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From: janw@inmet.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Liberalism, Part I
Message-ID: <28200728@inmet>
Date: Tue, 11-Mar-86 23:25:00 EST
Article-I.D.: inmet.28200728
Posted: Tue Mar 11 23:25:00 1986
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Nf-From: inmet.UUCP!janw    Mar 11 23:25:00 1986


[Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes]
/* ---------- "Liberalism, Part I" ---------- */
>... I cannot make any sense of the statement that Smith and
>Paine were "more Aristotelian" than most other Enlightenment
>philosophers.  

Adam Reed did not say that. He said that (1) Enlightenment philo-
sophers in general were "more Aristotelian"; (2) two of them par-
ticularly influenced Liberalism. 

However, I don't see how Smith and Paine were Aristotelian.  What
is  so peripatetic about the Invisible Hand? I can't remember any
remotely similar idea attributed to Aristotle.  As  for  Paine,
his  forte  is moral pathos, an extremist one that would be alien
to Aristotle, the philosopher of the golden mean. E.g., I have no
doubt  that Paine would have heartily endorsed Goldwater's famous
statement that "extremism in defense of liberty is no  vice".   I
am just as sure Aristotle would have rejected it.

There is a tendency in Rand, which I suspect Adam Reed inherited,
to  lump  her  good  guys  together. Smith and Aristotle are good
guys, therefore they must be philosophical kin. Rand  even  tends
to  make  Renaissance sound Aristotelian, though much of it was a
rebellion *against* Aristotle. (I, too, admire Smith, and  Paine,
and Renaissance, and Aristotle - and also diversity).

>>... 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?  

It flows, I believe, correctly from  "antithesis".   For  someone
attached to classical liberal ideas, proclaiming their antithesis
under the guise of the same name *can* be distasteful, can't it ?

>(ii) Modern liberalism is in no sense an antithesis of  classical
>liberalism,  but  rather  a development of the same basic princi-
>ples. The basic idea, more or less, is that JUSTICE REQUIRES THAT
>A  GOVERNMENT  MUST TREAT ITS CITIZENS AS EQUALS, with equal con-
>cern and respect. More on this in a later article.

Now THAT is terribly wrong. In a conflict between liberty and equality,
or liberty and order, or liberty and state interest, old liberalism
chose LIBERTY. Freedom to go to hell in our own unequal ways.
If *equality* (of any kind) was its basic idea, why wasn't it called
"egalitarianism" ?

Its preference, therefore, was not for the government to treat
citizens equally but to let them alone equally.
Old liberalism was minarchist. Laissez faire was its principal
ingredient.

 The new liberalism has reversed this choice completely.
It has been well said that a liberal doesn't care what you do -
as long as it is compulsory ! Its true name should be coercivism ...

(If you prefer, I can put it in Marxist terms. Old liberalism
was the ideology of the entrepreneurial class. The new one,
of the bureaucratic class. )

		Jan Wasilewsky