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Rothbard on the Fall and Rise and Fall of Liberty
By Ryan McMaken
02/08/06 "Lew Rockwell" -- --
George Orwell
wrote in
Nineteen Eighty-Four that those who control the present
control the past. It would be difficult to prove Orwell wrong, for
surely it is not a mere coincidence that the dim picture of history
taught in the government schools and the even more vague history
repeated incessantly by the public intellectuals, just happen to
create a worldview in which governments through the centuries have
made possible everything that is good and decent in the world today.
The myth goes
something like this: Prior to the rise of the modern States in the
modern world, all had been darkness. A backward feudal system
existed with bloodthirsty warlords and tyrannical bishops spreading
war and despotism across Europe. Then, one day, the Renaissance and
the Enlightenment took hold in Europe, breaking the power of the
superstitious and ignorant Old Order, and establishing in its place,
a rational, enlightened system of States. The States of this new Age
of Reason were admittedly not democratic, but they were certainly a
vast improvement on the old State of affairs. Over time, the kings
gave way to democracy for a few people, and eventually, to democracy
for everyone, making the State, at long last, the benevolent servant
of "the people." At the same time, the Industrial Revolution took
hold, but capitalism exploited the workers and polluted the
environment. Fortunately, the State was able to bring the
capitalists under control and bring an end to mistreatment of
workers, long hours of toil, and widespread environmental
degradation. The 20th century provided some challenges to
the spread of democracy, but those were conquered, just as we knew
they would be, and today, justice, equality, and protection from all
enemies of the great democratic order is provided for but a meager
sum of tax funds. Civil rights and economic prosperity are improving
all the time while foreign enemies are being cleared away, and the
day will surely come when the end of history itself arrives, and we
will all be thankful that we had such just and powerful governments
at our disposal.
Murray
Rothbard called this theory of history the State’s "Great March
Upward into the Light," and much of his work, especially his newly
republished History of Economic Thought, is devoted to debunking it.
Always at the center of this march to perfection is the State. For
the socialists and the left, the State will bring the society of
perfect equality. For the neoconservatives and the right, the State
will bring the millennial Pax Americana and the
End of History. Few believers of the myth will deny that there
have been some minor setbacks, yet they are firm in their contention
that there can never be true progress without the State. Without the
armies, and agencies, and weapons of the State, humanity would
degenerate back into superstition, war, ignorance, and want.
Depending on one’s point of view, a world without the State holds
the prospect of capitalists, or terrorists, or communists, or
Christian theocrats returning humanity to the presumed lowly State
of the pre-modern world. The modern defenders of the State never
speak in terms of "the State," and they may not even think in
such explicit terms. Yet, the end result is the same whether one is
explicit about it or not. States are at the center of their world,
providing the necessary means to combat the evils of our time,
destroying the oppressions of the past, and securing a safe and just
future.
Rothbard had
little patience for this pat view of human history. The myth of the
modern State as freeing mankind from a dark past was particularly
insidious to Rothbard. Whether discussing the American Revolution,
the Great Depression, or the history of economic thought, we find in
Rothbard’s work a thorough insistence that the political and
intellectual history of modernity is the history of a battle against
the State.
Rothbard’s
view of history revolves around at least three central assertions.
First, the history of liberty does not begin with the Enlightenment,
the Renaissance, or any other modern era claiming to be born out of
an earlier, darker age. The foundations of liberty are established
much earlier, in an era of increasingly free trade and of weak and
decentralized medieval States. The intellectual birth of liberty
begins with the foundations of natural law and natural rights laid
down by the medieval scholastics. Second, the industrial revolution
must be regarded as a good thing. In fact, it should be regarded as
one of the best things to ever happen in human history. Third, the
material prosperity made possible by the Industrial Revolution,
coupled with the ancient ideas of natural law and natural rights, is
a potent enemy of the State and the reason that liberty is likely to
prevail in the long run.
In his essay
"Left
and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Rothbard sums up his view
of the "Old Order":
The myth
held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism
in the early modern era was necessary for the development of
capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the
people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was
not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather
as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism
just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the
market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and
monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The
absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even
more despotic than before.
Contrary to
the myth, the rise of modernity did not make the State more just or
more enlightened. It just became bigger, stronger, and more likely
to abuse its power. The States of the Middle Ages had been
decentralized, weak, and couldn’t even qualify as "sovereign
States." Thanks to overlapping political jurisdiction and the
influence of the Church, no king of this era could claim total
control over internal affairs. Yet, the absolutist States that
heralded the arrival of the modern era were exactly the opposite.
They were centralized, vast, powerful, and their rulers could indeed
claim total internal sovereignty over their subjects
The political
theory of the Middle Ages also constrained the power of the States.
In
The History of Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Rothbard
focuses on the influence of scholasticism. Associated closely with
Thomas Aquinas, scholasticism revolved around theories of natural
law that governed all men and all institutions which were in turn
expected to adhere to immutable divine laws of justice and
governance. Kings and rulers who did not rule according to natural
law were subject to morally justified rebellion and even regicide.
Scholasticism, of course was closely associated with the Catholic
Church, and as the power of the Church declined in the Late Middle
Ages, so did scholasticism and the intellectual rigor it relied on.
The rise of the modern State accelerated with the Reformation and
with efforts to overturn scholastic critiques of political power.
From the German princes in the north to the rulers of the Italian
city-states in the south, kings and princes seized on the
Reformation as an opportunity to increase their power.
Having
abandoned the scholastic tradition, the original Reformers were
forced to fall back on proof-texting scripture for guidance on
political affairs, concluding that "absolute obedience and
non-resistance" was what scripture commanded. At the same time,
Niccolò Machiavelli would add to the assault on reason arguing that
States and princes should not be restrained by natural law, reason,
or any other external force, but only by the arbitrary and often
irrational will of the prince himself."
In the wake
of this intellectual and political revolution came Absolutism. The
new absolute monarchs went to war against the merchant classes that
had arisen during the High Middle Ages. Kings used their new
bureaucracies to impose taxes, enforce regulations, and wage
large-scale wars against their enemies. It was the age of Hobbes’s
Leviathan, and it was a great step backward for liberty.
Yet, even as the new vast modern States were consolidating their
power, theories of natural law and natural rights continued to be
developed. Theorists like John Locke and Richard Cantillon would
reclaim the natural law tradition and go on to use "rational
scholastic methods" and forward compelling defenses of private
property, commerce, and human freedom. Thus, by the 18th
century, the natural law theories of the scholastics had been
revived and were being reworked into liberalism, the new ideology of
individualism, liberty, and capitalism.
Meanwhile,
the Industrial Revolution was spreading across Europe in spite of
State attempts to control trade, knowledge, and even the movement of
capitalists themselves. The great enemy of the Industrial
Revolution, of course, has always been the State, and mercantilism
ruled the day with its price controls, tariffs, taxes, regulations,
and endless favors for friends of the ruling regime. The
"intellectual" justifications for mercantilism were never anything
more than irrational appeals to nationalism and privilege, while the
liberals maintained that mercantilism was not only despotic and
contrary to natural law, but inefficient and crippling to the
economy. Naturally, those who ruled also happened to benefit from
the largesse of the mercantilist despotism. But slowly, throughout
the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries,
liberalism gained ground. In "The Meaning of Revolution," Rothbard
outlines the struggle:
Theories
blended into activist movements, rising movements calling for
individual liberty, a free-market economy, the overthrow of
feudalism and mercantilist statism, an end to theocracy and war
and their replacement by freedom and international peace. Once
in a while, these movements erupted into violent "revolutions"
that brought giant steps in the direction of liberty: the
English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French
Revolution. The result was enormous strides for freedom and the
prosperity unleashed by the consequent Industrial Revolution.
Eventually,
liberalism swept Europe as a mass movement putting forth the natural
rights of men against the State. Yet, by the early 20th
century, liberalism had retreated. Various forms of nationalism and
socialism had begun to overtake liberalism in the 19th
century, and by World War I, liberalism had disappeared as the
dominant ideology of Europe. Liberalism’s intimate connection with
capitalism and the industrial revolution was particularly damaging.
Communists, socialists, nationalists, romantics, and primitivists
all denounced the Industrial Revolution for being exploitive, for
corrupting the morals of society, and for breaking down the alleged
virtues of the distant past. The drive against the Industrial
Revolution was thoroughly anti-intellectual as well, with the
opponents of capital pining for the days of yesteryear when men
could live by their wits in the wilderness and not be constrained by
the evils of the modern industrial world. Rothbard’s writings
exhibit particularly enthusiastic scorn for arguments such as these,
unleashing a rhetorical torrent of contempt on the romantics and
primitivists who had conveniently forgotten that the real history of
subsistence farming and the pre-industrial age was one of famine,
toil, and death.
In spite of
the political revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, and the
growing acceptance of natural rights as an immutable restraint on
the power of States, the 20th century was a disaster for
liberalism. The rise of National Socialism in Germany, Communism in
Eastern Europe, and the militarized welfare-warfare State in America
did much to destroy the liberalism that had expanded throughout the
previous century. Serious talk of global nuclear war, the continued
rise of socialism in Europe and the Americas, and the
marginalization of liberal intellectuals had all but relegated
liberalism to the dustbin of history.
Yet, even in
1965, before the fall of Soviet communism, before the internet, and
before the Chinese government decided it preferred industrial
revolutions to cultural revolutions, Rothbard was optimistic. In
"Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," he writes:
"What the
Marxists would call ‘objective conditions’ for the triumph of
liberty exist everywhere in the world and more so than in any
past age; for everywhere the masses have opted for higher living
standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various
regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals."
In spite of
his long-range optimism, however, Rothbard was always one to
emphasize that history is in no way linear. In the High Middle Ages,
the fledgling bourgeoisie might have thought that the benefits of
free trade and weak States might have lasted forever. But Absolutism
and "Enlightenment" intervened. The liberals of the 19th
century might have thought similar thoughts. The disaster of the 20th
century certainly put an end to that as well. Today, we are left
wondering if the 21st century will be more like the 20th
or the 19th. It is still too early to tell, but the
problem for defenders of liberty is the same today as it has always
been. The choice is between the State and liberty; between a free
economy and a controlled economy; between peace and war. The myth
that modern kings, and democracies, and armies of freedom secure the
blessings of liberty for all has been an obstacle to real
liberty for centuries. The real history of the State is one of
power, war, and domination. Real freedom has advanced in great
salvos against the State from political revolutions and from
industrial and technological ones. In spite of the 20th
century, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles the State
continues to pose against the cause of liberty, freedom has
nevertheless erupted at the most unexpected times. Rothbard, knowing
the resilience of liberty through the centuries, undoubtedly agreed
with Thomas Paine that although "the flame of liberty may sometimes
cease to shine, the coal can never expire."
Ryan McMaken [send
him mail] Ryan McMaken teaches political science in Colorado.
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
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