1. Why does popular sovereignty threaten individual freedom and moral community? How have democrats tried to solve this problem? Why has democracy today acquired more positive connotations than in antiquity?
2. Demo-kratos literally means the power of people;
3. Aristotle feared that the poor would put their interests as a class above the common interests of citizens; he placed democracy among the bad regimes;
4. Aristotle: only in a political community do people realize their full potential as human beings;
5. Idiotes: private persons, people without voting rights;
6. Was Socrates’ execution non-democratic according to the Athenians’ concept of democracy?
7. Aristotle’s liberality: moral control of wealth, courtesy, moderation, prudence, reason―what today is called civility;
8. The origins of liberalism and capitalism are closely connected; the two concepts are best understood together;
9. Kramnick: the simultaneous publication in 1776 of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is not merely an historical coincidence; it also reflects a convergence of political and economic philosophy;
10. The relationship of liberalism to democracy is more tenuous; despite their rhetoric of rights, most early liberals were far from democratic;
11. Liberalism became democratic only when the people repeatedly demanded it;
12. Joseph Schumpeter’s redefinition of democracy in the terms of modern liberalism: it is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of competitive struggle for the people’s vote;
13. Yet, in a liberal democracy, liberalism remains the dominant partner.
Liberal Individualism and Natural Rights
1. The Lockean concepts: state of nature; natural rights; the social contract; limited government; legitimate revolution;
2. Locke argues that freedom and equality are the natural conditions of humanity; in the state of nature, individuals can act as they choose, since no one has the power to rule over anyone else; the only restraint on natural man is the law of nature, which tells him not to harm himself or other people; when violations of this law occur, everyone is personally authorized to judge and to punish the offender;
3. Many conflicts frequently occur in the state of nature because many people ignore or mistake natural law;
4. Individuals have a natural right to life, liberty, and property; the latter is a predominant right; some people own simply their labor;
5. The law of nature places moral limits on the right to acquire property; yet the introduction of money breaks those limits;
6. Lockean liberalism is not fully democratic, even in the modern sense of representative government: the “industrious” and “rational” explicitly agree to unite in society and to form a government; the rest of the people tacitly consent to their government simply by remaining within its jurisdiction;
7. Locke: if the government abuses its powers, then sovereignty reverts to the people; Thomas Jefferson borrowed this Lockean concept in his American Declaration of Independence by transforming the right to property into a right to happiness;
8. In building his social contract theory, Locke abstracts from the actual human conditions; there are three important effects of this method: (1) For Locke, freedom means “being left alone,” indeed, “being alone;” his individual is simply a “possessive individual;” (2) it allow him to attack a feudal hierarchy and to defend a new liberal capitalist hierarchy that ostensibly bases class standing on merit alone―economic inequalities are moral; (3) the state of nature sets up liberals’ distinction between private and public spheres, individual rights and the responsibilities of citizenship;
Smith’s Economic Invisible Hand
1. Smith: no one is self-sufficient; from here, the need to trade emerges; that promotes division of labor;
2. People are motivated to cooperate by self-interest, not benevolence;
3. Current prices provide the information necessary to balance relationships of supply and demand;
4. In adjusting economic activities to market forces, the individual is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention; by pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it;
5. Government’s duties according to Smith: (1) protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; (2) the duty of protecting every member of the society from injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administrator of justice; (3) the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual to erect and maintain;
6. Thomas Jefferson’s limited government vs. Alexander Hamilton’s “general welfare;”
7. Jefferson was closer in spirit to Aristotle than to Smith, for moral community, not capitalist development, was Jefferson’s central concern;
8. Madison warns against the factional nature of mankind; as he points out, the problem of democracy is how to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government; according to Madison, the US Constitution solves this problem by applying an economic model to political institutions; ambition must be made to counteract ambition;
9. Ironically, the twentieth-century liberal have come to favor a revival of the very politics of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought;
10. Milton Friedman: free markets promote a free society in two ways: (1) freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself; (2) economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom;
11. Friedman: the lesson to be drawn from the misuse of Smith’s third duty is that government intervention requires very thorough justification; otherwise, it’s better the temporary harsh but ultimately beneficent policy of letting market forces work;
Utilitarianism
1. John Stuart Mill: I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, a sa thing independent of utility; I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions;
2. Mill was the first to adapt liberal ideology to an emerging democratic society;
3. Mill shifts the epistemology from the “natural” man to “the greatest happiness principle;” actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness;
4. Mill: the doctrine of equal rights should be accompanied by a principle of the just distribution of goods; justice requires not only equal rights but also equal opportunities to exercise them;
5. On the grounds of utility rather than rights, Mill claims that a democratic government can legitimately prevent its citizens from harming others, but they must otherwise be free to live as they choose;
6. Democracy is threatened by masses’ mediocrity; to rise above mediocrity, the mass public must be guided by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few;
7. Only liberty protect genius from the masses who cannot easily appreciate or understand it;
8. Mill defends representative democracy on utilitarian grounds: in liberal democracies, citizens’ rights are secure because they posses sovereign power; the danger here is that it can lead to class politics, as well as collective mediocrity.
Welfare-State Liberalism and Social Rights
1. There is also a spiritual component to liberal arguments for the rights of man to life, liberty and property; for Locke, the right to property extends from the products of human labor to divine creation;
2. Jefferson echoes Locke when he argues in the Declaration of Independence that the American colonists are defending natural rights “endowed by their Creator;”
3. Thomas Hill Green and his socialist-liberalism: the mere removal of restraints on individuals does not constitute freedom in any meaningful sense; although state should not legislate morality, it should help to create circumstances that will allow all individuals to develop their faculties fully; freedom, here, becomes “a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying;
4. Thus, more extensive resistance to the forces of wealth and privilege, to the sources of economic and political power, was required to save liberal capitalism;
5. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs; Democratic Party: the government has the definite duty to use all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controls—to insure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
6. Welfare-state liberalism is not intended to provide relief or to encourage dependence; its purpose is to create an America in which every citizen shares all the opportunities of his society, in which every man has a chance to advance his welfare to the limit of his capacities;
Contemporary Challenges
1. Communitarian liberals are those who combine communal aspects of ancient democracies with the individual freedoms of liberal societies;
2. Isaac Kramnick: individuals tend to be ambitious, restless, fearful, competitive, insecure, uneasy people;
3. Robert Bellah: possessive individuals escape the “race of life” only in their private lives; yet many people cannot fully convey their sense of self in these liberal and capitalist terms; a completely emty self that operates out of purely arbitrary choice is theoretically imaginable but performatively impossible; peoples’ actual lives are shaped by “communities of memory and hope;” the liberals are aware of such limitations—Locke: the society cannot tolerate atheists since promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bounds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist; Friedman includes paternalism (care for those who cannot care for themselves) among the functions of government;
4. Yet liberalism does little to sustain the communal ties on which it ultimately depends— the case of hate speech; yet, critics of multiculturalism fear that it promotes a “politics of identity” that further fragments American society; Bellah: genuine communities form around deep commitments to shared values; since liberal individualism cannot easily sustain genuine community, it also cannot easily counter political fragmentation or authoritarian groups; it might even contribute to them;
Politics and Markets
1. Critics of liberal individualism (Theodore Lowi) see Smith’s invisible hand, the notion of that capitalist market are self-correcting, as a utopian ideal;
2. What happens when markets fail to produce prosperity?
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