The Origin of 'Liberalism'
When Adam Smith and a group of fellow Scots first used the word in a political sense, it meant something very different than it does today.
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Adam Smith (left) and Edinburgh's Parliament Square, c. 1794 (Wikimedia Commons)
Thanks to digitization, we can now establish when the word “liberal” first took on a political meaning. For centuries it had had what scholars have called pre-political meanings, such as generous, tolerant, or suitable to one of noble or superior status—as in “liberal arts” and “liberal education.” But now usingGoogle’s Ngram Viewer we can see what the word “liberal”—as an adjective—was used to modify. Up to 1769 the word was used only in pre-political ways, but in and around 1769 such terms as “liberal policy,” “liberal plan,” “liberal system,” “liberal views,” “liberal ideas,” and “liberal principles” begin sprouting like flowers.
Robertson’s friend and fellow Scot Adam Smith used “liberal” in a similar sense in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. If all nations, Smith says, were to follow “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation,” then they would be like one great cosmopolitan empire, and famines would be prevented. Then he repeats the phrase: “But very few countries have entirely adopted this liberal system.”
Smith’s “liberal system” was not concerned solely with international trade. He used “liberal” to describe application of the same principles to domestic policy issues. Smith was a great opponent of restrictions in the labor market, favoring freedom of contract, and wished to see labor markets “resting on such liberal principles.”
Elsewhere, Smith draws an important contrast between regulating “the industry and commerce of a great country … upon the same model as the departments of a publick office”—that is, to direct the economy as though it were an organization—versus “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In drawing such a contrast, Smith again is signaling the label “liberal” for the latter, which he favors.
Smith also compliments a school of French economists: “In representing perfect liberty as the only effectual expedient” for making national wealth as great as possible, “its doctrine seems to be in every respect as just as it is generous and liberal.” At the core of Smith’s idea of liberal principles is the idea of natural liberty:
All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.For Smith, natural liberty was not an axiom. He made exceptions to it and acknowledged that he was doing so. Still, it is his main principle, and the burden of proof is on those who would contravene it. In an open letter to Smith in 1787,Jeremy Bentham saluted him for having taught society the presumption of liberty. Bentham then proceeded to challenge Smith on one of his exceptions, saying that Smith had failed to meet the burden of proof when he made an exception to natural liberty by endorsing an existing law setting a maximum interest rate.
Shortly after The Wealth of Nations was published, Robertson wrote to Smith, saluting it as an antidote to "illiberal arrangements" and saying, “Your Book must necessarily become a Political or Commercial Code to all Europe, which must be often consulted by men both of Practice and Speculation.” Robertson’s expectation, widely shared at the time, proved accurate. And as Smith’s system spread, so did his term for it. The term became familiar in British officialdom, popping up occasionally in Parliamentary debate and even in King George III’s address at the opening of Parliament in 1782.
The term was exported to Europe and the United States as well. Some scholars have argued that the modern usage of “liberal” originated on the European continent before spreading to Britain. But using Google’s scans of books in French, Spanish, Italian, and German, we can see that usage in these countries trails Britain. I wouldn’t go so far as Arthur Herman does in the title of his splendid 2001 book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, but it was Scots who originated the use of “liberal” in a political sense.
On the Continent, “liberal” was used, as compared to in Britain, more to denote constitutional reform and political participation, as opposed to natural liberty. Britain’s exceptional history of stable government and islandhood helped to make Smith’s focus on natural liberty possible. In his recent book Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, Daniel Hannan quotes Smith in a 1763 lecture. After the 1707 union of England and Scotland the “dominions were then entirely surrounded by the sea … No foreign invasion was therefore much to be dreaded ...They were therefore,” Smith continued, “under no necessity of keeping up a standing army.” The Parliament shared power with the Crown, under a rule of law. “In this manner,” Smith said, “a system of liberty has been established in England before the standing army was introduced; which as it was not the case in other countries, so it has not been ever established in them.”
After Smith’s death in 1790, his peers and students, such as Dugald Stewart and then Stewart’s flock of influential students, including those of the Edinburgh Review, reinforced “liberal” discourse and guaranteed that the term’s usage continued to spread. In the 1820s the suffix “-ism” was attached to create “liberalism.” and later in the century the Liberal Party rose in British politics.
William Gladstone, the party’s leader, served four terms as prime minister of the United Kingdom. To Gladstone and Liberal Party associates such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, “liberal” was understood largely as Adam Smith first used the term in a political sense. Gladstone advanced free trade abroad, reduced government expenditures, and reduced taxation. Joseph Schumpeterput it this way: “Gladstonian finance was the finance of the system of 'natural liberty,' laissez-faire, and free trade.” As for domestic deregulation, the Liberal Party’s record was mixed, but it has to be understood in the context of pressure toward interventionism. In his book The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain, Jonathan Parry writes, “Politicians were faced with the need to respond to the mass electorate, and they compromised accordingly … Liberals were committed to using the powers of central and local government pragmatically and constructively, so as to secure order, economy, free-market conditions and self-improvement.”
It was especially after 1880 that the Smithian sense of “liberal” began to lose traction to other, often contrary, meanings. The principal presumption of today’s “liberalism” often lies with the status quo, or even with the idea that the government should “do something” to solve perceived problems.
Google’s work enables us to establish who first used “liberal” in a political sense, what it meant, and how it spread. By knowing about the inception of “liberal” principles, we better understand the confusing semantics of politics today. Today, many of those who admire Adam Smith call themselves “classical liberals.” Maybe someday they will again be able to say simply “liberal.”
SCHOOL REFORM IN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF NEW YORK:
Unions of any description in any industry are the bane of progress, prosperity and justice, for that matter.
THE REAL WATER SHORTAGE DEMON IS GOVERNMENT, DESPITE OBLAMO'S RANTING FOR GLOBAL WARMING ON BEHALF OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRAZIES.
California's Drought Isn't Due To Global Warming, But Politics
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Posted 02/14/2014 07:18 PM ET
Water Wars: President Obama visited California's drought-hit Central Valley Friday, offering handouts and blaming global warming. But the state's water shortage is due to the left's refusal to deal with the state's water needs.
Following legislative action last month by Speaker John Boehner and California's Central Valley Representatives David Valadao, Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy, whose Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act was designed to resolve the long-standing problem of environmental water cutbacks that have devastated America's richest farmland, Obama is grandstanding in California, too.
His aim, however, is not a long-term solution for California's now-constant water shortages that have hit its $45 billion agricultural industry, but to preach about global warming. Instead of blaming the man-made political causes of California's worst water shortage, he's come with $2 billion in "relief" that's nothing but a tired effort to divert attention from fellow Democrats' dereliction of duty in using the state's water infrastructure.
The one thing that will mitigate droughts in California — a permanent feature of the state — is to restore the water flow from California's water-heavy north to farmers in the central and south. That's just what House Bill 3964, which passed by a 229-191 vote last week, does.
But Obama's plan is not to get that worthy bill through the Senate (where Democrats are holding it up) but to shovel pork to environmental activists and their victims, insultingly offering out-of-work farmers a "summer meal plan" in his package.
"We are not interested in welfare; we want water," Nunes told IBD this week. He and his fellow legislator Valadao are both farmers who represent the worst-hit regions of the Central Valley in Congress and can only look at the president's approach with disbelief.
"He's not addressing the situation," Valadao told us.
"They want to blame the drought for the lack of water, but they wasted water for the past five years," said Nunes.
The two explain that California's system of aqueducts and storage tanks was designed long ago to take advantage of rain and mountain runoff from wet years and store it for use in dry years. But it's now inactive — by design. "California's forefathers built a system (of aqueducts and storage facilities) designed to withstand five years of drought," said Nunes.
"We have infrastructure dating from the 1960s for transporting water, but by the 1990s the policies had changed," said Valadao.
Environmental special interests managed to dismantle the system by diverting water meant for farms to pet projects, such as saving delta smelt, a baitfish. That move forced the flushing of 3 million acre-feet of water originally slated for the Central Valley into the ocean over the past five years.
That hasn't helped the smelt any. But that doesn't seem to matter to Obama or his environmentalist friends.
The shutdown has been made worse by the inaction of California's Democrats, who for years have refused to build adequate storage facilities so that rainwater and snowmelt runoff can be stored for use by a growing population during dry years, another element of the earlier system. With no storage, the rain goes wasted.
"We can't make it rain, but what we can do is (conserve water) and save it for today, and we did not do that for two years," said Valadao, citing a recent wet year.
"We went into 2013 with reservoirs 80% full and ended the year at 20% full, and now we have 0%," said Valadao, citing the failure to build adequate storage for water. "We had lots of opportunities to prepare," he noted, but Democrats "blew it."
Nunes said the problem is serious and calls for concrete solutions, not dreamy social re-engineering efforts based on the unproven science of global warming.
"It's not global warming that led us to this problem, but math and engineering, because we let 3 million acre-feet of water go wasted over the past five years," Nunes said. "If we had that water, we would not be in an unmitigated disaster."
But that's right where California finds itself now.
A QUOTE THAT WARNS OF IMPENDING DISASTER:
"The reason why collapse, especially that caused by socialism, is so utterly complete is that the damage remains hidden for so long. The design margin is used up; savings are depleted; the institutions are hollowed out; public morality becomes perverted and education becomes nothing but a credential — and it all happens out of the public eye. Only when everything is used up, as in Venezuela, when the whole edifice implodes, as if by magic, does the cumulative effect become manifest."
The reason it's hard to disagree with this assessment are the examples of Detroit, Cuba, Venezuela an other socialist experimentations around the world. Read the full story here:
