Is Political Liberty Necessary for Economic Prosperity?: The Long Eighteenth Century

If the liberty-prosperity question was virtually absent in Antiquity, as Paul Rahe’s essay in this volume suggests, it certainly became prominent in the Long Eighteenth Century, and has remained so ever since.¹ The unprecedented mass abundance of our own time has spawned a plethora of historical theories as to how Homo sapiens could ever have escaped the Malthusian trap and made prosperity a durable and widespread possibility. Everything from geography and ecology, to culture and religion and values, to science and technology, has been adduced as the indispensable key.² New Institutionalists such as Douglass North have indeed emphasized liberty—constitutional, political, and legal—but their approach has had lively competition in the marketplace of interpretations.³

One thing all these theories have in common is the assumption that mass abundance, and the perennial growth that produces it, is both possible and at least broadly desirable. The Long Eighteenth Century was the period when that assumption came into being, but it did not do so in simple linear fashion. It was only the rising mercantile prowess of England and Holland in the seventeenth century that had brought wealth and political freedom together in some people’s minds, and it did so at first in a markedly limited way. For most European commentators, the chief benefit of the maritime powers’ growing wealth was solely strategic; its moral and social and even political implications were another matter entirely.

Even in England and Holland, the embrace of the new commercial society could be jolting in its novelty. “Trade,” wrote David Hume, looking back from the 1750s, “was never esteemed an affair of state until the last century.”⁴ And since the broad well-being of what contemporaries often called the “middling sorts” was a new phenomenon, there was no easy way of knowing what it portended or what had caused it. In trying to explain the rise of the Dutch, for example, the merchant-author Josiah Child cited no fewer than fifteen factors that set those redoubtable traders apart from the rest of Europe—none of which included political liberty per se (although religious toleration managed to claim the eleventh spot).⁵

Equally novel, in its own way, was the concern over regime types. While Western thinkers since Aristotle had included a diversity of constitutional forms in their reflections on politics, the Long Eighteenth Century saw a new and protracted debate over which form of government was most conducive to justice and good order. The debate took place along a broad continuum from absolute monarchy to democratic republics. It is easy to forget that for many Europeans, and even many Englishmen, the upheavals of the English Civil War (1642–49) were proof positive of the dangers of any kind of popular government. And yet, the idea never really went away; indeed, it gathered momentum over time, until it burst to the forefront with the American and French Revolutions.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was by far the most sophisticated spokesman for the view that absolute sovereignty, of a sort usually associated with monarchy rather than with “political liberty,” was essential to all civil life, including the economic. Hobbes’s view was that private property could not exist in the state of nature, because it implies security, which is absent there. Only when the people—brought to desperation by the elementary passions of competition, diffidence, and reputation (or greed, fear, and honor in modern parlance)—decide to leave this state by contracting to create Leviathan does property become possible. Even then, Hobbes is at pains to underscore that such property is conditional, and that the sovereign alone decides who has how much of it and under what circumstances. Indeed, the sage of Malmesbury pursued a running polemic against those English revolutionaries who had been insisting on absolute property rights, blaming them for much of the unpleasantness of England’s Civil War. Only the sovereign can decide what resources are needed to fulfill his functions of securing peace and executing justice, so only the sovereign can determine the form and scale of taxes to levy...