Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (19 page)

Consequently, new notions of interventionism have now entered internationalist liberal discourse. Universal welfare considerations that were well-known to layer four liberals (the securing of conditions that prevent domestic humanitarian crises), have changed the rationale for intervention and enforcement, as for example in Kosovo, in Africa, and in the Middle East—albeit in selective and haphazard manner. However, there is no consensus among states or among students of international studies on prioritizing those additional rights or even on classifying them as liberal. The problem with accounts of liberal internationalism and with ascribing the adjective ‘liberal’ to the main agents committed to constructing a world order is not that they conceal the full view of liberalism, but that they do not seem to benefit from knowledge of the richness of liberal argument that has accrued over time and across space. Although that problem exists in some circles with respect to domestic liberalisms as well, it is much more prevalent in international politics.

Liberalism as culprit

One consistent stream of criticism of liberal premises, with the characteristic one-sidedness of ideological disputes, has originated in the Marxist camp. Marxists have regarded liberalism as a typical bourgeois ideology, furthering capitalist interests at the expense of the working class, or engaged in the abstract utopian promotion of human rights rather than the concrete advance of material conditions. H.J. Laski (1893–1950), the British writer and socialist who went through a Marxist phase, offers a good illustration. Laski acknowledged in passing the existence of left-liberal thinkers, such as T.H. Green or Hobhouse, and even praised the early liberal breakthroughs such as advancing freedom of contract. But liberalism ‘forgot not less completely than its predecessors that the claims of social justice were not exhausted by its victory.’ The historical institutions created by freedom ‘veiled an internal decay’:

Liberalism has always been affected by its tendency to regard the poor as men who have failed through their own fault. It has always suffered from its inability to realize that great possessions mean power over men and women as well as over things. …Its purposes, no doubt, were always expressed in universal terms; but they were, in practical operation …the servant of a single class in the community.

In public political discourse in the United States liberalism is, from a very different stance, frequently—and dichotomously—paired with conservatism. Even professional analysts tend to work within the confines of that pairing. To suggest that Americans can simply be parcelled out between the two headings is a distortion of massive proportions. But it has immense rhetorical significance in American political debates and it spills over into political fault lines. On the whole, conservatives in contemporary America are thought to prefer the status quo, law and order, private property rights, markets, limited government, and a stratified society. Conversely, liberals are believed to prioritize big government (the legacy of F.D. Roosevelt’s presidency in the 1930s), civil rights (the legacy of the 1960s), tolerance, and greater social equality. The accuracy of those generalizations aside, they pervade politics at every level, from tax policy, to immigration, to health insurance, to abortion. They create dichotomous confrontations that do not enable any form of common ground or mutual respect that liberal theorists would seek.

In a notable book entitled
The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology
, the conservative American academic John H. Hallowell accused liberalism of moving from vigour to decadence. He held its tolerance and pluralism responsible for a sapping of the political and ideational will that eased the way for the interwar totalitarian ideologies of left and right. A more recent example of the unbalanced misrepresentation of liberalism occurred in the 1988 presidential campaign, focused in part on attacking the ‘L-word’, liberalism—described by one commentator as ‘a deliberate attempt to remove the liberal tradition from America’s political identity’. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate, was ‘tarred’ with that brush, while liberalism was controversially equated with undermining national defence and leniency towards dangerous criminals. Unlike its European counterparts, the pejorative connotations of liberalism are strong enough in the USA to render the word tricky to employ favourably, and even its substitutes such as ‘progressive’ run into difficulties. Though there are recognizable liberal currents coursing through American politics, they relate to an ideology that all too often dares not speak its name.

Liberal excesses and arrogance

Liberalism did not invent the rule of law but it became its champion. Within the right package of values, the rule of law is an embodiment of good procedure, of fair treatment, of rights protection, and of the predictability needed to ensure the smooth running of a political system. But if the rule of law is divorced from democratic control—as was the case with British rule in India prior to 1947, and in other British colonies—what goes under the name of liberalism ceases to be liberal. Instead it becomes a strict, often repressive, imposition of law on a dominated society, without the quality of mercy, decency, or respect. Liberal standards of culture and education condemned colonial societies to an inferior status. Attempts of local societies to express dissent, to protest against imperial laws, or to follow their own practices were often quelled harshly. The free development of individuality, so cherished by liberals at home, did not apply to many cultures abroad. The greatest advocate of that triad, Mill, thought no differently, as the following passage shows (race was a people, a cultural and ethnic entity, in his terminology):

… we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. …Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.

In addition, the expansion of capitalism and of markets under the aegis of free trade does not hide the fact that they have frequently been employed as instruments of imperial dominion and exploitation, as Hobson knew. In the cases when so-called liberal states have been guilty of such exercises of power, they have excluded themselves from the liberal family, no matter what lip-service they may have paid to liberal ideals and visions. The fact that societies that were on the whole domestically liberal pursued shockingly illiberal policies abroad may then either be seen as the failed extension of an external liberal civilizing project or, more plausibly, simply as a deviation from the core beliefs of liberalism—chiefly from the universal claims to liberty and individual development it espouses.

In domestic policy, too, liberalism has had a fraught relationship with democracy, some of it justifiable, some not. From many points of view liberalism is an elite doctrine, catering to the educated, or maybe only those educated in a certain set of Western and Northern European values that then spread with uneven success to other corners of the globe. Liberalism lacks a populist appeal and cannot be delivered in easy slogans or sound bites. There is undoubtedly a visible paternalist streak among liberals—their high-mindedness, their self-belief in a civilizing mission, and their over-emphasis on education as the key to citizenship. Reading Mill’s
On Liberty
, it is difficult not to assume that Mill regarded himself as a model for the free progressive individual he envisaged, remote from the experiences of the majority of people, about whose political capacities he had serious reservations. When one reads current political philosophers, the onerous requirement many of them endorse for people to reflect on and assess continuously their life-choices could only come from an intellectual’s desk. No less notably, the more liberalism relies on regulatory measures to optimize the life-chances of all the members of a society, and the more it entertains a homogeneous and unified view of society, the more its directive tendencies come into play. That is evident especially in layer four liberalism, the layer that produced the welfare state with its parallel enabling and steering practices.

Liberalism’s paternalism, with its professed benevolence of privileged classes towards the marginalized, is not of the hard kind, arrogant or overbearing by design. It is rather a soft paternalism driven by a genuine reforming urge. Nonetheless, throughout the 19th century and beyond, liberals promoted an idea of what a desirable character would look like and set preconditions for full participation in the growing democratic process. At first only property holders, then only those with minimal educational standards, were deemed fit for the full burdens of citizenship. Women fared even worse. In the UK, for example, they were excluded from full voting rights until 1928, including the years of the reforming liberal administrations between 1906 and 1914. One reason given was that they were insufficiently independent and their votes would be influenced by their fathers, brothers, and husbands—you cannot get more literally paternalist than that!

Having embraced democracy with initial reluctance, liberals sought to achieve social regeneration and establish benchmarks of what decent living would resemble, leaving many of those benchmarks to be determined by experts. Thus, individual contributions to social insurance schemes were made compulsory in order to render them financially viable. Many apparently liberal welfare policies, particularly in the USA, had punitive consequences for workers. American progressivism, too, was not exempt from paternalist traits, with Walter Lippmann extolling the importance of experts in relation to the general public in his book
Public Opinion
. There may be nothing wrong with putting one’s trust in experts, provided they are under public scrutiny, but liberal policy-making tended to rush ahead of such consultation. Too many people were considered to be incapable of producing the social visions that could emancipate them. When UK Liberal governments introduced compulsory social insurance schemes over a century ago, they were resisted by older style, second and third layer liberals, as ‘the newer Liberalism of Social Responsibility and …Paternal Government’. But other liberals saw that compulsion in a different light. The economist and politician L. Chiozza Money wrote:

It is not difficult to get the average man who works for his living to see that the compulsion of democratic law is not only a different thing from the economic compulsion to which he must day by day submit or starve, but that by virtue of the compulsion of law he may find mitigation of economic compulsion and even be saved from it.

Deliberate and inadvertent discrimination

Liberalism has its own silences and misrecognitions. If other ideologies often blatantly and deliberately tell a misleading tale about liberalism and its beliefs, liberals have themselves been guilty of walking around with blinkers and refusing to confront, or optimistically ignoring, crucial issues in their midst. Questions of race and ethnicity have only slowly crept into their field of vision in fifth layer liberalism. Liberal responsibility for their neglect cannot be overlooked, particularly in an ideology deeming itself to be socially aware and responsive. Even now liberalism exhibits a colour blindness it cannot completely shake off and its self-proclaimed inclusionary concern for the general interest has not eliminated an exclusionist, predominantly white, racial patriarchy.

Gender issues have been problematic for liberals in their own right, despite an earlier awareness of some of the problematics involved in the political standing of women, as illustrated by Mary Wollstonecraft. Mill, together with Harriet Taylor, his wife, was an early advocate of equal political rights—and votes—for women, insisting that ‘the inequality of rights between men and women has no other source than the law of the strongest.’ But the attainment of formal and legal equality that women’s enfranchisement brought in its wake has been attacked by feminists on two grounds. First, it was too superficial and partial a reduction of inequality, as economic and cultural gender divides still obtained. Second, a theme common among recent feminists, it did little more than turn women politically into men, absorbing them into the already existing category of a citizen based on masculinist cultural characteristics, without any sensitivity towards constructive gender differences. That type of gender blindness doomed liberalism to fall short of feminist aspirations. Its historical association with contracts carried on to marriage with potentially oppressive practices. It was accused of falling prey to glib dichotomies in which men inhabited the public domain of mind, rationality, and universality, while women occupied the private domain of body, emotion, and particularity. Instead, feminists approached radical Marxist and postmodernist ideologies for more effective and more ethical solutions. Perspectives from outside the liberal camp tend, though, to exaggerate liberal ill-intent and incompetence, and some feminists have stereotyped all liberalisms with some of its early 20th century incarnations.

All these instances demonstrate how an ideology such as liberalism can falter the moment it pursues one of its core values or concepts in an extreme way, disregarding the others. Legal propriety without tolerance or regard for the general interest leads to institutional brutality. Unconstrained markets and wealth accumulation without social justice lead to profiteering and new unregulated concentrations of power. The search for civilized standards of living without democratic sensitivity leads to a remote elitism. The belief in rational consensus and national homogeneity without alertness to diversity and difference leads to social exclusion. The inclusion of women without recognizing the continuation of patriarchy by other means has proved inadequate. Any one liberal value on its own is no guarantee of liberalism and is more likely to undermine it. Liberalism as an ideology always has recourse to a set of values. It holds its various components in mutual check, balancing them out while allowing for flexible permutations as long as they are not self-destructing.