See the discussion at this post.
And when people refer to Adam Smith and reference "liberalism" they are talking about classical liberalism, not the narrower modern American liberalism.
You can disagree with my title if you really want to (I think that's crazy). But it's extremely disappointing to me that in the comment section of that post the point I was making wasn't just one the other commenters disagreed with - it was so foreign to them that they actually thought I was making an argument about modern American liberalism when I used the word "liberalism".
They didn't think I could possibly be arguing that Smithian liberalism is not exhausted in modern libertarianism.
Very disheartening to see.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Yeah I was gonna say something to the same effect until I saw you did it already and I got angry with their new commenting thing.
ReplyDeleteTo have a rational discussion about these things, we would need an index demarcating how many restrictions on free trade there needs to be until it doesn't count as "liberal." Otherwise we're conflating the situation in the world today with autarky, which is insane. There's an argument to be made that the United States is pretty autarkic on certain margins, but I don't know if they are the important ones.
I'm not sure we need an index, but that's definitely a problem. At least we should all be able to recognize (1.) a few major senses in which we're not liberal (i.e. - the drug war), (2.) some issues on which honest liberals can disagree (fiscal policy), and proceed talking about it with the recognition that people are going to demarcate "liberalism" at somewhat different places, but we all agree on what constitutes or could constitute liberalism.
DeleteI would agree, but I would also say that modern libertarianism is far more related to the classical liberal tradition than is modern liberalism (which is far more related to progressivism and social democracy).
ReplyDeleteIf by related you mean more narrowly and rigidly construed. Modern liberalism is more expansive, incorporating elements of utilitarianism.
DeleteI don't think that utilitarianism can be the measure. After all, Mises was a utilitarian and he's certainly not a name often mentioned by modern liberals.
DeleteAlso, your followup comment about welfare liberalism being within the liberal tradition is just completely wrong. Classical liberals with very few exceptions (in fact, I can't even think of one) completely rejected positive rights. Do you even regularly read any of the classical liberals? I am asking this honestly, because you apparently don't seem to know the primary arguments made then between the classical liberals and the social democrats in Europe at the time.
ReplyDeleteOr that between the classical liberal theorists and the mercantilists before the social democratic movement?
DeleteBy welfare liberalism I just mean the welfare state... perhaps I'm using "welfare liberalism" incorrectly. Like the modern United States - a safety net but no positive rights, only negative rights. That seems to me to be well within the liberal tradition. This of course is not necessarily true of welfare states elsewhere that emerged out of democratic socialism.
DeleteBy the turn of the twentieth century this process of construing classical liberalism as libertarianism had already begun, of course. I'm not sure that's the best place to look. There were far more descendants of Smith, Locke, Madison, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Paine at the turn of the twentieth century besides the ones that a libertarian will usually list as the "classical liberals" of that time (Nock, Spencer, Spooner, Mencken, etc.). The process of appropriating the classical liberal legacy had already begun. So when you talk about "the primary arguments made then between the classical liberals and social democrats", you may be thinking of a group of people that I and many others would consider early libertarians.
DeleteI'm mostly thinking Smith, Say, Ricardo, Bastiate, and people of that nature, such as the early Austrians. Obviously, I also would mention Locke, Madison, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Paine, but they were far less focused on economics and more focused on political philosophy. Plus, they are more often thought of as Enlightenment figures, which certainly was a great influence on the classical liberals that followed, but were in line with the general movement. As for Nock, Spencer, Spooner, Mencken, they were a bit different in that they were all anarchists, so they are obviously read by many modern libertarians of the anarchist set, but I wouldn't say that modern libertarians give then more attention than the others mentioned.
DeleteMost of my study of political philosophy has been centered on three primary periods: The Scholastics, the Enlightenment, and Classical Liberalism. So I've read all of these guys, and a few more (Thoreau, Hobbes, Acton and Aquinas come to mind). What I have found is a certain continuity in that they are trying to find what the scope and role of the state should be, and throughout you find a great focus on negative rights, or the protection of negative rights, being the conclusion.
If you were to sum up classical liberalism in one sentence, it would be: the role of government is to protect negative rights, or to negate injustice. However, you find the same theme in both the scholastics and those of the Enlightenment, only they are approaching the problem from different angles. But they are all related schools of thought due to this.
What I have found when talking of the liberal tradition between modern liberals and modern libertarians is that while libertarians continue this tradition (albeit, often without the state), the liberals in America tend to support positive rights, which was what the liberal tradition rejected. This is why I say that modern American liberalism is far more related to Progressivism (in the US) and social democracy (in Europe), because they put great emphasis on the justness of positive rights and state action. There's a lot more to it than that, but that is the primary distinction in my opinion.
By the way, I understand that the idea of positive and negative rights is relatively new and would not have been mentioned explicitly in earlier writings, but there is a certain continuity along those lines.
DeleteI agree that libertarianism (new laptop add to dictionary. sigh...) is not the only movement in the classical liberal tradition and that this tradition has many descendants including the modern american liberals. (though I don't think they all fall in the classical liberal tradition anymore than all libertarians do) But I don't think we live in a very classically liberal world. In international trade, capital seems to move smoothly. But goods, services and people, not so much. The regulatory regime in place in the United States makes it very difficult to follow the law when engaging in a business. The drug war involves throwing in jail lots and lots and lots of people who have never done any harm to anyone but themselves. It's not the end of the world, but I don't think we live in a very liberal world.
ReplyDeleteRight and this is the issue that Ryan raised above. So the drug war is awful. Lots of people agree with that. Does that make us illiberal? I don't know - we seem far more liberal than the early nineteenth century on many other directions.
DeleteOn balance, we seem fairly liberal to me. If one wants to argue that the drug war is so substantial it removes us from liberalism, I would probably disagree with that weighting of the issue but I could see the value of the argument. But I don't think mere departures from libertarianism are a good argument for why we're illiberal.
I don't know enough about the early nineteenth century to say much about that and as I said above, classical liberals encompass more than libertarians. So it's obviously true that we can live in a liberal world without living in a libertarian world. I don't think the drug war by itself makes the world non-liberal. (Though if you count all of its effects on individual rights through distorted 4th Amendment jurisprudence etc, I think the argument is more reasonable) But when you add the drug war to the very restrictive environment on international trade and movement of people, the normative proliferation which makes all of us criminals at the mercy of prosecutoral discretion, the pervasiveness of occupational licensing, etc... The world doesn't seem very liberal to me.
DeleteI agree that libertarianism (new laptop add to dictionary. sigh...) is not the only movement in the classical liberal tradition and that this tradition has many descendants including the modern american liberals. (though I don't think they all fall in the classical liberal tradition anymore than all libertarians do) But I don't think we live in a very classically liberal world. In international trade, capital seems to move smoothly. But goods, services and people, not so much. The regulatory regime in place in the United States makes it very difficult to follow the law when engaging in a business. The drug war involves throwing in jail lots and lots and lots of people who have never done any harm to anyone but themselves. It's not the end of the world, but I don't think we live in a very liberal world.
ReplyDelete