I. "Left" and "Right," "Conservative" and "Liberal," Differentiated Historically

As has been noted, each of the three waves of revisionism that swept through the American history profession during the 20^th Century had a particular political ideology behind it. The revisionists led by Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes were known as the "Progressive Historians." Those galvanized and influenced by William Appleman Williams were known as the "New Left Historians." And those who followed the lead of James J. Martin and Murray N. Rothbard have come to be known as the "Libertarian Historians."

At first glance, these three political ideologies may seem quite distinct. The Progressives at the turn of the 20^th Century, Eric Foner reminds us, advocated new laws that would "combat the power of the giant corporation," a monster that had come into existence only in the previous few decades. They also argued for new laws that would "protect consumers, civilize the marketplace, or guarantee industrial freedom at the workplace"—laws "banning child labor and limiting the working hours of women," laws imposing "the taxation of corporate wealth [...] and state regulation of railroads and public utilities," laws providing for "old age pensions, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and the regulation of workplace safety." The Progressives sought further to "reinvigorate democracy by restoring political power to the citizenry." They backed measures like initiative and referendum, the election of judges, the direct election of U.S. Senators, and the extension of the franchise to women. They endeavored to "improve public transportation," and they "raised property taxes in order to spend more money on schools, parks, and other public facilities."²³⁴

Progressive foreign policy tended to be aggressive, if not positively belligerent. "[T]he expansion of government power" during World War I "struck most Progressives as a golden opportunity. To them, the war offered the possibility of reforming American society along scientific lines, instilling a sense of national unity and self-sacrifice, and expanding social justice. That American power could now disseminate Progressive values around the globe heightened the war's appeal."²³⁵

The majority of the New Left acquiesced to most of the Progressive program, accepting the idea of minimum wage laws, old age pensions, workplace safety regulation, and the like, and lending its support to the Progressive goals of expanding democracy, improving public schools, and safeguarding nature. Still, as Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau pointed out in 1971, the New Left

is not a movement easily categorized politically, nor is it defined by politics alone. Some Movement people are Socialists, others are anarchists. Some believe in nonviolence, others are willing to use guns and bombs to attack the oppressors and exploiters. Some are committed only to black liberation, some largely to women's liberation, and others are dedicated to world revolution. Some focus on altering men's lifestyles, others are concerned primarily with issues of power and wealth.²³⁶

Writing a few years later, Carl Oglesby—who presided during 1965 and 1966 over Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the dominant New Left student group—described the original New Left as an alliance of "true progressives, classical liberals, humanistic revolutionaries, and libertarians."²³⁷

Clearly the libertarians and classical liberals in the coalition would not have accepted the Progressive prescriptions for regulating the domestic economy. Neither would they be likely to accept the Progressives' determination to build and improve public schools and parks. Nor could the anarchists buy into any of these proposals. But three matters at least these three groups could agree on wholeheartedly with their neo-progressive colleagues: racial justice, the various injustices wrought (with government complicity) by large corporations, and the need to rein in the rampantly imperialist foreign policy of the U.S. government. And so it was that these three issues came to be the defining issues of the New Left coalition.

Within only a short time—before the end of the '60s—the libertarians were purged from that coalition, and most of the classical liberals and many of the anarchists followed both them and the libertarians purged at about the same time from the conservative student group, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), into a newly separate libertarian movement.²³⁸ The political platform of this new movement was simplicity itself, but it was neither Progressive nor New Leftist. The libertarians didn't recommend that the State impose minimum wage laws, old age pensions, or workplace safety regulation; nor did they recommend that the State work to expand democracy, improve public schools, or safeguard nature. The libertarians recommended that the State, in effect, off itself. To promote racial justice, it should get out of the way of African Americans. To right the wrongs it had enabled large corporations to commit, it should cease to help or hinder business in any way. To end its imperialist foreign policy, it should get out of the foreign policy business entirely. "[I]f you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts," wrote Murray Rothbard in 1973, "simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place."²³⁹

Some libertarians, then as now, did not think of the State as a criminal band, however. These "minarchists," or "limited government libertarians," believed with Ayn Rand that "[t]he proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories[...]: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invad-ers—the law courts, to settle disputes among men[...].²⁴⁰ Clearly, then, they would have been no more likely than the anarchists to support the Progressives' calls for old age pensions or workplace safety regulations or "improved" schools and parks. Nor would they have been likely to accept the New Left's commitment to forced integration of privately owned businesses. So far as Rand and the other minarchists were concerned, the only true "crimes" were murder, rape, other types of assault, theft, and fraud. Refusing to associate with someone, even for a stupid or reprehensible reason, should not, in their eyes, be regarded as a criminal offense.

Still, despite their differences, there is an important common denominator linking these three political ideologies—progressivism, new leftism, and libertarianism. They are all on the Left.

This claim will seem surprising to many. Most people today, if they know about libertarianism at all, tend to think of it, along with conservatism, as part of the Right. In the September 2005 issue of Harper's, for example, editor Lewis Lapham referred to "the several armies of the imperial right—conservative and neoconservative, libertarian and evangelical."²⁴¹ Libertarians themselves tend to see the matter in this way. Yet a brief look at the history of the relevant political terms—Left and Right, liberal and conservative—will persuade us that libertarianism has absolutely nothing in common with anything on the Right. For it is as the anarchist Murray Bookchin said back in 1978: "People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights—this is the true left in the United States. Whether they are an-archo-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left[...]." And what about the socialists, the Maoists and Trotskyites, and the liberals of the Democratic party? Bookchin was asked. What about the people most Americans regarded as "the Left"? Those people, Bookchin replied, were "going toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism." They were "becoming the real right in the United States."²⁴²

Bookchin was referring here to a conception of Western political history in which, as Karl Hess had put it a few years earlier, on "the far right[...] we find monarchy, absolute dicatorships, and other forms of absolutely authoritarian rule," while the Left "opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands." Just as the farthest Right you can go is absolute dictatorship, Hess argued, so "[t]he farthest left you can go, historically at any rate, is anarchism—the total opposition to any institutionalized power, a state of completely voluntary social organization [...]."²⁴³

To understand this perspective on Western politics, we must look back to the time, more than 250 years ago, when the terms Left and Right, liberal and conservative, first came into general usage. In the beginning, Murray Rothbard tells us,

there was the old order, the ancien regime, the regime of caste and frozen status, of exploitation by a despotic ruling class, using the church to dupe the masses into accepting its rule. This was pure statism; this was the right wing. Then, in 17th and 18th century western Europe, a liberal and radical opposition movement arose [...] a popular revolutionary movement on behalf of rationalism, individual liberty, minimal government, free markets, international peace and separation of church and state, in opposition to throne and altar, to monarchy, the ruling class, theocracy and war. These [people] were the left [...].²⁴⁴

Don Lavoie, writing nearly two decades later, in the mid 1980s, came to much the same conclusion. He wrote of "numerous popular revolts against the society of empire, feudalism, mercantilism, and privilege on behalf of principles of natural law or justice, from which none, not even kings and popes, are exempt," and continued:

Some of the earliest to formulate these vague principles into more specific shape were the Levellers of the English Civil War (16421647), the radical liberals during the French Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, and the American revolutionaries. Here was the original Left, the radicalism that opposed government power not by merely putting forth a set of reforms for the state to implement but by insisting on a set of rules—or natural laws, as they called them—by which all human beings, including those in positions of power, are to be equally limited in order that they be equally free.²⁴⁵

These people, the ones doing all the formulating and insisting, the ones who made up "the original Left," were known at the time as "liberals." Their doctrine, an outgrowth of the 18^th Century Enlightenment (English and Scottish as well as French), was called "liberalism." "Liberalism," Rothbard says, was "the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order." It wasn't long before "[p]olitical ideologies were polarized, with Liberalism on the extreme 'Left,' and Conservatism on the extreme 'Right,' of the ideological spectrum."²⁴⁶

The liberals (and the proto-liberals who preceded them) managed to achieve "at least partial victories for individual liberty, laissez-faire, separation of church and state, and international peace," Rothbard contends, through "a series of cataclysmic revolutions [...] the English Revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution [...]."²⁴⁷ The last two of these revolutions, which took place only about a decade apart, were intimately interrelated. French thinkers, most notably Montesquieu, had loomed large among the important intellectual influences on the American revolutionaries. A French liberal, the Marquis de Lafayette, had personally assisted the Americans with the difficult task of achieving a final military victory over the British. And once that victory was achieved, yet another French liberal, Alexis de Toqueville, exclaimed exuberantly that "[t]he Americans seemed only to be putting into practice ideas which had been sponsored by our writers, and to be making our dreams their realities."²⁴⁸

Having done so, the Americans repaid the favor by cross-fertilizing the French Revolution a few years later. As Will and Ariel Durant remind us, "[t]he Declaration of Rights issued by the Virginia constitutional convention on June 12, 1776, and the Bill of Rights added to the American Constitution, became part models for the Declaration of the Rights of Man promulgated by the French Constituent Assembly on August 26, 1789."²⁴⁹ Nor was this all: one of the chief American revolutionaries, the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, was also one of the chief French revolutionaries—and, for a time, a member of one of the several revolutionary governments.

As professor Owen Connelly of the University of South Carolina notes, in his widely used textbook French Revolution/Napoleonic Era, "[t]he Revolution proper (1789-1799) saw an incredible succession of governments—absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy (in various forms), representative republic, authoritarian republic, bourgeois republic [...]."²⁵⁰ And it was within one of those revolutionary governments, in the Legislative Assembly in the fall of 1791, that the terms Right and Left were first used in a political sense. As the Durants tell it, when the assembly convened, the "substantial minority dedicated to preserving the monarchy [...] occupied the right section of the hall, and thereby gave a name to conservatives everywhere." The liberals "sat at the left on an elevated section called the Mountain; soon they were named Montagnards. In the center sat 355 delegates who refused to be labeled [...]."²⁵¹

Though the American and French revolutions had much in common, they also differed in important respects. They differed, for example, with regard to the precise character of the liberalism that dominated each of the two struggles. The famous slogan of the French revolution—Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!—holds the key to this important difference. The idea of equality figured in the American Revolution as well, of course—didn't Thomas Jefferson write in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal"? But to Jefferson and the other American liberals, "equality" meant equality of rights, equality before the law. In France, by contrast, to more than a few of the revolutionaries, it meant much, much more than that. In the eyes of these French liberals, it was, as Ludwig von Mises summarized their view more than a hundred years later,

not enough to make men equal before the law. In order to make them really equal, one must also allot them the same income. It is not enough to abolish privileges of birth and of rank. One must finish the job and do away with the greatest and most important privilege of all, namely, that which is accorded by private property. Only then will the liberal program be completely realized, and a consistent liberalism thus leads ultimately to socialism, to the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.²⁵²

According to the Progressive Historian Vernon Louis Parrington, whose Main Currents in American Thought won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928, John Adams spoke for many American revolutionary leaders and activists when he criticized French revolutionists for preaching "equality of persons and property."²⁵³ For, as Connelly notes, the concepts of liberty and equality, when equality is taken to mean equality of income or equality of property, are "contradictory." This kind of equality "had to be imposed by force by the central government," and it wasn't long before "[t]he advocates of greater equality became the proponents of greater central power."²⁵⁴ Need it be added that "greater central power" is precisely the opposite of everything the liberals had long been fighting for and eagerly anticipating?

Lavoie tells the instructive story of Henri de Saint-Simon (17601825), a French liberal who came "gradually to reject the ideal of discovering rules for the equal protection of liberty, substituting in the last eleven years of his life the alternative ideal of setting up an elite for the rational control of society." By 1814, Saint-Simon had become a fervent admirer of feudal and other medieval organizational structures and an enthusiastic student of the principles of military organization as exemplified by Napoleon Bonaparte. He called for "a hierarchical administration of the whole of society's resources under the direction of the 'captains of industry,' among whom bankers are prominently included."²⁵⁵ Scientists and social engineers were also to play a major role in the planning of Saint-Simon's utopian dream.

According to Lavoie, "Saint-Simon was not a democrat" in his later years; in fact, he "had little but contempt for 'the masses' and explicitly recommended that those who refused to cooperate with the visions of the ruling intelligentsia be 'treated like cattle' [...]." All in all, Lavoie concludes, Saint-Simon had "definite authoritarian leanings." But this is putting it mildly. For not only did Saint-Simon advocate what amounted to a return to the despotism of pre-liberal times, he also advocated what amounted to a return to the essentially mercantilist economic policies of pre-liberal States. Mercantilism, according to political scientist David Osterfeld, is "a system in which the operation of the market is impeded by extensive government restrictions for the benefit of the ruling group."²⁵⁶ Another name for this kind of arrangement is state capitalism. Yet another is corporatism (or, alternatively, corporativism). Still another, if a fervent nationalism is added to the mixture, is fascism. How could people who thought of themselves as liberals, men (and women) of the Left, embrace such heresy?

According to Lavoie, the answer is to be found in an understanding of the role played in the liberal movement late in the 18^th Century and early in the 19^th Century by the ideal of equality. Under the influence of apostates like Saint-Simon, a good many liberals came to believe "that a planning bureau could rationally and democratically control the cultural and economic development of society for the benefit of all"; as a result, "the ambition of the Left came to be not just the complete equality of rights, as important as that was still thought to be, but the more grandiose ideal of equality of wealth."²⁵⁷

The liberals who became ensnared by this vision of a totally egalitarian society adopted socialism as their new ideal. It is customary today to regard socialism as the polar opposite of the doctrine of individual liberty and free trade, but in fact, as Rothbard notes, this is not the case. It is "conservatism," he writes, that

was always the polar opposite of classical liberalism. Socialism, in contrast, was not the polar opposite of either, but rather, in my view, a muddled and irrationally contradictory mixture of both liberalism and conservatism. For socialism was essentially a movement to come to terms with the industrial revolution, to try to achieve liberal ends by the use of collectivistic, conservative means.²⁵⁸

In a later essay, Rothbard expanded upon this insight. "Socialism," he wrote,

like Liberalism and against Conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, Conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc. Or rather, to be more precise, there were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified stat-ism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the "withering away of the State" and the "end of the exploitation of man by man."²⁵⁹