Liberty

Question 1

Who are humanity’s sovereign master’s according to Bentham?

Answer 1

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”

Question 2

What is the effect of pleasure and pain?

Answer 2

“They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.” (Bentham)

Question 3

What was the society of the ancients like according the Constant?

Answer 3

“The priests enjoyed unlimited power. The military class or nobility had markedly insolent and oppressive privileges; the people had no rights and no safeguards.”

Question 4

What was liberty like for the ancients?

Answer 4

“The people, however, exercised a large part of the political rights directly. They met to vote on the laws and to judge the patricians against whom charges had been levelled: thus there were, in Rome, only feeble traces of a representative system. This system is a discovery of the moderns” (Constant)

Question 5

What is the liberty of the moderns?

Answer 5

“the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practise it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings.” (Constant)

Question 6

What was the liberty of the ancients?

Answer 6

“exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgements; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them.” (Constant)

Question 7

What was the impact of ancient liberty on the individual?

Answer 7

“complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community. You find among them almost none of the enjoyments which we have just seen form part of the liberty of the modems. All private actions were submitted to a severe surveillance. No importance was given to individual independence, neither in relation to opinions, nor to labour, nor, above all, to religion.” (Constant)

Question 8

What was the individual in public and private in the ancient world?

Answer 8

“Thus among the ancients the individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations.” (Constant)

Question 9

How do the moderns use their public freedoms?

Answer 9

“His sovereignty is restricted and almost always suspended. If, at fixed and rare intervals, in which he is again surrounded by precautions and obstacles, he exercises this sovereignty, it is always only to renounce it.” (Constant)

Question 10

What did the ancients not have?

Answer 10

A “notion of individual rights” (Constant)

Question 11

What is the relationship between commerce and war for Constant?

Answer 11

“War and commerce are only two different means of achieving the same end, that of getting what one wants.”

Question 12

What is the first cause of the different sorts of liberty?

Answer 12

The size of a country and the number of its inhabitants - “The most obscure republican of Sparta or Rome had power. The same is not true of the simple citizen of Britain or of the United States.” (Constant)

Question 13

What allowed ancients to participate in their liberty and has been lost to the moderns?

Answer 13

“the abolition of slavery has deprived the free population of all the leisure which resulted from the fact that slaves took care of most of the work. Without the slave population of Athens, 20,000 Athenians could never have spent every day at the public square in discussions.” (Constant)

Question 14

What effect does commerce have on modern liberty?

Answer 14

It keeps people preoccupied and fills their time instead of exercising political freedom like the moderns.

Question 15

What does commerce give to moderns that it did not to Ancients?

Answer 15

“Finally, commerce inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence. Commerce supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without the intervention of the authorities.” (Constant)

Question 16

What are the reasons why ancient liberty cannot exist in modern times?

Answer 16

Large populations
No slaves
Commerce - which takes up time and provide people with what they need

Question 17

How does Constant describe individuals in modern times percieving political rights in contrast to the ancients?

Answer 17

“Lost in the multitude, the individual can almost never perceive the influence he exercises. Never does his will impress itself upon the whole; nothing confirms in his eyes his own cooperation. “

Question 18

What do the moderns cherish more than the ancients now?

Answer 18

“It follows that we must be far more attached than the ancients to our individual independence. For the ancients when they sacrificed that independence to their political rights, sacrificed less to obtain more; while in making the same sacrifice, we would give more to obtain less.”

Question 19

What do the ancients and moderns call liberty?

Answer 19

“The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the modems is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.”

Question 20

What is the first need of the moderns and that cannot be sacrificed?

Answer 20

“Individual independence is the first need of the moderns: consequently one must never require from them any sacrifices to establish political liberty.”

Question 21

What do modern men wish for according to Constant?

Answer 21

“We are modem men, who wish each to enjoy our own rights, each to develop our own faculties as we like best, without harming anyone”

Question 22

What do moderns need from the state?

Answer 22

“needing the authorities only to give us the general means of instruction which they can supply, as travellers accept from them the main roads without being told by them which route to take.” (Constant)

Question 23

Whatis the true modern liberty according to Constant and what is its guarantee?

Answer 23

“Individual liberty, I repeat, is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable.”

Question 24

What are the other names for modern and anicent liberty?

Answer 24

Civil and political liberty

Question 25

What sort of political (ancient) liberty do moderns possess?

Answer 25

“We still possess today the rights we have always had, those eternal rights to assent to the laws, to deliberate on our interests, to be an integral part of the social body of which we are members.” (Constant)

Question 26

Has modern liberty replaced and eradicated ancient liberty?

Answer 26

No, ancient liberty has changed?

Question 27

What is needed to protect modern liberty according to Constant?

Answer 27

“Hence, Sirs, the need for the representative system. The representative system is nothing but an organization by means of which a nation charges a few individuals to do what it cannot or does not wish to do herself. Poor men look after their own business; rich men hire stewards.” This is the history of ancient and modem nations.”

Question 28

What does the representative system allow modern individuals to do?

Answer 28

“in order to enjoy the liberty which suits them, resort to the representative system, must exercise an active and constant surveillance over their representatives, and reserve for themselves, at times which should not be separated by too lengthy intervals, the right to discard them if they betray their trust, and to revoke the powers which they might have abused.”

Question 29

So do moderns have any sort of anicent liberty according to Constant?

Answer 29

Yes, the representatative system is a new types of ancient and political liberty, but it is used to protect the true sort of liberty - that of the individual

Question 30

What is the dangers of the two types of liberty?

Answer 30

“The danger of ancient liberty was that men, exclusively concerned with securing their share of social power, might attach too little value to individual rights and enjoyments. The danger of modem liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.”

Question 31

Constant

Answer 31

“And where should we find guarantees, without political liberty? To renounce it, Gentlemen, would be a folly like that of a man who, because he only lives on the first floor, does not care if that house itself is built on sand.”

Question 32

What does Constant call for?

Answer 32

“Therefore, Sirs, far from renouncing either of the two sorts of freedom which I have described to you, it is necessary, as I have shown, to learn to combine the two together.”

Question 33

How did conception of liberty in britain change?

Answer 33

“This chapter is devoted to British liberalism in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These years have commonly been viewed as an era of transition. Mid-Victorian liberalism has been widely seen as individualistic, and suspicious of state intervention. The close of the century, however, saw the emergence of a new liberalism, which departed from the earlier individualism, and advocated an enhanced role for state action.” (Thompson)

Question 34

What did human nature desire for Mill?

Answer 34

“He argued in The Subjection of Women that, after material necessities, ‘freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature’, and that social duty and freedom were mutually reinforcing in civilised communities which embraced ‘the liberty of each to govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and social restraints as his own conscience can subscribe to’ “ (Thompson)

Question 35

What liberal view resonated in Victorian britain?

Answer 35

“Mill’s view that political participation and the freedom to pursue one’s own ends were parts of a whole resonated widely in mid-Victorian Britain. Rooted in radical accounts of aristocratic power and the value of ‘independence’, popular liberalism in the 1860s and 1870s attributed great importance both to widespread involvement in politics, not least through the suffrage, and to reducing the scope of the feudal state. The former was regarded as essential to achieving the latter.” (Thompson)

Question 36

How was voting seen by liberal in the nineteenth century?

Answer 36

“Millian links were made between liberty and the vote. Radicals such as G. J. Holyoake connected freedom with assent, whether direct or indirect, to the laws and compared the voteless to slaves “ (Thompson)

Question 37

How did freedom come to be defined in the nineteenth century?

Answer 37

“Green’s championing of real freedom led him to insist that ‘when we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying’. It is this stress upon freedom as dependent upon a positive power to act that was most significant in late nineteenth-century debates.” (Thompson)

Question 38

What was central to the new liberal arguements of the nineteenth century?

Answer 38

“In his introduction to Samuel’s restatement of liberal principles of 1902, Herbert Asquith argued that freedom ‘in its true meaning’ could not be confined to the removal of constraints, as ‘the true significance of Liberty’ lay in enabling individuals ‘to make the best use of faculty, opportunity, energy, life’. This realisation, he suggested, was apparent in liberalism’s new emphasis upon ‘education, temperance, better dwellings, an improved social and industrial environment’. The claim that social reform extended opportunity, and thus increased freedom, was central to new liberal argument.” (Thompson)

Question 39

What role did Mill see for the state in freedom?

Answer 39

“Mill was concerned in particular to demonstrate the range of state action that was non-coercive. He noted the role that government could play in fostering rather than dictating outcomes, not least by the provision of information.” (Thompson)

Question 40

What did changing notions of liberty lead to in the nineteenth century?

Answer 40

“The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a protracted discussion amongst liberals about representative government. The scope of the franchise, the role of the second chamber and the relationship between parties, representatives and voters were keenly contested. Debate was accompanied by and contributed to significant changes in the boundaries of the franchise, the powers of the House of Lords and the relationship between executive and legislature.” (Thompson)

Question 41

What was the public opinion seen as in nineteenth century liberal debates?

Answer 41

“Political notions of ‘public opinion’ rarely treated the public as synonymous with the population as a whole. The ranks of the political public were often defined, as by Mill in 1848, in terms of reading and debate. This intellectualist way of conceiving of the public was apparent in mid-century discussion of the intelligent artisan, and inflected later debate about women and the suffrage. These portraits of the public often placed, in Aristotelian fashion, middle-class male opinions at its core. “ (Thompson)

Question 42

Why did women not need the vote according to Dicey?

Answer 42

“More interestingly, some anti-suffragists, such as Dicey, argued that since women already contributed to the formation of public opinion, they had no need for the vote” (Thompson)

Question 43

What was the fourth component of the english constitution?

Answer 43

“There was broad acceptance amongst liberals of the claim that ‘public opinion’ was the fourth component of the constitution.” (Thompson)

Question 44

What did some liberals call for in nineteenth century britain in order to allow people to be a part of the community?

Answer 44

“Some new liberals, including Hobson and Hobhouse, defended the right to a minimum income, which while building on the established notion of a right to life, defined the living wage in terms of the ability to participate fully in the life of the community” (Thompson)

Question 45

When were ancient and modern civilisations?

Answer 45

“Ancient civilization and culture (both Sismondi and his translator used the two words interchangeably) began with the Greeks. Modern civilization and culture, on the other hand, began with the combined legacies of both the Romans and the Germans.” (Michael Sonenscher)

Question 46

What did modern and ancient liberty aim at according to Sismondi?

Answer 46

““The liberty of the ancients, like their philosophy,” Sismondi wrote at the end of the final volume of his History, “had virtue as its goal. The liberty of the moderns, like their philosophy, proposes no more than well-being (bonheur).” As the pronouncement implied, the obvious inference was to combine the two. This, Sismondi continued, was why “the legislator should no longer lose sight of the security of the citizen and those guarantees that the moderns have made into a system. But he should also remember that it is important to find ways to promote citizens’ greater moral development.”” (Sonenscher)

Question 47

How does Michael Sonenscher describe ancient and modern liberty?

Answer 47

“Ancient liberty subordinated the private to the public and set the concerns of the citizen above those of the individual. Modern liberty did the opposite, subordinating the public to the private and promoting the concerns of the individual above those of the citizen.”

Question 48

What did Constant and Sismondi and Constant seek to do according to Sonenscher?

Answer 48

“As with Sismondi, the point of the lecture was to call for a new synthesis of the two types of liberty so that private liberty would be complemented by public liberty, while the freedom of the individual would be matched by the freedom of the citizen. Although the point has sometimes been missed, liberty on Constant’s terms was, therefore, a synthesis of both the ancient and the modern.”

Question 49

What was central to nineteenth century political thought on liberty?

Answer 49

“the question of how the idea of self-development could be connected to a form of freedom that was a synthesis of ancient and modern liberty, were central components of nineteenth-century moral, philosophical, and political thought” (Sonenscher)

Question 50

How was ancient and modern liberty to be combined for Constant and Sismondi?

Answer 50

“Today, it is usual to associate both the subject and the concept of the division of labour with Adam Smith, productivity, and the history of economic thought. For both Sismondi and Constant, however, it was equally possible to associate the idea with the concept of perfectionnement because the idea of the division of labour could refer as much to the development of individual talents and abilities as to the increase of manufacturing capability and economic productivity.” (Sonenscher)

Question 51

How did Proudhon link liberty to labour?

Answer 51

““Negative liberty, whether simple or physical, he [meaning Fourier] said, is the lot of the poor or someone with a very small revenue, meaning the strictly necessary or a military ration. Someone in this condition could have a very active physical liberty because he is not forced to go to work as is the case with a worker deprived of all revenue. He is, for example free to go to the opera, but to get in to the opera you have to have money and so he will have to stand at the opera door. For all his pride in the fact that he is a free man, he has no more than a mirage of social liberty. He is no more than a passive member of society.”” (Sonenscher)

Question 52

Was it enough for people to be negatively free for thinkers in the nineteenth century?

Answer 52

“in 1831, the German Catholic Franz Baader argued that both types of liberty were prerequisites of the combination of centralization and decentralization that he hoped would be established in France after the revolution of July 1830. “It is not enough,” he wrote, “if two citizens are negatively free in relation to one another, or if their spheres of activity do not collide and they do not prevent one another from existing or acting. It is also necessary that they mutually help and serve one another to support one another and reach an emancipated existence.”” (Sonenscher)

Question 53

What did representation do to political liberty?

Answer 53

“Representation, seen like this, took political liberty out of political society, leaving no more than civil liberty.” (Sonenscher)

Question 54

What does the principle of utility do?

Answer 54

“The principle of utility recognises this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law.” (Bentham)

Question 55

What is the purpose of legislation for Bentham?

Answer 55

“It has been shown that the happiness of the individuals, of whom a community is composed, that is their pleasures and their security, is the end and the sole end which the legislator ought to have in view: the sole standard, in conformity to which each individual ought, as far as depends upon the legislator, to be made to fashion his behaviour.” (Bentham)

Question 56

What are ethics for Bentham?

Answer 56

“Ethics at large may be defined, the art of directing men’s actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness, on the part of those whose interest is in view. “

Question 57

What are private ethics for Bentham?

Answer 57

“Ethics, in as far as it is the art of directing a man’s own actions, may be styled the art of self-government, or private ethics”

Question 58

What is government for Bentham?

Answer 58

“As to other human beings, the art of directing their actions to the above end is what we mean, or at least the only thing which, upon the principle of utility, we ought to mean, by the art of government: which, in as far as the measures it displays itself in are of a permanent nature, is generally distinguished by the name of legislation”

Question 59

What is the link between private ethics and legislation for Bentham?

Answer 59

“Now private ethics has happiness for its end: and legislation can have no other. Private ethics concerns every member, that is, the happiness and the actions of every member of any community that can be proposed; and legislation can concern no more. Thus far, then, private ethics and the art of legislation go hand in hand. The end they have, or ought to have, in view, is of the same nature. The persons whose happiness they ought to have in view, as also the persons whose conduct they ought to be occupied in directing, are precisely the same”

Question 60

What is prudence for Bentham?

Answer 60

“Ethics then, in as far as it is the art of directing a man’s actions in this respect, may be termed the art of discharging one’s duty to one’s self: and the quality which a man manifests by the discharge of this branch of duty (if duty it is to be called) is that of prudence”

Question 61

Where is legislation not needed generally for Bentham?

Answer 61

“Of the rules of moral duty, those which seem to stand least in need of the assistance of legislation, are the rules of prudence. It can only be through some defect on the part of the understanding, if a man be ever deficient in point of duty to himself.”

Question 62

What is the limit of legislation for Bentham?

Answer 62

“It is plain, that of individuals the legislator can know nothing: concerning those points of conduct which depend upon the particular circumstances of each individual, it is plain, therefore, that he can determine nothing to advantage. It is only with respect to those broad lines of conduct in which all persons, or very large and permanent descriptions of persons, may be in a way to engage, that he can have any pretence for interfering; and even here the propriety of his interference will, in most instances, lie very open to dispute. At any rate, he must never expect to produce a perfect compliance by the mere force of the sanction of which he is himself the author.”

Question 63

What doe private athics and legislation teach?

Answer 63

“Private ethics teaches how each man may dispose himself to pursue the course most conducive to his own happiness, by means of such motives as offer of themselves: the art of legislation (which may be considered as one branch of the science of jurisprudence) teaches how a multitude of men, composing a community, may be disposed to pursue that course which upon the whole is the most conducive to the happiness of the whole community, by means of motives to be applied by the legislator.” (Bentham)

Question 64

What is the community and what are its interests for Bentham?

Answer 64

“The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what?—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. “

Question 65

Whose interests must you understand to understand the community’s interests?

Answer 65

“It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.” (Bentham)

Question 66

When should an action be done for Bentham?

Answer 66

“Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility, one may always say either that it is one that ought to be done, or at least that it is not one that ought not to be done”

Question 67

Do people tend to conform to the principle of utility?

Answer 67

“By the natural constitution of the human frame, on most occasions of their lives men in general embrace this principle, without thinking of it” (Bentham)

Question 68

What is at the heart of liberty?

Answer 68

“Thus, the fundamental or root concept of liberalism is equality, and its commitment to liberty springs from that” (Larry Siedentop)

Question 69

What is the other sort of liberty opposed to civil liberty?

Answer 69

“But civil liberty does not exhaust the meaning of liberty in the context of the modern state. The idea of ‘political liberty’ is necessary to identify the forms of participation which might be available to individuals to influence the law- or rule-making process in a society. A society in which the idea of rights was associated above all with personal will, with the ability to enforce commands and resist encroachments, was unlikely to conceive of liberty as essentially involving the right and duty to take part in the formulation of rules which would then bind all.” (Siedentop)

Question 70

Why did Constant oppose Rousseau?

Answer 70

“Benjamin Constant protested against Rousseau’s strategy by making his famous contrast between ancient and modern liberty; the implication of his argument was that in modern society ‘participation’ would have to be reconciled with respect for civil liberties” (Siedentop)

Question 71

What did Constant emphasise?

Answer 71

“Constant and other French liberals insisted that emphasis on participation and civic duty should not jeopardize a sphere of fundamental individual rights against the group or the state. Only by recognizing such rights was ‘virtue’ in a modern, individualist sense promoted; to emphasize participation or political liberty on the ancient model to the exclusion of individual freedom or choice was to hold up a concept of virtue which belonged to a totally different type of society – a society in which virtue consisted in solidarity or submergence in the group” (Siedentop)

Question 72

What were free moeurs?

Answer 72

“Free mœurs were understood to be a set of attitudes and habits fostered in individuals when civil liberty and political liberty or participation were joined together in a society, each reinforcing the other. The concept was used especially by Mme de Staël and Tocqueville. By free mœurs they meant a sense of personal capacity, which promoted both self-reliance and the habit of free association, and thus moulded all social relations. Free mœurs created an active citizenry attached to local freedom and joined together in numerous voluntary associations – the only real safeguard against excessive centralization, which, in turn, destroys free mœurs” (Siedentop)

Question 73

What would a reconciling of both political and civil liberty lead to?

Answer 73

“The second advantage expected from the development of local freedom was an enhanced sense of individual independence from the state. That is, the exercise of political rights and participation in government would make people more aware of their civil rights and increase their determination to defend them against both administrative abuse and legislative encroachment. Indeed, participation (in a context of civil liberty) would be likely to lead to calls for new rights, for the extension of civil liberty”

“Greater participation in government would be a more effective motor of the growth of civil liberty”
(Siedentop)

Question 74

What three types of liberalism developed after the french revolution?

Answer 74

“These consisted of, first, an elitist form of liberalism, headed by François Guizot, Pierre Paul Royer-Collard and the ‘Doctrinaires’, which favoured the power of the state; second, a constitutionalist and individualist liberalism, whose most prominent proponents included Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (commonly known as Mme de Staël), Benjamin Constant and the Coppet group; and, finally, a liberal Catholicism, guided by the likes of Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais and Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, that was both founded on tradition (that of the church) “ (Lucien Jaume )

Question 75

How was the state viewed before the french revolution?

Answer 75

“Ever since the kings had progressively constructed the nation through a series of measures directed against feudalism, the state was almost unanimously perceived as the guardian of the general interest, and therefore as the entity that could best appreciate, define, apply and control it.” (Jaume)

Question 76

What did the state represent before the french revolution?

Answer 76

“The state, therefore, represented the nation and stood up to local and private interests, which were long held to be the prerogative of privilege and feudalism. The expression ‘private interests’ was in itself derogatory in the French political vocabulary of the time.” (jaume)

Question 77

What separated the Coppet group from the Doctrinaires?

Answer 77

“The criteria that separated the Coppet group from Guizot’s variant of liberalism (that of the Doctrinaires, then the Orléanistes) was individualism, understood as the right to judge and control laws and power. Whereas the Coppet group analysed power and its necessary limits from the point of view of society and the individual, the Doctrinaires favoured the state, society’s notables and the administrative support that served these notables at the local level.” (Jaume)

Question 78

What is the liberty of the Doctrinaires according to Lucien Jaume?

Answer 78

“Liberty as interpreted by the Doctrinaire group is, I would argue, a liberalism by the state and not against the state.”

Question 79

What did the Coppet groups liberalism promote?

Answer 79

“In contrast, the Coppet group’s ‘individualist’ variant of liberalism promoted individual autonomy supported by constitutional freedoms. Indeed, Mme de Staël in 1795 and Constant in 1814–15 made significant contributions to constitutional thought. Constant also formulated a thesis of legitimate resistance to unjust laws, something derided by Guizot and Royer-Collard as the very type of ‘intellectual anarchy’ characteristic of the 1820s. In these same texts, Guizot called for a ‘government that leads society’” (Jaume)

Question 80

What was Guizot’s view of universal suffrage?

Answer 80

“In his famous response to Garnier-Pagès concerning universal suffrage, Guizot expressed his irreversible position: ‘The day of universal suffrage will never come. There will never be a day when all human creatures, whatever they may be, will be called upon to exercise political rights.’ “ (Jaume)

Question 81

How did liberal catholicism in france view the role of god?

Answer 81

“In 1838, Lacordaire summed up the meaning of their shared commitment to people’s rights in a letter to his friend: What is it that we value in this modern era that began with the American Revolution of 1776? We value the passing of three elements that were destructive to the Catholic Church, our eternal home, namely: absolutism, Gallicanism, and rationalism. We love the present era because it saps the absolutist power of the princes and raises the spirit that, over the past three centuries, has been violently crushed. Without playing an active part in any particular revolutionary episode, we witness each of them as great acts of God, a tragedy in which the freedom of the Church is at stake, and, through it, the liberation of humanity” (Jaume)

Question 82

What is at the core of all three versions of liberty that developed after the french revolution?

Answer 82

“If we compare the three variants that we have looked at here – individualist, elitist and Catholic – it becomes apparent that the pivotal question is the role given to the individual as a subject of judgement in politics and on institutional matters. In essence, what is at stake is ‘the right to judge one’s right’ that expresses a faith in the freedom of the citizen- individual, or, when this right is refused, the attempt to ‘erase’ it” (Jaume)

Question 83

What did Guizot base his views on?

Answer 83

“Guizot’s concerns had their roots in society (and more specifically, his distrust of the masses)” (Jaume)

Question 84

How did the Coppet group view the individual?

Answer 84

“Most probably due to its Swiss and Protestant heritage, the Coppet group, for its part, promoted the individual’s spirit of initiative and critique.” (Jaume)

Question 85

What did the french revolution introduce according to Guizot?

Answer 85

“The Revolution, Guizot explained, introduced ‘the principle of equality’ across society, which generated an irreversible atomization: ‘today, in France, nothing remains besides the government, citizens and individuals. Public authority is the only real and strong power.” (Jaume)

Question 86

How does Lucien Jaume characterise liberalism in france after the revolution?

Answer 86

“We can conclude that liberalism in France displayed many facets. In truth, one can distinguish several liberalisms, which competed against one another after the fall of the Empire. Rather than advocate a fundamental overhaul or a rupture with the past (an approach that would have embraced Constant’s theses), the governing liberal variant (principally Orléanism) adopted a strategy of appeasement (although not towards the church) and sought to practise what Guizot termed a ‘conservative politics’. “

Question 87

What sort of government did Guizot want?

Answer 87

“The ‘government of minds’, which Victor Cousin and Guizot both claimed was the defining issue in modern societies, consisted in ensuring hierarchical promotion, thereby reconciling elitism and egalitarianism” (Jaume)

Question 88

What happened at the end of the eighteenth century accorsing to Skorupski?

Answer 88

“Around the end of the eighteenth century a new era began to emerge. That much was obvious to many people at the time. Something great was happening: a shaking ‘of all previously known systems, theories, and manners of representation, a shaking whose range and depth is unprecedented in the history of the human spirit.’ Many changes contributed. Two great revolutions, however, command attention: a political and social revolution in France”

Question 89

What were the effects of the events of the french revolution?

Answer 89

“The great ideas that animated the French Revolution—liberty, equality, the will of the people—together with the dramatic swiftness with which its initial constitutional monarchism gave way to revolutionary terror, authoritarianism, and war—had a profound effect on moral as well as political philosophy” (Skorupski)

Question 90

What was the situation against which the revolution reacted?

Answer 90

“The whole in question can take a variety of forms—family, community, church, nation, or state. Crucially, this ethic takes the whole, not the individuals that comprise it, to be the ultimate end. Yet it does not neglect the good of individuals. Its doctrine is that their ultimate good lies in the fulfilment they achieve through virtuous discharge of their role or function in the whole.” (Skorupski)

Question 91

What conviction drove the people of the revolution?

Answer 91

“Or can there be community, and an ethic of service, without hierarchy? This question was first raised in pressingly political terms by the Rousseauist, egalitarian radical-democracy which we shall come to in Section 2.5. The conviction that such a community could be built was one of the most important drivers of the Revolution” (Skorupski)

Question 92

What did the people of the revolution have in mind for the constitution afterwards?

Answer 92

“When philosophe-proponents of the Revolution of 1789 talked of putting the foundations of constitution and state on the ground of ‘reason’, it was first and foremost impartial individualism that they had in mind” (Skorupski)

Question 93

What is the impartial individualism of the french revolution?

Answer 93

“Impartial individualism says that all ethical value must reduce to value for individuals, and that all rights are individual rights. Every individual has exactly the same rights, and the well-being of every individual counts for exactly as much as that of every other. You are a human being first and foremost; you are a Frenchman, an aristocrat, townsman, or peasant only by accident of birth and circumstance” (Skorupski)

Question 94

How did individualism change between the old order and revolutionary order in france before and after the revolution?

Answer 94

“The old order recognized that there were impartial principles of justice among individuals and among nations. And it accepted that all human beings are of equal absolute importance in the eyes of God. That carried weight; all the same, saying it often amounted to saying that it is for God, not for actors in this world, to take such absolute importance into account. In this world, our obligations are found in the social wholes to which we belong. Now, in the Enlightenment vision, the order of priority was reversed. Impartial individualism introduces no entity to which individuals have fundamental obligations other than human beings in general, considered impartially” (Skorupski)

Question 95

What was given priority after the french revolution?

Answer 95

“What was important was that it was the rights and/or the well-being of individual human beings that came first, and not anything else” (Skorupski)

Question 96

What was not included in natural rights by their proponents in the french revolution?

Answer 96

“Note that the list of natural rights does not include a right to a say in all collective decisions. Such a natural right was not envisaged by natural rights theorists. It would presuppose the existence of some collective to which one already belonged; whereas from the natural right standpoint, collectives only exist as voluntary associations which a group of individuals has agreed to set up” (Skorupski)

Question 97

What did impartial individualism lead the french revolutionaries towards?

Answer 97

“Meanwhile, since the one enemy against which every reformer and revolutionary strove was absolutist monarchy, it was natural to cast impartial individualism in terms of individual rights and the sovereignty of the people. Thus impartial individualism tended to a political programme. The programme called for equality under a law that guaranteed universal individual rights to all citizens, including freedom of conscience and speech. No one would be above the law; the law would be publicly knowable; it would issue from clear, constitutional, and scrutinizable processes. Customary or religiously sanctioned privilege would be abolished, and that in turn implied a purified theory of property acquisition (this was what underlay the assault on Church property described in 1.2). To the rule of law many of these impartial individualists added the sovereignty of the people in determining the law—though what they meant in practice was some form of representative government” (Skorupski)

Question 98

Other than impartial individualism, what other attitude was present during the french revolution?

Answer 98

“A different ideal was present from the start; it would briefly dominate from the ‘second revolution’ of 1792 to the downfall of Robespierre in 1794. Its master concept was the will of the people. Call it radical-democracy” (Skorupski)

Question 99

Where did radical democracy come from?

Answer 99

“radical democracy had an integrated, determinate ethics and politics, and a pre-eminent association with a single philosopher—Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (Skorupski)

Question 100

What was ethics and politics founded on for impartial individualists?

Answer 100

“For impartial individualists, the source is the welfare or the rights of the individual, or some combination of welfare and rights, conceived universally and impartially. It is from this standpoint that they assess the pros and cons of democracy. In revolutionary France they tended to favour a representative form of government hedged by a constitution safeguarding rights. Even those most favourable to democracy thought that democratic government, like any other form of government, must be both justified and limited by universal normative truths that do not depend on anyone’s will—certainly not the will of the people, or even (many of them thought) the will of God. “ (Skorupski)

Question 101

Where do ethics and politics come from for radical democrats of the french revolution?

Answer 101

“For radical-democrats, in contrast, the fundamental source of normative legitimacy is the will of the people. Legitimacy issues from the general will” (Skorupski)

Question 102

How does Locke’s social contract and Rousseau’s social contract differ?

Answer 102

“Consider, in this light, the contrast between Locke’s social contract and Rousseau’s. In Locke, as we noted, individuals with pre-existing natural rights agree to set up a government and cede to it their natural right to protect their other natural rights, which they retain. In Rousseau, a group of natural human beings become citizens through an act of mutual solidarity or at-onement, a social compact by which they are reborn into a collective whole: citizens of a political state whose collective or general will is sovereign. The rights they acquire in the political state are laid down by the general will and could not pre-date its formation. The resulting democratic republic is not primarily a means to individual ends; it is an ultimate end to which citizens owe allegiance. Everyone has a duty to participate actively in its decisions.” (Skorupski)

Question 103

What are the ethics of radical democrats?

Answer 103

“Radical-democratic ethics comprises these virtues—public-spiritedness; rectitude of principle; frank, down-to-earth honesty; a ready willingness to play one’s part in cooperative projects” (Skorupski)

Question 104

What is good in the eyes of radical democracy?

Answer 104

“Radical-democracy holds that there is no independent criterion of the good; the ‘common good’ is just the content of the ‘general will’—it is whatever citizens will when they will as citizens, i.e. disinterestedly.” (Skorupski)

Question 105

How is the general will and the will of the individual reconciled in Rousseau?

Answer 105

“But the basic idea is simply this: to act autonomously, fully freely, is to take part as a virtuous citizen, motivated by the common good, in the deliberations of the people’s assembly. Why? Because in acting thus one is determined neither by another’s will, nor by one’s appetites and the special interests they generate. Moreover, the verdicts of citizens who decide autonomously will converge. (Assume this just for the moment.) Then the law that is decided by a debate of autonomous citizens—the sovereign general will that emerges from it—is my will, and in obeying it I am fully free. In Locke, the new freedom brought by the social contract is civil liberty. The state’s role is protective. But in Rousseau the new freedom is autonomy, as achieved through political liberty, and the state’s role is transformative.” (Skorupski)

Question 106

Did Rousseau and radical democrats believe in natural rights?

Answer 106

“Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre allow for natural rights—that is, rights against the collective that exist prior to a social compact that produces a people and a general will. As already noted, this follows from the basic idea of radical-democracy, namely that normative principles are products of the general will. Therefore, individuals only have the rights the general will determines that they have. The general will cannot be constrained by a constitution that limits its sovereignty through pre-existing natural rights.” (Skorupski)

Question 107

What did Sieyes believe a refusual to limit the state by appealing to pre-existing natural rights would lead to?

Answer 107

“Critics at the time, as well as later liberals, thought this would lead to a dictatorship of the people. A notable exponent of this line was Sieyès, who had been a major contributor to the Declaration of 1789. He argued that the doctrine of unlimited sovereignty of the people implied submission to the ‘sovereign people’ of all individual rights. But in practice that signified a tyranny, a subjection of individual independence and liberties. It was not sovereignty that was inalienable, but those liberties . . . the unlimited sovereignty of the people consisted, in fact, in the absorption of individual liberties by a will called general and, consequently, in their annulment by a power that was itself unlimited. Such a state, Sieyès said, would produce not a ré-publique, but a ré-totale.” (Skorupski)

Question 108

What are the first 3 articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen?

Answer 108

” 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.” (Skorupski)

Question 109

What did popular soverignty mean in practice after the french revolution?

Answer 109

“In practice, then, the 1789/91 notion of popular sovereignty meant a legislative assembly made up of delegates elected by a very small electorate of active male citizens, charged with representing the citizens as a whole.” (Skorupski)

Question 110

How did some come to see the public and civil liberty that Constant spoke of?

Answer 110

“Germaine de Staël: Political liberty is to civil liberty as the guarantee is to the end for which it stands, security; it is the means and not the end” (Skorupski)

Question 111

What was the point of political liberty in the modern view?

Answer 111

“In this particular passage de Staël seems to suggest that the value of political liberty is purely instrumental. To some extent that standpoint is found in Restoration liberalism: civil liberty is what matters—we need political liberty to ensure that our civil liberties are not taken away.” (Skorupski)

Question 112

What is the task of modern liberals?

Answer 112

“The modern problem is thus to find the balance between political and civil liberties.” (Skorupski)

Question 113

Why did Tocqueville criticise democracy?

Answer 113

“Tocqueville is best known in anglophone countries for his great book, Democracy in America (Tocqueville 2000). Some of its themes have become a lasting feature of liberal critiques of democracy—notably, the way in which democratic emphasis on equality slides towards mediocre conformism and tyranny of the majority; at the same time, to an objectionable ‘individualism’ of unbounded wants” (Skorupski)

Question 114

What might democratic individualism lead to for Tocqueville?

Answer 114

a tyranny of the majority

Question 115

Could freedom only be found in a democracy?

Answer 115

“[Johann August Eberhard] He wanted to correct the “young republicans” who believed that freedom was to be found only in democracies and not in monarchies” (de DJin)

Question 116

How was monarchy, all monarchy, seen by some?

Answer 116

“In 1782 Johann Christian Schmohl, a resident of Halle—and, like Eberhard, a subject of the Prussian king Frederick the Great—published On North America and Democracy, in which he praised the Americans for their fight for “popular sovereignty” and expressed the hope that Europe too would soon throw off the yoke of “tyranny” and thus gain “liberty.”” (de Djin)

Question 117

Why were people living under the rule of a monarchy still free?

Answer 117

“It was an “unfounded prejudice,” he wrote, to believe that liberty was to be found only in democratic republics. The subjects of Frederick the Great already were free—hence, they needed no liberating—but they were free in a dif­ferent way from the citizens of popular republics. To clarify, Eberhard explained that, when talking about “the liberty of the citizen,” one should distinguish between two very dif­ferent kinds of liberty: civil liberty and political liberty. A people had political liberty when it participated in government. Hence political liberty existed only in republics, and it was most extensive in democratic republics. In contrast, individuals who had the right to act as they wished, insofar as such acts were not restricted by law, enjoyed civil liberty. This type of liberty did not depend on the form of government; it could exist as easily in a monarchy as in a republic.” (de Djin)

Question 118

What relation did some see political and civil liberty existing in?

Answer 118

“Eberhard claimed that political and civil liberty were not only different from each other but often inversely related when a people enjoyed more political liberty, it had less civil liberty, whereas a people living under royal absolutism often had a great deal of civil liberty” (de Djin)

Question 119

Why were people more free under monarchs in the view of some?

Answer 119

“The power of absolute monarchs, he pointed out, was typically less secure than that in republican governments, which could count on more broad-based support. Hence, kings and queens were inclined to leave their subjects more freedom to act, so as not to provoke discontent. By contrast, in republics, the restriction of civil liberty was more easily accepted, because such restriction was balanced by citizens’ awareness of their control over government. At the same time, in a democracy, the sovereign people was often swayed by passions and ignorance to take measures that undermined the common good and harmed individual liberties. Thus, popular governments often governed despotically, whereas in an enlightened monarchy like Prussia, the king and his civil servants acted on the basis of knowledge and reason. So if one wanted to be free, introducing democracy—as the American revolutionaries and their radical German admirers wanted to do—was not a good strategy. Rather, one had better put one’s hopes in “unlimited monarchy.” Civil liberty was best preserved not by the government of the ignorant multitude but under the rule of a wise and enlightened ruler like Frederick the Great” (de Djin)

Question 120

What did some believe political liberty could potentially be?

Answer 120

“These authors also repeated Eberhard’s stronger claim that political liberty was not just distinct from, but a potential threat to, civil liberty” (de Djin)

Question 121

Why did counterrevolutionaries criticise democracy?

Answer 121

“Counterrevolutionary thinkers took a dim view of the political capabilities of ordinary people. They saw the masses as akin to children, utterly incapable of governing themselves. At best, popular rule would bring the ignorant and dim-witted to power; at worst, it would lead to violent savagery” (de Djin)

Question 122

What did revolutionaries argue they could do for people?

Answer 122

“All over the Atlantic world, revolutionaries had argued that their political reforms would set men free. But that promise, their opponents countered, was hollow. Being free had nothing to do with popular self-government; at best, participation in government offered an inferior “political” freedom. Instead, people were free—that is, they possessed “civil” liberty—if they and their property were secure; if they were able to enjoy their lives and possessions in peace and quiet. Hence, American colonists, Dutch burghers, and French subjects were already free under their existing political institutions—and the revolutionary attempts to democratize these institutions threatened to undermine liberty rather than enhance it” (de Djin)

Question 123

Why were the people of the American colonies already free?

Answer 123

“Thus, John Wesley—an influential theologian with Tory sympathies— agreed with Price that the American colonists had an “undoubted right” to freedom. But they already enjoyed complete freedom under British rule—“because they enjoy religious liberty (the liberty to choose their own religion) and civil liberty (a liberty to dispose of our lives, persons and futures, according to our own choice, and the laws of our country).”” (de Djin)

Question 124

Who was one of the first to reject political liberty?

Answer 124

“Edmund Burke was the first of many conservative commentators to reject liberty “after the newest Paris fashion,” while emphasizing that he was nevertheless very much in favor of the “manly, moral, regulated” liberty provided by the British constitution” (de Djin)

Question 125

What criticism did counterrevolutionaries levy against democracy?

Answer 125

“The democratic definition of freedom was contradictory or even absurd; democracy did not lead to freedom for all but to the tyranny of the majority” (de Djin)

Question 126

What did some believe democracy would lead to?

Answer 126

“They conjectured that democracy might lead, at first, to majoritarian tyranny and, in particular, to the tyranny of the poor over the rich. But this would ultimately lead to out-and-out anarchy as the destruction of property led to a war of all against all. According to one of Price’s anonymous critics, the poor, if given the vote, would employ it to divest the rich of their possessions, and “property would become the most precarious and insecure thing in the world,” resulting in chaos” (de Djin)

Question 127

Who should be allowed to govern according to counterrevolutionaries?

Answer 127

“elites were better equipped to judge whether laws were just—whether they were protective of freedom—than ordinary citizens. A free government was not “the creature of the people.” Instead, a free state was “created by the superior wisdom of a few.” Happily, the English allowed themselves to be led by the intelligent few. This did not undermine their freedom, as the American revolutionaries claimed, but instead preserved it. The slavery they complained about was “nothing more than the subordination of folly to wisdom.”” (de Djin)

Question 128

What visions of a free state did counterrevolutionaries come up with?

Answer 128

“Thus, counterrevolutionaries formulated very dif­ferent answers in reply to the question of what a free state was supposed to look like. Some of them, like Meerman, implied that freedom depended on the extent to which one was governed—as long as one was able to more or less do what one wanted, one was free. Others, like Shebbeare, argued that a person could be counted as free depending on how they were governed—whether one was governed wisely or not. Yet others, like Burke, believed freedom to depend on checks and balances. From a theoretical point of view, these claims are, of course, quite distinct. But importantly, all these claims served the same purpose in counterrevolutionary discourse: they were used as alternatives to the democratic theory of freedom, which stipulated that a person was free or not depending on who governed.” (de Djin)

Question 129

How did Constant frame the distinction between political and civil liberty?

Answer 129

“But Constant also reformulated these ideas in a more original manner. He reframed the distinction between political and civil liberty as between “ancient” and “modern” liberty.” (de Djin)

Question 130

Why did modern society value a different sort of liberty to the ancients for Constant?

Answer 130

“the advent of modernity had brought a transition from bellicose to commercial societies. Ancient city-states obtained their supplies mainly through warfare, not trade. But in the modern world, men’s needs were supplied through commerce, without state intervention. Hence, modernity had fostered a new love of individual independence and a concomitant hatred of governmental interference.” (de Djin)

Question 131

What mistake had the french revolutionaries made?

Answer 131

The French revolutionaries, however, had mistakenly attempted to turn the clock back to antiquity. Misled by their enthusiasm for the ancients and by modern aficionados of antiquity, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, the revolutionaries had failed to recognize the changes brought about by the passage of time. They tried to turn France into a modern Sparta, but the attempt had only made the French, as individuals, less free” (de Djin)

Question 132

What was important for preserving freedom for Constant?

Answer 132

“Constant, sounding much like Meerman, defended the idea that a state could offer freedom to its citizens only when power was limited as much as possible. Rather than worrying about who was to wield sovereign power, he wrote, the friends of liberty should focus first and foremost on carefully circumscribing its extent: “It is the degree of force, not its holders, which must be denounced.”” (de Djin)

Question 133

What did Guizot believe needed to be sovereign in order to guarantee freedom and avoid despotism?

Answer 133

“In his view, it was not the people, but “reason,” that should be sovereign if despotism was to be avoided. In a free government, political power should be exercised by the most “capable” citizens. This principle had been recognized in Britain, where the electoral system was based on “capacity” rather than on “the sovereignty of the majority.” “ (de Djin)

Question 134

What did Constant and Guizot agree on and where did they admire?

Answer 134

“Constant, Staël, and Guizot agreed that democracy posed a threat to freedom. This underlying agreement is also reflected in the fact that all three thinkers believed that Britain, with its highly elitist political system, was the preeminent free state” (de Djin)

Question 135

What did Tocqueville believe democratic governments would be able to do and why?

Answer 135

“Democratization, Tocqueville now warned, might lead not to liberty but to a new kind of despotism, with a democratically elected government acting as a “paternal power” that sought to fix men “irrevocably in childhood.” Modern democratic citizens typically had very little leisure; they were preoccupied with making a living, which led them to focus on their own private affairs. This meant that they were only too happy when their governments took as many decisions as possible out of their hands. Hence, Tocqueville concluded, it was easier to establish an absolute and despotic government among a democratic people than among any other” (de Djin)

Question 136

What did the Terror demonstrate to opponents of democracy?

Answer 136

“In the wake of the Terror, even erstwhile radicals came to agree with Edmund Burke that democracy could only lead to anarchy or democratic despotism and that, hence, Britain’s balanced constitution was the only true guarantee of freedom.” (de Djin)

Question 137

How could someone enjoy their civil liberty in conjunction with the state?

Answer 137

“Individuals could be free only when they were interfered with as little as possible. This meant that, in a political society, one was free to the extent that one enjoyed the largest amount of “untrammeled action.” “ (de Djin)

Question 138

What did true, civil liberty not involve?

Answer 138

“True liberty was something very dif­ferent—it consisted of personal security and the protection of individual rights—and freedom, in this sense of the word, had nothing to do with manhood suffrage” (de Djin)

Question 139

What had France’s revolutionary leaders done?

Answer 139

“Like Constant, Laboulaye explained at length that France’s revolutionary leaders, as they remained beholden to out-dated “ancient” conceptions of liberty, had set France on the course to despotism rather than freedom.” (de Djin)

Question 140

What were the natural rights counterrevolutiomaries highlighted?

Answer 140

“A large part of Laboulaye’s election manifesto was therefore devoted to a discussion of the “liberties” and “natural rights” that all states were to protect—a list that included property rights, religious liberty, and liberty of education and association. “ (de Djin)

Question 141

What had the french revolution been?

Answer 141

“In other words, it was perfectly possible to have democracy without liberty—or to have liberty without democracy. Thus, the French Revolution, apart from a brief initial phase in 1789, had been “democratic to excess,” but it had been “in no way liberal.”” (de Djin)

Question 142

How do you liberalise democracy?

Answer 142

“In order to liberalize democracy, it was therefore of paramount importance to recognize individual rights—such as the right to religious freedom—as inviolable and sacred” (de Djin)

Question 143

What did Mill say about libety and democracy?

Answer 143

“Mill prefaced this essay with a long introduction in which he traced the genealogy of the concept of liberty. He explained that liberty had initially been understood as popular self-government by the revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century. Growing experience with democracy, however, had revealed that “abuse of power,” notably by the majority, was just as likely under this type of government as under any other. It therefore became clear that freedom primarily required “the limitation . . . of the power of government over individuals.”” (de Djin)

Question 144

How did abolitionists view liberty?

Answer 144

“True liberty, black abolitionists emphasized in the wake of the Civil War, was about more than juridical status; it required political rights as well. As the former slave and abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass put it, soon after the South’s surrender in 1865, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” Newly freed blacks in the South wholeheartedly agreed. After the war, freedmen started organizing local and state conventions and petitioned Congress for the franchise. Appropriating the revolutionary legacy for their own purposes, they drew up declarations claiming their inalienable rights, including the right to vote” (de Djin)

Question 145

What was hoped would come with black emancipation?

Answer 145

“The Civil War, as historian Eric Foner has reminded us, generated a new, effervescent enthusiasm for freedom understood as popular self-government. Just as it had during the Revolution of 1776, the expansion of American democracy, this time to black men, inspired new claims for inclusion, notably by women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a prominent abolitionist, proclaimed that women, no less than blacks, had arrived at a “transition period, from slavery to freedom.”” (de Djin)

Question 146

What did women see as the basis for liberty?

Answer 146

“The membership card of the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded by Pankkhurst, declared that the right to vote was the “basis of all liberty.”” (de Djin)

Question 147

How was economics tied to liberty?

Answer 147

“As social reformers agreed, a person could not be called truly free if they lacked control over their working lives. Hence, liberty required more than giving all people the vote. It also required changes in the economic system to make workers less dependent on factory owners and financial elites.” (de Djin)

Question 148

What came to be seen as a necessary prerequisite for political freedom?

Answer 148

“Economic equality was a necessary precondition for political liberty, not a form of liberty in its own right. Their nineteenth-century successors disagreed. To them, the freedom to govern oneself should not just be limited to the political sphere; it should also be part and parcel of the economic sphere. Doing away with economic domination was a goal in and of itself.” (de Djin)

Question 149

How did british liberals come to see the state as being possible to do economically?

Answer 149

“Historically, Hobson explained, liberals had tended to identify liberty with an “absence of restraint.” But now it was becoming clear that a “more constructive” idea of liberty was needed to rejuvenate the liberal movement. Notably, liberals needed to embrace the idea that state interference could enhance rather than harm freedom, as long as the power of the state was used to level the economic playing field. Many British liberals agreed. The idea that freedom had to be thought of as something “positive” rather than as something “negative” became widespread between 1900 and 1914. “ (de Djin)

Question 150

Why was government interference needed in the realm of economics?

Answer 150

“In the economic sphere, laissez-faire brought not liberty for all but rather the oppression of the weak by the strong. Just as important, a rigid insistence on laissez-faire was no longer appropriate now that the state was under the control of the people. As the government had become “the organ of the community as a whole,” even if imperfectly so, measures to ameliorate the lot of the working classes were not paternalistic; they were expressions of self-rule. In modern democracies, government was the “servant” of the people and the acts of government could therefore be considered acts of the people themselves.” (de Djin)

Question 151

What was state interference necessary for?

Answer 151

“Under modern economic conditions, he explained, there could be no fair play between individuals and corporate interests. Hence the “watchful interference, the resolute interference, of the government” was necessary to redress the balance in favor of those without economic power. “Freedom to-day,” had to be “something more than being let alone.” The program of a “government of freedom,” he concluded, “must in these days be positive, not negative merely.” “ (de Djin)

Question 152

What had rendered the freedon of 1776 meaningless?

Answer 152

“Now it was time to destroy economic tyranny, for the political equality won in 1776 had become meaningless in the face of growing economic inequality. Hence the time had come “to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776.”” (de Djin)

Question 153

What did Hayek warn about democracy?

Answer 153

“More generally, Hayek warned against making “a fetish of democracy.” His contemporaries, he explained, talked too much of democracy and too little of the values it served. Democracy was “essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom.” As such, it was by no means infallible. Indeed, it was “at least conceivable” that democratic majorities might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorships. At the same time, history taught there might be “much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies.” “ (de Djin)

Question 154

How did FRD concieve of liberty and the role of the state?

Answer 154

“Following instead the lead of British new liberals such as Leonard Hobhouse, Roosevelt believed in a broader conception of liberty. During one of his many fireside chats, he told the American people that he rejected “a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few.” He added, “I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving forward to a greater freedom, a greater security for the average man than he has ever known in the history of America.”” (de Djin)

Question 155

What was freedom not incompatible with?

Answer 155

“Freedom, in other words, was “not incompatible” with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government.” (de Djin)

Question 156

How did french political thinkers understand democracy?

Answer 156

“Whether on the left of the political spectrum or on the right, French political thinkers understood democracy primarily as a form of society, defined by social equalization. The dismantling of the caste barriers of ancien régime society was taken to have determined democracy’s rise. French theorists directed their efforts to trying to make sense of the new social order.” (drolet)

Question 157

What did egalitarianism mean for society?

Answer 157

“For liberals who studied with profit the works of the ancient anti-democrats Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides—such as the historian and statesman François Guizot (1787–1874)—the impulse to an ever greater egalitarianism rendered democratic society factional and unstable. “ (Drolet)

Question 158

What did Tocqueville think happened to the revolution?

Answer 158

“However, he contrasted this ideal vision of free democracy with its tendency to factionalism…Somehow the Revolution’s noble and universal character collapsed into a narrow particularism” (Drolet)

Question 159

What had gradually happened since the revolution according to Tocqueville?

Answer 159

“But equally democracy could narrow the individual’s scope for collective engagement, and, as Tocqueville saw it, the conditions under which democratic society had been instituted in France had increasingly had that effect. He made this clear in his observations of the 1830 Revolution. Unlike 1789, 1830 revealed ‘a government shorn of both virtue and greatness’ and a population which in its ‘egoism … thought much more of [its] private business than of public affairs; of [its] personal enjoyment than of the greatness of the nation’.” (Drolet)

Question 160

Did Rousseau believe in natural rights?

Answer 160

“Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre allow for natural rights—that is, rights against the collective that exist prior to a social compact that produces a people and a general will.” (Skorupski)