a marginal force, its free trade doctrines handicapped by the threat of industrial competition from a more advanced Britain, prior traditions of French mercantilism personified by Louis XIV’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and a generally more positive view of the State on both right and left.30 Its one significant achievement, the Anglo-French Treaty of 1860 lowering tariffs between France and Britain – negotiated by Richard Cobden and Michel Chevalier, once a disciple of Saint-Simon – would boomerang politically, as it came to be identified as the inaugural act of the final phase of Napoleon III’s rule, self-proclaimed as the ‘Liberal Empire’, whose collapse in the disgrace of the Franco-Prussian War ten years later covered the term with discredit. So no Liberal Party ever emerged in the Third Republic, unlike in Germany or Italy in the same period. ‘Liberalism’ acquired a toxic odour that, despite strenuous efforts by the deeply unpopular current ruler of the country, it has yet to overcome in France today.
In Britain, Adam Smith and David Hume were using ‘liberal’ in its pre-political sense in the late eighteenth century to describe their favoured free market system.31 Politically, however, the word arrived late – carried back from the Peninsular Wars in Spain, and as a result viewed with suspicion in Tory Britain. Lord Castlereagh detested the Cádiz liberales, nominally English allies, considering them little better than Jacobins. This impression was only confirmed when Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, notorious subversives, founded The Liberal, and championed Greek independence. For Robert Peel in 1820, ‘liberal’ was still ‘an odious phrase’, albeit an intelligible one. Three years later, the first English essay on ‘liberalism’ was a virulent attack on it as a destructive, alien doctrine wreaking havoc on the continent. Gradually, though, the Whig writers of the Edinburgh Review domesticated the term to describe their standpoints.32 But naturalization moved slowly for two reasons: first, the Whig-Tory dichotomy was deeply entrenched as the national political polarity; second, outside it, the term ‘Radicals’, referring loosely to the Benthamites, already occupied the space of innovation. It was not until the 1830s that John Stuart Mill wrote, privately, of the contrast between liberalism and conservatism, and not until the 1850s that ‘Liberal’ superseded ‘Radical’ as a political calling card in Britain.33
And yet when ‘liberalism’ as such finally arrived in Britain, it was far stronger than anywhere else in Europe. For here alone there was a totalizing fusion of the political ideas of rule of law and civil liberties with the economic maxims of free trade and free markets, in theories of ‘limited government’. The synthesis that was missed in France is captured in Mill, who authored the Principles of Political Economy (1848) as well as On Liberty (1859) and On Representative Government (1861). The leap from ideology to organization then took place with the demise of Whiggery, and the birth in 1859 of the Liberal Party, to be led by the charismatic Gladstone.
What produced this exceptional ideological-organisational double development? On the one hand, the dynamism of British industry, generating a feistier manufacturing class than on the continent, well capable of pursuing its own economic agenda, as in the Anti-Corn Law League.34 On the other, the absence of revolutionary plebeian traditions, with Chartist mobilizations quickly divided and deflated. British Liberalism remained poised between landowners and workers, as elsewhere, but with much less to fear from the latter. It could thus move more boldly to ‘disembed the market’ from society, in Karl Polanyi’s sense, than its European opposites, and to supplant earlier strains of Ricardian socialism with a fully capitalist free trade fetishism in popular consciousness itself. Political economy became, as Economist editor Walter Bagehot enthusiastically put it, the ‘common sense of the nation’.35
The singular consummation of liberalism in Britain is underscored by the fact that in Germany, Italy and France, the term remained so predominantly political that a separate coinage was typically used to indicate the economic creed central to British liberalism. In Germany, where the bourgeoisie of the Vormärz and 1848 were primarily bureaucratic and professional, not industrial, Manchestertum stood in for the cult of the free market. In Italy, Benedetto Croce coined liberismo, to distinguish it from liberalismo. In France, the conventional term was always laissez-faire – notably absent from Tocqueville, the country’s best-known defender of political liberalism.
Liberalism in America: A Detour
In America, on the other hand, no crystallization of liberalism as an explicit doctrine occurred, because many of its basic tenets were taken for granted from the start. As Louis Hartz and Eric Voegelin famously argued, the absence of either feudal and aristocratic barriers to capitalism above, or working class and socialist threats from below, obviated the need for systematic liberal theories or organizations in nineteenth-century America.36 Liberalism was not entirely unknown – a group of Liberal Republicans split from the Republicans, albeit for just two years, in 1870 – but it was not until almost half a century later that it began to acquire political salience. The New Republic, looking for alternatives to the word ‘progressive’ after the defeat of its candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, in 1912, chose the term. Eager to court its influential editors, and to justify his entry into the First World War, Woodrow Wilson began to describe his foreign policy as ‘liberal’ in 1917.
This fairly light symbolic baggage made ‘liberal’ attractive in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt hit on it as a tag for his New Deal policies, in part to distinguish them from the efforts of his Progressive predecessors to end the Great Depression. The alternatives were less appealing: social democratic, let alone socialist, was far too extreme, and anyway sounded foreign, while progressive was too redolent of Republicans and smacked of laissez-faire for most Democrats. Liberal, in contrast, had positive if vague associations with British ‘New Liberals’ such as Lloyd George, whom members of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust saw as paving an economic middle way between unbridled capitalism and oppressive statism. This appropriation of the term provoked an immediate reaction from right-wing critics, however, who claimed – as purer adherents of free markets – to be the ‘true’ liberals.37 Upset by collectivist departures from laissez-faire, but losing this battle to define liberalism in the 1930s, American conservatives eventually managed to invert the term, such that today ‘liberal’ often implies a leftist departure from American liberty, rather than its fulfilment.
Classical Liberalism: Three Unanswered Questions
The core ideological complex of classical liberalism that emerged in Britain combined economic freedoms – the right to unconditional private property; low taxes; no internal tariffs; external free trade – with political freedoms: the rule of law; civil equality; freedom of the press and assembly; careers ‘open to talent’; responsible government. While this was a coherent, integrated agenda, it left unresolved three large questions.
First, to whom was government to be responsible? Who should parliaments, essential to the new constitutional system, actually represent? The classical liberal response was a censitary suffrage: votes only for those with sufficient means and education to form an independent judgment of public affairs. But how should liberals react when those without them pressed for inclusion in the political process? Second, how far should the liberal order extend, not just to the lower classes within the constitutional state, but to territories beyond it? By the mid-nineteenth century, the modal type of liberal state was national. Could it also be imperial, with overseas possessions? If so, did liberal principles apply to them? Finally, what was the role to be accorded by liberal political economy to activities not regarded as productive of value – neither agriculture, nor industry, nor trade, but lending and borrowing, and speculation? Was money a commodity like any other, with banks no different from farms or factories? If business cycles were normal in a market economy, what of longer-lasting crises and depressions?
How, in other words, would liberals respond to the rise of democracy, the expansion of empire, and the ascendancy of finance, none of which figured in the core doctrine?
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