Laissez-faire Liberalism Research Articles

Active Citizens and an Active State: Uncovering the ‘Positive’ Underpinnings of the Australian Constitution

The Australian Constitution was drafted, and the institutions of national government were established, during a period in which the atomism of laissez-faire liberalism was being rejected. Instead, progressive liberals of the era were searching for ways to encourage collective action and social ties, believing that this would, in turn, enhance personal wellbeing. This article contends that a clearer appreciation of the influence of the ‘social’ turn in liberalism upon Australia’s constitutional and institutional development might contribute to a fuller understanding of Australia’s distinctive constitutional and public law traditions.

Ekonomia polityczna a demokracja w pismach klasyków liberalizmu – John Stuart Mill i Herbert Spencer

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND DEMOCRACY IN THE WRITINGS OF CLASSICAL LIBERALS – JOHN STUART MILL AND HERBERT SPENCER The main aim of this paper is showing mainstream economic theory as an important factor shaping the evolution of political liberalism. The role of the economic theory in this process seems underestimated. The paper analyses the writings of two classical liberal thinkers – John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, the former a pioneer of egalitarian liberalism, the latter of laissez-faire liberalism. Both Mill and Spencer were the followers of the classical political economy accepting the classical theory of distribution. Both saw the distribution of wealth as a spontaneous process, seeing no possibility correcting it for the people’s sake without disturbances or damages. According to the classical theory of wage fund, workers would get higher incomes only through accumulation of capital by owners and repressing their own fertility. Such statement was fundamentally opposite to all postulates of the workers’ movement. Workers always claimed bigger share in social income and legislation favoring laborers. The inevitable result of this contradiction was a conflict between liberal and democratic ideas. Mill and Spencer proposed two different solutions. J. S. Mill found a specific compromise and proposed enlarging franchise on working class, but with a still dominant position of the educated classes. Mill was against equal franchise for the working class because he did not conceive them as liable, rational and sober people. This position results from the wage fund doctrine; according to it, abundant workers’ fertility is wasteful for them and only sexual restraint (or chastity) would make their wages higher. Spencer in his early writing was an enthusiast of democracy, supposing the working class’ affinity to free market solutions. His later disappointment with democracy turned him into a strong critic of democratic parliamentarism from the standpoint of laissez-faire individualism. The case of these two liberal thinkers shows fundamental difficulty in reconciliation between the ideas of democracy and free market. We could choose democracy accepting welfare state or choose free market solution and become unambiguous critics of democracy. Spencer was a forerunner of all later ‘neoliberal’ critics of welfare state. Mill’s opinion was halfway between laissez-faire liberalism and modern egalitarian liberalism. Democracy and equal voting rights became acceptable by mainstream economist only when they had abandoned the wage fund doctrine and other constructs of the classical political economy. Thus changes in the economic theory had a significant impact on the evolution of political liberalism.

DUAL ARGUMENT, DOUBLE TRUTH: ON THE CONTINUED IMPORTANCE OF THE STATE IN NEOLIBERAL THOUGHT

It has been established that the neoliberal creed arising in the interwar and early postwar years, despite its strong rejection of economic planning, also entailed a rejection of laissez-faire liberalism. This article argues that recent attempts at construing early neoliberalism as thus being a more nuanced or moderate creed than later iterations are nonetheless flawed. The “dual argument” of early neoliberalism indicated a new approach to market liberalism in which the state was not seen as the market’s opposite but rather its precondition. This important move is obscured by the language of moderation and nuance. In place of “the radicalization thesis,” the second part of the article considers Philip Mirowski’s concept of a “double-truth doctrine” and argues that an appreciation of the state for social and economic governance is a common feature of different neoliberalisms, which nonetheless differ in their preferred policy suggestions for the use of state power.

Immigration, employment, and new town initiatives in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT The forces that drove the birth of Kwun Tong new town in Hong Kong are not comprehensively understood. Previous historical narratives have magnified the impact of industrialization or laissez-faire liberalism. This article looks at the formation of Kwun Tong new town from the perspective of migration and employment, and reveals that employment acted as a catalyst to resettlement. The production of space theory and investigation of British colonial archival documents, proposal maps, and aerial photographs reveal that new town planning unfolded relative to spatial coding in Ngau Tau Kok and urban practice in Shek Kip Mei, showing historical continuity. The social and political dynamics of immigrants and how they interactively influenced the built-environment and resettlement are highlighted in this article. Under morphological analysis, critical changes in urban form provide other angles from which to understand how the new town was shaped. In addition, morphological analysis provides a spatial dialectics, filling the research gap of town planning in Hong Kong in the 1950s.

Hayekian economic policy

What is the appropriate role of the state in economic policy-making? This paper shows that Friedrich Hayek, who is often considered a proponent of laissez-faire liberalism, offers three different answers to this problem. First, Hayek argues that the state should provide a legal framework for competitive markets. Second, he proposes to employ the rule of law criteria – generality, equality, and certainty – to distinguish permissible from non-permissible state interventions. Third, he downplays the importance of deliberate legislation and moves closer to the Misesian idea of a minimal state. The paper considers these answers in light of Hayek's analysis of the knowledge problem. We suggest that a Hayekian approach to economic policy-making should focus on improving the framework of general rules that guide individual behavior, thereby enabling spontaneous ordering processes and reducing the epistemological burden placed on policy-makers.

Finding the Center:Mrs Dalloway's Bureaucrats and State Centralization

AbstractAlthough the rise of the bureaucratic state was one of the most startling transformations of early twentieth-century British society, novelists raised on a diet of laissez-faire liberalism tended to shy away from direct representations of bureaucracy (with some prominent exceptions, such as the Circumlocution Office in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit or Anthony Trollope's Three Clerks). Although squarely set within the “governing-class spirit” of Westminster and populated with a bevy of civil servants, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway tends to be read as maintaining a strict public-private division with a marked preference for the richness and beauty of private life. This article argues that Woolf, no stranger to the civil service through her family and personal networks, had a more strained and ambivalent response to bureaucracy as an idea and government form. A close reading of the structural importance of Hugh Whitbread's character, a minor figure who is often read as an empty, flat Dickensian caricature of the gentleman, shows a more ambivalent response to how bureaucracy and its forms impacted the wider concerns raised about governmentality in Woolf's novel.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Embedded finance: the shadow banking system, sovereign power, and a new state–market hybridity

ABSTRACT With the rise of the shadow banking system, a new form of state–market hybridity has emerged, challenging existing monetary approaches to financial stability. A stable financial system today has essentially come to depend on a stable shadow banking system. Central banks are in the process of adapting to this new development. To secure the logic of laissez-faire market liberalism, the sovereign must resort to unprecedented measures and radically intervene in the financial markets. This new form of state–market hybridity forces central banks to provide ample reserves, to act as a dealer of last resort, and to give shadow banking actors access to their balance sheets. Such policies, however, produce new contradictions and fragilities. Based on Foucault's concepts of sovereignty and security, this paper argues that in today's world, the rationality of the laissez-faire security dispositif has become flanked by the rationality of sovereignty to a much greater extent than previously. Without losing its dominant status, the security dispositif is currently adapting so as to operate in crisis mode based on a post-laissez-faire rationality. The repo crisis of 2019 has demonstrated that central banks are still in the process of searching for ways to handle this new constellation.

Utopia and the Anthropocene

Utopia and the Anthropocene

Dartington Hall and the Quest for ‘Life in its Completeness’, 1925–45

Abstract In the wake of the First World War, reformers across the Western world questioned laissez-faire liberalism, the self-oriented and market-driven ruling doctrine of the nineteenth century. This philosophy was blamed, variously, for the war, for industrialization and for urbanization; for a way of life shorn of any meaning beyond getting and keeping; for the too great faith in materialism and in science; and for the loss of a higher, transcendent meaning that gave a unifying purpose to individual existence and to society as a whole. For many, the cure to these ills lay in reforming the liberal social framework in ways that made it more fulfilling to the whole person and that strengthened ties between individuals. This article looks at Dartington Hall as an outstanding practical example of this impulse to promote holistic, integrated living – exploring the project as an interlinked constellation of experiments in education, the arts, agriculture and social organization; and also looking at how Dartington’s philosophy and trajectory matched those of other such enterprises begun in interwar Britain and further afield, making it a bellwether of changes in reformist thinking across the century.

The Present and the Future of the Indian BIT Programme: Throw the Bathwater, but Keep the Baby

After White Industries and the numerous claims like Vodafone, Cairn Energy, Nokia, Nissan, etc, India has started reviewing its bilateral investment treaties (BITs). It has formulated a Model BIT in 2016 and has unilaterally terminated numerous BITs with countries. This Article analyses whether a review of existing BITs by India was the correct decision. Further, it examines the implications of termination of BITs and whether the Model BIT addresses India’s critiques of BITs. The BITs signed in the 1990s have been criticized to be based on the laissez faire liberalism model, and fail to balance the investor’s right with the state’s right to act in public interest. However, the Model BIT does not seem to resolve and clear the vagueness of the key BIT provisions. None of the disputes against India show a genuine and direct conflict between investment protection and the host State’s right to regulate and act in public interest. All these cases could have been avoided if the Indian State was more circumspect either in adopting its regulations or in conduct of its business. The Article concludes by stating that India will have to consider all of these factors while developing its new BIT practice.

Justificatory Fables of Ordoliberalism: Laissez-faire and the “Third Way”

This article critically examines two conceptualisations of ordoliberalism. In one, it is defined, together with neoliberalism, against 19th-century liberalism (in its social liberal and laissez-faire variants). This reading was common among ordoliberals themselves, and early neoliberals such as Friedrich von Hayek, as well as among critics, notably Michel Foucault. In another, ordoliberalism is contrasted to neoliberalism, with the latter presumed to be a species of laissez-faire economics. This reading is commonly accompanied by the supposition that ordoliberalism represents a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism, or between laissez-faire liberalism and state planning. The main body of this contribution presents a critical analysis of both positions, by way of analysis of ordoliberal texts and a history of the discourse of laissez-faire.

Либеральная демократия vs консервативный популизм

The origins of democracy date back to the Ancient World, and parliamentarism appeared in the Middle Ages. Their fusion to create representative democracy took nearly two centuries with this evolution process resulting in the appearance of present-day liberal democracy, where the latest form of liberalism have little to do with the laissez faire liberalism of the 19-th century or the Keynesian neo-liberalism of the 20-th. It serves the interests of financial oligarchy and imposes its rules upon the whole world. The former right- and left-wing parties are now merged into the same ruling elite. Nor did the former conservatism stand the test of time, resorting to alliance with neo-conservatism. Various opponents of this elite in the West today are called «populists». The most colorful example of this «populism» of the last decade is the movement of «yellow jackets» in France. Its participants unite socialist and anarchist slogans with the conservative ones and demand the «direct democracy». In Russia we have our own tradition of such unity, beginning with the early Slavophils, and supported by A.I. Solzhenitsyn as «democracy from below».

Social democracy, economic liberalism and physical education: a Dewey-informed review of philosophical and pedagogical possibilities

ABSTRACT This historical-themed critical paper utilises writings by John Dewey to review how constructions of social democracy might benefit conceptions of contemporary physical education. The review focuses on Dewey’s early ethics writings which considered that society functioned best when collective moral purposes merged with individual freedoms in a context where one should be alert to the marginalising influences of laissez-faire liberalism. The paper reviews why earlier attempts to engage with Dewey’s theorizing in the United States of America failed to result in sustained progress. Using this analysis, the paper then considers whether a greater interest in activist forms of participation could be enhanced further by establishing clearer Deweyan-informed links to democracy and learning. It is argued that physical education is best equipped to withstand the ramifications of advanced capitalism if students experiences are continuous and interactive, and contain a degree of responsibility and control over the pace and direction of learning.

Economic Liberalism and the State: Dismantling the Myth of Naïve Laissez-Faire

ABSTRACTThe article offers a critique of the prevailing understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism and classic nineteenth-century liberalism in contemporary international political economy (IPE) and offers a redefinition inspired by Polanyi and Gramsci. Within critical IPE studies, a consensus has emerged that neoliberalism cannot be reduced to a simple attempt to roll back the economy and let loose free-market forces. However, this insight relies on contrasting neoliberalism with a classic liberalism, that is, a simple attempt to implement just this naïve laissez-faire ideology. In contrast, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberalism is also characterised by an active use of state and legislative power. Through a historical study of two cases from nineteenth-century Britain, Poor Law reform and the Gold Standard, the paper will argue that state action played a central role even during the heyday of laissez-faire liberalism. With a starting point in Polanyi’s dictum that ‘laissez-faire was planned’, this reinvestigation will point towards a need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the distinctions between economic theory, ideology, and practical policy, as well as pointing towards a general reinterpretation of the role of the state in liberal economic ideology.

Coleridge, Employment and the Sorcery of Wealth

The Friend and the Lay Sermons present the problem of how the employment relationship should be located within the public/private divide that operates in Constitutional theory. This article is concerned with the question whether, in Coleridge’s thought, the low wages that caused the endemic poverty of the working poor engaged a role for the state, or whether the outcomes of contracting - the terms of the bargain between worker and employer - resided within an exclusively private realm with which the state should not, in principle, concern itself. If a role for the state was envisaged, how could that role be fulfilled? I shall argue that, whilst Coleridge’s Lay Sermons explicitly propounded three influences for moderating the disruptive potential of laissez-faire liberalism, there is elsewhere in Lay Sermons and The Friend the embryonic form of a fourth mechanism that he fails to locate within this typology of remedies. In this article I am principally concerned with the fourth possibility rather than the remedies that Coleridge explicitly prescribed. I shall not be concerned with Coleridge’s ideas on trade unionism, other than to note here that he did not argue for a regulatory regime that would tolerate collective industrial action. This was so because the coercive disciplinary powers necessary to enforce solidarity between workers was, in his view, incompatible with the moral freedom of the individual worker.

The European Economic Constitution and Its Transformation Through the Financial Crisis

The idea of an “economic constitution” was developed by a group of German economists and lawyers in the Weimar Republic which sought a “third - the ordo-liberal - way” between laissez-faire liberalism and socialist politics. Ordo-liberalism survived the Third Reich untainted. In the 50s, it was complemented by the concept of the social market economy. In the formative phase of the EEC, ordo-liberal scholars started to promote the ensemble of European economic freedoms and a system of undistorted competition as the constitutional core of the integration project. Economic and Monetary Union as accomplished by the Maastricht Treaty were expected to complete this project. However, the whole edifice started to erode immediately after its establishment. Following the financial and the sovereign debt crises, EMU with its commitments to price stability and monetary politics is perceived as a failed construction precisely because of its reliance on inflexible rules. The European crisis management seeks to compensate for these failures by means of regulatory machinery which disregards the European order of competences, disempowers national institutions, burdens, in particular, Southern Europe with austerity measures; it establishes pan-European commitments to budgetary discipline and macroeconomic balancing. The ideal of a legal ordering of the European economy is thus abolished while the economic and social prospects of these efforts seem gloomy and the Union’s political legitimacy becomes precarious.

The European Economic Constitution and Its Transformation Through the Financial Crisis

The idea of an “economic constitution” was developed by a group of German economists and lawyers in the Weimar Republic which sought a “third way” – the “ordo-liberal way” – between laissez-faire liberalism and socialist politics. Ordo-liberalism survived the Third Reich untainted. In the 1950s, Ordo-liberalism was complemented by the concept of the social market economy. In the formative phase of the EEC, ordo-liberal scholars started to promote the ensemble of European economic freedoms and a system of undistorted competition as the constitutional core of the European integration project. The Economic and Monetary Union, as accomplished by the Maastricht Treaty, was expected to complete this project. However, the entire edifice soon proved to be much more vulnerable than its advocates had promised. Following the financial and the sovereign debt crises, EMU with its commitments to price stability and monetary politics is perceived as a failed construction precisely because of its reliance on inflexible rules. European crisis management seeks to compensate for these failures by means of regulatory machinery which disregards the European order of competences, disempowers national institutions, burdens, in particular, Southern Europe with austerity measures; it establishes pan-European commitments to budgetary discipline and macroeconomic balancing. The ideal of a legal ordering of the European economy is thus abolished while the economic and social prospects of these efforts seem gloomy and the Union’s political legitimacy becomes precarious.

Adam Smith und die Bankenregulierung Ein Widerspruch zu einer sonst liberalen Wirtschaftspolitik?

Abstract Proponents of liberal economic policies in the financial market often refer to the moral and economic authority of Adam Smith, the founder of economics as a science, to add weight to their recommendations. They think, they can do so, because Adam Smith is in these circles considered a prominent representative of an economically unbridled laissez-faire liberalism. The fact that Adam Smith also advocated several measures of economic policies for the regulation of banking, like a limit for interest rates of 5 %, the prohibition of paper money under a nominal value of £ 5 and the use of option clauses on banknotes, is little known to the recipients. For this reason, this paper wants to give an answer to the question, whether Adam Smith’s advocacy of banking regulation is a contradiction to his otherwise liberal economic policy or not.

Dewey’s liberalisms: Depression-era insights for the Great Recession

This article explores John Dewey’s Depression-era analysis of ‘liberalism’ in an effort to clarify our own neoliberal moment. As Dewey argues, liberalism is a term used in the 1930s to signify diverse and often contradictory meanings. It variously refers to a minimalist state aimed at unbinding markets (laissez-faire liberalism) or an activist state charged with providing social welfare (what Dewey described as ‘humane liberalism’). Finding limitations in these visions of liberalism, Dewey calls for a ‘radical’ liberalism that would socialise the economy, challenge the corrupting power of privileged elites, and embrace experimentalism and mass participation in social planning and decision-making. The article draws on Dewey’s analysis of different liberalisms to make sense of contemporary political and educational debates that have been profoundly shaped by the growing prominence of neoliberalism in recent decades. It sheds light on why particular educational issues have emerged as central sites of contest while others receive little or no attention and hints at possibilities for social reconstruction.