On liberalism

Before we can proceed with our discussion of Philip Agre's essay on conservatism, I need to say a bit about liberalism. The meaning of the word has changed somewhat since it first developed in the 19th Century. John Stewart Mill was not far removed from feudalism and monarchical rule, while industrial capitalism was just recently in the ascendant. Modern mass communication and public relations did not yet exist, while British (and American) democracy was pretty much exclusive to men of property.

Therefore, in thinking about how liberty could be maximized, Mill and classic liberals were most concerned about the prospect of a tyrannical state, and also tended to think of the individuals whose enjoyment of liberty was the highest value as being much like themselves, that is having a relative position of privilege within society. It was possible to be, like Jefferson and other founders of the American state, both a liberal and a slaveholder. Indeed, slave owners argued that abolishing slavery would infringe on their liberty -- to own slaves. The idea of the freedom for women hadn't even occurred to most of them. That people who depended on wage labor could be oppressed by capitalists also had not really occurred to them. 

Consequently, classical liberalism argued for laissez faire -- that is, that economic transactions between private parties should not be constrained by any sort of intervention from the state. But as Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation:

[T]he idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.

In the midst of the Great Depression, even some enlightened capitalists recognized that the protection of liberty required government intervention. As Roosevelt put it, freedom required freedom of speech and freedom of worship, as Mill had argued; but it also required freedom from want and freedom from fear. The greatest danger to freedom for the masses was no longer tyrannical government, but rather overweening and conscienceless private interests. Hence the reforms of the New Deal and later, in the 1960s, the Great Society. And so liberalism became associated with activist government. (So-called neoliberalism of the 1980s et seq  really should have been called paleoliberalism.) So Agre writes:

Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in the interests of the aristocracy. This has been true for thousands of years. What is distinctive about liberalism is not that it promotes activist government but that it promotes government that acts in the interests of the majority. Democratic government, however, is not simply majoritarian. It is, rather, one institutional expression of a democratic type of culture that is still very much in the process of being invented.

 

The idea of freedom is not simple, and it is not a force of nature that can somehow be restrained only by government. Liberty requires institutions to defend it. That is one basic premise of liberalism. Conservatism, on the other hand, values freedom only for a few. 

Update: We can't have a conversation about Agre's essay unless the interlocutors actually read it. If you are too lazy to read it thoughtfully, then any comment you make about it will be spam. Agre discusses at length how the specific content of convervatism has changed over time. He also discusses what has remained the same. That is his point. Second, if you think there is a big difference between liberty and freedom, which is in fact a semantic quibble, you can't have liberty if you don't have freedom from fear and want. That seems pretty obvious to me.