Liberalism

Liberalism. The term “liberalism” is best understood historically as a language of individual rights with widely variant, and sometimes contradictory, political applications. The origins of the American liberal tradition lie in seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century English political philosophy. As science, technology, and civil war challenged the organic social order of medieval society, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith envisioned new relationships among the individual, the church, and the state. While Hobbes deduced political rights from the harsh conditions of life in a state of nature—“nasty, brutish, and short”—Locke more optimistically redefined civil society as a voluntary social contract among rational individuals. In his view, legitimate authority derived not from monarchs, nobles, or clerics, but from the consent of the governed, insofar as they accurately interpreted God's unchanging natural law. If a regime abrogated the rights to life, liberty, and property, its subjects could overthrow it and choose a new one. Tempering his philosophy's revolutionary implications, Locke stressed fidelity to Christian virtue, but on an individual level only. The state, reduced to a neutral arbiter of economic disputes, would leave matters of faith to individual conscience.

The notion that the state exists primarily to preserve private property emerged as one of free‐market liberalism's two core principles; Adam Smith provided the second, arguing in Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) that markets, left alone, function with optimum allocative efficiency. Though Smith cautioned against the excesses of unbridled free enterprise, he insisted that society benefited when the state allowed acquisitive individualism full scope.

In America, the potent union of Lockean and Smithian principles, generally called “classical” or “laissez‐faire” liberalism, pervaded Revolutionary Era political texts and formed a central tenet of early national political economy. It also undergirded Thomas Jefferson's idealization of the independent yeoman farmer. Equating large‐scale urban manufacturing with poverty and vice, Jefferson favored a rural economy based on agricultural exports and small‐scale manufacturing. The frontier's seemingly limitless supply of natural resources, he suggested, guaranteed immunity from the Old World's class struggles and moral corruption. The frontier ethos helped sustain Americans' commitment to Locke's calculus of property and liberty—despite the emergence of evangelical Christianity, labor unionism, and government‐sponsored internal improvements, all part of an urban industrial order at variance with Locke's idealized “state of nature.”

During the Progressive Era, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and other reformers redefined liberalism by affixing the term to what was, in fact, a sharp departure from classical liberalism. Locke, considering labor a form of property, was untroubled by the dehumanizing effects of industrial work. In the new liberal discourse, however, government emerged as the benevolent guardian of individual liberties against laissez‐faire capitalism run amok. Thus, the states passed laws shielding children from labor exploitation and small businesses from unfair monopolies. For pragmatists like Dewey, a new science of administrative efficiency would replace the now closed frontier as a guarantor of perpetual progress.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal accelerated the departure from classical liberalism by shifting emphasis from individual property rights to utilitarian governance on behalf of the public good. Through massive work programs, government sought to restore the economic independence once exclusively provided by property and wealth. World War II hastened the emergence of a managerial ethos that stressed group psychology over individualism. Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt stressed liberalism's secondary dictionary definitions: generous support for those in need and a broad‐minded tolerance for diversity, in stark contrast to the rise of totalitarianism elsewhere.

Cast into the realm of political rhetoric in postwar America, liberalism came to represent one side of a partisan debate. Post–New Deal liberals generally opposed socialism but favored the state's heightened role as an active agent for promoting individual well‐being and social equality. Conservatives, by contrast, raised the discarded banner of classical liberalism, which in the 1950s enjoyed a brief renaissance as a subject of scholarly debate. In 1955, Louis Hartz construed The Liberal Tradition in America as a broad historical consensus about freedom that bred a natural distrust of extremism. While acknowledging the dangers of conformity, Hartz found no room in a centrist, classless political system for radical ideologies like communism or messianic leaders like Senator Joseph McCarthy. Political scientists elaborated Hartz's vision of a nonpartisan liberal consensus, portraying municipal governance as an open, self‐correcting system of group competition, absorbing the discontent manifested abroad as riot and revolution.

During the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson completed liberalism's break from its roots in Lockean individualism. Johnson's Great Society initiatives extended government's advocacy into relationships between parents and children (welfare), patients and doctors (Medicare and Medicaid), and consumers and manufacturers (consumer protection). In Johnson's liberal vision of the good society, the benefits of economic growth accrued to all citizens more fairly, a principle underlying legislation banning discrimination on the basis of race, sex, age, and national origin. But while Johnson's support for civil rights alienated many southern Democrats, weakening liberalism's political base, the Vietnam War discredited the notion of liberalism as a humane philosophy and fueled a younger generation's revolt against the Democratic party's procorporate strategy. The Watergate scandal further eroded trust in government as an agent of change. Faced with a soaring national debt and opposition from a revitalized conservative movement, New Deal–style liberalism lost favor in the 1980s and 1990s, and politicians avoided the term. Blamed for a variety of evils, including an alleged decline of moral consensus, liberals found themselves relying, ironically, on the federal court system—the most undemocratic of government institutions—to continue the pursuit of social justice.

In the late twentieth century, commentators debated whether the so‐called crisis of liberalism resulted from its failures or its successes. Those who argued the former position cited such measures as affirmative action (racial preferences to redress past discrimination) as examples of government's excessive infringement of individual rights. Others suggested that the successful civil rights struggle had made the goal of equality in public life part of a new consensus, and that liberalism remained salient as a continuing appeal to the public conscience for tolerance and understanding of all racial and ethnic groups in an increasingly diverse society.

The focus on diversity, however, entailed new problems. Should liberalism maintain official neutrality among competing claims for the good, or should it affirm a set of core principles? Building on John Rawls's assertion, in A Theory of Justice (1971), that individuals naturally gravitate to a conception of justice, Ronald Dworkin argued that liberal activism derived from “a theory of equality that requires official neutrality amongst theories of what is valuable in life.” This argument found favor among advocates of multiculturalism but dismayed communitarians, who argued that liberalism rested on a sense of fixed values shared by all members of a liberal community.

Despite the accrual of competing meanings over its long history, liberalism remains a focal point of Americans' efforts to balance the benefits of capitalism with larger moral and ethical priorities.
See also Conservatism; Pragmatism; Radicalism; Republicanism.

Bibliography

C.B. Macpherson , The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, 1962.
Ronald Dworkin , Liberalism, in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire, 1978, pp. 113–43.
Drew R. McCoy , The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, 1980.
Michael J. Sandel , Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982.
Joyce Appleby , Capitalism and a New Social Order, 1984.
Dorothy Ross , Liberalism in Encyclopedia of American Political History, ed. Jack P. Greene, 1984, pp. 750–763.
William A. Galston , Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State, 1991.

Andrew Chamberlin Rieser