Will the Real Liberalism Please Stand Up?
How a poor understanding of liberty drives illiberal sentiment
Of all the poorly defined “isms” out there, liberalism is one of the worst offenders. American liberals are on the left, yet libertarians stand opposed to much of the liberal agenda, and “classical liberals” stand sometimes opposed to liberals and sometimes opposed to both. The conversation gets even more confused with the introduction of neoliberals and social liberals. Each claim to be in support of liberty, yet when a political dispute arises, each claims the other is betraying liberty.
So, what’s going on here? What’s the correct definition of liberalism? And which Americans are actually defending liberty today?
The Five Conceptions of American Liberty is a 2014 article from National Affairs that should be required reading for every high schooler in America. In it, Carl Eric Scott introduces a framework for thinking about the evolution of five different “interlocking but distinct” conceptions of liberty throughout American history.
I think this piece is a great introduction to American political thought, and a better understanding of these five conceptions by the American public would help avoid many of the overgeneralizations that underlie most of the attacks on liberalism coming from the left, the right, and the “postliberals”.
According to Scott, the five conceptions of American liberty are:
Natural-rights liberty
Classical-communitarian liberty
Economic-autonomy liberty
Progressive liberty
Personal-autonomy liberty
Each of these five are rooted in American history and can make a legitimate claim to be the “true” liberalism, but more often than not, they have been combined, traded, emphasized, and deemphasized in various ways and at multiple times by different political parties. We’ll get to how these five are mapped onto today’s parties, but first, a little history.
The Founding
The first two conceptions, natural-rights and classical-communitarian, were products of the founding. Natural-rights liberty is what many people think of when they talk about “classical” liberalism, i.e., the liberalism of John Locke, the Declaration of Independence, and many of the Federalist founders. This form of liberty focuses on securing and protecting the natural rights of the individual from the power of a potentially tyrannical state. Chief amongst these natural rights are life, liberty, and property. This is the liberalism of the English Enlightenment, which derived from even earlier attempts to constrain the power of the state dating back to the Magna Carta.
Equally important to the founding, yet less well-known, is classical-communitarian liberty. This form is akin to what many people call “small r” republicanism. Republicanism traces its roots to the classical Greek city states, where “Liberty” was understood as the rights and responsibilities of citizens. This understanding places high importance on the virtue of citizens and their freedom to participate in and contribute to the affairs of the polis. This form of liberalism is much less focused on the individual as an end and is instead focused on the individual as a means to serving the community. Following the Renaissance, this form of communitarian liberalism was highly influential amongst European intellectuals, and it had a strong impact on many of the founders. Jefferson’s ideal of a “nation of small farmers” was in large part driven by this republicanism. Another great example of this form can be found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s descriptions of the participatory townships of 1830’s New England.
The Gilded Age
The third form of American liberty – economic-autonomy liberty – was a direct descendent of natural-rights liberty. This new conception of liberty gained prominence towards the end of the 19th century, as industrialization and rapid economic growth swept the nation. Laws regulating wages and work hours were struck down during the Lochner era of the Supreme Court (1890 – 1937), as these laws were seen as a violation of the right to contract as one chooses. This interpretation held that government should protect natural rights by getting out of the way and allowing individuals to shape their own economic well-being through personal effort and “the sweat of their brow”. The elevation of these economic liberties over other liberties like freedom of movement, association, free speech, religion, etc. is the key differentiator of this conception. The goal is a market system that maximizes free enterprise and protects against monopolies and coercion such that every individual has the freedom to achieve economic independence.
The Progressive Era
The fourth conception – progressive liberty – was formed in direct response to the growth of economic-autonomy liberty. This form of liberty, intensely tied to the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, relied on an underlying hope in scientific and sociological advancement as well as an underlying fear of degeneration in the face of modern industrial society. The positive and usually top-down development of society, it was thought, was becoming a precondition for a free and prosperous individual. This type of liberty permeated much of New Deal and Great Society liberalism as well. In short, the protection of individual rights, according to this view, could only be achieved by expanding the view of justice to include all of society (social justice), which necessarily required a national scope and a muscular national government that could ensure the socially just society that allows for truly free individuals.
The 60’s
The last conception of American liberty – personal-autonomy liberty – came of age during the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. As Scott describes, “The core idea of personal-autonomy liberty is the notion that the individual should be allowed to do whatever he wishes, so long as he does not harm others or violate their rights”. This form of liberty has roots in natural rights liberty and economic-autonomy liberty, but the emphasis of personal-autonomy liberty tends to be placed on cultural and lifestyle decisions, such as who to marry, what to do with one’s body, or what religion (or lack of religion) to follow.
So who’s right?
The left today tends to emphasize conceptions four and five. Bush-era conservatives emphasized one and three. Trump supporters tend to emphasize one and a protectionist/culturally conservative form of four. Libertarians emphasize three and five. The problem with each of these groups is that each thinks they hold to a single and coherent conception of liberty. Turns out, they’re all wrong.
Liberalism is a complex idea that has meant different things to different people at different times. The beauty of a liberal democratic system is the flexible framework that the system provides to protect liberties. The flexibility is key, as the specific liberties that the public believes should be protected and emphasized will necessarily change over time.
As seen through the lens of the five conceptions, the flexibility of American democracy has accommodated these changes in emphasis over time. Many detractors of liberalism today decry what they see as inevitable negative effects of a liberal system. A better understanding of these five conceptions should remind us that liberalism’s flexibility means that there are no inevitable outcomes. Public demand, when flexed through a liberal democratic system, can create and protect the specific set of liberties that society demands, even if these demands change over time.
Has liberalism failed?
The left and the right oversimplify both the version of liberty that they each defend and the “perversion” of liberty that they each claim to fight. The conceptions of liberty are a messy group, with the various factions in tension with each other in different ways and at different times.
Claims that “liberalism has failed”, therefore, tend to be vast oversimplifications that view liberalism as a cascading Hegelian wave with no mechanism for course correction. In Patrick Deneen’s view, the excesses of conceptions three, four, and five were all inevitable outcomes of Locke’s natural rights philosophy. This view disregards the fact that these conceptions have historically been in conflict, that conception two offers a valid alternative path for liberalism, and that the popularity of each conception has ebbed and flowed over time according to the will of the public. Deneen’s answer is to propose a modern form of classical-communitarianism, which, ironically, is just itself another form of liberalism according to this framework. Attacks on liberalism should first be met with a question: “What form of liberalism do you mean?”. If the answer is “all of it”, you’re probably dealing with an overgeneralization.
As we reflect on the legacy of the United States and our liberal experiment on this Independence Day, it would be worthwhile to discuss liberalism with more nuance, historical perspective, and hopefully, a bit more reverence. Despite the triumph of liberal democracies over the past 200 years, liberalism’s discontents, both at home and abroad, have recently grown increasingly belligerent. Defending liberalism from its detractors will require the cooperation of both the left and the right. To ensure that cooperation, we need a better understanding of what liberalism is, how it’s changed over time, and why it's a better and much more flexible alternative to the many forms of illiberal solutions that are currently being proposed.