[The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought by Ralph Raico. Edited by Ryan McMaken. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2025; 287 pp.]
Ralph Raico was the foremost historian of classical liberalism and one of Murray Rothbard’s closest followers. In 2004, he gave a series of ten lectures at the Ludwig von Mises Institute that were very well received, but the lectures were never printed. We have Ryan McMaken to thank for making them available, and in doing so, he has performed an immense task. He has converted a transcript of the videos into a book and added footnotes that give the sources to which Raico referred when he spoke. Often this has involved arduous and skilled detective work on his part. Though the lectures often repeat themes that readers of Raico will recognize, they add new material as well, and it is some of this new material that I will discuss in this week’s column. I was especially glad to read the book because Ralph Raico was one of my closest friends, and the chapters often brought back memories of his immense knowledge, profound scholarship, and mordant wit.
The French Revolution is often called a bourgeois revolution, but what does that mean? Raico suggests that the real grievance of the Third Estate—the representatives of the bourgeoisie—was that they did not have equal access to positions in the government bureaucracy. They were much less concerned with individual liberties and property rights than the American revolutionaries:
We further see the lack of liberalism among the revolutionaries in the fact that the French revolutionaries’ “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” is in no way as unequivocal as the American Bill of Rights. The French declaration says, for instance, there shall be freedom of thought, even for religion, “within the limits of the law.” They never got to the American point, which was that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Now, of course, this didn’t mean separation of church and state within the American states, but it meant that the federal government could do nothing along these lines. (emphasis in original)
Ralph explains the mentality of the French bourgeoisie by invoking Alexis de Tocqueville:
This is a middle class that has many similarities to the middle classes in other European countries. They send their sons to university to be university educated in order to get government jobs and never have to work again. Tocqueville says this is a great victory of the so-called liberal bourgeoisie in France. Under Louis Philippe, they expanded government bureaucracy and created jobs for their own kind…. But I think the section [of the Declaration of Rights] that the revolutionaries felt most strongly about, that really was heartfelt was this: the part where they say that all government offices shall be open to all citizens regardless of what class they come from, whether nobility or commoner, and they should have equal access to all the awards and positions and functions that the government has to offer.
It will come as no surprise to most readers of Raico that he was a strong supporter of a non-interventionist foreign policy for America. But what some may find unexpected—at any rate, I was surprised—is what he says in this connection about Richard Cobden: “In my view, he was the greatest libertarian theorist of international relations who ever lived.”
Cobden’s principle was to eliminate foreign policy altogether, replacing it with free trade:
So, no entanglements—not only entanglements but hardly any connection, if possible, with governments. Rather, the idea was to let our merchants go all over the world—as they did during our “terrible” isolationist period when America had its “head in the sand”—and somehow American merchants were going to China, Europe, Africa, and everywhere. America then became an economic powerhouse in the nineteenth century…. The idea was no foreign politics—you have nothing to do with it.
Herbert Spencer is not usually thought of as a writer on international relations, but Raico looks to him as a precursor of his own non-interventionist views. You might think otherwise, because Spencer viewed evolution as a struggle for existence,
…but what Spencer believed was that warfare was suitable only in mankind’s primitive stage. The Western world, however, had long since left the stage of militancy and entered the stage of industrialism…. War in the contemporary world was retrograde and destructive of all higher values. Early in his career, back in 1848, Spencer maintained, as the Manchester school did, that wars were caused by the uncurbed ambition of the aristocracy.
Much as [Joseph] Schumpeter was to say in a famous essay of his on imperialism, Spencer argued that war was linked to the feudal spirit….
At this earlier, more anarchistic period of his career, Spencer even suggested the defense of the country against invasion might be provided independently of the state…. Throughout the following decade, Spencer opposed wars, meaning the colonial wars in which England was involved. At the end of his life—he died in 1903—he was outraged by the Boer War—the British attack on the Dutch farmers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
In another passage of great interest, Raico suggests that the Second Amendment was intended as a way of keeping the central government in line. If it attempted to violate people’s rights, it would be met by armed resistance from the state militias:
I don’t know how many people have ever put this together—right after the enumeration of these basic [First Amendment] rights, the Second Amendment comes. As William Blackstone said in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, this is one of the main ways of defending our basic liberties. The right of the people to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed” comes right after the First Amendment.
I have had space to discuss only a few of the insights in this remarkable book. It is the final testament of a great scholar and libertarian.
