LIBERALISM

Liberalism as a theory about politics and society upholds freedoms of belief, inquiry, expression, action, association and elections. In liberalism, freedom coalesces with value-commitments to equality, individualism, toleration, pluralism, and rationality. All of these commitments have interacted with science and technology in multiple ways.

Classical Liberalism

Liberals differ over determining the nature of freedom. Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive freedoms (freedom from as against freedom to) is useful in explaining the difference between classical and modern forms of liberalism.

In classical liberalism, freedom is interpreted in terms of a private sphere of non-interference that is supported by the rule of law. Free agents are protected from arbitrary interference, being left to enjoy their possessions, to retain personal beliefs, and to act in preferred ways on the condition that they respect the freedom of others to do the same. Support for private property and free markets goes hand in hand, in classical liberalism, with a prescription that power (economic as well as political) be divided so as to alleviate the risk of its being abused.

John Locke (1632–1704), whose Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) started the tradition of liberal thought, encapsulated classical liberalism in stating that "Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which cannot be, where there is no Law" (1960, p. 324). Locke's form of liberalism supported parliamentary government and the rule of law in England against absolute monarchy.

Among French thinkers, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), praised the English constitution for its separation of the powers of government and reflected adversely on the absolutism of the French monarchy. Tolerance, aversion to fanaticism, and advocacy of freedom of discussion and of the press characterize the writings of the eighteenth-century philosophes, including Marquis de Concordet and Francois-Marie Voltaire. After the turmoil of the French Revolution and of Napoleon Bonaparte's rule, Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) and Francois Guizot (1787–1874) conceived of a liberalism that was conservative and admiring of English political institutions, while Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) warned that democracy gives no guarantee of freedom and might end in tyranny.

Pre-eminent among German liberals, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) conceived of liberty as the will determining itself according to its rational law, converting pure reason into practical reason. Kant's state is a legal organization, limited in its role of ordering legal rights, reconciling the free will of each individual with that of all others. The sphere of morality, for Kant, consists in individual conscience as the judge of the righteousness of acts. In 1927 Guido de Ruggiero contended that Kant's liberalism served to constrain the exercise of power in Germany through the nineteenth century because, "even in periods of the strictest absolutism," governments were checked "by a profound consciousness of" being restricted to the sphere of rights (de Ruggiero 1927, p. 220). In his Essay on the Limits of the Action of the State (1851), Wilhelm von Humboldt argued that the worthy faculties and qualities of individuals only develop in an environment that a minimalist state protects as free and pluralist. In Germany, as in France, liberals were nowhere near as committed to the market economy as were their English counterparts.

Among the sources of nascent U.S. liberalism was Locke with his ideas of natural rights, government by consent, and the entitlement of subjects to revolt against a government that betrays their trust. French philosophes could envision human perfectibility, but the liberals who contributed to the formation of the U.S. republic were skeptical. Their understanding of human nature derived from the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Ferguson, David Hume and, particularly, Adam Smith who, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), argued for capitalist economics (the price mechanism as a beneficent invisible hand), the rule of law in a constitutional order, and equal freedom. Smith believed that a strong presumption exists against governmental activity, but his advocacy of laissez faire was not doctrinaire. A rule of thumb with Smith was that government should arrange social conditions in ways that would assist the market to provide public services; Jeremy Bentham and his circle embraced this theory. Adopting the principle of utility as his axiom, policies being calculated to advance the greatest happiness of the greatest number in society, Bentham inferred that joint stock companies should bid for government contracts to operate public institutions (prisons and poor houses).

Modern Liberalism

The emphasis in modern liberalism is placed on freedom as empowerment (freedom to). There has been no closer approximation to the ideal type of classical liberal society than nineteenth-century England in the era of William Gladstone and Richard Cobden. Nevertheless, after the reform of Parliament in 1832, governments in England—partly from the impetus received from Benthamite utilitarianism—became more active: reforming the administration of the poor law and of public health; regulating working hours, the police, and inspection of factories; and overhauling the civil service and local government.

Liberal thought in England also underwent a major revision with Lionel Hobhouse in 1911 describing the liberal socialism of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) as the link between the old and the new liberalism. The new liberalism of the Hegelians Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882) and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), appreciated the value of freedom as a positive power and recommended a more constructive mode of government. Agreeing with Mill that the core of liberalism consists in the "liberation of ... [the] spiritual energy" of agents (Hobhouse 1911, p. 137), Hobhouse proposed that the state should act so as to secure the economic conditions that would enable individuals to develop their faculties and to fully participate in the life of the community.

Two world wars and the intervening Great Depression led governments to assume a greater role in European and North American societies. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment (1936) explained how governments should use their fiscal powers of taxing and spending to regulate economic activity and control money supply as a means of mitigating the business cycle and unemployment.

In 1935, in the United States, John Dewey (1859–1952) expressed hostility to the free market order and its disparities in wealth. The Humboldt-Mill ideal of individual development as grounded in freedom that had impressed Green and Hobhouse was assimilated by Dewey and by many other liberal philosophers through the twentieth century. Dewey saw the ends of liberalism—"liberty and the opportunity of individuals" to fully realize "their potentialities"—as requiring governmental planning of "industry and finance" (1963, p. 51, 55).

The ideal of individual development is discernible in the most important work of liberalism to appear in the second half of the twentieth century, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). Arguing for redistribution and the welfare state, Rawls relied on principles of liberal justice. One of Rawls's tenets attributes freedoms of conscience, conduct, and religion to citizens; his other basic belief dictates that a redistribution of resources may only take place on the condition that the least well-off members of society will benefit from it. As a corollary, inequalities determined by an agent's social circumstances, and by that person's talents and abilities, are deemed to be illegitimate.

Prominent among the responses to Rawls's Kantian liberalism is communitarianism. Michael Sandel in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) demurred to Rawls's use of an abstracted individual to reason about justice, envisaging the self as being socially formed, and the individual as exercising reason only within the community.

The term modern liberalism does not mean that classical liberalism is an anachronism. The writings of neoliberals—Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman—that influenced the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, confirm the durability of the classical liberal position. Neoliberals argued that the meliorist activity of democratic governments must be kept to a minimum if liberal societies are to avoid what Hayek sign-posted as the road to serfdom.

The distinction between classical and modern liberalisms is not a sharp one, the positions shading off into each other. Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), for example, was convinced that many services in modern society can only be provided by large governmental enterprises and he defended a redistribution of wealth as socially stabilizing. Lippmann held with the ideals of Smith, however, which turned him against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and other forms of collectivism. The political thought of Karl Popper (1902–1994) can be located with Lippmann's near the middle of the continuum between classical and modern liberalisms.

Science and Technology as Supporting the Achievement of Liberal Ideals

Liberalism and science have commonly been seen as buttressing each other. While recognizing that scientific research needed governmental funding, liberals argued that because scientists are experts in research they should be free to select their topics of, and methods for, research. In the 1940s, Michael Polanyi defended the autonomy of science against Soviet-style planned research, and Popper supported free inquiry by showing that knowledge advances in an unpredictable manner. Like Polanyi and Popper, Robert Merton depicted science as an exemplary liberal community, highlighting norms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.

Since the detonation of the atomic bomb, with the proliferation of weapons of mass slaughter and with the deterioration of the environment, even liberals have become ambivalent toward science and technology, although most remain sure that science and technology are conducive to liberal values. Without science and technology, liberals argue, freedoms of modern society—of the press and of the airwaves, for example—would be attenuated. Freedoms of election and association benefit from electronic communications and rapid transport. The technology of publishing serves the marketplace of ideas, and media technology helps in checking the power of government. Travel and the mass media expose more people to foreign cultures, encouraging tolerance of ethnic and cultural diversity. Dissemination of information by way of the Internet assists people in making free choices on matters of health, religion, education, and politics. In contributing to the material conditions of life that underlie the enjoyment of all liberties, science and technology have helped people, particularly in Europe and North America, to live longer, suffer less pain, and enjoy better health and greater comfort.

Science and Technology as Impeding the Attainment of Liberal Ideals

Much of the liberal image of science is out of date. In the early twenty-first century most scientists are a part of big science. Typically research is conducted by large teams, is capital-intensive, and is shrouded in secrecy because most scientists aim at producing innovations for industrial and governmental sponsors. While liberals are correct in claiming that science ails when governments and corporations instruct scientists on how to conduct their research, the fact remains that governmental controls on scientific research have become more stringent.

Science and technology may support the liberal values of freedom and tolerance, but in a number of ways they also standardize culture and social practices, as James Scott has argued. Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) examined the idolization of science and technology—scientism and the cult of the expert—that so often takes responsibility away from laypeople and leads to the denigration of non-scientific beliefs and practices. In the first half of the nineteenth century, liberals (Tocqueville, Humboldt, and Mill) worried that newspapers and railways were creating a social mass that was hostile to individuality, diversity, and freedom. Concern about technology and the masses was also voiced by Max Weber (1864–1920) and José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). In the twentieth century, assembly line mass production and deskilling of the workforce in accordance with the precepts of Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management gave further impetus to standardization.

Social elites of scientists and technologists have privileged access to government policy makers and to funding agencies. They promote and benefit from scientism and standardization, having a major say over the curriculum and attracting the lion's share of resources for research in their fields.

In the hands of governments and corporations, modern science and technology have intruded deeply into the private realm. Although totalitarianism provided the most graphic evidence of mental regimentation by the electronic mass media, the mass media in democracies have been accused of manufacturing consent, indoctrinating consumers, and promoting irrationality. Computers and other information handling systems, security cameras, wire taps, and interception of on-line communications represent technologies that subject a citizenry to electronic surveillance.

STRUAN JACOBS

SEE ALSO Civil Society;Communitarianism;Conservatism;Democracy;Lock, John;Merton, Robert;Mill, John Stuart;Neoliberalism;Polanyi, Michael;Popper, Karl;Rawls, John.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arblaster, Anthony. (1984). The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. A major critique of the tradition.

Bellamy, Richard. (1992). Liberalism and Modern Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

de Ruggiero, Guido. (1927). The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood. London: Oxford University Press. A classic study of liberal theory and practice up to the early twentieth century.

Cranston, Maurice. (1967). Freedom, 3rd edition. London: Longmans.

Dewey, John. (1963). Liberalism and Social Action. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Diagnosis of, and prescription for, the ills of liberalism during the Great Depression.

Feyerabend, Paul (1975). Against Method. London: New Left Books. How to liberalize science.

Gray, John. (1986). Liberalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Greenleaf, W. H. (2003). A Much Governed Nation. London: Routledge. Part of his magisterial history of liberalism in England.

Hart, David. (1998). Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hobhouse, Lionel. (1911). Liberalism. London: Thornton Butterworth. The evolution of liberal thought in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Locke, John. (1960). Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. The great source of liberal ideas.

Manent, Pierre. (1994). An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Instructive on the development of French liberalism.

Manning, D. J. (1976). Liberalism. London: J. M. Dent & Sons.

Massimo, Salvadori. (1977). The Liberal Heresy. London: The Macmillan Press. Wide-ranging; somewhat uncritical.

Mulhall, Stephen, and Adam Swift. (1996). Liberals and Communitarians. Oxford: Blackwell. Careful examination of recent theories.

Ryan, Alan. (1995). John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton. A scholarly account of the career of Dewey.

Scott, James. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. The case against sweeping radicalism.