Table Of Contenti
What is Classical
Liberal History?
What is Classical
Liberal History?
Edited by
Michael J. Douma and Phillip W. Magness
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
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Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books
Chapter 1: Portions of this chapter were originally published as Scott M. Shubitz,
“Liberal Intellectual Culture and Religious Faith: The Liberalism of the New York
Liberal Club, 1869–1877,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 16, no. 2
(April 2017): 183–205.
Chapter 7: A portion of this chapter was previously published in Jonathan Bean,
“Introduction,” in Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, ed. Jonathan
Bean (University Press of Kentucky, 2009): 1–12.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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ISBN 978-1-4985-3611-0 (electronic)
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Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Michael J. Douma
1 Beyond Laissez-Faire and State Power: A Critical Look
at the Transformation Thesis and Classical Liberalism in
Nineteenth-Century America 1
Scott Shubitz
2 Classical Liberalism and the “New” History of American Capitalism 17
Phillip W. Magness
3 The Historicity of Civil Liberties, a Challenge for Liberals 39
Anthony Gregory
4 Lost in Methodenstreit: Reflections on Theory, History,
and the Quest for a Science of Association 59
Lenore T. Ealy
5 Some Roads Taken, and Not Taken, from the Progressive
Era to the New Deal 95
David T. Beito
6 A Manifesto for Liberty: Toward a New History of Civil
Rights in U.S. History 115
Jonathan Bean
7 The End or Ends of Social History? The Reclamation of
Old-Fashioned Historicism in the Writing of Historical Narratives 137
Hans L. Eicholz
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vi Contents
8 “History through a Classical Liberal Feminist Lens” 159
Sarah Skwire
9 Classical Liberalism in Eastern Europe: Very Vibrant but So Mild 171
Leonid Krasnozhon and Mykola Bunyk
10 “Start the Economy”: Causation, Emergent Order, and Social
Change in the Origins of Modern Economic Growth 189
Matthew Brown
11 A Non-Manifesto of Liberal History 209
Alberto Garín
Index 227
About the Editors and Contributors 243
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided
invaluable comments on early drafts of the book and the editors at Rowman
& Littlefield who were a pleasure to work with. Michael Douma would like
to thank Bruce Caldwell, Peter Boettke, Fred Smith, and George Nash for
useful comments.
Jonathan Bean would like to thank all those who reviewed and commented
upon earlier drafts, including David Bernstein, Richard Epstein, Robert
Weems, Paul Moreno, Roger Clegg, and Andrew Barbero. I am also grate-
ful for my loving wife, Tina Bean, who supported me in this endeavor, even
as my keyboard clicking filled the air with words that eventually landed on
these pages.
Hans Eicholz would like to thank his friends and colleagues, historians
G. M. Curtis and Peter Mentzel for enduring his interminable discussions
on these themes through the years. He would also like to acknowledge the
assistance of his former mentor, the late Joyce Appleby who had commented
on and encouraged an earlier essay on historicism and a review of Bernard
Bailyn's work that proved highly informative in this project.
Lenore T. Ealy would like to thank the dozens of intrepid individuals
who have participated since 2001 in the programs of the Project for New
Philanthropy Studies, the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders, and
the Philanthropic Enterprise, initiatives founded by Richard Cornuelle
(1927–2011) to foster scholarly deliberation to help us understand volun-
tary social processes as well as market processes.
vii
Introduction
Michael J. Douma
This book is designed to generate new ideas and new ways of thinking by
reviving a neglected historical tradition, classical liberal history. In doing so,
we hope not only to call attention to the best elements of the classical liberal
tradition but also to call upon historians to reflect on the importance of this
tradition to the history and practice of their own discipline.
Modern historiography reflects a diverse and overlapping set of epistemo-
logical positions, methods of inquiry, and approaches to research. In Ameri-
can academia, historiography began in a conservative vein. Conservative
historians tend to write histories of nations and biographies of statesmen and
great figures who serve as moral models for preserving the best of society.
Conservatives see in the past a morality tale and lament the destruction of
ordered systems which they hope to resurrect at least in part. By the turn of
the 20th century, however, progressive history had come to dominate the
preparation and practice of American historians. This approach to historical
study arose toward the end of the 19th century, alongside the development
of the new “social” sciences. Progressive historians, like their counterparts
in sociology, political science, and economics, tended to see the role of their
professions as helping to direct society on a path toward a better future.
Such presentist and political purposes have also characterized the alterna-
tive Marxist and other collectivist models of history (e.g., feminist histories)
which are based on the propositions that all people belong to a class, that
their actions are shaped by their material circumstances, and that therefore
we must study people as groups to understand how the past is necessarily
moving us through different stages of development. More recently, post-
modernist historians have challenged the possibility that historians can arrive
at “objective” facts with the implication that history is itself a political act
written only to serve power.
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