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PARTISAN REVIEW
Tibor Machan:
I just want to add one thing about this term "liberal,"
like the term "liberty" it has some genuinely different uses. If I am free of
a headache I am free in a certain sense. If I am free of poverty or illness,
or free of worries, I am free in a certain sense. That is not the sense of
"freedom" that is usually associated with politics in the classical liberal tra–
dition, where "free" means that no one is intruding upon me by thwarting
my behavior or my conduct. Classical liberals emphasize this latter sense of
the term "free." Modern liberals, on the other hand, use the term liberal in
the sense of being free of poverty, free of worry, free of hindrances. That's
why they can honestly claim also to be in the liberal tradition.
Marx also argued that
bourgeois
freedom is not enough, that we need
human
freedom. This human freedom is supposed to be the enablement we
often talk about: empowerment, not just freedom from other people's intru–
siveness. Once intrusiveness has gone away, we also need the liberating action
of the state or the community to steer us in the right direction and enable
us to grow and develop. That's why it's not entirely accurate to say that the
modern liberals kidnapped the term "liberal" from the classical liberals.
Indeed there is a sense in which classical liberals gave the initial impetus for
this conceptual alteration by treating human beings as moved by forces out–
side them, rather than being capable of initiating any action on their own. If
you think of human beings as essentially physical parts of nature, then you
need to give them a push when they aren't moving. Whereas
if
you think of
human beings as having something like free will, each of them can take the
initiative and move forward on his or her own. In that case modern liberal–
ism is a misconceived "corrective" to classical liberalism.
Gunther Stent:
I would like to respond to the claim that Machiavelli was
scientistic. On the contrary. He is a hero of mine exactly because I con–
sider him an anti-scientistic political philosopher. That is why, as pointed
out by Isaiah Berlin, Machiavelli has been hated across the whole spectrum
of religious, philosophical, and political thought. Machiavelli showed that
the ensemble of our aims is rationally inconsistent. He was pragmatic, but
not scientistic.
Tibor Machan:
Well, I think that calling him scientistic would be wrong
because he did not have a robust enough world view to address the issues
that make one scientistic. Someone like Hobbes, for example, is more sci–
entistic than Machiavelli. At the same time there are certain
methodological procedures that Machiavelli employs which intinute that
we
cannot
argue about ends or goals of political action. The only thing that
we can really talk about rationally is means to given ends, ends that are set,
ends that history reveals all political institutions to aim for. Machiavelli
studies history in order to find out what the Spanish did, what the Italians
