Gray's Liberalism (2) - A Review - The Unity of the Liberal Tradition

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Continued from Gray's Liberalism (1)

Ancient Freedom 

Gray sees Greece and Rome as part of the pre-history of liberalism. Personally I feel, research into the nature and extent of freedom in ancient times may prove to be rather a yielding exertion, especially research into the Republican, pre-Imperial Rome, where modern notions of liberty may be found; also I consider Hellenistic Stoicism a significant influence on later forms of pluralistic freedom; but I have no time for a deeper query. See also A Modern Story - Politics and the State in Ancient Greece, The Invention of the Modern Public, Freedom and Ancient Greece, and Demos and Freedom - Robust and Non-Robust Conditions of Freedom.

Modern Freedom

As a political current and an intellectual tradition, an identifiable strand in thought and practice, liberalism is no older than the seventeenth century. (p.xi) 

Like Gray, I tend to think that liberalism is a specifically European product, whose identity is closely tied to the unique circumstances surrounding the rise of the West - from the demise of the feudal order to the American Revolution. 

It is an interesting question to what extent non-European modern societies (such as Japan, Singapore or Hong Kong) have been able to take a short-cut to liberalism, by importing and imitating the specifically liberal advancement that had taken centuries to grow in Europe; but I cannot deal with this topic presently.

Freedom's Resilience

I would challenge Gray on his conjecture of

the near-eclipse of liberal society by totalitarian governments in our own time. (p. xii)

I do not think that fascism, national socialism or Russo-Sino socialism ever stood a chance to eclipse liberal society. And that is a phenomenal conclusion of the most momentous import for our species' fate. See The Corridor of Success. 

But I may be simply misreading Gray; perhaps, what he is saying is that during the rule of these totalitarian societies liberal society was nearly eclipsed. If so, it is still an intriguing question to what extent even modern totalitarian societies depend on liberal features in human interaction.

Gray's Timeless Core of Liberalism

Gray claims:

For all its variability, liberalism remains an integral outlook, whose principal components are not hard to specify, rather than a loose association of movements and outlooks among which family resemblances  may be described. (p.xiii)

This is a challenging proposition, and I wonder if I shall find evidence rather to refute Gray's conjecture than to corroborate it. 

Continuing from the above quote, Gray explains:

It is only thus that we can identify John Locke and Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, J. M. Keynes and F.A. Hayek, John Rawls and Robert Nozick as embodying separate branches of a common lineage. (ibid.)

Gray sees the Scottish Enlightenment as an era that would prove to be particularly effective in consolidating and promoting

the system of thought of classical liberalism ... when Adam Smith referred to 'the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice', but the term 'liberal' still functioned chiefly as a derivative of liberality, the classical virtue of humanity, generosity and the open mind.  (p. xi)

The two friends, David Hume and Adam Smith should be especially interesting candidates for some profiling under the presumption of  detecting two proto-social democrats. Are their pronouncement systematically incompatible with what Gray calls "modern or revisionist liberalism"? Is there a strand of classical liberalism that is already open to revisionism? An intriguing hypothesis.

At any rate, which are "the principal components [of liberalism] that [harness the above diverse philosophers into a team, and] are not hard to specify"?

Or as Gray puts it:

Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctly modern in character, of man and society. What are the several elements of this conception?

It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity:

egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings;

universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms;

and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements.

It is this conception of man and society which gives liberalism a definite identity which transcends its vast internal variety and complexity.

(p. xii)

At the end of the chapter on The Unity of the Liberal Tradition, Gray commits himself to this contention: 

The character of liberalism as a single tradition, its identity as a persistent though variable conception of man and society, holds true even if [...] is has been subjected to a major rupture, when in the writings of John Stuart Mill classical liberalism gave way to the modern or revisionist liberalism of our own times. (p. xiii)

I am sceptical as to such a daring contention of cohesion. Even intellectual attempts at liberty may be spontaneous events rather like popcorn popping in a pan than a railway construction whose extension and shape are made up of the same set of building blocks and part of a uniform plan.

Continued at Gray's Liberalism (3).