LIBERALISM 6 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 566.

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with one another, rights being a ‘zero-sum' game). Human rights can be distinguished from civil rights, on the grounds that the former are moral principles that claim universal jurisdiction, while the latter depend upon the freedoms and status accorded citizens in particular societies. However, the notions of civil rights and *civil liberties often rest upon an underlying belief in human rights, and are viewed as moral principles given legal expression in the form of *citizenship.

Significance

Human rights have come to be accorded in certain parts of the world a near-religious significance. Supporters of human rights argue that they constitute the basic grounds for *freedom, *equality and *justice, and embody the idea that all human lives are worthy of respect. In that sense human rights can be said to give political expression to moral values found in all the world's major religions and which transcend conventional ideological divisions. As such they have been accepted as one of the cornerstones of international *law, sometimes being viewed as superior to state *sovereignty and thereby being used to justify humanitarian and even military intervention (as in cases such as Iraq and Serbia in the 1990s). The most authoritative definition of human rights is found in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948), although other documents, such as the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1953), have also been influential.

However, the doctrine of human rights has also attracted criticism. A variety of philosophical difficulties have been raised. These include the arguments that human rights are merely moral assertions and lack any empirical justification; that it is difficult to view them as absolute because rights, such as the right to life and the right to self-defence, are often balanced against one another; and that it is not always clear when a person should be regarded as ‘human' and therefore entitled to human rights (which is particularly controversial in relation to abortion). Political objections come from conservatives and communitarians, who point out that it is nonsense to suggest that individuals have rights that are separate from the traditions, cultures and societies to which they belong. Marxists, for their part, have traditionally argued that natural or human rights protect private *property by giving all people the

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right to utilise their unequal social resources. Finally, it is often claimed that human rights are intrinsically linked to the ideas and assumptions of political *liberalism. In this case to portray them as universally applicable is to indulge in a form of ideological imperialism, suggesting that Western liberal values are superior to all others.

INDIVIDUALISM

Individualism is a belief in the primacy, or supreme importance, of the individual over any social group or collective body. It is usually viewed as the opposite of *collectivism. Individualism, however, may be either a descriptive or a normative concept. As a descriptive concept, in the form of methodological individualism, it suggests that the individual is central to any political theory or social explanation – all statements about society should be made in terms of the individuals who compose it. As Margaret Thatcher put it, ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families'. As a normative concept, in the form of ethical individualism, it implies that society should be constructed so as to benefit the individual, giving priority to the individual's *rights, needs or interests.

What ethical individualism means in practice, nevertheless, depends upon one's view of the individual or theory of *human nature. In its most familiar form, egoistical individualism (also called ‘market', ‘possessive' or ‘atomistic' individualism), it stresses human self-interestedness and self-reliance. The individual is the exclusive possessor of his or her own talents, owing nothing to society and being owed nothing in return (this form of individualism overlaps most clearly with methodological individualism). On the other hand, what can be called developmental individualism emphasises personal growth and human flourishing, and is expressed in the idea of individuality. As this form of individualism allows for social *responsibility and even altruism, it blurs the distinction between individualism and collectivism.

Significance

The doctrine of individualism emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the development of market or capitalist societies, in which individuals were expected to make a wider range of economic and social choices and to take personal

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responsibility for their own lives. It constitutes the basic principle of *liberalism and, as such, has come to be one of the major components of Western political culture. Methodological individualism has a long and impressive history, having been employed by social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), by utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), by economic theorists from Adam Smith (1723–90) onwards, and by modern *rational choice theorists. Its attraction as a mode of analysis is that it enables theories to be constructed on the basis of seemingly empirical, and even scientific, observations about human behaviour. In short: understand the individual and social and political institutions and mechanisms become explicable. However, the drawback of any form of methodological individualism is that it is both asocial and ahistorical. By building political theories upon the basis of a pre-established model of human nature, individualists ignore the fact that human behaviour varies from society to society, and from one historical period to the next. If experience and the social environment shape human nature, the individual should be seen as the product of society, not the other way round.

As an ethical or political principle, however, individualism has usually had strongly anti-statist implications. For classical liberals, the *New Right and individualist anarchists, the central thrust of individualism is to expand the realm of *civil society and the ‘private' sphere at the expense of political *authority. Individualism thus implies negative *freedom, the expansion of individual choice and responsibilities. However, this egoistical individualism has been rejected by socialists, traditional conservatives and modern communitarians. In the view of socialists individualism promotes greed and competition, weakening the bonds of *community; in the view of conservatives it produces insecurity and rootlessness and undermines traditional values; and in the view of communitarians it robs society of its capacity to establish moral order and encourage collective endeavour.

JUSTICE

Justice is the idea of a morally justifiable distribution of rewards or punishments. Justice, in short, is about giving each person what he or she is ‘due', often seen as his or her ‘just desserts'. In this sense

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justice can be applied to the distribution of any ‘goods' in society: *freedom, *rights, *power, wealth, leisure and so on. However, as the grounds for just distribution may vary enormously, justice can perhaps be seen as the archetypal ‘essentially contested' concept. A distinction can nevertheless be made between procedural and substantive notions of justice. Procedural justice, or ‘formal' justice, refers to the manner in which outcomes are arrived at, and thus to the rules that govern human conduct and interaction. For instance, any outcome of a sporting competition is considered just so long as it results from the application of fair rules independently adjudicated – in short, there should be a ‘level playing field'. Substantive justice, or ‘concrete' justice, on the other hand, is concerned with the substance of the outcomes themselves; that is, with the nature of the end-point. This can be seen in the idea that the punishment should ‘fit' the crime; in other words, that penalties should be appropriate and justifiable in themselves.

The two most common applications of the concept of justice are legal justice and social justice. Legal justice refers to the apportionment of punishments and rewards as a result of wrongdoing and, in particular, law-breaking. The judicial system is sometimes therefore described as the administration of justice. However, *law should not be equated with justice: laws may be just or unjust, as may be the court system through which they are administered. Social justice refers to a morally justifiable distribution of material or social rewards, notably wealth, income and social status. Many take social justice to imply *equality, even viewing it as a specifically socialist principle. However, concepts of social justice may be inegalitarian as well as egalitarian, and even when socialists use the term it tends to imply a weak form of equality: a narrowing of material inequalities, often justified in terms of equality of opportunity.

Significance

Justice has been portrayed as the master concept of political thought. Since the time of Plato (427–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384– 22 BCE), political thinkers have seen the ‘good' society as a ‘just' society. Much of *political theory therefore consists of a debate about ‘who should get what?'. In relation to legal justice this issue has largely been resolved through the development of widely accepted procedural rules about, for example, access to legal

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advice and representation, judicial neutrality, rules of evidence and the use of juries, although there may be important substantive differences between the laws which operate in liberal-democratic societies and, say, Sharia law found in Islamic states.

However, controversies over social justice have been deep and recurrent. Some, including supporters of the *New Right, dismiss the very idea of social justice on the grounds that it is inappropriate to apply moral principles such as justice to the distribution of wealth and income, because these are strictly economic matters and can be judged only by criteria such as efficiency and growth. From this perspective, to portray the poor as ‘victims' of injustice is simply absurd. Socialists and modern liberals, in contrast, have been attracted to the idea of social justice precisely because they are unwilling to divorce economics from ethics, and because they are unwilling to leave issues related to wealth and poverty to the vagaries of the *market. Sympathy for social justice therefore usually goes hand-in-hand with support for government intervention in economic and social life. However, there are quite different liberal and socialist models of social justice. The liberal model is rooted in *individualism and is based upon a commitment to *meritocracy, while the socialist model is rooted in *collectivism and exhibits greater support for social equality and *community.

LEADERSHIP

Leadership can be understood as a pattern of behaviour, as a personal quality and as a political value. As a pattern of behaviour, leadership is the influence exerted by an individual or group over a larger body to organise or direct its efforts towards the achievement of desired goals. As a personal attribute, leadership refers to the character traits which enable the leader to exert influence over others. Leadership in this sense is effectively equated with charisma, charm or personal power. As a political value, leadership refers to guidance and inspiration, the capacity to mobilise others through moral authority or ideological insight.

Significance

In some respects the subject of political leadership appears to be outdated. The division of society into leaders and followers is rooted in a

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pre-democratic culture of deference and respect in which leaders ‘knew best' and the public needed to be led, mobilised or guided. Democratic pressures may not have removed the need for leaders, but they have certainly placed powerful constraints upon leadership, notably by making leaders publicly accountable and establishing institutional mechanisms through which they can be removed. In other respects, however, the politics of leadership has become increasingly significant. For instance, to some extent *democracy itself has enhanced the importance of personality by forcing political leaders, in effect, to ‘project themselves' in the hope of gaining electoral support. This tendency has undoubtedly been strengthened by modern means of mass communication (especially television) which tend to emphasise personality rather than policies, and provide leaders with powerful weapons with which to manipulate their public images. Furthermore, as society becomes more complex and fragmented, people may increasingly look to the personal vision of an individual leader to give coherence and meaning to the world in which they live.The question of political leadership is nevertheless surrounded by deep ideological controversy. Its principal supporters have been on the political *right, influenced by a general belief in natural inequality and a broadly pessimistic view of the masses. In its extreme form this was reflected in the fascist ‘leader principle', which holds that there is a single, supreme leader who alone is capable of leading the masses to their destiny, a theory derived from Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844–1900) notion of the Übermensch (‘superman').Amongst the supposed virtues of leadership are the following:

Liberals and socialists, on the other hand, have usually warned that leaders should not be trusted, and treated leadership as a basic threat to *equality and *justice. Nevertheless, this has not prevented socialist regimes from employing leadership systems, and, in the case of Lenin's (1870–1924) theory of the vanguard party, they have sometimes stressed the need for political leadership.

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The alleged dangers of leadership include the following:

MERITOCRACY

Meritocracy literally means rules by the able or talented, merit being talent plus hard work. The term, however, is most commonly used as a principle of social *justice, implying that social position and material rewards should reflect the distribution of ability and effort in society at large. Different implications can nevertheless be drawn from meritocracy, depending on whether emphasis is placed upon talent or hard work. Meritocratic systems that focus primarily upon talent are designed to encourage people, and particularly the talented, to realise their natural ability to its fullest potential. Ones that primarily emphasise hard work only regard effort as morally laudable, on the grounds that to reward talent is to create a ‘natural lottery' ( Rawls, 1971 ). Meritocracy differs from hierarchy, in that it allows for social mobility and a flexible pattern of inequalities, as opposed to fixed and structural gradations in social position and wealth.

Significance

Meritocracy is a key liberal social principle and can be seen as one of the basic values of liberal *capitalism. Its defenders argue that it has both economic and moral virtues, including the following:

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However, the principle of meritocracy is by no means universally accepted. Its principal critics have been socialists but traditional conservatives have also objected to it. Amongst their criticisms are the following:

NEUTRALITY

Neutrality is the absence of any form of partisanship or commitment; it consists of a refusal to ‘take sides'. In international relations, neutrality is a legal condition through which a *state declares non-involvement in a conflict or war, and indicates its intention to refrain from supporting or aiding either side. As a principle of individual conduct, applied to the likes of judges, civil servants, the military and other public officials, it implies, strictly speaking, the absence of political sympathies and ideological leanings. Neutral actors are thus political eunuchs. In practice the less exacting requirement of impartiality is usually applied. This allows that political sympathies may be held as long as these do not intrude into a person's professional or public responsibilities.

Significance

The principle of neutrality is crucial to the theory and practice of liberal-democratic *government. At its core is a belief in state neutrality, the idea that the *state harbours no economic, social or other biases and therefore treats all individuals and groups alike. This is reflected in the constitutional principle of neutrality as it applies to state bodies and officials, notably the *judiciary, the civil service, the police and the military. Neutrality thus guarantees

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that the state is kept separate from the government, in the sense that public officials are not contaminated by the political and ideological enthusiasms of professional politicians. From this perspective, political neutrality has two key benefits. It ensures fairness in the sense that all people are treated equally regardless of social background, race, religion, gender and so on, and it fosters objectivity in allowing decisions to be made on the basis of reason and evidence, rather than irrational prejudice. However, neutrality has been criticised on three grounds. First, Marxists, feminists and others have portrayed it as a façade designed to mask the degree to which the state, often via the structure and composition of state institutions, articulates the interests of powerful or propertied groups in society. Second, some dismiss neutrality as simply a myth, arguing that no one is capable of suppressing values and beliefs that are formed through one's social background and group membership. Third, neutrality may be considered undesirable by those who believe that it engenders indifference or allows public officials to resist the will of democratically elected governments.

OBLIGATION

An obligation is a requirement or duty to act in a particular way. Legal obligations are nevertheless different from moral obligations. Legal obligations, such as the requirement to pay taxes and observe other *laws, are enforceable through the courts and backed up by a system of penalties. ‘Being obliged' to do something implies an element of coercion; legal obligations may thus be upheld on grounds of simple prudence: whether laws are right or wrong they are obeyed out of a fear of punishment. Moral obligations, on the other hand, are fulfilled not because it is sensible to do so, but because such conduct is thought to be rightful or morally correct. ‘Having an obligation' to do something suggests only a moral duty. To give a promise, for example, is to be under a moral obligation to carry it out, regardless of the consequences which breaking the promise will entail. The most important form of moral obligation is ‘political obligation', the duty of the citizen to acknowledge the *authority of the *state and obey its laws. Obligation can therefore be thought of as one of the key components of *citizenship, the *rights and obligations of the citizen being reverse sides of the same coin.

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Significance

The issue of political obligation has been one of the central themes in *political theory. This is because the question of obligations addresses the moral basis of political rule. The classic explanation of political obligation is found in the idea of a ‘social contract', an agreement made amongst citizens, or between citizens and the state, through which they accept the authority of the state in return for benefits which only a sovereign power can provide. For Plato (427–347 BCE), the obligation to obey the state is based upon an implicit promise made by the simple fact that citizens choose to remain within its borders; for Hobbes (1588–1679) and Locke (1632–1704), it was based upon the state's ability to deliver *order and stability; and for Rousseau (1712–78), it followed from the state's capacity to articulate the ‘general will' or collective good. However, conservatives and communitarians have gone further and suggested that obligation is not merely contractual but is an intrinsic feature of any stable society. From this perspective, obligation is a form of natural duty, reflecting the fact that our values and identities are largely derived from the societies in which we live. The only theorists who reject the very idea of political obligation are philosophical anarchists, who insist upon absolute respect for personal *autonomy.

PROPERTY

Property, in everyday usage, refers to inanimate objects or ‘things'. However, property is better thought of as a social institution, defined by custom, convention and, in most cases, by *law. As a political principle, property draws attention to a relationship of ownership that exists between the object in question and the person or group to whom it belongs. In that sense there is a clear distinction between property and simply making use of an object as a possession. For example, to pick up a pebble from the beach, to borrow a pen, or to drive someone else's car, does not establish ownership. Property is thus an established and enforceable claim to an object or possession; it is a *right not a ‘thing'. The ownership of property is therefore reflected in the existence of rights and powers over an object, and also the acceptance of duties and liabilities in relation to it.

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However, property can be conceived of as private, common or state property. Private property is the right of an individual or institution to exclude others from the use or benefit of something. The right to ‘exclude' does not necessarily deny access, however. Someone else can use ‘my' car – but only with my permission. Common property is based upon a shared right of access to property amongst members of a collective body, none of whom can exercise a ‘right to exclude', except in relation to non-members. State property is private property that belongs to the *state. Ordinary citizens, for instance, have no more right of access to state property such as police cars than they do to any other private vehicle. However, the notions of state property and common property are often confused. Terms such as ‘public ownership' or ‘social ownership' appear to refer to property owned collectively by all citizens, but in practice usually describe property that is owned and controlled by the state. ‘Nationalisation' similarly implies ownership by the *nation, but it invariably operates through a system of state control.

Significance

The question of property has been one of the deepest and most divisive issues in political and ideological debate. Indeed, ideological divisions have traditionally boiled down to where one stands on property, both left-wing and right-wing political creeds practising different forms of the politics of ownership. The clash between *capitalism and *socialism has thus been portrayed as a choice between two rival economic philosophies, the former based upon private property and the latter upon common ownership.Liberals and conservatives have generally been strong supporters of private property; amongst their arguments are the following:

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Socialists and communists, on the other hand, have advanced the following arguments in favour of common property:

Nevertheless, there are clear indications that the politics of ownership has declined in significance. Although its cause was revived in the 1980s by the *New Right's enthusiasm for privatisation, the collapse of *communism in the revolutions of 1989–91 and the de-radicalisation of socialism have resulted in a widespread acceptance of at least the economic virtues of private property and therefore of the disadvantages of both common and state property.

REPRESENTATION

To represent means, in everyday language, to ‘portray' or ‘make present', as when a picture is said to represent a scene or a person. As a political principle, representation is a relationship through which an individual or group stands for, or acts on behalf of, a larger body of people. Representation differs from *democracy in that, while the former acknowledges a distinction between *government and the governed, the latter, at least in its classical sense, aspires to abolish this distinction and establish popular self-government. Representative democracy may nevertheless constitute a

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limited and indirect form of democratic rule, provided that representation links government and the governed in such a way that the people's views are effectively articulated or their interests secured.

However, there is no single, agreed theory of representation. The term may have one of four sets of implications. First, a representative may be a trustee, a person who is vested with formal responsibility for another's property or affairs. This was classically expressed by Edmund Burke (1729–97), who argued that representatives serve their constituents by thinking for themselves and using their own, mature judgement. Second, a representative may be a delegate, a person who is chosen to act for another on the basis of clear guidance or instructions. Delegation implies acting as a conduit conveying the views of others, without expressing one's own views or opinions; examples include sales representatives and ambassadors. Third, a representative may be a person who carries out a *mandate, in the sense that such people are obliged to carry out the promises upon which they fought an *election. This theory implies that *political parties rather than individual politicians are the principal agents of representation. Fourth, a representative may typify or resemble the group he or she claims to represent, usually coming from the group itself. This notion is embodied in the idea of a ‘representative cross-section', and implies that a representative government or *parliament would constitute a microcosm of the larger society, containing members drawn from all groups and sections in society, and in numbers that are proportional to the size of the groups in society at large.