hfavr@mtuxo.UUCP (a.reed) (02/13/86)
>>[Adam Reed (ihnp4!npois!adam)] >[Jan Wasilewsky (decvax!inmet!janw)] [Adam Reed again:] >>I would like to add something Schwartz has not said, but I think follows >>from his argument. The Libertarian movement is repeating the history of >>the Liberal movement. In the time of "Classical Liberalism", Liberals >>were advocates of liberty, but they lacked a sound philosophical base >>from which either to derive an exact definition of what they meant by >>Liberty, or to demonstrate why liberty was desirable. What 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. >A decline of classical liberalism is indisputable. New liberalism >usurped its name; libertarianism (with a small l) is much the >same thing as old liberalism - but weaker. The problem is that there never was a discernible, discrete shift from "old liberalism" to "new liberalism". The meaning of "Liberalism" just drifted, gradually and continuously (just as "Libertarianism" is already drifting) until it wound up meaning the opposite of what it originally purported to mean. Need one add that those who ignore history are in the process of repeating it? >However, the attribution of old liberalism's decline to the lack >of "a sound philosophical base" is unsubstantiated. It even seems >implausible: how do you explain the *rise* of old liberalism ? 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. 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. Adam Reed (ihnp4!npois!mtuxo)