I am interested in how you all view radical liberalism as well as your personal relation to it. For me, I am still working on a proper definition for it. However, this way of thinking has been deeply illuminating to me, since I believe it speaks to our times. We must be equipped to have a compelling answer to modern authoritarianism and I believe radical liberalism is most equipped to handle that. At a time when conservatives have rebooted authoritarianism and many libertarians have failed to meet the moment, I believe that the radical liberals have answered the fundamental questions of our time in a way that is directly applicable to the moment.
Anyway, how do YOU view radical liberalism? And what does it mean to you?
I tend to use it broadly to mean roughly “libertarian in the public policy realm, but with a heavy emphasis on viewing policy as downstream of a cosmopolitan and inclusive ethics that views robust social liberalism as having great weight, and so is rather skeptical of social conservatism.”
I would tend to agree with that. I think the ethics of inclusivity are missing from many modern conceptions of libertarianism. You have those who supposedly endorse “thin libertarianism” who have tended actually to just adopt a right-leaning, often paleo-conservative view of the world. In many ways, it’s a lot worse than the Reagan-era “fusionism,” which was far milder. I mean, just the other day we heard Dave Smith in a debate essentially borrowing from Hans Herman Hoppe and * winning * an Oxford-style debate in front of a supposedly libertarian audience!
I agree 100% that true liberty requires the ethics of inclusion, cosmopolitanism, and social liberalism applied to the fullest extent. And I will take this a step further. We * should * make common cause with figures like AOC who are standing up to ICE and actually want to abolish the Department of Homeland Security, not just abuse it against their perceived enemies.
This is simplified, but I think don’t tread on anyone is a good one statement to capture the sentiment of radical liberty. It goes beyond the selfish don’t tread on me that conservatives like to use. And can be inclusive and apply in both government, economic, and social areas. Obviously it requires much fleshing out beyond it. But if someone asks me for a basic perspective on my politics, I like to bring that out.
It’s a good baseline perspective (even if I think ideally we should go further than it takes us). Where the objection comes in, or at least the way someone can profess belief in “don’t tread on me” and mean it while also holding illiberal political views, is in what counts as “treading.”
What I find is that a lot of people genuinely feel that they are tread upon within either a sufficient number of people around them (or who they are aware of) are behaving in ways different from their own preferences, or when there aren’t enough people around them who share their preferences for them to feel like society itself reflects their values. In both cases, activities that aren’t remotely treading come to feel like treading, and so can, in these people’s minds, be rightly restricted, banned, pushed back against, or disincentivized.
I think “a good baseline” is exactly what I was trying to say about the don’t tread on anyone sentiment. I used to be very conservative and loved the don’t tread on me slogan before I saw how it was actually used as a hammer to bludgeon other people who don’t share the same lifestyle or values. I also agree that we can go further. “Don’t tread on anyone” just became a go to baseline in arguing for a society where everyone is treated with equal dignity, while living the kind of life that they feel is best for themselves.
Hello. I presume all of you other than me are based in the USA? I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the North American concept of “Liberalism” as something pejoratively used for “lefties” more like our UK’s “Labour Party” position.
That’s not to say there isn’t enough confusion this side of the pond, since as a 25 year member of the “Liberal Democrats” in the UK I have seen how they have become ever more statist over the years.
Not that I remember it personally of course but the critical juncture appears to have been around the end of the nineteenth century with the work of the “New Liberals” like Hobhouse and TH Green in the UK, starting to advocate that only a Leviathan state could redress some of these injustices and achieve “positive liberty” for the masses.
So for me, “radical liberalism” comes from the era before them, and is what I adhere to as the truest liberalism. JS Mill, Thomas Hodgskin, Richard Cobden, John Bright and Thorold Rogers, even Herbert Spencer and before them back to Adam Smith and such like. It feels to me that all these thinkers were people who recognised the primacy of personal liberty, but who also recognised the problems of great poverty as part of industrial advancement and how the “robber barons” were able to capture a greater share of that new wealth.
So they sought market mechanisms - co-operatives, land trusts, radically freed markets - as ways to create what we might call mutual self-help mechanisms for addressing those social ills.
I feel that the “New Liberals” which essentially captured most of the UK Liberal Party from 1900 onwards were reacting to the rise of the statist socialist left and lacked the confidence in their own convictions that freedom would solve the problems and that instead a state apparatus was needed to forcibly rebalance the excesses of the market.
Anyway, the long and short of it is that for me “Radical Liberalism” is essentially that period of liberalism that without irony some of your reactionary conservative “libertarians” like to call “Classical Liberalism” without really understanding what that entailed. From the period when Herbert Spencer called the Liberals the “regime of contract”, and advocates of small government and the Conservatives the “regime of status”, the advocates of paternalistic and warfare/welfare big state, protectionism and interference in markets.
Yes, I think the majority of us are Americans. But I use “liberal” in the way it’s talked about in American philosophy departs, which still maps closer to the older way than as a simple synonym for “progressive.”
Your post gets at my great frustration with my lefty friends, which is failing to recognize how free markets (or “freed markets”) aren’t the enemy, but in fact one of the most powerful tools for achieving the kind of world and the kind of values they aim at. And how opposing markets means empowering the very forces that are most often used to reinforce the very hierarchies they seek to dissolve.
That raises something that annoys me too about the very language of left and right. A Libertarian friend pointed this out to me and it makes sense:
The 19th century liberals were the left. Based on support for a smaller state. Not being “church and king”. Support for religious minorities. At the fringes other marginal ideas like William Godwin’s free love. For free trade over protection. For markets over intervention. And purely based on the seating in the Assembly National in revolutionary France.
The 19th century Tories were the right. For all the opposite reasons.
Then along comes the Labour movement, which wants to use a similarly large state to achieve their aims. But could not be seen as being on the same side of the aisle as the Tories, so successfully adopted the idea that they were the “left”. And when you think about it, in Spencer’s terms, the statist left and the statist right are just as much equally the “regime of status” rather than the regime of (free) contract, the Liberals.
So I’m quite sanguine, maybe not sanguine but enthusiastic, about saying that true liberalism is the left and big statism, whether labelled “progressive” or “conservative” are really both of the right. And that’s the beauty of freedom loving liberals: that we can achieve everything we need to achieve to create a just society, by voluntarism and cooperation, without the inclination toward overbearing coercive government of left-statists or right-statists.
“Radical liberal” has a ton of (sometimes mutually exclusive) connotations depending on the context of the discussion, but around these parts (Aaron’s Podcast Universe) I think it’s basically a way of talking about libertarianism in a way that emphasizes its 1) historical connection to liberalism more broadly (and all the cosmopolitan, universalist values that entails) and 2) tendency to take those earlier liberal values in a more radical direction (not “radical” in the sense of “extreme” but in the sense of its original meaning of taking an idea to its roots). Many of the “radical liberals” I know are anarchists, specifically “left-market anarchists” who take issue with historical libertarianism’s complacency regarding what could be considered illiberal power hierarchies such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism (the latter being distinguished from freed markets by its systemic privileges for capital and capital-owners).
