Empire of Liberty - chapters 10, 11 and 12

In thinking about the conversation with Boyes over the past 3 weeks dealing with the first half of Wood's view of the federalist period in our history I am struck by the timeless nature of the issues raised, particularly the debate represented by Hamilton and Jefferson. Informing my thinking of this debate is the impact of centralization v decentralization from the libertarian perspective. Over the past weekend I listened to an FEE podcast by Gene Callahan that was provocative and helpful in crystalizing the importance of this discussion.

The podcast Lessons for Libertarians from the History of Political Thought made a series of points that seem key to our reading:

1. Civil discourse
2. The usefulness of the work of Oakeshott and Hayek in understanding libertarian first principles.
3. How Aristotle, Machievilli, Hobbs, and Oakshott can be used to better round out an understanding of libertarian first principles.
4. Non aggression as an organizing assumption to apply libertarian ideas to important debates.

So, I found Callahan's podcast (a tad over an hour) useful - I learned

1. To remind myself that civil discourse above all is a pre condition for change.
2. Hayek admired Oakeshott and I need to read Rationalism and Politics
3. Oh, so much here - what comes to mind is Aristotle's view of "the one", "the few" and "the many" and the role that the synthesis of these 3 groups had on liberty and freedom.
4. I had never consider the impact of placing non aggression at the lead of the libertarian assumption hit parade.

On to the three chapters that end the first half of Wood.

Chapter 10

Boyes does a nice job of outlining the key issued dealing with land. In many ways the relationship between the relative scarcity of the factors of production (land, labor and capital) shaped the evolution of formal and informal institutions in the United States. The abundance of land played a role in the emergence of the United States that has lead to a number of important beliefs about mobility, responsibility and change. Boyes and I have touched on this and page 398 captures the Whitmanesque contradictions of this "capacity of people to reinvent themselves".

This contradiction is most evident in the Burr/Wilkerson episode and reflects the tension that some find in Adam Smith - TMS v WN. The question is what shapes human behavior - justice, benevolence, prudence and self command as Smith argued in TMS. Or is it exclusively prudence, as the Wealth of Nations seems to argue. Or, as Vernon Smith argues are these two facets of the complexity of human behavior which may find different emergent rules in personal spheres as opposed to public ones. Does this relate to the abundance of land, the schemes for allocating this land and the attempts to shape rules to govern land?

The list of famous historical figures - Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clarke, William Henry Harrison seem to me to reflect both private and public motivations and invite an application of Smith's two works to the immediate issue of land and land ownership and the longer term issue of institutional change. Callahan invites libertarians to resist a doctrinaire approach to thinking about historical and political issues and instead concentrate on the various perspectives and messages embedded in these issues. Clearly as complex and self motivated personalities Burr, Madison, Wilkerson and Jefferson shared any number of motivating rules and differing on how there resolved the contradictions that inevitably arose from their underlying efforts to apply a moral code that included various doses of justice, benevolence, prudence and self command. Washington may well have epitomized the last, Hamilton the third, Marshall the first and, well perhaps they all had attributes of benevolence. How they applied their moral outlook, particularly in the sphere was shaped by prudence, self interest and public interest.

The force of unplanned and the resulting unintended orders are illustrated well here in the westward migration's overwhelming of planning (358) and the results of what Wood calls the demographic imperalism of the time. I heard this described by Louis Tambs (he was referring to the westward expansion of Brazil) as conquest by copulation.

Chapters 11 and 12 deal with the judiciary and Wood writes:

"strong indepedent judiciary and a flexible common law were crucial" (431). This is interesting and, as I previously posted, I learned that the judiciary was an afterthought to both Hamilton and Jefferson and was considered unimportant to the checks and balances and federalism that lay at the heart of the success of the emergent set of formal and informal rules. Again, Callahan has a fresh perspective regarding this institutional evolution during this period.


These two chapters resonate through the decades from decisions such as Dred Scott and Plessey to larger than life personalities and efforts to impose an ideology that may well be, in the long run, futile. The importance of the common law and the fundamental of natural law (448) argue for the importance of an independent judiciary and the Marshall impact on the evolution of the court and the role that the courts play in supporting common law was, for me, a second take away of these two chapters. Finally, it is clear that legal, political and judicial evolution is so interrelated and interconnected that efforts to understand these connections seem as important as ideologically based arguments to change this relationshiop.