Two snorts and a smile: A new study of James Bryce reviewed

James Bryce was an academic who became a Liberal MP and then a diplomat – he served as Britain's ambassador in Washington from 1907 to 1913. He doesn't sound or look the sort of person to give rise to humour, but Jonathan Parry's review of a new study of Bryce for the London Review of Books won two snorts and a smile from me.

First snort (I have a dark sense of humour):

His schoolmaster father, a devoted geologist and botanist, taught him to observe the beauties of the natural world, believing that revelation and natural science were God’s complementary ways of communicating his love for mankind. He was killed in a rockfall while exploring above Loch Ness.

Second snort (some seats always have generated more casework):

He found the workload as MP for Tower Hamlets unmanageable, and escaped to a smaller constituency, Aberdeen South, in 1885.

The smile (I've always had a weakness for donnish humour):

Bryce’s book offered a comprehensive analysis of American political institutions, including state legislatures and political parties, and was founded on much reading and many interviews with Americans (Stefan Collini once suggested that his "genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains.")

This is a good opportunity to recommend again Parry's recent short book Liberalism, which I reviewed for Liberator last year. 

He argues that we should not see thinkers like T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse as staking out a new path, which the Liberal Party then followed. Rather, they were attempting to systematise and justify what Liberal politicians and journalists were already doing and saying.

Peter Clarke on T.H. Green and the working man

Thomas Hill "T.H." Green

Peter Clarke is the author or two books, Lancashire and the New Liberalism and Liberals and Social Democrats, that anyone interested in British Liberalism should read.

Here he is back in 1980, reviewing Ian Bradley's The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism in the London Review of Books:

The attention given to T.H. Green can be justified partly because he sought to present such a formula in philosophically cogent terms. "When we speak of freedom," he argued, "we do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespective of what it is we like. We mean the greatest power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves." 

Green had reached this view by 1881 in a public lecture on "Liberal legislation and the freedom of contract". The opportunities for state intervention which this doctrine suggests were to give Green a subsequent reputation for fathering a collectivist approach in welfare legislation. 

But the reputation was really fathered upon Green – he was more fathered against than fathering. Green himself had not meant to move so far. But that he had moved away from any tolerably strict definition of voluntarism is surely evident. In 1873 he had declared that "the drink curse is altogether too big a thing to be dealt with by individual effort only." In this field at least, higher claims than mere liberty had to be asserted, albeit by the citizens as a body. 

There is a splendid vignette, dating from the following year, of Green in conversation with a friend, dwelling "with great disappointment on the use made by the workmen of their half holiday and shorter hours. He even said that he thought it was better they should not have a half holiday, but should be kept constantly at their work so that they should not have time to drink."

 I also like Clarke's formulation that "history does not repeat itself: historians repeat each other".

BOOK REVIEW Liberalism by Jonathan Parry

This review appears in the latest Liberator (issue 431), which can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

Liberalism

Jonathan Parry

Agenda Publishing (2025), £19.99

In this short book, written as part of a series that promises “incisive and provocative introductions to topics, ideas and events for students wanting to know more about how we got where we are today”, Jonathan Parry provides a history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats and makes you think again about the relation between political philosophy and political practice.

The first three chapters deal with the years 1830 to 1914 – the Liberal Party’s era as a party of government – and do so thematically rather than chronologically. In the first of these, Parry discusses the widening of the franchise, the taming of the House of Lords and the intermittent Liberal enthusiasm for proportional representation.

Asquith’s battles with the Lords will be familiar to all, but the Liberal attitude to the widening of the franchise was more ambivalent than you might imagine. The Liberal Party, Parry argues, was forged in the struggle for parliamentary reform, but that was not the same thing as democratic reform. 

So the Reform Act of 1832 swept away many of the abuses of the old system – notably 143 rotten boroughs, which effectively allowed seats in the Commons to be bought – but it was not born out of zeal for any abstract principle of democracy. Rather, it was intended to make sure the Commons did its job of representing the country’s various interests and allowing the peaceful expression of grievances.

Many 19th-century Liberals had their doubts about democracy. John Stuart Mill, for instance, hedged his support for the democratic principle in his Representative Government with all sorts of conditions that would ensure educated opinion was well represented in any elected chamber. Among these conditions was the introduction of proportional representation to ensure that minority points of view were heard.

But other tendencies within the Liberal Party did not share these patrician fears, so no legislation to change the voting system appeared. Nor did it under Asquith, when the rise of the Labour Party and the consequent inevitably of three-cornered contests led Liberals to explore the virtues of the Alternative Vote.

Parry’s second chapter on Liberal history before 1914 deals with the development of the Liberal attitude towards the state. Gladstonian retrenchment had great appeal earlier in the 19th century when the party was busy attacking the corrupt old city corporations. When these were replaced by elected local councils, school boards and health boards, then the good that government, national and local, might do became of increasing interest to the party. The growth of the Empire also brought with it irresistible pressure for more spending.

The third of these chapters looks at Liberal moves towards a pluralist society, notably in religion, where the party became the champions of Nonconformists in their disputes with the power of the Established church and a supporter of Catholic emancipation, both in Britain and Ireland. Parry notes that support for Home Rule changed the social basis of the Liberal Party, with most of its members from the landowning classes becoming Liberal Unionists.

Parry’s final two chapters cover the Liberal Party’s long years in the wilderness as it tried to survive as a centre party in a two-party system – and that in an era when politics was principally about economics and the struggle between capital and Labour. There were interesting Liberal economic ideas – the party was putting forward Keynesian policies on the need for public works while Asquith was still leader, and Elliott Dodds’s advocacy of an idiosyncratic blend of Distributism and private enterprise was influential after World War II – but no single one that voters identified with the party.

The Alliance years are passed over quickly, which is surely fair, as social democracy never did cohere as a force or a philosophy outside the Labour Party. The two most prominent former SDP members of the new Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy and Robert Maclennan, were already pretty much Liberals by the time the parties merged.

Nor did The Orange Book have much discernible long-term effect on the party. Its reputation was always a triumph of marketing over content, as it wasn’t the bracing call for an end to “nanny state” interventionism its adherents sometimes pretended. The chapter on social policy was thoroughly Blairite, born from middle-class impatience with the lower orders and the way they brought up their children. If only they were better raised, the authors reasoned, there would be less need for public spending on them in later life and taxes could be cut.

And maybe we have always worried too much about economic policy. Today’s Liberal Democrats have little to say on the subject, but that didn’t stop us electing 72 MPs last year.

Finally. Parry looks at the agenda that the Liberal Democrats have made their own: devolution, civil rights and Europe. Much of it has been party policy since the Grimond years – our early support for British membership of the European Economic Community, in particular, was seen as proof of our farsightedness and proof that, despite all the humiliations of life as a third party, history was on our side. This, I think, explains the reluctance, noted by Parry, of Liberal Democrats to criticise the EU in the years before the referendum.

I enjoyed this breezy and unusually accurate history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats, but what I will remember most from Liberalism is Parry’s discussion of the relationship between a party’s philosophy and its practice.

There is a temptation – I have been guilty of this myself – to turn to works by John Stuart Mill or L.T. Hobhouse or Jo Grimond in search of an expression of Liberal philosophy that will tell us what the party should be saying today. But this is to put the philosophical cart before the horse of practice.

Parry has no truck with this view:

This book claims that Liberal leaders such as Lord John Russell, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown are better guides to political Liberalism than theoretical writers such as J.S. Mill or T.H. Green. It argues that politics has its own rationale, and that politicians take up bodies of ideas for specific purposes, rather than allowing works of theory to set their policy agendas for them.

This is surely right, as is his reminder that:

Hundreds of Victorian Liberal pundits made interesting and rich contributions to national political debate. We know much more about these than was once the case, so there is no longer any excuse for elevating Mill or Green into a small elite of Liberal “thinkers” who have had a transcendental impact on the party’s definition.

And when we do read the works of this elite, we are likely to misunderstand what they were about:

Liberal intellectuals such as Green, or later L.T. Hobhouse, described the aim of Liberalism as the socialisation of individuals into civil society without the intervention of a heavy-handed state that would suppress the energy and self-control that was the essence of their individuality. These writings sound more utopian and radical than they were. They were elegant ways of describing social arrangements that were increasingly visible in many towns by the end of the century.

And if that is not enough iconoclasm for you, here is Parry on Mill:

On Liberty was not intended as a political party bible but as a contribution to general educated discourse. It was also intended to be provocative. Mill knew that most Victorians would not agree with his underlying assumptions. Most educated Victorians did not see orthodox religion as a restrictive cultural force. On the contrary many of them viewed the issue of liberty through a religious lens. Individual responsibility was responsibility and accountability before God.

Again this is surely right. Gladstone, for one, certainly took this view of liberty.

I shall add Parry’s Liberalism to my shelf of very good short books alongside Bryan Magee’s ones on Karl Popper and Richard Wagner and James Hawes’s “shortest histories” of England and Germany.

Jonathan Calder

Lord Bonkers' Diary: My new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails

Beavers and badgers. Badgers and beavers. It's all getting very confusing. How far this pair are correct in blaming Hegel for the societal organisation of the beavers and the impenetrability of T.H. Green I shall leave the philosophers to debate. In any event, Lord Bonkers is on record as preferring his brother, T.H. White.

The King of the Badgers is a character in the Revd J.P. Martin's Uncle books, but the king who appears in the Bonkersverse - debating weighty matters underground - owes most to the badger in White's The Book of Merlyn. Let's hope Labour will reward his statesmanship by ending the badger cull.

Saturday

Feeling in need of a chinwag, I make my way to the royal chamber of the King of the Badgers, deep beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to mark the victory of Wallace Lawler in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election. 

I find him in low spirits. His strategy of fighting the cull of his people through the courts while reining in the hotheads among the younger badgers has come to nothing. He is now inclined to let the young idea, as it were, shoot. 

Soon we are talking of the beavers, and the King suggests their guild-like organisation comes from reading Hegel, whom we agree is fundamentally unsound and responsible for making T.H. Green’s writing Such Hard Work. 

The King then tells me of a legend among the badgers that the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle is so pronounced because it was originally built by beavers, who were later driven from their home by usurping aristocrats. I shall make good use of this story next time I find myself talking to my new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails: it has The Ring Of Truth.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent
• The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal
• Conservative members are now attacking their real enemy... each other

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "When they asked for something heavy I thought they meant T.H. Green"

I appear to have stolen the joke about a particular gentlemen's XI turning up a man short from Peter Tinniswood. In my experience, the key to being an original writer is to steal from a wide variety of authors. Alfred, for instance, long ago wandered in from A.A. Milne's Toad of Toad Hall.

Saturday

In any normal summer I would be away with my cricket XI taking on Plaid Cymru, Mebyon Kernow or the Gentlemen of Surrey (who often turn up at least one man short). As it is, I am stuck here at the Hall watching that splendid carthorse Alfred drag the roller across my own pitch. “When they asked for something heavy I thought they meant T.H. Green” he remarks morosely. 

As evening falls, I ask the local bats – I don’t mean batsmen but those little fellows with wings who squeak and hang upside down – if they have the inside track on the virus. The exchange proves something of a disappointment: despite a carefully tuned ear trumpet, I am unable to hear a word they say.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• "It's like a peach, dearie"
• The former has upped sticks to Seattle and the latter has fled to China
• Proper subjects such as Hard Sums
• I now resemble a beatnik
• A six pack of Smithson & Greaves

GUEST POST Why am I a Liberal Democrat?

Simon Beard explains, with help from Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Clarkson.

It seems to me that Liberals have a peculiar obsession with self-justification. Keynes first posed the question "Am I A Liberal?" (he was) in 1925, and many have asked it, or something like it, since.

Indeed, Bertrand Russel felt called to provide two justifications "why I am not a communist" and "why I am not a Christian", while even Margaret Thatcher's favourite Liberal Fredrick Hayek wanted to explain to his readers "why I am not a conservative".

This is hardly surprising. Liberals are, after all, in favour of the individual, while Liberalism is a social movement. We are not natural joiners we Liberals, and so many of us feel the desire to consider ourselves apart.

Yet still, we recognise that what we believe in is worth believing, and what we fight for is worth defending. I think this may be part of the reason why so many 'ordinary people' claim not to know what the Lib Dems 'really believe’. It is not that we do not believe in things; but we feel slightly awkward about it and would really rather discuss something else.

So why am I a Liberal?

First and foremost, I think I am a Burkean. Edmund Burke is often held up as the grandfather of British Conservatism, but that is a load of piffle. Burke was a radical of his day who fought against empire and privilege. He simply did not accept the justification being offered for the French revolution, and that meant he was disowned by other radicals of his day.

Burke's philosophy is not easy to encapsulate in a few words, but let me try. Burke believed in government by agreement and consent; he was a proponent of the social contract. However, in contrast with the doctrine of the time, he saw this agreement as not primarily between the rich and the poor, that would be manifestly unfair. Instead, he proposed a contract between the generations.

Each of us, in turn, takes the place of a dependent child, an independent adult and a supportive elder, and Burke thought that we should view society in this light. He also believed that what the social contract was fundamentally about was building and maintaining institutions that allowed people to get along. However, ultimately, these were only means to the end of a fully flourishing society. As he wrote:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

When the state takes it upon itself to disregard these institutions and reorganise society around one big idea (as the French revolutionaries tried to do) Burke believed that the social contract was violated and society would fall apart. Now, of course, we might make the same point about our stewardship of the environment, and I think Burke would have agreed.

Finally, Burke believed that when we engage in politics, we do so person to person, not thought to thought or idea to idea. Thus, we should choose MPs who we trust to act wisely, not those who would merely represent some pattern or ideal that we share.

Burke was not quite a Liberal in the modern sense of the term, but he certainly was never a Conservative. He was a passionate social humanist, and one of the most profound thinkers our country has produced.

To Burke, I owe my distrust of those (like Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn) who seek to remake our country according to their own designs and who view the institutions we have built up as mere obstacles to be overcome.

Secondly, I am a utilitarian. In my heart and soul what I most believe is that any policy, any choice, must be justified on the grounds that it will benefit the people affected by it, by making their lives fuller and better and contributing to their wellbeing.

However, I am a utilitarian of the school of John Stewart Mill, who saw so clearly that happiness could not be bought or sold or counted or controlled, but had to be cultivated. Our joy, he wrote, will 'come like the air that we breath', but only when we are liberated, supported and empowered, with good health, education, work, a nourishing environment, social connections and a flourishing culture.

I was part of the Federal Policy Committee on Wellbeing and Quality of Life, and one of the things I wanted to say in our report was that government has a huge role to play in supporting people's wellbeing, but that so often people's experiences of the state where that it made them unhappy, by forcing them into a social straitjacket or failing to deliver on its promises.

To the utilitarians, and especially to Mill, I owe my belief in an empowering and enabling state whose job it is to provide people with education, healthcare and financial support, but also to allow them to be who they most want to be. A state that cultivates everyone's garden, but allows their flowers to bloom as they will.

The Liberal Democrats are consistently the party who plan to give most direct support to the poorest in society - while the Conservatives choose to ignore them and Labour focus on implementing their grand schemes - that is as it should be.

Thirdly, I am a Georgist and a Social Liberal. Power, as well as wealth, is distributed incredibly unequally throughout our society, and in so far as we need reform, it should be primarily aimed at removing the blockages built up over centuries to preserve this status quo.

The philosophy and economics of this get terribly complicated; even I struggle with the level of cultishness that can surround them (and that's before we get to the School of Economic Science, an actual cult).

However, two key points are 1) that we pay far too little attention to the distribution of the ownership of land (nature) and its implications on how our society is structured and 2) that corporations are given the same, if not more, protection in how they act than ordinary people and are allowed to get away with massive corruption, even though are without emotions, social connections, family ties and love for humanity and the world around them.

This is not merely about redistribution; it is about calling out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that lie at the heart of government policy, making it serve the interest of a tiny fraction of the population. Every classical Liberal, from Smith to Mill, envisioned a market of free individuals trading fairly, while every new Liberal, from Green to Beveridge, understood that the distortions of land and corporate power meant this had never been realised.

Yet, somehow people still feel able to describe the deregulation of markets as if it made them freer, rather than more totally controlled by a few special interests.

To the New Liberals, I owe my support for the voices of the small, for small business against big business, for renters against landlords, and for communities against developers. I also owe them my commitment to introducing Land Value Taxation and stronger restrictions on corporations.

These things matter even more than redistributing money, yet they are routinely overlooked by other parties. I think this is also why I am so glad the UK still manages to maintain a third party of national significance and wish we would introduce an electoral system that did not reduce everything to a binary choice, because there is always another perspective on any argument and it needs to be heard.

Fourthly, I am a supporter of human rights. In that old Liberal phrase, I believe that everyone is created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, and I mean everyone and I mean inalienable. Asylum seekers, single mothers, convicted criminals, disabled people, even straight, white, older men, all have the same fundamental rights.

Among these are the right to exist, publicly and as themselves, to pursue their own lifestyle and to play as full a part as possible in society. We must give prisoners the vote; we must give asylum seekers a decent level of support; we must allow gang members to express themselves culturally; we must ensure that everyone can walk the streets safely at night and that people can have a reasonable expectation of being able to get away with making mistakes.

Why? Because we are all human, we are all persons, we fundamentally have more in common than what divides us. And at heart, as those who first codified human rights after the second world war realised, these rights are ultimately protections against the power of others, and in particular the power of the state.

Rights should always stand outside the law and hem it on all sides. From these thinkers, I take an instinctive horror of anyone who sets up groups in opposition to each other, or who adopt dehumanising language for anyone – be they terrorists or billionaires.

Finally, I am an internationalist. Of course, that means I believe in nations, in groups of people who share a culture, a social ideal and a way of life. The hard-straight lines of the state must always be made to bend around the people it claims to serve.

However, it also means I believe that the boundaries of nations and peoples are flexible and fluid and that we realise the best in ourselves when we are open, tolerant and diverse and when we work with others to form a closer international union.

I understand that for many, we need to stay in the EU for economic reasons, for its social and environmental protections, or for peace and security; and I value all these things. However, ultimately, I am with Jeremy Clarkson, of all people, who said:

Whether I'm sitting in a railway concourse in Brussels or pottering down the canals of southwestern France or hurtling along a motorway in Croatia, I feel way more at home than I do when I'm trying to get something to eat in Dallas or Sacramento. I love Europe, and to me that's important.

I love Europe too (though I also love America), and I love what it stands for. I love my village, and my county, and my nation, and my country but I also love that 28 countries have joined together and are trying to form something bigger than themselves. I cannot give up on loving that, and nobody has any right to tell me to do so. Our party cannot give up on loving it either, and that is why I love it too.

This recent election really got me down; not just because of the result (though that was terrible) but because of the way everything seemed to get lost in the question of who could win or who could stop Brexit.

Please Liberal Democrats, do not forget who you are and why you are like that. Do not give up on your history and values and fall into the lie that this was simply a numbers exercise in tactical voting.

We are Liberals, and we have every right and reason to be so. Jeremy Corbyn is not, nor is Nicola Sturgeon. That does not make them bad people, but when it comes to fundamental questions of politics, philosophy and economics, I think it makes them wrong and I feel perfectly justified in saying that!

Simon Beard has a PhD in philosophy and works at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He has twice stood as the Lib Dem candidate for Dartford and tweets @simon_beard.

The Wolves in the Forest: Tackling Inequality in the 21st Century

The current issue of Liberator carries my review of the Social Liberal Forum's new publication The Wolves in the Forest: Tackling Inequality in the 21st Century, which is edited by Paul Hindley and Gordon Lishman.

I won't post the whole review here, just enough of it to explain the splendid title:

David Howarth contributes the introduction here too. He begins by pointing out that it is 110 years since Lloyd George delivered his ’People’s Budget’: 

‘He described a time when “poverty and the wretchedness and human degradation that allows follows in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests”. The wolves of poverty, wretchedness, human degradation and inequality are still with us. Far from being remote to modern Britain their infestation of modern Britain is becoming more widespread.’

And my conclusion:

Keynes died 73 years ago and L.T. Hobhouse and T.H. Green make their obligatory appearances too. Liberal Democrats are either going to have more recent thinkers to be inspired by or do the intellectual heavy lifting themselves.  The Wolves in the Forest is a welcome sign that we may be prepared to do just that.

You can buy The Wolves in the Forest from the Social Liberal Forum website.

Happy birthday John Stuart Mill

Embed from Getty Images

Time to post a link to an old Liberator article of mine:

So read Rorty, Popper and Berlin. Read L.T. Hobhouse if you want and pretend to have read T.H.Green if you must. But above all read the Mill of On Liberty.

T.H. Green and local citizenship

The Liberal philosopher T.H. Green - Thomas Hill Green - is much cited by Liberal Democrats but, I suspect, little read.

In fact, as he flourished in the brief period when Idealist philosophy dominated British academia, I wonder what modern readers (Realists to a man and woman) make of him.

But Tom Hulme reports giving a paper on him that was well received:

The paper was about the lasting influence of ... Green (1836–1882) in the application of citizenship education, and the specifically local and urban articulation that this took. 

Despite the tendency for historians to view citizenship through the prism of the national or imperial, it was actually common for both children and adults to be taught that it was in the local, and the city especially, that the rights and responsibilities of citizenship were received and enacted. 

Using Green’s justification for state intervention to ensure individual liberty, educators argued that municipal government was the guardian of the life and health of individuals and communities—an educational approach they termed civics. 

These ideas were prominent in the organizations that provided civics in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the National Association of Local Government Officers and the Association for Education in Citizenship.

Popper: "The key Liberal philosopher of the past century"

I am pleased to see David Boyle picking up on the Karl Popper video I posted on Monday.

And I share his belief that Popper was "the key Liberal philosopher of the past century or so". Having written the entry on him in the Dictionary of Liberal Thought I have something of a proprietorial interest in the old boy. (Popper that is, not David Boyle.)

Certainly, Popper - and Isaiah Berlin - have far more to offer modern Liberals than to do L.T. Hobhouse or T.H. Green. I suspect those last two are more often mentioned than read. Anyone who has tried reading Green will know why.

And if you want a Liberal philosopher who speaks to our postmodern condition, try Richard Rorty.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to recommend two easy ways into Popper's philosophy (though his own works are notable for their readability).

The first is Bryan Magee's short book on Popper in the Fontana Modern Masters series, which I recommended the other day. This gives me the chance to repeat a remarkable discovery about Bryan Magee that I made a few years ago:

I knew from his Confessions of a Philosopher that Magee was evacuated to Market Harborough during the war. I now know - having bought his latest volume of memoirs Growing Up in a War - the he stayed with two families here. The first lived just around the corner from where I live now. The second lived just around the corner from where I lived as a schoolboy (and where my mother still lives). 

He even mentions the little carpet warehouse across the road from my mother's house. In 1940 it was a factory making parachutes. And he used to buy sweets in the same corner shop as me.

Since I wrote that the the warehouse has been demolished and the land used for housing.

The second is Roger James's 1980 book Return to Reason, which you can find on the web in its entirety.

His first paragraph describes its purpose:

This book is about departures from reason in the conduct of public affairs and the power of certain wrong ideas and unquestioned assumptions. In exploring this power I shall draw extensively on the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper and I shall show how the disregard of it has led to so much that has gone wrong in our time. Also, very tentatively, I suggest how ways out of some of our troubles might follow from attention to rational methods and Popper's neglected ideas.

Which leads us back to David Boyle's post.

Isaiah Berlin's pluralism

Philosophy Bites has a podcast of an interview with Henry Hardy about Isaiah Berlin and his theory of pluralism.

Berlin argued that the tragedy of the modern Liberal is that there is no guarantee that the values we cherish - notably freedom and equality - are mutually compatible. More than that, when those values conflict there is no formula that will tell us which value should trump the other,

I think Berlin is right, and no amount being told to read T.H. Green or L.T.Hobhouse by people who have not read those thinkers themselves, will convince me he is wrong.

Feet of clay: Beveridge, Keynes and eugenics

Jonathan Freedland has an article in the Guardian today looking at the attraction that eugenics held for left-wing politicians in the first half of the 20th century:

The Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their ilk were not attracted to eugenics because they briefly forgot their leftwing principles. The harder truth is that they were drawn to eugenics for what were then good, leftwing reasons. 

They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning, the Fabian faith that the gentlemen in Whitehall really did know best? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same for the production of babies?

All good Liberals will be aware of this tendency among the Fabians, but we cannot draw much comfort from Freedland's article. Because he also points out that two Liberal heroes were implicated in the eugenics movement too.

John Maynard Keynes was director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, and

William Beveridge, who argued that those with "general defects" should be denied not only the vote, but "civil freedom and fatherhood."

I did not know of Keynes' involvement in this movement, but my impression of Beveridge was that his views veered between individualism and collectivism over his career. Perhaps he had more sensible things to say too?

This may be overkind to Beveridge. Freedland links to an article that Dennis Sewell wrote for the Spectator in 2009. It shows that the words Freedland quotes date from 1909, but the he held similar views 30 years later:

On the evening that the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report, Beveridge himself went off to address an audience of eugenicists at the Mansion House. He knew he was in for a rough ride. His scheme of family allowances had originally been devised within the Eugenics Society with a graduated rate, which paid out more to middle-class parents and very little to the poor. The whole point was to combat the eugenicists’ great bugbear — the differential birth rate between the classes. However, the government that day had announced a uniform rate. Beveridge was sympathetic to the complaints of his audience and hinted that a multi-rate system might well be introduced at a later date.

So it seems that Beveridge was a convinced eugenicist throughout.

What moral do we draw from this?

Certainly not that Keynes and Beveridge are beyond the pale. We are never going to agree with everything an historical figure wrote and thought, and people can often be a mixture of the very good and very bad. Hilaire Belloc, for instance, was both a raving antisemite and a uniquely acute critic of the dangers inherent in corporatist society.

But I do think this little bit of intellectual history should remind us of a certain style of argument that is popular in the Liberal Democrats. Often difficult modern-day problems are dismissed simply by citing the name of a past hero.

Should we reform the social security system? Read Beveridge. Can we reconcile individual liberty and economic equality? Read L.T. Hobhouse and T.H. Green. Whatever shall we do about the economy? Read Keynes.

Liberal Left even wanted to drag Gladstone into it the other day. As I recently argued myself, this constant citing of long-dead figures makes our self-styled radicals oddly conservative in practice.

If you add to this a fondness for quoting the party constitution or party policy as a way of countering people who ask awkward questions, and we start to look like a church, complete with saints and sacred texts.

Let's remember that all heroes, even Liberal heroes, have feet of clay and be prepared to a little more thinking of our own.

The social liberalism and social democracy debate

On Saturday morning, before I caught the bus to Northampton, I wrote a brief post about that day's first Social Liberal Forum (SLF) conference. As well as wishing it well, I asked how social liberalism differed from a social democracy.

That post elicited a remarkable response, both in the comments and in posts on other blogs.

Some attempted to answer the question, but those answers varied widely. In the comments on the post Simon Titley assured me that social liberalism and social democracy are two very different things, as I need only read David Howarth’s chapter in Reinventing the State (a book I briefly reviewed when it came out) to discover.

Meanwhile on Twitter (I am never comfortable linking to tweets on this blog - it feels like telling tales out of school - but I suppose it is best to give a link if you are quoting someone directly), Evan Harris told me:

Well SLF = Social Democrats plus social justice minded liberals. no?

A question that can receive such different answers was probably worth asking.

The person who got the gently teasing tone of my post, and realised that it was my friends on the radical wing of the party who were being teased, was Decline of the Logos. But other replies took it far more seriously.

Evan Harris, again on Twitter, thought I was finding argument where none exists, when I wasn't aware that I was arguing at all.

Meanwhile James Graham devoted a whole, rather bad-tempered post, to replying to me:

the implication of Jonathan’s post is of course that social liberals are merely atavistic social democrats.

No, I was merely asking how they are different. And the implication is that the SLF would do well to devote a little time to making this clear.

There are good things in James post. His characterisation of people who:

tend to think that labelling something as “fundamentally illiberal” in thunderous tones tends to make a good substitute for actual argument

will be familiar to anyone who has spent much time in Liberal or Liberal Democrat circles.

However, though James declares himself dissatisfied by political labels, the SLF must have had its reason for adopting the "social liberal" label and it must be legitimate for others to ask what they were.

And I cannot decide whether James’s suggestion that we should call ourselves “socialist liberals” is a philosophical own goal or a very subtle joke.

So let me try to make my own position clear.

For as long as I can remember, radical Liberals and Liberal Democrats have, when asked, said that distinguishes their views (and often what distinguishes them from socialists in particular) is that they believe in something like freedom, localism, co-operation and individuality.

At the same time, they get very nervous when this philosophy threatens to lead them to positions that do not fall within what one may term the Guardian orthodoxy. This holds that political progress lies, not only in more and more spending on public services, but in more and more areas of our life falling under the stewardship of government.

To me there is a clear contradiction here, and it is not one that can be solved by making reference to long-unread theorists like T.H. Green or L.T. Hobhouse.

The work of developing this nebulous modern Liberal philosophy of freedom, localism, co-operation and individuality, and of showing that it will be of benefit to the poorer half of society, is daunting. But it seems to me that it is the task to which the philosophical labours of the Liberal Democrats should be directed.

Maybe the SLF will set itself to do this. I hope it will.

But when people are writing articles with titles like This is the Social Liberal moment, others are bound to want to know more about what this social liberalism is. And one good way of understanding a concept is to ask how it differs from other, similar concepts.

Let Lord Bonkers solve your problems

Lord Bonkers writes exclusively for Liberal England.

In shall me devoting my next Diary in Liberator to answering my readers' problems. You will be aware that I have unparalleled political experience, so whether you want to know the best way to write a Focus, to know what our policy should be on the Levant or to know what the dickens T.H.Green was on about, then I am your man.

Remember too that I have many friends and employees upon whom I may call. Meadowcroft can advise you on gardening, Nanny on health problems, the Reverend Hughes on spiritual matters and so forth.

I am afraid that I cannot enter into individual correspondence, but all your emails will be read - especially if they include a 5/- postal order. Please write to me at Bonkers Hall.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Richard Grayson says "Shut that door!"

Few now will remember him, but for a time there was no performer more popular than Richard Grayson. From Shut That Door! through Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement to The Generation Game he was appeared in an interrupted stream of hit shows.

His catchphrases were on everyone’s lips: “Look at the muck on ’ere,” “Seems like a nice boy “and (an acid comment on the quality of some Focus leaflets) “The things I’ve had through my letterbox.” Best of all were the hilarious characters he invented: Slack Alice, Apricot Lil, L.T. Hobhouse, Everard Farquharson, T.H. Green. How we laughed!

Today Grayson is Professor of Twentieth Century History at Goldsmiths, University of London. It is funny how things turn out.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• The Great Rutland Inflation of 1752

Richard Grayson on Mill, Hobhouse and T.H. Green

Because of Charles Kennedy's indolence as leader, Richard Grayson had a large say in the running of the party for many years. Which makes him a slightly unconvincing representative of the party's grassroots in today's front-page Observer report by Anushka Asthana and Allegra Stratton.

Richard Grayson has an article of his own on the Guardian website in which he complains:

all we hear from Nick Clegg is lots about John Stuart Mill. Rarely, if ever, is there talk of the Liberals cited by Ed Miliband, nor the originators of social liberalism such as LT Hobhouse or TH Green. A philosophy which seldom goes beyond Mill is firmly stuck in the 1850s, as if more than a century of social liberalism never happened.

The explanation for this can largely be found in an article on Mill that I wrote for Liberator in 2007:

It is fashionable to name check L.T. Hobhouse and T.H. Green, but I suspect that few who do so have really read their works. Hobhouse’s Liberalism is approachable, but hardly profound when set against Mill, while Green is next to unreadable. In part this is because Green’s heyday came during that brief period in the late nineteenth century when Idealism was the dominant force in British philosophy, and it is hard for we 21st-century realists to make much of him as a result. Equally, however, there was a tension in Green’s thought between his espousal of liberty and the enthusiasms, such as Temperance, which he derived from his religious views. The suspicion must be that he sometimes found it convenient to take refuge in obfuscation.

In short, Green is unreadable and Hobhouse is not that good. But I do strongly recommend Peter Clarke's Liberals and Social Democrats, which looks at the intellectual circles of which Hobhouse was a member.

I was also a little amused that Richard complains that Nick Clegg is stuck in the past, but can offer no alternative thinkers more recent than Hobhouse (who died in 1929) and Green (who died in 1882 ). I wonder what Professor Grayson would make of a student essay that presented these two as representatives of modernity?

In my Liberator article I did manage to mention more recent names: Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Richard Rorty (who had only just died when I wrote it). But what we really need are some current-day Liberal thinkers.

Why John Stuart Mill is the greatest Liberal

I was asked to review Reinventing the State for Liberator. The word limit was 1800 and I found that I could not to do it justice in that space.

So I decided to write something else instead, and this article on Mill was the result. You can find it in Liberator 321 - the issue that was on sale at Brighton.

A few days later Comment is Free offered to pay me to review Reinventing the State in 400 words. Magically, I found it was possible.

Grist to the Mill?

More than 200 years after his birth, John Stuart Mill remains the most important philosopher for Liberal Democrats. It is fashionable to name check L.T. Hobhouse and T.H. Green, but I suspect that few who do so have really read their works. Hobhouse’s Liberalism is approachable, but hardly profound when set against Mill, while Green is next to unreadable. In part this is because Green’s heyday came during that brief period in the late nineteenth century when Idealism was the dominant force in British philosophy, and it is hard for we 21st-century realists to make much of him as a result. Equally, however, there was a tension in Green’s thought between his espousal of liberty and the enthusiasms, such as Temperance, which he derived from his religious views. The suspicion must be that he sometimes found it convenient to take refuge in obfuscation.

The greatest 20th century liberal thinkers are Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, and both are splendidly lucid. It would be wrong to dismiss either as a Cold War philosopher, but the fact that (perhaps unwisely) we no longer feel the same urgent need to defend democracy against tyranny means that their work is not as compelling as it once was. More recently Richard Rorty made an attractive attempt to reconcile the most avant-garde postmodern theory with a defence of the institutions of the Western liberal democracies, but the Mill of On Liberty still reigns supreme.

Yet something strange has happened to the way we remember On Liberty. Reading the new collection Reinventing the State, for instance, I came across two references to the work, and from them one could be forgiven for thinking that Mill was chiefly concerned with delineating the ways in which liberty must be circumscribed.

Writing on liberal environmentalism, Ed Randall cites Mill’s harm principle. This holds that what individuals do, as long as it does not harm others, should go unregulated by the state. He then argues that our modern understanding of the effects of economic activity on the environment means that the boundaries of the area of life that can be left to individual decision must be drawn more tightly than Mill imagined, but he seems unsure as to whether to claim Mill’s blessing for this new interventionism or to dismiss him as naive.

It is true that there are good reasons for seeing Mill as an early advocate of environmental politics. In his Principles of Political Economy he looked forward to the coming of the "stationary state" - not to be confused with the stationery state, which would be a dictatorship run by manilla envelopes - where the expansion of the economy would cease. He wrote:

I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition. I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.

Yet we should remember that there are those in the green movement who never much liked liberty in the first place and are happy to seize upon anything which gives them a pretext for curbing it. In an earlier generation they would have been Marxists and preached the need for centralised planning as capitalism was bound to collapse through its internal contradictions.

A second author in Reinventing the State quotes John Stuart Mill. Writing of the tolerance that liberalism has inherited from its Nonconformist roots, David Boyle says:

It is a tolerance that believes people’s conscience, and therefore their freedom to act, is sacrosanct - limited as always by the philosophy of John Stuart Mill.

This is only a throwaway remark, and it comes from one of my favourite modern liberal writers, but it is odd to see Mill’s philosophy remembered for prescribing limits to liberty.

It seems we have become obsessed by Mill’s harm principle. Yet it is only a small part of On Liberty: the essence of that work is not concerned with curbing liberty at all but is a glorious hymn in favour of its expansion.

Writing in Prospect magazine last year, Richard Reeves put it well:

for Mill, liberty consists of much more than being left alone. It requires choice-making by the individual. "He who lets the world… choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation," he writes. "He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties." For Mill, a good life must be a chosen life.

Or as The Levellers said more recently: "There's only one way of life, and that's your own, your own, your own."

The other problem with the harm principle is that it is often not clear which decision it should lead us to in practice. We have already seen that Ed Randall thinks it can be extended to justify wider government intervention in the economy, and Reeves notes that Simon Jenkins appealed to it while arguing against a ban on smoking in public places and Chris Huhne appealed to it while arguing in favour of one.

So let’s set the harm principle aside and look at Mill’s arguments in favour of an expansion of liberty.

He first looks at liberty of thought and discussion, and offers two pragmatic arguments in favour of it. The first is that the opinion the authorities wish to suppress may be true, and that even if it is true only in part then its assertion and the subsequent debate will help move prevailing opinion nearer to the truth. Karl Popper made this insight the basis of his philosophy, arguing that the institutions of a free society and the growth of human knowledge are intimately connected.

Mill’s second argument is that a failure to examine and argue for the beliefs we hold can render them mere dogma and lead to their meaning becoming enfeebled or lost. This shows great practical insight. A large part of the reason that the Labour Party was never able to mount an effective challenge to Thatcherism was that in the 1970s it had become impossible in Labour circles to question the party’s programme without being called "anti working class" or "racist" or insulted in some other way. It was an early form of what we now lazily call political correctness. When the Conservatives directly challenged Labour’s views, the party’s members found it difficult to argue for them. Those views had become, in Mill’s eloquent language, "a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience".

In a similar vein, Nick Cohen has written:

When conservatives complain about the undoubted liberal bias of the BBC, they assume some kind of socialist plot when it is geography not ideology driving attitudes. A young middle-class BBC type in London is unlikely to meet anyone socially who is, say, against abortion or pro-war. Because they don't confront opposing ideas, they can't put themselves into the minds of people outside their consensus and ask questions from another point of view.

Mill then moves on to argue the need for individuality of character, with the emphasis on the freely chosen life that Reeves notes. Here the arguments are less pragmatic: for Mill, as they should be for all liberals, authenticity and autonomy are good in themselves:

If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical atmosphere and climate.

And in the third of the substantial theoretical chapters Mill looks at the collision between individuality and wider society. He looks in particular at questions around the sale of alcohol and is critical of those who seek to curb its sale because of the disorder it causes and the costs it imposes on the taxpayer. He accuses them of holding the view that

it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance.

As Mill says, "So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify."

You can see that behind the rolling Victorian prose, which it is so tempting to quote at length, lie very contemporary concerns. Mill’s suspicion of social rights can be taken far beyond questions of licensing laws and seen as a condemnation of Labour’s current authoritarianism.

There is another aspect of On Liberty which has contemporary resonance. We are inclined to think of the Victorian age as one of great confidence and perhaps the last in which it was possible to believe in "Great Men" in an uncomplicated fashion. Was it not an age of mighty public intellectuals - Ruskin, Carlyle, Mill himself - who have no equivalent today?

Yet if you read On Liberty, you find a very different tone. Mill is deeply pessimistic about the way the times were heading and feared the extinction of individuality altogether. He wrote of the tendency of public opinion in those times to prescribe a standard of conduct and expect every one to conform to it:

And that standard, express or tacit, is to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character is to be without any marked character; to main by compression, like a Chinese lady’s foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently, and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity.

The Victorians were a lot less "Victorian" than we moderns believe - they did not cover up piano legs out of a concern for decency and they were a lot more relaxed about male nudity, at least, than we are in the 21st century - but maybe Mill was right in that he was seeing the passing of the more relaxed Georgian era. It was, after all, Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, who said "This damned morality will be the death of us all."

And there is no doubt that Mill speaks to us today in a world of mass culture, chain stores and reality television when liberals are again tempted to be pessimistic about the prospects for individuality. So read Rorty, Popper and Berlin. Read L.T. Hobhouse if you want and pretend to have read T.H.Green if you must. But above all read the Mill of On Liberty. Then you will see how wrongheaded it is to plead his name in aid of attempts to curb our liberty. Mill’s is the most powerful voice ever raised in support of the expansion of liberty.