The Making of Modern Liberalism - Hardcover

Ryan, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691148406 ISBN 13: 9780691148403

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2012

Synopsis

One of the world's leading political thinkers explores the history, nature, and prospects of the liberal tradition

The Making of Modern Liberalism is a deep and wide-ranging exploration of the origins and nature of liberalism from the Enlightenment through its triumphs and setbacks in the twentieth century and beyond. The book is the fruit of the more than four decades during which Alan Ryan, one of the world's leading political thinkers, reflected on the past of the liberal tradition―and worried about its future.

This is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory or the history of liberalism.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Ryan, the former warden of New College, Oxford, has taught political theory at Oxford and Princeton since 1969. His books include The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, and Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education.

From the Back Cover

"Alan Ryan's magisterial standing in political theory is already well known, but this book--a wonderful array of learned, insightful, historical discussions--puts his mastery beyond doubt. And it is massively more than the sum of its parts. It is just what the title promises: an authoritative, comprehensive, multifaceted, and strikingly intelligent account of the rise of the liberal tradition."--Jeremy Waldron, University of Oxford

"These essays are at once a history, a tapestry, and a trenchant defense of liberalism at its best. They have been crafted by one of our generation's most fertile political minds. Alan Ryan's intellectual odyssey is both captivating and compelling."--Ian Shapiro, author of The Real World of Democratic Theory

"Alan Ryan in this impressive work lights up the vast field of liberalism. He presents an accumulation of beautifully formulated ideas and leaves us with an enhanced knowledge of the depths, complexities, and richness of liberalism. His style is both vigorous and elegant, and his prowess as an interpreter is formidable. This is an invaluable book."--George Kateb, author ofPatriotism and Other Mistakes

"In The Making of Modern Liberalism, Alan Ryan sheds new light on key thinkers in the Western political tradition and presents his own liberal perspective on political affairs. Ryan's work shines with insight and intelligence. No one can read this book without being provoked to self-reflection, disagreement, and counterargument--precisely what's needed in a great work of political theory."--Glyn Morgan, Syracuse University

From the Inside Flap

"Alan Ryan's magisterial standing in political theory is already well known, but this book--a wonderful array of learned, insightful, historical discussions--puts his mastery beyond doubt. And it is massively more than the sum of its parts. It is just what the title promises: an authoritative, comprehensive, multifaceted, and strikingly intelligent account of the rise of the liberal tradition."--Jeremy Waldron, University of Oxford

"These essays are at once a history, a tapestry, and a trenchant defense of liberalism at its best. They have been crafted by one of our generation's most fertile political minds. Alan Ryan's intellectual odyssey is both captivating and compelling."--Ian Shapiro, author of The Real World of Democratic Theory

"Alan Ryan in this impressive work lights up the vast field of liberalism. He presents an accumulation of beautifully formulated ideas and leaves us with an enhanced knowledge of the depths, complexities, and richness of liberalism. His style is both vigorous and elegant, and his prowess as an interpreter is formidable. This is an invaluable book."--George Kateb, author ofPatriotism and Other Mistakes

"In The Making of Modern Liberalism, Alan Ryan sheds new light on key thinkers in the Western political tradition and presents his own liberal perspective on political affairs. Ryan's work shines with insight and intelligence. No one can read this book without being provoked to self-reflection, disagreement, and counterargument--precisely what's needed in a great work of political theory."--Glyn Morgan, Syracuse University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Making of Modern Liberalism

By Alan Ryan

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14840-3

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................viiIntroduction..........................................................................................1Part 1: Conceptual and Practical......................................................................191. Liberalism.........................................................................................212. Freedom............................................................................................453. Culture and Anxiety................................................................................634. The Liberal Community..............................................................................915. Liberal Imperialism................................................................................1076. State and Private, Red and White...................................................................1237. The Right to Kill in Cold Blood: Does the Death Penalty Violate Human Rights?......................139Part 2: Liberty and Security..........................................................................1578. Hobbes's Political Philosophy......................................................................1599. Hobbes and Individualism...........................................................................18610. Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life............................................................20411. The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau.................................................22012. Locke on Freedom: Some Second Thoughts............................................................233Part 3: Liberty and Progress, Mill to Popper..........................................................25513. Mill's Essay On Liberty...........................................................................25714. Sense and Sensibility in Mill's Political Thought.................................................27915. Mill in a Liberal Landscape.......................................................................29216. Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy: The Views of J. S. Mill...........................................32617. Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights.............................................................34618. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Liberty: Some Unanswered Questions in Mill's Politics.....................36419. Bertrand Russell's Politics: 1688 or 1968?........................................................38120. Isaiah Berlin: Political Theory and Liberal Culture...............................................39521. Popper and Liberalism.............................................................................413Part 4: Liberalism in America.........................................................................42722. Alexis de Tocqueville.............................................................................42923. Staunchly Modern, Nonbourgeois Liberalism.........................................................45624. Pragmatism, Social Identity, Patriotism, and Self-Criticism.......................................47325. Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education.........................................................48926. John Rawls........................................................................................505Part 5: Work, Ownership, Freedom, and Self-Realization................................................52127. Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie.....................................................52328. Hegel on Work, Ownership, and Citizenship.........................................................53829. Utility and Ownership.............................................................................55630. Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing...........................................................57331. The Romantic Theory of Ownership..................................................................58632. Justice, Exploitation, and the End of Morality....................................................60033. Liberty and Socialism.............................................................................617Notes.................................................................................................631Index.................................................................................................665

Chapter One

Liberalism

What Is Liberalism?

Anyone trying to give a brief account of liberalism is immediately faced with an embarrassing question: are we dealing with liberalism or with liberalisms? It is easy to list famous liberals; it is harder to say what they have in common. John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, T. H. Green, John Dewey, and contemporaries such as Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls are certainly liberals—but they do not agree about the boundaries of toleration, the legitimacy of the welfare state, and the virtues of democracy, to take three rather central political issues. They do not even agree on the nature of the liberty they think liberals ought to seek (Berlin 1969, 122–34).

It is a familiar complaint in writing about politics generally that key terms are undefined or indefinable; the boundaries between "political" and "nonpolitical" behavior and institutions are disputed, the defining characteristics of statehood, along with the necessary and sufficient conditions of legitimacy, are incessantly debated. Liberalism may be no worse off than its ideological competitors, of course. In everyday political practice, all the isms seem to be in the same condition; liberals, conservatives, and socialists can be identified only issue by issue, and their stand on one issue offers little clue to their stand on another. The conservative who opposes railway nationalization supports government subsidies of defense contractors, while the liberal who applauds the establishment of an ethics committee to investigate the financial dealings of politicians will deplore the establishment of a committee to investigate the ethics of schoolteachers.

But even if conservatism and socialism are in the same plight, one is still inclined to ask, is liberalism one thing or many? Is liberalism determinately describable at all (Dworkin 1985, 183–203)? The observation that the terms of political discourse are not easily brought to an agreed definition is not new. More than three hundred years ago, Thomas Hobbes remarked that if anyone had stood to profit from a similar confusion in geometry, mankind would still be waiting for Euclid. While Hobbes's remark suggests that it is the self-interest of priests, intellectuals, and politicians that explains this lack of precise definitions, twentieth-century writers have suggested another reason, that political concepts are "essentially contested" (Gallie 1956, 167–98; Gray 1983, 75-101). A third explanation, and one more relevant to liberalism in particular, is that liberals' political concerns have altered over the past three centuries. All three kinds of explanation suggest, however, that we should be seeking to understand liberalisms rather than liberalism.

One reason for the indefinability of political terms, or the systematic slipperiness of our concepts of the state, the political, or, as here, liberalism, is the use of these terms as terms of praise or obloquy in the political struggle; this is a modern version of Hobbes's view that disputed definitions are the result of competing interests. Since the 1970s, for instance, there has been an intellectual and political movement known as "communitarianism" whose main defining feature is hostility to liberalism (Sandel 1982). Communitarians emphasize the innumerable ways in which individuals are indebted to the societies in which they are reared; liberals, they say, write as if human beings come into the world with no social ties, owing no allegiances, and one way or another entirely detached from the societies they in some fashion inhabit. So described, liberalism is unattractive, built on sociological falsehoods and moral autism. Self-described liberals have naturally said that this is a parody of their views (Rawls 1985, 233; Rorty 1991, 179ff.).

Liberals themselves have sometimes tried to define liberalism in such a way that only the very deluded or the very wicked could fail to be liberals. At the height of the Cold War, it was easy to present the alternatives as liberal democracy on the one hand and assorted forms of one-party totalitarianism on the other. This attempt to narrow the range of political options was itself resisted. Social democrats, who opposed both the one-party state and uncontrolled capitalism, believed that their disbelief in the legitimacy of private property in the means of production distinguished them from liberal democrats. American conservatives distinguished themselves from liberals by according state and central governments a greater role in preserving national identity and some form of traditional moral consensus than liberals accept, or else by advocating a more laissez-faire economy and a reduced role for government (Rossiter 1982, 235ff.). Their critics retorted that they were nonetheless doomed by American history to remain liberals (Hartz 1955, 145–49).

The attempt to produce a clear-cut definition of a political stance is not always part of a hostile campaign to present the doctrines in question as incoherent or malign. Many political movements have devoted much effort to establishing a creed to which members must swear allegiance. Lenin spent as much time denouncing his Marxist allies for their misunderstanding of scientific socialism as attacking the czarist regime. He thought a revolutionary movement must know exactly what it thought and hoped to achieve. If the fainthearted or intellectually unorganized were driven out, so be it; as the title of one essay proclaimed: "Better Fewer but Better." Of all political creeds, liberalism is the least likely to behave like this. Whatever liberalism involves, it certainly includes toleration and an antipathy to closing ranks around any system of beliefs. All the same, liberals have often asked themselves what they have in common, where the boundaries lie between themselves and, say, socialists on the one side and conservatives on the other.

Another explanation of the difficulty of defining political terms is that they are essentially contested terms, terms whose meaning and reference are perennially open to debate. If we define liberalism as the belief that the freedom of the individual is the highest political value, and that institutions and practices are to be judged by their success in promoting it—perhaps the most plausible brief definition—this only invites further argument. What is liberty? Is it positive or negative? How does the liberty of a whole nation relate to the liberty of its members? Nor is liberty the only concept to invite such scrutiny. Who are the individuals in question? Do they include children? Do they include the senile and the mentally ill? Do they include resident aliens or the inhabitants of colonial dependencies? This might be thought to be unsurprising; any definition opens up discussion of the terms in which the definition is proffered. The sting in the claim that these are essentially contested concepts is the thought that any elaboration will provoke further argument (Gallie 1956, 175ff.).

There is a clear direction in which any elaboration of the definition of a chair, say, must go, and a clear line beyond which discussion is merely captious. This seems not to be true of the discussion of political doctrines. Whether the view that there are essentially contested concepts is entirely coherent is another question. Unless some substantial portion of the meaning of a concept is uncontested, it is hard to see how the concept could be identified in the first place. There must be a central uncontested core of meaning to terms like "liberty" if arguments about the contested penumbra are to make sense. A man in jail is paradigmatically not free; a man threatened with punishment if he writes a book is paradigmatically less free to write it than a man not so threatened (Berlin 1969, 122ff.). Even so, we may agree that political terms are constantly being endowed with new meanings, in much the way the terms of the law are endowed with new meanings in the course of legal argument. Even if liberalism is distinct enough to be identifiable, it still changes over time.

VARIETIES OF LIBERALISM: CLASSICAL VERSUS MODERN

To agree that liberalism may have a variety of institutional manifestations while resting on one moral basis—Locke's claim that men are born "in a state of perfect freedom, to order their actions and dispose of their possessions, and persons, as they see fit ... a state also of equality" (Locke [1690] 1967, 287), for instance—does not mean that all doubts about the porosity of liberalism have been laid to rest. One argument that has taken on the status of a commonplace is that there have been two kinds of liberalism: one "classical," limited in its aims, cautious about its metaphysical basis, and political in its orientation; the other "modern," unlimited, incautious, global in its aims, and a threat to the achievements of "classical liberalism." Classical liberalism is associated with John Locke ([1690] 1967), Adam Smith ([1775] 1976), Alexis de Tocqueville ([1835] 1964), and Friedrich von Hayek (1973–79). It focuses on the idea of limited government, the maintenance of the rule of law, the avoidance of arbitrary and discretionary power, the sanctity of private property and freely made contracts, and the responsibility of individuals for their own fates.

It is not necessarily a democratic doctrine, for there is nothing in the bare idea of majority rule to show that majorities will always respect the rights of property or maintain the rule of law (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1987, Federalist 10, 122–25); it is not always a progressive doctrine, for many classical liberals are skeptical about the average human being's ability to make useful advances in morality and culture, for instance. It is hostile to the welfare state; welfare states violate the principle that each individual ought to look to their own welfare, and frequently couch their claims in terms of the achievement of social justice, an ideal to which classical liberals attach little meaning (Hayek 1976). More importantly, perhaps, welfare states confer large discretionary powers upon their politicians and bureaucrats, and thus reduce to dependency their clients and those who depend upon the state for their prosperity.

Modern adherents of classical liberalism often ground their defense of minimal government on what they take to be a minimal moral basis. Minimal government may, for instance, be justified by the prosperity that economies deliver when they are not interfered with by governments; this argument has been current from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations defense of "the simple system of natural liberty" (Smith [1775] 1976, 687) down to Hayek's in our own time. It is not morally contentious to claim that prosperity is better than misery, and it has been given greater credibility than ever by the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the discrediting of military and authoritarian governments elsewhere.

An equally minimalist defense of liberalism as minimal government is provided by pointing to the nastiness of governmental coercion and to the contrast between the negative effects of mere brute force and prohibition compared with the benign effects of uncoerced cooperation. No classical liberal denies the need for law; coercive law represses force and fraud, and the noncoercive civil law allows people to make contracts and engage in any kind of economic activity. Still, every classical liberal holds that all the forces that make for imagination, invention, and growth come from the voluntary sector of the social order.

Classical liberals are not unanimous about the relationship between minimal government and the cultural and moral order, and this is perhaps the most important point about their moral views. Unlike modern liberals, they do not display any particular attachment to the ideal of moral and cultural progress. David Hume was more a political conservative than Adam Smith, but was more inclined than Smith to admire the "brisk march of the spirits" typical of a flourishing commercial society. Tocqueville was doubtful whether liberty could survive in the absence of strong religious sentiment, thinking that the self-reliance and self-restraint that he admired was not natural to modern man (Tocqueville 1964, 310–25), and Hayek was inclined to think that political liberalism rests upon cultural conservatism (Gray 1984, 129–31).

Contemporary defenders of classical liberalism think it threatened by modern liberalism. Modern liberalism, in this view, reverses the ambitions and restraints of classical liberalism, and in the process threatens the gains that classical liberals achieved when they replaced the tyranny of kings and courtiers with constitutional regimes. Modern liberalism is exemplified by John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, with its appeal to "man as a progressive being" and its romantic appeal to an individuality that should be allowed to develop itself in all its "manifold diversity" (Mill [1861] 1974, 120–22). Philosophically, it is exemplified equally by the liberalism of the English Idealists and "new liberals" such as L. T. Hobhouse ([1911] 1964).

In practice, it is exemplified by the assault on freedom of contract and on the sanctity of property rights represented by the welfare legislation of the Liberal government in the UK before World War I, by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal between the wars, and by the explosion of welfare-state activity after World War II. Modern liberalism is usually (but not always) agreed, even by its critics, to be a form of liberalism, for its underlying moral basis is couched in terms of freedom. Negatively, the aim is to emancipate individuals from the fear of hunger, unemployment, ill health, and a miserable old age, and, positively, to attempt to help members of modern industrial societies flourish in the way Mill and Wilhelm von Humboldt wanted them to.

It is liberal, too, because it does not share the antipathies and hopes of a socialist defense of the modern welfare state. Although some defenders of the rights of property claim that almost any restriction on the absolute liberty of owners to dispose of their own as they choose amounts to confiscation (Epstein 1985), modern liberalism has no confiscatory ambitions. Inasmuch as the ideals of the welfare state cannot be achieved without a good deal of governmental control of the economy, modern liberalism cannot treat property as sacrosanct and cannot limit government to the repression of force and fraud; but distinguished modern liberals such as John Rawls argue that personal property is a necessary element of individual self-expression, especially by means of freedom of choice in careers, even if vast shareholdings are not (Rawls 1971, 272–74). Critics of modern liberalism usually insist that it is liberalism, but a dangerous variety.

The fear that modern liberalism is inimical to the spirit of classical liberalism and will, in practice, threaten the latter's gains rests on two things. The first is the thought that modern liberalism is ideologically or metaphysically overcommitted. Mill's vision of man as a progressive being, with its demand that everyone should constantly rethink her opinions on every conceivable subject, is one with at best a minority appeal. To found one's politics on a view of human nature that most people find implausible is to found one's politics on quicksand. There is no need to appeal to such a vision of human nature to support classical liberalism; conversely, it is not clear that the kind of independent and imaginative personalities by which Mill set such store are best produced in a liberal society. History suggests that many of them have flourished by resisting an illiberal and conservative environment (Berlin 1969, 172).

The second is the thought that modern liberalism makes everyone an unrealizable promise of a degree of personal fulfillment that the welfare state cannot deliver, and that its efforts to deliver it will inevitably lead to frustration. For one thing, people resent being forced to part with their hard-earned income to provide the resources that supply jobs, education, and the various social services that modern liberalism employs to create its conception of individual freedom for other people. This creates a hostility between more and less favored groups of citizens that is wholly at odds with what modern liberals desire.

Moreover, the welfare state must employ an extensive bureaucracy whose members are granted discretionary powers and charged by law to use those powers for the welfare of their clients. This means that classical liberals' concern for the rule of law and the curtailing of arbitrary discretion is ignored: bureaucrats are given resources to disburse to their clients, and meanwhile the allegiance of the citizenry is undermined when the state fails to produce the good things it has been asked to provide. The liberation the welfare state promises—liberation from anxiety, poverty, and the cramped circumstances of working-class existence—is easily obtained by the educated middle class and is impossible to achieve for most others. There is thus a grave risk of disillusionment with liberalism in general as a result of its failure when it overextends itself. Some writers suppose that the worldwide popularity of conservative governments during the 1980s is explained by this consideration.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Making of Modern Liberalismby Alan Ryan Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691148406
• ISBN 13: 9780691148403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 680