For once, Mayor Zohran Mamdani sounded like a classical liberal.
In a speech commemorating America’s 250th anniversary, New York City Mayor Mamdani spoke from City Hall, seated behind George Washington’s desk and flanked by newly naturalized citizens. He cast America as an unfinished moral project: a nation oscillating between betraying and redeeming its founding promise.
Despite his socialist leanings, Mamdani hit the nail on the head with one point in particular worth focusing on. Discussing American exceptionalism, Mamdani stated:
We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, and more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because, here, nothing is fixed into place.
Mamdani’s best line points toward an older liberal insight: America’s promise was not merely national greatness but the possibility of escape from inherited status.
Before the liberal revolutions and reform movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of human history was the story of fixed orders: lords and tenants, masters and servants, castes, guilds, inherited rank, ethnic hierarchies, and legal privileges attached to pedigree. The majority of people were born into a set place and expected to remain there for life. The promise of 1776 was that this old world of status could give way to a new world where nothing about a person’s life should be permanently fixed by birth, lineage, class, or ancestry.
Breaking this habit of submission became one of the central themes of nineteenth-century classical liberalism. Throughout his Principles of Sociology, Herbert Spencer described progress as a movement from “militant” societies, organized around war, command, hierarchy, and compulsory cooperation, toward “industrial” societies, built around peace, exchange, and voluntary association. In the former, individuals existed for the collective; in the latter, they increasingly became free persons whose place in society was determined less by inherited status than by talent, choice, and mutual agreement.
In his book Ancient Law, British jurist and historian Henry Sumner Maine gave this transformation a name, writing, “the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.” Maine used “progressive” in the older historical sense: societies capable of growth and legal development, not in the modern sense of being politically progressive.
In a status society, the individual is not first encountered as an independent moral agent, but as the bearer of an inherited station. Contract society reverses this. It treats the individual as prior to the role. It allows people to form relations by consent rather than prescription, to choose their associations rather than merely inherit them, and to alter the course of their lives rather than submit to a place assigned in advance.
The 19th-century American sociologist and follower of Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, gave this idea its sharpest American expression in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other:
A society based on contract is a society of free and independent men, who form ties without favor or obligation, and cooperate without cringing or intrigue. A society based on contract, therefore, gives the utmost room and chance for individual development, and for all the self-reliance and dignity of a free man.
Mayor Mamdani’s phrase, therefore, reaches deeper than he perhaps intended. “Nothing is fixed into place” is another way of saying that birth should not govern destiny, and that social life should be built around consent rather than command.
The society of contract is now so woven into ordinary life that we can barely comprehend how radically different our lives are from those of our ancestors. We choose our employers, our friends, our churches, our cities, our political allegiances, and even our romantic partners to a degree unimaginable to most people who came before us. We take for granted the idea that a person may march to the beat of his own drum, that there is no single fixed path, ordained station, or required form of life. Life is not a problem to be solved by submitting to one’s assigned place. It is a practical experiment in crafting one’s own existence day by day through liberty.
An anecdote about cowboys that my colleague Deirdre McCloskey often tells captures the moral revolution of contract society better than any abstract theory. In late nineteenth-century Wyoming, some wealthy British cattlemen brought with them the manners and assumptions of the old world. One English visitor, seeing a cowboy at work, reportedly asked where he could find the man’s “master.” The cowboy’s reply was: “He ain’t been born yet.”
The cowboy was not denying that he worked for someone, took wages, or entered into obligations. He was denying that employment made him a servant in the old sense. He had no master because he was not born into subordination. He was a free man in a contractual relation, not a fixed inferior in a hierarchy of rank.
But the same freedom that makes contract society morally revolutionary also makes it difficult to maintain. Today, the liberal idea of a society of contract is under attack from both directions. A world without fixed status is exhilarating but unsettling. If nothing is settled by birth, ancestry, class, sex, or inherited station, then people are left constantly anxious and grasping for where they stand and who they are.
That burden creates a permanent temptation to retreat from contract back into status. People begin to long for politics to tell them what they are owed and who counts as friends or enemies. The old world of assigned places begins to look comforting precisely because liberty leaves so much undecided and open-ended.
Some on the right respond to that anxiety by circling the wagons around immigration, birthright citizenship, and national identity, seeking to decide in advance who truly counts as American. Some on the left often open by attacking what they view as an unjust status but then try to remedy it by reintroducing official categories of identity, representation, and group entitlement backed by the state. Both temptations return us, by different roads, to a world in which the individual is once again governed by the group and status into which they were born.
In The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek understood that the old regime of inherited rank, legal privileges, and assigned social position was not merely a social prejudice or preference but a legal and political order directly opposed to classical liberalism:
The conception of status, of an assigned place that each individual occupies in society, corresponds, indeed, to a state in which the rules are not fully general but single out particular persons or groups and confer upon them special rights and duties.
That is why the return of status is so dangerous. It does not merely ask people to take pride in their inheritance, community, or identity. It asks the law to recognize those categories and attach consequences to them. Status returns whenever the government stops treating people as equal rights-bearing individuals and begins sorting them into official classes, each with its own claims and privileges.
Mayor Mamdani’s best insight was right for reasons his own politics cannot fully sustain. America is exceptional because its liberal promise is that birth should not become destiny.
Free market capitalism is the system in which nothing is fixed permanently in place. Status, wealth, occupation, and opportunity are all made contestable by competition, entrepreneurship, and free markets. That dynamism is precisely what has drawn generations of immigrants to America.
No one crosses an ocean, leaves behind family, and begins again in a foreign country because they dream of being managed by a socialist bureaucracy. They come because America has promised something radically different: a free society in which talent, work, risk, and ambition can translate into a better life. The free market does not guarantee success, but it makes success possible without requiring permission from the state.
To honor 1776 is not to freeze America in the past, nor to manage it into new hierarchies of status. It is to preserve the radical classical liberal idea at the heart of the American experiment: that no life should be fixed into place before it has been lived.
