Notes on Ball & Dagger text
Chapter 3
Liberalism

INTRODUCTION TO / OVERVIEW OF LIBERALISM

When you hear that something (person, policy, proposal) is "liberal", what do you think of?  Give general principles, not specific people or policies, i.e., "A liberal person or policy has the following characteristics:  [etc.]"

Liberalism as a "great tent", covering free market conservatism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, modern welfare liberalism, libertarianism.

Assumptions about inherent human nature:

• Humans are capable of having & forming their own goals and plans.  In the end, only they can be the judge.  Not tradition, not a church, not a dictator.
• Humans are primarily self-interested.  They are not saints and cannot be assumed to be such (or taught to be such or even need to be such).  Along the same lines, humans are competitive to satisfy their own interests.
• Humans are rational, in that they can cooperate to better satisfy those interests.  To say this another way, while humans may be self-interested, they are not blindly selfish or hostile to one another.

This cooperation does require a solution to the so-called "assurance problem", but it does not require massive police forces to create this assurance.

Implication:  one's primary need is liberty to seek one's own ends and form one's own goals without interference from others.  The "Harm Principle" codifies this sense of liberty:  you should be able to do what you like as long as you do not harm others.  "My liberty ends where your nose begins."  Or as John Rawls puts it, a just system permits everyone the maximum system of liberty compatible with a like system of liberty for others.  (Notice that different liberties can be traded off against each other in a "system" of liberty;  liberty is not a single, absolute thing.)

Obstacles to liberty:

• laws;  religious dictates;  social pressure to conform;  other people deciding your goals, i.e., your sense of the Good.
• systemic social disadvantages:  poverty;  racism & sexism;  illness

Historical background:

• Economic, political, and social absolutism:  mercantilism, absolute monarchs, and religious dogma.
• Social & economic changes:  literacy, trade, travel, exposure to other cultures, revival of Greek thought, science, complexity of manufacturing technology and processes, complexity of trade ties.
• Wealth of manufacturing and trade;  taxation of the bourgeoisie gave wealth and military power to the state, but power follows money, and eventually the bourgeoisie could press their need for liberty to pursue economic opportunities.  They were opposed politically and ideologically to the landed aristocracy, who were seen as not producing anything, while the aristocracy looked down on the bourgeoisie as being "tradesmen".  But to make the point again, power follows money, and eventually the aristocracy either got into trade, married into its wealth, or went broke and got left behind.
• In this context, the Reformation (1521 excommunication of Martin Luther) had a logic that, once started, could not be contained:
  • Priesthood of all believers
  • Individual faith and conscience
  • Read & understand the Bible for oneself
• In sum, the Catholic Church and its priests were not required to mediate people's relations with their God;  they could do it themselves.  Thus the focus came onto the individual, not the institution.
• Doctrine of the "divine right of kings" put to an end with the execution of Charles I (1648)

Political-philosophical consequences for how people thought about government:

• Hobbes's subversive argument in Leviathan (1651) cast the problem of social order in a different light from before.  The problem is not finding who God has approved of as monarch but rather how to induce people to support a system that they themselves create.  How to get cooperation in the midst of a state of nature (given concreteness by the reality and image of the New World of the Americas).  The idea of the social contract.
• Locke's distinction of public and private.  Property and trade are basically private.  Religion is private, and non-official religions should be tolerated (except for Catholics and atheists, whose beliefs interfere with the possibility of a social contract).

The Great Division

This section of the chapter discusses the important difference between modern reform liberalism and modern conservatism.

[Notes end here, but let me remark that it is very important for you to understand the differences among the three types of liberalism we've talked about:  classical liberalism, modern reform liberalism, and modern conservatism.]

Potential quiz questions:

• What did the book say about liberalism that you didn't know before (or were glad to be reminded of).

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