Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (6 page)

From another perspective, consider the advice given to Italian princes by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) on how to pursue political success ruthlessly and efficiently, advice that was judged to be subversive of the ethical tenets preached by the Church. No liberal himself, Machiavelli has been seen by the liberal political philosopher Isaiah Berlin (see
Chapter 6
) as promoting a world in which different value-systems could live side by side, through his postulation of a rival political code of conduct alongside a religious one. That, argued Berlin, paved one of many paths towards the value-pluralism that liberalism embraces and encouraged the practice of challenging belief systems that claim a monopoly over their hold on the truth. That said, we now regard Machiavelli as a major disseminator and developer of an earlier Roman republicanism. Republicanism offered a popular basis of political power. Its notions of group liberty and of citizenship signalled an affinity with later liberal ideas concerning the self-rule of a people and an end to arbitrary dominance.

Social, economic, and cultural transformations

Another kind of transformation that stimulated the rise of liberalism was the growing urbanization of European societies. The gradual consolidation of a middle class, a bourgeoisie, with commercial interests and property assets, strengthened demands to further and protect the production of, and trading in, goods. The freeing of markets from arbitrary control, or from bureaucratic fetters, was added to the fundamental rights that individuals could claim. Those rights were initially wrested from ruling elites, but they grew to become expectations from the state itself. Rather than just assuming its traditional role of maintaining internal order and external defence, and raising taxes for those purposes, the state was re-invented as the guarantor of a set of rights that also included freedom of trade and respect for property. The latter two were incorporated into what eventually became aspects of liberal thinking and practice. The new economic role of the state was defined through phrases such as ‘holding the ring’, ‘honest broker’, or ensuring a ‘level playing field’. Economic activities were thus state enabled, not state directed. Voluntary organizations such as banks, firms, and factories, inspired by leaders of industry and other individual entrepreneurs, all located in civil society—the arena of voluntary economic and social interaction—would be the drivers of economic activity and commerce. The state would ensure they had relatively free rein.

As for property, it is a moot point whether its protection and valuing are themselves liberal features or whether the institution of private property is one of the prerequisites to developing fundamental liberal attributes such as freedom and individuality. If the former, a defence of private property would have acknowledged the personal contribution of individuals to their own good and that of society at large through their labour and inventiveness. It would have recognized the importance of justifiable security, incentives, rewards, and—not least—independence in private life in the form of material assets. All those had implications for an orderly and rule-bound public sphere. But it would also have sown the seeds of competitiveness: a virtue for some liberals and a vice—when found in excess—for others. And it would have endorsed the importance of the division of labour, which for many liberals introduced a justifiable inequality based on diverse talents or industriousness. But while critics of liberalism have indicted the division of labour for fomenting gross and unjust inequality, the left-liberal French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) regarded it as furthering a beneficial social interdependence, thus illustrating the malleability of liberal ideology.

If, however, private property was seen as a means to other liberal attributes, say self-development, that might explain the fluctuating fortunes of the concept of property in liberal thought and practice—namely, its relative centrality or distance from the liberal core, on which, see
Chapter 4
. Such variations may have been the outcome of identifying other ways of furthering liberal values, with similar effect. For instance, if income were to be redistributed to those more in need, rather than allowing property to accumulate unreservedly, that might achieve a fairer notion of individuality.

The growth of universities and the thirst for knowledge fuelled by human curiosity were another factor in the planting of liberalism’s seeds, harnessing the realms of culture and civilization to a liberal temperament. The search for new boundaries of experience was accompanied by the critical evaluation of knowledge, rather than its passive acceptance. Sensitivity to different forms of human expression, and the cultivation of reflective sensibilities towards what one was studying or arguing, became intertwined with liberal values. In Germany, the 18th and 19th century movement towards culture and education, known as
Bildung
, encapsulated some of those aims. German philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) believed that freedom was attained through education and that the recognition of cultural pluralism fostered individual development. Wilhelm von Humboldt, another German philosopher, advocated continuous individual growth. He was admired by Mill, who introduced his famous treatise
On Liberty
with an approving quotation from von Humboldt, citing the latter’s grand, leading principle: ‘the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity’.

Sustaining all that was the enlightenment, a movement of ideas located mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries, which promoted the view that empirical evidence was the basis of rational knowledge and focused on the scientific investigation of human beings in a social context, as well as on its artistic expression. This anthropocentric view of the ‘science of man’ also allowed for the study of the moral and cultural components of human conduct. It encouraged a non-dogmatic, experimental, and critical assessment of the human condition, releasing philosophical and social thought from traditional restraints. Enlightenment thinkers with direct impact on political thought were notable in particular in France—Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755); in Germany—Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); and in Scotland—David Hume (1711–76) and Adam Smith (1723–90). Instead of religious authoritarianism, they practised an open-ended curiosity, and most of them extolled the ideals of freedom and equality. That provided an impetus to the rational, planned construction of social and political institutions and to the furtherance of toleration. All these were accompanied by a swelling demand that the voice of the people be heard. Initially, that voice was restricted to some of the wealthy, the educated, and the articulate segments of society, particularly through a free and often outspoken press and pamphlet culture. But the idea of broad representation became another building block in the consolidation of liberal principles.

When liberalism met democracy

By the time of the rise of mass politics in the later 19th century the ground had been prepared for the crystallization of liberalism in its political forms. Equipped with those beliefs, liberals were understandably attracted to, and derived strength from, the early 19th century theories of rational progress gleaned from the enlightenment. But their fate was also intertwined with the emergence of a large Liberal party on the British political scene. Aristocratic landowners within the political faction known as the Whigs had been strongly aligned with Parliament, rather than the monarchy, and began to be seen as a force for progress. The moderate political reforms they supported slowly enabled middle class manufacturers and entrepreneurs to enter the political arena. The latter fought for the release of trade and industry from economic fetters and, being innovators, were far more amenable to change than the landed aristocracy. The ideas supported by those commercial and urban powers began to be put into practice. Notable radical reformers such as Richard Cobden (1804–65) and John Bright (1811–89) rose to prominence amongst them, preaching the gospel of free trade and internationalism. The Liberal party came into being as a combination of those groups and became a national party.

One of the chief political impacts of British liberalism was to press for the extension of the franchise through two major Reform Acts, in 1832 and in 1867. Both were cautious steps on the way to democracy, increasing the number of those entitled to vote to male householders. Women, however, had to wait until the early 20th century for the right to vote, agitating for political liberty and equality through the suffragette movement. That right was conceded only following their great contributions to the First World War effort. The Reform Acts also gradually enfranchised those who had previously been debarred from voting for religious reasons, and the Third Reform Act of 1884–5 redistributed electoral constituencies more fairly and equally, reflecting demographic shifts of population. Another political impact was to pass legislation that reduced controls on economic activity. It resulted in the Liberal party, and liberalism more generally, being associated with free trade and laissez-faire, even though governmental regulation and intervention still continued to a lesser degree and proper laissez-faire was always more mythical than real.

A third political impact was the introduction, from the 1880s, of a specific political programme put to the electorate, rather than just fighting elections on one issue at a time or as a personal contest between two candidates. The Liberal party helped to modernize politics by transforming parties from being exclusively machines for winning votes and putting people into office into ideological disseminators of policies whose role was also to wage battles of ideas. The influence of liberalism as a political theory was immensely assisted by the Liberal party forming governments for extensive periods between the middle of the 19th century and the First World War.

It was only by the mid 19th century that liberalism and democracy began to consolidate what now seems to be an inseparable relationship. Up to that point liberals were wary about what they believed were two dangerous features of democracy. First, democracy could develop into a tyranny of the majority, thus merely replacing the older despotisms of minorities wielded by kings and aristocrats with newer ones. Second, given the abysmal state of education of the population at large, it could perpetuate mediocre rule. That was one reason why liberals were passionate advocates of compulsory education for children: an enlightened democracy required the ability to make good and informed choices. It was only much later—as noted in
Chapter 1
—that the term ‘liberal-democracy’ came into circulation, with its message that democracy was not just about winning elections and majoritarian rule, but about how that rule was exercised between elections. Liberals, in turn, learnt to accept that their pursuit of liberty and the discovery of the individual had to operate within the framework of an inclusionary political system, even if it ran the risk of including illiberal voices.

The junction of ideas

The path taken by political liberalism was, however, hardly representative of the broader genres of liberal thought, emphasizing yet again that political parties rarely constitute an ideological vanguard. More dynamic and imaginative versions of political thought were bubbling away, with the result that liberalism began to thrive at the meeting-points of powerful intellectual currents. It emerged as a humanist endeavour, an emancipation of the human spirit, and a force for remarkable social as well as political transformation. A regard for human nature as fundamentally rational, cooperative, engaging in cogent communication, and capable of respecting others as well as showing individual initiative, became integral to liberal ideology. The Swiss-French liberal politician and writer Benjamin Constant (see
Chapter 5
) identified the ‘liberty of the moderns’ as the triumph of individuality through the growth of freedom of opinion, expression, and religion, but he also welcomed the participation of individuals in the social body. Thus arose the drive to devising and nourishing social institutions that could reflect and energize that rational cooperation. Initially, theories such as Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ did the necessary work. According to that theory, when individuals pursued their own interests, they concurrently contributed to the good of society as a whole. ‘Private gain, public benefit’ suggested a natural harmony in the workings of civil society that was sufficient for social stability and prosperity.

Subsequently, it became unclear whether such harmony was automatic or needed to be engineered by human design. That was the problem facing the Philosophic Radicals, another group whose impact on the development of liberalism was considerable. Their leading proponent, the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), was inspired by a belief in the scientific organization of humankind. The scientific principle he claimed to discover was that individuals were psychologically motivated by a desire to maximize their own pleasure or utility and minimize their pain. But if that was true then the ‘invisible hand’ doctrine would already be at work and indeed secure what Bentham called ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ It transpired, however, that this was not necessarily the case. External circumstances had to be moulded so as to accelerate that process. Consequently the Philosophic Radicals saw the task of social philosophers and reformers as one of radically reshaping constitutions, legal codes, and even prisons, to elicit the optimal well-being of members of a society. Bentham’s extreme individualism recognized only separate persons and he did not see society as a unit with its own attributes and ends. The key to his objective therefore lay in modifying individual conduct, while side-stepping appeals to the more elaborate moral visions subsequently voiced by liberals.