Toward a Social History for Classical Liberals

The historiography of material conditions is so colored by Marxist assumptions that classical liberals seldom want anything to do with it. More times than I can count, I have seen conservative or classical liberal historians deride the very idea of studying chairs, dresses, bread, horses--or artichokes.

Ideas, we hear again and again. Study the ideas, because the rest is just a lot of Marxist distraction.

Nonsense, I say.

And we should be worried indeed if we ever saw our anti-material prejudice confirmed: If the economic conditions of the past turn out to be explicable only in Marxist terms, then Marxism has won. But if the economic conditions of the past are amenable to other forms of analysis, then there is no telling what they might reveal.

My first argument, then, about economic conditions and their relationship to the mentalité of the early modern era is that the are absolutely worth studying--for us just as for leftists, and possibly a good deal more. A really robust classical liberal historiography of the early modern era ought to consider these issues thoroughly rather than just brushing them aside to talk about, you know, ideas.

Keep in mind that we need not subscribe to the Marxist notion that material conditions determine a society's ideas. It is frankly an outdated notion even in the academy, and its only remaining impact, so far as I can tell, is to make nonleftists afraid of studying anything besides the canonical great minds of history. But studying the great minds in isolation is like trying to do ecology by examining mounted trophies alone. Between these two extremes--between ideas as superstructure and ideas as the only things worth studying--there is an entire universe of complicated interplay among historical ideas and material conditions. It's time we started having our say about it.