10-11-2024, 08:46 AM
Mises Wire
Ryan McMaken
10/10/2024
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the Albuquerque Mises Circle in New Mexico, September 14, 2024. Listen to an audio version, here.
Throughout its history, liberalism—the ideology today called “classical liberalism” or “libertarianism”—has suffered from the impression that it is primarily against things. This is not entirely wrong. Historically, liberalism coalesced as a recognizable ideology in opposition largely to mercantilism and absolutism throughout western Europe. Over time, this opposition extended to socialism, protectionism, imperialism, aggressive warfare, and slavery as well. In this regard, liberals have for centuries fought against a wide array of moral and economic evils that spread poverty, injustice, and misery.
Being “against” things, however, has never been sufficient in itself, and liberals have never contented themselves with being so. Liberalism, of course, has long been closely associated with so-called “bourgeois” values, private property, local self-determination, and—in spite of claims to the contrary—religious institutions. Today, however, these institutions that have long under-girded liberalism and the free society are in an advanced state of decay. These are the institutions that have made society and civic life possible without state control.
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