Calling a Giraffe Fido won't make him a Dog

Jim Peron is author of nine books and a freelance writer for numerous newspapers and magazines around the world. He is also the owner of Aristotle's Books in Auckland.

Pity the poor liberal. And I mean the real liberal. Not the modern watered-down socialist who calls himself a liberal but a real, honest, classical liberal. There is so much confusion over the term and real liberals have allowed fake liberals to get away with this subtle destruction of the language. Recently I was reading two different books from two very different perspectives. One was J. Salwyn Schapiro's Liberalism: Its Meaning and History and the other was The Suicide of the West by the conservative writer James Burnham.

Now I would assume that both these men are highly intelligent and that they wouldn't allow this purposeful distortion of the meaning of liberal to continue. At least I expected they would acknowledge how the term has been distorted and then explain what liberalism actually stands for. But they don't. In fact both of them supported this destruction of meaning.

Schapiro explains what liberalism stands for but then turns around and includes in his litany of liberals some prominent antiliberals. Schapiro, after listing the libertarian principles of liberalism, speaks of the evolution of liberalism into something entirely different. His readings on liberalism include works by Hegel, Bismark and Franklin Roosevelt. Schapiro seems to assume that simply using the nomenclature of "liberal" is enough to make one a liberal. If a farmer had a herd of goats and named them Fido, Spot and the like these goats wouldn't suddenly become dogs. Yet Schapiro includes anti-liberals as liberals because these opponents of liberalism in practice used the name to disguise their illiberal programs.

Burnham is even worse. His book is supposed to be a classic of conservative thinking. If this is true then I had no idea how bad conservative thinking had become. Burnham argues that we can't know what liberalism is until we know who is liberal. And he doesn't mean who originated liberal thinking and what principles they held. He meant who was called a liberal at the time he wrote his book. Behold his logic:

The plain common sense fact is that everybody knows Eleanor Roosevelt was a liberal, just as everybody knows that Fido, who runs around the yard next door, is a dog. We all know that Mrs. Roosevelt was a liberal even if we have no idea what liberalism is. Whatever liberalism is, she was it. That's something we can start with.

Now in this case neither Fido or Eleanor were the first in their class. The category "dog"and "liberal" existed before either of them. And this category had a specific definition by which both Fido and Eleanor could be judged. Now let us assume that Fido had long skinny legs, and a very long neck which was used so he could eat leaves from the top of trees. If I told you he was yellow and brown and spotted you might point out that I'm not describing a dog at all but a giraffe. And calling that giraffe Fido won't change a thing.

Burnham had things backwards and he called that common sense. Fido is a dog because everyone knows he's a dog and not because he meets some objective criteria. And the very illiberal Eleanor Roosevelt was a liberal simply because everyone knew it. Burnham then listed an honour roll of illiberal liberals to support his Roosevelt thesis. This is followed by his announcing that there is no clear cut principles on which to pin the term liberal. Thus it is a fluid term but he, of course, has another common sense way to decide who is or is not liberal.

Burnham lists 39 statements and he says that liberals will agree with "every one, or very nearly every one, of these thirty-nine sentences."And a good conservative will disagree with nearly every one of them. Of course Burnham's list takes no recognition of the many true liberals who would probably end up agreeing or disagreeing with about half of the sentences he lists. Earlier in his book he says that a good non-liberal professor was Milton Friedman. To judge Mr. Burnham's test for accuracy I answered the questions from Friedman's view as best as I understand it. A few of Burnham's common sense statements are a bit confusing and hard to answer. But I calculate that Friedman would agree with about 15 of the statements listed. Yet as a non liberal he was supposed to disagree with the overwhelming majority. There's something clearly wrong with Burnham's thinking.

Burnham, for instance, has several statements listed which say that a liberal is someone who supports freedom of speech while a conservative would oppose such freedom. Burnham's conservatives would oppose the following:

• freedom of opinion and expression;
• freedom of thought and conscience;
• equality of political rights without distinctions such as sex, race, color, birth, status, social origin, etc;
• respecting the religious beliefs of others And Burnham had good conservatives supporting the following;
• racial segregation and discrimination;
• political, economic or social discrimination base on religious belief;
• using "methods of torture and physical terror"during war;
• colonialism and imperialism;
• stripping communists of the right to express their opinion;
• congressional investigating committees; and
• Joseph McCarthy.

This list exposes the seeming ignorance on Burnham's part of the tradition of classical liberalism. Now Friedman has publicly said he is a true liberal even while Burnham says he isn't. Burnham could not explain the fact that many people support free speech and oppose colonialism while also opposing mandatory unionism, socialized medicine and equal pay laws. This distinction is one which, while blatantly obvious, seems too subtle for the common sense approach of this conservative thinker.

Mr. Burnham lamented that no books existed which explained what liberalism stood for "save for that one modest and rather superficial little volume by Professor Schapiro, whose name is not elevated enough to count very much on those loftier planes where our opinions are made and remade".Two centuries of liberal writing are ignored so that Mr. Burnham could prove his point. But even with the faults previously mentioned Prof. Schapiro's book gives some excellent explanations concerning liberal principles. Here are some of the basic points of liberalism according to Schapiro:

What has characterized liberalism at all times is its unshaken belief in the necessity of freedom to achieve every desirable aim. A deep concern for the freedom of the individual inspired its opposition to absolute authority, be it that of the state, of the church, or of a political party.

[...]

Liberalism has proclaimed the principle of equality for all human beings everywhere. It must be borne in mid, however, that equality does not mean that all have equal ability, or equal moral perception, or equal personal attraction. What it means is that all have equal rights before the law, and that all are entitled to civil liberty.

[...]

In the liberal view the chief end of government is to uphold liberty, equality and security of all citizens.

Schapiro says that government must respect the rule of law, that all power rests on the consent of the governed and that "liberalism has placed highly important limitations on the power of government".

Of all civil liberties, the most prized has been liberty of thought and expression.

The stress placed by liberalism on intellectual freedom derives from the conviction that man is essentially a rational creature -- not indeed that he is always reasonable, but that he has the faculty of being so.

Since liberalism was fundamentally rationalist it viewed religion from a secular perspective advocating freedom of religion but the separation of church and state.

Liberalism because of its secular perspective "adopted a dynamic view of life, envisaging progress for mankind".

These ideas can, of course, be found the writings of such great liberals as Thomas Jefferson, Frederic Bastiat, Richard Cobden, Adam Smith, John Locke, Herbert Spencer and others. Since it is clear that Burnham has read Schapiro it would seem that he should be able to define a liberal fairly accurately even if he had stopped reading after 13 pages. Now with the above in mind one can easily refute the commons sense views of Burnham. Eleanor Roosevelt did not hold to equality before the law but to equality of results. She did not advocate a limited government which had as its prime function the defense of liberty. And just because you've named your pet giraffe Fido that doesn't make it a dog.

Now let us turn to the book The Liberal Tradition edited by Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock. Here we see that the confusion of adding anti-liberals into the liberal camp is carried on. While Bullock and Shock include Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Bright, and Richard Cobden they also include Hobhouse, Keynes and Beveridge. These academics, instead of recognizing that they are including the enemies of liberalism in the liberal tradition, announce that "the most striking thing about the Liberal tradition is its intellectual incoherence".Elsewhere they speak of the "inconsistencies"of liberalism. In fact what this implies is that liberalism has no beliefs and all beliefs. It is liberty and statism, laissez faire and socialism. It is A and non-A. They too are buying into the idea that naming a giraffe Fido makes its a dog.

Keynes argued that "there is now no place" for the ideas of "old fashioned individualism and laissez-faire" in spite of liberalism's great contributions to the 19th century and its successes. He saw it necessary "to invent new wisdom for a new age". But why invent a "new wisdom" and then use the old name of liberalism to describe it?

The reasons are not particularly complex. The classical liberals proposed laissez-faire and this lead to prosperity. The economics of 19th century liberalism brought about a major increase in the standard of living of all people. Thus real liberalism produced the results which socialists dreamed their system would provide. At the same time socialism was still in its infancy and just a theory. It's failure to produce was not yet demonstrated. It was argued that liberals and socialists wanted the same results but differed as to the means for achieving them.

This is only partially true. Many socialists wanted prosperity and thought socialism would lead to such results faster than classical liberalism. But at the same time many socialists saw their ideology as a means of grabbing power for themselves and it was the power, not the promised prosperity, which attracted them. Even the true utopians among socialists failed to see that authoritarian results would be the inevitable consequence of their methods.

Thus it was falsely believed by these socialists that they shared liberal goals. They also knew that liberalism had a good reputation with the working classes -- the very audience which they were targeting. The idea was to adopt the name liberal to describe socialism. Socialism, as socialism, was harder to sell. But by taking a name they did not deserve they felt they could make political gains on the backs of classical liberalism. And they did.

In the United States, where liberalism most clearly reversed its meaning, in common parlance, it was the socialist John Dewey who openly promoted the idea of stealing the liberal label. Dewey, in his book Individualism Old and New argued that liberal individualism had in fact disappeared and been replaced by state capitalism and that collectivism already existed in America. But he noted the collectivism of that day was a "collectivism of profit" and not a "collectivism of planning". He said the only way liberalism could return to its true meaning was to adopt socialism as the means by which liberal goals would be achieved. As he put it central economic planning was "the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims".

Peter Witonski, in his essay The Historical Roots of American Planning said: "Dewey was the first to argue that the world "liberal" -- which once stood for liberal, free-market capitalism -- could better serve the needs of social democracy in America than the world "socialism". The liberalism of Adam Smith was out-of-date Dewey argued. In his book Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey suggested that the goals of a free society could best be obtained "only be a reversal of the means to which early liberalism was committed". But the means of liberalism were fundamentally connected to the basic premises of liberalism. A reversal of means, while keeping similar goals in mind, also changed the premises of liberalism. The "new wisdom" of Keynes with the "reversal of means" of Dewey really meant stealing the name of liberalism and applying it to another very different species. The famed economist Joseph Schumpeter noted that "the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label".

Today a great deal of confusion reigns because socialists decided to deceptively call their own ideology liberal. And, to a very large degree, the academics who wrote the recent texts on liberalism were socialists. Hence they were quite willing to pretend that socialism was a modern form of classical liberalism. But in some places old labels didn't shift as readily. There the word liberal describes individuals supporting free markets, private property, profit management and limited governments. In other parts of the world so-called "liberals" support socialism, state ownership, bureaucratic management and statism.

But, just as I believe that calling a giraffe Fido won't make him a dog, I believe that calling a statist by any other name will make him a liberal. The true tradition of liberalism needs to be reclaimed. The psuedo-liberals, with their discredited beliefs, should be left to cling to the shameful, but more accurate, label of socialism.