Five More False Assumptions of Liberalism

This article is a follow-up to my previous article, Five False Assumptions of Liberalism. As I noted there, liberalism as a broad philosophy suffers from the issue that it is grounded on many assumptions that can be shown to be either false or nonsensical.

In that article I covered the wrong assumptions of man in a state of nature, the social equality of man, the idea that there was a kind of universal man, that man is a blank slate, and that there can be equality of opportunity.

However, there are still more assumptions about history, philosophy, and the contemporary world undergirding liberalism, all of which have been found to be untrue.

Man is Born Free

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” This statement from the opening paragraph of The Social Contract is a powerful, and false, claim that underpins liberal philosophy. Though it is a compelling way of framing his argument, Rousseau’s assumptions are simply incorrect. This is a common thread that runs through most liberal theorists, as their view rests on man being a perfectly free agent in the state of nature who sacrifices some of his rights to enter into society.

We can distinguish two ways in which Rousseau may have meant that man is born free: socially or literally.

Socially, this statement rests on the belief that man is born into the state of nature, where he is free of social ties and legal constraints. The purpose of Rousseau’s social contract is to restore to man the putative freedom he is supposed to have had in the state of nature. As we have covered, there never was a state of nature as early Enlightenment thinkers envisaged it; man was never an isolated being, roaming the wilderness on his own.

Rousseau explains that:

“The second relation is that of the members one to another, or to the body as a whole; and this relation should be in the first respect as unimportant, and in the second as important, as possible. Each citizen would then be perfectly independent of all the rest, and at the same time very dependent on the city; which is brought about always by the same means, as the strength of the State can alone secure the liberty of its members.”

It is not socially true that man is born free. He is not born devoid of the bonds that Rousseau believes society chained him in and which he seeks to break. Man is born into a web of social relations which connect him to his mother, father, siblings, and extended family, and then to a greater membership of his region or tribe, his wider ethnic group, and then to the entire human race.

There is already a hierarchy in place into which a person belongs which comes with social ranks that are loaded with duties and obligations; a child has an obligation to listen to and obey their parents, and the parents have a duty to love and care for their child, for example. Neither one is free of these social statuses, and nor should they be; it would be entirely detrimental to both parties if they were not connected in this way. Freedom from these bonds is not desirable and man is not born free from them.

In a much more literal way, man is also not born free in any meaningful sense. Any parent can tell you that a baby can do nothing for itself and has no autonomy. Babies are completely dependent on their parents for the entire time that they are babies, and even later on into their childhood. Moreover, babies are completely enthralled with their passions and have no rational capacity to make decisions, even if they had the physical capacity to execute them. It is simply not true that man is “born free.”

The Social Contract

In considering reason to be the focus and exception of human endeavours, Enlightenment thinkers had to rationally explain why it was that human society was actually able to function at all. Why is it that we live in relative harmony with our families, neighbours, and the State, under laws to which almost all consent? Why should men not steal, lie, cheat, and murder, if they thought they could get away with it? Why are things as they are and how can they be justified using reason?

If we take the views of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau to be the paradigmatic examples of social contract theory, we can see a general realm of agreement between them all. At some point, the roaming savage in the state of nature decided to divest himself of part or all of his natural liberties in order to enter into civil society and instantiate a State, so that he may receive protection otherwise unavailable in his natural isolation. The character of the State and the rights and protections it provides are different depending on the author, but the base assumption is the same.

Social contract theory, however, seems to fail to stand up to scrutiny. On its origins, who signed it and when? How do we break it? How do we renew it? Why aren’t we able to withdraw from it? Why can we not modify it?

Almost all social contract theorists are forced to fall back on the position that “tacit consent is inferred from silence," as in, simply going along with society as it stands consists of our agreement to the laws of the social contract. What, then, would it require for us to decide to break the social contract? What would be required for us to dissolve it? An overwhelming majority of citizens in objection? A violation of the duties of the government? The simply withdrawing of consent? Collectively wandering off into the wilderness?

All of these have been proposed by social contract theorists, but none of these explanations are able to explain why, when the conditions are met, the society and state still persist. Why do the police not simply abandon their duties, citing a breach of the social contract when the government suppresses a civil right? Why are people not able to withdraw consent from the social contract in order to evade taxation? How can the population persuade the state to organise a vote to abolish itself? Where is one supposed to actually go when withdrawing from the social contract, since all land comes under some jurisdiction or other?

These practical questions aside, we have further problems found in the theoretical grounds of the social contract. The problem that the social contract theorists have, of course, is that no such event of entering into one ever occurred. Social contract theory is founded on the idea that the State of Nature existed, which as I showed in my previous article, it did not. Therefore, at no point did people enter into a social contract; humans have always been communal and have never needed to make a rational agreement to live with one another.

Moreover, such a position requires that we make assumptions that fail to make sense. Take, for example, the preamble to the Constitution of the United States.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

A great deal is presupposed in this statement, beginning with the first word: we. Who is ‘we’, in this context, exactly? Certainly not a disparate group of individuals wandering in the wilderness of the North American continent; the Thirteen Colonies were hundreds of years old by the time of the Declaration of Independence, which existed as a settled extension of England, with all of the laws, customs, technology, and governance that comes with being a part of such a venerable civilisation.

The Founding Fathers were deeply Lockean in their ideological leanings and the United States is the first, and most successful, example of a distinctly liberal political project. However, the United States was not born out of the state of nature as liberal ideology would have it, though. As Roger Scruton noted, the “we” in “we the people” is predicated on an existing and settled population that already saw itself as a connected group with investments and dependencies on one another.

From what method would hypothetical savages in the state of nature be able to form some kind of council by which they would agree to form a civil society? The United States sidestepped this problem by inheriting a civil society from England.

The reality is that societies are simply not formed in the way suggested by the social contract. Atomised individuals do not come together to rationally agree to create a State, instead, people are born and raised into a civilisation which contains a set of existing traditions, into which each person is habituated as they grow up. By the time of adulthood, when we can reasonably claim to be in command of our rational and critical faculties, we have already been inculcated into these norms and do not find them strange or objectionable. Over the process of time, and due to the pressures of experience, states arise in primitive forms and become more sophisticated over time as knowledge accumulates and the situation dictates.

It is the seizure of power in an existing society by an ideological minority that enables liberal states to be formed, not through a naturalistic process of wandering individuals aggregating together and consciously forming a state through reason.

Social contract theory is a rationalistic attempt to explain the natural, intuitive, irrational consequences of human beings, as hierarchical animals, living together in peace. As such, it attempts to smooth out intellectual contradictions and finds itself committed to something that can be shown to be fictitious.

Unalienable Rights

Two conceptions of rights underpin Lockean and Rousseauian views of liberalism. The first is shared by the Founding Fathers and summarised in the term "unalienable rights." Neither school of thought seems to support such a notion.

As stated in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

However, this is not the view that Locke takes in the Second Treatise:

“But though men, when they enter into society, give up the equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of nature, into the hands of the society, to be so far disposed of by the legislative, as the good of the society shall require; yet it being only with an intention in everyone the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property; (for no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse) the power of the society, or legislative constituted by them, can never be supposed to extend farther, than the common good; but is obliged to secure everyone’s property, by providing against those three defects above mentioned, that made the state of nature so unsafe and uneasy.”

As we can see, Locke suggests that people literally “give up,” or alienate, a portion of their natural rights, yet we retain others, such as the right to self-defence. Locke states, for example, that it is lawful for a man to kill a thief even in the state of peace provided by civil society as the power of the law is not sufficient to intervene at the moment, so we must resort to the first natural right of self-defence. In particular, Locke admits we give up the liberty which was allegedly present in the state of nature in order to access the benefits of civil society.

Rousseau took this view even further and suggested that the social contract requires the sacrifice of all of our rights in exchange for a suite of civil rights which are provided by the state.

“These clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one—the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.”

The civil rights given by the state do not necessarily include even the right to life:

“...when the prince says to him: 'It is expedient for the State that you should die', he ought to die, because it is only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present, and because his life is no longer a mere bounty of nature, but a gift made conditionally by the State.”

In both the Lockean and the Rousseauian view of liberalism, there is no concept of unalienable rights at all; rights are alienable and those rights provided by the state are entirely contingent. In neither conception of rights are those rights provided by the state unalienable, as the Declaration of Independence suggests.

Moreover, what could be meant by an “unalienable” right, anyway? It seems to be an excessively idealistic statement that the cold reality of nature itself does not respect; if something were to be literally unalienable, it is surely logically or physically impossible to alienate, rather than being merely a moral injunction against alienation.

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein neatly dismantled the concept of “unalienable rights” as articulated in the Declaration of Independence in a brief passage in his novel Starship Troopers:

“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights’. Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed that great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called ‘natural human rights’ that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. 'The third ‘right’?—the ‘pursuit of happiness’? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition that tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as my brain lives—but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle chugs, can insure that I will catch it.”

The Will of the People

Arguments for liberal democracy generally rest on a rather hazy concept that is usually encapsulated in the phrase “the will of the people.” In his Second Treatise, Locke repeatedly refers to the “will of the society,” and Rousseau famously used the term “general will.” Hobbes sidesteps this problem by placing the society that has entered into the social contract under the absolute power of a single monarch, making him the autocrat and author of the political will of such a state, while insulating him from any possibility of accountability.

One pillar that supports the legitimacy of liberal democracy is that it allows the civil society that has purportedly formed itself from the state of nature to express the generally-held opinions on how society should be governed. Thus, the people are said to govern themselves by choosing representatives from their own population to enact legislation that is favourable to the majority. Theoretically, these would be men of calm temper and superior reason, who could adequately express the desires of the public and enact legislation that reflects those concerns.

This was presumed to be a given, and as James Madison described it in Federalist Paper #10, the main concern was not majoritarian representation, instead that the country would be polarised into two warring factions, and the factional majority would instead unjustly suppress the minority and deprive them of their rights.

“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty; that our governments are too unstable; that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party; but by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority.”

Though Madison accepted we would not always have superior, dispassionate men calmly debating in the light of reason at the helm, the general deconstructed nature of American federalism should prevent the schism of political polarisation.

“The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states: A religious sect, may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it, must secure the national councils against any danger from that source: A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the union, than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district than an entire state.”

However, we can see that this factional plurality simply hasn’t happened. The capture of the United States between two political parties is particularly stark as it skews between the diametric poles of Republican and Democrat, and these are the only two viable political alternatives from which independent voters have to choose.

One might argue that in Europe, there is a multiplicity of parties which often form coalition governments, and this is true. However, Madison argued that there would be a “variety of sects” dispersed across the country, which would not be able to form a hegemonic position. This is not true of Europe, in which we see a variety of sects that are all essentially different flavours of the same liberal ideological position.

Take the United Kingdom as an example. We have the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party, and much of the Conservative Party, who are all, to some greater or lesser degree, progressive liberal parties. Much of the political debate between these parties is not in opposition, but instead, who is prepared to up the ante sufficiently to be as liberal as possible on any given issue, upon which the public is invited to weigh which has the most realistic prospect of achieving liberal ideals against the illiberal nature of reality.

When a political system is captured by liberalism to the degree that any genuinely traditional or alternative political viewpoints are simply edged out of the public discourse by virtue of liberal prejudice against nonliberal ideals, the political environment becomes monotone and certain ideas become unthinkable, let alone unsayable, and the entire society is captured by a politics with which many people disagree, but feel that they have few options to vote against.

The “will of the people” is rarely properly articulated by such political capture, which shows in the view people have of democracy itself. In 2020, Pew Research released the results of their global polling which shows that, overall, most people in democratic societies were dissatisfied with democracy, did not believe their elected representatives cared about people like them and did not think that the state was run for the benefit of all people.

Other polls reveal that 64 per cent of British people and 71 per cent of Americans do not believe that their countries are “heading in the right direction.” How can it be reasonably argued that when a large majority of the people believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction, with only small minorities of people being satisfied with the way things are, that the “will of the people” is being enacted?

Enlightened Leadership

Emerging from the passionate and deeply religious feudal politics of the European Medieval period, it is an easy pitch to suggest that instead of kings warring with their barons or one another, politics should instead be conducted by calm, dispassionate men debating in the full light of reason to establish the best policy for the entire nation and enact it through laws applicable to all.

“...whoever has the legislative or supreme power of any commonwealth, is bound to govern by established standing laws, promulgated and known to the people, and not by extemporary decrees; by indifferent and upright judges, who are to decide controversies by those laws; and to employ the force of the community at home, only in the execution of such laws, or abroad to prevent or redress foreign injuries, and secure the community from inroads and invasion. And all this to be directed to no other end, but the peace, safety, and public good of the people.”

Moreover, when these representatives are democratically elected, it is assumed by many liberal theorists that the public will select wise, patient, sensible, conscientious, forbearing men as their leaders.

“Whereas in a republic the public voice hardly ever raises to the highest positions men who aren’t enlightened and capable, men who will fill those positions honourably, in monarchies those who rise to the top are most often merely little muddle-heads, little crooks, little intriguers, whose little talents get them into the highest positions at court and then, once they are there, reveal to the public how incompetent they are. The populace is far less often mistaken in this choice than the prince is; a man of real worth among the king’s ministers is almost as rare as a fool at the head of a republican government!”

Even those theorists who accept that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” such as James Madison, still labour under the idea that the democratic nature of liberal states will enable a broad selection of quality candidates to achieve office.

“...as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise with success the vicious arts, by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre on men who possess the most attractive merit, and the most diffusive and established characters.”

Madison further argues that it is to the advantage of a large republic that it is more likely to select representatives who possess “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments,” as opposed to men who are engrossed with parochial concerns.

I am not going to waste your time by listing the political leaders of contemporary liberal democracies to make the point that this assumption on the part of liberal theorists was clearly mistaken. It appears to be a fact of human nature that, in fact, cool-headed and dispassionate people rarely appear anywhere, let alone at the head of a government.

It also seems that there is a contradiction between the concept of the will of the people and their enlightened leadership that emerges within liberal theory. If the people are not terribly wise on average and should instead elect from among themselves those people of outstanding character, why should the enlightened leadership not find themselves in opposition to the people when making policy, due to having a set of different–presumably superior–judgements about the current state of affairs?

If the people are average in their intelligence, wisdom, and habits, and this is expressed in a kind of common will to have their civilisation evolve in one direction, while the select group of enlightened leaders rationally decide that, in fact, the civilisation should instead evolve in another direction, which set of wills should win out? Is sovereignty invested in the people, or in their leadership? Is it also not inevitable that the leadership will develop into a class which will find agreement within itself, rather than from the people it is purportedly selected from?

It seems that this is the contradiction which is manifesting itself in the general dissatisfaction that the public has when it comes to the direction in which society is changing, compared to the narrow constituency which supports the leadership in these changes.