Liberty and Order: Civil Government and the Common Good in Eighteenth-Century England

Recent Foucaultian work on ‘governmentality’ posits a distinction between two ‘rationalities’ of government: ‘police’ and ‘liberalism’. The former is closely associated with the idea of order, produced through constant and detailed intervention in public life. The latter is associated with freedom and the insulation of the social and economic spheres from (particularly political) interference. In this working paper I argue that defining the novelty of liberalism in terms of the presence of freedom at the heart of the governmental imagination is misplaced. The differences between English liberalism and continental police represent as much the ethos of the different political systems analysed as a transformation in the basic focus of government. To better understand the distinction between liberalism and its predecessors, I suggest that we need to pay more attention to the history of the idea of freedom itself. Therefore, I analyse the system of government in England before liberalism, demonstrating that although English civil government bears marked similarities to continental systems of ‘police’, it was not understood as a condition of order as opposed to liberty. Rather, freedom and order were understood to be inextricably interlinked. Freedom here did not mean ‘natural’ liberty – freedom from all interference in action or from all constraint – but ‘civil’ liberty – a bounded condition at the mean between anarchy and tyranny, opposed not to interference but to license. This is not so much a change in the meaning of freedom, as argued in the history of political thought, but a change in the kind of freedom at the centre of the governmental imagination.