This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 14th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Was the abolition of slavery a libertarian victory?

No one really used the word libertarian at the time, so it's at the very

least a difficult claim to measure. But the end of slavery did represent the heart of

libertarian thinking, that of self-ownership. Anthony Comegna assistant editor for

intellectual history at Libertarianism.org spoke with me last week.

As you understand it what would it mean for a historical victory, something like the abolition of slavery, for example, to be considered a victory of libertarian thinking?

Well, I mean, that is, in a way, a problematic question, but it's the sort of problematic

question that intellectual historians always have to deal with.

Because when you have a certain category in mind, you know, well, we forget that historians really

there isn't some ideal of the past out there for you to look at and see exactly what happened

exactly how and exactly what it means.

Historians really do that kind of work for us

by asking particular questions that interest them

from a particular point of view.

And then to some extent we do project that back into the past and use

our own current categories and ideas to guide our understanding of past events and

make them meaningful to us today.

So we use like a modern word to refer to something that may well have,

if that event had occurred in current times, we could clearly say this was a victory of this set of ideas and not that set of ideas even though the word that we're using was not common at the time.

Yes, and I mean you have to be very... using was not common at the time.

...