What Made Europe Different
[Editor’s note: In this selection from The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought, Ralph Raico introduces the idea that western Europe was unique in how it approached the power of civil government and sought to limit it. As we will find later in this chapter, Raico sets the origins of the West’s embrace of freedom in the Middle Ages a period characterized by political decentralization and a salutary conflict between civil governments and church power.]
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.1 The miracle in question consists in a simple but momentous fact: it was in Europe that human beings first achieved per capita economic growth over a long period of time. In this way, European society eluded the Malthusian trap, and this enabled new tens of millions— hundreds of millions really—to survive, and it enabled the population as a whole to escape the hopeless misery that had been the lot of the great bulk of the human race in earlier times. The question is, Why Europe? Why is Europe in this way set apart from other great civilizations: China, India, Islam, and so on? Geographic factors played a role, no doubt, but I think that Mises put his finger on the essential point when he wrote the following:
The East lacked the primordial thing, the idea of freedom from the state. The East never raised the banner of freedom, it never tried to stress the rights of the individual against the power of the rulers. It never called into question the arbitrariness of the despots. And first of all, it never established the legal framework that would protect the private citizens’ wealth against confiscation on the part of the tyrants.2
Mises was not primarily an historian. In my view, on the basis of what I know, he was the greatest economist of the twentieth century. On the other hand, he had this ability to put his finger on the solution to some historical problem in a way that other professional historians weren’t able to do. We’ll see when we discuss the Industrial Revolution later on the same thing there. Now, the question is still, Why was Europe in this kind of position? Now, one of the authors in this general school of thought—it’s an international movement: Americans, British, French, or Australians—is Jean Baechler of Paris. Baechler’s pioneering work pointedly expressed this, as he said,
The first condition of the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state. The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison d’être to political anarchy.3
We’ll see what that means. Among others who have developed this is Douglass North, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in this area in economic history. North wrote, “It was precisely the lack of large scale political order that created the environment essential to economic growth and ultimately human freedoms” in Europe.4 Now, this institutional approach was adumbrated by John Hicks, the Nobel laureate in economics in the late 1960s. But the essentials of the view were sketched by the great economic historian—now emeritus from Harvard—David Landes, who, by the way, is no particular classical liberal. But he’s a good historian in a book of his called The Unbound Prometheus. Landes said,
There were two factors that set Europe apart from the rest of the world, the scope and effectiveness of private enterprise and the high value placed on the rational manipulation of the human and material environment. . . . The role of private enterprise in the West is perhaps unique, more than any other factor that made the modern world.5
Still, why was there the scope and leeway for private enterprise? Landes also points to the radical decentralization of Europe, what Baechler had called political anarchy and this is what he writes:
Because of this crucial role in a context of multiple competing polities (the contrast is with empires of the Orient and the Ancient World) private enterprise in the West, possessed a political and social vitality without precede
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
