I use the term 'liberal
humanism' to denote the ruling assumptions, values and meanings of the
modern epoch. Liberal humanism, laying claim to be both natural
and universal, was produced in the interests of the bourgeois class
which came to power in the second half of the seventeenth century. There are, of course, dangers in collapsing the historical specifities
and the ideological differences of three centuries into a single term.
Liberal humanism is not an unchanging, homogeneneous, unified essence,
and the development, often contradictory, of the discourses and
institutions which sustain it, deserves detailed analysis. But there are
alternative dangers in a specificity which never risks generalization. .
. . To find in Locke, for instance . . . a liberalism and a
humanism with still recognizable constitute elements of
twentieth-century common sense is not to deny the importance of the
specific location of Locke's texts in the 1690s on the one hand, or the
subsequent and continuing debates and divisions within liberal humanism
on the other. (7)
The common feature of liberal humanism, justifying the use of
the single phrase, is a commitment to man, whose essence is freedom. Liberal humanism proposes that the subject is the
free, unconstrained author of meaning and action, the origin of history.
Unified, knowing, and autonomous, the human being seeks a political
system which guarantees freedom of choice. Western liberal
democracy, it claims, freely chosen, and thus evidently the
unconstrained expression of human nature, was born in the seventeenth
century with the emergence of the individual and the victory of
constitutionalism in the consecutive English revolutions of the 1640s
and 1688. But in the century since these views were established as
self-evident, doubts have arisen concerning this reading of the past as
the triumphant march of progress towards the moment when history levels
off into the present. And from the new perspectives which have
given rise to these doubts, both liberal humanism and the subject it
produces appear to be an effect of a continuing history, rather than its
culmination. The individual, it now seems, was not released at
last from the heads of the people who had waited only for the peace and
leisure to cultivate what lay ineluctably within them and within all of
us. On the contrary, the liberal-humanism subject, the product of
a specific epoch and a specific class, was constructed in conflict and
contradiction -- with conflicting and contradictory consequences.
One of these contradictions is the inequality of freedom. While in theory all
men are equal, men and women are not symmetrically defined.
Man, the centre and hero of liberal humanism, was produced in
contradistinction to the objects of his knowledge, and in terms of
the relations of power in the economy and the state. Woman was
produced in contradistinction to man, and in terms of the relations
of power in the family. (8-9)
This site will always be a work in progress
as a result of which pages will be found at various stages of
completion.