Hi all. I’ve been super busy with work and personal stuff, so, much to my regret, I haven’t been able to participate in the interesting discussions going on of late. But I have managed to squeeze in enough time here and there in the past couple of weeks to write a 4,000+ word piece summarizing my view of the political history of the west (if anybody’s read it already on my blog before today, it’s been expanded a good deal).
Of course with such a short piece covering so many centuries, major episodes often only get a mention (if that). At the same time, with such a sweeping topic, I don’t know if it would be focused enough to qualify as a potential Mises Daily. But I’d like to get feedback from all you well-read folk all the same. Thanks in advance.
Excellent work Lilburne. Very clear and concise and I really like your definitions of the epochs.
In the name of constructive criticism:
Maybe you could emphasise that recognition of private property was a key development of The Old Freedom, particularly in land. Recognition of land ownership was a prerequisite for agriculture.
Maybe you could mention globalization trends: something like “The prosperity of The New Freedom epoch led to an increase in long-distance trade, facilitated by an international gold standard. But in the Third Intermediate Period, this globalization of trade translated into an internationalization of government and fiat currencies. Regional political institutions such as the EU, NATO, AU, and ASEAN and global institutions such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, WHO, and the ICC have come to play an increasingly important role in world affairs. The inherent tendency for governments to centralize, driven by popular support for democracy and equality of wealth, logically culminates in the establishment of a global fiat currency and a global government.”
I think the internet should get a mention in the Future Freedom section. The internet is the reason the ideas of Mises, Rothbard and Paul have reached such a large audience. There are also many other ways the internet may be the downfall of both Throne and Altar (see this post by AJ).
It would be helpful to list the seven epochs in bullet-points in the introduction.
Typo: “In the 16th century, Henry VIII drove the Catholic Church out of France to expropriate its wealth and set up his own state church.” Obviously you mean England.
Again, great work - I’ve always been interested in how different historians define epochs and your scheme makes more sense than any other I have seen.
The only suggestion I would make is this: for a survey of this kind, some references would be welcome. You should add a list of books or articles that have helped form your understanding of the history you summarize. The purpose would be twofold: 1) you would give some poor historically illiterate sod like me a start on pursuing the subject if he fell upon your essay and liked it; 2) you would be warranting to the reader that you had delved into the subject more deeply than skimming Wikipedia articles, and thus were not simply a crank, spouting off from the top of his head. Number two is important to help persuade a maximal number of readers who stumble upon the article, since it is at least potentially an effort in persuasion, rather than just preachment to the choir.
Good points, twelveguage. Rest assured, I’m no Wikicrank. Here are the books I’ve read which informed the piece. I’ll reference these in footnotes per your suggestion.
History Begins at Sumer by Samuel Noah Kramer (350 page)
Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux (428 pages)
Penguin Atlases (about half of the pages of which are text, the other half maps) of Ancient History (120 pages), , Medieval History (106 pages), Modern History (90 pages), and Recent History (108 pages), all by Colin McEvedy
Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Egypt (131 pages)
A History of the Middle Ages by Crane Brinton, John Christopher, and Robert Wolff (19 hour audiobook)
Charlemagne: From the Hammer to the Cross by Richard Winston (14.5 hour audiobook)
How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas Woods (225 pages)
The Medieval Machine by Jean Gimpel (252 pages)
Medieval Feudalism by Carl Stephenson (2.5 hour audiobook)
The Crusades by Richard A. Newhall (5 hour audiobook)
A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman: The Calamitous 14th Century (700 pages)
The Italian Renaissance by J.H. Plumb (6 hour audiobook)
The Reformation by George L. Mosse (5 hour audiobook)
The Age of Louis XIV by Laurence Bradford Packard (4.5 hour audiobook)
Europe Under the Old Regime by Albert Sorel (3 hour audiobook)
A History of Britain by Simon Schama, Volume I (8 hour audiobook)
Conceived in Liberty by Murray Rothbard Volume I (511 pages), Volume II (268 pages), Volume III (the first 245 pages) (I haven’t read Volume IV yet)
The Enlightened Despots by Geoffrey Bruun (4.75 hour audiobook)
The French Revolution by Leo Gershoy (3.5 hour audiobook)
How Capitalism Saved America by Thomas DiLorenzo (256 pages)
Modern and Contemporary European History by J. Salwyn Schapiro (825 pages)
Europe Since 1815 by Mitchell Garrett and James Godfrey (750 pages)
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal by Robert Murphy (177 pages)
I’m omitting a lot, because I’m tired of typing: particularly ancient history texts. Also, since I don’t talk about classical antiquity (Greece and Rome) much in my piece, I’ve omitted what I’ve read on that subject. However, classical literature and history is actually somewhat of a specialty of mine.
Sorry if this is overkill, or if it seems like bragging. I just don’t want people to think I’m a crank.
EDIT: Forgot some key American history works…
John Adams by David McCullough (30 hour audiobook)
Thomas Jefferson and His Time by Dumas Malone, 6 volumes, (102 hour audiobook)
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands (26 hour audiobook)
The popular belief is that the Middle Ages were a dark age of barbarism and religious repression, and it was only with the Renaissance that civilization and advancement picked up where antiquity had left off. So when you say
people are going to want additional supporting evidence (citations, statistics, etc.) before they’ll believe it. Otherwise, they might just write off this article as the work of a crank (which I don’t think it is).
Also, in this passage:
you cover about 3000 years of history in one fell swoop. Is there anything worth mentioning about the fall of the Roman Empire? Do you think that the “campaign of conquest” pattern continued uninterrupted throughout Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages? I would think that the fall of the Western Empire, as well as the Early Middle Ages, deserve mention: In contrast to the continued existence of the Byzantine Empire, Western Europe had a period of several centuries where there was an “altar” but no “throne” to speak of (of course, there were kings and warlords, but no states in the modern sense). It’s likely that this contributed to the political fragmentation you mention in “The Middle Freedom.”
Although, I don’t claim to be an expert on these matters, so I’ll defer to you if anything I said was incorrect.
you could do a raw text paste (i.e. of just the numbers next to your footnotes (and the footnotes), into a plain text editor, like notepad, and then into your html editor, that way you are just manipulating plain text as you are used to.) obviously it wont help you in this project as its a done deal, but in the future if you anticipate you will have lots of footnotes in an article and you do feel it will be a pain to number the notes, its an idea.
Takes a while to learn this stuff, but it’s very useful. (especially if you’re putting in mathematical expressions) It’s what most researchers in computer science use. The bib files are really neat as you can use them to store your references.
I thought that the piece was very interesting and informative.
Only thing I don’t understand is the description of the high middle ages as a time of freedom. I know that centralized states were very weak at this point weren’t local feudalist states just as tyranical as any large centralized state?
No, the near-non-existence of chattel slavery alone is enough to tip the scales in favor of medieval western society. Also, the common image of the nobility as between the crown and the peasants “as the hound is between the hunter and the hare” describes the nobility under the post-High-Middle-Ages ancien regime. I’m not saying it was some peasant’s paradise, but it was much better than everything before it, and everything elsewhere at the time.