In the press and in the electronic media, we find the expression ‘liberalism’ bandied about. Rudrangshu Mukherjee does us a favour. He explains what exactly this liberalism is all about. He does it with a rare panache and aplomb in a series of short and lucid chapters in his book ‘Twilight Falls On Liberalism’. He imitates Madhava, the author of the famous Sarva-Darsana-Sangraha, as he summarises the arguments of liberalism, but also those who have opposed liberalism.
Liberalism is grounded in what we loosely refer to as western enlightenment traditions. While the foundations of liberalism go back to Immanuel Kant’s rational discourse, in the realm of political philosophy its flavour is predominantly Anglo-American. The founder is John Locke, with a little bit of help from his intellectual forebear, Thomas Hobbes. Scottish Enlightenment figures David Hume and Adam Smith are prominent in the evolution of liberalism; it reaches a culmination of sorts with Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill. Mukherjee walks us through the developments and the contributions of different individuals with a deft touch. His chaste prose is easy to understand. Only a consummate scholar can make it sound so lucid and comprehensible. The individual is the focus of this school of political philosophy. The individual is assumed to be rational and capable of knowing and articulating her interests. Freedom of the individual is assumed as an a priori good. Property and the right to property play an important role not only in ensuring the individual’s liberty, but also in allowing her to pursue happiness. The pursuit of individual happiness acquires a sacred aura in and of itself. An encroaching state, tyrant monarchs and suffocating religious institutions are seen as enemies of liberalism.
Mukherjee makes the point that, from its earliest days, liberalism suffered from a tragic flaw. The subjects of empire and slave races were excluded from the liberal dream. Smith might be the one exception among the early proponents of liberalism who did not suffer from this taint. The rest internalised it almost completely. Some of the worst examples of liberal double standards were the practices of the British in India. Intellectual legitimacy was conferred on racism. Recounting the Calcutta Derozio incident, Mukherjee makes the poignant case that mixed race persons were treated not as individuals, but as objects. Even if the patronising racist cancer existed from birth, even if it was reserved only for elite races, liberalism did develop a robust foundation in the West.
And now for the opponents. Romantics like William Wordsworth were concerned with a soulless atomisation that is caused by the excessive emphasis on the individual. German romantics took this argument to its logical extreme. Friedrich Schiller despised individualism; Johann Gottlieb Fichte wanted to exterminate it. Karl Marx came like a thunderclap. An insight that I picked up from Mukherjee’s analysis is that despite all of Marx’s tiresome meanderings about economic determinism and materialism, the man was at his core a German romantic and, therefore, anti-liberal and, therefore, anti-enlightenment (?). Mukherjee ends his piece on Marx in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Marx apparently preferred “the complete man contra the atomised man posited by liberal thought.” That is certainly beyond my feeble mind! The pompous Rawls and the feeble Walzer don’t like liberalism because it just doesn’t taste good to them. Then there is the extreme romantic mysticism of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche who know everything there is to know about Man with a capital M and Superman with a capital S. Mukherjee introduces us to two non-western critics of liberalism. MK Gandhi, the author of the majestic and puzzling Hind Swaraj, and Rabindranath Tagore, the creative mind behind Galpaguchchha and the magisterial voice in the Hibbert Lectures. One wishes that Mukherjee had spent more time on Gandhi and Tagore. It presents an opportunity for another book.
The summary of the utterly amoral doings of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin is one of the best I have come across. College students infected with residual Marxism can find no better antidote. Then came Hitler. Early liberal thinkers were suspicious of tyrant monarchs. They just could not and did not anticipate the evil possibilities of tyrant dictators. Luckily for humankind, Hitler and his regime collapsed. Mukherjee seems to hint at the entirely contingent nature of our good fortune.
We now approach the lifetimes of his readers. It is clear that Mukherjee would call himself a social democrat. Perhaps this is why he sees only the instrumental nature of the failures of western welfare states in the 1970s and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He does not dwell on the moral catastrophes launched by dependency syndromes, rapacious taxation and encouragement of victimhood that are central to the practices of social democrats. The collapse of the Soviet Union is presented as a tactical happening, not as a spiritual liberation similar to the world’s escape from the Nazis. Narasimha Rao’s actions in India are viewed through the instrumental lens of improving economic prospects, not as an attack on the soul-destroying, corrosive fabric of the permit-licence Raj. Mukherjee does not see that ‘left’ liberalism is an oxymoronic term. Leftists are believers in excess state power, persuading themselves that the power is used for good. Smith and Mill knew that this was a fable.
Now to contemporary times. He identifies Islamic Fundamentalism and its product, terrorism, as representing “the single biggest threat to liberalism, its values, its culture and its politics.” But he is reluctant to support a justified response to an existential threat. He does not see that excessive tolerance on the part of Hindu, Jewish or Western societies could lead to their extinction. His take on Hindutva nationalism meanders and he posits a far-fetched, convoluted comparison to European fascism of the 1930s. His criticism of Brexit sounds more misplaced. He never mentions the superstate in Brussels that sought to undermine Magna Carta traditions peculiar to Britain. The same goes for his views on Donald Trump and the Republican ascendancy in the US. He writes as though gerrymandering is a new phenomenon in democracies. This does not mean that we can stop being vigilant. We need to be vigilant now in the same manner in which we should have been vigilant when FDR attacked steel companies, when Jawaharlal Nehru kept amending the Constitution every time the judiciary defended property rights, when Indira Gandhi nationalised sector after sector of free enterprise, and when Labour shut down grammar schools despite the protests of parents. In fairness, Mukherjee does point out that ‘liberal’ social democrats never lived up to their own protestations. They frequently banned books and undermined free institutions. Mukherjee identifies anti-Semitism of the Islamic variety as a danger. Unfortunately, he falls into the trap of relating it to the crisis in the Middle East. Anti-Semitism, whether it is taken up by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Oswald Mosley or Joseph Goebbels, has invariably been anti-liberal as it will doubtless be with Jeremy Corbyn. Anti-Semitism reflects a belief in financial and media conspiracies and a dislike for negotiation and commerce—attacks on liberalism.
Mukherjee does not deal with all alternatives to liberalism. The conservative position cannot be dismissed as a subset of the liberal vision. From Edmund Burke through Benjamin Disraeli to Roger Scruton in Britain, from Hamilton to Friedman, Sowell and Buckley in the US, from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Mirza Ismail to C Rajagopalachari, Masani and Shenoy in India, there has been a conservative intellectual tradition, which, while not inimical to many traits of liberalism, has also argued in the words of Disraeli’s Coningsby that societies and countries need to preserve the “best in their traditions”. Perhaps Brexit, Hindu nationalism or belief in American exceptionalism are conservative responses, not illiberal ones.
The book is worth reading and rereading. It clarifies our vocabulary. It presents liberalism with its glories and its warts. It graphically describes the Bolshevik and Nazi attacks on liberalism. It urges vigilance as a required response from all of us. Mill would have been happy to read this book.
-The writer is a Mumbai-based entrepreneur; founder and former CEO of MphasiS; and executive chairman of Value and Budget Housing Corporation