Well argued, been dealing with bureaucrats for years, am now planning a flight to deeper in the north nearer to the arctic (namely the Arctic corners of Quebec), to establish a country-estate so to speak. We must re-establish and preserve the old ways slowly, one year at a time. At present, I'm doing so with my literary works and also with small moves every month towards the country and towards a freer life.
Excellent! We all must do what we must to try and preserve the old ways. Fortunately, the old ways can survive disorder in a way the present, soft society cannot
Great article! I also think we need gentlemen, not bureaucrats. Regulation and taxation are the vines that kill us. Still, two things I would like to add:
1. The middle class, coming up in the Middle Ages, had one great advantage over the nobility, the church, and the peasants: innovation. You mention the military supremacy that enabled adventuring Western gentlemen like Cecil Rhodes to achieve their goals. This supremacy was the result of a) the gentlemanly spirit, but also b) superior military technology. The latter largely came from innovation by the middle class, starting with magnificent plate armor build in medieval cities, but increasingly relying on all things gunpowder.
2. I think the great early capitalists were quite gentlemanly in outlook and behavior. They often were industrialists with their wealth tied to their factories, but also buying or building estates, and they stood for it all with their own name. Only later on, corporate culture, the equivalent to government bureaucracy, took over the large companies. Nowadays, you still have something resembling gentlemanly capitalists in CEO/founder guys like Elon Musk and in some family-owned companies that span generations.
To sum it up: I think capitalism and some aspects of the middle class can easily be included in a more gentlemanly future, and it can help to bring about more general prosperity than traditional Western society had.
Great points! Yes, I do agree. I've touched on those things in other articles, but you're quite right that it's worth noting. If you're interested in reading about this, two books on gentlemanly capitalism that are quite good are "Aristocratic Enterprise," which is about the Fitzwilliam coal mines, and "Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute," which is about that family's investment in the city of Cardiff, particularly its port infrastructure
Thanks for the book recommendations! I've been a Continental European Libertarian (a rare breed) for some years now, but now I feel some things like leadership and values as well as the countryside have been somewhat neglected in the libertarian tradition, so I will certainly read more of your articles.
One more question regarding this article: I'm not sure whether you suggest returning to tenant farming or whether you see it as a historical model on which an entirely new rural economic system should be based. I'm asking because tenant farming was based on farming requiring a lot of manual labor, no? With mechanized and probably increasingly robotic farming, a single family can manage a huge farm. Effectively, with good enough AI, the gentleman could own the land, the robots work the land. Just as in the past, the gentleman would have relatively work-free income from the land, only that he could keep all of it.
Tenant farming can work either way, either with mechanization or without. You're right that the farm size needs to go up, but the rented farms can just be larger, particularly somewhere like America
It’s almost like the author has never heard of Benjamin Franklin or Michael Faraday or Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison or Louis Salk or Alexander Fleming or…
What is he talking about? The 20th century wasn’t a time of commerce? Really?
And Robert E. Lee was a great gentleman? Is treason to his oath and country really such a great cause?
First, pretty much all those "new men" who became quite wealthy established themselves as gentlemen after doing so, aping the British commerce to gentry pipeline in that respect
Second, of course there was commerce. There has been since the bronze age. But England before 1890 or so was the last time in the Anglosphere that being a gentleman, tradition, and traditional customs like enjoying country house life and its sports were placed on a higher plane than men of commerce. Now CEOs and peers are seen as being of the same class and group, which is both ridiculous and a great shame
I see your point that the “new men” tried desperately to become gentry. It makes sense that this was something to aspire to. But they weren’t drawn from the gentry. Broadening the pools of talent that a society can draw from may have diminishing returns, but they do have some returns. Are the tradeoffs worth it? I’d say so. One faraday or Salk is worth a lot.
Yes I agree. The English aristocracy was excellent and survived because the worst fell out of it through going broke, being dishonorable, etc., and the best of the new men joined it by buying landed estates and becoming considered gentlemen in threeish generations. So it had the infusion of new blooded needed to stay strong, and didn't stagnate and grow hated like the French, or remain constantly pinched for cash like the Prussians and Russians
Well written and interesting! But I would add that there is a big important nuance thats missing from a particular line within your essay that *partially* invalidates it. You actually touched on at one point in the essay with your apt Coolidge quote: "“No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.”"
The USA used to be a far more politically and economically decentralized country than it is today, in fact some of its biggest centralizations didn't occur until they were rammed in between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s. Most domestic policy occurred at the sub national level, much of it, including things like economic policy, the organization of scientific and engineering, etc. happened not only at the state level but also in many cases at the local level with a huge amount of variability in policy design across the country because they were formulated, designed, and executed by different local forces operating mostly independently of each other. This means we had far more "leaders" than it appears from a headline glance, and while many fit your bills, they were a quite diverse array of people, collectively they were very much a motley crew.
Also, the USA used to genuinely have things that could to at least some meaningful degree be referred to as democratic governance structures; they were formed around our former, and completely different from what we have today, decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member Republican and Democratic parties of old. They almost entirely eliminated all of our democratic governance structures decades ago and those two parties were quietly killed, their skins peeled of and worn by their replacement impostors which are essentially two versions of Technocracy parties, neither of which care much about republicanism or democracy.
This is a good point. I think to a large extent the local problem is not present when there's a lynchpin of the community who remains there...typically a landed aristocrat who's present in the community. The Marquesses of Bute in Cardiff were a good example, or the Dukes of Westminster in Cheshire, the Mosleys at Rolleston as described in the article, or men like Washington/Jefferson/Madison in the US. Even local businesses used to do that to some extent with funding little league teams, hiring local kids, etc. As you point out, the centralization process killed that, with Big Business being a particularly bad offender
Personally, I doubt that that can be possible or work with mass democracy. To some extent it did in Athens. but their voting system was closer to landed voting of our mold than current year mas democracy. Once "the people" are held to be the same as the local man/men of note, that levelling impulse wipes away the point of being a leader and the desire for respect and to be listened to that comes with being the lord of the manor
Yeah, your right, the sort of national “lynchpin” figures were there and played a very import role even if most of it was culturally symbolic. There are some time periods in our history that we here in the USA are effectively lied about, two of which, are perhaps the most successfully lied about despite them being amongst the most widely contemporaneously documented events in history were two multi-decadal times periods that were long after their lives retroactively named the “Populist Era” and the “Progressive Era”, they were characterized by something that could be fairly described as being not too many miles away from being out-right mass scale participation in all non-foreign policy areas of public policy, commercial policy, scientific policy, and just in general governance. Almost none of the participants, at eats formally as like a name for themselves or anything like that, referred to themselves as “populists” or “progressives”, and they spread across a great many independent groups operating mostly locally. They didnt start parties, they used one of the old parties but just in their respective areas, the two parties we had were in some big ways actually just alliances of many different local parties, but most all domestic policies, of all sorts and kinds, were done at lower levels of government back then.
Darkly ironically, contemporary China, at least from the 1980s to ~2015, it seems like Xi’s trying to change this somewhat, but very much during those years and at least still for the most part today, with its high degree of political and economic decentralization, high variability in policy between places, moderate local trade protectionisms between areas within the country, partially fragmented capital markets, etc.; well, in some huge and fundamental ways contemporary China more closely resembles the USA’s Old republic than the contemporary USA does.
And a lot of what we had actually held for a long time, another time period we’re lied to a about over here is a period of our history called the New Deal Era, we’re told things are blatantly false about it, we’re tole it was a hyper centralized technocracy, in some ways, but in other it was very much not so and some of things people associate with it were super not that and also werent from it, they’d been their since day one of the country. For example, in the banking/finance sphere, the nation had a paradigm of internal inter-area capital flow inhibitors from the first day of its existence until they were phased out between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s, very Big Business, Very Big Finance, and the Big Government Technocrats tried to eliminate them during the entirety of the New Deal Era and while they did make some inroads, they mostly withstood the assaults throughout the whole Era, it wasn;t until the advent of the so called “Neoliberal Era” under the Carter administration that they finally broke, and the results been disastrous, like the results have been the in some cases the literal diametric of what was promised.
Well argued, been dealing with bureaucrats for years, am now planning a flight to deeper in the north nearer to the arctic (namely the Arctic corners of Quebec), to establish a country-estate so to speak. We must re-establish and preserve the old ways slowly, one year at a time. At present, I'm doing so with my literary works and also with small moves every month towards the country and towards a freer life.
Excellent! We all must do what we must to try and preserve the old ways. Fortunately, the old ways can survive disorder in a way the present, soft society cannot
Very well said, definitely agree
Great article! I also think we need gentlemen, not bureaucrats. Regulation and taxation are the vines that kill us. Still, two things I would like to add:
1. The middle class, coming up in the Middle Ages, had one great advantage over the nobility, the church, and the peasants: innovation. You mention the military supremacy that enabled adventuring Western gentlemen like Cecil Rhodes to achieve their goals. This supremacy was the result of a) the gentlemanly spirit, but also b) superior military technology. The latter largely came from innovation by the middle class, starting with magnificent plate armor build in medieval cities, but increasingly relying on all things gunpowder.
2. I think the great early capitalists were quite gentlemanly in outlook and behavior. They often were industrialists with their wealth tied to their factories, but also buying or building estates, and they stood for it all with their own name. Only later on, corporate culture, the equivalent to government bureaucracy, took over the large companies. Nowadays, you still have something resembling gentlemanly capitalists in CEO/founder guys like Elon Musk and in some family-owned companies that span generations.
To sum it up: I think capitalism and some aspects of the middle class can easily be included in a more gentlemanly future, and it can help to bring about more general prosperity than traditional Western society had.
Great points! Yes, I do agree. I've touched on those things in other articles, but you're quite right that it's worth noting. If you're interested in reading about this, two books on gentlemanly capitalism that are quite good are "Aristocratic Enterprise," which is about the Fitzwilliam coal mines, and "Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute," which is about that family's investment in the city of Cardiff, particularly its port infrastructure
Thanks for the book recommendations! I've been a Continental European Libertarian (a rare breed) for some years now, but now I feel some things like leadership and values as well as the countryside have been somewhat neglected in the libertarian tradition, so I will certainly read more of your articles.
One more question regarding this article: I'm not sure whether you suggest returning to tenant farming or whether you see it as a historical model on which an entirely new rural economic system should be based. I'm asking because tenant farming was based on farming requiring a lot of manual labor, no? With mechanized and probably increasingly robotic farming, a single family can manage a huge farm. Effectively, with good enough AI, the gentleman could own the land, the robots work the land. Just as in the past, the gentleman would have relatively work-free income from the land, only that he could keep all of it.
Tenant farming can work either way, either with mechanization or without. You're right that the farm size needs to go up, but the rented farms can just be larger, particularly somewhere like America
It’s almost like the author has never heard of Benjamin Franklin or Michael Faraday or Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison or Louis Salk or Alexander Fleming or…
What is he talking about? The 20th century wasn’t a time of commerce? Really?
And Robert E. Lee was a great gentleman? Is treason to his oath and country really such a great cause?
First, pretty much all those "new men" who became quite wealthy established themselves as gentlemen after doing so, aping the British commerce to gentry pipeline in that respect
Second, of course there was commerce. There has been since the bronze age. But England before 1890 or so was the last time in the Anglosphere that being a gentleman, tradition, and traditional customs like enjoying country house life and its sports were placed on a higher plane than men of commerce. Now CEOs and peers are seen as being of the same class and group, which is both ridiculous and a great shame
I see your point that the “new men” tried desperately to become gentry. It makes sense that this was something to aspire to. But they weren’t drawn from the gentry. Broadening the pools of talent that a society can draw from may have diminishing returns, but they do have some returns. Are the tradeoffs worth it? I’d say so. One faraday or Salk is worth a lot.
Yes I agree. The English aristocracy was excellent and survived because the worst fell out of it through going broke, being dishonorable, etc., and the best of the new men joined it by buying landed estates and becoming considered gentlemen in threeish generations. So it had the infusion of new blooded needed to stay strong, and didn't stagnate and grow hated like the French, or remain constantly pinched for cash like the Prussians and Russians
Well written and interesting! But I would add that there is a big important nuance thats missing from a particular line within your essay that *partially* invalidates it. You actually touched on at one point in the essay with your apt Coolidge quote: "“No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.”"
The USA used to be a far more politically and economically decentralized country than it is today, in fact some of its biggest centralizations didn't occur until they were rammed in between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s. Most domestic policy occurred at the sub national level, much of it, including things like economic policy, the organization of scientific and engineering, etc. happened not only at the state level but also in many cases at the local level with a huge amount of variability in policy design across the country because they were formulated, designed, and executed by different local forces operating mostly independently of each other. This means we had far more "leaders" than it appears from a headline glance, and while many fit your bills, they were a quite diverse array of people, collectively they were very much a motley crew.
Also, the USA used to genuinely have things that could to at least some meaningful degree be referred to as democratic governance structures; they were formed around our former, and completely different from what we have today, decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member Republican and Democratic parties of old. They almost entirely eliminated all of our democratic governance structures decades ago and those two parties were quietly killed, their skins peeled of and worn by their replacement impostors which are essentially two versions of Technocracy parties, neither of which care much about republicanism or democracy.
This is a good point. I think to a large extent the local problem is not present when there's a lynchpin of the community who remains there...typically a landed aristocrat who's present in the community. The Marquesses of Bute in Cardiff were a good example, or the Dukes of Westminster in Cheshire, the Mosleys at Rolleston as described in the article, or men like Washington/Jefferson/Madison in the US. Even local businesses used to do that to some extent with funding little league teams, hiring local kids, etc. As you point out, the centralization process killed that, with Big Business being a particularly bad offender
Personally, I doubt that that can be possible or work with mass democracy. To some extent it did in Athens. but their voting system was closer to landed voting of our mold than current year mas democracy. Once "the people" are held to be the same as the local man/men of note, that levelling impulse wipes away the point of being a leader and the desire for respect and to be listened to that comes with being the lord of the manor
Yeah, your right, the sort of national “lynchpin” figures were there and played a very import role even if most of it was culturally symbolic. There are some time periods in our history that we here in the USA are effectively lied about, two of which, are perhaps the most successfully lied about despite them being amongst the most widely contemporaneously documented events in history were two multi-decadal times periods that were long after their lives retroactively named the “Populist Era” and the “Progressive Era”, they were characterized by something that could be fairly described as being not too many miles away from being out-right mass scale participation in all non-foreign policy areas of public policy, commercial policy, scientific policy, and just in general governance. Almost none of the participants, at eats formally as like a name for themselves or anything like that, referred to themselves as “populists” or “progressives”, and they spread across a great many independent groups operating mostly locally. They didnt start parties, they used one of the old parties but just in their respective areas, the two parties we had were in some big ways actually just alliances of many different local parties, but most all domestic policies, of all sorts and kinds, were done at lower levels of government back then.
Darkly ironically, contemporary China, at least from the 1980s to ~2015, it seems like Xi’s trying to change this somewhat, but very much during those years and at least still for the most part today, with its high degree of political and economic decentralization, high variability in policy between places, moderate local trade protectionisms between areas within the country, partially fragmented capital markets, etc.; well, in some huge and fundamental ways contemporary China more closely resembles the USA’s Old republic than the contemporary USA does.
And a lot of what we had actually held for a long time, another time period we’re lied to a about over here is a period of our history called the New Deal Era, we’re told things are blatantly false about it, we’re tole it was a hyper centralized technocracy, in some ways, but in other it was very much not so and some of things people associate with it were super not that and also werent from it, they’d been their since day one of the country. For example, in the banking/finance sphere, the nation had a paradigm of internal inter-area capital flow inhibitors from the first day of its existence until they were phased out between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s, very Big Business, Very Big Finance, and the Big Government Technocrats tried to eliminate them during the entirety of the New Deal Era and while they did make some inroads, they mostly withstood the assaults throughout the whole Era, it wasn;t until the advent of the so called “Neoliberal Era” under the Carter administration that they finally broke, and the results been disastrous, like the results have been the in some cases the literal diametric of what was promised.