 Welcome to the Cato Institute. I'm David Bowes. I'm the executive vice president here, and I'm very pleased to have all of you. We have a perfect program tonight for this season in which we are celebrating the birth of the American Republic. We're going to be talking tonight about the history of liberty. And this really is the most important topic in American history and in the history of Western civilization. The libertarian tradition is at the core of our civilization. It has its roots in ancient Greece and ancient Israel. It developed through the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The rise of Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and into the American times. You cannot understand the world we live in without understanding libertarian ideas and without knowing something about the people that we'll be hearing about tonight. Some of you know that a couple of years ago, I published my own books on the libertarian tradition. And I can't help thinking that they are complementary with the book we're talking about tonight. I wrote Libertarianism, a primer in which I tried to lay out the basic principles and the contemporary argument for libertarianism. And I edited the libertarian reader, which collected about 60 of the greatest writings ever on liberty. Now Jim Powell has written The Triumph of Liberty, which tells the story of the great champions of freedom through their individual biographies. All those books should be available in any good bookstore or from Lezay Fair Books at LFB.org. Of course, those of you here tonight will be signing Jim Powell's book, The Triumph of Liberty, after the event. Our speaker tonight has a great background for writing about the history of liberty. At the University of Chicago, he studied under the great historians William McNeil and Daniel Boersten. As a student editor there, he published The Great Libertarians, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, George Stigler, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. And he was a research assistant for another Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase. He became a journalist after that and wrote more than 400 articles for publications ranging from American heritage to the Saturday evening post to reason and liberty. He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and he's the editor of Lezay Fair Books. To write this latest book, he visited libraries, bookstores, museums, historic sites in Europe, Asia and South America as well as around the United States. This book, The Triumph of Liberty, a 2000 year history told through the lives of freedom's greatest champions, is being published officially on the 4th of July by, appropriately enough, the free press. Jim has also created a website to talk about the book and the ideas and the history of liberty, which is libertystory.net. So now to discuss the triumph of liberty and the lives of its greatest champions, please welcome Jim Powell. Thank you, David. It's always a delight to be back here at Cato, which has done so much for liberty. In his book, Studies on Philosophy, Politics and Economics, F.A. Hayek explained that an important reason why socialism captured the imagination of intellectuals is that liberty ceased to be a living, relevant, inspiring idea. Hayek went on to say that more people seem to get their political ideas from history than from economics. For instance, a lot of people believe government intervention is needed to keep the economy going because they believe the stock market crash of 1929 caused the depression and that the New Deal got us out of it. So back in 1994, I decided to tell the story of liberty through the lives of heroes and heroines as a way to try to inspire old friends for liberty and to try to win some new ones. I've been studying the history of liberty for some four decades since my days at the University of Chicago, and I knew a great deal about intellectual history, economic history, legal history and related issues. But I was quite unprepared for the extraordinary drama and the powerful emotions of this story, which I came to understand by going through hundreds of biographies and published diaries and letters and other such material. I was overwhelmed to see how much friends of liberty suffered, how much they persisted against what they often found to be hopeless odds, how they helped each other, and in myriad ways, helped keep the cause alive. Liberty has to be one of the most thrilling stories ever told. In the triumph of liberty, for example, I tell the story of the amazing swede Raoul Wallenberg, who saved almost 100,000 Jews from the gas chambers. He operated in Budapest within Nazi controlled territory, which meant that escape was impossible. He was armed only with a pistol, which he never used. Wallenberg's driver, Shondor Ardai, recalled one phenomenal moment. We have come to a station where a train full of Jews was on the point of leaving Germany and the death camps. The officer of the guard did not want to let us enter. Raoul Wallenberg then climbed on the roof of the train and handed in many protective passports as he could through the windows. The Nazis fired their guns and cried for him to go away, but he continued calmly to hand out passports to the hands which reached out for them. I believe that men with guns were impressed by his courage and on purpose fired above him. Afterwards, Wallenberg managed to get everybody who had the protective passports off the death train. We'll take the story of Frederick Douglass, which is among other things about the wonder of liberty as it appeared for the first time to a runaway slave. When Douglass reached the shipbuilding port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he decided to settle down, he was amazed at the prosperity around him. He wrote, I had very strangely supposed while in slavery that few of the comforts and scarcely any of the luxuries of life were enjoyed in the north, compared with what were enjoyed by slaveholders in the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people own no slaves. I suppose that they were upon a level with the non-slaveholding population of the south and I knew they were exceedingly poor. I'd become accustomed to regard their poverty as the necessary consequence of not owning any slaves. I had somehow imbibed the opinion that in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth and very little refinement. Douglass continued, Here I found myself surrounded with the strongest proofs of wealth in New Bedford, lying in the wharves and writing on the stream, I saw many ships of the finest model in the best order and the largest size. Upon the right and the left, I was walled in by granite warehouses of the widest dimensions, stowed to their utmost capacity with the necessaries and comforts of life. Added to this, almost everybody seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared with what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore. I heard no deep oaths or hoared curses against the laborers, I saw no whipping of men, but all seemed smoothly to go on. Every man appeared to understand his work and went after it with a sober yet cheerful earnestness which betoken the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing as well as a sense of his own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly strange. From the wharves I strolled around the town, gazing with wonder and admiration at the splendid churches, the beautiful dwellings and finely cultivated gardens, evincing an amount of wealth, comfort, taste and refinement such as I had never seen in slaveholding Maryland. There's a great deal of lyrical visionary writing in the history of Liberty. I take these lines by the great Irish liberator Daniel O'Connell. He said, we will plant in our native land the constitutional tree of Liberty. That noble tree will prosper and flourish in our green and fertile country. It will extend its protecting branches all over this lovely island. Beneath its sweet and sacred shade, the universal people of Ireland, the Catholics and Protestants and Presbyterians and dissenters of every class will sit in peace and union and tranquility. Commerce and trade will flourish, industry will be rewarded and the people contented and happy will see old Ireland what she ought to be. Great, glorious and free, first flower of the earth, first gem of the sea. And yes, while researching the triumph of Liberty, I found humorous moments too. When the English political exile John Locke was asked what he was doing in Holland, he reportedly replied, I am here for the beer. As you might know, had Locke been in England at this time, he probably would have been executed as a conspirator against the king. The Scotsman Adam Smith worked on the wealth of nations for about a dozen years. And as soon as it was published in 1776, he began revising it. He had time for little else, except perhaps this jibe at his reputation for forgetfulness. He told his publisher, I had almost forgot. I was the author of an inquiry concerning the wealth of nations. University of Chicago Nobel Laureate George Stigler, who had documented the reasons why government regulations tend to backfire, came up with this game for children. He offered a million dollars to a child who could answer three questions. First, who was buried in Grant's tomb? Second, whose head is on the Lincoln penny? And at this point, of course, the children began to anticipate great riches. And then came the third question, who was Adam Smith's best friend? Now Stigler had in mind some contemporary of Smith, but on one occasion a child said, who was Adam Smith's best friend? Why you are Uncle George! And so he was. As I reflect on the story of Liberty during the last 2,000 years, several points stand out to me. First, how much has been gained for Liberty despite all the issues which trouble us today? Just imagine for a moment that you were living 2,000 years ago in Rome. Nobody's heard of individual rights. Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion. All of these things were utterly unknown. Marcus Tullius Cicero was beheaded for speaking out against the tyranny of Mark Antony. Murder had been common in Roman politics since at least 133 BC, when a reformer named Tiberius Sampronius Grocus was clubbed to death by senators he disagreed with. According to the biographer Plutarch, who wrote in the 1st century AD, Rome was filled with murder and there's no counting the executions or setting a limit to them. Rome was an empire based on military conquest and slavery. At the Emporiums of Capua and Delos some 20,000 slaves a day changed hands. Now how was it possible to go from that world to this world? How could you possibly get from there to here? It's almost unimaginable. We've come a long way in part because many people struggle valiantly for liberty over a very long time. A dozen of the people I write about were imprisoned. Another dozen were exiled. Two were beheaded. One was shot to death. Despite all the obstacles, friends for liberty have managed to advance the cause through their ideas, their stubbornness, their persistence and their courage. The Dutchman Hugo Grocius convicted of defending free will in Calvinist Holland was imprisoned but he escaped in a trunk intended to carry his books. And he wrote his great treatise on peace which made him the father of international law while in impoverished exile in France. Alexis de Tocqueville completed democracy in America and his other important books despite migraine headaches, neuralgia and stomach cramps which lasted a week at a time and he endured bouts of depression. Eventually he succumbed to tuberculosis. The great German playwright Friedrich Schiller produced his plays about liberty while he suffered from severe asthma, tuberculosis, liver and heart disease. The last nine years of his life when he was practically an invalid were his most productive. Schiller wrote one play about liberating the Swiss which is Wilhelm Tell another about liberating the Dutch which is Don Carlos and yet another about liberating the French which was the maid of Orléans. It is not easy to stop, wrote Thomas Mann, once I have begun to speak of Schiller's special greatness a generous, lofty, flaming, inspiring grandeur. Schiller's mighty talent, his libertarian sentiments, he is a poet who knows how to bring tears to our eyes while at the same time rousing our indignation against despotism. Cornell University historian Stanley Izzerta wrote this about the Frenchman known as the hero of two worlds. Lafayette knew only one cause during his long lifetime, human liberty. As a young man he risked his life in war and revolution for that cause. In middle age, living under the barely concealed dictatorship of Napoleon a regime he detested, he recalled how he had been wounded, denounced, condemned to death, despised, imprisoned, beggared and exiled all in the service of human liberty. Poor, powerless and with no prospects at that time Lafayette asked, how have I loved liberty? With the enthusiasm of religion, with the rapture of love, with the conviction of geometry, that is how I have always loved liberty. One of the really incredible aspects of this story is that most of the people who struck mighty blows for liberty had humble origins. They had no money, no connections, no pull, very little to indicate great promise. What they did seemed impossible. Who would have ever predicted that a poor wandering monk would turn out to be the first great champion for toleration and peace in modern history? This was Dutch-born, desiderious Erasmus who defended free will against Luther's claims of predestination who denounced war-making kings and popes and who protested the slaughter of 100,000 German peasants. Who would have predicted that a failed corset maker would help inspire the American Revolution? Harvard historian Bernard Balin reflected, Thomas Paine's Common Sense is the most brilliant pamphlet written during the American Revolution and one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language. How it could have been produced by a bankrupt Quaker corset maker, the sometime teacher, preacher and grocer and twice dismissed excise officer who happened to catch Benjamin Franklin's attention in England and who arrived in America only 14 months before Common Sense was published is nothing one can explain without explaining genius itself. Who would have ever imagined that a palsy brewer would become the most ingenious political agitator of the American Revolution? Whose newspaper articles, communication network and dramatic protests like the Boston Tea Party kept the British constantly on the defensive. I'm talking of course about Sam Adams. The English historian Thomas Macaulay was once so hard up after the failure of his father's business that he pawned a gold medal he had won at Cambridge. But he made himself one of the most eloquent of all authors on liberty. His very first speech in 1824 proclaimed his talent with these words for the emancipation of slaves in British colonies. He said the peasant of the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage and a hut whose door yields him no protection. But when his cheerful and voluntary labor is performed he will return with the firm step and a wreck brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to the cottage which is his castle. How was it possible that the failed storekeeper and pencil maker would give a little talk, never see it published during his lifetime and yet have it achieved global influence? Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote that Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience became the best known work of American literature to the peoples of Asia and Africa struggling to be free and it has earned the honor of having its sale prohibited in communist countries. And it would have seemed utterly preposterous to suggest that the son of a seamstress and a failed businessman would win a Nobel Prize and help make friends for liberty around the world and yet this is what Milton Friedman has done and continues to do. The story of liberty teaches us to take a long view and carry on. For 14 years, Ayn Rand worked on Atlas Shrugged, her epic defense of liberty and individualism and it went on to sell four and a half million copies. It sells tens of thousands of copies every year without being promoted by the publisher or assigned by professors and now at last the movie of Atlas Shrugged is being made. Victor Hugo's masterpiece, Les Miserables, about a private individual who was hounded by police but helps humanity was in the making for 22 years. It became the first international publishing event with simultaneous editions appearing in Amsterdam, Leipzig, London, Madrid, Paris, Turin and St. Petersburg. The musical Les Miserables become the world's most popular musical seen by over 40 million people. For six decades, Thomas Jefferson carried on as one of the most gifted pens for liberty, turning out more declarations, resolutions, reports and other official documents than any other founder. He turned out as well over 18,000 letters which offered keen insights on fundamental issues to practically everybody who was anybody in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The civil rights movement took a decade to turn the tide against compulsory racial segregation. Leaders of the free trade movement persisted for a quarter century before English grain tariffs were abolished, enabling poor people to buy cheap imported food. The movement for women's suffrage took an incredible seven decades from the time housewife Elizabeth Cady Stanton launched it in 1848. Her declaration of rights and sentiments was based on the Declaration of Independence and she advocated equal property rights and the right to vote as a means of securing this. Carrie Chapman Catt recalled that suffrages conducted 56 campaigns of referendum to male voters, 480 campaigns to legislators to get them to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to get state constitutional conventions to write women's suffrage into state constitutions, 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include women's suffrage planks, 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt women's suffrage planks, and 19 campaigns before 19 successive congresses. A tremendous amount of persistence in all of these cases. Again and again, the triumph of liberty, one can see how a few individuals or even a single individual can make a huge difference. The Greek bookseller Atticus paid Cicero's bills and helped sustain his spirits during his years of exile. During the 1680s, the Dutch Quaker merchant Benjamin Furley provided sanctuary for exiles William Penn, John Locke, and Algin and Sidney, and he kept Sidney's explosive manuscripts safe. Arthur Tappan and a few other Quaker merchants backed William Lloyd Garrison, making it possible for him to publish The Liberator, the foremost-established newspaper for three decades. Ellen Windsor, Rebecca Windsor Evans, and Edmund C. Evans made it possible for Albert J. Nock to write some of his best books, including Jefferson and Our Enemy of the State. When the Austrian adversary of socialism, Ludwig von Mises, arrived as an exile in the United States back in 1940, he didn't know anybody, he didn't have much money, but he did remember that journalist Henry Haslett had reviewed the English-language edition of his book Socialism, and he gave Haslett a call. Well, Haslett had spent much of his youth in a home for fatherless boys, and he had to give up his dreams of a college education because he didn't have any money. He started working for newspapers, and by the time the call came from Mises, he had worked his way up to a job at the New York Times. Haslett used his New York Times connections to get Mises some writing assignments and money, and he also used his Times connections to help get Mises' wife's daughter out of Nazi-controlled Paris. And Haslett helped persuade Yale University Press to publish Mises' books, Bureaucracy, Omnipotent Government, and Human Action. Since I began this talk recalling an observation of Hayek's that people aren't likely to support liberty unless they find it really inspiring, let me close with a Hayek's saga. During the Battle of Britain, Hayek's intellectual adversary and personal friend John Maynard Keynes helped find quarters for Hayek's family in Cambridge, and Hayek began working on a book idea in a semi-converted barn. The book, which explained why central planning must produce dictatorship, was The Road to Serfdom, published in England on March 10, 1944. It provoked much controversy, and the 2000 copy press run was sold out. To secure an American publisher, Hayek sought help from Fritz Maklip, an economist who, like Hayek, had attended the economic seminar of Ludwig von Mises back in the 1920s. Maklip had emigrated from Vienna to the United States, and he worked in Washington. He wasn't able to interest any American publishers in The Road to Serfdom, but he did show the English edition page proofs to Aaron Director, Milton Friedman's brother-in-law. Apparently, directors sent them to Frank Knight in the University of Chicago's economics department. Knight, in turn, recommended the book to William Couch, editor of the University of Chicago Press, and it was accepted. So there were very few friends of freedom at this time, but they were just enough to get the job done. Well, Henry Haslett wrote a 1,500-word front-page review in the New York Times Sunday book review declaring that Friedrich Hayek has written one of the most important books of our generation. The University of Chicago Press ordered another 10,000 copies. Reader's Digest editor, DeWitt Wallace, another friend of liberty, devoured the first 20 pages of this April 1945 issue to The Road to Serfdom. And then Harry Sherman, whose co-founder of Book of the Month Club, distributed another 600,000 copies of these in addition to the 8 million that got the original Reader's Digest at that time. Among the readers of the condensation was a former Royal Air Force pilot named Anthony Fisher, a self-made entrepreneur who pioneered the rent-a-car business in England. He was so excited about the road to serfdom that he decided he should go into politics and promote liberty. Since he lived near Hayek, he went over for a chat. Hayek convinced him that politics would be a waste of time until public opinion was more receptive to ideas on liberty. Hayek advised him that what Fisher should do is go out and make some money and use some of the proceeds to fund a think tank to try appealing to intellectuals and sway opinion that way. Accordingly, Fisher became a dairy farmer, but he was wiped out by hoof and mouth disease. Then he learned about factory farming of chickens, and he started Buckstead Chicken Company, which dramatically cut the cost of chickens in England and did more to put a chicken in every pot than all the politicians put together. As Hayek suggested, Anthony Fisher did use some of his proceeds, and he funded the Institute of Economic Affairs, and this did much to influence the political climate in England. Among those attending IEA functions over the years was Margaret Thatcher, and later her successful privatizations inspired other countries to start selling off government assets too. Fisher sold Buckstead Chicken Company and put most of his share into a turtle farming business because it uses a lot of meat. But he got wiped out in the early 1970s by endangered species laws. He was in bad financial shape, he was almost 60, so it was very hard for him to make that money back. But by this time, the success of the Institute of Economic Affairs had become evident to all, and other people began offering him money to start think tanks like the IEA in other countries. Fisher helped the Fraser Institute get firmly established in Vancouver, British Columbia. He went to New York and helped establish the Manhattan Institute. He went to Dallas and established the National Center for Policy Analysis, and then to San Francisco to start the Pacific Research Institute. He started the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to handle the increasing volume of requests from around the world, all of which happened because Fisher was inspired by that book that Hayek wrote in a semi-converted barn. Another man stirred into action by the road to surf, and was Harold Lunow, who worked for his uncle William Volcker's wholesale business in Kansas City. Volcker had started a charitable foundation in 1933, and by 1944, Harold Lunow had succeeded Volcker. He used his funds with stunning effect. Lunow arranged to pay Ludwig von Mies' salary at New York University after NYU refused to pay Mies' anything. Lunow paid Hayek's salary at the University of Chicago when that university didn't think Hayek was worth a paycheck. Lunow funded conferences, which figured in the development of Hayek's book The Constitution of Liberty. Lunow paid for the lectures Milton Friedman delivered, which became Capitalism and Freedom. Lunow approved the grant to Murray Rothbard, which resulted in man economy and state, and Lunow helped finance the founding of the Montpelerin Society, which every couple years brings Friends of Liberty together from around the world. All because one man had an idea that another man with some money was inspired to take decisive action. As you can see, the history of liberty abounds with stories which touch people's hearts. They can inspire old friends of liberty, win new friends, and help spur us all to carry the torch of liberty on its next lap. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jim. You know, it occurs to me there are actually a surprisingly large number of movies in the theaters right now that deal with themes in the history of liberty, from The Gladiator in Ancient Roman Times to Sunshine in East-West about the tyrannies of the 20th century, and of course the Patriot about the American Revolution. So maybe you should go stand in movie lines and hand out flyers about your book. Pardon me? Well, I haven't seen Chicken Run, so I can't swear to that one. We're going to invite you all up for wine and cheese in a few minutes, but before that, we'll take a few questions here. And Jim, I think I'll just let you come back up here and call on people. Would you wait for a microphone to come around so we can get your question on tape? Yeah. There are really so many favorites. That's a very hard question to answer because I must say I was very fortunate in my selection of stories. I had known something about all of the 65 people before I started the book, but I knew them primarily through their writings. I had not done such a focused effort on their biographies, and there were far more dramatic things going on than I had any idea. And I must say one story after the other, I just found emotionally overwhelming and quite gratifying. Certainly the most dramatic story that I could ever imagine is the story of Raul Wallenberg going into that horrific situation and doing the number of things he did. I talked with some of the people who were rescued by Wallenberg, and there were just so many of those stories. Almost everyone is more incredible than the last to read about the single negotiation that saved 70,000 people in December of 1944 when the Hungarian Nazis were about to wipe out what was left in the Jewish ghetto before the Russians came in. That was certainly one of the most, perhaps the single most dramatic story. Lafayette, those of us who are focused on intellectual history and ideas don't pay so much attention to Lafayette, but to read not just what he did during the American Revolution, but the early role in promoting a constitutional government during the French Revolution. His very dramatic face-down with Napoleon. After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, he was still the most feared military commander in Europe, and he still would have been very difficult to dislodge from power in France. It might have taken a good deal more pushing from Wellington or other external forces, but by that time Lafayette was in the constituent assembly, and he rallied enough people and had a very dramatic face-off with Napoleon, and forced his resignation before there was more bloodshed. Lafayette was in correspondence with the freedom fighters throughout Europe, with the people in Spain, with those seeking independence in Greece. In his attic at the place he lived outside Paris, he hid free polls, because there was a period certainly in the 1820s when it was illegal for the Polish immigrants to come in. He called his attic the attic of free polls, which is where he hid them until they could find something else. Then Lafayette played a role in the downfall of Charles X in 1830. He played a role in the downfall of two kings and an emperor and was just a tremendous personality. He was very emotional. He had no correspondence with Jefferson and especially with Washington, but with all of these people, he's just pouring out and pouring out. I remember reading one of the more critical biographies of Lafayette is by Oliver Bernier. The trend in 20th century biographies is to treat Lafayette as an idiot. He was a simpleton. He was vain. But Oliver Bernier, at the end of this, when he said, you know, he devoted himself utterly to human liberty a lot worse than that. So even his worst critics conceded the most important points. I mean, I just fell in love with Lafayette, but there were so many of these people. As I said, there were episodes that you can never forget. I referred to Hugo Grosius getting out of prison in a trunk and his maid was telling the soldiers, don't sit on the trunk. There's a very valuable books in China in here making sure it was anchored to the ship so it didn't wash overboard. I had thought that Holland was a very tolerant place because of course that's where William Penn and Sidney and Locke and others, there were a lot of Jews who were found sanctuary in Holland. But in the early period, there was as much intolerance there as elsewhere and a lot of courage displayed. See, there were just so many, the preponderance of stories has a great deal more drama than I had any knowledge of when I started just pursuing the biographies to see what did people run into and how did they overcome it. So I feel just thrilled with the stories as they worked out. It's really quite amazing to have been the same tradition with these people. Yes? I'm curious as to what criteria you brought to bear in selecting your candidates. I'm particularly curious since Milton Friedman is identified on the book jacket as a controversial choice. I would have thought that Friedman would have been the least controversial of all choices. And also I'm curious as to whether you took into account attributes that might be considered anti-liberty. For example, Martin Luther King who is included because of his incalculable contributions to the freedom of African Americans, that was not enough to include Abraham Lincoln apparently. King had favored redistributionist policies that many of us would have considered to be antithetical to liberty. Jefferson was considered by many to be condemned because he was a slave owner. So just what were the criteria that you applied? Well, certainly I had to make a judgment as to whether their contributions to liberty outweighed their contradictions. There's no question about that. And there are very few people who turn out to be perfect. A lot of people have even minor annoyances when you're looking at them from the standpoint of a story. I certainly came to the conclusion that Jefferson's contributions primarily in articulating principles and insights about liberty were so voluminous and so important that they outweighed the fact that he held slaves. And of course all the people, the Virginians of that period, the late, you know, the 18th century, none of them were defending slavery. They should have gotten rid of them. I don't understand it. But they at least were not defending it. So defensive slavery came later, 1820s, 1830s, people like Calhoun who are now saying that slavery is essential for civilization. That's a whole different thing. So you had to make a judgment over their contributions exceeding their drawbacks. In the case of Martin Luther King, it's hard to imagine doing a history of liberty without addressing what was going on in the South at that time. Martin Luther King relates back to Cicero, the higher law principle of determining the legitimacy of laws. You're not just accepting the government's word that his law is legitimate because all kinds of horrific things have been legal at one time or another. So that was a very sound principle which he was reviving. He also related to Thoreau in the book, the principles in civil disobedience. And the fact that in my view, Dr. King lost it later when he thought that marches and speeches could eradicate poverty does not in any way diminish from the truly heroic displays during the period when he was fighting compulsory segregation. Just to review the number of times he was shot at and all those other things, there were so many of those four or five places where he lived were bombed. Just to imagine that you're running into that resistance when all you're asking for is equal rights. And at some point somebody has to take the initiative to move against that. So I would again think in his case, sure there were drawbacks, but the contributions were quite enough to merit inclusion. It would be hard for me to imagine not having anything related to the civil rights period quite apart from the fact that the civil rights movement has become more of a special interest function at this time. It does not take away from what was done at that time. So you make judgments about these people. Also, the availability of adequate biographical material, that's a key factor. There were a number of people that I would like to have done. I just could not get enough biographical information on. Generally, Cicero is the earliest figure about whom a great deal is known because of all the letters of his that were found, his orations that were found, contemporary accounts of him. You could go back to Lao Tzu or some of his Euripides, people who expressed important ideas on liberty before Cicero, but we don't know much about their lives. And Lao Tzu probably didn't even exist. He was probably a name given to, he could have been named given to a number of storytellers much the way Homer was. We don't know if Homer was alive, but there was a continuity of this oral tradition. We refer to that as Homer, but you can't write about that. So there were some people in other countries. They tried to get information about B.R. Shanoi, who was the courageous opponent of the five-year plans in India. And I was not able to reach his daughter, Suda, in Australia, and I had some good conversations with Parth Shah in India, but I couldn't get enough biographical information. I tried Yakuchi Fukuzawa, who was a great champion of self-help in 19th century Japan and imported a lot of ideas about that component of liberty. Again, I couldn't get enough biographical information. That was a crucial limiting factor. Overall, I would say I was not aiming to assemble a top 65, a top 100, or anything like that, even though it certainly would be odd if you have a story of liberty that somehow does not include a major name. As pieces began falling into place, I'm looking for other things that would fill out a sequence on peace or a sequence on economic liberty so that a reader would get a rich treatment of each of those topics through the stories of people who had something to do with accomplishing them. Yeah. I just have a bit of an off-beat question for you, but I think you'll know the answer. There are a lot of circles in Washington. I'm right here. There are a lot of circles in Washington. And if you could refresh my memory, something about if the horse is on four feet, three feet or two feet, it depends whether the rider was killed in action or wounded, depending on how many feet the horse is on, the statues. Does that ring a bell? Did I say it wrong? Yes, I think we have some knowledge here. Wait for a microphone. Final answer. You can call home. If you have, if the horse is all four feet on the ground, the rider was not wounded. If one foot is in the air, the rider was wounded. If both feet are in the air, the rider was killed. Always learn something here. That's right. That's right. You get such a talented, knowledgeable group of people. It's amazing how much knowledge you can tell. Yes. I'm Bob Hershey. I'm a consulting engineer. In your research in going over these letters and doing the interviews, what did you find that was new and overlooked by previous biographers? It's really a scoop. Well, I would say the main thing, the main area where I'm adding value here over previous biographers is that the typical biography ends with an individual's death. It'd be very hard for me to think of a biography that goes beyond somebody's death. I mean, there must be a few, but 99 out of 100 are going to end with somebody's death. And certainly what I am particularly interested in doing relating to the thought of Hayek is to tie all of these extraordinary things as much as possible to the present, make them as relevant to people living now and what people are doing now as possible. So what I did was to trace the reputation and influence of these people down to the present. And in order to do that, I had to, in most cases, interview specialized scholars who had written on this subject, but this doesn't come out of any of the biographies. Take one wonderful story which involves Shiller. Shiller died in 1806, and that's as far as any of the biographers go, but there's a tremendous story after that because Beethoven loves Shiller and Beethoven is writing poems about Shiller, and then Beethoven, of course, uses Shiller's Oh, the Joy and the Fourth Movement of his Ninth Symphony and Gio Aquino Rossini writes his last opera, William Tell, based on the Shiller play about assassinating a tyrant. And now the Rossini play runs, the opera runs five hours, so pretty soon nobody's performing it, but of course the overture comes down to us as the theme for the lone ranger who's on the quest for liberty and justice. Verity, Giuseppe Verity, based five of his operas on Shiller plays. He was avid and he didn't write an opera on William Tell because Rossini had already did that, but he was enchanted by the play and he went to the Swiss sites where Geller was killed and these various sites that take place in the play. 1859 was the bicentennial, or it was the centennial, I should say, centennial of Shiller's birth, and it was the biggest event, certainly the biggest political event in the history of Germany up until that time. There were torch-lit parades and celebrations all over Germany. There was a collection of some 3,000 speeches that were given in Germany. There was a four-day celebration in New York. There were celebrations in San Francisco. There were celebrations in Sydney, Australia, all over the world, so it didn't just have to do with German unification. Keep in mind that when Napoleon was conquering Europe and Germany, Goethe, who was initially a more revered literary figure, he turned his back on it all. He said, well, there may be some good things we can learn from the French. You imagine the Germans weren't too crazy about that. Shiller, they loved Shiller. Now, Shiller was not a nationalist. He wrote a work right before he died called German Greatness, in which he was urging that the way to greatness is basically laissez-faire in peace. Just let people be with their families in peace. So Shiller was the great hero of Germany. That's where this comes in. So Mises writes about... The Germans turned to Shiller for their ideas. It was the ideas of Shiller that were being celebrated. And in 1909, I guess it was, 150 years after Shiller's birth, there was a performance of the maid of Orléans at Harvard Stadium. There were 15,000 people who showed up. In the 1920s, Bertolt Brecht and the socialists, they were dumping on Shiller for his idealism on liberty. But Thomas Mann wrote, you know, when he said, I saw a performance of Don Carlos, and it had this fire in the spirit that even unfashionable as it was, it just over-overcame the audience. During the 1930s, after Hitler came to power, the Nazis let some Shiller performances go on. There's a famous line in Don Carlos where Poza is advising the king of Spain. It's tiring the king of Spain. You should leave the Dutch alone. Poza says, give us freedom of thought. Well, the Nazis said you can perform, but just take out that line. And so when the action would go forward, the audience knew where that missing line was. They plotted the missing line. So the Nazis just said you can't play any more of the Shiller. After Hitler's downfall, there were 26 theatrical companies that toured Germany performing Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell and other of Shiller's works. It's only been since World War II that Goethe's reputation has come back. And Thomas Mann, I just can't recommend too highly an essay that he wrote on Shiller in his book called Last Essays. He's just overcome with this great champion of peace and toleration, who represents all that's decent in German culture. But all of this, you will not find in the biographies because it goes after his death. There were two books on Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. So in the case of Franklin, I traced the reputation and influence of the autobiography since his death, which is a whole other story there. The influence on Andrew Carnegie equating James Mellon to leave his farm and launch what became the Mellon family fortune and so on. So I could go on with many examples, but they're quite fascinating to trace the ups and downs of reputations and influence right down to the present. It makes for, I think, a far more dynamic and interesting story as well as adding value that you can't get from the conventional biographies. I think at least one more question there. More is the same question before, but in a different fashion. My question is dedicated to a thinker from Great Britain at one point. His name is Isaac Berlin. Isaiah Berlin? Yes. I asked this question in relation to the criteria that you pick about those thinkers. And the gentleman before me has raised a question about, let's say, Martin Luther King versus Jefferson, for example. What equality versus, let's say, the notion of liberty. Berlin has an interesting question to ask in his essay on the two concepts of liberty. Right, positive and negative. And there are two issues over here. One is that freedom from what and to what is quite commendable and noble for a person to free himself from something. But if the endpoint of that freedom is something else, which is questionable, it does not justify that very freedom from the endpoint. So for Berlin, for example, there's no ultimate principle in which you can pick from one to the other. There's no overall action framework. Any more than you can do the same thing in the relationship between liberty and equality, for example. There's a trade-off, a judgment call that you have to make, and there's a variety of judgments. My question to you is, based on the understanding of Berlin's insight, what then is the criteria that we have discovered if anything at all based on your research, which can overcome the very problem that Berlin has? If your answer is no, however, that you have not discovered any principle since his death, then my question to you is, how are you going to reconcile some of the impartiality which as a consequence of the problematic that Berlin has talked about for many years since then? Thank you very much. I'm not sure I follow all of that. Not everybody credits me with deep thinking. Let me mention another criteria in selecting people, namely that Free Press had correctly imposed a limit. I mean, I had long looked forward to writing a very long book, but people have told me that readers have limits. Free Press said, 900-page double-spaced manuscript is what you got. So if I had introduced any more people, I would have to cut from something else, either cut an entire story or cut the average length in order to have the total not exceed 900 pages. So if you keep adding stories, that means that all the rest that are there are increasingly going to move away from narrative, which is where the adventure is, I think, and to summary, which would be closer to an encyclopedia listing, which was the last thing I wanted. So certainly there are many wonderful people who could have been included, but at some point you have to make a judgment and that, of course, does not take away from the important insights that Isaiah Berlin contributed. Any other questions? Yes? It's confusing even further with the criteria that you use for choosing your heroes, but Karl Marx, for example, could be portrayed as a champion of the liberty of the labor masses, right? So I mean, the certain criteria that you use... Over my dead body. I know, over mine, too. I'm from Poland. None of that, but you see, I think it's kind of... I mean, I'm probably going to buy the book and read it to kind of discover my own what you had in your head, but, you know, the champions of labor, of, you know, establishing certain criteria is very important for what liberty constitutes. So the question is, why wouldn't you include Karl Marx? This was a book about champions of liberty. I know there's a more substantive answer than that, but you can read the book and see. Thank you very much, Jim, for being here, for launching your discussion of this book. Please go out in the hallway and buy a copy of the Triumph of Liberty. If you miss buying it here, it will be available in every bookstore on Amazon.com at LFB.org. And even at the Cato website, although I think we may be running out with tonight's event. Thank you very much for coming, and we look forward to seeing you at Cato again soon.