Liberalism was an ideology whereby the rising business classes fought against the land-owning aristocracy. It’s birth is usually assumed to occur in the 17th Century, with the alchemist, doctor and sponsored political writer, John Locke being its first significant philosopher.
While it has many virtues as a philosophy, classical liberalism (and modern libertarianism) also functions as a way of disguising the interests of capitalists and protecting the liberty of the capitalist and helping to ensure the wage-slavery of the workers. This is not accidental. Classical liberalism has been used to justify conquest, because of its insistence that unworked land is open for conquest, as people have not ‘improved it’ in a recognizable capitalist way – even if it was common land and occupied and used. Classical liberalism also either approved of slavery or the conquest of “lower races”, as part of capitalist expansion. It was a convenient philosophy. The work of Domenico Losurdo is good on this.
By emphasizing the individual alone, it also naturalizes people’s alienation from each other and from the creative process of co-operative labor and co-operative survival, this further acts as a way of preventing workers from organizing to form unions or political parties to participate in the political process, or to reject the organization of their lives by wage labor. Classical liberalism tends to be hostile to workers organizing, as it is a disruption of “free trade” and business power. Anything that disrupts business power becomes bad and unnatural in liberalism. In the long run everything becomes judged in terms of profit. Art is good if it makes money. Virtue is good if it makes money, and so on.
This is why the right spends so much time creating a false binary and arguing that socialism suppresses individuality and capitalism protects it, when (in reality, we are both social and individual. We exist in groups and require social being to truly exist – where else do we get language, ideas and culture from? Where else do our major satisfactions originate? Without society we cannot be individuals and vice versa. Any form which emphasizes one without the other is potentially tyrannous. Classical liberalism and modern individualisms all need modification by attention to their histories, unravelling the unintended consequences, and by the findings of social ‘science’.
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