Liberalism is a Plural Noun
Once upon a time, Christians would settle their disputes over things like who was allowed to translate “thou shalt not kill” (or rather, “non occides”) into the vernacular by fighting about it. Eventually they had so many disputes and got so good at fighting that they accidentally murdered a third of Germany. It was decided then that there would be strict limits on which nobles could sack whose towns for what. This is the seed from which liberalism grew.
No, wait, that’s not quite right - there is more, much more, that we have ignored. Let’s try again:
Once upon a time, there was a very bad king. He was so bad that people started to wonder where kings came from. He was so very very bad that people began to wonder whether they needed kings at all. Eventually some smart people got together, and found an answer: the king was king because people had agreed to let him be. But now it seemed like maybe the people had had enough of him; maybe they didn’t want a king at all. Some of them decided to do something about it. This is the source from which liberalism sprang.
Hmm. No, that doesn’t have quite the gravitas we’re looking for. Perhaps the tale really went like this:
Once upon a time, we died in the dark and lived on our knees. And for a long, long time, that was all the world could be. But very, very slowly, and then all at once - we grew rich. We bought light, and saw what had been denied to us. We bought strength, and saw what we might take back. And so we took it - and to hell with those who might resist. This is the fire in which liberalism was forged.
Or perhaps - but the other versions will have to wait. Liberalism, like any syncretic faith, has more than one true origin. Liberalism, like any state cult, has but a single lawful present. But while there is talk, occasionally, of purges - Berlin would rather exorcise Rousseau; Russell would sometimes seem to wish the whole Continent away - for the most part Received Liberalism takes an expansive view of its ancestry. Its adherents will happily claim descent from Hamilton and Paine, Mill and Bastiat, Voltaire and Montesquieu, and see no contradiction.
They are not necessarily wrong to do so; liberals owe all of them something, and something to them all - but what they owe them all isn’t much, and most of what they’ve received from one was found only in a few. An ideology is a moment; four hundred years of thought bearing down in a particular way on a particular point. There are other moments; there is no other history.
Mill is a liberal, and a socialist too; Voltaire would find good company with Napoleon et al. Adams was a living fossil from a hidebound age; Paine was an agrarian radical with more to recommend him than the sum of all his peers. Burke recoiled from the revolution in terror; Rousseau, had he lived to see it happen, would have spurred it on. Kant imagined every human being a legislator for the species; Bastiat denied the legitimacy of legislation as it actually was. All that unites them, really, is a common enemy in the Ancien Regime. All that unites their common descendants is simply - them.
Perhaps you prefer to orient yourself with respect to principles, not persons. Very well. Let us examine the purported principles of liberalism, and see what they really say.
Consider rights: the liberal concept par excellence, in one telling. For Bentham, these are legal constructs with a practical aim, fundamentally no different from patent law or public policy. For Thomas Paine, rights were written into the laws of nature: the law of men “operates by a contrary effect - that of taking rights away”. Thomas Hobbes agrees: the natural rights of man encompass “the right to every thing; even to one another’s body”, and it is the work of civilization, in large part, to abrogate them. And for William Lloyd Garrison, the Constitution of the United States was “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell”, the “source and parent of all the other atrocities” - when he spoke of rights, he referred to a higher law, written in the hearts of men.
These are not the same concept. They bear a loose family resemblance - but no more so to one another than to the right of labor to all that it creates, or the right of the politai of Athens to speak and be heard. In virtue of what, then, are these thinkers part of a single liberal tradition, while Athens remains pre- and the utopian socialists non-? Continuity can disqualify Pericles, but not Proudhon; an austere individualism can bar them both, but catches Hobbes and Tocqueville too.
Hobbes, I admit, we can do without: he was an incorrigible reactionary anyway. Perhaps we can even dispense with Tocqueville. But if Paine and Bentham are not both liberals, then of what use is the word?
Consider markets - or rather, the market society, in which “all fixed, fast-frozen relations” melt into cash. This is the distinctly liberal political economy, and yet we find no shortage of liberal giants recoiling from it in well-justified horror. Jefferson dreamed of a yeoman republic, an independent citizenry secured by the sacred right of land. “Those who labor in the earth”, Jefferson remarked, “are the chosen people of God”. Two hundred years later, John Rawls - no politician, but the more prominent philosopher by far - would reluctantly conclude that capitalism could have no hold behind the veil of ignorance: a just society must be a “property-owning democracy” (whatever that means: perhaps a yeoman republic for the modern age?), or else subscribe to a “liberal socialism”: one with all the well-worn rights of liberal democracy as we know it - except, of course, an unrestricted right to property. The Jacobins had their national workshops; Roosevelt had the CCC. Are we meant to say that they have no place in the liberal tradition? If so, it must be rather more parochial than is generally believed. And yet Rawls and Jefferson must be liberals, if there are to be any liberals at all.
Consider representative democracy - liberalism’s unique contribution to the annals of comparative polisci. It is difficult to see how Rousseau’s general will - which is to say the will that wills the good of all; our “coherent extrapolated volition”, to borrow one of the rationalists’ few worthwhile neologisms - can be reconciled with the delegation of decision-making to some supposed expert, as the defenders of the current regime would advocate. Such a democracy could be “representative”, in a more literal sense, but it would not much resemble ours. Rawls, on the other hand, would seem to demand particular outcomes - would make the people a little less than fully sovereign, and their representatives a little less than fully free, in the service of the common good. And yet Rawls is a liberal, through and through, or else no one is.
Consider pluralism, which defenders of liberalism in its narrowest sense would like you to believe is the essential character of all the twin Revolutions have given us, all that the blood of the martyrs has won. Or don’t, because they’re obviously wrong. Robespierre, a pluralist? Rousseau? Roosevelt? The absurdity of such a claim needs no explanation: there is no pluralism to be found in disposing of reactionaries, and not much more to be found in welcoming their hatred. And yet these are liberals, or else liberalism is oh so very particular: reduced, as all particularities, to something sad and small.
This is not to say, of course, that Europe’s 18th century saw nothing of any particular note. Something did change, something new did emerge, and there is a common thread that runs through every serious thinker of these last three hundred years. You can call it “liberalism” if you like - but it’s not the liberalism of free trade and free enterprise and doubly-free labor. It’s not freedom from politics; it’s not freedom of conscience; it’s not freedom tout court. It’s just modernity. Marx belongs to it as much as Mill; it claims Proudhon, and Owen too. The inheritance of Rousseau and Montesquieu is the common heritage of all mankind, and its proper heirs are all those who would defend Man qua Man against all the creatures of the past. There is no such thing as liberalism: only liberalisms, or else the Enlightenment, of which the Left is the best and truest heir. But that story, too, will have to wait.
Man you really could keep going with this. A la Helena Rosenblatt: Once upon a time some Germans wanted to think about God but also about history. Or once upon a time some Frenchmen thought---in spite of the available evidence of their own revolution---that free people might be more virtuous. A word that contains multitudes.