Molinari on mankind’s never-ending struggle for liberty (1849)

Found in Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare (1849)

The French economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) was inspired by mankind’s never-ending struggle for liberty against their oppressors and concluded his book Les Soirées (1849) with this inspiring speech:

Liberty! That was the cry of the captives of Egypt, the slaves of Spartacus, the peasants of the Middle Ages, and more recently of the bourgeoisie oppressed by the nobility and religious corporations, of the workers oppressed by masters and guilds. Liberty! That was the cry of all those who found their property confiscated by monopoly and privilege. Liberty! That was the burning aspiration of all those whose natural rights had been forcibly repressed.

In the Twelfth and final evening of discussion between a Conservative, a Socialist, and a free market Economist Molinari has the Economist launch into a speech on the centuries-long struggle by the oppressed slaves and serfs of Europe for greater liberty, epitomised by Spartacus and the slave uprising against the Romans he organised, and the enormous obstacles they have faced up until the present. The struggle as the Economist now sees it is between the two groups who oppose property rights, the Socialists who want “to increase the number of restrictions and levies which already weigh on property” and the Conservatives who want “purely and simply to preserve those which already exist.” Molinari thinks that a brave start in the liberation of humanity was made in the earliest phase of the French Revolution but this got sidetracked, first by the socialist Jacobins under Robespierre, and then by the militarist and conqueror Napoleon. A second attempt was made in the Revolution of 1848 but it too was knocked off track, again by socialists in 1848, and then again (although Molinari was writing in 1849) when another Emperor Napoleon seized control of the French state in 1852. Molinari would spend the next 63 years fighting this same battle in spite of all the odds he faced.