Scholars have analyzed the Summary View for what it says about natural law, natural rights, or the radical tone of its address. They have looked to its list of grievances for what that list reveals about the charges that made it into Congress’ formal statement of separation two years later. They have even looked to it to explain those grievances that were omitted from the original draft of the Declaration emanating largely from Jefferson’s pen.

For these and other reasons, Summary View can hardly be said to have been neglected. Still, it would not be wrong to point out that its most important aspects have rarely been appreciated or understood since Jefferson issued it in 1774. In fact, most treatments have regarded the document as composed of dubious exaggerations and fanciful assertions about local colonial self-government, the limits of parliamentary rule, and, more particularly, the nature of the king’s executive powers.

In a recent biography of George III, we are presented with the more traditional view of Jefferson’s claims. “American radicals,” we are told, “were proposing ways for the King to govern America without recourse to Parliament from which even the Tories shrank at home.” As it turns out, this long-held assertion needs to be significantly amended.

A great many Englishmen did in fact know exactly what Jefferson and the Americans were driving at and a great many more of them than was once believed, readily approved Jefferson’s constitutional understanding. It is exactly on these points concerning the decentralized nature of the empire, the need for a stricter delineation of the responsibilities of government, and the hope to carefully check and balance the powers of those offices that Summary View is most revealing and, I would argue, most important for understanding the American constitutional tradition.

Tone and Substance

Usually, histories dealing with Summary View note that it was, until the appearance of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in January of 1776, the most radical statement of the American cause. Falling just short of calling for separation, Jefferson made a direct and insistent address to “his majesty,” stepping over a line that most writers until that moment had taken care not to cross. Jefferson hoped to divest his remarks of all “expressions of servility,” so as not to be mistaken for asking for favors rather than rights.

But this was to be radical in tone only. Jefferson’s view in the document was in reality simply a fuller exposition of the constitutionalism that had been developing over the long course of English history going all the way back to the incorporation of the early kingdoms of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Today it is too easy to dismiss Jefferson’s arguments. The usual interpretation contends that any effort to separate the king from the control of Parliament ran against the entire force of British political thought. Parliament was never going to permit the king any kind of separate jurisdiction from its own power and Englishmen of the late eighteenth century are usually said to have been incapable of fathoming the American cause. But that is to prejudice one’s reading with the present day’s infatuation with the unitary nation-state.

As it turns out, plenty of Englishmen were quite used to dealing with separate and semi-independent realms. And a good many more wanted to keep it that way. The empire was in reality, highly decentralized, even, polycentric, and that reality is what shaped Jefferson’s constitutionalism. A quick review of the pamphlets on both sides of the Atlantic, not just the American, reveals how deep the controversy ran throughout the English-speaking world.

The Pamphlet Debates

The consensus was certainly not about Parliament’s sovereignty and certainly not its supremacy in any simple sort of way. As one anonymous writer in London observed over the Stamp Act, “Whatever Boundary there may be to the power of Parliament, it is not easily defined, the law relative thereto being extremely abstruse according to an expression of Lord Coke, Paucis cognita.” And many others thought precisely along these lines.

A common theme of writers at this time was to repair to the earliest examples of dominions acquired through conquest. Wales and Ireland were repeatedly raised as counterfoils to the claim of the imperial ministry that all power had to be under Parliament once the king’s authority was joined with Lords and Commons.

Among the earliest writers to grapple with the ambiguities of the imperial order was James Otis in The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. That pamphlet proved to be something of a bestseller and was widely reprinted throughout England. Contending against the imposition of the Stamp Act, Otis first raised the examples of Ireland and Wales. “I cannot,” he observed, “find any instance of a tax laid by the English Parliament on Ireland.” And if any dominion was to be taxed against its consent, he argued, surely it would be one that had been conquered.

“None doubted that Ireland was as much conquered as [Wales],” he noted, but in the former, they were allowed to have their own Parliament, while in the latter they were permitted to join with Parliament and send their own members well before any taxes were imposed. These points led Otis to the logical question, “Why … should they [the colonies] not be entitled to their assemblies, or parliaments, at least as well as a conquered dominion?”

That reasoning was repeated by the elder William Pitt in the House of Lords when he moved for the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766. The idea that some parts of England were only “virtually represented” was without foundation, he argued, because in England subjects “are represented in other capacities, as owners of land, or as freemen of boroughs,” but none of this could apply to the Americans.

In an earlier age, Pitt observed, “Even under former arbitrary reigns, Parliaments were ashamed of taxing a people without their consent.” Why, he asked, did the defenders of the act only refer to the cities of “Chester and Durham?” A “higher example” was to be found in Wales: “Wales, that never was taxed by Parliament till it was incorporated!”

What makes Otis’ Irish example particularly interesting is that it undermines much of the belief in the definitive nature of the Declaratory Act issued at the very same time as the repeal. Both Pitt and that rising star of English statesmanship, Edmund Burke, helped broker the deal that made repeal possible. For many historians, that seems incontrovertible evidence for the belief in the supremacy of Parliament, but they forget that in 1720, England had also passed such an act regarding Ireland.

Declaratory Acts never could, as Otis remarked, amount to anything more than a truism. Any assertion of absolutism was on its face a “contradiction in terms,” if by absolute was meant anything not already understood to be legal, or within the purview of law. Put most simply, “Parliament cannot make 2 and 2, 5; Omnipotency cannot do it.” If the act in question later proved contrary to “truth, equity, and justice,” he concluded, it would as a consequence be “void, and so it would be adjudged by the parliament itself, when convinced of their mistake.” The Declaratory Act of 1766 was simply a way for those who opposed repeal to save face, but as Burke and Pitt well knew, it by no means settled the dispute with the colonies.

These points about the ambiguity and indeterminacy of Parliament’s authority with respect to the other constituent members of the empire were carried forward in the later controversies over the Townshend duties and the tax on tea. One such writer was the second Baron Lord Rokeby, who put the matter very forcibly in a London pamphlet that preceded Summary View by just two months:

How many points of this sort are undetermined between Great Britain and Ireland, which are now to our mutual happiness entirely dormant, but which started and pursued with obstinacy and eagerness might make one or both of the islands run with blood … if peace and harmony are then so beneficial and desirable between Great Britain and Ireland and the measures producing or insuring them good, upright and wise; why do these things so alter their nature, when they are applied to America?

Rokeby’s conclusions merit closer consideration for those too eager to embrace the state building of Grenville, Whately, or Charles Townshend as emblematic of their time. As Rokeby also noted, “it often happens, that representatives and their Constituents are in the most essential and the most important points directly and diametrically opposite to one another.” Historians need to take this point more seriously.

Reevaluating the Constitutionalism of A Summary View

In this much more fluid and dynamic atmosphere then, Jefferson’s Summary View takes on greater resonance as a fundamental source document, elucidating an alternative view of the imperial constitutional order to the one that has generally dominated historical interpretation.

That the king could and even should have had separate and direct relationships with the other constituent assemblies of the empire was in fact, very conceivable, and not merely a play on words. In Summary View, Jefferson drew out the implications of that understanding.

Through the governors of the various American colonies, the king was mediately represented. In their capacity as the chief executive officer, each governor exercised his responsibility on behalf of the king. And as the king’s proxies, Jefferson contended, the governors stood in exactly the same relation to the colonial assemblies as George III did to the Parliament of England. Unlike the king, however, who had long refrained from vetoing acts of Lords and Commons, colonial governors frequently, and often by the king’s direct orders, vetoed colonial legislation.

By itself, such interdictions were perfectly constitutional and in line with the proper role of the executive power when checking the legislative from committing any wrongful act or breach of its due authority. What was egregious, however, was that this same power was never exercised by the king against Parliament when it overleaped its due authority as circumscribed by its proper jurisdiction. This was to become one of the major complaints in the Declaration two years later.

Nevertheless, Jefferson pointed out, the power to do likewise with Parliament still existed in theory, in the office of the king. It was only resting dormant because his predecessors had become “conscious of the impropriety of opposing their single opinion to the United wisdom of two Houses of Parliament.” This made sense “while their proceedings were unbiased by interested principle,” but “by a change of circumstances, other principles than those of justice simply have obtained an influence.”

Now was the time for that power to be resumed: “It is now, therefore, the great office of His Majesty, to resume the exercise of his negative power, and to prevent the passage of laws by any one legislature of the empire, which might bear injuriously on the rights and interests of another.”

From here, Jefferson went on to list the many grievances imposed by this foreign legislature on the rights and interests of these other bodies, many of which would come to find their way into the 13th grievance of the Declaration, in which the king was charged with combining “with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended Legislation.”

But in 1774, the king still possessed legitimate executive authority: “He [the king] possess[es],” Jefferson explained, “the executive power of the laws in every state.” But, “they are the laws of the particular state which he is to administer within that state, and not those of anyone within the limits of another.” Rather than “sacrificing the rights of one part of the empire to the inordinate desires of another,” the king’s responsibility was to “deal out to all equal and impartial right.”

Here then was the end of the executive authority properly spelled out. His responsibility was not simply to be the king in Parliament, but the king in every colonial assembly. As such, he was to “Let no act be passed by any one legislature which may infringe on the rights and liberties of another. This is the important post in which fortune has placed you, holding the balance of a great if well poised empire.”

Such a well-poised empire was not to be, but the idea of it would become a powerful current informing Jefferson’s thoughts on a proper constitutional order for Virginia, as presented in his draft proposal for the state in 1776. From here it would find its way into his extended critique of the actual Virginia constitution in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), where he advocated what he called a constitution founded not only on “free principles,” but one in which “the powers of government should be so divided among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.”

Madison would run with this insight at the end of the decade in Federalist essays #48 and #49 and from there he would develop the fuller theory of the “compound republic.” In this way, Summary View was not only reflective of a more plausible appraisal of an older imperial constitutional order, but it was also the harbinger of a new one.

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The Tea Party sparked the long series of imperial measures and colonial countermeasure that would eventually lead to the shooting war of the American Revolution. These measures included the much hated Boston Port Act, which collectively punished one of the most important trading centers in colonial America. The significance of the Tea Party as the ignition spark that exploded the powder keg of the American Revolution cannot be overemphasized. Yet there remains considerable doubt as to its moral, political, and economic causes.

A great deal of this orientation arises from a number of fairly recent critical accounts that are in sympathy with the constitutional and political position of the king and Parliament. We hear again ideas once pronounced by American Loyalists and their British counterparts that colonial Patriots were actually confused about the nature of the British constitution, that they were in large measure led about by local smugglers of Dutch tea in service of their private interests, and that the Tea Act of 1773 was actually designed to lower the price of tea to the benefit of American consumers. Each of these points can be defended as having a basis in historical fact. But there was a whole lot more going on than just this.

Politics does make curious bedfellows. Smuggling had been in active practice since the very beginning of the colonial enterprise over a century before. But in this instance, it was also a primary countermeasure to the attempt to compel compliance with the efforts of Parliament to tax various articles of trade issued just a few years prior to the Tea Party. Under what was then collectively called the Townshend Duties, taxes had been placed on various articles of trade imported into the colonies including tea, but the resulting opposition was so severe, and the form of regulation so out of the ordinary even for mercantilists, that most of the acts were repealed in 1770. All but one, that is: the duty placed on tea.

This tax was to remain at the insistence of Lord North, First Lord of the Treasury. Here, he argued, was the last redoubt to defend Parliament’s right to rule in any capacity over the colonies. Lose this tax, he asserted, and you would soon lose all claim to any power over the settlements whatsoever. Interestingly, even though this single tax was retained, tensions nonetheless subsided and for nearly three years, nothing much happened. Why? The calm was largely due to the fact that there were alternatives to the East India company’s product before 1773.

Smuggling, mostly from Dutch sources, ensured that other supplies of tea could be had, and while these brands were not as popular as the teas from China and India brought in by the English company, no colonial was forced into the purchase and so the duty could be easily avoided. This was possible because the original chartered privilege of the East India Company, as the sole supplier of various articles of trade to the Empire from the Far East, including tea, was initially restricted to bringing its cargoes to England. From here, merchants were allowed to purchase the company’s goods and reexport them to other parts of the empire, and so it was with tea.

That practice of re-exportation, however, raised the company’s costs of doing business in the colonies. It also made detection of smuggling more difficult. Independent agents could easily elude officials in the various colonial seaports and just as easily disguise the sources of their products carried in bulk. In 1773, as the stockpiles of East India company tea accumulated in London warehouses, the imperial ministry arrived at what it thought to be a very clever solution. And here is where the loyalist pro-ministry argument finds some historical footing.

Citing a few of these pro-imperial interpretations, Andrew Roberts has recently summarized the Imperial viewpoint in his Last King in America (2021). Americans, he notes, perceived the company to be a monopoly, but The Tea Act passed in May of that year would actually have opened up American commerce to “market forces” by allowing the company to sell directly to the American colonies. No longer would the company’s tea suffer under the heavy markups of middlemen. The act would finally permit the East India company’s agents to ship to their own consignees in the colonies.

The opening of direct trade thus promised to halve the costs to the company of its exports and was to be the key to “undercutting the Dutch alternative.” Americans, Roberts observes “would still have to pay the three penny per pound import duty, but since the tea itself would be so much cheaper than its illegal alternative, no difficulties were anticipated.”  Citing another similarly disposed interpretation, Roberts reports that some “historians have described the Sons of Liberty as the ‘henchmen’ of the rich smuggler-merchants: ‘It was essentially a private operation for the benefit of racketeers.’”

These points are the same ones originally raised by contemporary loyalist supporters of then Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Daniel Leonard, writing as Massachusettensis in his fourth letter of January 2, 1775, observed that had the act been allowed to go into operation, American consumers would have reaped “the benefit, as tea would have been sold at near one half” its former price and thus “the country in general would have been great gainers.” The losers, he pointed out, would have been the smugglers, who had up until this time, amassed great fortunes: “A smuggler and a Whig,” Leonard chided, “are cousin germans, the offspring of two sisters, avarice and ambition.”  

Among the main points in the Patriot case, a point that none deny, was the irritation caused by Governor Hutchinson when he quietly chose to take his salary and the salaries of judicial officers, directly from this last remaining duty on tea. That decision threatened to place royal officials beyond the power of the assembly’s ability to control the government’s budget. But there was another aspect to the issue that linked the colonist’s constitutional arguments to the fear of monopoly, and this helped to prepare the way for Boston’s radical response.

Writing at the height of the controversy over the Townshend Duties, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania authored a series of widely influential pamphlets styled, Letters from a Farmer between 1767 and 1768 in which he took up the question raised earlier by Franklin in his deposition before Parliament: The distinction between internal and external taxation. This was not really the issue, Dickinson argued, but rather, internal versus external impositions.

Duties to prohibit a trade were one thing, he noted, but duties imposed on articles of trade that could only be acquired from a single source, namely Great Britain, were quite another. The former were meant to restrict trade in articles thought to be detrimental to the needs of the whole empire. The latter, however, were clearly and unquestionably meant to raise money and establish Parliament’s authority to do so.

Here, monopoly played the central part of the constitutional argument of the Patriot cause: “If you ONCE admit, that Great-Britain may lay duties upon her exportations to us, for the purpose of levying money on us only, she then will have nothing to do, but to lay those duties on the articles which she prohibits us to manufacture—and the tragedy of American liberty is complete.” Dickinson had specifically referenced such articles as “paper, etc.” but the application of the principle was the same with respect to tea. By levying a tax on a product supplied only by an official monopoly, no matter how small the rate or quantum charged, the precedent would be finally established of Parliament’s right to raise any degree of revenue thereafter.

The Tea Act did far more than simply lower the company’s operating costs in the distribution of its products. By opening trade directly with the colonies, it also made enforcement of its monopoly position more secure through exposing clearly who was operating as a consignee of the company and who was not. With the powerful presence of the British fleet, such enforcement was not to be doubted. But there was still more reason for the particularly radical turn taken by Bostonians.

Governor Hutchinson had himself directly influenced the appointment of the agents for the company, and these included his own sons. More troubling still, he specifically ordered that the ships not be permitted to leave until they had unloaded their cargoes. Most other colonial governments, royal and otherwise, had left the captains of the ships and the consignees of the company to fend for themselves. Such inaction usually resulted in the departure of the vessels with no corresponding crisis.

In Massachusetts, however, Hutchinson not only ordered the tea to be landed, but he also used fort Castle William, to house and protect the consignees of the company. But there’s more.

Hutchison was also to insist that should the cargoes not be unloaded before December 17, they would be seized for non-payment of the prescribed duty! At that point, few doubted that the Governor planned to engage in a little black-market dealing himself, selling off the contrabanded tea to supply his and other’s salaries. The forces of the colony’s executive and imperial officials thus seemed arrayed to compel the creation of the very precedent warned of by Dickinson! And so, the tea was dumped on December 16, 250 years ago. The rest is history.

Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.

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In this attempt to revise the narratives of capitalism and the development of the modern world, the modern crop of socialists, which is nearly indistinguishable in any substantive way from progressivism generally, certainly make a number of highly questionable assertions.

Yet, for the most part, it is not the nihilism or merely the will to assert what is a fact that mars the modern progressive approach to history. It is the ultimate hopelessness of the narratives that they are spinning that is the primary problem. If the issue were merely errors of fact, the implications of the so-called “New Histories” would hardly amount to the proverbial tempest in a teapot.

More than Just the Facts

There are plenty of facts in the so-called “New Histories of Capitalism.” Most of those facts I would even affirm to be true. Slavery existed and it did contribute in certain important ways to the products and incomes of the early modern economy. One ought to be aware of these facts and relate them to the particulars of that institution in all its brutality.

Nor is moral relativism rightly understood, the entirety of what is wrong. Our progressive social warriors (of whatever sort) are generally brimming overfull with moral indignation, if not a hypertrophied sense of distributional equity or what is also called “social justice.”  A capricious decisionism of the will is not the primary problem. What is most objectionable is not factual error or relativism, but the way in which those facts are arrayed and the specific ethical orientation from which they emerge.

Traditional Marxism tied its ethical foundations to a claim about the nature of facts in history. Specifically the systemic nature of power was supposedly revealed in the way society creates and distributes economic wealth. The claim was that the measurable, tangible sources of material production were in fact the primary vehicle through which power is exercised in society, and only after reaching a certain point of development, would ideas themselves begin to alter how people think, preparing the way for the revolutionary reformation of society.

The modern progressive narrative, however, has discarded the idea that power flows from any particular arrangement of production in the economy. Instead, the modern radical believes it inheres directly in institutions, where beliefs about its proper exercise hold sway. No particular relationship to the facts of production are privileged from this perspective, but all relations throughout society are interpreted as evidence of a system of thought through which the intentions of the powerful are transmitted. In some respects, this is not so different from old fashioned intellectual and political narratives of the past that held to the primacy of ideas, with one very significant difference.

Historical Context Rightly Understood

Traditional intellectual histories recognized multiple competing voices in the past. One thinks here of historians like R. R. Palmer who set democratic ideas alongside monarchical and aristocratic traditions, or Caroline Robbins who placed republican thought in the context of absolutist and feudal modes of thought, or Harold Berman who studied the contending views of authority and law in both the late medieval and Reformation eras as they related to the various factions within Christianity. This kind of intellectual history aimed at understanding how different viewpoints could arise by understanding the context in which they developed.

Each of these historians viewed the various parties to a contest in time as playing a role in the shaping of the institutional character of society from one moment to the next. Sometimes such processes seemed to move society along more open and liberal channels (e.g. Palmer) but not necessarily so (e.g. Berman). And here was the ultimate source of history’s hopefulness. The contest of ideas was real, and individual choices remained open at each moment, with give and take on all sides contributing to the historical moment, holding out the possibility of substantial learning and the gaining of wisdom over time.

The modern radical narrative, however, accepts no such interplay. Instead, these theorists view the political realm as the product of ruling belief structures with little or no give and take of competing thoughts. That view reduces the realm of the past to a political battle of contending elites. It is the hopelessness of such a view, it’s either-or character, that is the real source of danger for our already too divisive political climate, and in this way, I don’t share Nathan Pinkoski’s relatively more benign assessment of current progressivism as simply misguided bourgeois liberalism.

The Hopelessness of Systemic Interpretation

The assertion that slavery is at the core of our modern day economic and legal “system” partakes of this very particular understanding of the systemic nature of discourse. In earlier historical debates, the tensions in logic and practice between free exchange and compulsory labor was a problem requiring historical understanding. It is what prompted Eugene Genovese’s earlier Marxist interpretation of the essentially backward-looking ideology of the Southern Planter Class. Slavery represented not a capitalist, but a re-feudalized order of society.

However, with the realization in the mid-20th century that Marx’s revolution would not occur as a matter of historical necessity, modern day revolutionaries surrendered the claim to an objective structural materialism at work in history for the idea that whatever exists, it exists as a system of thought where all aspects of current conditions become evidence of intentionality on the part of those with power, however complicated or even contradictory such ideas might at first appear.

From such a perspective, ideas and beliefs are imposed and not mediated. And unlike earlier liberal pluralism for which thoughts were formed through processes of give and take, modern progressives have no interest per se in the interplay of ideas with the genuine messiness of authentic legal, political or economic contexts, where distinct individual experiences generate genuine differences of perspective and opinion.

Even classic Marxists, like Genovese, still held that the means of capitalist production were part of a stage in economic development and were not evil in themselves. With modern discourse theory, however, evil is left open to the subjectivity of the beholder whether he or she inclines to seeing systemic machinations of sexism, racism, environmentalism or any combination of the above. All that matters is the systemic reformation of the whole.

Historical context, in this “new” way of thinking, simply becomes the expression of the predominate intellectual paradigm which the reformer must overturn. Such a view retains the conspiratorial aspects of Marx’s theory of class hegemony, but without any of the limitations imposed by his historical theory of material development. The modern revolutionary need not wait for the give and take of history among individuals and groups but seeks to forcefully replace one “structure of belief” with another in what amounts to an all or nothing, win or lose, contest.

Of course, that understanding requires “thought leaders” and “experts” who can distinguish the right ideas, behaviors, and intentions from the wrong ones and are strategically poised to assume the reins of power. And here is why freedom of speech and expression are under such severe attack.

Free Speech as Oppression

The central point to understand about Progressive discourse theory is that it contends not against the problematic nature of power, but only against the motives and ideas of those who are said to wield it. Symbols, ideas, manners, art, and language all become subject to critical reformulation, and the mode of reform must perforce rely on the critical direction of experts.

The destructive and ultimately hopeless nature of such a world view rests in the fact that it has no place for honest disagreement, no mere difference of opinion. Because all is evidence of a system of thought there can be no acceptable order where there is opposition over the substantive vision of the good that is to replace it, whatever that might be. Disagreement implies the persistence of opposition, and this, to our current crop of progressives, is intolerable.

Here the liberty of opinion serves no useful or necessary relation to the establishment of the new vision of a just social system which must be realized in whole, from the top down. In fact, liberty of thought and speech would be subversive, preserving smoldering embers of resistance or makeweights to power’s reformulation.

And so, tolerance itself, in the words of a leading critical theorist of the mid-20th century, Herbert Marcuse, becomes “tolerance towards that which is radically evil,” and must be countered because it is itself the manifestation of a whole whose “structure and function determine every particular condition and relation.” In other words, to use the favorite watchwords of our current radicals, evil is always and everywhere, “systemic.” And that has a direct bearing on the kinds of activity such radicals must pursue.

For the modern progressive, cultural planning has taken the place of economic planning, concocted from a heady brew of largely 20th century German and French critical theory and phenomenology. Any counter empowerment to the plans of social justice however defined, is to be rooted out as bias, prejudice, and aggression at all levels. In this world, a general rule respecting toleration and free expression is regarded as irrelevant at best, and more likely subversive in fact.

Individual liberty presupposes that voluntary action is possible and fundamentally beneficial when set within the parameters of equal laws, but the idea of society as a system where “every particular condition” is rooted in “structure and function,” rejects that premise. A commitment to voluntary choice and the liberty of free association hold out the hope for mutual gains from individual exchanges and the possibility of incremental improvements in society over time.

The systemic perspective, on the other hand, has room only for the reformation of the whole order, and so makes its pitch directly for control of the institutions of government. For the systemic thinkers of today, you are either one of the cognoscenti in favor of change, the enemy opposing it, or merely a pawn in the game. All the nuance and complexity of genuine context is drained away.

The “New” Socialist Narrative Agenda

And here then is the heart of the new radicalism of our time. All that is concerned with liberal institutions, such as markets, contracts, property, or constitutions, the rule of law, custom and precedent, are interpreted as the expression of systemic asymmetries of power. Being thus categorized, nothing of the politics of the U.S. or the economics of a largely market driven economy can offer anything redemptive or hopeful, and no quarter is to be given in the push for change.

In essence, the turn to a systemic narrative in modern socialist readings results in the worst kind of historical reductionism: the total politicization of all social relations all the way down, exposing the very truncated and shallow sense of context that informs present-day radical discourse. From here, the entirety of the past must be rewritten only with those power relations, in “every particular condition and relation,” boldly and unavoidably “confronted.”

And so, to the current crop of “New Historians,” slavery can no longer be interpreted as an evil and unfortunate off-shoot of historical and economic contexts but must be portrayed as the very engine of a single unitary system. Any dissent and all departures from that narrative and the substantive alternative vision of systemic justice with which it is inevitably fused, howsoever formulated in the mind of any given author, are to be classed as reactionary.

Histories that uphold, for example, older idealist interpretations become worse than suspect when they point to the positive aspects of past individuals, movements, beliefs or policies of those regarded to be part of the system. To think such is to deny that there is a “system.” Thus, the all too obvious tensions existing between the revolutionary ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the institution of slavery in the colonies is simply denied and the very movement for independence is itself asserted to be merely a defense of bondage, and not ultimately of liberty and self-government.

And what is worse, historians who point to such historical tensions, where motives and aims are seen to be in contention even among the so-called powerful, are quickly dismissed by such historians as complicit in the drive to preserve the “system.” And so we find that even Alfred Chandler and the New Institutionalist historians of the 1960s and 70s, however, “progressive” they may have thought themselves to be at the time, are actually counted among the apologists of capitalist exploitation, by allegedly providing a more pleasing portrayal of business practices in the late 19th century.

Conspiracy, in the form of systemic motivation, is really the only remaining vestige of the earlier Marxist critique. The groups doing the oppressing may not have any material basis in some specific mode of industrial production, but the common commitment to the wrong ideas mark them, whoever they may be, as enemies, and when you are an enemy of the substantive vision of social justice, whatever that might be, then there can be no liberty given, but only the freedom to renounce. It is all or nothing. That is a hopeless narrative—hopeless for all who might disagree at whatever level of opposition, even eventually among the revolutionists themselves.

Taking an Axe to Historical Context

The power ethic on which these new systemic narratives are based afford no ground from which a common social narrative can ultimately be worked out through civil exchange, polite debate, or learned disputation. These are old liberal tropes for which the modern critical narrativists have lost all patience. Of course, this means that there will never be any authentic unity even within their own ranks. For every Trotsky, there awaits an ice axe.

But in the meantime, statuary is to be pulled down, and not merely of offending Confederates, but a whole host of characters from Christopher Columbus to Thomas Jefferson, from George Washington to Winston Churchill. None of the symbols representing any degree of inconsistency with the systemic re-envisioning of the good can be tolerated.

This is no recipe either for a real understanding of the complexities of genuine historical context nor for the construction of an inclusive and stable social order in the present. A real sense of the complexities of context requires that space be given to the inescapable reality of human individuality and difference. It is however what Edmund Burke understood, to be at the root of revolutionary zealotry, the all or nothing, my way or the highway approach to society.

Real History is Hopeful

But reality, past or present, is not systemic. It has to be understood and interpreted precisely because each person as well as each moment is a composite of unique and often inconsistent elements. Here is the original notion of the concrete wherein real history’s hopefulness resides.

To be hopeful, history and politics must ultimately be truthful and that means more than mere facticity. A real understanding of both realms must accept far more than what a fixed and largely static conception of “systemic power” or “social justice” now asserts. It must accept that common social narratives are built up, bit by bit, in open, free and civil discussion where differences can first be clarified and discussed, and not through compulsory genuflection.

All hopeful narratives give some quarter for redemption through acknowledgement that good can exist simultaneously in this world with evil, and that anyone can come to see the tensions between them and choose the positive over the negative, affirming ultimately the salutary order of a society of free and equal laws. But perhaps even more importantly, hopeful narratives remain open to the possibility of their own falsification. This is the reason why liberty of thought remains such a vital principle in civil society rightly understood.

Accepting the possibility that one might be wrong is the very air that sustains all hopeful narratives, built up as they are through the give and take of multiple contributors. Such narratives depend on the liberty of free expression, opinion and perhaps most importantly, debate. That is indeed how peaceful, open and enduring civil order is actually formed. The new narratives, either of the past or the present, do not offer such hope—instead, they promise only destruction.

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With unemployment soon to reach and perhaps exceed 20 percent, however, it may well be that our homegrown socialists will have their best days since the Great Depression. But what form will their hopes and aspirations take?

In this context, many have noticed the frequent allusion to European-style social democracy. Before we rush down this path, though, we would do well to ponder the economic principles that actually sustain the most successful of these economies.

As it turns out, there is far more of old fashioned liberalism here than may at first be apparent to an American, whether such a person be a socialist or not. In fact, I would go even further. The core of the economic engine that sustains Europe has far more to do with a very real form of economic liberalism than what most of our home-grown socialists are probably willing to countenance for America’s future.

The vital core of the social market economy is to be found not among the disciples of Marx or even Sombart, but in the ordoliberal tradition of such thinkers as the economists Walter Eucken, Hans Grossman-Doerth, and Franz Böhm.

It is true that one finds in Europe a much greater role for the state in the provision of a social safety net. The level of transfer payments, not counting U.S. defense spending, are indeed more generous, but all of this is afforded because the main engines of economic growth are preserved through a commitment to the most basic rules of a still largely free market. And in some cases, those commitments actually run deeper than in the US.

These rules are, in order of appearance: 1) stability of currency due to a very deep-seated phobia against inflation; 2) a deeper existential commitment to private property rights; and 3) a commitment to competition. One might add other ancillary commitments such as greater restraint in torts, but these three get to the essential areas.

On the question of anti-inflationism, I will simply reference the tragic history of the early Weimar years in Germany and its effects on culture. As I said once before, it is amazing how much intervention an economy can endure so long as currency stability is maintained. This commitment will be sorely tested in the coming months as the new unprecedented financial side of the recent German and French aid package works its way through the system. But up until now, at least, the aversion to inflation has been the singularly most enduring part of the northern countries’ monetary culture on both the left and the right.

On the second point, for all of America’s much-ballyhooed commitment to property rights, Kelo v. City of New London exposed just how fragile ownership can actually be in the land of the free. Not so in the social market economy. To take private property in Germany requires, on balance, far more than just a public need: it requires proof of the necessity. If there is any alternative option, the claim for a taking will fail.

Respecting the final category, Walter Eucken was especially concerned to preserve competition. In large measure, this was the result of the peculiar history of German contract law respecting the cartelization of industries. An excellent overview of that history can be found in Eucken’s This Unsuccessful Age (1952), in which he outlined the classic problems of regulatory capture.

This concern for preserving competition continued to be vigorously pursued, even if contentiously debated throughout the remainder of the 20th century. And on this point, there can be no doubt but that, at least in its initial performance, the system of largely free markets with multiple private producers succeeded in the superior provisioning of certain essential medical supplies and tests.

Reflecting, then, on these three dimensions, we can see that there would be no “social” in Europe’s “social market economy” without the strictly market-friendly rules essential for economic efficiency. Going into our new hyper-mortgaged future, we will have to take very serious cognizance of these core principles, whatever degree of “socialization” our home-grown socialists may seek to implement.

The post European Social Democracy Isn’t What You Think It Is appeared first on Law & Liberty.

More specifically, it came with Woodrow Wilson’s call to replace an earlier Jeffersonian liberalism with a new kind of liberalism, one that would explicitly recognize the role of the expert in government to navigate society through the complexities of modern life. The older ways of reading the U.S. Constitution, Wilson very explicitly articulated, had to give way to intelligent administration.

In the classic history of that era, The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter argued that Wilson had tapped into a deep-seated anxiety prevalent among middle-class professionals at a time when they felt robbed of their rightful place in society by the increasing specialization and massification of American life. Professionalism, expertise, and management have been the essential leitmotifs of Progressivism ever since.

It is interesting, though, that most present-day progressives cannot run fast enough away from President Wilson, even though they too call for expert management, and like him are bold to assert the need to change the American narrative. This is certainly the case with the New York Times which endorsed Wilson both in 1912 and 1916, but decries his legacy these days. The Times can no longer invoke its own venerable progressive past because it no longer fits the current narrative.

You see, Wilson was a racist of a very systematic, “expert” sort, and so too were the “experts” of his day which progressives (like the Times) sought to empower. Rather than question the problematic nature of tying expertise to power, however, our modern-day progressives simply airbrush their forebear out of history. It’s what one does when changing narratives. You remove the uncouth from the family album. But you keep the power, keep the enthronement of expertise as you like it, and march forward at double-time, never looking back.

In their April 9 editorial, “The America We Need,” the Times editorial board fails to reckon with their own progressive history, even as the article remains progressivist to the core. Like Wilson’s “New Democracy,” the Times seeks to reorder American life along certain lines supposedly more in keeping with modern democracy and material equality, using the coronavirus crisis as a useful wedge. But the article takes a very peculiar turn. The board asserts that the current fragility of American life and institutions is “the product of deliberate decisions” that have “perpetuated the nation’s defining racial inequalities,” without any acknowledgment that the present welfare system is the product of the progressive tradition the Times itself has long championed.

Following a brief but vitriolic indictment of the housing and transportation policies of the 60s, for instance, one would never know that these were the hallmark programs, not of the founding narrative of individual liberty and constitutional constraint, but of the later progressive narrative of the Great Society! “The America We Need,” however, spares no effort to sling verbal effluent on the advocates of limited government and personal freedom as the champions of “wealth and privilege,” and “racial inequalities,” who deliberately trap “children and their children’s children” in poverty. If they weren’t so sanctimoniously earnest, you would think this was the beginning of the new tales of Scrooge. But they are deadly serious and deeply wrong.

Not only do they airbrush progressive history, but they also pass over the mountains of conservative and classical liberal scholarship on the problems of our institutional life that have been the hallmark of solid economic and political analysis of the progressivist state. They have set aside the explicit attacks on institutional racism, the hammering critiques of distortionary regulations, and the entire body of evidence indicting “crony capitalism.”

This very valuable and essential voice needs to be part of the current conversation. Only a vetting from a tradition that has been consistently holding government authority to account (and sorting through the mess of our current policy responses) can keep political power honest.

But rather than keep the channels of communication and debate open, the members of the Times editorial board seek to shut it down. Instead of bringing us together, something they frequently complain the administration in Washington fails to do, they are themselves promulgating division.

In addition to airbrushing out portions of the progressive past which they once supported, they airbrush out all memory of the genuinely leftist roots of much of the limited government tradition. The very idea of crony capitalism, for instance, can be traced back to such left-wing works as Bertram Gross’ Friendly Fascism and Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism. 

Both writers had noticed an inescapable fact of the modern national bureaucratic state: It invariably serves entrenched well-heeled economic interests. Many an old-left advocate of genuine equality and freedom was drawn to the limited government fold from following the leads of these writers. Recognizing the inherent tension in the progressivist claim that society could be restructured by experts yet remain egalitarian, their point was to limit the coercion that organized interests could wield in society. The Times editorial board members acknowledge none of this diversity in the lineage of their imagined opponents.

The first object of any would-be purveyor of power is to shut down all scrutiny of itself. Rather than foster a debate, as one ideally should expect of a daily worthy of the appellation of “newspaper,” the Times has rather retarded and hindered it, raising the natural question of the editorial board’s motives. Deliberate distortion weakens us as a country, and that is a sad additional cost we now must overcome in a crisis that has already cost everyone too much.

The post The America the <em>New York Times</em> Wants appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a Law & Liberty symposium on the 1619 Project.

How many types of capitalism are there? If one wants to play semantic games, I suppose there are as many as there are imaginable denotations of the word.

Matthew Desmond imagines there are good capitalisms, such as those in Norway, Thailand, and Brazil, where workers are protected in their jobs and employers are prohibited from hiring or firing as they choose; and bad capitalisms that leave employers free to make these decisions on their own with few or no restrictions.

To really understand Desmond’s contribution to the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” one has to realize that he is playing a semantic game of a very peculiar sort. In this game, facts and concepts are so much sand to be shaped into various piles of likes and dislikes according to what suits Desmond’s fancy. Thus he forms some into fairytale sandcastles over here, and others, into brooding keeps over there (the latter complete with gargoyles and circling vultures).

And the biggest, ugliest pile in Desmond’s sandbox is the one labeled American Capitalism, where some very choice grains have been plucked out and set before us.

The Bad, the Ugly, but not the Good

And here we meet, first and foremost, a very young and very brash first-generation son of poor immigrant Eastern European parents, one Martin Shkreli. Mr. Shkreli is presented not as a behavioral outlier but as the very ideal type of the American capitalist par excellence. This man is archetypal, we learn, because after gaining control of the patent of a life-saving drug, he did what every evil robber baron would obviously do: He raised its price by a whopping 56 times! Behold the face of American Capitalism.

His actions might have been sufficient for Desmond’s purposes, but Shkreli obliged him further by justifying what he did by invoking the rules of capitalism, giving Desmond the perfect Count Dracula to lead off his “just-so” story.

But, look here, some sand is left to the side. Let’s have a peek.

No mention is made of these particles: A hue and cry, by private and public persons alike, went up almost immediately when Shkreli initiated his pricing scheme. Nor are we told of the private firm that quickly intervened to address the outrage—voluntarily! And nothing is particularly made of the fact that Shkreli was convicted on charges brought by his own company for some of the severest trading violations in the world. Are these not things that happened in America, too? (See Jim Geraghty for more on what failed to be added to the American Capitalism pile).

Don’t awful things happen in Norway, too? Apparently not.

Not History but Discourse

The Desmond contribution to this majestic project of our Newspaper of Record has, it turns out, little to do with history per se. Desmond is not writing history but doing discourse theory, and thinks he is laying siege to the strategic high ground. It is an act of political warfare, and as such, openly embraces alternate constructs right down to how groups are defined and how facts are put before the reader, and in fact these are delivered up in an artful literary style worthy of the best fiction.

Under this way of seeing the world, relatively stable categories and definitions are for those who still believe in the goal of wertfrei research, “objectivity,” and source criticism. Hence, the definition of capitalism in the American context need not be accorded the same latitude as that given to Norwegian or Brazilian capitalisms because “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” to quote Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s authentic fairy-tale. And so Desmond generously bestows on the piles labeled “good capitalisms” all the legal and political interventions respecting labor that he likes, while the political, social, and legal elements of the “bad capitalisms” are only permitted to count as so much evidence against them.

How could this be good history?

In fact, Desmond is not a historian, but a sociologist (at Princeton University) who practices a kind of “theorizing” that has become all too prevalent in the academy, even among historians. Here scientific objects are to be “constructed” and new counter-narratives produced from those constructions. It is just the sort of “post-structuralism” that Allan Bloom worried about in his book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Others have noticed this connection too—and not necessarily because they disapprove of it—but simply because the terms employed are so closely aligned. In this world, not just the categories but the facts are to be treated as interpretive constructs.

Re-Constructing the Facts

Thus Desmond would have one believe that Thomas Affleck’s Plantation Record and Account Book (1847-1848) is the true source of the main ideas behind capitalist management as implemented in the United States today. His prose flows artfully, and it produces many tantalizing comparisons to modern American practices, but Desmond fails to put before us a single shred of evidence that Affleck’s book was the source of later labor-management techniques.

A reader who was unfamiliar with the history of accounting might thus be led to the conclusion that such a basic practice as double-entry bookkeeping was an innovation “whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.” It just isn’t so. Curiously, in making this claim, Desmond has unwittingly gone contrary to one of the early pioneers of his field who was also an important precursor to his own brand of discourse theory.

Werner Sombart had accepted the undeniable fact that double-entry bookkeeping constituted the crowning achievement of late medieval and early Renaissance capitalism in Italy, brought to its essential perfection by Luca Pacioli in 1494. “The very concept of capital,” Sombart wrote of this development, “is derived from this way of looking at things; one can say that capital, as a category, did not exist before double-entry bookkeeping.” (See the classic collection of original texts in Lane and Riemersma, Enterprise and Secular Change {1953}, p. 38.)

Plantation managers did not invent the managerial or accounting techniques employed in the North; they adopted already established practices, and those methods were in fact in deep tension with their own feudal self-image. One need only consult Eugene Genovese’s 2005 The Mind of the Master Class (or the excellent post by Phil Magness here). Such disjunctures must be understood and explained before we proceed to “construct” new categories.

I was particularly offended by the cavalier way Desmond brushed aside the always careful and meticulous scholarship of Alfred Chandler as merely the defense of a “more comforting origin story.” Chandler’s works are clearly encamped on ground that the new “historians” or “sociologists” of capitalism want so desperately to occupy. Yet Desmond makes no attempt to engage with Chandler’s sources or even to critique his categories. He simply offers up an opinion about motive. That ought not to be the way one “constructs” new subjects. Real history has at the very least, to understand something of the thoughts and motives of those who lived in a particular time and place.

So why did the planters imitate the age-old methods of enterprise? Might it be the slow and relentless squeeze on profit margins inflicted by the ever-increasing costs of enforcement and the policing of slaves? One should look here to Jeff Hummel’s important 2012 essay, “Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War.”

Plantation slavery was hardly a model of success, as Desmond’s own description of the periodic crises of mortgaged planter debt ought to have made clear to him. Placing slavery at the heart of his definition of American capitalism in the face of such evidence to the contrary, thus begs us to ask: Why?

Taking Exception

And here I need to take issue with the Cato Institute’s Jonathan Blanks’s characterization of the various conservative and libertarian responses to Desmond as so much “overreaction.” To play fast and loose with received categories; to redefine concepts for political ends without any clear or direct engagement with their textual and factual precursors—is to encourage resentments and promote group enmity.

Do you consider yourself to be a friend of freedom? Would you be a champion of all who seek a better life and a chance at self-improvement? Do you favor open and free markets? Do you support the peaceful exercise of liberty in thought and deed? Are we now to accept that such terms once considered synonymous with free enterprise in America are code for racism, oppression, and brutality?

Building his little sand castles the way he does, Desmond appears to be inviting just that kind of leap.

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About halfway through Monday’s broadcast of the PBS News Hour, I was fascinated to see that one of the speakers presented as an expert on mass violence was none other than an intellectual historian, a University of Chicago professor named Kathleen Belew. Belew has just published a book tracing the evolution of white supremacy in America from the days of its appearance on the Internet in the 1980s up to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

What really drew my attention was how Belew situated her research within present day debates concerning the causes and nature of mass shootings. Clearly there is a growing disposition among some to move public discourse away from psychological arguments about “lone wolves” to one that sees them as part of a more politically conscious and deeply orchestrated movement. Professor Belew is in that camp.

As the various discussants made plain throughout the broadcast, law enforcement has easier access to federal resources when going after terrorism that is directed or inspired by foreign actors because of its broader global and systematic nature. Consequently, to relate mass shootings to a more concerted web-based ideological movement could potentially inspire the kind of legal reform that would give law enforcement similar access to data and powers of surveillance in these instances of mass shooting.

While I, for one, have no problem with the sharing of information among law-enforcement agencies, either state or federal, for investigating and preventing violent acts, I do have some very deep concerns about the specific rationale being offered by Professor Belew.

Far from being “lone wolves,” she argues, mass shooters are connected to each other through “decades of organizing.” What is lacking, she insists, is a “coherent prosecution of this movement.” Indeed, she went on, the shootings are meant to be “focal points” for recruiting new members to the Aryan Nation.

One has to sympathize with Professor Belew’s desperation to deal with this horror. But our orientation to the evidence has to be accurate and our reasoning sound.

The fact that a number of the shooters have been inspired by these ideologies of hate is not a refutation of the psychological profiles used to explain their horrid acts. Indeed, if the ideological factor were to be, as Professor Belew seems to be advocating, sufficient grounds for prosecution, we would be challenging more than the NRA’s reading of the Second Amendment; also in play would be the ACLU’s reading of the First!

What has happened, I am afraid, is a classic error to which intellectual historians are peculiarly prone due to the nature of their craft. The historical profession, dominated by left-leaning social history in the 1970s, moved in the 1990s to the forms of discourse theory that predominate today; but this means that it has become focused on forms of intentionality and purposefulness. That in itself is not bad. (I have written on that in a chapter here.) But what must be guarded against is the temptation to see purposefulness in everything—to the point where one is seeing conspiracy everywhere.

Ironically, to succumb to this fallacy is to subtly reflect the very mindset to which these ideologies of hate tend to appeal. There is in fact a problem of social isolation to which the minds of young men are particularly susceptible (See for example, this). For most of human history, the social and economic roles of individuals were fairly well defined and prescribed. The modern division of labor, on the other hand, directed as it is through largely voluntary commercial relations, does not always satisfy everyone.

Add to this the misdirected social policies of the past 50 years, the ever-burgeoning rates of incarceration, the drug war and its deformed twin (communities decimated by addiction), and there is little left for many individuals so affected to attain a sense of purpose sufficient to sustain anything other than an oppositional form of identity. And this has had a particular influence on predominantly young white men.

It is this kind of oppositional identity that the platforms of conspiratorial thought thrive upon. And here I might recommend a much deeper  investigation into the debilitating aspects of modern communication technology: Catherine Steiner Adair’s The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age (2014). Let us just say, texting is no way to hug your child.

It is the oppositional, anti-social, and yes, essentially isolated frame of mind that is particularly drawn to the mirage of social connectivity that electronic media impart. It is this social isolation that is still a big part of what is transpiring. Yet here comes Professor Belew, (and she is by no means the only one) to raise, inadvertently or not, the status of these shooters from that of the mentally ill to membership in a grand conspiracy.

This argument, of course, leaves open the question of what ideas are supposed to count as radically “alt-Right” and which ideational signifiers are to be marked as permissible; which are, and which are not, classifiable as “hate?” Perhaps even more alarming is the question: Who gets to decide?

And what then to make of those who do not fit the particular ideological profile of Professor Belew such as the Dayton shooter? He was a misogynist, to be sure, but he was also a supporter of an openly professed leftwing socialist.

Further in the discussion, Professor Belew let slip a prime indicator of the sort of discourse analytics she is actually applying when she noted that white supremacy undergirds large swaths of our electoral and judicial institutions. (Again, intentionality everywhere!) But as we see, this explanation doesn’t reach every assailant who commits an atrocity.

One could hope in this day and age that people might finally wake up to the fact that our local and state governments have ceded far too many of their responsibilities up the chain of command, even as, at the federal level, Congress has ceded far too much of its authority to the executive branch. Real community is local, not virtual—and it is only at this level that we will get a rein on the problem.

Are we then, in a moment of fear and distress, to centralize even more power to classify harmful and less harmful thoughts, as Professor Belew seems to be suggesting?

In this instance, I would listen to the psychologists and not the historian.

The post Ideology or Psychology? appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Everyone would like a world of perpetual peace. Well, not everyone, and that is precisely why it will require more than attention to just our economic but also our political natures. Ironically, one of the least political of all our presidents may have just hit on the formula to achieve what has eluded practically every one of our recent administrations. We have exhibited a pattern of military restraint and a retreat from the Washington Consensus on free trade: and this may have opened up a surprising space for negotiating a new way forward.

Few people can accuse me of optimism and not a few have noticed how discouraging my sense of our current national political scene has been over the last few years. So please excuse me if suddenly I seem to evince the opposite inclination. For the sake of those who might think I have lost my mind, my principles or my senses, let me assure you, I am as much in favor of free trade and free enterprise as ever. Now, taking a deep breath, let me try out the following thought experiment.

Friedrich List was fond of saying that political economy must have as much politics in it as economy. With that he launched upon a critique of Adam Smith and free trade ideas that would inspire a significant portion of that line of thinking that would become the German Historical School of Political Economy. List’s assertion has garnered no end of opposition from classical liberals and libertarians ever since. But as Gustav Schmoller, a later member of that school, was always eager to insist, everything is always so very complicated.

What is now transpiring with the appointment of John Bolton and the concurrent opportunity to negotiate with North Korea is a staggering illustration of just such complexity. Either President Trump is a wildly brilliant strategist or he has stumbled into a mode of action that has inadvertently opened up enough space to bring the world back from what appears to have been the brink of ever expanding militarization, with all of its attendant threat of endless regional conflicts.

For the sake of argument, let me make the case for the first scenario, and risk the scorn of friends and associates.

In a world of zero-sum thinking, the economist typically contends that steady instruction in first principles and the experience of the long-run benefits of free trade, afford the best means to inculcate the fundamentals of sound policy. A major weakness in this approach though is that it assumes that people ultimately care so deeply about their personal well being that they will be open to learning from such instruction and such experience.

But the reality is quite otherwise. And it is not even that people who are inclined to think in zero-sum terms don’t understand the argument. It is just that they understand “well being” in a very different way from the rest of us. Indeed, I would be quite willing to bet that most of them in fact do understand quite well the proposition that rests at the heart of the notion of mutual gains from exchange. It is simply that they do not care, and are, in fact, quite willing to forego those benefits in pursuit of something else, something political.

Now lest you think by this that I mean simply nationalism, not so fast! It certainly plays a part in such a person’s indifference curves, to use the economist’s jargon, but it isn’t just that.

Every “great leader” whoever he might be, not only discounts the benefits of those outside of his particular country, but a good many within it!

Indeed, such a person very often positively wants to harm and directly handicap large numbers of people within his own country, people he regards as subversive or “enemies of the state.” Such a person might well understand the economist’s arguments about the long run, but he is not at all interested, as the economist is, in the benefits that accrue to persons in general, but only to the relative position of himself and his group. In such a world as this, prior to Trump, we were rapidly losing space within which to act or negotiate politically, other than through the military option. And we were doing so because of our unwavering attachment to global humanitarianism and free trade.

The same sort of ethical universalism that informs the calculations of our economists, was also fueling the reformist agendas of our past globalist policies. On that basis, we entered into other countries to protect their human rights, to ensure truth, justice and the American way. As much as we might like to liberate all people everywhere from evil, notice what that does: it inadvertently provides a handy rationale for resistance by all those who resent our intrusions.

Liberalization of any sort, whether it be human rights, free trade, limited government, environmental regulation etc., etc. becomes simply our imposition, the American way, and not their own way. Such association draws every malcontent everywhere like moths to a flame to take up arms and fight, which aids and abets the zero-sum group-think of would be strongmen everywhere. They need only point to the presence of our troops to say, “this is not natural, this is not ours, but is rather an imposed order.”

And all those whom we have helped? They become the perpetual enemy within to anti-liberal authoritarians everywhere. They are the handy-dandy universal reason for every possible obstacle to the great leader’s plans for greatness, a convenient pretense to back up every excuse to poor performance. It is, moreover, very difficult to speak of your movement if it is obviously backed by the armed forces of others.

In this world, the logic of our past policies, however much we insisted they were the result of higher universal law, invariably directed us to more and not less military adventurism and all the overreach that that entailed. We need only recall just how disappointed the non-interventionists were in Obama. But most of the fault probably lay with the implicit logic to which he was heir. Now comes Trump.

Whatever you may think about the benefits of protectionism (and please note, I am in no way a protectionist), what Trump’s language on trade has done, however inadvertently, is open up space for policies other than military intervention. How is that possible?

Because it strikes directly at groups, including the in-group of every political strong man. “Great leaders” do not care about total utility. They care about relative status, and usually that has much more to do with matters of symbolism than any kind of generalized philanthropy. Now comes the appointment of John Bolton. My first reaction was…train wreck!

But my second thought is a more hopeful scenario.

Bolton might well be the proverbial Rottweiler on a leash. As long as Trump has him there, he has the chained beast of past militarism firmly in hand for all to see. But in the other, he has now the carrots of trade. If played right, Trump need never let go of Bolton, because now he can step back from the brink to which past military intervention has led us. If this is correct, whether intentional or unintentional, it could well herald an important step in the direction of peace, and if that is correct, then the foundations of true reform and progress will have been well served.

But this scenario will require two things more from us and the president if the opportunity is not to be squandered, and these will require real skills of political negotiation: Patience and a steady resolve to abjure the use of force. I am not at all convinced that we can achieve these points, but I am willing to hope.

The post Opening Room to Negotiate? appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Everywhere the idea of liberty has simply become confused, even deranged. The pieces of a once-glorious tradition have been shattered, and the shards have been taken up as dueling implements in an all-out street fight, as right is pitted against right, freedom against freedom. Indeed, understanding liberty has become, for our people at least, entirely too complicated and even unnatural.

What has happened? As we consider cake-bakers in their artistic or religious expressions, or couples in their personal relations and public declarations; when we think of drug laws state and federal; when we consider the security of privacy and property while traveling or texting—everywhere we see contention and confusion, and all roads seem now to lead to the Supreme Court. What has happened? Technology has happened.

In the earliest years of the republic, the various branches and levels of government served very practical purposes largely enforced not by Madison’s vaunted checks and balances so much as by physical necessity. Under more primitive conditions, government could do very little; people simply had to make do with what they had in front of them.

Under such circumstances, where communication was not instant and travel was slow, separate jurisdictions not only made sense, but government really couldn’t function in any other way than by delegation. Indeed, the entire British Empire was less an empire than a bunch of separate settlements united by sentiment and managed by locals—very local government. When the Empire tried to do otherwise, America separated. Much of the American experience subsequently was the same.

As technology, improved, however, and communications sped up, local self-governance became more, not less problematic. Evils in one part of the country increasingly became more apparent and unacceptable to other parts. And with the railroad, one part could actually exercise its will far more effectively and forcefully. But even then, large portions of the old framework continued to endure, at least for another half century and, while the divide between state and national power became more permeable, not all claims could be administered by the federal government in Washington.

Thus, the old idea that federalism might serve as a protection to liberty through people’s right to emigrate and through a healthy competition among states, endured a bit longer. What Brandeis called the laboratories of democracy were supposed to bring change and improvement. As a process for change, however, it was slow. It relied on a belief—a republican faith—that ultimately, out of the competition for persons and property, truth and goodness would prevail. But it was, it seems, too slow for most of us.

When people think about jurisdictional lines, they need to realize that they are there for practical and therefore prudential reasons. But truth and goodness are generally, and rightly, felt to be absolutes. That people may disagree about such absolutes is understood well enough, I suppose. When a person’s sense of justice is violated, however, it is little comfort to him or her that the jurisdiction is what it is; or that the powers have been divided the way they are; or that liberty might be better served in the long run by not turning over everything to the President, the Supreme Court, or Congress. A perceived transgression of one’s liberty or rights has more the feel of a direct assault, for which victims demand immediate redress.

Today’s technology can instantaneously transmit to millions both the pain and the call for redress. And what’s more, government, at whatever level, can respond almost as quickly with force and resources. It was once thought that states had bills of rights to protect their own citizens, but that state governments could still do many things a majority of those citizens thought were right and good. The national government was prohibited from doing what was not enumerated, and was suppose to deal with national and international relations. That world was what it was because of the state of technology at the time.

Now? Who can hold coherently all those divisions and layers of authority in place and still think of their freedom intact? Who has the patience for, or is even able to imagine, processes that might take decades, let alone years, to work themselves out? Who could possibly think that a right to life, liberty, property, faith, or love might be differently perceived in one place than another and not be outraged?

It seems, sadly, so . . . unnatural.

The post Is Liberty “Natural”? appeared first on Law & Liberty.

The rhetorical use of language and the art of storytelling are aspects of intellectual engagement that I have become increasingly sensitive to in exploring German historical thought. It is no accident that McCloskey’s three-volume work on the great economic and social transformation of the modern world delves into channels that reach to the heart of that body of ideas, to Max Weber on concepts, to Ludwig Lachmann on plans, and even, in her contribution to the Reason forum, on Otto von Bismarck’s very deliberate manipulations to rearrange the German political landscape of his day.

The Germans, whether of the Left, Right, or center, quickly became attuned to the place of language in the formation of social order. In this, they picked up where the Scots and English thinkers had left off, but the German legacy was more mixed and ambivalent with respect to liberty in part because of the Germans’ particular and peculiar historical circumstances. Yet some were very clearly in this line: Wilhelm von Humboldt was the initial inspiration for John Stuart Mill’s work On Liberty (1859), and Lachmann clearly saw in Weber a necessary ingredient to furthering Austrian economic theory.

Walter Grinder once warned me about entering this deep wood for fear of being irredeemably lost among the trees. I think I’ve successfully negotiated that danger by leaving behind some well-paced markers in my explorations, and have in fact found one tree well worth further consideration: the relationship of language, and moral language in particular, to the formation of our sense of time and time preferences. I am convinced that this is where Lachmann was ultimately going with his discussion of Weber and the place of plans in the formation of economic order.

While the Austrians have always been the most sensitive of the various economic schools to the question of time, Lachmann was particularly so. Concepts are critical components in the structuring of thought into orderly plans of action. One can readily see their technical relevance to the economic equation. What needs further development, though, is the very central place of moral concepts in the lengthening out of the individual’s time preferences with respect to ends, and in the coordination of those preferences among different persons.

To explain orderliness in general, it may be sufficient to theorize from purposefulness, as Ludwig von Mises insisted, but different orders can be expected to arise from the predominating pursuits of different ends. All actions have unintended consequences, but whether the order that arises from those consequences is one that we want to affirm or not depends on the quality of the ends pursued. In this case, purposefulness alone will do very little work.

Values, as limits to what we are willing to do, or as goals to which we aspire, are crucial to the whole framework of a free society. Analyzing the content of purposefulness, then, is critical to understanding the free society, and this is exactly what moral language permits us to do.

Animals have purposefulness. What they have difficulty doing is deferring gratification. When my dog wants something, she does what seems most expedient: the direct application of her jaws to the desired object, toy, or food. She has little idea of “mine and thine” but what has been ingrained through training.

Here is where the real contribution of language to order comes into play: The technical problem of acquiring what we desire is made more feasible through our ability to plan. But more than this, we are able to work with the competing ends of others by properly situating our ends in relation to theirs. The more we are able to conceptualize a sense of where our mutual interests are, the more we are able to see others as ends in themselves and not merely as means for our own uses. The strength of our moral conceptions will thus define the degree to which we will pursue plans that are mutually beneficial, or at least not incompatible with the pursuits of others. The concept of property is a central value in this respect. This is at base what is meant by the lengthening of time horizons.

A person who does not have a sufficiently developed moral language will have a more difficult time deferring gratification by abjuring the use of theft or violence. Such a person needs the heavy hand of countervailing force to dissuade him or her from antisocial behavior. Thus if you want to move away from the use of force in society, the more you should engage in the very subject that Ruger and Sorens and McCloskey have raised.

Some commenters in the forum believe they have overstated their case. As well they may have—that is the very definition of making one’s point. That is why it’s “pointy.” It does not mean we should avoid the subject. It is, after all, only by engaging the question of morality directly, as they have done, that we really begin to understand the contours of self-government and liberty rightly.

I would frame the question this way: What are the languages that need to be internalized such that we extend and lengthen our time horizons to where we produce an order of self-governing persons worthy of defending?

That is the conversation I see Sorens and Ruger trying to initiate and it is one that I welcome.

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