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In this, the penultimate, part of my series on Henry Thomas Buckle, I have functioned more as a typist than as a writer. I say this because of the lengthy passages I have quoted from History of Civilization in England. I did this not because I am lazy—or at least not only because I am lazy—but because Buckle was a superb and entertaining writer. To paraphrase some of his key points would be to drain them of their stylistic beauty and emotional energy.

Moreover, Buckle’s massive, two-volume work (1857, 1861), though a popular best-seller in its day, might appear so intimidating to modern readers as to dissuade them from reading it cover-to-cover. This is understandable, since not every libertarian shares my enthusiasm for obscure books on freedom. But by giving some quotable quotes I hope to persuade readers to dip their feet in the water of Buckle’s History, if not dive in altogether.

Buckle’s work is a comparative intellectual history—richly detailed and meticulously documented—of four countries: England, Spain, France, and Scotland. Buckle traces the intellectual development of those countries and attempts to isolate the factors that explain why freedom was more prevalent in some countries than in others. Given the scope and complexity of the History, it is impossible to summarize even all of its basic points, so I shall rest content with presenting a few major themes, often in Buckle’s own words. Let’s begin with the stress that Buckle placed on intellectual factors in the progress of civilization.

The “great thinkers,” according to Buckle, “are the sole permanent benefactors of their species.”

Thought is the creator and vivifier of all human affairs. Actions, facts, and external manifestations of every kind often triumph for a while; but it is the progress of ideas which ultimately determines the progress of the world. Unless these are changed, every other change is superficial, and every improvement is precarious.

The works of important thinkers “can only be fairly estimated by connecting them with the social and intellectual condition of the age in which they appeared.” Historians who focus on political factors cannot account for important, long-range changes in a society because “they look too much at the peculiarities of individuals, and too little at the temper of the age in which those individuals live.”

Such writers do not perceive that the history of every civilized country is the history of its intellectual development, which kings, statesmen, and legislators are more likely to retard than to hasten; because, however great their power may be, they are at best the accidental and insufficient representatives of the spirit of their time; and because, so far from being able to regulate the movements of the national mind, they themselves form the smallest part of it, and, in a general view of the progress of Man, are only to be regarded as the puppets who strut and fret their hour upon a little stage; while beyond them, and on every side of them, are forming opinions and principles which they can scarcely perceive, but by which alone the whole course of human affairs is ultimately governed.

The harmful effects of legislation have been so formidable “that we may well wonder how, in the face of them, civilization has been able to advance.” The fact that considerable advancements have been made “is a decisive proof of the extraordinary energy of Man,” and it justifies our optimistic belief that progress will accelerate more as government interferes less. “But it is absurd, it would be a mockery of all sound reasoning, to ascribe to legislation any share in the progress, or to expect any benefit from future legislators, except that sort of benefit which consists in undoing the work of their predecessors.”

[T]he great enemy [of progress], and therefore the great enemy of civilization, is the protective spirit; by which I mean the notion that society cannot prosper unless the affairs of life are watched over and protected at nearly every turn by the state and church; the state teaching men what they are to do, and the church teaching them what they ought to believe.

In Chapter IX, “History of the Protective Spirit, and Comparison of it in France and England,” Buckle engages in comparative historiography in an effort to discover the reasons why England has, on the whole, enjoyed more freedom than France. Although there were some important similarities, such as the rise of chartered towns that served to decentralize power, in the French case such institutions were ultimately “useless.”

For it is not by the wax and parchment of lawyers that the independence of men can be preserved. Such things are the mere externals; they set off liberty to advantage; they are as its dress and paraphernalia, its holiday-suit in times of peace and quiet. But when the evil days set in, when the invasions of despotism have begun, liberty will be retained, not by those who can show the oldest deeds and the largest charters, but by those who have been most inured to habits of independence, most accustomed to think and act for themselves, and most regardless of that insidious protection which the upper classes have always been so ready to bestow that in many countries they have now left nothing worth the trouble to protect.

Beginning primarily with the reign of Louis XIV in the seventeenth century and extending through the rule of Napoleon, France trended to greater and greater political centralization and thereby intensified the habits of “superiority and submission” in the French people. The spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, whom Buckle cites in his discussion of the hazards of centralized government, is evident in passages like the following:

In France everything is referred to one common centre, in which all civil functions are absorbed. All improvements of any importance, all schemes for bettering even the material condition of the people, must receive the sanction of government; the local authorities not being considered equal to such arduous tasks….The exercise of independent jurisdiction is almost unknown. Everything that is done must be done at headquarters. The government is believed to see everything, know everything, and provide for everything. To enforce this monstrous monopoly there has been contrived a machinery well worthy of the design. The entire country is covered by an immense array of officials; who, in the regularity of their hierarchy, and in the order of their descending series, form an admirable emblem of that feudal principle which, ceasing to be territorial, has now become personal. In fact, the whole business of the state is conducted on the supposition that no man either knows his own interest, or is fit to take care of himself. So paternal are the feelings of government, so eager for the welfare of its subjects, that it has drawn within its jurisdiction the most rare as well as the most ordinary actions of life.

Like many classical liberals of his day, Buckle linked state education to the paternalistic control of adults by government.

Even the education of children [in France] is brought under the control of the state, instead of being regulated by the judgment of masters or parents. And the whole plan is executed with such energy that, as the French while men are never left alone, just so while children they are never left alone. At the same time, it being reasonably supposed that adults thus kept in pupilage cannot be proper judges of their own food, the government has provided for this also. Its prying eye follows the butcher to the shambles, and the baker to the oven. By its paternal hand, meat is examined lest it should be bad, and bread is weighed lest it should be light. In short, without multiplying instances with which most readers must be familiar, it is enough to say that, in France, as in every country where the protective spirit is active, the government has established a monopoly of the worst kind; a monopoly which comes home to the business and bosoms of men, follows them in their daily avocations, troubles them with its petty, meddling spirit, and, what is worse than all, diminishes their responsibility to themselves; thus depriving them of what is the only real education that most minds receive—the constant necessity of providing for future contingencies, and the habit of grappling with the difficulties of life.

According to Buckle, “men can never be free unless they are educated to freedom.” But such education cannot be acquired by attending school or by reading books. Rather, the crucial kind of education “consists in self-discipline, self-reliance, and in self-government”—character traits acquired early in life that are transmitted by cultural rather than by political means. Buckle believed that the French, despite their many theoretical contributions to a theory of liberty, were generally deficient in these characteristics because they had lived so long under the rule of a centralized, paternalistic government.

At the slightest difficulty, [the French] call on the government for support. What with us is competition, with them is monopoly. That which we effect by private companies, they effect by public boards. They cannot cut a canal, or lay down a railroad, without appealing to the government for aid. With them, the people look to the rulers; with us, the rulers look to the people.

With his emphasis on reason as a liberating force throughout history, and with his insistence that doubt and skepticism (in the broad sense) are essential factors in progress, Buckle might appear the quintessential “rationalist” of the sort criticized by F.A. Hayek. As we see in the above passages, however, Buckle does not fit the stereotype commonly found in conservative (and neoconservative) critiques of libertarians. This does not mean that Buckle was a rare exception to the general rule, for a number of other prominent libertarian thinkers, such as Herbert Spencer, also do not conform to the stereotype. In fact (as I hope to discuss in a future series), the Hayekian critique of liberal “rationalism”—which is little more than Edmund Burke warmed over—is based on a serious distortion of the historical record.

Perhaps the most interesting and original part of Buckle’s discussion of the protective spirit occurs in his discussion (in Chapter XI) of Louis XIV, the great “Sun King.” Even critics of Louis frequently praised his patronage of writers, philosophers, and scientists for supposedly bringing about a flowering of French culture. Buckle regarded this account as pure myth, and he attacked it with a vengeance, in the course of maintaining that an “alliance between the intellectual classes and the governing classes” is another instance of the protective spirit that invariably retards progress.

According to Buckle, the argument that state patronage can lead to intellectual and cultural advances that would otherwise be impossible “is a delusion which men of letters have themselves been the first to propagate. From the language too many of them are in the habit of employing, we might be led to believe that there is some magical power in the smiles of a king which stimulates the intellect of the fortunate individual whose heart they are permitted to gladden.” This is more than a harmless prejudice. It is a misconception that is “injurious to the independent spirit which literature should always possess.” (Buckle meant “literature” in the broad sense of writing in any field, such as history, science, philosophy, fiction, etc.)

In most cases a sovereign will bestow his favors not on intellectuals “who are most able, but those who are most compliant.”

In this way, the practice of conferring on men of letters either honorary or pecuniary rewards is agreeable, no doubt, to those who receive them; but it has a manifest tendency to weaken the boldness and energy of their sentiments, and therefore to impair the value of their works. This might be made evident by publishing a list of those literary pensions which have been granted by European princes. If this were done, the mischief produced by these and similar rewards would be clearly seen. After a careful study of the history of literature, I think myself authorized to say that for one instance in which a sovereign has recompensed a man who is before his age, there are at least twenty instances of his recompensing one who is behind his age. The result is that in every country where royal patronage has been long and generally bestowed, the spirit of literature, instead of being progressive, has become reactionary. An alliance has been struck up between those who give and those who receive. By a system of bounties, there has been artificially engendered a greedy and necessitous class; who, eager for pensions, and offices, and titles, have made the pursuit of truth subordinate to the desire of gain, and have infused into their writings the prejudices of the court to which they cling. Hence it is that the marks of favour have become the badge of servitude. Hence it is that the acquisition of knowledge, by far the noblest of all occupations, an occupation which of all others raises the dignity of man, has been debased to the level of a common profession, where the chances of success are measured by the number of rewards, and where the highest honours are in the gift of whoever happens to be the minister or sovereign of the day.

If Buckle’s argument against an alliance between the state and intellectuals had gone no further than these generalities, then it would not have been especially remarkable in the annals of libertarian literature; similar ideas had been expressed decades earlier by Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example. What makes Buckle’s treatment unique is the incredible amount of detail, as he discussed many dozens of French intellectuals during the reign of Louis XIV, and how their best work was done before or independently of state subsidies. Buckle concludes that the age of Louis XIV, in intellectual as in other matters, was an “age of decay; it was an age of misery, of intolerance, and oppression; it was an age of bondage, of ignominy, of incompetence.” The fact that so many historians had praised Louis’s patronage for its supposedly beneficial effects on the intellectual culture of France was the result of careless scholarship and the tendency of historians to be dazzled by the spectacle of political power.

To be continued….

In Part 1 of my series on Henry Thomas Buckle, I pointed out that his massive History of Civilization in England, originally published in two volumes (1857, 1861), was merely the Introduction to a much larger work on the history of England that he never lived to complete. Always in frail health, Buckle died in Damascus in 1862, at age forty-two, within a year after the publication of the second volume. It was commonly said that Buckle had worked himself to death.

As Buckle neared completion of the second volume, it had become clear to him that he would never finish his masterpiece, or even come close. In what is surely one of the most poignant digressions in the annals of historical literature, Buckle acknowledged that his ambitious project “requires not only several minds, but also the successive experience of several generations.”

Once, I own, I thought otherwise. Once, when I first caught sight of the whole field of knowledge, and seemed, however dimly, to discern its various parts and the relation they bore to each other, I was so entranced with its surpassing beauty that the judgment was beguiled, and I deemed myself able not only to cover the surface, but also to master the details. Little did I know how the horizon enlarges as well as recedes, and how vainly we grasp at the fleeting forms, which melt away and elude us in the distance. Of all that I had hoped to do, I now find but too surely how small a part I shall accomplish. In those early aspirations there was much that was fanciful; perhaps there was much that was foolish. Perhaps, too, they contained a moral defect, and savoured of an arrogance which belongs to a strength that refuses to recognize its own weakness. Still, even now that they are defeated and brought to nought, I cannot repent having indulged in them, but on the contrary I would willingly recall them if I could. For such hopes belong to that joyous and sanguine period of life when alone we are really happy; when the emotions are more active than the judgment; when experience has not yet hardened our nature; when the affections are not yet blighted and nipped to the core; and when the bitterness of disappointment not having yet been felt, difficulties are unheeded, obstacles are unseen, ambition is a pleasure instead of a pang, and the blood coursing swiftly through the veins, the pulse beats high, while the heart throbs at the prospect of the future. Those are glorious days; but they go from us, and nothing can compensate their absence. To me they now seem more like the visions of a disordered fancy than the sober realities of things that were, and are not. It is painful to make this confession; but I owe it to the reader, because I would not have him to suppose that either in this or in the future volumes of my History I shall be able to redeem my pledge, and perform all that I promised.

In order to appreciate these remarks, we must understand that Buckle set out to write far more than a conventional history. His goal was to elevate history to the status of an authentic science, one on a par with the physical sciences, by using the facts of history to formulate deterministic laws of historical progress. Buckle’s scientistic methodology, which was misconceived at its very root, was explained in the first several chapters, and it unfortunately became that part of the History for which he would be most remembered. Even Ludwig von Mises, in his discussion of Buckle in Theory and History (1957; section titled “Determinism and Statistics”), focused entirely on Buckle’s flawed methodology, claiming that Buckle was “blinded by the positivist bigotry of his environment.” Meanwhile, Mises altogether bypassed the libertarian, laissez-faire perspective that Buckle brought to bear in his detailed analyses of important events and developments in the history of modern Europe. Here is a typical example:

During almost a hundred and fifty years, Europe was afflicted by religious wars, religious massacres, and religious persecutions; not one of which would have arisen, if the great truth had been recognized, that the state has no concern with the opinions of men, and no right to interfere, even in the slightest degree, with the form of worship which they may choose to adopt.

I shall not here discuss the problems inherent in any effort to formulate deterministic laws of history. (I recommend that those who wish to explore this well-trodden field begin with Karl Popper’s little classic, The Poverty of Historicism, 3^rd ed., 1961.) It should be noted, however, that Buckle was a better historian than he was a philosopher, and nothing of substance in his History ultimately depends on his scientistic methodology. Where Buckle speaks of “laws,” readers may simply substitute “tendencies” or “trends,” and then move on. Indeed, nothing of value to libertarian readers will be lost if they ignore the first three chapters and begin with Chapter IV.

The nineteenth century was the great era of histories written by classical liberals, and since liberalism owed a great deal to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, it was hardly surprising that British liberal historians often investigated the causes and conditions of progress. The optimism implied by the term “progress” was partially inspired by the tremendous economic advances since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Equally important was the prolonged period of peace that was reflected in the title of an extensive work (1850) by the popular liberal historian Harriet Martineau, The History of England During the Thirty Years’ Peace: 1816-1846.

For Buckle and other classical liberals, the decades of peace were largely owing to the spread of libertarian ideas and policies throughout Europe, especially in Britain. Indeed, had it not been for the Crimean War (1853-56), which Buckle viewed as an unfortunate deviation from a general pacific trend, the Thirty Years’ Peace would have extended even further—a remarkable period of time when compared to the frequent wars of previous centuries. Buckle, like his contemporary Herbert Spencer—only one year separated them, and they knew each other—viewed war as one of the greatest evils in human history, and he was optimistic that the progress generated by the liberal ideas of peace, individual liberty, and free trade would continue indefinitely. Unlike Spencer, however, Buckle, having died in 1862, did not live long enough to witness what Spencer later described as the re-barbarization of Europe, so Buckle retained his optimistic hopes for peace and progress throughout his short life.

Although the militarism and devastating wars of the twentieth century would forever extinguish the belief in inevitable progress among classical liberals, this remained a common belief among liberals during the mid-nineteenth century. The key question for Buckle thus became: What were the causes of this remarkable progress?

This brings us to an interesting debate within the ranks of classical liberals. W.E.H. Lecky, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and many other liberals maintained that progress in the moral sphere (especially the sentiment of justice) is as evident in the historical record as any other kind of progress, and they pointed to advances in religious freedom, the repudiation of torture, and the abolition of slavery to buttress their case. But Buckle took a radically different view. He defended the thesis that moral sentiments and motives, unlike knowledge, are “stationary” and do not progress from one generation to the next. As Buckle put it, “the sole essentials of morals…have been known for thousands of years, and not one jot or tittle has been added to them by all the sermons, homilies, and text-books which moralists and theologians have been able to produce.” All progress, including the progress of freedom, was ultimately caused not by an improvement in moral sentiments but by the increase of knowledge and its diffusion throughout society, as people became more cognizant of the long-range consequences of their decisions and actions, and the disastrous effects of government intervention.

The belief in the priority of “intellectual” over “moral” causes led Buckle to focus on the history of ideas, including ideas in philosophy, science, and literature. Thus Buckle’s History was perhaps the most thorough and detailed intellectual history of Europe written up to that time.

This focus on the influence of ideas led Buckle to elaborate upon a number of fascinating insights. For example, according to Buckle, “The real history of the human race is the history of tendencies which are perceived by the mind, and not of events which are discerned by the senses.” This makes it impossible to fix a precise date for a significant change. When an event (e.g., the French Revolution) is pointed to as a moment of change, it is merely the external result of a change that has already taken place. We can pinpoint with chronological precision the death of a prince, the loss of a battle, or the change of a dynasty; but “those great intellectual revolutions upon which all other revolutions are based, cannot be measured by so simple a standard.”

The real problem with historical accounts of intellectual change is not that they lack certainty, but that they lack precision. That the English intellect in Buckle’s day was becoming more liberal was as certain as the fact that Queen Victoria wore the crown. We know the exact date of Victoria’s coronation, but in tracing the growth of English liberalism “all such exactness deserts us.” This lack of precision, however, does not preclude certainty. Something can be clear without being precise (in the mathematical sense), and what we can know clearly we can know with certainty.

As we have seen, Buckle argued that progress depends primarily on the advancement of knowledge and its diffusion throughout a society. But the desire for new knowledge must be preceded by doubt. If people believe they already know everything they need to know, and if they hold their beliefs with a sense of infallible certainty, then they will have no motive to seek additional knowledge or to improve upon the knowledge they already have. Quoting Buckle:

On this account it is, that although the acquisition of fresh knowledge is the necessary precursor of every step in social progress, such acquisition must itself be preceded by a love of inquiry, and therefore by a spirit of doubt; because without doubt there will be no inquiry, and without inquiry there will be no knowledge. For knowledge is not an inert and passive principle which comes to us whether we will or no; but it must be sought before it can be won; it is the product of great labor and therefore of great sacrifice. And it is absurd to suppose that men will incur the labor, and make the sacrifice, for subjects respecting which they are already perfectly content. They who do not feel the darkness, will never look for the light.

Thus did Buckle hail “the great principle of skepticism”—by which he meant a mental attitude far broader in scope than religious skepticism—as the lynchpin of human progress.

To be continued….