Liberalism, loose or strict.

• Author: de Jasay, Anthony
• Position: Reflections

Political doctrines can be understood and interpreted in many ways, but in order to survive and prosper, each doctrine needs an irreducible, constant element that represents its distinct identity and that cannot change without loss of the doctrine's essential character. Nationalism must hold out sovereignty, the safeguarding and, if possible, the expansion of a territory, a language, and a race as the chief goals of policy. If it does not, it will be no longer nationalism but something else. Socialism appears in many guises, but all its versions have at least one common, unalterable feature: the insistence that all wealth is created by society, not by its individual members. Therefore, society is entitled to distribute wealth in whatever way fits its conception of justice. Common ownership of the means of production and equality of well-being are derivatives of this basic thesis. Liberalism, I maintain, has never had such an irreducible and unalterable core element. As a doctrine, it has always been rather loose, tolerant of heterogeneous components, easy to influence, open to infiltration by alien ideas that are in fact inconsistent with any coherent version of it. One is tempted to say that liberalism cannot protect itself because its "immune system" is too weak.

Current usages of the words liberal and liberalism are symptomatic of the protean character of what the names are meant to signify. "Classical" liberalism is about the desirability of limited government and what goes by the name of laissez-faire, combined with a broad streak of utilitarianism that calls not for limited government, but for active government. American liberalism now is mainly concerned with race, homosexuality, abortion, victimless crimes, and in general "rights." In mid-Atlantic English, a liberal is what most Europeans would call a Social Democrat, and in French liberal is a pejorative word, often meant as an insult, and liberalism is a farrago of obsolete fallacies that only the stupid or the dishonest have the audacity to profess. These disparate usages do not have much in common. It should not surprise us that they do not.

Loose Doctrine on Loose Foundations

Much of liberalism's lack of a firm identity is explained by its foundations. At its deepest, the doctrine seems to spring from the love of liberty. In more philosophical language, liberty is a value, final or instrumental, that we hold dear. The superstructure of liberalism is made to rest on this easily acceptable value judgment. However, liberty is not the sole value, not even the sole political value. It has many rivals: security of person and property, security of subsistence, equality of many kinds, protection for the weak against the strong, the progress of knowledge and the arts, glory and greatness; the list might be virtually endless. Many if not most of these values can be realized only by curtailing freedom. It is contrary to the liberal spirit of tolerance and love of liberty to reject these values and to dispute anyone's freedom to cherish some of them even at the expense of freedom. The love of liberty allows trade-offs between itself and other things. The amount of freedom that should be given up for a...