Political Theories for Students
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L i b e r a l i s m
Liberty was defended by Montesquieu in his doctrine of the “separation of powers.” Montesquieu’s argument for a mixed constitution evolved because he thought deeply about the links between the social and the political, and about the benefits that would flow from necessary compromises. He was a social scientist in an era when science and rationality achieved unprecedented acclaim—during the Enlightenment.
Jean–Jacques Rousseau
A leading French critic of the ancien regime, Jean–Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was an idealist democrat whose major contribution was locating the source of constitutionality in “the general will.” In him the possibility of the separation of liberal from democratic theory emerges. The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) paid tribute to Rousseau: “The law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to concur in prison or through the representatives in its formation. It must be the same for all whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal before it.”
But although Rousseau’s genius located the general will, the cost for this great insight was that the political reality of different, often competing interests is avoided. Politics was reduced to the morality of a single moral principle which enabled its adherent to dismiss as illegitimate the entire historical experience of nations which contained competing interests. Civilization had been built on false and pernicious foun- dations—private property and self–interest. With Rousseau begins in earnest the disastrous attempt to use political means to attain a vague form of social freedom which is supposed to be in tune with both human nature and our moral conscience, based on a common will.
The Rousseauian political agenda was then built around exchanging tangible partial liberties for general intangible ones. In place of the private happiness that comes from pursuing one’s own interests, which liberals came to support, one should, for Rousseau, take one’s place within the community’s pursuit of the general will. Rousseau’s appeal derived from nostalgic and idyllic sentiments, which he expresses so forcefully. But Rousseau turns these sentiments into a mood of great despair: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Rousseau endorsed a politics in which the sovereignty of the people has no restraint. The use of the general will totally politicizes community experience. The purpose of the community becomes political existence itself, a far cry from Locke’s notion of politics as a necessary means for our own ends. This en-
dorsed collective totalitarianism from the Terror to Stalin. In the “general will,” Rousseau helped create that formulation of democracy, which eventually could give it a fascist, communistic and wholly illiberal character.
The Philosophy and Theory of Classical Liberalism
In the year of the Declaration of Independence, 1776, Adam Smith (1723–1790) published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and founded the science of political economy. Its basic doctrine was that human labor is the only source of a nation’s wealth. Smith advocated (and observed) the division of labor in the productive process, stressed the importance of individual enterprise and argued the benefits of free trade between countries. The true wealth of a nation, he held, lay not in the possession of gold but in the achievement of abundance. He warned against unnecessary intervention by the state in this process. In these conclusions, he was in part recommending the path which Britain was already undertaking, as it embarked, during his lifetime, on the world’s first industrial revolution.
He is also commonly associated with the notion of the “invisible hand” which, operating through the self–interest of each individual and untrammeled by state regulation, would produce the general welfare of economic growth, development and prosperity.
Smith argued that wherever government went beyond protecting personal liberty and property it inhibited economic development. He saw in many places poverty attributable to state interference and believed the only sources of wealth and prosperity were industry and the natural powers of production of men. He concluded what was required was to leave economics to itself, since there was harmony between individual and public interests, and that the natural pursuit of economic interests would produce the greatest prosperity. Smith included in political economy not only trade, exchange and production but also political institutions and laws.
Smith appears to point to unrestricted liberty as the best principle of political economy. But he speaks also of “the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security,” as the cause of national wealth and prosperity.
As the British state emerged in 1815 as the most powerful in the world, so Smith and the theories of liberal political economy which he had founded, were deployed to reform its political and economic structures. By the 1830s those who had become known at
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first as radicals, like Richard Cobden (1804–1865), and then later the more establishment Liberals under Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809–1898), pursued the idea of the laissez–faire state. The liberal economic regime, suggested by Smith, had not only become the model which Britain provided for the world, but a design to which it aspired.
Jeremy Bentham
The ancien regime in France had led to revolution, popular democracy, mob rule, and then military expansion under the Napoleon. England emerged victorious in 1815 as a wealthy, industrial and powerful country with an aristocratic system of government. Agitation for liberalization and democratization quickly emerged with the peace. Several prominent philosophers were influential in spreading the ideas which were to underpin the resulting creation of mid–nineteenth century, liberal England.
If Smith developed the idea that economic prosperity depended on the pursuit of self–interest and the operation of the “invisible hand,” it was left to others to divine the purpose of the state. Jeremy Bentham published anonymously, also in 1776, A Fragment on Government, in which he formulated his celebrated utilitarian principle, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” By it exclusively he would judge the value of juridical, political, social, ethical, and religious systems and institutions. In 1779 Bentham’s chief work, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, appeared.
After 1815, Bentham’s writings and ideas became widely influential. In England, his ideas of political reform were taken up by the leaders of emerging radical liberalism. Bentham attacked the Established Church and applied the utilitarian test to religion. In ethics, Bentham maintained happiness was the sole end of conduct and reduced moral obligation to the sanction inherent in the pleasant or painful results of action. The spread of his ideas contributed to Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the parliamentary reform Act of 1832 extending the franchise to the middle class.
Bentham was also the founder of the concept of “utility” in economics, defining it as private happiness, the modern economic usage. He associated man’s pursuit of happiness as a matter of the incentives provided by the balancing of pain and pleasure, prices and wages. The reforms Bentham pursued were directed towards good government, abundance, security and equality. He followed Adam Smith as part of the search for abundance, but advocated a state which provided guaranteed employment, minimum wages
Jeremy Bentham.
and a variety of social benefits. Much of his influence on ideas and legislation was through a circle of pupils and disciples, amongst whom were many economists, including David Ricardo (1772–1823) and John Stuart Mill.
John Stuart Mill
Like Tocqueville, Mill witnessed a social and political transformation that was without any historical parallel: the synthesis of the continuing triumph of liberal principles and the industrial revolution, with the expanding social power and political mobilization of the lower classes. Like Tocqueville, Mill also saw that the modern liberal democratic state could not adequately be described as having a mixed constitution. Ultimately, in any state there was one sovereign power, and in a democratic state it must be the people. Whereas Montesquieu saw the monarchy and House of Lords as still representing considerable social power, Mill no longer saw this as necessary. The burning issues of the day, for Mill, were how exactly the will of the people was to be constituted, and then how it was to be channeled for the greatest political good.
The question of what constituted the greatest good, for Mill, was addressed in the most important defense of liberal principles since Locke. In that work, On Liberty (1869), Mill focused upon what Toc-
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BIOGRAPHY:
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was the eldest son of James Mill, friend and disciple of Jeremy Bentham, and was taught Greek, Latin, mathematics, philosophy, and economics intensively from a very early age by his father in London. Young John did not go to school or associate with other boys of his age. Mill gave a vivid and moving account of his life, and especially of his peculiar education, in the Autobiography, posthumously published in 1873, that he wrote toward the end of his life.
Mill’s father then got him a comfortable job at the India Office where he worked for thirty–five years while producing an enormous published output. As a result, despite an extremely cloistered life, he became one of the most influential of Victorian liberal thinkers, on philosophy, economics and politics. In the 1830s he edited the London and Westminster Review, a radical liberal quarterly journal.
At first, like his father, Mills was a utilitarian. Then, after a severe mental crisis in 1826–1827, he became more romantic and wrote about poetry and its importance. He was, shortly thereafter, influenced by his wife, Harriet Taylor, who co–authored extensively with him before and after the death of her first husband. John and Harriet were married in 1851. Mills then moved towards humanism and idealism.
He also, later on, became somewhat sympathetic to socialism. He was a strong advocate of women’s rights, including the franchise, and supported proportional representation, labor unions, and farm co–oper- atives. But principally, he was a defender of individ-
ual liberty against the interference of both society and state.
Mills was a Liberal member of parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 1868, where he advocated women’s suffrage, the interests of the laboring classes, and land reform in Ireland. However, he made little impact on the Parliament.
As a philosopher, Mill was technically competent, but no pathbreaker. His System of Logic (1843) argued that scientific method could apply to social as well as purely natural phenomena. It is now little read.
Mill is better known for Principles of Political Economy (1848), but this has also slipped closer into obscurity. He is often included in histories of economic thought as a minor disciple of Adam Smith or a lesser contemporary of David Ricardo. Nonetheless, some of his observations about the environment may deserve revival.
In politics, his essay “On Liberty” (1859) aroused controversy at the time and may now be read as a defense of the individual against middle–class conformity, a common viewpoint among intellectuals today. He argued that the state should only interfere with the conduct of individuals when so doing would prevent a greater harm to others. His Considerations on Representative Government (1861) contains numerous interesting and practical suggestions for political reform, many now implemented in different countries. His Utilitarianism (1861) is a classic defense of that view, but it is not now so widely regarded. The Subjection of Women (1869) now looks enormously prescient.
queville had seen as the greatest single benefit that democracy had conferred upon the social character of America, a prodigious energy. For Mill, the primary purpose of politics is to unleash the energies of the species. Liberty takes on supreme importance for Mill because it energizes those who act in accordance with it. Liberty, then, is not simply an end in itself, as it is for Kant. Liberty is valuable because it is useful.
Intrinsic to the development of liberty, for Mill, is the expression of one’s wants and the willingness to involve oneself in the interests of the nation. Unless one does this, one’s liberty will inevitably be curbed by circumstances that are imposed by interests
that have emerged from another group. Mill does not believe that politics is just about the expression of self–interest, partly because he sees the very concept of “self–interest” as unclear. Further, unless a group participates in the decisions which concern it, it is not developing the energies required for its own growth.
Mill saw that two major social groups had been thus far deprived of participation in popular government: the laboring class and women. For the laboring class, there was a major social transformation taking place that could create serious social problems. There was serious danger of class conflict if the state became beholden to one of the two major disputing interest
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groups: the wealthy classes and the laboring classes. Ideally, it would be best if these classes were to hold “about an equal number of votes in the Parliament.” Mill adopted the scheme of proportional representation developed by Thomas Hare, wherein people choose between parties in a geographic location in a particular constituency and for a series of candidates from all over the country. Once a candidate has a sufficient number of votes, or quota, to be elected, the remainder for him go to second candidate until he gets a quota, and so on to the third and subsequent candidates until the places are exhausted. Mill believed that this approach would guarantee diversity of representation, and indeed variations of this system have been successfully utilized in Australia.
The second proposal that Mill had for moderating against the danger of self–interest submerging the national interest, was the provision of education for all classes. Mill believed that education was indispensable for the viability of popular government. If one could not read, write, or do simple arithmetic then one is incapable, for Mill, of participating in the political process. He even suggested that voters should be asked to a copy a sentence out of a book and do a simple math exercise. The key to good government, for Mill, lay in combining energy and intelligence. He even proposed that voters who had achieved a certain level of education be granted more votes, and that a second chamber be created on a meritocratic basis (selected by intellect).
Mill invoked the principle of no representation without financial contribution. Bankrupts and those who are dependent upon charity or state welfare for their livelihood should be excluded from the suffrage. Those who introduce new taxation, suggested Mill, must also feel the effect of it. Mill well knew that public goods come at a price and that one group may be happy for another group to pay the bill, just as one generation may want the successor generation to pick up the tab for its enjoyments.
Mill is an important figure in history because his large body of wide ranging works were persuasively, logically, and factually argued; because he made a synthesis of the various strands of pre–liberal thought into a more coherent modern form of liberalism; and because he stated the case for a liberal democracy just as that kind of society was, for the first time, coming into existence in Britain and the United States.
Liberals and Women’s Rights
One group for whom the franchise was becoming an issue were women. Greek philosopher Plato (428–348 B.C.) thought women capable of having a
John Stuart Mill.
political input and argued that women should be included in the guardian class. Aristotle, however, had defended the more traditional view of women as incapable of making any contribution to political life. This view was pretty much the standard philosophical view of women in the Middle Ages, although Descartes had to a minor extent broken with this tradition. But generally, even the more radical democratic spirits did not desire political power for women— Spinoza rejected the idea and while Locke vigorously argued against paternalism, within the family he believed that it was natural that the male should rule, and by implication political power should fall to him. Even Rousseau, while working for the removal of man’s chains, had in Emily sought to ensure that women’s role remained divorced from politics.
The exceptions were Marie Jean Condorcet (1743–1794), Jeremy Bentham, and the woman usually credited as the first to write a sustained treatise for the emancipation of women, Mary Wolstonecraft (1759–1797).
Condorcet in “On Granting Civil Rights to Women” (1790), compared the situations of Blacks and women, attacked their maltreatment and the institutional discrimination that they had to endure. He insisted that reason was universal, and that women could not be denied their rightful status as rational beings. Condorcet argued in Five Memoirs of Education
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that women should be educated just as men are, an issue that Daniel Defoe had raised almost a hundred years earlier, and the historian, Catherine Macaulay, also advocated in her Letters on Education (1790). Condorcet’s argument for women having civil rights was consistent in its advocacy that such rights should also be accompanied by political rights, provided the property qualifications for the vote were also met.
Jeremy Bentham was also an advocate for women’s rights. In an unpublished manuscript of 1789 he objected to equating women with infants and the insane for the purpose of excluding them from the vote. In a number of published works, including Catechism of a Parliamentary Reform (1809), the Radical Reform Bill (1819), and the Constitutional Code, he argued for extending educational and political opportunities to women.
In Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1795), Mary Wolstonecraft emphasized the absurd contradiction between Rousseau’s conception of rights, which she largely accepted, and the subordinate role of women, which he advocated. For Wolstonecraft, the inferior economic, political and moral circumstance of woman was the result of socialization not her nature. For her, the transformation of women’s role was largely a matter of education. Women needed to acquire new skills so that they would possess the necessary virtues for independence and participation in public life.
Mill’s views When Mill wrote his The Subjection of Women, the idea of gender emancipation was already current. There also existed a movement for the female suffrage, although it was nowhere near as strong as the trade union movement and the push for political power then being made by the working class. But, for Mill, the circumstance of the denial of women’s rights was not equivalent to other situations. The circumstance of women was different from any other social group and this largely explained the complicity by women in their own lack of political power. Further, Mill believes, the nature of women has been more thoroughly distorted through their relationships than any other social group, including slaves. The duties of women, Mill says, have been stretched beyond that of slaves: “no slave is a slave to same lengths and in so full a sense as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one immediately attached to his master’s person, is a slave at all hours and minutes of the day.” Even a slave is not under obligation as a wife to sleep with a master who degrades and tortures her.
But a growing number of women were by then demanding political representation. It was under-
standable, for Mill, that this movement was not supported by huge numbers, in light of the power relations between the sexes. He added that, “It is a political law of nature that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise. There is never any want of women who complain of ill usage by their husbands.” For Mill, the value of liberty is bound up with the unleashing of energies and talents. Mill’s plea for the emancipation of women is made within the context of a general theory of liberty and political representation, the theory of liberalism.
Mill saw the enfranchisement of the laboring classes and of women as indicative of the general progress of humanity in its political institutions. He also believed that such a change in the balance of political expression would have a generally benign effect on the social circumstance of the groups represented as well as the society as a whole. Closely related, was his belief that human progress was generated through discontent with the existing order. Each new group who had been through the process of demanding their liberty and articulating their moral discontents were entering into the creative task that lay before the species: its collective intellectual, moral and material improvement. The spirit of liberty was, for Mill, a restless one, but its very restlessness was indicative of the energizing character of human freedom.
Mill sat between those liberals who wanted to expand the powers of the state to help achieve greater liberty for the disadvantaged, and those who saw that any such attempt would drag liberalism into the sphere of socialism, and that the emphasis upon social equality would have harmful effects for individual liberty and social prosperity. Both groups saw Mill’s form of liberalism as unsatisfactory: the former because Mill did not provide enough for the state to play a more directive role in opening up the conditions of liberty; the latter because Mill was veering too close to paternalism, straying too far from his belief in the importance of the energies of the individual. This is a central dilemma for modern liberals.
The achievement of the franchise for the working classes and women meant that for the first time in human history all interests had been accepted as, in principle, having a legitimate right to representation in the politics of the state. Because this was a new situation it took some time for it to become clear what form this mass representation would assume. Since this political transformation took place almost everywhere in the advanced states at about the same time as the maturation of the process of industrialization, the two combined to take the form of a social democratic pro-
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gram that shared common features in the different states. The risk entailed for advanced liberal states now became not that the interests of the masses would be ignored, but that their excessive pursuit could destroy the march of progress altogether as the state encroached excessively on the domains of civil society.
British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.
(The Library of Congress)
THEORY IN ACTION
Gladstone and the Liberal Party in Britain
William Ewart Gladstone became the Liberal Party Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1868. At that time, there was much unrest in among the Irish people over their role in the commonwealth. The Act of Union in 1801 had religiously bound Ireland to the Protestant Church of England, a fact that caused tension among Irish Roman Catholics for generations.
Gladstone introduced and passed the Disestablishment Act in 1869, which repealed the Act of Union and allowed the Irish the freedom to support whichever church they chose. Gladstone also introduced a land act in 1870 which provided compensation for Irish tenants who were evicted by English landlords without cause.
Gladstone’s ministry enacted a host of measures which, as he put it, opened the windows of opportunity for Englishmen. These measures included the Education Act of 1870, the opening of all branches of the civil service except the foreign service to competitive examination in 1870, the abolition of purchase of commissions in the army by royal warrant and the opening of the universities to non–members of the Church of England in 1871, and the secret ballot act of 1872.
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The same degree of support was not given to all these measures by Gladstone, but the fact simply serves to illustrate his view of the role of prime minister, which was to act as mediator between factions in the cabinet and reconcile differences where possible.
Gladstone’s approach to foreign affairs was also established in his first ministry, which came into office shortly after the end of the U.S. Civil War. As a member of Parliament, Gladstone had caused some hostility in America by supporting the South in the Civil War. The North had strenuously objected when ironclads (warships with sides of armored metal plates) manufactured in Britain were delivered to the Confederates, and after the war there was a need to reestablish normal relations between the two countries. The Treaty of Washington in 1871 agreed to the U.S. request that claims for damages be submitted to arbitration. This act went a long way toward easing any tension between the two nations. Britain’s destiny may well have turned out to be a very different one had it lost the United States as its most powerful ally.
An unsuccessful attempt to pass a temperance bill that came close to an act of prohibition—and trouble over the continuing Irish question—hurt Gladstone in the election of 1874, and he was defeated. However, he was reelected in 1880, and soon introduced his first Home Rule bill for Ireland, which was defeated in Parliament by thirty votes. Gladstone continued his support for the bill, and when the Liberals returned to office after the election of 1892, he introduced a second Home Rule bill the following year. The measure passed Parliament’s House of Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords. Gladstone retired the following year.
Gladstone’s terms as Prime Minister saw many changes come to Great Britain. The army regulation bill shifted control of the armed forces from the monarchy to Parliament; indeed, the prestige of Parliament rose during his tenure. For the first time, all schools were evaluated by the government, standards in education soared, and more people had access to government positions. However, British imperialism reached its notorious high point—the “Scramble for Africa”—during the Gladstone era.
Social Liberalism and Social Democracy
As the franchise extended in liberal societies, so the powers and functions of the state were expanded. Partly as a result of socialist agitation, the power of illiberal political factions was used to undermine the classical liberal state.
During the early part of the twentieth century, all the developed states experienced the rise of such so-
cial democratic movements. They combined a number of characteristics that sprang from the achievement of the more or less universal franchise at about the same time in industrial societies. The result was a transfer of demands from the political sphere concerning representation in the deliberations of the state, to arguments about the purposes for which the state should be used. The more common form of the expression of social democracy was a democratic electoral coalition pursuing social and economic rights to augment the political gains already won for the masses. Social democratic parties began achieving Parliamentary representation by the 1890s and thereafter social democrats began to seriously influence political agendas everywhere. The line between social liberals and social democrats became very difficult to discern.
Social democracy has few outstanding theoreticians. In the political sphere the most developed were in Britain, where the Fabian Socialists argued for more state ownership of the economy, higher taxes, and more welfare benefits by using an elected Labour government to legislate for an extension of the egalitarian principle from the political to the economic and social sphere. In Germany, similar arguments were evolved by the previously Marxist Social Democratic Party led by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. In the economic realm, the dominant social democratic theoretician was John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) who gave theoretical legitimacy to the political aspirations of the social democratic political philosophers and politicians.
Liberalism and Christianity
From the Enlightenment, reconciling the growth of secular liberalism with the continuation of Christian religious doctrine also became an important issue for theology. Eighteenth century romanticism did this by stressing the intuitive and synthetic nature of human reason in which truth was gained by grasping the whole rather than by an abstract analysis of the parts. This was a reaction to the critical rationalism of the eighteenth century. Influential here was Friederich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a founder of modern or liberal theology. He accepted the validity of the Enlightenment criticism of dogmatic Christianity, and saw religious belief as subjective. Theological statements no longer were perceived as describing objective reality, but: “Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.”
Other liberal theologians, like Albrect Ritschl (1822–1889), saw religion in terms of personal moral-
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ity. He argued in Justification and Reconciliation, that “Christianity is the monotheistic, completely spiritual and ethical religion, which, on the basis of the life of its Founder as redeeming and establishing the kingdom of God, consists in the freedom of the children of God...the intention of which is the moral organization of mankind.” Religious truth could not be verified and existence of God could not be rationally demonstrated.
These views led quickly to the academic study of comparative religions. Christianity was no longer seen as unique and as knowledge of the wider world and other cultures and religions became available, the Bible was studied in its cultural setting. All religions were seen as being intellectually similar and, possibly, valid.
The social gospel movement then tried to apply Christianity to industrial societies and enlist the new working class. The American Walter Rauschenbusch, wrote in A Theology of the Social Gospel that, “The social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience.” The task of the church was working to end human suffering and establish social justice. In the late nineteenth century even papal declarations talked about justice for labor. Liberalism made Christian authority wholly subjective, based on individual spiritual experience. Ultimate authority was not to be found in the Bible or Church, but increasingly in reason and conscience.
Modernism was used to describe a similar movement within the Catholic Church. In the U.S. the term was applied to radical liberal theology in the early decades of the twentieth century. By the 1930s many other denominations were also affected. The implication was that Christianity had to be “modernized” in every age in order to remain socially and rationally relevant.
In liberal societies, religion tended to decline and become more secular in outlook.
The Neo–liberal Revolution in the 1980s
Milton Friedman (1912– ) is an intellectual descendant of the Austrian School, the best known of all “Monetarist economists” and won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. He was born in New York in 1912 and after working at Columbia University (and for the government), he became Professor of Economics at Chicago University. He did his best–known work there, surrounded by other Monetarists, also often termed the “Chicago school.”
In the 1970s, the social democratic state, which had been steadily encroaching on the liberal economy
throughout the developed world, created, with other developments, the crisis of “stagflation.” In this, it experienced a devaluation of the currency and a cessation of economic growth more or less simultaneously. In this critical context, the ideas of classical liberal political economy were revived in the intellectual sphere and implemented by a series of liberal politicians operating through the agencies of the powerful liberal states which they governed.
This neo–liberal counter–revolution in the realm of economic ideas is most closely associated with Friedman. Although prolific, his best known popular work was, with Rose D. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962). He was already an advocate of market economics and paying closer attention to the growth of the money supply, when the crisis of stagflation occurred in the mid–1970s. He then proved to be an able media performer and had an impact far beyond the academy, as his Nobel Prize attested.
Friedman argued that Keynesian demand management techniques had gone too far in distorting the market and had choked economic growth; that the growth of the money supply had generated inflation; and that the increased size of the state had become a political burden on developed countries. He advocated reducing state intervention in the economy, controlling the growth of the money supply and de–politicizing the economy. This message had an impact in all developed countries, but more in some than others. It was essentially the message of classical liberal political economy.
The Political Liberal Revival
Friedman’s ideas first began to take hold among policy makers in the years 1974–1975 when the developed countries experienced both stagnation and inflation. But the first major politician to take liberal ideas seriously, and not merely as a short–term solution to the stagflation crisis, was Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Britain from 1979–1990.
Britain had developed an extensive welfare state and state owned sector of the economy in the hay day of social democracy, 1945–1975. It also had one of the worst records of economic growth of developed countries. In the mid 1970s, under a Labour government, it encountered a severe crisis of stagflation. The opposition Conservative Party at first espoused similar policies under its centrist leader, Edward Heath. Margaret Thatcher then replaced him and won the 1979 election on a radical liberal/monetarist platform. During the next decade she reduced the state sector, cut the welfare state and reined in the money supply.
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The result was a radically re–structured British economy and society along more liberal lines.
The pain involved in this transition was considerable, but under pressure to relent, Thatcher famously insisted, “This Lady is not for turning.” Britain emerged as one of Europe’s stronger economies in the 1990s and the next Labour government, elected in 1997, did not reverse the liberal reforms.
As the Cold War and communism ended in 1991, this liberal impetus was sustained in the U.S. by Bill Clinton, U.S. President 1993–2001, who, although a Democrat, led the international economy into a period of globalization. As David Mosler and Bob Catley describe in Global America: Imposing Liberalism on a Recalcitrant World, this represented the apogee of liberal sentiment and a new attempt to recreate a global political economy along the lines attempted by liberal England in the mid–nineteenth century.
Clinton was elected on a reforming and welfare expanding policy and only swung away from social democracy after a considerable electoral defeat in the 1994 mid–term Congressional elections. Thereafter, he eschewed expanding the state sector and, rather, set about creating a free trading global economy in which American prosperity could be built on the strength of its industry. By the time of his second term he was dissolving the automatic entitlement to welfare, which had been established for Americans after the New Deal, and was concentrating on the strengthening of a global world order of liberalism.
During this period, world trade expanded rapidly, global production levels also increased, income levels for U.S. citizens were enhanced and the number of liberal democratic states increased. From being an advocate of social democratic reform, Clinton became the heir of the liberal tradition and its courier into the twenty–first century.
ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL RESPONSE
Liberals accord liberty primacy as a political value, and liberals have typically maintained, with Locke, that humans are naturally in “a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions.” Restrictions on liberty must be thoroughly justified, hence John Rawls’ first principle of justice: “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system for all.”
Liberals disagree, however, about the concept of liberty. Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) arguably the
twentieth century’s most eminent liberal, advocated in Four Essays on Liberty (1969) for a “negative conception of liberty.” For Berlin the liberal state’s commitment to protecting liberty is, essentially, the job of ensuring that citizens do not coerce each other without compelling justification. Other liberals emphasize positive freedom and want a larger role for the liberal state.
At the start of the twenty–first century this revolved around the “political correctness” debate. Is it permissible to restrict the freedom of speech of some citizens in order to impose the definition of freedom espoused by others? The classical liberal would surely respond in the negative.
Liberalism, Property, and the Market
For classical liberals, liberty and private property are related, but “social” liberalism challenges this close connection between personal liberty and a private property based market order. Modern social liberals, especially in the U.S., believe that far from being “the guardian of every other right,” as James Ely argued in The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights (1992), property rights generate an inequality. This theme is central to contemporary American liberalism, which combines strong endorsement of civil and personal liberties with little enthusiasm for private ownership.
There are several states which function effectively at the onset of the twenty–first century that are based on the principles of liberalism. The two most prominent examples are the U.S. and the United Kingdom, particularly after both undertook extensive liberal reforms in the 1980s. The U.S. has only about thirty percent of the economy going through the state sector and maintains an open economy and strict separation of political powers. Britain has reduced the state share of the economy and privatized most of the state owned enterprises that the Labour Party had previously brought into public ownership. After a similar process of liberal reform in the 1980s, which has been sustained under the Liberal led government, Australia may be regarded as a successful liberal society with a constitution drawn from both London and Washington.
France and most European Union states may be better regarded as social democratic societies because their state sectors are over forty percent of their total economy, a proportion which most liberals would regard as excessive. New Zealand also falls into this category.
There are number of other states which have some of the attributes of liberalism but do not function well. Legally and formally, Russia has a liberal constitution
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and economy, but in fact it functions as an oligarchy, both politically and economically. Japan has a liberal political constitution, but has been ruled since 1950 effectively by one governing coalition except for 1993–1994. Also, its state has considerable control over its economy and this has contributed to the condition of economic stagnation which has prevailed since 1990.
Nonetheless, it has proven difficult to transplant to other societies and its critics claim that liberalism only functions effectively in societies that have nurtured liberties and energies consistent with liberal principles for several generations. Not all nations may be ready for liberalism; those that are believe it is the most advanced way to run a country.
Liberalism’s Influence and Critics
Liberalism is unique in that while it may not have ever been truly implemented as a political system in any country, it has influenced many political systems in many different eras. It is much more than coincidence that on the timeline between the absolute kings and queens of the seventeenth century and the representative governments of today sit a large number of brilliant liberal thinkers who called for the limiting the power of the monarchy. Moreover, it was liberal ideas that toned down the evils of imperialism by calling for the teachings of Christianity and an end to the slave trade. And although Mill’s views on the rights of women fell short of equality, they were nonetheless far ahead of their time, and inspired many who carried on the fight for women’s suffrage. Nineteenth– century liberals instituted reforms in education and sought to improve working conditions. Some historians even feel that liberalism had a profound effect on the arts and culture by their very doctrine of challenging traditional themes. Liberals moved away from war and religion to a more peaceful, secular world view.
That is not to say that liberalism does not have its critics. Socialists and communists criticize liberals for defending capitalism. Democrats generally support liberalism, but are wary of the limitations it places on the power of government. Social democrats and supporters of Keynes believe liberalism places too much confidence in market economics. Statist economic developers think liberalism cannot deliver rapid economic growth. Fascists believe liberalism is too soft a belief with which to defend the civilized order. Post–modernists believe liberalism to be the doctrines of “dead white males.” And conservative critics have argued that the historical stability of liberal societies is based on a pre–liberal sense of shared identity amongst their members; liberalism only works in already well–ordered societies.
Liberalism is a set of beliefs about society, politics, and economics that developed, uniquely, in the most–developed countries of the world by the late–eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has proven to be successful in the wealthy English–speaking countries and has provided a foundation for their continuing prosperity and liberty.
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
•Why was Rousseau’s idea of the “general will” illiberal?
•Examine the attempts Gladstone made to settle the “Irish Question” and the effects of those policies.
•Explain Hayek’s criticism of socialism and how it pertains to liberalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sources
Catley, Bob A. and Wayne Christaudo. This Great Beast: Progress and the Modern State. London: Avebury, 1997.
Commire, Anne, ed. Historic World Leaders. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994.
Freeden, Michael. The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Gilbert, Felix, gen. ed. The Norton History of Modern Europe. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1971.
Harris, Paul and John Morrow, eds. Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Hayek, F.A. New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas,, 1993. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Mosler, David, and Bob Catley. Global America: Imposing Liberalism on a Recalcitrant World, Praeger, 2000.
Smith, Rogers M. “Unfinished Liberalism,” in Social Research. Fall, 1994 (vol. 61, no. 3).
Further Readings
Benn, Stanley I. A Theory of Freedom, Cambridge University Press, 1988. A powerful statement of the case for using the state to create positive liberty.
Cranston, Maurice. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, ed., Macmillan and the Free Press, 1967. Cranston’s essay “Liberalism” is a classic statement of the history and evolution of liberal doctrines.
Green, Thomas Hill. Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Essays, Paul Harris and John Morrow, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1986. Green’s 1895 essay is
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