The Classical Liberal Sensibility

Classical Liberalism Is Not a Leftist Ideology

In 2019, George Will elaborated his vision of American conservatism in The Conservative Sensibility. American conservatism is a “sensibility,” according to Will, in that it is something “more than an attitude and less than an agenda.” It entails a broad approach to politics flowing from an appreciation of the wisdom of the American founders—especially James Madison. Will’s conservatism does not prescribe specific policy commitments, but rather emphasizes prudential action to preserve the American constitutional order, which Will characterizes as “classically liberal.” To be a true American conservative, then, is to strive to promote and conserve classically liberal social and political arrangements.

But what does it mean to be a classical liberal? This question, surprisingly, has received some media attention in recent weeks, provoked by the podcaster Katie Miller’s remarkable assertion that “the principles of classical liberal democracy” represent a “woke and deeply leftist ideology.”

Miller’s assertion has been widely and justly ridiculed in a number of outlets from Yahoo News to The Atlantic to Reason. Her respondents have offered various descriptions of classical liberalism. The articles at Yahoo News and The Atlantic approvingly quote an X post by the actor and podcaster Jon Favreau responding to Miller that equates classical liberalism with a “system of liberal democracy that’s built on free elections, the rule of law, equal rights, and the freedom of speech; assembly, press, and religion.” At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait describes classical liberalism as “an Enlightenment philosophy, developed by thinkers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, built upon individual rights and limited government.” Robby Soave at Reason says that classical liberalism is a “forerunner of modern libertarianism: It is a philosophy that emphasizes individual rights, including civil rights and property rights.”

Those in search of a deeper understanding of classical liberalism might consult an article by Ralph Raico (in an encyclopedia on American conservatism, incidentally). The article is especially useful for its concise intellectual history. Liberalism in its classical sense, Raico recounts, drew inspiration from a variety of sources including: the 17th-century English Levellers; John Locke; the 18th-century English Commonwealthmen; the French Physiocrats; philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment including David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart; and 19th-century social theorists such as Frédéric Bastiat, Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, Herbert Spencer, Carl Menger, and Lord Acton. Classical liberalism moved forward in the works of prominent 20th-century social theorists from F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to Michael Polanyi. One could add to this list figures from the University of Chicago: Frank Knight, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan.

Is there anything uniting this diverse list of intellectuals? They certainly do not share a uniform political, economic, or ethical theory. Adam Smith took issue with the Physiocrats’ overemphasis on agriculture and with the mercantilist shades of Locke’s political economy. In his History of England, Hume described the Levellers as fanatics. Neither Smith nor Hume nor Ferguson foregrounded natural rights in their writings. The three Scottish thinkers took serious issue with the idea of the social contract. Dugald Stewart wrote respectfully of Smith’s contributions to political economy, but he ultimately criticized Smith’s ethical theory. Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary conceptions sat uneasily with Lord Acton’s Roman Catholicism. Hayek parted ways with Mises’s axiomatic approach to ethics and social philosophy. Michael Polanyi held a warmer view of the value tradition than most of his contemporaries in the Mont Pelerin Society. James Buchanan and Frank Knight criticized Polanyi’s understanding that the case for liberal society necessarily presupposes a set of values.

But despite the diversity of methods and even values, there is a common tendency that persists—imperfectly, but definitely—through this great body of thinkers. We might, cribbing from George Will, describe this tendency as “the classical liberal sensibility.”

The classical liberal sensibility holds that social order is not fundamentally a creation of the State. Social orders emerge and regulate themselves to a large extent through the voluntary and reciprocal initiatives of individuals. The classical liberal sensibility involves a deep appreciation of liberty, understood as the freedom to live one’s life, use one’s property, and order one’s affairs as one sees fit.

The classical liberal sensibility agrees with C.S. Lewis’s observation that the proper role of “the State” is “simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.” The classical liberal sensibility holds, however, that the State typically extends well beyond its proper bounds, very often doing a great deal more harm than good. In contrast to the potentialities of voluntarism and reciprocity, the classical liberal sensibility perceives the distortions and brutalities of coercion.

The classical liberal sensibility promotes degovernmentalization. It supports policy measures that constrain and limit the State and protect liberty. In this, the classical liberal sensibility is, like Will’s conservative sensibility, more than an attitude, for it gives a presumptive direction for policy reform. Violations of private property and limitations on individual freedoms of movement, assembly, speech, religion, and press are to be curtailed.

The classical liberal sensibility underdetermines the precise nature of desirable reforms in context, however, since classical liberals recognize (to varying degrees) the reality of political constraints, the role of bargaining, the importance of public opinion, and the coordinating function of status quo arrangements. Here there is disagreement among those who call themselves classical liberals.

Many today who call themselves “liberals” are, in the classical meaning of the term, no such thing. The modern American “liberal,” who responds at almost every turn with a clamor for government intervention, has no truck with Adam Smith’s “liberal plan” of “equality, liberty, and justice” in which each is free to pursue “his own interest his own way.” Katie Miller is severely misguided in her charge that classical liberalism is a leftist ideology. But many today who call themselves liberals share the illiberal sensibilities and policy preferences that classical liberalism emerged to resist.

Erik W. Matson is the Gibbons Fellow in Economics at the Catholic University of America and Co-Director of the Adam Smith Program at George Mason University.