Classical Liberalism – A Primer. Eamonn Butler
he was imprisoned for his challenge to authority – as he would be several times more.
Lilburne became a popular anti-establishment figure. He petitioned for the end of state monopolies and spelt out what amounts to a bill of rights. This was taken further by Richard Overton (c. 1610–63), also imprisoned for refusing to acknowledge the judicial authority of the House of Lords, who called for a written constitutional ‘social contract’ between free people whom he saw as having property in their own persons that could not be usurped by anyone else.
Curbing the power of monarchs
After the English Civil War (1642–51), the reigning monarch, Charles I, was put on trial and executed for high treason – a stark assertion of the limits on government authority.
But the power relationship between king and Parliament had already turned. The island nation of Great Britain (as it had become) needed no standing army to protect itself against frequent invasions. So, unlike continental Europe, the monarch had no force that could be used to repress and exploit the public. Charles needed Parliament to agree to raise taxes for foreign wars.
This frustrated a jealous monarch and led to many conflicts. Among other things, Charles suspended Parliament, sought to levy taxes without its consent and attempted forcibly to arrest five of its most prominent members. He had broken the implicit contract with the people, by which their rights were secured.
The Glorious Revolution
After an interregnum (1649–60) under the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, the balance of authority was made evident again when Charles’s son Charles II had to appease Parliament in order to return as king. When his successor, Charles’s second son, James II, was deposed, it was Parliament who invited William (the Dutch Prince of Orange) and Mary to the throne. The direction of authority, from people to monarch, could not have been clearer.
In 1689, William and Mary signed the Bill of Rights, an assertion of the rights and liberties of British subjects and a justification of the removal of James II on the grounds of violating those rights and liberties. It called for a justice system independent of monarchs, an end to taxation without Parliament’s consent, the right to petition government without fear of retribution, free elections, freedom of speech in Parliament and an end to ‘cruel and unusual punishments’. It would directly inspire another great classical liberal initiative, America’s own Bill of Rights, a century later.
John Locke (1632–1704)
John Locke drew together the older tenets of classical liberalism into a recognisably modern body of classical liberal thinking. Part of his purpose was to show how James II had forfeited his throne by violating the social contract. All sovereignty, he asserted, comes from the people, who submit to it solely in order to boost their security and expand their general freedom. When this contract is broken, individuals have every right to rise up against the sovereign.
Locke also developed natural rights theory, arguing that human beings have inherent rights that exist prior to government and cannot be sacrificed to it. Governments that infringe these rights were illegitimate.
But central to Locke’s ideas was private property, and not just physical property. Locke maintained that people have property in their own lives, bodies and labour – self-ownership. From that crucial understanding, he reasoned that people must also have property in all the things that they had spent personal effort in creating – ‘mixed their labour’ with. The principle of self-ownership therefore makes it crucial that such property should be made secure under the law.
These ideas would inform many of the thinkers behind the American Revolution.
The Enlightenment
The eighteenth century saw another revival of classical liberal thinking. In France, Montesquieu (1689–1755) developed the idea that in a free society and free economy, individuals have to conduct themselves in ways that maintain peaceful cooperation between them – and do so without needing direction from any authority. He therefore called for a system of checks and balances on government power – another idea that would inform American thinkers.
Meanwhile, a growing intellectual revolt against the authoritarianism of the church led to thinkers such as Voltaire (1694–1778) calling for reason and toleration, religious diversity and humane justice. In economics too, intellectuals such as Turgot (1727–81) argued for lifting trade barriers, simplifying taxes and more competitive labour and agricultural markets.
The Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith (1723–90) explained, along the lines of Montesquieu, how, in many cases, the free interaction between individuals tended to produce a generally beneficial outcome – an effect dubbed the invisible hand. Self-interest might drive our economic life, but we have to benefit our customers to get any benefit for ourselves.
Smith railed against official monopolies, trade restrictions, high taxes and the suffocating cronyism between government and business. He believed that open, competitive markets would liberate the public, especially the working poor. His ideas greatly influenced policy and ushered in a long period of free trade and economic growth.
The Rechtsstaat
On the European continent, meanwhile, thinkers such as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) were developing the principles of the ‘just state’ or Rechtsstaat, which would inform the creation of the American and French constitutions in the late eighteenth century.
Kant argued for a written constitution as a way of guaranteeing permanent peaceful co-existence between diverse individuals, which in turn he saw as a basic condition for human happiness and prosperity. He dismissed the Utopian idea that moral education could curb those differences and make everyone’s aims coincide. The state was about enabling diverse individuals to come together for mutual benefit, and the constitution is what held it together.
In the Rechtsstaat, the institutions of civil society – voluntary associations such as clubs, societies and churches – would have an equal role in promoting this social harmony. Government powers would be restrained by the separation of powers, and judges and politicians would be accountable to and bound by the law. The law itself would have to be transparent, explained and proportionate. The use of force would be strictly limited to the justice system. The test of a government is its maintenance of this just constitutional order.
Success and reassessment
A new home for classical liberalism
Thomas Paine took many of Locke’s classical liberal ideas on natural rights and social contracts, and that government is a necessary evil that can become intolerable if unchecked. In January 1776 he wove them into his influential call to arms, Common Sense, indicting Britain as being in breach of its contract to the colonists.
It was natural therefore that, after the hostilities, the Americans should seek a new classical liberal contract between themselves and the government they were creating. The Constitution would be infused with Locke’s ideas of natural, inalienable rights, and a Montesquieu-style division of government powers.
The nineteenth century
But new and radical classical liberal ideas returned to Britain. By 1833, classical liberal activists had secured the abolition of slavery throughout most of the British Empire, and by 1843 the reform was complete.
Also on the social front, the British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806–73) articulated the ‘no harm’ principle – that people should be able to act as they please, provided they do not harm others in the process, and thereby diminish their freedom. He also argued for a ‘personal sphere’ that the state could not touch, and, following the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1746–1832), argued that freedom was the best way to maximise public benefit, or ‘utility’.
In economics, the Anti-Corn-Law League, which sought to end protectionist taxes on imported wheat, grew into the Manchester School, whose leading figures such as Richard Cobden (1804–65) and John Bright (1811–89) called for laissez-faire policies on trade, industry and labour.
Reappraisal and decline
However,