# Toward a Critical Classical Liberal History **URL:** **By** Sheilagh Ogilvie **Published:** June 1, 1987 --- “These two schools partly derive their attraction from their willingness to transcend national boundaries, a tendency very much in accord with classical liberalism.” > Few men will deny that our views about the goodness or badness of different institutions are largely determined by what we believe to have been their effects in the past. There is scarcely a political ideal or concept which does not involve opinions about a whole series of past events. . . . Historical myths have perhaps played nearly as great a role in shaping opinion as historical facts. . . . The influence which the writers of history thus exercise on public opinion is probably more immediate and extensive than that of the political theorists who launch new ideas. ¹ Even more pernicious than the type of historical myth here castigated by Professor Hayek are unquestioned historical assumptions. Among the influences that have drawn the most dynamic young historians in the last generation to new methodologies and to Marxian-influenced social history have been their iconoclastic tendencies: the readiness “to criticize accepted views, to explore new vistas and to experiment with new conceptions.” ² Using new techniques and hitherto-neglected documentary sources, historians have been able to question and falsify basic historical assumptions (especially concerning the beliefs and behavior of the great illiterate mass of the common population in the past) that had previously been thought to be untestable, a matter only of literary interpretation or dogma.³ Unfortunately, few liberal historians have yet turned to the new, rigorous social, economic, and demographic history, and thus, although some false assumptions about the past are being questioned, others (for instance, the pernicious effects of the transition to capitalism, the benefits of state and corporate intervention in the economy and in social behavior, and the irrational and harmful effects of individual decision-making) persist uncriticized. The new theories being put forward to replace the falsified assumptions, and benefiting from the iconoclastic glamor, tend to derive from Marxian theory, and are already establishing a socialist and coercive tradition among practitioners of the new rigorous history. Genuinely liberal historians must equip themselves with the new historical techniques so that the iconoclastic results made possible by historical demography,⁴ microsimulation,⁵ census analysis,⁶ and Annales-school “_histoire totale_” 7 and “_histoire de la longue durée_” 8 not be made the sole intellectual property of statists. ## Three Directions There are three main directions in which liberal principles can be creatively applied using the new historical techniques to debunk established assumptions. One is to question and provide an alternative to the traditional assumption (almost as rife among “conservatives” and nineteenth-century liberals as among _étatistes_) that the nation-state is the natural and inevitable unit of historical analysis. Another is, in Professor Hayek’s formulation, to have the courage to “defend capitalism from the capitalists.” 9 Classical liberal and libertarian historians have excelled in identifying the ways in which markets are distorted and abusive privilege perpetuated by the state, 10 but they must not stop here. They must also be willing to identify institutions other than the state that distort markets in goods and information, and that appear repeatedly in history as beneficiaries of state coercion: merchant cartels and occupational corporations are two such potent and little-discussed sources of entrenched privilege. And finally, classical liberal historians must cease to accept the assumption of the _Kulturhistoriker_ that rational behavior was invented only in the eighteenth century, and that the actions of people in the past are comprehensible only in terms of “peasant irrationality” and “pre-industrial mentalities.” 11 Unless individuals can be trusted to have acted in their own interests, using the best knowledge available within the constraints of their situations, the assumption that it is and historically always has been beneficial and necessary to establish coercive organs to protect them from harming themselves will continue to gather support from historical studies. ## Questioning the Nation-State I have argued that unquestioned historical assumptions are more dangerous than even historical “myths” about specific events. The assumption that “history” is the history of the development and interactions between national states was, until recently, such an unquestioned assumption. It is ironic that it was most energetically promoted by precisely those nineteenth-century nationalist liberals, those “Whig” historians, whose reputation Hayek essayed to rescue from Herbert Butterfield’s strictures. 12 After the flowering of liberal history at the hands of Hume, Robertson, Ferguson, and Gibbon in the eighteenth century, the discipline was captured by the irrationalist German historicists, Ranke, Treitschke, Droysen, and their followers. Both the “Whig” historians criticized by Butterfield and the German historicists suffered from a deep-seated cultural determinism, a concentration on national units, and an exclusive attention to political and cultural elites. It was only with the advent, since 1945, of the _Annales_ school in France and the Cambridge school in Britain, both concerned to turn history into a science, that the vast productive, taxpaying common population of the past has begun to be studied, instead of merely the state that ruled it. Both new schools insisted that the traditional assumptions about “social history” underlying accounts of changes in intellectual currents and political events be tested rigorously, often with recourse to local and apparently dry and mundane documentary sources — parish registers, tithe and tax accounts, local court minutes — hitherto ignored by all but genealogists and antiquarians. 13 In the last two decades assumptions about the family and demographic behavior, 14 economic attitudes and actions, 15 popular culture and religion, 16 and the harmonious and egalitarian nature of pre-industrial communities, 17 have all variously been submitted to the test of new records, of exploiting old records in new ways, or simply of exposing traditional notions to the light of criticism. These two historical schools have captured the imagination of the younger generation of historians because of their willingness to be iconoclastic, and their insistence on studying hitherto neglected and “invisible” groups: the governed rather than the governors, the taxed rather than the taxmen, workers rather than capitalists, the illiterate rather than the elite, women and children rather than adult males, the vast rural population rather than the tiny minority in urban centers. These historical schools have also accomplished the necessary and desirable step of rejecting the national state as the unit of historical analysis and looking at these neglected groups across cultures. Demographic patterns and family structures have been compared between societies in the European past. 18 Theories have been advanced to explain contemporaneous social unrest in seventeenth-century European states, invoking the concept of a European “General Crisis of the seventeenth century.” 19 And an attempt has been made to explain that unique European phenomenon, industrialization, in terms of the rapid expansion of cottage industry for foreign markets (“proto-industrialization,” as it is called), all over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 20 Thus, these two schools partly derive their attraction from their willingness to transcend national boundaries, a tendency very much in accord with the principles of classical liberalism, but which has been unaccountably History books have generally displayed one of two attitudes toward the state. Either they have adopted a “Whig” attitude, showing how government responded creatively and helpfully to “social” (or other) “problems,” thereby adding yet another function to those previously exercised by it. 21 Or they have seen the state as a tool of a particular class, and have focused their historical attention on that group at the expense of the state itself. 22 The _Annales_ and Cambridge schools have taken one step forward, in demonstrating conclusively that the nation-state is not the natural, the inevitable, or the best unit of historical analysis and explanation, any more than the actions and words of the governing groups (monarchs, counsellors, officials, elected representatives, military figures) provide the natural, the inevitable, or the best window onto the human past. No longer can the “social background” to political and intellectual changes be dealt with in a handful of quotations from the writings of literate contemporaries. 23 Historical generalizations are no longer immune from criticism, but are expected to conform to the same standards of rigor (for example, consistency and falsifiability) as statements in other sciences. > These two schools partly derive their attraction from their willingness to transcend national boundaries, a tendency very much in accord with classical liberalism, but which has been unaccountably neglected by classical liberal historians. > Fernand Braudel’s _Mediterranean_ was written to show how utterly constrained the political actors (including Philip II himself) were by their geographic, social, and economic circumstances. In the process of moving away from the purely literary, however, history has been steered in the direction of the less rigorous (and more ideological) social sciences. The process of demystifying the state and its personnel as the natural spokesmen for the human past has not been undertaken systematically. Both the _Annales_ and Cambridge schools have tended to err in the opposite direction, often writing as if political and institutional structures are entirely passive to “underlying” social, economic, and ecological forces. The best-known to emanate from the _Annales_ group, Fernand Braudel’s panoramic _Mediterranean_, was in fact written to show how utterly constrained the political actors (including Philip II himself) were by their geographic, social, and economic circumstances. A geographic entity (the Mediterranean) is chosen as the unit of analysis, rather than a political state. The book is in three parts: “Structures,” “Conjonctures” (situations and conjunctures), and “Evenements” (events). The political narrative of the final part is designed to show that, given the “structures” and “conjonctures” of the first two parts, nothing was left to human choice. As Braudel puts it in his introduction, political events are the “foam on the surface” of the sea of history. 24 This of course reflects the Marxian diagnosis of institutions and ideas as “superstructure” to the forms and relations of production, which are seen as fundamental. 25 For the liberal historian it is not enough, therefore, to show that human history is not the history of the state. In fact, the specific contribution of the liberal historian can be, paradoxically, to draw attention to the state and stress its fundamental importance in human affairs. To imagine a society without pervasive state influence, it is essential to know how the state developed and came to dominate all other forms of political organization. Conversely, to understand how the state came into being is to understand that its existence and present nature are not inevitable. Such assertions may surprise the nonhistorian. Surely, he will think, coercive political organization is universal, and has always been with us. This commonplace view misses the critical point that coercion is context-specific; it can be identified and corrected only in a specific institutional context. To believe that coercion is endemic to all forms of human organization is both pessimistic and untestable—and only the darkest cynic would say that there are no differences between human societies in this respect. These differences, if one believes in them, are institutional differences, and we simply do not know how far coercion can be reduced under different institutional forms. The specific institution through which most political coercion is presently mediated is the national state, the characteristic political structure of modernity. It came into existence at a specific time, the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and in a particular place, western Europe. Like industrialization, the national state was in its origins a uniquely European phenomenon. Historians have only recently focused on the state itself (rather than the group of which it is a “superstructure,” or the history of particular states) as a subject of research. Like economists who have made the state itself a focus of research in recent years, 26 they have found that the state has its own dynamic, independent of those in whose interests it is supposedly run. Niels Steensgaard, in a remarkable article criticizing the debate about the mid-seventeenth-century “General Crisis” (a phenomenon well known to contemporaries, but which was then forgotten until the 1950s because historians were so narrowly focused on individual national states) was perhaps the first to point out that the growth of the state was in itself the dominant historical trend of early modern Europe: > Behind the conflict we find the same thing everywhere: the State’s demand for higher revenues . . . in every case it was the governments that acted in a revolutionary manner: the tax demands disrupted the social balance. They did not create a revolutionary situation: they were in themselves a revolution. 27 Though this approach has not yet found a wide following, it does provide the framework for what could be a fruitful research program for economic and social history—even for political and institutional history. In fact, it provides a framework for integrating these different “kinds” of history—economic, political, social, intellectual—that is potentially much more powerful than the rigidly deterministic approach of the _Annales_ school’s “_histoire totale_.” 28 ## Other Sources of Coercion While modern western societies represent a great improvement over the past in many respects, coercion, privilege, and oppression survive and flourish. The new schools of history have captured the imagination of so many dynamic and critical young historians precisely because they insist on looking at the oppressed rather than the oppressors. The task of the historian with clear and critical liberal principles must now be to ensure that all the sources of oppression and coercion in past societies are laid bare, not only those that proceed from the state. The libertarian historian must have the courage to recognize and proclaim the existence of social injustice and oppression wherever he sees it, rather than merely celebrate historical “progress.” Furthermore, he must be willing to test his theories about the true causes of oppression, by taking up the new and demanding methods (historical demography, computer analysis of long documentary series, microsimulation) that classical liberal historians have hitherto in their folly left to the statists. Only by doing so can the libertarian show that the state is not the instrument of a particular class, but an entity with its own, self-perpetuating, rationally self-serving dynamic, often horrifyingly independent of both ruler and ruled, but in pursuit of whose support many groups in society will always be willing to make large investments. Only so can the liberal historian show that the systematic oppression of certain groups in the past (such as women) did not result from the free operation of markets, but from specific, male-dominated legal and social institutions: the state, corporations such as guilds, merchant cartels, communities of male citizens, and trade unions. 29 By questioning traditional assumptions concerning the alleged capitalist oppression of women, the libertarian historian can show in quite a new way that the state and protective corporate groups were not sources of liberalization and progressive social justice, but rather operated to protect established (in this case male) interests. Freedom is not served by complacency with existing states of society, the results of historical progress, and the continued dominance of traditionally dominant powers. Rather, it arises from skepticism and criticism of accepted assumptions and inadequate theories, and an aspiration toward a better state of society in which the institutions that perpetuate established evils and entrenched privileges and abuses shall be abolished. The role of the liberal historian in the next decade must be to be seen to be defending capitalism against the abuses even of “capitalists”—against private monopolies as well as public ones, against “capitalist” cartels, against the purchase of bureaucratic and legislative favor by _anyone_, even those who identify themselves politically as “in favor of capitalism.” Liberal historians have not sufficiently dissociated capitalism from entrenched privilege and the abuses arising from the existence of regulatory initiatives, which can be “purchased’ by business. My own research has shown that what German historians of all political persuasions have blindly accepted as the “transition to capitalism” in Germany was in fact something very different from the mobile and relatively unregulated commerce enjoyed by western European societies such as England. It was in fact a transition to “state monopoly capitalism” (_Stamokap_) in which the state licensed out monopolistic privileges to merchant cartels, producer-monopolies, and professional corporations. 30 Small wonder that Central Europeans (most eloquently but by no means uniquely Marx and Engels) saw the “transition to capitalism” as bringing with it the economic and political oppression of industrial workers by a privileged few. It is the task of the classical liberal historian to show the importance of investigating and identifying _all_ barriers to the free operation of markets: both the state and individuals and groups that have, historically, frequently benefited from state support and have in turn helped to strengthen the state. It is imperative that the liberal historian find the courage and ingenuity to identify _all_ sources of coercion and market distortion, lest he or she seem to the critical and Utopian intellectual to be more a political apologist than a seeker after truth. > To imagine a society without pervasive state influence, it is essential to know how the state developed and came to dominate all other forms of political organization. I have argued that the new “scientific” historians have set off a revolution, which liberal historians would do well to adopt as their own. In demonstrating the fruitfulness of cross-cultural comparisons, the new historical schools have rejected the nation-state as the unit of analysis. In turning to hitherto-unplumbed documents and to “history from below,” they have shown that there is a great iceberg of social behavior underneath the level of the central state that is impervious to the explicit initiatives of those who claim to control or guide it, and which always has confounded and always will confound political programs. 31 What the liberal historian must bring to this is the perception that precisely for this reason the official versions of history (recorded from above by officials and intellectuals) are likely to be misleading. He must also, however, bring the perception that although state action often fails in achieving the results it _intends_, it can seriously distort markets, and have far-reaching _unintended_ consequences. He must show that there are other powerful coercive institutions at work in most societies which, so long as they benefit from some state enforcement, can also seriously distort markets, and perpetuate inequalities and abuses. The uniquely powerful perception of the liberal historian is that behind the enduring corporate institutions, and behind all entrenched privilege, lies the state. With the rise of interdisciplinary approaches to “scientific” history in the last two decades, historians have been searching in vain for a new focus for history: what, ultimately, is history “about”? The nineteenth-century nationalist-liberal research program is played out; the _Annales_ and Cambridge schools ignore the institutional dimension; the classical-liberal research program should be a candidate to fill the vacuum. The history of national states would then be replaced by the history of the state. ## Individual Rationality One of the props of coercive regimes and one of the favorite arguments of Utopian socialists is that the state is necessary to protect people from the harmful results of their own irrational choices. The assumption that many human decision-making mechanisms are irrational is based on innumerable studies by social scientists who have fallen back on “human nature” when they have found a social structure or a pattern of behavior too complex for their explanatory models. 32 Historians have contributed to this in two ways. They have explained the economic and other choices of pre-industrial Europeans in terms of concepts such as “the moral economy of the peasant”: according to this, the peasant was not concerned with rational maximization, but with achieving some culturally or economically determined standard of “limited good,” which would not deprive his neighbors in the peasant commune of their slice of a “cake” of fixed size. 33 Rational maximization, according to a second, concomitant assumption of many historians, came into being only with the rise of a “capitalist mentality” in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. 34 Thus a majority of historians joins the many social scientists outside the field of economics who hold that hunting societies, or peasant societies, or western societies before a certain date, or the “worker” sector of emergent capitalist societies, lack the mentality required for the economist’s tools to be applicable to them, and for the political theorist to be able to expect that they will make choices that are in their own best interests. One of the most vital tasks for the libertarian historian is to refute this patronizing assumption that human beings in the past were incapable of rational calculation. It is possible to advance explanations of human behavior and social structures in the past that are consistent with individual rational choice rather than collective irrationality. The belief of many historians — even among classical liberals — that rational maximization was invented in Europe only in the seventeenth or eighteenth century is one of the more damaging injuries to the liberal recognition of the dignity and worth of individuals. In my own doctoral research I succeeded in falsifying a new and powerful historical theory by showing that the economic and demographic behavior of proto-industrial workers in Central Europe in the eighteenth century did not follow the theory’s assumption of peasant and artisan irrationality, but rather was wholly consistent with the rational behavior of individuals in markets seriously distorted by social and legal institutions. 35 This led me to prefer the formulation of Sutti Ortiz, an anthropologist who studied peasant corporatism in modern Colombia: > The belief of many historians — even among classical liberals — that rational maximization was invented in Europe only in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, is one of the more damaging injuries to the liberal recognition of the dignity and worth of individuals. > The peasant’s goals and aspirations are not altogether different from our own; his behaviour can be explained without having to resort to a different logical framework; his uncertainties are phrased differently, perhaps, but his response to them is similar to ours. Peasants are not endowed with a different soul or a different perception of the world from ours. If they behave differently, if they shy away from recommended policies it is because they are either less informed about certain events, or perhaps better informed about the realities of their physical, social and economic world than we are. 36 Thus, even more important than the recognition that the state is _not_ the inevitable unit of historical analysis is the recognition that the individual — however lowly his status or undeveloped his education — is the proper unit of analysis. He probably will not be pursuing pecuniary maximization (as caricatures of classical liberal principles try to portray), for most markets in the past — as in the present — are distorted by political coercion, and since every individual, nowadays as well as in the past, also maximizes nonpecuniary values (esteem, security, and so forth). 37 The recognition that the individual _is_, and historically always has been, equipped to make the best of his situation in the light of his own values is not only a necessary step in recognizing his dignity and worth. It is a radical and Utopian reinterpretation of social developments in the past, and an indispensible component of the belief in voluntarism in human relations. Three possible approaches have been suggested by which a sound understanding of classical liberal principles could revolutionize the academic practice of history. By pursuing any of these approaches (as well, no doubt, as many others I have not mentioned), liberal historians can help their readers to understand the nature and origins of coercion in human societies. To an academic profession searching for a role in modern life, this is a brilliant prospect. ## Notes 1F. A. Hayek, “History and Politics,” _Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics_ (Chicago, 1967), p. 201. 2F. A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” _Studies_. p. 193. 3These new techniques and sources are discussed and exemplified in Peter Laslett, _The World We Have Lost_ (London, 2nd ed. 1971); and in Keith Wrightson, _English Society 1580-1680_ (London, 1982), esp. p. 11. Some of the French tendencies are illustrated in Marc Bloch, _French Rural History: An essay on its basic characteristics_ (London, 1966). 4An excellent instance is John Hajnal’s seminal essay, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in D. V. Glass \& D. E. C. Eversley (eds.), _Population in History_ (London, 1965), pp. 101-43. Other controversial results are discussed in E. A. Wrigley, _Population in History_ (London, 1969), and other basic texts of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. 5See, for instance, Kenneth W. Wachter with Eugene A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, _Statistical Studies of Historical Social Structure_ (New York, 1978). 6Peter Laslett \& Richard Wall (eds.), _Household and Family in Past Time_ (Cambridge, 1972); Richard Wall, Peter Laslett \& Jean Robin (eds.), _Family Forms in Historic Europe_ (Cambridge, 1983). 7\&8Defended and demonstrated in Fernand Braudel, _The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II_ (New York, 1972), and in Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, _Les Paysans de Languedoc_ (Paris, 1966). 9F. A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” p. 192. 10For instance, Douglass C. North \& Robert Paul Thomas, _The Rise of the Western World: A new economic history_ (Cambridge, 1973); or the essays in F. A. Hayek (ed.), _Capitalism and the Historians_ (Chicago, 1954\). 11 See Joyce Oldham Appleby, _Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England_ (Princeton, 1978), which was written to explain the “puzzle” of “how Adam Smith was able to assume that human beings possessed an innate commercial mentality,” p. ix. But see also a myriad of precursors, among whom R. H. Tawney, _The Acquisitive Society_ (London, 1921), p. 17 and _passim_. 12F. A. Hayek, “History and Politics,” pp. 202-3. This nineteenth-century assumption, which generalizes the mistake Hayek calls “monetary nationalism,” is well described in the following definition of monetary nationalism: “The monetary relations between small adjoining areas are alleged to differ from those between larger regions or countries ## Notes and this difference is supposed to justify or demand different monetary arrangements.” F. A. Hayek, _Monetary Nationalism and International Stability_ (London, 1937), p. 4. See also F. A. Hayek’s _Denationalization of Money: An analysis of the theory and practice of concurrent currencies_ (London, 1976) for a discussion of one of the many areas of human activity that would have to be fundamentally rethought if the libertarian historian were successful in bringing to the intellectual consciousness how pervasive (yet how unquestioned) the national state is, and how contingent on a unique historical path its development in fact was. 13 The definitive treatise on the new methodology of record-analysis was Alan Macfarlane’s _Reconstructing Historical Communities_ (Cambridge, 1977), although indications of it had already appeared much earlier, e.g., in T. H. Hollingsworth, _Historical Demography_ (Cambridge, 1969). 14 Summarized (for their eras) in E. A. Wrigley, _Population in History_ (London, 1969) and Jean-Louis Flandrin, _Familles: Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l’ancienne société_ (Paris, 1976). 15 Foremost Alan Macfarlane’s brilliant _The Origins of English Individualism: The family, property and social transition_ (Oxford, 1978); but also Samuel Popkin, _The Rational Peasant: The political economy of rural society in Vietnam_ (Berkeley, 1979); and, much in the same line, Carl Dahlman, _The Open Field System and Beyond_ (Cambridge, 1980). 16 Keith Wrightson, _Poverty and Piety in an English Village_ (New York, 1978); Carlo Ginzburg, _The Cheese and the Worms: The cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller_ (London, 1980); Robert Mandrou, _De la Culture Populaire au 17e et 18e Siècle: La bibliothèque bleue de Troyes_ (Paris, 1964); Michel Vovelle, _Piété Baroque et Déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe Siècle_ (Paris, 1973); Brian Pullan, _The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice 1550-1670_ (Oxford, 1983). 17 Alan Macfarlane, _The Origins of English Individualism_ and Keith Wrightson, _English Society 1580-1680_. Both books emphasize continuity over change in viewing English society between medieval and modern times. 18 Laslett \& Wall, _Household and Family in Past Time_ set the stage for this sort of systematic cross-cultural comparison. It has since been overtaken by other such exercises. 19 People at the time were aware of the international nature of the crisis of the seventeenth century: from seventeenth-century diarists, through Hobbes to Voltaire, who remarked on the contemporaneous revolutions in European countries, as well as in Poland, Russia and China, in his _Essai sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations_ (Paris, 1756). The nineteenth-century obsession with the nation-state caused these observations to be submerged and forgotten until the 1950s. The two basic essays, from diametrically opposite ends of the political spectrum, are E. Hobsbawm, “The crisis of the seventeenth century,” _Past and Present_ 5-6 (1954), and H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The general crisis of the seventeenth century,” _Past and Present_ 16 (1959). These and the other “general crisis” essays were collected in two volumes over the next two decades, a symptom of the growth of the supranational historical perspective: Trevor Aston (ed.), _Crisis in Europe 1560-1660_ (London, 1965\); and Geoffrey Parker \& Lesley M. Smith (eds.), _The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century_ (London, 1978). 20 The basic texts for the theory of proto-industrialization are F. F. Mendels, “Proto-industrialization: the first phase of the industrialization process,” _Journal of Economic History_ 32 (1972) and Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick \& Juergen Schlumbohm, _Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism_ (Cambridge, 1981), translated by Beate Schempp, first published as _Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung_ (Göttingen, 1977). 21 This process, whereby successively more and more functions were taken over by the state, runs straight through European history, from the Reformation to antitrust laws. See, for instance, the seldom-noted statism which emerges in any standard account of the Reformation, e.g., A. G. Dickens, _The English Reformation_ (London, 1964) or Kurt Aland, _Die Reformation Martin Luthers_ (Guetersloh, 1982). 22 An example is the Hobsbawm article referred to in footnote 19. The notion of the “capture theory” so beloved of Marxists has recently been argued against by Sam Peltzman, “Toward a More General Theory of Regulation,” _Journal of Law and Economics_ 19 (1976), pp. 211-40; by Gary S. Becker, “Comment,” _ibid_., pp. 245-8, and by Gary S. Becker, “A Theory of Competition Among Pressure Groups for Political Influence,” _Quarterly Journal of Economics_ (1983). 23 Although eloquent and entertaining attempts are made by Lawrence Stone, _Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800_ (London, 1977); Keith Thomas, _Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England_ (London, 1971), and Philippe Aries, _L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l’Ancien Régime_ (Paris, 1973). 24 Braudel, _The Mediterranean_, vol. 1, p. 21: Braudel refers to “l’histoire événementielle” (the history of events) as “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” 25 V. I. Lenin, _The State and Revolution: The Marxist theory of the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution_ (Moscow, 1972), which relies heavily on Engels’s _Anti-Dühring_. See also Ralph Miliband, _The State in Capitalist Society: The analysis of the western system of power_ (London, 1969). 26 See George Stigler, “The Economics of Regulation,” _Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science_, (Spring 1971); Richard A. Posner, “Theories of Economic Regulation,” _Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science_, (Autumn 1974); Sam Peltzman, “Towards a More General Theory of Regulation”; Gary S. Becker, “A Theory of Competition Among Pressure Groups,” and, of course, the works of the Public Choice school, for instance J. M. Buchanan, _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_ (Chicago, 1975). 27 Niels Steensgaard, “The Seventeenth-century Crisis,” in Parker and Smith, _The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century_ (London, 1978\), p. 44. 28 As outlined in the “Preface” to Braudel’s _Mediterranean_ (see note 24\). 29 This argument is put forward in my forthcoming article “Women, Proto-industrialisation and the Corporate Society: Württemberg Woollen Weaving, 1590-1740,” in W. R. Lee \& P. Hudson (eds.), _Women’s Work, Family Income and the Structure of the Family in Historical Perspective_ (Manchester, 1987). 30 This argument is put forward in my _Corporatism and Regulation in Rural Industry: Woollen Weaving in Württemberg 1590-1740_ (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 1985). It is corroborated by numerous studies of the overweening role of the State in German industrialization, among which (for Württemberg), Friedrich-Franz Wauchkuhn, _Die Anfänge der württembergischen Textilindustrie im Rahmen der Staatlichen Gewerbepolitik 1806-1848_ (diss., Hamburg, 1974). 31 It is well known, for instance, that state birth control programs in India and other third-world countries experience a marked lack of success as long as the “demand” for a large quantity of children persists. 32 A number of studies advancing “nonrational” or outright “irrational” explanations for human behavior are rightly castigated in Gary Becker, _The Economic Approach to Human Behavior_ (Chicago, 1976\), p. 7. 33 The idea of the moral economy attitude is put forward by James C. Scott, _The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia_. The classic evocation of “the peasant” in anthropology is in E. C. Banfield, _The Moral Basis of a Backward Society_ (New York, 1958\); and G. M. Foster, “Peasant society and the image of limited good,” _American Anthropologist_ 67 (1965), pp. 293-315. 34 See note 11. 35 Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, _Early Proto-Industry, Corporatism, and the State: Wildberg Weavers and Calw Merchant-Dyers 1600-1740_ (fellowship diss., Trinity College, Cambridge, 1984). 36 Sutti Reissig Ortiz, _Uncertainties in Peasant Farming: A Colombian Case_ (London, 1973), p. 1. 37 George J. Stigler \& Gary S. Becker, “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” _American Economic Review_ 67 (2) (1977), pp. 76-90. _Sheilagh Ogilvie is an IHS Claude R. Lambe Fellow working on a master’s in social science at the University of Chicago. She received a Ph.D. in history at Trinity College, Cambridge._