Today I'm going to be speaking on classical liberal historiography.
Now, you understand that the whole conference has been devoted to history and there's a reason for that.
Because we find from experience, we find from our own experience and people around us and society in general,
Well, history obviously has a number of important uses and functions, but among them is, one of the reasons for its importance is that people tend to derive their political views from what they think they know about history.
We've learned this in a way in the past couple of days.
There's a crying need for unity for the centralized state.
This is one of the great achievements of modern history.
And we learn about the story of a centralized state basically through history.
We learn about the glorious outcome of the so-called Civil War.
Civil War, by the way, one of our neoconfederates once simply made this remark, and to my mind
it is totally and instantly persuasive.
There was no civil war in American history.
Civil war is something as, for instance, in Spain in the 1930s, or the Russian Civil War,
the English Civil War, that is between two contending parties, each of which wants to
to gain control of the whole country.
This was not the case in 1861, obviously.
The South did not want to gain control of the whole country.
All they wanted to do was leave the empire,
just as the colonies wanted to leave the British Empire
in 1776.
In other words, it was a war of secession,
just as the American Revolution could
be called the War of American Secession
from the British Empire.
So that's a misnomer.
But in any case, it's from history that we learn
why we need the centralized state
and why it becomes more and more glorious
and we learn of the role of the sainted Lincoln.
And I'm afraid we cannot overestimate the power of these,
a certain interpretation of these historical episodes
that then is literally graven in stone with these memorials.
I've seen the Lincoln Memorial, even the Jefferson Memorial.
It's amazing that in all the works of Jefferson that speak of reducing government, of limiting government, of cutting government down,
that government is best which governs least, where we could be told from Washington when to reap and when to sow,
we should soon lack bread, and on and on and on.
The people who designed the Jefferson Memorial could not find one single statement.
You know, there are quotations from Jefferson around the wall there.
Not one single statement about cutting down government power.
But these... So Jefferson is understood in New Deal terms.
Lincoln, of course, is the great centralizer.
And now they're sacralized, made sacred to an extent by their memorials.
However, there is no need in my sunset years
to torment myself by ever, ever going to see the FDR memorial.
The closest we ever came at the Mises Institute was once holding a conference,
a guy was there, at Warm Springs, Georgia.
That was a conference on reassessing the presidency, the final product of which is this book.
And we did it in honor of the man that Sam Francis, perhaps a bit cruelly, calls old rubber legs.
However, when we held our conference there with some of the people who are here today,
strolling through the paths of the Southern White House and seeing all the sacred relics,
By the way, cured some of our lame people and blind people who were in our group just by touching Roosevelt's bed and so on.
Well, anyway, walking through those pathways, the odd and reverent tourists were a bit shocked by some of the conversation which they overheard.
But nonetheless, this Roosevelt Memorial now, you know, the little kids are going to be
taken, six and a half or seven acres with all kinds of things, and kids for the rest
of time are going to be brought there and shown how great Roosevelt was.
You know, I understand why Bradford, Mel Bradford, for instance, was so annoyed by this Lincoln
Memorial, because he was understood that the function of it was to push a certain
interpretation of the war between the states. Now today, I'm going to be a little
while I'll be talking about classical liberal historians, but nowadays
historians of course tend to be overwhelmingly on the on the left and I
I can't emphasize enough the importance of this brief essay by Robert Higgs, which you can find a download from the free market, Jeff Tucker would give us the volume and number, I think, if you ask, on America's greatest presidents, question mark, because this gives us an insight into the mentality of current day historians who, by pushing their interpretation
are also pushing their political agenda. Of course, we necessarily have to read some of these leftist historians. Many of them are very good, very competent. We learn a lot from them. There aren't too many other kinds of historians around, but then we can learn from them as long as we keep in mind their assumptions and values and discount that in what we read. In other words, get the material, the facts, the data, but don't necessarily buy the interpretation, which is based on their own leftist
assumptions. Sometimes though these leftist historians go really beyond the
pale. I don't know if you follow this kind of thing but for instance there's
the historian at Mount Holyoke, Joseph Ellis, who just won the Pulitzer Prize
for one of his works and now it turns out that he has been consistently lying to
to his students, to his colleagues, to the public, about his whole career.
He claims he was in Vietnam, he was in combat, he was 101st Airborne, Westmoreland used him
as an advisor, Halberstam used him as a consultant in his book on Vietnam, and it's all lies,
he admits it now.
Now the New York Times op-ed page featured an article explaining, it's not lies, it's
storytelling.
It's what historians do.
Okay, you know, I mean, there's so much craziness in the world that it's...
And this man won the Pulitzer Prize, okay?
But what do we just say about Belziel?
What's Belziel? David, what's Belziel's first name or Joe?
Michael. Michael, okay.
A man who won the Bancroft Prize, which is the highest prize given out to American historians,
for his book on arming America.
His thesis, maybe you've followed this, you can follow it on the internet, there are a lot of very good articles about this.
His thesis is that Americans weren't gun nuts before the Civil War.
That's when people started using guns in America.
It's ridiculous to think that in revolutionary times, in the frontier, people used guns.
There were almost no guns.
They didn't use guns for defense against the Indians or defense of their household.
They didn't use guns for hunting.
There were almost no guns, they didn't work, the ones that did exist.
So, and he was allegedly on the basis of a lot of data from probate courts, you know,
people never willed their guns to anybody.
It never occurred to him that perhaps guns were so common that there was no point in bequeathing guns
any more than bequeathing some other item, the dog, for instance.
Nonetheless, he went, and now it's been examined, and it turns out that the man is a fraud.
The very data that he claims supports his thesis.
Others, Joyce Malcolm, for instance, who was an excellent historian of the issue and of
the right to bear arms, going back to this data, it says the opposite of what he claims
it says.
Or, these laws that say, yeah, you can get a gun, you can't keep a gun, but you can get
a gun from the central storage area of the town, don't mention anything about guns.
So it's a tissue of fraud and fabrication, they're not going to take the Bancroft Prize
away from him, and of course, you know, none of us is going to win a Bancroft Prize, Bob
Higgs is not going to win a Bancroft Prize for Crisis and Leviathan, and when the time
The time comes that Dr. Thomas Woods, an octogenarian, shall have completed his 27th volume.
He's not going to win the Bancroft Prize, don't believe that.
What I want to talk about today is the tradition of classical liberal historians.
And here again, I don't know how these leftists get away with it.
Here's John Dunn, professor of political theory at Cambridge, the author of 20 books, or maybe,
And here's a quotation. He's talking about classical liberals and liberals in general.
If the central dispositional value of liberals is tolerance, their central political value
is perhaps a fundamental antipathy towards authority in any of its forms. Right? In other
words, Frederic Bastiat really wasn't a Catholic. But get this, dispositionally, liberalism
William has little regard for the past.
He was a professor at Cambridge University.
I mean, so much for Thomas Macaulay, the whole tradition of Whig historians,
for Augustin Thierry, for Ippalat Tain, William Leckie, all these great 19th century historians,
or the ones I'm going to be talking about mainly, Tocqueville and Acton.
They had no interest in history. They had no regard for history.
Incidentally, I just cannot understand how these celebrated leftists get away with it.
Here's another quotation on a subject I'm going to be dealing with in a moment,
Lord Acton, and this is from the celebrated historian of thought, Maurice Cranston.
You maybe haven't heard of him, but believe me, very well-known author of another 20 books,
biographer of Locke, biographer of Rousseau, and this is what he says about Lord Acton.
Lord Acton proposed to write a history of mankind in terms of its struggle towards freedom.
Acton seems to have meant by freedom, freedom from the constraints of nature, freedom from disease and hunger, and insecurity and ignorance and superstition.
In other words, you know, Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.
And Cranston calls this the progressive view of history, which culminates in our time in the welfare state.
So, here's Lord Acton as a precursor of the welfare state.
And I'm telling you, Cranston is a very famous and important guy.
So, let's go back now to the early 19th century.
And I'm going to be concentrating mainly, except for Acton, on the French tradition.
And this is something that I like to emphasize, and I think is very important.
Murray used to say this, Murray Rothbard, that we have a very provincial and parochial view of the history of liberal thought, liberal in our sense.
It's all England, America a little bit, America more practice than theory, but it's basically Britain.
And one reason is that American historians, amazingly, cannot read foreign languages.
I know members of the Stanford History Department, who are full professors and have been for many years, who cannot read a paragraph in French, let alone, you know, German, which seems beyond any possibility for these guys.
Of course, you know, the historian of Germany and so on can read German, but, but American academics in general just do not learn foreign languages.
and Foreign Languages
So, one of the men I'm going to mention now,
one of my favorites whom Tom Woods mentioned the other day,
Benjamin Constar
and his name is written just like constant
and we say Constar
Benjamin Constar, who in my opinion is the greatest French political thinker of the 19th century
and perhaps the greatest liberal political thinker of the 19th century altogether
it was only a few years ago
It was a few years ago that any of his major works was translated into English in the Cambridge text and political philosophy series.
So the people always talked about Tocqueville, who was the one guy who was translated very early and has constantly been in print, but almost never mentioned Constanze.
So that there is a bias in favor of anglophone historians and anglophone writers in general that we should try as much as possible to overcome.
I mean, you know, it doesn't mean that you have to learn French, but what ought to happen is that there should be more and more translations of the important writers.
Now, in the early 19th century, these liberals very often put their liberal philosophy in historical terms.
In other words, not in abstract philosophical terms, in the way that Locke might, although Constanze did that also,
and not in economic terms, the way Smith and some others might have done,
but they put their political principles in the form of a historical narrative.
Constanze, for instance, has two very important works, which you can find in this nice selection from Cambridge University Press.
One on the spirit of conquest and usurpation, which Napoleon has never mentioned in it, but it's an anti-Napoleonic work.
And here, Constanze's theory, which he develops, is that there was an age of conquest.
There was an age when war could even pay the victor and he deals with this in medieval times and so on however in the modern world the dominant factor is commerce and no war can pay as much as it costs even Napoleon with his plundering all of Europe bankrupted France so that someone like Napoleon again who's not mentioned but any conqueror any aggressive
is an anachronism in the modern age. So in other words he puts this liberal
philosophy emphasizing the importance of peace into a historical framework. What
used to be appropriate in the past, what's appropriate now. One of his great
essays, which I think anybody interested in a liberal idea should read, is a
speech he gave one time on the liberty of the ancients and of the moderns.
Constant, by the way, was, as all of these guys I'm going to talk about, was a very interesting personality.
There's just not very much time to go into their actual personality.
Well, he was born into the lower gentry, the lower nobility, and home-schooled.
Not by evangelical parents, however, unfortunately.
His father was a Rouet, and that is somewhat promiscuous, and Constant, like most of the 18th people born in the 18th century, took over those mores.
But he had a tutor at one point who played a game with him when he was about four or five.
They were going to develop a secret language, which would be a code just between them.
And Constant, like a kid might, was very thrilled by this and really plunged into the secret language,
which turned out to be classical Greek.
Now, again, I don't have time to go into a lot of interesting figures.
Very influential on Constanze, and influential in her own right, was Madame de Stijl.
That's not an umlaut, but it makes it pronounced as Madame de Stijl.
A very interesting figure, and she wrote the first important history of the French Revolution.
Her father was an important figure in the Revolution, in Necker.
Her book is Considerations on the Revolution in France.
And they collaborated in many different ways for a long time.
So really, one would have to say that a number of the ideas of Constanze probably came from Madame de Stijl also.
But this essay of his that I'm talking about, on the liberty of the ancients and the moderns,
Max Weber, maybe you've heard, this great German sociologist, had the idea of an ideal type.
Ideal type was a mental construct that we used to try to make sense of history.
And he said, Constanze's distinction between ancient and modern liberal is the great ideal type.
Because it does help, it's not necessarily true in every detail,
But it does help us arrange the data and make sense of historical development
And Constant said, what went wrong in the French Revolution?
What went wrong, he thought, basically, was that drawing on Rousseau,
Rupierre and the Jacobins, and even some of the others before him,
attempted to revive ancient liberty
What was ancient liberty?
Ancient liberty meant the right to participate in politics
However, in return for enjoying this right, the citizens gave over to the community, to the collective, total right over their property and lives.
As you can tell, for instance, even in Athens, Socrates was put to death simply by a vote of the people.
That was ancient liberty. They enjoyed all these great political freedoms.
On the other hand, did not enjoy individual freedom to the extent that we understand it.
So he said, what is the true liberty of the moderns?
And he goes through a list.
Not to be harassed by the law, not to be able to fill your days with your own work and pleasures and whims,
to use your property, even to abuse your property, to speak freely, to assemble with others for common purposes, and on.
And he says, this is what an Englishman, a Frenchman, an American understands by liberty today.
Now, in attempting to bring in ancient liberty, these French revolutionaries found an impossible
task since it is simply not fitted for the modern world.
We have a totally different world now.
We don't have the little city-states and slavery and engaged in constant warfare, one with
the other.
Again, the way of life of modern man is production and commerce.
So that in order to try to implement this vision, this impossible dream, the Jacobins had, of course, to have recourse to ultimate terror.
They had to force modern mentalities into a totally resistant framework.
Now, Constant was a big influence on the next generation of French writers I want to talk about.
And so was, another influence on them was another great French economist who Murray Rothbard, in his history of economic thought, considers much, much superior to Adam Smith.
By the way, if you ever get a chance, I know some of these books are quite expensive, but Murray's two-volume history of economic thought, I consider a masterpiece and almost a college education in themselves.
They're not in paperback yet, I don't know if they'll ever be, or in the near future, but see what you might be able to do about that.
But this economist I have in mind, this French economist, you'll find his name in one of the holes here, together with other great freedom fighters of the past.
What is this? Is this some insurrection?
Okay. I'm not going to try green. I'll try this one.
Okay. Does that satisfy you?
Okay. Jean-Baptiste Say.
And so I'm saying that Constanze, one influence, Say, his treatise on political economy, another.
And these writers I'm going to talk about right now call themselves the industrialists.
Because they came up with the philosophy they called industrialism.
And they include Charles Comte, not the famous Auguste Comte,
But another man, Charles de Noyer, and a man who became, they were more political philosophers and economists, but a man who became a famous historian in the 19th century, Augustin Thierry.
Now, what these industrial writers did was come up with a general framework for history.
According to them, history is the history of class conflict, and they listed the opposing classes in history.
They were the conquerors who established states versus the peasants who they lived off.
They were the feudal lords versus the merchants and workers of the towns.
They were the kings versus the productive classes of society in modern times.
Above all, the civilian and military bureaucrats versus anybody else in society who actually does productive work.
So they have an idea of class conflict, and they illustrate this on again and again and again.
So they have an idea of class conflict.
However, the classes that are involved are quite different from the ones that we hear about so often nowadays.
The classes that are involved, as far as the productive classes go, first you have to have production before you can have exploitation,
are the classes that actually produce utilities, produce economic value.
See this they get from Say. And those classes are the farmers, the artisans, other laborers, but also the merchants who increase value by marketing goods and taking goods from one place to where they're wanted more.
Other bankers, as long as they're engaged in free banking, the capitalists in general,
the capitalists in general who accumulate capital and make labor much more productive.
Those are the productive classes.
The exploiting classes are the classes that use force or the threat of force to extort
values from those people who produce them.
Now, this is in a way an abstract political theory, but I'm saying that they put it in the form of historical episodes in their early career.
Afterwards, they do other things. So the whole of history, they say, can be understood in this way.
Now, if this seems familiar to you, there's a reason.
I have an essay in a book that's come out already on Requiem for Marx, which the Mises
Institute put out, talking about this.
And Marx himself says, I did not originate the class conflict theory.
I got it from French historians and economists and all I did was introduce the dictatorship
of the proletariat and some other accessories.
So the fact of the matter is that this famous, world famous Marxist interpretation of history
has its roots in a much more defensible and a much more sensible classical liberal theory
of class conflict based on the plundering of productive people by the state and people
who exercise force in society.
Now, this master interpretation, this, you could say, libertarian interpretation of history,
was continued in France, even past Marxism, by the whole great French tradition that's
connected with the Journal des Economistes, this great French economic journal, the Journal
Journal of the Economists, which is, to my mind, the greatest single source of classical
liberal thought.
It was published for a century from the time of Bastiat in the 1840s, and it only came
to an abrupt end when Paris was occupied in June of 1940 by forces which I dare not mention
here because the Germans seemed to be in control of this institute more and more, but that's
So, another whole problem, did I say Germans? I'm sorry, I meant Hawaiians, but this tradition of the predatory classes connected with the state and the victimized productive classes is continued especially in Italy and there's a clear personal connection between these French economists and then Italian economists also and this is something that
Professor Bassani is very familiar with, and also Professor Gottfried is very familiar with and interested in also.
Now, well, okay, so these are some of the writers who do write about history, especially Thierry afterwards.
Now, I want to concentrate on two very famous classical liberals of the 19th century.
Now the first is Alexis de Tocqueville.
Now Alexis de Tocqueville is enjoying an extremely bull market.
Everybody quotes him, except Marxists.
Classical liberals, libertarians, communitarians, neocons, and there's a reason for that.
Talk to me about Robert Nisbet. By the way, I don't know if you know this name, Robert Nisbet.
He died a few years ago. He's a terrific sociologist.
A libertarian conservative, you might describe his position as.
And really, his books are always worth looking into.
And Nisbet had a very interesting article
called The Two Tocquevilles.
And he goes through Tocquevilles' thought.
And Tocqueville, maybe this was a part of his personality,
tended sometimes to say this.
And then, in a dialectical process within himself,
you might say, then tended to bring out
The Reservations in that statement and said this.
So that we have what seemed to be really very often
conflicting and almost contradictory positions
that he takes.
So that's one explanation of why he's so popular.
But I wanted to mention another thing.
I'll tell you, he wrote his greatest work
was Democracy in America in two volumes.
One came out in 1835 and one in 1840, and the one that came out in the first volume ends in this way.
There are at the present time two great nations, 1834, two great nations in the world which started from different points,
but seemed to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans.
Both of them had grown up unnoticed and while the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere,
But elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank of the nations.
All the other nations seem nearly to have reached their natural limits.
But the Americans and the Russians continue forward.
The Americans struggle against the obstacles that nature opposes to him, the American.
The adversaries of the Russian are men.
The former combats the wilderness and savage life.
and the latter, civilization, combat civilization with all its arms.
The conquests of the American are therefore gained by the plowshare, those of the Russian, by the sword.
The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest.
The Russian centers all the authority of society in a single arm.
The principal instrument of the American is freedom of the Russian servitude.
The starting point is different and their courses are not the same, yet each of them
seems marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.
Well, you can imagine after 1945, people considered Tocqueville a prophet, right?
More than a hundred years before, he seemed to have predicted the world situation in the
later 19th century.
And there are a lot of insights like that.
There's no doubt that his great book, Democracy in America in two volumes, is still the best character study of the American people.
A lot of it still rings true. America seems to be a joint stock company let loose on the shores of a continent.
Americans driven by self-interest. Americans, on the other hand, the most religious of the Western people.
And there are reasons for that also.
Now this is the thing about Tocqueville, he's not a historian in the sense, of course he deals with data, but he's not a historian in the sense that he simply piles up one fact after another.
What he's always looking for are the underlying psychological, social-psychological forces that are bringing about these phenomena.
And there's still very much to be learned from him.
Now, Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville, so he came from an aristocratic family, his mother
and father were arrested at the time of the great terror, and they were imprisoned just
at the time when the rug spear fell, they were scheduled to be guillotined, and when
his father came out, his father was 26 or something at the time, his hair had turned
totally white and his mother always had a kind of melancholy in her nature although she was a very
sweet natured and a very intelligent woman but that thing that passed on to Tocqueville also
there was also the problem that they married his english wife never bore him any children or he
never had any children so that also tended in that direction also when he was young he read the 18th
He was a landowner. He had tenants. He felt it was necessary to go through the ritual.
So he attended church. And he always insisted on the utility and also beauty and greatness
of Christian Doctrine, but now he had a big debate in the 1840s with a young up-and-coming
intellectual named Arthur de Gobineau, Gobineau you see was a scientist and Tocqueville a
humanist and Gobineau said I simply go by science, what do you go by science to do to
To prove the inequality of the human races, that was his book, his big book on the inequality of the human races, the beginning of European racism in the modern sense.
And Tocqueville desperately rejected this kind of biological determinism that Gobineau was presenting, and opposed to it, Christianity.
I am not a believer, but as much of an unbeliever as I am, I still admire Christianity, etc., etc.
that he could he did not find faith and again it was you know as the saying goes
that there's a there's a head in the gutter and the gutters running blood it's
the fault of Voltaire it's a fault of Rousseau so the 18th century produced
this in him but nonetheless he continued with the with the outside form now as a
The young man, he came to the U.S. in 1831, he came with his friend, Gustave de Beaumont.
There's no direct historical evidence for this, but my suspicion is they came mainly to meet babes,
being young Frenchmen and so on, but, you know, we can't, let's leave that aside for the moment.
He says that he came to study the future, that what was happening in America would be the future of Europe,
in Europe. And what was happening in America was democracy, equality. He wanted to study
the meaning of equality in America and the implications. And there are books on Tocqueville
in America that describe his actual journey in democracy in America. He doesn't detail
that very much, but it was fascinating. He came from a high family and had letters of
of Introduction to a Lot of Famous People
to a settlement called Detroit and to a clearing in the woods called Green Bay
down the Mississippi and on their boat they happen to meet and totally writes home about this
a member of the national legislature named David Crockett
who seems to be totally illiterate, he lives in the woods, dines on the results of his own hunting
And this is a man who makes the national laws.
On this fateful trip down the Mississippi, he happened to come across, I think it was the Choctaws.
They stopped at a certain point and there were all these Indians who were being transported across the Mississippi.
This was the Trail of Tears.
And he said, by the way, he's a beautiful stylist in everything he ever wrote, in his letters also, and he said, and I looked at them, there was not any active despair, but there was a sense of a vanishing, of a ghost coming in to take the form of what used to be human beings.
and this race seems to be doomed in North America.
He went to Washington and was presented to the President of the United States in 1831.
Who was that? Anyone, anyone?
You know, like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, anyone, anyone?
Jackson, right.
And so he said, and we went to the President's mansion,
which is the mansion of a middling nobleman in Paris.
If he has an entourage, they were not very attendant on him
because he entered the room by himself.
And he offered us a glass of wine
which we accepted, calling him Monsieur.
You understand the point.
I mean, he was not your majesty and so on.
He didn't have a court around him.
This was American democracy personified.
Okay, right? Of course he had all these secret service goons talking into their little...
So, he found a real, a different world in America.
And in 1835, the first volume of Democracy in America.
In 1840, the second. And immediate successes.
now much could be said about them I suggest that you you look into them you know there's a new
translation by Mansfield and somebody else which is supposed to be quite good I like the revised
old translation by Reeve from his own time it doesn't matter that much but you can get a hold
of the volumes you don't have to read them from cover to cover but dip into them and the titles
In the first volume, 1834, John Stuart Mill liked it very much because Tocqueville talks about the tyranny of the majority, that in democracy the majority itself can tyrannize, it's not just a question of a small clique.
I mean there's some point to that, but I don't think that's the most insightful thing he ever said.
The problem we have now is not so much the tyranny of the majority as the tyranny of a new aristocracy or a new clique of the political class.
What we see in America, for instance, and in other western countries, is the imposition of the world view of this self-appointed political elite on everybody else.
And as Professor Gottfried explained so well in his book After Liberalism, the concerted
attack on all of the voluntary institutions and traditions of society in an attempt to
root them out.
So it's not the majority that's particularly at fault here.
In the second volume, he goes more into the main theme of his works, which is the increasing
Centralization of State Power. Now when the time comes, in 1856, for him to write The Old Regime and the Revolution, his most important historical work, the thing that surprised people is this, of course the French Revolution brought about many changes, however, brought about many fewer changes than people think, because the main result was that it accelerated the trend towards centralization that the French
The French kings had started, so that it was not a break and a reversal, but the French kings had started to centralize, and it centralized to a great degree, as Professor Livingston explained.
And now, the French Revolution and Napoleon consolidating the Revolution created the great model of political centralization that we have today, and all of the attendant evils on that.
So that was the theme very often in the second volume, and especially in the old regime and the revolution.
And here, the second volume ends with one of the most, I think, terrifying visions in political thought,
because now he wants to talk about the future.
I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever existed before in the world.
The thing itself is new, and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it.
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.
The first thing that strikes one is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty, paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.
Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest.
He exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
And now comes this.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure the gratifications to watch over their fate.
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.
It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood.
It is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.
It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property and subdivides their inheritances.
What Remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.
Professor Stephen Holmes at the University of Chicago mocks conservatives and libertarians
who think this might have something to do with the welfare state.
Well this is really just in the way of an introduction of Tocqueville and I must get
on now to Lord Acton. Hey, John Acton. Now, Acton is one of those historians from the
19th century, like Tocqueville, that people still go to and read. Burkhardt, Jakob Burkhardt,
the Swiss is another one. And what I'm saying is that they're different, for instance, from
There are some other great historians of the century, like Thomas Macaulay in England or Michelet in France, who were great in their time, still great in a way, historians read them, but people don't go to these writers to find a kind of wisdom that's supposed to come from historical reflection, and they go to people like Acton, they go to people like Tocqueville. Acton is most famous, of course, right? Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that's a sort of emblematic
of the wisdom that people think should be able to be distilled from history and that historians, one hopes, would give us.
Now, unlike Tocqueville, Acton from his childhood enjoyed a serene Christian and Catholic faith.
Once he wrote about himself, this is the way he summed up his life.
He says, his mind is a very simple, obvious, and not interesting story.
It is the story of a man who started in life believing himself a sincere catholic and a sincere liberal and who therefore renounced everything in catholicism which was not compatible with liberty and everything in politics which was not compatible with catholic faith.
His guiding star was always that liberty advanced, as he says, by sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God.
So what we have here, the only individual in the National Biography, the great English reference work, the only individual who is referred to as a historian and moralist.
Now, again, his career is very interesting. He was one of the most learned men of his time, even in his own time, and a time when writers, thinkers acted as if they thought all the encyclopedias would someday disappear, vanish from the shelves, so they had to know all that stuff themselves.
and Acton read in two large books every day of his adult life and to other people who were very learned he was a phenomenon now he began by being a Catholic and also as he says also a liberal and defended the Catholic Church against rising nationalism the great enemy as he saw it was Jacobin type nationalism
Nationalism, the kind of nationalism that Professor Livingston referred to, that sanctified
the state, one and indivisible, as the highest value, the highest glory. They could sometimes
use the word God, but they never meant God. They meant God as the patron of this all-encompassing
and State. So that he had no great admiration for the French Revolution. He referred to
the first French Republic as a republic founded on a thousand murders. He meant the September
massacres where they went around the prisons and simply massacred prisoners. In his own
For a long time he opposed Italian nationalism and this windbag, Mazzini, not much of a thinker, but the message was clear that the nation and the nation state is the expression of the will of the people.
There is nothing higher than the will of the people and this is one reason why Acton thought that the Catholic Church could play a very important role.
And again, as it had in the past, acting as a counterpoise to the state.
As Tom Woods quoted the Constant, individuals on their own, each individual, you know, acting
on their own, it turns out to be Ruby Rich.
But individuals associated in institutions, which then can throw their weight around,
can act as a buffer against the growing power of the state.
The Catholic Church had done this in history, in the Middle Ages, in the controversy over
the investiture of the bishops, and as I mentioned in my first lecture, in its act, and who promotes
this idea, this fight between the papacy, between the Vatican on the one hand and the
Emperor and the Kings of Europe on the other, this is extended over 400 years, this is what allowed these free institutions of Europe to come into existence.
Now Acton is famous because when someone like John Stuart Mill or let's say Robert Nozick become less libertarian and less radical as time goes on, Acton became more radical as time went on.
Because he was conversant with the new research methods that the Germans had pioneered, that is, going into the archives.
Not just going into the archives, not just that, because the archives are basically state documents and you don't write history simply from what the state admits.
That's why E.H. Carr, for instance, wrote the history of Soviet Russia, the most famous Sovietologist in the early 20th century, basically from Soviet documents.
that is published Soviet documents.
But nonetheless, you start by going into the archives.
And then going into the Vatican archives,
he began to find out things that troubled him very much.
That is actual actions of particular popes,
actual actions of men who afterwards became saints,
became canonized,
that the Roman Inquisition did actually kill people.
Acton was aware that the states killed many more people than any church ever did, however, the church had a special obligation to remain ethical and morally pure.
And by not only committing murder but sanctioning murder, the church became, as he put it, the fiend skulking behind the crucifix.
and this changed his whole life.
At Vatican I, he was the great lay opponent of papal infallibility.
Because like a lot of people, he misunderstood.
He thought that papal infallibility was then going to be,
it's only been used twice, I think, in the whole history of the doctrine
and things having to do with Mary.
But he thought that papal infallibility would mean that every terrible thing
that the pope wanted to impose on people would now become Catholic doctrine.
Nonetheless, he fought it and they try to make it very hard for him to remain within the church.
Here, he simply would not go along with their plan to eventually kick him out because the church was
the keeper of the sacraments, he thought. This was too important for him so that he didn't say as much
Afterwards, when the infallibilists won, he didn't say as much as he might have.
But in his political views and in political interpretation, he became more and more radical.
He had originally been more or less of a Whig historian.
Now he says that the Whig interpretation and the Whig way of doing it in history was not enough.
This has to be replaced by liberalism.
And what he said, what he meant was that the idea that liberty is founded on the slow building up of tradition is true to an extent but not enough.
And the Americans found out the true answer, that liberty is based on natural rights that come from God.
They appealed from the laws of England to the laws of scripture and from the king of England to the king of kings.
and they thought that was the beginning of true radical liberalism.
Now, Acton is most famous and I'll have to be closing now, he's most famous perhaps still
for this part of the description I mentioned before that he was not only a historian but a moralist.
Acton finally was given an academic position in 1895.
seven years before he died and he gave a famous inaugural lecture on the study of
history to the assembled people there and which begins very nicely fellow
students and he gives advice learn as much by writing as by reading and he
says a lot of things and mentions other things that everybody will tell you then
he says but the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to
debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude but to try
others by the final maxim that governs your own life and to suffer no man and
no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict
on wrong. Now since this time very few historians have ever agreed with this
and you can understand I mean for instance Herbert Butterfield has a
a famous critique called the Whig Interpretation of History and you can
understand why people might be skeptical of this what gives historian the right
to act as a moral judge I mean what it do they really know what more about
morality than other people but I don't think that's the way to understand it
and the or a way to work to use Acton's advice rather this that look at it this
Too many historians exonerate bad people in history.
Sure, they'll say Hitler was bad and maybe Stalin did some bad things four times in his life.
But on the other hand, Franklin Roosevelt was justified in this, Harry Truman was justified in this, and so on.
So what Acton is saying is don't easily exonerate any of the powerful men in history.
History. Push and push into the evidence until you find out the whole story. And I would say that a good example of a neo-actonian historian is Robert Conquest. If you know this, this writer wrote The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow. Now Conquest is an excellent historian, goes by the evidence, all the evidence there is, is very careful. And it's not a question of saying that Stalin was
It's a question, what he does is he just pushes into the evidence, lays it forth, and you can see that what's going on in his mind is, I am not going to let them get away with it.
They will simply not get away with it. There's too much innocent blood that flows.
So in other words, it's not a question of haranguing people with moralistic judgments.
What dates would you put on the beginning and the end of this classical liberal period?
Acton died in 1902, you might say around then. Of course, Murray Rothbard's four-volume history of America up to the time of the Revolution and Constitution is a great example of libertarian history.
And there have been other historians, a man who was very good and died a few years ago, Alfred E. Kirch, who wrote Decline of American Liberalism, he meant that in our sense, and he was also a war resistor, and a free market man.
Did the Dr. Bell also phrase the Turkish morality in America, giving a lot of the greatness of America to his Christian heritage?
He was afraid of individualism. He used the term individualism in a bad sense, and that term, that word, individualism, for a long while had a negative connotation.
By individualism, he meant this concern only with your own welfare, maybe the welfare of your family, but no concern about what's happening in the wider society.
and the implication, and he even says this sometimes,
but you should be concerned with the wider society
because if you're not, the centralizing power
and the government and the bureaucrats
are working day and night to increase their power
and take your liberty away from you.
So if you just pay attention to your small group
and as he says, paltry affairs,
and don't worry about the larger society,
ultimately we're gonna come up with despotism.
Now, one of the things then that leads people
to a higher view, he thinks, is religion.
Because it says, first of all, sure, material in America.
Sure, material gain, but only within the law.
Only within the rules.
Not just grabbing anything you want.
And on the other hand, concern for your fellow man.
He says, in America, everything is
done by voluntary institutions.
He meant also institutions on the local level
In America, they get together in the town, in the township, in the county, in the village and whatever, and they do it themselves.
In France, he says, if you want to build a schoolhouse, a bridge, a Catholic or Protestant church, because government subsidized,
if you want anything done, you have to apply to the Department of the Interior, the Ministry of Interior.
In America, they get together in the town, in the township, in the county, in the village and whatever, and they do it themselves.
Every American belongs to 40 different organizations, the library association, the volunteer fire department, his church, and on and on.
So this kind of volunteerism, he says, is the strength of American democracy.
In Europe, there's the danger of having democracy, but only democracy in the sense of, sure, we select who's going to be in charge of the government
and then they'll do everything else.
And you're right, religion plays a very important role.
Do you think that America's history is unique
as a history professor at St. Augustine?
Do you think America's history is unique?
Well, but you know, you could say that
about a lot of countries.
I know that, but I'm just saying,
is there anything that you consider truly distinctive
about it if you look at the history of nations
and the histories of all countries?
Is there anything really truly unique to you as a historian?
Other than, you mean in a different sense from which every country would be unique, Germany would be different from France and from Poland and so on.
Well, the sort of things that Tocqueville talks about, that is the freedom in the modern sense coming to fruition in America.
And by the way, with these industrialist writers and others, well, I just mentioned Acton and the American Revolution,
America was their ideal society. And they often said, some of these writers,
you know, if freedom dies in America, at least now, it's going to be different from what it was in past ages,
Because we have a homeland beyond the seas, where freedom will last.
But, you know, this is not a total cold abstraction the way it might be understood now,
and it certainly doesn't just have to do with the right to vote.
What was great about America?
They make do with one-thirtieth of the number of bureaucrats that they need in France.
By this time, you know, America is almost the size of the population,
Actually, larger than the French population of 25 million or so.
They have as large a population or larger, and they have one-thirtieth of the bureaucrats.
They have less crime than England has, and their tax burden is whatever, one-fiftieth
of the tax burden of the English. There are no taxes.
You know, Bakunin, the anarchist, the left anarchist, communist anarchist, came to America in the 19th century when he escaped from prison and then went across Siberia and then America back to Europe, a long way around.
And he said, tended to do things like that. And Bakunin said, they don't need anarchism in America. They don't need me to preach anarchism here. There's no government in America.
As Thoreau said also, there's virtually no government here, and that was because what government was necessary, as Professor Livingston emphasized, was on the local level.
Well, that was a convergence theory in the last decades of the Soviet Union, and that's another great thing that the Sovietologists gave us.
you know there's this industry of sovietology first of all their main
business was to apologize for the Soviet Union professor Jerry Huff of Duke
University said Stalin might have been responsible for 10,000 deaths he's still
a professor there and then and then that the Soviet Union is not
totalitarian in the way that Nazi Germany was and then that this convergence
This theory, that it was going to become more and more liberal, we were going to become
more and more socialist, but you know that was at a certain phase and that had to do
with the Soviet Union and not Russia, so I wouldn't say there's much to that right now.
Well I think that's about it, thank you very much.