The Principles of Liberalism
A primer for the uninitiated
Recently I’ve written a few pieces around the same theme:
There is an odd absence in American intellectual culture of a strong liberal tradition and a corresponding liberal identity, and this has created a void that has been filled with (in my view) a lot of very bad ideas. The result has been that the American left has been rendered impotent and sclerotic in the face of right-wing populist backlash.
To recover the American liberal tradition, liberals, who I believe are best represented in the Democratic Party, need to aggressively denounce a vocal and bullying progressive coalition which has intimidated party leaders into adopting dumb policies which have alienated it from voters at the national level.
But of course, to replace bad ideas, you need good ones, and what I haven’t done here yet is elaborate on what I am referring to when I speak of “liberal principles” or “liberal values.” I’ll front load with a list of the values as I conceive them, and provide explanations below for the more philosophically-inclined. To those who are versed in liberalism, there is probably nothing new here. This is intended as an introduction for those who are unfamiliar with it.
Principles of Liberalism
Society is composed of individuals.
Freedom is the power of the individual to act from their own nature, without hindrance. The purpose of the state is to promote freedom.
The natural right of a person is their power, insofar as no other power negates it. This freedom is very limited.
The state is the means by which individuals maximize their freedom by willingly trading their natural right for legal rights, by which they are bound in common cause.
The social contract is the set of promises made by the state to individuals in return for their natural right. If these promises are broken, the contract is void.
Explanation
The starting point of any philosophy is somewhat arbitrary-everything follows from something that came earlier. But I take the roots of liberalism to be found in the modernist turn in Western philosophy that occurred over the course of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, initiated by thinkers like Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes. Like any philosophical movement, the various strands of liberalism are more family resemblance than a single, cohesive worldview, so what I describe here will necessarily differ somewhat from what another liberal might articulate. I view the principles described here as the tip of the spear, so to speak-underlying these are metaphysical and epistemological doctrines about the fundamental nature of reality, some of which I have addressed elsewhere and I won’t go into here, but from which they logically follow.
When I conceive liberalism, I think of the political principles that follow from the philosophy of a few figures-central in my mind are Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant. Of the three, I am by far the most familiar with Spinoza, so what I write here will have a very Spinozistic flavor. As an underlying metaphysical question, I believe we need to differentiate between the pantheistic liberalism of Spinoza (the leading thinker of the rationalist tradition) and the deistic liberalism of Hobbes and John Locke (leading intellectuals of the empiricist tradition)-in other words, a theory that proposes that God is the world, in contrast to a theory that proposes that God made the world, and does not interfere with it. If it’s not clear, I align much more closely to the former than the latter. The relevance of the underlying differences will become clear in my explanation below.
I distinguish here between the principles of liberalism and the values of liberalism. The principles I outline here are not moral or ethical guidelines, though inevitably I allude to them somewhat. I describe in a very basic way what the aim of human life is viewed to be within liberal thought-the expansion of freedom. But I don’t clarify exactly what freedom consists in, or, in other words, how an individual achieves happiness.
1. The Individual
Liberal societies are often criticized for being “individualistic.” But it is a simple fact of life that we experience the world as a singular mind, at least phenomenologically distinct from other minds. It is from the perspective of this individual mind that we act, and when this mind is acted upon, we are acted upon. In other words, the mind of the individual is that individual’s essence. And the essence of a mind is to desire and to act from desire.
So, no matter what political system we adopt, we ultimately adopt that system with regard to individuals-whether or not we admit it. And indeed, there is no political system I’m aware of which doesn’t address the individual, even if it only does so to subjugate individuals to some higher-order form of organization. Liberalism recognizes that individuals are, in fact, the fundamental units of societies, and rather than treating this as an inconvenient externality, reasons with the individual in mind from beginning to end.
This is not to say that to be a liberal is to be opposed to forms of community organization, such as friendships, families, church communities, etc. This is a principle, not a value judgment-a statement of fact, not of preference. It is rather to recognize that insofar as these institutions exist, they exist only with regard to the individuals of which they are composed, and such social organizations only exist insofar as individuals perceive association with them to be in their interest.
2. Freedom
To be a liberal, fundamentally, is to believe that happiness is identical to freedom-that insofar as someone is free, they are also happy. Thus, freedom is the essential aim of human life, which all individuals strive towards, although they may not conceive their actions in those terms themselves. This requires an extended philosophical argument, which I will provide elsewhere.
By “freedom,” I mean the ability of an individual to act unimpeded from his or her own nature, being affected or rendered passive by external things to a lesser degree than could otherwise occur. This does not mean that man is an island-it is certainly possible to be affected by an external thing in such a way that it increases one’s ability to act. Consider the invigorating feeling you experience when listening to a beautiful piece of music, or in being embraced by a close friend. These things would be seen as contributions to one’s freedom, as opposed to the hindrances of a physical injury, poverty, mental illness, or disease.
Insofar as illiberal ideologies prioritize the freedom of communities or governments to the exclusion of the freedom of individuals, they do so under the misapprehension that by allowing the community or government to determine the behavior of the individual, with or without their consent, they are making that person more free. “Freedom from sin,” for example, is the grounds on which a Christian community may institute strict punishments for blasphemy, adultery, pre-marital sex, or abortion. But sin, in my view, does not exist. Therefore one cannot be free of it, since it cannot act upon us. But nonetheless, even when a Christian conservative, who views the family as the fundamental political unit, speaks of freedom, they are ultimately referring to the supposed increase of freedom experienced by individuals who live in patriarchal households or theocratic regimes. This individual freedom is, ultimately, even what these most oppressive regimes are “for” in the minds of their proponents.
3. Natural Right
A common gripe with liberal theory is the claim that “natural rights” are not real. In response to the Lockean liberal tradition, in which natural rights are certain rights granted by God to life, liberty, and property, this critique is quite reasonable.
In Spinoza, natural right is a much more concrete and grounded concept. Natural right is nothing more than the freedom an individual possesses to act, insofar as no other power negates it1. I have the natural right to walk, insofar as my legs will propel me and nothing physically prevents me from walking. I have the natural right to attack someone on the street, or to go into their home and steal their belongings, because there is no physical force by which I am prevented from doing so, except insofar as they have the natural right to prevent me by their own power.
But natural right doesn’t take you very far, because it does not facilitate the trust and mutually beneficial action necessary to expand freedom. In a world with only natural right governing it, my physical safety is constantly unassured except insofar as I have the physical power to protect it. I can’t trust someone to employ me, because if they have the requisite power, they could simply enslave me and refuse to reward my labor. In other words, with only natural right, society is borderline nonexistent, and its benefits very limited.
In liberal theory, what I am describing is a state of nature-not a real state of affairs that actually exists, but a state of affairs which would necessarily exist, absent the institutions and laws humans invariably create.
4. The State
How, then, do we pull ourselves out of the state of nature, and create the possibility for a greater degree of freedom than what it offers us? The answer is clear: there must be a single, overwhelming force, so great that no individual actor or even a large group of actors can negate its natural right to enforce its will. That actor is a body called the state.
The individual is incentivized by the constant threat of violence and subjugation to hand his or her natural right over to this body. This is not done for free. In return, the state provides the individual with legal rights-the civil rights and civil liberties guaranteed, in the American system, by the U.S. Constitution. Under the state, an individual can own private property and expect to have it protected by the state’s overwhelming power. When an individual or group tries to negate another individual’s natural right to speak freely, or move about unmolested, or to receive compensation for labor, the individual can rely upon the state to punish the offender and extract just compensation.
5. The Social Contract
The social contract is grounded on the premise that individuals recognize that their natural right is very limited and easily negated by the natural right of any other individual or force that happens to be more powerful than them. Therefore, the freedom natural right offers is very minimal, and in return for them, the state offers legal rights. It is often asserted that these rights are “fictions,” and this is true, but the natural right of the state to enforce them is certainly not. Legal rights are real insofar as the state has the power to enforce them.
How do we determine legal rights? Since each individual enters into the social contract on the basis of mutual self interest, the legal rights we hope the state will defend and promote are precisely those rights which mutually expand our freedom, the common aim of each individual. In losing the natural right to steal, I also gain the legal right to be paid for a day’s labor. In losing the natural right to force someone else to adhere to my ideological preferences, I gain the legal right to think for myself. In other words, legal rights aim to engineer non-zero sum conditions in which individuals are able to mutually benefit from one another, and lessen the degree to which their interactions pose an existential threat to one another, or to one another’s freedom.
These legal rights thus create the opportunity to exponentially increase the power of individuals who possess them over what they had by nature, by making possible trade, technological innovation, education, and free inquiry. It is not a coincidence, I believe, that after a millennia of relative stagnation, the explosion of technological innovation, wealth, medicine, scientific knowledge, music, literature, and art that has occurred since the Enlightenment era has mostly occurred in countries founded on liberal principles, from the Dutch Republic, to post-revolutionary England, to America, and now to most of the developed world. It is also not a coincidence that nations founded on illiberal ideologies, such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, have lagged so far behind. It is not a coincidence that liberal nations are wealthier, better fed, less violent, and most attractive to immigrants. There are good reasons for this, located in the principles themselves, and the overarching goal of maximizing individual freedoms.
But the underlying safeguard of the social contract is that it is a contract, and like any contract, it is voided when one party violates its terms. The natural right of the state depends upon the natural right of the individuals who willingly grant their natural right to it-who it can enlist into its military, who supply the labor that fuels its economy, and who send their children to its schools and universities. If the state abuses the terms of the agreement and violates the legal rights it was designed to protect, the people always have the power to reclaim their natural right and unite to overthrow the state, and replace it with a new one.
Spinoza would actually reject this characteristic of natural right as imprecise, because in his view, the malicious actions I’ve described above could only follow from a passion caused by some external affect, and thus don’t really follow from the individual’s natural right per se (Ethics, 4P37). But while this distinction is useful from the perspective of moral philosophy, I believe it unnecessarily complicates my point here.