Post by GrayGhost on Nov 30, 2004 13:41:31 GMT -5
Very interesting read here:
www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods31.html
By Thomas E Woods Jr
Abraham Lincoln and the war he waged against the seceding Southern states continue to divide libertarian opinion. Some libertarians point to Lincoln as the harbinger of big government in America, while others cannot bring themselves to support the cause of the Southern states, so intimately bound up with chattel slavery as they believe it to have been. Although the latter position is often poorly or even dishonestly argued, the objection it raises is not in and of itself foolish or contemptible, and those who advance it in all sincerity are entitled to a fair-minded and non-polemical reply.
Lincoln’s personal opinions about race, the legality (or otherwise) of his actions as president, and the degree to which the war really was a conflict over slavery, are subjects for another time, and indeed are taken up in my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Here we confine ourselves to the more modest task of introducing a useful moral framework for evaluating the significance as well as the rights and wrongs of the conflict.
Many of Lincoln’s admirers have the honesty to admit that when he called up those first 75,000 militiamen in 1861 to put down the "rebellion" in the South, he had no intention of waging a war to abolish slavery. What they argue instead is that as the war progressed the meaning of the Northern war effort evolved in Lincoln’s mind, becoming a war not only for the Union but also for human liberation. The more mystical among them suggest that this had in some sense been the war’s purpose all along, but that it was only gradually that Lincoln himself became aware of the significance of the historical moment into which he had been placed.
But there is no reason that this kind of argument should be raised only on behalf of the Northern cause and not for the Southern. In other words, isn’t it possible that the South’s own self-understanding also evolved over the course of the war? Thus even if some people did believe they had seceded over slavery, is it not possible that they, too, may eventually have begun to appreciate larger issues at stake in the conflict just as Lincoln is said to have done?
Donald Livingston, professor of philosophy at Emory University, has identified one of these larger issues, and it was one that Southerners did indeed appreciate. In the modern age, Livingston observes, we have seen federative polities giving way to modern states. A federative polity is one in which a variety of smaller jurisdictions exist – like families, voluntary organizations, towns and states, and in medieval Europe institutions like guilds, universities, and the Church. Each of these social authorities has powers and rights of its own that the central government cannot overturn. Each of them is also a potential source of corporate resistance to the central government. Prior to the rise of the modern state, political leaders who desired centralization therefore found themselves up against the historic liberties of towns, guilds, universities, the Church, and similar corporate bodies.
Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, set out parameters for the modern state in Leviathan (1651) that developed into unexamined premises that later thinkers (even putative opponents like John Locke) all but took for granted. The modern state about which Hobbes theorized is one in which the central government is absolutely supreme, and in which society is thought of as being composed not of independent social authorities, as in a federative polity, but of a simple aggregate of individuals. There are no truly independent social authorities in the modern state because nothing is thought to be independent of or prior to the central government. All potential for corporate resistance is gone; mere individuals, by contrast, are typically helpless against a strong central government.
It is true that the modern state could protect individuals from the oppressions of these smaller authorities. Thus the modern state could end slavery in one fell swoop. But as Livingston points out, it could also carry out great atrocities, of a kind the world had never before seen. State slavery now re-emerged, not only in the form of the Soviet gulag and the Nazi concentration camps, but also in the form of military conscription, a uniquely modern idea. In just four years, nearly three times as many men were killed in World War I as there were slaves in the South. (Its sequel, World War II, took 50 million lives.) Tens of millions would perish in slave labor camps, dwarfing the 11 million slaves brought to the New World (five percent of whom went to North America) in 400 years of the slave trade.
What must be emphasized here, according to Livingston,
is that this enormous destruction was due primarily not to advanced technology, nor to the wickedness and madness of certain leaders (as important as both of these were) but to the structure of the modern state itself: the destruction of independent social authorities and the massive concentration of power at the center. Had Hitler and Stalin been absolute monarchs in the eighteenth century, they could not have carried out the destruction they did, simply because they would not have had the authority to do so. They would have been hedged in by powerful independent social authorities whose titles were as good as their own and who could be expected to resist.
Livingston’s conclusion is that we must give the moral benefit of the doubt to people who were fighting to prevent the transformation of the United States into such a state, and who would instead have given the world the moral example of a federal republic that acknowledged the sovereignty of its constituent parts. "Europeans at the time of the War for Southern Independence," he writes,
recognized that the Union was engaged in a Jacobin revolution to create a unitary state. Marx and Mill rejoiced in the project of destroying the federative order, as did the British liberal journal The Spectator, which declared in December 1866: "The American Revolution marches fast towards its goal – the change of a Federal Commonwealth into a Democratic Republic, one and indivisible." The so-called "Civil War" was in fact America’s French Revolution.
Continued below.......
www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods31.html
By Thomas E Woods Jr
Abraham Lincoln and the war he waged against the seceding Southern states continue to divide libertarian opinion. Some libertarians point to Lincoln as the harbinger of big government in America, while others cannot bring themselves to support the cause of the Southern states, so intimately bound up with chattel slavery as they believe it to have been. Although the latter position is often poorly or even dishonestly argued, the objection it raises is not in and of itself foolish or contemptible, and those who advance it in all sincerity are entitled to a fair-minded and non-polemical reply.
Lincoln’s personal opinions about race, the legality (or otherwise) of his actions as president, and the degree to which the war really was a conflict over slavery, are subjects for another time, and indeed are taken up in my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Here we confine ourselves to the more modest task of introducing a useful moral framework for evaluating the significance as well as the rights and wrongs of the conflict.
Many of Lincoln’s admirers have the honesty to admit that when he called up those first 75,000 militiamen in 1861 to put down the "rebellion" in the South, he had no intention of waging a war to abolish slavery. What they argue instead is that as the war progressed the meaning of the Northern war effort evolved in Lincoln’s mind, becoming a war not only for the Union but also for human liberation. The more mystical among them suggest that this had in some sense been the war’s purpose all along, but that it was only gradually that Lincoln himself became aware of the significance of the historical moment into which he had been placed.
But there is no reason that this kind of argument should be raised only on behalf of the Northern cause and not for the Southern. In other words, isn’t it possible that the South’s own self-understanding also evolved over the course of the war? Thus even if some people did believe they had seceded over slavery, is it not possible that they, too, may eventually have begun to appreciate larger issues at stake in the conflict just as Lincoln is said to have done?
Donald Livingston, professor of philosophy at Emory University, has identified one of these larger issues, and it was one that Southerners did indeed appreciate. In the modern age, Livingston observes, we have seen federative polities giving way to modern states. A federative polity is one in which a variety of smaller jurisdictions exist – like families, voluntary organizations, towns and states, and in medieval Europe institutions like guilds, universities, and the Church. Each of these social authorities has powers and rights of its own that the central government cannot overturn. Each of them is also a potential source of corporate resistance to the central government. Prior to the rise of the modern state, political leaders who desired centralization therefore found themselves up against the historic liberties of towns, guilds, universities, the Church, and similar corporate bodies.
Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, set out parameters for the modern state in Leviathan (1651) that developed into unexamined premises that later thinkers (even putative opponents like John Locke) all but took for granted. The modern state about which Hobbes theorized is one in which the central government is absolutely supreme, and in which society is thought of as being composed not of independent social authorities, as in a federative polity, but of a simple aggregate of individuals. There are no truly independent social authorities in the modern state because nothing is thought to be independent of or prior to the central government. All potential for corporate resistance is gone; mere individuals, by contrast, are typically helpless against a strong central government.
It is true that the modern state could protect individuals from the oppressions of these smaller authorities. Thus the modern state could end slavery in one fell swoop. But as Livingston points out, it could also carry out great atrocities, of a kind the world had never before seen. State slavery now re-emerged, not only in the form of the Soviet gulag and the Nazi concentration camps, but also in the form of military conscription, a uniquely modern idea. In just four years, nearly three times as many men were killed in World War I as there were slaves in the South. (Its sequel, World War II, took 50 million lives.) Tens of millions would perish in slave labor camps, dwarfing the 11 million slaves brought to the New World (five percent of whom went to North America) in 400 years of the slave trade.
What must be emphasized here, according to Livingston,
is that this enormous destruction was due primarily not to advanced technology, nor to the wickedness and madness of certain leaders (as important as both of these were) but to the structure of the modern state itself: the destruction of independent social authorities and the massive concentration of power at the center. Had Hitler and Stalin been absolute monarchs in the eighteenth century, they could not have carried out the destruction they did, simply because they would not have had the authority to do so. They would have been hedged in by powerful independent social authorities whose titles were as good as their own and who could be expected to resist.
Livingston’s conclusion is that we must give the moral benefit of the doubt to people who were fighting to prevent the transformation of the United States into such a state, and who would instead have given the world the moral example of a federal republic that acknowledged the sovereignty of its constituent parts. "Europeans at the time of the War for Southern Independence," he writes,
recognized that the Union was engaged in a Jacobin revolution to create a unitary state. Marx and Mill rejoiced in the project of destroying the federative order, as did the British liberal journal The Spectator, which declared in December 1866: "The American Revolution marches fast towards its goal – the change of a Federal Commonwealth into a Democratic Republic, one and indivisible." The so-called "Civil War" was in fact America’s French Revolution.
Continued below.......