Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (9 page)

3.
The Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England in the late 19th century. Manchester was a pre-eminent hub of free trade, whose doctrines were often referred to as the ‘Manchester School’.

We can put that differently. First layer liberalism focused on demarcating a safe area of individual space. It was predominantly a ‘let me be and do’ liberalism, better known by the French term ‘laissez-faire’—reflected also in second layer liberalism. Third layer liberalism focused on the forward-looking enlargement of human capacity: a ‘let me grow’ liberalism. The rise of that time-oriented but open-ended liberalism, which regarded human growth as a gradual process complementing human autonomy and independence, signalled a new stage in its history. This third sheet concealed those areas of the second sheet that over-emphasized individual competitiveness. Instead, it relocated liberal concerns from commercial exchange relationships to investing in the capacity of people to express themselves. Individual diversity and eccentricity were the prime engines of social progress. But the area of the groundsheet that entrenched constitutional arrangements for securing independent and, broadly speaking, uninterrupted individual activity still shone through.

It needs re-emphasizing, however, that there is no clear-cut chronological sequence between those layers. John Milton, for example, had expressed liberal ideas
avant la lettre
in his
Areopagitica
, the carefully crafted plea against censorship of the press: ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’ It was not liberty of movement within defined boundaries, or the liberty to follow one’s will, that exercised him, but the liberty to give vent to the vigour and liveliness of the human spirit. That absence of limits was an early instance of the third layer, commending not just physical space but the spiritual and intellectual scope for human development.

Layer four

The fourth liberal layer continued the remarkable revolution that was taking place within the liberal family of ideologies. Its prime feature lies in rethinking the spatial relations among people. The individualism of the first layer, including Mill’s resolute defence of the inviolability of the private sphere, was appreciably curtailed, appearing semi-opaque. Social space was no longer thought of as separating individuals by constructing protective barriers around them but as interweaving them, and not only on the material dimension of market relationships. That was especially evident in the intellectual and political movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries known as the new liberalism. The new liberalism emphasized the close interdependence among members of a society, suggesting that they could not survive on their own without assistance from, and support of, others and insisting on that support not as stifling or controlling but as essential to enabling individuality and human liberty themselves.

Second, no less significantly, this layer of liberalism endorsed the earlier liberal goal of protecting people—whether individuals or society as a whole—from undue intervention in their space. But the net was cast far more widely, including the blocking of newly discovered threats to the more limited kind of individual flourishing promoted in layer three. It was now contended that hindrances to human development do not just involve inappropriate physical or legal intervention, or the pressures of public opinion. Major additional barriers existed to the working out of one’s human potential, such as the five giants of ‘want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness’—in the words of the British mid-20th century liberal reformer William Beveridge (1879–1963)—all of which required eradicating or alleviating. The removal of such barriers did not entail the kind of illiberal positive liberty that imposed a template of self-realization on individuals, ‘forcing them to be free’. Rather, it facilitated the liberty to pursue the layer three conception of self-development through positive state action. Hence, third, the democratically monitored state was enlisted to assist in that mammoth task because some important human needs, such as securing a job or health care, were in far too many cases beyond the capacity of individual initiative.

Fourth—a particular feature of the new liberalism—society was conceived of as a harmonizable, unitary entity with shared rational ends. Divisions of class, geography, and even religion were at best irrelevant, at worst pernicious, though practising liberals often fell short of that august view and, as a rule, failed to embrace sweeping gender equality. In Britain, that fourth layer pushed out the boundaries of liberalism in its integration of the individual and the social more than any other European liberalism. Its main achievement during much of the 20th century was in laying the ideological foundations of the welfare state, a thoroughly and indisputably liberal creation. The famous ‘Beveridge Report’ of 1942, with its plan for post-war reconstruction that would alleviate poverty through social insurance and children’s allowances, became a milestone in the rise of the welfare state. In typical liberal fashion it combined private endeavour with public support. The state was transformed into a major, though not sole, agent of public good and public virtue. Similar tendencies could be found in the communitarian and statist liberalism of late 19th century French
solidarisme
.

Last but not least, as discussed in
Chapter 2
, the most novel aspect of the fourth layer lay in its version of an organic society. The left-liberals a century ago subverted the undemocratic implications of the organic analogy. Hobhouse in particular rejected the conflict version of social Darwinism, holding instead that social evolution displayed an increasing rationality and sociability and set the stage for the emergence of intelligent cooperation. For them, the lesson of the organic analogy was the promotion of individual rights by the benevolent state. An area of individual liberty was conducive both to the individual and to the health of the collective life.

The fourth sheet of paper let in the third sheet’s notion of temporality in the form of individual growth and progress but aligned it to the broader compass of social evolution. It acknowledged the individual at the centre of the first sheet but challenged any view of impermeable barriers between person and person, welcoming instead some incursions into private space in the spirit of community, when mutual assistance was the only route to individual well-being. That is why some forms of social insurance—health and unemployment—were made compulsory, to secure a common pool of wealth to help those individuals who faltered under the normal strains of life (
Figure 4
). The fourth sheet obscured the message of the pre-social naturalness of rights, regarding them as the consequence of social membership—an obligatory gift of society to its crucial building blocks: human beings. Indeed, the salience of liberty in the liberal groundsheet was slightly decentred as it was made to share prime billing with human welfare and flourishing. But liberalism’s second sheet—that regarded human relations above all as individual market transactions—was virtually removed from the sheaf by the left-liberals. It took almost half a century for that sheet to be re-inserted in the British liberal tradition, though it continued to be more evident in continental versions. Fourth layer liberals were prone to denounce what they termed ‘the Manchester School’ with its self-centred economic man, its lack of focus on the underprivileged, and its overlooking of the role that society plays in the creation of wealth. Though they welcomed free trade, it had to be trade emancipated from the control of financial, industrial, and military monopolies. Those monopolies may have grown out of the adulation of unlimited private enterprise but they transmogrified into exploitative imperialism.

Layer five

The fifth layer of liberalism—which is far more contemporary—dispenses with the unitary view of society promoted by layer four. Sociological transformations and cultural insights have increasingly impinged on liberal thinking. From the early 20th century onwards liberals became aware of the dispersal of power in a society, not as something to be overcome because it set group against group—as in class conflict—but as something to be welcomed. Social and political analysts discovered that society was composed of many disparate interest groups, none of which could monopolize power—a monopoly the state had been assumed to wield by German liberals such as Max Weber. That new kind of spread-out power supplemented and strengthened the legal and constitutional separation of powers. A liberal society had to take on board the interplay not only among individuals, but among such groups, a pluralist perspective that weakened the centralizing role of the state. Liberal politics could be re-conceptualized as a different kind of free market, not an economic one, but one in which a variety of social groups were jostling for positions of influence.

4.
The social reforms of the Liberal government in and around 1911 provided limited state health and unemployment insurance and set the basis for the future welfare state.

Later in the 20th century, what was known as the ‘politics of identity’ came to the fore. Just taking account of the plurality of groups competing over the realization of their commercial, financial, or local interests in the public sphere was no longer sufficient for liberals. A more permanent map of human diversity emerged in which the older, problematic categories of race and biology were in part superseded. Alternative categories based on gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation slowly worked their way into mainstream liberal consciousness, rather than being denied, excluded, or ignored. Liberals in India, for example, prioritize the protection of minorities who are denied fair participation. In the Netherlands the safeguarding of different lifestyles is prioritized over harnessing the state to achieve liberal ends. Those multiple identities—cultural, psychological, and social—are increasingly seen by liberals as normal rather than marginal features of communal life and have been added to the ideational heart of what they profess to hold dear.

Liberal dilemmas

The fifth layer constitutes a difficult terrain for liberals, interspersed as it is with some ethical and ideological quagmires. Its hallmarks are confusion and uncertainty, precisely because it attempts to amalgamate incompatible sections of the other layers. The incorporation of group diversity and uniqueness into the liberal lexicon has introduced a particularistic counter-current that has partly eaten away at liberalism’s former—and challengeable—pretensions to universalism. One could, of course, regard the current emphasis on the uniqueness of groups as an expansion of Mill’s insistence on the uniqueness of individuals, or at least of some individuals. With Mill, however, that wholly attractive diversity was not intended to revel in cultural diversity but to protect eccentric individuals whose cultivation could enrich social life. Fifth layer liberals are more hesitant. They are aware that, while much social diversity may indeed be celebrated, some has to be eyed warily. Notably, this new layer illustrates the typical, disruptive, and messy features of present-day liberalism, exemplified in liberal perplexity over recent high-profile debates. Those include arguments over female Muslim head coverings (free religious choice or social coercion?); the caricaturing of religious holy men (freedom of speech or respect for fundamental religious sensitivities?); the persistent unequal status of women in many social spheres (gender oppression or deeply engrained cultural codes?); or the introduction of gay marriages (freedom of lifestyles or affront to religious and traditionalist beliefs?). The tensions between such liberal particularisms and liberal universalisms would have seemed unreasonable to pre-1914 new liberals, who professed faith in the harmonious and organic unity of a liberal society.