The Questions: Ben Colburn's Social Liberal Values Part 4

Ben Colburn, pictured above (credit to Norman Fraser) was a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge until September 2010 when he became a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He recently gave a lecture to the Social Liberal Forum (Scotland) on the subject of Social Liberal Values. From Monday to Wednesday, you've seen the main body of the lecture. This is his appendix in which he reports on the questions he took from the floor of the event. Enjoy - and as I'm away on my holidays, play nicely in the comments threads If you missed it, you might want to also read Robert Brown's speech from the same event.


I am really grateful to Ben for letting me publish this in full. I hope it stimulates and informs debate within the party, not just in Scotland, as we seek to develop our policies for 2015 and beyond.

The Questions

The preceding is a slightly revised version of a talk I gave at the meeting of the Social Liberal Forum (Scotland) on 23 June 2012. It summarises, and incorporates, material from my essay ‘Liberalism for the People – the Orange Book challenged’, in The Little Yellow Book edited by RobertBrown and Nigel Lindsay, and published by Liberal Futures in March 2012. Those who want a little more detail on the ideas above should get their hands on a copy; they will also find, elsewhere in the volume, a set of cracking essays which explore different theoretical aspects of social Liberalism, and develop (better than I have) some specific policy proposals on these foundations. Those who want a lot more detail on these ideas might want to track down my monograph Autonomy and Liberalism (New York: Routledge, 2010), which will hopefully be coming out in paperback soon.

To conclude, I want to reflect on some of the comments that this talk elicited from the Social Liberal Forum meeting. 

Complex foundations

 One comment, characteristically sharp, came from Elspeth Attwooll. Elspeth agreed with my core contention that we should elevate social liberty above its three companions, and that the right way to characterise the relationship between them is by saying that personal, political and economic liberty are instrumentally valuable for social liberty. She worried, though, that it hasn’t so far been made properly clear what it means to say that something is an ‘instrumental’ value; and she complained (very politely, of course!) that it’s difficult to see how social liberty is supposed to fit together with responsibility, on the one hand, and the purportedly foundational value of autonomy, on the other. Aren’t things just getting a bit too complex here?

In response to Elspeth’s question, I’ve somewhat clarified above what I mean by ‘instrumental value’, and in particular I’ve distinguished it from ‘conditional value’. (The former is a relation between two political aims: one aim or value is instrumental when it is advanced as a way of achieving some other aim or value. The latter is what we mean when we say that something is valuable only under certain conditions.) I think I’ve also made it a bit clearer how the whole theory fits together. At the foundation lies the ideal of individual autonomy, which means an individual deciding for herself what is valuable, and successfully living her life in accordance with that decision. For political purposes, this ideal has two components: social liberty, and individual responsibility. A political programme based on autonomy must support and promote both of these as far as possible: they are, we might say, instrumentally but unconditionally valuable.[1] And doing that requires that we take a stance toward to the other forms of liberty: personal, political, and economic. These often support both social liberty and individual responsibility, but not always. So, they are instrumentally and conditionally valuable. Their pursuit in politics must be constrained by a supportive context to ensure that they enhance, rather than detracting from, individual autonomy. My five key questions are intended to articulate this constraint in a way which allows us to audit particular policies to see how far they match up to the fundamental social Liberal principles set out here.

So far, so good. But I think there’s a deeper problem raised by Elspeth’s question, which has to do with the role of complex theory in practical politics.

In one sense, I don’t think we need to be afraid of complexity. Social and political life is complex; we should expect that an adequate political theory will mirror that complexity. As Liberals, we should eschew the tendency we see in other political movements towards procrusteanism; that is, insisting upon an over-simple theory of politics, and twisting the evidence and the reality to try to make it fit.

Nevertheless, theoretical complexity does pose us a practical political problem: how do we articulate these basic social Liberal principles so that they resonate with voters? As it happens, I don’t think that the theory I’ve sketched is so complex as to preclude communication by a talented political commentator. Take the core concepts: the importance of responsibility; the fact that different people’s liberties, and different types of liberty, can come into conflict; and the value of someone shaping their own life according to their judgement about what is valuable that the ideal of individual autonomy asserts. These concepts, though not always framed in the terms I’ve used here, are ones which most people grapple with daily. The problem is that this quotidian political thought has become completely disconnected, in most people’s eyes, from the political process in Britain. In my essay in The Little Yellow Book I suggested that this depressing fact offers us Liberal Democrats an important opportunity. We are justly proud of our experience in community politics. The logical next step in that journey is to start talking about political theory, and connecting with the political thinking that people don’t realise they’re doing. This will help to rebuild trust and electoral success at the grass roots. Apart from anything else, it will show that we are ambitious, both for our Liberal ideas and for the good sense of the British population. 

The common good

 A second worry was articulated by various participants, including Robert Brown, Paul Coleshill, and Allan Heron. Social Liberalism is about recognising the importance of the common good; one of our main disagreements with economic Liberals and with neo-liberal Conservatives concerns their focus on the atomistic individual, to the exclusion of communal ends. Am I not guilty of the same thing, we might ask, by having at the foundations of my proposed social Liberalism the individualistic ideal of autonomy?

This is a penetrating question, and one to which I have no quick answer. All I can really hope to do here is to set out my current thinking on the matter, but it’s clear that this is a point which I (and social Liberals more general) need to work out much more carefully than I have time to right now.

The first thing to say is: the fact that at its roots my theory rests on an ideal of the good life for individuals doesn’t make it atomistic or ignorant of the common weal. As I said above, the Liberal recognises that individuals are of necessity embedded in a rich network of communal life: families, groups of friends, neighbourhoods churches, schools, universities, campaigning groups, political parties, and society more broadly. So, taking individuals seriously just means taking seriously the communal life to which they are committed. The libertarian view that treating individuals seriously means thinking that there’s no such thing as society – to allude to a famous misquotation of Margaret Thatcher – is simply mistaken about human nature: the atomistic and autarchical individuals which it posits do not, never have, and never will exist.

Above, in my discussion of responsibility, I indicate what I think this means. (That section, incidentally, has been somewhat bumped up in response to the questions I’ve referred to.) Let me repeat, and elaborate, here. If we think autonomy is important, then we’re going to take seriously people’s judgements about what makes their lives go well. Most people do place great importance on communal life. So, the social Liberal principles I’ve stated above imply that Liberals should uphold and support communal life and the common good, because of the importance it has for individuals. In particular, we should do whatever we can to support and extend citizens’ opportunities to seek value through engaging in public service, and by wholehearted community action.

There’s also a point here about responsibility. One of the things it means to be socially embedded – born into a particular society at a particular time – is that we necessarily incur responsibilities: responsibilities to our families and other educators, to the society and state which provides the framework within which we live our lives. These responsibilities are inescapable, and a central part of who we are. Above, I said that an important aspect of the ideal of autonomy is guaranteeing that people are responsible for how their lives go. In the present context, that means enabling people to recognise, and live up to, the responsibilities they have to their fellow citizens. Once again, for the social Liberal, taking individuals seriously means doing the same for the common good.

Will my interlocutors be happy with this? Possibly not. (Robert Brown wasn’t, when I talked to him afterwards.) ‘Why not just add ‘the common good’ in as an independent foundational value alongside individual autonomy?’ they might say. ‘Doesn’t this individualistic foundation concede too much to our opponents?’

I disagree, for two reasons. One problem with the proposal just essayed is that it risks a return to a la carte liberalism; that is (to repeat myself) something we must avoid if we are to be intellectually and politically credible. The other is that, while I share the view that the common good is tremendously important, I am mindful that appeals to it are frequently used to disguise policies which, on closer inspection, turn out to be deeply illiberal.

Let me explain why. To start with, I should reiterate that the individualist foundations I’ve laid out in this essay do indeed place a concern for the common good at the heart of social Liberal politics. Everyone has an inescapable responsibility to do their part in supporting a political system which guarantees for everyone the basic conditions of autonomy. It’s a sort of quid-pro-quo: we recognise that the importance of autonomy gives each individual considerable freedom and sovereignty over her own life, but only as much as is consistent with showing the same regard for all of her fellow citizens, and guaranteeing them the same privileges that she herself is claiming.

To insist that there is still something lacking is therefore to argue that our conception of the common good must go beyond this impartial concern for every citizen’s chance of living an autonomous life. That would result, in effect, in hard-wiring into our political system some specific judgements about what makes people’s lives go well. In reply to a question by Paul Coleshill I noted that Liberals are in other contexts rightly scornful of regimes which dictate ideals to their citizenry. We regard the imposition on an individual of a conception of the good life (whether that is by a state, by a church, by a family, or by social opinion) as one of the forms of oppression which Liberal politics is here to oppose. Treating the common good as something valuable in itself (rather than, as above, deriving it from the need to show equal regard for everyone’s autonomy), hence worth giving independent weight to in our political theory, seems to me not essentially different. John Stuart Mill, when remarking on the problem that a pure democracy doesn’t necessarily protect minority rights any better than a tyrant does, referred to the ‘tyranny of the majority’.  We might, similarly, talk here about the ‘tyranny of the common good’, and ask: how far should a Liberal society compel people to contribute to these communal ends if they themselves don’t see any value there? Our answer should be: no more than is absolutely necessary to secure the basic conditions of a good life for everyone.

I’m not certain of this. It’s hard to work out where to draw the shifting boundaries of Liberalism, and I would be delighted to be persuaded that my worries are unfounded. Nevertheless, I think that I have to stick to my guns. I’ve shown how – using just the foundational concern for individual autonomy and the derivative commitments to liberty and responsibility that it implies – one can generate a substantial political role for the idea of the common good. So, there’s unlikely to be any policy disagreement here. Someone might still want to complain that I’m still not giving the common good sufficient centrality. To substantiate that charge, though, they bear a burden of proof. That is, they must show that hard-wiring such judgements into politics can (the worries I’ve expressed here notwithstanding) be part of a consistent and rigorous social Liberalism. I don’t see how it can. Hence, I think the more modest social Liberalism presented here is our best bet.

---

[1] Actually, I should say that they are constitutively valuable rather than instrumentally valuable, for they are components of the ideal of autonomy, and not independent means to that end – but the distinction needn’t worry us here.

From social liberty to liberal policy: Ben Colburn's Social Liberal Values Part 3

Ben Colburn, pictured above (credit to Norman Fraser) was a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge until September 2010 when he became a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He recently gave a lecture to the Social Liberal Forum (Scotland) on the subject of Social Liberal Values. From Monday to Thursday this week, at 10 am, I'll put up a chapter of his lecture. Enjoy - and as I'm away on my holidays, play nicely in the comments threads If you missed it, you might want to also read Robert Brown's speech from the same event.

From social liberty to liberal policy

The discussion so far has been rather abstract. What we need is a way to convert social Liberal theory into a set of practical yardsticks by which we can judge proposed policies. In what follows, I suggest five principled questions we can use to decide what the truly social Liberal platform should include.

The first source of inspiration comes from the relationship between autonomy and liberty, as described above. I’ve said this already, but it’s worth repeating: to say that the value of personal, political and economic liberty is only conditional and instrumental is not to say that they aren’t vital parts of the autonomous life. People’s lives do generally go better if they enjoy such liberty. For one thing, it gives them the space to determine the shape of their lives for themselves, rather than having it imposed on them by state direction, social sanction, or the shackles of poverty. For another, people are generally better judges of what’s in their own interest than an outside agency can be, whether that agency is government, commercial interest, or just other interfering citizens. Obviously, people sometimes make bad decisions, but so do governments; on the whole it’s better to leave people to get on with things themselves.

On the other hand, for the reasons given above, guaranteeing personal, political, and economic liberty isn’t always enough. They must go hand in hand with other factors if they are to support what really matters, which is to say the ideal of individual autonomy underwriting social liberty. Merely removing coercion, or giving people options within a market place, won’t be enough. Most importantly, those forms of liberty aren’t much use if individuals don’t have access to full and accurate information about their options, or the wherewithal to understand that information. Under those circumstances the exercise of uncoerced choice (whether in private life, in politics, or in the marketplace) will in the long run tend to degrade the quality of the options available, rather than enhance it.

So, the social Liberal will echo the economic Liberal in arguing for a substantial degree of personal, political, and economic liberty. But this must go hand in hand with measures to secure the sort of supportive context which avoids the problems I’ve just sketched, on pain of self-defeat. This means, when deciding on our social Liberal agenda, that we must ask the following: 

1. Does this genuinely give people greater personal, political, or economic liberty, by increasing the extent and quality of their options? 

Some policies apparently motivated by the desire to extend choice in fact do nothing of the sort – take the privatization of the railway network, for example. True social Liberal policies will be ones that don’t merely appear to extend liberty, but actually do so, by genuinely increasing the range and quality of the options people enjoy.

Still, as I said above, the bare possession of those options is worthless absent the conditions of social liberty which ensure that people are able to take advantage of them. The crucial condition here is information and understanding. So, we must also ask: 

2. Will people have the information and understanding necessary to make effective use of their choices? 

If our answer to either question is ‘no’, then the proposal should be rejected, or at least shelved till we’ve provided other social or institutional structures which provide the necessary guarantees.

The second source of inspiration for our social Liberal tests of policy comes from an aspect of autonomy that I’ve not emphasised so far, namely a concern for individual responsibility.

As this point, many will recoil in horror. Talk of ‘responsibility’ in contemporary politics usually masks something distasteful and illiberal, for example the demonization of recipients of state benefits, which is merely a modern echo of old Toryish distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor. When it’s not, it signals vacuity. (Witness David Cameron’s vague appeal for an ethos of ‘social responsibility’ in the wake of the 2011 English riots, or Ed Milliband’s contentless ‘responsible capitalism’ as the solution to the banking crisis.) Reflecting on this, we might rightly think that the rhetoric of responsibility is only ever an attempt to disguise a lack of fresh thinking, with a tabloid-pleasing moralistic twist.

It is high time, then, to reclaim the concept of responsibility from the moralizers of both left and right. We must, because responsibility is as important a component of the ideal of autonomy as is social liberty. To see why, ask yourself what it really means for people to live their lives successfully? What does it mean to own one’s life?

The answer is: the autonomous individual is responsible for her life: she takes charge of her destiny and shapes her life as she sees fit. People are responsible when their lives go well because they make it so. Therefore, a Liberal should seek to guarantee the conditions under which individuals are genuinely responsible for their lives.

As before, this implies that there is an important role for personal, political, and economic liberty in social Liberalism. People aren’t responsible for lives which are characterized by coercion and oppression, so we should seek to eliminate those. It is good that people are able to take responsibility by contributing to the communal political enterprise through democratic institutions. It’s good that people can shape their lives through free choices in the marketplace: they thereby exercise responsibility in forming their lives, and claim responsibility for at least some of the consequences of their choices. Furthermore – and this takes a little further than I’ve argued so far – respect for responsibility means that the social Liberal must seek to reduce how far people’s lives are dominated by state power: dependency and domination preclude true responsibility.

A devotee of The Orange Book could happily agree to all of this, I think. There are, however, three important elements to individual responsibility which are usually missed, both by the conservative proponents of responsibility, and by the economic Liberal.

First, shrinking the state is never enough by itself. Merely turning a given public service over to the private or voluntary sector won’t solve anything. Dependency on charity, or domination by powerful commercial forces, is absolutely no better than state power. (Indeed, it’s a bit worse, given the weakened accountability.)

Second, if we are going to show proper respect for responsibility – rather than just paying lip service to that idea to provide some spurious justification for demonizing recipients of state benefits – we must also, on pain of inconsistency, seek to eliminate those factors which cause people disadvantage for reasons outwith their control. Many lives are blighted because of entrenched disadvantages for which people can’t be held responsible: their family and educational backgrounds; racist or sexist discrimination; lack of employment opportunities, and so on. To the extent that people’s opportunities are shaped by these factors, rather than their own choices, they lack responsibility for their lives. Social Liberal values require that we seek to eliminate these malign factors. It won’t escape the reader that this requirement has very substantial, and radical, policy implications. It means, for example, designing our education system so as to eliminate, as far as we can, the impact of different family backgrounds upon children’s life chances.

Third, control over one’s own life is not all there is to responsibility. Another equally important element is living up to one’s obligations to others in society. Some economic Liberals treat individuals as atoms – essentially unconnected from any other human beings in society. The social Liberal recognises that things are more complex than that. We are all individuals, but we are individuals who are situated in social and familial networks and groups, which support and partially constitute our identities. Part of what it means to be embedded in a social context like this is that we all have responsibilities and commitments, to each other and to the common good, which are as deep a part of our individual identities as anything else. In particular, we each have a responsibility to uphold and promote the opportunity for others to live a worthwhile life: that is, to decide for themselves what is valuable, and successfully to live their lives in accordance with that decision.

That might sound horribly onerous. How do we, as individuals, live up to such weighty obligations without them crushing any chance for us to pursue all the rich and diverse projects we want to pursue in life? Can the Liberal reconcile the need for public responsibility with scope for private autonomy? The answer is ‘yes’. Public services, communally funded and delivered, allow us to meet those obligations in a way which leaves space for us to live our lives as we see fit in other respects. But that requires that we think about the provision of public services as part of the common good. It is in the public interest to have strong public services because it helps all of us: not just those who need their support at times of vulnerability, but also those of us who are liberated by the communal discharge of our individual responsibilities to each other. What remains, of course, is an individual responsibility to uphold this common good. It is important, when deciding how to deliver our public services, that the Liberal doesn’t lose sight (as The Orange Book sometimes seems to) of the fact that they always secure an important common good, even for individuals who – fortunately! – aren’t at a particular time vulnerable and therefore actively reliant on those services.

Drawing together these reflections on responsibility, we get three further key questions which we should ask of any proposed Liberal policy: 

3. Does this proposal reduce dependency and domination, thereby enhancing people’s responsibility for the way their lives go? 

4. Does it go hand in hand with measures which seek to eliminate, rather than entrench, pervasive factors which shape people’s lives for reasons that lie beyond their control? 

5. Does it protect the provision of public services as a common good, in all our interests? 

As with the first two questions listed above, if our answer is ‘no’ to any of these, then, once again, the social Liberal should reject the proposal.

I realise that this is just a sketch, but I think it is a helpful starting point. It offers a useful and consistent test for assessing how Liberal a proposed policy really is, by offering principled yardsticks whereby particular policies can be ‘audited’ for their consistency with core social Liberal principles.

Moreover, from the point of view of someone who wants to defend a robust, rigorous social Liberalism free of a la carte-ism, it also performs the cheeky manoeuvre of taking the concepts at the core of other people’s views – personal and economic liberty, from the Orange Book Liberal, and responsibility, from the conservatives of left and right – and showing how, when they’re properly and clearly understood, they lead in a much more radical direction than their proponents believe. That is why social Liberalism is not merely one way amongst others of understanding our shared Liberal political heritage; it’s the best we have.

Defining Social Liberalism: Ben Colburn's Social Liberal Values Part 2

Ben Colburn, pictured above (credit to Norman Fraser) was a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge until September 2010 when he became a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He recently gave a lecture to the Social Liberal Forum (Scotland) on the subject of Social Liberal Values. From Monday to Thursday this week, at 10 am, I'll put up a chapter of his lecture. Enjoy - and as I'm away on my holidays, play nicely in the comments threads If you missed it, you might want to also read Robert Brown's speech from the same event.

Defining Social Liberalism

So far, I’ve examined David Laws’s attempt to defend and characterise economic Liberalism as the balanced and harmonious pursuit of four types of liberty: personal, political, economic, and social. Laws uses this vision as a way of arguing for the restoration of economic liberty to centre stage in Liberal Democrat policy, but his argument is flawed: in our imperfect world, we can’t pursue all four types of liberty at the same time, because they are not mutually supportive.

This realization allows us to see what we must do to define social Liberalism. I suggest we understand that position as characterized by two contrasts with Laws’s economic Liberalism. First, social Liberals recognise that we have to make hard decisions, and that we shouldn’t ignore the fact that in a non-ideal world these types of liberty can come into conflict. Second, rather than Laws’s lionization of economic liberty at the cost of the other forms of liberty (for that is, in effect, what his proposal amounts to), the social Liberal takes social liberty to be the heart of a truly Liberal programme. I suggest, in what follows, that this is because it is the main political manifestation of individual autonomy, the central Liberal ideal of the good life.

Let me expand on this by elaborating two reasons to give social Liberty this pride of place.

The first is that the other types of liberty – personal, politics, and economic – have only conditional and instrumental value. Their value is conditional, because they lack value if they’re not combined with social liberty. And their value is instrumental because they are worthy of Liberal concern only because, and insofar as, they promote social liberty.

So, take personal liberty, the absence of coercion and oppression. It’s possible to be totally free in this sense, while still being unable to do anything substantive or interesting with one’s life. Consider, for example, someone who finds herself on an uninhabited desert island. She enjoys perfect personal liberty because there’s nobody around to coerce or oppress her. Nevertheless, she lacks social liberty, because she lacks the external resources to do anything more interesting than making sandcastles and cracking open the odd coconut; under those circumstances, her extensive personal liberty is useless to her in living the sort of life we think the Liberal citizen deserves.

Or, take political liberty. Democratic participation is undoubtedly a good thing, but it’s cold comfort if the material necessities of life aren’t provided, and no use if the citizenry lack the information and understanding to use their political liberty effectively.

A similar point can be made for economic liberty. The market is frequently a powerful tool of progress, and offers participants the opportunity to exchange goods and services to their mutual advantage. But this freedom, to make contracts and exchange private property, is no good to someone who is locked out of that marketplace by poverty, or entrenched disadvantage of some other sort. Against a background of considerable inequalities in wealth, economic liberty is either a figleaf for naked self-advantage (the freedom to climb the Forbes rich list, as Nigel Lindsay put it), or an insulting attempt to mask the way in which the disadvantaged are unable to participate in economic, social and political life on fair terms.

So, there’s a strong case to be made for thinking that social liberty is really the fundamental strand of Liberalism: it provides the conditions under which the other kinds of liberty are generally valuable, because of their conditional and instrumental status. Those kinds of liberty are genuinely important, but they are important because they are usually supportive of our deeper ideals. When we push policies promoting political, or economic, or personal liberty, it therefore behoves us to be sure that we do so in a way which empowers people and extends their social liberty. Otherwise, such policies are at best irrelevant, and at worse actively retrograde to our true aims.

The second reason to focus on social liberty is, as I intimated above, its close connection with the value of individual autonomy. In some of my comments above, I’ve referred to the sort of life that a liberal citizen should expect to lead. Let me make those hints explicit. At the heart of social Liberalism, in my view, is an ideal of the good life; that is, a life lived with autonomy. The autonomous individual is someone who decides for herself what is a  valuable life, and successfully lives her life in accordance with that decision. Being able to do so requires a lot in terms of personal, political and economic liberty. But what’s absolutely central to it is the effective ability to use one’s freedom to shape one’s life as one sees fit. Hence the central importance of social liberty for the social Liberal.[1]

So, let me recap. My proposal is that we should understand social Liberalism as a political position which recognises that the good life is one in which individuals decide for themselves what is valuable and successfully live their lives in accordance with that decision. This ideal of autonomy is, at root, what justifies the social Liberal’s focus on social liberty, and it explains why the other notions of liberty must take second place. Personal, political and economic liberty are all extremely important, because of their role in supporting autonomy – but their doing so is conditional upon the conditions of social liberty having been secured first, and their value is anyway only instrumental with respect to our deeper ideals.

---

[1] I’ve written about this ideal of autonomy elsewhere; if you’re interested in the philosophical details, you can find most of them in my book Autonomy and Liberalism (New York: Routledge, 2010). Another Liberal thinker who defended this ideal, although he called it ‘individuality’ rather than ‘autonomy’, was John Stuart Mill, in his magnificent 1859 essay On Liberty.

Against the Orange Book: Ben Colburn's Social Liberal Values Lecture Part 1

Ben Colburn, pictured above (credit to Norman Fraser) was a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge until September 2010 when he became a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He recently gave a lecture to the Social Liberal Forum (Scotland) on the subject of Social Liberal Values. From Monday to Thursday this week, at 10 am, I'll put up a chapter of his lecture. Enjoy - and as I'm away on my holidays, play nicely in the comments threads If you missed it, you might want to also read Robert Brown's speech from the same event.

Part 1 - Against the Orange Book

What is a social Liberal? What are the values that underpin social Liberalism, and distinguish it from other political creeds, both within and outwith the Liberal family? And – most relevantly, for a meeting launching the Social Liberal Forum in Scotland – what makes social Liberalism better? This essay aims to answer those questions, and also to make a start at showing how those foundational values can be put to practical work in developing policies and informing practical politics.

To start with, however, I want to focus on our rivals. Effectively, this means the position set out in The Orange Book,[1] especially by David Laws in his keynote essay ‘Reclaiming Liberalism: a liberal agenda for the Liberal Democrats’. There is much that is wise and liberal in Laws’s essay, and in the Orange Book more widely. Nevertheless, seeing what’s wrong with Laws’s position seems to me the best way of motivating, and helping to characterise, a social Liberal alternative to the economic Liberalism articulated there. As we will see, the theoretical terrain is a good deal more complex than a simple opposition between two clear, distinct and homogeneous rivals; but we have to start somewhere.

The best thing in Laws’s essay is his injunction against a la carte Liberalism; that is, a political position not motivated by sound and consistent Liberal principles, but rather composed of a mish-mash of apparently worthy causes, adopted piecemeal with no overall theoretical framework. Laws is right that this is a bad thing. The danger of such an approach is that, while each of these policies might seem well-intentioned in context, it leads a fractured and contradictory picture overall. The chance of a clear and distinctive Liberal voice is lost, and the failure to articulate clear general principles underlying our policies gives the impression of their being an opportunistic pick and mix, even if they’re not.

So far so good. The social Liberal should agree that we must avoid a la carte Liberalism. Nevertheless, we part company with his positive proposal for how to do so.

Laws identifies four central commitments of the Liberal tradition: personal liberty, political liberty, economic liberty, and social liberty. The first consists in freedom from interference and coercion; the second in participation in the political system; the third in private property rights and the ability to participate in a free market; and the fourth in possessing the necessary internal and external resources to use the other types of freedom for individual and societal betterment. Laws’s view is that Liberalism should be concerned with the balanced combination of these four elements. However (he says) in the twentieth century the Liberal and Liberal Democrat parties consistently downplayed the importance of economic liberty, eventually leaving the Conservatives of Margaret Thatcher to become its champions. In the interests of restoring balance, Laws argues, we must reclaim economic liberty, and return it to centre stage in Liberal Democrat thinking. This is the guiding spirit of many of the essays in the Orange Book as a whole, most of which in one way or another argue for the incorporation of free market mechanisms into the organisation and delivery of public services.

The problem with Laws’s argument is that the four strands that Laws identifies are unhappy companions. True, they have all been elements of the Liberal heritage, albeit in different combinations and with different emphasis at different times. That history, however, doesn’t mean that all four elements can unproblematically now be combined. In fact, the opposite is true. To take one example, unconstrained economic liberty tends over time to lead to large inequalities in wealth and influence. Such inequalities impede political liberty because of their negative impact on people’s ability to participate in the political system on an even footing. To take another example, trying to promote social liberty sometimes leads to people having less personal liberty than they might otherwise have. Laws himself quotes a speech by Joseph Chamberlain in 1885, in which the latter evokes exactly this sort of tension:

The great problem of our civilization is still unresolved. We have to account for, and to grapple with, the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence of abundant wealth and teeming prosperity. It is a problem which some men would set aside with references to the eternal laws of supply and demand, to the necessity of freedom of contract, and to the sanctity of every private right of property. But gentlemen, these phrases are the convenient cant of selfish wealth.

In other words, in our current unjust world, we can’t pursue all four types of liberty at the same time. We can’t always have all the freedoms we might want, because in a non-ideal world the different types of liberty aren’t always mutually supportive. So, the assumption that they can be harmoniously combined and pursued in tandem is unrealistic, and it’s irresponsible to sell a political position by pretending that they can. It’s also dangerous, because it conceals the costs of giving one of the four strands greater emphasis: emphasising economic liberty risks diminishing social and political liberty, and we’d better not pretend otherwise. All of which is to say: if (as we should) we take seriously Laws’s injunctions against a la carte Liberalism, we should worry that his version of economic Liberalism is guilty of precisely the sins against which he rightly inveighs.

---

[1] The Orange Book ed. Paul Marshall & David Laws (London: Profile Books, 2004).