Liberalism

Hello, my name is Mathew Cole, I

teach history at the University of Birmingham.

And in this short module, I'm going

to talk about liberal beliefs.

Now, liberal beliefs in the 20th century

came to have a bit of a bad reputation.

The American poet Robert Frost described

a liberal as a man who was too good

natured to take up his own side in an argument.

The English playwright Malcolm Bradbury

created a character in his play The After Dinner Game

who said, if the God had been a liberal,

there would not have been 10 commandments

but 10 suggestions.

Clearly critics of the Liberal Party

have come to seize upon this.

Lord Hailsham, a member of several Conservative cabinets

described the party as usurpers, a party

without a philosophy, an aim or a purpose.

And Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister said that

if nobody had voted liberal, it was anybody's guess as to why.

There's an argument that liberalism has now

lost its way.

But it is a doctrine which has existed

since the time of the Enlightenment.

It has driven forward revolutions,

it has created nations and constitutions,

and it defends liberties which we still recognize today

and which are still under threat.

So where does liberalism begin?

Liberalism starts with the Enlightenment

in the 17th century, in the English Civil War,

and in the Glorious Revolution and the restoration

of the monarchy, a constitutional monarchy.

It's associated, at that time, with the ideas

of John Locke, who was an advisor to the Earl

of Shaftesbury, a member of the government,

founder of the Whig party.

And Locke's main concern in his Second Treatise

of Government of 1689, which he prepared

over the previous decade and more,

was to argue that individuals are rational.

Individuals are given the power of free will by God.

They're given the right to decide

how they should be governed.

And that in order for us to be virtuous and godly,

we have to allow them that freedom.

The idea of rationalism and of consent

is at the heart of liberalism from Locke's time

to the present day.

Locke argued that this meant that government should

be established on the basis that we

are given the freedom we would insist upon

if there were no government.

He used the device of the state of nature

used by other political philosophers like Hobbes

and later Rousseau to ask the question,

if there weren't a government, what kind of government

would we need to set up and why?

The frontispiece of the Second Treatise of Government

says that-- its subtitle is the true, original, extent, and end

of civil government.

Which in one language roughly means

the true origin, the true scope, and the true purpose

of government.

He argued that the purpose of government

was to protect rights, rights that we all know and feel

that we have.

He described these as the rights to life, liberty, and a state.

And within that he placed on the state

the constraints which are still recognized today

as being the basis of liberal democracy.

The rights which are set out in the American Bill

of Rights, the rights which are in the European Convention

on Human Rights, the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

The rights to own what we have earned, the right

to believe what we think is true, to argue it freely,

to worship the way that we want to,

and to be able to move and settle as we wish.

He argued that in order to achieve that you

had to have limited government.

Not necessarily limited in it activity

but limited in what it could do to individuals.

That it should not be able to interfere in their freedoms,

their rights as he had established them.

And he said that if we were in the state of nature,

that's what we all want.

What's wrong with a world where there's no government?

We can be killed, we can be injured, we can be stolen from,

we can be persecuted.

The purpose of the state is to prevent those things happening.

And we have not only to establish a state which

will be able to prevent those things happening,

but it will be unable to do those things itself as well.

It has to be a constitutional government and a government

in which power is fragmented between the three

branches of the state, the judicial, the legislative,

and the executive, branches of government,

and between different levels of government,

at national, subnational, and possibly

later international level.

Those principles remain the basis of liberalism today.

And the idea of consent was taken on

not only by people like James Madison

in the American Revolution in writing

the American constitution, with its Bill of Rights,

with its separated powers, but also by John Stuart

Mill in the 19th century in Britain

who argued that consent was important

not only for our agreement with government

but our agreement with other individuals.

He said that the only legitimate way in which power could

be exercised over any individual, by another person,

by a company, by a church or by a government

was to prevent harm to others.

That if we wish to do something with ourselves

or with other people that the rest of society

doesn't approve of it is none of their business

as long as they are not harmed.

There is a private sphere within which the state cannot

legitimately intervene.

That includes freedom of culture and reading.

And in the 20th century film or music

that includes the right to own property.

It includes family life, it includes

choices about how we behave.

And those questions, again and again,

came up in the 19th and 20th centuries

as religious and political movements

sought to impose beliefs and impose lifestyles on people

who didn't choose them.

So Mill established the legitimacy of consent

as the basis for individual interactions.

Locke established it as the basis of government

and of the powers of the state.

Those ideas gave birth to mixed government to increasing

participation and democracy to limitations on the power

of the state as a matter of entrenched law that cannot be

altered by any one government.

And the principles of individual or natural or civil liberties

are ones which are accepted around most

of the democratic world now, including

by those who originally resisted them in the doctrines.

Now, liberalism around the end of the 19th century

suffered a division.

A new form of liberalism emerged usually

called neoliberalism, which accepted the need

for greater intervention.

Because one of the key principles of early liberalism

had been the right to property, the right

not to be taxed without one's consent, the right

not to have one's home seized by the state or by anybody else.

And the emerging doctrine from that

had been one of laissez-faire, that the state should not

interfere in the economy.

It had allowed the British economy

to grow to be the workshop of the world.

It had allowed innovation and exploration and investment

to produce great wealth and growing economic status

in Britain.

However, it had brought with it growing poverty.

And some liberals, following the reports

of people like Booth and Rowntree

in British cities said, it's not just the liberty

to have property that matters.

It's the liberty to gain property,

it's the liberty to be able to participate in the matters.

And that means not that we abandon capitalism

but we manage it and create the circumstances

in it, in which everyone can benefit from it.

So we have to intervene to provide old age

pensions for those--

for whom the market has not provided

enough to be able to live in their old age.

We have to provide education for those who cannot afford

to provide it for themselves.

We have to provide food for the children of those families

in those schools.

We have to provide benefits for those

who are unable to work or unable to find work.

And we have to take those from excessive earning.

Even law used to talk about the problem of inquisitiveness

and the problem of wastage.

David Lloyd George using the new liberal ideas of people

like T.H Green, for example, and later Keynes and Beveridge

said, there should be investment in social reform using money

which has been gained by people not by their work,

not by their own efforts.

Which had been Locke's justification,

for having wealth that you had mixed your labor with something

by building a table or by teaching for a time even.

It was those people who had gained money simply

by owning land which it increased in value,

for example, or simply by collecting rents

on lands that they had inherited from their families.

Lloyd George in his budget of 1908,

bore down hard on those people and said,

you will now have to pay for the benefits

that you have earned from the growing economy,

by providing benefits for those who have gained least

from capitalism.

That produced the Beveridge report and the NHS

after the Second World War.

It produced Keynes's demand management

which provided full employment after the Second World War.

The new liberal ideas were ones which

modified but did not completely undermine capitalism.

Keynes described himself as the man

who wanted to save capitalism in its most humane form.

He did not want the state to own all property,

he did not want widespread nationalization.

But he did want to make capitalism work better.

Both these traditions have been reflected

in post-war liberalism.

Both of them were reflected in the coalition government.

We had privatization, we had the lowering of tax,

particularly for those on low incomes

by being taken out of the tax system

up until a higher threshold.

And we had an investment in the pupil premium

and in apprenticeships.

These things create tensions within liberalism.

Some liberals are more enthusiastic about them

than others.

The Liberal Prime Minister Campbell Bannerman

described Lloyd George's social reforms as two SOPs for labor.

The Liberal Democrats had to give

in to the idea of higher tuition fees.

But these are matters of degree and of circumstance.

The core liberal beliefs of individual freedom,

of rationalism out of consent, remain the same.