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

by Ian Dunt

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 pursues freedom, because freedom makes all other values possible.

‘Quod vitae sectabor iter?’ – what path in life shall I follow?

Wrong (quod)

‘I was afraid that this introduction, which could have appeared as if it were designed to introduce the views of sceptics, would disturb weak minds.’ As a result, Descartes switched from his native French to Latin. This had the advantage of expanding his learned audience internationally, while excluding uneducated readers

‘As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new idea is so much ahead of his time that everyone thinks him silly,’ the 20th-Century liberal philosopher Bertrand Russell said. ‘Then gradually, the world becomes ready for the idea, and the man who proclaims it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit.’

He insisted: ‘No person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.’

It was a strange battle for liberty, one which can’t really be categorised in modern terms. James used arbitrary powers to pursue religious tolerance. His opponents fought against arbitrary power to maintain religious discrimination.

James’ approach had a crucial strategic flaw. He alienated too many people without bringing enough supporters onside to make up for it.

The Two Treatises put forward the modern conception of freedom: the right of do-as-you-please.

‘The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government,’ Locke said, ‘is the preservation of their property.’

the legislative power was above the executive power because it could impose limits on it.

democracy is not enough. Without protections, the will of the people can be just as oppressive as arbitrary government.

Simply opening up politics to the public would not, on its own, secure freedom. The individual had to be protected from the people as much as from the state.

This was the Terror.

No documents were produced, no lawyers for the defence were permitted, and they had no right to speak except in response to the prosecutors’ questions.

In the first nine months of the Terror, 16,000 people died under the guillotine’s blades.

The Paris Commune soon made it an official policy and Notre Dame cathedral was reclaimed as a ‘Temple of Reason.’ In several areas festivals were held in which priests were forced to renounce their faith and declare themselves ready to marry, ideally to a nun. About 20,000 priests were bullied into renouncing their faith.

She told him she was unloved, so he proposed to her on the spot. They were married the next year and bitterly unhappy a year after that.

The problem for leaders like Napoleon was that the public weren’t actually that interested in military glory, especially when it came at the expense of their wealth and their children’s lives. So a series of lies had to be fabricated to secure their support and pretend that an initiative which was essentially hostile was fundamentally defensive. Wars of aggression became issues of ‘national security.’

The totalitarian regime would inject itself into the minutia of people’s day-to-day lives. ‘Coercion will have to fill the gap left by sophistry,’ Constant said.

But there was an alternative to war. It was trade.

It was a peaceful way of securing the same objective: access to resources.

a new type of political unit, which he called the individual. Constant’s first attempt to articulate what this unit looked like came in a novel called Adolphe.

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.

Napoleon wanted to rebrand himself as a liberal ruler. ‘One is not the same man at 45 that one was at 30,’ the former emperor said. ‘The repose of a constitutional monarch might suit me quite well.’

the whole idea of ‘the people’ was suspect. There was no will of the people. There never had been. There was only the varied will of individuals, which even they themselves would struggle to articulate in a consistent way.

‘To defend the rights of minorities is to defend the rights of all,’ Constant said.

the essence of property, however. In defiance of those who possess it, it tends to a continual changing of hands.’

Being unfashionable with the Benthamite set was better than being suicidal.

This was a fundamental distinction between Mill and Constant. Constant had been prepared to accept the permanence of a leisured upper class. Mill wanted to destroy it. ‘I do not recognise as either just or salutary,’ he said, ‘a state of society in which there is any “class” which is not labouring.’

Mill made tea and played the piano for Harriet, making up the music as he went along.

‘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.

Moral judgement could advance humankind. What you could not justifiably do was force them to stop.

The harm principle was designed to assist in debate, not to decide it.

they revealed the highest possible achievement of liberal behaviour: the reluctant acceptance of things which you personally found to be distasteful.

Learning another language embedded this lesson even deeper. It taught people that there were whole concepts that their own language could not even articulate, and by doing so opened up the mind to the limitation of its own thoughts.

Intellectual progress came from finding that which was true or meaningful in your opponent’s argument and incorporating it into your own.

It followed that there should be almost no limits to freedom of speech.

But there was one limit: the incitement to violence.

‘An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor,’ they said, ‘ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer.’

They had spotted the beginnings of a feedback loop in which mass media – starting with newspapers and then radio, television and finally social media – would receive public opinion, affirm it, amplify it, then beam it back into the public, in a constant self-perpetuating cycle.

The conspiracy theory was attractive precisely because it was false.

The nationalists could never be proved wrong, or held to account for their actions, because this form of political rhetoric was completely divorced from objective reality. It operated in a parallel never-never land of fantasy.

Hayek believed that the economy was too complex to be understood and manipulated. He rejected the idea that economists could look down on it from above, like a town planner looking at a scale model, and work out what to do. And because people couldn’t understand the economy, their attempts to interfere in it would make things worse.

The Road to Serfdom.

This approach was politically possible before universal suffrage. When the victims of economic downturns could not vote, it had been easy for right-wing liberals to dismiss calls for action with the excuse that it would only make things worse. But those days were over.

‘We get into a vicious cycle,’ Keynes said. ‘We do nothing because we have not the money. But it is precisely because we do not do anything that we have not the money.’

Demand therefore rose and business confidence along with it. Private sector growth came from public sector stimulus. The consequence of public works was that, in the short term, the national debt would grow.

It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.’

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.’