The Liberal Tradition I: Introducing a Few Basic Concepts
I am going to use the word "liberal" in a very broad sense to refer to the modern movement in ethics and politics that begins in the Renaissance, develops in the Enlightenment, and culminates in the classical liberalism of the 19th century. Socialism--and the other isms that have plagued European man for the past two centuries—is a byproduct of the liberal tradition. Though it may seem paradoxical to say it, Marx and Mises, though they have opposing views on the state and the market, share important common assumptions about human nature and the ends of human life, and it is to explore those assumptions that I have undertaken this series of comments.
To anticipate some of my conclusions, I shall put my cards on the table by listing some of the hallmarks of the liberal tradition—a tradition, I hasten to add, to which most conservatives have belonged. In The Morality of Everyday Life, I took up—and, I believe, successfully rebutted—three important and interrelated liberal assumptions, which can be summarized as rationality, objectivity, and universality.
Rationality
In liberal ethical and political theories, it is assumed though rarely stated that rationality can be applied to human questions much as it is applied to mathematics or physics. Although Descartes was far from being the first to act on this assumption—the fallacy goes back at least to Socrates and Plato—his relentless insistence on rationality makes him one of the most important founders of the liberal tradition. By necessity, liberals must be either religious skeptics or at least suspicious of any revelation or tradition that might take precedence over reason,
Objectivity
Liberals also assume that mere relationships have little or no bearing on questions of moral or political responsibility. We are supposed to view our own position from the third person, as it were, as if we were a distant observer or an extraterrestrial being or an impartial spectator. Such an assumption means, to take an example from Kant, that a mother's love for her children is not moral, because it is neither rational nor objective.
Universality
All rational and objective moral and political decisions must be applied universally, either uniformly to all human individuals (as in all humans have a right to life and property) or to all persons in similar circumstances. A mother's love, thus, must also be non-moral because it cannot be applied to the entire human race or to all children. Following this reasoning, some Catholic women—not the most balanced, certainly—have offered to "adopt" discarded embryos which they would have implanted in their own wombs.
Moral and Political Actors: The Individual and the State
While pre-liberal thinkers conceived of what has been called the corporate nature of man, liberals tend to reduce all forms of community and association to individuals. If they are anarchists, liberals are content with individualism, but if they concede the need for some corporate existence, they tend to invest the State and only the state with authority. Villages, parishes, provinces, traditional corporations—all, though their existence may be tolerated—must bow to the state, because it is the state that protects the rights and/or satisfies the needs of the Individual.
Sentimental Anti-Christianity
But there are other significant tendencies in the liberal tradition. It is not only the elevation of rationality that makes them generally hostile or at least indifferent to Christianity. The godfathers of liberalism—the Renaissance humanists and neo-Platonists—were generally opposed to the Christian traditions that developed in the Medieval period, which they characterized—whether or not they used the term Dark Ages—as an age of superstition and barbarism. They were nostalgic in elevating classical antiquity—which they misunderstood as an age of religious skepticism—to the heights of human achievement but also progressive in expecting to equal or surpass the ancients. The famous quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns can be seen, then, as a family feud among liberals.
Yet, while rejecting (overtly or not) Christianity, they naively accepted many Christian ideals—particularly brotherhood and philanthropy. One would have thought they would have quickly understood that questions of social justice could be as easily dispensed with as Confession or the Mass, but few were as bold as Hobbes or Nietzsche in regarding power as an ultimate principle or even summum bonum.
Human Dignity
Whether individualistic or statist, many liberals (until the rise of environmentalism) have liked to speak of the dignity of man, who is elevated to something like a god. This tendency is exemplified by Pico della Mirandola in his famous oration. What is often overlooked or deliberately omitted is Pico's contempt for Christianity and his pursuit of the dangerous magic of demons that live beyond the planetary spheres. If Pico and the alchemists are read carefully, one begins to understand the modern obsession with space exploration, cloning, and the creation of life. If man is truly to become a god, he must display the power and attributes of the Christian God, while refuting, at the same time, the claim that God was unique in creating life on earth.
The Human Blank Slate
Finally, although this list could certainly go on for many pages, the tendencies toward rationality and away from tradition encouraged many liberals to simplify human nature and to by sympathetic to Locke's theory that the human mind, far from being conditioned by either biology or Aristotelian categories, is really a blank slate on which the progressive reformer is free to write anything he likes, whether the message is communism or free love. Naturally, when the blank slate gets in the way of some strange hypothesis—Freud's libidinism or the homosexualist argument that they cannot help being born the way they are—they cheerfully ignore it.
It took several centuries for liberalism to reach its culmination in people like Godwin and Mill and Mises, and along the way many liberals were contaminated by such illiberal concerns as Christian faith (Acton), the supreme cultural value of the classics (JS Mill), an appreciation of tradition (Sir Henry Sumner Maine) or national community (Lecky and T.H. Green), or a sense of horror at the immoral conclusions to which the movement was tending (Fitzjames Stephen), and while I shall note some of these wholesome aberrations and speak in defense of their sanity, I do not wish to lose sight of the objective, which is to describe and categorize the beast we can call Homo liberalis.
To avoid turning this into an exercise in intellectual history--a more tedious exercise I cannot imagine--let us turn immediately to Bernard Mandeville, a bold and original mind who put squarely on the table the "virtue of selfishness" centuries before that dreadful female created her cult of delusional Untermenschen.
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"I am going to use the word “liberal” in a very broad sense to refer to the modern movement in ethics and politics that begins in the Renaissance, develops in the Enlightenment, and culminates in the classical liberalism of the 19th century."
What do you make of some writers who place the origins of liberalism not within the later Renaissance but upon the shoulders of Ockham?
They are confusing a metaphysical debate with a revolution against Christendom that Ockham could not have imagined. Like most clever bits of intellectual history,it is not just wring but irrelevant and trivializing.
Alasdair MAcIntyre wrote that conservatism is dead. Liberalism is the only game in town. There's some truth to this. Liberal ideas are so deeply entrenched in the Western (esp. Anglo) psyche that everyone is a liberal of some sort.
But times change and so do ideas. No zeitgeist has lived forever, although certain elements of an earlier zeitgeist might be preserved by later civilizations.
Despite the current overwhelming prevalence of liberalism, one sees cracks in this worldview. Most notable, all the contradictions of current liberalism and the fact that even its most ardent champions (whether leftist liberals or free-market libertarians and movement conservatives) no longer even appear to believe in many of its central tenets.
Liberalism's final day will come, perhaps sooner rather than later, but I doubt we'll see a return to conservatism, and what will replace the liberal paradigm I have no idea. Pat Buchanan has suggested that ethno-politics will prevail; others, that the new fault line will be between the nationalists and globalists.
Another dimension to all of this is the changing demographics of the world. Liberalism is the child of Europeans and Diaspora Europeans. But no one else in the world seems to believe in it. The UN predicts that world population could explode from the current 6+ billion to around 10 billion by 2050, with most of the growth anticipated in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. With such a sudden change, the grip of liberalism will probably be even less. The divisions occurring in such a world might be less ideological and more about basic necessities: water, food, land, access to oil, etc.
As much as I dislike liberalism, the post-liberal world might be worse (at least for a while). But who really knows. If you told a Londoner in 1910 what his city would look like in 90 years he would have thought you're insane.
Great essay, BTW.
TJF: "Yet, while rejecting (overtly or not) Christianity, they naively accepted many Christian ideals—particularly brotherhood and philanthropy."
This is one of the problems we face today. Christianity in a pre-modern world served its adherents well. But Christianity combined with post-Christian liberalism (vide the recent Southern Baptist decree on immigration) is toxic.
You are going to discuss liberals influenced by "illiberal" ideas right? Does that include Edmund Burke? I myself don't consider him liberal,but others do.
In short,is Burke really a conservative (like Russell Kurk believes) a liberal conservative, or just a liberal.
Thanks.
This is an excellent topic. The limits of "reason" as defined by liberal tradition (what can be measured and quantified) is a topic in which all serious conservatives should have an interest. If the social sciences have given us anything, it is the stacks and stacks of studies that confirm when reason as understood by liberals is opposed to the imagination as understood by tradition, the imagination wins every time. Quality is a reality as much as quantity, although liberals would not have it so.
A liberal is someone who would attempt to apply Newtonian physics to hyperspace.
A number of people have posted comments without signing in or using their real full name. Let us follow the rules. Some of those comments were also irrelevant to the discussion. The point about rationality is not that some more primitive form of reasoning (e.g. Newtonian) is inadequate to the subject, but that no form of reasoning can reach the sorts of scientific conclusions that social scientists have made their business. As Aristotle made pretty clear, in all human things (poetry, moral questions, politics) we have to be content with approximations and tendencies and not with absolutes.
I believe the way Aristotle suggested his introduction to human reason is that we cannot ask for more certainty than our subject allows. The social sciences do suggest he is correct, but always in a negative way, --- their endless experiments confirm that in many contemporary subjects of human interest we must "be content with approximations and tendencies and not with absolutes."
While MacIntyre is right to say that liberalism has triumphed--that conservatism and leftism, as he says, are mere stalking horses for liberalism--I don't think he has much of an understanding of the conservative tradition. His understanding was distorted by all those years on the left, and the last time I communicated with him, he expressed rather bitter contempt for so harmless a soul as Russell Kirk. As an analyst of the failure of liberalism, MacIntyre is useful, but his intellectual timidity has prevented him from taking any positive stands. I quite reading him 10 years ago for that reason.
I think it might be more accurate to say that postChristian pseudo-Christianity, when reinforced by sentimental liberalism, is toxic. In any age one has to separate out true Christian teaching from the Church's ad hoc accomodation to the world it finds itself in. There was a time when the Church acted as if monarchy was the only legitimate form of government, now the even more ridiculous claim is made that only democracies are legitimate. I try to be patient, because what matters is the long run, not the petty lies and accomodations the bishops feel compelled to make, sometimes in a good cause.
What difference does it make what we call Burke? Presumably, this is not an exercise for butterfly collectors who want to have a label for every specimen. Some years ago I wrote a piece for the Spectator on the unsuitability of Burke as a conservative godfather--the editors wittily gave it the title, "Tories Back Wrong Philosopher." My late friend Peter Stanlis was annoyed, insisting I did not understand Burke. But Burke was a sentimental liberal from youth--it was the Irish in him--and while no one had deeper insights into the wrong direction the world was taking, his political career militated against anything like a systematic or comprehensive point of view. His "Natural Law" philosophy was real, but he typically invoked it in the prosecution of Hastings, precisely because there was no English law by which to attack Hastings.
I should add re Burke that his influence has not been altogether good. For example, in elevating the Glorious Revolution to the foundation of the Anglo-American political order, he seriously confused things. Whatever one thinks about James II and William III, William was 1) not legitimate as successor, 2) a foreigner who used British blood to defend the Dutch, and 3) a a man who betrayed his father-in-law. The GR was a piece of thuggery acquiesced in by scoundrels like the first Duke of Marlborough. From one point of view--not mine--it was a necessity, but not the sort of necessity one puts at the heart of things, unless one believes that all great enterprises are founded on a crime. Burke's political myth is subversive, unlike the Whig myth of the Anglo-Saxons, which is creative and (for the most part) benign.
I should add that there are (or were) a few social scientist who understood these limitations.
Anna Alberdina Antoinette Terruwe for instance based her work on that of Thomas Aquinas and the relevance of Thomistic rational psychology to neurosis and its treatment. She was one of the more extraordinary pyschiatrists in the 20th century and of course remains relatively unknown to thisday.
I have often said the biggest problem with understanding someone else's point of view is the failure to understand our own. For readers who may not understand the differnce between alienated, contemporary man and his ancestors, I suggest three different reads from three different perspectives. One is rather long -- Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes by Henry B. Adams; One is a very short essay, The Nature of Medieval Art by Ananda Commaraswamy ; and the other a book recently recommended to me at this past Chronicle's Summer school by Father Hugh Barbour, Brother Petroc's Return by Sister Mary Catherine. There, that is my last post on this very interesting and timely topic today and like thirty cent coffee, it is what it is.
I asked about Burke because of this article by Murray Rothbard I read
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard11.html
Its about Burke's Vindication of Natural Society. In it he seems to be a liberal anarchist and not remotely conservative.Maybe he changed his mind, but old habits do die hard.
Personally I think his reaction to the French Revolution is probably what cements him as conservative.He does speak out against using abstract ideas to run society and prefers prescription and prejudice to guide policy.
Also I ask because I recently saw a leather volume in my school called Classics of Conservatism. And it included the Wealth of Nations,Democracy in America,and Reflections on the Revolution in France. How these are all conservative I don't know.But these are conservative in America I guess due to our heritage of liberalism.
My good friend Murray Rothbard knew many things, but he often fell into ideological traps of his own devising. For Rothbard, Burke was either bad because he defended the old order or good because he had an anarchist streak: For him there were only heroes and villains. Burke is a distraction because he is a complex man responding to different crises in his own time, not a philosopher. There is a strong conservative streak in him, but that is not the only streak. As for the Vindication, conservatives view it as a jeu d'esprit. I rather doubt that, but if he was serious, he moved away from that position.
Thanks for clarifying.I've been reading Russell Kirk's the Conservative Mind,which leads the reader to think Burke is the original conservative philosopher.
So I guess your liberal tradition series will focus on philosophers and not political leaders.I think that's what Kirk falls into with Burke.
As far as how liberals misunderstood realities of human nature and social life, did they primarily:
1) have good arguments for the wrong conclusions?
2) have bad arguments for the right conclusions?
2) have bad arguments for the wrong conclusions?
I ask, because you often qualify your criticisms of post-Renaissance thought by saying that it involved many well-intentioned people who lost their way somewhere.
Incidentally, I recently read about a sort-of-liberal called James Parkinson from the 18th century (Parkinson's disease refers to him, apparently!). The man was distributing various pamphlets promoting overthrow of government and once conspired a plot to poison the king. A nuisance and a troublemaker who always caused problems. I thought that such a person was totally alien from acceptable standards of society. If this is what liberalism is, it is probably difficult to concede that such people ever mean well.