Classical Liberalism ... An World View Built on Myth
I am forcing myself to write a post a day. My first posts on proof of brain were about modern politics and the left/right split.
I thought I should balance those posts with a look at the Classical Liberal tradition.
The picture comes from a Barlow's edition of Aesop's Fables. Aesop's fables appeared circa 600 BCE. His fables are often presented as early examples of MEMEs; so I will dual post this on POB and #MEME
The US Founders had a liberal arts education based on classical logic and steeped in Christian ethics. They fought a war to liberate the colonies from the crown and established an Constitutionally limited Republic and relatively free people.
To understand the ideas of the US Founders, one should look at the education they received a the books they read.
Here is the problem one faces with this approach. It was incredibly expensive to transport books across the ocean; the colonists only brought the books that they found most valuable.
This meant that the founders had a limited library and lacked access to primary sources.
For example, in logic class, the Founders did not study the works of Aristotle. They read logic as presented by Antoine Arnauld and Isaac Watts.
Apparently, Plato was not widely read before the Revolution.
It was common for people to meet to read plays. Playwriters such as Shakespeare and Addison had an enormous influence.
The founding generation had a unique interest in the Roman Republic; Cicero and Plutarch were commonly read.
The Founders had a limited but highly Romanticized view of the ancient world.
A huge portion of the population were dissenters who fled religious persecution in Europe. The most widely read book was the Bible.
My temptation is to say that the best way to understand the classical liberal world view is to study the works of ancient greek, roman and christian writers.
Unfortunately, this approach to discovering the classical liberal view doesn't work. People who study the philosophies of the Ancient Greeks and Romans will simply get caught up with the cultural debates of Ancient Greece and Rome.
What I want to do for my next essays is to present a selective view of the ancient world that highlights the struggle for liberty.
The image for this post is from the cover of Francis Barlow's 1687 Edition of Aesop's Fables.
I chose this image to emphasize that the classical liberal world view is based on a mythological view of the ancient world and not upon the actual ancient.
This claim is not an indictment of the limited view that colonists had of the ancient world. The observation that classical liberalism is based on a mythological view of the world is simply a recognition that everyone has a limited view of the world.
It is tempting to say that, in the information age, we have a trascendent view of the universe. With Google and Wikipedia we have access to information resources beyond the wildest dreams of the Founders.
However, even with Wikipedia and Google, our world view is limited. Google is notorious for shadow banning ideas that the technorati dislikes. Wikipedia is chock full of propagandists who taken on the task of deciding what is and what is not significant in our society.
For example, Wikipedia does not have a page on HIVE. The sniffy little editors believe that this blockchain is insignificant. I discovered the other day that a petty censor at Wikipedia deleted the page for Bittrex.
No human being has a complete world view. Even worse, there are always people like the petty little editors of Wikipedia who try to control one's world view by censoring information.
I actually think the best approach to studying history is to accept upfront that our understanding of history will always be incomplete. The fact that our world view in incomplete does not mean that we should not discuss or draw conclusions when we study history.
Accepting that we have a mythological world view is just a recognition that we are human.
I chose to start with Aesop because Aesop is part of a tradition where people communicate their ideas through cryptic tales about animals.
It is interesting to note that Aesop himself is somewhat of a mythological figure. Historians aren't sure if Aesop was a actual person or he might have been a name used by a variety of ancient writers who used the name to group together a collection of fables.
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Really interesting post! I don't know much about the origins of classical liberalism. Is it fair to say that it started with the American founding fathers and not earlier?
Classical liberalism is based on ideas that stretch back to antiquity. The philosophy emphasizes individual liberty, economic freedom under the under the rule of law.
Historians tend to trace liberal arts education to the Roman Senator Cicero.
The Roman Republic professed high ideals of liberty. The Roman Republic was a populist movement that favored economic centralization. The empire de-emphasized education and eventually fell into decline.
One of the most important influences of the classical liberal tradition is a collection of works called "The Bible." This book contains a long story about people called Israel who experienced a cycle of liberation and enslavement. The dissenters read The Bible from a classical liberal point of view.
Christianity appeared at a time when the Roman Empire had control of Judea and was ruling with an iron fist. It is likely that the New Testament was written by people who had a liberal arts education. Remember the New Testament was written in Greek.
The world was controlled by emperors and kings and they successfully suppressed the liberal arts in the West. it briefly flourished in the Middle East and Baghdad briefly emerged as the center of intellectual and cultural development.
The ideas of classical liberalism re-appeared in the period that we call "The Renaissance." Specifically, the Florentine Republic decided to build a Republic that would relive the glories of the ancient Roman Republic.
English Barons started pulling the ideas into England after the Magna Carta. A large number of English thinkers such as John Locke explored classical liberal ideas.
Classical liberalism is not a monolithic ideology. I used the term "world view." It is a world view that explores the experiences of different cultures from the past to make a society.
The way I see it is that the US Founders were the culmination of a classical liberal tradition that stretched to antiquity.
After the US revolution, political players sensed a power gap. The left/right split developed among proponents of the monarchy in reaction to the revolution. The French Revolution developed around the left/right split. Robespierre was a wild-eyed progressive and Napoleon was the ambitious conservative.
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Wow, I really recommend the way you think, and you've brought forward an interesting premise that I don't think have been explored enough. For sure the kind of books and literature the founding generation read would play such a huge part in their thinking at the time. I really look forward to reading how you'd further prove that their view of the ancient world was steeped in mythology and how such a view must have affected their actions.
I am actually just writing down what people would have considered to be basic grammar school education a hundred years ago.