Chapter 1. The Libertarian Heritage. The American Revolution and Classical Liberalism.
On Election Day 1976, the Libertarian Party presidential ticket of Roger L. McBride for president and David P. Berglund for vice president amassed 174,000 votes in 32 states throughout the country.
The sober Congressional Quarterly was moved to classify the fledgling Libertarian Party as the third major political party in America.
The remarkable growth rate of this new party may be seen in the fact that it only began in 1971, with a handful of members gathered in a Colorado living room.
The following year, it fielded a presidential ticket, which managed to get on the ballot in two states, and now it is America's third major party.
Even more remarkably, the Libertarian Party achieved this growth while consistently adhering to a new ideological creed, libertarianism.
anditarianism, thus bringing to the American political scene for the first time in a century
a party interested in principle rather than in merely gaining jobs and money at the public
trough.
We have been told countless times by pundits and political scientists that the genius of
America and of our party system is its lack of ideology and its pragmatism, a kind word
for focusing solely on grabbing money and jobs from the hapless taxpayers.
How then explain the amazing growth of a new party which is frankly and eagerly devoted
to ideology?
One explanation is that Americans were not always pragmatic and non-ideological.
On the contrary, historians now realize that the American Revolution itself was not only
The American revolutionaries were steeped in the creed of libertarianism, an ideology which led them to resist with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, the invasions of their rights and liberties committed by the imperial British government.
Historians have long debated the precise causes of the American Revolution.
Were they constitutional, economic, political, or ideological?
We now realize that, being libertarians, the revolutionaries saw no conflict between moral
and political rights on the one hand and economic freedom on the other.
On the contrary, they perceived civil and moral liberty, political independence, and
and the freedom to trade and produce as all part of one unblemished system, what Adam
Smith was to call, in the same year that the Declaration of Independence was written, the
obvious and simple system of natural liberty.
The libertarian creed emerged from the classical liberal movements of the 17th and 18th century
in the Western world, specifically from the English Revolution of the 17th century.
This radical libertarian movement, even though only partially successful in its birthplace,
Great Britain, was still able to usher in the Industrial Revolution there by freeing
industry and production from the strangling restrictions of state control and urban government-supported
guilds.
For the classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian revolution
against what we might call the old order, the Ancien Régime, which had dominated its
subjects for centuries.
This Régime had, in the early modern period beginning in the 16th century, imposed an
absolute central state and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older restrictive
web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions.
The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes and monopoly
privileges to produce and sell, conferred by central and local governments upon their
favorite producers.
This alliance of the new bureaucratic war-making central state with privileged merchants, an
alliance to be called mercantilism by later historians, and with a class of ruling feudal
Classical landlords constituted the old order against which the new movement of classical
liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The object of the classical liberals was to bring about individual liberty in all of its
interrelated aspects.
In the economy, taxes were to be drastically reduced, controls and regulations eliminated,
and Human Energy, Enterprise and Markets set free to create and produce in exchanges that
would benefit everyone and the mass of consumers.
Entrepreneurs were to be free at last to compete, to develop, to create.
The shackles of control were to be lifted from land, labor and capital alike.
Personal freedom and civil liberty were to be guaranteed against the depredations and
and Tyranny of the King or His Minions Religion, the source of bloody wars for centuries
when sects were battling for control of the state, was to be set free from state imposition
or interference, so that all religions, or non-religions, could coexist in peace.
Peace too was the foreign policy credo of the new classical liberals.
The age-old regime of imperial and state aggrandizement for power and pelf was to be replaced by
a foreign policy of peace and free trade with all nations.
And since war was seen as engendered by standing armies and navies, by military power always
seeking expansion, these military establishments were to be replaced by voluntary local militia,
by Citizen Civilians who would only wish to fight in defense of their own particular homes
and neighborhoods.
Thus, the well-known theme of separation of church and state was but one of many interrelated
motifs that could be summed up as separation of the economy from the state, separation
of speech and press from the state, separation of land from the state, separation of war
and military affairs from the state.
Indeed, the separation of the state from virtually everything.
The state, in short, was to be kept extremely small, with a very low, nearly negligible
budget.
The classical liberals never developed a theory of taxation, but every increase in a tax and
every new kind of tax was fought bitterly, in America twice becoming the spark that led
or almost led to the Revolution, the Stamp Tax, the T-Tax.
The earliest theoreticians of libertarian classical liberalism were the Levellers during
the English Revolution and the philosopher John Locke in the late 17th century, followed
by the true Whig or radical libertarian opposition to the Whig Settlement, the regime of 18th
century Britain.
John Locke set forth the natural rights of each individual to his person and property.
The purpose of government was strictly limited to defending such rights.
In the words of the Lockean-inspired Declaration of Independence,
To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends,
It is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.
While Locke was widely read in the American colonies, his abstract philosophy was scarcely
calculated to rouse men to revolution.
This task was accomplished by radical Lockeans in the 18th century, who wrote in a more popular,
hard-hitting and impassioned manner and applied the basic philosophy to the concrete problems
of the Government and especially the British Government of the day.
The most important writing in this vein was Cato's Letters, a series of newspaper articles
published in the early 1720s in London by true Whigs John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.
While Locke had written of the revolutionary pressure which could properly be exerted when
government became destructive of liberty, Trenchard and Gordon pointed out that government
always tended toward such destruction of individual rights.
According to Cato's letters, human history is a record of irrepressible conflict between
power and liberty, with power, government, always standing ready to increase its scope
by invading people's rights and encroaching upon their liberties.
Therefore, Cato declared, power must be kept small and faced with eternal vigilance and
and Hostility on the part of the public to make sure that it always stays within its
narrow bounds.
We know by infinite examples and experience that men possessed of power, rather than part
with it, will do anything, even the worst and the blackest, to keep it.
And scarce ever any man upon earth went out of it as long as he could carry everything
his own way in it.
This seems certain, that the good of the world or of their people was not one of their motives
either for continuing in power or for quitting it.
It is the nature of power to be ever encroaching and converting every extraordinary power granted
at particular times and upon particular occasions into an ordinary power to be used at all times
and when there is no occasion, nor does it ever part willingly with any advantage.
Alas, power encroaches daily upon liberty, with a success too evident, and the balance
between them is almost lost.
Tyranny has engrossed almost the whole earth, and striking at mankind root and branch makes
the world a slaughterhouse, and will certainly go on to destroy till it is either destroyed
itself or, which is most likely, has left nothing else to destroy.
Such warnings were eagerly imbibed by the American colonists who reprinted Cato's letters
many times throughout the colonies and down to the time of the revolution.
Such a deep-seated attitude led to what the historian Bernard Balin has aptly called the
The Transforming Radical Libertarianism of the American Revolution
For the revolution was not only the first successful modern attempt to throw off the
yoke of Western imperialism, at that time of the world's mightiest power.
More important, for the first time in history, Americans hedged in their new governments
with numerous limits and restrictions embodied in constitutions and, particularly, in bills
Rules of Rights Church and state were rigorously separated
throughout the new states, and religious freedom enshrined.
Remnants of feudalism were eliminated throughout the states by the abolition of the feudal
privileges of entail and primogeniture.
In the former, a dead ancestor is able to entail landed estates in his family forever,
preventing his heirs from selling any part of the land.
In the latter, the government requires sole inheritance of property by the oldest son.
The new federal government formed by the Articles of Confederation was not permitted to levy
any taxes upon the public, and any fundamental extension of its powers required unanimous
consent by every state government.
Above all, the military and war-making power of the national government was hedged in by
restraint and suspicion.
For the 18th century libertarians understood that war, standing armies and militarism had
long been the main method for aggrandizing state power.
Bernard Balin has summed up the achievement of the American revolutionaries.
The modernization of American politics and government during and after the revolution
took the form of a sudden radical realization of the program that had first been fully set
set forth by the opposition intelligentsia in the reign of George I.
Where the English opposition, forcing its way against a complacent social and political
order, had only striven and dreamed, Americans, driven by the same aspirations but living
in a society in many ways modern and now released politically, could suddenly act.
Where the English opposition had vainly agitated for partial reforms, American leaders moved
swiftly and with little social disruption to implement systematically the outermost
possibilities in the whole range of radically libertarian ideas.
In the process, they infused into American political culture the major themes of 18th
century radical libertarianism brought to realization here.
The first is the belief that power is evil, a necessity perhaps, but an evil necessity,
that it is infinitely corrupting and that it must be controlled, limited, restricted
in every way compatible with a minimum of civil order.
Written constitutions, the separation of powers, bills of rights, limitations on executives,
on legislatures and courts, restrictions on the right to coerce and wage war, all express
express the profound distrust of power that lies at the ideological heart of the American
Revolution and that has remained with us as a permanent legacy ever after.
Thus, while classical liberal thought began in England, it was to reach its most consistent
and radical development and its greatest living embodiment in America.
For the American colonies were free of the feudal land monopoly and aristocratic ruling
In America, the rulers were British colonial officials and a handful of privileged merchants,
who were relatively easy to sweep aside when the revolution came, and the British government
was overthrown.
Classical liberalism, therefore, had more popular support and met far less entrenched
institutional resistance in the American colonies than it found at home.
Furthermore, being geographically isolated, the American rebels did not have to worry
about the invading armies of neighboring counter-revolutionary governments, as for example was the case in France.
After the Revolution
Thus, America, above all countries, was born in an explicitly libertarian revolution.
A revolution against empire, against taxation, trade monopoly and regulation, and against
militarism and executive power.
The revolution resulted in governments unprecedented in restrictions placed on their power.
But while there was very little institutional resistance in America to the onrush of liberalism,
there did appear from the very beginning powerful elite forces, especially among the large merchants
Groups and Planters who wished to retain the restrictive British mercantilist system of
high taxes, controls and monopoly privileges conferred by the government.
These groups wished for a strong central and even imperial government.
In short, they wanted the British system without Great Britain.
These conservative and reactionary forces first appeared during the revolution and later
underformed the Federalist Party and the Federalist Administration in the 1790s.
During the 19th century, however, the libertarian impetus continued.
The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian movements, the Democratic-Republican and then the Democratic
parties, explicitly strived for the virtual elimination of government from American life.
It was to be a government without a standing army or navy, a government without debt and
with no direct federal or excise taxes and virtually no import tariffs, that is, with
negligible levels of taxation and expenditure, a government that does not engage in public
works or internal improvements, a government that does not control or regulate, a government
A government that leaves money and banking free, hard and uninflated.
In short, in the words of H. L. Mencken's ideal, a government that barely escapes being
no government at all.
The Jeffersonian drive toward virtually no government, founded after Jefferson took office,
first with concessions to the Federalists, possibly the result of a deal for Federalist
votes to break a tie in the Electoral College, and then with the unconstitutional purchase
Office of the Louisiana Territory.
But most particularly it foundered with the imperialist drive toward war with Britain
in Jefferson's second term, a drive which led to war and to a one-party system which
established virtually the entire statist federalist program, high military expenditures,
a central bank, a protective tariff, direct federal taxes, public works.
Horrified at the results, a retired Jefferson brooded at Monticello and inspired young visiting
politicians Martin Van Buren and Thomas Hart Benton to found a new party, the Democratic Party,
to take back America from the new federalism and to recapture the spirit of the old Jeffersonian
program. When the two young leaders latched on to Andrew Jackson as their savior, the new Democratic
Party was born.
The Jacksonian Libertarians had a plan.
It was to be eight years of Andrew Jackson as president, to be followed by eight years
of Van Buren, then eight years of Benton.
After 24 years of a triumphant Jacksonian democracy, the Mancheanian virtually no government
ideal was to have been achieved.
It was by no means an impossible dream, since it was clear that the Democratic Party had
had quickly become the normal majority party in the country.
The mass of the people were enlisted in the libertarian cause.
Jackson had his eight years, which destroyed the central bank and retired the public debt,
and Van Buren had four, which separated the federal government from the banking system.
But the 1840 election was an anomaly, as Van Buren was defeated by an unprecedentedly
A demagogic campaign engineered by the first great modern campaign chairman, Thurlow Weed,
who pioneered in all the campaign frills, catchy slogans, buttons, songs, parades, etc.,
with which we are now familiar.
Weed's tactics put in office the egregious and unknown Whig, General William Henry Harrison,
but this was clearly a fluke.
In 1844, the Democrats would be prepared to counter with the same campaign tactics, and
they were clearly slated to recapture the presidency that year.
Van Buren, of course, was supposed to resume the triumphal Jacksonian march.
But then a fateful event occurred.
The Democratic Party was sundered on the critical issue of slavery, or rather, the expansion
of slavery into a new territory.
Van Buren's easy re-nomination foundered on a split within the ranks of the democracy over the admission to the Union of the Republic of Texas as a slave state.
Van Buren was opposed, Jackson in favor, and this split symbolized the wider sectional rift within the Democratic Party.
Slavery, the grave anti-libertarian flaw in the libertarianism of the Democratic program,
had arisen to wreck the party and its libertarianism completely.
The Civil War, in addition to its unprecedented bloodshed and devastation, was used by the
triumphal and virtually one-party Republican regime to drive through its statist, formerly
HWIG program.
National government power, protective tariff, subsidies to big business, inflationary paper
over money, resumed control of the federal government over banking, large-scale internal
improvements, high excise taxes, and, during the war, conscription and an income tax.
Furthermore, the states came to lose their previous right of secession and other states'
powers as opposed to federal government powers.
The Democratic Party resumed its libertarian ways after the war, but it now had to face
A Far Longer and More Difficult Road to Arrive at Liberty Than It Had Before
We have seen how America came to have the deepest libertarian tradition, a tradition
that still remains in much of our political rhetoric and is still reflected in a feisty
and individualistic attitude toward government by much of the American people.
There is far more fertile soil in this country than in any other for a resurgence of libertarianism.
Resistance to Liberty
We can now see that the rapid growth of the libertarian movement and the libertarian party in the 1970s is firmly rooted in what Bernard Bailyn called this powerful permanent legacy of the American Revolution.
But if this legacy is so vital to the American tradition, what went wrong?
Why the need now for a new libertarian movement to arise to reclaim the American dream?
To begin to answer this question, we must first remember that classical liberalism constituted
a profound threat to the political and economic interests, the ruling classes who benefited
from the old order, the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants,
The Military Machines, The State Bureaucracies Despite three major violent revolutions precipitated
by the liberals, the English of the 17th century and the American and French of the 18th, victories
in Europe were only partial.
Resistance was stiff and managed to successfully maintain landed monopolies, religious establishments
and warlike foreign and military policies, and for a time to keep the suffrage restricted
to the wealthy elite.
The liberals had to concentrate on widening the suffrage, because it was clear to both
sides that the objective economic and political interests of the mass of the public lay in
individual liberty.
It is interesting to note that by the early 19th century, the laissez-faire forces were
were known as liberals and radicals, for the purer and more consistent among them, and
the opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the old order were broadly known
as conservatives.
Indeed, conservatism began in the early 19th century as a conscious attempt to undo and
destroy the hated work of the new classical liberal spirit, of the American, French and
Industrial Revolutions.
Led by two reactionary French thinkers, de Bonnall and de Maistre, conservatism yearned
to replace equal rights and equality before the law by the structured and hierarchical
rule of privileged elites, individual liberty and minimal government by absolute rule and
big government, religious freedom by the theocratic rule of a state church, peace and free trade,
Trade by militarism, mercantilist restrictions and war for the advantage of the nation-state,
and industry and manufacturing by the old feudal and agrarian order, and they wanted
to replace the new world of mass consumption and rising standards of living for all by
the old order of bare subsistence for the masses and luxury consumption for the ruling
elite.
By the middle of, and certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, conservatives began
to realize that their cause was inevitably doomed if they persisted in clinging to the
call for outright repeal of the Industrial Revolution and of its enormous rise in the
living standards of the mass of the public, and also if they persisted in opposing the
widening of the suffrage, thereby frankly setting themselves in opposition to the interests
Hence, the right wing, a label based on an accident of geography by which the spokesman
for the old order sat on the right of the assembly hall during the French Revolution,
decided to shift their gears and to update their statist creed by jettisoning outright
opposition to industrialism and democratic suffrage.
For the old conservatism's frank hatred and contempt for the mass of the public, the new
conservatives substituted duplicity and demagogy.
The new conservatives wooed the masses with the following line.
We too favor industrialism and a higher standard of living.
But to accomplish such ends, we must regulate industry for the public good.
We must substitute organized cooperation for the dog-eat-dog of the free and competitive
of Marketplace, and above all, we must substitute for the nation destroying liberal tenets of
peace and free trade, the nation glorifying measures of war, protectionism, empire and
military prowess.
For all of these changes, of course, big government, rather than minimal government, was required.
And so, in the late 19th century, statism and big government returned, but this time
The Old Order returned, but this time the beneficiaries were shuffled a bit.
They were not so much the nobility, the feudal landlords, the army, the bureaucracy and
privileged merchants, as they were the army, the bureaucracy, the weakened feudal landlords
and especially the privileged manufacturers.
Directed by Bismarck and Prussia, the new right fashioned a right-wing collectivism based
on war, militarism, protectionism, and the compulsory cartelization of business and industry,
a giant network of controls, regulations, subsidies and privileges which forged a great
partnership of big government with certain favored elements in big business and industry.
Everything had to be done, too, about the new phenomenon of a massive number of industrial
wage workers, the proletariat.
During the 18th and early 19th centuries, indeed until the late 19th century, the mass
of workers favored laissez-faire and the free competitive market, as best for their wages
and working conditions as workers, and for a cheap and widening range of consumer goods
as consumers.
Even the early trade unions, for example in Great Britain, were staunch believers in laissez-faire.
New conservatives, spearheaded by Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain, weakened
the libertarian will of the workers by shedding crocodile tears about the condition of the
industrial labor force and cartelizing and regulating industry, not accidentally hobbling
efficient competition.
Finally, in the early 20th century, the new conservative corporate state, then and now
the dominant political system in the Western world, incorporated responsible and corporatist
trade unions as junior partners to big government and favored big businesses in the new statist
and corporatist decision-making system.
To establish this new system, to create a new order which was a modernized, dressed-up
The New ruling elites had to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public, a con job that
continues to this day.
Whereas the existence of every government from absolute monarchy to military dictatorship
rests on the consent of the majority of the public, a democratic government must engineer
to acquire such consent on a more immediate, day-by-day basis.
And to do so, the new conservative ruling elites had to gull the public in many crucial
and fundamental ways.
For the masses now had to be convinced that tyranny was better than liberty, that a cartelized
and privileged industrial feudalism was better for the consumers than a freely competitive
That a cartelized monopoly was to be imposed in the name of anti-monopoly, and that war
and military aggrandizement for the benefit of the ruling elites was really in the interests
of the conscripted, taxed, and often slaughtered public.
How was this to be done?
In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion molders
of society.
For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts.
On the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual
classes, the professional dealers in ideas.
Now throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of states
have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens
in a free society.
Our states have always needed opinion-molding intellectuals to con the public into believing
that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable, into believing that the emperor has clothes.
Until the modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen, or witch-doctors,
the guardians of religion.
It was a cozy alliance, this age-old partnership between church and state.
The Church informed its deluded charges that the King ruled by divine command and therefore
must be obeyed.
In return, the King funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers of the Church, hence
the great importance for the libertarian classical liberals of their success at separating Church
and State.
The new liberal world was a world in which intellectuals could be secular, could make
make a living on their own, in the market, apart from state subvention.
To establish their new statist order, their neo-mercantilist corporate state, the new
conservatives therefore had to forge a new alliance between intellectual and state.
In an increasingly secular age, this meant with secular intellectuals, rather than with
and Divines, specifically with the new breed of professors, PhDs, historians, teachers,
and technocratic economists, social workers, sociologists, physicians, and engineers.
This reforged alliance came in two parts.
In the early 19th century, the conservatives, conceding reason to their liberal enemies,
relied heavily on the alleged virtues of irrationality, romanticism, tradition, theocracy.
By stressing the virtue of tradition and of irrational symbols, the conservatives could
gull the public into continuing privileged hierarchical rule, and to continue to worship
the nation-state and its war-making machine.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new conservatism adopted the trappings
of Reason and of Science.
Now it was science that allegedly required rule of the economy and of society by technocratic
experts.
In exchange for spreading this message to the public, the new breed of intellectuals
was rewarded with jobs and prestige as apologists for the new order, and as planners and regulators
of the newly cartelized economy and society.
To ensure the dominance of the new statism over public opinion, to ensure that the public's
consent would be engineered, the governments of the Western world in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries moved to seize control over education over the minds of men, over
the universities, and over general education through compulsory school attendance laws
and a network of public schools.
The public schools were consciously used to inculcate obedience to the state as well as
other civic virtues among their young charges. Furthermore, this statizing of education ensured
that one of the biggest vested interests in expanding statism would be the nation's teachers
and professional educationists. One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did
The reason why they did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels.
For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as liberals, and the purest and most militant of them as radicals.
have also been known as progressives, because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers.
The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words liberal and progressive,
and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, neanderthal, and reactionary.
Even the name conservative was pinned on the classical liberals, and as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of reason as well.
If the laissez-faire liberals were confused by the new recrudescence of statism and mercantilism as progressive corporate statism,
Another reason for the decay of classical liberalism by the end of the 19th century was the growth of a peculiar new movement, socialism.
Socialism began in the 1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s.
The peculiar thing about socialism was that it was a confused hybrid movement, influenced by both the two great pre-existing polar ideologies, liberalism and conservatism.
and Socialism.
From the classical liberals, the socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism and
the Industrial Revolution, an early glorification of science and reason, and at least a rhetorical
devotion to such classical liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising
standard of living.
Indeed, the socialists, long before the much later corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting
of Science, Reason and Industrialism, and the socialists not only adopted the classical
liberal adherence to democracy, but topped it by calling for an expanded democracy in
which the people would run the economy and each other.
On the other hand, from the conservatives, the socialists took a devotion to coercion
and the statist means for trying to achieve these liberal goals.
Social Harmony and Growth were to be achieved by aggrandizing the state into an all-powerful
institution, ruling the economy and the society in the name of science.
A vanguard of technocrats was to assume all-powerful rule over everyone's person and property
in the name of the people and of democracy.
Not content with the liberal achievement of reason and freedom for scientific research,
The Socialist State would install rule by the scientists of everyone else.
Not content with liberals setting the workers free to achieve undreamt of prosperity, the
Socialist State would install rule by the workers of everyone else, or rather, rule
by politicians, bureaucrats and technocrats in their name.
Not content with the liberal creed of equality of rights, of equality before the law, the
The socialist state would trample on such equality on behalf of the monstrous and impossible
goal of equality or uniformity of results, or, rather, would erect a new privileged elite,
a new class, in the name of bringing about such an impossible equality.
Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the liberal goals
Goals of Freedom, Peace and Industrial Harmony and Growth, Goals which can only be achieved
through liberty and the separation of government from virtually everything, by imposing the
old conservative means of statism, collectivism and hierarchical privilege.
It was a movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail miserably in those numerous
in the 20th century by bringing to the masses only unprecedented despotism, starvation and grinding impoverishment.
But the worst thing about the rise of the socialist movement was that it was able to outflank the classical liberals on the left.
That is, as the party of hope, of radicalism, of revolution in the western world.
For just as the defenders of the Ancien Régime took their place on the right side of the hall during the French Revolution, so the liberals and radicals sat on the left.
From then on until the rise of socialism, the libertarian classical liberals were the left, even the extreme left on the ideological spectrum.
As late as 1848, such militant laissez-faire French liberals as Frederic Bastiat sat on the left in the National Assembly.
The classical liberals had begun as the radical revolutionary party in the West,
as the party of hope and of change on behalf of liberty, peace and progress.
To allow themselves to be outflanked, to allow the socialists to pose as the party of the left, was a bad strategic error.
Error, allowing the liberals to be put falsely into a confused middle-of-the-road position
with socialism and conservatism as the polar opposites.
Since libertarianism is nothing if not a party of change and of progress toward liberty,
abandonment of that role meant the abandonment of much of their reason for existence, either
in reality or in the minds of the public.
But none of this could have happened if the classical liberals had not allowed themselves
to decay from within.
They could have pointed out, as some of them indeed did, that socialism was a confused,
self-contradictory, quasi-conservative movement, absolute monarchy and feudalism with a modern
face, and that they themselves were still the only true radicals, undaunted people who
Who Insisted on Nothing Less Than Complete Victory for the Libertarian Ideal, Decay from Within
But after achieving impressive partial victories against statism, the classical liberals began
to lose their radicalism, their dogged insistence on carrying the battle against conservative
statism to the point of final victory.
Instead of using partial victories as a stepping stone for ever more pressure, the classical
liberals began to lose their fervor for change and for purity of principle.
They began to rest content with trying to safeguard their existing victories, and thus
turned themselves from a radical into a conservative movement.
Conservative in the sense of being content to preserve the status quo.
In short, the liberals left the field wide open for socialism to become the party of
hope and of radicalism, and even for the later corporatists to pose as liberals and progressives
as against the extreme right-wing and conservative libertarian classical liberals, since the
latter allowed themselves to be boxed into a position of hoping for nothing more than
stasis, than absence of change.
Such a strategy is foolish and untenable in a changing world.
But the degeneration of liberalism was not merely one of stance and strategy, but one
of principle as well.
For the liberals became content to leave the war-making power in the hands of the state,
to leave the education power in its hands, to leave the power over money and banking
and over roads in the hands of the state.
In short, to concede to state dominion over all the crucial levers of power in society.
In contrast to the 18th century liberals' total hostility to the executive and to bureaucracy,
the 19th century liberals tolerated and even welcomed the buildup of executive power and
of an entrenched oligarchic civil service bureaucracy.
Moreover, principle and strategy merged in the decay of 18th century and early 19th century
liberal devotion to abolitionism, to the view that, whether the institution be slavery or
any other aspect of statism, it should be abolished as quickly as possible, since the
immediate abolition of statism, while unlikely in practice, was to be sought after as the
only possible moral position.
Therefore to prefer a gradual whittling away to immediate abolition of an evil and coercive
institution is to ratify and sanction such evil, and therefore to violate libertarian
principles.
As the great abolitionist of slavery and libertarian William Lloyd Garrison explained, urge immediate
abolition as earnestly as we may.
It will, alas, be gradual abolition in the end.
We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow.
That it ought to be, we shall always contend.
There were two critically important changes in the philosophy and ideology of classical
liberalism which both exemplified and contributed to its decay as a vital, progressive and radical
force in the Western world.
The first and most important, occurring in the early to mid-19th century, was the abandonment
of the philosophy of natural rights and its replacement by technocratic utilitarianism.
Instead of liberty grounded on the imperative morality of each individual's right to person
and property, that is, instead of liberty being sought primarily on the basis of right
and Justice. Utilitarianism preferred liberty as generally the best way to achieve a vaguely
defined general welfare or common good. There were two grave consequences of this shift
from natural rights to utilitarianism. First, the purity of the goal, the consistency of
the principle, was inevitably shattered. For whereas the natural rights libertarians seeking
Inheriting morality and justice cleaves militantly to pure principle.
The utilitarian only values liberty as an ad hoc expedient.
And since expediency can and does shift with the wind, it will become easy for the utilitarian
in his cool calculus of cost and benefit to plump for statism in ad hoc case after case,
and thus to give principle away.
Indeed, this is precisely what happened to the Benthamite utilitarians in England.
Beginning with ad hoc libertarianism and laissez-faire, they found it ever easier to slide further and further into statism.
An example was the drive for an efficient and therefore strong civil service and executive power,
an efficiency that took precedence, indeed, replaced any concept of justice or right.
Second, and equally important, it is rare indeed ever to find a utilitarian who is also radical, who burns for immediate abolition of evil and coercion.
Utilitarians, with their devotion to expediency, almost inevitably oppose any sort of upsetting or radical change.
There have been no utilitarian revolutionaries.
Hence, utilitarians are never immediate abolitionists.
The abolitionist is such because he wishes to eliminate wrong and injustice as rapidly
as possible.
In choosing this goal, there is no room for cool, ad hoc weighing of cost and benefit.
Hence the classical liberal utilitarians abandoned radicalism and became mere gradualist reformers.
But in becoming reformers, they also put themselves inevitably into the position of advisors and
efficiency experts to the state.
In other words, they inevitably came to abandon libertarian principle, as well as a principled
libertarian strategy.
The utilitarians wound up as apologists for the existing order, for the status quo, and
hence were all too open to the charge by socialists and progressive corporatists that they were
were mere narrow-minded and conservative opponents of any and all change.
Thus, starting as radicals and revolutionaries, as the polar opposites of conservatives, the
classical liberals wound up as the image of the thing they had fought.
This utilitarian crippling of libertarianism is still with us.
Thus, in the early days of economic thought, utilitarianism captured free market economics
with the influence of Bentham and Ricardo, and this influence is today fully as strong
as ever.
Current free market economics is all too rife with appeals to gradualism, with scorn for
ethics, justice and consistent principle, and with a willingness to abandon free market
principles at the drop of a cost-benefit hat.
Hence, current free market economics is generally envisioned by intellectuals as merely apologetics
A second reinforcing change in the ideology of classical liberals came during the late
nineteenth century, when, at least for a few decades, they adopted the doctrines of social
evolutionism, often called social Darwinism.
Generally, statist historians have smeared such social Darwinist laissez-faire liberals
as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner as cruel champions of the extermination or
at least of the disappearance of the socially unfit.
Much of this was simply the dressing up of sound economic and sociological free market
doctrine in the then fashionable trappings of evolutionism.
But the really important and crippling aspect of their social Darwinism was the illegitimate
carrying over to the social sphere of the view that species, or later, genes, change
very very slowly after millennia of time.
The social Darwinist liberal came then to abandon the very idea of revolution or radical
change in favor of sitting back and waiting for the inevitable tiny evolutionary changes
over eons of time.
In short, ignoring the fact that liberalism had had to break through the power of ruling
elites by a series of radical changes and revolutions, the social Darwinists became
conservatives, preaching against any radical measures and in favor of only the most minutely
gradual of changes.
Ironically enough, modern evolutionary theory is coming to abandon completely the theory
of Gradual Evolutionary Change. Instead, it is now perceived that a far more accurate
picture is sharp and sudden flips from one static species equilibrium to another. This
is being called the theory of punctuational change. As one of the expounders of the New
View, Professor Stephen J. Gould writes, gradualism is a philosophy of change, not an induction
from Nature.
Gradualism too has strong ideological components, more responsible for its previous success
than any objective matching with external nature.
The utility of gradualism as an ideology must explain much of its influence, for it became
liberalism's quintessential dogma against radical change.
Sudden flips are against the laws of nature.
In fact, the great libertarian Spencer himself is a fascinating illustration of just such
a change in classical liberalism, and his case is paralleled in America by William Graham
Sumner.
In a sense, Herbert Spencer embodies within himself much of the decline of liberalism
in the 19th century, for Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, as virtually
and, finally, a pure libertarian.
But as the virus of sociology and social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism
as a dynamic, radical, historical movement, although without abandoning it in pure theory.
While looking forward to an eventual victory of pure liberty, of contract as against status,
of industry as against militarism, Spencer began to see that victory as inevitable but
only after millennia of gradual evolution.
Hence Spencer abandoned liberalism as a fighting radical creed and confined his liberalism
in practice to a weary conservative rear-guard action against the growing collectivism and
statism of his day.
But if utilitarianism, bolstered by Social Darwinism, was the main agent of philosophical
and Ideological Decay in the Liberal Movement.
The single most important and even cataclysmic reason for its demise was its abandonment
of formerly stringent principles against war, empire and militarism.
In country after country, it was the siren song of nation-state and empire that destroyed
classical liberalism.
In England, the Liberals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries abandoned the anti-war,
anti-imperialist, little Englandism of Cobden, Bright and the Manchester School.
Instead, they adopted the obscenely entitled liberal imperialism, joining the conservatives
in the expansion of empire, and the conservatives and the right-wing socialists in the destructive
imperialism and collectivism of World War I.
In Germany, Bismarck was able to split the previously almost triumphant liberals by setting
up the lure of unification of Germany by blood and iron.
In both countries, the result was the destruction of the liberal cause.
In the United States, the classical liberal party had long been the democratic party,
known in the latter 19th century as the party of personal liberty.
Basically, it had been the party not only of personal but also of economic liberty, the stalwart opponent of prohibition, of Sunday blue laws and of compulsory education, the devoted champion of free trade, hard money, absence of governmental inflation, separation of banking from the state and the absolute minimum of government.
It construed state power to be negligible, and federal power to be virtually non-existent.
On foreign policy, the Democratic Party, though less rigorously, tended to be the party of peace, anti-militarism and anti-imperialism.
But personal and economic libertarianism were both abandoned with the capture of the Democratic Party by the Bryan forces in 1896,
and the foreign policy of non-intervention was then rudely abandoned by Woodrow Wilson
two decades later. It was an intervention and a war that were to usher in a century of death
and devastation, of wars and new despotisms, and also a century in all warring countries
of the new corporatist statism, of a welfare warfare state run by an alliance of big government,
Big Business, Unions and Intellectuals that we have mentioned above.
The last gasp indeed of the old laissez-faire liberalism in America was the doughty and
aging libertarians who banded together to form the anti-imperialist league at the turn
of the century, to combat the American war against Spain and the subsequent imperialist
American war to crush the Filipinos who were striving for national independence from both
with Spain and the United States.
To current eyes, the idea of an anti-imperialist who is not a Marxist may seem strange, but
opposition to imperialism began with laissez-faire liberals such as Cobden and Bright in England
and Eugen Richter in Prussia.
In fact, the Anti-Imperialist League, headed by Boston industrialist and economist Edward
at Atkinson, and including Sumner, consisted largely of laissez-faire radicals who had
fought the good fight for the abolition of slavery and had then championed free trade,
hard money and minimal government.
To them, their final battle against the new American imperialism was simply part and parcel
of their lifelong battle against coercion, statism and injustice, against big government
in every area of life, both domestic and foreign.
We have traced the rather grisly story of the decline and fall of classical liberalism
after its rise and partial triumph in previous centuries.
What then is the reason for the resurgence, the flowering, of libertarian thought and
activity in the last few years, particularly in the United States?
How could these formidable forces and coalitions for statism have yielded even that much to
a resurrected libertarian movement?
Shouldn't the resumed march of statism in the late 19th and 20th centuries be a cause
for gloom rather than usher in a reawakening of a seemingly more abundant libertarianism?
Why didn't libertarianism remain dead and buried?
We have seen why libertarianism would naturally arise first and most fully in the United States,
a land steeped in libertarian tradition.
But we have not yet examined the question, why the renaissance of libertarianism at all
within the last few years?
What contemporary conditions have led to this surprising development?
We must postpone answering this question until the end of the book, until we first examine
What the libertarian creed is and how that creed can be applied to solve the leading
problem areas in our society.