tensions provide a useful starting point to map

the most important varieties of the liberal script.

In our understanding, social tensions are dier-

ent from outright contradictions. Tensions de-

scribe a relationship between two or more items

that do not stand in a zero-sum relationship with

each other. They rather describe a relationship

between two or more forces that balance each

other, and at least one of them tends to extend.

Tensions can be productive by creating new bal-

anced results that allow all forces to develop in

parallel. Thus, they refer to variable-sum games.

It follows that a completely one-sided resolution

of a tension built into a script leads us beyond

its borders, since the tension is a necessary part

of the script. For instance, if the tension between

economic market competition and societal sol-

idarity leads to a completely one-sided resolu-

tion in favor of the latter, it may factor out com-

petition completely. Then it is not a liberal script

anymore. If the tension is resolved completely

one-sidedly in favor of the former, it may entirely

destroy the vision of equality and move it outside

of what can be described as the liberal script.

We consider four tensions as most important.

Each of them points to dierent variants of bal-

ancing individual rights and collective goals. Each

of these tensions can be loosely associated with

one of the spheres discussed above. At the same

time, each of the four tensions speaks especially

to one of the four Research Units of our Cluster.

17 These tensions therefore provide a useful starting point for

unfolding a third layer of liberal scripts that develops liberal sub-

scripts on the basis of the heuristic distinction between borders,

orders, (re-)allocation, and temporality (see Drewski/Gerhards

2020).

Rights versus Majority: In current varieties of the

liberal script, the notion of collective self-de-

termination is closely associated with the dem-

ocratic principle. Democratic practices are con-

ceived as participatory and egalitarian. But giving

a voice to all does not ensure that it is a liber-

al voice. Those who have civil and political rights

may favor policies that work against these rights.

In democratic theory, non-majoritarian institu-

tions are the solution. Non-majoritarian insti-

tutions can be deﬁned as entities that exercise

some level of specialized public authority sepa-

rate from that of other institutions and are nei-

ther directly elected by the people nor directly

managed by elected ocials (see also Thatcher/

Stone Sweet 2002: 2). These institutions are ex-

pected to protect the democratic process and the

civil, political, and social rights of institutions by

trumping majority institutions. They protect the

democratic process by controlling democratic de-

cisions (see Preuß 1994).

This creates a tension that comes in two ver-

sions. In the ﬁrst version, it pits national insti-

tutions against each other, when, for instance, a

constitutional court considers a parliamentary

decision as unconstitutional or certain decisions

about macro-economic policies are delegated to

central banks. In terms of deliberative democra-

cy, the tension concerns most generally the epis-

temic quality of decisions made by democratic

institutions assuming that they are vulnerable to

leaving the path of reason (Landwehr in press). In

this version, it is more generally the tension be-

tween expertise and the majority that is at stake.

The tension runs through the history of collec-

tive self-determination. The theme dominated de-

bates between British and American intellectuals

during the American revolution. While the Amer-

icans pointed to the will of the people, the Brit-

ish side emphasized the rule of law and individu-

al rights. Today, many populist parties pit the will

of the (silent) majority against the technocratic

rule of liberal experts. The second version of this

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

tension is more recent. It points to tensions be-

tween international and European norms on the

one hand and popular sovereignty on the other. In

this case, international institutions consider glob

al agreements and norms as superior to national

policies. Defenders of popular sovereignty oten

interpret this as just another form of the rule of

liberal cosmopolitans via experts. The Brexit cam-

paign is a textbook case of this.

The tension between rights and majority mainly

falls into the political realm. It aects most clear-

ly issues of order, understood as those parts of

the script that speak to secondary rules for agen-

da-setting, rule-making, rule-adjudication, and

rule-enforcement. Both one-sided resolutions

of the tension fall outside of the liberal script.

A ruthless rule of the majority and uncondition-

al nationalism violates individual rights and runs

against the ideas of universalism and openness.

At the same time, a technocratic rule based on

the claim of epistemic and moral superiority un-

dermines the whole idea of self-determination.

There are, however, many dierent ways of bal-

ancing the tension that all point to dierent vari-

eties of the liberal script. Both constitutional law

and political science work with conceptual dier-

entiations that capture this variety. The dierence

between Westminster and consensual democra-

cies is one of them (Lijphart 2004), dierent no-

tions of multi-level governance another (Hooghe/

Marks 2001).

Markets versus Solidarity: Property rights and

market competition are an integral part of the

liberal script. In some understandings, liberal-

ism cannot even be divorced from capitalism (see

Kocka 2013 for discussion). In this view, a private

economy based on capital entitlements and free

exchange is necessary for freedom and the cause

for dynamic innovations and wealth in liberal so-

cieties (Schumpeter 2005; Weber 1956). At the

same time, such an economy produces inequali-

ties that may go beyond any reasonable notion of

deservedness. Moreover, high levels of sustained

inequality undermine the equality of opportuni-

ties in the economic realm (especially if wealth

can be transferred within families) and even the

ﬁrst-layer concept of equal moral worth in the so-

cietal and political realm. Economic wealth can be

translated into undue cultural and political inﬂu-

ence. Poverty may deprive people of the resourc-

es needed to exercise political rights and thus

prevents participation in society (Dahl 1989). In

short, a market economy may violate social rights

with repercussions for civil and political rights.

As already argued above, an entirely one-sided

resolution of the tension falls outside the liber-

al script. A socialist solution that thoroughly ex-

cludes competition and market exchange cannot

be described as liberal. Accordingly, a version of

capitalism that is fully protected from political

interventions and that does not foresee any cor-

rection to the distributional outcome of markets

strongly violates components of current variet-

ies of the liberal script. This may be called neo-

liberalism but also falls outside the liberal script

as described. It may be just another road to serf-

dom. There is still much variation in the handlings

of this tension. For instance, on the basis of the

framework of Hall and Soskice (2001), scholars

have distinguished dierent varieties of capital-

ism, including coordinated, liberal, dependent,

and hierarchical forms of market economies. Sim-

ilarly, Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999) has distin-

guished dierent types of welfare regimes.

The tension between markets and solidarity

touches all the spheres of the liberal script. How-

ever, it originates in the economic realm produc-

ing eects that play out in all the realms. In any

case, it mainly concerns issues of allocation and

reallocation.

Competing Interests versus Common Good: A

somewhat less obvious tension within the liber-

al script concerns the self-understanding of the

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

society the script addresses. It thus emerges in

the societal realm but also has political reper-

cussions. It plays out most vividly regarding tem-

porality issues, especially regarding the tension

between short-term interests and long-term in-

terests of future generations.

The liberal script foresees autonomous individ-

uals with the capacity to develop their own will

and preferences. An individual that does not know

their own interests comes close to a contradic

tion in terms within the liberal script. At the same

time, the liberal script makes a distinction be-

tween private and collective goods. In many in-

stances, the long-term collective good can on-

ly be achieved if the immediate and short-term

individual interests are subordinated to collec-

tive norms as the expression of the collective will.

This tension leads to dierent understandings of

the public realm. In one extreme variety, the pub-

lic realm is the place in which competing inter-

ests come together to negotiate with each oth-

er. In this view, the political realm comes close to

a market of pre-determined interests. The out-

come of this game is a more or less fair form of

the aggregation of private interests. Theories of

pluralism (including asymmetric pluralism) con-

ceive the political realm in this way (Laski 1930;

Schumpeter 2005). In another variety, the public

is the space in which the collective strives for the

common good. Individuals participate in a pro-

cess of arguing and deliberation leading in theo-

ry to an outcome that transforms prior interests.

Again, any one-sided resolution of the tension

seems incompatible with the liberal script. The

common good cannot wholly dominate private in-

terests. At the same time, collective norms should

be more than just the mere aggregation of inter-

ests. Dierent varieties of the liberal script bal-

ance this tension in dierent ways. While repub-

lican orientations emphasize the common good

and the collective will, pluralist versions empha-

size the free interplay of interests. The tension

plays out especially regarding issues of temporal-

ity. Any decision dominated by an aggregation of

interests contains the potential of externalities,

producing costs for those who could not partici-

pate. Within a given community, the interests of

future generations are a likely victim. Democratic

decisions in the present may therefore easily af-

fect the rights of future generations. Justice across

generations requires deliberations that transform

the private interests of existing actors.

Cosmopolitanism versus Bounded Community:

The fourth manifestation of the tensions built in-

to the liberal script leads to struggle over borders

(Zürn et al. 2019). A long-standing debate with-

in liberal political philosophy has pitted those

emphasizing universal responsibility to humani-

ty (Caney 2005; Pogge 1992; Singer 2002) against

those emphasizing that there are “limits to jus-

tice” (Sandel 1998) in geographical, institution-

al, or cultural terms (see also Nagel 2005; Walzer

1994). On the one hand, cosmopolitanism is seen

as the necessary implication of liberal and uni

versal thinking in a globalized world (Beitz 1979;

Goodin 2010; Pogge 1989). In this view, the grow-

ing density of transactions across borders leads

to a global community of fate (Held 1995), sug-

gesting similar moral obligations to all people

independent of national borders. In response,

others have pointed to the normative dignity of

smaller human communities (Miller 1995) or the

decisive institutional context of the state (Nagel

2005). The proper development of the community

may in this view even trump an absolutist version

of individual rights. The positions can be sub-

sumed under the notion of communitarianism.

This debate, at its core, is one about the status

of communities and their relationship to individ-

uals. At stake are two border issues. One is about

the constitution of borders. While liberal commu-

nities need some borders, there is no democrat-

ic way to decide about borders in the ﬁrst place.

The liberal script depends on the existence of

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

communities, although the constitution of com-

munities and the associated act of exclusion vi-

olates the idea of equal moral worth. The oth-

er issue at stake is the management of existing

borders. While some universal rights of individu-

als require the freedom to move and to exit, any

community claims the right to control its borders.

Any one-sided resolution of the tension moves

outside of the liberal script (Merkel/Zürn 2019). A

world consisting of billions of individuals with hu-

manity as a whole as the only communal bound

can hardly develop notions of solidarity or orga-

nize democracy. On the contrary, a closed com-

munity that produces externalities without tak-

ing any responsibility for them, is normatively

as deﬁcient as primitive freedom. In the current

world, we see dierent ways of balancing the ten-

sion. One is related to the notion of open society.

Open societies oten have a long tradition of im-

migration and less developed welfare regimes.

The Swedish folkshemmet interpretation has a

much more ﬁxed notion of a given community and

usually much more developed welfare regimes.

Currently, the Schengen area with the EU may be

considered as a regionally limited but very open

interpretation of this tension.

Majority

MarketsCosmopolitanism

Common good

Solidarity

Competing interest

Bounded community

Rights

Figure 4: Tensions Within the Liberal Script

ORDERS

BORDERS

(RE-)ALLOCATION

TEMPORALITY

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

5 CONCLUSION

In this contribution, we develop an approach in

determining the content of the current liberal

script. In a ﬁrst step, we clarify the term “script”

before we turn our attention to the adjective of

“liberal”. We delineate scripts from other rival-

ling, more widespread social science concepts

like ideology, institution, order, and practice,

showing the added value that the term “script”

carries. In methodological terms, we outline a re-

constructive approach that fruitfully combines a

sociological perspective with a philosophical ﬁl-

ter. While a systematic empirical analysis is still

to be conducted, we propose a conceptual archi-

tecture that comprises two layers, leaving enough

internal ﬂexibility to account for variety via a fam-

ily resemblance structure and highlighting inter-

nal tensions. We maintain that the dierent vari-

eties of the liberal script are all anchored in the

principles of liberty, a private-public distinction,

and equal moral worth. We depict second-layer

components and order them along political, eco-

nomic, societal, and cross-cutting spheres. This

is done in the spirit of facilitating and stimulat-

ing empirical work within the cluster.

In doing so, we follow Tully Rector’s (2020) ad-

vice to avoid two fallacies: advocacy and exclu-

sion. The ﬁrst can be labeled advocacy error.

It occurs when “we select and order deﬁnition-

al components based on their moral desirability

or attractiveness, or impose an artiﬁcial form of

consistence on them” (Rector 2020: 7). While we

consider some consistency as necessary in or-

der to exclude pseudo-liberal speakers, we aim to

identify all the central components of the liberal

script, including the tensions built into them. The

social struggle over handling these tensions may

lead to outcomes that we consider as morally

18 The paper by Tully Rector to which we refer here is an in-

ternal discussion paper of the Theory Network at SCRIPTS. Upon

request, we are happy to share it.

indefensible. Because of these tensions, the va-

rieties of the liberal script have some downsides.

Moreover, we identify components of the liber-

al script that may produce morally problemat-

ic repercussions if unchecked: markets, strong

individualism, and exclusive community-build-

ing with the inherent goal to dominate others are

among them. This does not prevent us from ex-

pressing some sympathies for the liberal script.

The second error happens if we “rely, in our con-

struction of the concept of liberalism, on a nar-

row set of arguments, texts, and historical exam-

ples, privileging some standpoints over others

in a way that is epistemologically invalid” (Rec-

tor 2020: 7). In principle, our sociological claims

analysis approach encompasses all liberal speak-

ers and, therefore, is an attempt to be inclusive.

While any actual eort to carry out such an ef-

fort may include operational decisions excluding

some actors to some extent, it is principally an

open approach. Yet, we do not bring it to the end

in this paper. It is rather an eort to create a set

of statements about the liberal script that can be

corroborated, rejected, or developed further with

the help of empirical analysis. We mainly develop

a set of descriptive hypotheses about the com-

ponents that belong to the liberal script. At the

same time, we use a morphological approach to

develop statements about the relationships and

tensions between these components. In sum, em-

pirical research will undoubtedly lead to chang-

es and adaptations of our account. At least, we

hope our approach has helped us avoid the mis-

takes of advocacy and exclusion.

SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

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SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER NO. 10

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SCRIPTS WORKING PAPER SERIES

No. 1 2020 Tanja A. Börzel and Michael Zürn

Contestations of the Liberal Script. A Research Program

No. 2 2020 Hans-Jürgen Puhle

Populism and Democracy in the 21st Century

No. 3 2020 Tanja A. Börzel and Michael Zürn

Contestations of the Liberal International Order. From Liberal Multilateralism to Postnational

Liberalism

No. 4 2020 Daniel Drewski and Jürgen Gerhards

The Liberal Border Script and Its Contestations. An Attempt of Deﬁnition and Systematization

No. 5 2020 Tanja A. Börzel

Contesting the EU Refugee Regime

No. 6 2021 Claudia Rauhut

Slavery, Liberal Thought, and Reparations. Contesting the Compensation of Slave Owners in the

Caribbean

No. 7 2021 Camilla Reuterswärd

Organized Religion and Contestations of the Liberal Script. The Catholic Church, Body Politics, and

Anti-Gender Mobilizations

No. 8 2021 Tully Rector

Corporate Power. A Problem for Liberal Legitimacy

No. 10 2021 Michael Zürn and Johannes Gerschewski

Sketching the Liberal Script. A Target of Contestations

All SCRIPTS Working Papers are available on the SCRIPTS website at

www.scripts-berlin.eu

and can be ordered in print via email to

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Historical-Institutionalism in Political Science and the Problem of Change

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2006

Ellen M. Immergut

For nearly a century ‘change’ per se was not regarded as a pressing problem in political science. Scholars studying politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mainly concerned with the normative and procedural bases of politics, and tended to focus on constitutions — and, especially, the juridical principles embodied therein. Neither the politics of making constitutions nor the impact of these constitutions on everyday political life were particularly emphasized, although, to be sure, many writers in the tradition of Montesquieu also analysed the ‘goodness-of-fit’ between these formal, legal documents and the particular societies or cultures they had been drafted to govern.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

Book

May 2019

Katharina Pistor

The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century

Book

Dec 2018

Helena Rosenblatt

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

Book

Dec 2018

Quinn Slobodian

Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.

Article

Dec 1991

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Book

Jan 2006

David Harvey

Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

The Wretched of the Earth

Chapter