Estado Sentido

Russell Kirk, "Libertarians: the Chirping Sectaries":

The ruinous failing of the ideologues who call themselves libertarians is their fanatic attachment to a simple solitary principle – that is, to the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil social order, and indeed of human existence.

The libertarians are oldfangled folk, in the sense that they live by certain abstractions of the nineteenth century. They carry to absurdity the doctrines of John Stuart Mill (before Mill’s wife converted him to socialism, that is).

 

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In every principle premise of his argument, Stephen declared, Mill suffered from an inadequate understanding of human nature and history. All the great movements of humankind, Stephen said, have been achieved by force, not by free discussion; and if we leave force out of our calculations, very soon we will be subject to the intolerant wills of men who know no scruples about employing force against us. (So, one may remark, the twentieth century libertarians would have us stand defenseless before the Soviet Russians.) It is consummate folly to tolerate every variety of opinion, on every topic, out of devotion to an abstract “liberty”; for opinion soon finds its expression in action, and the fanatics whom we tolerated will not tolerate us when they have power.

 

The fierce current of events, in our century, has supplied the proof for Stephen’s case. Was the world improved by free discussion of the Nazis’ thesis that Jews ought to be treated as less than human? Just this subject was presented to the population of one of the most advanced and most thoroughly schooled nations of the modern world; and then the crew of adventurers who had contrived to win the argument proceeded to act after the fashion with which we now are dreadfully familiar. We have come to understand, to our cost, what Burke meant by a “licentious toleration.” An incessant zeal for repression is not the answer to the complex difficulties of liberty and order, either.

 

What Stephen was saying, however, and what we recognize now, is that liberty cannot be maintained or extended by an abstract appeal to free discussion, sweet reasonableness, and solitary simple principle.

Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination:

«In the course of one of the essays in this book I refer to a remark of John Stuart Mill’s in his famous article on Coleridge – Mill, at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political line, nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with this powerful conservative mind. He said that the prayer of every true partisan of liberalism should be, “ ‘Lord, enlighten thou our enemies…’; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.” What Mill meant, of course, was that the intellectual pressure which an opponent like Coleridge could exert would force liberals to examine their position for its weaknesses and complacencies.

We cannot very well set about to contrive opponents who will do us the service of forcing us to become more intelligent., who will require us to keep our ideas from becoming stale, habitual, and inert. This we will have to do for ourselves. It has for some time seemed to me that a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time. If liberalism is, as I believe it to be, a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine, then, as that large tendency makes itself explicit, certain of its particular expressions are bound to be relatively weaker than others, and some even useless and mistaken. If this is so, then for liberalism to be aware of the weak or wrong expressions of itself would seem to be an advantage to the tendency as a whole.»