Liberalism and ethnicity in South African politics, 1921-1948
Date
1976-03
Authors
Rich, Paul
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Abstract
One of the main problems confronting liberal ideology in
the South African context is the nature and role of group
identities. This has been no small question because liberal
theorists have tended to be hide-bound by a reliance on the
inherent rationality of a free market that specifically excludes the role of group interests from its sphere of operations. Thus, while twentieth century liberalism has made a number of important revisions in the classical laissez-faire model of the nineteenth century, it still places a considerable emphasis on the free market sector even though, as Professor John Kenneth Galbraith has
observed, this now typifies only a minority sector in western capitalist economies. It is this dependency on the free-market model, however, that restricts the liberal view of rationality to one of economics. The most rational figure in this view remains the classic homo economicus, the child of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, who buys in the cheapest market and sells in the dearest.
The implications of this model are far-reaching in terms of
social values. If the basis of society is seen to rest on free-floating individuals motivated by a high degree of psychological hedonism then the basis of society's values rests on individual ones to the neglect of the wider community. This is perhaps one reason why capitalist societies in the west have had such difficulty, for example, in regulating and controlling firms
involved in spreading pollution: the traditional free-market model only assumes a relationship between buyer and seller and cannot account for a third party involved in the transaction in the form of the community. Moreover, in terms of its system of morality, liberalism relies on a general public good accruing from the actions of individuals: by some mysterious hidden hand, "public good" is assumed to emerge from "private vices". As Robert Paul Wolff has argued, liberalism is unable to make the jump, short of radical revision, from the notion of a private value to one of community. Utilitarianism, he argues, in its concern for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, rests only on private values and a development
of liberalism towards the direction of interpersonal values
is the only way of resolving this problem and developing a
liberal morality that recognises the existence of a wider
community.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented March 1976
Keywords
Liberalism. South Africa, Ethnicity. South Africa, Blacks. Race identity