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

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4. Toward a definition.

In order to pin down a precise definition eventually, Jeremy Waldron’s introductory passage is as good a place to start as any. He writes:

Liberals hold that political organizations are justified by the contribution they make to the interests of individuals, interests which can be understood apart from the idea of society and politics. They reject both the view that cultures, communities, and states are ends in themselves, and the view that social and political organizations should aim to transform or perfect human nature. People have purposes of their own to pursue, either economic or spiritual (or both). Since those purposes do not naturally harmonize with one another, a framework of rules may be necessary so that individuals know what they can count on for their own purposes and what they must concede to the purposes of others. The challenge for political philosophy, then, is to design a social framework that provides this security and predictability, but represents at the same time a safe and reasonable compromise among the disparate demands of individuals.[24]

We need to distinguish some of the main ideas here.

(i) The pre-social individual: The point of departure for liberals is the discrete, perhaps asocial, and (in some sense: economically or spiritually) self-interested individual. Thus, in the words of Hobbes, nature is seen to ‘dissociate… men’.[25] In the natural condition, as Rousseau claims, men ‘are living in primitive independence’, that is, ‘without mutual relations’.[26] Ludwig von Mises, in a more reticent tone appropriate to his time, speaks of ‘the – at least conceivable – isolated life of individuals’ that preceded social development.[27]

(ii) Natural discord: Between any number of such individuals there is inevitable discord The view of a natural harmony of (social) interests is ruled out in favor of a natural disharmony of (individual) interests – or, famously, in the extreme case of Hobbes, a natural state of ‘war of every man against every man’, a natural state wherein ‘every man is enemy to every man’ and, consequently, life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.[28] Rousseau argues, by contrast, that ‘without mutual relations’, war between individuals – like peaceful co-existence – is inconceivable. Locke argues that though the pre-social condition may be marked by individual acquisitiveness and resulting competition, it is not a state of war since nature itself regulates relations between individuals: ‘The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone. And reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions’.[29] In contemporary philosophy, John Rawls maintains the idea of a ‘conflict of interests’. Individuals, he writes, ‘have their own plans of life [which] lead them to have different ends and purposes, and to make conflicting claims on the natural and social resources available’. He goes on from here to propose a (hypothetical) ‘condition of mutual disinterest’, that is, the idea that ‘individuals [take] no interest in one another’s interests’, or ‘are severally disinterested, and are not willing to have their interests sacrificed to [those of] others’.[30] Another example in contemporary philosophy is Berlin, who observes mildly that ‘human purposes and activities do not automatically harmonize with one another’.[31]

(iii) Voluntary creation of the State: Some degree of harmony, lacking in the natural condition, must be created; artificial harmony must be brought about by a general act (or general recognition of a fact) among (naturally) free agents. In the pre-social condition these self-oriented agents lack, in Waldron’s words, ‘security and predictability’. Therefore, for the provision of these conditions, they choose to establish the organs of the State, or, as Locke puts it, they put ‘on the bonds of civil society… by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it’.[32] Of this Hobbes had written earlier: ‘by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State (in Latin, Civitas), which is nothing but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended’. [33] Hence, social order (here synonymous with the State) is viewed as something artificial or ‘unnatural’.

(iv) Political freedom: Such a State will ideally – in spite of its restraint of natural freedom – serve the interests of the individuals who constitute it in a fair or (to use Waldron’s word)  ‘reasonable’ way. On some accounts, the State thereby extends the freedom of individuals qua political freedom, that is, freedom achieved through the State (versus anarchists, for whom freedom must include freedom from the State). Rousseau writes: ‘What man loses by [entering society] is his natural liberty [‘which is bounded only by the strength of the individual’] and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty [‘which is limited by the general will’] and the proprietorship of [or title to] all he possesses’. He goes even further and anticipates Kant by claiming: ‘We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty’.[34] Berlin, for one, objects to this line of thinking, arguing that it implies that ‘Liberty, so far from being incompatible with authority, becomes virtually identical with it’. He sides with Jeremy Bentham who, ‘almost alone, doggedly went on repeating that the business of laws was not to liberate but to restrain: every law is an infraction of liberty – even if such infraction leads to an increase of the sum of [general] liberty’.[35]

1. the concept of the individual (here distinguishing liberal individualism from ‘social-istic’ thought, be it socialist or even conservative);

2. the concept of liberty or freedom (here distinguishing liberalism from egalitarianism – socialist, anarchist, or otherwise); and

3. the concept of the political and the State or the concept of authority in general (here distinguishing liberalism, even in its ‘libertarian’ form, from both individualist and social anarchism).

[24] op. cit., introduction; emphasis removed from original (in which the whole passage is emphasized), except those phrases which remain in italics.

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