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A Symposium: How Does Contemporary American Liberalism Differ From Socialism?
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12390 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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1 / 1987 |
10,196 Words |
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Editor
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Editor's Introduction
"What the devil do you mean by that?" was a comment made by more than one respondent about the question being asked. 'Liberalism and 'socialism,' I explained, are being left undefined so that participants may address the question without obstructive hints or suggested answers. The key terms, of course, admit of multiple meanings and various connotations. For example, Emile Durkheim, the French social theorist, considered socialism to be an "organizational principle" that provides for public ownership of the means of production in a modern industrial society. But can true socialism exist in premodern agrarian countries, contrary to what was believed by Durkheim and Karl Marx? Moreover, must socialism, to be definitionally true, work to eliminate social and political inequalities as Marx thought it would? Or are we justified in having the term 'socialist' applied to Eastern European and Third World regimes that tolerate and even nurture gross inequalities? Must socialism entail necessarily direct government ownership of the means of production? Perhaps it is appropriate to apply the same term where the state tightly controls property and resources without expropriating them outright.
'Contemporary liberalism' may seem less ambiguous, but it, too, does not evoke a single and universally shared range of associations. Is contemporary liberalism somehow continuous with an older liberal tradition? If so, in what way? Nineteenth-century liberals such as Lord Action, Sir Henry Maine, Max Weber, and Francois Guizot believed that good government protected private property and religious conscience while accepting constitutional limits on its power. They recognized an indissoluble link between liberalism and middle-class civilization.
The figures mentioned above (save for the Catholic Lord Acton) hailed the Protestant Reformation for establishing the moral culture that undergirded a free society. But does contemporary liberalism follow the older, liberal example of combining a defense of the free market with essentially Protestant middle-class morality? Some of the respondents argued that contemporary liberals have nothing substantive in common with their namesakes. True liberals defended private property, capitalism, and the traditional nuclear family; by contrast, those who claim to be their successors are mostly hostile to the older liberal concerns.
Attacks on this old liberal interpretation, however, have come from the Right and from the Left. Edward Shils makes the point that Western civilization has produced
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