"The vast majority of people who were looting in New Orleans were doing so to feed their families or to get resources to get their families out of there. If I had a store with an inventory of insured belongings, and a tragedy happened, I would fling my doors open and tell everyone to take what they need: it is only stuff."

Dan notes that"the implication is that she would not give away the store, so to speak, if she had to pay for it, but if an insurance company were footing the bill, she'd be more than generous with the carrier's money." That does seem to be what she's saying. Most people are more generous with other people's money. It also struck me as less than credible that the"majority" of looting was about survival necessities. As far as I could tell, an awful lot of it was TVs and jewelry and designer sneakers. I was already negatively disposed towards Sheehan for her anti-semitic remarks, but now I see she also has no respect for private property.

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

I’m currently in the middle of the third volume of John Julius Norwich’s Byzantine trilogy (a generally fascinating work, I should specify, since I’m about to be critical), wherein he naturally enough attempts to explain the Byzantine Empire’s gradual decline and eventual fall. His explanations invariably focus on the personal qualities of various emperors and generals; indeed he seems to agree with the assessment of Emperor Ioannes VI, whom he quotes on page 293:

There is nothing more conducive to the destruction of a nation, whether it be republic or monarchy, than the lack of men of wisdom or intellect. When a republic has many citizens, or a monarchy many ministers, of high quality it quickly recovers from those losses that are brought about by misfortune. When such men are lacking, it falls into the very depths of disgrace. That is why I deplore the present state of the Empire which, having produced so many excellent men in the past, has now been reduced to such a level of sterility that today’s governors possess nothing to elevate them above those whom they govern.

Yet in passing, four pages later, Norwich mentions a rather different fact which one might think has some relevance to Byzantium’s decline:

Such wealth as existed in the impoverished Empire had ... become concentrated in the hands of the aristocratic few, while the majority of the population could feel only indignation and resentment. In most Western societies, the cities and towns had gradually produced a flourishing bourgeoisie of merchants and craftsmen [but] in the Byzantine Empire this had never occurred ....

Surely Byzantium’s increasing economic desperation, inability to pay its mercenaries, and so on, has something to do with its failure to develop a prosperous middle class. What explains this difference between the Byzantine Empire and its Western neighbours? What features of Byzantine law, society, or culture were blocking economic progress? One might think that any historian attempting to explain Byzantium’s fall would show an interest in such questions.

But not Norwich. As he explains in the preface to the second volume:

If I tend to give economic considerations less than their due, this is because I am not an economist and a three-volume work is quite long enough already. Similarly, if I concentrate on the personalities of Emperors and Empresses rather than on sociological developments, I can only plead that I prefer people to trends.

Well, he’s perfectly entitled to focus on what interests him (though his contrast between personalities and trends strikes me as rather artificial). But the price of neglecting economic and sociological considerations, or treating them as some sort of optional add-on, is that one will inevitably fail to understand the events one is writing about.

I like revisiting classic, and unfortunately forgotten, works in the (classical) liberal, or libertarian, canon. This pays several dividends. For one, it brings great books to the attention of people who never knew they existed. Moreover, old books often contain insights and information you can find nowhere else. Murray Rothbard was fond of pointing out that, contrary to what people assume, knowledge does not advance inexorably"onward and upward." Important things can be omitted, overlooked, and forgotten. Consequently, later books on a subject can be less complete than earlier books. So it is wrong to think that the older books need not be consulted because subsequent work incorporates everything of value from the past.

I first became acquainted with the late Arthur A. Ekirch Jr.'s The Decline of American Liberalismin my college days. The book was first published in 1955, then reissued in 1967. It was a History Book Club selection and, I've been told, a contender for a national book award. Ekirch wrote nine other books, including Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought (1971)and The Civilian and the Military (1972), especially relevant today....

Ekirch wrote for the intelligent nonspecialist, and his work sets the standard for accessible scholarship. The Decline of American Liberalism is a great place to start because it provides a readable look at the whole of American political-economic-intellectual history in under 400 pages. I highly recommend it.

Read the rest of this week's TGIF column,"Arthur Ekirch's The Decline of American Liberalism," at the Foundation for Economic Education website.

Cross-posted at Free Association.