Right Reason

Liberalism Need Not Be Based In Consent

We may become the makers of our fate once we have ceased to be its prophets.

-Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

 

In “Classical Liberalism: Contemporary Voices,” Patrick J Deenan stumbles upon one of my political pet peeves: The insistence that liberalism need be rooted in consent. He argues:

The affinity between liberalism and democracy is found most fundamentally in liberalism’s insistence upon consent as the only basis for legitimate power and authority. While in theory liberalism can accept any form of government, including a constitutional monarchy, from the very beginning, the architects of classical liberal regimes decided that periodic consent was the best means of ensuring ongoing legitimation. While John Locke speaks of the theoretical possibility of “tacit consent” as an ongoing basis on which to ground claims of legitimacy, as a practical matter, it is difficult for people simply to pull up stakes or foment a revolution when they decide that their tacit consent no longer suffices. Elections solve a practical problem, and liberalism became wed to democracy.

 

Especially when Mr. Deenan is advertising the rather lengthy and rambling essay to be a seminar about liberalism, to ignore the streams of liberal thought that have no relation to the idea that legitimate government is based on consent. The mistake is a compounded conclusion of a similar mistake about identifying the authors from whom the liberal tradition flows. Most important is whom he fails to consider.  

In his earlier article, “Liberalism Sources and Themes,” Mr. Deenan had boxed himself into that erroneous conclusion by arguing that that Locke and Paine are the fonts of classical liberalism. But what of David Hume and Adam Smith? David Hume had provided a timeless criticism of theories of government based on consent in “On the Original Contract.” The Scotsman even went so far as to write: “When we assert,that all lawful government arises from the consent of the people, we certainly do them a great deal more honour than they deserve, or even expect and desire from us.” 

Hume is certainly one of the font heads of liberal thought, so where does he fit in Mr. Deenan’s narrative. Short answer, he doesn’t and Mr. Deenan’s narrative therefore doesn’t capture the breadth of liberal thought.

 

The idea that any government, legitimate or not, is based on the consent of the governed is a laughably absurd idea and deserves to be shamed as such. As Hume writes in “On the Original Contract”:

The face of the earth is continually changing, by the encrease of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes. Is there any thing discoverable in all these events, but force and violence. Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of? 

Liberalism deserves to be taken seriously. By couching it in social-contract talk, we, almost by definition, fail to take it seriously. The social contract is an intellectual fraud. It fails to take into account that governments have a focal nature to them which, when legitimate, can properly demand the obedience of those in its jurisdiction. It doesn’t ask, it forces. 

Liberalism seeks to minimize that superior-inferior relationship that governments introduce into society, and to seriously go about that practice liberals cannot think that people have agreed to take the inferior role. Instead, they are there largely as a consequence of historical accident. Historical accident and fortunate violence, not consent, are what have formed the political institutions today. Any stream of political thought that contends otherwise doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously for the same reason that any biologist who believes that Genesis is the factual creation story doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously: Neither are true, neither conform to their given objects.     

Klein on the Origin of 'Liberalism'

Daniel Klein has a new article in The Atlantic. "The Origin of 'Liberalism'" which covers the great replication of the use of the word 'liberal' ever since its use by Adam Smith:

Thanks to digitization, we can now establish when the word “liberal” first took on a political meaning. For centuries it had had what scholars have called pre-political meanings, such as generous, tolerant, or suitable to one of noble or superior status—as in “liberal arts” and “liberal education.”  But now using Google’s Ngram Viewer we can see what the word “liberal”—as an adjective—was used to modify. Up to 1769 the word was used only in pre-political ways, but in and around 1769 such terms as “liberal policy,” “liberal plan,” “liberal system,” “liberal views,” “liberal ideas,” and “liberal principles” begin sprouting like flowers.

My research with Will Fleming finds that the Scottish historian William Robertson appears to be the most significant innovator, repeatedly using “liberal” in a political way, notably in a book published in 1769. (I presented more details in a lecture at the Ratio Institute, viewable here.) Of the Hanseatic League, for example, Robertson spoke of “the spirit and zeal with which they contended for those liberties and rights,” and how a society of merchants, “attentive only to commercial objects, could not fail of diffusing over Europe new and more liberal ideas concerning justice and order.”

Robertson’s friend and fellow Scot Adam Smith used “liberal” in a similar sense in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. If all nations, Smith says, were to follow “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation,” then they would be like one great cosmopolitan empire, and famines would be prevented. Then he repeats the phrase: “But very few countries have entirely adopted this liberal system.”

Smith’s “liberal system” was not concerned solely with international trade. He used “liberal” to describe application of the same principles to domestic policy issues. Smith was a great opponent of restrictions in the labor market, favoring freedom of contract, and wished to see labor markets “resting on such liberal principles.”

Daniel Klein on the Emergence of the Term "Liberal"

 

 

 

The basic question: Have we lost the vocabulary of the liberal era? Klein argues in the affirmative and argues that we must reclaim that vocabulary.