4. The Radical Attack on Liberalism. As we have
seen, there were liberals after the French Revolution
who thought democracy dangerous to freedom. Their
fear of democracy made them suspect to the radicals,
who therefore attacked them. The radicals attacked
not freedom but liberalism, which they interpreted as
concern for the privileges of the well-to-do masquer-
ading as concern for freedom.
The quarrel between radicals and liberals has been
genuine enough, though it has led to equivocation and
self-deception. It was in France that it first came to
the forefront of politics, especially during the July
Monarchy and the Second Republic. The liberals
wanted the political rights, and above all the right to
vote at free elections, confined to persons capable of
exercising them responsibly, who (in their opinion)
were the educated and the well-to-do. If, in practice,
they cared more for political than for social rights, this
was not because they thought them more important
in themselves but because they held that, at least in
Western countries, they were less secure; as indeed
they were, for the educated and the well-to-do, who
in fact enjoyed their social more securely than their
political rights. The liberal argument of that time
might be put briefly into these words: the people as
a whole will enjoy their rights more securely, if the
most important of the political rights, the right to vote,
is confined to those capable of exercising it responsibly;
and therefore the right to vote is, of all rights, the one
that must be extended the most cautiously, as education
and political competence spread.
The radicals answered that the poor and the unedu-
cated enjoyed their social rights precariously, and
lacked some altogether, precisely because they were
without political rights. They too, like the liberals,
treated the right to vote as the most immediately
important; the other political rights were of limited
use without it. To begin with, many radicals thought
it enough that the poor should have the vote, and that
their children should be educated at public expense.
This, they hoped, would enable them to exercise all
their rights effectively. Later they changed their minds,
and made progressively larger demands on behalf of
the poor, requiring that more and more services be
provided for those unable to pay for them; and to cover
the cost of these services, they advocated steeper taxa-
tion of the well-to-do. Also, to protect the economically
weak from the effects of crises and depressions, they
pressed for a wider control of the economy, whether
by the state or by lesser political communities or by
producers' associations.
The liberals too, self-styled or so-called by socialists
and others to the “left” of them, have changed with
the times. They have accepted first manhood and then
universal suffrage, a large provision of “social services”
at public expense, and a greater control of the econ-
omy. If a distinction is worth making between the
liberal and the radical, it is a distinction between
attitudes rather than doctrines. Both the liberal and
the radical accept the rights, social and political, that
were mentioned earlier, at least in the sense that they
admit that all men should have them, when conditions
allow. And they both accept the three liberal principles
used to justify these rights. They are both, therefore,
in the broad sense liberals. Yet there is a difference
between them worth noticing: the liberal is more con-
cerned than is the radical that attempts to extend the
rights quickly should not emasculate or even destroy
them, while the radical is more concerned that they
should be extended quickly.
We distinguish here between two attitudes taken in
the abstract. Of course, there are people calling them-
selves liberals (and even called so by others) who care
above all for the privileges of a minority, just as there
are people calling themselves radicals (or socialists or
communists) who care above all for getting power and
exercising it over docile subjects. Such persons are
sometimes cynical, sometimes self-deceivers, and
sometimes both.
Thus, though there is nothing illiberal about radi-
calism—about the desire to extend, as far and as
quickly as possible, the rights, social and political,
whose exercise constitutes the freedom we have been
discussing—it is easy enough to see how radicals, as
assiduous and vocal champions of the poor, come to
appear illiberal to liberals. Nor is it always a matter
of appearances, for radicals may indeed be illiberal.
That is to say, they may do more than advocate policies
that postpone the coming of freedom without intending
to do so; they may want to deprive people of liberties
they already have.
For example, they may want to deprive some people
of political rights they already have while pretending
to give them to everyone; they may extend the fran-
chise and abolish free elections, or they may form
associations and encourage people to join them, but
otherwise suppress freedom of association. They may
have illusions about their intentions or they may not.
They may even admit that they are suppressing some
liberties, taking them away from a minority who use
them to prevent urgently needed reforms. This minor-
ity are to be deprived for a time of some of their
freedom so that everyone may have freedom more
abundantly in the future. Or, as happens more often,
perhaps, they may deny that they want to deprive
anyone, even for a time, of any of the rights that
constitute freedom, and yet advocate courses that result
in this deprivation. Though they refuse to admit this
result, their policies are in fact illiberal if putting them
into effect curtails the liberties of some people without
extending those of others.
There is, as recent history proves, an “equivocation
of the Left” difficult to avoid. The champions of the
poor and the ignorant need their support if they are
to get for them what they hope to get. Their aim, they
say, is to “liberate the people,” to ensure that they
acquire essential liberties (the rights, social and politi-
cal, that we have been discussing, and others like
them); and they can hardly win the popular support
they need unless they assume, at least in public, that
the people understand and want the benefits intended
for them. They can hardly say to the poor and the
ignorant: “Support us in our endeavors to get for you
advantages that you do not understand, or understand
so little, that we shall not be able to let you have them
for some considerable time after we have got power
with your support.” So they equivocate, both to keep
their followers loyal to them and to reassure themselves
as to their own intentions.
The more backward a country, the less social and
cultural conditions inside it allow the effective exercise
of these rights, the greater the temptation to equiv-
ocate, to declare publicly that the people do exercise
them while adopting policies that make sense only on
the assumption that they do not yet understand them
and so cannot exercise them. This equivocation is made
easier by attacks, often enough justified, on the hypoc-
risy of the well-to-do liberals, who pretend to care for
freedom in general when in fact they care only for
their own privileges. The rights precious to these lib-
erals, say the attackers, have been too often used, in
their present forms, as excuses to prevent drastic but
urgent reforms for the benefit of the poor at the ex-
pense of the rich. So these rights, in these forms, are
denounced as “illusory” or “bourgeois.” They are rights
proper to a society in which there are great inequalities
of wealth, and the rich can exercise them much more
effectively than the poor can, even though, on paper,
all classes have them. The radicals who attack
bourgeois liberalism do not reject in principle even the
political rights asserted by the liberals: they do not
deny that governments should be responsible to the
people, or that the people should be free to form
associations to promote aims of their own choosing,
or should be allowed to express their opinions freely.
They say rather that these rights, in their so-called
“bourgeois” or “liberal” forms, are not useful to the
people generally but only to the rich. Unfortunately,
they seldom make it clear how these bourgeois forms
differ from other, and (in their opinion) more genuinely
popular, forms.
That the poor, though they have these rights “on
paper,” cannot exercise them effectively while the rich
retain their wealth and the advantages it brings, may
or may not be true; or it may be true to an extent
that varies with the circumstances. But, true or not,
it is not obvious why, when great inequalities of wealth
are removed, these rights must take forms very differ-
ent from those they now have if all sections of the
community are to exercise them effectively. In partic-
ular, the argument that political rights, if the people
generally are really to have them, cannot take the
forms they do while they are of little use except to
the wealthy, is quite unconvincing. If the argument
were merely that different political and legal institu-
tions are required to ensure that a vast number of
persons exercise their rights effectively from those that
suffice to ensure that a small number do so, it would
be more plausible at the first blush, though still not
convincing, unless it were made clear what the differ-
ences would be and the reasons for them. But this is
not the argument.
Not all radicals (as defined above) are given to this
kind of equivocation. But the Marxists have been and
are, and so, too, have socialists of other schools. Nor
is this equivocation of the Left confined to socialists,
for there are traces of it as far back at least as the
Jacobinism of the seventeen-nineties.
There is also an equivocation of the Right. In its
earlier forms, it was cruder and perhaps more wide-
spread than it is now, but it still survives. This kind
of equivocator, while he says that all men are equal
in certain fundamental respects, though some are su-
perior to the rest in other respects, fails to notice (or
to admit) that the other respects are at bottom only
some of the fundamental ones described in dif-
ferent words. This sort of equivocation goes back at
least as far as Montesquieu and Locke, and perhaps
further.
Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws (Book XI,
Ch. 6), with the English form of government in mind,
speaks of persons who ought not to have the vote
because they are “in so mean a situation as to be
deemed to have no will of their own.” Yet in other
parts of this same work, he takes it for granted that
all men (except, presumably, infants and the mentally
defective) are legally responsible for their actions. If
someone of “mean situation” breaks the law or makes
a contract, Montesquieu does not claim for him dimin-
ished responsibility on the ground that he has no “will
of his own”; that his understanding of the circum-
stances in which he acts is such that he ought not to
be held responsible for what he does, or ought to be
so held less than if he were not in a “mean situation.”
He understands the law and the circumstances to which
it applies quite well enough to be deemed to have a
will of his own when he commits an offense or makes
a contract, but when it comes to choosing lawmakers,
he must have no say, because he then lacks a will of
his own—that is to say, does not understand what law
is about well enough to be of good judgment in de-
ciding who shall take part in making or declaring the
law.
Now, it may well be that the criteria of legal and
political competence are not the same, so that we
cannot say that someone who has understanding
enough to be answerable to the courts for breaches
of law or contract must have understanding enough
to make a rational use of the vote. But Montesquieu
never troubled to distinguish legal from political com-
petence, and never explained why the “mean in situa-
tion” (presumably, the poor and the uneducated)
should be deemed legally competent and politically
incompetent. Even if it should happen that political
is more rare than legal competence, it is not obvious
that there is proportionately less of it to be found
among the poor and the uneducated than among the
others. And if there is less, may this not be due above
all to their not exercising the rights denied to them
on the ground that they are politically incompetent?
Is not political competence acquired by exercising
these rights rather than by going to school or having
private tutors? And was this not so particularly in
Montesquieu's day, when formal teaching was so
largely classical and literary?
The truth is that while the criteria of legal com-
petence (or legal responsibility) have been often dis-
cussed, the criteria of political competence have been
so scarcely at all. Political competence consists, pre-
sumably, of a variety of capacities or skills, though for
our purposes it is enough to distinguish, broadly, be-
tween four:
political judgment, or being a good judge
of what policies are likely to achieve some desired end
or ends;
political sense, or being good at discerning
who has political judgment and can be trusted to exer-
cise it responsibly;
political skill, or knowing how to
use established procedures to get the decisions you
want; and
political power, or being able to induce those
who have political judgment or skill to exercise it as
you want them to do.
Political judgment and political skill are kinds of
competence acquired above all by being politically
active, by taking part in government or by observing
it closely. Being well-to-do and well-educated do not
give this judgment or skill to a man except to the extent
that they make it easier for him to take part in govern-
ment or to observe it. Political sense and political
power come mostly of the exercise of political rights,
and are confined to the well-to-do and well-educated
only while they alone have these rights. With the
coming of democracy, the acquiring of political com-
petence, in all four kinds, is not a product of forms
of education or styles of life peculiar to any class; it
is acquired either by professionals, whose business is
government and politics, or the discussion and study
of them, or else it comes of the exercise of political
rights. The more widely these rights are shared, the
more evenly distributed among all classes the kinds of
competence that come of exercising them, and the
more the kinds that are acquired professionally are at
the service of all classes. For it is less the social origins,
or the present status, of the politically active that
matters than the extent to which their services are at
the disposal of different sections of the community. It
is the same with whole-time politicians as with other
“professionals.” Not long ago, doctors were not only
drawn mostly from well-to-do families; they also mostly
served them. Today they are drawn from them rather
less often than they used to be; but what matters more
is that their services are now much more widely avail-
able to the poor.
This is not to suggest that the idea of political com-
petence is empty, and that adults ought never to be
refused political rights on the ground that they are
politically incompetent. It is to suggest only that peo-
ple who use the idea, either by that name or another,
often do not know what they are about. They say, on
the one hand, that all classes or all races or the two
sexes are equal in certain respects (often called “funda-
mental respects,” to lend dignity to them), while on
the other, overtly or by implication, they claim superi-
ority for some classes or races, or for one of the sexes,
without noticing that the respects in which they claim
it are identical, wholly or in part, with some of the
respects they call fundamental.
There are, of course, people who do not admit that
everyone ought, as far as possible, to enjoy the rights
we have been discussing. In their case, there is none
of the equivocation mentioned earlier, though their
arguments may be defective for other reasons. The
“equivocators” are all, in the broad sense, liberal; they
agree that in principle everyone ought to have these
rights. Their equivocation consists in their taking up,
without noticing or at least admitting it, positions
inconsistent with the principle. On the Left, they reject
as bourgeois shams institutions needed to secure these
rights, or some of them; on the Right, they make
political competence a condition of people's having
some of these rights, when in fact their having them
is a condition of their acquiring political competence
or of their being able to call on the services of the
politically competent.
