Liberalism

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LIBERALISM

By definition, a liberal is one who believes in liberty, but because different people at different times have meant different things by liberty, "liberalism" is correspondingly ambiguous. The word was first heard in a political sense in England in the early nineteenth century, when "liberals" were thus named by their Tory opponents. Indeed, they were first called liberales, and the Spanish form was used "with the intention of suggesting that the principles of those politicians were un-English" (see Shorter Oxford English Dictionary ). This was ironical, since the word liberal had been adopted by the Spaniards for policies they regarded as essentially English—that is, the Lockean principles of constitutional monarchy, parliamentary government, and the rights of man. In any event, the Englishmen who were called liberals (though as late as 1816 Robert Southey was still calling them liberales ) rejoiced in the name, and what was intended to be a pejorative quickly proved to have a distinctly pleasing flavor, perhaps partly because its other significance, the Shakespearean sense of liberal as "gross" or "licentious," had given way to the modern sense of liberal as "bountiful," "generous," or "open-hearted."

English Liberalism

Traditional English liberalism has rested on a fairly simple concept of liberty—namely, that of freedom from the constraints of the state. In Thomas Hobbes's memorable phrase, "The liberties of subjects depend on the silence of the law." In general, however, English liberals have always been careful not to press this notion to anarchist extremes. They have regarded the state as a necessary institution, ensuring order and law at home, defense against foreign powers, and security of possessions—the three principles John Locke summarized as "life, liberty and property." English liberals have also maintained that the law can be used to extend the liberties of subjects insofar as the law is made to curb and limit the activities of the executive government. Thus, for example, the English laws of habeas corpus, of bail, and of police entry and arrest all constrain or restrain the executive and, in so doing, increase the freedom of the people. Some instruments of constitutional law have a similar effect.

The traditional form of English political liberalism naturally went hand in hand with the classical economic doctrine of laissez-faire. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, certain radical movements and certain English liberal theorists, such as Matthew Arnold and T. H. Green, developed, partly under foreign, left-wing influences, a different—as they claimed, a broader—concept of freedom, which was, to a large extent, to prove more popular in the twentieth century than traditional English liberalism with its economic gospel of laissez-faire. The central aim of this new school was utilitarian—namely, freeing men from misery and ignorance. Its exponents believed that the state must be the instrument by which this end was to be achieved. Hence, English liberal opinion entered the twentieth century in a highly paradoxical condition, urging, on the one hand, a freedom that was understood as freedom from the constraints of the state and, on the other, an enlargement of the state's power and control in order to liberate the poor from the oppressive burdens of poverty. In the political sphere this contradiction in the liberal ideology ended in the disintegration of the British Liberal Party. With the defeat of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, a disciple of the philosopher T. H. Green and an adept at reconciling contradictions, the British Liberal Party broke into two, the right-wing, or laissez-faire, element joining forces with conservatism and the radical, étatiste element merging with socialism. Only a "rump" remained.

French Liberalism

The ambiguity of the word liberalism is more marked in French than in any other European language. Some writers hold that as a result of events in France since the time of Louis XIV, the French people have been divided into two political camps: One that supports the Roman Catholic Church, traditional social patterns, and the Syllabus of Pius IX (1864) and one that opposes the church and favors parliament, progress, and the rights of man. Historians who see France in these terms call one side conservateur, the other libéral. Opposed to this view are those historians who see not two, but at least three, continuing traditions in French political thought: on the right, royalism and conservativism; on the left, socialism, anarchism, syndicalism, and communism; in the center, liberalism. In the first of these two analyses, libéralisme is understood to embrace all the creeds of the left; according to the second analysis, libéralisme is a political doctrine at variance with the creeds of the left.

Again, one can distinguish two distinct—indeed, opposing—schools among French theorists who claim to be liberal. One is the Lockean liberalism of Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, and Benjamin Constant (in effect, also that of François Guizot and the July monarchy of Louis Philippe)—the liberalism of the minimal state, individualism, and laissez-faire. But there is a second liberalism, represented by the masters of the French Revolution and by the youthful Napoleon Bonaparte, which is democratic, Rousseauesque, and étatiste. Whereas Lockean liberalism understands freedom as being left alone by the state, the other liberalism sees freedom as ruling oneself through the medium of a state that one has made one's own.

Both these schools of libéralisme contributed something to the ideology of the French Revolution, and the often unperceived contradiction between them may also be said to have contributed to the intellectual confusion of those times. The fall of Napoleon was the signal for a return to the more purely Lockean style of liberalism. Benjamin Constant not only insisted that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of liberty was an illusory one but also maintained that "Du Contrat Social [1762] so often invoked in favour of liberty, is the most formidable ally of all despotisms." Constant and his friends desired only to reproduce in France the Lockean Glorious Revolution of 1688. In 1830 they believed they had succeeded; Louis Philippe was enthroned on the basis of an understanding very like that on which William and Mary had been crowned in England. Politicians such as Guizot, who called themselves Libéraux, were put in charge of the kingdom. The result was not inspiring. A new bourgeoisie basked in the liberty the Lockean state introduced; the great were diminished, but the poor were not elevated. A rebellion came from the left in 1848, and the right replied with Napoleon III. Henceforth, there were few self-styled Libéraux of any importance in French politics and no liberal party. When new parties were formed later in the century, the name chosen by the center was Republicain rather than Libéral. This is not to say that liberalism died in France in 1848; rather, the word libéralisme thereafter ceased to call to the minds of French-speaking people any clear or distinct idea.

In 1912 Émile Faguet published a celebrated work, Le libéralisme, in which he took a rigidly Lockean position. "The state," he wrote, "is an evil; a lesser evil than anarchy, but nevertheless to be limited to the tasks of securing public order and safety through the justiciary, police and army." Several critics at the time attacked Faguet's definition as being outmoded; nevertheless, the definition of libéralisme in the 1935 edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française is, like Faguet's, thoroughly Lockean; it defines libéralisme in terms of the citizen's right to freedom of thought and to protection from government interference in private and business affairs.

One of several French theorists who attacked Faguet's exposition of liberalism (and, by implication, the academy's definition) was Jean de Grandvilliers. "How the word 'liberalism' is perverted by those who treat it as synonymous with individualism!" he wrote in Essai sur le libéralisme allemand (1925). "We can only reply by giving the word its true meaning." According to Grandvilliers, the true meaning of liberalism is to be found in a policy of extending the liberty of the people; he maintained that the intervention of the state is not only a useful, but also a necessary, means to achieve that end. Grandvilliers is thus a champion of the étatiste school of liberalism, which derived its concept of liberty from Rousseau and which argued that as long as the state belongs to the people, the enlargement of the power of the state is equally an enlargement of the power, and therefore the freedom, of its citizens.

German Liberalism

The word liberal was first heard in Germany in 1812, going there, as it went to England, from Spain. But the last years of Napoleon's power marked the decline of one tradition of German liberalism and the beginning of a new one. For in Germany, as elsewhere, we may discern not a single doctrine of liberalism but at least two main, conflicting schools, which again may be classified as the Lockean and the étatiste. The older German tradition was not merely derivatively Lockean; it also had contributed much to the formulation of Locke's own thought. In the sixteenth century it was a German philosopher, Johannes Althusius, who proclaimed that sovereignty derived from the people, and it was the German Naturrechts school of jurists that provided the bridge between the Stoic concept of jus naturale and the Lockean doctrine of the rights of man. But Locke, in turn, influenced the eighteenth-century German liberals, among whom Wilhelm von Humboldt was perhaps the most conspicuous. The very title of his book Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (Ideas toward an investigation to determine the proper limits of the activity of the state; 1792), reveals his preoccupation with limited sovereignty and the minimal state. In this work Humboldt argued that the function of the state is not to do good but to ward off evil, notably the evil that springs from man's disregard for his neighbors' rights. The state, he said, "must not proceed a step further than is necessary for the mutual security of citizens and protection against foreign enemies; for no other object should it impose restrictions on freedom." Eighteenth-century Germany also had several liberal economists, including Christian Kraus, who considered that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) was the most important book after the Bible.

In the nineteenth century a new school of liberalism, which was first and foremost nationalistic, arose in Germany. The freedom it stood for was the freedom of Germany, and the condition of the realization of this national freedom was the unification of Germany. Thus, whereas the old Lockean liberals were against the state, the new nationalist liberals wanted to create a greater state. The French declaration of 1789 proclaimed the rights of man; the German liberals inspired in 1848 a declaration of the rights of the German people. The new German liberals thought in terms of collective, rather than individual, rights. Thus, the étatiste German liberals saw nothing incongruous in sending a mission in 1849 from the Frankfurt parliament to Berlin to offer the crown of all Germany to a Prussian monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm, who detested democracy and who, in any event, grandly announced that he did not take crowns from commoners.

The difficulty of understanding in what sense this new German liberalism rested on a principle of freedom is that of understanding what it was that its votaries were demanding freedom from. Indeed, for many German liberals it was not a question of freedom from anything. German metaphysics of the same period was working out a concept of freedom that had nothing to do with resisting constraint. Guido de Ruggiero, a sympathetic Italian historian of German liberalism wrote:

The eternal glory of Kant is to have demonstrated that obedience to the moral law is freedom.… It was the great merit of [G. W. F.] Hegel to have extracted from the Kantian identification of freedom with mind, the idea of an organic development of freedom, coinciding with the organisation of society in its progressively higher and more spiritual forms.… The State, the organ of coercion par excellence, has become the highest expression of liberty. (History of European Liberalism )

The idea that true freedom is to be found in obedience to the morally perfected state gave a theoretical justification (of a highly abstract kind) to the nineteenth-century German liberals' pursuit of liberty in submission to a strong and unified nation-state. But these high-thinking theorists never recovered from Friedrich Wilhelm's snub in 1849. Germany got its unity, but it was the imperialists, not the new liberals, who achieved it, and it was Otto von Bismarck, rather than Immanuel Kant, who gave the unified nation its political ethos. After the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945, however, there was some revival of the Lockean type of liberalism in Germany.

American Liberalism

In the United States the word liberal has never enjoyed the prestige it has in the United Kingdom, for in America there has never been, as there has in England, a national liberal party. The short-lived Liberal Republican Party of the 1870s was without a coherent program. Horace Greeley, its presidential candidate, was at once a socialist, spiritualist, vegetarian, and total abstainer; his personality led many Americans of his time to associate the word liberal with a visionary crank, and some still do. F. O. Matthiessen wrote in 1948: "In our nineteenth-century political life we had no such formulated division as that between the Conservatives and Liberals in England.… The key word seized upon by our native radical movement of the eighties and nineties, that of the Populists, was not 'liberal' but 'progressive'" (From the Heart of Europe, New York, 1948, p. 90). Again, whereas in Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought the word liberal occurs on almost every page, Parrington's pupil Henry Steele Commager never once uses the words liberal and liberalism in his continuation volume, The American Mind (New Haven, CT, 1950).

Just as in France the word liberal had been used by some writers for almost any kind of left-wing opinion, so in America the word liberal was widely adopted after the Great Depression as a soubriquet for "socialist." In The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling defined liberalism as meaning, among other things, "a belief in planning and international co-operation, especially where Russia is in question." This definition may not have been wholly authorized by common usage, but there can be no doubt that the word liberal has come to be associated in the American public's mind with étatiste and left-wing ideologies rather than with the Lockean notions of laissez-faire and mistrust of organized power.

Indeed, it was one of Parrington's arguments in Main Currents in American Thought that American liberalism, as he called it, had always been concerned with democracy in a way that Locke and his English followers had not. Yet even before the emergence of twentieth-century left-wing liberalism, two rival creeds, both of which could reasonably be called liberal, contended for political supremacy. The first, as Parrington pointed out, was close to the "English philosophy of laissez-faire, based on the assured universality of the acquisitive instinct and postulating a social order answering the needs of the abstract 'economic man' in which the state should function in the interests of trade." The second liberalism was Rousseauesque rather than Lockean. It was "based on the conception of human perfectibility" and looked toward an egalitarian democracy "in which the political state should function as the servant to the common well-being."

The dominant political sentiment of the American tradition derives something from both these kinds of liberalism, for it has combined a Lockean attachment to liberty from the state with a Rousseauesque belief in democracy and equality. Nevertheless, perhaps it is still not quite respectable to be an avowed liberal in America. This may be partly because there has been no traditional support for a liberal party. It is also partly because not only socialists, but also communists and communist sympathizers, have not ceased to assume the title "liberal" rather than a more explicit expression of their political commitment.

A remarkable variety of political structures has been thought by different philosophers to embody liberty, and a correspondingly mixed company has shared the name "liberal." In singling out certain main streams or schools of liberal thought, one has to be mindful of the divergences that exist even among those which can be usefully grouped together. One might broadly divide philosophers of freedom into those who think that to be free is to be able to do what one wants to do and those who think that to be free is to do what one ought to do. By a similar method, one might divide liberals into those who see freedom as something that belongs to the individual, to be defended against the encroachments of the state, and those who see freedom as something which belongs to society and which the state, as the central instrument of social betterment, can be made to enlarge and improve. It remains to be said that some of the greatest names in the history of liberal thought, including John Stuart Mill himself, are strangely poised between these two positions.

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