Liberalization

Liberalization is a process that reduces state control over the lives of persons subject to the authority of a state. It may have both economic and political dimensions. Economic liberalization reduces state intervention in the marketplace. Political liberalization expands individual liberty and rights, including the right to speak freely against state authorities and to organize with others to oppose those authorities. Economic and political liberalization may or may not go together. Political liberalization may or may not lead to democratization, which also enables a broadly inclusive electorate to unseat an incumbent government.

The concept of liberalization must be understood in the context of liberalism, the dominant modern political philosophy. Liberalism first emerged in the 17th century as a challenge to the notion that monarchs had God-given, absolute authority. Thomas Hobbes defended absolute authority but grounded it not in divine will but rather in the hypothetical agreement of the subjects to yield entirely to a sovereign their natural rights to defend life and property.

John Locke rejected Hobbes's argument. While agreeing that governmental authority is indeed grounded in the consent of the governed, Locke held that people would leave the state of nature and set up a commonwealth only if they could thereby protect their natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Rather than cede their natural rights to a sovereign, the people became the sovereign by virtue of the social contract through which they established the commonwealth. Monarchs were no more than magistrates who could be removed by the sovereign people if they failed to protect natural rights.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in turn, rejected Locke's emphasis on individual rights, returning instead to the Hobbesian concept of ceding natural rights to an absolute sovereign. But Rousseau also rejected Hobbes's idea of a sovereign separate from the people. He envisioned the whole people, acting together, a radically democratic polity in which individual rights had no place. Locke's liberalism was thus bracketed by two absolutisms.

Liberalism after Locke remained committed to protecting individual liberty, but it left behind the [Page 1440]conventional device of the social contract. From the late 18th through the 19th centuries, liberals developed the idea of utility, or usefulness, as the central tool for discerning the good. Jeremy Bentham produced the most systematic formulation of utilitarianism as a means of judging what is good and bad. Adam Smith developed the quintessential defense of the free market as the best way to maximize productivity in the economic sphere. John Stuart Mill, the most influential liberal of the 19th century, elaborated utilitarianism as the foundation for a classic defense of individual liberty as well as for the enfranchisement of workers and women in a representative government.

Liberalism began with the project of defending individual liberties against encroachment by the state. The American Declaration of Independence is a classic statement of that sort of liberalism. Increasingly, though, liberalism was also concerned with the growing problem of democracy. The American Constitution, taking the form of an explicit contract among the people to set up a government, is just as concerned with protection from majority tyranny as it is with guarding against individual or oligarchic despotism. And John Stuart Mill, for all his advocacy of expanded suffrage, feared the tyranny of an unenlightened mass.

...