Chapter Five Liberal Democracy: Political Liberalism

Chapter Five Liberal Democracy: Political Liberalism Liberalism and Democracy In political terms, liberalism is the principle and institutional system of liberty in polity or of liberal democracy. By assumption and in reality, liberal society and modernity, a liberal polity, state or government in particular, is democratic in contrast to its illiberal alternatives as typically anti-democratic such as medievalism, proto-conservatism, fascism, com- munism or under- and pseudo-democratic like neo- conservatism. In essence, liberal society or liberalism constitutes, generates and predicts democracy or a free polity, as indicated by what Mannheim (1936) calls “liberal-democratic” ideology and government (Zaret 1989), and anti-liberalism non-democratic outcomes, from medieval despotism in medievalism to traditional authoritarianism in proto-conservatism to totalitarianism in fascism to neo-authoritarianism in neo-conservatism. Liberal-secular society and modernity is intrinsically political democracy, though theoretically not all democracies may be “liberal-secular”, but also, in their self-projections, non-liberal and non-secular: traditional and conservative, “faith-based” republics like America during most of its history, old and New England’s Puritan theocracies and Iran’s Islamic theocracy, commu- nist “popular democracies”, even fascist, such as Nazi plebiscitary “democracy” (Habermas 1989). 358 • Chapter Five A paradigmatic or original exemplar is what modern liberals call the “West- ern liberal democratic model of the organization of the liberal state and the free market” (O’Riain 2000: 189). In this connection, some sociologists refer to “English-speaking nations with liberal political traditions” (Pampel 1995), and in particular comment that within British “liberal ideology and jurispru- dence, in a dispute government is merely another party” (Jepperson 2002: 70) in contrast to what is described French and continental European statism. However, as seen, it is historically and sociologically inaccurate or imprecise to limit liberal ideology and democracy to “English-speaking” societies in view of the French Revolution, not to mention the European Enlightenment as represented by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Kant and other classical political liberals, alongside their English-Scottish colleagues, from Bacon and Locke to Hume and Smith and Mill and Spencer. At least in the sense or form of the Enlightenment, both Anglo-Saxon and continental European countries, such as France and to a lesser extent Germany, have “liberal political traditions”. Recall, as Keynes (1972) stressed, even economic liberalism a la the laissez-faire doctrine was invented by the French Enlight- enment philosophers and then adopted by classical economists like Smith et al. in Great Britain and beyond. To that extent, the above con ates the origin of at least economic liberalism in the European Enlightenment with its subsequent adoption or expansion in “English-speaking nations” and its alternative abandonment or moderation in continental Europe, including laissez-faire France itself. Liberal Democracy and its Adversaries Alternatively, democracy within modern Western societies is almost invari- ably created, designed or understood as liberal, despite illiberal, including conservative and fascist, claims to their own democratic creations, designs or understandings. Historically, the ideal and institutional practice of modern political democracy was and remains the product and achievement of liberalism as democratic ideology, institution and politics par excellence, in particular of the Enlightenment and its practical revolutionary climax in the French and in part American liberal Revolution. The French, American and other liberal or “bourgeois” revolutions (Moore 1993) were by de ni- tion and in reality pro-democratic, and conversely, their anti-liberal reactions through conservative, including fascist, counter-revolutions (Bourdieu 1998; .

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