Yet the problem is this: There is no single, unambiguous thing called liberalism. All the liberalisms that have existed, and that exist, select — deliberately or unconsciously — certain items from an accumulated and crowded liberal repertoire and leave others out, both because some elements are incompatible with others and because intellectual fashions and practices change.
That, too, must remain unsubstantiated, for what counts as victory in the field of ideas, theory, or ideology will always be contested. Short-term victories may well end up as long-term defeats: the history of 20th century communism attests to that, but who knows what may happen to communism’s fortunes in the even longer term?
It has a clear message: democracy, if by that we mean the rule of the people, is all well and good, but winning elections and popular government on their own are merely a minimum kit. That kit is necessary but insufficient for a political system to be called “liberal.” Liberals maintain that democracy must display additional characteristics for it to be considered a worthy system of government. Democracy needs to be fair, tolerant, inclusive, restrained, and self-critical, not simply the pursuit of majority rule. Liberal democracy involves not just elections, but free elections. It involves not just representative government, but accountable and constrained government. It involves not just the right to vote, but the equal and unsupervised right to vote. And it involves attention to the well-being of all the members of a society, a principle that requires some governmental activity but may be open to different interpretations. The qualities liberals demand are extensive and varied: it is a lot easier to preach liberalism than to realize it.
A number of political theorists nonetheless hold that liberalism is a philosophical and ethical imperative that ought to be universal: the highest expression of norms of social morality and justice. For them it exists as a general set of ideals appropriate for all right-thinking individuals, regardless of whether or not it is realized in actuality. In sum, for many, liberalism is a label keenly pursued and, when attained, staunchly defended. Its supporters bask in the light of the term; its detractors pour scorn on its unworldliness of hypocrisy.
Liberalism is also the target of misrecognition and ambivalence. In the US it is seen as a supporter of big government and human rights, or conversely as the enfeebling gospel of the nanny-state. In some highly religious societies, liberalism is tantamount to heresy, falsely deeming human beings, not God, as the measure of all things, elevating the secular hubris of individual preferences above the divine will.
Ronald Dworkin, who from a legal-moral perspective defined liberalism as consisting of a particular theory of equality, whereby citizens are treated as equal by insisting “that government must be neutral on what might be called the question of the good life.” The assumption here is that an individual is the best choice exercise for his or her own life and that governments should steer clear of dictating moral options in the private sphere.
Ideologies, liberalism included, clump ideas together in certain combinations that have a unique profile, a distinct morphological pattern. They arrange political concepts such as liberty, justice, equality, or rights in clusters. The clusters at the liberal core will be those that appear in all the known versions of liberalism and without which it would be unrecognizable.
There is something very unusual regarding the way the history of political thought is usually written about and taught. It is presented as the accumulated thinking of some 50 individuals, give or take. The express route begins around Plato and Aristotle, moving through St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, stopping at Machiavelli and then onto Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. From there it branches to Hegel, Marx, and Mill, and after that offers a series of lesser tracks into the 20th century.
The reason for the strange historical sweep — or lack of it — of the study of political thought is complex. For one, it was not designed by historians but in the main by scholar-philosophers whose prime interest was in the unique, the outstanding, and the visionary. Second, it was rooted in now-disputed theories of evolution and progress that regarded political thinking as unfolding in a clear sequence. Third, it became a self-perpetuating convention, encouraged in universities, of addressing political ideas as reified and constituting the challenging heart of dignified culture, albeit with a striking Western bias.
Liberalism began, broadly speaking, as a movement to release people from the social and political shackles that constrained and frequently exploited them. Tyrannical monarchs, feudal hierarchies and privileges, and heavy-handed religious practices combined to create a sense of oppressiveness that became increasingly difficult to bear, and that steadily fell out of step with the advent of the modern world. The rise of liberal ideas is therefore linked to great social changes that were occurring across Europe. One of them was the challenge to religious monopolies, as secular powers sought to escape the control of the Church. It was followed by objections to the uniformity of religious belief and practice from within the domain of religion itself, typically during the Protestant Reformation. More generally, the right to resist tyranny was becoming an increasingly vocal demand, and it culminated in the celebrated insistence of John Locke on the right of the people to dismiss those rulers who heaped on their subjects “a train of abuses.” But the implied consent was still embryonic. It was not broadly democratic in nature except in the setting up of a political society — a fairly rare event. It centered on the voicing of dissent, not consent. The right of the people to say “no” to bad government preceded by a considerable margin their right to say “yes”: to fashion desired political practice by mandating governments to act. And Locke recognized tacit “consent” as a sufficient indication of the legitimacy of a government: silence was over-optimistically interpreted as political consent merely through a person using public goods such as a highway, or renting property in a government’s domain.
The theory of natural rights eventually underwent some modification — the American Declaration of Independence notably substitutes the pursuit of happiness for the right to property — but it lasted as an anchoring point of liberal discourse until well into the 19th century, as a powerful statement that established limits to the interference in individual lives. By the end of that century, although rights discourse remained central to liberal languages, most liberals no longer thought of rights as independent on their social origins and of social recognition.
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 defense, 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.”
As for property, it is a moot point whether its protection and valuing are themselves liberal features or whether the institution or private property is one of the prerequisites to developing fundamental liberal attributes such as freedom and individuality.
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 and arguing, became intertwined with liberal values.
The absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.
A third political impact was the introduction, from the 1880s, of a specific political program put 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.
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 endeavor, 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.
Hegel contended that basing the well-being of a society merely on a selfish drive, however inevitable to the functioning of markets, fell short of what a state had to strive for. A sense of purpose and solidarity could not be supplied by the extreme individualism of market competition, even if it secured material prosperity. That sense of communal unity could only be provided by the rational state, whose role it was to conciliate the tensions among individual egoistic ends by infusing society with an altruistic ethos. That would be buttressed by a state conforming to the strict rule of law. Only then, asserted Hegel, would a society be free.
Nationalism is frequently associated with anti-liberal tendencies. It is often expressed in a strident emotional voice, appearing to prefer the aims of the nation over those of its individual members. In its extreme manifestations it displays aggression towards other nations and ethnic groups, is obsessed with myths about its “glorious past,” and develops leadership cults.
Human beings, rather than nature, God, hierarchical and hereditary rulership, or the weight of history, were now firmly placed at the center of the social universe.
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 favor. 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. Locke significantly distinguished liberty from license, 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.”
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.”
Liberal neutrality: A liberal state and its government should steer clear of offering an opinion on individual choices and lifestyles, let alone direct them, as long as the latter were not harmful to others.
In sum, the second sheet of liberalism maintained the idea of individual liberty but rethought the priorities of the state as liberty’s guardian. 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. 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.
Third layer liberalism focused on the forward-looking enlargement of human capacity: a “let me grow” liberalism. The rise of that time-oriented but open-ended liberalism, which regarded human growth as a gradual process complementing human autonomy and independence, signaled a new stage in its history.
The removal of such barriers did not entail the kind of illiberal positive liberty that imposed a template of self-realization on individuals, “forcing them to be free.” Rather, it facilitated the liberty to pursue the layer three conception of self-development through positive state action. Hence, third, the democratically monitored state was enlisted to assist in that mammoth task because some important human needs, such as securing a job or healthcare, were in far too many cases beyond the capacity of individual initiative.
It acknowledged the individual at the center of the first sheet but challenged any view of impermeable barriers between person and person, welcoming instead some incursions into private space in the spirit of community, when mutual assistance was the only route to individual wellbeing. That is why some forms of social insurance — health and unemployment — were made compulsory, to secure a common pool of wealth to help those who faltered under the normal strains of life.
But giving a voice to all people does not necessarily ensure that it is a liberal voice, and we have yet to witness a full-scale revolution that was liberal, from the French through the Bolshevik revolutions, let alone to lesser upheavals such as the various “Arab Springs.” As Europe democratized in the second half of the 20th century the resounding call was for democratic Europe, not for liberal Europe.
Theories of benign social evolution have also gone out of fashion, while the costs of brining welfare and wellbeing to all have proved astronomical, made further unsustainable by waves of human envy and suspicion and by large-scale disasters, whether avoidable or not.
Progress is closely associated with individuality, but is a core concept in its own right. It introduces the dynamic of positive movement and development into liberalism. That dynamic is often seen as part of liberalism’s enlightening and civilizing mission, and it includes the constant improvement of material technology and increasing standards of living through human inventiveness and effort. Above all, it focuses on an optimistic view of time as unfolding in the direction of social betterment in the broadest sense. The unfolding of liberal time is not predetermined or teleological — that is, it does not inexorably move towards a projected end, as may be the case in some socialist or utopian ideologies. Instead, it is open-ended. Human development is a continuous process that harnesses and reflects the free will of individuals embedded in and secured through the other liberal core concepts. Being neither automatic nor imposed, it is not entirely predictable.
They often subscribe to a version of “Fable of the Bees,” in which private vices produce public benefits: the pursuit of personal advantage could result in benefits for all. Adam Smith and Hegel had suggested that an invisible hand worked to convert the pursuit of self-interested through the division of labor and specialization into outcomes that were int he public interest.
In a deep sense liberals are embarrassed by power: after all, the historic emergence of liberalism was chiefly in response to abuse and oppression by the powerful. In other sense they realize that governments have to be authorized to make binding decisions, and the making and implementation of decisions always involve the exercise of power. Notwithstanding, decisions in a liberal polity are hedged in and circumscribed by checks and balances, by countervailing power, by constitutional rules of justifiable and hence enforceable usages of power, and, not least, by a dispersal of power that renders it less perilous and that draws in a variety of groups into its wielding.
As core concepts always rotate through the many meanings they can carry, a mechanism is needed to lock one of the meaning into place, however temporarily. Otherwise ideas are blurred and incoherent, and a fix on political reality — incomplete though it is — cannot be achieved.
Decontestation also opens an interesting window on liberalism itself. The multiple meanings that concepts carry mirror the ideational flexibility and adaptability that is one of liberalism’s hallmarks and that has secured its longevity. Tweaking and readjusting is something that liberal ideologies perform far better than totalitarian ones, the latter often demonstrating sclerotic rigidity that causes them to crack under strain. But there is a flip-side that liberalism does, after all, share with many other ideological families. It, too, has non-negotiable spheres and red lines it will not cross.
Liberty is not only a state of being uninterfered with, but a state of actively making choices and finding expression for one’s capabilities. Freedom then is not just a passive state of being but a dynamic state of doing, employing one’s own abilities that are concurrently enabled through the support of others.
The concept of “immigration” impinges on liberal thinking, as it does on other ideologies, but it is not as central to liberalism as it is to some recent populist or nationalist groups. Liberals have had a tolerant attitude towards migration for 2 reasons: as part of the freedom of movement they value; and as a consequence of humanitarian considerations intended to protect individuals from harm in the form of suffering or persecution in their places of origin.
Ideologies may want to present themselves as unique and clear-cut, but an examination of their morphologies quickly reveals overlaps, shared areas, and mutual permeation. Crucially, it is not the presence or absence of ideas and concepts that differentiates one ideology from another, but the distinct patterns in which such imbricated or common components are assembled.
He stipulated a divide between self-regarding and other-regarding actions, a distinction that highlighted the boundary between the public and private spheres that became one of liberalism’s hallmarks. Self-regarding actions were those with which no one had a right to interfere. Among those, Mill listed decisions about one’s personal safety, one’s tastes and beliefs, and the purchase of drugs and medicines. In all those cases, individual reason was to be relied on and, even if people made mistaken decisions, it was always better that they learn from these than they be directed by others.
Mere inconvenience to others, or offence, were insufficient causes for intervention in an individual’s actions. Intervention was justified only when other-regarding actions were critically detrimental to the interests of other members of a society. Mill’s notion of harm to others was narrow by today’s standards. It comprised physical damage and legal compulsion, or the undue pressure of public opinion, but not psychological, emotional, or historical harms of oppression.
Indeed, Green contended that if individuals carried out their moral duties while valuing and recognizing others for possessing the same potential, they were at their freest. To be free was none other than to be rational and ethical, to will what was true and good, unencumbered by clouded judgment. For Green that was an eternal truth, reflecting God’s will, and it guided people towards their ultimate perfection.
We have seen that the precise meaning of liberty, or freedom, as is the case with all political concepts, is essentially contested. As one of the first to suggest a distinction between positive and negative liberty, Green contributed to the fundamental disagreement among liberals as to the implications of liberty. Even in his cautious and considered language, Green was sounding a radical note that challenged existing social arrangements and assessed individual conduct by the personal improvement and the social benefits freedom brought in its wake. The growth of freedom was measured by the greater power of the body of the citizens to make “the most and best of themselves” — a view embodying the tail end of the optimistic enlightenment belief in human perfectibility.
The community was seen as a producer of social goods, the main good being the well-being of its members. But the consequence of that argument was intriguing: the community was itself a rights-bearer alongside the rights of its individual citizens. Too many needs, although vital for individual flourishing, were beyond individual reach. Hobhouse belonged to a new generation of progressive thinkers who realized that the liberal end of encouraging human growth and expression would be frustrated unless the community possessed the right to help individuals attain their personal potential. Liberty was now irrevocably twinned with social cooperation:
Mutual aid is not less important than mutual forbearance, the theory of collective action no less fundamental than the theory of personal freedom. The life of the individual would be something utterly different if he could be separated from society. A great deal of him would not exist at all.
Both over-saving and the unequal distribution of wealth, Hobson argued, restricted the overall purchasing power of the British people. The poor ended up with insufficient income to survive in dignity and their consequence under-consumption created economic crises as well as personal misery, while the well-to-do accumulated more than they could spend. Imperialism was partly the result of that maldistribution, as financial capitalists and manufacturers turned to overseas outlets for investing their surplus wealth, furthering economic greed, aggression, and militarism, and exploiting the political control of colonies to those purposes.
As did other liberals, he grappled throughout his life with the balance between the individual and the social nature of human beings. That included the recognition that society too was a maker of values, a producer and a consumer. Hobson subscribed to a more pronounced organic theory of society than that of his colleagues. Venturing beyond the views of his friend Hobhouse, Hobson believed that society had a life and purpose of its own that parallel those of its members. Yet he was keen to insist that the organic analogy nonetheless reinforced liberal individualism. Only by nourishing the well-being of each individual and securing their opportunities to express themselves through democratic arrangements could the health of the whole be promoted.
As did his fellow left-liberals, Hobson was at pains to point out that the new liberalism differed significantly from socialism, both because it rejected universal public ownership and because it rebuffed the mechanical, averaging, and centralizing inclinations socialists were thought to advocate. But the modern study of ideologies now denies the existence of stark and impermeable boundaries between ideologies. The forms of liberalism endorsed in Britain a century ago were broadly speaking social-democratic at their heart.
For Constant that meant a decline in the central authority of a small community and its replacement by what we would now call civil society, independent and socially mobile. Liberalism manifested itself in the increase of personal, autonomous opportunities and choices, and in the prosperous production of material goods for all.
German political thought had evolved a deep respect for the role of law — and the rule of law — as directing individual conduct towards accepted rational ends, whether or not within a liberal context. But in another sense, the insistence on achieving a degree of culture that established the appropriate moment for freedom and hence for minimizing state intervention became a keystone of German political thinking.
His sociological and historical analyses of the German bourgeoisie, as well as of the state, led him to conclude that in order to protect society from extreme bureaucratization, a class of responsible, committed, and ethical leaders would have to emerge. He argued that the charismatic leader would become the guarantor of individualism, supported partly by a mass democracy searching for the disruption of authoritarian patterns of government. This elitist liberalism picked up a theme rarely acknowledged by liberals themselves. Liberalism was a product of the middle class, and its values — however desirable to progressives — were often chosen and formulated by cultural minorities: the educated, the politically alert, and the relatively well-to-do. It was of course also a liberalism that respected the rule of law but it was not strongly egalitarian.
True, national self-determination had been a plank of 19th century European liberalism, but both Weber and Naumann went beyond that in their enthusiasm for national power and prosperity. The nation was not a simple object of aggrandisement, however, but the repository of the country’s skills, expertise, ethos, and spirit resting, on “deeply rooted psychological foundations.” The nation state was the site of a balancing act between the rational state and the often irrational, or arational, “Volk.”
Croce subscribed to a grand conception of liberalism that identified it not as a particular political doctrine but as “a complete idea of the world and of reality.” Unlike most other noted liberal theorists, Croce saw in liberalism the expression of divine wisdom, of a higher morality. But it was also one that rejected the “mathematical and mechanistic” tendencies of socialism for an equality based on a common humanity. Indeed the unequal ownership and distribution of property was acceptable to liberals as long as it did not suppress an enquiring and critical spirit. Although human beings strove for improvement, they were imperfect and capable of error.
Far more than Mill and Hobhouse, with their smoother visions of human evolution, Croce regarded setbacks, struggle, and antagonism as elements of the real world liberalism had to confront and take heed of, and which its spirit would ultimately overcome.
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 from: 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.
For Hayek, the heyday of liberalism was in the mid-19th century. 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. 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 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. 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.
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.
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 also has material consequences for the allocation of possessions and benefits.
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.
However, the “least advantaged” remains an elusive category as a policy guide as it is consummately difficult to identify an individual who would occupy the hapless position simultaneously on the different scales of wealth, health, intelligence, and good looks, to mention some of the more prominent criteria that determine human life-chances. Because we may be advantaged on one scale and deprived on another, this requires a comparison that can never be conclusive.
Seen historically, liberalism has pursued an elusive universalism. On the contrary, the neatness of philosophical liberalism lies in its logical immediacy and robust persuasiveness for those who subscribe to its ethical vision. Once you accept its impeccable moral reasoning it simply becomes the correct viewpoint.
The argument for state neutrality could only hold if certain choices, rules, and rights were regarded as supra-political, beyond human contention. That would seemingly limit liberalism’s role not only to protecting all privately held values, however distasteful, but to the active facilitation of their expression, reminiscent of the old adage “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” That approach is redolent of an older liberal view of harm as physical and legal rather than psychological and emotional.
But the immunity bestowed on the Bill of Rights has fostered the illusion that the Supreme Court possesses a neutral perspective impervious to political vicissitudes.
Liberals who profess neutrality are far from neutral in recommending it — indeed they can be passionate about neutrality — and in that context advocating neutrality is a contradiction in terms. Better to hope for Supreme Court impartiality — addressing the questions of justice and rights without favor or bias. Impartiality may be distinguished from neutrality, as it may be pursued within a framework that is itself non-neutral about the virtue of law and the wickedness of crime.
Liberalism, to repeat, has throughout its history actively promoted certain choices and has regarded some features of public life as non-negotiable, dependent neither on consensus nor on adjudication. The bottom line is that no ideology, liberalism included, can forego the self-assumed responsibility of introducing its certainties into political life. Politics always includes that drive to finality on an ideology’s own terms, even when it is doomed to failure or to partial realization.
The problem with according equal respect to the values held by individuals is that it bypasses the empirical fact that ranking goods is an inevitable feature of political life. Without a means of distributing the significance of values and asserting that “this is more important, or worthy, than that” no political decisions can be taken.
Berlin preached tolerance, but even liberal toleration has its no-go areas. Berlin himself, of course, subscribed to his own ranking of values, one in which (negative) liberty was a master concept. He was therefore intolerant of attempts to undermine it. When push comes to shove, a ranking of preferences must be arrived at in each concrete instance of governing and communal living. That is the flipside of liberal philosophers’ espousal of neutrality. Rather, as Berlin, insisted, the one-size-fits-all of universal solutions disregards the “crooked timber of humanity.”
What has to happen for a political system to be legitimate? When is civil obedience justified? What makes an individual deserving of rewards in the form of social goods? Should we compensate individuals for misfortune? Which democratic practices are most conducive to sustaining democracy? How do we reconcile cultural and ethnic loyalties with free choice and individuality? Philosophical liberalism has frequently narrowed and defined the area in which answers to questions such as these can — and should — be found. But to the extent that some of its practitioners believe in clear solutions to those issues, they may find themselves crossing the admittedly porous line between liberalism and its challengers — particularly that between utopias of human perfection and the liberal acknowledgement of imperfection.
Ideologies are precarious and volatile things. They may burst out of their reasonable confines. They may fall into the wrong political hands and be abused. They may suffer from hubris and become an embarrassment to many of their adherents. They may lose touch with political reality. Or they may pull a metaphorical rabbit out of a hat and deliver far more than was expected of them. Liberalism ticks every one of those boxes.
One intention may be to take cover under the umbrella of liberalism in order to sweeten some unpleasant pills those non-liberals are keen for people to swallow.
In this case an ideological variant dons the mantle of a rival in order to cloth itself in rhetorical respectability and even to wrest ground, deliberately or unwittingly, away from established liberal versions. Neoliberals tend to see the world as an immense and potentially unencumbered global market, in which the exchange of goods for profit overrides other aspects of cross-national relations. Being a liberal is understood by neoliberals to characterize the free individual agent, alone or in conjunction with others, as being above all economically assertive. The defining features of that assertiveness are to maintain and develop the economic power inherent in capitalist production and transactions, to open up new areas for investment, and to benefit from the plethora of goods available for consumption. Neoliberals subordinate social, political, and cultural spheres to a professed self-regulating economic market and their principles are supposed to inspire the ways all social activities are run.
State power is mainly marshaled to guaranteeing trade and commerce, not to creating the conditions for human flourishing and well-being. Instead the unfettered power of the market is unleashed, so that the liberal concept of constrained and accountable power is circumvented. It is retained mainly to protect entrepreneurs in going about their business, while sidestepping the aim of a genuinely free market that could unlock the economic energy and inventiveness held to be intrinsic to all individuals. In its most recent forms, neoliberalism champions a world in which huge multinational corporations and mega-banks increasingly control and dictate the way we live, fostering an imposed and conformist managerialism.
In promoting the notion of a self-regulating market, neoliberals approach conservative terrain. One of conservatism’s key features is a belief in the extra-human origins of the social order, reflecting sets of rules that derive from the divine, the historical, the economic, or the “natural.” Neoliberals provide a self-assured economic version of the naturally balanced system. In that version, attempts to direct and coordinate human effort can trigger catastrophic intervention when “natural” economic rules are flouted.
Both civil society and market society tendencies shared the quest to diminish the centrality of the state as far as possible, whether it acted for good or for evil. The state, in the words of the Polish academic Jerzy Szacki, was seen “as the agent of all social injustice,” a position quite of step with left-liberal ideological and philosophical theories. Collective action was mistakenly identified with the socialist collectivism of the old regimes. Anything even remotely associated with collectivism was thus to be avoided.
And the misleading idea that civil society was a parallel society, happily separate from the distasteful world of politics, implied that political issues did not permeate the whole of society. The discrete notions of the state, the government, and politics were frequently and carelessly equated. Liberalism failed to take deeper roots in Easter Europe, while its ideas of liberty were pressed into personalized and idealized intellectual and artistic spheres.
What, then, is a “liberal world order” and why is the term so popular both among many players in the international arena and among international relations experts? At its heart are 3 assumptions, explicit or implicit.
First, that “liberal-democracy” refers not to an ideology but to a type of regime, to a set of institutional political arrangements and a rule-based system for which the phrase “liberal-democracy” is a useful abbreviation.
The second assumption is that liberalism always involves an economy based on capitalism and markets (an assumption to be distinguished from the exaggerated neoliberal inflating of free markets at the expense of most other liberal values). That is insufficiently nuanced, for neither capitalism nor markets are fixed quantities. They display degrees of control and regulation that vary vastly within different ideological frameworks.
The third assumption holds that to be liberal on the international scene is usually associated with the promotion of universal human rights and with peaceful conflict resolution.
The established list of human rights principally contains the rights of respect for individual reform; protection from tyranny and torture; security; property ownership; and gender, race, and religious equality — and, collectively, of national self-determination.
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 purpose, no doubt, were always expressed in universal terms; but they were, in practical operation the servant of a single class in the community.
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, civil rights, 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.
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, 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. 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.
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, nor 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.
All these instances demonstrate how an ideology such as liberalism can falter the moment its 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. 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.
It is not in doubt that liberalism is about the rational application of reason to political issues. Yet in recent time 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.