Progress pill
Philosophy of liberalism

The liberal alternative to the welfare state

Freedom as a Social Project

The liberal alternative to the welfare state

  • Voluntary solidarity and free association
  • Feminism and liberalism
  • The liberal position on racism and immigration

Voluntary solidarity and free association

The liberal perspective on social issues rests on a particular conception of human existence, centred on individual freedom and personal responsibility. But does this mean that liberalism is indifferent to the poor, the sick, the aged, the vulnerable? This is the accusation most often levelled against it, and it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding. Human relations are naturally organised around contract, but also around what we may call human sympathy and the individual's natural associations: the family circle, relatives and close friends, as well as the free associations and companies in which each person evolves.
Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912), the Belgian-born economist who spent his career in Paris and whose intellectual audacity remains unmatched in the liberal tradition, understood this clearly. In his Questions d'économie politique et de droit public (1861), he wrote:
"One would need a very poor opinion of humanity to believe that, left free to organise their own assistance, men would allow their fellows to perish of misery and want. The history of free peoples shows precisely the contrary: wherever the state has not suffocated voluntary charity by substituting compulsory charity, voluntary solidarity has flourished in forms of extraordinary variety and effectiveness. The mutual aid societies, the free hospitals, the charitable foundations: these are the natural products of a society that respects human initiative."
Indeed, this social organisation allows for the emergence of voluntary solidarity, which can reach considerable proportions. The mutual aid societies, or sociétés de secours mutuels, that developed in the nineteenth century are a perfect illustration. These organisations were in fact the ancestors of today's welfare state and social security systems, with the crucial difference that they operated on the basis of competition rather than state monopoly. This competition between establishments and methods enabled continuous improvement in practices, favouring the success of the most efficient forms and the abandonment of those that failed. In other words, they were subject to the same discipline of excellence that governs every sphere of free activity.
The power of free association deserves special recognition. The isolated individual has always found himself in a weak position when faced with the vagaries of life and the evolution of his productive capacities. It is precisely for this reason that human beings have lived in society since the time of the tribes. Association and private enterprise, not the individual alone, must be the solution to the state's declining powers. Private assistance, unlike regulatory and bureaucratic public assistance, elevates man by respecting his individuality and pushing him toward progress, whereas public assistance tends to degrade him and keep him in a tutelage comparable to that of a serf.
Frédéric Passy (1822–1912), the economist and peace activist who shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, expressed this conviction with eloquence in his Leçons d'économie politique (1860):
"Compulsory charity is a contradiction in terms. Charity that is extorted by the law from those who would not have given it freely is no longer charity; it is taxation. And taxation, however noble its stated purpose, does not produce in the taxpayer the habits of generosity and solidarity that make a truly human society. True solidarity is born of freedom, not of constraint."

Feminism and liberalism

The liberal analysis of feminism rests on a historical and anthropological study of the condition of women in different societies. Charles Comte (1782–1837), jurist, publicist, and son-in-law of Jean-Baptiste Say, whose Traité de législation (1827) remains one of the great monuments of classical liberalism, examines the condition of various population categories in ancient societies and in those recently discovered in Australia and New Zealand. His analysis reveals that in primitive societies, the lot of women was far from enviable: they were truly the slaves of their time, treated as property, as instruments of labour, as objects of exchange between men.
Comte wrote, with the composed indignation of a man who had studied his evidence carefully:
"Among savage peoples, the woman labours without rest while the man rests. She carries the burdens, tends the animals, prepares the food, and raises the children, all while being legally counted as nothing. It is not nature that has made her a slave; it is the absence of law, the reign of brute force, that has placed her in this condition. Every step that civilisation makes is a step toward the equality of the sexes, because civilisation is nothing other than the progressive substitution of right for force."
The emancipation of women was achieved through freedom and through what we call capitalism: the use of tools and machines that gradually gave women a productive capacity equal to, or even greater than, that of men. This technological development placed a greater emphasis on perseverance, moral and intellectual virtues, where early societies had valued brute force alone. In other words, the market, by rewarding intelligence and diligence rather than physical strength, was the most powerful engine of female emancipation that history has known.
The central notion of consent is the fundamental point of convergence between feminism and liberalism, since contract and free exchange are based entirely on this principle. The system of tutelage and constraint, by contrast, rests on non-consent or majority consent, which dispenses with the individual, day-to-day agreement of each person. Indeed, every form of oppression of women throughout history has been, at its root, a violation of the principle of consent: a refusal to allow women to say no, to leave, to choose. Liberalism, by making consent the foundation of all legitimate social relations, is therefore the only coherent philosophical basis for genuine feminism.

The liberal position on racism and immigration

The question of racism was the subject of numerous discussions at the Société d'économie politique in the nineteenth century, which brought together France's leading liberal intellectuals under the presidency of figures such as Michel Chevalier (1806–1879) and Gustave de Molinari. These debates addressed various manifestations of racism, from anti-Semitism and the fate of Jews in Romania to the situation of Chinese workers in California and Australia. The vast majority of the society's members took a positive view of the mixing of human groups, believing that competition is propulsive and that the work of generations, combining different elements of culture and intelligence, leads to the best possible development of civilisation, provided this is accomplished on the basis of contract and voluntary cooperation.
Molinari, who had observed the racial question in both the Americas and Europe, stated the liberal position with characteristic bluntness in his Économie de l'histoire (1888):
"The doctrine of race, in its political applications, is merely protectionism applied to human beings. Just as the industrialist wishes to reserve the national market for his own products by excluding foreign goods, the racial nationalist wishes to reserve the national territory for members of his own group by excluding those born elsewhere. In both cases, the argument is the same: we are being threatened by competition. And in both cases, the answer is the same: competition benefits the consumer, the worker, and civilisation alike."
The individualistic character of the doctrines of liberty directly contradicts collective representations of races or nations as homogeneous groups. The question of immigration must be approached from the liberal fundamentals of self-ownership and ownership of things. When immigration is founded on voluntary exchange, legitimate appropriation of goods, and equal contracts, freedom of immigration must be asserted. Gustave de Molinari, himself a Belgian immigrant who spent his career in France, epitomises this position. He and the vast majority of French liberals of his time viewed immigration positively, recognising that the fight against immigration constituted a new form of protectionism: a labour protectionism comparable to that of industrialists protecting their profits from international competition.
In other words, just as industrialists wished to reserve a national market for themselves at the expense of consumers, workers and their political representatives, under universal suffrage, saw competition from foreign workers as an embarrassment to be legislated away. The social liberal programme was therefore not limited to economic issues but encompassed the retreat of the state in favour of contract and free trade, in a perspective perfectly compatible with the feminist and anti-racist convictions that liberalism generates by its own internal logic.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
According to Charles Comte's analysis in the Traité de législation, what methodological approach did he use to study the condition of women across different societies?