Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/440

414 philosophers (Hume, Adam Smith, etc.). Liberalism, following Schiller, conceived such men as in Rousseau's view Christ had been, to be the embodiments of the humanitarian ideal. That ideal was conceived, extensively, as an endeavour to secure the ethico-political unification of all mankind.

Thus interpreted, liberalism aimed at freedom in all domains. Hence its various watchwords; freedom of belief, conscience, and thought; free speech; freedom of teaching, science, and education; free schools and a free press; free trade and free industry; free contract between employer and employed; and so on. Freedom was regarded as the greatest possible expansion of individuality in the sense of ethical personality. The philosophic expression of liberal individualism was found in Kant's insistence upon equal respect for one's own individuality and for that of others, and in his maxim that we must never treat another human being as a mere means to our own ends.

Opposing the church and theology, liberalism, as voiced by most of its representatives, tended to be utilitarian and hedonist, adverse to the ascetic ideal.

In the domain of law, liberalism adopted and developed the old doctrine of natural law in the spirit of enlightenment and of humanitarianism.

The political outcome of this liberalism was the recognition of the rights of man and of popular sovereignty as fundamentals of the power of the state; constitutionalism and parliamentarism (majority rule) were the further necessary consequence of the establishment of the power of the people through the system of universal suffrage. The power of the aristocracy and of the clergy was restricted simultaneously with that of absolutism. Characteristic is the fact that the modern written democratic constitution originated in imitation of the agreement concerning religious liberty (in the American colonies).

Absolutism was further weakened by the doctrine of the partition of forces. Some even of the monarchs cherished liberal ideas (the so-called enlightened despotism of Joseph II, Frederick the Great, and Catherine II). In France, above all, the monarchy had to recognise constitutionalism; and after the revolution, in absolutist Prussia, too, Stein and Hardenberg instituted liberal reforms.

Liberalism logically presses on towards democracy. Abbé Sieyès assigned a great future to the third estate, to the bour-