UF (12) — Classical Liberalism: Dead or Alive?

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Classical Liberalism – Dead or Alive?


Whether one is likely to consider classical liberalism to be dead or alive hinges on three questions that I tend to regard as the fundamental political problems that the doctrine is facing.


Problem 1: if the state is indispensable in order to secure liberty, and if the state cannot be financed by voluntary contributions, so that it must be granted the privilege of taxation, then classical liberalism finds itself entangled in a fundamental contradiction. After all, liberty is defined as the absence of arbitrariness. However, the privilege to tax empowers the state to act arbitrarily, i.e. to render a person, against her will, a means toward another party’s end.


Problem 2: perhaps problem 1, the exercise of arbitrary power by the state, can be confined to serving no other purpose than to secure and foster liberty, thus rendering problem 1 insignificant and acceptable. However, this gives rise to problem 2: is it possible at all to appropriately constrain the arbitrary rule of the state?


Problem 3: if problem 1 and problem 2 cannot be overcome, does this mean that liberty can only be achieved in the absence of the state? Therefore, problem 3 may be phrased in this manner: if the attainment of liberty under stateless conditions is likely to be highly difficult and at best a distant prospect or even an impossibility altogether, does this not imply the failure of classical liberalism?


The answer depends on whether or not one is accepting or rejecting an all-important tacit assumption: liberty must be able to generate herself.


Once it is recognised that this assumption is erroneous and therefore ought to be dropped, problem 1, 2, and 3 turn out not to be fatal flaws in the doctrine of classical liberalism at all; to the contrary, they provide grounds to support the doctrine, lending value to it and underscoring its cogency.


By contrast, problems 1, 2, and 3 appear fatally destructive of classical liberalism, if one subscribes to an argumentative logic that treats liberty like a formal system whose most important characteristic is consistency (i.e. the lack of logical contradictions), irrespective of insurmountable empirical facts that rule out such consistency.


Liberty is always a transformation of states, processes, and patterns of personal action that lie outside of or are independent of liberty, and hence must be altered to create room for freedom.


Amongst these states, processes, and patterns that antecede liberty and need to be shaped appropriately for freedom to emerge there are anthropological constants such as political action in all its forms, the search for power and enforcing authority to establish norms binding on society, the competitive evolution of structures of maximal power and the concomitant development of state structures. The inescapable challenge is to develop liberty out of what is not liberty yet. And this needs to be done not once and for all but again and again.


Problems 1, 2 und 3 are ever recurring to-do items on the agenda of freedom, the most important tasks in the product brief of freedom, the very challenges that create a demand for liberty and define her practical duties.


Whether problems 1, 2, and 3 put the final nail in the coffin of classical liberalism or whether they are sources of the vital need for it is a question of perspective. He who looks at liberty as being an ideal outcome that is capable of final and complete accomplishment and can be exactly mapped onto a consistent formal structure is apt to reject classical liberalism as a still-born doctrine.


He who views liberty as an ongoing process of adaptation and approximation in the course of which freedom must assert herself incessantly against a changing environment that is full of interests and convictions indifferent or antithetical to freedom, will be able to experience the life force of classical liberalism.


Written in April 2013


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