Simple Simon’s Political Lexicon: Liberal

In one of our discussions, I hinted that our conversations might be expedited by agreeing to use certain words, e.g., liberal, conservative, radical,  Marxist, traditionalist, culture/cultural, republican, democratic, in a precise manner that takes account of historical reality.  The most obvious term with which to begin is the almost universally abused word “Iiberal.”

Political Liberal:  Someone who advocates liberty and individual autonomy as the ultimate good and seeks to weaken or eliminate all barriers and impediments that stand in the way of an individual’s quest for fulfillment.  At different periods Liberals have opposed monarchy, established churches, aristocracy, tradition, and such restraining moral constraints as censorship and even gossip.  Liberals typically celebrate freedom of choice, rationality, and objectivity as basic moral criteria and tend to denigrate subrational criteria such as kinship, friendship, and religion.  One hallmark of Liberal thinking is a naive faith in progress and, in America at least, in American exceptionalism.

Not all Liberals opposed all impediments to liberty.  There are Liberal and even Libertarian monarchists (Erik v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn),  defenders of aristocracy  and tradition (William F. Buckley), and even Catholic Liberals (Lord Acton).  In Victorian England there were decidedly conservative Liberals like Fitzjames Stephen and Sir Henry Sumner Maine.  In most cases, however, we are confronted by theoretical Liberals endowed with good sense and taught by experience that there are other aspects of life as important--perhaps even more important--than freedom.  This combination results, in my opinion, in moral and political incoherence.  If freedom to chose is of fundamental importance, then out the window go religion, tradition, and the arts of civilization.  An exception might be made for the British conservative Liberals  (but not the Americans) who may well have understood that liberty is a good, among other goods, but not an absolute.  Even Hayek realized, near the end, that Liberty could not be an ultimate principle but had to be grounded in something beyond itself.

From its beginnings in the Renaissance and the early Enlightenment,  Liberalism has been evolving and changing form, usually in response to new challenges, embracing in turn republicanism, democratism, capitalism, Darwinism, and some forms of feminism.  Its political force was spent before WW I, when it was mostly absorbed by Socialism.  As will be noted in the entry on Socialism, the goal of rational individualism was taken over by Socialists who argued that it required massive government intervention to give every individual the capacity to fulfill his life’s plans.  The argument ran something like this:  Fairness requires that competitors for success run on a level playing field.  In modern societies, education is an important key to success; thus, it is the responsihility of government to make a high quality of education universally available.  This easy and inevitable slide from extreme individualism into collectivism is one of the reasons  that the Marxist Clintons and Kennedys are commonly described as Liberals.   (The other reason is that they are lying hypocrites who know that the term Socialist is a term of abuse in the USA.)  Nonetheless, the distinction between fundamental Liberalism and Fundamental socialism should always be observed.  Bill Buckley and Milton Friedman were Liberals.  Barack Obama is a Socialist.

The term Liberal is simple in conception but obscured by confusion and deliberate misrepresentation.  After all, it comes from liber, the Latin word for “free” and was used to translate the Greek eleutheros, which had secondary senses that range from humane to noble to generous.  We still speak of “the liberal arts” and of people who are liberal in making gifts or doing favors.  It is quite proper to speak of non-political liberalism as a peculiarly western form of virtue, rather like the concept of the gentleman.  In much the same way, some of the moral and cultural ideals of classical liberalism can and should be looked at as splendid artifacts of European civilization, ideals to be respected and cultivated but not ultimate principles.  As Hayek understood in the end, the ideal of liberty can only be truly defended and cherished if it is rooted in some power outside our ordinary experience, and the liberal tradition can only be maintained in a milieu where more fundamental principles of order and  self-restraint, beauty and nobility are observed.

The extreme modern form of Liberalism is Libertarianism, but fairness to Libertarians requires us to acknowledge that they are only carrying out 19th century Liberal principles to the logical extreme of complete absurdity.   The failed ideology of Liberalism, sometimes modified by respect for the social order and, occasionally, for tradition is really at  the heart of American Conservatism.