Politics: Liberalism - Human Nature

-He saw liberty, for example, not just as a 'natural right' and an end to itself but as the engine of ongoing human development.

-As such, his human nature was never the 'finished article'; there was always room for improvement.

-He did not just want to liberate individuals as they were at present; instead, he pondered what individuals could become - a concept he termed 'individuality' and which has since been referred to as developmental individualism.

-He famously stated, it was 'better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied', while any support for liberty had to be 'grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being'.

-With a view to clarifying tolerance, he divided human actions into 'self-regarding' and 'other regarding'.

-'self-regarding' human actions included religious worship or robust expression of personal views. These actions did not impinge on the freedom of others in society and therefore should be tolerated.

-'other regarding' human actions included violent or riotous behaviour, which clearly did 'harm' the freedom of others in society and therefore should not be tolerated by a liberal state.

-He stated, 'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign'.

-He disagreed with Benthamite Utilitarianism which stated that human actions are so to gain pleasure or pain - for him, there were ‘higher and lower’ pleasures.

-He was concerned that during the mid-19th century, most would-be voters were ill-equipped to choose 'intelligent' representatives to act 'rationally' on their behalf.

-With that in mind, he argued that universal suffrage must be preceded by universal education, hoping this would promote developmental individualism - whereby there would be the advancement of individual potential, so as to produce a liberal consensus in society.

-This in turn would safeguard tolerance, reason and individualism, meanwhile, a vote would be withheld from the illiterate and unschooled, while those with a university education would receive more than one vote.

-His upbeat view of human nature and that it was guided by rationalism, meant he also believed the state of nature was to be underpinned by 'natural laws', 'natural liberties' and 'natural rights' (such as the right to property).

-Men are born equal – ‘foundational equality’.

-Men are ‘individuals’ and not ‘a group or collective’ and are, therefore self-reliant and self-sufficient.

-Man is entitled to the maximum amount of individual liberty as he was ‘born free’.

-As with all liberals, a concern for individualism lay at the heart of her philosophy.

-As such, she insisted that all individuals should be free to seek control over their own lives and the full realisation of their potential.

-Yet in 'The Feminine Mystique' (1963), she argued - like Wollstonecraft almost 2 centuries earlier - that gender was a serious hindrance to all those individuals who were female.

-She argued that it was illiberal attitudes in society, rather than human nature, that condemned most women to underachievement.

-She contested that these attitude were nurtured and transmitted via society's various 'cultural channels', notably schools, organised religion, the media, and mainstream literature, theatre and cinema.

-These channels of 'cultural conditioning' left many women convinced that their lot in life was determined by human nature rather than their own rationality and enterprise.

-She sought to challenge this 'irrational' assumption.

-She cited Mill's 'harm principle' to claim that laws criminalising sexual discrimination, for example, were designed merely to prevent some female individuals having their freedoms 'harmed' by others.

-He rejected the classical liberal view that society was composed of egotistical individuals driven only by self-interest, claiming that human beings were also motivated by a desire to promote the common good.

-He therefore argued that personal happiness derived not just from self-indulgence or self-gratification, but from attending to the happiness of others.

-In his work, 'A Theory of Justice' (1971) he set out to show that an enabling state redistributing wealth was not (as Friedrich von Hayek had suggested) a 'surrender to socialism' but perfectly consistent with liberal principles.

-To do this, he constructed a series of philosophical conditions.

-The first of these was termed 'the original position', whereby individuals would be asked to construct from scratch a society they judged to be superior to the one they lived in currently.

-Central to such an exercise would be questions about how wealth and power should be distributed.

-The second condition was termed the 'veil of ignorance' whereby individuals would have no preconceptions about the ort of people they themselves might be in this new society.

-They might, for example, be White or they might be from an ethnicity minority; they might be rich or they might be poor.

-He argued that when faced with such conditions, human nature - being rational and empathetic - would lead individuals to choose a society where the poorest members fared significantly better than in present society.

-From a liberal angle, he argued that the key point here was that this 'fairer' society, where inequalities were reduced, was the one individuals would choose.

-So an enlarged state, with higher taxation and significant wealth redistribution, was indeed consistent with liberalism's historic stress upon government by consent.

-In eighteenth-century England, both society and the state implied that women were not rational, and that they were thus denied individual freedom and formal equality.

-She argued as a result of fettering female individualism, nations like England were limiting their stock of intelligence, wisdom and morality.

-She argued that without formal education being made available to as many men and women as possible, individuals could never develop their rational faculties, never realise their individual potential and never recognise he 'absurdity' of illiberal principles such as the divine right of kings.