In this Liberty Matters online discussion forum we explore a number of issues concerning the role ideas have had in changing societies by examining several historical examples such as the anti-slavery movement in Britain and America in the first half of the 19th century, Richard Cobden and the free trade movement, and the rebirth of classical liberal and free market ideas after the Second World War. In the Lead Essay David Hart surveys the field of ideological movements and present a theory of ideological production and distribution based upon Austrian capital theory as it might be applied to the production of ideas. The commentators are Stephen Davies who is education director at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London; David Gordon who is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute; Jason Kuznicki who is a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and Editor, Cato Unbound; Peter Mentzel who is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund; Jim Powell who is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute; George H. Smith who is an independent scholar and contributor to <libertarianism.org>; and Jeffrey Tucker who is a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, editor at Laissez Faire Books, and founder of Liberty.me < http://liberty.me/ > .

See the Archive of "Liberty Matters".

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David M. Hart, "On the Spread of (Classical) Liberal Ideas" [March, 2015]

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The Debate

Lead Essay: David M. Hart, "On the Spread of (Classical) Liberal Ideas" [Posted: March 1, 2015]

Responses and Critiques

The Conversation

About the Authors

David M. Hart received a Ph.D. in history from King's College, Cambridge on the work of two French classical liberals of the early 19th century, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. He then taught for 15 years in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide in South Australia before joining the Liberty Fund as Director of the Online Library of Liberty Project in 2001. He is currently the Academic Editor of Liberty Fund's six volume translation of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. He is also editing for Liberty Fund a translation of Molinari's Conversations on Saint Lazarus Street: Discussions on Economic Laws and the Defence of Property (1849). 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.

Stephen 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).

David Gordon is a Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 1975. He is the author of Resurrecting Marx, An Introduction to Economic Reasoning.and The Essential Rothbard. He is the Editor of the Mises Review and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute. He has contributed to Analysis, Mind., Ethics, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Journal of Libertarian Studies, and other journals.

Jason Kuznicki has facilitated many of the Cato Institute’s publishing and educational projects. He is editor of Cato Unbound, and his ongoing interests include censorship, church-state issues, and civil rights in the context of libertarian political theory. He was an assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. He has just completed a book with the working title What Is Government For?, which traces the history of various purposes that intellectuals have given in support of the state.

Peter C. Mentzel, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University in Washington in 1994, after which he was a professor of History at Utah State University until joining Liberty Fund in 2008. During that time, he regularly taught courses on Islam and the History of the Middle East. His research focuses on the social and intellectual history of South Eastern Europe and the Middle East in general, and on the late Ottoman Empire in particular. His publications include Transportation Technology and Imperialism in the Ottoman Empire, and (as editor) Muslim Minorities in the Balkans.

Jim Powell is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, the author of FDR’s Folly, Wilson’s War, Bully Boy, Greatest Emancipations, The Triumph of Liberty, Gnomes of Tokyo and other books. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, American Heritage, Forbes, Americana, Esquire, The Freeman, National Review, Human Events, Liberty, Reason and Fox News, among others.

Jeffrey Tucker is Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me <http://liberty.me/>, the global liberty community with advanced social and publishing features. He is also Director of Digital Development for the Foundation for Economic Education <http://fee.org/>, executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, research fellow at the Acton Institute <http://acton.org/>, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute <http://heartland.org/>, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review <http://praxeology.net/molinari-review.htm>, an advisor to the blockchant application builder Factom <http://factom.org/>, and author of five books.

George H. Smith is an independent scholar and a weekly columnist at the Cato Institute’s Libertarianism.org. 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 wrote the lead essays for an earlier Liberty Matters discussion in September 2013 on his most recent book The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and on "Herbert Spencer's Sociology of the State" (November 2014).

Additional Material

LEAD ESSAY: David M. Hart, "On the Spread of (Classical) Liberal Ideas"↩

Hayek’s Despair at the End of World War Two

At the height of the war in 1944, when what had once been relatively free market societies had been turned into government planned and regulated war economies, the economist Friedrich Hayek penned a desperate warning - if such heavy planning, regulation, and taxation was not soon brought to an end England and America were well and truly “on the road to serfdom”. He followed this up 5 years later with an essay, “The Intellectuals and Socialism” which has become a kind of gospel for libertarian and free market groups ever since as they grappled with the sad fact that they were in such a small minority while all around them, other intellectuals and scholars were socialists and interventionists of various kinds. I remember vividly in the 1970s when I first became involved with these ideas, we used to wonder how to convince our friends and colleagues what a wonderful thing individual liberty really was, a veritable “liberal utopia”, as Hayek eloquently phrased it:

Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew? It may be so, but I hope it need not be. Yet, so long as the people who over longer periods determine public opinion continue to be attracted by the ideals of socialism, the trend will continue. If we are to avoid such a development, we must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians. Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may arouse the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” or a mere “relaxation of controls” is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm. The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. The intellectual revival of liberalism is already underway in many parts of the world. Will it be in time?

Nearly 70 years later, we have less reason to be as pessimistic as Hayek was then as we have witnessed in the meantime a significant growth of free market and libertarian individuals, groups, institutes, books, journals, and even rap videos. However, as historically aware individuals we know that this has not been the first time that a pro-liberty movement has emerged, that previous attempts to build a free society were attempted, were partly successful, and that many of them failed and sank into oblivion. Will this happen as well to the current movement? Can we learn from the past, both how the successes were achieved, why they failed, and what might make for another successful movement in the future.

This Liberty Matters discussion follows on from two earlier ones: one in November 2013 on “Arthur Seldon and the Institute of Economic Affairs” and another in January 2015 on “Richard Cobden: Ideas and Strategies in Organizing the Free-Trade Movement in Britain”. In those discussions we wanted to study in greater detail a couple of specific examples of how pro-liberty ideas were developed and then used to bring about political and economic change in a pro-liberty direction. The first study was how Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris began the Institute of Economic Affairs in post-war Britain (1955), developed a research and publication program to disseminate these ideas, and how these ideas gradually came to influence politicians like Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The second study examined how Cobden was able to organise one of the most successful single issue movements in the modern history of liberty, namely the repeal in 1846 of the protectionist Corn Laws in England. What I would like to do in the present discussion is to broaden the scope of our analysis to include other movements in the past which have sought to bring about a freer society, especially those movements which some success in moving towards this goal.

What I would like to do in this opening salvo of the discussion is to lay the groundwork in an expansive and rather open-ended way, firstly by listing a large number of general questions about how societies change, and the role which ideas and individuals play in bringing about that change (see Appendix 1: Questions about the Relationships between Ideas and Radical Social Change); secondly, by listing the (surprisingly) large number of historical examples of radical intellectual and political change over the past 2,000 years (both in a pro-liberty and anti-liberty direction), along with some of the key individuals and events involved (see Appendix 2: Historical Examples of Radical Change in Ideas and Political Structures); and finally, a list of some of the institutions, individuals, and events which have arisen to further the cause of liberty since Hayek wrote his appeal for intellectuals to rediscover the utopian promise of liberty (see Appendix 3: The Spread of Pro-Liberty Ideas in the Post-WW2 Period). I hope the other contributors to this discussion will help me flesh out these lists so they are more complete.

I would then like to offer an analysis of intellectual and social change based upon the Austrian theory of the structure of production, in which the production of ideas replaces that of the production of goods. I will argue that, just as in the real economy, a pro-liberty movement requires the creation of raw materials (liberal theory), investors who will provide funding, entrepreneurs who can identify profit opportunities and organise production, a salesforce who can persuade consumers to buy the product, and of course consumers to buy the product.

In the final section is a brief discussion of what most classical liberal and libertarian intellectuals and scholars have largely avoided thinking about in any depth, namely developing strategies for achieving radical intellectual and political change based upon their knowledge of history, economics, and the science of human action. I conclude with a half-serious, half-lighthearted list of the various strategies which have been adopted over the centuries to achieve a free society (see Appendix 4: List of Different Kinds of Strategies for Change: From Retreatism to Cadre-Building and Beyond). I hope my fellow discussants will be able and willing to add to the list!

Surveying the Territory

We need to consider a number of general questions about how societies change, and the role which ideas and individuals play in bringing about that change. These include, how do ideas about liberty develop and how do they spread? what role do individuals play? what groups are interested in change in a pro-liberty direction? who are the vested interests who oppose change in a pro-liberty direction? what are the relative costs and benefits of organising dissent against the old order and how do they change over time? how successful have been “top down” (elite) attempts at reform? how successful have been “bottom up” (popular) reforms? how long does it take for new and radical ideas to go from conception to inception? for classical liberals what are the required objective and subjective conditions for successful change?

For a fuller list of these and other related questions, see Appendix 1: Questions about the Relationships between Ideas and Radical Social Change, below.

Historians have many excellent examples of successful radical change in ideas and political and economic structures, in both a pro-liberty and anti-liberty direction. They include the spread of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, the anti-slavery movement, the Free Trade Movement, and many others (see Appendix 2: Historical Examples of Radical Change in Ideas and Political Structures). Also see my own “Study Guides on the Classical Liberal Tradition” as well as Jim Powell’s excellent The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000-Year History (2000) and Steve Davies’ “Introduction” to the The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (2008). The articles in the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism on key individuals and historical movements are also essential reading (see bibliography for a full list).

Closer to our own time, we can also point to several examples of the successful spread of pro-liberty ideas in the post-Second World War period (see Appendix 3: The Spread of Pro-Liberty Ideas in the Post-WW2 Period for a more detailed list). I think we can identify four waves or generations of pro-liberty organizations and groups which were founded during this period to confront particular issues at particular times but which also shared the more general goal of spreading knowledge about individual liberty and free markets. The First Generation during the 1940s was concerned about rebuilding the classical liberal movement after the devastation of WW2, a strategy which might be termed the discovery and preservation of “The Remnant”; the Second Generation was active during the 1950 and 1960s and busied itself with establishing a variety of educational and publishing institutes and foundations, or a strategy of “Hayekian Educationism”; the Third Generation in the 1970s and 1980s saw the creation of many public policy and outreach programs, or a policy of “Converting the Senior Bureaucrats” combined with “Reverse Fabianism”; and the Fourth Generation in which we are now living has a much more diverse range of activities, several of which take advantage of the internet to disseminate ideas, or a strategy of “let a thousand electronic flowers bloom”.

For more information on these groups, see Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism (2007) for details and the relevant articles in The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism.

Strategies for Achieving Radical Change

Hayek vs. Rothbard

There has been surprisingly little analysis by classical liberals and libertarians of past movements for intellectual and political change and what they might teach us in the present. One might well ask, where is our Antonio Gramsci? Friedrich Hayek outlined his strategy for promoting liberal and free market ideas in “The Intellectuals and Socialism” based upon his analysis of how socialism had become so successful in his lifetime. This essay has been enormously influential in guiding the activities of the Liberty Fund and the Institute for Humane Studies, amongst other institutions. It was written at a time when classical liberals ideas and movement were particularly weak following WW2 and Hayek reflects this with his short term pessimism and very long-term prognosis about the role of intellectuals in changing the climate of opinion. Remember, he had only recently published the warning The Road to Serfdom in 1944. His strategy might be termed “Very Long Term Educationism” since he believes that it will take decades or a couple of lifetimes before the ideas of free market economists like him begin to trickle down through academia, into the ranks of journalism, and then be considered for inclusion in policies drawn up by elected politicians. There is also an element of “Reverse Fabianism” in that he hopes to do for liberal ideas what George Bernard Shaw and other English intellectuals did for socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The libertarian economist Murray Rothbard on the other hand, beginning in the mid–1970s, has given much thought to the problem of strategy but his work is not well known. His ideas need to be taken seriously because the rise of the modern libertarian movement to a large degree took place in NYC in the 1950s and 1960s (Mises seminar at NYU, the Rand salon, the Circle Bastiat, his and Liggio’s activities in the anti-Vietnam war movement, the first libertarian scholars conference, etc) and as a participant in those events his observations should carry some weight. In an unpublished and “strictly confidential” manuscript from April 1977 he goes into some detail about the strategies used in the past to achieve radical change, ranging from libertarian movements like the American Revolution, the Philosophic Radicals around James Mill, and William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionist movement; to totalitarian groups like the Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and the Nazi Party. He advises for the libertarian movement the creation of a Leninist style “cadre” of committed and knowledgeable individuals who understand both the theory of liberty as well as how it might be implemented in practice in the political world. It should be noted that Rothbard wrote this memorandum at a time when he hoped to turn the fledgling Libertarian Party into one modelled on his theory of “cadres” before he split acrimoniously with Koch and the Cato Institute and then gave up the idea of shaping the LP in his Millian-Leninist image. In spite of this political failure, his historical and theoretical reflections in my view still deserve attention by historians and political theorists. To answer the question Lenin himself asked in 1902 “What is to be done?”, we can say that we need more case studies of successful ideological movements, especially pro-liberty ones, like the ones I have listed in Appendix 2.

Rothbard’s writings on strategy provoked several discussions both inside and outside the Libertarian Party, such as the shortened version which was published for the “Radical Caucus” of the Libertarian Party “Strategies For A Libertarian Victory”, and the special edition of Libertarian Review (Aug. 1978) entitled “Toward the Second American Revolution: Libertarian Strategies for Today” which included essays on strategy by Milton Mueller, Murray Rothbard, Ed Crane, Leonard Liggio, Charles Koch, Bill Evers, and David Theroux.

Rothbard’s strategic theory might be pursued at greater length in a future post in this discussion, especially his Millian-Leninism and its appropriateness for a movement based upon individual liberty, free markets, and individual responsibility.

Some Observations from History about Strategy

What I have found useful in studying this matter is Austrian capital theory developed by Hayek and Mises, in particular the notion of “the structure of production of goods” - if we understand in this context that “goods” are “intellectual goods” or ideas and not raw materials or machinery. Before we can distribute goods to consumers (first order goods) we have to have a structure of production of goods ranging from the highest order (such as raw materials), to various intermediate orders (such the production of machines for factories, the factories which produce the final goods, and the trucks and logistics to get the goods to their final destination), and then the shops on main street which sell the final order of goods to consumers. For this structure of production of goods to exist, we need investors with a low time preference who are willing to invest their capital in the various stages, we need entrepreneurs who can bring together the funds, skilled personnel, and managerial talent to produce the appropriate goods at each stage of production, and we need a sales force who can persuade consumer to buy their particular product from among all the others goods made by competitors.

When we apply this analysis to the spread of classical liberal ideas it becomes apparent that a successful movement needs all of the following types of individuals and activities:

individuals who are capable of supplying the intellectual raw materials (the theory of liberty as applied to economics, politics, and society)

investors who are willing to provide the financial means for these ideas to be produced and distributed to others

entrepreneurs who can identify a market opportunity (a “strategic issue”) and can organise all the components needed for the production and distribution of ideas for different types of markets (scholarly, general interest, education, mass market)

a salesforce (marketers, advertisers, salespeople) who can persuade the consumers of ideas to buy this particular product in a competitive market for ideas

consumers who buy our products (ideas)

One might ask, might the state distort this structure of the production of ideas, just as it distorts the investment of capital in the structure of production of economic goods by manipulating interest rates and the money supply? I do not have space to go into this question here, other than to suggest that the biggest distortion it creates is the supply of government schools and universities which “crowd out” both private suppliers of educational services, but perhaps more importantly, crowds out “unwelcome ideas” which support the free market and individual liberty.

From what I have said above I believe we can identify the following patterns in the way pro-liberty advocates have organised their activities in the past. Not all groups have proceeded in this way but they have used various components in their efforts and historians and social theorists might be able to construct a better model for intellectual and social change in the future by studying their activities.

The First Steps

“gather the Remnant” - there is a need to identify and find like-minded people

find investors who are willing to fund long term intellectual and political activities

Promote liberal scholarship (highest order production of ideas)

encourage and fund highly original theorists (Mises, Hayek, Rothbard)

place scholars in colleges and universities

publish books, articles, hold conferences

provide scholarships for interested students

start graduate programs for scholars and future teachers

Create centres and institutes to disseminate liberal ideas among intellectuals, journalists, and political elites (middle/second order of production of ideas)

public policy groups which criticise existing government policies and offer alternatives

produce monographs and policy proposals showing how to liberalise the economy

produce magazines, organise talks, write op ed pieces for newspapers, appear on TV

Create associations, organisations, parties to agitate and lobby for liberal change (first order)

outreach to voters, students, and activists

intellectual material which is suitable for the average educated reader

create single issue lobby groups to put pressure on government to repeal legislation

campus organisations

organise direct action to oppose unjust laws

One Historical Example: The Anti-Corn Law League

I would now like to show how this “structure of the production of ideas” can be applied to a specific historical case study, namely the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL) 1838–1846, which I regard as the text-book example of the strategy of “Single Causism”.

(Highest) Fourth Order: the intellectual groundwork for free trade was done by Adam Smith in his treatise The Wealth of Nations (1776). This theoretical work was continued by many other classical economists in the early part of the 19th century like David Ricardo, James Mill, and J.R. McCulloch where the idea of free trade became a core component of the classical school of economics.

Third Order: Other classical economists and intellectuals gave lectures and wrote books and pamphlets on free trade; People like Thomas Hodgskin gave lectures to popular audiences at Mechanics Institutes and published books; Thomas Peronnet Thompson wrote books and pamphlets for middle brow audiences.

Second Order: Members of the Board of Trade had become influenced by Smithian free market ideas, there were sympathetic MPs in the Conservative Party who were prepared to argue in favour of free trade in the House of Commons and to vote for the repeal of the Corn laws, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel was won over to the free trade cause and organised a vote on it. Wilson started The Economist magazine to promote free trade ideas.

First Order: Cobden’s and the ACLL’s genius was to see how ordinary people could be organised to put pressure on the government. The ACLL realised that the recent dramatic drop in the price of postage (the Uniform Penny Post) meant that they could distribute their printed material at a much lower cost than previously. He created membership cards for the ACLL so people could show their allegiance; envelopes for personal letters with ACLL designs and slogans were sold (merchandising); bazaars were held to sell other ACLL merchandise; signature drives were orgnised to demonstrate the scale of public support to MPs; large public meetings were held; there was wide distribution of magazine and pamphlets.

I do not believe that this structure of production of ideas was a deliberate creation of any one of the individuals involved in the free trade movement. It seemed to have evolved without a great deal of conscious strategic planning. According to my schema we can identify the following key roles:

the creator of the “raw materials”: Adam Smith in his treatise The Wealth of Nations, and his followings in the Classical school of economics

the investors: Richard Cobden and his fellow cotton manufacturers who funded the organisation

the entrepreneurs: Cobden was very good at identifying legislative opportunities for the free traders, and showed great skill in designing the best way to market the ideas to the general public (the symbol of the “big loaf” vs. “the small loaf”; James Wilson who founded The Economist magazine in 1843 to spread free market ideas

the salesforce: lecturers like Hodgskin, Thompson; politicians like Villiers and Cobden who gave speeches in the house; the journalists who wrote articles the magazine The League

the consumers: those ordinary people who voted for free trade candidates; signed petitions to parliament; attended large public meetings in support of free trade

The question we might ask ourselves, is whether or not a structure of the production of ideas like this is necessary for any significant intellectual and social/political/economic change to occur? How many examples can we find from history where something like this structure appeared, and how many took place without this kind of structure? If we can, how do explain the creation, dissemination, and impact of ideas in those cases?

A further question to consider is how long it takes for ideas to move from the Highest Fourth Order or stage of high theory production to the First Order or stage where the ideas get put into practice and pro-liberty reforms are enacted? In the case of free trade there was a 70 year period between the publication of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Is this a typical time frame? What other examples can historians find?

One might get depressed if one counted the years since the appearance of Mises’ Human Action in 1949 and the current state of monetary and banking policy in the West - some 65 years. On the other hand, the appearance of Rothbard’s For a New Liberty in 1974 and the ensuing growth of the modern libertarian movement over the following 40 years might give one cause to be more optimistic.

A final question to consider is to compare the success of classical liberals in England in abolishing slavery (1808 and 1833) and repealing the protectionist Corn Laws (1846) with the failure of liberals to do the same in the United States. There, the slave trade was ended but slavery itself proved to be a much harder nut to crack and the sad conclusion one might have to make is that ideological and political agitation was not enough to overcome the vested interests of the slaveowners and the apathy of the voting public, and that slavery only ended as a result of a very violent and destructive war. The failure of the American free traders is another example which needs to be studied in greater detail. Jean-Baptiste Say’s free trade ideas in his Treatise (English translation 1821) were taught in American colleges for decades but this did not produce a broadly based free trade movement (although there was an American Free Trade Association with branches in Chicago and New York which republished many of Bastiat’s free trade writings) and the U.S. remained a protectionist nation for the entire 19th century with some of the highest rates of tariffs in the world. So on two counts, on issues which practically defined what it meant to be a classical liberal at this time - free trade and opposition to slavery - the U.S. liberals were found wanting and failed.

Conclusion: Some Outstanding Historical Examples of Investors, Entrepreneurs and Salespeople of Ideas

I would like to conclude this already long essay on an upward beat by listing some of the outstanding examples of individuals who have played key roles in the classical liberal movement over the past 200 years. I believe that any successful movement requires individuals like these in all of the main areas of activity if it is to be successful. The problem seems to be that it is in fact a rare occurrence for a movement to have such individuals in each stage of the production of ideas at the same time.

investors Harold Luhnow and the William Volker Fund Antony Fisher and IEA and Atlas Pierre Goodrich and Liberty fund Charles Koch and Cato Institute and other groups

entrepreneurs Thomas Clarkson: the British Anti-Slavery movement Guillaumin: the French political economists Richard Cobden: the English free trade movement Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris: the IEA in London Leonard Read: FEE Baldy Harper: IHS Antony Fisher: IEA and Atlas Ed Crane: Cato Institute

salespeople Frédéric Bastiat: free trade journalism Ayn Rand: best-selling novels Milton Friedman: “Free to Choose” TV series and book Ron Paul: presidential campaigns



Endnotes

Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (The University of Chicago Press, 1944, 1976). Also Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, with The Intellectuals and Socialism. The Condensed Version of The Road to Serfdom as it appeared in the April 1945 edition of Reader’s Digest (London: The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2005). With “The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons”. Originally published in Look magazine. See, Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

F.A. Hayek , “The Intellectuals and Socialism” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (The University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 178–94. Quote from p. 194. Online at at mises.org http://mises.org/etexts/hayekintellectuals.pdf.

John Blundell, “Arthur Seldon and the Institute of Economic Affairs” (November, 2013) /pages/seldon-and-the-iea; Stephen Davies, “Richard Cobden: Ideas and Strategies in Organizing the Free-Trade Movement in Britain” (January 2015) /pages/lm-cobden.

My own efforts to list some of these movements can be found at my personal website. See, David M. Hart, “Study Guides on the Classical Liberal Tradition” http://davidmhart.com/liberty/Guides/ClassicalLiberalism/index.html. These include a concept map showing the key ideas of the classical liberal tradition, and A History of Classical Liberalism in Three Parts: Part 1: Twelve Keys Concepts of the Classical Liberal Tradition; Part 2: Ideological Movements and Key Political Events; Part 3: Quotations from Key Texts Illustrating Classical Liberal Ideas.

Jim Powell, The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000-Year History, told through the Lives’ of Freedom’s Greatest Champions New York: The Free Press, 2000). Steve Davies’ “General Introduction,” The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, pp. xxv-xxxvii, which is an excellent survey of the ideas, movements, and key events in the development of liberty.

The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008. A Project of the Cato Institute). Most of the key articles are listed in my “Study Guides on the Classical Liberal Tradition”.

Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, Perseus Books Group, 2007).

Murray N. Rothbard, Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change (April, 1977), available on my website <davidmhart.com/liberty/OtherWorks/Rothbard/Rothbard_1977TowardStrategy.pdf> [PDF 6.9 MB]. See also, Murray N. Rothbard, “Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez-Faire,” The Journal of libertarian Studies, vol. IX, no. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 43–67, <davidmhart.com/liberty/OtherWorks/Rothbard/Rothbard_1990IntellectualsSocialChange.pdf> [PDF 1.3 MB]; Rothbard also condensed some of these ideas into Part V: “Toward A Theory of Strategy for Liberty.” “30. Toward A Theory of Strategy for Liberty” in The Ethics of Liberty, pp. 257–273. <davidmhart.com/liberty/OtherWorks/Rothbard/Rothbard_1998TheoryStrategy.pdf> [PDF 438 KB] From, Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty. With a New Introduction by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

See, Joseph Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).

See, Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and his Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 New York: Pantheon Books, 1969).

Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1901, 1902). Lenin’s Collected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, Moscow, Volume 5, pp. 347–530. https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm or PDF https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/download/what-itd.pdf.

Murray N. Rothbard, “Strategies For A Libertarian Victory” (Libertarian Party. Rothbard (sic) Caucus) (February 2004) http://www.lprc.org/strategies.html. This is an online version of Rothbard’s essay which first appeared in Libertarian Review (August, 1978). With an epilog dated July, 1982.

Libertarian Review, Special Issue entitled “Toward the Second American Revolution: Libertarian Strategies for Today,” Aug. 1978, vol. 7, no.7, Murray Rothbard, “Strategies for a Libertarian Victory,” pp. 18–24, 34. http://www.libertarianism.org/lr/LR788.pdf.

Hayek, The Pure Theory of Capital (1941)in The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. Volume 12, The Pure Theory of Capital (1941), edited by Lawrence H. White (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). Ludwig von Mises, “Part I. Human Action. CHAPTER 4: A First Analysis of the Category of Action” in Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, in 4 vols., ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). Vol. 1. /titles/1893#Mises_3843-01_388.

See the Liberty Matters discussion, Stephen Davies, “Richard Cobden: Ideas and Strategies in Organizing the Free-Trade Movement in Britain” (January 2015) /pages/lm-cobden.

See the illustrated essay “Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League” /pages/cobden-and-the-anti-corn-law-league.

Jean Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy; or the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. Translated from the 4th ed. of the French by C.R. Prinsep. To which is added, a translation of the introduction and additional notes, by Clement C. Biddle (Boston, Wells and Lilly, 1821). Also see my paper, “The Liberal Roots of American Conservatism: Bastiat and the French Connection,” given to the Philadelphia Society meeting March 27–29, 2015.

Gerald Frost, Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty (London: Profile Books, 2002).

Dane Starbuck, The Goodriches: An American Family (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001). /titles/1065.

RESPONSES AND CRITIQUES↩

1. Jeffrey Tucker, “Does the Structure of Production Apply to Ideas?” [March 3, 2015]↩

Sometime in the late 1980s, I found myself in a mild debate with Murray Rothbard over matters of strategy. It was an exchange of private letters. I cannot recall the specifics but the issue had something to do with how broad or narrow an ideological journal, with the goal of propagating a body of ideas, ought to be in order to achieve its goals. Should it encourage broad debate, or try overtly to advance a particular plumbline of thought? Should it be an advocate of one point of view and thereby exclusionary, or a venue inclusive of many points of view including radical ones that mainline publications eschew?

After some back and forth, Rothbard concluded our correspondence with a general observation that I can only paraphrase. He did not believe that he somehow had all the right answers to the strategic question. He was highly interested in more discussion of this topic and happy to have the subject raised. To his mind what mattered was that the strategy, whatever it is, a) not be immoral or be based on some fundamental lie, and b) worked to achieve the result. Despite his reputation as a cadre-enforcing Leninist in the 1970s -- or perhaps because he had seen the failure of that program, as David Hart mentions -- his own attitude was highly flexible on strategic matters. He had his preferences, but he didn’t rule out other ways of going about things so long as they were not immoral and held out some possibility of success.

I’ve always kept that in mind in the course of modern debates on strategy. People can become wildly passionate about this topic, pushing their own view as if there is only one way. If you vote, you are evil; if you don’t vote, you are not helping the cause. If you eschew academia, you are not invested in serious ideas; if you are in academia, you have sold out. If you don’t protest in the streets, you are unwilling to get your hands dirty; if you do protest in the streets, you are contributing to the problem of mobocracy. And so on. People suppose they have the right way, and it is the only way.

This is one reason I can’t but celebrate Hart’s creative list of 16 various strategies for social change. ​ It shows just how many theories have been spawned in the last 65 years, a period in which which liberty has suffered so many blows. If we knew the right answers, and if we had seen some particular strategic outlook prevail over the others, matters would be more simple. But we’ve rarely seen such progress. Ludwig von Mises wrote in his private diary that he wondered whether his dreams of being a reformer had given over to becoming a “historian of decline.” I suspect many people feel that way.

And yet, as we look around the world today, with the state still on the march, we do see a new flourishing of liberty. How to measure this? The least-revealing way is to look at the number of libertarian organizations and academics. Surely it is better to look at the actual progress of liberty itself. Here we see massive gains through communication technology, life opportunities, the decline of violence, the decline of poverty, the globalization of the division of labor, and the effective realization of universal rights in more places in the world than ever before. How is this happening? Enterprise is outpacing the the ability of the state of keep up with regulating it. As to how and why enterprise has done so much so fast, I see no one particular causal agent. As Hart notes, “The world being a complex and messy place, there is probably no one strategy that will be successful in all places and all times.” The implications of this observation are profound. Just as we cannot anticipate the emergent shape of social institutions under conditions of freedom, we cannot anticipate, much less plan, the way in which liberty-centered ideas will bring about social and political change. We think we know, but then, as it turns out, we don’t know.

This is why I have fundamental doubts about this idea of applying to the world of ideas the structure of production as it pertains to the physical world. It strikes me as too constructivist, affected, and planned. More than that, there are important reasons why the model might be fundamentally flawed. Ideas move through time and space in a way that is completely different from the physical world. The danger in conflating these two very different spheres of the world is that we actually limit the power of ideas rather than unleash them.

To see why this is the case, ask why there is a structure of production at all. Goods need to be produced. Once they are consumed, they must be produced again. Production takes time and that production must be coordinated across many layers of cooperative industrial structures: capital goods, intermediate goods, and consumer goods. Institutions such as prices and interest rates assist in this coordinative process. The process is arduous but necessary to overcome the inherent privations of the state of nature. To rise above it requires the employment of scarce means to achieve unlimited wants, and this process of production must keep economics constantly in mind.

But what is the fundamental fact that makes these production structures necessary? Why can’t we just have all the stuff we want without having to build these intertemporally complex systems? The reason comes down to scarcity itself. If that condition did not exist, we could dispense with production structures completely.

If it were possible to make gasoline, steaks, and sneakers just one time, and these goods could somehow replicate themselves unto infinity once produced, the whole economics of production would be moot. None of the factors that give rise to it would exist.

Consider: ideas are not scarce in an economic sense. Once produced -- and that production can take a decades or only an instant -- an idea can be infinitely reproduced, just as Thomas Jefferson said of fire itself. It does not depreciate in value as physical property does. It can belong to, and by consumed, one person or billions of people at the same instant. An idea is also immortal: the ideas produced by Plato or Einstein are available forever. An idea is also malleable: it can be changed and remixed with other ideas by any individual mind, without disturbing the integrity of the original. Its course of transport through the population and through history takes a completely unpredictable path: books, word of mouth, blogs, podcasts, signs, texting, rumour, advertising. The digital world has put the portability of ideas on hyperdrive. Their distribution follows no set course; every idea becomes part of a storm of ideas, merging with all other ideas that have ever existed. Their final triumph can take a circuitous route that defies all expectations.

In economics, the first condition of the need for economization is scarcity. For this reason, the difference between scarce and nonscarce goods is fundamental and absolute. A good is either rivalrous in ownership and control or it is not. It either has to be reproduced following consumption or not. It either depreciates in its physical integrity or it does not. If I am wearing my shoes now, no one else can wear them at the same time. But if I hold an idea and decide to share it with the world, I can retain my ownership while permitting the creation of infinite numbers of copies. In this sense, ideas evade all the limitations of the physical world.

Another example: Let’s say that I’m standing in front of a group of a thousand people. I hand an item, like watch or glass, to a person on the front row. She passes it on through the crowd. At any point in time, it would be possible for me to track precisely who has the item, who handed it to her, and then to see whom she hands it to next. It follows a traceable path. That path can be observed. But if I stand in front of the same group, and sing a song, toss out an idea, or show an image, it would be impossible to trace the path that this idea would take as it impresses itself on the minds of the people present. The travels of ideas are impossible map it.

This is the difference between ideas and scarce property. They are produced and distributed in a completely different way. None of the conditions that cause the structure of production to exist in the physical world actually apply to the world of ideas. Their functioning is radically different.

Perhaps, then, it is best to regard the structure of production as applying to the world of ideas only in a metaphorical sense? Even then, there is a question about how much such a metaphor actually explains. Good ideas as they apply to liberty can come from anywhere. Consider the repeal of alcohol prohibition in the United States. Did the idea come first from the academics, flow to the media, and become enacted by the common people working through their representatives in politics? Not so far as I understand the history. Instead, it came about because the policy was no longer enforceable in light of mass civil disobedience. The same might be said of pot legalization today.

Such bottom-up efforts are evident in the progress of the cyberpunk world that gave us distributed networks, mass availability of cryptography, and the innovation of the blockchain ledger for porting secure information. We now have the technology to commodify, bundle, and title any type of information pool, based on our own creation as an extension of our own imagination, and port it over geographically noncontiguous lines, using cryptography to customize what information we share and over a distributed network that no state can take down, in a manner that is non-forgible and nonreproducible and not subject to any level of depreciation, ever. That’s just amazing. We can do that now, and no one can take that technology away from us. The whole apparatus was released on a free forum by an anonymous programmer. How can we possibility fit this liberty-granting technology into some structure of production?

And consider, too, the cluster of deregulatory efforts of the late 1970s: trucking, oil, airlines, telecommunications, and banking. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was president and a champion of this movement. He worked mainly with the office of Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democrat, in enacting the legislation. This is something that no one could have anticipated. The “structure of production” of these ideas followed a nonintuitive course.

We make a profound error in imagining that we can plan intellectual change in the way we plan production of other goods and services. That ideas permeate society in an unpredictable and even chaotic way is nothing to regret. But we need to come to terms with the reality and thereby eschew the presumptions of knowledge that are inherent in trying to construct some top-down strategy for social change. It is best just to speak out, tell the truth, and build liberty in every conceivable way we can, pushing history in the direction it must go, and then delight as the course of events defies our every expectation.

2. David Gordon, "Austrian Capital Theory and the Role of Ideas" [Posted: March 4, 2015]↩

I’d like to discuss three topics in David Hart’s excellent and characteristically erudite essay. The first of these topics is the most general. Hart writes of wanting to study “how pro-liberty ideas were developed and then used to bring about political and economic change in a pro-liberty direction.” He proceeds to list a large number of “historical examples of successful radical change in ideas and political/economic structures, in both a pro-liberty and anti-liberty direction.”

I hope that I do not misinterpret Hart, but his remarks suggest that he takes ideas to be a major cause, perhaps the major cause, of political and social change. This is a familiar view. Everyone will remember Keynes’s comment in The General Theory: “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

Some people go further. Leonard Peikoff claims in The Ominous Parallels that not only do philosophical ideas determine the course of history, but that this must be the case. “Since men cannot live or act without some kind of basic guidance, the issues of philosophy in some form necessarily affect every man, in every social group and class. Most men, however, do not consider such issues in explicit terms. They absorb their ideas ... from the atmosphere around them. . .”

Peikoff notes that a “cultural atmosphere is not a primary. It is created, ultimately, by a handful of men: by those whose lifework it is to deal with, originate, and propagate fundamental ideas.” Accordingly, the “root cause of Nazism” lies in the “esoteric writings” of the professors who laid the foundation for the events “hailed or cursed in headlines.”

I do not wish to claim that the view I attribute to Hart of the role of ideas in history is false: to the contrary, I hope that it is true. If it is true, though, it is not obviously true, and it should not be assumed as a matter of course. Those who favor the position ought to argue for its truth, and pleasant quotations from Friedrich Hayek and Lord Acton about the importance of ideas do not suffice.

Whether or not, though, ideas are influential, the question arises: how are they created and spread? Hart appeals to “Austrian capital theory,” and his remarks about this are the next topic I’d like to discuss. What interests Hart is “in particular the notion of ‘the structure of production of goods’ -- if we understand in this context that “goods’ are ‘intellectual goods,’ or ideas, and not raw materials or machinery. Before we can distribute goods to consumers (first-order goods), we have to have a structure of production of goods ranging from the highest order (analogous to raw materials) to various intermediate orders (analogous to the production of machines for factories that will produce the consumer goods, and the trucks and logistics to get the goods to their final destination), and then the shops on Main Street that will sell the lowest-order goods to consumers.”

According to the Austrian theory to which Hart appeals, consumer goods normally require land, labor, and capital to produce. For each capital good involved in the production of a consumer good, one can in turn inquire: how was it produced? Either land and labor sufficed to produce the capital good, or another capital good was required. In the latter case, we can repeat the inquiry. Eventually, the inquiry will end at a stage with only land and labor as inputs: no capital good is an original factor of production. Production travels forward from original land and labor to consumer goods, but the analysis of the process of production goes in the other direction, from the consumer goods back through the stages of production to the original land and labor. The stages are said to become “higher” as they recede from the consumer goods.

It should be clear that this has little if anything to do with the generation and spread of ideas. The application of the Austrian view to ideas, I take it, is that one begins with “liberal scholarship” This is analogous to the “raw material” at the “highest level”’ that is then passed down the various stages until it reaches the consuming public. The starting point, in sum, is a complex, nuanced, and creative idea that is simplified and made palatable to the public.

Nothing precludes such a process, but it is certainly not necessary. Why must one begin with a creative contribution to scholarship? Perhaps instead, in a particular case, popular ideas came first, and later scholarly work refined them. If you want to build a modern airplane, you cannot do it with bare labor and land on which to stand. You require a vast array of capital goods as well, and these must be produced in the way described by Austrian production theory. To bring an idea to the public, by contrast, you do not need to have as “raw material” a scholarly idea that you will then simplify.

Confusion on this point may stem from the fact that Hayek, a leading contributor to Austrian capital theory, wrote also a famous paper, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” that deals with the transmission of ideas, In this paper, which Hart discusses, Hayek has a great deal to say about the way in which intellectuals, whom he calls the “secondhand dealers in ideas,” take over the contributions of scholarship and offer them to the reading public. Nowhere, though, does Hayek claim in “The Intellectuals and Socialism” that ideas must be produced in this fashion. Certainly a scholar does not need a “secondhand dealer in ideas” in order to reach a wide audience. Hayek, after all, wrote The Road to Serfdom for the educated public. Neither does he make any connection in his article between what he says about ideas and the Austrian theory of production.

The final topic in Hart’s essay I wish to discuss is his account of Murray Rothbard’s ideas on strategy. Hart says, “For the libertarian movement he advises creation of a Leninist-style ‘cadre’ of committed and knowledgeable individuals who understand both the theory of liberty as well as how it might be implemented in the political world.” Hart goes on to say “Rothbard’s strategic theory might be pursued at greater length in a future post in this discussion, especially his [James] Millian-Leninism and its appropriateness for a movement based upon individual liberty, free markets, and individual responsibility.”

Hart’s remarks convey, unintentionally I am sure, a misleading impression. The unwary reader might surmise that Rothbard was proposing a libertarian version of the Bolshevik party, with its fanaticism and iron discipline. The impression would be enhanced by Hart’s incorrect suggestion that Rothbard’s thought on strategy began in the 1970s, “when he hoped to turn the fledgling Libertarian Party into one modeled on his theory of ‘cadres’ and before he split acrimoniously with [Charles] Koch and the Cato Institute and gave up the idea of shaping the LP in his Millian-Leninist image.”

Rothbard’s began thinking about strategy substantially before the 1970s, and he did not formulate his ideas as a way to influence the Libertarian Party, which did not then exist. When he first spoke of cadres, he did not have in mind a political party, much less a political party in the style of the ruling party in Soviet Russia. In a Memorandum of July 1961, “What Is To be Done?” written for the Volker Fund, Rothbard says: “We are not interested in seizing power and governing the State, and we therefore proclaim, not only adhere to, such values as truth, individual happiness, etc., which the Leninists subordinate to their party’s victory.”

What, though, of that dread word “cadre”? Rothbard intended nothing sinister by it. Rather, he had in mind people who adhered to a consistent set of libertarian principles. Like the Leninists, they were interested in more than day-to-day-“opportunism.” That is to say, they did not find satisfactory as a goal the mere modification of the existing arrangements in way slightly more favorable to the free market. Unlike “‘sectarians,” Rothbard does not insist that one state one’s “full ideological position at all times,” but the hard core, or cadre, “must always aim toward the advancement of libertarian-individualist thought … among the people and to spread its policies in the political arena.”

In a passage from “The Intellectuals and Socialism” that Hart quotes, Hayek makes the same point: “We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote.” It is puzzling, for that reason, that Hart entitles the section of his essay that discusses Rothbard, “Hayek vs. Rothbard.”

Endnotes

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York, 1936), p. 383.

Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels ( New York, 1982), p. 24

Ibid., pp. 24-25.

David Gordon, ed., Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard (Auburn, 2011), p.8. The title of Rothbard’s memo of course echoes Lenin’s famous pamphlet.

Ibid., p. 9

3. Jim Powell, "The Importance of Peaceful Mass Movements" [Posted: March 5, 2015]↩

In his lead essay David Hart has done a lot fruitful brainstorming and compiled a comprehensive list of important pro-liberty movements. His rich mother lode of material might help resolve an enduring puzzle: There are far more libertarians now than a half-century ago, far more libertarian books published, far more libertarian think tanks developing and promoting libertarian ideas, and so on -- yet government is bigger and more powerful than ever. What, if anything, can be done about it?

My suggestion is that we reexamine peaceful mass movements because some some of the greatest advances for liberty have been achieved with that strategy. Few if any libertarians seem to have had firsthand experience with a peaceful mass movement in the United States -- after all, the last one ended about a half-century ago. Among the most successful peaceful mass movements for liberty were the movement to abolish the British slave trade and British slavery in the Western Hemisphere (1838), the movement to achieve Catholic emancipation from civil disabilities (1829), the movement to abolish the Corn Laws and promote free trade (1846), the movement to achieve equal rights for women, including the right to vote (1918), and the movement to abolish compulsory racial segregation (1964).

A peaceful mass movement aims to get a policy changed, and the movement continues, perhaps for many years, until the policy is changed or the movement runs out of steam. A peaceful mass movement involves mobilizing large numbers of people for rallies, protests, marches, demonstrations, concerts and other public events. Motivating large numbers of people to show up for an event is the most dramatic way to prove that there's a lot of discontent about something the government is doing or not doing. Discontent, in turn, can put pressure on politicians to do the right thing. Mobilizing large numbers of people creates newsworthy events that generate photographs and videos tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people can see, leading to more publicity. To be effective, a peaceful mass movement must have a specific, simple agenda -- which the recent anti‑Wall Street "Occupy" sit-ins notably lacked.

Recall how, in 1955, the American civil rights movement began as protests against compulsory racial segregation and persisted for nine years until compulsory racial segregation ended. Martin Luther King Jr., as the movement’s most famous leader, sometimes required considerable courage since he was jailed 14 times, the target of countless death threats, stoned, and stabbed; his home was blasted by a shotgun and bombed, and a motel room where he stayed was bombed, too, before he was assassinated.

In 1823 Irish lawyers Daniel O’Connell and Richard Lawler Sheil formed the Catholic Association to challenge English laws that denied Irish people the liberty to own land, attend school, learn a trade, bear arms, hold public office, travel abroad, or practice their religion without interference. This was the beginning of a peaceful mass movement aimed to achieve Catholic emancipation. O’Connell was on the road constantly, speaking in every city and hamlet. He generated so much popular pressure for reform that back in London, on April 10, 1829, Parliament passed the emancipation bill to reduce or remove many restrictions on Catholics.

In 1787 Cambridge University student Thomas Clarkson began to travel around England, helping to form antislavery groups and giving speeches at public meetings run like religious revivals. In this peaceful mass movement, Clarkson shocked audiences by holding up branding irons, neck collars, leg shackles, handcuffs, thumbscrews, and other gruesome devices for enforcing slavery. He displayed diagrams showing how slave ships chained human beings into tiny spaces, awash with excrement. Clarkson arranged for former slaves like Olaudah Equiano to testify about their experience. Clarkson bombarded Parliament with about 500 antislave-trade petitions signed by more than 400,000 people. Buoyed by this proof of public support, member of Parliament William Wilberforce introduced antislave-trade bills year after year. By 1807 Parliament voted to abolish the British slave trade. Clarkson and Wilberforce subsequently campaigned to abolish British slavery. Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act on August 29, 1833.

In 1839 Richard Cobden and John Bright began a peaceful mass movement to abolish grain import taxes that made food more expensive for millions of hungry people. "It appears to me," Cobden wrote, "that a moral and even a religious spirit may be infused into that topic [free trade], and if agitated in the same manner that the question of slavery has been, it will be irresistible." Cobden and Bright were on the road almost nonstop. Cobden recalled, "We spoke to about two thousand persons in the parish church [Aberdeen], travelled thirty‑five miles, held a meeting at Montrose, and then thirty-five miles to Dundee, for a meeting the same evening. Tomorrow we go to Cupar Fife, next day, Leith, the day following, Jedburgh.” Spurred by the failure of the Irish potato crop and the deadly famine there, Parliament repealed the grain import taxes in 1846.

In 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton launched a peaceful mass movement to achieve equal rights for women. She was mainly concerned about gaining equal property rights -- the right to sign contracts, to hold property, to inherit property and so on. She viewed the right to vote as a policy needed for securing equal property rights. She formed the Woman Suffrage Association of America and served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association. She crisscrossed the country, giving speeches, as she recalled, “in log cabins, in depots, unfinished school houses, churches, hotels, barns, and in the open air.” Stanton and her principal partner Susan B. Anthony kept the movement going for decades. The right of women to vote in America was secured 70 years after the movement had begun.

Would it really be possible to mobilize large numbers of people for liberty and justice today? Well, it's hard to draw a crowd, since that involves motivating people to leave the comfort of their homes, to go someplace that might be inconvenient, perhaps to incur some travel costs, and most important, to make time for the event in a busy schedule.

I have some specific ideas on how this might be done, which I will pursue in more detail in a future post.

References

Jim Powell, The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000-Year History, told therough the Lives of Freedom's Greatest Champions (New York: The Free Press, 2000).

several chapters from this book have been published on the libertarianism.org website. See:

"Militant Nonviolence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr." <http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/militant-nonviolence-biography-martin-luther-king-jr>

"Passionate Oratory: A Biography of Daniel O’Connell" <http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/passionate-oratory-biography-daniel-oconnell>

and the video: David Boaz and Jim Powell, "The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000-Year History, Told through the Lives of Freedom’s Greatest Champions" (June 28, 2000) <http://www.libertarianism.org/media/around-web/triumph-liberty-2000-year-history-told-through-lives-freedoms-greatest-champions>

Jim Powell, Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

and the video: David Boaz and Jim Powell, "Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery" (Sept. 28, 2008) <http://www.libertarianism.org/media/around-web/greatest-emancipations-how-west-abolished-slavery>

4. Jason Kuznicki, "The Most Reasonable People in the Room" [Posted: March 6, 2015]↩

I find nothing more entertaining than getting together with four or five other libertarians, opening a bottle of bourbon, and chatting about praxeology until the wee hours of the morning.

By most Americans' standards, that makes me ... a weirdo.

In my defense I am a happy weirdo. I love being a professional libertarian. Every day I look forward to going to work, and I recognize how rare a treat unalienated labor is in the grand scheme of things.

If you're reading this, you're probably something of a weirdo too. Not that there's anything wrong with that. And I'm glad you're with me, because we liberty people need to stick together.

Our little tribe could even be dead right about everything. I wouldn't be doing what I do if I didn't think we had found something both true and important. When it seems that you have found something like that, it is enormously fun just to sit around and discuss it.

But if we really are right, then we are also called upon to sell our unconventional viewpoint. And I've got to confess that the late-night libertarian bull sessions begin to look like a guilty pleasure. To use the metaphor of economic production offered in the lead essay, high-level discussions are not necessarily primary production goods. They may be consumption goods, at least insofar as they don't lead, directly or indirectly, to any form of changed public policy.

Against Utopia

What might change public policy? I can name several things. First, though, a couple of warnings.

The vast majority of Americans simply aren't interested in our ideology. They do not want to learn about it. They do not want to hear about it. They may even find something vaguely disreputable about the practice of building an ideology in the first place, whether it be ours, or the socialists', or anyone else's. Americans aren't interested in ideology, period.

That all by itself may be a big part of why we haven't won.

In many cases Americans' disdain for ideology works out for the good. We have largely been shielded from fascism and communism, and we have even escaped many of the worst aspects of gradualist socialism. Even the socialists' utopianism -- which Hayek clearly envied -- did not help socialism as much as Hayek feared it would. Being anti-ideological would appear to be a healthy part of our nation's political immune system.

My first caution, then, is that utopian visions are vastly overrated. The unappreciated truth about writing in the utopian vein is that utopias only rarely inspire on their first appearance. Most of them fail immediately, above all among Americans. There is much more in the way of bad and ugly about the genre, I think, than there is of beautiful and stirring. And even successful works of utopian literature usually age badly: Everyone remembers Aldous Huxley's dystopian masterpiece, which is Brave New World. Everyone forgets Island, his attempt at a utopia.

This suggests that trying to write the next Atlas Shrugged may not be the best strategy for us, even granting that the first Atlas Shrugged was a phenomenal success. (Which it was!) As an editor, I have seen dozens of books billing themselves as the next Atlas Shrugged, and none of them have stirred me in the slightest. Their authors might have done better to write a simple letter to the editor of a newspaper, or an op-ed about a local issue that mattered. They would certainly have wasted less time, and they might even have made a difference.

I do wish it were easy to be inspiring in the sort of comprehensive, broad-brush way that Ayn Rand so clearly mastered. But it's not easy. It's damnably hard, and as a result, our efforts are almost certainly better spent elsewhere.

Rationalism Is Killing Us

My second warning concerns rationalism in ideology. Among those who as a matter of habit think in abstractions, there is a dangerous tendency to ignore -- or even to flout -- that which passes for common sense. And so we are led down paths that do us no good as a movement.

Murray Rothbard frankly shot himself in the foot when suggested that in his ideal society a parent would have no positive legal obligation to feed her child, and that no one would have any legal right to interfere if she did.

Rothbard need not have made the move he did. He might simply have said, as almost all other libertarian rights theorists do, that rights theory is a set of generalizations that begins with -- and that thus only applies to -- adults. We cannot expect it to give reasonable answers when it is applied, unchanged, to infants. If we want to make it work for infants, we first must consider how infants differ from adults.

There would be nothing inconsistent at all about such a position. But the danger I describe here is one of a foolish consistency, and I do think Rothbard fell for it. It's also exactly what happens when theory is pursued to the exclusion of empirical fact.

At times like these, a peculiar mental process begins to work in the minds of most readers. It was first brought to my attention years ago in an op-ed by William F. Buckley, one that I have unfortunately been unable to locate. I recall that Buckley was uncharacteristically kind to libertarians, at least for a bit. Then he narrated several of the Libertarian Party's then-current foibles, and he commented to the following effect: In every reasonable person there exists a little mental sorter, one that constantly asks whether one is not listening to the words of a madman. Whenever the sorter says yes, the reasonable person stops listening altogether.

It does not matter that the little mental sorter sometimes registers false positives. Life is short, and there are many clearly reasonable people to listen to. A few false positives is a small price to pay for weeding out all the nutcases in the world. Against this sorter, it does not avail that Rothbard believed that a libertarian society would see much less child neglect than we do today. It does not matter that he was exploring an odd lacuna in his theory, one he thought would basically never find its way into practice. The mental sorter has done its work: Rothbard is a nut. He shall be cast into the outer darkness.

So What Now?

That, my friends, is what we are up against, and I see only one way forward: We must become the most reasonable people in the room. At any gathering we attend, in any venue where we appear, it's up to us to play the straight man. If the status quo really is as crazy as we think, then we have no need to outdo it. Being reasonable attracts reasonable people. Being zany attracts attention, which is a different thing, and it only works until Buckley's mental sorter kicks in.

Now, this does not mean that we must surrender our principles so as to win over the unprincipled. Far from it. What it means is that we must whenever possible put empirical foundations under the things we have come to believe through abstraction. We must give people with no patience for ideology a reason to settle on libertarian policies anyway. As Ayn Rand wrote, "Americans are anti-intellectual (with good grounds, in view of current specimens), yet they have a profound respect for knowledge and education." That's where we need to be strong.

But doing so requires data. It also requires hard work. It may even require, on further examination, that we alter some of our beliefs -- but only if that's where the empirical investigation (and not the lure of political gain) ultimately leads us. We claim that we have courage in our convictions, and that considerations of principle have given us good reason to believe as we do. Very well, let us courageously put our beliefs to the test. If we are right, it is glorious. If we are wrong, we will have learned something. Either one should be counted a win.

Many individuals have been exemplary in this respect. If Milton Friedman doesn't immediately spring to mind, he should. But also Donald J. Boudreaux, Radley Balko, Timothy Sandefur, Jacob Sullum, Greg Lukianoff, Conor Friedersdorf, Clint Bolick, and more. These are the people who do the hard and not always fun work of turning abstract convictions into a measurable difference in the world. They don't agree on everything, and I don't expect them to. What they share is that they are convincing. As a direct result, they change American minds and prompt better public policies. I hope to see many more like them in the future.

Endnotes

See Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty (Auburn, Ala., Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2002), "14. Children and Rights," p. 100.

5. Peter C. Mentzel, "On Crisis, Revolution, and Liberty" [Posted: March 6, 2015]↩

David Hart has given us an overview of a theory of how classical liberal/libertarian ideas are produced and spread, a suggestion for an intellectual-history project on the subject, and an intriguing taxonomy of different kinds of libertarian approaches to transformation, based on various historical models. As a fellow historian, I was particularly interested in this last aspect of Dr. Hart’s fine essay, and in the short space I have here I want to try to tease out a few points from his remarks that I hope will have some relevance to our current conversation. In particular, I would like to suggest that an atmosphere of crisis seems to play an important role in many (if not most) of the historical examples he provides at the end of his essay. It seems to me that intellectual movements, even those which might seem marginal, or even rather loony, in “normal” times can suddenly emerge as the “obvious” answers to the problems facing a society during times of crisis. In the brief remarks that follow I want to focus on the histories of three revolutions in eastern and central Europe: a revolution that achieved some important successes but ultimately failed to secure political power for the forces of liberalism (the revolutions of 1848); an anti-liberal revolution that succeeded (the October Revolution in Russia); and finally a successful revolution in 1989 that had swept away the communist governments in the region by 1991.

To start with the earliest of these examples, the 1848 revolutions have usually been considered failures. To paraphrase G.M. Trevelyan’s famous quip, 1848 was the “turning point that failed to turn.” While it is certainly true that the liberals were ultimately defeated by their enemies, they achieved everywhere, but especially in east central Europe, some important and lasting victories. Probably the most important of these, which Dr. Hart mentions in his essay, was the elimination of serfdom in the Austrian Empire in 1848 (actually the culmination of a process begun by Emperor Joseph II in 1781). What were the causes for these successes, and why could the liberals not capitalize on these victories?

Liberal ideas had been circulating in central Europe for at least a couple of decades before 1848, and their promoters had a chance to advance them further due to the exogenous crises created by a string of crop failures all over Europe in the years before 1848. These not only led to rural unrest and to financial difficulties in most European countries but also contributed to the increasing pauperization of the newly emerging industrial working class. The growing social turmoil created the conditions for liberal intellectuals and their allies in most of the European states to try to seize power and establish liberal governments.

The ultimate failure of the east central European liberals was due largely to the fact that they allowed themselves to get sidetracked by another intellectual agenda that ultimately proved to be more powerful: nationalism. Rather than focus on socioeconomic and political liberalization, the members of the revolutionary German government meeting at Frankfurt am Main in the so-called Vorparlament, instead focused increasingly on the establishment of a German constitutional monarchy, and in the process dissipated their energies in endless and ultimately futile discussions about the nature and extent of their envisioned German state

A very important example of a successful, though nonliberal, revolution that Dr.Hart mentions is the October (or November) Revolution of 1917. Does this revolution, paradoxically, have something to say to classical liberals and libertarians? Perhaps, but in any case, this revolution, even more than 1848, owed much of its success to exogenous circumstances and an atmosphere of crisis.

It is important to remember that Russia in the fall of 1917 was already experiencing a revolution. The monarchy had been overthrown in the February (or March) Revolution and the country was being ruled by a shaky provisional government. In this context the Bolsheviks had two important advantages. First, they had an ideology that provided clear overall goals (even if they were vague on the specifics). Part of this ideology concerned the architecture not only of the party itself, but also of the society of the future. Lenin’s main contribution (outlined in his 1902 tract What Is to Be Done?) was his idea of the party not as some sort of proletarian mass-movement, but as a “vanguard” made up of a select, dedicated, group of professional revolutionaries who had mastered the laws of History and could thus steer society.

The second advantage the Bolsheviks had was a politically savvy ability to capitalize on the social and economic catastrophe that was engulfing wartime Russian society. By the fall of 1917 the country’s social and economic fabric was so obviously fraying that the Bolsheviks, in Lenin’s terms, simply “picked up power” that they found “lying in the street.” The October Revolution was really a coup d’etat carried out by Lenin’s small vanguard party against the thoroughly demoralized and weakened Provisional Government.

The Bolshevik revolution was a spectacular success, and the system they established ended up dominating much of Europe, indeed the rest of the globe, by the end of the 20th century. The overthrow of the Soviet empire in the revolutions of 1989-1991 must certainly count as one of the greatest victories for the cause of liberty in history. Where does it fit into the categories provided by Dr. Hart and into the narrative I have been sketching in this essay?

Once again, the success of the revolutionaries involved both the power of ideas and the impact of exogenous crisis. Liberal ideas of various kinds had never been completely extinguished in the lands of “Really Existing Socialism,” especially in the countries of east central Europe. There were always intellectuals, both in and outside the Party, who were familiar with, and attracted to, various aspects of liberalism. Moreover, the people of those countries had front-row seats to the economic development of the (relatively) liberal polities of western Europe, no matter how vigorously their communist rulers tried to disguise or disparage those achievements.

The opportunity for these liberal ideas to find some sort of purchase grew during the late 1980s because of a growing crisis of confidence in the communist parties of the Soviet Union and its satellites. This was in part the result of economic challenges posed by changes in the world economy, but it can also be thought of as a manifestation of the intellectual exhaustion of Really Existing Socialism. This situation made possible the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of first secretary of the CPSU in 1985. While Gorbachev was no liberal, he was one of a long line of communist leaders who sought to strengthen the communist system by piecemeal introduction of selective liberal reforms, along with a new approach to relations with the satellite countries.

As we all know, these reforms (soon copied with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the communist countries of east central Europe) if anything only made the crisis worse by creating economic and social chaos. They also provided the opportunity for the thus-far thoroughly marginalized and nearly invisible liberals to come out into the open and demand deeper and more extensive reforms. Interestingly, as in 1848, these liberal voices were frequently joined by, or even influenced by nationalist sentiments and demands.

In any case, faced with increasing economic and social disruptions, the communist parties, especially those in east central Europe, found themselves by 1989 in an untenable situation. Unable to count any longer on the military or even the moral support of their comrades in Moscow, the rulers of the different parties were pushed aside by more opportunistic (not necessarily liberal) comrades who were willing to work with the newly empowered liberal dissidents and others demanding constitutional democracy and free-market reforms. This process continued, with many variations of course, until the Soviet Union officially dissolved itself in December 1991.

In all three of these cases a crisis situation created an opportunity for a previously marginalized intellectual movement to make a bid for power. But where exactly this leaves us I am not sure. While “Rothbardian Leninism” might seem to be an attractive strategy, the sort of ruthless discipline and party purity it calls for are hardly compatible with the broader liberal project. On the other hand, the liberal revolutionaries of 1848, though a very mixed bunch with different intellectual agendas, were initially able to win some important victories, only to be blindsided by the power of nationalism. The revolutionaries of 1989, while also espousing a wide variety of views and while also being influenced in varying degrees by nationalism, were apparently able to muster some bare minimum of discipline so that they were able to take power during the crisis years of 1989-1991. I wonder where their strategy fits within Dr. Hart’s taxonomy of libertarian resistance and what if anything it has to teach us?

Endnotes

Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 270-71; Robert Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 198-99.

Rapport, p. 36.

The revolution occurred in October 1917 according to the old Julian calendar, corresponding to November in the Gregorian calendar.

Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), p. 35.

M.K.Dziewanowski, A History of Soviet Russia and its Aftermath (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 87.

Archie Brown carefully notes that the “crisis” was “perceived only by a minority of people within the political elite -- those acutely conscious of the long-term lag between the rate of Soviet economic growth and of the technological lag between the Soviet Union and the West … but this was not crisis in the sense that there was significant public unrest.” p. 486.

Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 175; Peter C. Mentzel, “Nationalism, Civil Society, and the Revolution of 1989,” Nations and Nationalism, vol.18, part 4, October 2012, pp. 624-42.

Mike Rapport is one of many writers to note the similarities between the revolutions of 1989 and 1848. An important difference is that many of the leaders of the 1989 revolutions “wanted their revolution to be an ‘anti-revolution’” in the sense that “opposition to communism was not about a violent seizure of power, but rather involved elevating the cultural opposition in civil society to greater importance than the repressive state.” p. 414.

6. Stephen Davies, "Ideas and Strategies" [Posted: March 8, 2015]↩

David Hart’s wide-ranging survey offers much food for thought, not least in the exhaustive survey of both strategies to expand liberty and episodes in history that successfully did so. Several immediate thoughts come to mind, in particular that of how far there was a connection between the two. How many of the movements or events he identifies were clearly motivated by ideas of liberty that had been articulated beforehand and were held by, and inspirational for, the participants and leaders? In some cases, such as antislavery, the connection is clear; in other such. as medieval peasant movements, less so. In this piece I will look at one set of thoughts and questions that arise from the essay, leaving another set (that of the role of ideological entrepreneurship and the use of the analogy drawn from Austrian economics) till later.

Clearly we need to make a distinction between formulating, developing, and articulating ideas on the one hand and having them influence and shape political and social change on the other. The two can be connected but the link is not always straightforward. There is also the major question of the direction of the causal arrow. Was Hayek correct in seeing ideas as the driving force, the motivating or shaping factor that led to social change and gave it a specific direction? Or is it rather, as materialist explanations would have it, that it is changes in material conditions of life that lead to new ideas or reformulations of old ones and which lead to certain kinds of outcome. Perhaps, as many argue, the real answer is a combination of the two in which causation works in both directions and with many feedback loops, some positive, others negative.

David Hart has an extended analysis of what he describes as the production process of ideas. Considering this further can clarify what is involved in the activity of sustaining and developing a comprehensive set of ideas, arguments, and analyses, an ideology if you will. One obvious point is that this kind of intellectual production cannot be done by isolated savants, no matter how brilliant or insightful they may be. Isolated scholars will tend to produce work that is not fully thought out and often eccentric or obscure. Moreover it will generally not achieve purchase upon public discourse or vocabulary. What is needed is a community of scholars and producers of ideas and analysis, of people who conduct a conversation among themselves. This is the real importance of Nock’s idea of organizing and collecting the “Remnant” together, of the work of Pierre Goodrich in creating Liberty Fund, and of Hayek in creating the Mont Pelerin Society. One of the most important aspects of this is the development of rules, norms, and institutions that govern the conversation, and this is often difficult as it has to mean that certain people or modes of argument are excluded.

However the creation and sustaining of this conversation and the community that creates it is only a necessary condition for the successful development of a sound and effective set of ideas. The organized intellectual community (classical-liberal intellectuals in this case) cannot and must not remain a self-conscious remnant. It is vital that they participate in a conversation with the wider academic community as well as among themselves. Moreover, as Hayek argued, they need to communicate with and influence the disseminators of ideas into wider public discourse, the “second-hand dealers in ideas” that he saw as the crucial social group to influence.

Active and effective participation in the general scholarly conversation is hugely important for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that if the aim is for the ideas to have influence, this will not happen if they are ignored. Even hostile responses are better than none. In addition, it is precisely that criticism and challenge that ultimately strengthens the ideology and makes it more robust. Here the crucial work was done by think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs in London and organizations like the Institute for Humane Studies in America, which supported new and established intellectuals and helped them to do good work and get their arguments and ideas taken seriously, even if they were often sharply criticized. The point is not only to refine one’s own ideas but to engage in debate with the dominant orthodoxy, both to challenge it and, more importantly, to ensure that the argument is intellectually robust.

This point bears emphasizing because so many seem to ignore it, not least among classical liberals. The great danger for any intellectual project that aims not only to understand the world but also to change it is that it will fall into what sociologists call “the cultic milieu.” This was a concept first formulated by the British sociologist Colin Campbell in 1972. He and other sociologists observed that people who held one view that deviated from the orthodoxy tended to hold other unorthodox views on matters completely unrelated to their main interest. Thus when socialism was very much an unorthodox view, its adherents were disproportionately likely to also be vegetarians and interested in the occult and cranky or discredited views of history. Today people who have fascist politics are also disproportionately likely to believe that the earth was contacted by aliens or that enormously advanced technologies exist but have been suppressed.

The reason for this, Campbell argued, was the existence of an oppositional subculture where people opposed to different aspects of the conventional way of thinking mingled, exchanged ideas, and organized. The result was that their marginality was intensified. In addition, this phenomenon meant that people who had an initially reasoned dissent from some part of conventional wisdom would come to hold views that were genuinely bizarre or cranky. The best example of this, and the big warning sign that an ideology (or rather its followers) have become part of the cultic milieu, is when many of them come to believe in conspiracy theories or other paranoid accounts of the world. The more self-contained and self-referential an intellectual community becomes, the more likely it is that this will happen, and this is an even greater danger than irrelevance when it comes to having an influence on social development.

The classical liberals who came together after World War II (although the process had begun before the war, with the Colloque Lippman in Paris) managed to avoid this trap for the most part, although it remains a peril. However, as David Hart’s essay points out, the original production of ideas and their refining (scholarly activity) is only the first stage. The ideas then have to be disseminated. This takes three forms. The first is the one alluded to earlier, in which ideas developed by original thinkers are then spread and broadcast by “second-hand dealers in ideas” such as writers, journalists, teachers; in other words by the “chattering classes.” This is the one that classical liberals have followed with some success since Hayek’s original formulation of the idea in the 1940s. It was also historically a matter of great importance. In the history of the spread of liberal ideas in 19th-century Europe and the wider world, the key figures were people like Harriet Martineau or Sydney Smith, who took the ideas of scholars such as Smith and Ricardo and made them widely known and understood. Sometimes original thinkers play both roles -- J. S. Mill was an example of this on the liberal side, while Ruskin and Carlyle can be cited on the opposition -- but this is unusual.

However, there are other aspects of this part of the “production process” in which classical liberals have been arguably less successful since 1945 than their predecessors in the 18th and 19th centuries. The second way that ideas are spread is through organized and systematic propaganda aimed at the mass of the population. Here it is fair to say that all political ideologies have found it harder to effectively spread their views than was the case a hundred years ago. This may seem strange, given that the advent of the mass circulation press in the early 20th century, followed by radio and then television, has made it possible to reach a mass audience in a way that was inconceivable before 1900. However, the nature of these media works against oppositional or critical ideologies. Their very high capital costs (exacerbated by regulation and government controls) mean that access to them is controlled by the dominant social and political groups, which make it difficult for rival perspectives to find expression. (This is often done in an unthinking and unpremeditated way, but that does not affect the reality.) Moreover, the nature of these media, above all television, is that it is hard to put over complex or nuanced arguments, as compared to the media that use print or only the spoken word, and this hampers ideas that are not commonplace. Recently even orthodox or mainstream ways of looking at the world have found it difficult to propagandize effectively because the nature of contemporary mass media is to overwhelm messages with random reporting of trivia (in communications-speak, the signal is drowned out by noise) and to focus on the immediate present at the expense of any kind of longer term perspective. Fortunately we seem to be having a new communications revolution that is undoing this, but classical liberals are only starting to find ways of employing propaganda effectively again.

The third way that ideas developed by scholars are disseminated and absorbed is perhaps the most important. This is through the medium of popular culture and art. This can have a truly profound and transformative effect because of the way it shapes what French historians call the “mentalite collectifs,” the general (often inarticulate) way of understanding and making sense of the world that is shared by the great mass of the population in a given time and place and the commonly understood symbols and allusions that come from this. In the 19th century, liberal ideas came to permeate much popular culture through literature (as for example in the works of Stendahl, Schiller, Manzoni, Victor Hugo, Trollope, and Thackeray), fine art and architecture (most notably in the works of the “Academical School”), and music (notably the work of people such as Beethoven and Verdi). This was not uncontested of course; we can point to figures such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, or Richard Wagner on the other side, but at that time the liberal way of thinking was widespread and influential.

There were certain genres that were particularly important in this regard. One was popular pol