TENETS OF LIBERALISM
Auerbach, Carl A.
Tenets of Liberalism FROM WEALTH TO WELFARE: The Evolution of Liberalism, by Harry K. Girvetz. Stanford University Press. 323 pp. $5. Reviewed by Carl A. Auerbach AS our nation mobilizes its...
...The classical liberal was a revolutionist in his day, interested in using the philosophy of individualism as a weapon against both a static and stifling feudal order and the despotisms of the 18th Century...
...Though the contemporary liberal is convinced that these limitations need not sacrifice the essentials of a free society, his lines of thought diverge from those of the classical liberal...
...Exposing the conservative who uses classical, or 18th and 19th Century, liberalism to cloak a wholesale apology for the status quo...
...This work will stand high among them...
...Revtu...
...Prof...
...For expounding these tenets with clarity and conviction, Prof...
...To remove these obstacles, society has found itself compelled to limit individual freedom in the classical liberal sense...
...great body of material and sys-i tematic presentation of the basic ideas and programs of contempor-: ary liberalism is the book's major contribution...
...Liberalism has not experienced a continuous political development...
...For too long it was overwhelmed by conservatism on the one hand and Marxian socialism on the other...
...sion from Fascism and Communism/* as well as dissatisfaction with das* sical liberalism, shapes the though^ of the liberal today...
...But the liberal today recognizes that the issues confronting him are different from those of the 18th and 19th Centuries and that the classical liberal did not have all the answers to all the problems of man for all time to come...
...Only when the seeds of Fascist and Stalinist tyranny in these respective doctrines were revealed, did the liberal determine to steer an independent course...
...It was natural for him, therefore, to regard freedom primarily as the absence of legal restraint and in this sense to justify the maximum freedom of the individual...
...In the moral and political conflict with Communist ideology, the tenets of contemporary liberalism are a source of great strength to the free world...
...Prof...
...Girvetz presents two variants of the Welfare State...
...Girvetz deals with the work of the American pragmatists (Pierce, James, Mead, Dewey) and of Veblen, Keynes, Alvin H. Hansen, Berle, and Means and attempts a refutation of the high: priests of conservatism, Hayek, and Von Mises...
...The "Welfare State" is his means to this end...
...Most significantly, while the latter assumed that the individual struggle for wealth would necessarily promote the general welfare, the contemporary liberal has concluded that events have shattered this assumption and is therefore concerned to promote the general welfare more directly...
...He summarizes the achievements of classical lib-, eralism culminating in the early 19th Century and the movement for social legislation in the late 19th Century, in the course of which contemporary liberalism was bora, II In discussing the contemporary liberal creed, Prof...
...The first describes the New Deal and the Fair Deal and is based upon the economics of Keynes and the philosophy of Dewey...
...In his opinion, contemporary liberalism has room for the two variants, because it is "essentially a fluid . . . doctrine . . . eclectic in point of view...
...Girvetz has indicated...
...The failures of our complex industrial society have forced the contemporary liberal to think of freedom as the absence also of other restraints or obstacles (e.g...
...economic insecurity) which hinder the full development of the individual...
...It is heartening to note than the number of good books dealing with current liberal thought and traditiaon is increasing...
...To maintain, however, that contemporary liberalism evolved out of classical liberalism is an oversimplification...
...This brief outline does justice to the scope of the mafcpl which Prof...
...Girvetz deserves our thanks and attention...
...Girvetz brings to B)£§ upon his analysis...
...Classical and contemporary liberalism, he emphasizes, "share a common devotion to the dignity of the individual" and a "categorical opposition to the exercise of unlimited power...
...This thought is* still in the process of growth, bti$?: it is inspired by a heritage which to richer and more varied than Prof...
...His synthesis of this...
...The second describes the liberal-socialist state of Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries...
...In explaining t&$ psychological, economic, and poht4 ical creeds of classical liberalism,' he deals succinctly with the thought of Hobbes, Bentham, Locke, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Hume, Rousseau, Burke, Herbert Spencer, and our own Founding Fathers...
...Reviewed by Carl A. Auerbach AS our nation mobilizes its armed might, we are in danger of forgetting that the advance of Soviet Communism cannot be checked by military power alone...
...Girvetz explains the strands of classical liberal thought which are acceptable to the contemporary liberal and those which are not...
Vol. 15 • May 1951 • No. 5
