What Is Classical Liberal History? PDF
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i What is Classical Liberal History? What is Classical Liberal History? Edited by Michael J. Douma and Phillip W. Magness LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books Chapter 1: Portions of this chapter were originally published as Scott M. Shubitz, “Liberal Intellectual Culture and Religious Faith: The Liberalism of the New York Liberal Club, 1869–1877,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 16, no. 2 (April 2017): 183–205. Chapter 7: A portion of this chapter was previously published in Jonathan Bean, “Introduction,” in Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, ed. Jonathan Bean (University Press of Kentucky, 2009): 1–12. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-3610-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-3611-0 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Michael J. Douma 1 Beyond Laissez-Faire and State Power: A Critical Look at the Transformation Thesis and Classical Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century America 1 Scott Shubitz 2 Classical Liberalism and the “New” History of American Capitalism 17 Phillip W. Magness 3 The Historicity of Civil Liberties, a Challenge for Liberals 39 Anthony Gregory 4 Lost in Methodenstreit: Reflections on Theory, History, and the Quest for a Science of Association 59 Lenore T. Ealy 5 Some Roads Taken, and Not Taken, from the Progressive Era to the New Deal 95 David T. Beito 6 A Manifesto for Liberty: Toward a New History of Civil Rights in U.S. History 115 Jonathan Bean 7 The End or Ends of Social History? The Reclamation of Old-Fashioned Historicism in the Writing of Historical Narratives 137 Hans L. Eicholz v vi Contents 8 “History through a Classical Liberal Feminist Lens” 159 Sarah Skwire 9 Classical Liberalism in Eastern Europe: Very Vibrant but So Mild 171 Leonid Krasnozhon and Mykola Bunyk 10 “Start the Economy”: Causation, Emergent Order, and Social Change in the Origins of Modern Economic Growth 189 Matthew Brown 11 A Non-Manifesto of Liberal History 209 Alberto Garín Index 227 About the Editors and Contributors 243 Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided invaluable comments on early drafts of the book and the editors at Rowman & Littlefield who were a pleasure to work with. Michael Douma would like to thank Bruce Caldwell, Peter Boettke, Fred Smith, and George Nash for useful comments. Jonathan Bean would like to thank all those who reviewed and commented upon earlier drafts, including David Bernstein, Richard Epstein, Robert Weems, Paul Moreno, Roger Clegg, and Andrew Barbero. I am also grate- ful for my loving wife, Tina Bean, who supported me in this endeavor, even as my keyboard clicking filled the air with words that eventually landed on these pages. Hans Eicholz would like to thank his friends and colleagues, historians G. M. Curtis and Peter Mentzel for enduring his interminable discussions on these themes through the years. He would also like to acknowledge the assistance of his former mentor, the late Joyce Appleby who had commented on and encouraged an earlier essay on historicism and a review of Bernard Bailyn's work that proved highly informative in this project. Lenore T. Ealy would like to thank the dozens of intrepid individuals who have participated since 2001 in the programs of the Project for New Philanthropy Studies, the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders, and the Philanthropic Enterprise, initiatives founded by Richard Cornuelle (1927–2011) to foster scholarly deliberation to help us understand volun- tary social processes as well as market processes. vii Introduction Michael J. Douma This book is designed to generate new ideas and new ways of thinking by reviving a neglected historical tradition, classical liberal history. In doing so, we hope not only to call attention to the best elements of the classical liberal tradition but also to call upon historians to reflect on the importance of this tradition to the history and practice of their own discipline. Modern historiography reflects a diverse and overlapping set of epistemo- logical positions, methods of inquiry, and approaches to research. In Ameri- can academia, historiography began in a conservative vein. Conservative historians tend to write histories of nations and biographies of statesmen and great figures who serve as moral models for preserving the best of society. Conservatives see in the past a morality tale and lament the destruction of ordered systems which they hope to resurrect at least in part. By the turn of the 20th century, however, progressive history had come to dominate the preparation and practice of American historians. This approach to historical study arose toward the end of the 19th century, alongside the development of the new “social” sciences. Progressive historians, like their counterparts in sociology, political science, and economics, tended to see the role of their professions as helping to direct society on a path toward a better future. Such presentist and political purposes have also characterized the alterna- tive Marxist and other collectivist models of history (e.g., feminist histories) which are based on the propositions that all people belong to a class, that their actions are shaped by their material circumstances, and that therefore we must study people as groups to understand how the past is necessarily moving us through different stages of development. More recently, post- modernist historians have challenged the possibility that historians can arrive at “objective” facts with the implication that history is itself a political act written only to serve power. ix
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