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Reviews of
The Triumph of Liberty

"Where liberty dwells, 
there is my country."
-- Benjamin Franklin

Bookshelf: From Rabelais to Reagan, Freedom's Long March

by Tom Bethell

     Liberty has never been a fashionable cause.  Ruling elites have feared it as something that might threaten their hold on power.  Today intellectuals, having attained a considerable measure of power themselves, are at best ambivalent about it, and for decades they have toiled to enlarge and centralize government.  This would surely have surprised their bookish predecessors, who for centuries craved little more than the freedom to publicize their opinions.

     Writing a book on liberty therefore tends to be a thankless task.  So we should thank Jim Powell, a freelance writer and graduate of the University of Chicago, who has written a wonderful history of the subject.  In a brief forward, the British historian Paul Johnson argues that "worthwhile abstract ideas are best promoted by the study of the lives of those who embodied them," and that is what Mr. Powell has done.  He tells the story of liberty through the lives of remarkable people. The earliest (and surely one of the greatest) is Cicero, while a few, including the economist Milton Friedman, are still with us.  Mr. Friedman, he writes, "ranks as the greatest champion of liberty during the 20th century."

     Told in 65 chapters, Mr. Powell's brief lives are themselves a literary achievement.  He has gone to enormous trouble to hunt down out-of-print biographies, so that he can view his subjects from a variety of angles.  He tells us what his heroes and heroines looked or sounded like, puts them in historical context, uses an abundance of direct quotations and concludes with a look at his subjects' influence or current stature.  (Six women are included: Rose Wilder Lane, Maria Montessori, Ayn Rand, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Thatcher and Mary Wollstonecraft.)

     Mr. Powell scoured libraries and out-of-print booksellers, interviewed specialists and visited historic sites.  (Very few academics these days would bother with such essential legwork.)  And Mr. Powell's lives are as readable as they are instructive.  Start any one of them and you are unlikely to stop.  Having embarked on his accounts of Benjamin Constant, Desiderius Erasmus and Victor Hugo -- or less-known figures like Frederic Bastiat (the 19th century French political economist) and John Lilburne (the 17th-century British pamphleteer) -- I found myself arriving at the end of the chapter before I knew it.

     Organizing a mass of material without a clear story line is not easy.  Daniel Boorstin's books (The Seekers, The Discoverers) suggested a method to Mr. Powell,, who divides liberty into 10 aspects -- natural rights, toleration, peace, self-help, individualism, economic liberty, and so on.  Then he groups six or seven lives under each.  Sometimes the allocation seems arbitrary.  Under "peace," for example, we find Richard Cobden, William Gladstone, William Graham Sumner and Ronald Reagan.  Clearly Cobden -- who worked with extraordinary dedication to abolish import taxes in England in the 1840s -- could as easily have been included under economic liberty, and Mr. Reagan under "the spirit of liberty."  In any case, Mr. Powell stresses throughout the connection between free trade and peace, and he rightly sees those who agitate for war as great enemies of liberty.

     Mr. Powell has gone out of his way to include people who are not normally associated with liberty: Ludwig van Beethoven, William S. Gilbert (Arthur Sullivan's collaborator), Louis L'Amour, H.L. Mencken, Rabelais.  His ecumenical outreach is admirable, but perhaps not in every case successful.  Beethoven, for example, he describes as "an outspoken republican amid a continent of kings," who "broke free of conventional forms so music could plumb the depths of despair, express heroic struggles, and reach astonishing peaks of joy."  But the breaking of musical traditions and the breaking of real chains are very different.  Man is meant to be free, but "free music is, well -- try John Cage.

     Mr. Powell includes the canonical theorists of liberty, whether in politics or economics -- John Locke, Tom  Paine, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises among them.  Although well known, their stories are often the most effective.  It is precisely the adversary political or intellectual environment in which some of them lived -- particularly the free-market economists of the 20th century -- that stimulated them to new thoughts.  Both their lives and their insights seem the more dramatic as a result.  Others -- one thinks of Henry David Thoreau -- are less impressive precisely because they lived in surroundings of unprecedented freedom.

     Many Americans, of course, have experienced much hardship.  One thinks of Rose Wilder Lane growing up in the prairie states.  She wrote The Discovery of Freedom and rewrote her mother's drafts for The Little House in the Prairie and other works. Her inspiring story I thought one of the best in the book.  In the early 1920s, Rose Wilder embraced communism and went to the Soviet Union, where she soon learned her mistake.  When she left, she said: "Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to which I had been born."

     Native-born Americans often don't learn this lesson.  And failing to appreciate their good fortune, they don't bother to fight for it.  "Liberty is  rare and precious thing," as Mr. Powell says.  He believes that preserving it will require a never-ending struggle.  His book, an education between hard covers, makes his own valuable contribution to the cause of liberty.

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     Mr. Bethell is Washington correspondent of the American Spectator and author of The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages (St. Martin's).