The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
All history is at least partly conjectural.
If we think about the enterprise of history for a moment or two, we can easily see why
this must be so.
For when we walk outside our dwellings and take a look at the world around us, one inescapable
A remarkable fact is that much of the past is still here, still with us.
Particularly if the town or city we live in has been in existence for a while, walking
through such a place is something like being a geologist and passing through a present
world in which outcroppings of the past, buildings, statues, place names, institutions, even transportation
How are we to know about that part of the past that has not survived?
The answer is that we rely on documents for information about those aspects of the past
that we can no longer witness directly for ourselves.
For as the English historian John Tosh reminds us, from the High Middle Ages onwards, which
is to say for approximately the last thousand years, the written word survives in greater
The surviving written word is of a number of types.
There are published and unpublished sources.
The unpublished sources include the diaries, journals and letters of individuals, the records
and correspondence of those engaged in business enterprises, and the paperwork generated by
government at all its levels.
The published sources include flyers, pamphlets, almanacs, catalogues, newspapers, magazines
and books.
And not all of these, whether published or unpublished, may safely be relied upon.
As John Tosh observes, many primary sources are inaccurate, muddled, based on hearsay,
or intended to mislead.
Indeed, the majority of sources are in some way inaccurate, incomplete, or tainted by
prejudice and self-interest.
So some of the facts the historian needs are inaccessible, and much of what is accessible
is also unreliable.
What do you do then if you're writing an account of some historical event or some historical
period or some individual's life and career, and you come to a point where the available
information thins out and you don't know for sure what happened next?
What if there appear to be no documents that provide that information?
Or if there are several documents that give conflicting information?
If it's a minor issue, one that doesn't really matter that much to the overall point you're
making in the article or chapter you're writing, you can work around it, simply say nothing
about it one way or another.
In some cases, however, you're going to feel that you need to know what happened, if only
in order to tell a coherent story, one that doesn't leave nagging questions in the minds
of your readers or listeners.
So what do you do?
The answer is that you make your best guess about what actually happened.
You use words like probably and presumably so that your readers or listeners will know
that you're dealing in conjecture, not facts, and you make your best guess.
And what is that best guess based upon?
It's based upon your knowledge of the historical situation, of course, the facts you do have,
Plus your understanding, or at least your beliefs, about human nature and about the
way the world is.
The historian John Lewis Gaddis in his book The Landscape of History has proposed that
every historian approaches his subject with certain assumptions based on personal experience
about how things happen in the world, assumptions about the way the world works, sorting out
About the difference between how things happen and how things happened, Gaddis writes, involves
more than just changing a verb tense.
It's an important part of what's involved in achieving a closer fit between representation
and reality.
Even if a particular historian is not very philosophical of temperament, not much given
to reflecting on the nature of the human condition, and this perfectly describes most historians,
by the way, that historian will still be operating under certain assumptions about how things
happen in this world and this life.
Ayn Rand used the phrase sense of life to describe what I'm talking about here.
A sense of life, Rand wrote in 1966, is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics,
an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.
Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices,
forms value judgments, experiences emotions, and acquires a certain implicit view of life.
Every choice and value judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around
him, most particularly of his capacity to deal with the world.
He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false, or he may remain mentally
passive and merely react to events, that is, merely feel.
Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities,
integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes
a Habitual Pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him.
What began as a series of single discrete conclusions or evasions about his own particular
problems becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the
compelling motivational power of a constant basic emotion, an emotion which is part of
According to Rand, the key concept in the formation of a sense of life is the term important.
What is important, worth noticing, worth heeding, paying attention to about life?
What aspects of life are important in the sense that they encapsulate and, in effect,
represent something about the way the human condition is in its essence?
Rand employed this concept of sense of life principally in her discussion of the arts,
especially the art of fiction writing, arguing that it is the artist's sense of life that
that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from
the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style, as he selects those aspects of existence
which he regards as metaphysically significant, and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting
what he regards as the insignificant and accidental, presents his view of existence.
But is it not obvious that what she says here is no less true of the historian, who tells
stories about actual events, periods, and individual human lives of the past?
For the historian selects those aspects of the past which he regards as significant,
and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting what he regards as the insignificant and accidental,
Once his view of the event, period or individual life he is writing about, and what he regards
as significant will be in the end at least partially determined by his sense of life,
by his notions about how things happen in this world of ours.
And what if the events the historian is writing about took place earlier than a thousand years
ago?
What if they took place so long ago that no documents regarding them have survived?
What if they took place before written records of any kind were even systematically created
and kept?
I'm thinking here of two particular historical works that loom large in the libertarian tradition.
Folkways by William Graham Sumner and An Essay on the History of Civil Society by Adam Ferguson.
Folkways, which is subtitled A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners,
Customs, Morays and Morals, begins by discussing the origin of folkways.
If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive
men and primitive society, Sumner writes, we perceive that the first task of life is
to live.
One begin with acts, not with thoughts.
Every moment brings necessities which must be satisfied at once.
Need was the first experience, and it was followed at once by a blundering effort to
satisfy it.
In the beginning, the method was that of trial and failure, which produces repeated pain,
loss and disappointments.
was the impelling force.
Pleasure and pain, on the one side and the other, were the rude constraints, which defined
the line on which efforts must proceed.
The ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain is the only psychical power which
is to be assumed.
Thus, ways of doing things were selected, which were expedient.
They answered the purpose better than other ways, or with less toil and pain.
During the course on which efforts were compelled to go, habit, routine and skill were developed.
The struggle to maintain existence was carried on not individually but in groups, each profited
by the other's experience.
Hence there was concurrence toward that which proved to be most expedient.
All at last adopted the same way for the same purpose.
At this point it seems to me any properly skeptical reader simply has to ask, how on earth does
Sumner know all this?
No documents exist that could possibly give him this information, and the events he is
is describing happened so long ago that they could scarcely have left much physical evidence
behind.
Sumner's remark at the beginning of the passage about all that we have learned from anthropology
and ethnography with regard to primitive men and primitive society is the tip-off.
Anthropologists and ethnographers take the fragmentary and often suggestive but always
These ambiguous remains of events in the remote past, and combining this scanty information
with what is known about so-called primitive people living a primitive lifestyle in more
recent times, and with the anthropologists and ethnographers' own notions, whether consciously
or unconsciously held, about the nature of the human condition and how things happen
in the World, they attempt to infer what life must have been like for these ancient people.
These anthropologists and ethnographers, then, are doing essentially the same thing every
historian, every police detective, every natural scientist does.
They are looking at an existing situation, an existing state of affairs, and asking themselves,
how did things come to this pass?
What events, if they had happened, would have led inexorably to what I see before me?
The method by which natural scientists generate hypotheses.
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called it abduction or retroduction to distinguish
it from induction and deduction.
But whatever you call it, it has much in common with what the elementary textbooks in logic
call the fallacy of affirming the consequent, if it rains, then the streets will be wet,
the streets are wet, therefore it has rained, logically not necessarily, but the scientific
method says, the streets are wet, that would be the case if it had rained, maybe it has
rained, then the scientific method tests that hypothesis, has it rained, what does the empirical
Imperial data show.
If it hasn't rained, what else might account for the wet conditions we see around us?
For the historian, as we have seen, the empirical data may not be conclusive.
He or she may have to make his or her best guess, based at least in part on his or her
views on the human condition and how things happen in this world we all live in.
At one point in the opening pages of Folkways, Sumner writes that it is of the first importance
to notice that from the first acts by which men try to satisfy needs, each act stands
by itself and looks no further than the immediate satisfaction.
From recurrent needs arise habits for the individual and customs for the group.
But these results are consequences which were never conscious and never foreseen or intended.
They are not noticed until they have long existed, and it is still longer before they
are appreciated.
Another long time must pass, and a higher stage of mental development must be reached
before they can be used as a basis from which to deduce rules for meeting, in the future,
problems whose pressure can be foreseen.
The folkways, therefore, are not creations of human purpose and wit.
This bears an almost uncanny resemblance to an observation made by Adam Ferguson nearly
140 years earlier, in 1767, in his book, An Essay on the History of Civil Society.
One was a Scot, born 288 years ago this month, on July 1, 1723, the son of a clergyman.
He entered the ministry himself in 1745 at the age of 22, but found he had little talent
for the work.
After nine years, he gave it up, traveled on the continent for a time, then returned
to Scotland and spent a couple of years working as a librarian and as a private tutor before
for joining the faculty of the University of Edinburgh, where he remained for most of
the next three decades.
After resigning in 1785 at the age of 62, he devoted himself to travel and writing.
He died early in 1816 in Scotland at the age of 92.
He wrote an essay on the history of civil society not long after beginning his teaching
in the University of Edinburgh when he was in his early 40s and in its pages he noted
that human beings living in communities frequently stumble upon establishments which are indeed
the result of human action but not the execution of any human design.
Ronald Hamowy in his excellent article on Ferguson in the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism
calls this insight of Ferguson's possibly the single most spectacular contribution to social
philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment.
He finds it reflected in Adam Smith's description of the market as an invisible hand and in
David Hume's discussions of the origin and nature of justice.
And of course, in the more recent works of Friedrich Hayek, it has become one of the
The most influential ideas in modern social thought.
And where did this idea, this linchpin of the libertarian tradition, come from?
From what Hamowy describes as a conjectural history of social institutions, full of Adam
Ferguson's best guesses as to what probably happened many millennia ago, when human beings
were first bringing order to their social life.
Ferguson had little solid factual basis for his guesses.
He had to base them mostly on his beliefs about the human condition generally and about
the way things happen in this world we all share.
Not for nothing did he entitle his first chapter of The General Characteristics of Human Nature.
Ferguson's beliefs on these issues, which he had formed gradually over 40-odd years
of Living led him to see something different when he looked closely at the same social
institutions that people had been looking at for centuries before him.
They led him to see what we now, thanks to Hayek, know as spontaneous order.
As Hamowy writes, embedded in Ferguson's conjectural analysis of the historical development of
of Societies is the notion that the institutions under which men live are not the product of
deliberate contrivance, but take their form through a process of evolution.
Indeed, these institutional arrangements are of such a high order of complexity that their
structure and interconnections with each other are beyond the comprehension of any mind.
Rather, they come into being and are shaped by numerous discrete individual actions, none
of which aims at the formation of coherent social institutions.
Society is not the result of calculation but arises spontaneously, and its institutions
are not the result of intentional design but of men's actions, which have as their purpose
and Array of Short-Term Private Objectives.
It seems clear, does it not, that this almost certainly is what happened long, long ago?
That this is how humans came to have the social institutions we see before us when we go out
to look at the world of 2011?
Yet it is an historical truth arrived at not by studying the documents and other artifacts
What's left over from the time in which it happened?
It is an historical truth, as profound an historical truth as anyone has ever identified,
which was arrived at by a man who looked intently at what little was known in the mid-18th century
about the early social experience of human beings, and then offered his best guess.
This is Jeff Riggenbach.