What's in a name?

I knew it was a mistake involving myself in political commentary*, but having taken the plunge, I guess I have to keep swimming, at least until the election.

One of the things that has mystified me for years is how the label "liberal" came to be associated with support for government regulation of business, e.g. environmental and worker protection measures, or even (heaven forbid) financial transactions. I know that my colleagues in political science would have an answer to this, and I suspect it goes back to sometime in the 1980s, when Berke Breathed did all those comics about the General [my bad: the Major; it's been a long time] and Milo hunting liberals in the meadows of Bloom County. But knowing the little that I do about the history of the concept of liberalism as it developed in the 19th century, I must confess myself rather confused.

This is the way John Stuart Mill (as Wikipedia puts it, "one of the first champions of modern 'liberalism'") saw the problem, in his On Liberty (1859). According to Mill, the great issue of his own day was "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." Note that here, Mill is talking about "society", not "government". The distinction is important. For Mill, the great danger to individual liberty was civil or social, not political, and the tyranny he was concerned with was that of the mass of people (i.e. "society") "collectively over the separate individuals who compose it." Back in the Middle Ages (I love this part!**), "and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality to the present time [i.e. the 19th century], the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power. At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of the masses."

For Mill, being lost in the crowd was hardly a good thing. In his view, the crowd, the mass, was inevitably "a collective mediocrity." And nothing good could come from such a mediocrity. "The initiation of all wise or noble things comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual." As Mill saw it, civilization was in a crisis and would necessarily die out if the freedom of the individual to pursue his own thoughts and activities were not preserved. Accordingly, Mill was adamantly opposed to anything approaching social regulation, except insofar as "any part of a person's conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others." At this point, "society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it becomes open to discussion." But up to that point, society has no business in prescribing how a person should behave.

Now, you will doubtless detect even in this somewhat clumsy summary, the seeds of our present-day arguments in favor of diversity (Mill's own word) and free social experimentation. Appropriately, you might say, Mill argued that society, acting through the State, has no business passing laws against (for example) drunkenness or fornication or gambling, except insofar as it offended against decency and so encroached onto the public realm. Likewise, he insisted, marriage, "having the peculiarity that its objects are frustrated unless the feelings of both the parties are in harmony with it, should require nothing more than the declared will of either party to dissolve it." In other words, there should be no legal or social barrier to divorce. In similar fashion, if to his own personal distaste, there should be no legal or social barriers to variants on marriage, as for example, that of polygamy as practiced by the Mormons, as long as the women involved consented to it voluntarily.

So far, so good, right? Here we have liberals in all their glory, arguing for multicultural curricula and gay marriage and lowered drinking ages and no seat belt laws and free trade and no mandatory public schools....wait, am I still talking about liberals? According to Mill, I am. "Trade," he argued, "is a social act.... [It] is now recognized, though not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality of commodities are most effectually provided for by leaving the producers and sellers perfectly free, under the sole check of equal freedom to the buyers for supplying themselves elsewhere." And on schools: "If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them." Sounds like charter schools and vouchers to me. Mill likewise anticipated the No Child Left Behind Act: "The instrument for enforcing the law [to obtain an education] could be no other than public examinations, extending to all children and beginning at an early age." Mill doesn't actually mention seat belts (there being no automobiles in his day), but it is fairly easy to extend his argument about drunkenness to include similar activities that endanger only oneself.

What's a Bloom County liberal to do? Yes, Mill insisted that "diversity [is] not an evil, but a good," but only "until mankind are much more capable than at present of recognizing all sides of a truth." Yes, Mill argued that government should be conducted on the basis of "free and equal discussion," but he did not think that this discussion should go on indefinitely: "As mankind improve, the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase; and the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested." In other words, eventually, given enough discussion, we will all agree, although it will be important at that point still to practice argument so that civilization does not stagnate. But that time is still incalculably far away. Accordingly, "as it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them."

Nevertheless, in the end, truth will out, but only if the State keeps its nose out of everybody's business: "The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes--will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish."

Could it be that those who today call themselves "conservatives" are actually, in Mill's terms, "liberals"? George Orwell would be proud.

*By which I mean, I really should be working on that list of liturgical uses of books of Hours, not writing about politics right now.
**It has more bite if you read it against Jakob Burckhardt's contention in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, published in the very next year (1860; trans. S.G.C. Middlemore, 1929): "In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness--that which was turned within as that which was turned without--lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation--only through some general category." In other words, there were no individuals, pace Mill. So, which is it? Mass society then or now?