What is Liberalism?

Come with me on an adventure.  We'll see something bewildering, strange, and difficult to understand or even to identify - precisely because it is so familiar.  Yes, we're going home.  The challenge is to solve that strange riddle: what is liberalism?

Liberalism is not the same thing as democracy.  Also, liberalism is not about rights.  Karl Marx believed in rights, and fought hard for democracy, and yet was no liberal.  Liberalism is not about any particular policy or political position, or any particular form of government or any philosophy of government.  It is more fundamental than that.  It is an entire worldview.  Historically, it precedes the development of large-scale democratic nation-states with constitutionally-guaranteed rights by centuries.

Well, if liberalism is not about democracy or rights, then what is it about?  It can be difficult to say.  Just close this window for a moment, and try to define liberalism.  It might be harder than you think.  But this is not because liberalism is so rare or obscure, but just the opposite: because liberalism is so ubiquitous.  It is like asking a fish what water is: chances are, they have no idea, because they have never known anything else.  They have no definition for it - definite in the sense of being finite, or limited - because they have nothing to compare it to and therefore no way of determining a border or dividing line between them.

In the United States, we call members of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party "liberals" - and they are - but also Conservatives and Republicans are liberals, perhaps in many ways even more so than members of the Democratic and Liberal Parties.  For that matter, most politicians are and have been liberals, to differing degrees, in almost every European country for centuries.  And, through imperialism, Europe has exported liberalism to just about every corner of the globe. 

The problem is that liberalism is such a powerful and all-encompassing worldview, dominating minds so completely, that it can be difficult to see one's way out of it.  In fact, there are two challenges with liberalism: the first is the difficulty of understanding anything outside of liberalism, and the second is that those who manage to even partially escape from the liberal worldview in any way usually only fall into a more right wing reactionary position.  (This, by the way, includes Stalinists, whom I regard as a kind of right wing reactionary.)

Liberalism is a worldview, or rather a set of worldviews. Provisionally (get ready for some major complications) we can simply define liberalism as those worldviews which are based upon the assumption (often unstated and unthought, and often applied inconsistently) that humanity consists of independent individuals.

An immediate caveat: liberalism should not be confused with individualism.  Obviously, liberalism and individualism are related. And yet they are not the same. There is a kind of Venn diagram between liberalism and individualism. Many liberals may be individualists of a sort, and many individualists may be liberals.  But there are liberals that are not individualists, and there are individualists who are not liberals.  In that final category I count myself: I am an individualist who is not limited by liberalism.  I am capable of understanding the world around me through the worldview of liberalism, but I am also capable of other perspectives.  

Individualism is an ethical stance, with moral consequences.  It is about what should be. Liberalism, on the other hand, is a worldview.  It is about what is.  

A worldview is quasi-empirical, or, you might say, epistemological.  It concerns the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of the world.  But notice that, although liberalism has an empirical “flavor” so to speak, it is, itself unfalsifiable, untestable, and thus non-empirical.

I’ve already pointed out that liberalism is not identical with individualism.  Notice also that liberalism is not identical with belief in free will.  There are liberals who do not believe in free will.  (Sam Harris is an obvious example, but there are many, many, many more.  I am willing to believe that most of the people who profess not to believe in free will are liberals.)

There is yet another difficulty in defining and understanding liberalism, which is the paradox of liberalism's particular cultural history.  Strangely enough, liberalism arose with Protestantism - especially Calvinism, which explicitly rejected belief in free will.  It also arose, paradoxically enough, with the growth of the international "triangular" slave trade.  Inevitably, tracing the history of liberal ideology will be full of confusions, riddles, contradictions.  John Locke, sometimes called the "father of liberalism," began his life as a Calvinist and became a fierce advocate of the most radical Reformation currents, namely Socinianism.  He was hired by the Earl of Shaftsbury in 1669 to write The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, the Province of Carolina occupying a huge amount of land occupying what is now not only North Carolina and South Carolina but also much of what is now Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and parts of the Caribbean.  The document that Locke produced was unusually reactionary and authoritarian even for its time, not only guaranteeing that a "free man" would have "absolute power and authority over his negro slaves," but also establishing a system of landed nobility, involving "cassiques" and "landgraves" and a system of inherited serfdom even among the white population.

Liberalism is an ideology, but one that is notoriously difficult to define or even to see clearly.  Many liberals do not realize that they are liberals - they do not realize the extent to which liberalism has influenced and permeated their ways of thinking about the world.  Let's look at some of these contradictions.

Obviously, the word "liberalism" shares a root with the word "liberty," so we might expect liberalism to have something to do with freedom, personal self-determination, and rebellion against authority.  But that root is the Latin liberalis, which literally refers to a member of the nobility - those people which the common people might be expected to be rebelling.  We tend to associate liberalism with license and licentiousness, but for the Classical (Greco-Roman) thinkers, to be liberal meant to exhibit qualities of character that were the product of both good breeding and highly specialized and disciplined training.  We think of liberalism as self-directed and self-interested, but the qualities they most associated with a liberal character were generosity and willingness or even zeal for self-sacrifice.  If we go back even further, the Indo-European root for liberalis is theorized to be *leudh-ero-, which literally means "belonging to the people."  The contradictions pile on top of each other.

But enough of these etymological games.  Let's look at liberalism economically.  From a Marxist point of view, Karl Marx wrote Capital, volumes 1 through 3, with the subtitle "A Critique of Political Economy."  And that's what it was, for the most part.  Although Marx puts forward his own ideas here and there, the book is mostly an attempt to unlearn political economy as it had been understood for several centuries before him - that is, to unlearn liberal political economy - or rather, to critique it, which is not to sweep it aside as worthless, but rather to criticize it dialectically.  Liberalism refers to that tradition of political economy that stretches from James Steuart, through the Physiocrats, through John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, through to James and J.S. Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and beyond.  It requires an enormous amount of intellectual work to unlearn the assumptions that these liberal economists make - as Marx puts it, there is no "royal road to science."

One liberal economist that is especially of note is John A. Hobson.  Hobson was no Marxist, but a liberal economist in the tradition roughly sketched out above.  Hobson did not do the work of unlearning the liberal categories of thought, the commodity fetish as spelled out by Marx in Capital, and so he remained quite liberal in his thinking.  Since Lenin followed Hobson in his theory of imperialism, Lenin was in this sense a liberal, and his theory of imperialism was a liberal theory.