One of the most disastrous elements of the post-World War II conservative movement in America has been its commitment to severing the ideology of “classical liberalism” from its historical roots in antiwar and anti-interventionist foreign policy. What we now call classical liberalism—the ideology of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Frederic Bastiat, Richard Cobden, and Herbert Spencer—was consistent in opposing state power in all spheres, both international and domestic.
This was true in the United States up until the early twentieth century when the people called liberals—now known as “classical liberals” or “libertarians”—were characterized by anti-imperialism, restraint in military spending, and a general philosophy that is now maligned with the term “isolationism.”
After the Second World War, however, the new so-called conservative movement succeeded in neutralizing the old laissez-faire liberal opposition to foreign intervention in the name of fighting communists. The conservatives replaced the old laissez-faire factions with a new incoherent ideology that claimed it favored “freedom and free markets” while also promoting runaway military spending and endless foreign interventionism. This, of course, was all to be done in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.”
Many American conservatives who consider themselves to be “classical liberals,” or in some other way the ideological heirs of laissez-faire, have fallen for this historical bait and switch for many decades now.
The Real History of Classical Liberalism: Opposing the State and Its Wars
To better understand how immense this turnabout really was—and what a victory it was for the forces of militarism—we need to first consider just how closely the ideology of laissez-faire liberalism was associated with antiwar sentiment during the formative years of liberalism.
In his history of political thought, historian Ralph Raico notes that the ideology we now call classical liberalism considered opposition to war and foreign intervention as central to the ideology. Even the milquetoast liberals like British Prime Minister William Gladstone put peace up front and center in their political programs. Raico writes:
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.”
This propeace liberalism was the standard form of liberalism in Britain through Richard Cobden’s Manchester School, and also in France through popularizers and scholars such as the radical liberal editors of the political journal Le censeur européen. At the top of every issue of the journal was the phrase “paix et liberté”—peace and freedom.
Among the journal’s editors were Charles Dunoyer, a leading figure of the French liberal school—and the close ally of Charles Comte, the son-in-law of Jean Baptiste-Say. Like most liberals of his time, including those of both the United States and Britain, Dunoyer opposed standing armies. He wrote:
“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.
Similarly, Dunoyer’s views were reflected in the writings of Frederic Bastiat who sought to abolish France’s standing army. In an 1847 pamphlet titled “The Utopian,” Bastiat reminded his readers that military expenditure is generally an enormous waste of money, and that the exploitation of the taxpayers could be greatly reduced were the size of the French military drastically lessened. Specifically, Bastiat sought to abolish “the entire army” with the exception of “some specialized divisions” which would have to be staffed with volunteers since Bastiat, of course, also sought to abolish conscription altogether. Bastiat sought to replace the state’s army with a militia of private citizens in possession of private arms. As Bastiat put it: “Every citizen must know two things: how to provide for his own existence and how to defend his country.”
In this, Bastiat was echoing American sentiments. In the United States, of course, opposition to militarism took the form of vehement opposition to a centralized military force and an American standing army. The lack of direct taxation made funding a large military difficult as well.
As liberals like George Mason made clear, the military power of the US was to reside principally in the private ownership of arms and in the locally controlled militias of the several states. Culturally, Americans of the nineteenth century regarded federal troops with high levels of suspicion. While it was considered laudable to serve a stint in the volunteer militias, Americans regarded full-time federal troops as shirkers living off the government dole. (The modern culture of fawning over government employees—at least the military variety—and thanking them for their “service” would have been considered bizarre in classical liberal nineteenth-century America.) These reviews reflected those of many of the founding generation of Americans, including James Madiason, who according to Raico: “wrote of war as perhaps the greatest of all enemies of public liberty, producing armies, debts, and taxes, ‘the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.’”
Moreover, Raico shows that Dunoyer’s views were typical of the liberals of the “industrialist school” which pioneered liberal exploitation theory. Contrary to the modern-day myth that classical liberals rejected notions of class conflict, it was actually the liberals who pioneered the idea. In this view, the “tax-eating” class exploits the “tax-paying” class which is forced to support the regime. In the classical liberal view of the industrialist school, war was a central means by which the regime and its allies exploited the productive classes.
Raico notes that “A propeace position was central to the industrialist point of view … their attack on militarism and standing armies was savage and relentless.” Herbert Spencer—a British liberal who was also highly influential in the United States in the late nineteenth century—can also be included among those who subscribed to the industrialist school’s exploitation theory. With Spencer, state warfare remanent of the past, and destructive of both freedom and economic progress. Or, as Raico sums up Spencer’s view:
Spencer believed … 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. … 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.
The reference to the aristocracy was also a common sentiment among the classical liberals who saw the state’s obsession with war as a characteristic of the absolutist and anti-liberal states of Europe.
Raico shared this view, noting that in the pre-liberal world, most people were simply pawns to be manipulated for the benefit of the central state and its agents. According to Raico:
In 1740 Frederick II of Prussia— called “the Great,” probably …. because he was a mass murderer— plunged the world into war. Afterwards, when they asked him why, he said “because I wanted to be talked of.” It was possible in this world before liberalism and capitalism to talk of war in those terms because liberalism and the liberal ideology had not yet made war into an awful thing.
The tradition of the ruling classes treating war with a capricious attitude was the norm before the rise of liberalism in the eighteenth century. The great French liberal Benjamin Constant notes this attitude among the rulers of the ancient world. As Raico puts it, Constant believed that “the ancients, the Greeks, and the Romans, for all their achievements, were basically societies that were founded on war and on constant war making, which included, of course, imperialism and plunder of other societies.” These societies did not understand the value of markets and voluntary exchange as the liberals do, and thus these societies constructed their value systems around war, conflict, and force. As Constant put it:
War therefore predates trade. One is wild impulse, the other is civilized calculation. . . . The Roman Republic, without trade, without letters, without articles, having no internal occupation other than agriculture . . . and always threatened or threatening, engag[ed] in the business of uninterrupted military operations.
Ludwig von Mises also identified the ancient preoccupation with war when, in his book Liberalism, Mises directly contradicts the Greek Heraclitus who had declared that “War is father of all and king of all.” Rather, Mises writes that “Not war, but peace is the father of all things.”
Murray Rothbard echoed these sentiments. In his history of the post-war American right wing, Rothbard remembers his realization at the time that that ideology of warmongering was not hardly a modern invention. Rather, the modern militarist consensus of the social democrats and conservatives after the Second World War “was a reversion to the old despotic ancien régime.” He continues:
This ancien régime was the Old Order against which the libertarian and laissez-faire movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had emerged as a revolutionary opposition: an opposition on behalf of economic freedom and individual liberty. Jefferson, Cobden, and Thoreau as our forbears were ancestors in more ways than one; for both we and they were battling against a mercantilist statism that established bureaucratic despot ism and corporate monopolies at home and waged imperial wars abroad.
By “we,” Rothbard meant the libertarians—the true heirs of the classical liberals—and not the conservatives of the “New Right.”
In this, Rothbard was also echoing the anti-imperialists of America in the late nineteenth century who sought to rein in America’s drift toward militarism and European-style global intervention. Raico notes that the anti-imperialist drive was centered around the classical liberals Edward Atkinson—a follower of the Manchester School—and E.L. Godkin of The Nation, which Raico describes as “the flagship classical liberal publication” in the United States at the time.
But perhaps the most famous strike against America’s turn toward global militarism—as illustrated by the US’s war against Spain in 1898—was the work of William Graham Sumner. Sumner, an influential classical liberal and Yale sociologist delivered a lecture at Yale in 1899 titled “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” The title was a play on words, given that the US had, in military terms, easily defeated the Spanish military. Yet, Sumner feared that it was actually the US—or at least the quickly expiring antiwar sentiments of republican America—that had been defeated in the war. Rather, Sumner contends that the Americans had abandoned the restraint of laissez-faire liberalism in favor of, as Raico puts it “the grandeur of empire.” This would be attractive to those who delight in state power and prestige, of course, but, Sumner notes, it comes with a price: “war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery — in a word, imperialism.”
The Post-War Defeat of the Anti-Interventionist Classical Liberals
Needless to say, most modern day Americans—of both left and right—would consider these ideas of the nineteenth century liberals to be quaint.
The modern mindset, however, represents the triumph of the forces of militarism and anti-interventionism over the spirit of laissez-faire.
How and when did this happen? On the Left, the old spirit of peace and anti-intervention was destroyed first by Woodrow Wilson’s war efforts in the Great War. The final nail in the coffin came with the Roosevelt administration’s enthusiasm for war in both Asia and Europe.
On the Right, however, the end of liberal antiwar sentiment was more gradual. On the Right, the classical liberal impulse in favor of peace was destroyed by the rise of the conservative movement.
Murray Rothbard describes this process in The Betrayal of the American Right. Rothbard shows that while the so-called New Right contained the old anti-interventionist, free-market libertarian coalitions—the people most connected to historical classical liberalism—this was not the dominant faction. Rather, this New Right, in contrast to the Old Right, came to be dominated by an “increasingly powerful gaggle of ex-Communists and ex-leftists.” This new conservatism was premised primarily on red-baiting and building up state power to fight Communists (both real and imagined) at both home and abroad. This was all eventually confirmed and solidified by the rise of William F. Buckley, Jr. as the preeminent theorist of the so-called conservative movement. For Buckley—who called for totalitarianism in the name of waging the Cold War—laissez-faire was little more than a convenient and cynical bone to throw to the remnants of the old laissez-faire liberals in order to keep them within the political right wing.
This served to neutralize the laissez-faire movement during the Cold War, and this new ideology of conservatism served to divorce the old laissez-faire liberalism from its historical antiwar roots.
This shift can still be seen today in how the conservative movement, and its political arm, the Republican Party, has successfully grafted a patina of “freedom and free markets” onto what remains essentially a pro-government, militarist movement in favor of “spreading democracy” through a robust military establishment and surveillance state. Its origins are in the pro-government, militant anti-communism of the 1950s. This continues to be reflected in today’s conservative movement.
For decades, as ever more federal power was defended by this conservative coalition in the name of beating the communists. This same impulse then seamlessly transferred to the “global war on terror” and its new spy apparatus deployed against Americans in the wake of 9/11. Even today’s “MAGA” coalition, which is relatively less bad than the Bushian and Nixonian warmongering coalitions of the past, promises ever more military spending and even more federal surveillance in the name of “homeland security.” After all, a federal security and spy state is presumably necessary to round up people who write op-eds in support of Hamas or aliens who might get a job without the proper federal paperwork.
The Left, of course, has been lost almost entirely in this respect. What antiwar movement occasionally exists on the Left tends to completely disappear whenever there is a Democrat in the White House. Even worse, the Left now tries to beat the Right at its own game—the Left now routinely accuses its ideological enemies of being foreign agents to a degree that might even make Joseph McCarthy hesitate.
Among conservatives, however, there appears to be no corner of the globe which does not require US intervention. This attitude continues in spite of the fact that many “America First” advocates claim to be for a minimalist foreign policy. There is nothing minimalist, however, about continued intervention in both the Middle East and in Ukraine where the “America First” candidate has inked a new minerals deal that will keep the US government engaged there indefinitely. There is nothing “America First” about open-ended military aid to an Israeli state that never tires of efforts to draw the United States ever further into Israel’s regional wars. There is nothing “America First” about the Trump administration’s efforts to secure a trillion-dollar military budget and to keep funding an archipelago of hundreds of American military bases across Europe and Asia.
Of course, any true classical liberal—any true opponent of untrammeled state power—from Spencer to Jefferson to Cobden and to Bastiat—would denounce the standing army, the crippling military expense, and the de facto imperialism of endless global intervention. Were they here to do this, of course, they would likely be themselves denounced by conservatives, who would call the pioneers of laissez-faire “naïve pacifists” and perhaps even “traitors” for not embracing a strong American state.
