Hi, welcome back.

Make yourself comfortable. I want to use this presentation to talk a

little bit more about these liberal ideas in the
middle of the 1800s. Again, I'm using liberal in the classical
sense, in the way it would've been used by Europeans in the
middle of the 19th century. These ideas are really important. They continue to be
hugely influential in
the world today. So let's look at what liberal ideas would look like in politics.
First, liberals would be against
despotism. They'd be against tyrants. For reasons that we've spent a lot of time
discussing in previous presentations. Indeed, to liberals the opposite of a
liberal society is a tyrannical society. On the other hand, liberals also are very
worried about the tyranny of the mob, of mob rule. In the 1860s and especially into
the
1870s, the symbol to them of mob rule is what had just happened in
Paris in 1871. Some of you out there may have just seen this beautiful movie made
from the musical
play, Les Miserables. Les Miserables is based on a novel written
by Victor Hugo in the early 1860s. In it, Hugo dramatizes and romanticizes the
condition of the oppressed of Paris. He depicts a heroic revolt against oppression,
building barricades in the
streets of Paris. That's set at around 1832. So that heroic image of the wretched
of Paris rising up to try to overthrow the
monarchy, that's a very different image, though, for
a liberal-minded thinker of 1871. In the 1830s, the liberals of that time,
men like Benjamin Constant, would've been
sympathetic with some of these revolutionary ideals. Victor Hugo himself would've
thought of
himself as very much a liberal writer. By 1871 however, when the Commune had
taken control in Paris, the result was terrible
civil violence. For example, here is a contemporary
illustration of the battle between the Army of the
Third Republic as it's trying now to recapture a street in Paris, the
avenue, the Rue de Rivoli. And here's an actual photograph, taken of
that very avenue, that gives you some sense of the devastation in Paris itself
after the Commune had been
defeated. So the liberals are seeing themselves as
the people in the center, balancing against
the tyranny of despots on the one hand and the revolutionary violence of the mob on
the
other. They tend to align themselves with people
of property. And they also tend to align themselves
with the ideal of the new nation state. They support the ideal of the nation,
especially as contrasted with
foreign oppression. Liberalism also has powerful views about
economics, economic life. The whole term, economics, is a relatively
modern one. What we would now call economics was just
a branch of philosophy. Not much different than the people who
would think about political problems, they would
also naturally think about problems of commerce because
that was in a way the problems of ordinary life. So therefore, it's really
important in understanding liberal beliefs to see that
their beliefs about economic life are all tied up with their beliefs about
political
life. What liberals, in this era, fear most are
tyrants. In other words, the state that is too
strong. A lot of this is actually born of
reactions against the old fiscal-military state of
the 1700s. They're against state monopolies. They're against state protectionism
and
high tariffs that are bringing in money to enrich the rulers, to build large
armies,
that then create the threat of tyranny. And indeed, in commercial life, they tend
to be in favor of a light hand of government. Liberals tend to be supportive of
free
trade, partly because they think free commerce between free people is bound
to be a good thing, but partly because when the government
controls trade it stifles off the natural growth of human potential and
it enriches itself to become too powerful. Also, they're against too much
regulation
in commercial life. Adam Smith's original argument back in the
1770s, when he was promoting the virtues of capitalism, was that if a
state just had peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration
of justice then all would be happy and
prosperous. What mid-19th century liberalism did do is
encourage private citizens to bound together in free associations, or
cooperatives, to increase their political and economic
strength. It supported the creation of political
parties, of political activism. It thought citizens should be more literate and
work
together in economic matters as well. You see, what happens to all these people
when they leave the farms and they go into the
cities? Or they find themselves uprooted from a
traditional subsistence farm and working more in the
markets? The argument is that these citizens need
to work together and form new kinds of communities to replace the kind of communal
solidarity
or clan solidarity that they relied on in
traditional world. These communities, these associations,
these cooperatives are a really interesting facet of 19th century social
life on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Let's look at a particular illustration
of
what I mean by one of these cooperatives. This is a pamphlet, published in America,
helping to tell Americans how to form
these cooperatives. It's doing so by reprinting the rules of
an English cooperative, a prototype for how to do it, called
the Rochdale Pioneers. Here's the founding document. By the way,
typical liberal document, almost a kind of constitution for their cooperative
society in which these people are basically getting
together. They pay dues and what they do is they're
going to establish a store. They're going to buy some real estate; they might rent
property. They're going to pool their resources and work together to increase their
market
power. And also for mutual protection. For instance, they'll pool their
resources so that if someone has a family tragedy, there's some
insurance there. If someone maybe needs a small loan, they
can provide a little loan. If someone needs a little extra money to be able to pay
for funeral expenses, there is a cooperative that
helps with that. This is not a formal part of quote
political history, but it's a really important part
of the lives of these communities as they're
coping with modernity and picking up on some of these liberal
ideas. Let each member have only one vote. Majorities rule on all matters of
government. And so on down to counsel about how people ought to behave in their
private economic life. Beware of long reckonings. Quarterly accounts are the best.
You can see, too, this particular prototype
cooperative, which started in England, grew up
over the years. In 1844, you can see it has a membership
of 28 people and not very much money. By 1894, 50 years later, there are more
than 12,000 members of this cooperative and their
funds are pretty significant. Farmers, too, would develop cooperatives
to help meet their mutual needs and give them a little more market power
by working together. The idea of these farmer societies was a
really important in a huge farm country like the United
States of America, which is making a lot of its income from
the sale of its agricultural products to the
rest of the world. Here's an illustration popularizing one of
the great American farming cooperatives: called the Grange.
G-R-A-N-G-E This is an illustration showing the Gift for the
Grangers. You can see the happy farmers prospering by working together in many
kinds of
cooperative activities. The Grange would of course put on the
occasional dance as you can see here in the bottom
left-hand corner. But The Grange, as you can see in the
upper right-hand corner, would also be an occasion for members of the farming
community to get together and talk about issues of the
day, not just farm prices. So liberalism also has a lot of influence
in the way people think. Let's delve into that a little bit more.
In religious beliefs, the liberals are in favor of tolerance and against government
establishment of a single religion. So, even in England, yes there's a
government established church, the Anglican Church, but the government tolerates
the creation and practice of many other
kinds of religions. Liberal thought is also coming to grips
with the implication of their ideas for the role of
women. If all, men are created equal, well, maybe
that includes women, too. So you move from some of the early liberal thinkers like
Thomas Jefferson,
Jeremy Bentham, Benjamin Constant, in the 1790s, 1820s, 1830s, to a principle
liberal
thinker like John Stuart Mill, in the 1860s and 1870s, and Mill is taking
up the cause of the rights of women. Here is Mill, an influential writer on
political philosophy on many issues. Very well read in his day. So it was a big
deal in 1869 when Mill
published this book on The Subjection of Women,
boldly putting forth the principal that women really were entitled to all the
equal political rights along with men. The argument before that had not been so
much that women were inferior, but it was that women had a different role
in society. And according to the men, the men would
argue that since the women had this particular role
in society, one of the roles of the men is to look out for
and protect the interests of the women while women
played their more domestic role. Mill is saying that that kind of separation, with
its inherent hierarchy of
inferiority for women, is just not sustainable if you really pursue the principles
of
liberal thought. And the issues of rights for women become an increasingly
important subject in the
Atlantic world all through the second half of the 19th
century. And so the issues of rights for women and
just what rights women should enjoy is an increasingly important issue on both
sides of the Atlantic ocean in the 1870s, 1880s
and beyond. Some of these ideas were very
controversial. And the late 1800's are going to see the
rise of a lot of beliefs that challenge some of
these tenets of liberalism. We'll spend a little more time on the
enemies of liberalism next time. See you then.