Is a cancer growing in the bowels of liberalism? . - Tolerating Freedom - The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit; - Brief Article - book review

Reason, June, 2002 by Loren E. Lomasky

The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, by A.J. Conyers, Dallas: Spence Publishing, 266 pages, $27.95

Two Faces of Liberalism, by John Gray, New York: The New Press, 161 pages, $25

HOW SHOULD HUMAN societies be ordered? The question has called forth diverse answers. Some governments take their primary task to be ensuring that people do the bidding of the gods, and so they establish a coterie of priests or prophets or mullahs to ascertain and enforce divine will. Ancient Egypt and Japan went that one better by finding a man-god to give the orders. Other states seek more worldly outcomes. Rome intricately structured its republic to maintain a balance between patricians and plebeians; Tito's Yugoslavia sought to preserve one between Serbs and Croats.

The Soviet Union claimed to seek a dictatorship of the proletariat, while virtually every contemporary African country is a straightforward dictatorship of the dictator. Imperialist nations strive to put a finger into every available international pot; Switzerland has managed for centuries to remain uninvolved in external entanglements. China built a great wall to keep outsiders out, East Germany one to keep insiders in. And most every other fancy of ambitious, powerful men has found expression in some political form or another.

Only recently in human history, however-during the last four centuries at most-has any currency been given to the conception of a political order dedicated to the proposition that individuals are to be left alone, by each other and, especially, by their governors. The earliest theorists of this new idea declared that all human beings have rights that delimit a zone in which they are morally entitled to set their own course, subject only to avoiding trespass on the protected zones of others. John Locke characterized the perimeter of this zone as rights to life, liberty, and property; Thomas Jefferson revised the canonical list to include pursuit of happiness. They are among the founding spirits of the revolutionary politics that eventually came to be known as liberalism.

More important than the subtle details distinguishing these various liberal philosophies is the broad area within which they achieve consensus. Against the entire tide of prior human experience, they audaciously insist that the state is properly the servant of the people, not vice versa. Government's role is not to pursue some grand national ideal but rather to protect citizens from aggressors internal and external so that people will be free to devote themselves to ends of their own.

It is easy to underestimate just how significant a break from all previous political practice early liberalism represented. Virtually every established interest found it threatening. Kings could not abide the suggestion that they were to be public servants rather than divinely appointed masters; aristocrats despised liberalism's leveling tendencies; clerics saw it as an invitation to heresy or irreligion; moralists perceived that individuals set free to develop their own conceptions of the good might give themselves over to every species of license. The first generation of liberalism's opponents, then, condenmed generalized liberty as an invitation to wickedness. Today that sort of criticism is rarely voiced by parties this side of the Taliban (although one may suspect that it is written in the hearts of any number of conservatives, ecofeminists, and doyens of political correctness). Contemporary opponents of liberalism prefer indirect lines of attack. The most prominent approach is to find within liberal ph ilosophies not sinfulness but contradiction. The progenitor of this strategy was Karl Marx.

Early socialists excoriated liberalism's market economy as greedy, unjust, altogether lacking in compassion. Marx pointedly rejected these excursions into "bourgeois morality" and in his best sneering style labeled its purveyors "utopian." To flail away at well-entrenched institutions with weapons fashioned from homilies and sentimental broadsides is, Marx maintained, quixotic. Rather, if liberal society and, especially, its economic foundation (which he dubbed "capitalism") were to be supplanted, it would be by identifying structural flaws that render it unsustainable.

In some of the most turgid but nonetheless influential prose of the 19th century, Marx professed to exhibit the contradictions of an economic system that is sustained by extracting ever-increasing quantities of surplus value from workers but can do so only by progressively impoverishing them such that they are unable to afford the dazzling wares spewed out by the capitalist engine. In the fullness of time these workers would rise up and expropriate the expropriators. For Marx, liberal society wasn't simply immoral; it was irrational.

Marx's analysis had the great virtues of rigor, elegance, and explanatory richness. The only problem was that it was falsified by experience. As late as the 1950s many took Nikita Khrushchev seriously when he banged his shoe on the table and declared, "We will bury you!" Today it is Khrushchev who is buried, under earth that was formerly but is no longer the Soviet Union. In the meantime, liberal capitalist societies have obdurately refused to implode but instead churn out for their increasingly wealthy citizens an abundance of goods and opportunities. Today the Marxist critique is essentially dead everywhere except Cuba, North Korea, and the humanities departments of American universities.