A contested label for one side of a division
In a January 2015 episode, John Allison framed American politics as a philosophical contest. He told Bob Zadek that a fundamental philosophical fight for the future of America was underway, with statists on one side and, on the other, classical liberals and libertarians—the camp he said he and Zadek shared. Asked by Zadek to explain “statist,” Allison described statists as believers in big government who think government can solve all problems and who regard the average person as stupid; Zadek interjected that they pursue their vision of the common good, and Allison agreed, calling them elitist power-lusters found on both the left and the right. On the right, Allison said, they want to control personal life; on the left, they want to take money. He called the whole idea of the common good an oxymoron, since practically nothing is equally good for everybody, and said that acting in its name produces group warfare in which groups rather than individuals hold rights John Allison on the Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure (2015).
Allison set against that the Founding Fathers’ ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: each individual’s right to their own life, to pursue personal happiness, and to the product of their labor, including the right to give it away. That moral prerogative, he said, demands personal responsibility, and in that world the role of government is simply to protect individual rights—to prevent force or fraud—rather than to save people from what elitists think is good for them.
The gathering storm
By February 2019 the term had acquired a defensive cast. Bob Zadek opened an episode by noting that his guest, law professor John McGinnis, had written a blog post titled “The Gathering Storm for Classical Liberalism,” and asked whether the word “storm” signaled something ominous. McGinnis answered that the gathering storm against classical liberalism was not due entirely, or indeed mostly, to the president; it had been gathering for some time. His first reason was the universities, particularly elite universities of the kind at which he teaches, whose faculties he described as wholly antithetical to liberal and classical liberal ideas, with the left in complete ascendancy and an orthodoxy in which the best and brightest students are brought up Here Comes the Storm (2019).
McGinnis’s second reason was partly the president. He credited Donald Trump with a variety of good things for liberty but said that partly because of his persona Trump had increased polarization, and that this had contributed, along with the transmission belt of ideas from higher education, to the movement of the Democratic Party toward being a truly left party that called into question central ideas of the American founding. He cited Bernie Sanders running as a socialist as a sea change, noted Sanders’s standing on prediction markets, and said he considered Kamala Harris not really that different from Sanders. McGinnis said he was not so much worried about Trump’s policies, though he had reservations about some for liberty, as about what likely comes afterwards, and that he was not at all confident Trump would capture the swing voters needed to remain in the White House in 2020.
In the same episode, Zadek offered an observation about Trump as transactional—making decisions ad hoc rather than from a core set of values—and worried about the loss in public debate of America’s first principles, which he said give American exceptionalism its power. McGinnis agreed and compared Trump to Reagan, who from 1976 to 1980 traveled the country writing speeches; Trump’s background, he said, was that of a real estate operator from New York, than which nothing could be more transactional. McGinnis nonetheless identified two sources of hope. The first was Trump’s commitment to appointing judges who read the Constitution as written—originalist judges—which he connected to a long theory of the Supreme Court going back to the early Republic in which the justices are Republican schoolmasters who call the country to its founding principles; he said many justices had done the opposite, and he cited Roe v. Wade as made out of nothing and taking powers away from the states. He gave Trump enormous credit for the appointment of Gorsuch, said Kavanaugh was not yet known but there was reason to believe he would be quite good, and called Trump’s appointments of justices and of appellate and district court judges the best of any president, even better than Ronald Reagan’s. The second was Trump’s most recent State of the Union address, which McGinnis thought a great improvement on the inaugural address because it captured principles, talking about the danger of socialism and the importance of freedom. Zadek played a clip of Trump saying that socialism has bankrupted an oil-rich nation and driven its people into abject poverty, that wherever socialism or communism has been tried it has produced suffering, corruption, and decay, and that all nations should resist socialism and the misery it brings; Zadek said it was right out of Hayek and the first time Trump had drilled down to a principle in support of his policies. McGinnis said one reason to think it continues is that giving government more power is not popular, and that if opportunism and principle coincide, Trump certainly will not oppose principle.
The American tradition and its collapse
A December 2019 episode with C. Bradley Thompson treated classical liberalism as the American founding creed and asked why it gave way. Zadek observed that the colonists had it pretty good compared with the rest of the world, were intellectually free and not bound to support a particular religion, yet rejected a good life under British rule for something better, and asked why, when the ideas of the late nineteenth century began to get a toehold, there was no comparably large group of Americans defending the same principles. Thompson called it a great question he had contemplated for twenty-five years and said he did not have a good answer. He stated that in the post-Civil War period the ideas of the classical liberal tradition in America not only came under assault but imploded, and that one cannot find any really great political thinkers in the post-Civil War era up through World War II who defended the principles of the Declaration, of the Constitution, or more broadly of the classical liberal tradition—calling this one of the great mysteries of American history and a great dissertation topic C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019).
Thompson confirmed Zadek’s premise that in 1765 the American colonists were the freest and probably the wealthiest people anywhere in the world at that time, if not in history, and loyal subjects of the British crown, and asked how and why they would risk it all against the world’s greatest military power. He attributed it to what he called in his book the American spirit of liberty, saying he did not think any people anywhere at that time or since had genuinely appreciated and loved liberty as the Americans did then. He described the Stamp Act of 1765 as in many ways a small tax that served as a tripwire—a kind of intellectual and moral tripwire—triggering the Americans in defense of their liberty, and said that at every step in the ten years between 1765 and 1775, up through the battles at Concord and Lexington, the Americans resisted every attempt by British imperial officials, Parliament, and the King to impose taxes or control their freedom and ability to govern themselves.
Two traditions in American history
An earlier episode, from February 2014, framed the same term as one of two opposed threads in American life. The guest, Maggie McNeill, said she agreed with Zadek and described two very different and really opposed traditions in the United States: the tradition of liberty going back to the Founding Fathers and the philosophical and classical liberalism, and the Puritans who settled here with religious ideas of creating their view of a perfect society founded on Christian principles. In her account the puritanical streak got stronger over the first couple of centuries America, The Most Sexually Hypocritical Nation on Earth (2014).
The exchange then turned to prostitution. Zadek said the history of its criminalization through much of civilization, even in the church, showed it was accepted as necessary and almost never criminalized, that the church did not consider it a sin, and that in the early days of the country prostitution was not a crime—criminalization coming, he thought, at the very beginning of the twentieth century. McNeill said it was considered a sin in Christian thought, but that the medieval church viewed it as a lesser sin that prevented a greater sin, the lesser of two evils, with prostitutes committing a sin to prevent other people’s greater sin. She described a thirteenth-century movement in which the church tolerated prostitutes while making it possible for them to leave that sin, and even encouraged men to marry prostitutes for a while to save their souls. Laws involving prostitution, she said, mostly aimed not to stop it but to segregate good women from bad women—sumptuary laws requiring prostitutes to wear a certain color, such as yellow in Roman history, so they could not be mistaken for good women, and especially not for women of the upper classes. She noted that nobody among the lawmakers cared if a working-class woman was mistaken for a prostitute, but that senatorial-class women could not be. The excerpt breaks off as Zadek begins a remark on the Progressive Movement and criminalization.
Across episodes
The term recurs across the 2014, 2015, 2019 and 2019–2023 episodes, but the excerpts show no single argument developed over time. Allison in 2015 supplies the definitional contrast with statists; McGinnis in February 2019 supplies the diagnosis of a gathering storm and the hope placed in originalist judges; Thompson in December 2019 supplies the historical claim that the classical liberal tradition collapsed after the Civil War; McNeill in 2014 supplies the Puritan-versus-classical-liberal frame; and the 2023 introduction notes only that Richard Epstein founded and heads a Classical Liberal Institute at NYU School of Law California Passes the Worst Piece of Legislation Since AB 5 (2023).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define classical liberalism as a doctrine in its own right, beyond Allison’s association of it with individual rights, personal responsibility, and a limited government that protects against force and fraud. They do not say when the term was coined, who its canonical theorists are apart from passing references to Hayek, or how it relates to the libertarianism with which Allison and Zadek group it. Several excerpts break off mid-sentence—Zadek beginning a question on the Progressive Movement, a section headed “The Role of Government and Coercion,” and a section headed “Why Academia Leans Left”—so the arguments those segments introduced are not available here.