This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the Albuquerque Mises Circle in New Mexico, September 14, 2024. Listen to an audio version, here.
Throughout its history, liberalism—the ideology today called “classical liberalism” or “libertarianism”—has suffered from the impression that it is primarily against things. This is not entirely wrong. Historically, liberalism coalesced as a recognizable ideology in opposition largely to mercantilism and absolutism throughout western Europe. Over time, this opposition extended to socialism, protectionism, imperialism, aggressive warfare, and slavery as well. In this regard, liberals have for centuries fought against a wide array of moral and economic evils that spread poverty, injustice, and misery.
Being “against” things, however, has never been sufficient in itself, and liberals have never contented themselves with being so. Liberalism, of course, has long been closely associated with so-called “bourgeois” values, private property, local self-determination, and—in spite of claims to the contrary—religious institutions. Today, however, these institutions that have long under-girded liberalism and the free society are in an advanced state of decay. These are the institutions that have made society and civic life possible without state control.
The decline of these institutions did not happen by accident. The power of the modern state is the result of long wars by the state against independent churches, against family ties, and against local self-determination. The state has never suffered rivals, so any organization that competes for the “hearts and minds” of the population must be made impotent.
So, we find that the challenge at hand is more than simply opposing the state. Rather, it is necessary to build up, reinforce, and sustain institutions that can offer alternatives to the state in terms of organizing and supporting human society.
After all, it is safe to say that most people we encounter today have become accustomed to looking to the state to meet an increasing array of needs and desires. These include pensions, health care, schooling, scientific research, and public safety, just to name just a few.
Thanks to the decline of the family, it is even possible now to imagine that for many millions of Americans, their most meaningful and enduring relationships are with government agencies.
In this environment, if we have any hope of supplanting state institutions with something better, there will need to be private institutions that can be plausibly put forward as replacements for the state institutions that so many have come to think provide, comfort, safety, and basic necessities.
Without these private institutions, liberalism’s job of providing a world of free, private, and prosperous institutions is much more difficult—or even impossible.
Societies Are Composed of Institutions
As libertarian historian Ralph Raico notes, liberals make a key distinction between the state and “society.” Society is simply those institutions that are not the state. Or as the philosopher David Gordon puts it, “Liberals believe that the main institutions of society can function in entire independence of the state.”
All these institutions outside the state are what we call “the private sector.” We often just associate the phrase with commercial enterprises, but it is also proper to speak of churches, families, and any non-state community organizations as “the private sector.”
The idea that the institutions of society, the private sector, can function without a state is an established historical fact. Since the beginnings of human civilization, even in the absence of states, people have built up institutions and relationships designed to provide order, security, and social safety nets. As described by Yale historian Paul Freedman, many societies have been held together by something other than “government in the sense that we understand it.” Rather, they can be held together with what Freedman calls “informal social networks and ties.” These include “kinship, family, private vengeance, religion.”
But we can also find more formal and recent institutions designed specifically to provide services that had once been provided by states and empires.
The Role of the “Corporations”
During the Middle Ages, and until the age of absolutism, for example, Europeans, faced with weak and limited state institutions, created what scholars call “corporations.” These were not the corporations we today associate with joint-stock companies. These organizations were, in the words of economic historian Avner Greif, “voluntary, interest-based, self-governed, and intentionally created permanent associations. In many cases, they were self-organized and not established by the state.”
These included the Church itself, but also monastic orders, universities, the Italian city-states, urban communes, militias, and merchant guilds. All actively sought to protect their own commercial interests in Europe’s various legal institutions.
Moreover, whatever their provenance, these corporations tended to think of their own interests as distinct from the interests of the prince or civil power. The corporations thus acted as yet another institutional brake on state power. As Raico has shown, Europe’s decentralized political power—and the accompanying protections for private property—grew out of a complex legal environment of contracts, rights, and other legal considerations forced upon princes and civil authorities by the demands of these corporate groups. Thus, Europe came to be home to political and legal philosophies respecting the idea of “mine and thine” rather than the idea that all belongs to the prince or the collective.
To quote Raico:
Princes often found their hands tied by the charters of rights … which [Princes] were forced to grant their subjects. In the end, even within the relatively small states of Europe, power was dispersed among estates, orders, chartered towns, religious communities, corps, universities, etc., each with its own guaranteed liberties.
Not surprisingly, the rise of the modern state is closely connected to the state’s struggle against these institutions. As historian of the state Martin van Creveld has shown, in order to consolidate power, the state first had to gravely weaken or destroy the churches, the nobility, the towns, and the corporations. After all, these organizations competed with the state. They often provided economic safety nets of their own, and civil order through courts and local militias. They created a sense of community and social purpose apart from the idea of the nation or state. They provided key economic services, as in the case of the Hanseatic League, which offered safe trade routes and arbitration services for merchants.
These polycentric political systems were obstacles to the state’s consolidation of power, and as economist Murray Rothbard has noted, the process of abolishing nonstate institutions accelerated during the early modern period. By the sixteenth century in France, the process was in full swing.
Rothbard writes:
The sixteenth century French legalists [that is those who served the absolutist king] systematically tore down the legal rights of all corporations or organizations which, in the Middle Ages, had stood between the individual and the state. There were no longer any intermediary or feudal authorities. The king is absolute over these intermediaries, and makes or breaks them at will.
This process was necessary to end pockets of independence and potential resistance to the state. In earlier times, the state had to gain buy-in from a variety of organizations that could offer real resistance to its rule. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the nineteenth century: “Not a hundred years ago, amongst the greater part of European nations, numerous private persons and corporations were sufficiently independent to administer justice, to raise and maintain troops, to levy taxes, and frequently even to make or interpret the law.”
This also summarizes essentially what has been the struggle between the state and the private sector for centuries. Whatever was once private, separate, decentralized, or not under the control of the central state must be brought to heel.
Creating a Direct State-Citizen Relationship
Yet even after their medieval legal independence was abolished, churches, fraternal organizations, and families continued to be institutions critical to local solidarity, regional independence, and poverty relief.
Moreover, extended family enterprises made up a separate locus of power outside the state, and many of these families self-consciously sought to remain economically independent. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s view of the “bourgeois family” is not exactly complimentary, but he nonetheless captures some of the central role of the family in nineteenth-century society: “The ‘family’ was not merely the basic social unit of bourgeois society but its basic unit of property and business enterprise.”
But even this informal institutional competition with the state could not be tolerated. In the nineteenth century, the state’s opposition to independent institutions was taken to the next level with the welfare state. This came first in Germany, where a true bureaucratic welfare state was introduced for the first time by conservative nationalist Otto von Bismarck. Raico reminds us that the welfare state was a deliberate effort by Bismarck to end the population’s financial independence from the state.
Also, economist Antony Mueller concludes the welfare state established “a system of mutual obligation between the State and its citizens.” This further solidified the idea that the state was to enjoy a direct relationship with individuals, unimpeded by local, cultural, or religious institutional obstacles. It was this political need to—as one of Bismarck’s advisors said—”bind the people to the throne with chains of gratitude,” that led to the introduction of the welfare state.
This also represented a powerful way of circumventing the family unit as an institutional buffer between the state and the individuals. Certainly, poverty relief had existed in the past. But, it nearly always was administered at a household level. The state, prior to Bismark’s welfare state had not yet fully pierced the household family unit to deal directly with individuals.
Not surprisingly then, more than a century after Bismark, the family as an institution has gone into steep decline, and unless it is again strengthened, will cease to provide any counterbalance or institutional resistance to state power.
Public Schools
Perhaps no institution has done more to directly engage individuals than the public schools
The rise of the public schools and the replacement of private schooling and home schooling has been one of the state’s greatest achievements over the past century—great in the sense that it has done much to destroy the private sector.
Historically, public education has long been geared toward promoting cultural uniformity, assimilation, and a pro-government ideology in students. Private schools, on the other hand, have often been founded specifically for the purpose of offering an alternative to the regime’s schools. They have often focused on teaching a culture and curriculum different from that offered by the state. Often, these institutions either directly or indirectly encourage skepticism of the cultural and ideological norms pushed by public schools.
Needless to say, governments have never been enthusiastic about the existence of such institutions.
The War Against Private Christian Schools
By the early twentieth century, American public education reflected a watered-down version of Protestant Christianity. But the religious elements existed largely to offer a patina of religious morality behind what was primarily political ideological education. The most important role of the schools was to make students into good citizens of the American polity.
Private religious schools, however, didn’t necessarily play this game. Both Lutheran and Catholic groups often placed more emphasis on religious education, while even helping to perpetuate the values of the immigrant groups who populated the schools. Lutheran schools often taught use of the German language and the Lutheran religion. Many saw this as coming at the expense of cultural assimilation and “loyalty” to American governments. Even worse were the Catholic schools which taught religious and cultural views that were regarded by the Protestant majority as even more alien than those of the Lutherans.
Opposition to these schools was further increased by the jingoism of the First World War. So, it was not an accident that some of the greatest threats to private education would arise during the 1920s.
In his book Public Vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America, Robert Gross provides a history of the period:
In the 1920s, conservative Protestants staged the most concerted campaigns since the origins of public school systems to prohibit private education. In more than a dozen states they tried but failed to prohibit attendance at private schools, while in Oregon they successfully enacted a law compelling students to attend public schools exclusively.
This law “compelled children ages eight to sixteen to attend public school …Noncompliant parents faced heavy fines and imprisonment.”
The Oregon law, however, was not long for this world. It was struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 1925.
The arguments made by attorneys for the State of Oregon were the typical “do it for the children” claims. According to the State, parents simply couldn’t be trusted to educate their children properly. More specifically, since today’s school children are tomorrow’s voters, the State argued, the State has an overriding public interest in ensuring that the students receive a proper education. (What is proper, of course, is to be determined by the government.)
The answer, apparently, could be found in forcing parents to send their children to the (presumably higher-quality and more competent) government schools.
Decline of the Family
The state’s victory in making government institutions (i.e., schools) central to the lives of most children is further reflected in the institution that is supposed to be central to the lives of children: the family.
The trend of family decline has been clear for decades. In 1992, the sociologist David Popenoe published an exhaustive study on the state of families titled “American Family Decline, 1960-1990.”
In his study, Popenoe acknowledges that many factors in the decline of the family pre-date the 1960s. These include rising divorce rates and falling fertility. Yet, things did indeed accelerate from the 1960s to the 1990s.One key aspect of this is the falling fertility rate. In the late 1950s, the average Americna woman had 3.7 children over the course of her life. In 1990, Popenoe found, the average was 1.9. In 2023, it was under 1.8.
Whatever conclusion one may come to about what is the “correct” number of children to have, the Popenoe notes it illustrates a real trend away from interest in raising children. Survey data also backs this up, and as Popenoe puts it, we have witnessed “a dramatic, and probably historically unprecedented, decrease in positive feelings toward parenthood and mother- hood.”
The relevance of the fertility rate for our purposes is that it illustrates a declining interest in family life overall, which translates into a lack of stability and duration of family life, as we see in other indicators such as divorce.
Indeed, in recent decades, we also continue to see a widespread retreat form marriage. Poponoe found between 1960 and 1990, the proportion of women aged 20 to 24 who had never married, more than doubled, from 28% to 63%; for women aged 25 to 29, the increase was even greater, rising from 11% to 31.%
These trends have only continued,albeit at less dramatic rates, in the 30 years since Popenoe’s study. The trends illustrate that families are being de-institutionalized in a variety of ways. That is, family life is shorter in duration, and generally involves more unstable relationships which are less central to people’s lives.
Or as Popenoe puts it “family change is family decline.” This is illustrated in a number of ways. Children are more likely to leave the home before age eighteen in non-intact families. This is especially true for young women. Marriage rates have gone into deep decline, and are now at the lowest levels they have ever been. Marriage has been replaced in many ways by co-habiting couples, but non-married couples of these sorts tend to report shorter relationships.
The number of US adults living as part of a married couple has declined from 67 percent to 53 percent from 1990 to 2019.
We could name a variety of other statistics, and people may disagree over whether or not individual cases are good things or not, under various circumstances. But one conclusion is hard to dispute: these trends make it clear that the family is far less relevant and less important as a social institution than in the past. And, as such, it is ill-equipped to offer any sort of meaningful resistance to the state’s ongoing efforts to reduce all non-state institutions to dust.
Popenoe sums up what it means to be institutionally strong. He writes, “In a strong group, the members are closely bound to the groups and largely follow the group’s norms and values. Families have clearly become weaker in this sense.”
What is the reason for this? A lot of evidence suggests it is overwhelmingly an ideological issue. We hear much about how people say they can’t afford to start a family. Yet, marriage rates and fertility rates are now far below what they were during the Great Depression. Or we might note that fertility rates are lower now than what they were during 1942, when the world was caught up in one of history’s most bloody and destructive wars.
It is thus difficult to take seriously any claims that, by some objective measure, the world is too dangerous or too unaffordable to justify family and marriage.
Rather, the more likely scenario is simply that people don’t believe that marriage and child bearing are important. Robust historical analyses have shown this. For example, in a 2021 study co-authored by Enrico Spolaore, the greatest determinant of fertility rates in Europe over a 140 year period was the diffusion of French anti-fertility ideologies.
Family and marriage decline because people don’t believe they are important.
The Twilight of Nonstate Institutions
The decline of the family is just the latest evidence of how the state’s efforts to neutralize nonstate institutions have been enormously successful. Institutional obstacles to state power are shadows of their former selves. Long gone are the independent communes, the free towns, the local militias, and the independent monasteries and churches. In more recent history, even fraternal organizations and local charities have become increasingly invisible, and ever more dependent on the central government’s tax dollars. Religious observance is in deep decline. Church organizations such as schools and parishes are consequently much reduced. Families are less cohesive and less permanent.
In contrast, the most enduring economic and institutional relationships many people will have is with their national government. The vast majority of taxes are paid to central governments. Most healthcare and pension benefits come from national governments. States—not churches or local prominent families—now financially dominate universities, hospitals, and poverty relief.
This is all to the advantage of the state, since it means fewer individuals can rely on family or other local networks for economic or social security. It means fewer allegiances to any community except the vaguely defined and essentially imaginary national “community.”
Individuals Are Not Enough
In response to all this, some might say, “Oh, we don’t need any organizations or institutions. We only need rugged individualists!” It’s a nice idea, but there is no evidence of this actually working all by itself as a counterweight to state power. Historically, liberals have long understood that opposition to state power cannot be effective if based merely on opposition from diffuse individuals who share no preexisting and enduring practical, religious, familial, or economic interests and feelings of common cause.
Rather, resistance to the state has tended to be centered around some cultural or local institutional loyalty. Historically, this often took the form of local networks of families and their allies. Tocqueville noted that these groups provided a ready nexus around which to organize opposition to government abuses. He writes,
As long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone; he looked about him, and found his clients, his hereditary friends, and his kinsfolk. If this support was wanting, he was sustained by his ancestors and animated by his posterity.
Without these, or similar institutions, Tocqueville concluded, political opposition to the state becomes ineffective. Specifically, without institutions through which to practically build resistance to state power, even anti-regime ideology has no way of being brought into practice:
Tocqueville continues:
What strength can even public opinion have retained, when no twenty persons are connected by a common tie; when not a man, nor a family, nor chartered corporation, nor class, nor free institution, has the power of representing that opinion; and when every citizen—being equally weak, equally poor, and equally dependant [sic]—has only his personal impotence to oppose to the organized force of the government?
The Franco-Swiss liberal Benjamin Constant came to similar conclusions, noting that local social institutions often provide a cultural counterbalance to state power through solidarity and organization. Constant writes: “The interests and memories which are born of local customs contain a germ of resistance which authority suffers only with regret, and which it hastens to eradicate. With individuals it has its way more easily; it rolls its enormous weight over them effortlessly, as over sand.”
What Is to Be Done?
Thus, if we are to meaningfully oppose state power, it is necessary to encourage, grow, and sustain institutions and organizations over which states cannot so easily roll their enormous weight. When people support a local parish, raise a family, build a business, create mutual aid organizations, or foster local civic independence, they are doing work that is absolutely critical to fighting state power. While it is always good to speak ill of state power—and to oppose its countless violent and impoverishing grifts—this is not enough. We must also speak well of nonstate institutions and strengthen them in our daily work and daily lives.
Listen to this lecture on the Radio Rothbard podcast:
