Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Freeden Read Free Book Online Page A

certain common political and social purposes …the aspiration for social righteousness or betterment …was thoroughly, comprehensively, and constructively national’.
    In Louis Hartz’s classic but controversial The Liberal Tradition in America , he suggested that the American way of life was fundamentally liberal, an import from the English world of Locke and other European sources. The absence of feudalism had permitted the spread of an American liberalism unchallenged by class antagonisms. As Hartz saw it, ‘America created two unusual effects. It prevented socialism from challenging its Liberal Reform in any effective way, and at the same time it enslaved its Liberal Reform to the …dream of American capitalism’. He had little sympathy for the ‘welfare liberals’, seeing in Croly only a rather agonized supporter of democratic capitalism. Hartz’s approach lacked understanding of the range and complexity of the plural ideological beliefs a large society such as the USA would entertain. It took less than ten years after the book’s publication for racial and ethnic awareness to explode on to the American liberal scene through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, belying the consensual homogeneity in which 19th and early 20th century liberals preferred to believe.

Applying the brakes
    There were of course currents that sought to stem the tides of change in liberal thought and practice. Many of their advocates saw themselves as the true liberals, whether as free market advocates or as libertarians. For the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) liberalism was a capitalist theory based on private property. He opposed measures that involved greater material equalization and regarded all governmental interference in conditions of welfare—such as establishing a minimum wage for workers—as authoritarian and contrary to the liberal spirit:
In England the term ‘liberal’ is mostly used to signify a program that only in details differs from the totalitarianism of the socialists. In the United States ‘liberal’ means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations. The American self-styled liberal aims at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning by the authorities, i.e., socialism.
    The economist F.A. Hayek (on whom, more in Chapter 5 ) regarded even Mill as occupying a transition point from liberalism to a moderate socialism. Hayek considered welfare-state liberalism as liberal only in name, not in substance. State intervention in markets was anathema to many such older style liberals because they believed it undermined the free-wheeling, spontaneous, and self-motivated rationale of liberalism. By contrast, the German economic school of the mid-20th century, the ordoliberals, held that a strong state should guarantee the competitive conditions of the economy by actively establishing a market order and curtailing cartels. Those ideas contributed to the emergence of Germany’s post-war social market economy but did not focus on the broader features of liberalism.
    On a different dimension again, the flame of radical freedom was nourished by libertarians. Currently a minority tendency that has become detached from more prominent liberal strands, libertarians have insisted for over a century that liberty alone, in its purest form, is the message that should be extracted from the liberal tradition and employed to guide social and political, not only economic, life. There is a reason, therefore, for the adoption of the word ‘libertarianism’ to distinguish it from liberalism, although it too encompasses many variants. A stress on individualism, assuming the superior rationality of individuals, and on defending liberty of action, voluntary cooperation, and private property, propelled libertarians such as the British philosopher Herbert Spencer