Liberal Theory Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Since its emergence in early modern Europe, the liberal tradition of political thought has spawned three major families of theory. The oldest, going back to the seventeenth century or earlier, comprises a set of ideas about political institutions. A second family, which originated in the eighteenth century and reached a zenith of sorts in the nineteenth, focuses on economic arrangements and social relations. The subject of the third family of theories is the normative principles used to evaluate the other, more concrete subjects that are of interest to liberal theorists. Since the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971, the third family, which this work exemplifies superbly, has overshadowed the others, at least in academic political theory. Yet the oldest of these families remains the most powerful and defensible member of the liberal clan.

Emergence

As a recognizable doctrine, liberalism first developed as a theory of political institutions along with, and in response to, the territorial consolidation of political control that resulted in the formation of modern states. Two of the most prominent aspects of that consolidation were the replacement of relatively dispersed, overlapping, and warring centers of power by a high degree of concentrated power held and transmitted via dynastic principles, and the enforcement of uniform standards and rules in place of highly diverse local practices. The tradition of writing now recognized as liberal is united by the aspiration to limit the concentration of political power in order to prevent the emergence of tyranny. Liberals proposed to accomplish this objective in part by subjecting state officials, including monarchs, to a distinct set of rules and in part by securing protection for other, social centers of power that could challenge the power of the state. This strategy led to the development of theories of constitutionalism, including the separation of powers; to the idea of the rule of law; and to theories of individual rights.

Expansion To Economics

In the eighteenth century, liberal writers extended the skein of their ideas to include economic arrangements. This extension was animated by two motives that overlapped with, but were distinct from, those that drove their forbears. Both motives are in plain view in the most celebrated representative of this second family of liberal theories, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). First, Smith aimed to show how legal and regulatory reforms could lead to the generation of much greater wealth than could be produced through the economic arrangements that had prevailed in the past. Second, he argued that the same reforms would undermine the relations of domination and servility that had prevailed under the old order, clearing the way for the emergence of a new mode of social relations based on norms of reciprocity and legal equality. Smith called the legal and regulatory regime he envisaged the “system of natural liberty.”

In the nineteenth century, this combination of economic liberalism and a distinctively liberal conception of social relations blossomed into a powerful ideology. To its advocates, it seemed self-evident that the basis of human relations should be voluntaristic, so that human beings acquire obligations only through their own consent. The idea of a contract between independent and nominally equal agents became the dominant model of social relations. By the late nineteenth century, this ideal had given birth among historians and social scientists to powerful narratives about the shift from ascribed status to freely agreed contracts that cast that transformation as the conclusion of a teleologically driven evolutionary process. At the same time, philosophers and other writers celebrated an idealized conception of persons to serve as a companion for this voluntaristic conception of social relations. According to this ideal, people are (or should be) autonomous individuals who form themselves and therefore are responsible for their characters as well as for the many decisions that determine the course of their lives. This ideology has been subject to challenges from the time of its inception, yet it remains highly influential today.

Normative Theories

The third family of liberal theories is united by a common interest in a more abstract subject, namely the normative principles that should be invoked to evaluate or justify institutions and other social arrangements. Since the 1960s, a great deal of academic writing about liberalism has sprung up from within this family, which has generated two principal approaches to the justification and criticism of political institutions and social arrangements. The deontological approach assumes the idea of society as a framework of rules within which individuals are or should be free to make decisions for themselves and to act freely, and then seeks to articulate principles that can be used to determine whether those rules are as they should be. Rawls’s highly developed version of this approach is based on the idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation among free and equal persons. In contrast, a prominent teleological approach borrows from the voluntarist ideology described above to identify an ideal of persons as autonomous individuals as the basis for evaluating and criticizing actual institutions and practices. This approach to political philosophy is goal-oriented, with the cultivation of personal autonomy as the central goal, as distinct from deontological liberal theories, which are typically rights-oriented.

As powerful as it is, the liberal ideology of voluntaristic social relations and autonomous individuality is beset with difficulties. It underestimates the importance and positive value of relationships and obligations whose roots cannot plausibly be described as the results of voluntary choices by those on whom those obligations rest, such as the obligations of children to parents or of siblings to one another. Nor is there any evident reason to accept its claim that a life of individual autonomy is the uniquely highest and best kind of life a human being can have. Moreover, the history of the twentieth century suggests that the problems of concentrated power, and the value of contributions by theoretical writers to efforts to disperse power, are far from obsolete. Liberal theories are at their strongest when the motives that were at work at the origins of the liberal tradition remain within their sights.

Bibliography:

Johnston, David. The Idea of a Liberal Theory. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Laski, Harold J. The Rise of European Liberalism. 1936. Reprint, London: Allen and Unwin, 1962.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Ruggiero, Guido de. The History of European Liberalism. Translated by R. G. Collingwood. 1927. Reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1981.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Canaan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Vile, M. J. C. Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998.
Waldron, Jeremy. “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism.” Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1987): 127–150.

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