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.
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