By Jonathan Derbyshire
Prospect / July 17, 2014
Political philosophers may find Edmund
Fawcett’s assertion that “liberty is the wrong place to begin” when
telling the story of liberalism rather startling. They tend to be in the
business of deriving conclusions about the legitimate activity of the
state from a set of assumptions about liberty, consent and individual
rights. In Fawcett’s account, by contrast, liberalism is not a settled
doctrine arrived at through rational argument but a “political practice”
with a history. As for liberty, it’s certainly something liberals
believe in, Fawcett writes, but then so too do “most non-liberals.”
In place of the tattered standard of
liberty, he puts four key ideas—tolerance of conflict, resistance to
power, belief in progress and civic respect. And taking these as his
guiding thread through a long history that starts in the first half of
the 19th century, Fawcett is able to find family resemblances between
thinkers and statesmen otherwise as diverse as François Guizot and
William Gladstone, John Stuart Mill and Pierre Mendès France.
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