Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Liberalism puts the freedom of the individual at its centre: there can be no liberal way of life. For the essence of freedom remains the free choice of a way of life. Yet this only seems self-evident on the surface.
Push the surface aside, though, and the answer is anything but obvious. After all, every law or politics student knows the Böckenförde dictum: „Der freiheitliche, säkularisierte Staat lebt von Voraussetzungen, die er selbst nicht garantieren kann. […] Als freiheitlicher Staat kann er einerseits nur bestehen, wenn sich die Freiheit, die er seinen Bürgern gewährt, von innen her, aus der moralischen Substanz des einzelnen und der Homogenität der Gesellschaft, reguliert. Andererseits kann er diese inneren Regulierungskräfte nicht von sich aus, das heißt mit den Mitteln des Rechtszwanges und autoritativen Gebots zu garantieren suchen, ohne seine Freiheitlichkeit aufzugeben […]“ (The liberal, secularised state lives on preconditions it cannot itself guarantee. As a liberal state it can only endure if the freedom it grants its citizens regulates itself from within, out of the moral substance of the individual and the homogeneity of society. Yet it cannot try to guarantee these inner regulating forces by itself, that is, by means of legal coercion and authoritative command, without giving up its liberal character.) Pursue the question further and it quickly becomes apparent that the famous constitutional judge stands in a long tradition. Even the early philosophers of liberalism had no intention of leaving man alone in a vacuum with his freedom.
Wilhelm von Humboldt begins his „Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen“ (The Limits of State Action) not with the state and not with freedom as a concept, but with the individual. The purpose of man „ist die höchste und proportionirlichste Bildung seiner Kräfte zu einem Ganzen“, the highest and most harmonious development of his powers into a whole. This requires, first, the „Mannigfaltigkeit der Situationen“, the variety of situations, but also ties to other people, so as to „den Reichthum des andern sich eigen [zu] machen“, to make the wealth of the other one’s own. Only against this background, in which his friendship with Goethe shows all too clearly, do freedom and the state that guarantees it acquire their meaning. Humboldt draws on the Enlightenment vision of the self-perfecting individual, which Goethe himself expressed most beautifully when he wrote in a letter of the „Begierde, die Pyramide meines Daseins, deren Basis mir angegeben und gegründet ist, so hoch als möglich in die Luft zu spitzen“, the desire to raise the pyramid of his existence, whose base was given and laid for him, as high into the air as possible.
John Stuart Mill saw the purpose of freedom in the increase of happiness, understood as the absence of pain. That sounds like the opposite of Humboldt’s idea, and like the absence of any more complex picture of man. But Mill’s theory is nobler than the simple utilitarianism of his predecessors (such as Jeremy Bentham, „that most radical fool”, to quote Goethe). There are, after all, higher and lower kinds of pleasure; Mill is no hedonist. Mill’s conception rests on an optimistic view of the human mind, which, freed from its fetters and properly educated, „finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future”.
One further outstanding liberal of the nineteenth century, from the other side of the Channel, must not go unmentioned. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to America to take a closer look at the new, free, and democratic society. He returned with a central message for Europe’s liberals: a free order does not sustain itself. It needs shared mores and a robust civil society. An order has to be lived, not merely exist on paper.
The great continuators of this noble nineteenth-century liberalism in the twentieth century were the ordoliberals. They pointed out that a free political order is interwoven with a set of particular economic and social orders; one of their most important representatives was Wilhelm Röpke. For Röpke, this promise of an independent, creative life is not only the goal of liberalism but also its precondition. He sees a danger to freedom in a depersonalised mass society whose members have neither the property and economic room for manoeuvre that guarantee individual freedom of action, nor intellectual independence. They might then give up freedom themselves, since it no longer holds any value for them. At the centre of Röpke’s views stands an economy built on strong, independent individuals who resist the collectivist „cult of the colossal”. Small craftsmen, farmers, and entrepreneurs are to form the backbone of a free society and keep it from sliding into the rule of tyrants.
From this short history we can draw a few lessons. From Humboldt we can learn that the liberal state is no end in itself and that it is called upon to enable people’s creative power and self-realisation. Mill’s lesson for us is this: we may pursue happiness in the lower way (after all, we are free), but it is the higher aspirations, rooted in education and curiosity, that bring real fulfilment. De Tocqueville admonishes us that freedom must be lived not alone but in civil society. Röpke, for his part, warns us that in a massified and largely meaningless society freedom becomes a fragile good, since it holds no value in itself for people who do not know what to do with it. Freedom needs independently thinking, capable citizens, or there will be no one left who still values it.
Critics of liberalism are wrong when they claim it has always been a selfish and antisocial philosophy that ends in loneliness and nihilism. But admittedly, they might turn out to be a little right if they look at the present state of liberalism. The fascination with efficiency and GDP growth as the universal answer to all social problems, so characteristic of the 1990s and 2000s, put liberals into nap mode. Perhaps it was an unavoidable demand of the hour; the successes of market reforms brought an enormous increase in prosperity and quality of life, and for a brief moment it seemed as though one could really go to sleep. As someone who comes from Poland, I would have to be mad to deny those successes.
So liberals slept and, the author included, slept through the warnings from the United States about a weakening civil society and weakening social ties (think „Bowling Alone”). For a long time they also slept through the growing concentration of the digital economy, which the Chicago School in part made possible. Uprooted individuals could thus easily fall victim to algorithmically fuelled polarisation, which in turn began to endanger the liberal system itself. Growth alone is not enough to sustain a free order.
Another dimension of this nap was the slow forgetting of a tradition in which liberalism was understood as an idea rooted in its social and cultural context. It is no exaggeration to say that in liberal circles it was easier to come across seminars on Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand than a small event on the thought of Tocqueville or Humboldt. Not for the first time in history, liberals have yielded to the temptation of falling back on simplified and superficial interpretations of their own tradition, which hollows it out. Even if it does not look that way, this is good news, because it means there is a way back, through a serious engagement with one’s own tradition.
The liberal way of life does not have to be reinvented. It was always there. The real challenge will be to tell it anew. One can draw on works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they must be adapted to the challenges of the twenty-first. The first step is to bring this tradition back into the liberal vocabulary.
