'Classical liberalism' and the Irish question
Or: Peter writes for the first time, but not the last, about his hatred for A. V. Dicey
The other day I was asked whether I would consider myself to fall in the ‘classical liberal’ camp within the Liberal Democrats. It was a well-meant question based in my obvious affinities for some of the arguments coming out of that camp.
What I said was that I didn’t like the label, or—for that matter—the ‘social liberal’ label often opposed to it. I thought the whole ‘social vs classical’ debate was basically outdated and didn’t reflect any real practical divisions in the party today, and that even during the pre-coalition years when the party did largely divide into these camps, the quality of debate wasn’t great. The distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘social’ liberalism did not relate directly to any of the major political or policy challenges of the day, nor did it furnish the party with useful intellectual resources to navigate the coalition, never mind the catastrophe of 2015. Even if the individual thinkers who contributed to The Orange Book and Reinventing the State were smart, thoughtful, and nuanced, the terminology that structured and set the rules of the overall debate was unhelpful. So I said that I don’t really find ‘classical liberal’ a useful term.
What I didn’t say, but what was also very much on my mind (especially with the conversation coming so soon after St Patrick’s Day), was that I felt I couldn’t be a classical liberal because I’m Irish.
Alan S. Kahan’s recent history of liberalism locates the ideology’s heyday in the ‘all-too-short nineteenth century’, a period that ended around the 1870s with the split between ‘classical liberals’ and their ‘social liberal’ opponents1 over what was then called the ‘social question’—i.e., the problem of poverty and inequality in industrial (and later post-industrial) societies.
This is a very old story; indeed, it was first told in the years immediately after the 1870s! And there’s something clearly right about it. It is pretty clear that self-identifying, ideological liberals fell out with themselves at the end of the nineteenth century, and that the political dominance of liberal politicians and liberal parties waned significantly from around the 1870s onwards,2 even as institutions and ideas derived in large part from liberalism (and often explicitly called ‘liberal’) put down deep roots.
But the idea that this division can be traced to a single issue (be it the market, the state, poverty, inequality, property, or any of the other dimensions of the ‘social question’); and that it split liberals along one axis, more-or-less into two camps—this seems far too simple. Down the decades, it has suited both ‘classical’ and ‘social’ liberals (for their own purposes) to simplify the divisions in liberalism. But just focussing on one country, the British Liberal Party has split four times in its history:
in 1988–89, when a group led by Michael Meadowcroft refused to accept Paddy Ashdown’s leadership of the Social and Liberal Democrats and formed a rump ‘continuity Liberal’ party;
in 1931, when a three-way split emerged between followers of David Lloyd George, John Simon, and Herbert Samuel over the connected issues of free trade and co-operation with the Conservative-dominated National Government;
in 1918, when Lloyd George’s government endorsed only some Liberal candidates, with other Liberals (led by H. H. Asquith) having to fight independently;
and in 1886, when Lord Hartington and Joseph Chamberlain led Unionists out of the party over W. E. Gladstone’s support for Irish Home Rule.
Unless you really squint at the 1988–89 split (which happened long after the party’s eclipse anyway), none of these were about the social/classical divide. In 1931, those opposed to co-operation with the Tories and most sympathetic to the trade unions (the standard ‘social liberal’ orientation) were the most staunchly committed to free trade and market freedoms (an ostensibly ‘classical liberal’ commitment); those who sought to keep the bulk of the Labour Party out of office abandoned market principles to do so. A division between ‘social’ and ‘classical’ liberalism does little to explain the divisions within British liberalism after 1870.
You might try here to distinguish between ‘capital-L’ and ‘small-l’ liberalism, saying that party manoeuvrings and philosophical principles are different matters. But this is a distinction that only really makes sense after liberalism has already split. In its heyday, liberalism was a uniting and animating principle in practical politics, both small-l and capital-L at once. The idea of liberalism as a small-l doctrine, a broad philosophical outlook that can inform politics across the political spectrum, is something that gets formulated only after liberalism loses its initial practical unity; it cannot be invoked to explain that loss of practical unity.
I’m not sure I have anything interesting to say on the political history: the loss of practical unity within liberalism, its weakening into a broad philosophical doctrine and the fragmenting of liberal parties, is too big a topic and not my area of expertise. But I do think I can contribute something to a related question of intellectual history: why did we start explaining the loss of practical unity in terms of a split between social and classical liberalism, to the extent that people genuinely started identifying with these tendencies? I think this is a problem that is profitably considered in the context of the 1886 split over the Irish question. The man who laid the foundations for modern ‘classical liberalism’ was also the great propagandist of the breakaway Liberal Unionist Party: A. V. Dicey.
Dicey is positioned in Kahan’s book as an archetypal classical liberal, a representative of the entire movement, but he is even more than that—he should be considered the movement’s founder. Dicey is best-known today for his dual ideas of parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, both of which grew out of the nineteenth-century liberal tradition of parliamentarism. In terms of the latter, he ‘had a knack of expressing the Rule of Law in terms of principles whose eloquent formulations belied their deeper difficulties’; in terms of the former, his extreme view has become constitutional orthodoxy thanks to Dicey’s influence on law teaching in university, despite the serious absence of evidence or argument offered to defend his interpretation and the patent incoherence of his formulations.
But Kahan focusses much more on Dicey’s ideas about English political history. Dicey was the first to identify nineteenth-century liberalism (before c. 1865–1870) as fundamentally driven by the doctrine of individualism, backed up with an unqualified faith in free trade and laissez-faire and equipped with Benthamite utilitarianism as its public morality. It ‘swept away restraints on individual energy’ and attacked ‘every historical anomaly or survival, which appeared … in any way to place a check on individual freedom.’ At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Dicey saw the rise of a new ‘collectivism’ embodied in socialism, nationalism, and scepticism of the concentration of wealth. This new attitude, Dicey wrote, ‘favours the intervention of the State, even at some sacrifice of individual freedom, for the purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people.’ By the time he came to write about these matters at the start of the twentieth century, he was convinced that ‘faith in laissez faire [had] suffered an eclipse’, arguing that even the remaining defenders of laissez-faire proposed it in a qualified, empirical, contingent way and not as the almost-religious article of faith it had been.
Dicey identified himself as one of the last remaining defenders of individualism against the collectivist onslaught. And his story should be familiar, in some form or another, to anyone who has ever encountered even a single classical liberal or libertarian. It has been key to the development and self-conception of classical liberalism; indeed, I would suggest (see below) that it defines classical liberalism to some extent. These ideas constituted Dicey’s legacy to twentieth- and twenty first–century liberalism.
But these ideas did not emerge in a political vacuum. Indeed, as much as scholars of legal history have been slow to adopt the contextual practices of historians of political thought,3 Dicey’s works on their own without any wider contextual reading are enough to make his specific political intentions clear. Not only was Dicey’s propaganda output in favour of the Liberal Unionist Party and against Irish nationalism prolific and consistent across four decades, not only was it explicit and unambiguous and unwilling to tolerate an ounce of nuance, not only was it so inflammatory that he would unhesitatingly declare that his opponents ‘menace the integrity and the power of the United Kingdom’—not only this, but it infected his scholarly and theoretical work. He made revisions to his still-influential textbook Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution to draw out the connection between his ideas about constitutional law and his ideas about Ireland, and based his Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion on arguments that were first formulated as weapons against Home Rule.
Dicey began applying his model of parliamentary sovereignty to the Home Rule debate in 1886, in England’s Case Against Home Rule (where he claimed that Home Rule would ‘undermine the moral basis of the Constitution’) and columns in the Spectator—less than a year after his constitutional ideas first appeared in print. And in the revised Introduction, Dicey made the correspondence absolutely clear even to his purely academic readers, asserting that federalism (which he de facto equated with Home Rule)4 was ‘absolutely foreign to the historical and, so to speak, instinctive policy of English constitutionalists’, precisely because that historical policy was dedicated to the defence of ‘that complete political unity which is represented by the absolute sovereignty of the Parliament’.
Of course, federalism has a hallowed place in the history of liberal thought, and indeed the theorist who can most plausibly be said to have originated the entire liberal political tradition—Adam Smith—ended his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations with an urgent plea for exactly the sort of federal union that Dicey thought untenable. But this would not stop Dicey from portraying Home Rule as a break from historical liberal principles. For it was not just his approach to parliamentary sovereignty that was designed around the Irish question, but also his vision of ‘individualist’ classical liberalism (and its ‘collectivist’ alternative). Dicey thought of nationalism as an archetypal instance of collectivist politics, and there’s no mistaking which country’s nationalism he had in mind. Here is his description of the approach good liberals should take to nationalism (which he applied to collectivism more generally):
[I]t can hardly be disputed that nationalism … often has become a hindrance to what any Benthamite Liberal would account good government. What is even more to be regretted, a narrow spirit of nationalism, fostered, as it often is, by historical traditions, has in more States than one produced racial divisions and animosities, which are not only in themselves a gigantic evil and an impediment to all true progress, but, since they depend upon feeling rather than upon any wish for good government, cannot be composed by any merely rational reform of laws or of institutions. [Law and Public Opinion, Lecture XII, ch. 2, emphasis mine.]
The origin of this line of thought is no mystery. In a series of articles for the Spectator published in 1886, Dicey argued strenuously that no compromise was possible with Home Rulers, that the very nature of Irish nationalism was ‘revolutionary’, and that no ‘rational reform’ could solve the Irish question: Home Rule must be crushed, not compromised with. In Law and Public Opinion Dicey was generalising ideas he had first developed to attack Irish nationalism, using them to define the nature of ‘collectivism’, and to outline its fundamental and irreconcilable incompatibility with an individualist liberalism of ‘rational reform’—justifying the decision of ‘classical’ liberals to break away entirely from those liberals who sought to accept some measure of collectivism, like (say) a Home Rule Bill. Dicey’s arguments abstracted out from Irish nationalism, to nationalism in general, and then to ‘collectivism’, but the political issue lurking in his mind was always Home Rule.
Again, even if the link between Dicey’s ‘Benthamism’ and opposition to Home Rule weren’t clear enough from this, he spelled it out for us:
[T]here is another reason for my pressing forward the interest of England. It is the conviction that every scheme of Home Rule—that is, of political partnership between England and Ireland—must affect the interests of both countries. But the inhabitants of Ireland are about 4,000,000, whilst the inhabitants of Great Britain are about 40,000,000. I am an old, an unconverted, and an impenitent Benthamite. I hold to the belief that where, in one State, the welfare of 40,000,000 has to be weighed against the welfare of 4,000,000, the welfare of the greater number ought to prevail… [A Fool’s Paradise, preface.]
Dicey’s assertion that individualism was the core of classical liberalism, and his identification of Benthamite utilitarianism as the moral theory of individualism, have been immensely influential down to our day. But the man himself primarily deployed these assertions in an attempt to use population statistics to bury the legitimacy of Irish demands for self-determination.5 (There is no little irony in Dicey’s growing preference for the greater happiness of the much smaller number of Ulster Protestants, once Edward Carson turned that province into the epicentre of Unionism.)
Now, Dicey did not lack cogent arguments against Home Rule. England’s Case Against Home Rule, unquestionably his best writing on Ireland, rightfully centred the question of landownership (the most important question in Irish history) and adapted insightful arguments from Edmund Burke. But Dicey was fundamentally a propagandist. He combined these cogent arguments with others that were insipid and (frankly) stupid, using whatever weapons could find, and refusing to countenance not only the desirability but even the possibility of compromise. And he was a propagandist not just in his pamphlets and political writings, but in his scholarship too: his most fundamental ideas and most general arguments in jurisprudence and political theory were all designed to deliver a pre-decided answer to the Irish question.
In short: Dicey’s invention of classical liberal ‘individualism’ functioned as a rationalisation of the Liberal Unionists’ abandonment of Liberalism and their collaboration with (and eventual merging into) the Conservatives. The Liberal Party and the liberal public had lost their way, Dicey said, on a fundamental point of principle. In Dicey’s self-aggrandising story, rather than Ireland being the defining issue, it was presented as only one instance among many of nationalism, which was only one instance among many of collectivism; this last was the real driver of political changes in the late nineteenth century.
The power of this story was its generality. By focussing on such high-minded ideals and pushing concrete political disagreements to one side, Dicey’s vision spread widely, being adapted to wildly different circumstances. The ‘classical liberal’ identity was adopted by Liberals who were not so much Unionist, but who regretted the party’s direction of travel under Campbell-Bannerman and Lloyd George, adopting ‘individualism’ as a watchword. It travelled abroad, to places where there was no Irish dimension to the history of liberalism. It became fused with the pro-market strand of liberalism that was growing increasingly fearful of the state in itself (a strand that largely abhors Diceyan parliamentary sovereignty). Most interestingly, it was adopted with heavy alterations and qualifications by social liberals like L. T. Hobhouse: they accepted for their own purposes the idea that the single dividing line of liberalism was the philosophical principle behind laissez-faire, but switched the valence, positioning their opponents as defenders of laissez-faire and therefore either selfish individualists or outdated dinosaurs.
But while the clash of philosophical principles in Dicey’s story was what made that story powerful, the same element also guaranteed that it could not be accurate as a history of liberalism: all Hegelian and sub-Hegelian attempts to turn real events into idealist struggles over philosophy (whether in the mind of the People or of the Weltgeist) distort the facts. In fact, Ireland was the defining issue (the only issue) involved in the Liberal Unionist split. Infamously, many of those who abandoned the Liberal party over the Irish question were not at all committed to laissez-faire, taking the first chance they got to embrace euphemistically-named ‘tariff reform’ in alliance with protectionist, rent-seeking Conservatives. And in response, the people of Great Britain—far from having lost their affinity for laissez-faire, as Dicey had claimed—handed the Unionists one of the most thumping election defeats in British history.
More damningly, even Dicey had no consistency in the principles he invoked to legitimise his politics. In the 1910s, as it became clear that the immensely successful political manoeuvring of Asquith and John Redmond made it overwhelmingly likely that Home Rule would be passed, Dicey—to put it politely—lost his shit. In his 1913 pamphlet A Fool’s Paradise, he started ranting about democratic legitimacy in a manner completely at odds with his previous thinking, unambiguously departing from any plain meaning of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ or ‘rule of law’, the ideas that made his name. Even the most sympathetic (to the point of being at some points strained) reading of Dicey’s views on popular sovereignty, Rivka Weill’s ‘Dicey was not Diceyan’, cannot avoid the obvious truth that his response to 1912 was a ‘desperate move’, driven not by any internal logic but by knee-jerk reaction against Home Rule.
On the verge of defeat, Dicey’s reactionary perspective went beyond anything he had said before. Even if a general election was called and the Home Rulers won it handily, he argued, unionists should not admit defeat; their next stage would be a paramilitary campaign of violence, which (he vaguely but unmistakeably intimated) would be legitimate:
Every loyal citizen of the United Kingdom ought in general … to obey the law of the land, or, in other words, the clearly and indubitable expressed will of the nation.6 But… there may exist acts of oppression on the part of a democracy, no less than of a king, which justify resistance to the law, or, in other words, rebellion.
… What conduct are you prepared to recommend if the electors [after a hypothetical general election] should return to the newly elected House of Commons a majority of Home Rulers? My reply is this: I will not raise cases on the Constitution. I will not try to give an opinion upon a case which has not yet arisen… The conduct of Unionists, if defeated at the next General Election, must depend upon circumstances which no human being can foresee.
… If the Government … avail themselves of the Parliament Act to transform the Home Rule Bill into the Home Rule Act, 1914, it will … lack all constitutional authority, and the duty of Unionists will be to treat it as a measure which lacks the sanction of the nation. [A Fool’s Paradise, ch. 3.]
When A Fool’s Paradise was published in 1913, the unionist paramilitary Ulster Volunteers had just been set up, and were importing weapons and organising public drills in a clear threat to the government of the UK and the nationalist population of Ireland. Despite his evasive language and dancing around the subject, it is transparent in the above passages that Dicey had no problem with this campaign of intimidation, no matter its blatant illegality (which Carson was notably open about).
But when the nationalist reaction came and the parallel Irish Volunteers were organised, Dicey changed his tune yet again. The introduction to the eighth edition of his Introduction, written in 1914, was suddenly full of misgivings about and handwringing over the idea that citizens might have a right to disobey unjust laws!
Lawyers are trained to try to identify general principles that can unite and explain past decisions and be applied to future ones; Kahan observes correctly that this was Dicey’s approach to political decisions as much as judicial ones. But not only were Dicey’s proposed principles not good explanations for the motivations of other political actors, they weren’t even upheld by the man himself. The minute the sovereign Parliament acted in a manner he disliked, was ready in the blink of an eye to abandon all his pretences, work his hardest to undermine the rule of law, and cover for paramilitary violence. The only principle that he consistently held was that the Irish cannot be allowed to govern themselves.
He died in April 1922, less than a year after the establishment of Home Rule, and less than a year before the Free State took her place among the nations of the earth. I like to think that his body and mind simply could not handle it.
Anyway. Dicey did not get the last word on classical liberalism, and the afterlife of this ideology has been complicated by many different factors: its association with and morphing into ‘libertarianism’ in the US; its political dalliances with conservatism across the Western world; and the immense influence of F. A. Hayek.
Hayek’s influence in particular has been crucial in the history of this term. For all that Hayek adopted Dicey’s vision of individualism embattled by collectivism and embraced the idea of ‘rule of law’, the Austrian’s central concept of ‘spontaneous order’ and his consistent advocacy for federalism and internationalism meant that, in many ways, his vision of what individualism actually entailed was much closer to the views of Home Rulers. And, of course, Hayek’s vision of a ‘road to serfdom’ led him to want to bind the power of the state in itself; certainly he would not have left its legislative branch the power to make or unmake, bind or unbind anything it wanted, the power Dicey insisted must be retained to parliament. Yet the sheer power of Hayek’s thought and the vibrancy of his vision have meant that these historical fault-lines in his ideas were smoothed out: individualism, spontaneous order, market freedom, and scepticism about sovereign state power were joined into a classical liberal ‘package’, with each element interpreted so as to reinforce the others.
But, the power of Hayek’s system notwithstanding, the divisions in liberalism that drove the emergence of self-conceived ‘classical liberalism’ were not primarily between supporters of this package and its opponents. Rather, in many cases liberalism was divided between different elements within the ‘classical liberal’ package.7 In Britain, these divisions were most apparent—indeed, often emerged in response to—the Irish question. In the years after Irish independence, it took significant creative synthesis on the part of figures like Hayek to mend them and make ‘classical liberalism’ (as we understand it today) look at all coherent.
In fact, the only aspect of self-conscious ‘classical’ liberalism that has remained completely consistent since the turn of the previous century, its ideological ‘hard core’ and defining element, is the story it tells about itself. The idea that classical liberalism is a defence of historic individualism in the face of collectivism has been constant, even as the definitions of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’ have been subject to shifts and reinterpretation. This story is constitutive of classical liberalism, and it is a story that was invented by Dicey, told in the context of a career the only unifying purpose of which was to deny Ireland a parliament. Indeed, more than that, it was a story used in, and even (dare I say) created for the purpose of, explicit propaganda efforts against Irish self-government.
I think the story is wrong as history, but then—I would think that! More fundamentally, I think it's wrong, in a moral-political sense. If Dicey’s potted history, created for the purpose of telling the Irish nation ‘thus far shalt thou go and no further’, is what defines classical liberalism—then count me out of classical liberalism.
Kahan actually uses the term ‘modern’ liberalism for the latter group, which seems a little … tendentious? The accusation that classical liberalism is ‘not modern’ is one that Constant-invokers on the liberal right would find unwelcome. ‘New liberalism’ is the preferred term in British historical scholarship to oppose to ‘classical liberalism’, but as a Lib Dem I will stick with ‘social liberalism’.
Outside of a handful of exceptional cases where Liberal parties and coalitions either rallied and reunited after splits (as in Canada) or found an external enemy to hold them together (as in France with the Catholic Church). Even in these cases, few countries saw Liberal dominance continue as far as the postwar period—maybe only Canada? (There is also the US, which remains an exceptional case to this day, whose liberal tradition is deeply unlike the rest of the world’s but also not as isolated as some would like to think.)
In general. Some scholars of Dicey and legal history more broadly, like James Kirby, have begun to synthesise legal history with the history of political thought, though connections between Dicey’s Liberal Unionism and his legal theory still tend to be made in a rather scattershot manner. But a few interesting articles exist on the topic, albeit quite old now: see especially Hugh Tulloch, ‘A. V. Dicey and the Irish Question’.
More precisely, Dicey thought of Home Rule as a project that would lead inexorably to either federalism or ‘separation’ (Irish independence). See Dicey’s final Letter on Unionist Delusions (for the confused, the ‘unionist delusions’ are delusions of compromise with Home Rulers, which Dicey opposed to the utmost).
I shouldn’t need to say, but I will say just in case, that Dicey’s ‘Benthamism’ bore almost no resemblance to the ideas of Jeremy Bentham.
An editorialising aside: the contradiction here with Dicey’s official doctrine of absolute legal sovereignty of parliament is actually funny in how pathetically blatant it is. No matter what Dicey might raise in terms of ‘political sovereignty’, the equation of ‘law’ with the will of the nation is blatantly incompatible with his official doctrines. Again, Dicey never came across a dispute that he wasn’t willing to argue both sides of if doing so would fuck over Irish nationalism.
And, indeed, over different elements of the ‘social liberal’ package, as with disagreements over the proper response to the Taff Vale case.