longer.blue

From: The Making of Modern Liberalism, by Alan Ryan. Ch. 1 (33-34) (Testing a method for doing long posts....) ANTICAPITALISM The history of hatred for despotism, theocracy, and the modern union of the two that is reflected in totalitarianism is a long history. The third of liberalism's antipathies has a shorter history. From the middle of the nineteenth century until today, one strand of liberalism has regarded capitalism as an enemy of liberty (Mill [1848] 1965, 766-69; Dewey [1931] 1984). This marked a great reversal in the history of liberalism. It is not a large oversimplification to say that until the early nineteenth century there was no question of opposing liberalism to capitalism. The movement of ideas and institutions that emancipated individuals from tradition, insisted on their natural rights, and demanded that "careers should be open to talent" rather than birth was a seamless whole. Just as a man had to think for himself, so he had to work for himself; just as society would progress only if each person took responsibility for their own ideas and moral convictions, so it would flourish economically only if everyone stood on their own two feet. How far this was an articulate defense of capitalism as such is debatable; the term "capitalism" itself did not come into general use until the late nineteenth century, and it is difficult to decide how appropriate it is to characterize as capitalist those societies that possessed nothing one could call a proletariat, whose populations still lived largely in the countryside and worked the land, and that thought of them-selves as "commercial societies" rather than "capitalist economies" (Smith [1775] 1976, 399-403). Moreover, many of the rights to dispose of property just as one wished, to work for anyone willing to employ one, and to contract with anyone for any purpose not obviously damaging to the security and good morals of the commonwealth had been established by successive decisions made by judges appealing to the English common law rather than by legislation of a self-consciously liberal kind. Still, there is an obvious affinity between liberalism on the one hand and the rule of private property and freedom of contract on the other. The liberal view that the individual is, by natural right or by some-thing tantamount to it, sovereign over himself, his talents, and his property is at once the basis of limited government, the rule of law, individual liberty, and a capitalist economy. But it was apparent from the beginning that property might be employed oppressively as well as harmlessly or beneficially. Apart from the conflict between the rights of property owners and the traditional claims of rural workers such as customary claims to gather wood or to glean in the fields or to take small game-there was a more general conflict between the liberty of the large property owner to do what he chose with his property and the impossibility of his workers or competitors striking anything like a fair bar-gain with him. Throughout the nineteenth century, the sentiment grew that if it had once been necessary to liberate the entrepreneur from misguided or oppressive government, it was now necessary to liberate the worker and consumer from the tyranny of the capitalist (Hobhouse [1911] 1964, 22-24, 82-84; Green 1892, 366-70). Mill observed that the modern wage laborer had as little real choice of occupation as a slave had in antiquity. In that spirit, he defended the right of working people to organize into trade unions to redress the balance of power a little. T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse went further, suggesting that capitalism exerted a kind of moral tyranny over the ordinary person, as exemplified by the spread of drinking establishments that destroyed both the health and the self-respect of their victims (Green 1892, 380-85). The "New Liberalism," exemplified in Britain by the social policy of the Asquith government of 1908-16, and in the United States by the demands of the Progressives and the practice of the Democratic Party after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, had many positive ambitions, but one negative assumption was that the workingman needed to be freed from the power of the capitalist. It is this that explains the seeming paradox that late twentieth-century conservatives are often characterized as "neoliberals." The contemporary defense of property rights is not, as it was two centuries ago, the defense of landed property against commercial and industrial capital, but the defense of nineteenth-century laissez-faire and the property rights of commercial and industrial capital against modern reformers.