Saving the Soul of Classical Liberalism

Artigo de James Buchanan.

George Bush (pai), during his presidency, derisively referred to "that vision thing," when someone sought to juxtapose his position with that of Ronald Reagan. The "shining city on a hill," the Puritan image that Mr. Reagan invoked to call attention to the American idea, was foreign to Mr. Bush's mind-set. Mr. Bush did not understand what Mr. Reagan meant and failed to appreciate why the image resonated in public attitudes.

In a sense, we can say that Ronald Reagan was tapping into a part of the American soul about which George Bush remained illiterate. The critical distinction between those whose window on reality emerges from a comprehensive vision of what might be, and those whose window is pragmatically limited to current perceptions, comes clear in this comparison.

My larger thesis is that classical liberalism cannot secure sufficient public acceptability when its vocal advocates are limited to this second group of "does it work?" pragmatists. Science and self-interest do indeed lend force to any argument. But a vision, an ideal, is necessary. People need something to yearn and struggle for. If the liberal ideal is not there, there will be a vacuum and other ideas will supplant it. Classical liberals have failed, singularly, in their understanding of this dynamic.

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[T]he problem here lies in the leading thinkers. Few socialists dispute the suggestion that an animating principle, an ideal, is central to the whole socialist perspective. But many who profess to be classical liberals have seemed reluctant to acknowledge the existence of what I have called "the soul" of their position. They often seem to seek exclusive "scientific" cover for advocacy, along with occasional reference to enlightened self-interest.

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The collectivists claimed superior wisdom; life became the pursuit of happiness in the aggregate. Aided and abetted by the Hegel-inspired political idealists, these new intellectuals shifted away from the notion of personal realization to that of collective psyche. The ideal of socialism was so successful that it led to major political and institutional changes - even when the experience of history showed it to be deeply flawed. What else but the power of the socialist ideal can explain its longevity in Russia or even parts of Western Europe?

So what differences are we actually parsing here? The categorical difference between the soul of classical liberalism and that of socialism is that one idealizes the individual, the other the collective. The individual is indeed at the center of the liberal vision: he or she strives to achieve goals that are mutually achievable by all participants in society. Precisely because these goals are internal to the consciousness of those who make choices and take actions, the outcomes they produce are neither measurable nor meaningful, as "social" outcomes. Yet most aggregate numbers that we use are designed with the "social" in mind: think of the distribution tables that American tax analysts use to depict the nation''s tax burden, or the standard unemployment figure that governments issue periodically.

As soon as we lay down a "social" purpose, even as target, we contradict the principle of liberalism itself. Yet classical liberals succumbed. They themselves have confused the discussion by advancing the claim that the idealized and extended market order produces a larger "bundle" of valued goods than any socialist alternative.

To invoke the efficiency norm in so crude a fashion as this, even conceptually, is to give away the whole game. Almost all of us are guilty of this charge, since we know, of course, that the extended market does indeed produce the relatively larger bundle, on any measure. But attention to any aggregative value scale conceals the uniqueness of the liberal order in achieving the objective of individual liberty.

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Small liberal "victories" on details of legislative policy are not enough. Nor, even, are electoral successes by those who, to an extent, espouse the liberal principles. Just because we manage to ban rent control in our locality, or to elect a Ronald Reagan as President, does not mean that classical liberalism can be said to inform public attitudes. Classical liberals quite literally "went to sleep" during the decade of the 1980s, and kept sleeping after the death of socialism. The result is that public attitudes today are more shaped by the nanny state, or by paternalist, rent-seeking, mercantilist regimes than they are by liberal ideals.

Creating a new vision, a new soul for liberalism, is our most important task now. I am not here suggesting that attention should be limited to the design of all-inclusive political packages. Politics, for the most part, proceeds in piecemeal fashion, one step at a time. What I am suggesting is that we, those who teach liberalism, focus on the vision, the constitution of liberty, rather merely on pragmatic utilitarian calculus that shows liberalism to yield quantifiably better results than politicized economies.

In other words, liberals should not lean back and say, "our work is done." The organization and the intellectual bankruptcy of socialism in our time has not removed the relevance of a renewed and continuing discourse in political philosophy. We need discourse to preserve, save, and recreate that which we may, properly, call the soul of classical liberalism. Without public understanding of its organizing principles, the extended market order will not survive.