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Sari Hanafi, "Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Mortaza Hajizadeh. Today we're going to talk about a very interesting book on liberalism. Again, the book we're going to discuss is called Against Symbolic A Plea for Dialogical Sociology. The book was published in September 2025 by Liverpool University Press. And with me to discuss the book is the author, Dr. Sari Hanafi. Dr. Sari Hanafi is a professor of sociology and director of the center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He served as president of the International sociological Association from 2018 to 2023 and Vice President of the Arab Council for social sciences from 2015-16. Sari, welcome to New Books Network.
- [00:58]
A
Thank you, Murtaza, for hosting me and all my solidarity for Iranian and Lebanese people under the new imperial world order. Unfortunately.
- [01:09]
B
Absolutely right. Yeah, absolutely right. I wish we were able to talk under better circumstances, but unfortunately that's a reality on the ground. Yeah. Thank you very much. It's a fascinating book, Symbolic Liberalism. I was immediately drawn to the title of the book. But before we discuss the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and also your field of expertise and tell us how the idea of this book came about?
- [01:35]
A
I'm professor of sociology and the director of the center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies and chair of the Islamic Studies Program at the American University of Beirut. So my research interest is about sociology of religion, connection of moral philosophy to social science, sociology of forced migration, the politics of scientific research, something like that. So this book didn't emerge from a sudden intellectual epiphany in a coffee. Although I wish I could claim that I grew. Sorry, it grew slowly, almost stubbornly, out of 10 years of research and reflection during my involvement with the International Sociological association, first as a vice president and then as a president. During that time, I made three rather ambitious goals. The first was for a global sociology with the positionality of the author of this sociology. So always with the qualification. And of course, sociologists always add qualifications. So the second call was to connect sociology with the moral philosophy, because sociologists cannot forever pretend they have no moral vocabulary. And the third is at your country in Melbourne. It was a World Sociology Congress, where I end my mandate in 2023, where I call dialogical sociology. So at the same time, I was observing something unsettled. A deepening crisis of liberal democracy, an increasingly frozen public sphere, polarization among elites and ordinary citizens drifting to the right, sometimes out of frustration, sometimes out of fatigue. As a Sociologist. When something puzzling happens, I cannot simply complain about it. I feel professionally obligated to turn it into a research question. So this book is my attempt to understand what on earth is going on.
- [04:07]
B
That's fascinating. And as I mentioned at the beginning, I was immediately drawn to two aspects in the title of your book, Symbolic Liberalism and Dialogical Sociology. I'm not going to ask you to define liberalism. I guess if you ask 100 scholars, they will give you 100 different definitions. But I guess we all have a shared understanding of what liberalism is. But can you tell us what you mean by symbolic liberalism and also, more importantly, dialogical sociology?
- [04:38]
A
Thank you for your questions. Symbolic liberalism is a fascinating contradiction. It describes individuals who sincerely espouse classical liberal principles. Freedom of expression, tolerance, pluralism, yet sometimes act in politically illiberal ways when confronted with disagreement. These individuals are often knowledge economy producers, sociologists, academics, media professionals, legal expert, politicians. So in an era of depolarization, social scientists or some of them unintentionally reproduce the very exclusions they critique, taking entrenched positions while dismissing alternative perspectives, occasionally with impressive moral certainty. The result? A climate in which neoliberalism, emotional capitalism, economic precarity, environmental destruction, populism and authoritarianism all flourished, while reasonable debate become something of an endangered species. So my book argued that symbolic liberalism inflate the the universality of rights while narrowing the space for dialogue. So instead of doubling down on ideological rigidity, I call for dialogical turn, a renewed public sphere where the conception of justice and the diverse conceptions of the good can genuinely converse rather than merely shout biased on other. But let me define what we mean by liberalism. As you said, Mortaza has a different different meaning. So I distinguish between classical liberalism, which upholds the importance of civil rights, individual rights such as freedom of expression, property rights, freedom of religion, etc. While contemporary political liberalism is is heavily influenced by the thinking of the American philosopher Jean Rawls. Even if Rawlsian political liberalism is a normative theory for governance and society, I defined it as a thin theory, a theory with some core values, for instance, justice as a furnace, with its two egalitarian indifferences, principles and differentiation between the conception of justice and the conception or the pluralistic conception of the good. Let me clarify what is the conception of the good? It's about preferences individual have regarding dress, food, leisure, personal characters, family, broader ideals of life, etc. So beyond this thin theory, I provided a critical assessment of when it went wrong as a thick theory adopted, theorized and implemented. So the problem Begins when the thin theory become thick, when become so individualistic or disregard those who are in colonial spaces as now we witness, or when the particular moral worldview is smuggled into the category of justice itself and presented as a universally binding. That is where symbolic liberalism enters the stage.
- [08:27]
B
I think it was a very good definition. And you also. Well, naturally, when we talk about liberalism, we can't disregard John Rawls, whom we just referred to. But your book, you know, takes John Roll's classic idea of justice and good framework. But you also add other concepts. Your book adds the neighbor and also shared culture common good to that idea of classic justice. Can you tell us how these additional concepts change what liberal societies must do politically and morally? Something that Rawls categories alone cannot really capture. So what are those new concepts you add about neighbor and shared culture?
- [09:15]
A
Thank you for this interesting question. Gen Rawls privatizes the good I try to rebalance political liberalism by reintegrating community. So in dialogue with the liberal communitarians, I highlight the importance of the concept of the common good. What George Orwell once called command decency or what Olivier Roy, the French political scientist, describes as a shared culture. So modern identity politics often fragments identity into ever smaller subcultures. Identity ones revolve around the class, nation or religion, large complex collectivities. Today it can revolve around neural external markers. Think about race, sexual orientation or even lifestyle choices like dietary habits, often against the internal other. So meanwhile, social class analysis quietly exits the room. This is a problem. So against this excessive identity politics, I remind people by highlighting the concept of neighbor. The importance of this neighbor is not necessarily part of one's community, but serve as a moral test. It could be a fellow citizen, a refugee, or even someone in the neighboring countries whose faith is intertwined with us. The neighbor remind us that moral regard should not stop at identity boundaries.
- [11:13]
B
Another part of this idea of symbolic liberalism that you discuss in the book, your argument is that this symbolic liberalism rhetorically champions rights and things like that and produces something you call deculturation, bureaucratic overreach and rights inflation, things of this sort. What do you think is the most maybe damaging consequence, real or tangible, concrete consequence of this kind of symbolic liberalism today, especially across global north and South.
- [11:51]
A
Thank you. Symbolic liberalism deflates social justice while inflating a hegemonic conception of the good under the banner of universal rights. This is really very important claim in my book. This creates tension between morality, how people and negotiate different goods and codified norms. The privileged site for symbolic liberals to impose their conception of the good and often institutionalize it as justice. Take the French ban of the Muslim veil in schools and public offices. The veil, like dress, generally belongs to the realm of the good, yet it is reframed as a matter of justice. Conversely, in Iran, compulsory veiling similarly imposes a similar conception of the good. In both cases, the state moves from public mediating morality to enforcing it. Of course, in the global north, human rights discourse can even be or can become weaponized against the dominated such as migrants under the with widespread of Islamophobia we know all what is going on in Europe, but also weaponizing antisemitism against the anti colonial pro Palestinian movement. We saw this during the genocide on Gaza. Thus human rights become the language of the powerful against the weak New Year
- [13:38]
C
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- [14:05]
B
Experian and I think there are, as you mentioned we can clear at the beginning of the interview, we can clearly see the example of that, you know what's happening in the Middle east right now. What about, let's see, one of the claims in the book that is the famous liberal idea of public reason. So one of your strongest claims in the book is that public reason must expand to include non authoritarian religious and moral language and at the same time it must be able to avoid relativism to avoid dogmatism, which is a difficult thing of course to do in reality. So I'm keen to know from a practical perspective what sorts of institutional norms or what sorts of civic habits are needed to be able to widen this idea of public reason to include these ideas you mentioned without really collapsing into illiberal tendencies or moral chaos.
- [15:09]
A
Very good question. Generals ask how deeply divided society can remain stable and just this is his main question. His answer was public reason. In a sense, translating moral claims into political language accessible to all and rooted in constitutional principles, no matter how very comprehensive doctrines of individuals. For example, citizens with diverse moral and religious beliefs may all support taxation to assist those in need, even if their justifications differ. One may appeal to solidarity or fraternity, a Republican rationale, another to religious duty, a third to utilitarian concern about social stability or crime prevention. So the issue is not to remove the moral tenet of an argument, but to translate that tenant into language accessible to all citizens. This act of translation is the core function of public reason. But excluding religious arguments altogether risks impoverishing democratic deliberation, particularly giving the enduring role of religion in shaping moral convictions at both individual and collective levels. In many regions in the world, we used to say in the Africa, in the Middle east, but now even in United States, in America, in Latin America. So more justification of political and social positions can no longer be fully disentangled from religious or non religious beliefs, nor from the sociological, psychological and pragmatic considerations that inform public judgment. So Jurgen Habermas similarly recognizes the significance of religion in the public sphere, but confines it or confines religious arguments to informal deliberation within civil society, excluding them from formal political institutions. But this requirement raises a crucial question. Is it genuinely possible to disentangle religious justifications from secular 1? Religious actors continuously reinterpret their theological commitments in response to the new political context in all religion, including Islam. By the way, the innovation, the ijtihad, what we call similarly my hero, the Irish philosopher Melvcock argues that the primary problem with religious argument is in the public sphere. Sorry, so that the primary problem is not that they appeal to a non shared framework, but that they often take authoritarian and dogmatic forms. So Coke's distinction is helpful here. Authoritarian reasoning appeals to unquestionable authority, while non authoritarian reasoning invites contestation. So religious arguments thus can enter public life if they are presented in fallible, historically situated, open ways. Authoritarian secularism exists too. When republican values, the famous concept in France and in Europe, become untouchable dogma, secularism starts behaving like a religion. So to clarify this distinction, consider the following example. If a Sikh man argues publicly or in court that wearing the turban in his public office is integral of his religious identity, he is engaging in non authoritarian reasoning and he seeks recognition of his freedom without imposing obligations on others. Take another argument. Someone claim Islam prohibits alcohol consumption. Anyone who contests that will be outside the Muslim community and the state should ban alcohol for all citizens. Such a statement constitutes authoritarian reasoning as it seek to excommunicate those who disagree with him and impose a comprehensive doctrine on society at large. However, a religious leader has a right to say this within the context of preaching, for instance inside of the mosque. So again there is an also authoritarian secular argument. Take a concrete example of the French coach of the Saint Germain only football team who stated in commenting on a player posing for a few second drinking water and eating a date in order to break his fasting during Ramadan. He considered that against republican values. Here Republican values have been transformed into a totalizing doctrine that impose not only a conception of justice, but also a conception of the good. Hear the problem?
- [21:07]
B
I think that was a good example. Kind of helps to put everything into perspective. Let me ask you about this dialogical liberal project again. You mentioned that this dialogical liberal project requires re embedding, let's say reasoning, care, emotion, shared spaces and reciprocity. I'm keen to know what is the top according to you, what do you think is the most important or the top practical reform, whether it's political, economic or urban, that could help make this idea of theological liberalism a reality, lived reality, rather than being just an academic ideal or a scholarly ideal?
- [21:52]
A
Very good question. So the dialogue in the dialogical political liberal project is not merely a panel discussion between adversaries in order to mitigate differences and enhance commonality. Segregated cities, gated communities and marginalized peripheries. Slums produce segregated mines, mixed housing, common public schools, shared spaces. Those create everyday encounters. So it is really interesting that the first speech of the labor leader Kirk Starmer, when he became a UK Prime Minister in July 2024 was to talk about a crisis of housing and the necessity to improve social housing. Myself, I travel a lot to Algeria where I saw in different cities the importance of social housing. And maybe this is the best reminder of its socialist era. So how to address social inequality? We need what Eric Oil Wright, the famous Marxist sociologists, call real utopias. These utopias, such as the universal unconditional basic income. By the way, it is gaining increasing support not only among social scientists, but also among some politicians. We need more cooperatives such as Mondragon Cooperative in Spain, which employ over 81,000 people. Can you imagine? We need a serious commitment to address the ecological crisis through taxation of consumerism. For instance, the democracy voucher program in Seattle is very interesting. It offers a new way of encouraging residents to participate in local government politics by supporting campaigns and running for for office themselves. It has been operating since 2015 with a lot of success and bringing new blood and not coming from a business milieu. Other campaign reforms include campaign contribution limits for lobbyists and contractors. Now in the time of Jeuffrey Epstein affairs, I mean, we know how how influential money to bring certain people. Also in a global south. Think about an emerging excellent example of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre in Brazil, which now serve as a model for many, many municipalities. So I will come to the question of care. Look, Mortaza, power cannot always come from authority and hierarchy through domination and competition mechanism, as many symbolic liberal things, unfortunately, but through collaboration and overabundance of care, as it is theorized by the sociologist school of thought is called social love. Led by two friends, Silvia Cataldi and Gennaro Iorio, these two Italian sociologists show us cases where social love is expressed like praying for a cup of coffee for someone who cannot afford it. They show researchers that the world has plenty of instances where social relationships are not commodified. And to tell people that happiness and well being are not individual, but collective. Of course, paying for someone coffee may not appear in GDP statistics, but it might save our democracy.
- [26:17]
B
It is a nice idea, but I hope more and more people will be able to share it with more and more people and see more of such examples. Another important part of the book is. I mean, I do like to talk about this idea, the logical liberal project. And you also argue that this theological liberal project needs dialogical sociology. What do you mean by that?
- [26:43]
A
Look, sociology will be dialogical when it disentangle its commitment to civil society into two levels. By the way, it's Michael Barawi here, late Michael Barawi, my dear friend who wrote the preface of this book. His idea that sociology is defined by its commitment to civil society. But I push this and I differentiate two levels of this commitment. First level is mediation, and the other is a strong normativity. So about the level of mediation, sociology provides scientific research that is important for public reason, debates and for social movements, and maybe for revolutions. It entails the possibility of providing knowledge to civil society organizations and governments whose action we don't always agree with. So this sociology believes that despite the incommunity of some modes of reasoning and political, cultural and religious traditions, actors can engage with each other through a dialogue and reach sometimes overlapping consensus, A concept very dear to Jean Rolls. This is not only in line with with the theory of Rawls and Habermas, but also with Durkheim's vision of a sociology that promotes social cohesion. Now we come to the second level. Second level is a strong normativity where sociology not only engages with civil society, but also takes a position in favor of marginalized groups against hegemonic power and defend those values dear to sociology. So, frankly, I did this entanglement because I am worried when sociology analytically conflate the two levels, or offer no distinction between providing scientific knowledge and critical thinking from one side and position taking and policy formulation on the other side, or worse, neglects the first level and become incapable of engaging with all stratas of society, including conservatives, religious people and those with whom we we disagree. By doing this we reinforce our status as a bubble that doesn't speak beyond our own moral tribe. And this is really the bad consequences we live today in Liberalism, of course,
- [29:27]
B
secularism is an important aspect of it, and your treatment of secularism in this book makes a distinction between multicultural secularism and also secularism as a religion, that is the French idea of laicite. Can you tell us how states can enforce non discrimination while mediating, let's say, or while mediating, rather imposing contested goods like dress, ritual and also religious symbolism?
- [30:00]
A
Thank you for this question. The problem starts how symbolic liberals defined religion. It is done in a reformed Christian manner, reduced to private conscience at home and ritual practice within the church. So the public visibility of Islam, for instance, itself began to appear for them as a form of Protestantism. The same thing for the burkini, the same thing for the long dress, etc. So this directly excludes Islam as a foreign religion, but also exclude others like Sikh. Also they have turban or historically how they exclude Judaism with their kippah. So this is why, instead of taking France or Europe, some countries in Europe, as a pragmatic paradigmatical model of secularism, what I advocate through theological liberal project a softer and multicultural secularism, one that is less divisive and in fact necessary and even indispensable for every society. So I take it seriously, frankly, this new framework for the relationship between religion and the state introduce a certain permeability between domains that have long been dissociated. Religion and state, ethics and politics, religion and secular arguments in the public spheres, etc. So secularism is merely a mechanism, though one largely capable of effectively affirming the value of the theological liberal project within society. Okay, so it's a mechanism and not a value by itself. So in this meaning, secularism should not be defined as a hard separation between politics and religion, but more as a differentiation and distinction between both of them. That religion can enter politics through ethics, for instance, like Marxism enter politics through ethics as well. And of course the relative neutrality of the state vis a vis of all its citizens. This is really very important.
- [32:38]
C
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- [33:33]
B
Terms apply and you have an example of Swedish compulsory charge removal laws. This example. Your analysis of this shows how bureaucratic routines can unintentionally impose a thick moral good. What would a genuinely dialogical, let's say, child protection system look like? One that protects children, but while at the same time respects families autonomy and cultural diversity?
- [34:04]
A
Thank you for this question. In fact, in my last chapter of the book, I spare really a chapter to focus on how Sweden approached the tension between the rights of families, the right of individual children, and the right of the state to intervene in these fields. Many scholars have argued in the past that family authority is being eroded by both the liberal state and the force of neoliberal and emotional capitalism. To explore the consequences of this, I looked at the numerous cases of compulsory child removal from the biological family in Sweden. One should note that According to the 2020 Swedish official statistics, around 3,500 children and adolescents were taken from their families and rehomed in the care sector without their family consent, often to the foster family. Many of them are from migrant origin. We know that even there is no statistics. This number seems like a significant one for a country of 10 million inhabitants, and it was larger in the precedent years. And if we compare it to other European countries like France, Spain, Italy, the ratio is much, much larger in Sweden. So it's important to show the extent to which there is intolerance. In the current debates on the importance of family, I argued that the Swedish symbolic liberals in the social services, with conscious and unconscious silence or justification from media, academia or the political field, are imposing their hegemonic and the culturalized conception of the good over society, to the point that some lawyers went to the European Court to sue the Swedish social services and they win the cases so let me be clear that I have no nostalgia for traditional family. I'm also sensitive that some of this removal is absolutely necessary. But I don't believe that because we are in the neoliberal age, the family is a salient social structure for protecting individuals vis a vis the coercion of the state and the market and for providing material but also emotional support for their offspring. For me, it is really problematic the way in which the new liberal state use its authority and that of the school or social service over the family's authority instead of complementing it. So here the issue, for me,
- [37:20]
B
another idea is the idea of justice floor. You differentiate the justice floor, that is things like non discrimination safety from circular ceiling. Can you tell us what these concepts mean and what does a dialogical pluralist education system look like when navigating highly charged debates around gender identity, but without really collapsing into either censorship or indoctrination?
- [37:47]
A
Yeah, this is really a very important issue. So let me first clarify where the general problem is. Let me take the case of a French football player, Zakaria Abu Hlal, who refused to wear shirts with rainbow colored numbers, declared in June 2024 all his respect to sexual orientation groups, but not feeling participating in this campaign. This is in a tweet he did. So the heavy punitive measures against him from his club triggers on me that we should distinguish between embracing gender and sexual diversity in a sense of recognizing, accepting and refraining from discrimination versus celebrating it, which involves actively campaigning for it and considering it beneficial to society. So I distinguish between these two levels, embracing versus celebrating. This distinction is not anecdotal. It is really strategic approach to advance the right and societal recognition of vulnerable sexual and gender groups. I observe how individuals in the west shift toward the right when they feel that symbolic liberals impose gender fluidity and a sex spectrum as a fundamental principles for recognizing society. Framing them as a conception of justice. It means a non discrimination against LGBTQ individual. So here the the issue when gender fluidity become identity politics, if you like, it's not about gender fluidity per se. So think about how some Indian leftist, sorry, think about how some Italian leftist voted for Giorgia Meloni because of her conception of what is a good Christian family. And against gender fluidity. By the way, she is not really against lgbtq. I mean, I observe many of her speeches. Now I come to your question on the controversial introduction of the sexual and gender identity school curriculum in many Western countries. So let me, let me note that, that before Trump began his second term, my research had already revealed significant tensions between schools and parents as evidenced by various surveys conducted by the respectable Pew Research center in the United States. But many social scientists don't want to see the problem or simply deploy their strong normativity by advocating a sort of authoritarian imposition of how to advance sexual minority rights. My research reveals that the tension is not necessarily against the inclusion of this curriculum, but about what kind of content and to which age child age. An example of this comes from a conversation I had with a Norwegian parent with a low level of religious she was not religious. She contested the new curriculum of her eight years old child. Her objection was not to the presentation of diverse family structures, but rather to how they were introduced. For her, the issue wasn't with the idea that the family can consist of either a male, female couple or same sex parents. Rather the problem she suggests that children should be taught I quote here from our conversation. Statistically a family is most often composed of heterosexual couples, but it can also made up of same sex couples. So this is how she formulated she wanted the school to have this kind of presentation. So this subtle distinction is important and should not be dismissed as anti gender ideology. Her view reflects belief in her liberal rise to educate her children according to her own conception of the good, while recognizing that the school where her child is enrolled has the right to teach a plurality of family form as a part of conception of justice. But unfortunately, there is no debate about this, neither between parents and schools, nor in academia, nor within the educational system. So it is interesting to know that current British Member of Parliament George Galloway defended his support for same sex marriage during his 2016 campaign to become Mayor of London. While he recently opposed the inclusion of sexuality and gender identity curriculum in British schools. So we see that in fact. We cannot smash him as a homophobe by opposing this. So the theological liberal project seeks to contextualize sexuality and gender identity within cultural frameworks while adhering to a minimum standards of human rights established by by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or CEDAW or other covenants. This project operates through the process of disentangling gender discourse by distinguishing between justification based on conceptions of justice and those rooted in the plurality of conceptions of the good. It's always disentanglement and so the project advocates for keeping the debate open on how to reconciliate the perspective of those who wish to express their sexuality in public sphere and those who prefer to confine it to the private sphere. I'm thinking about many countries in the global south if you like, including Arab and Muslim countries. While I acknowledge and praise the critical role feminists and and LGBTQ movement have played in advancing the right of women and sexual minority. Really this is a great work. I also call for a greater tolerance of diverse feminist perspective. Mortal. You know, in I don't know if you know the the Australian philosopher Holy Lawford Smith. She's in Melbourne University.
- [45:33]
B
I haven't heard of him.
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A
She got a terrible campaign because of her gender critical feminism. This is really a council culture used against not conservative voices but against inside of the own leftist group. She is herself a lesbian overtly and etc. So let me finish by this word. If democracy is to survive its current crisis, we don't need louder certainties. So the illogical project is not about certainties really. We need better conversations and perhaps a little more humility above all from sociologists who use not to be very humble, I guess.
- [46:30]
B
Yeah. Dr. Sara and Nafi, I'd like to thank you for your time to talk with us about your wonderful book on New Books Network, the book we just discussed.
- [46:42]
A
My pleasure.
- [46:44]
B
Against Symbolic Liberalism, published by Liverpool University Press. And we certainly hope to be able to speak to you about your future.
- [46:50]
A
And by the way, it will be out in 11 languages. It's already in. In Spanish, in Arabic, in Persian, in Turkish, and very soon in Korean. The Chinese, Russian and Italian and the French. You see, French. Still resist translating it. But I succeed finally. Okay.
- [47:17]
B
Wow, that's amazing. That's a lot of work. A lot of languages. I mean, so that just goes to show how well received the book is. Thank you very much. Hope to be able to speak to you soon again about your future work.
- [47:32]
A
Thank you so much, Murtadhaq. It was my pleasure.