Ideas on Liberty

BY JOHN K. WILLIAMS

ONLY a person consumed by self-hatred would ascribe to himself or herself the adjective “illiberal.” The term itself derives from the Latin illiberalis, meaning “mean” or “sordid.” The word is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary by such expressions as “not befitting or of the nature of a free man,” “not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberty of others,” “narrow-minded, bigoted,” and “base, mean, vulgar, rude, sordid.”

Paul Poirot is the antithesis of the “illiberal” person. A graciousness and a generosity inform his professional activities and personal relationships. He never confuses breadth of spirit with shallowness of insight, never lets a warm tolerance degenerate into a superficial indifference, never identifies an open mind with an empty head. As one of the many people unspeakably enriched by him—both through the pages of The Freeman and as a colleague—I am proud to have been asked to honor in this volume a man in whom the principles of the freedom philosophy have found a compelling incarnation.

Yet the irony is that Paul Poirot has been denied, by the debasement of language, a label—“liberal”—which, if one is interested to track back words to their original signification, superbly describes him. Men and women violently opposed to the ideas and ideals which, expounded by thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson, once constituted “liberalism” have somehow managed to capture and press into their service a word, and claim for themselves the honorable pedigree still attached to that word.

The anything but flattering connotations of the word “illiberal” may, perhaps, explain why it is that men and women committed to ideas and ideals anathema to the constitutive principles of “liberalism” as originally understood—private property rights, government limited to the task of protecting the equal human rights of all citizens, and an essentially unfettered market economy—have tenaciously clung to the word “liberalism” whilst transforming its original signification. Yet whatever the “why” of the transformation, that transformation most certainly has been effected.

Liberty, Government and Rights

Liberalism in its classical mode defined the role of government very simply. Its task was to protect the individual from actual or threatened violence, theft or fraud. Government existed to secure and protect individual freedom, and freedom signified simply “freedom from human-created constraints,” constraints typically finding expression in laws which proscribed for some activities permitted to others.

Frequently linked with this understanding both of the role of government and of the nature of liberty was a negative doctrine of human rights. Essentially, this doctrine affirmed that a “right” of A to do X or to own Y signified the absence of an obligation to refrain from doing X or to surrender Y. This “right” of A implied a correlative obligation for people other than A—the obligation not to force A to refrain from doing X or to surrender Y.

The English philosopher Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882) directly challenged this understanding of the role of government and of the nature of liberty, and indirectly challenged this negative understanding of “rights.” Liberty signifies, insisted Green, not simply an absence of humanly imposed constraints but the actual possession of a “positive power” or “capacity” to engage in some activity. Government’s task is not simply that of protecting an individual from coercive restraints imposed by other human beings, but of positively fostering an individual’s power or capacity effectively to engage in an activity. “Freedom” signifies not simply “freedom from external constraint” but “freedom successfully to engage in an activity.” Simply, a person is “free” to climb a mountain if and only if that person (1) is not obligated to refrain from attempting to climb it, and (2) possesses the capacity, and perhaps the equipment, necessary successfully to climb it!

Thus was the way paved from a negative analysis of the word “right” to a positive analysis. Alan Gewirth, an extraordinarily sophisticated moral and political philosopher, perhaps most eloquently today defends this analysis (Reason and Morality ). An individual, A, he argues, has, simply by virtue of his or her capacity to engage in purposeful activity, a “right” to freedom (crudely, noninterference by others) and a “right” to well-being. Correlative to these “rights” of A are obligations of people other than A both not coercively to interfere with A’s peaceful autonomous behavior and to provide A with the goods and services necessary for his or her “well-being.”

Thomas Hill Green did not perceive himself as drastically changing the classical liberals’ analysis of the role of government, of liberty, or of “rights.” He categorically rejected the statism of Hegel, insisting that “we cannot significantly speak of freedom except with reference to individual persons” (Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation [Ann Arbor; University of Michigan Press, 1967] p. 8). Indeed, the transition from what one might call a “protective” model of government to a “providing” model of government had been facilitated by John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty Mill had failed dismally to reconcile his enthusiasm for the principles of laissez faire and his sympathy for the practices of socialism. He de facto threw his lot in with the latter when he allowed that “a state ought to be considered as a great benefit society, or mutual insurance company, for helping (under the necessary regulations for preventing abuse) that large proportion of its members who cannot help themselves.” Even had Mill elaborated and justified “the necessary regulations for preventing abuse,” the crucial move leading to the transformation of the classical liberals’ understanding of government had been effected.

Yet an even more significant contribution to the transformation of the nature of liberalism must be “credited” to Mill. The welfarist function of the state, crucial to contemporary “liberalism,” rests in part upon an essentially economic distinction, a distinction clearly made by Mill but rarely discussed.

Production and Distribution

In his justly famous Principles of Political Economy Mill pens these words: “The laws and conditions of the production of wealth, partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them. . . . [T]his is not so with the distribution of wealth. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like.” (7th edition, p. 200)

The primary distinction here made by Mill is between the productive capacity of the free market in a free society and the distribution of goods and services effected by such a politico-economic system. That distinction has today become all but ubiquitous.

•Many “compromising” defenders of a partially-free market economy simultaneously laud the productive genius of the market and lament the alleged “inequities” characterizing the distribution an unfettered market economy would effect. “Naturally, I am not defending laissez-faire capitalism with all its injustices. We must, minimally, ‘redistribute’ in a fair and equitable way what the market produces. . . .”

•An increasing number of self-styled socialists are rejecting the old-style model of centralized, socialist planning. At a theoretical level, works such as Peter Rutland’s The Myth of the Plan come to mind. At what one might call the “practical” level one cannot but be aware of the belated rediscovery of markets in many Eastern European nations, the nervous flirtation with markets in Communist China and Gorbachev’s Russia, and the extraordinary enthusiasm for markets voiced by “democratic” socialists in numerous Western nations, including my native Australia. Yet the claim is repeatedly made that reliance upon the market for wealth production in no way entails a reliance upon the market’s distribution of wealth. A distribution of goods and services informed by the essentially egalitarian vision of socialism must be effected.

Simply, the contemporary “liberal” vision has been modified by grim economic reality. The free market is requisite if the goods and services sufficient for all more or less equally to enjoy a “good life,” materially defined, are to be produced. Yet since the market’s productivity is allegedly distinct from the profoundly unequal holdings of goods and services effected by the market, the latter can be corrected and made to conform to the egalitarianism informing the “liberal” model of a “just social order.” The productivity of the market, plus the pattern of wealth allocation dictated by “distributive justice,” brings, if not Utopia, at least the “good society,” within the power of human beings to realize.

Yet can one distinguish, as does Mill, between production and distribution in a free market economy? I think not.

To what must the productive genius of a free market economy be ascribed? The voluntary exchanging of goods and services? Surely not: Such exchanges have taken place from the very beginnings of human history on this planet. Jerusalem of early biblical days was a market city—a place where people exchanged the products of their labors—as were all the great cities of the ancient world.

Oddly, two French historians once hailed by the “Left” have reminded a forgetful world of what sound but all too widely ignored economists long had realized. Jean Baechler, in his scintillating work The Origins of Capitalism (trans B. Cooper ) and Fernand Braudel, in his magisterial three-volume study Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century (trans S. Reynolds [New York: Harper and Row, 1984]) have documented in painstaking detail the appearance, in sixteenth-century England and the Netherlands, of an unprecedented phenomenon: sustained economic growth. Human beings stumbled their accidental way into, or in a few cases actually reasoned out, changed practices which increased the productivity of their labors. So far, so familiar. The goods and services available to a community increased. Again, so far so familiar. The mortality rate decreased and life expectancy increased. Nothing new about that. But the old Malthusian trap that, for millennia, had cursed humankind was somehow foiled! The rate at which productivity increased surpassed the rate at which population increased. Every new birth was hailed as a potential source of creativity rather than cursed as yet another mouth to be fed. The grim joke played by a seemingly cruel cosmos had come to an end.

Why did this unprecedented phenomenon—sustained economic growth—appear when it did and where it did? The old answers fail to work. No new technologies or empires or elsewhere unavailable supplies of raw materials can be posited. One and only one reality makes sense of what in truth happened. In sixteenth-century England and the Netherlands a new system of property rights was conceived. In its embryonic form, the system of universal private property later defended by Adam Smith and his fellow classical liberals had been conceived. The rudimentary beginnings of the free market economy in a free society had appeared upon the earth, and the age-old specters of famine and destitution began to fade away.

From whence this new system of property rights? The story is complex, but in large part the system derived from ideas about human nature which were rediscovered during the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic counter-Reformation. What is significant is that changing ideas led to changing legal and political structures, and that these in turn led to a drastic change in humanity’s economic lot.

What, one might well ask, has the above historical aside to do with Mill’s distinction between the productive capacity of a market economy and the distribution of goods and services effected by such an economy? Let me make explicit my argument: A market economy depends upon a system of private property rights.

Given such a system, there is at no stage of the productive process a stock of “unowned goods”—machinery is owned, money to pay workers in the present for goods to be sold in the future, if ever, is owned, incompletely produced goods are owned, completed goods are owned. It is precisely because this is the case, that the market so efficiently allocates resources and so bountifully generates wealth.

A politically determined distribution of the goods and services produced by the market thus demands a prior expropriation of these goods from their “rightful” owners.

Such a distribution therefore interferes with and drastically modifies the process whereby the goods are created.

Simply, if Mill is correct in insisting that the laws of economics—the processes whereby wealth is created—are not “optional or arbitrary,” and if private property rights, precisely defined and efficiently enforced are crucial rather than incidental to these processes, the alleged distinction between the production of wealth and the distribution of wealth collapses.

And with it collapses a crucial tenet of many contemporary “liberals.”

Epilogue

Those of us espousing the freedom philosophy so cogently defended by Paul Poirot can with justice resent the “linguistic imperialism” displayed by the collectivists’ capture of the word “liberal.” Yet in the last analysis what matters are the realities words signify, not the words themselves. One would be surprised to learn that Paul Poirot was in any way agitated by his being denied a word to describe himself and his philosophy. His concern was to recover not a word but liberty and the realities that make for liberty. May that concern be ours.

The Reverend Dr. John K. Williams has been a teacher and is a free-lance writer and lecturer in North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. He has been resident scholar at FEE for the past three summers.