What Is Classical Liberal History?

• Author: Wright, Robert E.
• Position: Book review

* What Is Classical Liberal History?

Edited by Michael J. Douma and Phillip W. Magness

Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018.

Pp. xxii, 246. $100 hardback.

"Classical liberal history" here literally means history written from the perspective of classical liberalism, not from the "progressive" (statist if not outright Marxist) or "conservative" perspective. The key theme is that classical liberal historiography is important but remains largely underdeveloped because in the past five decades or so few professional historians, people with doctorates in history who teach history in universities, have undertaken it. Much of this historiography has been written by people from other academic disciplines or by trained historians, such as myself, who are subsisting in various roles on the fringes of the history establishment. 'Tis telling, indeed, that of the thirteen contributors to What Is Classical Liberal History ? only eight have terminal degrees in history and only three of those hold tenured or tenure-track positions in history departments, while the other five hold various research, visiting, or nongovernmental organization positions. The other contributors hail from architecture, English, political science, and economics.

One would think that classical liberal historians would be able at least to hold their own in historiographical debates. After all, as editors Michael J. Douma and Phillip W. Magness explain in the introduction, classical liberal historians write about "salient, relevant issues of human freedom and unfreedom such as the rise and fall [sic] of slavery, the origins of constitutional limits on government power, and the growth of markets that bring prosperity" (p. xi). Moreover, unlike some conservative and many progressive historians, classical liberal historians tend to employ relatively rigorous methodologies well grounded in empirical evidence and even "subject to empirical falsification" (p. xi). They emphatically employ liberal principles such as "openness, debate, empiricism, and charity" (p. xi) in their scholarly work, which often borrows theories from economics and other social sciences. The editors' list of scholars working in the classical liberal historical tradition include such luminaries as Niall Ferguson, Stephen Halbrook, Robert Higgs, Jeffrey Hummel, Deirdre McCloskey, and Larry Schweikart.

Progressive historians, however, control the history establishment and block the professional advance of classical liberal...