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ОглавлениеHuman Nature and the Good Society
I
AMONG THE ELEMENTS OF AN ideological syndrome there are feelings, attitudes, habits and values as well as ideas and theories. My direct concern in this and the two following chapters will be the ideas and theories of the liberal syndrome: the “cognitive” meanings of liberalism that can be stated in the form of propositions accepted by liberal ideology as true. The distinction suggested here between cognitive meanings and emotive or affective meanings is considerably less clear in content than in form, and it will be necessary to qualify it later on; but it provides a convenient framework for exposition.
My present objective, then, is to exhibit modern liberalism as a more or less systematic set of ideas, theories and beliefs about society.1 Before proceeding, I pause for a prefatory comment on liberalism’s intellectual ancestry.
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 apparent anomalies will be dealt with more thoroughly in Chapter VIII. I here comment on them briefly.
(a) Though it is true that some Catholics and Freudians (or post-Freudians) are to be numbered in the liberal army, there is often a little uneasiness, on both sides, on this score. On a mass scale, Catholics are comparatively recent recruits to liberalism. The older generation of bluestocking liberals are glad to welcome such impressive contingents to the camp of virtue, but they can’t help remaining just a bit suspicious; and this is in part because of a feeling that there is something wrong, from a liberal standpoint, with the Catholic theory about human nature and man’s fate. This feeling is strong enough to lead some liberals—like Paul Blanshard and his Committee for the Separation of Church and State—to steer altogether clear of Catholics. Nearly all liberals keep their ideological fingers crossed when they observe such a group as the Jesuits beginning to sound like liberals, as the American Jesuits have often done of late in the pages of their principal magazine, America. The wisest liberals are not surprised, and reassured in their own faith, when, after saying all the proper things about social reforms and right-wing extremists, America suddenly reverts, as it did in 1962, to reactionary prejudice when it has to comment on a Supreme Court decision banning prayer in public schools.
It is noteworthy that Americans for Democratic Action, one of the leading congregations of liberal fundamentalism, was at first most unhappy about the prospect of the nomination of the Catholic John F. Kennedy to the Presidency—even though scores of ADA members were soon to find themselves occupying high posts in the Kennedy administration. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., an ADA founder and leader, estimated that less than 10 percent of the ADA membership was pro-Kennedy at the start of 1960. In September 1959, a memorandum by Allen Taylor, director of the New York State ADA chapter, recorded: “Religion is the major element in the liberals’ doubt about Kennedy.”5
A Freudian, too, can disturb the liberal waters. Max Lerner is in practice a somewhat maverick ranger in the liberal formation, far less reliable than, say, his columnar teammate, James Wechsler. Occasionally Mr. Lerner gets way out of line with the liberal consensus.
(b) Many individuals professing belief in a religious doctrine of Original Sin, or such theories of human nature as Freud’s, give their view a modified or metaphorical interpretation that brings it sufficiently into accord with the requirements of liberal theory and practice—rather as believers in the Bible have been able to reinterpret their understanding of Genesis to reconcile it, psychologically at least, with the theory of evolution. This process is eased by the fact that general beliefs about human nature are not precise anyway; their meaning may be more to express attitudes toward life than to make verifiable assertions.
(c) Nonetheless, there undoubtedly are many cases where a given individual is logically committed by his religion or by psychological or biological theory to one view of human nature and by his liberalism to an incompatible view. Of such cases, we can only note that human beings are like that. They are seldom fully consistent in their beliefs; and are often committed to many a contradiction. To most people this is not particularly troublesome; they are usually not aware of the contradictions, and in any case they don’t take logical precision very seriously.
(d) However varied may be the combination of beliefs that it is psychologically possible for an individual liberal to hold, it remains true that liberalism is logically committed to a doctrine along the lines that I have sketched: viewing human nature as not fixed but plastic and changing; with no pre-set limit to potential development; with no innate obstacle to the realization of a society of peace, freedom, justice and well-being. Unless these things are true of human nature, the liberal doctrine and program for government, education, reform and so on are an absurdity. To this logical necessity, Chapter VIII will return.
2. The liberal ideology is rationalist. Professor Oakeshott, as I have mentioned, classifies liberalism as simply a special case of what may be called in general, “rationalism.” Reason, according to rationalism, is not only what distinguishes man in logical definition from other species, as Aristotle stated (though meaning something rather different by “reason”); reason is man’s essence, and in a practical sense his chief and ultimately controlling characteristic. Liberalism is confident that reason and rational science, without appeal to revelation, faith, custom or intuition, can both comprehend the world and solve its problems.
The liberal as rationalist is described by Professor Oakeshott: “He stands . . . for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of ‘reason.’ His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once skeptical and optimistic: skeptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his ‘reason’; optimistic, because the rationalist never doubts the power of his ‘reason’ (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action.”6
The rationalism enters into the definition of human nature, as Professor Schapiro explains: “In general, liberals have been rationalists [holding] the conviction that man is essentially a rational creature. . . . What is known as rationalism endeavors, by using reason, to subject all matters, religious as well as non-religious, to critical inquiry. The rationalist looks primarily to science for enlightenment. Reason . . . is his mentor. Hence, what cannot stand the test of reason is not to be accepted.”7 Professor Sidney Hook has squeezed the entire definition of liberalism into a single unintentionally ironic phrase: “faith in intelligence.”
3. Since there is nothing in essential human nature to block achievement of the good society, the obstacles thereto must be, and are, extrinsic or external. The principal obstacles are, specifically, as liberalism sees them, two: ignorance—an accidental and remediable, not intrinsic and essential, state of man; and bad social institutions.
4. From these doctrines of human plasticity and rationality and of the external, remediable character of the obstacles to the good society, there follows belief in progress: what might be called historical optimism.
The idea of progress had its purest expression during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, but it is present in one form or another, along with one or another degree of historical optimism, throughout the family history of liberalism, from Francis Bacon and René Descartes to Senator Hubert Humphrey. If mankind would employ his method, Bacon promised, it would be able to “extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe”; disdaining “the unfair circumscription of human power, and . . . a deliberate factitious despair,” human life will “be endowed with new discoveries and power.”8 By his method, Descartes explained, any man, merely using the reason native to him as a human being, could discover all truths.9 The Marquis de Condorcet explains his purpose with aristocratic candor: “The aim of the book that I have undertaken to write, and what it will prove, is that man by using reason and facts will attain perfection. . . . Nature has set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties. The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth to be free of all hindrances, will last as long as the globe on which nature has placed us.”10
As it took charge of the French Revolution, the Jacobin Club announced “the reign of Virtue and Reason” not only over France but soon to spread over the entire globe; and Robespierre actually crowned the Goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral. (The young girl who was the Goddess’ fleshly avatar for the occasion subsequently disappointed her worshipers by marrying a rather ordinary fellow and producing several bouncing babies.) Robert Owen proposed a world convention that would “emancipate the human race from ignorance, poverty, division, sin and misery.” The British Fabian Society launched itself in 1883 “for the reconstruction of society according to the highest moral principles.”
In our own day, Americans for Democratic Action keeps the torch alight. The 1962 Program offers ADA’s self-definition as “an organization of liberals, banded together to work for freedom, justice and peace. Liberalism, as we see it, is a demanding faith [and] the goals of liberalism are affirmative: [not only] the fulfillment of the free individual in a just and responsible society [at home but] a world where all people may share the freedom, abundance, and opportunity which lie within the reach of mankind—a world marked by mutual respect, and by peace.”
There is a double aspect to this historical optimism. The peaceful, just, free, virtuous, prosperous and so on society is, on the one hand, the desirable goal for mankind. But in addition, the good society is to be the actual outcome of historical development: either inevitably, as Condorcet and many other pre-liberals and liberals have believed and even tried to prove, or scheduled to come about on the condition that human beings behave rationally—that is, accept the liberal ideology, program and leadership.
It is the second, predictive aspect that is the more distinctive attribute of liberalism. There are others who agree with liberals about the specifications of the good society—though not everyone; there are some persons who have favored, some who still do favor, quite different social arrangements, and still others who do not have any goal at all for secular society, either because their goal is not of this world or because they think that a general social goal is silly. But even among those non-liberals who do share the liberal goal, many would look on it not as an attainable target but merely as a somewhat obscure ideal that can sometimes provide rough guidance for social conduct or inspiration for social effort.
That is to say: it is characteristic of liberals—and perhaps of all ideologues—to believe that there are solutions to social problems. Most liberals, and nearly all their intellectual forebears, have believed that there is a general solution to the social problem: that “the good society” or a reasonable facsimile thereof can actually be realized in this world. “The twentieth-century liberal, like his eighteenth-century forebears . . . believes that free men have the intellectual capacity and moral resources to overcome the forces of injustice and tyranny,” was the way Hubert Humphrey restated the tradition in 1959.11
More sophisticated liberal intellectuals of our day—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for example, Sidney Hook or Charles Frankel—usually keep the old-fashioned optimism out of sight when company is present. They drop most of the eighteenth-century metaphysics and concede that progress may not be “automatic” or “inevitable.” But in the end, by the back door if not the front, they return to their heritage. “To hold the liberal view of history,” Professor Frankel writes as if passing impersonal judgment on the naive beliefs of yesteryear, “meant to believe in ‘progress.’ It meant to believe that man could better his condition indefinitely by the application of his intelligence to his affairs.” But five pages later he is recommitted: “Can we, amidst the collapse of our hopes, still maintain the essential elements of the liberal outlook on history? I think we can.” 12
If they reduce the odds (Professor Frankel quotes them as “a fighting chance”) on mankind’s realizing the good society in general, they continue to believe that there is indeed a solution to every particular social problem, even to the large and difficult problems: the problems—liberals are prone to speak in terms of “problems” 13—of war, unemployment, poverty, hunger, prejudice, discrimination, crime, disease, racial conflict, automation, the population explosion, urban renewal, recreation, underdeveloped nations, unwed mothers, care of the aged, Latin America, world communism and what not. “The vision behind liberalism,” Professor Frankel sums up from this perspective, though why “behind” is somewhat obscure, “is the vision of a world progressively redeemed by human power from its classic ailments of poverty, disease, and ignorance.”
“ADA’s most fundamental tenet,” proclaimed a 1962 Statement issued by Americans for Democratic Action, echoing therein its philosophes, many of whom are also members, “is faith in the democratic process. Faith in its capacity to find solutions to the problems that challenge twentieth-century society. We have faith that [their italics], with major efforts, we can find solutions to the old but continuing problems of . . .” and then comes a sample list of the usual problems. ADA is cited here much as a medical textbook seeking to define schizophrenia would refer in the first instance to well-developed clinical cases rather than to the incipient or partial schizoid behavior common to so many of us. As a liberal fundamentalist group, ADA often puts these matters in conscious, explicit and unequivocal terms. But this faith in the existence of solutions to social problems is present right across the entire liberal spectrum, overlapping in fact a large segment of the band that names itself “conservative” but actually shares many of the underlying liberal axioms. Few indeed are the editorial writers, columnists, professors, speakers, elected or appointed officials in the United States14 who flatly declare of a pending political, economic or social problem that it is not going to be solved, that it is just plain insoluble. Professor Oakeshott comments on this feature of liberalism (“rationalism,” in his terminology). The liberal, he writes, “is not devoid of humility; he can imagine a problem which would remain impervious to the onslaught of his own reason. But what he cannot imagine is politics which do not consist in solving problems, or a political problem of which there is no ‘rational’ solution at all. Such a problem must be counterfeit. And the ‘rational’ solution of any problem is, in its nature, the perfect solution. . . . Of course, the Rationalist is not always a perfectionist in general, his mind governed in each occasion by a comprehensive Utopia; but invariably he is a perfectionist in detail.”15
5. The ignorance and bad social conditions that cause the world’s evils and block progress are the legacy of the past; “the product,” Professor Schapiro puts it, “of the errors and injustices of the past.”16 There is therefore no reason to favor ideas, institutions or modes of conduct merely because they have been long established, because our ancestors accepted them; their ancient lineage is, if anything, a ground for suspicion. We should, rather, be ready to undertake prompt, and even drastic and extensive, innovations, if these recommend themselves from a rational and utilitarian standpoint. Thus liberalism is anti-traditional.
I rather think that the attitude toward tradition furnishes the most accurate single shibboleth for distinguishing liberals from conservatives; and still more broadly, the Left from the Right, since with respect to change the revolutionary and the reactionary are merely pushing the respective attitudes of liberal and conservative toward their limits. In the New York Times Magazine article on the definition of “liberalism,” to which I have already referred, Senator Humphrey particularly insists on “change” as the key: “It is this emphasis on changes of chosen ends and means which most sharply distinguishes the liberal from a conservative in a democratic community. The dictionary defines a liberal as ‘favorable to change and reform tending in the direction of democracy.’ . . . In the political lexicon of 1959, liberals recognize change as the inescapable law of society, and action in response to change as the first duty of politics.”
We may put the question this way: does the fact that a particular idea, institution or mode of conduct has been established for some while create a presumption in favor of continuing it? To this question a conservative will answer with a definite Yes; and a liberal, with No, or “very little.” This does not mean that a conservative never, and a liberal always, wants to change what is. It is the revolutionary nihilist, not the liberal, who thinks everything to be wrong; and the reactionary, not the conservative, who wants nothing altered (unless, perhaps, in order to return to the past). For the conservative there might be some new circumstance cogent enough to call for a change in the prevailing ways, in spite of his presumption in their favor; and the liberal is on occasion content to let well enough alone. But the difference in presumption, bias, trend, remains.
The innovations favored by the liberal he usually calls “reforms,” and liberals may be described in general as “reformists.” “Belief in progress,” writes Professor Schapiro, “has inspired liberals to become the ardent advocates of reforms of all kinds in order to create the good society of the future. Reform has been the passion of liberalism.”17 In situations where both conservatives and liberals agree that reforms are in order, the conservative will want the reforming to be less extensive and more gradual than what the liberal will believe to be necessary, desirable and possible. This difference is plainly illustrated by the present “racial problem” in the United States. Nearly all conservatives agree with all liberals that there ought to be reforms in existing race relations. But the conservatives, as compared to the liberals, wish the reform program to be more piecemeal, involving at any given stage less sharp a break with existing conditions. In the “deliberate speed” that the Supreme Court set as the proper pace for changes, conservatives would stress the “deliberate,” and liberals the “speed.”
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.
