The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism

From the blog post:

[W]hat I mean when I say liberalism is its original (and broadly international) meaning: the political philosophy which first emerged fully in the early modern period and which places individual freedoms – liberty – as its central, defining value.

…

Liberalism emerged as a political philosophy at a particular historical moment. The temptation here is to conflate liberalism with democracy, rolling both ideas together as some sort of generic ‘freedom’ and attribute them to a ‘western tradition’ that stretches back to antiquity. Instead, while 17th and 18th century liberals – most importantly John Locke – reach back to classical ideas and language to frame their ideas (which also owe something to North European political customs stretching back into the Middle Ages), liberalism was very much a product of their early modern context.

…

The Greek polis actually makes a good example [of intensively governed states]: individual citizens (politai) had few if any rights the community as a whole was bound to respect. The polis was free, in the sense that it was self-governing and the citizens were free in the sense they were not slaves, but they didn’t have liberties in the way we understand. The Athenian demos – the people – could, famously, temporarily exile a politician for being unpopular (or too powerful) despite breaking no law, execute generals for losing battles (or even winning them) and philosophers for asking the wrong questions and being generally irritating. Likewise, property rights could be curtailed, as Greek poleis often compelled individual citizens (typically the rich) to provide state services at personal expense (called a liturgy), rather than a uniform system of taxation (such as Rome’s land tax, the tributum). Athens was democratic, but not liberal.

…

[M]ass literacy, the printing press and bureaucracy made a new sort of government for this part of the world possible: a government that intensively governed a lot of people over a wide area. The result was the exposure of a much wider range of people to a lot more state power from a state that might differ quite a lot more from them. Absent local autonomy, the question of who ruled suddenly became extremely high stakes as rulers were in a position to try – and in the end, fail violently – to enforce their own uniformity.

In particular, religious uniformity:

It is not an accident that some of John Locke’s (1632-1704) first major works are on religious toleration and one of his key arguments is that trying to enforce religious uniformity causes more problems that it solves, a point that he could have observed in action through much of his early life.

But why was religious uniformity a goal at all? One thing not mentioned is that the impulse for religious uniformity in part came from Christianity’s claim to be a universal religion. (Polytheism has some built-in accommodation for diversity.)

Locke reached for other universal claims to counter it:

Natural law is the idea that there is a fundamental set of rules and rights which apply to all humans, in all places, at all times – a code against which human action may be judged with universal application.

It’s quite common, both historically and today, to claim legal rights that aren’t universal:

I should note that both this North European ‘freedom for Big Men’ concept as well as Roman libertas are aristocratic rights, albeit the former more than the latter. Regular Roman citizens certainly could invoke libertas and sometimes do so, but the word was more often a rallying cry for the elite and the tyranny they invoked it against was the arbitrary rule of an individual over the Senate (a body of aristocrats) rather than over the Roman popular assemblies.

Universal rights led to a somewhat counterintuitive notion of equality becoming common:

That universalizing nature brought in through natural law brings in a value in liberalism that may have been, until now, conspicuous by its absence: equality. If everyone is equally subject to natural law (and that’s what it means for something to be natural law) and that establishes rules and rights, then it becomes difficult to justify rigid classes and orders of people, hereditary nobles or established clergy with special privileges that mark them as better. Instead, liberals will insist, “all men are created equal,” in the very particular sense that they share equally in the rights granted by natural law (and for the religious, thus created and sanctioned by “nature’s God”).

But notice how equality is a secondary value of this system, a derived value – a corollary, rather than a first principle. Liberalism, as an ideology, insists first on rights and second on the fundamental, universal natural state of those rights and only then as an unavoidable consequence, the fundamental equality of the people who have those rights. Which is to say, liberalism values equality in so much as it is necessary for liberty, but not as a value in and of itself in all of its forms, which is why liberalism is relatively tolerant of economic inequality.

…

Equality and liberty are not opposites (indeed, most who hold to one value also value the other quite highly), but they exist in a sort of tension. In a quite real sense, social democracy, as practiced (for instance, by some European countries) is an effort to resolve this tension or at least to find a balancing point, as it turns out that a society can ‘buy’ quite a lot of equality before infringing seriously on liberalism’s many liberties; pretty much all modern liberal democracies, including the United States, aim to strike some kind of balance in this regard.

He then starts writing about the United States. I’ve quoted enough already, but [edit] I’ll go on a bit more:

It is, I think, all too easy once again to miss the radicalism of this moment. In 1776 there were no governments founded on liberal ideas. […] The idea of founding a new country on the liberal notions that, “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” was radical in 1776 – indeed, so radical the men who wrote those words, signed their names, and pledged their “Lives […] Fortunes and […] sacred Honor” fell far, far short of putting their explosive ideas into full practice. Like most ideals, liberalism was only attained in halting, half-steps.

It was, among other things, a radical enough document to have its publication suppressed by various European monarchies for decades; the text of the thing was banned in Russia for eight decades and in Spain for nine.

…

But these ideas were also going to be an important part of holding the new country together. The Thirteen Colonies preparing to fight for their newly independent lives against the British Empire were hardly homogeneous. […] Attempting to enforce cultural, religious or linguistic uniformity would have only led to the same kind of shattering wars Europe had experienced a century prior.

…

I’ve commented before that the First Amendment’s first two clauses are effectively the ‘don’t have a Thirty Years War’ proviso of the Constitution, by assigning religion completely to the realm of liberty. The next four clauses neatly remove some of the key flashpoints in the lead up to the English Civil Wars: no arresting people for political opinions, speech statements or efforts to bring up grievances. Some key property rights – which remember, are at their foundation a limitation of communal claims to resources and labor – get protected in the Second (arms), Third (quartering), Fourth (searches and seizures) and Fifth (takings clause) Amendments.

But the US Constitution also had fudges that only delayed the next big flashpoint, which was of course slavery:

The American Civil War thus became a fundamentally liberal war, particularly by 1863, against a fundamentally illiberal movement. Indeed, liberal thinkers abroad (e.g. John Stuart Mill) recognized this fact. One thing that comes out quite strikingly in the letters, diaries and memoirs of the Civil War is the steadily growing commitment of the United States’ cause not merely to the Union itself but to the fundamentally liberal goal of abolition – what begins as a whisper ends the war as a battle cry.

Edit 2:

It is an easy and careless mistake to assume that the incomplete realization of the principles of liberal societies makes them the same as anti-liberal societies rejecting those principles entirely. Like the American Civil War, World War II was a liberal war, a war for liberalism against anti-liberal regimes and ideologies.

…

Liberalism, after all, was supposed to solve problems. Did it? […] compared to other political systems liberalism has been fantastically successful.

[…]

Germany and Japan were both shorn of the empires and bombed into ruin before having liberal governments effectively imposed upon them; they are now the third and fourth largest economies. And of course the German example is even more instructive because after the ruin, the country was split in half, with one half getting a liberal government and the other half an anti-liberal communist one and the difference in economic performance was so vast that decades of narrowing under a united, liberal and democratic Germany have still left East Germany somewhat behind. Likewise, while the roots of rapid economic growth in South Korea and Taiwan date before they adopted truly liberal and democratic political systems, it is after that political shift (in c. 1987 for both) that their economic growth takes off.