Liberalism is the best model to address inequality and it is good for black activism, historical movements and change prove. Liberalism is black.

We’ll just delve right in. You explicitly employ a classical liberal lens to address the questions of racial justice in the history of Black America. First of all, what do you mean by classical liberalism, and why do you think classical liberalism is a useful lens for understanding the history and future of racial justice in America?

To tease this up, let me lift this quote from your book where you’re referring to John Tomasi’s book “Free Market Fairness,” where you’re highlighting that the liberal revolution is by far the greatest thing that could happen to poor people, marginalized people and oppressed people since it restricts the power of government to oppress you, requires that the law protect you from the oppression of your neighbors and frees you up to participate in really effective systems of voluntary cooperation, whether these be economic or social. Tell us more about classical liberalism.

FERGUSON: Well, this book is written for a popular audience, so we tried to keep it very straightforward. And we really talked about three institutions and two values with regard to classical liberalism. Our three institutions are private property rights, freedom of contract and the equal protection of the rule of just laws. Our two values are a real value for the incredible productivity and liberatory power of a free market, as well as the need for really thick civil society institutions and a culture of cooperation, of voluntary association.

That’s how we’re outlining classical liberalism. And as you pointed out, from “Free Market Fairness,” we go back and look at some of the great thinkers in the classical liberal tradition, and we noticed that they all really were impressed by the way that a liberal society works for regular people. Not just for elites, regular day laborers whose lives are getting much, much better in many ways as a result of living in a liberal society.

We want to respond to the criticism that maybe people get if they value the founding or something like that, that they are in a tradition that doesn’t care about the poor or the downtrodden. We think that that’s coming from a certain narrative that is incorrect, and so we’re addressing that.

WITCHER: I think it’s really important to recognize that the founders were themselves classical liberals. And as a historian, when we look at the long trajectory of human history, classical liberalism and liberalism as it manifested out of the Enlightenment, and then of course in the 19th century and on, has been extraordinarily liberating to people across the globe.

Taking a longer view of history, there’s no wonder why we’d want to apply the values of classical liberalism to Black Americans because classical liberalism has been proven to work at lifting people out of poverty since at least the late 18th century. Like Rachel said, I think we’re pushing back against a narrative that says that classical liberalism or the values of the founding doesn’t have answers for today. It does, absolutely.

At the same time, we’re trying to push back against a conservative doctrine or a conservative narrative that tries to say, “Well, if you venerate the founding, you can’t criticize the fact that we didn’t live up to these values.” One of the things we try to do in the book is say that the problem was not classical liberalism. The problem was not the values. The problem was that flawed men did not live up to the values, that our institutions didn’t live up to the values of our own founding and of liberalism. That’s one of the things we try to tease out throughout the book.

KLUTSEY: Very interesting. One of the critiques we’ve heard about classical liberalism from another scholar and classical liberal himself, who was in this series, Richard Ebeling, did mention that a lot of classical liberals, the prominent classical liberals, did not speak up or were fairly silent with regard to the oppression of Black people—like Mises, Hayek and these folks. I think that fosters a lot of distrust about whether classical liberals really mean that they care about oppression and these types of things. I wonder if that makes it a little bit difficult for you guys in talking about these ideas and promoting classical liberalism?

FERGUSON: Well, one of the things I was actually really pleased to discover as I researched for the book is that there’s an incredibly strong pro-Black classical liberal tradition. I didn’t even know—as a person who’s been in the liberty movement for 25 years—I hadn’t actually been taught, ever, that a major portion of the abolitionist movement was driven by serious classical liberals, free marketeers who were so intense in their views that a person like [William Lloyd] Garrison, for instance, could say that he wished he could shut down every tariff house in the world. He had very extreme free market views, and he was also a very extreme abolitionist.

He and many of his followers were people who saw this all as part of a nonviolent, maybe a Christian nonviolent perspective on the world. And he had a huge influence, of course, especially through Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass is another example of a loud and proud classical liberal who was obviously fighting for the rights of Black Americans, but it goes on.

For instance, two of the major co-founders of the NAACP were serious classical liberals: Moorfield Storey, Oswald Garrison Villard. And Rose Wilder Lane, who’s considered one of the three mothers of libertarianism—and she’s the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder—she wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier, which was the biggest Black newspaper in the United States. She was fighting for Black rights from a libertarian perspective and actually trying to educate her white compatriots on what Blacks were really dealing with, because she was shocked herself to understand just how widespread, for instance, the lynching terrorism was and things like that.

You have other heterodox thinkers like Zora Neale Hurston and so forth—highly individualistic, anti-New Deal, anti-communist. Others, George Schuyler, T.R.M. Howard, et cetera, that we could discuss. I think we have to admit that you do have classical liberal thinkers who seem to not notice or not think it’s worth commenting on that a certain group of Americans is being excluded from the basic institutions that underlie economic flourishing. And I think we have to face up to that and call those people out.

On the other hand, you really do have a strand of pro-Black classical liberalism that makes a real difference in our history, in the civil rights movement, in the rise of the NAACP, going all the way back to actually ending of slavery. That was very exciting and a wonderful thing to discover. Then, of course, modern libertarians have been some of the most sensitive to issues like the drug war and the mass incarceration crisis and been willing to face those together with the Black community.