December marks the eighth anniversary of the passing of Ralph Raico, one of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends and the greatest twentieth-century historian of classical liberalism and a great libertarian theorist as well. In this week’s article, I’m going to highlight some of his insights, but it would be easy to fill several articles with more of them.
As I just said, Raico was our greatest historian of classical liberalism, but he in fact doesn’t like the term “classical liberalism.” As he puts it, “There was no ‘classical’ liberalism, only a single liberalism, based on private property and the free market, that developed organically, from first to last.” Liberals believe that the main institutions of society can function without the state: “Liberalism … is based on the conception of civil society as by and large self-regulating when its members are free to act within the very wide bounds of their individual rights. Among these, the right to private property, including freedom of contract and exchange and the free disposition of one’s own labor, is given a high priority. Historically, liberalism has manifested a hostility to state action, which, it insists, should be reduced to a minimum.”
Raico believed that liberalism as he defined it was linked to Austrian economics. “On the level of policy, Austrianism’s individualist and subjectivist methodology tends, indirectly at least, to sway decisions in a liberal direction.” Critics of Austrian economics like Milton Friedman attack it for using deductive, a priori reasoning, which they claim is dogmatic, Raico easily disposes of this objection: “How such an argument could emanate from such a distinguished source is simply baffling. Among other problems with it: Friedman’s theory would predict the occurrence of incessant bloody brawling among mathematicians and logicians, the non-occurrence of which falsifies that theory in Friedman’s own positivist terms.”
Judged by Raico’s standard, even Friedrich Hayek falls short. Though certainly a classical liberal, he conceded too much to the welfare state. “The state, Hayek insisted, is not solely ‘a coercive apparatus,’ but also ‘a service agency,’ and as such ‘it may assist without harm in the achievement of desirable aims which perhaps could not be achieved otherwise.’ … Predictably, Hayek’s endorsement of state activism in the ‘social’ sphere has provided knowledgeable opponents of the laissez-faire position with a rhetorical argument of the form ‘even F.A Hayek conceded …’”
How did the current confusion over liberalism develop? Raico ascribes a good deal of the blame to John Stuart Mill. Raico contends that Mill was not a friend of liberty. “In the name of individual autonomy, he aimed to “demolish religious faith, especially Christianity, and received mores, on the way to erecting a social order based on ‘the religion of humanity.’”
Mill’s disdain for tradition, expressed especially in On Liberty (which Raico calls “presumptuously titled”) led naturally to the new liberalism, with its reliance on the state and displacement of property rights from their formerly central position. Mill’s view of tradition “also forges an offensive alliance between liberalism and the state, even if perhaps contrary to Mill’s intentions, since it is difficult to imagine the uprooting of traditional norms except through the massive use of political power.”
Raico emphasized the Christian roots of liberalism, focusing on the universal church as an alternative source of loyalty to the state in medieval Europe: “That culture was the West — the Europe that arose in communion with the Bishop of Rome.… The essence of the European experience is that a civilization developed that felt itself to be a unity and yet was politically decentralized. The continent devolved into a mosaic of separate and competing jurisdictions and polities whose internal divisions themselves resisted central control.”
As we have already seen, Raico places great emphasis on the distinction between true liberalism and its modern counterfeits. Keynes certainly does not qualify as a true liberal. Someone who relied on the state to the extent that Keynes did could hardly have believed that civil society has no great need for the state. But Raico does not leave it at that. Keynes, far from being a wholehearted lover of freedom, viewed with some sympathy the fascist and Communist “experiments” of the 1930s.
Ludwig von Mises stood foremost among 20th-century advocates of classical liberalism, and Marxists have been unable adequately to respond to his challenges to their creed. Instead, they have all too often resorted to smears. In “Ludwig von Mises’s Liberalism on Fascism, Democracy, and Imperialism,” Raico answers one such attack on Mises, advanced by the British Marxist historian Perry Anderson. Anderson noted that in Liberalism, published in Germany in 1927, Mises said this about Italian fascism: “It cannot be denied that [Italian] Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment, saved European civilization.”
Was Mises, the supposed champion of freedom, really a fascist? Raico’s comment on this issue is simple and straightforward. Mises was of course not a fascist: his criticisms of that system were many, far reaching, and various. But Italy in the years after World War I really was threatened by socialist revolution, or at least many competent observers at the time believed so; and Mussolini and his cohorts ended that danger.
In his essay, “Eugen Richter and the End of German Liberalism,” Raico describes the heroic struggle of the leader of the German liberals against Bismarck’s welfare state. Advocates of the welfare state often portray it as an effort to shield workers and the poor from the ravages of capitalism. To the contrary, state-enforced welfare measures interfered with private welfare programs and threatened to initiate an unsustainable orgy of spending.
As Richter pointed out, “By hindering or restricting the development of independent funds, one pressed along the road of state-help and here awoke growing claims on the State that, in the long run, no political system can satisfy.” Raico completely agrees:
“One might also reflect on a circumstance that today appears entirely possible: that, after so many fatal ‘contradictions’ of capitalism have failed to materialize, in the end a genuine contradiction has emerged, one that may well destroy the system, namely the incompatibility of capitalism and the limitless state welfarism yielded by the functioning of a democratic order.”
Raico’s essay, “Arthur Ekirch on American Militarism,” is a tribute to an outstanding historian who has traced the rise of militarism over the course of American history. Ekirch, like Raico, had a strong moral commitment to freedom; and he analyzed the rise of militarism, not as a dispassionate observer, but as a confirmed opponent.
In the course of his tribute to Ekirch, Raico accomplishes a remarkable feat. He offers a brilliant summary of the entire course of America’s foreign policy, culminating in America’s present position of world dominance. Here are a few samples of his comments: Of the great advocate of a strong navy, Alfred Thayer Mahan, he says,
“Mahan was not much of a naval commander (his ships tended to collide), but he was a superb propagandist for navalism. His work on The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, was seized upon by navalists in Germany, Japan, France, and elsewhere. It fueled the arms race that led to the First World War, and was no great blessing to mankind.” As you would expect, he has little use for Theodore Roosevelt: “Heaven only knows what Theodore Roosevelt is doing on that endlessly reproduced iconic monument on Mount Rushmore, right alongside Jefferson. He despised Jefferson as a weakling, and Jefferson would have despised him as a warmonger.”
Ralph Raico was an extraordinary thinker and scholar. He lectured at Mises conferences and events for many decades. His talks at our annual Mises University were especially popular. When I met him, I was impressed right away by his intelligence, his scholarship, and his sense of humor. I have learned a great deal from him and was honored to have him as a friend.
