Liberalism and Equality

REVIEW ESSAY
Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea
by Darrin M. McMahon
Basic Books, 2023, 528 pages

Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism
by Alan S. Kahan
Princeton University Press, 2023, 528 pages

Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage
by Gianna Englert
Oxford University Press, 2024, 224 pages

Today, many self-described liberals in the professions—including in my world of academic political philosophy—inhabit what the histo­rian Darrin M. Mc­Mahon calls “a kind of egalitarian plateau,”¹ convinced that the orienting value of their lives is equality. Equality is at the center of the liberal theory produced in the ivory tower and the liberal activism of protestors and NGOs. Yet several new books, in their own ways, re­inforce a lesson which scholarship has made increasingly clear in recent years but which seems not to have penetrated to a general readership: namely, that liberalism’s relationship to equality has, his­torically, been far from a warm embrace.

As McMahon’s sweeping new study, Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea, confirms, equality has had a wide set of meanings—only some of which liberals have found attractive. Indeed, liberalism appears as rather a bit player in McMahon’s documenting of the many “imagi­naries of equality” across the long history of the species. Historian Alan Kahan, writing from the perspective of a devoted liberal, laments at the outset of his Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism that “many people have incorrectly identified liberalism with equality.”² Political theorist Gianna Englert’s Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage likewise makes clear how inhospitable to much equality talk the first well-developed tradition of liberalism was.³

Outside the ivory tower, liberalism finds itself facing seemingly opposite complaints. It is charged with containing the seeds of an ex­treme egalitarianism destined, sooner or later, to give birth to the woke excesses of the past decade; and it is accused of providing moral cover for an elite that will adopt any tool at hand to stymie the popular will when the latter threatens its control. This duality of disaffection with contemporary liberalism has deep historical antecedents; for while lib­eralism from its inception was keen to protect equality rightly under­stood, it has often identified contending demands of equality as among its greatest enemies.

Equality before Liberalism

McMahon’s Equality participates in a growing trend of longue durée history.⁴ This approach, like any, has advantages and drawbacks. One salutary effect in this case is to burst the parochial bubble wherein a special relationship to ideas of natural or moral equality is claimed for liberalism. American liberals—at least those raised in the more patriotic ethos that prevailed until the last decade—are used to hearing that we founded our society on the revolutionary proposition of the equality of humankind, on our shared status of being “created equal.” But as McMahon demonstrates abundantly, far from being “startlingly new,” the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence was a “hack­neyed cliché,” versions of which had been uttered for centuries by all manner of figures—from popes to emperors to slaveholders—who had not the slightest notion they were putting the social order in jeopardy. Stoicism and Christianity, to take just two notable examples, had been grounded in the “equal value of all human beings.”⁵ For Stoics, men were equal insofar as they all possessed the capacity to act according to reason and to be virtuous. For Christians, all were equal insofar as salvation was attainable by anyone who accepted Christ, and because God was indifferent to our merely earthly gradations; saving the soul of a rich man was no greater in God’s eyes than saving a poor man’s. But neither Stoics nor (almost all) Christians took this to mean that they had to subvert the gradations their societies took for granted.

Theses of the natural equality of mankind, and of our equal basic value, circulated throughout the West for centuries before anyone had conceived of a set of practices and ideals called liberalism. Nor does a kindred concept which is often seen as constitutive of the birth of liberal theory, the concept of a “state of nature,” have anything particularly to do with the egalitarian notions that liberals today profess. Both those we might now see as early liberals or precursors of liberalism, and those to whom no one would apply any such label, deployed the concept. Medie­val writers made frequent use of it. The state of nature was, definitionally, a condition of equality, since its purpose was to allow us to reflect on a world from which political authority, and often property as well, were absent.⁶ But such reflection on an abstract egalitarian condition was not to inspire readers to level the distinctions they found among them. The point of the device, instead, was to legitimize at least one great inequality—that between rulers and ruled, “magistrates” and “the people” (in Locke’s words)—and usually another also, namely, the inequalities that arose from private property. The lesson of the state of nature was that equality was not enough to live well (or perhaps to live at all). Insofar as tropes about natural equality or the invocation of a state of nature occurred in early modern writers now retrospectively enlisted in the founding of liberalism, it was not for the sake of championing social, economic, or (frequently) even legal equality, but to justify the great powers vested in the civil sovereign—normally with the end in view of defeating the rival claims to authority of corporate religion, and some­times with a reservation made for a (limited) right of resistance to tyranny.⁷ State-of-nature theorists were not promising a community of equals.

Insofar as the moral equality at the heart of the Western tradition translated into political life, it did so as the demand that everyone’s interests be given consideration. The good of an aristocrat was not to be weighed more heavily than the good of a commoner. But this did not mean that the division between aristocrats and commoners was unjust, since the presence of an aristocracy could very well make all of us better off, by acting, for instance, as a counterweight to royal power and supplying a set of people duty-bound to perform important public functions. Hierarchies had to be beneficial. But apart from a few tiny radical sects who would hardly be categorized today as liberal, no one was envisioning a world without hierarchy—at least not in this earthly life.⁸

The shape which this attitude took—at once affirming our equal worth and accepting the necessity for great inequalities in civil society—on the cusp of the birth of liberalism proper is captured well by Edmund Burke, now best known as the father of conservatism (a word that would not gain traction until well after his death). Burke exemplified the standpoint of the enlightened ancien régime; and as often, one finds the best voices for a way of life coming at its end, like owls of Minerva. The crisis of the French Revolution prompted Burke to give his finest articu­lation of the relationship between the equality to which he was committed as a believing Christian and the inequality which he supported as a faithful adherent of the “antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.”⁹

Readers today sometimes find Burke slippery or evasive. Yet he believed, with considerable reason, that he was summing up the com­mon sense of “the great politick communion [of] the Christian world” against an insurgency of intellectuals and speculators who were turning the cry of égalité into an alibi for a self-interested upending of the social order.¹⁰ For Burke, it was true that “natural rights” could be said to exist, and that, all men sharing these rights, all could be regarded as naturally equal. But the time-honored point that no specific prescriptions for social ordering followed from this recognition was equally true. “Civil society” developed precisely because a condition of natural equality was eminently undesirable. “Government,” as he put it, “is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total inde­pendence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is their practi­cal defect. By having a right to everything [natural men] want everything.” Sure, there might be a sense in which our natural equality carried over into the body politic; “all men have equal rights,” he allowed. But certainly “not to equal things.” “Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together,” he warned.

In the British context, a hereditary monarchy and aristocracy, a privi­leged clerical establishment, steep qualifications for public office, and the protection of great agglomerations of property in private and corporate hands had all proven beneficent.¹¹ None of this, though, contravened Christian equality, or “true moral equality,” as Burke called it.¹² The sense in which our status as equal natural-rights holders and equal in the sight of God carried over into civil society was as a kind of uber-right: we had the right to the best government available. As Burke articulated it in a typically exalted rhetorical flight: “If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule.” Each man, the little as well as the great, was owed all that the great “partnership” called the “State” could do in “his favour.”¹³

Our moral equality was thus instantiated in our equal entitlement to be governed well. But again, this entitlement did not mean that we were owed, for instance, equal shares of political power. In fact, it entailed the opposite: we had a right to be ruled by those with the greatest aptitude. On this view, I was failed by those governing if I were subjected to a political order that insufficiently provided for my true, long-run inter­ests even if that order granted me personally more voice or power. This is partly what Burke meant in his paradoxical declaration that “the re­straints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” Human beings possessed all kinds of “passions” that needed to be “subdued” for a civilized community life to be possible, and the desires of the ignorant many for political participation or a share of rule fell into this category. Burke made the upshot clear in a passage from which Englert quotes:

The Chancellor of France . . . said . . . that all occupations were honorable. If he meant only that no honest employment was disgraceful, he would not have gone beyond the truth. But in asserting that anything is honorable, we imply some distinction in its favor. The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honor to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.¹⁴

In sum, our moral equality expressed itself in political philosophy as our equal claim not to suffer oppression or injustice. This was an open-ended and contextual demand, compatible with a range of (hierarchical) sociopolitical dispensations, so long as these were not characterized by domination or abuse.¹⁵

Importantly, this approach established a similarity between domestic and imperial contexts. What Irishmen and Indians, no differently than Englishmen, were owed was enlightened, Christian governance in their best interests. As Burke wrote during his attempt to render the East India Company (as he saw it) less exploitative of the native population: “all political power which is set over men, and all privilege claimed or exercised in exclusion of them, being wholly artificial, and for so much, a derogation from the natural equality of mankind at large, ought to be some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit. If this is true with regard to every species of political dominion, and every description of commercial privilege . . . then such rights, or privileges, or whatever else you choose to call them, are all in the strictest sense a trust.”¹⁶ Moral equality was a universal principle, applicable in Bengal as much as in Bristol. What it implied was not the same level of power or possessions, but that only those differentials among men that redounded to the bene­fit of all were acceptable, leaving no portion of one’s fellows merely trampled upon.

Recognizing the vital place of moral equality in the thought of a figure like Burke helps us more clearly understand what is distinctive about liberalism once it arrives on the scene as a self-conscious movement. Perhaps the classic statement of liberal philosophy for modern readers comes from John Rawls. Rawls’s Theory of Justice famously foregrounded “two principles of justice.” The first (1) was that “each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties [freedom of speech, assembly, the vote, right to hold office, and the like].” The second, which itself came in two parts, speci­fied that “social and economic inequalities” had (2.i) to be “attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity”; and (2.ii) to operate to the “benefit of the least-advan­taged members of society [the difference principle].”¹⁷ We can see now that what distinguishes liberalism has little to do with Rawls’s point (2.ii), his celebrated “difference principle.” This had been a staple of the political thought of Christian aristocracy; the Romantic poet and con­servative phi­losopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s laudation of Shakespeare epitomizes this tradition: “a philosophical aristocrat, de­lighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages.”¹⁸ For Coleridge, a well-ordered aristocracy, and such an aristocracy alone, satisfied the difference prin­ciple.

Even those Enlightenment authors who are most often seen as progenitors of liberalism shared the same general orientation as Burke. Locke was a believing (if rationalist) Christian, and he began his political theory from a premise of perfect equality among men bound only by the law of nature.¹⁹ But he was largely at peace with England’s hierarchical social-political structure, and arguably his most important contribution to political argument was to justify the inequality that attended private property on the grounds that all had their lot improved thereby: “a King in America feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England,” he reminded his countrymen who might lament the gap between “larger Possessions” and smaller ones among them.²⁰ And Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws was a kind of gospel for the siècle des lumières, thought the “love of equality” was characteristic of regimes which were constitutively illiberal by any later standards. This passion belonged to small republics which closely regulated mores and behavior (e.g. through sumptuary laws), insisted on religious unity, rejected or at least greatly curtailed commerce, and effaced the distinction between public and private. “Love of equality” was equivalent to “love of frugality”—an upbeat version of Locke’s message, which was that to love equality was to love poverty.²¹ Any equality beyond the moral equality that we have been discussing was inconsistent with liberty, the finer things, big and powerful states, and progress. It was atavistic and anti-modern to seek to translate the concern with everyone’s interests and the smallness of our differences before God into a call for economic and political equality; one might as well wish to live among the savages of the new world or go back in time to a classical city‑state.

Liberalism’s Two-Front War

Liberalism proper emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution.²² It was a broad ideological and political camp, as befits a movement that offered itself as a third way, an alternative to both reaction and further revolution. In this “two-front war,” as Kahan calls it, there was a great deal of room for variation and disagreement; there were many coordinates one could place oneself at between those dreaded poles and still plausibly call oneself a liberal.²³ But one thing that brought liberals together was the belief that, whatever horrors might have been perpetrated in its course, the French Revolution’s attack on privilege, its abolition of feudalism, and its installation of equality under the law were significant achievements that demanded protection from attempts at aristocratic restoration. As long as the égalité that made up the middle term of the Revolution’s credo was interpreted in this way, liberals were devoted to it.

Liberals embraced this civil equality for a range of reasons: as part of a fight against corruption and misgovernment (especially in Britain), and as a means for gaining stability by accepting “accomplished facts” (in France). But another major reason was the judgment that the system of Christian aristocracy had ultimately failed to respect the moral equality it claimed to uphold. The march of history had revealed that, whatever long-standing philosophies and theologies may have taught, to treat others as of equal moral concern did require a common ideal of citizenship, rather than the feudal differentiation of men into ranks, orders, corps, and stations. We can treat Tocqueville as exemplary of this liberal thinking. Famously, he worked with stylized contrasts between forms of society, and in so doing he brought tradeoffs to the fore: egalitarian societies would never achieve the glory and refinement of aristocratic ones, for one thing. But one area where the former would excel was in their greater justice, for the treatment of others as moral equals had not in fact survived the hard social distinctions that had been integral to the anciens régimes of Europe. Aristocratic societies had cohesion and reliability: people lived in “fixed positions”—it was clear both to whom they owed obligations and on whom they could call for assistance and succor. Yet this hierarchical, differentiated dispensation had expunged the consciousness of a common humanity: “in these same centuries, the general notion of fellow is obscure.”²⁴ It had turned out to be impossible to preserve a sense of equal ultimate value when the idea of a shared “nation” had been obscured behind the categories of “privi­leged orders,” as the liberal intellectual Germaine de Staël put it.²⁵ To Tocqueville, pre-Revolution European society devolved into “a caste system” that generated “constant friction among self-obsessed little groups,” such that “the legitimate pride of citizenship fell into oblivion” and “each of the thousand small groups of which French society was composed thought only of itself.” Each became obsessed with “the order of precedence” and harbored “a great reservoir of contempt” for those whose rank was below his own. Even the improvement in material standards across the eighteenth century could not overcome the moral injury done by this social order. The ideological poisonousness of the ancien régime was encapsulated by the behavior of “Mme Duchâtelet, who . . . was quite comfortable disrobing in front of her servants, in view of the absence of incontrovertible proof that valets were men.”²⁶ Looking back after the revolutionary cataclysm, Tocqueville concluded that societies of estates and privileges stymied any sense of mutual respect among compatriots and fostered a dehumanizing attitude toward social inferiors. A single citizenly status and equality before the law were thus indispensable for the recognition of the equality of our souls.

Alongside this civil or legal equality ran a social-psychological dimen­sion. With the disappearance of formal barriers to each person practicing what occupation he wants, aiming to amass as much wealth as he wishes, or owning any kind of property that comes to market—with the establishment of careers open to talents and equal liability to taxation and punishment—men came to feel that they were profoundly “alike,” that the differences in endowments or achievement were somehow inessential next to our fundamental similarity. An attitude of “you think you’re better than me?” crept in. This trend toward a powerful feeling of likeness was assisted by the homogenizing impacts of industrial produc­tion and the spread of commerce, which obliterated regional variations and made the prejudices and tastes of the middle class nearly the only ones to which it was profitable to cater.²⁷ The sense of superiority that led Mme Duchâtelet to regard her servants as of another species was being ineluctably swept away; and whatever drawbacks attended this development, it nonetheless marked a great moral advance, for it brought us closer to the perspective of “the all-powerful and eternal Being, whose eyes necessarily take in the whole of things, and who sees all of humanity and each man distinctly.”²⁸

When it came to economic equality, liberalism in its mid-nineteenth-century heyday encompassed a spectrum of beliefs, though they re­mained anchored in a commitment to private property and a confidence in the benefits of economic growth. To all but a few of the more visionary among them, the arrival of legal and social equality suggested nothing about the termination of the division between rich and poor—although they frequently assumed that smaller wealth gaps and a broader distribution of property and opportunity aided the flourishing of representative government and free institutions. There was something of a divergence between those who thought that a greater measure of equality would come on its own with the replacement of traditional monopolies and customary limitations by free markets, at least if accompanied by increased provision of education and a merit-based public administration, and those who fretted (usually without proffering any solutions to the problem) that concentrations of economic power great enough to threaten liberty could emerge as a result of industrialization.²⁹ Kahan correctly observes that the reduction of liberalism to free market absolutism is distortive.³⁰ But as is often the case, correction begets overcorrection: liberals were usually proponents of retrenchment—“austerity hawks,” as we might now call them—and tended to take a slippery-slope approach to proposed expansions of state authority. Even when they strayed from their comfort zone of stripping away encumbrances and restrictions on exchange to facilitate a widening domain of contract, they often preferred that the state create a market for what needed to be done rather than doing the work itself.³¹ A few visionary liberals foresaw a possibility of inaugurating an economy of cooperative firms that would abolish the division between capitalists and laborers³²—but even for these rare writers who pushed the limits of liberalism, this was a prospect for the distant future. In the near term, and probably forever, a healthy society would be marked not by the end of the divide between capital and labor but the achievement of harmony between the classes through such means as lowering the tax burden on the working classes, removing the restraints that had traditionally ham­pered working-class organization and self-help, securing economic com­petition and free trade against cartelization and protectionism, and promoting the development of civic associations.

One point of contrast between liberalism and the worldview it so largely displaced is that the former tended to install a sharper contrast between the imperial and domestic contexts. Whereas the theorists of aristocracy saw a wide extent of hierarchies and privileges as permissible across both domains so long as they could be understood to operate in a manner beneficial to all, many liberals committed themselves to civil-legal equality in their own metropoles while insisting that these princi­ples did not apply in “less advanced” settings. There, they claimed, qualities of obedience, orderliness, reliability, industriousness, and coop­erativeness had to be instilled in the population before free discussion and free contract could be instituted.³³ Until that time, the principle that was to govern the relationship between metropolitan rulers and imperial subjects was that the former not seek to enrich themselves off the backs of the latter, instead ruling in accordance with the latter’s best interests as the more enlightened rulers’ saw them, which was usually taken to be equivalent to preparing them for an eventual arrival at a liberal stage of civilization. One day civil rights and equality before the law would come to the peoples under their imperial tutelage—but not yet.

Equality, but Not Yet

For all its real egalitarian leanings, though, liberalism in its first few generations was hardly as enamored of equality as the naïve reader today might imagine. The greatest of Victorian liberals, John Stuart Mill, wrote that “each person maintains that equality is the dictate of justice, except where he thinks that expediency requires inequality.”³⁴ Most liberals—including Mill himself—held that equality was likely to prove inexpedient in the political sphere when one considers how it would clash with other crucial values (such as efficiency, expertise, fairness, reasonableness). Englert’s new book is the latest entry in a series of historical works that have emphasized the nondemocratic character of early liber­alism. In the context of France, Englert’s work reinforces a lesson previously established but not fully absorbed: that one need not look to the imperial periphery to learn that democracy was far from a first principle for influential early liberals like Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, or François Guizot. In the domestic context, these liber­als—as did many in the United Kingdom—opposed political equality as instantiated in equal universal suffrage. A single Ngram (showing that the term “liberal democracy” first appears in the 1930s and only rises to prominence around the 1990s) can never tell anything close to a full story; but the assumption that liberals must subscribe to a democratic system of government was foreign to the period which Kahan, following the philosopher Eric Voegelin, calls the “field of optimal clarity” for liberalism.³⁵

A bedrock of classical liberalism, if we want to call it that, was the distinction between civil and political rights. As a legacy of the U.S. civil rights movement and the form that the struggle for racial equality took in this country, twenty-first-century Americans are used to considering civil rights as including the vote, eligibility for public office, etc. Nine­teenth-century liberals, however, treated these as two separate domains of rights. On the civil front, as we have seen, liberals’ egalitarianism was quite unyielding, and dovetailed with their sense that in these spheres the achievement of equality entailed primarily the removal of old re­straints, and hence was really a matter of emancipation or liberation. Opening careers to talents; dismantling remnants of hereditary privilege; guaranteeing the fair access of even the poorest to legal processes—on these fronts, equality advanced in tandem with laissez-faire and the rule of law. This was what Tocqueville referred to as “the equality of condi­tions,” and what Mill picked out as “the peculiar character of the modern world”:

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life . . . but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable. Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle. . . . The old theory was, that the least possible should be left to the choice of the individual agent, that all he had to do should, as far as practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. . . . The modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years of experience, is, that things in which the individual is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion, and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous.

Hence “freedom of individual choice” in social, economic, and professional matters and equality of civil rights went together seamlessly in the liberal social imaginary.³⁶

When it came to politics, however, the case was different. For this domain was not, as they saw it, an arena of open competition and voluntary cooperation, but one marked by the exercise of coercion. Political rights, above all the franchise, were a way of distributing power over others; thus they were not to be viewed as a symbol of our shared humanity to which all were entitled. On the contrary, the vote was a public function, and was to be granted or withheld in light of its impact on the representative system as a whole. Both Kahan and Englert highlight this theme, which recent accounts of liberalism have made prominent. Constant, probably the archetypal first-generation liberal, classed the vote under the category of “powers,” rather than true civil rights; the later libertarian-leaning liberal Herbert Spencer distinguished “so-called political rights” from “rights properly so called.”³⁷ Mainstream liberals and conservatives were by and large in accord that possession of the franchise had “no definite or assignable relation to liberty.”³⁸

The career of the Marquis de Condorcet, perhaps the exemplary philosophe of the late eighteenth century, points us to the boundaries of liberal thought on the cusp of its inception as a self-conscious creed. Shortly before the Revolution, as an advocate of liberalizing reforms who adopted the dominant natural-rights idiom of his context, he ranked the “right to contribute, either directly or through representatives, to the making of laws” among the “rights of man.” And yet despite this classification, Condorcet adjudged that this particular right of man needed to be held in abeyance, and inserted property qualifications into his constitutional proposals. “Zealous republicans,” he chided, should know that they were to take the listing of political participation as a natural right seriously but not literally; it was an end to aspire to, rather than a demand for the here-and-now, when “superstition” and “prejudices” would prevent the masses from recognizing “public happi­ness” and the “immutable laws of justice.”³⁹ After the Revolution broke out, though, Condorcet joined the ranks of the zealous republicans, devising a constitution that interpreted natural rights as requiring not only universal suffrage, but also extensive and baroque pathways for direct popular input in lawmaking. To insist on the immediate universalization of the franchise was by and large to leave the liberal ranks and enter a more radical ideological camp, and we can say that Condorcet left behind his liberal period under the vertiginous pressures of revo­lutionary populism.

At the conceptual level, then, liberals regarded political equality as a horse of a different color from civil equality because of the distinctively coercive character of state action; as the patron saint of liberalism, J. S. Mill, put it bluntly: “there is no such thing in morals as a right to power over others; and the electoral suffrage is that power.” Where power of this sort was concerned, all talk of “right” was inapt, and instead one had to return to the notion of the suffrage as “a trust for the public good,” susceptible therefore to all manner of limitations to ensure the system’s salutary character.⁴⁰ Of course, one could hold that, even if the vote were best conceived as a trust and not a right, nevertheless it was to the good that all citizens be so entrusted. Why did liberals, at least through most of the nineteenth century, not take this tack?

In general, liberals balked at equal universal suffrage for two reasons. The first was that it would bring about a form of class rule. Given that the working classes outnumbered the other sections in society, and that the rise of modern industry was making the conditions of labor ever less varied, “one man, one vote” portended the return of a homogeneous assembly, containing only one (proletarian) vantage point on social problems. This was a recipe for tyranny. The formal equality of such democratic electoral rules was illusory: it resulted in plebianism, not republicanism or representative government, with “the masses,” “the multitude,” alone effectively able to exercise legislative power.⁴¹ “Under the name of equality,” Mill observed, the votes of laborers and “the uneducated” would “in reality count for vastly more” given the great size of their socioeconomic constituency relative to that of the educated and upper classes.⁴² What was needed in the electoral realm was not equality, but diversity and inclusivity; without the latter, the arbitrary will and violent passions of the class controlling the legislature would run roughshod over the other segments of the population. Liberals thus diagnosed a likely conflict between two kinds of equality, “the equality of rights” in the civil sphere and the equality of the vote. Only a balance of power among classes in the legislative arena, which meant departing from equal vote-weight for all citizens, could supply a safeguard of civil equality.⁴³

The second rationale was more directly condemnatory of laborers and the unpropertied. The problem was not that political equality cashed out practically as the dominance of the largest class, which happened to be the lower class by dint of its size, but that the many were baldly unfit for the franchise. Kahan established the centrality of “capacity” to nineteenth-century liberalism in a previous book, and returns to it in his latest; Englert likewise highlights the theme in her work. Capacity was an expansive notion, and the accusation that it was lacking in certain populations (the working classes; those who did not pay direct tax; those who did not own landed property; the “residuum” of the perennially unemployed; the “priest-ridden”; women) came in different forms in different countries and decades. The vote was to be possessed only by those whose station secured for them an independent will, rather than being corruptible by employers on whom they were dependent; who held real political opinions as opposed to transient and ill-considered whims; who had the leisure to inform themselves about public affairs; who had attained a respectable character; who demonstrated literacy and numeracy. The rise of heavy industry, with the rote character of the work and the deplorable conditions in urban centers which accompanied it, made responsible mass public participation improbable. In the most maximalist versions, capacity was equated with nothing less than ascer­tainment of “reason, truth, and justice,” as one of the greatest early liberals—at once an historian, philosopher, prime minister, and architect of the modern French education system—François Guizot put it.⁴⁴ The modern-day libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan’s argument that “the right to a competent electorate” outweighs any individual right to the suffrage is very much in this spirit of original liberalism.⁴⁵

As is ever the case, particular policy concerns were closely intertwined with these broad theories. Among the litany of erroneous posi­tions imputed to the lower classes, the worries about bigotry we heard from the pre-revolutionary Condorcet above persisted; many liberals fretted that religious toleration would be under threat from the mob of the unlearned. Most of all, anticipated economic errors loomed large: attacks on private property, exorbitant taxation, and a whole host of other civilization-threatening anomalies (that increasingly came under the heading of “socialism” as the century wore on) were expected if the incapable rushed inside the pale of the constitution.

The case of America, where democracy seemed to be conjoined with religious reverence for property rights, gave some European liberals hope for the long run but did nothing to make them more friendly toward rapid democratization in their homelands. In America, property ownership was widespread, wages were high, and natural resources were abundant; these conditions rendered the population moderate and safe. But in the cramped, constrained, unequal societies of the Old World, equal political voice would bring mere plunder.⁴⁶ America also had a well-established education system and near-universal literacy; this was the minimum level of social achievement necessary to have even a shaky confidence that the people could appreciate the counterintuitive truths of political economy. If the joke about communism would later be that we’re all equal but some are more equal than others, for liberalism it was that we’re all equal now and will be even more so in future. Or, to adapt Saint Augustine: Lord, grant me political equality, but not yet.

Thus it was the position of many liberals that, with expanded educa­tion and continued economic growth, political equality might become as viable as civil equality had proven to be—though there was road still to travel. For other liberals, however, political equality did not appear on the horizon, eventually to be welcomed if properly prepared for, but instead presented a menace to be permanently warded off. Guizot was among the most ardent “never democrats,” on the grounds that, even with the greatest outlays to raise the socioeconomic and educational floor, the lower classes could not but remain relatively less enlightened and rational than their propertied betters. These were permanent, if unpleasant, truths about the comparative moral-intellectual attainments of different segments of the population. “Under the pretext of maintaining legitimate equality, [democracy] violently introduces equality where none exists, and pays no regard to legitimate inequality. The consequences of this principle are the despotism of number, the domination of inferiorities over superiorities, that is, a tyranny of all others the most violent and unjust.”⁴⁷ As another liberal put it decades later: “However [the working classes’] condition as to property and education and morals may be raised, they must always be the least educated portion of the community, the least endowed with political capacity . . . under no conditions can they help being more ignorant, more engrossed with the struggle for individual well-being, more unqualified to foresee or con­sider remote and collateral consequences.”⁴⁸

The “advanced liberal” Mill felt likewise, even several decades after deciding that Guizot had abandoned his good sense to the forces of reaction. Equal voting, he averred, ran counter to “the natural order of human life” because it treated the “superior knowledge and cultivation” of “better and wiser” people as “of exactly equal value” to the preferences of those with no insight into or interest in public matters. In politics, “one person is not as good as another,” yet equal suffrage wrongfully effaced the difference between ignorance and enlightenment.⁴⁹ How was one to get expertise and merit taken seriously in a society where the basic institutions of state suggested that all opinions were of equal weight? The worry had haunted minds since Tocqueville, at least: that with the spread of social equality an antiauthoritarian disposition became prevalent, one which saw “the intelligence of one man” as being just as good as another’s, leaving no room to recognize “greatness and superiority” in public affairs.⁵⁰

This severing of political equality from civic equality reflected the third-way character of early liberalism noted above. In terms of ideolo­gies or movements, as we observed, the two-front fight of liberals meant the refusal at once of revolutionary and reactionary tendencies. Translat­ed into institutional terms, this meant that they sought to steer between both aristocracy (which had in practice revealed itself to be not the rule of the best, but mere caste entrenchment) and democracy (which either degenerated into ochlocracy or portended a crushing stagnancy). The name most liberals gave to this institutional Aristotelian mean was representative government. It is no accident that this phrase, which has drifted to the margins of today’s discourse, appears in the titles of many of the most important works of the time. Liberals saw themselves as upholding a constitutional order (representative government) that could meet the imperatives to protect civil rights and facilitate orderly progress. Their opponents, on the contrary, indulged in either the radical sentimentalism of mistaking a share in public power for a human right or the atavistic nostalgia for fixed ranks and orders. Englert articulates the symmetry in liberals’ portrayals of rival regimes well in exegeting the aforementioned Guizot:

Guizot condemned political democracy by restating many of the arguments he first marshaled against the aristocratic renaissance. Both regimes erroneously attach rights to “birth alone.” Under aristocracy, the right to rule belongs to the sovereign privileged caste. Democracy, by contrast, universalizes that right; all are born sovereign by virtue of being born . . . the two regime types seem to spring from the same roots. Political democracy is no more than “aristocratic despotism” with an unfamiliar face, the “privilege” once reserved for men of noble birth now bestowed in error upon all men as the “right” to govern.⁵¹

Many liberals saw themselves as rejecting the hereditary investiture of political power—whether in few or all—in favor of a constitutional system adapted to the facts about where knowledge, merit, and virtue resided in their societies.

The question of speech is a good illustration of how the divide between the political and civil informed liberal ideas. Mill’s On Liberty is now assumed to be a sacrosanct liberal text, and certainly it was acclaimed upon its publication. But many liberals stopped well short of Mill’s free speech absolutism, and significant restrictions on speech were present across the “liberal” countries of the era. On this question, there was a divide within liberalism. Once again, Guizot was a typical figure. For him and his school, the doctrinaires, the press was a kind of governmental machinery; it was an apparatus by which society revealed its needs and formed conclusions about acting on those needs, not different in kind from what occurred in assemblies or elections. The press, they believed, was a quasi-official partner in governance, a public power. They concluded from this analysis that, being a public function, the press demanded regulation—assurances were necessary for its re­sponsible use in the common interest. To run a newspaper was to command an important social force, and thus it had to be treated in a manner akin to regulation of the franchise. Following out these ideas, the doctrinaires came close to transforming journalism into a class privilege: to operate a newspaper, they advocated that the state require a very high deposit that would be forfeited if the publication overstepped the boundaries of the press’s ordered liberty and became licentious.⁵² Non-Millian liberals retained the long-standing distinction between the press’s liberty and its license, and asserted that the state’s prerogative to superintend the deployment of modern technologies included the terrain of communications. As one idiosyncratic liberal put it, “the newspaper has become the vehicle of ideas, much like the railway has for persons and parcels”; it was “an article of civilization like gas, steam, electricity, paper-money, gunpowder,” all of which eminently demanded an ele­ment of government control.⁵³ Hence the government was called to check incendiary rhetoric from the newspapers, and to prevent abusive publishers from operating.

By contrast, those liberals who took a libertarian line closer to Mill’s treated the liberty of discussion and the press as belonging to the domain of civil rights. These figures, like Benjamin Constant, of course acknowledged that much of what citizens would communicate via the press would have political import. But they denied that the government acquired any right therefrom to prescribe the terms of the expression and publication, just as they asserted that the evident fact that religion affected politics did not entail that the state could rightfully dictate the order of church services. The free press, on this account, was ultimately to be understood as an instrument of the self-determining life—a good in which we were all equally interested, and which we could pursue without exerting power over others. Free speech was not a correlative of democracy (until late in the nineteenth century, most of those inclined to speech-libertarianism were less than enthusiastic about universal suf­frage); it was a civil liberty. And civil liberties, rather than political powers, were to be apportioned equally.

While “equality before the law” was at the center of their credo, liberals tended to pooh-pooh notions of “social equality” that went be­yond recognizing the “immutable respect for human nature as such”; and they generally wished that extensions of political rights would occur cautiously and gradually. “The Liberal Principle of civil Equality” was cashed out “not in levelling down, but in levelling up, not in weakening the strong, but in strengthening the weak, not in destroying the power of natural superiority, but in breaking down the artificial barriers raised between man and man by Privilege, Monopoly, and Ascendancy.” Its hallmark was to cheer on popular enlightenment while scrupulously striving to keep political reforms from outrunning it:

the first and broadest of all Liberal Principles is the unreserved recognition of Progress as the appointed law of all human institu­tions, civil or religious. . . . He does not fall into the Conservative error of imagining that codes or precedents or customs or forms have any vitality or any authority in themselves, but he regards them as products of national character, the development of which should keep pace, and should not more than keep pace, with the natural process of social evolution.⁵⁴

Liberalism was thus quintessentially the ideology of (civil) equality protected and (political) equality postponed. In politics, equality was not an intrinsic value for most liberals. Its bestowal or refusal depended on contingent facts about the economic, social, and educational condi­tion of the country. And paradoxically, when liberals envisioned sce­narios in which they would be prepared to support formal equality, these often included the proviso that the masses had proven ready to acknowledge the practical inequality in knowledge and ability necessary for the right conduct of public affairs. Democracy was tenable when, and only when, the lower classes—while having the right and indeed duty to express their perspectives on issues—nonetheless showed themselves willing to heed the verdicts of experts, specialists, the learned. The virtue of discerning deference, as we might call it, had to be ingrained before the conferral of equal universal suffrage. Discerning deference meant escaping both (on the one hand) the traditional sub­missiveness before squires, aristocratic trumpery, old family names, or mere wealth, and (on the other) an intellectually egalitarian complacency that suggested good intentions were enough on their own for devising sound policy and that no one really knew any better than the common man. For a number of liberals, political equality would be the reward for the internalization of the lessons of intellectual inequality.

Here Mill is, as usual, archetypical. Mill wrote in his thirties, the most politically radical period of his adulthood, that the many would be ripe for their share of sovereign authority precisely when they showed themselves “duly sensible of the value of superior wisdom” and appre­ciative of the insights of the “specially instructed Few.” At the very least, democracy required that workers had internalized “the great prin­ciples on which society rests, the security of property, and the maintenance of the authority of law.”⁵⁵ At the same time, Mill was theorizing a kind of natural alignment between the working classes and the professional middle classes, one in which the latter took the reins in articulating the “common interest” of all those bereft of “privileges”—manual workers, professionals, and independent industrialists alike were bound by hostility to landowners, rentiers, lords, incompetent aristocratic incumbents in church and state, parasites, and idlers.⁵⁶

Some liberals drew from this sort of diagnosis the conclusion that a wider franchise was unnecessary, as the working class was already having its needs looked after by their (more educated) natural allies. Others who wished for the gradual broadening of the suffrage reassured themselves that, because the lower classes were inclined to accept the judgments of the educated and their interests ultimately harmonized, political equality might in fact supply the proper setting from which the earned inequalities of expertise and learning and deliberative ability could be given their due—at least if the ascendant professionals and industrialists comported themselves less haughtily than the old aristocracy. “Brains and numbers” could go hand-in-hand, so long as the latter’s inclusion came about slowly and the commonfolk proved able, due to salubrious cultural conditions, to repel the instinct to acquiesce to the lowest common denominator’s views. Over the decades, those who could never come around to such sanguine hopes about the kinship between meritocratic professionals and laborers fell into despondency about the seeming inevitability of democracy. Their brand of “old liberalism” was quite dead by the early twentieth century.

Underlying this rich and multifarious landscape of liberal theorizing was a terror of stagnation. In the eighteenth century and the decades after the French Revolution, fears of the demos tended to be cast in terms of anarchy and ochlocracy—mob rule, fickleness, violence would be the order of the day. During the acme of liberalism, however, the chief anxiety had shifted to stagnation, to a deadening cultural mediocrity ushered in by democratic leveling.⁵⁷ A number of stories were told as to how exactly this would come about: that the monopolization of the state by the lower class would crush public debate; or the majority tyranny about which Tocqueville warned would impress a deadening conformity to custom and silence eccentrics and trailblazers; or the push toward bureaucratization caused by a misguided philanthropic impulse that wanted all the ills of poverty solved immediately would leave no space for innovation. Amid these doleful recitations, “envy” often appeared; whatever equality liberals wanted had nothing to do with the base instinct to tear down those who rose high or marched to the beat of their own drummer.⁵⁸ All progress, almost by definition, had begun with new ideas that came from a talented and courageous minority. One of the deepest and most characteristic terrors of liberalism as it came to self‑consciousness was that what came to be called “mass society” and the “consumerist” values of ill-cultured people would ruin the soil out of which artistic and industrial greatness grew. It is no accident that Mill wrote an essay on “genius” as a young man, or that his On Liberty was recognized from the moment of publication to be a book chock-full of hearty elitism, animated by the impulse to protect the few luminous minds—whose habits and ways would inevitably be repugnant to many ordinary men and women around them—from the deadening yoke of public opinion.⁵⁹ Original liberalism was suffused by technocratic ele­ments (as befitted a movement of professionals), but importantly also by Romanticism and its cult of intellectual and artistic heroism.⁶⁰ Liberalism was the ideology of those who disdained both mere rote labor and the conferral of power to “conventional or accidental advantages”; its rallying cry was “the claim of pre-eminence for personal qualities,” the appeal to do justice to “active and aspiring talent.”⁶¹ The civil rights which liberals would grant equally had the dual merit of securing weaker groups from oppression and protecting those qualities of genius and scientific expertise which were threatened by the homogenizing effects of commercial busyness, bureaucratic creep, corrupt institutional capture, and mass lowbrow media. Unreserved support for civil-legal equality, combined with diffidence and caution toward movements for political equality, was what liberals believed a progressive orientation to public life dictated.

Post-Democratic Liberalism

Several themes that are today associated with right-wing anti-liberalism, then, were quite at home within liberalism during its formative period. An obses­sion with warding off the stagnation that would ensue if a brilliant and talented minority were shackled by an envious many characterized the greatest liberals of the nineteenth century. Believers in our ultimate moral equali­ty, in contrast to anti-liberal figures such as Nietzsche, they nonetheless shared the concern that there were rival egalitarianisms which might stifle progress.

Indeed, the liberalism I’ve been exegeting here surely bears only the thinnest of relations to that of the twenty-first century, one might think, when almost no liberals avow an open hostility to democracy, instead present­ing themselves as its protectors. But this would be an oversimplification. Scholars have divided the “parliamentary liberalism” that has been the subject of this article from the “democratic liberalism” that succeeded it,⁶² when a synthesis between the democratic and liberal traditions seem to have coalesced into a stable governing system for the West, one which held liberty and equality together in the proper balance. The constant claims of crisis we hear now suggest we might be entering a third phrase, one of post-democratic liberalism.

With today’s alarm about “populism,” liberalism is in a way return­ing to its origins. Absent steady guidance, the people are only too inclined to support demagogues and plutocrats rather than dispassionate and principled men of learning. The angst about misinformation be­speaks a profound mistrust of the capacity of average people to partici­pate in public debate without effective supervision; the “irresponsible” use of media platforms has become a quintessential liberal bugaboo. Credentials and experts, liberals across America and Europe have frequently lamented in recent years, are insufficiently heeded. And the countries of the liberal West have undergone processes of judicialization and bureaucratization that remove ever more decisions from democratic contestation. The great liberal anxiety of the nineteenth century was that democratization would bring unyielding working-class control of gov­ernment, that the “mere will” of workers would displace public reason. This worry turned out to be unfounded: electoral democracy, if any­thing, systematically secured too little, rather than too much, influence for the less affluent. And yet the fear that the populace is too heedless of the advice of their betters has come back to prominence within liberalism—and perhaps unsurprisingly, has done so precisely as non-elite political engagement in several liberal nations, including the United States, is on the rise.⁶³

If one constitutive element of “populism,” according to its detractors, is a lack of respect for knowledge, achievement, and expertise, and an overreliance on folk wisdom, another is its alleged contempt for vulner­able minorities. Here, the language of equality plays an important role, and one that is ambivalent in ways that recall the liberalism of yore. Whatever might be the state of liberal political philosophy, movement liberalism today is closely tied to a progressive instinct that mistrusts popular judgment. This mistrust is grounded in solicitude for what it considers central individual rights, and the rhetoric around these indi­vidual rights is closely tied to the value of equality. So far, so many resemblances to nineteenth-century liberalism. But whereas the earlier iteration placed freedom of contract and exchange, freedom of association, freedom of worship, and equal treatment before the law at the center of the list of rights which it sought to protect in the name of our moral equality, and generally regarded bureaucracy and state expansion as threats to these rights, the newer vintage has concentrated on issues of identity recognition, the affirmation of a true self, freedom from offense and hate, and tends to embrace bureaucratization and state action to advance these goals. Equality in the hands of contemporary left-liberals seems most often to countenance increased regulation and intervention into civil society and private life, and to do so in ways that arguably undermine traditional liberal understandings of due process and the rule of law. The instantiation of these new rights supposedly derived from a commitment to equality also tends to take place in venues far from the domain of democratic accountability, to occur via courts and agencies and HR departments. It is for this reason that one increasingly hears, for example, laments from liberal outlets that referendums and elections pose the real threats to democracy,⁶⁴ much as original liberalism feared universal suffrage as a stumbling block for civil equality and minority rights. If that proto-liberal, John Locke, argued that public office was a trust and that it was the constant endeavor of magistrates to prove to the people their worthiness to continue to be so entrusted, liberals in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries seem to reverse the equation, and suggest that it’s the people who need to prove themselves trustworthy to the more educated strata if they wish to weigh in on the pressing issues of the day.

Liberalism appears, then, to be replaying some of its original tunes in emphasizing individual civil rights (however differently conceived and carried out) over political power in its conception of equality. But there is a further trouble for the liberalism of today that the liberalism of yesteryear did not face: simply, that equality does more work in con­temporary liberal argument, and is more expansively invoked. Institutional liberalism in the 2020s (even in Europe, where it retains much more of its free market connotations) considers economic inequality in itself a matter of much greater concern than did its ancestral version. Liberalism now presents itself largely as the home for those who, while repudiating socialism and wishing to preserve a good measure of eco­nomic competition, nevertheless seek greater income and wealth equali­ty. Hence equality does double duty in the discourse of modern liberals: they are the champions both of lower Gini coefficients, and also of the identity- and recognition-driven social claims with which we have become all too familiar. But though one might speak of equality in both domains, one might well ask (as the electorate seems to do): what does one really have to do with another, and what does either of them nec­essarily have to do with that particular equality which should be prized by democrats, namely, an equal power to shape the basic institutions of the state? Are lgbtqia+ rights and a more redistributive/regulative economic policy really part of the same cause, just because the word equality is often attached to both? Much of liberalism’s difficulty of late seems to lie in that, while one can naturally spin out exotic theories about why the two form part of a common moral project, it has as of yet failed to find a compelling story to account for why these quite disparate sets of issues have become bundled together—or, at least, none more compelling than the opposite story that letting economic inequality boom fits more neatly with a cul­tural egalitarianism of identity affirmation and therapeutic emancipation.

Finally, there remains the stubborn fact that support for liberalism qua cultural progressivism is weak among precisely those who want more welfare benefits and worker’s rights.⁶⁵ As McMahon’s book shows us, it is eminently possible to spread a message of social hierarchy to everyone (as did Confucius⁶⁶), just as one might preach a gospel of equality only to a select few. This latter situation, which increasingly characterizes our prestigious institutions, leads to a situation in which elites ask for deference in part on the grounds that they understand best what equality entails. Liberalism today finds itself in the rather paradoxical place of upholding an elite whose claim to preeminence lies in part in its being more egalitarian than those below them in the class structure. In this, it is not entirely unlike its forebears from two centuries prior.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 3 (Fall 2024): 172–94.

Notes