When is something a liberal project?
Anthony King and my other political science lecturers at the University of Essex taught me that Britain and its Western neighbours were a ‘liberal project’, and that modern politics was about what to do with its consequences. George Dangerfield’s famous book from 1935, ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’, explores some of the reasons why: Britain’s Liberal Party passed the People’s Budget in 1910, faced down the House of Lords during constitutional reform in favour of the democratic House of Commons in 1911, and extended the vote to women in 1918, all considerable achievements that have kept it mostly out of power ever since. If they were the acme of the 19th century liberal project, other parties were better placed in the 20th century to manage it: conservatives to preserve what had been achieved, progressives to challenge it.
The commentator Ezra Klein and the academic Francis Fukuyama noted in a recent podcast that by the end of the 20th century, management of the liberal project had settled on discussions of the size of the state and the distribution of wealth. Bill Clinton’s flagship 1996 welfare reform act sought to raise the incomes of America’s poor by increasing their participation in the labour market rather than putting up benefit payments, and Britain’s New Labour introduced its New Deal in 1998 with similar aims. Complaints that politics had become ‘managerialist’ — and that in Britain there was no difference between the two main parties — were common.
But it’s not clear that the 21st century’s big projects — such as those in technology or ones run by China — are being driven by liberal ideas. Google wanted to catalogue the world’s knowledge and started with the ethic of ‘don’t be evil’ — which many non-liberals around the world also believe in — but in 2018 was fined EUR4 billion by the European Union for restricting the freedom of others on how to search it. China created the Asian Infrastructure Bank to use infrastructure to broaden economic opportunities across Asia, but may have as many as 3.8 million people living in ‘slavery conditions’ at home.
It turns out that liberalism is hard to define and it’s difficult to know when something is motivated by it. In his book, ‘Liberalism’, the philosopher John Gray argued that searching for its foundations is futile. Edmund Fawcett’s ‘Liberalism: The Life of an Idea’ showed how liberal ideas have been applied in the West, and he argued that the characteristics of liberalism — ‘people’s rights, toleration, constitutional government, the rule of law, and liberty’ — are easy to spot, but that its capacious nature makes it difficult to find an agreed definition that enables one to say ‘That thing over there is a manifestation of liberalism, but this thing here is not.’
In the first edition of his book, Fawcett argued that today’s liberals worry about their project in the same way that previous generations did. He heard them fearing their ideas not being attractive enough to be enacted in new ways, that those ideas were not coherent or politically viable, and that they were too idealistic.
In 1994 Gray in his book wrote that liberals were right to be worried, as theirs was the political philosophy that had motivated modernity and it was dying as a new era was born. He believed that liberalism had emerged from conflicts in the Reformation and Wars of Religion, and had sought to rationally justify morality in a way that was independent of the parties involved, thereby creating mutually respected conditions that would allow them to live together and prosper. But if that justification was an Enlightenment project and we have lost interest in propagating it — Gray believed that little academic work was being done on the ideals of the Enlightenment, outside of the Philosophy of Science — then liberalism would wither too.
But Gray’s statement of the enduring problem that liberals seek to solve — ‘specifying the terms of peaceful coexistence among exponents of rival, and perhaps rationally incommensurable, world-views’ — still seems to apply. Even though China hasn’t done enough to be considered a market economy by the World Trade Organisation, its economic growth has been driven by Deng Xiaoping’s liberalisation programme. And despite Google’s senior management being prepared to amend its services in China to restrict the flow of information to Chinese citizens so that it could compete there, the beliefs of its staff seem to have forced it to change course.
Fawcett wrote that the liberal project was always about bringing mutually respected order to a debated and unstable world. On his telling, liberals have tried to do this by believing that eradicating conflict in the pursuit of social harmony was foolhardy and suffocating; that too much power of some over others would always lead to arbitrary rule; that human character and society could change; and that might was not right, because individuals should be respected. If, as the historian Niall Ferguson claims, the internet has taken us back to the age of the printing press and the social turmoil it invited through the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, perhaps liberalism can be re-applied to solve the same problems again.
Despite there being many types and applications of liberalism, Gray found four commonalities between them that we can use to judge whether a new and big thing like the internet or China on the world stage are liberal projects:
- Is the project individualist, in that it puts the claims of the individual over those of the group?
- Is it egalitarian, with the same moral worth being assigned to all individuals?
- Is it universalist, with the moral commonality of the human race taking precedence over cultural or historical practices that apply to only one group?
- Is it meliorist, meaning that it allows for the improvement of the human condition?
It’s a simple checklist, but one that we can use to think about how we might solve some of the biggest challenges we face today.
