CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM, USA / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
John C. Calhoun was regarded by some as a liberal because of his defense of individual liberty—albeit for the rights of whites to own slaves.
[From article]
In a famous incident at a political banquet in 1830, President Andrew Jackson offered a toast to “Our federal Union, it must be preserved”—to which Calhoun, his vice president, pointedly responded with a toast to “the Union, next to our liberty, the most dear.” The liberty he meant was, of course, the freedom of Southern whites to own slaves; and he was devoted to this liberty to the point of advocating secession if it were threatened by the federal government. If liberalism is the political philosophy that takes liberty as its primary value, doesn’t that mean that Calhoun was a liberal par excellence?
[. . .]
two recent books [. . .] are otherwise diametrically opposed in their ideological and methodological approaches. Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, by the distinguished British journalist Edmund Fawcett, is an accessible account of major liberal politicians and thinkers of the last two centuries, written from a position of unillusioned but profound solidarity with the liberal tradition. On the other hand, as its title suggests, Liberalism: A Counter-History, by the Italian political theorist Domenico Losurdo, takes a debunking approach to that tradition. Losurdo argues that liberalism has never been interested in true, universal liberation but was instead an ideology by which privileged elites justified and celebrated their domination over workers, slaves, and conquered native peoples.
[. . .]
if an out-and-out white supremacist and celebrator of slavery like Calhoun was a liberal in good standing, the name “liberal” can hardly function as an honorific. That is precisely the conclusion reached by Losurdo, who writes that in Calhoun, “we are dealing with one of the major authors and great minds in the liberal tradition and pantheon.” And if that is so, “we can no longer maintain the traditional (and edifying) image of liberalism as the thought and volition of liberty.”
[. . .]
THE BOWES MUSEUM, BARNARD CASTLE, COUNTY DURHAM, UK / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
For political theorist Larry Siedentop, liberalism’s roots go all the way back to Saint Paul’s emphasis on individual conscience.
it is possible to be devoted to liberty but not to be a liberal—indeed, to be antiliberal. If so, then liberalism, despite its name, is not exactly a philosophy of liberty after all. It is, rather, what Fawcett considers it: a practice of politics, a way of responding to the challenges of capitalist modernity, a pursuit of a set of values that are often difficult to reconcile.
[. . .]
By liberalism, Fawcett and Losurdo—and Larry Siedentop, in his important 2014 study Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism—mean rather different things; but none is talking about the left wing of the Democratic Party. That position in twenty-first-century American politics is just one on the broad historical spectrum of liberalism, and, depending on which of these writers you listen to, the spectrum becomes broad indeed.
By liberalism, Fawcett and Losurdo—and Larry Siedentop, in his important 2014 study Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism—mean rather different things; but none is talking about the left wing of the Democratic Party. That position in twenty-first-century American politics is just one on the broad historical spectrum of liberalism, and, depending on which of these writers you listen to, the spectrum becomes broad indeed.
[. . .]
Locke figures in any textbook of political philosophy as one of the founders of liberal thought
[. . .]
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were also the height of the Atlantic slave trade and the expropriation of the American Indians; and in Losurdo’s view, these crimes were absolutely integral to the development of liberalism. “The rise of the two liberal countries either side of the Atlantic,” he writes, “involved a process of systematic expropriation and practical genocide.”
[. . .]
If freedom, individualism, and equality are at the heart of liberalism, Siedentop believes, all these things were not so much modern inventions as Christian inheritances.
[. . .]
Is there a common thread running through all the varied uses of the name “liberal,” or would it be better for the word to be retired, in favor of more relevant distinctions?
[. . .]
It may be hard to define because it is the air we all breathe and the lens through which we see all political issues.
Indeed, the great story of the modern world is the triumph of liberalism—defined loosely as the politics whose primary value is individual freedom—over challenges from all its competitors. First, in the nineteenth century, liberalism overthrew monarchy, feudal privilege, and chattel slavery. In the twentieth, it fought a great war against fascism and a long cold war against Communism, winning both.
[. . .]
in its traditional heartland of Western Europe and America—the countries Fawcett writes about—liberalism remains predominant, though not unchallenged.
[. . .]
the politics known in America [. . .] —that is, between “left” and “right”—both sides appeal to identical liberal values of freedom and fairness.
[. . .]
no American politician advocates antiliberal principles such as hierarchies based on birth, or the abolition of private property, or the power of race and blood. We are happily constrained by the Constitution to frame all our political debates in liberal terms, as a matter of ensuring the rights of individuals.
[Is this guy paying attention to what is going on in the United States?]
[. . .]
One of the defining achievements of nineteenth-century English liberalism, for instance, was to end the legal disabilities for Catholics, Dissenters, Jews, and others who did not take communion in the Church of England. For their part, religious institutions recognized this threat—none more so than the Catholic Church, which waged a long battle against liberal modernity. The gallery of liberal heroes includes many, from Galileo to Darwin, who stood up against supernatural claims to authority in the name of reason and science.
[. . .]
the paradox that the same men who created the United States as a haven of freedom and democracy, who gave the world its most inspiring defense of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” were also slaveholders. Thomas Jefferson,George Washington, James Madison—all participated in that world-historical crime. And these same leaders, and later arch-democrats like Andrew Jackson, were also responsible for the conquest of North America and the expulsion or elimination of its aboriginal inhabitants.
[. . .]
Locke was a shareholder in the slave-trading Royal African Company. Tocqueville was a cheerleader for the French conquest of Algeria and endorsed genocidal measures against the indigenous Arabs.
[. . .]
American historians reserve the term “liberal” or “progressive” for Lincoln’s Republican Party, which fought and won the Civil War.
[. . .]
Much of the globe still lacks the freedom that the West takes for granted; and it is precisely at moments of discouragement that liberalism itself is most vulnerable to attacks from more confident and simplistic ideologies.
http://www.city-journal.org/2016/26_1_melancholy-liberalism.html
ADAM KIRSCH
Melancholy Liberalism
Has a beleaguered intellectual tradition lost its optimism?
Winter 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment