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

(1820–1903) to join in bemoaning whether liberalism had not abandoned its own principles:
How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more into power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation? How is it that … Liberalism has to an increasing extent adopted the policy of dictating the actions of citizens, and, by consequence, diminishing the range throughout which their actions remain free? How are we to explain this spreading confusion of thought which has led it, in pursuit of what appears to be public good, to invert the method by which in earlier days it achieved public good?
    We have seen in this chapter a convergence of different movements of thought to produce an array of ideas that served to consolidate liberalism. Human beings, rather than nature, God, hierarchical and hereditary rulership, or the weight of history, were now firmly placed at the centre of the social universe. A critical and querying approach to knowledge and learning was aligned with human curiosity and scientific practice, and put at the service of people who wished to control their own destinies. The notion of open-ended reform and development gained purchase in an environment increasingly undergoing rapid change—technological, demographic, social, and political. A growing appreciation of the richness of the human spirit and potential emphasized the importance of valuing others and lent a greater urgency to the reduction of human inequality. It meant the nurturing not only of private, but of public, generosity. Soaring above those ideas was a passionate commitment to liberty in its diverse forms—whether that of individuals, markets, or communities. For liberals, liberty was the engine that made a wholesome society possible, and that could stretch human imagination and experience to their very limits.

Disconnected and overlapping histories
    Liberals and students of liberalism have frequently regarded their cluster of ideas as a unity developing smoothly through time. That view reflects their cardinal belief in a linear progression of humanity towards higher and more civilized ends. But liberalism itself has done no such thing. That evolutionary self-image, wedded to theories of progress and cherished by so many liberals, is not borne out by liberalism’s own history. Instead, liberalism has undergone fits and bursts of change resulting both in convergences and separations of its key tenets. That is a consequence of liberal ideas having originated at different times, from diverse sources, and with varying aims in mind.
    Accordingly, it is more helpful to approach liberalism as an ideology with complex, interacting layers in a constant state of mutual rearrangement. Crucially, those layers do not constitute a neat sequential chain. They are a composite of accumulated, discarded, and retrieved strata in continuously fluctuating combinations. As will presently be shown, the so-called liberal tradition is a mixture of at least five different historical layers linked, if at all, in ill-fitting and patchy continuities. One reason why the five layers do not add up into a unified whole is because they too often pull in irreconcilable directions. Some do indeed succeed others, but others exist in parallel, and others still disappear and then re-emerge. Liberalism’s newer layers often obscure and conceal, as well as expand, the gathered meanings it contains and transmits.
    Conceptual historians like to use the phrase ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’—an expression coined by the doyen of that school, Reinhart Koselleck. Applied to liberalism it implies that our current understandings always include new ways of looking at earlier, past understandings of that ideology, as if those understandings live only in the present. Thus, if liberalism once concentrated on non-intervention in individual lives, liberals may now regard the unremitting application of that time-honoured practice both inadequate and occasionally undesirable.