A friend of mine has been getting pushback from libertarian readers who dislike his use of the term “liberal” in its modern American meaning. I have nothing against anyone who wants to defend the honor of an older usage, but the history of Anglo-American political ideas is more complicated than my friend’s critics realize.

Not every proto-libertarian in the 19th and early 20th centuries welcomed the liberal label. Albert Jay Nock, for one, blasted an editorial written by his friend Oswald Garrison Villard — editor of The Nation — welcoming Nock’s publication, The Freeman, to the club of “liberal” periodicals:

The Freeman is not a liberal paper; it has no lot or part with liberalism; it has no place in the field of liberal journalism and cannot pretend to seek one. That field, indeed, is so competently served by the Nation itself and by the New Republic that it would be a superfluity, not to say an impertinence, for the editors of this paper to think of invading it. The Freeman is a radical paper; its place is in the virgin field, or better, the long-neglected and fallow field, of American radicalism; its special constituency, if it ever has any, will be what it can find in that field. Hence, readers of the Nation, if ever they do this paper the honor of picking it up, must not be misled by Mr. Villard’s quick and characteristic generosity in bestowing upon it a distinction to which it has no right.

Nock explained the philosophical difference:

The liberal believes that the State is essentially social and is all for improving it by political methods so that it may function accordingly to what he believes to be its original intention. Hence, he is interested in politics, takes them seriously, goes at them hopefully, and believes in them as an instrument of social welfare and progress. He is politically minded, with an incurable interest in reform, putting good men in office, independent administrations, and quite frequently in third-party movements. The liberal forces of the country, for instance, rallied quite conspicuously to Mr. [Theodore] Roosevelt in the good old days of the Progressive party. The liberal believes in the reality and power of political leadership; thus, again, he eagerly took Mr. Wilson on his hands at the last two elections.

The radical, on the other hand, believes that the State is fundamentally antisocial and is all for improving it off the face of the earth; not by blowing up officeholders, as Mr. [Mitchell] Palmer appears to suppose, but by the historical process of strengthening, consolidating and enlightening economic organization. The radical has no substantial interest in politics, and regards all projects of political reform as visionary.

Nock is not playing Humpty Dumpty here, and even before the progressive turn in American liberalism led figures like Villard from strong anti-statism toward domestic inventionism, there were differences between radicals and liberals, though not necessarily differences of the kind Nock limned. The term “radical” had been sometimes annexed to, sometimes in contention with the terms “liberal” and “Whig” in British politics since the late 18th century. If you look up this sense of “radical” in Wikipedia, you’ll see a great deal about electoral reform and the Chartists. Those were signal issues, but it would be a mistake to think of 18th-century radicalism merely as a movement for democracy. It’s conventionally said that Whigs and radicals together made up the new 19th-century Liberal Party, but strains of radicalism distinct from their liberal surroundings remained.

Moreover, the term “liberalism” came to signify something that anti-statists wouldn’t like rather earlier than many of today’s libertarians think. Already in 1884, Herbert Spencer was warning about liberalism becoming the “New Toryism.” In a note added when the essay was collected, he remarked that while the old Tories were still bad, he could imagine liberals and conservatives (Tories) switching places entirely some time in the future:

A new species of Tory may arise without disappearance of the original species. When saying, as on page 16, that in our days “Conservatives and Liberals vie with one another in multiplying” interferences, I clearly implied the belief that while Liberals have taken to coercive legislation, Conservatives have not abandoned it. Nevertheless, it is true that the laws made by Liberals are so greatly increasing the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens, that among Conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness there is growing up a tendency to resist it. Proof is furnished by the fact that the “Liberty and Property Defense League,” largely consisting of Conservatives, has taken for its motto “Individualism versus Socialism.” So that if the present drift of things continues, it may by and by really happen that the Tories will be defenders of liberties which the Liberals, in pursuit of what they think popular welfare, trample under foot.

But it’s not even the case that Whig and Tory — to the extent they can even be taken as precursors to liberal and conservative, a complicated and controversial question in its own right — were stable terms in the 18th century. Spencer cites Lord Bolingbroke’s characterization of what those terms originally meant:

The power and majesty of the people, an original contract, the authority and independency of Parliament, liberty, resistance, exclusion, abdication, deposition; these were ideas associated, at that time, to the idea of a Whig, and supposed by every Whig to be incommunicable, and inconsistent with the idea of a Tory.

Divine, hereditary, indefeasible right, lineal succession, passive-obedience, prerogative, non-resistance, slavery, nay and sometimes property too, were associated in many minds to the idea of a Tory, and deemed incommunicable and inconsistent in the same manner, with the idea of a Whig.

Spencer uses these lines as evidence that this is what old Whigs and Tories really did stand for, though the Tory Bolingbroke’s language is carefully hedged — these are the meanings commonly “associated” with the terms up to Bolingbroke’s time. And Bolingbroke goes on to say that in his day whatever older significance the terms had, they had now been changed:

These associations are broken; these distinct sets of ideas are shuffled out of their order; new combinations force themselves upon us; and it would actually be as absurd to impute to the Tories the principles, which were laid to their charge formerly, as it would be to ascribe to the projector and his faction the name of Whigs, whilst they daily forfeit that character by their actions. The bulk of both parties are really united; united on principles of liberty, in opposition to an obscure remnant of one party, who disown those principles, and a mercenary detachment from the other, who betray them.

The important distinction for Bolingbroke in 1733 is not between old Whigs and Tories, but between what he calls the Court Party and the Country Party — both of which include both Whigs and Tories of different kinds.

We could plunge deep into British history from here. Instead, I’ll make two general points: first, while there is a genealogical connection between Whiggism, liberalism, and libertarianism, the bloodlines are hardly unmixed or without bastards in each generation; and second, there is a recurrent problem when a faction that professes to be the party of liberty, whether it calls itself liberal or conservative or something else, takes control of the state and then comes to be opposed by another faction that claims to speak for liberty. For a time, the new faction can assert itself to be the true Whigs or real liberals, but pretty soon the confusion that results creates a pressure for a change of names. At that point, the new anti-statists might lay claim to an old label, such as conservative, or invent a new one, such as libertarian. Famously, when Friedrich Hayek was confronted by a situation in which “liberal” had been appropriated by social democrats and “conservative” had been taken by Russell Kirk, he tried to recover the “Old Whig” persona, but that didn’t catch on.

Whether attempts to reclaim the word “liberal” will catch on is an open question. As the essays by Spencer and Bolingbroke show, there is always a struggle to conceptualize the history and language of faction.

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My note on @TAC about Reagan’s centenary already links to my review of William F. Buckley Jr.’s The Reagan I Knew. Here I’ll also tout my review of John Patrick Diggins’s Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, a piece that ran in Reason a few years back. Here’s a preview:

There’s a good deal of irony in the contrast between the free-spending “conservative” Reagan and the frugal “liberal” Jimmy Carter, who as Diggins rightly notes “was as antistatist as Reagan” and accomplished much of the federal deregulation—removing entry barriers in air travel, trucking, and other fields—for which Reagan would sometimes receive credit. While both the left and the right have made Reagan out to be a great scourge of government power, Diggins demonstrates that the president’s rhetoric was more anti-statist than his actions. Reagan’s conservatism, too, was not what his admirers and detractors often claimed that it was; the religious right flourished in the 1980s, but Reagan—a divorced, socially tolerant movie star—hardly embodied it. Both Carter and Reagan’s successor as governor of California, the former seminarian Jerry Brown, were much more traditionally Christian (and more fiscally parsimonious) than Reagan, who “opened the American mind to optimism and innocence, leaving it closed to sin and experience.” Reagan, a believer but not much of a churchgoer, “seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice.”

Read on.

A reader on @TAC thinks I’m too kind to Reagan in the Buckley review. The litany of bad policies and personnel choices under Reagan is lengthy: the federal government grew and the executive branch became more secretive and less accountable; the neoconservatives gained a permanent foothold in the GOP; Reagan’s judicial appointments were often flawed; the U.S. pulled out of Lebanon but became more enmeshed in Third World proxy warfare; the drug war escalated; etc. For the case against Reagan, see Murray Rothbard, as well as Peter Hitchens’s TAC review of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

On the other hand, while conservative movement hacks regularly overestimate Reagan’s contribution to the end of the Cold War, his critics continue to underestimate that contribution. A relative of mine who was no admirer of Reagan interacted with Eastern Europeans quite a bit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Poles and Czechs and East Germans certainly did feel a debt to Reagan, even to the point of naming their children after him. He was the first American president in a generation who did not equivocate about the evils of socialism and the Soviet empire. The nations of what had traditionally been Central Europe had seen their sovereignty signed away by Roosevelt and Truman at the Yalta and Potsdam conference. Reagan seemed to repudiate those concessions.

He did so without starting World War III or, what was a greater risk, eliciting a Soviet crackdown. He took fire from the neoconservatives and movement cons for his negotiations with Gorbachev — which were not always as friendly as they are popularly remembered as being — but Reagan successfully de-escalated the Cold War in Europe while giving moral support to the captive nations. That Reagan did both of these things is astonishing: had anyone else been in office, the one should have undermined the other. Think of Gerald Ford asserting in debate with Jimmy Carter, “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Republicans could, as Nixon did, “go to China,” but in doing so they appeared to be surrendering the moral high ground. Reagan was firm and flexible in exactly the right proportion, and it was no accident. He genuinely believed that communism was evil — a term that doesn’t carry much weight in realpolitik — and he genuinely believed that people longed to be free and were basically good. The former was a conservative belief, the latter a liberal one. Both proved to be indispensable at the moment when he was president. (I should note, by the way, that Peter Hitchens’s piece in the March 2011 issue of The American Conservative is essential reading, especially for those who think that history had a simple happy ending once the Soviet empire fell — the corruption and post-communist forms of despotism that took root throughout much of the former USSR after 1991 attest to the darker side of history.)

At home as well, Reagan accomplished an historical remoralization — not in the sense of renewing morality, but in restoring morale. That has entailed a mixed legacy: Americans, especially conservatives, began to reaffirm markets over Great Society (if not New Deal) planned and the country became more entrepreneurial. We entered a new era, one in which the dominant political tones would be those of neo-liberal economics. Cutting taxes and growing the economy came to take precedence over creating new government services — at least, rhetorically they did. In practice, Leviathan continue to grow during Reagan’s years and afterward, and new kinds of economic insanity flourished, above all the now pathological Republican belief that economic growth is a freedom-preserving panacea. Reagan was not, in fact, as much of a neo-liberal as his epigones — as Jeff Riggenbach has pointed out, he was actually more of a protectionist than the presidents on either side of him. But even if Reagan’s policies had a Buchananite tinge to them, the worldview that predominated on the right after the Reagan era was one of free-trade agreements and open borders. And beneath this neo-liberal veneer, neo-imperial foreign-policy views proliferated, thanks to the neoconservatives that Reagan brought to government and to the exceptionalist and democratist rhetoric Reagan himself employed. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Reagan also had Buchanan and other traditional conservatives in his administration. The president hardly handed power directly to the neoconservatives.

Reagan’s foreign policy in Europe and toward the USSR was a success of world-historical proportions — again, not because he brought down the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union, but because he encouraged the Europeans who did tear down the wall, and he avoided the grandiose military-strategic blunders of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (as well as Bush, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama). His foreign policy elsewhere was mixed, but again not catastrophic, which is actually saying a lot. At home, his policies were also mixed and he sowed seeds that would bear terrible fruit in the Great Recession. Letting those seeds grow into entangling weeds, though, is something for which Clinton and Bush II deserve more reproach. Reagan was the right man for his time and place; the trouble is that once he had left office his Emersonian optimism was turned into a hard and cynical neo-liberal statism by his successors, both on the right and in the Oval Office.

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Samuel Huntington’s “Conservatism as an Ideology” is still a pretty good roadmap to how conservatism is conceptualized in the United States. There are basically three approaches: one roots conservatism in the specific circumstances — the class structures and institutions — of Europe’s ancien regime; a second attaches conservatism to natural law or some other transcendent concept; and a third, which Samuelson finds most analytically useful, considers conservatism as a positional ideology remade by new radicalisms as they emerge. For Huntington, there’s nothing paradoxical about the last generation’s liberals becoming this generation’s conservatives. (The regularity with which defecting liberals or radicals have supplied the sharpest pens on the American Right suggests there’s something to this thesis.)

Conservatism understood as something intimately connected to feudal institutions poses a difficulty for the American Right, in that it’s conventionally thought that America didn’t have a feudal past. (Robert Nisbet challenges that notion in “The Social Impact of the Revolution.”) But a historically grounded American conservatism does not have to locate itself in European history. There are American traditions, and those traditions are worth conserving, even if they aren’t what textbook traditionalists, taking their inspiration from Europe, consider to be authentically conservative. Caleb Stegall makes this point very well in this post on Front Porch Republic. Caleb would perhaps go farther than I would in finding something conservative about Emerson or Thoreau, but there’s no doubting that there’s something characteristically American about them. Certainly Ronald Reagan thought so, as John Patrick Diggins showed.

(An earlier Diggins book, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism, tackles the problem in an interesting way: he contradicts those who say that America doesn’t have strongly Lockean inclinations, but he argues that those leanings were once restrained and refined by Calvinist tradition, which has since slipped away.)

What can you conserve in a New World where men have no past — where there are “keine verfallenen Schlösser / und keine Basalte”? If “feudal” ideas and institutions are really so important elsewhere, won’t America suffer for their absence? On the other hand, as Willmoore Kendall asked, what kind of conservative “takes a dim view of his country’s established institutions, feels something less than at home with its way of life as it actually lives it, [and] finds it difficult to identify himself with the political and moral principles on which it has acted through its history”? These are questions that serious traditionalists should wrestle with. Stegall, as well as Patrick Deneen and others writing at FPR, have addressed a question that needs careful exploration, even — or especially — if it makes neoconservatives and Mr. Peanut traditionalists uncomfortable.

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“David Hume and the Conservative Tradition,” by Donald Livingston, makes a compelling case for the Scotsman as the lodestone of anti-ideological conservatism. It also reminds us that “American” exceptionalism has sources across the Atlantic:

Hume was at odds with the Whig establishment of his time, which subscribed to the contract theory of government (a form of false philosophy) and “ancient constitutionalism” (a false history). The latter taught that liberty is a unique possession of the English national character due to an unchanged constitution stretching back to the Saxon forests. Hume thought this history nourished a chauvinistic and aggressive English nationalism that threatened liberty, and he wrote The History of England largely to refute it. He showed that there had been at least four distinct constitutions in English history and that each was more the result of unintended consequences and contingencies than of efforts to defend any pre-existing, “ancient” constitution.

Even today, of course, many exponents of American exceptionalism are believers in ye olde English exceptionalism as well — to which George Gilder would add Israeli exceptionalism as well. Hume and Livingston are good antidotes to such nonsense.

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About two years ago I was asked to contribute to a volume of essays on seminal 20th-century American conservative thinkers. My assignment was Willmoore Kendall, the “wild Yale don” (as Dwight Macdonald called him) known, among other things, for his defiantly populist commitment to majority rule. When Bill Buckley quipped that he’d rather be ruled by the first 400 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard, he was channeling his friend and preceptor Kendall.

The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, which includes my Kendall essay, will be out next month from the University of Kentucky Press. Meanwhile, out now from the Mises Institute is Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard, which features Rothbard’s take on Kendall (along with such other notable figures as Charles A. Beard, George Kennan, and Eric Voegelin). As one might expect, Rothbard does not find Kendall’s ideas congenial: on the contrary, as Rothbard sees things, “Kendall has set forth the philosophy of tyranny cogently” and “the Kendallian doctrine is the Enemy.”

The Kendall material in Strictly Confidential comes from a 1956 report Rothbard wrote on the Yale professor’s Buck Hills Falls lectures, which previewed many themes that would subsequently be worked out in The Conservative Affirmation and various Kendall essays. Rothbard tends to agree with Kendall’s criticism of government by experts, which Kendall sees as characteristic of modern liberalism, but he is utterly opposed Kendall’s alternative, an unbridled majority rule — indeed, something that could be called majoritarian dictatorship. Rothbard considers Kendall’s thought to be even more antithetical to libertarianism than the ideas of Russell Kirk and the “New Conservatives” of the 1950s:

Kirk is the philosopher of old pre–Industrial Revolution, High Anglican England, the land of the squire, the Church, the happy peasant, and the aristocratic bureaucratic caste. He is essentially and basically antidemocratic. Kendall, on the contrary, is, as I have said, the patron of the lynch mob—he is an ur-democrat, a Jacobin impatient of any restraints on his beloved community. He hates bureaucracy, but not as we do, because it is tyrannical; he hates it because it has usurped control from the popular masses. He is the sort of person whom the [Clinton] Rossiter-[Peter] Viereck “new conservatives” are combating, for they are trying to defend the existent rule of the leftist bureaucracy against any populist mass upheaval. So they—the leftists—have shifted from mob whippers to soothing conservatives.

Kendall not only argues that a majority should get its way in politics; he goes so far as to argue that the Athenian public was right to condemn Socrates to death, indeed it had a duty to do so, for the alternative would have been either to accept Socrates’ teachings (which the Athenians were not prepared to do) or to treat the fundamental questions that Socrates raised as matters of indifference. Rothbard’s criticism extends Kendall’s doctrine ad absurdum, arguing that any innovation that would change a community must, on Kendall’s account, be forbidden by the majority. Otherwise the community would be surrendering its own identity to a subversive element.

How fair is all of this? Kendall was certainly no libertarian. But he was not the totalitarian that one might think from some of his more provocative statements. Rothbard does not draw out the connection between what he finds agreeable in Kendall — the criticism of modern liberalism as a covert form of domination over the public by an ideological elite — and the majoritarianism he finds objectionable. For Kendall, political power is a given; whatever scruples anyone might have about the use of force, and whatever written laws may be in place, ultimately somebody is holding a sword. Modern liberalism is not the tolerant, peaceful thing it claims to be because its political order is still based on conformity and force; the sword is wielded by a expert class that disguises its dominance over everyone else with empty language about rights. (To the extent that anyone actually believes that language, even within the expert class, they are putting their own necks under the sword’s edge.)

Various political thinkers have argued that different classes, castes, or factions should wield the sword. Kendall, however, sees a straightforward categorical division: either the majority wields the sword, or some minority, a special interest of some sort, wields it. Kendall, following his interpretation of Locke and the American political system, believes that the majority should wield power. (Later, Kendall’s views will become more complex: he continues to hew to majoritarianism, but he becomes critical of Locke and draws a distinction between different kinds of majority rule — a bad, plebiscitary kind, and a good, structured kind that he identifies with the best parts of the American tradition.)

Kendall would see Rothbard’s idea that everyone should adhere to a framework of liberty derived from property rights (including self-ownership) as irrelevant to political theory. Kendall also might not like the Rothbardian credo, but his personal preferences can be separated from his philosophy, and it seems to me the more important Kendallian philosophical point is that no ideology of rights or rearrangement of institutions eradicates power from human life. In a Kendallian view, Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism can just as fairly be called a dictatorship of the property owners as Kendall’s majoritarianism can be called a dictatorship of the majority. The “dictator” in either system need not be sadist; indeed, he could be an enlightened despot, full of the milk of human kindness and absolutely determined to harm no one. But ultimately someone is holding the sword, and it is the sword-holder’s disposition that determines how much liberty or license other people may have. Kendall is not totally indifferent to liberty: he does, however, believe that ordinary people will have the best judgment of what liberty should mean and that ordinary people as a whole will tend to have less tyrannical impulses than any minority faction.

In this, Kendall more or less explicitly affirms what he considers to be John Locke’s “latent premise” — Locke can be a majoritarian and a believer in natural rights, according to Kendall in John Locke and the Doctrine Of Majority-Rule, because he tacitly assumes that the majority can be trusted to abide by those rights. Kendall and Rothbard are both Lockeans — even the later Kendall, who repudiates Locke himself, still retains some “Lockean” characteristics — but of very different species: Rothbard emphasizes a natural-rights Locke, Kendall a majoritarian Locke.

There are plenty of problems with majoritarianism, beginning with the question of just how “majoritarian” it actually is. Isn’t talk about majority rule just a disguise for rule by another kind of elite, much as talk about human rights and tolerance is? I don’t recall Kendall tackling this question head on, but I suspect that beyond whatever confidence he puts in democratic political machinery (which was sometimes quite a bit, especially where the U.S. Constitution was concerned), he might also see a strong cultural component in the desire and ability of a government to express the popular will. His interest in Rousseau (who seems also to have such a thing in mind) suggests as much. (Kendall translated and wrote introduction for The Social Contract and The Government of Poland.) In any case, there is plenty of cause for skepticism about the merits of majority rule, but it’s worth keeping an open mind about whether Kendall’s absolute majoritarianism is as incompatible with broad view of liberty as Rothbard thought.

An anarcho-capitalist society, after all, might well decide not to tolerate communists proselytizing on private property. (And if there is no public property, that means not tolerating communist speech at all.) Indeed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe insists on this point in Democracy: The God That Failed:

As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of continued nonconformity, exclude and ultimately expel these members from society. In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.

Thomas Jefferson, of course, notoriously wanted to ban certain Tory books, including Hume’s History of England, from the University of Virginia’s libraries. The point I would make is that in any community, whether democratic or anarcho-capitalist or what have you, somebody is going to be drawing lines dividing permissible opinions from speech acts that endanger the society order. One might choose to be far more latitudinarian than Kendall, Hoppe, or Jefferson, but don’t confuse latitudinarianism with the belief that one’s own limits upon expression aren’t really limits at all. Liberals, Kendall and Rothbard would agree, say they are committed to complete free speech when in practice they are not; but more than that, even someone who sincerely believes in total expressive freedom has probably just failed to recognize his own innate beliefs about where limits should be drawn.

The question of what limits should exist is both distinct from and intimately connected to the question of who should rule. Only the “ruler,” in the abstract, is able to establish the limits (and the conversely the freedoms) that he wants to see in society. The questions that Kendall raises, and the sometimes extreme form in which he poses them, should be helpful to anyone who wants to think seriously about political philosophy. They are questions that even a Rothbardian must confront, even if the answers he comes up with are very different from Kendall’s.

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