Deirdre McCloskey’s books about (British) economic history and liberty have had an outsized impact on me and my intellectual development for almost two decades. After a publishing streak worthy of some sort of award, there ought to be only so much more for this academic and public intellectual to say; only so many ways to deliver the remarkable, honest, simple, and powerful message of liberalism — the good old-fashioned one of free minds and free markets (to invoke the tagline of libertarian magazine Reason), not the modern liberalism of The New York Times.
In her forthcoming Equality of Permission: The Politics of Feasible Liberalism, it’s exactly this distinction that this great scholar hammers home again and again. Primary liberalism, McCloskey emphasizes, is the obvious and natural system of Adam Smith, of “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” Secondary liberalism, emerging around 1848, is that pesky Marx-influenced version that has informed most Americans’ understanding of “liberal.”
The book’s rather silly title, equality of permission, isn’t particularly memorable or descriptive; and in the prose, McCloskey moves away from it quite quickly — with the majority of the book discussing “primary liberalism” instead. The equality of permission is described in Bourgeois Equality, the final part of her Bourgeois Era trilogy, where everyday folk are legally and socially considered equals. This stands in stark contrast to ancient hierarchies that subordinated most ordinary folk and kept innovations and ideas locked away. It’s an “equality of recognition, acknowledgment, mutual trust, dignity, egalitarian respect”:
My book argues for a substantial restoration of this first, Scottish, Smithian, and individual liberty. Alone. It argues against a state-directed, collectivist, and faux-predictable pursuit of an unattainable utopia, a top-down social engineering advocated widely in the French Enlightenment, which promises, through what it calls its numerous nice-sounding but coerced ‘policies,’ to serve a general will.
Same old, same old? asks a long-time reader. Yes… and no. Equality of Permission is certainly spicier than many of the books emerging from McCloskey’s pen in recent years, with the occasional aggressive — even lewd — insult hurled at enemies. The ambition (in the age of tribalism and digital echo chambers) is perhaps bolder than even advancing the virtue of markets: trying to have a sweet, respectful conversation about intellectual matters with an engaged reader. In contrast to dumbed-down AI output and hot, inflammatory, viral takes, what she asks us to do is almost a lost art: to “[a]rgue seriously, so that we can together in a liberal conversation discern the truth.” She opens the book in Chapter 2 with this neat, respectful ask: maybe — just maybe — the statist within you might be mistaken about something, big time.
And clearly, lots of people still struggle with the logic and evidence of the market-optimistic story McCloskey brings. She draws creatively on “economics and history to imaginative literature and political theory,” and delivers in a spiky, witty way aimed at statist and economist opponents. The ideas are old ones, but rhetoric matters, even in an age of AI slop.
In flashbacks to Bourgeois Dignity, “what is actually novel about the modern world is not the market, which is ancient and pervasive, or the vulgarity of human consumption, which is sadly also universal.” What’s new is the decentralized, liberated way for ordinary people to try out their ideas commercially, in “market-tested betterment.”
As always, McCloskey shines dissecting the opinions and stances of other renowned economists and scholars: Daron Acemoglu gets a turn, as does his co-author James Robinson; the behavioral economics is reduced to people making mistakes when talking to their stockbroker or buying milk; Esther Duflo is a Nobel Prize-winning economist “who performs unethical experiments on impoverished human beings in poor countries in order to arm the state to better dominate them.” Michael Sandel, the rockstar Harvard philosopher, gets his own historically informed critique. Patrick Deneen, the conservative critic of liberalism, “hasn’t opened a book on economics since Marx, or of economic history since Polanyi.” As a dire consequence, “he does not understand how a market economy works, and what its actual history has been.”
It’s wonderful… much like the Merovingian in the movie The Matrix Reloaded says about cursing in French: like wiping your arse with silk.
If I said or wrote things like this, they’d come out snarky and insulting; ranty and altogether unserious. Somehow McCloskey has the intellectual respect and smooth-talking standing to pull it off.
Equality of Permission is strong in substance and, to a market-friendly intellectual, quite familiar. But the writing has melody and rhythm, making the reading a full-on experience rather than a regurgitation of facts or a polemic policy paper.
McCloskey’s densely allusive prose takes some getting used to. But once there, the message of primary liberalism becomes explosively powerful.