Liberalism's "key concept": "Liberals have championed the cause of freedom on the assumption that individuals are rational enough to shape their conduct and beliefs with minimal interference from State or Church" (2).
Liberalism's central idea used differently by conservatives and socialists, conservatives being interested in a negative concept of liberty (as the absence of restraint) and so "the ideal of a minimal State"; socialists preferring a concept of "positive liberty" (liberty requiring the provision of equal rights to social welfare by the state) are interested in a "government [that] assumes active responsibility for the public good" (2-3).
Radical liberals advocated civil liberties (e.g., "freedom of speech and assembly, religious toleration, freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment) and broader electoral franchise. They were "populists": "They opposed every form of customary privilege and championed popular rights" = Levellers and other early radicals.
Whigs ("the principle carriers of the the banner of British Liberalism in the eighteenth century") more conservative: wanted checks and balances to monarchical power, "defenders of limited and representative government," but "Whigs nevertheless supported the traditional social hierarchy of wealth and power in which their property rights were preserved. They resisted democratic pressures, and the `rights of the people for which they agitated was / often little more than a euphemism for the privileges of the rich" (4).
vs. Harold Laski, who says that liberalism "`in its living principle, was the idea by which the new middle class rose to a position of political dominance'" [The Rise of European Liberalism (1936), qtd. on p. 5):
"Laski's statement requires qualification in so far as Britain never experienced clear-cut conflict between an ascendant middle class and an aristocracy in decline. The transition from agrarian to industrial society was relatively undramatic because the landed classes were themselves involved in commerce and industry. It would be mistaken, therefore, to suppose that liberalism originated as pure bourgeois ideology. Initially, in fact, there were two forms of liberalism: Whiggism embraced by owners of substantial property in commerce and finance, as well as land; and a more radical doctrine, whose earliest exponents were the Levellers in the middle of the seventeenth century, that was espoused by less prosperous social groups. Neither variants of liberalism constituted a eulogy of the middle classes. Whigs argued that . . . . the rich . . . were entitled to weild political power since they were most likely to safeguard liberty against either the anarchic impulses of the masses or the despotic inclinations of the Crown. Radicals, by constrast, claimed that the privileges of inherited wealth sustained an exploitative aristocracy wich frustrated the rights and freedoms of the common people. Although these early radicals opposed monopolies, tithes and other economic practices which inhibited the transfer of aristocratic wealth to other social groups, they were hardly the ideologues of an aspirant middle class. Their ideal, rather, was a society of masterless men--smallholders of land, self-employed craftsmen, tradesmen and so forth--based upon a widespread distribution of property: a community in which great inequalities of wealth had been eroded and where, in consequence, everyone owned enough property to be independent of the political control of any social class. Liberalism, then, did not originate as the buoyant expression fo the aspirations of a confident bourgeoisie. [What Eccleshall is describing here is a shift throughout the century from aristocratic to definitively bourgeois advocates of liberalism as indeed aristocrats became members of the bourgeoisie or lost money, land, status.]
"But perhaps Laski's own phrase--"in its living principle"--is sufficient to qualify the claim that liberalism is grounded in middle-class interests, for the ideology did convey ideas associated with the eventual triumph of capitalism. As society evolved, liberals increasingly denigrated the landed aristocracy and extolled the virtues (5) / of the commercial and industrial classes. The middle classes, wrote James Mackintosh in 1792, had pioneered the struggle to emancipate society from traditional constraints upon individual liberty:
"The commercial, or monied interest, has in all nations of Europe (taken as a body) been less prejudiced, more liberal [liberal in the sense of "a generous and tolerant disposition or habit of mind"4], and more intelligent, than the landed gentry. their views are enlarged by a wider intercourse with mankind, and hence the important influence of commerce in liberalizing the modern world. We cannot wonder then that this enlightened class of men ever prove the most ardent in the cause of freedom, the most zealous for political reform. It is not wonderful that philosophy should find in them more docile pupils; and liberty more active friends, than in a haughty and prejudiced aristocracy. [Vindiciae Gallicae: defence of the French revolution and its english admireres, against the accusation sof the Right Hon. Edmund Burke 1792.]
"Liberals believed that enlightened reforms would encourage everyone to have bourgeois habits. Therein lay the key to social progress" (5-6).
vs. Anthony Arblaster who says: the "emphasis on the asocial egoism of the individual plays a permanently important part in liberalism" (The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism [Basil Blackwell, 1984] 43, qtd. on p. 6):
"Now it is true that liberals have always advocated a `free zone' of individual rights within which people have ample scope to exercise private judgement and to manage their particular economic affairs. But it does not follow, as Arblaster and others contend, that liberalism is rooted in a form of bourgeois or `possessive' individualism which sanctions the unrestricted pursuit of private goals--especially the accumulation of property--at the expense of wider social duties. Running through liberalism, in fact, is a persistent conviction that political stability presupposes a moral community of individuals who co-operate in the pursuit of common objectives. Early radicals and Whigs, notwithstanding their differences, shared the belief that private property tends to engender in its owners the moral discipline and mutual tolerance through which a free and integrated political order is sustained. And even later liberals, who were eager to demonstrate that economic prosperity flows from the ambitions of self-seeking individuals, believed that government should attend to the cultivation of socially responsible attitudes among its citizens. In endorsing the spread of bourgeois habits throughout society, liberals have wished to (6) / promote, not the `asocial egoism' of atomistic individual, but the civic virtues of people consicous of their obligations within the body politic" (6-7).
the "twofold strategy of embourgeoisement":
I. undermine aristocratic power, "the power of inherited wealth derived from ownership ofland" (7)--
A. vs. aristocratic idleness and parasitism
B. vs. paternalism because it "foster[s] in others an attitude of deference incompatible with a free and independent existence."
"Liberals confronted aristocratic paternalism with an alternative social ideal--a meritocratic ideal fo the self-made man whose wealth and status were achieved rather than conferred by birth and who embodied the productive energy from which flowed economic prosperity" (7).
II. liberals wanted to make "the labouring classes" "virtuous" = "thrifty, prudent and self-reliant"; "law-abiding citizens who had abandoned any illusion that their future lay in class warfare. Hence . . . liberals endorsed policies intended to universalize bourgeois virtues" (7).
"The image that emerges from the liberal desire to make everyone bourgeois through the implementation of equal rights is of a one-class society--a one-class society in that that, notwithstanding inequalities of income which reflect the diversity of individual talent and achievement, there exist common habits of self-discipline and responsible citizenship. . . . From this image . . . the ideology derives its identity" (7).
The image differs from conservatives' image of a ruling privileged minority, and from socialists' image of a genuinely "classless society in which all capitalist inequalities of power and wealth have been eradicated" (7).