Decay From Within

But after achieving impressive partial victories against statism, the classical liberals began to lose their radicalism, their dogged insistence on carrying the battle against conservative statism to the point of final victory. Instead of using partial victories as a stepping-stone for evermore pressure, the classical liberals began to lose their fervor for change and for purity of principle. They began to rest content with trying to safeguard their existing victories, and thus turned themselves from a radical into a conservative movement — “conservative” in the sense of being content to preserve the status quo. In short, the liberals left the field wide open for socialism to become the party of hope and of radicalism, and even for the later corporatists to pose as “liberals” and “progressives” as against the “extreme right wing” and “conservative” libertarian classical liberals, since the latter allowed themselves to be boxed into a position of hoping for nothing more than stasis, than absence of change. Such a strategy is foolish and untenable in a changing world.

But the degeneration of liberalism was not merely one of stance and strategy, but one of principle as well. For the liberals became content to leave the war-making power in the hands of the State, to leave the education power in its hands, to leave the power over money and banking, and over roads, in the hands of the State — in short, to concede to [p. 15] State dominion over all the crucial levers of power in society. In contrast to the eighteenth-century liberals’ total hostility to the executive and to bureaucracy, the nineteenth-century liberals tolerated and even welcomed the buildup of executive power and of an entrenched oligarchic civil service bureaucracy.

Moreover, principle and strategy merged in the decay of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century liberal devotion to “abolitionism” — to the view that, whether the institution be slavery or any other aspect of statism, it should be abolished as quickly as possible, since the immediate abolition of statism, while unlikely in practice, was to be sought after as the only possible moral position. For to prefer a gradual whittling away to immediate abolition of an evil and coercive institution is to ratify and sanction such evil, and therefore to violate libertarian principles. As the great abolitionist of slavery and libertarian William Lloyd Garrison explained: “Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.”4

There were two critically important changes in the philosophy and ideology of classical liberalism which both exemplified and contributed to its decay as a vital, progressive, and radical force in the Western world. The first, and most important, occurring in the early to mid-nineteenth century, was the abandonment of the philosophy of natural rights, and its replacement by technocratic utilitarianism. Instead of liberty grounded on the imperative morality of each individual’s right to person and property, that is, instead of liberty being sought primarily on the basis of right and justice, utilitarianism preferred liberty as generally the best way to achieve a vaguely defined general welfare or common good. There were two grave consequences of this shift from natural rights to utilitarianism. First, the purity of the goal, the consistency of the principle, was inevitably shattered. For whereas the natural-rights libertarian seeking morality and justice cleaves militantly to pure principle, the utilitarian only values liberty as an ad hoc expedient. And since expediency can and does shift with the wind, it will become easy for the utilitarian in his cool calculus of cost and benefit to plump for statism in ad hoc case after case, and thus to give principle away. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to the Benthamite utilitarians in England: beginning with ad hoc libertarianism and laissez-faire, they found it [p. 16] ever easier to slide further and further into statism. An example was the drive for an “efficient” and therefore strong civil service and executive power, an efficiency that took precedence, indeed replaced, any concept of justice or right.

Second, and equally important, it is rare indeed ever to find a utilitarian who is also radical, who burns for immediate abolition of evil and coercion. Utilitarians, with their devotion to expediency, almost inevitably oppose any sort of upsetting or radical change. There have been no utilitarian revolutionaries. Hence, utilitarians are never immediate abolitionists. The abolitionist is such because he wishes to eliminate wrong and injustice as rapidly as possible. In choosing this goal, there is no room for cool, ad hoc weighing of cost and benefit. Hence, the classical liberal utilitarians abandoned radicalism and became mere gradualist reformers. But in becoming reformers, they also put themselves inevitably into the position of advisers and efficiency experts to the State. In other words, they inevitably came to abandon libertarian principle as well as a principled libertarian strategy. The utilitarians wound up as apologists for the existing order, for the status quo, and hence were all too open to the charge by socialists and progressive corporatists that they were mere narrow-minded and conservative opponents of any and all change. Thus, starting as radicals and revolutionaries, as the polar opposites of conservatives, the classical liberals wound up as the image of the thing they had fought.

This utilitarian crippling of libertarianism is still with us. Thus, in the early days of economic thought, utilitarianism captured free-market economics with the influence of Bentham and Ricardo, and this influence is today fully as strong as ever. Current free-market economics is all too rife with appeals to gradualism; with scorn for ethics, justice, and consistent principle; and with a willingness to abandon free-market principles at the drop of a cost-benefit hat. Hence, current free-market economics is generally envisioned by intellectuals as merely apologetics for a slightly modified status quo, and all too often such charges are correct.

A second, reinforcing change in the ideology of classical liberals came during the late nineteenth century, when, at least for a few decades, they adopted the doctrines of social evolutionism, often called “social Darwinism.” Generally, statist historians have smeared such social Darwinist laissez-faire liberals as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner as cruel champions of the extermination, or at least of the disappearance, of the socially “unfit.” Much of this was simply the dressing up of sound economic and sociological free-market doctrine in the then-fashionable [p. 17] trappings of evolutionism. But the really important and crippling aspect of their social Darwinism was the illegitimate carrying-over to the social sphere of the view that species (or later, genes) change very, very slowly, after millennia of time. The social Darwinist liberal came, then, to abandon the very idea of revolution or radical change in favor of sitting back and waiting for the inevitable tiny evolutionary changes over eons of time. In short, ignoring the fact that liberalism had had to break through the power of ruling elites by a series of radical changes and revolutions, the social Darwinists became conservatives preaching against any radical measures and in favor of only the most minutely gradual of changes.5

In fact, the great libertarian Spencer himself is a fascinating illustration of just such a change in classical liberalism (and his case is paralleled in America by William Graham Sumner). In a sense, Herbert Spencer embodies within himself much of the decline of liberalism in the nineteenth century. For Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, as virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of sociology and social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic, radical historical movement, although without abandoning it in pure theory. While looking forward to an eventual victory of pure liberty, of “contract” as against “status,” of industry as against militarism, Spencer began to see that victory as inevitable, but only after millennia of gradual evolution. Hence, Spencer abandoned liberalism as a fighting, radical creed and confined his liberalism in practice to a weary, conservative, rearguard action against the growing collectivism and statism of his day.

But if utilitarianism, bolstered by social Darwinism, was the main agent of philosophical and ideological decay in the liberal movement, the single most important, and even cataclysmic, reason for its demise was its abandonment of formerly stringent principles against war, empire, and militarism. In country after country, it was the siren song [p. 18] of nation-state and empire that destroyed classical liberalism. In England, the liberals, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, abandoned the antiwar, antiimperialist “Little Englandism” of Cobden, Bright, and the Manchester School. Instead, they adopted the obscenely entitled “Liberal Imperialism” — joining the conservatives in the expansion of empire, and the conservatives and the right-wing socialists in the destructive imperialism and collectivism of World War I. In Germany, Bismarck was able to split the previously almost triumphant liberals by setting up the lure of unification of Germany by blood and iron. In both countries, the result was the destruction of the liberal cause.

In the United States, the classical liberal party had long been the Democratic party, known in the latter nineteenth century as “the party of personal liberty.” Basically, it had been the party not only of personal but also of economic liberty; the stalwart opponent of Prohibition, of Sunday blue laws, and of compulsory education; the devoted champion of free trade, hard money (absence of governmental inflation), separation of banking from the State, and the absolute minimum of government. It construed state power to be negligible and federal power to be virtually nonexistent. On foreign policy, the Democratic party, though less rigorously, tended to be the party of peace, antimilitarism, and antiimperial-ism. But personal and economic libertarianism were both abandoned with the capture of the Democratic party by the Bryan forces in 1896, and the foreign policy of nonintervention was then rudely abandoned by Woodrow Wilson two decades later. It was an intervention and a war that were to usher in a century of death and devastation, of wars and new despotisms, and also a century in all warring countries of the new corporatist statism — of a welfare-warfare State run by an alliance of Big Government, big business, unions, and intellectuals — that we have mentioned above.

The last gasp, indeed, of the old laissez-faire liberalism in America was the doughty and aging libertarians who banded together to form the Anti-Imperialist League at the turn of the century, to combat the American war against Spain and the subsequent imperialist American war to crush the Filipinos who were striving for national independence from both Spain and the United States. To current eyes, the idea of an antiimperialist who is not a Marxist may seem strange, but opposition to imperialism began with laissez-faire liberals such as Cobden and Bright in England, and Eugen Richter in Prussia. In fact, the Anti-Imperialist League, headed by Boston industrialist and economist Edwad Atkinson (and including Sumner) consisted largely of laissez-faire radicals who had fought the good fight for the abolition of slavery, and [p. 19] had then championed free trade, hard money, and minimal government. To them, their final battle against the new American imperialism was simply part and parcel of their lifelong battle against coercion, statism, and injustice — against Big Government in every area of life, both domestic and foreign.

We have traced the rather grisly story of the decline and fall of classical liberalism after its rise and partial triumph in previous centuries. What, then, is the reason for the resurgence, the flowering, of libertarian thought and activity in the last few years, particularly in the United States? How could these formidable forces and coalitions for statism have yielded even that much to a resurrected libertarian movement? Shouldn’t the resumed march of statism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries be a cause for gloom rather than usher in a reawakening of a seemingly moribund libertarianism? Why didn’t libertarianism remain dead and buried?

We have seen why libertarianism would naturally arise first and most fully in the United States, a land steeped in libertarian tradition. But we have not yet examined the question: Why the renaissance of libertarianism at all within the last few years? What contemporary conditions have led to this surprising development? We must postpone answering this question until the end of the book, until we first examine what the libertarian creed is, and how that creed can be applied to solve the leading problem areas in our society.

• 4Quoted in William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, eds., The Antislavery Argument (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965), p. xxxv.
• 5Ironically enough, modern evolutionary theory is coming to abandon completely the theory of gradual evolutionary change. Instead, it is now perceived that a far more accurate picture is sharp and sudden flips from one static species equilibrium to another; this is being called the theory of “punctuational change.” As one of the expounders of the new view, Professor Stephen Jay Gould, writes: “Gradualism is a philosophy of change, not an induction from nature . . . . Gradualism, too, has strong ideological components more responsible for its previous success than any objective matching with external nature . . . . The utility of gradualism as an ideology must explain much of its influence, for it became liberalism’s quintessential dogma against radical change — sudden flips are against the laws of nature.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution: Explosion, Not Ascent,” New York Times (January 22, 1978). [p. 20] [p. 21] [p. 22] [p. 23]