Nationalism and Liberalism Lecture ( Buckley)

Nationalism. The invention of tradition.

Liberalism in Five Flavors: Classical, French, Utilitarian, J S Mill, Nationalist.

When I suggested both in the lecture on Romanticism and that on the French Rev. that nationalism was a new force in the 19th century I thought I detected some blank stares.

Surely nationalism is not recent. Surely everyone has always had a sense of belonging to a country No: identifications were much more local until the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th.

Even Americans in their letter to each refer to themselves as a citizen of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, even the term American as a self description is rather rare until the 1840s.

Beyond these local identifications people, until the late 18th century were more likely to see themselves bound together as subjects of a king, or members of a universal church.

There weren't just geographical limits to the imagination of nationalism but ideological ones as well. Remarkably few people saw the nation state on the horizon. During epochs of upheaval educated people naturally look backwards in time for clues and inspiration. Over most of the globe - in the Mogul and Chinese Empires, in Islamic countries - the literate classes had lived in a retrospect of carefully ally gilded imperial and religious statehood. They inherited dynasties which were either 'immemorial' or had succeeded other ones without bringing about deep social changes. Their accompanying faiths were by definition eternal, and delimited only by a shifting frontier against outside barbaric idolatry or unlettered animism.

But 17th and 18th-century Europe was different Uniquely, its intelligentsia dwelt in a world which had existed long before that of the reigning monarchies and the religions which they increasingly opposed. They lived, that is, in the partly mythic domain of Greco-Roman antiquity, and enjoyed a common high culture measured primarily in terms of familiarity with Aristotle, Stoicism and the chronicles of Republican Rome. One crucial element of the remote models which informed this extraordinary mentality lay in their being organized not by nation but by city-state. The political ideals and heroic figures of the revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic remained those of the old urban patriciates: Athens, Sparta and above all pre-Imperial Rome.

'Patriotism' signified the actual or supposed attitude of ancient aristocratic Cities towards their own city-countries, and their opposition to malevolent and obscurantist despots - especially Oriental despots like the Persian Darius or later the Ottoman sultans, who could be perceived as precursors of the Bourbons, the Stuarts and other Early Modem monarchs. 'Country' rarely meant 'nation' in anything like the modem sense: its core significance was always 'city', the civilised nucleus which really counted, with or without what Machiavelli called its contado or distretto - an attached countryside that might always be useful but was never essential. It is interesting to note the precise inversion of meaning here. Before long, 19th-century Romantic nationalism would be placing overwhelming emphasis on the virtues of the contado. A nation could do without its cities - dens of decadence, 'cosmopolitan' vice, traitors etc. - but never without its healthy peasantry, folk traditions and a bloodstream free from alien admixtures.

Thus arose the 'tribe-nation', a fateful postNapoleonic idea-system which developed unstoppably east of the Rhine, spread to Central and Eastern Europe and then more patchily and belatedly to the extra-European and post-colonial world of the 20th century. Nationalism then is a new sense of belonging to a people, and it is forceful because people may not be living in their own independent state.

Today we can see the Tamils, in Sri Lanka, or the Kurds in Iran and Turkey, or the Quebecois in Canada, and a group I'd like to talk about today, the Scots in Great Britain. These are all people with a distinct history, language and culture but who do not possess the features of the independent state: their own armies, schools, police, and government.

Both England and America I'd suggest are interesting countries in having a strong sense of statehood, but a weak sense of nationhood.. They operate through large symbols and set rituals, not local details and shared feelings. Flags, anthems, birds and so forth are a symbolic of the state but not towards national sentiments that are not really there. This is all very different to those countries that have a linguistic and folkoristic sense of the nation, the sets of stories and myth about the common folk that mark their own distinctiveness. In the last half of the 18th century there were massive self-conscious revivals of national musics, dances, folk tales, linguistic and literary traditions and where these traditions were inadequate to the political task of creating a sense of nationhood they were simply made up.

Now the Scots I'd claim show one of the clearest cases of a fabricated nationalism. Whenever and wherever Scotsmen gather together we know what to expect. Tartan Kilts, bagpipes and scotch. Now the highland Scots had no independent tradition before the late 18th century, They were a subset of Irish culture and the Celtic lords had ruled the Scottish highlands from the 5th to the 17th centuries. The language was essentially Irish, their music came from the harp, and their poetry came from second rate druid bards who were weeded out from Ireland. The first stage in the making of an independent Scottish tradition was therefore the denial of Irish paternity and to do this there had to be a claim that the Scots were of a different and older descent. that they were descended from the ancient Caledonians who had resisted the roman armies. In the 1760s two writers of the same surname set about this task. James Macpherson, who found something called the Ossian manuscripts and John Macpherson the minister of sleat in the island of skye. Between them, by two distinct acts of forgery, they created an indigenous literature for Celtic Scotland and as a necessary support to it a new history. Both this literature and history in so far as they had any connection with reality had been stolen from the Irish. The sheer effrontery of the Macphersons must demand our admiration. James Macpherson picked up Irish ballads in Scotland, then wrote an epic in which he transferred the whole scenario from Ireland to Scotland and then dismissed the genuine ballads as debased modern compositions. The minister of Sleat John then wrote a critical dissertation in which he provided a necessary context for the Celtic homer whom his name sake had apparently discovered. he placed the Irish speaking Celts in Scotland four centuries before they actually arrived and explained away the genuine native Irish literature as having been stolen, in the dark ages, by the unscrupulous Irish from the innocent Scots. To complete the picture James Macpherson himself using the ministers papers, wrote an independent Introduction to the history of Great Britain and Ireland repeating the ministers assertions.

The remarkable thing about this forgery was how widely accepted and talked about it became. The famous historian Edward Gibbon accepted the work as fact, Madame De Stael thought the Ossian manuscripts equal to homer. Geothe praised the work as evidence of an authentic non-classical civilization. all that remained was to add some costuming to this story, to stage the ancient highlanders in a new way. The occasion fro this appears to have been a pageant devised by the novelist Sir Walter Scott, for an historical display of Highland life before the King of England in 1822. There one saw for the first time a parade of Scotsman, wearing something called kilts, with particular tartans designating the clan or family to which they belonged.

Each aspect of this sight has its own tortured history. First the kilt itself was invented by an English Quaker in 1727. Tradition highland dress was a long shirt coming all the way down to the knees usually of a brown or green color. Wealthy Scotsman could afford some patterned cloth supplied by Flemish weavers, and if they were very wealthy and wanted to conform to lowland tradition they would wear leggings, or trews from which the term trousers derives. Occasionally, to prevent the bottom of the woolen shirt getting wet or muddy they might tuck it in the belt, or if ti rained they would throw it over their heads, an act, according to an English commentator of gross indecency.

The English Quaker comes into the picture when he secures the rights to mine iron on a Scottish estate and he finds the local dress inconvenient, so he designs a skirt, like the tucked in shirt, but with the folds already pleated and sown. its a great success and local laird or chief, Macdonell, requires that his servants wear it. The history of the tartan cloth is even more bizarre. After the Scottish rebellion of 1745 the English ban traditional Celtic garb, the older shirt and the newer kilt, but they wish to use Scottish troops in the Empirial wars against the French. So Scottish soldiers were organized into regiments and in order to improve morale they were allowed to were tartan trousers, not kilts offshore as they fought Indians in north America and the other Indians in the Bengal and mysore. as the highland regiments multiplied to meet the needs of these wars, so their tartan uniforms were differentiated and when the wearing of tartan by civilians was resumed and the romantic movement encouraged the cult of the primitive clan the different tartans were transferred from regiment to families.

Ironically then the visual registration of highland uniqueness was designed to be of service by the English in imperial conquest. The tartan cloth and the kilt dress came together within the Scottish regiments as they fought the French, and the international image of the Scotsman was visually registered in Paris in 1815 at the final defeat of the French napoleonic army. By 1822 a young Scottish officer, who had never seen the outside of a mess room wrote a book, The character, manners and present state of the highlanders of Scotland, that projected back, to time immemorial, the wearing of the tartan kilt and outlined the particular colors that belonged to particular families. when George the forth came to Edinburgh in 1822 to thank the Scots for their work in defeating the revolutionary ardor of the French we was greeted by the pageant, devised by the novelist Scot, in which the modern tradition was fully established We can laugh at the thin historical legitimacy for any of these practices, but to do so would miss the point. what's of more interest surely is the enthusiasm, the almost religious fervor with which these new rituals were pursued and adopted. national tradition is obviously something very different from a local custom.

It only makes sense within an international context most nationalisms before 1848, were liberal. That is these traditions were used at the cultural level to distinguish a particular people over against some controlling dominant and foreign authority. They gained an immediate political purpose. The Germans and Serbs, and indeed the Italians against the autro-hungarian empire, the Scots against the English, the Basques against the Spanish and so forth. They applied to the natural concept of the people rather than the constructed concept of king or emperor, many of whom were frequently of another "race" a difficult word that we won't get into today.

Liberalism

Basically liberals derive their political theory and program from the seventeenth century ideas of Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Kant, Madison, and in the 19th c. J.S. Mill. In France Liberal ideas were developed by Tocqueville and by Benjamin Constant. Basic Precepts of liberalism 1) Religious Toleration 2) Freedom of Discussion 3) Restrictions on Police Behavior 4) Free Elections 5) Constitutional government based on separation of powers. 6) Public access to decision making processes -- budgets, etc. 7) 7) Freedom of Contract

Four Core Norms of Liberal Society 1. personal security -- legal regulation of the monopoly on violence. 2. impartiality. -- single system of laws for all. 3. individual liberty. freedom from government supervision, freedom of conscience, travel, etc. 4. democracy. public discussion, free press, elections.

Liberal attitude is traditionalism upside down. traditional societies = inherited inequalities were accepted, new economic inequalities of wealth and social status were unacceptable. liberal societies reject all claims to inherited monopolies, opposed inequality as a privilege or "right," but accepted economic inequality as a basic good. Not poverty or dependency, but class inequality as a basic good -- leading to competition, prosperity, and therefore personal security,. Selfhood Liberty is sometimes synonymous with "freedom" a) from constraint and arbitrary oppression; b) from restriction on participation in politics; c) of conscience and belief; d) and the right to live as one pleases; self-fulfillment. (selfhood).

This last ideal also implies "autonomy", the right to education and cultivation. In Germany liberalism was defined more around this "unpolitical" freedom than around the first four. In the nineteenth century, however, this vision of liberty came into conflict with positive ideas of justice, which attempted to "extend liberty" either to previously unenfranchised parts of society: women, the working classes, the poor; or to extend justice more universally and equitably in the form of health insurance (1884 in Germany; universal in other eur. countries by 1900); public education; welfare support; and other "social rights.: when is liberty "reasonably" constrained? For example when it furthers democracy, e.g., by mass public education; or when the right to vote was restricted to owners of property

Classical LIBERALISM 18th century liberalism or (sometimes called protoliberalism" or classical liberalism) the ideas of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume believed in freedom of economic action; freedom of intellectual exchange (opinion) Freedom of movement These were absolute goods in that they furthered economic growth and scientific progress. Liberalism was thus born in protest against the encroachments of state power. The central idea of liberalism is thus: one in which individual freedom is in principle unlimited; state intervention is limited. The classical liberals welded together elements of democracy with the emphasis on restricting state intervention and undoing the bounds erected by tradition. Classical liberals accepted Locke's idea of the natural liberty of the individual; Smith's ideas of economic liberty; and Hobbes' opposition to theocracy and religious tyranny. During and after the French Revolution's struggle against the old regime meant that liberalism was opposed to fixed hierarchy; but the Jacobin experiment warned liberals of the danger of too quick and too radical an extension of liberty downward. In the U.S. the Federalists added the idea of a new republican polity grounded in civic freedom. This view of politics as a negotiation, a field of contestation, of negotiation, and ultimately of plural interests, classes and groups in conflict was particularly American. Liberal republicanism was more interested in constraining power and authority by democracy by extending rather than limiting it through restrictions on voting (as was Constant).

FRENCH LIBERALISM: CONSTANT English liberalism tended to argue from psychological or philosophical first principles -- e.g., selfhood, or freedom of action; while French liberalism tended to argue historically and sociologically. English liberalism was concerned with the limits to liberty, French liberalism much more concerned with the dangers of democracy. The focus of French controversies over liberalism was the relationship between "Ancient and Modern Liberty" defined by Benjamin Constant. Constant was reacting against the Jacobin phase of the Fr. Rev., his argument was that the struggle against the old regime produced a new form of liberalism, "liberal democracy." The threat to liberal democracy HE ARGUED was popular democracy, democracy based not on representatives and rules, but on plebiscite, on the popular will. This kind of democracy was modeled on the "old" liberty of the Greeks in which each citizen had to be active, involved and engaged in politics. Popular democracy, was not a good, but threatened to become tyranny. Modern liberty, then was one in which the citizens were for the most part "passive" not active, popular sovereignty had to be limited.

DEMOCRATIC LIBERALISM Nineteenth century. liberalism. is a complex and sometimes unstable mix of liberal and democratic virtues: a state that does not invade private life and coerce citizens; limited participation (constantly being negotiated in terms of extended liberties (e.g, civil rights to Jews, nonconformists and other religious minorities; universal male suffrage; female suffrage; social rights and social mobility (reform); naturalization laws that made immigrants citizens) and those who opposed such extensions. This struggle continues to define modern liberty. Sometimes conservatives promoted certain extensions of liberty while restricting others: Bismarck introduced social legislation that was the most advance in the world; the autocratic Napoleon III and Disraeli (English Tories) granted nearly universal male suffrage. Another essential part of the new democratic liberalism of the later 19th century was "moral latitudanianism," the view, that there is no one best way of life no single set of virtues or common good definable by either tradition or moral absolutism.

UTILITARIANISM Another important strand of the new liberalism was utilitarianism represented by Jeremy Bentham and the younger John Stuart Mill. Bentham was a figure of the Enlightenment, who stood for the rule of reason as opposed to natural rights. He criticized Locke's idea of individual liberty based on natural rights "as nonsense upon Stilts." For Bentham the content of any law or rule was justified or not justified by the sole criteria of its public utility, which was equated with the "greatest happiness for the greatest number." Therefore the state was to be oriented not toward some absolute end, like morality, as Kant and Hegel believed, nor toward no end particular end, as the republicans and Federalists believed, but toward the welfare, equality and security of the majority of the population. Democracy therefore, was an essential part of liberalism, the test of whether or not a reform was rational was whether or not it was supported by those it affected. Bentham was also a utopian -- he wanted to make institutions conform to utilitarian principles. Discuss his Panopticon. Synonymous with social control. But unfair to Bentham who favored better more efficient government but not more government.

JOHN STUART MILL (1806-73). Great synthesizer and theorist of modern liberalism. A link between Adam Smith and David Ricardo (economic liberalism) and Benthamite Utilitarianism. Principles of Political Economy (1848). His father James, a civil servant in the India Office, was a great Benthamite and so was the youthful Mill, educated his son. At the age of 3 his father taught him Greek; at age 8 Latin. At twelve he began his philosophical education and at age fourtepn he spent the year living with Jeremy Bentham's brother. He founded the original Utilitarian Society. Only after he suffered a mental breakdown in 1826 at the age of 20 did JS Mill begin to discover elements of the liberal tradition that were not so hyper-rationalist. He rejected his father's utilitarian "religion" and his lack of any respect for feelings. Mill said he was left "with a well-equipped ship and rudder, but no sail." Utilitarianism was too mathematical, it was (as satirized by Carlyle) as a "felicific calculus," an "awful grinding-Mill" (a pun on father's name). Mill rejected the technocratic side of Bentham (Panopticon) and embraced both a conservative restriction on popular suffrage and sovereignty, since he feared the tyranny of the majority, and a more radical liberalism, one which extended rather than imposed liberty from above. On Liberty (1859) demonstrates both of these tendencies. He believed that conservative liberals (like Tocqueville) underrated the importance of equality and the dynamism of commerce. But he also believed that society incurred the dependence of citizens, and that history was tending towards the decline,. rather than the expansion of energy. Main points of On Liberty: It opens with the question: ""What are (should be) the limits of the collective authority of society over the individual? Adjudicates a simple principle: Interference is justified only by self-protection, by the prevention of harm to others. 2.A government has no right to suppress freedom of opinion. Suppression blocks out truth and excludes unpopular or controversial opinions; even when an opinion is false, truth is served by refuting error; no opinion is completely true or false, partial truths are useful. 3. Freedom of action is desirable since moral choice in conduct is essential to personality. It forbade state interference in regard to "self-regarding" conduct, and it exalted the freedom of "pursuing our own good," e.g., liberty of selfhood. Freedom was, as the utilitarians said, ultimately a key to happiness. 4. Where OR WHEN is collective interference in individual affairs justified? Individuals have a duty to bear a fair share of society's burdens; not to injure others; and not to infringe on the interests of others where society has jurisdiction. Society has the right to protect its members from "moral vices." So crime and immorality can justify interference. Liberty is promoted by preventing a parent from selling a child into slavery, and by insisting on public education. However, laws prohibiting drunkenness or idleness are illiberal since they do not promote the public good and only the individual himself is injured. He rejected scientism as akin to Enlightened despotism, as state paternalism. How do we draw the line between conduct affecting ourselves and conduct affecting others; between social conventions and government policies?

He promoted an experimentalism in private as well as public life. He was a promoter of many modern ideas, like birth control, and above all, the rights of women. He was a proponent of libertarian liberalism. (He has been portrayed by F.A. Hayek as severing the individual from society and tradition)

Mills basic principles have as historian Isaiah Berlin once said, "degenerated into commonplaces of liberal eloquence."

( Not read) However, on one point he has received a recent challenge and resurrection. John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice (1971) is often regarded as the most important American contribution to political philosophy, Mill's view of the right to "a maximum of liberty compatible with a similar extent for others," but proposes a test of justice, which stipulates that "social inequalities are to be allowed only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged members of society." Instead of the utilitarian test of "happiness for the greatest number," he applies the test of a degree of "fairness" which has to be included in the idea of freedom for freedom to be free, since access to the goods (both moral and material) and freedom from risk are also part of a is permanently disenfranchised free society. Someone economically at risk in terms of health and welfare is not capable of effective citizenship. This argument can also be distilled from a reading of Mill. But the solution would look more like democratic socialism, than 19th century England.

NATIONALIST AND SOCIALIST LIBERALISM Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872). In his youth he was part of a secret society the Carbonari's fighting a war to unify Italy and liberate it from Austrian rule. In 1831 he founded Young Italy and campaigned for a unitary republican state modeled on liberal France across the whole peninsula. He was forced into exile in England and wrote his Duties of man In 1848 after the revolution he was briefly a public figure in the Roman Republic but after its defeat, he returned to exile. He was a universalist humanist, but added membership in a national community to the 12 basic precepts of liberalism. Freedom meant freedom of the nation to govern itself, and sovereignty involved citizenship and belonging to a national community in equal measure. 20th century anti colonial movements like Ghandiism have taken Mazzini's liberal nationalism as a model. {Not read} Nineteenth century liberals differed from the ideas of Adam Smith (really a vulgarization of Smith) in trying to define and negotiate the absolute liberalism of the "market man" in relation to the relative political liberty of men and women in society. Society is not identical with economy. So if for example free trade would militate against the movement of economic actors, a restriction on the right to associate (as in forming unions) would appear to further economic freedom, but would also infringe on the rights and liberties of individuals, e.g., workers to organize trade unions to defend their social position. Freedom of the labor contract versus freedom for labor as a social right.

Conclusion What links these two concepts nationalism and liberalism is that they base their political philosophies on a new conceptualization of the people. They are vaguely democratic to the extent that they view the nation as collectivity, either as an organic whole as with nationalism and conservatism, or as an aggregate of economic actors, as with liberalism. None require kings or popes as their motive force. It's this conceptualization of the people that will lead up to the next round of revolutions in 1848 and it will underwrite many colonial revolts through to this century as well. Neither accommodates one might note the growing economic differentiation within a people and next week we will have to look at a powerful new idea --class.