A Most Peculiar Kind of Liberal

Ian Crowther

IAN CROWTHER is Literary Editor of the Salisbury Review and the author
of a recent hook, G.K. Chesterton published by the Claridge Press in
1991 for their series Thinkers of Our Time.

From his first forays into journalism for The Speaker and the Daily
News to the books and essays he wrote in his maturity, G.K. Chesterton
never ceased to insist that he was a liberal, though not always of the Lib-
eral Party. But the sense in which he did so, and the remarks with which
he invariably accompanied his professions of liberal faith, give rise to the
question of how far Chesterton's liberalism was sui generis: a thing un-
recognizable as liberalism except by himself For example, in his book.
The Resurrection of Rome, published in 1930, Chesterton declared that
when he called himself a Liberal, he meant that he was opposed to "the
spirit of oligarchy."^ So far, so good, except that to the dismay then and
since of his more liberally-minded readers, Chesterton saw Mussolini, for
all his fauhs, as also a spirited opponent of oligarchy: to the extent that the
Italian Fascist State had demonstrated its "despotic independence of the
ordinary capitahst regime . . . it is, for good or evil, the return and re-es-
tablishment of government; of government as a separate thing distinct
from the differences and interests of the governed."^ The Republic had
once meant the Public Thing, and it was this Public Thing which Chester-
ton credited Fascist Italy with attempting, however vainly and violently,
to revive. In 1930, there could have been few, i f any, other self-styled lib-
erals similarly disposed to suggest even the slightest parallel between
their own civic ideal and that of Signor Mussolini.
Chesterton was far from saying that Mussolini was an ideal Republi-
can, and far from denying that the Fascist regime, though an understand-

Risnjak National Park

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 The Chesterton Review

able reaction to the bribery and corruption of liberal democracy, rested

finally on nothing but force: it was not that the Fascists exercised too
much authority; but rather that they had too little. " A minority," Chester-
ton wrote with characteristic directness, "should be tested by a morality."^
Although Chesterton thought that a minority should also be tested by a
majority, his anti-Fascism was grounded less in liberal than in permanent
values. Liberals could hardly criticise Mussolini for lacking what they
openly lacked themselves, namely, a fixed moral philosophy. Hence
Chesterton pleased liberals no more by the way in which he condemned
Fascism than by the way, the very limited way, in which he condoned it.
It has been said that by the time he came to write The Resurrection of
Rome, his powers were failing, and that one must, therefore, make al-
lowances for his lapses of judgment in that book. But in fact there is noth-
ing in this book which is at all inconsistent with positions taken up and
defended by Chesterton in his earlier years. On the contrary: the ancient
Republican aims that Chesterton imputed to Mussolini he had earlier im-
puted to the high-minded French Revolutionaries. As for his chief objec-
tion to Fascism, that it was morally vacuous, this is reminiscent of his
chief objection to the loosely defined liberalism of his youth. A n elected
majority, Chesterton thought, can be as headstrong as an unelected minor-
ity in the uses it makes of its liberty. A majority should also be tested by a
morality. "How a free man is to find that staff and standard of justice that
will support him against the spiritual pride of minorities as well as the au-
tomatic tyranny of majorities,""^ that, for Chesterton, was the great ques-
tion when he first took up his pen, as much when he last laid it down.
Moreover, the answer which he gave to it remained essentially the same
throughout his life. Whether this answer can in any sense be called liberal,
not whether his thought took an illiberal turn in later years, is what con-
cerns us here.
Chesterton began as a supporter of the Liberal Party, and campaigned
for it in the election of 1905. Yet in that same year he pubhshed his book.
Heretics, in which there occurs this passage:
We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a
dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking
about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is
good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge
to avoid discussing what is good. The modem man says, "Let us
leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is,
logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be
considered good not to decide it."^

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A Most Peculiar Kind of Liberal

Now there could have been few, i f any, other liberals in 1905 similarly
disposed to cast doubt on the most sacred article of their creed. Even the
so-called New Liberals of the Edwardian era, whose positive view of the
State was to make the Liberal Party indistinguishable from, and ultimately
replaceable by, the Labour Party, did not admit to any lessening in their
attachment to liberty; they simply argued that liberty was better secured
by some form of collectivism; the process of overcoming what John Stu-
art M i l l had called "the despotism of custom" could no longer be left en-
tirely to private initiative. Old-fashioned and New Liberals, though at
odds in the respective roles which they allotted to the State, were alike in
opposing liberty to custom, unlike Chesterton, who was arguing for the
indissolubility of liberty and custom. We might even go so far as to say
that he was arguing for the identity of liberty and custom, or at any rate
for the identity of popular liberties and popular customs.
Liberalism has normally meant much more than the simple assertion,
with which Chesterton had no reason to disagree, that freedom is a good
thing among other good things. For the liberal, freedom is itself an abso-
lute good before which customs, constraints, institutions and traditions
must all yield precedence. Freedom, indeed, entails the absence of all
these things, except in so far as they may be shown to be freely chosen or
entered into by consent or contract. Anything, in short, that impedes us in
the free exercise of our wills or the pursuit of our desires, unless it be to
prevent our harming others, is viewed by the liberal as intolerable, not to
say inhuman. Such, for example is any notion of objective truth or what
the sceptical liberal damns as dogma. Chesterton's liberahsm, by contrast,
was founded on the belief that the free mind has a purpose, and that being
free includes being free to bind oneself to something greater than oneself.
"The human brain," Chesterton declared, "is a machine for coming to
conclusions." 6 The permanently open (or vacant) mind, upon which so
many modems plume themselves, is a device for shirking conclusions,
particularly moral conclusions. We are bidden "to keep an open mind"
lest, heaven forbid, tmth should enter in and drive out error, thereby com-
pelling us to admit that not everything is relative or contingent upon per-
sonal circumstances of one kind or another.
Just as open-minded modems are perpetually putting off questions of
ultimate value, so they are perpetually putting o f f such commitments as
would tie them down. Hence their advocacy of free love and easy divorce.
Even now, when the full destmctive effects of this attitude have become
all too apparent in broken homes, abandoned wives, and disturbed chil-

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dren, few can be found to stand up for the institution of marriage, so in-
grained in our minds is the Uberal ideology of freedom. Chesterton's mind
ranged wider than the tyranny of free thought normally permits. He saw
that "the overwhelming mass of mankind has not believed in freedom in
this matter, but rather in a more or less lasting tie;"^ and he saw why:
this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a principle of which
the modem mind has made a very inadequate study. It is, per-
haps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind
in walking. The principle is this: that in everything worth having,
even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that
must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. . . .
All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviv-
ing with success this breaking point, this instant of potential sur-
render.

In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage

when no one would do it, except for necessity or honour. It is
then that the Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the
firmer ground ahead. . . . The whole aim of marriage is to fight
through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes
unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompati-
ble.8

Even for children fortunate enough to be raised in stable, two-parent fami-

lies, their proper development may still be hobbled by a misplaced liber-
tarianism. For even where this anarchic ideology has not touched and m¬
ined the home, it w i l l likely have touched and mined the school. The
classroom has been tumed into a laboratory where licensed cranks may
try out the latest theories of education on their helpless charges. But the
one thing not taught anywhere in our State schools is that great body of
tmths which makes up our civilisation, and which makes us civilised.
Chesterton described the schools of his day, in terms alas, which we can
still all too easily recognise in ours, as having the last ideas in education,
without having the first, the first being that innocence must leam from ex-
perience:
Once flinch from this creative authority of man, and the whole
courageous raid which we call civilisation wavers and falls to
pieces. Now most modem freedom is at root fear. It is not so
much that we are too bold to endure mles; it is rather that we are
too timid to endure responsibilities . . . and such people are espe-
cially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to
which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of

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A Most Peculiar Kind of Liberal

becoming men. I mean the responsibihty of affirming the tmth of

our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority,
an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education: to be sure
enough that something is tme that you dare to tell it to a child.
From this high audacious duty the modems are fleeing on every
side.9

Chesterton's understanding of education as properly providing authorita-

tive guidance was at one with his understanding of tradition as providing
the same. But it was clearly not at one with the view that modem man has
"come of age," and no longer needs to be guided by the dead hand of tra-
dition. How, it is asked, can we modems enjoy that unfettered self-mle
which is our democratic right if, at the same time, we are obliged to con-
sult the ghosts of our ancestors, as though they were still walking about
among us and entitled to be heard with as much respect as the living?
Chesterton's was a lone voice among liberals in challenging the idea that
democracy and tradition are in some way incompatible:
It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through
time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices
rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. . . . Tradition
may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means
giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is
the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the
small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be
walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by
the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified
by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a
good man's opinion, even i f he is our groom; tradition asks us
not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father. I , at
any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradi-
tion; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea.
In his defence of tradition, here as elsewhere, Chesterton again parts com-
pany with liberal notions of society. For i f there are obligations which we
do not choose, but which instead are chosen for us, then the liberal's fond
idea of the autonomous self, unencumbered by customary usages and re-
straints, is fatally undermined.
In all the matters on which we have so far touched, Chesterton spoke
up for etemal or permanent things. There are certain great moral tmths, he
believed, which apply to man as man, not to man as modem man or as
medieval man or as primitive man. Human nature, since it is essentially
unchanging, yields insights about how we should conduct our lives which.

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A Most Peculiar Kind of Liberal

our commonsense tells us, are true at all times and in all circumstances.
Thus Chesterton was able to say of the family that it "is the social struc-
ture of mankind, far older than all its records and more universal than any
of its religions." But those who believe that Being is only Becoming,
and that the human reason is only relative and unreliable, are cut off from
access to all such universal truths. Where Chesterton saw man against the
background of eternity, most modems have seen man against the back-
ground of history. It is from the liberal view that man must be absolutely
at liberty to shape his destiny as he thinks fit, without the obstacles which
have been placed in his path by tradition and dogma, that there naturally
arises the modem attachment to history rather than to etemity as the ele-
ment in which man can best find perfect freedom and fulfilment. Man
makes himself as he goes along; there are no etemal definitions of his na-
ture to which he is bound: our values, far from being etemal, are relative
to the changing times in which we live. Hence the old moral categories of
tmth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and bad lose their relevance
for us. In their place, masquerading as moral judgments, are the new cate-
gories of modem and old-fashioned, progressive and reactionary, well-ad-
justed and maladjusted. We must all now obey the imperative "to move
with the times." But i f history is impelling us in a certain direction, are we
really as free in its service as we were when eternity or God was our
guide?
We can see why it is on the stage of history that the liberal chooses to
act out his dreams of freedom. For in his eyes, history is a story that will
end well: it records the evolution of humanity towards a future uncontam-
inated by the prejudices and superstitions of the past. The future is bliss-
fully open: a blank slate on which we modems can write whatever we
want. But precisely for this reason, it is also an invitation and an incite-
ment to the narrow mind. A l l the richness and complexity of reality fall
away in this fantasy of a future made safe for a few simple dominating
ideas. As Chesterton said, " I can make the future as narrow as myself; the
past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity." We are thus
tempted to bring the future nearer by moulding the present—and people in
the present—in its supposed likeness. It is a temptation made all the more
irresistible by our belief that human nature has a history, but no nature, its
plasticity being such that we can easily alter it for the better. A l l it takes is
an environment rationally managed by enlightened experts. And so, by
what Chesterton would have called a "queer paradox", the partisans of an
absolute or unlimited liberty are led by their own logic to tear up and up-

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root traditions of popular freedom that can have no place in the future
which they envisage. In order to be free, people must be liberated from all
those attachments—^to family, kinsfolk and country, to religion or ritual,
or even to liquor or tobacco or fox-hunting—attachments which they had
mistakenly imagined to constitute their freedom. Having no patience with
Chesterton's "old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual,
respectable man,"i^ progressives become prohibionists. It was, of course,
ever so, as Chesterton well knew:
A person with a taste for paradox (if any such shameless creature
could exist) might with some plausibility maintain conceming all
our expansion since the failure of Luther's frank paganism and
its replacement by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion
has not been an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that
less and less beautiful and humane things have been permitted.
The Puritans destroyed images; the Rationalists forbade fairy
tales; Count Tolstoy practically issued one of his papal encycli-
cals against music; and I have heard of modem educationalists
who forbid children to play with tin soldiers. I remember a meek
little madman who . . . asked me to use my influence (have I any
influence?) against adventure stories for boys.^"^
Chesterton's own vigorous championship of liberty, as well as of tmths
and traditions as old as humanity itself, tums out not to be incoherent at
all; rather the incoherence is all on the other side: on the side of those for
whom liberty is not liberty as long as there are dogmas or limits. Chester-
ton, by contrast, saw liberty as by definition dogmatical: as having its ba-
sis in a mystical dogma about man's dignity. The only solid ground for
liberty—the only ground in which it can take root and flourish—is conse-
crated ground. The concrete liberties of Western man grew out of the
Christian dogma that every man's soul is his own, and that consequently
the individual personality has a sanctity, dignity and responsibility beyond
anything the economic or political order can assign it. "There is no basis
for democracy," declared Chesterton, "except in a dogma about the divine
origin of Man." Kings and emperors and aristocrats had always been
considered worthy of the freedom they enjoyed, by virtue of their exalted
stations in life. But that all men are worthy of freedom, the least and low-
est o f them, by virtue o f their being "specially made . . . shaped and
pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatitude"
is a dogma held only by the Christian faith. Once man comes to be re-
garded, not from the standpoint of etemity as Chesterton's "Everlasting
Man", but from the standpoint of evolution as the ever-changing man, or

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A Most Peculiar Kind of Liberal

as the unfinished being, there is then nothing in principle to stop the

strong oppressing the weak in the name of progress.
An idea of liberty which is inseparable from the spiritual idea of
dogma is likewise inseparable from the social idea of limitation. When
every man has round him "a transcendental circle of omnipotence," ^'^ he
is also more likely to have round him an earthly circle of omnipotence:
Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or
rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen
a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a
king.i^

But this civic idea of liberty as entailing the exercise of real powers and
responsibilities, and a space or place in which to exercise them, has been
comprehensively undermined by the modem idea of an unlimited or un-
principled liberty which is all for loosening, in the most liberal fashion,
social bonds and brotherhoods. The resuh has been to smash society into
atoms, leaving a mass of detached, deracinated individuals who are the
more easily mied or regimented to the extent that they lack concrete pow-
ers and liberties that they can call their own.
There is a final and fundamental sense in which freedom cannot ade-
quately be defined as the formless, aimless thing it has become for mod-
ems. Freedom is, in practice, meaningless to a person who is neither able
nor willing to exercise it. But it is just this sort of person whom the mod-
em liberal most admires—the person with no settled ends, whose mind is
forever unmade up—who is least able to act as a free being. Tme, he may
be "free" to satisfy each desire as it arises; but he will have no conception
of the value of these desires, or of which of them will bring personal ful-
fillment and which will not. In his "freedom" from all dogmas and defini-
tions, he is actually becoming less and not more free, less not more hu-
man:
Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles
doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the forma-
tion of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he
is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capa-
ble, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doc-
trine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie
himself to a system, when he says he has outgrown definitions,
when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own
imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but con-
templating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly

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backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the un-
consciousness of the grass. 1^
There was no inconsistency in Chesterton's believing in "the elementary
liberal doctrine of self-governing humanity" and of his believing equally
in customs, traditions and dogmas usually thought hostile to this doctrine.
Self-governing humanity, Chesterton understood, does not spring into ex-
istence ready-made like Athena from the head of Zeus; rather what is re-
quired for its creation is a whole set of customs and constraints through
which each of us is endowed with moral purpose and intention. By mak-
ing bare unfettered choice or mere willing all that is necessary in order to
secure freedom, the liberal destroys the pre-conditions of freedom. Far
from our being made free in this way, we are instead thrown into a state
of suspended animation:
the acceptation of mere "willing" really paralyzes the will. . . .
You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring
pleasure or pain, to discover truth or to save the soul. But you
cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is
merely to say that it is an action. By this praise of will you cannot
really choose one course as better than another. And yet choosing
one course as better than another is the very definition of the will
you are praising. . . . The worship of will is the negation of will.
To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.^^

Every act of choosing is unavoidably an act of self-limitation. We choose

something rather than nothing, or else we do not choose at all. The value
that we attach to our freedom to choose, as well as the use that we make
of it, are alike dependent on our having a strong sense of what is valuable;
and this sense can only be imparted to us by the very traditions and cus-
toms which the average liberal, in his pursuit o f an illusory freedom,
would remove from our lives.
Chesterton was not an average liberal in advocating a liberalism
which "had for its duty that of creating sanctities and preserving sancti-
ties." 22 But we should not, therefore, deny to Chesterton a political title
which, as we have tried to show, it was not merely quixotic of him to
claim as his own. I f liberalism means above all a belief in liberty, then it
had better be wedded to unalterable truths and traditions rather than being
divorced from them:
I f this Liberalism, in which I believe, succeeds in surviving, it
will go onward along a very different course from that marked
out for it by sceptics and iconoclasts. It will go on making more

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A Most Peculiar Kind of Liberal

and more things sacred, not more and more things desecrate; it
will increase in its power of belief, not in its power of query. I f it
lives, it will increase the religious life of mankind. I f it dies, it
will be the last of the religions.^^

^ G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (London, 1930), p. 258.

^ G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome, p. 256.
^ G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome, p. 290.
G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome, pp. 290-291.
^ G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (London, 1928), p. 25.
^ G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, pp. 287-288.
G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World (London, 1910), p. 52.
^ G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, pp. 52-54.
^ G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, pp. 203-204.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London, 1957), pp. 69-70.
" G.K. Chesterton, The Thing (London, 1939), p. 34.
12 G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, p. 27.
1^ G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, p. 60.
1^ G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, p. 206.
1^ G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (London, 1922), p. 305.
1^ G.K. Chesterton, The Thing, p. 20.
1^ G.K. Chesterton, "The Poetic Quality in Liberalism," The Chesterton Review
(May, 1982), p. 125.
1^ G.K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce (London, 1920), pp. 67-68.
1^ G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, p. 288.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 67.
21 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 54-55.
G.K. Chesterton, "The Poetic QuaUty in Liberalism," The Chesterton Review
(May, 1982), p. 124.
2^ G.K. Chesterton, "The Poetic Quality in Liberalism," The Chesterton Review
(May, 1982), p. 125.

Lividraga

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