One Tradition, Several Liberalisms

“Liberalism” names a family of positions rather than a single doctrine. What unites them is a normative core: individual liberty has political priority, collective power requires justification to those who are subject to it, and a society must accommodate reasonable disagreement about the good. Around this core the authors diverge on almost everything: the foundation of liberty (natural right, utility, value pluralism, epistemic efficiency), the role of the state in the economy, and the place of community and tradition.

A terminological caution is in order. In the United States, “liberal” usually designates the reformist center-left; in continental Europe and Latin America the word more often refers to the economic and political liberalism of nineteenth-century lineage. This article deals with the tradition running from Locke to Hayek, commonly called classical liberalism, and refers where needed to contemporary egalitarian liberalism and libertarianism, which are examined in the article Rawls and Nozick.

John Locke (1632–1704) is often treated as the intellectual founder of political liberalism, although the label is retrospective. In the Two Treatises of Government (published anonymously in 1689, dated 1690 on the title page), the First Treatise refutes Robert Filmer’s patriarchalism and the Second Treatise offers the positive theory. Its central features are:

  • State of nature and natural law. Individuals are by nature free and equal, and bound by a law of nature that obliges everyone not to harm others in their life, health, liberty, or possessions.
  • Property. Each person has a property in his own person; by mixing labor with common goods one acquires property in the result, under conditions (the so-called proviso that “enough and as good” be left for others, together with a prohibition on waste).
  • Consent and limited government. Political power is a trust: people establish it by consent to protect rights they already possess, and a government that violates the trust forfeits its legitimacy, opening the way to a right of resistance. The contractarian foundation is examined in The Social Contract: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

In the Letter Concerning Toleration (published in Latin in 1689), Locke argues that the civil magistrate has jurisdiction over civil interests (life, liberty, health, property) and not over the salvation of souls, and that faith cannot be produced by coercion because it depends on inner assent. Locke’s toleration has acknowledged limits: it excludes atheists (who, he held, cannot be bound by oaths) and those who owe allegiance to a foreign prince, a provision aimed chiefly at Catholics and one that Locke thought would endanger civil order.

Recent scholarship also discusses Locke’s relation to slavery. He was involved in the administration of the Carolina colony, and the extent of his role in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which provided for slavery, is disputed among historians, as is the question of authorship and responsibility. The point matters because it exposes the tension between the universalism of natural rights and the practices of the Atlantic world in which the theory was written.

Montesquieu and Adam Smith: Moderated Power and Commercial Society

Montesquieu (1689–1755) is not a contractarian; his method in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) is comparative and sociological, attentive to climate, customs, and institutions. His liberal contribution is the theory of moderate government. In Book XI, political liberty consists in the security that one will not be compelled to do what the law does not command nor prevented from doing what it permits, and it is preserved only where power checks power. Hence his analysis, based on the English constitution, of the distribution of legislative, executive, and judicial functions among distinct bodies. Montesquieu also argued that commerce tends to soften manners (the doux commerce thesis, Book XX).

Adam Smith (1723–1790) added the economic and moral dimension. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), morality arises from sympathy and from the standpoint of the impartial spectator; in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the division of labor and exchange in competitive markets explain growth and the coordination of dispersed interests. The famous “invisible hand” metaphor appears only sparingly in his work and is often over-interpreted. Smith assigned the state substantial tasks (defense, justice, certain public works and institutions, Book V) and sharply criticized mercantilism and the merchants’ conspiracies against the public. To make him a doctrinaire of the unrestricted market is therefore a caricature; he serves better as an ancestor of the idea that complex social orders can result from individual actions without central design, a theme Hayek would take up.

Constant: The Liberty of the Ancients and of the Moderns

In 1819, at the Athénée Royal in Paris, Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) delivered the lecture De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes. The thesis is both historical and normative. In the ancient cities, liberty consisted chiefly in the direct, collective exercise of sovereignty (voting, judging, deliberating in the assembly), while the individual remained largely subordinated to the authority of the whole in private life. In large-scale modern societies, with commercial economies and individuals devoted to work and leisure, liberty is above all the right to live under the rule of law, free from arbitrariness, with guarantees of expression, association, religion, property, and choice of occupation.

Two consequences follow. The first is a critique of anyone who would restore ancient liberty in the modern world; Constant had in mind, among others, the extensions of Rousseauian popular sovereignty in the Revolution and the Terror. The second is a symmetrical warning: the danger of modern liberty is that citizens, absorbed in private concerns, may renounce political participation and hand power over to their rulers. Constant’s answer is the representative system, accompanied by civic vigilance and political education, not a choice between the two kinds of liberty.

Mill: The Harm Principle

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) published On Liberty in 1859. His problem is social tyranny: besides oppression by rulers, there is the oppression exercised by prevailing opinion and custom, which may be more pervasive than legal penalties. His answer is the so-called harm principle, stated in Chapter I: “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 individual’s own good, physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant for coercing him.

The book develops this principle on several fronts:

  • Liberty of thought and discussion (Chapter II). Mill offers epistemic arguments: the silenced opinion may be true; it may be partly true; and even if true, without challenge it tends to degenerate into dead dogma whose meaning is lost.
  • Individuality (Chapter III). The development of character requires self-chosen life plans and “experiments of living”; diversity is a condition of progress.
  • Limits to the authority of society (Chapter IV). He distinguishes conduct that affects only the agent (protected from coercion) from conduct that affects others (open to control).

Mill grounds the principle on utility “in the largest sense,” tied to the permanent interests of humans as progressive beings, which both links and separates him from Bentham’s utilitarianism (see Utilitarianism: Bentham, Mill, Singer). The known difficulties are of three kinds. First, the boundary between what affects only the agent and what affects others is contestable (what counts as “harm”? offense? indirect harm?). Second, James Fitzjames Stephen (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1873) accused Mill of underrating the role of conventional morality in social cohesion, an objection that returns in the twentieth-century debate between Patrick Devlin (The Enforcement of Morals, 1959) and H.L.A. Hart. Third, Mill himself restricts the principle to adults in “civilized” societies, a qualification that postcolonial critics connect with his career at the East India Company and with imperial paternalism, a point developed, for example, by Uday Singh Mehta in Liberalism and Empire (1999).

Tocqueville: The Tyranny of the Majority

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) is hard to classify, being both a liberal and a critic of tendencies in the democratic world; his place in conservative thought is discussed in the article Conservatism: Burke, Tocqueville, Oakeshott, Scruton, and Tradition. In Democracy in America (vol. I, 1835; vol. II, 1840), he takes equality of conditions as a structural fact of modern societies and asks what kind of liberty can survive it.

His analysis identifies two dangers. In the first volume, the tyranny of the majority: when the majority controls the legislature and shapes opinion, there is no authority to which the individual can appeal, and coercion ceases to be physical and acts instead on the mind, discouraging dissent. In the second volume, soft despotism: citizens absorbed in private pleasures delegate the management of their lives to a tutelary power, benevolent and meticulous. The remedies Tocqueville values are institutional and cultural: decentralization, local self-government, the jury, a free press, civil associations, and mores (mœurs) tempered by religion. There is an echo and development of Constant here, and an anticipation of Mill, who received Democracy in America with great interest.

Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) delivered his inaugural lecture Two Concepts of Liberty at Oxford in 1958; it was later collected in Four Essays on Liberty (1969). He distinguishes:

  • Negative liberty: the absence of interference or external obstacles to the agent’s choices; the question is what the area is within which I am left free to do or be what I want.
  • Positive liberty: being one’s own master, acting according to one’s own will and reason; the question is who or what governs me.

Berlin’s central warning is that the positive ideal, though legitimate, can be distorted: if there is a “higher” or rational self distinct from empirical desires, a power claiming to know my true self may coerce me “for my own good,” in the name of my liberty. Berlin sees this structure in forms of monist political rationalism and in totalitarian practice. His liberalism also rests on value pluralism: human ends are many, not always compatible, and frequently incommensurable, so that choosing among them involves real loss, and negative liberty protects the space for that choice.

The objections are well known. Gerald MacCallum (1967) argued that all freedom has a triadic structure, “X is free from Y to do or be Z,” and that the binary opposition is misleading. Charles Taylor, in “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty” (1979), argued that a purely negative conception cannot distinguish relevant from trivial obstacles without appealing to evaluations of what matters to the agent, which reintroduces “positive” elements. Philip Pettit, finally, proposed a third conception, non-domination (see below).

Hayek: Spontaneous Order and the Knowledge Problem

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), economist and social philosopher, received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. In The Road to Serfdom (1944) he argues that central economic planning, by requiring a single plan for the whole society, tends to concentrate discretionary power and to erode the rule of law; economic and political freedom would be interdependent. The book does not advocate the absence of the state: Hayek allowed, for example, a certain public provision of a social minimum and the legal regulation of the market. The dispute concerns the form of intervention: general, abstract, predictable rules as against particular, discretionary commands.

Two concepts underpin his more theoretical work:

  • The knowledge problem. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), Hayek holds that the knowledge relevant to the economy is dispersed, tacit, and local, and is unavailable to any planner; the price system works as a communication mechanism that coordinates this dispersed knowledge. The argument recasts in epistemic terms the older socialist calculation controversy opened by Ludwig von Mises.
  • Spontaneous order. Institutions such as language, customary law, and the market are “the result of human action but not of human design,” a formula he takes from the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson). In Law, Legislation and Liberty (3 vols., 1973–1979), he distinguishes spontaneous order (cosmos) from organized order (taxis) and criticizes the notion of “social justice” as an inappropriate category for evaluating outcomes of processes with no agent, a point on which he opposes Rawls directly.

Hayek’s critical reception is broad. It is argued that the diagnosis of The Road to Serfdom is overly deterministic, given that democracies with strong welfare states did not slide into totalitarianism; that the knowledge argument, though strong against comprehensive planning, does not decide among degrees of regulation; and that his sympathies for transitional dictatorships, expressed in visits to Chile in the Pinochet period, are at odds with the liberalism he defended. Hayek also distanced himself from conservatism (see below).

From Classical to Egalitarian and Libertarian Liberalism

In the twentieth century the liberal core bifurcated. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), maintains the priority of basic liberties but holds that economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the least advantaged. Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), starts from Lockean individual rights and concludes in favor of a minimal state. Both are examined in the article Rawls and Nozick. For the articulation between liberalism and democratic procedure, see Deliberative Democracy and Its Critics; for the modern origin of the notion of legitimate power, see Machiavelli and the Autonomy of Politics, whose realism is often the counterpoint to contractarian idealism.

The Critiques

Communitarians

In the 1980s, Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981), Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982), and Charles Taylor, among others, questioned liberalism’s anthropology. Sandel holds that the Rawlsian conception of the person presupposes an “unencumbered self,” prior to its ends, whereas our identities are constituted by ties and narratives we did not choose. MacIntyre argues that modern moral discourse is a set of fragments of abandoned traditions of virtue and that practical rationality is always situated in traditions. Liberals reply that liberal neutrality protects precisely the attachments individuals choose, and that the critique confuses a methodological thesis about the abstract “self” with a claim about real life; Rawls himself, in Political Liberalism (1993), recast his theory as a political rather than metaphysical conception of the person.

Marxists

In On the Jewish Question (written in 1843, published in 1844), Marx argued that the “rights of man” enshrined in liberal declarations are largely the rights of the egoistic member of civil society, that is, of the individual separated from the community, and that political emancipation, though progress, is not human emancipation. Along related lines, C.B. Macpherson (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962) read in Hobbes and Locke the presuppositions of a market society in which liberty is modeled on property. The Marxist tradition thus distinguishes formal from real freedom: what good is the right to contract to those lacking the means to do so? Liberal replies include the defense of social rights (Rawls and, in a different register, Mill’s own social liberalism) and the observation that Macpherson’s reading of Locke must be assessed textually, since it is contested among specialists.

Republicans

Philip Pettit (Republicanism, 1997) and Quentin Skinner (Liberty before Liberalism, 1998) retrieved a neo-Roman tradition according to which to be free is not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another: liberty as non-domination. The difference from negative liberty lies in modality: the slave of a benevolent master who never interferes suffers no interference but remains dependent on another’s discretion, and so is not free. The consequence is that institutions must limit the capacity for arbitrary interference, not merely actual interference, giving law and civic participation a more demanding role. Hannah Arendt, by another route, defends freedom as common political action. Liberals respond that the concept of non-domination either collapses into negative liberty or requires a stronger commitment to the civic good than liberalism can accept; republicans reply that their conception is compatible with pluralism.

Conservatives and Other Objections

For the conservative critique, running from Burke to Oakeshott, liberalism rests on an abstract rationalism that underrates tradition and inherited attachments; this debate is the subject of the article Conservatism, which also records Hayek’s refusal to be classified as a conservative. There is also the critique of Carl Schmitt, for whom liberalism neutralizes the political, seeking to replace antagonism with discussion and commerce (The Concept of the Political, 1932). Other objections include the feminist one, such as Carole Pateman’s (The Sexual Contract, 1988), for whom the classical social contract concealed a sexual division of power, and the postcolonial one, already mentioned in connection with Mill.

Assessment

Classical liberalism offers a coherent answer to three questions: where the legitimacy of power comes from (consent, utility, accountability), what boundary power must not cross (rights, the private sphere, freedom of thought), and how to coordinate a society of individuals who disagree (general institutions, markets, toleration). Its most persistent difficulties are the determination of the boundary between public and private, the relation between formal liberty and the real conditions of its exercise, and the status of its anthropological presuppositions. Each critique examined above strikes one of these points, and each of the authors studied here, from Constant to Berlin, can be read as a partial reply to one of them.

References

  • Berlin, I. “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.
  • Constant, B. “De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes” (1819).
  • Hayek, F.A. The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge, 1944.
  • Hayek, F.A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. American Economic Review 35(4), 1945.
  • Hayek, F.A. Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 vols., 1973–1979.
  • Locke, J. Two Treatises of Government (1689/1690); A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689).
  • MacCallum, G. “Negative and Positive Freedom”. Philosophical Review 76(3), 1967.
  • MacIntyre, A. After Virtue. 1981.
  • Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford, 1962.
  • Marx, K. “Zur Judenfrage” (1843/1844).
  • Mehta, U.S. Liberalism and Empire. Chicago, 1999.
  • Mill, J.S. On Liberty. 1859.
  • Montesquieu. De l’esprit des lois. 1748.
  • Pateman, C. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, 1988.
  • Pettit, P. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford, 1997.
  • Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice. 1971; Political Liberalism. 1993.
  • Sandel, M. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge, 1982.
  • Skinner, Q. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge, 1998.
  • Smith, A. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759); The Wealth of Nations (1776).
  • Taylor, C. “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty” (1979).
  • Tocqueville, A. de. De la démocratie en Amérique. 1835–1840.

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