Yesterday afternoon, Mr. McCarthy raised a very pertinent question talking about how liberalism is treated by political scientists and historians and about the transition from what some refer to as the older liberalism, the laissez-faire liberalism, to the new liberalism,
Socialism, the basically social democratic socialist liberalism, and what role John
Stuart Mill played in this.
And that is a very crucial role.
Mill was the transition figure.
I keep mentioning Murray Rothbard's history of economic thought.
I urge you, if you haven't looked at it, to at least browse in it, in the two volumes,
and if you're not used to Murray Rothbard's writing style, you'll find it refreshingly
unorthodox compared to other economists.
He didn't like John Stuart Mill very much, he thought John Stuart Mill was a disaster,
And the pages on Mill are especially informative and entertaining.
It refers to the dithering Mill, which is very much on the mark.
Now, it's to my mind a disservice when, let's say, in a typical college course, they will
deal with the history of political thought, and then as an example of 19th century liberalism,
John Stuart Mill vs. Marx vs. Friedrich List
is a very logical and rational kind of writing style, but there are very serious problems with Mill from an authentic liberal point of view that I will be pointing out.
Much of the confusion prevailing in the whole problem of defining and understanding liberalism can be traced to Mill.
To my mind, he occupies a vastly inflated position in the conception of liberalism and detained by English-speaking people.
This is an example of Anglo-centrism, you might say.
It is a scandal how a few American social scientific university professors can easily read even modern European languages like French and German.
I happen to know this is a fact in connection, for instance, with the Stanford University history department,
Department, although they have great scholars, on the other hand, there is this lack of having
access to works of continental writers that have not been already translated.
You know that James Buchanan, when he undertook his study of public finance and so on, learned
Italian, which I think must be a very rare accomplishment among American economists, in
In order to read this rich treasury of economic thought, in fact I'll mention it a little
later on in this lecture, of the Italian economists of the late 19th century and early 20th century
who dealt with the issue of public finance.
But this lack of the ability to access some of the most important continental political
Thinkers, leads to a ridiculous overemphasis on the on the British tradition to my mind.
Man that I'll be mentioning a number of times, I think from now on,
is one of my favorite authors altogether, Benjamin Constant.
And it was only, Constant wrote an enormous amount on political philosophy and other
Subjects. And it was only a few years ago in the Cambridge Blue series of political thinkers that
you may have come across, it's very useful, that some of his major writings on political philosophy
were available in English. And Sabine, if you know the old book by George Sabine of the History of
Political Thought, doesn't even mention Constant. Although I would be prepared to argue that he was
He was the most important liberal philosopher of the 19th century and worlds ahead of Mill, as far as I'm concerned.
But Mill was a disaster on a number of fronts. In economics, he held that the, quote,
the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade.
And here he's using free trade in the sense of economic freedom, freedom of trade not just internationally but in general.
The principle of freedom, this is from On Liberty, is not involved in economic affairs.
Whereas Milton Friedman quotes a great letter that Benjamin Franklin sent to one of the French physiocrats
where Franklin said that he thought that liberty of exchange, liberty of contract, liberty to work, liberty to buy and sell, is even more important than any civil liberty, than freedom of expression, for instance, because it deals with the freedoms people need every single day of their lives, and the freedom that everyone needs, not just the intelligentsia that publishes, but everyone needs.
We have Mill going in the opposite direction and saying that economic freedom is not really
part of the concept of freedom he's going to be dealing with.
Mill provided ammunition for the protectionist arsenal.
Richard Cobden, the great free trader of the mid-19th century, complained of one of Mill's
writings that this has undone any good he might have done in any other respect by providing
Arguments in Favor of Protection for Infant Industries
He rejected, Mill rejected, the liberal notion of the long-run harmony of interests of all
social classes, including entrepreneurs and workers.
On the grounds that, this is from Mill, to say that they have, that workers and capitalists
have the same interest, is to say that it is the same thing to a person's interest
whether the sum of money belongs to him or someone else.
Following that reason would reveal a very large number of hitherto unsuspected conflicts of interest in society.
Between you and me, for instance, since I don't have access to your wallet.
Indeed, in arguing that anti-capitalism is one of the hallmarks of liberalism,
Capitalism, Anti-Capitalism, the well-known English political philosopher Alan Ryan, invokes
none other than John Stuart Mill, who wrote in the middle of the 19th century,
The generality of laborers in this and most other countries have as little choice of occupation
and Freedom of Locomotion as they could on any system short of actual slavery.
This short of actual slavery, this at a time when English and other serfs were migrating in the
millions to towns and cities and even to foreign countries. It has to have been someone like Mill
who spent his life as a philosopher and writer, but otherwise made his living as a bureaucrat for the British East India Company
not to have noticed what was going on around him, this vast migration where Mill says that it's virtually impossible for working people to move from one place to another.
As I'll discuss this afternoon, Mill was a disaster in international affairs,
where he repudiated the liberal principle of non-intervention.
And I'll explain that.
Now, worst of all was Mill's deformation of the concept of liberty itself.
His most famous work on liberty tends in that direction.
Liberty, it seems, according to Mill, is a condition that is threatened not only by physical aggression on the part of the state or other institutions or individuals, rather, society often poses even worse dangers to individual freedom.
This it achieves through, these are quotes, the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.
The tendency, quote, to impose by other ways than civil penalties society's own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.
Society compels all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.
This is non-aggressive, non-coercive, in the ordinary sense, tyranny, according to Mill.
And this is on liberty, the great liberal manifesto, supposedly.
True liberty, according to Mill, requires autonomy, because adopting the traditions or customs of other people,
is simply to engage in ape-like imitation.
Whereas others see individuals choosing goals laid out for them by what they freely accept as authoritative institutions, this is the real liberal position, Mill perceives the extinction of freedom.
In other words, for instance, if you're a Roman Catholic and accept the authority of the Catholic Church, the Magisterium, you're not exercising your freedom.
In a striking if preposterous illustration, Mill writes, in On Liberty, an individual Jesuit is to the utmost degree of abasement a slave of his order.
I have to call Father Sadowski at Fordham and inform him of this fact of which he has been aware all of his life.
When one wonders what is supposed to follow from this, must we form abolitionist associations
to emancipate the willing slaves of the society of Jesus?
One wonders also how Mill in his alter ego, Harriet Taylor, could ever have imagined themselves
entitled to legislate on the status of members of the catholic or orthodox orders, the status of orthodox Jews, devout muslims and of other believers.
His comment on the Jesuits illustrates a facet of Mill too rarely noticed.
He was, in the words of Maurice Cowling, one of the most censorious of 19th century moralists.
Mill constantly passed judgment on the habits, attitudes, preferences, and moral standards
of great numbers of people of whom he knew nothing.
As Cowling-Drawley observes, bigotry and prejudice are not necessarily the best descriptions of opinions
which Comtean determinism has stigmatized as outdated.
Now, there's beginning to be a literature on Mill the authoritarian, Mill the secret duplicitous authoritarian.
I mentioned Maurice Cowling, who has a short book on the subject.
Joseph Hamburger of Yale, published a posthumous work on the subject, and recently a big book by Linda Rader who teaches at a Florida University,
University, Mill and the Religion of Humanity, outlines in detail, and not just in Non-Liberty
but in other of his works, what Mill's secret agenda was.
But as I say in the shorter work by Hamburger, he examines the dark side of John Stuart Mill.
And Hamburger, like most anybody else, he long entertained the view that John Stuart
Mill was a true believer in an exemplary opponent of individual freedom, but like Rader does
in more detail, he examines not only On Liberty, but Mill's other writings and letters and
the personal testimony of his friends, and his conclusion is that the freedom of opinion
espoused by Mill in On Liberty was largely part of a grand strategy. Strategy was to
to implement freedom of total freedom of opinion in England in order to demolish religious faith and this was the especially Christianity and the received mores.
Now I don't want to engage in ad hominem arguments except I will later in the week in regard to people who certainly deserve it like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
But this I will say, that when an individual has, let's say, lifestyle problems,
you know, that's up to the individual, it's a private matter, fine.
However, when they fuel and provide the basic impetus behind his political philosophy,
then it becomes a problem.
John Stuart Mill had this problem with Harriet Taylor, who was a married woman.
I discussed this once with John Gray, who's not now my favorite guy, but a smart guy who knows a lot about Mill,
and teaches, taught at Oxford and now at the University of London, a political philosopher, and John agreed with me.
If Mill had been French at the time, you know, okay, so, you know, he has an affair with Harriet Taylor.
doesn't have to erect this assault on society and its mores into the cornerstone of his political thought.
Someone like Benjamin Constant, for instance, had the mores of the 18th century and did that kind of thing.
It's a different question.
But Mill, I think, was felt pretty agonizingly constrained by his heritage. His father was an atheist, but from a Scottish Calvinist background, through and through, the moral values were still there.
So that Mill had to lash out against society, I think, for what basically was his own particular problem.
In any case, Hamburger and Rader, in more detail, show that in Mill's view, once Christianity and the mores of English Victorian society were destroyed,
Then true individuality would be incarnated in the future million man, on the, he uses the term on the model of Soviet man, the million man dreamt of by Mill and then the lady who became his wife, Harriet Taylor, and the million man is the exemplar of someone in whom selfishness and greed would be replaced by altruism and the cultivation of the higher
Faculties. Now, we understand that in economics and international relations, Mill was a problem for people dealing with liberalism, but I think mainly in this area. The fateful linking of liberalism to an adversarial stance vis-a-vis tradition and social norms stems from Mill. It has unfortunately become standard. Owen Chadwick
There's a famous historian of religion, Dixie Professor Emeritus at Cambridge, and this
is what he wrote about liberalism.
Chadwick said, a liberal is one who wanted, of the 19th century, one who wanted more liberty,
that is more freedom from restraint, whether the restraint was exercised by police, or
by law or by social pressure or by an orthodoxy of opinion which men assailed at their peril.
The liberal thought that men needed far more room to act and think than they were allowed
by established laws and conventions in European society.
Note how in this statement no distinction is made between state coercion on the one
hand and social pressure, orthodox opinion and conventions on the other.
A famous British historian of political thought is a man named John Donne, and Donne wrote,
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.
Dispositionally, liberalism has little regard for the past.
Okay, so much for Macaulay, Thierry, W.H. Leckie, Acton and all the other liberal historians we could mention.
Descriptions of Chadwicks and Duns are much more expressive of the antinomian, lawless, normless mentality of contemporary Western academics
and the contemporary western chattering classes, than of liberalism historically.
Mill's view tends to erase the radical distinction, I would say, between incurring social disapproval and incurring imprisonment.
It leads to pitting liberalism against innocent, non-coercive traditional values and arrangements, especially religious ones.
It also forges an offensive alliance between liberalism and the state, even if contrary to Mill's intentions, since it is hard to see how one can be sure of uprooting traditional norms, except through the massive use of political power.
Contemporary writers committed to the million project of enjoining autonomy, the highest possible good, do not shrink from advocating this course, presumably unaware of its totalitarian implications.
Paul Gottfried has illustrated this in his two small books on after-liberalism and on multiculturalism.
How autonomy becomes the guiding star, autonomy understood as the rejection of tradition,
the rejection of inherited social norms, the rejection of religion,
and the people who take that position then feel perfectly free as you can see everywhere in America today,
In America today, Western Europe also, they use the state, its various institutions, educational institutions and other institutions, in order to, as much as possible, erase the inherited traditions and values of the past.
Replace them by their own idea of what is supposed to be autonomy.
When I'm talking about John Stuart Mill, I want to mention one other famous writer whose point of view has also distorted the meaning of liberalism and added to this conceptual mayhem where liberalism can mean virtually anything, anything except, of course, Nazism, and that's John Maynard Keynes.
Now, you can look up my article in the free market on Keynes and the Reds.
This is a short version of a chapter that will appear in my book on classical liberalism on John Maynard Keynes.
It's been a long time being worked on, many, many years,
and my publisher, Routledge, suggests that I might start planning to have it published posthumously.
If anybody is interested in many more citations about Mill on this point, that is his sympathy
for totalitarian experiments, as he called them, especially in the Soviet Union, if you
want further references from Mill's writings, as with any of the other talks I'm giving,
give me your email address, also your mailing address would be good, and I'll send them
Mill is another troubled individual. You'd think on the face of it that he'd be a prima facie case not to call him a liberal, since the hallmark of liberalism is the idea that society can run itself.
That's how liberalism started in the rejection of mercantilism and authoritarianism, state authoritarianism in every respect in the 18th century, 17th century also, what the level is.
Society runs itself. Voluntary agreements based on the principle of private property pretty much take care of everything.
Keynes is most famous for rejecting this idea in the core area of classical liberalism economics
and maintaining that an unregulated market economy cannot achieve full employment and
is subject to regular depressions and business fluctuations, very damaging to the masses
This is his economic theory, which has been exploded many times now. However, beyond that, he was also a social philosopher.
And I think, as with Mill, there's first of all the fact that he's in the British tradition, which gives him a head start in the minds of many people.
The Theory of Money and Credit
Now, one thing that's odd about Keynes is his sympathy for totalitarian experiments in the 1920s and 1930s.
And as I say, I can give you references in the 1920s and his visits to the Soviet Union.
Oh sure, he didn't like the suppression of thought, of dissenters.
Very typical, again of his kind of liberal, the emphasis on what the problems encountered by the intelligentsia, by people who like to talk and think and publish their views.
There were other people who suffered in the Soviet Union and suffered much more massively.
I don't know if you've ever noticed, but often, maybe less now that evidence has come out,
The purge trials were directed against the leaders of the communist party, Stalin's rivals.
The masses of people who had been oppressed and killed by the millions, the peasants and small business people,
and working for the people, the people who had been killed by the millions, the peasants and small business people,
by the millions, the peasants and small business people and working people, the intellectuals seem to take that in stride,
well, that's kind of the price for building up socialism, but when an intellectual like Leon Trotsky is now put on trial and condemned to death in absentia,
they get very excited and John Dewey sets up an international commission to investigate the case of Leon Trotsky.
What about the case of Ivan Smirnoff and his family and his kids who died in some Ukrainian village of starvation?
That wasn't too much of a problem for many of these so-called liberals.
Now, Keynes in his visits to the Soviet Union, I say, was critical of this aspect.
On the other hand, he had a very strange, and I can provide you the quotes from, if you care to have them, very strange, made very strange statements about how the Soviet, we have to at least give this to the Soviet leaders, that they are extirpating the crazy love of money, which is the hallmark of our own civilization, and the worst moral failing of our civilization.
In the Soviet Union, the communist cadres work for the sake of the community.
Here he was in perfect harmony with his good friend Beatrice Webb, who said the same thing at the time
and remained a good friend of Cain's, one of his best friends up until the time she died in 1946.
I think she died in 1943 and Cain died in 1946.
So that he does have sympathy for the Soviet Union at that time.
There's a famous essay of his that appeared in the Yale Review.
It's also in his collected works, but the collected works does not contain everything he says in that review.
Let me see, I think it was the Yale Review, it was 1933, I think it was April of 1933,
where he praises the experiments now going on in Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union.
He says, I don't agree with everything that they're doing, and the Nazis especially are wild, crazy people.
On the other hand, they at least have the courage to experiment, which is something that nobody in the West is prepared to do.
We're stuck with this old laissez-faire system, and the people of the establishment,
In 1933, he also wrote the preface to the 1936 German edition of the General Theory, which is very questionable.
He talks about how his system is more adapted to a country like Germany than it is to a country like England or America.
And by the way, that is not due to any mistranslation. That's what appears in the English draft.
Now, what I want to mention now, what I talk about in this thing in the free market,
is a statement that he makes in a radio broadcast of June of 1936
where he's reviewing, he reviews books and here he reviews a massive tome that has just come out
a tome that has just come out from Sidney and Beatrice Webb
called Soviet Communism and New Civilization
famously the first edition of that had a question mark after New Civilization
This book of theirs is noted as probably the most notorious, really infamous act of any fellow travelers in the whole sordid history of fellow traveling with Stalinism of the 1930s and 1940s.
most of the information comes directly from the Soviet sources and it's an
apologia for what Stalin is doing. This is 1936. The book was published in Russian
translation in the Soviet Union as the web's note, very nicely produced,
good paper and so on. The Soviet authorities welcomed it. So you would
I expect then a liberal like Keynes in his radio review to attack this book.
That's not what he does.
He says Soviet communism is a book which every serious citizen will do well to look into.
Until recently events in Russia were moving too fast
and the gap between paper professions and actual achievements was too wide for a proper account to be possible.
But the new system, he means hardcore Stalinism, 1936, but the new system is now sufficiently crystallized to be reviewed.
The result is impressive. The Russian innovators have passed not only from the revolutionary stage, but also from the doctrinaire stage.
I guess that makes him a liberal, but he's not a doctrinaire. He's in favor of compromise and flexibility.
as is shown by these Soviet authorities. There is little or nothing left which bears any special relation to Marx and Marxism as distinguished from other systems of socialism.
They are engaged in the vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully over a territory so extensive that it covers one sixth of the land surface of the world.
Methods are still changing rapidly in response to experience.
That also, I guess, is supposed to make him a liberal.
That he's against any kind of principles
and in favor of constant adjustment to experience.
The largest scale empiricism and experimentalism,
which has ever been attempted by disinterested administrators,
is in operation.
Meanwhile, the webs have enabled us to see the direction in which things appear to be moving and how far they have got.
It leaves me, finally, it leaves me with a strong desire and hope that we in this country, in Britain,
may discover how to combine an unlimited readiness to experiment with changes in political and economic methods and institutions,
while preserving traditionalism and a sort of careful conservatism.
That's very typical of Mill. I mean, if you try to make sense of that, unlimited desire to experiment and change things combined with a careful conservatism, what is he saying?
But if you're able to follow his remarks about the Soviet Union, now it happens that some authors, famous authors like T.S. Eliot, for instance, a number of others, Mencken recently,
recently made unfortunate comments in regard to Jews and in regard to sometimes in regard to
National Socialist Germany in this period and unfortunate and mistaken and deplorable sometimes.
However, the whole world resounds with that fact that all of these authors are somehow guilty of
of Anti-Semitism and helped along the road to Auschwitz and so on.
I never stop hearing about that, if you follow these things as I do.
Why don't we hear about this?
You may know that the man who's just finished the third and last volume of his great biography of Keynes,
Robert Skadelsky, Lord Skadelsky, he's raised in the peerage because I think of this great biography, well, in the second volume where he should have mentioned this, this radio talk by Keynes, which can be found in Keynes's collected works, it's not there, I wrote Lord Skadelsky, those are the kind of people I hang out with really,
Dear Bob, how are things?
And I asked him how come this did not appear.
How come it didn't appear in a major article he wrote on Keynes and the Fabians?
Sidney and Beatrice Webb were the leaders of the Fabian Society.
And he wrote back and said, well, there are reasons that explain why Keynes wrote this.
He was friendly with the Webb's and he wanted to promote their book.
He was afraid that some Russian friends of his, who had relatives in the Soviet Union,
if he wrote negatively about the Soviet Union, would feel the repercussions.
But Skidelsky said, I'll try to put this in somehow in my third volume.
He didn't put it into his third volume.
As far as history goes, this has disappeared.
Unless you have access to the free market.
What explains that? I don't think that that's an honest way to operate.
This is an outrageous thing for Keynes to have written.
By that time, anybody who wanted to know could find out what was happening in the Soviet Union.
They could find out about the Ukrainian terror famine that claimed, we don't know, 6, 7, 8 million people with cannibalism in the villages.
They could find out about the gulag that had been set up by Lenin.
They could find out about the constant executions that were going on.
and then they found killing fields containing tens of thousands of bodies, anybody could have found out about this, it was in the anarchist press, it was in the socialist press, it was in the catholic press, it was in some of the conservative press also, so you didn't have to go by the lies of the webs to judge what was happening in the Soviet Union.
Well, I want to say that this is a very odd thing for a model liberal to have written.
Not only a model liberal, but there are anthologies of liberal thought that say liberalism from what?
John Locke to John Maynard Keynes, as if he were the culmination of liberalism.
Well, let's go on from there to a major subject I want to cover now, and that is the classical liberal theory of class conflict.
The greatest interpreters of this theory were French.
So I want to say something about French liberalism to begin with.
I mentioned to you that Murray Rothbard in his history of economic thought
tends to place French economic thought ahead of British economic thought, French and continental in general.
As I mentioned to you, Murray is especially annoyed by Adam Smith and his reputation, which Murray, remember, said,
Adam Smith's reputation almost blinds the sun, and then this view that Adam Smith was somehow the father of economics, continuing with Malthus, Ricardo Mill, Marshall, and of course culminating in Keynes.
Murray much prefers the continental tradition of Turgot, including Bastiat, who we considered a very fine economist and there was a very interesting article, I think, in the quarterly review of Austrian economics by Professor Hülsmann on Bastiat as a precursor of Austrian economics.
Hayek has not helped the cause along, because Hayek wrote a famous essay called True and False Individualism.
And here, rather bafflingly, I think, Hayek attempts to distinguish two traditions of individualism,
or that was the term that he was using at the time for liberalism or classical liberalism.
The first, basically a British and empirical line of thought according to Hayek, represents genuine liberalism.
He believes the second French and continental tradition is not liberal really at all.
Rather it is a rationalistic deviation that leads inevitably, as he says, to collectivism.
This follows Hayek's claims from the contrasting social theories underlying the two doctrines.
Where the British tradition appreciates the truth regarding social institutions,
that they originate and develop spontaneously,
the French and Continental tradition holds them to be products of deliberate human contrivance or design.
Hayek was the head of my dissertation committee at Chicago many years ago.
I've always had very great respect for him, and he was a person who probably was as good a scholar that is learned in the history of thought as he was an economist, but here in this denigration of the continental and French liberal tradition, I really cannot follow him.
For one thing, there's a kind of funny game that he plays, because in the British tradition, he lists not only David Hume, Smith and Burke, but also Alexis de Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant, who were not exactly British subjects.
And among the French, he mentions the physiocrats, the encyclopedists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri de Saint-Simon.
Am I going to be talking about Rousseau and Saint-Simon? I'll talk about tomorrow.
Now, it's a peculiar thing it seems to me, if you're talking about liberal tradition,
to bring in the French encyclopedists, who have a whole bundle of baggage of their own,
and some people do consider them liberals, but Diderot and Dolbach and so on, hardly liberal in
my view, certainly not Rousseau, certainly not Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the utopian socialists.
So this is how the French get burdened with the idea of being in some tradition that leads inevitably to totalitarianism.
Hayek goes so far as to speak of the absence of a truly liberal tradition in France.
What can you say when it's obvious that there was an immense liberal tradition in the 19th century?
He traces all of these French problems back to Descartes, who thinks somehow hatched the
The idea of social engineering, a scientism, as Hayek discusses it, but if you want to select somebody, it wouldn't be Descartes, who wrote practically nothing about social theory.
I think a much more likely candidate would be the English philosopher Francis Bacon, who thought that in the future, society ought to be recreated on the model of science.
Well, more could be said about this, but I just want to point out that there are very serious problems with Hayek if you ever come across this essay on true and false individualism.
For one thing, this distinction between individualism or liberalism based on the idea of spontaneous order created by voluntary interaction on the one hand,
on the one hand, versus the idea of order being created by social engineering, leaves
out a very central liberal tradition, which is the tradition of natural rights, the sort
of thing that David Hume and Burke and Adam Smith were not really centrally concerned
with, and certainly these French people like Rousseau and Saint-Simon were not concerned
But there was this whole tradition of natural rights, and the French kept going long after the English had given them up.
Now, turning now to the doctrine of class conflict, which as I say is best developed by the French.
by the French. The idea that classes are in conflict is almost inevitably and invariably
associated with Marxism. I don't know if you know the name, Hirschman, Albert O. Hirschman,
Some economists might have come across him. He's an economist. And he has a reputation of being an economist who's thoroughly familiar with the history of thought, with intellectual occurrence of the modern period.
In front of his books, Hirschman comes across a statement by the famous Italian economist,
Wilfredo Pareto, where Pareto talks about class conflict.
And Hirschman is obviously the loss when confronted by this, because as he says,
says, it sounded at first curiously, perhaps consciously, like the communist manifesto.
But as he says, Pareto distanced himself from Marxism by talking about sporeliation.
Now, what is obvious from this, what is clear as day from this, is that this celebrated
expert in intellectual history has not got the first notion of a classical liberal class
conflict theory. The term spoliation, spogliazione in Italian, we'll talk about the Italians
in a little while, was the term used by innumerable classical liberal writers, including Bastiat
for instance, to refer to the exploitation of one part of society by another part of
society using the state.
This was a commonplace of this whole intellectual tradition and maybe you can understand sometimes
This is why people, of our point of view, get a little annoyed at their intellectual adversaries for simply not doing their homework,
not acknowledging our own tradition, our own thinkers, not equating themselves with our own thinkers.
You have to take my word for it, that Hirschman is famous for knowing everything about intellectual history.
and here, and Pareto, you know, is a very big name in the history of economic thought.
Now this is what Pareto was, this is what Hirschman was talking about from the beginning
of the Communist Manifesto, the history of all hitherto existing society, 1848, the history
of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, freemen and slave, patrician
Christian and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor
and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.
That was 1848.
In 1837, one of the French liberal school, a man named Adolphe Blanqui, who was a protégé
of Jean-Baptiste Say, wrote what is probably the first history of economic thought.
In all the revolutions there have always been but two parties opposing each other, that
of the people who wish to live by their own labor and that of those who would live by
the labor of others. Patricians and plebeians, slaves and freemen, whelps and gibbelines,
red roses and white roses, cavaliers and roundheads, liberals and serviles are only varieties of
of the same species.
There's no doubt that Marx read everything on economics,
read Blanqui's history of economic thought.
Blanqui quickly makes clear what he understands
to be at issue in these social struggles that
permeate history.
So in one country, it is through taxes
that the fruit of the laborers' toil is wrested from him
under pretense of the good of the state.
In another, it is by privileges declaring labor
or Royal Concession and making one pay dearly for the right to devote himself to it, through
the guilds, for instance, or government monopolies.
The same abuse is reproduced under more indirect but no less oppressive forms when, by means
of customs duties of tariffs, the state shares with the privileged industries the benefits
of the taxes imposed on all those who are not privileged.
So here we have, in a nutshell, the liberal theory of class conflict, predating the Marxist
theory, stated in terms probably nearly copied by Marx at the beginning of the Communist
Manifesto, that no one, very few exceptions, myself, Joe Stromberg, Hans Hoppe and now you
are acquainted with, so if you thought that whatever you had to pay to come to this gathering
was questionable, now you know it wasn't, because you have this secret knowledge, and
in fact it's going to remain secret, it doesn't matter that we publish these things in publications
of the Mises Institute, Hirschman is not going to learn anything from it, Skudelsky didn't
changes mind about mentioning Keynes' rave review for Soviet communism and new civilization.
Well we do what we can. Now, by the time that Blankey wrote in 1837, this idea was a commonplace
of classical liberal thought. In fact, it has its roots in the 19th century. I wanted
from the 19th century. I wanted a quote from something that should be known by intellectual historians and that is from Alexis de Tocqueville's
Recollections
Tocqueville, everybody quotes, he's almost as often quoted as Winston Churchill
and in his recollections Tocqueville writes about the middle class
which historians tell us came to power in France in 1830
under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe
This is supposed to have been the period of liberalism in the first part of the 19th century in France.
And Tocqueville says, this middle class entrenched itself in every vacant government job,
prodigiously augmented the number of such jobs and accustomed itself to live almost as much upon the Treasury as upon its own industry.
So he's talking about a bourgeoisie or middle class, very different from what we understood in America in those days or Britain in those days.
This is a middle class that has many similarities to the middle classes in other European countries.
Send their sons to university, to be university educated in order to get government jobs and never have to work again.
And what he says is, this is the great victory of the so-called liberal bourgeoisie in France.
Under Louis Philippe, they expanded the government bureaucracy and created jobs for their own kind.
If you look up the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of the French Revolution and the Constitution of 1791,
you read it over, I think I mentioned that it doesn't bear comparison and that Joe did also in his talk with the American Bill of Rights
and Human Rights, because there are so many loopholes for government action against individual liberty.
But I think that the section that they felt most strongly about, that really was heartfelt,
is where they say, all government offices shall be open to all citizens,
regardless of what class they come from, nobility or commoners,
should have equal access to all the awards and positions and functions that the government has to offer.
There were some French liberals of our sort, the authentic liberals, in the later part of the century.
I'll mention, in fact, some of these French class conflict theorists who said that was the essence of the French Revolution.
The commoners, the third estates revolt against the aristocracy because the aristocracy and the French monarchy had limited access to government positions and the civilian and military bureaucracies in the church and so on.
The third estate was kept out of those and had to crush the power of the privileged orders in order to get those jobs.
Well, that's a possible and fruitful interpretation of the revolution, I believe.
But now, I want to direct attention to some authors of the very early part of the century,
Right after the overthrow of Napoleon, under the Bourbon Restoration, a group of then young liberals founded a journal, happened to be called the Sancerre Européenne, and began publishing their views.
Their views were a synthesis of some earlier, somewhat earlier, French thinkers like Constant, like Destut de Tracy, and like Jean-Baptiste Say.
And in this journal, which just lasted for a few years, they outlined a philosophy of history that includes, embedded in it, a theory of class conflict,
and gave the best, clearest interpretation of this classical liberal view that I'm aware of.
Say was a very important influence. Let me mention who these men were.
The European censor.
And there was Charles de Noyer.
Charles Comte, there was no relation to Auguste Comte, Auguste Comte was one of the founders of sociology and a deeply evil man, and Augustin Thierry, Thierry became the most famous, he was a well-known historian in the 19th century.
Now, and Say was the father-in-law of Charles Comte. So there was a, and also everybody met each other socially in the salons of the time. So there was a close interconnection.
Now, according to Say, the different ways of producing all consist in taking a product in one state and putting it into another in which it has more utility and value.
This is what Murray is talking about.
This is while Malthus and Ricardo were talking about the labor theory of value.
According to him, all members of society who contribute to the creation of values are deemed productive,
but Say awards a pride of place to the entrepreneur, which is one of his major contributions, and Murray talks about that in his History of Economic Thought.
Unlike Smith, for instance, who had no place there for the entrepreneur, he talks about the capitalist instead,
Say understands the contribution of the entrepreneur to the dynamic free enterprise, free market economy that he believes is coming into existence.
In other words, we have the opposite of the pessimism of the English school.
However, there are flies in the ointment. Say says, and talks about the value of personal
interest in fueling the economy, but personal interest is no longer a safe criterion if
individual interests are not left to counteract and control each other. If one individual or
For one class can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it
acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community.
This is the origin of class conflict, the state entering into market relations.
It can then make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but
but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its own private profit.
The legislative body has great difficulty in resisting the importunate demands of this
kind of privilege.
The applicants are the producers who are to benefit thereby, who can represent with much
plausibility that their own gains are a gain to the industrious classes.
This is an important point, who can represent that their own gains are a gain to the industrious classes and to the nation at large.
In other words, ordinarily, if we're talking about manufacturers or merchants, business people in general, well, they're the good guys.
They help society along. They produce a utility for society.
And that leads us to sort of misdirect our attention from the fact that they're the ones who are now coming asking for government privileges.
In other words, what they would say is saying, if it were the members of the Catholic Church, or if it were noblemen, or if it were state functionaries who came and asked for special privileges,
Well, right away we could see that they're suspect and that they are people who are trying to live now at the expense of others.
But it's more difficult to see in the case of businessmen, which helps us to understand how it was possible for a noted author to write a book about American businessmen,
and the Business Men, the Most Persecuted Minority, which Murray responded to, talking about the history of American business and the unfortunate connection, especially between big business and government.
Now, the authors, these authors that I'm talking about invented a philosophy they called industrialism.
In any given society, according to them, a sharp distinction may be drawn between those who live by plunder, and they don't hesitate to use the word, and those who live by production.
The first are characterized in several ways, the plunderers. They are the idle, the devouring, the hornets.
The second are, among other things, the industrious, the bees.
Those who attempt to live without producing are the savages. The producers are the civilized men, no matter what the appearance might be.
Cultural evolution has been such that whole societies may be designated as primarily plundering and idle, or as productive and industrious.
The History of Old Hitherto Existing Society is the History of the Struggles between the Plundering and the Producing Classes
They have the view of Benjamin Constant that the ancients for all their achievements, the Greeks and the Romans for all their achievements, were basically societies that were founded on war, on constant war making, which included of course imperialism and the plunder of other societies.
And then came the German invasions, their concern mainly with the Frankish invasions, the invasions of the Franks, and then in England the invasion of the Normans, and the creation of feudalism.
Now, I would say that they had a somewhat one-sided view of feudalism, but nonetheless this followed in their, followed their typology.
The feudalism represented a kind of subordination that subjected the laboring men to the idle and devouring men,
and which gave to the latter the means of existing without producing anything, or living nobly.
They're talking mainly about robber barons, particularly.
To the rapacious nobility, I'm summarizing hundreds and hundreds of pages that are written along these lines.
To the rapacious nobility, there eventually succeeded the equally rapacious kings.
And I'm quoting kind of promiscuously from all three authors, whose thefts with violence, alterations of the currency,
Bankruptcies, confiscations, hindrances to industry are the common stuff of the history of France.
When the lords were the stronger, they viewed as belonging to them everything they could lay hold of.
As soon as the kings were on top and defeated the nobility, they thought and acted in the same way.
With the growth of the wealth of the commoners, growth of the towns,
Additional riches became available for expropriation by the parasitic classes.
These writers are particularly severe on royal manipulation of money and legal tender laws.
And in modern times, the main types of the idle classes have been the professional soldiers,
the clerics of the state-established religion, the nobles and the bourgeois,
who were nobled that has left the status of bourgeois in order to become nobles and governments.
These authors had a lot to say about war and peace which I'll deal with I think this afternoon.
In fact, in this newspaper, their motto in every issue printed at the top was,
Pay et Liberté, Peace and Freedom
One of the main categories of plunderers and exploiters of the present day, according to the Sans Serre Payen group, were state functionaries.
and, in fact, I could even cite an article for you on them as precursors of the School of Public Choice.
For them, and for Europeans at this time, this is the early 19th century, this is before the War of the Southern Secession and everything that followed that,
America was a promised land and they cite the virtual non-existence of any kind of federal bureaucracy in the United States compared to France.
You see that with the number of bureaucrats we have in France, you could have 30 United States federal governments staffed by them.
Although the United States is now rapidly approaching the population of France.
At this point, Say was one of the inspirations, but now we're talking about the class conflict theory of the Sancerre group.
Well, I think that you're getting the idea. I'll talk if time permits about the continuation of this class conflict view.
But one thing I want to point out, let's go back to Professor Hirschman and his kind.
Class conflict sounded like Marxism. Well Marxism sometimes sounds like liberal class conflict theory.
There are in fact two theories of social conflict in Marxism.
Marxism. One is the one everybody knows about, that is, in the present day, of the bourgeoisie
expropriating surplus value from the proletariat and therefore being its natural enemy.
Here's another Marxism, though. This is from Marx's Description of France in the third
The executive power, the French state, with its enormous bureaucracy and military organization,
with its ingenious state machinery embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering
a half a million, besides an army of another half a million.
This appalling parasitic body, nothing about capitalists
here so far, this appalling parasitic body,
which enmeshes the body of French society like a net
and chokes all of its pores, sprang up
in the days of the old monarchy.
The Bourbons and the July monarchy
added nothing but a greater division of labor,
More bureaucrats, and therefore new material for state administration.
This is Karl Marx.
Every common interest, somehow the common interest of everybody in society outside of the state,
every common interest was straightway severed from society,
counterposed to it as a higher general interest, snatched from the activity of society's members themselves,
and Made an Object of Government Activity.
Now I submit to you that that sounds very much like a classical liberal, right?
If you follow what I'm saying here, that is the opposition of the state and state action
with the rest of society.
You're not talking about capitalists and workers here.
You're just talking about the rest of society that was willing to see to these various tasks,
do what had to be done.
Instead, the state bureaucracy snatches it away from them.
All revolutions perfected this machine, this is Alexis de Tocqueville, instead of smashing it.
The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession as this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.
And here Marx was often very shrewd, especially when he dealt with concrete historical episodes and not his general economic theory.
This you could say was the secret history of revolution in the 19th century and afterwards.
The attempt of one group to seize the state power and everything that went with it, all
the jobs especially from another group.
A good quote from the Civil War in France.
These quotations by the way are online from a short article I wrote for the Journal of
of Libertarian Studies, Volume 1, Number 3, a long time ago.
So you can check out these quotations from Marx.
Now what I think I'll do at this point is save some elaborations of this until my afternoon
What about Rabun and the Americans? Did he have any inspiration, did he read any of the books?
These are the people who were very aware of what was being done to them by Northern manufacturing interests.
These French scholars that later on were near Morales when the Americans won them, did that happen to them?
Well, yeah.
One problem was that, and is, that often people do not, who are totally goodwill and basically sensible ideas, in my view anyway, don't really know what's happening in another country.
They have to go on the information that they get.
The information is mediated by, you know, some group of intellectuals, foreign correspondents, journalists, or whatever, so they get a distorted view.
So that many northerners, many French liberals, had a distorted view of what was going on in America at the time.
Edward Laboulet was the most prominent French liberal of, let's say, the third quarter of the 19th century.
He concocted a plan. He loved America, visited America, wrote about America. He was a very distinguished French academic, wrote about America, and felt the need to do something for America.
He didn't want to do it as long as the Institution of Slavery existed.
He was a great fan of Lincoln, a great supporter of the Union, and once the Southern Secession had been crushed, he could go along with his plan.
His plan was to give America a present.
And I set up an organization, instituted a campaign, not funded by government, oddly enough.
They got contributions from affluent people, from working people, collected contributions at factories, schools and so on,
and collected enough to build a statue to send to America on its birthday, and that was the Statue of Liberty.
However, when you read Laboulet on the Civil War and read other French liberals, it's kind of pathetic.
Now, it happens that there was one great French liberal, I hope I have occasion to talk about him,
because he was the most consistent, the best of the whole 19th century.
He lived, whatever, 97 years or something. His name was Gustav de Molinari.
Now, De Molinari may be a familiar name to you, read the few pages in Murray's History
of Economic Thought, because he seems to have been the first person to come up with the
The idea that the one function that passive liberals typically ascribe to the state need
not be fulfilled by the state, and that is the production of security.
That just like production of any other commodity, any other good, any other service can be provided
by competing private firms, so can security.
That is, defense against internal and external aggressors.
In other words, he was the founder really of what you could call, what has been called
anarcho-capitalism.
He did this as a young man, that is, he presented these views as a young man, and there was
a meeting of the Economics Society or Society of Political Economy in Paris where it was
funny to see people like Bastiat and Dunwayet say, what are you coming up with?
This is so extreme. This is so fantastical. The Molinari lived for a long time. For many
years he was the editor in the late 19th century of the Journal des Economistes. Now, it happens
that when Louis-Napoleon III set up his dictatorship in France, Molinari went back to his native
of Belgium for a while, and edited a journal called The Belgian Economist, which he published
during the period 1861 to 1865.
As far as I know, no complete set exists in the United States.
The Library of Congress has one volume, a 15-year run.
I was able to find it complete, bound, nicely presented to you by the friendly, competent
people working there at the British Library and was able to look through these years.
And this talk about Southern supporters, talk about Confederate partisans, Molinari is surprisingly
He was only well informed about what's going on in America, and he's totally on the side of the South, because they were fighting, not that he loved slavery, because they were fighting for the most basic human right, which was the right to govern yourself.
to understand his idea was you start by governing yourself in a state or a region and in a community
and down to the individual who decides for himself or herself what defense agency he
wants to subscribe to.
So the Southerners were fighting for that cause and I may actually write an article
about that.
At this time, the best source of information about de Molinari is also in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. You can look up under the name David Hart.
Now David Hart is currently with the Liberty Fund in Indianapolis. I think he has his own website on the history of liberal thought.
This is one of the things he's devoted his career to.
He's a Cambridge University PhD and wrote three articles, three lengthy articles that
were published, that Murray published in JLS, on De Molinari.
So that's the best introduction in English that exists.
Okay, now back to other general questions or comments.
See, if you were a student of mine, I would probably give you an A in the course just for asking that, showing that you really were concerned enough and gave enough of a damn to ask how the thing is spelled.
Much of what I quoted can be found in an essay in one of the Mises Institute books.
Yuri Maltsev edited a book called Requiem for Marx and I wrote an essay called Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes.
No, no, there was a quote from His History of Political Economy.
Okay, everybody got that done? And by the way, in that same volume, Hans Hoppe has a very good essay on the Austrian theory of class conflict.
Do you have notes available to the Molinari on Southern Secession, the Passport? Did you just read about it?
No, I mean, I read the stuff itself. It's all in French. The journal was published in Brussels, so it's all in French and I haven't translated any of it so far.
I can give you some, if you give me your email and your mailing address, I can give you some key quotes.
He talks about this also late in his life, in one of his books, but I think it's also just in French.
Joe?
In the previous generation, before the censor group, there is some direct influence on the southerners because Jefferson read first Jean-Baptiste Say, he also read the Stutt-Nedrasse and translated the economic part of the Stutt-Nedrasse's big treaties, and I have to say because of our Taylor rights, the Taylor runs these writers on a very exciting basis, John Taylor is very close to their general view of exploitation, it seems to me.
You know, could have derived it independently.
Even people like Adam Smith talk about exploitation through the use of the government.
Turgot talks about the people who encourage foreign wars in order to gain advantages in
foreign countries.
But you're right about Jefferson's connection with the French economists, with the Say and
de Tracy.
Yes.
Yes, young man?
What do you think is the cause of the great antagonism between national socialism and communism?
They seem to be very similar as far as my country.
That's a very interesting question.
Listen, I'll have a whole lecture on communism later in the week.
So if you don't mind, save it for that, because that would be a very appropriate question.
When Mill said he wanted to overthrow authorities, did that mean that he thought that experience counted for nothing, that everything had to be thought out a little?
That's an interesting question. Now, of course, he considered himself an empiricist. However, it had to be controlled scientific experience, not the experience of mankind in all its manifold, different directions.
And that experience, as Burke said, then distilled into traditions. You could say the traditions are the result of experience.
and the experience of many more people than simply a few scientists, let's say, the experience
of mankind over a much larger period of time, and from that we get traditions and norms
in society.
I think there's a lot of truth in that point of view.
Edmund Burke was a founder of modern conservatism, said that without traditions, mankind would
would be like the flies of the summer, every generation they die out at the end of the summer, and then they have to start over again, and they don't accumulate any knowledge, they don't advance it and progress it all, because they cannot build on the experience of previous generations.
But Mill had no respect for that kind of tradition and his ideal seemed to have been society
as a constant advanced philosophy seminar, you know, which would lead to the mental breakdown
and Schizophrenia of Masses and Masses, and can you imagine leading a life like that consistently and constantly?
No, you know, you take certain things for granted and then go on and do something rather than constantly throwing everything into question.
Yes.
In his introduction to Bastiat's essays, Hayek was very negative about Bastiat, very much down to places, writing and contributions, and I really couldn't figure out why he did it.
You know, I just read that years ago.
Really?
I remember reading that years ago. I don't recall it too well. I wonder why he was asked to write the introduction then, if he didn't particularly appreciate Bastiat.
Bastiat, what year did he live? Less than 50 years and had an enormous influence in that period when things seemed to be going our way after the repeal of the Corn Laws and so on.
Edward Atkinson in Massachusetts, who became one of the leaders of the Anti-Imperialist League later in his life, was converted by Bastiat, a man you probably haven't heard of, but who was recognized as the greatest Russian social scientist of the 19th century, Boris Chicharin, was converted to the free market in Russia by Bastiat.
The German liberals, whom I've written about myself, who headed the German free trade movement
and brought free trade for a while and market economy to Germany, Bastiat was their chief
inspiration.
He has had a really great influence, one could speak of a Bastiat wave, for instance.
He was a believer and is buried in the church of St. Louis of the French, St. Louis de
Francese in Rome, where he died, and the one day that I had available to visit it, the
church was closed.
As I get older, I feel drawn to places like that, grave sites, and famous people, library...
Can I try to spell?
Well, you know, you want it in Cyrillic?
I don't show off. That's how it's usually spelt in English, I think. Okay, yeah, Joseph.
Well, it's interesting that you should mention that. Comte died relatively young, and that is Charles Comte.
If you look at my essay in Requiem for Marx, I talk about that. It's an unfortunate history in a way.
Charles de Mellet and Thierry became sort of seduced by the so-called bourgeois monarchy,
July Monarchy of Louis Philippe, got government jobs and began changing their tune.
Also, there's this other thing, that we see a number of times, and we have to keep in mind, it's kind of dialectic if you want to put it that way, at the same time there's a rise of the socialist movement.
So, a number of thinkers, who begin by being radical libertarians, start to think, well,
maybe considering what the socialist movement might amount to, a reign of terror or whatever,
and the socialists say we're going to abolish all private property and other crazy ideas,
maybe it's not such a good idea to dismantle the authoritarian state and the powerful police
and the Army, because we might need it, if it came to that, against these crazy socialists.
That's one of the things that happens in the revolutions of 1848, where liberals can't
succeed because then a red movement comes along and scares practically everybody else
into supporting the establishment.
So Dunwayet is an example of that and I think Thierry, you could say Thierry also.