[lbo-talk] Liberalism (Was Re: Nietzsche)

[andie nachgeborenen]

I agree with you about the history of liberalism and
the reason it has the content it does now. But it does
have that content now. I am not sure "cede" is the
word. Liberals in the US won the term away from the
Spencers (and the Holmeses, who was a Social
Darwinist.) Now "Classical liberals" (Spoencerians)
have to use the qualifier or call themselves
"libertarians" or "neoliberals." In ordinary para
lance, liberals in America suppose social liberalism,
a welfare state, and a mixed economy.  That is in no
small part due to the fact that the commies and the
IWW and the black liberation movement  feminists
kicked their butt until they did the right thing, but
they did it, kicking and screaming and backing away
when they could, but the word is now ours. If I were
writing in Spain, where liberalism means economic
liberalism and socialism wasn't a poison word in
public I'd use different terms. But the list I give is
what the term means in America now, and it's not far
from what it meant to J.S. Mill either. Anyway: as you
know I don't hide from being a  radical or a
socialist, but being a liberal is politically useful
as well as accurate in our circumstances. It's a
useful way to sum up the short but important list of
positions that I list.

Be that as it may, I am still waiting for critics to
say that we should be eclectic or who say that
liberalism so defined is dead to explain what they
have that's better.

--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> 
> On Jul 3, 2007, at 12:28 PM, andie nachgeborenen
> wrote:
> 
> > What's your alternative? Which of:
> >
> > competitive elections
> > universal suffrage
> > extensive civil and political liberties
> > democratic decisionmaking (as opposed to
> imposition of
> > someone's idea of the good life will-we-nil-we)
> 
> You keep listing these as attributes of liberalism,
> but 19th century  
> liberals weren't terribly interested in lots of
> them; they were all  
> for economic liberalism, but opposed to it in the
> political sphere,  
> because the masses might vote to expropriate the
> expropriators. There  
> was a bourgeois movement in the 1870s, for example,
> to limit the  
> franchise in New York to property owners, with The
> Nation's E.L.  
> Godkin as one of its leaders. Radicals gave this
> content to what  
> you're calling liberalism - why cede these virtues
> to the followers  
> of Herbert Spencer?
> 
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

 
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