[Political Interest]

I have often heard that proto-liberalism dates to the very early period of British history, notably the signing of the magna carta as well as the governing styles of the kings which included consultation with nobility. However can liberalism be said to have originated from these developments or did it come later with the Enlightenment and Reformation? Was it inevitable for Anglo-Saxon civilisatin to develop a liberal character or could it have gone in another direction?

[Ummon]

In my opinion liberalism is an expression of intelligence. "Evolutionarily novel" behavior correlates with intelligence such as drug & alcohol use, sexual monogamy for men, and "strange beliefs." Childhood iq (yes I know iq is not intelligence) also tracks with liberal beliefs as an adult. Choosing to help others one is not directly related to is definitely evolutionarily novel. I believe in part that exposure to more words/sounds, concepts, images, information, and all manner of stimuli creates more complex neural networks in childhood when 90+% of neural connections are formed allowing the mind to hold more complex abstract thought and allows for more comfort with uncertainty and potential contradiction in belief (cognitive dissonance).

[mikema63]

Claiming that an ideology is the ideology for smart people is utter nonsense and a logical fallacy of the highest order.

Untestable personal beliefs are not subject to the claim.

[ThirdTerm]

John Stuart Mill worked as a colonial administrator in India and he was one of the English liberal thinkers who supported imperialism enthusiastically as a civilising mission. In his view, English colonialism helped non-democratic countries move on to the next necessary step in social progress by gradually training the people to walk alone. "A Few Words on Non-Intervention" (Mill, 1859) established the modern doctrine of non-interventionism and he argued that neighbouring countries or one powerful country with the acquiescence of the rest are entitled to intervene to end the conflict and enforce terms of reconciliation. Britain's soft and liberal approach to imperialism had made it acceptable to the colonised for centuries and a nation cannot invade or colonise other countries successfully without being greeted as liberators.

The question "what happens when liberalism encounters the world?" is more central to liberal thought than was long appreciated, as recent scholarship has begun to suggest.11 There has been considerable disagreement in the literature and in popular understandings of the tradition about what the "liberal" position on empire has been, and about what the implications of liberal thought are for international justice more broadly. Some have claimed that liberalism has always contained an imperialist core: that a liberal insistence on progress and establishing the rule of law has led liberals over and over again to support imperialist projects. In this view, nineteenth-century Britain and the French mission civilisatrice serve as typical examples of the imperialist logic of liberal political thought.12 Others suggest that liberalism is inherently anti-imperialist, given its commitment to human equality and self-government: in this account, otherwise liberal thinkers who support empire merely reveal an illiberal side or smuggle illiberal ideas into their arguments. Jeremy Bentham himself used this argument polemically when he wrote to the Spanish people that if they maintained their domination over their New World possessions, "in vain would you continue your claim to the title of liberals."13 The first view cannot explain the many thinkers widely considered liberals who strongly opposed European imperialism, particularly in the eighteenth century. The second disregards the fact that many of the staple concepts of liberal political thought have indeed been mobilized in favor of the European imperial enterprise, and that European liberalism was forged alongside, and deeply affected by, imperial expansion. Liberals--in different times and under diverse circumstances in the history of the liberal tradition--have been among imperialism's most prominent defenders and its sharpest critics.
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7967.html

[foxdemon]

I have often heard that proto-liberalism dates to the very early period of British history, notably the signing of the magna carta as well as the governing styles of the kings which included consultation with nobility. However can liberalism be said to have originated from these developments or did it come later with the Enlightenment and Reformation? Was it inevitable for Anglo-Saxon civilisatin to develop a liberal character or could it have gone in another direction?

Anglo-Saxon civilization...Hmm. Pure Anglo-Saxon culture would have common law, Germanic language and Pagan religion. What we call Anglo-Saxon culture today is a synthesis of old German culture and sub Roman culture, fused in the context of medieval Europe. Ideas about the open mind, critical thinking, and so forth existed in ancient Greek and Roman culture. Certainly these way of thinking was extensively developed by the western Europeans during the modern era, but this was not exclusive to the British.


Could the English have something special in their culture that made England more suitable to liberal ideas?


The poor farmers weren't quite as powerless as the peasants on the continent. As you point out, the Magna Carta made the king relative less powerful amongst his peers which was a step on the road to the sovereign being subject to the same law as everyone else (rule of law). Kings on the Continental evolved toward absolutism in many cases. So maybe power was not so concentrated in English culture?


The War of the Roses made a difference too. The medieval English dynasty managed to wipe themselves out right at the beginning of the renaissance. The gave the English a 'clean slate' as just the right time in history.
The change from Catholicism to Protestantism provided some independence allowing the English to develop their political system in novel ways. They were earlier adopters of limited democracy. During the civil war era there were radical ideas challenging the old order, such as Levelers. So the English were innovative.


However, when talking about the origin of liberalism, we must never forget the Dutch. The Dutch were the 'founding fathers' of capitalism and finance as we know it. A Dutch king took the English throne toward the end of the 17th century (William of Orange). This resulting in a strong Dutch influence and the adoption of Dutch financial ideas. So we see the English had rule of law, democracy and capitalism before the Enlightenment thinkers formalism the concept of Liberalism.



Does this show the British to be predisposed to Liberalism? If so, a similar argument could be made for the Dutch being 'born liberals'. I think both nations were heading toward what we now call liberalism. Sooner or later they would have formalized a set of ideas into an ideology that expressed they political philosophy.

[Paradigm]

So long as we're not conflating liberalism with progressivism, I'd say it's a product of the European Enlightenment. Not Anglo-Saxon per se, as several French authors also contributed to the idea of liberalism, and even Machiavelli expressed some liberal ideas in his Discourses on Livy. Particularly, I would say that liberalism emerged out of Western Europe's unique history of struggles between church and state. Liberalism grew out of a distrust for both institutions, and a desire to hold both of them in check. Other societies in which this antagonism did not occur did not have the proper conditions for the emergence of liberalism.

[foxdemon]

So long as we're not conflating liberalism with progressivism, I'd say it's a product of the European Enlightenment. Not Anglo-Saxon per se, as several French authors also contributed to the idea of liberalism, and even Machiavelli expressed some liberal ideas in his Discourses on Livy. Particularly, I would say that liberalism emerged out of Western Europe's unique history of struggles between church and state. Liberalism grew out of a distrust for both institutions, and a desire to hold both of them in check. Other societies in which this antagonism did not occur did not have the proper conditions for the emergence of liberalism.

Certainly the French, and indeed the Americans, played a big role in the final emergence of the liberal ideology. But I am not sure that the reformation is so important 9other than through 'emancipating' various aspects of society from the unity of Catholicism) as opposition to absolutist monarchs. The French wars of religion occurred in the 17th century, while liberalism didn't emergence there until the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.


The Seven Years War played an important role in that the war cost the various protagonists a lot of money. This is what brought done the French 'Ancien Regime' and it is also what lead the British to over tax the American colonies setting of the American War of Independence. This was a time when the thoughts of enlightenment thinkers had coalesced into a definite ideology. At this time 'Liberal' was a dirty word in England, much like 'Communist' was a dirty word in post war USA. It was the weakness of the governments in question that allowed a revolt which used the anti-establishment ideology of that time.


Liberalism was the ideology of the merchant. The development of the urban traders and guilds was in opposition to the traditional feudal economy in the renaissance (particularly Holland, where they invented modern banking). As the towns became relatively richer, they came to challenge the power of the aristocrats. It is no coincidence that early liberals included anti-feudal polemics in their works. This ideology was in deliberate opposition to the absolutists who were identified as inheritors of feudalism in the 18th century. Liberalism emphasized social mobility rather than inherited social station. This suited the wealth traders of the towns, who lacked noble birth but aspired to power.


It should be recognized that enlightenment thinkers don't always fit neatly into our views of ideology. Voltaire, for example, is considered a liberal. Yet he fled revolutionary France and took sanctuary in Prussia, advocating 'enlightened dictatorship'. This ideology is more like Plato's Republic idea and not at all Liberal. Voltaire could be seen as much as a proto-Facist as a proto-Liberal.


So this was the historical context of the development of Liberalism. But it was the English who had the democracy, rule of law and economic organization, as I described in my first post, that made that country most suitable for liberalism to take root in the mid 19th century. In this sense, the British were predisposed to Liberalism.

[Paradigm]

Certainly the French, and indeed the Americans, played a big role in the final emergence of the liberal ideology. But I am not sure that the reformation is so important 9other than through 'emancipating' various aspects of society from the unity of Catholicism) as opposition to absolutist monarchs. The French wars of religion occurred in the 17th century, while liberalism didn't emergence there until the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.

I didn't mention the Reformation. The Reformation was the eventual outcome of antagonisms between church and state that had been in place throughout the Middle Ages.

[foxdemon]

I didn't mention the Reformation. The Reformation was the eventual outcome of antagonisms between church and state that had been in place throughout the Middle Ages.

The misunderstanding is mine, Gomenasai. Please expand on your idea of a struggle between church and state leading to the emergence of liberalism.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

It should be recognized that enlightenment thinkers don't always fit neatly into our views of ideology. Voltaire, for example, is considered a liberal. Yet he fled revolutionary France and took sanctuary in Prussia, advocating 'enlightened dictatorship'. This ideology is more like Plato's Republic idea and not at all Liberal. Voltaire could be seen as much as a proto-Facist as a proto-Liberal.

Voltaire died in 1778; his arguments were with the French monarchy, not revolutionary France.

When the First French Republic was brought to an end by Napoleon, his coup d'etat did not mark the end of the French Revolution, but only its passage to the third, or imperial, phase. Again he had to look no further for his ideas than to those provided by the French Enlightenment. This time it was the turn of Voltaire, and his doctrine of enlightened absolutism. This theory, like that of Rousseau, kept the sovereignty of' the state undivided, but in Voltaire's case it was not transmitted to the people but kept, without question, in the hands of the monarch.

Voltaire proclaimed himself to be, like Montesquieu, a disciple of the English philosophers, and having visited England at much the same time, he described the English kingdom, in much the same terms, as the homeland of liberty. Again, like Montesquieu, Voltaire named Locke as the prince of English philosophers, and there can be no doubt that he owed much to Locke's inspiration. Voltaire's own Traite sur la tolerance, for example, adds little to the arguments of Locke's Letter for Toleration. But Voltaire did not join Montesquieu in subscribing to the theory of divided sovereignty and constitutional government as set forth in Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Voltaire was far more attracted to the political ideas of another Englishman, Francis Bacon, the philosopher of progress. Although Bacon had died in 1626, Voltaire considered him the most up- to-date of thinkers: one whose message had a kind of actuality and relevance for eighteenth-century France that exceeded even that of Locke, whose message was mainly a message to the English, who already had experience of parliamentary government which the French had not.

Voltaire admired Bacon first as a man of science. It was not that Bacon had made any scientific discoveries of his own; he simply proclaimed the doctrine that science can save us. What was distinctive about his approach was his stress on utility. Science, he suggested, was not just an intellectual exercise to give us knowledge, but a practical enterprise to give us mastery over our world. Once men knew how nature worked, they could exploit nature to their advantage, overcome scarcity by scientific innovations in agriculture, overcome disease by scientific research in medicine, and generally improve the life of man by all sorts of developments in technology and industry.

Voltaire thrilled to this vision of progress, and he was no less excited by the programme Bacon sketched out as a means of achieving it. First, the abolition of traditional metaphysics and of idle theological disputes on which scholarship was wasted. Second, the repudiation of old-fashioned legal and political impediments to the efficient organisation of a progressive state. Bacon was frankly in favour of an enlarged royal prerogative at the expense of the rights of the Church, Parliament and the courts. Voltaire approved. Bacon had, in his time, the scheme of fostering the desire of James I to become an absolute monarch so that he himself might enact the role of philosopher at the elbow of a mighty king; Bacon failed, but Voltaire was more than sympathetic to his effort.

Besides, the Baconian plan seemed to him to have a better chance of success in France, because France had had, in Voltaire's opinion, an altogether happy experience of absolute monarchy under the Bourbon kings of the seventeenth century. One can readily understand Voltaire's admiration for Henri IV; it is less easy to understand his veneration for Louis XIV, the persecutor of Protestants, the oppressor of dissent and the protector of the pious. It has been suggested that Louis XIV appealed to the aesthetic side of Voltaire's imagination, which saw the king as an artist imposing unity on the chaos of society. In any case, Voltaire saw no necessary threat to freedom in the centralisation of royal government. On the contrary, he considered that in French experience the great enemies of liberty were the Church and the institutions controlled by the nobility, including the parlements. By suppressing or emasculating such institutions, a strong central government could enlarge the citizen's liberty; it had done so in the past in France and could do so in the future. He would not accept Montesquieu's doctrine of power checking power to produce freedom through equilibrium. For Voltaire, one single power that can be trusted is needed not to counter-balance, but rather to subdue those other powers which menace freedom.

The idea of 'philospher-king', of course, dates back at least as far as Plato. In the eighteenth century, several European monarchs were persuaded by Enlightenment philosophy to try to enact the role, among them, the Empress Catherine of Russia, the Emperor Joseph of Austria, as well as several lesser princes. Frederick of Prussia was the one who approached Voltaire in person, and invited him to join his Court at Potsdam. It was a doomed enterprise. Voltaire found himself unable to control the mind of a king who considered himself a philosopher already, and who wanted no advice, but only praise.

The French kings took no interest whatever in Voltaire's ideas: but Napoleon did. And once Napoleon had seized power, he made the Baconian, or Voltairean, project his own. Napoleon could fairly claim to be something other than a military dictator. He introduced what he thought of as scientific government. He gave his patronage to those intellectuals who saw themselves as the heirs of the Enlightenment: to Destutt de Tracy, Volney, Cabanis and Daunou, exponents of what they called the 'science of ideas.' He furthered the creation of such essentially Baconian institutions as the Polytechnique, the lycees, and the several ecoles normales. He made education a central feature of imperial policy, and he made that education state education.

Assuredly, Napoleon modified the Voltairean theory of enlightened absolutism in directions that Voltaire would not have approved. Napoleon introduced something approaching a democratic element by making his despotism plebiscitary, something which the earlier phases of the French Revolution had made almost inevitable. Voltaire had never cared much for democracy, because he considered the majority of people to be hopelessly unenlightened, but once the people had been brought into the French political arena, Napoleon saw that there was no way of pushing them out. They had only to be persuaded to let themselves be led, and Napoleon, of course, proved something of a genius in doing this. Voltaire, had he lived, might have admired him for this, but he would not have admired, or approved either of Napoleon's re-establishment of the Catholic Church or his military adventures. It was Frederick's wars which did most to alienate Voltaire; and Napoleon's wars would have, pleased him no more; especially as' Napoleon's conquests seemed to diminish rather than increase his attachment to the ideals of science and of freedom.

http://www.historytoday.com/maurice-cra ... ideologies

[Ummon]

Claiming that an ideology is the ideology for smart people is utter nonsense and a logical fallacy of the highest order.

Untestable personal beliefs are not subject to the claim.

http://phys.org/news186236813.html

The difference is even higher than between the religious and irreligious