Liberalism Notes

Week 7: Liberalism – Part One

  • How do we understand the Rights of Man as the rights of the demos (the generic name of political subjects in classical democracy)?
  • How does the notion of the Rights of Man relate to liberal democratic principles and practices?
  • Readings:
    • Andrew Heywood, Politics, 4th Edition, chapter 2.
    • Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction, chapter 2, Liberalism.
    • G. Cohen, ‘Socialism and Equality of Opportunity in political Thought’.
    • Refer back to the readings by Gamble and Gutman.
    • Freedom Charter.
  • The main liberal theorists who make contributions to this discussion are: J. S. Mill, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, Robert Nozick.

The Foundations of Liberal Democratic Constitutionalism

  • Liberal democracy relies on the notion of the “ideal of equality” and the “ideal of freedom” as the underpinning values of democracy under the principles of the modern liberal constitutional state.
  • Traceable to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 (or the Haitian constitution which most liberal theorists don’t recognise).
  • According to Gamble, the “English Revolution of, which began with the civil war in 1640 and ended in the political settlement of 1688, produced the first modern state based on liberal principles”.
  • In what Edmund Burke refers to as the ‘estate of liberty’, the liberties included “the freedom from arbitrary arrest, arbitrary search, and arbitrary taxation, equality before the law, the right to trial by jury, a degree of freedom of thought, speech and religious belief, and freedom to buy and sell”.
  • The private sphere of liberty was to be protected from arbitrary state intervention.
  • Is there a difference between democracy and liberty?
  • For some, liberty or the freedom of civil society from government interference can be established without constitutionalism and democracy (rule by the people through direct government).
  • The struggle in Europe was against the arbitrary power exercised by kings and the legal privileges of the landed nobility.
  • They wanted to move away from royal absolutism
  • Before the turn to liberalism, Man did not acquire rights through ‘universal rational principles’

Classical Liberalism

  • Minimal public ownership and state intervention
  • Low levels of taxation and public spending
  • Strong managerial prerogative (technocratic)
  • Weak role for trade unions

Modern Liberalism

  • Welfare state Capitalism
  • Significant public ownership and state intervention
  • High levels of taxation and social spending
  • Nationally centralised industry wide collective bargaining (for example the role of NEDLAC in South Africa).

The Principles of Liberal Democracy

  • The individual is central to all the categories of liberal democratic practices.
  • Its main principles are those of constitutionalism and consent.
  • Liberalism emerges from the breakdown of feudalism and the market economy.
  • It rises from the middle class which was opposed to the absolutist tendencies of monarchs and landed property.
  • The central values of liberalism include the individual, freedom, reason, justice, and toleration.

The Individual

  • Each individual has their own interests and unique identity.
  • Under liberal democracy, rational and scientific explanations gradually replaced religion as the central view point to understanding the organisation of society.
  • Individuals are regarded as ‘ends in themselves’.
  • Liberalism emphasises the uniqueness and equality of individuals.
  • Liberalism relies on the idea of an atomistic individualism.
  • Society is regarded as a collection of self-sufficient individuals.
  • The individual is independent of society and it owes nothing to society.

Freedom – Isaiah Berlin

  • Negative freedom is regarded as the absence of constraints and is supported by classical liberals.
    • It supports the free choice of the market.
    • It is called negative freedom because it is based on the absence of external restrictions or constraints on the individual.
    • The principle of negative liberty can be associated with the minimal state and the laissez-faire economy.
  • The principle of Positive freedom is supported by modern liberals.
    • The state must be involved in the personal development of individuals.
    • For the individual to be one’s own master they must be supported by the state in the development of skills.
    • The capacity development of human beings to aid in their self-realisation.
    • The principle of positive freedom can be associated with the social democratic state, the developmental state, or the welfare state.

Reason/Rationalism

  • Rationalism: is centred on the idea of human reason and critical inquiry.
  • Knowledge flows from reason.
  • Rationalism has its roots in the Enlightenment.
  • It does away with paternalism which tries to reduce the freedom of individuals by subordinating them to an authority.

Justice and Equality – John Rawls

  • Justice denotes a particular kind of moral judgement with regards to the distribution of rewards and punishment.
  • Social justice: it refers to the distribution of material rewards and benefits in society, such as wages, profits, housing, medical care, welfare benefits.
  • Each individual embodies natural rights or human rights, therefore there is equality.
  • Foundational equality considers “the idea that individuals should enjoy the same formal status in society particularly in terms of the distribution of rights and entitlements.
  • There should be no discrimination on the enjoyment of rights on the basis of race, gender, creed, religion or social background, class.
  • The key components of formal equality are legal equality and political equality.
    • Legal equality: based on equality before the law in relation to legal decision making.
    • Political equality: emphasises the idea of democratic participation, voting rights.
  • The idea of equality of opportunity.
  • For liberals social equality is not so much important because people are not born the same.
  • It only believes that there should be equality of opportunity in order to improve skills or abilities and social equality.
  • A meritocratic society is based on chance or luck.
  • Liberal equality is unjust in so far as it treats unlike individuals alike.
  • The question hinges on how rights should be applied.
  • Lays emphasis on the idea of equality of opportunity.
  • Left-liberal equality of opportunity promotes giving a head start to everyone in education.
  • Socialist equality of opportunity seeks to correct for all unchosen disadvantages, disadvantages that is for which the agent cannot herself reasonably be held responsible, whether they be disadvantages that reflect social misfortune or disadvantages that reflect natural misfortune.
  • Where socialist equality of opportunity prevails, differences of outcome reflect nothing but differences of taste and choice, not differences in natural and social capacities and powers.
  • Under socialist equality of opportunity, differences in income must be nothing but different income/leisure preferences.
  • The socialist equality of opportunity amounts to equality of outcome.
  • Under socialist equality of opportunity, differences do not constitute inequalities in the benefits people get in life.

Liberalism – Part Two

  • Who is the subject of the Rights of Man? Is it the Individual as citizen or as a human species?
  • What are positive rights and negative rights?
  • Readings:
    • Andrew Heywood, Politics, 4th Edition, chapter 2.
    • Michael Sandel, Democratic Discontent.
    • Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction, chapter 2, Liberalism.
    • Refer back to the readings by Gamble, Gutman, and Cohen.

The Two Concepts of Liberty/Freedom – Isaiah Berlin

  • Individual liberty or freedom is the supreme value for liberals (both classic and modern).
  • But, liberal theorists believe that freedom should be limited.
  • Freedom requires the recognition of duties and responsibilities by the individual designate.
  • It is Isaiah Berlin who makes the distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom.
  • Positive liberty also supports the idea of equality of outcome and negative liberty only supports the idea of equality of opportunity (meritocracy).

Principle of Negative Freedom/Liberty

  • This notion identifies more with the categories of Classical liberalism which adheres to the idea of a minimal state which maintains order and personal security
  • The two crucial principles of liberalism are “government by consent and civil liberty”.
  • This is how the state was conceived as a partnership between government and the people expressed in a contract (69).
  • Government was seen as a necessary device for securing objectives like the maximum freedom of citizens.
  • Civil liberty under these principles meant; the absence of government interference and control in economic life and religious toleration.
  • For Locke, the role of the state was to provide for “safety and security of the commonwealth, and of every particular man’s goods and person”.
  • This kind of constitutionalism rested on the “acceptance of social hierarchy that protected great inequalities of wealth and position”.
  • It made the “ownership of land a basic requirement for political participation”.
  • Under liberal democratic constitutionalism, there was a shift from basing liberty on historical precedents or biblical authority to the rights of man.
  • The monarchical system of government was based on the “grounds of hereditary rights, ancient tradition, or scriptural authority”.
  • The notion of the rights of man is based on the idea that, “the rights of man belonged to individuals as individuals in the state of nature and therefore prior to their entry into the society”.
  • The state must protect the natural rights of citizens which included the right to own property, the protection of property, no taxation without representation, the right to choose government and give consent.
  • In order to institute these rights those participating in the American Declaration of Independence, who are themselves land owners wanted to limit the scope of these rights and they wanted them to be protected through the creation of a republic.
  • And they argued for the retention of slavery.
  • The central Ideal of liberalism is “The organisation of state power to protect the sphere of private life in civil society”.
  • The main facet of negative freedom or liberty is the idea that there should be non-interference with the wider freedom of the individual by others or by the state.
  • But the question is, how wide could or should this area of non-interference be?
  • How unlimited or limited it should be?
  • Does its idea of natural freedom lead to chaos where the needs of the majority cannot be satisfied?
  • It neglects the social needs of individuals and puts high value on other goals such as justice, happiness, culture, or security.
  • For them there is a minimum area of human freedom which must not be violated.
  • But what are the limits of this freedom?
  • The advocates of negative freedom seek to draw a frontier between the private sphere and the public sphere.
  • But where is it to be drawn?
  • The negative liberty principle does not outline the conditions for the use of the freedom it advocates for.
  • They believe that individual liberty is the ultimate end of the human condition without outlining the social or economic conditions that make this freedom realisable.
  • The liberal theorists who believed in the pursuit of human nature assumed that the area of private life was not compatible with government intervention.
  • These theorists included Mills, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, etc.

Positive Freedom/Liberty

  • What is the nature of the relationship between the state and the individual as defined under the principle of positive liberty?
  • It identifies more with the principles of Modern liberalism which promotes the role of the state through social and economic intervention.
  • The word positive derives from the wish of the individual to be the master of his/her own destiny without any external interference.
  • It believes that, the true goals of man (happiness, performance of duty, wisdom, a just society, self- fulfilment must be identical with his freedom.
  • The government must ensure that the individual is capable of this self-realisation.
  • That is, in order to realise these goals, the individual has to be inflated into some super personal entity, i.e. a state, a class, a tribe, a collective, or a nation.
  • In other words, in the moment that the individual cannot command his/her goals, they should be aided by the state.

The Separation of Power Doctrine

  • Montesquieu’s doctrine of separation of powers, hold that the legislative, executive and judicial powers of government should be separated.
  • The core features of a liberal democracy are: constitutional government, guaranteed civil liberties and individual rights, checks and balances, regular elections, party competition and political pluralism, civil society, and a market oriented economy.
  • It relies on a notion of representation which supports the idea of democracy.
  • Its advocates like Bentham and Locke argued for “limited government and economic individualism”.
  • Liberal democratic procedures are used as means for choosing those who to exercise executive functions in a modern state.
  • The government of laws rather than the government of man became the slogan of liberty.
  • The role of the state under liberal constitutionalism is to remove obstacles to the dynamism of civil society.
  • Written constitutions and the Bill of Rights play a role in constitutional liberalism.
  • The struggle for individual liberty is meant to undermine the legitimacy of all social authority (kings, priests, or family) through the promotion of the Bill of Rights (lookup for the features of the Bill of Rights).
  • The key device of constitutionalism that we want to focus on in these discussions is the separation of the powers of government: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.
  • To avoid permanent and structural conflict between the executive and the legislature a veto power or a two thirds majority can be instituted.
  • These are meant to disperse power and weaken government and to force it to perform the functions assigned to it.
  • Some liberal were afraid of uncontrolled liberty hence they opposed democracy.
  • These were some of the elitist and authoritarian tendencies of liberalism which were based on its nature as a rationalist ideology which places emphasis on science.
  • This scientific turn shows that liberalism privileges certain kinds of knowledge I.e., inductive knowledge (observation, measurement, prediction, and experiment) or logical deductions from first principles.
  • Since there exists objective facts, knowledge is therefore said to depend on calculation.
  • Majoritarianism: Can the majority use democratic institutions to infringe on the rights of minorities?
  • Majoritarianism is viewed as a problem that is inherent to liberal democratic procedures.
  • The advocates of liberal constitutionalism hold a pessimistic view of human nature and believe that if the majority are not refrained by law they can attack the minority.
  • Because of its majoritarian tendencies, democracy is regarded as the tyranny of the majority.
  • The 65% threshold or the two thirds majority system tries to do away with this majoritarianism.
  • The legislature: it is the sovereign body directly elected by the people, it decides on the kind of rules or laws to be enforced, and it votes the necessary funds to be used to maintain these laws.
  • It checks the power of the executive and makes law.
  • The theory of representation in English constitutionalism was used to Establish the two Houses of Parliament; the House of Lords and House of Commons, with the monarch playing a symbolic role.
  • For Edmund Burke representatives cannot serve their sectional interests, rather they must have national interests (the idea of civic duty).
  • You should also be able to identify some of the problems associated with the process of representation.
  • Parliaments were established as deliberative assemblies which should function through defined constitutional processes.
  • The executive: it is armed with the mandate of the legislature and tax revenues, it enforces laws and protects the security of the whole community.
  • The judiciary: it interprets the law in the instance of a clash between citizens or the state and a private citizen.
  • That is, it interprets the meaning of law (constitutional and statutory), and reviews the powers of government.
  • It is neutral and should protect the individual from the state.