How Should Liberalism Be Understood?
Mark Naydorf
Over time, some words lose the things they once denoted and fall out of use along with them (for example, the medieval terms fief, feud, and homage), while others remain in circulation but come to denote something different. The word seigneur once referred to a major feudal lord, whereas in its modern sense senior often means an experienced or higher-ranking professional—for example, a senior accountant, captain, manager, and so on. In such cases, part of the meaning is retained, but it is adapted to an entirely new context. Something similar has happened to the word liberalism.
Words ending in “-ism” usually signify the generalization of something specific into an overarching idea. For example: feudal lord—feudalism; reality—realism; abstraction—abstractionism; commune—communism; romance—Romanticism; progress—progressivism; and so forth. Liberalism (from the Latin word for freedom, libertas) is likewise a “general idea,” or a general conception of a properly organized society of free citizens, characteristic of the self-understanding of a number of European-type countries in the nineteenth century.
Since then, liberalism’s original ideas have gradually changed, while the name has remained. We must therefore distinguish between what “classical liberalism” originally was and what is now called liberalism. This distinction is essential because using the same name for different phenomena can cause confusion. The subject of our discussion is the gradual transformation of the concept of liberal society from its classical form to its modern one, in which the original form is no longer easy to recognize.
“Classical” liberalism viewed society as consisting of a multitude of unique, independent individuals connected by an endless network of exchanges. Within it, everyone may create or produce something that other people need, while continually needing what others have made. On this entirely natural basis, an extensive network of exchanges arises, causing people to interact continuously and making them mutually interested and interdependent. In its structure, this all-encompassing network of exchange is a market, which liberalism regards as society’s economic foundation and as the exemplary model through which society understands itself.
As it understands itself, a liberal society is a society of individual commodity producers who freely and voluntarily exchange the products of their labor or creativity. It is in this act of exchange—whether barter or monetary exchange—and only in it, that the individual “appears” to others, becomes significant and socially real, and becomes an actual and active member of society enjoying the full range of natural rights.
A person who cannot produce a commodity for exchange must rely on charity. In that case, however, the person is not a fully entitled subject: because such an individual does not participate in the market, he or she lacks freedom of choice regarding the quantity and quality of the goods required and thus lacks the freedom to shape his or her own life.
Two further consequences are worth highlighting:
(a) No one may appropriate the product of another person’s labor except through voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange. This implies that a whole range of surviving seigneurial rights are recognized as unnatural and inhuman, thereby providing grounds for their abolition.
(b) This scheme depicts a society of peaceful producers founded on endless voluntary exchanges of goods among equals. Such a society can therefore contain no conflicts. If someone has produced a ham and wishes to exchange it for a bundle of firewood, it is for the parties themselves to decide what quantity of each commodity would constitute a fair exchange.
Liberalism is not a theory of market relations. Rather, the image of the market was chosen as the central metaphor of the liberal understanding of a just and viable society—as an explanatory model of a naturally rational social order. Partly taking up conditions that already existed by the end of the eighteenth century, liberalism aspired to make them fully dominant. Classical liberalism therefore captured features of reality and presented them as a universal, future-oriented project, an “ideal image” of a properly ordered society. Its central figure is the individual, sovereign in every respect and acting within a “free”—that is, self-organizing—social field.
The idea of the individual’s moral and legal separateness became a commonplace of the cultures belonging to Western civilization.
In its role as a social project, the liberal order stimulated commodity production, since under this model it was obvious to everyone that the more an individual brought to market, the more useful things that individual could obtain. The effectiveness of this incentive found expression in the rapid economic growth of countries of European culture in the nineteenth century, above all through the invention and introduction of machinery. Yet this evident success produced an unexpected problem: not every product could now find a “partner in exchange” on the market. Economists call this situation a “crisis of overproduction.”
It often happens, however, that situations arising from the successful application of necessary efforts in the right direction unexpectedly turn out to be problematic. Let me recall several familiar examples.
In the early 1970s, China introduced a state program to reduce birth rates, known as “Later, Longer, Fewer,” which imposed a number of strict restrictions on private life. Its success was so striking that decades later the authorities had to resort, conversely, to desperate attempts to encourage childbearing.
Another example concerns our contemporary attitude toward safety as an indispensable condition of personal and social comfort, which justifies committing the maximum possible effort and resources to ensuring protection. At a certain point, these efforts produce an enormously heightened sensitivity among individuals and groups to circumstances that previously caused no alarm. As a result, nightclubs and other venues for mass youth entertainment lose visitors because they cannot provide the required degree of “safety guarantees”; from the standpoint of comfort and safety, playing a computer game at home becomes the clearly preferable option.
A third example: the colonial powers sought to develop their colonies in order to expand those colonies’ market capacity and increase the volume of resources that could be extracted from them. A by-product of these efforts was the formation of a local bourgeoisie, which, in pursuit of its own interests, launched a “national-liberation, anticolonial struggle.”
In these and many other cases, we can observe the successful attainment of a desired state of affairs that unexpectedly proves problematic. We call this turning point a “goal-attainment crisis.” The way out of such a crisis lies in inventing a new conception of the resulting state of affairs and, accordingly, new rational goals, strategies, and structures for achieving them. This is how history propels itself forward.
After several decades, it became apparent that the influence of the classical liberal project was making economic and social practice more complex. That practice could no longer be understood through a simple market model—as a network of mutual exchanges in a spontaneously self-regulating market. Special institutions became the regulators of exchanges involving money, goods, and ideas: large trading companies and firms, political associations, universities, banks, and the like.
Thus arose a crisis of the original liberal ideas based on the principle of individual autonomy: historically, they had been confirmed, but in practice they were refuted as no longer adequate as an explanatory model—precisely at the moment of their evident success.
The resolution of this conceptual crisis was found by rethinking the social environment. The market model of social organization was retained, but in a radically different form. Instead of emphasizing individual effort and private exchange, the new market model identified mass technologies and the mass exchange of things and ideas as its chief determinants. The decisive role passed from sovereign individuals to institutional intermediaries.
The emergence of department stores in major cities in the 1870s may be taken as a sign of this economic transition (see Émile Zola’s novel The Ladies’ Paradise). To this we may add the construction of large transportation networks, bank financing of trade, the rise of joint-stock companies, and the expansion of the market through the inclusion of new participants from poorer social strata and of new kinds of commodities in the form of services. In the social sphere, one may recall a whole range of reforms during the second half of the nineteenth century: electoral, party, and trade-union reforms; the development of socially accessible art through exhibition practices and of education; and the growth of the mass press, including newspapers and magazines. Overall, one may speak of an increasing integration of individual efforts in every sphere of European-type liberal societies—for example, in elections, or in mass tourism, which can exist only when individual aspirations are synchronized into tourist flows.
The notion of the sovereign individual survived in certain areas. Examples include the recognition of authors’ rights in art and the practice of attaching an inventor’s name to mass-produced goods: Singer sewing machines, X-ray apparatuses, Diesel engines, Boeing aircraft, and so forth. Rubik’s Cube is a later example of the same tradition. The idea of personal autonomy survived most fully in the sphere of private life.
Thus, after the crisis of classical liberalism, the following fundamental conditions remained:
(a) the publicly significant sovereignty of the individual, which may be expressed through voluntary action, though now within institutions of production, communication, and exchange; and
(b) the still-traditional understanding of the state’s principal function as the detached legal and police protection of that sovereignty.
Both of these basic conditions were subsequently reinterpreted—radically so during the First World War.
During the First World War, the principal belligerent countries adopted a system of total mobilization: for the first time in history, every group of the population without exception became a participant in the war. Society delegated to the state the principal manifestations of agency, including, to a large extent, agency in private life: income and the allocation of household expenditure, the choice of workplace and working conditions, the quality of food, the cancellation of holidays and days off, and much more. Almost no sphere remained in which individual autonomy could manifest itself. Of course, human agency or “free will” cannot be abolished altogether, but the space and time for exercising the will can be narrowed to the utmost, so that millions of people simultaneously want to do, and actually do, the same thing—what the interests of the belligerent state require of them.
Under wartime conditions, the state ceased to be an arbiter, a “night watchman” of legality, and became the principal institution of social integration. Importantly, the citizens of the belligerent states regarded this turn toward the broadest possible competence of the state as practically justified and expedient, while the liberal model remained in the collective imagination as a feature of the “good old days,” now simply inappropriate.
After the “Great” War, in the 1920s and 1930s, this experience of universal internal mobilization was applied above all in the countries defeated in the war: Russia, Italy, and Germany. The political systems established in these states came to be called totalitarian. In countries where elements of the liberal political order were largely restored after the war, however, totalitarianism loomed over them either as a threat or as a desired goal. In almost every country of Europe and North America, powerful mass movements of mutually opposed fascists and communists existed—obvious bearers of totalitarianism, a conception that appealed to many people.
Victory over Germany and its allies in the Second World War did not mean a return to the model of classical liberalism, even in the countries west of the Iron Curtain. Social space had changed radically and become a mass society, and its “liberalism” had become entirely different.
Anyone who had failed to understand this after the First World War and hoped to return to the old order of life after its conclusion was compelled to acknowledge the massification of the Western world during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Depression occurred largely because the elites of the victorious countries failed to recognize the global change in the type of culture and did not alter their model for understanding and governing the new societies after the First World War.
In the 1920s, while clashes among radicalized masses were taking place in postwar Europe on an unprecedented scale, the United States—against the background of an economic boom, the “Jazz Age” and the era of “prosperity”—still viewed itself as a country of traditional liberalism. President Hoover (1928) was convinced that “the economy is driven by the individualism and enterprise of businessmen, who do not need government regulation.”
Only the stock-market crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic crisis, which lasted for more than a decade and became worldwide, forced the rejection of the old liberalism and the creation of a new version. The New Deal was President Franklin Roosevelt’s reform program, based on a new understanding of the role of the state in the age of mass society.
During the crisis it became evident that, in modern societies, the state is the only social instrument capable of restraining the pressure of mass phenomena. The new liberalism therefore no longer limits the state but, on the contrary, relies upon it. Government is now held to be obliged to use all its power and resources to solve the social problems of the established mass society—through new measures of social control—in order to secure for the average person the right to an economic and political life of his or her own, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness.
The new social philosophy, which continues to call itself liberal, firmly supports public spending on programs such as education, healthcare, and social security. The state’s responsibilities are now taken to include ensuring social justice and proper economic proportions in wealth and income; protecting minority voting rights; affirmative action; women’s reproductive and other rights; support for LGBT rights; and immigration reform.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy described liberalism in the following terms: “If by a ‘liberal’ they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, housing, schools, jobs, civil rights, and civil liberties—... if that is what they mean by a ‘liberal,’ then I am proud to say that I am a ‘liberal.’” [Quoted from the Wikipedia article “Modern liberalism in the United States.”]
In this new and expanded interpretation, “liberal” means something like “favorably disposed toward the ordinary person.”
The principal difference between classical and modern interpretations of liberalism lies in a fundamental reconsideration of the individual’s social position and of the institution that guarantees it.
In the market model, the “autonomous individual” is the absolute subject of goal-setting. In a particular situation, the individual devises and performs actions corresponding to his abilities and to his personal interest as he understands it. This is the ideal form of the basic element of the classical liberal model of society.
In the liberalism of the modern mass age, the individual also remains a subject, but primarily as the subject of his needs. He is socially significant as a solvent consumer who freely and voluntarily chooses goods capable of satisfying those needs. The modern version of liberalism rests on two central principles of comfort: consumption and its voluntary nature.
Here, the modern individual appears as a subject requiring state protection from the economic and political monsters of the contemporary mass economy and from radical mass movements, which continually restrict his capacity to set goals for himself. The prevailing model assumes that individual independence is no longer secured by a balance between the interests of equals, as in the classical model, but by the protection—or guardianship—of the “strong hand” of a just state.
The paradox, or dead end, of modern ideas about the human being is that the state is regarded as the sole guardian of consumer freedom, safety, and personal comfort—both in modern liberalism and in the modern “left-wing” conception of humane socialism. The slogan “Everything for the individual, everything for the benefit of the individual,” incidentally, was for many years a central theme of Soviet state propaganda.
Most likely, all these state-centred social models inherited from the past are, as the saying goes, living out their final days. Other models will be devised when it becomes necessary to describe a society that does not yet exist.