Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (15 page)

Socialism, grasped in its essential aspect, is the progressive actualization of the idea of liberty and justice among men.… Liberalism in its most straightforward sense can be defined as the political theory that takes the inner freedom of the human spirit as a given and adopts liberty as the ultimate goal, but also the ultimate means, the ultimate rule, of shared human life …in which each individual is certain of being able to develop his own personality fully. …Liberalism conceives of liberty not as a fact of nature, but as becoming, as development. One is not born free; one becomes free. And one stays free by retaining an active and vigilant sense of one’s autonomy, by constantly exercising one’s freedoms …in the name of liberty, [socialists] want social life to be guided not by the egoistic criterion of personal utility, but by the social criterion, the criterion of the collective good.

The accord with British liberals’ ideas of individual development, the social moulding of personality, the quest for a common good, and the assertion that communal life is at the disposal of the individual—as well as a resonance with the deep spirituality of Croce—is striking.

John Dewey (1859–1952), the American philosopher and educationalist, was a liberal theorist reacting to a cultural environment quite dissimilar to those of his European counterparts. To begin with, 20th century American liberalism was an unusual combination of progressivism and nationalism, notably articulated in the writings of Herbert Croly. At the same time, the connotations of liberalism in the USA can be more negative than anything to be found in European democracies, signifying as they did—in the wake of the New Deal of the 1930s—big, interventionist government that in the worst case saps individual initiative and independence, or, alternatively, undermines the ability to take a strong position in political altercations. Dewey belonged to the school of philosophical thought known as Pragmatism and his approach, as expressed in particular in his
Liberalism and Social Action
, was strongly experimental and based on experience. Liberalism was in his view a practical set of ideas, historically conditioned and relative, rather than containing universal immutable truths that had to be uncovered.

Dewey resisted the distinction between the individual and political society. Although he hailed the significance of British philosophers such as Green and his successors in proclaiming the ideals of liberalism to be the common good, liberty, individuality, and the claim of each individual to the full development of his or her capacities, Dewey maintained that liberal values were the outcome of concrete collective activity. It was human intelligence, not an abstract spiritual essence, that propelled liberalism:

A liberal program has to be developed, and in a good deal of particularity, outside of the immediate realm of governmental action and enforced upon public attention, before direct political action of a thorough-going liberal sort will follow …the majority who call themselves liberals today are committed to the principle that organized society must use its powers to establish the conditions under which the mass of individuals can possess actual as distinct from merely legal liberty.

In bringing liberalism down to earth, Dewey humanized it and freed it from the rigid, doctrinaire constraints that both natural rights theory and political economy had imposed on it in the past.

Liberalism required the inclusion of economic activities, but in his stringent critique of capitalism Dewey argued that they had to be subordinated to the higher capacities of individuals. Indeed, the initiative and vigour channelled through economic life was mistakenly assumed to apply to economics alone, to the exclusion of their presence in ‘companionship, science and art’. Not least, Dewey’s insistence on the inextricability of individual action from human association was reminiscent of Hobhouse’s pairing of mutual aid and mutual forbearance, and the organic interdependence of society that demanded ‘collective social planning’. Dewey’s empiricism also identified another feature of liberalism—albeit shared with other ideologies—towards which Hobhouse had been working his way in less explicit form: the emotional intensity of liberal ideas was necessary to bring them to fruition. Reason alone was ineffective in a political ideology, even in liberalism, unless it was sustained by passion.

This chapter ends with an assessment of the ideas of Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992), an economist, philosopher, and political thinker who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. To be sure, Hayek is a controversial figure in the annals of liberalism. One thing he certainly illustrates is the continuing struggle over the intellectual heritage of liberals. Whether Hayek is considered a liberal (which he insisted he was), a conservative, a libertarian, or a hybrid among those, is itself a question of ideological as well as scholarly interpretation, and it is one to which Hayek contributed an active role. That role is expressed on two levels: in his own account of the history of liberalism, and in the substantive arguments he produced about liberalism and the place of liberty within it.

For Hayek, the heyday of liberalism was in the mid-19th century. In an instructive article he contributed to the Italian
Enciclopedia del Novecento
he rejected Croce’s distinction between
liberalismo
and
liberismo
, claiming instead that freedom under the law simply implied economic freedom for individuals. Liberal freedom was—contra Green—a negative conception referring to the absence of an evil, the evil of government directing the individual towards particular ends and benefits. Hence, argued Hayek, liberalism began to decline from the 1870s, since which time—and particularly under the new liberalism at the beginning of the 20th century—‘new experiments in social policy were undertaken which were only doubtfully compatible with the older liberal principles’. Those older principles were the ones towards which Hayek was deeply sympathetic. Welfare liberalism was interpreted as a departure from liberal principles, which for Hayek involved the cluster of liberty, law, and property, while he dismissed the belief in progress as ‘the sign of a shallow mind.’

We encounter here the perennial problem of change over time. Is liberalism—or for that matter any ideology—a set of fundamental beliefs, a doctrine with an original exemplar from which there are deplorable deviations, or is it a continuously evolving and changing set of ideas around a loose core of values, as Dewey saw it? Hayek plumped firmly for the former. His resistance to the mutation of ideas was different, however, from that of those philosophers—recently, John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin come to mind—who identify a pure, abstract principle at the centre of liberalism. For Hayek, rather, it was a matter of tried and tested experience examining which claim to liberalism had worked best, but, once that question was settled, it was no longer open to alteration.

The centrality of liberty to Hayek’s work followed from what he believed was the natural spontaneity of human beings and a socio-economic order that was self-generating: Hayek referred to that kind of order as a catallaxy. Human knowledge was dispersed and could not be possessed by any single directing authority, including the state. The central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan or blueprint would catastrophically eliminate the purposiveness and rationality of innovating individuals, and impoverish the exchange of ideas—indeed, the market of ideas—that could be put to the service of a society. That was the energizing and optimistic component of layer two liberalism that Hayek embraced. Individual freedom was thus essential for economic and social flourishing, as progress could not be centrally engineered, and social justice was a contradiction in terms. Hayek borrowed the phrase ‘open society’ to describe his position. In terms of a broader approach to liberalism, he expanded the spatial presence of the concept of liberty within the liberal core—spelt out in
Chapter 4
—at the expense of most liberal core concepts. The only other core segments Hayek retained were limited, constitutional power and a specific notion of individuality as experimental innovation.

Liberalism …merely demands that the procedure, or the rules of the game, by which the relative positions of the different individuals are determined, be just (or at least not unjust), but not that the particular results of this process for the different individuals be just …

The central belief from which all liberal postulates may be said to spring is that the more successful solutions of the problems of society are to be expected if we do not rely on the application of anyone’s given knowledge, but encourage the interpersonal process of the exchange of opinion from which better knowledge can be expected to emerge.

Chapter 6

Philosophical liberalism: idealizing justice

Basic postulates

There is another, parallel and partially separate, world of liberal thinking and theorizing, one that takes place almost wholly within the walls of academe. Liberal political philosophy is a particular sub-set of liberal language. Though with strong roots in English philosophical traditions, its more recent manifestations have, broadly speaking, been American. They resonate with the constitutional arrangements peculiar to the USA and, assisted by the worldwide power of American publishing and the opulence of its leading universities, have often, and mistakenly, been thought to represent liberalism as a whole. More to the point, liberal political philosophy now constitutes the major creative and probing instance of current liberal theorizing even as, ironically, the vernacular connotations of liberalism are under frequent attack in broader American political discourse. The previous period of liberal flourishing took place a century ago among the new and left liberals in the UK, but it was far more immersed in actual political life and reform and served as an apposite example of what action-oriented and group-supported political ideologies are like. If
Chapter 3
engaged with liberalism as a set of discontinuous, overlapping, and reinforcing concrete and politically engaged histories, the political impact of philosophical liberalism is partly disabled by its fundamental premises. It is largely an abstract and ideal-type normative approach invoking an ostensibly supra-political, universal, and decontextualized social ethics towards which all right-minded individuals should aim. Admittedly, there has also been another 20th century flourishing of ideas claiming to be liberal, neoliberalism, but those claims are questionable, as we will see in
Chapter 7
.

Philosophical liberalism presents arguments for the construction of legitimate and ethically attractive social arrangements, focusing on a number of central areas. It is, first, predominantly preoccupied with the shaping of a just society. Second, it assumes individuals to be rational, autonomous, and purposive agents and it is designed to promote those attributes. Third, it seeks out justifications for a decent society that all its members can endorse. It does so by emphasizing large-scale involvement in decision-making, and it holds out the prospect of outline consensus on communal policy based on an appeal to human rationality and fairness. Fourth, many of its articulations have a specific take on the state, to which it entrusts the securing of the political end of neutrality among the different conceptions of the good held by its citizens.

All this means that people must be offered the opportunity to express their preferences through a threefold process. First, individuals should be given not only the vote but a voice. They should be encouraged to articulate their views clearly, without hindrance. Second, they should be persuaded to play a role in public life so that they can control their own fates. Hence active political participation has to be promoted. Third, they should respect others in the same manner in which they wish to be respected—that is called recognition. Recognition has symbolic value in accepting the uniqueness, dignity, and worth of individuals, but it also has material consequences for the allocation of possessions and benefits. All those liberal principles are there to be discovered through the exercise of reason and ethical intuitions.

Philosophic liberalism is strongly universalistic and unafraid to postulate moral truths. It does not see itself as one amongst many ideological creeds competing for primacy but as a prescription for the good life of individuals and a civilized life for a society, in essence above the contingencies of the political fray. It is in effect a system of high-minded morality—indeed, on that view liberalism is simply identical to a social ethics that is insulated from politics. It has, however, impressively developed a persuasive force of its own that has often overtaken more vernacular expressions of liberalism and—at least among the more cerebral liberal aficionados—put those expressions in the shade.

Not all of this is new. For centuries such analytical-philosophical models have anchored liberalism in a frame of desirable human conduct with instant, universal rational appeal that ostensibly decontextualizes it and detaches it from the vagaries of life. Social contract theory established grounds for founding a political society anchored in certain ideas about human nature as reasonable and conflict-averse. Psychological approaches to human flourishing stipulated that the maximizing urge to self-benefit could be harnessed to a society useful to all. But liberal political philosophy has undergone an extraordinary flowering in recent decades as a minor intellectual industry. It is particularly adept at generating thought experiments to initiate schemes for the fair distribution of crucial goods. Those experiments hypothesize what risk-averse individuals would want for themselves and others if they were originally ignorant about their social circumstances, and about most of their capacities.