History: The Struggle for Liberty

Mises Institute
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Ralph Raico, professor of European history at Buffalo State College and Schlarbaum laureate, presents a series of ten formal lectures on the history of Liberty: its origin, its development, its friends, and its enemies. Download the complete audio of this event (ZIP) here.

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  1. EPISODE 1

    1. The European Miracle

    Ralph Raico covers classical liberalism’s growth, development and possible future. Liberalism arose in Europe entwined with Christianity. Why Europe? The East lacked the idea of freedom from the state and never established the legal system that could protect wealth. Europe had multiple, decentralized competing powers, not a universal empire. Europe came into existence in the Middle Ages. The contractual relationship between princes and subjects was similar to the Magna Carta. The Middle Ages [5th to the 15th century] were not dark ages. The sign of a freeman was that he had the right to keep and bear arms. The powerful, international Church of Rome was the strong institution that acted as a counterweight to secular power. It was the largest property owner in Europe and concerned about taxation. Lecture 1 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty. Transcript [This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. The Q and A at the end of the lecture has been omitted. Annotations have been added by Ryan McMaken.] This week, my subject is going to be history as a struggle for liberty. This conception of history, what history is, goes back to Lord Acton, a famous nineteenth-century historian who spent all his life accumulating notes and materials for what would be thought a great history of liberty—the greatest book never written, people say. Nonetheless, Acton wrote many essays on the subject and he’s a historian well worth consulting. What I’m going to be discussing this week is classical liberalism. I might slip and just call it liberalism from time to time, but you’ll understand what I’m saying. We’ll be discussing its growth, its development, and finally, I’ll say something about the possible future of liberalism. Now, the history of classical liberalism is intertwined in the history of Europe and its outposts, especially America. Europe has sometimes been defined as extending from Warsaw to San Francisco—and one might amiably throw in also Vancouver and Melbourne. Some people would consider this a very Eurocentric kind of approach. Well, so is the history of modern science Eurocentric. The story that I’m going to be outlining will serve as an antidote to what some of you, at least, have experienced in your high schools and colleges and that is the demonization of Europe and Europeans as mass genocidal murderers and imperialist exploiters. If you doubt that this is standard in American education today, then you can read the works of Alan Kors, a Professor at The University of Pennsylvania who has specialized in this. He is a great scholar of France and the French enlightenment otherwise, but has made it a point to detail how this demonization takes place through sensitivity training and many other respects.Paula Reid “History prof Alan Charles Kors Critiques universities' political correctness,” The Daily Pennsylvanian (Philadelphia),  March 24, 2009. https://www.thedp.com/article/2009/03/history_prof_alan_charles_kors_critiques_universities_political_correctness  Now, of this view of the Europeans as genocidal murderers and demons and so on, much could be said. I’m not going to go into any great detail. The first thing that comes to mind is that Europeans, like everybody else, are subject to original sin and have a proclivity to temptation of putting their own perceived self-interests above others to any extent that they feel necessary. Another thing that could be said is that power corrupts, as Acton famously said. In the modern period, it’s Europeans who had the power. It would be interesting to see what would have happened if it had been the Aztecs— Aztecs famous for their ritual murders and cannibalism—who landed in Spain rather than the other way around and what scenes we would have witnessed. Finally, I want to say that there were Europeans who opposed those various crimes of the men of power in their own countries and among them—among the most prominent—were the classical liberals that we’ll be talking about this week. What Made Europe Different Now, the first thing to say about liberalism is that it arose in Europe, specifically in western Christendom. This is the Europe that grew up in communion with the Bishop of Rome, at one time or another, so that the history of Europe and the history of liberalism, are intimately intertwined. The question of why this should be the case has given rise to an enormous literature. This approach to trying to find out why Europe was different, why Europe was distinctive, is sometimes called the institutional approach of economic historians. This phenomenon could be called “the European miracle,” after the title of a book by one of the major authors of this approach, E.L. Jones, the Australian economic historian.See E.L. Jones, The European Miracle:Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 118 The miracle in question consists in a simple but momentous fact: it was in Europe that human beings first achieved per capita economic growth over a long period of time. In this way, European society eluded the Malthusian trap and this enabled new tens of millions—hundreds of millions really—to survive, and it enabled the population as a whole to escape the hopeless misery that had been the lot of the great bulk of the human race in earlier times. The question is: why Europe? Why is Europe in this way set apart from other great civilizations: China, India, Islam, and so on? Geographic factors played a role, no doubt, but I think that Mises put his finger on the essential point when he wrote the following: The East lacked the primordial thing, the idea of freedom from the state. The East never raised the banner of freedom, it never tried to stress the rights of the individual against the power of the rulers. It never called into question the arbitrariness of the despots. And first of all, it never established the legal framework that would protect the private citizens’ wealth against confiscation on the part of the tyrants.Ludwig von Mises, Money, Method, and the Market Process (Norwell, MA: Luwer Academic Publishers, 1990) p. 311 Mises was not primarily an historian. In my view, on the basis of what I know, he was the greatest economist of the twentieth century. On the other hand, he had this ability to put his finger on the solution to some historical problem in a way that other professional historians weren’t able to do. We’ll see when we discuss the Industrial Revolution later on, the same thing there. Now, the question is still: why was Europe in this kind of position? Now, one of the authors in this general school of thought— it’s an international movement, Americans, British, French or Australians— is Jean Baechler of Paris. Baechler’s pioneering work pointedly expressed this, as he said, The first condition of the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state. The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison d’être to political anarchy.Jean Baechler, The Origins of Capitalism (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1975), pp. 77, 113. We’ll see what that means. Among others who have developed this is Douglass North, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in this area, in economic history. North wrote, “It was precisely the lack of large scale political order that created the environment essential to economic growth and ultimately human freedoms” in Europe.Douglass C. North, “The Rise of the Western World,” in Political Competition, Innovation and Growth: A Historical Analysis (Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag Berlin, 1998) p. 22. Now, this institutional approach was adumbrated by John Hicks, the Nobel Laureate in Economics in the late 1960s. But the essentials of the view were sketched by the great economic historian—now Emeritus from Harvard—David Landis, who, by the way, is no particular classical liberal. But he’s a good historian in a book of his called The Unbound Prometheus. Landis said, There were two factors that set Europe apart from the rest of the world, the scope and effectiveness of private enterprise and the high value placed on the rational manipulation of the human and material environment. … The role of private enterprise in the West is perhaps unique, more than any other factor that made the modern world.David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 15. Still, why was there the scope and leeway for private enterprise? Landis also points to the radical decentralization of Europe, what Baechler had called political anarchy and this is what he writes: Because of this crucial role in a context of multiple competing polities (the contrast is with empires of the Orient and the Ancient World) private enterprise in the West, possessed a political and social vitality without precedent or counterpart.Ibid Now, of course, it wasn’t a linear progression to some kind of a libertarian utopia. However, we’re talking relatively and in contrast with other civilizations. Keep that in mind. There’s radical decentralization based on a context of multiple competing polities. Baechler, as others might well have written, says that this is the crucial non-event of European history. After the fall of Rome, no empire was able to arise in Europe to establish hegemony over the continent. There was no universal empire although this was tried from time-to-time. Instead, Europe developed into a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, ecclesiastical domains, and other political entities. Within this system, it was highly imprudent for any prince to attempt to infringe the property rights in the manner that was customary elsewhere in the world. And these authors— aga

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    2. Classical Liberalism

    Mises’ book, Liberalism, states that liberalism sufficed to change the face of the earth. The term liberal has since been hijacked by social democrats, so they don’t have to use the tainted word socialism. Raico defines liberalism to be civil society, minus the state, running itself within the bounds of private property. After the end of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance created the late scholastics – the School of Salamanca. Their legitimate theory of value had nothing to do with labor as it did in England. They saw that buyer and seller are each better off by an exchange, not equal. The Dutch produced a fairly free society, but not a political philosophy. The French felt the period 1846-1940 to be almost a hundred years of true laissez-faire policy. During the English Civil War, the Levellers began the history of liberalism by their demands to free John Lilburne from prison. The Leveller cause was effectively crushed in 1649. Their legacy was abstract natural rights. Rothbard called them the world’s first self-consciously libertarian mass movement. John Locke is a fountainhead of crucial ideas about society being self-ruled with property being the fundamental right to life, liberty, and estates. Government was meant only to protect that right. Such an uncoerced vision animated Jeffersonians. The laissez-faire society worked well. Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson were chief thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. They held that the fundamental importance of human reason should be combined with a rejection of unreasonable authority. Lecture 2 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty. Transcript [This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. The Q and A at the end of the lecture has been omitted. Annotations have been added by Ryan McMaken.] This lecture will concern classical liberalism itself. Now, I think that you’ve been given—free of charge in the usual generous tradition of the Mises Institute—or somewhere along the line, gotten hold of a copy of Mises’ book called Liberalism. In the original German it’s called just Liberalism, and in the current English version, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition.The English version of Liberalism was translated by Raico himself and in an aside Raico jokes that the “rather brilliant” English translation has been “compared by many to Chapman’s Homer.”  At the very beginning of the book, Mises talks about liberalism and says, The philosophers, sociologists, and economists of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century formulated a political program that served as a guide to social policy first in England and the United States, then on the European continent, and finally in the other parts of the inhabited world as well. Nowhere was this program ever completely carried out. Even in England, which had been called the homeland of liberalism…Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1985) p. 1.  Mises says Liberalism was never permitted to come to full fruition: “Nevertheless, brief and all too limited as the supremacy of liberal ideas was, it sufficed to change the face of the earth.”Ibid. And it goes on in that vein. Well, as I say, he uses the term “liberalism” which for a long time was the word associated with this program that he’s developing. But it may seem strange to you to associate liberalism with basically laissez-faire and the other elements of the liberal program, considering that liberalism—not only in the United States, but now in other countries as well—has come to mean something quite different. There’s a rather well-known story how, in English-speaking countries first of all and then elsewhere, around the turn of the century—that is, the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century—the term liberal was hijacked by people who were essentially social democrats. What Is Liberalism, and Why Do Social Democrats Call Themselves Liberals? Joseph Schumpeter is an economist from Austria—but not what we would call an Austrian economist—and a very famous social philosopher and well worth consulting. He wrote a very big book that I think is still in print from Oxford called History of Economic Analysis. In a famous passage there, he ironically states that it was a kind of compliment, if an unintended one, when the enemies of the system of free enterprise confiscated the name liberal for what was basically the opposite of what liberalism had stood for from the start.The famous passage reads: “[T] the term has acquired a different—in fact almost the opposite—meaning since about 1900 and especially since about 1930: as a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.” See Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York, NY: Routledge, 1954), p. 394.  Nowadays, you can find writers who express astonishment that free market economists still sometimes insist on calling themselves liberals rather than conservatives. Some might say why argue over a name, why not just call your position anything at all and go on from there to argue the case for it? Stephen Holmes, a political scientist from Chicago, has called the dispute over the term, liberal, a matter of bragging rights; the right to brag “I’m the real liberal in the liberal tradition and you’re not.” On the other hand, he insists that he’s in the real liberal tradition and thinks it’s worth arguing about.Stephen Holmes “Liberal Guilt: Some Theoretical Origins of the Welfare State,” in Responsibility, Rights, and Welfare: The Theory of the Welfare State ed. Donald J. Moon (Boulder Colo.: Westview, 1988), p. 101. It seems to me there are good reasons to hold onto the name “liberal” from the point of view, say, of Ludwig von Mises and not of John Kenneth Galbraith. First, we must hold on the name in order to preserve a conceptual coherence, when dealing with an intellectual history. How can you make sense of the history of ideas if you say there was an important school of thought called liberalism while Galbraith, John Maynard Keynes, John Rawls, and Franklin Roosevelt are just as entitled to the name “liberal” as Mises, Hayek, Nozick and say, Grover Cleveland? Second, there was demonstrably, a very deliberate political aim when Leonard Hobhouse, J.A. Hobson, John Dewey, Friedrich Naumann and others in Germany, promoted the transformation of the term. There was a theory underlying the terminological change, a kind of ideological subtext, one might say, that is still operative. This is what the idea was: there was an old liberalism of laissez-faire that is now antiquated and obsolete, made so by massive changes in society.  Those writers at the turn of the century that pioneered the new liberalism, as they sometimes called it, based their claims on a ridiculously inflated view of the power of business enterprise vis-à-vis the individual workers or the labor market. This was accompanied by an equally inflated view of the business corporation’s alleged enormous power vis-à-vis the individual consumer. In any case, the hijacking of the term, liberal implied that the old liberalism, the liberalism of Mises, for instance, in his book, was dead and certainly need not be considered a plausible candidate for support. Then, some of the English old-fashioned liberals like Auberon Herbert and the extreme followers of Herbert Spencer started saying “let’s call ourselves something else, let’s call ourselves individualists.” Then, John Dewey started saying “well, you know, there was an old individualism that is now obsolete.”John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (New York: Minton, Balch, 1930), passim. The new individualism, which is the same thing as the new liberalism, called on all of the powers of society to support the individual in his or her self-development and on and on in that vein. Finally, I submit that there is no intellectually honest reason to bestow the term liberal on those nowadays who favor a never-ending list of government funded programs. These programs, we are told, are necessary to deal with every real or imagined ill of society and favor a constantly expanding state apparatus to wage war on the traditional ways and values of civil society. The people who support this are the people who are called liberal nowadays. Peculiarly enough, to complicate it even further, in some cases the term liberal does retain its old meaning. In the case of France, for instance, the term liberal or sometimes ultraliberal means a believer in laissez-faire or an extreme believer in laissez-faire. So the French—unlike the English, the Americans, the Canadians, even the Germans to an extent—have preserved the older meaning. In those countries, there is a name for the position that calls itself liberal or liberalism in America. It is called “social democracy” or “democratic socialism.” These are perfectly legitimate names. Why do they want to take over the name liberal? The “new” liberalism of Hobhouse and Hobson is indistinguishable from the position, for instance, of Eduard Bernstein, the founder of the vision of socialism in Germany. This has today become socialism altogether in the modern world, just as the position of American liberal intellectuals is indistinguishable from that of people who call themselves social democrats in Europe. This is what Eduard Bernstein said around 1920 or so: The development and protection of the free personality is the goal of all socialist measures, even of those which superficially appeared to be coercive measures. A closer examination will always show that it is a question of a coercion that increases the sum of freedom in society, that gives more freedom and to a wider group than it takes away.This may be Raico’s own translatio

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    3. John Stuart Mill

    Mill played a crucial, but inflated, role in liberalism. Rothbard did not like Mill much. Mill was a disaster on economic freedom and international issues. Mill rejected that workers and capitalists shared interests. Mill was anti-capitalist. Mill’s On Liberty addresses the nature and limits of legitimate power by society over individuals. Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor, a married woman, twisted his own mores. Mill’s liberalism had little regard for the past. John Maynard Keynes also contributed to liberalism meaning almost anything including Nazism. Keynes felt his system was more adapted to socialism and Stalinism. But the hallmark of liberalism is that society can run itself with voluntary agreements based upon private property rights. French liberalism involved the idea of class conflict which led to totalitarianism. This doctrine is generally associated with Marxism, but predated Marx. The French made all government offices open to all citizens. That was the essence of the French Revolution. Two main conflicting classes are producers and plunderers. The British tradition of liberalism, as F.A. Hayek espoused, leaves out the tradition of natural rights. Transcript: Lecture 3 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty. [This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. The Q and A at the end of the lecture has been omitted. Annotations have been added by Ryan McMaken.] John Stuart Mill played a crucial role in the transition from the older liberalism—the laissez-faire liberalism—to the new liberalism, a type of democratic socialism. Now, it is, to my mind, a disservice when a typical college course that deals with the history of political thought does this: as an example of eighteenth-century liberalism they’ll maybe have Adam Smith. As an example of nineteenth-century liberalism, they will have John Stuart Mill. They’ll present it as John Stuart Mill versus Karl Marx or Friedrich List, and use the idea that Mill is the exemplary liberal of the nineteenth century. One reason that he’s very attractive to people is that he had a very good writing style. There’s no doubt about that. And his writing style is superficially very logical and rational. But, there are very serious problems with Mill from an authentic liberal point of view that I’ll be pointing out. Much of the confusion prevailing in the whole problem of defining and understanding liberalism can be traced to Mill. To my mind, he occupies a vastly inflated position in the conception of liberalism entertained by English-speaking people. This is an example of Anglo-centrism, you might say. It is a scandal how few American social-scientific university professors cannot easily read even modern European languages like French and German. I happen to know this is a fact in connection, for instance, with the Stanford University history department, although they have great scholars. On the other hand, there is this lack of having access to works of continental writers that have not been already translated. James Buchanan, when he undertook his study of public finance, learned Italian—which I think must be a very rare accomplishment among American economists—in order to read the rich treasury of economic thought among the Italian economists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The lack of the ability to access some of the most important continental political figures, leads to ridiculous overemphasis on the British tradition, to my mind. A man that I’ll be mentioning a number of times, I think from now on, is one of my favorite authors altogether: Benjamin Constant. Constant wrote an enormous amount on political philosophy and other subjects. It was only a few years ago, in the Cambridge “blue” series of political thinkers, that some of his major writings on political philosophy became available in English. George Sabine’s history of political thought doesn’t even mention Constant, although I would be prepared to argue that he was the most important liberal philosopher of the nineteenth century.George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961). First published 1937.  He was worlds ahead of Mill, as far as I’m concerned, and Mill was a disaster on a number of fronts. In economics, Mill held that, “The principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade.”John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, (London : Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green,1864) p. 171 He is using “free trade” in the sense of economic freedom: freedom of trade, not just internationally. But for Mill in On Liberty, in general, the principle of freedom is not involved in economic affairs. In contrast, Milton Friedman quotes a great letter that Benjamin Franklin sent to one of the French physiocrats where Franklin said that he thought that liberty of exchange, liberty of contract, liberty to work, and the liberty of buy and sell, is even more important than any civil liberty; than freedom of expression, for instance, because it deals with the freedoms people need every single day of their lives and the freedom that everyone needs. This is not just the intelligentsia and the publishers, but everyone.The source appears to be a letter to the Abbe Morellet, April 22, 1787, in which Franklin writes: “I am of the same opinion with you respecting the freedom of commerce … Nothing can be better expressed than your sentiments are on this point, where you prefer liberty of trading, cultivating, manufacturing, etc., even to civil liberty, this being affected but rarely, the other every hour.” Found in The Works of Benjamin Franklin XI, ed. John Bigelow (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904) p. 326 So here we have Mill going in the opposite direction and saying that economic freedom is not really part of the concept of freedom he’s going to be dealing with. Mill provided ammunition for the protectionist arsenal. Richard Cobden, the great free trader of the mid-nineteenth century, complained of one of Mill’s writings, that this has undone any good he might have done in any other respect by providing arguments in favor of protection for infant industries.Quoted in A.V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (London: MacMillan, 1963) p. 429 and n.2. Specifically, Cobden says “I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage of his book on Political Economy in which he favors the principle of Protection in young communities has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings.” Mill rejected the liberal notion of the long-run harmony of interests of all social classes, including entrepreneurs and workers, on the grounds that “to say that they have same interest . . . is to say that it is the same thing to a person’s interest whether a sum of money belongs to him or to someone else.”Richard Ashcraft, “Class, Conflict, and Constitutionalism in J.S. Mill’s Thought” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) p. 114 Following that reasoning, in arguing that anti-capitalism is one of the hallmarks of liberalism, the well-known English political philosopher Alan Ryan invokes none other than John Stuart Mill, who wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century, “The generality of laborers in this and most other countries have as little choice of occupation and freedom of locomotion . . . as they could . . . on any system short of actual slavery.”Alan Ryan, “Liberalism” in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, eds. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993) p. 209 This at a time when English and other serfs were migrating in the millions, to towns, cities and even to foreign countries. It has to have been someone like Mill—who spent his life as a philosopher and writer but otherwise made his living as a bureaucrat for the British East India company—not to have noticed what was going on around him. There was this vast migration, when Mill says that it’s virtually impossible for working people to move from one place to another. As I’ll discuss this afternoon, Mill was a disaster in international affairs, where he repudiated the liberal principle of nonintervention. Mill’s Novel Definition of “Liberty” Worst of all was Mill’s deformation of the concept of liberty itself. His most famous work On Liberty tends in that direction. Liberty, it seems, according to Mill, is a condition that is threatened not only by physical aggression on the part of the state or other institutions or individuals. Rather, society often poses even worse dangers to individual freedom. For example, Mill believes society threatens liberty with “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling,”John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, (London : Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green,1864) p. 13 and the tendency “to impose by other ways than civil penalties, [society’s] own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.”Ibid., p. 13 Society “compel[s] all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.”Ibid., p. 14.  This is non-aggressive, non-coercive in the ordinary sense, “tyranny,” according to Mill. This is in On Liberty, the great liberal manifesto, supposedly. A true liberty, according to Mill, requires autonomy because adopting the traditions or customs of other people is simply to engage in “ape-like … imitation."Ibid., p. 106 Whereas others see individuals choosing goals laid out for them by what they freely accept as authoritative institutions—this is the real liberal position—Mill perceives the extinction of freedom. In other words, for instance, if you’re a Roman Catholic and accept the authority of the Catholic Church, the Magisterium, you’re

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    4. Class and Conflict

    Gustave de Molinari became the grand old man of classical liberalism, crediting Pareto. Molinari understood that the main issue in the Civil War was the tariff, not slavery. In Italy economists founded free market economics, crediting Bastiat. In America, John Taylor saw society becoming feudalistic with exploiting classes. Government needed to be separated from banking systems. Thomas Jefferson’s values were held most high. William Graham Sumner talked about plutocrats – wealthy persons who used the state. There was the liberal idea of class conflict. Production led to peace, whereas militarism led to war and destruction. War is the health of the state, said Bourne. The pro-peace position was led by the Manchester School, particularly by Richard Cobden. They led the free trade movement. Their aim was harmony and peace among nations. The tax-eating rather than the tax-paying classes favored war. Cobden emphasized trade not politics. Bastiat proposed getting rid of the French army. The American Open Door policy with China was free trade imperialism. Unilateral free trade works. Trade agreements don’t. Just do away with tariffs. War making was often based upon incorrect information. Kosovo and Iraq are examples of disinformation stampeding us into war. The liberal anti-war tradition was against imperialism. The US went down the road of empire as did Spain. Constant war, large standing armies, crushing debt, and destructive levels of taxation are all with us now. Herbert Spencer believed that warfare was only suitable to man’s primitive stage, not his advanced stage after industrialization. However, some liberals, like de Tocqueville, did support war under certain conditions. Lecture 4 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

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    5. War, Peace, and the Industrial Revolution

    It was thought that the ultimate antidote to war was universal democracy. It was not. Spencer defined liberal democracy as an individual free to control the product of his own efforts on the market. Welfare societies could not rationally be termed democracies. Globalism perverts the Constitution. Meddling activism has unintended consequences like centralizing the power of the Presidency. Intervention creates blowback. The effects of the Industrial Revolution are a major issue in Classical Liberalism. From 1750 to 1850 industrialization got slowly underway in Britain. Division of labor and urbanization were considered a catastrophe. It was thought that only labor unions could improve conditions of the working people. This myth created a standing presumption that laissez-faire ruins countries and requires state intervention to protect present victims of capitalism. An optimist school made gradual headway against these pessimists. They gathered objective data and applied better economic theory. Wages, availability of foodstuffs, and length of life were finally considered in contrast to initial horror stories. In fact, the standard of living improved for most workers. Industrialization allowed tens of millions of people to survive as their populations exploded. The Industrial Revolution was not the problem; it was the solution. Lecture 5 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

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    6. The New World of Capitalism

    In the face of overwhelming evidence of the prosperity of capitalism, Marxists were forced to rephrase their arguments from material provisions to quality of life. Robert Nozick, a brilliant philosopher of liberty, became a libertarian. Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his main book, dominates debate in political philosophy. Why were intellectuals so hostile toward the market place and private property? Only state interventionism was seen as virtuous. Hayek saw that intellectuals had egalitarian biases, but felt they meant well. They just had scientistic prejudice. Schumpeter remarked that Hayek was polite to a fault. Schumpeter held that the key to intellectual hostility was the education and literacy that the capitalist wealth machine made possible – the freedom to nibble at the foundations of the capitalist society. This analysis is in his most popular book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Mises was not polite to a fault. His focus on this issue cites work about money making having been stigmatized. Western culture has had contempt for money making, commerce, merchants and business people. Entrepreneurs and capitalists themselves are swayed by the moral outlook which damns their activity. Lecture 6 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

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    7. The Anti-Capitalists

    Humans are prone to envy, writes Helmut Schoeck in Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Humans try to set up a society in which none is envious of another. George Stigler of the Chicago School saw man as always a utility maximizer. Robert Higgs disagreed with Stigler’s position. Higgs presents that the kind of person one becomes confirms a self-image. When acting politically, people are often concerned about what might be right or wrong. Russia was fertile grounds for socialist ideas. European intellectuals had made capitalism an object of horror. The Marxist dream was to be obtained by abolishing private property. One prevailing historical myth has been part of socialist pseudo-history. Did German big business play an essential role in the rise of Hitler? No, finds Henry Ashby Turner, but historians keep repeating this story. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was not a socialist, but was an enemy of capitalism. His views and his activities were destructive. Rousseau and Voltaire hated each other. Rousseau’s famous book is The Social Contract. It is very different from Locke’s. Rousseau should not be put into the liberal camp. Raico calls Rousseau historical rubbish. Robespierre was one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Surprising to Marx, socialism arose in Paris not in London. The best book on socialism is by Alexander Gray –The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin. Gray was Rothbard’s favorite historian of economic thought.   Lecture 7 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

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    8. The Planned Society

    Utopian socialism was a term created by Marx and Lenin to denigrate the enemies of Marx and Lenin. Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideology of the industrial class, opposed to the idling class, inspired and influenced utopian socialism. Capitalists were seen to be an important component of the industrial class. Saint-Simon did not promote class conflict. Auguste Comte was his disciple. Comte founded sociology and the doctrine of positivism. He is regarded as the first philosopher of science. Main Currents of Marxist Thought by Kolakowski is an indispensable work about Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. He describes Marxism as the “greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.” Marx was after the human race achieving real human dignity. Man will only achieve control of his own destiny by creating planned societies. There is no invisible hand. Man must be conscious masters of nature. Everything will be planned. That will free mankind. Trotsky’s book, For Literature and Revolution, claimed that the average human type will rise to the stature of an Aristotle. Lenin first put into place the Stalinist planned society – communism. Lecture 8 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

  9. EPISODE 9

    9. The First World War

    Intellectuals are pro-power and anti-market. Great presidents are war presidents who glorify power. The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency are recommended books on this topic. The First World War was a turning point which vastly extended state power, and vastly destroyed social power. Bismark united all of the German tribes into one state to preserve a German peace. The understanding in 1907 linking Great Britain, France and Russia was called the Triple Entente. This alliance in 1914 entered WWI as Allies against the Central Powers Germany and Austria-Hungary. The creation of a German navy put them on a collision course with Great Britain. Germany’s strategy was to quickly knock France out of the war by sending troops through Belgium. The Archduke is killed in Sarajevo. Austria declares war on Serbia. Austrians could then invade Serbia and do away with it. Germany declares war on Russia and France. France convinces Britain that she must declare war against Germany, although no Britain had any clue about the war or any say about it. Yet, war was greeted with enthusiasm. The intellectuals were rapturous. German U-boats sank British ships, bringing America into the war. The 1915 sinking of the Lusitania with some Americans aboard was used to justify Wilson’s position against Germany. Wilson had a hidden agenda to create a New World Order. The case of Eugene Debs was an example of how vindictive Wilson was and how individual liberties lost more ground in WWI than during WWII.

  10. EPISODE 10

    10. Classical Liberalism and the Welfare-Warfare State

    Germany surrendered conditionally in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Everybody opposed the treaty, but it was forcibly implemented. Revisionism is necessary to combat state propaganda, e.g. the lie in WWII that FDR was surprised by Pearl Harbor. The welfare state was actually begun by Bismarck in the 1880s. The welfare state that now exists will simply keep expanding in its agenda of rooting out older values and substituting others. As the crisis of the welfare state is approached, only newcomers from the third world can become taxpayers for retired elders. Identities of European peoples will be extinguished. Constitutions and Bills of Rights will not be the protectors of our liberties. The liberals in classical liberalism had no answers because they still held to the power of the state. The centralized state must be broken down by means such as secession even to the level of the individual. History shows the struggle for liberty. He who controls the present controls the interpretation of the past. Lecture 10 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

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Ralph Raico, professor of European history at Buffalo State College and Schlarbaum laureate, presents a series of ten formal lectures on the history of Liberty: its origin, its development, its friends, and its enemies. Download the complete audio of this event (ZIP) here.

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  • Creator
    Mises Institute
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Clean

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