------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (July 2007)

Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, editors, _Rethinking 
Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays_. 
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. xii + 302 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 
0-7546-5572-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Leonard P. Liggio, George Mason University Law School.


In 1981 Ronald Reagan responded to the question of Evans and Novak, 
what "philosophical thinkers or writers most influenced your conduct 
as a leader?" Reagan responded von Mises, Hayek, Bastiat, Cobden and 
Bright "and the elimination of the Corn Laws and so forth, the great 
burst of economy or prosperity for England that followed." Margaret 
Thatcher referred to Cobden in warning of the dangers to the economy 
of protectionism. The French minister of industry, Alain Madelin, at 
Chatham House in 1988, referred to Cobden as an inspiration for 
European free trade. In Germany former economics minister, Graf Otto 
von Lambsdorf, recalled the current need for the economic vision of 
Cobden and Bright speaking at the Liberal Institute of the Friedrich 
Naumann Foundation in May, 2004. In May 2004 IMF Managing Director 
Anne Krueger praised Cobden for mobilization of consumers for free 
trade when she lectured at the Graduate Institute of International 
Studies in Geneva. Its director, William Rappard, had delivered the 
eighth Cobden lecture, _The Common Menace of Economic and Military 
Armaments_ (London, 1936). During the 1930s Rappard had brought 
together a faculty of economists which included Ludwig von Mises, 
Wilhelm Roepke and Luigi Einaudi.

This book represents the scholarly papers presented at the Cobden 
Bicentenary Conference, July 14-16, 2004 at Dunford House in West 
Sussex, his birthplace and residence of Cobden's later years.

The contemporary world is focused on the issues Cobden raised. 
According to co-editor, Anthony Howe's "Introduction": "For the 
modern preoccupations with globalization, free markets, the retreat 
of the state, the importance of civil society are all ideas which 
took political shape in the 'age of Cobden.' While post-modernists 
may find in Cobden's liberalism too many of the emblems of the 
'modernity' project from which they are keen to distance themselves, 
historians and the public may still have much to learn from one of 
the first practical attempts to implant the 'Enlightenment project' 
within the fabric of the world order." Cobden's affinity with 
European Liberals reflected their shared heritage of the 
Enlightenment in the works of Vattel, Grotius, Voltaire, Rousseau, 
Franklin, Jefferson, Bentham and James Mill.

Richard Cobden, _The International Man_ (by John A. Hobson (London, 
1918)) captured the cosmopolitanism associated with Cobden. Howe 
refers to the central thinking of Cobden: "the belief in the progress 
of industrial society, opposition to militarism, to colonial 
expansion, and to the extension of the state." Thus, seven of the 
fifteen chapters are devoted to the international aspects of Cobden's 
efforts, particularly, the struggle for peace and against foreign 
interventions.

In 'La Ligue Francaise' Alex Tyrrell examines the impact of Cobden on 
the expansion of Economic Liberalism in the last days of the July 
Monarchy. (Cf, Alex Tyrrell and Paul A. Pickering, _The People's 
Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League_ (London, 2000)). The 
Ligue was the creation of one of the major anglophile schools in 
France: the heirs of Jean-Baptiste Say. Their progressive values were 
summed up in the concept Industrialisme: "politics, above all 
revolutionary politics, had no positive role to play in this vision 
of the future; state intervention in the economy would produce 
economic stagnation and social demoralization. As the economist 
Charles Dunoyer put it, 'the height of perfection would be attained 
if all the world worked and no one governed'."

The French formed a free trade committee consisting of Horace Say, 
Charles Dunoyer, Leon Faucher, Jerome-Adolphe Blanqui, Joseph Garnier 
(editor of the _Journal des Economistes_ and author of _Richard 
Cobden, Les Liguers et la Ligue_) and Frederic Bastiat (editor of _Le 
Libre Echange_ and author of _Cobden et la Ligue_). Cobden was 
acclaimed during his extensive travels in France and Italy. Through 
the writings of Bastiat his ideas spread to Italy, Spain and 
Scandinavia. In 1860 he negotiated with Michel Chevalier the famous 
free trade treaty between England and France which bears their names.

Donald Winch's essay notes the mutual influences of the Manchester 
School and the French economists. He notes the reservations of the 
Manchester School towards the Ricardian case for free trade. As with 
the French economists, exchange value depended on utility and not on 
labor inputs or costs of production. They found confirmation in 
praise of the French economists by William Stanley Jevons (Cf: 
William D. Grampp, _The Manchester School of Economics_ (London, 
1960)).

One interesting aspect was Cobden's and Liberalism's relationship to 
the American Civil War covered in Stephen Meardon's "Richard Cobden's 
American Quandary." Cobden visited America in 1835 and again in 1859 
when his fame was at its height. In both countries the Liberals' 
platform was peace, free trade, and abolition of slavery. English 
Liberals shared with their American abolitionist friends opposition 
to the use of force to end the independence of the Confederacy. In 
the final phase they acquiesced in the violence. Cobden had 
"counselled that the North should achieve its victory without war, by 
containing the Confederacy rather than recapturing it: "In a word, 
all that the North wants is time to ensure its triumph over the 
South. With time, Slavery, if shut up within itself, will be its own 
destroyer."

Cobden's Anti-Corn Law League was a major foundation for the Liberal 
Party. It pioneered in registration of voters, drawing often on the 
Dissenting Protestant chapels. It freed the press from 'taxes on 
knowledge' and established widely read newspapers. Particularly 
important was the _Leeds Mercury_, edited by three generations of 
Baines, which spearheaded the opposition to government intervention 
into education.

This book of excellent essays is well worth the attention of 
historians of economic and political thought as well as of English 
Liberalism.


Leonard P. Liggio, who teaches at George Mason University Law School, 
is Distinguished Senior Scholar of the Institute for Humane Studies, 
Executive Vice-President of Atlas Economic Research Foundation and 
recent past president of the Mont Pelerin Society. He is co-author 
(with Alex A Chafuen) of "Cultural and Religious Foundations of 
Private Property," in Enrico Colombatto, editor, _The Elgar Companion 
to the Economics of Property Rights_ (2004).

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