This article is a transcript of Ryan McMaken’s lecture at the 2025 Mises University at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.
In 2004, the late historian Ralph Raico, a longtime senior fellow at the Mises Institute, presented a ten-hour lecture series here at the Institute on the history of political thought. He called it “History: The Struggle for Liberty” and attempted to present his students with a concise summary of the more than 400 years of political thought that underlies the political ideology of laissez-faire.
Thanks to the Mises Institute, this lecture series is now available in book form as The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought. As editor of this new book, I have extensively annotated the text with bibliographical notes and some commentary on Raico’s sources and work. This book is meant to be read somewhat as a companion piece to Murray Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. If you are looking for a general intellectual history explaining the origins of and ideological support behind the ideas of freedom and free markets, I recommend reading both of these works. Moreover, now that they are a published text, the lectures are much easier to cite in future scholarly research.
Whether you’re a scholar or a beginner, you’ll find several recurring themes that come through in Raico’s narrative, and I’d like to talk to you about five of these today.
Specifically, Raico debunks five common myths about the intellectual history of the ideology of laissez-faire, freedom, and free markets. He approaches the topic as a true advocate of laissez-faire himself, and as a qualified working historian with expertise in intellectual history. As such, Raico is uniquely qualified to comment on these matters from the point of view of those who actually value the idea of laissez-faire.
What are these five myths?
The first is the idea that the ideology of laissez-faire (which we now call libertarianism) is wholly separate from the movement we now call classical liberalism (which historically has just been known as liberalism). Raico shows this is not the case. The second myth is that Jean-Jacques Rousseau—in the context of the so-called Enlightenment— made important contributions to liberalism. Raico shows that the Enlightenment, especially its aspects particular to Rousseau, was not at all critical to the development of liberalism or laissez-faire. The third myth is that we should look to John Stuart Mill as an essential or indispensable theorist of nineteenth-century liberalism. In fact, Mill was, to use Raico’s term, a disaster for liberalism, and his views are not representative of the liberal movement. The fourth myth is that liberalism frowns upon the idea of class conflict and class warfare. We’re often told today that this idea is from the Marxists. Not so. And finally, the last myth is that constitutionalism will save us. One strain of thought among liberals—but not a definitive one—is that written constitutions will protect freedoms and property. For Raico, the constitutionalist idea is clearly a failure, and the solution lies in the deconstruction of the so-called liberal states, and not in their preservation.
Myth 1: Libertarianism and Classical Liberalism Are Two Different Things
The first myth that Raico addresses is the contention that libertarianism is outside the historical liberal tradition. This idea is employed today by supporters of the status quo and apologists for the world’s regimes who posit so-called classical liberalism as eminently moderate and reasonable. They contrast this “moderate” version of liberalism with libertarianism, which is allegedly too modern and radical to be part of the historical liberal movement. For example, if you see the phrase “classical liberal” in the bio of some political commentator, it’s a fairly safe bet that the person is using the phrase to communicate that he is moderate and reasonable but has some vague free market leanings. It’s a sort of dog whistle for people who like the status quo but maybe want slightly lower taxes or support gay marriage. Raico shows, however, that radicalism is very central to historical liberalism, and that modern libertarians fit well within the ideological spectrum of so-called classical liberalism.
In fact, liberalism as a movement begins in the mid-seventeenth century with the English Levellers. The Levellers were one of the more radical groups of the English Civil War era and were notable for being radical agitators who opposed mercantilist monopolies, limits on freedom of speech, and centralized control of arms. They were not, as some modern conservatives have claimed, some sort of egalitarian group. Rather, the Levellers were bourgeois middle-class liberals of a type that would be recognizable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, it is not surprising that Murray Rothbard describes the Levellers, as “the world’s first self-consciously libertarian mass movement.” Raico notes that John Locke was influenced by the Levellers’ libertarian sensibilities, and also points to Rothbard’s characterization of Locke and his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, as working out a “‘neo-Leveller’ movement.”
Raico also describes how Locke’s radicalism has been downplayed in recent centuries. In truth, Locke was a radical in his own time who was dissatisfied with the tame and moderate nature of the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. Importantly, of course, Locke was highly influential with Thomas Jefferson and the American revolutionaries, who were hardly moderates. Raico doesn’t spend much time talking about the American revolutionaries—except to say that they were secessionist radicals—but we might note that Rothbard often said that the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution is not properly appreciated and that many American revolutionaries were borderline anarchists. I refer you to volume 4 of Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty. This radical strain of liberalism that dominated in the very early United States has, of course, been ignored by those who today support the conservative authoritarian counterrevolution of the nationalists like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and the centralizing Federalists.
When making the case that there is no real difference between libertarians and liberals, we might hear the claim from those who don’t know better that libertarians are necessarily anarcho-capitalists and therefore did not exist until the modern libertarian movement. This claim fails in two ways. First of all, it’s easy enough to show that anarcho-capitalism is hardly the only kind of libertarianism, which is why Raico takes an ecumenical line on this topic. Secondly, even if the claim about libertarians being only anarcho-capitalists were true, it is not the case that such radicals could not be found in, say, the nineteenth century. Surely, modern conservatives and other moderates would find influential liberals like Richard Cobden to be intolerable. Cobden called for unilateral free trade and opposed a standing army. French liberals like Charles Dunoyer and Frédéric Bastiat wanted to abolish the French army. Herbert Spencer promoted anarchism in some phases of his career. And then there was Gustave de Molinari, who wanted to privatize military institutions and pushed for widespread secession and radical decentralization. Molinari was described by Rothbard as the first anarcho-capitalist.
Some modern milquetoast moderates will try and convince you that to be a liberal or “classical liberal” means to be sensible, moderate, a status quo defender of the nation-state. This is an attempt to distract you from the true history of liberalism, which is far more radical than most modern-day conservatives and Beltway libertarians of the Cato Institute variety.
Finally, Raico also delves into the more remote past to find earlier stirrings of the idea of freedom. In this, he draws heavily on Lord Acton— also a great historian of the idea of liberty. Like Acton, Raico looks to late antiquity and the Middle Ages for early contributions to the idea of liberty, from the Spanish Scholastics to Saint Ambrose in the late Roman Empire. Raico quotes Ambrose, who denied that the empire could exercise authority over the property of the church, and stated, “The palace is the Emperor’s. The churches are the Bishop’s.” Raico concludes, “Lord Acton, earlier in his career, had identified [the conflict between church and empire], in his view, as the origin of the idea of liberty; that is, there’s a realm that is not the state’s.”
This idea—the idea that there is a realm that is not the state’s—is the essential core of liberalism, or libertarianism. It is about the limiting of state power. Raico opposed countless efforts to complicate this matter. Many later theorists, for example, have tried to make historical liberalism about expressing yourself, or being free from social constraints or discrimination.
Raico dismisses this idea as he dismisses attempts to assign to liberalism certain philosophical characteristics beyond the relationship between state and individual. He states: “Now, it is sometimes maintained that underlying liberalism is a particular philosophical system, in the sense of a particular metaphysics and epistemology. Often, this philosophical system is taken to be British empiricism from John Locke to John Stuart Mill, but I don’t find this satisfactory. There are simply too many divergent and conflicting philosophical traditions within the history of liberalism, from Aristotelianism and Thomism to Kantianism to Empiricism, and so on, for this to be convincing. The working definition of liberalism that I will adopt is this: it is the ideology that holds that civil society—understood as a sum order of society, the sum of the social order minus the state—by and large runs itself within the bounds of a principle of private property. This is liberalism as I’ll be discussing it here.”
Myth 2: The Enlightenment Paved the Way for Classical Liberalism
Now, Raico’s concise definition of liberalism takes us to the next topic, which is the myth that liberalism’s foundations are found somewhere within the French Enlightenment, or even with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Now, if you’ve been through an undergraduate class on the history of political thought you have possibly encountered the idea that Rousseau was some sort of protoliberal. It may be that modern theorists get confused by the fact that Rousseau wrote a book about the social contract and think that this had something to do with later liberal constitutionalism.
In any case, some theorists try to make Rousseau out to be a contributor to the liberal tradition. To say the least, Raico does not agree with this assessment. Indeed, it might be said that Raico loathed Rousseau, going so far as to say this: “You all know, as sensible people, that the ad hominem argument is invalid. We can’t say that somebody’s ideas or claims are wrong because of the sort of person that he is. . . . but really we shouldn’t make a fetish of this or be overly fanatical. There are some cases where one has to bring in the ad hominem argument. Two cases that I can think of are, obviously, the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the other is Woodrow Wilson.”
Raico is partly joking here, but he’s also making the point that some people are so awful that it may be illustrative to point this out when examining their ideas. Rousseau apparently qualifies as such a person.
Raico goes on to describe Rousseau as one of the most destructive political theorists in history, partly because of his terrible ideas, but also partly because he was so influential. Rousseau was perhaps the single most influential theorist in the minds of the worst French radicals of the revolution. Maximillien Robespierre, for example, was a devoted disciple of Rousseau. It should not surprise us, then, that Rousseau was a great enemy of private property, and a de facto supporter of the unlimited state.
In his 1961 New Individualist Review article “Benjamin Constant: French Liberal Extraordinaire,” Raico puts it this way: “Like Locke, Rousseau had posited an original social contract, but where the English philosopher had attempted to employ this notion as a foundation for civil rights, in Rousseau’s conception the contract involved the total surrender by the individual of his life, liberty, and possessions into the hands of the community.”
This community was governed by the so-called general will, which was essentially the democratic mass that would control everything. Rousseau seemed to naïvely believe that the general will could somehow be neutrally imposed on the population in a way that reflected everyone’s desired outcomes. The very idea is obviously absurd, but Rousseau had a rather unsophisticated understanding of the fact that the policies of the state must ultimately be carried out by a class of bureaucrats and technocrats acting as state agents. In practice, this unsurprisingly took the form of the various French revolutionary dictatorships.
One problem with Rousseau, according to Raico, is that he rejected the idea of natural law and thus respected no natural limitations on state power. Raico notes that Rousseau subscribed to the theory that society could be built and remade at will in accordance with the dreams and theories of a “great lawgiver.” Raico writes: “This is the puerile theory—the idea that a supergenius somehow created a society— that Rousseau and other writers of the French Enlightenment had as to how society comes into existence. Society is instituted by some great lawgiver. Moses instituted the Hebrews, Solon instituted the Greeks, Lycurgus instituted the Spartan people, and so on.”
Yet, bizarrely, we often encounter claims that Rousseau was somehow part of the liberal project. Among the propounders of this myth is even F. A. Hayek, of all people. Raico notes that Hayek liked to denigrate the Continental liberal tradition but that in doing so, he would include nonliberals on his lists of alleged Continental liberals as a way to show how bad the non- British liberals were. Raico says: “There’s a kind of funny game that [Hayek] plays, because in the British tradition he lists not only David Hume, Smith, and Burke, but also Alexis de Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant, who were not exactly British subjects. And among the French, he mentions the physiocrats, the encyclopedists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Henri de Saint- Simon. It’s a peculiar thing, it seems to me, if you’re talking about the liberal tradition, to bring in the French encyclopedists. . . . Some people do consider them liberals, but Denis Diderot and Baron d’Holbach, and so on, were hardly liberal, in my view. Certainly not Rousseau.”
Raico more than once expresses doubt that the Enlightenment had much to contribute to the liberal project, and the connection is indeed tenuous. For more on this, we can look to Raico’s 2010 book The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. Raico approvingly quotes Lord Acton who says: “All these factions of opinion [in prerevolutionary France] were called Liberal: Montesquieu, because he was an intelligent Tory; Voltaire, because he attacked the clergy; Turgot, as a reformer; Rousseau, as a democrat; Diderot, as a freethinker. The one thing in common to them all is the disregard for liberty.”
We can also find Raico’s aversion to Enlightenment schools of thought in his work on Benjamin Constant. Constant was a highly influential French liberal, and Raico clearly admired his work but notes that Constant’s early exposure to the Enlightenment actually acted as a handicap. Raico writes that there are two key things to remember about Constant’s work: “the fact that Constant began thinking on social problems under the sway of the ideas of the French Enlightenment, and that a good deal of his intellectual career consists of the struggle to free himself from this mental framework.”
Part of the problem with the Enlightenment, Raico notes, is that it was cynical in the extreme and that the way it manifested itself in society and in discourse was as a regard for everything as something of a joke. There was nothing sacred. There were no higher ideals. All that really mattered was to be thought to be clever. Thus, Raico concludes that Constant, in his bid to overcome his Enlightenment handicap, “conceived of himself as combating a sort of intellectualist madness, which had proved itself to be disastrous for the moral life of France.”
Myth 3: John Stuart Mill Was an Archetypal Liberal
The idea of a degraded moral life brings us to our next topic, which is the unfortunate influence of John Stuart Mill. Specifically, the third myth we will address here is this: John Stuart Mill was the quintessential nineteenth-century liberal, central to liberalism as viewed in Europe and America.
Raico points out that this is hardly the case. Yet this myth is central to how political ideas are taught in college. Should one go through a program on political thought at a modern college or university, one will generally encounter John Stuart Mill presented as the most important liberal of the nineteenth century. Not only is this not true—many other theorists were far more important at that time—but Mill’s thought actually represents a distraction and a diversion from what have always been the most important aspects of the liberal program.
Raico puts it this way: “John Stuart Mill played a crucial role in the transition from the older liberalism—the laissez-faire liberalism—to the new liberalism [that is, to the modern left-wing ideology that some people call liberalism], a type of democratic socialism.”
He continues: “It is, to my mind, a disservice when a typical college course that deals with the history of political thought does this: As an example of eighteenth-century liberalism, they’ll maybe have Adam Smith. As an example of nineteenth-century liberalism, they will have John Stuart Mill. . . . To my mind, he occupies a vastly inflated position in the conception of liberalism entertained by English-speaking people.”
In fact, Raico describes Mill’s contribution to liberalism as “disastrous.” Specifically, Mill was bad where it counts the most. He was bad on private property and trade, declaring that “the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade.” This use of the term “free trade” included both domestic and international trade. Raico also says that “Mill was a disaster in international affairs, where he repudiated the liberal principle of nonintervention.” Specifically, Mill took a position similar to today’s interventionists who justify various foreign interventions on “humanitarian grounds,” or spreading civilization, as Mill saw it.
For most liberals—especially the best, most radical ones, like Bastiat and Cobden and Molinari—the core of the project was peace and freedom from state coercion. Since Mill didn’t care much about those things, what was his emphasis? Well, Mill drastically redefined freedom to include freedom from private pressures and private discrimination. Raico writes: “Liberty, it seems, according to Mill, is a condition that is threatened not only by physical aggression on the part of the state or other institutions or individuals; rather, society often poses even worse dangers to individual freedom. For example, Mill believes society threatens liberty with ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling’ and the tendency ‘to impose by other ways than civil penalties, [society’s] own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.’ Society ‘compels all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.’”
This is probably partly why modern left-wing academics—and Reason magazine–type libertarians—like to emphasize Mill. He lines up with their modern ideals of social democracy, in which “freedom” means liberating yourself from conventional morality.
As Raico points out, Mill was no fan of Christian morals, especially hated Catholicism, and attempted to make liberalism into an ideology that would reinforce his personal animosities toward these things. Raico suggests that this results from Mill’s personal problems. Mill was a committed adulterer, cavorting with his mistress, who was a married woman, and so he hated that conventional social ideals did not agree with his personal life choices. This seemed to greatly affect Mill, to the point of affecting his whole view of liberalism.
Raico laments that Mill was not French, since had he been French, he would have viewed his own degenerate behavior with a shrug and as a personal shortcoming rather than as something to obsess over. Raico writes: “When an individual has ‘lifestyle problems,’ that’s up to the individual, and it’s a private matter. That’s fine. However, when these problems fuel and provide the basic impetus behind one’s political philosophy, then it becomes a problem.”
This problem led Mill to erect his own puritanical reverse morality, which condemned anyone who chose to subscribe to a cultural or moral system that Mill did not like. Thus, Mill sat in judgment of those who didn’t confirm him in his lifestyle. Mill claimed that anyone who applied social pressure toward any particular cultural end was some sort of enemy of freedom. This attitude deformed his view of liberalism and made him into an opponent of private civil society rather than a fighter against state coercion. Raico concludes: “One wonders also how Mill and his alter ego, Harriet Taylor, could ever have imagined themselves entitled to legislate on the status of members of the Catholic or Orthodox orders, the status of Orthodox Jews, devout Muslims, and of other believers. . . . He was, in the words of Maurice Cowling, ‘one of the most censorious of nineteenth-century moralists.’ Mill constantly passed judgment on the habits, attitudes, preferences, and moral standards of great numbers of people of whom he knew nothing.”
So, let us return now to better liberals who did more to draw our attention to the actual evils of the state. This brings us to the fourth myth.
Myth 4: Class Warfare Was Invented by Marxists
Now, the fourth myth that Raico addresses is that Marxists invented the idea of class warfare or class exploitation. In fact, it was the liberals who did this. Certainly, the Marxists invented their own version of exploitation based on invented categories of economic division. But it was the liberals who recognized that there is a fundamental division between the ruling class and the rest of the population, which is exploited by that ruling class. There is, as John Bright put it in nineteenth-century Britain, the “tax-eating class,” and there is the “tax-paying class.”
The observers of this process of exploitation by the government class used the term “spoliation.” This was frequently used by the great radical Vilfredo Pareto, who had no illusions about the ways that the various parasite classes—such as military officers, government contractors, civil servants, and social benefits recipients— plundered those who are net taxpayers.
Bastiat used the term as well. In the French-language original of The Law, we find the phrase “la spoliation légale”—often translated as “legal plunder.”
The liberals saw the relationship between the state and its taxpaying subjects as one of exploitation, and as part of a constant struggle between classes. The Italian radicals like Pareto were especially insightful on this, according to Raico, and he writes: “Again and again, [the Italian liberals] excoriate the Italian state for 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, 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.”
The liberals especially noted that war was one of the most convenient ways for states to exploit the productive classes. The great British liberal John Bright blamed certain economic interests such as “stock-jobbers”—namely, certain “capitalists” who made money from endless government spending on war.
Raico sums up the liberal view of the national-security state: “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—the 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.”
This is an important thing to note. The liberals of this period were not fooled into thinking that just because some corporation or group was ostensibly private, it was part of the productive classes. After all, so-called private interests—i.e., bankers and producers of weapons—were often the most enthusiastic about exploiting the hapless taxpayers.
Americans were not blind to this either. It is among America’s most radical liberals, such as the great Northern Jacksonian William Leggett and William Graham Sumner, where we find some of the most insightful opposition to legal plunder as something encouraged by alleged private industry. Chief among the exploiters were the bankers. This is why Leggett often called for the “separation of bank and state” and why Sumner coined the words “plutocrat” and “plutocracy.” These words were devised to condemn not the wealthy in general, but only those wealthy classes who used their influence over the state to enrich themselves and exploit the actual productive members of society.
Much of this exploitation played out behind the scenes, of course, and as a comment on the private special interests, Raico quotes Cobden, who says: “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.”
This relationship was put much more simply by Pareto, who said that there is the class that rules and the class that is ruled. The liberals were not fooled by amorphous claims about the so-called common good. Rather, the most insightful and radical liberals simply state the reality: In the presence of a state organization, there are those who are exploited and those who exploit.
The Marxists could only poach this idea and modify it to suit their own, misguided version of things. And lest there be any doubt about this, Raico points out that the first lines of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, go like this: “The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, yield master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another.”
Raico then points out that nine years earlier, in 1837, Adolphe Blanqui, a member of the French liberal school and a protégé of Jean-Baptiste Say, wrote this: “In all the revolutions, there have always been but two parties opposing each other, that of the people who wish to live by their own labor and that of those who would live by the labor of others. Patricians and plebians, slaves and freemen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, red roses and white roses, cavaliers and round heads, liberals and serviles are only varieties of the same species.”
For Raico, it is clear that Marx was influenced by Blanqui’s words and expropriated them. And perhaps it was Blanqui who best summarized the liberal view of class conflict when he wrote: “So, in one country, the fruit of labor is taken from the workman by taxes, under pretense of the welfare of the state; in another, by privileges, declaring labor a royal concession, and making one pay dearly for the right to devote himself to it.”
As Raico notes, “This is done through the guilds, for instance, or government monopolies.” Blanqui continues: “The same abuse is reproduced under forms more indirect, but not less oppressive, when, by means of custom-duties, the state shares with the privileged industries the benefits of the taxes imposed on non-privileged classes.”
Myth 5: Constitutionalism Will Save Us
This brings us to the fifth and final myth we’ll address today: that written constitutions can save us.
Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries part of the liberal project has been to design and put into place written constitutions.
Constitutions are not core to the idea of liberalism, of course. They are a tactic rather than a core tenet of the ideology. Similarly, universal suffrage has been a tactic employed by classical liberals but is hardly central to the liberal idea that society can run itself and that state power ought to be strictly limited.
The constitutionalist idea has long been part of the liberal program, but Raico believes that it has failed. It has failed precisely because the constitutionalists have tended to believe that centralized national political power is acceptable, or can be made benign, so long as it is theoretically limited by written constitutions.
This view of the state as potentially neutral, or perhaps even useful, in bringing about liberal ends was perhaps the greatest fatal flaw in the liberal political movement. Raico notes that this naïve view of the state led liberals to actually increase state power as a means of bringing about liberal ends. In this view, Raico may have been influenced by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, who in his 2003 essay “Secession and the Production of Defense” describes the liberals’ mistake this way: “To get rid of aristocratic privileges, the classical liberals first supported the king against the lesser aristocrats, and then concentrated further powers in the democratic central state to fight all regional and local forms of monarchism and aristocracy. Rather than curbing political power, they merely shifted and centralized it, creating even more powerful political institutions than those they were trying to supersede.” In other words, the liberals made the mistake of increasing state power to abolish the old impediments to liberalism. This was excused and justified on the grounds that written constitutions would be employed to ensure that the state would be restrained from violating rights.
This proved to be a misplaced hope. Some of the more clever French liberals, in particular, saw the mistake almost immediately, and Raico notes that once the old regime was swept away, the problem of the modern centralized state came into view. He writes in “Benjamin Constant: French Liberal Extraordinaire”: “The focus of all threats to individual freedom became the government itself. The Church, nobility, guilds and other corporations that, endowed with coercive privilege, had vexed the free functioning of men, left the stage, and across the gap created by their disappearance the individual and the state, for the first time, stood alone facing each other. And now the liberals’ attitude toward the state underwent a change. Where previous French liberals had seen [in the state] a potential instrument for the establishment of liberty, and one that might at times even safely be used for the realization of certain ‘philosophical’ values, writers like Constant started to see a collection of standing threats to individual freedom: government is ‘the natural enemy of liberty;’ ministers, of whatever party, are, by nature, ‘the eternal adversaries of freedom of the press;’ governments will always look on war as ‘a means of increasing their authority.’ Thus, with Constant, the chief articulator of his generation’s liberal ideals, we see the beginnings of classical liberalism’s ‘state hatred,’ which, after the eighteenth century’s ambiguous attitude, marks its theory to the present day.”
But much damage had already been done. The attempt to switch over to a liberal-oriented polity via a stronger centralized state led to consolidated national states which quickly set to work undermining liberal gains. In the United States, which implemented perhaps the most liberal national constitution, for example, the situation almost immediately began to unravel. The initial highly liberal constitution was soon replaced by one that was much more centralist. Then, the supporters of more consolidated national power set to work centralizing power even more.
Raico writes that the American Bill of Rights was “a heroic attempt to limit government, but very quickly the Hamiltonian and then the Whig tradition arose in America to expand the powers of the national government. Very quickly also, the national government’s own Supreme Court set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution and interpreter of the Constitution. That’s very dangerous. What could be a protection against this? What could be a protection against a national government doing all kinds of things in the economy—protective tariffs, so-called internal improvements, pork for their contractor friends in the railroads, and printing money—that it forces on the people? What could prevent the federal government from doing that? . . . Now there seems to be no limit—no institutional limit, no theoretical limit— to what the national government can do. You say, ‘Well, we still have the Bill of Rights.’ Well, we have the Bill of Rights, but the Bill of Rights has to be interpreted. It’s interpreted by the federal Supreme Court.”
That is, once the federal courts agree with the antiliberal forces promoting centralization, there is no amount of centralization and state growth that will be deemed illegal or contrary to the constitution. This is because legal solutions to despotism, such as written constitutions, do not suffice to constrain state power. Constant, for instance, understood that “all the constitutions which have been given to France have equally accorded individual liberty, and under the empire of these constitutions, individual liberty has been ceaselessly violated. The point is that a simple declaration does not suffice. What is required are positive safeguards; what is required are bodies powerful enough to employ in favor of the oppressed the means of defense sanctioned by the law.”
So, what is the solution to this? Raico concludes that since the state itself will judge what can be allowed legally and constitutionally, the only answer lies outside what states will consider to be legal. Specifically, secession and the deconstruction of the state. He writes: “It’s very clear that there is no way of salvaging ‘limited government.’ It’s simply going to be getting worse and worse, so our more direct and immediate aim has to be to destroy the centralized state, to do away with the centralized state in stages.”
The strategy he offers here is secession and the deconstruction of the state, which undoes the earlier liberal tactic of centralization under a constitution. Raico, of course, views secession as a well-established and morally licit means of breaking down state power. He notes throughout his book the salutary effects of the secession movement that led to the creation of the Dutch republic in the sixteenth century, for example, as well as the laudable secession of the Americans during the revolution.
Secession’s liberal pedigree is further backed by Gustav de Molinari in France and by William Leggett in New York, who repeatedly held that the dissolution of the United States might be necessary to free the nonslave states from the scourge of legalized slavery. And liberals also supported a variety of movements in the name of national liberation, such as the secession of Hungary from the Austrian Empire.
Generally, though, secession and the deconstruction of the state is maintained by the national states themselves to be unconstitutional. Even where secession might be theoretically legal, the powers that control the state are likely to deem secession illegal and unconstitutional in practice. We have seen this play out over and over again whenever states are confronted with the possibility of dismemberment. This simply proves Raico’s point, of course, that should anything significantly challenge the power of the state— including any ostensible liberal state—then the option will be cut off, and constitutionalism ultimately ends in little more than legal interpretations that protect the state itself.
I think Raico is correct here. Constitutionalism simply is not a realistic avenue to the protection of the rights that classical liberals advocated for. Thus, in practice the constitutionalist aspects of liberalism have failed.
One will encounter many other insights and topics in Raico’s history of political thought, and in his works overall. But here I’ve tried to show some of the more prominent themes in his work. Naturally, I encourage you all to read and study Raico’s work for yourselves.
