The wishful thinking of the ‘Classical Liberal’ label

The wishful thinking of the ‘Classical Liberal’ label

So now with the preceding posts in mind, let’s move onto a label which many in my no-label-to-call-home position tend to gravitate towards, as I once did, with thinking that ‘Classical Liberal’ is the right fit.

At first glance it does seem to be a very nice fit, at least in the sense of what most people imagine that ‘Classical Liberalism’ refers to, as being all about respecting sound science, valuing individual rights, property rights, liberty, free markets, and appreciating our Founders’ era as the culmination of the greatest period of actual societal progress in a thousand years, as noted by people like James Lindsay, and @ClassicLibera12 (but in a good way). That period, after all, succeeded in binding governmental power down with the constraints of constitutional law, for the purpose of upholding & preserving justice and liberty for every individual, and their putting those ideas into practice is what enabled the prosperous fruits of political economy (see Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat) to be enjoyed by all, and made the life-saving and enhancing scientific and technological progress we enjoy today possible.

What’s not to like in something so admirable, right?

Well… just the fact that it’s not true that ‘Classical Liberalism’ refers specifically to that.

What? Nope. ‘Classical Liberalism‘ refers to those ideas generated across a period of time that extends roughly from the early 1600s to the mid 1800s, and spans thinkers as poles apart as Hobbes and Locke, Descartes and Thomas Reid, Rousseau and our Founding Fathers, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and produced such radically contradictory ideas as range from Natural Law (which our constitution was derived from), to Positivist Law (which the administrative state depends upon).

So you tell me, if that’s the case – and it is – how does identifying as a ‘Classical Liberal’ actually identify only the popular sense of it that I agree with, or even identify any one aspect of it?

“But Van, ‘Classical Liberalism’ just refers to the culmination of that period of thought!”, and I initially assumed that to be the case as well, but that period we value was not the culminating point of the ‘Classical Liberal’ period. Following the close of our Founders’ era, there was still at least a half-century more to go in the span of time which the term refers to, and those ideas and doctrines which seek to undo and repeal the real progress that was made during our Founders’ era, came to prominence during that closing period and that is what those who revile what we revere, cite as being the culmination of ‘Classical Liberal’ thinking, and it’s from that standpoint that they roll their eyes at what we value, as being naive and undeveloped. And so, worse than the term not identifying anything clearly, by promoting the label of ‘Classical Liberalism’, we assist our opposition in misidentifying, misleading, and subverting, the very ideas which those of us with no-label-to-call-home, value most.

A quick look at the timeline of what we’re considering here, is in order. The period typically referred to, opened up with Sir Francis Bacon (‘knowledge is power’, or so his secretary Hobbes tells us), and began to hit its stride as the Science of Issac Newton lit up popular imagination and the political philosophy of John Locke’s Two Discourses on Civil Government which put that spirit into words. Not long afterwards the Scottish Enlightenment (which itself spans such irreconcilable philosophical poles as David Hume & Thomas Reid), ushered in Adam Smith’s Political Economy, and culminated politically with our Founders’ Era in the last quarter of the 1700s, which brought the Free Market to its high point with the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s.

That period which began immediately after our Founders era and carried ‘Classical Liberalism’ forward roughly from the1820s to its close in the 1850s, while benefitting from the prosperous effects of a nearly Free Market that were clearly seen by all, began undermining the ideas that had made that prosperity possible, through a new set of ideas in philosophy & academia, whose implications went mostly unseen by the public. Behind the scenes of the financial pages, the intellectual current was being turned against the tide of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West, by drawing heavily upon the thinking of Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Comte, etc., and the period became dominated by the ‘classical economists’ such as J.S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. As they promoted the philosophically corrosive schools of German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Hegel), it saw the advent of the ‘Social Sciences’, and the ‘new’ (old authoritarianism rebranded) theories of Positivist law, that were the anti-thesis to the Natural Law that our Constitution was derived from.

It was with that altered telos, new direction, and with those ‘new’ ideas in hand, that the latter ‘Classical Liberals’ progressively transformed the reality based liberalism and SCSR (Scottish Common Sense Realism) of our Founder’s era, into an idealistic form of illiberalism, which actively sought to disrupt that earlier framework of philosophy, education, and political economy, which had made the real progress of our Founders’ era possible. Worse still, those involved, who reviled the ideals that we value, were promoting these new ideas by using the same terms that were common to both periods (you’ve heard the phrase “They shared their vocabulary, but not their dictionary“, which when done intentionally, is now called Semantic Deception), so that words that were spelled the same – words like Liberty, Education, Progress – were being used to convey very different meanings & purposes between those ‘in the know’, which gave cover to the regressive movements which they desired, and which they called ‘progress!’.

Perhaps the most consequential product of the latter period of ‘Classical Liberalism’, was the new field of ‘Economics’, which was the lovechild of proponents of Positivist Law and the Social Sciences, through their shared fondness for Marxism and Fabian Socialism. Those latter day ‘Classical Liberals’, and especially the ‘Classical Economists’, aggressively promoted the rise of their new field, and by as early as 1900 it had rapidly risen to eclipse all serious references and concerns for the Political Economy of our Founders’ era and enabled them to usher modern Socialism & Communism onto the world stage, as the respectable and welcomed heir to ‘Classical Liberalism’.

Do you see my problem with the label? To expect that a term which applies to such a wide span of time, and which contains such a contradictory range of ideas, to bring to mind only that particular subset of ideas and positions which were reflected in the founding of America, is counting on far too many questions not being asked, by people who are often unable or even piously unwilling to identify what is real and true, in the name of what they think of as being ‘Classical Liberalism’

What results from that is worse than being only a distraction, as it enables far worse to go forward under cover of the same heading, and I suspect that academics, the press, politicians, and crony-capitalists alike, secretly rub their hands in glee, whenever we profess ourselves to be ‘Classical Liberals’.

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