Classical Liberalism

Author(s):  
John Tomasi

This chapter offers an intellectual history of liberalism, focusing on the classical view that was eventually displaced by modern, “high” liberalism. It first considers classical liberalism's notion of equality and property rights as well as economic liberty before discussing the ideas of thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, and F. A. Hayek. It then explores the emergence of market society, with particular emphasis on what Smith called “the system of natural liberty.” It also examines classical liberal ideas in action during under revolutionary America and concludes with an analysis of the essential features of classical liberalism: a thick conception of economic liberty grounded mainly in consequentialist considerations; a formal conception of equality that sees the outcome of free market exchanges as largely definitive of justice; and a limited but important state role in tax-funded education and social service programs.

Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry

A collection of essays by a leading scholar. The work selected spans several decades, which together with three new unpublished pieces, cumulatively constitute a distinct interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole while incorporating detailed examination of the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. There is, in addition, a substantial introduction which, alongside Berry’s personal intellectual history, provides a commentary on the development of the study of the Scottish Enlightenment from the 1960s. Each of the previously published chapters includes a postscript where Berry comments on subsequent work and his own retrospective assessment. The recurrent themes are the ideas of sociability and socialisation, the Humean science of man and Smith’s analysis of the relation between commerce and morality.


Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.


2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Panitch

AbstractGiovanni Arrighi made a remarkably broad-ranging and original contribution to comparative political economy and historical sociology over five decades. His last book shares these qualities. But Adam Smith in Beijing is unfortunately not mainly about the origins and dynamics of Chinese capitalism over the past three decades. It presents Adam Smith not as the apostle of free-market capitalism, but rather of a ‘non-capitalist market society’; and it uses this to make the case that since China’s economic development takes place outside the European/North American capitalist ‘core’, it must, almost by definition, not be capitalist. Markets are conceived here as the instruments of states, yet the theory of the state advanced is severely undeveloped. Arrighi’s argument that China’s economic development is part and parcel of the demise of the US project for establishing itself as the ‘world state’ misinterprets the nature of the US empire as well as misses the extent of China’s integration with US-led capitalist globalisation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 46-69
Author(s):  
Blanca Luz Rache de Camargo

Inicio del liberalismo económico con sus primeros exponentes: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, y David Hume. Desarrollo del carácter científico de la economía mediante el pensamiento económico de Adam Smith, expuesto en sus dos grandes obras: Teoría de los sentimientos morales y Causa y naturaleza de la riqueza de las naciones.


Author(s):  
Arthur Walzer

British rhetorical theory in the eighteenth century departs from classical theory in significant ways. First, influenced by the empiricism of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and especially David Hume, Joseph Priestley and George Campbell recast traditional theory in psychological terms. Second, influenced by the belles lettres tradition, Adam Smith and Hugh Blair shift the focus of rhetoric from composition to criticism and create a theory intended to account for literature, history, philosophy, and oratory. Furthermore, in terms of rhetoric’s formative ideal, Quintilian’s ideal orator would share his place of privilege with the polite person of “taste” and “sensibility,” who would speak in a conversational register, as the coffeehouse emerged as a venue to rival the forum. Some scholars have welcomed these innovations; others have seen them as a radical wrong turn. This chapter discusses this transformation of rhetoric during the Enlightenment and reviews and attempts to resolve the scholarly debates the transformation has prompted.


Author(s):  
Patrick J. Deneen

This chapter examines the ways in which the individualist philosophy of classical liberalism and the statist philosophy of progressive liberalism reinforce each other. It begins with a discussion of the conflict between the “conservatives,” who advance the project of individual liberty and equality of opportunity especially through defense of a free and unfettered market, and the liberals, who aim at securing greater economic and social equality through extensive reliance upon the regulatory and judicial powers of the national government. The chapter shows how statism and individualism grow together while local institutions and respect for natural limits diminish, noting that, despite their differences, this ambition animated thinkers such as John Locke, John Dewey, Francis Bacon, Francis Bellamy, Adam Smith, and Richard Rorty.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-189
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson

AbstractWhen did liberal political theory, or perhaps liberal political economy, begin? Although many would trace their beginnings to the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, or perhaps John Locke, in fact many of the propositions we today recognize as forming the core of liberalism were articulated in the first half of the seventeenth century by an unduly neglected group called the Levellers and their leader John Lilburne. In this essay, I first give some historical background and context to the Levellers and Lilburne. Next, I articulate several of their liberal positions, including freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of commerce and trade, and I examine their justifications for these positions, which I argue were both novel and radical. I conclude by exploring the contemporary relevance of the Levellers and argue that they should be considered as among liberalism’s most important founders.


Author(s):  
Emily C. Nacol

This book shows that risk, now treated as a permanent feature of our lives, did not always govern understandings of the future. Focusing on the epistemological, political, and economic writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, the book explains that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, political and economic thinkers reimagined the future as a terrain of risk, characterized by probabilistic calculation, prediction, and control. In these early modern sources, the book contends, we see three crucial developments in thought on risk and politics. While early modern thinkers differentiated uncertainty about the future from probabilistic calculations of risk, they remained attentive to the ways uncertainty and risk remained in a conceptual tangle, a problem that constrained good decision making. They developed sophisticated theories of trust and credit as crucial background conditions for prudent risk-taking, and offered complex depictions of the relationships and behaviors that would make risk-taking more palatable. They also developed two narratives that persist in subsequent accounts of risk—risk as a threat to security, and risk as an opportunity for profit. Looking at how these narratives are entwined in early modern thought, the book locates the origins of our own ambivalence about risk-taking. By the end of the eighteenth century, a new type of political actor would emerge from this ambivalence, one who approached risk with fear rather than hope. By placing a fresh lens on early modern writing, the book demonstrates how new and evolving orientations toward risk influenced approaches to politics and commerce that continue to this day.


1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 275-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Den Uyl

Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, was the grandson of the First Earl of Shaftesbury (also Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1621–1683). The First Earl, along with John Locke, was a leader and founder of the Whig movement in Britain. Locke was the First Earl's secretary and also the tutor of the Third Earl. Both the First and Third Earls were members of parliament and supporters of Whig causes. Although both the First and Third Earls were involved in politics, the Third Earl is better known for intellectual pursuits. Indeed, the Third Earl (henceforth simply “Shaftesbury”) is second only to Locke in terms of influence during the eighteenth century. Yet if one takes into account effects upon literature, the arts, and manners, as well as upon philosophical trends and theories, Shaftesbury might be even more influential. Even if we restrict ourselves to philosophy, Shaftesbury's ideas were admired by thinkers as different as Leibniz and Montesquieu—something which could obviously not be said about Locke. Within ethics, Shaftesbury influenced Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Samuel Butler, and Adam Smith and is credited with founding the “moral sense” school of thought.


Author(s):  
John Scholar

Chapter 2 begins the book’s intellectual history of the impression from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (which continues in Chapter 3). These contexts come from two movements, empiricism and aestheticism. Chapter 2 explores empiricist contexts, arguing that James’s impression owes much to empiricist philosophy (John Locke, David Hume), and nineteenth-century empiricist psychology (James Mill, J. S. Mill, Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, William James). By tracking the word ‘impression’, we can see that Locke and Hume’s stress on first-hand observation, and on thought as a kind of perception, are contexts for James’s conception of the imaginative but observant novelist, for the epistemological demands he makes on his readers, and for the way he represents his characters’ consciousnesses, especially in recognition scenes. Nineteenth-century empiricists’ divergence as to the agency of the subject in consciousness is reflected in James’s characters whose impressions by turns assault them from the exterior, or are partly fictions of their own making.


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