Steps toward world disarmament would be a good thing.
32. Everyone is entitled to political and social rights without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
33. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and expression.
34. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.
35. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.
36. Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security.
37. Everyone has the right to equal pay for equal work.
38. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions.
39. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
A FULL-BLOWN LIBERAL WILL mark every one, or very nearly every one, of these thirty-nine sentences, Agree. A convinced conservative will mark many or most of them, a reactionary all or nearly all of them, Disagree. By giving this test to a variety of groups, I have confirmed experimentally—what is obvious enough from ordinary discourse—that the result is seldom an even balance between Agree and Disagree. The correlations are especially stable for individuals who are prepared to identify themselves unequivocally as either “liberal” or “reactionary”: such self-defined liberals almost never drop below 85 percent of Agree answers, or self-defined reactionaries below 85 percent of Disagree; a perfect 100 percent is common. Certain types of self-styled conservatives yield almost as high a Disagree percentage as the admitted reactionaries. The answers of those who regard themselves as “moderate conservatives” or “traditional conservatives” and of the rather small number of persons who pretend to no general opinions about public matters show considerably more variation. But in general the responses to this list of thirty-nine sentences indicate that a liberal line can be drawn somewhere—even if not exactly along this salient—and that most persons fall fairly definitely (though not in equal numbers) on one side of it or the other.
These sentences were not devised arbitrarily. Many of them are taken directly or adapted from the writings of well-known liberals, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, or the liberal questionnaires that have been put out in recent years by the American Civil Liberties Union. The last eight are quoted verbatim from the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” adopted in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly. That entire document is an impressive proof of the global nature of liberalism and its prevalence that I have remarked among opinion-makers.
A number of articulate liberals—university professors, as it happens—who have become acquainted with this set of thirty-nine sentences have objected to it. I am not sure that I have understood just exactly what the objection comes down to; actually, it is rather mild compared to objections that have been made to other portions of this book. No one has stated that these thirty-nine, give or take a couple and disregarding verbal details, are not liberal sentences—that is, sentences that most liberals would agree to. I gather that some critics feel the sentences are not distinctively liberal: that not only liberals but all normal and reasonable persons nowadays agree with them; that they express no more than the “universal modern consensus,” or something of that sort.3
Of course it will seem so, if one is interpreting and judging them as a liberal, from the perspective of liberalism. It will seem so because the conceptions of a “normal” and “reasonable” person, of “rationality,” are then derived from the implicit basic assumptions of liberalism. I must report, however, that though these sentences are undoubtedly agreed to by the presently prevailing trends of opinion in the United States and in most other advanced Western nations—less widely so in some, perhaps, than in the United States and Britain—there nevertheless remains a fair number of persons, doubtless irrational but still not quite the fascist mad dogs of Herblock’s or Low’s cartoons, who disagree with many, with a majority, even in some cases with all of these thirty-nine self-evident truths.
The evidence seems to show that liberals share a common stock of ideas and that they agree on at least the main lines of practical programs: and that many or most of these liberal ideas and programs are recognizably different from non-liberal ideas and programs. We might thus call liberalism a Weltanschauung, a world-view and life-view; the dominant Weltanschauung of the United States and much of the West in the past generation. Or we may use a now familiar term and call liberalism, as I have been doing, an “ideology.” It might be still more convenient, as I have suggested elsewhere,4 to borrow a term from medicine, and to call liberalism a “syndrome”; more specifically, an “ideological syndrome.” A syndrome is a set of symptoms or elements that are observed to occur together, as a group. Thus doctors find it useful to define certain diseases as syndromes—Parkinson’s disease, for example. It is not necessary that every element or symptom should be present in each instance of a given syndrome. It is enough if most of them are there, in a certain relation to each other.
By designating liberalism a syndrome we avoid trying to assign it more systematic order and rigidity than it actually displays. There is the further advantage of leaving open the question of causation. As a pattern or collection of symptoms, a syndrome may be observed to exist and recur, even if we have no idea what causes it.
We can verify by observation that each of the persons whom I earlier listed as typical liberals exhibits all or most of a certain cluster of symptoms. Suitably analyzed, we may call this cluster or set the “liberal syndrome.” When we discover it latent in the ideas, words and acts of a hitherto unobserved individual, we may call him a “liberal.” In a similar way, we might also discover different clusters—different not in every symptom but in most, and very different in general pattern—that we might name “the conservative syndrome,” “the fascist syndrome,” “the communist syndrome,” and so on.
1. There are persons in every country who may be appropriately called “liberals,” and who regard themselves as liberals (or the equivalent). I shall show later on, in the discussion of the dialectics of liberalism, that the existential meaning of the liberalism found in the new and underdeveloped nations is radically different from liberalism within older and more advanced nations.
2. Readers of this book might be interested, or amused, to give themselves the test.
3. In the New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1959, Chester Bowles, one of the most forthright of liberal oracles, declared: “To paraphrase a Victorian Tory statesman, we are all liberals now.”
4. In Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959).
Human Nature and the Good Society
I
AMONG THE ELEMENTS OF AN ideological syndrome there are feelings, attitudes, habits and values as well as ideas and theories. My direct concern in this and the two following chapters will be the ideas and theories of the liberal syndrome: the “cognitive” meanings of liberalism that can be stated in the form of propositions accepted by liberal ideology as true. The distinction suggested here between cognitive meanings and emotive or affective meanings is considerably less clear in content than in form, and it will be necessary to qualify it later on; but it provides a convenient framework for exposition.
My present objective, then, is to exhibit modern liberalism as a more or less systematic set of ideas, theories and beliefs about