Liberalism, Neoliberalism and the Rise of Consumerist Education

          The rise of the bourgeois class into economic and political powers in the17th to the 19th centuries in Europe correspondingly brought with it a theoretical justification of this social phenomenon, the dissemination by this class through their intellectuals of the theory of the natural rights of men. Though the theory of the universal rights of men first gained academic credence in the Peripatetic school of the Stoics of Ancient Greece, dominated by the Athenian middle class, it was revived in Northern Europe, particularly among the active merchant class in the Netherlands by two philosophers, Athusius and Grotius. The Ancient Stoic philosophy had still a religious basis as it expounded that all persons are the breaths of One God and therefore are equal and that there is a Divine Plan in the world. Stoic philosophy did not, however, reach the masses as it was confined as a culture of high learning among the intellectual elites of Greece and Rome, the most notable of which is seen in the writings of the stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD ). 

          The theory of natural rights as it was resurrected by the intellectuals of the rising bourgeois class in the 17th century, after its long hiatus during the Middle or the Dark Ages when all forms of Greek thought were eschewed, later found expression in the theory of liberalism of Thomas Hobbes. While his predecessors still advocated a God as the basis of rights, Hobbes eliminated all religious justifications of these rights. To him they are founded on the basic instinct of self-preservation or what he calls the right to life of every person. John Locke, who was closely associated with the English bourgeois class as a custom official, developed the right to life and happiness of Hobbes to include the right to property of the individual. 

        The theory of liberalism when it appeared in Europe primarily emphasized the rights of the individual against the state, which was then controlled by the nobility and the clergy, who had as their favorite milking cows when their coffers ran out, the emerging wealthy bourgeois class in the form of new taxes, enforced monetary contribution and even outright confiscation of properties.Thus to the liberals the right of the individual became the right to do business unmolested by the state (Adam Smith and the French Physiocrats) and the right against unjust taxes, the rallying cry of the French bourgeoisie in the French revolution of 1789. This was also the case in the earlier American 1776 revolution in which the main spark of the rebellion against colonial master Britain was what the nascent American bourgeois class considered unjust taxes on imports which led to the Boston Tea Party. 

        After the successful revolutions of the bourgeois class against the feudal monarchies in Europe, using the masses as cannon fodders who were led to believe that they too will enjoy political and economic emancipation after these social upheavals, this class forthwith limited the right of suffrage to the propertied and educated. And all promised economic reforms were all but forgotten. The masses were made to believe that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the National Assembly in 1789 will bring about their liberation from the shackles of feudalism, under a new regime of liberty, equality and fraternity for all “citizens or people” as the French revolutionary bourgeois and pettybourgeois intellectuals call them. But such trust in their bourgeois leaders proved to be misguided. The betrayal of the libertarian promises to the lower classes pushed them to seek for an explanation of their unfortunate fate as some of their leaders were even hanged by the victorious bourgeois classes (the cases of the Levellers in the Cromwellian Army in the English revolution and Babeuf and other leaders of the League of the Just during the French revolution).For indeed the liberal philosophy of the bourgeoisie only reflected the morality of this class which became economically and politically dominant in Western Europe and the United States.  

Thus the virtue of individualism and the inviolability of private property were lauded in the constitutions of this class and none of the rights of man went beyond egoistical man, “an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his privatecaprice” (Marx 1964: 26). In short, the modes of life of the successful bourgeois became the rights of the citizen.