On Liberalism and Mass Democracy

On March 25, 1867, a still quite youthful T.H. Green (1836-1882) — then a Lecturer in Ancient and Modern History at Balliol, but soon to become [update: one of the] most important systematic philosopher of his generation in England — gave a speech to the (recently founded) Oxford Reform League. (I thank the librarians of the University of Amsterdam for scanning it for me.) Green is usually (and correctly) described as a key figure in the development of British idealism, but he is also an important theorist of freedom and a version of liberal perfectionism. (The Hume scholar in me also acknowledges my debt to him because he is probably the person who revived serious, critical interest in Hume and he contributed to scholarship on him in multiple ways not the least by preparing enduring editions.)

Now, as regular readers know I am not very keen on theorists and philosophers promoting politicians and political parties (but do favor their involvement, if they wish, in supporting principles, ideals or policies [although with important constraints]). And the reason for that is that politicians and parties need to make concessions to considerations that have nothing to do with the truth or the good (or the right). And so, promoting a politician or a party will make the theorist/philosopher inevitably compromised (by the standards of truth/goodness/right, etc.), complicit in all kinds of bads, and involve them in inconsistencies.*

The main point of Green’s speech is to promote reform (expansion of the franchise, parliamentary reform, and a number of important changes in how elections are run). The reform league itself grew out of the activism and mass organizing of the free-trade anti-Corn-Law league headed by Cobden and Bright (so-called ‘Manchester Liberalism’).

It is often assumed even by people who ought to know better that ‘Manchester’ liberals were utilitarians, but if one reads their speeches they are generally not appealing to utilitarian principles (rather, they are broadly Smithian liberals). Both Cobden and Bright were rather courageous in their subsequent anti-war and anti-imperial-expansion stances (and paid non-trivial political price for this). And they both fought actively for various forms of equality for religious minorities, including Catholics. After the success in abolishing the Corn Laws, Cobden himself became the architect of international functional integration (supported by Bright). And Bright focused on the expansion of the franchise to include workers. Cobden was (alas) indifferent about such expansion of democracy.

As illustrated by Cobden’s stance, many critics and even some friends of liberalism doubt its commitment to mass democracy, especially in its majoritarian guises. You are undoubted familiar with the recurring criticisms that liberals prefer property rights and the sanctity of contracts in free markets to democracy with its purported fondness for redistribution. And indeed, some liberal reservations about democracy are rooted in class privilege. Guizot, say, warmly embraced the limited franchise rooted in property.

However, not all liberal reservations about mass democracy are so narrow in tenor. Benjamin Constant (a key early liberal) articulated the liberal fear of democratic despotism (or Caesarianism/Bonepartism) from the start (recall here). (And proposed all kinds of mechanisms to make democracy, more liberal.) We know from J.S. Mill the fear of letting the un-educated rule the cultivated (and extended this thought, alas, to a defense of empire based on civilizational superiority [see Duncan Bell here]). And many kind of liberals have spoken up for a rights-based regime or federalism to protect systematic (linguistic, ethnic, religious, and national) minorities (or promoted national self-determination).

But judging by the avalanche of criticism directed against the distrust of democracy from friends and enemies of liberalism, it seems many are largely unaware of the ways liberalism historically warmly embraced democracy (meaning a full franchise). My bedrock foundation is that the word ‘liberal’ in its modern sense was coined by William Robertson and Adam Smith in the mid 1770s. (Dan Klein has also argued this, and the idea originates in Hayek.)

The uptake of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, spread the idea of liberalism. As regular readers know, this is not just a vehicle for ‘economic’ liberalism, but also a much larger political program against the war-prone imperial mercantilism of the eighteenth century (going back to Locke). This was well understood at the time during the Swedish and Spanish revolutions at the start of the nineteenth century. Rather than linking you to lots of old blog posts, just check out the evidence I gather in my Stevenson Trust lecture in Glasgow. But then I did not focus on democracy.

So, before in France Constant put together the whole familiar package of ideas we call ‘liberal,’ (and Bentham, who unlike many of his followers was a friend of mass democracy, did the same) Adam Smith’s ideas were received by Condorcet and Grouchy as fully compatible with their own (majoritarian) democratic ideals. They articulated this explicitly in the 1790s. Condorcet did so in his posthumously published Sketches on the future of Mankind (see here for an intro), whereas Grouchy did this in her Letters on Sympathy appended to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and his essay on the Origin of Languages. It’s worthing quoting her Advertisement:

The name of Smith needs no praise. This writer is today generally regarded as one of the first geniuses of the century; and his glory is one of the few that time must daily confirm and enlarge. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is without a doubt the most complete analysis that has yet been made of human affections. The Wealth of Nations presents, on almost all questions of political economy, and the richest tableaus of all the facts that can relate to this science, and the most extensive, the most certain, the most liberal views on the different branches of internal administration. It is not only a guide necessary for all persons charged with the execution of laws; it is a torch for the Legislators, and a torch whose light is all the purer, as the theoretical principles are always, in this Work, established or confirmed by a rich set of conclusive examples. (Translation by Google, modestly adjusted.) {I thank Jason S. Canon for alerting me to this.}

Grouchy clearly reads Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a work in political economy and the art of government. Crucially, Grouchy herself is one of the most committed of democrats (see here a piece with Sandrine Berges for the full story).

So much for set up.

In his speech to the Oxford Reform League, Green praises John Bright a number of times. In fact, the speech is an explicit defense of Bright against a number of criticisms. The first mention of Bright is directed against “the people who abuse Mr. Bright for setting class against class.” (p. 227)* Now, these are people who believe in automatic progress, that the arc of history takes care of itself (“who think that we have only to sit still, and Reform will come of itself.”) In principle, in words they disagree only over means not the end.

This point is repeated a few lines down, when Green mentions Bright for the second and third time, “Some 8 years ago everyone professed to be for reform, and we were told we might have had it at once, if a 'base mechanic fellow,' John Bright, had not gone about stirring up bad blood. Well, just because of the commanding energy of this same John Bright, a Reform Bill was introduced in 1860.” (p. 228; emphasis added) Despite Bright’s organizing, Parliament wouldn’t budge, “The people were prosperous and quiescent, and so it was contemptuously shoved aside.”

Bright’s advocacy of including workers in the franchise is treated as class warfare by such reformers. And as Green discerns, such critics may well, in substance, also fear the ends that reform will generate.

Now, it’s worth noting that outside and inside parliament, Bright was an agitator for peaceful reform not revolution. In fact, Bright himself probably thought that Chartism had undermined its own cause by flirting too often with violent revolution and insurrection and, thereby, scaring the landowners. For Bright, the point of organization is a change in public opinion and, thereby, to decisively shift even an unrepresentative parliament in the right direction. (In a subsequent generation, A.V. Dicey becomes the most able theorist of this point of view, but (recall) builds it on less democratic, Humean foundations.)

I don’t mean to suggest that for Bright public opinion is all powerful. One gets the sense of his speeches and George Macaulay Trevelyan’s biography that one reason (out of many) why he favored free trade is because he thought a more prosperous and growing state would be more favorable to expanding the franchise and other worthy reforms. In his speech, Green himself treats expansion of the franchise and parliamentary reform as valuable ends and instrumental to further progress: “if the reform of Parliament, for which we wait, brings with it a free Church, free land, and free education, we shall rejoice to have refused all half measures, and shall feel that we have not waited and laboured in vain.” (P. 232)

Lurking here is the sense that sometimes no reform is better than bad reform; bad reforms entrench a status quo, whereas the good reforms open up the possibility for other kinds of political movement for the better. And one reason why entrenching a status quo is bad, is because it undermines further education—for echoing Bright himself, Green (anticipating Luxemburg and Dewey) thinks organizing and protesting are themselves forms of education: “It will bring more to the public conscience the need of social reforms as well as political, and familiarize it with the nature of the system by which the present possessors of power maintain their monopoly.”

Then comes the crucial passage (with the final mention of Bright) in Green’s speech:

Then came the American war - the slaveholders' rebellion. Every one out of England perfectly understood the nature of that war. There was not a politician or a newspaper, claiming to be liberal and enlightened, over the whole of Europe that did not know that it was a desperate effort on the part of a privileged class -privileged to hold slaves - to break up a Government, acknowledged to be the most beneficent in the world, because it could no longer work it in its own interest. Just for that reason the privileged class in England, with its dependents, took sides with the slaveholders. We were asked to believe that what the slaveholders themselves confessed to be simply a struggle for free licence 'to larrup their own niggers' was a great struggle for human liberty. During the whole of that period the one politician of eminence among us who kept his head clear was Mr. Bright (cheers). If he had not kept his light burning through the thick darkness of the Palmerstonian regime, I know not whether the nation would have emerged from its political apathy this generation. For many years he stood virtually alone. (p. 229)

To many cheers of his audience, Green then goes on to praise Bright as the exemplar of true liberal statesmanship. So, Green doesn’t merely praise Bright as a way to praise the principles and ideals he advocates, he also praises Bright for his strength of character as explicitly an inspiration to theirs. (The reference to Palmerstonian regime, is a way to point to Bright’s rejection of imperial expansionism.)+

The quoted paragraph doesn’t even begin to hint at the significance of Bright’s actions in England during the American civil war. In many ways he helped prevent England from siding with the South, convincing the wealthy aristocracy that their long-term interests were with an American victory, representing the noble solidarity and sacrifice of the workers who were greatly suffering due to the implosion of the cotton economy (look up Lancashire Cotton Famine), and through Senator Sumner steering the Lincoln administration away from confrontation with Britain (say over the CSS Alabama and other incidents).

I don’t think Green is merely praising Bright because he is an hero to his audience (of mostly disenfranchised workers). He clearly conveyes Bright’s life and actions is an example worth emulating (using Milton and Shakespeare to good effect to support this point.)

Now, if you look closely at Bright’s life there is plenty to criticize from the perspective of liberalism. He was inconsistent on female suffrage, and later (Green did not live to see it), Bright (who had been an amazing and true friend of Irish Catholics for most of his career) helped cement Ulster Unionism as the core of British politics (and so prevent the growth of peaceful catholic equality within the empire). His plans (while interesting theoretically) for India ultimately fruitless.

Let me wrap up. I tend to think of twentieth century liberalism as complex entwinement of liberal ideals (rooted in Smith, Constant, Bentham) and what one might call ‘republican’ ones tracing back to Rousseau and Kant. This entwinement originates in Grouchy and Condorcet; but in my view Green is the first theorist who really exhibits this entwinement when the liberal ideas have been crystalized. And I don’t think it’s a surprise that interest in Green has been growing.

Crucially, neither John Bright nor T.H. Green is a fearful democrat. This is not true of all liberals then and since.+ But Bright and Green did not wait for progress, they helped shape our more democratic worlds, in theory and in practice, even if their work is unfinished.

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*All my references are to volume 5 of the Collected Works of T.H. Green, (additional writings).

+If you do manage to track down the speech, you’ll see that Green uses Bright to attack ‘Philosophical Liberals’ and ‘Moderate Liberals’ (as well as ‘educated Liberals’)