THE END OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE

The disposition towards public affairs, which we conveniently sum up as
individualism and laissez-faire, drew its sustenance from many different rivulets of
thought and springs of feeling. For more than a hundred years our philosophers ruled
us because, by a miracle, they nearly all agreed or seem to agree on this one thing. We
do not dance even yet to a new tune. But a change is in the air. We hear but
indistinctly what were once the clearest and most distinguishable voices which have
ever instructed political mankind. The orchestra of diverse instruments, the chorus of
articulate sound, is receding at last into the distance.
At the end of the seventeenth century the divine right of monarchs gave place to
natural liberty and to the compact, and the divine right of the church to the principle
of toleration, and to the view that a church is 'a voluntary society of men’, coming
together, in a way which is 'absolutely free and spontaneous' (Locke, A Letter
Concerning Toleration). Fifty years later the divine origin and absolute voice of duty
gave place to the calculations of utility. In the hands of Locke and Hume these
doctrines founded Individualism. The compact presumed rights in the individual; the
new ethics, being no more than a scientific study of the consequences of rational selflove,
placed the individual at the centre. ‘The sole trouble Virtue demands', said
Hume, 'is that of just Calculation, and a steady preference of the greater Happiness.'
(An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, section LX).
These ideas accorded with the practical notions of conservatives and of lawyers. They
furnished a satisfactory intellectual foundation to the rights of property and to the
liberty of the individual in possession to do what he liked with himself and with his
own. This was one of the contributions of the eighteenth century to the air we still
breathe.