Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (13 page)

That was not Mill’s only, or even main, contribution to liberalism. He was one of the first to transform utilitarianism from a pleasure-seeking theory into a more refined doctrine. He replaced the utilitarians’ focus on fleeting pleasures with a solid insistence on the permanent interests of people, concentrating on their self-development and insisting that they were progressive beings. That idea of improvement had previously not been prevalent in utilitarianism, as its precept of maximizing one’s pleasure did not have to involve any idea of personal growth.

Ultimately, Mill bequeathed to the liberal tradition a more sophisticated understanding of its values. As already noted in
Chapter 3
, he saw liberalism as based on a triple conceptual combination—even if the title of his essay referred to liberty alone—centred on the ‘free development of individuality’:

If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a co-ordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilisation, instruction, education, culture; but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued …

In this inner circle of liberal concepts, liberty was both enhanced and constrained. It was enhanced because it was purposive, understood as the unfolding of human potential. It was constrained—although not fully—because the licence to do nothing or to disrupt one’s capacity to lead a good life was frowned upon. Development was specifically located in an individual’s will, emanating from within, not imposed from without. And individuality was a substantive ethical ideal and the route to cultivating character. It conjured up the attributes of vigour, variety, and originality—giving full rein to individual diversity. It entailed designing one’s own life-plan. Above all, it involved the exercise of choice, an exercise absolutely essential to judgement, discriminatory feeling, and moral preference.

Thomas Hill Green (1836‒82)

The new currents that were beginning to flow through liberalism got an unexpected boost through the often obscure and difficult writings of T.H. Green, a philosophy tutor at Balliol College, who was a prominent member of the British school of Idealism. Many of those who attended his lectures found them abstract and hard to follow, and his prose would certainly not seem an obvious choice through which to disseminate ideological innovation. Yet Green articulated crucially important insights and displayed occasional flashes of rhetorical brilliance, which go to show that the incisive rendering of an idea can be picked up by larger political publics. Idealism, as the name indicates, accorded a fundamental and pre-eminent status to the ideas, values, and obligations that underpinned social life. While Mill recognized the social component of human existence, Green extended the idea of sociability, insisting that individual thought and conduct could not be detached from the community of cooperating fellow individuals in which a person was always located. Indeed, Green contended that if individuals carried out their moral duties while valuing and recognizing others for possessing the same potential, they were at their freest. To be free was none other than to be rational and ethical, to will what was true and good, unencumbered by clouded judgement. For Green that was an eternal truth, reflecting God’s will, and it guided people towards their ultimate perfection. For later liberals, that morality could just as successfully be retained in secular form.

Green demonstrates one long-standing tendency in liberal thinking—the assumption that there are independent and immutable standards of good behaviour, both for an individual on his or her own and for the interactions among individuals. Decency, respect, tolerance, and moderation were some of the features of that good conduct. That struck a chord among many thoughtful late-Victorians who had become increasingly uneasy with the harsh and selfish bargains that economic and commercial life appeared to dictate. In a rare foray into popular language, Green explained himself more clearly, delivering in 1881 a famous public lecture called ‘Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract’. It set the tone for the subsequent belief of left-liberals that personal development and mutual interdependence were complementary rather than contradictory aspects of a common good. Here also lies Green’s important contribution to the idea of freedom, which was ultimately reflected in modern welfare state thinking. Rising to the occasion in a spirited rhetorical flourish, Green asserted that freedom was not just being left alone but a positive ability to act, together with others:

We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings—that its attainment is the true end of all our effort as citizens. But when we thus speak of freedom, we should consider carefully what we mean by it. We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion. We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespectively of what it is that we like. We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others. When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others.

We have seen that the precise meaning of liberty, or freedom, as is the case with all political concepts, is essentially contested. As one of the first to suggest a distinction between positive and negative liberty, Green contributed to the fundamental disagreement among liberals as to the implications of liberty. Even in his cautious and considered language, Green was sounding a radical note that challenged existing social arrangements and assessed individual conduct by the personal improvement and the social benefits freedom brought in its wake. The growth of freedom was measured by the greater power of the body of citizens to make ‘the most and best of themselves’—a view embodying the tail end of the optimistic enlightenment belief in human perfectibility. But Green’s was not the extreme version of positive liberty later excoriated by Isaiah Berlin, one in which the rational self-mastery associated with a higher nature or ‘true’ self would be taken up by an oppressive social grouping, bent on coercing individuals to conform to its uniform interpretation of what was good for its members. The voices of individuals could not be usurped by a manipulator speaking on their behalf and ‘forcing them to be free’, in Rousseau’s famous phrase.

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864‒1929)

L.T. Hobhouse, together with his colleague J.A. Hobson, was the leading exponent of the new liberalism that changed the focus of liberal thought at the turn of the late 19th–20th centuries. Hobhouse is of special interest to students of liberalism because he had one foot firmly in the philosophical domain and another in the world of quality journalism. Almost uniquely, Hobhouse spoke the two liberal languages of the time: as formulator of a general theory of liberalism and as a constructor of a working and living liberal ideology, moving easily between the two. His most famous book,
Liberalism
, published in 1911, was an inspired reformulation of the liberal ethos, in a popularly written and widely disseminated format. It is still in print more than a century later and is unrivalled as a now classic account of modern left-liberal thinking. In addition to holding the first chair of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Hobhouse was an editorial writer for the leading liberal newspaper of the time, the
Manchester Guardian
. Through those editorial comments, Hobhouse demonstrated how the general precepts of liberalism could be applied to many concrete and pressing social and political issues. In tandem with Hobson, Hobhouse helped to steer progressive public opinion towards embracing the social liberalism associated with the new liberals.

The idea of harmony among human beings as the natural outcome of social evolution guided much of Hobhouse’s theories and was strengthened by his scientific bent of mind—his field studies also entailed lengthy periods of observation at a Manchester zoo. Hobhouse believed that human rationality was active and purposive. He pushed Mill’s emphasis on human development further out by asserting optimistically that it encompassed both an increased ethical awareness and a conscious and deliberate interdependence among people. Whereas for Mill development ensured the control of individuals over their lives and the maturing of their characters, Hobhouse claimed that evolutionary development also replaced competition with rational sociability; indeed, human beings were the first product of the evolutionary process that could direct its own evolution. The end-result of social evolution was not only a free individual but a harmonious community, guided by a benevolent, democratic state.

At the heart of Hobhouse’s liberal vision was a project of social reform. Society was defaulting on its responsibility towards its members because it failed to pursue the common good. That included optimizing opportunities for individual development and harmonizing potentially conflicting human ends. The community was seen as a producer of social goods, the main good being the well-being of its members. But the consequence of that argument was intriguing: the community was itself a rights-bearer alongside the rights of its individual citizens. Too many needs, although vital for individual flourishing, were beyond individual reach. Hobhouse belonged to a new generation of progressive thinkers who realized that the liberal end of encouraging human growth and expression would be frustrated unless the community possessed the right to help individuals attain their personal potential. Liberty was now irrevocably twinned with social cooperation:

Mutual aid is not less important than mutual forbearance, the theory of collective action no less fundamental than the theory of personal freedom …the life of the individual …would be something utterly different if he could be separated from society. A great deal of him would not exist at all.

The idea behind that was that each person was both a cherished individual
and
a member of a sustaining social group. Although the divide between public and private still obtained, the social side of individuals was central to their very being, both as givers and as receivers. Hobhouse advocated the public right to work and to a living wage, supported unemployment and health insurance (introduced by the Liberal government in 1911), and was also an early enthusiast for universal old-age pensions. Nonetheless, the state was not there to compete with individual initiative but to facilitate it by redistributing material goods and hence life-chances to those who were disadvantaged through personal misfortune or unfair social arrangements. Only then could a liberal society discharge its fundamental responsibility towards its members.

Hobhouse’s view of social harmony and of the convergence of human rationality on shared understandings of the common good was an ethical ideal that underpinned his faith in the overcoming of conflict. The First World War, with its battlefields of unleashed violence and the resurgence of an over-interventionist state, rocked his earlier optimistic convictions but did not change them substantially.

John Atkinson Hobson (1858‒1940)

Although less punctilious in his argumentation than the philosophers we have just discussed, J.A. Hobson was the most original and imaginative of the new liberals of his generation. Hobson was an independent writer and a journalist as well as an influential social critic and economist. He made his name by foreshadowing some of Keynes’ economic theories, and created a notable public impression as a vociferous critic of British imperialism. Both over-saving and the unequal distribution of wealth, Hobson argued, restricted the overall purchasing power of the British people. The poor ended up with insufficient income to survive in dignity and their consequent under-consumption created economic crises as well as personal misery, while the well-to-do accumulated more than they could spend. Imperialism was partly the result of that maldistribution, as financial capitalists and manufacturers turned to overseas outlets for investing their surplus wealth, furthering economic greed, aggression, and militarism, and exploiting the political control of colonies to those purposes.

Hobson’s radicalism, however, was powerfully directed inwards as well as abroad. Through extensive journalistic and lecturing activities, he propagated advanced ideas of social reform, many of which found their way into the ideology and practices of the 20th century British welfare state. As did other liberals, he grappled throughout his life with the balance between the individual and the social nature of human beings. That included the recognition that society too was a maker of values, a producer and a consumer. Hobson subscribed to a more pronounced organic theory of society than that of his colleagues. Venturing beyond the views of his friend Hobhouse, Hobson believed that society had a life and purpose of its own that paralleled those of its members. Yet he was keen to insist that the organic analogy nonetheless reinforced liberal individualism. Only by nourishing the well-being of each individual and securing their opportunities to express themselves through democratic arrangements could the health of the whole be promoted.

Hobson’s striking contribution to liberal thinking is most evident in his
The Crisis of Liberalism
(1911), which propounded a vision of liberal welfare more advanced than anything achieved to date, and which endorsed the ‘fuller and more positive liberty to which the Liberalism of the future must devote itself.’ The liberal state, he believed, should provide all the necessities that people could not procure for themselves, freeing individuals to develop the creative and individualistic artistic aspect of labour. In a memorable statement Hobson wrote: