Individual economic freedom: I’m all for it, being me and all.

But I doubt it had that much relevance to, say, the American Revolution (which I think counts as a revolution because, rather than fighting the king to force him to acknowledge their rights, they simply cut off the king to enforce their rights for themselves–I’m not judging this one way or another, just recognizing the revolutionary step). It may have had a bit. It all depends when you date the industrial revolution and how far you date it at the time.

I had, coming out of college, more or less seen individual liberty as a progress of constitutional recognitions of rights that could be tracked as a series of political wins. For example, the Magna Carta would be a part of this heritage.

But, at the same time, being deeply immersed in libertarian/”capitalist” theory/propaganda, I more or less correlated or even smudged this with economic individual liberty. Free individuals making free choices about price, purchase, investment, and risk were the key ingredient in a prosperous and civilized community.

But to even begin thinking that way, there is a necessary precondition: It must be widely understood that your carreer is largely undetermined and unconstrained by your father’s career. Otherwise, it simply makes no sense. If you are a blacksmith because your father is a blacksmith dealing with landlords and with farmers whose lives have been determined the same way, then you are not going to think much about the freedom of “a person” as an individual needing economic freedom. You will think of yourself as a member of a class that is trying to find a correct fit with other classes.

You will think this way because anything else would be irrelevant and stupid.

You go to the bookstore and you will find a whole industry on how to choose a career, how to measure your gifts/skills/proclivities/turn-ons, how to present yourself and find your place in the economy. Did this literature even exist in the 1770s. Maybe Poor Richard’s Almanac was the start. Maybe geographic displacements make this sort of thinking more likely. Maybe. But I doubt it was that common compared to the 1850s. And so on.

More likely, the Americans simply did not want their legislatures under the thumb of Parliament (rather than being recognized as their own pariaments under the king). This certainly makes more sense of the French Revolution, that no amount of libertarian spin could ever reinterpret as anything but class warfare. And it certainly makes the attraction of Marxism more understandable. Bourgeois life was a complete novelty to history in Marx’s day. Why would he expect it to be a real new stage in human history rather than a transitional anomaly?

To make myself extra clear, there could always be human rights in the sense of the right not to be murdered. I’m not saying that all forms of “individualism” are new. I’m saying that the free-market-individualism we hear so much about (in order to justify various government redistributions and coercions, usually) is novel because, before industrialism, it made no sense at all. We are in a truly new situation.

Of course, if there are any precedents, they will be found in the biggest cities in history. The industrial revolution was an urbanization revolution. The whole world got moved into cities.

And the other precedents for modern notions of freedom will be found in the intellectuals of the urban areas. Hippo may not have been a huge metropolis, but Augustine had lived in Rome and learned to live there. It is in the city that one can find new ways of making a living, marketing oneself, making deals, and thus being a freelancer whose children may do something totally different. The practice of apprenticeship was a half-step to this new reality, since parents would look at the economy and make a guess at what would be best for their children to do. Luther is an early witness to the angst this could cause, since he didn’t want to follow in the legal profession his father had planned for him.

While you would never know it through the “orientation” rhetoric of political homosexuality, I think urban same-sex communities are a version of this. On the farm, one’s relationships are determined by biology. One continues in one’s father’s trade, marries one of a few possible females, and raises children to help in the trade. And this is all anyone remembers ever happening. In the city one can escape kinship-determinism. One can have friends and, if one wants to be even more free, lovers, that have nothing to do with children or family–except perhaps the emotional bonds one associates with an idealized family. So the phenomenon is a perversion that shows up the real tension of the way the world is being changed.

(From the naming the episode, “Family,” to the whole dynamic of escaping an abusive patriarchy, 5×06 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is pretty insightful on the point. [Of course, in the Buffy/Angel universe only the radically chosen families are workable. Buffy’s own family only works with Giles’ as stand-in father, whom she eventually must outgrow to be a better slayer and lone leader [with friends but know one complement]. Fred’s family in Angel is the only one left peaceably, if I recall. And the deal Angel makes with Wolfram & Heart for Connor is, as far as I can remember, the only time in the Whedonverse that a family is actually allowed to be a possible source of health and life for a child.] The flight from kinship seems almost as important as the fight against the demonic in Buffy/Angel. Given the fact that the demonic is tied to primitive evolutionary history in the show [explicitly: dinosaurs] I’m tempted to postulate that the show wants to make a connection.)

What all this means for Christian social theory, I am not sure. If it makes us more open to the structures we see in the Bible of tribe, monarchy and empire (both in being sympathetic with them and understanding that the Gospel seems to have brought about our distance from them), I think this rambling post may be helpful.