On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (Vintage) by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Author:Gertrude Himmelfarb [Himmelfarb, Gertrude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

One of the paradoxes of contemporary liberalism is that it has become increasingly libertarian in moral affairs and at the same time increasingly dirigiste in economic affairs. In the moral realm, the individual is as close to being “sovereign”—or, we would now say, “autonomous”—as Mill could have desired. In the economic realm, however, the state exercises a degree of control at least the equal of the “social tyranny” that he so feared.

It is common to remark upon the great difference between nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism and twentieth-century social-welfare liberalism. The difference can be exaggerated: laissez-faireism was never as rigorous or systematic as was once thought; and the social-welfare state, with the demise of communism and the discrediting of socialism, is now on the defensive if not in retreat. But with all due qualifications, the distinction between the two modes of liberalism is real and significant. No less real and significant is the disjunction within contemporary liberalism between the moral and the economic realms.

Here, too, the problem may be seen in embryo in On Liberty, although Mill made a determined, if not entirely persuasive, effort to minimize it. “Trade is a social act,” he pronounced, therefore in principle falling within the province of society.42 Restraints on trade are “evil” insofar as they are restraints, but they are “wrong” only if they do not produce the desired results. Thus the government, Mill finds, can properly intervene to prevent the adulteration of products or assure the health and safety of workers in dangerous industries. But other restraints, such as temperance laws or restrictions on the sale of poisons, are a violation of liberty because they infringe on the liberty of the buyer rather than the producer.

The logical difficulties here are obvious. Why is it a violation of the principle of liberty to restrain the buyer but not the producer? Why should the sale of adulterated food be prohibited but not the sale of poison? If poisons require only proper labeling and a registry of sale but not medical prescription, why are these conditions not sufficient for adulterated products? Whatever the inconsistencies in Mill’s argument, however, his purpose is clear: to limit the role of government, on grounds of expediency as well as liberty. His guiding rules for such limitations are equally clear. The government should not intervene “when the thing to be done is likely to be better done by individuals than by the government”; when individuals may not do it as well but “it is nevertheless desirable that it be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education”; and when government intervention would contribute to “the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.” These conditions, Mill specifies, militate against government control of roads, railways, banks, large companies, universities, and the like, even if that would make for greater efficiency. Indeed, the evil would be all the greater the more efficient the government might be, for if the government were to exercise such control, no

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