The Liberal Democrats’ decision to go into government with the Conservatives has brought their principles and policies under scrutiny, but liberalism is still very much a keystone in the foundations of progressive political thought.

At present, there are arguably few better Liberal standard bearers than Harvard Professor and Demos 2010 Annual Lecturer, Amartya Sen. Indeed, the 1998 Nobel Laureate may well be something of a modern John Stuart Mill. Speaking this month at the RSA, Professor Sen laid out the central theme underlying his idea of justice: that the true task of a theory of justice is not to imagine perfectly just institutions, but to recognise and remove real incidences of injustice in people’s lives.

Whereas the more mainstream, Hobbesian understandings of justice, which have come to dominate contemporary political theory, focus on institutions, Sen begins with a deep concern about the “different ways in which people’s lives may go”. He refrains from trying to design perfectly just institutions, precisely because people have different perceptions of justice.

This recognition is distinctly liberal – in the Millian sense. Mill understood well that “different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all plants can in the same physical, atmosphere”. A person’s principles can only be considered best because they are best for them and them alone. It is the ability to put such principles into practice that constitutes the very basis of freedom itself. “The only freedom”, Mill wrote in On Liberty, “which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way”.

That’s not to say that institutions don’t matter; they do. Sen certainly thinks so. More that, as Richard Reeves and Phil Collins point out in The Liberal Republic, “institutions exist to serve individuals not the other way around”. Take Sen’s capability approach, which frames freedom in terms of a person’s capability to lead the life they value. Individuals are left to decide how to use their capabilities, but it is up to the state and society to ensure they have capabilities to use. In fact, Sen’s capabilities approach is a central tenet of the Deputy Prime Minster’s own liberal vision, which he outlined just last week in a speech to Demos.

A liberal state strives to empower individuals with the independence and capabilities they need to control their own lives. Once this is achieved, people are rightly left free to pen their own story. Such narratives will be far from perfect – many will be messy, sprawling and riddled with inconsistencies. But all this is central to the plot of a good society – characterised, as Mill says, “by different experiments of living”. Diversity is fundamental to such a society – one in which, as Clegg claims, nonconformity, aspiration and creativity can flourish.

Mill and Sen do, of course, have differences: Sen’s capability approach marks a radical departure from Mill’s doctrine of utilitarianism. But, ultimately, even Mill recognises there can be no happiness without freedom. In this way, Sen’s vision is akin to Mill’s, albeit new and updated. A century and a half on from On Liberty, the lifeblood of liberalism still flows rich and deep through the heart of progressive politics.    

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