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The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of Classical Liberalism, Part 3: The 20th Century

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The First World War was the watershed of the twentieth century. Itself the product of antiliberal ideas and policies, such as militarism and protectionism, the Great War fostered statism in every form. In Europe and America, the trend towards state intervention accelerated, as governments conscripted, censored, inflated, ran up mountains of debts, co-opted business and labor, and seized control of the economy. Everywhere "progressive" intellectuals saw their dreams coming true. Thee old laissez-faire liberalism was dead, they gloated, and the future belonged to collectivism. The only question seemed to be: which kind of collectivism? In Russia, the chaos of the war permitted a small group of Marxist revolutionaries to grab power and establish a field headquarters for world revolution. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx had concocted a secular religion with a potent appeal. It held out the promise of the final liberation of man through replacing the complex, often baffling ...

Individual Liberty and Civil Society

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In 1819, the French classical liberal, Benjamin Constant, delivered a lecture in Paris entitled, "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Modems." He drew his audience's attention to the fact that in the world of ancient Greece, "the aim of the ancients was the sharing of power among the citizens of the fatherland: this is what they called liberty. the citizen, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations. As a citizen, he decided peace and war, as a private individual, he was constrained, watched and repressed in all his movements; as a member of the collective body, he interrogated, dismissed, condemned, beggared, exiled, or sentenced to death his magistrates and superiors; as a subject of the collective body he could be deprived of his status, stripped of his privileges, banished, put to death, by the discretionary will of the whole to which he belonged.... The ancients, as ...

Social Conflict, Self-Determination, and the Boundaries of the State

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For the advocate of classical or market liberalism, the depoliticization of economic life is considered the primary avenue for the diminishment of social and cultural tensions in society. The removal of the state from all involvement in market activities, other than as protector of life and property and legal arbiter of interpersonal disputes, means that political power may not be used to benefit any in the society at the expense of others. In the free-market society, all human relationships are based on voluntary agreement and mutual benefit. Individuals can be neither compelled to nor prohibited from trading with any others in the society. Every citizen in the classical-liberal society may freely compete in any line of endeavor in which he chooses to try his hand; his success or failure will depend upon whether those to ...

Going Postal: A Libertarian Tradition

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BENJAMIN TUCKER, editor of Liberty (1881–1908) and the prototypical 19th-century radical libertarian, constantly experimented with strategies to educate people away from government. He particularly delighted in anti-government stickers, which he declared to be “highly useful” because of their cheapness and versatility. The stickers were “invented” by Steven T. Byington, who also translated Max Stirner’s Ego and His Own, and ...