The word ‘liberalism’ and the history of liberalism are complicated and surprising. Historians are careful to distinguish among the different definitions of ‘liberalism’ for this reason. A political thinker who was a liberal in the 17th century is different from one in the 18th century, who in turn is different from one in the 19th century. It will be important to sort and chart these distinct meanings of the word.
John Locke was a liberal; Hillary Clinton was a liberal. But the two are different and distinct from each other.
Although historians can identify isolated strands of liberal thought in previous centuries, and even millennia ago, modern political liberalism emerged in the late 1600s. This era includes the Glorious Revolution and most of John Locke’s political writings.
The initial version of liberalism, shaped by Locke and others, emphasized the task of government being to protect every citizen’s life, liberty, and property. The etymology of ‘liberalism’ and ‘liberty’ make clear the goals and values of liberalism. In one famous passage, Locke writes that “no one can be put out of” an initial free state of nature “and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”
Along with the idea that a government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, other key ideas in this original Classical Liberalism included an emphasis on keeping government in check so that it did not encroach on the rights of the individual, and the articulation of such rights as freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and free markets. A laissez-faire economic approach was understood as protecting the individual’s right to do as she or he pleases with her or his property.
Note that Locke posits that humans have, or had, an initial “state of nature,” which he hypothesizes to be a state of liberty. Other political philosophers, including some who disagree sharply with Locke, agree on this point, that there is or was a “state of nature” which is prior to a social contract and the institution of government. The “state of nature” might be logically prior or temporally prior to the formation of a governed state.
For example, Thomas Hobbes developed a concept of the “state of nature” which was sinister and violent, while Locke’s state of nature was a bit more cheerful.
This initial version of modern political liberalism — note that the late 1600s are reckoned as ‘modern’ — arose and developed in the British Isles, and is often called ‘Classical Liberalism’ as Maurice Cranston writes:
Traditional English liberalism has rested on a fairly simple concept of liberty — namely, that of freedom from the constraints of the state. In 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 law and order at home, defense against foreign powers, and security of possessions — the three principles Locke summarized as “life, liberty and property.”
Buried in Locke’s view of the world is an Enlightenment concept of human beings as rational, knowing, deliberative agents. Locke, like nearly every other political philosopher, had a notion of human nature, and his conception of society and government arose from his idea of human nature.
The concept of a human being as a deliberate, rational, knowing agent is foundational for free market economics.
Central to this original version of Classical Liberalism is a sharp distinction between society and government. In chapter 19 of Locke’s Second Treatise (1689), which runs from paragraph 211 to paragraph 243, the word ‘government’ occurs approximately 48 times, the word ‘society’ approximately 43 times, and the words ‘free, freedom, liberty’ approximately 29 times. In the chapter, Locke makes a detailed effort to distinguish between society and government.
Following Locke, Thomas Paine emphasizes this distinction and scolds the writers who fail to note it. In 1776 he explained:
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.
Paine continues, writing that society “encourages” communication or dealings between individuals or groups, while government “creates distinctions.” Society “is a patron,” but government is “a punisher.”
Classical Liberalism proposes that the task of political philosophy is to develop structures which will confine government to its proper province and prevent it from encroaching up society’s realm, as Maurice Cranston notes:
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 Classical Liberalism of John Locke had a profound influence on the founding of the United States, leading to the abolition of slavery and the universal suffrage for all citizens, including women and formerly enslaved people.
Eventually, a competing form of liberalism arose to contend with the original form of Classical Liberalism. A central author in this new movement was J.S. Mill. In 1859, advocated a schema which inverted the logic of Classical Liberalism. Instead of limiting and curbing government power so that both the individual and the society would be free to flourish, J.S. Mill wanted to empower government to restrain society. Mill reasoned that society, with its unregulated markets and its political principle of majority rule, was the true danger to the freedom of the individual.
This new form of liberalism, promoted by Mill and others, rested on a subtly but importantly different understanding of freedom.
A “liberalism” that once argued for economic freedom, and for the government to refrain from controlling society, now argued for the exact opposite. Maurice Cranston explains:
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,” continues Maurice Cranston, propounded “a different — as they claimed, 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 split between Classical Liberalism and J.S. Mill’s liberalism each birthed a handful of political and economic movements which would struggle with each other through most of the twentieth century.
The newer form of liberalism was less about protecting freedom and more about providing comfort. Indeed, it was willing to sacrifice freedom.
One of Mill’s famous sayings seems to support liberty:
the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
The slippery slope in Mill’s argumentation is hiding behind the word ‘harm’ in this well-known quotation. ‘Harm’ had long been understood as compromising or undermining the protection of an individual’s life, liberty, and property. But now Mill would interpret ‘harm’ in a broader way. ‘Harm’ would be the failure to intervene into the life of the individual, or into the life of society. Such intervention was, according to Mill, morally obligatory, in order to improve the life of the individual.
Liberalism had gone from protecting the life of the individual to improving the life of the individual. While an improved life might seem like a good thing, troubling questions soon appeared: Who decided what was truly an improvement? Who decided which improvements were necessary? How would this improvement violate the rights of the individual, if she or he didn’t want a particular improvement? And who would pay for the improvements?
Maurice Cranston describes the tensions between the two groups of liberals:
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 which 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.
Liberalism had split into two movements. The two contradicted each other. A single liberal movement soon became a practical impossibility, and eventually, there were more than two versions of liberal movements, both in England and around the world. A significant number of these movements did not use the word ‘liberal’ but rather wore labels like communist, socialist, progressive, etc.
Before the rise of J.S. Mill’s new version of liberalism, the original Classical Liberalism had a good career, especially in the United States, but also in various nation-states around the world, as Patrick Deneen writes:
A political philosophy conceived some 500 years ago, and put into effect at the birth of the United States nearly 250 years later, was a wager that political society could be grounded on a different footing. It conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life. Opportunities for liberty were best afforded by a limited government devoted to “securing rights,” along with a free-market economic system that gave space for individual initiative and ambition. Political legitimacy was grounded on a shared belief in an originating “social contract” to which even newcomers could subscribe, ratified continuously by free and fair elections of responsive representatives. Limited but effective government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections were some of the hallmarks of this ascendant order and, by all evidence, wildly successful wager.
The success of Classical Liberalism for a century or two in various locations around the globe is due to its core drive for freedom and liberty. Practical steps toward a “weak” or “limited” government made such freedom and liberty possible.
The vision of freedom was nearly universally appealing, allowing Classical Liberalism to appear in nations of various cultures, various religions, and various languages: a global phenomenon. Patrick Deneen expounds on the attractiveness of the doctrine:
The deepest commitment of liberalism is expressed by the name itself: liberty. Liberalism has proven both attractive and resilient because of this core commitment to the longing for human freedom so deeply embedded in the human soul. Liberalism’s historical rise and global attraction are hardly accidental; it has appealed especially to people subject to arbitrary rule, unjust inequality, and pervasive poverty. No other political philosophy had proven in practice that it could fuel prosperity, provide relative political stability, and foster individual liberty with such regularity and predictability.
As effective as Classical Liberalism had been in the process of moving the world into modernity, it yet had within itself the seeds of its own downfall. The liberty of each individual to propound her or his own worldview included the worldviews which undermine a stable society. Those worldviews were translated into action. As society was sabotaged, civic chaos began; the response to the turmoil was increased governmental powers to manage the social instability.
Classical Liberalism, which began by restraining government power to protect individual liberty, had given birth to a movement which necessitated increased government intervention into the life of the private citizen.
Instead of society working to limit government’s ability to shackle the individual, the new order included increasing the government’s power to shackle the salutary ability of society to shape a communal life conducive to individual development.
Patrick Deneen narrates how liberalism destroyed both itself and society:
Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the persistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate individuals from the constitutive associations and education in self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest moments, the health and continuity of families, schools, and communities were assumed, while their foundations were being philosophically undermined. This undermining led, in turn, to these goods being undermined in reality, as the norm-shaping power of authoritative institutions grew tenuous with liberalism’s advance. In its advanced stage, passive depletion has become active destruction: remnants of associations historically charged with the cultivation of norms are increasingly seen as obstacles to autonomous liberty, and the apparatus of the state is directed toward the task of liberating individuals from such bonds.
What will the twenty-first century bring for liberalism? Will the struggle between Classical Liberalism and J.S. Mill’s liberalism continue? Will one or the other of those two dominate? Will the tension continue to be framed as one between individual liberty and governmental interventionism? Which political leaders, and which policies, correspond to Classical Liberalism? Which correspond to J.S. Mill?
In any event, the only way to understand the political dynamics of today and tomorrow is to study the past.
