Critics of Liberal Rights

Abstract

As highlighted before, liberalism has long had its fair share of friendly and utterly dogmatic critics. Many were reactionary and religious figures who were keen to dispute the alleged atheism or amoralism within proto-liberal and liberal theories. Often times these authors engaged in well-known debates, whether one is thinking of Hobbes’ spat with John Bramhall, Locke’s debate with Robert Filmer in the first Treatise, Kant’s efforts to avoid drawing the ire of Prussian censors, and of course Bentham’s arguments with just about everybody about everything. Mill entered into a long series of hostile back and forths with a number of critics, particularly those who took issue with his shocking arguments about women’s suffrage. Most of these are largely of historical interest by this point, though as we shall, figures on the new postmodern right in the twenty-first century lodge grenades which would be familiar to these earlier critics. Part of this can be chalked up to the fact that liberals were initially calling for radical changes, which meant that critics had the advantage or upholding a status quo which may well have appeared natural or at the very least safer than any alternative. But by the eighteenth century things had dramatically changed. Influenced by liberal theorizing, but also the advent of a literate bourgeois public sphere and affective exposure to relatively new literary genres like the novel, liberalism began to become less an esoteric theory partially advanced in a few Western European quasi-republics and constitutional monarchies. It was evolving into a revolutionary force with the power to topple ancient regimes and remake the world in a new image. When the young Hegel was apocryphally writing the Phenomenology of Spirit and saw Napoleon march into Jena, the idealist is said to have claimed the world spirit was marching into Germany. Liberalism, or at least a modern way of life, was on the march and the old world and its calcified regimes was falling before it. It was around this time that the first genuinely novel critiques of liberalism and liberal rights began to emerge. As liberalism gained power and influence as a guiding ideology, it also found new enemies who understood that one could not simply appeal to the status quo to defeat it. Novel arguments were needed, and they would emerge on very different sides of the political spectrum.