Why are liberals called "liberals"?

Question

Why are liberals called "liberals"?

Answer 1

For centuries the word "liberal" has carried multiple meanings, on the one hand meaning generous or broad-minded, on the other dissolute or undisciplined. In American history the concept of liberalism has been similarly multivalent despite its champions' and critics' efforts to narrow or simplify its significance. Despite an enduring myth that a single "liberal tradition" has dominated American history, the central liberal values of generosity toward the poor and toleration of diversity have always been contested. Contemporary critics of liberalism fall into two distinct camps. Conservatives, including many Republican Party loyalists, accuse liberals of mobilizing the resources of big government in a futile effort to engineer equality without respecting individual property rights. Academic cultural radicals, by contrast, accuse liberals of neglecting the egalitarian aspirations of marginalized Americans and paying too much attention to individual property rights. Can the ideas of liberalism, assailed from the right and the left, be salvaged?

Varieties of Liberalism

Viewed historically, liberalism in America bears little resemblance to today's stereotypes. From the seventeenth century onward, liberals have tried to balance their commitments to individual freedom, social equality, and representative democracy. Until recently, most American liberals conceived of individual rights within the ethical framework provided by the Christian law of love. Puritan John Winthrop, for example, was neither an egalitarian nor a pluralist, but in 1630 he characterized "liberallity" toward the least fortunate members of the community as a duty Christians must observe. Massachusetts pastor John Wise, writing in 1707, invoked the German philosopher of natural law Samuel von Pufendorf rather than the Englishman John Locke to bolster his claim that the principles of sociability and love of mankind operate alongside the principle of self-reservation. Similar combinations of religious, ethical, and traditional restraints on personal freedom provided the vocabularies employed when Americans began to challenge different aspects of British rule after 1767. The resulting discourses of protest culminated first in local and state declarations of independence, then in state constitutional conventions, and finally in the United States Constitution, complete with its Bill of Rights. As all these documents stipulated, what Thomas Jefferson termed the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" could be pursued legitimately only within boundaries established "by certain laws for the common good," as John Adams put it in the 1779 Constitution of Massachusetts. Whether that concern for the public interest derived from the Christian law of love or the Scottish common-sense philosophers' principle of benevolence, from the English common law or colonial legal practice, from classical republicanism or Renaissance civic humanism, from Pufendorf or Locke, the concept of justice as a goal transcending the satisfaction of individuals' personal preferences pervaded the founding documents that secured the rights of citizens in the new nation.

But what about those denied citizenship? Proclamations of the common good clashed with the fact that a majority of Americans did not enjoy equal liberties. In response, some mid-nineteenth-century liberal reformers such as Sarah Grimké and Frederick Douglass began to clamor for women's rights and the abolition of slavery. A few invoked the principle of toleration to protest the removal of Indians from their ancestral lands. Others invoked the language of liberty on behalf of a campaign for economic enterprise that extended Enlightenment convictions about the civilizing effects of commerce and economic growth. But local and state laws continued to circumscribe much economic activity with regulations premised on the common-law doctrine of the people's welfare, a principle invoked to justify laws controlling the use of waterways, the operation of stables and slaughterhouses, and the licensing of butchers, bakers, grocers, physicians, and lawyers. Many of those who clamored for the right of all to own property justified their claims by invoking egalitarian ideals rather than more individualist concepts of natural rights. The notion of laissez-faire never succeeded in uprooting such practices and traditions. In the decade prior to the Civil War, contrasting appeals to equal rights assumed strikingly different meanings in the North and the South. When Lincoln succeeded in tying the expansion of slavery to the degradation of free labor, he bound the political, economic, and religious strands of liberal reform sentiment into a fragile but impressive coalition perceived by the South as a threat to slaveholders' property rights.

Setting a pattern for times of peril, during the Civil War the restriction of civil liberties was justified by the goal of securing liberty. Afterward the sacrifice of the freed slaves' rights and the postponement of women's rights were both justified by the goal of restoring a Union rededicated to the principle of liberty for white men. Lincoln's more generous and more broad-minded vision of the national purpose faded from view.

For a brief moment in the late-nineteenth century, gangs of greedy industrialists and politicians hijacked liberal principles to rationalize the unchecked exploitation of people and resources, but by the turn of the century agrarian and labor activists were working to bring that anomalous period to a close. Some coalitions of progressive reformers sought to restore the earlier liberal balance between rights and obligations, invoking the eighteenth-century concept of the common good to justify restoring the authority of government as a counterweight to the assertion of private prerogatives. Their "new liberalism" sought to harness the techniques of science to regulate an industrializing and urbanizing America in order to secure effective freedom for all instead of protecting empty, formal rights that enabled "the interests" to oppress "the people." Thinkers such as John Dewey and W. E. B. Du Bois and reformers such as Louis Brandeis and Jane Addams yoked the language of liberty and justice to the philosophy of pragmatism and the energetic engagement of public authority to address social and economic problems.

Although business interests protested at first, during and after World War I they learned how to live with government because it promised to secure and legitimate the stability they prized. The Great Depression shattered their hopes and altered their strategy. Although large enterprises continued to depend on the state's cooperation, the business community developed an ideology of implacable opposition to "liberal" government intrusions into the "private" sector.

The New Deal emerged from the chaos of the depression, established a new social vision, then ended in retreat in the late 1940s when its opponents in both parties joined forces to defend hierarchies of race and privilege. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt initially lacked a coherent program of national recovery, by the end of World War II he and his advisers had transformed the meaning of liberalism. When he declared in 1944 that the Allies were fighting to secure a "Second Bill of Rights," including the rights to higher education, a job, a living wage, decent housing, and health care for all citizens, he established an agenda that has continued to drive liberal politics ever since. During the Cold War, critics derided such programs as being antithetical to an "American way of life" that sanctified the individual rights of a privileged majority, and interpreted invocations of a shared common good as evidence of dangerous communist sympathies.