i am authentically very scared about the harm that will be visited on us through a trade war. with that, we have 27 seconds left. so i will take that time. start againwe will on time with the next presentation. and remember, this evening dinner will not be here. , we will be meeting at 5:45 pm for transportation to the winery, where they actually do make wine, and will have wonderful food and a presentation. thank you very much. [applause] >> next, mcgill university political science professor jacob levy talks about how the concept of liberty and western civilization changed during the 18th and 19th centuries. minute longd 15 session is part of the symposium on history and philosophy posted by the cato institute.

>> so, our next presenter, jacob levy, is someone i have known for a few years since he was a student at brown university. he will speak to us on the evolution of ideas of liberty. he is one of the smartest people i know, incredibly well read, and every time he disagrees with me, i want to show you that i am deeply right at a deeper level. he is an author of a number of important books, and with no further ado, jacob. -- thank you, tom. thank you for inviting we to take part in my very first talk at cato institut university.

even though i have been involved in one way or another since i first visited the old brownstone building when i was 18 years old. a year before i met tom himself. my old and dear friend doctor tom palmer invited me to give a lecture on the evolution of the ideas of liberty, with a special emphasis on the transitions from liberties to liberty and then , well, treated due to the two lectures he has treated you to .oday faced with a slight temptation to throw out my planned lecture and instead, treat you to an hour of what it is that dr. palmer and professor macdonald are deeply misguided in their admiration for the wildly hasicious john locke, who orderly distorted the path of libertarian thought for centuries. [laughter] instead, i will stay to the topic to which i was assigned well, it rather more like a university course is sometimes, in which one lecture

can build on another. i will be covering some of the same material and some of the tom covered in his 2 lectures today, but as you heard in the last lecture, tom is a sympathizer. he looks for a way in which things ultimately fit together. i am temperamentally a polar a themes atok for weak which we can poke, ways in which we could see how things come up maybe don't fit together just one way and need to be rearranged, maybe they will still overlap, maybe there will that there is and interesting intellectual work to ofdone in the development classical liberal ideas, in thinking about those overlaps, those gaps and those rearrangements. i am going to start off with three stories about the libertyn of the dia of

-- of the idea of liberty. three big ones to start. and for those of you who like to take notes with a skeleton come i will slug them up front. that three big stories are benjamin com liberty of the ancients and the moderns, the slavery theory, and the contrast between the medieval and modern conceptions. moderns,s ancients and patterson's slavery, and not attaching an author to it at this time, -- transition from modernity.ages into this is done in the spirit of the relationship to him talk last night between history and philosophy. there is not one history of the evolution of liberty. it is not that kind of thing. rather, they are interpretive stories that we tell frey a

variety of purposes in order to bring out both things that are of contemporary interests to us, and in order to highlight one or another tendency in the past. so the three stories i'm going to tell, i think all of them .over true things and yet, they are not wholly compatible, but neither do they entirely contradict each other. they as you see, highlight different things. benjamin crump liberty of the ist, was and modern delivered as a public lecture in 1918 come of the 200th anniversary is coming up in 1818. >> delivered as part of his very long-term project of engaging in which i education -- by don't mean state schools -- i mean an education of the public,

in liberal" additional politics over the course of decades. constance liberty of the issues and the more dense is to my eye thus liberty of the ancients and the moderns is to my eye, one of the greatest books on liberalism. and considering that the printed constant's book runs about -- pages come upon for pound, i think it is second to none. it is an extraordinarily dense and rich and valuable understanding of what was coming in his own time, and in most part, due to his own political and intellectual efforts. meaningfully identifiable

classical, liberal politics. unlike smith or montesquieu, unlike any of the american was couldconstant self-consciously in liberal, that is, he was one of the first people to use that word as a description of his politics and of the cluster of political views to which he was could self-consciously in belonged. and he sought to help a french populist scarred by decades of revolutionary imperial bonapartist and then restoration nest violence of various kinds. violence ofonist various kinds. he wanted him to understand what liberty could be and what it meant to strive for the politics oriented around it. in the liberty of the ancients and the moderns, constance claims that liberty for the insurance was fundamentally a

in theof having a share collective political life of one's city liberty was a collective good area at it was in our sense though, not in the sense that he would have meant to this, a democratic good. what meant to be free, was to be a fully participating member of a political collective that would make all the important decisions governing the whole collective of political life. was ane thought, very muchidea for a of western-european history and inspirede idea that so jean-jacques rousseau and some of his followers, as to catch flame in the french revolution, leading the french revolutionaries to seek to re-create an ancient roman or

spartan model of what it is to have a free republic. over and over again, french revolutionaries would seek to make the kinds of people who would in a way, rousseau, head also envisioned -- would devote themselves fully to the public good of the republic, and would understand that what it meant for them to be free, was for france to be a free republic. constant, there was no interest in the liberty of the individual. was rather come was an appreciation of what can be accomplished by the political community. what it meant to be free was to have a sense of agency and power , and that sense of agency and power came from my ability to

help direct the really big, ,mportant things that we spartans, romans, assyrians, we do together. constant phase, this was a real -- constant says that this was a real freedom. but, he says, it is not our modern sense of freedom. any attempts to re-create it for our modern world is doomed to the kind of catastrophic failure in which the french revolutionary attempt had ended. we want a different kind of liberty, and one way or another, people have it. we want an individual liberty to arsue our private lives, not share in the public liberty to direct our public likes. .hy -- our public lives why? of threenames

conspicuous reasons and it leaves another in subtext of that lecture. and expands on it in great length elsewhere. the three regions are #1 the first merger size -- the vastly larger size of modern society. there had been great debate over the question -- is the 18th century world more populous than the ancient world? there was ao know, limit to how good the census data was, before 400 or 500 b.c.e.. the place is really have pretty good reference for, like i know to be unrepresentative of the world. mediterranean and took a great deal of work in modern social science to start to generate what we think of now as reasonably accurate population estimates for the ancient mediterranean or european world as a whole. there is a great deal of attitude in the 18th century that said, the ancients were greater than we are, including,

they were more populous, there were more of them than we are, and that we are few, is a sign of how far the world has fallen. constant understood and appreciated the wealth of evidence that suggests this was false. modern european societies were not only very much larger in a geographic terms then say, ancient greek city states, though not in the inch and roman but they were taken much more together as much more populous than the inch and political societies were -- they were taken together as much more populous than the ancient political cities were. the ability to decide about what we will do together is not actually worth that much in ancient societies. one outas potentially of 5000, or when out of 10,000 voting citizens of my city state

, even better if it was a city state that had rotation in had a, such that meaningfully larger chance of serving in office, drawn by lottery some time in my adult life, i could genuinely feel that my voice mattered. 2 milliona one over or 5 million or 10 million, to say nothing of 300 million, member of a population of a modern state, my agency that i get out of my share of directing ,he public is effectively zero. so we, in the major societies could not get much out of the ability to direct the public as the ancients could. second, we have a great deal more that we can benefit from in our private lives. we are richer than they were.

the growth inout european wealth later on in my talk, but for now, just take for granted that it is true. the availability of leisure goods, consumption goods, printed books to read, music to listen to come the availability of things that one might privately decide to buy, to consume, to enjoy, was explosively greater in a 19th-century europe than in had been in even the culturally richest of ancient societies like athens or rome. hand, we don't get very much out of the public activity, on the other hand, we have a great deal more to lose in our private activity. and that matters twice over. one way that it matters is, we want to protect our time.

the ancient model of freedom as constant understood it, spending all day, every day, if i could assembly, in the debating political question after political question -- well, as oscar wilde loved to joke about -- the problem with socialism is that it takes too many evenings -- constance constant's problem with liberty is that it takes too much time. we are allust that enjoying the same private benefit, it is that we are all enjoying a wide variety of --rett benefits of our own private benefits of our own, so we have something very valuable to protect with individual liberty, our freedom to choose time,ves, our use of our

our use of our money, our consumption, our leisure, our self-development, our education. each of us separately, now has with privateo protect liberty and less to gain with public liberty. served, we, modern societies -- which it is important that he means me, european modern societies -- have abolished or are in the process of abolishing slavery. and the ancient model of liberty rested on a world in which a handful of active, engaged citizens could spend their days in the assembly because someone else was doing all the work. in a modern, middle-class commercial society in which most people, most of the time, art doing work for themselves, one way or another, gaining their living not by sending their own slaves to the field, but by

following a profession or trade we simply do not have the time, even if we wanted to have the time. course, toright, of abolish slavery or to be in the process of abolishing it, and since we were doing there, we could not possibly regain what the ancients had. the fourth reason he left as ibtext, as i said, of which will expand on in great length elsewhere, was that we, modern christians, we, modern post-reformation christians in a world characterized by deep, religious pluralism, we think that we have responsibilities for the disposition of our own souls. in the ancient world, you worship the god of the city or the gods of the city, there was no conflict between your religious and your civic duty. you go, you make the appropriate

sacrifices on the appropriate day to the temple of athena in athens, you worship a gods of rome, at letting the rye fire's, making the right sacrifices, political and religious life were both tied together and collective. after the rise of monotheism, the idea of individual souls, and after the fragmentation of the christian world in the reformation, we could not possibly trust the disposition of our own immortal souls to some collective decision it would be crazy for us to do so. this is the greatest responsibility that we have to protect our freedom -- it was a great responsibility and we had to protect our freedom to choose it for ourselves. constant concludes in the liberties of the ancients and the moderns, by saying, there is

face.lem that we moderns it is all well and good to celebrate this emerging liberal vision of liberty, to say that their archaic republicanism that motivated the french revolution and jean-jacques rousseau has to be left in the past, that we have pluralism, privacy and wealth, and have rejected by all of that is to the right of constant, but, it will tempt us to neglect politics altogether. and here, constant has in mind, and here, constant has in mind, in particular, the bonapartist temptation. we, wealthy, middle-class, modernists, we are so willing to let someone else take the business of governing off-hours hands because we have demands on our time, because we wish to protect and pursue our wealth, but also

because we are constantly kind of scared of the mob of peasants and workers in the parisian are sorelyt we tempted to give in to along comes bonaparte and tells the middle classes, do not you worry your heads about governing. i will protect you from the mob. you will never have to worry about the security of your property again, just give me absolute power. and constance says, first of all, this is a degraded position. you are reducing yourself to someone else's mercy. second, it is ridiculously full foolish. -- you are putting yourself at someone else's mercy and bonaparte's record was not, even in middle-class french,

well-respected, and constance had been an opponent for most of napoleon's rain. but he does not think this was just a silly mistake the french middle classes made in the mid-1790's, he thought there was something structural about it, and that is something that i think we opt to continue to pay attention to us the liberty of the ancients and modern. even if we reject the idea that liberty consists in our participation in democratic politics, even if we reject that in the state, our liberties are not well protected when we give up on or resign ourselves from, or appoint someone to manage in our place the political sphere. and attempt to she knows modern liberal commercial citizens to give into the right-wing promises to take

the business of governing off so long as he protects their property from the mob. that is not a phenomenon that disappeared with the end of napoleon's ruling. now, constance liberty of the ancients to the so long as he protects their property from the mob. that is not a moderns is not a fair characterization of the ancient world. athenian democracy, in abolished debt slavery as one of its founding acts. you heard earlier today tom quote from pericles he is funeral ration, talking about the liberty each athenian had to speak the liberty of their mind, to look another in the eye and not be ruled by them. they're genuinely was an orientation. and constance glances at them and steps aside from the idea that athens was different. again, you have an

rejection ofd slavery, but the real value of liberalization modern is not telling us an accurate history of ancient greece but painting a powerfully true picture of commercial, liberal modernity, and the ways in which religious liberty, our freedom to choose our leisure time, commercial liberty, our ability to live in very large state, the rejection of slavery, and the continuing responsibility to democratically govern ourselves, nonetheless, of how all of that hangs together, and that the fullest statements, i think, of classical liberalism as that came to be as it fully worked political view. a second story about the evolution of the idea of liberty.

historical sociologist orlando patterson of harvard thee in his book that is most important book on the evolution of the idea of freedom, as he calls it, not liberty -- we will not worry about the difference -- argues that "the basic argument of this work is that freedom was generated from the experience of slavery. people came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life as a result of their experience of or response to slavery or its a competent form, serfdom. in their roles as masters, slaves, and non-slaves." he motivates that argument by asking questions, why don't we find words for or a political ideal of freedom or liberty everywhere around the world? there is dispute about this

question, and i have no expertise which would you did it, but it is at least claims, and patterson excepts the claim, that many or most non-european cultures do not have an idea that corresponds to what the european languages and traditions conceive of as freedom or liberty. they have a concept like the status of not being a slave, and they have a concept like anarchic or lawless or licentious. have a word or concept for the freedom to choose among things that need wireless --hic, lawless, or licentious. that he seeks to do things that he has no interest in doing, that is the concept that patterson says we

do not find everywhere around the world. everywhere and every time in european history. it? do we find when there is a large body of people who come into immediate contact with the phenomenon of slavery. and to our imposition to develop and articulate moral vocabulary about them. ist this means is that it enslaved societies that we most often find an acutely moral and political concern with liberty. today, rob showed you a quote from john adams, saying of the british that we would not -- we americans would not allow the british to make up their knee grows -- there negroes. the counterpart on the british side was by samuel johnson, who was an opponent to the american

revolution and had no sympathy for it at all. in writing his bitter denunciation and indictment of the claims of the american colonists bitterly, how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes? in england by this time, slavery was in an important formal asse, the legal, and it was a social matter effectively nonexistent. perspective,h listening to these american slaveowners demand their liberty and object to the status of being a slave, founded deeply violently,y and hypocritical. what patterson tells us is that

while, sure, it is hypocritical, it is also a recurring act and pattern. the americans saw up close with slavery was like, and they understood it to be the most , oneintegrated condition urgently to be avoided. that did not mean that they sought to rid themselves of slavery, though some of them did some time. whether this understanding of freedom lends itself to an opposition of slavery as such is a very occasional and conditional thing. mostly it doesn't. mostly, it is a demand for me, to us, and people like us, be protected against this truly awful status that we see up close and personal. adam smith in the wealth of had said it will be

democratic society that has the hardest time ridding themselves of slavery. a free government, said smith, will do very much worse than a government that is arbitrary and protecting the interests and welfare of slaves or in taking any steps toward an eventual abolition. why? well, the slaveowners are the voters. slaves are not voters, and the slaveowners have, says adam smith, in one of his characteristically deeply perspective accounts of human psychology, the human love of domineering. smith does not say and does not believe slavery is economically profitable, what he says and believes is that people are willing to pay a significant financial price for the status and power they get over other human beings. great mass of the

populace has an important voice in politics, if it be free government, well, the great mass of the free population is not going to be willing to give up the status and power that they have over other human beings. montague's argument was related but a little different. in a monarchy, where there is an -- where there are mayors,ights, noblemen, and on, and on, there is not a tremendous gap between the lowest rank non-slaves and the slaves. is,more equal the society the more equal the free part of the society is. the more important the gap

between the lowest free person in the slaves to come. marker becomes the marker of not becoming a slave rather than the marker of being a little bit higher in the futile hierarchy, church, versailles. conclusion for montagu is the same for smith, free government, free people will be especially resistant to giving up this odious practice. saying, there is reason to think that this was right. the newly independent united states was an outlier among the independent states it regarded as pure societies. the states of western europe did not, at that time, have significant slave or serf

populations. hadr than britain, they legally ended the possibility of including, as it were, tourists visiting with their slaves and bleeding again, and they had not abolished slavery in the caribbean colonies. but slavery was less prevalent. there was no slavery in the netherlands , almost no slavery in france and slavery in france was abolished in a handful of years. the american, society this not look like the european society. it is a society that talks about liberty all the time and a society with millions of enslaved persons. patterson teaches us to expect that there is going to be that kind of paradoxical dialect about when and why people discuss freedom.

patterson does not think that freedom changes dramatically as a value between ancient greece and the modern west. he thinks the status of slavery has enduring characteristics, and the response to it has the same enduring characteristics. we wish to be able to not eat cynically constrained, -- chains,ly constrained, chains we wish to have equal status, the ability to look other people in the eye, not the obligation to grovel and debate, we wish to have the ability to take an active part in our shared political life. patterson thinks that both individual and collective aspects of freedom are built into the concept then and now because slaves are denied all of those things then and now.

we have deep continuity in the idea of liberty over the centuries. but the continuity that will not allow for gradual unfolding's of , it is thether continuity that will force us to constantly pay attention to the ways in which an upsurge of interest in liberty might be because there is, at the same time, an increase in the number of people who were not free. the third story. from liberty to liberty, the transition from the middle ages to modernity. are two versions of this story that are told around this time of the french revolution. the most common is that the ancient constitution by which they did not mean agent greece or rome, but the

prerevolutionary world, a world of 1600, 1700, the prerevolutionary world had only known liberties, a variety of patchwork rights -- of rights. not to be the liberty tax to buy the king without its taxed by the king without its consent. the church had its liberty to appoint its own bishops and maintain its own ties. a university had the liberty to exercise jurisdiction over its professors, students, to maintain its gates and protect the internal academic affairs that happened within its walls. to set had the liberty the minimum wage for which people were allowed to work in a relevant trade, and to exclude others from taking part in the trade. and so on, and so on.

each of the separate corporate bodies, in particular, in france, but no way that is arguably realistic and most of europe, a variety of corporate bodies had the separate, collective privileges. were, to theerties modern democratic mindset that takes hold with the french futile --, entirely le.i they are no more respected and honored than the privileges and the french revolution swept them away together. the privileges of nobility and liberty, liberty of the church and universities. equal liberty,by a general abstract right in hearing an individual, not

incorporate collective. version of the story of the transition from the middle ages to revolutionary modernity. the other, told by benjamin constance's close intellectual associate and sometimes love interest, went under the slogan, ancient,, liberty is nepotism is modern -- devotees of his modern. there was a meaningful sense of freedom that was challenged by the rise of divine right and absolute kings in early modernity. the bourbon kings, in particular, in france, louis the xiv, and the kings in england,

beginning with james the first, and james the vi, these kings were determined to abolish the liberties of cities and churches and universities and all the rest because those were inherited constraints on royal power, including royal taxing power. kate did not want to be told --y cannot tax the church, teens did not want to be told gs did nott tax -- kin want to be told they cannot tax the church, and it was the incapacity of those early monarchs that gave rise to the movement that was to anger the french populace to the revolution. later thinkers. that in an important way, there was greater political freedom in the old

world of the liberties then there was in the early modern world of the kings who were suppressing the liberties. now, the liberties i have been describing as collective and corporate. but it is a little more complicated than that. refer back to the two examples of medieval liberty that tom talked about and then invoke one more. the two examples tom talked about where the libertas ecclesiastic, the liberty of the church, established in the investor crisis of the 11th century. liberty of the catholic church to have self-governing authority over its personnel. the ability to appoint its own bishops, not to be subject to the imperial rule of the holy roman empire, and later iterations of that, the rules by the kings of france or england. the libertas ecclesiastic is

meaningful and incorporate liberty, and also in a meaningful way, the foundation of the religious liberty, but it is not primarily a liberty of individuals except insofar as you get an individual believing catholics who asserts their status of member of the church to protect them against royal punishment or royal execution for their continued fidelity. however, the other example tom offered us -- city air makes you free. asies were understood bastions of freedom. and that was partly a collective corporate fact. people who wished to be free of the rule of the 88 warlords and -- idiots warlords and

charlemagne's warlords who made wishe feudal mobility, who to trade in peace, who wished to be able to live without risk of conscription by the warlords and so on, they would come together and build walls, and pledged themselves to the fence of the walls -- to the defense of the walls enjoying in the making of laws to join the society within the walls. cities were carved out more or less against the will of local powers a lot of the time. people wished to be free of the local power. and that freedom was in the first instance the collective corporate freedom. we govern ourselves inside these walls. we are not subject to the feudal hierarchy directed by the church or what have you. but then there was a powerful sense of freedom for individual members of the city. the freedom of the city was also

the freedom of the citizens. freehat it was to become after breathing city air for a year and a day was to be individually free from the ties fromudal obligations, the ties of course to marriage, from duties to people with whom you have not reached agreements. so highly individualized freedom. like what theng 19th century critics of the middle ages were to describe as liberty, not liberties. and the same is true for the university. the city,sity, liked the separate bodies within the church, was in medieval law, the corporation. the corporation voluntarily formed and entered into, sometimes by students, professors, or both together,

but the corporation would then take on a long-term existence, would put up some walls and gates, which is still configured in university architecture to this day, to protect internally self governed space against the intrusion of the town or at the church or of the king. we judge you by her academic performance. in here, you are safe from conscription by warlords, the people walkhe way, around and funny hats and downs is because wearing that habit, habit,ncept as a nun's marks you as being a scholarly person, therefore, the number you to having hands laid on you, having yourself grabbed or thrown into the local lords army when you moved from one university to the other.

as a sign of your status as being within the jurisdiction of the university world. .hat is an individual freedom that is protected by the liberty ofollective the university. academic freedom, the core value of the liberty of the university, retains this dual character to this day. freedom ofngful scholars but foundational he freedom of the university to govern itself without intrusion from external forces that seek to dictate the content of what is taught. the corporateof entities of the mid--- medieval world, they did not precisely that peoplet it is

hoped for from their dissolution into liberty in democratic modernity. that people hopedit you replace libertas eca eight, the corporate liberties of the church with something like individual freedom of conscience, and understanding of religious liberty that had grown in prominence since the reformation and had some deep root in the allergy other than getolic theology, then you situations like someone saying, well, my order of nuns believe in contraception, so we assert our religious liberty against the catholic church to follow our consciences, and to prescribe and deliver contraceptives in our charitableng of our

medical missions, and at the catholic church comes along and says, no, you cannot do that, my conscience tells me otherwise, then you cannot really make sense of the catholic church's claim without a model of liberty, without the corporate thatom to govern itself the church gained in the 11th century under the title libertas ecclesia. this has been an ongoing problem in liberal democratic modernity. the urge to dissolve the world of privileges and corporations into a world of individuals has .any salutary effects the dissolution of the guilds into the world of individual freely contracting workers has fervently advocated by the wealth of nations, it liberated people from types of balls man

should -- apprenticeship, it freedom markets to new entrants, and disempowered incumbents from being able to exclude newcomers, and thereby, greatly contributed to the growth of commerce and 12 in newly commercial societies. wealth in newly commercial societies. and in churches, cities and provinces, many of the corporate entities of the old order had reconceptualizing what their roles will be. when we imagine the corporate was, in thend this 19 century, become one of the great sources of worry for such classical liberal thinkers. asodern democratic order,

they understood it, would be a world of undifferentiated mass. in one sense, each individual equally free, in another, each individual tiny and anonymous, and powerless. he hoped in the american setting that voluntary association could do something to re-create some of the sense of corporate efficacy in self-government, and the town level self-government in the new england style could similarly generate efficacy, collective fax, that would counteract the tendency of being just part of an anonymous mass. neither tocqueville or mill was especially optimistic, and neither spawned a clear solution for how to evade this huge sociological fact as they took it that in the modern world, we are all going to be equally free and anonymous, and tiny, and

trivial. now, i want to start to put a couple of those stories together in different ways. to recap, we had constance on the ancients and moderns, patterson on slavery, and we had the coupled different versions of the transitions from the liberties to liberty. going to place i am look at them together is the spirit of the laws written, by a french 1748 baron montesquieu. montesquieu to the understanding of the liberty. took the pluralistic sense of the ancient order of the high middle ages in early modern europe, to the fact that churches, cities, universities, guilds and all the rest have

as a foundation for what began to emerge in the hands has a meaningful liberal conception of liberties as such. montesquieu was not deeply concerned for those bodies in their own right. he did not much like the roman catholic church and did not like the use the church made of its corporate liberties. he had deep worries about in disagreements with reactionary tendencies and the university, the university of paris, the sor bonne. we differid, between a monarchy in a despotism. the difference between a moderate regime ruled by one person and immoderate,

terroristic regime is the existence and protection of the intermediate bodies. not because they are doing good stuff. why then? well, in part because they provided an organized social basis for countervailing power. to a neck an -- bit for montesquieu to worry about that -- but he could see it in the distance. as kings become powerful like louis xiv. who can stand against them? we'll never be one person. can only be organized social bodies. a mixedd unlike constitutional tradition and political thought, montesquieu

did not limit itself in terms of power checking power. rather, he said, the intermediate bodies will defend law. they will not simply set the power against the kings power. rather, they will insist on the continued legal status of their inherited rights. and so, they will insist on the idea that a king faces legal constraints and so they will keep alive the rule of law. montesquieu, we care deeply about the rule of law just just because in some circular way the intermediate bodies protect the role of law protect the of law intermediate bodies. we care about the role of law because we care about liberties in an individual way. montesquieu was deeply concerned

with freedom of individual persons from the system of state coercion and punishment. about not been talking the procedural liberties that individual persons have when they a faced with something like the prospects of arrest, torture and execution. there is a long-standing tradition of those concerns. you find evidence of it in the magna carta. the writ of habeas corpus has it entrenched in the british constitutional basin the 16th century. the 16 center thrown into the kings dungeon without charge or trial care protection from the secret police. protection from torture. protection from the ability of the king to use the army as a pseudo-police force. de cache, lettres

a lettercould write that someone be spirit it away and locked in a tower. those for montesquieu were core offenses against what it is to be a free person. and he thought, the aspirations of that kind of cruel, punishing domineering was the most dangerous, the most toxic of moral and political personalities. those with power love to use their power in that way. and we who live under power, we seek the protection of law, which means two things. if is we seek to know that we follow the law, we will not be arrested and punished. this is habeas corpus. this is no extra judicial executions. this is no secret police.

if i live under the law, according to the law, i may not be punished. and if i am accused of violating the law, then i still have ongoing legal process protections for what happens next. were for montesquieu, central to the idea to what it is to have freedom in the space of the growth of state violent power. as we face the prospect of our xivch kings like louis slipping from moderate monarchy and immoderate despotism, montesquieu probably thought they had crossed over that line, a great deal of what we fear, the animating principle of despotism is fear. ll alwaysear is we wi

be subject to arrest and punishment in torture and execution for any reason or no reason at all. we cannot speak freely to the desperate. -- to the despot. we live in a constant kind of terror state, because we lack the protection of law. and the contribution of the car the customs to usual order is not just the protection of separate liberties, but the fact that in order to defend their liberties, they have to affect the rule of law. defend the idea that the king faces legal limits, and therefore, there would be a very strong connection between the survival of the liberties, the corporate collective body, and the liberty of the individual person to be able to live their life free from that fear. now, those stories that i have been telling, they more or less all end in the revolutionary

era. they more or less all end in the aftermath of the french revolution, the turn of the 19th-century. liberalism, however, only begins there. take onralism starts to other understandings of what a free social order looks like that are not simply expressions of one or another of those traditions of how to think about liberty. in order to explain what is going on there, i what to make reference to a work by living -- wallace. work by north called " violence in social orders." argue that a fundamentally new kind of social organization criticizes -- crystallizes and immersions over the course of the late 18th and early 19 centuries. erges over the course

of the late 18th and early 19th century. all governments up until that time had been one way or another haditions of eltites who control over the violent tools of rule and who engage in various kind of coalition politics. they both want the ability to extract grain from the peasantry. you priests want command over people's souls. the king, you want armies. and we will reach deal. more orcoalition are less unstable in one place or another, but fundamentally the fact of political society was correlations and alliances of elites using the tools of violence to rule over populations that are basically excluded. from the political circumstance. morehey did that in the

mature natural state, the state of say the 17th and 18th centuries, they did those using legal tools among themselves. they had the ability to enter into contracts among themselves. they h ad the liberty to create corporations. they had the ability to leave w ills and testaments and the ability to organize into coalitions that became the protocol of the parties of early modern britain. all in the service of more and more efficient use of violence and power to rule over the rest of society. course of the , beginningry decade to some degree earlier in the netherlands, little bit earlier in england, but quickly than in the early united states and post revolutionary france, and then spreading across western europe,

the organizational tools access to contracts, access to corporations, access to the legal right to organized lately, to contest for political rule is opened to a very much larger portion of the populous, eventually to all. not immediately. women were still excluded. everywhere. between a much larger share of ve hadpulace than ha access heretofore. and this is not accidentally related to the economic takeoff that we associate with the rise of commercial society and what comes to be described as capitalism. aboutn't talked much trade and commerce in the world before 1800. there were always traders.

there were always people buying and selling. long-term,as not sustainable, compounding economic growth. effectively anywhere in the world for any sustained time before early modern europe. there's debate about when you can really start to see it in early modern europe. there's tremendous debate about why. thethe fact remains -- economic growth that we think of as being a crucial advantage of the world of commercial society, smith, montesquieu all saw emerging and thought to encourage, that economic growth was not an existing fact in the 18th-century, certainly not in the 17th century. fundamentally affect of the 19th and 20th centuries. the world started to get richer.

and to get richer sustainably in a compounding way. weingass saysace and this happens because you incorporate a larger portion of the populace into the regime of having legal access to contracts, to corporations, to secure ownership of their property, to protections against theft and protection from expropriations by economically elites. the emergence of commercial society wasthe emergence of coml society was not -- to the incumbent wealthy elites. their ongoing desire is to convert their wealth into control over the tools of violence to expropriate and control the rest of society. but it turned out that the democratizing corporation of a much larger portion of the society into the regime of

liberty and liberties, giving people the vote, the secure accs to contracts and ownership, the rights to form associations that would not be suppressed as colonel conspiracies, the freedom to form new churches, a freedom that develops especially in the early american republic and to a certain degree in england before that, that had not previously been part of any understanding up religious liberty. theability to form collective churches. that all of that is a world brought into the being by the open access order. and that is the world that helps give us the tremendous benefits of free commerical societies that smith had envisioned. fore are prices to be paid that. the ongoing increase of wealth is part of what generates that mass anonymity that mill and

tocqueville are concerned with. the beginning of it generates the deep concern protecting -- for protecting what's mine that is going to always tempt the middle classes into turning over politics to some right wing autocrat who proposes to take the business of governing out of their hands. of commercial society is not a world that was envisioned by the theorists of liberty or the liberties in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. it's not just the freedom of one person to own, not even the freedom of one person to own, a another person to buy. it is an emergence over all transformed societal order. eyat may have depended, th make a good case, that it did depend, on a wide scale democratized incorporation of

the whole population into full, equal, political and legal citizenship. giving them a stake in economic prosperity among other things, but in a way that made it then difficult to recovered much of what we thought we cared about so legal andr political and moral thinking. when commerce was so suspect. when the idea of liberty was to protect what i have, not to engage in an ongoing dynamic process of creative destruction, where i risk losing it. and so, there are, i think, puzzles about whether the various strands of the evolution of liberty, as they came to overlap and leave gaps between each other, in the immediate post revolutionary decade, 1820, 1800, 1810,

whether they meaningfully generated that three of liberty the theory of liberty that is the theory of our open access, liberal democratic commercial modernity. and there are i think intellectual -- challenges as we seek to understand the order we inhabit now and from which we have so powerfully benefited using un modified versions of ideas that preceded that time. thank you. [applause] dr. levy: we have time for questions. >> good afternoon. thank you for the presentation . bringing up the university environment in medieval times and you talked ofut the transition

liberties to modernity pretty were bastions of liberalism, being constructed by warlords, they could make their own decisions of economic freedom but we also talked about rousseau. he talked about how the arts and sciences were conducive to the degradation of and depreciation of moral fabric, which is the foundation of individual liberty. so, i'm wondering if we can extrapolate what he said about the arts and sciences in medial times and talk about our modern environment in which universities across the nation especially united states, we may not be conscripted by warlords but we are definitely pressure to be conscripted in the social justise warrior army, and how speakers on campuses are being turned away. berkeley. there is not a lot of academic freedom. if we can extrapolate what au said about the arts and sciences in medieval times, what in our modern day may be destructive to our concepts of capitalism individual freedom today? dr. levy: all right.

there are number of different lines to chase down there. one is that i -- one is that w rousseau was talking about the rise of the arts and sciences, he does not have the middle ages in my. university survived across that transition. medieval universities that taught theology, law, traditional philosophy became in the renaissance what we think of the liberal arts. on a verytook to informed intellectual contest, as a result of the rise of global arts and the renaissance. she world that rousseau' complaining about is the post renaissance world you are the arts and sciences that all the other 18th-century frenchmen were glorying in has contributed to a moral degradation. we liberals i think should not

have any truck with any part of rousseau first discourse on the arts and sciences. iberal admiration of sparta. it is an aspiration to a wholly corrective and full uniform life, and it was, i think, really crucially on decisively refuted in adam smith's theory of moral sentiment. now, academic freedom. academic freedom is not primarily about the ability of people from a town to wander into the space and begin to claim. academic freedom is about the life of the members of the university. the students and the professors, the researchers, the teachers, the learners. there are resasons, i think, in valuedern world to also

universities as making a contribution to something like public debate by having a more generalized, modern liberty of freedom of speech. . but that is not actually academic freedom the non-member wandering in and starting to talk is not exercising academic freedom. at best what happens is the inviting unit of the university, the department that issued an invitation in the hopes that the person was going to add something to the educational environment, has an academic freedom interest in protecting the existence of that talk. but most academic freedom most of the time is about what happens in research and in the classroom. and the understanding of a crisis of academic freedom that is centered on a handful of high profile cases of off-campus speakers, reflects a significant misunderstanding about what is at stake. that is not to deny that there can be climate problems that

affect professors and students for internal conformism, but what academic is not only -- a freedom, it is the ability of universities and universities as a whole to govern themselves according to their best understanding of appropriate means of inquiry. when the professor of biology or geology becomes a young earth creationist, and starts to insist on their ability to stand up in front of class and teach, creationism toate students. the biology and geology department say no. the do not thereby violate professors academic freedom, because an important way, academic freedom is the freedom of the discipline to judge only the standards of the discipline. they say we will never punish

you as a biologist for your political views or your religious you. we will however constrain you to teach biology as we scientifically understand that. you tweet whatever you want, you write whatever lead us to the editor, you run for whatever office you wanted to say whatever you want in church on sunday. but when you're standing here is professor of biology, or when you are writing research articles as a professor of biology, you are bound to the intellectual norms shaped by the discipline of biology. there's an important element of that kind of collective shaping that's central to academic freedom and marks it off as something other than just a vague, general, individual liberal freedom of speech of the broader society. the broader society, i can pay a ghost writer and publish a novel that i purport to be the . don't put the ghost writer's

name on the cover. if i do that with my university press monograph, that is the ultimate defense. no violation of academic freedom, and firing me for having a ghost writer, but it is a core exercise of the academic freedom of the university to protect its norms of inquiry. that always is going to have some rift sk of a kind of groupthink or conformism. there's no getting around it. because part of what you are looking at there an organized community of inquiry setting boundaries. we'll have arguments from one time or another about what the right boundaries are, within one discipline or another. but it's going to be an ongoing tension, not something you can dissolve by saying, but i ought to have the freedom. well, i am also part of the "we" that is my discipline in my university and so on.

>> thank you. >> i would like to come back to your comments about constant's concern about handing off governments to the commercial classes or just by people distracted by abundance. at societyround today, i was curious how you would assess that risk. and let me toss off several things for you to react to. i'll call it daavovos man. the great gab fest of all the ceo's and celeb academics going off. what about the k street lobbyists? dr. levy: sorry. k street lobbyists. >> what about falling participation in elections in a u.s.? go down some of these current things and say, where would

say constant was right and where iwas he wrong in terms of what we see today? dr. levy: constant's vision of politics was maybe somewhat cleaner than the really existing complicated democratic society say. but it was not so clean as the classical republicanism that had informed not only rousseau, but even the american founders in their opposition to political parties. constant was one of the first theorists of democratic society say political parties are what we need in modern democracies. going tohow we are organize our sherpa look-alike in these large societies, how else can we possibly organize all the interest? how can we organize the debates? we are not is unified is the ancients were. we are pluralistic, we disagree.

in these large societies, how else can we possibly organize all the interest? our disagreements have to be able to express themselves in a meaningful organizational capacity. and this, by the way, is what political scienceholds to this day. there are no large modern democracies without parties. the desire of both the american founders and the french revolutionaries to do without and say parties are special interests. we hate them. that is not what life anin a large modern democracy can they like and constant had much more faith in the system he was envisioning, maybe not for the particular details of a world of lobbyists, but for the fact of jostling and jockeying for power, and that would be elbow s s out. and there would not be people just declaiming their love a public virtue living on corruption free lives. rather, what he hoped for was a world in which these organized interest could hold each other accountable, calling out there

errors, not living lives free of error. that is only in the neighborhood of some of things we are talking about but some of the things you're talking about i do not think i could say much. thank you, everyone. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] weekend on american history tv on c-span3, tonight at 10 p.m. eastern on "reel america." >> we are here to witness tonight a significant achievement in the cause of peace. thoughtvement none possible a year ago. or even a month ago. an achievement that reflects the courage and wisdom of these two leaders. >> the 1978 framework for peaceon a camp david

accords and sunday at 6 p.m. on american artifacts, a look back on the 1998 bombings of the u.s. embassies in nairobi kenya and tanzania. >> we were meeting with the minister of commerce. we heard an explosion. most of us went to the window. ten seconds later, a great train-sounding impact of high energy hit all of us. were instantly killed. were employees of the united states government. >> watch on american history tv, this weekend on c-span 3. two retiree members of congress, republican senator democraticand

congresswoman niki tsongas of massachusetts talk about their experience in congress. >> so important for us as a nation to continue to be a beacon to the world and conduct ourselves in a manner that represents the best. when we stoop to uncivil discourse, we stoop to pettiness, we have to remember that the entire world looks to us. >> i'm deeply concerned by our president on many levels, on policy. beennk on, i think he's toy, not been helpful long-term relationships to long-term relationships across the globe. you can only read about that on a daily basis. long-term allies who question the support of the united states. he suggests that we in the united states can go it alone. i don't think that is the case by any means. we have extraordinary power in and of herself but we need partners around the globe to a achieve the goals we seek.

>> join us for our conversations :00 eastern on c-span and c-span.org or listen with a free c-span radio app. >> sandra day o'connor was the first woman to serve on the united states supreme court, ininated by president reagan 1981 and sworn in later that year. next, the former justice talks about her life before and after serving on the high court. synagogued a historic and washington, d.c., to promote her book. this is about 35 minutes.