Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (20 page)

Liberal passions: a redemptive finale

Having noted some liberal lapses, this chapter ends with a corrective to a typical misidentification of the relationship of liberals to their creed. It is not in doubt that liberalism is about the rational application of reason to political issues. Yet in recent times that has often been costly in failing to find a language appealing to populations with different political tastes. The association of liberalism with cool, reflective rationality is only one side of the coin. Like any other ideology, liberalism has an emotional side that its critics underestimate and of which its adherents are not always aware. For Hobhouse, ‘the philosophies that remain ineffectual and academic are those that are formed by abstract reflection without relation to the thirsty souls of human kind.’ He contended that only the philosophies that arose out of the practical demands of human feeling have driving force. In effect, that is what gave them their ideological force. Liberalism was not just about reason but about imagination and social sentiment. That, liberals believe, is where one of liberalism’s great strengths lies: its rational ideas—at their best—inspire passion and commitment. Liberals get hot under the collar when confronted with injustice, and outraged by violations of human dignity and by physical violence against people. Dehumanizing acts provoke anger and protest—though liberals being liberals, such protests usually occur through petitions, letters to the editor, and campaigns to change laws or policy, rather than by direct action. That is one reason, perhaps, why the suffragettes fighting for their right to vote over a century ago lost patience with liberalism. Liberal parties have been modest in their use of bombast and propaganda to arouse support in an age of mass politics, unlike demagogues from the left and the right. That, unfortunately, reduces their competitive edge in the world of politics.

Liberals, as we saw in
Chapter 2
, are not averse to nationalism either, though they may prefer its milder and less strident forms of patriotism. And nationalism is a very emotive practice of identifying with one’s country or ethnicity. Liberals appear to extend the right to national self-determination to all nations, though in a world that acknowledges plural ethnic groupings it is increasingly complicated to agree on who constitutes a nation. Ultimately, liberals wax emotional about their own view of the world. As the Italian liberal historian Guido de Ruggiero put it, ‘liberalism possesses that kind of tact or flair …which …is true political sensitiveness, and serves to recognize everything that is human—human strength and human weakness, human reason and human passion, human interest and human morality’. It is therefore fitting to end this book with Hobhouse’s message to liberal democrats:

… they may come to learn that the vision of justice in the wholeness of her beauty kindles a passion that may not flare up into moments of dramatic scintillation, but burns with the enduring glow of the central heat.

References

Chapter 1: A house of many mansions

F. Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(London: Penguin Books, 2012 [first published 1992]), especially pp. 45, 48, 51.

R.G. Collingwood, ‘Introduction’ in G. de Ruggiero,
The History of European Liberalism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1959 [first published 1927]), p. vii.

L. Strauss,
Liberalism
(New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. vi.

L. Trilling,
The Liberal Imagination
(New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), p. 7.

L.T. Hobhouse,
Liberalism
(London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), pp. 46–7, 128. Hobhouse’s
Liberalism
remains an exemplary exposition of the humanist liberal viewpoint.

K. Marx and F. Engels,
The German Ideology
(C.J. Arthur, ed.) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), p. 99.

C. Mouffe,
The Democratic Paradox
(London: Verso, 2000), p. 50.

R. Kirk,
The Conservative Mind
(London: Faber and Faber, 1954), pp. 388–9.

J. Rawls,
Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 12; and R. Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’ in R. Dworkin,
A Matter of Principle
(Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1986), pp. 191–2. These two highly prominent American philosophers of liberalism are discussed in Chapter 6.

John Maynard Keynes was the most influential economist of the twentieth century and also a supporter of the British Liberal Party. The quotation comes from his
Essays in Persuasion
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1931), p. 343.

Chapter 2: The liberal narrative

John Locke’s seminal discussions of consent and of resistance are in his ‘Second Treatise of Government’,
Two Treatises of Government
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), Sections 96, 119, 225.

Isaiah Berlin’s singular take on Machiavelli’s
The Prince
is in I. Berlin,
Against the Current
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1979), pp. 25–79.

É. Durkheim,
The Division of Labour in Society
(New York: The Free Press, 1964).

Mill quoted W. von Humboldt’s
The Limits of State Action
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 48. This was only published in English in 1854, a few years before Mill’s
On Liberty
in 1859.

H. Croly,
Progressive Democracy
(New Brunswick: Transaction Publications, 1914), pp. 203–4.

L. Hartz,
The Liberal Tradition in America
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), p. 228.

L. von Mises,
Liberalism
(Irvington, NY, 1985 [first published 1927]), pp. xvi–xvii.

H. Spencer,
The Man versus the State
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969 [first published 1884]), p. 67.

Chapter 3: Layers of liberalism

Reinhart Koselleck’s approach is epitomized in his
Futures Past
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

J. Locke, ‘Second Treatise of Government’,
Two Treatises of Government
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), Section 57.

C.B. Macpherson,
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

John Bright, Speech on ‘Foreign Policy’ in Birmingham, 29 October 1858.
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bright-selected-speeches-of-the-rt-hon-john-bright-m-p-on-public-questions#lf0618_label_037

The quotation from a speech by Richard Cobden at Manchester, 15 January 1846 is in A. Bullock and M. Shock (eds.),
The Liberal Tradition from Fox to Keynes
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 53.

The quotation from John Milton’s
Areopagitica
(1644) can be found in
http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/literature/books_in_PDF/1644%20Areopagitica.pdf
, p. 36.

William Beveridge’s five giants are listed in his report, ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’, Cmd 6404 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1942), p. 6.

The phrase ‘muscular liberalism’ appears in a speech by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, delivered in Munich on 5 February 2011. See
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/02/terrorism-islam-ideology

George W. Bush, ‘Speech to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia’, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 12 December 2005.
http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/12.12.05.html

Chapter 4: The morphology of liberalism

For a detailed discussion of liberal morphology, and ideological morphology in general, see M. Freeden,
Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). A briefer guide is M. Freeden,
Ideology: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

J. Locke, ‘Second Treatise of Government’,
Two Treatises of Government
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), Section 5.

B. Mandeville,
The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits
.
http://lf-oll.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/846/Mandeville_0014-01_EBk_v6.0.pdf

L. Hartz,
The Liberal Tradition in America
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), p. 9.

D. Bell, ‘What is Liberalism?’
Political Theory
, vol. 42 (2014), pp. 682–715. This is a considered attempt to reinterpret the history of liberal thinking as the sum of the arguments that liberals claim to be liberal over time and space, while Bell abstains from assessing their relative weight within the liberal tradition.

Chapter 5: Liberal luminaries

J.S. Mill, ‘On Liberty’ in J.M. Robson (ed.),
Essays on Politics and Society, Collected Works of J.S. Mill
, vol. 18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 261.

T.H. Green,
Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract
(Oxford: Slatter and Rose, 1881), pp. 9–10.

L.T. Hobhouse,
Liberalism
(London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), pp. 124, 126.

J.A. Hobson,
The Crisis of Liberalism
(London: P.S. King & Son, 1911), pp. xii, 97, 113.

M. Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975 [first published 1792]), pp. 139, 319.

B. Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’ in
Political Writings
(B. Fontana ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 317, 323.

W. von Humboldt,
The Limits of State Action
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 10, and J.S. Mill, ‘On Liberty’,
op. cit
., p. 261.

B. Croce,
Politics and Morals
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946), pp. 78, 84, 87, 102.

C. Rosselli,
Liberal Socialism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 [first published 1930]), pp. 78, 85, 86.

J. Dewey,
Liberalism and Social Action
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935), pp. 15–16, 27, 38, 43. Dewey’s book remains one of the finest reflections on liberal values and liberal history.

F.A. Hayek, ‘Liberalism’ in F.A. Hayek (ed.),
New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 130, 141, 148; F.A. Hayek,
The Constitution of Liberty
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 39.

Chapter 6: Philosophical liberalism: idealizing justice

John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 3. He discusses the idea of a realistic utopia in J. Rawls,
The Law of Peoples
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 11–23. On Rawls’s minimalist liberalism, see J. Rawls,
Political Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Herbert Asquith’s comment on individual development is in a speech he delivered in the House of Commons (
Hansard
, 4th Series, 18 April 1907).

For the views of Rawls and Dworkin on neutrality, see J. Rawls,
Political Liberalism, op. cit
., p. 161; and R. Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’ in R. Dworkin,
A Matter of Principle
(Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1986), pp. 181–204.

H. Croly,
The Promise of American Life
(New York: Macmillan, 1909), p. 192.

G.F. Gaus,
Justificatory Liberalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 293–4.

B. Williams,
In the Beginning was the Deed
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), especially pp. 1–18.

I. Berlin,
Four Essays on Liberty
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

This contains his most famous analyses of liberal thought and his treatment of the concept of liberty.

Chapter 7: Misappropriations, disparagements, and lapses

J. Szacki,
Liberalism after Communism
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), p. 109.

G. Sørensen,
A Liberal World Order in Crisis
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 54.

R.H. Tawney,
Equality
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938 edn), p. 208.

H.J. Laski,
The Rise of European Liberalism
(London: Unwin Books, 1962 [1936]), pp. 167–8.

J.H. Hallowell,
The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1943).

The comment on the 1988 presidential campaign is in P.M. Garry,
Liberalism and American Identity
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1992), p. 10.

J.S. Mill, ‘On Liberty’, in J.M. Robson (ed.),
Essays on Politics and Society, Collected Works of J.S. Mill
, vol. 18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 224.

W. Lippmann,
Public Opinion
(New York: Macmillan, 1922).

J. Armsden, ‘First Principles of Social Reform’,
Westminster Review
, vol. 169 (1908), p. 639.

L. Chiozza Money,
Insurance versus Poverty
(London: Methuen and Co, 1912), p. 7.

J.S. Mill, ‘The Subjection of Women’, in J.M. Robson (ed.),
Essays on Equality, Law and Education, Collected Works of J.S. Mill
, vol. 21 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 264.

L.T. Hobhouse,
Liberalism
(London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), pp. 51, 250–1.

G. de Ruggiero,
The History of European Liberalism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1959 [1927]), p. 390.

Further reading