The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Brigenbach.
Timothy Ferris is a science writer and documentary filmmaker whose articles and essays have appeared
in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Playboy, The New York Review of
of Books, Forbes, Smithsonian, Harper's, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Scientific American,
The Nation and The New Republic.
His films have been shown in prime time on PBS.
He teaches at the University of California Graduate School of Journalism in Berkeley.
He is the author of at least a dozen books, the latest of which, The Science of Liberty,
Democracy, Reason and the Laws of Nature was published about six weeks ago in early February by Harper.
What is the Science of Liberty about?
Here's how Ferris dealt with that question in a presentation he made at the Cato Institute in Washington DC in
February. My thesis is that there is a symbiotic relationship between science and
liberalism, let me
I'd like to quickly define my terms. By science, I mean what sometimes is called modern science,
which is to say the entire social institution of a scientific establishment that has professional
scientists, university departments, laboratories, refereed journals, scientific conferences
and all the rest of it.
Ferris thinks modern science in this sense dates back to the beginning of the 17th century
and has since developed into something truly unprecedented in human history.
There's never been in history anything like the scientific establishment we have today.
And it does have a method despite the efforts of hundreds of scholars to claim otherwise.
And the essence of this method is a kind of feedback loop.
You have an idea and instead of just testing it either by its internal logic
or by testing it against other competing ideas which Aristotle had identified as the only
two ways to evaluate an idea before science, you conduct an experiment.
And then based on the experiment you might affirm, revise or deny the hypothesis.
That really is how science works as far as I can tell in 40 years of covering it, even
though many people seem to think otherwise.
So much then for what Ferris means by science when he speaks of a symbiotic relationship
between science and liberalism.
What does he mean by liberalism?
Now by liberalism I have in mind classical, what is sometimes called classical liberalism.
In my opinion liberalism like science is not a term that benefits from modifiers.
I don't think there's any need to talk about modern science or classical liberalism.
To me liberalism is just liberalism enshrined in the Bill of Rights and so forth.
Farris had been a little more exact the day before when he explained his new book to WNYC radio interviewer Leonard Lopate.
I use liberalism in the original sense as the original political philosophy invented primarily by John Locke and a few others
and embodied in the American Bill of Rights and the British Bill of Rights a century earlier.
It's a philosophy that people can be trusted to be free, and it's the basis of liberal democracy.
Democracy, liberal democracy is just a government in which people can vote to do just about anything
except abridge the rights of their fellow citizens.
Ferris told his audience at the Cato Institute that modern science and classical liberalism have much in common.
Now, liberalism does have in common with science that, at least in terms of liberal democracy,
one constructs experiments. They are inherent to the system. Every election is an experiment.
Every act of legislation is an experiment. This isn't the way we talk about it so much
now, but the founders did talk in experimental terms. Jefferson's Second Inaugural is one
More important, the two are operationally interdependent.
For example, as Ferris told Leonard Lopate, science can thrive only in a liberal environment.
If you're going to nurture science, you've got to have a free country, and that's just
empirically the fact. It's a fact that emerges from the historical record.
Consider the case of China, Ferris urged Lopate.
No matter how much money China spends trying to become a first-rate Chinese power, and
All right, so science needs liberalism. But does liberalism need science? Ferris thinks
Science, he writes, was the innovative ingredient, the crystal dropped in the supersaturated liquid,
suddenly solidifying it, without which the democratic revolution would not have occurred.
The truth is, according to Ferris, that the democratic revolution was sparked.
Caused, is perhaps not too strong a word, by the scientific revolution, and science
Science continues to foster political freedom today.
Science, Ferris writes, is an ongoing enterprise that requires freedom of speech, travel and
association.
Moreover, scientific skepticism is corrosive to authoritarianism.
Overall, science promotes liberty and democracy.
Science, you see, depends on unfamiliar and sometimes unpopular ideas being freely promulgated,
discussed and, in some instances, accepted.
The fact that millions of people today are open to new ideas and skeptical about political
or intellectual authority is largely due to the rise of science.
The history of the last few hundred years, then, may be summed up by saying that science
Ferris demanded liberty and demonstrated its social benefits, creating a symbiotic relationship
in which the freer nations were better able to carry on the scientific enterprise, which
in return rewarded them with knowledge, wealth and power.
Consider the record, Ferris told WNYCFM interviewer Leonard Lopate.
As he had written in chapter 1 of his book, in 1900 there was not a single liberal democracy
in the world, since none yet had universal suffrage. By 1950 there were 22. And today?
46% of the people in the world now live in liberal democracies. The other half want to
live in liberal democracies. Everyone wants the benefits of science and many people are
Ferris told his audience at the Cato Institute in February that it's not difficult to figure
out why liberal democracy has spread so rapidly, nor is it hard to guess why people want to
live under such a system.
This combination of science and liberalism has quite a number of attainments.
In the book, I try to boil down some of them to what I think are fairly universal values.
What can everyone agree it's good for people to have, like health, wealth and happiness?
In terms of health, thanks to science and free enterprise and such, the average expectation
of a baby born in the world today is more than twice what it was in 1800.
The production is up 52% per person despite the increase in population just since 1961 and that's actually just to 2001.
And the reason of course for that is that agriculture is much more productive.
It's not productive because some scientific council got together and made up a set of precepts that were then carried out.
It's productive because of experimentation and that's what I've tried to emphasize in the Science of Liberty
So much for health, what about wealth?
And can Ferris really prove that liberal democracy has increased human happiness?
Happiness is hard to measure.
One thing I looked at is literacy because clearly people are better off if they can
and Read and Write and feel better off and more in contact with the world and their community.
World literacy went from 63% in 1970 up 10% by 1985 and over 80% today.
Now if you were sitting in a coffee house in 1700 in London, let's say on Change Alley
where a lot of the science-minded people would gather, and you were all science aficionados
and you were trying to guess what the future might bring, you might have been, you know,
Francis Bacon did this. This was a guy who was smart enough that a lot of people think
he was Shakespeare. Francis Bacon saw some of what was coming with science and tried
to predict it, and it's very difficult to do. It's hard to make predictions, as Niels
Bohr said, especially about the future. Had you said at such an assembly that by somewhere
Reading through Ferris's new book, its full title again, is The Science of Liberty, Democracy,
Reason and the Laws of Nature.
I was repeatedly reminded of another book, a book I read a few years ago.
This book was called Inventing Human Rights, a History.
It was the work of a UCLA professor of modern European history named Lynn Hunt, and it was
published in 2007 by W. W. Norton and Company.
According to Hunt, the story behind inventing human rights was a fairly simple one.
The longer she thought about the events of the 18th century, particularly the American
and French revolutions, the more she was struck by how very quickly the fundamental
What I was really interested in was a very simple question, but the simple questions always turn out to be difficult, which is what made people in the 18th century think that universal human rights
was were self-evident an implication that they must always exist when they
hadn't been considered self-evident previously so how could something become
self-evident and because it's self-evident it's a little bit hard to
get at, Jefferson's we hold these truths to be self-evident, when you think
something is self-evident you tend not to give long arguments for why it is so
In the same book discussion recorded at UCLA in May 2008, Hunt also called attention to
the very rapid changes in public opinion in the 18th century about torture and cruel punishment.
New attitudes about torture and cruel punishment develop quite suddenly.
Why do practices that have been accepted for centuries suddenly come apart at the seams?
What happened in the 1760s and 1770s?
Enlightenment reformers claimed explicitly in print that what happened was that when you applied reason to the practices
It wasn't satisfied with that reasoning.
She wanted to pose a more fundamental question.
Why was it that when the idea salesmen went out into the public square in the 1760s and
1770s with their rational ideas about human rights, they suddenly found so many ready
and enthusiastic buyers?
As she investigated this question, she came to understand, she says, that the buyers had
had a kind of learning curve to deal with when they considered buying, say, the idea
that everyone in a free society enjoys equal rights before the law.
Alexis de Tocqueville recounts a story told by Voltaire's secretary about a woman named
Madame de Chatelet, who did not hesitate to undress in front of her servants, who quote
him not considering it a proven fact that valets were men.
Before the 18th century and indeed long after the 18th century too, hierarchy, dominance
and subordination were the natural ways of social relationship. The lesson is that equality
has to be learned, that historically dominance and subordination have been much more common
and seemingly natural.
One might well retort that dominance and subordination had to be learned every bit as much as the
idea of equality of rights, but we must avoid digressions, the clock is ever ticking.
Given that equality of rights had to be learned before those who learned it could be expected
to lend public support to such a radical idea, before they could reasonably be expected to
Human rights take on self-evidence from the middle of the 18th century onward, really
in the decade or so before 1776, thanks in part, and let me underline, in part, to the
emotional effect of reading a new genre, the epistolary novel, that is the novel based
on the Putative Exchange of Letters.
And how would an epistolary novel educate a person so that the person would be more
receptive to a pitch for equal rights for everyone?
The narrative form of the epistolary novel as it develops after 1740 induces readers
by its form to empathize with ordinary people unknown to them.
This forces readers to see that the most ordinary people, even servants like Pamela, the heroine
of Richardson's novel by that name, have inner selves just like their own.
The term rights of man, which was the French term, widely adopted in the late 18th and
early 19th century, including by Jefferson at that time, emerges, the term rights of
Man emerges in the 1760s, and I believe that the ground is prepared, in part, by the epistolary
novel. It is fascinating, though hardly conclusive, that the inventor of the phrase rights of man
in French was also the 18th century's best-selling novelist in French, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
that one of the first to seize upon the political power of natural rights, another common term,
So you see then why Hunt's book is like Ferris's book.
Both authors are trying to explain what seems to them like a sudden shift in public opinion.
Ferris calls that shift in public opinion the democratic revolution, Hunt calls it the invention
of human rights, and both authors seek to explain this change by finding a single cause
for it.
For Ferris, science caused the democratic revolution.
For Hunt, the rise of the novel and the memoir in the early years of the 18th century caused
the invention of human rights.
And they're both right, of course.
They're both right, and they're both wrong.
What they're trying to do is like trying to explain why a new product suddenly swept
through the marketplace.
Why did millions of individuals in the marketplace of ideas, uncoordinated by any master plan
or any manual or instruction booklet, simultaneously make the particular decisions they made?
There is never a single answer to such a question.
Different people were persuaded by different things.
All we can do is name some of the factors that probably influenced the thinking and
decisions of some of the people involved.
In the case of the democratic revolution, the invention of human rights, one of the
important factors was the rise of science.
Another was the rise of fiction and memoir. Hunt, at least, knows all this. You'll note
that she was careful to say that it was the reading of novels that, in part, accounted
for the sudden growth of the idea that equal rights were self-evident.
There are many ways to approach rights, and I am not at all arguing against other approaches.
One could talk about Christian origins, origins in Greek and Roman Stoicism.
One could talk about Catholic natural law.
There are many other ways.
People have talked about the resonance with the Indian, Chinese, Muslim, Native American
traditions.
And I don't in any way mean to say that these don't matter or are somehow unimportant.
But I really focused in, for reasons of my own expertise, but also because I think there's
We've all encountered the rival theories Hunt is talking about here.
The thinkers like Max Weber, who believed that the rise of liberalism was caused by
the Puritan work ethic.
The thinkers who believe that the rise of liberalism was made inevitable by Christian ideas about
the individual soul, and so forth.
Take all such theories with a grain or two of salt, I implore you.
When you're attempting to explain market processes, whether in the marketplace for
goods and services, or the marketplace of ideas, it's never that simple.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.