Okay, let me finish up a couple of points that I wanted to raise in connection with
classical liberal class conflict theory. The French contribution
remained pretty much the same after the industrialist school through the 19th century.
It was repeated. There wasn't much amplification or enrichment in a theoretical way, I would say.
Nonetheless, the French school typically adhered to the analysis that I gave you in the last hour
and added certain other historical examples.
Now I mentioned Gustave de Molinari.
He became, after a while, the grand old man of French liberal economics.
I told you he lasted for a long, long time.
became the editor of the Journal des Economistes for some decades at the end of the 19th century, into the 20th century.
And I indicated also that he, in a way, added a historical example in the connection with class conflict theory
that had to do with the American Civil War.
That is, in his interpretation, his interpretation is basically the interpretation you can read in Charles Adams and to a degree in Tom DeLorenzo's book on the Civil War and to a degree in Tom DeLorenzo's book, and that is that the main issue was the tariff.
The tariff had been the issue over which secession had practically already occurred in the 1830s in connection with South Carolina, not the issue of slavery,
and that this was the foremost, according to De Molinari, this was foremost in the minds both of the southern leaders and of the northern republicans.
So that the American Civil War then fit into this category of class conflict, the predatory class being the northern republicans who wanted protectionism
and the preyed upon class being the southern planters.
But, in general, de Molinari used this analysis all over the place. He analyzed the success of French regimes, not only Louis Philippe, but the Revolution of 1848, Napoleon III, the Third Republic, in these terms.
Now, meanwhile, let's turn our attention to Italy for a moment.
If you know something about James Buchanan's public choice theory, he gives great credit
to the Italian economists for steering him in this direction, giving him the tools of
basic analysis. One economist he doesn't mention is the man who more or less founded Italian
Free-Market Economics in the 19th Century, Francisco Ferrara.
Ferrara taught for many decades at the University of Turin, and Murray has again, in his History
of Economic Thought, a few pages on Ferrara.
But Ferrara's main interest for us is that he acted as the editor of an enormous series
by for instance Bastiat, influencing the Italian Ferrara and from Molinari we have the influence
on Wilfredo Pareto. Now Pareto will be a name to people who studied economics here. Pareto
optimality is still a concept that's used. Now in economics he was more of the school
The School of Valra, not an Austrian really, but in his social theory very much of a libertarian.
And again Murray has some pages on Pareto in his History of Economic Thought.
Pareto openly referred to Molinari as his master, called him meta-master.
You can see the traces of Molinari's economic theory in general, especially this class conflict analysis in Pareto.
Pareto is simply the most well-known of a whole school of Italian economists.
They were the best Italian economists of the time, late 19th century, early 20th century.
Schumpeter says that by this time Italian economists were the equal of any in the world.
Very prominent is a man named Antonio Daviti Di Marco, whom Jim Buchanan quotes, and Mafio Pantaleone, whom I don't think he does quote.
However, reading Jim Buchanan on these people and then reading the authors themselves, I
don't think he does justice to the radicalness of their position.
Again and again, they excoriate the Italian state, the being nothing but a collection
of predators, of crooks, of gangsters, of people who are in one way or another stealing
Making money from the productive citizens, working people, business people, the peasants
of the South and so on, and channeling the privileges to their favorite clientele, which
included not only businessmen who got protection through tariffs, contractors of all kinds,
but also unionized workers, so that in general it was the North with the industrialists and
their protective tariffs and paying off the unionized workers as well to gain their support
that were preying on the productive citizens of the rest of the country and especially
in the agricultural sector which was still the main industry in Italy.
These people are well worth looking into.
The analysis continued afterwards with a man who is famous, really, I have to tell you,
although maybe you're not familiar with his name, Luigi Inaudi, a free market economist
who was the first president of the Italian Republic after World War II and probably the
The most famous free market liberal thinker in Europe at that time.
Now this class conflict analysis had other traditions besides that of the French and
through the French of the Italians.
In the United States, for instance, some Jeffersonians and Jacksonians also grappled in detail with
and the question of class in the politically relevant sense, and came to conclusions very much reminiscent of the industrialist school.
John Taylor of Caroline, William Leggett, a man I'm going to speak about in a moment,
John C. Calhoun, were keen observers and critics of the social groups
whom they believed were utilizing political power in order to exploit the rest of society, the producers.
John Taylor was outraged by what he saw as the betrayal of the principles of the American Revolution by a new aristocracy based on, quote, separate legal interests, again, homing in on the idea that these conflicting classes were created by government privilege.
The bankers privileged to issue paper money as legal tender and the beneficiaries of public improvements and protective tariffs.
The American system, the policy of the Whigs in the early 19th century.
American society, according to John Taylor, had been divided into the privileged and the unprivileged by this substantial revival of the feudal system.
Talking now about feudalism in the way that the industrialist writers had.
Two decades later, in the 1830s, the northern radical, William Leggett,
a northern democrat, denounced the same exploiting classes.
and Leggett was the Chief Spokesman for Jacksonian Principles in the North.
He denounced, in the Jeffersonian manner, the bankers, the beneficiaries of government grants for internal improvement.
And his own position was, as he thought of it, the same as that of the original American Republic, laissez-faire, do not govern too much.
The American aristocracy, he thought, naturally favored a strong government, including especially control of the banking system.
The banking issue was the main issue of that time.
Legate, in contrast, demanded the absolute separation of government from the banking and credit system.
Now it happens, and this is a copy of the book I just got from the library here, so I'll return it and you can look at it,
that a collection of Legate's editorials was assembled and published by Larry White, the Austrian economist, now in Missouri, and published by Liberty Press.
Now, if you're not familiar with the Liberty Press, you should become familiar with them,
since they put out very good editions, cheaply, of important books.
This happens to be Murray's copy.
You can tell it's Murray's copy because every single line is underlined.
We always thought, you know, really, what's the point, Murray?
You look at it, every single line.
On the other hand, there are remarks in the margins, no, because he favors this, so the
remarks are, ah, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, right, right.
With authors he disagrees with, it's different.
So Leggett, by the way, he was the editorial writer and his pulpit was the New York Evening
Post, the oldest paper in America founded by Alexander Hamilton, as they still have
the nerve to put on the front page of this idiotic rag that's worse than the New York
Daily News now, if you can imagine it, the New York Post.
But in those days it was edited by the great American writer and poet, William Cullen Bryant,
And Leggett was there, the chief editorial writer. He summed up his, he expressed the
principles that he was going to be writing according to. They were the principles of
Thomas Jefferson, he said. The sum of good government is described by that illustrious
champion of democracy, he's a Jacksonians, so he thinks he's talking in favor of democracy,
is all we aim at. In Jefferson's words,
a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another,
shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement,
and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
And this book is really
a goldmine. There's all kinds of...
he wrote very well and there's all kinds of
great editorials here by Leggett.
He has an editorial denouncing the governor of New York for proclaiming thanksgiving.
Where he says, where in heaven's name does this politician come off telling us when we should give thanksgiving to the Lord?
And appointing a special day for it.
Why doesn't government leave it up to us to decide when we want to do something like that?
And he has an essay here called The Street of Palaces.
He talks about Genoa.
It has a very elegant street, commonly called the Street of Palaces,
with the houses of the great and influential and nobles of the past.
But he says, is this condition of things confined to Genoa or to the European countries?
Is there no parallel in our own country?
Have we not, in this very city, New York, our street of palaces, adorned with structures as superb as those of Genoa?
Have we not, too, our privileged orders, our scrip nobility?
You understand scrip? That is, a paper put out under some different authority,
without any backing and precious metals to act as money.
are script nobility, and he means the banks that were given the right in New York State
to issue paper money without the backing of precious metals.
Aristocrats clothed with special immunities who control indirectly but certainly the political
power of the state, who monopolize the most copious sources of pecuniary profit and ring
the very crust from the hard hand of toil.
Have we not, in short, like the wretched serfs of Europe, our lordly masters?
If any man doubts how these questions should be answered, let him walk through Wall Street.
You can see in what sense he was a radical, in what sense he was a democrat, but his ire
was directed against those influential, wealthy, often wealthy people who use the state in
order to gain their assets, and this is very typical of the whole liberal tradition going
back to the levelers, obviously no classical liberals were believers in socialism or egalitarianism
or the leveling of fortunes, on the other hand they were very suspicious of people with
William Graham Sumner and Sumner talked about the plutocrats.
Now, maybe you've heard that term, plutocrat.
It's commonly used to mean any wealthy person.
It comes from the god Pluto,
who as the god of the underworld
was supposed to be the god of treasures
and buried wealth and so on.
And this, of course, means rule by.
So, nowadays it means rule by wealthy people,
Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, Hans-Hermann Hoppe,
Finally, what I want to say is that, in contrasting the Marxist and the classical liberal ideas of class conflict,
it seems obvious to me that the classical liberal idea of class conflict is enormously superior,
in fact, there's no contest, to the Marxist theory in explaining Marxist regimes.
Now Marxists and Communists in general had a very hard time trying to explain what kind
of society, what kind of regime existed for instance in the Soviet Union, right? It wasn't
a capitalist regime anymore, it wasn't an exploitative regime of the bourgeoisie because
they'd gotten rid of the bourgeoisie, they chased them out or executed them, and all
the property was taken over by the state in the name of the people. What sort of regime
is that what class is involved there
if class conflict
exists according to the marxist views because of differential access to the
means of production
well there's no capitalists on one side to claim the means of
production anymore
there's no struggle over the means of production anymore
what you have are the means of production allegedly owned by society at
large
This was the position of the Soviet regime. We're a class society. We don't have class exploitation anymore.
In fact, this was obvious to everyone from the word go.
Every alleged Marxist regime in the world was an exploitative regime with a ruling class that came to be known as the nomenclatura.
So, how to explain that? Well, you have the liberal idea of class conflict, that is, a
certain group of people gain control of the state apparatus and exploit the rest of society.
This was the new class, as it was sometimes called. Have you read Animal Farm, maybe?
This was the pigs, this was the nomenklatura, that is the people in charge, the people whose
names were in a certain book of influential people, so that the liberal idea can explain
and also Marxist regimes in a way that the Marxist idea of class conflict cannot and in general it is much more useful than any alternative and maybe it's time that some of our scholars discovered that there was such a thing as the liberal idea of class conflict.
Now, one area of class conflict that was especially pointed out by the classical liberals was
the area of war and peace and international relations.
I mentioned to you last time that the motto on the front page of the Censure Européenne
in every issue was peace and freedom.
And a pro-peace position was central to the industrialist point of view.
And their attack, just to take this one liberal group, their attack on militarism and standing
armies was savage and relentless.
This is a typical passage repeated many times, for instance, by Dunwayier.
He's being sarcastic, really savagely sarcastic here.
Remember, he talked about how production is at the center of, production and exchange at the center of social life, so that we have to honor and respect the people who engage in production.
Well, what is the production of the standing armies of Europe? He raises the question.
It has consisted in massacres, rapes, pillages, conflagrations, vices and crimes.
The deprivation, ruin and enslavement of the peoples, these standing armies have been the
shame and the scourge of civilization.
The industrialists and including and also Jean-Baptiste Say attacked British imperialism,
The Arrogance of British Imperialism, which they say, which Say said, has turned production
and commerce itself into an attack on civilization.
They were for various reasons not particularly Anglophile.
Now you've heard many times the phrase that war is the health of the state, comes from
from this left anarchist Randolph Bourne in the course of the First World War, and Murray
Rothbard was the one who introduced this phrase and concept into libertarian thinking. Murray
always stressed the idea that war is the health of the state, because that is what history
has demonstrated, and I'm sure that next week, those of you who have the privilege of listening
Robert Higgs will find him amplifying on that to a great extent. It's one of his major fields.
So, the idea of war being a special problem for society, the preservation of peace being a major aim of liberalism.
In Mises book on liberalism, he has a different, in the beginning the different sections, property, freedom, and among the early ones, peace, as one of the aims of the liberals.
Peace is the father of all things, peace is always better than war.
Stolen peace has characterized the classical liberal movement from the 18th century, at least from Turgot on, through the 19th century, even Gladstone, who wasn't frankly that much of a liberal.
His slogan in mid-Victorian Britain was peace, retrenchment and reform.
Now, in Anglophone countries, the greatest single factor leading to the identification of classical liberalism with a pro-peace position is the work of the Manchester School and its leaders Richard Cobden and John Bright.
And here we have another couple of my personal heroes, especially Cobden.
Richard Cobden and John Bright
Very great literature on these men
Biographies, especially two new biographies of Cobden
A number of their works still in print
and certainly many of their works in libraries
Best known for their advocacy of free trade, they were the leaders of the
free trade movement that led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1847
In 1947, these men held that unhampered freedom of commerce among nations is the surest road
to an even higher goal than the material well-being of the people, world peace.
You know, we're always attacked for being mean-minded, venal materialists.
It's very clear that all businessmen as they were and interested in profits as they were,
John Bright was proud of being a successful mill owner.
Still, in supporting free trade, their higher aim was to bring about harmony and peace among the nations.
What year was the war on?
1846.
The most fundamental reason for opposition to war and its concomitants, imperialism and militarism,
was stated succinctly by John Bright, one of his speeches during the Crimean War.
That was a watershed, the war in the Crimea, 1850-46.
This is what Bright said.
What is war?
I believe that half the people that talk about war
have not the slightest idea of what it is.
In a short sentence, it may be summed up
to be the combination and concentration of all
the horrors, atrocities, crimes, and sufferings
of which human nature on this globe is capable.
So when you see some of the people nowadays, some of the writers nowadays talking so glibly
about war, you should keep that in mind. They don't. And we're supposed to be, with our
belief in laissez-faire and pure capitalism, we're supposed to be the heartless ones, where
They don't really give a damn about, and I think even their remorse over the death of
American mercenaries is pretty much half-hearted, and they certainly don't give a damn about
the victims of American war waging.
The Pentagon itself says, we don't keep those figures.
To take the Iraqi war, the thousands of civilians, that even Associated Press counted as 3200-something,
but you know, maybe you've seen that headline, but 3200 was only people who died in hospitals,
not people who were buried under rubble or died on the road, only about half the hospitals
in Iraq, although the largest ones, so it's very probable that some 5, 6, or maybe 10,000
civilians died, that does not include the ones who were maimed, mutilated, like Kid
Ali with his arms gone, so what we're talking about, he was a Quaker, he was not a pacifist
But he was a Quaker, he was a human being, unlike the people who call themselves conservatives nowadays, who really could not care less, in fact sort of gloat about it, that we have the power to do that kind of thing.
Someone who had that point of view, that it was fine to kill people just because we had the point of view, would have come under, I believe would have come under suspicion in the SS.
as most likely a potentially dangerous sadist. We don't want those kind of people.
We want people who are just disciplined and killed and kill when they're given the order
and don't get any special kick out of it. Well, be that as it may.
Let's go back to the Manchester School. They believe that the interest of the great majority in all countries was peace.
And that both specific wars and long-term patterns of belligerency on the part of governments
could be explained by and large by reference to the interests of particular groups within the governing circles, more or less of what Bright was fond of calling the tax-eating rather than the tax-paying classes.
And this was the old liberal view that you could find in Kant and Condorcet and Paine and many others.
that it was the classes associated with the old order, and largely in the industrialists also,
the classes associated with the old order who fomented war,
and the classes of the producers would tend to want to avoid war.
In mid-19th century England, these tax-eating classes that favored war
were in their view the aristocracy with its ramified sinecures
in the Army, Navy, Foreign Office and Colonial Bureaucracy, The Established Church of England and, to a lesser degree, certain capitalist groups wishing to spread foreign trade with the backing of English military and political power, the opium wars against China, for instance.
Besides pressing for free trade, which would tend to make war an increasingly self-defeating proposition,
the Manchester Liberals considered it their duty to attack and expose the particular wars into which England was always drifting or threatening to drift.
I'm concentrating on this Manchester score because they adumbrate many of the traits of future classical liberal writers down to libertarian writers today
in their critique of war and the forces behind it.
Cobden said it would seem as if there was some unseen power behind the government,
conspiracy theory anyone, always able unless held in check by an agitation in the country
to help itself to a portion of the national savings limited only by the taxable patience of the public.
The two-volume political writings of Richard Cobden, which David Hart, whom I mentioned
to you last time, of the Liberty Fund is going to put online, two big volumes of Cobden's
different pamphlets and so on, all concern foreign policy and international relations.
Naturally, Cobden made speeches and wrote on many, many different issues, but these
These political writings are on this subject and, in my view, he was the greatest libertarian
theorist of international relations who ever lived.
In his first, very first pamphlet, he put on title page a quotation from George Washington's
farewell address.
Washington said, the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in
and extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection
as possible.
So no entanglements, not only entanglements, hardly any connection, if possible, with foreign
governments and let our merchants go all over the world as in fact they did during
our terrible isolationist period when America was like an ostrich with its head in the sand.
Compton said these words of Washington are the primary cause of the prosperity and happiness
of the American people.
In his early years, before reality set in, he looked forward to the day when the test
of no foreign politics would be applied to those who offered to become the representatives
of free governments.
No foreign politics just have nothing to do with them.
Well, there was the Crimean War and the British public's wild support of it that changed his
mind on that, as to whether that was a reasonable expectation.
Bastiat went so far as to propose the unilateral disarmament of France.
Who's going to come and invade us?
Who's going to bother to send armies, garrison the country?
We have a large population, we have a highly intelligent, disciplined, self-disciplined population.
Why don't we set the example and simply get rid of our army?
Now, whatever the concept, the concept that's sometimes used in this connection is, by Starings, is free trade imperialism.
That is, being in favor of free trade and against protectionism, but using the government in order to force other countries to adopt free trade and to allow our capital imports and commodity imports.
The American open door policy in China is a prime example of free trade imperialism.
The American government and American business community at the time figured that we could out-compete any other country.
So what we had to do was to make sure that China kept an open door, an equal open door to all foreign countries,
and we could sell our goods there, out-competing the British, the Japanese, certainly, and others.
and others. Now, in order to enforce this open door policy, the American government used diplomacy, economic sanctions against Japan at various times, finally the threat of war and war itself.
It was the American policy towards China and the so-called open door policy that was the major stumbling block between the United States and Japan.
So that is something you could call free trade imperialism.
Well whatever you want to say about that, Cobden was no supporter of that at all.
He declared, Affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if
touched by the hand of violence.
For as faith forced would no longer be religion but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery
if Coerced by Warlike Armaments.
Also it's important to note and significant that the Manchester School, in the example
for instance of the repeal of the Corn Laws, was in favor of unilateral free trade.
That is, you don't enter into complicated agreements like the North America Free Trade
Free Trade Agreement, how many pages is that? 1,700,000 pages or something of the so-called
free trade agreement. What you do is simply abolish your tariffs. You don't get the impression
that by abolishing your tariffs you're helping the other side. What you're doing is you're
helping your own consumers, you're helping your own public to just do away with the tariffs
and allow your own domestic consumers to buy things more cheaply.
If the other side wants to punish its own people
by keeping its tariffs, well that's up to them.
Now, in respect to their foreign policy views, the Manchester men have been
have been termed little Englanders. That's what the term
refers to, little Englanders. Cobden's critique of English imperialism in the
The Peace Party will never rouse the conscience of the people, so long as they allow them
to indulge the comforting delusion that we have been a peace-loving people. We have been
the most combative and aggressive community that has existed since the days of the Roman
Since the Revolution of 1688, we have expended more than 1,500 million pounds of money upon wars, not one of which have been upon our own shores or in defense of our hearths and homes.
We have manifested an insatiable love of territorial aggrandizement in the insolence of our might.
And without waiting for the assaults of our envious enemies, we have sallied forth in search of conquest or rapine and carried bloodshed into every quarter of the globe.
And Bright said, what do you think of a people that has never experienced an invasion since the year 1066 and yet lives in daily fear of a foreign invasion?
Is this some kind of mass delusion? Well, he thought it was forced to, typically by the government.
Now, by the way, from some statement like that, you might come to the conclusion that he was some kind of self-flagellating masochist or something.
He wasn't. He was enormously healthy, very happy, happily married, and happy in his family life and his political career, and loved England.
Cobden died in 1865, John Bright survived him by 24 years.
The most notable foreign policy issue that arose in this period involving Bright was
the Prime Minister William Gladstone's decision to occupy Egypt in 1882.
It was a temporary occupation that lasted for 75 years.
Bright as a member of the cabinet resigned in protest.
At his advanced age, he could not make Egypt into a crusade as he had at the time of the
Corn Laws or, as he tried to do in the Crimean War, in private Wright identified the City
of London's financial interests as the chief force behind expansion into Egypt, since holders
of Egyptian government bonds were fearful of the loss of their capital.
So now we've moved away from the old feudal classes, the nobility, the established church,
The State and its functionaries as the fermenters of imperialism and war.
Now it's certain capitalist interests.
He confided to his friend Goldwyn Smith, a famous historian of the time,
It is a stock jobbers war.
We shall very likely have more of the same thing.
When one set of causes of war departs, another crops up in its place.
An interesting view.
We can contrast with the position of the Manchester School, the position of John Stuart Mill.
Again, Mill was no principled opponent of foreign intervention.
The example he took is, if any million bothered to think about it, a rather embarrassing example for him.
What he said was this, if Europe was filled with nationalist movements that were trying to gain independence from empires,
For instance, the Austrian Empire and, for instance, the Hungarians. He said if a national movement should rise up, attempting to gain its independence from some tyrannical government, then we let them fight it out because whether the nationalist movement can survive or not is a good test of whether it's mature enough to become independent.
However, what happened in 1848, 1849 in Central Europe was this. The Hungarians were able to defeat the Habsburgs and maintain a certain independence for a while, but then the Habsburg Emperor called in the Russians to help him.
The Russian army came across the passes of the Carpathian Mountains, as they did in 1956 to crush the revolution, and defeated the Hungarians.
In that case, when a third party intervenes, England has the obligation to use all of its resources to support the nationalist independent movement.
He said, those people who are in favor of non-intervention and little England and mind their own business are selfish.
And it's embarrassing for the whole world to see that we English are so selfish, all we're interested in is our own national self-interest, our own survival.
We should be altruistic about this.
So, he would have favored, and as he did, he favored the Crimean War to punish the Russians.
But now, when I said that millions would be embarrassed by his position, what I had in
mind was this.
The truth of the matter is, and the fact of the matter is, that yes, the Hungarians led
by Louis Koschutt, one of their independents from the Habsburgs. And the way people judge
superficially on these matters, Koschutt had will-wishers everywhere, Britain, the United
States Everywhere. But in actuality, what Kossuth insisted on was Hungarian, that is,
the ethnic group, not the territory, Hungary, which is something else, but the ethnic group
of Hungarians, who call themselves Magyars, that they should control all of that part
of the Austrian Empire and that they should lord it over the Slovaks, the Romanians, the
The Serbs and other minority, Croats, I guess I mentioned, and other minority ethnic groups.
You follow what I'm saying?
So, in other words, what he wanted was a smaller version of what the Habsburgs wanted.
The Habsburgs wanted to control and lord it over different ethnic groups, and he wanted
his own people, the Hungarians and Magyars, to lord it over these various groups.
That was his actual position.
John Stuart Mill presumably was one of the best informed people in Europe. He was either
not aware of this or didn't think it was particularly important, maybe thinking that the Hungarians
were more advanced than these Slavic people and the Romanians and therefore maybe deserved
to be in charge. But my point is that here we have somebody who was willing to involve
England in a war with Russia in 1849 on the basis of lack of information, of not really
understanding what was going on.
And he actually was in favor, if he had been able to press a button he would have done
it.
Now the Crimean War came a few years after that, but even that there was no reason to
have.
This is the case very often in regard to war making, based on incorrect information or
sometimes deceptive information, disinformation, in the case of the war over Kosovo in 1999.
Nothing is clearer now than that what was involved was an insurrection on the part of
The Kosovo Albanians against the rule of the Serbians, Kosovo being a province of Serbia.
This insurrection, which had been going on for a while, was led by a group called the
KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army, something like that, or whatever, UCK in their own language,
which had been labeled a terrorist group by the United States State Department.
Well, Milosevic, the leader of Yugoslavia, attacked the KLA rather severely.
It was an insurrection. It was brutal and harsh about putting it down.
But nonetheless, that was the situation, that was what was going on.
It was nowhere, incidentally, nowhere as brutal as the United States government was in putting down the Vietnamese rebellion during the Vietnam War.
The US government and the media began now a campaign that genocide was going on in Kosovo,
that the Serbs were committing genocide.
Maybe you're too young to remember.
Maybe, like most Americans, you think it's ancient history anyway, so why bother?
Christiane Amanpour should really be put on trial for war crimes or the way the US does it or the Israelis do it, just shot in the streets for having fomented this war.
Those of us of a certain age followed it in detail. They talked about genocide.
This is the worst example of ethnic cleansing in Europe since the Second World War. This is genocide.
Elie Wiesel said it was genocide. It was comparable to the Holocaust. I heard with my own ears Senator Lieberman say this is genocide.
Amenpour said that 100,000 Kosovo Albanians of military age are missing. Where are they? Where are they?
The US and NATO troops have control of Kosovo, just as they have control of Iraq now. They go wherever they can, looking for bodies. Altogether, they found 2,100 people who were killed by the KLA.
The US and NATO troops have control of Kosovo, just as they have control of Iraq now. They go wherever they can, looking for bodies.
Looking for Bodies. Altogether, they found 2,100 unidentified dead. Unidentified, that is, it was not clear whether they were Albanians or Serbs.
Not clear if they were Albanians, whether they had been fighters and died in some firefight.
This was a disinformation on the basis of this alleged genocide was a disinformation spread by the U.S. government, by NATO, other NATO governments, by the western media.
This was a disinformation that stampeded the American public into supporting this war in Kosovo.
It's the sort of thing that you can find on the Internet. Thank God for the Internet.
And a belated thank you to Vice President Gore for having invented the Internet.
And where is he now that we need him?
Now, to continue with the liberal anti-war tradition.
This is what I mentioned the other day from Sydney Smith.
Remember I mentioned that Sydney Smith studied under Dougal Stuart who was a disciple of Adam Smith
and in this way imbibed his liberal ideas in the early 19th century.
In 1923, he wrote to a friend,
For God's sake, do not drag me into another war.
I'm worn down and worn out for crusading and defending Europe,
protecting mankind. I must think a little of myself.
I'm sorry for the Spaniards. I'm sorry for the Greeks.
The people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny.
Baghdad is oppressed. I do not like the present state of the Delta.
Tibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people? The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be the champion of the decalogue and be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy?
There was a liberal who thought not. There were different views afterwards.
Now in the United States, classical liberals were first mobilized against imperialism at the time of the Spanish-American War and the following war against the Philippine Insurrection.
You know, it's always called the Philippine Insurrection, although by what right the United States acquired the Philippines as a colony and became the legitimate power against which these Filipinos were now engaged in insurrection is unclear.
The Anti-Imperious Lee was led by Edward Atkinson, E. L. Gatkin, of The Nation, at the time the flagship of the classical liberal publications,
Carl Schurz, Men Who Were American Versions of the Little Englanders.
You can find, I'm sure, somewhere on the internet, although I have my own hard copies of it, from books, a very famous essay by a man I just mentioned a little while ago, William Graham Sumner, titled, The Conquest of the United States by Spain.
Sumner was a professor of sociology at Yale, the leading classical liberal of his time,
defender of the gold standard, free trade against coercive unionism, against spending
the author of the famous book, the famous essay, The Forgotten Man.
The Forgotten Man really would be an example of the productive individual who becomes a
prey of the predators.
And interestingly enough, this was whatever, 1880s, he said the Forgotten Man is a person
who does what he's supposed to do, is where he's supposed to be, contributes to society,
and then becomes the victim of the do-gooder who takes from him to give to the underprivileged.
He says, the forgotten man, by the way, is very often a woman, maybe a widow or a single
woman who does what she's supposed to do, works hard, is frugal, doesn't ask anything
from Anyone Else and Yet Becomes a Victim of Government Coercive Charity.
Well, this is just one example.
Sumner did a lot of polemical writings of this kind, besides his work in sociology, which he was very famous for.
Now, in this essay, a speech first of all it was, The Conquest of the United States by Spain,
Sumner startles people by the title itself. The United States had just smashed Spain the way we just smashed Iraq.
But he says, yes, militarily speaking, the United States was victorious, but in fact, Spain was victorious in the field of ideas.
Because what is happening is that the United States is going down the road that the Spaniards pioneered, the road of empire.
And in this way, turning its back on its own nature, on the philosophy that had been the signature of the American people,
the philosophy of the founding fathers, and opting for the grandeur of empire.
And the Spaniards did achieve greatness through their empire, great conquests, great wars, great victories.
But in the nature of things that had a price, and the price was constant war, large standing armies,
heavy taxation, inflation, debt, crushing taxes
remember I quoted from the Spanish late scholastics in an earlier lecture
about how the level of taxation was destroying the substratum of the villages and towns of Castile
and this way of empire brought Spain to where it is today
for Spain to become the hollow shell of a country that we could so easily crush.
But we're on that road now and we have to expect, because nature is, he was a Darwinian
and a follower of Spencer, nature is not forgiving.
You do A and that causes B and all your wishes, all your tears aren't going to make any difference.
So, he warned about this and he said, really what I would say myself, he said, we seem
to have decided on this road to empire.
By the way, it was a cabal, Joe Stromberg can give you the details and has written in detail
about it.
It was a small cabal of people who decided on the war.
He said the American people have been convinced, decided on the war, undertaken this road to
Empire and in this way put an end to the old republic.
I don't think that my own little talk here, as he said, or my own little essay is going
to make any difference.
So why am I doing it?
Why I'm doing it is because it really was quite an idea at the beginning, it really was
has quite a vision that the government would only take care of the guaranteeing of the
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the people and everything else
would be left to civil society, to the voluntary interaction of people.
And Sumner says it is worth maybe paying a final tribute to it as it's about to vanish
into History, and that's why I'm writing, that's why I'm saying what I'm saying.
Now, it turns out, we could get into an interesting discussion on that, that there were some classical liberals
who thought that war could be useful and people have a much better claim to be classical liberals
than John Stuart Mill does. Before I get into that, let me mention another late 19th century,
Herbert Spencer, The Struggle for Existence, The Survival of the Fittest
was a central view of his but what Spencer believed was that warfare was suitable only to mankind's primitive stage the Western world however had long since left the stage of militancy and entered the stage of industrialism he uses the phrase industrial industrialism also war in the contemporary world was retrograde and destructive of all higher value
Early in his career, back in 1848, Spencer maintained, as the Manchester School did, that wars were caused by the uncurbed ambition of the aristocracy.
Much as Schumpeter afterwards was to say in a famous essay of his on imperialism, he argued that war was linked to the feudal spirit.
He also argued against state-sponsored overseas colonization as burdensome to the domestic taxpayers and oppressive of the native inhabitants, that is, of the areas overseas where these British colonists were being resettled.
Colonists had no right to be protected by the government of the society they abandoned.
Spencer found none of England's recent wars, including the Opium War, then being waged in 1843 against China to be necessary.
At this earlier, more anarchistic period of his career, he even suggested the defense of the country against invasion might be provided independently of the state.
In social statics, Spencer has a famous chapter on the right to ignore the state.
To the following decade Spencer opposed the wars, mainly colonial wars, in which England
was involved. At the end of his life, by 1903, he was outraged by the Boer War, the British
attack on the Dutch farmers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The pretext for
For Hostilities was the refusal of the Transvaal government to extend voting rights to the
outlanders who were mainly British immigrants who flocked to the little state to exploit
the gold mines discovered there.
In other words, in the mind of the British government, they were waging war against the
Boers for the sake of bringing them democracy.
In an essay titled Patriotism, Patriotism, sort of ironically, Spencer confesses that
But he had cherished a love of England because of its long history of fostering free institutions.
But his love of country could not survive the desolating war against the Boers, concocted
by the arch-conspirators like Cecil Rhodes, and again with the frenzied support of the
English public, as they had supported also the Crimean War.
And Spencer said, if I am called unpatriotic, well, I am content to be so called.
Spencer had evidently grown so embittered that he openly stated his indifference to
the death of British soldiers engaged in imperialist adventures.
At the time he wrote this, by the way, it happened to be in Afghanistan.
Herbert Spencer said, when men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing
Talking about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.
To the objection that his position amounted to a suicidal pacifism, Spencer replied, No,
not at all.
For one war an army would remain just as available for as now is a war of national defense.
In such a war, every soldier would be conscious of the justice of his cause.
He would not be engaged in dealing death among men, about whose doings, good or ill, he knew nothing, but among men who were manifest aggressors against himself and his compatriots. Only aggressive war would be negative, not defensive war.
And now, I want to talk about some of these, because this brings up an interesting theoretical point,
some of these liberals who have favored war under certain conditions.
And they go back to the 18th century.
Among writers, we could mention Wilhelm von Humboldt, even in Limits of State Action,
of State Action, he says that there's some good that could be said for war, not that
he actually supports war, but war did develop certain elements of the personality which
tended to be stunted by modern society. That's a kind of minor concession. Much more important
is what Alexis de Tocqueville says about war and imperialism. And that's a major reason
I do not consider Tocqueville to be a hardcore, authentic, classical liberal.
Another reason is that he didn't care very much about economics, didn't know very much
about economics.
His views had to do with politics, there he made some very important points about the
dangers of centralization of power and so on, but he was not any supporter of the factory
System and the Industrial Revolution.
As an aristocrat who lived off the rents of his land, I guess he saw no particular reason
to have factories and industrialization, so that on that basis he's more of a middle-of-the-road
or more of a wig, I would say, than a real, authentic liberal, and especially on the question
of war and imperialism.
He favored the creation of a new French colony in Algeria that had started in 1829.
He supported the British in India, he thought it was a magnificent occasion for advancing
and Civilization, and here we have a more significant, theoretically interesting case
going back to the 18th century, late 18th century.
In the course of the French Revolution, France comes to wage war against almost all the rest
of Europe.
The group at this time in the French Revolutionary complex that is considered liberal in the
sense of favoring a free society, free enterprise and so on, are the Girondins.
And their close ally, Condorcet, who has a real claim to be an important classical liberal
thinker, the main disciple of Turgeau.
Now at first the Girondins and Condorcet had the position that the French Revolution, which
They Thought Expanded Freedom was threatened by the reactionary powers of Europe.
However, when the French Revolutionary armies began to throw back the invading armies of
the Prussians and the Austrians, the Girondins and the Incandesce came to the conclusion
that with the new freedom-loving principles of the French Revolution to lead them forward,
the French Revolutionary Army should now undertake the liberation of Europe.
Not simply defend France and its revolution against attacks, but now bring the blessings
of the French Revolution, of the new liberal order, to everyone else.
So what you have here is a, you can say your first example in a way of another strain,
I don't think it's really the major strain and I don't think it's the most authentic
strain of classical liberalism, that is the idea that you have now a free country that
is also a powerful country and it should use its power to spread freedom everywhere.
This position was accepted also by a man who was in Paris at the time, a friend of Condorcet,
Thomas Paine.
You know, Paine's work in the American Revolution, and Paine associated himself with the Girondins.
In fact, Jacobins arrested Paine, and if the reign of terror had continued, they probably
And as the French Revolutionary Armies, as they said, liberated Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the left bank of the Rhine River, and then Northern Italy and so on,
and so on. Payne became very enthusiastic and said that this is the beginning now of the Federation of Free States and supported the Revolutionary Armies.
Now, this was also the position that, as I said, you can draw a line from there to certain liberals, not very good liberals, but people who were considered liberals like Palmerston in England in the 19th century.
and then this becomes Wilsonianism, the Wilsonian doctrine that we have a duty, not only a duty and therefore a right, as a powerful and free country to use our power to support and extend our values to the unfree world.
And this, as you know, is an argument which is used nowadays, and is in a very sharp contrast to the authentic liberal position of non-intervention, for which I'll give some theoretical, analytical reasons probably in my next lecture.
Okay, so what we want to do now is entertain some questions and comments about everything I've said about class conflict this morning and now, and also about liberalism and this question which is obviously becoming increasingly important of war and peace.
Like in 1848, there was a conservative spirit in Europe with Madernich. How did the liberals react to him?
and then at the Congress of Vienna, ending the Napoleonic War in 1814-1815, he was a major presiding figure there.
Menenex was of course a conservative and you could say reactionary.
He had a position which is more interesting than it's usually made out to be in the textbooks, and that was this.
The great majority of the people want peace. They want peace and quiet.
There's a small minority of people, liberals in the cities, members of the middle class,
who have big influence because of their links to the press and in education and so on,
a small group of people who want to keep agitating society.
They want to bring in all these reforms.
The great majority of people have no interest in that, so that a government that suppresses liberals and the demand for reform is acting really in the interests of the majority.
So how do we keep peace? Well, how do we keep peace is by accommodating all the interests, the interests of the kings, of the emperors, of the princes,
to a degree the interest of the aristocracy, the interest of important elements of the third estate, but none of these blanket demands for individual rights, because that ends in endless revolution.
So, well, you can see that on the face of it, the liberals considered him an enemy as he was, a self-declared enemy of liberalism.
He used the secret police, censorship, sent spies into universities to make sure that the students weren't hearing things that they shouldn't,
and try to keep the lid on liberalism and also, since he was the Austrian minister,
on nationalism because nationalism would have meant the death of Austria as it finally did,
the death of Austria.
In 1848, when everything finally exploded, the Habsburgs thought that they could buy
by some public support by throwing him to the wolves.
So they dismissed him and didn't make any difference.
People wanted, or the activists, at least,
wanted more than that.
Like everybody else in 1848, like Mazzini and Garibaldi,
Koshut, Karl Marx, Metternich wound up in London.
And I guess they could have gotten together
and told some good stories to each other.
But of course, they hated each other.
Guizot also in France, wound up in London.