Category: Intellectuals & academics

The ideas of Liberal liberals

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

Nearly 30 years ago now I dropped out of a PhD exploring the communitarian critique of liberalism. My interest in liberalism continued through articles, chapters, book reviews and especially blog posts, but I never wrote anything major, original or influential. From the early 2010s my express ‘liberal’ output dropped further as higher education policy took over my life.

All of this is background to my surprise at being included in The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Party: Intellectuals and the Liberal Party of Australia, a study of six politically engaged liberal/Liberal intellectuals – Peter Coleman, David Kemp, Greg Melleuish, Margaret Fitzherbert, Louise Asher and myself. Along with Melleuish, I was never an MP, but I had several advisory stints with Liberal governments. I was on the winning side in some internal discussions but ultimately failed to achieve my policy objectives.

Geoffrey Robinson, author of The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Party, is an academic at Deakin University. His book is old-school academic work – and I mean that in a positive way, that an academic’s first priority should be to understand their subject matter, not to denounce or to advocate. For someone whose previous book was called Being Left-wing in Australia he shows restraint.

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Robert Manne’s political memoir (and how he played a minor part in my career)

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In the break-up of Australia’s anti-communist political alliance, in the early 1990s after the end of European communism, Robert Manne and I took different political paths. But I still followed his work, with on one occasion significant benefits for my own career. When his ‘political memoir’ was published it went immediately onto my must- read list.

Early life

For me, the first quarter of Manne’s book – on his early life and education – was the most interesting part. His parents were Jewish refugees from Nazism just prior to WW2; his grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. Robert was born in Melbourne in 1947. As Manne says, his family history made him ‘naturally sympathetic’ to refugees.

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Milton Friedman: The last conservative or the first welfare state classical liberal?

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When Milton Friedman died in 2006 I wrote a blog post crediting him as an ‘enormous influence on my life’. I said back then that although few people call themselves ‘Friedmanites’, for many – including me – his writings guided us to a broader set of arguments and influences. Despite the subtitle Jennifer Burns gives her biography of Friedman -‘the last conservative’ – these were mostly ideas in the classical liberal tradition.

Classifying Friedman

Burns acknowledges that Friedman described himself as a classical liberal. But in the United States ‘liberals’ are the rough equivalent of social democrats or progressives in other countries. Tribally, Friedman was not one of them. His US partisan leanings were Republican, he was sceptical of ‘big government’, and he sometimes associated with people progressives hate.

If Friedman is a ‘conservative’, the word ‘last’ is doing a lot of work. It refers back to the post-WW2 synthesis of relative conservatism in social matters, private enterprise/free market economics and anti-communism adopted by ‘conservative’ political parties. Friedman more than anyone else turned the private enterprise part of this synthesis into a free market perspective. This combination of views still exists, but has faded as a political force. In the 2010s and 2020s populist figures like Donald Trump captured American ‘conservatism’.

For a non-American audience it is simpler to keep Friedman’s ideological classification as ‘classical liberal’.

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Mill’s On Liberty after 150 years

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This article was originally published in the winter 2009 issue of Policy.

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John Stuart Mill is the only nineteenth century liberal intellectual still widely read and discussed in the twenty-first century, thanks mainly to his book On Liberty, published 150 years ago. In his time, several of Mill’s books were influential, particularly his Principles of Political Economy, but it is On Liberty that has lasted. It has been continuously in print since 1859.

On Liberty’s longevity makes it the most-read classic of the liberal canon. It retains an audience because the dilemmas Mill writes about— especially over when to regulate speech and behaviour that lacks clear harm to others—are nineteenth-century versions of issues that remain controversial today. Mill speaks to the present as well as the past. Quotations from him still appear regularly in the world’s English-speaking media; his ideas proving useful and his name adding weight to arguments made more than 130 years after he died.

Despite the book’s enduring popularity and influence, On Liberty is not undisputed as a liberal sacred text. Liberals as well as conservatives contest its arguments. Mill was a utilitarian, favouring those policies likely to produce the greatest happiness. Liberals in the natural or human rights traditions see utilitarianism as an insecure foundation for freedom, fearing that it justifies sacrificing the freedoms of some for the benefit of the many (anti-terror laws, for example). In On Liberty, Mill needs sometimes complicated arguments to move from utilitarian premises to liberal conclusions. Classical liberals—their adjective a response to the then new ‘social’ liberalism Mill helped usher in— question the priority Mill gave to ‘individuality’ over other forms of life, and his critique of the role of custom in social life.

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Donald Horne’s life in the lucky country (some comments on Ryan Cropp’s Horne biography)

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Donald Horne’s Death of the Lucky Country, his attack on the dismissal of the Whitlam government, its title an allusion to Horne’s 1964 bestseller, was the first ever adult non-fiction book I owned. I have a vague memory of pestering my mother to buy it for me, the $1.50 price tag (still on the back of my copy) being beyond my budget at age ten.

I don’t remember exactly why I wanted Horne’s book; as a very young Liberal I was happy to see the Whitlam government gone. But recently reading Ryan Cropp’s excellent Horne biography, A Life in the Lucky Country, I can see why Horne appealed to my developing interests. He was a ‘public intellectual’ – the quotation marks because this term and perhaps role has faded – someone who bridged the world of ideas and general audiences. Horne’s books — he was as Cropp notes a prolific author – were always easy to read and, thanks to the secondhand bookshops that once existed in large numbers, usually affordable without parental financial assistance.

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Socialism defeated but liberalism not triumphant (on David Kemp’s A Liberal State: How Australians Chose Liberalism over Socialism 1926–1966)

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The first three volumes of David Kemp’s Australian political history told the story of Australian liberalism’s rise and fall between 1788 and 1925. In a global comparative sense Australia remained a liberal democracy in 1925, but ‘policy change by erosion’ (to use a Kemp phrase from another context) was undermining its liberal characteristics.

From a contemporary liberal perspective, Kemp’s third volume showed that key policy erosions such as the White Australia policy, protectionism and industrial arbitration came from governments that were broadly on the liberal side of the then dominant ideological conflicts. The increasing influence of socialist ideas, the growth of trade unions, and Labor Party electoral successes all threatened a more radical abandonment of liberal ideas and institutions.

This fourth volume in Kemp’s series, covering the decades from 1926 to 1966, is sub-titled ‘How Australians chose liberalism over socialism’. By 1966 the socialist threat to Australian liberalism, which began in the late 19th century and peaked in the 1930s and 1940s, had been defeated. But this was not a foregone conclusion. A Liberal State tells the story of how the semi-liberal order of 1925 survived the challenges it faced over the next 40 years.

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John Gray gives up on finding universal foundations for liberalism (my 1990 review of Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy)

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I think this might be the first book review I had published outside of student magazines. It appeared in the May 1990 issue of Quadrant. Stylistically I have evolved – fewer adverbs now and more care to avoid cliches (‘rests on his laurels’), archaic words (‘hitherto’) and the universal male (‘open to man’). But intellectually I still share the views of my young self, believing in liberal societies without thinking that liberalism can be derived from a single foundational principle or that liberalism suits all countries.

Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy, by John Gray; Routledge, London, 1989.

Over the last decade and a half John Gray, an Oxford academic, has been one of the most stimulating liberal theorists. Writing with great intellectual energy, he has produced influential books on John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, a text entitled simply Liberalism for the Open University in England, which articulates the basic ideas of the philosophy with remarkable clarity and brevity, and numerous articles on liberal thinkers and topics, many of which are collected in the volume under review.

One reason that Gray is of interest is that he never rests on his laurels. As this book’s essays (which are collected in the order of their original publication) show, he has continually revised his ideas as to which arguments constitute the most plausible foundations for  the liberal philosophy.

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Two answers to the question ‘What is liberalism?’

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Edwin van de Haar’s Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology and Michael Freeden’s Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction both set out to answer the question ‘What is liberalism?’ They share a methodology for reaching a conclusion. But they leave readers with quite different impressions of contemporary liberal thought.

In classifying political beliefs, both books use Michael Freeden’s work on ideology. Borrowing a term from linguistics, Freeden argues that ideologies have ‘morphologies’. By this he means that ideologies share common clusters of concepts. These concepts can vary in their meaning and weight, but similar cluster content puts intellectuals, activists and parties into the same ideology. Peripheral or adjacent concepts can exist alongside the base cluster of concepts.

For Freeden, liberalism’s conceptual core consists of liberty, rationality, individuality, progress, sociability, the general interest and limited and accountable power. Edwin van de Haar doesn’t list his core liberal concepts in a way clearly intended to be comprehensive, but on my reading it includes freedom, individualism, tolerance, classical natural rights, belief in spontaneous order, a realistic view of human nature, constitutionalism, and limited government.

These lists contain ideas that serve different purposes within an ideology. Some – liberty, tolerance, constitutionalism, limited government, individuality and the institutions of spontaneous order – are liberalism’s political agenda. Other concepts are assumptions or theories about people and social organisation, such as rationality, sociability, and the feasibility of spontaneous order. Others still provide high-level normative justifications for liberalism: the value of individuality, progress, the general interest, and natural rights.

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The rise of liberalism in colonial Australia (a review of the first volume of David Kemp’s history of Australian liberalism)

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(A shorter version of this review, omitting discussion of how the American experience influenced Australian politics to the mid-19th century, is cross-posted at Goodreads.)

This book is the first in David Kemp’s five-volume history of liberalism in Australia. The series, three volumes out to date, will cover 1788 to 2019. This first book takes us from European settlement in 1788 to 1860, when the colonies had achieved a substantial level of democratic self-government. It is principally a political history with special reference to liberalism; it focuses on major players and their involvement in big debates and events, not on the philosophical views of long-forgotten writers and activists.

To disclose my biases, I have known David Kemp for decades, including working for and with him, and share his interest in and concern for the Australian liberal tradition, with its ups and downs over 200 or so years in Australia. Some years ago I read a manuscript that turned into the first two volumes of this series.

In 1788, when British settlers arrived in the place that became Sydney, there was not yet such a thing as liberalism. The period covered by this first volume is the early decades of both Australia (that name is post-1788 too, but for convenience I’ll use it for the colonies collectively) and liberalism.

Although 1788 was before liberalism, many of the institutions and ideas that were later joined under the label ‘liberal’ were forming. Liberalism came in part from the creative linking between and expansion of existing ideas, institutions and issues.

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Assorted links and comments

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

The first poll on the flood levy finds opinion heavily polarised on partisan lines, but overall against, 53% disapproving to 39% approving.

A different question on the same poll finds that 64% of respondents believe that universities would be better run by the public sector and 20% believe universities would be better run by the private sector. This dichotomy does not include the public-private hybrid nature of Australian universities as an option.

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In the context of the fascinating events in Egypt, Tyler Cowen reminds us of an outstanding book on public opinion, Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies. In authoritarian regimes people conceal their true political views, but new dynamics can take over in which more and more people are emboldened to express their opinions. With no real support, in these circumstances regimes can crumble quickly when they lose the will to kill.

An interesting post on the signalling dynamics of cutting communications.

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