User:9d8g4j0j/39084509840850498/Liberalism

by Max Lerner This article first appeared in 1960 and remained in print until 1973, the last year of the Fourteenth Edition. Lerner was a passionate, though by no means blind, adherent of the liberal view and here is eloquent in his exposition and defense of it. Above the pleasure of the prose and the clarity of thought behind it, the article offers a reminder of a time when "liberal" was not yet an epithet.

LIBERALISM.Liberalism is the creed, philosophy and movement which is committed to freedom as a method and policy in government, as an organizing principle in society and as a way of life for the individual and community. As a term it took its origins from the "Liberales," a Spanish political party in the early 19th century, but received its widest currency in the English language. As an idea and philosophy it predates its use as a term, and can be traced back to the Judaeo-Christian-Greek intellectual world, along with the idea of liberty itself with which it is closely linked.

Confusion of Terms.--Some of the confusions about liberalism arise from the various stages of meaning through which the term passed during a history of several centuries, and from the wide diversity of uses to which it has been put. There were in the second half of the 20th century a number of political parties, in Great Britain, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, called by the name of the "Liberal party" or some variant of it; there was a party of the same name active in the politics of New York state; and even a Liberal International which served as a clearinghouse for liberal political movements throughout the world. But while these parties expressed the liberal outlook, that outlook was not limited to them. Their emphasis was on an economic program and policy which minimized state intervention and control, and which sought to carry out the philosophy of economic freedom under the difficult conditions of modern industrial organization. They thus expressed the outlook of a liberal capitalism on the defensive against various forms of socialism and communism on one side, and against conservatism and the totalitarianisms of the right on the other. "Liberal" political parties tended thus in practice to be caught between the upper and nether millstones, and their appeal was for that reason constricted to a middle ground position.

Yet liberalism as a dynamic philosophy was not at the end of the road. Just as it had its modern origin in the revolutionary movements attending the emergence of the business class to power and enlisted the most radical energies of the 18th and 19th centuries, so it showed a capacity to absorb many of the ideas of the revolutionary movements which challenged that class. What gave it this resiliency was its master idea of freedom as a method and a credo, this master idea being one of the great seminal revolutionary ideas of world history, not limited to any one economic program nor to the social power of any one class.

Liberalism is thus a basic approach to individual and collective living in the modern world. Its locus has been largely the west, since it has come out of the intellectual and institutional history of the great western nations. Its golden age may be dated roughly between 1750 and 1914; i.e., between the era of the French philosophes and the start of World War I. But there is nothing inherent in it to limit it thus either in time or place. It proved pervasive enough to penetrate to some degree into every 20th-century society and social climate. It was associated with revolutionary movements in England, France, Germany and Italy, but it was also an active force in tsarist Russia, opposing both tsarist reaction and communist totalitarianism. It became a force in political systems as diverse as post-World War II Japan, Israel, Turkey, Greece and a number of Latin-American nations. It was an ingredient (the extent of which was widely debated) in the democratic socialist movements of Great Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and the Scandinavian countries, and of the "welfare state" in the U.S. The term has also been applied to certain "liberal" elements of conservatism (as in the phrases "liberal Republicanism" or "liberal Toryism"), and to the internal struggles within the U.S.S.R. and the communist bloc, as in the phrase "liberal Communist elements."

History.--In its history as an idea liberalism is closely linked with the idea of liberty or of liberation, since the essence of the liberal idea is to aim at freeing--and thereby expressing and fulfilling--the human spirit in the individual. The idea can be pushed back to Socrates and his quiet insistence on holding to his truth even at the cost of his life. But it was the Stoics who, in an era of expanding world horizons, were able to break away from the idols of the organic tribe or city-state and universalize man as an individual, as something apart from his civic pattern. It was Christianity which, by giving a religious sanction to man's dignity as an individual, gave the movement to fulfill it a passionate quality.

In the early phases of modern Europe such 17th-century thinkers as Descartes, Milton and Spinoza served as the conduits through which the long-preparing stream of liberal thought came into European experience. Descartes shaped the instrument of rationalism; Spinoza forged the links between the life of reason and the values of an emerging liberal outlook; and Milton directed powerful assaults on the repressive engines of censorship, which kept men from access to what might be the liberating truth. Together they applied to everything, including the powerful institutions of state and religion, the shattering method of critical inquiry. The way had indeed been prepared for them by the Protestant Reformation, which stressed the role of individual private judgment even in religious concerns. But far more powerful was the scientific revolution, whose preparatory phase was the Renaissance, opening new vistas of time and place and turning men from the next world to the present one. The grand centuries of this scientific revolution were the 16th and 17th, when man's growing knowledge and control of his environment and the rise of a new economic class to exploit it revolutionized the life claims and life prospects of the intellectuals in Europe and those in whose name they wrote and spoke.

All these streams of thought and tendency converged in the great explosive movement called variously the Enlightenment (q.v.) or the Age of Reason (in France the age of the philosophes, in Germany the Aufklärung), which spread throughout western Europe and even across the seas into the new world, and whose great voices were Voltaire, Locke, Goethe and Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau, Hume and Kant, Diderot, Lessing, Adam Smith and Giovanni Vico, Condorcet, Montesquieu and Benjamin Franklin. These were the miners and sappers of the intellectual and institutional life of a society of feudal ties, monarchical and church authority and aristocratic and clerical privilege. They also had the prevision of a new intellectual and cultural structure the outlines of which were still obscure because the political, economic and social cement necessary to build the structure and hold it together was still in formation. That cement was to come with the great political revolutions (the English, American and French, which took place within the century between 1688 and 1789) and with the rise to power of the new middle and business classes that used the revolutions to capture and consolidate their position. On their road to power they struck alliances--loose, often unconscious, but nonetheless real--with the intellectuals, each partner to the alliance using and being used by the other, and both of them helping to bring to fruition the master ideas of the liberal system of thought.

Leading Concepts.--To list some of these master ideas is an artificial process, since they were tied together in an ideological web, and each loses much of its meaning when torn from this web. Yet even a listing may suggest the richness of the intellectual armoury of liberalism.

Central to the whole is the idea of liberty itself--not absolute liberty ("No government allows absolute liberty," wrote Locke), but the maximizing of the individual's freedom to think, to believe, to express and discuss his views, to organize (associate) in parties, to find employment, to buy and sell commodities (including his own labour) freely and to keep the rewards, to choose his rulers as well as his form of government and to change both--by revolution, if necessary. So crucial is the idea of liberty that liberalism might be quite summarily defined as the effort to organize liberty socially and to follow out its implications.

As for where this right to maximal liberty comes from, liberalism's answer was nature. "The laws of Nature and of Nature's God," as Thomas Jefferson denominated them in the American Declaration of Independence, formed the true religion of liberalism, and on it they built what the 20th-century U.S. historian Carl Becker called "the heavenly city of the 18th-century philosophers." The 18th century carried on a love affair with nature, in religion, law, politics, metaphysics and landscape painting. Rousseau in France and Locke in England were the principal 17th- and 18th-century protagonists of the idea that men had rights rooted in nature, which governments must protect and which must be defended even against government.

Bills of rights, petitions of right, declarations of the rights of man and of the citizen--these became the watchwords of the era. Since they were based on nature and in natural law, they were universalized, abstracted and made absolute--"indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible," as the Virginia constitution put it in describing the natural right of revolution. Actually this notion of natural law came less from theology than it did from Sir Isaac Newton and his colleagues in the scientific revolution, who showed that the operation of the universe could be explained rationally in terms of the laws of nature without bringing in any external divine intervention.

As a result even God became nature's God, and religion was universalized into a deism, thus diluting the rigours of revealed religious certitude and emphasizing tolerance toward the variety of forms in which nature's God might be worshipped. The Renaissance, the scientific revolutions, the march of technology, the rising living standards, all contributed to a growing rationalism in thinking and attitudes and to a secularism of belief. The axis of men's concerns shifted from the next world to this one, and from what had been laid down by tradition in the past to what men could achieve for themselves in the present and future. In place of the idea of sin men began to talk of the idea of progress, in place of predestination they caught a glimpse of the vision of men's perfectibility. Everything seemed possible in the "best of all possible worlds." The test of institutions became the question not of whether they were in the service of God but whether they ministered to the happiness of men.

Armed with these weapons of secularism, progress and happiness, liberalism was able to turn a withering fire on institutions. "Man is born free," wrote Rousseau in the Contract sociale, "yet he is everywhere in chains." And in Émile: "God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil." It was a basic assumption of the liberal thinkers that man is endowed with reason and goodness, and that only the institutional frame into which he is born corrupts and enslaves him. The enemy was custom, tradition, institutions, social habit. The French philosophes, the English utilitarians, the philosophic radicals, the Italian patriot-intellectuals were the "angry young men" of their time, blasting away at the establishment of their day--the church, the feudal order, the aristocratic classes, the dynastic state, the educational system, the censorship. Always they sought to lift from men what Jefferson called the "dead hand of the past."

If it was man's meddling with the natural order that caused all the mischief, then it follows that the best human course is to leave things alone. This powerful nexus linked the liberal intellectuals with the emerging business class, who wanted free markets, the removal of crippling restrictions upon economic activity and the chance to amass wealth and property.

But laissez faire (q.v.) in itself was not the whole of the liberal program. To it was added republicanism, popular sovereignty and education--especially the last. The removal of governmental restrictions and the toppling of tyrannical institutions would provide the freedom for reason to function: but reason needed tools with which to function, and education would provide them. Since the liberals believed in man's goodness, they believed also in his perfectibility, and education was the instrument by which it could be furthered. Some of the more realistic liberal thinkers, however, saw the darker side of the moon as well: that if men were by nature good, they were also ruled by ambition, greed for power and the political passions. Hence it was necessary to curb the majority will by a concern for the protection of minorities. And it was especially necessary to provide in government for the separation of powers (q.v.), so that the legislative and executive powers would not be fused into a single tyranny, and the judiciary could remain independent of both.

Thus the liberal image of the state came to mirror the equilibrium physics that the scientific revolution had made familiar. And the liberal image of the human mind came to stress the primacy of self-interest as a drive (egoism), the primacy of reason as an instrument (intellectualism) and the ultimate value of individual efforts toward self-realization (progress, happiness) or of individual nonefforts (laissez faire, quietism) in a state of nature.

Men had by the mid-20th century become more aware of some of the weaknesses of this liberal outlook that characterized the vanguard thinking of liberalism's golden age. They knew about its oversimplifications, about its atomism, its primitivism, its utopianism, its naïve cults of nature, progress and happiness. But it is well to remember that in its emergence liberalism was an exciting new movement of thought that released the energies and enlisted the loyalties of men. For a historic moment they caught a vision of human possibility, and this vision armed them for their encounters with what they regarded as the powers and principalities of darkness.

The Battlefields of Liberalism.--These encounters were fought out chiefly on five national battlefields--Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and the United States. In each country liberalism as a political and social movement took on the salient aspects of the national character.

Great Britain.--In Great Britain, the birthplace of modern liberalism, it moved from the revolution of 1688 to the 20th-century welfare state without grand generalized formulations, without sharp breaks and with a minimum of violence; it moved mainly by gradual and piecemeal yet organic and continuous reforms, so that each generation absorbed the gains and victories of the previous one. In France the nobility fought tenaciously for its privileges, and the Bourbon monarchy--after making concessions to the revolutionary clamour--finally threw in its lot with the clergy and nobility and was overthrown; in England, on the other hand, from the time of Magna Carta, the aristocracy fought for its own privileges, which were then generalized into the liberties of all classes and men; it was able to retain its vigour through the 18th century and continued to absorb into itself elements from business, the professions and even some of the leaders of the labour movement. The English monarchy, after a futile effort under the Tudors and Stuarts to set up absolutism against the growing pressures for parliamentary rights, accepted its modern constitutional position as spokesman and symbol of the continuity of British history. This continuity was able to absorb the parliamentary reform acts, the religious toleration acts, factory legislation, free trade, educational reform and the transformation of the British empire into a commonwealth of federated autonomous states.

Many of these reforms were accomplished under the 19th-century Whigs and later under the Liberal leadership of William E. Gladstone and David Lloyd George; but some were accepted and even furthered under Tory governments, while some of the unfinished work of liberalism had to wait for Labour governments under the rubric of the initial work of democratic socialism. The moving spirits in the intellectual history of British liberalism, after Locke and Adam Smith, were Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians; James Mill and his school of philosophic radicals; John Bright and Richard Cobden and the Manchester free-trade group; John Stuart Mill, who sought to develop a political and economic theory which would serve as a basis for the fulfillment of the individual within a social frame; the liberal philosophical school of T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse; and the sharply different school of Harold J. Laski, which set for itself the same goals as the liberals did but was contemptuous of liberal methods and called for socialist means to attain the humanist ends of liberalism.

It is within the British historical frame that the sequence of stages in the development of liberalism as a pattern of thought and social action can be seen with greatest ribbed clarity. The first stage, mainly one of intellectual preparation, was in essence a revolutionary one, justifying and even preaching the "natural right" of revolution, more so in the French setting than in the British, but with some revolutionary elements in every national setting. The second stage was that of middle-class constitutionalism, which laid the foundations of representative government and established the dominance of the business middle class. The third, closely related to this, became known as "classical" liberalism. Its champions in England were the classical economists, from Adam Smith through David Ricardo, Thomas R. Malthus and Nassau Senior; its banners were those of laissez faire, free trade and the weak state. This stage in turn gave way to the stage of democratic liberalism, when laissez faire was replaced by a stronger and more affirmative state, when trade-union organization brought with it a shift of the class base for liberal militancy and when the emphasis shifted to mass education ("Now we must educate our masters," as the phrase went after the Reform act of 1832) and to economic security. This stage in turn developed into welfare (or social) liberalism, which operated with large-scale governmental intervention for social security and created the mixture of welfare capitalism and welfare socialism applying (with a differing emphasis on the ingredients) in the 20th century in most of western Europe and the United States.

France, Italy and Germany.--In the case history of French liberalism, the first stage was far more revolutionary than in Great Britain, and led to the "liberty, equality and fraternity" of the French Revolution, and the violence and bitterness as well as the sweeping reconstructions of that movement. In the first half of the 19th century the French experimented with middle-class liberalism, in the intervals of further revolution and reaction. With the advent of the third republic, Leon Gambetta became the spokesman for a democratic liberalism (the French came to call it, characteristically, "radical socialism"), as Alexis de Tocqueville had been its precursor, both of them affirming a faith in the inevitable triumph of the democratic mass through the leverage of political reform. Yet the history of French liberalism under the third and fourth republics was a stormy one, with its effectiveness largely crippled by governmental weaknesses and the slowness of constitutional reform.

In the Italian case the emergence of liberalism was almost wholly linked with the rise of the movement for national liberation and unity, and its champions were therefore Cavour, Garibaldi and Mazzini, especially the last, for whom the three basic pillars of liberalism were universal suffrage, free education and the security of having work to do. But there was no class base in Italy broad enough or strong enough to move from Mazzini's vision of a liberal democracy to the actuality of democratic liberalism, and Italy had to go through the bitter experience of class war, followed by a fascist interlude, before it could move toward a telescoped version of the democratic and welfare stage of liberalism.

The German experience was even stormier. National unification, when it came, carried with it an authoritarian monarchy; the middle-class and democratic phases of liberalism were elided (the German middle class supported the authoritarian state, as it later supported Nazi totalitarianism); the army caste and the big landowners proved to be reactionary forces; paternalistic welfare legislation was pushed through under Bismarck, in order to anticipate and defeat the emerging socialist energies; the Weimar republic, in the interval between World War I and Naziism, expressed a constitutional liberalism which lacked a strong leadership, a strong class base and a civil liberties tradition, and it fell victim to the Nazis. In west Germany, after World War II, a liberal reawakening went along with an economic revival. The west Germans, who had borrowed the technology of the Industrial Revolution from the British without their accompanying liberal democracy, attempted to telescope into a brief period the historic phases leading to a democratic and welfare liberalism.

The United States.--In the case of the United States the obstacles that loomed so large in the path of continental liberalism, especially in Germany and Italy, were largely absent. There were no feudal institutions to overthrow, no encrusted traditions, no entrenched landowning aristocracy or monarchy, no oppressive burden of clericalism. The revolution against British imperial controls, once achieved, laid open a path for U.S. development in its own terms. Born in the early centuries of the liberal impulse in Europe, and with its own characteristic institutions shaped during the liberal Enlightenment, the U.S. became the most striking expression of a liberal government and society.

Since the United States is so largely a middle-class society, and since liberalism began and flourished mainly as a middle-class movement, it is not surprising that it should have found its greatest successes in America, from the middle-class liberalism of the constitution itself, through the democratic liberalism of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and the progressive liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, to the welfare liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

International Character.--To examine how the liberal movements fared in each of these major countries should not, however, obscure the fact that it was a broad movement of ideas and programs that cut across national boundaries. Its great landmarks were the English revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the failure of the 1848 revolutions on the continent (the failures in the history of liberalism are as important as the successes), the unification of Italy, the liberation of the serfs in Russia, the American Civil War, the victory of the Dreyfusards in France, the emergence of the British welfare state, the U.S. New Deal and the victory of civil rights in the supreme court school decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Whenever in modern history and wherever in the world men have shown the capacity to act together to ensure the welfare of the many by methods that fortify the freedom of the individual and enable him to fulfill his potentials, there liberalism as a whole has won a victory. The U.S. experience, for example, came out of the liberal revolutionary energies of Europe, and its success in turn strengthened the liberal spirit in Europe and caught the imagination of the world. On the other hand, the persistence of the problem of Negro status in America, the cyclical fluctuations of prosperity and depression in the capitalist economies of the west, the failure of nerve on the eve of Italian and German fascism--these events cast doubt on the validity of the liberal idea and the survival value of its program.

Liberalism in the Second Half of the 20th Century.--A number of 20th-century observers spoke at mid-century of the decline of liberalism, both as a system of thought and as an organization of government and society, but they may have been reading a funeral service over a corpse that refused to die. It might certainly be said that the classical and largely negative phases of liberalism had gone with the winds of history. What was not clear was whether this applied also to the democratic and welfare phases of the affirmative liberal state.

The central dilemma of liberalism is that it must emphasize the method of freedom, which tends toward the diffusion of the national energies and the fragmentizing of the collective purpose; at the same time it must compete with collectivist creeds and totalitarian systems for the allegiance of the world's uncommitted peoples. To meet this dilemma, 20th-century liberalism tended to make freedom responsible rather than anarchic; to move away from the relativism and pragmatism with which the later historical liberalism had been associated; to rekindle the fires of religious belief; and increasingly to invoke equality as a goal and slogan, as well as liberty. There were in the second half of the 20th century many liberals who would agree with Hobhouse's remark that "liberty without equality is a name of noble sound and squalid meaning" (L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, 1911). Hence the emphasis on the economic and social context within which the struggle for freedom is set, and hence also the experiments with economic regulation and controls which made some of the champions of classical liberalism prophesy that democracy was traveling the "road to serfdom."

More striking than the signs of decline in liberalism was the fact that, in the face of battering from wars, depressions and the attack from totalitarianisms of the right and left, liberalism was able to survive as it had. It had to meet and absorb drastic changes within capitalism itself. It encountered communism, fascism and those intensely nationalist and antilibertarian internal movements which have been called the "radicalism of the right." It came under fire from the revolutionary nationalist movements of the middle east, the far east and Africa, which associated European and American liberalism with the imperialism of some of the western powers.

Its ordeal was all the more difficult because the fanaticisms which accompanied the various post-World War II independence movements everywhere more and more excluded any middle ground. This was particularly true of the colonial-nationalist movements in Africa and the middle east: in the name of liberation, in many instances, they inaugurated programs of racist chauvinism, economic constriction and political intolerance. Heirs to the liberation tradition of the west, they did not always apply it. Yet it was not clear whether these movements, even after the achieving of independence, might not have to grapple with the problems of freedom, and might not then have to rediscover some of the liberal solutions that had been slowly recognized, after centuries of political experiment and experience, and at a high cost in courage.

What still kept liberalism a viable system were some of the elements that made possible an open society and a relatively good life: the "career open to talent"; the principle not of equality as such, but of access to equal opportunity for all; the basing of decisions on consent, so that when crises come the people as a whole respond to them in a more organic way than the imposed response under totalitarianism; the winning of ever greater economic security without the sacrifice of freedom; the channeling of what might otherwise become deep class and social conflicts into political conflicts, whose results were accepted even in defeat; and finally, as at the start, the principle that every man has in him a potential which he must have a chance to fulfill.

See also DEMOCRACY; INDIVIDUALISM

Bibliography. L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (1911); J.S. Schapiro, Liberalism: Its Meaning and History (1958); G. de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (1927); Harold J. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism (1936); Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the 18th Century (1932); M. Salvadori, Liberal Democracy (1957); H.K. Girvetz, From Wealth to Welfare: the Evolution of Liberalism (1950); John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (1935); C. Frankel, The Case for Modern Man (1957); A.V. Dieg, Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England During the 19th Century, 2nd ed. (1914); L. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (1957); L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955); Eric Goldman, Rendezvous With Destiny (1952); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955); Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (1955); Michael Kraus, The North Atlantic Civilization (1957); Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope (1951); Max Lerner, It Is Later Than You Think, rev. ed. (1943), America as a Civilization (1957).

(M.LR.)