Relevance Of Liberalism

Zbigniew Brzezinski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367301026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000309560
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume is the product of a conference held at theResearch Institute on International Change on 21 January1976. The subject of the conference, the relevance of liberalism in the contemporary world, represents one aspect of the institute's research focus on changes in values and the impact of these changes on international affairs. This focus reflects the belief that we are living in a time when the sudden expansion in popular political consciousness is altering fundamentally the ways in which politics is perceived, in which political values are translated into political action, and in which political movements and moods transcend state boundaries and thus have worldwide repercussions. Together these changes may result in profound discontinuities in political behavior, in social institutions, and in the basic values around which institutions and procedures are shaped.

1
The Relevance of Liberalism in Retrospect

Giovanni Sartori

If one compares the label "liberalism" with its neighbors-democracy, socialism, and communism—liberalism has one winning claim: it is the most unsettled and misapprehended term in the whole string. We all speak of democracy (in the singular), thereby implying that this concept can be given a core meaning. But most writings on liberalism end up speaking of liberalisms (in the plural),¹ often declare the singular form intractable, and surely are at their worst when attempting a synthesis² or when searching for an all-embracing, rarefied meaning.³ Even more interesting, while all the writings on democracy (the thing) say "democracy," much of the literature on liberalism (the thing) does not employ the word. We say "Lockeian liberalism," but Locke himself did not. We declare Montesquieu a classic of liberalism, but this is not how Montesquieu perceived himself. Likewise, much of the literature on the American Mind⁴ actually describes what Europeans would call the American brand of liberalism, but is not presented, by its authors, under this focus.⁵ And, perhaps, the distinction between the thing and the word offers the best thread for introducing my topic.

The thing was conceived and constructed some two centuries before it was named. For the name liberalism was apparently invented in Spain in 1810—both too late and at a wrong moment. Too late because "liberalism" was coined when liberalism had already delivered its major message, and because the acceleration of history had already begun to shorten time, thereby affording insufficient time for the name to take hold, stabilize itself, and establish its rank. One of the resulting paradoxes was that while the Germans began to speak of "liberalism" when their liberalism—à l'avant garde during the Enlightenment⁶—was on the wane, at the other extreme Americans never really adopted "liberalism" as the distinctive label for the constitution and the polity they had constructed. The United States was first perceived as a republic, and subsequently as a democracy, flying as it were over the head of "liberalism" (the name). Thus "liberalism" has not even lent its name to a national party; and the term liberal has always been used, in the United States, in one of its sectarian senses, for reformist, progressive, and/or radical groups.

The overall paradox of this is that while an unnamed liberalism has represented, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, the most fundamental experience of the Western political man, "liberalism" as the rightful denomination for this experience has been applied in most countries only for a few decades; and even in England, which represents the most notable exception to this generalization, the word became popular when the liberal experiment was departing from its Lockeian course and extraneous influences-notably German idealism—were muddling its image. Thus England can well illustrate my second point, namely that to the misfortune of having been baptized too late one must add the misfortune of having been baptized at a wrong moment.

When the word arrived in England from Spain, the novelty was not political liberalism but economic liberism. (I purposely emphasize a difference—the difference between a political system and an economic system—that has not entered, as I am about to explain, into English.) And economic "liberism" coincided with the first industrial revolution—which is also to say with capital accumulation paid for by ruthless exploitation. The first coincidence inextricably confused the central feature of liberalism, the constitutionalization of politics, with one of its possible, but not necessary, corollaries—as if the lineage of Locke, Blackstone, and Montesquieu, intrinsically political thinkers, lay in economics, in Adam Smith, Ricardo, Cobden, and the Manchester gospel. And the second coincidence goes a long way toward explaining the lasting disaffection, if not hostility, to liberalism of the working classes. Even though capital accumulation has ever since exacted heavy tolls (in Socialist and Communist countries as well), yet the first association of "capitalist exploitation" was not with "liberism" but with "liberalism" as an undivided whole. Hence, the newborn label was easily exposed to the negative value connotations which were soon put forward by the early "Socialists" (the word was used first in England, not in France, by the Owenists) and which have been subsequently hammered to no end in all the Marxist literature. Now, it is a pretty safe guess that if "liberalism" had not been coined in 1810 but either a hundred years earlier or later, it would have never occurred to us to use one and the same name for political and economic freedom.⁷

Let it be added that while classical liberalism—rooted as it was in the natural law doctrine—was endowed with an ethical flavor, little of this flavor survived in the English philosophy of the time, namely, in the hands of the utilitarians and specifically of Bentham—a thoroughgoing rationalist bent upon the felicific calculus. The retort to this is that the central figure of nineteenth century English liberalism is John Stuart Mill—not his father James Mill, and even less Bentham.⁸ Nonetheless when John Stuart Mill wrote his celebrated essay On Liberty, an additional element had complicated the picture: democracy. That is to say, J. S. Mill's referent was not liberalism per se but liberal democracy—so much so that his major preoccupation was germane to Tocqueville's preoccupation: the tyranny of the majority "over opinion."⁹ The issue was further complicated by the fact that the following generations (Thomas Hill Green and Leonard Hobhouse) embraced and disseminated an idealistic "organic" version of liberalism whose highly abstract metaphysics simply did not fit into the language, let alone the tradition, of English philosophy; and the subsequent, combination of Mill and Spencer left "the theory of liberalism in a state of unintelligible confusion."¹⁰ The Spencer-Darwin-type confusion made little headway in continental Europe (but mightily crossed the Atlantic). Conversely, the idealistic, and indeed Hegelian, version of liberalism hardly struck roots in the English soil and even less in the American soils, but did confuse many European minds and did travel surprisingly well from Germany to Italy.¹¹

The misfortune of having been baptized both too late and at a wrong moment can be highlighted- leaving England-from a more general angle. History proceeds via elementary oppositions and polarizations. Before the entry of "liberalism," the opposition had long been between monarchy and republic. As the republics materialized they lost much of their magic, and—as we see very clearly in Tocqueville— the new opposition might well have been between liberalism and democracy. But this opposition was already shattered by the 1848 revolutions. At least in France, already in 1848 a third major protagonist (and antagonist) had shown its force—"socialism"—and called for a new two-front realignment. An immediate consequence was that, in Europe, liberals and democrats had to converge and merge somewhat too fast, out of necessity rather than out of clear thinking. Let it be recalled that in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions two entirely different (but hardly well distinguished) conceptions of democracy were at stake: on the one hand the preliberal "democracy of the ancients" (rejuvenated by Rousseau), and on the other hand the "democracy of the moderns," which is younger than liberalism, presupposes liberalism, and constitutes its natural implementation.¹² Now, if reference is made not to the Rousseau-type democracy drawn from distant memories (ethymological democracy) but to the liberal democracy that was the daughter of reality and was establishing itself in the United States, then it can be safely asserted that the convergence between liberalism (Lockeian and constitutional liberalism) and democracy was successful, and that the liberal component of this happy marriage has long remained its central element.

However, this victory of liberalism (the thing) was not the victory of "liberalism" (the word). As time went by, and as "socialism" (the word) affirmed itself as the ideal which opposed the prose of liberal-democracy, the new polarization became, in the twentieth century, the polarization between "democracy" (tout court) and "socialism." Of course, one can argue that the substance matters more than the name. Yet nomina numina. What is unnamed either remains undetected, or tends to be forgotten. As a consequence the notion of liberalism today is associated, at best, with a typically nineteenth century specimen, with something belonging to the past, if not with a wholly obsolete reality. So allow me to make once more the point that the fortune of liberalism (both the word and the thing) would have been, in all likelihood, far greater had the name been invented either earlier or later.

The thread pursued thus far brings out two points that deserve further scrutiny.

First, a major difficulty in assessing the accomplishments and inadequacies of liberalism resides precisely in the fact that some authors speak of the thing with only passing reference to the word, while other authors, following the word, are led astray by its secondary meanings and/or by the party and sectarian uses of the term. This goes to explain the so-called elasticity of liberalism.¹³ The question remains: the elasticity of what? If this question is not taken seriously, we are easily trapped into a discussion without object. My stand is that liberalism can be traced back to a distinct and distinctive historical connotation, provided that we search first for "pure and simple liberalism" (in the singular) and that this unraveling is aided by appropriate distinctions.

Second, it is contrary both to the historical evidence and to the principles of analytic thinking to deal in one blow with a political system (liberalism) and an economic system (liberism). That is to say that we must carefully distinguish liberalism from laissez-faire, market economy. To the real founding fathers—from Locke to the authors of The Federalist Papers in the United States and from Montesquieu to Benjamin Constant in France—liberalism meant the rule of law and the constitutional State, and liberty was political freedom (freedom from political oppression), not free trade, free markets, and (in Spencer's development) the law of survival of the fittest. Let it be added that since political liberalism was born long before economic liberism, if it was able to perform without laissez-faire earlier, it can conceivably perform without laissez-faire later.

On the other hand, it is true that the liberal state was conceived in wholesale distrust of state power, and therefore with the purpose of reducing rather than increasing the scope and role of the State. Thus, in the nineteenth century the liberal state was actually constructed as a small state, if not as a minimal State, and consequently as a do-little or even do-nothing state.¹⁴ But the liberal state is not characterized by its size nor by its amount of activity; it is characterized by its structure and thus is, first of all and above all, a "constitutional state" in the garantiste meaning of the term.¹⁵ Therefore nothing prevents the liberal state from evolving into a large and even all-interfering state—on this essential condition: that the more it ceases to be a minimal state, the more important it becomes that it remain a constitutional state.

To distinguish is not to separate. The argument is, then, that it is only after having distinguished between liberalism and "liberism" that we can appropriately and profitably discuss how they relate to each other. The answer may well be (as in the von Hayek and von Mises line of argument) that the two things optimize one another, that liberalism performs best when implemented by a market economy—and vice versa. And the best counteranswer is not, in my opinion, the one that challenges this argument, but the one that points to the changing needs and priorities of each epoch. We may prefer, for example, distributive justice (despite its costs) to producing more for less. We may believe that a Pareto optimum is really the optimum; but we may also pursue Rawls-preferred solutions.¹⁶ However that may be, I am only pointing out that the connection between liberalism and "liberism" can indeed be conceived as being, or having to be, very loose. The question still is: can the two things be entirely disconnected? More fundamentally, and also more precisely put: can the liberal solution to the problem of power cope with, and survive under, any kind of economic system? Since this is an ultimate question, it is tackled best by envisaging extreme instances: either a non-market, Communist type of planned economy or, at the other end, the principle of private property. And since the whole argument begins with and hinges on how liberalism relates historically to what has been vividly called "possessive individualism,"¹⁷ let my first reply simply be: individualism, yes; possession, no—and give my reasons for so replying.

Marxists read back into history a concept of private property that does not belong to the actual fabric of history. The sacredness of property affirmed over the centuries by the natural law theory and so eloquently reiterated in the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights¹⁸ shares nothing with the capitalistic notion of property. From Roman times up until the end of the eighteenth century, property meant, all in one and indivisibly, "life, liberty, and estate;" it did not mean "possession" for its own sake or for the sake of unlimited accumulation, let alone " capital accumulation." Even the Leveller writers maintained that freedom is a function of possession. Were they, for this, inconsistent revolutionaries? I would rather say that they made perfect sense. With a bare subsistence economy and endemic exposure to undifferentiated insecurity, to "own" signified, very simply, to improve life chances: property was "protection"— indeed the way of removing insecurity from the bare surface of one's skin. To be sure, even then to "have" implied to "have power." But the economic power of property had yet to gain momentum and to be perceived as such. The patrimonial state (and, from the top, all the way down the feudal echelon) was not an economic State: it needed resources for raising armies which were, in turn, its real power base. Up until the domestication of politics, far beyond mere influence power meant "force," the force of arms and violence—not the force of property.

Hence the allegation that liberalism was founded upon a "possessive market society,"¹⁹ or that it is a superstructure of a capitalistic-type economy, is simply untrue to the facts. Liberalism cannot be reduced to economic premises, or presuppositions, even at this most elemental juncture. If property is an economic concept related to an acquisitive society and to the industrial "multiplication" of production, then this is not the concept that upholds liberalism. Liberalism praises and defends the individual²⁰ and sustains this individual with that "security" that is his property—with a property as safety that has nothing to share with an economic vision of life.

Leaving aside the Marxist interpretation of history we may still wonder, prospectively instead of retrospectively, whether the liberal solution to the problem of political power can survive under a propertyless, nonmarket type of economic system. This is a different question, for the fact that political liberalism historically preceded commercialism, laissez-faire, and capitalism, bears no conclusive evidence on what the case may be in industrial and postindustrial societies. Under these new circumstances, and in the extreme instance under consideration, the essence of the case was grasped in just one brief sentence by Trotsky: when the state is the sole employer, "he who does not obey does not eat." So the answer clearly is that the liberal protection of the freedom of the individual becomes baseless under a Communist-type economy. But let us not interpret this assertion wrongly. The argument is not that political liberalism cannot survive under Communist capitalism (seemingly a paradox, but not really) because liberal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• The Contributors
• 1 The Relevance of Liberalism in Retrospect
• 2 Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?
• 3 Liberalism 1976: A Conservative Critique
• 4 Does Liberalism Have a Future?
• 5 The Antinomies of Liberalism
• 6 The Long Life of Liberalism