First, Durkheim intended his objections to apply not only to Herbert Spencer but to classical liberals generally, who typically emphasized the importance of rational self‐​interest in generating and maintaining social order and a free society. But to focus on Spencer’s ideas alone could not do justice to this grand tradition, and it might even prove misleading. Spencer introduced some complicating factors into liberal thinking, especially in the fields of social and moral evolution, that were atypical and sometimes did more harm than good. I have therefore decided to take a broader view of the relationship between self‐​interest and social order in the liberal tradition. I find this perspective much more interesting, and I think most of my readers will agree.

Second, Durkheim’s own ideas, which were the foundation of his objections to classical liberalism, are so complex and convoluted that I decided they were not worth the space, time, and effort that would be required to explain them, even in a cursory manner.

Third, there is a common misconception, even among scholars, that classical liberals marched pretty much in lockstep in matters pertaining to self‐​interest and social order, whereas we actually find interesting differences and debates within the liberal tradition. I shall illustrate this point by exploring the ideas of three eighteenth‐​century liberals—Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith—in this series. Whether or not the discussion will continue after that point is something I will figure out later.

Unlike Durkheim and other positivists, eighteenth‐​century liberals emphasized that an understanding of human psychology is essential if we are to understand the ultimate foundations of social order. It is therefore better to characterize this series as an exploration of liberal social psychology rather than liberal sociology. Let us now proceed to our first of three classical liberals.

Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and author of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), is not as well known today as David Hume, Adam Smith, or even lesser‐​known British moralists, such as Francis Hutcheson. Yet he was a commanding figure in eighteenth‐​century liberal thought whose far‐​reaching influence was widely acknowledged. (Shaftesbury’s grandfather, the First Earl of Shaftesbury, was John Locke’s patron who had Locke tutor his grandson.)

It was Shaftesbury who pioneered the idea of sympathy—a psychological phenomenon that might be described today as “empathy”—as a key to understanding the “natural sociability of man.” (I shall discuss this meaning of “sympathy” in more detail in a later essay.) Shaftesbury veered from the moral rationalism found in John Locke and later figures, such as Samuel Clarke, and pioneered the school of thought known as “sentimentalism”—an approach that would later be developed in greater detail by Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. This is not to say that Shaftesbury and later sentimentalists denigrated the role of reason in human affairs; they manifestly did not, but they also maintained that the elements of social order, such as justice and benevolence, did not originally arise from abstract philosophical reasoning. Rather, just as Adam Smith would later discuss a spontaneous economic order in his Wealth of Nations, so Shaftesbury and other sentimentalists focused on the fundamental psychological elements of a social order that, as Adam Ferguson put it in a different context, is “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

In An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (which would later be incorporated into his Characteristics), Shaftesbury set out to study the “inward anatomy” of the human mind, an enterprise he deemed essential to understanding human sociability. Although social interaction is first and foremost a subjective phenomenon, Shaftesbury complained that most previous philosophers had largely neglected the psychological aspects and principles of social order. “[I]t is apparent that few of us endeavour to become anatomists of this sort. Nor is anyone ashamed of the deepest ignorance in such a subject,” even though “the order or symmetry of this inward part is, in itself, no less real and exact as that of the body.”

Of course, many philosophers had woven a psychological perspective into their theories of social order, for a certain amount of this is necessary in any discussion of human nature, but Shaftesbury rejected many of those treatments as insufficient, if not downright false. He was especially critical of a doctrine known as psychological egoism, which insisted that all human actions are necessarily self‐​interested. In one respect Shaftesbury did not object to this primitive hedonistic analysis, since all human action is motivated by the desire to attain happiness, or satisfaction of the self, in some sense. Nevertheless, it is a serious error to suppose that all human actions are motivated by self‐​interest, as that term is commonly understood. Individuals are part of a social system—they are born into society and find their greatest pleasures in interacting with others—so in addition to selfish passions (which Shaftesbury by no means condemned, when properly moderated and understood), there are also social passions that can be gratified only during the course of social interaction.

In the final analysis, according to Shaftesbury, psychological egoism is little more than a play on words. However many examples of disinterested or benevolent behavior are presented to psychological egoists—those “distributors and petty retailers of this wit”—they manage to show how “self is still at the bottom.” Few will dispute the claim “that happiness was to be pursued and in fact was always sought after,” but this is scarcely the relevant point. Rather, we should determine the true nature of happiness, and whether it can be achieved by those who focus narrowly upon themselves at the expense of others. If we pay attention to this issue rather than “run[ning] changes and divisions without end upon this article of self love,” the “question would not be ‘who loved himself or who not?’ but ‘who loved and served himself the rightest and after the truest manner?’”

This rejection of psychological egoism as irrelevant at best and devious at worst would later be explored at greater length by Bishop Butler, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and others. So much for the common claim that classical liberals believed that all human actions are motivated by self‐​interest.

Shaftesbury rejected a utilitarian analysis of social passions of the sort that a psychological egoist might defend. It is not as if individuals somehow calculate that their own interests coincide or harmonize with the interests of others, after which favorable emotional responses follow suit. Rather, the social passions develop naturally, from the psychological constitution of man and our early interactions with others, and therefore precede any such rational analysis. We begin to feel an affinity with our family and fellow humans long before we are able to project the long‐​range consequences of our actions, so the psychology of human sentiments (a combination of mental and emotional dispositions) must be viewed as an independent subject apart from the rational calculations of an acting agent. In short, whereas many individualists, such as John Locke, had stressed the natural sociability of man, Shaftesbury believed this sentiment had not been adequately explained, owing to insufficient attention to the “anatomy” of the human mind.

The appellation “sentimentalist” is therefore an appropriate label for Shaftesbury’s approach (and those British liberals who followed him), owing to its stress on the natural “sentiments” that generate social order. And this is why it is appropriate to include Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith in a discussion of social psychology. Of course, the term “psychology” had not yet been coined—all this was subsumed under the label “moral science” or “moral philosophy”—but the issues discussed by eighteenth‐​century sentimentalists have much in common with those discussed by modern social psychologists and sociologists, and many of their insights retain their value even today. That value may easily be overlooked because the normative vocabulary of eighteenth‐​century social psychology, such as “virtue,” “vice,” and “merit,” is no longer in fashion, having been widely dismissed as contrary to the value‐​free terms of social science. Nevertheless, British moralists understood that humans are normative animals, and that social interaction depends on a complex web of value judgments and value‐​laden feelings, so it may be that some modern social theorists have lagged behind their predecessors in this respect.

All “sensible creatures,” Shaftesbury argued, may be said to pursue the good inasmuch as they engage in life‐​sustaining activities, but normative concepts like “virtue” and “merit” apply only to the human species—creatures endowed with reason who are capable of reflecting on their own mental states and processes.