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From: hfavr@mtuxo.UUCP (a.reed)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Liberalism, Part I
Message-ID: <1395@mtuxo.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Mar-86 11:43:04 EST
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Posted: Wed Mar 12 11:43:04 1986
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> > Adam Reed:
> >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. 
> 
>  Richard Carnes:
> 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.

Sorry for the imprecision. The relevant fact is that the orignal
Liberals on the above list - Locke, Hume, and Smith - made no attempt
at a rigorous derivation of ethics, politics, or social theory
from considerations of epistemology and metaphysics. Thus, in
spite of their intellectual interest in the foundations of philosophy,
the early Liberals did little that could keep Liberalism from "drifting".
The same is true of Mill.

Of the other two names on the list - Hobbes and Spinoza - neither
qualifies as a Liberal. Hobbes, with his "social organismic" theory of
the State, was the intellectual precursor of fascism and of
totalitarian democracy. Spinoza held that individual will, and thus
individual freedom, was an illusion. His pantheistic metaphysics led
to an ethics based on the premise that "Whatever exists is God". The
political corrolary of this view is acquiescence in whatever exists.
The Panglossian secularization of the above ("All is for the best in
the best of all possible worlds") was the intellectual foundation of
early conservatism, and was mercilessly ridiculed, from an
uncompromising classical Liberal perspective, by Voltaire. While
Spinoza's refusal of a royal pension from Louis XIV tells us a great
deal about his personal integrity, the fact that the pension was
offered tells us even more about the political uses and implications
of his philosophy.

I have learned a lot from Carnes' articles, but I am glad for the
occasional demonstration - such as his inclusion of Hobbes and Spinoza
in a list of philosophical liberals - of the fact that erudition does
not necessarily entail substantive comprehension of what one has read.

				Adam Reed (ihnp4!npois!adam)