Robert Nisbet and "the ecological community": shared roots
Tim Sydney wrote:
Another linkage between 'classical liberalism' and ecology is provides by Robert Nisbet.
Although he avoided the 'classical liberal' label, Robert Nisbet was probably the doyen of conservative sociology and his definition of conservatism, definitely Burkean, was decidedly hostile to militarism and the emerging neocon and Christian Right agendas.
Nisbet's sociology was definitely anti-statist but not anarchist. He sought a new community based on "a new laissez faire", one that would revive a network of intermediate institutions and communities between the individual and the central state, the only recipe he believed that worked against centraism. His new laissez faire was not a reversion to 19th century style laisser faire. With these qualifications in mind, I still think "classical liberals" are right to think of him as "one of their own."
Anyhow in his book "The Social Philosophers" (1974), a survey of historically influential social thinkers, he defined six broad classes of community, and grouped the various social thinkers into this scheme. The half dozen types were the military community , the political community, the religious community, the revolutionary community, the plural community and the ecological community.
The last he defined as "the close, cohesive interdependences symbolised by the small household economy, the interdependences among organisms and between organisms and the environment which are natural, in contrast to those which are contrived or artificial; and the profound sense of a web of life existing between man and the rest of nature that man endangers only at his own peril."
Into this class of thinkers Nisbet placed Saint Benedict of Nursia, Sir Thomas ("utopia") Moore, Proudhon, Kropotkin, the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith.
Perhaps paralleling Nisbet's thinking here, John C. Medaille has called Adam Smith, "The Forgotten Agrarian" (see his PDF here).
Medaille quotes "Wealth Of Nations" in his article lead: "“[The Agricultural System]… is, perhaps, the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political oeconomy, and is upon that account well worth the
consideration of every man who wishes to examine with attention the principles of that very
important science.”
So there is a definite "ecological" / "agrarian" thread in classical liberalism. Some of the American 20th century agrarians like, for example, Louis Bromfield (see Joseph Stromberg's summary here) combined a concern for the soil, free trade, anti-militarism and conservationism. They were "green" back when greens were something you ate and predated the more socialistic oriented greens of today.
The distributists, whose leading thinkers had roots in the anti-imperialist wing of the UK Liberal Party early in the 20th century, paralleled many of the concerns of the agrarians. Distributist Hillaire Belloc'a "The Servile State" was in many ways a forerunner to F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom".
In recent years E.F. Schumacher, the 1970s pioneer of "small is beautiful" and "alternative technology" has himself migrated "right-wards" to be closer to the Distributists. (See article here).
This survey shows that historically there have been movements and tendencies close to, sometimes parallel to, sometimes overlapping with, classical liberalism that have not only adapted to an ecological viewpoint, but have helped develop it. So the task of greening classical liberalism may not be quite as counter-intuitive as many both inside and outside the classical liberal movement think.