carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (03/09/86)
This is a response to some of Adam Reed's postings of a few weeks ago. He makes a number of assertions which I find quite strange and which ought to be challenged. >As I said, "old liberalism" never "declined" - it just metastatized >into "new liberalism", growing rather than declining (in count of >followers and in political influence) at every point in its drift >toward the current form. Early Liberalism got its start from the more >Aristotelian "worldly philosophers" of the enlightenment, >particularly Adam Smith and Thomas Paine. It drifted because its >intellectual precursors did not give to metaphysics, epistemology and >ethics the thought they gave to economics and politics. Adam Reed's version of political and intellectual history bears little resemblance to what I understand. Take the last sentence quoted above. Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Smith were all deeply interested in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and J.S. Mill wrote a treatise on logic. All of them were thinkers of the first rank and made contributions to a variety of philosophical areas. Also, I cannot make any sense of the statement that Smith and Paine were "more Aristotelian" than most other Enlightenment philosophers. The philosophical bases of *The Wealth of Nations* may be found (other than implicitly in the work itself) in Smith's *Theory of the Moral Sentiments* and to a considerable extent in the works of his close friend David Hume. >What [Peter] Schwartz >has done is to identify the mechanism by which the Liberal movement >inexorably devolved into that loathsome antithesis of classical >liberal ideas which goes by the name of "liberalism" today. (i) Is the term "loathsome", as used above, merely an expression of distaste (nothing wrong with that) or does it have a philosophic content? If the latter, what does it mean? (ii) Modern liberalism is in no sense an antithesis of classical liberalism, but rather a development of the same basic principles. The basic idea, more or less, is that JUSTICE REQUIRES THAT A GOVERNMENT MUST TREAT ITS CITIZENS AS EQUALS, with equal concern and respect. More on this in a later article. >For a demonstration of the link between lack of a philosophical base >and the gradual drift toward statism, just read John Stuart Mill on >compulsory education. OK, I read it (I assume you are referring to the discussion of education in the last part of *On Liberty*). What I found was evidence of an impressively lucid and subtle thinker, not any lack of a philosophical base, which can be found in the rest of the book and his numerous other writings. (BTW, *On Liberty* should be high on the reading lists of the readers of this newsgroups, whether you think you will agree or disagree with Mill.) >The Liberal movement, on the other hand, grew in numbers and >influence, yet remains, among ideological movements, the paradigm of >failure: its ideas never made a visible dent in the dominant culture, >which remained a morass of authoritarianism, obscurantism, and >collectivism. An ideological movement fails when it "rises" to the >point of becoming popular among people who do not understand its >ideology. I find this unintelligible. Liberalism became, somewhere in the 18th century, the dominant political philosophy of the West. It still is, its chief rival today being socialism in its varieties. As far as liberal ideas never making a visible dent, they made a huge dent known as the United States of America, the preeminently liberal polity of modern history. Please see *The Liberal Tradition in America* by Louis Hartz. Classical liberal doctrines were extremely influential in the 19th century. -- Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes
tedrick@ernie.berkeley.edu (Tom Tedrick) (03/11/86)
> [ ... ] Modern liberalism >is in no sense an antithesis of classical liberalism, but rather a >development of the same basic principles. The basic idea, more or >less, is that JUSTICE REQUIRES THAT A GOVERNMENT MUST TREAT ITS >CITIZENS AS EQUALS, with equal concern and respect. [ ... ] This relates to my interest in corruption in political systems. Since a large population is likely to exhibit a wide range of abilities, intelligence, morals, etc., an attempt to treat everyone as equal gives the more criminally inclined elements of the population something to exploit (ie if certain rights are guaranteed to all, the criminals can seek to exploit these rights for personal gain, at the expense of those who will voluntarily forgo personal gain for social welfare.) Or it may force society to treat everyone "equally" badly in order to guard itself against the criminal types. So attempting to guarantee certain rights to all may in fact be a kind of subsidy for the criminal types. -Tom tedrick@ernie.berkeley.edu
janw@inmet.UUCP (03/12/86)
[Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes] /* ---------- "Liberalism, Part I" ---------- */ >... I cannot make any sense of the statement that Smith and >Paine were "more Aristotelian" than most other Enlightenment >philosophers. Adam Reed did not say that. He said that (1) Enlightenment philo- sophers in general were "more Aristotelian"; (2) two of them par- ticularly influenced Liberalism. However, I don't see how Smith and Paine were Aristotelian. What is so peripatetic about the Invisible Hand? I can't remember any remotely similar idea attributed to Aristotle. As for Paine, his forte is moral pathos, an extremist one that would be alien to Aristotle, the philosopher of the golden mean. E.g., I have no doubt that Paine would have heartily endorsed Goldwater's famous statement that "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice". I am just as sure Aristotle would have rejected it. There is a tendency in Rand, which I suspect Adam Reed inherited, to lump her good guys together. Smith and Aristotle are good guys, therefore they must be philosophical kin. Rand even tends to make Renaissance sound Aristotelian, though much of it was a rebellion *against* Aristotle. (I, too, admire Smith, and Paine, and Renaissance, and Aristotle - and also diversity). >>... Liberal movement >>inexorably devolved into that loathsome antithesis of classical >>liberal ideas which goes by the name of "liberalism" today. >(i) Is the term "loathsome", as used above, merely an expression of >distaste (nothing wrong with that) or does it have a philosophic >content? If the latter, what does it mean? It flows, I believe, correctly from "antithesis". For someone attached to classical liberal ideas, proclaiming their antithesis under the guise of the same name *can* be distasteful, can't it ? >(ii) Modern liberalism is in no sense an antithesis of classical >liberalism, but rather a development of the same basic princi- >ples. The basic idea, more or less, is that JUSTICE REQUIRES THAT >A GOVERNMENT MUST TREAT ITS CITIZENS AS EQUALS, with equal con- >cern and respect. More on this in a later article. Now THAT is terribly wrong. In a conflict between liberty and equality, or liberty and order, or liberty and state interest, old liberalism chose LIBERTY. Freedom to go to hell in our own unequal ways. If *equality* (of any kind) was its basic idea, why wasn't it called "egalitarianism" ? Its preference, therefore, was not for the government to treat citizens equally but to let them alone equally. Old liberalism was minarchist. Laissez faire was its principal ingredient. The new liberalism has reversed this choice completely. It has been well said that a liberal doesn't care what you do - as long as it is compulsory ! Its true name should be coercivism ... (If you prefer, I can put it in Marxist terms. Old liberalism was the ideology of the entrepreneurial class. The new one, of the bureaucratic class. ) Jan Wasilewsky
hfavr@mtuxo.UUCP (a.reed) (03/12/86)
> > Adam Reed: > >As I said, "old liberalism" never "declined" - it just metastatized > >into "new liberalism", growing rather than declining (in count of > >followers and in political influence) at every point in its drift > >toward the current form. Early Liberalism got its start from the more > >Aristotelian "worldly philosophers" of the enlightenment, > >particularly Adam Smith and Thomas Paine. It drifted because its > >intellectual precursors did not give to metaphysics, epistemology and > >ethics the thought they gave to economics and politics. > > Richard Carnes: > Adam Reed's version of political and intellectual history bears > little resemblance to what I understand. Take the last sentence > quoted above. Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Smith were all > deeply interested in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and J.S. > Mill wrote a treatise on logic. All of them were thinkers of the > first rank and made contributions to a variety of philosophical areas. Sorry for the imprecision. The relevant fact is that the orignal Liberals on the above list - Locke, Hume, and Smith - made no attempt at a rigorous derivation of ethics, politics, or social theory from considerations of epistemology and metaphysics. Thus, in spite of their intellectual interest in the foundations of philosophy, the early Liberals did little that could keep Liberalism from "drifting". The same is true of Mill. Of the other two names on the list - Hobbes and Spinoza - neither qualifies as a Liberal. Hobbes, with his "social organismic" theory of the State, was the intellectual precursor of fascism and of totalitarian democracy. Spinoza held that individual will, and thus individual freedom, was an illusion. His pantheistic metaphysics led to an ethics based on the premise that "Whatever exists is God". The political corrolary of this view is acquiescence in whatever exists. The Panglossian secularization of the above ("All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds") was the intellectual foundation of early conservatism, and was mercilessly ridiculed, from an uncompromising classical Liberal perspective, by Voltaire. While Spinoza's refusal of a royal pension from Louis XIV tells us a great deal about his personal integrity, the fact that the pension was offered tells us even more about the political uses and implications of his philosophy. I have learned a lot from Carnes' articles, but I am glad for the occasional demonstration - such as his inclusion of Hobbes and Spinoza in a list of philosophical liberals - of the fact that erudition does not necessarily entail substantive comprehension of what one has read. Adam Reed (ihnp4!npois!adam)
hfavr@mtuxo.UUCP (a.reed) (03/12/86)
Richard Carnes writes: > Modern liberalism > is in no sense an antithesis of classical liberalism, but rather a > development of the same basic principles. The basic idea, more or > less, is that JUSTICE REQUIRES THAT A GOVERNMENT MUST TREAT ITS > CITIZENS AS EQUALS, with equal concern and respect. Sorry, but I find no reference to this "basic idea" in any "Liberal" writings up to the time of House. The early Liberals - de la Boetie, Locke, Voltaire, Smith, Paine - would have disagreed explicitly with several components of the above: 1. Up to the time of Hegel, who made this kind metaphoric animism academically acceptable, the ascription of personal attitudes (such as concern and respect) to collective institutions (such as the state) would have been regarded by every competent philosopher as a category error. 2. As Isiah Berlin points out, the statement that "Justice requires X" does not imply the advocacy of X unless one regards "justice" as one's highest-priority political value. But most of the early Liberals put Liberty rather than Justice at the head of their priorities - this is why they were called Liberals. (Those who put Justice ahead of all other considerations, such as order, security, virtue, and even liberty, were called Jacobins). (Later classical Liberals, starting with Bastiat, defined "Justice" to consist of "the predictable consequences of one's own actions", so that a Liberal government, which left citizens free to act, and to enjoy the consequences of their actions, would also go a long way in the direction of ensuring "Justice". But, by definition, a Liberal was someone who put Liberty ahead of all other political goals). 3. Since Liberty is maximized by reducing governmental constraints on *every* person to the absolute minimum, and since most restrictions on the liberty of Europeans in the 18th century were the consequence of special priviledges bestowed on members of established institutions, the Liberals were, from the beginning, advocates of equal liberty. And, as Amitay Etzioni put it, "those who aimed at liberty ahead of equality have always done better by equality, than those who put equality ahead have done by liberty". But to make equality the entire basis of liberalism, to the total exclusion of liberty, as in the Dworkin/Carnes formulation presented above, would have flabbergasted every Liberal up to the time of Mill, and perhaps even later. Adam Reed (ihnp4!npois!adam)