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What is Liberalism?

There is an old joke about economists that if you put ten of them in a room and ask them a question you will receive eleven different answers. Something similar could be said regarding the definition of liberalism. Many contemporary liberals are in favour of the mixed economies and welfare states that exist in the Western world today. Their key ideational point of reference is likely the philosopher John Rawls or someone similar. Yet contemporary libertarians will violently disagree that this is the liberal position. They will emphasize the strain of liberalism that is extremely distrustful of the state and say that this is true liberalism. Their ideational point of reference is likely the economist Friedrich von Hayek or someone similar.

Then there is the meta-question of liberalism. Adherents today would distinguish liberalism as being in opposition to other ideological trends in the twentieth century such as communism and fascism. As popular as this position is, it raises more questions than it answers. Those who promote this view would readily concede that liberalism developed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, with key thinkers such as the philosopher John Locke and key events such as the American Revolution. But presumably liberalism in this period arose in response to a society that was not liberal. Yet such a society was obviously not communist or fascist, since these ideologies arose in the nineteenth and twentieth century respectively. No, liberalism arose as a response to monarchism and the aristocracy, which were completely different political ideologies and structures to anything resembling communism and fascism. This definition of liberalism - which we might refer to as the 'triumphalist twentieth-century' definition - gives rise to an irritating tendency on the part of liberals to assume that anyone who is not a liberal must be either a fascist or a communist.

This is not a book about liberalism. It is a book about the end of liberalism. It seeks to track the weaknesses of global liberalism - a quasi-imperial structure that liberalism ascended to in its final days - and how these weaknesses are now leading to its collapse. Yet to discuss these topics we need a definition of liberalism. In this book we will take a much broader and historically accurate view of liberalism. We will consider liberalism to be the Enlightenment political ideology par excellence that sought to level and 'rationalize' social and political relationships. Liberalism's target has always been hierarchical structures in politics and society at large. This is why it formed in response to the monarchies and the aristocracies. Liberalism is in a strong sense synonymous with modernity. On this reading, communism and fascism are not independent of liberalism at all. Communism was and is an outgrowth of liberalism that sought to bring liberalism's equalizing or levelling tendencies to bear on the economy itself, while fascism was and is a knee-jerk reaction to liberalism's dysfunctions as they emerged in the interwar period that drew on doctrines of nationalism that were themselves born out of the early liberal movement.

This much broader definition of liberalism allows us to see the sheer breadth of liberalism's victory in the twentieth century. Liberalism did not just beat off fascism and communism, rather it demolished all the pre-liberal institutions. By the end of the twentieth century almost all the pre-liberal institutions had been liquidated. Monarchies still exist around the Western world, but they are purely symbolic. Aristocratic titles in most European countries are still carried on largely in private, but they have no bearing on social or political questions. Western countries that maintain monarchies - like Britain, Spain or Sweden - allow them only a symbolic function, having no immediate impact on the governance of society. The only serious institution in the Western world that is truly pre-liberal and maintains widespread power and influence is the Catholic Church.* But in most Western countries its influence too has waned, and it has increasingly turned its attention to the developing world.

Yet, as this book will argue, it is now becoming clear that liberalism is a flawed ideology that self-destructs as it becomes ever more dominant. The relatively functional global liberalism of the second half of the twentieth century worked because remaining pre-liberal hierarchical institutions, most notably religion and the family, gave it hard ground on which to build. But as liberalism progressed and began to liquidate these institutions, it sawed off the very branch it was sitting on. This is the key to understanding the collapse of global liberalism; in the following chapters, we will chart this collapse in all the core institutions in society and show how they are leading, inevitably, to a post-liberal world.

The Secret History of Liberalism

The secret history of liberalism is hidden in plain sight. If you were to ask a well-informed liberal what the foundational document of their creed is, they would no doubt point you to John Locke's Two Treatises on Government.1 Ask the same liberal what the Two Treatises is about, and they will no doubt tell you that the book is about contract theory, property rights and representative government. It is true that the second of Locke's Treatises addresses these topics, but not the first. Locke's first Treatise is an extended attack on the work of Sir Robert Filmer. The prominence of this critique can be observed not simply from the fact that Locke made it one of his two treatises but also in the full title of the entire work itself: Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, The False Principles, and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers, Are Detected and Overthrown. The Latter Is an Essay Concerning The True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government.

Sir Robert Filmer's book is entitled Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings.2 It was written in response to the events of the English Civil War, which saw the execution of King Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. British historiography likes to play down these events by calling them a civil war, but it is obvious to any neutral observer that the so-called civil war was in fact a revolution in which the Parliament revolted against the King, won a revolutionary war, and re-established the government along proto-liberal lines. The only school of historiography that maintains this interpretation today and is still widely read is the Marxist school. The Marxist school, drawing on Karl Marx's 1850 pamphlet England's 17th Century Revolution,3 describes the events of the English Civil War as a 'bourgeois revolution'. In this context, bourgeois is synonymous with liberal.

Filmer certainly saw the so-called civil war as a revolution, although he did not use the term. He recognized that Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, by executing the King and establishing a state without one, were attacking principles of society that he viewed as foundational. Filmer argued that the relationship between the King and his subjects was similar to the patriarchal relationship between a father and his children; for him, this was a natural relationship, one that could be seen not just in human society but across nature. In this Filmer intuited the heart of the logic of liberalism: the doctrine was not really aimed at any particular hierarchical structure, but rather at hierarchical structures in general. The Cromwellian attack on the King threatened not just the monarchy but ultimately all hierarchical relationships, right down to the family. If Filmer were alive today and had witnessed the twentieth-century liberal attacks on the family and the church, he would be in no way surprised. For him, this is a perfectly logical outcome of the spread of liberalism.

As liberalism evolved and spread, it would become ever more radical. Cromwell and his Puritan followers had no interest in challenging religion because they saw themselves as devout Protestants. They were content to attack hierarchical elements embodied within the Anglican and Catholic Churches while maintaining the ideational hierarchies embodied in their stripped-down version of Christian doctrine. By the time the French revolutionaries rose up in the late eighteenth century, however, they were attacking not just the King and the Churches, but religion itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, liberal demands had become more radical still. The 1848 revolutions started as attempts to overturn monarchies and replace them with nation states, but they quickly developed into demands for freedom of the press and economic rights for workers. It was directly out of this essentially liberal series of revolutions that communism developed. This was a logical development because liberalism is effectively an attack on hierarchical structures. Marxist communism simply pushes the liberal critique one step further to question the hierarchical relations established by liberal capitalism between the worker and the capitalist.

By the early twentieth century liberalism was truly on the march. With its spread into politics now effectively on autopilot, liberals turned their attention to questions of a more personal nature. They sought to develop a liberal way of living by overthrowing hierarchical relations that they encountered in everyday life. This was related to but fundamentally different...