by Mike Gray

On the libertarian website Mises Daily, Jeffrey A. Tucker reviews a book published five decades late:

Forty years ago, historian Ralph Raico completed his dissertation under the direction of F. A. Hayek at the University of Chicago. Its title masks its power and importance: The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton.

While Raico was doing his research, an intellectual controversy was well underway:

The argument between conservatives and libertarians was fundamentally about the Cold War, but that was not the only subject discussed. Instead, the conservatives came to characterize the libertarians as not only strategically flawed but philosophically corrupt. And why? Because they had inherited the secularism, the anticlericism, the essential immoralism and antinomianism of the old-liberal school of the Enlightenment (a word to be spoken with sneering disdain).

You see, the conservatives said, the libertarians imagine a world of autonomous individualism in which people run around and do whatever they want, free of the shackles of religion and morality, and this, they believe, is the true end of existence. Freedom and nothing else is their rallying cry! Thus did the conservatives attempt to paint the libertarians with the brush of the hippy, dropout generation — a sector of the New Left that spoke vaguely of freedom while rejecting all manner of social authority.

…. There was another tradition of liberalism that was not necessarily antireligion and antitradition but rather focused its critique of coercion against the state alone. After all, it is only the state, not religious institutions, that possess that critical power to aggress against the life and liberty of the individual.

To the extent the church can tax, it is only through the power and authority of the law over which the state possesses the monopoly. What’s more, this other sector of liberalism did not see freedom alone as the sole point of existence, but rather as a means to an end of achieving higher moral purpose.

The classical liberals Raico focuses on were “three massively important figures in the history of liberalism for whom a religious orientation, and an overarching moral framework, was central for their thought: French Protestant Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), French Catholic Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), and Lord Acton (1834–1902).”

Tucker’s full review is here.