On Liberalism

Provided for non-commercial research and educational use only. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use. This article was originally published in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author’s benefit and for the benefit of the author’s institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institution’s administrator. All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution’s website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier’s permissions site at: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial Gilbert E. 2009. Liberalism. In Kitchin R, Thrift N (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume 6, pp. 195–206. Oxford: Elsevier. ISBN: 978-0-08-044911-1 © Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd. Author's personal copy Liberalism E. Gilbert, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Glossary Biopower A form of regulation exerted by the state or by institutions which attends to individual bodies and lives in ways that are designed to enable the protection of the population and the maximization of their quality of life. Biopolitics Governance that is exerted through biopower, that is, through techniques of control targeted to individual lives and the population. Citizenship The formal relationship between citizen and the state that in its ideal form denotes political membership comprising rights, responsibilities, and a sense of community belonging. Democracy A form of government that is presumed to reflect the will of the people by way of popular representation, in which all citizens are purported to have equal rights and equal access to participation. Freedom In liberalism, an ideal state of being whereby the individual, state, or market is able to act unhindered by constraints of any other individual, state, or market except perhaps when the safety of another is threatened. Governmentality The practices through which subjects are governed, by themselves and by others, and which include techniques of power and expertise, such as accounting and mentalities or rationalities of rule. Liberalization The loosening of regulations, often those enacted by the state, with respect to the governance of the market and social welfare. Neoliberalism A form of governance that resurrects aspects of classical liberalism to affirm that individual liberty is achieved through expanded market competitiveness, a weakened state, and the ’responsibilization’ of individuals and families for social welfare. Post-Structuralism A loose term that captures a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches that have sought to destabilize totalizing narratives of truth, power, reason, and structures of meaning. much critical work has sought to undermine liberalism’s key tenets. In part, the hegemony can be attributed to the scope and breadth of the concept, which refers at once to a philosophy, a political doctrine, and a political tradition, and includes theories of human nature, governance, and economy. To simplify greatly, liberalism champions individual ‘liberty’, for an individual conceived of as rational, egalitarian, and perfectible. How to limit the imposition of authority, particularly in the guise of state rule, is a key concern. So too is the role of the market, so much so that the legacy of liberalism today rests on the twin principles of individual and market freedoms, and how best to reconcile them when they diverge. Alongside these fundamental principles are powerful and programmatic ideals such as equality, freedom of expression, tolerance, universality, human rights, self-government, liberal democracy, citizenship, public and private spheres, a free press, competition, private property, private enterprise, free trade, open markets, and the rule of law. There is no definitive coherence to liberalism, however. It is complicated, confusing, and often contradictory. Liberalism has varied greatly over time and place, in ways that are often theoretically or practically consistent or reconcilable. It is also continually being reinvented and reimagined, often in light of that which has come before, lurching between elitism and radicalism. Thus, it is useful to follow Michel Foucault’s approach which, rather than trying to define a singular concept, asks how liberalism aspires to govern. To what kind of ‘liberty’ do liberals aspire? For whom? From whom? Even with these questions in mind, liberalism’s full complexities cannot be captured here. Three key concepts are thus considered – the individual, governance, and the market – and the ways that they have been used to secure and mobilize the governing of the population, as well as how they have been resisted. These concepts overlap, and are not easily separable, but doing so here provides an overview that is not simply historically linear or descriptive, but which gestures toward the variety of liberalisms across time and place even as its origins in the Anglo-West are stressed. The importance of liberalism to geography and geographers is emphasized. Introduction The Liberal Individual The impact of liberalism on geography has been pervasive and profound. It is hardly an exaggeration that no area of Western, Anglo-human geography has been left untouched, although from the late twentieth century If individual liberty is the foundational concept to liberalism, this begs the question: which individual? what liberty? These are the issues that this section will address; first, by examining four foundational principles of the 195 Author's personal copy 196 Liberalism liberal self – individualism, rationalism, egalitarianism, and ameliorism – before turning to the critiques that geographers and others have raised, drawing upon theories such as post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonialism. Liberals have tended to presume that individuals are born free, and possess natural, inalienable, and usually God-given rights. Humans thus have a prior ontology and epistemology: people are fully formed, self-reliant, and capable of knowing and of governing themselves. John Locke, perhaps the most influential early contributor to liberal philosophy, helped shape this modern view. His Treatises on Government, written at the end of the seventeenth century, presents the individual as free and reflexive, in a state of nature much more harmonious than Hobbes’s characterization of life as ‘‘nasty, brutish and short.’’ JeanJacques Rousseau also emphasizes human goodness and freedom; he worries, however, in The Social Contract (1762) that although ‘‘men are born free [y] everywhere they are in chains.’’ Rousseau and Locke diverge with respect to how those chains could be loosened, but they both place the sovereign individual at center stage of their worldviews. John Stuart Mill also insists on an a priori principle of free individuals in On Liberty, which shaped his antipathy to authority and government. Secondly, for liberals, reason provides both the basis for which the claim to individual liberty can be made, and the mechanism through which liberty can be realized and governance of the self justified. Even into the late twentieth century, reason prevails. In John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice he posits an original position – a reworking of the mythical state of nature wherein humans are free, rational, and good – to provide a normative theory of the just society and its political institutions. In this ideal original position, individuals assume a rational impartiality because their self-interests are surmounted, which leads to a consensus around social governance. Similarly, Jürgen Habermas’ model of communicative action suggests that a just society will emerge out of the dialog of rational individuals in the public sphere, where individuals transcend all traces of their individuality. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant had argued that reason was the best means to transcend one’s passions. For Rawls and Habermas, however, it is not just individual liberty at stake, but that of the body politic. Thirdly, the model of the rational individual infers a disembodied universalism that as we shall see has been extensively critiqued. It also, however, has provided the basis for an ethics (if not practice) of egalitarianism, used to expand the concept of natural rights across the population. Questions persist as to how to deal with pluralism. Wendy Brown outlines the ways that the concept of ‘toleration’ has been mobilized to this end, from the Reformation onward, and in figures as diverse as Spinoza and Milton. Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration appeals for the acceptance of religious difference, albeit not including Roman Catholics. His argument rests on a crucial differentiation between civil and political society: religion was deemed an individual and private matter, and hence tolerable because separate and distinct from the public sphere of common truth. Thomas Paine’s agitation against slavery rests on similar principles of equal rights and tolerance. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft argues that woman’s inability to reason or to achieve liberty was because they were not given the opportunity to do so, not because of an innate incapacity. The distinction between public and private was retained, however, as she affirmed that woman’s natural role was as wife and mother. Underlying the arguments for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery is a fourth principle, that of human progress and individual ameliorism. Nineteenth-century utilitarians such as Mill and Jeremy Bentham enthused over the role of science and education in the perfectibility of the self and of society. Rousseau’s semifictional Émile describes the best education for young men and women to fulfill their social roles, albeit again resting on a gendered differentiation of public and private spheres. Science and education were thus held out as progressive, even as they were used to reinforce discriminatory practices. There is also an implicit sense that the individual is self-knowing and self-knowable, and open to transformation. Into the twentieth century, the ethos of perfectibility has morphed into an emphasis on selfimprovement, one that entails a responsibilization of the individual (and the family) with a limited role for society or the state. The model of the autonomous, rational individual – ostensibly equal but needing improvement – continues to predominate, although as we will see below, in a more nefarious incarnation in the neoliberal homo economicus. The liberal self has thus come to be associated with individualism, rationalism, egalitarianism, and ameliorism. Anglo-geography has largely cohered with this model, for example, the universal, ‘rational man’ of positivism, and even the individualism celebrated in humanism. In the last several decades, however, attempts have been made to dislodge this construction of the self, and to problematize the appeals to liberty upon which liberalism is founded. The role of post-structural theory, which gained ground in the discipline in the 1980s, has been central. The techniques of deconstruction associated with Jacques Derrida were wielded to reveal a narrative’s inherent contradictions by uncovering how meanings are produced through binary oppositions, and the gaps and supplements to the text. This deferral of meaning and play of signifiers unsettles liberal presumptions of logic, truth, and certainty and the possibility of a rational, self-knowing self. Individual autonomy is further challenged in that identity is conceived as relational, constituted in reference to an Author's personal copy Liberalism ‘other’. The self is hence neither natural nor free; nor is there a single truth or reason through which liberty can be realized. Rather, post-structuralists and postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard celebrate disorder and disruption as they herald the death of the Enlightenment metannaratives of order, truth, reason, and logic that underlie liberal subjectivity. The challenge to singular truth resonates with the much earlier writings of Friedrich Nietzsche who describes truth as ‘‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms.’’ In works such as Beyond Good and Evil, his attack extends still further to include selfconsciousness and free will; he remarks that the subject is but a ‘grammatical fiction’. Drawing upon Nietzsche, Foucault’s archeological studies displace the centrality of the human subject by turning to structural histories of medicine and the social sciences. In The Order of Things, he reflects upon the very recent history of the autonomous subject, and draws attention to the discursive contingency of the subject as an effect of power and discipline. These tactics are perhaps most clearly evident in institutions, whether for the ‘insane’, as Hester Parr and Chris Philo have examined, or the poor house described in Felix Driver’s work. Spaces such as Chinatown work in still different ways, as Kay Anderson has revealed, to constitute marginal and dominant subject positions through racialized and gendered discourses. Psychoanalytic theory has also unraveled the unity of the rational individual. Sigmund Freud’s theory of the tripartite structure of the psyche into ego, superego, and id, undermines the certainty of a transparent self. Desires are repressed, denial and displacement are endemic, and dreams are laden with symbolism. Freud and his former colleague Jacques Lacan both suggest that identity formation is relational and conflictual, whether produced through the Oedipus complex, or during the ‘mirror stage’. But Lacan takes issue with Freud’s talking cure in that it extends the possibility of the restoration of a coherent self. He argues instead that the ‘unconscious is structured like a language’, an assertion that speaks to the complexity of the subject who cannot possibly be transparent to himself, but troubled with symbolism. Only a few geographers such as Liz Bondi, Heidi Nast, Steve Pile, and Gillian Rose have explicitly engaged with psychoanalytic theory to problematize the spatial constitution of bodies, sexuality, desire, and trauma. If post-structural and psychoanalytic theories decenter the autonomous and transparent liberal self, Marxist analysis redirects attention to the social constitution of the individual, enmeshed in the class-based structures of capitalism. For Marx, liberal appeals to egalitarianism are impossible to realize in a private property system where ownership conveys power and influence. This invective informs David Harvey’s seminal Social Justice and the City which argues for moving away 197 from ‘Liberal formulations’ – the title of the first section of his book – to a revolutionary Marxist critique that will address social injustice by abolishing private property. The book thus positioned a new critical human geography in opposition to liberalism. Marxism, however, paid little explicit attention to the constitution of the subject and subjectivity. It could be inferred from the discussions of class, which shaped the intimate relations between the bourgeoisie and working class, that individuals are always social and political beings, situated at a particular historical moment – and not a priori, autonomous beings. But only with the writings of Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser does a more compelling critique of the self emerge. Drawing upon Freud and Lacan, he argues that the self is an ideological construct. His article ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, asserts that the self and citizen are made meaningful through their interpolation in social structures. The individual is thus produced through, constrained by, and even managed through such institutions. Understanding the social constitution of the self was also the object of Anglo-feminist geography of the 1970s, although much of the early work was resolutely liberal. The emphasis inside and outside the academy was on the extension of rights to women and the affirmation of women’s place in the academy both as researcher and as research subject. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) galvanized popular interest in the suburban anomie experienced by full-time homemakers in the postWorld War II suburbs. Feminist geographers began to provide a more politicized critique of the public–private divide, often by drawing upon Marxism, although its relationship with feminism has often been uneasy. Suzanne McKenzie and Damaris Rose, among others, identified the centrality of the home and unpaid domestic labor to the material and ideological reproduction of capitalism. Addressing the public private divide that is inherent to liberalism – and the power politics of this differentiation – has been a key facet of feminism, as captured in the popular slogan ‘the personal is political’. A more embodied feminist research has also emerged, attuned to subjectivity and positionality. Bodies themselves have become a focus of study as geographers work to unsettle conventional dualities between male/ female and mind/body, as with Rachel Pain’s exploration of women’s fear of violence in public spaces. Isabel Dyck and Pamela Moss have also challenged the ableist presumptions of much social science research that disregards disability and illness. Research on the body has also informed studies of sexuality. David Bell, Jon Binnie, Glen Elder, Larry Knopp, and Gill Valentine have all examined gay and lesbian spatialities, and the impact of the visibility of bodies in the public sphere in an era when gay and lesbian activists were taking to the streets. Author's personal copy 198 Liberalism Research on the body has thus drawn attention to a wide range of subjectivities that are obscured by a liberal universalism that presumes a rational, disembodied self. Studies of race have made similar interventions, while activist scholars such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde have assailed feminist approaches that idealize the concept of ‘woman’ and ignore class and racial privilege. In contrast to Friedan’s ‘feminine mystique’, hooks’ moving piece on home as a site of resistance unpacked the suburbs as both the site of heterosexual, normative family and the dependence of this kind of family structure on black labor. Geographers Alastair Bonnett, Ruth Gilmore, Peter Jackson, and Laura Paulido have examined the ways that race is produced and reproduced in social and legal spaces such as schools and prisons. They challenge the liberal narratives of progress and ameliorism that govern these institutions and their imposition of dominant forms of subjectivity on the marginalized. The spatiality of racism needs to be interrogated, Linda Peake and Audrey Kobayashi argue, not only to reveal the hypocrisy of liberal universalism and its underlying racist practices, but also to illustrate that race is a human construction, with no biological justification, produced and reproduced through space. The collection, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, records the tensions between liberal aspirations to pluralism and egalitarianism and the structural inequities that persist in the United States arising from its history of slave labor and dispossession from the land. The contributors demand a radical restructuring that can address this racism, not an integrationist liberalism that subsumes cultural differences, depoliticizes private cultural identities, obviates politics, and tries to remake the ‘other’ in one’s own image. No less has been demanded by anticolonial and postcolonial writers. In the 1950s, legendary revolutionary and registered psychiatrist Franz Fanon railed against the internalization of the colonial subjugation by the colonized. From another perspective, Edward Said examines how Eurocentric imaginative geographies of the East as ‘weak’ and ‘effeminate’ were used to rationalize colonial and imperial expansion. His book Orientalism examines how discourses of the ‘other’ constitute the colonizing subject, whereas Fanon had suggested that colonial subjectivity was negated. More recently, postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, Ann Laura Stoler, and Anne McClintock have drawn upon post-structuralism and psychoanalytic theory to frame the relations between colonizer and colonized in a more nuanced way that eschews binary oppositions, and explores the complexities of desire, eroticization, transgression, and hybrid subjectivity. But the question that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak poignantly raises, as to whether the subaltern can find a voice given her interpolation in colonial and patriarchal discourse, is left hanging. The egalitarianism to which liberalism aspires never seems to be realizable for the marginalized. Identity politics associated with studies of race and gender has raised important issues regarding the exclusionary practices of liberalism. At times, however, there has been a tendency to reinstate a liberal individualism, and the values of the perfectible and transparent self. Queer theory, by contrast, has sought to unsettle these narratives, while also raising opportunities for resistance. The attention to the social construction of the categories of gender, sex, and sexuality have challenged essentialized notions of identity and the identity politics that have emerged around fixed concepts of class, gender, and race. Judith Butler posits that the self is in a process of becoming, whose undoing is always possible. Butler’s analysis of performativity reveals how gender is assembled through routine: subject positions are created, not just imposed, albeit enacted in a context of external constraints. She identifies the possibility of transgression, though humor and irony, for example, or resistant performances such as drag. Identities are thus fluid and in flux, not fixed, autonomous and self-knowing, as conceived by liberalism. For some, the possibility that identities are complex, dynamic, and hybrid is cathartic because of the potential for reconstitution and reconfiguration that this holds out. For others, however, this characterization is too playful, too transient, and too partial to tackle material injustices. Along different lines, Katharyne Mitchell cautions against the ‘hype of hybridity’ because the aspiration to transformation and subversion can and has been co-opted in the interests of capitalist accumulation. Nonetheless, the trope of hybridity persists. In another strand of research, geographers have engaged with the concept to raise moral and ethical questions about the relation between the human and the nonhuman and to encourage a dissolution of those binaries. Donna Haraway’s model of the cyborg, a technological hybrid of human and machine, works to complicate the distinctions between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, and nature and culture. Actor-network theory (ANT) and scholars such as Michael Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law draw from the philosophy of science, economy, and sociology to argue that agency (and power) are constituted in and through networks held together by immutable mobiles that help to make the networks durable. In this formulation, agency, albeit muted, is a capacity of both the animate and the inanimate. Sarah Whatmore has drawn upon ANT, Haraway, and the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to push toward a reconceptualization of the ‘autonomous self ’ that acknowledges a world woven together by human and nonhuman elements. Her work on ‘becoming elephant’, for example, addresses the performativity of the elephant subject in the recursive processes negotiated between actor and network. This attention to the ‘more than human world’ speaks to a broader contemporary anxiety around the constitution of the human subject. Author's personal copy Liberalism The new work on hybrid natures unravels the binary opposition implicit to the concept of a liberal self which presumes that agency, rationality, egalitarianism, and ameliorism are uniquely human capacities. Identity politics, by contrast, has criticized the liberal individual because it is modeled on a white, masculine, and disembodied self who is idealized as rational, self-interested, self-maximizing, and self-knowing. In some instances, critique has been used to expand liberal categories to make them more inclusive of marginalized populations, in effect, using liberalism’s aspirations to universalism and egalitarianism against itself. Others, however, argue that paradox and prejudice are intrinsic to liberalism, so that it must be overthrown. Geographers have engaged with these debates from all sides, and they continue to challenge foundational liberal constructions such as the public–private divide, and the naturalization of gender and race. More cross-cultural research could identify alternative epistemologies, for example, an aboriginal worldview or Chinese Buddhism, which each in quite different ways offer a more holistic and less-individualized epistemology. Such comparisons might bring even closer into focus the liberal paradox whereby freedom from domination is emphasized at the very same time that material and discursive stratification is being reinforced. Liberalism’s tenacity, however, speaks to the popular appeal of its claim to individualism, and the concepts of liberty that it promotes. Governing through Liberty If individuals are presumed to be free, rational, and perfectible, then how can society be ordered to maximize these qualities? Liberalism tends to argue that self-rule is the best mechanism for ensuring the autonomy and freedom of the individual, and is a due right of rational beings. At the same time, classical liberalism suggests that maximizing individual freedom is also in the best interests of all, which requires a social ordering that is both individualizing and totalizing. A persistent question has been how to balance individual rights and social relations. Political liberalism is usually traced back to seventeenth-century England when social hierarchies were disrupted by the Glorious Revolution of 1640–88 which loosened the grip of religious authority, and bolstered popular sovereignty and parliamentary democracy. The aristocracy of the Whig party, heirs to liberal values after the English revolution, supported government through choice and consent – alongside personal and economic freedoms, and even religious toleration – although only for the propertied classes. The resonance with Locke’s social contract is clear. Individuals agree to their political rule because although there is equality in the state of nature, social conflicts over natural rights, for example, 199 property, need to be mediated. A state is thus a social necessity, although it needs to be limited, as outlined in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s programmatic volume, On the Limits to State Action. John Stuart Mill suggested that the only legitimate justification for state constraint was to prevent harm, to the individual or to others. Liberal thought thus arose alongside a breakdown in traditional authority and struggles to place power in the hands of the (propertied) people. It bore both progressive and conservative proclivities. What this has meant with respect to the role of the state has been of key interest to political philosophers. Writing in 1958, Isaiah Berlin differentiated between ‘negative’ freedom (freedom from coercion) and ‘positive’ freedom (freedom to self-realize). Although it has since been argued that these freedoms coexist, liberals tend to emphasize one or the other. As noted above, classical thinkers such as Locke and Mill argue from the vantage of negative freedom: individual liberty is construed as freedom from state intervention, with the state playing only a minor role in the economy, only a little more of a role in matters of security and civil liberties, and almost no role in the private sphere. As we will see in more detail below, these ideas have been revived by neoclassical liberals such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman who argue that less state and more individual freedom is in the best interests of all. By contrast, the predominant liberalism of the early twentieth century, with a little nod to Rousseau, has emphasized positive freedoms. T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, and John Rawls promote the state provision of social rights and services as a means to ensure that each member of the population has the same opportunities. Under welfare liberalism, resources are redistributed and services such as education and healthcare are provided to encourage a minimum standard of living. The social benefits and social security of this model are touted as egalitarian, even as redistribution helps to make capitalist inequities more palatable and hence more durable, to the advantage of the propertied class. In both positive and negative models, liberalism is territorialized onto the nation-state. Locke’s writings, for example, and those of other contemporary liberal thinkers such as Thomas Paine, were formative to the push for national independence in the eighteenth century. The American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) were grounded in the natural rights of the individual and variants on Locke’s life, liberty, and property, even as they took on different dimensions. US liberals trumpeted the importance of individual rights over class, whereas in Britain economic liberties were promoted. In France, the 1789 revolution’s attack on the monarchy, aristocracy, and the Roman Catholic Church led to an emphasis on secularism and democracy. Liberalism also infused other national movements in Europe, Author's personal copy 200 Liberalism enshrined, for example, in Spain’s first constitution of 1812. In the Americas, Haiti declared its independence from France in 1791, drawing upon the aspirations to liberty of the French revolutions, just as the Spanish example would influence the South American wars of independence led by figures such as Sı́mon Bolı́var and José de san Martı́n. Liberalism has thus been pivotal to movements for national independence. In turn, the nation-state has become ‘the’ political container within which liberalism operates and within which individual rights and freedoms have been made achievable and understandable, even as it exhibits an antipathy to state rule. This is one of the key paradoxes between liberal ideals and forms of government. By and large, geographers have tended to reinforce the assumption that nation-states are, as Neil Brenner has put it, the locus of power and economic management, although this has been challenged by globalization and neoliberalism. Some recent works, however, interrogate this assumption. Matt Sparke’s In the Space of Theory, for example, draws upon antifoundational critiques of the production of truth and knowledge to challenge the mapping of social theory onto the nationstate. As Clive Barnett and Murray Low remark, however, only in limited ways have geographers examined the connections between liberalism and democracy or democratization. Their collection, Spaces of Democracy, begins to attend to this lacunae, at the same time that it examines other scales of governance. Foucault’s work has been crucial to rethinking the state, governance, and power. He has instigated a strain of research on ‘governmentality’, that is ‘the conduct of conduct’, or how and why people govern themselves and others. Foucault identified in the liberal state a shift away from an emphasis on territorial sovereignty, to an interest in biopower, in the population and its governance. How to regulate life, rather than how to threaten death, is the object of the modern liberal state. Matt Hannah examines how the population is made knowable and calculable through discourses and techniques, for example, census and statistics, in late nineteenth-century United States. As his work demonstrates, it is not that concerns for the population completely supplant sovereignty, but that governmental rule is reoriented toward ensuring the health, wealth, and happiness of the population. The state strives for social security, but it is also through this security that the state governs. Foucault also argues, however, that this rationality is not only disseminated by the state, but becomes internalized within the population. Individual and social institutions – the family, the workplace, nongovernmental organizations, etc. – all strive to maximize their quality of life, and assume responsibility for optimizing their own potential. Freedom is both a condition of and the outcome of this responsibilization. Foucault identifies a two-pronged strategy through which liberal technologies of power are deployed. The first, as noted above, entails the protection of the population from risks associated with the industrial economy (e.g., health programs, education reform, etc.), so that they can optimize their quality of life. The second is a more nefarious wielding of ‘racial hygiene’ whereby the population is assessed and ruled according to its perceived capacity to achieve responsible autonomy. Disciplinary power is applied both to reform those who do not meet the norms, and to excise those who are considered to be irredeemable, for example, in institutions such as asylums or prisons. The propagation of those elements of the population deemed most at risk, and hence risky to others, is hence limited. As the term ‘racial hygiene’ denotes, there is an inherently racial dimension to this social ordering, as racial differences are identified and mapped onto the population through techniques such as racial profiling and ghettoization. Foucault’s analytic framework identifies the illiberalism upon which the liberal state’s rule of its population is founded. Other scholars have turned to examine the transnational dimensions of ‘racial hygiene’. With echoes of Said’s ‘Orientalism’, David Theo Goldberg illustrates that liberal governance manages its own population by identifying ‘uncivilizable’ populations beyond the state, largely codified through race. Geographers have been complicit in this process; at the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, environmental determinist Ellen Churchill Semple classified populations with respect to their land use and propensity to violence, naturalizing social relations in terms of geographical distribution. Liberals have also been, as Uday Singh Mehta documents, among the most ardent advocates of empire. British colonial India was a favorite laboratory. John Stuart Mill, who worked for the British East India Company for 35 years, approved of colonial rule because, he argued, Indian ‘barbarians’, were incapable of governing themselves. Thus, as Mariana Valverde has remarked, while Mill was progressive with regards to the expansion of rights at home, for example, to women, he had no compunction in rationalizing despotic rule for populations elsewhere. In settler societies, the consequences were often violent. Indigenous peoples were deemed ‘uncivilizable’ and were corralled onto reserves, or removed from their families and placed in residential schools as in Canada and Australia. These strategies were part of the bifurcated attempts to both discipline and train other populations through spatial segregation. Geographers have been sensitive not only to this wider colonial history, but also to the complicity of the discipline. Felix Driver and David Livingstone have provided broad overviews of this participation, while others have addressed geographic tactics of rule and dispossession through maps, spatial segregation, and Author's personal copy Liberalism urban planning. The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in Britain sponsored a number of expeditions by figures such as Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Richard Francis Burton, Ernest Shackleton, and Sir Edmund Hillary. The explorers often had administrative impact. Livingstone, for example, opened up central Africa to missionaries who brought with them a form of biopolitical care and control with their plans for health, education, and work. New forms of geoeconomic empire reared their head when the RGS merged, after some controversy, with the academic-based Institute of British Geographers; Shell’s sponsorship of the new institution was contentious, largely because of its oil capitalism in Africa. In the early twentieth century, geographers played a significant role in international affairs. The heartland theory of Halford Mackinder, which he submitted to the RGS in 1904, proposed a reworked geopolitics that placed Europe at the center of a nascent global worldview. Control of Eastern Europe, he argued, was necessary to world domination, which informed international and US containment policies. Almost his contemporary, geographer Isaiah Bowman, who directed the American Geographical Society for 20 years, played a parallel role in the US where he acted as presidential advisor first to Woodrow Wilson and then to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In American Empire, Neil Smith uses the figure of Bowman to critique US aspirations to hegemonic globalism and the victory of liberalism over geography. This was the dawn of a new empire, being built on a global assertion of economic and moral liberalism. Although the new, internationalist drive appeared to triumph over space, it required the careful management of global geography. Area studies programs of the post-World War II era, with their direct links to the military and foreign analysis, thrived in the impetus for knowledge of the world. These academic policies and programs reinscribed the polarity between the domestic and the foreign, all the while enclosing the world within a liberal integrationist order. Domestically, Western states introduced a varying degree of redistributive welfare programs. Social security enabled the positive freedoms celebrated in the writings of T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse, as liberalism reinvented itself as a superior moral force within the new geopolitical order. The international infrastructure that was created, including the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, was used to promote Western liberal economic and moral values around the world. The increased mobility of the population in this same era, however, revealed underlying social and cultural tensions. Hannah Arendt drew attention to the wave of displaced and stateless peoples in the aftermath of the two world wars, and the impact on people bereft of political status as a result of 201 ethnic cleansing. When citizenship rights are grounded in the nation-state where does that leave those whom the state has refused to recognize? This is one of the paradoxes of liberal citizenship that Hannah Arendt exposed. Universal values appear to transcend the nation-state, yet citizenship depends upon exclusionary practices that separate those with ‘legitimate’ claims to the state from the rest, internally and externally. To put it somewhat differently, as Barbara Cruickshank has done, citizenship is a technology of state through which the population is governed and deemed governable (or not). Feminist scholars such as Ruth Lister and Iris Marion Young have examined the persistent gendering of citizenship that harkens back to the public–private divide of the social contract. Despite the expansion of programs post-World War II, rights were dependent on workforce participation, a proviso that meant women were largely excluded except in their status as dependents of male breadwinners, while children still continue to be considered only citizens-in-the-making. Citizenship, Daiva Stasiulis and Abigail Bakan forcefully insist, needs to be understood in terms of capitalism’s uneven power relations whereby the rights and responsibilities associated with Western citizenship are predicated on the labor and subjugation of the Global South. This kind of analysis is especially important given the ongoing political controversy in the US around undocumented workers. Geographers have also examined these citizenship paradoxes, with attention to mobility and borders, as with Jennifer Hyndman’s analysis of refugee camps in post-war Africa, and Alison Mountz’s work on the smuggling of Chinese migrants into Canada. Ongoing research has also affirmed that formal citizenship does not necessarily entail substantive rights. Drawing upon critical race theory, Yasmeen Abu-Laban insists that bias is inherent to political participation, representation, and the allocation of resources, which perpetuate marginalization and discrimination. Multicultural ‘tolerance’ also reproduces and naturalizes differences: cultural traditions – for example, food and dance – are celebrated in the public sphere, but political structures remain intact, regulated by a universalized liberal reason. At the same time, however, the adherence to community, the rhetoric of tolerance, and the logic of egalitarianism have been used to expand citizenship claims for minority populations. Charles Taylor and Will Kylimcka have even proposed that group rights, for example, aboriginal citizenship, are possible within the liberal nation-state, as a means for reconciling demands for subnational self-governance. At the transnational scale, the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 has projected tolerance into the international arena, even if it remains very much state-based in its application. Immanuel Kant suggested that a cosmopolitan world order, with internationalized human rights, would ensure Author's personal copy 202 Liberalism ‘perpetual peace’, an ethos that infused the early postWorld War II period. Yet, the reality has been quite the opposite. Violence and insecurity have long been constitutive elements of liberalism, rather than what happens when liberalism fails, as we have seen above with respect to the history of colonialism. If there is a coherence across liberalism, it is its tendency toward illiberalism – and the violent imposition of liberalism – in the name of liberty. The sovereign’s power to render subjects as homo sacer, that is to remove their political rights so that their death can be ordered with impunity, brings violence to the fore. In particular, and compellingly for geographers, Giorgio Agamben’s work in this area draws attention to those spaces of ‘exception’ where subjects are rendered into bare life: the quintessential example is that of the Nazi concentration camp. But, he argues, it is not simply that exception is located or locatable in particular spaces, but through the exception that the law is constituted. This reinforces the idea that politics, law, and violence are not separate but continuous realms, a perspective that further undermines the liberal premise of the neutral state. Derek Gregory develops Agamben’s remarks to consider Guantánamo Bay as a state of exception. Gregory’s analysis, however, situates Guantánamo within an international (not just national) politics and thereby attends to the colonial histories and international jurisprudence in which it is embroiled. He argues that it is not the law that is absent, but rather the application of human rights, a point which drives home the long legacy of practices of ‘racial hygiene’. In the current ‘war on terror’ questions around human security are pressing, and have materialized themselves particularly at borders where the power of the nation-state is highly visible. But even when formal war is not decreed, rights are suspended. Gerry Pratt documents the legal abandonment of women sex workers and domestic laborers, who because of their gender are outside the rational public sphere and consequentially more easily, and more surreptitiously, rendered into bare life. With the closing of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Francis Fukuyama teleologically declared The End of History and the Last Man. Liberal capitalism, he argued, was now ascendant as the last, best model of social ordering and human political achievement. By contrast, Michael Hart and Antonio Negri argue in Empire that the moment of liberal democracy has passed, that it has undergone a crisis of legitimacy because of the military overreach of the United States. Writing before 9/11, their comments on new imperial forms seem especially prescient given the imposition of parliamentary democracy in Iraq in 2005, following the American-led invasion, and the continuing violence there. The specter of older forms of colonialism and imperialism looms large as Western states impose their liberal norms and ideals in a reinvented world order. The Fukuyama-style rhetoric that casts liberalism as the one rational choice, as morally superior, and as the quintessence of liberty is precisely that which enables violence to be perpetuated in liberalism’s name. Liberal Economies If a key question of liberalism is how the individual is to be ruled (or not) within a just society, so too is the question of how the economy can best be governed (or not) to maximize individual liberty. Two key liberal economic principles are private property and free trade. For Locke, property is one of the three foundational natural rights alongside life and liberty. Property is deemed an inalienable, natural right because it arises out of labor over nature. Since people are autonomous, owners of themselves, they are also owners of their own labor and its products. It is to guarantee this right that people assent to being ruled, with the polity’s chief role the preservation of one’s property against the claims of others. Some notion of property rights have been enshrined in state laws since the American and French constitutions, and are now more universally recognized with the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Property holders, it is argued, possess special social status, and an implicit moral and political authority, which is used to rationalize their dispossession of the land. This logic informed the push for enclosure that accompanied the changing farming economy of Britain and later, industrialization and urbanization. Common land was appropriated for private use, which reinforced the discrepancies between the landowning and the landless, who often rioted. In the colonial context, the result was an unreserved land grab. In settler colonies, where indigenous peoples did not share this concept of property rights and tilled the soil more lightly, land was routinely dispossessed. Capitalist claims to property rights thus not only externalized nature as that to be owned, but allocated resources in the interest of the bourgeoisie, an argument developed by Neil Smith in Uneven Development. Nicholas Blomley has examined more explicitly the continuing violence of liberal law which, constituted as it is through boundary-making (e.g., frontier, survey, and grid), reinscribes the colonial geographies out of which it originates, and the differences between colonizer and colonized, and the owners and the landless. In the contemporary context, petro-capitalism plays out a new kind of imperialism that is laced with violence, as Michael Watt describes, as the oil industries and local communities jostle over the land and its resources. Free trade is a second foundational principle in liberal economics. Eric Sheppard notes that, despite historical– geographic differences in implementation, the arguments Author's personal copy Liberalism for (and against) free trade have remained largely continuous for over 200 years. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, David Hume and Adam Smith, resisted the mercantilism of their day and its protectionism, and argued that free trade would stimulate economic growth. The pursuit of individual self-interest in a competitive market, Smith asserted, would produce efficiencies that would benefit all society. The market would naturally regulate itself by an ‘invisible hand’. The only role for the state was to provide some security, legal infrastructure, and limited public works to ensure that individuals could freely pursue their own economic interests. David Ricardo also was opposed to mercantilism. He argued vehemently against the British Corn Laws, in place since 1815, which protected the price of domestic grains against foreign imports. This subsidization, he argued, prevented the country from benefiting from open competition with other markets, and maximizing its production in terms of comparative advantage. The shift away from mercantilism and toward liberal, laissez faire economics underpinned the development of free market capitalism in Britain. Interest in free trade also emerged elsewhere in Europe, for example, with the writings of Jean-Baptiste Say in France and Anders Chydenius in Finland, and in the United States and Canada where a reciprocity treaty was in place between 1854 and 1866. By the late nineteenth century, however, a neoclassical economics had emerged. Drawing upon the economic liberalism of Smith and Ricardo – and retaining the principles of individualism, private property, and self-adjusting markets – economists sought a scientific model for supply and demand, and production and consumption that would be in the best interests of all. Theories of consumer behavior were expounded based around a rational individual whose choices, it was assumed, would maximize their utility. The paradigm was thus rooted in liberal rationalism and perfectionism, with a nod to utilitarianism. Economic liberalism, however, was contested. Socialist thought was percolating across Europe, particularly in Britain and in France. In Glasgow, Robert Owen promoted forms of collective living, and argued that the individual was a product of society, not an autonomous figure. The Chartist movement galvanized the working class to expand the franchise and their claims on the state. In France, socialism was promoted by Comte Saint-Simon, who criticized social inequities and argued against both individualism and laissez faire markets. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon promoted anarchy, and called the ownership of property theft. Most famously, Marx criticized capitalism’s internal contradictions, and the (creative) destruction wrought by capital investment and disinvestment. He argued that the state was not neutral, but rather protected bourgeois interests such as private property. His alternative vision involved shared ownership of the means of 203 production, which ran counter to the individualist, laissez faire, private property thrust of the capitalist economy. Marx was also wary of free trade: he feared that the abolishment of the Corn Laws was a ruse by manufacturers to drive down food prices and hence wages. Marxist and socialist thought informed the radical geography of the 1970s, when there was also a brief revival of the anarchism of geographers Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Réclus. New research emerged on the spatial dimensions of capitalism in the urban landscape, drawing upon the methodologies of historical materialism. This rich body of work sought to depose economic geography’s cohesion with liberalism, from its idealized model of liberal ‘man’ as rational, productive, and selfmaximizing, to its affirmation of private property. Bill Bunge, David Harvey, and Neil Smith examined the urban inequities of capital accumulation, from the de-investment in inner cities, to the politics of reinvestment as part of gentrification. Feminist scholars, such as Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell, addressed the social structures underpinning the gendered dynamics of urban space. Recent work also attends to the contemporary reconfiguration of the nation-state under globalization (and especially free trade) and neoliberalism. The nation-state, contra classical liberal theory, played a significant role in the economy at the beginning of the twentieth century, partly as a response to the radical critiques, but also because of all the accommodations demanded by the propertied classes. The sweeping changes of World War I and the Depression, when the failures of laissez faire liberalism were stark, gave further impetus to nationalist protectionism. Alternative ways of conceiving individual and economic liberty around ‘positive’ freedoms, which had previously been relegated to the background, were now being championed. In Britain, T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse advocated a qualified role for the state to maximize individual potential. The provision of basic necessities, argued John Dewey in the United States, would in turn contribute to the ‘public good’. John Maynard Keynes provided the economic rationale for an expanded state role, by reorienting analysis to questions of employment. He argued that state intervention at times of high unemployment could help to stimulate consumption or investment, and thus help maximize individual and social freedoms. In the post-World War II era, with varying degree, social welfare was implemented in Western liberal states. In Europe, a model of state planning, social programs, and public ownership was predominant, while in the US, Roosevelt’s ‘new deal’ ushered in a series of federal programs for ‘relief, recovery, and reform’. ‘New deal’ liberalism was configured around social liberalism, whereas in England liberalism was distilled through the Liberal Party and Prime Minister William Gladstone, a conservatism echoed in much of Europe. Author's personal copy 204 Liberalism In the post-World War II era, nation-states thus loomed large as they carved out a certain degree of economic autonomy. But they also participated in the creation of an international political order through multilateral institutions such as the UN, the Bretton Woods agreement, GATT, the IMF, and the World Bank. Political scientist John G. Ruggie described this as ‘embedded liberalism’ in that a ‘grand bargain’ was struck between state autonomy and external regulation, with an eye to social and political security. Although World War I had challenged the liberal premise that international interdependence would preempt war, the idea that a more open trading system would bring peaceful relations was revived. GATT was part of the program for post-war economic recovery, and ushered in a nascent free trade, later expanded under its transformation into the World Trade Organization (WTO). These international and multilateral post-war agreements consolidated a new globalized economic order, which by the 1980s would be underpinned by a revival of classical liberalism that has taken shape as ‘neo’liberalism. By the 1970s Keynesianism was being challenged by the dissolution of Bretton Woods; the oil crisis; and the shift to more open, internationalized markets. The Chicago School economists, drawing up on the Ordoliberals of 1930s Germany and the works of Friedrich Hayek in particular, refuted Keynesian interventionism. They attributed the crisis to fiscal policies, national debts, and government failures. Milton Friedman’s advocacy of ‘negative’ freedoms – a minimal role for government in the economy, a prioritization of monetary policy over fiscal policy, and a general emphasis on individual liberty – began to gain acceptance. With the elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, laissez faire capitalism was revived. Unions were attacked, individualist economics were promoted through tax breaks and the reduction of social programs, and in the UK, industry was denationalized. Programs such as workfare, as Jamie Peck has detailed, began to replace rights-based access to income support with a stress on individual self-sufficiency. With neoliberalism, the primacy of the individual was reinstated. But, as Graham Burchell argues, neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in that it is not about determining the kind of government that is best able to optimize the ‘natural’ freedom of the individual. Rather, the object of neoliberal governance is to ‘produce’ the free individual – an individual who not only embodies all the liberal qualities of autonomy, rationalism, ameliorism, and egalitarianism, but also personifies market principles such as self-maximization, efficiency, accountability, profitability, productivity, competitiveness, and entrepreneurialism. The revamped individual at the center of neoliberalism is homo economicus. Moreover, market values and expectations are also projected onto social and political institutions, such as governments and schools, which themselves become quasi-enterprises whose ‘products’ (e.g., knowledge) can be consumed by their ‘consumers’ (e.g., students). The cost–benefit calculations demanded of these enterprises require additional forms of regulation. As Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell have pointed out, neoliberalism entails not just a succession of rollbacks (withdrawal or disinvestment), but also a rollout of regulatory forms that need more management and supervision. The workfare policies that Peck has examined, for example, require a de-regulation of labor, but in a highly regulated way that is enforced by the disciplinary and penalizing measures of the state. The use of disciplinary and punitive measures reveals yet another duplicity. Liberals have consistently claimed that liberalized economies engender peaceful relations, certainly at the state level. John Stuart Mill argued that commerce would bring about peaceful international relations, while anti-Corn law proponent Richard Cobden proposed that free trade would help ensure peace (and hence prevent war). Increasing security cooperation between states after World War I and World War II was also infused with commonplace rhetoric that liberal states were less likely to wage war on one another. In a twist to this logic, Milton Friedman argued that free markets and individual freedoms would precipitate the fall of totalitarianism. But, as Thomas Friedman has recently suggested, the ‘hidden hand’ of globalization and corporate capitalism is only made possible by a ‘hidden fist’, in this case that of the US military. Liberalism often requires the use of force and generates insecurities, even within the domestic population. This is clearly in evidence in Chile where General Augusto Pinochet’s Chicago-inspired market reforms of the 1970s were implemented with the firm hand of the military state and thousands were killed and tortured. More recently the reconstruction of Iraq, which has been promoted as an opportunity to rebuild infrastructure and facilitate democratization, has been shot through with violence. The Coalition Provisional Authority, working with the US Department of Defense and UK authorities, has introduced new orders of council that liberalize the Iraqi market, including privatization, tax cuts, and openness to foreign investment (e.g., by US company Halliburton), in ways that were inimical to the previous Iraqi constitution. As the increasing violence and dissent there suggest, the liberalization of the economy has been far from successful, and the lives of the population are far from secure. Privatization has also generated other kinds of insecurities. Natural resources have been especially impacted, although as James McCarthy and Scott Prudham reflect, little attention has been paid to the impact of neoliberalism on the environment, even as attacks on Keynesian spending and national investment have undermined the environmental legislation implemented in that era to limit unheeded development. They point Author's personal copy Liberalism out that forms of life are increasingly becoming commoditized through patents, genetic engineering, biopiracy and bioprospecting, private property rights around pollution, and user fees, all of which rely upon and expand a Lockean concept of individualized private property rights upheld by the state. This commoditization is transforming human–nature relations, but also concepts of the human. A new kind of biological citizenship is emerging, Nik Rose and Carlos Novas suggest, to reconcile the deterritorialization of the state, recalibrations of human life and value, new forms of biopolitical governance, and struggles and claims to biological rights premised on the very insecurities that these transformations entail. Free trade has similarly generated insecurities, as the expansion of export processing zones (EPZs) suggest. EPZs allow free trade under preferential terms to encourage the relocation of manufacturing: limited bureaucracy, reduction or elimination of taxes, and the removal of import or export tariffs. As Melissa Wright has documented with respect to Mexican maquiladoras, however, the impact of these highly liberalized economic zones can be devastating on the employees. To attract investment, wages are reduced, unions are prohibited, and the rights of workers denied. Women have been made especially vulnerable, their labor cheapened, their lives devalued, and their agency denied. National borders have also become sites of human insecurity, even as free trade facilitates the movement of goods and capital. In tandem with the introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, was Operation Gatekeeper, a border security initiative implemented in several US states. Joseph Nevins describes the regulations, border control agents, and surveillance techniques that were all deployed against ‘illegal’ Mexican immigrants. At the same time, NAFTA opened borders for professionals who best met the criteria of the marketized homo economicus: accountability, profitability, self-scrutiny, and entrepreneurialism. These hierarchical policies are being reinscribed into the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership of 2005. As I have argued elsewhere, this NAFTA-plus program exacerbates social insecurities in that it encourages greater private-sector participation in the deepening integration and harmonization of economic and security sectors, but allows only limited mobility rights, either through expanded temporary work programs or in preregistered security programs for professionals. The entrepreneurial rationality of neoliberalism, and its extension into social and political spheres, may generate a more secure field for trade and privatization, but creates more insecurities and anxieties for the population. Although Wendy Larner’s caveat against universalizing and totalizing neoliberalisms must be heeded, some generalizations around private property and free trade orthodoxies 205 can be made if only because of the ways that they have been imposed internationally by the post-World War II infrastructure. Richard Peet has identified the ways that, since the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s, the institutions of the Washington Consensus have become much more interventionist with respect to industrializing economies. The ‘unholy trinity’ of IMF, World Bank, and WTO has institutionalized ‘poverty’ and ‘underdevelopment’ with its tonic of ‘stabilization’ and ‘structural adjustment’ programs that have imposed currency devaluation, privatization, de-regulation, and free trade. For much of the Third World this has entailed a hollowing out of the nation-state as credit and investment are made conditional on privatization, de-regulation, tax reform, trade liberalization, and fiscal discipline. In Africa, James Ferguson describes, the rollback of the state has exacerbated political crisis and has led to more unrest, insecurity, and violence. Opposition to neoliberalism and globalization is gaining ground. The post-Washington Consensus, spearheaded by former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz, has sought to ‘bring the state back in’ through the backdoor of good governance, transparency, and accountability. Socialist governments in Latin America have opposed the Western imperialism of the Washington consensus and US foreign policy, although governments such as President Lula’s in Brazil have found it difficult to implement anti-neoliberal policies. The expansion of free trade has prompted extensive protests by civil society. The Zapatista uprising of 1994, in the wake of NAFTA, has been followed by the Battle in Seattle in 1999, in opposition to WTO negotiations, and at the Quebec City Summit in 2001, where discussions around the Free Trade Area of the Americas were taking place. In each of these instances, the protests have been met with intensive securitization and violent suppression, a reminder of the ongoing twinning of economic security with human insecurity. The opposition has had some success, even if incremental. Protests against this encyclopedia’s publisher Elsevier, for example, prompted the company’s disinvestment from arms fairs. Elsevier had argued that the defense industry is ‘‘necessary to the preservation of freedom and national security’’ and that ‘‘its exhibitions assisted in ensuring there is a licensed, regulated and open market.’’ Academics, however, raised concerns about this deepening interpenetration of the university with securitization and militarization, and the compromise of academic and ethical integrity. The protests provided an opportunity to debate the deepening integration of universities into the military–industrial complex, an ongoing issue that needs to be addressed as liberal economies expand, security and military industries privatize, personal insecurities increase, and liberal expectations of the public sphere – of freedom of speech and political participation – are denied. Author's personal copy 206 Liberalism Conclusions Geography has and continues to be complicit with liberalism in many ways: as an academic discipline, and with respect to teaching and learning. The discipline is entrenched in a history of colonialism, and has provided the science, techniques, and experts required to make empire possible and the dissemination of liberal values. Education is saturated with a principle of individual ameliorism. Universities have internalized neoliberal entrepreneurialism, embracing the categorization of students as consumers and teachers as learning providers. As an economy, the university is embedded in the military–industrial complex, from its research programs through to its pension plan schemes. The academic enterprise itself embodies liberal ideals, with individual scholarship and invention valorized alongside reason, universalism, and egalitarianism (albeit often in terms of a meritocracy). Academics, however, have come to question this complicity, and have challenged the presumptions invested in the liberal self, liberal rule, and liberal economics. Geographers have engaged in many of these debates, with a particular emphasis on how situated knowledge and localized research reveal the contradictions and complexities at the heart of the liberal project. This situated research helps to undermine the universalizing narratives of liberal hegemony, of the fault lines that have emerged in the wake of Fukayama’s totalizing claims to liberal ascendancy, Samuel P. Huntington’s narrative of a ‘clash of civilizations’, or Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld. With the war on terror launched after September 11, 2001, the political imperatives of undermining these reconfigured ‘Orientialist’ discourses are all the more pressing. Continued attention to the challenges to equality, universality, politics, citizenship, economies, etc. as globalization and neoliberalism reterritorialize the domestic and international landscape, will illuminate the ongoing paradoxes of a shape-shifting liberalism that constantly reconfigures itself in light of what has come before, and imagines itself anew. See also: Gender, Historical Geographies of; Governmentality; Marxism/Marxist Geography I; Marxism/ Marxist Geography II; Neoliberalism; Patriarchy; Queer Theory/Queer Geographies; Sexuality. Further Reading Abu-Laban, Y. (2002). Liberalism, multiculturalism, and the problem of essentialism. Citizenship Studies 6(4), 459--481. Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (eds.) (1996). Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Baumeister, A. T. (2000). Liberalism and the ‘Politics of Difference’. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brown, B. (2006). Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cruikshank, B. (1999). The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Dean, D. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In Burchell, G., Gordon, C. & Miller, P. (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp 87--104. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hall, S. (1986). Variants of liberalism. In Donald, J. & Hall, S. (eds.) Politics and Ideology, pp 34--69. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hindess, H. (2004). Liberalism – what’s in a name? In Larner, W. & Walters, W. (eds.) Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, pp 23--39. London: Routledge. Locke, J. (2006). John Locke: An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–1683. Oxford: Clarendon Press, first published in 1689. Mehta, U. S. (1999). Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Mill, J. S. (2006). On Liberty; and The Subjection of Women. New York: Penguin, first published in 1859. Ramsay, M. (1997). What’s Wrong with Liberalism? A Radical Critique of Liberal Political Philosophy. London: Leicester University Press. Richardson, R. L. (2001). Contending Liberalisms in World Politics: Ideology and Power. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers. Smith, S. (2005). The Endgame of Globalization. New York: Routledge. Relevant Websites http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook18.html Internet Modern History Sourcebook. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/339173/ liberalism#tab=active~checked%2Citems~checked&title= liberalism%20–%20Britannica%20Online%20Encyclopedia Liberalism in the Online Brittanica Encyclopedia. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/ ‘Liberalism’ in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.