Pros And Cons Of Conservatism

Individual liberty is the most significant moral and political value in liberalism. Liberalism views politics and political institutions’ main task as providing a means in order to facilitate the free choice of individuals. However, within liberalism itself, there is a lack of consensus regarding the most suitable instrument for obtaining individual liberty. The term individual liberty is defined as the absence of external constraint. This essay will firstly examine the arguments of classical liberals, such as John Stuart Mill (1806-73) and John Locke (1632-1704), then New Liberals, including Thomas Hill Green (1836-82) and John Rawls (1921-2002) and finally the ideas of Friedrich Hayek (1889-1992), a neo-classical liberal. It will argue that
Locke maintained that everyone has natural rights, such as the security of their life, liberty and personal property, which are irrespective of laws in different countries as these were bestowed upon people by God (Locke,1689). He argued that humans are in ‘a State of Perfect Freedom to order their Actions…as they see fit…without asking leave or depending on the Will of any other Man’ as imagined in a state of nature (Locke,1689, p.269). This suggests that the state will not interfere in the lives of citizens unless the freedom of others is restricted as a result of non-interference (Redhead and Hood, 2017 as cited in Wetherly, 2017). Moreover, Locke asserted that a social contract would exist between people and the government because citizens in a state would find this more desirable compared to living in a state of nature. The government would be able to more securely protect the state and ensure the enforcement of natural rights due to its greater authority (Locke, 1689). Therefore, Locke argued that liberalism seeks to enhance individual liberty through a social contract, through which citizens would respect the government’s policy of
He argued that social institutions are a means to attain human purposes due to the unpredictable shifts in human thought and conflicting moral and intellectual traditions in society (Gray, 1980). However, although he believed that the role of the state in constructed order is important, he also stated that the state’s role has to be limited as planning poses a threat to political liberties. Thus, he maintained that constructed order should do no more than provide favourable conditions for spontaneous order, of which the most significant is the rule of law. He suggested that the law should only include negative freedoms, rather than positive freedoms as these make citizens subject to the arbitrary will of the state, consequently defying the principle of liberty, as freedom, according to Hayek, is the absence of coercion (Hayek, 1994). Therefore, Hayek can be differentiated from classical liberals such as Locke, as he recognised the importance of the state in relation to constructed order whereas Locke only advocated state interference when the liberty of a certain individual limits the freedom of another