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Dedicated to socialists of all parties who are now free
Fantastically Comprehensive Book
Franklin, has hit the nail on the head.
Different ways of thinking in different nations
WHAT A SHAME THIS BOOK IS OUT OF ORDER!!!
Erudite and highly readable survey of later Georgian EnglandFirst, a few words to place my remarks in context. I'm not a historian (I'm an economist), but I've long enjoyed reading general histories. Indeed, I've read the entire 15-volume Oxford History of England, a series now being replaced by the New Oxford History of which, I believe, "A Polite and Commercial People" is the first volume.
Not being a specialist, I'm in no position to comment on whether or not Langford's book is representative of recent thought on the period. He'll sometimes set out a position with which he disagrees, and then explain his reasons for coming to a different conclusion. In these instances his may or may not be a minority view, but at least he has set out the opposing position with what seems like clarity and fairness. I'm not sure I'd want him to do much more in what is, after all, a book for the general reader.
The "general reader" of old was, of course, notoriously well-read, and at times Langford takes advantage of this assumption. I don't actually have the book handy just now and so can't check chapter and verse, but I think it helps if, for example, you've already heard of Maria Teresa. The author doesn't have time to explain, and a few times I found myself having to make an educated guess but, in 725 pages, this happened quite rarely (a tribute to the author's organisational skill, not to my own reading).
Traditional political history takes up only three chapters which Langford spreads throughout the book covering, respectively, from the accession of George II to the fall of Walpole, to the end of the Seven Years War, and to end of the American War of Independence. I've no idea how innovative or otherwise Langford was in choosing categories for his other chapters, but he manages to make concepts such as "politeness" interesting and coherent enough to serve as their themes. It strikes me that, when political history first began to fall out of favour, it was replaced by rather dull stuff that focussed excessively on, say, education or the poor law. Yes, these topics are dealt with thoroughly in Langford's book but, somehow, he manages to organise and interpret his material in such a way that it has all the narrative virtues we old-fashioned "general readers" used to like in those political histories. (I know that must sound naive to a historian, but these reviews are meant to be helpful to others who might share my failings. Another naive confession: I can't resist drawing a great many parallels between the period Langford describes and, on the other hand, our own times.)
Throughout, the author's style is elegant, varied and energetic without ever seeming affected in the slightest. It is direct, but capable of considerable nuance. I'm a surprisingly slow reader for a person who reads so much, but this really was [cliche alert] a page-turner [/cliche].
Now that I've finished it, I still might not be able to pass a pop quiz on the Gordon Riots, say, or the War of Jenkins Ear. Still, I've been entertained and--if I can put it like this--enlightened by this first volume in the new Oxford series. Bring on fourteen more!
A Preemptive Strike at Harry BlackmunThere was. Though I didn't see it right away, I knew of the author, Prof. Bernard Siegan of the University of San Diego School of Law. Siegan had written two books, Economic Liberties and the Constitution (1980) and Property and Freedom (1997), both of them supportive of property rights and the freedom of contract.
This new book begins with the Magna Carta, from which sprang the phrase "due process of law." Siegan traces the historical march of due process, and its allied idea that when the state takes private property it should have to pay. Through the English common law and commentaries, the American state constitutions and the U.S. constitution, Siegan lines up his analytical cannons. The enemy is at first unidentified. Then, halfway through, he appears: Justice Harry Blackmun, who brought up the losing side in the 1992 property-rights case, Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council.
In the majority's decision in that case, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the supporters of property rights reclaimed important territory from the administrative state. But Blackmun, a defender of the state, penned an ambitious dissent. In the decade since the Lucas triumph, Siegan has seen Blackmun's dissent quoted again and again. More than anything else, Siegan's book is a preemptive strike against Blackmun's historical argument, to provide ammunition for justices who would reject it.
Blackmun argued that for more than a century, courts had been allowing governments to wipe out all commercial uses of property in order to protect the public good. There was, for example, Mugler v. Kansas, an 1876 case in which the owner of a brewery sued for compensation when Kansas went "dry." The court said it was too bad; that the legislature had declared beer to be "injurious to the health, morals and safety of the community," and Mugler was out of luck. Blackmun argued that this was normal. He wrote: "The principle that the State should compensate individuals for property taken for public use was not widely established in America at the time of the Revolution." He wrote, "State governments often felt free to take property for roads and other public projects without paying compensation to the owners."
Siegan argues that the American legal tradition was quite different from Blackmun's anti-property view. On the taking of property for roads, he shows that the main case Blackmun cited to prove his point does no such thing, and that of all the states as of 1860, only one, South Carolina, allowed the uncompensated taking of land to build roads.
Blackmun had not quoted any federal cases before 1870, but Siegan does. Siegan then offers 60 pages on the Fourteenth Amendment, focusing on the due process and the privileges or immunities clauses. Here he shows that the legislators who proposed these provisions, revised them, debated them and approved them thought of them as highly protective of property owners. They did not mean to say that state legislatures could devalue private property to near-zero by citing some general public interest.
In the final part of the book, Siegan goes well beyond a reply to Blackmun. Siegan presents the Fourteenth Amendment as the great battering ram for individual liberty, if only judges understood what it it was meant to say and do-particularly those old English phrases, "due process of law" and "privileges or immunities."
One may ask why all this history matters. One might as well ask why scholars today should be arguing so hotly about whether 19th century Americans owned guns. It is because we have the same issue today. And Siegan's argument in this book is part of an argument about what to do today about wetlands, salmon streams, urban-growth boundaries, design review and other such unhistorical things.
This book does not argue, as the pro-government side will probably portray it, that property rights are absolute. In our tradition, no rights are absolute. Some rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, have an extensive territory-greater today than in the 19th century. Some rights, such as the freedom to contract over the sale of one's labor, formerly had a large territory, and since the 1930s is vastly shrunken. Lucas and other decisions of the past 15 years have extended the right of property to a medium-sized domain, less than that of free speech but greater than freedom of contract.
Siegan's life work has been to make an historical and legal case for the property-rights territory to be larger. He makes it brilliantly in this book, and by focusing part of it on Blackmun, he raises the chance that his argument will count.
Probably the best available introduction to historiographyThis slinder volume belongs on every historian's shelf. It far surpasses Barbara Tuchman's much-lauded "Practicing History." Furthermore, Tosh's "Pursuit of History" is not a popularly-directed work in the negative sense of the term: that is, he doesn't water down his fine prose in order to attract a large popular reading audience; nor does he slip in corny examples from subjects the public at large tend to be endlessly attached to. Yet Tosh's work is certainly not a dry work only for academics. I think most college students in history or social science will find it especially helpful in gaining a firm grasp on the "aims and methods" of historical study.
A Fitting Tribute to Professor Michael BeesleyIn 1999 his untimely death deprived the UK of one of it's most distinguished economists only shortly before the latest of the lecture series got underway. Now aptly renamed the Beesley lectures the series has continued under the auspices of the IEA and LBS and this book, edited by Beesley's close friend and colleague, IEA Editorial Director, is the record of that 1999 lecture series.
The format of the book mirrors that of the lectures themselves - each year the academics and the practitioners alternate in giving the lecture while the others chair the session and comment before opening up to the floor for questions and discussion. In line with the IEA brief to express the issues clearly and cogently so that the layman can follow the debate, the papers are well written with the minimum of technical jargon to explore the current issues and examine possibilities for the future.
The whole question of the limits to public finance which instigated privatisation, deregulation and increased competition in the provision of public services the world over has led to a burgeoning literature on regulation which may be viewed as the ability of government to ensure service delivery standards without direct provision. As universities and research institutes the world over focus on the questions of regulation, this series, although focussing on the British experience, nonetheless provides insights which have general applicability.
The quality of this book is very high and is recommended reading for expert, student and layman alike. Some of the papers are a little dated such as Colin Mayer's excellent exposition on the 1999 Water price review but which has important lessons for the whole of utility regulation. Overall the papers provide interesting perspectives on the approach of the recently elected Labour government's approach to regulation and competition. Professor Catherine Waddhams Price's paper is a prime example of regulation with a social needs perspective. Colin Robinson has done a marvellous job is editing the papers. The most interesting from my own point of view are the Ian Jones paper on 'Railway Franchising' and the final paper by Dan Goyder on the new Competition Commission.
All in all this is a befitting testimony to a great man who always had a knack of finding a new way of looking at things from everyone alse.
In his preface to the book, Hayek recounts how the spirit of socialism swept through the minds and hearts of the young in his early years when the power of socialist ideals and the role of the state held out the promise of eradication of the great evils of the human condition. He recalls his message in the Road to Serfdom of the perils of following the road to collectivism which were ignored by all the powers, great and small alike and that by the 1970s he feared that socialism had swept all before it.
This book exemplifies the power of ideas to bring about cataclysmic changes in scoiety.It charts the loss of faith in the power of the state to achieve lasting change for the better and the recognition that socialsm for all it's pretence is really the power of envy and coercion. The authors contained within it's covers are mainly young writers and scholars who for a variety of reasons have chosen the path of freedom at a time where it was still unfashionale to do so. They and others like them have been at the vanguard of the fight to show the failures of socialism and collectivism. They have been instrumental in bringing the ideas of freedom to a new generation of people brought up within the cocoon of a welfare state, educated to believe that individual effort should be subordinated to cradle-to-grave state action, but a generation who understands that this does not work.
The authors of the New Right Enlightenment help to provide the intellectual tools to set the people free. Arthur Seldon has played no small role in that process. In his modest way he has been the inspiration to most of these young British writers and to many in Britain who have hade the yoke of serfdom removed from their shoulders, he will remain unknown.