Studies in Twentieth-Century Liberalism

he collapse of communism and the failure of socialist states around the world revealed the Left's vision to be unattainable. In countries where policies inspired by the Left were implemented, the condition of the people was made worse. The record is unambiguous to all except those such as the Hungarian theorist, Gyorgy Lukacs, who asserted in 1919 that Marxism would still be 'true' even if every one of its specific historical claims turned out to be empirically false.

The once liberal, but now liberal-sceptic, John Gray recently questioned in the New Statesman whether liberalism was viable in the long term. He assumed that because neither socialism or communism were viable in the long term, so too liberalism could not be, and he went on to criticize those such as Margaret Thatcher for believing 'that freedom is the natural human condition'. Gray would be more accurate if he had said that for Thatcher, and for George W. Bush, there existed a belief that freedom should be the natural human condition, even if, for millions around the world, it was not currently. In their eagerness to condemn Thatcher, Bush and others, Gray and the Left have condemned themselves to a position which accepts that freedom is to be available only to the lucky few.

In the second half of the twentieth century, liberalism also became a less coherent philosophical direction, just as 'classical liberalism'-centred on the protection of rights-was challenged by 'social liberalism'-founded in the writings of John Stuart Mill, which held that, in some circumstances, government could intrude on the rights of some in order to provide 'positive' rights for others. This was the principle of the 'welfare state' which did much to undermine the faith in liberalism.