About the Author - Paul McLaughlin teaches in the Philosophy Institute, Pedagogical Academy of Zielona Gora, Poland.

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3. What is liberalism? Who are the liberals?

These are not, on the face of it, easy questions to answer. As Jeremy Waldron puts it in a recent encyclopedia entry: ‘defining liberalism is, on the whole, a frustrating pastime. There are many ways of mapping this philosophical landscape, and there is no substitute for grappling with the disparate detail of the different theories propounded by particular liberal philosophers’.[18] I agree; there is no substitute for the latter enterprise, that is, the attempt to get to grips with particular liberal theories through a critical reading of the relevant texts. However, I will try to offer a brief but fair account of the overall liberal position and to reach some general conclusions here, using Waldron’s helpful article as a point of departure, making critical interjections along the way, and developing the main themes by reference to some central thinkers and texts. Of course, only detailed analysis, largely beyond us within the confines of such an essay, can provide an adequate test for these effectively provisional conclusions.

It is possible to provide a satisfactory theoretical overview and to reach some general conclusions because the difficulties and complexies involved are, as I see them, of the historical and (pejoratively) ideological order rather than the conceptual order: this is true of almost all political philosophy despite the endeavours of some contemporaries to render it ‘analytic’ and to give it a somewhat ‘scientific’ veneer; furthermore, even relative to other ideologies, liberalism does not strike me as being particularly complex – indeed, as will become apparent, my conviction is that it is conceptually one-sided.

From the historical perspective, there are perhaps six elements in the liberal tradition of thought.[19] (Such lists are inevitably somewhat arbitrary and of fairly little value, but the following may help to orient us at the outset, giving some idea of who it is that we are referring to.) They are:

(i) classical English liberalism (Hobbes, Locke, etc.);

(ii) ‘continental’ Enlightenment liberalism (Rousseau, Voltaire, Constant, Kant, Humboldt, etc.);

(iii) utilitarian liberalism (Bentham, Mill, etc.);

(iv) Russian liberalism (Desnitskii, Radishchev, Herzen, Chicherin, etc.);

(v) British Idealist liberalism (T.H. Green etc.);

(vi) Twentieth Century liberalism (Berlin, Hayek, Nozick, Rawls, etc.).

This is a diverse list and clearly not all the figures fit neatly within the liberal tradition as it is often represented: Hobbes, Rousseau, and Green are notorious examples, due to elements of authoritarianism, republicanism, and interventionism.[20] Alexander Herzen’s case, which is less famous than these, is particularly interesting and difficult. He makes statements like ‘The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and on this alone that the true will of the people can develop’, and ‘The individual… is the true, real monad of society’, which seem to confirm his liberalism quite clearly (see our definition, below). Nevertheless, he simultaneously attacks liberalism on grounds such as the following:

Herzen also attacks the representative form of democracy (‘Europe has realized, thanks to the reaction, that a representative system is a cunning device to transmute social needs and a readiness for energetic action into words and endless arguments’). He sometimes endorses socialism (‘one or the other must fall; either monarchy or socialism… Myself I back socialism’); but he often seems much closer to anarchism than any other political ideology (‘the [supposed] crusaders of freedom, the privileged liberators of humanity… are frightened of freedom, they need a master to prevent them from becoming spoilt, they need authority because they do not trust themselves’; or, ‘I don’t know how to choose between kinds of slavery any more than between religions… On both sides [republican and monarchist] there is slavery: on the one side it is sly, concealed under the name of liberty and therefore dangerous; on the other side, it is wild and bestial, therefore quite open’; or, ‘[republicans] cannot abandon the old forms; they regard them as eternal boundaries – that is why their ideal only bears the name and colour of the future, but in essence belongs to the world of the past and does not repudiate it… They wanted to leave the walls as they were and to give them a new function – as though the plan of a prison could be adapted to a free life’). Even aside from issues of specific ideology, Herzen frequently expresses a revolutionary fervour quite foreign to the liberal sensibility (‘long live chaos and destruction! Vive la mort! And may the future triumph!), though this is usually curtailed.[22]

With such considerations in mind, Berlin, though eager to draw Herzen toward the liberal tradition, is forced to concede that ‘he did not, despite all his distrust of political fanaticism, whether on the right or on the left, turn into a cautious, reformist liberal constitutionalist. Even in his gradualist phase he remained an agitator, an egalitarian, and a socialist to the end’.[23] Thus, Herzen may be the most dubious inclusion on our list. That said, I agree with Berlin that some of Herzen’s thoughts (including those quoted above) are highly liberal in nature, and those that are are often richer and more revealing than the more consistent and voluminous contributions of other self-declared liberals. So he remains on our list. By and large, in any event, our outline of liberalism applies and seems, to that extent, at least of some, if limited, summary value.

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