A Bourgeois Creed
 Liberalism is a narrowly individualistic creed which
legitimates the maximization of private satisfactions
without regard to the public good.
 The argument is that, in emphasizing the sanctity of
individual rights, liberals have an impoverished sense of
community and of the requirements of citizenship.
 In a loose sense liberalism is evidently a bourgeois
ideology.
 From its inception, the doctrine conveyed ideas associated
with the disintegration of feudal society and the eventual
triumph of capitalism.
 What «Struggle» means in liberal accounts is to emancipate
individuals from the shackles of traditional society.
 Early liberals challenged arbitrary power by appealing to
universal principles.
 Individuals were said to come into the world with certain
natural or inalienable rights, by which was meant an innate
capacity and equal entitlement to manage their economic,
religious and other affairs.
 The duty of the government, if there has to be one, is to
protect the rights-freedoms of individuals.
 Legitimate government is rooted in the consent of those to
whom its authority extends.
 The accusation of a social individualism can be legitimately
made against free-market conservatives who sometimes
depict society as a collection of competitive individuals
joined by a common desire for security rather than by an
awareness of citizenship.
 Locke argued that the ‘body of the people’ had a right to
resist unjust government, and later liberals have advocated
democratic elections and other forms of public participation.
 For Rawls the preservation of fair democratic institutions is
itself a common good achieved, as he writes in A Theory of
Justice.
 For early liberals this ideal of citizen self-rule was to be
achieved through the dispersal of power and authority from
 In this loose sense, liberals did indeed construct a
bourgeois ideology, arguing as they did that a well-ordered
society depends upon virtues associated with the
acquisition of private property.
 Liberals claim that they are in favor of one-class society,
despite inequalities of wealth; there are common habits of
self-discipline and responsible citizenship.
 Regardless of social class, economic situation, everyone
has a vote.
A Brief History
 Today’s liberalism basically evolved in a British context.
 In its classical phase, we have seen, liberalism took shape
around the idea of natural rights, a concept which was given
clear expression during the Civil War period of the 1640s.
 In The Freeman’s Freedom Vindicated (1646) a Leveller leader,
John Lilburne, articulated the view pivotal to natural rights
doctrine: that no form of authority is legitimate unless grounded
in the consent of those affected by it.
 The Levellers, a group formed in 1646, whose extensive
program of political reform took its bearings from the
assumption of natural freedom and equality.
 Leveller proposals for redistributing authority to ordinary
people included a written constitution to protect civil
liberties by ensuring that government was bound by the
rule of law and also limited in scope.
 Prominent among these liberties was the right to follow
conscience in spiritual matters.
 Levellers were against any single religion to be dictated
over the society.
 There should be toleration and permitting heterodoxy.
 Levellers were early exponents of a possessive
individualism that licensed the pursuit of economic selfinterest.
 The Leveller objection to aristocratic privilege was that it
sustained a hierarchy of social relations – ruler and subject,
master and servant – contrary to the natural human
condition of freedom and equality.
 The Leveller strategy for restoring the natural condition of
freedom and equality was to construct a society in which
no one depended upon the will of another.
 Without intending to ‘level men’s Estates, destroy
Propriety, or make all things Common’, as their manifesto,
An Agreement of the Free People of England, put it, the
Levellers nevertheless proposed to disperse property
ownership as widely as possible by eliminating economic
monopolies.
 So, the Levellers were not narrowly bourgeois ideologues
who anticipated a new age of capital accumulation and
wage labor.
 Their ideal was a society of independent proprietors,
enjoying ample space within civil society to shape their
lives in a responsible manner, respecting the liberties of
others.
 Here was the image that recurred in later liberal writings: a
one-class community of autonomous citizens, each
responsible for his own affairs and making a particular
contribution to the common good.
 In the eighteenth century those claiming to be heirs of the
struggles of the previous century against absolute monarchy and
religious conformity were the Whigs, who favored a system of
parliamentary government and a degree of religious toleration.
 They were liberal in endorsing civil liberties, but it was a ‘thin’
sort of liberalism.
 As men of wealth and rank, many of them beneficiaries of
government patronage, many Whigs neither opposed
aristocratic privilege nor advocated democracy, which they
equated with rule by the rabble.
 These ‘conservative’ Whigs, embarrassed by that aspect of their
ideological legacy which gave credence to demands for political
and economic equality, often sidestepped the concept of natural
rights.
 Whig support for limited government and religious
toleration provided a tenuous link with the radicalism of
the previous century.
 Although most eighteenth-century Whigs retreated from
the radicalism of the previous century, others continued to
resort to the idea of natural rights to urge the extension of
civil liberties and political rights.
 The New Right of the 1980s is sometimes said to have
been in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Manchester
school of liberalism.
 But members of Manchester school, unlike free-market
conservatives, were intent on eliminating prevailing
inequalities.
 Some of them were involved in a free-trade movement
which culminated in 1846 with the abolition of tariffs on
imported grain.
 The Corn Laws, they believed, inflated the price of
domestic bread, and were therefore a form of taxation on
the poor for the benefit of landowners.
 Earlier liberals had condemned arbitrary government; Mill
used the concept of liberty to warn of the danger of the
tyranny of public opinion.
 In modern society, according to Mill, there were growing
pressures to conform which inhibited individual
spontaneity and cultural diversity.
 A person who is excluded from all participation in political
business is not a citizen.
 He does not have the feelings of a citizen.
 The effect would be a ‘moral revolution’ providing the
laboring classes with a sense of autonomy and of being
engaged in the pursuit, not of competing private and
sectional interests, but of a common good.
 Society had advanced to a stage where the poor had to be
treated as citizens rather than subjects, Mill wrote in the
same book, so that the ‘prospect of the future depends on
the degree in which they can be made rational beings’.
 The Oxford philosopher and Liberal city councilor, T. H.
Green (1836–82), said that freedom is not a license for a
minority to frustrate the potential of others to contribute to
the common good by making the best of themselves.
 The notion of classical liberalism changed over the time. L.
T. Hobhouse (1864–1929), a prolific publicist of the new
liberalism, detected in modern society the emergence of a
higher form of morality because citizens were increasingly
willing to set aside private interests for the sake of the
common good.
 Hobhouse used his theory of evolutionary collectivism to
justify a more extensive program of social reform than
Green had envisaged.
 Hobhouse’s intention was to vindicate the measures
implemented by the reforming Liberal government between
1906 and 1911, including the provision of old-age pensions
and an insurance scheme for sickness and unemployment.
 In arguing for a minimum wage and other social rights,
moreover, he discarded the assumption of earlier liberals
that a market economy could provide everyone with the
material basis of individual autonomy.
 The social dimension of wealth creation entitled
government to treat a proportion of individual income as
surplus that could be taxed to provide the poor with a basic
wage and other benefits.
 Hobhouse derived the idea of a surplus from his friend, J.
A. Hobson (1858–1940), who argued that the redistribution
of wealth into a living wage for the poor would secure
economic efficiency by providing them with new
purchasing power.
 Two men, both members of the Liberal party, are regarded
as the principal architects of the welfare or humanized
capitalism which prevailed in Britain from 1945 until the
ascendancy of the New Right in the 1980s.
 In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
(1936), J. M. Keynes (1883–1948) provided the classic
vindication of a mixed economy in which the state assumes
overall management of investment and consumption, while
leaving production in the hands of private enterprise.
 This kind of hybrid economy preserved personal liberties
and cultural diversity, according to Keynes, while
eradicating mass unemployment and other social ills which
nurtured authoritarian political regimes.
 Is Keynesian economic theory a fit to classical liberalism
or neo-liberalism?
 What type of economic policies does the government need
to implement at the time of recession or depression?
 Is excessive saving good in Keynesian economic modal?
 The other man, William Beveridge (1879–1963), an
unsuccessful Liberal party candidate, wrote several reports
in the 1940s which became the ideological foundation of
the post-war welfare state.
 The business of government was to eliminate deprivation
and unemployment, according to Beveridge, through such
measures as comprehensive social insurance, free health
care, the setting of a minimum wage and Keynesian
management of the economy.
 Beveridge says, “A starving man is not free, because till he
is fed, he cannot have a thought for anything but how to
meet his urgent physical needs; he is reduced from a man
to an animal.”
 So, the provision of full employment in a welfare state was
another tactic in the liberal strategy to achieve equality of
rights.
 Liberal values can be discerned, for example, in arguments
against sexual and racial discrimination, on behalf of
minority rights, and in a renewed campaign in Britain since
the 1980s to safeguard citizens against arbitrary
government through, for example, the establishment of a
Bill of Rights or the introduction of a written constitution.
 Socialists can, with greater legitimacy claim to have
inherited the mantle of liberalism.
 ‘We are not among those communists who are out to
destroy personal liberty,’ wrote Marx and Engels in the first
issue of the Communist Journal (1847).
 The market socialism, though not described as such, has
been a feature of liberal thinking since the Levellers.