Part II

      Liberal Theories of Social Order

      Introduction to Part II

      Introduction to Part II

      Liberalism was an outgrowth of the European intellectual movement called the “Enlightenment” of the 18th century. Intellectuals wanted a new “science of society” – general, useful social explanations – based on analytical reasoning and empirical observation. The social sciences had an ethical mission, namely, to realize the innate human potential for freedom and progress. Science would enable people to choose their own paths; hence the purposes of social science were “liberal” (freeing) and human emancipation would be its great result. In 1782, the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet laid out the utopian longings that lay behind liberalism nicely, arguing that, “Those sciences, created almost in our own days, the object of which is the happiness of man, will enjoy a progress no less sure than that of the physical sciences, and this idea, so sweet, that our descendants will surpass us in wisdom as in enlightenment…”.

      But how best to achieve these lofty goals? A key claim of the Enlightenment was that society could be improved by unlocking the human capacity for rational pursuit of self-interest. There can be tension between the imperatives of freedom and those of order. One way to resolve the tension led through revolution to overthrow traditional authorities like princes and priests and replace them with a new governing elite that would use the power of the state to modernize society in line with enlightened goals. This radical path was appealing to liberal thinkers impatient with the slow pace of progress, obstructed by tyrants, and committed to egalitarianism. However, in the minds of the most influential liberals, the radical, state-led path lost its appeal following the violence and tyranny that arose from the French Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic dictatorship that followed it. After decades of revolutionary conflict, many liberal thinkers, particularly those influenced by the Utilitarian principles of possessive individualism and rational action, proposed that a just social order would be best achieved from below, by unleashing enlightened self-interest. Good government would empower citizens and entrepreneurs to remake society through a thriving market economy, protection of property rights, and voluntary collective action. The triumph of the Russian Revolution in 1917 that enthroned a communist dictatorship committed to abolishing property and overcoming the market further hardened the position of many twentieth-century liberals against all forms of collectivism and state control of the economy.

      What liberal thinkers of many stripes shared was a distinctive conception of social order. Rather than thinking that cooperation was only possible where a strong state regulated human conduct and imposed equality, liberal thinkers focused instead on (a) spontaneous and unplanned coordination that emerged from the daily interactions of rational, self-interested people, and (b) contracts through which people agreed to jointly regulate their actions. The best ways to foster this kind of social order were through those institutions that enabled people to define and act upon their subjective interests. The two great institutions that might yield this social order were free-market economies and representative government. Democracy and the market thus became the two great pillars of liberal social thought. Liberal social order thrived, as evidenced by the success of the Industrial Revolution and the gradual extension of civil rights and the franchise to widening circles of citizens. Nevertheless, by end of the 19th century confidence in democracy and the market as agents of equality and progress waned. The great crises of the early twentieth century – the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression – further eroded liberalism. By mid-century, critics of liberalism proposed that capitalism could only survive through radical reforms that overcame classical liberalism.

      We represent these broad theoretical trends with works from four key theorists who, combined, give a good sense of debates around freedom and democracy that characterize the late 19th century and early 20th century. All four thinkers were influenced by their encounter with America. The first is a set of excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) taken from his masterful Democracy in America (1835). This work presents Antebellum America in a comparative frame with France and highlights some core questions around social mores, equality and the nature of democratic institutions. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) was an essayist, fiction author and social thinker who is commonly considered the first female sociologist. Like Tocqueville, she wrote on America from an outsider’s point of view after traveling through the country. Her travels sparked two books, Society in America (1837, excerpted here) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). Jane Addams (1860–1935) was a prominent American social worker, activist and co-founder of Chicago’s Hull House, a famous immigrant support organization. Addams was a prolific author and pamphleteer; the work we excerpt here first published as an article in the American Journal of Sociology (1896), is a discussion of how housekeepers, as a profession, had failed to modernize at the expense of poor women and their families. Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) was an Austo-Hungarian intellectual and political leader who thought deeply about economic structure and the unique ways that markets simultaneously shape and are embedded within social life. Escaping fascism at home, he formulated his critical view on failures of free markets to achieve social justice and general welfare in British and then American exile. His most famous book, which we excerpt here, is The Great Transformation (1944) where he lays out the history and consequences of market development in Europe and calls for political restraints on market action.

      Alexis de Tocqueville

      Alexis de Tocqueville is the most important sociological thinker in the liberal tradition. For contemporary sociologists and political scientists, Tocqueville looms large because he had a profound influence on the development of historical and comparative social sciences and on the analysis of the role of social institutions in the political life of a nation (Swedberg 2009).

      Tocqueville was the son of an old aristocratic family, but he lived in an age of upheaval, in a world being transformed by the Industrial Revolution and shaken by democratic movements. Tocqueville was not an academic. He studied law and began his political career in 1830, serving as a parliamentary deputy. As parliamentarian and later as a government minister, Tocqueville earned a reputation as a principled liberal and a cautious reformer. He lent his voice to various causes, including the abolition of slavery, the promotion of free trade, and indirect rule that would have preserved local autonomy in an Algeria recently colonized by France.

      Along with his life-long friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866), Tocqueville was offered a government commission to tour the United States and draft a report on the state of prisons in the young republic. The journey radically expanded Tocqueville’s intellectual horizons. The two budding statesmen travelled across antebellum America and explored its political institutions, cultural values and social