ABSTRACT
The previous part of the book examined the current ‘state of play’ in national and international environmental policy and governance. The ‘liberal environmentalism’ presently informing ‘sustainable development’ emerged out of the perceived need for ‘sovereign’ states to address sustainability concerns while prioritising renewed economic growth. Its basis in market norms stems from the resurgent economic liberalism associated with the neo-liberal milieu. As suggested in earlier chapters, though, conflating liberalism and neo-liberalism has an obfuscatory effect to the detriment of progressive environmental forces. In seeking a reformist alternative to the neo-liberal conception of sustainability, this part of the book examines the efforts to integrate ecological imperatives into different versions of liberalist doctrine spanning the economic, political and social. Despite its compartmentalism and evident complexity, Eccleshall (2003: 55) has argued that there is an underlying coherence to liberalism that is detectable in the ‘way in which a persistent commitment to an equal right to liberty has been given substance in different historical contexts’. However, the meaning attributed to liberty and the definition of those that may enjoy ‘equal’ treatment in that liberty, have been diverse phenomena (Gaus 1983: 7; Freeden 1996: 139; Eccleshall 2003: 25). For the classical liberals, an equal right to economic liberty was accompanied by a limited franchise and therefore an unequal right to political liberty. They believed in ‘universal economic freedom but not in universal political freedom’ and were advocates of ‘free trade’, yet also ‘political nationalism’ (Grampp 1965b: xiii; Appleby 1976). That the meaning of ‘liberty’ can embody diverse meaning in this way is not a case of ‘inconsistency’ between (purist) principles and (distorted) political practice, as Manning (1976: 17) suggests. Rather, it points to the fact that the liberal commitment to freedom lies in substantive as much as moral or idealist
imperatives. The differences are due to the complexity of material conditions at that historical juncture – in particular, the significant structural transformations associated with ‘the transition’ from feudalism to capitalism discussed in Chapter 3. The changes to fundamental socio-economic structures set in place a ‘privileged’ position for economic liberty because of the imperatives associated with ‘autonomous dependence’. The universal ‘right’ to self-preservation, and the accompanying ‘ideology’ of self-reliance, was a structural necessity in the absence of traditional feudal relations. However, the idea that the masses should also enjoy universal political rights was quite another matter. Far from such rights being a fundamental attribute of liberalism, there has been a ‘historical tension between commercial liberty and justice’, with the result that democratic freedoms have been a gradual and hard-won development (Jones 1994a: 4). The threat to those gains evident in the current neo-liberal milieu attests to the persistence of this historical tension and to the need to better understand and manage it if ‘commercial liberty’ is not to impede the goal of ecological sustainability. The present chapter lays the basis for the subsequent chapters, which examine efforts to integrate liberalism and environmental thinking. It does so by teasing out some of the material and ideational forces underpinning liberalism’s complex and ‘chameleonic’ character. Although it may be commonly portrayed as a set of idealist principles associated with the autonomous individual, liberalism is also a ‘living’ ideology and governmentality – a substantive and historical phenomenon that is the product of active processes. To echo E. P. Thompson (1980: 8), liberals have always been present at its making. The first section of the chapter charts a historically contextualised ‘story’ of classical liberalism as it emerges and evolves in tandem with the interplay of material conditions and prevailing ideas. The second section teases out the origin of liberalism’s economic, political and social strands in the nineteenth century, when the forces of economic liberty and those of political justice (democracy) compelled a social compromise in the theory and practice of liberalism.
