by David McDonagh
The British Empire and Liberty
The ‘Bitter Truth’: Empire and the Death of Liberalism
| The ‘Bitter Truth’: Empire and the Death of Liberalism Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, has started a bit of a controversy with his essay “Why Liberalism Means Empire,” the thesis of which is that t… | |||||||
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In his article, “The ‘Bitter Truth’: Empire and the Death of Liberalism: Why liberalism cannot and never did mean empire” by Justin Raimondo, 6 October , 2014, the author is right to say, basically, that imperialism is intrinsically illiberal, but it is not the most illiberal thing, but he seems to think, or rather to write, as though it is. His thesis is that more imperialism means less liberty and vice versa, that they are inversely related, but that seems to be clearly false.
Nationalism has all too often proved to be even more illiberal than any empire, and that was, even more often than not, the case when nationalism went up against the British Empire, for that empire, at least from about 1860 up to 1914, was very greatly influenced by the liberal idea; that was in that period in fashion in Britain, but the British Empire not ever fully in accord with this liberal ideal, of course, as that is hardly possible. At no time was imperialism unopposed in the supposedly mother country and when liberalism became the fashion amongst the elite, after 1840, but with the masses way before then, maybe in the 1780s, so from about 1840 the home opposition to the Empire was even more keen than it had been beforehand.
The pristine liberals of the 1830s, like Richard Cobden and John Bright, were always hostile to empire, on principle, and that principle was the liberal idea. But following the long consideration given to the colonies in The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith, the two liberal propagandists held that imperialism was not only illiberal but also exceedingly costly and a massive white elephant, “India was millstone around England’s neck” said Cobden, and, later, Disraeli, oddly, repeated it.
But owing to the rise of statism in the Liberal Party of the UK in the 1870s and ’80s we, today, often see the uglier, longer word, “libertarianism” being used for the pristine liberal idea. Statist liberalism is the norm today, but pristine liberalism has never quite become defunct. It has revived a bit since the 1970s from the sundry rump that maintained the ideal beforehand, at least in a few books.
Daniel McCarthy, Justin Raimondo’s target in the saidabove linked article, may well take statism rather than pristine liberalism as what he feels leads to imperialism. McCarthy’s thesis, that imperialism is a prerequisite of liberalism, is quite absurd in the pristine sense of liberalism but also the wrong way round in the statist sense, as historically statism precedes imperialism, as well as surviving it.
And if the likes of T.H. Green, a nineteenth century pioneer of statist neo-liberalism, are to be heeded then liberalism requires a far stronger state, even, than we have today. But Green realised he was almost the opposite of those who had earlier called themselves liberals. He was more an Hegelian than a liberal, and he would have been more honest had he openly said so. But the rising statist liberals of his day just seemed to like the word. And there was quite a few of them. They eventually made the word their own, hence the use of “libertarianism” by pristine liberals today. But they confused quite a few by doing so, both in the 1870s, and ever since too.
Dominant politics often does lead to imperialism, if it can. There is glory in it for most politicians, even if they are not enthusiastic ideological imperialist idealists, as Joseph Chamberlain so clearly was. An empire usually aids the politician’s ability to make war. The ambition of all politicians is, clearly, to rule over others. Many obfuscate that fact with the cant that they are serving the public, but how many politicians are truly dim enough to shallow that cant? The state rules the public rather than serving it, but the journalists working on the media tend not to realise that fact, so the common political cant is still alive and well.
From 1860 to 1900, there was a lot of confusion between what I, here, call pristine liberalism and statist neo-liberalism within the Liberal Party of the UK. Even Gladstone was not always clear on the distinction. Men like David Lloyd George was utterly confused on it, though he was well aware of his own utterly statist aims for the future, but what they all agreed on was that liberalism was the way of future progress; that it was progressive. The idea of progress was vital to liberalism. But many overlooked, especially after 1880, that progress for statism is directly the contrary of progress for individual liberty.
Liberalism was not, ever, a Conservative position, though it emerged from the Peelite split in the Conservative Party in the mid to late 1840s over the repeal of the Corn Laws. It might also one day become quite conservative, if only ever full liberty is completely attained. But liberalism historically emerged in the House of Commons as a movement led by Robert Peel away from protectionism towards free trade. It existed as an ideological movement in books from way over a hundred years beforehand, from at least 1688, if not from the 1640s.
If McCarthy truly thinks the empire was a prerequisite to liberalism then he has, unwittingly, adopted a delusion. Liberalism is viable economically but the state and all of politics is not; so it is politics that always needs the subsidy, indeed it needs complete support from taxation, not liberalism, which, in its most extreme form of anarcho-liberalism, is anti-politics.
The idea of hegemony is as alien to liberalism, as is any empire. Liberalism is about the most extensive liberty for one and all. Any government of the people is alien to this ideal.
T.H. Green, who was one of the leading the statist reformers of liberalism after 1860, was a keen reader of the philosophy of Hegel, who was an ignoramus [i.e. an advocate who
has not mastered the subject-matter], especially in logic, but Green took to him as if he was a master. As those in error often, ironically, pride themselves exactly on their errors, so Hegel prided himself on his new “advanced” logic of dialectics, a paradigm that Marx pretended to adopt, but, though he occasionally used it to obfuscate things, he mainly remained, nevertheless, an Aristotelian, rather than an Hegelian, especially in logic; though Hegel himself remained largely Aristotelian too, in most things, despite his supposed “innovations” in logic.
Where Marx truly did follow Hegel, seriously, was in becoming, as I am myself today, a critic of political economy; though I have distinct, if not opposite, criticisms of economics from what those two had. Like Keynes later, Hegel hated the fact that the political economists were tending to downplay, if not completely forget about, the role of the state. By contrast, I resent the fact that the economists think way too much about statist economic policy, tending to make it their main object instead of the truth.
Liberal democracy is almost a unity of opposites, but not quite, as democracy could remain liberal if only people voted to negate the various negations of liberty e.g. for tax cuts, for true privatisation [viz. no state control or
state use of the market
but a complete sell off by the state], or for otherwise rolling back the state. To remain liberal, democracy, like coercion generally, needs to remain reactive, or defensive of liberty. When democracy goes proactive then it thereby gets illiberal.
Men, like James Mill, who was very active from 1802, when he moved to London from Scotland, up till his death in 1836, were not so unrealistic in thinking that democracy, or indeed the state, might be so limited as they have since seemed to twentieth century men like Joseph Schumpeter, who have thought that democracy was almost bound to be used to replace the market in his famous book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943). It is easy for the modern reader to overlook how popular liberty was before about 1870.
After 1870, though, what Schumpeter had in mind was what more and more people were thinking in terms of; and not only the ideological socialist for statism was generally coming into fashion. Men like T.H. Green aided the successful rise of statist liberalism to crowd out pristine liberalism. The early liberals, like James Mill and Francis Place, expected democracy always to be used in a purely defensive way but later many saw it, as had some in the 1789 riots, that the Romantics call the French Revolution, as applying to every aspect of life, as indeed totalitarian. [See The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
(1952) J.L. Talmon]. Looking back from 2014, this looks to be almost impossibly naïve but that is to overlook the fashion or general outlook from about 1800 to at least 1850, if not to 1870, for, in those days, liberalism was very popular.
Any modern reader of a biography of Richard Cobden would think that Cobden was being very foolhardy to put pristine liberal principles before the electorate, when he first stood for parliament, in 1837, when he contested seat for Stockport. The reader will not be surprised to read that he lost the contest, and it will be thought, by most readers today, that it was as a result of Cobden being too openly liberal.
When they read that Cobden was utterly surprised they will, again, smile, but Cobden was utterly shocked as well as surprised, and he set out to discover why. He was completely sure that it was not a rejection of liberalism. We might smile yet again.
But in the next few days, Cobden found that his supporters had nearly all forgotten about the election, and that they thought it was still due in the next few days, or, in a few cases, even in the next few weeks, that, anyway, most of them felt that the time to vote was still sometime in the future. Cobden concluded that he would have won, just as he thought had done before he saw the result, if only he had but realised that he needed to remind his supporters of the day they needed to go out and vote on. He said, at once, that he could win an immediate re-run, with ease, the very next week, and that he hardly needed to do much to win the next time, and that proved to be true in 1841. So he was quite right all along. What the modern reader overlooks here is the massive change in fashion from pristine to statist liberalism; that took place well after Cobden’s death in 1865.
The sentence from Justin Raimondo that: “McCarthy’s essential premise is that history refutes the anti-interventionist arguments of “idealists” who deny the fundamental beneficence of empire, whether British or American” leads me to think that though history itself, as being merely only the past, lacks any brain of its own, so it never itself judges, so any historian can do better than that, but most historians, hitherto, seem to, perversely, produce something that is even worse than nothing if ever we had to have what they write as the only account; though any idea, whatsoever, is good enough to start any enquiry from, so given any account, we can always do better. However, many historians, so far, have written very poor books fact-wise. They usually seem to be out to flatter the state, to indulge in the fallacy of playing to the political gallery rather than to put the truth in the first place.
For example, it looks like sheer Romantic nonsense to call the breaking away movement of the colonies, which became the USA, a “revolution”, as it does also the riots in France that began in 1789. Edmund Burke saw that the new Romantic meaning of Revolution was a sham, as well as I do today, but he still continued to use the jargon in the revised sense of going to a completely new epoch, as it added spin to his warmongering schemes against France. The 1688 meaning of completing the revolution back to 1685 was maybe also unrealistic but not such a massive delusion. It was far more mundane than the 1789 Romantic meaning, just as the event was way more peaceful than the Romantic riots of 1789. It was also in reaction or defensive and it meant the same as reactionary. Liberalism is about repealing politically coercive laws rather than being progressive politics that can only be wasteful as well as illiberal.
Such silly schemes that the Romantic Edmund Burke was so keen on are still fashionable in the UK/USA today. It is a version of his rival Romantic, Rousseau’s absurd paradox of attempting to force people “to be free”, an aim that is bound to be self-defeating, as it actually puts force prior to liberty in practise. The UK/USA invades to “free” the people of Iraq but should they be surprised that the natives are not likely to see it that way but rather as sheer imperialism? Democracy itself is not liberty. It is, at best, a temporary evil, for the same reasons that Tom Paine said that the state was. Paine held that, ideally, coercion should not be needed at all but he felt that, realistically, it looks as if we will have to use it in defence. He realised that things are not yet, when he wrote in 1776, completely ideal. We might, even today, feel the need to admit the same for the foreseeable future. Coercion can be liberal if used only in defence.
Contrary to what Justin Raimondo says, it is not at all odd for a USA Conservative to be anti-Paine and pro-Burke, or pro-John Adams and thus pro-British. Justin Raimondo writes as if he does not read much USA Conservative literature.
Mises was right to see that the British Empire opened up to free trade after liberalism arose in the homeland from about 1840 to 1870. The empire was never was captured by the imperialist ideal, that the likes of Joseph Chamberlain sought to achieve, at the top, from about 1870 onwards, but that was an aim that Chamberlain had that he failed to ever bring off. Instead, the empire arose by default, as the British were actually aiming mainly at fighting the French and the accidental result, or unintended consequence, or by-product, of that aim was the emerging British Empire.
Liberalism is not a product of empire in any way, Justin Raimondo is right there, and McCarthy seems to be quite wrong to think that it is, but the British relatively neglected their Empire but instead they invested all around the world prior to 1914, and they did not ever make a customs union, as the current European Union [EU] is attempting to do today, out of the Empire but rather they left things open to the rest of the world in free trade after about 1860 up to 1914. That latter fact is contrary to Justin Raimondo’s idea and also to the spirit of his Mises quotation too, but not to the actual letter of it, for Mises goes on about the aims of the British imperialist ideologues, like Chamberlain, rather than the actual historical organisation of the Empire, which the imperialist idealists never quite got in charge of before 1914 but they got a bit more of a look in from 1918 onwards but, by then, their imperialist ideal was rapidly waning. Protectionism of the British Empire itself, called “Empire Free Trade” by Joseph Chamberlain, lost out badly to free trade that the Liberal Party championed against the Conservative and Unionist Party in the 1906 UK General Election.
The British invested more in places like Argentina, or even in the independent USA, rather than in the Empire prior to 1914. This looked very silly to Joseph Chamberlain, the late arriving imperialist idealist ideologue after 1870, and it is also contrary to how so many students, or even tutors, in the colleges, today, suppose imperialism just must have been like, as well as to how Chamberlain wanted it to be. Chamberlain fully aimed for it to more like the imperialist ideal. But he never quite achieved that aim, or even got anywhere near it. The Empire was never liberal, but it was influenced by the liberal idea to a far greater extent than it ever was by the ideological imperialist ideal. Later, after 1918, it went over more to Fabian influence, which was nearer to the imperialist ideal that it never attained, but by then the naked imperialist ideal was ebbing badly. The Fabians were not ever so openly imperialist as Joseph Chamberlain was. Nor were either of his two sons. Even the Conservative and Unionist Party moved on after 1906, thought they were to return to protectionism, if not to “Empire Free Trade” in the inter-war years. The Fabians pretended to be socialists but way more elitist than the ordinary socialist, as they were usually upper or at least middle class socialists, and their hidden imperialism was one of many features that made them extraordinary socialists, when it occasionally became quite explicit.
The breakaway of the USA in 1776 was not a struggle against imperialism but rather a split between Whigs and Tories in England as well as in the colonies, which was later turned into a nationalist split by Tom Paine and others. Some men in America, like Ben Franklin and his son [though he later became a founding
father, but his son
remained British], did value the British Empire, to begin with, as did Adam Smith in Britain, but most, prior to 1776, did not seem to think in terms of the Empire at all but only of the attempt of King George III to revive the power of the crown; as against the rule of parliament. The main issue, later, became whether taxation of the colonies to make up for the recent war against the French was fair or not.
Justin Raimondo writes as if the 1812 war, when the Whitehouse was burnt by the British, took place in 1776. What he means by “their own government” is best known to him, for the Tories, even in 1812, would not think the USA government was their own. They would not have seen it in Raimondo’s nationalist terms. But it is true that politics will split people off into enemies in its acme of war, but politics is never quite the liberal ideal, just as the British Empire never was quite in the grip of the imperialist ideal.
Liberalism was not thrown out by imperialism as such. Rothbard does not look so hot on any of this sort of stuff. He looks as if he was always too much in love with sheer Romance. Nearly every step Rothbard took away from Mises, with the exception of a few, like the step he took towards anarchy, looks like a backward one. He failed to see that the jump from utilitarianism to natural rights resulted in a distinction without anything other than a mere verbal difference, as Joseph Priestley rightly said of the debates over the supposed difference between utilitarianism and natural rights in the eighteenth century. Rothbard imagined many things that never existed, like revolutions.
Rothbard was not so good on Ireland either. But then nor was Gladstone. John Bright was principle bound to regretfully leave the Liberal Party on Gladstone’s error there in 1886. Gladstone was unwittingly making civil war in Ireland far more likely. Ironically for a lifelong opponent of Catholicism [despite being a High Church man] Gladstone sought to put many Protestants, puritans as well as all sorts of Anglicans, in Ireland under Rome Rule with his Home Rule aims.
Anyway, the Rothbard quote that Justin Raimondo gives is hopelessly inept. Liberalism emerged from the Tories after 1840 but Catholic Irish nationalism was not one whit liberal, in any way. Any liberals in Ireland soon found their way to the north, if not to England, but Gladstone unwittingly backed a totalitarian nationalist cause that would show no mercy to liberty in the second largest of the British Isles, especially on freedom of religion, that arose from about 1830 onwards.
The Catholicism of the south was fresh, energetic and intolerant and it effectively formed a new second nation in Ireland, one that was far from liberal, from a population that, before 1800, had only spoken Gaelic but that, in the decades long series of “monster meetings” of Daniel O’Connell, by 1820 they mainly spoke English for the first time, to also became both actively Catholic and Irish for the first time too. The new rising nation contrasted greatly with those who had supported Napoleon and the French before 1800, whom had largely been won over to the Act of Union in 1801, and who, soon, felt utterly alienated from the new movement in the south, so much so than many of them moved north.
But it is true for Raimondo to say that liberalism began to ebb in Britain in the 1870s.
Yes, empires cost money, as do wars. Justin Raimondo gets that right. But what is he referring to by “inner rot”? My guess is that it refers to nothing at all. The rise of statist liberalism after 1870 is not usefully called “a rot”. A better analogy would be that it was like the rapid growth of a new weed. Any gardener might think that it is most ironic that young males, boys and teens, often call their rivals “weeds” when they intend to mean that they their rivals are weak. In the garden, the plants called weeds are often the strongest known to the gardener. Statist liberalism was not weak, or rotten in any way, after 1870. It replaced pristine liberalism.
As normal politics is always cold war till it gets to its acme in normal war, or open violence instead of mere coercion, we had lots of cold war long before 1945.
McCarthy certainly seems to over rate the influence of politics, judging by the citations that Justin Raimondo gives from his writings. But it is an exaggeration on the part of Justin Raimondo to imagine a slippery slope that we cannot recover from if ever the politicians conquer foreign lands and thereby create an empire. It will be very illiberal for them to do that sort of thing but, presumably, they can always grant the conquered their independence. It seems easy enough to reverse.
But nationalism is not always going to be naturally nearer to liberalism than it is to imperialism anyway. And the story from 1945 up to today has not been towards increasing liberty whenever national independence has been obtained from the British Empire. More often than not, it has resulted in a more illiberal regime than was the case even with the intrinsically illiberal Empire.
Justin Raimondo tells us that McCarthy presents an absurd paradox of power where we can only get liberty by empire, and he rightly sees that as incoherent, but there is a coherent paradox of power, in that power cannot honestly earn its own keep but instead requires taxation, or support, from some enterprise that is economic. That only has a paradoxical flavour owing to common sense still expecting power to be efficient, when the reality is, instead, that political power always economically dysfunctional or expensive. But Justin Raimondo is clearly right in seeing that imperialism itself is always going to be illiberal but so too is the state and, usually, nationalism is too.
The rise of statist neo-liberalism, from the 1880s onwards, has certainly resulted in a contraction of civil liberties in the UK today, as Justin Raimondo rightly says.
Political Correctness [PC] has turned all the old liberal memes on their head, and, with their feet in the air, so to write, they are effectively defeated [bad pun
intended]. In J.S. Mill’s day, liberal tolerance was tolerance for criticism but today PC stresses this right to our own opinion, that usually ends up putting mores against any criticism, on the idea that criticism upsets people so [according to PC] it thereby tends to be “intolerant”!
But we cannot, justly or adequately, blame the rise of PC onto imperialism, but Justin Raimondo tends to wrongly suggest by what he writes that we can.
All states are at the expense of liberty so, as the USA is about the biggest state, then Justin Raimondo is right to see it as about the biggest enemy of liberty.
But democracy will only be a friend of liberty when used in reaction or defence. If ever it goes proactive, and its idealists today usually want exactly that, then it will then crowd out liberty, for a vote is always a vote against others. If they have done nothing to us, then proactive democracy is bound to be unjust aggression against them; even if mere voting does seem to be only a very slight aggression, or coercion, rather than being like any open violence. Liberty requires less or ideally no politics at all. Liberty alone is the pristine ideal of classical liberalism if we take it to its natural extreme.
