Milton Friedman: The last conservative or the first welfare state classical liberal?

December 28, 2023December 28, 2023 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

When Milton Friedman died in 2006 I wrote a blog post crediting him as an ‘enormous influence on my life’. I said back then that although few people call themselves ‘Friedmanites’, for many – including me – his writings guided us to a broader set of arguments and influences. Despite the subtitle Jennifer Burns gives her biography of Friedman -‘the last conservative’ – these were mostly ideas in the classical liberal tradition.

Classifying Friedman

Burns acknowledges that Friedman described himself as a classical liberal. But in the United States ‘liberals’ are the rough equivalent of social democrats or progressives in other countries. Tribally, Friedman was not one of them. His US partisan leanings were Republican, he was sceptical of ‘big government’, and he sometimes associated with people progressives hate.

If Friedman is a ‘conservative’, the word ‘last’ is doing a lot of work. It refers back to the post-WW2 synthesis of relative conservatism in social matters, private enterprise/free market economics and anti-communism adopted by ‘conservative’ political parties. Friedman more than anyone else turned the private enterprise part of this synthesis into a free market perspective. This combination of views still exists, but has faded as a political force. In the 2010s and 2020s populist figures like Donald Trump captured American ‘conservatism’.

For a non-American audience it is simpler to keep Friedman’s ideological classification as ‘classical liberal’.

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Mill’s On Liberty after 150 years

December 17, 2023 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

This article was originally published in the winter 2009 issue of Policy.

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John Stuart Mill is the only nineteenth century liberal intellectual still widely read and discussed in the twenty-first century, thanks mainly to his book On Liberty, published 150 years ago. In his time, several of Mill’s books were influential, particularly his Principles of Political Economy, but it is On Liberty that has lasted. It has been continuously in print since 1859.

On Liberty’s longevity makes it the most-read classic of the liberal canon. It retains an audience because the dilemmas Mill writes about— especially over when to regulate speech and behaviour that lacks clear harm to others—are nineteenth-century versions of issues that remain controversial today. Mill speaks to the present as well as the past. Quotations from him still appear regularly in the world’s English-speaking media; his ideas proving useful and his name adding weight to arguments made more than 130 years after he died.

Despite the book’s enduring popularity and influence, On Liberty is not undisputed as a liberal sacred text. Liberals as well as conservatives contest its arguments. Mill was a utilitarian, favouring those policies likely to produce the greatest happiness. Liberals in the natural or human rights traditions see utilitarianism as an insecure foundation for freedom, fearing that it justifies sacrificing the freedoms of some for the benefit of the many (anti-terror laws, for example). In On Liberty, Mill needs sometimes complicated arguments to move from utilitarian premises to liberal conclusions. Classical liberals—their adjective a response to the then new ‘social’ liberalism Mill helped usher in— question the priority Mill gave to ‘individuality’ over other forms of life, and his critique of the role of custom in social life.

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Donald Horne’s life in the lucky country (some comments on Ryan Cropp’s Horne biography)

August 13, 2023March 31, 2024 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

Donald Horne’s Death of the Lucky Country, his attack on the dismissal of the Whitlam government, its title an allusion to Horne’s 1964 bestseller, was the first ever adult non-fiction book I owned. I have a vague memory of pestering my mother to buy it for me, the $1.50 price tag (still on the back of my copy) being beyond my budget at age ten.

I don’t remember exactly why I wanted Horne’s book; as a very young Liberal I was happy to see the Whitlam government gone. But recently reading Ryan Cropp’s excellent Horne biography, A Life in the Lucky Country, I can see why Horne appealed to my developing interests. He was a ‘public intellectual’ – the quotation marks because this term and perhaps role has faded – someone who bridged the world of ideas and general audiences. Horne’s books — he was as Cropp notes a prolific author – were always easy to read and, thanks to the secondhand bookshops that once existed in large numbers, usually affordable without parental financial assistance.

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Liberal project successes, followed by stall and setback (on David Kemp’s Consent of the People, 1966-2022)

January 29, 2023May 21, 2023 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

The Consent of the People: Human dignity through freedom and equality 1966-2022 concludes David Kemp’s epic five volume 2,504 page political history of Australia with particular reference to liberalism.

The full set takes us from the pre-liberalism of the late 18^th century, when ‘liberal’ ideas and institutions were yet to be linked into the ideology of liberalism; through liberalism’s highpoint in the 19^th century (volumes one and two); the twentieth century’s dismal first half when racism, protectionism, war, economic depression and utopian socialism broke liberalism but not democracy (volumes three and four); to the defeat of socialism after World War II covered in the later parts of volume four; to the story of volume five, which covers the revival of the liberal project in the 20^th century’s final decades followed by stall and setback in the early 21^st century.

The 40 years after Sir Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966, having been in office since 1949, saw a liberalisation in which liberals were one influence among many. Kemp’s idea of ‘liberal project’, a policy agenda, is useful in understanding how Australia became a more liberal society despite ideological liberals not being numerous or always highly influential. Many people had reasons for overturning the ‘Australian settlement’ of the 1900s: white Australia, high tariffs, and a highly-regulated labour market.

In Australia’s division of political labour for the most part the people outside government calling for more liberal social policies and more liberal economic policies were different.

Liberal social policies were often promoted by single issue movements, at their core people trying to improve their own lives and not advance general philosophical ideals, although sometimes attracting support by appealing to broader principles (see Jon Piccini’s book on human rights in Australia).

Liberal economic policies were promoted by a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, economists, business interests and think-tanks. In the think-tanks especially classical liberal philosophy was explicit, but in the other groups support for market mechanisms owed more to utilitarianism than freedom. The aim was greater and more efficient economic growth.

As in the immediate post-World War II period the Liberal and Labor parties provided the alternative governments. But ideologically party competition changed in the 1960s. Declining support for socialism within Labor and its increasingly university-educated and socially-liberal MPs and voters meant that attitudes to ‘liberalism’ were less of a divide between the two main parties. The Liberal Party often struggled to find a clear direction. Labor governments took the lead in ‘liberal’ reforms.

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Socialism defeated but liberalism not triumphant (on David Kemp’s A Liberal State: How Australians Chose Liberalism over Socialism 1926–1966)

January 22, 2022January 22, 2022 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

The first three volumes of David Kemp’s Australian political history told the story of Australian liberalism’s rise and fall between 1788 and 1925. In a global comparative sense Australia remained a liberal democracy in 1925, but ‘policy change by erosion’ (to use a Kemp phrase from another context) was undermining its liberal characteristics.

From a contemporary liberal perspective, Kemp’s third volume showed that key policy erosions such as the White Australia policy, protectionism and industrial arbitration came from governments that were broadly on the liberal side of the then dominant ideological conflicts. The increasing influence of socialist ideas, the growth of trade unions, and Labor Party electoral successes all threatened a more radical abandonment of liberal ideas and institutions.

This fourth volume in Kemp’s series, covering the decades from 1926 to 1966, is sub-titled ‘How Australians chose liberalism over socialism’. By 1966 the socialist threat to Australian liberalism, which began in the late 19th century and peaked in the 1930s and 1940s, had been defeated. But this was not a foregone conclusion. A Liberal State tells the story of how the semi-liberal order of 1925 survived the challenges it faced over the next 40 years.

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The decline but survival of Australia’s major political parties (a review of Sam Roggeveen’s Our Very Own Brexit)

September 19, 2021 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

A review of Sam Roggeveen’s Our Very Own Brexit., originally published on GoodReads in November 2019.

How vulnerable is Australia to the disruptive political developments in other Western countries – Trump in the US, Brexit and Corbyn in the UK, and the electoral devastation of former ruling political parties across Western Europe?

Sam Roggeveen, from the Lowy Institute in Sydney (disclosure: I have known Sam for many years and we had a recent private online discussion about his argument in this essay), is cautious but sees significant political risks. As in other countries, the Australian political parties that have been the foundation of post-WW2 stability have shrinking bases of support, leaving them open to internal insurgencies and political rivals.

One symptom of the old political system’s weakness, a rising vote for independent and minor party candidates, has been present for a long time. I wrote about this, as did many others, in the early 2000s and last year my Grattan Institute former colleagues published a detailed analysis of the characteristics and beliefs of minor party voters.

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Illiberal groups in a liberal society (a review of The Liberal Archipelago by Chandran Kukathas)

September 18, 2021 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

This review first appeared in Policy, Summer 2003-04

A review of The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom by Chandran Kukathas, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Chandran Kukathas’s The Liberal Archipelago is a contrarian book. Recent liberal (well, left-liberal) writers support special rights for minority groups to protect their culture, but believe groups should give their members liberal rights. Kukathas takes the opposite view. Minority groups should not be given special rights, but they can run themselves illiberally. If their members don’t like it, they can leave.

To understand why these contrary conclusions are reached we have to go back into liberalism’s history.

Kukathas returns liberalism to one of its original principles, toleration. Liberalism emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a response to European religious conflict. John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is the most famous argument for toleration from that time, though Kukathas rates more highly Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary (1708).

Since this early period toleration has been a way of preserving peace. Forcing diverse groups into a common culture causes conflict, including violent conflict. Putting up with each other, advocates of toleration say, is the better option. Kukathas argues that this is not merely a compromise; it comes to be internalised in basic norms governing social relations.

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Methodological and normative liberalism (A review of Mark Pennington’s Robust political economy)

September 15, 2021January 22, 2022 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

This review was published in Policy in 2011.

A review of Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy by Mark Pennington, Edward Elgar Publishing 2011

The UNSW academic Martin Krygier draws a useful distinction between the ‘methodological’ and the ‘normative’ aspects of political ideologies. The methodological aspects are theories about how the world works, while the normative aspects are theories about which values are most important. The two have a complex relationship. The normative ideal of socialism, equality between people, continues to resonate even though socialism is methodologically discredited, its institutions overwhelmingly thought ‘not to work’. The methodological ideas of conservatism (Krygier’s example) about the unanticipated and often unwelcome consequences of radical change provide useful insights, even for people who might find conservatism’s ‘normative’ aspects, such as support for religious values, unappealing

Mark Pennington’s book Robust Political Economy puts him in the school of classical liberal thought that emphasises methodological claims. Mainly following Friedrich Hayek , Pennington focuses on the institutional implications of limited human cognitive capacities and, to a lesser extent, limited moral motivations. The strands of classical liberalism or libertarianism that make normative rights-based arguments are largely absent from his book, while the normative arguments of left-liberalism, as found in the work of John Rawls or Ronald Dworkin, are present but criticised on methodological grounds. Pennington’s liberalism is one that starts with Adam Smith and David Hume, rather than John Locke.

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Separating marriage and state (a review of Tamara Metz’s Untying the Knot)

September 13, 2021 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

This review appeared in Policy magazine in Spring 2010.

In many Western countries, marriage is a subject of passionate political contention. Gay marriage triggers controversy wherever it is proposed. Conservatives suggest ‘covenant’ marriages with stricter obligations than imposed under current marriage law. Religions and cultures that permit men to take multiple wives challenge monogamous marriage. Participants in these debates disagree on much but concur on one thing: the state should decide what marriage means.

Tamara Metz questions this assumption. In her book Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce she argues that a liberal state should not determine which relationships count as marriages. Disputes over how to define marriage show that there is no consensus on its meaning. The state should see marriage in the same way it sees religion, another subject on which agreement seems impossible, as a private matter in which governments should not interfere. There are other ways of promoting long-term relationships and protecting the parties to them.

Liberal thinkers on marriage

Core liberal ideas suggest that marriage and state should be separate, but, historically, leading liberal thinkers have not called for their separation. Metz shows that while John Locke—a leading liberal figure on the separation of church and state — and John Stuart Mill both applied liberal principles to marriage, neither saw a clear dividing line between marriage and the state. Both assumed that marriage, unlike religion, would be ‘established’ — an institution officially recognised and regulated by the state.

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John Gray gives up on finding universal foundations for liberalism (my 1990 review of Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy)

September 12, 2021September 12, 2021 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

I think this might be the first book review I had published outside of student magazines. It appeared in the May 1990 issue of Quadrant. Stylistically I have evolved – fewer adverbs now and more care to avoid cliches (‘rests on his laurels’), archaic words (‘hitherto’) and the universal male (‘open to man’). But intellectually I still share the views of my young self, believing in liberal societies without thinking that liberalism can be derived from a single foundational principle or that liberalism suits all countries.

Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy, by John Gray; Routledge, London, 1989.

Over the last decade and a half John Gray, an Oxford academic, has been one of the most stimulating liberal theorists. Writing with great intellectual energy, he has produced influential books on John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, a text entitled simply Liberalism for the Open University in England, which articulates the basic ideas of the philosophy with remarkable clarity and brevity, and numerous articles on liberal thinkers and topics, many of which are collected in the volume under review.

One reason that Gray is of interest is that he never rests on his laurels. As this book’s essays (which are collected in the order of their original publication) show, he has continually revised his ideas as to which arguments constitute the most plausible foundations for the liberal philosophy.

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