Categorically speaking, there are two explanations for political differences between people. Mistake Theory posits that the reason libertarians and, say, Marxist-Leninists, don’t agree with each other is that we have firmly-held, genuine beliefs about how to solve problems in the world. Politics is simply “the science of society,” and good politics tends towards the greatest good. Most people simply differ on how best to achieve the greatest good.
Conflict theory, on the other hand, maintains that politics is the result of concentrated human effort to gain at the expense of others. Communists certainly believe in a conflict of economic classes throughout history. Many right-wingers believe in a conflict between civilizational or racial groups. If you asked many modern self-identified libertarians or “classical liberals,” they would instinctively reject the idea of conflict theory; it calls back to a more brutish, less cooperative way of seeing and interacting with the world. Economics is not a zero-sum game, so why not apply the same thinking to politics?
However, there’s a long liberal tradition of class conflict. Indeed it can be said that modern class theory originated not with Marx, but with the classical liberals of 18th century Europe. Our class theory is that of the plundering class and the plundered class. The violent apparatus of the state, its executive directors, and parasitic clients and vassals make up the plundering class, stealing from and lording over the mass of men that work for a living. Frederic Bastiat used the term “legal plunder” to refer to this in activity, similar to exploitation’s place in Marx’s theory.
Just as a Marxist would not bother spending all his time debating the exploitative class in his society, but instead organizing to defeat them and to empower the proletariat, the class conscious liberal sought to overthrow the feudal and absolutist regimes that placed onerous, regressive taxes on the common man, and richly rewarded its friends with them. This resulted in the liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Murray Rothbard—Mr. Libertarian—only tweaked the ancient liberal class theory to exclude all governments and their agents. As Rothbard said about all his works, his was merely a fully consistent liberal program. The question for him was not how to convince men who made their living from the plunder of the peaceful and productive with intellectual appeals to greater goods, but the organization and radicalization of those very men who were being plundered.
To understand how the ruling class of a given society operates, classical liberal sociologists led by Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto created what is now known as Elite Theory. Pareto also studied how new elite classes are created and replace the old. So let us look at Pareto, the man and his work. Vilfredo was born in Paris in 1848 to Italian parents of devout liberal beliefs. Training as a young man in engineering, he was drawn into political economy by the writings of a man who died when he was only two years old, Frederic Bastiat:
I was approximately sixteen when I chanced to read two authors of a completely opposite nature, Bossuet [French 17th century theologian] and Bastiat. I heartily disliked the first, whereas the second fully pleased my sentiments, which under this respect were in utter contrast with those of the people who surrounded me at that time, such as I can state that they weren’t acquired, but were a consequence of the temperament I had since my birth.
Bastiat made him a committed anti-statist, a man who always upheld the basic liberal principles of free trade, free minds, and free markets. Bastiat’s successor—Gustave de Molinari—was a friend and close correspondent of Pareto, who referred to him as “Maître” (master). Molinari was the first liberal theorist to suggest the privatization of that industry long held as a basic government function: security.
Having spent most of his life in the private sector as an engineer, in 1880, Pareto began vocally opposing what he saw as destructive statist policies in modern Italy. While Italy was led by nominally liberal factions, “practical politics” had prevented Italy from removing significant trade barriers, and freedom of organization and assembly—especially by rural peasants and industrial workers—was suppressed. In 1891, one of the public speeches Pareto gave against trade tariffs actually got broken up by the police as an “affront to public order.” His public articles on these topics often got him death threats and challenges by the aristocratic right to duels, challenges which Pareto never backed away from. A crack shot and handy with a blade (and the son of a Marquis besides), Pareto would practice his marksmanship by blasting mice on his estate.
Pareto saw what he called the “bourgeois” elite in Italy as basically sleepwalking into socialism. On one hand, they refused to listen to the prescriptions of the economists of Manchester and the French Liberal school—to sweep away all the feudal privileges and elevate men with the animating contest of freedom. On the other, their suppression of left-wing opposition from the poor and their advocates only strengthened the resolve of socialist thinkers and activists.
Pareto pointed out how weak socialism was in Switzerland—where liberalism was far closer to pure—and how strong socialism was in Spain—where liberalism was barely existent. When some self-identified admirers talk about Pareto’s lambasting of his ruling class, they’ll point to the general observation he made that the Italian bourgeois was too morally and intellectually cowardly to defend its own position. Certainly anyone of any ideological strain can take from this that men must have the courage of their own convictions. But more specifically, Pareto was attacking the lack of liberalism in those liberal elites. Some of the biggest waves of death threats to Pareto were during his courageous stands against the Italian adventurism in east Africa, especially the disastrous Ethiopian campaign in 1896 where the “uncivilized black barbarians” soundly defeated an army that had pretensions of being a major world power. The following century proved to be full of more anti-liberal horrors, both for Italy and the world.
Libertarians can take much from Pareto. Frederich Hayek sought to understand the collapse of liberalism in the 20th century with Elite Theory, writing “Intellectuals and Socialism” in 1949, an article that echoes much of Pareto’s observations about the intellectual cowardice of bourgeois conservatives nominally in power in the Western democracies, that they were giving away all their moral and institutional ground to the left because they refused to understand the reality that it was not the beliefs of the masses but of those elites in society that truly mattered. Like Pareto, his prediction for the future of liberalism in the west was pessimistic, if not completely hopeless:
It may be that a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends….
Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew? It may be so, but I hope it need not be….
Murray Rothbard also understood the importance of elites in the loss of liberalism to statism, not only in our own period—in his great posthumous work, The Progressive Era—but at the very founding of our country—in volume 5 of Conceived in Liberty—documenting the way a small, directed core of nationalists contrived to replace the Articles of Confederation with the centralizing, anti-libertarian Constitution:
The nationalist leaders, in contrast to their wavering opponents, knew exactly what it wanted and strove to obtain the most possible. The initiative was always in the hands of the Federalist Right, while the Anti-federalist Left, weakened in principle, could only offer a series of defensive protests to the reactionary drive. The battles were consequently fought on the terms set by the aggressive nationalist forces.
Pareto’s studies tell us libertarian activists cannot simply wait for the masses—or a nascent elite—to come to our point of view. We must train a dedicated cadre of intellectuals who take our ideas with grave moral seriousness. We need men who “Hate the State,” and we need men who understand that our principal opponents are not fools on social media, but the plundering class that educates them and teaches them that true liberalism was guilty of a litany of atrocities, just as much as it is the men who enforce those rules. Vilfredo Pareto’s work in uncovering the truth about elites—how they gain power, and how they lose it—is essential to any fight for liberty having a chance of success.
