Even virtue has a need of limits
by Scott B. Nelson
19 November 2019
This speech was delivered on 14 November 2019 on the occasion of the Eighth International Conference of “The Austrian School of Economics in the 21st Century“. It was more favourably received than I would have anticipated.
Classical Liberalism on the Wane
Although the theme of this conference is Austrian economics, I hope you will forgive me if I speak to you – as an outsider looking in – about classical liberalism in general. I am neither an economist nor a philosopher. I will not speak to the details of classical liberal policies in various countries, but am concerned here more with the attitude and worldview of classical liberalism, for we know that political preferences are not determined by policy positions alone, and that political preferences are themselves expressions of a worldview.
Classical liberalism would appear to be in a bad way in the West today. I’ll spare you the usual laundry list of news items that have transpired over the last few years – all of which you are familiar with anyway – and skip straight to the crux of the matter. How is it that a set of ideals explored and espoused by such luminaries as John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Acton, and our own Friedrich von Hayek, to name but a few, could come to be increasingly maligned in our time?
We have always known that socialism, in all of its guises, posed a threat to classical liberalism in subjecting liberty to equality of outcome, an equality that could be bought at the price of servitude. Today we also see some conservative movements beginning to dispense with the traditional separation between state and civil society, one of the hallmarks of the alliance between classical liberals and conservatives. As populist movements continue to gain traction around the Western world I am in no position to say what the prospects are of repairing this alliance. It would seem in any case that some conservatives are about as fed up with classical liberalism’s tendency to talk only about economic freedoms as they are with socialism. The well-balanced triangle that Hayek sketched out in his famous essay, “Why I am not a conservative” – with socialists at one corner, liberals at another, and conservatives at the third – is becoming increasingly elongated, with a critical mass developing around the socialist and conservative camps, both united against the individualism and the perceived materialism of classical liberalism.[1]
Perhaps they have a point. Perhaps classical liberals have been less forthcoming about the excesses and faults of what the classical liberal tradition has become. I would like briefly to enumerate a couple of faults – and they are faults if carried to excess: materialism and opposition to the state.
In some sense the classical liberal tradition has been undone by its astounding success. For classical liberalism triumphed over communism. The capitalist economic system, coupled with the ethic of industrial society, has enriched millions upon millions all over the world and done more to raise people out of poverty than anything else, as we all know. The capitalist economic system has brought us immense material prosperity and yet we remain unhappy. Why?
Classical liberalism has had little to offer in terms of our spiritual enrichment. This is not because classical liberals despise the spirit, as I hope to illustrate over the course of my talk, although I feel that in their worst form they do obsess excessively and exclusively over economic and material concerns. They are methodological individualists and have an individualistic view of man. This view has its strengths in endowing every individual, regardless of sex, race, or background, with the capacity to reason – a capacity that neither precludes nor demands the pursuit of spiritual questions. But seen uncharitably, one would say that classical liberalism has simply dispensed with such questions, either because they cannot be answered or because they are viewed as irrelevant, in particular to economic issues.
One of the greatest dangers to said liberalism is the state, famously defined by the sociologist Max Weber as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”.[2] For reasons I certainly needn’t remind you of, such an entity can impede liberty and economic efficiency as well as erode our moral sensibilities by depriving us of any sense of agency or duty. But is it possible that classical liberals at times conflate opposition to the institutions and means of coercive control that organize and preserve order in a political community with opposition to the public good as such? And is it also possible that if classical liberals distrust the state because of its tendency to concentrate power, they should be equally suspicious of any entity or individual at all amassing so much power?
The French Liberal Tradition – Tocqueville and Republicanism
Now, if there is any justice in what I have said thus far about the potential pitfalls of focusing so strongly on materialism and opposition to the state, what are some things that classical liberals could consider in dealing with these issues? For better or worse, classical liberals needn’t look any further than another branch of their own tradition: the French tradition of liberalism. In focusing on this particular branch I do not mean to suggest that the following ideas were foreign to their British counterparts; rather I simply feel an elective affinity with this particular tradition and would like to share it with you.
Forty years ago the philosopher Sir Larry Alan Siedentop argued that the French tradition of liberalism was rich in certain insights – namely, that 1. Humans are a part of societies that have their own quirks and histories; 2. Their problems will require different solutions according to the history of that society and the experiences and spirit of the people; and 3. The safeguarding of liberalism required some idea of the political community, the res publica, in which these liberties could be practiced and defended.[3] This republican tradition of classical liberalism begins with Montesquieu, passes through various 19th century thinkers such as Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville, and includes thinkers from the 20th century such as Raymond Aron.
They believed in the importance of individual liberty but they also saw it intertwined with robust political engagement.[4] In fact, as concerned as they were with an excessively large and centralized state, they were equally concerned with the opportunities for despotism that could be visited upon an unengaged, apolitical, atomized population focused only on themselves and their particular, private interests. Let us recall the famous passage from Tocqueville:
I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who spin around restlessly, in order to gain small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others; his children and his particular friends form for him the entire human species; as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is next to them, but he does not see them; he touches them without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if he still has a family, you can say that at least he no longer has a country.
Above those men arises an immense and tutelary power that alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyment and of looking after their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-sighted and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like it, it had as a goal to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary it seeks only to fix them irrevocably in childhood; it likes the citizens to enjoy themselves, provided that they think only about enjoying themselves. It works willingly for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent for it and the sole arbiter; it attends to their security, provides for their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, settles their estates, divides their inheritances; how can it not remove entirely from them the trouble to think and the difficulty of living?[5]
For Tocqueville, civic engagement, or civic virtue, was so important that some have argued that he more or less endorsed methods of compelling people to be public citizens.[6] Tocqueville’s spirit of republicanism should also remind us of the centrality of the nation-state in any sort of political regime that professes to defend liberty. For many of the classical liberals I’ve mentioned, the current global governance vogue would have been both incomprehensible and antithetical to the maintenance of individual and political liberties. Until the norms we place under the rubric of international law are both generally agreed on and generally enforceable – or until we have designed a world state – the laws that are meant to defend liberty will remain effectively interpreted and administered only at the nation-state level. Parenthetically I might also mention another oddity of global governance, of which the European Union is a species: it springs from the desire for peace and cooperation amongst peoples, and it is for this reason that nationalism, so often seen as the cause of the tumults of the 20th century, is regarded by large segments of the population with a great deal of suspicion. The republican tradition, on the other hand, was consistently dissatisfied with peace and tranquillity as the goal of public action. As Tocqueville observes:
I agree without difficulty that public peace is a great good, but I do not want to forget that it is through good order that all peoples have arrived at tyranny. It assuredly does not follow that peoples should scorn public peace; but it must not be enough for them. A nation that asks of its government only the maintenance of order is already a slave at the bottom of its heart. The nation is a slave of its well-being, and the man who is to put it in chains can appear…When the mass of citizens wants only to concern itself with private affairs, the smallest parties do not have to despair of becoming masters of public affairs.[7]
The French Liberal Tradition – Constant and the Ends of Man
This brings us to another key element of the French liberal tradition: their willingness to speak of the ends to which this liberty should be applied. So much of the liberty we enjoy today we spend on all sorts of pursuits that we hope will make us happier. Apart from the fact that many such pursuits might not conduce to our happiness, French liberals were also ambivalent about happiness as a goal. Benjamin Constant concludes his famous speech comparing the liberty of the ancients and the moderns by asking that government leave us alone to assume for ourselves the responsibility of being happy. But he then goes on to ask:
…is it so evident that happiness, of whatever kind, is the only aim of mankind? If it were so, our course would be narrow indeed, and our destination far from elevated. There is not one single one of us who, if he wished to abase himself, restrain his moral faculties, lower his desires, abjure activity, glory, deep and generous emotions, could not demean himself and be happy. No, Sirs, I bear witness to the better part of our nature, that noble disquiet which pursues and torments us, that desire to broaden our knowledge and develop our faculties. It is not to happiness alone, it is to self-development that our destiny calls us; and political liberty is the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development that heaven has given us.
Political liberty, by submitting to all the citizens, without exception, the care and assessment of their most sacred interests, enlarges their spirit, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and power of a people.[8]
With that term “noble disquiet” we are confronted with the same agonistic sensibility Tocqueville thought was essential to the preservation of liberty. What is also latent in this passage is the idea that defenders of freedom, classical liberals, can and should speak about a hierarchy of values, and that they should not be apathetic to the purposes of the freedom we enjoy. Constant and Tocqueville – and I do not believe Austrians such as Mises or Hayek disdained this idea – would maintain that the rigid view of man as a homo oeconomicus, driven only by material self-interest, is as narrow a description of human motivation as it is plebeian a prescription of human ends. The liberty of classical liberalism leaves us free to choose whether we pursue economic self-interest or turn our gaze to other ends, such as charity, honour, or virtue.
I believe that classical liberals of both the British and French traditions were conscious of and aspired to these higher ends. Although they may not necessarily have spoken as often of such matters as did Plato or Aristotle or Cicero, classical liberals were imbued with the ancients’ sense of virtue. The sheer success of Canadian professor Jordan Peterson’s bestseller 12 Rules for Life is indicative of man’s need of order. Some find order in religion; others in the promises of the state; but what of order that is neither otherworldly nor relies on the state as a crutch? The ancients’ discussion of virtues – prudence, courage, temperance, justice – was meant to trace the outlines of a life worth living. Virtues are important and yet difficult to cultivate because they come from within. They are independent of fickle fortune, unlike wealth, which can come and go. They equip the individual with the tools necessary to handle adversity. They are, in short, intertwined with human excellence and fulfillment. And some classical liberals believed them to be intertwined – they believed that they must be intertwined – with liberty. For example, as Edmund Burke remarks: “[W]hat is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”[9]
The French Liberal Tradition – Montesquieu and Moderation
Up until this point I have leaned heavily on the republican aspect of the French liberal tradition, with its emphasis on civic virtue and “love of the laws and the homeland.”[10] But let us descend from the virtuous heavens and look briefly at one final characteristic of the French liberal tradition: moderation. With so much unproductive outrage emanating from the “self-righteous spirits”[11] on both the progressive Left and the conservative Right, classical liberals might consider revisiting the principle of moderation, lauded by a man who was in turn exalted by many classical liberals, but whose hybrid thought does not always secure his candidacy in the classical liberal canon:[12] Montesquieu. His magnum opus The Spirit of the Laws has many purposes, one of which is to prove that “the spirit of moderation should be that of the legislator; the political good, like the moral good, is always found between two limits.”[13]
In fact, given the polarization of public debate today, it is as if he were half speaking to us when he observes: “In extremely absolute monarchies, historians betray the truth because they do not have the liberty to tell it; in extremely free states, they betray truth because of their very liberty for, as it always produces divisions, each one becomes as much the slave of the prejudices of his faction as he would be of a despot.”[14] He sounds a note of almost Hayekian epistemic humility when he remarks: “The soul takes such delight in dominating other souls; even those who love the good love themselves so much that no one is so unfortunate as to distrust his good intentions”.[15] But “[e]xtreme laws for good give rise to extreme evil.”[16] French liberals, especially those who could reflect on the French Revolution, had an understanding of tragedy – that evil and unintended consequences can come from good intentions. This is another reason for their moderation.
Montesquieu, as all well-bred gentlemen of the time, was educated in the classical tradition, and so while he certainly could see the merits of virtue, he was also enough of a modern to acknowledge the salutary effects occasioned by the development of gentle commerce.[17] And yet, he was conscious of the pitfalls of excessively adopting the commercial ethic:
We see that in countries where one is affected only by the spirit of commerce, there is traffic in all human activities and all moral virtues; the smallest things, those required by humanity, are done or given for money.
The spirit of commerce produces in men a certain feeling for exact justice, opposed on the one hand to banditry and on the other to those moral virtues that make it so that one does not always discuss one’s own interests alone and that one can neglect them for those of others.[18]
What is more, he leaves open the possibility – a possibility that is anathema today to those who believe interconnectivity will bring us peace – that the intercultural communication that accompanies commerce also brings with it “various destructions and certain ebbs and flows of population and of devastations.”[19] After all, knowing more about each other, being in ever more frequent contact with each other can also give us so many more reasons to hate each other. Might we even be more open to one another if we didn’t dogmatically assert the inherent desirability of the unencumbered movement of people across borders, as if borders themselves were barriers and not the expression of a country’s liberty and national sovereignty? Montesquieu understood that liberty could take on different meanings as well as present itself differently in different cultures. He understood that imposing liberty on a people unready or unaccustomed to it could be tyrannical.[20] His thought embraces paradoxes, such as the paradox of the state, which is “at once a threat and a protection, a constant potential threat against liberty and at the same time an indispensable guarantor of the liberty and security of all.”[21]
Conclusion
But let us not conclude with paradoxes. The spirit of classical liberalism is one of optimism. It is a fighting spirit. It partakes neither of the progressive’s penchant for denigrating the past and present in light of a utopian future, nor of the conservative’s lament of the imperfect present in light of the imagined perfection of the past. It exists, as Hannah Arendt might say, “between past and future”, in the field of action. And this is appropriate at such a time when people despair at their seeming powerlessness and inability to effect any changes in their lives. The answer is not, as you well know, to ask always what the state can do for us, as if we were little more than the meek recipients of rights. Classical liberalism restores individual agency by speaking of human beings not as victims of structural oppression, but as free actors who can take steps toward shaping their own future. It is, to wield the language of the Left, supremely empowering. It allows us to open our minds to solutions that are not state-sponsored, and in so doing, it also frees us of the polarized debates concerning what the state should do to address some social ill or how we can realize ourselves through the state. As classical liberalism restores individual agency, it can also speak to those who feel that all of this material prosperity has not brought them the happiness they had expected. It can remind them of the examples that inspired the great tradition of classical liberalism – of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, for example, which advocated the cultivation of the virtues as the true path to fulfillment, not the cultivation of the bank balance. Classical liberalism can speak the language of virtue, of liberty well applied.
It is a difficult philosophy and I do not know
if it will ever gain mass traction. It places the burden of responsibility on
individuals themselves. It requires a vigilance that is difficult to sustain
amongst generations of people who have known freedom all their lives. But its
accomplishments are indeed marvelous, and it offers a path forward to those who
would advocate solutions that do not emanate from the state; who believe in
individual happiness and virtue; and who prize civility, moderation, and
liberty.
Bibliography
Ball, Terence, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, eds. Political Innovation and Conceptual Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by Frank M. Turner. With essays by Darrin M. McMahon, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Jack N. Rakove, and Alan Wolfe. London: Yale University Press, 2003.
Callanan, Keegan. Montesquieu’s Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Constant, Benjamin. “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns.” Austrian Economics Center. Accessed 25 October 2019. https://www.austriancenter.com/liberty-ancients-compared-moderns/.
Craiutu, Aurelian. “Moderation may be the most challenging and rewarding virtue.” Aeon. Accessed 31 October 2019. https://aeon.co/ideas/moderation-may-be-the-most-challenging-and-rewarding-virtue.
Ehrard, Jean. “Montesquieu and us.” In Montesquieu and His Legacy, edited by Rebecca E. Kingston, 259-269.
Geenens, Raf, and Helena Rosenblatt, eds. French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Hayek, F. A. The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition. Edited by Ronald Hamowy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011 [1960].
Jainchill, Andrew. “The importance of republican liberty in French liberalism.” In French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, edited by Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt, 73-89.
Kingston, Rebecca E., ed. Montesquieu and His Legacy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de. The Spirit of the Laws. Translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Peterson, Jordan. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2018.
Siedentop, Larry. “Two liberal traditions.” In French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, edited by Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt, 15-35.
Skinner, Quentin. “The state.” In Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, edited by Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, 90-131.
Spector, Céline. “Was Montesquieu liberal? The Spirit of the Laws in the history of liberalism.” In French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, edited by Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt, 57-72.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, Volume 2. Edited by Eduardo Nolla and translated by James T. Schleifer. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010.
Weber, Max. From Max Weber. Translated, edited, and with introduction by Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills. With a new preface by Bryan S. Turner. Oxon: Routledge, 2009 [1948].
Weber, Max.
“Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber, 77-128.
[1] Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 520.
[2] Weber, From Max Weber, 78. An interesting discussion of the evolution of the concept of the “state” can be found in Skinner, “The state,” 90-131.
[3] Siedentop, “Two liberal traditions,” 15-35.
[4] The following points concerning Constant and Tocqueville are taken from Jainchill, “The importance of republican liberty in French liberalism,” 73-89.
[5] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, IV.6.
[6] Jainchill, “The importance of republican liberty in French liberalism,” 86.
[7] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, II.14.
[8] Constant, “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns.”
[9] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 208.
[10] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1.4.5.
[11] Craiutu, “Moderation may be the most challenging and rewarding virtue.”
[12] See, e.g., Spector, “Was Montesquieu liberal? The Spirit of the Laws in the history of liberalism,” 57-72.
[13] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 6.29.1.
[14] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 3.19.27.
[15] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 6.28.41.
[16] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 4.22.21.
[17] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 4.20.1.
[18] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 4.20.2.
[19] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 4.21.5.
[20] Callanan, Montesquieu’s Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics.
[21] Ehrard, “Montesquieu and us,” 267.
