Sari Hanafi, "Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of new Books Network. This is your host, Morteza 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 Liberalism. 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 Hanoffi. Dr. Sari Hanoffi is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for App and Middle East and 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 to 2016.

Sari, welcome to new Books Network. Thank you Morteza for hosting me.

And all my similarity for Iranian and Lebanese people under the new imperial world order.

I'm forcing absolutely right. Yeah, absolutely right. I wish we were able to talk on the better circumstances, but unfortunately that's a reality on the ground.

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 fellow expertise.

And tell us how the idea of this book came about.

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 and 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 caffeine, although I wish I could claim that.

I grew, sorry, it grew slowly, almost stubbornly, out of ten years of research and reflection during my involvement with the International Social Sciences Association, first as a vice president and then as a president.

During that time, I made the 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, sociologist always had qualifications.

So the second goal 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 for dialogical sociologists.

So at the same time, I was observing something unsettled, a deepening crisis of liberal democracy and 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 buzzing 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.

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 the logical 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?

Thank you for your questions.

But 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 experts, 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 are all flourished while reasonable debate become something of an endangered species.

So my book argued that symbolic liberalism inflate the universality of rights while knowing the space for dialogue.

So instead of doubling down on ideological rigidity, I call for the ideological turn and renewed public sphere where the conception of justice and the diverse conceptions of the good can genuinely converse rather than merely shout past 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 and visual rights such as freedom of expression, property rights, freedom of religion, etc.

While contemporary political liberalism is heavily influenced by the thinking of the American philosopher John Rose.

Even if words and political liberalism is a normative theory for governance and society, I define it as a theory.

A theory with some core values, for instance, justice as a furnace, with its two egalitarian and differences, brandsubleness, 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 and individual have regarding address, food, leisure, personal characters, family, broader ideas 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 becomes thick, when it becomes 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 represented as a universally binding, that is where symbolically liberalism enters that stage.

I think it was a very good definition, and you also, naturally when we talk about liberalism, we can't disregard John Rose when we just refer to, but your book takes John Rose'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 Rose's category is alone cannot really capture?

Not those new concepts you add about neighbor and shared culture.

Thank you for this interesting question.

John Rose 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 common decency, or what Olivier Roi, the French political scientist, describes as a shared culture.

So more than identity politics often fragments identity into ever smaller subcultures.

Identity once revolve around the class, nation or religion, large complex collectivities, today it can revolve around narrower 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.

A neighbor is not necessarily part of one's community, but served as a moral test.

It could be a fellow citizen, a refugee or even so, one in a neighboring country whose fate is intertwined with us.

The neighbor reminds us that moral regard should not stop at identity boundaries.

Another part of this idea of symbolic liberalism that you discussed in the book, your argument is that this symbolic liberalism rhetorically, you know, champions rights and things like that and produces, you know, 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?

Thank you.

The symbolic liberalism deflates social justice while inflating a huge humanic conception of the good under the banner of universal rights.

This is really a very important claim in my book.

This creates tension between morality, how people negotiate different goods and codified norms, the privileged side for symbolic liberalism to impose their conception of the good and often institutionalize it.

As a justice.

Tick the French ban of Namos and Ville in schools and public offices.

The Ville, like the rest generally, belongs to the realm of the good, yet it is refrained as a matter of justice.

Conversely, in Iran, compulsory Vailing 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 become weaponized against the dominated, such as migrants under the widespread of xenophobia.

We know all what is going on in Europe, but also weaponizing anti-Semitism against the anti-colonial pro-Palestinian movement.

We saw this during the general side of Gaza.

Does human rights become the language of the powerful against the weak?

I think there are, as you mentioned, we can clearly begin to get into.

We can clearly see the example of that, you know, in 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 more 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 read a collapsing into illiberal tendencies or immoral chaos?

Very good question.

Jean Rose asked 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, citizen with diverse moral and religious beliefs may also support taxation to assist those in need, even if their justifications differ.

One may appeal to solidarity or fraternity, a republican rational, another to religious beauty, a third to utilitarian concern about.

Social stability or crime prevention?

So, the issue is not to remove the moral tenant 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 in buffering 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 and the Middle East, but now even in the United States and Latin America.

So, moral 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, the organ hypermass 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 generally possible to disentangle religious certifications from the Colorado one?

Regents of this actor continuously reinterpret their theological commitments in response to the new political context.

In all religion, including Islam, by the way, the innovation that she had what we call.

Similarly, my hero, the Irish philosopher Mavkoke, argues that the primary problem with religious argument is in the public sphere, 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, Koch'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 encores that wearing the turban in his public office is integral of his religious identity, he is engaged 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 seeks 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-on-Lay football team, who stated in commenting on a player posing for a few seconds, 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 imposed not only a conception of justice, but also a conception of the good. Here, the problem.

I think that was a good example. It 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 reinbedding, 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 the logical liberalism a reality, a reality rather than being just an academic ideal, or it's a scholarly ideal.

Very good question. So, the dialog in the dialogical political liberal project is not merely a panel discussion between adversaries in order to mitigate differences and enhance community.

Segregated cities, gated communities and marginalized peripheries, slums, produce segregated minds, mixed housing, common public schools, shared spaces, those create everyday encounters.

So, it is really interesting that the first speech of the Labour leader, Kirk Starmer, when he become 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 writes, the famous Marxist-Susurgeist called Real Ottopians.

This, it will be as such as the universal and conditional 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 ecologically crisis through taxation of consumerism, for instance, that 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 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 Rufri Abistina Affairs, we know how influential money to bring certain people.

Also, in a global thought, things 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, Mortada, power cannot always come from authority and hierarchy through domination and competition mechanism, as many symbolically as things, but through collaboration and overabundance of care, as it is theorized by the sociologist's school of thought.

So, it is called social love, led by two friends, Sylvia Cataldi, Anginaro, Yorio.

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 researcher that the world has a plenty of instance where social relationships are not commodified, and to tell people that happiness and will be are not individual but collective.

Of course, being for someone coffee may not appear in GDP statistics, but it might save our democracy.

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 ideological liberal project, and you also argue that this ideological liberal project needs the ideological sociology. What do you mean by that?

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 briefest of the 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 illusions.

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 incommensurability of some modes of reasoning and political, cultural and religious traditions, actor can engage with each other through a dialogue and reach sometimes overlapping consensus, a concept very dear to Jean Rois.

This is not only in line with the theories of roles and happenments, but also with Durkheim's vision of sociology that promotes social cohesion.

Now we've come to the second level.

Second level is a strong normativity where sociology not only engage with civil society, but also takes a position in favor of marginalized groups against hygienic power and defend those values dear to sociology.

So frankly, I did this entanglement because I am worried when sociologically conflated the two levels or offer no distinction between providing scientific knowledge and critical thinking from one side and a position taking and policy formulation in the other side.

Or worse, neglects the first level and become incapable of engaging with all the stratas of society including conservatives, religious people and those with whom we disagree.

By doing this, we reinforce our status as a model that doesn't speak beyond our moral tribe and this is really the bad consequences we lived today.

In liberalism, of course secularism is an important aspect of this 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 laissez-té.

Can you tell us how states can enforce non-discrimination while mediating rather imposing contested goods like dress, ritual and also religious symbolism?

Thank you for this question.

The problem starts how simple liberalism finds religion. It is done in a reformed Christian manner, reduced to private conscience at home and ritual practice within that church.

So the public visibility of Islam, for instance, itself began to appear for them as a form of pluralism, 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 excludes others like Sikhs, also they have to urban or historically how they exclude Judaism with their keeper.

So this is why instead of taking France or Europe, some countries in Europe as a pragmatic but a digmetic model of secularism, what I advocate through the Illegical Liberal Project, a softer and multicultural secularism, when that is less divisive and in fact necessarily and even indispensable for every society.

So I take it seriously, frankly. This new framework for the relationship between religion and the state introduced a certain permeability between domains that have long been dissociated, religion and the state, ethics and politics, religion and secular arguments in the public spheres, etc.

So secularism is merely a mechanism, though when largely capable of effectively affirming the value of the the Illegical Liberal Project within society.

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-à-vis of all its citizens. This is really very important.

And you have an example of Swedish compulsory child removal laws. This example, your analysis of this shows how bureaucratic routines can unintentionally impose a thick moral good.

What would a genuinely biological, let's say, child protection system look like, one that protects children but why at the same time respects families, autonomy and cultural diversity?

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 right 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 consequence 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 3500 children and adolescent were taken from their families and re-owned 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 precedents years.

And if we compare it to other European countries like France, Spain, Italy, Asia, 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 symbolically barrels in the social services, with conscious silent 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 known Estellia for the 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 sector for protecting individuals, is a wider version 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 neoliberal state uses its authority and that of the school or social service over the family's authority instead of complementing it.

So here they show for me.

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 this concept means and what does a dialogical, pluralistic education system look like when navigating highly charged debates around gender identity, but without really collapsing into either censorship or indoctrination?

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 Aboukhlal, who refused to wear shirts with Rambo-colored numbers declared in June 2024 all has respect to sexual orientation groups but not feeling participating in this campaign.

This is in a tweet he did.

So the head of the primitive 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 reframing from discrimination versus celebrating it which involves

actively campaigning for it and considering it beneficial to society.

So I distinguish between this two levels, embracing versus celebrating.

This distinction is not an identical. It is really a strategic approach to advance the right and societal recognition of vulnerable sexual and gender groups.

I observe how individuals in the West shift towards the right when they feel that some political liberals impose gender fluidity and a sex spectrum as a fundamental principles for recognizing society.

Framing them as a conception of justice, it means an undiscrimination against LGBTQ and individual.

So here the issue, when gender fluidity becomes identity politics if you like, it's not about gender fluidity per se.

So think about how some Italian leftist voted for Georgia Miloni 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 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 United States.

But many social scientists want to see the problem or simply deploy their strong normativity by advocating a sort of authoritarian opposition 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 an origin 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 for how they were introduced.

For her, the issue was not with the idea that the family can consist of either a male-female couple or same-sex parents.

Rather, the problem, she suggested that children should be taught. I could hear 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 subtly distinction is important and should not be dismissed as anti-gender ideology.

Her view reflects, believe, 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 it is not, we cannot smash him as a homophob by opposing this.

So the illusical liberal project seeks to contextualize sexuality and gender identity within cultural frameworks, while adhering to a minimum standards of human rights established by the universal declaration of human rights or sedal or other conventions.

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 is always this disentanglement.

So the project advocates for keeping the debate open on how to reconciliation 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 am thinking about many countries in the global south, including Arab-Muslim countries.

While I acknowledge and praise the critical role feminist 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.

You know, I don't know if you know the Australian philosopher Holy Lo for Smith, she's in Melbourne University.

She got a terrible campaign because of her gender-critically feminism.

This is really a council culture used against not conservative voices, but against the inside of the own leftist group.

She is herself a lesbian overtly, 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 be very humble, I guess.

Doctors are an offer. 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, my pleasure.

It gains symbolic liberals and published by Liverpool University of Paris.

And we certainly hope to be able to speak to you about your future.

By the way, it will be out in 11 languages.

It's already 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.

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. I hope to be able to speak to you soon again about your future work.

Thank you so much, Murtada. It was my pleasure.

Thank you very much.