Reassessing the Presidency: the Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom.

• Author: Belz, Herman
• Position: Book Review

Edited by John V. Denson

Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001. Pp. xxxv, 791. $35.00 cloth.

"There cannot be too much of a correct theory," Ludwig von Mises wrote in Epistemological Problems of Economics. This provocative claim inspires the methodology of Austrian economics scholarship against the doleful and misguided teaching of modern social science historicism. Evidence of its bracing influence outside the sphere of technical economic science is apparent in the historical essays presented in this new Ludwig von Mises Institute publication Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, edited by John V. Denson.

Herbert Spencer, the great nineteenth-century libertarian, said of the relation between history and theory: "Until you have got a true theory of humanity, you cannot interpret history; and when you have got a true theory of humanity you do not want history." The authors of Reassessing the Presidency generally subscribe to the philosophies of Mises and Murray Rothbard and are well equipped with a theory. Things have changed since Spencer wrote, however, for these authors are historical-minded libertarians, confidently deploying theory to interpret the U.S. Constitution and the executive power. For them, libertarian theory serves as an analytical calculus capable of explaining with breathtaking simplicity ideas and events that more pedestrian scholars, uninstructed in what Joseph R. Stromberg has referred to elsewhere as "libertarian dogma," perceive as conflicting motives, purposes, and goods embedded in contexts of historical and political complexity.

The theory of liberty to which I refer is of course familiar to readers of this journal. How it is intended to guide normative reassessment of the presidency in the political-constitutional order may be less so. According to libertarian principles, liberty of the individual is the foundation and necessary condition of all other goods and indeed of civilization itself. The accounts presented in this volume further reflect the influence of Rothbard's belief, as Llewellyn H. Rockwell expresses it, that "Once we understand why private property should be inviolable, troublesome notions fall by the wayside"--such as the conventional notion that a distinction exists between taxation and theft. In more specific terms, editor John V. Denson identifies the ground of classical liberalism on which the project is situated in stating that the liberty of citizens is threatened by their own government more than by any foreign government or domestic criminal.

As a contribution to constitutional history, Reassessing the Presidency has a...