A Defense of the word "Liberal"

Alan Wolfe is not defending liberalism here, which needs no defense, he is merely defending the continuing use of the word "liberal" as opposed to say, "progressive." I agree completely.



29.01.2009
In Defense of "Liberal"
Alan Wolfe is a TNR contributing editor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

When John McWhorter tells us liberals, today on TNR.com, to give up our fixation with the term, it is not clear if he is speaking as a linguist, a political pundit, or, increasingly fashionable these days, both. In any case, I could not disagree more.

Words change their meaning, as McWhorter rightly points out; one of my favorites is the persistent use of the term "condescend" in Jane Austen, where it is clearly meant as a compliment. But words do not change their meaning through acts of God. Their meanings change because we change them. This, I dare say, is precisely why McWhorter took to this site to make his argument. He was not merely announcing that the old meaning of liberal is now passé; he was urging that we treat it as passé.

A libertarian like F. A. von Hayek once wrote that he was not a conservative. I do not think that those to the left of George Bush and Karl Rove should say that they are not liberals. Liberal is a good word because the values it embodies--the very ones cited by Tim Ash, whose reflections on the term prompted McWhorter's piece--are good values. As I say in my own effort to deal with these issues, The Future of Liberalism (officially published next Tuesday), we do not study the "conservative arts" and we do not call Western polities "conservative democracies." Liberals are people who are generous of temperament, committed to fairness, and believers in such substantive goals as autonomy and equality. No other term captures that range of meanings. Progressive--a term frequently urged as a substitute for liberalism, including by McWhorter himself--is dreadful by comparison; it assumes a straight road from there to here to the future, when, as the liberal Kant pointed out and the liberal Isaiah Berlin seconded, out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing could be fashioned.

The application of the word liberal to politics derives from the first decade or two of the nineteenth century when Spanish reformers were searching for an alternative to Napoleonic rule. McWhorter says that we should not be bound by the way terms have been used in the past because conditions change. Some do. Some do not. The ideas that we ought to be free from the capricious rule of tyrants, that we have the power to shape the world in which we live, that we insist on the primacy of rights, that in recognizing our own flaws we should be tolerant of others--these are the stuff of permanent things. Letting go the term that made them part of our consciousness would be a terrible mistake.
--Alan Wolfe
Posted: Thursday