Professor Grayling’s theme in this lucid book is the history of the liberal idea of political order. For centuries, according to Grayling, the countries of Europe were in the grip of despotic powers, such as the church, the nobility and the various absolute monarchs, all of whom regarded government as a means to preserve their own privileges. Here and there, however, and in ever-increasing numbers, people fought for another kind of government – one that exists not to protect privileges but to advance the equal rights and freedoms of the people. Grayling’s book extols some of the intellectual heroes in this “struggle”, as he repeatedly calls it. While treating us to some agreeable ventures in the history of ideas, he recycles the Victorian notion that the West has progressed from oppressive superstition to enlightened liberty. There have been setbacks along the way, but they were caused, in Grayling’s view, by the temporary triumph of “reactionaries”, or by the pent-up frustrations of their victims.

Grayling rescues from obscurity several champions of liberty who should be better known, such as Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva, Servetus’s posthumous defender Sebastian Castellio, and the American Quaker Anthony Benezet, who in Grayling’s plausible view deserves far more credit in the fight against slavery than the currently overrated Wilberforce. Grayling’s scholarly account of these and other heroes makes up for his one-dimensional view of Western history, in which the Good forces of liberty, secularism, democracy, equality and enlightenment are locked in “struggle” (how I hate that word!) with the Bad forces of religion, authority, hierarchy, inequality and darkness. Grayling is surely right to believe that people aspire to freedom and light; but he cannot see, from his ivory tower, that they also need obedience and shadows.

Grayling sees all liberal ideas as summed up in a single moral imperative, which is the defence of “human rights”. His hostility to Christianity causes him to ignore the church’s defence of natural law, from which the idea of human rights derives. The rights defended in secular terms by John Locke were spelled out more thoroughly by Thomas Aquinas, who is given only fleeting credit. For Grayling, the political influence of the medieval church is symbolised not by Aquinas but by the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada. Why not say, rather, that, while Torquemada disgraced the Dominican Order, Aquinas redeemed it? Aquinas stands to Torquemada roughly as Condorcet stands to Robespierre. To lay the sins of Torquemada at the door of his faith is like blaming Grayling’s ideal of liberty for the Terror. After all, didn’t Robespierre describe what he was doing in just those terms – as “the despotism of liberty”?

Instead of examining the idea of a “human right” Grayling gives us a series of appendices, containing the various declarations of rights that have influenced modern government. But what are these declarations really about? Grayling does not say. The UN Declaration of Human Rights tells us in the same breath that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person (as Aquinas and Locke acknowledged) and also that everyone has a right to medical care, social services, unemployment benefit, and whatever else is “indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality”. To Grayling, the UN declaration is “the greatest achievement in the sphere of rights and liberties that the world had hitherto seen”. To me, it is the beginning of the “rights inflation” that is ruining the delicate and hitherto durable equilibrium maintained by the common law. Grayling is similarly indulgent towards the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which launched the French revolution on its path of unrestrained murder, and is unable to see what Burke was getting at when he argued that abstract rights without concrete institutions will lead of their own accord to anarchy.

Grayling concludes his book with an extended warning against the way in which the hard-won liberties of the subject are being eroded in Britain and America. He makes a strong point with good-natured grace. But here are two examples that he does not mention. Habeas corpus, which is at the heart of Anglo-American liberty, is a common-law right, dating from the Middle Ages, and deeply embedded in our legal and political traditions. It is about to disappear, cancelled by the corpus juris of the EU. The right to hunt – on which the way of life of my neighbourhood depends – was recently taken away by a dictatorial House of Commons. It is indeed odd, given his historical emphasis, that Grayling overlooks this last example, the right to hunt being the first granted at the French revolution as a symbol that the land was being returned to the people, and being enshrined also in the constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Such uneducated invasions of inherited rights are, it seems to me, far more indicative of the fragility of liberal political order than the identity cards of which Grayling complains at such length. I agree with him that liberal order is under threat. But one of its greatest enemies remains the one identified by Burke – the airy declaration of abstract political goals, combined with a contempt for real people.

Buy TOWARDS THE LIGHT: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West by AC Grayling
Bloomsbury £20 pp337

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