I am in a country which scarcely resembles the rest of Europe. England is passionately fond of liberty, and every individual is independent.
—BARON DE MONTESQUIEU, 1729
The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it, the storm may enter, the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!
—WILLIAM PITT THE ELDER, 1763
Toward the end of his life, Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947), three times the prime minister of the United Kingdom, was asked whether the thoughts of any political philosopher had guided him. Somewhat surprisingly—for Baldwin had never had much time for doctrines of any sort—he replied that, as a young man, he had been deeply impressed by the ideas of Sir Henry Maine, the eminent jurist and historian whose Ancient Law (1861) was a classic statement of Anglosphere exceptionalism. It was from that great text, Baldwin declared, that he had come to see that all human progress took the form of a movement from status to contract. Then, frowning, he paused. “Or was it the other way around?”
It is a telling story, an illustration of how even the most brilliant ideas can become stale through repetition. In Baldwin’s day, Maine’s status-to-contract theory was passing from seminal insight to orthodox theory. Nowadays it is barely read at all—except, it seems, by Francis Fukuyama, who drew heavily on it when formulating his own model of history as the inexorable triumph of liberal democracy.
Stop, though, and consider the sheer wonder of Maine’s intuition. In almost every period of human history, people’s circumstances were fixed at birth. In societies with negligible economic growth, people thought of assets as being fixed in quantity. Land was the only sure source of income, and those lucky enough to have it made sure that the system was rigged so that their children would enjoy the same advantage. Almost every social structure, from Neolithic times onward, had a caste aspect. Inca warrior priests, Indian Brahmins, ancien régime aristocrats, Soviet apparatchiks—all were beneficiaries of the closed and partially hereditary system that is the usual form of human organization. Slavery was almost ubiquitous.
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 in the Anglosphere.
All these miracles followed from the recognition of people as free individuals, equal before the law, and able to make agreements one with another for mutual benefit.
In the twentieth century, German sociologists elaborated Maine’s thesis, positing a shift from Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society). The essential difference between the two states lay in the freedom of the individual to make limited, case-by-case bargains with his fellows, rather than having to accept relationships defined by blood, ritual, or precedent. As the rationalist philosopher Ernest Gellner put it, “It is this which makes Civil Society: the forging of links which are effective even though they are flexible, specific, instrumental.”
The dry language of social science disguises the vastness of the concept. Every farming society had elevated predation over production. Seizing someone else’s crop offered a better effort-to-reward ratio than cultivating your own. Enshrining such predation in law, through tithes, taxes, and dues, was the most rewarding of all. Agrarian society gravitated toward oligarchy; most cultures have remained stuck there ever since.
In only one place was the pattern broken. Gellner, who saw the Anglosphere with the clear vision of an immigrant, wondered at “the circuitous and near-miraculous routes by which agrarian mankind has, only once, hit on this path” (emphasis in original).
It happened in the English-speaking lands from the late seventeenth century onward—though something similar was happening in contemporary Holland, which, but for an accident of geography and the expansionist ambitions of Louis XIV, might have been the place where the transformation was completed.
The path, once taken, led on to almost everything that we consider to be modern, comfortable, and rational, from human rights to the consumer society, from regular elections to equality for women. Pause, though, to survey the world, and see how exceptional these things are even today.
According to the Democracy Index, a survey of 167 states and territories published annually by the Economist Intelligence Unit, only 11.3 percent of people live in full democracies, and that population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Anglosphere and the closely related and largely Protestant states of Nordic and Germanic Europe. Strip out these two categories and the number of full democracies falls to seven: Czech Republic, Uruguay, Mauritius, South Korea, Costa Rica, Japan, Spain.
What catalyzed the shift from status to contract? What were the magic ingredients? In recounting our story so far, we have identified them. They are five in number.
First, the development of a nation-state: that is, a regime able to apply laws more or less uniformly to a population bound together by a sense of shared identity.
Second, and related to the fact of common nationality, a strong civic society: a proliferation of clubs, societies, and other groups filling the space between individual and state.
Third, island geography. The English-speaking world is an extended archipelago. With the exceptions of North America and India, its territories are insular: the Caribbean states, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Falklands, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bermuda, Great Britain itself.
The Anglosphere is an essentially maritime civilization. “It has always seemed absurd to me that islands should not be English—unnatural,” says Patrick O’Brien’s fictional nineteenth-century naval captain, Jack Aubrey, when planning an attack on Mauritius.
Although geographically continental, the North American lands were politically isolated, “kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean,” as Jefferson put it in his 1801 inaugural address, “from the exterminating havoc [of Europe].”
Fourth, religious pluralism in a Protestant context, which not only encouraged a proliferation of denominations but also encouraged an individualistic and democratic ethos—one that has long outlived its religious origins.
Fifth, and most important, the common law: a unique legal system that made the state subject to the people rather than the reverse.
If our thesis is correct, if these attributes were peculiar to the Anglosphere at the time of its takeoff, then we should expect foreign visitors during that period to remark upon them.
There were several European voyagers to Britain and America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We have enough evidence from travel journals and letters to build up a broad picture of what struck them as unusual. Several themes crop up repeatedly. Visitors found the English and American people undeferential, quarrelsome, keen on making money, fiercely individualistic, and uninterested in the doings of foreigners.
These attributes, of course, were by-products of the Anglosphere’s political institutions, not the institutions themselves. The number of foreigners who were interested enough to write about the political and legal systems was smaller, but they included some of the most distinguished men of letters of the age, among them Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville.
Throughout this period, visitors tended to see the United States as part of a broader “English” or “Anglo-Saxon” civilization. These days, few conservative seminars in the United States are complete without someone quoting Tocqueville in support of American exceptionalism. But the French aristocrat was as much a student of British as of American society. He traveled in both countries and, indeed, married an Englishwoman. Both places were the subject of his anthropological surveys.
He believed the United Kingdom and the United States formed a cultural continuum: “I do not think the intervening ocean really separates America from Europe. The people of the United States are that portion of the English people whose fate it is to explore the forests of the New World.”
The reason Tocqueville remains popular is that he was an astute observer. Many of the distinguishing traits that he found in the United States—the commercialism, the individualism, the pluralism, the localism—continue to set that country apart nearly two centuries later. But Tocqueville did not believe that these characteristics had been acquired in the New World. For him, America’s key advantage lay in what he called its “point de départ”: the place it had started. English society had been characterized by representative assemblies, by resistance to taxation and state authority, by strong property rights. These tendencies, Tocqueville believed, had been given free rein in the Americas: “In the United States, the English anti-centralization system was carried to an extreme. Parishes became independent municipalities, almost democratic republics. The republican element which forms, so to speak, the foundation of the English constitution shows itself and develops without hindrance.”
In other words, the American colonists had not just borrowed British political values and institutions; they had intensified them. Tocqueville believed that, just as French America had exaggerated the authoritarianism and seigneurialism of Louis XIV’s France, and Spanish America the ramshackle corruption of Philip IV’s Spain, so English America (as he called it) had exaggerated the libertarian character of the mother civilization.
Part of this heritage involved the proliferation of nonstate actors and civil associations: everything from privately funded orphanages to village bands. Tocqueville, like almost every foreign visitor, was struck by the way in which Anglosphere peoples would go ahead and form a club without seeking any kind of state license. “The spirit of individuality is the basis of the English character. Association is a means of achieving things unattainable by isolated effort. . . . What better example of association than the union of individuals who form the club, or almost any civil or political association or corporation?”
Such private associations—Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”—were products of a state that was both strong and weak. Strong in the sense that it could be confident in the patriotism of its citizens (private clubs are never allowed to proliferate in insecure dictatorships); weak in the sense that it did not aspire to do by legislation what could easily be left to commercial or philanthropic endeavor.
But why did the nation-state develop so early, first in England, and then in the broader Anglosphere imperium? What lay behind the restraint of central government, and the flowering of the private associations? Again, foreign visitors were far more struck by the answer than natives: you couldn’t reach the Anglosphere without crossing water.
THE ANGLOSPHERE ARCHIPELAGO
Insularity facilitated the development of a nation-state, as we saw in chapter 2. Critically, it also meant that there was no need for a permanent army. National defense was left largely to the navy, whose task was to prevent invaders from reaching the island in the first place. Other than in times of war, land forces were tiny, and largely made up of part-time territorial units.
Since neither a navy nor a territorial militia could easily be used for internal repression, the government found itself in a weak position vis-à-vis the population. When it wanted to pass a law, it had to secure the consent of the people through their representatives. When it needed revenue, it had to ask Parliament nicely.
Montesquieu was something of a geographical determinist, especially when it came to the model of British freedom that he admired:
The inhabitants of islands have a higher relish for liberty than those of the continent. Islands are commonly of a small extent; one part of the people cannot be so easily employed to oppress the other; the sea separates them from great empires; tyranny cannot so well support itself within a small compass; conquerors are stopped by the sea; and the islanders, being without the reach of their arms, more easily preserve their own laws.
While England had precociously become a nation-state in the ninth century, it was not quite an island state, for it shared the island of Great Britain with another kingdom. It is true that England was overwhelmingly the dominant partner in terms of wealth and population, sometimes treating Scotland as a semiprotectorate, occasionally receiving the ambiguous homage of Scottish kings. Nonetheless, the two crowns were not merged until 1603, nor the two parliaments until 1707.
It is no coincidence that the Anglosphere miracle followed the removal of Great Britain’s last internal land border. Certainly Adam Smith, the greatest of all Scottish philosophers, saw the link. In one of his lectures at Glasgow University in 1763, he made the connection between isolation and liberty:
The absolute power of the sovereigns has continu’d ever since its establishment in France, Spain, etc. In England alone, a different government has been established from the naturall course of things. The situation and circumstances of England have been altogether different. It was united at length with Scotland. The dominions were then entirely surrounded by the sea, which was on all hands a boundary from its neighbours. No foreign invasion was therefore much to be dreaded. We see that (excepting some troops brought over in rebellions and very impoliticly as a defence to the kingdom) there has been no foreign invasion since the time of Henry 3d.
Smith, like most educated Scots at that time, used “England” both in its narrow sense and as a synonym for Great Britain. His key insight, though, has to do with the redundancy of standing armies in island states:
The Scots frequently made incursions upon them, and had they still continued seperate it is probable the English would never have recovered their liberty. The Union however put them out of the danger of invasions. They were therefore under no necessity of keeping up a standing army; they did not see any use or necessity for it. In other countries, as the feudall militia and that of a regular one which followd it wore out, they were under a necessity of establishing a standing army for their defence against their neighbours.
In Poland, France, and Sweden, argued Smith, kings were able to crush their legislatures: “The standing armies in use in those countries put it into the power of the king to over rule the Senate, Diet, or other supreme or highest court of the nation.” England, and later the united Anglosphere, were different: “As the sovereign had no standing army he was obliged to call his Parliament.”
Once again, the political tendencies of English-speakers in the Old World were exaggerated by those in the New. Americans—and, for that matter, Australians and New Zealanders—were even more hostile to standing armies, and even more anxious lest their leaders, under the pretext of fighting foreign wars, acquire powers that might facilitate despotism at home. The English had treated their liberties as an inherited tradition. The Americans were determined to take no risks, and wrote into their earliest charters guarantees against standing armies and in favor of private citizens’ right to bear arms.
The United States might not literally be an island, but there is a reason why the attitude of nonintervention lauded from the early days of the republic is called “isolationism.” The Founders, and those who have upheld their vision since, linked America’s foreign policy to its geography. Theirs was the mentality of an island race.
Listen, for example, to George Washington’s Farewell Address, still reverentially read out every year in the Senate:
Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. . . . Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?
As Tocqueville put it: “Placed in the middle of a huge continent with limitless room for the expansion of human endeavor, the [American] Union is almost as isolated from the world as if it were surrounded on all sides by the ocean.”
Anglosphere political theory at the time posited a link between geographical isolation, accountable government, trade, and peace. Many of today’s political scientists make a similar connection. A comprehensive survey of the evidence by Henry Srebrnik at—appropriately enough—Prince Edward Island University concludes: “A number of studies suggest that island states are more likely to be democratic than others, regardless of levels of economic development. The Commonwealth islands, especially, have done very well on indices of political and civil rights and have provided the basis for vibrant civil societies.”
Island status, of course, is not the whole story. There are other reasons that Guam is not Timor-Lest, that Bermuda is not Haiti, that the Falklands are not the Comoros. Once again, these reasons have to do with the point de départ, the starting point.
PROTESTANT ETHIC
There is a scene in The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s exquisitely tragic 1915 novel, when the main characters go as tourists to see an original draft of the Protest: Martin Luther’s 1517 denunciation of the abuses of the Roman Church. A wealthy American woman declares, superciliously:
Don’t you know that this is why we were all called Protestants? That is the pencil draft of the Protest they drew up. It’s because of that piece of paper that you’re honest, sober, industrious, provident, and clean-lived. If it weren’t for that piece of paper you’d be like the Irish or the Italians or the Poles, but particularly the Irish.
That checklist of Protestant virtues could have been rattled off by English-speakers at almost any moment in the previous three hundred years. England had defined itself as the champion of the anti-Roman cause in Europe. Early America took this self-definition further, seeing itself as a providential nation, set aside by God through its religious orientation. Protestantism 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 colonies.
Not until the twentieth century, though, did anyone attempt to test the idea of a Protestant ethic scientifically. In a series of essays published over 1904 and 1905, the German sociologist Max Weber asked whether there was a connection between Protestantism and economic growth. The resulting thesis, titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued that there was indeed such a correlation, and that its cause lay in the peculiarly Protestant idea that industry and thrift were godly virtues. Until then, Weber argued, Christians had sought to renounce worldly things: to be ascetic, to despise wealth, to overcome desire. But Puritans believed that money, honestly acquired through hard work, was a sign of divine favor.
Plenty of critics rushed to point out flaws in Weber’s methodology. Capitalism had not been an exclusively Protestant invention. Elements of it had developed in the city-states of northern Italy before the Dutch and the English perfected it. The Catholicism of the School of Salamanca is as libertarian as anything in the Protestant world. And Weber’s thesis left little space for the equally powerful work ethic that we find in Austria, Bavaria, the Czech Republic, and the Catholic cantons of Switzerland. Indeed, for all the sneering of Ford Madox Ford’s character, Ireland was a brilliantly successful example of tax-cutting capitalism until it made the disastrous decision to join the euro.
Still, Weber’s findings cannot be easily dismissed. A major survey of the economic data between the years 1500 and 2000 carried out by Stanford University showed that, factoring for other variables, Protestant states began spectacularly to outgrow Catholic ones from the late seventeenth century, with “no signs of convergence until the 1960s.” In 1940, GDP per capita in Europe’s Protestant states was 40 percent higher than in its Catholic ones, and the divergence in the Americas was wider still.
How are we to explain such a huge gap? Weber’s thesis of a different work ethic is, by its nature, difficult to measure. There are, though, other related explanations. For one thing, Protestantism, being Bible-based, placed a unique emphasis on literacy. Self-improvement and self-education were natural corollaries of a faith that encouraged worshippers to study the scriptures.
The spread in literacy might initially have been encouraged for devotional reasons, but it soon became an end in itself and, in northwestern Europe, the magical universe of the Middle Ages was gradually replaced with a rational one.
Protestant countries were not just keener on schools; they were keener on nonreligious schools. Indeed, they were keener on secularism in general. Again, it is difficult to separate out how much of this had to do with doctrine—a belief that the individual Christian should not rely on priests to intermediate his relationship with his Maker—and how much to do with the practical reality that, once the monopoly of a single church had been broken, it was impossible to prevent a general profusion of sects. As Voltaire put it, “If you have two religions in a land, they will be at each other’s throats; but if you have thirty, they will dwell in peace.”
Even in Protestant states where a single church was established, there was a logical impetus toward, first, toleration and, later, full equality, including the freedom to proselytize. Toleration, in its narrow sense, had existed in many multicultural states, including some which were in no sense liberal: Ottoman Turkey, for example. But total religious freedom was almost unknown outside the Anglosphere. Indeed, even within the Anglosphere, equality was slow to come to Catholics.
Nonetheless, visitors from Catholic Europe were surprised and delighted to find a place where you could be a free thinker without being anticlerical, and where no one was persecuted for his beliefs. Voltaire, who had fled to England in 1726 after falling out with a powerful aristocrat, became enraptured with this aspect of his new home. On one occasion, he was confronted by an angry London mob, who took him for a French spy. He pleaded with them that it was his immense misfortune not to have been born in Britain, and spoke with such conviction that the cheering crowd ended up carrying him back to his club on their shoulders. “By G— I do love the Ingles,” he later wrote, in a delicious attempt to mimic the vernacular speech of his new friends. “G-d dammee, if I don’t love them better than the French, by G—.”
Montesquieu perceived, accurately, that granting equal status to different religions was a form of secularism, regardless of whether one sect remained established, and that it would lead to a proliferation of different churches:
With regard to religion, as in this state every subject has free will, and must consequently be led either by the light of his own mind or by the caprice of whim, it follows that everyone will either look upon religion with indifference—which means that they will drift towards the established religion—or they must be zealous, by which means the number of sects is increased.
The Founders of the United States, yet again, pushed to its logical conclusion the tendency that had grown up in the rest of the Anglosphere, decreeing from the first that no religion should be established. Partly as a consequence, religious observance was and remains far more widespread in that country than in Europe. Nationalization is rarely successful: it stifles innovation and rewards inefficiency. Where state churches have dwindled, private—and privately funded—churches have fared better.
Full religious freedom—the removal of the minor remaining civil disabilities suffered by Catholics and Jews, such as not being able to become an MP—came to the United Kingdom nearly half a century after the establishment of the United States on the principle of religious pluralism. Still, to get a sense of how unusual this development was, it is worth remembering that the Anglosphere had embraced complete religious pluralism while the Spanish Inquisition was still operative: it was not finally wound up until 1834.
The centrality of Protestantism to the Anglosphere’s cultural and political identity was the single biggest surprise to me when I researched this book. It is hard to recapture its importance today, partly because of the general decline of religion, and partly because the lines drawn by the Reformation have become blurred. The Catholic Church moved briskly to address the outright abuses identified by the early Reformers. And, in an age when practicing Christians of any sort are a minority, the churches have tended to converge. Catholicism now places rather more emphasis on the Bible than it did; Protestantism, arguably, more emphasis on the Eucharist. Yet, though the doctrinal differences are less meaningful than they were, we can still see the traces of the political culture engendered by Protestantism, above all in the peculiar Anglosphere emphasis on individualism.
Tocqueville, too, was struck by the connection, and could see that that political culture now covered English-speakers of all faiths. Again, he traced it back to its point de départ: “When I consider all that has resulted from this first fact, I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on these shores.”
That Puritan—like those of his coreligionists who remained behind—had necessarily created a distinction between the public and private spheres, between state and church, between Caesar’s realm and God’s. Such a separation was not necessarily his intent—Massachusetts Congregationalists were almost the last people to support full equality for other Protestant sects, let alone for Catholics. But, whether he intended it or not, he created a political system where religious pluralism became inevitable.
To put it another way, the distinction was not between Catholic and Protestant individuals, but between Catholic and Protestant states. Tocqueville would have expected an Australian Catholic to be every bit as libertarian as his Protestant neighbors, a French Protestant every bit as committed to a strong state as his Catholic compatriots. “In fact,” he remarked, “I never met an English Catholic who did not value, as much as any Protestant, the free institutions of his country.”
This perhaps explains, as Weber’s theory does not, the political culture of Bavaria, the Catholic parts of Switzerland, and, above all, Ireland. What mattered was not people’s view of the Immaculate Conception or priestly celibacy. What mattered was their view of personal liberty, free trade, and the inviolability of private contract. 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.
Even so, as we look back from our present, secular vantage point, we should nod respectfully at those who, as recently as the middle years of the twentieth century, acted on what they took to be the link between religion, industry and liberty.
Men like England’s Alf Roberts, whose story might stand for those of millions. Alf left school at thirteen and, through sheer hard work, built a successful business as a grocer. A popular Methodist preacher, he saw commerce, faith, and politics as a continuum. “A lazy man,” he declared in one of his sermons, “has lost his soul already.”
Once a week, Roberts would bake extra loaves of bread and send them with his daughters to those of his neighbors whom he knew to be in need, taking care to explain that he had prepared too many, and would otherwise have to throw them out, for he didn’t want anyone’s pride to be hurt.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Roberts was involved with many of the civic associations that are such a distinguishing characteristic of the Anglosphere. The moment that he realized Hitler was wicked was when he learned that the Rotarians, of whom he was a keen supporter, had been suppressed in Nazi Germany. When the war came, he organized the town’s subsidized canteens for the men involved with war work.
For Alderman Roberts, thrift, sobriety, and hard work were not simply Protestant virtues: they were active political principles. He was a devoted town councilor, working constantly to keep expenditure down and cut the local rates. He saw his community, especially the shopkeeping class, as the real heroes of Britain, struggling on despite the taxes and regulations thrown at them by remote elites.
He was right. As Matt Ridley showed in The Rational Optimist, small businessmen have been the drivers of progress through the centuries. Societies that laud martial valor, nobility, and faith tend to be less pleasant places to live than societies that value freedom, enterprise, and privacy. The petit bourgeoisie, whom Marx so despised, have contributed more to human happiness than any number of crusaders. And they have done so, in the main, unhonored, unthanked, and unnoticed.
Indeed, the only reason we have heard of Alf Roberts today is that he drummed his values into his daughter who went on to become the greatest British leader, and perhaps the most enthusiastic Anglospherist, of the late twentieth century: Margaret Thatcher.
ANCIENT LAW
In 2000, in his book Les Cartes de la France, Hubert Védrine, then foreign minister of France, enumerated a series of qualities that made a state, as he put it, “un-European.” It is as comprehensive a summary as you could ask of Anglosphere exceptionalism: “Ultra-liberal market economy, rejection of the state, non-republican individualism, belief in the ‘indispensable’ role of the United States, and concepts which are Anglophone, common-law and Protestant.”
It was, with the exception of the anti-American dig, a list that a Continental politician might have drawn up in 1700, 1800, or 1900.
Travelers from overseas noticed the limitations on the government, and the profusion of nonstate actors. They remarked—often with contempt—on the elevation of trade and moneymaking. They were struck, too, by the lack of deference among even the poorest classes, their readiness to assert their rights as freeborn men. And, if they came from Catholic countries, they could not help but gawk at the way the proliferation of different sects had led to a formal (in the United States) or de facto (in Britain) separation of church and state.
One thing, though, struck them as especially curious. They were astonished—as we, habituated to it by the passing centuries, are not—by the miracle of the common law. In their countries, laws were drafted by the government and then applied to particular cases. But in the Anglosphere (except Scotland), laws emerged case by case, building upward from the people rather than being handed down by the regime.
As an English Master of the Rolls named William Brett put it in a late-nineteenth-century ruling:
The common law consists of a number of principles, which are recognized as having existed during the whole time and course of its existence. The Judges cannot make new law by new decisions; they do not assume a power of that kind: they only endeavour to declare what the common law is and has been from the time when it first existed.
In other words, neither judges nor politicians could alter the law, which, rather, was a heritage, passed down just as surely as any family heirloom. It was part of the compact that bound the living to the dead and to the yet unborn. As the seventeenth-century judge Robert Atkyns put it, “We ourselves of the present age, chose our common law, and consented to the most ancient Acts of Parliament, for we lived in our ancestors 1,000 years ago, and those ancestors are still living in us.”
Lawyers raised in the Roman law tradition had, as they often still have, difficulty with this idea. Yet they could hardly miss the practical consequences of a legal system under popular control. Independent magistrates, juries, the right of habeas corpus: all were remarked upon by visitors.
Montesquieu saw the common law as a glorious survival of the free, Germanic legal system, which, elsewhere, power-hungry kings had replaced with Roman law. England, believed Montesquieu, had been saved from such a fate by its island status, and had then passed on its unique legal system to its colonies.
Tocqueville, as usual, believed that the Americans had distilled their English heritage into a stronger and purer form. Nowhere else, he wrote, was the law so independent of the executive and legislative branches of the state, nor so accountable to the people expected to obey it. Along with the jury system—at which, like most observers, he marveled—Tocqueville was captivated by the idea that, instead of sending out centrally appointed judges and prefects, the Americans had localized their magistracy: “The Americans have borrowed from their English forefathers the conception of an institution which has no analogy with anything we know on the Continent—that of Justices of the Peace.”
Adam Smith, whose native Scotland had, slightly incongruously, adopted Roman law, was struck by the same thing:
One security for liberty is that all judges hold their offices for life and are intirely independent of the king. Everyone therefore is tried by a free and independent judge. The Habeas Corpus Act is also a great security against oppression, as by it any one can procure triall at Westminster within 40 days who can afford to transport himself thither. Before this Act the Privy Councill could put any one they pleased into prison and detain him at pleasure without bringing him to triall.
Again and again in our story, we have seen the common law used as a bulwark against excessive state power. It served heroically against Charles I and again against James II; it found that the air of England was so pure that no man who breathed it might remain a slave; it made the American Revolution.
Above all, common law has proved the surest defense of property rights. Today, companies from all over the world pay premiums to sign their contracts in common-law jurisdictions. They do so because they have confidence in the impartiality, security, and fairness of the system.
Every year, the Heritage Foundation ranks the economic freedom of the world’s states, comparing such data as corporate tax rates, personal tax rates, security of ownership, and how long it takes to found a business. In 2012, six of the top ten territories were Anglosphere states. The top four, in order, were Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. In no age but our own would it be considered impolite or impolitic to point out what they had in common.
NO EXTREMISM, PLEASE
One Anglosphere leader who was never bothered about being impolitic was Alderman Roberts’s younger daughter. On one occasion, Margaret Thatcher scandalized bien-pensant opinion by observing, tartly but truthfully, that, throughout her lifetime, Britain’s problems had come from Europe, and the solutions to those problems from the English-speaking world.
She thought she knew why. Although she was no intellectual—she would have had strong words for anyone who suggested otherwise—she nevertheless had a sense that Anglosphere exceptionalism was rooted in history.
In 1989, she was invited to Paris, along with other world leaders, to celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution. She felt, in her bones, that it was wrong to go. It wasn’t just that the French Revolution had ushered in a series of wars with Britain, which lasted almost uninterruptedly for a quarter of a century. It was that the values of that revolution—the statism, the violence, the belief in enforced equality, the anticlericalism—were the opposite of everything she took to be the true basis of freedom.
François Mitterrand, that wiliest of French presidents, decided to host the G7 summit in Paris over the date of the bicentenary, thereby more or less obliging the British prime minister to attend. She was not happy, and gave vent to her feelings in an interview with a French newspaper:
Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution; they stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity. We had 1688, our quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King. It was not the sort of Revolution that France’s was. “Liberty, equality, fraternity”—they forgot obligations and duties I think. And then of course the fraternity went missing for a long time.
Again, the words were undiplomatic, but the underlying analysis was accurate. Anglosphere exceptionalism does not reside in democracy. Democracy is an old word for an old idea, and the Continental revolutionary tradition is at least as much based on majority rule as the Westminster parliamentary tradition.
The difference lies, rather, in the approach to the rule of law, property rights, and personal freedom. The post-Jacobin Continental strain of democracy elevated majority rule over individual liberty. Anglosphere democrats were a different breed altogether.
European radicalism grew up alongside, but largely separate from, Anglosphere radicalism. Its heritage and assumptions were only very distantly related to those of the Levelers, the Chartists, or the early English-speaking trade union activists. Its ultimate philosophical inspiration came rather from the collectivist writings of Hegel and Herder and, in particular, from Rousseau’s belief in the “general will” of the people in place of the private rights of the citizen. Here was a philosophy that conceived of rights as universal, guaranteed by law and handed down by the government rather than inherited—a philosophy very different from the common-law conception of a free society as an aggregation of free individuals.
The Continental model had an obvious flaw: the contracting out of human rights to a charter, necessarily interpreted by some state-appointed tribunal, left the defense of freedom in a small number of hands. If those hands failed, freedom failed. In the Anglosphere, where the defense of freedom was everyone’s business, dictatorship and revolution were almost unknown. Liberties, as the novelist Aldous Huxley observed, are not given, they are taken.
To make the point slightly differently, liberty was theoretical in Europe, practical in the Anglosphere. As the nineteenth-century Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli put it, “To the liberalism they profess, I prefer the liberty we enjoy; to the Rights of Man, the rights of Englishmen.”
From the first, the radical tradition in Europe was violent. The repression that followed the French Revolution is known as “the Terror.” That name, however, was not bestowed by opponents of the Revolution; on the contrary, it was taken up by the Jacobins themselves. On September 5, 1792, the revolutionaries announced their policy in these terms: “It is time that equality bore its scythe above all heads. It is time to horrify all the conspirators. So, legislators, place Terror on the order of the day! The blade of the law should hover over all the guilty.”
The Continental radical tradition eventually whelped two malformed pups: revolutionary socialism and fascism, respectively the most murderous and second-most murderous ideologies in human history. Hayek, another clear-eyed and appreciative immigrant to the Anglosphere, correctly understood that the two statist ideologies were related, both in their origins and in their elevation of the herd over the individual. Both, in their different ways, were antitheses to Anglosphere liberalism.
Between the two world wars, fascism and communism were seen as the coming ideas, and country after country fell for—or at least fell to—the one or the other. Antiparliamentary forces did not rely on coups and invasions: from Portugal to Russia, from Germany to Greece, autocratic government enjoyed broad popular support. In the Anglosphere, by contrast, no fascist party ever managed to get a single candidate elected to a national legislature, and the fortunes of the revolutionary left were almost as dire.
In the United States, socialism was seen—with some justice, given who its chief proponents were—as a creed for a minority of European immigrants. Even at its high point in the 1920s, it never had more than a hundred thousand active supporters.
In Australia and New Zealand, communist parties existed throughout the lifetime of the Soviet Union, and were spasmodically active in the trade union movement, but never managed to elect a single MP.
In Canada, following the entry of the Soviet Union into the Second World War, the former communists formed a broader party known as Labor-Progressive, which at its peak managed to elect one MP, Fred Rose—who was later found guilty of spying for the Soviets.
In Ireland, the communist party never had any success at the polls, though today’s Socialist Party, a Trotskyist offshoot from Labour, does have a single parliamentary representative: the likable Euro-skeptic Joe Higgins.
In the whole history of the United Kingdom, a grand total of six revolutionary socialists have been elected to the House of Commons: two in 1922, one in 1935, two more in 1945, and one—the antiwar radical George Galloway—in 2005. Given that, throughout this period, the House of Commons had more than six hundred MPs, it’s an extraordinarily thin record.
Of all the Anglosphere states, only India, and, more notably, South Africa, whose communist movement benefited from its opposition to apartheid and fought elections in alliance with the ANC, have seen any electoral success for the revolutionary extremes.
It is easy to forget the mass electoral support that fascist and communist parties secured across Europe, not just between the wars, but well into the second half of the twentieth century. Membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain peaked at 60,000. In France, there were 800,000 Communist Party members, in Italy 1.7 million.
Many creeds took root in the fertile loam of the Anglosphere, but the seeds of fascism and communism never sprouted there. The democratic constitutions that most European states had acquired after the First World War gave way one after another before the men in uniforms. But, in the Anglosphere, the defense of civil rights was everyone’s duty. People took their responsibilities seriously, and extremists were rejected again and again at the polls.
Fascism never held much appeal for the English-speaking peoples. It seemed faintly ludicrous, with its parades and shiny boots and silly salutes. Nor did the mainstream Anglosphere left ever flirt seriously with Marxism.
Whether from historical experience or from some quality in their language, the English-speaking peoples have tended to prefer practice to theory, to shy away from abstract ideologies. And communism, for all the claims of its proponents, is the most abstract ideology of all.
Marxism, uniquely among political philosophies, defined itself as a science. To its adherents, its propositions were not speculative but empirical. As a good Hegelian, Marx saw his forecasts as part of an inexorable historical process. Yet every one—every one—of them turned out to be false.
Capitalism was supposed to destroy the middle class, leaving a tiny clique of oligarchs ruling over a vast proletariat. In fact, capitalism has enlarged the bourgeoisie wherever it has been practiced. Capitalism was supposed to lower living standards for the majority. In fact, the world is wealthier than would have been conceivable 150 years ago. The whole market system was supposed to be on its last legs when Marx and Engels were writing. In fact, it was entering a golden age, hugely benefiting the poorest. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter put it, the princess was always able to wear silk stockings, but it took capitalism to bring them within reach of the shopgirl. The living standard of someone on benefits in the Anglosphere today is higher than that of someone on average wages in the 1920s.
I don’t know how many of the people parroting Marx are aware that they’re doing so. But, whatever name we call it by, his doctrine has proved stunningly impervious to events. You’d have thought—I did think—that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989 would have definitively refuted revolutionary socialism. Yet successive generations continue to fall for it.
The more we learn of behavioral psychology, the more we understand that ideologies are as much a product of people’s nature as of observed experience. The perverted doctrines that actuated the Bolshevists may be immanent in a portion of humanity. Some people are determined to see every success as a swindling of someone else, every transaction as an exploitation, every exercise in freedom as a violation of some ideal plan, every tradition as a superstition. How delicious that, as we approach the bicentenary of his birth, Karl Marx should have turned into the thing he loathed above all: the prophet of an irrational faith.
English-speaking countries have been fortunate in the temper of their left-wing parties. You don’t have to look far to find socialist movements rooted in envy, authoritarianism, and bloodthirstiness. Significant parts of the Continental left were born in violence and revolution—a revolution that would be complete, according to its agents, “only when the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
In the United States, no socialist movement of any significance got off the ground at all, and both main parties were, in European terms, center-right. In the other main Anglosphere territories, the left tended to grow out of the radical wing of Whig-Liberalism.
From the first, the Anglosphere’s labor parties were associated with self-help and self-improvement: with brass bands, the temperance movement, workingmen’s libraries. Morgan Phillips, the Welsh colliery worker who served as the British Labour Party’s secretary-general between 1944 and 1961, declared that that party owed “more to Methodism than to Marxism.”
There was much truth in that remark. While there has always been an angry and sour element in Labour, it is balanced by a different tendency: one that seeks to improve the lot of the poor, not by tearing down the system, but by extending opportunities.
The proudest achievements of the Anglosphere left, down the years, have involved the dispersal of power from closed elites to the general population. This high-minded ambition led to legal rights for women, the extension of the franchise, and universal education. These reforms happened throughout the English-speaking world, though not always at the same moment: New Zealand, for example, became the first state to extend the vote to all adults in 1893, though it was followed swiftly enough by other Anglosphere nations. In no major English-speaking country, though, did any significant number of people argue that the changes they sought required the system to be overthrown. The twin settlements of 1689 and 1787 lasted: to call for a revolution in the English language sounded affected, foreign, or downright childish.
All of this raises an intriguing question. Why is patriotism, in English-speaking societies, mainly associated with the political right? After all, measured against almost any other civilizational model, the Anglosphere has been overwhelmingly progressive.
It is true that the individualism of English-speaking societies has an antisocialist bias: there has always been a measure of resistance to taxation, to state power, and, indeed, to collectivism of any kind. But look at the other side of the balance: equality before the law, regardless of sex or race; secularism; toleration for minorities; absence of censorship; social mobility; universal schooling. In how many other places are these things taken for granted?
Why, then, is the celebration of national identity a largely conservative pursuit in English-speaking societies? It won’t do to say that patriotism is, by its nature, a right-of-center attitude. In the Continental tradition, if anything, the reverse was the case. European nationalists—those who believed that the borders of their states should correlate to ethnic or linguistic frontiers—were, more often than not, radicals. The 1848 revolutions in Europe were broadly leftist in inspiration. When the risings were put down, and the old monarchical-clerical order reestablished, the revolutionaries overwhelmingly fled to London, the one city that they knew would give them sanctuary. With the exception of Karl Marx, who never forgave the country that had sheltered him for failing to hold the revolution that he forecast, they admired Britain for its openness, tolerance, and freedom.
What stops so many English-speaking leftists from doing the same? Why, when they recall their history, do they focus, not on the extensions of the franchise or the war against slavery or the defeat of Nazism, but on the wicked imperialism of, first, the British and, later, the Americans?
The answer lies neither in politics nor in history, but in psychology. The more we learn about how the brain works, the more we discover that people’s political opinions tend to be a rationalization of their instincts. We subconsciously pick the data that sustain our prejudices, and block out those that don’t. We can generally spot this tendency in other people; we almost never acknowledge it in ourselves.
A neat illustration of the phenomenon is the debate over global warming. At first glance, it seems odd that climate change should divide commentators along left–right lines. Science, after all, depends on data, not on our attitudes to taxation or defense or the family.
The trouble is that that we all have assumptions, scientists as much as anyone else. Our ancestors learned, on the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa, to make sense of their surroundings by finding patterns, and this tendency is encoded deep in our DNA. It explains the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. When presented with a new discovery, we automatically try to press it into our existing belief system; if it doesn’t fit, we question the discovery before the belief system. Sometimes this habit leads us into error. But without it, we should hardly survive at all. As Edmund Burke argued, life would become impossible if we tried to think through every new situation from first principles, disregarding both our own experience and the accumulated wisdom of our people—if, in other words, we shed all prejudice
If you begin with the belief that wealthy countries became wealthy by exploiting poor ones, that state action does more good than harm, and that we could all afford to pay a bit more tax, you are likelier than not to accept a thesis that seems to demand government intervention, supranational technocracy, and global wealth redistribution.
If, on the other hand, you begin from the proposition that individuals know better than governments, that collectivism was a demonstrable failure, and that bureaucracies will always seek to expand their powers, you are likelier than not to believe that global warming is just the left’s latest excuse for centralizing power.
Each side, convinced of its own bona fides, suspects the motives of the other, which is what makes the debate so vinegary. Proponents of both points of view are quite sure that they are dealing in proven facts, and that their critics must therefore be either knaves or fools.
The two sides don’t simply disagree about the interpretation of data; they disagree about the data. Never mind how to respond to changes in temperature; there isn’t even agreement on the extent to which the planet is heating. Though we all like to think we are dealing with hard, pure, demonstrable statistics, we are much likelier to be fitting the statistics around our preferred worldview.
Central to the worldview of most people who self-identify as left-of-center is an honorable and high-minded impulse, namely support for the underdog. This impulse is by no means confined to leftists; but leftists exaggerate it, to the exclusion of rival impulses.
Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist, a man of the soft left, who set out to explain why political discourse was so bitter. In his seminal 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, he explains the way people of left and right fit their perceptions around their instinctive starting points. Support for the underdog, in conservatives, is balanced by other tendencies, such as respect for sanctity. In leftists, it is not.
Once you grasp this neurological difference, all the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions of the leftist outlook make sense. It explains why people can think that immigration and multiculturalism are a good thing in Western democracies, but a bad thing in, say, the Amazon rain forest. It explains how people can simultaneously demand equality between the sexes and quotas for women. It explains why Israel is seen as right when fighting the British but wrong when fighting the Palestinians.
History becomes a hierarchy of victimhood. The narrative is fitted around sympathy for downtrodden people. The same group can be either oppressors or oppressed depending on the context. Hispanic Americans, for example, are ranked between Anglos and Native Americans. When they were settling Mexico, they were the bad guys; when they were being annexed by the United States, they were the good guys.
All historians, of course, have their prejudices. My purpose is simply to explain why national pride in Anglo-American culture is so concentrated on one side of the political spectrum. The answer, quite simply, is that there are very few scenarios in which the Anglosphere peoples can be cast as the underdogs. Small countries take satisfaction in their struggles against mightier neighbors, and that pride is shared across the parties. In many former colonies, patriotism is seen as an essentially leftist cause, and conservatism is associated with, if not exactly collaboration, certainly cultural subservience to the former power. In the Ba’athist Arab states, in Sandinista Nicaragua, in Peronist Argentina or Bolivarian Venezuela, nationalism was a revolutionary socialist creed, associating popular sovereignty with state power, the toppling of unpatriotic oligarchies, and the removal of foreign influence.
Anti-American and anti-British agitators around the world have taken up nationalist language—the only nationalism of which English-speaking progressives generally approve. George Orwell wrote disparagingly of “the masochism of the English Left”: its readiness to ally with any cause, however vile, provided it was sufficiently anti-British. He cited the IRA and Stalinism. Had he been writing today, he’d doubtless have extended the critique to the American left and Islamism.
Nationalism is fine for leftist opponents of the Anglosphere: Welsh nationalists, anti-yanqui agitators in Latin America, Quebec separatists. All are able to slot their sense of nationhood into the hierarchy of victimhood, to see themselves as underdogs. Anglosphere progressives, by contrast, can rarely do so. The few occasions when they can—Washington leading his exhausted men through the snow at Valley Forge, Churchill rallying London during the Blitz—are commensurately popular. But there is no getting away from the fact that the Anglosphere, over the past three hundred years, has generally been more technologically advanced than other civilizations.
This very success makes it awkward to celebrate the distinguishing features of Anglosphere culture. To do so is to risk the appearance of complacency or jingoism. Episodes that, in any other context, leftists would uncomplicatedly applaud—Napier’s response to the Hindu priests who favored sati, for example—are tainted by their supposed cultural imperialism or colonial arrogance.
The tendency to what Orwell called masochism is the perversion of a healthy Anglosphere characteristic, namely fair-mindedness. We like to think, we English-speaking peoples, that we are tolerant, that we look at things from other people’s point of view. It is not hard to see how this trait can be exaggerated to the point where it becomes, if not exactly self-hatred, certainly a form of cultural relativism in which the unique achievements of Anglosphere civilization are devalued.
The tendency has existed ever since the Anglosphere countries rose to global dominance. In their 1885 operetta The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan mocked
The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this and every country but his own.
Until the second half of the twentieth century, though, cultural relativism was largely confined to university campuses and small circles of intellectuals. Even those most determined to see the other point of view, to find fault in their own civilization, generally had to admit that the Anglosphere was a freer, fairer, and more progressive society than Stalinist Russia or Republican China or Imperial Ethiopia.
Still, ideas have consequences. The students of the relativist academics became schoolteachers. Their pupils ended up imbibing a version of the doctrine. It is now quite normal, in English-speaking societies, to approach our history with guilt rather than pride. It won’t quite do to say that we have done away with moral judgment. But, absurdly, we judge the deeds of the English-speaking peoples according to contemporary leftist nostrums rather than by the standards of their times.
As we lose sight of what the Anglosphere has achieved, we risk losing the institutions that have served to make it what it is.