Modern liberalism, as is well known, is a synthetic, or eclectic, doctrine with a rather elaborate family tree. Without trying to carry its line back to the beginning of thought, we can locate one undoubted forebear in seventeenth-century rationalism. Professor Michael Oakeshott, the successor of Harold Laski in the chair of political science at London University, uses the term “rationalism” as the genus of which liberalism and communism are the most prominent contemporary species. In Rationalism and Politics he names both Francis Bacon and René Descartes as “dominating figures” in its early history.2
The lines to the eighteenth century are fuller and more direct: to the Enlightenment in general, to Voltaire, to Condorcet3 and his co-fathers of the idea of Progress, and to Jacobinism. From utilitarianism and the older doctrine that was called “liberalism” in the nineteenth century, as it still is in parts of Europe, modern liberalism has taken some of its theory of democracy, its critical emphasis on freedom of speech and opinion, and certain of its ideas about the self-determination of nations and peoples. Genes from the Utopian tradition—both of the Enlightment’s kind of utopianism and of Utopian pre-socialism like that of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen—are manifestly part of the heritage.
A somewhat different line intermarried more lately; some of Karl Marx’s spiritual offspring, particularly such cousins from the collateral revisionist branch as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Jean Jaurès and the British Fabians; William James, John Dewey and others from the American pragmatist and utilitarian wing; and the most influential economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes.
Although these make up a large and seemingly mixed lot, the lineage is not so arbitrarily linked as it might at first glance seem. These forebears share certain features of historical posture as well as theoretical doctrine, a fact which, as we shall be able to see more specifically later on, helps solve a paradox in the way modern liberalism functions in practice.
Having named these multiple roots, I might almost seem to be saying that the intellectual source of liberalism is the entire body of post-Renaissance thought. It is natural enough that this should almost be the impression. Our modern liberalism is in truth the contemporary representative, the principal heir, of the main line (or lines) of post-Renaissance thought, the line that has the right to consider itself most distinctively “modern” and most influential in both shaping and being shaped by the post-Renaissance world.
Still, this main line is not the only line, even if the rest consists of poor relations. From its undoubted and acknowledged forebears, liberalism has inherited only a portion of the estates; a part and in some cases a major part of the entireties, liabilities along with assets, has been assigned elsewhere. If the modern liberal can press his claim to the legacies of Descartes, Diderot, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Locke, Bentham, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, William James and Kautsky by bringing before the court many a confirming page and chapter, a disputant will be able to present a contrary file substantial enough to cast a cloud on at least some of the titles. It can even be argued, and has been, that today’s liberals maintain their hold on some of the properties—those tracing, for obvious example, back to John Stuart Mill or John Locke—only by what lawyers would call “adverse possession,” backed by their present control of the intellectual records office.
And, granted all these many prominent figures among the ancestors, direct, collateral and adopted, of modern liberalism, not everyone is hung in its gallery even from the post-Renaissance epoch—not to mention those dark centuries before science and democracy, as to which liberalism’s family records are on any account somewhat skimpy and blurred.
The entire tradition of Catholic philosophy, especially its primary Aristotelian wing, which after all did live on after Renaissance and Reformation and even Isaac Newton, has little part, or none, in liberalism’s lineage. Nor do we find among its ancestors Thomas Hobbes or Thomas Hooker, Blaise Pascal, David Hume, Edmund Burke, John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, Henry Maine, Jacob Burckhardt, Fustel de Coulanges or Lord Acton. Niccolò Machiavelli and Michel de Montaigne had only minor flirtations, without issue on the chart. And for the most part, though it has an emotional attraction for some contemporary liberal intellectuals, liberalism has in its blood little of the dark infusion that flows from the nineteenth century’s irrational springs: from Soren Kierkegaard (back to Pascal, really, with his heart’s reasons of which Reason knows nothing), to Dostoevsky’s underground man and Friedrich Nietzsche.
As a way of thinking for moderns, liberalism is out in front, but it is not alone in the field.
II
CLOSING THAT PARENTHESIS, I shall now describe the basic ideas and beliefs that compose the formal structure of the ideological syndrome of modern liberalism.
1. The logical starting point for liberalism, as for most other ideologies, is a belief about the nature of man. On this point as on many of the others it is unwise to try to be too precise in formulation. Liberalism is not an exact and rigid doctrine, in either its psychological and social function or its logical structure. Its beliefs are not like theorems in geometry or Spinoza, questiones in scholastic philosophy or theses in Hegel. We must understand them in a looser, more flexible sense, with plenty of modifiers like “on the whole,” “more or less” and “by and large.” Some of the beliefs of liberalism should be thought of as expressing tendencies or presumptions rather than as attempting to state laws or precise hypotheses. Nevertheless, even if rough or vague, a belief can be meaningful, significantly different from contrasting beliefs, and exceedingly important from a practical standpoint.
That disclaimer recorded, we may assert that liberalism believes man’s nature to be not fixed but changing, with an unlimited or at any rate indefinitely large potential for positive (good, favorable, progressive) development. This may be contrasted with the traditional belief, expressed in the theological doctrines of Original Sin and the real existence of the Devil, that human nature had a permanent, unchanging essence, and that man is partly corrupt as well as limited in his potential. “Man, according to liberalism, is born ignorant, not wicked,” declares Professor J. Salwyn Schapiro,4 writing as a liberal on liberalism.
The traditional view of human nature came under indirect attack by Bacon, Descartes and even earlier Renaissance thinkers. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau, Condorcet, Diderot and other French philosophers of the Enlightenment made a frontal assault. They openly rejected the dogma of Original Sin and its attendant philosophical theory. In their rhetorical enthusiasm, they taught that man is innately good, not bad or corrupt, and held that man’s potentialities are unlimited: that man, in other words, is perfectible in the full sense of being capable of achieving perfection.
On this as on many issues, modern liberalism puts matters more cautiously and vaguely. Innately and essentially, human nature is neither pure nor corrupt, neither good nor bad; and is not so much “perfectible” in a full and literal sense as “plastic.” There may be some limit, short of perfection, to what men might make of themselves and their society; but there is no limit that we can see and define in advance. If a limit exists, it is so distant and so far beyond anything that man has yet accomplished that it has no practical relevance to our plans and programs.
The decisive distinction is probably this: Modern liberalism, contrary to the traditional doctrine, holds that there is nothing intrinsic to the nature of man that makes it impossible for human society to achieve the goals of peace, freedom, justice and well-being that liberalism assumes to be desirable and to define “the good society.” Liberalism rejects the essentially tragic view of man’s fate found in nearly all pre-Renaissance thought and literature, Christian and non-Christian alike.
There exist individuals whom no one would hesitate to call “liberals” but who do not seem to believe this doctrine concerning human nature that I here attribute to liberalism. Specifically, there are Roman Catholics who regard themselves as liberals and are so regarded, but who as Catholics are committed to the theological dogma of Original Sin. And there are others known as liberals who hold Freudian or similar views in psychology—Max Lerner would seem to be a prominent American example; but it is difficult to reconcile the psychoanalytic account of human nature with a doctrine of man’s indefinitely benign plasticity.
These