John Ray asks in a previous post,

“Why are Americans who advocate broadly the reverse of what 19th century English liberals advocated still called liberals?”

The answer, I believe, is that there is no such reversal of politics. Modern left-wing liberals share the same underlying principle as nineteenth century liberals.

Both groups believe that we express our humanity by using our own individual will and reason to shape who we are and what we do.

However, once you adopt this view you have a problem. If we are all atomised individuals pursuing our own individual preferences, how is a society to function? How can millions of competing wills be reconciled?

The nineteenth century liberals hit upon the idea that the free market could be the great regulator. We could all, as Economic Man, pursue our own selfish desires for profit, and the hidden hand of the market would regulate this for the common benefit.

But this view required an acceptance of unequal outcomes. Some classical liberals were particularly harsh in advocating the “social benefit” of poverty and economic distress. For instance, Herbert Spencer wrote an article in 1851 in which he sets out the basic liberal principle, (which he calls “the fundamental law”), as follows:

“To enforce the fundamental law - to take care that every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man - this is the special purpose for which the civil power exists. Now insuring to each the right to pursue within the specified limits the object of his desires without let or hindrance, is quite a separate thing from insuring him satisfaction ...”

Spencer here tells us that politics is about individuals being unimpeded (“without let or hindrance”) in their individual will (“a freedom to do all that he wills”).

Having set out this core liberal belief in individual freedom, Spencer goes on to accept that some will suffer for the greater good through the process of market competition:

“Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind ... those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many “in shallows and in miseries,” are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence. It seems hard that an unskilfulness which with all its efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artizan. It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life and death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence - the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents ...”

Is it any wonder that the “free market” solution did not appeal to all liberals? A “new liberalism” grew in strength later in the nineteenth century which rejected a purely free market solution as a means of regulating society. The new liberal alternative was to deliberately and “scientifically” use the state to regulate society and the economy. Not surprisingly, the growing labour movement was more sympathetic to these “left-liberals” than to the classic, free-market (right-wing) liberals.

Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed this newer “left-liberalism” in a message to the Congress in 1944 when he stated:

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”

And here are the thoughts of the American philosopher John Dewey in 1935:

“Since liberation of the capacities of individuals for free, self-initiated expression is an essential part of the creed of liberalism, liberalism that is sincere must will the means that condition the achieving of its ends ... The notion that organized social control of economic forces lies outside the historic path of liberalism shows that liberalism is still impeded by remnants of its earlier laissez faire phase ... Earlier liberalism regarded the separate and competing economic action of individuals as the means to social well-being as the end. We must reverse this perspective and see that socialized economy is the means of free individual development as the end.”

This Dewey quote is especially good as it shows clearly what is happening in the split between classical (right) liberals and “new” (left) liberals. It is not the underlying principle of liberalism which is being reversed. Dewey, just like Spencer, believed that the “end” of politics is “free individual development” or more specifically “liberation of the capacities of individuals for free, self-initiated expression”. We are not to be impeded in choosing individually what we are to be or do.

The “reversal” is more in the means of achieving this. Classical liberals wanted a laissez faire solution of regulation by the hidden hand of the market. New liberals wanted a scientific management of society and the economy by the state.

Which leaves one question. John Ray notes that the left-liberals of the early twentieth century (up to FDR) supported eugenics, nationalism, national uniformity, and the inferiority of Jews and blacks. John argues that the change in policy on these issues on the left since then must have a psychological explanation.

There are two points to be made regarding this claim. First, I don’t think that left-liberals were quite as united in their support of such policies as John suggests. FDR, for instance, in the message to Congress quoted above spoke of a second Bill of Rights which would be established for all “regardless of station, race or creed” - which does not suggest the idea of the “inferiority of blacks and Jews”, certainly not as part of public policy.

The second point is that to understand liberalism you have to trace its real, historical unfolding. For instance, it’s not hard to understand the appeal of eugenics to some of the “new” liberals of the early twentieth century. If you have a naive faith in the “scientific” management of society by technocrats as part of social progress, then eugenics will seem an attractive option. It fits in with an early enthusiastic phase of “scientific materialism”, which has subsequently receded.

Or take the issue of nationalism. In 1906 the British activist Tom Mann came to Melbourne to help organise the early labour movement. He was an internationalist. Mann proclaimed that “our movement ...  gets rid of national frontiers ... Narrow patriotism therefore disappears, and a true cosmopolitanism takes its place.”

One of Mann’s admirers was John Curtin, later to become prime minister. Curtin supported Mann’s internationalism at first, but jettisoned it while trying to get elected. It did not appeal to the Australian workers of the early twentieth century, who were strongly nationalistic.

In 1917, for instance, Curtin warned the electorate of Government plans to import large numbers of cheap, non-European labour, of replacing ANZACs with Chinese.

By the late 1930s, however, the influence of Marxist internationalism had grown strongly in the Australian labour movement, and Curtin in the early 1940s was able to push forward plans for a multiethnic Australia without fear of alienating his support base.

So you can’t expect an abstractly consistent rendering of liberal politics. Instead, you have to look at the stage of development of liberalism within a particular society as well as the political conditions in which liberals are operating at a particular time.