Book Review:
'Inventing Freedom' by Daniel Hannan
The U.S. and Britain together midwifed
political freedom into the modern world.
By Barton Swaim in the
Wall Street Journal
Years ago, when I was
an American student in Edinburgh, I had a long conversation about British
foreign affairs with another student—an Italian—and remember finding it
slightly amusing that he kept referring to the British as "your
cousins." I had never thought much about the political and cultural ties
binding the U.S. and Great Britain and was at the time more keenly aware of the
differences between the two peoples than of their essential sameness. But as
Daniel Hannan observes in "Inventing Freedom," his history of the
principles and institutions that have defined English-speaking nations,
non-English speakers much oftener think of the U.S. and Britain as a single
entity than as two countries. When French political commentators and European
Union officials complain
about "Anglo-Saxon" values—liberalized labor markets, low taxes—they
are coming closer to the truth than Americans and Britons typically realize.
Inventing
Freedom
By Daniel Hannan
Broadside Books, 395 pages, $26.99
Broadside Books, 395 pages, $26.99
Mr.
Hannan's book is more than intellectual history; it's also an argument and a
plea. The principles of representative democracy, individual liberty and
property rights aren't the products of some general European phenomenon called
"capitalism," he says, and any belief that they are owes more to Karl
Marx than to the historical record. These principles originated in pre-Norman
England, were realized fully in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and spread as
English speakers left the British Isles to colonize the New World, India, East
Asia and Australia.
A British member of
the European Parliament, Mr. Hannan believes that Continental Europeans have
never valued representative government and personal liberty in the way the
English have for more than a millennium. "Inventing Freedom" is,
though, very far from a jingoistic tirade; the author doesn't argue that the
people of non-Anglophone nations are somehow deficient in political
understanding, and indeed he goes out of his way to show that patriotism in
English-speaking countries has almost always based itself on principles and
institutions rather than on military superiority or genetics. He contends,
rather, that by a combination of historical development and geographical
accident, the people of what is now called Great Britain created something
entirely different from the closed and centralized regimes that have been the
norm in most of human history. They produced a society where rulers were
subject to the law and the law belonged to the people, where collective will
did not trump individual right, and where free citizens were permitted to
create and keep their own wealth. These principles have transformed the world:
"The miracles of the past three and a half centuries—the unprecedented
improvements in democracy, in longevity, in freedom, in literacy, in calorie
intake, in infant survival rates, in height, in equality of opportunity—came
about largely because of the individualist market system developed by the Anglosphere."
The author, though, is
worried. By aligning its laws and policies increasingly with the Continent
rather than the U.S. and the other Anglophone democracies to which it gave
birth, he fears, Britain may be abandoning the principles that brought political
freedom to the world. Recent political developments on this side of the
Atlantic suggest a similar course for the U.S. Yet none of this takes away from
the sunny winsomeness of Mr. Hannan's writing or the book's narrative drive
(the first chapter begins with the words, "When I was four years old, a
mob attacked our family farm").
Mr. Hannan has engaged
with a wide array of important academic historical works, among them James
Campbell's "The Anglo-Saxon State" (2003) and the Cambridge historian
Alan Macfarlane's groundbreaking "The Origins of English
Individualism" (1978) and "The Culture of Capitalism" (1987).
The book's chapters cover medieval and early modern England, move to what the
author calls the First and Second Anglosphere Wars—the struggle between king
and Parliament in the 1650s and the comparatively humane war over American
independence in the 1770s and '80s—and finally tell the story of how the
British Empire transformed itself into a loosely connected Commonwealth and,
later, a global alliance of nations united primarily by values rather than
formal agreements. That the book contains no bibliography or proper citations
is irritating, but the decision to give it a tract-like feel is defensible.
The story begins in
the 10th century, when the Saxons were living in an England that, in a
primitive but no less real way, valued law over force. These were litigious
people, always bringing disputes before magistrates and demanding adjudication.
It was among the Saxons that English common law was born. The common law—the
form of law used throughout most of the Anglosphere even now—was based on the
premise that judges should decide cases, not by applying an abstract principle
of law to specific situations, but by determining how cases had been decided in
similar situations before.
This bottom-up form of
jurisprudence in effect put the law itself in charge; judges didn't so much
"decide" cases as discern how they'd been decided already. The common
law, Mr. Hannan argues, contrasting as it did with the more top-down
Continental traditions, has had profound effects on the way English speakers
think about the world. "The pragmatic nature of the Anglosphere
peoples," he writes, "their dislike of purely theoretical reasoning,
was built from the first into the way they made—or, rather, discovered—their
laws."
By the early 11th
century, the Saxon form of government was already premised on the belief that
kings couldn't do whatever they pleased. In 1013, a Danish invasion had driven
the Saxon king Aethelred into exile and placed a Dane, Sweyn, on the throne.
When Sweyn died unexpectedly the next year, the Saxon ruling assembly, the
Witan, invited Aethelred to return—on condition that he refrain from imposing
excessive taxes and heed the Witan's counsel. And when Aethelred died two years
later, the same offer was extended to the Danish king Cnut. The Saxons were
devastated by the Normans in 1066, and so were all their traditions of law. But
the Saxons' political worldview survived in regional and municipal assemblies.
That worldview would be given its most sublime expression in 1215, when the
egregious King John was forced to sign the charter that circumscribed
monarchical power and dealt a death blow to absolutism in the Anglosphere—the
Magna Carta.
The book's strongest
chapter asks us to rethink the narrative of European economic history that
scholars have for the most part uncritically accepted for generations. During
the late Middle Ages, the story goes, European society was based on the shared
ownership of land. Boys were expected, in effect forced, to remain on that land
and practice their father's trade. Only with the rise of "capitalism"
in the 16th century—i.e., the freer movement of labor and wealth—was the system
fractured. That narrative, says Mr. Hannan, describes just about everywhere in
Europe except England. Long before the 16th century, English law had considered
boys free agents the moment they reached legal maturity. Once he left home, a
young Englishman could join whatever trade he wished.
English law, too,
allowed a man to leave his property to whomever he pleased, whereas Continental
laws required a more equitable distribution to all family members—a difference
that still exists. Long before the rise of industrialism in the 18th century,
then, English society reflected a view of individual rights and economic
mobility that was largely absent on the Continent.
The Glorious
Revolution was the next pivotal event. By inviting the Protestant William of
Orange to invade in 1688 and chase the Catholic James II from the throne,
England's political leaders created a nation in which state power was limited
by the will of Parliament. Mr. Hannan records a beautiful moment when seven
Anglican bishops, having been consigned by James II to the Tower of London for
refusing to pronounce a royal edict in their churches, were cheered by vast
crowds as they made their way to prison. As they entered the tower, the guards,
ostensibly working for the king, knelt for a blessing. In England, the doctrine
of the divine right of kings was truly dead.
Mr. Hannan goes to
great lengths to emphasize the ways in which the American Founders drew on the
documents of English libertarianism (that's his term for it). It's more than
just a debt of language, although the language is suggestive: The Magna Carta
forbade taxation without representation, for example, and England's 1689 Bill
of Rights maintained that "excessive bail ought not to be required, nor
excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
The observation has
often been made, but it bears repeating: The Founders didn't consider
themselves revolutionaries; they considered themselves Englishmen who had been
denied the right to govern themselves by an arrogant monarch enabled by a
misguided Parliament. "The Grand Union Flag was the banner that the
Continental Congress met under," Mr. Hannan writes, "the banner that
flew over their chamber when they approved the Declaration of Independence. It
was the banner that George Washington fought beneath, that John Paul Jones
hoisted on the first ship of the United States Navy. That it has been almost
excised from America's collective memory tells us a great deal about how the
story of the revolution was afterward edited."
The point here isn't
merely academic. The U.S. and Britain together midwifed political freedom into
the modern world, and their vibrant economies and political stability have
ratified their principles. Mr. Hannan rightly notes that representative democracy
and individual rights have never been popular around the world. In 1688, the
absolutism personified by Louis XIV was the wave of the future, and in the
1930s the idea of democratic rule was laughed at by sophisticated people all
over the globe and particularly on the Continent. At both moments, it was the
Anglosphere's task to defend the ideals of individual freedom and
self-governance against their enemies. And on both occasions the task was
fulfilled more or less successfully.
How unfortunate, then,
that at a time when Anglosphere nations have begun to coalesce around shared
values—Mr. Hannan argues that Ireland and perhaps even India are now
full-fledged members of the Anglosphere—the U.S. president should defenestrate
those values and embrace statism and centralization instead. As if to reinforce
his rejection of Anglosphere principles, Barack
Obama has pointedly
downgraded the long-standing special relationship existing between Britain and
the U.S. Mr. Obama's straining of these ties is typical of the left's
reluctance to champion the Anglosphere's political heritage. This, even though,
over the past century, English-speaking nations have defended and fostered
precisely the values that left-liberals claim to cherish and even as the
regimes the left has too often defended—from Soviet Russia to the Palestinian
Authority—have spurned those values in all but rhetoric.
But there is another
fundamental antagonism at work here, and it has to do with the Anglosphere's
religious inheritance. "Protestantism," writes Mr. Hannan, drawing on
Linda Colley's marvelous history of British identity, "Britons"
(1992), "was the single biggest factor in the forging of a common British
nationality out of the older English, Scottish, and Welsh identities—a common
nationality then transmitted to the settler societies." That's undeniable.
The Protestant worldview, with its emphasis on individual conscience and
personal Bible-reading and its elevation of industry, facilitated the rise of
Northern and Western Europe's mercantile culture as nothing else did. But even
the loosest forms of Protestantism, and indeed all forms of Christianity,
necessarily imply a metaphysical source of authority, and radical ideologies
from the mid-19th century forward have usually defined themselves in opposition
to all forms of spiritual authority. Church attendance may have hit rock bottom
throughout much of the Anglosphere today, but the history and present habits of
these nations, as Mr. Hannan is right to observe, are still soaked in an
essentially religious outlook.
Whether the
"Protestant ethic" can survive the recession of Protestantism is
another question altogether. Mr. Hannan sounds upbeat: "While
Protestantism might have been an important component in establishing the
Anglosphere's political culture, that political culture quickly took on a
durability and energy that allowed it to flourish from Ireland to
Singapore." True enough. But the habits of thought instilled by a century
of welfare-state entitlements and big-government cronyism have gradually and
quietly undermined the older outlook, based as it was on the dignity of work
and individual attainment. It's far from clear to me, anyhow, that a
post-Protestant work ethic animated solely by material gain can compete with an
ethic of handouts and bailouts.
But Mr. Hannan
shouldn't be faulted for his optimism—particularly given the gravity of his
book's central argument: that the survival of democratic self-governance, individual
rights and economic freedom depends largely on the choices made today by the
world's English-speaking cousins.
—Mr. Swaim is writing
a book about political language and public life.
