Manchester School

("Classical Liberals")

 Newall's Buildings, Manchester; the headquarters of the Anti-Corn-Law League

The "Manchester School" was the term British politician Benjamin Disraeli used to refer to the 19th Century free trade movement in Great Britain.   The movement had its roots in the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL) of Richard Cobden and John Bright, headquartered in Newall's Buildings in Manchester, UK.

The British Corn Laws had been strengthened in 1815 to prohibit the importation of corn (i.e. wheat) until the home price became eighty shillings a quarter. More flexible Corn Laws were instituted in 1828 with a sliding scale of import duties rather than outright prohibition.  Although beneficial to landlords, the Corn Laws were detrimental to the populations in the cities, faced with higher food costs, and, consequently, industrial manufacturers, faced with higher wage bills and restricted foreign trade possibilities. The ACLL was thus set up in 1836 by Cobden and Bright and, by 1846, had successfully had them repealed by Parliament.

Since then,  the general term "Manchester School" has been used to refer to radical liberalism/libertarianism in economic policy: laissez-faire, free trade, government withdrawal from the economy, and an optimistic stress on the "harmonious" effects of free enterprise capitalism.  As a result, the school's nature is largely "political" rather than purely "economic".   Its arguments are not necessarily couched in any particular economic theory.  Certainly in the early part of the 19th Century, its governing principles were those of the Classical Ricardian School, but even then they did not shy from using intuitive supply-and-demand arguments a la Adam Smith. 

As the 19th Century progressed, classical liberalism increased in influence.  Although in Britain it never quite dominated academia, it was particularly influential through the medium of famous journals and newspapers such as Walter Bagehot's The Economist.  It had counterparts in the French Liberal School, founded by Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Dunoyer and Frédéric Bastiat and, in America, under Henry C. Carey and Francis Amasa Walker.

The bloodbath of World War I and the subsequent economic crises shook the faith of Europeans in the liberal bourgeois-capitalist order.  Liberalism reached its lowest period of influence in the inter-war period, as nation after nation embraced socialist planning and Fascist corporatism as better ways of organizing economy and society.  The decline of liberalism continued on after World War II, during the period of the "Keynesian" consensus and the rise of development planning. 

Nonetheless, throughout this time, the liberal flame was kept alive in public discourse by popular economists and statesmen such as John Jewkes, Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, Luigi Einaudi  Friedrich A. von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, James Buchanan and organizations such as the Mont Pelerin Society.  Things changed considerably in the 1980s, when "neo-liberalism" began to gain sway among policymakers in America and Europe.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the consensus quickly came full circle.  With varying degrees of success, liberal policy doctrines have been exported not only to ex-socialist nations of Eastern Europe but have been taken on board by many developing nations.  Today, liberalism is at the height of its influence on public policy, having regained much of the ground that it lost since the late 19th Century.  

The "Manchester School": British Liberalism

American Liberalism

Continental Liberalism 

20th Century Liberalism

Resources on the Manchester School and Libertarianism

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