Essential questions are “untimely” by their very nature. Plato presented Socrates as a “gadfly,” not because he had an annoying personality or a perverse tendency to pester people who just wanted to get on with their business, but because he insisted always and everywhere on raising the question that made him famous, “What is x?” a question that interrupts business by its very nature.1 The practical order of business is concerned with means and ends, and works within the horizon of value: is this or that sufficiently good or bad to warrant some decision, some action, in its regard? The “what is” question breaks through the “value-horizon”; it requires one to suspend the calls to make a decision, not just until one can get clarification about the matter to be decided, thus forcing the issue back within the practical horizon, but in a certain sense indefinitely. Even if this question turns out, as it inevitably does, to be necessary for the proper judgment of value, it cannot but prove to be a constant “stumbling block” for the practical order.
The question “What is liberalism?” is an essential question, and therefore an untimely one. In the present moment, the question of the “value” of liberalism—that is, modern political philoso- phy founded on “natural rights” and some version of the “social contract” theory—has emerged with an urgency it may never have had before. While preceding generations have simply taken liberal- ism for granted as the given context within which we make practical judgments about many other things, the current generation seems willing to raise astonishingly bold questions regarding liber- alism itself.4 Is it the only possible way to think about politics? Is it the “ best regime”? Can we not entertain the notion that there were good features in some of the older political forms that liberalism replaced? In Catholic circles above all, there is a rising enthusiasm for “integralism,” the cooperation between throne and altar, that would not have been conceivable even five years ago. The recent debate between Sohrab Ahmari and David French over whether we ought to refuse the terms of play liberalism sets or work with liberalism to guide it from within, was a sign of this bold, new time. But however urgent these questions may be, they are not first order questions, and so cannot be the questions with which we ought to begin. The new openness to a radical questioning of liberalism needs to be led beyond itself to the most radical question, the question that essentially precedes all the others, the question that is necessary now precisely because it is untimely, unconcerned with any particular moment or impending judgment: What is liberalism?...
