This is the first third of a longer article I wrote for Quillette
America has a deeply confused understanding of liberalism,
neo-liberalism, conservatism and progressivism. Thanks to the outsize influence
of US politics on global discourse, this confusion is slowly infecting other
countries. It’s a dangerous disease because it prevents the articulation of a
consistent framework for analysing policy, which leaves the voter in thrall to
sloganeering, issue-baiting and crude policies formulated along only vague
ideological grounds.
As many of these confusions pertain to some variety of liberalism—classical, neo, libertarian—let’s start clarifying things there. Classical liberalism begins roughly with Hobbes. He experienced the horror of a civil war and argued that a ‘leviathan’ was needed that could enforce ‘the rule of law’ to control the human tendency towards violence. He argued that all individuals should cede some of their innate sovereignty to this sovereign. Note this fundamental appreciation of the individual’s sovereignty over herself. This is something you don’t find in fascism, which prioritises the state, or progressivism, which prioritises the class or marginalised group.
As many of these confusions pertain to some variety of liberalism—classical, neo, libertarian—let’s start clarifying things there. Classical liberalism begins roughly with Hobbes. He experienced the horror of a civil war and argued that a ‘leviathan’ was needed that could enforce ‘the rule of law’ to control the human tendency towards violence. He argued that all individuals should cede some of their innate sovereignty to this sovereign. Note this fundamental appreciation of the individual’s sovereignty over herself. This is something you don’t find in fascism, which prioritises the state, or progressivism, which prioritises the class or marginalised group.
Locke comes next and suggests the separation of powers to
tame the leviathan. The sovereign will be split into the elected legislature,
the executive (Crown or President) and the courts. These institutions will
share power and jealousy guard their patch against encroachment from each other,
ultimately making the leviathan accountable to the sovereigns of the populace,
who are the source of power. The checks and balances of parliamentary process
develop around this time and find perhaps their most cogent articulation in the
constitutionalist debates of the American founding fathers.
Locke also writes the first widely popular essay on
tolerance in response to Catholics and Protestants massacring each other on various
pretexts founded in dogma.
The French revolution saw major contributions to the
ideational history of liberalism, conservatism and progressivism. Paine pens
the Rights of Man, which articulates inalienable human rights as a fundamental
institution of liberal society.[1] Meanwhile, the Jacobins,
early flagbearers of progressivism, execute all who oppose their glorious
attempt to bring about greater equality. Burke, disgusted by this slaughter,
articulates the founding principle of conservativism. Namely, the current order
evolved for a reason, and one should be very careful that in trying to change
it one does not throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were. Policy
change should be incremental, not wholesale. Note that Burke was not a fan of
traditionalism—he was a Whig, not a Tory. But he was a fan of order—a
consistent theme in conservative thought.
Around this time, Adam Smith hits upon the free market.
People left to their own devices will more efficiently allocate scarce
resources than any central planning government ever could. Leave capitalism to
deliver wealth (grow the pie) and government to deliver equity (split the pie).[2] Smith was writing
especially in the context of trade restrictions, price setting and government
monopolies.
Fast forward. Bentham and the utilitarians develop a
secular principle to guide public policy formulation. What is ‘good’ is what
brings the greatest benefit to the greatest number. This is a rational calculus
that can be argued over, unlike religious morality. It also enshrines social
welfare as an aggregation of individual welfares.
John Stuart Mill develops the harm principle: the only
grounds on which the state can restrict the freedom of a citizen is if leaving
them free would cause harm to another citizen. The obvious example is violence,
though the concept of harm remains open to contestation. Critically, Mill
emphasises that while institutions must protect liberty, individual morality
behoves the individual to refrain from doing harm. For example, you have a
right to free speech, but also a duty to be polite.
The notion of positivism coalesces in jurisprudence. The
law is not natural in the sense that it is handed down from God or written into
the firmament. Instead, the law is an institution of social expediency and open
to cyclical reinterpretation. This is compatible with the conservative notion
that new legal matters, like copyright law, should be dealt with by extending
existing legal frameworks to cover the new issues.
Read the rest here, at Quillette.
[1]
There is some confusion about whether Paine was in fact a progressive given his
involvement in the French Revolution. Those who hold this view are directed to
Eric Hobsbawm’s essay ‘Thomas Paine’ in ‘Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion
and Jazz’, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1998, which will doubtless disabuse them
of this misunderstanding.
[2]
For anyone interested in what happens when a society gets this division of
institutional labour backwards, have a look at modern India. A fantastic,
concise and recent overview is provided by T. N. Nainan in The Turning of the Tortoise.
Hi Mark.
ReplyDeleteI came across your article via a Twitter link to Quillette. A very fine piece it is too. You wrote of why "...democracies almost always operate at the centre of politics'. Has the centre of politics always remained as a constant? You note that Classical Liberalism moved away from Natural Law and eventually adopted Positivist law. Would that not lead to a shift in what we would regard as centrist politics? After all, it is positivism which blends into progressivism. Classical Liberal theories of liberty are derived from Natural Law, but Progressive theories of politics are of liberation, which deny Natural Law. progressivism cannot 'progress' without overthrowing the order which natural Law assumes. So, atheistic progressivism has overtaken Theistic notions of a God given order, discoverable by man as natural Law. Strangely, natural Law theory had developed to such an extent that theistic scholars such as the Jesuit Saurez and the Protestant Grotius both declared that God could be taken out of the natural Law paradigm and the theory would still hold true. Legal Positivism says that Law is socially constructed, representing accepted social norms. However progressivism works hard at changing what those accepted norms are. That being the case, how does one define the 'centre of politics'? I would suggest that progressivism strives to alter what we think the centre of politics might be and in the process it is driving us further and further away from the Classical Liberal foundations of western democracies (are there any other sorts of democracies?). Legal Positivism, so its critics scream, fails to give due recognition to morality. Classical Liberalism and the capitalist systems it built, rely heavily upon a system of personal morality, with its attendant rights and obligations. If progressivism alters accepted norms and legislates accordingly, do we have a new centre? If the centre of politics continually shifts, does conservatism and classical theory eventually fail all together?
Hi John. Thanks for commenting.
ReplyDeleteI think you can have an interpretation of natural law that moves away from law as founded on objective morality. Hayek has such a position. He basically argues that natural law is the inherited wisdom of our ancestors, so new legal issues should be resolved by extending existing laws rather than coming up with new ones. This makes natural law a matter of social expedience, but has a more cautious bent to it than the instrumentality of pluralism. I don't believe objectivity morality exists - it's all subjective. So I am pluralist in that sense, and liberal, but I am very sympathetic to Hayek's version of natural law.
Certainly the centre has moved, but liberalism is arguably the view that 'you should move with the centre', as it were. Individuals at liberty form collectives to promote their values and make the world more like they want it to be. This is an emergent political order. As society changes, culture changes, technology changes and the economy changes, the values that people want to see the world align with also change. They can only express these changing values if they are at liberty and an emergent order can in fact emerge. Liberals value this emergent order and want to preserve it. It is not the values that the order expresses but the order itself that they value. Liberals are thus interested in preserving the institutions that make the shifting of the centre by these collective forces possible. By contrast, progressives and reactionary conservatives are happy to shut down those instutions to protect their gains when the political tide turns.
So the short answer to your question: yes the centre has shifted and you cannot define a centre of politics in perpetuity, but liberals value the very fact that the centre can shift, and so they will always be aligned with the centre.
That's my view. I hope it's clear enough.