For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the desire to subject people to an ethical ideal - regarded as universal and thus universally binding - is the mother of all crimes, "the crime which contains all crimes," for it amounts to the brutal imposition of one's own view onto others, and is thus the root cause of civil disorder. This is why, liberals claim, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first pre-condition is to get rid of any moral temptation: politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered "realistic," taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations.

The paradigm here, in many ways, is the way that the market operates: human nature is egotistic and there is no way to change it, so what is needed is a mechanism that would make private vices work for common good. Hence a fully self-conscious liberal should intentionally limit his altruistic readiness to sacrifice his own good for the good of others, aware that the most efficient way to act for the common good is to follow his private egotism. Here we have the logical obverse of the motto "private vices, public benefits" - namely, "private goodness, public disaster."

There is in liberalism, from its very beginning, a tension between individual freedom and the objective mechanisms which regulate the behaviour of a crowd, as was already observed by Benjamin Constant who clearly formulated this tension: everything is moral in individuals, but everything is physical in crowds; everybody is free as individual, but a cog in a machine in a crowd.

The two faces of liberalism

The inner tension of this project is discernible in two aspects of liberalism: market liberalism and political liberalism. As Jean-Claude Michea has brilliantly argued, these two aspects of liberalism are linked to two political meanings of "Right": the political Right insists on market economy, the politically-correct Left insists on the defence of human rights - often its sole remaining raison d'etre.

Although the tension between these two aspects of liberalism is irreducible, they are nonetheless inextricably linked, like the two sides of the same coin. And so, today, the meaning of "liberalism" swings between the two poles of economic liberalism (free market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, and so on) and political liberalism or libertarianism (with the accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, and so on).

The point is that, while one cannot decide through some close analysis which is the "true" liberalism, one also cannot resolve the deadlock by way of trying to propose a kind of "higher" synthesis of the two, much less through some clear distinction between the two senses of the term. The tension between the two meanings is inherent to the very content that "liberalism" endeavours to designate: this ambiguity, far from signalling the limits of our understanding, points to the innermost "truth" of the notion of liberalism itself.

Traditionally, each "face" of liberalism necessarily appears as the opposite of the other face: liberal advocates of multiculturalist tolerance, as a rule, fight against economic liberalism and try to protect the vulnerable from the ravages of unencumbered market forces, while free-market liberals, as a rule, advocate conservative family values.

We thus get a kind of double paradox: the traditionalist Right supports the market economy while ferociously fighting the culture and mores it engenders; while its counterpoint, the multiculturalist Left, fights against the market (though less and less these days, as Michea notes) while enthusiastically enforcing the ideology it engenders. (Today, it should be said, we seem to be entering a new era in which both aspects can be combined: figures like Bill Gates pose as market radicals and as multiculturalist humanitarians.)

The dark side of liberal moralism

Here we encounter the basic paradox of liberalism. An anti-ideological and anti-utopian stance is inscribed into the very heart of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives itself as a "politics of lesser evil," its ambition is to bring about the "least evil society possible," thus preventing greater evil, since it considers any attempt directly to impose a positive Good as the ultimate source of all evil.

Winston Churchill's quip about democracy being the worst of all political systems, with the exception of all the other, holds even better for liberalism. Such a view is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature: man is egotistic and envious animal, if one builds a political system which appeals to his goodness and altruism, the result will be the worst kind terror (recall that both Jacobins and Stalinists presupposed human virtue).

The liberal critique of the "tyranny of the Good" comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, gradually takes on the very features of the enemy it claims to oppose. In fact, the global liberal order clearly presents itself as the best of all possible worlds: its modest rejection of utopias ends with imposing its own market-liberal utopia which will become reality when we subject ourselves to the mechanisms of the market and universal human rights.

But as every observer of the deadlocks of political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral goodness - which should be relativised and historicized - ends up in a claustrophobic, oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any "organic" social substance grounding the standards of what George Orwell approvingly referred to as "common decency," the minimalist program of laws intended to do little more than prevent individuals from encroaching upon each other (annoying or "harassing" each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process of legalization and moralization, presented as "the fight against all forms of discrimination." If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, just the bare fact of subjects "harassing" other subjects, then who - in the absence of such mores - will decide what counts as "harassment"?

For instance, in France, there are associations of obese people which demand that all public campaigns against obesity and for healthy eating habits be stopped, since they hurt the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the "specism" of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal - for them, a particularly disgusting form of "fascism") and demand that "vegetophobia" should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. This could be extended to include those fighting for the right to incest-marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism, and so on.

The problem is here the obvious arbitrariness of the proliferation of these ever-new rules. Take child sexuality, for example: one can argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one can also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest against the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies, worry when someone condemns members of foreign cultures who live among us for doing exactly this, claiming that this is a case of meddling with other "ways of life."

It is thus for necessary structural reasons that this "fight against discrimination" is an endless process endlessly postponing its final point: a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Jean-Claude Michea puts it, "would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere."

The ideological coordinates of such a liberal multiculturalism are determined by the two features of our "postmodern" zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism (all values and rights are historically specific, any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent) and universalized "hermeneutics of suspicion" (all "high" ethical motifs are generated and sustained by "low" motifs of resentment and envy - say, the call to sacrifice one's life for a higher Cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or else a pathological expression of masochism).

Bonds of trust and debt

There is a problem with this liberal vision of which every good anthropologist, psychoanalyst, or even observant social critic like Francis Fukuyama, is aware: it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is usually referred to as "socialization," which it simultaneously undermines, thereby cutting off the branch on which it is sitting.

In the market - and, more generally, in the social exchange based on the market - individuals encounter each other as free rational subjects, but such subjects are the result of a complex previous process which concerns symbolic debt, authority and, above all, trust. In other words, the domain of exchanges is never purely symmetrical: it is an a priori condition for each of the participants to give something without return so that he can participate in the game of give-and-take.

Of course, the market is the domain of egotistical cheating and lying; however, as Jacques Lacan taught us, in order for a lie to function, it has to present itself and be taken as truth - which is to say, the dimension of Truth has to be already established. Kant missed the necessity of unwritten, disavowed, but necessary rules for every legal edifice - it is only such rules that provide the "substance" on which laws can properly function. The exemplary case of the efficiency of such unwritten rules is the famed example of "potlatch."

In market exchange, two complementary acts occur simultaneously (I pay and I get what I paid for), so that the act of exchange does not lead to a permanent social bond, but just a momentary exchange between atomized individuals who, immediately afterwards, return to their solitude. In potlatch, however, the time elapsed between my giving a gift and the other side returning it to me creates a social link which lasts (for a time, at least): we are all linked together with bonds of debt. From this standpoint, money can be defined as the means which enable us to have contacts with others without entering in proper relations with them.

This atomized society, in which we have contact with others without entering into proper relations with them, is the presupposition of liberalism.

Slavoj Zizek is one of the world's most influential public intellectuals. His most recent book is The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, and he is the presenter of the film The Pervert's Guide to Ideology.