Near the beginning of his ten-hour lecture series on the history of political thought, the great free-market historian Ralph Raico takes a little time to define his terms. In the first lecture he says:
What I’m going to be discussing this week is classical liberalism. I might slip and just call it liberalism from time to time, but you’ll understand what I’m saying. We’ll be discussing its growth, its development, and finally, I’ll say something about the possible future of liberalism.
As the lectures progress, it becomes apparent that Raico is using the term liberalism to mean the philosophy of freedom and laissez-faire. To many average Americans who think of themselves as being of the party of freedom and free markets, they may think this is rather odd. Many Americans in this group—especially the variety who are not prone to reading history books—might be confused by this. After all, don’t talk show hosts like Sean Hannity use the term “liberal” to describe todays social democrats? Isn’t it proper to use the term “conservative” to describe the free-market group?
If one tends to think of the 1940s as the murky, distant past, then yes, the current use of the terms “conservative” and “liberal” seems fine. On the other hand, for people who actually study history and try to make sense of intellectual movement and their origins, it is usually obvious that the way the term “liberal” is used by pundits at Fox News and MSNBC simply doesn’t work.
This is because the term “liberal,” as used by people in the past, clearly meant the party of freedom and free markets. The term “conservative,” meanwhile, denotes no specific ideological content, and depends on which country one is talking about.
The post-1945 ideological movement we now call “conservative” has never really been an heir to the classical liberals. This can be seen in the American conservative movement’s obsession with war, and in the fact that its founder, William F. Buckley, literally supported the adoption of militarist totalitarianism. Indeed, the free-market aspect of conservatism was never more than a thin patina applied to the movement to help the conservative leaders attract the disaffected free-market supporters of the Old Right. American conservatism in practice has never prioritized freedom as historical liberals have. Indeed, some of the conservative movement’s own theorists, such as Russell Kirk, explicitly sought to separate the conservative movement from the free-market liberals of the nineteenth century. (See Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind.)
To describe a free-market person as “conservative” in 1910 or 1850 would have just been confusing to everyone involved.
Libertarianism is the Radical Wing of Classical Liberalism
This is an important issue for libertarians since, as Raico shows, the ideology we call “libertarianism” is simply the radical wing of the intellectual movement known as classical liberalism. This, however, hasn’t stopped many modern day classical liberalism and libertarians from claiming that there is some sort of bright shining line between libertarians and free-market liberals. Often, the claim is that libertarians and classical liberals are fundamentally incompatible because libertarians are all supposedly hard-core anarcho-capitalists while classical liberals demand the existence of a state.
This attempt at inserting a hard separation between the two groups does not survive a look at the historical reality, however. For instance, we can find plenty of theorists with anarchist views who were well ensconced and highy influential in liberal circles. Perhaps most notable is Gustave de Molinari, the grand old man of liberalism by the late nineteenth century, but also arguably the first anarcho-capitalist. Molinari denied that a state was necessary and generally took a very radical laissez-faire, anti-statist view. He was also the editor of the flagship liberal journal Journal des Économistes for decades. It would be absurd to claim that Molinari cannot be counted among the liberals because of his anarchist views. We might also look to Jean-Baptiste Say who was clear that he did not regard the state as necessary. It’s hard to overstate Say’s prestige and influence among liberals in the nineteenth century. Yet, he was clearly part of the liberal world, and it makes no sense to claim that his anarchist statements somehow render him not a part of the liberal movement. J.B. Say, like Molinari, was clearly both a libertarian and a classical liberal. We might make similar observations about Herbert Spencer. Spencer, of course, famously wrote an anarchist essay on the right to ignore the state. Was Spencer therefore not a liberal? That would be news to most of the liberals of Spencer’s time.
Spencer was one of the radicals, and as such, was a libertarian. But he was hardly outside the liberal movement. As with every other intellectual movement, there were some who were more moderate than others. The breadth and radicalism of some corners of the classical liberal movement should now make it all the more clear how incoherent it would be to apply a term like “conservative” to describe this group. To apply the term “conservative” to theorists like Spencer, Say, or Molinari should strike us as laughable.
Because of this, Raico has even gone so far as to use the terms “classical liberal” and “libertarian” as near synonyms. This is fitting given how even the more moderate classical liberals of the past—such as Adam Smith—would be considered free-market extremists by today’s political standards. In this sense, the term libertarian can indeed serve as a substitute for classical liberal.
Why Surrender the Term to the Left?
Even with “libertarian” as a serviceable substitute for “liberalism,” properly understood, that’s not a good enough reason to simply let the Left have it. Yes, handing over the term “liberal” to be the exclusive property of the democratic socialists may seem no big deal to people who rarely read about the past as it was before living memory. But, it is a serious problem for people who actually try to think systematically about the origins of modern political and intellectual movements. It doesn’t work to describe the Lockeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as “liberals” on one page, and to then describe people with the same beliefs as something else entirely a few paragraphs later—simply because that second group of people happened to live in the twentieth century.
This is a formula for creating what Raico calls “conceptual mayhem” in which the term “liberalism” means both the ideology of Hillary Clinton and the Ideology of Thomas Jefferson. If we use the word this way, then it has no useful meaning at all.
This is how we ended up with the term “classical liberal” in the first place. Recognizing that there is no suitable substitute term for the ideology of laissez-faire, some commentators attempted to deal with this mayhem. “Classical liberalism” is an awkward phrase, but is used out of necessity. The added adjective “classical”—which is essentially a synonym of “traditional”— is used as a makeshift solution to the abuse of the term “liberal” in recent decades. That’s why we have it.
The whole reason this even became necessary, of course, is because social democrats stole the term to describe their own ideology back in the first half of the twentieth century. As Raico shows, this was done deliberately because liberalism was extremely popular at the time, and it made a lot of sense to poach the word and apply it to the Left’s unliberal ideologies. Raico writes:
In a famous passage [Joseph Schumpeter] ironically states that it was a kind of compliment, if an unintended one, when the enemies of the system of free enterprise confiscated the name liberal for what was basically the opposite of what liberalism had stood for from the start. Nowadays, you can find writers who express astonishment that free market economists still sometimes insist on calling themselves liberals rather than conservatives.
Some might say why argue over a name, why not just call your position anything at all and go on from there to argue the case for it? Stephen Holmes, a political scientist from Chicago, has called the dispute over the term “liberal” a matter of bragging rights; the right to brag “I’m the real liberal in the liberal tradition and you’re not.” On the other hand, he insists that he’s in the real liberal tradition and thinks it’s worth arguing about.
Raico notes here that scholars on the Left—that is, the social democrats—aren’t willing to give the term back to the laissez-faire party, and think it’s worth fighting to retain control of the term.
On the other hand, many free-market people—who generally seem to lack the savvy and drive of their enemies on the Left—can’t be bothered with fighting for proper terminology. Instead, I often hear from free-market activists that we should just adopt another term. Perhaps “voluntarist” or “individualist.”
Both terms, of course, conceptually sever the link between modern laissez-faire liberals and their 400-year history. That’s part of the Left’s plan. The Left wants use to believe that modern social democrats like John Maynard Keynes are the real liberals and the inheritors of the the tradition of “liberty” pushed by the revered American revolutionaries. This is completely false, of course, but by controlling the word “liberal,” the left can also distance the true party of freedom from its own historical patrimony.
Moreover, if a new term for the laissez-party actually becomes popular, the Left will just try to expropriate that term, too. This already happened with the term “individualist” as Raico notes:
some of the English old-fashioned liberals like Auberon Herbert and the extreme followers of Herbert Spencer started saying “let’s call ourselves something else, let’s call ourselves individualists.” Then, John Dewey started saying “well, you know, there was an old individualism that is now obsolete.”
Dewey then went on to say that his leftwing ideology was the real individualism.
Indeed, surrendering to the Left on definitions and terminology just encourages the Left to keep poaching popular words. Basically, every time a self-described “conservative” uses the term “liberal” to describe a Leftist social democrat, he is basically saying “yes, I agree to discuss everything using the terms and definitions dictated by the Left.”
We have already made a big concession by using the modifier “classical” at all. Alas, we are forced into it because the social democrats who now call themselves “liberals” have long controlled the media and academia, and those groups have tremendous influence in the public’s use of words.
Words Have Meanings
But, if the real liberals, the real party of laissez-faire, simply abandons the term, it will become next to impossible to construct a coherent historical narrative about the party of freedom and free markets. That’s what the Left wants, of course, but we don’t have to go along with it. Raico concludes:
I submit that there is no intellectually honest reason to bestow the term liberal on those nowadays who favor a never-ending list of government funded programs. These programs, we are told, are necessary to deal with every real or imagined ill of society and favor a constantly expanding state apparatus to wage war on the traditional ways and values of civil society. The people who support this are the people who are called liberal nowadays.
The “new” liberalism of Hobhouse and Hobson is indistinguishable from the position, for instance, of Eduard Bernstein, the founder of the vision of socialism in Germany. This has today become socialism altogether in the modern world, just as the position of American liberal intellectuals is indistinguishable from that of people who call themselves social democrats in Europe. ...
The working definition of liberalism that I will adopt is this: it is the ideology that holds that civil society—understood as a sum order of society, the sum of the social order minus the state—by and large runs itself within the bounds of a principle of private property. This is liberalism as I’ll be discussing it here.
Raico is right. We might still have to add on the word “classical” on occasion to help along those with a weaker grasp of history. But “liberal” remains the only truly accurate and consistent term for the ideology of freedom and free markets.
