Classical liberalism affirms negative liberty (freedom from interference by other people, the state or the church) and forms of moral, legal, and political equality; but it rejects economic or social equality:
"PERSPECTIVES ON . . . EQUALITY
*LIBERALS believe that people are ‘born’ equal in the sense that they are of equal moral worth. This implies formal equality, notably legal and political equality, as well as equality of opportunity; but social equality is likely to threaten freedom and penalize talent. Whereas classical liberals emphasize the need for strict meritocracy and economic incentives, modern liberals argue that genuine equal opportunities require relative social equality."
(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. p. 82)
"Classical liberalism
Classical liberalism was the earliest liberal tradition. Classical liberal ideas developed during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and reached their high point during the early industrialization of the nineteenth century. As a result, classical liberalism has sometimes been called ‘nineteenth-century liberalism’. The cradle of classical liberalism was the UK, where the capitalist and industrial revolutions were the most advanced. Its ideas have always been more deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon countries, particularly the UK and the USA, than in other parts of the world. However, classical liberalism is not merely a nineteenth-century form of liberalism, whose ideas are now only of historical interest. Its principles and theories, in fact, have had growing appeal from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. Though what is called neoclassical liberalism, or neoliberalism, initially had the greatest impact in the UK and the USA, its influence has spread much more broadly, in large part fuelled by the advance of globalization. Classical liberalism draws on a variety of doctrines and theories. The most important of these are:
* natural rights
* utilitarianism
* economic liberalism
* social Darwinism.
Natural rights
The natural rights theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the US political philosopher and statesman, had a considerable influence on the development of liberal ideology. Modern political debate is littered with references to ‘rights’ and claims to possess ‘rights’. A right, most simply, is an entitlement to act or be treated in a particular way. Such entitlements may be either moral or legal in character. For Locke and Jefferson, rights are ‘natural’ in that they are invested in human beings by nature or God. Natural rights are now more commonly called human rights. They are, in Jefferson’s words, ‘inalienable’ because human beings are entitled to them by virtue of being human: they cannot, in that sense, be taken away. Natural rights are thus thought to establish the essential conditions for leading a truly human existence. For Locke, there were three such rights: ‘life, liberty and property’. Jefferson did not accept that property was a natural or God-given right, but rather one that had developed for human convenience. In the American Declaration of Independence he therefore described inalienable rights as those of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.
The idea of natural or human rights has affected liberal thought in a number of ways. For example, the weight given to such rights distinguishes authoritarian thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes from early liberals such as John Locke. As explained earlier, both Hobbes and Locke believed that government was formed through a ‘social contract’. However, Hobbes argued that only a strong government, preferably a monarchy, would be able to establish order and security in society. He was prepared to invest the king with sovereign or absolute power, rather than risk a descent into a ‘state of nature’. The citizen should therefore accept any form of government because even repressive government is better than no government at all. Locke, on the other hand, argued against arbitrary or unlimited government. Government is established in order to protect natural rights. When these are protected by the state, citizens should respect government and obey the law. However, if government violates the rights of its citizens, they in turn have the right of rebellion. Locke thus approved of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, and applauded the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1688.
For Locke, moreover, the contract between state and citizen is a specific and limited one: its purpose is to protect a set of defined natural rights. As a result, Locke believed in limited government. The legitimate role of government is limited to the protection of ‘life, liberty and property’. Therefore, the realm of government should not extend beyond its three ‘minimal’ functions:
* maintaining public order and protecting property
* providing defence against external attack
* ensuring that contracts are enforced.
Other issues and responsibilities are properly the concern of private individuals. Jefferson expressed a similar sentiment a century later when he declared: ‘That government is best which governs least.’
Utilitarianism
Natural rights theories were not the only basis of early liberalism. An alternative and highly influential theory of human nature was put forward in the early nineteenth century by utilitarian thinkers, notably Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Bentham regarded the idea of rights as ‘nonsense’ and called natural rights ‘nonsense on stilts’. In their place, he proposed what he believed to be the more scientific and objective idea that individuals are motivated by self-interest, and that these interests can be defined as the desire for pleasure, or happiness, and the wish to avoid pain, both calculated in terms of utility. The principle of utility is, furthermore, a moral principle in that it suggests that the ‘rightness’ of an action, policy or institution can be established by its tendency to promote happiness. Just as each individual can calculate what is morally good by the quantity of pleasure an action will produce, so the principle of ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ can be used to establish which policies or institutions will benefit society at large.
Utilitarian ideas have had a considerable impact on classical liberalism. In particular, they have provided a moral philosophy that explains how and why individuals act as they do. The utilitarian conception of human beings as rationally self-interested creatures was adopted by later generations of liberal thinkers. Moreover, each individual is thought to be able to perceive his or her own best interests. This cannot be done on their behalf by some paternal authority, such as the state. Bentham argued that individuals act so as to gain pleasure or happiness in whatever way they choose. No one else can judge the quality or degree of their happiness. If each individual is the sole judge of what will give him or her pleasure, then the individual alone can determine what is morally right.
On the other hand, utilitarian ideas can also have illiberal implications. Bentham held that the principle of utility could be applied to society at large and not merely to individual human behaviour. Institutions and legislation can be judged by the yardstick of ‘the greatest happiness’. However, this formula has majoritarian implications, because it uses the happiness of ‘the greatest number’ as a standard of what is morally correct, and therefore allows that the interests of the majority outweigh those of the minority or the rights of the individual.
Economic liberalism
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of classical economic theory in the work of political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo (1770–1823). Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was in many respects the first economics textbook. His ideas drew heavily on liberal and rationalist assumptions about human nature and made a powerful contribution to the debate about the desirable role of government within civil society. Smith wrote at a time of wide-ranging government restrictions on economic activity. Mercantilism, the dominant economic idea of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had encouraged governments to intervene in economic life in an attempt to encourage the export of goods and restrict imports. Smith’s economic writings were designed to attack mercantilism, arguing instead for the principle that the economy works best when it is left alone by government.
Smith thought of the economy as a market , indeed as a series of interrelated markets. He believed that the market operates according to the wishes and decisions of free individuals. Freedom within the market means freedom of choice: the ability of the businesses to choose what goods to make, the ability of workers to choose an employer, and the ability of consumers to choose what goods or services to buy. Relationships within such a market – between employers and employees, and between buyers and sellers – are therefore voluntary and contractual, made by self-interested individuals for whom pleasure is equated with the acquisition and consumption of wealth. Economic theory therefore drew on utilitarianism, in constructing the idea of ‘economic man’, the notion that human beings are essentially egoistical and bent on material acquisition.
The attraction of classical economics was that, while each individual is materially self-interested, the economy itself is thought to operate according to a set of impersonal pressures – market forces – that tend naturally to promote economic prosperity and well-being. For instance, no single producer can set the price of a commodity – prices are set by the market, by the number of goods offered for sale and the number of consumers who are willing to buy. These are the forces of supply and demand. The market is a self-regulating mechanism; it needs no guidance from outside. The market should be ‘free’ from government interference because it is managed by what Smith referred to as an ‘invisible hand’. This idea of a self-regulating market reflects the liberal belief in a naturally existing harmony among the conflicting interests within society. Smith expressed the economic version of this idea as:
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It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests.
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Such thinking was further developed by David Ricardo and the so-called ‘Manchester liberals’, Richard Cobden (1804–65) and John Bright (1811–89). Their ideas are often referred to as commercial liberalism . The key theme within commercial liberalism is a belief in the virtues of free trade. Free trade has economic benefits, as it allows each country to specialize in the production of goods and services that it is best suited to produce, the ones in which they have ‘comparative advantage’. However, free trade is no less important in drawing states into a web of interdependence which means that the material costs of international conflict are so great that warfare becomes virtually unthinkable. Cobden and Bright argued that free trade would draw people of different races, creeds and languages together into what Cobden described as ‘the bonds of eternal peace’.
Free market and free trade ideas became economic orthodoxy in the UK and the USA during the nineteenth century. The high point of free-market beliefs was reached with the doctrine of laissez-faire. This suggests that the state should have no economic role, but should simply leave the economy alone and allow businesspeople to act however they please. Laissez-faire ideas opposed all forms of factory legislation, including restrictions on the employment of children, limits to the number of hours worked, and any regulation of working conditions. Such economic individualism is usually based on a belief that the unrestrained pursuit of profit will ultimately lead to general benefit. Laissez-faire theories remained strong in the UK throughout much of the nineteenth century, and in the USA they were not seriously challenged until the 1930s.
However, since the late twentieth century, faith in the free market has been revived through the rise of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was counter-revolutionary: it aimed to halt, and if possible reverse, the trend towards ‘big’ government that had dominated most Western countries, especially since 1945. Although it had its greatest initial impact in the two countries in which free-market economic principles had been most firmly established in the nineteenth century, the USA and the UK, from the 1980s onwards neoliberalism exerted a wider influence. At the heart of neoliberalism’s assault on the ‘dead hand’ of government lies a belief in market fundamentalism. In that light, neoliberalism can be seen to go beyond classical economic theory. The matter is further complicated by the fact that in the case of both ‘Reaganism’ in the USA and ‘Thatcherism’ in the UK, neoliberalism formed part of a larger, New Right ideological project that sought to foster laissez-faire economics with an essentially
conservative social philosophy.…
Social Darwinism
One of the distinctive features of classical liberalism is its attitude to poverty and social equality. An individualistic political creed will tend to explain social circumstances in terms of the talents and hard work of each individual human being. Individuals make what they want, and what they can, of their own lives. Those with ability and a willingness to work will prosper, while the incompetent or the lazy will not. This idea was memorably expressed in the title of Samuel Smiles’ book Self-Help (1859) which begins by reiterating the well-tried maxim that ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves’. Such ideas of individual responsibility were widely employed by supporters of laissezfaire in the nineteenth century. For instance, Richard Cobden advocated an improvement of the conditions of the working classes, but argued that it should come about through ‘their own efforts and self-reliance, rather than from law’. He advised them to ‘look not to Parliament, look only to yourselves’.
Ideas of individual self-reliance reached their boldest expression in Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State (1884). Spencer (1820–1904), the[36]UK philosopher and social theorist, developed a vigorous defence of the doctrine of laissez-faire, drawing on ideas that the UK scientist Charles Darwin (1809–82) had developed in The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin developed a theory of evolution that set out to explain the diversity of species found on Earth. He proposed that each species undergoes a series of random physical and mental changes, or mutations. Some of these changes enable a species to survive and prosper: they are pro-survival. Other mutations are less favourable and make survival more difficult or even impossible. A process of ‘natural selection’ therefore decides which species are fitted by nature to survive, and which are not. By the end of the nineteenth century, these ideas had extended beyond biology and were increasingly affecting social and political theory.
Spencer, for example, used the theory of natural selection to develop the social principle of ‘the survival of the fittest’. People who are best suited by nature to survive rise to the top, while the less fit fall to the bottom. Inequalities of wealth, social position and political power are therefore natural and inevitable, and no attempt should be made by government to interfere with them. Spencer’s US disciple, William Sumner (1840–1910), stated this principle boldly in 1884, when he asserted that ‘the drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be’."
(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. pp. 31-6)
