Mark Howard
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The term liberalism—at root, an ideology of economic and political individualism—evokes multiple meanings, some of which appear to be in contradiction with one another. This makes what we (or at least those of us schooled in a Eurocentric mode of thought) sometimes assume to be an intuitive and simple concept into something less obvious and more complex. Stuart Hall (1986, 37) argues that the chief power of liberalism is that it has become part of the English (and by extension, Western Capitalist) common sense; it has become self-evidently obvious, and in need of minimal philosophical defense. In domestic terms, we can see this common-sense view of liberalism played out in the ideas of Adam Smith who, building on the work of John Locke, contributed to the establishment in Britain of an institutional liberalism that was embraced and developed by both conservative (e.g. Edmund Burke) and radical (e.g. Thomas Paine) political factions. Smith took it for granted that liberal ideas formed the basis of the fundamental laws of economy (Hall 1986, 38). In international terms we can see the common-sense view demonstrated by Francis Fukuyama’s (1989), perhaps premature, declaration of ‘The End of History’—the teleological victory of Liberal Democratic ideology as the only viable conception of political-economic organization left standing in post-Cold War political-economy; one that would be, if not adopted, then begrudgingly accepted as unquestionably the most adequate ideology to structure forms of life beyond US/Soviet hostilities.

Although it is commonplace to deride Fukuyama’s grand (and generally misinterpreted) claim about the triumph of Liberal Democracy, his explication reveals something fundamental to the nature of liberalism: that it is, above all, an ideology. This view is shared by Hall (1986, 36), who notes that if there is anything essential about ideology, it is that no ideology has an unchanging essence; that is, ideologies are always marked by inconsistencies and logical breaks. This goes some way to explaining why different political factions (conservatives and radicals) have, up to the present day, adopted liberalism and its variants as their philosophical impetus. 

But this does not tell the whole story, for there are two distinct branches of liberalism, each with its own distinct and unequally beneficial outcomes: political liberalism and economic liberalism. The former is that which was first philosophically articulated by John Locke, who argued for the equality of individuals before the law. Political subjects, he claimed, constituted a class of free men (Williams 2014, 179). On this account individuals living within a liberal society were the bearers of political rights and free speech, however the reality of such a claim was that until at least the twentieth century large sectors of society, such as women and the poor, were excluded from these rights (Chang 2014, 51). Political liberalism therefore, has not always signified a completely liberal democracy. Still, once implemented it imbued all included members of a society with equal rights before the law. Economic liberalism, on the other hand, because inextricably intertwined with capitalism, makes claims to economic equality, but in fact signifies a society in which a relatively small class of people who own the means of production exercise a vastly disproportionate influence on society (Miliband 1992, 109), and wield their influence at the expense of those without capital (i.e. the workers). Thus, while economic liberalism offers a condition of equality, this condition is insufficient given the unequal context in which it is bestowed. First given popular credence by Adam Smith, it was recognizable even to him that economic liberalism was “in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all” (in Chang 2014, 51).

Thus liberalism has never been without its controversies, nor its opponents. Indeed, it has found promotion and opposition in both conservative and socialist circles (Hall 1986), just as it has been equated with human freedom at one given moment (i.e. the Liberal internationalism of Fukuyama and his adherents), and as neo-imperialism the next (cf. Harvey 2007 on the invasion of Iraq). Further confusing the sea of animosity and praise, is that liberal has become a byword for centrism and laissez-faire in countries such as the UK, but denotes left of center political allegiance in the US (where ‘liberals’ are roughly the equivalent of European social democrats) (Chang 2014, 52).

Part of the problem is that liberalism constitutes a somewhat hollow ideology that has been filled out with varying forms of content in different times and places. At the center of its ideology there is really only one emphasis—individualism. Both Locke and Smith in their accounts of political and economic liberalism placed the (gendered) individual at the center of their analysis, in the form of an abstract being endowed with concrete characteristics derived from human nature (Hall 1986, 40). Thus we end up with a negative form of freedom from, that is intended to protect the individual from nefarious outside forces. In both politics and economics this implies freedom from the arbitrary will of a sovereign or the state (in the latter this amounts to a protection of private property from arbitrary confiscation), which at the time of its advent was a radical move, in that it elevated civil society—the space of individual interest and realization—over the state as the primary object of ideological concern (Hall 1986, 40). It is this reversal that is in some ways responsible for the disparity of equality between political and economic liberalism, for the economic theories of liberalism are founded on a principle of healthy competition, and the assumption that for some to win, others may have to lose. It is in this context that the strict separation of civil society and state allowed political equality before the law/state to be preserved, just as the private accumulation of wealth and influence was able to proceed uninhibited in the enclosed domain of civil society (Hall 1986, 43).

The outcomes of such inequality in relationships ostensibly formed around equality are the same as those that I described in the separate keyword definition for free trade: the weak are forced to be free and to engage in free relations, even though those free relations are not to the benefit of the weak, but to the distinct benefit of the strong, who forced the relationship to exist in the first place. Quijano and Wallerstein (1992) reveal some of the ways that this may be characterized beyond a strict (domestic or international) bourgeoisie/proletariat distinction, and that are most clearly seen in relation to the capitalist world-system. For instance, remnants of colonially produced hierarchies are culturally sustained in ethnicity constructs, and these ultimately become manifest as racist ideologies that do not fit within the liberal political-economic framework, but rather need to be assimilated in order to sustain it. Through liberalism’s capitalist symbiosis we thus arrive at the twin ideologies of universalism and meritocracy (Quijano & Wallerstein 1992, 551), each of which offers the myth of equal opportunity and obscures the socially and culturally rigged system in which such ‘opportunity’ will be offered.

(See Economic Reason, Empire, Neoliberalism, Enclosure/Border)

Bibliography

Brown, Wendy. “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003).

Chang, Ha-Joon. Economics: The User’s Guide, Vol. 1. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2014.

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?.” The National Interest (1989): 3-18.

Hall, Stuart. “Variants of Liberalism.” Politics and Ideology (1986): 34-69.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.

Miliband, Ralph. “Fukuyama and the Socialist Alternative.” New Left Review (1992), no. 193: 108.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism. Verso Books, 2012.

Quijano, Anibal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “‘Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World.” International Social Science Journal 44, no. 4 (1992): 549-557.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press, 2014.