Ralph Raico covers classical liberalism’s growth, development and possible future. Liberalism arose in Europe entwined with Christianity. Why Europe? The East lacked the idea of freedom from the state and never established the legal system that could protect wealth. Europe had multiple, decentralized competing powers, not a universal empire.Europe came into existence in the Middle Ages. The contractual relationship between princes and subjects was similar to the Magna Carta. The Middle Ages [5th to the 15th century] were not dark ages. The sign of a freeman was that he had the right to keep and bear arms.The powerful, international Church of Rome was the strong institution that acted as a counterweight to secular power. It was the largest property owner in Europe and concerned about taxation.Lecture 1 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

1. The European Miracle

Germany surrendered conditionally in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Everybody opposed the treaty, but it was forcibly implemented. Revisionism is necessary to combat state propaganda, e.g. the lie in WWII that FDR was surprised by Pearl Harbor.The welfare state was actually begun by Bismarck in the 1880s. The welfare state that now exists will simply keep expanding in its agenda of rooting out older values and substituting others. As the crisis of the welfare state is approached, only newcomers from the third world can become taxpayers for retired elders. Identities of European peoples will be extinguished.Constitutions and Bills of Rights will not be the protectors of our liberties. The liberals in classical liberalism had no answers because they still held to the power of the state. The centralized state must be broken down by means such as secession even to the level of the individual.History shows the struggle for liberty. He who controls the present controls the interpretation of the past.Lecture 10 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

10. Classical Liberalism and the Welfare-Warfare State

Mises’ book, Liberalism, states that liberalism sufficed to change the face of the earth. The term liberal has since been hijacked by social democrats, so they don’t have to use the tainted word socialism. Raico defines liberalism to be civil society, minus the state, running itself within the bounds of private property. After the end of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance created the late scholastics – the School of Salamanca. Their legitimate theory of value had nothing to do with labor as it did in England. They saw that buyer and seller are each better off by an exchange, not equal.The Dutch produced a fairly free society, but not a political philosophy. The French felt the period 1846-1940 to be almost a hundred years of true laissez-faire policy.During the English Civil War, the Levellers began the history of liberalism by their demands to free John Lilburne from prison. The Leveller cause was effectively crushed in 1649. Their legacy was abstract natural rights. Rothbard called them the world’s first self-consciously libertarian mass movement.John Locke is a fountainhead of crucial ideas about society being self-ruled with property being the fundamental right to life, liberty, and estates. Government was meant only to protect that right. Such an uncoerced vision animated Jeffersonians. The laissez-faire society worked well.Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson were chief thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. They held that the fundamental importance of human reason should be combined with a rejection of unreasonable authority.Lecture 2 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

2. Classical Liberalism

Mill played a crucial, but inflated, role in liberalism. Rothbard did not like Mill much. Mill was a disaster on economic freedom and international issues. Mill rejected that workers and capitalists shared interests. Mill was anti-capitalist.Mill’s On Liberty addresses the nature and limits of legitimate power by society over individuals. Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor, a married woman, twisted his own mores. Mill’s liberalism had little regard for the past. John Maynard Keynes also contributed to liberalism meaning almost anything including Nazism. Keynes felt his system was more adapted to socialism and Stalinism.But the hallmark of liberalism is that society can run itself with voluntary agreements based upon private property rights.French liberalism involved the idea of class conflict which led to totalitarianism. This doctrine is generally associated with Marxism, but predated Marx. The French made all government offices open to all citizens. That was the essence of the French Revolution. Two main conflicting classes are producers and plunderers.The British tradition of liberalism, as Hayek espoused, leaves out the tradition of natural rights.Lecture 3 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

3. John Stuart Mill

Gustave de Molinari became the grand old man of classical liberalism, crediting Pareto. Molinari understood that the main issue in the Civil War was the tariff, not slavery. In Italy economists founded free market economics, crediting Bastiat.In America, John Taylor saw society becoming feudalistic with exploiting classes. Government needed to be separated from banking systems. Thomas Jefferson’s values were held most high. William Graham Sumner talked about plutocrats – wealthy persons who used the state. There was the liberal idea of class conflict. Production led to peace, whereas militarism led to war and destruction. War is the health of the state, said Bourne.The pro-peace position was led by the Manchester School, particularly by Richard Cobden. They led the free trade movement. Their aim was harmony and peace among nations.The tax-eating rather than the tax-paying classes favored war. Cobden emphasized trade not politics. Bastiat proposed getting rid of the French army. The American Open Door policy with China was free trade imperialism. Unilateral free trade works. Trade agreements don’t. Just do away with tariffs.War making was often based upon incorrect information. Kosovo and Iraq are examples of disinformation stampeding us into war. The liberal anti-war tradition was against imperialism. The US went down the road of empire as did Spain. Constant war, large standing armies, crushing debt, and destructive levels of taxation are all with us now.Herbert Spencer believed that warfare was only suitable to man’s primitive stage, not his advanced stage after industrialization. However, some liberals, like de Tocqueville, did support war under certain conditions.Lecture 4 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

4. Class and Conflict

It was thought that the ultimate antidote to war was universal democracy. It was not. Spencer defined liberal democracy as an individual free to control the product of his own efforts on the market. Welfare societies could not rationally be termed democracies.Globalism perverts the Constitution. Meddling activism has unintended consequences like centralizing the power of the Presidency. Intervention creates blowback.The effects of the Industrial Revolution are a major issue in Classical Liberalism. From 1750 to 1850 industrialization got slowly underway in Britain. Division of labor and urbanization were considered a catastrophe. It was thought that only labor unions could improve conditions of the working people. This myth created a standing presumption that laissez-faire ruins countries and requires state intervention to protect present victims of capitalism.An optimist school made gradual headway against these pessimists. They gathered objective data and applied better economic theory. Wages, availability of foodstuffs, and length of life were finally considered in contrast to initial horror stories. In fact, the standard of living improved for most workers. Industrialization allowed tens of millions of people to survive as their populations exploded. The Industrial Revolution was not the problem; it was the solution.Lecture 5 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

5. War, Peace, and the Industrial Revolution

In the face of overwhelming evidence of the prosperity of capitalism, Marxists were forced to rephrase their arguments from material provisions to quality of life. Robert Nozick, a brilliant philosopher of liberty, became a libertarian. Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his main book, dominates debate in political philosophy.Why were intellectuals so hostile toward the market place and private property? Only state interventionism was seen as virtuous. Hayek saw that intellectuals had egalitarian biases, but felt they meant well. They just had scientistic prejudice. Schumpeter remarked that Hayek was polite to a fault.Schumpeter held that the key to intellectual hostility was the education and literacy that the capitalist wealth machine made possible – the freedom to nibble at the foundations of the capitalist society. This analysis is in his most popular book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.Mises was not polite to a fault. His focus on this issue cites work about money making having been stigmatized. Western culture has had contempt for money making, commerce, merchants and business people. Entrepreneurs and capitalists themselves are swayed by the moral outlook which damns their activity.Lecture 6 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

6. The New World of Capitalism

Humans are prone to envy, writes Helmut Schoeck in Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Humans try to set up a society in which none is envious of another. George Stigler of the Chicago School saw man as always a utility maximizer.Robert Higgs disagreed with Stigler’s position. Higgs presents that the kind of person one becomes confirms a self-image. When acting politically, people are often concerned about what might be right or wrong.Russia was fertile grounds for socialist ideas. European intellectuals had made capitalism an object of horror. The Marxist dream was to be obtained by abolishing private property. One prevailing historical myth has been part of socialist pseudo-history. Did German big business play an essential role in the rise of Hitler? No, finds Henry Ashby Turner, but historians keep repeating this story.Jean-Jacques Rousseau was not a socialist, but was an enemy of capitalism. His views and his activities were destructive. Rousseau and Voltaire hated each other. Rousseau’s famous book is The Social Contract. It is very different from Locke’s. Rousseau should not be put into the liberal camp. Raico calls Rousseau historical rubbish.Robespierre was one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Surprising to Marx, socialism arose in Paris not in London. The best book on socialism is by Alexander Gray –The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin. Gray was Rothbard’s favorite historian of economic thought. Lecture 7 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

7. The Anti-Capitalists

Utopian socialism was a term created by Marx and Lenin to denigrate the enemies of Marx and Lenin. Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideology of the industrial class, opposed to the idling class, inspired and influenced utopian socialism.Capitalists were seen to be an important component of the industrial class. Saint-Simon did not promote class conflict. Auguste Comte was his disciple. Comte founded sociology and the doctrine of positivism. He is regarded as the first philosopher of science.Main Currents of Marxist Thought by Kolakowski is an indispensable work about Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. He describes Marxism as the “greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.” Marx was after the human race achieving real human dignity. Man will only achieve control of his own destiny by creating planned societies. There is no invisible hand. Man must be conscious masters of nature. Everything will be planned. That will free mankind.Trotsky’s book, For Literature and Revolution, claimed that the average human type will rise to the stature of an Aristotle. Lenin first put into place the Stalinist planned society – communism.Lecture 8 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty.

8. The Planned Society

Intellectuals are pro-power and anti-market. Great presidents are war presidents who glorify power. The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency are recommended books on this topic. The First World War was a turning point which vastly extended state power, and vastly destroyed social power.Bismark united all of the German tribes into one state to preserve a German peace. The understanding in 1907 linking Great Britain, France and Russia was called the Triple Entente. This alliance in 1914 entered WWI as Allies against the Central Powers Germany and Austria-Hungary. The creation of a German navy put them on a collision course with Great Britain.Germany’s strategy was to quickly knock France out of the war by sending troops through Belgium. The Archduke is killed in Sarajevo. Austria declares war on Serbia. Austrians could then invade Serbia and do away with it. Germany declares war on Russia and France. France convinces Britain that she must declare war against Germany, although no Britain had any clue about the war or any say about it. Yet, war was greeted with enthusiasm. The intellectuals were rapturous.German U-boats sank British ships, bringing America into the war. The 1915 sinking of the Lusitania with some Americans aboard was used to justify Wilson’s position against Germany. Wilson had a hidden agenda to create a New World Order. The case of Eugene Debs was an example of how vindictive Wilson was and how individual liberties lost more ground in WWI than during WWII.

History: The Struggle for Liberty

History: The Struggle for Liberty

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