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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Liberalism, Part I
Message-ID: <361@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 8-Mar-86 22:35:58 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.361
Posted: Sat Mar  8 22:35:58 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Mar-86 00:14:03 EST
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 70
Summary: 

This is a response to some of Adam Reed's postings of a few weeks
ago.  He makes a number of assertions which I find quite strange and
which ought to be challenged.

>As I said, "old liberalism" never "declined" - it just metastatized
>into "new liberalism", growing rather than declining (in count of
>followers and in political influence) at every point in its drift
>toward the current form.  Early Liberalism got its start from the more
>Aristotelian "worldly philosophers" of the enlightenment,
>particularly Adam Smith and Thomas Paine.  It drifted because its
>intellectual precursors did not give to metaphysics, epistemology and
>ethics the thought they gave to economics and politics. 

Adam Reed's version of political and intellectual history bears
little resemblance to what I understand.  Take the last sentence
quoted above.  Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Smith were all
deeply interested in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and J.S.
Mill wrote a treatise on logic.  All of them were thinkers of the
first rank and made contributions to a variety of philosophical
areas.  Also, I cannot make any sense of the statement that Smith and
Paine were "more Aristotelian" than most other Enlightenment
philosophers.  The philosophical bases of *The Wealth of Nations* may
be found (other than implicitly in the work itself) in Smith's
*Theory of the Moral Sentiments* and to a considerable extent in the
works of his close friend David Hume.  

>What [Peter] Schwartz
>has done is to identify the mechanism by which the Liberal movement
>inexorably devolved into that loathsome antithesis of classical
>liberal ideas which goes by the name of "liberalism" today.

(i) Is the term "loathsome", as used above, merely an expression of
distaste (nothing wrong with that) or does it have a philosophic
content?  If the latter, what does it mean?  (ii) Modern liberalism
is in no sense an antithesis of classical liberalism, but rather a
development of the same basic principles.  The basic idea, more or
less, is that JUSTICE REQUIRES THAT A GOVERNMENT MUST TREAT ITS
CITIZENS AS EQUALS, with equal concern and respect.  More on this in
a later article.

>For a demonstration of the link between lack of a philosophical base
>and the gradual drift toward statism, just read John Stuart Mill on
>compulsory education.

OK, I read it (I assume you are referring to the discussion of
education in the last part of *On Liberty*).  What I found was
evidence of an impressively lucid and subtle thinker, not any lack of
a philosophical base, which can be found in the rest of the book and
his numerous other writings.  (BTW, *On Liberty* should be high on
the reading lists of the readers of this newsgroups, whether you
think you will agree or disagree with Mill.)

>The Liberal movement, on the other hand, grew in numbers and
>influence, yet remains, among ideological movements, the paradigm of
>failure: its ideas never made a visible dent in the dominant culture,
>which remained a morass of authoritarianism, obscurantism, and
>collectivism.  An ideological movement fails when it "rises" to the
>point of becoming popular among people who do not understand its
>ideology.

I find this unintelligible.  Liberalism became, somewhere in the 18th
century, the dominant political philosophy of the West.  It still is,
its chief rival today being socialism in its varieties.  As far as
liberal ideas never making a visible dent, they made a huge dent
known as the United States of America, the preeminently liberal
polity of modern history.  Please see *The Liberal Tradition in
America* by Louis Hartz.  Classical liberal doctrines were extremely
influential in the 19th century.
-- 
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes