What Is Classical Liberal History?

AuthorKuznicki, Jason
PositionBook review

What Is Classical Liberal History?

Michael J. Douma and Phillip W. Magness, eds.

Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017, 268 pp.

As an undergrad I knew well that professors in economics and even in political science were generally more tolerant of libertarian-sounding ideas than were the professors in my own major, history.

I consoled myself that it could always be worse--at least I wasn't in anthropology. But guidance on how to be a classical liberal historian was basically nonexistent. Sometimes I would find a book or two that seemed to have been written from something like a classical liberal perspective. Usually it happened by chance. No one taught me as an undergrad how to write in this mode, and no one encouraged me when I tried it. (Badly, I might add.)

My grad school mentors were more supportive than one might imagine, but even here--maybe especially here--I walked a lonely road. The books from the libertarian canon that I was reading in my free time often seemed like they came from a different universe from the books that I was reading for my classes. Connecting the two sometimes seemed impossible.

A lot has changed since then, both for good and ill. No surer mark of the change can be found than What Is Classical Liberal History?, a collection of historiographic essays edited by Michael J. Douma and Phillip W. Magness.

First, I want to ask, where was this book when I was in college? Essay after essay connects die discipline of history to the theoretical and methodological commitments of classical liberalism. Lenore T. Ealy's contribution in particular would have saved the early grad school version of myself much angst about what historians could, and should, be up to as they seek to take Austrian economics seriously. Far from banishing history, as is often imagined, Ealy shows that the Austrian school of economics situates history in a useful place and gives it important work to do, the disdain of certain Austrians for the whole discipline notwithstanding.

Hans Eicholz's metahistorical essay builds a bridge from the mainstream of the discipline's disenchantment with Marxism--which has been deep but little discussed--through the linguistic and cultural turns of the late 20th century and on toward a revival of straightforward narrative history. It has sprung up, one almost imagines, simply for lack of anything better to do. And yet a revived narrative history, one whose subject matter is more varied than the old-time narratives focused...

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