[Part 4 of "The Secession Tradition in America," a paper presented at the 1995 Mises Institute conference, "Secession, State, and Economy." Click here for Part 3, "The American Genius for Self-Government".]
The sort of consolidationism which the British had sought to impose on their North American possessions had been going on in Europe for centuries and is still going on. Of the thousands of independent territorial units that existed in Europe at the dawn of the modern era, only a few dozen remain, and there is an attempt to consolidate most of these into a European Union. The ideologies that have sought to legitimate these consolidations have usually been in the name of the individual. Liberals favor consolidation of power to secure the liberty of the individual, and Marxists have favored it in order to secure the equality of the individual and to build an egalitarian society. But both of these forms of consolidationism have been at the expense of substantial moral communities and traditional forms of life. Indeed, Enlightenment Liberalism and Marxism, in their different ways, have been the most destructive forces in history in respect to traditional moral communities. ….To Read More….
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