Die Partei der Freiheit: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus.

• Author: STROMBERG, JOSEPH R.
• Position: Review

Die Partei der Freiheit: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus By Ralph Raico

Stuttgart: Lucius and Lucius, 1999. Pp. 298. DM 68 cloth.

To say that the new book by Ralph Raico, professor of history at Buffalo State College, fills a gap in the literature would be a gross understatement. There is simply no other study like it. Anyone who has taken undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in modern German history recalls that standard texts and specialized studies in the field run all the way from market-hating treatments to market-shy ones. Raico's book, whose title in English would be "The Party of Freedom: Studies in the History of German Liberalism," is something not often seen in this field--a market-friendly account by a classical liberal.

Raico studied with Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek and translated Mises's Liberalism into English in 1962. He is thus uniquely fitted to his task. Few historians have brought such a thorough knowledge of economic thought to bear on disputed historical questions. (Actually, few historians bring along much economic thought at all, yet many are downright happy to greet Bismarck's Sozialpolitik or Roosevelt's New Deal as great victories for humanity or prosperity.) On the basis of meticulous study of original sources and secondary literature, Raico has reconstructed lost, or deliberately forgotten, chapters in the story of German liberalism. The book has six chapters, three handling this reconstructive work (2, 3, and 4), two dealing with those who worked to uproot German liberalism (5 and 6). Chapter i surveys German liberalism from the eighteenth century to the Weimar Republic. Along the way, Raico raises doubt that the famous Sonderweg or "separate path" of German history was as completely divorced from possibilities realized elsewhere in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century western Europe as we have been led to believe.

In chapter 1, Raico remarks that people's political opinions derive primarily from what they know of history, or what they believe they know. In recent decades a "new paradigm" for modern history has come into being, associated with Jean Baechler, David Landes, Douglass C. North, E. L. Jones, and Ernst Nolte, with Henri Pirenne as an honored predecessor. In this view, it was Europe's divided sovereignties and competing powers (the Church among them) that made possible the rise of a market-based liberal social order. Unfortunately, most writers on German liberalism have overlooked these new insights.

Raico notes that Germans had benefited from the same system of relative powers as had western Europe. Economic life in England, and later the United States, taught how to foster prosperity. Raico's research uncovers many neglected eighteenth-century German political liberals (for names, see p. 15) and advocates of economic freedom (names on p. 22). He treats Jakob Mauvillon, a mentor to the great French liberal...