The Defenders of Liberty

Human Nature, Individualism, and Property Rights

Neema Parvini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030394516
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030394523
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Defenders of Liberty presents a history of economic liberalism from the Renaissance to the present. It chronicles the tradition of thought that sees human nature as social yet self-interested, methodological individualism as its key analytical tool, and property rights as foundational to a civilised society. In the development of this way of thinking, it considers the contributions of many key thinkers including Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Richard Cantillon, A.J.R. Turgot, David Hume, Adam Smith, Nassau William Senior, Richard Cobden, Herbert Spencer, Jean-Baptiste Say, Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, Gaetano Mosca, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Vilfredo Pareto, Phillip Wicksteed, Edwin Cannan, Ludwig von Mises, Lionel Robbins, F.A. Hayek, W.H. Hutt, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Murray N. Rothbard, James M. Buchanan, and Thomas Sowell.

The book contends that liberalism needs to be grounded in realism, and that it has been derailed whenever economists have deviated from an explicitly realist understanding of human nature, individualism and property rights.  It argues that the cause of liberalism was compromised by errors in economic reasoning by such major figures as David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou, and John Maynard Keynes. In diagnosing what has gone wrong for liberalism in the twenty-first century, The Defenders of Liberty argues against substituting mathematical abstraction for causal realism; it opposes interventionist central banking; it seeks to recover economic liberalism from social and political liberalism, which are somewhat unrelated schools of thought; it resists a view of human nature rooted in selfishness or atomised individualism; and finally alerts defenders of freedom to the ruthless but effective language games played by their opponents.

This book will be of interest to the educated general reader as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in disciplines such as economics, political theory and philosophy.

© The Author(s) 2020

N. ParviniThe Defenders of Libertyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39452-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Liberty, Human Nature, Individualism, and Property Rights

Neema Parvini¹

(1)

School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

Neema Parvini

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

LibertyMethodological individualismLiberalismProperty rightsHuman nature

End Abstract

The Importance of Definitions

I write this book at a time when many have been proclaiming the imminent death of liberalism.¹ Critics from the radical left and conservative right have argued that Western liberalism is failing. These writers are certainly correct that something is failing. However, it is not liberalism but social democracy—a movement led by the enemies of liberty that hijacked the term ‘liberalism’ at the turn of the twentieth century²—that is currently in crisis. We have seen the ‘coming slavery’ of which Herbert Spencer warned us in 1884,³ which is why we are currently witnessing a clash between the people and ensconced Bismarckian elites too full of their own hubris to make sense of what might be ailing the plebeians. The collapse of the centre-left vote across Europe should be a strong signal that it is not the free market or the fundamental concepts of individual liberty or property rights that have caused such agitation.⁴ Rather, we are witnessing a revolt against an overbearing and overwhelmingly technocratic regulatory framework that attempts to manage the global economy through central banks and a financial system marked by its extraordinary fragility.⁵ In such a climate, this book aims to reconnect readers with a sense of what liberty really means by tracing the history of the concept in the West from the early 1500s to the present day. In so doing, I aim to define what freedom is, and what it is not. When I use the term ‘liberalism’, I mean it, as Milton Friedman did, ‘in its original meaning’.⁶ The central thesis of this book is that liberty, as it has emerged through centuries of political economy, must be founded on three core pillars: human nature, individualism, and property rights.

The enemies of liberty do not deal in clear definitions or rational argumentation. Instead they deal in obfuscation, doublespeak, and smears; they twist originally accepted definitions beyond recognition; in George Orwell’s terms they deal solely in Newspeak.⁷ The enemies of liberty are the cheerleaders of state control. They are nearly always intellectuals for whom market demand is perennially low. The market is an intrinsically bottom-up phenomenon which no one planned or designed; the intellectuals in their hubris fancy they might be able to do better through their allegedly superior insight. They imagine the economy to be an engineering problem or a puzzle to be solved from the top down. They imagine they can foresee and therefore plan better outcomes for millions of people on their behalf; after all, they are intellectuals, so it stands to reason that they must know better. Peter Saunders summed it up best:

Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them. It does not need them to make it run, to coordinate it, or to redesign it. The intellectual critics of capitalism believe they know what is good for us, but millions of people interacting in the marketplace keep rebuffing them.⁸

Intellectuals have some options artificially to increase their market value. They can gain employment, prestige, and power for themselves as apologists for the current regime; they can present themselves as ostensibly vocal critics of the current regime who end up nonetheless advocating for expanding its possible jurisdiction; or they can become lobbyists for special interest groups.⁹ Joseph A. Schumpeter observed, ‘Intellectuals are in fact people who wield the power of the spoken word and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguishes them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.’¹⁰ Their primary talent is linguistic; they exert control in the flow of information and the dissemination of ideas. The first battle to win is the language game. Therefore, the rest of this chapter is devoted to definitions of the terms of my title: liberty, human nature, individualism, and property rights.

Incidentally, there is one final possible path open to intellectuals, that of discovering and disseminating the truth, despite the possible social and professional costs. This option is taken only by the brave: these are the Defenders of Liberty to whom this book is dedicated. A look at the list of the names I discuss will bear out the extent to which smear tactics have been used by their cowardly and intellectually dishonest opponents. Machiavelli is perhaps the most vilified philosopher of all time, his name becoming synonymous with evil.¹¹ Adam Smith was caricatured as a ‘bourgeois apologist’,¹² when he was nothing of the kind. Herbert Spencer, who despite being one of the greatest thinkers of his day and a bastion of liberty, is now mostly forgotten except as a byword for ‘Social Darwinism’.¹³ Ludwig von Mises, despite being one of the lone voices for freedom in the dark period of totalitarianism that mired the mid-twentieth century, and despite being demonstrably correct in both his socialist calculation problem and in his theory of the business cycle, was dismissed by many at the time as a crank.¹⁴ Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard were attacked as cult leaders (and not always by each other). Thomas Sowell has even been abused on racial grounds as ‘an Uncle Tom’. Yet all of these people and the others I discuss in these pages dared to stick out their necks against the prevailing visions of their respective eras.

Liberty

In discussing liberty for the remainder of this book, I maintain that any sensible definition must fulfil three criteria:

1. 1.
   It must not contradict human nature.
2. 2.
   It must respect the individual as opposed to a collective or group.
3. 3.
   It must protect property rights.

This may seem like a narrow definition of freedom to some, but those people are confusing liberty with a concept that is in many respects its opposite: power.¹⁵ An individual is said to be ‘free’ if left to his or her own devices. Liberty is not, as Patrick J. Deneen seems to think, ‘the agent’s ability to do whatever he likes’.¹⁶ This is a fundamental misunderstanding of liberalism. It is a concept from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform and does what he desires.’¹⁷ Rousseau was a Romantic utopian thinker, and this line of thought has no place in the liberal tradition. As Isaiah Berlin puts it, in a seminal essay, Rousseau’s definition of freedom, later adopted by John Stuart Mill, ‘will not do’.¹⁸ Freedom is hence, as Berlin suggests in that same essay, the absence of coercion or violence. I am free to walk down the street so long as I do not punch you in the face, and vice versa.

Some have called this definition of liberty the ‘non-aggression principle’, which has its origin in this famous passage by John Locke:

The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Liberty, Human Nature, Individualism, and Property Rights
• 2. The Machiavellians
• 3. Hobbes and Locke on Human Nature; Locke on Property Rights
• 4. The Enlightenment
• 5. The Nineteenth Century
• 6. The Austrian School
• 7. The London School
• 8. What Went Wrong and What Is to Be Done?
• Back Matter