In Chapter 11 of The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek offers a sweeping genealogy of liberty, locating its true birth in the constitutional evolution of seventeenth-century England. “Individual liberty in modern times,” he writes, “can hardly be traced back farther than the England of the seventeenth century.” This claim has shaped generations of classical liberals and libertarians who have looked to the Glorious Revolution, common law, and Parliament as the fountainhead of modern freedom. But from the standpoint of the broader classical liberal tradition—especially its Austrian variant—Hayek’s genealogy is not only incomplete, it is uncharacteristically narrow.
While Hayek is right to emphasize the importance of legal traditions and institutions in securing liberty, his account reflects a kind of Anglocentrism at odds with his own Austrian insights into the nature of emergent order. It also overlooks the remarkable legacy of legal decentralization, institutional competition, and civic liberty that flourished across the continent long before Locke, Coke, or the English Bill of Rights.
Ralph Raico—one of the finest historians of continental liberalism and a student of Hayek—offers a necessary corrective to this narrative. Raico’s work reveals a Europe rich in competing legal traditions and liberal experimentation, from the Italian republics and the German Free Cities to French liberals like Benjamin Constant and Frédéric Bastiat. To suggest, as Hayek does, that liberty’s roots lie almost exclusively in the English experience is to do an injustice to the broader tapestry of liberal development.
The Italian City-States: Republican Liberty Before Locke
Centuries before the English Civil War, the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, and Genoa fostered systems of self-government rooted in mercantile liberty and civic participation. Florence had its Signoria, an executive council drawn by sortition from guilds and elite families, and was shaped by the political innovations of civic humanists like Machiavelli. Venice, with its powerful Doge, Senate, and Great Council, operated under a complex and remarkably stable mixed constitution designed to prevent tyranny and factional dominance. Genoa, though less stable, also featured republican institutions and a Doge, though its political system was more prone to aristocratic infighting and institutional turnover.
These republics frequently recognized property rights, operated with codified commercial law, and developed judicial systems relatively independent of monarchical authority. Their republicanism—whatever its limitations—was rooted in commercial liberty, legal predictability, and vibrant public discourse. While Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy may be more civic humanist than liberal in tone, the institutional frameworks of Renaissance Italy clearly nurtured key components of liberty without following the English path of constitutional monarchy and common law.
From an Austrian perspective, what stands out in these republics is not state centralization but decentralized, competitive orders. There was no Leviathan; instead, there were competing jurisdictions, private arbitration, and bottom-up law formation through merchant guilds and chartered cities.
The Holy Roman Empire: Legal Polycentrism as a Bulwark of Liberty
Perhaps nowhere in Europe was liberty preserved through decentralization more vividly than in the Holy Roman Empire. Often dismissed as an incoherent and backward relic, the Empire was in fact a marvel of polycentric governance. With hundreds of duchies, principalities, bishoprics, and Free Cities, the Empire created space for a remarkable degree of political autonomy and legal pluralism.
Raico emphasized that the Empire’s fragmented structure helped prevent the rise of absolutist central states across large swaths of German-speaking Europe. Cities like Hamburg, Lübeck, and Nuremberg operated with extensive self-governance and codified commercial law. The imperial courts—though imperfect—offered a kind of supranational dispute resolution far removed from the monopolistic model of English jurisprudence.
From the Austrian vantage point, the Empire is a prime example of competition in governance. No single authority could exercise unchecked power, and individuals could often “vote with their feet” by moving to jurisdictions more favorable to commerce, religion, or personal freedom. This decentralization acted as a check on tyranny—one far more in line with Hayek’s general theory of liberty than the centralized English crown of the seventeenth century.
The Catholic Church and Canon Law: Early Rule-of-Law Traditions
Another critical omission in Hayek’s account is the role of the Catholic Church in developing a rule-of-law tradition. Canon law, especially as codified by Gratian and elaborated upon by medieval jurists, introduced principles such as legal equality, due process, and the limitation of arbitrary authority. Ecclesiastical courts offered venues of appeal and protection—sometimes even against secular rulers.
Hayek’s vision of the rule of law as a constraint on coercive power finds an early expression here. The medieval Church was not a paragon of liberty, but in its legal institutions and intellectual contributions, it laid the groundwork for ideas about rights, contract, and law as a higher authority than the ruler’s whim. Raico often credited Catholic legal thinkers with preserving classical natural law traditions that would later influence liberal theorists from Grotius to Locke to Mises.
The idea that law should be preexisting, general, and apply to rulers and subjects alike—a Hayekian theme—was kept alive in part by scholastic thinkers and Church institutions. To ignore this legacy is to truncate the actual historical lineage of the rule of law.
Hayek Against Hayek: The Limits of His Anglocentrism
The irony is that Hayek himself, in other contexts, deeply appreciated decentralized legal orders and the spontaneous emergence of law through custom and tradition. His praise for the common law is best understood as a broader endorsement of evolved, non-legislated legal frameworks—precisely the kind found in the city-states of Italy, the polycentric Empire, and ecclesiastical courts.
Why then the narrow focus on England? The answer may lie partly in Hayek’s intended audience. Writing at a time when a brand of Anglo-American liberalism was the dominant intellectual tradition, Hayek may have felt the need to anchor his arguments in familiar constitutional landmarks. Yet this rhetorical move risks distorting the deeper liberal heritage that includes figures like Pufendorf, Grotius, and the later German ordo-liberals—many of whom operated far from Westminster.
From an Austrian perspective, this narrowing is especially problematic. Austrian economists and thinkers, including Mises and Rothbard, emphasized historical contingency, institutional variety, and methodological individualism. To claim that liberty “began” in 17th-century England is to impose a teleological narrative inconsistent with the broader Austrian framework.
Conclusion: Toward a Broader Liberal Genealogy
Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty remains one of the most important defenses of classical liberalism in the twentieth century – albeit a problematic and inadequate one for its grudging accommodation with welfarism. Likewise, in Chapter 11 his account of liberty’s origins falls short. By tracing modern freedom solely to seventeenth-century England, he neglects the vast landscape of legal and institutional experimentation that preceded and in many ways anticipated the English experience.
Ralph Raico’s scholarship serves as an essential counterweight. His exploration of continental liberalism—its thinkers, institutions, and intellectual traditions—shows that liberty is not the product of one nation or one revolution, but the emergent result of diverse experiments in limiting power and defending property.
For students of Austrian economics and classical liberalism, the real lesson is this: liberty arises not from blueprints or monarchs who stumble upon good constitutions, but from competition, decentralization, and deeply rooted cultural norms that favor individual autonomy.
Image Credit: Image of Hayek via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
