The Fiction of Consent – The Unfreedom at the Heart of Liberalism

 

If liberalism has one guiding thread it’s that nothing should happen to a person without their consent.  John Locke, probably the most famous philosopher in the history of liberalism, argued that “no-one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”

Good intentions were rather undermined by the fact that in Locke’s Britain, a bastion of liberalism since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the number of offences for which the death penalty applied rose to around 250 by the early 19^th century. A person could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief or taking an unauthorised clipping from an ornamental bush. A slight impediment to health, one might think.

Locke himself invested in the slave trade and thought children as young as three ought to be sent out to work.

But, nonetheless, the principle was laid down.

The liberal dictatorship

In addition to a penchant for hanging peasants, early liberalism was implacably hostile to democracy. Faced with the huge Chartist petition of 1842, the liberal historian and politician Thomas Macaulay declared universal suffrage “incompatible with civilisation”. Chartist leaders in Britain were jailed and the mere demand for the vote often treated as a criminal act by the ‘liberal’ authorities.

However, in the intervening years the opposition of most liberals to democracy dissipated to such an extent that ‘liberal-democracy’ is now seen as an eternally natural state of affairs, rather than the coupling of once sworn enemies.  And in the reconciliation the liberal principle of consent has survived. Governments, it is proclaimed, are dependent on the will of people. They are compelled to seek a popular mandate. Nothing should be done without the people’s consent.

However, I want to argue that both economically and politically, the liberal – now liberal-democratic – principle of consent is a sham. In the words of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman we manufacture consent, we don’t seek it out.  A society founded on genuine consent would look incalculably different to the one we now inhabit.

I will illustrate this hollowness by looking at two seemingly disconnected topics – UK Labour party leader Keir Starmer and “modern slavery”.

By any means necessary

Keir Starmer was overwhelmingly elected as leader of the Labour party in 2020. In his election campaign, he presented himself as a crusader for striking miners and printers. If elected, he promised to make “the moral case for socialism” based on ten pledges – including support for common ownership of utilities, abolishing the House of Lords, an end to ‘illegal wars’, and reversing cuts to corporation tax. He also set himself up as the unity candidate, promising “an end to factionalism”.

In retrospect – after a year and a half of Starmer’s leadership – all this seems utterly farcical. He has shunted the party inexorably to the Right, urging activists to embrace the legacy of Tony Blair, a man venerated as “the master” by George Osborne.  Starmerism has involved courting the support of billionaires, seeking Parliamentary candidates from outside the party and trade unions, defenestrating the left-wing leader of Scottish Labour, forcing shadow ministers to apologise for being ‘anti-business’, refusing to make any spending commitments and being outflanked from the left by the Conservatives, for example on nurses’ pay. In the words of an aide, rather than making a moral case for socialism, “all that nonsense” – meaning Corbynite policies – had to be ditched.

And far from seeking unity, Starmer has waged an unrelenting war on opponents in the party, removing the whip from his predecessor for telling the truth, sacking left-wingers from the shadow cabinet on spurious grounds and expelling and suspending members who disagree with him, including swathes of left-wing Jews.

It is sometimes argued that Labour party members – all half a million of them – are unfortunate, but necessary, collateral damage in Starmer’s quest to make Labour “electable”. But this is belied by Starmer’s plummeting approval ratings and the fact his predecessor’s policies – if not the man himself – were popular with voters.

However, in assessing Starmer’s performance, mainstream commentators don’t condemn the duplicity he exhibited in order to get elected as Labour leader. In fact they laud him for shrewdness or political nous. Because Starmer encapsulates – in telescoped form – what ‘democracy’ under neoliberalism, or ‘new liberalism’, is. It is not about seeking to define and represent the popular will, but to obtain – by any means necessary including lying – consent for a pre-ordained set of policies.

Without doubt pre-neoliberal Parliamentary democracy has often manifested exactly the same tendency. But it has been distilled into an art form in the last four decades, with real power usurped by pan-governmental organisations like the IMF. Governments are now placed in a straitjacket, compelled to support balanced budgets and accompanying austerity, liberalized financial markets, low corporate taxes, and personal tax rates that don’t prompt an exodus to the Bahamas on the part of the very wealthy. Given the resentments that this state of affairs inevitably generates, ‘democracy’ is largely about ensuring they are directed at powerless targets, usually immigrants and benefit claimants.

Curiously, however, even though the spirit of democracy can be unashamedly trampled on, the formalities can’t. Free and fair elections must be periodically held and consent, by hook or by crook, extracted. It is an irony of history that just as a wave of democracy rolled across the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, toppling dictatorships and one-party states in its wake, the actual content of democracy was hollowed out. Governments, whatever their theoretical commitments, were invariably compelled to accept the strictures of IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes and the dictates of the Washington Consensus. Post-apartheid South Africa is a textbook example of “democracy without democracy”. Elitist fears expressed at the dawn of universal suffrage a century and a half ago, that democracy would swamp liberalism, have proved groundless. Precisely the opposite has happened.

Liberalism and slavery

The same liberal neuroses about consent can be observed in the furore over “modern slavery”. Governments bend over backwards to condemn it in the strongest possible terms, charities pledge to eradicate it, and the media join the chorus.

This is not to deny that modern slavery is a serious problem, and a separate category from the conventional employer/employee relationship. But the wall erected between “compelled labour” and the normal workings of capitalism is supremely ideological. In the urge to locate “exploitation” as happening solely when a worker is coerced – the UK’s Gangmasters & Labour Abuse Authority defines its aims as “preventing worker exploitation” – another claim is implicitly made: that when the labour exchange is free and consensual exploitation doesn’t occur.

But this is nonsense. In the words of academic Neil Howard, this fictional binary “protects the system from the moral outrage that might otherwise challenge its hegemony”.

Capitalism – i.e. an economic system based on ‘free’ labour exchange – cannot do without reams of people without property who are compelled to rent themselves out in order to procure the means to physically survive.

Even if one is to ignore the millions of people on the margins of the global economy who choose to submit to servitude or trafficking because in conditions of dire poverty they represent their least worst options, a comparatively wealthy country like Britain shows the depth of the well from which exploitable people are drawn.

There are, it is estimated, 16 million people in the UK who have less than £100 in savings. And nearly 80% have some form of personal debt in the shape of credit cards, personal loans, bank overdrafts and payday loans. In such circumstances – and in those of a benefit system that will sanction claimants who can’t prove they are looking for work – saying no to a job offer is not, practically, possible. In previous, more honest, eras, this was called wage slavery.

Exploitation through the ages

Marxism is frequently presented as nightmare ideology that wants to make everyone the subject of an all-powerful state and was responsible, in the last century, for killing millions in gulags and famines. But the hysteria partly comes from Marxism’s insistence, uniquely in economic thought, that exploitation doesn’t just occur under patently coercive arrangements like slavery and feudalism but also when people, on the surface, voluntarily choose to work for an employer.

“There’s only one basis that any capitalist ever hired a worker,” says author Richard Wolff, “and that condition is ‘you gotta produce more for me than I pay you for coming here to do it’”. In this sense, capitalism is no different from prior economic systems, or the vestiges of such systems that remain. In all cases, a small minority exploits the vast majority in order to extract a surplus from them. “Capitalism, even though the workers are not slaves or serfs, does replicate those two systems in this particular way,” says Wolff. “One group of people – the employees – go to work on condition that they produce a surplus that the employer gets.”

You may baulk at the notion that someone like Lionel Messi (salary €71 million at Paris Saint-Germain F.C.) is exploited. However, what cannot be honestly denied that is corporations and other businesses, practically and legally required to maximise profit, view the world’s population as either a resource ripe for exploitation or a human mass to be left to rot (“the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all,” said 20^th century economist Joan Robinson). In the latter case, the human material is created for trafficking and forced labour in the West.

And in most Western countries, exploitation – exploitation that is of workers who ‘freely’ consent to do their jobs – is intensifying. In Britain, in the wake of the financial crisis, zero hour contracts have mushroomed and many workers – for example builders or delivery drivers – are falsely reclassified as ‘independent contractors’ in order to save the employer from having to fork out for holiday or sick pay. They can also earn below the minimum wage because they aren’t officially paid a wage and don’t have set hours.

In addition, as pandemic conditions slowly lift, many employees are finding they are being sacked and told to reapply for their jobs based on inferior conditions. Despite the rhetoric about the inestimable value of key workers in the worst stages of the pandemic, Tesco, British Gas, British Airways and local councils and have all tried to engage in this “industrial thuggery”.

In such circumstances what better way to shield capitalism from justifiable anger, than to focus all attention on the plight of slaves and coerced workers who, it is claimed, exist entirely outside of its legitimate confines?

The cooperation of the exploited

But there is a deeper reason, in my opinion, for this blindness of liberalism. In the 1970s, psychologist Stanley Milgram, author of the famous obedience to authority experiments, noted that for obedience to work seamlessly, those subject to it had to believe that their submission was a voluntary choice. “The psychological consequence of voluntary entry is that it creates a sense of commitment and obligation,” he said, “which will subsequently play a part in binding the subject to his role.”

Any endeavour – and that includes the ubiquitous labour contract – is so much easier to perform if the victims of it can be convinced to cooperate. Enforcing coercion is hard. It requires perpetual surveillance and overcoming an ingrained human resistance – some have called it counterwill – to bowing to another’s desire.

That is why liberalism insists that consent exists in political and economic arenas when patently it has to be fabricated. But if consent can be given, it can also be withdrawn, if only spiritually at first.

Despite what Jordan Peterson says, the world is not your lobster*

I’ve been enticed back into reading about Jordan Peterson and his exemplary lobster. For the uninitiated, Peterson – ‘classical liberal’ and self-help guru – believes we should be inspired by the not so humble lobster, willing to fight all-comers (well other lobsters) for the best places to live. The lobster (and also the merciless wren, the chicken, the chimpanzee etc.) is an example of nature’s dominance hierarchy which is a “near-eternal aspect of the environment”. Older than trees in fact.

Humans, according to Peterson, are just as subject to the unforgiving laws of this dominance hierarchy. Despite our cultural pretensions and elaborate societies it still operates under the surface. “It’s inevitable,” avers Peterson, “that there will be continuity in the way animals and human beings organise their structures”. Thus, brutal economic inequality – the fact that 85 ultra-wealthy people at the top of society have as much as three and half billion at the bottom – is given a biological justification.

Read the memo: it’s inevitable, get used to it and don’t – the ultimate Peterson sin – start getting resentful.

The immediate temptation, to which many have succumbed, is to say Peterson’s examination of the natural world is hopelessly partial. Why choose to focus on the lobster or the status-obsessed chimpanzee and pass over the egalitarian, sharing bonobo or the unaggressive, vegetarian gibbon? An argument that can be traced back to Kropotkin’s highlighting of mutual aid among animals, in contrast to the simplification of the survival of the fittest.

Civilised hierarchies

However, this argument rather misses the point, or to be more precise, it concedes too much before it gets to the bone of contention. Because human hierarchies – that is actually existing hierarchies that have dominated the history of human civilisation before reformers, revolutionaries and utopians messed with them – are radically and qualitatively different to animal dominance hierarchies. In fact the latter don’t merit the appellation ‘hierarchy’ at all, the word originally applying to the rule of the high priest in ancient Greece, a uniquely human dispensation.

Only in early hunter-gatherer societies, can human arrangements be said to resemble dominance ‘hierarchies’ among animals in the sense that charismatic and talented individuals might acquire power. And even then, the evidence suggests tribal members were aware of the dangers of power becoming entrenched and embodied in certain individuals and took steps to ensure that, uniquely in the natural world, economic relations, family structure and political life were regularly shuffled.

The history of civilisation in all parts of the world, by contrast, and despite its undoubted benefits, is the history of dynasties, aristocracies, land-owners and empires on the one side and serfs, slaves, indentured labourers, and workers on the other. Slavery was an unmissable feature of ‘civilised’ society for thousands of years. It’s not a Western invention or imposition; it was only abolished in China in 1908.

In such societies, the facts of birth and inheritance were all-important. Intelligence, cunning, physical strength, charisma – or whatever other attributes Peterson thinks differentiates winners from losers – would at best have enabled the lucky incumbent to progress within their caste or class. Only very rarely would they have permitted them to rise within the hierarchy itself. Hannah Arendt’s description of the “caste conceit” of the British aristocracy in the 19^th century – “the pride in privilege without individual effort and merit, simply by virtue of birth” – could be applied to ruling castes and classes throughout history the world over.

‘God hath placed them there’

Such hierarchies were, in Murray Bookchin’s description, were “clothed in ideologies” because they were anything but natural. They were, however, intended to endure and such longevity was not merely secured by immense military power but also because most people, especially those oppressed by such hierarchies, were assiduously convinced of their, often divinely-ordained, legitimacy. Something animals obviously can’t be. Lobsters don’t bequeath their hiding places to their offspring nor insist to other lobsters left with stringy pieces of seaweed as camouflage that it’s blasphemy to object to such inequality because it’s been prescribed by the great lobster god.

Hence belief systems like the medieval ‘Great Chain of Being’ in which everyone – serfs, vagabonds, yeomen, lords etc. – had a recognised position because ‘God hath placed them there’.  In 17^th century England, parish priests issued weekly instructions for servants to obey their masters and behave “lowly and reverently” towards their betters.

In such societies, the personal attributes and characters of rulers might be a source of regret or rejoicing, but they were irrelevant for determining the power they wielded. As Bookchin noted about now infamous European monarchs:

Figures like Louis XVI of France and Nicholas II of Russia, for example did not become autocrats because they had genetically programmed strong personalities and physiques, much less keen minds. They were inept, awkward, psychologically weak, and conspicuously stupid men (even according to royalist accounts of their reigns) who lived in times of revolutionary social upheaval. Yet their power was virtually absolute until it was curtailed by revolution.

But, but ...  I’m guessing Peterson would instantly interject were he to be – unlikely I know – reading this: what you’re saying might be true for human hierarchies deeply ensconced in tradition and time-encrusted practices, but since the advent of liberal-democracy and capitalism and the demise of ancien regimes it has been possible for people born in difficult circumstances to, through their own native ability and self-discipline, rise in society and transform their lives.

“… the most valid personality trait predictors of long-term success in Western countries,” says Peterson “are intelligence … and conscientiousness.”

As a precursor, “success” needs to be defined. Because so much intelligence, conscientiousness and talent that doesn’t fit into money-making purposes and interest those organizations that hire people to do their bidding (and into which democracy is not permitted to intrude) simply withers or is actively suppressed.

Yea, even unto the Middle Ages

However, the other side of the coin is that liberal capitalism’s reputation for social mobility – progressing up the income scale during your lifetime – has been greatly exaggerated even on its own terms. So many of our current political leaders have emerged from privileged backgrounds and wealth amassed before y’know everyone had a crack at it. David Cameron is descended from King William VI and was brought up in a stately home, Boris Johnson’s full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Donald Trump inherited his fortune from his property tycoon dad.

Social mobility’s heyday under capitalism was actually in its post-war social-democratic incarnation when the rich were heavily taxed and finance forced into productive investment. Since the 1980s, after capitalism became more purely capitalistic, it’s gone down. A 2017 report found that in the US after the ‘inflection point’ of 1980, inequality skyrocketed and social mobility started “declining sharply”. The British Social Mobility Commission reported last year that inequality is now “entrenched from birth to work” and according to the UN Development Programme a “great new divergence” is taking place around the world, leaving educated young people stuck in low wage, dead-end jobs:

“What people perhaps 30, 40 years ago were led to believe and often saw around them," an UNDP administrator says, “was that if you worked hard, you could escape poverty.” Yet in many countries today, he says, upward social mobility is “simply not occurring” anymore.

This is modern-day capitalism, where intelligence and conscientiousness aren’t, after all, enough to help you lead a better life. And by the way, this conclusion is not impaired by Peterson’s revelation that human and lobsters share “basic neuro-chemistry” so you can administer an anti-depressant to a lobster and it will fight “harder and longer”. Anti-depressants have been administered to millions of human beings since the late 1980s, making evidently no difference to rates of social mobility.

Entrepreneurs and capitalists

Why, you might ask, does it have to be this way? Because capitalism is at heart a system where great wealth is extracted by people who do nothing to earn it. It isn’t, despite the advertising, a justice dispensing machine where, notwithstanding the rough edges, diligent and creative entrepreneurs are rewarded for the improvements they bring to people’s lives.

As author David Schweickart has astutely shown, the entrepreneur is capitalism’s “white knight”, routinely unveiled to justify ‘returns to capital’ that have nothing to do with inventions or improving methods of production. Vast fortunes are made and replenished daily simply by virtue of the ownership of real or financial assets:

In a capitalist society, enormous sums are paid to people who do not engage in any entrepreneurial activity or take on any significant risk with their capital. Trillions flows to shareholders who make an entirely passive contribution to production.

In fact, despite the enormous changes wrought by the economic system known as capitalism, the capitalist bears an uncanny resemblance to the landowners and landlords of past centuries who commandeered immense wealth and power without doing anything to deserve it. Indeed, capitalism has frequently coexisted with small coteries of landowners in most parts of the world. Which is why land reform was such a seminal political issue for numerous countries in the 20^th century – something you might be aware of if you manage to get over a fixation with capitalist white hats and communist black hats.

Don’t complain

The awkward problem is that wanting human society to replicate the daily fights for survival, nourishment and safety evident in the animal world requires not a laissez-faire approach, but massive government intervention in society. It demands severe taxation of the rich and punitive restrictions on inheritance. It compels instituting downwards as well as upwards social mobility, which means abolishing private education that works, in effect, to over-promote a small section of the population and lavish resources on them. And even then, the result would be a pale imitation of animal ‘hierarchies’.

But western societies are intent on the diametrically opposite policy. Every time in recent history – for example the 2008 financial crisis or the current Covid-19 crisis – the wealth of the moneyed and propertied has been threatened, governments stepped in to artificially protect it and institute bogus stock market booms.

Isolated conservatives and ‘classical liberals’ may have objected to this massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich but the vast majority – Peterson included – raised not a whimper of protest.

The grain of truth in Peterson is the emphasis on personal responsibility and the insistence that, whatever your circumstances, no-one, apart from yourself, determines how you react. But others before have expressed this anti-determinism better. “It makes no sense to complain since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, how we live, or what we are,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, trickily also a Marxist, in 1943.

But ignoring the structures of society that are not amenable to individual efforts to change them but can, nonetheless, still be changed collectively, is not only wrong but is liable to lead to depression and resentment, the very things Peterson says he wants to alleviate.

* my son

The Liberalism Nobody Knows

Liberal democracy (or liberal-democracy) appears as one of those natural pairings of the English language – a linguistic partnership that enhances, rather than does violence to, its constituents. It has become a modern truism that liberalism and democracy are inseparable bedfellows, soul mates even. Where liberalism is vanquished, democracy, at best, becomes a plebiscitary tool to vindicate the wishes of absolute rulers. Conversely, where liberalism is allowed to flourish, democracy – defined as free elections, an independent media and free speech – inevitably follows.

But this comfortable view, which permits its proponents to always feel they are siding with the angels, is a delusion. As Domenico Losurdo shows in Liberalism: A Counter-History, liberalism had quite separate roots from democracy and was fully prepared to countenance the seemingly illiberal tools of coups and dictatorship if it felt threatened from below. The much vaunted, and supposedly natural, coupling of liberalism and democracy was a slow, painful and fitful process, invariably achieved against the will of liberals and to which they have never been reconciled.

The rarely told history of liberalism

Losurdo traces the history of liberalism back to the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688. The subsequent Bill of Rights limited the power of the monarch and allowed a Parliamentary (though emphatically not democratic) system to emerge. From that point, liberalism was defined as opposition to concentration of power, in the form of the monarch and sometimes the Catholic Church. The other side of the coin was the liberty of people to be unrestrained by state power. But this liberty was never meant to be the birthright of everyone. Far from it, only “the community of the free”, in Lusurdo’s phrase, a small minority of male property-owners, were so blessed. The role of everyone else – the vast majority of people – was merely to be their servants.

Thus it was no accident that the liberal era was coeval with the slave trade, “the largest involuntary movement of human in all history”, and the establishment of a brutal system of racial chattel slavery in the United States – a British settler colony that achieved independence. In the metropolitan countries, the vast majority of non-property owners were not slaves but they were enchained as serfs or wage labourers. Freedom, to early liberalism, was the freedom of property owners to enjoy their property as they wished. In England, from 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) to 1820, the number of crimes carrying the death penalty increased from 50 to between 200 and 250 and these were almost always for crimes against property. In England at the start of 19^th century you could be hung for taking an unauthorized clipping from an ornamental bush.

The newly independent United States of America was a bastion of liberalism. But as British loyalists pointed out, this love of liberty went hand in hand with the consecration of the ‘worst species of slavery’. The Britain derived from the Glorious Revolution, the rebel colonists shot back, presided over the horror of the slave trade and treated its white servants little better than slaves.

Both accusations were true and both exposed the underbelly of liberalism. The veneration of freedom for some people was dependent on the complete opposite – total subjection and domination – for many others. To work this required an intricate ideology of dehumanisation. The French liberal Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès regarded wage labourers as “bipedal machines”, while the British liberal-conservative Edmund Burke (a man considered to be the father of modern conservatism who incidentally subscribed to the most elaborate Jewish conspiracy theories) looked upon workers as mere instrumentum vocale.

And when these machines began to make demands, the sheen of opposition to ‘despotism’ miraculously fell away. John Locke, the most influential of the early liberals, regarded physical force as entirely justified in the event of a tax not authorised by those affected by it. Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, was intransigently opposed to attempts to legally reduce the 12 hour day, introduce progressive taxation or instigate rent controls and believed “nothing authorizes the state to interfere in industry”. He supported the idea of a temporary dictatorship to modernize France. In Britain, between 1790 and 1820, more than 60 Acts of Parliament were passed aimed at repressing working class activity. Liberals enthusiastically endorsed the discipline of the workhouse.

The story of the vote

This is not to deny the umbilical connection of liberalism to self-government and representative, elected institutions – ‘no taxation without representation’ as the American rebels famously proclaimed – but the section of the population to be represented was necessarily and intentionally tiny. Britain had Parliamentary institutions – powerful bodies that had succeeded in executing a King and, since the Glorious Revolution, formed part of a constitutional monarchy – but prior to the Great Reform Act only 3 per cent of the public were entitled to determine who their members were – about 200,000 out of a population of eight million.

In 1832, the franchise was extended to 13 per cent of adult males, but Chartism, a mass movement calling for universal manhood suffrage and annual elections, was bitterly resisted and above all by avowed liberals. “In England” Karl Polanyi reminds us, “it became the unwritten law of the Constitution that the working class must be denied the vote. The Chartist leaders were jailed; their adherents, numbered in millions, were derided by a legislature representing a bare fraction of the population, and the mere demand for the ballot was often treated as a criminal act by the authorities …. Inside and outside England, from Macaulay to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner, there was not a militant liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism.”

Britain did not approach becoming such a democracy until after the First World War. On the eve of that conflagration, only 30 per cent of the adult population (no women and 60 per cent of men) could vote. Britain was thus less democratic than its illiberal adversary, Germany, which had manhood suffrage.

The community of the free in the US was more expansive – voting for all white men was in place by 1856 – but that was because of the existence of millions of black slaves and endless expanses of supposedly “unpossessed” land. Even so, the idea that wage labourers were, in reality, wage slaves – because of their material dependence on employers, their state was comparable to that of chattel slaves – was enormously strong in the 19^th century.

And one of the strongest of the liberal “exclusion clauses” related to women. The vote wasn’t granted to women in the US until 1920. In Britain female votes were only achieved following a campaign of militant civil disobedience and hungry strikes and the massive turmoil of World War One. Women gained the vote partially in 1918 and, unconditionally, in 1928.

Far from being synonymous with democracy, liberalism, as Losurdo points out, regarded it with “coldness, hostility and sometimes frank contempt” – an attitude maintained for more than two centuries. Democracy and equal rights didn’t flow naturally from liberalism; they had to be prised from it:

… it must be borne in mind that the exclusion clauses were not overcome painlessly, but through violent upheavals of sometimes quite unprecedented violence. The abolition of slavery in the wake of the Civil War cost the United States more victims than both world wars combined. As for censitary discrimination [restrictions on the electoral franchise], a decisive contribution was made to its abolition by the French revolutionary cycle. Finally, in major countries like Russia, Germany and the United States the accession of women to political rights had behind it the war and revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century (Liberalism: A Counter-History, p 341).

The new liberalism

But, it will be objected, all this refers not so much to the history of liberalism, as its pre-history. With the emergence of the ‘new liberalism’ in the late 19^th century, the creed of liberalism changed beyond recognition. It became reconciled to – even championed – democracy, economic regulation and racial and gender equality. John Maynard Keynes, for example, an economist synonymous with scepticism towards laissez-faire capitalism, was a lifelong member of the British Liberal party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, probably the most famous of 20^th century American liberals (he never called himself a socialist), placed freedom of speech and freedom of worship on a par with freedom from want for “everyone in the world”.

The face of modern liberalism can be seen in the public letter of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates published in January who warn that European “liberal democracy” is confronted with “a threat not seen since the 1930s”. The liberal values espoused here are those of internationalism, anti-populism and toleration. Democracy is ostensibly defended, not derided.

But the older liberalism has not died. It is, in fact, arguably more influential than its modernised twin. Neoliberalism (‘new liberalism’) has been guiding force of the economy since the 1980s. Neoliberalism holds that market forces should determine economic decisions, taxes on wealth and corporations should be as low as possible and government budgets should be balanced (a feat always to be achieved by cutting public spending rather than raising taxes on the wealthy). Neoliberalism harks back very directly to economic liberalism, the doctrine of laissez-faire that asserted that contracts negotiated between ‘free’ individuals should not be interfered with by the state.

Except that economic liberalism is a misnomer. The original 20^th century economic liberals, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, did not regard themselves as economic liberals but consistent liberals. To them, the other liberals had abandoned the tenets of liberalism and embraced ‘socialism’. It was always a cause of some regret to Hayek that his ideas were taken up by the British Conservative party – he was a major influence on Margaret Thatcher – rather than the Liberals.

Taking the risk out of democracy

And Hayek and Von Mises retained the older liberalism’s coldness towards democracy. Hayek, for example, was full of praise for Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet and believed that “liberal dictatorship” was infinitely preferable to “democratic government devoid of liberalism”. Von Mises, a generation older, regarded trade unionism as a form of terrorism and thought the merit of Italian Fascism – won through saving European civilisation from the workers’ movement – would “live on eternally in history” (and this in a book entitled Liberalism).

The temptation is to say that we are dealing with two distinct political currents that, by dint of historical coincidence, go by the same name. But that would be too hasty a judgement. Hayek, for instance, was very sympathetic to the idea of European federalism. To him it offered protection against the virus of democracy. “The absence of tariff walls and the free movements of men and capital between the states of the federation has certain important consequences which are frequently overlooked,” he wrote in a 1939 essay. “They limit to a great extent the scope of the economic policy of the individual states.”

Hayek’s praise for the virtues of “one single market” thus prefigures the creation of the EU’s single market which does indeed limit the economic policy of individual European states and enshrines the free movement of capital and people. And the single market – resolutely supported by Margaret Thatcher it should be recalled – is the core institution of a European Union whose “liberal values”, intellectuals warn, are under attack from nativists and xenophobes.  

But the clearest bridge between the two liberalisms can be seen in the outlook of the corporate elite at the Davos World Economic Forum. Their concern about the threats to what they term the “liberal order” has now risen to a crescendo. This order comprises the free movement of capital and commodities (globalisation) coupled with a cosmopolitan attitude and support for gender and racial diversity.

However their stance towards the arch destroyer of that liberal order – Donald Trump – is revealing. They are repelled by his protectionism, hostility to immigrants, sexism and xenophobia but irresistibly attracted to his indulgence of the immensely wealthy. When, in 2017, Trump massively cut taxes for the rich (reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 per cent and instituting tax breaks for millionaires), Davos went weak at the knees at this long overdue “tax reform”.

Contrast this with the unrelenting hostility directed towards left-wingers such as Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who are in fact resiliently liberal in their opposition to attacks on immigrants, refugees or LGBT people but also in favour raising taxes, moderately, on the wealthy (and, in Corbyn’s case, renationalising public services). Should Corbyn become UK Prime Minister – which now seems likely – expect that hostility to ramp up into brazen attempts to bring down his government, by any means possible. And liberals will be at the forefront of that effort. The tragedy is, they will always return to their roots.