A genuine Australian political classic.(Liberty and Liberalism)(Book Review)

Liberty and Liberalism, by Bruce Smith; Centre for Independent Studies, 2005, $59.95.

BRUCE SMITH might be an unprepossessing name but it was held by one of the outstanding intellectuals of Australian history. If the recent republication of Smith's major work, Liberty and Liberalism, has the impact it deserves, his name might finally be rescued from the disregard it has suffered for more than a century.

Liberty and Liberalism was originally published in separate editions in Australia and England in 1887. It was a big book dedicated to the defence of classical, Adam Smith liberalism in both politics and economics. It was written at a time when liberalism was under pressure to abandon the philosophy of free markets in favour of a much greater role for government in the economy. The shift from the politics of the small state to the big state took place concurrently throughout the English-speaking world, provoking critiques from traditional liberal intellectuals everywhere, but Smith's book was the best of them.

Today, its arguments are so in tune with the revival of classical liberal economics in our own time that it is enjoying a publishing revival. Last year its full text was published on the internet by the Liberty Fund of the USA. Now, a new edition has been published in book form by the Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney, with an introduction by historian Greg Melleuish.

Until now, the book has been almost entirely forgotten in its author's own country. The unsympathetic entry on Smith in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes Liberty and Liberalism as "massive and anachronistic" and portrays its author as an extremist: "He remained a doctrinaire extreme laissez-faire free trader, becoming increasingly anti-socialist in the 1900s."

It is wrong to call the book anachronistic since it was very much in tune with its times. From the 1880s to the 1900s, the major political parties in the Australian parliaments were the Free Traders and Protectionists, with Sydney identified as the home of free trade and Melbourne the centre of protectionism. In the 1890s and early 1900s, even Labour representatives in parliament were themselves split between these competing philosophies.

It was not until 1905, when Alfred Deakin became Prime Minister with Labour support on a platform of industry protectionism, centralised wage fixing and White Australia--what Paul Kelly has called "the Australian settlement"--that Smith's brand of traditional liberalism was relegated to political oblivion.