 Ladies and gentlemen welcome once again to Mises weekends. This is our last program of 2016 And we'd like to thank you for listening and thank you for everything you do to support the Mises Institute We decided it would be fitting for our last show of the year to feature a great talk from the late Dr. Ralph Raco You may have heard the sad news that Ralph passed away earlier in December at the age of 80 He was an absolute giant in the Liberty Movement a former student of Ludwig von Mises having attended his famous seminars at NYU Friedrich Hayek Advised him on his PhD and of course he was a great colleague and friend of Murray Rothbard and other luminaries like Ron Hamaway He knew and interacted with Ein Rand personally for a period and he's probably best known as a phenomenal Revisionist historian, but he gave a talk at our Mises University in 2009 simply entitled liberalism It's an absolute tour de force on what real liberalism is and it's well worth an hour of your time to spend with the genius That was the late Dr. Ralph Raco I'm very pleased to be at one another one of these Mises universities and that from what I understand This is by far the largest group Allow me a bit of nostalgia It used to be said that the whole American libertarian movement could be fitted into Murray Rothbard's living room and and often was And that's you know pretty much true really I'm talking about quite a long time ago, but things have changed under the leadership of Lou Rockwell Seconded by Bert Blumert and this wonderful Institute and now carried forth by Doug French and Things are are looking up I'm gonna be speaking this morning about Liberalism okay Now a few decades ago before your time most of the people here, but Believe me the scholarly world devoted an enormous amount of effort to the history of socialism Especially in its Marxist versions even the minutia of Socialist doctrine and agitation Were examined over and over again in mind numbing detail There was even for instance a book written on the day-to-day lives adult lives of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Particular branches of the field like a so-called Marxist humanism Became minor academic industries. This is all over the place in Europe. I think probably more than in the US Such an imbalance of allocation of scholarly resources was not perhaps Irrational if you accepted the view Which was very widespread among intellectuals of the time that socialism was the predestined Radiant future of all mankind. I don't know if any of our European friends Remember but in those days that that was that was one of the standing slogans in these East European Capitals, I mean something like out of 1984 the huge banners Across the streets or in plazas and so on with different slogans and that was one of the major slogans Radiant future of all mankind More recently a change has become evident With the frustration of the traditional socialist project in the West and the failure and collapse of real Existing socialist regimes. It has begun to be to dawn on certain professors That maybe a little bit of attention should be paid to the philosophical foundations of our own civilization thus Liberalism which a French scholar has rightly called the steady Motif of modern politics of the politics of Europe and the West for about the past 300 years Liberalism has become increasingly the subject of study though Still to a relatively minor degree considering its intrinsic importance as Yet, no serious effort has been made to provide a an overall account of the history of liberalism comparable to the highly praised and deeply flawed work of Guido di Regiero a story of European liberalism Which in any case was just limited to France Germany, Britain and Italy Hayek calls calls Regiero's book and characteristically generous terms His justly esteemed work. I think I think it's a terrible work Hayek as you know was my professor at Chicago, but he liked too many people So such such Synthetic Treatment of liberalism is needed doubtless Someday be attempted maybe by one of you and what I'm saying now can be considered Simply as a as prologamana to such a general treatment of liberalism Now understandably enough the current disfavor Into its socialism has fallen has spurred what an Italian scholar Refers to as a frenzy to proclaim yourself a liberal Many writers have recourse to the stratagem of inventing for them for themselves a liberalism according to their own taste as The scholar says Raimondo a cubeddu is his name the super at Pisa the super abundance of liberalism's He says is like that of money and you know by debasing everything and emptying it of meaning in fact If you look over the literature on liberalism nowadays, it's a it's a mess. It's a mass of conceptual mayhem One root cause of this is the frequent attempt by some writers to accommodate all important political groupings that have called themselves liberal This is an approach a favorite especially by some British scholars in particular And whose conception of liberalism the doings and sayings of the British liberal party of the 20th century way mightily critics in Britain have said what the liberal party now it stands for basically is public funding of Sex change operations for the police Now there there is no doubt that around 1900 the liberal party in Britain veered increasingly in a status direction and in the u.s. similar transformation happened to the Democratic Party, which was once called the party of Jefferson and Jackson but such and similar changes in continental Parties that kept the name liberal But this is explained typically by the dynamics of Democratic electoral politics Faced with the competition of collectivist ideas Liberal parties produced a new breed of political entrepreneurs Maybe you're familiar with that term from public choice. They're skilled at mobilizing rent seeking constituencies In order to gain power these political leaders revise the liberal program to the point where it was Virtually indistinguishable from Democratic from social democracy or Democratic socialism Ending up by accepting the notion as they do today that the state is an instrument for redesigning society to produce particular ends if One holds however that the meaning of liberal must be modified because of ideological shifts within the British Liberal Party or the Democratic Party in the u.s. then Consideration must be given to the national liberals of imperial Germany Maybe not too familiar to you, but they were very important at one time They as well as David Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes Would have a claim to be situated in the same ideological category as Richard Cobden John Bright Thomas Jefferson and others yet These are there's a pet peeve of mine these national liberals in Germany supported among various other things The couture comes the that is a Bismarck's persecution of the Catholic Church and the anti socialist laws Bismarck's abandonment of free trade introduction of the protective tariff and the Bismarck's introduction of the welfare state welfare state was invented in in Germany at that time The so-called national liberals supported the enforced Germanization of the poles of eastern prussia colonial expansion world politics and the military and especially naval build-up under Wilhelm II which Disastrous consequences of alienating britain So if you wanted to go simply by the party labels, I mean who calls themselves liberals These national liberals would have more of a right to the title than the authentic german liberals who went by different names progressives and fries in and so on and these national liberals Betrayed authentic liberalism So why so why not then include these national liberals if that's the way you want to approach it that anybody who calls themselves Liberal you have to accommodate Them in their point of view in a general definition of liberal Why not? Well, it's typical anglo-american parochialism You know nothing really counts unless it's written and spoken in english Uh, so it is evident that mere self description by politicians cannot be decisive A few authors have disbared of finding any common characteristic Underlying liberalisms of different national groups or even individual decades of modern history More common, however, has been the attempt To demarcate the concept of liberalism by listing a list of traits or a list of model liberal figures And you know, I said it's conceptual mayhem and this will give you an idea This there's a celebrated manhattan literary critic at columbia named Lionel Trilling and he wrote a book called a liberal imagination characterized liberalism as among other things A belief in planning an international cooperation, especially where soviet russia is in question More more plausibly john gray Who at one time john gray? Spokious at one time. I don't know if you're familiar with his works, but He's gotten worse and worse and now I mean he's gone through a lot of different phases of Ideologies and now john who used to be a friend of mine. I think the main thing on his mind is his intense hatred of the human race I mean, he's a super tree hugger John gray views liberalism as individualist egalitarian universalist And then goes on to distinguish equally valid separate branches of the liberal heritage Gray as well as some other writers furnish Lists of clear cut unquestionable unquestionable liberals Which includes besides john lock and cunt And herbert spencer and hayek thinkers like john mayner canes carl popper and john rolls But if you want to include all those people somehow under the term liberal Um, it impoverishes the term to the point where it becomes useless if you want to Canvass the views of cunt spencer carl popper john rolls There's no Common consensus on crucial issues. For instance on the welfare state or the limits of state action And it is significant that an Unambiguous belief in private property is absent from gray's enumeration of so-called essential traits It is remarkable how often writers on liberalism omit support of private property when they characterize the doctrine Here's an ideology That has shaped world history But which it seems had nothing definite to say About how human beings work survive and occasionally prosper Instead what liberalism is about is individual self-expression I mean the vast majority of human race is interested in economic freedom the sort of things that go along with private property Intellectuals however are interested in individual self-expression Private property in fact has always been the chief bone of contention In recent years with the emergence of revitalized movements stressing property Our our kind of thing in the free market A number of commentators have experienced acute embarrassment I won't go through all of these There's a brazilian writer named helio guaribe a political scientist He describes hayek milton freedman and ludwig von mesis He identifies mesis by the way as the author of the libel socialism As extremely conservative as extremely conservative writers david spitz is a well-known american commentator Likewise thinks that those three people hayek freedman and mesis are conservatives But what he could possibly understand by that is unclear since he believes that their patron saint was herbert spencer You know just a mishmash And contradictions they don't bother to make sense. They don't think enough of our point of view to bother to make sense or Have some consistent consistent view Max Weber who of course was a the great german sociologist I'm going to try to use this device here I think this is called an ipod All right, it does work Max Weber and Weber wrote on I was a great man A great and really great sociologist of modern times as far as I'm concerned a lot of people are concerned wrote a lot about methodology And Weber said the use of undifferentiated collective concepts of everyday speech Is always a cloak for confusion of thought and action It is indeed very often an instrument of specious and fraudulent procedures in other words dishonesty It is in brief always a means of obstructing the proper formulation of the problem Um In other words, we can't simply take this term liberal that's thrown thrown around all the time It has to be clarified. It has to be distilled and Maybe I'll I'll be able to talk about what Weber meant by that We don't have to deal with some of these people Oh, yeah, a man who's very interesting because an english writer he wrote a book called on the on the uh Rise and decline of liberalism a big Historical work that has a lot of interesting information, but Afterwards after he wrote this book he confessed I was honest enough to confess that he was mistaken in only devoting a few pages To a liberal political economy, which is to say economic freedom He writes this is afterwards in this kind of confession Regarding the views of hayek and others Thinkers he said my account of the phenomenon Was based on this half conscious assumption that history had rendered these ideas permanently obsolete That is private property the free market and so on that their revival was almost an eccentricity Certainly a deviation from the main path of modern social and political development Which pointed steadily in the direction of the growth of state intervention in the economy And state responsibility for the welfare of citizens and I think it's he's very honest about that And that's what's involved with the many of these other writers Grappling with this issues caused A very accomplished historian of ideas an englishman named Alan Ryan who teaches at the oxford and in a princeton He concedes a place to hayek within the category of contemporary liberals You know nobody bothers to mention mesas mesas was sort of infradig and You know high as I say hayek made a lot of consent hayek devoted had Dedicated the road to serfdom You know to socialists of all parties That's like iron rand dedicating at the shrug to at to thugs of all descriptions Mises wouldn't do something wouldn't do something like that. So hayek they find more favorable But ryan says that the classical liberals Can't be considered libertarians libertarians are in a different category because libertarians favor decriminalizing victimless crimes you I mean the guy doesn't I respect him. But how can he say something like that? First of all decriminalizing victimless crimes is implicit in herbert spencer's law of equal freedom And it's it's explicit in hayek's constitution of liberty and in mesas human action where mesas Is in favor of doing away with with drug prohibition laws okay now so How did this confusion come about? Much of the present contradiction and confusion about liberalism can be traced to a man named Can't believe this John stewart mill should you should feel free to to hiss in a discrete kind of way from time to time When I mention people like Jean Jacques was so and you know, I say discreetly don't Make her riot out of it Now john stewart mill occupies a tremendously inflated position in the view that dingler speaking people have of liberalism probably you were You had to read some parts of his famous book on liberty in one of your classes or other and He was called the saint of rationalism by gladston but he Was responsible for key distortions Of the liberal doctrine that had come down to him For instance, if you if you look at his little book on on on on liberty He says at the very beginning that i'm not going to be dealing with economic with the the doctrine of free trade By which he meant economic freedom um The use of of property and so on Which of course is what the vast majority of the human race is interested in instead he's going to deal with freedom of of Expression and Of and the experiments in lifestyle Which you know, I'm important enough, but really a minority interest He accepted and even elaborated socialist arguments He's very interested in the socialism of his time I uh mill um explicitly rejected the liberal notion that of the long-term harmony of interests of all social classes Including for instance entrepreneurs and workers mill said to say that they have the same interest is to say That it is the same thing to a person's interest Where there is some of money belongs to him or to someone else Following this very peculiar reasoning Would reveal a very large number of hitherto unsuspected conflicts of interest in society For instance between any two people who pass each other in the street um I'm supposed to Murray has some very good pages on Murray Rothbard for some very good pages on on mill and his history of economic thought Um calls him the dithering Mill man of mush That was a problem with Murray always pulling his punches Uh indeed in arguing Alan Ryan again That um anti that That anti capitalism is one of the hallmarks of liberalism Ryan invokes none other than john stewart mill Mill wrote the general The generality of laborers in this and most of the countries Have as little choice of occupation and freedom of low of locomotion locomotion As they could on any system short of actual slavery That's at At a at a time when millions in england and tens of millions elsewhere Uh, we're moving around going to cities going even abroad Colonizing the world and so on and he says that these laborers had Role most slaves In international affairs he repudiated the liberal principle of non-intervention in foreign wars which was Exposited basically by Richard Cobden whom I'll talk about tomorrow Cobden feared such entanglements in The affairs of other countries would undermine liberty at home Mill provided the Interventionists with what has become a favorite argument And to the to the very day to this very day among the new york conservatives A basically free society that is powerful for instance england in mill's time Had has an obligation To come to the defense of the freedom of other people when they are threatened by oppressors And um, no, no and there's a there's a line that connects in question of foreign affairs connects mill with uh, Woodrow wilson You don't know when to hiss Um And to the to the present day with the new york conservatives But worst of all was mill's deformation of the concept of liberty itself Liberty it seems is a condition that is threatened not only by physical aggression On the part of the state or other institutions or individuals rather society Often poses even graver dangers to individual freedom This it achieves through what he called the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling He says the tendency to impose by other ways and civil penalties Its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who descend from them What society does is compel all characters to fashion themselves upon a model of its own True liberty Requires what mill called autonomy Because if you adopt the traditions and customs of other people You're simply engaging in ape-like imitation Where we would say that men and women choosing goals laid out For them by institutions whose authority Over them they freely accept Mill perceives the extinction of freedom In a striking and utterly preposterous illustration The saint of rationalism says An individual Jesuit Uh is to the utmost degree of abasement a slave of his order One wonders what is supposed to follow from this Unless we form abolitionist societies To emancipate the willing slaves of the society of Jesus How should we go about selecting our john browns To lead the storming of the slave pits of fortum university in georgetown You have to ask yourself by what right Mill and his alter ego his girlfriend Harriott Taylor could ever have imagined themselves Entitled to pass judgment on the status of members of catholic and eastern orthodox Religious orders on orthodox jews and devout muslims or any other religious believers A libertarian philosopher who I think is extremely perceptive Lauren Lomaski Wrote about this this concept of autonomy that philosophers love to talk about Um lauren said the advocacy of autonomy is typically accompanied by contempt for the actual One who is a born to a particular family nation religion is not therefore burdened with an anchor that restricts his domain of choice Rather he is a beneficiary of an inheritance of a manageable number of prospects for fashioning a worthwhile life um Mill's comment on the jesuits illustrates a facet of mill Too rarely noted There's a british Philosopher, I think passed away since calls um Mill one of the most since Murray's cowling one of the most sensorious of 19th century moralists Mill constantly passed judgments on the habits attitudes Preferences and moral standards of vast numbers of people of whom he knew nothing um Now um There are two writers who are written important books criticizing mill recently one is uh Joseph hamburger passed away and um Linda raida who teaches at a As a professor at a college in florida excellent works um hamburger hamburger wrote um On the dark side of john stewart mill As far as mill mill and harry tale his lifestyle goes What I thought I knew everything there was To know about this ipod Okay There was a there was an english liberal of the middle of the 19th century named henry reeve He was very well known. He was the editor of the edinburgh review, which was a major uh liberal journal He translated tockville's democracy in america into english And he and reeve knew mill through most of his adult life And uh I Reeve believed that one result of mill's You know if you read his autobiography mill's autobiography that strange is kind of upbringing Among other things the whole autobiography never even mentions his mother. It's just his father who From the age of three on imposes Extremely odd education learning latin and greek and and so on So, um Reeve says this peculiar and isolated upbringing and His and his and harry tale is later general avoidance of social intercourse Meant that mill was totally ignorant Of english life and society Reeve says mill never lived in what might be called society at all in later years He affected something of the life of a prophet Surrounded by it admiring of uh disciples Mankind to him and them Was an abstraction rather than A reality he knew nothing of the world Now this is a man who wasn't an enemy of mill. He's just uh an acquaintance knew him very well um What um hamburger and uh linda raider um Conclude is that um mill was not in favor of a real um uh freedom of expression He had a hidden agenda the hidden agenda was to destroy organized religion As it as it existed in his time and to replace it by mill's concept of the religion of humanity Okay, where everybody would somehow spontaneously uh work, uh Their whole lives uh through for the good of everyone else so the uh Main thing was to destroy religion and his in his own time meaning christianity um and From mill's time on Liberalism in the minds of some people of some of some of these commentators Um has become linked to an adversarial stance Uh vis-a-vis religion tradition and social norms Here's an example by a well-known scholar Owen Chadwick who was uh Dixie professor of emeritus of ecclesiastical history at cambridge Chadwick said a liberal was one who wanted more liberty That is freedom from restraint Whether the restraint was exercised by police By law or by social pressure or by an orthodoxy of opinion Which men assailed at their peril The liberal thought men needed far more room to act and think than they were allowed by established laws and conventions in european society Um, I mean that's really more of a description of i don't know greenwich village bohemians than than than liberals You can't you can't uh Recognize lord actin for instance and something like that John dunn is a very famous British political philosopher and historian of politics said wrote If the central dispositional value of liberals is tolerance Which itself is absurd uh, I mean the tolerance of of what? Uh I mean the the central dispositional Characteristic of liberals is belief in liberty. I think But anyway, the central political value is perhaps a fundamental antipathy towards authority in any of its forms That means that somebody of for instance, uh, who is a practicing roman catholic Submits himself to the authority of his church voluntarily. We're not talking about the spanish inquisition anymore uh, voluntarily, uh is somehow Can't be a liberal Dispositionally the liberalism has little regard for the past This this guy is quite famous Little regard for the past so what happens to To the great liberal historians of the 19th century macaulay Augustin Thierry Lecky lord actin and and so many others mill's view Tends to erase the rather critical distinction between incurring social disapproval and incurring imprisonment It leads to pitting liberalism against innocent non coercive traditional values and arrangements, especially religious ones It also forges an offensive alliance between liberalism and the state even if contrary to mill's intention since it's very hard to imagine how They they can demolish everything mill wants to demolish without using political power Um, so, uh, I don't my view is it, um Um It's a fundamental mistake to to consider Mill a liberal in case you you're interested. I do the same sort of rather Actually brilliant demolition job On john maynard canes In an article called was canes a liberal you can see it's online In the independent review That robert higgs edits and it's in the What form a 2008 issue now People talk about the old liberalism Versus the new liberalism Now there's no dispute That the term liberal did undergo some kind of change around 1900 um In the english-speaking countries not so much for instance in france where liberal Uh still pretty much means what what it originally did and means our point of view joseph schumpeter whom some of you may be familiar with schumpeter was Schumpeter was an economist in an austrian although he's not an austrian economist But he was a brilliant man fantastically well read his um a history of economic analysis is a huge book and uh really encyclopedic um Ironic he ironically observed That the enemies of the system of free enterprise painted the an unintended compliment When they applied the name liberal to their own creed Historically the opposite of what liberalism it stood for in the past Now For about a century people have argued about what the term liberal should mean But you can follow the change This transformation from uh What I would consider authentic liberalism to What they call liberalism nowadays um The conventional view Defends this change What it says is that liberals from the 18th century on characters characteristically believed in laissez-faire But they say Beginning in the decades of the 19 of the late decades of the 19th century British thinkers like t.h. Green and l.t. Hobhouse And their counterparts in the u.s. And germany Realize that laissez-faire was totally inadequate to the conditions of modern society. They were often inspired by john stewart mill explicitly And um One of the expositors of this conventional view says The central value of the liberated individual Of man as far as possible his own sovereign did not change The understanding of the value and the means of achieving This end of the liberated individual did In particular the state which earlier liberals Had feared As the enemy of individual liberty Was now according to this view Correctly seen as a potent engine for furthering Individual liberty in vital ways The old liberalism then they say gave way to the new Now One thing to point out is that is that there was a political purpose I would say kind of underhanded political purpose behind the semantic change It was to ease the way for the revolutionary extension of the state's agenda Today it is virtually an unlimited agenda even in the united states government can do anything at once The crying need for such an extension however was grounded on a highly questionable theory Which is still operative The theory is that the old liberalism of laissez-faire had been made obsolete by deep-seated changes in society The pioneers of the so-called new liberalism and their successors Based their claims on the supposed overwhelming power of business enterprise over consumers and workers but Despite all this propaganda such a power cannot be shown empirically or theoretically you can check out Works by dama Armentano Murray Rothbard Tom de Lorenzo and jack high have an important article that dates from 1988 But moreover and decisively the standard rationale for speaking of a new liberalism is analytically flawed Because the end of achieving the liberated individual cannot be definitive of liberalism Other ideologies among them communist anarchism and many varieties of socialism share that end Consider the statement by edward baron stein Who was a founder revisionist socialism? It's another Use of the term revisionist baron stein said the development and protection of the free personality Is the goal of all socialist measures even those which superficially appear to be coercive A closer examination will always show that it is a question of A coercion that will increase the sum of freedom in society that gives more freedom to a wider group than it takes away Jean Jaurès who was a leader of french socialism at the time of the second international Asserted that socialism is a logical completion of individualism In that it realizes the individualist ends through means more appropriate to the modern age But how does this differ from the standpoint of the new liberals What divides liberalism from opposing ideologies is precisely Its substantive program the means it advocates Or it has the same ends as as bernstein and jurès are Describing but the means are different the means are private property the market economy Minimizing the power of the state and of state backed institutions in anglophone countries Those who anywhere else in the world would be called Social democrats or democratic socialists nothing wrong with those terms honorable terms That they shy away from Acknowledging their proper name. Why is that? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is essentially a matter of political expediency For some reason labels suggestive of socialism have not been popular in countries of english heritage In england, that's called a labor party in Canada the the new democrats in the united states The democrats this and republicans actually Now there was a man named edward bellamy who wrote a famous book called looking backward He was a socialist His cousin by the way, another man named bellamy wrote the pledge of allegiance to the flag You can you know look up the history of this There's a reason why he talks or the pledge of allegiance says one nation Indivisible You know take that you confederates But that's another another story Bellamy wrote this classic socialist work called looking backward and then they wrote a letter 1888 to a well-known american author william dean howells and bellamy Was considering what to call his doctrine, but he rejected the term socialist Uh, he said that's a word. I could never well stomach Since it is foreign in itself and equally foreign in all its suggestions Whatever german and He said whatever german and french reformers may choose to call themselves socialist is not a good name for a party to succeed with in america He wanted to use the term nationalist Others on the same grounds called themselves liberals now the social Social democratic commandeering of the term liberal met with great success Leading some laissez-faire liberals to start calling themselves Individualists now amusingly. I think well not that not that amusing but sort of ironically Uh, the next step was for socialists like john dewey To try to capture the term individualist as well Dewey said That um, there was an old individualism You heard that story before before the age of the great corporations In modern social science, which which he incarnated. He thought That in that old individualism must now be replaced by a new individualism and One product of this new individual individualism would be quote a coordinating and this is 1930 so Well, i'll explain why that's significant in a second This new one product of this new individual individualism would be a coordinating and directing Council in which captains of industry and finance would meet with representatives of labor and public officials To plan and regulate the economy. Any idea where that was happening in 1930? Yeah In italy there was most it was miscellaneous idea, but this is going to be the new individualism. He thought The the the power center that Dewey proposed would have a voluntarist and thus appropriately american slant In america would set out constructively quote upon the road which soviet russia Is following in such a deplorably destructive way So the concept of liberalism was transformed To exclude adherence of the market economy in the private property and now individualism was also to be Uh redefined in the same way. It's almost as if they didn't want to have us Uh, they wanted to define us out of existence um One could talk now about uh liberalism and and the welfare state but i'm afraid my Time is becoming deplorably short I get the same amount of time as anybody else Um Let let me uh very quickly sketch The roots of what i consider authentic uh liberalism The the the liberalism did not emerge uh full blown um Nor did it Don't nor did it undergo a metamorphosis into a status character caricature of itself But it did evolve I'm not offering any argument that liberalism certainly sprang up at a certain point complete fully matured Neither can liberalism be approached as some people do Uh as over a conversation conducted among philosophers over the centuries instead Liberalism must be understood. I think As the political as a political and social doctrine And a movement grounded in the distinctive culture And traceable to specific historical conditions That culture is the west The europe that arose in communion with the bishop of roam The historical conditions were those of the middle ages The history of liberalism is rooted in what economic historians Sometimes called the european miracle That's the title of a book by an australian Jones The european miracle The essence of the european experience is that The civilization developed that felt itself to be a unity And yet was politically radically decentralized As a french scholar says The great event of the great non-event of european history Is that after the fall of the roman empire in the west No Single empire was able to take over in western europe the hohenstaufen Kings of germany tried it At various times spain tried it and the polian tried it There'll be the 14th tried it, but it never worked out europe remained decentralized And and the continent in the west evolved into a mosaic of separate and competing jurisdictions and polities Whose internal divisions themselves Resisted central control As one writer wrote there was in other words a type of laissez-faire built into europe as a whole The relative ease of exit Write this in your notes Was fundamental What it meant was all these different Principalities kingdoms Free states you could move easily from one to another Uh, let's say you you were a businessman in uh in cologne And for some reason the archbishop of cologne decided to impose heavy taxes Or even confiscate your property. Well, you just moved down the rine to rotterdam or Cross the north sea to england And and so this was a constraint on the typical predatory practice of rulers everywhere and throughout the ages In this process major roles were played by a powerful independent and self-aggrandizing church um The catholic church and not a national church an international church So it was not bound by any particular rulers It had its own Program but nonetheless very often found itself in opposition to political rulers The magna carta For instance is signed by the barons these This indictment on bad king john signed by the barons of england and the first name is Stephen Langton archbishop of canterbury the church in alliance with the barons against the king um There was that and then there were uh There was the rise of the towns the self-governing towns in the low countries in germany elsewhere, italy and um The emergence of a self-confident middle class over a course of centuries what happens is that um parliaments arise Not just the parliament in england which everybody heard of everywhere the court the court has in castile for instance um in the german states and And elsewhere and the point of these parliaments was to restrict the tax The taxing power of the prince you had to go to them in order to raise taxes there were charters That enshrined the rights of people the magna carta is the most famous, but there were many others in the low countries The joyeuses entrée so Thus long before the 17th century europe had produced political and legal arrangements a whole way of life That set the stage both for individual freedom And the industrial takeoff the role of christianity here is very important scholars have pointed at a point The end of antiquity The state was sacred roma was a goddess um and worshiped um when the christians came along st. augustine is the best example the state was desacralized uh, it was um created because of man's sins and there was nothing metaphysical metaphysically lofty about it but In modern times in the 16th century on there's the rise of absolutism in the centralized bureaucratic monarchies that tried to do away with all these various institutions that the people had developed They were and they succeeded in many cases in france for instance the estates general was done away with But uh, there were two incursions of absolutism that were fought successfully um in the netherlands the um Struggled against the spanish hypsburgs. How many people here have heard of the revolt of the netherlands? Okay, number of your europeans american students really don't have any time for that um because They would have to ignore the careers of some some lady named harry at tubman and another lady named sojourner truth. I'm not sure they are but No time to hear about this crucial This crucial development in the history of of the west of human freedom could say a lot about about uh holland let me see if I can come up with a Oh, yes What the dutch were after a number of decades finally successful? And they got their independence from spain Small people in northwestern europe against the greatest empire in europe at the time and one of one of their sons a philosopher jewish philosopher named uh spinosa The um the dutch by the way were were very tolerant especially of the jews And when portugal and spain expelled the jews many of them went to uh to the holland and spinosa very Very proud of his city the city of amsterdam He says Reaps the fruit of this freedom in its own great prosperity and the admiration of other people For in this most flourishing state and most splendid city Men of every nation and religion live together in the greatest harmony And no questions and ask no questions before trusting their goods to a fellow citizen Save whether he'd be rich or poor and whether he generally acts honestly or the reverse Holland uh holland is is one of the provinces and generally We can talk about the netherlands uh became an early example of a viertschofswunder An economic miracle It flourished Amazingly and because europe was divided up in these different jurisdictions and so on It exerted demonstration effect That other people other peoples picked up on It was remarkably prosperous for its time It was radically decentralized. There was no prince. There was no court Um, there was a diet of of all the provinces of the netherlands, but they didn't have any Vito they did they they could be vetoed by any one of the provinces. There were seven provinces um, so there were you know a very little uh legislation and regulation And as i mentioned religious toleration Because about two-thirds of the population was protested one-third Catholic And uh and all the jews as well and they decided on a de facto not not uh, Technically but a de facto religious toleration because The netherlands was ruled by merchants. They were Interested in in making a profit Um, they didn't like the idea of burning people at the stake for their religion Didn't appeal to them very much it interfered with business um, and um So you have this great example of the netherlands and then Drawing on to a degree on the on the example in the 17th century came the experience of the english And there the incursion was the steward kings who tried to undo The liberties that the english had accumulated for a long time and that and then the history of liberalism begins With the levelers and john lilburn you read about it in murray's book, but you should buy You should buy his history of economic thought because it's really encyclopedic um Maybe buy it for your mother for christmas or something But murray talks about the levelers the first What you could call liberal movement in a strict sense in um in europe Um, that's yeah He means that literally Okay, thank you very much Subscribe to mises weekends via itunes you stitcher and soundcloud or listen on mises.org and youtube