Inventing the Individual: the Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop

Liberalism: the Life of an Idea by Edmund Fawcett

All over the Atlantic world, political liberalism has fallen on evil days. In the U.S., the creed of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F Kennedy has become a sin that dare not speak its name. In last year’s German election, the Free Democratic Party—the embodiment of the country’s liberal tradition and the second party in coalition governments for most of the postwar period—won less than 5 percent of the popular vote and is no longer represented in the federal parliament. In the 2011 Canadian election, the Liberal Party—for decades a dominant force—suffered a catastrophic defeat. The Radical Party of the Left, today the closest approximation to a liberal party in France, is little more than a pimple on the body politic. In Britain, the Liberal Democrats, heirs of the Liberal Party of Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge, have clambered into bed with a market-fundamentalist Conservative Party and endured a huge slump in the opinion polls.

As Edmund Fawcett and Larry Siedentop show in different ways, the travails of political liberalism reflect a profound crisis of the liberal world-view. To put it crudely, it is no longer clear what liberalism means. Its core value is freedom—freedom for unconstrained individuals to choose for themselves. Freedom, however, is a notoriously slippery word. Freedom as a source of human flourishing is one thing; freedom to ignore the common good and exploit others is quite another. Positive freedom, or freedom “to,” is not the same as negative freedom, or freedom “from.” The great Liberal government of 1905-15 curbed the negative freedom of the privileged in order to enhance the positive freedom of the dispossessed.

Much the same is true of choice and the individual. Choices can be bad as well as good. There is a world of difference between individuals of flesh and blood, shaped by lived traditions and shared histories, and the abstract, egocentric, disembodied individual posited by the neoliberal orthodoxy of our day. Yet today’s liberals seem strangely reluctant to distinguish between good and bad choices, to make clear how they envisage the individual, or to define the proper relationship between individual freedom and the public good.

At an early stage in the French Revolution, the great Whig statesman and thinker Edmund Burke declared that he was for the “splendid flame of liberty” but not for “solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man were to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will.” The liberty he sought, he added in a pregnant phrase, was “social freedom.”

In a similar vein, 70 years later, John Stuart Mill argued that individuality—the quality that made human beings “noble”—could grow only through arduous activity in the public sphere. Fawcett’s workmanlike history of the bundle of ideas and practices that liberals have espoused since the Spanish liberales coined the term after the Napoleonic wars is an excellent guide to liberalism’s rise and fall.