A Libertarian's Basic Repertoire

...On the other, they had no sympathy with the "glories" of war—which means, no love for the way in which certain people heighten the drama and intensity of their own lives by creating a stageset requiring the destruction of the lives of other people (George Patton offers a good example of this process inour own time...

...While I would object to "free trade imperialism" as a contradiction in terms, I find that this argument has a good deal of merit to it (although, unlike J.A...

...free trade" imperialism...

...the work was signed, "A Manchester Manufacturer"): "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible...

...The following examples typifies Cobden's ongoing radical critique of England's world-role: "The peace party will never rouse the conscience of the people so long as they allow them to indulge in the comforting delusion that we have been, a peace-loving people...

...For this very reason, a recent reviewer for National Review (a writer connected with the Nixon White House, I believe, although not himself in jail), contrasted the great friend of freedom and peace unfavorably with the war-mongering Lord Palmerston: in the reviewer's opinion, Cobden simply was not a fun-person...

...In his work, How Wars are Got up in India (which, as Paul Goodman said of Wilhelm Reich's The Function of the Orgasm, is a classic already by virtue of its title), he warns that England must make "timely atonement and reparation" and "put an end to the deeds of violence and injustice which have marked every step of our progress in India," or else face the inevitable providential "punishment for imperial crimes...

...Actual military control and political hegemony, the argument goes, are not necessary conditions of imperialism...

...for they keep men's minds in a degrading state of fear and dependence, and afford the excuse for continually increasing government expenditures...

...To my mind, William Appleman Williams, Lloyd Gardner, and others are persuasive when they employ this concept to help explain, for instance, the origins of the Cold War...

...To the Manchesterites, the Corn Laws represented purely and simply a tribute levied by the Lords and great proprietors of the soil on the productive classes of Britain, and the repeal of those Laws in 1846—which, perhaps even more than the Reform Bill of 1832, signalled the fading of the ancient system of rule by Whig and Tory landed interests—was largely the work of Cobden's and Bright's great Anti-Corn Law League...

...But there is little cause for wonder...

...you don't have to be an anarchist to wonder just what it was that half a million men gave their lives for in the Crimea...

...The defenders of the interests of our New Aristocracy have had the floor and the final say for a long time now...

...But, as with Frederic Bastiat, who learned much from them and who helped spread their views on the Continent, these most famous of free traders believed that their doctrine would serve even higher ends than material abundance: free trade was to be a major means for the eventual elimination of war (which, along with papermoney, Cobden called "the curse and scourge of the working classes"), by tightly interconnecting the economic wellbeing of all civilized nations...

...Itmight attract much more general support than the conventional Tory or Labour politician would suppose...

...It would seem," Cobden asserted, "as if there were some unseen power behind the Government, always able, unless held in check by an agitation in the country, to help itself to a portion of the national savings, 'limited only by the taxable pa,- thence of the public...

...ment—England was at war almost continuously from 1793 to 1815—a point which is recognized but not, I think, sufficiently appreciated by libertarian pro-Industrial Revolution scholars such as T.S...

...military and political power in furthering their primary aim—the extension of their foreign trade and foreign investments—then a form of imperialism 'not much different from the More 'conventional varieties existed: i.e...

...The libertarian-learning British economic writer Samuel Brittan, in his remarkable book Capitalism and the Permissive Society, recently wrote: "The need for a modern Cobdenite movement which would combine belief in both personal and economic freedom with nonintervention overseas has still to be met...

...The people marked for exploitation, though, are not the masses of troublesome, illiterate, disease-ridden peasants in underdeveloped countries...

...As long as Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States more recently were prepared any time the occasion should arise to use their...

...Nothing so reveals the State for the murderous farce it is as the exposure of' its studied duplicity and hypocrisy in maneuvering peoples into bloody conflicts with each other (Winston Churchill's reputation among American conservatives might suffer somewhat if they were aware of the fact that he made virtually a lifelong career out of "embroiling"—his word—the United States in world wars in defense of the British Empire...

...For in Cobden's mind, "the primary cause of all the prosperity and happiness of [the American] people is to be found in the wisdom of that advice...

...And cost-overruns were evidently already notorious by the middle of the nineteenth century, having doubtless existed from the very beginnings of "defense" establishments...

...Cobden's writings are especially interesting for their revisionist analyses of the origins of England's wars, evidencing once more the inner logical connection between revisionist historiography and libertarianism...

...Heraclitus was wrong, Mises wrote in The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth: peace, not war, is the father of all things...

...for as faith, if forced, would no longer be religion, but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments...

...On the contrary, he declared, "the true secret of the people is to remain on their guard against false alarms about the intended aggressions of their neighbors, which when too credulously believed, give to governments all the political advantages of a war, without its risks...

...All revisionist works teach a lesson, and Cobden (in the midst of war agitation against France, hence the second date in his title) hoped "that all might understand the 'true secret' of despots, which is to employ one nation in cutting the throats of another, so that neither may have time to reform the abuses in their own domestic government...

...they are not ordinary productive men and women, like Cobden, who are exploited for imperialism's sake...

...Naturally, it is nothing of the kind, since there is no real self-referral in the accusations...

...Perry Watlington, M.P., viz., that if Lord Palmerston, "who has the command of all the resources of knowledge and information," asks for millions for coastal fortifications against the French, "then it would be positive madness to doubt the danger, and it would be culpable negligence not to be prepared for, it, presenting an obvious parallel to the mindless apologists for Presidential , power in recent American history...

...And it was the producing classes of Britain who, through merciless taxation, had to pay for militaristic policies...

...There is his attack on Britain's going to war in defense of unspeakable Turkey, "a fierce, unmitigated military despotism, allied with the fanaticism of a brutalizing religion, which teaches its followers to rely on the sword, and to disdain all improvements and labor," bringing to mind our own alliances with any number of tyrannical regimes and corrupt social systems around the world...

...By the same token the utter inconceivability of present-day France and West Germany going to war—even if they had continued to have great power status—would be a good confirmation of Manchester school expectations (except that, for Cobden and his friends, the ideal was worldwide economic integration...

...He mentions, for instance, the widespread rumors that the French Admiralty had sent spies to map out the English coast for possible invasion sites (as if any information they could conceivably obtain were not already available from atlases, the south coast of England being rather well-known to sailors...

...Sixty-five years later, the leaders of the two Western Entente powers, in the secret Treaty of London, were to offer Russia both Constantinople and the Straits...

...In the present day, the Manchester school is best known for its strict adherence to laissez faire (Manchestertum is commonly used in German as a generic name for extreme economic liberalism): its opposition to state regulation of hours and conditions of work (except for children), any but the meagerest taxes, coercive trade-unionism, government meddling in general but particularly protective tariffs, and, above all, the tariffs on grain, the Corn Laws...

...Isn't it time we began, on a wide scale, to rediscover the great Anglo-American libertarian tradition of nonintervention and anti-imperialism, and, at its center, the thought of the immortal Richard Cobden, "Manchester Manufacturer...

...Since the Revolution of 1688 we have- expended more than 15 hundred millions of money upon wars, not one of which has been upon our own shores, or in defense of our hearths and homes...

...In the chapter on "The Protection of Commerce," in his pamphlet Russia (1836), for example, he wrote: "Affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if touched by the hand of violence...

...Hobson, its propounders are totally blind to the State bureaucracy's own material interest in foreign expansion...

...He was a harping critic of the status quo in Britain (and Ireland), and an incessant nagger and needier, especially of those who ran the foreign affairs of the country...

...He was also, as this reprint by Garland Press of his most important works brings to our attention, the greatest libertarian theorist of international relations who ever lived...

...For the United States in particular, every war emergency and its subsequent detumescence has been a case of two steps forward and one step back for the government power...

...BLit none of this has anything to do, logically or historically, with the libertarian attitude, as exemplified by Cobden and others...

...One of the main reasons why Cobden was known in his day as a "Radical" will become evident to anyone who peruses these volumes...

...But while the interest of the great majority in all countries was peace, Cobden and Bright were well aware that both specific wars and long-term patterns of belligerency on the part of govern...

...This is a magnificent example of a Cobdenite sentiment, Cobdenly expressed...

...So that, besides pressing for the changes in the direction of free trade that would tend to make war an increasingly self-defeating economic proposition, the Manchester liberals considered it their duty also to attack and expose the particular wars into which England was always drifting or threatening to drift...

...That this was the logic of war—that the State, born in war and conquest, would tend to expand when placed again in its natural culture-medium—was an insight of the radical wing of nineteenth century liberalism...

...Nonetheless it existed and was the position of the most prominent free traders of the nineteenth century...

...Asa result, not only have militarist institutions and values and the number of State functionaries grown, but so have the suppression of civil liberties and, most especially, the whole system of state-corporate capitalism with which we are presently blessed...

...These men were, as we are so often told, the embodiment of the middle-class weltanschauung, and that at its best...

...In recent years a number of liberal and socialist scholars have tried to blur the historical distinctiveness of this libertarian position by speaking of something they call "free trade imperialism," A concept central to leftist interpretations of the modern foreign policies of both England and the United States...

...But Richard Cobden was not only a hero of peace in the political arena...

...Libertarianism and Revisionism The reader of this exciting collection of Cobden's writings—all, significantly, devoted to foreign affairs—will note the beautiful irony in the contemporary ring of many of the issues raised...

...The documents show rather, Cobden found, that it was causedby the determination of the British ruling class to prevent the spread of the democratic contagion...

...The exploited masses are United States taxpayers, the most productive and easily managed subject population in the history of the world...

...In this spirit, in his brilliant revisionist essay, 1793 and 1853, Cobden takes on the myth that the Anglo-French War of 1793, which went on, with unimportant interruptions, until Waterloo, was caused by some expansionist dynamism inherent in the new French Revolutionary "religion...

...Historians have sometimes expressed perplexity over the fact that such "brutal" Social Darwinists as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, or such "cold egoists" as Jeremy Bentham, were among the most outspoken enemies of imperialism and war...

...In the social order of mid-nineteenth century Britain, these "tax-eaters" were the aristocracy, with its ramified sinecures in the Army and Navy, the Foreign Office and colonial bureaucracy, and the established Church, and, to a lesser degree, certain capitalist groups wishing to spread foreign trade with the backing of English military and political power...

...and, consistently applied, it would make impossible' most of what is understood by "free trade imperialism," as well as the international conflicts and resentments to which it has led...

...Now knee-jerk conservatism's response to this line of thought is, of course, to cry "masochism" and "self-flagellation" (facile words—but real insight into what "masochism" might mean in a political context would probably give the average conservative an anxiety attack...

...On the one hand, the bloodshed, poverty, and statism caused by war filled them with horror...

...We have been the most combative and aggressive community that has existed since the days of the Roman dominion...

...Those responsible for the "imperial crimes" are the governors...

...Cobden, Bright, and their followers sought to provide the necessary checks on this unseen power...

...One is free to say, as many New Left historians no doubt would, that such a view is "unrealistic," that it "could not meet the needs of a maturing capitalism," etc., etc...

...Ashton...

...Interestingly, Cobden traces much of the miserable condition of the British workers in the earlier stages of the Industrial Revolution to the war policy of the British govern...

...As a young man he optimistically expected that some day "the test of `no foreign politics"' would be "applied to those who offer to become the representatives of free constituencies," and although political experience withered away his optimism in this regard (the British public's fevered enthusiasm for the Crimean war was an eye-opener for him), the principle set by Washington was his guiding star throughout his political and polemical career...

...He cites, too, the sage counsel of a certain Major J.W...

...A sort of middle-class Banquo's Ghost, Cobden was always pointing out to a public that preferred to dwell on the fantasies and tinsel-symbols of British world-power ("Empress of India") that the source of soldiers and ships is the wealth of those who work, and their main purpose is to terrorize and slaughter defenseless natives...

...He speaks of "our insatiable lovt'of territorial aggran- diacirienC.of the fact chat in the inso- knceiornur alit`without waitingfor the assaults of envious enemies, we have sallied forth in search of conquest or rapine, and carried bloodshed into every quarter of the globe...

...Actually, there are signs that such a movement, in our country at least, may be underway...

...ments could be explained by and large by reference to the interests of particular groups within the governing circles—the interests, more or less, of what Bright was fond of calling the "tax-eating" rather than the "tax-paying"class...

...There is no question but that, of all the great classical -liberals who championed peace, the men whose names are most closely associated with that cause are the leaders of the Manchester school, Richard Cobden and John Bright (arguably the two noblest individuals who have ever sat in the House of Commons...

...Rather than being "masochistic," Cob-den's indictments exhale a healthy Christian pugnacity, even while he is hauling "his country" before the bar of justice...

...As politicians, they consistently took antiwar positions, most famously in their almost solitary battle against the Crimean War, waged by Britain and France against Russia for the defense of Turkey...

...Spencer once said that his British patriotism could not survive the Boer War, and Sumner entitled a lecture on the outcome of the Spanish-American War, "The Conquest of the United States by Spain...

...reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt's lie about the "map" that had fallen into his possession showing how the Germans were planning to invade South America from Dakar...

...And, we may add, Schumpeter was correct in seeing this insight as probably the most enduring contribution to world civilization by the industrious and creative middle class of nineteenth century Europe and America...

...Here, their theory, though often ridiculed, can be supported by the fact that the reversion of most major nations to protectionism after about 1880 was surely part of the process of steadily augmenting international antagonism that finally led to war in 1914...

...No Foreign Politics" Cobden's views on foreign policy can almost be summed up in the quotation, from George Washington's Farewell Address to the American people, which he placed on the title page of the very first work he ever published (England, Ireland and America, in 1835...

...In The High Priests of Waste, A. Ernest Fitzgerald (associated with the National Taxpayers Union) declared: "It is undoubtedly true that subject population exploitation is a major objective of the [American] military spending coalition...