The literature of liberalism
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The literature of liberalism
Who belongs on a reading list of original and influential liberal thinkers? You tell us
Aug 2nd 2018
by T.E. & A.H.B.
WE NEED your help. The definition of liberalism has long been the source of disagreement. The very term has come to mean “progressive” in the United States, whereas in Britain it has kept its older meaning of being respectful of individual freedom and the wisdom that can be drawn from free thought and open debate.
For Open Future, an initiative aimed at sparking debate around classical liberal values, we aim to build a bibliography of liberalism. Below, we offer 11 names to get you started—including three people who helped edit The Economist in its early years.
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We want you to add your favourite liberal thinkers. Our list could be more diverse, ideologically and otherwise. Who are the people that laid the foundations for a school of political thought which has, for better or worse, shaped the modern world? Our aim is to build a cannon that will be classically liberal in a generally (but not universally) accepted way. Ultimately, we’d like to be able to group authors so as to show how liberal ideas evolved.
Email openf...@economist.com, or comment on this article—or on Facebook, Twitter or Medium—to add your suggestions for writers, books or pamphlets you would include in your own “literature of liberalism” list. They can be early philosophers or modern-day writers, so long as they are original and relevant. Tag @TheEconomist or use the #OpenFuture hashtag to get our attention. Every week, our editors will comb through your suggestions and update the list.
Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679
Main work: “Leviathan”, 1651
Known for: Among the earliest of a handful of writers to set out principles for liberalism.
Because the natural state of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” liberty for an individual is tied to the power of a sovereign, administering through laws, within a commonwealth. His detailed construction became the foundation for numerous other works examining the proper role and structure of government.
Influenced: Everyone
John Locke 1632-1704
Main works: “A Letter Concerning Toleration”, 1689, and “The Second Treatise of Government”, 1689
Known for: Expanded on Hobbes to provide the architecture for a modern liberal state. In “A Letter” Locke argues, contrary to Hobbes, for the state to tolerate different religious beliefs. In his “Second Treatise”, he echoes Hobbes’s view of the need for strong government, writing: “where there is no law, there is no freedom”. But, rather than endorse Hobbes’s all-powerful Leviathan, Locke thought that the system should separate those who make laws from those who execute them.
Influenced: Everyone
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu 1689-1755
Main work: “The Spirit of the Laws”, 1748
Known for: Montesquieu devised the tripartite structure of government adopted by America. His monumental work provides guidance on how governments should be structured “by fallible human beings” to serve “the people for whom they are framed” with the most liberty that would be feasible. To accomplish this requires limits: “Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would no longer be possessed of liberty.”
Influenced: Many citations in the Federalist Papers in essays by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton
Thomas Paine 1737-1809
Main work: “Common Sense”, 1776
Known for: In just a few dozen pages of argument, Paine creates the intellectual catalyst for the American Revolution. The work received immediate, widespread circulation in America and then in other countries. “Government,” Paine argues, “is a necessary evil”, inevitably restricting liberty. He attacked both hereditary rule and monarchy, proposing instead a government of elected representatives and a limited, rotating presidency.
Influenced: Revolutionaries in America and elsewhere—until they become the government themselves
Adam Smith 1723-1790
Main work: “The Wealth of Nations”, 1776
Known for: Smith laid the intellectual foundation of modern economics, markets and free trade. His assertion that an “invisible hand” is at the heart of the market is among the most cited phrases in economics. But he also explored the division of labour, the benefits of trade, the mobility of capital, the rigging of markets by businesses and government, and public goods (notably universal education).
Influenced: If economics had a bible…
Olympe de Gouges (Marie Gouze) 1748-1793
Main Work: “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen”, 1791
Known for: Gouges is often heralded as a founder of modern feminism. Her “Declaration” is a response to “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”, drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson, and Honoré Mirabeau, which did not extend the natural rights of the citizen to women as well as men. Gouges was a prolific defender of free speech, women’s rights and political dialogue, as well as an abolitionist and pacifist. She was executed by guillotine for her support of constitutional monarchy at the beginning of Maximilien Robespierre’s “reign of terror” in 1793.
Influenced: Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie and Nicolas de Condorcet and the Girondins, a group of French republicans during and after the revolution
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759-1797
Main Work: “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, 1792
Known for: Wollstonecraft’s treatise is considered by many to be the first feminist manifesto. Others grapple over whether her writings, which critique excessive emotion and female sexuality, are indeed feminist. “A Vindication” contains endless references to the paragon of rational thought, and a vehement defence of the importance of equal educational opportunities for men and women.
Influenced: Thomas Paine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf
John Stuart Mill
1806-1873
Main Work: “On Liberty”, 1859
Known for: Mill has become a reference point for liberalism. “On Liberty” is a defense of individual freedom with a caveat: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Mill views even a society under representative government to threaten liberty, notably, in a term he popularised, the “tyranny of the majority”.
Influenced: An inevitable citation in debates about liberalism
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The Economist and liberalism
Walter Bagehot’s fame dominates the origins of The Economist, but as Scott Gordon, then a professor at Carleton College, wrote in December, 1955, in The Journal of Political Economy, “If one set out…to name the leading proponents of the doctrine of individualism in the 19th century, one could scarcely do better” than the group that assembled in its early years. Three were especially important:
James Wilson 1805-1860
Known for: Founding The Economist
Our name originally included the phrase: “Free Trade Journal”. The Economist was an impassioned defender of laissez-faire while Wilson was editor, from 1843-59. In 1849 we wrote: “all the great branches of human industry are found replete with order, which, growing from the selfish exertions of individuals, pervades the whole. Experience has proved that this order is invariably deranged when it is forcibly interfered with by the state.”
Influenced: The Economist
Thomas Hodgskin 1787-1869
Main work: “Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital”, 1825
Known for: One of Wilson’s deputies, Hodgskin had a far-ranging suspicion of intervention. “All law making,” he wrote, “except gradually and quietly to repeal all existing laws, is arrant humbug.” He argued that property rights are antithetical to individual liberty. Writing about capital, he said, “the weight of its chains are felt, though the hand may not yet be clearly seen which imposes them.” The book was praised as “admirable” by none other than Karl Marx—who used the chains metaphor rather more memorably in the “Communist Manifesto”.
Influenced: Herbert Spencer, a giant in libertarian thought, as well as Marx. Reflecting how he perceived himself, Hodgskin signed articles written in 1869 for a newspaper as "A LIBERAL"
Herbert Spencer 1820-1903
Main work: “The Man verses the State”,1884
Known for: A lowly editor in the early years of The Economist, Spencer went on to become an intellectual rival of Marx. He is perhaps best known for coining the phrase “survival of the fittest.” An influential thinker in many fields, Spencer writes: “The degree of [man’s] slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or society.”
Influenced: Libertarians
From <https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/08/02/the-literature-of-liberalism>
Erol Ortabag