(Classical) Liberalism Has Not Failed, and We Need It Now More Than Ever

The Ralph Raico Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Murray and Florence Sabrin. Presented at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

Below is a written version of the lecture (supplied by Ryan McMaken).

I am very honored to be asked by Joe to deliver the Ralph Raico memorial lecture at this conference, and this means a lot to me because I have for many years been an enthusiast of his work, and especially in his work on the history of liberalism. Moreover, Raico largely specialized in European history, and I think his work is especially important for Americans to read because, when it comes to the history of ideas, Americans usually end up dwelling excessively on little more than nineteenth and twentieth century America, and to the extent that Americans explore outside American history, they usually confine themselves to the Anglosphere and to theorists who wrote in English only. 

Raico is a good antidote to all this, and as we’ll see today, Raico, like Rothbad, regarded the continental classical liberal theorists to often be superior to what we get from the British. 

I say all these because we are going to need to delve into the work on many Continental theorists, largely those who wrote in French and Italian, to explore the most fruitful strains of liberalism. Specifically, we need to look at the specifical school of liberalism that I’ll here refer to as the “realist” school or the “exploitation” school of liberalism. These strains of liberalism were notable for their central observation about the state: namely, that it is a tool of the ruling elite for the exploitation of others. This will be contrasted with the type of liberalism we might call the naïve school of liberalism which views written constitutions and democracy as tools that will sufficiently constrain state power.

But before we can do anything, really, we need to make a brief note about terminology. During this talk, I’m going to use Raico’s terminology when it comes to the terms “liberalism” and “libertarianism.” That is, when I use the term “liberal,” I’ll be referring to the ideology of laissez-faire, freedom, and free markets which has been historically known as liberalism, or in more modern times as classical liberalism, since that has now become necessary thanks to a muddling of language after the 1930s. Moreover, Raico regarded what we now call libertarianism as synonymous with historical liberalism, especially its more radical varieties. So, at no point, when I say the word “liberal,” am I referring to the social democrats or so-called progressives that modern-day right-wing pundits insist on calling liberals.

So, with all that out of the way, I’d like to set the tone with commentary drawn from the final section of Raico ‘s 10-hour lecture series on the history of political thought. Known as The Struggle for Liberty. So, as the series draws to an end, Raico says this:

I go back often to Machiavelli ... In The Prince, he talks about men who want power and gain power, what the nature of power is, and what the nature of politics is. He says he is writing for a few people and not for the mass of people. Machiavelli contends the mass of people prefer appearance to reality. They prefer their fantasy to what actually exists. If they knew what politics really was, they wouldn’t have a good night’s sleep for the rest of their lives. ... The average person is born to be a sheep, and, as another Italian, Pareto, said, “he who plays the sheep will find the butcher.”1

Now, when you’re in my line of work and deliver lectures of this sort, you’ll often be told to end your talks with something optimistic and light. Well, if Raico ever got that memo, he wadded it up into a little ball and threw it away.

After all, what Raico says here—that’s not very pleasant to think about. That seems pretty dark. Surely, if we just vote for the right people, or change a few laws, then the regimes of the world, and especially the American regime, will suddenly decide to limit itself to a few core functions, and make a turn toward laissez-faire. Well, that is definitely not the message Raico wants to send. The reality is far more grim than anything that can be fixed by voting or promoting written constitutions. Rather, the reality has something to do with the exercise of political power, which usually amounts to using violence against others. 

And considering this, it’s definitely no coincidence that Raico decides to conclude by quoting Vilfredo Pareto, who wasn’t exactly known for a rosy view of the future of what is nowadays called liberal democracy. 

In fact, it’s very appropriate for Raico to go back to Pareto—whom Raico has invoked in numerous cases across a number of essays—in Raico’s work on class conflict and exploitation. 

Pareto can act for us here as a launching off point for exploring the larger context Raico was trying to express through his lecture series, and through other works, especially over the last 25 years of his career. 

So first, let’s look at Pareto in some detail, and see what Raico’s use of Pareto can tell us about some of Raico’s emphases and conclusions. 

Now, most economists are familiar with Pareto through his work in the field of economics, but Raico was interested in him in his political work because he was a radical free-market liberal (that is, he was a libertarian) in the line of Bastiat and, importantly Gustave de Molinari, who Rothbard suggested was the founder of the idea of anarcho-capitalism.

Indeed, Rothbard refers to Pareto in his history of economic thought as a “pessimistic follower of Molinari.”2 Early in his career, Pareto had been a fairly standard doctrinaire liberal on constitutions. But later in his career, by the very late nineteenth century, he took a turn. As Rothbard put it, Pareto was “faced with the failure of his hopes and with the looming statist hell of the twentieth century.” Rothbard in this case, is talking about the Pareto of 1902. Pareto died in 1923, and he certainly wasn’t getting more optimistic after 1902. By 1919 and 1920, Leninist brigades were using the democratic process in Italy to protect and sustain a campaign of terror against property owners in northeast Italy. As you can imagine, this didn’t exactly disabuse Pareto of his suspicion of democracy. By the way, it was the alarming successes of the Leninist in Italy that had prompted Pareto to suggest that Mussolini and his followers might be a useful tool against communist totalitarianism and exploitation. And we should note that for this, Pareto is often slandered as fascist, although this was never true. Pareto never abandoned his hardline stance in favor of total freedom of speech, free trade, and opposition to state power. Pareto was never so naïve as to see Mussolini as anything more than one gangster that might be useful in being pitted against another gangster. Pareto certainly did not subscribe to the fascist creed of “nothing outside the state.” Moreover, Pareto died less than a year after the blackshirts’ March on Rome in 1922, so Pareto exited the scene before Mussolini could even really consolidate power. So to call him a supporters of Mussolini and the fascists is rather disingenuous. 

Indeed, as Raico notes, Pareto, until the end, described himself as an admirer of Gustave de Molinari, the radical anti-statist and decentralist, the advocate of total laissez-faire. Moreover, Pareto’s overall project puts him in every way into the camp of the liberal exploitation theorists following Bastiat, Charles Dunoyer, on the Continent, and Richard Cobden and John Bright—that is, Manchester School—in England. We also find some similar sentiments among the Jacksonians in America, specifically William Legget and William Graham Sumner. 

Pareto’s pedigree in this respect is perhaps summed up in a line from his 1896 book Cours d’économie politique in which he says that the struggle to appropriate the wealth produced by others is “the great fact that dominates the whole history of humanity.”3 Pareto follows Bastiat in portraying the state as the engine of “spoliation” or what is often translated as “legal plunder” in English. The core of this liberal exploitation school is that the state employs war, taxation, money printing, and a plutocratic relationship with at least some of the wealthy economic elites to carry out the exploitation of the general population. This can be carried out by any type of regime, and certainly is carried out by democratic regimes. As made very clear in Pareto’s works. It should also be noted that this is done on purpose. It’s not some unintended consequence of well-meaning public servants. 

Political scientist Alberto Mingardi also provides a helpful summary of Pareto’s work, and Mingardi summarizes the basics of Pareto’s 1916 General Treatise on Sociology, and writes:

The central fact of politics is the truth that whenever you have politics, you have someone governing and someone obeying: politics, indeed, allows somebody to take advantage of somebody else. Such truth is unpleasant: even liberal economists of the Utopian kind prefer to close their eyes to it. People want to believe things are different and they hold ideologies that allow them to avoid considering unpleasant truths. Such Pareto realism dismantled the ideological pretenses that democracy is different from and better than all other regimes ... 

The idea that democracy is, to paraphrase a puerile slogan from Churchill, the worst system except for all the rest, clearly runs contrary to Pareto and most of the liberal exploitation theorists who certainly did not believe that democracy would somehow tame the state. This is not the rosy view of politics we often get from other corners of liberal thought which might have us believe in the pluralist idea of political representation in which the regime works as a neutral arbitrator, of sorts, to ensure a relatively fair distribution of resources, brought about by peaceful compromise. Moreover, in this view, we are also often told that legal norms and written constitutions can act to restrain the state, and that legal barriers can be constructed as reliable bulwarks against abuses of power. 

That view is largely ignored or disparaged by the less naïve theorists we now generally associate with exploitation theory. Rather, those who see the state as necessarily exploitable, like Pareto, who view the state as simply the cudgel used by the plutocratic elites to despoil everyone else. In Pareto’s view, this situation is in no way improved by democracy or so-called representative government, or even by written constitutions, since ultimately, any successful governing elite will turn all of those mechanisms, instruments, and institution toward the continued enrichment of the ruling elites themselves. 

A healthy suspicion of democracy among the French liberals goes back at least to Benjamin Constant, in the early nineteenth century who countered Rousseau’s notions of the general will and concluded that “Popular government is nothing but a convulsive tyranny...”4

Also key to understanding Pareto is his view of the elites. For Pareto, every political system is run by a relatively small elite, and this is always true regardless of regime type, constitution, or political system. There is no “will of the people.” Moreover, elites behave the same way when it comes to building and keeping power. This is true across all regime types with the elites working to preserve their privileges through the use of propaganda, coercion, and alliances with various interests within the polity. This can vary in the details, but is fundamentally the same whether the elites head an authoritarian regime or a democratic regime. And, finally, every revolution ultimately replaces one set of elites with another. No revolution results in the “rule of the people.” There may be an interregnum of political disorder, that may last for a time, in some cases, But this, in every case, ends with the ascension of a new governing elite. 

The new regime then begins again the work of exploiting the population for the preservation of the elites in their positions. Again, this mechanism is not prevented by the uses of constitutions or elections, or any other legal mechanism. In all cases, the regime will work to modify these institutions and legal frameworks to favor the governing elite. So, for Pareto, political theorists largely waste their time in trying to design the optimal way to select the government’s policymakers. 

In his Cours d’economie politique, Pareto puts it his way: 

It seems to be agreed on as an axiom that a formula must exist for selecting guardians [that is, legislators and policymakers] in such a way that they will be unable to abuse their power; and that the evils seen occurring in practice derive simply from the fact that this wonderful formula has yet to be applied. This error occurs in those theories which ascribe an exclusive influence over social phenomena to the form of government or to the method of selecting its personnel. These factors are indeed interdependent, but to a much smaller degree than is generally supposed. To appreciate this it is enough to make a comparative study of the facts observable in societies which have changed either the method of recruiting their governors or the form of government itself. Such a study makes it clear that, while the facts observed are variable in form, the fundamental substance remains pretty much the same. The sole appreciable result of most revolutions has been the replace of one set of politicians by another set.5

This is just a short quotation, but I need to emphasize that Pareto is not simply stating this. These conclusions come only after a long analysis of how the democratic state works. Many readers, in fact, will be surprised at just how much Pareto had democracy’s number. Writing in 1910, 1912, and 1896, it is remarkable how well Pareto already understood the process of special interest politics within a democratic system, and how the ruling elite exploits a complex system of clients and patrons to maintain the elite in power.

So, it’s here that many historians of classical liberalism—regardless of whether or not they are themselves liberals—often get confused or annoyed. When Pareto and other liberal exploitation theorists take a dim view of democracy, and of the constitutional projects from which democracy usually springs, doesn’t this show that those people aren’t even liberals? Must not all liberals be in favor of written constitutions, and elections, and a belief in the electoral process, variously defined? That is, don’t liberals necessarily subscribe to a program that roughly reflects that of say, James Madison or John Stuart Mill, or perhaps the Jacksonians in America who pushed relentlessly for universal manhood suffrage. After all, throughout most of the nineteenth century, both in the US and in Europe, classical liberalism was associated with democratization. 

The answer to all this is no. It is not necessary for a liberal to believe in this political program. 

I think Mingardi helps us here again because he draws an important distinction between the liberal program and the liberal worldview, and also a difference between the realist liberals and what Mingardi says are the liberals who are Utopian to various degrees. 

So, Mingardi sees Bastiat and Pareto—and those like them, such as, we might argue Molinari, and even to some extent, Benjamin Constant—as practitioners of political realism. 

Mingardi concludes with making an essential distinction: 

Pareto’s drastic realism is not incompatible with a classical-liberal worldview: it is incompatible with a classical-liberal program. In Pareto’s times, that program consisted in seeking to obtain a constitution from the rulers and pursuing one kind of reform, in particular one aimed at widening the franchise. 

The idea was that broadly giving a vote to a larger and larger portion of the general population would somehow work to restrain the elites from exploiting the public, and also punish those elites who abused their power. Mingardi continues: “Was that sufficient to shackle political power? Hardly so, and 20th-century liberals ... tried to update and perfect that program, make it more resilient, figure out better constitutional restraints.”

Early in the twentieth century, Pareto could already see that the usual liberal-endorsed political methods simply were not restraining the power of the state. 

The distinction that Mingardi makes here between the liberal program on the one hand, and the liberal worldview is very important. It’s important because we now live in a time when we increasingly hear voices from critics of liberalism, stating that liberalism “has failed” in some respect or other. We don’t have time to critique those arguments, but when we encounter the claim, we must make that very important distinction between the liberal worldview and the liberal program. Moreover, the liberal program of this sort was certainly never universally supported by liberals, especially among the most radical, libertarian ones, like Pareto and Molinari. 

After all, whether or not liberalism has failed would depend much on how we define liberalism. Is liberalism the program, or is it the worldview? Or are the two inextricably linked? 

For Raico’s part, he defines liberalism strictly in terms of its worldview. He puts it this way: liberalism is “the ideology that holds that civil society—understood as ... the sum of the social order minus the state—by and large runs itself within the bounds of a principle of private property.”6

That’s it. 

Raico opposed efforts to define liberalism in terms of epistemology or metaphysics, as many writers on the topic—especially philosophers—often try to do. Raico, however, focused on how liberalism was employed in the real world to animate ideological and political movements. The core of liberalism is its opposition to state power and its definition of society as “other than” the state.

The implications of this worldview are sizable and from them flows much of centuries’ worth of liberal commentary on the problems that arise when the state intervenes in civil society. Or, put another way, in this view, when the state prevents the private use of property as the owners see fit, the state destroys freedom. This leads Rothbard to conclude, along with Lord Acton that freedom is the “highest political end” for the liberal. 

But, neither Rothbard nor Raico would claim that this worldview implies—let alone requires—an embrace of written constitutions or democratic institutions. These have historically been methods used by many liberals. This cannot be denied, but there is nothing inherent to the liberal ideology itself, rightly understood, which necessarily leads to what we often now see as the liberal program. 

Moreover, given the realities of the past century or so, it’s difficult to see how the liberal worldview has failed. The liberals, after all, were absolutely right about the dangers of socialism, central planning, central banking, fiat money, the welfare state, the military-industrial complex, protectionism, and so much more. It has all crippled economic growth, human flourishing, the standard of living and much more. And, of course, the evils of the modern state, against which liberals have generally led the opposition, has taken a grave toll on human life and human rights in general. Certainly, no other worldview has ever made a priority of protecting property rights, and of explaining, using sound economic science, the economic implications of the abuses of state power. 

Nonetheless, when we channel our inner Pareto, and point to the dangers of the state, its elite, and its democratic facade, we’ll often encounter opposition from self-identified liberals and libertarians. Much of this springs from a temperamental difference which Mingardi alludes to when he writes: 

In the liberal tradition two elements coexist. For one, you have Bastiat on plunder and Pareto on the ruling class—more generally speaking, thinkers who see the state as the ultimate device for exploitation. But you also have thinkers who stress that the market economy tends to multiply bread and fishes, thereby providing an optimistic perspective on the present and future. Superficially, the one worldview may imply the falseness of the other, but this ought not be the case. The fact that we have economic progress should not necessarily blind us to the exploitative nature of government. In a sense, economic progress is precisely what makes that exploitation nowadays more bearable, even though, measured in the percentage of GDP devoured by taxation, the exploitation is much greater than in the past.

And one often encounters this attitude among even modern-day libertarians. They’ll highlight that the standard of living is today higher than it was 40, 50, or 100 years ago. Which, no doubt, it is. But this enthusiasm often results in a complacency with the status quo and the contention that things are great, and nothing more than a few minor reforms are ever necessary. This view, however, relies only in the seen and ignores the unseen. What is seen is the higher standard of living that, thanks to the resilience of markets, even when crippled by taxes and regulations, manage to deliver more wealth and productivity, even to a majority of the population to some extent. 

What is unseen, however, is the widespread exploitation inflicted by the ruling elite and its allies on the general population—the booms and busts, the financial bubbles, and destruction of purchasing power, the military draft, the enduring military-industrial complex, and much more. The Bastiats and Paretos of this world have never been content to sit back and talk about how splendid everything is when they consider the grave injustices of this exploitation. 

Others, however, don’t like to hear from these grumpier libertarians who decry the injustice of the state, and refuse to acknowledge that the scraps from the ruling elites’ table are relatively tasty and filling. 

This difference of emphasis nothing new, of course. It existed in the days of British Imperialism and decades ago, Raico remarked on the opposition to Cobden as being too grumpy and critical of the regime. Raico noted, approvingly, that “Cobden and Bright were harping critics of the status quo in Britain and Ireland, constant naggers, especially of those who ran the foreign affairs of the country.” That’s not a criticism. But it helps to explain the posture taken by many who were sick of the negativity of the regime’s opponents. Raico wrote: 

Contemporary conservative poseurs [that is, contemporaries of Cobden] would unquestionably agree with the founder of their breed, Benjamin Disraeli, that the men of Manchester were simply not fun-people. Rather, they were incessant complainers who found themselves unable just to sit back and enjoy the fantasies and tinsel-symbols of British world power.

Certainly, modern American political discourse has no lack of such people who prefer to speak well of the status quo because that sounds relatively pleasant and optimistic - and after all, aren’t all these modern gadgets and apps we now have evidence of how great life on earth is. The fact that life is pretty great, in this view, also suggests that the system of liberal democracy works pretty well. Sure, 40-year highs in inflation, nonstop war, constant ravaging of the middle class through taxation and protectionism, and the national surveillance state are maybe sub optimal, but once we elect the right people, everything will surely improve. On the other hand. those modern-day disciples of Bastiat and Cobden are always complaining about something. 

This ongoing battle of emphasis and temperament, I would suggest, also helps to characterize and highlight the hard-nosed realism of the exploitation theorists on the one hand, and the happy-go-lucky partisans of, what I would say is a political fantasy, on the other. 

This brings us to the final portion of the talk which is “what is to be done.” 

To start this discussion, let’s go back to Raico, and see what he had to say in The Struggle for Liberty about possible solutions. He starts by saying that the conventional liberal program has no answer, “because they strove to preserve the state. He says: “I’m telling you is that 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.”

Raico goes on to note that he theoretically prefers the anarcho-capitalist model, and the goal is a true marketplace in what we now regard as government services. But he’s also saying in practical terms, that’s a distant goal. But what is also clear is that constitutions and democracy don’t work to move the world toward something more compatible with the liberal worldview.

So, in this view, in order to find the first step in the strategy of countering the exploitive state, we have to look beyond naïve liberalism.7 Now this is coming from Raico who never abandoned the liberal worldview, so he’s not saying to become a fascist, or a medieval-style traditionalist, and he’s certainly not saying to become a Republican. He was clear about that sort of thing. And, of course, this is coming from a series of lectures largely geared toward explaining the virtues of the liberal worldview. 

But he states that the immediate and direct aim, needs to be the destruction of the centralized state. And that’s not a throwaway adjective he’s using when he says “centralized state”. He means something specific beyond simply saying “oppose the state.” For the exploitation theorists, the centralized state is an additional evil on top of coercive government in general.

Raico then makes it clear that what he means in opposing the centralized state. He says the next stop is to push for secession and the dismemberment of the centralized state, rendering it less centralized. The total abolition of coercive government remains the goal, in a Rothbardian fashion, but the first step on this path is secession.8 

And additionally, we should note that he is opposing violent opposition. He writes: “I’m not talking violent revolution. As a matter of fact, I hope that the leaders of the United States—President Bush, Ariel Sharon, and the other leaders of the United States—live forever, and I wish them well.”

Some of our young readers might not have noticed the joke in there. Back when Raico was saying this, Ariel Sharon was the prime minister of Irrael, and he’s saying Sharon was one of the leaders of the US. This was 2004 and Raico was saying that the State of Israel was running the United States. That just struck me as relevant today.

In any case, I agree with Raico that secession is indeed the most important major step we can take in terms of practical activism. But I would suggest that Raico was not quite right in saying we must look beyond liberalism. Secession has long been part of the realist liberal program, and has long been supported among the more radical liberals.

Raico has noted this himself when he states that the American Revolution was a secession movement inspired by liberalism. Moreover, we could note that the liberal idea of secession is translated into the concept of self-determination, which is usually accomplished through secession, or some other type of decentralization. This enters the political mainstream, through the liberals, by 1848. 

Raico speaks well of a number of liberals of the exploitation school who supported secession, such as Charles Dunoyer and Gustave de Molinari. Dunoyer, for example, sought what he called the “municipalisation of the world,” a type of radical decentralization designed, in Dunoyer’s thinking to undo the creation of large states, and he writes “There are no enterprises which require the union of ten, twenty or thirty million people. It is the spirit of domination which has created these monstrous aggregations or which has made them necessary. ”

In other words, the states of the world are much too large, and must be broken down into smaller pieces to counter the “spirit of domination.” Moreover, Dunoyer specifically sought to ensure that the [c[enters of activity will be multiplied,” as he put it, to counter the old system of major national capitals ruling over the provinces throughout the rest of the vast states of Europe, such as France. This rule from the center—found in the centralized states—were especially problematic for Dunoyer and for many other radical liberals working within the framework of exploitation theory. We also see here the beginnings of the idea that political centers—and presumably the political elites ensconced there— ought to face competition from other political centers and elites. 

Indeed this view reflects the overall liberal concern with decentralization, of which secession is simply a type. As historian Henri Michel, in his extensive history of European political thought concluded, the concept of political decentralization ”constitutes an essential article” of the French Liberal school. Interestingly, it is to the influential French liberal Benjamin Constant that Michel attributes the popularization of political decentralization in European liberalism. Constant was a favorite of Raico, who considered Constant to be one of the finest liberal theorists of Europe. Indeed, Raico quotes at least one example of Constant’s views on the dangers of political centralization. 

According to Constant’s popularizer Édouard Laboulaye, Constant ”earnestly demanded ... what he called municipal power.” Similar to Dunoyer, Constant wanted to disassemble state powers away from the center. He called political centralization “a watered-down form of socialism”9 and lamented that the French revolution had created a centralized state that “bears down with an enormous weight upon the individual, crushing him beneath it.”10 

Now admittedly, Constant did not advocate for full secession, seeing a role for a state in international affairs. But his many arguments against centralization often supply strength to arguments in favor of secession. 

But we do find full advocacy for secession with Gustave de Molinari— Pareto’s teacher and mentor— who advocated for what he called a “system of free government” within which ”the municipality, freed from political servitude, would have the right to separate from the province and the province from the state.” This “dual right of secession” as Molinari called it, was simply among the rights that any free society was bound to respect. He notes that one of the purposes of secession would be to “generate sufficient competition between states and provinces to improve the quality of their services and lower their price.” This is typical Molinari in that he views the monopoly of state power as the primary problem, and thus secession offers an essential means toward lessening the strength and extent of that monopoly. This blow against the state’s monopoly power, Molinari writes, 

would be the first consequences of the application of the right of secession, from the moment the abolition of political servitude authorized the exercise of this right, currently prohibited throughout the civilized world, and whose mere demand has not ceased to be considered a “crime against the security of the state.”

This program from Molinari comes from a natural progression from anti-state thinking from Jean-Baptiste Say, through Bastiat, and on to Molinari. Or, as Henri Michel puts it: “when M. de Molinari proposes to subject governments themselves to competition, “he speak[s] as [a] disciple... of Bastiat.”11

So why does Raico, as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal in the tradition of the liberal-exploitation theorists, advocate for secession? Part of it is simply to counter concentrated state power, which if broken up decentralizes political power, in most cases weakening it. 

The result is usually greater freedom, as can be seen in the case of the breakup in the Soviet Union. No successor state has come anywhere near replicating the power that was exercised by the Soviet state prior to the outbreak of secession movements in the early 1990s. 

But many of the reasons for secession, as we’ve noted, are laid out by the liberal secessionists themselves: the exercise of self-determination, the lessening of the state’s monopoly power, and even, as Dunoyer notes, the lessening of heterogeneity within the smaller states. This is something that Constant notes as well - namely that the more diverse a society is - as it grows larger- the greater is the coercive power necessary to force compliance with laws and customs that will run counter to the values of at least some significant portion of the population. In this view, a smaller more homogeneous society is a more voluntary one. 

If the goal is freedom, then secession offers the best of hope of actually opposing state power, which is a goal in itself, because the state, in this view, is the greatest danger to freedom. In the wake of the French revolution, the more radical liberals abandoned older moderate, reformist views in favor of more vehement opposition to state power overall. This was the development of what Raico calls the “state hatred” that developed Among French liberals, especially those influenced by Bastiat.12 Or, as Henri Michel puts it, after the revolution “two rival, even hostile, principles appear and stand in opposition to one another: the state and the individual. Every triumph of one is a setback for the other.”13

If this is the case, then the very cause of centralization, which every state seeks as a key tool in state building, is necessarily a setback for freedom, and every wound inflicted against centralization, especially secession, is a triumph for freedom. 

As a final note, even if secession becomes widespread, our job is not finished, especially for those of us who deal in the battle of ideas. After all, even if we are to succeed in breaking up the large states, there will always be elements who will work to recentralize political power, to expand the prerogatives of the state, and to, therefore, necessarily constrict human freedom. Ultimately only the liberal worldview can supply the right ammunition and the right foundation for the never-ending battle of ideas that will always be necessary. After all, even if every state in the world were restricted to a totally privatized anarcho-capitalist voluntary community, some within the population would surely and eventually create new political movements committed to state building and the creation of new states and larger states. This would be done through political union and consolidation smaller decentralized polities through political union and consolidation. This is how it was done, after all, to create today’s system of modern nation states, a process that began in the early modern period.

There is no final victory over despotism, and those who seek power are always conspiring to gain more, to wield it for the benefit of whatever ruling elites manage to seize control of a state. 

This is the grim reality that Bastiat, Molinari, Pareto, and Raico were warning against. It’s what Machievelli understood. The endless conniving of state elites is always there, and there are always traps laid by those who rule, traps ready to be sprung against those who let their guard down. The state’s methods are violent, cruel, and relentless. The state and its agents are willing to use them. We must be ready to oppose them every chance we get. 

• 1

  Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2025) p. 259.

• 2

  Murray N. Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Vol. II (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2006) p. 455.

• 3

  Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2012) p. 185.

• 4

  Benjamin Constant, Cours de politique constitutionnelle, ed. Edouard Laboulaye( Paris: Guillaumin, 1872) p. 12.

• 5

  Vilfredo Pareto, Sociological Writings, trans. Derick Mirfin (New York: Praeger, 1966) p. 110.

• 6

  Raico, Struggle for Liberty, p. 45.

• 7

  For an extended discussion on this by Raico, see his essay in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Spring 1996, titled “Mises on Fascism, Democracy, and Other Questions.” 

• 8

  Raico, The Struggle for Liberty, p. 255.

• 9

  Constant, Cours de politique constitutionnelle, p. xxvi. 

• 10

  In Laboulaye’s view, Constant was not among those liberals who sought to centralize modern states so as to more rapidly impose a liberal program uniformly across the entire territory. Laboulaye writes: “Benjamin Constant never fell prey to modern errors; he never sought the dangerous assistance of the State or of centralization.” See Constant, Cours de politique constitutionnelle, p. xii.

• 11

  Henri Michel, L’idée de l’état; essai critique sur l’histoire des théories sociales et politiques en France depuis la Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1896), p. 365. 

• 12

  Raico, The Struggle for Liberty, p. 64. 

• 13

  Henri Michel, L’idée de l’état, p. 309.