Right Reason

Offer Something Better

In the Spring 2015 edition of The Intercollegiate Review's "The Privilege of Freedom," Daniel Hannan provides a piece of wisdom for us all:

My friend grew up under a Communist dictatorship in Poland.

Although his father defected to Canada, he chose to stay in Poland because he wanted to be part of the change he saw coming. One reason he had such confidence was that as a boy he had witnessed John Paul II’s first visit to Poland as pope. My friend told me something about the visit that I had never considered before. He said, “You know, the Holy Father never once directly criticized the Communist authorities. He didn’t have to. He just offered something better.”

That, I think, should be the creed of conservatives: Just offer something better.

Sound advice. And advice that I think pertains to all commentary. Always keep in mind the better alternative. Life is as much a matter as where we are going as it is a matter of where we are and so we should always be properly orientated towards making the case for the best alternative.  

Are Imagined Communities Real?

 

In the aftermath of Scotland's decision to remain in the United Kingdom, Daniel Hannan defends British nationalism as a source of harmony in the debates over Scottish independence in in "The positive case for nationalism". He argues that that nationalism led to the best in human nature revealing itself in people's acquiescence to the outcome of the election.

At the end of the post he takes aim at the view that nations are simply made up lines on a map:

Most ordinary people – that is, people who are not literati or politicians – take feelings of national belonging for granted, and see patriotism as an unalloyed virtue, like honesty or courage. Yet the prevailing intellectual fashion is that patriotism is artificial. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn popularised the idea that nations depend on “invented traditions”.  A.C. Grayling held that they were synthetic creations, “their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars”.

What was once Marxist critique is now academic orthodoxy. Virtually every political science postgraduate who passes through my office has been taught the same bilge about nations being “imagined communities”. And so, technically, they are, in the sense that they exist largely in people’s minds. But this is true of lots of perfectly real things. Why is a £20 note worth £20? Because we agree that it should be. Why is David Cameron prime minister? Because we agree to treat him as such.

Those who disparage or detest nationhood are guilty of an old Marxist conceit: the notion that people can be reconstructed, purged of the “wrong” ideas, cured of “false consciousness”.

As usual when talking about the nature of nations, Mr. Hannan is right, and very much so - even if the cosmopolitan sentiments within us may wish otherwise.

The idea that nations are simply imagined communities, and therefore may be discarded by an Enlightened era isn't a sound argument. The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premises. Nations may be imagined communities, but that doesn't imply that they are unreal. Here a metaphysical point needs emphasis: Mental objects exist just as extended ones do. (All of you who think that metaphysics isn't necessary take heed. We actually need to know a thing or two about what kinds of substances exist to talk coherently about the world.) Nor are those mental objects necessarily arbitrary.

It's the peccadillo of an adolescent to think that simply because something, such as tradition, exists only in the minds of its adherents that it is therefore made up and arbitrary. As David Sloan Wilson has shown in Darwin's Cathedral, the human mind can develop such objects because such objects have helped our far-off ancestors in their struggle for existence. Imagined communities and other mental objects have biologically evolved because they are useful adaptations.

Adaptations, in turn, have some form that reflects the problems they help solve. One can go as far as to speak of them as embodied knowledge. That embodied knowledge must in some sense be complex and in being complex. Culture's reality as a set of mental object is betrayed by the complexity of those adaptive structures no less than the tactile properties of some sand in one's hands would prove the reality of that sand. If imagined communities and other traditions were simply made up, they would be random in their form. Instead, though, they are adaptive. Britannia, Rule the Waves! tells us something about the problems which have faced British society in the past just as a polar bear's lush fur would tell someone about the environment it inhabited. 

There is also an underlying biological explanation of of patriotism that Mr. Hannan doesn't touch on when he writes:  "Patriotism, as this blog never ceases to argue, is what makes us behave unselfishly." That explanation is that, as a cooperative species, Homo sapiens has evolved an innate desire to belong to a band. Nature has left Homo sapiens a distinctly cooperative species, and that propensity to cooperate is reflected in a desire to belong to a community because without such a sense of belonging cooperation to a human degree would be impossible. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin argued that traits such as "sympathy, fidelity, and courage" evolved to such a degree in human beings because "selfish and contentious people will not cohere" (Darwin 1989[1877]: 134-135[129-130]).

Even though human society has greatly changed since the conditions of our band-ancestors, human instincts have remained comparatively constant, and so the same instincts that would lead someone to desire the solidarity of a band compel them to find a first-person plural in the nation. In a sense, patriotism is atavistic because it reflects our desire to belong to bands even though patriotism's object is a much wider civilization. There shall always be a human desire to belong impelling people's patriotism, what matters is how culture directs that emotional impetus. 

 

Everyone Wants Peace on Their Terms

 

As for me, I cease not to advocate peace. It may be on unjust terms, but even so it is more expedient than the justest of civil wars.

-Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Atticus

 

In “Does anyone really want a settlement in the Middle East?”, Daniel Hannan asks the question of what anyone has to gain from the current flare up of the conflict in Gaza:

What is Hamas trying to achieve by firing rockets into Israel? I’m not asking about its right to do so, or what the alternatives are, or the pros and cons of the whole 70-year-old dispute. I’m asking a narrower strategic question. What are the people who run Gaza trying to achieve by lobbing ordnance across the border?

…

The most rational explanation I can find for Hamas’s renewal of hostilities is that it’s trying to shore up its support in Gaza. The Syrian civil war and the Egyptian coup have deprived the paramilitaries of, respectively, their chief sponsor and their most immediate sympathiser. Isolated and bankrupt, unable even to pay the salaries of their 40,000 government employees, Hamas leaders seem to have decided to stake everything on a military campaign. Possibly, like Galtieri’s junta in 1982, they feel they have little to lose. At best, a new ceasefire might result in concessions, such as prisoner releases or – the big prize – a reopening of Gaza’s borders. At worst, the conflict should rally people to their regime.

 

Pareto efficiency is an important concept here. Less important as a positive standard for policy as much as a via negativa for eliminating policies we think shouldn’t work.

The world is Pareto-efficient when no one can be made better off except at the expense of somebody else. Or, as Andreu Mas-Colell and Michael D. Whinston express the idea in their text book Microeconomic Theory: “(A world) that is Pareto optimal uses society’s initial resources and technological possibilities efficiently in the sense that there is no alternative way to organize the production and distribution of goods that makes some consumer better off without making some consumer worse off” (Mas-Colell and Whinston 1995, 313). 

Pareto efficiency is a standard which conforms very much to how we would like politics done in a liberal democracy. After all, would not benevolent citizens choose to vote to avoid a world in which somebody can be better off without hurting anybody else? If Jim could be given a new home without hurting Jill or Bill, wouldn’t Jill or Bill let that happen? So clearly Pareto efficiency does conform to the ethos of a liberal democracy, and expresses the basic sentiment motivating liberal democracy (especially of the social democratic variety) that people can come together through the voting booths in order to solve their problems in an amicable fashion. Yet, though Pareto efficiency is interesting in speculations about policy, it absolutely fails in being a useful standard for guiding policy, and the reason for that is that Pareto efficiency is so weak a condition that pretty much every conceivable state of the world beyond economists’ models is already Pareto efficient. 

  

At this point, somebody who looks at the world from the point of view of economics alone can point out how much is being wasted over the struggle between the two nations and how much their citizens could gain by living in peace with each other. However, politics is about identify as much as about policy, and so for the political situation between Palestine and Israel to change, somebody’s identity has to lose, and so somebody has to be made worst off. Maybe not in profane terms (in fact, they might be made better off from the Max-U point of view), but certainly in the sacred terms of identity. 

Indeed, I can’t even find a neutral term to describe the region inhabited by the two nations without giving off signs of non-existent bias between either faction. If I call the region, Palestine, I imply that the Palestinians should win the conflict (whatever that means) and vice versa for calling the region Israel. Even importing the Latin word Judea or the Greek Παλαιστίνη doesn’t work. There’s just no way of talking about the situation without hurting somebody’s identity, which implies that the entire situation is some weird equilibrium, and kept there because changing it would require pain that no one wants to feel.  

 

We are all tethered by history in a world of utility maximizers, both in terms of the sacred and the profane, and that is felt no more strongly in Israel/Palestine/Judea/Παλαιστίνη/whatever-you-want-to-call-the-region. For there to be peace in the region, because of the initial endowment given to us by history, somebody will have to walk away from the negotiating table unhappy; yet, because we live in a world of utility maximizers, that won’t happen. 

The Commercial Society Contradicts Our Instincts

 

In "The trouble is that free trade is just feels wrong", Daniel Hannan discusses how human beings are biased against free trade. However sound the free-trade argument may be, the cause of protectionism is still alive and well over a hundred years after The Wealth of Nations. Mr. Hannan correctly identifies our social instincts as one of the main culprits behind that tragedy of policy which continues to impoverish the world:

(Free trade is) a missed opportunity from the United Kingdom’s point of view. Outside the EU, we’d have negotiated a properly open bilateral deal with the United States years ago. As members, we’re obliged to uphold a relatively protectionist EU commercial policy for the sake of French film-makers, Italian textile manufacturers, Bavarian smallholders and so on.

Still, we are where we are. A key task for Conservative MEPs over the next six months will be to try to convince others that free trade benefits all participants. For once, the word “convince” may be apt. Politicians rarely change their minds (as opposed to changing their policies, which they do frequently). Trade, unusually, is an example of an issue where intelligent people, shown the evidence, often do shift their view.

The reason is that free trade is literally counterintuitive. It seems to violate so many ideas that feel right. How can it be better to fly stuff half way around the world than to produce it locally? How can it be right to rely on one sector instead of encouraging the growth of a balanced economy? Doesn’t it make sense to shield infant industries from competition until they’re strong enough to go it alone? Shouldn’t we aim to be self-sufficient in basics, such as food?

All these ideas appeal to minds evolved on the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa. Our brains are designed to make short-cuts, to go with hunches. But the hunches that served well enough for hunter-gatherers programmed to hoard against famine are often irrational. (I try to address the food security issue, for example, in this blog).

Just as we can understand that an optical illusion isn’t what it seems, so we see through false intuitions (of which, indeed, optical illusions are a sub-category). A good example is the question of comparative advantage, perhaps the single most counter-intuitive notion in the whole of economics. If Country A is more efficient than Country B in every respect, we can see why Country A stands to gain from free commerce between the two. But surely, we assume, Country A’s gain will be Country B’s loss? Country B’s industries will be overwhelmed by cheaper competition, its workers thrown onto the streets. Won’t they?

 

The unavoidable conclusion is that human nature has a bias against the liberal civilization. Friedrich Hayek addressed this idea, which I think deserves a lot more attention than it has hitherto recieved, in The Fatal Conceit: 

(M)an's insticts, which were fully developed long before Aristotle's time, were not made for the kinds of surroundings, and for the numbers, in which he now lives. They were adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few milion years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was still being formed. These genetically inherited instincts served to steer the cooperation of the members of the troop, a cooperation that was, necessarily, a narrowly circumscribed interaction of fellows known to and trusted by one another. These primitive people were guided by concrete, commonly perceived aims, and by a similar perception of the dangers and opporunities - chiefly sources of food and shelter - of their environment (Hayek 1988, 11-12).

Part of our present difficult is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our sentiments and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once (Ibid, 18). 

Parliamentarian Triumph at the the Battle of Marston Moor

 

The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn.

-Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

 

Today marks the two hundred and eightieth year anniversary of the Battle of Marston Moor.  During the First English Civil War, the Royalists were greatly helped by the norther ports which gave them access to mainland Europe and by the general sympathy that many in the English northern counties had for King Charles I. In a blog post, Daniel Hannan writes of the day as perhaps the most tangible date for when the English-speaking world removed itself from the trends of European absolutism:

It was a sad day for Boye, for Prince Rupert and for the unfortunate Royalist commander, the Marquess of Newcastle, who had exhausted his fortune in the King’s cause, and who now sought exile in Hamburg rather than endure “the laughter of the court”. It was a glad day, though, for freedom, for democracy and for Anglosphere exceptionalism.

The King had lost the North and, with it, the manpower of its conservative shires as well as its North Sea ports. From then on, it was only a matter of time before Charles I was brought to terms. If we are looking for a day when the English-speaking peoples branched irretrievably away from European absolutism, 2 July 1644 is as good a candidate as any.

You might situate the divergence earlier, of course. Some of the men who won the day at Marston Moor would have pointed at Henry VIII’s break with Rome, others at Magna Carta. Yet others would have gone back still further, to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon common law that had constrained kings before 1066.

Alternatively, you might place the moment later: even in 1688, it seemed possible that the English-speaking peoples might yet be subjected to French- or Spanish-style autocracy.

But I think it was the interlinked conflicts of the 1640s – what, in my book, I call the First Anglosphere Civil War – that marked our real break with Europe. There were, to be sure, relapses and regressions. But never again was it seriously proposed that a king or a clergyman might stand above the law.

It’s true that the victorious parliamentary regime lapsed into military repression. The admirable Lieutenant General Cromwell who led the horsemen at Marston Moor became the altogether less admirable Lord Protector Cromwell, a harsh dictator. But the restoration, when it came in 1660, was in the first place a restoration of a legitimate parliament. Only after its own re-establishment did that parliament invite Charles II to return.

The English-speaking peoples, in short, had made up their minds in favour of parliamentary sovereignty. And they were determined that that sovereignty should be an ally of freedom and a guarantor of property, not just an instrument of majority rule.

Klein and Cowen on Hannan's _Inventing Freedom_

I've already written about my own approval of Hannan's grandiose yet surprisingly sensible claim, but don't take it from me alone. Both Daniel Klein and Tyler Cowen have both written about how they think the book is more important than one might expect prima facie. 

Klein from "Cafe Hayek":

I’ve finished reading Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. I think that it is a very valuable book, and in many ways; it really should be read and discussed.

Like Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism it is a book that I do not always agree with, but which teaches a lot and is quite persuasive in many of its central messages. As wide-frame as Goldberg’s book is, Hannan’s is much much wider. I learned a great deal more from Hannan’s book.

Here is the awesome 3-min 2009 video of Hannan to Gordon Brown.

Here is Hannan’s recent 30-min presentation of the book at Heritage (followed by some Q & A).

Here is an informative WSJ review of the book.

Here is a 10-min interview at the Institute of Economic Affairs (London).

Hannan is clearly a strong proponent of individual liberty and free markets. But some libertarians will object to Hannan. My sense is that Hannan is not really very militaristic (here is a blog post where he says Britain probably should have stayed out of the First World War); he is for at least moderate liberalization of drugs. In the Heritage talk he flatly tells the audience to favor immigration.

 

Tyler Cowen from "Marginal Revolution":

That is the new book by Daniel Hannan and the subtitle is How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.

Oh how one can mock those subtitles about the making of the modern world, heh heh!  Yet this subtitle has a plausible claim to be…true.  Even more shockingly, the subtitle accurately describes the book.

Every time my plane lands in England I shed at least a tear, maybe more, out of realization that I am visiting a birthplace (the birthplace?) of liberty.  This is not a joke and during my trips there I never quite snap out of that feeling, though I am also well aware of all the problems those people have foisted upon the world as well.

I found many parts of this book to be superficial, or perhaps well-known.  Yet often they were superficial and…true.  Here is one excerpt:

To put it another way, the distinction was not between Catholic and Protestant individuals, but between Catholic and Protestant states.

Here is from an Amazon review:

"Author Daniel Hannan is a person of English ancestry who was born and raised in Peru then relocated to the United Kingdom as an adult and made a career in politics, including becoming one of the U.K.’s representatives to the European Parliament. His global experience has shown him how unique is our 'Anglosphere' heritage of representative democracy, protection of property rights, the sanctity of law, and the inalienable rights of the individual."

This is in some ways an important book, though I do not think it is a book which will satisfy everybody.

For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.

 

SNL: Obama Sends a Message to Putin

 

 

 

On a serious note, I think Daniel Hannan is in the right on the issue:

I wish it were as easy as goodies against baddies, students against secret policemen, democrats against autocrats. In the early stages of an uprising – what we might call the Arab Spring Phase – Western media, wanting to simplify things for their readers, gloss over the complexities. Later, when things turn tragic, those readers can be left baffled.

Don’t get me wrong. Viktor Yanukovych was a nasty piece of work, whose goons carried out unspeakable crimes. My sympathies were with the protesters, both in general (the vision of a pluralist, market-oriented Ukraine is more wholesome than that of a country tied to Putin) and on the specific issue that triggered the demonstrations (a free trade agreement is better than a customs union, because it is non-exclusive).

But the ousting of a thug doesn’t mean that “all shall be well / and all manner of thing shall be well”. This is, after all, not the first time that Yanukovych has been toppled by street protests. Ten years ago, crowds in the same places pushed him from office and, in new elections, installed their candidate, Viktor Yuschenko. Years of corruption and failure followed, and Yanukovych came back, in an election that observers agreed had been free and fair, in 2010.

Ukraine means “edge” or “borderland” (Krajina in the former Yugoslavia shares its etymology). To Russian nationalists, Kiev is the cradle of Russian nationhood, and Ukrainians are the Little Russians who, along with the White Russians and the Great Russians, comprised the historic motherland. Plenty of Russians will tell you that Ukrainian is a Russian dialect and Ukrainian national identity a creation of, first, Polish and, later, Austrian occupiers. They point to the many famous Russians who might as easily be called Ukrainian – Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Brezhnev – arguing that the distinction is synthetic and pointless.

Ukrainian patriots respond by pointing to the result of their 1991 referendum, when 92.3 per cent of voters, including a clear majority of Russian-speakers, voted for independence. There were majorities for separation in every region – even Crimea, which had always historically been part of Russia until whimsically given to Ukraine by Khruschev (another Russian with Ukrainian connections) in 1954.

These two views – Ukrainians as a historic people, Ukrainians as a strain of Russians – frame the present quarrel. Most Russian nationalists allow, albeit reluctantly, that Ukrainian national consciousness exists. Alexander Solzhenitsyn grumpily accepted that western Ukrainians, after the horrors of the Soviet era, had been permanently alienated from Mother Russia; but he insisted that the frontiers were arbitrarily drawn under Lenin. If Ukrainians claimed independence on grounds of having a separate national identity, he argued, they must extend their own logic to the Russian-speakers east of the Dnieper.

Crimea is an example of post-Westaphalia great power politics. Legitimacy cannot simply be seen as lines on a map, which is the great error of post-Versailles great power politics, but it must be seen as a topographic map. On that topographic map, Russia's legitimacy in the Crimea may very well be greater, for reasons which would take an entire book on Crimean history to write, than a nationalistic Ukrainian government's legitimacy. 

The Anthropogenic Fallacy

 

A rather chilling paragraph concludes Daniel Hannan's blog post about people's need to ascribe fault and intention to the recent floods in England:

We like to believe that we control our destiny. We rage against the sense that we are in the grip of larger forces, “as flies to wanton boys”. In that rage, we lash out at identifiable human-shaped objects. Our remote ancestors went so far as to slaughter each other on altars in their attempts to control the weather. The Green Party today is less demanding: it wants only to purge the government of all officials and ministers who disagree with it. Neither form of sacrifice makes a difference. The rain it raineth every day.

 

Related to Hannan's remarks, Amartya Sen wrote about the destruction that the illusion that people can control their destiny has had on the human race across history in Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny.

Liberty and the Anglosphere: Reflections on Hannan's _Inventing Liberty_

 

 

The nations, not so blest as thee,

Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

 

In his recent book, Inventing Liberty: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, MEP Daniel Hannan discusses how the ideas of a liberal society emerged within the British isles over a course of hundreds of years, and how their proliferation across the world happened within a distinctly English-speaking context. Hannan argues that it has been the ascendency of the Anglosphere in the past three hundred years, including nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, which has made possible the similar ascendency of liberal values over that same time period. Hannan argues that it was the culture of common law, of Magna Carta, and of representative government, not intellectual arguments, which made the free and open society possible. As intellectuals discussed (and eventually en masse rejected) the values which cultivated such a society, they were transported to and flowered in British colonies the world over,  even amongst the prisoners shipped to Australia.  

 

The main question, at least for me, which Inventing Liberty brings up is the question of how culture has made liberalism possible. A constant problem facing any order at the level of society at large is: How do people participate within them? As every angsty teenager has recognized, sometimes society can be an impersonal machine in which people can be but cogs, used as means rather than as ends in and of themselves. As Shakespeare wrote: All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely players. What guides those players, and forms their collective patterns of behavior into what we know as as society are the institutions and norms of the societies which people find themselves surrounded by. The way that people participate in the social orders they live in is thus often merely a product of the culture they are surrounded by. 

Of course, we all know (and for the most part appreciate) that institutions matter. But there is something quite different between the argument which Hannan is making, and the arguments which many institution-matter theorists make is that Hannan argues, implicitly though, that we cannot simply replicate the institutions of the Anglosphere to non-Anglosphere countries. The necessary jump between Hannan’s main point in Inventing Liberty and an institutions-matter theorist like James Buchanan’s throughout his corpus is that Hannan’s vision is very much historically fatalistic whereas Buchahan looks at the problem from the point of view of social contract theory. For Buchahan, the question what can be done is a very real one, though in Hannan, what can be done is largely just a matter of preserving what is already there. In Hannan's history, institutions are determined by culture, and if a nation does not have the culture to support good institutions, then it is by and large doomed to go without them.

The British character of liberalism and of the commercial society it animates is corroborated by common language. When people are speaking about the core tenet of a liberal market, competition, people, especially in Continental Europe, often speak of “Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” The view that it is that British variety which encourages “dog-eat-dog” competition whereas their more “cooperative” approach cultivated more moral outcomes. The use of such language is so wide that it has gotten its own page of Wikipedia: “The Anglo-Saxon Model.” The culturally English-speaking nature of the modern commercial society is thereby displayed by its identification with a certain cultural group, that of Great Britiain.

 

The question which I am naturally lead to is then: Why Britain? Why did the English-speaking population become the cradle of liberal ideas rather than, say the populations of Holland or Italy? The Dutch certainly went a long way towards the development of liberal ideas, and during the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam was a shining light in the world. There, the first modern stock market was established there by the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Levels of religious toleration were high compared to the rest of Europe, especially towards the Jews (though the Catholics suffered due to perceived political loyalties to the Habsburg empire that the Dutch Republic had succeeded from). Daniel Hannan even celebrates Dutch society in “I realised why I like the Dutch so much,” and claims that what he loves about Dutch society is found in the bourgeois values that the Dutch and British both share: “Only recently, though, was I able to put my finger on what I liked so much. It’s this: for centuries, the Dutch made the honest pursuit of self-betterment a supreme virtue.” The bourgeois virtues which Deirdre McCloskey celebrates in her aptly named book, The Bourgeois Virtues, were quickly coming to fruition within Amsterdam, and the Dutch Republic could therefore have seemed to be a viable candidate to be the cradle of liberalism for the Western world. 

That was not to be, though. One of the main reasons was that the Dutch Republic did not have Great Britain’s fortunate geography. Unlike Great Britain, which is an island separated from the Continent, the Netherlands is a low-lying plain, much of it reclaimed from the sea, close to the center of Europe. As such, the influenced of the bourgeois virtues in the Netherlands was vulnerable of being snuffed out by conquest, and that is one of the events which happened following the Dutch Golden Age. Whereas the British were able to survive and compete against the Continental powers by outdoing them on the seas, the Dutch Republic never had such an option, and like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was unable to assert its independence forever against the encroachments of illberal states very adept at waging war. Unlike those two, Great Britain was in the fateful position of being separated by the sea from the many wars which were waged on the Continent in the early modern period, and was thereby separated from the need of winning those wars, at the cost of its liberal values, in order to ensure its survival.

 

In the end, liberalism wasn’t discovered by the great powers of human reason; rather, it was cultivated in culture until finally being recognized by the mind. It is not a necessary outcome of progress. Rather, it is a historical accident. The ascendency of liberalism is thus not a matter, as it often is depicted to be, of the triumph of human reason over bigotry and superstition. Instead, the ascendency of liberalism is a matter of a historically contingent sequence of unique events in unique places; of infectous habits rather than explicit ideas. The lesson to be appreciated from Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Liberty is that the free and open society is a consequence not of human ideas, but of human history.