Let us consider another example more fully. In the American Congress the chairmen of standing committees are named from the majority party on the basis of seniority. Although some rational arguments can be offered in favor of this practice, they are on the whole less convincing—judged strictly from an abstract, purely rational point of view—than the many arguments that can be and often have been brought against it. It is a practice, however, of ancient lineage, which, without being formally debated or much thought about, became fixed very early in the history of the Congress; fixed also—though this is less seldom remarked—in the practice of all other legislative bodies (state and municipal) in the United States; fixed as a rule, in truth, in most legislative bodies at all times and places, once they have been established for a number of years.
To the conservative mind this venerable habit or custom, appearing or reappearing in so many times and conditions, seems to wield some legitimate authority. Not deliberate reasoning, granted, but long practical experience seems to have led men to adopt or to fall into these seniority rules and other procedures of the same sort. This might seem to suggest that from the practical experience itself men gradually learn certain things about conducting assemblies and making laws that cannot be derived from principles and reason alone, or from books; much as practical experience, habit, apprenticeship and direct acquaintance seem to be necessary to the proficient practice as well as the genuine understanding of painting, carpentry, music and indeed all the arts and crafts—maybe, even for adequate understanding of philosophy and the sciences themselves.
Nevertheless, most liberals in and out of Congress do not feel in this matter of committee chairmanships, which is a very critical point in the American governmental system, that such considerations of experience, habit, custom and tradition have any appreciable weight as against the clear-cut arguments derived from democratic theory and reformist goals; and the liberals are certainly correct in holding that seniority and similar rules in legislative assemblies are logically counter to democratic theory, and in practice are brakes to the rapid achievement of major social reforms.
Liberals, moreover, when seized with the “passion” for reform to which Professor Schapiro readily confesses, do not reflect unduly on the fact that no social innovation takes place in a vacuum. When we alter item A, especially if it is changed deliberately and abruptly instead of by the slow molding of time, we will find items B and C also changed, and to some degree the entire social situation, sometimes in most unexpected ways. We may be successful in achieving our sought-for reform; but there will be other, unintended and perhaps undesired changes arriving along with it; and there will also and inevitably be something lost—at the minimum, what the reform has replaced; so that on net the loss may more than counterbalance the gain on the scale of Progress.
In the case we have been considering and in general, this possibility does not greatly worry the liberal in advance because he will have reached his decision about the desirability of the reform by derivation from his ideology—which comprises a ready-made set of desirable goals—and not from slow, painstaking and rather pedestrian attention to the actual way in which assemblies, or whatever it may be, function. Thus in every session of Congress in these recent decades since liberalism has become a pervasive influence there are proposals to abolish the seniority and allied non-democratic rules. On this matter it is revealing to note that in spite of the generally prevailing liberal climate of opinion in the United States, the liberal innovations have made slow headway in Congress: a fact that confirms the liberal judgment and condemnation of Congress as the most conservative of our national political institutions.
The liberal attitude toward tradition and change can be illustrated from every sphere of social life, and toward a thousand issues ranging from divorce to Peace Corps, from patriotism to the school curriculum. Bertrand Russell, one of the early if somewhat eccentric prophets of twentieth-century liberalism, expresses it without qualification in his book Why Men Fight. The task of education, he insists, should be not to uphold but to destroy “contentment with the status quo. . . . It should be inspired, not by a regretful hankering after the extinct beauties of Greece and the Renaissance, but by a shining vision of the society that is to be, of the triumphs that thought [or reason, as we have been using the term] will achieve in the time to come.”18 John Stuart Mill was no less categorical in his most influential essay, “On Liberty”: “The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement. . . . The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind.”19
1. In Chapter VIII, I shall consider the question whether the system of ideas that I shall have by then made explicit “really is” liberalism, whether liberals believe in liberalism. Meanwhile, I note that my endeavor in these three chapters is in no respect to distort, misstate, libel, caricature or refute liberalism considered as a system of ideas, but merely to understand and describe it.
2. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 14.
3. Professor Charles Frankel, The Case for Modern Man (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956), p. 7, lists Voltaire, Condorcet and John Stuart Mill as “the great names” attached to the philosophy of history standing behind liberal ideas.
4. J. Salwyn Schapiro, Liberalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1958), p. 12. This small volume is, so far as I know, the only attempt to present modern liberalism in a more or less systematic textbook.
5. Clifton Brock, Americans for Democratic Action (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1962), pp. 177, 185.
6. Oakeshott, op. cit., pp. 1, 2.
7. Schapiro, op. cit., p. 12.
8. Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorisms 129, 88, 81.
9. Discourse on Method, passim.
10. Esquisse d’un Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (“Outline of the Progress of the Human Mind”).
11. “Six Liberals Define Liberalism,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1959, p. 13. It should be recalled that Senator Humphrey was a professor of political science before turning professional politician.
12. Frankel, op. cit., pp. 36, 41.
13. Professor Frankel remarks: “To put it starkly, but I think exactly, liberalism invented the idea that there are such things as ‘social problems.’ ” (Ibid., p. 33.)
14. This faith in the solubility of social problems has been so prominent and widespread in the United States, that in the American context it should probably be considered more a national than an ideological trait. In American speeches, reports or articles on political, economic or social problems, a “positive” ending is de rigueur in nearly all circles. This is one of the senses in which Professor Louis Hartz and other intellectual historians are almost correct when they state that “the liberal tradition” is the only American tradition. In Europe the conservatives and many religious tendencies have never shared this social optimism.
15. Oakeshott, op. cit., p. 5.
16. Schapiro, op. cit., p. 12.
17. Schapiro, op. cit., p. 13.
18. Quoted from Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell (New York: The Modern Library, 1927), pp. 99, 110.
19. John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty.” Quoted from Bantam Books edition of Essential Works of John Stuart Mill, edited and with an Introduction by Max Lerner (New York, 1961), p. 318.