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Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority

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This philosophical history of freedom is not flawless but contains extraordinary insights as it unfolds the stages in the discovery of individual liberty from the earliest times. The work reveals salient discernment, uncovers forgotten history and shows unintended prescience. Explaining how the human mind works with standards of value, Lane identifies three crucial factors: the nature of human energy, the recognition of the human race as one & the quest for the ideal method for individuals to combine their energies.

Part One (The Old World) contains discussions of antiquity when life was viewed as static or cyclical and authority was absolute; Plato's dictatorship of the intellectuals & Spengler's theory of the rise & fall of civilizations; Communism, including the early collectivist experiments in the American colonies, and planned economies. The author points out that many revolutions just represent the turning of a wheel around a motionless center; a new gang replaces the old but individual freedom never materializes. Enormous waste occurs when authority is enforced in the production & distribution of material goods.

Part Two (The Old World) explores the steps that led to a free society in the USA. First there was Abraham who embraced the concept that God created human beings as free agents. Later there was Moses, the Ten Commandments and Israel under the Judges which was a libertarian society. Lane emphasizes the significance of Samuel's warning to the Israelites that demanded a king. Her observations on antisemitism ring true and are confirmed by history: the Old World is alarmed at Israel and the hatred derives from the fear of freedom. It is always the tyrant that leads the attack on the Jewish people who have faithfully preserved their scriptures that proclaim the individual to be free.

Lane considers the second attempt to be the Islamic expansion which in its tolerant, golden age made lasting contributions in the spread & development of e.g. astronomy, mathematics and medicine. Unfortunately she quotes only a small, nice sentence from this religion's foundational document while ignoring Dhimmitude and the eventual decline and regression of this civilization. Britain became the next setting where freedom unfolded, in a type of benevolent feudal system. The Magna Carta was a charter of liberties within an entrenched social order. This however, was a grant of liberty, not the recognition of individual liberty. Despite not recognizing freedom as the inherent state of the human being, the British system did promote the concept of human rights for many centuries.

America represents the third attempt, the one that succeeded. Lane explores early American history and the radical new concept of individual freedom that developed amongst the colonists. She shows that the American Revolution had no single leader but erupted spontaneously amongst many. Self-sufficiency had undermined the Old World concept of authority. The colonists were traders who learnt about human nature, creation, wars, adventures, intrigues and family life from the Bible. They defied British laws restricting trade, smuggled to their hearts' content and chose to fight rather than conform & submit. Ten years before Lexington, American rebellion was in full swing. Finally, creativity won the battle against control.

For the first time, the individual was seen as the shaper of life & society. There was no conflict between religion & science as opposed to Europe where the French Enlightenment made a god of science. The American view as articulated by Thomas Paine considered the pursuit of science as the divine study of the works of God in creation. From the beginning, there was a profound difference between the Enlightenment of the Anglosphere and that of Continental Europe. Rose Wilder Lane cherished the mind that knows the individual is free as the most valuable thing in the world.

This section includes chapters on property rights, the Constitution, the right to vote, democracy, republicanism and the industrial revolution that gave birth to innumerable inventions and unimaginable wealth. The free use of energy is the quickest way to a better life, but minds take longer to change than actions. The revolutions of the 19th & 20th centuries in South America & Europe are covered in interesting detail. Lane believed the counter-revolution came from Germany because that country had never experienced Roman Law nor the proper application of the feudal concept of human rights. Anti-modernist ideologies like Fascism, Communism & Socialism all derive from Marx. Napoleon from France served as model for Bismarck and this strongman concept eventually inflicted Hitler, Mussolini & Stalin on the world. Lane could not have known that it would spread to much of Africa, the Islamic World & large parts of Asia, leaving mass murder & misery in its wake.

In discussing Germany, she observes that the USA borrowed its idea of compulsory state education. She laments the fact that free and private education in America was abandoned. This is where she was perhaps unintentionally prophetic. The German model resulted in the sorry state of US education today, in both its failure to educate and the fact that academia - the humanities in particular - has become a lair of collectivist utopian thinking with a disastrous effect on society. Today its toxic infusions into the culture include irrational & evil philosophies like postmodernism & multiculturalism. Hatched in the universities, they are spread by the mass media.

Lane's optimistic vision of the future is of a living network linking all human beings in a dynamic interplay of free creative energies. In 2009 the prospects may not look good, but the reasons and explanation that she provides remain convincing. Freedom being the human being's natural state, once the concept has spread around the globe it can never be eradicated. The enemies of freedom fight back with deception but the only way they can win is by obliterating knowledge. The forces of sinisterism have caused much bloodshed in their struggle against freedom and will do so again. Ultimately, however, freedom will triumph around the globe. Human energy is variable & creative and the spark of individual liberty can never be extinguished.

[This is] a work that is so powerful it may well have launched the modern freedom movement. Originally published in 1943, Discovery had the impact of a lightening bolt, setting intellectual fires that burn brighter than ever among the modern intellectuals who are leading the growing assault on government control of our lives.

This is a book of timeless importance. It must be read by anyone who is seriously interested in the heritage of liberty--not just in America, but the world over. And reading it is a joy. Lane, who is said to have written the book 'at white heat,' was at once a brilliant thinker and a gifted storyteller.

This book is a withering attack on statism, nationalism, and what Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek calls the 'fatal conceit' of national economic planning. It is an intellectual tour de force that stood up to the collectivist paradigm of its time and pointed the way to rediscovering the principles of the American Revolution--a true revolution unlike those of the Old World that 'are revolutions only in the sense that a wheel's turning is a revolution.' Her exciting description of the revolutionary period (you can tell she wishes she'd been there to lend a hand to Paine, Mason, Jefferson and the gang) is the best of a brilliant book.

Rose Wilder Lane was a truly remarkable woman. Like Jefferson, she attacked life, living it to the fullest, as adventurer, journalist, world traveller, iconoclast, and just prior to her death, war corespondent in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, the clear-eyed determination and supercharged energy she brings to attacking the enemies of liberty in Discovery is unique among prominent proliberty writers.