Liberalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy built on the rights of the individual, liberty, the consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. It is frequently named the dominant ideology of modern history. Yet the word itself once meant something almost unrecognizable. In 1375, liberal described the liberal arts, an education thought fitting for a free-born man. Within decades it could mean free in bestowing, freely permitted, or, as a slur, free from restraint. William Shakespeare even wrote in Much Ado About Nothing of a liberal villaine who hath confest his vile encounters. How did a word for generosity, and sometimes indiscretion, become the banner under which kings were overthrown? Who first argued that a government rules only by the consent of the people, and that a tyrant may rightfully be deposed? And why, centuries on, does the same word mean limited government in Europe and the welfare state in the United States? The answers run from a castle near Geneva to the floor of the Great Depression.

• 2. Locke's Radical Consent

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  John Locke is generally regarded as the father of modern liberalism, the philosopher who first drew liberal ideas together into a distinct ideology. His Two Treatises of 1690 became the foundational text of liberal thought. Locke argued that each man holds a natural right to life, liberty, and property, and that governments must not violate these rights.

  Thomas Hobbes had set the stage by imagining a state of nature, a war-like scenario before any state existed. Individuals, Hobbes reasoned, ceded some of their rights to an established authority in exchange for security, and only an absolute sovereign, his Leviathan, could fully sustain that security. Locke adopted the state of nature and the social contract but turned the conclusion on its head. Government, he held, acquires consent from the governed, and that consent must remain constantly present for the government to stay legitimate. When a monarch becomes a tyrant, the social contract is broken, and the people have a right to overthrow him.

  Locke wrote that what begins and constitutes any political society is nothing but the consent of any number of freemen capable of a majority to unite. The insistence that lawful government has no supernatural basis broke sharply with the divine right of kings. Dr John Zvesper described the new thinking: in the liberal understanding, there are no citizens within the regime who can claim to rule by natural or supernatural right, without the consent of the governed.

  Locke's other great opponent was Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha of 1680 defended the divine right of kings by claiming that authority granted to Adam by God passed to his male descendants. Locke disagreed so obsessively that his First Treatise reads almost as a sentence-by-sentence refutation. He countered that the grant of dominion in Genesis was given to humans over animals, not to men over women, and argued that conjugal society is made up by a voluntary compact between men and women. Not a feminist by modern standards, he nonetheless became the first major liberal thinker to integrate women into social theory, a step that would echo through the centuries toward Mary Wollstonecraft.

• 3. Toleration And Free Speech

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  In his Letters Concerning Toleration, Locke built a general defence for religious toleration on three arguments. Earthly judges cannot dependably evaluate the truth of competing religious claims. Even if they could, force cannot compel belief. And coercing religious uniformity breeds more social disorder than diversity allows. From the social contract he also drew a natural right to liberty of conscience, something rational people could never cede to a government to control. This reasoning made Locke an originator of the separation of church and state.

  The Presbyterian politician and poet John Milton shaped these ideas before Locke. A staunch advocate of freedom in all its forms, Milton argued for disestablishment as the only effective route to broad toleration, holding that the government should recognise the persuasive force of the gospel rather than force a man's conscience. As assistant to Oliver Cromwell, he drafted the Agreement of the People in 1647, a constitution of the independents stressing the equality of all humans.

  In Areopagitica, Milton gave one of the first arguments for freedom of speech, naming the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. His case rested on reason: every person should have unlimited access to the ideas of others in a free and open encounter, so that good arguments could prevail. Two centuries later, John Stuart Mill would sharpen the same conviction in On Liberty of 1859, declaring that the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.

• 4. Ancients And Moderns

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  Near Geneva, at Coppet Castle, an unusual gathering shaped nineteenth-century liberalism. Between the establishment of Napoleon's First Empire in 1804 and the Bourbon Restoration of 1814 to 1815, the Coppet group assembled under the exiled writer and salonniere Madame de Stael. Its members included Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jean de Sismondi, Lord Byron, Sir James Mackintosh, and August Wilhelm Schlegel.

  Benjamin Constant, the Edinburgh-educated Swiss Protestant among them, was one of the first thinkers to call himself a liberal. He looked to the United Kingdom rather than to ancient Rome for a practical model of freedom in a large mercantile society. Constant drew a famous distinction between the Liberty of the Ancients and the Liberty of the Moderns. Ancient liberty was participatory and republican, giving citizens the right to shape politics directly through debate and votes in the public assembly. It demanded a burdensome moral obligation of time and energy, and it depended on a sub-group of slaves doing the productive work in small, homogenous male societies that could gather in one place.

  The Liberty of the Moderns rested instead on civil liberties, the rule of law, and freedom from excessive state interference. In states too large for direct rule, and in a mercantile society where almost everybody had to earn a living, voters would elect representatives to deliberate in Parliament on their behalf. Constant's writings, and his critique of the French Revolution, informed later understanding of liberalism. Sir Isaiah Berlin, the British historian of ideas, pointed to the debt that thought still owes him.

• 5. Two Liberties

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  Late in the nineteenth century a new conception of liberty entered the liberal arena, first developed by the British philosopher T. H. Green. Green rejected the idea that humans were driven solely by self-interest, stressing instead the complex circumstances behind moral character. This new kind of liberty became known as positive liberty, to distinguish it from the prior negative version. Green tasked society and political institutions with enhancing individual freedom and creating the conditions that allow genuine choice.

  From Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, earlier liberals had conceived liberty as the absence of interference from government and other individuals, so that all people could develop their abilities without being sabotaged. Friedrich Hayek pressed that older view into the twentieth century, arguing in The Road to Serfdom of 1944 that reliance on free markets would preclude totalitarian control by the state. Green viewed society instead as an organic whole in which everyone has a duty to promote the common good. His ideas spread rapidly through thinkers such as Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse and John A. Hobson, and within a few years this New Liberalism had become the essential programme of the Liberal Party in Britain.

  As liberals worked to expand suffrage, they grew wary of the tyranny of the majority, a concept explained in Mill's On Liberty and in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America of 1835. They began demanding safeguards to protect the rights of minorities. Voltaire had already noted the puzzle at the heart of their creed, calling equality at once the most natural and at times the most chimeral of things. American philosopher John Rawls would later emphasise both equality under the law and the equal distribution of material resources, while the libertarian Robert Nozick disagreed, championing the older Lockean version of equality.

• 6. The Invisible Hand

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  Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776 and supplied most of the ideas of economics until John Stuart Mill's Principles in 1848. Smith argued that as long as supply, demand, prices, and competition stayed free of government regulation, the pursuit of material self-interest, not altruism, would maximise society's wealth. An invisible hand, he wrote, directed individuals and firms toward the nation's good as an unintended consequence of their own gain. This gave a moral justification for accumulating wealth, something previously viewed by some as sinful.

  The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say followed with his Treatise on Political Economy in 1803, expanded in 1830, and challenged Smith's labour theory of value by holding that prices were set by utility. Say placed the entrepreneur at the centre of the economy, an intermediary who combines land, capital, and labour to meet consumers' demands and who needs an unerring market sense. He is credited with Say's law, summarised as supply creates its own demand, a phrase later coined by John Maynard Keynes, who criticised Say's formulations as amounting to the same thing.

  Thomas Malthus added a darker doctrine. In An Essay on the Principle of Population of 1798, he argued that population grows geometrically while food production grows only arithmetically, so growth would always outstrip the food supply until nature checked it through vice and misery. David Ricardo and Malthus together transformed Smith's wage assumptions into the iron law of wages. Smith's economics entered practice across the nineteenth century: tariffs fell in the 1820s, the Poor Relief Act that restricted the mobility of labour was repealed in 1834, and the rule of the East India Company over India ended in 1858. Several liberals, Smith and Richard Cobden among them, believed the free exchange of goods between nations would lead to world peace.

• 7. Keynes And The Crisis

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  John Maynard Keynes, who lived from 1883 to 1946, gave what the source calls the definitive liberal response to the Great Depression. Brought up as a classical liberal, he became increasingly a welfare or social liberal after the First World War. He was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures and argued that budget deficits were a good thing, a product of recessions. Government borrowing, he wrote, is nature's remedy for preventing business losses from bringing production to a standstill.

  At the height of the Depression in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which recommended counter-cyclical public spending and contained one of the first mentions of the multiplier effect. His magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, followed in 1936. It challenged the neo-classical paradigm holding that an unfettered market would naturally reach full employment, and it justified the interventionist policies he favoured.

  Keynes introduced the concept of price stickiness, the recognition that workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even when a classical economist might call it rational. Because of it, the interaction of aggregate demand and aggregate supply could settle into stable unemployment equilibria, leaving the state, not the market, as the source of recovery. As early as 1928 he urged action: let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth. The strategy was to prime the pump until private funds began flowing again.

• 8. Many Liberalisms

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  In Spain, the liberales were the first group to use the liberal label in a political context, fighting for decades to implement the Spanish Constitution of 1812. During the Trienio Liberal, from 1820 to 1823, they compelled King Ferdinand VII to swear to uphold that constitution. The first use of the word liberalism in English had appeared only in 1815. By the middle of the nineteenth century, liberal had become a political term for parties and movements worldwide.

  The meaning then split across the map. In Europe and Latin America, liberalism came to mean a moderate form of classical liberalism, spanning both conservative liberalism on the centre-right and social liberalism on the centre-left. In North America, it refers almost exclusively to social liberalism. Since the 1930s, the bare word in the United States means social liberalism, tied to the welfare-state policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In Europe, by contrast, it is more commonly associated with limited government and laissez-faire policies. In the United States the older classical liberalism evolved into modern conservatism, and liberal is often used there as a pejorative. Even the colours diverge: yellow is the colour most commonly associated with liberalism worldwide, but in the United States liberalism is marked by blue and conservatism by red.

  From this single root grew movements that the source can only list: liberal feminism, pioneered by Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 brought women into liberal society. Social liberalism, advanced by figures from John Stuart Mill to John Dewey. And the anti-state liberal tradition, traced by historian Ralph Raico from Gustave de Molinari to Murray Rothbard, who coined the term anarcho-capitalism. Wollstonecraft, the source notes, denied that women are by nature more pleasure seeking than men, reasoning that confined to the same cages, men would develop the same flawed characters. What she most wanted for women was personhood.