Another grave, this time semantic misunderstanding between America and Europe lies in the concept of liberalism. In Europe the significance of this term has also undergone several changes, but its essential meaning always has been kept. In the United States today the word “liberalism” has a content diametrically opposed to its etymology, and to its original sense as understood not only in Europe but also in Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, Southern Asia, and Japan. In its process of deformation the idea of liberalism has suffered nowhere more than in the United States, although a certain degenerative process of this term also has taken place in Britain. The liberalism preached by the Whigs at the beginning of the last century, the liberalism of Palmerston, of Asquith, of Lloyd George, and the younger Churchill, and obviously that of Mr. Acland-Hood—each have somewhat different meanings.
Let us look at the verbal meaning. The root is liber (“free”). The term liberalis (and liberalitas) implies generosity in intellectual and material matters. The sentence “he gave liberally” means that the person in question gave with both hands. In this sense liberality is an “aristocratic” virtue. An illiberal person is avaricious, petty-minded, tight-fisted, self-centered. Up to the beginning of the Nineteenth century the word “liberal” figured neither in politics nor really in economics.
We explained the political content of the term in Chapter V. While democracy answers the question as to who should rule, liberalism deals with the problem how government should be exercised. The answer liberalism gives is that regardless of who rules, government must be exercised in such a way that each individual, each citizen enjoys the widest personal liberty still compatible with the common good. Yet in spite of the fact that the “common good” can be wilfully interpreted in the narrowest way, it is clear that liberalism rightly understood stands essentially for freedom.
As far as our research goes, the first time this term was used in a political sense was in the year 1812, and the “place of action”—not unnaturally—was Spain, a nation famous for its individualism, its inordinate sense of liberty, its strong anarchical drives. The supporters of the Constitution of Cádiz were called los liberales and their opponents (among them the Apostólicos) were nicknamed los serviles. Yet even at this very early stage of the game a certain amount of misunderstanding had crept into the use of this term inasmuch as the Constitution of Cadiz also had democratic features while the majority of the Apostólicos had federalistic (local rights) leanings which became even more marked when the Carlist Wars broke out and the Liberals rallied around Queen Isabel II who also enjoyed the aid of enthusiastic British volunteers.
It took several years for this nomenclature to make its appearance in England. Southey used it for the first time in 1816 and, significantly enough, employed the Spanish form, speaking of “our liberates.” Sir Walter Scott, soon afterward, copied it from the French, referring to the liberals as libéraux. In the early 1830s, when after the reforms of Sir Robert Peel the new parties emerged, the Whigs became the Liberals and the Tories the Conservatives. This evolution was not surprising. Whigs and Tories were both “aristocratic” parties (as we have pointed out in Chapter VII), but the Whigs were more genuinely aristocratic in that they saw in the king a mere primus inter pares, whereas the Tories were the party of the aulic nobility fawning in a rather unaristocratic way upon the monarch. (At least this is the way the Whigs saw it.)
In other words, there is in all genuine aristocracies a certain republican undercurrent: The typical aristocratic state is always an open or a disguised oligarchic republic. This is borne out by Venice and Genoa on one side, and the Polish Commonwealth and Britain after 1688 on the other. The classic ally of the monarch is not the nobility or the clergy, but the burgher class. Only with the French Revolution do we see a radical and tragic change.
Thus the idea of liberalism existed well before 1812. During the eighteenth century an economic school was in the ascendancy (particularly in Britain and in the Netherlands) which, without straining our semantics, can be styled preliberal because it still did not use the liberal label. We are referring here to the Manchester School whose philosophical (or theological) roots were deep in the soil of deism. God, the Great Architect, had created the world nearly perfect. All evils were due to human intervention which upset the Divine plan. This could easily happen because this deist God had withdrawn from His creation: Neither priestcraft nor white magic, neither prayers nor other incantations moved Him any longer. It was up to man to work out his own salvation, i.e., his terrestrial happiness by interfering as little as possible (or, preferably, not at all) with a universe existing in a preestablished harmony which rested on divine laws. If state and society never intervened in commerce and industry, these would automatically flourish, while all artificial limitations, rules or regulations—for instance, guilds, labor laws, tariffs, currency reforms, etc.—would bring about the downfall of prosperity.
As Alexander Rüstow1 has pointed out, there is a true theological background to the thought of Adam Smith and the entire Manchester School, a “theology” which has to be understood partly as a logical continuation of Calvinism, partly as its dialectical contradiction. In other words, there is in the ideology of Manchesterism and its laissez-faire a synthesis of John Calvin and the Renaissance. Of course there is also a good deal of practical truth and common sense to this outlook. With its appeal to human egotism and ambition, the different schools of economic liberalism have delivered the goods much better than the various economic orders based on a pseudomonastic collectivism and/or statism.
At the same time one ought to recognize that Manchesterism was a truly “grand bourgeois” ideology related to but not identical with Whiggery. The second phase of liberalism (which, indeed, bears the liberal label) we will call early liberalism. Though perhaps not entirely unaffected by deism, it had to a large extent the leadership of thinkers with decided religious affiliations or at least strong sympathies for the Christian tenets. This early liberalism reached its apogee in the 1850s, but its forerunners were active already in the 1820s and 1830s while some of its exponents died around 1900. Let us name only a few of them in chronological order: Royer-Collard, Alexis de Tocqueville, Montalembert, Gladstone, Jacob Burckhardt, Lord Acton. Half of them, significantly enough, were aristocrats; the others belonged to what is sometimes called the patriciate. Not a systematic thinker but a statesman of the same school is Count Camillo Cavour. Nor should one omit the name of Achille Léonce Victor Due de Broglie.2 In other words, from a sociological viewpoint we are here faced with upper-class men, none of whom had an antireligious bent. (Jacob Burckhardt has to be styled an agnostic, but in his declining years he developed warm feelings for the Catholic Church.) Did early liberalism have a forerunner? A man who inspired most of them? Inevitably one thinks here of Edmund Burke, not a preliberal, but certainly an early conservative who influenced de Tocqueville as well as Metternich.
Many of these early liberals were not lovers of freedom besides being Christians but took their political inspiration either directly from Scripture or from theology. As we can see, it was their “religious anthropology,” their picture of man which invited or forced them to walk the road of liberalism. Man has an immortal soul, man has a personality, man is not an accident of blind forces of nature, man needs freedom because God wants him not only to develop his personality in the right direction but also to live a moral life, freely (but rightly!) choosing between good and evil.
From the aforementioned it is obvious that the religious aspect of early liberalism was more strongly developed among Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and those supporters of the Reformation faiths who had broken with the strict views of the Reformers, who were “Erasmian” and Zwinglian rather than Calvinistic or Lutheran. Among the names we have mentioned we do not find a single supporter of what is loosely called “Protestant orthodoxy.” Calvin and Luther certainly were not liberals in the decadent American sense, but they were not “libertarians” either. “Libertarianism,” that is to say true liberalism, in the Reformation faiths makes itself felt only in the Eighteenth century as a result of the impact of the Enlightenment and of rationalism, both late descendants of the Renaissance and therefore alien in themselves to the spirit of the Reformation. The man in the street, to be sure, more often than not associates the Enlightenment, rationalism, and individualism with the “Protestant” outlook, if not with the Reformed religions. He knows nothing about the 180-degree turn the bulk of the Reformed faiths took 200 years ago, nor has he taken much notice of the return of a number of Reformed theologians to the orthodoxy of the Sixteenth century, a relatively recent development which, so far, has not had the time (or the chance) to affect the faith of the masses.
But whereas liberalism in the beginning received support from certain Catholic thinkers, its supporters were probably more numerous among the Reformed people. In the Catholic world the early liberal parties were small and largely composed of elites. There economic thinking and economic considerations played a rather minor role and early liberalism placed its emphasis on other sectors of human endeavor. It was different in the Evangelical areas of Europe, where commerce and industry always occupied a more honored position than in the orbis catholicus and where the ideas and notions of a very economic-minded preliberalism were still very much alive. Here we must bear in mind that the lacking prestige of the businessman in the Catholic world is due partly to the realization that the merchant is the representative of the only profession ever to have been physically chastised by Our Lord. (What a wonderful subject for our great painters in the past!) St. Thomas Aquinas’ views on the trader were frankly hostile,3 and modern capitalism rising in Northern Italy in the Fifteenth century had many technical and psychological hurdles to overcome. (Double entry bookkeeping was invented in the Fifteenth century by Fra Luca Pacioli di Borgo, a Franciscan, but with the rise of Calvinism the center of business quickly shifted to the North.) No wonder the Catholic renewal in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries had certain bitterly anticapitalist aspects.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how rarely the early liberal thinkers were preoccupied with economics, whereas the next wave of liberalism, the old liberals (paleoliberals, to use the phrase coined by Frau Heddy Neumeister)4 became as intensively interested in economic problems as the preliberals. Early liberalism was characterized by a rather limited pragmatism. It was intuitive rather than scientific. Montalembert’s thinking rested squarely on Christian premises. De Tocqueville, profoundly influenced by Madame Swetchine who was also the great soulmate of Lacordaire,5 coordinated at a more advanced age his political and social vistas increasingly with his reviving Christian faith. Jacob Burckhardt was deeply imbued with Christian ethics: It is indeed moving to see an agnostic solemnly choosing celibacy in his young years to be able to devote himself entirely to knowledge, research, wisdom, and truth. In the early liberals there is very little of that equation of freedom and usefulness prevailing among the preliberals and the old liberals of a slightly later period. The early liberals considered freedom as something to be treasured and defended because man needed it, because it was a postulate of a moral, not of a practical order, because—as many of them acknowledged—“Christ had liberated us to liberty” (Galatians, V:l). An early liberal would hardly have shaken in his belief if somebody had proved to him that freedom is impractical, or expensive, or less apt to produce higher living standards than some effective form of slavery.
Precisely because the early liberals were “idealists” in the narrow sense of the term, because their background was aristocratic or patrician, because they were intellectuals of a high order, without exception educated in the classics, because they founded their demand for freedom on religious and philosophical principles, they were not friendly toward democracy. As a matter of fact, most of them could frankly be styled antidemocrats. This, however, is often not fully realized by those interested in the history of ideas. Acton’s remark to Bishop Creighton in a letter addressed to him in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is frequently cited by well-meaning democrats who forget (or do not know) that Acton, quite an antidemocrat himself, would have applied this formula to parliaments or popular majorities without batting an eye. The mere fact that de Tocqueville wrote a standard work called Democracy in America, foretelling a further extension of democracy on a worldwide scale, has made him an apologist in the eyes of so many an American. But de Tocqueville was much too clever to believe that, with the coming upsurge of democracy, political history and its e very-changing forms would come to an end. He realized, we can be sure, that the world would outlive the democratic age, which he did not like at all. Yet he wrote in such a detached way that one has to read carefully between the lines. The man who, disgusted by the July Revolution of 1830, had left France for a United States, then under its first Democratic administration, was not a democrat. But, let us admit that even a few of his more intelligent readers were not quite sure where he actually stood. When once asked peremptorily about his convictions, he replied:
I have an intellectual inclination for democratic institutions, but I am instinctively an aristocrat, which means that I despise and fear the masses. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for rights, but not democracy . . . liberty is my foremost passion. That is the truth.6.
This is not the Alexis de Tocqueville known to the average American.7 Nor, to be sure, does the ordinary Swiss burgher, looking at a stamp featuring Jacob Burckhardt, realize how much this great man loathed democracy—as did Burckhardt’s liberal friend, J. J. Bachofen, similarly honored by the Swiss post office.
Outstanding men who have a certain pride in their experience or their knowledge are not likely to be admirers of democracy which refuses to distinguish between the various degrees of knowledge, is indifferent toward truth (as Berdyaev pointed out)8 and takes its stand on the basis of quantity and biological age rather than quality. In this system of government the votes are counted and not weighed, an observation Aristotle made well over 2,000 years ago. Indeed it would be difficult to find in Europe more than a handful of truly outstanding thinkers who believed or believe in democracy. As a matter of fact, only Bergson and Maritain come to my mind, and Maritain joined the democratic group only in his early forties. Before that time he was fairly close to the Action Francaise.9 We mention Bergson only because in one of his philosophical works we find a passage hinting at his democratic convictions. However, he was strictly a philosopher and not in any way a political scientist. Naturally, one could produce a long list of literary men of the greatest talent adhering to democracy. Thomas Mann who also had such friendly words for the Soviet Union, is a case in point.11 But literary people address themselves to a broad public; they are primarily artists and not systematic thinkers.
The aversion of the early liberals for the two democratic postulates of equality and majority rule also had other important roots. They knew about the incompatibility between the liberal and the egalitarian principle, they saw very clearly that the enfranchisement of the masses would inevitably lead to the rise of political movements exploiting the envy of the many, they realized that the concept of the “politicized” nation was in itself totalitarian—a term then not known or used but clearly sensed and understood as in de Tocqueville’s vision of the new tyranny to come.12 It was also evident to the early liberals that democracy would replace the search for truth in the light of reason with the mere whim, the emotions, the naked desires of the many expressed in numbers. Burckhardt spoke about dangers coming from political decisions based merely on the Gärungen der Völker, on the “peoples in ferment.” Royer-Collard no less than Montalembert emphasized the lights, les lumières, the quest for truth which obviously is a task of the few but not of the many. They have neither the training, the time nor the money to get and to digest the information necessary for the judgments they have to make. (Needless to say, moral qualifications are also necessary for one to arrive at decisions which demand immediate sacrifices ensuring a better future. “Blood, sweat and tears” can usually be promised only to a people with its back against the wall.)
Not all the early liberals were safe at all times in the face of the temptations of democracy which, as we have pointed out, has a paradisiacal character and all the lure of a “clear but false idea.” One has only to bear in mind that even Acton leaned temporarily toward democracy and that Constant de Rebecque also had a great moment of weakness when this brilliant essayist and politician suddenly decided to collaborate with Napoleon during his Hundred Days. And yet nobody had written a better and more scathing analysis of the democratic French Revolution and the Bonapartist dictatorship than the early liberal Benjamin Constant during his exile. These things, unfortunately, do happen. Still, the early liberals are certainly nondemocrats or antidemocrats whereas their successors, the old liberals, had usually a philosophical and ideological outlook which predisposed them to view democracy in more positive terms. The main reason for this state of affairs is the strongly “agnostic” bent of the old liberals.
Genuine liberals always wanted freedom. It is, however, precisely this quest for freedom which in certain minds started the idea that every firm conviction, every strong affirmation automatically results in intolerance. As we have pointed out in Chapter IV, the possibility of a truly convinced man’s intolerance (and “illiberality”) exists: It is a hurdle, a temptation he has to overcome. Those, however, who do not believe in absolute truth or in the human ability to attain truth, are naturally not tolerant but merely indifferent. Still the confusion between tolerance and indifference hardly bothered many old liberals who thought they could “play safe” by preaching a basically agnostic attitude (to use the word in a much wider than merely theological sense) and by waging a real intellectual and political crusade against all who believed in absolutes. These were decried as “dogmatists.” Such an attitude, as could be expected, put the old liberals all too frequently in opposition to Christianity and especially to Christian orthodoxy of any denomination.
It is precisely this leaning towards “agnosticism” which facilitated the old liberals’ armistice or even alliance with democracy. Democracy—as democratism—is an ideology, though in its simpler form it can also be seen purely as a system, as a mere procedure for “producing,” i.e., for selecting, a government. A democratic constitution offers a frame into which a picture can be fitted through the voting process. It is the majority vote which usually determines the character of the picture. Now, according to standard democratic doctrine—there are a few others—every full citizen has the right not only to vote, but also to organize a party or to propose local candidates. The guardians of the democratic constitution have to adopt a neutral position toward all candidates, all parties, all ideas represented. One man is as good as any other man, one opinion as good as any other, all men and all opinions are invited to participate in the race, and he who wins numerically gets the prize. Democracy as an abstract principle has to insist on fair play, must express no preferences, and thus also has to give a “break” to parties which would put an end to the democratic order. If 51 percent or, better still, two-thirds of a people vote one or several antidemocratic parties into power, the end of democracy is at hand. In other words, democracy can commit suicide democratically.
This quandary, this dilemma of democracy appears in many parts of the world. Italian law gives democratic rights to Communists but not to Fascists. (The M.S.I, is not exactly the successor of the old Fascist party.) In Argentina the real Peronists could not run for office either. (They might actually have won as much as a good one-third of the votes in free elections.) In short, democracy often distinguishes undemocratically between supporters of its own ideology and its adversaries—whereby the totalitarian aspects of democracy, perhaps tragically and unavoidably, become manifest.
An ideal democracy does not discriminate. Fearful of violent dissent which rends asunder the fabric of state and society, it not only tries to be neutral but knowingly-unknowingly considers an “agnostic” attitude to be the natural lubricant for the democratic process. Precisely here we find the golden bridge between old liberalism and democracy. People in a democracy should have tenuous party affiliations: Their convictions should not be too well grounded and their loyalties ought to be superficial. Otherwise they might always vote in the same way. A happy democracy of a liberal character where freedom survives, rests on change, however, not permanance. The citizens should be in the mood to switch their votes and individuals, parties, and party leaders should always be ready to engage in compromise, in fifty-fifty arrangements which are the lifeblood of parliamentarianism. (Here one should not overlook the coalition cabinets on the Continent which—in contrast to the Anglo-American world—are the rule and not the exception.)
Democracy and old liberalism have something else in common. They share the optimistic Roussellian view of man. Man is basically good and wise; let him act according to his whims, his desires, his intuitions, and everything will be all right. The good people will prevail—almost automatically. In this attitude democracy is far from Calvin and the argument that it really has its historic roots in Calvinist synods (the Synod of Dordrecht has been named as a conspicuous example) becomes somewhat questionable. Of course the term “good” implies a value judgment. The true agnostic would be rather inclined to say, “Man is as he is; you prefer him to act this way and I that way, and that is where we are.” Such would be the position of the grandfather of democracy, the Marquis de Sade. Still, whatever the formulation, democracy and old liberalism give a basically unqualified “yes” to man, though not to each individual man. In this respect, needless to say, old liberalism shows that it has its roots in preliberalism rather than in early liberalism. The fear of “interference” is very highly developed in the first and third stage of genuine liberalism. Here again the deist and subtly pantheistic attitude of the Manchester School and Adam Smith comes to the fore. Democracy as an ideology maintains that if one voted after mature reflection and in an “unfettered” way, the relatively best decision could be made and progress thereby assured.
“A million eyes see better than a single pair!”
This, however, as we all know, is certainly not borne out by the facts. Such belief is a fetish of the democratist, a magic formula which, as history teaches, sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. For reasons we shall give elsewhere, it will work less and less as time goes on last but not least because the “Information Explosion” has brought us confusion and bewilderment rather than enlightenment and balance. To know facts still does not mean to know how to weigh evidence.
The democratic optimism as to man, his nature, and the entire universe also animated the old liberals who, to be sure, unlike certain democrats, always insisted that man needs first to be educated. (We guardedly said “certain democrats” because there are many people who seem enchanted if elections are held in African jungles where the illiterates are gently guided by the choice of animal symbols. Knowledge and maturity are undemocratic principles! The vast majority of democrats, however, still believe that literacy is a prerequisite for the vote—the new American “voting rights” bill notwithstanding!—and that a free press and witty radio commentators can do the trick.)
This emphasis on education in an intellectual and a moral sense has definitely an elitarian character. Just like the preliberals, the old liberals thought that the sum total of all enlightened self-interests would, in a mysterious harmony, automatically make for happiness and a life of plenty, that especially in the field of economics this would lead to abundance and the survival of the fittest. These in turn, by their pull and their shining example would raise general levels. Half truths, one can say, are optimistic exaggerations. Still, the old liberal stand caused infinitely fewer tragedies than the opposite errors of the leftist gnostics (in the sense Eric Voegelin uses this term) and of the red “Monasticists” whom we have mentioned earlier.
As one can easily see, there is a certain psychological connection between the social Darwinism adopted by the old liberals (strongly rejected by most of the early liberals)13 and democratic optimism believing not exactly in the survival of the fittest, but in the identity of wisdom and majority opinion. (There is a precursor to this in the Christian adage securus iudicat orbis terrarum: The judgment of the big wide world is infallible.) It should not be surprising that this old liberal social Darwinism not only had a Manchesterian root but also played into the hands of the Nazis at a later period.14 In the whole Manchesterian calculation, however, there always lurked the danger of mammothism and colossalism, of cartels, trust, and monopolies which are an evil not so much because they are big and dwarf the individual, but because they are menacing the most important aspect of a free economy, i.e., competition. Without a free choice for the customer to buy this or that product and without the competition between enterprises trying to produce the best and the cheapest, there is no free economy. True, the evils engendered by a private monopoly are sometimes as great as those due to the state monopoly of socialism. We say “sometimes” because the monolithic aspect of state-controlled economic production, as well as the repetitious rewards for party loyalty which are crucial in the managerial appointments inevitably lead to corruption and inefficiency—and these indeed are the far greater evils. Thus the private enterprise monopolies, though lacking the proper incentives of competition, will still give better service, will be better administered, will make greater efforts than their state-owned counterparts. There is an example of this in the United States where the Bell Telephone System is a virtual monopoly but still vastly superior to the United States Post Office with its strongly political character, the job of postmaster being one of the typical plums in the spoils system.
Old liberalism in Europe also had the tendency to enter into various alliances and combinations. On the one hand it preached an extreme liberalism in the economic field, but on the other it merged with nationalism which, in Europe, has an ethnic connotation. Bismarck derived his main support from the National Liberals and not from the Prussian conservatives who were Prussian patriots and not nationalists with Pan-German leanings. Ethnic nationalism was always anti-Catholic, anti-Papal—with the exception of Irish and Polish nationalism—and above all this animosity played into the hands of the old liberals. Since they hated anything they called “dogmatism,” they were, as we have hinted before, opposed to religious orthodoxy and above all to Rome. Bismarck’s Kulturkampf pleased nationalists, old liberals, and national liberals almost equally. (It won no applause from the Prussian conservatives although they were staunch Lutherans.)15 Obviously the aristocratic character of early liberalism was not inherited by the old liberals who got their main support from the upper and middle bourgeoisie, precisely the layers of society which had anticlerical and nationalistic leanings. In some countries—we think here above all of the Latin nations—old liberalism allied itself strongly with Freemasonry, which in these countries has a character quite at variance with its counterpart in the English-speaking world. There was and there remains a real antagonism between the Grand Orient of Paris with all its affiliates and the two main British rites.
Given all these alliances and connections it is not surprising that old liberalism became illiberal. If one is solemnly convinced that all strong stands, all firm affirmations, all orthodoxy, all absolutes in thought are evil, then indeed one becomes inclined to show hostility to all representatives of “absolutism” (religious, political, philosophical, or otherwise) and, if one had the chance, to persecute them methodically and mercilessly. Since the old liberals in the second half of the Nineteenth century and also frequently in the early Twentieth century had, thanks to the property qualifications for voting, great parliamentary power, they could also abuse it. Owing to their intellectual appeal they had a near monopoly in the universities and acquired an iron grip on the press, the theater, and the entire intellectual life. Thus they could painfully discriminate against their conservative and Christian opponents. The Holy American Illiberal Inquisition, as we see, had a forerunner.
The old liberals, moreover, had some supporters in the working class, even in the aristocracy and quite frequently in the royal families. They were, in fact, only rarely antimonarchists. They were favorable to democracy, as we have pointed out before, but they did not underwrite it without reservations and usually considered it as just one useful element in a mixed government. The Spanish aristocracy was largely liberal.16 So was a sizable part of the Italian, the Portuguese, the Bavarian,17 the Hungarian, and the Scottish nobility. Franz Josef’s sympathies lay with the liberals and so, notoriously, did his son’s, the ill-fated Crown Prince Rudolf. His brother the tragic Maximilian of Mexico, contrary to what the average American or European tends to believe, was even an ardent liberal. The royal houses of Italy, Spain, and Portugal were largely liberal.18 “Privileges” were not decried by the old liberals provided these were held by the “right people.” Whatever might be said against the old liberals—and a great deal can be—they were never really a party of the left.
Actually the old liberals were responsible for their own decline around the end of the century. In Austria the introduction of the one-man-one-vote principle in 1907 was a great blow to them. Their anticlericalism led to a rather well-organized Catholic opposition which astounded and dismayed the old liberal leadership. It is obvious that the Church did not at all like the idea of descending into the political arena and competing with other secular ideologies. It was the (inofficially Catholic) Center party which defeated Bismarck and made him eat humble pie. These Catholic parties, after all, had the allegiance of a good cross-section of the people—peasants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, professional men, intellectuals, and the nobility. (The evangelicals could not found a similar party because they were already doctrinally too much allied with old liberalism and/or nationalism.) All the troubles the old liberals had caused in marriage and school legislation, all the laws they had enacted which were alien to the spirit of the Church (compulsory civil marriage, as an example) now boomeranged against them.
A boomerang, however, also came from the other side: the rise of the Socialist parties which had partly benefited from the “anticlerical” attitude spread rather unwisely by the old liberals. Neither the new Catholic nor the Socialist opposition against old liberalism was characterized by an appeal to liberty. As a matter of fact, old liberalism had contributed by its ambiguous attitudes to rendering even the word liberty suspect.19 In France liberty meant expelling religious orders. In Hungary it was used to justify compulsory civil marriage. In Spain it worked as a screen for the confiscation of almost all Church property. In Switzerland and in Germany it was invoked to exile the Jesuits.
By the outbreak of World War I old liberalism found itself in a very grave crisis. It remained entrenched in certain intellectual strongholds, but it was totally beaten in the field of power politics. The liberal parties on the Continent had been decimated: What remained were specific positions in the universities and the still sizable liberal press, which had become a middle-of-the-road institution promising (not always truthfully) “objectivity” to its readers. In the practical political sphere, however, it no longer could “deliver the goods.” This startling phenomenon could be observed all over Europe. Papers such as the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Corriere della Sera, Le Temps, Die Neue Freie Presse, or De Algemeene Handelsblad still held their leading position, but they ceased to affect elections. Deeply allied with nationalism, the old liberals could not take an independent line in World War I either. Among the Allies they were tied to the war interest, felt that they had a real stake in it and naively hoped that the murderous struggle would foster their cause. Among the Central Powers old liberalism was haunted by the thought that its followers were better entrenched in the Allied camp. And when it came to the Paris Peace Conference, Western old liberals were among the most fanatic supporters of a “hard peace,” thus contributing to the rise of National Socialism in Germany, while in Central Europe they tended to blame their old governments for the beginning and the end of the war and thereby invited the wrath of the totalitarian nationalists, who denounced them as traitorous collaborators with the West. Whatever they did, they did wrong, which is not so surprising in the light of the fact that they had completely parted with absolutes and played politics “by ear.” History does not honor mere goodwill or good intentions.
When the totalitarian wave started, the old liberals were persecuted, in a sense, more bitterly than the people on the left. Those on the left—Socialists, Communists, and Jacobin democrats—were totalitarian competitors, not mutual enemies. The Social Democratic worker in Essen and the Socialist worker in Sesto San Giovanni or in Turin could very easily switch sides: The worker in Essen gave up international socialism and embraced National Socialism. The directors of his factory were now mere stewards of the state. The worker in Turin knew that Benito Mussolini had been a Socialist and that the Fascist movement had grown out of Italian socialism, shedding first of all its international outlook.20 (This is just what the Czech National Socialists had done when they seceded from the Czech Social Democratic Party in 1897.) The old liberals had nothing but declared enemies and no competitors. They could not easily “switch.” The new, big totalitarian parties stemming from the French Revolution boasted of being “democratic.” They called themselves “Socialist”: They too were engaged in that perennial trick of successful leftist parties ever since 1789, the “mobilization of envy.” The old liberals, whatever their faults (and they had many), abstained from this tempting strategy which proved so rewarding at the polls.
Professor Eduard Heimann, a German “Religious Socialist,” wrote very correctly during World War II:
Hitlerism proclaims itself as both true democracy and true socialism, and the terrible truth is that there is a grain of truth to such claims—an infinitesimal grain, to be sure, but at any rate enough to serve as a basis for such fantastic distortions. Hitlerism even goes so far as to claim the role of protector of Christianity, and the terrible truth is that even this gross misinterpretation is able to make some impression. But one fact stands out with perfect clarity in all the fog: Hitler has never claimed to represent true liberalism. Liberalism then has the distinction of being the doctrine most hated by Hitler!21
We, however, would go a great deal further than this author who by conviction was a democrat and a Socialist. Still, his thesis is correct—even in the light of the curious fact that “National Liberalism,” this particular central European compound, had and even today still has subtle links with Nazism. Since the death of the so oratorically gifted German Social Democrat leader Kurt Schumacher, a real nationalist, the Nazi old guard rather sympathizes with the Free Democratic party (F.D.P.), aptly called by the foreign press the “liberal party.” Exactly the same situation exists in Austria where the Freiheitliche Partei Osterreichs (F.P.O, Liberal party of Austria) is the joint party of surviving old liberals and of ex-Nazis. And it is not so much the “National Liberal” past, but rather “anticlericalism” which brought both camps together. It was also, needless to say, not the enthusiasm for liberty but the hostility towards organized religion in general and Christian orthodoxy in particular that caused the old liberalism to be energetically attacked by the Catholic Church. Pope Pius IX in Proposition 80 of his Syllabus errorum (December 8, 1864) condemned the following statement: “The Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself and cooperate with progress, liberalism and modern civil society.”22
This antiliberal trauma remained for a long time a very potent force in orthodox Christianity (not only in the Catholic Church!) and when neoliberalism developed in the 1930s and 1940s it was often difficult to persuade freedom-loving Christian thinkers that this new phase of liberalism differed in many important and even decisive ways from its immediate predecessor, because the word “liberal” created a mental block among many devout Christians.
The term neoliberalism, denoting the fourth phase of liberalism, hardly appears before the end of World War II. When in 1946 a remnant of liberal scholars met at the Mont-Pèlerin Hotel near the northern shores of Lake Geneva to coordinate their forces and form an organization, it soon became apparent that a certain fission had taken place in and outside the domain of economics. There were now, mostly in central Europe, thinkers who viewed the problem of liberty in a different light than the men who belonged to a somewhat older generation and in many ways could have been called their teachers. (Almost all of them, to be sure, as far as economics go, had been inspired by Ludwig von Mises.) But in matters of economics these newer lights were less radical in their outlook and they admitted curbs on mammothism and colossalism to preserve competition. They thought that the state had a right and even a duty to correct possible abuses of economic freedom—just as we give to a mature person a driving license and the right to travel wherever he wants but still make him submit to traffic laws. Yet probably more important than this change was the reappraisal of religion, especially of Christianity. Many of the neoliberals declared that it is not sufficient to prove that “liberty delivers the goods,” that freedom is more agreeable or more productive than slavery. There must be philosophical and even theological reasons why liberty must be achieved, fostered, preserved. One of the neoliberals, perhaps the one best known in the United States, the late Professor Wilhelm Röpke, maintained that even if it could be proved to him that a planned and collective economy is materially superior to a free one, he would still, in an “ascetic” spirit, prefer the latter. Under these circumstances sacrifices of a material order would have to be made to preserve the dignity of man. From such views we can deduct that the neoliberals had, in a certain way, a greater affinity with the early liberals than with their immediate predecessors. Interested in economic problems, they refused, however, to make a fetish of economics and they tried to integrate their economic views into a metaphysical humanism. The great early liberal thinkers, from de Tocqueville to Burckhardt, were seriously studied by new liberals who in many cases were professing Christians.
The new liberalism started in the German-speaking countries. This is not an accident because in this area the old liberalism had suffered its major bankruptcy and had helped to undermine the older Christian civilization, a process from which the totalitarians derived the greatest profit.23 Who are the leading neoliberals? Three of the founders of the new liberalism have died: Walter Eucken, professor of economics at Freiburg University in Breisgau,24 Alexander Rüstow, professor emeritus of Heidelberg University, and Wilhelm Röpke, professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Geneva. Alexander Rüstow was the son of a Prussian general who, out of juvenile enthusiasm, joined the Spartacist movement in 1919.25 Penniless and near despair, he was aided by that famous Catholic priest and charity organizer, Dr. Carl Sonnenschein who provided him with a desk and a typewriter. Rüstow, never adhering formally to a church, and always cultivating a somewhat anarchical outlook, became first deeply interested in Greek philosophy (especially in the pre-Socratics) and only later in his life concentrated on economic problems within their historical, sociological, and theological context. When Nazism made research impossible and academic liberties illusory, Rüstow emigrated to Turkey in order to remain near to his country. He taught for many years at the University of Istanbul.
Alexander Rüstow is famous not only for his essay on Manchesterism but mainly for his stupendous three-volume Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart. Like all other neoliberals, Rüstow (who died in 1964) always refused to deal with economics in an isolated way, detached from all the other disciplines. His book, whose title in English, literally translated, means “Location of the Present” offers us a sweeping historical view of one of our last polyhistors, a work in some ways more impressive than Toynbee’s A Study of History. Today, however, the use of any language other than English is a grave handicap to worldwide fame. Jacob Burckhardt (orbiit 1897), for instance, was unknown in the English-speaking world until the middle of World War II, and even Max Weber gained only posthumous recognition in America. Very little, indeed, is known in the United States or even in Britain about the conservative authors of the Continent.
The late Walter Eucken, professor of economics, and Franz Böhm, professor of law at Jena University, were both active in the German resistance. (Eucken was jailed for some time.) After the war they founded Ordo, a liberal (predominantly neoliberal) yearbook containing essays of a very high quality. Professor Wilhelm Röpke also fled first to Turkey but finally went to Switzerland, where he taught until his untimely death in Geneva in 1966. During the last years of the war he published his first stirring books. These dealt either with basic economic problems or with political, social, and cultural questions in which he equally espoused the cause of liberty. At the end of the war he wrote a memorandum for the Allies recommending a monarchic restoration in Germany, a step advocated by Chancellor Brüning as early as 1932. In Brüning’s case it was the aging Hindenburg, in Röpke’s case it was the Allies who ignored these suggestions. As a matter of fact, the Soviets vied with the United States in imposing, fostering, and promoting the republican form of government. Moved by her self-interest, they were seeking a parliamentary frame for Communist parties to cooperate with legally in a constitutional form—eventually to kill the constitution.26
Professor Goetz Briefs, another eminent star in the galaxy of neoliberal thinkers, has been living in the United States ever since the earliest days of Nazism and was for a long time professor at Georgetown University. Originally he came from the school loosely identified as “Catholic Social Thought,” the tradition emanating from Ketteler and Vogelsang. He started as professor at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg and is a prolific writer. In recent years he has occupied himself with the problem of trade unions acting as a state within a state and developing here and there into a real menace to a free society—and even to democracy.
The neoliberals are hardly organized and it is significant that in the Germanies they have no special love for those parties which do not quite wear the liberal label but are usually referred to as “liberal.” Many of the neoliberals are contributors to Ordo, published annually in Düsseldorf. Naturally they collaborate with the Institut für freie Marktwirtschaft in Heidelberg-Bonn, an organization engaged in economic research and in propaganda for the “free market economy,” i.e., free enterprise. In 1962 they held a memorable private roundtable conference in Augsburg with Catholic sociologists, but the demarcation lines were blurred inasmuch as some of the attending neoliberals were professing Catholics. It became evident that the viewpoints expressed on this occasion were indeed not far from each other.27
NB. Obviously, a man such as Cobden might also figure as a late preliberal, Edmund Burke as an early conservative. We have omitted American names deliberately.
In a few cases it is not easy to draw the dividing line between neoliberals and certain later old liberals. Professor Friedrich August von Hayek, for instance, is a thinker on the borderline (but rather “old” than “new”). While Wilhelm Röpke could be called a conservative, F.A. v. Hayek declines this label.28 Alexander Rüstow was in many ways a conservative.
Recapitulating the four phases of genuine liberalism, it might be helpful to make a tabulation which (permitting for certain simplifications) would roughly look like the table on page 200.
Realizing, however, that European new liberals and modern conservatives often have become practically indistinguishable from each other, we cannot help remembering how different the situation is in the United States—not in fact but purely from the point of view of current labels. Indeed, we have before us two problems to be solved: first, to find out how it happened that liberalism in the United States evolved into the very opposite of what it set out to be—if it did “evolve”!—(thereby morally forfeiting the right to call itself “liberal”), and second, later on, to analyze what conservatism, old and new, really stands for or, at least, ought to stand for.