How To Be A Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

by Ian Dunt

The first lie is that you do not exist as an individual. Nationalism claims that society is composed of two groups, who are in a perpetual conflict with one another: the people and the elite.

The second lie is that the world is simple. This lie proceeds logically from the first. If the world is split between two groups, instead of being a vast and diffuse network of individual and organisational interests, it follows that all that is wrong is the result of the elite and all that is right is the result of the people.

The third lie is that you must not question. To speak out, to interrogate, to inquire, is to reject the purity of the people. It is to place yourself above them.

The fourth lie is that institutions are engaged in a conspiracy against the public.

The fifth lie is that difference is bad. This applies to people from other countries, or with different coloured skin, or sexuality, or clothing, or language. This view is entailed by the concept of the people as a singular, virtuous body. All outside entities are, by definition, a challenge to its purity.

The sixth lie is that there is no such thing as truth. A commitment to objective fact is treated as the mewling of the elite. Evidence and reason, the qualities that allow humanity to aspire towards certainty, are dismissed as plots against the people. Statistical authorities, academics, economic analysts, trading experts and investigative journalists are categorised as political opponents. This is because truth is a challenge to power.

Liberalism is the struggle for the freedom of the individual. When it is truly followed, it can never be the tool of the powerful. It can never be used to oppress. It can only liberate. It rejects the false choice of the people versus the elite. It is committed to empirical reality. It stands up for institutions, and diversity, and, chief among all values, the liberty of every person to engage in their own act of self-creation. To be who they want to be. To live where they want to live. To love who they want to love. To do as they please, with the only restraints on their actions entailed by the protection of liberty for others. It pursues freedom, because freedom makes all other values possible.

It had four sequences: First, separate out what you know to be true from the parts you can doubt. Second, break down the remaining problems into smaller units. Third, solve the simple ones first and work your way up. Finally, review the work and assess if anything has been left out.

In truth, the ideas Descartes was outlining were not really that new. Aristotle had a similar thought when he said that ‘to perceive that we perceive or think is to perceive that we exist.’ St Augustine, the 5th-Century philosopher, did too, when he responded to sceptical arguments by replying that ‘if I am mistaken, I exist.’ Jean de Silhon, a friend of Descartes, had toyed with similar formulations. But the history of ideas is not the history of the people who first thought of them. More often than not, it is the history of the person who popularised them.

Although modern liberalism is overwhelmingly secular, one of its ironies is that the seeds of its growth were planted by Christians making pious protests against Catholicism.

These three ideas – of personal freedom, the individual, and the uncertainty of truth – would become central to liberal thought.

People did not always know what was true, so free debate was needed to find out.

And then Overton went one step further. He outlined where those rights ended: at the exact point at which someone else’s rights were infringed. You were free to do whatever you wanted, as long as you did not take away the freedom of others.

Locke’s contemporary, the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, constructed his influential idea of Leviathan using a similar process. He deemed humankind to be violent and irrational, resulting in a state of nature which would be ‘nasty, brutish and short.’ It was therefore necessary to have a strong central government that could prevent a ‘war of all against all.’

Locke’s view was more positive. He argued that the state of nature was a place of perfect freedom. Liberty was not a modern development, the product of rebellious minds. It was the starting condition of the species. Humans were ‘by nature all free, equal and independent.’ They could ‘order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit.’ There was law, but it was not enforced from above. Everyone regulated it themselves, rationally and equally. ‘All the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal,’ Locke said, ‘no-one having more than any other.’

Locke was continuing a core liberal principle established in the Levellers’ Heads of Proposals. Power was dangerous. It had the capacity to infringe on individual liberty. So it had to be restrained by being broken up and put in many locations. Legitimacy, Locke said, involved ‘balancing the power of government, by placing several parts of it in different hands.’

It was liberty, not authority, which was the natural state of humankind. It was government, not rights, which was artificial. And it was individuals, not the state, who decided if the government was legitimate. This was the final philosophical articulation of decades of struggle, from the start of the English Civil War to the close of the Glorious Revolution.

Monarchy accorded with Hobbes’ idea that people were corrupt and unruly and therefore needed a firm leader to keep them in order. But the states were republics. Like Locke, they presumed that people were fundamentally good and rational. Order would come from below, from the public themselves.

There was something terribly wrong with the democratic system the revolutionaries had established. It produced a central state that was too weak to function and chaotic state governments that could be strong-armed by local interest groups. America was discovering one of the central propositions of liberal theory: that democracy is not enough. Without protections, the will of the people can be just as oppressive as arbitrary government.

The constitution was a short, prosaic document. This was not the poetry of the Declaration of Independence. It was the section-by-section, article-by-article formulation of its aspirations in legal terms. It was also a product of compromise, between those who wanted greater centralisation of power and those who cherished state independence. It led to positions no-one had originally proposed. But that, too, reflected the democratic practice of its values.

The legislature was called Congress. It was bicameral. The lower chamber, the House of Representatives, reflected the public vote. The representatives of each state were directly elected, in numbers proportionate to each state’s population.

The upper chamber was the Senate. Senators were elected, but they were more distant from the public than the representatives. They were not voted for directly, but chosen by popularly-elected state legislatures.

The branches were balanced against one another with countervailing restraints. The Supreme Court judges, for instance, were chosen by presidential nomination, but with Senate approval. The president could veto a congressional bill, but the veto could be overturned by a two-thirds majority in Congress. The president could be removed by Congress through the process of impeachment.

Not all of the decisions taken in the constitution worked. The use of non-proportional representation in the Senate gave excessive power to states with relatively few inhabitants. The inclusion of a presidential nomination to the Supreme Court would eventually create a hopelessly politicised body. But the real importance of what took place was not its specific form. It was the pursuit of the task itself. Radicals were now reaching an extremely sophisticated understanding of one of the central missions in liberal history: the separation of power – the attempt to carve it up, and balance it, in a web of coordinated tensions, so that it was prevented from ever lying in one place, ripe for misuse.

The individual had to be protected from the people as much as from the state. That involved individual rights, embodied in the Bill of Rights, and a restraint in the operation of democratic government, embodied in the US Constitution’s checks and balances.

And then he had the crucial thought, the one which took his self-obsessed ramblings and turned them into something political. If he did not know what was good for him, then society didn’t either. And if so, it had no right to tell him how to live.

The Wealth of Nations was an explanation and defence of capitalism – a system of production organised for profit. And it fitted liberalism like a glove.

John Stuart Mill was initiated into what one of his biographers, Alice Rossi, described as ‘perhaps the most intensive study regimen any child has ever been subjected to.’ By three he was learning Greek. By six he had written a history of Rome. By seven he was reading Plato. By eight he was learning Latin. By nine he had already read the Iliad dozens of times. By 11 he was on Aristotle. By 12 he had consumed whole libraries of Ancient Greek and Roman texts, studied logic and oratory, and developed a comprehensive understanding of Athenian institutions, legislation and governance. By 13 he had completed a full course in political economy. At 15 he was finally given the last part of the puzzle: a copy of Bentham’s philosophy. He had been created for this moment. His entire life had been reverse-engineered so that his mind would be most receptive to this work when it was handed to him.

The early manuscript detailed how the relentless study and his father’s refusal to let him play with other children had left Mill so physically incapable that he would struggle to do up a tie, even as an adult. He attempted several passages in which he described these defects in detail, then decided against them and simply wrote: ‘I consequently remained long, and in a less degree have always remained, inexpert in anything requiring manual dexterity.’ Mill described how he had been left friendless for the entirety of his childhood. His father was the only person he spent meaningful time with, and he was a cold, distant, punishing figure. ‘I thus grew up,’ he wrote, ‘in the absence of love and in the presence of fear.’

‘Even if there were errors,’ Mill concluded, ‘there might be a substratum of truth underneath them.’ He started to become obsessed with the idea of ‘half-truth’ – that there were little slivers of validity in everyone’s philosophy, which he could discover and reassemble, through a kind of empathetic intellectual archaeology. He had been raised to have complete faith in one system of thought, but now he grew wary of the idea that any ideology could provide all the answers. The whole idea of a ‘universal synthesis’ was flawed.

Mill never quite gave up on Utilitarianism, although the work he did on it in later life mangled it out of the shape fashioned by his father and Bentham. What he did give up on was the idea that it could provide a total scientific system for understanding the world. Instead, he saw it more as a framing device, a way of arming people with the right questions.

The most important works of the philosopher known as John Stuart Mill were in fact jointly produced by him and Harriet Taylor. Liberalism had a mother. And she was erased.

This thought was the precise opposite of the sentiment behind laissez-faire. It would not ‘let things be.’ It urged the opposite: shake things up. Turn the world over. Do not just accept the way things are. They were concluding that liberal principles, consistently applied, made the world more equal.

Earlier liberals had talked of the freedom of the individual. But from the Putney debates to Constant they had then quickly acted to limit those who could benefit – women were excluded, and those without property, and other races, and slaves. Now Taylor and Mill finally recognised the weakness of that proposition. Freedom was for everyone.

When the Commons finally passed a law granting women the same voting rights as men in 1928, 55 years after Mill’s death, an elderly Fawcett watched from the public gallery. Afterwards, she led a delegation of women to his statue in Embankment, and laid a wreath in his memory.

Mill envisaged a much more fundamentally equal society, involving a ‘well-paid and affluent body of labourers; no enormous fortunes, except what were earned and accumulated during a single lifetime; but a much larger body of persons than at present, not only exempt from the coarser toils, but with sufficient leisure, both physical and mental, to cultivate freely the graces of life.’ He was rejecting the easy laissez-faire dismissal of economic arguments, the wave of the hand that discarded the real lived experiences of human beings in favour of an assertion that in all times, at all places, society would be worsened by state interference. Instead, he was bedding his analysis in the third role of the state Smith outlined in the Wealth of Nations: the maintenance of ‘public works and certain public institutions.’ These were areas where the market failed and state action was needed. This duty was often ignored by the laissez-faire liberals who followed Smith, with the state reduced to just external defence and internal justice. But Mill fixed pointedly on it and expanded it. Like Smith he recognised the need for public provision of schooling for everyone. And like Smith he thought that public necessities like roads and canals might also require government assistance, but he updated this principle for the industrial age. Numerous public works were best done by local government, or under its oversight. This included natural monopolies such as gas and water, where, ‘though perfe...

‘Human beings should help one another, and the more so in proportion to the urgency of the need,’ he said. ‘None needs help so urgently as one who is starving.’ This required a kind of embryonic welfare state – the provision of government help to those in genuine need. It was not to be too generous, or else people would lose their initiative to work. Recipients should not get as much as they would by having a job. But they had to receive enough to cover essential costs.

it was the start of a school of liberalism which stood opposed to laissez-faire. It was egalitarian liberalism. It would not let things be, but instead prod away at them, ask questions, demand change, and test the success of freedom by the extent to which it resulted in equality. At the heart of it was a profound idea. The binary ‘state versus market’ debate was infantile. It was dangerous to suggest, as some socialists were starting to, that the state should provide everything. But it was also absurd to pretend that the market could do the same. The question of how far the government should interfere in the market, Mill said, in a comment that would echo into the future of liberalism, ‘does not admit of any universal solution.’

The book would go on to become the single most important work in the history of liberalism. It is On Liberty.

‘The will of the people practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people,’ they argued. ‘The people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.’ They branded this the ‘tyranny of the majority.’ This meant there were actually two threats to the individual: the state and society. Society’s threat to the individual was if anything more alarming than that of the state, because it could reach deeper into people’s lives.

The solution they invented was called the harm principle. It was extremely simple. ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,’ they wrote. ‘His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. In the part that merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’

You could disapprove all you wanted. And if someone did something which you found unpalatable, you could avoid or chastise them. Perhaps they were a serial liar, or cheated on their partner, or wasted all their money on gambling. All these things could rightfully earn someone the contempt of their peers. And this was potentially positive. It meant that people could pressure others to be more considerate. Moral judgement could advance humankind. What you could not justifiably do was force them to stop. If they wanted to commit errors and become a ‘subject of distaste,’ that was ultimately up to them.

People had to make their own decisions, based on the unique situation. The harm principle was designed to assist in debate, not to decide it. There were, however, basic individual liberties that could not be touched: freedom of thought and conscience, the freedom of ‘expressing and publishing opinions,’ freedom of lifestyle – ‘of doing as we like’ – and freedom of association.

These two cases showed the strange counter-intuitive character of liberalism. It was at once daringly radical – authorising countless actions which would be considered intolerable by the majority of people – and also practical and even-handed.

A basic principle was being articulated, which would become a source of controversy in liberalism in the 20th Century. You could decide to live life with less freedom, but there had to be entry and exit rights. You had to enter of your own free will and have the ability to leave when you wanted.

Objecting to something and then allowing it was not a defect in the system. It was the peak of liberal action: the point when a liberal lived up to their convictions.

Opposition was only the opening stage of the battle of ideas. It was also about synthesis. Intellectual progress came from finding that which was true or meaningful in your opponent’s argument and incorporating it into your own. At the heart of that thought was an astonishingly humble realisation: that there could be truth in the words of someone you disagreed with. Sometimes it was just a trace element. Sometimes it was a sizable chunk.

If an opinion was true, banning it robbed us of the opportunity to realise its truth. If it was false, a ban prevented us from recognising the validity of the opposing idea.

‘Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects, combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious and immoral?’

They did not know as they were writing, but in the same year that On Liberty was published, Charles Darwin would finally release his book outlining the theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species, after 20 years of nervous delay. It would be the most explosive assault on the religious account of existence since Galileo and a perfect demonstration of their argument.