Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Stephen Macedo, Princeton University

In Covid’s Wake: How We Failed Liberalism

Abstract 

The greatest global crisis since World War II, the Covid-19 pandemic put most of the world’s societies on a war footing. Fundamental liberties were curtailed, including freedom of movement and worship. Economies were locked down and schools were closed. Granting that in the Spring of 2020 policy had to be made amidst great fear and uncertainty, we still need to ask what, in hindsight, does the response to this crisis tell us about the health of liberal democratic institutions?     

This paper pays special attention to liberal democracy’s “truth-seeking” departments, staffed by educated elites: science and science journals, the academy, and the media more broadly, as well as the major medical associations and public health officials.  While the fundamental principles of liberalism, science, and democracy require toleration of dissent and openness to criticism, in the case of Covid, dissenters were too often dismissed, scorned, and censored. And that was in spite of the fact that pre-Covid pandemic planning documents warned that lockdown policies and the whole suite of social distancing measures were of doubtful effectiveness but could prove very costly, especially for children and the less well-off. 

Covid policy provides a dispiriting window onto our degraded epistemic environment, in which political partisanship, media failure, and intolerance of dissent undermined the core commitments of liberalism, science, and democracy.  While not denying the threats to liberal democracy coming from the right, I argue that educated elites need to take a hard look at their own shortcomings which have contributed to rising distrust in science, journalism, and universities.  In the case of Covid: liberalism did not fail, we failed liberalism. 

About Stephen Macedo:

Stephen Macedo is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.  He is the author of, among other things, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford, 1990), and the forthcoming, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025). 

About the workshop:

A workshop for presenting and discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The central aim is to provide an opportunity for students to engage with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues of potential interest to philosophers and political theorists.

The theme for Spring 2025 is “Critics of Liberalism,” and we will host scholars working in Philosophy, Law, History, and Political Science. Our underlying concern will be the normative critiques of substantive liberal ideas from both the left and right, as well as staunch defenders of liberalism.

This semester the workshop is co-taught by Joshua Cohen and Desmond Jagmohan.