From the Middle Ages to Today’s Libertarian Tent?

Among my three articles in the Fall issue of Regulation, which is just out in printed and online formats, two are reviews of recent books that are, not surprisingly, related to individual liberty.

The first one is about Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi’s The Individualists, which provides a detailed intellectual history of libertarianism since its birth in the 19th century (see pp. 40-43 in the magazine). In the authors’ typology, which is defendable, libertarianism in its broad sense includes not only the most radical libertarians but also the contemporary version of classical libertarianism. It is a serious and well-documented book, challenging in many ways for both libertarians and non-libertarians.

One of my critiques is the neglect of Anthony the Jasay. I write:

There is a big absence in the book’s review of contemporary libertarian schools of thought. Nowhere is the work of economist and political philosopher Anthony de Jasay mentioned. In my opinion, de Jasay fundamentally renewed both the critique of the state and the liberal–libertarian argument for anarchy. (See “A Conservative Anarchist? Anthony de Jasay, 1925–2019,” Spring 2019.) De Jasay’s work also attenuates the relevance of the standard left–right, progressive–conservative distinction, and throws new light on political philosophy and libertarianism. For sure, he is far from an academic household name, but his first, seminal book, The State, was published four decades ago. Since I did not myself immediately discover its importance (Buchanan was quicker), I can’t really cast the first stone.

My review concludes:

Is libertarianism too large a tent, with too many diverse occupants? The authors of The Individualists believe that “libertarianism is not accidentally but intrinsically a diverse ideology” and that “the tension between radical and reactionary elements is not accidental but intrinsic to libertarian thinking.” They seem to attribute this characteristic to the different circumstances where the major threats to liberty changed. Perhaps it is also because libertarianism is defined along a different dimension than the standard left-right spectrum: the dimension of individual choice/collective choice. At any rate, analysis, discussion, peaceful diversity, and tolerance are pluses, not minuses. Zwolinski and Tomasi’s book is a useful guide in these interrogations.

The second book I review in this hot issue of Regulation is a defense of the Middle Ages as a precursor of classical liberalism: The Medieval Constitution of Liberty: Political Foundations of Liberalism in the West (see pp. 51-54 in Regulation online) by two libertarian economists, Alexander William Salter and Andrew Young. The incipit of my review:

The Middle Ages seem mysterious. The period from the fall of Rome in the 5th century through the 15th century is often—or used to be, anyway—referred to as the Dark Ages. Yet, this period was followed by the Renaissance, the Early Modern period and, in the 18th and 19th century, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and (to borrow from Deirdre McCloskey) the “Great Enrichment.” There must have been something in the Middle Ages that was not antithetical to the birth of modernity.

Salter and Young explain what that was. They also argue that we (in the West) owe the measure of liberty we have not to the “state capacity” (one of today’s academic buzzwords) that developed between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment but, on the contrary, to the decentralized political power that characterized the High Middle Ages (11th-13th century). Let me quote the last few paragraphs of my review:

The medieval constitution did not survive long after the High Middle Ages, notably because of the shocks of the 14th century. The Black Death, a plague or viral epidemic, ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. Depending on the region, it killed between one-eighth and two-thirds of the population. Another shock was the siege cannon, which produced economies of scale in coercion and eliminated the relative advantage of fortified places. Centralized nation-states rose with “state capacity” for producing what we would now call public goods.

State-capacity scholars believe that the privatization of political authority in the High Middle Ages prevented state centralization and the building of useful state capacity, notably for supporting economic growth. They point to the correlation between high taxes and high economic growth since the Industrial Revolution. (See “A Shackled Leviathan That Keeps Roaming and Growing,” Fall 2021, and “A Fashionable Appeal to a Benevolent State,” Winter 2023–2024.) An example of the perverse effects of decentralized medieval institutions can be found in the guilds, which limited innovation and competition among artisans, and existed from the 11th to the 18th century. Local tolls offer another example. Only the modern central state, goes the argument, was able to abolish these obstacles to the Great Enrichment. Salter and Young consider the state capacity argument “a significant challenge,” which they endeavor to meet.

The state capacity explanation for economic development has been challenged by several scholars such as Peter Boettke, Roselino Candela, Vincent Geloso, Ennio Piano, and Salter and Young themselves. Strong states can be predatory as much as producers of public goods. Historically, state capacity has generally stifled economic development; we only need to think about imperial China or, in recent times, North Korea or the Soviet Union. To support prosperity, state capacity must be limited by the rule of law and a market economy. The state must be constrained in the use of its capacity. Western countries’ march toward the Great Enrichment suggests that something must have prevented state capacity from becoming predatory. Salter and Young argue that this something “was the set of background constraints bequeathed by the constitutional heritage of medieval Europe.”

Thus, we cannot explain “the bounty of modernity” without the conditions that existed in the High Middle Ages. “The rise of the West must be viewed not as an escape from the High Middle Ages,” the authors write, “but a continuation of the proto-liberal traditions that solidified in the High Middle Ages.”

Salter and Young’s book confirms that capitalism or, more generally, individual liberty is the daughter of anarchy or, at least, of polycentric and limited political power. Let’s repeat that the Middle Ages were not perfect and mankind had to wait for 19th century classical liberalism to have a glimpse at the bounty that individual liberty can produce.

Sociologist and historian Jean Baechler said something similar (his emphasis):

The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and its raison d’être to political anarchy.

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DALL-E hopes somebody is listening