Ok, so enough about me lets talk about me. Just kidding. I started out wanting to talk about the romantic idea of liberty, or about romantic liberalism, which is different from classical liberalism in that it takes more of an expansive view of the social sphere than does classical liberalism. Classical liberalism has the tendency to reduce society purely to individual little atoms interacting, guided by rational thought, without really realizing that there's more to life than that and that applying strict reason to everything can in fact limit a person's possibilities in that certain things aren't easily explained in this way--not anything beyond the norm, but even normal things. Looking at life as consisting of people who are constantly making rational calculations about everything sort of misses the times when we act from habit or we act from emotion or we take a view on life or on a part of life which isn't easily reduceable to rational explanation if we view rational explanation as being something which is totally self contained and doesn't make much reference to things outside of itself.
The dilemma of the romantic liberals in the 19th century was how to situate humanity within the greater universe of social relationships and the full experience of the individual without falling back on conservatism. If this sounds contrary to common sense it shouldn't be. Conservatives have in the modern world defined conservatism as the doctrine that certain social relationships, namely the family and the greater social structure, were necessary for society to keep on going and that if you disrupted these relationships then you'd end up getting something worse than what you started out with. The same went for values. Conservatives emphasized Christian values , and religion, but they did so not because the religious way of looking at things could be considered to be fuller as much as that the religious way of looking at things guaranteed the stability of society. It might be fuller, and some conservatives argued that this was the case, or it might not, in which case it was thought that although the religious way of looking at things was limited that what the doctrines of the Enlightenment were offering was a type of fools gold, something which looked like it offered wealth and happiness but in reality turned out to be worthless.
If people are autonomous beings situated in a social context, and if this social context, as much as the individual, accounts for happiness and fulfillment, how then can you describe the virtues of the social context without thereby reinforcing the stereotypical social relationships which form that social context?
Say, for example, that having family makes life better, and that people who have a rich and good family life have a richer experience than those that don't. First of all, do you know this to be the case? Or is it just in some respects that this is true? Ok, take it as a given for a moment. The question then becomes, if family, in the general, is a good thing, how do you express that without saying that the typical, stereotyped, family arrangement of your country or your region, is necesarily the right arrangement? Limiting the definition of what constitutes a family and saying that the traditional notion of family necessarily leads to happiness is extremely conservative. What if someone wants to experiment with a different notion of family because they think that it might be better, that it may make them more happy than the traditional family, should a person who talks about family making things better then try to interfere with that? What about people who don't want family at all, are they left out of our happy state?
This is how the Romantics fell down the often noted road from being people who opposed how society was and who wanted to make life better for people to people who endorsed ideas, like linguistic and ethnic nationalism, which were reactionary in practice. They wanted to recognize something beyond individual social atoms bumping around in a void but they had a hard time doing this without falling back on the thought of their enemies. After all, what can you say is the typical social experience? Can you really say what, specifically, beyond generalities, would make a person fulfilled? You could say, friends, family, having a religion which provides a viewpoint into the world, which makes life understandable in a way which enlightened philosophy doesn't make it, you could say that community makes life good, that keeping old traditions alive makes life good, that being able to speak your own language without feeling excluded makes life good, but taken as a whole, transformed into a program where it's no longer "This MAY make life better" and is instead "This WILL make life better" oppression can very easily follow. And has.
The Romantic dilemma was partially solved through using the last bit of Enlightenment philosophy out there, the thought which, while paving the way for Idealism, was still connected enough to the thought of the Enlightenment to be somewhat useful in a non-conservative light. Immanuel Kant's theories of equity and of social justice were adapted to the liberal tradition by British thinkers, particularly a man by the name of L.T. Hobhouse, who established the idea of welfare-state liberalism, meaning that to be free was now thought to not just refer to personal liberty in the abstract but instead to also refer to effective liberty in a social sense, in that man was thought to need more than just non-interference from a co-ercive, conservative, state, and his own mind to be able to really exist freely in society. He(she) needed economic and other resources in order to live in the society in an efficacious way, or, in other words, to be a full citizen of whatever society he lived in. Since this had to do with people's welfare and the means by which people were to acocmplish the redistributions and social programs necesssary to make the increased welfare of the people a reality was the state, it became known as welfare-state liberalism.
There was however another tradition that flowed from the thought of the Romantics that also bore fruit in the 20th century, namely socialism. Here the transfer from an expansive, over-arching, conception of social life to one limited by some force which would make it in some way democratic and non-oppressive was accomplished by way of Hegel and Hegelian idealism rather than Kantian philosophy. The Hegelian ideal was brought down to reality by Ludwig Feuerbach, who was the source of much of Marx's approach, although there are really significant differences, but I won't go into those right now, just to say that I think Feuerbach was less historically minded than Marx was.
If Marx was dependent on Hegel, it came through Feuerbach. What Feuerbach did was to look at all of the Hegelian writings on religion, in which Hegel labelled the religious sensability as the primary way in which people expressed knowledge of and thought about the world, as well as, I'm sure, other current philosophers who had something to say about it, and took from the wide range of experience that they talked about, the idea that whatever was established in relation to heaven or the religious world was actually, in practice referring to relationships between people on earth.
So Christianity was important, but it was important because of how belief in a spiritual world effected relations between people here on earth. Christianity helped the community and it helped people effect self realization.
It helped the community realize collective welfare and it helped individuals become more human and become more human in relation to each other, but the relationships themselves were just means to an end--they weren't god given and were therefore changeable. The focus was no longer on religion in and of itself as something which was a positive good but on something derivative, which might not even have to be expressed in religious terms, but which could adapt to different formulations in order to realize the same concept, human realization and a generally well community.
No longer, "family is good because it makes life better" but, instead, the self realization of people is manifested through many different ways, in some cases this has been through the family but it does not necessarily have to go that route; theoretically self realization could come through other means, and if people themselves decide that the traditional family is the best way to accomplish that, that's fine, if they decide that a non-traditional family is a good way to accomplish that, then that's fine too, the goal is more important than the means, and the means are changeable.
What Marx did was to take this sensibility and link it to the economic structure. This had its bad parts as well as its good parts. According to Marx, the fundamental way that the means to social well being are organized is through the economic structure of society, and, moreover, the people themselves aren't in control of this structure, the capitalists are, and, therefore, you can't really talk about people freely defining their destinies, freely defining what works best for them, until the issue of people exercising unjust power of each other through the means of economics is taken care of.
This, in it's pure form, is hostile to liberalism. Marx in his early writings, which weren't published until the 20th century, namely the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and his "Critique of the German Ideology" (Which was Left-Hegelian absolute idealism), show him to be more concerned with the types of freedom implied with self realization and being able to be more human than do his later works, although here still, the main determinant, despite the wiggle room, is the broad economic structure. I think that the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes of a) things being totally amenable to change and b) things being totally constrained (i.e. you can't have real freedom or progress towards freedom, or a better quality of life until the whole system is changed. The question which the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts raise is if there are extra economic determinants to freedom, whether these can be dealt with independently of economics, maybe taking economics as one prong and these extra-economic influences as another one, in order to advance the cause of liberty in a tangible way right now, something at least which would give people hope that liberty itself is possible in a non-socialist state.
The superstructure of society might embody the economic interests of the infrastructure, but does it have to? Can it be reformed to work for the people? While social equality is pursued as well? And what about democracy? Can't the causes which have traditionally been associated with the advancement of a decent society be pursued along with economic reform? What about further experiments with liberty?