It would be hard to find anyone to disagree with the proposition that language has immense social impact. But Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson goes even further, arguing that language helped create the nation-state, nationalism, and modern society itself. In his book Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Anderson coined the term “print capitalism” to describe his theory. In short, he believes that the invention of the Gutenberg Printing Press in 1454 standardized vernacular languages in Europe via the publishing entrepreneurs who wanted their books to reach the widest possible audience. 

Previously, most people communicated via a welter of geographically specific dialects and most were illiterate. After the printing press, larger geographical units could be united around a shared language. For example, French gradually replaced regional languages like Breton, Burgundian, and Gascon, which then eased political and cultural divides between these regions. This allowed speakers of different dialects to interact more with each other. Thus, according to Anderson, the first European nation-states were formed on the basis of national print-languages. No one at the time could have imagined that mass market demand for book sales would have helped construct European nationalism, but that was the unintended outcome.

In order to understand the profound impact of the printing press on the rise of the nation state, it is important to first consider what exactly is a nation. According to Anderson, a nation “is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” since it has invisible boundaries. While many people in a nation will never meet, they share certain interests and goals which creates social cohesion. 

The printing press acted as a catalyst for this sense of cohesion by creating a standard language. National communities could now form new relationships and establish a shared identity, something not as easily achievable prior to the birth of the printing press. In particular, Anderson writes, “Print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation.” Print-capitalism, mixed with linguistic homogeneity, strengthened the nascent nation-state in Early Modern Europe. 

However, book-selling entrepreneurs were not intentionally trying to invent the nation state. They were simply taking advantage of a market opportunity. Prior to the printing press, a majority of books were printed in Latin, but only a small, educated elite could read that dead language. By contrast, growing numbers of the new urban middle classes were learning to read in these new national languages. By printing in languages rather than in Latin, book sellers could amass a wider potential audience. This had other salutary, unintended knock on effects. For example, fewer women than men knew Latin; and the language had also served as a barrier between the upper aristocratic and middling bourgeoisie classes. Thus the transition from Latin to vernacular publishing allowed for greater upward mobility for the previously excluded.

The Gutenberg printing press had such a monumental impact on the spread of vernacular languages due to the sheer volume of books printed. As historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin estimate in their book The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800, half century after Gutenberg’s innovation the number of books published in vernacular languages had grown from essentially zero to 23% of all books produced in Europe. 

The number of books printed in the vernacular would continue to grow exponentially. Anderson writes, “It has been estimated that in the 40-odd years between the publication of the Gutenberg Bible and the close of the fifteenth century, more than 20,000,000 printed volumes were produced in Europe. Between 1500 and 1600, the number manufactured had reached between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000.” After 1640, the majority of books were published in vernacular languages rather than Latin. “The fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized,” Anderson writes.

This chart visualizes the print capitalism book boom. 

Buringh, Eltjo; van Zanden, Jan Luiten: “Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (2009), pp. 409–445 (417, table 2)

Three other important factors contributed to the rise of print-capitalism: the esotericization of Latin, the Reformation, and the increasing usage of French as the language of diplomacy. 

Esotericization refers to the way that Renaissance humanists shifted the perception of Latin; they increasingly treated it as an ancient scholastic text rather than as a language for ordinary communication. For the humanists, Latin was a research language, part of their intellectual pursuit to revive pre-Christian literature, and not considered a language for publication. 

The Protestant Reformation also had a lasting impact on the use of the vernacular language. In 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a cathedral door, he wrote them in the German translation of the Latin Bible. Those theses were then reprinted and spread all over Germany, providing an immediate boost to the German language press. Three times as many books were published in German from 1520-1540 compared to 1500-1520. There was immense demand for Luther’s books and pamphlets; his translation of the Bible into German went through a remarkable 430 editions. As Anderson writes, “In effect, Luther became the first best-selling author so known. Or, to put it another way, the first writer who could ‘sell’ his new books on the basis of his name.” 

However, the Counter-Reformation did try to preserve the use of Latin over the vernacular. Anderson notes, “Despite a temporary come-back during the Counter-Reformation, Latin’s hegemony was doomed. Nor are we speaking simply of a general popularity. Somewhat later, but at no less dizzying speed, Latin ceased to be the language of a pan-European high intelligentsia.” 

Thirdly, the administrative centralization of political power had a lasting impact on the use of languages. For example, in England prior to the Norman Conquest all documents were written in Anglo-Saxon, which was also the language of the court. However, between around 1200 and 1350, state Latin was superseded by Norman French. It was the gradual fusion of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon that created the Early English language, which emerged as the language of the courts and parliament after 1362. A bible was printed in Early English in 1382, further shifting the language away from Latin. Guttenberg’s movable type printing press accelerated that trend towards vernacular English.

The rise of vernacular languages was a crucial precondition for the rise of the modern nation-state, which needs a people bound together by common customs, myths, and language. It is a part of turning a pre-modern people into something that the State can make legible, document, tax, conscript, and control. Benedict Anderson’s scholarship is a reminder that language has immense power. This contradicts a common criticism of capitalism, that markets are but a creation of States and elites to entrench their own wealth and power; however, Anderson’s work shows that print capitalism preceded, and perhaps even invented, the nation-state.

Anderson, who died only a few years ago, had a complicated set of politics. His views were influenced by post-colonial Marxism, but he rejected both orthodox Marxism and classical liberalism for paying insufficient analytical attention to the role of nationalism in explaining the architecture of the modern world. However, libertarians have much to learn from his work, not least about how technological innovation and expanding markets for knowledge transformed early modern Europe. Book selling entrepreneurs, simply trying to maximize their sales, had simultaneously bound together and divided Europeans in unexpected ways. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Image Credit: TV Guide

Summary:

The Good Place is a show that lays out a moral vision for the world that’s surprisingly sophisticated and deeply informed by academic philosophy — a vision that puts learning, and trying to do good front and center. We follow the journey of four characters who thought they were in The Good Place, but later learned they were in The Bad Place because they didn’t earn enough points on Earth by doing good things. In four seasons they show how the point system that determines your fate in the afterlife is faulty.

How did NBC’s The Good Place teach us how to be good? Does The Good Place make moral philosophy digestible? Is The Good Place about striving for moral change?

Transcript: 

There is a common trope in cultural depictions of authoritarian regimes. They might be evil, but their advantage is that they’re ruthlessly efficient and disciplined. It’s a staple of so much of our fiction, where the antagonists are thinly veiled Nazis, like in the Star Wars universe or a million other books, TV shows, and movies.  
 
Real-world despots play up that perception in their own propaganda, —minus the evil part of course, —selling themselves as offering order and unity over chaos and dysfunction. But even in negative fictional portrayals, totalitarian baddies are often depicted as having regimentation and a strict chain of command as among their key advantages. After all, Mussolini made the trains run on time, right?  
 
No, he didn’t, and those like him never really do.  
 
It’s not just the improbable logistical prowess of the Palpatine administration. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has praised China’s one-party dictatorship because “that one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.” Similar takes have been on offer praising China’s rapid moves to impose a nationwide lockdown to control the coronavirus pandemic. Vladimir Putin and his aspiring emulators like Hungary’s Viktor Orban often make this case explicit when touting their systems as preferable to liberal democracy.  
 
The reality, however, is that authoritarian populists and totalitarian dictators are anything but efficient and orderly. From top to bottom, governments of this type are astonishingly corrupt, venal, and dysfunctional. They are incapable of competently handling a crisis or tackling major social ills. Far from avoiding chaos, autocrats produce vast amounts of it along with the attendant human suffering.  
 
Low corruption, predictable administration, and overall stability are the hallmarks of the liberal tradition at its finest. These desirable qualities flow from the rule of law, solid constitutional foundations, and a government limited to a few well-defined responsibilities while also being sufficient to meet those responsibilities. The impersonality of the law is why our judges wear plain black robes, and it’s not mere symbolism. It is the crucial framework around which the rest of a healthy society can be built.  
 
A boring government is the best kind of government, and cults of personality can’t do boring. Demagogues starve without constant attention. The destruction of limits on government power is essential for them because it makes for a government that can do a lot more attention-grabbing things. There’s no time for civil servants soberly minding the store when we must be kept in a state of perpetual revolutionary crusades to remake society.  
 
The politics of personal loyalty also replaces any idea of meritocracy with a pure spoils system of patronage and graft. When no activity is outside of the state’s reach, the opportunities for rent-seeking multiply exponentially. Arbitrary diktats replace the equal application of general laws. Transparency and the free and open flow of information must be sacrificed as well, hobbling a society’s ability to evaluate and respond to problems.  
 
The governance of a liberal polity with bourgeois values might seem mechanistic and lacking in romance. But it’s that stability which allows an open and organic society to flourish, like vines on a trellis. Limited government is the closest we’ve ever come to competent government: a state that works when we need it to and otherwise stays out of our way. That is not only beneficial in good times, it is absolutely crucial in moments of crisis such as the current pandemic.  
 
The myth of the efficient autocrat imposing order and stability is just that: pure fiction.

Americans are far less likely to trust their institutions, and each other, today compared to decades past. This collapse in social and political trust arguably fuels our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship.

What’s the basis for people to trust each other? How do you measure social trust? What is reflective equilibrium?

Further Reading:

Must Politics Be War?: Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society, written by Kevin Vallier

Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, written by Kevin Vallier

Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates, edited by Michael Weber and Kevin Vallier

Related Content:

Arguments for Liberty: Rawlsianism, Free Thoughts Podcast

A Rawlsian Case for Libertarianism, written by Kevin Vallier

Subjective Reasons and Political Justification, written by Julian Sanchez

Technologist Alec Stapp joins the show to discuss why the US lagged weeks behind South Korea in testing for COVID-19. While the failures of the FDA and CDC have been grim, the show does find a silver lining in the crisis, that technology has greatly eased the transition into social distancing for many Americans.

How is our internet surviving during this global pandemic? How has the private industry stepped up to the plate to tackle COVID-19? Why was the United States late to the game to test patients for COVID-19? Is the FDA to blame for the lack of U.S. testing?

Further Reading:

Timeline: The Regulations—and Regulators—That Delayed Coronavirus Testing, written by Alec Stapp

The 4 Key Reasons the U.S. Is So Behind on Coronavirus Testing, written by Olga Khazan

How utility, phone and internet companies are giving consumers a break during coronavirus pandemic, written by Nathan Bomey

Trump adviser outlines cautious approach for reopening economy, written by Rachel Roubein

Netflix will reduce its European network traffic by 25 percent to manage surge, written by Julia Alexander

Related Content:

Libertarianism and the Coronavirus Pandemic, written by Andy Craig

What Made the Internet Possible?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

When will the United States understand how important immigrants are to our country? It is not easy to get a green card. It is largely up the government who wins and who loses when it comes to immigrating to the U.S.

This is part two of a two-part discussion about DACA.

Mentions:

Natalie Dowzicky spoke to Alex Nowrasteh, Jose Antonio Vargas, Gaby Pacheco, Oscar Hernandez, Kevin Ortiz, Nelcy Rocha, Ewaoluwa Ogundana, Christian Aguirre, & Bruna Distinto.

Special thanks to TheDream.Us scholarship program for working closely with us to find students to speak with.

Music by Cellophane Sam.

Stephanie Slade joins the show to talk about her new cover story for Reason Magazine; Against the New Nationalism. Her piece starts by noting how Richard Lowry, the author of The Case for Nationalism, argues that there is no real difference between nationalism and patriotism. We discuss how conservative nationalists argue that we lost sight of how to be a moral people, and we need the government to get us back on track.

What is nationalism? Is nationalism patriotism? Are Americans proud of their country? What is the nationalism conservatism movement? What threat does nationalism pose?

Further Reading:

Against the New Nationalism, written by Stephanie Slade

The New Conservative Nationalism Is About Subverting Individual Liberty, written by Stephanie Slade

The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free, written by Richard Lowry

New York Times 1619 Project

Related Content:

Vice in The Virtue of Nationalism, written by Akiva Malamet

What’s Wrong with National Conservatism?, Free Thoughts Podcast

Why 1619 Matters in 2019, written by Matthew Feeney

In recent days, there has been snark from some quarters about the current crisis somehow catching libertarians flat‐​footed. The argument goes that the need for a big government response disproves a political ideology that is often, though in somewhat oversimplified fashion, summarized as favoring “small government.” A better description would be a government limited in scope but sufficient to meet that scope.

Libertarianism, properly understood, encompasses certain core functions as the proper role of government. It is not the libertarian view that government should be ineffective at protecting individual rights or dysfunctionally paralyzed in the face of a massive threat to people’s lives. Government has a role to play in responding to the pandemic in much the same way it is the government’s job to prosecute murderers or defend the country from invasion.

At the same time, libertarian principles and insights can provide some guideposts for how to respond in this unprecedented global emergency.

One thing to keep in mind is that some limits on government power are even more crucial now. Emergency powers should be limited in duration and limited to directly addressing the present situation based on the facts as best we know them. Such policy responses shouldn’t be larded up with a pre‐​existing wish list of unrelated concerns. It is essential to preserve constitutional liberal democracy and resist excessive long‐​term concentration of power in the executive.

Social distancing measures should rely on voluntary compliance to the greatest degree possible, and most people have been voluntarily complying. Even when enforcement is necessary, simply breaking up gatherings without citation or prosecution is possible and preferable in many cases. A heavy‐​handed reliance on coercive enforcement might not only be unnecessary in some regards, it can also backfire by sparking protest non‐​compliance, and it might also be redundant to all the other measures already in place. With so much shut down, the only place most people have to go is to one of the essential businesses left open such as grocery stores. You don’t need to order people to stay home—except for the list of exceptions—if they already have almost nowhere to go that isn’t on that list of exceptions. For that reason, some states have so far rejected compulsory “stay at home” or “shelter in place” orders. There is no need to fuel further panic or distract police from their more important duties to worry about safe and benign activities like taking the family dog for a walk.

At the same time, many jurisdictions have moved to suspend petty arrests altogether, mostly for victimless crimes, in an effort to reduce jail populations. Also under consideration are proposals to release many of those individuals currently in jail awaiting trial for minor offenses. This is a welcome shift that should prompt us to reconsider the necessity of some of these laws, many of which have long been the target of libertarian ire.

Another insight comes from Nobel laureate, libertarian icon, and Cato Distinguished Senior Fellow, the late F. A. Hayek. In works such as The Constitution of Liberty, he wrote that good laws should be general, equal, and certain. That is a principle that is relevant even in something as far removed from the libertarian ideal as the emergency economic responses currently under consideration. Rather than targeted industry bailouts and micro‐​managed interventions, policy responses should be clear, simple, system‐​wide, and with a defined end date as soon as possible. Simple universal payments to individuals are also preferable to corporate bailouts. It is not feasible for the government to abruptly order massive shutdowns of so much economic activity without some kind of compensation, in much the same way we require just compensation for eminent domain. It is proper for the government to own the consequences of its orders and to soften the shock of this sudden disruption. But in doing so, it’s best to follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Libertarian criticisms of bad regulations have proven especially prescient. A crucial government failure has been the FDA’s inflexible and heavy‐​handed bureaucracy, which has held up tests and prevented thousands of private and academic labs from quickly increasing testing capacity. For most of February, the FDA required everybody to rely solely on tests produced by the CDC and refused to grant permission to other labs. This proved to be catastrophically flawed when the first round of tests produced by the CDC didn’t work and had to be replaced. This failure is a large part of why America’s coronavirus testing response to date compares so unfavorably with South Korea’s.

Another example of a libertarian response to the pandemic has been the quick need to suspend many occupational licensing restrictions, such as by letting doctors practice interstate and upgrading the permissions of nurse practitioners and doctors’ assistants. Even mundane and trivial regulations of the sort that only libertarians would have worried about before have suddenly been cast aside. Two months ago, who would have thought it an urgent concern to suspend alcohol regulations so that restaurants can serve beverages to go for home delivery by rideshare drivers?

While we can welcome these wins, there is no doubt that we have also seen extreme impositions on personal freedom. Libertarians can find that loss especially painful. Even when these new rules are sadly necessary and justified by the facts, it is a cost we should carefully weigh as we eventually move to unwind restrictions and return to some kind of normalcy. In the name of saving lives from the immediate threat, governments around the world have suspended most international travel and heavily curtailed consumer freedoms and freedom of association. The acute loss of freedoms we’ve long taken for granted underscores how valuable they truly are. And some freedoms, like freedom of speech and the right to privacy, should remain sacrosanct and defended tenaciously even in the face of an emergency.

While much of the policy response so far has been in good faith (if often inept), the propensity for power grabs by authoritarian populists should not be discounted. Preserving the rule of law, checks and balances, and constitutional liberal democracy is essential. Elections should proceed on time and with whatever accommodations prove necessary. Legislatures and courts should be kept open for essential business, including by remote participation if necessary, and foundational constitutional structures should remain in place. We have no need of a dictator in the United States nor in other countries around the world.

And perhaps most importantly: emergency rules and powers should extend only for the duration of the emergency, and be repealed at the earliest feasible opportunity. We should be wary of the ratchet effect, where governments tend to retain powers and keep open programs long after their original justification has disappeared.

Freedom is precious, and in the grand sweep of human history it has often been fleeting and tenuous. Right now we are facing the greatest threat to a free and open society that most of us have ever witnessed, at least in the United States, if not in many other nations that have been through worse scourges of totalitarianism and major wars. So libertarians will continue as they always have, ready to defend the principles of human freedom at every turn.

This piece was originally published on the Cato Institute blog. 

Summary:

Despite his obscurity, François Poullain de la Barre is a philosopher who thought beyond the constraints of his time. In 17th-century France Poullain articulated a case for gender equality. His proposal was so radical few took it seriously at the time. Poullain is still relevant today for his analysis of how oppression is “justified” and how to unlearn prejudices.

Related Content:

Poullain Believed in Gender Equality in the 17th Century, written by Paul Meany

Aristotle and Libertarianism, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Rationalism and Hayek in Conflict: Feminist Practice, written by Grant Babcock

Transcript:

John Locke is one of the most frequently cited philosophers in the classical liberal tradition. But while much has been written about Locke’s legacy, little has been written about those who influenced Locke’s own work. Even the greatest genius does not work in a vacuum. We all borrow from others, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that includes John Locke. One of the most significant thinkers who shaped Locke’s philosophy, despite preceding him by eighteen centuries, is Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famed Roman lawyer, statesman and philosopher. Cicero influenced Locke’s thinking on natural law, property rights, and mixed government.

Cicero’s Life and Times

Cicero was born to a wealthy family in Arpinum, Italy in the year 106 BC. Cicero was extensively educated in philosophy, even studying abroad in Greece. After completing his studies, he became a lawyer. He quickly became the most eloquent man in Rome, and the variety of speeches he delivered shows an adaptable and quick-witted mind.

Cicero climbed what was called the “Cursus Honorum,” the order of political offices held by aspiring politicians. Despite his family’s wealth, he was handicapped by his lack of noble ancestry, making him a Novus Homo, a ‘New Man’. Despite this, Cicero held every office of the Cursus Honorum and even became a consul, the highest position in Rome’s political hierarchy and which was held by only two men every year. The zenith of his career came during his consulship when he thwarted a conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic by disgruntled politician Catiline. His speeches condemning Catiline are masterworks of oratory. For his efforts he was awarded the title Pater Patriae, or ‘Father of the Fatherland’, the greatest achievement of his life.

The latter half of Cicero’s career was marked by his undying efforts to fight against the encroaching tyranny of Julius Caesar. Civil war erupted in 49BC and the Republic was thrown into chaos. Caesar eventually prevailed and made himself dictator of Rome. After Caesar’s assassination by a group of senators, Cicero attempted to restore order and quell the competition for power between Augustus and Mark Antony. After delivering a set of damning speeches condemning Mark Antony, Cicero was assassinated. His hands were chopped off and nailed to the rostra (a platform for public speakers) for all to see.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Cicero left behind an extensive number of his writings, including his legal and political speeches, letters to his best friend Atticus, and his philosophical writings. His work covers a huge breadth of topics, including arguments against redistributing lands, arguments for self-defense, instruction on how to give convincing speeches, the nature of the Gods, old age, friendship, and a whole host of other topics.

Today, Cicero is rarely read by anyone besides students of the classics. For a long time, classical scholars believed that there was little merit in reading Cicero as an original thinker. Throughout his philosophical writings, Cicero consistently peppers his work with quotations and anecdotes from an impressive number of Greek thinkers. This led many to believe that he had no original thoughts of his own and was, at best, a good vehicle by which to reconstruct the teachings of the lost philosophers from the Greek world. Thankfully, academics have begun to take Cicero seriously as an original thinker in his own right and to investigate his extensive influence on later thinkers.

One of Cicero’s most well-read philosophical treatises is De Officiis (On Duties). This book was written in the last year of Cicero’s life. Although it was dedicated to his son, Cicero intended for De Officiis to have a much larger audience. Cicero’s wish was posthumously granted. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that De Officiis is one of the most influential books in Western political philosophy and with good reason. 

Many church fathers deeply admired Cicero and his avoidance of dogma. As Augustine wrote,“There are some people who use philosophy to lead people astray… the one thing that delighted me in Cicero’s exhortation was the advice to ‘not study one particular sect but to love and seek and pursue and hold fast and strongly embrace wisdom itself, wherever found.” Throughout Thomas Aquinas’ masterwork, the Summa Theologica, he quotes Cicero numerous times. Renaissance Humanists attempted to recreate Cicero’s writing style throughout their works to an almost comical degree. De Officiis was the third book and the first classical text to be issued from the printing press.  In the 17th century, little had changed. Rodger L’Estrange, a prolific pamphleteer and contemporary of Locke, exclaimed that De Officiis was “one of the commonest School Books that we have.” Even in the 18th-century, Cicero’s ideas were so commonplace that when Adam Smith quotes Cicero (which he often does), he does not bother to cite him as doing so would insult the reader’s intelligence. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Declaration of Independence was influenced by what he called “the elementary books of public right,” which included Cicero and Locke. 

Cicero was a massively popular author for more than a millennium. In the domain of political philosophy, Cicero holds sway comparable to giants like Plato and Aristotle. However, Cicero differs significantly from his Greek predecessors and in many ways from most political philosophers. Many intellectuals have written impressive treatises on politics, but few have ever taken part in political life themselves. At times, this leads to overly idealistic, esoteric or scholarly conclusions. One reason that Cicero was such an authoritative thinker for so long was that he did not merely theorize about politics, but rather he practiced what he preached. It is a rarity for such a well-read and scholarly person to also hold the reins of political power. John Adams, for whom Cicero was a personal hero, complimented Cicero by saying that “all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character, his authority should have great weight.” Cicero was no mere observer of political life: he was an active participant until his death. 

Locke’s Love of Cicero

Locke probably first encountered Cicero while he was attending Westminster as a boy. Throughout Locke’s early life, he used quotations from Cicero to add a sense of dignity and wit to his letters. However, this was not merely some teenage phase, as Locke’s love of Cicero lasted his entire life. By the time Locke had died, there were nine editions of De Officiis in his personal library. Locke also undertook a personal project in which he attempted to establish the chronology of Cicero’s life and work, a task he only attempted with one other person, Jesus Christ. Even contemporary classical scholars might have been surprised by Locke’s dedication to his study of Cicero.

In 1693, Locke wrote Some Thoughts Concerning Education which was intended to be a treatise on the education of gentlemen. In this work, he discussed a huge array of topics at great length, such as how to toilet train a child and whether or not children should be allowed to eat certain fruits. However, when explaining what books a child should be given to read on moral conduct, Locke recommends only two books, the Bible and Cicero’s De Officiis. He also specifies that one should not give Cicero to a child solely to learn Latin, but rather to “be informed in the Principles and Precepts of Virtue for the Conduct of his Life.” The original cover of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is adorned with a Cicero quote from De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) and the epigraph for the Second Treatise is a quote from De Legibus.

Locke certainly admired Cicero. However, the critical question for classical liberals is: to what extent, if any, did Cicero effect Locke’s political thought?

Natural Law/Rights, The Yardstick of Government

Cicero was a firm adherent of the natural law tradition. He believed that there was a divine creator of the world who imbued rational beings with an objective set of laws by which to abide, not written physical laws but a code etched into the mind. To Cicero, natural law provides a standard by which to measure man-made laws, which, he assures us, can never trump natural law. For Cicero, the widespread approval of acceptance of an act does not make it just. Nor is this law contextual to different nations or peoples; it is fixed and immutable. Cicero writes that “there will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal unchangeable law.” The first and foremost principle of Cicero’s natural law is that “no man should harm another unless he has been provoked by injustice.” Locke’s foundational principle of natural law closely resembles Cicero’s, “Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Both believed that by their created nature, humans bear certain rights which cannot be overridden.  These laws, for both Locke and Cicero, are inherent in the nature of humanity. Even if no state ever existed to enshrine these laws they would still exist. Thus the government is judged by how it conforms to natural law’s dictates.

Origins of Civil Society

If Cicero is right, that we already have a moral code which is discoverable by all beings, why then do we even need a state to enforce rules? Cicero believes that we leave the state of nature and form states for three reasons: cooperation, inconvenience, and, most importantly, property. Locke shares all of these reasons for the state’s existence.

According to Cicero, the first people roved the wild holding onto whatever meagre property they could defend. Cicero believed men of virtue and wisdom convinced these primitive beings that it was advantageous to join together and to combine their collective abilities. Cicero argues for a kind of proto-division of labour, listing the benefits of cooperating together such as bread, buildings, seafaring travel, irrigation, and trade. Locke has a not so coincidentally similar list of goods. Both Locke and Cicero believe that through a system of stable laws, which allow for peaceful cooperation, we can all achieve a great deal more material comfort than we would if we lived in the state of nature without cooperating.

Secondly, there is no justice system in the state of nature, and every man operates as their own judge, jury, and executioner. This can lead to complications; as Cicero explains, “We do tend to notice and feel our own good and bad fortune more than that of others.” We are biased towards our own interests which may cause us to overstep our boundaries when resolving conflict. Locke explains that in a state of nature when one impinges upon another’s rights, the aggrieved party has the moral right to exact justice. However, this justice is not without limits and only stretches as far as “calm reason and conscience dictate.”

Locke agrees that without a system of laws, we would be likely to overreact in our pursuit of justice. This would provoke a cycle of revenge and lead to escalating violence.  In order to avoid the confusion and disarray, “all private judgment of every particular member being excluded, the  community comes to be umpire, by settled standing rules, indifference, and the same to all parties.” Unlike his contemporary Hobbes, who believed that we surrendered all of our natural rights when entering into a state, Locke believed we only surrendered one, our right to execute the law of nature. Instead, we yield this right to the community at large in order to create equitable and suitable laws which punish wrongdoers within reason.

Private Property

Many ancient thinkers, such as Plato and Aristotle, thought that the end goal of the state was to aid the moral flourishing of its citizens. This was not Cicero’s end goal. Instead, he is one of the earliest thinkers to provide an extensive discussion of the state’s role in protecting private property. Cicero believed “political communities and commonwealths were established particularly so that people could hold on to their property.” He advises that the first and foremost duty of those who administer public affairs is to “see that everyone holds on to what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by public acts.” Cicero accepts that no property is private by nature; however, “everything produced on the earth is created for the use of mankind.” Despite explaining at great length the importance of the state’s protection of private property, a glaring fault in Cicero’s writings is that he does not adequately explain how one comes to appropriate something as their property justly. At best, he reasons that convention, tradition, and harmony are adequate reasons for us to respect private property.

Locke places a similar emphasis on the state’s role in protecting private property. He explains that “Government has no other end but the preservation of property.” Like Cicero, Locke believed that no property is private by nature; as he writes, “God, who hath given the world to men in common.” However, unlike Cicero, Locke explains that what makes property justly acquired is mixing one’s labour with the land. Every person owns themselves and “every man has a property in his own person.” When a person applies their labour to something in nature it is no longer held in common but held privately by that person. 

The Form of Government

Both Cicero and Locke believed that any form of government could at least theoretically be legitimated by conforming to the standards of natural law and acting to preserve people’s rights. However, both thinkers believed that there were systems that tended to fare better than others. What makes Cicero unique is that unlike many natural law theorists, who articulate moral principles, Cicero was committed to figuring out what government can best preserve our natural rights.

Cicero believed that there are three forms of simple government, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, the rule of the one, the few and the many. Each of these forms has their own issues which cause them to be defective and to decay into tyranny, oligarchy or anarchy. To avoid this, Cicero believed that the best course of action was to have elements of each to balance the other out in a mixed form of government which worked off of an early version of the separation of powers. Importantly, Cicero argued that all political authority is ultimately derived from the people. He based this upon the principle “let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law,” which was the epigraph of the Second Treatise on Government (and also, as it so happens, the motto of the state of Missouri). Cicero’s definition of a republic is, simply put, the property of the people, a state of affairs in which the people have a meaningful say in how the state is run. When sovereignty is not located in the people, tyranny quickly takes hold. 

John Locke takes a similar approach by arguing in favour of a mixed government, which is different from Cicero’s in form but similar in principle. Locke argues that mixed government consists of legislative, executive, and federative powers. Legislative power, the ability to establish law is made legitimate by the consent of the people. While this seems like a universally accepted principle to modern eyes, many of Locke’s contemporaries argued in favour of parliament as a supreme authority. Locke was consciously adapting Cicero’s definition of a republic as the common property of the people. A separate executive power guarantees that those who make the laws abide by their dictates. Lastly, the federative power is the state’s ability to organize for the defence of the state. Both Locke and Cicero share an appreciation of the separation of powers and both locate the sovereignty of the state with the people.

Resisting Tyranny

Cicero famously wrote, in De Officiis, about the justifiability of killing a tyrant. He argued that if a person or group of people were tyrannizing others, the people have the right to dispose of the tyrants as if they were wild beasts. He writes that it is similar to a situation in which “the wildness and monstrousness of a beast appears in human form [and], it must be removed from the common humanity.” The oppressed are not revolting; on the contrary it is the tyrant who is revolting against the immutable laws of nature. Simply because a law is written down does not confer its legitimacy because “true law is right reason in agreement with nature.”

Locke similarly argues that since all people are naturally equal, no one has the right to initiate force against another. He writes, “Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People.” Similar to Cicero’s wild beast analogy, it is not the people who are at fault but those who defied natural law. This dissolves any bonds and frees the people from “any farther Obedience.” With the bonds of civil society broken, each man regains the ability to execute natural law through self-defense.

Cicero provides the foundation of Locke’s political thought. Locke’s theory of natural law, the origins of the state, the organization of government, and the right to revolution are all deeply indebted to an implicitly Ciceronian framework. But Locke is not a mere borrower. He further developed Cicero’s ideas by fleshing out his theory of property rights and focusing more on democratic ideals than Cicero, who had favored aristocracies in many scenarios. This is not to say that Locke ever outgrew his Ciceronian roots; it was apparent to his contemporaries that Locke was a devout Ciceronian. The Philosopher John Toland praised Locke, writing that “John Locke… must be confest to be greatest Philosopher after Cicero in the Universe.” The pairing of the two must have been deeply flattering to Locke.

Liberalism is usually conceptualized as a project of the Enlightenment, but the authors of the Enlightenment did not abandon the traditions and authorities of the past. On the contrary, they adapted them to their political purposes. In this vein, Cicero, as a learned man and lover of his country was a tremendous authority to evoke . If Locke can accurately be called the Father of Liberalism, then, considering his debt to Cicero, it would not be unreasonable to dub Cicero the Grandfather of Liberalism.

                                                                                       Image Credit: NME.com

Summary:

Leslie Knope, Ron Swanson, April Ludgate, Andy Dwyer, Tom Haverford, Ann Perkins, and the rest of the gang are all loyal employees of the Parks and Recreation Department of the Pawnee local government. Leslie Knope hopes to beautify her town by helping Ann Perkins turn an abandoned construction site (the pit) into a community park, but what should be a fairly simple project is stymied at every turn by oafish bureaucrats, selfish neighbors, and government red tape.

Is Ron Swanson a libertarian? Is Tom Haverford a real entrepreneur? Which Parks and Rec character are you?

Transcript:

Josiah Warren was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1798. His biographer, the anarchist writer William Bailie, notes that he was “of historically famous Puritan stock”—a relative of General Joseph Warren, one of the heroes of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Historian James J. Martin states that this relation “appears to be a romanticism unfounded on available sources Warren’s own son, George, leaves mention of any such relation out of his account. In any case, Warren became deservedly famous in his own right, as we shall see. Warren was “our most practical anarchist,”¹ “a genuinely universal man” whose “philosophy had always been that the best way to understand a process was to learn to do it.”² He was a talented professional musician, a successful inventor, a teacher, an entrepreneur, and a social theorist and experimenter. Often credited as the first American anarchist, Warren articulated a libertarian vision that married his arch-individualism to what he called “equitable commerce,” in which smallholders and craftspeople would exchange equal values—those values being defined by the amount of labor time invested.

The story of Warren’s political awakening finds the Welsh industrialist-turned-reformer Robert Owen, called “the father of English socialism,”³ a central figure. Along with notable contemporaries such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, he is among the early utopians, so-called, who in the first half of the nineteenth century founded self-contained model communities to test and demonstrate their ideas, arguably touching off the modern socialist movement. The young Warren was captivated by Owen’s ideas and optimism, so much so that he sold his lamp factory and followed Owen to New Harmony, Indiana. There Owen established his new community, having purchased the land and structures from a settlement of Rappites (which had been called Harmony). As Crispin Sartwell observes, it is a testament to Owen’s skill as an orator that so many did as Warren did, uprooting their lives, families, and careers to join Owen in his uncertain exercise in social experimentation. In Owen’s thought, we find “the belief in complete environmental determinism,”⁴ or, as Warren (favorably, it should be noted) quotes him as saying: “we are effects of causes, and therefore cannot deserve praises [or] blame.”⁵ Owen’s socialism entailed the idea that human beings are more or less perfectible, susceptible to reshaping with the right background conditions. But if Warren held onto Owen’s determinism, then he ultimately came to depart sharply from Owen in his opinion as to the conditions most likely to bring about perfect human relations. Owen’s utopian socialism seemed to Warren to require a wholesale restructuring of human nature, premised on the idea that the individual person could and would be made to disappear into an altruistic collective. Warren came to see this as wrong for both ethical and practical reasons; he believed that New Harmony’s downfall was its obliteration of the individual and her rights. Warren writes, “[T]he difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity… . It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us.”

Owen’s socialism, while permanently imprinted on Warren, had taken on a new character in Warren’s own thought: a decentralist and libertarian socialism committed to individual choice and to “[d]isunion, disconnection, [and] the dissolving of associated interests.”⁶ Warren had become thoroughly convinced that compulsory “political and social combinations” were doomed to produce confusion and failure, that “one or a few” would always govern such combinations as a matter of fact, all others compelled to yield their individual sovereignty. He predicated his social philosophy “on a principle exactly opposite to combination,” that of Individuality (frequently capitalized in Warren’s writings), arguing that “combinations and all institutions built upon them” reduce the individual “to a mere piece of a machine.”

By “combinations” Warren did not mean voluntary, cooperative social endeavors, but compulsory schemes that destroy individual initiative and the incentives necessary for social flourishing. Warren saw in Owen’s New Harmony project something like the tragedy of the commons problem: if everyone, as the collective, owns everything, then as a practical matter, no one owns anything, all things (and society itself) thus inevitably falling into disrepair and decay. Warren’s political economy does contemplate a more egalitarian society, but it is one leveled by an absence of special privilege rather than by state action or arbitrary collective interference in the affairs of the individual. Warren clearly anticipates present-day libertarians in arguing that society and the state (and other collective entities) are not conscious actors or ends in themselves, but merely amalgamations of their constituent members. “[S]ociety,” he writes, “will have to dissolve its imaginary masses and resolve itself into individuals before liberty can be anything but a word.” For Warren, the rugged individualism of his individual sovereignty doctrine is not a green light for greed and capitalistic accumulation; it is, in a sense, a socialism, market competition eroding the power and position of the rich and giving way to a fundamentally fair economy in which individuals stand on equal footing and exchange equal values. For Warren, fundamentally, economic equity does not mean perfect economic equality. Individuals are unique, with different talents and aptitudes, aversions or attractions to various types of work, and plans for their lives. Equality of opportunity and open, competitive markets would, Warren believed, function to effect a system “in which returns would be measured by the amount of work performed,”⁷ the individual unable to achieve economic gain without rendering equivalent service.

The relationship between liberalism, with its ennoblement of the unconstrained individual, and anarchism, characteristically socialist and anti-capitalist, has ever been contested ground. In Warren, we arguably find a point of intersection between liberalism, socialism, anarchism, and libertarianism as it is understood today. “As a foe of exploitation,” writes historian Roger Wunderlich, “Warren can be called socialistic; as a defender of private ownership, he is in the tradition of Locke; and as the advocate of everyone’s being his or her own church and state, on condition of not denying the same right to others, he is the first American philosophical anarchist.” Though frequently called “the American Proudhon,”⁸ Warren developed his ideas independently—and indeed before the publication of Proudhon’s landmark work What Is Property?. Carlotta R. Anderson, the granddaughter and biographer of Joseph Labadie, goes as far as writing that “Warren was the first to put together a coherent libertarian philosophy.” Comparing Proudhon and Warren, the labor organizer and activist Albert Weisbord writes, “Both identified labor with the agrarian toiler or handicraftsman who, although a petty owner, worked directly at his own means and tools of production.” Weisbord nevertheless sees Warren’s thought as having a closer kinship to liberalism than to anarchism, as “simply an extreme formulation of typical American Liberalism”—“rugged individualism running rampant.” Other students of anarchism have frequently shared Weisbord’s observation, treating the “bourgeois anarchism” (or “bourgeois liberal-anarchism”) of Warren—and others like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker—as something fundamentally unlike the “co-operative” anarchism endemic to Europe.

If indeed Warren can be accurately regarded as a socialist, then his socialism is contained in the idea that labor ought to be exchanged for labor—that cost should be the limit of price. Here, Warren’s ideas reflect the labor theory of value. As Sartwell observes, the labor theory of value “was already something of a commonplace when [Warren] wrote,” having been articulated in works as far back as William Petty’s and as important as those of Hume, the Physiocrats, and of course Adam Smith. “Indeed, one supposes that it is an ancient insight, a kind of inevitable conclusion,” its obvious analytical limitations notwithstanding. Warren’s invention of the Time Store was the practical embodiment of his economic program, labor being exchanged for labor and price being limited to cost. Patrons in Warren’s store would make payment in notes entitling the recipient to a certain amount of their labor, measured in hours. Warren would start a timer when he began assisting a customer, adding to the price of products he sold that customer based on the amount of time he assisted.

Having refined Owen’s vision by accounting for and incorporating the sovereignty of the individual, Warren set out to found his own model community, called Modern Times (sited on Long Island). Modern Times was actually the last and the most long-lived of Warren’s three attempts to inaugurate an “equitable village,” the first two being Equity (1835-1837) and Utopia (1847-1851), both in Ohio.⁹ Where other such American utopias espoused community ownership and collectivism in pointed rejection of private property, individualism, and market-style exchange, Modern Times embraced these in their most radical, principled forms.¹⁰

Instrumental to the dissemination of Warren’s political-economic philosophy and the founding of Modern Times was another renaissance man, Stephen Pearl Andrews.¹¹ An anarchist and Massachusetts native like Warren, Andrews was a lawyer of some prominence who became an active and outspoken abolitionist early in life. He and his young family were even run out of Texas on account of his abolitionism, fugitives from the law forced to return to the northeast. Warren and Andrews happened to meet at one of Warren’s Boston lectures on his equitable commerce ideas. Warren became to Andrews the “Euclid of the Social Sciences,” a visionary genius who had pinpointed the source of social and economic strife, ready to lead to a better way. The experiment of Modern Times was confounded by several factors, both internal and external, and it eventually became present-day Brentwood, New York. Andrews, much more than Warren, emphasized the free love aspects of his social thinking, and Modern Times attracted unwelcome and frequently unfair attention as a haven for eccentrics.

It is difficult to place Warren on today’s political spectrum or within its categories. He is undoubtedly a poor fit within a libertarianism that celebrates capitalism and that correctly rejects obsolete labor theories of economic value, yet he is a perhaps still poorer fit within a socialism that abhors market exchange, property rights, and individualist ideology and makes the all-embracing modern state the savior of the worker. Though a firm friend of labor, Warren decidedly did not advocate for “expropriating the expropriators.” Writing to a friend, he remarked that the proposition of “restor[ing] all existing wealth to its proper owners” was among the ideas most damaging to labor reform, and particularly ridiculous “from an Anti-war-under-any-circumstances man.” Warren was of the mind that the apostles of the labor movement were frequently their own worst enemies, their “wild denunciations” of businessmen “tend[ing] to repel many of the best of men.” He bristled at being “classed as a Reformer” and forcefully rejected socialists’ “direct and persistent war on the ownership of land.” Warren recoiled at the idea of violence and maintained skepticism toward mass political movements. This philosophy is perhaps captured in the title of his paper, The Peaceful Revolutionist, which Warren began publishing in 1833. Similarly, Andrews, in his book on Warren’s ideas, made direct appeal to “those who are denominated Conservatives.”

Contemporary academic work on both libertarianism and anarchism contains precious little meaningful discussion of Josiah Warren’s thought or practical experiments, preferring to dismiss him as a marginal figure; he is usually mentioned, if at all, as a footnote to the discussion of the more influential and well-known Benjamin Tucker, himself either minimized as not a True Anarchist or else mischaracterized to fit the anti-market, anti-property anarchist mainstream. It is perhaps especially important for contemporary libertarians to study Warren given this relative obscurity; his thought presents a principled vindication of individual sovereignty while suggesting that libertarian ideas would actually effect more egalitarian outcomes than the monopoly capitalist version of “free markets” we find around us today.

1. Crispin Sartwell, The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren (Fordham University Press 2011). ↩
2. Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (Seabury Press 1974). ↩
3. John Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (Taylor & Francis 2009). ↩
4. Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography. ↩
5. Sartwell, The Practical Anarchist. ↩
6. William Bailie, Josiah Warren: The First American Anarchist, A Sociological Study (Small, Maynard & Company 1906). ↩
7. James J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908 (Ralph Myles Publisher 1970). ↩
8. See for example, Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible and Rudolf Rocker’s Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America. ↩
9. Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. ↩
10. Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. ↩
11. For more information on Andrews, see Madeleine B. Stern’s The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews. ↩

Published in 1859, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is one of the most celebrated defences of free speech ever written. In this elongated essay, Mill aims to defend what he refers to as “one very simple principle,” what modern commentators would later call the harm principle. This is the idea that people should only be stopped or restrained from acting when their conduct may harm another individual. Mill states that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” However, Mill’s simple principle is not the only focus of On Liberty. He also discusses the struggle between liberty and authority, the importance of individuality, the limits of state authority, and the practical application of the harm principle. It is a small yet dense essay with many questions about how a free society ought to treat its citizens. Mill’s answers provide the bedrock of what we today call liberalism.

Who is John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was born on May 20th, 1806, in London. John’s father, James Mill, was an ardent reformer and personal friend of Jeremy Bentham, the famous utilitarian philosopher. James Mill was determined to mould John into a well-educated leader and an advocate of his reforming ideals. To this end, John was given an extremely rigorous education from a young age. He learned Greek at the age of three, Latin at eight, and read Plato’s dialogues in the original language before his tenth birthday. He was also tutored by some of the brightest minds of his day, including Jeremy Bentham, economist David Ricardo, and classicist, George Grote. Not only did John have to study a wide array of topics, but he was also charged with teaching his younger siblings what he had learned. Given the heavy workload that James Mill imposed on his young son John, James Mill might come across to a modern reader as overly demanding. Regardless of how this might be perceived today, John would later praise his father’s methods, writing, “If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.” After his intense education, Mill began working in the East India Company, in which he would serve for 35 years.

The Other Author of On Liberty

One can scarcely mention On Liberty without discussing Harriet Taylor. Mill met Harriet in 1831 at a dinner party. The pair  quickly became good friends. Mill thought Harriet his intellectual equal and treated her as such. However, Harriet’s husband, John Taylor, disapproved of their friendship and demanded that Harriet break off their friendship. Harriet’s husband eventually softened his approach and allowed Mill to see Harriet occasionally. While Mill and Harriet’s relationship was solely platonic at this time, they married in 1851, two years after the death of John Taylor.  

On Liberty was intended to be a short essay, which Mill began writing in 1854 with Harriet’s help. However, when On Liberty was nearing completion in 1858, Harriet suddenly died, from which point onwards Mill made no further edits to the text, defining the work as a tribute to her memory. Today any copy of On Liberty will bear the name of John Stuart Mill, but Mill himself described On Liberty as “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name.”  Harriet’s influence can also be felt in Mill’s work On the Subjection of Women, a foundational text for liberal feminism inspired by Harriet’s passionate advocacy of female equality. It is challenging to quantify Harriet’s influence on Mill, but if we take Mill’s word, Harriet’s discussions and scrutiny were formative in shaping Mill’s philosophy. 

Introduction of On Liberty

Mill opens On Liberty by explaining the nature of liberty versus authority. Traditionally, liberty was defined as “the protection against the tyranny of political rulers.” To achieve liberty, limits on state authority ought to be imposed, which would eventually lead to those in power becoming more akin to tenants than perpetual rulers. By Mill’s time, the old orders of monarchy and aristocracy were waning, and democratic republics began to predominate the European political landscape.

The world was moving towards greater equality, a trend Mill appreciated, although not without reservation. With the rise of democratic government came a new threat, what Alexis De Tocqueville described as “tyranny of the majority.” Mill believed that a new form of social tyranny was emerging, one that was in some ways worse than actual tyranny as it has “fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

At best, this new tyranny could lead to conformity; at worst it stifled the originality and intellectual vigor needed for progress. Mill believes that all eras are either organic or critical. In organic periods people accept some form of positive creed. In critical ones, positive creeds lose their sway without other beliefs emerging to take their place. During critical periods we yearn for new ideas, according to Mill, so we allow people to pursue their lives in “in innumerable and conflicting directions.” This freedom to experiment with different ideas and ways of life allows for progress, both material and moral.

Self-Regarding Sphere

At this point in the text, Mill has already outlined the principle which he wishes to defend, the harm principle. In the chapter entitled “Of The Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” Mill argues in favour of freedom of speech in the vast majority of situations, barring a few key exceptions such as when an individual incites immediate violence.  Mill deals with three cases of free speech: one in which the suppressed opinion is true, one in which it is partly true, and, lastly, one in which it is wholly false. 

Mill explains that “mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man named Socrates.” The ancient philosopher Socrates, famous for his Socratic method argument, was put to death by an Athenian jury on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. Similar to Socrates, Jesus Christ was also persecuted for his beliefs, which in Mill’s day were considered the moral backbone of English society. No person no matter how intelligent is wholly infallible and, for Mill, “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.” Therefore, no person has the right to silence others. We should all be keenly aware of our fallibility. Even if the vast majority of people in any given society agree on some issues, it does not justify silencing dissenters. Mill passionately explains that even if “all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” Mill laments that so many people have fallen into what he calls the “pleasant falsehood” of believing that “truth triumphs over persecution.” Truth does not inherently triumph over falsehood. The annals of history repeat this lesson constantly, which is why we should always be hesitant to suppress dissenting or differing views, even on the most fundamental questions of life.

What about an opinion which is neither wholly true nor wholly false? Mill was a keen advocate of progress. He rightly believed that the era in which he lived was marked by unprecedented material and moral progress. But Mill did not believe that progress consists of false beliefs being replaced with true beliefs. Instead, he viewed improvement as a cyclical process in which different elements of truth rise and fall. In time, the rigorous challenging of mixed doctrines would allow future thinkers to separate the true parts from the false parts of any given ideology. 

But what about wholly false opinions? In modern terms, why should flat earthers, holocaust deniers, and climate change deniers be allowed to express their opinions? For Mill, “however true [the received opinion] may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma,not a living truth.” Mill makes a distinction between what he calls true belief and knowledge. True belief is holding correct beliefs; however, knowledge is holding beliefs because they are justified through rational argumentation. If we simply hold onto our beliefs without passionately defending them, they will hold progressively less sway in our mind as they decay into a dead dogma. False beliefs provide us with the opportunity to defend our most cherished beliefs, making sure that they remain a living truth rather than dead dogma. By continually challenging our beliefs, we strengthen them further. Our beliefs are like muscles. If we do not make use of them they will weaken; by consistently defending our opinions, we bolster them against falsities that would usurp their position in our minds.

Note that Mill does not base his arguments for free speech on universal or natural rights. Like both his father and Jeremy Benthem, Mill was a utilitarian, which is the doctrine that actions are right or ethical when they promote the maximum happiness for the majority of people. Simply put, the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Utilitarianism can, at times, have a shaky relationship with the concept of natural or innate rights. The father of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham famously described natural rights as “nonsense on stilts.”  It is essential to understand that Mill believes that humans are “progressive beings.” He explains that “the source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being” is that we are “capable of rectifying…mistakes, by discussion and experience.” Thus those who censor opinions commit “a peculiar evil” by “robbing the human race” of the path to truth. While Mill’s case for free speech is not built upon a foundation of natural rights, it is based upon the proposition that free and unhindered discussion corrects our errors and does so to the long term benefit of humanity. This allows us not only to improve our own lives but those of our future descendants who will also benefit from our discoveries. 

Individuality

Mill argues that in the vast majority of cases we are afforded absolute liberty of thought and expression. But thought and expression do not compose the entirety of life. We also need to make choices and interact with others. In the chapter entitled Of Individuality, as one of the elements of well-being, Mill makes a case for the  positive value of individuality.   

Mill believes that every person has their own personal preferences and tastes in all aspects of life. Mill explains that “human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” Since there is no one masterplan or method that guarantees a fully flourishing life, Mill believes that there must be “experiments of living.” 

Mill despised and feared conformity.  He deeply feared a future in which people lived their life based upon nothing but custom and habit. He explains,“The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.” Mill’s opposition to custom is nuanced. He is not a libertine who supports eccentricity for its own sake. Instead, he argues that when people act upon custom alone, they do not make a decision, they simply follow what has already been done without thought. Our perception and judgement must be fine-tuned, and this can only be achieved by exercising our choice. Therefore, Mill explains that “he who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or desiring what is best.” 

But as before with freedom of speech, Mill does not base his arguments in the inherent value of choice or individuality. He believes allowing for individuality and choice creates an industrious and creative environment in which progress is unimpeded. As he explains, “Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” Mill’s arguments for individuality also have a personal tinge to them. He had felt firsthand the judgmentalism of Victorian England. At the age of 17, he had been arrested for distributing information on birth control. In his adult life, he was looked at with scorn for his relationship with Harriet Taylor. And throughout his life he had to hide his atheist beliefs fearing ridicule from society at large. 

Limits of Authority 

In the penultimate chapter, “Of The Limits to the authority of society over the individual,” Mill discusses when state-sanctioned coercion is legitimate. The state provides a degree of security and stability. Therefore Mill concludes we have reciprocal obligations to the state and society at large such as respecting others rights and paying our fair share in taxes to uphold justice. But the relationship between the individual and the state is not a one-way street; in return for their cooperation and services, the state ought to acknowledge certain limits which it ought not cross as a general rule.

According to Mill, legal coercion is society’s most profound disapproval of specifically egregious actions. It is not to be used lightly; it must only be used to prevent the most egregious and apparent harms. Mill explains that not all harmful or immoral activity ought to be punished by legal coercion.

He also distinguishes between natural and artificial punishments. Artificial punishments are acts of legal coercion while natural punishments consist of the unfavorable social opprobrium of certain conduct. For example, if a person is drunk during the day at home, we ought not to bring the weight of the state upon him but we can voice our disapproval and even disassociate with this person.

There are two spheres of action for Mill: self-regarding and other-regarding. One affects only the agent while the other affects the agent and other people. In the realm of self-regarding acts, Mill believes that “there should be perfect freedom” from coercion. We may be able to attempt to convince others that their self-regarding conduct is harmful or unwise by offering “considerations to aid his judgment [and] exhortations to strengthen his will.” But ultimately, the individual is the final judge. To this end Mill is wholly opposed to paternalism.

However, any other-regarding action may be subject to the laws and regulations of society. For example, drinking alcohol and selling alcohol are wholly different endeavours. For Mill, society has a legitimate interest in regulating trade to assure there is no foul play or dishonesty in marketing. But these regulations may never result in an outright ban. If he were alive today, Mill would likely approve of health warnings being placed on cigarette packs, but would never advocate for an outright prohibition on cigarettes.

Applying Mill’s System

In the final chapter, Mill discusses the practical applications of his two major principles, which are “that the individual is not accountable to society for his [self-regarding] actions” and “that [for] such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected to social or legal punishment.” Of all the chapters of On Liberty this one covers the broadest range of ideas, ranging from voluntary slavery, the selling of narcotics, suicide, divorce, and birth control. Since it is impossible to cover all of Mill’s conclusions effectively, I will focus upon the area most pertinent for classical liberals, the role of the state.

A General Acceptance of Laissez-Faire

As previously mentioned, Mill believes that “trade is a social act,” which means that society has a legitimate interest in regulating certain aspects of selling.  Despite society being justified in regulating trade, Mill believes that the doctrine of laissez-faire is preferable. He explains that “it is now recognised, though not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality of commodities are most effectually provided for by leaving the producers and sellers perfectly free.” However, Mill does not ground the doctrine of laissez-faire in natural rights but its practical benefits. Protectionism or constant regulating “are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them.” While members of a society are justified in interfering with trade, Mill argued that such control was often inexpedient and could be harmful. He concluded that the majority of the time in economic affairs laissez-faire was a preferable system. 

The Looming Fear of Increased State Power

Mill feared “the great evil of adding unnecessarily to [government] power.” People are self-interested, and this does not magically change when they are in positions of power, as they will use their positions to benefit themselves. Even if politicians were benevolent and only wanted the best for their citizens, Mill was still sceptical about state intervention. Mill believed that “when the thing to be done is likely to be better done by individuals than by the government,” non-intervention is the best policy. As a general rule, individuals understand their own situation and preferences better than a third party. Even benevolent governments interventions could end up being flawed and misguided.  

Mill feared the growth of a state in which “everything is done through the bureaucracy.” He feared bureaucracy because in a bureaucracy “nothing to which the bureaucracy is really adverse can be done at all.” Mill cites China and Russia as examples of extreme bureaucratic states which curtailed liberty. Mill believed that bureaucracy would naturally lead to stagnation and eventual decline due to the power of vested interests which cripple creativity.

Mill further believes that individuality and spontaneity created progress. Thus, the governing body of society must mirror this by cultivating independent associations and cooperatives which provide alternative solutions. Charities, cooperatives, and voluntary organizations develop individual’s sense of duty and empathy for others. Non-intervention allows people to solve their problems and can be a “means to their own mental education.” Mill explains that the state’s “business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others; instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.”

On Liberty Today

Mill rightly predicted that of all his writings On Liberty would be the most discussed. Surely enough, he was proven correct. On Liberty became massively popular following its publication in 1858. To this day, it is still hailed as one of the best defenses of free speech. But while this is true, this praise does not capture the colossal scope of this small but potent essay. Mill not only called for legal defenses of free speech but also for the promotion of individuality and widespread tolerance on a societal level. Despite his utilitarian roots, Mill’s thoughts in On Liberty represent a love letter to spontaneity, individuality, and the robust importance of choosing one’s own path in life.  

This vision of the good life is threatened by two main villains, political and social tyranny. Political tyranny ought to be limited by a general acceptance of laissez-faire policies and careful application of the harm principle. Social tyranny is a harder problem to tackle because correcting it requires not only legal corrections but societal change. To curb social tyranny, we ought to celebrate the value of choice and the innumerable ways we can peacefully live our lives not only by experimenting but through critiquing and advising each other on how best to live. Mill never wanted people to invoke the harm principle in order to tell people to stop criticizing their choices. Instead, he wanted us all to engage with each other on how we ought to maximize our happiness through lively and critical discussion over how best to live our lives.

There are many new challenges to Mill’s vision of a free world in the 21st century. The surveillance state intruding upon people’s privacy, the rising popularity of regulating speech, and the unstoppable growth of the regulatory state all threaten the legacy that Mill bequeathed liberal-minded people. But On Liberty is not merely a political text explaining the intricacies of how the state ought to act. It is a love letter to the individual virtues of intellectual curiosity, tolerance, and open-mindedness.

While we practice social-distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, Aaron and Trevor remind us that there’s something about politics itself that is harmful to us and makes us worse people. If you think the political debate is rancorous now, just imagine what it’ll be like when it determines even more of our lives, as we become more and more connected.

What effect does politics have on our lives? How has politics evolved? How do political parties pin people against each other? How do you engage in politics? Is politics bitter by nature?

Related Content:

Do We Have a Duty to Vote? (with Julia Maskivker), Free Thoughts Podcast

Exploring Wealth Inequality, Free Thoughts Podcast

Politics Makes Us Worse, written by Aaron Ross Powell

The Three Languages of Politics, Free Thoughts Podcast

Transcript:

Stop me if you’ve ever heard some version of the following argument: government mandates and funding gave us the __________ [insert: space shuttle, internet, Silicon Valley], so the government should spend $ __ billions/trillions on stimulating innovation and shaping industrial policy today.

But that argument is built upon a simplistic and sometimes flawed understanding of what actually happened in the past. The true story is much more complex. In this episode, Paul talks with historian Christophe Lecuyer about the military’s role in the creation of Silicon Valley. And he then sits down with Cato’s Peter Van Doren to discuss the track record for government industrial policy in the decades since.

What is silicon logic, user logic and competitive logic? Does the military use new technologies first? What are the advantages of Pentagon contracts compared to private contracts? What is the difference between research and development contracts and manufacturing contracts?

Further Reading:

Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, written by Christophe Lécuyer

The Technology Pork Barrel, written by Linda R. Cohen and Roger G. Noll; With Jeffrey S. Banks, Susan A. Edelman, and William M. Pegram

Related Content:

Universities Built Silicon Valley (with Margaret O’Mara), Building Tomorrow Podcast

Military-Industrial Complex, written by Christopher A. Preble

Regulations Gone Wrong, Free Thoughts Podcast

How the Powerful Captured the Economy, Free Thoughts Podcast

There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the United States. About 800,000 immigrants in the U.S. are current DACA-holders. There is no way for them to get a green card or to become permanent residents. This is why when President Trump announced he was ending DACA in 2017, many Dreamers feared they would be deported immediately. But, now the United States Supreme Court is deciding their fate.

This is part one of a two-part discussion about DACA. In two weeks we will release part two.

Mentions:

Natalie Dowzicky spoke to Alex Nowrasteh, Jose Antonio Vargas, Gaby Pacheco, Oscar Hernandez, Kevin Ortiz, Nelcy Rocha, Ewaoluwa Ogundana, Christian Aguirre, & Bruna Distinto.

Special thanks to TheDream.Us scholarship program for working closely with us to find students to speak with.

Music by Cellophane Sam.

Transcript:

Free markets are incompatible with crony capitalism—the practice of businesses lobbying governments for, and governments granting them, special favors in the form of monopolies, subsidies, tax credits, low-interest loans, or regulations that prevent new firms from entering the field and competing with the favored businesses. Progressives and conservatives sometimes object to crony capitalism on the basis of which industry or firm is getting the favor. As a rule of thumb, Progressives approve of favors for anything green-ish, conservatives for anything militaristic. Both love favors to “our family farmers”—even though nearly all the farm aid goes to big farmers of cash crops. Libertarians alone object to government favors in principle.

Causes and Effects of Cronyism

Crony capitalism is prevalent at the federal as well as the state level, where occupational licensing creates a virtual monopoly of established businesses by requiring expensive licensing procedures for newcomers. Cronyism is thus both unjust and harmful. By boosting the profits of some industries or firms at the expense of other industries or firms, the government violates its obligation to treat everyone impartially, and harms the disfavored industries or firms. And since the government plays favorites by dipping into the public coffer, it also harms taxpayers. The practice socializes costs while privatizing benefits. Crony capitalism also breeds corruption in both business and government, because in exchange for government favors, firms spend money on the campaigns of the favoring politicians. Last but not least, the practice also costs society billions of dollars in unrealized prosperity by harming the privileged firm’s competitors or preventing would-be competitors.

All in all, in Matthew Mitchell’s words, cronyism is an “extraordinarily destructive force.” (Matthew Mitchell, The Pathology of Privilege). Big business is usually regarded as the worst culprit in this regard. But some researchers point out that at least currently, big business doesn’t have much influence on the federal government, as measured by the amount it spends on lobbying: $3 billion a year, versus the $300 billion spent on advertising. (Tyler Cowen, Big Business: A Love Letter, 170-71). But how much big business spends on lobbying might not be a very good measure of its influence on government policy. Perhaps it spends relatively little on lobbying because it doesn’t need to spend more to get what it wants. Even if that is the case, it may still be true that most big, privileged firms don’t have much influence on government because we live in an era of fast technological advances. As a report by Credit Suisse analysts claims, “The average age of a company listed on the S&P 500 has fallen from almost 60 years old in the 1950s to less than 20 years currently.” (“Technology killing off corporate America: Average life span of companies under 20 years”)

On the state and city level, however, attempts by established businesses to keep out new competitors have led to the expansion of occupational licensing. Whereas in the 1950s, only 5% of workers had to be licensed to practice their profession, now nearly 33% do. (License to Work: First Edition, Executive Summary) And many of the licensing requirements have nothing to do with consumer safety.

To be clear, not all business lobbying of government is for the sake of special privileges. Some of it is for the sake of preventing or changing harmful or unjust regulations. The epithet ‘cronyism’ applies only to the former. Again, not all businesses that engage in cronyism are equally at fault. And some may not be at fault at all. Consider a business that seeks a tax credit or subsidy purely defensively, that is, only because it can’t compete against businesses that are getting tax credits or subsidies. No business—or person—has an obligation to do what would normally be obligatory in a corrupt system or situation, if doing so means harming, or even destroying, itself. Not seeking the same favorable treatment as one’s competitors in this situation would be like playing by the rules in a game where everyone else is cheating. A business that seeks a tax credit or subsidy defensively, however, will stop taking tax credits or subsidies when it no longer needs them. If it doesn’t, then it joins the long list of firms that seek favors just for gaining an advantage over their competitors. Needless to say, a business that is already flourishing has no excuse for trying to get tax credits or subsidies. This is what makes Amazon’s recent successful attempts at such help for its second headquarters so deplorable.

Some libertarians reject the idea that seeking tax credits is cronyism because, they claim, the state never had a right to impose taxes on us in the first place. Whatever the merits of this claim about taxes, the argument proves too much. If it’s ok to seek tax credits, it’s also ok to seek subsidies, because, after all, subsidies are taken from the same taxes that the state supposedly never had a right to impose on us. Similarly, if it’s ok to seek tax credits, it’s ok to seek low-interest or guaranteed loans from the government, because they also draw on the taxes that the state supposedly never had a right to impose on us. So if seeking tax credits is not cronyism, neither is seeking subsidies or guaranteed loans, a view that libertarians, of course, reject.

It’s important to note that a business that doesn’t get government help when its rivals do needn’t always do worse than its rivals. Sometimes the exact opposite is true. For example, J.J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad was the only transcontinental railroad built and operated without any government help. It was also the most successful. The two facts are connected. Because he wasn’t subsidized, Hill built his track only where he expected people to use his railroad, whereas his subsidized competitors laid track willy-nilly, as Congress was paying them per mile of track. (Folsom, Myth of the Robber Barons.) Hill educated his farmer-customers about the latest agricultural technology and methods, because he could prosper only if they did. Most of the subsidized railroads went bankrupt in the panic of 1873. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad not only survived, it was, according to the biographer, Michael P. Malone, the “best constructed and most profitable of all the world’s major railroads,” even as the rates Hill charged fell steadily with greater efficiency. (“Railroads, Robber Barons, and Unbridled Capitalism”)

Similarly, Commodore Vanderbilt’s steamship business flourished without any government help, whereas its rivals, fattened by subsidies, foundered under the weight of their own incompetence and wastefulness. (Folsom, Myth of the Robber Barons) In the 1830s, Vanderbilt established routes all over the Northeast, offering service that was cheaper and faster than that of his competitors. Everywhere he went, he reduced fares permanently, beating out Robert Fulton, who had been given a monopoly by the New York State legislature for thirty years. Because Vanderbilt had only his wits to help him compete against his subsidized rivals, he came up with ways of cutting costs and wooing passengers that made his steamships by far the most popular. He also competed with a subsidized trans-Atlantic steamship run by Edward Collins, who got lavish subsidies that were spent on luxurious and economically inefficient steamships (6-8). Vanderbilt declared that his own prosperity was “the direct result of unfettered trade, and unrestrained competition,” and that it was his wish that those who came after him would also find an open field (7-9).

Whom to Blame?

As is obvious, cronyism is both harmful and unjust. Who is primarily responsible for it? Who is the prime mover: the business that lobbies for subsidies, tax credits, tariffs, low-interest loans, or regulations to prevent competition, or the government that grants these favors? A long line of economists, all the way from Adam Smith in the 18th century to Milton Friedman in the 20th, have criticized business for seeking favors. These days, libertarians and others who defend free markets tend to blame the government, whereas progressives, when they blame anyone, tend to blame business.

One reason that most libertarians assign the major share of the blame to the government is that the government violates its obligation to be impartial by playing favorites. This is certainly true. But doesn’t business also have a moral obligation to compete fairly in the market, instead of seeking special treatment? Some libertarians argue that the only obligation of business is to maximize shareholder value without deception or fraud. But avoiding deception or fraud is not sufficient. As Milton Friedman points out, a business must increase its profits within “the rules of the game,” and the rules not only bar deception and fraud, they also require “open and free competition”. Crony capitalism is the very antithesis of open and free competition.

A second reason that libertarians hold the government primarily responsible for cronyism is that if government didn’t have the power to intervene in the economy, business couldn’t lobby it for favors. The root of the problem, they say, is that government has arrogated to itself the power to intervene in the economy. This complaint is also true. But has government accrued this power all by itself, without any encouragement from business? This seems doubtful, if only because government agents and businesspeople have the same incentives to grow the government’s power of intervention. Each wants something from the other, and each is willing to trade favors to get it.

A third reason why libertarians point to government as the main culprit is that however this unhappy state of affairs came about, government, and only government, has the power to change it by changing the laws that allow the government to intervene in the economy. This is undeniable. But those who want to change these laws cannot become government agents without the support of voters. Unfortunately, libertarians seem to be the only group that support such reform-minded individuals. Too many businesses support politicians who will pass regulations that will protect them from competition. And too many non-business voters think that all regulations protect customers from harm, or else that they serve social justice. Their guiding philosophy seems to be that “it is to secure these regulations, that Governments are instituted among Men”; without these regulations we would be like helpless children in the hands of business. As libertarians and other defenders of free markets know, however, most federal regulations benefit big business at the expense of small or new businesses, and occupational licensing at the state and local level often protects established businesses at the expense of new ones. Sadly, even the most obviously ridiculous regulations and licensing requirements are welcomed with open arms by many voters. Consider the federal regulations of frozen, unbaked cherry pies. The FDA requires that all such pies contain at least 25% of cherries by weight, of which no more than 15% may be blemished. It further defines “blemished” and “frozen” and tells bakers how much crust they may have on the pie. Fortunately, the FDA recently announced that it would axe this regulation (“FDA To Stop Regulating the Amount of Cherries in Frozen Cherry Pie”). But when I posted this announcement on Facebook, the news was greeted with alarm by some of my friends, as though without this regulation frozen cherry pie aficionados would forever more be condemned to eating pure flour pies instead of cherry pies. Yet the unregulated condition of blueberry and other fruit pies occasioned no alarm.

It seems that there is no one primary culprit in the picture. Government, business, progressives, and conservatives are all equally blameworthy. The government is more at fault when it takes the initiative to offer subsidies, tax credits, or loans to a business or industry. This may be the case with the electric car industry. A particular business or industry is more at fault when it takes the initiative to lobby for favors. Conservatives are more at fault when they push for subsidies for manufacturers of military equipment. And progressives are more at fault when they demand more regulation of businesses.

The Way to Open, Competitive Markets

Is there a way out? Michael Munger and Mario Villarreal-Diaz are pessimistic (“The Road to Crony Capitalism”). Businesspeople have to act rationally, they say, and it would be irrational for them to leave dollars on the table (p. 341). Likewise politicians vis-à-vis votes. But what is rational or irrational depends on your goal. If your goal is to make money any old how—or be elected any old how—then Munger and Villarreal-Diaz are right that rationality requires businesspeople—and politicians—to keep playing the crony game. Yet, as we have seen, there have been and still are some businesspeople (e.g., Whole Foods founder John Mackey and former BB&T CEO John Allison) whose goal is to make money only in free and fair competition. And there are politicians whose goal is to treat everyone fairly (e.g., Justin Amash). For all of them, cronyism is irrational.

But how do most politicians and businesspeople view cronyism? So far as I’m aware, there have been no studies of politicians’ views on this matter. But Matthew Mitchell et al. have conducted an important study of businesspeoples’ beliefs about cronyism (A Culture of Favoritism: Corporate Privilege and Beliefs About Markets and Government). In a survey of 500 business leaders of big firms, 61% reported that their firm benefited from at least one form of favoritism, usually tax credits (p. 6). But 70% of all leaders also thought that the government should not favor specific firms or industries (37). This response was, however, much lower among those who thought that their firms were being favored (61.1%) than among those who thought that their firm was not being favored (83.8%) (pp. 36-38). Business leaders who are the recipients of government largess are more likely to believe that they are doing the right thing by their businesses and society by taking this largesse. It’s hard to say whether this favorable belief about cronyism is the effect of their cronyism, or its cause, or both. Fortunately, among business leaders and the broader public, 76% oppose favoritism. (“Fifty Years of Rent-Seeking: A Q&A with Matthew Mitchell,” in The Bridge, July 24, 2019.)

So, the task of changing the minds of those who think that favoritism is good for the economy and society, though hard, is not impossible. Another reason for hope is that at least two well-known left-wing scholars have recognized that regulation often helps big business at the expense of small business. The left-wing historian, Gabriel Kolko, writes about Progressives’ failure to see that the federal regulation of the economy that they were promoting was actually benefiting big business. (The Triumph of Conservatism, A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916.) In 1973, the pro-government, activist lawyer Ralph Nader co-authored an article with Mark Green about the way government regulation of the economy ultimately ends up benefiting big firms at the expense of small ones, undermining competition and establishing monopolies (“Economic Regulation vs. Competition: Uncle Sam the Monopoly Man”). This led to a spate of (partial) deregulations of some major industries, including the airlines. Could this not happen again?

As for occupational licensing, which now covers about 33% of America workers, we can take hope from the fact that in the 1950s it covered only 5%. The efforts of the Institute for Justice have led to reforms in several states. Is it not possible that occupational licensing will continue shrinking?

There can never be a complete separation between the state and the economy, even if we have only a minimal state, because the state has to rely on private enterprise to fulfill its minimal functions: defending us from criminals and foreign enemies. It’s private enterprise that must build the roads, buildings, military vehicles, and weapons that the state needs to carry out its functions. Therefore the potential for cronyism will always be there, and so will the need for vigilance.

Julia Maskivker believes not only that we should vote, but that we must vote. Even when confronted with two unappealing candidates, or with ballot propositions whose effects we will barely feel, or with the fact that our single vote might never tip an election, we must vote.

Do we have a duty to vote or do we have a duty instead to vote well? What is the purpose of voting? What is voter fatigue?

Further Reading:

The Duty to Vote, written by Julia Maskivker

An Economic Case for Democracy, written by Anthony Downs

The Ethics of Voting, written by Jason Brennan

Related Content:

Ranked Choice Voting, A Better Way to Vote?, Building Tomorrow Podcast

Voting as a Moral Wrong, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Bonus Election Day Episode: Should Libertarians Vote?, Free Thoughts Podcast

Summary:

Before the 18th-century, European criminal law was unpredictable, repressive, and punitive. Judges had an abundance of discretionary power, and harsh punishments were doled out inconsistently. Cesare Beccaria, in his famous essay On Crimes and Punishment articulated a system of law based upon deterring crimes and using punishment only when it was necessary to detain current criminals and deter future offenders. To this end, he was against the death penalty, which he believed was counter-productive and barbaric. Following its publication in 1764, On Crimes and Punishments became not only popular reading, but also a catalyst for reform in Europe, Russia, and America.

Further Reading:

Cesare Beccaria Was a Trail Blazer on Capital Punishment, written by Paul Meany

Self-Interest and Social Order in Classical Liberalism: Thomas Hobbes, written by george Smith

Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments [1764]

Summary:

Between 1720-1723 in England, a popular weekly pamphlet became a thorn in the government’s side for viciously criticizing the corruption and greed of politicians. This pamphlet was known as Cato’s Letters, written by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon consisted of over a hundred “letters” on topics such as freedom of speech, religious toleration, the benefits of liberty, and the right to resist tyrannical governments. Their writings became extremely popular not only in England but also in America. Throughout the American Revolution Cato’s Letters were quoted as an esteemed authority of the nature of freedom and the nightmare of tyranny.

Further Reading:

Cato’s Letters: 300 Years, written by Chris Edwards

The Legacy and the Ideas Behind Cato’s Letters, written by Paul Meany

Cato’s Letters, Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

Summary:

Medieval feminism sounds like an oxymoron. The medieval ages inherited a caustic tradition of misogyny from the ancient world. The 15th-century writer Christine de Pisan argued in her work The City of Ladies that the ideas of both her predecessors and contemporaries were delusional. Pisan explained the inherent equality between men and women. For Pisan, both sexes had a capacity for virtue, and both ought to be educated in the same manner.

Further Reading:

Feminism and Women’s Rights

Libertarian Feminism: An Honorable Tradition, written by Sharon Presley

Feminism Does Not Demand Collectivism, written by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Americans tend to talk about feminism as a series of chronological and generational “waves,” but this obscures major differences between feminist factions within eras and the recurrence of ideological battles between them over time. The proper role of the government in promoting equality, whether to define equality around opportunities or outcomes, and policies regarding parenting, labor, and sex have long divided U.S. feminists.

At times—generally when government mandates directly deprive women of equal status in very obvious ways—it has been relatively easy for feminists on all sides of these divides to come together in common cause. Less so when the agenda goes beyond ending discriminatory policies to propping up laws that advantage women over men, or laws that restrict liberty broadly for the sake of creating some social conditions supposedly necessary for women to thrive.

Today, as western feminism enters what some might call its “fourth wave,” libertarian feminists can play an important role in reorienting the movement toward freedom, individual rights, and empowering people against the state. But first, those with classically liberal leanings must stop seeing socialism, Progressivism, and authoritarianism as inherent features of movements for sex and gender equality. 

The early American feminist movement was fundamentally “a classical liberal women’s movement,” argued Joan Kennedy Taylor in “Feminism, Classical Liberalism, and the Future.”

The 1993 essay touches on the same themes as Taylor’s first book, Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Reconsidered (1992). “Each time feminism came on the scene, it was the message of individualism that captured the imagination of women,” she writes in the latter.

Yet while “the appeal of non-coercive, non-governmental feminism has always reached a wider audience than collectivism has, it is often collectivism that gets media attention. And various feminist theorists (and attackers of feminism) have been happy to say that such collectivists speak for the only true feminism,” suggested Taylor back then.

At a time when feminism’s frontiers were even more tightly policed than they are today, Taylor relied on historical example to make a case for the legitimacy of libertarian feminists in the late 20th Century. Working through groups like Feminists for Free Expression (which Taylor co-founded) and the Association of Libertarian Feminists, Taylor and her cohort saw some great successes over the course of the 1990s and the early aughts. But in several key realms, their brand of feminism has been backsliding since then.

It’s time we reclaim a place for it in mainstream feminist discourse and within the libertarian movement.

Many “First Wave” American feminists came to that movement from fighting for the abolition of slavery. These 19th century activists—women and men—worked to improve women’s legal and social position using a natural rights framework. They sought an end to state-mandated sex discrimination in realms like voting, marriage contracts, and property rights, with measuable success. 

Come the first few decades of the 20th Century, however, and “classical liberalism had been modified by progressivism and so had feminism,” noted Taylor. By the time (white) women in America were granted the right to vote, in 1919, prominent feminist voices were clashing over whether this newly-earned electoral power should be used “to push for special-interest legislation or legal equality,” she pointed out.

Over the next few decades, women’s rights campaigners teamed up with Progressives, socialists, religious conservatives, and others pushing for alcohol prohibition, sex-based labor restrictions, anti-prostitution laws, and other state interventions supposedly necessary for women’s good. Meanwhile, membership in dedicated women’s groups dwindled, as organized feminist activism was subsumed into other political and social movements.

Many prominent feminists of the era promoted an “angel in the house” feminism that conditioned women’s rights on their supposedly superior talents for morality, empathy, and matters of home and hearth—a perch that left little room for the concerns of women who fell outside white, heterosexual, middle-class, or Christian respectability bounds.

Some state-wary feminists were still active, of course (and a number of equality-minded women writers of this period would become influential in the early U.S. libertarian movement), just as black women, gay women, transgender women and others outside the progressive feminist mainstream were performing resistance and seeking progress in their own ways and in their own communities. Yet little of this occurred under the broader umbrella of women’s rights or organized feminism. And little, if any, of it permeated mass media or wider cultural consciousness.

Flash forward to the 1960s, however, and the first stirrings of the “Second Wave” feminist movement were grounded in individual rights and classical liberalism. This also remained the case into the 1970s, suggested Taylor. “Consciousness raising was a profoundly individualistic activity, and the political issues that gained wide adherence were the reproductive rights to birth control and abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment, which (at least in its initial support) was a classical liberal restraint on government,” she wrote.

Many of the significant advances made by this cohort were cultural or social, not tied to government. And, again, “women’s liberation” captured widespread attention and allyship among disparate audiences. But given a little time, the classical liberal strain in feminism fell behind forces fighting for new sorts of protective labor laws, declaring war on pornography, and pushing particular lifestyle choices as the only way to achieve gender equality.

By the end of the 20th century, mainstream feminism was dominated by “a left-wing critique of American society, mistrust of individual liberty, and the belief that regulation of sexist behavior and language was essential to achieving equality,” wrote Wendy McElroy in Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century (2002). Often, these “radical” feminists found common ground with values groups and social conservatives who also aimed to use the state to impose their version of good on everyone.

Although they don’t always grab headlines like collectivist feminists, “There are feminists today,” wrote Taylor in 1993, “who advocate noncoercive, nonlegislative change in society,” adding further that there were “even more women who share [libertarian feminist] ideals without calling themselves feminists—because the media focus on those within the spectrum of feminism who want more laws: either economic legislation or laws against pornography.”

This should not sound foreign to anyone paying attention to feminist issues and coverage today. But between the late ’80s and now, what folks like Taylor and McElroy called “individualist feminism” would once again cause a little ruckus.

A less infantilizing, more accessible, and more sex-positive feminism was gaining traction, with less hostility to individual women making their own lifestyle choices and less qualms about pop culture, private enterprise, and more.

In the 1990s, “American feminism experienced cataclysmic changes,” suggests Camille Paglia in “Libertarian Feminism in the Twenty-first Century,” her contribution to Liberty for Women. The 2002 essay collection (edited by McElroy) features an array of “Third Wave” feminists on issues such as censorship, sex work, discrimination, and women’s health care. There’s cautious optimism throughout, hope that feminism’s worst days may have passed.

“My wing of pro-sex feminism, which was ostracized and silenced through the long period ruled by anti-pornography activists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, made a stunning resurgence,” wrote Paglia. In addition, Paglia no longer saw feminism’s mainstream fueled by an opposition to fashion, rock music, sex, science, or free markets. 

With the demise of the Soviet Union and “fashionable Marxism,” noted Paglia, “capitalism’s central role in the modern emancipation of women is starting to be seen.”

“Most of the positions for which I was pilloried when I came on the scene a decade ago […] are now scarcely controversial at all, so sweeping has been the victory of libertarian feminism, which is in tune with a younger, sassier generation of feminists,” Paglia wrote in 2002.

Indeed, younger feminists were helping shift priorities within organized feminist activism and seizing whatever cheap or new communications mediums they could to spread their ideas without gatekeeping. Meanwhile, classical liberal feminists of all ages were finding themselves less outcast, commanding attention in academic, media, and policy spheres.

The U.K. faced a somewhat similar feminist trajectory over the 20th Century. The first “death” of libertarian feminism in Britain took place somewhere between 1900 and 1920, suggested Johanna Faust and Chris R. Tame in a 1987 pamphlet from The Libertarian Alliance and the British Association of Libertarian Feminists. “From that time on libertarian feminism suffered the same decline as libertarianism and classical liberalism in general—until their contemporary rebirth.”

In the same pamphlet, historian Stephen Davies offers a history of waxing and waning libertarian tides within mainstream British feminism. While “the connection of feminism to socialism may appear inevitable,” concludes Davies, “history has shown that this is not the case.”

When the sort of illiberal feminism that favors social engineering through the law is dominant, libertarian feminists—and the much larger faction of ordinary people who believe in basic feminist values—wind up turning away from organized feminist activism and causes. This, in turn, allows more space for radical, carceral, collectivist, and all-around anti-liberty factions to anoint themselves the spokespersons for all women’s issues, the gatekeepers of good gender politics, and the arbiters of true feminism.

Both feminism’s outside image and inner parameters shift in response to changes in the classical liberal/collectivist or libertarian/authoritarian orientation of the movement.

Taylor argued something like this back in 1992. “The individualist impulse brings women together,” she suggests in Reclaiming the Mainstream. But “as the aims of the movement shift, from a stress on individualism, social cooperation, and negative rights to a stress on collectivism (not just any ‘collective’ action, but in the sense of using government power) and positive rights, the movement becomes marginal and ineffective.”

Much of the cultural territory captured for classical liberal feminism in Taylor’s time has since been lost again. The reasons why are complex, and I’ll leave them for another time. For now, let’s just say it’s understandable why there are many who say libertarians and classical liberals should simply cede any claim to feminism and move on.

But they’re wrong. The struggle for a more freedom-friendly feminism—one emphasizing natural rights, empowering anti-carceral actions, and centered on actual equality under the law (“equality of permission,” as author and historian Deirdre McCloskey puts it)—is one with deep roots among modern feminists. And it is too important to give up now.

Whether they accept or reject the “feminist” label, most Americans believe in political equality for everyone, regardless of sex, gender, or sexual orientation. Most Americans want the legal and cultural room to organize their own families, education, professional ambitions, reproductive decisions, sexuality, social lives, and self care as they see fit—and can, with the right pitch, be persuaded to let others do the same.

There is great potential for a classical liberal feminism’s resurgence. Yet libertarians are often our own worst enemies when it comes to the kind of coalition-building that could actually help reclaim feminism for liberty in the 21st century.

While 21st Century libertarians carry on the classical liberal tradition of earlier feminist eras, many speak the language of anti-feminism—leading potential allies to conclude (not inexplicably) that libertarianism as a philosophy is sexist and offers no sound solutions or perspectives when it comes to women’s and gender issues. This also creates room for today’s carceral, collectivist, and illiberal feminists to present themselves as the only path forward for those who care about equality.

Plus, as Taylor observed (in so many words), “normies” tend to tune out when socialists and scolds dominate public-facing feminism. And people from all sorts of marginalized groups wind up pushed out and/or turned off when feminism’s gatekeepers take a “thick” view (for example, saying that supporting a particular political candidate, promoting certain trendy causes, or adopting the right rhetorical style are required in order to call oneself a feminist).

If history is any guide, the sort of diverse, pluralistic, and populist coalition that must be a part of any effective modern feminist movement can only be sustained by a radical commitment to freedom and individual rights.

HBO’s Westworld causes you to question the very nature of your reality. In this world, humans interact with AI intelligences, hosts, for the experience of a lifetime, but at times it is challenging to decipher who’s a host and who’s human. In many instances, the hosts seem more human-like than the real humans. What does it mean to be a conscious being?

The Second Amendment is one of the most hotly debated subjects in American politics. The text is succinct: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The amendment allows citizens to own firearms, not only for individual protection but also for the defense of their rights against government tyranny. For some, this anti-government sentiment seems outdated at best, dangerously paranoid at worst. It is an especially alien concept in Europe, where gun ownership is not a culturally ingrained tradition. As the debate around guns becomes increasingly divisive, it is important to know the original purpose of the Second Amendment. Its ideological roots are deeply indebted to an Enlightenment vision of history and English Republicanism.  

Not the Republican Party

When I say Republicanism, I am not referring to members of the modern day political party. Republicanism is a long and broad intellectual tradition that spans ancient Roman writers such as Cicero and Polybius, medieval Italians such as Nicolo Machiavelli, and early modern English writers such as Algernon Sidney and James Harrington. In ancient Greek and Roman political thought, there were only three possible forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The choice was between the rule of the one, the few, or the many. Republicans believed that the best government would be one which utilizes all three forms of government, thus balancing out the excesses of each kind while keeping their virtues. This was known as a mixed constitutional form of government. In addition to a mixed constitution, Republicans advocated for a separation of powers to stop any one individual or group from dominating the political process. But a well designed government was not enough. Republicans thought civic virtue was needed in tandem with a sound governmental architecture. What they meant by “civic virtue” was a commitment to the common good and a sense of patriotism.  If all of these elements—the mixed constitution, the separation of powers, and civic virtue—were present, republicans believed liberty could prevail and tyranny would be held at bay.  

18th-century Views on the Nature of History

Heavily influenced by the scientific thought of Isaac Newton, the Founders like John Adams believed that the same cause would produce the same effect. This idea of cause and effect was applied to history as a rudimentary science of how best to promote liberty and curb power. The Founders believed that power and liberty were in constant conflict, with power consistently overcoming liberty due to humanity’s weak will in the face of the temptation of power. 

They found the solution to the corrupting nature of political power in the works of English Republican writers. Republicans argued emphatically against standing armies as they believed that they promoted tyranny. Standing armies promoted tyranny because they paid their members to fight, making them similar to mercenaries. A true patriot fought on behalf of a cause, not a pay cheque. Professional armies were viewed as rapacious mercenaries who would perform anything their masters bidded as long as the price was right. Rather than professional armies providing national defence, they proposed instead the maintenance of citizen militias as a check on despotic power and as a method of promoting and renewing personal virtues. 

Long before the Age of Enlightenment, the ancient Greeks believed that the power of tyche (chance or luck) played a key role in human affairs; the Romans characterised fortune as a fickle woman due to her unpredictable nature. Later, medieval Europeans believed that fortune was an officer of God’s will and a “terrifying instrument of divine providence.” In contrast, at the dawn of the Enlightenment Newton’s advances in science portrayed an ordered world with rules governing its every action. Enlightenment thinkers believed that ascribing events to chance simply reflected ignorance of the cause of an event. Humanity was now to be governed by the ordered rules of the universe, rather than the whims of chance. 

The language of cause and effect began to dominate philosophical discussion. For example, the analogy of God as a watchmaker was evoked by thinkers such as William Paley: God created the universe, but the universe ran itself based on a set of rules operating without His direct interference. Importantly, it was believed that humans could discover these rules and thus learn how the world functioned. These ideas—cause and effect and the proposition that universal rules govern the universe—were transplanted into the study of history.  History was effectively secularized, there was no divine intervention, only human action. Enlightenment thinkers believed that by examining history, they could perfect human affairs. Edward Gibbons, summarising the Enlightenment view of history, exclaimed that “history is the science of cause and effects.”

Liberty and Power: Hunter and Hunted

Along with this view of history a conception of human nature became common amongst the Founding generation’s view of the duality of power and liberty. The Founding generation viewed power as a kind of natural predator that preys on a delicate liberty. To the Founders power was, simply put, the active domination of some over others. The nature of power was constantly contrasted with the nature of liberty, which, delicate and passive, was to be defended while power, robust and brutally active, was to be resisted. 

The Founders did not view power as inherently evil. It was considered a necessary aspect of organizing a community in a peaceful manner; therefore, a degree of power was necessary to defend liberty. The problem was that mankind is prone to a fatal tendency towards corruption due to the temptations of power. Power contorted people into immoral and greedy despots. Samuel Adams aptly states that “the depravity of mankind that ambition and lust of power above the law are…predominant passions in the breasts of most men.” The temptations of power were considered so strong and pernicious that even “the united considerations of reason and religion’ are not ‘sufficiently powerful to restrain the lusts of men.” Human will is weak. Power, like a strong drink, intoxicates people, turning formerly good people into the most rapacious tyrants.

When combined with the idea of universal history, the impotence of the human will in the face of power’s temptation meant that humanity’s existence was a grim affair. Power was always expanding and growing, while liberty was perpetually on the brink of extinction. John Adams described liberty as “hunted and persecuted in all countries by cruel power.” Writers who greatly influenced the American Revolutionaries, such as David Hume, John Trenchard, and Machiavelli, all agreed that what happened before will come to fruition yet again if similar circumstances persist. Put simply, the same causes will produce the same effects. This meant history was a grim tapestry of human folly. 

Yet however miserable the historical record seemed, there remained brief periods of freedom in certain societies such as the Roman and Italian republics. The Founders believed they could learn from history by discerning under what conditions liberty had flourished and power was tamed. What, they asked, was the cause of despotic power’s constant victories over liberty? 

This is where it is vital to understand the English Republican tradition. Republican writers believed the key to disarming tyranny was to oppose the maintenance of standing armies during times of peace. Their position stemmed from three main beliefs: a general skepticism of and opposition to standing armies, a commitment to citizen militias as a check on despotic power, and, finally, the belief that a virtuous population owned property and bore arms.

Why Oppose Standing Armies?

This tradition of opposition to standing armies, later adopted by the English Republicans and American Founders, can be traced back to  Machiavelli in Renaissance Italy in 1520 A.D. Machiavelli, in his treatise The Art of War, believed that in a republic every citizen should bear the burden of military service. While every citizen was to take part in the military, it was to be the profession of none. Gesturing towards Republican Rome, Machiavelli states that Rome thrived when “there was never any soldier who made war his only occupation.” Citizen militias defend the liberty of all, but also renew civic virtue. Machiavelli also blamed the decline of Rome to the professionalization of soldiering under Marius and later emperors. Machiavelli’s ideas were popular among the English Republicans ____ centuries later who shared his belief that the key to maintaining a stable and free republic was a citizen militia ready to take up arms against any possible oppression, foreign or domestic.

English Republicans who followed Machiavelli as a guide believed that the main tool of a despot or tyrant was the pernicious influence of a standing professional army during times of peace. The professional army earned their wages by following their master’s orders. This meant their allegiance was to those who paid them, not to the citizenry at large. Because of this, some feared that having a professional standing army would allow potential despots to easily subdue and oppress the populace. Typical of the Republican ethos, John Trenchard wrote, “Unhappy nations have lost that precious jewel liberty…[because] their necessities or indiscretion have permitted a standing army to be kept amongst them.”

On the other hand, citizen militias existed only to defend their own property and liberty. They did not fight for wages; instead they would be called to arms out of their own self-interest and sense of duty to the nation. Because of their attachment to their property, they would also not take part in unnecessary foreign wars of expansion. 

The Citizen’s Resistance to Despotism

On the topic of standing armies, Andrew Fletcher warned emphatically that “he that is armed, is always a master of the purse of him that is unarmed.” Racked with a constant fear of corrupt authority, republicans stressed the importance of a citizens militia. The maintenance of militias and the support of citizen’s rights to arm themselves are both key features of Republican thought. John Trenchard and Walter Moyle summarised these views in An Argument showing that a Standing Army is inconsistent with a Free Government, and absolutely destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy. Similar views were also espoused in Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s collection of essays known as Cato’s Letters. These authors agreed on the premise that “a Man that hath a Sword by his side, shall have least occasion to make use of it.”

The primary function of a citizen militia was to be a check upon centralized power. Gordon and Trenchard affirmed that “a general exercise of the best of their people in the use of arms was the only bulwark of their liberties; this was reckon’d the surest way to preserve them both at home and abroad.” Discussing the benefits of militias, the Republican James Burgh believed “there is no end to observations on the difference between the measures likely to be pursued by a minister backed by a standing army and those of a court awed by the fear of an armed people.” Militias were a fundamental aspect of the republican order. They represented the true will of the people and acted as a protector of their cherished liberties. The militia was considered a check upon the encroaching hand of power, even if they never actually fired a single shot. Just the idea of armed cohorts of citizens throughout the country would make central authorities think twice before acting.

Akin to the classical societies they praised, Republicans aimed to make soldiering the practice of all but the profession of none. William Blackstone most eloquently summarised this idea stating, “In a land of liberty it is extremely dangerous to make a distinct order of the profession of arms.” Francis Hutcheson developed a theory of rotational service in which people would be part of a militia for a few years at a time and then return to their own private lives. Hutcheson believed this idea would be both prudent in the defence of the nation and promotion of virtue. It would allow for a large stock of trained troops in case of a national emergency and would foster “reputable virtuous citizens, many of them having valuable stakes in their country.” In short, there ought to be no distinction between soldier and citizen in the Republican society.

Virtue, Property and Arms

James Harrington was the first English Republican to adapt and expand upon Machiavelli’s views in his book The Commonwealth of Oceania. Where Machiavelli linked the bearing of arms with citizenship, Harrington linked the bearing of arms with owning property. Harrington believed that a citizen militia, ideally composed of economically independent freeholders of property, was the key to a free republic. He based his idea of property as a qualifier for citizenship on the model of the Roman Republic—property ownership was essential for a militia member because if people were invested in the land they lived on, they would defend it more adamantly since “where the owner of the plough comes to have the sword, too, he will use it in defence of his own.” The ownership of property meant that a citizen was qualified to bear arms in defence of his country. This duality of property and arms is vital to the Republican notion of citizenship. James Burgh argued that “a militia consisting of any others than men of property in a country, is no militia but a mungral army.” Similarly, Blackstone argued that the Roman empire collapsed when defence was in the interest of the “rabble of Italy.” Militiamen ought to be personally invested in the society that they  are charged with protecting.

English Republicans had a fierce distrust of centralized power as corrupting to a person’s character. One important tool of a corrupt central authority was the standing army because its soldiers had allegiance to no one except those who paid their wages. To combat the possibility of a standing army, Republicans believed a citizen militia ought to be maintained to protect the liberty of the people. However, a citizen militia alone would not suffice. A robust character also had to be cultivated by property ownership, which promoted the agrarian virtues of frugality, industry, independence, and courage. Economic independence and the bearing of arms were considered prerequisites of Republican citizenship.

Republicanism across the Atlantic

The views of English Republicans were extremely popular in the colonies during the American Revolution. In public and private libraries, Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana was owned by 7% of libraries, Algernon Sidney’s works were held by 25%, and Cato’s Letters were held by a staggering 40% of libraries. The works of Harrington, Sidney, Hutcheson, Blackstone, Gordon, and Trenchard were owned by a wide array of the Founding Fathers, including Josiah Quincy, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and Samuel Adams. In Josiah Quincy’s last will and testament, he wished to give his son the works of influential authors including Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, and Algernon Sidney. He believed these authors were essential for his son to learn about a free society. After saying he would bestow these authors’ works to his son, he wrote: “May the spirit of liberty rest upon him!” Throughout the country, English Republicans were constantly quoted in major newspapers, pamphlets and speeches.

American Opposition to Standing Armies

Many of the newly formed states’ bills of rights contained articles dealing with the problems of standing armies, militias, and the right to possess arms. Virginia’s Bill of Rights contained all of these issues in one article reading “that a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in times of peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases military power should be under strict subordination to, and governed by the civil power.” Both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists agreed that citizen militias were the guarantors of liberty. The concept of militias as an essential institution to the flourishing of liberty was a widely held belief during the revolutionary period. 

American colonists viewed themselves as a free nation surrounded by a world filled with despotic kings. According to George Mason, “North America is the only great nursery of freemen now left upon the face of the earth.” According to the Founders, Europe was dominated by kings and nobles who had disarmed their people. By depriving them of self-defence, despots could easily oppress them and strip them of their liberties through the domination of standing armies. Josiah Quincy believed professional standing armies made “wicked ministers more audacious.” For Quincy, a paid soldier was but a “slave among freemen” who had no reason to protect the rights of any but their master. 

In contrast to this vision of Europe, America had supposedly retained its liberties through, according to James Madison, “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.” While this sentiment may seem a bit self-congratulatory, it was not a view held solely by Americans. The former British army member Charles Lee wrote in a widely circulated pamphlet that “the Yeomanry of America…are accustomed from their infancy to firearms; they are expert in the use of them.” He lamented that in England, “by tyranny of certain laws,” Englishmen were widely ignorant of the use of arms. English Republicans saw America as a proof of concept; it was a nation free of tyranny due to its opposition to standing armies and its tradition of bearing arms. They used this depiction of America as a nation of virtuous farmers bearing arms as a way to chastise the luxurious hedonism of England, a departure from their own honourable history of yeoman farmers.

Virtuous Republic

The idealized vision of Roman farmers . The Roman poets Virgil and Horace praised the agrarian lifestyle resulting in their poems being devoured by American landowners. The American diplomat and poet Joel Barlow, in his poem The Hasty Pudding, praised the simple virtues of rural life. Thomas Jefferson believed that “our government will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.” Orators augmented their speeches by referencing the virtues of the Roman Republics soldiers and encouraging civic duty with the language of the English Republicans. The Republican vision of independent farmers with a robust sense of independence was naturally appealing to those American colonists who were agrarian landholders. The Founders believed that no republic could survive for any length of time without a virtuous population dedicated to the collective protection of liberty. The virtue of Americans was promoted by their attachment to their property in a similar manner which the preceding English Republicans had described. 

It is worth noting that while republicans talked a great deal about the importance of property ownership to promoting virtue and liberty, all too often they were hypocrites in regards to the role of women and slaves in their idealized vision of society. Slaves were denied their freedom, but even once freed they were commonly denied the right to bear arms. Similarly, women were overlooked. Female property ownership was typically subordinated to male heads of household, which also meant that women could not take part in the militia system. This is not to say women played no part in republican thought, but the role they played was restrained by their gender. Thus the republican vision of a militia was one which only included free, white, property-owning men.

This view of American agrarian virtue was not solely espoused by Americans. The English preacher Richard Price used the idea of American agrarian virtue to criticize the current state of English society. In Price’s Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution: And the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World, he argued that the Yeomanry of America were the best protectors of liberty due their virtuous rustic lifestyle. Similarly, the English politician Matthew Robinson-Morris Rokeby described the state of liberty in England as “the last snuff of an expiring lamp.” On the other hand, Rokeby believed America was inhabited by “a new and uncorrupted people.”

Anachronistic Elements of Republican Thought

The idea of a citizen militia quickly receded into the background following the Whiskey Rebellion during the 1790s. While the rebellion had been successfully quelled with little bloodshed, it exposed the disorganized nature of militias and their lack of experience. The Whiskey Rebellion played a key role in the early expansion of the American military as a standing army. 

Without examining the origins of the Second Amendment, it is impossible to understand why the Founders feared centralized authority.  They believed that the historical track record of nations with professional armies justified their fear of unchecked federal power. The standing army was condemned as an enemy of liberty and a tool of tyrants. Instead, a militia made up of propertied citizens would defend the newly founded country not only from foreign invaders but also from rapacious statesmen. 

Contemporary supporters of the second amendment often stress the importance of the individual right to bear arms, but they commonly ignore the original intent of the second amendment, namely to curb the growth of an expansive professional military. Citizen militias were, at least in theory, meant to curb the growth of a professional military because a standing army is capable of subduing the very citizens they are meant to serve. In 2008, following the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller, the courts ruled that the right to bear arms existed outside of the context of a militia. Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that this was a return to the “original understanding” of the Second Amendment. Regardless of whether the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to own weapons privately, it is undeniable that the Second Amendment was implemented to avoid the problems associated with a standing army.

Democracy can be a good thing, but if forced into places and situations where it fits poorly, like a Thanksgiving dinner, then maybe we should rethink its limits. We discuss the nature and purpose of democracy and whether democratic politics is an end in itself or whether democracy exists for a purpose with Robert Talisse.

Is it possible to have too much democracy? Does too much democracy damage the very goals for which we have democracy in the first place? How has our partisanship seeped in to other areas of our lives?

Further Reading:

New Books in Philosophy, hosted by Robert Talisse

Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place, written by Robert Talisse

Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, written by Ilya Somin

Why We Argue Podcast, hosted by Robert Talisse

Related Content:

Religious Toleration Versus Religious Freedom, Excursions Podcast

In the Pursuit of Self Government, Does Quality News Matter?, Anthony Comegna & Caleb Brown

Three Languages of Politics, written by Arnold Kling

Of Political Society, by David Hume