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- Herausgeber: Canbury
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Liberalism is under attack. From the rise of nationalism and populism to the decline of trust in institutions, liberals are facing unprecedented challenges. But what does it mean to be a liberal in the 21st Century? And how can we defend the values that we hold dear? In his new book, How to Be a Liberal, Ian Dunt provides a clear and concise guide to liberalism for the modern age. Drawing on his years of experience as a journalist and political commentator, Dunt argues that liberalism is not just a set of abstract principles, but a practical guide to living a good and meaningful life. In the book, Dunt covers a wide range of topics, including: - What is liberalism and why is it important? - The history of liberalism and its key thinkers - The different types of liberalism and their strengths and weaknesses - How to be a liberal in a world that is increasingly hostile to liberalismDunt's writing is witty and engaging, and he makes complex ideas accessible to a general audience. He is also not afraid to tackle difficult topics, such as the challenges of multiculturalism and the rise of identity politics. But what makes How to Be a Liberal truly unique is Dunt's emphasis on the importance of humor and irony in the defense of liberalism. He argues that liberals need to learn to laugh at themselves and their opponents, and to avoid taking themselves too seriously. In one passage, Dunt writes: "Liberalism is not a religion. It is a set of ideas that are open to challenge and debate. Liberals should never be afraid to laugh at themselves or their own beliefs. In fact, I would argue that a sense of humor is essential for any liberal who wants to be effective in the world." Dunt's book is a timely and important contribution to the debate about liberalism in the 21st century. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it means to be a liberal today and how to defend the values that we hold dear.
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HOW TO BE A LIBERAL
Ian Dunt
4To mum and dad,
who gave me the two most important
gifts of all:
To be loved and to be free
CONTENTS
TODAY
Nationalism is marching across the world.
Nowhere is immune to its advance. Everywhere must come to terms with the threat it poses.
In the last few years, nationalism has become the driving force behind the Republican party in the United States, the Conservative party in Great Britain, the Bharatiya Janata party in India, Likud in Israel, the Alliance for Brazil in Brazil and PDP–Laban in the Philippines. It conquered Hungary under Fidesz and Poland under Law and Justice. It dominated political debate in Italy through the Lega, Austria through the Freedom Party, Bulgaria through Attack and Estonia through the EKRE.
Sometimes it loses a battle. Sometimes it wins. In some countries, it takes over the government in its entirety. In others, it acts as a junior partner in a coalition. Often it does not even need power. It simply dictates the political narrative from opposition.
Wherever nationalism establishes a position, it transmits its narrative, which consists of six lies, or a combination of them.
The first lie is that you do not exist as an individual. Nationalism claims that society is composed of two groups, who are in a perpetual conflict with one another: the people and the elite.
In reality, neither of these groups exist. There is no such thing as the people. Individuals do not compose a homogeneous mass. They do not speak with one voice. They have different values, interests and eccentricities. They are not singular, but plural. 8The elite is also a fiction. There is no one centre of power, not in politics, economics, culture or anywhere else. The world is composed of distinct clusters of power, which sometimes flow together and sometimes apart.
The notion of the people versus the elite sounds like a challenge to power, but that is a misdirection. In fact, it consolidates power. It does this by creating a moral through-line, a fairy story, by which the nationalists can claim unchallengeable legitimacy on behalf of those they claim to represent. In their eyes, only the votes of the people who agree with them count as democracy. The rest of the population is ignored.
This process warps and diminishes what it is possible for humanity to be. Nationalism pretends that we have only one identity, that we cannot be more than one thing at once. It makes us uniform and categorised, a part of the mass: an undifferentiated component of the whole.
The second lie is that the world is simple. This lie proceeds logically from the first. If the world is split between two groups, instead of being a vast and diffuse network of individual and organisational interests, it follows that all that is wrong is the result of the elite and all that is right is the result of the people.
The notion of complexity is thereby eradicated from existence. The great ecosystems of the world – from trading networks, to law, finance and sovereignty – are wiped away. They are replaced by childish assessments of problems and infantile proposals for their solution.
These solutions never work, because they do not address the real-world circumstances which caused them. But when they fail, as they invariably do, the blame is not placed on nationalism. It is placed on a conspiracy of the elite. Nationalism therefore works as its own intellectual consolidation and enforcement program. The things which disprove it are used to justify it. The events which go against it are taken as evidence of its necessity.
The third lie is that you must not question. To speak out, to interrogate, to inquire, is to reject the purity of the people. It is to place yourself above them.9
Independent minds are a threat to power. Their mere existence disproves nationalism’s world view and their conclusions undermine its policy platform. They are a living refutation of the notion of a binary class system of the people and the elite. It is therefore necessary that they should be denigrated and abused. They are branded enemies of the people.
The fourth lie is that institutions are engaged in a conspiracy against the public. On a national level, these institutions include the courts, the parliament or Congress, the press, charities and research institutes. On an international level, they include the United Nations, the European Union, the World Health Organisation, and the World Trade Organisation.
By their nature, institutions limit the power of government. They scrutinise it, balance it, separate it, hold it to account, block it from taking illegal actions and force it to abide by democratic standards. Internationally, they solve problems countries cannot handle on their own, demonstrating the capacity of humankind to co-operate across national borders.
The narrative of the people versus the elite does not allow for that degree of organisation. If the people are pure and the nationalists represent them, then there can be no legitimate restrictions on their expression. So the institutions are attacked, at all levels, at all times. First they are discredited. Then they are disabled. Then they are destroyed.
The fifth lie is that difference is bad. This applies to people from other countries, or with different coloured skin, or sexuality, or clothing, or language. This view is entailed by the concept of the people as a singular, virtuous body. All outside entities are, by definition, a challenge to its purity.
Nationalism asserts that you should be afraid of those who are not like you. Minorities are treated as a threat to the integrity of the people, rather than proof of the richness of human experience. The language it speaks is of uniformity, conformity – the machine over the organism.10
The sixth lie is that there is no such thing as truth. A commitment to objective fact is treated as the mewling of the elite. Evidence and reason, the qualities that allow humanity to aspire towards certainty, are dismissed as plots against the people. Statistical authorities, academics, economic analysts, trading experts and investigative journalists are categorised as political opponents.
This is because truth is a challenge to power. If voters base their views on verifiable data, the nationalist narrative can be contradicted. Those who live under its shadow are therefore encouraged to process information according to their tribal identity rather than its veracity, to close themselves off from anything that might challenge their faith.
The lies of the nationalist movement range from the gigantic to the trivial, from the systemic to the opportunistic. This disinformation is not just a means to an end. It is an end itself. It serves two distinct agendas. Firstly it attempts to redefine day-to-day events in whichever way most suits the nationalist narrative. Secondly it works to degrade the entire notion of empirical reality. If nationalists can lie without consequence, the concepts of truth and falsity fall into irrelevance. And then there will be no checks on their power whatsoever.
There is a system of thought which understands what is happening to us and offers the means to resist it. Its name is liberalism. It is the single most radical political programme in the history of humankind.
This is not because of its conclusions or its tactics. It is certainly not because of the political parties that bear its name. It is because of its unit of analysis.
Liberalism is the struggle for the freedom of the individual. When it is truly followed, it can never be the tool of the powerful. It can never be used to oppress. It can only liberate.
It rejects the false choice of the people versus the elite. It is committed to empirical reality. It stands up for institutions, and diversity, and, 11chief among all values, the liberty of every person to engage in their own act of self-creation. To be who they want to be. To live where they want to live. To love who they want to love. To do as they please, with the only restraints on their actions entailed by the protection of liberty for others.
It pursues freedom, because freedom makes all other values possible.
Liberalism does not have a party line. It does not worship leaders. It is a living, breathing thing, a constantly evolving set of questions and answers. It is the rebel thought, the view of the world which springs from within – rather than the one imposed from above.
There are countless ways to fight back against what is happening to us, but they all start with this one moment: of understanding what liberalism is. Of knowing what we fight for and why.
This book tells the story of liberalism, from its birth in the age of science to its new status as a resistance movement against nationalism.
It is a story of war, romance, economics, eccentricity and struggle. It is the story of a single idea, which grew more complex and daring over the centuries, and of the dangers and tragedies that followed from its articulation. It is the story of some deeply unusual, stubborn, free-thinking people, who lived life on their own terms and devised a system that would allow others to do likewise.
It is also an account of how it faltered – how a combination of economics, culture and technology weakened it and brought us to the situation we are in today. It’s through understanding that process that we can repair liberalism, gather ourselves and undo the damage that is being inflicted upon us.
This is how we fight back. Not by compromising with nationalism. Not by respecting it or getting so lost in our ideological confusion that we allow it to prosper. We fight back by rediscovering our principles. And that means going right back, to the dawn of science, to see where the dream of liberty first took hold.
1. BIRTH
On 10th November 1619, René Descartes had a nightmare. He was walking down a road in a violent storm and shadowy figures were following him. He couldn’t keep a straight line. A weakness was affecting his right side and driving him constantly to the left. Strong gusts of wind kept spinning him around and preventing him from getting a sure footing.
Ahead of him he could make out some gates and beyond that a church where he could flee the storm. But even when he went in the courtyard, the wind kept throwing him off balance. He saw a man he recognised and tried to say something to him. It was impossible. He couldn’t stand upright. Then, slowly, other figures began to appear, all of them steady on their feet, unaffected by the weather. And they stared down at him as he scrambled in the dirt.
He woke up. It was the dead of night. A fire crackled in the corner of the room. Descartes was inexplicably terrified. For hours he lay in bed and there in the darkness, half-mad with anxiety, he started to develop a terrible thought: what if there was an evil demon watching him, putting these nightmares in his head?
He prayed. And then, finally, he fell asleep again.
As soon as he lost consciousness there was a loud explosion. He snapped back awake and stared at the fire. Had it crackled loudly? Or did that just happen in his mind? He felt more terror, more of the anxiety of the night-time, and then eventually drifted off again.13
He was standing by a table with two books on it. He opened one of them and saw the line: ‘Quod vitae sectabor iter?’ – what path in life shall I follow? A man appeared and they discussed the books for a while. Then the books and the man faded.
But Descartes did not wake up. He stood there, by the table, and realised something. He was dreaming. And then he started to interpret the dream, to think it through, while he was still in it. When the analysis ended, he woke up.
These dreams would come to define Descartes’ life. He became concerned with the gap between dream and reality, the thin line between being awake – existing in a real physical space with ordered thoughts – and the crazed world of dreaming, where everything is bizarre and volatile.
The aspect of dreams which seems to have disturbed Descartes was how life-like they felt. If dreams seemed so real at the time, he thought, then who was to say that the things we thought or perceived when we were awake were any more reliable? For all he knew, the evil demon he imagined that night was real. It could be putting thoughts into his mind when he was awake as easily as it could while he was asleep.
Descartes didn’t believe there was an evil demon. What concerned him was that he could not prove – utterly, without any trace of doubt – that there wasn’t. And if he couldn’t prove that, then he couldn’t really prove anything. Perhaps green was red. Perhaps two plus two equalled five. Perhaps the bed he slept in wasn’t real. If you followed this line of reasoning far enough, the world fell down: maths, geometry, physics, politics, religion, civilisation. Everything was built on shaky foundations.
Descartes, an aimless 23-year-old Frenchman, decided to dedicate his life to finding certainty. He roamed the world, speaking with scientists and theologians, trying to find bits of knowledge, priceless slivers of certainty, which he could be absolutely sure were true. He was engaged in an act of existential quarantine: finding and isolating facts that someone could believe without any shadow of doubt.14
‘During the following nine years I did nothing other than wander around the world trying to be a spectator rather than an actor in the dramas that unfold there,’ he wrote. ‘I rooted out of my mind all the errors that could have slipped into it.’ Then, eventually, he settled down and started to write philosophy. It was not until he was 45, in a work called Meditations on First Philosophy, that he properly grappled with the dream and its implications. It is arguably the most important book ever written, but not for the reason Descartes thought. He intended for it to be an affirmation of religious faith. He wanted to protect belief in God from the relentless doubt he had experienced, from nagging questions of scepticism. But instead of finding certainty in God, he found it somewhere else entirely. He found it in the individual.
This idea would go on to destroy the old world and create a new one, based on rights, reason and liberty. It was the birth of liberalism. And it happened by accident.
Descartes was a hard man to like. He combined haughty arrogance about the brilliance of his writing with extreme sensitivity to criticism and a disregard for the work of almost everyone else.
He dismissed even great thinkers and seemed completely uninterested in any book, by any author, on any subject. ‘Although when one publishes a book one is always very anxious to know what readers say about it,’ he once wrote, ‘I can assure you that it concerns me very little. Indeed, I think I know the ability of most of those who pass for learned so well that I would think little of my views if they approved them.’
He was no more interested in people’s company than their writing. When he returned from his early travels, he lived like a recluse, moving constantly from house to house, town to town, in a bid to be left alone.
In the end, he started to conceal his location from even trusted friends and put misleading return addresses on his correspondence. His 15acquaintances, such as they were, began referring to him as Monsieur d’Escartes: Mr Evasion. His few friendships almost always ended in bitterness and recrimination.
Insofar as he kept contact with anyone, it was Marin Mersenne, a French mathematician who acted as an intellectual hub for the scientific minds of Europe. As Descartes became more and more reclusive, Mersenne served, to all intents and purposes, as his emissary on earth. He forwarded his correspondence, told him of the current debates among learned men in France, and helped him publish his books.
They were living through a period of great change, where rationality was starting to challenge the old authority structures.
Since around the end of the 12th Century, the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle had begun to meld with Catholicism and fossilise into dogma. Subjects like epistemology, the study of knowledge, and metaphysics, the study of reality, had narrowed into unchallengeable truisms. Those who questioned them too forcefully were accused of heresy. Religious authorities used torture and execution to keep people in line.
Then something broke. It started with the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish polymath. His book in 1543, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, rejected the idea that Earth was the centre of the universe. In fact, the Earth was just a part of a solar system. The other planets in the sky were not circling around it. They, like the Earth, were circling the sun.
Copernicus was reducing the stature of humankind. He was implying that we were just one part of a greater story, perhaps just a minor part, rather than the centre of existence. The theory contradicted several passages in the Bible, including I Chronicle 16:30, which stated that ‘the world also shall be stable, it be not moved.’ The more confident scientific thought became, the more it challenged religion’s monopoly on knowledge.
In 1593, Giordano Bruno, an Italian friar who claimed that the universe was infinite and had no centre at all, was tried for heresy by 16the Inquisition, the Catholic Church’s religious courts. He was found guilty and burned at the stake in Rome. By 1615, the Inquisition had found Copernicus’ theory to be ‘formally heretical.’ Later, it would persecute the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. He was dragged to Rome, threatened with torture and put under house arrest.
Descartes spent his life worrying about these controversies and what they might mean for his own writing. He was wise to do so. His work strongly implied – but never explicitly stated – that Copernicus’ theory was correct. And there was something else, something deeper. While Descartes was a committed Christian, his thinking, when you got down to it, was fundamentally heretical. In an age of rigid religious belief, his life’s work was premised on the idea that it was hard to establish certainty.
‘I shall say nothing about philosophy,’ he wrote in 1637, ‘except that it has been practised by the best minds that have appeared over many centuries, and yet it still contains nothing that is not disputed and consequently doubtful.’
To write his first book, The World, Descartes retreated alone to Amsterdam between 1630 and 1633. He wrote in the opening sentence: ‘In proposing to treat here of light, the first thing I want to make clear to you is that there can be a difference between our sensation of light and what is in the objects that produce that sensation in us.’
It’s hard to put yourself in the mind of someone who would need to be told that light and our perception of it are different. We know that light exists and that our visual and mental apparatus – our eyes and brain – translate that phenomenon for us to experience. But in Descartes’ time the orthodox view of the world was entirely human-centric. Objects were thought to contain the qualities people saw in them: blood, for instance had the quality ‘red’ in it. Fire had the quality of ‘heat.’17
Descartes was saying something completely different: an object existed independently of our experience of it. Our sensory apparatus did not tell us the truth about reality, but only what we perceived.
He was prying open something fundamental about the world, because from this thought, all science followed. If you could not trust your senses, you needed to construct a hypothesis, a theory about how things might be. And then you needed to test it, which required instruments which could account for our sensory weakness. And once you were doing that, you were doing science.
Just as Copernicus had removed humankind from the centre of space, Descartes was removing it from the centre of reality. A mysterious world opened up underneath our feet, in which we were suddenly strangers in a land which had been full of certainty, constructed by the soothing words of priests and ancient Greeks.
Descartes always insisted this idea was compatible with the teachings of the Church, but in truth it was a revolutionary thought, with implications that would uproot traditional structures of authority.
Once the reader was convinced that their senses weren’t reliable guides to the world, Descartes started asking questions about how things might really work. He focused on fire. He dismissed the medieval notion that it had the form of ‘fire,’ the quality of ‘heat,’ and the action that ‘burns.’ Instead, he concluded, ‘the body of the flame that acts against the wood is composed of small parts, which move independently of one another with a very fast and very violent motion.’
These parts, which he called ‘corpuscles,’ were ‘so small that we cannot distinguish them by sight.’ It was a primitive theory of atoms.
This was Descartes’ second great insight: that the explanation of matter relied on microstructural qualities that were fundamentally mathematisable. He had not only outlined the starting realisation of the scientific revolution, but made considerable progress towards establishing its initial findings. He did this in the opening 13 paragraphs of his book.18
And then, just as he was putting the finishing touches to it, Descartes heard about what happened to Galileo. It was a disaster. The principles of Descartes’ physics were quite plainly in line with Galileo’s views. This now constituted a formally heretical opinion of the motion of the earth. Just as he was about to send off the finished manuscript for publication, he decided to hold back.
‘I have decided to suppress completely,’ he told Mersenne, ‘and to lose almost all my work over four years.’
Descartes had been given a fright. He had, by the skin of his teeth, avoided publishing a work which could have seen him dragged before the religious authorities. The Netherlands was more tolerant than Italy or Spain, but he was playing a dangerous game and he knew it.
He suddenly became extremely cautious, constantly fretting over religious attitudes to his work. Sometimes he buckled. Other times he tried to pre-empt and discourage criticism by launching aggressive assaults on otherwise obscure critics. His working life deteriorated into a series of theological disputes.
He became embroiled in a long-running dispute with a Jesuit college. He was vigorously criticised by a Dutch Calvinist theologian, Gisbertus Voetius, who commissioned a writer to pen a book-length attack, suggesting Descartes ‘injects the venom of atheism delicately and secretly into those who, because of their feeble minds, never notice the serpent that hides in the grass.’ In a moment of real danger, he was compared to Lucilio Vanini, an Italian atheist, who had his tongue cut out and was strangled and burned at the stake in Toulouse.
Descartes pursued these arguments at length, but it was a losing battle. The reality was that his entire world view, of faulty sensory perception and the superiority of mechanistic explanations for physical phenomena, was an innate challenge to the Church. 19
So he had an idea, a way of putting all the theology behind him and focusing on what really mattered. He would demonstrate that the existence of God was absolutely certain. By doing so, he could rule out ever being branded heretical or atheistic. This would set him free to get on with his broader study of doubt without constantly looking over his shoulder.
It turned out to be a terrible misjudgement. Descartes had become too good at what he did. He was a master of prising things apart and exposing their inner flaws. By turning his focus on God, he would end up breaking the entire composition of human knowledge. And worst of all, he would do so by accident.
In 1637, Descartes finally published his first book, a series of three essays on optics, geometry, and meteorology, with an accompanying note called Discourse on the Method to introduce them. The three essays are now less well known, but The Discourse has become part of the canon of western philosophy. It was where he first laid out his system for rigorous, systematic doubt – an unflinching critical gaze one could apply to any problem.
It had four sequences: First, separate out what you know to be true from the parts you can doubt. Second, break down the remaining problems into smaller units. Third, solve the simple ones first and work your way up. Finally, review the work and assess if anything has been left out.
Today it seems like a perfectly normal approach to problem-solving. At the time, it was a deeply subversive system. It didn’t matter how Descartes tried to dress it up. The method implied that reality was open to the human intellect. Anyone who was prepared to sit and think could evaluate the evidence for themself. It left no room for authority, unless it had something to contribute in the search for truth, which in most cases it did not.
Descartes took care to protect himself. He published The Discourse anonymously. He inserted a chapter titled ‘morals and maxims of conducting the method’ which explicitly excluded faith and the laws 20of the state from its application. He made it clear that most people should not be trusted with the method.
And then, crucially, he added another section, in which he tried to show that God could not possibly be subject to the level of doubt he was applying elsewhere. Three things, he stated, existed outside the realm of scepticism: his own existence, reason and God.
It didn’t work. The section was brief and reluctant. It raised more questions than it answered. And it most certainly did not erect a firewall between his faith in God and his system of doubt.
That put Descartes in a perilous position. The book may have been anonymous, but he was widely known to be its author. Any theologian who was out to get him – and there were now several of them – could claim that his arguments in favour of God were so weak that he was actually trying to spread atheism.
So he made a fateful decision. He resolved to address the problems head on. He would write another book that definitively showed that his system of doubt was not a threat to God.
It would dismantle and defeat sceptical arguments like the evil demon theory, which suggested we didn’t really know anything. It would establish God’s existence with absolute certainty. And then he could address himself to the problems which really interested him.
In truth, Descartes was reluctant about the whole endeavour. In order to defeat sceptical arguments he would have to describe them, and that was a dangerous thing to do.
‘I did not dare to attempt this, because I would have had to explain at length the strongest arguments of the sceptics,’ he wrote to an acquaintance in May 1637. ‘I was afraid that this introduction, which could have appeared as if it were designed to introduce the views of sceptics, would disturb weak minds.’
As a result, Descartes switched from his native French to Latin. This had the advantage of expanding his learned audience internationally, while excluding uneducated readers – thereby allowing him to say that he had gone out of his way to protect them from febrile ideas.21
But it was not enough. Descartes failed beyond his own worst nightmares. Not only would feeble minds come into contact with sceptical ideas, but he was about to write a book which described them so vividly and compellingly that he would be known for centuries as a byword for the very viewpoint he was trying to defeat.
The book was The Meditations. Descartes laid it out like a work of fiction. His narrator, who was a kind of composite version of himself, was in a room, by a fire, doubting everything.
He was going to sift through everything he held true and judge whether he could really prove it. If he couldn’t, he’d discard it.
He didn’t need to take each belief in turn. That would take too long. He only needed to look at the foundations. If those were faulty, the whole construction would come tumbling down.
So he started with his senses. ‘How could I deny that I possess these hands and this body?’ he asked himself. But he could, because when he was asleep, he was equally certain that his dreams were real, when in fact they turned out to be false.
‘There exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep,’ he said. ‘I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.’
The threat of dreaming erased all certainty of the physical world. Physics, astronomy, medicine – they were all suspect. But he still had the contents of the mind, the concepts that we give meaning to through our thoughts and which exist independently of physical reality, like maths or geometry. After all, two plus two equals four no matter whether you’re awake or dreaming.
But Descartes couldn’t be certain of even this. He returned to his fear of an all-powerful evil demon tricking him. It could have inserted false thoughts about mathematics and geometry in our minds. Maybe 22in reality two plus two equalled five.
This left nothing which could withstand doubt, not even our own thoughts. ‘The sky, the air, the earth, colours, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity,’ Descartes wrote.
He was lost. ‘I had fallen all of a sudden into very deep water, I am so greatly disconcerted as to be made unable either to plant my feet firmly on the bottom or sustain myself by swimming on the surface.’ Nothing could be relied on. ‘What is there, then, that can be esteemed true?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps this only, that there is nothing absolutely certain.’
This was the moment in the history of ideas – the exact point – when the old world died.
Amid the ruins, Descartes started scrambling around for one thing, just one block of unassailable truth, with which he could start putting the world back together again. ‘I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable,’ he said.
And then he found it: a point of truth. He found the self.
He did it with a single thought: If I am being deceived, then there must be a me who is being deceived. Therefore I am.
Everything else can be stripped from you, except that one solitary part. Doubt can challenge all things, but it cannot challenge the fact that you are doubting and therefore definitely exist. ‘This proposition – I am, I exist – is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.’
Or, in Latin: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.
It is arguably the most famous sentence in all of western philosophy. And it is also – without hyperbole – the single most beautiful thought in the history of humankind. It is the only thought you can have which is certainly true without any hint of doubt. There is simply no other thought like it. It proves itself, in a circular motion, by virtue of what it contains. It is a closed system of perfect confidence. 23
Descartes had brought down the entire edifice of knowledge and found just one thing that was certain: the individual.
But that was not all. There was something else contained in the Cogito: a secret partner. The individual was not a blank slate. It had one definable characteristic. It thought. It was only by virtue of thinking that it knew it existed.
‘I am a real thing, and really exist, but what thing?’ Descartes asked himself. ‘A thinking thing.’ He had a mind, he had understanding. In other words, he had reason.
This was the moment liberalism was born.
That seems a strange thing to say. Most people don’t consider Descartes a liberal. He wasn’t even writing about politics. Other major thinkers, like the German moral philosopher Immanuel Kant, are usually considered to be the outriders of liberalism. But it was here, completely by accident, that its basic operating units spluttered into life. The existential truth of the individual replaced the creaky old dogma of church and state.
But it was not a single embryo. The ‘I am’ could not be proven without the thinking and the thinking could not take place without the ‘I am.’
Liberalism and reason were born as twins.
From then on, Descartes frantically tried to build up from this block of truth to where he was trying to reach all along: the existence of God. But suddenly his skills and reasoning betrayed him. From one page to another, he went from some of the most impressive arguments in the history of philosophy to some of the least.
He fired off numerous arguments for God, each seemingly more desperate than the last, each falling apart faster than the previous one. The Meditations collapsed as soon as it turned to its original purpose.24
All of those pro-God arguments turned to dust. But the preceding thinking, the Cogito, took on a life of its own. Once its truth was revealed, it spread out relentlessly. Within years, students were asking searching questions of their teachers and agitating against the old Aristotelian strictures of their classes. Now, hundreds of years later, it is often the first argument given to philosophy undergraduates.
In truth, the ideas Descartes was outlining were not really that new. Aristotle had a similar thought when he said that ‘to perceive that we perceive or think is to perceive that we exist.’ St Augustine, the 5th-Century philosopher, did too, when he responded to sceptical arguments by replying that ‘if I am mistaken, I exist.’ Jean de Silhon, a friend of Descartes, had toyed with similar formulations.
But the history of ideas is not the history of the people who first thought of them. More often than not, it is the history of the person who popularised them. ‘As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new idea is so much ahead of his time that everyone thinks him silly,’ the 20th-Century liberal philosopher Bertrand Russell said. ‘Then gradually, the world becomes ready for the idea, and the man who proclaims it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit.’ Descartes was that person, even if he never wanted to be.
Part of the reason the Cogito spread so far and fast was because it was so well written. Despite his stated concerns about uneducated readers, Descartes continued to write ‘in the vernacular.’ His voice was emotionally rich and appealing. The text was vivid and immediate. It was nothing like the treatises written by other philosophers of the time, or the dialogues which had been popular since Plato. His lack of interest in books left him free of the affectations of the age. His suspicion of learned men pushed him into a much more engaging and democratic form of writing.
The Meditations was eventually banned by the Church, a few years after Descartes’ death. It had various theological problems, but the truth was deeper and broader. It was Descartes’ whole personality. No matter how much he tried to hide it, he reeked of rebellion. He 25had prodded and probed until the whole edifice of authority had fallen down.
In its place, he found the individual. He freed humans from being a part of a whole.
We are not a subsection of our family, or class, or tribe, or religion, or race, or nation. We are individuals. We can think for ourselves. We have a capacity for reason. This was the philosophical truth that emerged from the ruins of the old certainties. And from there, it took over the world.
2. AWAKENING
It happened in 1647, six years after The Meditations was published. A group of English soldiers and radicals stood in a room in Putney, just outside London. They had taken their king captive. They were at war with their parliament. They had mutinied against their officers. And then they held an advanced debate on political theory.
For centuries, the records of this meeting were lost. But in 1890 a librarian at Worcester College in Oxford made an extraordinary discovery: carefully noted minutes of what took place, written down in an early form of shorthand. It was, as the 20th-Century historian Austin Woolrych said, possibly the most ‘exciting archival discovery in any field of British history.’ It provided a detailed minute-by-minute account of people hammering out the very early outlines of what would become liberalism, in the frenzy of civil war.
The sophistication of the debate was not by chance. It was the culmination of years of radical arguments, scribbled down in jail cells, smuggled out by sympathisers, published on outlawed presses, spread in the streets and alleyways of London, and whispered through the army ranks. It was the result of a sustained campaign by a group of stubborn, bloody-minded radicals called the Levellers.
They were the first group to process Descartes’ existential assessment of the individual into religion and politics. They hadn’t read him. They almost certainly had no idea he existed, but at certain moments in history, similar ideas start to emerge in distinct and disparate contexts, like branches of an evolutionary tree. And that was what happened here.27
The Levellers’ struggle started with King Charles I. England’s sovereign had married a Catholic French princess, Henrietta Maria, in 1625, and in doing so created lasting suspicion and resentment against his rule in his Protestant kingdom. During his reign, a form of High Anglicanism was imposed on England that had a grandeur and theatricality to it which looked, to his opponents, a lot like Catholicism. Above all else, Charles believed in the divine right of kings – the notion that monarchs received their authority directly from God and were therefore entitled to exercise absolute power.
Looking back, he seems like a relic of the old world caught in the furnace of the new. But that would not have been how it appeared at the time, even to his opponents. Much of Europe was at that stage moving towards absolutism and would keep doing so for decades to come. Charles saw himself as a moderniser and a reformer, trying to overcome a century of economic inertia and stagnation. He could be a slippery character, prone to lying and misleading people, but he was not avaricious. Despite his many failings, he was a man of principle. He really believed he was God’s elect and that to defy him was to challenge the creator.
Similarly, those who fought against him did not see themselves as the harbingers of a new democratic era. They rooted most of their arguments in ancient English liberties, which evoked a bygone – and largely fictitious – age of freedom deep in England’s history.
History is not simple or linear. Its characters have a jumble of religious and political convictions that are barely comprehensible to a modern person. But at certain points, shocking new ideas emerge by chance out of economic and social events. And that’s exactly what took place.
Charles was being frustrated by parliament. At this point, it was still under his command. He could choose when to call it and when to dissolve it. But it had a hold over him which was far more powerful than God’s. It could raise taxes.
For years parliament had been using this lever to keep the king in check. It would only authorise new funds when it had secured something 28in return. And that meant Charles was stuck. When he recalled parliament, its members challenged his authority. When he didn’t, he ran out of money.
For over a decade, he held off from calling them and tried all sorts of other imaginative – and ultimately unsuccessful – ways of raising money. It was known as the Eleven Years’ Tyranny. During this period Charles exerted executive control through a kind of mini-parliament called the Star Chamber. This body could pass laws, call witnesses, and torture and execute suspected heretics. It became a byword for arbitrary power among those opposed to the king’s rule.
At its head was a deeply reactionary archbishop called William Laud. He was Charles’ enforcer.
Laud understood that society was changing at breakneck speed. The shift of people from the countryside into London was forging new kinds of identity. Where people previously thought of themselves as being part of their village and religion, essentially as a part of a mass, they were now being bundled together, cheek-by-jowl, from diverse parts of the country and different social classes, in relatively large numbers. The old ties were fraying. Now there were new identities – of individual churches, Protestant groupings, occupation, and class.
City-living also created the necessary conditions for what we now call news. Information could flow between people much faster in the bustling streets than it could between remote villages. When events took place, outbursts of gossip, rumour and innuendo flew across the city like darting birds, often sparking bouts of mass political activity.
One piece of technology above all others fomented this instability: the printing press.
Laud understood better than anyone the danger this invention posed to the regime. It could super-charge the flow of information so that it no longer required one person to speak to another. Unless it fell under government control, it would challenge religion and the king.
So in 1637, Laud passed a decree through the Star Chamber restricting the number of authorised printers in London to 20. The number of 29people authorised to cast type was limited to four. Printing domestic news was a criminal offence. Authors and publishers of unlicensed material were interrogated and tortured.
The Stationers’ Company – a mixture of a trade union and a professional body with full commercial control of books and printing – was expected to seek out and eradicate any published work that was considered treasonous or heretical or had been published on an unauthorised press. No carpenter, joiner or blacksmith was allowed to make any part of a printer without informing the Company. It became a kind of censorship militia, tracking down banned books and arresting their authors and publishers.
In the summer of 1637, three anti-Catholic writers – William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick – were hauled before the Star Chamber and convicted of seditious writing. They were fined £5,000 each – an inordinate sum of money – and sentenced to life imprisonment. They were also put in the pillories, had their books burned in front of them, and had their ears cut off. In the case of Prynne, who had already been before the Star Chamber four years earlier, the stumps of his ears left over from his previous mutilation were removed. He was branded with the initials SL, for ‘seditious libeller.’
One young man in his twenties was inspired by the plight of three men and the way they stood by their convictions despite their torture. His name was John Lilburne and he would become the closest thing the Levellers had to a leader. He continued to distribute their works until December 1637, when he was caught by Laud’s agents and sent before the Star Chamber.
His actions at this point defined his approach to politics for the rest of his life: defiance, legal literacy, a rousing and near-ceaseless insistence on the ancient liberties of the English, and a desire to be as argumentative and stubborn as it was possible for a man to be. As 30one of his allies once said: ‘If there were none living but himself, John would be against Lilburne, and Lilburne against John.’
The Star Chamber secured convictions on the basis of its own witness testimonies, meaning that interrogations doubled up as grounds for prosecution. So Lilburne simply refused to speak except to state his freeborn right against self-incrimination. He also insisted that he could not contribute to the hearing because he had not been subpoenaed. Finally, he told prosecutors, he could not take the oath required of the court until he had been given time to consider its lawfulness. It was like someone had cut him out of the future, which had due process, and pasted him into his own time, which did not. The Star Chamber ruled that he be fined £500, imprisoned, and publicly tortured.
On 18th April 1638, Lilburne was tied to the back of a cart, marched from Fleet Bridge to parliament, and beaten with a knotted three-thronged whip every four paces. Onlookers shouted encouragement to him as he was pulled through the streets.
When he reached Westminster he was put in the stocks. He stared out at the crowd and delivered a calm and eloquent speech on Laud’s abuse of authority. Eventually the authorities stuffed a gag in his mouth, so he resorted to staring out at the people around him and regularly stamping his feet as a mark of defiance. From that day on he was known as ‘Freeborn John.’
The authorities sent Lilburne back to prison, where they put him in solitary confinement and denied him food, clothing and medical care. He only survived because fellow prisoners smuggled him morsels through holes in the wall.
Lilburne kept on writing from his cell, smuggling out radical anti-Laudian tracts that were published clandestinely. One of them, Cry for Justice, sparked huge protests. That was when he came to truly understand the power of the printing press. It was an extremely effective mechanism for mobilising support. You could write a pamphlet, publish, and – within a day – bring out crowds in protest.
Laud had made a mistake. Banning printing did not make it go 31away, it just drove it underground. By capping the number of legal printers but not apprentices, the Star Chamber probably helped create the economic conditions for an illicit press. Idle trained workers were primed for an approach by radicals and many of the presses that should have been broken up ended up on the black market, where they gave voice to a growing network of anti-Catholic writers in London. These new customers wanted something urgent and quick. Instead of a long book for the nobility, the new product was an A3-sized sheet of paper folded into an eight-page pamphlet.
Hundreds of these could be churned out over the course of an evening using just a single printer. And business was brisk. The area around St Paul’s Cathedral became the beating heart of a renegade printing trade. In a maze of decrepit back alleys and dingy buildings, a small army of radicals and criminal publishers smuggled in illegal printers and distributed outlawed pamphlets. They were referred to as ‘paper bullets.’
They cost no more than the price of a beer to buy, so even very poor people could read them. At this stage London was surprisingly literate – 60 per cent of people could sign their own name. And those who could not read would often hear the tracts read out in the alehouses and taverns. The pamphlet was the opening salvo in the democratisation of politics.
By 1640, Charles was embroiled in a messy ongoing conflict with the Scots which urgently needed funding. His financial situation was getting desperate, so he finally called a new parliament. It was a catastrophic error. He had bottled up the problem for too long and now it exploded.
As soon as parliament was recalled, its members set to work ensuring they could never be dismissed again. They passed a legal requirement that parliament be summoned at least once every three years and that, if this did not happen, it could assemble on its own, thereby establishing 32itself as an independent political body separate from the king. Then they accused Laud of treason, threw him in the Tower of London, and abolished the Star Chamber.
Laud’s entire system of censorship fell down around him. The liquidation of the Star Chamber created a regulatory vacuum that destroyed the Stationers’ Company as an effective political or economic body and triggered a free-for-all in publishing.
The number of titles published jumped from 900 in 1640 to more than 2,000 in 1641, then to 3,500 in 1642. More printed material was produced in that year alone than in the previous century and a half put together. Tellingly, the number of actual pages printed did not increase. These were predominantly pamphlets. The black market and the formal market were now effectively the same thing.
Among the key Leveller figures who rose up in this new anything-goes printing culture was William Walwyn. He was older than most of his Leveller allies and more contemplative. His instincts constantly guided him away from violence and towards calm, reasoned argument. His chief pleasures in life, he said, were ‘a good book’ or an ‘honest and discoursing friend.’ Just like all the Levellers, and indeed anyone involved in the politics of the 17th Century, he was deeply religious.
Although modern liberalism is overwhelmingly secular, one of its ironies is that the seeds of its growth were planted by Christians making pious protests against Catholicism.
In 1517, the German pastor Martin Luther had challenged the authority of the Pope by opposing the extravagances of the Catholic Church, starting the Reformation and eventually Protestant Christianity. By the time of the Levellers, this conflict had ballooned to cover the entire continent. It defined the animosity between parliament and the king and was the motivation for the 30 Year War raging in Europe.
Protestantism wasn’t homogeneous. After it spun off from Catholicism, it continued to fracture into countless pieces. Some were fairly similar to Catholicism in their political structure. Orthodox Presbyterianism, for instance, which was common in the British Isles, envisaged a state 33church, a legal requirement that people attend it, and a demand that they worship in a particular way. But some members of other Protestant movements took a different view. For them, the challenge to the Pope’s authority extended into a challenge to any religious authority. They saw the relationship with God as personal.
The Puritans were the dominant group in what became the Levellers. They were themselves extremely diverse, with many conservative adherents supporting a national church. But the radical members were more subversive. They believed in a separation of church and civil authority, the autonomy of congregations, and the importance of personal conversion.
Three explosive political thoughts sprang out of that religious outlook. The first was that people should have freedom of religious conscience. They should be able to worship as they pleased, in whichever church they wished. Some radicals even encouraged people to visit numerous churches and listen to different preachers before settling on one.
The second was the notion of the individual. By centring their religious views on a personal relationship with God, radical Puritans undermined the authority structure of society. It wasn’t that they wanted individual freedom to find God exactly. In fact, their thinking went in the other direction – they were trying to clear away the man-made clutter to free God’s will for the individual. But the end result in the material world was the same.
The third was the notion of doubt. Descartes recognised this when he saw the weakness of human senses in perceiving fire, and again when he stripped away human certainty about truth. Radical Puritans applied the same caution to religion.
They accepted that humankind did not have the spiritual apparatus to know exactly how to worship God. It followed that everyone’s personal journey to religious enlightenment should be tolerated, so that people could discover which one was right. Neither the state nor any individual had the right to enforce a style of worship on others. Jesus, 34as Walwyn noted, used ‘no other means but argument and persuasion to alter or control.’
These three ideas – of personal freedom, the individual, and the uncertainty of truth – would become central to liberal thought.
Liberalism did not exist yet and it would have been incomprehensible to any of the people pursuing these views. And yet its starting assumptions were now starting to emerge, half-formed, in a cauldron of dissent.
By this point, the king realised how badly he had misjudged his opponents in parliament. They had wiped out his allies, broken down his mechanisms for exerting authority and begun to assert themselves as an independent political force. So in January 1642, he took decisive action. He charged five members of the House of Commons with treason.
The next day he emerged from his chambers and said simply: ‘My most loyal subjects and soldiers, follow me.’ Then he strode out and took a coach to parliament, followed by hundreds of armed men. He was going to do with military might what he had failed to do through politics. He was going to humble parliament.
The soldiers lined up at the door of the Commons, drew their swords from their scabbards and cocked their pistols. Charles walked slowly into the Chamber and approached William Lenthall, the Speaker, who chaired debates. ‘By your leave Mr Speaker,’ the king said, ‘I must borrow your chair a little.’
Lenthall got up. Charles sat in the seat and looked around at the MPs in front of him. The five men he was looking for had already fled but the king didn’t know that yet. He turned to the Speaker and told him to point them out.
Lenthall’s response was a key moment in English history. It would fundamentally alter the constitutional structure of the country.
‘May it please your majesty,’ he said, ‘I have neither eyes to see nor 35tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me.’
The words hung in the air. They constituted the marking of territory. The king’s authority did not extend in that room, among the country’s elected representatives. The Speaker was the servant of parliament, not the Crown. It was now explicitly a fully formed and independent source of political power.
Charles marched out the chamber. It was the last time any English monarch entered the House of Commons.
He had been humiliated. Within days he left London for the north of the country, to ensure his safety. A period of shock and dawning realisation followed on both sides. Then, on 22nd August 1642, Charles raised his royal standard in Nottingham. He was going to war with his own parliament and England was about to endure one of the bloodiest conflicts in its history.
Parliament’s military fortunes lay with two men. One was Thomas Fairfax, a dashing lieutenant-general whose gallantry and bravery in battle inspired a fierce sense of loyalty from his men. The other was Oliver Cromwell, one of the most mercurial and impenetrable figures in British history.
Countless books have been written about him, but none ever seem to pin him down. He is a body of contradictions and evasions. To some, he is the great defender of parliament. To others, he is Britain’s only military dictator. To many he is a monster, because of the crimes he committed later in Ireland.
He is a shadow. At certain crucial moments in the narrative, he simply disappears. At others he speaks at length in favour of one set of ideas only to pursue the exact opposite course of action the following day. His behaviour is often impossible to decipher.
Cromwell came from the lower rungs of the upper class, with a very wealthy grandfather but a struggling father. In his twenties he 36was diagnosed with melancholia, which was probably some form of nervous breakdown. After that period he became intensely religious.
Cromwell and Fairfax were among the most successful army leaders Westminster possessed, but it wasn’t enough. Their forces were subject to a series of military defeats forcing them to retreat ever closer to parliament’s stronghold in London. There was a real fear that Charles was going to win the war.
Cromwell used his status as an MP to launch a blistering attack against the existing army leadership in November 1644. He accused it of ‘backwardness in all action’ and pointedly suggested that many in parliament were unwilling to have the war ‘prosecuted unto full victory.’
He was right. Parliament had been split. Some MPs and Lords wanted to end the fighting as soon as possible, sign an agreement with the king imposing their own form of religious government, and then reinstall him so he could enforce it. This was the Presbyterian faction.
On the other side were the Independents. They wanted a much more root-and-branch reform of the system – freedom of conscience and an end to state religion. They believed that churches were voluntary bodies and people could decide whether to commit to them. They did not want to trade one system of coercion for another, but to fundamentally alter the conduct of religion and politics.
This split had a military dimension. The Independents believed that the war had to be won hard. It was only by a swift and firm defeat that the king could be forced to make the radical changes they required.
The Presbyterians were constantly trying to make deals with the king, from the beginning until the bitter end of the war, in order to return to normality, but with their own mild reforms in place. The king flirted with them throughout, always seeming to be open to negotiations but never treating them seriously.
The acrimony in the Commons created a problem. Most MPs agreed that parliament needed its own national army to take the fight to the king, but both sides of the House were wary of it being controlled by the other camp. So they came up with what seemed like a simple 37solution. They would pass a law banning any member of the Commons or Lords from maintaining military command. It was called the Self-Denying Ordinance.
At the time it seemed pragmatic, even ingenious, but the parliamentarians did not fully grasp what it entailed. They had created a completely new and independent power in the kingdom, as consequential as themselves or the king. And then they were giving it lots of weapons.
This new national fighting force, which was professional and well paid, was called the New Model Army. It proved to be powerfully effective. In a decisive battle on 14th June 1645, the New Model defeated the king at Naseby in Northamptonshire and triggered a complete military collapse of the royalist forces. Leicester surrendered, followed by Bridgwater, Bath, Sherborne Castle, Bristol, Devizes and Winchester.
By autumn, Charles retreated to Oxford, his last bastion, and, realising he was defeated, tried to escape in disguise. He made his way to Scottish forces and surrendered. The war was over.
Or at least that’s what people thought. It was actually about to turn into something far messier. Parliament’s radical defenders were going to learn a harsh lesson – one which has been experienced by countless other revolutionaries in the years since: those who lead the fight very quickly become as oppressive as those they overthrow.
