Adam Gopnik offers an insightful description
and explanation of the origins of liberalism – tracing that origin to the 1860s
and the contributions of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor[1]
(see previous posting, “Romantic Liberalism” [2]). Through his review, Gopnik establishes that
essential to liberal thought and speech (their critical words), they go beyond
“liberty” and “democracy” and include “humanity,” “reform,” “self-realization,”
“pluralism,” and “autonomy.”
These terms reflect the establishment or the
strengthening of a self-selected community with its governance – the creation
of which is not accidental but due to reflected action. That describes a federated arrangement in which
a people come together and establish, by common consent, the polity that will
govern them.
And in addition, that polity will govern with a
sense of shared purpose, that being “eliminating cruelty and sadism and
needless suffering from the world.”[3] But how specific are these ideas that one
associates with liberalism or how well are they combined to show one the way to
a better society?
Here, Gopnik takes a bit of a turn in his
explanation and feels it necessary to describe the role that town centers
played through the centuries in how liberalized life became possible. More than merely being symbols for this view
or belief of common folk having a say in governance, town centers or the Italian
piazza played a central role through the centuries. It is not by accident that these centers
became targets of such authoritarian powers all the way back to the times of
the ancient Persians and Spartans.
These centers often served as markets as they
provided the practical reason for townspeople to gather, but they functioned
beyond providing provisions. They became
centers for sharing concerns and voicing demands and wishes. They also provided face-to-face contacts
among the townspeople where empathy could develop and strengthen. In terms of Western democratic tradition, the
Greek agora played that important role.
More currently, a good deal of liberalism, as a
thought-out construct, can be traced to the Enlightenment of the seventeenth
century, but its definitive character, according to Gopnik, seems to have been
established in the 1859-1872 period and he gives a good deal of credit to Mill’s
contribution, On Liberty (along with Charles Darwin’s Origin of the
Species). Historically, along with
these written sources, there were also the historical events of the American
Civil War and the establishment in France of the Third Republic.
Gopnik explains: “Darwin’s was a new articulation of the
history of life and humanity’s place within it, implicit but obvious, and
Mill’s was the articulation of a new understanding about the nature of
authority and the individual’s claims against it.”[4] And given the events of the mid to late 1800s,
people were more apt to reconsider the culturally determined place that average
people should take in the political landscape.
The North winning the American Civil War with
its emancipation of slaves prodded democratization beyond American
borders. It encouraged it in Britain,
for example. It reenergized democratic
forces in France. And it threatened
authoritarian voices in Germany under the leadership of Otto Von Bismarck while
enhancing the socialist message of Karl Marx.
This indicates a bit of diversion and, as such,
reveals a lack of a pointed message.
That would be a message with a definite plan for a perceived future that
would put into effect the favored democratic governance. Instead, what emerged was an idealistic
vision based on broad democratic principles.
In turn, this allowed these varied reactions just mentioned and reflected
its lack of rulemaking or definitive direction.
Gopnik writes:
“It tends to hold implicit and explicit ideas about community, reform,
violence, sexual roles, and more.
Liberalism … is an attempt to realize liberty, not merely to
invoke it or make it the subject of an incantation.”[5] In the opinion of this blogger, this reflects
a looseness in definition or theoretical rigor.
And this lack of definitiveness plagues liberal advocates to this day.
It allows for such offshoots as those mentioned
above or for the natural rights view that disdains any social or legal
restraints on human behavior on just about any level of social concern – from
laws to norms to habits. As this blog
has repeatedly claimed, this last view took dominance in the US in the years
following World War II and has grown in its influence ever since.
With that transition, the general sense of duty
and obligation of citizenship – which was described in the last posting and is part
and parcel of Mill and Taylor’s promotion of liberalism – has eroded. In its stead, a contractual – quid pro quo –
view has taken hold and dismissed a compact-al – partnership – view that had
been dominant in the US from America’s colonial period to the mid-twentieth
century.
And this blogger believes that that transition
has been highly instrumental in generating the increasingly polarized politics that
the nation is currently experiencing.
Surely the argument of this posting could be more solid in its reasoning,
but it is offered as an interpretation. That
is, liberalism as experienced today has become radicalized.
Whether liberalism, in its essence, has gone
through various forms from its inception, readers have a good dose of latitude
to judge. As for this blogger, he would
like to see a re-establishment of Mill and Taylor’s apparent bias toward
federated ideals and away from radical liberalism.
[1] Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventures of Liberalism (New
York, NY: Basic, 2019). The factual claims of this posting are based
on the information this source provides.
[2] Robert Gutierrez, “Romantic Liberalism,” a posting, Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, a blog, accessed
January 3, 2024, URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2023_01_24_archive.html.
[3] Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities, 14.
[4] Ibid., 14.
[5] Ibid., 17.
Emphasis added.
