In this first installment of an interview series on liberalism, Benjamin Klutsey, the director of academic outreach at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, speaks with Alan Charles Kors about the history of liberalism, the proper purpose of education, and the core liberal value of mutual forbearance. Kors is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in European intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has published several books and many articles on early-modern French intellectual history and was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. [...]

KLUTSEY: I see. You talked about Voltaire and you mentioned toleration, the idea that you have two religions, they might be going after each other, but you have 30, so everyone learns to live with one another. That idea, it grew. Now, would you think of liberalism as a pre-political notion or in some sense meta-politics?

KORS: It is in the modern sense, I suppose, a pre-political position with the most dramatic political implications. I should think of it that way. But I think you do right to focus on toleration as lying at the heart of it. If people are willing to slaughter each other over religious beliefs, in fact over beliefs in general, if people are not willing to argue, to debate, their recourse then, if they think matters are important, is to force and to coercion.

So at the heart of the classical liberal tradition lies the notion of, in John Stuart Mill's terms, mutual forbearance, in which we allow each other to think, to choose a lifestyle, to seek to satisfy ourselves on the deepest or on the shallowest questions with mutual forbearance, which has the advantage, as John Stuart Mill saw, of also producing experiments in living, experiments in lifestyles, experiments in life choices from which a whole society of individuals can learn negative or positive lessons.

KLUTSEY: You had mentioned in a recent talk when you were talking about Voltaire--I think this was a quote--that "mutual forbearance, legal equality, peace, and prosperity go hand in hand, and if you lose the first, the rest are in peril."

KORS: Yeah. That's exactly right. Again, in Voltaire's seminal Philosophical Letters, a work of extraordinary influence all throughout the Western world, what Voltaire is essentially arguing is that religious liberty, free trade and commerce, the end of aristocratic privilege by birth, restraint upon central power, and balance of powers and separation of powers, which he sees in the English model, that all of these are part of the same general picture that has made progress possible and can make yet extraordinary progress possible in the future.

KLUTSEY: It's almost as though it would be difficult to separate the civil freedoms from the economic freedoms. They almost go hand in hand.