Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (14 page)

Liberalism is now formally committed to a task which certainly involves a new conception of the State in its relation to the individual life and to private enterprise. …From the standpoint which best presents its continuity with earlier Liberalism, it appears as a fuller appreciation and realisation of individual liberty contained in the provision of equal opportunities for self-development. But to this individual standpoint must be joined a just apprehension of the social, viz., the insistence that these claims or rights of self-development be adjusted to the sovereignty of social welfare.

And he elaborated: ‘Free land, free travel, free power, free credit, security, justice and education, no man is “free” for the full purposes of civilised life to-day unless he has all those liberties.’

As did his fellow left-liberals, Hobson was at pains to point out that the new liberalism differed significantly from socialism, both because it rejected universal public ownership and because it rebuffed the mechanical, averaging, and centralizing inclinations socialists were thought to advocate. But the modern study of ideologies now denies the existence of stark and impermeable boundaries between ideologies. The forms of liberalism endorsed in Britain a century ago were broadly speaking social-democratic at their heart. That variant of liberal social-democracy was clearly located within the circle of the great liberal family, even if the intense rivalries between political parties tended to obscure such subtle shadings.

In addition to the four British liberal thinkers, a slight step back in time is necessary to recognize the significant contribution of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) to liberalism. Wollstonecraft was a political essayist, writer, educationalist, and moral philosopher, who believed passionately in human rationality, for which liberty and political rights were essential. Her major input into the incipient liberal tradition was through her famous book,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. In that volume she argued that women had to be educated to become rational and independent. That would improve their social roles considerably as good wives and mothers as well as citizens. Advanced as it was for her time, 20th century feminists distanced themselves from that traditional role-assignment and from Wollstonecraft’s message for women to emulate men. But Wollstonecraft was a major pioneer of women’s rights and of treating women equally:

Women, I allow, may have different duties to fill, but they are human duties, and the principles that regulate the discharge of them …must be the same. To become respectable, the exercise of their understanding is necessary, there is no other foundation for independence of character.

Wollstonecraft concluded: ‘Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man, for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.’

The wider liberal net

Even though Britain was a powerhouse of liberal thought, continental Europe and the USA hosted major varieties of liberalism bearing their own characteristics. We shall briefly look at some representative thinkers. In France Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), an early employer of the term ‘liberal’, focused on two main features. The first was a theory about the transformation of the idea of liberty from ancient to modern times, adapting in the process to the complex commercial practices of 19th century society. For Constant that meant a decline in the central authority of a small community and its replacement by what we would now call civil society, independent and socially mobile. Liberalism manifested itself in the increase of personal, autonomous opportunities and choices, and in the prosperous production of material goods for all. But that was not a claim concerning the innate universalism of liberalism to be found among some 20th century liberal philosophers; rather, it was an empirical observation about the historic mutation of liberalism in relation to changing social circumstances.

The second feature was equality before the law, the emphasis being on constitutional representation, peace, and liberty from arbitrary government. Constant combined that with a strong resistance to governmental intervention in economic affairs, as a commercial society would best function under conditions of laissez-faire. The need for representation reflected the impossibility of direct political participation due to the wealth-creating commitments of individuals. Yet, crucially, that wealth-creation released individuals to engage in cultural and spiritual pursuits, retaining the civilizing aspect that liberalism was supposed to enable. Constant explained:

The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to those pleasures …Individual liberty, I repeat, is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of today to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter.

In Germany, towards the end of the 18th century, the philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) published a treatise on the limits of state intervention that, when translated half a century later into English, profoundly influenced Mill. The opening sentence of its second chapter was quoted by Mill in full in his
On Liberty
:

The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.

Freedom and diversity were for Humboldt, as for Mill, the two prerequisites for the full development of the individual. As with many German philosophers of the time, the importance of culture, education, and enlightenment (subsumed under the German term
Bildung
) was regarded as central to a full life. This enabled the cultivation of moral and intellectual powers—all within the framework of spontaneous activity. Above all, Humboldt called for the removal of as many political and legal fetters as were consistent with promoting individual freedom and progress. In one sense it was a theory that spoke more clearly to the British than to the Germans. English political thought, from its early modern stages, had emphasized freedom of individual action until such point as harm to others ensued. German political thought had evolved a deep respect for the role of law—and the rule of law—as directing individual conduct towards accepted rational ends, whether or not within a liberal context. But in another sense, the insistence on achieving a degree of culture that established the appropriate moment for freedom and hence for minimizing state intervention became a keystone of German political thinking.

Max Weber (1864–1920), the eminent German sociologist, presented another side of liberalism. His sociological and historical analyses of the German bourgeoisie, as well as of the state, led him to conclude that in order to protect society from extreme bureaucratization, a class of responsible, committed, and ethical leaders would have to emerge. He argued that the charismatic leader would become the guarantor of individualism, supported partly by a mass democracy searching for the disruption of authoritarian patterns of government. This elitist liberalism picked up a theme rarely acknowledged by liberals themselves. Liberalism was a product of the middle classes, and its values—however desirable to progressives—were often chosen and formulated by cultural minorities: the educated, the politically alert, and the relatively well-to-do. It was of course also a liberalism that respected the rule of law but it was not strongly egalitarian.

Weber’s liberalism, as that of his contemporary Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919) was also permeated by a strong nationalism that was muted—though not entirely absent—in other forms of liberalism. True, national self-determination had been a plank of 19th century European liberalism, but both Weber and Naumann went beyond that in their enthusiasm for national power and prosperity. The nation was not a simple object of aggrandisement, however, but the repository of the country’s skills, expertise, ethos, and spirit resting, in Weber’s words, on ‘deeply rooted psychological foundations’. The nation state was the site of a balancing act between the rational state and the often irrational, or arational, ‘Volk’. Naumann added another strand to that German path of liberalism: a more social variant. His interest in planning, organization, and the attainment of welfare ends acknowledged the forces of economic modernization and the need for the industrial and technical progress of the community at large. But in prioritizing those over individual ethical development, Naumann was teetering on the edge of the liberal domain and was brought back only by his concern for the development of individual personality.

In Italy, Benedetto Croce (1886–1952) demonstrated a more visionary side to continental liberalism than the one emanating from the concrete historical and sociological preoccupations of German liberals. Croce was a philosopher and occasional politician who had studied Hegel and was influenced by him. He had moved from supporting fascism to advocating liberalism. In his
Politics and Morals
—a collection of essays written largely in the 1920s—Croce subscribed to a grand conception of liberalism that identified it not as a particular political doctrine but as ‘a complete idea of the world and of reality.’ Unlike most other noted liberal theorists, Croce saw in liberalism the expression of divine wisdom, of a higher morality. But it was also one that rejected the ‘mathematical and mechanistic’ tendencies of socialism for an equality based on a common humanity. Indeed the unequal ownership and distribution of property was acceptable to liberals as long as it did not suppress an enquiring and critical spirit. Although human beings strove for improvement, they were imperfect and capable of error.

That humanistic version of liberalism countered liberal experimentation and tentativeness with an unchallengeable ethics. Croce thus reflected the kind of dialectic tension displayed by his type of Idealist thought, as well as the uncertainties and fragilities of human conduct that perceptive liberals had come to recognize. Far more than Mill and Hobhouse, with their smoother visions of human evolution, Croce regarded setbacks, struggle, and antagonism as elements of the real world liberalism had to confront and take heed of, and which its spirit would ultimately overcome. Against the backdrop of the rise of Italian fascism and various types of continental authoritarianism, that had become a particularly poignant observation:

…the liberal mind regards the withdrawing of liberty and the times of reaction as illnesses and critical stages of growth, as incidents and steps in the eternal life of liberty …the liberal conception is not meant for the timid, the indolent and the pacifist, but wishes to interpret the aspirations and the works of courageous and patient, of belligerent and generous spirits, anxious for the advancement of mankind and aware of its toils and of its history.

Italian linguistic practice helpfully distinguishes between
liberalismo
and
liberismo
, a distinction central to a famous dispute between Croce and the Italian economist and politician Luigi Einaudi (1874–1961).
Liberalismo
relates to the fully-fledged political and ethical conception of liberalism, while
liberismo
refers to its economic, free-enterprise aspects. Whereas in German, and even more so in French, contexts the tendency—as was Einaudi’s—was and still is to conflate the two, Croce sought to separate them out. It is, as we have seen in
Chapter 3
, debatable whether economic liberalism alone contains sufficient components of the fuller family of liberalisms. As Croce put it succinctly, ‘the difficulty appears as soon as we give to the system of free enterprise the value of a norm’. That created conflict with ethical and political liberalism, which had a different set of guiding norms, not based on egoistic and hedonistic considerations of utility.

Carlo Rosselli (1899–1937) was an Italian socialist thinker and activist, ultimately murdered at Mussolini’s behest. Adversity and, indeed, oppression were fertile ground for the minority of continental dissidents who had the courage to express their anti-totalitarian views in the face of grave personal risk. That aside, Rosselli commands attention not only because of the substance of his ideas—it could be argued that he was not a major thinker in his own right—but because he illustrates the difficulties we find in categorizing left-liberalism in a comparative perspective. The boundaries between left-liberalism and moderate socialism, or social-democracy, are highly permeable and the space those adjoining ideological positions occupy overlaps considerably. Croce had already paid homage to Hobhouse and to the latter’s phrase ‘liberal socialism’, although ‘social liberalism’ would have described Hobhouse’s position more accurately. Rosselli made his mark with a book called
Liberal Socialism
, published in 1930. He saw the essence of socialism in the moral attraction of liberty and, like Croce, attempted to consolidate an intellectual and political position that was anti-fascist as well as inimical to a state-run economy. Rosselli shared with other social-democrats—such as Eduard Bernstein in Germany—the belief that a moderate socialism was the inheritor, and better utilizer, of liberal values. A political liberalism, grounded in democratic practices and self-government and divorced from a reliance on a dogmatic free market, introduced the possibility of innovation and movement into social life: