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The rise of liberalism;: The philosophy of a business civilization,
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1939
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About the author
Harold J. Laski
160 books28 followersHarold Joseph Laski was a British Marxist, political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer, who served as the chairman of the Labour Party during 1945-1946, and was a professor at the LSE from 1926 to 1950.
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May 21, 2024
This book was published originally under the title The Rise of European Liberalism, and there are other reviews of it under that title. I’ll review this one because this is what my library had: the original 1936 version published in the US.
I read this book because currently in the 2020s there’s been a debate about whether the democratic backsliding of past fifteen years or so means liberalism is dead/dying. To answer that question we first need to know what liberalism is. It’s such a broad term that encompasses so many things (some of which can reasonably be seen to contradict one another) that people use it in different ways to mean different things. So I’ve been reading books that talk about liberalism as a school of thought. Even they don’t directly define the term, you can tell a lot about how an author thinks about liberalism by what/how they write about it.
Laski does define liberalism although not in a pithy one-sentence definition. That would be impossible. Liberalism is “not easy to describe, much less to define,” he writes on page 5 “for it is hardly less a habit of mind than a body of doctrine.” The whole of Part 1 of this book is basically a history of modern thought from the 16th to the 18th century and that is the definition of liberalism. A final chapter called the Aftermath goes a bit into the 19th. So no, not pithy at all! You won’t find a good one-sentence definition of liberalism here, but you will find a good argument.
The writing is a little stuffy since he’s an early twentieth century intellectual but if you can tolerate that, he does have a solid argument: given they both arose out of the same set of circumstances, liberalism cannot be distinguished from capitalism. Both are the product of transformed economic relationships at the end of the Middle Ages. For Laski liberalism is the philosophy that justifies capitalism and defends the right of the individual to own private property. Part 3 shows how even that paragon of liberalism the French Revolution did not do much for non-property-holders (“those who have only their labor to sell”).
Put that way it sounds a bit obvious but compare other theorists (take L. T. Hobhouse for example) who talk about liberalism as being about freedom. Hobhouse says liberalism is like a defensive shield against anything that threatens the rights of the individual and that includes inequality (so the liberal state should act to reduce inequality as much as possible). For Laski liberalism is based upon the idea that in order to have a stable civil society one needs to protect property rights. That inherently limits the liberal idea to the middle classes and leaves out the working classes (using Laski’s terms).
Sure Hobhouse is very idealistic. He was writing in 1911. Laski is writing just after the Great Depression. Context is everything.
Laski argues that because of this defense of property rights, liberalism is doomed to fail. Paraphrasing Marx he says “like all social philosophies it contains in its birth the conditions of its own destruction.”
It is a cynical take but one that has to be taken seriously. It doesn’t refute Hobhouse’s argument (which is far more inspiring) but if one doesn’t want to be labelled a dreamy-eyed Idealist like Hobhouse you’d have to have some sort of an answer to Laski. Personally I can’t think of anything better than what Churchill said about democracy: it’s not a perfect system but it’s damn better than the alternative. Not satisfying I know but that just shows how good the argument here is. It’s a good book. Especially relevant for our times. I recommend it.
I read this book because currently in the 2020s there’s been a debate about whether the democratic backsliding of past fifteen years or so means liberalism is dead/dying. To answer that question we first need to know what liberalism is. It’s such a broad term that encompasses so many things (some of which can reasonably be seen to contradict one another) that people use it in different ways to mean different things. So I’ve been reading books that talk about liberalism as a school of thought. Even they don’t directly define the term, you can tell a lot about how an author thinks about liberalism by what/how they write about it.
Laski does define liberalism although not in a pithy one-sentence definition. That would be impossible. Liberalism is “not easy to describe, much less to define,” he writes on page 5 “for it is hardly less a habit of mind than a body of doctrine.” The whole of Part 1 of this book is basically a history of modern thought from the 16th to the 18th century and that is the definition of liberalism. A final chapter called the Aftermath goes a bit into the 19th. So no, not pithy at all! You won’t find a good one-sentence definition of liberalism here, but you will find a good argument.
The writing is a little stuffy since he’s an early twentieth century intellectual but if you can tolerate that, he does have a solid argument: given they both arose out of the same set of circumstances, liberalism cannot be distinguished from capitalism. Both are the product of transformed economic relationships at the end of the Middle Ages. For Laski liberalism is the philosophy that justifies capitalism and defends the right of the individual to own private property. Part 3 shows how even that paragon of liberalism the French Revolution did not do much for non-property-holders (“those who have only their labor to sell”).
Put that way it sounds a bit obvious but compare other theorists (take L. T. Hobhouse for example) who talk about liberalism as being about freedom. Hobhouse says liberalism is like a defensive shield against anything that threatens the rights of the individual and that includes inequality (so the liberal state should act to reduce inequality as much as possible). For Laski liberalism is based upon the idea that in order to have a stable civil society one needs to protect property rights. That inherently limits the liberal idea to the middle classes and leaves out the working classes (using Laski’s terms).
Sure Hobhouse is very idealistic. He was writing in 1911. Laski is writing just after the Great Depression. Context is everything.
Laski argues that because of this defense of property rights, liberalism is doomed to fail. Paraphrasing Marx he says “like all social philosophies it contains in its birth the conditions of its own destruction.”
It is a cynical take but one that has to be taken seriously. It doesn’t refute Hobhouse’s argument (which is far more inspiring) but if one doesn’t want to be labelled a dreamy-eyed Idealist like Hobhouse you’d have to have some sort of an answer to Laski. Personally I can’t think of anything better than what Churchill said about democracy: it’s not a perfect system but it’s damn better than the alternative. Not satisfying I know but that just shows how good the argument here is. It’s a good book. Especially relevant for our times. I recommend it.
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