By Murray N. Rothbard
Ludwig von Mises Institute
May 13, 2006


[This article is excerpted from the first chapter of For a New
Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. An audiobook version of
this chapter, read by Jeff Riggenbach, including a new
introduction, written and read by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.,
is available for podcast or download. The book will be out
from the Mises Institute this summer.]

On election day, 1976, the Libertarian party presidential
ticket of Roger L. MacBride for President and David P.
Bergland for Vice President amassed 174,000 votes in
thirty-two states throughout the country. The sober
Congressional Quarterly was moved to classify the fledgling
Libertarian party as the third major political party in
America. The remarkable growth rate of this new party may be
seen in the fact that it only began in 1971 with a handful of
members gathered in a Colorado living room. The following year
it fielded a presidential ticket which managed to get on the
ballot in two states. And now it is America's third major party.

Even more remarkably, the Libertarian party achieved this
growth while consistently adhering to a new ideological creed
— "libertarianism" — thus bringing to the American political
scene for the first time in a century a party interested in
principle rather than in merely gaining jobs and money at the
public trough. We have been told countless times by pundits
and political scientists that the genius of America and of our
party system is its lack of ideology and its "pragmatism" (a
kind word for focusing solely on grabbing money and jobs from
the hapless taxpayers). How, then, explain the amazing growth
of a new party which is frankly and eagerly devoted to ideology?

One explanation is that Americans were not always pragmatic
and nonideological. On the contrary, historians now realize
that the American Revolution itself was not only ideological
but also the result of devotion to the creed and the
institutions of libertarianism. The American revolutionaries
were steeped in the creed of libertarianism, an ideology which
led them to resist with their lives, their fortunes, and their
sacred honor the invasions of their rights and liberties
committed by the imperial British government. Historians have
long debated the precise causes of the American Revolution:

Were they constitutional, economic, political, or ideological?
We now realize that, being libertarians, the revolutionaries
saw no conflict between moral and political rights on the one
hand and economic freedom on the other. On the contrary, they
perceived civil and moral liberty, political independence, and
the freedom to trade and produce as all part of one
unblemished system, what Adam Smith was to call, in the same
year that the Declaration of Independence was written, the
"obvious and simple system of natural liberty."

The libertarian creed emerged from the "classical liberal"
movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the
Western world, specifically, from the English Revolution of
the seventeenth century. This radical libertarian movement,
even though only partially successful in its birthplace, Great
Britain, was still able to usher in the Industrial Revolution
there by freeing industry and production from the strangling
restrictions of State control and urban government-supported
guilds. For the classical liberal movement was, throughout the
Western world, a mighty libertarian "revolution" against what
we might call the Old Order — the ancien régime which had
dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in the
early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century,
imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine
right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land
monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions. The
result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of
controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell
conferred by central (and local) governments upon their
favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic,
war-making central State with privileged merchants — an
alliance to be called "mercantilism" by later historians — and
with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old
Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and
radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The object of the classical liberals was to bring about
individual liberty in all of its interrelated aspects. In the
economy, taxes were to be drastically reduced, controls and
regulations eliminated, and human energy, enterprise, and
markets set free to create and produce in exchanges that would
benefit everyone and the mass of consumers. Entrepreneurs were
to be free at last to compete, to develop, to create. The
shackles of control were to be lifted from land, labor, and
capital alike. Personal freedom and civil liberty were to be
guaranteed against the depredations and tyranny of the king or
his minions. Religion, the source of bloody wars for centuries
when sects were battling for control of the State, was to be
set free from State imposition or interference, so that all
religions — or nonreligions — could coexist in peace. Peace,
too, was the foreign policy credo of the new classical
liberals; the age-old regime of imperial and State
aggrandizement for power and pelf was to be replaced by a
foreign policy of peace and free trade with all nations. And
since war was seen as engendered by standing armies and
navies, by military power always seeking expansion, these
military establishments were to be replaced by voluntary local
militia, by citizen-civilians who would only wish to fight in
defense of their own particular homes and neighborhoods.
Thus, the well-known theme of "separation of Church and State"
was but one of many interrelated motifs that could be summed
up as "separation of the economy from the State," "separation
of speech and press from the State," "separation of land from
the State," "separation of war and military affairs from the
State," indeed, the separation of the State from virtually everything.

The State, in short, was to be kept extremely small, with a
very low, nearly negligible budget. The classical liberals
never developed a theory of taxation, but every increase in a
tax and every new kind of tax was fought bitterly — in America
twice becoming the spark that led or almost led to the
Revolution (the stamp tax, the tea tax).

"Being libertarians, the revolutionaries saw no conflict
between moral and political rights on the one hand and
economic freedom on the other."

The earliest theoreticians of libertarian classical liberalism
were the Levelers during the English Revolution and the
philosopher John Locke in the late seventeenth century,
followed by the "True Whig" or radical libertarian opposition
to the "Whig Settlement" — the regime of eighteenth-century
Britain. John Locke set forth the natural rights of each
individual to his person and property; the purpose of
government was strictly limited to defending such rights. In
the words of the Lockean-inspired Declaration of Independence,
"to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…."

While Locke was widely read in the American colonies, his
abstract philosophy was scarcely calculated to rouse men to
revolution. This task was accomplished by radical Lockeans in
the eighteenth century, who wrote in a more popular,
hard-hitting, and impassioned manner and applied the basic
philosophy to the concrete problems of the government — and
especially the British government — of the day. The most
important writing in this vein was "Cato's Letters," a series
of newspaper articles published in the early 1720s in London
by True Whigs John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. While Locke
had written of the revolutionary pressure which could properly
be exerted when government became destructive of liberty,
Trenchard and Gordon pointed out that government always tended
toward such destruction of individual rights. According to
"Cato's Letters," human history is a record of irrepressible
conflict between Power and Liberty, with Power (government)
always standing ready to increase its scope by invading
people's rights and encroaching upon their liberties.

Therefore, Cato declared, Power must be kept small and faced
with eternal vigilance and hostility on the part of the public
to make sure that it always stays within its narrow bounds:
We know, by infinite Examples and Experience, that Men
possessed of Power, rather than part with it, will do any
thing, even the worst and the blackest, to keep it; and
scarce ever any Man upon Earth went out of it as long as he
could carry every thing his own Way in it…. This seems
certain, That the Good of the World, or of their People, was
not one of their Motives either for continuing in Power, or for quitting it.

It is the Nature of Power to be ever encroaching, and
converting every extraordinary Power, granted at particular
Times, and upon particular Occasions, into an ordinary
Power, to be used at all Times, and when there is no
Occasion, nor does it ever part willingly with any Advantage….

Alas! Power encroaches daily upon Liberty, with a Success
too evident; and the Balance between them is almost lost.
Tyranny has engrossed almost the whole Earth, and striking
at Mankind Root and Branch, makes the World a
Slaughterhouse; and will certainly go on to destroy, till it
is either destroyed itself, or, which is most likely, has
left nothing else to destroy.

Such warnings were eagerly imbibed by the American colonists,
who reprinted "Cato's Letters" many times throughout the
colonies and down to the time of the Revolution. Such a
deep-seated attitude led to what the historian Bernard Bailyn
has aptly called the "transforming radical libertarianism" of
the American Revolution.

For the revolution was not only the first successful modern
attempt to throw off the yoke of Western imperialism — at that
time, of the world's mightiest power. More important, for the
first time in history, Americans hedged in their new
governments with numerous limits and restrictions embodied in
constitutions and particularly in bills of rights. Church and
State were rigorously separated throughout the new states, and
religious freedom enshrined. Remnants of feudalism were
eliminated throughout the states by the abolition of the
feudal privileges of entail and primogeniture. (In the former,
a dead ancestor is able to entail landed estates in his family
forever, preventing his heirs from selling any part of the
land; in the latter, the government requires sole inheritance
of property by the oldest son.)

The new federal government formed by the Articles of
Confederation was not permitted to levy any taxes upon the
public; and any fundamental extension of its powers required
unanimous consent by every state government. Above all, the
military and war-making power of the national government was
hedged in by restraint and suspicion; for the
eighteenth-century libertarians understood that war, standing
armies, and militarism had long been the main method for
aggrandizing State power.

Bernard Bailyn has summed up the achievement of the American revolutionaries:

The modernization of American Politics and government during
and after the Revolution took the form of a sudden, radical
realization of the program that had first been fully set
forth by the opposition intelligentsia … in the reign of
George the First. Where the English opposition, forcing its
way against a complacent social and political order, had
only striven and dreamed, Americans driven by the same
aspirations but living in a society in many ways modern, and
now released politically, could suddenly act. Where the
English opposition had vainly agitated for partial reforms …
American leaders moved swiftly and with little social
disruption to implement systematically the outermost
possibilities of the whole range of radically liberation ideas.

In the process they … infused into American political
culture … the major themes of eighteenth-century radical
libertarianism brought to realization here. The first is the
belief that power is evil, a necessity perhaps but an evil
necessity; that it is infinitely corrupting; and that it
must be controlled, limited, restricted in every way
compatible with a minimum of civil order. Written
constitutions; the separation of powers; bills of rights;
limitations on executives, on legislatures, and courts;
restrictions on the right to coerce and wage war — all
express the profound distrust of power that lies at the
ideological heart of the American Revolution and that has
remained with us as a permanent legacy ever after.
Thus, while classical liberal thought began in England, it was
to reach its most consistent and radical development — and its
greatest living embodiment — in America. For the American
colonies were free of the feudal land monopoly and
aristocratic ruling caste that was entrenched in Europe; in
America, the rulers were British colonial officials and a
handful of privileged merchants, who were relatively easy to
sweep aside when the Revolution came and the British
government was overthrown. Classical liberalism, therefore,
had more popular support, and met far less entrenched
institutional resistance, in the American colonies than it
found at home. Furthermore, being geographically isolated, the
American rebels did not have to worry about the invading
armies of neighboring, counterrevolutionary governments, as,
for example, was the case in France.

After the Revolution

Thus, America, above all countries, was born in an explicitly
libertarian revolution, a revolution against empire; against
taxation, trade monopoly, and regulation; and against
militarism and executive power. The revolution resulted in
governments unprecedented in restrictions placed on their
power. But while there was very little institutional
resistance in America to the onrush of liberalism, there did
appear, from the very beginning, powerful elite forces,
especially among the large merchants and planters, who wished
to retain the restrictive British "mercantilist" system of
high taxes, controls, and monopoly privileges conferred by the
government. These groups wished for a strong central and even
imperial government; in short, they wanted the British system
without Great Britain. These conservative and reactionary
forces first appeared during the Revolution, and later formed
the Federalist party and the Federalist administration in the 1790s.

During the nineteenth century, however, the libertarian
impetus continued. The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian movements,
the Democratic-Republican and then the Democratic parties,
explicitly strived for the virtual elimination of government
from American life. It was to be a government without a
standing army or navy; a government without debt and with no
direct federal or excise taxes and virtually no import tariffs
— that is, with negligible levels of taxation and expenditure;
a government that does not engage in public works or internal
improvements; a government that does not control or regulate;
a government that leaves money and banking free, hard, and
uninflated; in short, in the words of H. L. Mencken's ideal,
"a government that barely escapes being no government at all."

"America, above all countries, was born in an explicitly
libertarian revolution, a revolution against empire;
against taxation, trade monopoly, and regulation; and
against militarism and executive power."

The Jeffersonian drive toward virtually no government
foundered after Jefferson took office, first, with concessions
to the Federalists (possibly the result of a deal for
Federalist votes to break a tie in the electoral college), and
then with the unconstitutional purchase of the Louisiana
Territory. But most particularly it foundered with the
imperialist drive toward war with Britain in Jefferson's
second term, a drive which led to war and to a one-party
system which established virtually the entire statist
Federalist program: high military expenditures, a central
bank, a protective tariff, direct federal taxes, public works.
Horrified at the results, a retired Jefferson brooded at
Monticello, and inspired young visiting politicians Martin Van
Buren and Thomas Hart Benton to found a new party — the
Democratic party — to take back America from the new
Federalism, and to recapture the spirit of the old
Jeffersonian program. When the two young leaders latched onto
Andrew Jackson as their savior, the new Democratic party was born.

The Jacksonian libertarians had a plan: it was to be eight
years of Andrew Jackson as president, to be followed by eight
years of Van Buren, then eight years of Benton. After
twenty-four years of a triumphant Jacksonian Democracy, the
Menckenian virtually no-government ideal was to have been
achieved. It was by no means an impossible dream, since it was
clear that the Democratic party had quickly become the normal
majority party in the country. The mass of the people were
enlisted in the libertarian cause. Jackson had his eight
years, which destroyed the central bank and retired the public
debt, and Van Buren had four, which separated the federal
government from the banking system. But the 1840 election was
an anomaly, as Van Buren was defeated by an unprecedentedly
demagogic campaign engineered by the first great modern
campaign chairman, Thurlow Weed, who pioneered in all the
campaign frills — catchy slogans, buttons, songs, parades,
etc. — with which we are now familiar. Weed's tactics put in
office the egregious and unknown Whig, General William Henry
Harrison, but this was clearly a fluke; in 1844, the Democrats
would be prepared to counter with the same campaign tactics,
and they were clearly slated to recapture the presidency that
year. Van Buren, of course, was supposed to resume the
triumphal Jacksonian march. But then a fateful event occurred:
the Democratic party was sundered on the critical issue of
slavery, or rather the expansion of slavery into a new
territory. Van Buren's easy renomination foundered on a split
within the ranks of the Democracy over the admission to the
Union of the republic of Texas as a slave state; Van Buren was
opposed, Jackson in favor, and this split symbolized the wider
sectional rift within the Democratic party. Slavery, the grave
antilibertarian flaw in the libertarianism of the Democratic
program, had arisen to wreck the party and its libertarianism completely.

The Civil War, in addition to its unprecedented bloodshed and
devastation, was used by the triumphal and virtually one-party
Republican regime to drive through its statist, formerly Whig,
program: national governmental power, protective tariff,
subsidies to big business, inflationary paper money, resumed
control of the federal government over banking, large-scale
internal improvements, high excise taxes, and, during the war,
conscription and an income tax. Furthermore, the states came
to lose their previous right of secession and other states'
powers as opposed to federal governmental powers. The
Democratic party resumed its libertarian ways after the war,
but it now had to face a far longer and more difficult road to
arrive at liberty than it had before.

We have seen how America came to have the deepest libertarian
tradition, a tradition that still remains in much of our
political rhetoric, and is still reflected in a feisty and
individualistic attitude toward government by much of the
American people. There is far more fertile soil in this
country than in any other for a resurgence of libertarianism.
Resistance to Liberty

We can now see that the rapid growth of the libertarian
movement and the Libertarian party in the 1970s is firmly
rooted in what Bernard Bailyn called this powerful "permanent
legacy" of the American Revolution. But if this legacy is so
vital to the American tradition, what went wrong? Why the need
now for a new libertarian movement to arise to reclaim the American dream?

To begin to answer this question, we must first remember that
classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the
political and economic interests — the ruling classes — who
benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed
aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines,
the State bureaucracies. Despite three major violent
revolutions precipitated by the liberals — the English of the
seventeenth century and the American and French of the
eighteenth — victories in Europe were only partial. Resistance
was stiff and managed to successfully maintain landed
monopolies, religious establishments, and warlike foreign and
military policies, and for a time to keep the suffrage
restricted to the wealthy elite. The liberals had to
concentrate on widening the suffrage, because it was clear to
both sides that the objective economic and political interests
of the mass of the public lay in individual liberty. It is
interesting to note that, by the early nineteenth century, the
laissez-faire forces were known as "liberals" and "radicals"
(for the purer and more consistent among them), and the
opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the Old Order
were broadly known as "conservatives."

Indeed, conservatism began, in the early nineteenth century,
as a conscious attempt to undo and destroy the hated work of
the new classical liberal spirit — of the American, French,
and Industrial revolutions. Led by two reactionary French
thinkers, de Bonald and de Maistre, conservatism yearned to
replace equal rights and equality before the law by the
structured and hierarchical rule of privileged elites;
individual liberty and minimal government by absolute rule and
Big Government; religious freedom by the theocratic rule of a
State church; peace and free trade by militarism, mercantilist
restrictions, and war for the advantage of the nation-state;
and industry and manufacturing by the old feudal and agrarian
order. And they wanted to replace the new world of mass
consumption and rising standards of living for all by the Old
Order of bare subsistence for the masses and luxury
consumption for the ruling elite.

"Slavery, the grave antilibertarian flaw in the
libertarianism of the Democratic program, had arisen to
wreck the party and its libertarianism completely."

By the middle of and certainly by the end of the nineteenth
century, conservatives began to realize that their cause was
inevitably doomed if they persisted in clinging to the call
for outright repeal of the Industrial Revolution and of its
enormous rise in the living standards of the mass of the
public, and also if they persisted in opposing the widening of
the suffrage, thereby frankly setting themselves in opposition
to the interests of that public. Hence, the "right wing" (a
label based on an accident of geography by which the spokesmen
for the Old Order sat on the right of the assembly hall during
the French Revolution) decided to shift their gears and to
update their statist creed by jettisoning outright opposition
to industrialism and democratic suffrage. For the old
conservatism's frank hatred and contempt for the mass of the
public, the new conservatives substituted duplicity and
demagogy. The new conservatives wooed the masses with the
following line: "We, too, favor industrialism and a higher
standard of living. But, to accomplish such ends, we must
regulate industry for the public good; we must substitute
organized cooperation for the dog-eat-dog of the free and
competitive marketplace; and, above all, we must substitute
for the nation-destroying liberal tenets of peace and free
trade the nation-glorifying measures of war, protectionism,
empire, and military prowess." For all of these changes, of
course, Big Government rather than minimal government was required.

And so, in the late nineteenth century, statism and Big
Government returned, but this time displaying a proindustrial
and pro-general-welfare face. The Old Order returned, but this
time the beneficiaries were shuffled a bit; they were not so
much the nobility, the feudal landlords, the army, the
bureaucracy, and privileged merchants as they were the army,
the bureaucracy, the weakened feudal landlords, and especially
the privileged manufacturers. Led by Bismarck in Prussia, the
New Right fashioned a right-wing collectivism based on war,
militarism, protectionism, and the compulsory cartelization of
business and industry — a giant network of controls,
regulations, subsidies, and privileges which forged a great
partnership of Big Government with certain favored elements in
big business and industry.

Something had to be done, too, about the new phenomenon of a
massive number of industrial wage workers — the "proletariat."

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, indeed
until the late nineteenth century, the mass of workers favored
laissez-faire and the free competitive market as best for
their wages and working conditions as workers, and for a cheap
and widening range of consumer goods as consumers. Even the
early trade unions, e.g., in Great Britain, were staunch
believers in laissez-faire. New conservatives, spearheaded by
Bismarck in Germany and Disraeli in Britain, weakened the
libertarian will of the workers by shedding crocodile tears
about the condition of the industrial labor force, and
cartelizing and regulating industry, not accidentally hobbling
efficient competition. Finally, in the early twentieth
century, the new conservative "corporate state" — then and now
the dominant political system in the Western world —
incorporated "responsible" and corporatist trade unions as
junior partners to Big Government and favored big businesses
in the new statist and corporatist decision-making system.

To establish this new system, to create a New Order which was
a modernized, dressed-up version of the ancien régime before
the American and French revolutions, the new ruling elites had
to perform a gigantic con job on the deluded public, a con job
that continues to this day. Whereas the existence of every
government from absolute monarchy to military dictatorship
rests on the consent of the majority of the public, a
democratic government must engineer such consent on a more
immediate, day-by-day basis. And to do so, the new
conservative ruling elites had to gull the public in many
crucial and fundamental ways. For the masses now had to be
convinced that tyranny was better than liberty, that a
cartelized and privileged industrial feudalism was better for
the consumers than a freely competitive market, that a
cartelized monopoly was to be imposed in the name of
antimonopoly, and that war and military aggrandizement for the
benefit of the ruling elites was really in the interests of
the conscripted, taxed, and often slaughtered public. How was
this to be done?

"Classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to
the political and economic interests — the ruling
classes…"

In all societies, public opinion is determined by the
intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For
most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and
concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas
promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the
professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we
shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States
have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than
have peaceful citizens in a free society. For States have
always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public
into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable;
into believing that the "emperor has clothes." Until the
modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen (or
witch doctors), the guardians of religion. It was a cozy
alliance, this age-old partnership between Church and State;
the Church informed its deluded charges that the king ruled by
divine command and therefore must be obeyed; in return, the
king funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers of the
Church. Hence, the great importance for the libertarian
classical liberals of their success at separating Church and
State. The new liberal world was a world in which
intellectuals could be secular — could make a living on their
own, in the market, apart from State subvention.

To establish their new statist order, their neomercantilist
corporate State, the new conservatives therefore had to forge
a new alliance between intellectual and State. In an
increasingly secular age, this meant with secular
intellectuals rather than with divines: specifically, with the
new breed of professors, Ph.D.'s, historians, teachers, and
technocratic economists, social workers, sociologists,
physicians, and engineers. This reforged alliance came in two
parts. In the early nineteenth century, the conservatives,
conceding reason to their liberal enemies, relied heavily on
the alleged virtues of irrationality, romanticism, tradition,
theocracy. By stressing the virtue of tradition and of
irrational symbols, the conservatives could gull the public
into continuing privileged hierarchical rule, and to continue
to worship the nation-state and its war-making machine. In the
latter part of the nineteenth century, the new conservatism
adopted the trappings of reason and of "science." Now it was
science that allegedly required rule of the economy and of
society by technocratic "experts." In exchange for spreading
this message to the public, the new breed of intellectuals was
rewarded with jobs and prestige as apologists for the New
Order and as planners and regulators of the newly cartelized
economy and society.

To insure the dominance of the new statism over public
opinion, to insure that the public's consent would be
engineered, the governments of the Western world in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries moved to seize
control over education, over the minds of men: over the
universities, and over general education through compulsory
school attendance laws and a network of public schools. The
public schools were consciously used to inculcate obedience to
the State as well as other civic virtues among their young
charges. Furthermore, this statizing of education insured that
one of the biggest vested interests in expanding statism would
be the nation's teachers and professional educationists.
One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their
work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to
manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional
connotations attached to such labels. For example, the
laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as "liberals,"
and the purest and most militant of them as "radicals"; they
had also been known as "progressives" because they were the
ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty,
and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed
of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to
themselves the words "liberal" and "progressive," and
successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with
the charge of being old-fashioned, "Neanderthal," and
"reactionary." Even the name "conservative" was pinned on the
classical liberals. And, as we have seen, the new statists
were able to appropriate the concept of "reason" as well.

"For the old conservatism's frank hatred and contempt
for the mass of the public, the new conservatives
substituted duplicity and demagogy."

If the laissez-faire liberals were confused by the new
recrudescence of statism and mercantilism as "progressive"
corporate statism, another reason for the decay of classical
liberalism by the end of the nineteenth century was the growth
of a peculiar new movement: socialism. Socialism began in the
1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s. The peculiar thing
about socialism was that it was a confused, hybrid movement,
influenced by both the two great preexisting polar ideologies,
liberalism and conservatism. From the classical liberals the
socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism and the
Industrial Revolution, an early glorification of "science" and
"reason," and at least a rhetorical devotion to such classical
liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising
standard of living. Indeed, the socialists, long before the
much later corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting of science,
reason, and industrialism. And the socialists not only adopted
the classical liberal adherence to democracy, but topped it by
calling for an "expanded democracy," in which "the people"
would run the economy — and each other.

On the other hand, from the conservatives the socialists took
a devotion to coercion and the statist means for trying to
achieve these liberal goals. Industrial harmony and growth
were to be achieved by aggrandizing the State into an
all-powerful institution, ruling the economy and the society
in the name of "science." A vanguard of technocrats was to
assume all-powerful rule over everyone's person and property
in the name of the "people" and of "democracy." Not content
with the liberal achievement of reason and freedom for
scientific research, the socialist State would install rule by
the scientists of everyone else; not content with liberals
setting the workers free to achieve undreamt-of prosperity,
the socialist State would install rule by the workers of
everyone else — or rather, rule by politicians, bureaucrats,
and technocrats in their name. Not content with the liberal
creed of equality of rights, of equality before the law, the
socialist State would trample on such equality on behalf of
the monstrous and impossible goal of equality or uniformity of
results — or rather, would erect a new privileged elite, a new
class, in the name of bringing about such an impossible equality.

Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried
to achieve the liberal goals of freedom, peace, and industrial
harmony and growth — goals which can only be achieved through
liberty and the separation of government from virtually
everything — by imposing the old conservative means of
statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege. It was a
movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail
miserably in those numerous countries where it attained power
in the twentieth century, by bringing to the masses only
unprecedented despotism, starvation, and grinding impoverishment.

But the worst thing about the rise of the socialist movement
was that it was able to outflank the classical liberals "on
the Left": that is, as the party of hope, of radicalism, of
revolution in the Western World. For, just as the defenders of
the ancien régime took their place on the right side of the
hall during the French Revolution, so the liberals and
radicals sat on the left; from then on until the rise of
socialism, the libertarian classical liberals were "the Left,"
even the "extreme Left," on the ideological spectrum. As late
as 1848, such militant laissez-faire French liberals as
Frederic Bastiat sat on the left in the national assembly. The
classical liberals had begun as the radical, revolutionary
party in the West, as the party of hope and of change on
behalf of liberty, peace, and progress. To allow themselves to
be outflanked, to allow the socialists to pose as the "party
of the Left," was a bad strategic error, allowing the liberals
to be put falsely into a confused middle-of-the-road position
with socialism and conservatism as the polar opposites. Since
libertarianism is nothing if not a party of change and of
progress toward liberty, abandonment of that role meant the
abandonment of much of their reason for existence — either in
reality or in the minds of the public.

But none of this could have happened if the classical
liberals had not allowed themselves to decay from within.
They could have pointed out — as some of them indeed did —
that socialism was a confused, self-contradictory,
quasi-conservative movement, absolute monarchy and feudalism
with a modern face, and that they themselves were still the
only true radicals, undaunted people who insisted on nothing
less than complete victory for the libertarian ideal.

Decay From Within

But after achieving impressive partial victories against
statism, the classical liberals began to lose their
radicalism, their dogged insistence on carrying the battle
against conservative statism to the point of final victory.

Instead of using partial victories as a stepping-stone for
evermore pressure, the classical liberals began to lose their
fervor for change and for purity of principle. They began to
rest content with trying to safeguard their existing
victories, and thus turned themselves from a radical into a
conservative movement — "conservative" in the sense of being
content to preserve the status quo. In short, the liberals
left the field wide open for socialism to become the party of
hope and of radicalism, and even for the later corporatists to
pose as "liberals" and "progressives" as against the "extreme
right wing" and "conservative" libertarian classical liberals,
since the latter allowed themselves to be boxed into a
position of hoping for nothing more than stasis, than absence
of change. Such a strategy is foolish and untenable in a
changing world.

But the degeneration of liberalism was not merely one of
stance and strategy, but one of principle as well. For the
liberals became content to leave the war-making power in the
hands of the State, to leave the education power in its hands,
to leave the power over money and banking, and over roads, in
the hands of the State — in short, to concede to State
dominion over all the crucial levers of power in society. In
contrast to the eighteenth-century liberals' total hostility
to the executive and to bureaucracy, the nineteenth-century
liberals tolerated and even welcomed the buildup of executive
power and of an entrenched oligarchic civil service bureaucracy.

Moreover, principle and strategy merged in the decay of
eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century liberal
devotion to "abolitionism" — to the view that, whether the
institution be slavery or any other aspect of statism, it
should be abolished as quickly as possible, since the
immediate abolition of statism, while unlikely in practice,
was to be sought after as the only possible moral position.
For to prefer a gradual whittling away to immediate abolition
of an evil and coercive institution is to ratify and sanction
such evil, and therefore to violate libertarian principles. As
the great abolitionist of slavery and libertarian William
Lloyd Garrison explained: "Urge immediate abolition as
earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in
the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown
by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend."

Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it
tried to achieve liberal goals by imposing the old
conservative means of statism, collectivism, and
hierarchical privilege.

There were two critically important changes in the philosophy
and ideology of classical liberalism which both exemplified
and contributed to its decay as a vital, progressive, and
radical force in the Western world. The first, and most
important, occurring in the early to mid-nineteenth century,
was the abandonment of the philosophy of natural rights, and
its replacement by technocratic utilitarianism. Instead of
liberty grounded on the imperative morality of each
individual's right to person and property, that is, instead of
liberty being sought primarily on the basis of right and
justice, utilitarianism preferred liberty as generally the
best way to achieve a vaguely defined general welfare or
common good. There were two grave consequences of this shift
from natural rights to utilitarianism. First, the purity of
the goal, the consistency of the principle, was inevitably
shattered. For whereas the natural-rights libertarian seeking
morality and justice cleaves militantly to pure principle, the
utilitarian only values liberty as an ad hoc expedient. And
since expediency can and does shift with the wind, it will
become easy for the utilitarian in his cool calculus of cost
and benefit to plump for statism in ad hoc case after case,
and thus to give principle away. Indeed, this is precisely
what happened to the Benthamite utilitarians in England:

beginning with ad hoc libertarianism and laissez-faire, they
found it ever easier to slide further and further into
statism. An example was the drive for an "efficient" and
therefore strong civil service and executive power, an
efficiency that took precedence, indeed replaced, any concept
of justice or right.

Second, and equally important, it is rare indeed ever to find
a utilitarian who is also radical, who burns for immediate
abolition of evil and coercion. Utilitarians, with their
devotion to expediency, almost inevitably oppose any sort of
upsetting or radical change. There have been no utilitarian
revolutionaries. Hence, utilitarians are never immediate
abolitionists. The abolitionist is such because he wishes to
eliminate wrong and injustice as rapidly as possible. In
choosing this goal, there is no room for cool, ad hoc weighing
of cost and benefit. Hence, the classical liberal utilitarians
abandoned radicalism and became mere gradualist reformers. But
in becoming reformers, they also put themselves inevitably
into the position of advisers and efficiency experts to the
State. In other words, they inevitably came to abandon
libertarian principle as well as a principled libertarian
strategy. The utilitarians wound up as apologists for the
existing order, for the status quo, and hence were all too
open to the charge by socialists and progressive corporatists
that they were mere narrow-minded and conservative opponents
of any and all change. Thus, starting as radicals and
revolutionaries, as the polar opposites of conservatives, the
classical liberals wound up as the image of the thing they had fought.

This utilitarian crippling of libertarianism is still with us.
Thus, in the early days of economic thought, utilitarianism
captured free-market economics with the influence of Bentham
and Ricardo, and this influence is today fully as strong as
ever. Current free-market economics is all too rife with
appeals to gradualism; with scorn for ethics, justice, and
consistent principle; and with a willingness to abandon
free-market principles at the drop of a cost-benefit hat.
Hence, current free-market economics is generally envisioned
by intellectuals as merely apologetics for a slightly modified
status quo, and all too often such charges are correct.
A second, reinforcing change in the ideology of classical
liberals came during the late nineteenth century, when, at
least for a few decades, they adopted the doctrines of social
evolutionism, often called "social Darwinism." Generally,
statist historians have smeared such social Darwinist
laissez-faire liberals as Herbert Spencer and William Graham
Sumner as cruel champions of the extermination, or at least of
the disappearance, of the socially "unfit." Much of this was
simply the dressing up of sound economic and sociological
free-market doctrine in the then-fashionable trappings of
evolutionism. But the really important and crippling aspect of
their social Darwinism was the illegitimate carrying-over to
the social sphere of the view that species (or later, genes)
change very, very slowly, after millennia of time. The social
Darwinist liberal came, then, to abandon the very idea of
revolution or radical change in favor of sitting back and
waiting for the inevitable tiny evolutionary changes over eons
of time. In short, ignoring the fact that liberalism had had
to break through the power of ruling elites by a series of
radical changes and revolutions, the social Darwinists became
conservatives preaching against any radical measures and in
favor of only the most minutely gradual of changes.

In fact, the great libertarian Spencer himself is a
fascinating illustration of just such a change in classical
liberalism (and his case is paralleled in America by William
Graham Sumner). In a sense, Herbert Spencer embodies within
himself much of the decline of liberalism in the nineteenth
century. For Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal,
as virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of
sociology and social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer
abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic, radical historical
movement, although without abandoning it in pure theory. While
looking forward to an eventual victory of pure liberty, of
"contract" as against "status," of industry as against
militarism, Spencer began to see that victory as inevitable,
but only after millennia of gradual evolution. Hence, Spencer
abandoned liberalism as a fighting, radical creed and confined
his liberalism in practice to a weary, conservative, rearguard
action against the growing collectivism and statism of his day.

"This utilitarian crippling of libertarianism is still with us."

But if utilitarianism, bolstered by social Darwinism, was the
main agent of philosophical and ideological decay in the
liberal movement, the single most important, and even
cataclysmic, reason for its demise was its abandonment of
formerly stringent principles against war, empire, and
militarism. In country after country, it was the siren song of
nation-state and empire that destroyed classical liberalism.

In England, the liberals, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, abandoned the antiwar, anti-imperialist
"Little Englandism" of Cobden, Bright, and the Manchester
School. Instead, they adopted the obscenely entitled "Liberal
Imperialism" — joining the conservatives in the expansion of
empire, and the conservatives and the right-wing socialists in
the destructive imperialism and collectivism of World War I.
In Germany, Bismarck was able to split the previously almost
triumphant liberals by setting up the lure of unification of
Germany by blood and iron. In both countries, the result was
the destruction of the liberal cause.

In the United States, the classical liberal party had long
been the Democratic party, known in the latter nineteenth
century as "the party of personal liberty." Basically, it had
been the party not only of personal but also of economic
liberty; the stalwart opponent of Prohibition, of Sunday blue
laws, and of compulsory education; the devoted champion of
free trade, hard money (absence of governmental inflation),
separation of banking from the State, and the absolute minimum
of government. It construed state power to be negligible and
federal power to be virtually nonexistent. On foreign policy,
the Democratic party, though less rigorously, tended to be the
party of peace, antimilitarism, and anti-imperialism. But
personal and economic libertarianism were both abandoned with
the capture of the Democratic party by the Bryan forces in
1896, and the foreign policy of nonintervention was then
rudely abandoned by Woodrow Wilson two decades later. It was
an intervention and a war that were to usher in a century of
death and devastation, of wars and new despotisms, and also a
century in all warring countries of the new corporatist
statism — of a welfare-warfare State run by an alliance of Big
Government, big business, unions, and intellectuals — that we
have mentioned above.

You can listen to this article as a Mises.org podcast.
The last gasp, indeed, of the old laissez-faire liberalism in
America was the doughty and aging libertarians who banded
together to form the Anti-Imperialist League at the turn of
the century, to combat the American war against Spain and the
subsequent imperialist American war to crush the Filipinos who
were striving for national independence from both Spain and
the United States. To current eyes, the idea of an
anti-imperialist who is not a Marxist may seem strange, but
opposition to imperialism began with laissez-faire liberals
such as Cobden and Bright in England, and Eugen Richter in
Prussia. In fact, the Anti-Imperialist League, headed by
Boston industrialist and economist Edward Atkinson (and
including Sumner) consisted largely of laissez-faire radicals
who had fought the good fight for the abolition of slavery,
and had then championed free trade, hard money, and minimal
government. To them, their final battle against the new
American imperialism was simply part and parcel of their
lifelong battle against coercion, statism and injustice —
against Big Government in every area of life, both domestic
and foreign.

We have traced the rather grisly story of the decline and fall
of classical liberalism after its rise and partial triumph in
previous centuries. What, then, is the reason for the
resurgence, the flowering, of libertarian thought and activity
in the last few years, particularly in the United States? How
could these formidable forces and coalitions for statism have
yielded even that much to a resurrected libertarian movement?
Shouldn't the resumed march of statism in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries be a cause for gloom rather than usher
in a reawakening of a seemingly moribund libertarianism? Why
didn't libertarianism remain dead and buried?

We have seen why libertarianism would naturally arise first
and most fully in the United States, a land steeped in
libertarian tradition. But we have not yet examined the
question: Why the renaissance of libertarianism at all within
the last few years? What contemporary conditions have led to
this surprising development? We must postpone answering this
question until the end of the book, until we first examine
what the libertarian creed is, and how that creed can be
applied to solve the leading problem areas in our society.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was dean of the Austrian
School. This article is excerpted from the first chapter of
For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.

An audiobook version of this chapter, read by Jeff Riggenbach,
including a new introduction, written and read by Llewellyn H.
Rockwell, Jr., is available for podcast or download.