• Ideologies determine what facts are important and what
actions are acceptable.
• How far is the Sun ?
• Human species are diverse. Hair, eye, skin, height
• Liberal Ideology – the facts about diversity might not be very
important when it comes to deciding how we build a society.
• Fascism – Human being are diverse ?
• It takes certain facts, prioritizes them and say these facts
mean this action is what we should be doing
• Somebody insists that their ideology is based purely on facts. Its
never the full picture
• Nobody ideology is based on every single fact there is.
• Ideology determines which facts are most relevant.
• Which things get to be called facts
• What action are okay to deal with that facts
• Liberalism often markets itself as not an ideology, other ideologies
like fascism often own it.
• Liberalism – neutral and objective – false image
• Selects and construct the facts that it find useful.
• Job of political ideology ?
• It identifies who are the acceptable targets of violence.
• Fascism - people who don’t meet the definition of whiteness the
fascist use
• Leninism – violence is acceptable if it is targeted at certain
oppressive classes
• Liberalism ?
• Liberty and justice for all
• Non violent.
• Emphasis on civil rights and freedoms
Making exceptions to the normal rule is a defining characteristic
of liberal ideology in practice.
Savage and barbarians
Who are savage ?
Mill loved liberty. However, he did not think Indian people should
be at liberty to run India.
Making Exceptions
Its important to realize
that although all
political ideologies
legitimize violence
somewhere and all
claim to be moderate
and objective that
doesn’t mean that they
are all the same or all
equally good choices.
It just means that its
not enough to believe
the marketing.
• Britain - Leave Vote
• America - Trump
• Poland - ?
• Hungary - Viktor Orbán
• Why?
• Elitist
• Hypocrite
• Remote from concerns of ordinary people
Origin
liberalism as a developed ideology was a product of the
breakdown of feudalism in Europe.
liberalism reflected the aspirations of the rising middle
classes, whose interests conflicted with the established
power of absolute monarchs and the landed aristocracy.
Liberals criticized the political and economic privileges of
the landed aristocracy and the unfairness of a feudal
system in which social position was determined by the
‘accident of birth’.
The character of liberalism changed as the ‘rising middle classes’
succeeded in establishing their economic and political dominance.
Liberalism thus became increasingly conservative, standing less
for change and reform, and more for the maintenance of existing –
largely liberal – institutions.
liberalism gives priority to ‘the right’ over ‘the good’. In other
words, liberalism strives to establish the conditions in which
people and groups can pursue the good life as each defines it, but
it does not prescribe or try to promote any particular notion of
what is good.
Meta-ideology - body of rules that lays down the grounds on
which political and ideological debate can take place.
What is liberalism?
Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy
emphasizing individual autonomy, equal
opportunity, and protection of individual rights to
life, liberty, and property.
implies that each individual should enjoy the
maximum possible freedom consistent with a like
freedom for all.
Conception of Human Nature :
• Man is individualistic by nature.
• Endowed with reason
• Mill, Locke, Bentham – Utilitarian
• Atomistic man
• When we analyze a society in terms of decisions that individuals
make
• Society is collection of individuals and not prior to man
• When we explain what happens in a society the explanation will
individual as a unit for reference
Individualism
• feudal period
• Market Oriented societies
• For example, A Serf living on same land
• Reason and science – displaced traditional religious theories
• Individual possess distinctive qualities
• Kant – dignity and equal worth of individual – ends in themselves
• Uniqueness vs equality
• Egoism – concern for ones own self interest.
• primacy of the individual
• ‘society’ itself does not exist, but is merely a collection of self-
sufficient individuals.
• extreme individualism is based on the assumption that the individual
is egoistical, essentially self-seeking and largely self-reliant.
• C. B. Macpherson (1973) characterized early liberalism as ‘possessive
individualism’, in that it regarded the individual as ‘the proprietor of
his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them’.
• Individual interest more important than community interest.
• Individual owns himself
• Freedom means freedom from dependence on the wills of others.
Freedom
• Supreme political value.
• Natural right.
• Develop skills and talents.
• John Mill – ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his
will, is to prevent harm to others’.
• most minimal restrictions on individual
• self-regarding vs other-regarding
• Seat belt, Suicide, helmet, drugs
• Two Concepts of Liberty - Isaiah Berlin
• Berlin showed, negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of
liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political
ideal. Since few people claim to be against liberty, the way this term is
interpreted and defined can have important political implications.
• absence of external restrictions or constraints on the individual
• ability to be one’s own master; to be autonomous. Self-mastery requires that the
individual is able to develop skills and talents, broaden his or her understanding,
and gain fulfillment.
• absence of something Vs require the presence of somethings
• “What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is
or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by
other persons?”, whereas we use the positive concept in attempting to answer
the question “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can
determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?”
Reason
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Adam
Smith, Jeremy Bentham
• Paternalism – creates the prospect that those
invested with responsibility for others will abuse
their position for their own ends.
• expansion of knowledge
• capacity to take charge of their own lives
Justice
• giving each person what he or she is ‘due’.
• individualism implies a commitment to foundational
equality
• foundational equality implies a belief in formal equality or
equal Citizenship
• disapprove of any social privileges or advantages
• Rights should not be reserved for any particular class
• legal equality and political equality
• equality of opportunity.
• meritocracy
Toleration
• diversity has been associated more commonly with toleration
• “I detest what you say but will defend to the death your right to
say it”- Voltaire
• Autonomy and How human beings should behave towards one
another
• John Milton (1608–74) and John Locke (see p. 52) to defend
religious freedom.
• the proper function of government is to protect life, liberty and
property
• Toleration should be extended to all matters regarded as ‘private’,
Liberal State :
• How balanced and tolerant society will develop ?
• Anarchist vs Liberal
• Liberals fear that free individuals may wish to exploit others, steal their
property or even turn them into slaves if it is in their interests to do so.
• each person can be said to be both a threat to, and under threat from,
every other member of society.
Liberals have traditionally believed that such protection can only be
provided by a sovereign state, capable of restraining all individuals and
groups within society.
• ‘where there is no law there is no freedom’.
• Social Contract Theories
• State Of Nature - ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.
• rational individuals would enter into an agreement to establish a sovereign
government, without which orderly and stable life would be impossible.
• Sacrifice a portion of their liberty in order to set up a system of law.
• political authority comes, in a sense, ‘from below’.
• Government arises out of the agreement, or consent, of the governed.
• citizens do not have an absolute obligation to obey all laws or accept any
form of government.
• state as a neutral arbiter.
Constitutionalism
• all governments are potential tyrannies against the individual
• Poses constant threat to individual liberty
• As human beings are self-seeking creatures, if they have power – the
ability to influence the behavior of others – they will naturally use it for
their own benefit and at the expense of others.
• Egoism + Power = Corruption
• Government can be limited of constitutional constraints
• written constitution ,checks and balances, separation of powers
Classical Liberalism
• Transition from feudalism to capitalism – Industrialization
• Nineteenth century liberalism – UK, USA
• Egoistical individualism - rationally self-interested creatures,
characteristics of society can be traced back to the more fundamental
features of human nature.
• negative freedom - The individual is free in so far as he or she is left
alone, not interfered with or coerced by others.
• State as ‘necessary evil’, ‘nightwatchman’ - maintenance of domestic
order, the enforcement of contracts, and the protection of society
against external attack.
• Natural Rights
- rights are ‘natural’ in that they are invested in human
beings by nature or God.
- ‘life, liberty and property’
- Jefferson and Locke
- Hobbes and Locke
• Utilitarianism
- Bentham – Natural rights - Nonsense on stilts
- The greatest happiness for greatest number
• Economic Liberalism
- Mercantilism
- Freedom within the market
• Social Darwinism
- Your own responsibility
- Charles Darwin
- Herbert Spencer
Liberalism and Capitalism
• Economy what we have now
• Free market, profit, private ownership, wages
• Core ?
• Wood – Labour – chair – profit – wages
• Money you invested is called capital – capitalism
• Profit – wages – investment
• Labour ? Wood ?
• How the west come to rule – 2007
• Social, economic, and political – that sustain and reinforce that
practice.
• Land – common land – family main unit of the society
• Enclosure – fencing
• Individual laborer who must go where work is
• Feudalism and Capitalism
• Locke – Two Treatises of Government - Consent of people -
property
• Individualism + Freedom – exception when profitable
• US
• Liberalism takes capitalism as given
• Lot of violence that liberalism legitimizes is the violence that keeps
capitalism going.
• Colonialism
• Immigrants
Neo- Liberalism
• The worst of both worlds ?
• Lovechild
• Finance – Low spending – low taxes - YES
• Regulation – welfare – trade unions - No
• Use the state to create new market – Privatization (carbon trade)
Personal Responsibility
• Dream with your own hand and hard work
• Dependent on Hand outs - lazy
Freedom of the market
• Consumer can choose how to spend the money
• Every US president, EU, UK since 80’s
• Fetcher, Reagan
• Clinton – Democracts , Blair – British Labour Party
2008 financial crisis, Austerity, tax breaks, caps on public
sector
Cuts for social security.
- Create jobs ?
- Iraq ?
- Making rich people richer
• Carbon Trading
• Welfare state erosion
• Monopolies
• Increased Financial Instability
• Inequality
• Globalization
• Impose negative duties
• Libertarians strongly value individual freedom and see this as
justifying strong protections for individual freedom. Thus,
libertarians insist that justice poses stringent limits to coercion.
• While people can be justifiably forced to do certain things (most obviously, to
refrain from violating the rights of others) they cannot be coerced to serve the
overall good of society, or even their own personal good.
• As a result, libertarians endorse strong rights to individual liberty and private
property; defend civil liberties like equal rights for homosexuals; endorse drug
decriminalization, open borders, and oppose most military interventions .
• Libertarians usually see the kind of large-scale, coercive wealth redistribution in
which contemporary welfare states engage as involving unjustified coercion.
• It affirms a strong distinction between the public and the private spheres of life;
insists on the status of individuals as morally free and equal, something it interprets
as implying a strong requirement of individuals sovereignty; and believes that a
respect for this status requires treating people as right-holders, including as holders
of rights in property.
• It is popular to label libertarianism as a right-wing doctrine. But this is mistaken.
For one, on social (rather than economic) issues, libertarianism implies what are
commonly considered left-wing views. And second, there is a subset of so-called
“left-libertarian” theories. While all libertarians endorse similar rights over the
person, left-libertarians differ from other libertarians with respect to how much
people can appropriate in terms of unowned natural resources (land, air, water,
minerals, etc.).
• left-libertarians differ from other libertarians with respect to how much people can appropriate in terms
of unowned natural resources (land, air, water, minerals, etc.). left-libertarians insist that this constraint
has a distinctively egalitarian character. It might require, for instance, that people who appropriate
natural resources make payments to others in proportion to the value of their possessions.
• Self-Ownership
• libertarians of this kind consider freedom the paramount value. They hold, for example, that each
person has a right to maximum equal negative liberty, which is understood as the absence of forcible
interference from other agents
• Nozick
(1) rights to control the use of the entity: including a liberty-right to use it as well as a claim-right that
others not use it without one's consent,
(2) rights to transfer these rights to others (by sale, rental, gift, or loan),
(3) immunities to the non-consensual loss of these rights,
(4) compensation rights in case others use the entity without one’s consent, and
(5) enforcement rights (e.g. rights to restrain persons about to violate these rights).
• We consider assault wrong for similar reasons, but allow voluntary boxing matches.
• The principle is a strong endorsement of the moral importance and sovereignty of the
individual, and it expresses the refusal to treat people as mere things to use or trade off
against each other.
• Full self-ownership, for instance, offers a straightforward and unequivocal defense of
women’s rights over their bodies, including the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies. It
explains why it’s wrong to sacrifice the rights and freedoms of minorities (even a minority
of one) for the sake of protecting the interests of the majority.
• Robert Nozick (1974), that people have a right against being forced to assist others, except
as a result of their agreement or wrongdoing. Such a view rules out redistributive taxation
aimed at reducing material inequality or raising the standards of living for the poor. Since
taxation siphons off part of people’s earnings, which represent people’s labor, and people
initially have the right not to be forced to work for certain ends, Nozick argued,
redistributive taxation is morally on a par with forced labor.
• but cases in which a person in extreme need can be greatly benefitted
as a result of using another person. Even if one has no duty to assist in
those cases, may others use one’s person, without consent, to assist
someone in need? Suppose, to use an extreme example, we can save
ten innocent lives by gently pushing an innocent person to the ground.
Full self-ownership asserts that this would not be permissible. Again, the
idea is roughly that since individuals are normatively separate, they
cannot permissibly be used to benefit others without their consent.
• full self-ownership may permit voluntary enslavement. Just as people
have, on this view, the right to control uses of their persons, they also
have the right to transfer their rights over their persons to others, for
example through sale or git.
• full self-ownership might seem to condemn as wrongful even very minor
infringements of the personal sphere, such as when tiny bits of pollution
fall upon an unconsenting person. Prohibiting all acts that can lead to
such minor infringements poses an unacceptable limit to our liberty.
• Distributive justice and political authority
• Robert Nozick in his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).
• John Rawls that purport to show that a more-than-minimal state was
justified and required to achieve distributive justice
• A person who is too sick to gather food has his negative liberty intact—
no one is stopping him from gathering food—but not his positive liberty
as he is unable to gather food even though he wants to do so. Nozick
and most libertarians see the proper role of the state as protecting
negative liberty, not as promoting positive liberty, and so toward this
end Nozick focuses on negative rights as opposed to positive rights.
• Kant’s categorical imperative -
• Distributions of property are just, according to Nozick, if they arose from
previously just distributions by just procedures.
• Discerning the justice of current distributions thus requires that we
establish a theory of justice in transfer—to tell us which procedures
constitute legitimate means of transferring ownership between persons
—and a theory of justice in acquisition—to tell us how individuals might
come to own external goods that were previously owned by no one.
• Top fifth of the income distribution in the United States controls more
than 80 percent of the nation’s wealth—that a distribution is unjust.
Rather, the justice of a distribution depends on how it came about—by
force or by trade? By differing degrees of hard work and luck? Or by
fraud and theft? Libertarianism’s historical focus thus sets the doctrine
against both outcome-egalitarian views that hold that only equal
distributions are just, utilitarian views that hold that distributions are just
to the extent they maximize utility, and prioritarian views that hold that
distributions are just to the extent they benefit the worse-off. Justice in
distribution is a matter of respecting people’s rights, not of achieving a
Neoliberalism amounts to a form of market fundamentalism. The market is seen to
be morally and practically superior to government and any form of political control.
In that sense, neoliberalism goes beyond classical economic theory.
Hayek (1944) advanced a damning economic and political critique of central
planning in particular and economic intervention in general. He argued that planning
in any form is bound to be economically inefficient because state
bureaucrats, however competent they might be, are confronted by a range and
complexity of information that is simply beyond their capacity to handle. In his
view, economic intervention is the single most serious threat to individual liberty
because any attempt to control economic life inevitably draws the state into other
areas of existence, ultimately leading to totalitarianism (see p. 227).
• robust property rights and the economic liberty that follows from their
consistent recognition are of central importance in respecting individual
liberty
• In terms of political recommendations, libertarians believe that most, if
not all, of the activities currently undertaken by states should be either
abandoned or transferred into private hands.
• legitimately provide police, courts, and a military, but nothing more. Any
further activity on the part of the state—regulating or prohibiting the sale
or use of drugs, conscripting individuals for military service, providing
taxpayer-funded support to the poor, or even building public roads—is
itself rights-violating and hence illegitimate.
• anarcho-capitalists who believe that even the minimal state is too large,
and that a proper respect for individual rights requires the abolition of
government altogether and the provision of protective services by private
markets.
