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This question has often been asked both by liberals and their conservative critics, especially when confronting fascists, Nazis, and communists who will trample on individual rights and liberties and destroy liberal societies in the name of some supposedly higher good. Some liberal democracies have answered by banning political parties with such totalitarian aims. In recent years, however, the question of whether to tolerate those who seem to be intolerant has been asked with renewed urgency in Denmark, The Netherlands, and other European nations known for their tolerance of other cultures and ways of life. Middle Eastern immigrants, most of them Muslims, have immigrated into Europe but have retained beliefs and customs that people in their host countries deem sexist, homophobic, and generally intolerant of liberal toleration. The resulting clash of cultures has produced some dramatic confrontations, such as the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2005 by a Dutch-born Muslim of Moroccan descent. Van Gogh had recently released a film, Submission (which is what “Islam” means in Arabic), which exposed and criticized the mistreatment of women in conservative Islamic communities. The murderer used a knife in van Gogh’s chest to pin a note threatening death to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim woman and member of the Dutch Parliament who had collaborated with van Gogh on the film.38 In another event, the publication in Denmark in 2006 of newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in satirical and unflattering ways sparked riots and the firebombing of Danish embassies and businesses in several Middle Eastern countries.
These events testify to the importance of the question, Should liberals tolerate those who are not themselves tolerant? Liberals typically answer by drawing a distinction between belief and behavior. Following John Stuart Mill, they say that liberal societies should tolerate almost any attitude or belief or opinion, however abhorrent others may find it. If, however, someone acts on such a belief and if that action produces harm to someone other than the actor, then the action—but not the belief, or public expressions of the belief—can be forbidden by law and punished accordingly.
Conservative critics (and some liberals) object that there is no hard-and-fast distinction between belief and behavior, pointing out that—as Mill himself wrote—“It is what men think that determines how they act. . . .”39 People who think illiberal thoughts or hold illiberal opinions and intolerant beliefs are apt to act in illiberal and intolerant ways. Therefore, critics contend, there are good grounds for a liberal society to censor public expressions of illiberal views and to outlaw or exclude antiliberal individuals or groups (for example, Nazi parties). The Danes and the Dutch have not gone this far— yet. But the Dutch government has begun to tell prospective immigrants that they must be tolerant if they are themselves to be tolerated in turn. As the New York Times reported from the Netherlands:
So strong is the fear that Dutch values of tolerance are under siege that the government [in 2006] introduced a primer on those values for prospective newcomers to Dutch life: a DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing. The film does not explicitly mention Muslims, but its target audience is as clear as its message: embrace our culture or leave.40
Intolerance in the form of terrorism raises the same question in a different form. In the United States liberals, long committed to fair play and the rule of law, are now divided over how to deal with the threat of terrorism. Should the right of privacy be
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protected or compromised in the face of potential terrorist threats? Are secret searches without warrants justified in some circumstances? Should the security of the wider society take precedence over the civil rights of individuals? Many, perhaps most, liberals answer negatively; but some answer in the affirmative, claiming that Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups are not only terrorist but totalitarian organizations prepared to turn American civil liberties against liberty itself.41 And the libertarianleaning judge and legal scholar Richard Posner contends that during a “national emergency” the U.S. Constitution is “not a suicide pact” that protects the civil liberties of the possibly guilty few at the cost of the liberty of the innocent many.42 Shortly before leaving office in 2007, moreover, British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a similar warning. It is, he said, a “dangerous judgment” to put the rights of suspected terrorists ahead of the safety of the public, and he promised to give British police sweeping powers to stop and question anyone without a warrant.43
By contrast, liberals like Ronald Dworkin hold that liberties protected only when the state finds it convenient or costless to do so are not really liberties at all. All governments will, if they can, extend their powers into the lives and liberties of individuals, using any reason or excuse, including “national emergency” or “the global war on terror.” No government should ever be given a free hand to bypass the Constitution and curtail the freedom of its citizens or to engage in torture and other violations of human rights.44 If we are to remain citizens of a free and open society dedicated to the rule of law, there are strict ethical and legal limits on what the government can do in our name.
Such tensions divide liberals, now perhaps more than ever. As we shall see in the chapter following, conservatives—like liberals—agree about many issues, but do not speak with a single voice on every issue. Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona), for example, is generally considered quite conservative, especially where national defense is concerned, but he has taken a stand against torture that is similar to the liberal Dworkin’s. As McCain has argued, the question is not who “they” (terrorists or suspected terrorists) are, but who we are as a nation and what we will become if we allow suspects to be tortured in our name and supposedly for our sake.45 Neither liberalism nor conservatism is so sharply defined and coherent as to have one and only one position for a liberal or a conservative to take on every possible issue. In fact, as the following chapters will show, no ideology is so clear cut that its adherents never disagree among themselves. If the lack of agreement on such an important question as whether to tolerate the intolerant is a problem for liberals, in short, it is not a problem that they alone must face.
Coda 2: A New New Deal?
Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 there has been a concerted and partially successful effort to roll back or repeal the reforms of the New Deal era. Regulations on banks and other financial institutions were eased or eliminated, allowing them to expand into areas of the economy that had previously been off limits. Deregulation and privatization—long the watchwords of neoliberalism—became the new currency of political debate and public policy during the presidencies of Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Then in 2007, the last year of the younger Bush’s administration, the unthinkable happened: economies around the globe,
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including the American economy, began to contract and even to collapse in the greatest recession since the Great Depression. Major banks and other large financial institutions—Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and others—collapsed like a house of cards. Credit dried up almost overnight. Undercapitalized and overleveraged, unregulated or under-regulated to a remarkable degree, and hoping to reap enormous profits, these institutions had taken huge gambles—largely though not exclusively in the subprime mortgage market—and had lost almost everything.
The ensuing financial firestorm prompted the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration to take drastic measures to prop up failed or fastfailing financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.” The “bailout” of these institutions was quickly followed by a rescue of the American automobile giants, General Motors and Chrysler (Ford took no government money). In 2009 the federal government oversaw the sale of Chrysler to the Italian automaker Fiat and took ownership of 60 percent of GM, with the Canadian government and the United Autoworkers Union owning another 12.5 percent. In the case of the auto industry, as with the financial sector, the justification offered for the bailout was that the failure of these large and iconic institutions would be catastrophic for the rest of the economy. Jobs lost in the auto industry would mean jobs lost in plants and factories that manufacture the thousands of parts that go into every car, from pistons and camshafts to axles and tires, dashboards and windshields. The resulting “ripple effect” of failure at one end would produce a cascade of catastrophes in communities all across the country. Having taken such a huge stake in the financial and auto industries, the federal government became the “stakeholder of last resort”—a move that outraged conservatives and troubled many liberals, especially those who protested that the government seemed prepared to rescue large banks and mortgage companies while leaving small mortgage holders to fend for themselves, which often meant facing foreclosure and the loss of their homes to the very banks that had taken taxpayer money.
Some—critics and supporters alike—dubbed the Obama administration’s policies a “new New Deal” that emulates and in some respects even exceeds the original New Deal. To be sure, there are some similarities. For one, both were prompted by a dire financial emergency. For another, both were experimental attempts to save capitalism from its own excesses. It merits mentioning and underscoring that both FDR and Obama regarded their efforts as attempts to stimulate and reform—rather than replace—a capitalist economy in crisis. Liberal defenders of both say that conservative critics who cried “socialism” seem neither to appreciate nor to understand the crucial distinction between reforming capitalism and replacing it outright. Under the previous system profits had been privatized and risks socialized—that is, if a large firm (bank, insurance company, hedge fund, etc.) took risks that led to its failure, the American taxpayer would come to the rescue. Such a system was rife with moral hazard, that is, the danger that people who don’t have to experience the consequences of their bad behavior will behave more recklessly and irresponsibly than those who do.
FDR once quipped that he felt like someone who had saved a drowning man only to be criticized for not saving the man’s hat as well. His point was that the drowning man—capitalism, or rather its agents and avatars (bankers, hedge fund managers, and others)—can be saved only if that man agrees (or is required) to wear the life preserver of financial regulation. Without those regulations and restrictions, he will take undue and even reckless risks with other people’s money, swimming without protection in the
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roiling waters of financial danger and opportunity. This might be well and good, if only his own life and livelihood were in danger; but, liberals like Roosevelt note, other people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake here—workers, homeowners, investors, depositors, retirees, pension funds, and of course taxpayers—and so the harm principle requires that government intervene to prevent harm to those endangered others: taking risks with other people’s money, homes, and jobs is quite clearly an other-regard- ing act. For liberals, then, the harm principle undergirds and justifies a “new New Deal” in America and, indeed, in any society with a capitalist economy.46
NOTES
1.Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 11; see Terence Ball and Richard Dagger, eds., Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader, 8th ed. (New York: Longman, 2011), selection 3.10.
2.Ibid., Chapter 13.
3.Quoted in Herbert Muller, Freedom in the Western World: From the Dark Ages to the Rise of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 307. The English Bill of Rights (1689) should not be confused with the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791), which comprises the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
4.John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, paragraph 4; Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.11.
5.For a systematic comparison of the Declaration of Independence and Locke’s arguments, see Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 42–49. On the background and meaning of the Declaration, see Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Random House, 1942); Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
6.The full text of the Declaration is printed in Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.13. For Jefferson’s original draft, see Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball, eds., Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 96–102.
7.Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny (London, 1775); quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960 [1791]), p. 876.
8.See James Farr, “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought,” Political Theory, 14 (1986): 263–289.
9.For a debate on Locke’s purported “feminism,” see Melissa Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” American Political Science Review, 72 (1978): 135–150, and Terence Ball, “Comment on Butler,” ibid., 73 (1979): 549–550, followed by Butler’s “Reply,” ibid., 550–551.
10.Muller, Freedom in the Western World, p. 382.
11.As translated in Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1792); emphasis in original. For the full text of the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen, see Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.14.
12.Included in Ideals and Ideologies as selection 8.53.
13.Michael Walzer, “Citizenship,” in Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, eds.,
Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 211–219, provides an insightful account of the notion of citizenship in the French Revolution.
14.Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter II; see Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.15.
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15.J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition: Leonardo to Hegel
(New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 455.
16.Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner, 1948), p. 1.
17.Ibid., p. 70.
18.For Bentham’s views on voting, see Terence Ball, “Utilitarianism, Feminism and the Franchise,” History of Political Thought, 1 (1980): 91–115.
19.John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter I; see Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.17.
20.Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982 [1783]), p. 159.
21.See the excerpt from Mill’s Representative Government in Ideals and Ideologies, selection 2.9. For further discussion of “protective” (or “economic”) versus “educative” theories of democracy, see Terence Ball, Transforming Political Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), chap. 6.
22.William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1970), p. 88; see Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.18.
23.Ibid., p. 114.
24.See Green’s essay, “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,” part of which appears as “Liberalism and Positive Freedom,” in Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.19.
25.For an important and influential critique of positive liberty, see Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Berlin, Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a critique of Berlin and a defense of positive freedom, see Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” in Alan Ryan, ed., The Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
26.For an overview, see Michael Freeden, “The Coming of the Welfare State,” in Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
27.See Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where do we go from here?”; reprinted in Ideals and Ideologies, selection 8.49.
28.See, e.g., “The Port Huron Statement” of the Students for a Democratic Society; reprinted in James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 329–374.
29.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
30.Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 169.
31.See Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” printed as the Appendix to his The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
32.For an elaboration of the libertarian anarchist position, see Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1973); also Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.22.
33.See Terence Ball, “Imagining Marketopia,” Dissent 48 (2001): 74–80; reprinted in a slightly revised and updated version as “A Libertarian Utopia” in Ideals and Ideologies, selection 3.23.
34.Edison Electric Institute report, “Why Are Electricity Prices Increasing?” (Washington, D.C.: The Edison Foundation, Summer 2006); David Cay Johnston, “Competitive Era Fails to Shrink Electric Bills,” New York Times, Oct. 15, 2006, pp. A1, A27; and “Flaws Seen in Markets for Utilities,” Nov. 21, 2006, pp. C1, C4.
35.John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
36.See, e.g., William Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George Sher, Beyond Neutrality: Perfectionism and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., Civic Liberalism: Reflections on Our Democratic Ideals (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
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37.Amitai Etzioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society
(New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 12.
38.Ayaan Hirsi Ali has since sought political asylum in the United States and published an autobiography, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007).
39.Mill, Considerations on Representative Government in Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, A. D. Lindsay, ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), p. 247.
40.“Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to the Center,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 2006, pp. A1, A12.
41.Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003).
42.Richard Posner, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
43.“Police to Get Tough New Terror Powers,” The Sunday Times, May 27, 2007; at www. timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1845196.ece, as of August 19, 2007.
44.Ronald Dworkin, “Terror and the Attack on Civil Liberties,” New York Review of Books, 50 (November 6, 2003): 37–41.
45.John McCain, “Torture’s Terrible Toll,” Newsweek (November 21, 2005); available at www.newsweek.com/id/51200 as of July 22, 2009.
46.Many free-market libertarians, including Ayn Rand follower and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, were by their own admission caught completely off-guard by the Great Recession that threatened to turn into the Great Depression 2.0. For one liber- tarian-leaning thinker’s rethinking of unregulated free-market capitalism, see Richard A. Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Note that Posner writes of “a failure,” and not (as a socialist might) of “the failure” of capitalism. His point is that this is a particular failure from which we can learn lessons about what reforms and regulations are needed, and why. But he regards “recession” as a euphemism and insists that “depression” better describes the “crisis of ’08.”
FOR FURTHER READING
Ashcraft, Richard. Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Berlin, Isaiah. Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Boaz, David. Libertarianism: A Primer. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
Dagger, Richard. “Communitarianism and Republicanism,” in G. Gaus and C. Kukathas, eds., Handbook of Political Theory. London: SAGE Publications, 2004.
Dworkin, Ronald. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Elton, G. R. Reformation Europe, 1517–1559. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Etzioni, Amitai, ed. New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions, and Communities. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.
Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose. New York: Avon Books, 1981. Gray, John. Liberalism. Milton Keynes, U.K.: Open University Press, 1986.
Halévy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. London: Faber & Faber, 1928. Hayek, Friedrich. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Krugman, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Manning, D. J. Liberalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976.
Miller, James. Democracy Is in the Streets: From the Port Huron Statement to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Moon, J. Donald. Constructing Community: Moral Pluralism and Tragic Conflicts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
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Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Ryan, Alan. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Ruggiero, Guido de. The History of European Liberalism, trans., R. G. Collingwood. Boston: Beacon Press, 1959.
Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Selznick, Philip. The Communitarian Persuasion. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002.
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Spragens, Thomas A., Jr. The Irony of Liberal Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Terchek, Ronald. Republican Paradoxes and Liberal Anxieties. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Wolfe, Alan. The Future of Liberalism. New York: Random House, 2009.
From the Ball and Dagger Reader Ideals and Ideologies, Eighth Edition
Part III: Liberalism
10.Thomas Hobbes—The State of Nature and the Basis of Obligation, page 56
11.John Locke—Toleration and Government, page 63
12.Thomas Paine—Government, Rights, and the Freedom of Generations, page 78
13.Declaration of Independence of the United States, page 82
14.Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, page 85
15.Adam Smith—Private Profit, Public Good, page 88
16.Immanuel Kant—Freedom and Enlightenment, page 91
17.John Stuart Mill—Liberty and Individuality, page 94
18.William Graham Sumner—According to the Fitness of Things, page 101
19.T. H. Green—Liberalism and Positive Freedom, page 105
20.Franklin D. Roosevelt—New Deal Liberalism: A Defense, page 109
21.Donald Allen—Paternalism vs. Democracy: A Libertarian View, page 114
22.Murray Rothbard—Libertarian Anarchism, page 119
23.Terence Ball—A Libertarian Utopia, page 123
USEFUL WEBSITES
Americans for Democratic Action: www.adaction.org.
Move On: www.moveon.org.
People for the American Way: www.pfaw.org.
The American Prospect: www.prospect.org.
The Ayn Rand Institute: www.aynrand.org.
The Cato Institute: www.cato.org.
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Exercises for Liberalism
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