I was reading The Poverty of Liberalism today, by the Marxist philosopher Robert Paul Wolff. His theory is that classical and modern liberalism both adhere to John Stuart Mill’s principles as expounded in On Liberty.
The idea is, as Wolff understands it, that both classical liberals and modern liberals think that humans should be free as long as they are competent to handle that freedom. JS Mill excludes children and “idiots” (Wolff’s word) from eligibility for freedom.
Modern libertarians, he argues, are blindly assuming that people are competent. Modern liberals, he argues, have seen the historical record and the science, and have realized that humans are competent to handle freedom. They are like children, or idiots, or both.
It was a conscious effort by fabian socialists to ram their doctrine through. For many years, people rejected socialism in America. So they changed their name to “progressives”. After they earned themselves a bad name with that one, they moved on to a much more reputable host/name (liberalism) like viruses.
In 1927, an American socialist named Norman Thomas, who was six times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said that the American people would never vote for socialism, but he said under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program. - Ronald Reagan
Unfortunately, my scanner has gone kaput on me. Otherwise I definitely would. I actually typed some of it out but this website ate my post so I got discouraged and quit lol. Might try again later.
Liberalism was nanners to begin with. The free market was just one of the things liberalism adopted along the way and used to various degrees, depending on the fashion of the times. Proudhon, Bakunin, Thomas Paine, Rousseau, Robespierre all nuts and all liberals.
My own thoughts on this have been somewhat changed in light of a reply I received on the same subject in the Tea Party thread. I don’t know about the US, but I was vaguely aware, and am now aware of the “Orange Bookers” branch of the UK Liberal Democrat party, whic is far closer to classical liberalism than the rest of the party. Indeed the fact that 4 out of 5 of the current Lib Dem cabinet members(if I recall correctly) are from this branch, thern this might explain why they decided to form a coalition with the Tories over labour. I also had no idea Mark Littlewood, who I think I may have even vaguely met, now the head of the IEA, was the former media head for the Lib Dems.
As Hayek puts it in his Constitution of Liberty, there are two traditions of liberalism: The english and the french one. In the past, people understood the distinction better. What people here call the classical liberals are the liberals of english tradition. The philosophers of english tradition believed in self-organization and not yet fully developed concepts of “spontaneus order” whereas the philosophers of french tradition believed in planning, the primitive form of a fully planned state. It is not strange at all that in the attempt to be consistent the english tradition developed ideas like anarchocapitalism and the french communism. Both are called liberalism. Hayek thinks these two types of freedom only share the name though they are similar in that they deal with restrictions to human action. The english tradition deals with restriction through fellow human beings, the french with restriction through economic or more general, environmental factors. Of course the latter stems mainly from a misconception of economics but thats not the point.
Most people nowadays can not distinguish these two traditions. I think this is the case because people neither have a consistent theory of freedom (in the english meaning) nor of the “freedom” of the french tradition. Both “kinds of” freedom are called by the same and thus are not really seperated. Another possibility is a complete misconception of the economic state that leads people to misintepret the causes of their misery or wellbeing, leading them to support whatever seems to put them in a better position. Admitted, this idea has some similarity with Marx’ polylogism, but the point of this whole post is: Todays liberals are only the descendants of a liberal tradition, not the tradition of classical liberalism.
Well, knowing the love that most classical liberals had for democracy (equating it, or even seeing it as superior to freedom), I can’t help thinking that, save for the strongest minds, all where very ripe to embrace modern liberalism as it is, simply as a consistent product of democracy. So yeah Garegin, you make a very sharp point.
LeeO, it is time we liberals acknowledged that it was some of our own who ended up betraying principles and pushed for far greater state expansion than ever known.
It’s because liberals are also human beings. And human beings are selfish and greedy.
And this is why Jefferson exploited the executive power to go to war, even though he was against it. Because Jefferson was greedy and dishonest, under the Original Sin.
Lionel Robbins, John R. Hicks, Abba P. Lerner, Nicholas Kaldor, G.L.S. Shackle, and Kenneth E. Boulding were all once far more liberal than the Auburn program people. What does that tell us?
