Liberalism

V

Utilitarianism

In Britain, liberalism was elaborated by the utilitarian school, chiefly the jurist Jeremy Bentham and his disciple, the economist John Stuart Mill. The utilitarians reduced all human experiences to pleasures and pains, maintaining that the only function of the state was to increase pleasure and reduce pain and that legislation was acceptable as an evil designed to reduce worse evils. Utilitarian liberalism had an especially beneficial effect on the reform of British criminal law. Bentham demonstrated that the harsh penology of the 18th century was uneconomical and that leniency was shrewd as well as decent. Mill defended the individual's right to act freely, even to the person's own detriment. His essay “On Liberty” (1859) is one of the most eloquent defenses of free speech.

VI

Liberalism in Transition

By the middle of the 19th century, liberal thought concerning constitutionalism, wider suffrage, toleration of dissent, absence of arbitrariness, and policies designed to promote happiness had acquired powerful advocates in Britain and other European countries and in the United States. Despite a prevalent tendency to find fault with the U.S., European visitors considered that nation an exemplar of liberalism because of its popular culture, emphasis on equality, and wide suffrage. Nevertheless, liberalism reached a stage of crisis at this time, in relation to democracy and economic power, that was important to its later development. On the one hand, some democrats such as the French philosopher and author Jean Jacques Rousseau were not liberals. Rousseau objected to the network of voluntary, private groups that many liberals considered essential to the movement. On the other hand, most early liberals were not democrats. Neither Locke nor Voltaire had believed in universal suffrage, and even most 19th-century liberals feared mass participation in politics, holding that the so-called lower classes were uninterested in the principal values of liberalism, that is, that they were indifferent to freedom and hostile to the expression of diversity in society. As suffrage steadily widened in the 19th century, with the successive reform acts in Britain in 1832, 1867, 1884, and 1885, many liberals became concerned chiefly with preserving the individual values that they identified with an aristocratic social and political order. Their place as social critics and reformers soon was taken by more radical groups such as the socialists.

VII

Economics

The crisis concerning economic power was more profound. One branch of liberal philosophy was its economics as developed by the so-called classical economists, notably the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith and British economist David Ricardo. Economic liberals opposed mercantilist restrictions on economic activity and favored unhampered private enterprise. Such thinkers as the British statesman John Bright argued against such legislation as maximum-hour laws on the ground that it infringed on liberty and that society, particularly its economy, would flourish best when it was regulated least. As industrial capitalism developed in the 19th century, economic liberalism continued to be characterized by a negative attitude toward state authority. The working classes began to suspect that the philosophy protected the interests of powerful economic groups, particularly manufacturers, and that it encouraged a policy of indifference and even of brutality toward the working classes. These classes, which had begun to acquire political status and organized strength, turned to the political liberalism that was more concerned with their needs—that of the socialist and labor parties.

The outcome of this crisis in economic and social thinking was the development of positive liberalism. As noted, certain modern liberals, like the Austrian-born economist Friedrich August von Hayek, consider the positive attitude an essential betrayal of liberal ideals. Others, such as the British philosophers Thomas Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet, known as the “Oxford Idealists,” devised a so-called organic liberalism designed to “hinder hindrances to the good life.” Green and Bosanquet advocated positive state action to promote self-fulfillment, that is, to prevent economic monopoly, abolish poverty, and secure people against the disabilities of sickness, unemployment, and old age. They came also to identify liberalism with the extension of democracy.

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VIII

20th Century U.S.

In the U.S., positive liberalism was further extended, with such developments as the social criticism of the muckrakers, the agitation for and enactment of legislation curbing trusts and extending the suffrage to women, the trade-union movement, the “New Freedom” of President Woodrow Wilson, and the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Gradually these programs, movements, and laws prepared the way and provided sanctions for government intervention in the economy. The U.S. Supreme Court, which had long maintained a sturdy defense against such intervention, heard eloquent defense for state regulation of hours and wages by both conservatives, such as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and liberals, such as Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis. Their opinions were accepted by the majority after 1936, when the Court sustained one act of New Deal legislation after another, asserting that individual citizens must be protected against overpowering economic groups and from disasters they have not brought on themselves. Legislative enactments provided for old-age and survivors insurance, unemployment insurance, federal control of various financial interests, minimum wages, supervision of agricultural production, and the right of labor unions to organize and bargain collectively.

Despite the metamorphosis in the philosophy of liberalism since the mid-19th century, almost all modern liberals agree that their common objective is enlargement of the individual's opportunity to realize full potentialities.

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