HELENA ROSENBLATT'S LOST HISTORY OF LIBERALISM

Rosenblatt is an historian of political thought not a social historian and describes what writers, academics, preachers and political leaders were saying. The views of the masses of thinking people behind them might differ.

The myth of “classical liberalism”

She concentrates on France, Germany, Britain and the U.S. - France particularly. Occasionally, things like the formation of independent Belgium with a liberal constitution are cited and the shock-waves of Liberalism in distant cultures get brief mention. The role of Liberalism in the revolts against Spanish rule in Latin America is not mentioned. She covers the long hostility between the Catholic Church (not all Catholics) and Liberalism in France, but the climatic event of that conflict – one that still helps to define a Liberal – the Dreyfus Affair, is nowhere mentioned.

She argues that Liberalism was never a creed of unrestrained individualism or a small state. Those, she argues, are unhistorical glosses from the end of the 19^th century (in opposition to Social Liberalism and to Socialism) which seeped into academic orthodoxy via Hayek and Berlin in the wake of Fascism and the Second World War. So “classical liberalism” as currently understood is a myth. But so is the American idea that Liberalism equals high public spending and an all-powerful state, in which case Hitler and Stalin count as Liberals. Liberalism does not define itself by the size of the state.

From liberality to Liberalism

She starts with Cicero. To show “liberalitas”, was to be a model citizen of the Republic, public-spirited and generous, not self-interested. It meant active citizenship and charitable generosity. A society of such citizens would prosper and one lacking them would fail: liberality would strengthen “the social union of men among men”. It did not imply unease about slavery and Cicero defended the status quo – provided the privileged were good citizens. Already we can see similarities with modern British Liberalism – the focus on “active citizenship”, on people as citizens not subjects or consumers and on free co-operation. The story of Liberalism is above all else the story of how values that were once applied only to an elite were progressively applied to everyone.

In the “Dark Ages” and the Middle Ages, a good Christian would be liberal if he had the required resources. St Ambrose, in the early Church, argued any true community rested upon justice and goodwill. A thousand years later, the Puritan John Winthrop, arriving in Massachusetts, exhorted the settlers to liberality – “to bear one another’s burdens”. That sounds like a Liberal society (except that it excluded many entirely).

With a few exceptions like Winthrop (and John Donne), people thought liberality was for the high and wealthy only. However, in 1746, an English dissenter, Samuel Wright, argued that it meant supporting “Principles of Liberty both in civil and religious matters” - something humble people could do and moreover, political. By 1772, The Oxford English Dictionary defined it as “free from bias, prejudice or bigotry; open-minded, tolerant”. A Liberal  supported a free constitution and was an active citizen.

The term became truly politicised with the French Revolution and liberal resistance to both Napoleon’s authoritarianism and cult of emperor-worship, and the reactionary monarchist clampdown that continued into the 1820s. She argues that liberals always stressed duties and morality as much as rights: the two should be balanced.

She highlights the travails of French Liberals under Louis Philippe and Napoleon III: the latter’s reign, with its combination of brutal repression with plebiscites and appeals to popular sentiment, resembles the rule of a modern populist like Erdogan of Turkey or Orban of Hungary. German Liberals, seeing unification as a precondition to the achievement of a liberal state, made a pact with the “devil” of Prussian authoritarianism. She stresses they were genuine Liberals – but was Liberalism really not achievable without unification?

The Liberal split over the social question

Liberals split over the “social question”. Some argued for minimum government intervention; others believed in a strong liberal state intervening against poverty and misery. There was never a golden age of small-state Liberalism. What is clear to a reader is the crucial failing of 19^th century Liberals in France and Germany. They agonised about the condition of the workers, but did not reach out to them. They worried, rightly, that a rapid enfranchisement of the masses might lead to oppression: Louis Napoleon won the Presidency of the Second Republic by universal manhood suffrage and promptly replaced republic with empire. But they made little effort to communicate with the workers, unlike the socialists. In Britain, where the workers’ condition was not quite so desperate, there were no revolutions in 1848, socialism was a theory and a strong Liberal Party existed, Liberals built a base of support in the urban and rural working classes (and lost it in the 1920s). A further factor, I suggest, was the strength of Nonconformity, with its anti-establishment and community self-help characteristics, in the British working class. There was no equivalent in France and practically not in Germany.

Apart from mentioning Beveridge, the Welfare State and T.H. Green, she ignores British political Liberalism after Gladstone to concentrate on America, which was deeply influenced, in competing directions, by Fascism and the Second World War. Franklin Roosevelt saw himself as a Liberal, so in our terms, a Social Liberal. His Universal Declaration of Human Rights drew on Jefferson and the French revolutionary equivalent, but gained urgency from the experience of fascism, total war and the “Final Solution”. Very quickly, it also offered moral high ground in opposing Communism. Coming out of the huge Allied effort of that war, it may have seemed unnecessary to stress equally the need for co-operation and community. Moreover, such calls had been made by the enemy!

Dissident voices were heard. Berlin proposed his doctrine about positive and negative liberty. Hayek argued that the state – however caring it pretended to be – was a con trick. Both were removed from the coal-face and the dole queue. They had Liberal instincts, but their work, mainly in the U.S. rather than the U.K., fuelled a harsh Conservatism and unfettered capitalism. Thus, a split Liberalism, one based on rights, entitlements and welfare; the other, on a minimal state and on the belief that people pursuing their personal economic interests produced the best outcome for society.

Rosenblatt, focussing on opinion leaders, has agreements and dissonances with the work on grassroots British (and Italian) Liberalism by Professor Eugenio Biagini, though without mentioning him. They agree that the current version of “classical liberalism” is largely a myth, but Rosenblatt barely discusses what Biagini shows was central to 19^th century Liberalism - empowerment through co-operation and a moral responsibility to co-operate, be political and fight injustice.