How should liberals think about liberty?

• Author: Lind, Michael

Michael Lind writes:

In his insightful and important essay "Taking Liberty" (Washington Monthly, April 2005), William Galston, one of contemporary America's leading social and political thinkers, is right to insist that liberty should be at the heart of American progressive politics. And he is right to caution against "a temptation by many, especially on the left," to redefine freedom to mean "economic fairness and social justice" with which "today's left is more comfortable. That temptation should be avoided. Because freedom has its own context and logic, we cannot make it mean whatever we like." In the American political tradition, if not in the French or Swedish, liberty is central, not equality or fraternity. Galston deserves credit for emphasizing that it is not enough for thinkers of the center-left to learn to "speak American"; they must learn to "think American" as well even if the kind of progressivism this produces does not necessarily resemble any European model. Given the disorientation of the center-left in the United States today, Galston's advice could not be wiser or more timely.

But we can accept his premise that liberty must be at the center of our understanding of the history of American reform and at the same time question the details. Many of the achievements that progressives in the United States today are trying to defend from the right or build upon can be defended by two different conceptions of liberty, which might be called individualist liberalism and republican liberalism. These map the same reality in different ways, like Euclidean geometry and Riemannian geometry.

Galston writes, "For much of the 20th century, progressives took the lead in both defining freedom and advancing its borders. Teddy Roosevelt expanded the 19th-century laissez-faire conception of freedom ... to include the liberties of workers and entrepreneurs to get ahead in the world.... FDR further redefined the concept to include social protection from the ills of want and fear." This is the language of individualist liberalism, which is the predominant strain of center-left liberal thought today. Natural to individualist liberalism is the notion of progress as a gradual broadening of the conception of liberty, from civil rights to political rights and ultimately to social rights, to use the language of influential 20th-century British liberal thinker T. H. Marshall. While these rights are due to all citizens, no corresponding duty on the part of citizens is necessarily attached. In much center-left thought, social rights, like economic entitlements, are justified because they allow individuals to have more options to order their lives as they choose.

This tradition is particularly powerful in Britain. But while it began influencing American liberalism in the Progressive era, the individualist liberal tradition exists in tension with older American republican liberal ideas which are now found among more populists than self-identified progressives. The basic difference is this: Individualist liberals on the center-left are inclined to justify compulsory universal schooling, Social Security, and the military by redefining individual freedom, while republican liberals do not need to make that intellectual move. For republican liberals, freedom, narrowly defined in terms of civil and voting rights, is secured by a republican form of government, based on elections, checks and balances, the rule of law--and a competent and virtuous citizenry. In a republican liberal society, policies and institutions that strengthen the republican citizenry can be justified even if they do not increase the liberty of particular individuals or, in some cases, all individuals. The premise that republican government generally tends to protect liberty frees republican liberals from any need to justify particular policies that are good for the republic in terms of the freedom of particular individuals.

To illustrate the difference, let us look again at Galston's examples. "Teddy Roosevelt expanded the 19th-century laissez-faire conception of freedom, in which government was seen as the greatest threat, to include the liberties of workers and entrepreneurs to get ahead in the world, freedoms restricted by concentrations of economic power and protected by the exercise of public power." To a republican liberal, this is an oddly economistic and individualistic way to describe the great campaigns to regulate or break up the trusts, the purpose of which, from the republican liberal perspective, was not so much to maximize individual economic mobility as to reduce the threat to the institution of republican government posed by political corruption and an aristocracy of wealth.

A similar point can be made about another of Galston's examples: "FDR further redefined the concept to include social protection from the ills of want...