Liberalism’s core principles rest on empirically questionable descriptive claims.

Evidence

The central principles of liberalism, she reminds us, rest on assumptions about the nature of mankind and the nature of society that are frequently questioned: “all men are created equal,” “everyone possesses human rights,” and so on. But no dispassionate observer of the human condition would find these descriptive propositions unproblematic, says Canovan. For men and women are not in fact equal, they do not all exercise human rights in the world as we know it. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 283

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to critiques of natural-rights foundationalism and the is/ought gap in political theory.