Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (8 page)

Chapter 3

Layers of liberalism

Disconnected and overlapping histories

Liberals and students of liberalism have frequently regarded their cluster of ideas as a unity developing smoothly through time. That view reflects their cardinal belief in a linear progression of humanity towards higher and more civilized ends. But liberalism itself has done no such thing. That evolutionary self-image, wedded to theories of progress and cherished by so many liberals, is not borne out by liberalism’s own history. Instead, liberalism has undergone fits and bursts of change resulting both in convergences and separations of its key tenets. That is a consequence of liberal ideas having originated at different times, from diverse sources, and with varying aims in mind.

Accordingly, it is more helpful to approach liberalism as an ideology with complex, interacting layers in a constant state of mutual rearrangement. Crucially, those layers do not constitute a neat sequential chain. They are a composite of accumulated, discarded, and retrieved strata in continuously fluctuating combinations. As will presently be shown, the so-called liberal tradition is a mixture of at least five different historical layers linked, if at all, in ill-fitting and patchy continuities. One reason why the five layers do not add up into a unified whole is because they too often pull in irreconcilable directions. Some do indeed succeed others, but others exist in parallel, and others still disappear and then re-emerge. Liberalism’s newer layers often obscure and conceal, as well as expand, the gathered meanings it contains and transmits.

Conceptual historians like to use the phrase ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’—an expression coined by the doyen of that school, Reinhart Koselleck. Applied to liberalism it implies that our current understandings always include new ways of looking at earlier, past understandings of that ideology, as if those understandings live only in the present. Thus, if liberalism once concentrated on non-intervention in individual lives, liberals may now regard the unremitting application of that time-honoured practice both inadequate and occasionally undesirable. Although it still appears in many liberal versions, non-intervention may be accompanied by appeals for measured intervention to mitigate human misery. All those stratified understandings combine to form a rich tapestry of the liberalism we now experience and contemplate.

Inasmuch as no layer can capture the intricacy of liberalism on its own, liberalism cannot be understood without acknowledging their interplay. In the course of those intersections, we may find one major layer (say, the defence of economic markets) thickening and becoming more marked, while another layer (say, the securing of social rights) is present in less noticeable form. But in another instance that interrelationship may be inverted—the previously major theme shrinks, while the minor one exhibits prominence. Indeed, any given version of liberalism may deliberately exclude or debase segments of other layers in the liberal tradition if it deems them incompatible with its own: liberals can be as selective in doctoring their stories as the rest of us!

That constant interplay of layers throws light on the range of existing interpretations of what it means to be a liberal and provides the tools through which to chart the intricacies the term invokes. To do justice to the complexity of liberalism means to attempt to reconstruct a rather messy interrelationship of phases, trends, hiatuses, and sub-plots. An idealized optimal liberalism would include the features of all five layers as they have presented themselves over the past few hundred years. However, that is logically and substantively impossible because some features of liberalism are simply incompatible with others. Accordingly, no actual variant of liberalism exhibits all five layers. All known liberalisms are therefore at most only sub-optimal, ‘second-best’ approximations of the over-arching ideational resources that liberal ideology can host, and has hosted.

How, then, do the layers interact? Imagine a sheaf of five sheets of paper, one on top of the other, each of which contains different messages liberalism has imparted. The surface of each sheet has a mixture of transparent and semi-opaque holes cut into it, the latter covered with wax paper. That means that through the top sheet you can clearly read some areas of the lower sheets, but other parts of those lower sheets are rendered fuzzy. And of course, where no holes have been cut, the areas underneath are concealed entirely. In addition, liberals are prone to re-arrange the order of the sheets, except for the bottom one, which they leave in place. That early, bottom sheet extols the importance of liberty and rights, and that message can be seen through all the sheets stacked above it. But the view of other inscriptions on the lower sheets will depend on how the cut-outs are positioned on each of the sheets placed higher up. Moreover, as the sequence of the sheets is shuffled from time to time and from place to place, the view through the holes changes continuously. Thus, messages concerning competition may be seen in one arrangement of the layers but veiled in another. Sometimes, too, liberals simply crunch up and throw away one or more of the sheets, leaving a much thinner version of the combined liberal tradition.

Layer one

The first and earliest liberal layer—the bottom sheet—is the most durable of them all. Its origins lie in pre-democratic times, long before the term ‘liberal’ became prevalent politically and ideologically. The seeds of that liberalism sprouted, as noted in
Chapter 2
, as an uncoordinated, but strongly felt, ‘contra tyranny’ movement. It stimulated a restraining doctrine, curbing the rulers’ capacity for arbitrary conduct and distancing them from the ruled. That first layer was—and still is—a liberalism of simultaneous release and constraint, one in which spaces are cleared around individuals in order for them to have the freedom to express themselves, to be counted as part of the body politic, and to act without fear or favour. But it is also a restricted freedom, because for any individual to have such freedom acknowledged requires that others be accorded it as well. And because one person’s liberty may clash with another’s, liberty cannot be unlimited for all. In Locke’s
Second Treatise of Government
, he significantly distinguished liberty from licence, liberty being not for ‘every Man to do what he lists’ but to ‘dispose, and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within the allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own’. First layer liberalism is fundamentally constitutional, relating to a
Rechtsstaat
, a state based on the rule of law. In Finland, for instance, this has remained the heart of liberalism; in many other societies, it is only the foundation for the further growth of liberal ideas.

In that first layer, some rights were presented as natural and inalienable human attributes, with which people were born. Nonetheless, they were fragile attributes, often under dire threat, and therefore their safeguarding became the express purpose of establishing governments. The initial association of liberalism with rights, and of the political sphere with serving those rights and thereby preserving essential human liberties, was as a doctrine of limitation both of individuals and of governments, in which the idea of a social contract was preeminent. That limitation was cast in the shape of physical and legal curbs. Special over-riding reasons had to be brought into play for endorsing intervention in a person’s space without his or her consent, such as committing a crime or an act of war. It is worth registering those principles, for some later liberal layers partially obscured those messages on that groundsheet.

Layer two

If the first layer emphasized liberalism’s role as a vehicle for expressing individual preferences that were not to be interfered with by others, the second layer of liberalism transformed that initial role. Rather than focusing on controlling the relationships between individual and individual, and individual and government, being free now meant being able to interrelate to others actively, with the chief end of self-improvement, material and spiritual. That transformation took the shape of elevating markets to the prime arena of liberalism in practice. ‘Keep off my grass’ was replaced by ‘let’s explore new fields’. Markets enabled the exchange of human capacity and epitomized an adventurous sense of open boundaries. A world of free enterprise beckoned, with individuals redefined primarily not as equal natural rights bearers—that area of the first sheet was partly obscured—but as unequal units of energy, endowed with talent and drive, and acting to change their social and economic environments. In Eastern European countries in the later 19th century that was coupled with a call for modernization to catch up with more developed societies.

Freedom of economic intercourse and movement could hardly be formulated as a natural right, for commerce could obviously not be pre-social. Instead, Locke’s natural right to property was brought into play. Locke’s view was an unusually powerful statement. By regarding property as a birthright rather than the outcome of social or legal consent, he inspired a belief in what the Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson termed ‘possessive individualism’—the open-ended accumulation of goods by private individuals. During the 19th century, the right to property and to its accumulation was enhanced and reformulated—to a far larger degree than envisaged by Locke—as a necessity for social and national flourishing. A major strand of liberalism thus accentuated the bond between person, property, and wealth.

The second liberal layer held that the unbounded economic and commercial activity of entrepreneurial initiative-takers, manufacturers, and financiers would direct the toil and labour of the newly industrialized working class. Increased production and consumption would stimulate wealth, diffuse knowledge, and endorse the virtues of a self-helping population. Individualism, honest work, and inventiveness would combine, in the words of John Bright, ‘to promote the comfort, happiness, and contentment of a nation’. Whether or not all these can describe the actual practices of trade and commerce is beside the point, for the rhetoric of unadulterated economic exchange and expansion became firmly coupled to the liberal doctrine, and also inspired what became known as liberal imperialism. In that particular version, liberals ingeniously intermingled the colonizing of foreign markets with a sense of a ‘civilizing’ mission and purpose concerning the spread of their wealth-producing, rational, and individualist values across the globe. They also re-invigorated the liberal connotations of contract—previously and famously employed to underpin the formation of a political society as a whole—by assigning it to regulating market exchanges and endowing them with security.

One significant consequence of re-interpreting the state as the guarantor of private initiative and socio-economic intercourse—but otherwise limited to preserving social order and defence—was as a precursor of myths about liberal neutrality: a liberal state and its government should steer clear of offering an opinion on individual choices and life-styles, let alone direct them, as long as the latter were not harmful to others. We shall return to the problem of neutrality in
Chapter 6
. For now we should note that, even were a neutral state a possibility, this need not entail a weak state. The liberal state of the second layer was expected to protect economic interests vigorously through legislation. In practice it also did so through the power of its army.

For many campaigners, however, free trade had an ethical as well as an economic rationale. Liberal aspirations were vented by Richard Cobden, who saw in the free trade idea ‘that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.’ In sum, the second sheet of liberalism maintained the idea of individual liberty but re-thought the priorities of the state as liberty’s guardian. The free will area on the first sheet was re-inscribed, its penchant for limited government now associated with the free trade message that was etched in bold strokes on the second sheet. The task of government was no longer solely to protect against arbitrary oppression but to ensure against obstacles to the smooth running of economic relationships (
Figure 3
). The second liberal layer marked out a new version of human nature: competitive, potentially aggressive, and insatiable. That such a version could nonetheless bring about ‘eternal peace’ was a massive feat of self-delusion.

Layer three

The third layer of liberalism involved a conceptual and ideological breakthrough in liberal semantics. Though not inimical to free trade, it switched liberal priorities once again and adumbrated a fork in the road that seemed to detach virtue from intimations of greed. The notions of unlocking human potential and encouraging individual development, of which John Stuart Mill was the most able advocate, would be enabled through freedom of speech and education as the invaluable pathways to beneficial human expression and interaction. While Mill was a powerful advocate of protecting private spaces around individuals, he was equally concerned with what individuals did within those spaces and outside them—an issue that was not obvious in liberalism’s first layer. Doing nothing, let alone degenerating, was not an acceptable option—although it could be discouraged only through opprobrium, not force or legislation. Liberalism now took on board the fostering of a maturing and progressing individual whose will was not to be identified at a point
in
time but was exercised through an unfolding continuum of points
over
time. That is the real significance of Mill’s crucial phrase ‘the free development of individuality’: the creation of a social, political, and cultural environment in which liberty would be assigned new substance. Individualism may have been a statement about the fixed uniqueness of persons as separate parts of society; individuality was the detection of a dynamic process at the core of being human. Temporal development and flow were superimposed on the constitutional stasis of the first layer. Temporality here refers not to the obvious changes over historical time that liberalism exhibits, but to the introduction of the notion of time itself into liberal thought.