Liberty is liberty, and is meaningless by parts.

Dierdre McCloskey at her best. Ready wit topping a mountain of knowledge and insight. From An Interview with Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, UIC by Eric Wallach.

I am slowly making my way through her Bourgeois trilogy. Slowly because nearly every paragraph requires thought and digestion. There is no surfing on froth in her work.

Selections.

The Yale Politic: According to Bourgeois Equality, the average U.S. resident’s real income per head increased from $3/day in 1800 to $132/day in 2010– an increase of 44x. You attribute this ‘betterment’ to the ideas of dignity and liberty. What do you mean more concretely?

Deirdre McCloskey: It’s not exactly “according to [that excellent volume of 2016] Bourgeois Equality.” It’s rather “according to the solid scientific consensus of economic historians.” Concretely I mean that the bizarre 18th-century idea of liberalism—which is the theory of a society composed entirely of free people, liberi, and no slaves—gave ordinary people the notion that they could have a go. And go they did. In the earliest if hesitatingly liberal societies such as Britain and France, and among the liberi in societies still fully dominated by traditional hierarchies such as Russia and much of Italy, or the slave states of the United States, the turn of the 19th century saw a sharp rise of innovation. “Innovation” means new ideas in technology and organization and location, ranging from the electric motor to shipping containers to opening a new hairdressing salon in town, or to moving to Chicago away from Jim Crow and sharecropping. Since 1800, with no believable signs of letting up, it has improved the material lives of the poorest among us by startling percentages—4,300 percent in some places (that factor of 44), or 10,000 percent including improvements in quality, or at worst 1,000 percent worldwide by conventional measures including stagnant places, in a world in which rises of 100 percent had been rare and on Malthusian grounds temporary.

I recently read that the term ‘liberalism’ only acquired political significance in 1769 (when Scottish historian William Robertson published The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V). What exactly do you take to be the essential features of ‘liberalism?’

The idea is earlier than 1769, if not the very word. Yet as you say in the 1770s it springs to political life. The ur-liberals were Locke and Voltaire and Turgot, and behind them earlier, executed radicals such as Spartacus in 71 BCE or the Lollard Priest John Ball in 1381 (“When Adam delved and Eve span / Who then was the gentleman?”) or the Leveller Richard Rumbold in 1685 (“I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him”). No slaves, whether private or public.

Besides possible misjudgment as to liberalism’s prudence–as a political philosophy/guide to public policy–do you think there are any common misconceptions about what liberalism actually is and what its followers believe?

The central misconception is to think that one can claim the honorable title of “liberal” if one approves of one form of liberty, such as mutual consent in sexual partners or the ability to drill for oil where you wish, but excludes the other form. Liberty is liberty, and is meaningless by parts. You are still a slave if only on odd days of the month.

A reminder to the New York Times and all such pits of ignorance that slavery was a worldwide condition and the classical liberalism reflected in the American Revolution was the beginning of freedom, not an original sin.

The British Liberal Party passed the Liberal welfare reforms in 1906, greatly expanding the welfare state and representing a departure from classical liberalism in favor of modern liberalism. If my history is correct, what do you view as the fundamental differences between these two philosophies? Do you still consider the latter philosophy ‘liberal?’

Yes, the so-called New Liberalism was slow socialism, as was an American Progressivism recommending the sterilization of defectives to improve the Aryan race and a minimum wage to drive non-Aryan immigrants out of the labor force, not to speak of carrying a big stick and joining a war to end all wars. The slow socialism took longer to implement than the fast versions in Bolshevism and Nazism. It was pushed along by the taking of powers by governments in the 20th-century wars, hot and cold. Calling it “modern liberalism” has always been an abuse of language. And it was an abuse of people to implement it.

It still is. Statism, being the partial enslavement of people to others by way of the government, may or may not be a good idea. But it is anyway not liberal, whether exercised by kings or by Congress. As Tom Paine wrote in the liberal birth year of 1776, “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Better keep the power to coerce modest. By 1849, at the first maturation of liberalism 1.0, Henry David Thoreau declared, “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.” In the same year in far Torino the liberal Italian economist Francesco Ferrara wrote that “taxation is the great source of everything a corrupt government can devise to the detriment of the people. Taxation supports the spy, encourages the faction, dictates the content of newspapers.” (In 1792 even in a quasi-liberal Britain the government owned secretly over half the newspapers.)

Entertaining and informative throughout.