Stephen F. Williams on Liberalism: The Need to See a Share of Truth on the Opposite Side, and a Share of Error on One’s Own
When Adam White invited me to discuss Judge Stephen F. Williams’s views on liberalism and reform, I confess to feeling a certain trepidation. Judge Williams was a capacious thinker, and liberalism is a particularly elusive concept. I cannot capture the breadth and depth of Judge Williams’s views on that subject, especially in a short paper. And Judge Williams expressed his views primarily through two books on prerevolutionary Russia. Until the last years of his life, the Judge preferred to hire a clerk who spoke Russian to assist with his scholarship. I was not that clerk, and I cannot provide the historical or cultural context his scholarship deserves.
But my worries abated somewhat, if not entirely, when I picked up the Judge’s books. Some authors write in such a way that the reader hears the words on the page in the author’s voice. Judge Williams had that gift. As I listened to Judge Williams inside my head, I found myself remembering him and my clerkship.
One of the peculiar and most enjoyable tasks of a Williams clerk was to send the Judge op-eds, academic articles, or news items that might interest—often horrify—him. Invariably, attachments to a morning email turned into the topic of lunchtime conversations. Occasionally, the Judge would propose that the clerks read a book or an article to discuss. Once it was a draft manuscript from an academic acquittance. Another time it was the upcoming assignment for his book club. (On that occasion, Judge Williams had proposed the book to the club and wanted to be prepared to lead the discussion.) Some judges like their clerks to be “yes men.” Not Stephen Williams. He loved questioning an idea—even his own scholarship and especially his judicial opinions. Though the Judge certainly had intellectual predispositions, there were no litmus tests or sacred texts in the Williams chambers. At lunch, everything was up for grabs.
When Judge Williams and I spoke, the conversation had a tendency to turn to contemporary events of a kind that might fall under the rubric of “liberalism and reform.” The year I clerked for Judge Williams saw President Donald Trump’s first impeachment and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong—to name just two topics that fit that label and which occupied our mutual interest. In the spirit of the Williams clerkship and its lunchtime discussions, I want to take Adam’s invitation as an opportunity to imagine what I might say to Judge Williams about his books and liberal democracy, were we to have lunch again.
Judge Williams wrote two books. Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime focuses on an effort to reform peasant property rights in prerevolutionary Russia and inculcate liberal values among the peasantry. Above all, Liberal Reform is a richly detailed economic history. But Judge Williams uses prerevolutionary land reform to pose a broader question: Can rulers impose liberalism from above, by engaging in macro level reforms? Or must liberalism organically accrete from the ground up? The Judge ultimately concludes that top-down reform is difficult and more likely to succeed when it poses no immediate threat to those in power. This is a pessimistic if honest assessment about the limits of reform and the universal appeal of liberalism from a man who one suspects wished to provide a more hopeful answer.
