Liberalism Quotes

“This is a book about a god that succeeded, though a rather neurotic god that frets about why it has succeeded, whether it really has succeeded, and, if it has, how long success can last. It asks itself who it is and which its idols are. It worries whether it deserves its success or whether it is simply a successor, the next god in line. For one so widely worshipped, the self-doubt is startling. But this is an ungodly god that got its start by challenging other authorities, if not the notion of authority itself. It is the kind of god that tells people to obey its commands so long as they agree to. Though it is hard to picture the world without it, nobody is quite sure what it is or why it feels indispensable. The god’s name is liberalism.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“I take liberalism for a practice guided by four loose ideas. I flag them in shorthand conflict, resistance to power, progress, and respect.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“leader of the Baden liberals, Carl von Rotteck, had cried “I prefer freedom without unity to unity without freedom.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Conservatives, on [Friedrich] Hayek’s account, suffered from the following weaknesses. They feared change unduly. They were unreasonably frightened of uncontrolled social forces. They were too fond of authority. They had no grasp of economics. They lacked the feel for “abstraction” needed for engaging with people of different outlooks. They were too cozy with elites and establishments. They gave in to jingoism and chauvinism. They tended to think mystically, much as socialists tended to overrationalize. They were, last, too suspicious of democracy.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Worry about underpopulation and lack of young men for soldiering led in 1889 to an extension of French nationality to those born in France of non-French fathers. In 1927, war-bled France relaxed restrictions on immigration, only to be villainously attacked on the right for letting in the wrong kind of foreigner, notably Jews, an exclusion codified in Vichy’s nationality laws.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Many liberals found themselves ready to agree with the cynical old adage cited by the Prague-born American scholar Karl Deutsch, in Nationalism and its Alternatives (1956), that a nation was a group of people united by a common mistake about their ancestry and a shared dislike of their neighbors.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Polemical energy is wasted on showing that liberalism’s aims and ideals are narrowly Western, secular-Enlightened, bourgeois-individualist, procapitalist or—to use a fashionable term of abuse—rootlessly cosmopolitan. None of these slurs or labels stick. No sect or party owns liberalism’s aims and ideals. They serve every nation, gender and class. If that brands liberals as universalists, so be it. They may wear their scarlet “U” with pride.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“The same man,” Roosevelt said, “who tells us that he does not want to see the government interfere with business . . . is the first to go to the White House and ask the government for a prohibitive tariff on his product.” In”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“the Second Empire did wonders on the other hand for French banking and industry. It”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Liberalism’s first guiding idea—conflict—was less an ideal or principle than a way to picture society and what to expect from society. Lasting conflict of interests and beliefs was, to the liberal mind, inescapable. Social harmony was not achievable, and to pursue it was foolish. That picture was less stark than it looked, for harmony was not even desirable. Harmony stifled creativity and blocked initiative. Conflict, if tamed and turned to competition in a stable political order, could bear fruit as argument, experiment, and exchange. Human power, second, was for liberals implacable. It could never be counted on to behave well. Superior power of some people over others, whether political, economic, or social, tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked. Liberalism’s call to resist power was often put negatively. Resistance required the refusal of submission and the prevention of domination by any single interest, faith, or class. Human character and human society as liberals saw them were, third, not static but dynamic. They were open to change. Liberal hope stiffened by liberal history suggested that both character and society might change for the better. The fourth liberal idea was that moral limits existed to how superior power could treat people. Might alone was not right. Power was obliged to respect people for themselves. Liberal respect could also be put negatively. It set out what superior power should not do: obstruct or intrude on people in pursuit of their chosen enterprises or beliefs. Once embraced democratically, respect for people as such forbade power from excluding anyone from the circle of liberal protection.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Looked at from the point of view of citizens, liberalism is a practice of politics for people who will not be bossed about or pushed around by superior power, whether the power of the state, the power of wealth or the power of society.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Good governance depends on the balance of forces.” In avoiding the domination of one power, he was echoing Madison and Guizot.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“First, human character was varied. Second, pleasure lay less in feeling things than in doing things, that is in pursuits and activities. Last, certain kinds of pleasure were “higher” than others. It was better to be “a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“To make laws for the regulation of trade,” he said in 1836, “is as wise as it would be to legislate about water finding a level or matter exercising its centripetal force.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Whatever the liberal mood, the task of containing and utilizing conflict was never over, just as the task was never over of resisting power. For liberals, unlike for conservatives or socialists, there was no escape from politics.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“But people were not ideal, and politics had to work with people as they were.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Absolute power could, as its defenders argued, be enlightened, beneficial, and benign. To liberals that was not enough. Absolute power could also change its mind when it wanted. It could turn harmful and malign. Intentions changed. Capacities lasted. Power was not to be trusted.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“Modern liberty in contrast was protection from unwanted interference by state or society.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea