Episode Details

The Ralph Raico Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Murray and Florence Sabrin. Presented at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

Below is a written version of the lecture (supplied by Ryan McMaken).

I am very honored to be asked by Joe to deliver the Ralph Raico memorial lecture at this conference, and this means a lot to me because I have for many years been an enthusiast of his work, and especially in his work on the history of liberalism. Moreover, Raico largely specialized in European history, and I think his work is especially important for Americans to read because, when it comes to the history of ideas, Americans usually end up dwelling excessively on little more than nineteenth and twentieth century America, and to the extent that Americans explore outside American history, they usually confine themselves to the Anglosphere and to theorists who wrote in English only. 

Raico is a good antidote to all this, and as we'll see today, Raico, like Rothbad, regarded the continental classical liberal theorists to often be superior to what we get from the British. 

I say all these because we are going to need to delve into the work on many Continental theorists, largely those who wrote in French and Italian, to explore the most fruitful strains of liberalism. Specifically, we need to look at the specifical school of liberalism that I’ll here refer to as the “realist” school or the “exploitation” school of liberalism. These strains of liberalism were notable for their central observation about the state: namely, that it is a tool of the ruling elite for the exploitation of others. This will be contrasted with the type of liberalism we might call the naïve school of liberalism which views written constitutions and democracy as tools that will sufficiently constrain state power.

But before we can do anything, really, we need to make a brief note about terminology. During this talk, I'm going to use Raico's terminology when it comes to the terms “liberalism” and “libertarianism.” That is, when I use the term “liberal,” I'll be referring to the ideology of laissez-faire, freedom, and free markets which has been historically known as liberalism, or in more modern times as classical liberalism, since that has now become necessary thanks to a muddling of language after the 1930s. Moreover, Raico regarded what we now call libertarianism as synonymous with historical liberalism, especially its more radical varieties. So, at no point, when I say the word "liberal," am I referring to the social democrats or so-called progressives that modern-day right-wing pundits insist on calling liberals.

So, with all that out of the way, I'd like to set the tone with commentary drawn from the final section of Raico 's 10-hour lecture series on the history of political thought. Known as The Struggle for Liberty. So, as the series draws to an end, Raico says this:

I go back often to Machiavelli ... In The Prince, he talks about men who want power and gain power, what the nature of power is, and what the nature of politics is. He says he is writing for a few people and not for the mass of people. Machiavelli contends the mass of people prefer appearance to reality. They prefer their fantasy to what actually exists. If they knew what politics really was, they wouldn’t have a good night’s sleep for the rest of their lives. ... The average person is born to be a sheep, and, as another Italian, Pareto, said, “he who plays the sheep will find the butcher.” 

Now, when you’re in my line of work and deliver lectures of this sort, you’ll often be told to end your talks with something optimistic and light. Well, if Raico ever got that memo, he wadded it up into a little ball and threw it away.

After all, what Raico says here—that's not very pleasant to think about. That seems pretty dark. Surely, if we just vote for the r