classical liberalism

classical liberalism, an early form of liberalism, the political-philosophical doctrine which holds that the central problem of politics is the protection of individual freedom or liberty. The term classical liberalism may also refer to actual political systems that instantiate classical-liberal principles.

Both classical liberalism, which was first articulated in England in the mid-17th century, and modern liberalism, which was predominant in western Europe, North America, and elsewhere for much of the 20th century, hold that government is necessary to prevent individuals from being harmed by others. They also recognize that a necessary role of government is the provision of public services that private businesses are incapable of performing fairly or efficiently, such as law enforcement, education, health care, national security, and sanitation. All forms of liberalism, however, seek to limit the powers of government, because government itself can pose a threat to individual freedom. The problem that liberalism in general addresses, then, is that of devising a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual freedom but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.

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liberalism: Classical liberalism

The problem is compounded when one asks whether this is all that government can or should do on behalf of individual freedom. Contemporary liberals in the classical tradition—the so-called “neoclassical” liberals, or libertarians—answer that it is. Modern liberals, however, have insisted that the powers of government can promote as well as protect the freedom of the individual. Indeed, according to modern liberalism, the chief task of government is to remove obstacles that prevent individuals from living freely or from fully realizing their potential—obstacles such as poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance.

This article discusses the origins of classical liberalism, its historical instantiations, its contrasts with modern liberalism, and its contemporary revival as neoclassical liberalism or libertarianism. For additional treatment of liberal political theory, see political philosophy.

Political foundations of classical liberalism

Although classical liberal ideas were not noticeable in European politics until the early 16th century, classical liberalism has a considerable “prehistory” reaching back to the Middle Ages and even earlier. In the Middle Ages the rights and responsibilities of individuals were determined by their place in a hierarchical social system that placed great stress upon acquiescence and conformity. Under the impact of the slow commercialization and urbanization of Europe in the later Middle Ages, the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance, and the spread of Protestantism in the 16th century, the old feudal stratification of society gradually began to dissolve, leading to a fear of instability so powerful that monarchical absolutism was viewed as the only remedy to civil dissension. By the end of the 16th century, the authority of the papacy had been broken in most of northern Europe, and rulers tried to consolidate the unity of their realms by enforcing conformity either to Roman Catholicism or to the ruler’s preferred version of Protestantism. These efforts culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which did immense damage to much of Europe. Where no creed succeeded in wholly extirpating its enemies, toleration was gradually accepted as the lesser of two evils; in some countries where one creed triumphed, it was accepted that too minute a concern with citizens’ beliefs was inimical to prosperity and good order.

The ambitions of national rulers and the requirements of expanding industry and commerce led gradually to the adoption of economic policies based on mercantilism, a school of thought that advocated government intervention in a country’s economy to increase state wealth and power. However, as such intervention increasingly served established interests and inhibited enterprise, it was challenged by members of the newly emerging middle class. This challenge was a significant factor in the great revolutions that rocked England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries—most notably the English Civil Wars (1642–51), the Glorious Revolution (1688), the American Revolution (1775–83), and the French Revolution (1789). Classical liberalism as an articulated creed is a result of those great collisions.

In the English Civil Wars the absolutist king Charles I was defeated by the forces of Parliament and eventually executed. The Glorious Revolution resulted in the abdication and exile of James II and the establishment of a complex form of balanced government in which power was divided between monarchs, ministers, and Parliament. In time this system would become a model for liberal political movements in other countries. The political ideas that helped to inspire these revolts were given formal expression in the works of the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes argued that the absolute power of the sovereign was ultimately justified by the consent of the governed, who agreed, in a hypothetical social contract, to obey the sovereign in all matters in exchange for a guarantee of peace and security. Locke also held a social-contract theory of government, but he maintained that the parties to the contract could not reasonably place themselves under the absolute power of a ruler. Absolute rule, he argued, is at odds with the point and justification of political authority, which is that it is necessary to protect the person and property of individuals and to guarantee their natural rights to freedom of thought, speech, and worship. Significantly, Locke thought that revolution is justified when the sovereign fails to fulfill these obligations. Indeed, it appears that he began writing his major work of political theory, Two Treatises of Government (1690), precisely in order to justify the Glorious Revolution of two years before.

By the time Locke had published his Treatises, politics in England had become a contest between two loosely related parties, the Whigs and the Tories. These parties were the ancestors of Britain’s modern Liberal Party and Conservative Party, respectively. Locke was a notable Whig, and it is conventional to view classical liberalism as derived from the attitudes of Whig aristocrats, who were often linked with commercial interests and who had an entrenched suspicion of the power of the monarchy. The Whigs dominated English politics from the death of Queen Anne in 1714 to the accession of King George III in 1760.

Economic foundations of classical liberalism

If the political foundations of classical liberalism were laid in Great Britain, so too were its economic foundations. By the 18th century, parliamentary constraints were making it difficult for British monarchs to pursue the schemes of national aggrandizement favoured by most rulers on the Continent. These rulers fought for military supremacy, which required a strong economic base. Because the prevailing mercantilist theory understood international trade as a zero-sum game—in which gain for one country meant loss for another—national governments intervened to determine prices, protect their industries from foreign competition, and avoid the sharing of economic information.

These practices soon came under classical-liberal challenge. In France a group of thinkers known as the physiocrats argued that the best way to cultivate wealth is to allow unrestrained economic competition. Their advice to government was “laissez faire, laissez passer” (“let it be, leave it alone”). This laissez-faire doctrine found its most thorough and influential exposition in The Wealth of Nations (1776), by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith. Free trade benefits all parties, according to Smith, because competition leads to the production of more and better goods at lower prices. Leaving individuals free to pursue their self-interest in an exchange economy based upon a division of labour will necessarily enhance the welfare of the group as a whole. Self-seeking individuals become harnessed to the public good because in an exchange economy they must serve others in order to serve themselves. Importantly, however, it is only in a genuinely free market that this positive consequence is possible. According to Smith, any other arrangement, whether state control or private monopoly, necessarily leads to regimentation, exploitation, and economic stagnation.

Every economic system must determine not only what goods will be produced but also how those goods are to be apportioned, or distributed (see distribution of wealth and income). In a market economy both of these tasks are accomplished through the price mechanism. The theoretically free choices of individual buyers and sellers determine how the resources of society—labour, goods, and capital—shall be employed. These choices manifest themselves in bids and offers that together determine a commodity’s price. Theoretically, when the demand for a commodity is great, prices rise, making it profitable for producers to increase the supply; as supply approximates demand, prices tend to fall until producers divert productive resources to other uses (see supply and demand). In this way the system achieves the closest possible match between what is desired and what is produced. Moreover, in the distribution of the wealth thereby produced, the system is said to assure a reward in proportion to merit. The assumption is that in a freely competitive economy in which no one is barred from engaging in economic activity, the income received from such activity is a fair measure of its value to society.

Presupposed in the foregoing account is a conception of human beings as economic animals rationally and self-interestedly engaged in minimizing costs and maximizing gains. According to this view, since individuals know their own interests better than anyone else does, their interests could only be hindered, and never enhanced, by government interference in their economic activities.

In concrete terms, classical-liberal economists called for several major changes in the sphere of British and European economic organization. The first was the abolition of numerous feudal and mercantilist restrictions on countries’ manufacturing and internal commerce. The second was an end to the tariffs and restrictions that governments imposed on foreign imports to protect domestic producers. In rejecting the government’s regulation of trade, classical economics was based firmly on a belief in the superiority of a self-regulating market. Quite apart from the cogency of their arguments, the views of Smith and his 19th-century English successors—the economist David Ricardo and the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill—became increasingly convincing as the Industrial Revolution in Britain generated enormous new wealth and made that country into what came to be called the “workshop of the world.” Free trade, it seemed, would make everyone prosperous.

In economic life as in politics, then, the guiding principle of classical liberalism became an undeviating insistence on limiting the power of government. The English philosopher and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham cogently summarized this view in his sole advice to the state: “Be quiet.” Others asserted that that government is best that governs least. Classical liberals freely acknowledged that government must provide law enforcement, education, sanitation, and other public services that were beyond the capacity of any private agency. But liberals generally believed that, apart from these functions, government must not try to do for individuals what they are able to do for themselves.

Emergence of modern liberalism

By the end of the 19th century, some unforeseen but serious consequences of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America had produced a deepening disenchantment with the principal economic basis of classical liberalism: the ideal of a market economy. The main problem was that the profit system had concentrated vast wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of industrialists and financiers, with several adverse consequences. First, great masses of people failed to benefit from the wealth flowing from factories and lived in poverty in vast slums. Second, because the greatly expanded system of production created many goods and services that people often could not afford to buy, markets became glutted and the system periodically came to a near halt in periods of stagnation that came to be called depressions. Finally, those who owned or managed the means of production had acquired enormous economic power, which they used to influence and control government, to manipulate an inchoate electorate, to limit competition, and to obstruct substantive social reform. In short, some of the same forces that had once released the productive energies of Western society now restrained them; some of the very energies that had demolished the power of despots now nourished a new despotism.

Such, at any rate, was the verdict reached by an increasing number of liberals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As noted above, modern liberals held that the point of government is to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of individual freedom. In this they followed the lead of thinkers and reformers such as the British political philosopher T.H. Green. According to Green, the excessive powers of government may have constituted the greatest obstacles to freedom in an earlier day, but by the middle of the 19th century these powers had been greatly reduced or mitigated. The time had come, therefore, to recognize hindrances of another kind—such as poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance—which individuals could overcome only with the positive assistance of government. The new liberal program was thus to enlist the powers of government in the cause of individual freedom. Society, acting through government, was to establish public schools and hospitals, aid the needy, and regulate working conditions to promote workers’ health and well-being, for only through public support could the poor and powerless become truly free.

Although most liberals eventually adopted this new course, there were some dissenters, notably the influential social Darwinists Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States. As the term Darwinists indicates, these writers thought of politics, economics, and society in general in evolutionary terms. Like Paine, they regarded government as at best a necessary evil—not, however, because it coerces but because it too often interferes with the struggle for survival that nature imposes on human beings as much as on other species (see natural selection). Helping the poor and the weak, they argued, impedes individual freedom and retards social progress by holding back the strong and the fit. The social Darwinists concluded that the sole responsibility of government must be to protect the lives and property of the people—that is, to be nothing more than a “night watchman.”

The revival of classical liberalism

The three decades of unprecedented general prosperity that the Western world experienced after World War II marked the high tide of modern liberalism. But the slowing of economic growth that gripped most Western countries beginning in the mid-1970s presented a serious challenge. By the end of that decade economic stagnation, combined with the cost of maintaining extensive social benefits, pushed governments increasingly toward politically untenable levels of taxation and mounting debt. Equally troubling was the fact that government spending designed to stimulate economic growth and foster full employment (see Keynesian economics) seemed to lose its effectiveness, too often resulting in increased inflation and ever-smaller declines in unemployment rates.

As modern liberals struggled to meet the challenge of stagnating living standards in mature industrial economies, others saw an opportunity for a revival of classical liberalism. The intellectual foundations of this revival were primarily the work of the Austrian-born British economist Friedrich von Hayek and the American economist Milton Friedman. One of Hayek’s greatest achievements was to demonstrate, on purely logical grounds, that a centrally planned economy is impossible. He also famously argued, in The Road to Serfdom (1944), that interventionist measures aimed at the redistribution of wealth lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Friedman, as one of the founders of the modern monetarist school of economics, held that the business cycle is determined mainly by the supply of money and by interest rates, rather than by government fiscal policy.

These arguments were enthusiastically embraced by the major conservative political parties in Britain and the United States, which had never abandoned the classical liberal conviction that the market, for all its faults, guides economic policy better than governments do. Revitalized conservatives achieved power with the lengthy administrations of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) in Britain and Pres. Ronald Reagan (1981–89) in the United States. Their ideology and policies, which properly belong to the history of conservatism rather than liberalism, became increasingly influential, as illustrated by the British Labour Party’s official abandonment of its commitment to the “common ownership of the means of production” in 1995 and by the cautiously pragmatic policies of Democratic U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The clearest sign, however, of the importance of this neoclassical version of liberalism was the emergence of libertarianism as a political force—as evidenced by the increasing prominence of the Libertarian Party in the United States and by the creation of assorted think tanks in various countries, which sought to promote the libertarian ideal of markets and sharply limited governments.