History: The Struggle for Liberty

4. Class and Conflict

History the Struggle for Liberty 2003
Tags: Philosophy and Methodology, Political Theory, War and Foreign Policy, World History
Ralph Raico

Gustave de Molinari became the grand old man of classical liberalism, crediting Pareto. Molinari understood that the main issue in the Civil War was the tariff, not slavery. In Italy economists founded free market economics, crediting Bastiat.

In America, John Taylor saw society becoming feudalistic with exploiting classes. Government needed to be separated from banking systems. Thomas Jefferson’s values were held most high. William Graham Sumner talked about plutocrats – wealthy persons who used the state. There was the liberal idea of class conflict. Production led to peace, whereas militarism led to war and destruction. War is the health of the state, said Bourne.

The pro-peace position was led by the Manchester School, particularly by Richard Cobden. They led the free trade movement. Their aim was harmony and peace among nations.

The tax-eating rather than the tax-paying classes favored war. Cobden emphasized trade not politics. Bastiat proposed getting rid of the French army. The American Open Door policy with China was free trade imperialism. Unilateral free trade works. Trade agreements don’t. Just do away with tariffs.

War making was often based upon incorrect information. Kosovo and Iraq are examples of disinformation stampeding us into war. The liberal anti-war tradition was against imperialism. The US went down the road of empire as did Spain. Constant war, large standing armies, crushing debt, and destructive levels of taxation are all with us now.

Herbert Spencer believed that warfare was only suitable to man’s primitive stage, not his advanced stage after industrialization. However, some liberals, like de Tocqueville, did support war under certain conditions.

Transcript: Lecture 4 of 10 from Ralph Raico’s History: The Struggle for Liberty.

[This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. The Q and A at the end of the lecture has been omitted. Annotations have been added by Ryan McMaken.]

The French contribution to class-conflict theory remained pretty much the same after the industrialist school. There wasn’t much amplification or enrichment in a theoretical way, I would say. Nonetheless, the French school typically adhered to the analysis that I gave you in the last hour and added certain other historical examples.

Gustave de Molinari became, after a while, the grand old man of French liberal economics. He lasted for a long, long time, and became the editor of the Journal Des Economiste for some decades at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Molinari provides, in a way, an additional historical example with how he connected class conflict theory with the American Civil War. His interpretation is basically the interpretation you can read in Charles Adams, in his book on the Civil War.1 It is also found to a degree in Tom DiLorenzo’s book2: namely, that the main issue was the tariff. The tariff had been the issue on which secession had practically already occurred in the 1830s, in connection with South Carolina. It was not the issue of slavery and this was, according to Molinari, foremost in the minds both of the Southern leaders and of the Northern Republicans.

The American Civil War then fit into this category of class conflict, the predatory class being the Northern Republicans, who wanted protectionism and the preyed upon class being the Southern planters, but in general, Molinari used this analysis all over the place. Through this lens he analyzed the success of the French regimes, not only of Louis Philippe, but the Revolution of 1848, Napoleon III, and the Third Republic.

Now let’s turn our attention to Italy, for a moment. If you know something about James Buchanan’s public choice theory, he gives great credit to the Italian economists for steering him in this direction, giving him the tools of basic analysis. One Italian economist he doesn’t mention is the man who more or less founded Italian free market economics in the nineteenth century, Francesco Ferrara. Ferrara’s book was taught for many decades at the University of Turin.3 Murray Rothbard has in his History of Economic Thought, a few pages on Ferrara4, but Ferrara’s main interest for us is that he acted as the editor of an enormous series of works by foreign economists. He translated these into Italian with huge introductions, about their lives, their contributions and so on, so he was in a way, a very helpful, great historian of economic thought.5 And Ferrara gives full credit for his point of view—which again is a liberal class-conflict point of view in the way I outlined last time—to Bastiat. So, what we have then is the French school by Bastiat influencing the Italian Ferrara. From Molinari, we have the influence of Vilfredo Pareto. Now, Pareto will be a name to people who have studied economics here. “Pareto optimality” is still a concept that’s used. Now, in economics, he was more of the Lausanne school of Walras, and not an Austrian-School economist. But in his social theory, he was very much a libertarian.

Again, Rothbard has some pages on Pareto in his History of Economic Thought.6 Pareto openly referred to Molinari as his “maître” and master, and you can see the traces of Molinari’s economic theory in general, especially this class conflict analysis in Pareto. Pareto is simply the most well known of a whole school of Italian economists. They were the best Italian economists of the time—the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Schumpeter says that by this time Italian economists were the equal of any in the world.7 Very prominent is a man named Antonio de Viti de Marco, whom Jim Buchanan quotes and Maffeo Pantaleoni, whom I don’t think he does quote.8 However, reading Jim Buchanan on these people and then reading the authors themselves, I don’t think he does justice to the radicalness of their position.9 Again and again, they excoriate the Italian state of being nothing but a collection of predators, of crooks, of gangsters, of people who in one way or another were stealing money from the productive citizens, working people, small business people, of the peasants of the south and so on. The predators channeled money and privileges to favored clientele, which included not only businessmen who got protection through tariffs—contractors of all kinds—but also unionized workers. In general, it was the North with the industrialists and their protective tariffs paying off the unionized workers as well to gain their support. They were preying on the productive citizens of the rest of the country and especially in the agricultural sector, which was still the main industry in Italy.

These people are well worth looking into.

The analysis continued afterwards with a man who is famous really, I have to tell you, although maybe you’re not familiar with his name: Luigi Einaudi. He was a free-market economist who was the first President of the Italian Republic after World War II and probably the most famous free market liberal thinker in Europe at that time.10

The Jeffersonians

Now, this class-conflict analysis had other traditions besides that of the French and—through the French—of the Italians. In the United States, for instance, some Jeffersonians and Jacksonians also grappled in detail with the question of class in the politically relevant sense and came to conclusions very much reminiscent of the industrialist school. John Taylor of Caroline, William Leggett, and John C. Calhoun were key observers and critics of the social groups whom they believed were utilizing political power in order to exploit the rest of society, the producers. John Taylor was outraged by what he saw as the betrayal of the principles of the American Revolution by a new aristocracy based on “separate legal interests.”11 Taylor was homing in on the idea that these conflicting classes were created by government privilege: the bankers’ privilege to issue paper money as legal tender, the beneficiaries of public improvements, protective tariffs, the “American system,” and the policy of the Whigs in the early nineteenth century. American society, according to John Taylor, had been divided into the privileged and the unprivileged by this substantial revival of the feudal system. (He’s talking now about feudalism in the way that the industrialist writers have.)

Two decades later in the 1830s, the Northern radical William Leggett, a Northern Democrat, denounced the same exploiting classes. Leggett was a chief spokesman for Jacksonian principles in the North. He denounced in the Jeffersonian manner the bankers and the beneficiaries of government grants for internal improvement. His own position was, as he thought of it, the same as that of the original American Republic: laissez-faire, do not govern too much. The American aristocracy, he thought, naturally favored a strong government including especially control of the banking system. The banking issue was the main issue of that time. Leggett, in contrast, demanded the absolute separation of government from the banking and credit system.

Leggett was an editorial writer and his pulpit was the New York Evening Post, the oldest paper in America founded by Alexander Hamilton. In those days it was edited by the great American writer and poet William Cullen Bryant. Leggett was their chief editorial writer. He summed up the principles that he was going to be writing according to. They were the principles of Thomas Jefferson, he said. “The sum of a good government is described by that illustrious champion of democracy…”—these are Jacksonians, so he thinks he’s talking in favor of democracy—“is all we aim at.”12 In Jefferson’s words, “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another; shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement; and shall not take from the mouth of labor, the bread it has earned.”13

This book is really a goldmine.14 He wrote very well and there are all kinds of great editorials here by Leggett. He has an editorial denouncing the Governor of New York for proclaiming Thanksgiving. He asks where, in heaven’s name, does this politician come off telling us when we should give Thanksgiving to the Lord and appointing a special day for it that? Why doesn’t government leave it up to us to decide when we want to do something like that?15 He has an essay here called “The Street of Palaces” and he talks about Genoa, that has a very elegant street commonly called the street of palaces, with the houses of the great and influential nobles of the past. Leggett says, “Is this condition of things confined to Genoa or to the European countries? Is there no parallel in our own country? Have we not in this very city [New York] our street of palaces adorned with structures as superb as those of Genoa, have we not too our privileged orders, our scrip nobility?”16 Do you understand scrip, that is, a paper put out by a different authority without any backing in precious metals to act as money? By “scrip nobility” he means the banks that were given the right in New York state to issue paper money without the backing of precious metals: “Aristocrats clothed with special immunities, controlled indirectly, but certainly the political power of the state, who monopolize the most copious sources of pecuniary profit and wring the very crust from the hard hand of toil. Have we not ensured like the wretched serfs of Europe, our lordly masters? If any man doubts that these questions should be answered, let him walk through Wall Street, a street of palaces.”17

You can see in what sense he was a radical, in what sense he was a Democrat, but his ire was directed against those influential, wealthy—often wealthy—people who used the state in order to gain their assets. This is very typical of the whole liberal tradition going back to the Levellers. They were obviously not classical liberals who were believers in socialism or egalitarianism or the leveling of fortunes. On the other hand, they were very suspicious of people with large fortunes because those people are the sort who tended to have connections with the government. They tended to act hand in glove with the government, getting favors from the government and afterwards. I’ll mention in a little while, one of the last and greatest of the American classical liberals, William Graham Sumner who talked about the “plutocrats.”18 Maybe you’ve heard that term, plutocrat. It’s commonly used to mean any wealthy person. It comes from the god Pluto who, as the god of the underworld, was supposed to be the god of treasures and buried wealth and so on. So, nowadays “plutocracy” means ruled by wealthy people, but he used plutocrat in very sharp distinction to capitalist, for instance. A plutocrat was, in fact, some wealthy person who used the state in order to defend his position on the market. A plutocrat didn’t dare to risk himself on the open market, but used the state instead. Leggett is a very good example of this anti-plutocrat tradition in America.

Marx and Soviet Class Conflict

Finally, what I want to say in contrasting the Marxist and classical liberal ideas of class conflict, it seems obvious to me that the classical liberal idea of class conflict is enormously superior. In fact, it is no contest between the liberal theory and the Marxist theory, in explaining Marxist regimes. Marxists and communists in general had a very hard time trying to explain what kind of society and regime existed, for instance, in the Soviet Union. It wasn’t a capitalist regime anymore. It wasn’t an exploitative regime of the bourgeoisie because they had gotten rid of the bourgeoisie. The communists had chased the bourgeoisie out or executed them. And all of your property was taken over by the state in the name of the people. What sort of regime is that? What class is involved there? If class conflict exists, according to the Marxist views, because of differential access to the means of production, well, there’s no capitalists on one side to claim the means of production anymore. There’s no struggle over the means of production anymore. What you have are the means of production allegedly owned by society at large. And this was the position of the Soviet regime: we’re a classless society. We don’t have class exploitation anymore.”

In fact, the problem was obvious to everyone from the word go, every alleged Marxist regime in the world was an exploitative regime with a ruling class that came to be known as the nomenklatura. So, how to explain that? Well, you have the liberal idea of class conflict that there is a certain group of people who gain control of the state apparatus and exploit the rest of society. This was the “new class,” as it was sometimes called.19 Have you read Animal Farm, maybe? This was the pigs. This was the nomenklatura, the people in charge, the people whose names were in a certain book of influential people. The liberal idea can explain also Marxist regimes in a way that the Marxist idea of class conflict cannot. And in general, it is much more useful than any alternative and maybe it’s time that some of our scholars discovered that there was such a thing as the liberal idea of class conflict.

War and Peace

One area of class conflict that was especially pointed out by the classical liberals was the area of war and peace and international relations. I mentioned to you last time that the motto on the front page of the Censeur Européen in every issue was, “peace and freedom.” A pro-peace position was central to the industrialist point of view—just to take this one liberal group—and their attack on militarism and standing armies was savage and relentless. This is a typical passage repeated many times, for instance by Dunoyer. He’s being sarcastic, really, savagely sarcastic here. Remember he talked about how production and exchange is at the center of social life, so that we have to honor and respect the people who engage in production. He raises the question: “What is the production of the standing armies of Europe? It is consisted in massacres, rapes, pillages, conflagrations, vices and crimes, the deprivation, ruin and enslavement of the peoples. The standing armies have been the shame and the scourge of civilization”20 The industrialists, including also Jean-Baptiste Say, attacked British imperialism, the arrogance of British imperialism, which Say said, has turned production and commerce itself into an attack on civilization.21 They were for various reasons, not particularly anglophile.

Now, you’ve heard many times the phrase that “war is the health of the state,” and this comes from the Left anarchist Randolph Bourne in the course of the First World War. Murray Rothbard was the one who introduced this phrase and concept into libertarian thinking.22 Murray always stressed the idea that war is the health of the state because that is what history has demonstrated. I’m sure that next week, those of you who have the privilege of listening to Robert Higgs, will find him amplifying on that to a great extent.23 It’s one of his major fields. So, the idea of war being a special problem to society, the preservation of peace became a major aim of liberalism.

In Mises’ book on liberalism, he has in the beginning the different sections listed: property, freedom and—among the early ones—peace as one of the aims of the liberals. As Mises says, “Not war, but peace is the father of all things,”24 contrary to what the Greek philosopher Heraclitus maintained.25 Mises says, “Peace is always better than war.”26 Extolling peace has characterized the classical liberal movement from the eighteenth century at least from Turgot on through the nineteenth century to even Gladstone who wasn’t, frankly, that much of a liberal. His slogan in mid-Victorian Britain was, “peace, retrenchment, and reform.”

Now, in anglophone countries, the greatest single factor leading to the identification of classical liberalism with a pro-peace position is the work of the Manchester School and its leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright. Here we have another couple of my personal heroes, especially Cobden. Richard Cobden and John Bright: there is a great literature on these men. A number of their works are still in print and certainly many of their works are in libraries. Best known for their advocacy of free trade, they were the leaders of the free-trade movement that led to the repeal of the corn laws in 1847. These men held that unhampered freedom of commerce among nations is the surest road to an even higher goal than the material wellbeing of the people, world peace.

Classical liberals are often attacked for being mean-minded and venal materialists. It’s very clear that businessmen as they were, and interested in profits as they were—John Bright was proud of being a successful mill owner—the liberals of the Manchester School had a higher aim which was to bring about harmony and peace among the nations.

The most fundamental reason for opposition to war—and its concomitants, imperialism and militarism—was stated succinctly by John Bright in one of his speeches during the Crimean War. That was a watershed war in the Crimea from 1854 to 1856.27 This is what Bright said: “What is war? I believe that half the people that talk about war have not the slightest idea of what it is. In a short sentence it may be summed up to be a combination and concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable.”28

So when you see some of the people nowadays, some of the writers nowadays, talking so glibly about war, you should keep that in mind. They don’t. Yet, those of us who believe in laissez-faire and pure capitalism—we’re supposed to be the heartless ones. Meanwhile, they don’t really give a damn about—and I think even their remorse over the death of American mercenaries is pretty much half-hearted—the victims of American war waging. The Pentagon itself says, “we don’t keep these figures.” Take the Iraqi war with its thousands of the civilians dead. Even the Associated Press counted 3,200-something, but 3,200 was only people who died in hospitals, not people who were buried under rubble or died on the road. This total was from only about half the hospitals in Iraq, the largest ones. So, it’s very probably true that five to six—maybe 10,000—civilians died and that does not include the ones who were maimed, mutilated like that kid, Ali, with his arms gone.29

Bright was a Quaker. He was not a pacifist, but he was a Quaker. He was also a human being, unlike the people who call themselves conservatives nowadays, who really could not care less and gloat about how we have the power to do that kind of thing. Someone who had this point of view—that it was fine to kill people in this way—I believe would have even come under suspicion in the SS, as most likely a potentially dangerous sadist. They wanted people who were just disciplined and killed when they were given the order and didn’t get any special kick out of it.30

Let’s go back to the Manchester School. They believed that the interest of the great majority in all countries was peace and that both specific wars and long-term patterns of belligerency on the part of governments could be explained by and large by reference to the interests of particular groups within the governing circles. These groups were more or less what Bright was fond of calling, “the tax-eating”—rather than the “tax-paying”—classes. This was the old liberal view that you could find in Kant and Condorcet and Paine, the industrial school, and many others: that it was the classes associated with the old order who fomented war. The classes of the producers would tend to want to avoid war. In mid-nineteenth-century England, these tax-eating classes that favored war were, in their view, the aristocracy with its ramified sinecures in the army, navy, the foreign office in colonial bureaucracy, the established Church of England, and to a lesser degree, certain capitalist groups wishing to spread foreign trade with the backing of English military and political power, as with the opium wars against China.

Besides pressing for free trade, which would tend to make war an increasingly self-defeating proposition, the Manchester liberals considered their duty to attack and expose the particular wars into which England was always drifting or threatening to drift. I’m concentrating on this Manchester school because they adumbrate many of the traits of future classical liberal writers down to the libertarian writers today, in their critique of war and the forces behind it. Cobden said “It would seem as if there were some unseen power behind the Government, always able, unless held in check by an agitation in the country, to help itself to a portion of the national savings, limited only by the taxable patience of the public.”31

David Hart of the Liberty Fund is going to put online two big volumes of Cobden’s different pamphlets and so on, all concerning foreign policy and international relations.32 Naturally Cobden made speeches and wrote on many, many different issues, including on this subject. In my view he was the greatest libertarian theorist of international relations who ever lived. In his very first pamphlet, he put on the title page a quotation from George Washington’s farewell address. Washington said, “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”33 So, no entanglements, not only entanglements, but hardly any connection, if possible, with foreign governments. Rather, the idea was to let our merchants go all over the world—as in fact 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. Cobden said these words of Washington are the primary cause of the prosperity and happiness of the American people. In his early years before reality set in, he looked forward to the day when “the test of ‘no foreign politics’…” would be applied “to those who offer to become the representatives of free constituencies.”34 The idea was no foreign politics—just have nothing to do with it. There was a Crimean War, however, and the British public’s wild support of it, that changed Cobden’s mind on that, as to whether that was a reasonable expectation.

Bastiat, meanwhile, went so far as to propose the unilateral disarmament of France.35 Bastiat asked who’s going to come and invade us? Who’s going to bother to send armies and garrison the country? Bastiat pointed out that France had a large, highly intelligent, and self-disciplined population. He suggested France set an example and get rid of its army.36

A concept that’s sometimes used in connection to the peace-and-trade position, by historians, is free trade imperialism. That is, being in favor of free trade and against protectionism, but using the government in order to force other countries to adopt free trade to allow our capital imports and commodity imports. The American open door policy in China is a prime example of free trade imperialism. The American government and American business community at the time figured that we could outcompete any other country, so what we had to do was make sure that China kept an open door, an equal open door to all foreign countries and we could sell our goods there, outcompeting the British, the Japanese certainly, and others. Now, in order to enforce this open-door policy, the American government used diplomacy, economic sanctions against Japan at various times, and finally the threat of war and war itself. It was the American policy towards China and the so-called open-door policy that was the major stumbling block to good relations between the United States and Japan. So, that is something you can call free trade imperialism. Well, whatever you want to say about that, Cobden was no supporter of that at all. He declared, “Affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, changed their very nature if touched by the hand of violence, for as faith forced would no longer be religion, but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments.”37

Also, it’s important to note—and it is significant—that the Manchester school, as in the example of the repeal of the corn laws, was in favor of unilateral free trade. That is, in this view, you don’t enter into complicated agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement. What you do is simply abolish your tariffs. You don’t give the impression that by abolishing your tariffs, you’re helping the other side. What you’re doing is you’re helping your own consumers, you’re helping your own public, to just do away with the tariffs and allow your own domestic consumers to buy things more cheaply. If the other side wants to punish its own people by keeping its tariffs? Well, that’s up to them.

Now, in respect to their foreign policy views, the Manchester men have been termed “Little Englanders.” Cobden’s critique of English imperialism in the British Empire was scathing and unrelenting. As he said, for instance, “the peace party… will never rouse the conscience of the people, so long as they allow them to indulge the comforting delusion that they have been a peace-loving nation. We have been the most combative and aggressive community that has existed since the days of the Roman dominion. Since the Revolution of 1688, we have expended more than 15 hundred millions of money…”—pounds, in those days—“…upon wars, not one of which have been upon our own shores or in defense of our hearths and homes.”38

He continues: “We have manifested an insatiable love of territorial aggrandizement. In the insolence of our might and without waiting for the assaults of our envious enemies, we have sallied forth in search of conquest or rapine, and carried bloodshed into every quarter of the globe.”39

Bright said, “What do you think of the people that have never experienced an invasion since the year 1066 and yet lives in daily fear of a foreign invasion?”40 Is this some kind of mass delusion? Well, he thought it was forced typically by the government.

By the way, from some statement like that, you might come to the conclusion that he was some kind of self-flagellating masochist or something. He wasn’t. He was enormously healthy and happily married with a happy family life and political career and he loved England. But he loved his own little spot and place in England. He was a regionalist and gloried in the fact that he was an Englishman. What he was against was the policy of the English government and of the English predatory classes that supported that government.

Cobden died in 1865. John Bright survived him by 24 years. The most notable foreign policy issue that arose in this period involving Bright was Prime Minister William Gladstone’s decision to occupy Egypt in 1882. It was a “temporary” occupation that lasted for 75 years. Bright, as a member of the cabinet, resigned in protest. At his advanced age, he could not make Egypt into a crusade, as he had at the time of the Corn Laws or as he tried to in the Crimean War. In private, Bright identified the city of London’s financial interest as the chief force behind expansion and to Egypt, since holders of Egyptian government bonds were fearful of the loss of their capital.

So now, in Bright’s view, we’ve moved away from the old feudal classes, the nobility, the established church, the state and its functionaries as the fomenters of imperialism and war. Now it’s certain capitalists’ interests. He confided to his friend, Goldwin Smith, a famous historian at the time, that “[i]t is a Stock Jobbers’ war. We shall very likely have more of the same thing. One set of causes of war departs, another crops up in its place.”41

John Stuart Mill and Austrian Intervention

It’s an interesting view. We can contrast with the position of the Manchester School the position of John Stuart Mill. Again, Mill was no principled opponent of foreign intervention. In fact, he thought that foreign intervention was sometimes absolutely needed. The example he took is, if any Millian bothered to think about it, a rather embarrassing example for him.

What he said was this: Europe was filled with nationalist movements that were trying to gain independence from empires. For instance, the Hungarians within the Austrian Empire. He said if a national movement should rise up attempting to gain its independence from some tyrannical government, then we let them fight it out because whether the nationalist movement can survive or not is a good test of whether it’s mature enough to become independent. However, what happened in 1848-1849 in Central Europe was this: the Hungarians were able to defeat the Hapsburgs and maintain a certain independence for a while. But then the Habsburg emperor called in the Russians to help him. The Russian army came across the passes of the Carpathian mountains, as they did in 1956 to crush the revolution, and defeated the Hungarians. Mill says that in that case, when a third party intervenes, England has the obligation to use all of its resources to support the nationalist independent movement. He said those people who are in favor of nonintervention and little England and mind their own business, are selfish. Mill said it was embarrassing for the whole world to see that the English are so selfish and interested in their own national self-interest, their own survival. He didn’t use the term “altruist,” but he said the English should be altruistic about this. So, he would have favored—as he did—the Crimean War to punish the Russians.

When I said that Millians would be embarrassed by his position, what I had in mind was this. The truth of the matter is that yes, the Hungarians led by Lajos Kossuth wanted their independence from the Habsburgs. The way people judge superficially on these matters, Kossuth had well wishers everywhere including Britain and the United States. But, in actuality, what Kossuth insisted on was that Hungarians—that is, the ethnic group called Magyars, not the territory—should control all of the non-German parts of the Austrian Empire, and that Hungarians should lord over the Slovaks, the Romanians, the Serbs, the Croats and other minority ethnic groups. Do you follow what I’m saying? In other words, what he wanted was a smaller version of what the Habsburgs wanted. The Hapsburgs wanted to control and lord it over different ethnic groups and he wanted his own people the Hungarians, the Magyars, to lord it over these various other groups. That was his actual position. There’s no doubt about that.

John Stuart Mill presumably was one of the best informed people in Europe. He was either not aware of this or didn’t think it was particularly important, maybe thinking that the Hungarians were more advanced than these Slavic people and Romanians and therefore maybe the Hungarians deserved to be in charge. But my point is that here we have somebody who is willing to involve England in a war with Russia in 1849, on the basis of a lack of information and not really understanding what was going on. If he had been able to start a war with the Russians by pressing a button, he would have done it. The Crimean War came a few years after that, but there was no reason to fight the Russians at that time, either.

This is the case very often the case. War making is often based on incorrect information or sometimes deceptive information and disinformation. In the case of the war over Kosovo in 1999, nothing is clearer now than that it involved an insurrection on the part of the Kosovo Albanians against the rule of the Serbians—Kosovo being a province of Serbia. This insurrection, which had been going on for a while, was led by a group called the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which had been labeled a terrorist group by the United States State Department. Well, Milosevic, the leader of Yugoslavia, attacked the KLA rather severely. It was an insurrection, and the Serbian state was brutal and harsh about putting it down. Nonetheless, that was the situation. However, it was nowhere as brutal as the United States government was in putting down the Vietnamese rebellion during the Vietnam War. The Serbians never used napalm and never destroyed villages en masse, and so on. The US government and the media, however, began a campaign saying that genocide was going on in Kosovo, and that the Serbs were committing genocide. Maybe you’re too young to remember. Maybe like most Americans, you think it’s ancient history anyway, so why bother?

One of the chief spokespeople in this media campaign was Christiane Amanpour who should really be put on trial—the way the US does it or the Israelis do it, and just be shot in the streets—for having fomented this war. Those of us of a certain age followed it in detail. They talked about genocide and heard that this is the worst example of ethnic cleansing in Europe since the Second World War. Eli Wiesel said it was genocide, and that it was comparable to the Holocaust. I heard with my own ears Senator Joseph Lieberman say this is genocide. Amanpour said that 100,000 Kosovo Albanians of military age are missing. These people simply retell the stories, the atrocity stories, put out by the KLA. The media interviews refugees who say that there were hundreds killed with thousands missing, and so on.

The war is now over, however, and the US and NATO have control of Kosovo, just as they have control of Iraq now. They go wherever they can looking for bodies, yet altogether they found 2,100 unidentified dead. Unidentified, that is, in that was not clear whether they were Albanians or Serbs. It is not clear if they were Albanian civilians or if they had been fighters and died in some firefight. The disinformation about this alleged genocide was disinformation spread by the US government, by other NATO governments, and by Western media. This was a disinformation that stampeded an American public into supporting this war in Kosovo.

Antiwar Liberalism in the Late Nineteenth Century

Now, to continue with the liberal anti-war tradition. This is what I mentioned the other day from Sydney Smith. Remember I mentioned that Sydney Smith had studied under Dugald Stewart, who was a disciple of Adam Smith, and in this way imbibed his liberal ideas in the early nineteenth century. In 1823, he wrote to a friend,

For God’s sake, do not drag me into another war! I’m worn down, and worn out, with crusading and defending Europe, and protecting mankind. I must think a little of myself. I am sorry for the Spaniards — I am sorry for the Greeks; I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Baghdad is oppressed; I do not like the present state of the Delta; Tibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people? The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy?42

This was a liberal who thought not. Now, in the United States, classical liberals were first mobilized against imperialism at the time of the Spanish American War and the following war against the Philippine insurrection. (You know it’s always called the Philippine “insurrection,’ although by what right the United States acquired the Philippines as a colony and became the legitimate power against which these Filipinos were now engaged in “insurrection” is unclear.) The Anti-imperialist League was led by Edward Atkinson, E.L. Godkin of The Nation—at the time the flagship the classical liberal publication—and Karl Schurz. These men were American versions of the Little Englanders.

There is a very famous essay by a man I just mentioned a little while ago, William Graham Sumner, titled “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”43 Sumner was a Professor of Sociology at Yale, the leading classical liberal of his time, a defender of the gold standard, free trade, against coercive unionism, against spending, and the author of the famous essay “The Forgotten Man.”44 The forgotten man really would be an example of the productive individual who becomes prey of the predators and interestingly enough, this was in the 1880s. He said the forgotten man is a person who does what he’s supposed to do, is where he’s supposed to be, contributes to society and then becomes the victim of the do-gooder who takes from the forgotten man to give to the “underprivileged.” Sumner says the forgotten man—who, by the way, is very often a woman who may be a widow or a single woman who does what she’s supposed to do, works hard, and is frugal—doesn’t ask anything from anyone else and yet becomes a victim of government coercive charity.

This is just one example. Sumner did a lot of polemical writing of this kind besides his work in sociology which he was very famous for. Now, in this essay, a speech first, called “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” Sumner startles people, by the title itself. The United States had just smashed Spain—the way we just smashed Iraq. Sumner says, yes, militarily speaking the United States is victorious. But in fact, Spain was victorious in the field of ideas because what is happening is that the United States is going down the road that the Spaniards pioneered, the road of empire. In this way, America was turning its back on its own philosophy that had been the signature of the American people, the philosophy of the Founding Fathers. Instead, America was now opting for the grandeur of empire. Sumner notes that the Spaniards did achieve greatness through their empire, through great conquests, great wars, and great victories. But that came with a price and the price was constant war, large standing armies, heavy taxation, inflation, debt, and crushing taxes.

Remember that I quoted from the Spanish late Scholastics in an earlier lecture about how the level of taxation was destroying the substratum of the villagers and towns of Castile. This way of empire brought Spain to where it was in Sumner’s day—the hollow shell of a country that the United States could so easily crush. Sumner concluded we’re on that road now, and we can expect eventual defeat in a similar manner because this is in the nature of things and nature is Darwinian. Sumner ends using some language similar to Herbert Spencer: nature is not forgiving. Do A and that causes B, and all your wishes or your tears aren’t going to make any difference. So, he warned about this and he said really what I would say myself. He said we seem to have decided on this road to empire.

He said the American people have been convinced, and decided on the war, and undertaken this road to empire. In this way Americans put an end to the old republic.45 He continued saying he didn’t think “my own little essay” is going to make any difference, so why was he doing it? He said he was doing it because the idea of the American republic really was quite an idea at the beginning. It really was quite a vision, that the government would only take care of guaranteeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the people and everything else would be left to civil society and to the voluntary interaction of people. Sumner says it is worth maybe paying a final tribute to it as it’s about to vanish into history.

Herbert Spencer on Imperialism

Now, it turns out we could get into an interesting discussion on that, that there were some classical liberals who thought that war could be useful, including people who had a better claim to be classical liberals than John Stuart Mill did. Before I get into that, let me mention another late nineteenth-century and early twentieth century liberal who is famous to you probably: Herbert Spencer. Spencer, of course, was a Darwinian. He was the originator of the phrase, “the struggle for existence” and also “survival of the fittest.” So, Darwinism is a central view of his, but what Spencer believed was that warfare was suitable only to mankind’s primitive stage. The Western world, however, had long since left the stage of militancy and entered the stage of industrialism. He uses the phrase “industrialism” also. 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 Schumpeter afterwards was to say in a famous essay of his on imperialism, Spencer argued that war was linked to the feudal spirit.46 Spencer also argued against state-sponsored overseas colonization as burdensome to the domestic taxpayers and oppressive of the native inhabitants—that is, in the areas overseas where these British colonists were being resettled. Spencer said colonists had no right to be protected by the government or society they abandoned. Spencer found none of England’s recent wars, including the Opium War then being waged in 1843 against China, to be necessary.

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. In Social Statics, Spencer has a famous chapter on the right to ignore the state, and comes very close to anarchism.47 (He left that chapter out in the later editions.) Through 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. The pretext for hostilities was the refusal of the Transvaal government to extend voting rights to the Outlanders, who were mainly British immigrants who flocked to the little state to exploit the goldmines discovered there. In other words, in the mind of the British government, they were waging war against the Boers for the sake of bringing them democracy.

In an essay titled “Patriotism,” sort of ironically, Spencer confesses that he had cherished a love of England because of its long history of fostering free institutions.48 But his love of country could not survive the desolating war against the Boers, concocted by the arch conspirators like Cecil Rhodes and—again—the frenzied support of the English public, who supported also the Crimean War. Spencer said, “I am called unpatriotic—well, I am content to be so called.”49 Spencer had evidently grown so embittered that he openly stated his indifference to the deaths of British soldiers engaging in imperialist adventures. At the time he wrote this, by the way, the latest imperialist war happened to be in Afghanistan. He wrote “[w]hen men hire themselves out, to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.”50 To the objection that his position amounted to a suicidal pacifism, Spencer replied,

Not so fast, is the reply. For one war an army would remain just as available as now—a war of national defense. In such a war every soldier would be conscious of the justice of his cause. He would not be engaged in dealing death among men about whose doings, good or ill, he knew nothing, but among men who are manifest aggressors against himself and his compatriots. Only aggressive war would be negatived, not defensive war.51

So, this was just about the last word of one of the most famous liberals of the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer.

This brings up an interesting theorical point: some liberals of this period have favored war under certain conditions, and this goes back to the eighteenth century. Among writers we could mention is Wilhelm von Humboldt. Even in The Limits of State Action, he says that there is some good that could be said for war. Humboldt did not actually support war, but he thought war did develop certain elements of the personality which tend to be stunted by modern society.52 That’s a kind of minor concession.

The French Revolutionary Wars and Spreading “Freedom” by Force

Much more important is what Alexis de Tocqueville says about war and imperialism and that’s a major reason I did not consider de Tocqueville to be a hardcore authentic classical liberal. Another reason is that he didn’t care very much about economics. He didn’t know very much about economics. His views had to do with politics. He made some very important points about the dangers of centralization of power and so on, but he was not any supporter of the factory system and the Industrial Revolution. As an aristocrat who lived off the rents of his land, I guess he saw no particular reason to have factories and industrialization. So on that basis, he’s more middle-of-the-road, or more of a Whig, I would say, than a real authentic liberal.

Especially on the question of war and imperialism, de Tocqueville favored the creation of a new French colony in Algeria that had started in 1829, and he supported the British in India. He thought it was a magnificent occasion for advancing civilization. Here we have a more significant and theoretically interesting case, going back to the late eighteenth century. In the course of the French Revolution, France comes to wage war against almost all the rest of Europe. The group at this time in the French revolutionary complex that is considered liberal—in the sense of favoring a free society, free enterprise and so on—are the Girondins and their close ally, Condorcet. Condorcet has a real claim to be an important classical liberal thinker, the main disciple of Turgot. At first, the Girondins and Condorcet had the position that the French Revolution—which they thought expanded freedom—was threatened by the reactionary powers of Europe. However, when the French Revolutionary armies began to throw back the invading armies of the Prussians and the Austrians, the Girondins and Condorcet came to the conclusion that with the new freedom-loving principles of the French Revolution to lead them forward, the French Revolutionary Army should now undertake the liberation of Europe. The new idea was not simply to defend France and its revolution against attacks, but now bring the blessings of the French Revolution or the new liberal order to everyone else.

So what you have here is a first example, in a way, of another strain—I don’t think it’s really the major strain and I don’t think it’s the most authentic strain—of classical liberalism. That is, the idea that you have now a free country that is also a powerful country and it should use its power to spread freedom everywhere. This position was accepted also by a man who was in Paris at the time, a friend of Condorcet, Thomas Paine. You know Paine’s work in the American Revolution and Paine associated himself with the Girondins. In fact, Jacobins arrested Paine and if the Reign of Terror continued, they probably would have guillotined him.

As the French Revolutionary armies, as they said, “liberated” Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the Left Bank of the Rhine River, and then Northern Italy and so on, Paine became very enthusiastic and said that this is the beginning now of a federation of free states and supported the revolutionary armies. Now this was also the position that, as I say, from which you can draw a line to certain liberals. These were not very good liberals, but they were people who were considered liberals like Palmerston in England in the nineteenth century. Later, this becomes Wilsonianism—the doctrine that we have a duty and therefore a right as a powerful and free country to use our power to support and extend our values to the unfree world. This is an argument which is used nowadays and is in very sharp contrast to the authentic liberal position of nonintervention for which I’ll give some theoretical/analytical reasons in my next lecture.

  • 1

    Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

  • 2

    Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2003).

  • 3

    Francesco Ferrara, Esame Storico-Critico de Economisti, 2 vols. (Turin: Unione Tipigrafico-Editrice, 1891).

  • 4

    Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006), pp. 2:448-55

  • 5

    See Otto Weinberger, Journal of Political Economy 48, no. 1 (Feb.1940):91-104. Weinberger writes on page 95: “Ferrara established his scientific reputation chiefly by the prefaces which he wrote for the first and second series of the Biblioteca dell’economista. These prefaces are distinguished not only for their valuable biographical and bibliographical material but also for their interesting observations on the development of the science of economics in France and England and for the original thoughts of the editor himself, relating to the most varied range of theoretical issues. These prefaces were reprinted in two volumes at Turin in the years 1889 and 1891, under the title Esame storico critico di economisti e dottrine economiche del secolo X VIII e prima meta’ del XIX. (“Critical historical examination of economists and economic doctrines of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.”)

  • 6

    Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 2:455-459.

  • 7

    Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006 [1954]), pp. 485-89.

  • 8

    James M. Buchanan, Public Finance in Democratic Process: Fiscal Institutions and Individual Choice (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987 [1967]), pp. 129, 258

  • 9

    In his Public Principles of Public Debt published in 1958, Buchanan acknowledged that “the Italian approach to the whole problem of public debt was instrumental in shaping my views...” Quoted in Richard E. Wagner, James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 1063. Buchanan was the first anglophone economist to focus on this and included the Italians’ work in his chapter, “The Italian Tradition in Fiscal Theory,” in his 1960 textbook Fiscal Theory and Political Economy.

  • 10

    See Ralph Raico, “Mises on Fascism, Democracy, and Other Questions,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12 no. 1 (Spring 1996): 16. Raico says of Einaudi: “Of all the Italian free-trade economists, Luigi Einaudi was to become the most prominent and achieve the greatest political influence. After the Second World War, Einaudi became the first president of the Italian Republic and probably the best-known economic liberal in Europe. He shared the views of the liberisti school both on the basic malignancy of the Italian political and economic system and the dangers of socialism for his country.” 

  • 11

    John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Fredericksburg, VA: Green and Cady, 1814), p. 254.

  • 12

    William Leggett, A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett, ed. Theodore Sedgwick (New York: Taylor and Dodd, 1840), p. 199. 

  • 13

    See Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801. Quoted in Leggett, A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett, p. 199. 

  • 14

    Raico is here referring to a specific collection of Leggett editorials: William Leggett, Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy ed. Lawrence H. White, (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund,1984).

  • 15

    Leggett, A Collection of the Political Writings, p. 2:113.

  • 16

    Ibid., p. 123

  • 17

    Ibid.

  • 18

    See William Graham Sumner, “Democracy and Plutocracy,” “Definitions of Democracy and Plutocracy,” and “The Conflict of Plutocracy and Democracy” in Earth-Hunger and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1913), pp. 283-300.

  • 19

    This term owes much of its popularity in the English-speaking world to the writings of Yugoslavian writer Milovan Djilas in Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1957).

  • 20

    Charles Dunoyer, “Du système de l’équilibre des puissances européennes,” Le Censeur européen (Jan. 1817): 121. The original French reads: “Ce qu’ont produit ces armées, ce sont des massacres, des viols, des pillages, des incendies; ce sont des vices et des crimes; ce sont la dépravation, la ruine et l’asservissement des peuples : elles ont été l’opprobre et le fléau de la civilisation.” 

  • 21

    Raico may here be actually quoting Dunoyer, who wrote in 1817: “The result of this pretension [i.e., British imperialism] was that the spirit of industry became a principle more hostile, more of an enemy to civilization, than the spirit of rapine itself.” See 
    Charles Dunoyer, “Du système de l’équilibre des puissances européennes” Le Censeur européen (Jan. 1817): 133. Retrieved online April 14, 2024, http://davidmhart.com/liberty/FrenchClassicalLiberals/Comte/CenseurAnthology/Censeur-Anthology.html.

  • 22

    Rothbard used this quotation from Bourne at least as early as 1963, and it can be found in Rothbard’s essay “War, Peace, and the State” reprinted in Murray N. Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2000), p. 131n. For Bourne’s original essay, see Randolph Bourne, “Unfinished Fragment on the State,” in Untimely Papers (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919).

  • 23

    See Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Robert Higgs, Delusions of Power: New Explorations of the State, War, and Economy (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2012).

  • 24

    Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.,1985), p. 24.

  • 25

    Raico is referring to an often-quoted passage from Heraclitus in which the Greek philosopher writes: “War is father of all and king of all.” 

  • 26

    Mises, Liberalism, p. 24

  • 27

    The war began in 1853, but the United Kingdom did not declare war on Russia until 1854.

  • 28

    John Bright, Selected Speeches of the Right Hon. John Bright, M.P. on Public Questions, ed. Ernest Rhys (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1907), p. 228.

  • 29

    This is likely a reference to Ali Ismail Abbas. Abbas was 12 years old when he lost both arms in a US missile attack during the Iraq War in 2003. At least 13 members of his family were killed in the attack, including both his parents. 

  • 30

    Raico is likely here referring to the case of the Dirlewanger Brigade. Led by Oskar Dirlewanger, the brigade was primarily composed of convicted criminals, and became notorious for its sadism. The unit’s methods were so brutal that some within the SS itself campaigned (unsuccessfully) to have the unit disbanded and Dirlewanger arrested. 

  • 31

    F.W. Hirst, “The War Budget,” The Economic Journal 10, No. 37 (March 1900): 105.

  • 32

    See Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, 2 vols. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903). Retrieved online, April 12, 2024: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cobden-the-political-writings-of-richard-cobden-in-2-vols

  • 33

    George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), p. 13:316.

  • 34

    Quoted in Hans J. Morganthau, “Diplomacy,” The Yale Law Journal 55, no. 5 (Aug. 1946): 1068.

  • 35

    See Bastiat’s pamphlet “The Utopian” published in January 17, 1847.  Retrieved online, April 12, 2024: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bastiat-the-best-of-bastiat-3-3-the-utopian.

  • 36

    Bastiat also advocated the simultaneous disarmament of both France and the United Kingdom: Frédéric Bastiat, Speech on “Disarmament, Taxes, and the Influence of Political Economy on the Peace Movement”, in “Report of the proceedings of the second general Peace Congress, held in Paris on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of August 1849,” (London: 1849), p. 49-52. Retrieved online April 11, 2024: https://coppetinstitute.org/frederic-bastiat-speech-on-disarmament-taxes-and-the-influence-of-political-economy-on-the-peace-movement-1849/.

  • 37

    Richard Cobden, Russia (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1836), p. 44.

  • 38

    Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), p. 2:376.

  • 39

    Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), p. 1:104

  • 40

    The exact quotation is “But what are we to say of a nation which lives under a perpetual delusion that it is about to be attacked—a nation which is the most combined on the face of the earth, with little less than 30,000,000 of people all united under a Government which, though we intend to reform it, we do not the less respect it, and which has mechanical power and wealth to which no other country offers any parallel?” John Bright, Selected Speeches of the Right Hon. John Bright, M.P. on Public Questions, ed. Ernest Rhys (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1907), p. 213.

  • 41

    George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 434.

  • 42

    Sydney Smith, The Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. Sydney Smith (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1869), p. 343.

  • 43

    William G. Sumner, The Conquest of the United States by Spain (Boston, MA: Dana Estes and Company, 1899).

  • 44

    This essay was originally published in 1883 with the title “On the Case of a Certain Man Who is Never Thought Of.” See William G. Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers LTD, 1974), pp. 107-15.

  • 45

    Here Raico notes in an aside that although the American public was convinced to embrace the war with Spain, the idea of the war originated with “a small cabal.” 

  • 46

    Schumpeter explores these ideas in Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes: Two Essays (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1951).

  • 47

    Herbert Spencer, “The Right to Ignore the State” in Social Statics (London: John Chapman, 1851), pp. 206-16.

  • 48

    Herbert Spencer, “Patriotism” in Facts and Comments (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1902), pp. 122-27.

  • 49

    Ibid., p. 124.

  • 50

    Ibid., p. 126.

  • 51

    Ibid.

  • 52

    This book is also found under the title The Sphere and Duties of Government. See Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government, trans. Joseph Coulthard, Jr. (London: John Chapman, 1854).