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Article Excerpt
Histories of the Classical Liberal tradition begin with the Stoic philosophers of the Greco-Roman world. Greek political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle focused on the polis or Greek city-state with its small and homogeneous population. This world ended with Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire. With his early death, his generals who were his successors from Egypt and Greece to the Indus River established several empires with large new dries of many populations but with commercial Greek as the common language. The polls was replaced by the cosmos polis--the world city, or the whole world as a single country, cosmopolitan. The Stoic philosophers took the world city as their starting point, that is, a world without distinctions of family origins. Civilized people spoke Greek, but non-Greek speakers were equally part of mankind.
Although people might speak Greek they came from different countries with different legal systems. The Romans, who were very conservative about treasuring their archaic legal system, realized that all the merchants who came to Rome had better commercial concepts. The Roman Republic set up a separate judgeship for the foreign merchants which drew on all the different commercial legal concepts to formulate the most efficient and productive law merchant. The Romans generalized from this and felt that what was common to various law systems indicated a common source of law--a natural law. Cicero's legal writings represented this Stoic philosophy of natural law. This was adopted by the Christian philosophers making it the center of Western European thought, and the foundation for Classical Liberalism.
F. A. Hayek, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is considered the leading classical liberal thinker of the 20th century. His approach might be similar to the Roman jurists. Hayek thought that means which provide happiness and prosperity will be recognized and adopted under freedom, while those which do not will be rejected or lead to failure. He believed that social evolution produces successful social mechanisms while the unsuccessful will die out. Hayek, his mentor, Ludwig yon Mises, and his London School of Economics colleagues, Lord Lionel Robbins or Sir Arnold Plant, or his Chicago colleagues, Milton Friedman, George Stigler or Allen Wallis shared the general approach which Hayek best articulated. Of course, as economists, they were operating only in a positivist and utilitarian framework.
However, there are a number of Classical Liberal scholars who believe, like the Stoics, that it is possible to draw a more general philosophical framework from the nature of humankind. Henry Babcock Veatch was the dean of such philosophers. Fred Miller, director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Doug Rasmussen, Doug Den Uyl, and Tibor Machan are among these Classical Liberal moral philosophers. A major figure was the late Economics Professor Murray N. Rothbard who felt economics was totally true but incomplete. In addition to Man, Economy and State, and Power and Market, Rothbard wrote The Ethics of Liberty.
These scholars are located in the central tradition of Western philosophy established when Aristotle was brought to the University of Paris from the commentaries of the Arabic philosophers. From Thomas Aquinas to Henry Veatch, natural rights has been at the core of moral philosophy and of classical liberalism. Lord Acton named Thomas Aquinas as the first Whig.
The medieval universities arose in and with the re-emergence of European towns. The towns were the centers of trade and manufacture and sought to protect their developing prosperity from the extortion of taxation. There was a struggle for autonomy which resulted in most towns gaining charters which protected their resources through self-government. There was a pamphlet literature at each stage of struggles for autonomy which provides early contributions to political philosophy. The defense of representative institutions against centralizing power provided part of the Classical Liberal legacy.
This defense became more developed as the Reformation Age saw the emergence of absolute rulers who removed constraints by the representative institutions in which diverse religious opinions found expression and protection. England, the Netherlands and Switzerland were the countries in which the executive powers were limited and the representative institutions were able to be maintained. The taxing power was kept in the hands of the representative institutions and thus taxes were low in these countries.
The 17th and 18th centuries were the ones in which English liberties flourished: one monarch was executed, a second went into exile, a republic had been instituted, the Bill of Rights became the constitutional foundation, and the house of commons flourished after German monarchs were installed who preferred to remain in Hanover. France, meanwhile, was spared most of this healthy struggle; in 1614 was the last meeting of the Estates General. The next meeting was one hundred and seventy-five years later when the fiscal crisis of the national debt caused the recall of the Estates General in 1789. That in a nut-shell would be traditional Whig history.
Elizabeth I's forty-five year reign was one of autumnal warmth. Taxes were kept low. There were practically no central government agents around the country. Unlike continental Europe with extensive tax collecting systems and huge bureaucracies to find and hold the taxes, England blissfully invested in farms and sheep ranches, metallurgy and textiles, imports and exports, coastal and overseas trade. France had ten times the number of government officials per person as did England. It would be hard to say which was more beneficial to England, the low taxes or the absence of government inspectors to interfere with productive economic activities. The low taxes meant there was capital to invest in the variety of initiatives available because there were no bureaucrats to prevent enterprise.
This was challenged with the succession to Elizabeth of her nephew, James VI of Scotland, James I of England, son of Mary, Queen of Scots (executed by Elizabeth). In Scotland, James was raised in the theory, if not the practice, of absolute monarchy. Not the least he wished the revenues which continental absolute monarchies could gather. When he could not get tax increases, he would issue grants of monopolies. The grantees of the courtiers would pay up-front and then collect from the consumers who bought their monopolized product.
The parliament in 1601 had condemned the issuing of monopolies as against Magna Charta. Parliament strongly declared monopolies contrary to the ancient and fundamental laws of the realm, and utterly void in 1624. The king forbade parliament to "meddle with the mysteries of state," and he tore out the offending pages of the Journal of the Commons, dissolved parliament, and sent former chief justice Sir Edward Coke and other leaders of Commons to the Tower of London.
Charles I became king in March, 1625, and dissolved two parliaments in the first fifteen months of his reign. In 1628 a third parliament proposed the Petition of Right drawn up by Sir Edward Coke. It denounced illegal taxation, arbitrary imprisonment, billeting of soldiers in homes, and martial law. Charles I dissolved parliament and sought to rule for eleven years without calling parliament and tried to operate on existing taxation. Just as fifteen years earlier the French crown had closed the last Estates General for one hundred and seventy-five years, Charles might have achieved the same goal. Many in England expected that conclusion; some chose to immigrate and the Great Migration to New England began in 1629.
Charles recalled parliament, and it resolved not to be dissolved-the Long Parliament. Parliament defeated and beheaded Charles I. The Commonwealth under Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell meant the maintenance of a large standing army, and thus, heavy taxes. After Cromwell's death the Long Parliament returned to recall Charles II from exile. Charles II did not wish to resume that journey abroad and so tried to minimize exactions.
The 17th Century English political conflict, in particular, is the starting point for modern journalism, and freedom of the press is central to Classical Liberalism. Classical Liberalism's concept is captured best by one of its greatest doyens, Thomas Jefferson: "if one must have a society with government and no newspapers, or with newspapers and no government, only...
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