In Search of European Liberalisms

Concepts, Languages, Ideologies

Michael Freeden, Javier Fernández-Sebastián, Jörn Leonhard, Michael Freeden, Javier Fernández-Sebastián, Jörn Leonhard

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789202816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Conservadurismo y liberalismo

Since the Enlightenment, liberalism as a concept has been foundational for European identity and politics, even as it has been increasingly interrogated and contested. This comprehensive study takes a fresh look at the diverse understandings and interpretations of the idea of liberalism in Europe, encompassing not just the familiar movements, doctrines, and political parties that fall under the heading of "liberal" but also the intertwined historical currents of thought behind them. Here we find not an abstract, universalized liberalism, but a complex and overlapping configuration of liberalisms tied to diverse linguistic, temporal, and political contexts.

Chapter 1

Habsburg Liberalisms and the Enlightenment Past, 1790–1848

Franz L. Fillafer

This chapter establishes a dialogue between two areas of research that rarely speak to each other. The first is recent scholarship that critically tackles the old notion of a monolithic eighteenth-century Enlightenment; today the eighteenth century teems with sentimental empiricists, republican hacks, defenders of enlightened kingship and Anglican Newtonians – some scholars even speak of ‘rival Enlightenments’.¹ In the second field, several studies have begun to view afresh the varieties of European liberalism in the nineteenth century beyond the binary opposition between a laissez-faire agenda and a republican model predicated on either political participation, civic virtue or both.²

Both approaches are important, but they rarely make contact. If the Enlightenment is no longer seen as a robustly uniform set of idioms and imperatives, we also need to rethink its ‘end’. The conventional tale about its abrupt dissolution or fragmentation around 1800 can no longer offer convincing guidance, and nor can the story about Enlightenment’s ‘almost imperceptible’³ transformation into liberalism. Both accounts invite scrutiny and they prompt us to rethink three large-scale problems. What happened to rival Enlightenment vocabularies and practices on their way into the nineteenth century? In what ways did their conceptual refurbishment impinge on the Enlightenment’s becoming historical, on the emergence of an Enlightenment past? What role did liberals play in this process, and what does this mean for the architectonic traits of liberal ‘languages’?

What Enlightenment? What Liberalism?

As the following pages will try to show, the study of the relationship between the Enlightenment and liberalism is also a fertile line of enquiry because it offers valuable material for a redescription of the Enlightenment. The study of the stages of conceptual engineering by which liberals made the Enlightenment part of their political pedigree permits us to reconstruct how the Enlightenment became what it seems today: rationalist, predicated on natural law, deist, anticlerical and imbued with the idea of popular sovereignty. The Enlightenment was now regarded as a result of the Reformation and it was believed to have culminated in the French Revolution. Liberals remade the Enlightenment in their image, and the study of this process tells us a lot both about the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and about the emergence of liberalism.

These problems are directly relevant to the comparative study of liberalisms. Some students of liberal ‘languages’ have noted the deceptive similarity of purportedly equivalent semantic patterns across European contexts.⁴ Nevertheless, it is far from clear how a comparison of liberalisms can avoid glossing over the asymmetries and dislocations that existed among them. This point is directly related to the interaction and conceptual transfer between different strands of liberalism. The study of these phenomena must take into account frictions, transmission losses and the repercussions that intellectual change at the ostensibly ‘peripheral’ fringes had on what happened in the ‘centres’.⁵ The study of how liberals remade the eighteenth-century past can offer some relevant insights here.

The usual narrative on the intellectual history of the first third of the nineteenth century makes the Enlightenment shade into liberalism quite smoothly, yet few reliable studies exist on how exactly and by what means this happened. Little is known about the milieus, conceptual arbitrators and intermediaries that made this transition possible.⁶ The approach advocated here can enable us to study the varieties of liberalism by exploring what Enlightenment resources it deployed and by seeing this activity in constant interplay with the concepts of the historical Enlightenment that a given strand of liberalism elaborated in order to embrace or to reject it.

This approach permits us to redescribe the ‘genesis’ of liberalism. In addressing this problem, the following pages will also raise some questions regarding method as the chapter permits us to look more closely at the scope, structure and durability of ‘political languages’. The relationship between the Enlightenment and liberalism throws into relief some basic conceptual questions regarding the study of ‘political languages’ that I will turn to in the last section of this chapter. The specific formulation of the problem presented here is a response to the increasingly unsatisfactory older approach that simply antedated the development of liberalism by identifying ‘anticipations’ of liberalism and ‘protoliberal’ sentiments in the eighteenth century. It is precisely at this point that close attention to the history of concepts, their usage and contestability, and to the historization of the Enlightenment can offer important insights.

Liberalism has long been defined on the basis of its British and French archetypes, yet both phenomena seem to disaggregate. The ‘varieties of Whiggism’ have become conspicuous in the British case, and we are in a good position to chart the divergences between Whigs and liberals regarding ethics and psychology that came to the fore once liberals had broken with the Newtonian notion of a creative mind that moulds inert and passive matter.⁷ Liberals also deviated from the Smithian model of a self-adjusting equilibrium when they introduced scenarios of surpluses, slumps and business cycles, and they supplanted Smith’s concept of labour, which relied on the measuring of amounts of value, with a definition of labour that rested on workers’ toil, energy and time.⁸ Liberals were also far from alone in laying claim to the Enlightenment’s bequest: Edmund Burke’s defence of a free enterprise system in an Anglican environment, protected by a mixed constitution and chivalric manners, resonated with early nineteenth-century readers. David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s sceptical Whiggism bred a distinctive brand of enlightened Toryism that emphasized the personal security of property in a society of ranks and led to protectionist arguments, schemes of entail reform and proposals for more effective poor laws.⁹ To complicate matters further, evangelical revivalism whose strength grew after 1800 shared the basic premises of economic deregulation, although evangelicals derided liberals’ distributional paradigm of natural gratification, sweetness and light. Instead, they saw the competitive economy as a divinely ordained moral trial, a framework of rewards and reprimands whose adverse effects could be soothed by self-help once the theology of special providence had been abandoned.¹⁰

The same variegation applies to France, where a similar system of vertical conceptual corridors that led from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century emerges. Studies of French liberalism have discovered various solvents under an ostensibly solid crust.¹¹ In France, ‘republican’ arguments of frugality and civic ethos have been shown to persist after 1800, now replete with lessons learned from the deprivation of politics under the ancien régime and under Napoleon’s dictatorship.¹² This republican strand existed beside an ‘aristocratic liberal’ tradition. Aristocratic liberals rebelled against bourgeois enrichessement, which led to smug and philistine self-gratification and destroyed the moral personality of the citizen. Aristocratic liberals deplored ‘individualism’ because it led to a loss of civil consciousness and was accompanied by the destruction of constitutional intermediary powers.¹³ This tradition ran from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, and it tilted lances against the third contender to the title ‘liberal’, the statist liberalism of the juste milieu most fully embodied by François Guizot after the 1830s.¹⁴

‘National’ varieties of liberalism can only be understood if one applies a new grid of similarities, imbrications and elective affinities in which forms of European liberalism can be assorted. What also deserves to be highlighted here is the uneasy relationship of liberal aims in different sectors of public life that becomes obvious: ‘liberal’ attitudes to sociopolitical, economic and religious issues were not necessarily compatible. In the British case, for instance, economic liberals were often High Churchmen or evangelicals who resisted Catholic emancipation and poor relief, while social and economic interventionists were liberals in terms of religion. Hence, Liberal Anglicans, Whigs and High Tories supported a generous treatment of Dissenters, but refused to believe that the economic order inculcated an authorized, natural version of social morality.¹⁵

Liberalism thus seems quite brittle, and scholars are becoming sceptical of its unity across time and across sectors of intellectual activity and enquiry. The older idea that liberals defended an agenda based on an unfettered market economy, associational psychology, rational individualism and an anthropology that maintained the satisfaction of given ends without a moral hierarchy among them melts into the air. Thereby, the British variety of liberalism is being progressively dislodged from its previous privileged position as a set of standard values against which liberals elsewhere were measured. This leapfrogging liberalism that united the triumvirate of Locke, Smith and Bentham never existed, and it has ceased to loom as large over Europe as it once did.¹⁶ Once this apparently coherent pattern of thought comes apart in Britain, its absence elsewhere can no longer signify the nonexistence of proper ‘liberalism’ in these regions.

The Habsburg Case

The main part of this chapter focuses on the Habsburg lands between 1790s and the 1850s. The findings of the history of concepts seem unambiguous here: as in other European places, the term ‘liberal’ denoted ‘generosity’ in the languages of the Habsburg lands after 1800 and came to change from this meaning of magnanimity into a substantive ‘-ism’ that bristled with the energy of a ‘concept of movement’ (Bewegungsbegriff) in the 1820s and 1830s.¹⁷ The intellectual roots of liberalism are usually traced back to the sources nineteenth-century liberals themselves proudly advertised: the reforms of Joseph II. The textbook account suggests that the Habsburg monarchy was jolted out of torpor by Joseph II. He broke with his mother Maria Theresa’s method of cautious change and set off an avalanche of ill-prepared reforms.¹⁸ Joseph enacted toleration of all Christian religions and of the Jews, prepared a civil code that was to ensure equality before the law, and abolished serfdom and bondage in his lands. Joseph’s roughshod ride over inherited rights and privileges led to outbursts of popular disaffection that brought the monarchy to the brink of disaster.

The conventional account of the emergence of liberalism is heavily coloured by the work of nineteenth-century liberal historians. It runs like this: after Joseph was forced to rescind much of his legislation on his deathbed in 1790, Leopold II managed to restore order. Leopold was succeeded by his son, Francis II/I, whose reign made the monarchy sink into obscurantism and reaction. The repressive regime of Prince Metternich continued until 1848, when the Revolution blew the Vormärz system into pieces. The year 1848 saw the election of an imperial parliament whose plenary hall teemed with delegates from all Habsburg kingdoms and duchies with the exception of the Hungarian and Croatian lands. This was the dawn of constitutionalism in the Habsburg monarchy. The standard account suggests that this was the success of liberals who had clung to Joseph’s reformist project and handed down his legacy over the decades. This implies that liberalism surreptitiously continued the aims and concepts of the Enlightenment the governments of Francis II/I and Ferdinand I had sought to suppress.¹⁹ Yet liberals’ legacy-building obliterated two key aspects: first, the reactionary regime that liberals rebelled against in the name of Joseph II continued to rely on Joseph’s designs in law, civic administration, religious toleration and economic politics; and, second, mid nineteenth-century liberals also drastically abridged and shrunk the Enlightenment in retrospect. According to liberal historians and politicians, the Enlightenment had been eradicated under Francis II/I, thereby becoming the very antipode of pre–1848 reaction and a legacy for liberals to piously appropriate.

Liberals’ remaking of their Enlightenment patrimony belittled the claims of collateral heirs to that estate.²⁰ Conservatives and radicals were excluded from this legacy. Liberals neatly patterned their constitutional aims on the epoch before 1848.²¹ This led to an all-inclusive approach to liberalism, making it an umbrella term for all forms of pre–Revolutionary criticism of the regime, an approach which truncated the variety of pre–1848 political life. I shall turn to this problem in a moment when I survey selected Enlightenment conceptual resources and how early nineteenth-century liberals made use of them. Before I explore this issue in more detail, I will turn to the question of liberal nationalisms in the pluricultural and pluriconfessional Habsburg monarchy.

The liberal refashioning of the Enlightenment past offers rich insights for a better understanding of the various national revivals in the Habsburg lands, but also for the differences between distinct strands of liberalism in the region. The early nineteenth century was the epoch of ‘national renascences’ in the Habsburg lands.²² These revivals have been long seen as rambunctiously romantic movements that ran up to their preordained destinations, nam...