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NOTE The English Civil War and the First Libertarian Movement

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Rigenbach.

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In the 1640s, when outright civil war came to England, with a royal army headquartered

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in Oxford, fighting a parliamentary army headquartered a mere 50 or 60 miles away in London, it suddenly

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became possible to think all sorts of things that had previously been considered unthinkable.

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The King was the divinely mandated representative of God on earth, after all, and yet here he

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was being defied and warred against.

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True he was being warred against by Parliament, which liked to think of itself as representing

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the people, but this way of looking at things would not withstand close scrutiny.

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The majority of the people couldn't even vote in parliamentary elections.

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Neither was it exactly true to say, as Harry Elmer Barnes did in his 1947 survey of Western

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Civilization, that Parliament represented the interests of the commercial or mercantile

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middle class, the bourgeoisie.

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It would be closer to the truth to say, with H.G. Wells writing in 1920, that Parliament

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represented the interests of the private property owner, both the owners of the great hereditary

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estates who sat in the House of Lords, and the businessmen and professionals who sat

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in the House of Commons.

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But however you defined your terms, whoever was behind it, the private property owner

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or the bourgeoisie, this open defiance of the king employing force of arms, flew in

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the face of everything everyone had always been taught.

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It made you wonder what else that everyone had always been taught might turn out on closer

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examination to rest on a less secure foundation than one had always been led to believe was

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there.

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Might we, for example, actually be better off with no king at all, with just parliament?

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Why did we have government in the first place?

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What was it for?

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Murray Rothbard described the situation succinctly in his Austrian perspective on the history

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of Economic Thought, The Turmoil of the English Civil War, he wrote, stimulated radical thinking

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about politics.

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And the most radical thinkers of all in the 1640s were the Levellers.

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Rothbard calls them the world's first self-consciously libertarian mass movement.

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They worked out a remarkably consistent libertarian doctrine, upholding the rights of self-ownership,

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Private Property, Religious Freedom for the Individual, and Minimal Government Interference

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in Society.

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The rights of each individual to his person and property, furthermore, were natural.

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That is, they were derived from the nature of man and the universe, and therefore were

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not dependent on, nor could they be abrogated by, government.

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And while the economy was scarcely a primary focus of the levelers, their adherence to

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to a free market economy was a simple derivation from their stress on liberty and the rights

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of private property.

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The economy was not a primary focus of the Levellers because they had what today we would

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call civil liberties issues of a particularly compelling sort, clamouring for their attention

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and not willingly taking a back seat to what seemed far less urgent matters of commerce

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and trade.

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After the career of the man who was far and away the best known of the Levellers, John

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Lilburn, who was born in London sometime in the second decade of the 17th century.

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No record of the exact date of his birth seems to have survived the nearly 400 years of history

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that have elapsed since.

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Though his parents were minor officials in the royal court of King James I, Lilburn himself

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Joseph was never overly respectful toward the divinely mandated representative of God

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on earth.

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He was barely out of his teens before he began spending a lot of his time with people of

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what the king and his courtiers would have regarded as a distinctly unsavory type.

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There was William Prynne, for example.

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In his book The Triumph of Liberty, Jim Powell describes Prynne as a Presbyterian lawyer

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A lawyer who had published many attacks on the Church of England for which he was fined.

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But the fines were the least of his troubles.

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As Powell tells the tale, Prynne also was disbarred as a lawyer condemned to life imprisonment

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in the Tower of London, his ears were hacked off, and his cheeks were branded with the

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initials S.L. for seditious libeler.

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There was also a physician, Dr. John Bastwick, who had his ears cut off for criticizing Church

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of England officials, and who had introduced young John Lilburn to Prynne.

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It can come as little surprise when Powell tells us that the government considered Lilburn

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a potential troublemaker for associating with these people.

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He didn't remain a potential troublemaker for long, however.

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He soon realized his potential.

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Over the course of the roughly 20 years of Lilburn's public career, from the late 1630s

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to the late 1650s, he wrote and published a hundred or so political pamphlets.

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Over and over and over, Powell tells us, Lilburn set out his beliefs, that laws should be written

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in English so everybody could read them, and a trial would be proper only when formal charges

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Laws are filed when they refer to known laws and when the defendant can confront the accuser

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and have an adequate opportunity to present a defense.

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He denounced the government-granted monopoly on preaching, attacked government-granted

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business monopolies, and spoke out for a free trade and a free press.

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He observed that the longer politicians remained in parliament, the more corrupt they became,

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So he called for annual parliamentary elections and universal male suffrage.

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For saying these things, for writing and publishing them, John Lilburn was repeatedly imprisoned.

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He spent most of his adult life in jail, and at one point at around the midpoint of his

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career in 1645, Powell reports that he had one of his eyes poked out with a pike for

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for daring to write and publish a pamphlet describing the injustices he had suffered at the hands of King Charles I's government.

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But when parliament took over the national government at the end of the decade after capturing and beheading the king,

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John Lilburn didn't find his personal situation much improved.

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In the 1650s, under parliament and under the subsequent military dictatorship of former parliamentary army officer Oliver Cromwell,

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Somewell, Lilburn was imprisoned at least as often for expressing his opinions as he

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ever had been under King Charles.

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Lilburn himself was a former officer of the parliamentary army, but he had been disillusioned

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early.

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As early as 1646, when the King still lived and civil war still raged all about them,

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Lilburn had appeared before the House of Lords and denounced its membership in no uncertain

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terms.

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All you intended when you set us a fighting, he told the assembled members of the upper house of parliament,

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was merely to unhorse and dismount our old riders and tyrants, so that you might get up and ride us in their stead.

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It's astounding that Lilburn had any time left over at all from his busy schedule of writing, publishing and serving time,

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to work as a brewer, which he did, and to serve as a captain in the parliamentary army, which he also did, for his life was very short.

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He died in 1657, a year before Cromwell, and at a time when the latter was still very much in power.

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Lilburn is thought to have been around 43 years old at the time of his death.

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His health had been ruined by years of imprisonment under harsh conditions.

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He had given his life, what there was of it, in order to get out his libertarian message.

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And he had got it out, and it had been received, and would be carried forward by others.

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At least one of those others was, shall we say, a somewhat unlikely candidate for the

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honor of carrying on John Lilburn's message.

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He was an English aristocrat, whose birth name was Anthony Ashley Cooper.

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Cooper was about seven years younger than Lilburn. He was born late in July of 1621,

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so he was a young man only 21 years of age at the time the strife of interests between

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the government and the private property owners erupted into civil war between King and Parliament

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in the early 1640s. At first, young Cooper backed the King in the conflict, but after

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After a couple of years, he switched his allegiance to parliament.

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During the 1650s, he served as an official in Oliver Cromwell's government.

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After Cromwell's death, he became a member of the 12-man delegation sent by parliament

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to invite Charles Stewart to re-establish the Stewart Line on the English throne.

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After Charles II became king in 1660, Cooper served his government in a number of official

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Now, before I get sidetracked on Locke, consider Anthony Ashley Cooper's career so far.

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Not a particularly promising one, would you say?

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A young man is briefly a royalist, then, once he sees who is more likely to win the civil

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war, a partisan of parliament.

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In his thirties he serves the commonwealth government he helped to create.

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Then in his forties he becomes a royalist again, helping to bring back a king who immediately

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rewards him with high position.

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Is this not merely the tale of a young man who knows which side his bread is buttered

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on and who contrives always to be on the winning side in any conflict over who will govern.

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Yet Murray Rothbard portrays Cooper very differently in his Austrian perspective on the history

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of economic thought.

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Rothbard rehearses the well-known basic facts of John Locke's biography.

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Born in 1632, the son of a country lawyer who, like John Lilburn, served as a captain

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in the Parliamentary Army during the English Civil War.

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After the war, the Elder Locke's former commanding officer helped him obtain a scholarship for

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his son John to attend the prestigious Westminster School, from which he moved on to Oxford.

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At Oxford, he studied classics, and after obtaining his master's degree, joined the

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faculty, teaching Greek and rhetoric.

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He then took up the study of medicine and became a physician, largely, as Rothbard

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notes, in order to stay at Oxford without having to take holy orders.

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But much as he liked Oxford, both the town and the campus, Locke willingly left it after

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15 years, at the age of 35, to take up residence in the London home of Anthony Ashley Cooper,

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where he assumed new duties as personal physician to Cooper's family, tutor to his children,

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and secretary, advisor, and ghostwriter to Cooper himself.

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The two men had met the previous year, when Cooper went to Oxford to seek medical advice

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for a persistent and troublesome liver infection.

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Locke recommended an operation, which Cooper underwent successfully.

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He believed that Locke had saved his life and spent the rest of that life attempting

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to repay Locke in any way he could.

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Now when the two men met in 1666, Locke was not without political opinions, and the political

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opinions he held were of a sort one would think would appeal to a high official in the

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king's government, as Cooper was at the time.

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At Oxford, Locke had insinuated himself into a group of scholars devoted to the ideas and

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political preferences of Francis Bacon, a royalist who had served as Attorney General

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and Lord Chancellor under James I. Rothbard writes that Locke and his colleagues enthusiastically

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welcomed the restoration of Charles II, and Locke's colleagues successfully prevailed

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was built upon the newly restored king to personally order Oxford University to keep

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Block as medical student without having to take holy orders.

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Nor was this all, for, according to Rothbard, in 1661, Block, this later champion of religious

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toleration, wrote two tracts denouncing religious tolerance and favoring the absolute state

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Enforcing Religious Orthodoxy As Rothbard sees it, something happened to

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John Locke when he became personal secretary, advisor, writer, theoretician, and close friend

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of Anthony Ashley Cooper, who in 1672 was named the first Earl of Shaftesbury.

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It was due to Shaftesbury that Locke, from then on, was to plunge into political and

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Economic Philosophy, and into public service, as well as revolutionary intrigue.

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Locke adopted from Shaftesbury the entire classical liberal Whig outlook, and it was

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Shaftesbury who converted Locke into a firm and lifelong champion of religious toleration,

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and into a libertarian exponent of self-ownership, property rights, and a free market economy.

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It was Shaftesbury who made Locke into a libertarian, and who stimulated the development of Locke's

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libertarian system.

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Rothbard quotes the editor of one edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government as

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saying, justly, in Rothbard's opinion, that without Shaftesbury, Locke would not have

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been Locke at all.

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But, Rothbard continues, this truth has been hidden all too often by historians who have

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have had an absurdly monastic horror of how political theory and philosophy often develop

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in the heat of political and ideological battle.

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Instead, many felt they had to hide this relationship in order to construct an idealized image of

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Locke, the pure and detached philosopher, separate from the grubby and mundane political

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concerns of the real world.

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Another way of putting this would be to say that political theory and philosophy often

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emerge out of what is, at bottom, merely a strife of interests, two or more groups seeking

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to use the power of the state to advance what they see as their interests.

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The men who run such groups typically care little or nothing for ideas, political theory

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and philosophy emphatically included.

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They see ideas as sometimes useful to sway or manipulate public opinion, however, and

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they see men of ideas as sometimes useful to do the writing that makes the swaying and

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manipulating possible.

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In the epitaph he wrote for his long-time patron, friend and mentor, John Locke called

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Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, a vigorous and indefatigable champion of civil

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and Ecclesiastical Liberty.

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But what if, instead, Shaftesbury was merely a smarter-than-average 17th century English

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politician, trying to look out for what he saw as the interests of the wealthy, private

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property-owning class into which he had been born?

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What if his political career reflected nothing more than his successive judgements about

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what was expedient toward that end?

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But if sometimes he had supported the king, sometimes parliament, because he had tried

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always to be on good terms with whichever was the winning side, working with those on

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the winning side to achieve his own objectives as best he could under the ever-changing circumstances.

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If the king became impossible to deal with, you could see if you could ally yourself with

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parliament.

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If parliament became impossible, you could form a new political party to promote your

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What if, because Shaftesbury was smarter than average, he had given some thought to how the interests of the private property-owning class could best be packaged to win popular support, and had some ideas of his own as to what sorts of arguments would likely be most effective?

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What if he had decided to try persuading his talented young assistant and understudy, John Locke, of the truth of these arguments, before asking him to work the ideas out further, develop them, turn them into a sustained and fully coherent philosophical discourse?

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As worked out and developed by John Locke in the early 1680s in his Two Treatises of Government,

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Shaftesbury's arguments turned out to be pretty much the same as the ones John Lilburn had offered the literate English public back in the turbulent 1640s,

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back when Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, was an impressionable young man in his early 20s.

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Rothbard writes that Locke's entire structure of thought in his Two Treatises of Government

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was an elaboration and creative development of leveler doctrine, the beginnings in self-ownership

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or self-propriety, the deduced right to property and free exchange, the justification of government

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as a device to protect such rights, and the right of overturning a government that violates

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or becomes destructive of those ends.

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There would seem to be little room for doubt that John Lilburn was a man of principle, not

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a mere spokesman for an organized interest.

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As Leonard Levy memorably put it in his book on the origins of the Fifth Amendment, while

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others supported civil liberties to gain their own freedom and denied it to their enemies,

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Lilburn grew more and more consistent in his devotion to the fundamentals of liberty, supporting

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civil liberty to gain your own freedom while denying it to your enemies.

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This is the sign of the man who is merely a spokesman for an organized interest, not

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an advocate of a principle.

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Lilburn was an advocate of a principle.

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The case is not so clear and unequivocal with Shaftesbury, or even with Locke, who espoused

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the interests of the king when the king was taking care of him, and the interests of the

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private property owners when they were paying his rent.

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Rothbard candidly acknowledges that Locke's two treatises of government was written in

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1681 and 1682 as a schema for justifying the forthcoming Whig Revolution against the stewards.

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But does it matter?

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Not really.

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What counts in history, including intellectual history, is results, not intentions.

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Various European mariners, Christopher Columbus among them, set out late in the 15th century

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to find an alternate sea route to China and India.

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They found something else entirely.

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What matters today is not what they set out to do or what motivated them to do what they

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What they did, but what they did.

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Whatever their motives may have been, whatever at any given moment they thought of themselves

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as doing, Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke advance the libertarian idea, just as John

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Lilburn did.

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All three of them are part of the libertarian tradition.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.

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The Theory of Money and Credit