Politics: Liberalism - Society

-He argued the core liberal principle of 'foundational equality' meant individuals required not just formal equality under the law and constitution but also greater social and economic equality.

-This was necessary, to ensure the just society, where all lives could be rich and fulfilled.

-Yet, this could be provided, he stated, only by a significant redistribution of wealth via an enabling state, with extensive public spending and progressive taxation.

-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 sort of people they themselves might be in this new society.

-They might, for example, be White or they might be from an ethnic 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.

-He denied this was simply a fresh justification for socialism and egalitarianism.

-He noted that though most individuals would indeed choose to improve the lot of the poorest, they would still want considerable scope for individual liberty, self-fulfilment and, thus, significant inequalities of outcome.

-Therefore, he didn't argue that the gap between the richest and the poorest should necessarily be narrowed.

-Regarded as providing a valuable bridge between classical liberalism and modern liberalism, his ideas are also known as representing 'transitional liberalism':

-He outlined in his seminal work 'On Liberty' (1859), what became known as the idea of 'negative freedom', in which it argued that freedom mainly involved an absence of restraint.

-This connected to his 'harm principle', the notion that an individual's actions should always be tolerated, by either the state or other individuals, unless it could be demonstrated that such actions would harm others.

-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.

-The tolerance of diverse opinions was especially important, he argued, because it would ensure new ideas emerged while bad ideas were exposed via open, rational debate.

-He saw liberty, for example, not just as a 'natural right' and an end in itself but as the engine of ongoing human development - this affected his approach to the core liberal principle of individualism.

-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.

-As 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'.

-He believed that universal education could promote developmental individualism, with the advancement of individual potential, so as to produce a liberal consensus in society; this in turn would safeguard tolerance, reason and individualism.

-Once widespread education had been secured, he argued, democracy could actually further liberal values - promoting, for example, political education and opportunities for enlightening debate.

-Such a progressive society, he argued, could allow a pleasing refinement of Bentham's utilitarianism: 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' could then be a calculation made by politicians and voters, thus encouraging ordinary citizens to consider and aggregate everyone's interests, not just their own, when forming a political judgement.

-He and other liberals argued that each individual has a unique personality and peculiar talents; that individuals are rational in the pursuit of their self-interest; and that individuals are egotistical, driven by a wish to fulfil their potential and a desire to be self-reliant and independent.

-In view of all of this, each individual therefore seeks freedom.

-For him, this specifically meant freedom from any dependency on others and the freedom to live one's life in a way that maximises self-reliance and self-fulfilment.

-Taking issue with Mill's concept of 'negative' liberty, he argued that freedom should not be seen merely as the absence of restraint and 'freedom from' oppressive rulers.

-Instead, it should be regarded as something more altruistic - a concept that involved individuals 'enabling' other individuals, thus allowing them the freedom to pursue individual fulfilment.

-According to him, this approach was not to be confused with the state-led collectivism of socialists such as Beatrice Webb, or the aristocratic paternalism of conservatives like Edmund Burke.

-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.

-Prior to the state's existence, there was a 'natural' society which served mankind's interests tolerably well.

-Borrowing a phrase coined by Thomas Hobbes 40 years earlier, he described this natural society as the 'state of nature'.

-However, his state of nature was very different to the 'nasty and brutish' version depicted by Hobbes.

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

-Specifically, he defined the 'right' to property as 'that with which Man has mixed his labour'.

-As such, his state of nature was not one that people would be keen to leave at any cost.

-The alternative 'state of law' (in other words, the modern state as we know it) was therefore designed to improve upon an essentially tolerable situation, by resolving disputes between individuals more efficiently than would be the case under the state of nature.

-She argued that in 18th century England, both society and stated implied that women were not rational, and they were thus denied individual freedom and formal equality.

-Women, for example, were rarely allowed land ownership or remunerative employment and sacrificed what little individualism they had in order to become wives.

-Once married, a woman had little legal protection against violence inflicted by her spouse, and no recourse to divorce.

-Furthermore, women could not vote for those who governed them - a blatant violation of 'government by consent'.

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

-As she observed, 'such arrangements are not conditions where reason and progress may prosper'.

-She asserted that the effective denial of liberty to an entire gender left society vulnerable to doctrines that threatened the whole spirit of the Enlightenment.

-She argued that the treatment of women during the 18th century was a general affront to reason and a particular affront to the individual liberty of half the adult population.

-She duly contested that English society in this period could only conceive of women as emotional creatures, suited to marriage and motherhood but little else.

-As she observed, instead of developing their individual potential, Hanoverian society contrived to 'keep women in a state of listless inactivity and stupid acquiescence'.

-She conceded that women themselves were complicit in their subjugation, generally desiring only marriage and motherhood.

-For this to be corrected, she argued, formal education should be made available to as many women and men as possible.

-Without such formal tuition, she contested, 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.