For B. A. B., who continually asked for this to be written.
‘Liberalism’ was concerned [with what] I have called the menace of ‘sovereign’ authority and with constitutional devices to reduce it. If it had any theoretical understanding of a state it was that of an association in terms of assured ‘natural rights’ recognized as civil conditions to be subscribed to in conduct, and the menace was identified as the propensity of rulers to inhibit the enjoyment of these rights by the exercise of lordship. But these ‘natural rights’ came to include the enjoyment of certain substantive conditions of things capable of being assured only in the exercise of lordship (e.g. employment, medical attention, education) and consequently what was menacing became, not a lordly managerial government, but a government which failed in its lordly office of assuring to subjects the enjoyment of these conditions or one which imposed other similar but deprecated conditions, like religious uniformity.
—Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct
A common misconception about political theorists is that they have “answers” for contemporary political problems. For the most part, this is wrong. When it comes to the practical affairs of government, I assume my opinions hold no more weight than anyone else’s. This isn’t to say that all political opinions are equal—only that training in political theory offers little advantage in deciding what to do politically. To theorize about politics is less to prescribe than to ask what politics is, and that question is itself an ambiguous one. Politics is often what we make it—for better or worse—and so a theory of politics can only ever describe patterns grounded in history and practice. Such ideas may illuminate, but they become prescriptive only when we misunderstand how difficult the real work of politics is. Pithily: such theorizing may inform but hardly instructs.
All of this is a necessary preamble to a topic friends often ask me about: liberalism. The question may be partly contextual. I live in Canada in the early twenty-first century, where we have a national Liberal Party that seems to repel much of what has historically flown under the banner of “liberalism.” This irony presumes, however, that we already know what liberalism is—but I’m not yet ready to grant that assumption. Because confusion around this term is so common, I want to sketch a brief history of how it came to mean so many different things. A full theory of liberalism would require a tome of several hundred pages, but what follows is simply an entry point.
To be succinct: liberalism is the set of viewpoints that recognize only two essential political actors, the state and the individual, and the task of the former is to secure the liberty of the latter. Put differently, the liberal is one who asks how the state can guarantee liberty to those individuals under its rule. This does not exclude industries within the state’s mandate (such as schools or hospitals), but it treats them as extensions of state action. Nor does it deny the existence of other associations—families, churches, unions, and the like—but these remain secondary to the relation between individual and state. For a state to be liberal, this is all that is required; for a state to act only from this description is impossible. Much remains to be filled in—above all, the question of what it means for an individual to be liberated. As this history unfolds, I also come to the general problems underlying liberalism from its outset but which have manifested more obviously over the last century.
To make sense of liberalism, one must understand the earlier modern developments in statecraft. By the seventeenth century, two major shifts had reshaped the political landscape over several hundred years: the consolidation of feudal domains into larger administrative units that would become “states,” and the collapse of the Roman Catholic Church’s universal spiritual authority. These developments forced moral deliberation, legislation, and adjudication to migrate to the state, which now stood in relation to all those who had once been spiritually subject to the Church. We see this most clearly in the thought of Thomas Hobbes—though I do not want to reduce his thought to this explanation alone. What matters here is that the state’s newly centralized and comprehensive power was a novelty. Few political structures in European history—save perhaps the Greek tyrannies or Roman empire—had conceived of themselves in such totalizing terms. Though even such Greek and Latin authorities would not have had the terminology used by these later modern states to give themselves such standardized, intrusive control over their subjects.
Yet the emergence of the modern state-individual dyad does not itself explain liberalism. The dyad is necessary but insufficient. What also arose in the late seventeenth century was a secular adaptation of Christian moral ideas. In John Locke’s thought, for instance, one finds an attempt to transpose Christian natural law into a non-ecclesial frame, such that it might serve as a moral impediment to state overreach. But the defender of these moral limits was now to be the state itself—an evident conflict of interest. One might say that “the people” replaced the Church as the moral counterweight, yet this shift lacked the institutional structure and theological coherence that had once given that authority force. For a time, the sacredness of the individual soul was secularized into the sanctity of the autonomous self. In this sense, a reformed Christianity quietly birthed the principles of liberalism, and it endured for a while given the norms already held in the post-Reformation cultures of that time.
Over the next two centuries, the state-individual dyad persisted even as the meaning of “individual liberty” underwent dramatic interrogation. Particularly in England and Germany, several thinkers began to question whether the individual was a fixed entity at all or rather a product of specific social and institutional arrangements. One can trace this to the decline of the Church’s social services—its schools, hospitals, and charitable orders—which the modern state increasingly absorbed. As it did so, the state discovered that the freedom it was meant to secure required a new regime of obligations. By the late nineteenth century, figures like T. H. Green and Leonard Hobhouse had transformed liberalism from a doctrine of protection into one of enablement. As Michael Oakeshott once summarized (quoted at length at the beginning of this piece), the state passed through three phases: first as Lord over the people, then as restrained by natural law, and finally as Lord once more—now responsible for making its subjects worthy of that law. It is, as Oakeshott noted, an awkward and disjunct movement, but one that is difficult to deny in light of the historical record.
A more contentious part of this history is the erosion of Christian belief—but it is indispensable to the story. Through the Reformation and its aftermath, the heart of European societies as Christian basically vanished. From John Stuart Mill to John Dewey to John Rawls, one finds no trace of Christianity as the proper source of normative ethics for a liberal frame. The individual becomes instead a kind of secular totem: the bearer of rights whose dignity is assumed rather than grounded. By the twentieth century, the result is a peculiar mixture: the state never relinquishes its role as Lord over the individual, but the moral foundation that once justified the protection of the latter had disappeared. Whether in National Socialism or Communism, the sacredness of the person is lost, though the dyad endures. Nietzsche perhaps foresaw this: the collapse of transcendence would invite the return of tyranny, only now armed with technology and mass organization that developed in those same European nations in modernity.
Liberalism, thus, might be understood as the bastard child of a broken Church. In rejecting its heritage, it could no longer understand itself or properly enact its own identity. It married the worldly powers of state and technology but ultimately got lost in them without its ethical core intact. This was not necessarily deliberate, but it is clear when one surveys the tradition. We began with Locke, whose politics were inseparable from Christian anthropology, but by the twentieth century most conscientious liberals—Rawls, Nozick, and Hayek, just to name a few—had replaced theology with Kantian formalism, itself ironically an obvious secularization of Lutheranism. We are left unmoored because there is no longer any consensus on what or who the individual is. Without that, the state-individual dyad cannot help but become unstable.
Understanding this history leaves us today with two key observations about liberalism’s progeny. First, that our politics now seek to enforce conceptions of the human being that are fundamentally contested and perhaps irresolvable. Second, that we attempt to sustain the state’s legitimacy precisely by pursuing this impossible task of determining the nature of the individuality in need of liberation. The plight of our politics can thus be reduced to a deceptively simple question: If you do not know who—or even what—I am, how do you have any authority to tell me what to do? I say this not as a deterministic or pessimistic conclusion, but as a recognition of what seems to me the dominant current in the political history of those places we have reluctantly called the “West.” There is, no doubt, much more to this history, and there may yet be resources to help us overcome our folly—a possibility for which I may naively be hoping. A single, homogenous line of development is to be found in history only if history is made a dummy upon which to practise the skill of a ventriloquist.
For those with an interest to get a little more, here are a few books that I think are worth reading (though they do not have the same sense of Christian influence as my reading does):
Freeden, Michael. Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Gray, John. Liberalism. 2nd ed. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1995.
Gray, John. Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy. London, UK: Routledge, 1989.
Ryan, Alan. The Making of Modern Liberalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Hoping for Clarity 