The liberal challenge

There's been a (quite modest) discussion in Sweden regarding liberalism, and about who carries the liberal legacy, between representatives of the "traditional" liberal party (folkpartiet) and the socio-liberal green party (miljöpartiet). What stuck out to me was the question of whether state-owned businesses can be defended from a liberal point of view. Without actively labelling myself a "liberal" (although I guess in some ways I am) I would argue that the traditional view, that this is impossible, is flat-out wrong. Furthermore, it goes to show how the traditional view of liberalism is not just misguided, it is also highly conservative.

It is true that early liberals, such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill were opposed to state-ownership. But what you need to keep in mind here is that Smith (1723-1790) and Mill (1806-1873) lived in a vastly different time and environment than we do today. It would be stretching things not a little bit to claim that Great Britain in their time was a democracy -citizens had very little influence over the state and how it worked, so naturally they would be opposed to state-owned business and in favour of private ownership. Increasing and supporting private ownership was a way of further liberating individual citizens, giving them more control over their own lives - which would be a central idea in liberalism.

Contrast that with the situation we've got today. Most countries, not just in the "Western world", are vastly more democratic, with citizens having at least the potential for long-ranging influence over the state and how it is run. I won't deny that liberals such as Smith and Mill and their ideas have played a great part in this, but equally it's undeniable that socialist ideas such as public education and healthcare and, more broadly, the welfare state have played a vital part. The end-result is that in many ways we, as individual citizens, have been "liberated" and the same is true, in some ways, of the state itself.

Today the state is made up of, created by and controlled by the citizens - to varying degrees of course - but through general elections, transparency and accountability we citizens, as a people, have seized control of the state. Sure, there's corruption and such, and likely always will be, but the situation is nowhere near that of the 18th and 19th century. The state is no longer a distant "other" which controls us, other than in the minds of the most paranoid. It is open to public scrutiny and control.

Today, we as individual citzens collectively own any and all companies owned by the state. Wasn't the original idea that private-ownership was there to give individual citizens more freedom and control over their lives? Well, we as citizens have more control over state-owned business than we do over private-owned. If anything, the "liberal" problem today should be the lack of insight and transparency of private-owned businesses and conglomerates (as well as the lack of insight and transparency into government affairs). I'm not saying that every business should be run by the state - what I'm saying is that state-ownership shouldn't be a problem for liberals.

So why the reluctance towards state-owned and -run business? I can think of two reasons, neither of them valid. For one, it might be that "traditional" liberals, in fact, do not think that we live in a democratic society, where the state (and also government) is controlled by its people. It is true that we lack full insight, but in most cases this is due to a lack of interest and knowledge. The solution to that should be to stimulate interest and provide knowledge. When confronted with the charge that private-owned companies are less than transparent, the liberal reply is often "well, you can always become a shareholder". While this is not always as easy as it is made out to be, the argument is even better suited towards transparency of the state. "Well," I would argue, "you can always involve yourself politically".

The other reason for the reluctance towards state-owned and -run business, is "tradition". Liberals are so used to the idea that state-owned and -run business is wrong, that they no longer reflect upon the reasons behind it. It has become a fixed tenet or belief, and they fail to see how circumstances today are different to those during Smith's and Mill's time. They have lost track of the basic liberal ideals or aims, and instead cling to the consequences and means of those same ideals. They have, in effect, become conservatives rather than liberals.

But even the basic ideals of liberalism might need to be refined. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the old saying "no man is an island" is true. We need to remember not just the social and political circumstances of the 18th and 19th century, but also the world-view. Society in those days was highly influenced by a Cartesian-Newtonian dualistic-mechanical view of the world. There was a definite split between the mind and the body, as well as between "the individual" and "the society". This split, I believe, lies at the root of many of the challenges facing us today. Bridging that gap means realising that "the individual" and "the society" are not two opposing factors, they're not really even two different perspectives. They are one and the same, and you can't have one without the other.

In a way, the liberals won. First in their struggle against an oppressive (and highly un-democratic) state, and then in their struggle against what turned into an equally oppressive and dictatorial perversion of Marx' socialist ideas. But in their victory, in the "victory of the individual", we now risk going too far in the opposite direction.

It is often claimed, from the "political left", that our current right-wing government is tearing Sweden apart. Generally what is referred to is the growing inequality, both financial and social. But what is also happening is that our society (and this is not limited to Sweden alone, of course) is being torn apart in that the individual is torn away from the collective. We need to bridge not just the social and economic gap, but also the gap within ourselves, between "man and nature". This ought to be the liberal challenge in the 21st century. And this is the challenge which Green Parties all over the world are accepting.

It is not about who can "manage" the "liberal heritage" - that can only lead to stagnating conservatism - it is about who can deal with the challenges we face.