the new liberals, while espousing ideas almost complete opposite of classical liberals are not aliens who highjacked the name. the movement itself had an evolution. the classical liberal parties vanished into thin air by the turn of the century. to prove my assertion i can give you examples. the latte drinking bourgeois who root for obama are the sons and daughters of wig wearing cognac sippers like Voltaire. the manners, talking points and lifestyle of new liberals is oddly similar to the classical liberals.
i may be wrong on this, though. your though, please
if the real liberals are bound up in a basement, and the pretenders are using their stolen IDs there must be a lot of secret basements around. universities for the most part were classical liberal bastions. now their marx-keynes-obama bastions. get the pattern. plus, were the hell did these statists come from, and where did all the liberals go?
An ideological/philosophical movement is based on ideas, not on people. The ideas of today’s so-called liberals have nothing to do with the ideas of the real liberals of the 19th century. They have no relationship to one another in any meaningful way.
It’s funny, because it seems like the tide may be swaying back to the classical side. Take the blue dogs, and other non-state emphasizing “Liberals” penetrating the Democratic Party.
seriously dude. “liberal ends, conservative means” does that quote ring a bell. they are not entirely different. molinari said so.
i think this how the evolution went down.
first you had the lazzes fairers like smith and the manchester doctrine. they advocated that free trade would benefit everyone. the system was “supposedly” implemented in the capitalist golden age. economic growth skyrocketed. here we have three version of the story. vulgar libertarians like Friedman and Hayek claim that this was largely a free market and workers were doing better than ever. socialists claim that it was a free market and a nightmare for the working class. and others like carson and anarcho-capitalists claim that this was not truly a free market and that the REAL deal would be great.
and so you have the three strands
the classical liberals wanna roll back to the good ol’ days, the socialists want to move towards the other direction as more economic liberalization = more exploitation and the radical free traders want to go realz .
Classical liberalism (let’s just call it liberalism) has always been a fringe movement with various degrees of success in implementing policies.
The founder of the Economist magazine and the finance minister of British India, James Wilson, was a Liberal. Indeed, it is remarkable that a liberal like him managed to get around some major influential areas in and outside of the government. Except Wilson was not particularly well liked by the British upper class elite. He was just a lower middle class apprenticed hat-maker who was too much of a nuisance for the snobbish civil service and government elite, and even if Wilson had some success in penetrating the establishment, he was still relegated to positions of setting up the budget of a particular colony, and thus was not well respected. That’s about as significant as the success of a liberal in influencing policy normally ever used to get.
The earliest liberals, be it Locke or Mills, were lower middle class or middle class people who got into the habit of writing books once the printing press was available, and had their ideas slowly penetrate public consciousness. To an extent, this may have helped in ensuring a small and honest government in Britain which kept its hands off on matters that should not be in its jurisdiction, but the British government did intervene in bad ways. The Enclosure Act of the country effectively ruined the country’s rural agricultural population, and was nothing more than a means of speeding up urbanisation and industrialisation in the country to benefit a few private interests.
The liberals are hardly dominant or successful in either politics or academia, by and large. They just do their best. We often hear of Keynesian and other new schools of economic thought complaining about the dominance of “market fundamentalism”. But who is the market fundamentalist and where do you see them so often? Here in India, rather statist economists would be called “pro-market”, as would be the case internationally for men like Milton Friedman, who were hardly the “market fundamentalists” that Stiglitz and Galbraith would claim they were. You don’t see many radically pro-market economists actually, do you?
It’s just that a large number of economists have been using the apparatus and language of the few well-respected liberal economists. The ideas of this minority managed to pervade far more widely and quicker among other non-liberal economists, because the liberals argued their points much better. And even as the rest of the economics scene uses their influence, they contradict their ideas.
I don’t know. Liberal changed from classical liberal to modern liberal around, what, 1906. So what happened in 1906? The liberalism of Cobden, Burke and Gladstone was rejected and the “liberal socialism,” as he called it, of LT Hobhouse took over the Liberal Party and instituted the Liberal Welfare Reform of 1906 to 1914. That effectively put an end to classical liberalism.
So the question, did liberalism evolve? The Liberal Party “evolved,” or devolved, but did individual thinkers change their minds? I’m sure some did, but the majority of the noteworthy liberals did not.
Classical liberalism lost its appeal to people, and really was not a credible choice at the time. Reading literature of the time, all options were variants of socialism. Hobhousean liberal socialism probably saved Western society from Marxist socialism by offering a compromise.
your comments are greatly appreciated. i think the reason i thought that way was because you often hear that lazzes faire was implemented to a huge degree and the effects were disastrous. your contention is that it really wasn’t? i guess the first person that perpetuated the “free markets are running wild” idea was marx, who was a contemporary.
I think it’s really iffy. No clear cut answers there. Sometimes I’ll be reading a classical liberal from those days and just be astonished by the contradictions. One minute he’ll be talking about individual liberty, the next he’s justifying violation of the same in the name of the greater good.
John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” is an great libertarian tract, but his other writings were very much sympathetic to collectivism.
i think the radical liberals like bastiat were the minority and most liberals stood on shaky ground. however even in bastiat’s time they were the clearly state socialists that he referred to.
First, party politics had much to do with watering down classical liberalism, making “liberalism” more susceptible to socialist dogma. In Britain, the Whig party, which became known as the liberal party, rejected classically liberal ideas for political expediency. This we should expect, but that is not to say there wasn’t some degree of change in the thoughts of “liberal” thinkers - just look at J.S. Mill. He’s not very popular with Austro-libertarians, primarily because he introduced the idea of “positive liberty,” which was nothing more than a repackagaing and reflavoring of contemporary resentment on the part of labor against big business and the state. Many historians have noted that the death knell of liberals was their growing support of the central-state and nationalism as protectors of liberty. I tend to agree. When you throw your hat in the arena of realpolitik, you cannot survive without sacrficing principle.
Second, by the last three decades of the nineteenth century, states had succeeded in establishing compulsory, state-driven education systems. It should be no suprise to anyone here that these institutions were a direct attack on classical liberal ideas. Just one example, in the German states concerted efforts were made to eliminate liberal thought from the schools and universities, even to the point that teachers could be banned altogether. It worked, and one can see the effects in Omnipotent Government where Mises laments that there was no real liberal opposition to the social democrats and conservatives, and those that remained sold out to the Bismarckian state anyway.
Well, if you’re a utilitarian, like most people, then you can argue for liberty, or for government services, but sooner or later you’re going to get backed into a corner and you’ll be forced to admit that government services do indeed work for the greater good, in utilitarian terms.
Take Dostoevsky’s question, if you could end all suffering by torturing one child, would you do it? A utilitarian by his own principles is forced into an affirmative answer. That’s why I think ethics has no place in political discussion. We are individuals, not collectives.If a moral theory was 100% individualistic, then maybe it would be meaningful, but they aren’t.
What I liked is that the great mid-20th century philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin finally came up to clarify in one of the boldest essays ever known that “Everything is what it is, and liberty is liberty, not justice or fairness, or happiness or satisfaction, or a quiet conscience.”
And if anybody ever thought about why liberty should be an end in itself, Berlin said that ultimately, a society without liberty results in “cramped, warped, hidebound human beings”.
And if Per Byland’s article here on How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden is not a proof of it, I don’t know what is.