CHAPTER ONE In Search of a Liberal Essence
LIBERALISM AS A SEMANTIC PROBLEM
THE history of liberalism in the twentieth century has been one of growing semantic confusion. This has resulted from two interrelated problems. First, liberalism has not been allowed to keep any fixed and specific meaning. It has signified dramatically different and even opposed things at different times and places in the course of this century, from a defense of free-market economics and of government based on distributed powers to a justification of exactly the opposite positions. Self-described liberals in the Western world during the last seventy-five years have been nationalists, internationalists, socialists, libertarians, localists, bureaucratic centralizers, upholders of Christian morality, and advocates of alternative lifestyles. They have treated these identities not as random individual choices but as true expressions of their liberal convictions.
Second, the term “liberal” has by now assumed a polemical sense, with the result that its antithesis “antiliberal” has come to overshadow any positive definition it may have had. Particularly during the Second World War and its cultural aftermath, a practice came to prevail among journalists and academicians to brand their opponents as antiliberal. Special measures were seen as necessary to curb antiliberal politics and statements, lest they lead to the illiberalism of imperial Germany or, worse yet, Nazism. And as early as 1937, the American Political Science Review devoted fifty pages to a monitory essay by Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights.” Loewenstein, taking up a theme that would be further developed by David Reisman in the Columbia Law Review in 1942, called for the creation of a “militant democratic” America that would counter antiliberal forces by being affirmative about its “values.”1
By the 1930s liberals were themselves engaged in disputes about the direction in which liberalism should be moved. There was heated disagreement between the Progressive educator John Dewey and the sociologist Lewis Mumford about the role of absolutes in a liberal society. In The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930–41, R. Alan Lawson shows that liberals became increasingly divided in the thirties between pragmatists and the advocates of “absolute values.”2 The emergence of an antiliberal enemy in the form of fascism therefore provided feuding liberals with a welcome source of unity. “Militant democracy,” which would be propagated in postwar Germany as “die wehrhafte Demokratie” by the occupying forces, was an embattled liberalism as defined by an absolute enemy, antiliberal fascism. Social psychological texts, such as Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), became important for liberal educators and policymakers bent on protecting their fellow citizens and rallying fellow liberals against reactionary attitudes. The intractability of such attitudes was seen to reflect both the force of traditional religion and faulty child-rearing. Such cultural influences offered a challenge to liberal reformers, one that demanded the adoption of a vigorous social policy.3 In this therapeutic literature the discussions centered on attitudes and values and on the need for proper socialization. Without such planning, traditional “authoritarian” attitudes, it was feared, would persist and lead to the kind of repressive society which had existed under European fascists.
Such argumenta ad Hitlerum have characterized the charge of antiliberalism brandished by liberal advocates since the forties. Invariably this line of attack relies on some form of the slippery slope, by which any serious assault on liberal social planning is condemned as a plunge into the rightist past. This tactic of debate, for example, was favored by prominent liberal intellectuals responding to The Bell Curve, a study of the genetic sources of intelligence, in the October 31, 1994, issue of the New Republic. The Bell Curve’s authors, Charles Murray and (the late) Richard Herrnstein, argue in excruciating detail that there are “intractable differences in I.Q. that cannot be accounted for entirely by environment.” They suggest that social policies intended to remove these cognitive disparities will fail in the end and that American society in the future will likely organize itself hierarchically and multiculturally, along lines of intelligence.4 Whatever the merits of these debatable propositions, nowhere do Herrnstein and Murray call for the eugenic planning that their liberal respondents ascribe to them. One critic, Michael Lind, traces their research to a “brave new right” that favors “Nazi eugenic policies.”5 Another respondent, New Republic senior editor John Judis, offers the opinion that the unwillingness to bring up hereditarian causes of intelligence is “not a taboo against unflinching scientific inquiry but against pseudo-scientific racism. Of all the world’s taboos, it is most deserving of retention.”6
Judis, Lind, and the other respondents do not demonstrate that The Bell Curve is “pseudo-scientific.” Rather, they perform a kind of liberal exorcism by attempting to drive their debating partners out of the community of respectable scholars. The New Republic also published a highly revealing response by the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer on the danger of inquiry to a liberal culture. After the agonized admission that Herrnstein and Murray might be right in their conclusions, Glazer goes on to say that there may be higher value in telling noble lies than unsettling facts: “Some truths may not be worth knowing. Our society, our polity, our elites, according to Herrnstein and Murray, live with an untruth. I ask myself whether this untruth is not better for American society than the truth.”7 This truth, we are told, is that “smarter people get more and properly deserve more” and though there is nothing in this view that might offend a free-market or meritocratic liberal, it does not fit together with the current liberal emphasis on social engineering.
This recommendation of teaching through concealment that turns up in the New Republic’s defense of liberalism comes from a desperate inherited situation. Liberalism is increasingly adrift. Having gone over to social planning earlier in the century, it had to jettison its nineteenth-century heritage in return for humanitarian and “scientific” goals. Liberalism now survives as a series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and it maintains its power by pointing its finger accusingly at antiliberals. The depiction of sinister enemies has enabled liberals to hold on to those who may be wavering in their faith. In the Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), for example, Princeton political theorist Stephen Holmes goes after a string of “antiliberal thinkers” on the left as well as on the right who have been communitarian critics of liberal individualism. All of them, from Joseph de Maistre to Christopher Lasch, from Catholic counterrevolutionaries to socialists formerly on the New Left, are thought to resemble “fascist philosophers whose rhetoric is often indistinguishable from their own.”8 Holmes does respond thoughtfully to some of the accusations raised against the Enlightenment by nineteenth-century conservatives, and he is especially effective in pointing to the real absence of individual autonomy that John Locke and the French philosophes criticized.
What he fails to prove is that the same liberal tradition has been around for centuries. He ignores the changing character of liberal doctrine when he scolds Christopher Lasch for having antiliberal reservations about fair housing laws and for preferring ethnic enclaves to racial integration. Holmes considers those positions as being at odds with the “liberal universalism” that he traces back to his liberal heroes. But contrary to what he suggests, many past liberals, starting with David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, were not racial egalitarians. It is also hard to find examples of pre-twentieth-century liberals who worried more about racial integration than about property rights. In the History of European Liberalism (1927), Guido Ruggiero, a self-described Italian liberal, shows the persistent regard of his numerous subjects for private property and constitutional liberty; yet none seemed driven by any concern to integrate social and ethnic groups residentially or educationally.9 In a glaringly anachronistic spirit, Holmes takes Locke’s maxim “No man in civil society can be exempted from the laws of it” to mean what Locke never intended. This statement is made to reflect a “liberal universalism” that goes from teaching that “each citizen must play by rules that apply equally to all” to a variety of modern democratic practices, from state-subsidized universal education to universal suffrage.10 What is never made clear is how the “disallowance of self-exemption for citizens from the law,” which Locke did stress, mandates those measures Holmes would like to enforce. The term “universal,” for Holmes, takes on an aura. It is not merely coextensive with authorized citizens but made to envelope humanity in general.
Locke himself was explicit about why civil society was created and repeats the same rationale several times in The Second Treatise of Government. In chapter 9 he asserts, after what is taken to be a sufficient demonstration of his argument, that “the greatest and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into a commonwealth and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.” The commonwealth, we then learn in chapter 11, need not be “a democracy or any form of government but any independent community,” providing, as Locke states repeatedly in chapter 11, it manages to protect property.11 In Holmes’s improved version of Locke, “the enjoyment of property in peace and safety” takes a backseat to twentieth-century democratic rights, all of which are inferred from Locke’s alleged attachment to liberal universalism. Holmes goes as far as attributing to Locke the thoroughly modern view that everyone in a country should have the right to vote, regardless of race, gender, or religious persuasion.12 Such a position was not the one that Locke had in mind when he argued for the equality of legal obligations for all citizens. He was making this judgment about a particular and quite limited group, those who were recognized as citizens by the community in which they resided. His judgment did not apply to those who were not recognized citizens, even though in the state of nature all people were presumed to claim the same rights to life, liberty, and property.13
Contemporary liberals, such as Holmes, who undertake the task of devising a usable liberal heritage from John Locke on, have their work cut out for them. Often they begin by imagining that their position has a venerable pedigree, but as they look around for its presence in other times and places, they are drawn into a search that is eventually abandoned. Without an authentic and cohesive heritage, these liberals turn to a contrived one that, we are told, is the real essence of liberalism. We are bidden to focus our attention on this essence or spirit to make sense of an otherwise disjointed patrimony. This essence, we are told, is ample enough to embrace a varied company, from English Old Whigs and French aristocratic opponents of monarchical absolutism to the American civil rights movement and feminist spokeswomen. In one particularly frenzied attempt at liberal comprehensiveness, J. Salwyn Schapiro, in his anthology Liberalism: Its Meaning and History (1958), compiles, in defense of his own liberal faith, excerpts from Socrates, Erasmus, Peter Abelard, the German nationalist historian Heinrich Treitschke, Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and labor union advocate Louis Brandeis. All of these anthologized figures supposedly share one or more of several defining liberal characteristics, starting with secularism and rationalism.14 Since Treitschke and Voltaire both despised the Catholic Church and since Bismarck and Brandeis both advocated state support for the working class, all of them are made to illustrate Shapiro’s liberal typology. Significantly, free-market liberals are excluded from it, if they had the misfortune of living and working after the rise of the welfare state. In all of this moving about of historical settings, the same persistent concern is evident: All liberalism must be shown to hang together. Otherwise two suspicions may be confirmed: that liberalism lacks a univocal meaning and that it should be replaced by a timelier term of reference.
The need for semantic clarification that this chapter seeks to underline is brought home to me on each successive visit to the Canadian city of Toronto. Public vehicles there exhibit signs with the message “Homophobia is a disease!” The provincial government of Ontario has made it a criminal act to publish statements offensive to racial and ethnic groups, and under the New Democratic Party provincial administration of Premier Bob Rae, which fell in 1995, initiatives were taken to “educate” the public about Canadian multinationalism. Extensive social services operate for which Torontonians and other Canadians pay with almost half their yearly earnings. When asked to characterize their municipal and provincial governments, however, most educated Torontonians of my acquaintance will usually answer “liberal” or “liberal democratic.”
Behind this new multicultural and bureaucratically administered Canadian society stands an older one, which is still evident in Toronto. It is the Canada that points back to an English imperial past. Its heritage is kept alive by parks, monuments, and various landmarks. Examples of Victorian and Edwardian architecture abound in downtown Toronto, and the public celebration of the birthdays of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and other figures out of the Canadian-English past preserves the connection between sight and memory. Some of those for whom Toronto’s streets and landmarks have been named were English statesmen, and most of them, like William Gladstone, Robert Peel, and Henry John Temple Palmerston, were associated with nineteenth-century liberal politics, even if their formal affiliations were Tory. These politicians opposed the sacrifice of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres in British India, the imposition of tariffs on imported grains, and other practices that they believed interfered with personal freedom. But they did not believe in political equality and considered the quest for social equality incompatible with both liberty and the integrity of the family. They were also proudly and resolutely patriotic. They found nothing wrong, as Lord Palmerston bluntly told his people in the mid-nineteenth century, with pursuing English interests abroad.15
The question that keeps returning to me in observing the two Torontos, one ascendant and the other vestigial, is: what connection is there between their political worlds? Both are thought to be, in some sense, “liberal,” but it is hard to discern the common ground between these political worlds. Would Palmerston (1784–1865), for whom the street was named where my late wife grew up and where my children still own property, recognize himself in those self-described liberals living on Toronto’s Palmerston Boulevard? Would he and they share some kind of worldview despite their obvious differences? Palmerston was, after all, a proper Victorian, free-marketeer, and self-consciously English man; while today’s residents of Palmerston Boulevard, from what I can tell, are predominantly multiculturists and socialists, with a sprinkling of Sikh converts. Symbolic of the distance between the old and new liberalisms is the massive stone gateway at the entrance to the boulevard, dating from the 1890s, and the center for multicultural education that lies a stone’s throw away. Both betoken liberal eras: one from the middle of the last century and the other designating our own time, one associated with imperial England and a Victorian society and the other with a managed and multicultural democracy.
The problem with locating a single liberal tradition in any case did not start the day before yesterday. In America the semantic waters already ran muddy during the interwar years. This can be gathered from looking at those interwar socialists and social democrats who claimed for themselves a liberal pedigree. These efforts at appropriation succeeded, thanks to an obliging professoriate and eventually sympathetic press, but they also called into question whether liberalism forms an “unbroken tradition.” There were good reasons that social democrats in the twenties and thirties elected to call themselves “liberal.” Some wished to hide the radical nature of their reformist agenda, and most were looking for a self-description that linked them to the American past. Contrary to Louis Hartz’s claim, liberalism is not “America’s only political tradition,” but it is a strong one nonetheless. And it has seemed more congenial to most Americans than socialism. While American workers, noted the German sociologist Werner Sombart ninety years ago, hoped for better material conditions, they also rejected socialist ideology as a European import. This undoubtedly dawned on American social democrats trying to package their programs for their own countrymen. The Socialist Party, they perceived, attracted only a fringe vote outside of a few municipalities, but the “liberal tradition,” at least in its Jeffersonian sense, was something most Americans viewed positively.
The appropriation of the term “liberal,” however, did not go uncontested. In Austria the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises complained in his major work, Die Gemeinwirtschaft (1932): “No one has understood liberalism less than those who have claimed in recent decades to be liberals. They have imagined themselves fighting the ‘excrescences’ of capitalism; and they have thereby taken over the characteristic asocial thinking of the socialists. A social order has no ‘excrescences’ that can be merely excised. If a phenomenon develops necessarily out of the effects of a social system based on private control of the means of production, no ethical nor aesthetic whim should condemn it. The speculation that goes on in economic development cannot be damned in its capitalist form because the moral judge has no understanding of its function.” Moreover, according to Mises, it makes no sense to condemn capitalism as inferior to socialism as a moral ideal, while praising it as better in practice: “One could with the same justification assert that a perpetual motion machine as a theoretical construct is better than a machine built by the laws of mechanics, even if the first cannot be made to work.”16
Mises’s utilitarian objection to socialism was related to his moral unhappiness about the passing of an age of relative freedom. As he had already observed in 1927: “The world today knows nothing more about liberalism. Outside of England the designation ‘liberalism’ is utterly despised; in England there are indeed ‘liberals,’ but most of them are such only in name and really moderate socialists.”17 In the same year, 1927, Guido Ruggiero, after chronicling the turns of European liberalism since the French Revolution, asked with unmistakable dread: “Is the [liberal] state now in decay? It certainly appears to have been exhausted by the gigantic efforts that have been required of it, one following another without interruption. Socialism and nationalism, illiberally employing the liberty bestowed on them, first tried to undermine it from within and to create an autocratic and dictatorial anti-state.”18
Ruggiero and Mises were both writing against the background of liberalism’s accommodation with rowdy bedfellows: nationalist movements in the nineteenth century, and socialism and the welfare state in the twentieth. Both believed these accommodations had added to the burden of defending a separation between the private and public spheres; each thought that the assault on property rights and the adoption of social policies threatened both freedom and proper political authority. Ruggiero ascribed this problem to the “democratization of liberalism,” which he traced to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873).19 It was Mill who first undertook a synthesis of one particular freedom, expressive liberty, with a plan for extensive income redistribution. It was Mill, Ruggiero also noted, who brought to England the technocratic schemes of the father of French sociology, Auguste Comte (1798–1857). In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill advocated the creation of a house of lords composed of scientifically educated administrators. By this bow to scientific planners, he hoped to moderate the power of a democratically elected parliamentary lower house.
In 1944 a longtime admirer of Mill but critic of Comte, Friedrich Hayek, published a resonant broadside against welfare state liberalism, The Road to Serfdom, later serialized in Reader’s Digest. Hayek depicted the journey toward a socialized economy as leading toward servitude. He made clear that he himself was decrying social democracy not as a European conservative but as an exponent of individual freedom and rational thinking. What the Nazis and Communists had done in one fell swoop, making everyone serve arbitrary power, Hayek maintained, Anglo-American “reformers” were doing by stages. And they carried out this work relentlessly, while misrepresenting themselves as “liberals.”20
Hayek scorned the argument that democratic procedures would suffice to protect the citizens of a social democratic regime against the loss of freedom: “We have no interest in making a fetish of democracy. Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. Democratic control may prevent power from becoming arbitrary but it does not do so by its mere existence.”21 Far more than his fellow exile from the Nazis, Ludwig von Mises, Hayek questioned the strength of democratic restraints in the face of socialism. He also thought less harshly than Mises about the reactionary opponents of liberalism. Unlike Mises, he did not devote his energies to attacks on the Prussian “state socialism” of the nineteenth century or the social policy of Bismarck as a spawning ground for modern collectivism.22 For Hayek, the enemies of liberalism who seemed most likely to take power, after Hitler, were on the left, and they wore social democratic colors.
A social democratic liberal who responded angrily to Hayek was Herman Finer in The Road to Reaction (1945). Finer appeals to an evolving liberalism that he accuses Hayek of ignoring. According to Finer, Hayek does not take the democratic aspect of liberal democracy seriously enough: he favors democratic elections in order to avoid unrest but does not want the majority to have its way. He also assumes “that the mass of the people are more likely to be swayed by the demagogue who intends to be a dictator, while the people of higher education and intelligence will not.” Hayek keeps coming back to the dubious point “that mere argument can sway people in the direction of a policy they do not like, whereas it is well known that people are swayed by their interests in large measure.”23 Because Hayek seeks to curb the majority, Finer explains, he talks about federations in which sovereignty is divided. But Finer suggests that this too is a futile attempt to deny the people the social justice which they seek: “In our time the only form of government which will give Hayek what he wants—namely the protection of economic individualism in the extreme form that he wants it—is dictatorship, which coerces whole peoples, and sneers at rule by persuasion.”24 Thus Hayek extols the idea of democracy but has no stomach for what the people really want, and he attributes “more rationality and honor to millions struggling with each other economically than to millions democratically composing their own laws and controlling their responsible administrations.”25 Finer may have exaggerated the accountability of public administrators, but he is right to notice the squeamishness among free-market liberals in speaking about the democratic will.
Finer then goes on to point out that he himself has liberal as well as social democratic credentials. He affirms his belief in constitutional procedures as a precondition for social reforms and presents socialism as an attempt to overcome “the failures of private enterprise.” Finer also points back to John Stuart Mill as a precursor for his own liberalism: unlike Hayek, Mill “did observe and finally concluded that the good of England required socialism.”26 Finer’s appeal to Mill is not without precedent among social democratic liberals of his generation. Like J. Salwyn Shapiro and English Labourites, Finer cites Mill as representing a natural progression from the old liberalism to the new, a progression that went back to the mid-nineteenth century. Though John Stuart’s father, James Mill, had believed in a market economy, the son had moved gradually toward a new kind of liberalism. It was one combining concern about the status of women and the free exchange of ideas with the acceptance of a democratic welfare state. These stands were supposedly of a piece, including Mill’s examination of the “social question.” A defender of individual autonomy, Mill had come to recognize what “reactionary” liberals still denied, namely, the need to separate the questions of production and distribution. By the late 1840s he had proposed that redistributionist measures be enacted for the sake of English workers (later social democrats praised Mill for treating property as a function of social evolution). While he understood that legally fixed property claims were necessary for peace in primitive societies, he nonetheless questioned the value of such arrangements in his own day. In the industrial age, Mill explained, property, by remaining an unequally distributed good, led to civil strife and not to general tranquility.
Mill’s journey toward social democracy is chronicled in his autobiography, a work long mined for comments on the kind of reconstruction of liberalism favored by American reformers. But there were other English precedents for what later social planners would advocate. The English Liberal Party had begun to embrace the welfare state between 1910 and the First World War, abandoning free trade, introducing social welfare measures, and stripping the House of Lords, with the King’s connivance, of any effective veto power. In The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910–1914, George Dangerfield bade a not entirely affectionate farewell to “the true prewar [English] Liberalism supported, as it still was in 1910, by free trade, a majority in Parliament, the ten commandments, and the illusion of Progress.”27
The changing views on socioeconomic questions among English Liberal politicians reflected their understandable desire to gain working-class votes. This trend also underscored, however, the effect of certain social philosophers of the late-nineteenth century, who struggled to reconcile liberal individualism with communal responsibility. Such thinkers as Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1912) and T. H. Green (1836–1882) distilled for the English public the works of continental philosophers, particularly Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in making a case for an ethically engaged state. In books and in lectures these authors took to task the “Manchesterian liberalism” of the mid-nineteenth century, which they equated with commercial values and a night-watchman state. English liberal critics of liberalism insisted that the individual’s liberation from coercive and status-bound relations would not bring social improvement, unless it also led to a renewed corporate identity. Thus they demanded that the growing disjunction of the modern age between the individual and established authority must be overcome by the creation of a new synthesis between liberty and order. In Liberalism (1911), L. T. Hobhouse, editorialist for the Manchester Guardian and admiring critic of Green and the English Hegelians, went one step further than most other Liberal Party members of his time. He called for a revamping of the British economy on the basis of shared power with trade unions. Only in this manner, Hobhouse maintained, could workers become fully integrated into the English nation.28
Such Hegelian and organicist concepts were floating in the United States as well and in the late nineteenth century made a powerful impression on the young John Dewey (1859–1952). Dewey picked up these concepts from his professor and later colleague at the University of Michigan George Sylvester Morris (1840–1889). Much of Morris’s short life was devoted to lecturing on Hegel’s social philosophy and to his magnum opus, Hegel’s Philosophy of the State and History: An Exposition. Morris also helped Dewey to establish close ties to the philosophy faculty at Johns Hopkins University, where Hegel and T. H. Green were both in favor. But such weighty philosophical speculation did not lead into social planning on this side of the Atlantic. Rather, it provided the window dressing for the new liberalism being formulated in the United States during the interwar years.29 Arthur A. Ekirch documents the attempts at labeling the “public philosophy” that were implicit in American centralized planning.30 When Dewey decided to characterize his proposed social reforms as “liberal,” he had already tried out “progressive,” “corporate,” and “organic.” The rise of fascism may have rendered rhetorically problematic the last two alternatives to “liberal.” And since there were competitors for “progressive” associated with the reform wings of the two major national parties, Dewey and his confreres may have become “liberals” faute de mieux. In any case the social planners grouped around the New Republic, Common Sense, and the Nation chose “liberal” to describe themselves and their projects. What they wanted, explained Alfred Bingham, a social democratic activist and nephew of the conservative Connecticut senator Hiram Bingham, was a “New Society based on planning.”31
In “The Future of Liberalism,” written for the Journal of Philosophy in 1935, Dewey defined the new liberal creed as “commitment to the experimental method and a continuous reconstruction of the ideas of individuality and liberty in intimate connection with changes in social reforms.” Contrary to what he thought was the view of classical liberals, Dewey mocked “the monstrosity of the doctrine that assumes that under all conditions governmental actions and individual liberty are found in separate and independent spheres.” Yes, nineteenth-century liberals were innovative in their own time, but their descendants seemed to Dewey either economic imperialists or the captives of a frozen past. He called attention to their lack of an historical sense, a failing that results in “absolutism, this ignoring and denial of temporal relativity.”32
Almost all the appeals to the new liberalism in interwar America invoked Progress, a concept which had also resonated in the older liberal tradition. In John Dewey’s A Common Faith (1934), this meliorism draws upon Auguste Comte’s scheme of human development, which had originated one hundred years earlier. Comte had sketched a course of human improvement extending from a primitive religious through a metaphysical to a social scientific, or positivist, consciousness. Dewey took this Comtean scheme and recast it, having it culminate in “the intense realization and values that inhere in actual connections of human beings with one another.” Those who pursue experimental methods and take an active part in social affairs he placed at the point of a fully evolved human consciousness. Dewey’s process of movement goes from an oppressive sense of the supernatural through a reflective theological period and onward to the “values of natural human intercourse and mutual dependence.”33 In Lewis Mumford’s graphically presented end point, we encounter human consciousness bringing about the global transmission of a distinctively American model of living: “The United States, with its Federal system of government and its strongly centralized executive, is an image of the greater world we must help create for all men.”34 In the face of “fascist barbarism,” it seemed necessary to Mumford to move quickly into the inevitable future. The United States, he insisted in 1940, should open its borders to all who wished to come in and then take steps to ensure a “worldwide authority for the allocation and distribution of power and raw materials.”35 In a less generous mood, Charles and Mary Beard linked the course of American Progress to economic growth and technology in The Rise of American Civilization (1930). Though the Beards accepted most of the new liberal premises, including the need for social planning, they remained explicitly nationalist in their thinking.36 This economic nationalism made them increasingly skeptical of the liberal idealism among interventionists before and during the two World Wars. And it may account for the Beards’s break with mainstream liberals by the early forties and for their recent popularity among the American Old Right.37
The linkage between Progress and social planning allowed interwar liberals to assign changing contents and applications to what they presented as a unified liberal heritage. And once “progressive” liberalism caught on rhetorically and conceptually, this development helped to make liberalism synonymous with both a politically controlled economy and material redistribution. In 1949 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. located American liberalism within the “vital center,” between anti-New Deal Republicanism and out-and–out socialism, and few in the United States rose to protest.38 Though there were liberal parties on the European continent that still treated economic freedom and property rights as sacred principles, in both England and North America that fight was winding down by the late forties. When the avowed social democrat John Kenneth Galbraith celebrated “the liberal hour” in a book by that title in 1960, no one of significance complained that social planning by public administrators went against the real liberal tradition.39 By then “liberal” had come to mean “progressive,” and “progressive” meant being in sync with an evolving and bureaucratically administered society.
Liberalism also changed over time to incorporate two other features, both related to its association with social planning. Both were also implicit in the view of progress as something that affects human consciousness as well as material circumstances. As in other ways, Mill was paradigmatic here. Like other English progressives, including John Bright, Richard Cobden, and James Mill, John Stuart Mill had supported what became the British policy of international free trade. Like his father he believed this policy would benefit English workers while promoting goodwill among peoples. But Mill was also a militant interventionist who believed in the need to propagate what he took to be universal progress. He grew indignant in 1862 when the British government of Lord Palmerston failed to side actively with the American Union. The struggle against slavery became a consuming passion of his throughout the American Civil War. Moreover, like his father, who had written the History of British India, Mill went to work for the East India Company and hoped to reform the gender and other social relations which existed among India’s inhabitants. In Parliament between 1865 and 1867, Mill returned to the question of “female bondage,” calling for the political equality of women and demanding an end to the legal disabilities against them. He also backed what became the Reform Act of 1867, extending the franchise to all English men, and he expressed the wish that the vote be given to women as well.40
A frequently heard adage is that history tells less about what really happened than what each generation imagines about the past.41 This certainly applies to contemporary conceptions of liberalism, in which free trade, political internationalism, and the welfare state are all seen as parts of a composite whole. But these associations have been neither natural nor inevitable. In the nineteenth century most continental liberals were also nationalists and only opportunistically free traders. In England free trade ideas arose mostly among democrats, not mainstream liberals, and among the Philosophical Radicals to whom the French historian Elie Halévy devoted a famous monograph in the 1920s.42 In twentieth-century America free traders have included both nationalists-isola-tionalists and vigorous internationalists. In 1940 opponents of American intervention in the Second World War, led by William Borah and Hamilton Fish, thought that the removal of tariff barriers would bring peoples together without military force. Those on the other side of the intervention issue, such as Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson, called for American action against imperial Japan to create an international order favorable to free trade.43 In recent debates over the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the same difficulty arose about determining the true representatives of the liberal tradition. Those who invoked free trade were mostly very qualified supporters of a market economy, while much of the opposition on the “Old Right” came from free market critics of the welfare state. In the case of presidential hopeful Patrick Buchanan, opposition to unprotected industries went together with attacks on the welfare state, except when it was protecting American jobs.44
The impetus toward liberal internationalism may be determined less by an economic outlook than by a commitment to a particular vision. Once liberalism came to signify the march of Progress and the advance of social policy, it could also be made to mandate a civilizing mission. That explicitly progressive mission explains why European imperialism attracted many on the left, including Karl Marx, the militantly secularist French Radicals of the 1880s, and English Fabian socialists twenty years later. Western imperialists were seen to be the midwives of modernity, who would bring the non-Western world into the new age of science, materialism, and equal rights.45
The history of twentieth-century liberalism in any case refutes a critical judgment first put forth by the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt in the 1920s. According to Schmitt, liberals have no real sense of political life or of the intensity of political struggles. They dream instead of “depoliticized” world markets based on economic exchange and legal norms. Liberals view all rights as universal or universally extendable, because they ignore cultural and national differences—or hope they will go away. The same Schmittian refrain has come from the Left, in Theodore Lowi’s The End of Liberalism (1969). According to Lowi, a distinguished academician who favors well-coordinated social policy, “Liberal government cannot plan. Planning requires the authoritative use of authority,” but liberals, who apply “pluralist principles,” cannot “overcome the separatist tendencies and self-defeating proclivities of independent functions in government. In short, they are economic negotiators instead of political leaders.”46 In the twentieth century this view of liberalism as “the opposite of the political” has become less and less true. By now successive crusades have taken place, from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson on, to make the world safe for liberalism and democracy. Liberal democracy has become an “armed doctrine” (to use the colorful phrase of Edmund Burke) as well as a human right, and both sides of the American party spectrum have called for the use of force and public money to bring its blessing to other peoples. As Laurence Whitehead explains with regard to this ideological imperative: “One feature distinguishing the United States from all previously dominant or hegemonic powers is a persistent and self-proclaimed commitment to the promotion of democracy as an integral element of its foreign policy and its long-standing confidence that all ‘good things,’ U.S. influence and security, economic freedom, political liberty, and representative government, go together.”47
Equally significant, American liberals have insisted at least since the thirties that social and moral improvement requires educational efforts at home and abroad. Letting people go their own way will not suffice to make them open-minded or civic-spirited. The foundations for a planned society go back in Europe to the eighteenth century, and the idea of managed progress provided inspiration for Comte and other social scientists in the mid-nineteenth century. In the United States, Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913), a father of academic sociology and a devotee of Comte, advocated the creation of a “telic and dynamic society” that would pursue rational collective ends. Sociological reformers hoped to implant these ends in all citizens.48 Ward’s concept of “realistic education” influenced heavily Thorstein Veblen, Dewey, and other early-twentieth-century American reformers. Such figures found in public education a training ground for an enlightened democratic citizenry—one that might be cleansed of unseemly religious beliefs, among other flaws. That the projects devised by European social scientists reached America was not surprising, given the cultural ties between the two continents. More interesting was the fact that these lucubrations should come to be seen as liberal. For Hayek, who wrote a diatribe entitled The Counter Revolution of Science (1955), this self-description of sociological reformers as “liberals” was patently false. “Totalitarians” such as Comte and his disciples, he said, pretended to believe in freedom and scientific method while respecting neither.49
But Mill, whom Hayek did admire for his utilitarian thinking, praised Comte and tried to apply the latter’s sociology in the 1840s. A hundred years later it would be widely believed that liberal societies could only survive if they intensively trained their young in liberal values. More accurately put, American social reformers presented a view, which came to prevail, that public officials should preach “liberal democracy.” In the mid-thirties Dewey hoped that churches could be encouraged to do the same. To build a new society based on experimental method and communal values, it was not enough to depend on public educators. Dewey hoped to enlist religious leaders in winning acceptance for “human values that are prized and need to be cherished, values that are satisfied and rectified by all human concerns and arrangements.” Churches could do this by supplementing the work of public servants. They could “show a more active interest in social affairs, take a definite stand upon social questions as war, economic injustice, political corruption,” and, above all, “stimulate action for a divine kingdom on earth.”50
Other liberals of the period emphasized the fascist threat in making a case for democratic values. The most instructive case in point was Karl Loewenstein in his earnest essay of 1937, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights.” Though Loewenstein stops short of proposing national indoctrination in his preferred political values, he ends his warnings about the fascist danger to democracies with these pregnant observations: “In order to overcome the danger of Europe’s going fascist, it would be necessary to remove the causes, that is, to change the mental state of this age of the masses and of rationalized emotion. New ‘psycho-technical methods’ must be found to ‘regularize’ the fluctuations between rationalism and mysticism.”51
Loewenstein’s hope that therapeutic methods could be devised to make liberal democracy fascism-resistant would become apparent among postwar militant democrats. In this respect the authors and disseminators of The Authoritarian Personality and more recent advocates of sensitivity education have not initiated anything that was not already dormant in interwar liberalism. Nor do the recent fears expressed by liberals in regard to the populist masses represent a departure from the interwar liberal devotion to the people. Finer’s attempt to appear more democratic than Hayek was simply a ploy. His defense of the people was made in the course of praising their acceptance of public administration and social planning. It is hard to imagine that he would praise their wisdom if they rejected what he calls, euphemistically, “guidance.” Loewenstein is entirely candid on this point. “Democracy,” he insists, “has to be refined. It should be—at least for the transitional stage until a better social adjustment to the conditions of the technological age has been accomplished—the application of disciplined authority by liberal-minded men, for the ultimate end of liberal government: human dignity and freedom.”52
LIBERAL CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES
The developmental picture of liberalism here being offered is not intended to be a rogues’ gallery. Much of the movement from the old liberalism to the steadily newer occurred because of circumstances common to the industrialized West since the nineteenth century. Urbanization, struggles for universalizing the franchise and for broader distribution of material wealth, and the growing identification of popular government with public administration have all contributed to the reconstitution of political identities. Political taxonomies, like parties, have had to change to keep abreast of social and institutional developments. Less obvious but equally significant, however, has been the shaping of political discourse, a process that has influenced structural changes in the way it has presented and prescribed them. For example, it is not irrelevant to the pace or even the nature of major political changes in the United States that social reforms have been presented as liberal, thereby bestowing upon them the appearance of continuing something hallowed over time. In Liberalism and its Challenges, Truman biographer Alonzo L. Hamby equates liberalism with all social welfare programs introduced by the federal government since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Though Hamby dissents from post-sixties liberal ventures into affirmative action and minority set-asides, he treats all governmental social planning since the teens as liberal manifestations.53 What he leaves unexplained is how this accumulation of social programs, all bearing the same label, is related to what used to pass for liberalism in the nineteenth century.
Those who have undertaken to address this question have typically cobbled together presentations of an unchanging and temporally unbounded liberal essence. Though there are multiple variations on this theme, at least three have recurred with some regularity. One is the ascription to Americans of an invariable liberal identity that inevitably permeates all of their political and other activities. Viewed as embodiments of something resembling the Calvinist notion of irresistible grace, Americans are seen to have a liberal status no matter what they do. The political philosopher Leo Strauss and his numerous epigones insist that America was founded as a Lockean nation; thereafter it has stood unchangingly for individual rights to life and property. Strauss’s student Thomas Pangle further maintains that the American character was permanently shaped by the country’s founding ideas, which were materialistic, utilitarian, and individualistic.54 The European Catholic traditionalist and exuberant critic of American life Thomas Molnar also speaks of an immutable American character. Molnar argues that the United States was founded as a Protestant commercial republic, and all of its subsequent political and moral problems are traceable to that circumstance.55 In a kinder spirit Louis Hartz and Lionel Trilling have written on America’s permanent liberal culture as reflected in arts and letters.56 Trilling went so far as to locate the evidence of that culture within a particular imagination and within a temperament that he claimed to find in the national literature.
A second attempt to find liberal continuity is to equate it with characteristically modern assumptions about society and the nature of reality. These assumptions are thought to be particularly persuasive in our time, as alternative ones have lost their hold on the popular imagination. The liberal worldview is alleged to be contractual, individualistic, and secularist. It was supposedly implicit in the attitudes of an earlier age. It found expression among eighteenth-century rationalists, but its full unfolding is taking place only now. A German intellectual historian, Hans Blumenberg, pushes the unfolding liberal heritage even further back in time. In Die Legitimita¨t der Neuzeit and in numerous essays, Blumenberg has looked for an operative secular humanist outlook from the age of Copernicus onward.57 The search for a scientific view of causation during the Renaissance, he explains, reflects attitudes about knowledge and its uses which were typical of rationalist modernity. The detachment of this modernity from older authorities, Blumenberg maintains, began earlier than is often imagined. Looking at the the American side of this modernity, political theorist William Galston makes the point that “liberalism contains within itself the resources it seeks to declare and defend a conception of the good and virtuous life that is in no way truncated.”58 Galston does not deny that liberals may draw some conceptual support from both classical and religious authors, but he is also adamant that liberals do not require these sources for the “content and depth” of their beliefs. He attributes to the spread of liberal openness and rationality a number of characteristics that he believes are embodied in contemporary America: social peace, the rule of law, receptiveness to diversity, a tendency toward inclusiveness, minimum decency, affluence, scope for development, and approximate justice (without achieving full distributive justice), openness to truth, and regard for privacy. According to Galston, we have become the showcase for all these desirable things, and to the extent that they exist, they prove the power of our liberal beliefs, which are not “neutral” but supportive of liberal institutions.59
A third approach to presenting a consistent and vital liberal tradition is through reenactment. At the popular level this involves periodic celebrations of past liberal achievements. In the last twenty years Americans have experienced many such rites, from commemorating the Declaration of Independence to expressing gratitude for “two hundred years of a living Bill of Rights” (as a billboard that I passed daily on the way to work used to read). Reenactment also takes a second, more reflective form: engaging in a liberal founding act to justify the transformation of liberalism into social planning. The appeal to a continuous, cognitive refounding of civil society in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) illustrates this kind of reenactment. Rawls, who is both a socialist and a Lockean, provides a contractual theory of society in which property rights are subordinated to “fairness.” Rawls tries to conceptualize a society that would be acceptable to all on the basis of justice. Justice, he tells us, is reducible to two principles, to which all of us would give our assent if placed in an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance.” Rawls notes that “the idea of an original position is to set up a fair procedure so that only principles agreed to will be just.” None of us in this state would be allowed to have a concrete identity: “If a knowledge of particulars is allowed then the outcome is biased by arbitrary contingencies.” This “notion of the original position” would force the participants to “choose principles the consequences of which they are prepared to live with whatever generation they turn out to belong to.”60 In a situation in which all are forced to draw their fortunes from the same bag, we would likely arrive, according to Rawls, at the same two principles of justice: “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others,” and “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and b) attached to positions and offices open to all.”61
Despite Rawls’s insistence that his own priorities do not violate the first principle of justice, his concern for the second principle, that is, for the “distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organization that makes use of differences in authority and responsibility,” overshadows his discussion of justice. He sets down conditions intended to shape its application: Inequalities are permissible only if everyone’s position is improved. Moreover, “Unless there is a distribution that makes both persons better off, an equal distribution is to be preferred.” Finally, “Inequality is permissible only if by lowering it we make the working class even worse off.”62 Presumably those who think about justice without the burden of particular identities would create and apply such maxims. Behind the veil of ignorance they would be forced to imagine themselves as have-nots and would therefore demand a socialist public policy.
Though various approaches to demonstrating liberal continuity have been undertaken, none is believable in the end. For none tells us much about the political life it sets out to describe. All of them lack the “temporal relativity” or historicity that Dewey thought that classical liberals left out of their social views. It is hard to imagine that the present American managerial state is the instantiation of a liberal character descended from the country’s founders. Other cultural circumstances must be taken into account to explain our political development. It is equally questionable whether some “disposition” discernible among learned mid-nineteenth-century New Englanders provides the key to understanding our political life in the 1990s. By now America’s inhabitants have changed in so many ways that Victorians would have trouble recognizing in them their own successors. Authorial journeys into the past may be instructive, but their value is limited. They do not reveal secrets about today’s far more heterogeneous—that is, less traditionally Protestant and less classically liberal—American society. Invocations of an immutable American liberal identity deny what centuries of change have wrought.
It is, furthermore, hard to grasp the value of enumerating the putative achievements of particular societies as proof of their liberal “resources.” First, one may question whether these achievements are being accurately described—that is, whether there is social peace and not urban violence and racial hate in the United States, or whether inclusiveness is not really an attempt by public administrators to force groups together, often against their will and in violation of older liberal principles. But, even more to the point, it is not altogether clear what Galston means by liberalism. In the early chapters of his book he associates it with Lockean and classical liberal thinking, but by the end of the same work he is talking about “judicial liberals” and the “liberal” opponents of moral traditionalists.63 Do all those “liberals” belong to an unbroken chain? That may be the case, but Galston does not provide the evidence to prove it. He also never shows us that today’s liberals are truer heirs of Locke, Hume, Kant, or Montesquieu than their pro–free market, “morally traditionalist” opponents. Even less useful is the claim that “autonomous” liberal resources and arguments have changed society. In what way, might we ask, is this true? Does Galston believe that those who have produced desired change over the course of centuries are simply personifications of his own values? In any case he never demonstrates that one can find liberal principles that are entirely unrelated to older sources. As socially and culturally situated beings, most of us do not act exclusively on the basis of any one set of principles. Even in Galston’s case, no consistent set emerges from his demonstration.
In Rawls’s speculative exercise it is equally doubtful that we are dealing with actual people. It is one thing to devise a “concept of a veil of ignorance” or a “notion of the original position,” but quite another to describe what culturally situated groups are likely to think and do. In a review of Rawls’s latest book, John Gray offers an appraisal that might apply equally well to A Theory of Justice: “The upshot of his theorizing is not a political conception of general human interest but an apology for American institutions as they are perceived from the politically marginal standpoint of American academic liberalism.”64 To justify redistributionist social policy as an extension of liberal principles, Rawls must provide an imaginary founding of society taking place on his own moral terms. This exercise can work only in the absence of “arbitrary contingencies.” Otherwise we might have to deal with particular societies that contradict Rawls’s premises.
The veil of ignorance not only saves us from noticing distinctive cultural attitudes about economic risk and the welfare state but also permits Rawls to rework an economic theory without telling us. Rawls seizes upon the optimality principle, developed by Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto in the late-nineteenth century and then restated by Mises, and gives it a socialist twist. Rawls assumes that a redistribution of goods and honors must follow if we accept the principle that inequalities must benefit all. But here he wants to rework, without calling by name, the theory of optimality by which classical liberal economists reached conclusions totally different from his, namely, that those who are least advantaged fare best under a market economy.65 Rawls is free to express other conclusions, but he should provide empirical or mathematical evidence for them.
Like other contemporary social democrats who call themselves liberal, Rawls fails to discuss power. The reasons are not the ones Lowi gives, that liberals, being hopeless pluralists, are looking for bargains to be struck by competing economic interests. The real reason, I would argue, is that liberals do not want to be seen as imposing their will upon others. They are philosophically and temperamentally uncomfortable with the power they both exercise and expand. Thus when Rawls approaches the delicate questions of whose advantages the state should take away and in favor of whom, his language becomes suddenly evasive: “In the matter of fair equality of opportunity, I shall not attempt to measure, in any exact way, the degree of justice.”66 But who will make this desired measurement? Obviously public administrators who will be empowered to carry out redistributionist directives bearing on jobs, income, and educational opportunities.
In Finer’s polemic against Hayek the denial of the staggering powers being used in the postwar period by English socialists, who were nationalizing key industries and massively redistributing income, amounts to mere hypocrisy. According to Finer, England’s march toward socialism was a happy consequence of democracy, “the product of at least three hundred years of severe mental labor, careful reflection, and piece by piece development.” Postwar social and economic reconstruction took place on the basis of “party programs … thoroughly elaborated in the greatest detail by intra-party discussion and amendment and reconciliation among the many interests that are domesticated in each political party, before they are put forward to the electorate in considerable particularity.”67 Hayek might have responded to this particular civics lesson by pointing out that such intra-party discussion preceding general elections would provide little comfort to those who were being expropriated. One might also recall the pungent observation by the Italian jurist Gian-franco Miglio that “governing takes place not by everyone compromising but by one will yielding to another.” In this case it was the opponents of socialism who had to yield to a slightly larger electorate, in allowing costly and irreversible changes to be enacted against them. These changes did not stop with economic redistribution and the nationalization of industries. They eventually led to the resocialization of the British population as administrators reconstructed public education in the postwar years.
Such social planning may be good or bad, depending on one’s judgment, but those liberals who devise and carry it out are not innocent souls. They are not the heirs to those legalistic Germans of the 1930s who allowed Hitler to seize power because his party had obtained a parliamentary plurality. They reinterpret constitutions to suit their ends. Nor are they Lowi’s tolerant pluralists waiting for cultural and economic interests to flow together under recognized legal norms. Even less do they struggle to uphold academic freedom and the right of (non-minority) groups to private association. Many of the liberals to whom Galston refers have been eager to impose speech codes on educational institutions. They have forced clubs and organizations to open themselves to designated minorities and have introduced laws in Canada, England, and France against ethnically insensitive publications. All of these “defensive” acts have involved the extension of governmental power that liberals fought to expand in the past, particularly in the United States, by increasing the reach of public administration and judges.68 Such actions are always presented as “defensive,” as when agents of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission sue business people for not hiring arbitrarily set minority quotas or move against banks that have not made enough loans to high-risk members of the underclass. Dealing with the effects of inequality has become a euphemism for current liberalism’s assault on what the old liberals called civil society. And the public acceptance of these assaults confirms the old liberal platitude, repeated by Hayek, that all freedoms are inextricably bound together.
Yet it is also clear that the response of free-market and constitutional liberals to democratic changes has not been entirely aboveboard. Finer is right to notice that Hayek accepts democracy only if he can “restrict its meaning arbitrarily,” make it subject to “rules which it could not amend.” Thus Hayek undertakes in The Road to Serfdom to control “the fashionable concentration on democracy,” lest it come to undermine liberty. Having created his own legalistic conception of a democracy that stays in its place, in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) Hayek confidently identifies all good government with “liberal democracy.”69 In this he follows another liberal, Ludwig von Mises, who in Liberalism maintains that democracy, with his meaning always understood, is the best of regimes. But it must be his definition that is operative; otherwise there cannot be true democracy, that is, one in which general elections are used to legitimate the application of liberal legal norms. Neither Mises nor Hayek accepts what another classical liberal, Gottfried Dietze, designates as “democracy proper,” as opposed to “proper democracy.” Neither wishes to live under twentieth-century democracy as it is practiced, as opposed to how it might operate under the guidance of free-market liberals. Mises assures us that “political democracy and economic democracy condition one another. A democratic constitution is the political corollary either of a primitive community of owners or of a market economy.”70
These statements by Mises and Hayek about a natural harmony between democracy and a market economy might have been understandable in the 1840s. Then James Mill and John Bright dreamt of a fusion between economic and political principles that were still largely untested. These reformers hoped that an extension of the vote to the lower-middle and working classes would be the first step toward creating an unfettered market economy. Such an extended franchise, they believed, would end both Tory privilege and ecclesiastical paternalism and thereby promote commercial liberty throughout society. The second of these predictions was false, as democratic practice amply demonstrates. Within decades of the time that a universal male franchise was introduced in England, France, Germany, and other industrial nations, voters behaved as some nineteenth-century liberals said they would. They supported socialist parties organized with a democratic franchise and drove older, established parties in the direction of redistributionist policies. In the first decade of the twentieth century Max Weber was already associating democracy with both public administration and the welfare state. Although Mises and Hayek do the same, they also pretend that a welfare economy is extraneous to modern democracy. And they wish to have civil servants, rather than political parties, administer decisions arrived at democratically. By doing this, they believe, one might guard against parties growing too strong and threatening legal norms and property arrangements.71 They ignore a pervasive fact of modern political life: that public administration has affected civil society far more deeply than rule by party patronage. This has come about because of the reputation of civil service as an impartial and scientific tool of governing: whence its rise into the dominant political organization form in modern Western democracies.72
Free-market liberalism continues to provide a critical method for studying socialist economies. The same method demonstrates the rationality of the market in gauging relative human needs through pricing. What free-market liberals cannot do is offer an acceptable alternative to modern democracy as it really operates. The most prominent exponents of that liberalism have therefore embraced it selectively, as evidenced by the example of Margaret Thatcher. After years of preaching the virtues of the free market, Thatcher left the British prime ministership with the English welfare state intact. She could not have done otherwise. In the mid-eighties more than 40 million people (or about two-thirds of the total population) in Great Britain received most of their income or welfare benefits (paid to pensioners and to the unemployed) from the government.73 In a country in which the welfare state is by far the largest employer, Hayek’s political-economic model ceases to be relevant.
In the eighties neoconservative political theorists, led by the theologian Michael Novak, hastened to present their own improved version of classical liberalism. “Democratic capitalism,” subsequently renamed “welfare state capitalism,” was presented as the mature, humanized product of what John Locke, Adam Smith, and other early liberals had in mind for society. Although he has since proved willing to criticize American culture, in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), Novak exalts the United States and Western Europe as embodiments of a happy fusion between democratic politics and capitalist economics.74 Out of this coalescence, Novak says, has come a blessing for the human race, which Americans have tried to share with others. While a limited democratic welfare state, together with market incentives, is the political-economic paradigm being recommended, nonetheless it is sometimes hard to distinguish this blessing from social democracy. Novak not only presents public administration as democratic capitalist, but also insists that “social democracy is an acceptable variant on democratic capitalism.”75
By the end of the twentieth century liberalism has become a pillar of whatever liberal democracy the United States and its imitators are thought to embody. What the United States or those who follow its example do institutionally, politically, or economically signifies liberal democracy in practice. This yardstick seems to be the one most suitable for policy analysts and political theorists alike. And there is a precedent for this form of measurement. After the Second World War, the American government spent treasure and energy to “repoliticize” occupied Germany and Japan on the basis of its liberal democratic ideals. Thus the American system became as linked to a spiritual mission as was the Catholic empire of seventeenth-century Spain. Despite these conversionary efforts, one may be justified to continue to ask whether liberal democracy is not perpetuating an older liberal tradition or whether “liberal democracy,” to speak like Thomas Hobbes, is not merely the name we choose to use. This question is by no means idle. If the claimed continuity in tradition does not exist, as I believe is the case, what we are left with is the arbitrary ascription of a label to a fluid political culture. This labeling hides the extent to which the democratic revolution in this century altered older institutions and values. It also conceals the reformulations of liberalism that came to make it coextensive with both social planning and educational socialization. In a penetrating essay for Harper’s (August 1990), John Lukacs analyzes the course of liberal democracy more accurately than either Frederich Hayek or Margaret Thatcher: “Traditional capitalism is gone in the West, even from the United States. The universal attribute of every country in the world is the welfare state, administered by large bureaucracies. We are all socialists now whether we call ourselves that or not.”76
Lukacs looks at another factor contributing to this change, beside the advent of democratic electorates and urban working classes. He views the First World War, with its mobilization of entire nations, as the most monumental event of the modern era.77 Among the changes wrought by that cataclysm was the centralized control of human and material resources among the belligerents, or what the Germans called Total-wirtschaft. That command economy, put in the service of a heroic national effort, inspired social planners throughout the Western world. Some became fascists, others communists, and still others Catholic corporatists.
But in America, as Arthur Ekirch observes, the situation was different. The New Deal brain truster Rexford Tugwell viewed his stint in helping to administer America’s war industries as an exhilarating experience in “wartime socialism.” In 1927 Tugwell regretted that the armistice in 1918 “had brought to a halt a great experiment in the control of production, control of prices, and control of consumption.”78 Like other Americans of his generation, Tugwell decided to call his social planning “liberal,” a term that might accentuate its quintessentially American character. Once he and others had done this and their appropriation went, for the most part, unchallenged, the new liberalism came to replace the old. But this did not keep even newer liberalisms from coming along and claiming to be both more democratic and more thoroughly liberal. By now the interwar new liberalism once prevalent in the United States has split into rival sects, one side capturing the postwar conservative movement and renaming itself “neoconservative” and the other, more egalitarian side becoming the left wing of the Democratic Party. Though the revenge of a semantic theft, this development underscores the difficulty of assigning essentialist definitions to a changing ideology. The liberal essence, it can be said, continues to elude.