David Gordon — Liberalism and "Classical Liberalism" — An Unfortunate Evolution

Backgrounder in the history of the development of liberalism. While it written from a Libertarian point of view, it is useful in understanding the historical background.

For a more thorough treatment although still a summary backgrounder, see the entry on liberalism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Where it falls short is assuming the John Locke somehow discovered the foundations of genuine liberalism, when the fundamentals emerged in ancient Greece and where treated throughout the history of Western thought and manifested differently in Britain, the Continent, and America.

Both the Gordon and Stanford Encyclopedia summaries focus on liberalism as an Anglo-American phenomenon and neither mentions either the history or Continental approach to liberalism, or the antecedents. "Laissez-faire" is, of course, a French term, and the early French writers on economics and political theory were highly influential in the development of economic and political liberalism. Gordon mentions only Frédéric Bastiat.

Gordon and Stanford Encyclopedia also ignore the German contribution to the development of liberalism is ignored, which is understandable given the scope of their summary. But it is a major omission in that many consider Kant rather than Locke to be the father of modern liberalism. Prussian philosopher and educationist Wilhelm von Humboldt, who today is not adequately recognized for his contributions to the Western intellectual tradition, was also a major influence. The Stanford Encyclopedia article on liberalism does make mention of him but only in a brief sentence about his influence on J. S. Mill and it cites Humboldt's The Limits of State Action in the bibliography.

Of course, Anarchists were the the arch-liberals in the sense of advocating for complete freedom from government intrusion in the lives of individuals. While Marx and Engels disagreed with the anarchists of the time over means, they were in agreement over the principle of freedom from state control of individuals and proposed what they concluded from their analysis to be an optimal means for means of achieving this goal. 

After witnessing the French Revolution, Marx and Engels did not simply assume that getting rid of the state through overthrowing the state would lead to utopia immediately. That would take a gradual process of development that would need an interim arrangement to manage the transition as peacefully as possible under the circumstances. They also recognized that the elites in power and their regimes would not just roll over.

Another point that is interesting is that Mises, Hayek and Rothbard all wrote books specifically on liberalism from the classical liberal point of view updated in terms of modern Libertarianism.

A work I like in the tradition of welfare liberalism is John Kenneth Galbraith's The Good Society: The Humane Agenda.

In order to really understand your position, you have to think a thing through carefully using creative and critical thinking. This is best accomplished by writing. At the end of the process, there is something to share with others that may be of value — and could even change the world.

Mises Wire
Liberalism and "Classical Liberalism" — An Unfortunate Evolution

David Gordon |  Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review

Dirk Ehnts — J. S. Mill (1848) on tax-driven money

Via Matt Forstater (link), I have found some paragraphs by J. S. Mill on tax-driven money (see below). It is quite amazing that this knowledge got lost in the 21st century, with all that technology available.

econoblog 101
J. S. Mill (1848) on tax-driven money
Dirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin

tom Hickey — some reflections on liberalism and left and right libertarianism

Liberalism and left and right libertarianism

Classical liberalism can be viewed through the lens of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Utilitarianism.

Mill saw liberalism as the struggle against authoritarianism and dogmatism. Liberalism can be seen as the culmination of the struggle against authority, then the remnants of the dominance of religious hierarchies and dogmas and of feudalism as social and political hierarchies that established privilege. Authority was seen as curtailing liberty.

Mill’s classical statement of liberalism is this:

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right...The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Introductory 

The basis for valuation in this conception of liberalism is utilitarianism, a category of consequentialist ethics, characterized by Epicurus and Jeremy Bentham, in contrast to deontological and virtue ethics, characterized by Kant and Aristotle respectively.

Mill described utilitarianism as follows:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded—namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. — John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 2

This is a paradigm, and it would be illiberal to regard it as dogmatic. This paradigm has provided the platform for subsequent debate about social, political and economic liberalism.

Liberalism in the strict senses emphasizes individual liberty against hierarchically imposed authority, as is found in states organized on the military model, and collectivism, such as the tyranny of the majority over minorities and individuals, such as occurs in representative democracies. In fact, in representative democracies, minority positions can be imposed on majorities by representatives elected by the majority.

Libertarianism addresses these issues from different points of view across a political spectrum ranging from individual sovereignty and global privatization and to the commons and community based on consensus.

Consequently, libertarians of both left and right are opposed to tradition organization of states and governments, since historically they have arisen a context of authoritarianism and perpetuate authoritarianism. 

Libertarians are "anarchists" in the sense of opposing involuntary imposition of authority that curtails individual liberty.

Libertarians of the right appeal to natural spontaneous order arising from individual liberty exercised within the bounds of security of person and property. Libertarians of the right hold that the only basic rights are the right to security of person and property.

Libertarians of the left emphasize consensus in governance and universal human and civil rights under the rule of law in accordance with self-determination and equality of persons.

Libertarians of the left hold that liberty grows out of the commons and therefore the commons must be recovered from enclosure. As a result, they view a constellation of rights as necessary to protect individuals and minorities.

Different positions have been staked out along this range, the extremes of which are utopian and unlikely to be realized on a mass scale. Moreover, left and right converge toward the center, so there are center-left and center-right libertarians. 

The New Left of the Sixties was an attempt to create a coalition of left and right libertarians, for example. Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess were involved but nothing came of it beyond agreement on the anti-war issue. See Murray Rothbard, The New Left Was Great (Before It Collapsed).

Miles Kimball — The Complexity of Liberty: How Equality Enters into a Good Definition of Liberty

Having blogged through to the end of On Liberty, I know that what John Stuart Mill claims in the 9th paragraph of the “Introductory” to On Liberty is simple is anything but simple…

Liberalism deals with harmonizing freedom, egality, and community, another one of those pesky trifectas.

Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal
The Complexity of Liberty: How Equality Enters into a Good Definition of Liberty
Miles Kimball | Professor of Economics and Survey Research at the University of Michigan

Miles Kimball — "Aristotle saw people not as striving to maximize a state of satisfaction, and also not as striving..."

Aristotle saw people not as striving to maximize a state of satisfaction, and also not as striving to perform a list of duties. He saw them, instead, as striving to achieve a life that included all the activities to which, on reflection, they decided to attach intrinsic value.

— Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, pages 119-120

Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal
"Aristotle saw people not as striving to maximize a state of satisfaction, and also not as striving..."
Miles Kimball | Professor of Economics and Survey Research at the University of Michigan

Sandwichman — For the Abolition of the Wages System!

Some more history of political economy.

Econospeak
For the Abolition of the Wages System!
Sandwichman

Edward Martin And Mateo Pimentel — The Inadequacies of Liberalism: The Centrality of Socio-Economic rights for Marxism and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition

Weekend reading.

Counterpunch
The Inadequacies of Liberalism – The Centrality of Socio-Economic rights for Marxism and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition
Edward Martin And Mateo Pimentel

Edward Martin is Professor of Public Policy and Administration, Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Long Beach, and co-author of Savage State: Welfare Capitalism and Inequality.

Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border. You can follow him on Twitter @mateo_pimentel, or read more at www.guerrillaprose.info.

Miles Kimball — John Stuart Mill: Two Maxims for Liberty

Pretty much sums up the social and political kerfuffles taking place in the US today over when and where the individual and social intersect. Different factions draw the lines differently. This is the case not only with social and political liberalism but also economic liberalism.

Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal
John Stuart Mill: Two Maxims for Liberty
Miles Kimball | Professor of Economics and Survey Research at the University of Michigan

Christina McRorie — The Emptiness of Modern Economics: Why the Dismal Science Needs a Richer Moral Anthropology

It’s tempting to conclude that Piketty understands and delivers what the public wants from economics: a return to classical political economy. More than a few reviews of his work make this exact claim; he’s been hailed as the Smith, Mill, or Marx the twenty-first century has been waiting for. 

If only it were true. Or, to be fair, completely true. Piketty’s work is certainly a welcome step in the right direction, but it doesn’t make him the new Adam Smith. Empirical attention to the sweep of history was not the only thing that enabled the grand theorists of classical political economy to make sense of market life for their readers. The other half of what made political economy—the forerunner of economics—so compelling was its ability to take on “big questions” by connecting economic matters with moral and philosophical concerns, often by way of what might be called moral anthropology. 

For those longing for a revival of political economy in the tradition of Smith, even Piketty’s remarkable turn to richer data doesn’t fully satisfy their hunger for a fully worked out exploration of the connection between economics and larger philosophical and moral questions. These questions are about more than mere markets and politics; they pertain directly to the moral dimensions of economic life.

Because early economists such as Smith (1723–90) were also moral philosophers, they took up such questions naturally. They assumed that theories of justice and normative reflections on society were inseparable from their theories about pricing, the distribution of resources, and national wealth. They assumed that their field could advance only if all such concerns were part of a seamless whole. 

This may seem a surprising history for a discipline that has long been known as the “dismal science,” on the grounds that its business is to make gloomy statistical predictions backed with the authority of science. The little-known origin of the phrase, however, had to do precisely with philosophical arguments over anthropology, and nothing at all to do with statistics. Nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle used the term in a pro-slavery essay to attack the profession of political economists such as John Stuart Mill, who supported slave emancipation on the basis of their egalitarian beliefs about human nature.2 It’s a mark of how much economics has changed that—rather than serving as a badge of honor—the title now generally conveys a sarcastic commentary on the discipline’s total lack of philosophical, or humanistic, aspirations.…

Are humans intrinsically self-interested or selfish? And if so, does this nature participate in some larger order—either spontaneous or divinely planned—in which self-interest invariably redounds to public benefit? Can we be described, without remainder, as rational utility-maximizing actors? Or does this characterization fail to capture, in some real manner, the complicated way in which our selves are morally constructed, and the complicated ways in which our behavior develops? And, inching toward more modern issues, is it really the case that interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible to make, and fruitless besides?

We can’t push these questions aside. Nor should we. They float around, behind, and beneath most of our conversations about market orders, wealth inequality, and the future of capitalism. And this is so precisely because the discipline of economics cannot avoid being about human nature and human behavior. As much as a century after Adam Smith, economists still took this for granted. In 1890, economist-philosopher Alfred Marshall opened his famous textbook,Principles of Economics, with the claim that
Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing. Thus it is on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part of the study of man.26 

The fact that economics today has largely set aside the big questions proper to this study—both empirical and normative—has left it with a gaping hole of meaning at its center. Piketty’s remarkable work begins to fill the void by returning attention to big-picture questions about real peoples’ lives. But even Capital in the Twenty-First Century fails to restore fully the humane breadth of the earliest discussions of political economy. Surely, such breadth is called for as we try to talk together about the common good and the future of our economic arrangements.

Nice article by an ethician that is familiar with the literature of economics as it relates to the big picture and the big issues that conventional economics assumes away and the world suffers for it. While economists bears some of the blame, it is a result of the compartmentalism of knowledge that has taken place since liberal education as education for life was replaced by practical education as preparation for a career in a field. Definitely worth a read.

The Hedgehog Review | VOL. 16 NO. 3 (FALL 2014)
The Emptiness of Modern Economics: Why the Dismal Science Needs a Richer Moral Anthropology
Christina McRorie

ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Christina McRorie is a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on ethical issues raised by the global economy and consumer society.

Nigel Warburton — Talk With Me

...Conversation without critical judgment becomes mere chatter and airing of different opinions — as William Empson wrote in his poem ‘Let It Go’ (1949):

"The contradictions cover such a range.The talk would talk and go so far aslant.You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there."

However, it was John Stuart Mill who crystallised the importance of having your ideas challenged through engagement with others who disagree with you. In the second chapter of On Liberty (1859), he argued for the immense value of dissenting voices. It is the dissenters who force us to think, who challenge received opinion, who nudge us away from dead dogma to beliefs that have survived critical challenge, the best that we can hope for. Dissenters are of great value even when they are largely or even totally mistaken in their beliefs. As he put it: ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.’

Whenever philosophical education lapses into learning facts about history and texts, regurgitating an instructor’s views, or learning from a textbook, it moves away from its Socratic roots in conversation. Then it becomes so much the worse for philosophy and for the students on the receiving end of what the radical educationalist Paolo Freire referred to pejoratively in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) as the ‘banking’ of knowledge. The point of philosophy is not to have a range of facts at your disposal, though that might be useful, nor to become a walking Wikipedia or ambulant data bank: rather, it is to develop the skills and sensitivity to be able to argue about some of the most significant questions we can ask ourselves, questions about reality and appearance, life and death, god and society. As Plato’s Socrates tells us, ‘These are not trivial questions we are discussing here, we are discussing how to live.’

Aeon
Talk with me
Nigel Warburton

Tim Johnson — Lady Credit

Economics is can be seen as being primarily concerned with managing resources when faced with scarcity; the maximisation of expected utility. An alternative view is that aspects of economics, particularly finance, are concerned with managing resources when faced with uncertainty. This distinction is not new, Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, argued that the suffering of mankind is not because they were expelled from the Garden of Eden into a world of scarcity but because they were expelled into a world of uncertainty. In the Garden of Eden humans had perfect knowledge, which was lost with the Fall, and it is the loss of this knowledge which is at the root of suffering: If we know what will happen we can manage scarcity

Magic, Maths, and Money
Lady Credit
Tim Johnson | Academic Fellow, Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics and the Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University

(h/t geerussell via email)

This post is really about the philosophy of economics set forth in terms of the history of economic thinking. Really insightful and lots of good info. It's not perfect, but very good. You will want to read this one.Yes, MMT and Chartalism make an appearance.