This is the last of a three-part series looking at the philosophy behind the concept of liberalism and the history that gave rise to it. The series is based on a section of my recently completed MPhil project. The first part appeared on 1 June, and the second part on 8 June.
The 20th century saw the emergence of what has been termed New Liberalism. This was essentially a shift from focusing on removing the constraints on people to proactively assisting them. It sought to ameliorate social problems and to provide society’s less affluent with the means for their upliftment and effective participation in society.
This was evident in Britain in the growth of welfare provisions (the post-Second World War Labour Party government would expand this into the welfare state – this having originally been conceptualised by William Beveridge, a senior member of the Liberal Party), and in the United States at various points: during the so-called Progressive era early in the century, during the New Deal in the 1930s, and the period of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives.
On matters of political and civil rights, liberalism continued to grow into the forms familiar today: a concern for the individual with a growing recognition that ascriptive differentiators such as sex and race could not justify denying rights to people. Democracy on the basis of universal adult suffrage, an idea that would have been viewed with some disapproval by liberals in the early 19th century, became a matter of liberal principle.
Liberalism had evolved considerably since its early emergence, and, over its existence, demonstrated some ripe contradictions in the positions of its adherents. The liberalism of the 20th and 21st centuries increasingly became a heterodox system of thought. Perhaps it was a marker of its adaptability that it came to embody various strains of thinking, some of which would sit uncomfortably with others. Thus, while the individual’s worth is to be respected, some thinkers have argued for a form of liberal “group rights”.
The Canadian philosopher, Will Kymlicka, for example, has argued at length for the reconciliation of communal claims with liberal thought. His writings have attempted to map out a liberal case for the recognition of ethnonational minorities – cultural identity being intrinsic to the individual’s sense of meaning and belonging – within broader society, and for establishing a resultant hierarchy of entitlements.
With the specific background of Canada in mind, for example, he posits that it is just, rational and pragmatic to accord differing sets of rights to distinct groups in society, with “national minorities” (such as Canada’s aboriginal population and the Quebecois) being entitled to greater degrees of recognition that more recent immigrant communities, the former having often been unwillingly incorporated into the society, the latter having done so voluntarily.
In different societal and political contexts, liberalism might occupy different positions relative to other ideologies. Thus, Michael Freeden notes that in Britain liberalism is seen as an ideology to the left of the political centre, in France and Germany, to the right. Germany has evolved a form of liberalism that stresses a strong and capable state along with free markets – so-called Ordoliberalism – while in the United States, liberalism is associated with large government intervention.
This brief overview of the development of liberalism should demonstrate that it is a varied and heterogenous idea.
Differences in broad liberal thought have been noted and have contributed to the difficulty of settling on a firm and uncontentious definition. Nevertheless, it should be clear that particular preoccupations characterise “liberal” thinking. Unmistakable here would be an aversion to tyranny and a corresponding commitment to liberty – “liberal” and “liberty” share an etymological root. With this as an anchor concept, various definitions have been proposed.
Thus, the late Roger Scruton described liberalism as “an intellectual tradition formed from the interplay of two political ideals: liberty and equality. Liberals differ according to whether liberty or equality is more important to them.”
On this reading, personal and societal freedom are critical, and should be fortified by equality in the eyes of the state – in citizenship, and in the law – and in some strains of thinking, also in socio-economic terms, both on ethical grounds and since inequality is held to produce hierarchies that constrain liberty.
John Gray sets out a four-point characterisation of liberalism. It is individualist, in that it takes individuals as its fundamental unit of analysis. It is egalitarian, regarding each of those individuals (though it must be said, with some regard to factors such as age and criminal status) as of equal moral legal and political value; this one might describe as equal citizenship. It is universalist, with a view of itself as applicable to all people across cultures. And it is meliorist, in that it believes that the improvement of conditions and the resolution of problems is inherently achievable.
In Gray’s account, liberalism is a fundamentally optimistic worldview. It is also one with wide latitude for interpretation. An important element of his analysis is his distinguishing negative from positive freedom, a distinction drawing on the ideas articulated by Mill and again by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s.
Negative freedom relates to the absence of constraints – a “freedom from” – and is linked to the older, “classical” form of liberalism. Positive freedom, by contrast, describes conditions and interventions that are aimed at making the practical attainment of desirable goals possible. It is a “freedom to”, pioneered by the New Liberalism. Echoing Scruton’s remark about differences among liberals on the relative importance of liberty and equality, whether a negative or a positive conception of liberty is adopted will have significant implications for the nature of public policy.
It is quite conceivable that liberals of different orientations might dispute whether the policy prescriptions of their peers are consonant with liberalism at all.
The same theme is prominent in Alan Ryan’s work, The Making of Modern Liberalism. His analysis is framed by a recognition of a conceptual difficulty: “are we dealing with liberalism or with liberalisms?”
Stressing the differences between “classical” and “modern” liberalism (which emphasise respectively, in broad terms, the negative and positive freedoms touched on above), he adds a distinction between liberalism and libertarianism.
The point of divergence here is that while “liberalism” views state power with caution, libertarianism has a more radical view as to the role and legitimacy of state power. The state, from a libertarian perspective, should only secure people’s rights to their persons and property and their ability freely to transact with others. This position would tend to exceed the limitations on state action that most liberals (or perhaps “liberalisms”) would advocate, and Ryan notes that it strikes a particularly discordant note in relation to “modern” liberalism.
He cites in particular the argument made by the late John Rawls: “Rawls’s claim is that we should acknowledge two rights: the right to the most extensive liberty consistent with the same liberty for everyone, and a right to just treatment, enshrined in the thought that inequalities are justified only to the extent that they improve the situation of the least advantaged.”
Ryan suggests that it is revealing to examine liberalism from the perspective of what it rejects. This he summarises as anti-absolutism, anti-theocracy and (more contentiously) anti-capitalism. Liberalism rejects monopolies on power and its arbitrary exercise.
Citizens in such societies need not be compelled to pledge allegiance to something repugnant to their conscience; rather, they should be free to form their own voluntary associations and to articulate and campaign for their own interests.
Government is not constituted through divine mandate, and the state and religious belief should be kept separate from each other, with the free exercise of religious expression left to individuals (indeed, freedom from religious coercion and to practise religion freely were early objectives of proto-liberalism).
The suggestion of an inherent liberal antipathy to capitalism refers less to market economics than to the prospect of the generation of expanding inequalities and power concentrating in influential (‘capitalist’) interests. This would be an argument familiar to Mill.
For the most part, however, liberalism is sympathetic towards or enthusiastic about private enterprise, markets and property rights, both on pragmatic grounds and as an expression of and means of safeguarding individual liberty.
Freeden has written extensively on the various strands of liberalism, and suggests seven features common to all: liberty, individuality, progress, rationality, the general interest, sociability, and constrained power.
Broadly speaking, all liberalisms (Freeden insists on this formulation[1]) are committed to freedom of people and groups to conduct their affairs and to make their choices without coercion; they place the individual at the centre of their analyses and their policy concerns; they are committed to the improvement of conditions and the efficiency of processes; they link the possibilities of progress to the thoughtful and evidence-based consideration of problems; they seek solutions that contribute to overall wellbeing of the polity at large, rather than that of a narrow section, whether the latter be a hereditary aristocracy or a social class; they recognise the inevitability – and one might add, the value – of social life and the need for mutually beneficial and non-coercive organisation, and they are sceptical about the use of power, whether by the state or by any other interest.
Andrew Heywood, meanwhile, attempting to render the topic comprehensible for a classroom setting (i.e., for a textbook), points to five core values in liberalism: individualism, freedom, reason, justice and toleration. It is noteworthy that his account does not attempt a common definition of liberalism, but rather two separate definitions.
He described classical liberalism as “the tradition within liberalism that seeks to maximize the realm of unconstrained individual action, typically by establishing a minimal state and a reliance on market economics.”
Modern liberalism, on the other hand, is a tradition within liberalism that provides (in contrast to classical liberalism) a qualified endorsement for state and societal intervention to spur individuals’ development.
From the above synopsis of history and thinking – and this is confined to small selection of relatively analytically rigorous work, and excludes everyday, public deployment of the term “liberal” or “liberalism’, often as invective – it should be clear that liberalism is not a concept that lends itself to easy or succinct definition.
Liberalism is a concept with varied and sometimes disputed definitions, and one whose understandings have evolved considerably over time. Nevertheless, some key ordinal features should be clear. It is a system of thought that prioritises the individual and his or her autonomy and the associated opportunities for self-fulfilment.
Perhaps of greatest importance for its relevance to politics and governance is the stress on restraining power; liberalisms may differ on the role of the state or for that matter on the role of any powerful actor. But all liberals would seem to acknowledge an inherent danger in the uncontrolled use of power, and an acute awareness of its potential to be abused. Where liberal thought might tend sometimes to be utopian, it is never messianic.
[Image: President Lyndon B. Johnson on his Birthday in Swimming Pool with his Dog and Grandson, https://nara.getarchive.net/media/president-lyndon-b-johnson-on-his-birthday-in-swimming-pool-with-his-dog-and-f39149]
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[1] He writes: “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 (Freeden, 2015).”