Introduction: reconstructing liberalism.

• Author: Ward, Cynthia V.

However bruised by the continuous attacks of its radical critics, "liberal legalism" has so far survived the critical onslaught. But like all battles between powerful opponents the fight has produced casualties on both sides. Liberal theorists have responded to radical attacks by re-examining certain facile assumptions about the priority of individual autonomy, the nature of rationality, and the possibility of state neutrality, and replacing them with a rich and provocative literature that affirmatively defends liberal values and celebrates liberal legal institutions as the best--perhaps the only--way of respecting and encouraging human "difference" while also maximizing freedom and equality

On the other side, the work of radical critics of liberalism has begun to reflect the idea that liberal values--appropriately modified--are worth examining in a reconstructive light. Without losing sight of the injustices that have been inflicted on vulnerable groups under the liberal American Constitution, at least some radical theorists seem willing to concede that something precious, perhaps even irreplaceable, would be lost were liberal rights and institutions, with their vision of respect for individual dignity and their desire to maximize individual freedom, to be rejected wholesale along with the scourges of racism and sexism that have always shadowed them.

It is tempting to oversimplify. One should take seriously the declared motivations and concerns of one's opponents, and be careful not to discover casually that they have been on one's side all along, although somehow without realizing it. Let me therefore emphasize that I think there are important and irreconcilable differences, at many levels, between liberal visions of the person, of politics, and of the law, and the visions articulated by liberalism's communitarian, critical race, feminist, and postmodern critics. What I find most fascinating in recent legal theory, though, is the increasingly apparent intuition that amid such basic differences there is also a growing area of common ground. Ironically, it may be that the reconstruction of liberal legalism, in some recognizable form, will become the single most dramatic result of radical legal theory.

Of course the whole project of reconstructing liberalism raises as many questions as it does answers. Suppose, for example, that under a redeemed liberalism, individual autonomy--albeit in reconstructed form--becomes the shared human faculty...