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

by Ian Dunt

True liberals had to do something else too, which was arguably even more difficult: listen to those who disagreed with them. They had to open themselves out completely to the most compelling, informed, effective and eloquent attacks from the opposing position. ‘He must feel the full force of the difficulty,’ they stressed. This required something even greater than confidence and independence. It required empathy.

On Liberty is often criticised, both in its own time and ours, as being a somehow cold vision of the world, as an attempt to promote an atomised society of isolated individuals, with no responsibilities to each other, whose only relationship to humanity is through the mediation of the harm principle. But that is not so. The harm principle was merely there to protect each individual against unwanted interference by others. The central argument of the book was not for any particular form of society. It was simply that people truly chose their lives, rather than have it chosen for them.

Marx’s main philosophical and economic concern was labour – the way in which humankind worked to adapt its environment. Throughout history, Marx argued, human labour had operated under different types of political control. First there had been primitive communism, where everything was held in common. Then there was slave society, where labourers were owned by a master. Then feudalism, where they were technically free but worked on their lord’s land. And finally capitalism, where they worked for a wage using machinery owned by their employer. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society,’ Marx wrote in the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto, ‘is the history of class struggles.’

Marx’s theory was an impressive intellectual achievement. It is difficult to even begin to describe the extent of its influence, not just to communist thought, but to social democracy and anarchism. By the latter part of the 20th Century, one third of the world’s population lived under governments which claimed to follow its ideas.

But as attractive as that vision was, Marx’s theory followed a pattern that western philosophy had seen before. It replicated Rousseau. Instead of focusing on the individual, Marxism suggested that the authentic self was at the social level in the form of class. The true emancipation of humankind did not come from personal liberty, it came from the freedom of the group. Those who could perceive this, and its scientific basis, had authentic consciousness. Those who could not were experiencing false consciousness.

Once the party accused a member of something, it was seen as a further crime to proclaim one’s innocence. This was an act of dissent against the will of the party. In fact, any expression of personal conviction, or private conscience, was considered an act of rebellion.

These two systems of thought seemed to be polar opposites. They fought each other in the streets and defined themselves in opposition to one another. But in fact there was an underlying similarity. Fascism did for race what communism did for class. The individual was disregarded. Instead, the authentic social self was to be found in an organic racial community.

Unlike the great political philosophies of communism, conservatism and liberalism, fascism had no intellectual heft. There was no Karl Marx, or Edmund Burke, or John Stuart Mill, no learned Victorian debate to fall back on. Fascism did not communicate through the mind. It was pumped into the heart and pursued with the fist. Fascist communication operated on the level of emotion, via vitriolic rhetoric, mass-ceremonies and organised violence.

Between 1929 and 1953, when Stalin died, 18 million Soviet citizens passed through the gulag system. A further six million were internal exiles. A minimum of 2.7 million people died in the gulag system and exile villages.

In total during the war, around three million Jews were killed in the extermination camps, 700,000 in the mobile gas vans, 1.3 million by being shot, and up to a million from hunger, disease or murder. Around six million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime and its allies. This was the consequence of liberal failure. This was what happened when the individual was destroyed.

The economic chaos after the First World War had ravaged Europe. The Great Depression which followed led directly to the triumph of the Nazi party. If liberalism was going to survive, if it was going to prevent totalitarianism, these types of events could never be allowed to reoccur.

Nowadays, Hayek is treated as a conservative, but that’s not right. He was a liberal. He believed in the freedom of the individual and his views, whether economic or political, flowed from that concern. When he failed to abide by his convictions, for instance when in his old age he voiced support for dictatorships, he betrayed himself as a liberal, not as a conservative.

Hayek recognised a central truth: that fascism and communism were variants of the same evil. They might appear as polar opposites, but they reflected a similar effort to destroy individual freedom.

‘It is obvious that an individualist society left to itself does not work well or even tolerably,’ Keynes said. ‘The more troublesome the times, the worse does a laissez-faire system work.’ He was aiming to destroy not just the economic arguments of the time, but the underlying assumption behind them: that the self-interest of each individual necessarily improved the lot of all.

Keynes’ vision was intent on finding a middle ground. The free market would do what it did best and the state would do what it could not. In liberal terms, it meant that the market and the state were to be treated with the same degree of scepticism. Both were necessary. Both, in the right way, at the right time, were advantageous. But both were also a potential threat to freedom. They had to be held in check.

In Keynes’ system, the whole could still benefit from the self-interest of the individual. But he introduced a vital addition. The individual also succeeded because of the good of the whole. The multiplier demonstrated that people’s fortunes were bound up with one another. They were not alone. They were not defined exclusively by their self-interest. They relied on one another.

On 15th April 1994, GATT modernised and expanded. One hundred and twenty-three nations signed an agreement turning it into a new international body: the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Today, there are 164 members, including all major trading countries.

The project to end nationalism through trade had begun with a commitment to eradicate war.

The first type of rights – the old liberal ones – were branded first generation rights. The second type – the new Keynesian-tinged ones – were branded second generation rights.

Their response to it was the Refugee Convention, signed in 1951 and then beefed up with a Protocol in 1967. Anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of nationality, politics, religion, or membership of a particular race or ethnic group, now had a right to seek and be granted protection by another country. In this, as in all parts of the post-war settlement, the message was simple: never again.

And then two men in England tried to address the problem. One of them was English and never fitted in. The other wasn’t and always did. They were both, at heart, outsiders. Their names were George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin. Orwell was a stubborn socialist journalist, made for dirty typewriters and trench warfare. Berlin was a philosopher nestled into the institutional splendour of Oxford, made for fine restaurants and glamorous dinner parties. But as distinct as they seemed, they shared crucial qualities. They despised the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in equal measure. They were committed to the notion of the individual. They believed in basing political ideas on what could be practically demonstrated. And they were fascinated by the question of belonging. It was through their work, conducted at the same time and in the same country, but culturally a million miles apart, that liberalism’s relationship with identity started to be articulated.

Politically, he didn’t quite fit in either. There was a left-winger in there somewhere, but also a standard-issue Burma police authoritarian. He subscribed to the progressive magazine Adelphi, for instance, but would also get so frustrated by it that he occasionally nailed it to a tree and used it for target practice.

It seemed to her that even if you no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to follow in the ancient ways than to drift in rootless freedom.’

Spain made Orwell realise that Stalinism and fascism were equivalent evils. ‘The Spanish war and other events of 1936–7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood,’ he said. ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.’ In the years to come, conservatives would seek to downplay Orwell’s socialism, so he could be turned into a typical anti-Soviet figure of the Cold War, but that was to misunderstand him. He was a socialist, albeit one with an unshakeable commitment to personal freedom. ‘I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential,’ he said, ‘if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.’ But he wasn’t simply a socialist with liberal sensibilities. He was something else, something really quite unusual. He had split himself in two. There was the civilian, who fought for socialism. And then there was the writer, who was a liberal, by professional duty.

For a while Orwell had presumed that what people were missing was the church. But now it seemed clear that it was something more powerful. Patriotism, he wrote, had ‘overwhelming strength’ – Hitler and Mussolini had grasped its importance and exploited it in their rise to power. Those who opposed them had not and had paid the price. People’s need for belonging would never go away, Orwell warned. There would never be a world of Constants, adrift from their nation, cosmopolitan, floating between countries as if they were towns. You could either accept this fact and incorporate it into your political agenda, or leave it to the fascists and let them have a monopoly on people’s sense of identity.

Orwell’s English patriotism did not demand conformity. It did not suggest homogeneity. It was an individual expression of admiration that could only have come from someone who had never quite fitted in, with the kind of eyes and attention to detail which that status gave him. He found the love of his country in tiny details – ‘solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.’

It was possible for those who admired freedom to still feel a deep affinity with the nation, without in any way reducing their commitment to the individual. In 1945, with the war over, Orwell started to refine this idea in a way that incorporated his abiding concern with objective truth. He did it in an extraordinary essay called Notes on Nationalism.

Orwell said. ‘The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.’

Orwell wasn’t trying to portray a world without hope. He was writing a call to arms. He wanted to demonstrate the extent of the threat from totalitarian thought. And he wanted to show how it could be defeated. The defence lay in a vigorous defence of objective reality. That was the only route to freedom, as it had been since the dawn of the Cogito.

Like Orwell, he was fascinated by the religious embrace that could be placed around that sense of belonging, despite rejecting the belief itself. ‘I have never known the meaning of the word God,’ he said. ‘I cannot even claim to be an atheist or an agnostic – I am somewhat like a tone-deaf person in relation to music.’ But regardless, Berlin kept to the Jewish festivals all his life. They were an expression of allegiance and provided a sense of meaning. ‘Stone-dry atheists,’ he said, ‘don’t understand what men live by.’

It began with belonging. This wasn’t some kind of irrelevance, as many liberals had treated it, or something for people to discard as they grew more sophisticated. It was a central feature of the human condition. Like Orwell, Berlin was intent on looking at how people really behaved in their day-to-day lives, and prioritising that empirical self over abstract theories. ‘This rejection of natural ties,’ he said, ‘seems to me noble but misguided. When men complain of loneliness, what they mean is that nobody understands what they are saying: to be understood is to share a common past, common feelings and language, common assumptions, possibility of intimate communications – in short, to share common forms of life.’

There would never be a day in which the problems of humanity would go away. Conflict was a fundamental attribute of the human condition. It would never stop. This, for Berlin, was a description of humanity as it really was. It was an empirical assessment of how humans actually behaved, rather than how philosophers pretended they did.

Berlin looked back through the history of thought. It was, in most cases, a history of denying the reality of human life. Philosophers kept insisting that there was a mythical authentic self that lay separate to the way people truly behaved. This was what Rousseau and Marx had done. They had imagined a collective higher self – either in the general will or class consciousness – which was disconnected from how people acted in real life. And then their disciples, in the years after their death, had tried to bludgeon humans into the desired shape, at terrible cost. But Berlin did not restrain himself just to the standard enemies of liberalism. He turned his guns on liberals themselves. It wasn’t just the idea of a collective higher self that was the problem. It was any notion of dividing humans into different selves. It was anything we introduced beyond their actual demonstrable behaviour.

The very idea of an authentic self, even at an individual level, opened the door to tyranny. ‘This is one of the most powerful and dangerous arguments in the entire history of human thought,’ Berlin insisted.

Berlin’s liberalism encouraged people to embrace the full varieties of life in whatever manner they wanted – whether it was patriotism, hedonism, duty, romance, charity or anything else. But the embrace of those values stopped the moment they challenged freedom, reason, autonomy or moderation. Because to undermine those values was to undermine the capacity to embrace values in the first place.

Berlin had committed liberalism more deeply to its founding ideas: of doubt, complexity and empirical reality. It fixed its gaze on what humans actually did, instead of what philosophers thought they should. It was more truthful, permissive and humane. But there was something else, something properly vital, which stood above all that. By placing values at the foundation of his thoughts, Berlin had given liberalism a human warmth.

Until Berlin, there had often been the sense of liberalism perhaps being slightly cold. Locke’s theory was developed with the aim of settling property disputes. Even Taylor and Mill, who understood and celebrated the diversity of human life, were fundamentally concerned with managing the rules of non-interference between individuals. But Berlin’s theory was built out of the confusing joys and agonies of the human experience. His liberalism was not just a way of managing the disputes which emerged, but also encouraging as many of the goods as possible. Liberalism was required as the guardian of human life in all its diversity and complexity. It was liberalism that safeguarded love, honour, disinterest, obsession, discipline, joy, stoicism and everything else. It protected people’s ability to choose what they wanted, did not lie to them about what that would entail, and ensured that each value was underpinned with a consideration for individual freedom. That included, most importantly of all, the value upon which Berlin had himself laboured: belonging.

Both Orwell and Berlin had started with acceptance. They accepted that patriotism mattered to people. Not all of them perhaps, and not all the time, but enough to make it a powerful source of identity and self-definition. Orwell’s response to that acceptance was political and personal. Politically, he urged liberals to recognise the force of patriotism so that fascists could not monopolise it. Personally, he recognised that the tug of belonging and group membership must be mediated by a commitment to truth and objectivity. Berlin’s response was philosophical. If liberalism was grounded in the individual, he argued, then whatever the individual cared about was important. Liberalism was bound, by its own principle...

The end of the USSR was considered the complete historical triumph of the laissez-faire model. Two opposing economic extremes had faced each other: communism and unfettered capitalism. And now one of them was victorious.

By the time centre-left parties had fought their way back into power in the 1990s – under Democratic President Bill Clinton in the US and New Labour prime minister Tony Blair in the UK – they had largely accepted the deregulation agenda. These leaders were not, as some subsequently claimed, identical to conservatives. They invested in social programmes in a way the preceding governments never had. Health and social services, which had dwindled into chronic dysfunction through lack of funding, were revitalised. But there was an acceptance of the core proposition that the market performed best when left to its own devices. Clinton summarised the approach neatly in his 1996 State of the Union address. ‘We know big government does not have all the answers,’ he said. ‘The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.’

‘The rating agencies were important tools,’ Jim Callahan, a trader for the investment bank Salomon Brothers, said, ‘because the people that we were selling these bonds to had never really had any history in the mortgage business. They were looking for an independent party to develop an opinion.’ But there was a critical failure of incentives at the credit rating agencies. In truth, they weren’t really independent actors. They were companies. And they were being paid by the very same banks whose products they were evaluating.

After three decades of singing from Hayek’s hymnsheet of non-interference, politicians and bankers changed their views overnight. An industry which had constantly broadcast the need for the state to keep out of its way was pleading for government assistance. And governments which had spent decades insisting on the inefficiency of state intervention in the markets now recognised that it was the only way to protect the broader economy. The emergency measures introduced across the US, Europe and Britain totalled over $7 trillion.

If cultural relativism was true, even the most despicable acts could be justified on the basis that they were culturally appropriate. The conclusions it came to, much to the horror of its left-wing defenders, were invariably very right wing. What opposition could there be to imperialism, for example, if it was a genuine cultural practice? Why oppose Nazism? To accept relativism was to submit to atrocities at the extreme of the human condition.

Universality does exist – not just in theory, but as a point of objective fact. All cultures have a belief in key values like freedom, equality, justice and belonging, even if they express them in different ways, estimate them to different degrees and apply them to different groups.

Relativism also presumed people were much more rigid than they really were. In reality, individuals have various identities – parent, child, spouse, a lover of your continent, your country, your city, and much more besides. Each of these identities had its own multiple cultural sources. No single culture defined an individual. They contributed to them, but they did not encapsulate them.

Take positive discrimination. This is the tactic of introducing unequal treatment in order to improve the condition of people who face unfair disadvantage, for instance by favouring female applicants for senior positions in business or politics. For some liberals, this was intolerable. The use of unequal law to favour a group was a step too far. It treated people on the basis of their group membership rather than as individuals. For others, it was a way to achieve equal status for individuals. The starting position of society was stacked against marginalised groups. They had reduced access to education, faced greater material barriers, and experienced widespread discrimination. As a temporary measure, positive discrimination could rebalance those odds.

Taylor and Mill had encountered this problem in the case of Mormon polygamy. Liberals, they believed, had to allow people to live illiberal lives, anything else was a kind of tyranny. They had recommended a solution of entry and exit checks – a need for the liberal state to ensure that people entered these arrangements willingly and were able to leave when they wanted. The blossoming of cultural diversity in the 20th Century threw up many more examples. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, believed it was against God’s will to receive blood and sometimes tried to exclude their children from necessary medical procedures. The Pueblo Indian community in the US denied housing benefits to Christian converts. An Old Order Amish community, which wanted to live apart from mainstream American life, won the right to take its children out of school at the age of 14 instead of 16, in order to limit their awareness of the outside world.

The process that created identity politics began in the 1960s and 70s, when campaigners on the left started to ask some searching questions of liberalism. What exactly was this thing called the individual? Liberals had an easy answer. The individual was everyone. The whole point of the individual was to create a set of political rules that treated people as moral equals. It was a category that stood for universal humankind. But if that was true, why did the entire practice of liberalism appear to refute it? Why did it take so long for women to enter the conversation? Why were black people excluded from it? Why were lesbians and gay men seemingly outside of its remit? Maybe the individual wasn’t everyone after all. Maybe when liberals said ‘individual’ what they actually meant was heterosexual white men. And who were these liberal theorists exactly? They were mostly heterosexual white men. Campaigners started putting two and two together. It wasn’t hard. The conclusion was near-inescapable. Liberalism wasn’t about freedom. It was about freedom for heterosexual white men. This critique was called standpoint theory. It was one of the most important ideas in 20th-Century politics. As soon as it was expressed, it changed everything.

Standpoint theory was a form of epistemology which stated that our knowledge of the world was dependent on the social context in which it was learned. If you were a white man, with the experiences of a white man, your view of freedom would be that of a white man. You would prioritise things like free speech, and maybe property rights. You probably wouldn’t prioritise office harassment, or racial discrimination in employment contracts, or domestic violence. Standpoint theory was more than a political argument. It went to the heart of the human ability to process reality. It suggested that people’s imaginative capacity was limited. When they thought about the world, they went through their own experiences and then projected them out as if they were universal. But they weren’t. They were just their experiences. Given the history of liberalism, this theory seemed convincing. Liberal theorists had spent generations talking about universally applicable ideals that had been applied only to the segment of the population that looked like them.

The problem wasn’t just about past failures. It was conceptual. Radical feminists didn’t feel the individual was a useful unit of analysis. The relationship between radical feminism and liberalism was a lot like the one liberalism had with Marxism. Marxists had looked at what liberals called a transaction – a business owner hiring a labourer, for instance – and reinterpreted it as an example of class oppression. Radical feminists looked at what liberals called interpersonal relationships and reinterpreted them as part of a system of gender oppression.