Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
We are proud to announce that James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus have completed their book America 3.0 and submitted the manuscript to their publisher, Encounter Books on Friday, November 30, 2012.
Please stand by for further announcements in this regard.
(Cross-Posted at America 3.0)
“What the USA did was to take the patterns and toolkit the British used to create their society, and to simplify, universalize, and generalize it until it became a versatile template that could quickly convert expanses of raw land into new, functioning self-governing communities without a thousand years of cultural evolution, and a concept of citizenship that could take European peasant communities who had been dumbly following orders for a thousand years, and turn them within a generation into citizens, jurors, legislators, militiamen and volunteers, vestrymen and congregation-members, entrepreneurs, and self-actualized persons — the whole Anglosphere toolkit — all in a deliberate manner that the British never thought they would need, but now might do well to look at.
“Americans have in many ways been congratulating themselves for the wrong things. The truths of the Declaration were hardly novel or shocking to the Englishmen who read them; rather, they saw them as a Whig five-finger exercise that had been boilerplate since 1688. What was shocking was that the Americans were throwing their own ideals back in their face.”
James C. Bennett, July 8, 2006, at http://anglosphere.com/weblog/archives/2006_07.html
Also preserved at: http://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/525.html
One huge problem we have in America is that the millions of people who are struggling to start or grow businesses, or go solo through self-employment, have no voice. The people who talk and write — the chattering classes — do that for a living. The people who live off the public teat are often talkers and writers, and thus dominate the conversation. The major business guys are in bed with the government or have a lot to lose, so they lie low. The big middle band of actual and potential self-starters and wealth-creators is inarticulate and it needs someone to speak for it, and to learn to speak for itself.
The regulatory state is structured to punish and thwart solo workers, self employment, small businesses, and start ups. The regulatory state has several missions. Expanding its power is one. Moving resources to its clients is another. Insulating its clients from possible threats — incumbent protection — is another. The very thing which will allow us to dig out of this recession is what our government is structured to prevent.
This has to change.
I just spent some money on more books about the Saxons, who lived in England and ruled it prior to the Norman conquest of 1066. I am working on a part of the book where I talk about the Saxons. I had to ask myself this question before I clicked on the purchase button: Why should we care about the Saxons?
We care about all this old stuff simply to show how deeply rooted our culture is, and the institutions that have grown up on that basis. This means that very basic changes in how we do things, what we want, what our aspirations and life-plans and life-goals are going to be, are simply not going to happen. As a result, we have certain strong points as a culture and we should be playing to those strong points. So it is not a matter of establishing whether people actually thought that much about the Magna Carta in the centuries before Lord Coke, or whether we have unimpeachable evidence that the Saxons lived in single family homes (though in both cases I believe the answer is yes). The point is the continuity over the centuries, with changes being bounded by these basic Anglospheric impulses. The point is not antiquarianism, as much as your authors are in fact antiquarians, but to show the incredible depth of this continuity.
The further point is that America 2.0 was a partial detour away from some of these things, with a constant pushback by ordinary people who wanted autonomy, their own homes, their own businesses, middle class respectability, mobility, etc.
And the yet further point is that America 3.0 is shaping up to even further get us back onto the track we have been on for all these centuries, while taking best advantage of all the new technology which is coming along. Your authors want to encourage and facilitate that because it is the most natural fit with the deepest roots of American culture, and thus the most realistic path to the continued success of the American experiment.
The representative systems which sprang up as a part of the constitutional machinery of the several provincial states founded by English settlers upon American soil were in no proper sense the result of imitation. Like the states themselves of which they were a part, they were the predestined product of a natural process of reproduction. The constitutional history of these provincial states does not begin with the landing of the English in America in the seventeenth century, but with the landing of the English in Britain in the fifth. The English emigrants who founded upon the eastern coast of what is now the United States a group of colonial commonwealths brought with them in their blood and bone, and in a matured form, that peculiar system of political organization which had been slowly developing in the mother country for centuries. They brought with them ready made the language, the law, the institutions of the old land to be modified and adapted to the changed conditions of the new. The settlements made by the English colonists in America in the seventeenth century were in all material particulars substantial reproductions of the English settlements made in Britain in the fifth. In both instances the settlers crossed the sea in ships in small companies, and in both lands they grouped themselves together in distinct and practically independent self-governing communities.
Hannis Taylor, The Origin and Growth of the English Constitution, an Historical Treatise, In Which Is Drawn Out, By The Light Of The Most Recent Researches, The Gradual Development Of The English Constitutional System, And The Growth Out Of That System Of The Federal Republic Of The United States, in Two Volumes (1899)
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