It is not well known that classical liberal thought has had a strong tradition within it of thinking about “class”, namely the idea that one group of people live off the labor and taxes of another group of people. In this discussion David Hart, the Director of Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, explores this “other tradition” of thinking about class which can be traced back to the 17th century and which was was taken up again by Murray Rothbard in the 1950s and 1960s in what he describes as the “Rothbardian synthesis” of classical liberal class analysis, Austrian economics, and New Left class analysis. He provides a brief survey of its history, examines some of the key concepts within this tradition, and raises some problems which contemporary scholars need to explore further, in particular the theoretical coherence and usefulness of the “Rothbardian synthesis.” He is joined in the discussion by Gary Chartier, Distinguished Professor of Law and Business Ethics at La Sierra University in Riverside, California; Steve Davies, the education director at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London; Jayme Lemke, a senior research fellow and associate director of academic and student programs at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; and the independent scholar George H. Smith.

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David M. Hart, "Classical Liberalism and the Problem of Class" [November, 2016]

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The Debate

Lead Essay: David M. Hart, “Classical Liberalism and the Problem of Class” [Posted: Nov. 1, 2016]

Responses and Critiques

The Conversation

About the Authors

David M. Hart is the Director of Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty Project and the Academic Editor of Liberty Fund's six volume translation of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat and the editor Gustave de Molinari's Conversations on Saint Lazarus Street (1849). He received a Ph.D. in history from King's College, Cambridge and taught in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. Recent works include co-editing with Robert Leroux two anthologies of 19th century French classical liberal thought: French Liberalism in the 19th Century: An Anthology (London and New York: Routledge, 2011) and in French, L'Âge d'or du libéralisme français. Anthologie. XIXe siècle (The Golden Age of French Liberalism) (Ellipses, forthcoming). On his personal website <http://davidmhart.com/liberty> David has a considerable number of resources on 19th century classical liberal thought. In 2015 he wrote the Lead Essay for a Liberty Matters discussion on “The Spread of (Classical) Liberal Ideas” (March 2015).

Gary Chartier is an American legal scholar who currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Law and Business Ethics and Associate Dean of the Tom and Vi Zapara School of Business at La Sierra University in Riverside, California. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of 10 books, including Public Practice, Private Law (Cambridge, 2016), Anarchy and Legal Order (Cambridge, 2013), Radicalizing Rawls (Palgrave, 2014), and Economic Justice and Natural Law (Cambridge, 2009). A proud southern California native who wishes he had attended UC Sunnydale, he received a BA (magna cum laude, 1987) in history and political science from La Sierra before proceeding to the University of Cambridge, where he studied ethics, the philosophy of religion, theology, Christian origins, and political philosophy and earned a PhD (1991) with a dissertation on the idea of friendship. He studied legal philosophy and public law at the UCLA School of Law (JD, 2001, Order of the Coif). The University of Cambridge presented him with an earned LLD in 2015 for his work in legal theory.

Steve Davies is education director at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Previously he was program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University. He joined IHS from the United Kingdom, where he was senior lecturer in the department of history and economic history at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. A historian, he graduated from St. Andrews University in Scotland in 1976 and gained his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1984. He has authored several books, including Empiricism and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and was coeditor with Nigel Ashford of The Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (Routledge, 1991). He has also written the Lead Essay for a previous Liberty Matters discussion on “Richard Cobden: Ideas and Strategies in Organizing the Free-Trade Movement in Britain” (January 2015).

Jayme Lemke is a senior fellow in the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a senior research fellow and associate director of academic and student programs at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her specialization is in public choice economics, constitutional political economy, and the political economy of women’s rights. Her research on these and other topics has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Institutional Economics, Public Choice, the Review of Austrian Economics, and Studies in Emergent Order. In 2015 she wrote an article on “An Austrian Approach to Class Structure,” in New Thinking in Austrian Political Economy. Advances in Austrian Economics.

George H. Smith is an independent scholar and a weekly columnist at the Cato Institute’s Libertarianism.org <http://www.libertarianism.org/people/george-h-smith>. He is the author of Atheism: The Case Against God (1974), Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies (1991), Why Atheism (2000). He is also the author of the audio series on “Great Political Thinkers,” “The Meaning of the Constitution,” and “The Ideas of Liberty.” He has articles and book reviews published in the New York Times, Newsday, Reason, Liberty, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Free Inquiry, and The Humanist. He has also written the lead essays for 2 previous Liberty Matters discussions on his book “The System of Liberty” (September 2013) and “Herbert Spencer's Sociology of the State" (November 2014).

Additional Reading

LEAD ESSAY: David M. Hart, "Classical Liberalism and the Problem of Class" [Posted: November 1, 2016]↩

Introduction

(M)en placed in society ... are divided into two classes, Ceux qui pillent,—et Ceux qui sont pillés (those who pillage and those who are pillaged); and we must consider with some care what this division, the correctness of which has not been disputed, implies. The first class, Ceux qui pillent, are the small number. They are the ruling Few. The second class, Ceux qui sont pillés, are the great number. They are the subject Many. James Mill, "The State of the Nation" (1835)

When one hears the word “class” one usually thinks of Marxist-inspired social theorists, who talk about the exploitation of the “working class” by the “capitalist class,” which owns the factories in which the workers labor away producing valuable goods but who do not receive the “full value” of what they create in their wages; thus they are “exploited.” Or more recently, one thinks of those who rail against the “1 percent,” the “wealthy elites” of “Wall Street” who own 90+% of “society’s wealth” and who have “rigged the system” so they continue to receive “excessive profits” at the expense of “the rest of us.” Other common understandings of class have their origins in the work of Max Weber on class and status, or perhaps in the work of C. Wright Mills on power-elite theories.

However, this initial reaction would be wrong, or, rather, incomplete, as it ignores a much older tradition of classical-liberal theories of class and exploitation which predate Marxism and which in fact partially inspired Marx in his own thinking about class, which he developed during the 1840s and 1850s. In this essay I want to briefly sketch a history of this “other tradition” of thinking about class, a classical-liberal way of thinking about class (what I will henceforth call CLCA -- or classical liberal class analysis), which emerged during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, before it was forgotten, only to be rediscovered by Murray Rothbard and his circle of friends (in particular Ralph Raico and Leonard Liggio) in the 1950s and 1960s and which has exerted a certain influence on the modern libertarian movement. I call this reworking of class analysis by Rothbard the “Rothbardian synthesis” of three traditions of thought into a new version of CLCA. His synthesis combined the following:

an older, classical-liberal and radical set of ideas about class and the state from authors such as La Boétie, John C. Calhoun, Frédéric Bastiat and Gustave de Molinari, Franz Oppenheimer, and Albert Jay Nock, with his own reworking of Austrian economic theory, which appeared in his theoretical works Man, Economy, and State (1962) and Power and Market (1970), and a New Left theory of class, which appeared in the 1960s (by Gabriel Kolko and William Appleman Williams, among others) as part of its critique of American capitalism, foreign policy, and the war in Vietnam, appearing in a series of important essays and pamphlets Rothbard wrote during the 1960s, especially “The Anatomy of the State” (1965).

Rothbard’s Definition of Class and the State

I want to begin by quoting Rothbard’s classic definitions of class and the state from “The Anatomy of the State":

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the “economic means.” The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed “the political means” to wealth. It should be clear that the peaceful use of reason and energy in production is the “natural” path for man: the means for his survival and prosperity on this earth. It should be equally clear that the coercive, exploitative means is contrary to natural law; it is parasitic, for instead of adding to production, it subtracts from it. The “political means” siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer’s incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence. In the long run, the robber destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or eliminating the source of his own supply. But not only that; even in the short-run, the predator is acting contrary to his own true nature as a man. We are now in a position to answer more fully the question: what is the State? The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory. For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.

To summarize Rothbard’s view, he defines the state as “the organization of the political means of acquiring wealth” and class (or caste) as “a parasitic and destructive individual or group” which lives off this politically acquired wealth.

I would argue that these ideas, or at least ones very similar to them, have been part of the classical-liberal tradition for a couple of centuries and have been largely forgotten or ignored by social theorists. They need to be better understood and appreciated, and closely examined to see if they can enrich our present understanding of the nature of class and the state.

A Brief Survey of the Other Tradition

This long but relatively unknown other tradition is quite diverse, but the variations have a number of features in common depending upon the sophistication of the economic theories that the relevant thinkers had to work with and the actual types of class society they lived in and were trying to understand. These common features include the following three key ideas:

(1) that societies can be divided into two antagonistic groups, most simply put as “the people” vs. their “rulers,” with the defining feature being who has access to political (i.e., coercive) power within a given society. The latter has been variously termed:

“the single tyrant” and his “favorites” and “petty chiefs” (La Boétie) “the ruling few” (Bentham, James Mill, Spencer) “the sinister interests” (Bentham, Mill) “the oligarchy” (Knox, Wade, Bastiat, Cobden).

(2) that one of these groups, “the ruling few,” “exploits” the other by taking the latter’s property without its consent or by passing laws which benefit the former at the expense of the latter. These groups have been variously termed:

“ceux qui pillent” (those who pillage) vs “ceux qui sont pillés” (those who are pillaged) (James Mill) “the plunderers” vs. “the plundered” (Bastiat), “the conquerors” vs. “the conquered” (Thierry, Spencer, Oppenheimer), “tax-payers” vs. “tax consumers” (Calhoun) or “tax-eaters” (Cobbett) or “the budget eaters” (Molinari) or the “caterpillars” (the Levellers) “the producers” vs. “the non-producers” (Turgot, Say).

(3) that societies evolve over time as technology changes and trade and production increase, resulting in new kinds of class rule and exploitation, usually evolving towards a society with greater freedom. These stages have been described variously as:

evolution through four stages of communal property, slavery, feudalism, commerce (Ferguson, Millar, Smith, Turgot) ancient warrior and slave-based society vs. modern commercial and industrial society with a new “industrious class” (Constant, Comte, Dunoyer) conquest, slavery, feudalism, then Free Cities, Communes, and the Third Estate (Thierry) war, slavery, theocratic plunder, monopoly, bureaucratic plunder, free trade (Bastiat) militant vs. industrial societies (Spencer) the feudal state, the maritime state, the industrial state, the constitutional state (Oppenheimer).

The key period during which traditional CLCA emerged in a more coherent form was roughly the 100 years between 1750 and 1850, a period which, not incidentally, coincided with the Enlightenment in Europe and North America and the liberal revolutions which accompanied this in America and France in the 18th century and across much of Europe in 1848.

I list below eight ideological currents of thought which I believe have contributed to the formation of CLCA. Although not all of them can be described as “classical liberal” (as this term had not been invented when many of these authors were writing), they were “liberal” in the sense that they had a concern with individual liberty, property rights, and limited government:

The Prehistory. I include in this group a couple of early modern and early 18th-century thinkers who made the rather crude distinction between “the people” and “the King (or Prince) and his Courtiers.” I include in this group people like La Boétie, Levellers such as Richard Overton and William Walwyn, the 18th Century Commonwealthmen John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and the early Edmund Burke. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment. Thinkers like Adam Ferguson, John Millar, David Hume, and Adam Smith developed theories about “rank” within societies and a four-stage theory of history (such as slavery, feudalism, commerce) each of which had a corresponding ruling elite which benefited from their privileged political position. The French Enlightenment. Several thinkers, especially among the Physiocrats (like Turgot), had a similar stage theory of history which was to have a profound impact on 19th-century ideas about class in both the classical-liberal as well as in the Marxist camps. Radical Individualists and Republicans. These thinkers were influenced by the American and French revolutions and were active in England, America, and France. They developed ideas about oligarchies (both aristocratic and mercantile), the growing importance of public debt and central banks, the role of an expanded military and its elites which controlled the empire, and the opposition of established political elites to the rising lower orders who wanted to participate in politics, such as working-class men and women. The main branches of this group included Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Vicesimus Knox, William Cobbett, and Percy Shelley in England; Thomas Jefferson, John Taylor, John Calhoun, and William Leggett in America; and Jean-Baptiste Say, Benjamin Constant, Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry in France. The latter I think were particularly important in the development of CLCA because of the special problem in France created by the Restoration of the monarchy and the aristocracy after 1815, the legacy of Napoleon’s militarism and centralization of the state, and the rise of a centralized bureaucracy and the “place-seeking” (job-seeking) which took place within the French state. The Philosophic Radicals and the Benthamites. The two main thinkers in this group were Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, who had a profound impact on the thinking of diverse radicals in the first half of the 19th century in England, such as John Wade and Thomas Hodgskin. Bentham’s idea of the “sinister interest” of the ruling elite and Mill’s contrast between the ruling few and ruled many, were particularly influential. These ideas led John Wade to write an extraordinarily detailed catalog of exactly what groups and individuals in the British ruling elite benefited from taxpayer’s money. The Classical Political Economists and Their Supporters. The English branch of the school got side-tracked by their labor theory of value and theory of rent which led others (such as Marxists and other socialists in France like Louis Blanc) to argue that employers did not pay workers the full value their labor produced and hence “exploited” them, or that the rent paid for land was unearned by the landowner. However, they (Adam Smith and David Ricardo) were strong supporters of free trade, and agitators like Richard Cobden adapted this into a class interpretation to criticize the landed oligarchy which ruled Britain and benefited from tariffs at the expense of ordinary consumers. Other topics they were interested in included the condition of the working class and women (J.S. Mill) and slavery (William Stanley Jevons). The French branch of the classical school were interested in the productive role played by the entrepreneur (Say), whom they argued was not a parasite or exploiter, the idea of the existence of an “industrial class” (Comte and Dunoyer), the importance and essential productivity of nonmaterial goods, or “services,” (Say and Bastiat), the economics of slavery (Heinrich Storch and Gustave de Molinari), the continuing problem of the centralization of government power (Alexis de Tocqueville), the growth of bureaucracy and “place-seeking” (Dunoyer and Molinari), and “plunder” (Bastiat and Ambroise Clément). The Sociological School. With the rise of sociology as separate discipline in late 19th and early 20th centuries, classical liberalism made significant contributions, such as the idea of the militant vs. industrial types of society (Herbert Spencer and Molinari), the circulation of elites (Vilfredo Pareto), “the forgotten man” (i.e., the ordinary taxpayer) and rule by a plutocracy (William Graham Sumner), status and rank (Max Weber), and overall theories about the growth of the modern state (Molinari, Gaetano Mosca, and Oppenheimer). Oppenheimer in particular is important because of his later influence on Rothbard in the 1950s and 1960s. Post-World War II Austrian School, Public Choice, and Modern Libertarian Movement. Several streams of thought have contributed to the modern version of CLCA. During World War II Ludwig von Mises turned to a form of economic sociology with his writings on bureaucracy (1944), the total state (Nazism and Stalinism) (1944), and his general theory of interventionism (1940). Yet he refused to embrace the idea of “class” preferring instead to use the older term “caste” in his writings. As a postgraduate student attending Mises’s seminar at New York University Rothbard played the central role in the “Rothbardian synthesis,” especially the component drawn from Calhoun, Bastiat and Molinari, Oppenheimer, and Nock. (I will discuss this in more detail in a later post). Rothbard’s synthesis inspired two younger scholars, Walter Grinder and John Hagel, to take his ideas further with an Austrian-inspired class analysis of “state capitalism” in the mid–1970s. Another stream appeared beginning in the 1960s with the key players in the Public Choice school, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, applying their version of free-market economics to the study of rent-seeking, the politics of bureaucracy, and “Leviathan” without adopting an explicit class interpretation. Nevertheless, their work fits in very well with CLCA. There has also been an interesting contribution by Margaret Levi in 1988, who applied a rational-choice perspective to an analysis of the state and class rule, which she appropriately called “predatory rule”; this appears to be a clear link back to mid–19th-century classical liberal theories of class.

I should note before concluding this brief survey that in the mid-19th century this classical-liberal tradition of thinking about class was taken up by Karl Marx, altered considerably, and then diverted into an entirely different theory of class. Ralph Raico and Tom Palmer have documented how Marx borrowed key ideas from the classical-liberal tradition but emphasized the Smithian and Ricardian errors concerning the labor theory of value and turned this into a theory of class based upon the inevitable and necessary exploitation of workers via the payment of wages by employers. It should be further noted that when Marx wrote as a journalist, such as in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), he reverted to a more CLCA approach, but when he wrote as an economist in Das Capital (1859) and elsewhere he increasingly abandoned CLCA and used a more “Marxist” Ricardian approach.

Ideas and Concepts within CLCA for Modern Classical Liberals to Revisit

Given the richness of this classical-liberal tradition of thinking about class, it is not surprising that there are some ideas which modern day researchers might profitably revisit in order to deepen our understanding about the complexities of class and power. Here are a handful of them which I would like to put forward for consideration.

The Circulation of Elites. In his essay on “The Circulation of Elites” (1900) Vilfredo Pareto explores the important question of how open entrenched elites are to newcomers. A common way to describe a circulation of elites taking turns to rule is John Wade’s “the Ins” vs. “the Outs.” In our own “democratic” societies it is assumed that the elites are open to some degree to outsiders. But is this in fact true, given the continuing importance of what school one attended (such as the preponderance of Yale and Harvard among members of the ruling elite) and the persistence of certain elite families in banking, law, and finance circles? Political and Economic Fallacies. Both Bentham and Bastiat stressed the way in which elites spread misinformation or “fallacies” (Bentham) or “sophisms” (Bastiat) to hide how elites went about getting their privileges (usually through Parliament or Congress) and to deflect criticism by the general public. How has the spread of mass communication in a democracy made this process of deception and obfuscation easier or harder for elites to achieve this? What role do “flatterers” (a term used frequently by Trenchard and Gordon), “court intellectuals,” and today the mainstream press play in this process? Compiling a new Black Book of Statist Privilege. The radical John Wade compiled a very detailed list (some 850 pages) of people and groups who lived off taxpayers’ money in the 1820s and 1830s -- from the Civil List of royalty, to the privileges and property owned by the Church of England, to the sinecures of the children of aristocrats, to the pensions of ex-government employees, army officers, and politicians. This book badly needs to be updated to cover the modern welfare/warfare state. Something like this was attempted by Ferdinand Lundberg on the “sixty families” who ruled America in the first part of the 20th century Describing the Gradations of Tyrants. Both Trenchard and Bentham were interested in the complexities within the hierarchy of those who comprised the “ruling few.” They understood that it was not homogeneous but made up of many different levels with different privileges and powers. Bentham talked about “the sub-ruling few”, Gordon talked about a “gradation of tyrants” and “deputy tyrants” who were rivals for power within the oligarchy, and La Boétie talked about a pyramid of power with the tyrant at the top and several hundred chiefs and petty chiefs below him who exploited the people. Intra-institutional rivalries and “class conflicts” have not been well studied, especially in key institutions like the military, the CIA, and the Federal Reserve. Why the Worst get on Top. The radical minister Vicesimus Knox in his essay on “Despotism” (1795) asked the same question Hayek would answer in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom. Knox wanted to know what type of person was attracted to political (or military) power, what skills they needed to be successful, and what this kind of personality and behavior meant for a free society. The “pathology of power” has been studied in the case of dictators like Hitler, Mao, or Stalin, but their counterparts in democracies less so, such as Winston Churchill, Tony Blair, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, and now perhaps Donald Trump. The Paper Aristocracy. In the first decade of the 19th century William Cobbett thought that a new kind of aristocracy, a “paper aristocracy” dependent of paper money, had emerged in Britain which benefited from the banking system and the government’s need for loans to fund the war effort against Napoleon. The power of central banks (such as the Federal Reserve) is also highlighted by Grinder and Hagel as one of the central sources of power within the modern state, control of which is crucial for controlling all other aspects of economic life in the modern era. This sector continues to be of vital importance in the post-financial-crisis (2008) era, given the unprecedented experiments central banks are conducting with their policies of Quantitative Easing, ZIRP (zero interest rates), and negative interest rates. What groups are benefiting from these monetary experiments and who will ultimately pay for them?

Some Problems to Resolve within CLCA

Let me conclude with a few remarks about some problems within CLCA. An obvious problem to begin with is the question of why classical liberals have been so reluctant to adopt class analysis in the postwar period, which leads to the related problem of why there are so few classical-liberal sociologists, with the notable exception of people like Robert Nisbet and Stanislav Andreski. Perhaps like Mises they were reluctant to adopt the terminology of class because it seemed too “left wing.” Yet the nature of power, how it is wielded, and how it benefits some at the expense of others should be of concern to classical-liberal theorists today as it has been for a couple of centuries.

Another problem lies with the rather crude distinction which Calhoun developed and Rothbard took up up, namely, the idea of “net taxpayers” and “net tax-receivers.” In the complex world in which we live, where the state has interpenetrated so many aspects of our lives, the distinction is not as clearcut as it might have been when Calhoun first formulated it in 1849. Since we are all forced to be tax-receivers of some kind (even if only because we walk on state-funded sidewalks and drive on state-funded roads) it is not clear that the tax-receivers have as markedly different a set of “class interests” vis-à-vis the taxpayers as Calhoun and later Rothbard imagined. Perhaps there is more of a gray zone now between the two groups, the complexities of which need to be explored further. If we are not “all Keynesians now,” maybe we are all “tax-eaters” now.

A third problem concerns the organization and intent of individuals and groups that seek privileges and political “rent” from the state. Are they just disorganized one-off attempts to get benefits at the expense of one another and the broader taxpaying public? Can they come together to organize a better way to achieve their common goals over time (and thus form a “class”) or are such attempts constantly disrupted by rivalry among themselves? If they do manage to organize amongst themselves, how long does it take before they become an “institution” like a “ruling class”?

A fourth and more general problem, which Jayme Lemke has discussed in her recent and important paper, is how CLCA can be reconciled with methodological individualism, which lies at the heart of modern Austrian economic theory. This question of compatibility can be extended to the other components of the "Rothbardian synthesis", namely is Rothbard's combination of classical liberal class analysis, Austrian economics, and New Left class analysis a theoretically coherent one? Does it provide us with useful tools to explain historical and political phenomena? Can (or should) the Public Choice school's insights into the "economics of politics" also be included in this synthesis?

There are other problems as well of course, but I will leave discussion of those to another time.

Endnotes

See for example Max Weber, Sociological Writings, ed. by Wolf Heydebrand (New York: Continuum, 1994), and Chap. XXIX “The Rational State” in General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Knight (1927).

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956).

Full references can be found in the bibliography: Étienne de la Boétie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1549, 1576); John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (1849); Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development viewed Sociologically (1908); and Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy the State (1935).

Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, with Power and Market: Government and the Economy. Second Edition. Scholar’s Edition (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009).

For example, Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963); and William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Delta, 1962).

Rothbard, “The Anatomy of the State” (1965) in Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature and Other Essays (Washington, DC: Libertarian Press Review, 1974), pp. 34–53. See also the 40-page Part III: The State versus Liberty in The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982), pp. 159–96, with short articles on “The Nature of the State,” “The Inner Contradictions of the State,” ”The Moral Status of Relations to the State,” and “Of Relations between States.”

Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, pp. 36–37. Quoting Chap. II “The Genesis of the State” in Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development viewed Sociologically, authorized translation by John M. Gitterman (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1922). /titles/1662#lf0315_label_032.

For a discussion of Rothbard’s theory of class see David Osterfeld, “Caste and Class: The Rothbardian View of Governments and Markets,” in Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, ed. with an Introduction by Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988), pp. 283–328.

I have compiled a fairly thorough collection of texts which illustrate the classical-liberal theory of class here <davidmhart.com/liberty/ClassAnalysis/Anthology/>.

A history of the four-stage theory can be found in Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Noble Savage (Cambridge University Press, 1976).

Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, ed. and with a Foreword by Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2007) /titles/1891; Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, ed, with a Foreword by Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2011) /titles/2394; and Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, ed. with a Foreword by Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2011) /titles/2399.

Ludwig von Mises, “The Clash of Group Interests” (1945) reprinted in The Clash of Group Interests and Other Essays, with a Preface by Murray N. Rothbard. Occasional Paper Series #7. (New York: The Center for Libertarian Studies, 1978), pp. 1–12.

Walter E. Grinder and John Hagel, “Toward a Theory of State Capitalism: Ultimate Decision-Making and Class Structure” (1974) in Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1977, pp. 59–79; and John Hagel III and Walter E. Grinder, “From Laissez-Faire to Zwangswirtschaft: The Dynamics of Interventionism” (1975) reprinted in The Dynamics of Intervention: Regulation and Redistribution in the Mixed Economy. ed. P. Kurrild-Klitgaard. Advances in Austrian Economics, Volume 8, pp. 59–86 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005).

See several works by Tullock in The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004–5), vol. 5. The Rent-Seeking Society (Liberty Fund, 2005); vol. 6. Bureaucracy (Liberty Fund, 2005), especially “The Politics of Bureaucracy” (1965); and vol. 8. The Social Dilemma of Autocracy, Revolution, Coup d’Etat, and War (Liberty Fund, 2005), especially “The Exploitative State” (1974) and “The Goals and Organizational Forms of Autocracies” (1987).

Margaet Levi, “Chap. 2 The Theory of Predatory Rule,” in Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 10–40, first published as “A Theory of Predatory Rule,” Politics and Society, vol. 10, no. 4, 1981, pp. 431–65.

Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio’s Paper,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, (Summer, 1977), pp. 179–83; and Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes” (1988, 1992) in Requiem for Marx, edited by Yuri N. Maltsev, (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1992), pp. 189–220.

Tom G. Palmer, “Classical Liberalism, Marxism, and the Conflict of Classes: The Classical Liberal Theory of Class Conflict” in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2009), pp. 255–75.

Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoléon (1852) in Karl Marx: Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, Volume II, David Fernbach, ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).

Vilfredo Pareto, The Rise and Fall of the Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology. Introduction by Hans L. Zetterberg (Totowa, NJ: The Bedminster Press, 1968), 1st ed. 1900.

The Book of Fallacies (1824), in Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–1843). 11 vols. Vol. 2. /titles/1921#lf0872-02_label_846; and Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, trans. Arthur Goddard, introduction by Henry Hazlitt (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) /titles/276

John Wade, The Black Book: An Exposition of Abuses in Church and State, Courts of Law, Municipal Corporations, and Public Companies; with a Précis of the House of Commons, Past, present, and to come. A New Edition, greatly enlarged and corrected to the present time. By the Original Editor. With an Appendix (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1835).

Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s Sixty Families (New York: Vanguard Press, 1937).

Bentham, Chap. XXIV “Special Juries” in Principles of Judicial Procedure, with the Outlines of a Procedure Code (1827), in Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–1843). 11 vols. Vol. 2. /titles/1921#Bentham_0872-02_2360

Gordon, NO. 72. SATURDAY, APRIL 7, 1722. “In absolute Monarchies the Monarch seldom rules, but his Creatures instead of him. That Sort of Government a Gradation of Tyrants.” In Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, Cato’s Letters, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects. Four volumes in Two, edited and annotated by Ronald Hamowy (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1995). /titles/737

Knox, SECTION XXXII. “On Political Ethics; their chief Object is to throw Power into the Hands of the worst Part of Mankind, and to render Government an Institution calculated to enrich and aggrandize a few, at the expense of the Liberty, Property, and Lives of the many,” in Vicesimus Knox, The Works of Vicesimus Knox, D.D. with a Biographical Preface. In Seven Volumes (London: J. Mawman, 1824). Vol. 5. /titles/630.

Friedrich A. Hayek, Chap. X. “Why the Worst Get on Top,” in The Road to Serfdom (The University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Cobbett, “Paper Aristocracy” (24 Sept., 1804) in William Cobbett, Selections from Cobbett’s Political Works: being a complete abridgement of the 100 volumes which comprise the writings of “Porcupine” and the “Weekly political register.” With notes, historical and explanatory. By John M. Cobbett and James P. Cobbett. (London, Ann Cobbett, 1835). Vol. 1. /titles/2688#lf1627-01_head_113.

Of his many works see R.A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (London: Heineman, 1970).

See for example, Stanislav Andreski, Parasitism and Subversion: The Case of Latin America (New York: Schocken, 1969).

Jayme S. Lemke, “An Austrian Approach to Class Structure,” in New Thinking in Austrian Political Economy. Advances in Austrian Economics, Volume 19, (2015), pp. 167–192.

RESPONSES AND CRITIQUES↩

1. Gary Chartier "Identifying Classes and Methodological Individualism" [Posted: November 3, 2016]↩

The classical-liberal/libertarian tradition embraces a distinctive understanding of class. On this understanding, class membership is constituted not, as on Marxist and similar views, by relationships to the means of production (though these are certainly implicated in various ways), but rather by relationship to predatory power. This distinctive understanding possesses substantial illuminating power, and it is a vital component of any classical-liberal or libertarian political theory. This is so because it helps to make clear that the libertarian or classical liberal understands, is sensitive to, is concerned about those deep-seated frustrations that give rise to movements like Occupy! and the Tea Party. Perhaps more importantly, it also helps to underscore the fact that the libertarian or classical liberal can offer an effective response to these frustrations that is consistent with her own political philosophy, and so is not ad hoc.

David Hart has performed an invaluable service over more than two decades as a prime chronicler, interpreter, transmitter, and exponent of this mode of class analysis. In his lead essay, he helpfully notes a wide variety of historical topics and contemporary issues on which our Liberty Matters conversation this month might focus. In this initial response, I want briefly to address two: the relationship between class analysis and methodological individualism, and the definition of class with reference to state-conferred benefit.

Class and Methodological Individualism

We have good reason to be methodological individualists. The methodological individualist insight is that all actions are actions undertaken by real persons, identifiable agents, who make choices in light of their own beliefs and preferences. Social phenomena may be, and ultimately can only be, explained in terms of the choices of these agents. But viewing individual agents as explanatorily irreducible needn’t mean thinking away class.

There might, indeed, be a conflict between methodological individualism and class analysis if engaging in class analysis meant denying the agency of the individuals who make up classes or if it meant treating the classes as agents over and above their members. But, as far as I can see, it needn’t mean either.

A class-analytic view simply begins with the assumption that (i) we can identifiable common circumstances, outlooks, and interests, (ii) these common circumstances, outlooks, and interests predictably influence (even if they do not determine) agents’ choices, and (iii) it is not only the case that the preexisting circumstances, outlooks, and interests of similarly situated agents influence all of these agents in predictable ways but also that the ongoing choices these agents make in light of these factors influence each other’s attitudes and actions as well. In addition, it will sometimes also be the case that (iv) a subset, perhaps a quite influential subset, of a group whose members are effectively linked because of these factors may act self-consciously and deliberately in pursuit of the interests of the class (or of the interests of the subset in ways that yield spillover benefits to the group as a whole). The perception of common interests isn’t necessary for people with shared characteristics to constitute a class, but of course awareness of such interests can help to constitute a class as such.

None of these characteristics depends on the denial of individual agency or on the postulation of any sort of supra-individual agency. The methodological individualist can see shared features, the influence of these features, the feedback effects exerted by actions made in light of this influence, and, sometimes, self-conscious, coordinated action by group members as fully explicable in individual terms and yet, at the same time, as usefully characterized with reference to class membership. This is so because, even though the methodological individualist understands the individual as the ultimate explanatory unit, she will have perfectly good reason to acknowledge that the language of class helps us to see individual reality more clearly. It provides an illuminating lens through which to organize our understanding of the roots, dynamics, and consequences of individual action.

Identifying Classes

Hart rightly notes the difficulty with analyzing class in terms of net tax consumption and similar variables. He emphasizes that we are all tax consumers in one way or another, even if some of us benefit more than others. I submit that the difficulty lies not only in the complexities associated with performing the needed computations and making the needed accounting decisions (how to allocate this or that benefit, etc.) but also in the focus of this sort of analysis, familiar though it is from such class theorists as Calhoun and Rothbard, on the outcome of state action.

Of course, the growth of the regulatory-cum-administrative state has meant that state benefits can’t all be seen in terms of cash transfers. Tariffs would have played a significant role in shifting wealth to privileged groups in the eras of Smith and Say, Bastiat and Calhoun. But today state regulations of all kinds also help to confer class position. These include everything from occupational licensing rules to building codes to institutional accreditation requirements (for entities like banks and hospitals). Artificial property rights—especially rights to “intellectual property”—are also obviously vital. And while these factors, along with straightforward subsidies and tariffs, help to shift wealth and influence to well-connected groups, they do so in complicated and subtle ways.

It’s not just the multiple sources of class privilege that should be seen as relevant in constituting classes from a libertarian/classical-liberal perspective, however. Equally important is the role of those who possess or seek privilege in influencing or effecting grants of privilege. And it is this additional factor—related to the springs of state action and not merely its outcomes—that helps to distinguish the rulers and their allies on the one hand from mere beneficiaries of state action on the other.

Except in the fantasies of some naïve culture warriors, single mothers benefiting from government financial assistance do not constitute an effective power bloc. While those who receive such assistance may, indeed, acquire more from the state than they pay in taxes, they are not members of the ruling class or closely associated with it, since in no obvious sense are they in a position to move the levers of power, nor are they, in general, seeking to do so. No doubt state actors do sometimes confer financial benefits on the poor and marginal to keep them pacified or to promote other benefits sought by the powerful and well-connected; and no doubt wealthy elites sometimes encourage the conferral of such benefits for this reason. But when this sort of thing occurs, it doesn’t somehow make the poor and the marginal into politically efficacious actors.

It is also worth emphasizing that, while poor people may sometimes receive more in tax revenue than they pay in taxes, treating them as net consumers of state benefits will often make sense only if we ignore the multiple disabilities imposed on them by the state, not to mention the “subsidy of history” effected by massive asset theft by wealthy and well-connected elites. State actors and their allies have thus both actively dispossessed poor people (with obvious, even if not always inescapable consequences for their successors in interest) and shackled them with constraints that make achieving economic well-being difficult. When these factors are taken into account, it is much less clear that many poor people, even if they do receive state-conferred benefits, qualify as net beneficiaries of state action.

Whether they do or not, however, I believe the active role played by elite factions and their allies in securing state benefits for themselves (and imposing regulatory and other costs on others) distinguishes these groups from the economically marginal in an important way. This distinction helps to justify referring to these groups as elements of the ruling class (or as that class’s upper- and upper-middle-class associates) quite apart from the specific benefits they receive.

Class analysis remains a fruitful field of study for libertarian and classical-liberal historians, philosophers, lawyers, economists, and sociologists. This is so even if they are, rightly, committed to methodological individualism: class analysis is quite compatible with methodologically individualist assumptions. And it is also quite compatible with acknowledging that the dominant classes are defined not only by their immediate receipt of cash transfers from the state but also by their active and effective role in securing state benefits.

Endnotes

In practical terms today this will mean, in general, relationship to the state. But it need not in the abstract. Organized Mafiosi, for instance, might play a similar role in some contexts.

See Charles Johnson, “Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It,” The Freeman, December 2007, <https://fee.org/articles/scratching-by-how-government-creates-poverty-as-we-know-it/>, and Gary Chartier, “Government Is No Friend of the Poor,” The Freeman, January 2012, <https://fee.org/articles/government-is-no-friend-of-the-poor/>.

See Kevin A. Carson, “The Subsidy of History,” The Freeman, June 2008, <https://fee.org/articles/the-subsidy-of-history/>.

2. Jayme Lemke "Class Structures as Complex Systems" [Posted: November 4, 2016]↩

David Hart provides an excellent introduction to the concept of class in classical-liberal thought. I would like to begin by highlighting two related points from his synopsis. First, distinctions between groups or classes of people have historically been recognized as important within the classical-liberal tradition. Second, most of the attention has been directed towards the divide between the political haves—those who have disproportionate access to the use of the state’s monopoly on violence—and the political have-nots. As Hart puts it in describing the first of his three ideas common to different versions of classical-liberal class analysis: “societies can be divided into two antagonistic groups, most simply put as ‘the people’ vs. their “rulers.’”

Classical-liberal scholars have historically focused on the difference between the political haves and the political have-nots for good reason. The idea that even democratic forms of government generate privileges for those in power is and has been a great contribution of classical-liberal scholarship. Rules can create privileges that give particular individuals or types of people power over others, and although rules emerge from many sources, the strongest and most stable of these privileges are no doubt those enforced through the state’s monopoly on violence. State power as such is a significant and often underappreciated source of inequality in authority and opportunity.

But what I would like to suggest in this brief essay is that, in many societies, people cannot easily be sorted into those who rule and those who are ruled. Class structures are instead better conceived as complex systems in which power and privilege can vary across social groups in many different ways simultaneously. Considering class structure in this way puts the focus on rules and how they affect different groups of people rather than on particular external characteristics like race, gender, family membership, or economic status (though these could turn out to be quite important if rules do discriminate on those characteristics). Further, the classical-liberal tradition provides many valuable tools that can facilitate conceptualizing class in this way, including the focus on institutional analysis and emphasis on the significance of even effects which cannot be seen.

All rules in effect in a society—including laws, regulations, and consistently enforced social norms—have the potential to give authority to some that is denied to others. For example, a law requiring plumbers to procure a license from the state gives some individuals the authority to legally accept compensation in exchange for installing a shower while simultaneously denying others the right to do the same. Although the law will certainly have a greater impact on some individuals than others, it may or may not privilege a particular group. To the extent the law applies equally to all, it is best considered a general law.

Other rules are non-general, meaning that people acting in the same way are treated differently under the rule. For example, a law that prohibits women from driving means that the choice to drive is met with different consequences for them than for men. The possibility of punishment is an additional cost borne only by women that they must consider when deciding whether to pursue a course of action that involves driving. Consequently, in a society in which this rule exists and is enforced, it is likely that women will make systematically different choices from men, even with no difference in their interests or abilities.

The system of rules in effect in a particular society can potentially include multiple non-general components. Class distinctions are most obvious when the same group is repeatedly singled out for differential treatment based on gender, religion, race, family name, place of birth, or some other identifiable characteristic. Think slave societies, caste-based societies, and other obviously discriminatory systems, such as those faced by women and racial and religious minorities in many different countries across the globe. These institutional systems are of great concern to most of the liberal tradition, and it would be a missed opportunity for the classical-liberal voice to be missing from that discussion.

It is also possible for the system of rules in effect in a particular society to include multiple non-general rules that do not always single out the same population. Political privileges and unequal power relationships could potentially be distributed quite widely through the population, possibly even in ways such that group membership is not static. To the extent this is true, a single system of rules can contain many different hierarchical power structures.

In a system with multiple hierarchies simultaneously in effect, it is possible for the same two people to have a different relationship to each other depending upon where and how they are interacting. Consider the position of a city councilwoman. Her position gives her a privileged authority with respect to a particular set of decisions—things like which roads will be plowed first after a storm, or perhaps whether or not to levy a property tax on vehicles garaged within city limits. But the councilwoman does not have privileged authority relative to the other residents of the town in all areas of life. The members of the school board will be privileged with respect to what curriculum her children will be required to study. The chief of the police department will be privileged with respect to how strictly she will be required to obey the posted speed limit. The IRS agent who lives in the city will have to pay the vehicle tax assessed by the councilwoman, but the councilwoman will be subject to the IRS agent’s authority when the accuracy of her income tax return is assessed. I leave it as a matter for further debate whether the head of the neighborhood association in which she lives, the pastor at the church she attends, and the supervisor at her day job might be considered to also have differential authority. The answer is likely a function of both one’s definition of power and the specific institutional context.

Particularly in a polycentric system in which rules are created by multiple types of organizations simultaneously, possibly even with multiple organizations regulating the same types of decisions, teasing out the structure of class relationships in a particular society can be quite challenging. This suggests an important direction in which classical-liberal class analysis could differentiate itself from other versions of class theory. Instead of beginning analysis with the assumption of a class relationship, classical liberals can take as their first task the identification of the many different rules in effect that shape the allocation of power throughout a class structure.

This leads directly to two reasons why I think scholars working in the classical-liberal tradition are particularly well suited to study class structures. First, institutions matter, and this has always been an important part of the tradition of classical-liberal scholarship. If the way to understand power and class structures in society is by first identifying the rules in effect and the ways in which those rules might privilege particular groups, then class analysis is effectively a form of institutional analysis.

Second, in the words of Frédéric Bastiat:

[FEE trans.] [A]n act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause -- it is seen. The others unfold in succession -- they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference -- the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. [New LF trans.] In the sphere of economics an action, a habit, an institution or a law engenders not just one effect but a series of effects. Of these effects only the first is immediate; it is revealed simultaneously with its cause, it is seen. The others merely occur successively, they are not seen; we are lucky if we foresee them. The entire difference between a bad and a good Economist is apparent here. A bad one relies on the visible effect while the good one takes account both of the effect one can see and of those one must foresee.

Bastiat’s message about the importance of unseen and second-order effects may be the most valuable insight classical-liberal scholars could bring to the study of class structures. The non-general rules that create differential powers and privileges don’t just have the immediate effect of systematically distorting the costs of action along group lines. The group divisions they create will continue to have consequences, potentially very far into the future. For instance, what are the long-term ramifications of historical non-general rules such as the Jim Crow laws, or the Progressive Era decisions by the Supreme Court that upheld the constitutionality of gender-specific legislation? What are the likely effects of new non-general policies being considered today, such as proposals to limit the international mobility of particular groups according to their nationality or religion?

Class analysis can be a way to bring important classical-liberal insights about society and the nature of power to discussions about the long-term impacts of discriminatory laws. This is not only important for understanding history, but also because of Bastiat’s admonition that it would be “well for us” if these long-term consequences could be foreseen. We may not be able to rectify the damages of class divisions created in the past, but it may be possible to avoid causing further damage if we can avoid perpetuating systems that differentially advantage particular groups at the expense of others.

Endnotes

David Hart, “Classical Liberalism and the Problem of Class.”

With some important exceptions, the most extreme being slave societies. In a slave society it is very easy to see who has authority and who does not, and the power relationship is strongly unidirectional.

Whether or not a definable group receives a differential advantage is an empirical question that depends on a variety of other factors, including other related regulations in effect and the history of the occupation (e.g., has a particular group been encouraged or denied the ability to work or train as plumbers in the past?).

This is the same distinction as made by, e.g., F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), and James M. Buchanan, “Three Amendments: Responsibility, Generality, and Natural Liberty,” Cato Unbound, December 4, 2005, <https://www.cato-unbound.org/2005/12/04/james-m-buchanan/three-amendments-responsibility-generality-natural-liberty>.

The only reason we cannot say for sure that women will choose differently is that the cost difference may be small enough that it won’t result in observable changes in behavior, though that is not likely in this case. Or, there could theoretically be other discriminatory rules that either decreased the cost of driving for women or increased the cost of driving for men that would counterbalance the expected effect.

An interesting question open for analysis is to what extent privileges are likely to consolidate over time. This relates closely to Hart’s call to study “the circulation of elites.”

I further elaborate on this argument in Jayme S. Lemke, “An Austrian Approach to Class Structure,” in eds. Christopher J. Coyne and Virgil H. Storr, New Thinking in Austrian Political Economy, (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2015), pp. 167-92.

See Vincent Ostrom, Charles M. Tiebout, and Robert Warren, “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas,” American Political Science Review, 55 (1961), pp. 831-42, for an introduction to polycentricity.

This complexity could contribute to why an individual’s interests might not always align with those of their perceived class, as discussed in James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999 [1962]), p. 26.

See, for example, Ronald Coase, “The New Institutional Economics,” The American Economic Review 88 (1998), pp. 72–74, which explains the connection between new institutional economics and ideas about the functioning of economic systems which extend at least as far back as Adam Smith.

FEE trans.: Frederic Bastiat, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen,” (1850), </titles/956#lf0181_label_033>. New LF trans.: “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” </pages/wswns>.

Ibid.

3. George H. Smith, "A Comment on David Hart’s “Classical Liberalism and the Problem of Class”" [Posted: Nov. 6, 2016]↩

David Hart has given us a concise and very useful overview of the classical-liberal and libertarian approach to class analysis as it has existed for several centuries. Included in his discussion are differences among classical liberals themselves in how they framed their class analyses in terms of the rulers and the ruled. I will discuss another difference in this comment.

Although “classical liberal” and “libertarian” are frequently used as interchangeable labels in modern literature, there is a significant difference between these two camps in their approach to class analysis. Among classical liberals, criticisms of the ruling class were almost always directed at governments as they existed at a particular point in time. We see this in Jeremy Bentham’s assault on the “sinister interests” in Britain, by which Bentham meant the landed aristocracy that passed legislation to promote its own interests (mainly economic interests) at the expense of the common good. But Bentham proposed a solution to this rule by a special class, namely, universal suffrage, which would bring about a harmony of interests between the rulers and the ruled. Bentham believed that people would never (or almost never) vote against their own interests, so a democratic system would largely solve the problem of exploitation by government.

In contrast to Bentham, classical liberals in the Lockean tradition appealed to some version of social-contract theory to legitimize government. The “consent” involved here, as we find in Locke himself, was typically tacit consent, not express consent. To appeal to express consent would be to render all government illegitimate, because no government could possibly meet this requirement. This is what the liberal clergyman Josiah Tucker had in mind when he claimed that “the Lockian System is an universal Demolisher of all Civil Governments, but not the Builder of any.” If Locke’s principles “were to be executed according to the Letter, they would necessarily unhinge, and destroy every Government upon Earth.” This had been a basic theme among critics of social-contract theory for many years, and it would later be incorporated into Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

The point here is that most classical liberals did not view government per se as an exploitative ruling class; only certain forms of government, such as absolute monarchies, qualified for this epithet. A limited government based on consent, which was commonly envisioned as existing in a “republican” form, would be vulnerable (like all governments) to the abuse of power, but the institution itself was not regarded by classical liberals as inherently exploitative. Indeed, the social-contract model was frequently used to justify a minimal amount of taxation. In exchange for the protection afforded by a just government, citizens had tacitly agreed to surrender a certain amount of their alienable property in exchange for that service.

Only among the radical liberals, or libertarians—those who rejected the social-contract model--do we find the argument that government is inherently invasive and predatory. This was the position, for example, of the important libertarian theorist Thomas Hodgskin, who worked as the senior editor of The Economist for a number of years during the 1840s and 1850s.

Hodgskin categorically rejected the Benthamite formula of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as a meaningless guide to legislation, owing to the impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons. Thus: “If the greatest happiness principle, be the only one that justifies lawmaking, and if that principle be suitable only to Omniscience—man, having no means of measuring it, there can be no justification of all Mr. Bentham’s nicely adapted contrivances, which he calls civil and penal laws.”

Hodgskin’s analysis of legislation anticipates the modern economic school known as “public choice theory,” which seeks to understand political behavior as stemming from the pursuit of self-interest by those in government. As he put it: “Let us look closer at who is the legislator, and what is his object in making laws.” Just as Adam Smith had posited self-interest as an explanatory principle in economics, so Hodgskin extended this method to the realm of politics. The impulse of self-interest, in politics as in economics, is everywhere operative. It is naïve to suppose that lawmakers do not act from the same motives as other men. Although the law is often defended as necessary to maintain property rights, in fact it is designed to enable those in government to maintain their power:

When we inquire, casting aside all theories and suppositions, into the end kept in view by legislators, or examine any existing laws, we find that the first and chief object proposed is to preserve the unconstrained dominion of law over the minds and bodies of mankind. It may be simplicity in me, but I protest that I see no anxiety to preserve the natural right of property but a great deal to enforce obedience to the legislator. No misery indeed is deemed too high a price to pay for his supremacy, and for the quiet submission of the people. To attain this end many individuals, and even nations, have been extirpated. Perish the people, but let the law live, has ever been the maxim of the masters of mankind. Cost what it may, we are continually told, the dominion of the law, not the natural right of property, must be upheld.

Government, in Hodgskin’s view, is essentially an exploitative institution; and law is the mechanism by which those in government, who produce nothing, expropriate the property of others. “Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects.”

Actually and in fact [laws] are intended to appropriate to the law-makers the produce of those who cultivate the soil, prepare clothing, or distribute what is produced among the different classes, and among different communities. Such is law.

According to Hodgskin, laws are made not by those who labor to produce wealth but by those who live off the labor of others and who expropriate what they have produced. This is essentially the same view later expressed by the anarchist Murray Rothbard. As David Hart notes, Rothbard was influenced by the writings of Franz Oppenheimer and Albert J. Nock, but we should be aware of an important difference. Both Oppenheimer and Nock distinguished between a state and a government in a manner that Rothbard did not. Only states are inherently predatory, according to Oppenheimer and Nock. Governments, in contrast, may serve a legitimate purpose, such as protecting individual rights.

I may have more to say about the distinction between state and government in a later comment. For the present I wish to suggest that a true class analysis of the state is not found in the writings of most classical liberals, who typically justified government by appealing to a social contract and consent (per Locke) or by appealing to social utility (per Bentham). In these schemes government is morally neutral; it can be used for good or bad purposes, depending on who controls the reins of power, their authorization for such control, and their intentions. Only among the more radical libertarian philosophers do we find a consistent approach to class analysis in which the state (or government) plays a central role.

Endnotes

A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (1781), in Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings, ed. Robert Schuyler (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 459. Online </titles/1674>.

Tucker, A Letter to Edmund Burke, 2d ed. (1775) in ibid., 378.

Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832; rpt. Clifton, NJ: Augustus Kelley, 1969), ii. Online </titles/323>.

Ibid., 44-45.

Ibid., 47.

4. Stephen Davies, "Forgotten But Not Superfluous" [Posted: Nov. 7, 2016]↩

The class theory of classical liberalism was a central but now almost forgotten part of the body of historical liberal thought. It was central to much of the analysis and argument of a whole range of thinkers, activists, and politicians, and also figured prominently in literature and overtly nonpolitical writings. Its disappearance as a central element of liberal thought is a historical puzzle, the answer to which casts light on other questions about the trajectory and fate of liberal thought and politics since the later 19th century. As David Hart indicates, its recovery and refurbishment should be a major intellectual project for classical-liberal scholars from a number of disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, and history.

David Hart’s masterful survey brings out the main features of classical-liberal class analysis (hereafter CLCA) and shows how it came to be formulated in a number of places, notably Restoration France and Regency England, and how it was closely connected to a number of other important elements of classical-liberal thinking, such as the stadial model of history. His account lists both key ideas and the various groups of thinkers who contributed to the ideas. His points however bear extending in a number of ways.

The first is that the list of thinkers he gives is, of course, nowhere near exhaustive. However, what is even more significant is the way that the concepts of CLCA were used by all kinds of people in addition to economists and other theorists. In particular it was hugely important in popular liberal politics from the middle of the 19th century onwards, in Britain and elsewhere. This was not a matter of a fringe idea or one that was popular with the unenfranchised masses but with little effect on elite politics. As Eugenio Biagini points out in his magisterial survey of popular liberalism in Britain, mainstream liberalism was a mass movement which had a set of radical ideas on many topics, including such matters as land ownership, access to credit, taxation and the national debt, and the nature of social classes. CLCA was central to this, and for many working-class liberals in particular was central to the way they thought about the world and understood society and their place in it.

Nor was it simply a matter of politics. The idea that society was marked by a division between the productive classes and exploitative classes, who used the political process to enrich themselves, pervaded popular culture and can be found in literature of all kinds, but most notably self-help writings and popular didactic literature. It is found for example in the work of Samuel Smiles and Harriet Martineau. It was also a prominent feature of popular fiction and journalism, as for example in the writings of George W. M. Reynolds. Very often the ideas of CLCA were not spelt out or elaborated at length but simply alluded to, normally through the use of key expressions or terms. There are constant references for example to “the industrious classes” in the central part of the century with a marked peak in the 1840s, as the Google Ngram shows.

The Ngram for the corresponding term “the idle classes” is even more striking, with a series of peaks that correspond to upsurges in popular radical liberalism.

The crucial point here is that the people who used the vocabulary of CLCA and embedded its arguments and analysis into their writings did so without elaborating it. What this shows is that the ideas were so widespread and generally known that they could be alluded to with confidence that the reader would understand the argument simply from the reference. In other words, CLCA was a pervasive and widely understood idea that was an important part of both political culture and language and popular culture more generally.

The ideas and analysis, however, were not hegemonic, in either England or France, for example, because they were also strongly contested by authors who mounted robust defenses of traditional hierarchies and divisions. The was particularly marked in the United States with the propagation in the years before and after the Civil War of what came to be known as the “mudsill” theory of society and manual labour, by authors such as Robert Lewis Dabney, James Henry Hammond, and William Harper. According to this theory, it was both inevitable and good that societies were divided between a set of ruling elites and a lower class of laborers. Civilization and high culture depended on the existence of a leisured elite who rested upon the “mudsill” of uneducated workers. The relations and use of power denounced by CLCA were seen as being both necessary for a functioning society and beneficent because they made civilized living possible and maintained appropriate social relations.

What this highlights in turn is the close association between class analysis and a number of other ideas in classical-liberal thought on both sides of the Atlantic. One of these was that of the inherent dignity and worth of all kinds of work and trade (as opposed to the traditional aristocratic view that manual work was ignoble and degrading, and trade or commerce morally suspect). This went along with a critical view of those who did not do anything productive but lived from rents and transfers (a category that included aristocrats and clergy on the one hand and paupers, people dependent on poor relief, on the other). Another was the idea of the “democratic intellect,” the belief that culture and ideas should be available to anyone interested in them regardless of their occupation, with corresponding skepticism about any kind of special class of the educated (a clergy or clerisy in other words).

What this means is that we cannot properly understand classical-liberal thought, politics, and culture unless we understand both the main ideas and arguments of classical-liberal class analysis and its centrality to classical liberalism. In particular it makes historical liberal thought and politics appear much less radical and subversive than it seemed to contemporaries, and indeed actually was. It also leads to an excessive focus upon economics as the core of classical-liberal thought when in fact it was only one part of it and arguably not the most significant.

This in turn leads to another area where David Hart’s account can be strengthened. Looking at the survey of groups he gives and the key ideas associated with them, we can make more sense of the development of these ideas as a process if we combine these into an analytical narrative. In the first place we have ideas that have been around for a very long time, such as the notion of a divide or conflict between rulers and ruled or St. Augustine’s well known remark in City of God that all governments were in their origins simply bands of robbers. There were also thinkers such as La Boetie and the Levellers who looked at the way rulers persuaded and convinced people to obey them even when it was not in their interests to do so or at the way in which certain interests were enriched by favors and privileges at the expense of the general population. These ideas were not integrated into a general or thought-out theory, however, not least because they were typically cast in the formulae and language of moral argument rather than being connected to an empirical and theoretical account of what privilege was and how different social classes came into being and were distinguished from each other.

The second phase, which David Hart focuses on, saw the explicit creation of a theory of class conflict and the working out of its implications. This began in the later 18th century with people such as John Millar and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, but as Hart describes, really happened in the 1820s and 1830s in both Great Britain and France. There are several aspects of that process that should be highlighted. The first of these is the way that many of the formulators, such as James Mill and the Philosophical Radicals or Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, were actively involved in politics. In fact the worked-out theory of CLCA was developed in and through politics, and it was in its origins a political critique or analysis. It was aimed at the monarchical and aristocratic forms of government, which had been predominant for most of human history in most parts of the world, and the whole of CLCA was essentially a project to analyze, understand, and ultimately unmask this kind of government and rule, both in the abstract and in the concrete or actual (as in the work of John Wade, for example). More specifically it was a critique of the actual form that monarchical and aristocratic government had taken in Europe during the Baroque era. In some cases, such as that of the Philosophical Radicals and before them the Physiocrats, the political program that the analysis was associated with was one of radically reforming government to put it on a different basis, while in other cases the program was one of minimal statism or even anarchism – at least in the future. Its combination of the concrete and the general, or theoretical, meant that this was an attack upon and critique of not only specific people and policies but of the entire system of politics and government (the Thing, in William Cobbett’s memorable terminology).

Another thing to notice was the key role played by campaigning journalists and publications, such as Reynolds, Cobbett, and Wade in Britain and Comte and Dunoyer in France. This shows how the roles of intellectual and journalist were still very close and not as distinct as they have now become; some people such as Tom Paine combined the three roles of journalist, thinker, and politician. In other words the intellectual world that produced CLCA (and other equally forgotten ideas of classical liberalism such as the “voluntary theory”) was open and pluralistic and not dominated by the academy in the way that the contemporary world has become. However, although many of the formulators were indeed polemicists as well as scholars, they did not fall into the trap of producing pure and simple polemic. The intellectual content remained central.

Perhaps the most striking feature, however, is the relatively small role played by economists. The place of philosophers, historians, and early sociologists was much more important. David Hart mentions the important part played by Augustin Thierry, but we could also emphasize the contribution of early British economic historians such as James Thorold Rogers. The work of people like Millar in developing a sociological as well as historical account of the origins and development of classes and ranks was also hugely important. What this means is that CLCA, as it came to be in the early to middle 19th century, was not simply an economic theory or an application of economic thinking to politics and governance. Rather it was a multidisciplinary approach that used a range of perspectives to think about the question of social divisions and their connection to power and the activity of government.

The third phase that we can identify in David Hart’s account might be called the reevaluation and further-development one. This took place in the later 19th and very early 20th century, and the key figures here were definitely sociologists and political scientists, such as Vilfredo Pareto, William Graham Sumner, Gaetano Mosca, and Franz Oppenheimer. One of the major changes that can be seen in their work was the abandoning of the idea that society was evolving in the direction of less government, and therefore of reduced class divisions, and the gradual disappearance of the ruling classes (given that they owed their existence to their use of a state to capture and engross wealth and income from the productive classes). Instead there was a much more cautious or even pessimistic view in which the continued existence of government was assumed and in which the main question now became one of the nature of the ruling class and the degree to which it was open or closed, united or divided, and subject to replacement or semipermanent. This was particularly marked in the work of Pareto and Mosca but can be seen in other writers as well. The main contributions of these later theorists to the theory itself were firstly a much more sophisticated understanding of both the types of ruling class and the institutional structures that they relied on in the modern world (such as political parties), and secondly a kind of speculative historical account of the origins of government and hence of the division between ruling classes and productive classes. This last was initially articulated by Oppenheimer and can be thought of as a way to put St. Augustine’s insight mentioned above onto a firmer basis. Although initially speculative rather than empirical, subsequent research has confirmed much of the argument, as in the work of Charles Tilly for example.

The final stage is the one that David Hart looks at first, which is the reaffirmation of this analysis by Rothbard. In his case and that of subsequent authors, such as Leonard Liggio, Walter Grinder, and John Hagel, this was a matter of intellectual archaeology, of rediscovering and reformulating a body of ideas and analysis that had almost been forgotten. At the same time people such as the Virginia School of Gordon Tullock and James M. Buchanan independently developed arguments that can be seen as making the same kind of points as much CLCA, even though they do not derive directly from it. For most contemporary libertarians and classical liberals the revived and reinterpreted CLCA articulated by Rothbard is the one that they know about. This is actually problematic for several reasons. One is that Rothbard’s theory lacks the richness and variety of the older tradition. It is much more of a theory driven by economics and lacks the dense sociological and historiographical support that the older theory had (although Rothbard himself was interested in and supportive of such work by others). It has a tendency to a conspiracy-theory view of politics, which may reflect the difficulty alluded to in David Hart’s essay of reconciling a sociological account with strict methodological individualism. Above all it is, like the original CLCA, associated with and driven by a specific kind of politics, and the project in question is somewhat dubious. Essentially, Rothbard’s political project was one of mounting a populist revolt against the established American state. The problem is that in reality it is very hard to have a politics of that kind that does not also involve a strong element of cultural conservatism and ethnic-identity politics along with a simplistic contrast between the corrupt elite and the honest populace. All of this makes the overall package that includes Rothbard’s revived CLCA very troubling for many people of a classical-liberal bent and serves to discredit the class theory by association. Moreover it does not generate a useful or productive research program (as opposed to one that is purely polemical).

The obvious major question, which David Hart’s essay raises, is simply this: what happened? Why did such an elaborate body of theory and ideas, so widely known and understood and drawing upon so many disciplines, suddenly disappear? Why is it that today the great majority of classical liberals do not know of the main arguments and insights of CLCA in the way that they know arguments from economics or philosophy, never mind the general public or people who espouse other political perspectives? Reflection suggests that this vanishing act can be explained in three ways and that all of these explanations have credibility.

In the first place there are intellectual explanations that have to do with the general climate of educated opinion. These of course then raise the question of why that climate changed in the way that it did, but that is a different and wider issue. One crucial thing was the sudden decline in explicitly liberal thinking and approaches in disciplines such as history, sociology, and political science. Eventually it was only economics where a kind of liberal approach survived. This was particularly significant for CLCA because, as has been noted, it was the other disciplines that had contributed to the working out and substantiating of the theory. When sociologists in particular lost interest in the kinds of questions that inspired CLCA and focused more on the social relations of a capitalist society while (scandalously) ignoring the role of the state or (more understandably) seeing the state and political power as an epiphenomenon of economic relations rather than as an autonomous or even determinative area of social relations, it is unsurprising that CLCA was simply discarded. As David Hart notes there were exceptions, notably Stanislaw Andreski, but he was exceptional and had little impact on the wider discipline. Elite theory did have a revival in the work of people such as C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff, both of whom had significant insights and contributions. But that tradition (which derived ultimately from the work of people like Pareto) had succumbed to the idea that it was economic relations that ultimately drove other kinds of social structure.

At the same time, there was a significant shift in the way intellectuals in general and broadly liberal intellectuals in particular thought about politics and government. This was in many ways a working-out of the division among liberal thinkers alluded to earlier. While CLCA was partly a critique and analysis of the Baroque state and its associated class relations that became generalized as an account of power and class, there was an important division among the intellectuals and activists who formulated it. For many, such as the Philosophical Radicals, the idea was that if you had a different kind of state and political power, you could have a society that did not have the kind of exploitative ruling class that CLCA posited. In particular the idea was that a democratic political system would lead to a state that was not controlled by and would not generate “sinister interests.” It would rather be simply the administrative organ for the will of the people as a whole, at least as regards their shared or common interests. For others, such as many of the French liberals, it was the existence of government as such that led to the division between productive and idle classes, hence the idea that progressive social evolution meant the fading away of government. Another way to think of this disagreement is that for some, CLCA was essentially a historical analysis of how power and class relations functioned in historical societies but would no longer apply once the state itself had been modernized, while the other view held that this was a picture of social relations that would continue to be accurate for as long as government existed. Undoubtedly for most intellectuals of the 20th century it was the first view that was predominant. There was still disagreement over how large and extensive government should be, but the class analysis was no longer thought to be relevant. Radical sociologists such as Mills also shared this view and held that the persistence of a power elite simply showed that the system was not democratic enough, in particular that formal political democracy needed to be supplemented by “economic democracy” (i.e., socialism).

In the second place are what we may call political explanations that look at the political context within which liberal intellectuals and activists were situated. One aspect of this was the increasingly close alliance between classical liberals and moderate conservatives or Christian democrats in a world of mass democracy and the challenge of socialism and communism. This led to several of the more radical aspect of classical-liberal thought being downplayed or abandoned, including CLCA. Moreover, after roughly the 1890s and particularly after 1917 the idea of class conflict became firmly associated with Marxism and, given that most classical liberals came to see Marxism and communism as their main opponents, they became reluctant to use language or arguments that were apparently similar (and as a matter of intellectual genealogy were related).

The third was changes in modern capitalist societies that revealed weaknesses and obscurities within the original theory and made it increasingly difficult to use it without a radical rearticulation. Although this process began with the work of the early elite theorists such as Mosca and Pareto, it was not continued for the other reasons given above. The main difficulty was the one that David Hart refers to in his essay: that the clear-cut divisions one could identify in the 18th and early 19th century between taxpayers and tax eaters, or productive classes and idle classes, were much less easy to make in the world of the later 19th and 20th centuries. The two crucial changes were the massive expansion of government with the rise of the welfare state and the emergence of the modern large-scale business corporation along with the regulatory state. Whereas it was easy to identify state pensioners and (most) aristocrats and clergy as a class that lived off state transfers, things were not so clear when it came to the owners and managers of large firms. To the extent they owed their income to political favors or regulations, they could be categorized as part of the ruling class. But you could no longer draw a sharp and clear division since they also created wealth and paid taxes.

So what can we conclude from all this? Should we regard the recovery of this set of arguments as simply a piece of intellectual archaeology, important for understanding the past of classical liberalism but of limited use now or going forward? The answer must be very much to the contrary. This kind of analysis is still applicable and hugely important because it helps us to understand a great deal of contemporary society and politics and what is going on in the world. It supplements other kinds of liberal thinking in areas such as economics and philosophy and makes argument and analysis more robust. The use of political power to extract wealth from the productive has not ceased, to put it mildly. All kinds of features of politics and society make much more sense when viewed through this prism. Above all it makes it clearer who the enemy is, where it comes from, and what the source and nature of its position is.

There are obviously challenges, which David Hart identifies. The first is that of how to identify the classes that are primarily productive and primarily exploitative. The second is to explore and understand and theorize the organization and mechanism of the process of the “political means.” It may well be that this is ad hoc and unstructured, in which case the language of class is not appropriate. But it is a relatively simple matter to identify and trace the kinds of connections and collaborations that actually exist and make this kind of language useful and accurate. One task is to distinguish between a power elite and a ruling class. Basically if you have a specific and identifiable group of people who have access to political power and can use it to benefit themselves, then you have a power elite. If the people who compose that elite are, over time, largely drawn from the same families (obviously allowing for some degree of circulation), then you have a ruling class. It seems clear to me that the United States at present does have a ruling class.

One of the things to do here is to use but amend the work of radical sociologists such as Domhoff and Mills. Another author whose work is very useful empirically is Thomas Ferguson whose “investment theory” of political competition offers real insight into the way class and power relations play out today. The things to strip out from these works are the assumption that democracy and even more politics are the cure for the syndrome they diagnose and analyze, and the idea that politics is not autonomous as a human activity but ultimately determined by economics. Another thing to draw on are accounts or studies of specific examples of the political class and its machinations. Kevin Phillips’s masterful account of the Bush clan is one recent example, while the older work of Ferdinand Lundberg is still useful.

The third challenge is how to reconcile class analysis with methodological individualism. For me this is a classic “economists only” problem. Other disciplines such as history, political science, and most notably sociology have no problem recognizing that while it is individuals who act and actually do things, they do so in patterned and often predictable ways and within a context that they themselves do not determine but which shapes and limits the kinds of choice they make and leads to what is often purposive and coordinated action by groups of people. The “sociological imagination” described by Mills is what is needed, in other words, but this is not incompatible with methodological individualism.

There is one other major challenge that is not raised, which we might call Pareto’s Question. If the existence of political power means there will inevitably be a ruling class of one kind or other that will use that power for its benefit and come to be defined by its relation to it, then unless you think that anarchism is both possible and desirable, there will always be a ruling class. In that case you will have to ask what kind of ruling class you want or prefer (maybe fear least) and how do you contain it? It also raises the very old question of how to educate and train the rulers so that they are at least decent chaps. In all of these cases, though, what is really needed is scholarly research and argument. Fortunately CLCA generates an astonishingly rich and unexplored research agenda, so there are ample opportunities out there for young scholars.

Endnotes

Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Adrian Jarvis, Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values (Cheltenham: Sutton Publishing, 1997); Tim Travers, Samuel Smiles and the Victorian Work Ethic (London: Routledge, 2016); and R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau, A Radical Victorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). See also, Samuel Smiles, Self Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863). </titles/297>.

See for example Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions Volume IV: Secular (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1994 [1897]).

George Elder Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).

See St. Augustine, City of God in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Vol. II St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, LL.D. (Buffalo: The Christian Literature Co., 1887). Quotation </titles/2053#lf1330-02_label_289>.

On "the Thing" see William Cobbett, “The Royal Family of England”, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, Feb. 10, 1816, vol. XXX, no. 6, pp. 161-75. Quote on p. 174-5.

After this view of the situation of this family how we must laugh at De Lolmes' pretty account of the English Constitution. After seeing that about three or four hundred Boroughmongers actually possess all the legislative power, divide the ecclesiastical, judicial, military, and naval departments amongst their own dependants, what a fine picture we find of that wise system of checks and balances, of which so much has been said by so many great writers! What name to give such a government it is difficult to say. It is like nothing that ever was heard of before. It is neither a monarchy, an aristocracy, nor a democracy; it is a band of great nobles, who, by sham elections, and by the means of all sorts of bribery and corruption, have obtained an absolute sway in the country, having under them, for the purposes of show and of execution, a thing they call a king, sharp and unprincipled fellows whom they call Ministers, a mummery which they call a Church, experienced and well-tried and steel-hearted men whom they call Judges, a company of false money makers, whom they call a Bank, numerous bands of brave and needy persons whom they call soldiers and sailors; and a talking, corrupt, and impudent set, whom they call a House of Commons. Such is the government of England; such is the thing, which has been able to bribe one half of Europe to oppress the other half; such is the famous "Bulwark of religion and social order,” which is now about, as will be soon seen to surround itself with a permanent standing army of, at least, a hundred thousand men, and very wisely, for, without such an army, the Bulwark would not exist a month.

James Thorold Rogers, The Economic Interpretation of History (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909).

Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993).

Stanislav Andreski, Parasitism and Subversion: The Case of Latin America (New York: Schocken, 1969), and Military Organisation and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965) and G. William Domhoff, The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (London: Routledge, 2015) and State Autonomy or Class Dominance? (London: Aldine, 1996).

Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: 