During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the party of laissez-faire and free markets—known today as “classical liberals”—often pushed a political program that included the adoption of written constitutions. The old liberals—such as the American revolutionaries and French bourgeois reformers—thought that written constitutions would offer a substantial barrier to abuses of state power.

The constitutional program of the classical liberals is not to be confused with its underlying ideology—what is today generally called “libertarianism.” Nonetheless, constitutionalism has been an important tactic favored by liberals/libertarians historically. That is, it was thought that written constitutions, as a means, would ensure liberal ends. The ideology of the classical liberals favored minimizing state power so that the non-state institutions—known as “society”—could grow and flourish free of state intervention.

Unfortunately, written constitutions have failed to achieve this goal. Throughout the new liberal states that arose from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, central governments grew rapidly to achieve powers that would have been thought unthinkable even under the old monarchical regimes of Europe.

The liberals’ constitutional reforms failed to prevent rising taxation, growing bureaucracy, and military conscription within the national states that had ostensibly adopted liberal constitutions. This liberal project failed because the it embraced the idea that it was desirable to centralize and consolidate power within a single national state apparatus. Under most circumstances, this sort of centralization of power was considered by most to be a recipe for more powerful states. But, the liberals rather naïvely thought that the powers of these new, centralized “liberal” states would be limited and controlled through their written constitutions.

It didn’t work out that way. What happened instead was that the consolidation of state power within new, uniform, and national “constitutional” frameworks enabled states to overcome and abolish the older decentralized power structures that had previously impeded the state power. …

Thus, what had begun as a naïve faith in the potential of centralized, liberal constitutions quickly become an acute awareness of danger of state power, regardless of its written constitution.

But much of damage had already been done. The attempt to switch over to a liberal-oriented polity via a stronger centralized state led to consolidated national states which quickly set to work undermining liberal gains. In the United States, for example, which perhaps, among national states implemented the most liberal national constitution, the situation almost immediately began to unravel. The initial highly liberal constitution was soon replaced by one that was much more centralist. Then, the supporters of more consolidated national power set to work centralizing power even more. …

Specifically, Raico points to secession as the means of reversing the process of centralizing political power within national states. In, this, of course, he follows many classical liberals—i.e., Gustave de Molinari, Charles Dunoyer, Thomas Jefferson, and John Locke— who did not follow the centralist liberal strain that was, unfortunately, so common and so successful.

It is important to note that when Raico says there is “no answer within classical liberalism” he is referring to the means, not the goals. Raico never wavered from his ideological liberalism in favor of the weakening of states and the undermining of state power. Raico is correct to conclude, though, that the old liberal political tactics of constitutionalism, state building, and universal suffrage—have clearly failed.