The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (151 page)

A group of radicals which emerged during the English Civil War. In the Putney Debates they argued for a more sweeping programme for the Parliamentary army than their generals, Cromwell and Ireton , were willing to adopt. They focused on a wide extension of the franchise and other ‘democratic’ reforms, but, unlike the Diggers ( see
Winstanley
), they accepted the principle of private property, if not its existing distribution. Indeed, they linked the claim that ‘each had a property in his person’ to the argument for a wider franchise, because they accepted that the franchise was based upon a property qualification.
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The product of the merger of the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party in 1954, the LDP won every election in Japan until its defeat in 1993. It was highly factionalized, and the Japanese electoral system encouraged factions to run against each other as well as against other parties. However, its factions have always been personal rather than ideological. The LDP is a right-wing party but one without a distinctive ideology.

 
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Liberal parties are as varied as the idea of liberalism is broad and vague. All liberals believe in the freedom of the individual, but that belief takes very different forms, varying from the ‘classic’ liberal belief in natural rights with which the state cannot interfere to the ‘new’ liberalism, which has dominated the English Liberal Party for over a century and which sees an important role for the state in liberating people from poverty, ignorance, and discrimination. There are liberal parties which some liberals would regard as not very liberal, and parties that do not contain a reference to liberalism in their name but which many liberals would recognize as essentially liberal in their aims. The nature of a liberal party in a particular state has very often been determined by the kind of main party to which it has been opposed: those parties which have seen a socialist party as their main rival tend to be more favourable to free markets than those which have opposed a conservative party.
Liberal parties tend to lack both the social base of socialist, communist, conservative, and agrarian parties and the territorial base of regionalist and nationalist parties. In most political circumstances in the twentieth century they have tended to find themselves in a moderate, centre position, typically between socialists and conservatives. For these reasons, their importance has generally declined. Most countries do not now have a recognizable liberal party and only in a tiny minority of states is the liberal party the government or principal opposition. Such countries are, however, an impressively wide variety. They include Australia, Canada, Colombia, Honduras, and Japan. In Australia and Japan the Liberal and Liberal Democratic Parties respectively are perceived as right of centre, in Honduras and Canada the Liberal Parties are left of centre, while the party in Colombia is perceived as holding the centre ground.
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A faction of the Whig Party whose members called themselves ‘liberals’ or ‘radicals’ emerged around the time of the Reform Act of 1832. Some of these MPs were influenced by the doctrines of classical economics and/or the utilitarians (‘philosophical radicals’)
Bentham
and James
Mill
. The proportion of Liberals to Whigs in the coalition gradually grew during a period of confusion in party labels from 1846 (when the Tory Party split over the repeal of the Corn Laws; many Tory supporters of repeal, including W. E. Gladstone , became Liberals) to 1868, when a majority Liberal government was formed. The Liberal Party split in 1886, when most of the remaining Whigs (who had been drifting towards the Tories) and some others refused to support Gladstone's proposal for Home Rule to Ireland. Nevertheless, alternation of Liberals and Conservatives in a two-party system continued until 1915. There is a lively debate as to whether the supplanting of the Liberals by Labour as the opposition to the Conservatives between 1918 and 1929 was an inevitable consequence of social change and of franchise extension, or whether, but for accident and personalities, it might have been the Liberals rather than Labour who emerged stronger from the First World War, in which case the plurality electoral system would have crushed Labour in the way in which it actually crushed the Liberals.
The Liberal Party survived at a low ebb until the early 1960s, always winning a handful of parliamentary seats in peripheral areas of the United Kingdom. Its slow and patchy revival since then can be variously attributed to the intensifying of centre—periphery conflict, to the growth of retrospective voting in which voters wished to punish the incumbent party without being willing to vote for its traditional rival, to some resurgence of nineteenth-century liberal ideology, and to the alliance with the Social Democratic Party (1981–7). However, the Liberals (now the Liberal Democrats) remain penalized by the electoral system. Though they have supplanted Labour as the opposition to the Conservatives in parts of the periphery and in much of southern England, they are unlikely to achieve power without proportional representation, which it is not in the interests of the other parties to grant. Large elements of traditional liberalism are found in the other parties. For instance, Labour has inherited the mantle of the party of nonconformity, of idealistic foreign policy, and (for the most part) of peripheral resentment, while the Thatcherite wing of the Conservatives has appropriated the economic, although not the social, part of nineteenth-century liberalism.

 
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In general, the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice. In common with
socialism
and
conservatism
, it emerged from the conjunction of the
Enlightenment
, the Industrial Revolution, and the political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Liberalism retains a faith in the possibilities of improvement in present social conditions, which is related to the idea of progress widely accepted in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That idea embraced the prospects for developments in knowledge, in welfare, and in morality. Although the confidence in the prospects for progress in some of these respects has now diminished ( see
post-modernism
), liberalism retains an ameliorative ambition. The Enlightenment also shaped liberalism's perception of human agency, conceived as (at least potentially) rational and responsible. The political revolutions in France and America disclose an ambiguous heritage. The emphasis placed on equal rights remains, and this is the fundamental form of equality most liberals would aim to achieve. On the other side, liberalism has been pictured by its critics as infected with bourgeois values, those appropriate to the position of the emerging class of capitalists in present industrial society.
Apart from the concern with equality of rights and amelioration, liberalism has focused on the space available in which individuals may pursue their own lives, or their own conception of the good. The immediate threat to this ‘space’ was considered to be the arbitrary will of a monarch, leading liberals to consider the proper limits of political power. They explored the relationship between legitimate power and consent, and the characteristics of the rule of law. Other threats were seen in religious intolerance and the power of public opinion, or social intolerance. In a general way, liberalism has tried to define the line to be drawn between the public and the private, an approach which has several key components.
The first is the project of describing the peculiar features of political power, in contrast to the power which might be held or exercised in private domains.
Locke
, for example, devoted considerable attention to the distinctions to be drawn between the power of a master over a servant, the power of a master over a slave, paternal power, and the power of a husband over a wife, on one side, and political power, on the other. None of those ‘domestic’ power relations illuminated the nature of political power, which was legitimate if, and only if, the governed consented to it. That power was to be directed at the public good, limited by its purposes and regulated by settled and known law. This notion of limited government has been in the centre of liberal concerns: the rule of law, division of powers, constitutionalism, emphasis on civil liberties, for example, are consequences of a desire to restrict political power to what is conceived to be its proper domain.
A second aspect of the limitation of government has been an emphasis on the autonomy of the economic realm, and a defence of private property. This characterization, however, needs to be treated with caution. Liberals have not always been enthusiastic proponents of a
laissez-faire
policy, not least because they have recognized that a market system is not capable of guaranteeing the conditions of its own existence. Again, while private property has generally been supported as providing a bulwark against state power, allowing some prospect of independence, many liberals have been concerned about the effects of concentrations of private property. It has been a common, but not wholly justified, complaint against liberal thought that it takes insufficient notice of the effects of private power as a consequence of its concern to limit public power.
The advent of
democracy
has posed particular problems for liberalism, which has given only a qualified endorsement to the idea of government by the people. Whilst democracy might be welcomed as a counter to the tendency of those who hold power to pursue their own interests, it may threaten individual liberty in new ways. ( See
tyranny of the majority
.) More generally, liberals have been concerned lest the levelling tendencies of mass society suppress individual initiative and eliminate the space for experiments in ways of life. Just as liberalism has had an uncertain relationship with unrestrained democracy, so too it has had a complex relationship with
utilitarianism
. Some accounts of liberalism restrict their consideration to writers who have endorsed
natural rights
, thus excluding all utilitarian contributions. Even if attachment to natural rights is not considered to be a qualification, some accounts regard utilitarianism as propounded by
Bentham
and J. S.
Mill
as a deviation from the main tradition of liberal thought: Benthamism seems to license greater state activity than is desired, while J. S. Mill was sympathetic to socialist experiment, and paid insufficient regard to the sanctity of private property. The controversy between rights theorists and utilitarians continues, but it is not clear that only the former have a claim to be regarded as liberals. At stake is the balance between the welfarist ambitions of utilitarianism, which are consonant with the liberal concern with amelioration, and the liberal emphasis on the protection of the individual from the effects of public power, which may be incompatible with unrestrained utilitarianism. All political ideologies can be seen as dynamic, in the sense that particular values to which they are attached have to be defended in the face of new threats, or reassessed in the light of changing conditions. For this reason, amongst others, there is no shared conception of
freedom
within liberalism. The so-called new liberals, who were responding to conditions at the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth century, adopted a more positive conception than many of their predecessors, a conception which re-emphasized the welfare concern of utilitarians with whom they otherwise had little in common. Contemporary liberalism has been much exercised by the notion of justice. Rawls , Dworkin , Nozick , and Ackerman are perhaps the most highly regarded contributors to this discussion. This concern with justice has been linked to another characterization of contemporary liberalism, a concern with neutrality. The relevant neutrality may be variously conceived, but it certainly includes a neutrality with respect to citizens' conceptions of the good. Communitarian critics have doubted whether the priority of the (justice-based notion of) right over the good can be sustained, but it is clear that in many spheres the liberal ambition is to produce neutral procedures which allow for, but do not discriminate between, the diverse conceptions of the good or ways of life adopted by citizens. Such neutrality suggests that the role of public power is merely instrumental, creating the necessary space for the exercise of individual freedom and providing for conflict-resolution; such an approach has been challenged not only by communitarianism but also by liberal
perfectionism
.
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