The Intellectual History of Social Liberalism

The notions of social contract and universal suffrage seem at once to go hand in hand with Liberalism, and with it, property. Alas, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the landless working class, certain shortcomings began to take shape. Liberty and freedom were inexorably tied to property and wealth, and Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism justified the growing gap between the haves and have-nots. The rift was diagnosed in the late 1800s and early 1900s by the likes of Hobhouse, Hobson, Dewey, and Keynes, but did not come to a head until the Depression of 1929. It was at this critical juncture that Social Liberalism began to fully overtake Classical Liberalism as the prevailing ideology.

To understand Social Liberalism, one must look upon its intellectual history beginning with John Locke's Two Treatises of Government published in 1690. In this work, Locke first introduces the concept of "the law of nature... and reason, which is that law," which is to say that all men are rational creatures (Locke §6). What is more, he establishes that man is "born... with a title to perfect freedom" and that the law of nature carries with it the privilege to "his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate" (Locke §87). In addition, Locke also stipulates that "government has no other end but the preservation of property," planting the initial seed of limited government (Locke §94).

Adam Smith correlates and cements Locke's theory by adding an economic aspect to it. In The Wealth of Nations published in 1776, Smith adapts Locke's ideology to economics by making the accusation that "THE (sic) policy of Europe, by not leaving things at perfect liberty, occasions other inequalities of much greater importance" (Adams, Bk. 1 Ch. 10). Compounded with Rousseau's The Social Contract, these words ushered in the age of a new ideology rooted in individual rights, popular sovereignty, and small government. Banners were hoisted in its name, and in France, guillotines were erected.

The French Revolution was one of the first of its kind. It was a revolution of societal change, opposed to the 1776 American Revolution or the 1688 Glorious Revolution in Britain which were movements to maintain the status quo, rather than to change it (Adams 18). With the French Revolution came the blossoming of the Romantic Movement. A reaction to the Enlightenment, the Romantics sought to de-emphasize science, reason, and collectivity. In its place, they championed the ideas of emotion and individuality. The movement's impact upon Liberalism was subtle. The trend continued towards minimal government, but laissez-faire economics was no longer the sole driving intellectual factor. In The Limits of state Action, published in 1792, Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt triumphs the "essential importance of human development in its richest variety." Unfortunately, to borrow a phrase from Hume, the work fell stillborn from the press. The revelations made in Humboldt's writings were not properly published until more than a half-century later, when it provided an "intellectual background to social liberalism" (23-24).

Indeed, Humboldt's essay became one of the foundations of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty published in 1859. In the book, Mill contends that the state has license to intervene only when an individual's actions are harming the well-being of another individual. Commonly known as the harm principal, he writes that "The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others... Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign" (Mill). The other foundation of Mill's philosophy was de Tocqueville's observation that American Democratic society tends to pressure its members to conform (Adams 26). This culture of mass conformity was anathema to Mill's vision of individualism. He went so far as to call it "the tyranny of the majority" and to describe this tyranny "as among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard." Driving this opinion was Mill's fear of ignorance, which explains the seeming contradiction in his promotion of government intervention in education as "a selfevident (sic) axiom that the State should require and compel the education, up to a certain standard, of every human being who is born its citizen" (Mill). It is at this juncture that the basic elements of social liberalism are introduced.

Despite Mill's partiality to government intervention, the philosophy of the day belonged to Herbert Spencer. A contemporary of Mill, Spencer applied the theories of Charles Darwin to the human realm. Promoting an ideal of the "survival of the fittest," he emphasized maximum competition and absolute minimal intervention, especially in social and economic areas. Influential in Victorian Britain, his theories were quickly adopted as justification for the US's oppressive industrialization in the late 19^th to early 20^th centuries (Adams 25).

Indeed, more influential than the American or French Revolutions was the impact of the Industrial Revolution. In 1870, the US produced 23% of the world's manufactured goods, but by 1913 the US was leading the world in manufacture with a 12.5% increase over the figure of 1870 (Tables 1). Similarly, in 1840 69% of the US labor force was involved in agriculture, falling to 38% by 1900 (A History). These statistics demonstrate the fall of farming in the US economy during the Industrial Revolution. America was moving away from the Jeffersonian ideal of small, nearly self-sufficient farmers and into a new age of urbanity. This new age presented a wealth of new problems to contend with, all of which were initially ignored by governments both American and British.

As a result of the decline in agriculture, a mass migration into America's cities took place. Many were unemployed, and the squalor of the tenement houses was known to many, citizen and immigrant alike. The competition of Capitalism combined with Social Darwinism formed a bitter pill for city-dwellers to swallow. Either work long hours for impossibly low wages or join the ranks of the indigent unemployed. Exploitation of the workforce was widespread and a corrupt political system paid little attention to it. So the "age of the robber-barons" came to be (Adams 25).

Picking up the banner of the new, marginalized working class in the late 1800s and early 1900s were the Populists and Progressives. The results of these movements included the direct election of senators, local primaries, and anti-trust legislation, or "trust-busting" with the presidencies of Roosevelt and Wilson (Adams 33-4). Behind the action was the theory of several prominent new thinkers who had set to the task of reconciling liberalism with the 20^th century. What John Stuart Mill had touched on, these new theorists wrote volumes, and right in time. 1929 brought the largest shock to the political system that Liberals had ever felt, the Great Depression. The classical, non-interventionist Liberalism of Spencer and William Graham Sumner had to change or resign itself to the annals of history.

The question posed itself: how free are the uneducated, the unemployed, and the homeless, and what can be done to remedy the situation? Several liberal thinkers answered between 1900 and 1930, including TH Green, Leonard Hobhouse, and JA Hobson. All of them argued for some form of state interventionism to make up for the social shortcomings of the capitalist system (Adams 29). Hobhouse put it most succinctly in writing that "The 'right to work' and the right to a 'living wage' are just as valid as the rights of person or property. That is to say, they are integral conditions of a good social order" (Hobhouse). In essence, the "right to work" can be justified in that it is a freedom from the more exploitative aspects of the capitalist system (Adams 29).

In Britain, the purveyor of these social changes was William Beveridge. In 1942, Beveridge released his Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services. He proposed "an attack upon Want," detailing a social security package that would ensure subsistence for all citizens (Beveridge §1). The system was rooted in six basic principals: "flat rate of subsistence benefit ; flat rate of contribution ; unification of administrative responsibility; adequacy of benefit ; comprehensiveness ; and classification" (Beveridge §17). In America, the change came from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal, providing a system similar to Beveridge's that continued to evolve up into the 1960s New Frontier of Kennedy and Great Society of Johnson (Adams 35).

John Maynard Keynes provided the economic basis for the new social liberalism as Adam Smith did for its predecessor. Keynes believed that the economic trend of boom and bust could be mediated by government intervention, preventing many ills that severe depression was cause to. The economy was to be managed by a control of public demand through taxation and the manipulation of interest rates (30). The economic theory of Keynes and the social program of Beveridge became the modern face of Social Liberalism.

Such has been the intellectual history of Social Liberalism to date. It was the inevitable result of Classical Liberalism and its shortcomings in dealing with the working class in a capitalist economy. However, whether or not it is the "highest stage of the liberal project" is open to interpretation. Hobhouse himself went on to describe his theory as "not Liberalism but Socialism." The crux of the debate lies in whether or not Social Liberalism counts as Socialism proper. Hobhouse continues by differentiating Social Liberalism from Marxist Socialism in that the latter has an ultimate project of Utopia which does not make for a "sound method of social science" (Hobhouse). The project of Social Liberalism, on the other hand, is one of as much freedom as possible, but safeguarded against its crueler capitalistic tendencies. If Hobhouse is to be believed, then Social Liberalism truly is the highest stage of Liberalism. It is an intricate set of checks and balances between government and industry. If taken further, it would inevitably tend towards Marxism. If regressed, it would fail to address the societal and economic needs that it took nearly a century to answer.

Sources Cited

A History of American AgricultureAgriculture in the Classroom.

http://www.agclassroom.org/teacher/history/index.htm

Adams, Ian. Political Ideology Today. Manchester. Pelgrave. 2001

Hobhouse, L.T. Liberalism, 1911. Modern History Sourcebook

Ed. Paul Halsall, May 1998. Fordham U.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1911hobhouse.html

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government, 1690. Modern History Sourcebook.

Ed. Paul Halsall, July 1998 Fordham U.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1690locke-sel.html

Mill, John Stuart On Liberty, 1859. Modern History Sourcebook

Ed. Paul Halsall, August 1998. Fordham U.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/JSMILL-LIB.html

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations, 1776. Modern History Sourcebook

Eds. Halsall, Arkenberg, January 1999. Fordham U.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/adamsmith-summary.html

Tables Illustrating the Spread of Industrialization Fordham U.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/indrevtabs1.html