After Liberalism Read online

  The problem with locating a single liberal tradition in any case did not start the day before yesterday. In America the semantic waters already ran muddy during the interwar years. This can be gathered from looking at those interwar socialists and social democrats who claimed for themselves a liberal pedigree. These efforts at appropriation succeeded, thanks to an obliging professoriate and eventually sympathetic press, but they also called into question whether liberalism forms an “unbroken tradition.” There were good reasons that social democrats in the twenties and thirties elected to call themselves “liberal.” Some wished to hide the radical nature of their reformist agenda, and most were looking for a self-description that linked them to the American past. Contrary to Louis Hartz’s claim, liberalism is not “America’s only political tradition,” but it is a strong one nonetheless. And it has seemed more congenial to most Americans than socialism. While American workers, noted the German sociologist Werner Sombart ninety years ago, hoped for better material conditions, they also rejected socialist ideology as a European import. This undoubtedly dawned on American social democrats trying to package their programs for their own countrymen. The Socialist Party, they perceived, attracted only a fringe vote outside of a few municipalities, but the “liberal tradition,” at least in its Jeffersonian sense, was something most Americans viewed positively.

  The appropriation of the term “liberal,” however, did not go uncontested. In Austria the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises complained in his major work, Die Gemeinwirtschaft (1932): “No one has understood liberalism less than those who have claimed in recent decades to be liberals. They have imagined themselves fighting the ‘excrescences’ of capitalism; and they have thereby taken over the characteristic asocial thinking of the socialists. A social order has no ‘excrescences’ that can be merely excised. If a phenomenon develops necessarily out of the effects of a social system based on private control of the means of production, no ethical nor aesthetic whim should condemn it. The speculation that goes on in economic development cannot be damned in its capitalist form because the moral judge has no understanding of its function.” Moreover, according to Mises, it makes no sense to condemn capitalism as inferior to socialism as a moral ideal, while praising it as better in practice: “One could with the same justification assert that a perpetual motion machine as a theoretical construct is better than a machine built by the laws of mechanics, even if the first cannot be made to work.”16

  Mises’s utilitarian objection to socialism was related to his moral unhappiness about the passing of an age of relative freedom. As he had already observed in 1927: “The world today knows nothing more about liberalism. Outside of England the designation ‘liberalism’ is utterly despised; in England there are indeed ‘liberals,’ but most of them are such only in name and really moderate socialists.”17 In the same year, 1927, Guido Ruggiero, after chronicling the turns of European liberalism since the French Revolution, asked with unmistakable dread: “Is the [liberal] state now in decay? It certainly appears to have been exhausted by the gigantic efforts that have been required of it, one following another without interruption. Socialism and nationalism, illiberally employing the liberty bestowed on them, first tried to undermine it from within and to create an autocratic and dictatorial anti-state.”18

  Ruggiero and Mises were both writing against the background of liberalism’s accommodation with rowdy bedfellows: nationalist movements in the nineteenth century, and socialism and the welfare state in the twentieth. Both believed these accommodations had added to the burden of defending a separation between the private and public spheres; each thought that the assault on property rights and the adoption of social policies threatened both freedom and proper political authority. Ruggiero ascribed this problem to the “democratization of liberalism,” which he traced to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873).19 It was Mill who first undertook a synthesis of one particular freedom, expressive liberty, with a plan for extensive income redistribution. It was Mill, Ruggiero also noted, who brought to England the technocratic schemes of the father of French sociology, Auguste Comte (1798–1857). In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill advocated the creation of a house of lords composed of scientifically educated administrators. By this bow to scientific planners, he hoped to moderate the power of a democratically elected parliamentary lower house.

  In 1944 a longtime admirer of Mill but critic of Comte, Friedrich Hayek, published a resonant broadside against welfare state liberalism, The Road to Serfdom, later serialized in Reader’s Digest. Hayek depicted the journey toward a socialized economy as leading toward servitude. He made clear that he himself was decrying social democracy not as a European conservative but as an exponent of individual freedom and rational thinking. What the Nazis and Communists had done in one fell swoop, making everyone serve arbitrary power, Hayek maintained, Anglo-American “reformers” were doing by stages. And they carried out this work relentlessly, while misrepresenting themselves as “liberals.”20

  Hayek scorned the argument that democratic procedures would suffice to protect the citizens of a social democratic regime against the loss of freedom: “We have no interest in making a fetish of democracy. Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. Democratic control may prevent power from becoming arbitrary but it does not do so by its mere existence.”21 Far more than his fellow exile from the Nazis, Ludwig von Mises, Hayek questioned the strength of democratic restraints in the face of socialism. He also thought less harshly than Mises about the reactionary opponents of liberalism. Unlike Mises, he did not devote his energies to attacks on the Prussian “state socialism” of the nineteenth century or the social policy of Bismarck as a spawning ground for modern collectivism.22 For Hayek, the enemies of liberalism who seemed most likely to take power, after Hitler, were on the left, and they wore social democratic colors.

  A social democratic liberal who responded angrily to Hayek was Herman Finer in The Road to Reaction (1945). Finer appeals to an evolving liberalism that he accuses Hayek of ignoring. According to Finer, Hayek does not take the democratic aspect of liberal democracy seriously enough: he favors democratic elections in order to avoid unrest but does not want the majority to have its way. He also assumes “that the mass of the people are more likely to be swayed by the demagogue who intends to be a dictator, while the people of higher education and intelligence will not.” Hayek keeps coming back to the dubious point “that mere argument can sway people in the direction of a policy they do not like, whereas it is well known that people are swayed by their interests in large measure.”23 Because Hayek seeks to curb the majority, Finer explains, he talks about federations in which sovereignty is divided. But Finer suggests that this too is a futile attempt to deny the people the social justice which they seek: “In our time the only form of government which will give Hayek what he wants—namely the protection of economic individualism in the extreme form that he wants it—is dictatorship, which coerces whole peoples, and sneers at rule by persuasion.”24 Thus Hayek extols the idea of democracy but has no stomach for what the people really want, and he attributes “more rationality and honor to millions struggling with each other economically than to millions democratically composing their own laws and controlling their responsible administrations.”25 Finer may have exaggerated the accountability of public administrators, but he is right to notice the squeamishness among free-market liberals in speaking about the democratic will.

  Finer then goes on to point out that he himself has liberal as well as social democratic credentials. He affirms his belief in constitutional procedures as a precondition for social reforms and presents socialism as an attempt to overcome “the failures of private enterprise.” Finer also points back to John Stuart Mill as a precursor for his own liberalism: unlike Hayek, Mill “did observe and finally concluded that the good of England required socialism.”26 Finer’s appeal to Mill is not without precedent a
mong social democratic liberals of his generation. Like J. Salwyn Shapiro and English Labourites, Finer cites Mill as representing a natural progression from the old liberalism to the new, a progression that went back to the mid-nineteenth century. Though John Stuart’s father, James Mill, had believed in a market economy, the son had moved gradually toward a new kind of liberalism. It was one combining concern about the status of women and the free exchange of ideas with the acceptance of a democratic welfare state. These stands were supposedly of a piece, including Mill’s examination of the “social question.” A defender of individual autonomy, Mill had come to recognize what “reactionary” liberals still denied, namely, the need to separate the questions of production and distribution. By the late 1840s he had proposed that redistributionist measures be enacted for the sake of English workers (later social democrats praised Mill for treating property as a function of social evolution). While he understood that legally fixed property claims were necessary for peace in primitive societies, he nonetheless questioned the value of such arrangements in his own day. In the industrial age, Mill explained, property, by remaining an unequally distributed good, led to civil strife and not to general tranquility.

  Mill’s journey toward social democracy is chronicled in his autobiography, a work long mined for comments on the kind of reconstruction of liberalism favored by American reformers. But there were other English precedents for what later social planners would advocate. The English Liberal Party had begun to embrace the welfare state between 1910 and the First World War, abandoning free trade, introducing social welfare measures, and stripping the House of Lords, with the King’s connivance, of any effective veto power. In The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910–1914, George Dangerfield bade a not entirely affectionate farewell to “the true prewar [English] Liberalism supported, as it still was in 1910, by free trade, a majority in Parliament, the ten commandments, and the illusion of Progress.”27

  The changing views on socioeconomic questions among English Liberal politicians reflected their understandable desire to gain working-class votes. This trend also underscored, however, the effect of certain social philosophers of the late-nineteenth century, who struggled to reconcile liberal individualism with communal responsibility. Such thinkers as Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1912) and T. H. Green (1836–1882) distilled for the English public the works of continental philosophers, particularly Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in making a case for an ethically engaged state. In books and in lectures these authors took to task the “Manchesterian liberalism” of the mid-nineteenth century, which they equated with commercial values and a night-watchman state. English liberal critics of liberalism insisted that the individual’s liberation from coercive and status-bound relations would not bring social improvement, unless it also led to a renewed corporate identity. Thus they demanded that the growing disjunction of the modern age between the individual and established authority must be overcome by the creation of a new synthesis between liberty and order. In Liberalism (1911), L. T. Hobhouse, editorialist for the Manchester Guardian and admiring critic of Green and the English Hegelians, went one step further than most other Liberal Party members of his time. He called for a revamping of the British economy on the basis of shared power with trade unions. Only in this manner, Hobhouse maintained, could workers become fully integrated into the English nation.28

  Such Hegelian and organicist concepts were floating in the United States as well and in the late nineteenth century made a powerful impression on the young John Dewey (1859–1952). Dewey picked up these concepts from his professor and later colleague at the University of Michigan George Sylvester Morris (1840–1889). Much of Morris’s short life was devoted to lecturing on Hegel’s social philosophy and to his magnum opus, Hegel’s Philosophy of the State and History: An Exposition. Morris also helped Dewey to establish close ties to the philosophy faculty at Johns Hopkins University, where Hegel and T. H. Green were both in favor. But such weighty philosophical speculation did not lead into social planning on this side of the Atlantic. Rather, it provided the window dressing for the new liberalism being formulated in the United States during the interwar years.29 Arthur A. Ekirch documents the attempts at labeling the “public philosophy” that were implicit in American centralized planning.30 When Dewey decided to characterize his proposed social reforms as “liberal,” he had already tried out “progressive,” “corporate,” and “organic.” The rise of fascism may have rendered rhetorically problematic the last two alternatives to “liberal.” And since there were competitors for “progressive” associated with the reform wings of the two major national parties, Dewey and his confreres may have become “liberals” faute de mieux. In any case the social planners grouped around the New Republic, Common Sense, and the Nation chose “liberal” to describe themselves and their projects. What they wanted, explained Alfred Bingham, a social democratic activist and nephew of the conservative Connecticut senator Hiram Bingham, was a “New Society based on planning.”31

  In “The Future of Liberalism,” written for the Journal of Philosophy in 1935, Dewey defined the new liberal creed as “commitment to the experimental method and a continuous reconstruction of the ideas of individuality and liberty in intimate connection with changes in social reforms.” Contrary to what he thought was the view of classical liberals, Dewey mocked “the monstrosity of the doctrine that assumes that under all conditions governmental actions and individual liberty are found in separate and independent spheres.” Yes, nineteenth-century liberals were innovative in their own time, but their descendants seemed to Dewey either economic imperialists or the captives of a frozen past. He called attention to their lack of an historical sense, a failing that results in “absolutism, this ignoring and denial of temporal relativity.”32

  Almost all the appeals to the new liberalism in interwar America invoked Progress, a concept which had also resonated in the older liberal tradition. In John Dewey’s A Common Faith (1934), this meliorism draws upon Auguste Comte’s scheme of human development, which had originated one hundred years earlier. Comte had sketched a course of human improvement extending from a primitive religious through a metaphysical to a social scientific, or positivist, consciousness. Dewey took this Comtean scheme and recast it, having it culminate in “the intense realization and values that inhere in actual connections of human beings with one another.” Those who pursue experimental methods and take an active part in social affairs he placed at the point of a fully evolved human consciousness. Dewey’s process of movement goes from an oppressive sense of the supernatural through a reflective theological period and onward to the “values of natural human intercourse and mutual dependence.”33 In Lewis Mumford’s graphically presented end point, we encounter human consciousness bringing about the global transmission of a distinctively American model of living: “The United States, with its Federal system of government and its strongly centralized executive, is an image of the greater world we must help create for all men.”34 In the face of “fascist barbarism,” it seemed necessary to Mumford to move quickly into the inevitable future. The United States, he insisted in 1940, should open its borders to all who wished to come in and then take steps to ensure a “worldwide authority for the allocation and distribution of power and raw materials.”35 In a less generous mood, Charles and Mary Beard linked the course of American Progress to economic growth and technology in The Rise of American Civilization (1930). Though the Beards accepted most of the new liberal premises, including the need for social planning, they remained explicitly nationalist in their thinking.36 This economic nationalism made them increasingly skeptical of the liberal idealism among interventionists before and during the two World Wars. And it may account for the Beards’s break with mainstream liberals by the early forties and for their recent popularity among the American Old Right.37

  The linkage between Progress and social planning allowed interwar liberals to assign changing contents and applications to what they presented as a unified liberal her
itage. And once “progressive” liberalism caught on rhetorically and conceptually, this development helped to make liberalism synonymous with both a politically controlled economy and material redistribution. In 1949 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. located American liberalism within the “vital center,” between anti-New Deal Republicanism and out-and–out socialism, and few in the United States rose to protest.38 Though there were liberal parties on the European continent that still treated economic freedom and property rights as sacred principles, in both England and North America that fight was winding down by the late forties. When the avowed social democrat John Kenneth Galbraith celebrated “the liberal hour” in a book by that title in 1960, no one of significance complained that social planning by public administrators went against the real liberal tradition.39 By then “liberal” had come to mean “progressive,” and “progressive” meant being in sync with an evolving and bureaucratically administered society.

  Liberalism also changed over time to incorporate two other features, both related to its association with social planning. Both were also implicit in the view of progress as something that affects human consciousness as well as material circumstances. As in other ways, Mill was paradigmatic here. Like other English progressives, including John Bright, Richard Cobden, and James Mill, John Stuart Mill had supported what became the British policy of international free trade. Like his father he believed this policy would benefit English workers while promoting goodwill among peoples. But Mill was also a militant interventionist who believed in the need to propagate what he took to be universal progress. He grew indignant in 1862 when the British government of Lord Palmerston failed to side actively with the American Union. The struggle against slavery became a consuming passion of his throughout the American Civil War. Moreover, like his father, who had written the History of British India, Mill went to work for the East India Company and hoped to reform the gender and other social relations which existed among India’s inhabitants. In Parliament between 1865 and 1867, Mill returned to the question of “female bondage,” calling for the political equality of women and demanding an end to the legal disabilities against them. He also backed what became the Reform Act of 1867, extending the franchise to all English men, and he expressed the wish that the vote be given to women as well.40