“Liberalism: The Life of an Idea author: Edmund Fawcett publisher: Princeton University Press pub date: 05.04.2014 pp: 488 tags: Politics & Economics Andrew Sabl on Liberalism: The Life of an Idea”
“Fawcett takes liberalism to be primarily a response to change, to the shocks of industrial capitalism and 18th-century revolutions, heralding a new age of flux and uncertainty. Liberalism embraced the insight — both “dream” and “nightmare” — that modern political orders, in the face of such change, could never be static.”
“Thus Fawcett, a learned and polyglot former journalist, has set out to write not a “philosophy” of liberalism, but a “chronicle” of it: a series of dynamic adaptations and compromises. Liberalism retains four core ideas: the inescapability of social conflict; a distrust of power, whether political, social, or economic; faith in human progress; and “respect for people whatever they think and whoever they are.” Tracking those ideas, liberalism consistently seeks an ethical order without divine authority or tradition; an economic order without monopolies and local barriers; an international order of treaties and trade rather than force; and a political order without absolute authorities or unchecked powers.”
“What gives liberalism its variety and variability is not only the need to adapt to constant change but also the tension among these four ideas. Abandon any one of them and you’re no longer fully a liberal. Yet combining and vindicating all of them at once requires intellectual skill and political nerve.”
“Above all, the life of liberalism lay, and still lies, in a vision of conflict “turned to welcome ends in innovation, argument, and exchange.””
“Thus the “exemplary liberals” through whom Fawcett tells his story include Humboldt, Constant, Tocqueville, Mill, Keynes, Hobhouse, Popper, Rawls, and Hayek, and also Lincoln, Gladstone, Clemenceau, Stresemann, Franklin Roosevelt, Beveridge, LBJ, Thatcher, Kohl, and Mitterrand.”
“None of these insights, or a thousand others in this book, is proven. Few could easily be proven — much less disproven, the great liberal Karl Popper’s criterion for possible truth. No doubt detailed argument and historical evidence would show some of them to be confused or even false. Yet the world is much richer for having claims like this in it: the products not of professional scholarship but of reflection, erudition, and wisdom.”
“Wisest of all is the chapter on the compromises that gave us liberal democracy. Fawcett faces unflinchingly what too many of liberalism’s historians and defenders ignore: liberalism was, at its origins, an elite and elitist position. It was cool at best towards democracy and consistently determined to define equality in ways that prevented it from entailing political equality.”
“Fawcett’s conceptual analysis is as fresh as his history. He stresses that what makes liberalism unique is not liberty nor individuality, but a certain way of thinking about both. Regarding individualism, Fawcett describes the distinctive liberal approach as one of “nonintrusion” (personal security and a distinct, inviolable private sphere), “nonexclusion” (a strong and ever-expanding presumption of universal human worth or dignity), and “nonobstruction.” Though he doesn’t stress it, the last may be the most distinctively liberal value of all: “an image of seeds of potential in everyone that might grow and flourish if properly nurtured,” a celebration of “initiative, openness, and originality.” Find someone, Left or Right, who’s made queasy by that list, who suspects it of slighting tradition, religion, or community, and you’ve found someone who’s not very liberal.”
“The postmodern neo-Thomist moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who has consistently portrayed the Enlightenment as a huge mistake and taken the existence of differing, incompatible, schools of moral thought to be a sign of a “new Dark Ages,” is called by Fawcett a “closet liberal,” albeit one who somehow dislikes “moral individualism” and likes “mental conformity.” Then there is Sartre, whom Fawcett repeatedly calls, along with Orwell and Camus, one of liberalism’s great writers. Sartre was one of history’s most consistent and fervent anti-liberals. He constantly rejected individual judgment, demanding that agents surrender themselves to causes; Fawcett himself notes that “romance with imaginary crowds led him into totalitarian foolishness.” Sartre supposedly qualifies as a liberal on the strength of his dissent from official stances, his fondness for underdogs, and his eccentricity. Here and elsewhere, Fawcett is too quick to confuse a nonconformist soul with a liberal mind.”