1. The European Miracle

Ralph Raico covers classical liberalism’s growth, development and possible future. Liberalism arose in Europe entwined with Christianity. Why Europe? The East lacked the idea of freedom from the state and never established the legal system that could protect wealth. Europe had multiple, decentralized competing powers, not a universal empire. Europe came into existence in the Middle Ages. The contractual relationship between princes and subjects was similar to the Magna Carta. The Middle Ages [5th to the 15th century] were not dark ages. The sign of a freeman was that he had the right to keep and bear arms. The powerful, international Church of Rome was the strong institution that acted as a counterweight to secular power. It was the largest property owner in Europe and concerned about taxation. Lecture 1 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty. Transcript [This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. The Q and A at the end of the lecture has been omitted. Annotations have been added by Ryan McMaken.] This week, my subject is going to be history as a struggle for liberty. This conception of history, what history is, goes back to Lord Acton, a famous nineteenth-century historian who spent all his life accumulating notes and materials for what would be thought a great history of liberty—the greatest book never written, people say. Nonetheless, Acton wrote many essays on the subject and he’s a historian well worth consulting. What I’m going to be discussing this week is classical liberalism. I might slip and just call it liberalism from time to time, but you’ll understand what I’m saying. We’ll be discussing its growth, its development, and finally, I’ll say something about the possible future of liberalism. Now, the history of classical liberalism is intertwined in the history of Europe and its outposts, especially America. Europe has sometimes been defined as extending from Warsaw to San Francisco—and one might amiably throw in also Vancouver and Melbourne. Some people would consider this a very Eurocentric kind of approach. Well, so is the history of modern science Eurocentric. The story that I’m going to be outlining will serve as an antidote to what some of you, at least, have experienced in your high schools and colleges and that is the demonization of Europe and Europeans as mass genocidal murderers and imperialist exploiters. If you doubt that this is standard in American education today, then you can read the works of Alan Kors, a Professor at The University of Pennsylvania who has specialized in this. He is a great scholar of France and the French enlightenment otherwise, but has made it a point to detail how this demonization takes place through sensitivity training and many other respects.Paula Reid “History prof Alan Charles Kors Critiques universities' political correctness,” The Daily Pennsylvanian (Philadelphia),  March 24, 2009. https://www.thedp.com/article/2009/03/history_prof_alan_charles_kors_critiques_universities_political_correctness  Now, of this view of the Europeans as genocidal murderers and demons and so on, much could be said. I’m not going to go into any great detail. The first thing that comes to mind is that Europeans, like everybody else, are subject to original sin and have a proclivity to temptation of putting their own perceived self-interests above others to any extent that they feel necessary. Another thing that could be said is that power corrupts, as Acton famously said. In the modern period, it’s Europeans who had the power. It would be interesting to see what would have happened if it had been the Aztecs— Aztecs famous for their ritual murders and cannibalism—who landed in Spain rather than the other way around and what scenes we would have witnessed. Finally, I want to say that there were Europeans who opposed those various crimes of the men of power in their own countries and among them—among the most prominent—were the classical liberals that we’ll be talking about this week. What Made Europe Different Now, the first thing to say about liberalism is that it arose in Europe, specifically in western Christendom. This is the Europe that grew up in communion with the Bishop of Rome, at one time or another, so that the history of Europe and the history of liberalism, are intimately intertwined. The question of why this should be the case has given rise to an enormous literature. This approach to trying to find out why Europe was different, why Europe was distinctive, is sometimes called the institutional approach of economic historians. This phenomenon could be called “the European miracle,” after the title of a book by one of the major authors of this approach, E.L. Jones, the Australian economic historian.See E.L. Jones, The European Miracle:Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, U.K.: Ca