Читать книгу Liberalism and Capitalism Today - Paul-Jacques Lehmann - Страница 10

The foundation of liberalism rests on the assumptions that human beings are rational – that is, driven by desires and individual interests of which they are more or less clearly aware – and that they strive to use the means they consider best to achieve their goals. The individual must use their freedom through action, which enables them to achieve autonomy and well-being. They are able to prioritize their preferences. It follows that, in society, it is the individual who is most important. Thus, de Tocqueville and Weber speak of the actions of individuals, not of society as a whole. Humans must be understood as they have been, as they act and think, hence the importance of referring to history.

Liberalism is thus presented as the doctrine that best allows each individual to assert themself within the society in which they live, since this doctrine is supposed to reward the individual energy that is the source of life and development within a society. For example, the taste for work is an essential motivation of liberalism. Not only does labor allow us to measure the value of all goods, but it is also a source of capital. Encouraged to work more to improve the conditions of their existence, each individual has the chance to succeed and is able to save money in order to increase their income, and thereby their personal well-being, and at the same time, promote the economic development of their country.

It follows that each individual must dominate nature in order to satisfy in an ever more complete manner their needs, which increase in number and intensity as they become more civilized. As a consequence of their freedom, they are then be able to benefit from the resulting progress, which gives them confidence in the institutions that allow them to implement it. Thus, at the heart of liberalism is the defense of individual liberties and private initiatives everywhere and at every opportunity. It is an inexorable evolution. Thus, de Tocqueville explains that “the history of humanity shows that the gradual development of the equality of conditions is constant. It is a providential fact, with key characteristics: it is universal, it is lasting, it escapes human power every day […] All events, like all men, serve its development”.

He adds that there can be no political equality without parallel economic equality, that “those who believe that they can permanently establish complete equality in the political world without at the same time introducing a kind of equality in civil society, those seem to me to be making a dangerous mistake. I think that one cannot give men with impunity a great alternative of strength and weakness, making them touch extreme equality in one sense and letting them suffer extreme inequality in others, without soon aspiring to be strong, or becoming weak in all senses”. As for the relationship between equality and liberty, de Tocqueville explains that it is equality that prevails, because humans know that, in a democratic society, the state tries not to let anyone die of hunger; “nations, nowadays, cannot make conditions within them unequal; but it depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or to liberty, to enlightenment or to barbarism, to prosperity or to misery”.

However, this doctrine is not blind: if we take the previous example of work, it attempts to differentiate between the economic point of view and the moral point of view. It recognizes that, in the first case, it is a constraint that humans are obliged to assume if they want to satisfy their desires and enrich themselves, while affirming that, in the second case, work is the means of developing moral and physical faculties in the individual’s own interest.

Capitalism and liberalism are two notions that are often confused, even though they are of different but complementary natures. Even today, it is only in Western nations that we find, to varying degrees, these two concepts together. In fact, capitalism was, and still is, spoken of in countries in which all forms of liberalism are totally absent. This is the case for what is called “state capitalism” in the former USSR, Cuba or China, which simply means that the state owns all the means of production and therefore controls all the capital of national enterprises. Nothing to do, therefore, with liberalism and capitalism as we will describe them. Conversely, countries that claim to be liberal sometimes, and in important respects, behave in a non-liberal way, for example by implementing protectionist measures.

Liberalism is at the heart of a political philosophy that advocates the participation of all individuals in public life to the detriment of the decision-making power exercised by a person, for example a sovereign, by imposing their point of view. In a liberal world, each individual must have the possibility of using their freedom by freeing themself from the obstacles they encounter, thus gaining access to moral freedom, characterized by independence of mind: any infringement of freedom constitutes an infringement of the natural law of the individual. The concept of political freedom is itself difficult to define, since the parties claiming to be liberal belong to opposite currents. Thus, for a long time, it was those close to left-wing parties who defined themselves as liberals, whereas nowadays it is rather members of right-wing parties who claim to be liberals.

Political liberalism has engendered economic liberalism in the form of capitalism, but these two forms of liberalism are not always seen as compatible: being in favor of a certain degree of political liberalism does not necessarily mean being in favor of the same degree of economic liberalism and accepting an equivalent capitalism. The latter can be defined, from a material point of view, as the economic translation of the satisfaction of innumerable human needs in the form of transactions, when resources, both natural and at the disposal of each individual, are scarce.

Liberalism is based on individual interest, the homo oeconomicus: each individual seeks to maximize their own well-being. This mainly functions based on a belief in the observation of laws drawn from observation and knowledge of the facts that govern trade. Admittedly, these laws cannot be approached in the same way as those found in the physical sciences. They simply mean that the behavior of individuals in their economic activities leads, in any place and at any time, to certain inexorable consequences of which the course cannot be changed. It is customary to say that economic principles are truths that people have been able to extract from experience; for example, that the freedom of work and exchange on which capitalism is based promotes economic growth.

As we will see, capitalism emphasizes the spirit of enterprise. Its consequence – risk-taking – can only be envisaged in a market economy; that is, a decentralized and deregulated economy, as opposed to a planned economy, which allows competition to take place in most sectors of activity and transactions of goods and services to be carried out according to the prices resulting from the confrontation of supply and demand. Indeed, free play of the market makes it possible to achieve an optimal balance of competition, which means that it is not possible to improve the situation of one agent without worsening that of another, and that this is the only way to satisfy economic agents as much as possible and to make the best possible use of available resources.

The market economy should not be confused with market economics, which stems from the segmentation of the market into its various components according to the nature of the products traded. For example, we can talk about the automobile market, the oil market, the financial market and so on.