CRESC Working Paper Series Working Paper No. 21 Liberty and Order: Civil Government and the Common Good in Eighteenth-Century England Francis Dodsworth CRESC, Open University August 2006 For further information: Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK Tel: +44 (0)1908 654458 Fax: +44 (0)1908 659267 Email:
[email protected] or
[email protected] Web: www.cresc.ac.uk The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. CRESC Working Papers Liberty and Order: Civil Government and the Common Good in Eighteenth-Century England Francis Dodsworth Abstract Recent Foucaultian work on ‘governmentality’ posits a distinction between two ‘rationalities’ of government: ‘police’ and ‘liberalism’. The former is closely associated with the idea of order, produced through constant and detailed intervention in public life. The latter is associated with freedom and the insulation of the social and economic spheres from (particularly political) interference. In this working paper I argue that defining the novelty of liberalism in terms of the presence of freedom at the heart of the governmental imagination is misplaced. The differences between English liberalism and continental police represent as much the ethos of the different political systems analysed as a transformation in the basic focus of government. To better understand the distinction between liberalism and its predecessors, I suggest that we need to pay more attention to the history of the idea of freedom itself. Therefore, I analyse the system of government in England before liberalism, demonstrating that although English civil government bears marked similarities to continental systems of ‘police’, it was not understood as a condition of order as opposed to liberty.