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arguments, for classical liberal conceptions of human political economic
life; as have the philosophers Jan Narveson and David Conway whose
defenses are based on contract rather than national law.
In the classical liberal tradition, there has always been this division
between the positive (or scientific) versus the normative (or moral) defens–
es of the free society with, of course, some shadings in between that are
difficul t to classify. Yet, in the earlier incarnations of the posi tion, the pos–
itivist stance was clearly dominant. This stance can be traced,
philosophically, to Thomas Hobbes as well as Baruch Spinoza, and
includes such classical champions of the economic liberty as Adam Smith
and David Ricardo. Posi tivists are still better positioned, academically, but
their approach is no longer so widely championed. A few years ago one
could encounter Milton Friedman and
F.
A.
Hayek on "Meet the Press"
and read Friedman regularly in
Newsweek.
Friedman still appears now and
again on the edi torial page of
The Wall StreetJournal.
The same prominence
is evident in the appointment of someone like Richard Posner as judge of
the 7th District Court in Chicago, as well as by the number of Nobel
Prizes received by economists who defend a free market system of eco–
nomic arrangements for human communities. Books written by these
social scientist champions of classical liberalism are well-published. We will
shortly get to those who advance the moral defense, one that seems to be
more widely championed, especially in the circles of scholars who discuss
political theory and philosophy. In other words, if we take John Rawls as
the philosophical representative of the social democratic-or modern lib–
eral-welfare state, it is Nozick, Lomasky, Rasmussen, Den Uyl, and some
others who are discussed as the classical liberal or libertarian counterpoints
outside economics.
The social-scientific defense of freedom once had a better standing
than the moral defense in the communi ty of poli tical inquirers. This is
because the normative defense has seemed weak, flawed in light of the sci–
entism of the last several centuries. A great deal of respect had been
accorded to approaching a problem along lines similar to those spelled out
in the natural sciences for reasons that are not difficult to appreciate. They
promise rigor, exactitude, precision, and practical usefulness. They also
suggested that complex human problems-psychological, ethical, political,
etc.-could be dealt with in the proven ways of technology. The modern
era's confidence in what B.
F.
Skinner called "the technology of culture"
can be appreciated once one considers the rapid progress of the natural sci–
ences and the resulting technological advances, along with the age old
propensi ty of intellectuals to seek simple unifying systems of thought so as
to make sense of reality. The persistent hope for the Archimedian point
from which all problems could be solved, with adequate information at
