“If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations. What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction; the arguments do not move in a context familiar to us; and they rarely give us direct answers to the questions we are asking.”
-Friedrich August von Hayek (1960)
“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation”
-Ronald Reagan (1967)
Classic liberalism has one major disadvantage in the battle of ideas: it is counterintuitive. It consists of ideas that do not come naturally to us. Quite often, it even asks us to actively override our initial emotional reactions, impulses and gut feelings, and to think things through properly rather than go along with what “feels right”. You can be “instinctively socialist”; you can be “instinctively conservative”; but few people are “instinctively liberal”. What would it even mean to be “instinctively liberal”? At best, people can have an instinctive aversion to authority, but that, on its own, is more likely to lead to a juvenile libertinism than to a consistent liberalism. (Although some of our conservative critics would, of course, argue that that is exactly what classical liberalism is.)
But this major disadvantage also has one minor upside: it means that classical liberals have interesting stories to tell.
If you ask a socialist how they became a socialist, or a conservative how they became a conservative, the most likely answer will be: “I have always felt that way; I was just not able to articulate it, until I read X, or met Y, or joined Z.” Thus, most of their intellectual development will have consisted of finding post-hoc rationalisations for what they already believed. They will have started with the conclusions already largely formed, and then looked for ways to justify those conclusions in retrospect.
A classical liberal is much more likely to tell you a story involving some internal conflict, some agonising, some painful self-interrogation. There will also be much greater variability in their stories, with people coming at it through very different pathways. If you get a bunch of liberals into a room and ask them for their political “origin stories”, what you will get is bound to be both entertaining and informative.
A great example of that genre is the book The New Right Enlightenment: Young Authors on the Spectre That Haunts the Left (henceforth “TNRE”), published in 1985, on which this article series is modelled, and to which it is, in a sense, a sequel.
TNRE is a collection of essays by twenty people who were then up-and-coming thinkers of what was then called “the New Right”, in which they explain their political outlook, and how they got there. It was not technically an IEA publication, but it was commissioned and edited by Arthur Seldon, then Editorial Director at the IEA, and it contains several chapters from people who would later join the Institute in some capacity or other. I consider it an IEA publication, even if the IEA’s logo is not printed on the cover.
What Seldon et al meant by “the New Right” was essentially classical liberalism, although in hindsight, the title of the book was poorly chosen. According to Google Ngram Viewer, the use of the term “the New Right” peaked around the time TNRE was published, but then began to decline. It was also prone to misunderstandings, and even a lot of the authors of TNRE did not seem particularly happy with it.
Be that as it may: TNRE can be read as a mini-primer on the Austrian School of Economics, the Chicago School of Economics, the Virginia School or Public Choice School, and the political theories of Robert Nozick and Karl Popper. The added personal element – people reconstructing their own intellectual journeys – makes these abstract ideas more relatable, but it does this without being self-indulgent.
To the extent that TNRE is a primer of classical liberal ideas, it is a timeless classic. A present-day reader can easily forget, over long passages, that the book is over 40 years old. To the extent that it is about the authors’ personal intellectual journeys, though, it is quite clearly a product of its time, describing generation-specific experiences. Most of the authors of TNRE were Baby Boomers1, the youngest ones were early cohorts of Generation X2. There are no Millennial authors in TNRE, for the simple reason that the oldest Millennials3 were four years old when the book came out, while the bulk of them had not been born yet. The earliest cohorts of Generation Z4 would not be born for another 12 years.
Why does this matter? Would the experience of a budding liberal born 20, 30 or 40 years later than the authors of TNRE really be so fundamentally different from theirs?
In some important ways – yes, very much so. The political/ideological spectrum has changed quite a lot since 1985, the zeitgeist has changed, the way we engage with political ideas has changed, and the most salient issues of today are no longer those of 1985.
For a start, TNRE authors still used the old rule of thumb that a classical liberal is somebody who is “right-wing on economics; left-wing on social/cultural issues”. This is a reference to the “Nolan Chart” from the 1960s, which forms the basis of most versions of the political compass. As far as ultra-simplified rules of thumb go, it worked remarkably well for about half a century. But it presupposes a political Right which is interested in economic progress, and a political Left which is socially/culturally permissive. In the context of a NIMBY Right on the one hand, and a censorious “woke” Left on the other, the political compass no longer works in that way.
Related to that: while classical liberals were undoubtedly a minority in 1985, on an issue-by-issue basis, most of their opinions were not so unusual. What made classical liberals unusual was their package of opinions, and the consistency with which they applied them. Thus, the authors of TNRE did not have a general sense of political isolation. Rather, their experience was that wherever they went, they would find common ground with people on some issues, while provoking strong disagreement on others.
The policy challenges the country faces have also changed. The domestic backdrop to TNRE was Keynesian-interventionist postwar consensus, which was in the process of being rolled back by the Thatcher government, but that process was by no means complete at that stage. The international backdrop was the Cold War: none of the authors could have known that the Berlin Wall would not survive the decade.
Britain did not have a housing crisis yet, so the housing market and the planning constraints on supply are only mentioned once in TNRE. Immigration and Britain’s relationship with the EU are side issues; climate policy and transgenderism are not even that.
The way people engage with political ideas has changed even more radically. Twitter, Bluesky, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok – these things are not even imaginable yet. The only time technology is mentioned in TNRE as a means to spread political ideas is when one author proudly describes how he uses a computer to make political posters.
In short, there is a lot to be said for a present-day sequel to TNRE, written by Millennials and Zoomers, to talk about their intellectual journeys, and make classical liberal ideas relatable to members of their generation.
The title “Millennial Liberalism” is, of course, a response to “Millennial Socialism”. A lot of media stories have portrayed Millennials as a generation of Corbynites, and Gen Z as a generation of Polanskiites. Judging from opinion surveys, this portrayal is largely correct. But there is such a thing as a Millennial-Zoomer Liberalism too, even though it is clearly not a mass movement, it is not fashionable, and people will never chant “Ohhhhhhh Ludwig von Miiiiiiises” at Glastonbury.
The upside of this is that Millennial Liberals and Zoomer Liberals are among the brightest and most independent-minded members of their generations. These are people who have a genuine interest in ideas: unlike Millennial Socialists or Zoomer Socialists, they are not doing this in order to boost their social image. They are not going along with the fashions of the time, and they are not trying to fit in. The upside of ‘uncool’ ideas is that you can at least be sure that nobody ever adopts those ideas in order to ‘look cool’.
So I have asked some of those Millennial and Zoomer Liberals to tell me their stories, which is what they will do, in this article series. Unfortunately for me, I am slightly too old to qualify for a contribution of my own: I was born in 1980, which makes me part of the last cohort of Generation X. What I can do, though, is abuse my position as editor to say a few words about my own ideological journey here.
And you cannot stop me.
Like countless other people before and after me, I went through a typical “confused, clueless teenage commie” phase from about age 15 to 17 or 18. I had copies of the collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, but never made it past the first few pages, because it was difficult to read, and, like most Millennial and Zoomer Socialists today, I was much more drawn to the “rebellious”, “cool” image of socialism than to the actual ideological content. (I would, of course, have denied this at the time, and was genuinely unaware that that was what I was doing.) Still, while my ideological commitment was extremely superficial and ill-informed, it felt real, and it was not so easy to let go of.
At the age of 17 or 18, I started to develop a grudging appreciation of the market economy. I remember reading a booklet written by a liberal economics journalist which made an impression on me: Wundertüte Marktwirtschaft: Was kann sie leisten – was müssen wir leisten? (“The market economy as a goody bag: What can it achieve – and what do we have to achieve?”). It described basic economic concepts in extremely simple terms, one of them being Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” – the idea that, in a market economy, you can do things that benefit other people even if that is not your intention. You do not get rich simply by “being greedy”. In a market economy, economic transactions are voluntary. I cannot force you to trade with me. If I want some of your money, I need to offer you something that you want, and are prepared to pay for.
More: whatever it is that I am offering you, I am probably not the only one vying for your custom (or at least not for long). Others will try to do the same. I need to outcompete them. I need to offer you something better and/or cheaper than them. When one of my competitors comes up with a more appealing offer, I need to match that somehow.
This sounds trivial today. But it was a mind-blowing realisation for me at the time, because I started applying it to things I saw around me. I started noticing that pattern in real economic life. In particular:
Two years earlier, a regional brewery had launched a new style of beer. It turned out to be extremely popular, and other breweries tried to respond to it in various ways. As a budding beer enthusiast, I enjoyed the results of that competitive process, but I never once thought about why this was happening. More generally – I never once asked myself why, every time I set foot into a shop, the shelves were full of nice things offered at reasonable prices. To say that I took things for granted would be an understatement. All the good things that a modern market economy has to offer were, from my perspective, just somehow there. And that was it. That was early-stage Niemietzonomics. Everything is just somehow there.
Also around 1997 or 1998, I developed an interest in the postwar period, and especially the West German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that turned a war-torn wasteland into one of the most prosperous countries in the world. I knew from my grandparents’ anecdotes that things had not always been this way, but my theory for how things get better over time was analogous to my theory for how goods get into the shelves: they just somehow do.
Except, as I then learned, there was nothing “somehow” about it. The Wirtschaftswunder was the result of active political choices, which were controversial at the time. It started in 1948, when Business Secretary Ludwig Erhard abolished price controls overnight, and the shop windows started to fill up almost immediately. Erhard, who was influenced by a group of liberal economists (the original neoliberals or “Ordoliberals”), was initially very much in a minority with his pro-market views. The two largest parties – the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democrats (CDU) – both initially supported a semi-socialist economy with a raft of nationalised industries.
So, for a while, I was torn. I accepted the case for a market economy at a logical level, but my heart was not in it. The market economy seemed right, but it did not feel right.
I thought that a good solution to that inner conflict would be to become a social democrat. So in the Federal Election of September 1998, I voted for the SPD, a few weeks later, I joined the party. It seemed like a good compromise: the SPD was a left-wing party; they had Marxist roots which they still cherished in a nostalgic way, but they were also explicitly accepting of the market economy (and had been since 1959). The party had a proud history, which I found extremely appealing. Born out of the political struggles of the Bismarck era, they later became the bedrock of the ailing Weimar Republic, and in the Republic’s dying days, they were the last man standing against Hitler. I generally hate the expression “on the right side of history”, but in this case, for once, it just fits.
Still, joining them did not really resolve my inner conflict: it just transformed it. I soon learned that the party was torn between a market-friendly “Blairite” wing and a traditionalist left wing, and I found myself firmly on the side of the former. The left-wing of the party seemed overly emotional – indeed, childish – to me. For example, even though government spending at the time was about 48% of GDP, left-wingers were constantly warning about an imaginary “dismantling” of the welfare state.
They also had a tendency to unduly moralise economic outcomes and economic policy decisions. For example, many public sector programmes, such as the pension system, were running chronic deficits, which the Blairites wanted to close with modest spending cuts. Rather than presenting alternative plans, the Left denounced such plans as “socially unjust” and “unfair”. For me, these were not matters of fair vs unfair, or just vs unjust, at all. They were just matters of basic arithmetic. You cannot constantly spend more than you bring in. How is that not obvious? How is that even a discussion?
Or similarly in labour markets: unemployment was very high at the time, in part because a system of centralised collective bargaining prevented wages to vary with productivity. The Left did not accept that argument, claiming, instead, that it was “unfair” that people in less productive parts of the country should be paid less: they work just as hard! Some of them even thought it was “unfair” that East Germans earned less than West Germans, despite the obvious East-West productivity gap.
What estranged me from the Left was that I had started to think like an economist. I started to think of market outcomes as amoral signals of supply and demand, not as moral judgements.
I attended local party meetings, where I was usually in a minority of one with those views. It became clear to me that while the party tolerated its market-friendly wing, they would never truly accept it. Their heart was not in it, and it never would be. After about a year, I started to accept that, as much as I liked my comrades on a personal level, I did not really belong in that party.
But where else to go? Defecting to the Right was completely out of the question for me. I may have become “economically right-wing”, but I still strongly rejected social conservatism and nationalism. The aforementioned Nolan Chart may have been past its prime, but around the turn of the Millennium, it still worked perfectly for me. I was economically right-wing, but socially and culturally left-wing.
There was, of course, a party which occupied that quadrant of the Nolan Chart, and that was the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). In early 2000, I reluctantly defected to them, still insisting that I remained a bit of a Leftie, and that it was specifically the party’s left-liberal wing that I identified with.
Those were also the early days of online discussion forums, a forerunner of what we now call “social media”. Each party had its own forum, and, then as now, the extremes were heavily overrepresented. The conservative forum had its fair share of far-right nationalists, the social democratic forum had its fair share of literal communists, and the liberal forum… well, they had the libertarians.
I did not like those people at all, the libertarians. They were arrogant. They were elitist. They came across as lacking in empathy. But they were really challenging to argue with. They were smart, they were knowledgeable, and they were infuriatingly consistent. They did not win me over, but I found them interesting enough to look up some of the names I picked up from them, such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich August von Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises.
I finished school in June 2000, and then relocated from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate to the state of Bavaria to do my National Service. It was not a bad experience overall, but it was not exactly intellectually stimulating, so I decided to fill that gap by reading up on libertarianism. Some books were available from the liberal Friedrich Naumann Foundation, others from an online bookstore called “Amazon” which I had recently discovered. The early Austrian School types wrote in German, which was neat, but Milton Friedman, rather inconsiderately, did not. There were German translations of his books, but they had tiny print runs, and were impossible to get hold of. (Needless to say, every word Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky ever uttered was instantly translated, and available everywhere.) Armed only with school English, reading Friedman in the original was a pain. But by then, I was sufficiently captivated by the ideas to keep going.
I cannot remember at what point I realised that I had moved over from left-liberalism to libertarianism. There was no single breakthrough, just a series of realisations that I was wrong about many things.
An example is the welfare state. I believed that the state was generally a bad entrepreneur, and that a competitive marketplace was a better way to provide goods and services. But for a long time, it just did not occur to me to expand that kind of thinking to social protection and welfare services. It did not occur to me to think of the welfare state as essentially a nationalised industry, providing services which, in the main, could also be privately provided.
I also developed an interest in real-world approximations of free-market reforms. I read about Thatcherism, Reaganomics and “Rogernomics”.
After National Service, I spent the spring and summer of 2001 travelling through Central America. Although I loved the region, I was also shocked by the poverty and underdevelopment I saw there, and became more interested in Development Economics as a result. I was particularly drawn to successful examples of countries that had recently grown out of poverty, and it was in this context that I learned about Hong Kong, Singapore, and Chile. I came to the conclusion that, while there were no pure libertarian development models, opening up and liberalising the economy was indispensable for escaping poverty. Naturally, this led me to believe that globalisation was the best thing ever.
It was the worst possible time to come to that conclusion. In October 2001, I moved to Berlin, to study Economics at the Humboldt University. It was the heyday of the anti-globalisation movement. They were all the rage on campus, and impossible to avoid.
I hated them.
They were frustrating to argue with, because they had that typical left-wing combination of ignorance and over-confidence, mixed with a strong sense of imaginary moral superiority.
Another peculiarity of Berlin in those days – just over a decade had passed since German Reunification – was that you could still very easily tell whether you were in the East or in the West. Eastern and Western Germany were still, in lots of ways, two different countries, and nowhere was this more obvious than in Berlin.
As much as I hated socialism as an ideology, I was also weirdly attracted to East Berlin’s frozen-in-time dystopian vibe.
But it was not just vibes. At the time, people did not yet treat the late-stage GDR, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the process of reunification, as “history”. It was still, in the broadest sense, “the present”, and a frequent topic of conversation. They talked about it in the way British people today would talk about Brexit: yes, a few years have passed, but it’s not over, and it feels far to recent to be “history”.
The standard opinion was that the GDR represented a perverted version of socialism, which had lost touch with the original Marxist ideals. Describing the failure of the GDR as a failure of socialism was considered the most cringeworthy thing a person could possibly say: a surefire way to out oneself as a complete ignoramus. Attitudes to socialism were treated as an implicit IQ test: dumb people judge socialism by its real-world outcomes, smart people judge it by its original intentions. (Needless to say, I was already one of the dumbest of the dumb people even then, and I have only become dumber in the meantime.)
Otherwise, I discovered the books of Murray Rothbard and David Friedman, and was flirting with those more radical versions of libertarianism for a while. I had also started to write for a small libertarian magazine, eigentümlich frei. My ultra-libertarian phase was short-lived, though, and in the mid-2000s, I reverted to a more conventional Hayekian liberalism.
Berlin is a very, very left-wing city. Nonetheless, I managed to track down the city’s 12 or so classical liberals, and gathered them at the Libertärer Stammtisch (=the libertarian regular’s table or meetup group, held at a pub in central Berlin). It must have been through them that I became aware of the Institute for Free Enterprise (IUF), a tiny free-market think tank that was just being formed. In May 2006, they organised a conference on free-market economics with speakers from around the world. One of the speakers was a Brit, who represented an organisation called the “Institute of Economic Affairs”.
-“He talks a lot of sense”, I remember saying to the chap next to me. “Any idea what that organisation is?”
-“What, the IEA? Oh yes! They’re great! They were the ones who prepared the ground for the Thatcher revolution, in the 1970s.”
-“Sounds interesting”, I said. “Think I’ll send them a CV, and apply for an internship there.”
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This is an excellent idea for a series of essays, even though, as a contributor to the 1985 model, it makes me feel very ancient indeed! I will be interested to see whether the intellectual influences on the new contributors include figures whose work appeared during the forty years since I read the classical liberal canon of the mid 80s. My hunch is that Deirdre McCloskey may turn out to have been important, and that Adam Smith will have exerted a more substantial influence that he did back then.