The Beginnings:
- As countries such as the USA and UK began to industrialise, individuals had a growing sense of class consciousness and as a result, concepts like democracy and socialism began to grow in interest.
- Liberalism needed to strike back to remain relevant, 4 thinkers provide an interest into how different these differences are.
Jeremy
Bentham’s Ideas’ (1748-1832):
- Writing at a period when England had industrialised, Utilitarianism: Society should help as many of possible including the working class.
- Developed a scientific alternative to the natural rights theory based on the idea that each individual would seek to maximise their own ‘utility’ by maximising personal pleasure and minimising personal pain.
- This would cause more clashes between individuals than early classical liberals would have thought.
- The liberal state would have to be more proactive. ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’ to inform legislation and government policy.
- He found ‘democracy’ and thought that governments were more likely to follow ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ if they were elected and accountable to ‘the greatest number of voters’. Laws should be passed in order to ensure that people were happy of the most amount of people.
Samuel
Smiles’ Ideas (1812-1904):
- Individualism was being threatened by socialism as it was related to liberalism whereby they wanted more state provision.
- Industrialised societies made it harder for individuals to be self-reliant as many people were unemployed.
- To overcome this, individuals should be challenged more rigorously.
- If “self-help were usurped by state help, human beings would remain stunted, their talents unknown and their liberty squandered’
Herbert
Spencer (1820-1903):
- A contemporary of Smiles, he acknowledge the importance of self-help and wanted more state intervention like Smiles.
- He argued against the challenge that humans could rise to the challenge. Noting that some humans were still “feebly failing”. These failing people need more state intervention.
- Instead he agreed with natural selection and though that the “survival of the fittest” stemmed from minimal state intervention and negative freedom.
- It would later lead to the gradual elimination of those unable to enjoy the benefits of individualism. The eventual outcome would be a society where rational self-reliance was the norm and where individual freedom could thrive.
Key
Thinker 3: John Stuart Mills (1803-1873):
- JSM was important as it took place at a time (mid-19th century) when many liberals were struggling to work out how liberalism could harness trends towards universal suffrage – “tyranny of the majority”.
- Updated representative government into representative democracy. People would not make policy decisions but rather elected liberally minded representatives to make decisions for them. You should have the view of different people and then work with the majority of the view.
- People would later create “direct democracy” which he claimed was a much more conductive to the “tyranny of the majority”
- He thought voters would be ill-equipped to vote for people so universal education should go along with universal suffrage.
- He promoted Development Individualism: An idea that individuals could become what they want rather than what they had become.
- Those with no education should get no vote whilst those who were university education get one more vote.
- After universal education had been reached, he thought that political education was the next step where people could form their own political opinions instead of having some enforced on them.
- He remained vague in what he meant, he did not mention if he agreed with a minimal state. The successors (modern liberals) were prepared to answer this with more clarity and boldness – not just in education.
- He argued for negative freedom where freedom mainly involved an absence of restraint. It was connected to the harm principle – a notion that a individual’s actions should always be tolerated either by the state or other individuals
- Divided human actions into self-regarding and other regarding. It does not impinge the freedom of others in society and should therefore be tolerated and not in a liberal state. This was seen as bad but Mills argued that this is what he wanted as new and better ideas would emerge.
- He saw liberty as a ‘natural right’ and he thought human nature was not the finished article.
- He did not want to just liberate individuals as they were present, he created individualism which later became developed individualism. It was better to be a “pig satisfied”.