A History of Liberalism

Long considered the dominant ideology of the West, liberalism is in crisis. Its principles are in retreat around the world. Populism, authoritarianism and nationalism are on the rise. The Economist recently sounded the alarm: ‘Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it.’ The Economist’s index categorises the United States as a ‘flawed democracy’.

It is not just that liberalism is under attack from its traditional enemies. Voters in the West have begun to doubt that the system works for them. Some say that liberal elites have become complacent. ‘Liberalism’s central problem’, says the Economist, is that it has ‘lost sight of its essential values’. Another problem, however, is rarely discussed: What does ‘liberalism’ actually stand for?

Given its central importance to Western politics, the lack of consensus is strange. For some, liberalism refers to the Lockean idea of individual rights and free markets; for others, it means the welfare state. In many parts of the world, being liberal in colloquial parlance means favouring ‘small government’, while in the US it means favouring ‘big government’. Some speak of a ‘classical liberalism’, which is supposedly more authentic than that of today. How can its ‘essential values’ be recovered when we do not agree on what these are?

The situation is further complicated by the confusion over the relationship between liberalism and democracy. Some use the term ‘liberal democracy’ as if it were a synonym for ‘liberalism’. Others point to the existence of something they call ‘undemocratic liberalism’. Finally, there is talk of the rise of ‘illiberal democracies’ around the world.

Vague and elusive

One way of obtaining some clarity is to turn to history. Some historians are not being particularly helpful, however, confessing that liberalism is a confusing term, a ‘vague’, ‘elusive’ or ‘slippery’ concept. The Oxford historian Michael Freeden explains that ‘there is no single, unambiguous thing called liberalism’. It might be better to speak of liberalisms. But most historians, in order to solve the conundrum, often stipulate a personal definition and construct a history that supports it. They select a number of political concepts, thinkers and actors from the past and line them up chronologically in a way that validates their own definitions. This leads not only to anachronism, but perpetuates fruitless debates between people who do not share a vocabulary.

In order to ground an understanding of liberalism in historical fact, what is needed is a word history of liberalism: a history that traces what the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ have meant to the people who have used these terms in the past. When was the word ‘liberalism’ coined, what did it signify to the people who employed it and how has this changed over time? When did people begin calling themselves ‘liberals’, what did they mean by this and how has it changed? Even if such an approach fails to provide easy solutions or answers to the current predicament, it can offer some valuable lessons and perspectives.

Venerable tradition

Nothing is more common today than the belief that liberalism is a venerable Anglo-American tradition with deep roots in English history. Some trace its origins back to Magna Carta; most attribute a founding role to the 17th-century political philosopher, John Locke. After Locke, liberalism is thought to have slowly gained acceptance during the 18th-century Enlightenment, until it was brought to North America, where the Founding Fathers enshrined its principles in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. During the 19th century, liberalism continued its steady advance until it became the dominant doctrine of the West. This is a nice story, but it is also a myth.

In fact, liberalism, as a word and a cluster of ideas, emerged in France in the wake of the Revolution. Its first theorists were the Swiss thinkers, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël. Locke knew nothing of liberalism and never called himself a liberal, since those concepts were not available to him. Originally invented as a term of abuse, liberalism referred to the principles of the French Revolution, the ‘ideas of ’89’. For most of the 19th century, it was seen as a French doctrine, tied to that country’s successive revolutions (1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871). Its association with France and revolution led many Britons and Americans to distrust and even fear it.

When, after the Revolution of 1789, politicians and theorists like Benjamin Constant began to use the word ‘liberal’ to designate their principles many recoiled in horror. British conservatives often added an ‘e’ to the end of the word, liberale, to suggest that liberal principles were foreign and dangerous. Liberalism, they said, was simply another word for Jacobinism. It was an ‘influenza’ and a ‘moral plague’. Throughout the 19th century, France, not Britain, was the ‘fountain head of liberalism’.

In the US, too, the word liberal, when used in the political sense, tended to appear in conjunction with reportage on French events. As in Britain, an ‘e’ was added to the end of the word, or it was italicised, to indicate its foreignness. For the same reason, newspapers often spoke of the ‘so-called liberals’. Benjamin Constant and the Marquis de Lafayette were sometimes called ‘the leaders of the Liberals’. In the Encyclopedia Americana of 1831, the entry on ‘liberal’ explained that the word’s new meaning came from France. As yet, the encyclopedia had no article on liberalism. When, half a century later, one appeared in the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, it was a translation of a French article that equated liberalism with the ‘principles of ’89’.

Today the term ‘liberal democracy’ is often used in an unproblematic way, as if liberalism and democracy were natural allies. But early liberals were highly suspicious of democracy. None of them would have been surprised by the term ‘illiberal democracy’ or would have found it confusing. The French Revolution convinced some that the masses were ignorant, irrational and prone to violence. Under their pressure, the rule of law had been suspended, ‘enemies of the people’ guillotined and rights trampled upon. The most democratic phase of the Revolution was also the most bloody.

De Staël preferred ‘government by the best’. Constant favoured stiff property requirements for voters and even stiffer ones for office-holders. The right to vote was a trust and not a right. Indeed, during the heyday of what is often called ‘classical liberalism’, the 19th century, it is hard to find a liberal who was enthusiastic about democracy. It would not be wrong to say that liberalism was originally invented to contain democracy.

Nor was securing individual property rights from government regulation a primary concern. Constant wrote that private property was ‘merely a social convention’ and was ‘under the jurisdiction, of society’. While respectful of individual rights, early liberalism was concerned most with how to construct a moderate, stable and lasting regime. Liberals such as Constant warned against government becoming despotic, but they did not generally want to minimise its powers. Some believed in laissez faire; others did not. This is true of liberals throughout the 19th century.

German school

While France gave birth to liberalism in the early 19th century, Germany reconfigured it half a century later. As new problems arose, liberals adjusted their goals. Early liberals were most concerned with establishing the rule of law, civil equality and constitutional and representative government. Later ones became increasingly concerned with the major changes being brought about by industrialisation, particularly in Britain. Its modernising economy was generating enormous wealth, but also huge income disparities and a new kind of endemic poverty. In the cities and slums, overcrowding and disease were rampant, labour unrest growing and socialism in its various forms was attracting followers. These facts caused liberals to become receptive to new ideas about the role of government coming from Germany.

It was there that a new school of political economists had emerged mid-century. The pathbreakers were professors such as Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand and Karl Knies. Influential in their day, but now largely forgotten, these men and their disciples launched a full-scale attack on the doctrine of laissez-faire. Free market ideas, they said, were too abstract and theoretical to be of any use. A more practical, results-oriented political economy based on empirical facts was needed. They set about collecting data showing that economic growth was leaving large swathes of the population sunk in poverty with no hope of lifting themselves out. Profoundly moralistic in their outlook, they advocated government intervention to help the poor.

Profound influence

The ideas of the German economists were translated and disseminated in Britain and the US, where they soon exerted profound influence. By 1879 the Fortnightly Review, one of the most influential and reform-minded magazines in Britain, could joyfully announce the fall of ‘the old orthodox creed’. A few years later, it published John Stuart Mill’s ‘Chapters on Socialism’, in which the great liberal thinker argued that socialist ideas should be given full consideration because they could supply the guiding principles for reform.

In the US, the new ideas of political economy were introduced by the many young men who went to study at German universities. Like their British counterparts, they became increasingly convinced that laissez-faire was wrong, both morally and empirically, and they began to advocate more government intervention in the economy.

The idea that the state should involve itself more in economic matters triggered numerous debates over the nature of ‘true liberalism’. Philosophers, political scientists, journalists and politicians weighed in, taking sides on the question. In Britain, pamphlets and articles with titles such as What are Liberal Principles? debated the issue. Some liberals welcomed and absorbed the new ideas enthusiastically; others rejected them outright. The result was what the American philosopher John Dewey would later call the ‘two streams’ of liberalism, one favouring interventionism and the other laissez-faire. The two sides would battle it out for the next century and, to a certain extent, continue to do so. Some new liberals became friendly to socialism. The prominent liberal theorist, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, wrote that socialism ‘serves to complete, rather than destroy, the leading liberal ideals’.

Encyclopedias recorded the schism. The 1885 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article on political economy said that a new school was rising. The Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States informed its readers that political science was in a chaotic state. A rebellion was taking place against the doctrine of laissez-faire, which the Germans had proved to be so utterly false. A ‘new liberalism’ was replacing the old.

American journey

The word ‘liberalism’ was still rarely used in America. Only in the second decade of the 20th century did it come into common usage. This happened thanks to a group of reformers, who were Republican Progressives in 1912 and Wilsonian Democrats in 1916. To them, the word meant the new, interventionist type of liberalism. Woodrow Wilson called himself ‘progressive’ in 1916 and ‘liberal’ in 1917. Although Roosevelt’s New Deal would eventually come to represent liberalism of this variety, debates continued over which constituted the true liberalism, the interventionist or laissez-faire variety, well into the 20th century.

As yet there was little, if any, talk of an Anglo-American liberal tradition with roots deep in English history. This idea was conceived as a result of the two World Wars, the rise of the Anglo-American alliance and especially the Cold War. The fear of fascism, Nazism and communism caused liberalism to be reconceptualised again, this time as the ‘other’ of totalitarianism. It became necessary to emphasise liberalism’s support for individual rights. Because of their ‘statism’, France and Germany were now found to have non-existent or flawed liberal traditions. John Locke was inducted as a founding father of the Anglo-American tradition, and his espousal of property rights made the core of his philosophy. As the American philosopher Richard Rorty said: ‘Like the history of anything else, history of philosophy is written by the victors. Victors get to choose their ancestors.’ The US and Britain got to decide what ‘liberalism’ was.

Getting it right

What can this lost history of liberalism tell us that is relevant to the crisis in which we find ourselves today? As an historian, I think that getting history right should need no justification. But history can also lend critical perspective on the present. It can tell us about the challenges people in the past faced, the options they had and the choices they made. Liberal democracy, we are often told, is ‘on the right side of history’. This idea can foster a complacency and smugness, since all of history seems to point to ‘us’. But liberalism was born in France and then reconfigured in Germany. Its progress was never smooth nor certain; it faced formidable enemies and was riven by disagreements and there was nothing inevitable about its success. It was always contested from outside and even from within. To be successful it was obliged to adapt to circumstances. The US and Britain joined the liberal tradition late and did so by accentuating certain aspects of it and downplaying others.

This is only one of the many things we can learn from the lost word history of liberalism. Nor is the history of words a mere matter of semantics. As Madame de Staël said: ‘Battles over words are always battles over things.’

Helena Rosenblatt is Professor of History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York and author of A Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, 2018).