The Moral Foundations of Liberalism

In the eighteenth century, it was commonplace to consider political economy a moral science, implying by moral not some moralistic sense of the word but the need to take reasonable, reasoned indeed, choices aimed at the improvement of mankind and society.

As is well known,JSM was a disciple of his own father and Jeremy Bentham, who gave an impetus to a consequentialist approach in ethics and legislation, whereby human actions are generally not considered as inherently good or bad, but they become so according to their consequences. At a first glance, this distinction seems to merely shift the judgment from the goodness of an action to that of its consequences, that is, it still requires an external definition of goodness. However, JSM underlines its revolution­ary character for it makes morality a subject of rational debate and thus of democracy, whereas “an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference” (OL, 221), and as we discuss below, the fact that a preference may happen to be shared by many people, does not per se make it preferable.

As is well known, to Bentham the rational measure of goodness of any action’s con­sequences is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. In his mature works,JSM conditionally approves of this definition, provided happiness is defined in a long-term, extensive sense of personal improvement: “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (ibid., 224). In his posthumously published Autobiography, he describes the shift in his views with respect to the education Bentham and his father had given him:

I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life.

This description of happiness informsJSM’s (1861, 212) famous moral statement that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a satisfied fool—not because of a religious or moral imperative to suffer, but precisely because mental and moral cultivation make us happier, provided happiness is properly distinguished from the immediate satisfaction of physical pleasures (“and if the fool isn’t convinced, it is because he only knows half of the argument”).

JSM not only modified Bentham’s definition of the notion of “pleasures and pains” but also his approach on how to move from an individual to a social happiness (which only merits the name “utility”). While with the first generation of utilitarians social welfare, that is utility, was the mere sum of individuals’ (un)happiness,² JSM was aware of how sim­plistic and biased this approach is. Our perception of happiness changes with our social interactions and modifications of the institutional context, which is whatJSM calls our “social education,” as well as with the development of habits and propensities, or our “self­education” (D'Ippoliti, 2011). Thus, the aim of public policy should be to create the condi­tions for elevated happiness, for human flourishing, of a vast majority of, if not all, people.

Since these considerations make it much more difficult to estimate the goodness of a specific individual action or public policy in a given context,JSM understood he had radically changed the original utilitarian approach, developing a “rule utilitarianism” whereby moral assessment usually applies not to a single act but to institutions and gen­eral rules of conduct—along Kantian lines—on the act as if it were to be applied as a general rule.

With his aim of generalized personal improvement, we still can consider JSM’s approach as founded on a nuanced notion of political individualism. As he writes in On Liberty, “individuality is the same thing with development, and [...] it is only the culti­vation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings” (OL, 267). Though, as common practice at the time,JSM was usually sparing of cita­tions, it is evident that this approach is informed by, or at least recalls that of one of Roncaglia’s favorite economists, Adam Smith. In some passages JSM (“without quoting Smith,” Roncaglia, 2005a, 125) notices that each person “is the most interested person in his own well-being [...]; with respect to his own feelings and circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else” (OL, 277).

However, differences between JSM’s and Smith’s approach abound. Thinking of the British environment of his time,JSM is very critical of the idea that human conduct is generally informed by feelings of sympathy. Comparing them to the “general habit” of the French, JSM laments “the way in which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things of an unselfish kind, [.] causes both their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain undeveloped” (1873, 61).

Interestingly, Schmoller (1900), the leader of the German Historical School, raised the same criticism against all British classical political economists, of not considering how generalized selfishness could be a peculiar feature of English society (D’Ippoliti, 2011). We doubt whether the other European populations (of that time or of our time) should be regarded as generally altruistic and other-regarding, but certainly the Anglo-Saxon influence on the economists of the rest of the world has by now made (especially main­stream) economists and their students much closer to the wicked and narrowly egotistic kind of person than Schmoller and Smith had in mind.

Truly, later JSM adds that “[i]n most other countries the paramount importance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual happiness is an axiom” (1873, 157), but in general he is much more willing to emphasize the wide diversity of people’s motives and interests, and “all the multifarious causes which influence their wishes in regard to the conduct of others, [. s]ometimes their reason—at other times their prejudices or superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their antisocial ones, [.] but most commonly [...] their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest” (OL, 221).

It hardly needs recalling here that JSM is very far from maintaining that people fol­low any sort of rational, be it self- or other-regarding, behavior: “I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary” (ibid., 265).^[8] Thus, not only is sympathy just one among many motives of behavior, but it is not likely to be a major one. In contrast, Smith’s liberalism and specifically his trust in the viability of free competition certainly impinges on his notion of sympathy as a ruler of moral conduct (set forth in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: Smith 1759), even though one should always recount how biased and far from Smith’s view is the mainstream economic notion of an “invisible hand” (see, e.g., Roncaglia, 2005b).

The differences between Smith and JSM are not limited to the roots of their argu­ment for liberalism but concern their overall policy stance too. In the Wealth of Nations, Smith proposes several forms of what today would be called public “intervention” in the economy, but his liberalism stopped short of the paternalistic aspects, for example, of JSM’s call for an “education of the feelings” (1873, 115). As much as he draws a hier­archy between physical and mental pleasures, JSM deems self-interest neatly inferior to other-regarding behavior and argues that altruism and sympathy should be taught and cultivated (ibid., 277).

With respect to Smith and classical liberalism, Roncaglia (2005a, 121-26; 2005b) draws a much-needed distinction between selfishness and self-interest, clarifying that the latter is not necessarily in opposition to, and is quite often conjoint with public interest. However,JSM is obviously skeptical about the capacity even of this “enlightened self­interest” to bring about enough progressive social development. He specifically attributes this Smithian notion to his father, highlighting how this is one of the few things on which he later developed an autonomous, almost contrary, thinking:

While fully recognizing the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, we [first-generation utilitarians] did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings. Although this last is prodigiously important as a means of improvement in the hands of those who are themselves impelled by nobler principles of action, I do not believe that any one of the survivors of the Benthamites or Utilitarians of that day, now relies mainly upon it for the general amendment of human conduct. (JSM, 1873, 113-15)

Rather, in his view a social education of the feelings is necessary in order to allow society to attain the maximum utility it can achieve. Two major elements of this social education are democratic public debate and education in the strict sense, that is, a system of school­ing as well as of higher education and research. Both topics deserve closer inspection both because On Liberty devotes the brunt of the argument to them, and because they play a crucial role in Roncaglia’s thought as well.

themselves cannot be fixed and general but must evolve as society develops. Thus, JSM distances himself not only from specific aspects of his father’s political philosophy (e.g., concerning women’s right to suffrage) but also from his method in general.⁴ He set forth to lay down not a set of model institutions but “principles from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be deduced” (JSM, 1873, 169).

This relativism should more properly be recognized as historicism. JSM refers to French and German thinkers to highlight what he learned, partly in opposition to Bentham’s andJames Mill’s deductive method:

that the human mind has a certain order of possible progress in which some things must pre­cede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent; that all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institu­tions; that government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it; that any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history. (Ibid., 169; emphasis in original)

He provides a sketch of such a philosophy of history at the beginning of OL, where he describes a stage theory of “Civil, or Social Liberty” In many ways, this was also the way Smith decided to tackle the issue, central in his thought, of value in exchange and the division of labor.

According to JSM, in a first, rude stage of society, the imperatives of survival and security made it reasonable for the vast majority of society, unable to defend itself and its interests, to be subject to the strongest of its members, it being preferable to be exploited than predated. Evidently, from this stage dates the deep-rooted notion, taken in high con­sideration by contemporary populist movements, that the interests of the governed are different from, and often in opposition to, the interests of the governors. As civilization progressed, a struggle between liberty and authority ensued, in which the main aim of the liberal factions was to obtain limitations to the power of those who have authority— that is, constitutional checks. Then, in a third stage, this struggle evolved into one for voice and participation in the administration of common affairs, that is, democracy.

The evolution from tyranny to democracy is indisputably a positive development: not in itself (which would be a deontological ethical stance) but for the greater possibilities of human flourishing under democracy. JSM

looked upon the choice of political institutions as a moral and educational question more than one of material interests. [... And he] thought the predominance of the aristocratic clas­ses, the noble and the rich, in the English Constitution, an evil worth any struggle to get rid of; not on account of taxes, or any such comparatively small inconvenience, but as the great demoralizing agency in the country. (JSM, 1873, 177)

However, democratization too has its drawbacks, against which it is necessary to establish countermeasures. As parliaments and governments grow to represent the will of the masses, according toJSM people in general would no longer feel them­selves different from and in opposition to the governing bodies. Thus, by his time (the fourth stage of development), democracies were engaged in, or at risk of, a reduction of the constitutional limits that were created in the previous stage, on account of the delusion that “[t]he nation did not need to be protected against its own will” (OL, 218).

Old-style liberals, thus, who understand liberty as protection from government inter­ference (which was very reasonable in Smith’s time), were byJSM’s time fighting the previous war. And neoliberals today, when we are probably in even a further stage of this dialectic development of liberty and authority, resort to such old-fashioned arguments that one wonders whether their plea for liberty in the oldest, pre-Smithian sense, is not in fact just a facade.

In a democracy, protection against the “tyranny of the magistrate” is not enough and is not even a priority, in the face of the looming threats of despotism. Indeed, the retrenchment of political or even constitutional checks in the name of efficiency (or today we would say “stability”) paves the way to a further stage of the history of liberty, in which “the ‘self-government’ spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest” (ibid., 219).

While being generally thrifty of citations, on this accountJSM refers to an author who will later be amply lauded by Paolo Sylos Labini (whose relationship with Roncaglia needs no recounting here): Alexis de Tocqueville. At that point, JMS had already written two book reviews of Tocqueville’s (1835) De la Democratic en Amerique, and one could say the whole On Liberty is a reflection on Tocqueville’s notion of the tyranny of the majority. In this fifth stage, the struggle between liberty and authority becomes one between the rights of minorities and the power of the majority.

However, consistent with his approach that institutions matter as a moral and edu­cational question, more than a material one, there is a specific aspect of the tyranny of the majority that JSM fears the most, “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling” (OL, 220). He repeatedly stresses that the free sway of society on aspects of an individ­ual’s life that do not concern anyone else but the individual herself, consistently narrow the scope of individuality: “society has now fairly got the better of individuality” (ibid., 264), and that “at present individuals are lost in the crowd” (ibid., 268). This aspect of the tyranny of the majority is singled out byJSM in light of his theory of human flourishing as individual development, recalled above, from which descends the idea that in a demo­cratic society “the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement” (ibid., 272).⁵

JSM traces back the tyranny of public opinion to some major long-term forces work­ing toward the leveling out of individual differences: the reduction in class differences of social position, the extension of education, improvements in the means of communica­tion, the increase in commerce and manufactures, and the ascendancy of the rule of public opinion in the political institutions of the state. In contrast, with a position that will be discussed in depth by Albert O. Hirschman (1977), JSM believes that “Europe is, in my judgment, wholly indebted to [... its previous] plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development” (OL, 274). Thus, he refers to an English translation of

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1851) to point out two measures necessary to allow people to remain “unlike one another; namely, freedom and variety of situations” (OL, 274). Jointly, freedom and variety allow us both to “experiment” lifestyles—about which JSM (1869) will reiterate, especially with respect to family arrangements and gender equality—and most of all to experiment pursuits and opinions, which are a necessary precondition for any change in practices.

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