The Liberal Tradition

Long before our time, the word liberal meant: leave society to manage itself. It meant laissez-faire and private property, the rule of law, and liberty. Freedom was the solution to whatever ailed the social order.

Liberalism's achievements are magnificent and sweeping. It crushed protectionism. It achieved absolute security of private property, civil liberties for women and Jews, the end of slavery, the establishment of the freedom of association and religion, the end of mercantilism and the institutionalization of free trade, and the end of torture and cruelty in penal laws. In this 1957 book, edited by Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock, these achievements are chronicled in the words of its champions in England from the 18th century on.

Reading through this volume, you can feel your heart racing with excitement. The statism of old was being swept away. In the minds of these great men, there could never be too much liberty.

The book also documents the change that began to overtake liberalism in the late 19th century, resulting from what Hans Hoppe has called the great failing of liberalism: its belief that the state could be made liberal, benign, and even part of the structure of society itself. You begin to detect a change in the narrative, based on the myth of the possibility of good government. The first sector to fall is education, as we might expect. Then the foreign policy sector, stemming from the view that the state could become a liberator, World War I changed everything. Liberalism lost its antistatist core and abandoned laissez-faire economics.

It ends with Keynes's famous essay calling for an end to individualism. "Progress lies in the growth and the recognition of semi-autonomous bodies within the State — bodies whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public good as they understand it."

This is a collection with great lessons to teach. Though it focuses on England, Americans will learn much about their own history in its pages.