Hiding in plain sight, hegemonic liberalism seeks to suppress non-liberal voices and endangers modern academia, warns Tamas Dezso Ziegler

Academic freedom is in the news again. While attacks from the authoritarian right and marketisation are widely held to have a negative effect on academic freedom, what is rarely discussed is the role of hegemonic liberalism in creating a conformist academia, even though we have important research on self-silencing in Western higher education. Liberalism is generally portrayed by the mainstream as a charitable, permissive intellectual stream favouring expanded freedoms and diversity, and those going against the liberal mainstream are labelled as harmful illiberals and threats to democracy. However, the overall picture is more complex.

If we can talk about the moderate and authoritarian left and the moderate and authoritarian right, then we can also talk about moderate and authoritarian liberalism. If an authoritarian political ideology wants to dominate, by creating conformist, hegemonic systems and excluding those who disagree, then its authoritarian dynamics are similar to other authoritarian streams. Liberalism may once have been about human rights, checks and balances, and the rule of law – now, authoritarian liberalism demands adherence from everybody under its rule.

Goodbye pluralism, hello neoliberalism

To a certain degree, the malaise of contemporary liberalism is clear to see. Amid the cheering for liberal democracy, our former ideal of pluralist democracy has been forgotten. In academia, abandoning intellectual pluralism has resulted in the creation of echo chambers. If authoritarian liberals want to maintain their hegemony, they will not hire scholars who question and challenge their positions, as intellectual diversity becomes dangerous. It is telling that we need a Journal of Controversial Ideas to have a reasoned discussion about contentious issues.

In his book, Why liberalism failed, Patrick J Deneen criticised liberalism as being selfish and individualistic. We have seen how the individualistic, self-aggrandising scholar became the ideal: less cooperation in scholarly communities and greater focus on personal achievements, thereby diminishing the community element of academia. Besides Deneen, Michael Wilkinson explains in his book, Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe, how modern-day authoritarian liberalism implemented neoliberal economics, which undermined democratic politics. Academia changed accordingly: high tuition fees excluded many from studying and from social emancipation. This market fundamentalism interprets universities as businesses: a view that results in the rights of academics being curtailed, just like workers in companies, and students being treated as customers.

Meaningless for most

As modern liberalism merged with critical studies, liberalism became meaningless for the masses, and the same happened in academia. As Deneen puts it, “while students’ groups grounded in racial or sexual identity demand justice so that they can fully join modern liberal society, cohesive ethnic groups resistant to liberal expressive individualism like Kurds or Hmong, persecuted religious minorities such as Copts, nonurban nonelites such as leaders in the 4-H, and the rural poor can expect little attention from today’s campus liberals” (Deneen, p.122). An academic system that puts the focus solely on certain minorities and on a cultural war around identity politics becomes irrelevant for most people. If cold-war liberalism abandoned the idea of rationality, as Samuel Moyn explains it, then modern-day authoritarian liberalism has started to function like a sect: it wants belief, admiration, and surrender from the scholars, not rational analysis. Wokism in authoritarian liberalism becomes part of a switch from rationality to religious-like belief systems and the fervour that engenders.

As he examines the legacy of cold-war liberalism in his book, Liberalism Against Itself, Moyn shows how the will of the people is viewed as a possible danger to democracy. In this sense, liberalism became more ochlophobic – hostile towards people and democracy. This encouraged the elitist, over-confident worldview of authoritarian liberals and the suppression of those who disagreed with their principles. Applying this to academia, we see how this approach distorted certain fields in social science. In Western academia, this gave rise to numerous studies on populism, illiberalism, the rule of law and fields related to mainstream liberal thinking (for example, LGBTQ issues, gender mainstreaming). However, other perspectives are more or less missing: non-liberal, non-European voices, conservative or leftist perspectives, or non-mainstream opinions (such as post-fascism, critiques of liberal democracy, non-mainstream feminist perspectives) barely get published. Thus, liberalism had a chilling effect on diverse viewpoints: conformism and self-censorship became entrenched in academia.

Authoritarian liberalism in Hungarian higher education

Like elsewhere in the Western world, authoritarian liberalism has created echo chambers in Hungarian universities. However, unlike in the US, thorough research about this phenomenon is missing in Hungary. This could be partly due to the opacity in academia, but also, as a reaction to the political party, Fidesz’s attack on academic institutions. Many Hungarians think it would be immoral to attack higher education institutions, when they are already under siege by the government. As a result, it’s hard to show that liberals used state resources to finance their own research groups and centres, with no consideration for the needs and purposes of the institutions they worked for. This lack of transparency and accountability extends to other parts of Hungarian academia. Contrary to other spheres of social life in Hungary, there isn’t extensive research on hiring practices in academia, where personal connections and like-mindedness have been prioritised over academic performance. This has distorted departments, as poor performers concur with their superiors to protect their fragile positions. Furthermore, as Hungarian liberalism had a very naïve stance towards the West, extensive self-colonisation and a deep disdain for their own country prevailed. This has resulted in a nearly critique-free acceptance of Western liberal values, including neoliberal market policies. Talking about open society and dangerous illiberalism thus became the standard in academia, alongside the imported identity wars. Viktor Orbán and Fidesz understood that this mentality was elitist and based on a supposed moral superiority. Fidesz’s authoritarian response to this phenomenon was to break these old structures, including academic communities, which did not help the case of pluralism, and created hegemonic competition between the authoritarian right and authoritarian liberals.

A neoliberal utopia

As Hungarian liberals fell in love with neoliberalism in the early 1990s, high tuition fees were accepted as normal, and a neoliberal utopia began to take shape in academia. It is important to note that it was not Fidesz, but the socialist-liberal government who unsuccessfully proposed tuition fees in the early 2000s. This neoliberal mentality is also why many liberal academics cheered the tyranny of metrics as they lived under an outdated spell of this modernisation theory. I have personally witnessed how many from the liberal establishment disparaged the leading universities of Hungary, which have a 400-600-year-old history. In this form of liberal thinking, tradition is not valued as much as a militantly liberal, metrics-based, elitist university model, which would serve development and Westernisation (modernisation) better.

It also became common practice to present the authoritarian liberal worldview as clear-cut science and encourage students to dismiss non-liberal opinions. As a result, authoritarian liberalism created intellectual bubbles at Hungarian universities (as in other countries), where students rarely encountered opinions differing from the liberal mainstream. The professor’s role was misinterpreted: professors became generals who led students to victory in a war against their intellectual enemies; wielding the power to destroy the careers of those who disagreed with them. Personality cults formed around certain scholars, and pressure was applied on others to align with authoritarian liberal principles. The interplay of this phenomenon with right-wing authoritarianism is remarkable, as authoritarian liberals started to use securitisation in the same way Fidesz did during the refugee crisis: if a community is the victim, it cannot be the oppressor, right? If liberals are attacked, they can be only the good guys, and blame must necessarily fall on non-liberals.

I do not claim that liberalism is inherently evil: it has great achievements. But to maintain a more inclusive academia, we must cut back the authoritarian elements of liberalism, and return to a more pluralistic ideal, where scholarship is not about ideological indoctrination, but curiosity, debate, and reasoning. And if we criticise right-wing authoritarianism for eliminating pluralism, then we should apply the same standard to authoritarian liberalism as well.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions.    _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 

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