DOCTRINAIRE LIBERALISM

Por Anthony Arblaster (*)

 the liberal rarely needs to be ashamed of the

realities created in his name as the socialist has to

be much of the time.(Ralf Dahrendorf <1 o:p="">

Liberal writers, at least in the last forty years, have made a speciality of claiming that, unlike almost all other doctrines, and certainly unlike socialism and communism, liberalism is quintessentially non-doctrinaire and, indeed, anti-doctrinaire. 'The essence of the liberal outlook,'Bertrand Russell once wrote, ‘lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology.’ The title of this article implies, and is intended to imply, that this claim is, in some respects at least, untrue, and is, as a generalisation, misleading and historically inaccurate. Liberalism has been, and in some of its forms still is, quite as ‘doctrinaire’ as the rival ideologies which liberals so freely denounce.

To my mind this is a very obvious and simple point to make. Yet it does not appear to get stated very often.

There has been a tendency to take liberalism, and liberals, at their own evaluation. The liberals’ own account of their own history and ideas has commanded a wide and uncritical acceptance. Given this, it may not be entirely superfluous to go over this ground once again, and remind ourselves of some aspects of the history and character of liberalism which the liberals themselves have, understandably enough, tended to sweep under the carpet. Or, to change the metaphor, let us unlock a few cupboards and parade one or two of the hidden skeletons of liberalism across the spotlit stage of the history of ideas.

The liberal self-image

First we must recall the seif-image of liberalism as it has been presented in the period of the Cold War and of socalled ‘totalitarianism’, and particularly as it was developed in the decade and a half between 1945 and 1960. One major source of this self-image was Karl Popper’s excessively influential book, The Open Society and its Enemies, which appeared in 1945 – the ideal moment for it to make the maximum impact. Popper found the fundamental conflict between liberal reason and totalitarian dogmatism everywhere, even in classical Athens, where it was Socrates ‘who taught the lesson that we must have faith in human reason, but at the same time beware of dogmatism,’while his pupil Plato epitomised the anti-rational, dogmatic spirit of totalitarianism .

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