Succinct Distinction
a little huntin’ around...
As I was researching Eric Foner for the previous post, I found this:
Liberalism and the Left; rethinking the relationship: And of course there’s the question of which liberalism we’re talking about. The classical liberalism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, positing the autonomous individual as the carrier of certain basic natural rights as the foundation of political thought, with the role of liberalism to protect that individual’s rights against concentrations of power, particularly a too-powerful state. And then there is modern liberalism or social liberalism. This is geared more to the so-called welfare state and inequalities of economic power, and is not as worried about the state interfering with individual rights. Indeed, it often sees the national government as the protector of liberties against local majorities. I don’t want to get into a definitional, semantic debate [because that would actually provide clarity and clear concepts to discuss e-C] except to say that one of the reasons this discussion will probably go on forever is that people are talking different things when they are discussing liberalism [which, of course, would be cleared up by a definitional, semantic debate *ahem* e-C].
But this very fact may obscure the important historical point that liberalism and radicalism, or liberalism and the left, have common historical origins. In the late eighteenth century, in the Age of Revolution, the roots of modern liberalism and modern socialism can be found in the movements to dismantle privilege, hierarchy, monarchy, and aristocratic power. As social movements, both liberalism and the left originated in the egalitarian fervor of the age of the American and French revolutions. And this overlapping history of liberalism and the left (or socialism) [well, that’s clear enough—e-C] can be traced into the twentieth century. Even in the Progressive era, so-called “new liberals” like T. H. Green in England, or John Dewey and other progressive thinkers in the United States, sought to find common ground between socialism and liberalism, challenging the distribution of economic resources while insisting that the notion of the state as the primary threat to individual liberty was now outmoded [thereby leaving that “notion” to the conservatives and Constitutionalists—e-C] and that the major danger to the rights of the liberal individual lay in concentrated corporate power. And on that ground, liberals and socialists could and did make common efforts in Progressive America.
...Lately, however, there has been an effort, at least within the realm of political theory, to reunite [liberalism and the left ]. ...Liberalism’s Crooked Circle ,...an attempt to find in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet model what he calls “liberal socialism” that will avoid the harshly authoritarian elements of that socialist experiment [uhm, yeah, I’d say “avoiding” Stalinism like the freakin’ plague might be a good ‘notion’—e-C] , and yet not simply succumb to the free economic marketplace as the definition of justice.
...other political theorists are also trying to argue today that individual autonomy, the basis of the liberal faith, requires state action, [run that by me again, what? “individual autonomy requires state action”... if that action by the state is leaving me the hell alone, m’kay—e-C] it requires creating the conditions of freedom for people. It is not enough to restrict political power to create liberal freedom, but the state can be a source of liberty. The notion of a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power, they argue, can be developed on strictly liberal grounds. [yup. the classic is still: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need."]
Thoughts?
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