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Liberty's Hollow Triumph*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

John Skorupski
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Extract

The history of liberalism is the history of an ethical ideal as well as a set of political and social arrangements. In the latter sense liberalism entrenches the juridical equality of all citizens, their equal civil and political rights – including among those rights a set of liberties strong enough to restrict the authority of society over the individual in a fundamental way. How to express in institutions this politically fundamental restriction is an important matter of debate, but that debate will not concern us. For present purposes I assume I can refer to liberalism as a set of political and social arrangements without further examination. Our concern will instead be the liberal ethical ideal and its present prospects.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 45 , March 2000 , pp. 51 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2000

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References

1 Quoted in Siedentop, Larry, Tocqueville Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p.49.Google Scholar

2 Mill, J. S., On Liberty, in Warnock, M. (ed.), Utilitarianism, On Liberty Essay on Bentham (Glasgow: Fontana, 1985)Google Scholar, ch. V, para. 4.

3 For an account of them see Schwartz, Pedro, The New Political Economy of J. S. Mill (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1992).Google Scholar

4 Schiller, Friedrich, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, edited and translated by Wilkinson, Elizabeth M. and Willoughby, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1967), pp. 19, 23Google Scholar. These letters were written from 1793 to 1795; a revised version appeared in 1801.

5 Mill, On Liberty, ch. Ill, para. 8.

6 Culture and Anarchy, ch. IV, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Supe, R. H. (ed.), (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–78), vol. 5, p. 165.Google Scholar

7 ibid., p. 167.

8 ibid., p. 88.

9 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, in M. Warnock (ed.) Utilitarianism, ch. 3, para. 10.

10 ‘O ye millions I embrace you/ Here's a kiss for all the world. The Ode to Joy continues: Br00FC;der! Über'm Sternenzelt/ Muss ein lieber Vater Wohnen.’ (Brothers, above the starry canopy/ theremust dwell a loving father.) Compare Arnold's 5th ‘Switzerland’ poem:

‘Yes! in the sea of life enisled/With echoing straits between us thrown/ Dotting the shoreless watery wild/We mortal millions live alone.’

11 Siedentop gives a brief account.

12 Hegel, , Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, T. M. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1942), §153.Google Scholar

13 Note that Hegel does not reject the modern principle of ‘subjective freedom’; in that respect he regularly distinguishes his view of the state from Plato's, specifically rejecting the idea that social roles may be allotted to individuals - e.g., Philosophy of Right, §185, §262, addition.

14 Mill, On Liberty, chapter 3, para. 13.

15 Brahms's personal motto, ‘fret aberfroh’ (free but joyful), expresses the distance travelled from that earlier liberal world. It was itself, apparently, a response to the motto of his friend Joachim - ‘fret aber einsam’ (free but alone).

16 See Schiller's Sixth Letter. It is of course also the problem that Marx, whose ethical ideal of the developed human being is Schiller's, took very seriously.

17 On The Genealogy of Morals, Smith, Douglas (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 34–5Google Scholar. (First published 1887; Brahms' third symphony, for which ‘fret aber froh’ provides the motto theme, was first performed in 1883.)

18 In Twilight of the Idols both Mill and Schiller appear on Nietzsche's list of ‘impossibles’, Mill for his ‘offensive clarity’ and Schiller as the ‘Moral-Trumpeter of Sackingen’ (Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, p. 78).Google Scholar

19 Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 5th edn, 1906), p. 288.Google Scholar

20 Works of Thomas Hill Green, Nettleship, R. L. (ed.) (London: Longmans, Green, 1885–8), vol. II, p. 463.Google Scholar

21 ibid., vol. III, p.73.

22 The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945), vol.IGoogle Scholar, p. ix

23 ibid., vol. II, p. 213.

24 I examine value-pluralism in Skorupski, ‘Value-pluralism’, in Archard, David (ed.) Philosophy and Pluralism, (Cambridge University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 129Google Scholar (my emphasis). Rawls has again set out his conception of ‘public reason’ in ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, The University of Chicago Law Review, 64 (1997), pp. 765–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 I argue this point with reference to Mill in Skorupski, –The Ethical Content of Liberal Law’, in Tasoulias, John (ed.), Law, Values and Social Practices (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1997), pp. 191–211Google Scholar. Obviously there can be and was debate about how useful it is for the state to get involved in such things; my point is that it was not conducted at the level of a philosophical thesis of state-neutrality.

27 From Schiller's Kallias letters, quoted by the editors in Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man, p. 297.

28 The Schillerian element in classical liberalism's ideal - spiritual freedom embodied in honest aesthetic semblance - is better expressed, for example, in those paintings in which Cézanne achieves it, or perhaps by the enigmatic classicism of Seurat, or in some high modernist architecture, than in any of the nineteenth century's exercises in hellenic nostalgia- Lord Leighton, say (for all the power with which he conveys that nostalgia).