And Why the True Tradition of Liberty Comes from Aristotle to the Austrians
For generations, classical liberalism has been marketed as the origin of Western liberty: the philosophy of individual rights, markets, and limited government. But this story is misleading. Classical liberalism was not the foundation of freedom, but a halfway house between throne and bureaucracy. Its theoretical compromises laid the groundwork for the centralized, egalitarian, and technocratic order we now endure. The real tradition of liberty is older, deeper, and more intellectually sound. It begins with Aristotle, flows through Thomas Aquinas and the School of Salamanca, and culminates in the Austrian School of Economics.
Classical Liberalism: The Gateway to Managerial Statism
Classical liberalism never abolished the state; it merely tried to rationalize and limit it. The idea of a “night-watchman state” still accepts a coercive monopoly over law, taxation, and territorial authority. But no monopoly remains limited. The tools it preserves—taxation, standing armies, national constitutions—inevitably expand.
Moreover, classical liberalism often adopted egalitarian premises. While advocating for “equal rights,” many liberals opened the door to redistribution and democracy as mechanisms for enforcing equality. Once equality becomes a political ideal, the logic of Marxism follows naturally. The question ceases to be whether to intervene, and becomes how much. In this sense, Marxism is not a rejection of classical liberalism, but its full maturation.
Many classical liberals also turned to utilitarianism and legal positivism—treating law as the product of consensus rather than as grounded in moral reality. Jeremy Bentham and his followers severed liberty from natural law, reducing it to a bureaucratic balancing act of competing interests. This made liberalism flexible, yes—but morally defenseless against state expansion.
Protestantism and Enlightenment Rationalism: The False Path
The Protestant Reformation shattered the institutional unity of Christendom. It emphasized individual conscience but also empowered emerging nation-states to consolidate authority over church and society. Protestant churches often became state churches: Anglicanism in England, Calvinism in Geneva, Lutheranism in Prussia. Far from decentralizing authority, the Reformation often fused it more tightly to political power.
The Enlightenment attempted to rebuild social order through reason alone. While it produced some worthwhile critiques of tyranny, it also fostered a rationalist hubris: the idea that society could be redesigned from scratch. This gave rise to abstract constructs like the “general will,” the “social contract,” and technocratic constitutions. These replaced tradition, localism, and moral realism with central planning, legal fictions, and a cult of progress.
The True Lineage: Aristotle, Aquinas, Salamanca, and the Austrians
The actual roots of liberty run far deeper than Locke or Mill. They lie in the classical realist tradition of Aristotle, who viewed man as a rational and social creature, embedded in community and governed by natural ends. This vision was carried forward by Thomas Aquinas, who fused Aristotelian realism with Christian theology, creating a coherent system of natural law.
From this sprang the Spanish Scholastics of the School of Salamanca in the 16th century. Thinkers like Francisco de Vitoria, Juan de Mariana, and Luis de Molina developed theories of subjective value, just price, property rights, and resistance to tyranny—long before Adam Smith or the Enlightenment. They grounded rights not in abstract contracts, but in natural law and moral reality.
This tradition was later revived by the Austrian School of Economics: Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and others. While some Austrians used the label “classical liberal,” they were fundamentally different from Enlightenment liberals. Austrians emphasized praxeology, natural rights, private property, and the limits of human knowledge. They rejected central planning not only because it was inefficient, but because it was wrong.
Natural Rights: Not Enlightenment, but Eternal
Some assume natural rights are a product of Enlightenment thought. In truth, they long predate it. The Christian natural law tradition holds that rights are moral facts, grounded in the nature of man and the created order. This is what restrains the state: not a constitution, not popular will, but the inherent dignity and freedom of the person.
This view was championed by the Scholastics and reaffirmed by Austrian thinkers who based liberty not on utility or democracy, but on principle. True rights are discoverable, not invented; they are limits on power, not grants from it.
Conclusion: Reclaim the True Tradition
The classical liberal narrative is a myth. Liberty did not begin in 1688 or 1776. It did not emerge from contractarian blueprints or Enlightenment committees. It grew out of an older, richer tradition—one that combined metaphysical realism, natural law, and decentralized order.
We must stop defending classical liberalism as if it were the high point of freedom. It was a compromised philosophy, riddled with internal contradictions. Instead, we should reclaim the tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas, the School of Salamanca, and the Austrians. That is where liberty lives—not in paper constitutions or parliamentary chambers, but in property, ethics, and voluntary order.
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