The ‘New Liberalism’

What has come to be known as ‘new’, ‘revisionist’, ‘welfare state’, or perhaps best, ‘social justice’, liberalism challenges this intimate connection between personal liberty and a private property based market order (Freeden, 1978; Gaus, 1983b; Paul, Miller and Paul, 2007). Three factors help explain the rise of this revisionist theory. First, the new liberalism arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which the ability of a free market to sustain what Lord Beveridge (1944: 96) called a ‘prosperous equilibrium’ was being questioned. Believing that a private property based market tended to be unstable, or could, as Keynes argued (1973 [1936]), get stuck in an equilibrium with high unemployment, new liberals came to doubt that it was an adequate foundation for a stable, free society. Here the second factor comes into play: just as the new liberals were losing faith in the market, their faith in government as a means of supervising economic life was increasing. This was partly due to the experiences of the First World War, in which government attempts at economic planning seemed to succeed (Dewey, 1929: 551-60); more importantly, this reevaluation of the state was spurred by the democratization of western states, and the conviction that, for the first time, elected officials could truly be, in J.A. Hobson's phrase ‘representatives of the community’ (1922: 49). As D.G. Ritchie proclaimed:

اقتباس :: be it observed that arguments used against ‘government’ action, where the government is entirely or mainly in the hands of a ruling class or caste, exercising wisely or unwisely a paternal or grandmotherly authority — such arguments lose their force just in proportion as the government becomes more and more genuinely the government of the people by the people themselves (1896: 64).

The third factor underlying the development of the new liberalism was probably the most fundamental: a growing conviction that, so far from being ‘the guardian of every other right’ (Ely, 1992: 26), property rights generated an unjust inequality of power that led to a less-than-equal liberty (typically, ‘positive liberty’) for the working class. This theme is central to what is usually called ‘liberalism’ in American politics, combining a strong endorsement of civil and personal liberties with, at best, an indifference, and often enough an antipathy, to private ownership. The seeds of this newer liberalism can be found in Mill's On Liberty. Although Mill insisted that the ‘so-called doctrine of Free Trade’ rested on ‘equally solid’ grounds as did the ‘principle of individual liberty’ (1963, vol. 18: 293), he nevertheless insisted that the justifications of personal and economic liberty were distinct. And in his Principles of Political Economy Mill consistently emphasized that it is an open question whether personal liberty can flourish without private property (1963, vol. 2; 203-210), a view that Rawls was to reassert over a century later (2001: Part IV).

2.3 Liberal Theories of Social Justice

One of the many consequences of Rawls's great work, A Theory of Justice (1999 [first published in 1971]) is that the ‘new liberalism’ has become focused on developing a theory of social justice. For over thirty-five years liberal political philosophers have analyzed, and disputed, his famous ‘difference principle’ according to which a just basic structure of society arranges social and economic inequalities such that they are to the greatest advantage of the least well off representative group (1999b: 266). For Rawls, the default is an equal distribution of (basically) income and wealth; only inequalities that best enhance the long-term prospects of the least advantaged are just. As Rawls sees it, the difference principle constitutes a public recognition of the principle of reciprocity: the basic structure is to be arranged such that no social group advances at the cost of another (2001: 122-24). Many followers of Rawls have focused less on the ideal of reciprocity than the commitment to equality (Dworkin, 2000). Indeed, what was previously called ‘welfare state’ liberalism is now often described as ‘egalitarian’ liberalism. And in one way that is especially appropriate: in his later work Rawls insists that welfare-state capitalism does not constitute a just basic structure (2001: 137-38). If some version of capitalism is to be just it must be a ‘property owning democracy’ with a wide diffusion of ownership; a market socialist regime, in Rawls's view, is more just than welfare-state capitalism (2001: 135-38). Not too surprisingly, classical liberals such as Hayek (1976) insist that the contemporary liberal fixation on ‘the mirage of social justice’ leads them to ignore the way that freedom depends on a decentralized market based on private property, the overall results of which are unpredictable. In a similar vein, Robert Nozick (1974: 160ff) famously argued that any attempt to ensure that market transactions conform to any specific pattern of holdings will involve constant interferences with individual freedom.

The ‘New Liberalism’

2.3 Liberal Theories of Social Justice

The ‘New Liberalism’ :: تعاليق

The ‘New Liberalism’