Left liberalism: principles and prospects.
| Author | White, Stuart |
| Position | Features |
What has just happened is so startling that even now, it is hard to take in. A Liberal-Conservative alliance with an agreed long-term programme for government, Lib Dem ministers, and shared liberal values light years away from the centralising social democracy that has dominated Britain for more than a decade. These are the words of The Guardian journalist, Julian Glover, writing shortly after the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government (Glover, 2010a). Glover is not alone in suggesting that the philosophical glue holding this surprising Coalition together is something called 'liberalism': 'The unifying idea is liberal ... a strong respect of the primacy of the individual over the state--a distrust of arbitrary authority and interference' (Glover, 2010b). This liberalism has been rapidly translated into a policy agenda that aims to roll back the state along a number of dimensions.
How should the left respond? Not by rejecting liberalism, I argue, but by affirming an alternative, left liberalism (see also Cruddas and Rutherford, 2010). As Sunder Katwala has argued, it is a mistake to think that we either have to be for or against the state. Drawing on the resources of egalitarian liberal theory, such as the work of John Rawls, the left should adopt a discriminating approach to the state which identifies both where its authority is needed to secure social justice and where its power is properly limited for the sake of individual freedom (1).
In the first part of this article ('liberalism for the state') I discuss the basic philosophical difference between liberalisms of right and left and how this translates into different views of the proper role of the state. In the second part of the article ('liberalism against the state') I then explore some of the ways in which left liberalism calls for limits on state action, offering a clear corrective to Labour's authoritarian approach to civil liberties and related issues.
In concluding, I consider the prospects for a revival of left liberalism. The prospects for this, I argue, lie less in any of the main political parties at the moment than with some recent and newly emerging cross/non-party campaigns. Taken together, these campaigns give promising expression to the distinctively left liberal idea of being both for and against the 'big state'.
Liberalism for the big state
Students of political theory sometimes speak of a 'classical liberalism' which advocates the free market and 'limited government'. In its most dogmatic forms, it presents the market economy as a 'system of natural liberty' which we ought not to tamper with at all. But classical liberalism can shape political thought without taking this dogmatic form. Much more widespread than this dogmatic classical liberalism is the idea that there is a presumption in favour of the market-based distribution of income and wealth. This presumption can be defeated by sufficiently serious considerations of need and opportunity. But the burden lies on those seeking to justify a departure from the market-determined baseline. This is what we can call the just market presumption.
The Coalition government and its supporters are not dogmatic classical liberals. People like Julian Glover and Orange Book liberals like David Laws accept a role for the state in widening opportunity and securing a welfare baseline relative to a free market society (Marshall and Laws, 2004). However, I think the rhetoric of the Coalition suggests that, at its centre of ideological gravity, it embraces the just market presumption. The market-determined distribution of income and wealth is regarded as the morally relevant baseline. Some departures from it can certainly be justified. But the burden of justification is on those seeking to move away from this baseline.
The flip-side of the just market presumption is that state regulatory or distributional initiatives are presumptively undesirable. This is often expressed by drawing on a particular way of understanding the value of liberty. 'Liberty', as an abstract value, is understood concretely relative to the particular distribution of freedom implied by the market-determined distribution of property. Taxation is thus necessarily an invasion of 'liberty' and, while sometimes justifiable, always to be somewhat regretted since it is a curtailment of liberty. We will return to this below.
The just market presumption, however, is not shared by all schools of liberal political philosophy. Indeed, it actually runs counter to the arguments of some of the most significant liberal political philosophers of the past few decades, such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Bruce Ackerman (Rawls, 1999; Dworkin, 2001; Ackerman, 1980).
For Rawls, the free market system is an example of what he calls a 'basic structure': roughly, a set of ground-rules to regulate economic interaction amongst citizens (2). However, it is only one of many kinds of basic structure that we can imagine and set up. It is one institutional option among many and, as such, has no morally privileged position. In assuming that the free market has such a position, so that its distributional outcomes are presumptively right, the classical liberal takes as given what actually has to be argued for: the justice of this particular kind of basic structure.
As this suggests, for liberals like Rawls the theoretical task is to identify a set of independent principles of justice which we can then use, as democratic citizens, to identify the basic structure we ought to have. If, as Rawls and others argue, the right principles of justice...
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