What makes you a classical liberal?

a sense of history, a spirit of freedom

My answer to this question, which I saw being discussed elsewhere, is a marginal one, in the sense that I do not intend to offer any sort of core principles. You know well enough that individual freedom, the equality of persons, religious and political toleration, are essential to all forms of liberalism. This is what Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.” (Smith being the fount.)

Rebecca Lowe

wrote about this recently.¹ (Mises once wrote that “liberalism is applied economics”—no, that’s insufficient!)

What I want to offer is the idea that liberalism must have a sense of history. I do not mean by this that a classical liberal must know a lot of history, though many of the most significant liberals certainly have known their history, or lived through it, as Locke and Mill did. What I mean is that a liberal will know something about how their ideas work in the world, amid the flow of events. Liberals have been concerned with improvement, and with the appreciation of their own times. (“The Galoshes of Fortune” by Hans Christian Andersen is instructive on this point.) History shows us the importance of that very clearly.

Classical liberalism is very difficult to achieve without preconditions. You need, for one thing, a system of government that is amenable to liberalism. One important reason why England was the historic land of liberty was the resilience of the Saxon model of government, and later the ideal of that model. (Robert Tombs is good on the topic of just how the Saxon model survived the Norman invasion.) Another long development was the idea that every individual is a precious soul as part of a unique human species. It just took a long time for these ideas to become liberalism.

One reason for that is that so much is required to be done. So many ideas needed evaluating; so many political events need to be learned from; so much remained to be discovered about the individual in art. I don’t think I can prove that Shakespeare is a precondition of liberalism, but certainly you need a society capable of conceiving of the individual as individual quite so significantly (and diaries, and the massive expansion of the language, and so on) in order to be liberal. We say “individualism” as a piece of jargon, almost cant jargon, without enough reflection that the idea of the individual has to be worked on with specifics and examples.

And you have to actually live through the Reformation. Human society cannot work that all out on paper. Even when these things are being worked out on paper, it is often directly related to human events. The role of the law courts is hugely important, for example. What is liberalism without recourse to a free and fair judiciary?

We did not simply wake up one day as

A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent

because people were reading John Locke (blessed though he be).

For Smith’s “liberal plan” to be workable, the state had to evolve in a certain way, or set of ways. Now, you may not need to know all of that history today to be a good liberal. But,—liberalism is a practical business, a “plan”, as Smith said.

Someone asked me for reading recommendations about free speech recently. Yes, yes, Mill and Milton. Of course! Excellent stuff! But also: the law reports. Read the history of the case-law. Compare it to the assault cases. What does it actually take for someone to cross the line from speech to actionable speech is worth considering in the light of the courtroom as well as by the glow of the philosopher’s candle.

It is often said, and well said, that liberalism requires constant jealous guarding. If we consider this as an essential part of being a classical liberal, a sense of history becomes indispensable. This is the reason, I think, that eighteenth century aristocrats like Lord Chesterfield (he of the famous letters) and Lord Chatham (Pitt the Younger’s father, and Prime Minister himself) advised their sons to read Bolingbroke’s Remarks on the History of England.

Bolingbroke tells the history of England (briefly) as a sort of tussle between the forces of faction and the spirit of liberty. It is a partial account, and a narrow one, but it hits an essential point. Who benefits from a theoretical liberalism? The plan can only be implemented in accord with historical conditions. For the people to believe in this spirit of freedom, the great guard against illiberal forces, they must know a little of the history of how they became free and how they might not have done.

I would also emphasise the role of the imagination, but that is for another time…

1. (Like Rebecca, I am a pluralist, in case you care.)