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Liberalism: a moral ideal born of the 18th century Enlightenment,…
Liberalism: a moral ideal born of the 18th century Enlightenment
Fundamentally incompatible with
Capitalism: a social system characterised by the fact that private persons (or legal entities like corporations) own the means of production. I.e., the private ownership of capital
incompatible with the possibility of achieving liberalism's primary aim:
because
formal political processes do not exhaust the way our society governs itself
also governed by 'covert' structures, like class, which are a consequence of an industrialised, liberal society, which is a consequence of liberalism.
'development industry'
Immediately after the Second World War, with Europe in ruins, the communist threat seemed to reach its peak. To spearhead reconstruction, Western states created institutions such as the World Bank to assist governments in their work, and private charities arose to join this crusade. Oxfam (1942), CARE International (1945) and UNICEF (a joint private-United Nations charity created in 1946) all came into being to provide famine relief to war-torn Europe
new frontier
With Europe’s overseas empires breaking up, dozens of new nation-states were coming into being, each of them eager to ‘catch up’ with its erstwhile colonial master
Philanthrocapitalism: 'how the rich can save the world'
Since the rich were getting richer, they had more money to throw around.
1990s (Clinton US, Blair UK): The lure of yet more lucre could now be used to steer them into sinking some of this new wealth into the poorest communities, something touted by Clinton late in his presidency when he went on a four-day ‘new markets’ tour of deprived American neighbourhoods. Urging the super-rich to do some good with a portion of their rapidly growing prosperity, Clinton told them that a better world would make them richer yet. ‘Every time we hire a young person off the street in Watts and give him or her a better future,’ he said, ‘we are helping people who live in the ritziest suburb in America to continue to enjoy a rising stock market.’
In the two decades after Clinton took office, the number of charitable foundations doubled
New problem
This growing number of foundations and NGOs found themselves relying on a diminishing pool of wealthy donors
due to
Plutocracy: a society governed by the ultra-wealthy.
cultivates
via 'protecting liberties'
A liberal society is a society of equals – of people who are equally entitled and empowered to make decisions about their own lives, and who are equal participants in the collective governance of that society.
personal, i.e. dress, hair, religion, property ownership
political: voting, protesting, joining political party
primary aim:
"Free people living together in a society of equals"
defends the right to:
Liberalism needs democracy or autocracy as its political foundation to produce social stability. Liberal morality alone cannot produce a stable social order based on choices of self-interested individuals.
Centres the value of
Individualism / Individual Autonomy
Libertarianism
Take individual freedom as the paramount political value and understand coercion to be the antithesis of that freedom
People can justifiably be forced to do certain things—most obviously, to refrain from infringing the liberty of others— but, they cannot be coerced to serve the good of other members of society, nor even their own personal good
Regard contemporary democratic states’ redistribution of wealth as an unjustified use of coercion that violates the rights of individuals.
Political morality of classical libralism
Regard the moral function of the state to be the enforcement of a system of rights that facilitate socioeconomic cooperation, and little else
Embodied by John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant
It is popular to label libertarianism as a “right-wing” doctrine. This is mistaken. On social—rather than economic—issues, libertarianism tends to be “left-wing” in advocating for radical social liberty in the form of freedom of association, of cultural and religious expression, and sexual liberation. On foreign policy it is also aligned more with the left in opposing border restrictions and war. Its historical entanglement with both radicalism and reaction, as well as its approach to rights being used to endorse distributive egalitarianism, means that it cannot be easily placed on a contemporary left-right partisan spectrum. In a sense, the left-right spectrum is itself reiterated within libertarianism, given its internal diversity.
Neoliberal economic policy
The ‘less government, more growth’ approach became orthodoxy, but it brought back – with a vengeance – the challenges of distribution.
Ronald Reagan (US) and Margaret Thatcher (UK) - early proponents of this new libertarian approach, harkened back to the unbridled individualism of the Victorian age. Reagan: "Third World countries ought to follow the US model, whose economy had been built by self-sufficient, independent farmers".
Offers reasons why rights should be regarded as universal, as inhering in each individual human being, and why a coercive state must be neutral in terms of religion
Democracy: demos "the people", kratein "to rule"
Can be joined in a successful political order, but their marriage is not inevitable. A political regime can be liberal but not democratic (19th century Austro-Hungarian empire) and vice versa (Ancient Athens)
Democracy without liberalism risks majoritarian tyranny.
often confused with, or used as short-hand for
Liberal democracy
a 'grab-bag' of favoured conditions: popular sovereignty, rule of law, voting rights, human rights, free speech, equal opportunity, separation of church and state, distributive justice, a market-based economy.
Ancient Greeks: Collective self-government by citizens. Ancient Athens was a democracy, but not a liberal democracy. AA did not embrace human rights nor separate religion from coercive state authority.
today, has almost no forthright opponents
E.g., Neo-Nazis in Germany dub their party National Democrats (not National Socialists). Chinese autocrats describe their authoritarian regime as a democracy.
If democracy becomes indistinguishable from liberalism - collective self-government is equated with human rights and secular governments
Markets: institutions in which individuals or collective agents exchange goods and services
Distinguised by:
The goods or services traded in them (e.g., financial markets, housing markets, labor markets)
Their scope (e.g., regional, national, international markets)
Their structure (e.g., competitive, oligopolistic, monopolistic markets)
Depend on, and in turn influence, many other institutions and aspects of social life
Thus, co-determine the ways in which values such as liberty, justice or solidarity can be realised
a core element of
Free-market policies
Worsening inequality
Meritocracy: influence (of some sort) is possessed on the basis of merit.
radical individualism
essentially, aristocracy
Given aristocracy's association with feudalism, sociologists later coined the term meritocracy.
classical liberalism
Industrialisation
When societies industrialise, achieving economies of scale and the capacity to purchase cutting-edge technologies needed for profitable production becomes extremely expensive. So expensive, in fact, that it is possible only for a relatively small number of people or entities to do it.
leads to:
Division of labour
Class stratified society
Capitalists: own the products and technologies
Effectively
capitalists are private dictators telling their workers what to do, when to do it, what to wear, when to pee, and what to post online
Negates the primary aim of liberalism
Workers: work for capitalists in exchange for a wage