The Endangered West by John Higley

Author:John Higley [Higley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781412864152
Google: TGHEjwEACAAJ
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2016-01-15T03:28:02+00:00

Ideological Illusion: Democracy

As formulated by John Locke and rounded out by Adam Smith, liberalism combined in various ways with earlier political ideas to underpin a range of political positions during the nineteenth century. In European countries where elites were united or becoming partially united, conservative parties accepted much of the original liberal position while giving it various traditional, usually religious, colorings. Their conservatism was a quite indistinct blend of residual feudal and religious ideas about the necessities for, and the responsibilities of, social privilege and rank. Associated with the aristocratic classes, conservatism failed, except in Britain, to attract much popular support if it was not wedded to political Catholicism. In the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, there was never any basis of indigenous political thought other than the liberalism of Locke.11

A sort of “left” liberalism also evolved in countries with united or partially united elites. Most clearly articulated in the writings of John Stuart Mill, this strand of liberalism was distinguished by a strong insistence on universal suffrage and other egalitarian reforms aimed at restraining the power of great wealth. Its main message was “democracy,” which was portrayed as the basic principle of political legitimacy, although general agreement on this was not reached until about the time of World War I. During most of the nineteenth century, nonetheless, democracy was the spreading ideology in countries where elites were united or partially united. Movement towards some form of universal suffrage was assumed to be inevitable and probably desirable, even among elite factions who for various reasons sought to slow it.

In countries where elites were disunited, however, liberalism constituted a doctrine that reflected the nineteenth century’s new capitalistic conditions. It was reasoned that if the market could be counted upon to regulate production and distribution in the public interest, as Adam Smith and other capitalist economists taught, then wealth in general should be free from political regulation. This strict laissez-faire position was embraced by members of aristocratic classes who remained socially distinct from members of bourgeois classes, but whose economic interests were no longer distinct from bourgeois interests in the aftermath of the legal reforms associated with the French Revolution. Consequently, except for the English-speaking, Scandinavian, and the now integrated Netherlands, “Liberal” came to be a label for conservative parties obviously representing and defending wealthy interests.

While liberalism was strongly associated with democracy in the countries with united or partially united elites, in those with disunited elites liberalism’s democratic thrust became amalgamated with severe criticisms of the prevailing capitalist economic system and of the aristocratic and bourgeois classes that most benefited from it. Thus socialism, which did not assume major importance until the twentieth century, attacked private property in the means of production while professing democracy and political freedom more or less as a matter of course. Nineteenth-century socialists tended to assume that only those who wanted a thorough overthrow of capitalism could be genuinely democratic.

However, whether it was conceived of as a central goal in itself or as a goal

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.