Inventing freedom
Why does the world speak English? Why does every country at least pretend to aspire to representative government, personal freedom, and an independent judiciary? This book is an ambitious account of the historical origin and spread of those principles, and their role in creating a sphere of economic and political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled. According to author Daniel Hannan, the ideas and institutions we consider essential to maintaining and preserving our freedoms--individual rights, private property, the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government--are not broadly "Western" in the usual sense of the term. Rather, they are the legacy of a very specific tradition, one that was born in England and that the Americans, along with other former British colonies, inherited. By the tenth century, a thousand years before most modern countries, England was a nation-state whose people were already starting to define themselves with reference to common-law rights. Inventing Freedom explains why the extraordinary idea that the state was the servant, not the ruler, of the individual evolved uniquely in the English-speaking world. It is a chronicle of the success of Anglosphere exceptionalism.--From publisher description.
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4mentions
2people
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75% recommend25% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- > It is easy claim that China is autocratic therefore it must do X bad things
If you read the book you wouldn't need the articles because then you'd understand how they work.
A good China-specific book to read is:
https://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth/dp...
It doesn't deal with corruption per se, rather how China has been operating politically and economically for the last few decades. The gist of it is, so long as you play ball with the CCCP, then you can enrich yourself. But the second you step out of line, officials will happily confiscate your life's work and tell you you're lucky you're not in jail. And the only reason you're not in jail is because as long as you can make wealth that they can take, you're more useful to them free than imprisoned. If that changes, a life behind bars awaits you.
What you can do in China, any autocratic regime really, is precisely what the local thugs will allow you to do, or what you can get away with outside their attention. They may not be as smart as you, but they are more numerous and have the legal system on their side.
To complete your political education, this book will fill in the gaps between dictatorship and the kind of democracy that Anglosphere nations enjoy:
https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Freedom-English-Speaking-Pe...
This book will show you the conditions in which freedom develops and really makes you appreciate the United States, tempered of course by the lessons in the Dictator's Handbook that tell how democratic regimes are, in general, not the forces for good in other countries that you'd like to believe they are. Would-be freedom fighters are fighting forces so much larger than they are that success or failure is entirely out of their control. Either the conditions are ripe for revolution or they aren't.
Barring some massive worldwide event, Hong Kong's future is dimming by the day. The Internet was supposed to be that event, but autocrats are more than capable of suppressing freedom there too, up to and including just shutting the whole damn thing off.
- Ancient Egypt wasn't all that isolated. They had threats from the west, south, and north.
> Like, I believe that China did have periods of peace that would have been long enough to develop liberal democracies. China was the strongest country in their region,
China was not one country until 220 BCE, and afterwards, they had to adopt an imperialist expansionist policy to shore up their borders. They had a long period of political stability, but they still had to defend themselves from threats without. Democracy only happens after all these are removed so the population can build up the political will to challenge the power structures.
It has a flow to it, the building up of democracy. Power flows outward from the ruler to an aristocracy, which eventually engages in trade, building up the merchant class. In order for citizens to want to participate in a democracy, they need to be economically well-off, this means something like a middle class.
Countries go through these phases all the time, but only in a really geographically isolated place can they actually build to the point where there's a real democracy.
> sure they had borders to watch but they were just as protected as France or Germany during their conversions to democracy or republics.
France's democracy disappeared quickly with Napoleon and to me is an example of why isolation is absolutely essential to safeguard freedom. French Republican armies were nigh-invulnerable, and this whetted their appetite for empire. Napoleon gave them what they wanted. Again here, the world at large ruined their ability to self-govern.
Germany's revolution was not a democratic one, but a socialist one. The socialism of the day was totalitarianism in democratic clothes, this to some extent remains true. Populists turn autocratic very quickly after getting elected. Germans of the era were every bit as militaristic as the French were after the Revolution.
> being cast off from europe (their legacy bureaucracies didn't suppress innovation), being free-market inclined, having a group identity ("American") that all migrants can share, practicing freedom of religion and inheriting the british common law framework.
These are all outgrowths of geographic isolation.
The reason Europe left them alone was because it they were too busy dealing with each other, America was too far away for it to ever be more than a side-show.
A free market flourishes in the kind of democratic environment that comes from isolation. Remember the Dutch and the British were the commercial masters of the colonial age, both nations were extremely well-isolated.
The group identity aspect Americans took straight from the British, it's a very British idea.
English common law is, again, one of those social innovations that can only come from a long period of time where there is no credible external threat sapping public will to uphold legal freedoms against aristocratic depredations.
You should read the very excellent Inventing Freedom, it elaborates on how British legal and commercial innovations came to be.
http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Freedom-English-Speaking-Peo...
- > W/r/t to legal systems collapsing, they're protected by guns and myths.
This is true enough in many parts of the world, but a careful reading of the history of English Common Law reveals a fascinatingly iterative legal process that formed a bulwark against monarchal oppression for hundreds of years.
For a good introduction, check out this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Freedom-English-Speaking-Peo...
- Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World by Daniel Hannan
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