Philadelphia Society conference on charity
From charity to ‘compassion.’ (Philadelphia Society conference on charity)
FROM CHARITY TO `COMPASSION’
I will tell you a Philadelphia Society secret: reporters are not allowed at its national meetings. There are always a couple of NATIONAL REVIEW editors present, but nobody thinks we qualify. So, the rule is kept, yet once a year you get some report of this most pleasant and fertile of conservative gatherings.
And an NR trade secret: the job is rotated informally among the editors, partly to keep a fresh outlook, mostly to see if anyone can think up something new to say about the unvarying meeting routine, which is as familiar and comfy as cotton. I’m not even going to try.
What is ever fresh and fascinating is the ground covered. The more so this year, because the subject lent itself to such sharp, factual focus: “Charity, Philanthropy, and the Welfare State.” Most of the speakers were either in the front lines of research or in the last redoubts of a true charitable impulse for organized philanthropy. Veterans, with scars to prove it. The picture that emerged was so widely agreed upon I’ll try to summarize it before taking up individual contributions.
Irving Kristol titled his keynote remarks, “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.” This gloomy title introduced an appropriately bleak view of institutional philanthropy today that was echoed, refined, and elaborated by other speakers. Some in the audience thought this view too pessimistic in details. But no one, either speaker or auditor, was willing to say that things go well in the non-profit establishment.
Not long ago, the shining hope of non-profit enterprise was to foster independence: to compete, as it were, with government’s misguided do-goodism, which only turns its “beneficiaries” into dependent wards of the state. But all this has been turned upside down, said Kristol. Institutions that were supposed to rescue us from the worst of welfarism–churches, philanthropies, higher education, especially the tax-exempt general-purpose foundations–developed an insatiable affinity for the state and a hunger to serve its purposes. What we get is a whole class of what Kristol bitingly called “professional altruists”–the irony will be lost on the Left–feeding Moloch.
What is the purpose of philanthropy? The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, as Forrest McDonald reminded us, said that the highest form of philanthropy is to help one’s fellow man stand on his own. Present-day “philanthropic” institutions invert this and recreate serfdom.
Older charities were based on the Christian vision of a city on a hill. Wealth was not sought for its own sake but to foster virtue, family, and community. Charities had the philosophy, “No relief given here!” Instead, they worked toward such self-help institutions as day nurseries, libraries, and savings banks.
This vision weakened after the Civil War as religious belief waned and industrialism boomed. What came in, with an assist from Marxist group-think, was the idea of social insurance, followed inevitably by the idea of entitlement. The philanthropist’s gift became the recipient’s right. With this inversion, the seeds of the welfare state are firmly planted. But in the process, a welfare class is created, dependent as well as parasitic, and the charitable impulse is taken away from the involuntary giver.
Concurrently, the focused charity gave way to the general-purpose foundation. Professional managers, guided by “science” instead of philanthropy, allocated foundation funds to the social agenda. The philanthropists’ original purpose is almost always distorted or even perverted.
Moreover, the big foundations turn their statist lust into potent leverage in tax dollars. For every dollar they spend setting up the outlines of a liberal program, they may squeeze twenty or fifty dollars out of taxpayers.
In a word, the non-profit sector belongs almost exclusively to the liberals and the Left. Even business goes along: 70 per cent of corporate donations go to left-wing groups. Nineteen of the top 25 corporate donors support radical feminist groups, and many now support gays and lesbians. The “philanthropic” network aggrandizes government, attacks the market, and works to subvert the American system. Yet it is the market that promotes private charity–and, of course, provides the resources–and the state that chokes it.
A generalized view like this cannot convey either nuance or the richness of detail the speakers offered. In the little space that remains, I would like at least to make introductions, and mention a few more specialized arguments. And assure you that, however bleak the prognosis, the meeting could not have been more good-humored and cheerful.
Forrest McDonald opened the Friday evening keynote session by refusing to introduce Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and discussing the history of philanthropy from potlatch to the constitutional meanings of the three-point shot in basketball. Well, that’s close.
Nothing new at the members’ breakfast meeting the next morning except that the Treasurer actually used two (albeit rounded and vague) numbers in discussing Society finances. One may infer that the financial picture has improved.
The Saturday morning session, titled “Charity, Welfare, and the State,” was chaired by William Campbell (now at Heritage) and featured Allan Carlson of the Rockford Institute, Eric Mack of Tulane, Les Lenkowsky of the Institute for Educational Affairs, and James Gwartney of Florida State. Professor Gwartney’s argument, being specialized, was shortchanged above, but was one of the most interesting offered. Namely, that income transfer has done very little to help the poor and, in theory, never can. Whatever you have to do to get the benefit defeats its purpose. If, say, you have to stand in line to get a government check, the line will be exactly long enough to reduce the value of standing there to zero. Or, if you have to be poor to get the check, the law will be that you have to stay poor to keep getting it–and there you are, trapped. Moreover, the marginal tax rate on escaping the trap is terrible. And so it goes. The transfer is capitalized in terms of entry costs, and disappears.
Luncheon speaker Charles Lichenstein is a man of courage and humor. It was he, you recall, serving with Jeane Kirkpatrick at the UN, who told the UN whiners that if they didn’t like it here, he’d be delighted to escort them to (and off) the pier. Ta-ta. He needed both resources to address a gathering split into two dining rooms, one served by a video gadget and also, oddly, having much the younger audience. Mr. Lichenstein made the most of it, and if he ever abandons the government-UN-Heritage circuit in favor of gainful employment, he’ll be a natural at the comedy club.
But he was of serious purpose in his remarks on the Ford Foundation. Ford, he said, practically invented arms control, and was busy putting termites in the woodwork as early as 1952. They are still feeding. The effect of arms control is always to disarm the good guy while the bad guy prepares for war. Similarly, public TV and radio are the product of Ford, which even helped develop the first PBS communications satellite. For its own relatively modest cost, it is extracting millions in taxes and corporate donations to finance the “principal transmission belt of [the] dominant liberal culture.”
Willa Johnson chaired the first afternoon session, “Charitable Giving and Social Change.” The speakers were Stanley Rothman of Smith College; Ernest Lefever of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Marvin Olasky of the University of Texas; and Michael Joyce of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. As outlined above, they all argued vividly that the “social change” discussed was for the worse.
Frank O’Connell chaired the last session, which was given over to the professionals in conservative foundations; they are so few in number that most were represented here. The subject was “The Role of Philanthropy in a Free Society.” The speakers were W. W. Hill of the Liberty Fund; James Piereson of the John M. Olin Foundation; Robert Russell, management consultant; and Donald Coxe, an NR associate, representing the Donner Canadian Foundation. What was interesting in this segment was the unanimity of purpose. The founders of these philanthropies were all businessmen concerned about the encroachments of government not only into the market but into the charitable act. They had in common also education in classical teachings, and a clear understanding of where the trends they saw would lead. So these few, at least, took great precautions that their philanthropy would be rightly used. It has been. The present managers, sharing both these ideals and these understandings, have preserved what is left of genuine philanthropy.
Meeting adjourned–but by no means over. There was an optional dinner meeting Saturday night, and another for Sunday breakfast. And of course friends to yak with and Chicago spots to visit and all the sense of reunion until next year’s meeting in–Philadelphia. Do you suppose it will be the Chicago Society meeting there?
| Author: | Wheeler, Timothy J. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | National Review |
| Date: | Aug 5, 1988 |
Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought
Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought.
THE DREAM WALKS AGAIN
As the Reagan Presidency enters its final months, a specter is haunting conservatives: the specter of a return to the wilderness. Whether the next occupant of the White House be an unreconstructed McGovernite from Massachusetts or the incumbent Vice President from Texas, increasing numbers of conservatives fear that the new Administration will not be theirs and that political initiative in the Nineties will return to their foes on the Left. Like aging New Dealers after the passing of Franklin Roosevelt, anxious Reaganites have begun to lament that the euphoria of 1981 may not recur in their lifetimes.
The mounting restiveness in conservatives’ ranks transcends their immediate political prospects. As the unifying and invigorating struggles of the early 1980s recede from consciousness, disturbing signs of sectarianism have begun to afflict an always multifarious movement. Spreading, too, among older conservative leaders is the unsettling conviction that far too many “third generation” activists are insufficiently grounded in the historical and philosophical sources of their beliefs. Thus the Heritage Foundation has instituted graduate-level seminars for young rightists on such topics as “Classics of Twentieth-Century Conservatism”–surely an unusual project for a public-policy think tank to undertake. Thus the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has revived its summer-school program for college students–and has been overwhelmed by the response.
Meanwhile evidence accumulates that Academe, never very hospitable to conservative intellectuals and their world view, is becoming even more antagonistic. What do conservatives stand for if not the preservation of the best in Western civilization? And yet, this spring, in a decision of devastating symbolism, one of the trend-setting universities in the country abandoned its required “Western Culture” course for freshmen, and replaced it with something called “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” Dropping many Western classics from the reading list, the new course will instead emphasize “cultural diversity” and “cultural interaction”–as if the best way for students to learn more about other cultures is to learn less about their own. As the American academy shows increasing signs of sclerosis, the need becomes more imperative to develop alternative means by which at least a Remnant may be educated.
At this critical juncture in the nation’s political and intellectual journey, it is singularly fitting that William F. Buckley Jr. has compiled an anthology of modern American conservative thought, with the able assistance of Charles R. Kesler, a frequent contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW. Although officially a revised edition of American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (published in 1970), the volume at hand is essentially new. Less than one-third of the material appearing in the 1970 edition is reprinted here, enabling the editors to assemble a fresh, updated, and, in Kesler’s words, “representative selection of the best of American conservative thought.”
Usually, when one inspects an anthology, a few of its components seem marginal. Not here: every one of this hefty volume’s 26 selections truly belongs. Here one finds seminal essays and excerpts from books by such luminaries of the post-1945 conservative renaissance as Richard Weaver, Friedrich Hayek, James Burnham, Milton Friedman, and Russell Kirk. Here, too, are generous samplings from some of the Right’s leading political philosophers (Strauss, Voegelin, Kendall, and Jaffa, among others), as well as such influential younger thinkers as Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, and George Will. The neoconservative impulse is represented by Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick (although not, oddly enough, by Irving Kristol). And topping off the confection are sublime and moving contributions by Whittaker Chambers and Albert Jay Nock.
Reading this impressive collection prompts many thoughts. First, one is struck anew by the philosophic introspection, literary breadth, and historical learning of most of the contributors. As their frequent and unforced allusions to ancient and modern figures attest, these are individuals who are genuinely at home in Western civilization. For them our heritage matters; it can teach. One wonders whether an anthology of modern liberal thought would disclose the same attributes in such abundance.
Moreover, while some of the essays in the Buckley/Kesler volume are polemical, and nearly all are marked by certitude that the West’s very survival is at stake, entirely absent from these pages are the rancor and shrillness that one associates with ideologues. One does not detect here the pent-up bitterness that seems to drive so many of conservatism’s enemies on the Left.
Keeping the Tablets is more than a timely compendium of estimable writings, however. As part of its scholarly apparatus, Buckley has reprinted “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” (his introduction to the 1970 edition). In it he recounts some of the treacherous intellectual shoals through which the good ship NATIONAL REVIEW navigated in its early years. His essay contains an important lesson in prudence.
Charles Kesler’s introduction is differently focused and more ambitious. After identifying the principal intellectual components of the conservative Grand Alliance, he addresses the disconcerting fact that, for all its recent victories and hard-won status, American conservatism “cannot claim to be successful.” A former student (and now a colleague) of Harry Jaffa at Claremont McKenna College, Kesler contends that conservatism has fallen short because it “has not yet learned the vernacular of American politics”–above all, the teaching of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” According to Kesler, too many conservatives have denied “the first principles of the American founding” and have permitted liberals to pervert the Declaration’s true meaning. Thus Kesler has fired a new salvo in one of the longest-running internal battles on the American Right.
Not surprisingly, the contents of Keeping the Tablets to some degree reflect Kesler’s desire to remedy what he sees as conservatism’s deficiencies. More than the 1970 edition, the volume at hand deliberately emphasizes the continuing intellectual fissures on the Right–in order, says Kesler, “to spur the rethinking and crystallization of conservatism’s first principles.” Thus, for example, Willmoore Kendall’s strictures on Abraham Lincoln and the equality principle are immediately followed by Harry Jaffa’s rejoinder. In a subtle way this anthology attempts not just to represent modern conservatism but to further its self-definition.
Needless to say, many readers of NATIONAL REVIEW will not be persuaded by Kesler’s diagnosis and will be quick to propound other explanations for conservatism’s tenuous ascendancy. But in one sense, at least, his point clearly seems well taken: if conservatives are to prevail in the public arena, they must speak in recognizably American terms. Surely the ability to do this accounts in part for the success of postwar conservatism’s most popular political embodiment, Ronald Reagan, and his continuing hold on America’s affections. Whatever its limitations, his rhetoric and vocabulary are undeniably indigenous–hence comprehensible by everyday people leading everyday, untheoretical lives.
Indeed, after reading Buckley and Kesler’s volume one has precisely this wish: that it somehow could have been even longer and have incorporated more essays in applied conservatism–conservatism accessible to grassroots America. Of all the contributions to this volume, only Joseph Sobran’s “The Abortion Culture” discusses the religious and social issues that have mobilized millions and made possible the Reagan Presidency. Similarly, no contributor confronts head-on the two most revolutionary intellectual currents of our era: feminism and environmentalism. Both have had far more impact on American law and mores than postwar conservatism so far has–a matter worth sober reflection.
How one wishes also that there had been room for the now-classic essay “Goodbye to All That” by the ex-New Leftists Peter Collier and David Horowitz. And if conservatism be best understood in contrast to its principal domestic adversary, one wishes that the editors could have stretched their volume to include James Burnham’s unforgettable dissection of secular liberalism in Chapter 15 of Suicide of the West.
But all anthologies necessarily have their limits. As it happened, the editors of this one were obliged to drop eight essays from their final selection. In any case, this reader’s yearning for even more delectables on the menu does not diminish the feast put before us. Keeping the Tablets is indeed just that: a veritable picnic spread of wisdom and purposive scholarship.
Contemplating its varied riches reminds us of one thing more. The conservative intellectual movement since 1945 has become in a way like a hand, comprising five separate yet associated digits: traditionalist, libertarian, anti-Communist, neoconservative, and New Right. If any one of these is severed and removed, or tries to function to the exclusion of others, the hand as a whole loses effectiveness.
In this season of conservative discontent, then, as the American Right gropes for its compass, those within it who seek to rediscover their heritage now have an excellent place to begin. Buckley and Kesler deserve our thanks–and our readership.
| Author: | Nash, George H. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | National Review |
| Article Type: | Book Review |
| Date: | Aug 5, 1988 |
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Keeping+the+Tablets:+Modern+American+Conservative+Thought-a06542234
Frank Chodorov: Champion of Liberty
Frank Chodorov: Champion of Liberty
By Aaron Steelman
Mr. Steelman is a staff writer at the Cato Institute.
December 28, 1996, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Frank Chodorov, one of the giants of the American Old Right. It seems appropriate to look back at his life and career, not only to pay homage, but also to rediscover some of the fundamental insights he brought to the fore in his many books, articles, and speeches.
Frank Chodorov had a profound influence on the postwar American Right. Murray N. Rothbard, William F. Buckley Jr., James J. Martin, and many other exponents of the free market have cited Chodorov’s work as vital to the formation of their worldviews. Indeed, Buckley once said, It is quite unlikely that I should have pursued a career as a writer but for the encouragement he gave me just after I graduated from Yale.[1]
Born in New York City in 1887, Chodorov graduated from Columbia University in 1907, and spent the next 30 years working in a variety of jobs, including a stint as an advertising representative and running a clothing factory. From four to seven years was about all I could take of any occupation throughout my life. I went at each job I undertook with verve, mastered it and when it became routine I lost interest and went looking forsomething else, Chodorov wrote in his 1962 autobiography, Out of Step.[2]
Besides working in various fields, Chodorov read widely in the literature of liberty, and was particularly impressed by the work of Henry David Thoreau, Albert Jay Nock, and Henry George. By the time he was offered, and accepted, the directorship of the Henry George School of Social Science in 1937, he counted himself firmly within the classical liberal tradition.
For the first time—at the age of 50—his position afforded him an opportunity to write and speak widely on the issues of the day and to spread the anti-statist gospel. He and his students started a school publication, The Freeman, borrowing the name from the then-defunct journal Nock had edited in the 1920s. In its pages Chodorov found his ultimate calling: journalism with an intensely personal, individualist flair.
Chodorov pulled no punches in his many articles for The Freeman. He viewed the state as the greatest threat to individual liberty and human happiness. In the tradition of Cobden, Bright, and Nock, he did not limit his disdain for the use of state power to domestic actions; he feared the state’s ability to conscript its citizens and use them to wage war as much as, if not more than, he did its ability to control the economy. This intellectual consistency eventually gained Chodorov many devoted followers but, for the time being, it attracted some important opponents. In The Freeman I took delight in attacking the New Deal and Mr. Roosevelt, mainly on economic grounds. That went well until Mr. Roosevelt started preparing the country for war, in 1939. Prudence should have prompted me to avoid the war issue, but prudence was never one of my virtues, and I continued to hammer away at the war measures right up to Pearl Harbor.[3] The school’s board regarded his principled and steadfast opposition to American involvement in the war as too controversial and too frightening to potential donors and, therefore, relieved Chodorov of his duties in 1942.
Fulfillment of a Dream
Following his dismissal, Chodorov looked for a new medium for spreading his ideas. The result was his creation of analysis, which he later called the most gratifying venture of my life. An unpretentious four-page broadsheet published from 1944 to 1951, analysis was hard-hitting and uncompromising, just like The Freeman. Unlike The Freeman, however, analysis did not actively solicit articles from outside writers; nearly every issue was written entirely by Chodorov.
In an early promotional letter to would-be subscribers, Chodorov summed up his paper’s editorial position concisely and accurately:
. . . analysis . . . stands for free trade, free land and the unrestricted employment of capital and labor. Its economics stem from Adam Smith and Henry George.
. . . analysis goes along with Albert Jay Nock in asserting that the State is our enemy, that its administrators and beneficiaries are a professional criminal class, and interprets events accordingly. It is radical, not reformist.
In short, analysis looks at the current scene through the eyeglass of historic liberalism, unashamedly accepting the doctrine of natural rights, proclaims the dignity of the individual and denounces all forms of Statism as human slavery.[4]
In issue after issue of analysis, Chodorov kept the flame of the anti-statist, antiwar cause burning during some of classical liberalism’s darkest nights. He approached myriad topics from the same perspective: voluntary, peaceful actions are moral and productive and should be encouraged; coercive actions are immoral and should be condemned. As both an anti-statist committed to individual liberty as a great moral ideal and a social scientist examining past events objectively and empirically, Chodorov was a formidable and prescient critic.
The Ratchet Effect Theory
For example, in the 1940s Chodorov hit upon the ratchet effect theory to explain the growth of government, thereby setting the stage for some of the most incisive and probing work by classical liberals in the decades to come. In the August 1950 issue of analysis, he wrote: All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates. Note how the `emergency’ taxes of World War II have hardened into permanent fiscal policy. While a few of the more irritating war agencies were dropped, others were enlarged, under various pretexts, and the sum total is more intervention and more interveners than we suffered before 1939.[5]
In a pamphlet distributed by Human Events, he struck a similar chord, using the ratchet effect theory to explain the rise of direct taxation in the United States:
When war or the need of ameliorating mass poverty strains the purse of the state to the limit, and further indirect impositions are impossible or threaten social unrest, the opposition must give way. The state never relinquishes entirely the prerogatives it acquires during an emergency, and so, after a series of wars and depressions direct taxation became a fixture of our fiscal policy, and those upon whom it falls must content themselves to whittling down the levies or trying to transfer them from shoulder to shoulder.[6]
On education, Chodorov was ahead of his time, developing a radical critique of government schooling long before the so-called school choice or voucher movement got on its feet many years later. To Chodorov, it was no surprise that students were receiving subpar educations at government schools. As he saw it, the purpose of the public school was not to educate children, but to turn them into good citizens—schooled in the ways of the democratic system and taught that they were the government despite the obvious absurdity of such a claim. By controlling the schools, the state could control, to a large degree, the minds of future generations, thereby limiting the possibility of dissent.
In Chodorov’s mind, the only solution to the education problem was to separate schooling completely from politics: If we would reform our education system basically, we must desocialize it. We must put it back where it belongs, in the hands of parents. Theirs is the responsibility for the breeding of children, and theirs is the responsibility for the upbringing. The first error of public schooling is the shifting of this responsibility, the transformation of the children of men into wards of the state.[7]
Editing analysis brought great joy to Chodorov, but the journal was financially shaky. At its peak in 1951, it had no more than 4,000 subscribers. Edmund Opitz recalls that Chodorov was pouring so much of his own money into his enterprise that he was sustaining himself on one meal a day.[8] In 1951 analysis was merged with Human Events, a Washington-based publication founded in 1944 by Felix Morley, Frank Hanighen, and Henry Regnery. Chodorov became an associate editor at Human Events and stayed there until 1954, when Leonard Read chose him to edit a revamped version of The Freeman, which Irvington Press (a subsidiary of FEE) had recently purchased.
The Later Years
By the early 1950s, Chodorov was already well established as an individualist writer of the highest quality. In his view, the movement he had helped to preserve and shape in the 1940s was not conservative; it was individualist.[9] He was disturbed by the growing influence of a system of thought he viewed as fundamentally majoritarian in nature. The new conservatism of Russell Kirk, Walter Berns, and Harry Jaffa did not in any way resemble the historic liberalism that Chodorov and other prominent Old Right figures held dear. This new strain of thought held that unbridled individualism, not an omnipotent federal state, posed the greatest threat to the social order. Moreover, Jaffa and company believed that the Soviet Union placed the United States in imminent danger and that decisive federal action was needed to thwart Soviet expansion.
Over the next ten years, Chodorov spent as much time trying to check this new brand of conservatism as he did refuting the myths and dogmas of the Left. In Chodorov’s mind, only individuals themselves could, and should, make all relevant personal decisions. To rely on the vague notion of the community to make such decisions, as Kirk and others urged, was to subjugate the individual to the collective, and this subjugation was to be avoided at all costs.
The Cold War
Chodorov’s unwavering defense of individualism and the minimal state also led to clashes with other American rightists regarding foreign policy. By the late 1950s, most conservatives agreed that noninterventionism no longer constituted a viable option; Soviet power was so immense and threatening that the United States needed to prosecute another expensive war, the Cold War. Chodorov balked. The Soviets, he argued, were a threat to the United States only if Americans allowed them to be. The real danger was not that the Soviet Union would conquer the United States militarily but that in the name of a strong national defense, the United States would take actions that would thoroughly collectivize the nation—this time, for good. Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States.[10] For these reasons, he called the Cold War a war to communize America.
In a brilliant essay on Isolationism, Chodorov once again stated his position for those who had ignored it the first time. He believed that isolationism was not only the type of foreign policy that kept the state to a manageable size, but also the one compatible with the makeup of human beings. It is in the nature of the human being to be interested first, in himself, and secondly, in his neighbors. To ask someone in Michigan, for example, to be interested in the affairs and political stability of Tennessee is slightly unreasonable; to ask that same person to be interested in the affairs of a far-off Latin American country is simply absurd.
For Chodorov, a noninterventionist foreign policy was incompatible with protectionism or a restrictionist stand on immigration. Noninterventionism restricted the power of the state; tariffs and immigration quotas expanded it. Noninterventionism, free trade, and open borders belonged in the same package. To accept one part of the package while rejecting the others was not only to give in to the state, but to flirt with nativism. In chastising the America First Committee’s defense of trade and immigration restrictions, he wrote:
One flaw in their program was a tendency toward protectionism; the anti-involvement became identified with Buy American slogans and with high tariffs; that is, with economic, rather than political, isolationism. Economic isolationism—tariffs, quotas, embargoes and general governmental interference with international trade—is an irritant that can well lead to war, or political interventionism. To build a trade wall around a country is to invite reprisals, which in turn make for misunderstanding and mistrust. Besides, free trade carries with it an appreciation of the cultures of the trading countries, and a feeling of good will among the peoples engaged. Free trade is natural, protectionism is political.[11]
Chodorov also parted company with most of the conservative movement regarding big business. Unlike many of his colleagues, Chodorov did not hold a romantic view of corporate America; and he certainly did not agree with Ayn Rand’s belief that big business is America’s most persecuted minority. Instead he saw big business as all too willing to compromise with big government, producing a disastrous result for most Americans. In this way, he foreshadowed the arguments made by William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko in the 1960s. Chodorov argued that in America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx’s prophecies. Beguiled by the state’s siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism.[12] And to abandon capitalism was to abandon the very system necessary for the preservation of individual liberty and the attainment of human happiness.
Despite Chodorov’s differences with many on the Right—and there were a number of significance—he maintained a position of prominence even after he left The Freeman in 1955. This was largely because of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), which he founded with Buckley in 1953 and continued to oversee until his death in 1966.[13] ISI was the first large free-market organization to focus its efforts on influencing college students. Its goal was to be an effective antidote to the well-organized Intercollegiate Society of Socialists. It attempted to accomplish its mission by distributing free-market books and pamphlets to interested students, sponsoring classical liberal speakers on the campuses, and organizing discussion clubs. By the early 1960s, more than 40,000 students had taken part in its programs.
ISI was an important part of Chodorov’s strategic program for turning back the tide of statism. Having tired of attempts to directly influence the political process (he did not vote after 1912), Chodorov became convinced that the only way the individualist tradition could be saved was by spreading classical liberal ideas among young people, who would one day be the opinion-shapers. Students, he believed, could be influenced and, thus, attention should be directed toward them. What the socialists have done can be undone, if there is a will for it. But, the undoing will not be accomplished by trying to destroy established institutions. It can be accomplished only by attacking minds, and not the minds of those already hardened by socialistic fixations. Individualism can be revived by implanting the ideas in the minds of the coming generations. . . . It is, in short, a fifty-year project.[14]
Unfortunately, Chodorov did not have 50 years left to see what would come of his prediction. He suffered a stroke in 1961 while teaching at Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School in Colorado. The stroke limited his activity sharply, and his output dwindled continuously until his death five years later. Yet, in many ways, his work had already been accomplished. He had done more than his part to ensure that the great American tradition of individualism would not die—at the hands of either the socialists or the growing legion of conservatives who saw little value in the ideals of classical liberalism. And he had built upon the intellectual foundations of this tradition himself, adding many keen and original insights.
As libertarians continue to wage an intellectual war against the omnipotent state, they would be wise to consult Frank Chodorov’s writings. For as William F. Buckley Jr. has said, everybody is bound to benefit from exposure to his purist and dogged battle against institutionalized power, and the case he weaves for the presumptive denial to the central government of every additional BTU it asks for.[15]
1. Cited in George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 380.
2. Frank Chodorov, Out of Step: The Autobiography of An Individualist (New York: Devin-Adair, 1962), p. 75.
5. Charles H. Hamilton, ed., Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1980), p. 363.
6. Frank Chodorov, Human Events Pamphlet Number 15, Taxation is Robbery (Chicago: Human Events Associates, 1947), p. 9.
9. In a 1956 letter to National Review, Chodorov stated: As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical. Cited in Hamilton, p. 29.
10. In Chodorov’s mind, the Soviet Union was not a viable experiment; it would eventually implode. Thus, the United States didn’t need to wage an activist battle against it. As he liked to state: Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids. To him, the Soviet Union was in the process of making a number of pyramids, while neglecting the production of things that sustain a society.
13. ISI was renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute after Chodorov’s death and remains in operation to this day.
15. William F. Buckley Jr., Nay-Sayer to the Power-Hungry, National Review, December 4, 1962, p. 447.
http://www.fee.org/Publications/the-Freeman/article.asp?aid=4691
We should study conservatism in schools
We Should Study Conservatism In Schools
It’s high time Americans start learning about the conservative movement. For whatever reason, we can identify feminists, Islamists, environmentalists, abolitionists–but very few of us know that conservatism, a coherent ideological movement, even exists. For example, when you open up the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition and look up “progressivism,” you get:
In U.S. history, a broadly based reform movement that reached its height early in the 20th cent.
Yet when you look up conservatism, there is no mention of the conservative movement:
In politics, the desire to maintain, or conserve, the existing order. … By the 20th cent. Conservatism was being redirected by erstwhile liberal manufacturing and professional groups who had achieved many of their political aims and had become more concerned with preserving them from attack by groups not so favored.
No mention of the American political and intellectual movement that has a distinctive philosophy, infrastructure, and policy preferences–and whose thirty-year ascendance (after twenty years in the wilderness) has been one of the defining events of the late 20th century.
As Sean Wilentz notes in this week’s issue of TNR, the conservative era has been longer than the eras of “either Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, longer than the Gilded Age or the Progressive Era, and as long as the period of liberal reform that stretched from the rise of the New Deal to the demise of the Great Society.” Yet we don’t learn about it in high schools, and seldom–if ever–in college history courses.
This puts the American left–and indeed, the American public–at a disadvantage, because it leads fair-minded people to assume conservatives are basically just people with bowties or people who like guns (or both)–rather than a serious, rather militant ideological movement to be understood and reckoned with.
This is partially the result of inertia. High school history books, for example, are often loathe to discuss contemporary issues. (Although my twin sisters’ 10th grade textbooks certainly mentioned neoconservatism.)
It’s also partially the result of ingrained liberal perceptions. Most liberal thought arose in opposition to entrenched business and political interests, so it’s easy to assume modern conservatism is simply another manifestation of the same.
Finally, it’s Russell Kirk’s fault. His book, The Conservative Mind, tries to establish a genealogy for modern conservatism that stretches back to Edmund Burke and T.S. Eliot–much in the way that the Mormon Church posthumously insists Shakespeare was indeed a Mormon. This gives off the misimpression that modern conservatism is simply a cautious cast of mind, no different from the conservatism of Burke or Eliot.
Yet American conservatism actually has nothing to do with Burke, other than drawing street cred off his deceased personage. The conservative movement began with William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and Russell Kirk himself during the 1950s, in a magazine called National Review–and it was revolutionary, bombastic, and eager to overhaul American society, not Burkean. Unfortunately, whenever anyone does try to read up about the conservative movement, he is inevitably handed Kirk’s book–along, perhaps, with a copy of Patrick Buchanan’s A Republic, Not An Empire, or something similarly misleading–and hustled off to learn nothing about his intended subject.
It’s a pathetic state of affairs. In political matters, an uneducated citizenry is as good as defenseless–and on this issue, it would seem that Americans are, and continue to remain, uneducated.
Update: Some commenters are asking for a recommended basic text. George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement In America Since 1945 is the authoritative one.
May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time?
May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time?
By Russell Kirk
The Heritage Foundation
Lecture #377
Lecture given: December 11, 1991
(published at 7 pages)
This year my Heritage lectures have been concerned with American political errors during the closing decade of the twentieth century — errors of the Republican party, of the Democratic party, and general blunders in foreign relations. This evening, ladies and gentlemen, I conclude my lecture series for Anno Domini 1991 with some desultory remarks on the possibility of redemption from error — and, in particular, whether our rising generation in these United States may find it possible to “redeem the time, redeem the dream” — to borrow T.S. Eliot’s line.
First, a few words about this concept “generation.” To generate is to beget; to bring into existence. In popular usage we mean by a generation a large number of persons brought into existence about the same time; in the same year, perhaps, or possibly in the same decade. Thomas Jefferson promulgated the somewhat vague concept of every “generation” of people making its own choices; of the generation of the living not binding the generation which soon would come into existence.
Yet, this notion cannot be sustained logically or pragmatically. For really there exists no line of demarcation parting alleged generations of men and women. Every minute, as I address you, babies are being born somewhere; and during the same minutes, old people are dying in every land.
Actually, society is an intricate continuity of lives, not a mere succession of human beings resembling the flies of a summer, generation unable to link with generation. It is possible for me to say truthfully that six generations of my family have lived in our house at the village of Mecosta, in Michigan; but those alleged “generations” have much overlapped; at no time over the past twelve decades has only a single generation lived in our family home. The notion of distinct generations, then, each generation monopolizing the earth during its brief span of existence, is merely a convenient fiction.
Nevertheless, we employ that useful fiction frequently, particularly with reference to literary and political movements. Thus Spaniards refer to the “Generation of ‘98,” made up of literary movers and shakers whose convictions were formed at the time of Spain’s naval and military defeats that caused the loss of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Thus, in Britain, Wyndham Lewis referred to the “men of 1914″ — certain innovating writers who began to appear in print about the beginning of the First World War: Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and Lewis himself. And thus, a very few years ago, here at The Heritage Foundation, Mr. Ben Hart introduced the concept of three generations of American conservatives that have exercised influence since the late 1940s, say. Tonight, I address especially the third of those hypothetical generations.
By the First Generation, I take it, Mr. Hart means men and women of politics and letters who began to come to public attention about the end of the ‘Forties and the beginning of the ‘Fifties; who, most of them, had grown aware of the sunken state of the world about them, some time between, or during, the First World War and the Great Depression. Among such persons who grew up with a conservative inclination were Richard Weaver, Francis Wilson, Robert Nisbet, Daniel Boorstin, William Buckley, and your servant; one might add William Yandell Elliott (a little older) and William McGovern, and others who were active so early as 1933, say. There would be regarded as belonging to an earlier “generation,” both in point of years and of thought, such persons as T.S. Eliot, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. Among public men, Senators Robert A. Taft and Carl Curtis, say, would be classified as members of the pre- conservative generation, I suppose, their activity having occurred mostly during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman; while Senator Barry Goldwater, a relatively late conservative champion in arms, would be classed with the First Generation conservatives, I suppose, in Mr. Hart’s scheme. You will perceive, ladies and gentlemen, that membership in a hypothetical generation does not necessarily coincide with the date of one’s nativity.
The Second Generation of conservatives, in Mr. Hart’s categories, consists of persons of varying ages who were attracted to conservative causes, or began to style themselves conservatives, sometime after 1953, in which year The Conservative Mind was published. Thus Mr. Irving Kristol, almost so old as is your servant, is classified as Second Generation; so is my wife Annette Yvonne Cecilie Courtmanche Kirk, the first secretary at the organizational meeting of Young Americans for Freedom, twenty-one years younger than myself. I take it that Dr. Jeffrey Hart, Mr. Ben Hart’s father, is Second Generation — although very nearly meeting the requirements for Generation I; that Mr. M. Stanton Evans, despite his many years of active duty in the conservative array, is a Second Generation legionnaire; while Mr. Ben Hart himself, and his spouse are field marshals of the Third Generation.
But, more subtle distinctions and classifications I leave to Mr. Gregory Wolfe, now engaged in preparing an Encyclopedia of the Right. So far as public men go, permit me to suggest merely that such conservatively-inclined gentlemen as Senator Richard Lugar, Governor John Engler, and Mr. Patrick Buchanan seem to fall within the Second Generation fold. In brief, nowadays First Generation conservatives — such of them as have not passed unto a less troubled realm of being — usually are people in their seventies or their sixties; Second Generation conservatives, most of them, in their fifties or forties; Third Generation conservatives, in their thirties or their twenties — or even in their teens. Pass we then to these ladies and gentlemen of the Third Generations.
Few of the Third Generation folk retain personal memories of the Disaster of 1964 — that is, the defeat of Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, the centralizing follies of President Johnson’s “Great Society,” the foretaste of ruin in Vietnam, the loathsome and destructive antics of the crazy black militants and the crazier young white radicals. The present members of the Third Generation were reared when the hearts of our great American cities already were dismal and rotten; when addiction to narcotics plagued every social class; when public schools, with few honorable exceptions, offered next to nothing for mind and conscience; when Demon TV offered something for every taste but good taste; when promiscuity and sexual perversity demanded recognition as normality; when it was unwise to walk the streets o’nights; when shrieking mobs dominated what had been the grove and halls of Academe; when altercations in Washington made it almost impossible to conduct the regular business of government; when American life seemed confusion worse confounded; when one came to appreciate the mordant aphorism of Albert Jay Nock: “American society is like German beer; dregs at the bottom, scum at the top.”
In short, the conservative Third Generation have not known a tranquil and pleasant and confident America. They scarcely can imagine a time, not many decades past, when it was the happy evening diversion of families or couples to stroll in New York’s Central Park of Detroit’s Belle Isle Park. They have little knowledge even of the neighborhood grocery or butcher-shop, the corner drug-store with its soda-fountain; for them is the leviathan shopping-mall, commercial collectivism. They have experienced little of continuity; the expectation of change has been greater far. Yet, they know that much remains to conserve, and that much ought to be restored.
In one respect, but in that respect only, the task of the conservative of 1991 looms less oppressive than was the task of the conservative of 1951, when my first book was published. I mean that the grim menace of the Soviet Union no longer hangs over us. Seventy years were required for the Communist ideology to work its own ruin, so that it fell to pieces at a good-natured push, quite bloodless, from Mr. Ronald Reagan. Always will there be wars and rumors of war; yet from the Soviet terror we have been saved, so that the Third Generation conservatives may address their energies to something more fundamental than resisting the armed doctrine called Marxism.
What, then, is the mission of Third Generation conservatives, young men and women who seek to preserve the Permanent Things, those elements in human existence that were not born yesterday? It is not to promulgate a “conservative ideology”: for conservatism is the negation of ideology. Ideology is an attempt to govern all life by political slogans; while American conservatives believe that no mere political formulas can make a people content. Conservatives take for their guide in politics what Edmund Burke called “the wisdom of the species”: that is, the experience of human beings in community, extending over many centuries. Thus, American conservatism is a cast of mind and character, not a neat body of political abstractions. Ideology is political fanaticism, an endeavor to rule the world by rigorous abstract dogmata. The dogmata of an abstract “democratic capitalism” may be mischievous as the dogmata of Marx.
It is possible to describe certain attitudes that make up America’s conservative mentality, even though not all Americans could express coherently their belief in such general principles, and although some conservatives would dissent from one or more of the general assumptions or principles I now mention.
First, belief in some transcendent order in the universe, some law that is more than human: a religious understanding of the human condition, if you will; a belief in enduring moral norms. As the national pledge of allegiance puts it, “One nation under God…. “
Second, opposition to totalist ideology and the totalist political order. The American conservative rejects the notion of a future earthly paradise — which the ideologue promises to attain.
Third, confidence in the American Constitution — both the written national Constitution and the intricate fabric of custom, belief, and habit that makes up the underlying “unwritten” constitution of a nation-state. Many decisions of the Supreme Court in recent decades are bitterly resented; nevertheless, attachment to the Constitution itself remains strong.
Fourth, maintenance of the rights of private property and of a free or competitive economy, as contrasted with a directed or socialist economy. This healthy prejudice persists despite the increasing consolidation of business and industry into large conglomerations or oligopolies.
Fifth, suspicion of central political direction, and preference for state and local powers: insistence upon private rights.
Sixth, a deep-rooted patriotism, joined to uneasiness at “entangling alliances”; this latter attitude, nevertheless, modified by determination to resist totalist powers that menace the American national interest.
Seventh, an awareness that change is not identical with healthy improvement; a relish for the American past; a genuine preference for the old and tried.
Such is the consensus of that very large body of Americans who choose to call themselves conservative in their politics. Within this crowd of conservative citizens exist various factions, each emphasizing some aspect or another of the general conservative attitude. There exists no “party line” to which conservatives of one persuasion or another are compelled to conform.
Retrenchment and Reform. With such assumptions as those I outlined just now, America enters upon an age of retrenchment and reform in economic concerns. If American prosperity is to endure, public expenditure and taxation must be kept in check. Conservative economic measures must be employed to prevent inflation of the currency and to reduce the national deficit — a hard necessity of which the general public is becoming aware.
In this present era when the Soviet power fades away, the majority of the American public seem disillusioned with social experiments and with the rapid pace of change; with excessive governmental regulation; with cities fallen to ruin and tormented by crime; with subsidized abortion, with judicial usurping of power, with a permissive indulgence of license and criminality, with the blight of pornography, with the whole liberal climate of opinion. For the next half-century at least, I suggest, the American democracy will tend to reject those politicians who still indulge dreams of Lotos-land. Liberalism has undone itself.
There have been ages when custom and inertia have lain insufferably upon humankind; and such an age may come to pass again; but such is not our age. Ours is an era when the moral and social heritage of many centuries of civilization stands in imminent peril from the forces of vertiginous indiscriminate change. Resistance to the folly of such change is the primary duty of the Third Generation conservative.
The continuing American conservative movement, if it is to be carried on tolerably well, must work within the minds and the consciences of a good many young men and women. I do not think that this work of conservation can be accomplished by any particular group; certainly not by any idealizing of “business rule.” I trust that Americans will conserve a market economy and all the better features of an economy marked by volition. But Americans will conserve such advantages only if they conserve something higher and older: that is, a society of tradition, diversity, and the life of spirit.
The critic Eliseo Vivas wrote once that “It is one of the marks of human decency to be ashamed of having been born into the twentieth century.” Spiritually and politically, the twentieth century has been a time of decadence. Yet, as that century draws near to its close, we may remind ourselves that ages of decadence often have been followed by ages of renewal.
What can you do to commence redeeming the time, to conserve the Permanent Things, to raise up the human condition to a level less unworthy of what Pico della Mirandola called “the dignity of man”? Why, begin by brightening the corner where you are; by improving one human unit, yourself, and helping your neighbor.
You will not need to be rich or famous to take your part in redeeming the time: what you need for that task is moral imagination joined to right reason. It is not by wealth or fame that you will be rewarded, probably, but by eternal moments: those moments of one’s existence in which, as T.S. Eliot put it, time and the timeless intersect. In such moments, you may discover the answer to that immemorial question which now and again enters the head of any reflective man or woman, “What is all this? What is this world that surrounds us, and why are we here?”
Yes, what is all this? Why, this present realm of being, in which your consciousness and my consciousness are aware of reality, is a divine creation; and you and I are put into it as into a testing- ground — into an arena, if you will. As the German writer Stefan Andres put it, “We are God’s Utopia.” You and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this temporal world.
The Roman Stoics taught that some things in life are good, and some are evil; but that the great majority of life’s happenings are neither good nor evil, but indifferent merely. Wealth is a thing indifferent, and so is poverty; fame is a thing indifferent, and so is obscurity. Shrug your shoulders at things indifferent; set your face against the things evil; and by doing God’s will, said the Stoics, find that peace which passes all understanding.
True Authority. How do we know such postulates, religious and philosophical, to be true? Why, by the common sense and ancient assent of mankind — that is, by hearkening to the voice of true authority, the voice of what G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” I think of what John Henry Newman wrote about Authority in 1846: “Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is antiquity; such are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories; such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.” Believe what wise men and women, over the centuries, have believed in matters of faith and morals, and you will have a firm footing on which to stand while the winds of doctrine howl about you.
This counsel that I offer you, conservatives of the Third Generation, will not guarantee your winning any of the glittering prizes of modern society; for those too are among the things indifferent, and some of them are among the things evil. Yet, this advice from a conservative of the First Generation who has seen a good deal of the world conceivably may help you on the track toward certain eternal moments, when time and the timeless intersect. What happens at such timeless moments, such occurrences in eternity? Why, quiet perfect events, usually; among them the act of telling stories to one’s children, or of reading aloud to them.
What is all this — this confused American world of glittering material things and of appalling personal and social decay? I have found it to be a real world, sun-lit despite its vices; a real world in which one may develop and exercise one’s potential virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice; one’s faith, hope, and charity. You will take your tumbles in this world, which can be rough enough in our age, Lord knows; but also you may enjoy your triumphs. It is a world in which there is so much needing to be done that nobody ought to be bored. For young Americans especially, this is still a world of high opportunity.
All this creation about us is the garden that we erring humans were appointed to tend. Plant some flowers in it, if you can, and pull some weeds. If need be, draw your sword to defend it. Do not fancy that a sorry policy of Looking Out for Number One will lead you to Heaven’s gate. Do not fail to remind yourselves that consciousness is a perpetual adventure. Do not ignore the wisdom of the ages, the democracy of the dead. Such, ladies and gentlemen, is the counsel of this survivor from the First Generation.
Those of us who aspire to conserve our inherited order and justice and freedom, our patrimony of wisdom and beauty and loving- kindness, have a hard row to hoe nowadays — that I confess. But, I am heartened from time to time by a stanza from Chesterton’s long poem, The Ballad of the White Horse. Chesterton is describing the prophets of doom, who tell us that nothing in life is permanent; that all is lost, or is being lost, in our culture; that we totter on the brink of an abyss. Such prophets of doom think themselves wise. Chesterton has in mind the typical intellectuals of the twentieth century, but he calls them the wise men of the East. Here I give you Chesterton’s lines:
The wise men know what wicked thingsAre written on the sky,They trim sad lamps, they touch sad stringsHearing the heavy purple wings,Where the forgotten seraph kingsStill plot how God shall die.
Such despairing souls, though possessed perhaps of much intelligence, in truth are not wise. In our time, ladies and gentlemen, many voices have been declaring that life is not worth living. A multitude of writers and professors and publicists and members of the class of persons commonly styled “intellectuals” gloomily instruct us that we human beings are no better than naked apes, and that consciousness is an illusion. Such persons insist that life has no purpose but sensual gratification; that the brief span of one’s physical existence is the be-all and end-all. Such twentieth- century sophists have created in the murky caves of the intellect an Underworld; and they endeavor to convince us all that there exists no sun — that the world of wonder and of hope exists nowhere, and never did exist. Plato knew just such sophists in his age. Those doctrines of despair, the rising generation of conservatives must confront and refute.
My counsels so far may have seemed somewhat ghostly, no doubt. But, I have learned from life in various regions of the world, and under differing circumstances, that it is the life of spirit which truly matters; and that the Permanent Thing most worthy of preservation is an understanding of the human soul. The conscious conservative defends the soul of humankind against the corrosive materialism and sensuality of twentieth-century will and appetite.
Let me turn, however, to the art of worldly wisdom. I can offer, too, some practical advice. How, for instance, you may ask me, does one contrive to forge ahead in practical political life in this sprawling American democracy, with the intention of conducting a conservative defense of the Permanent Things?
Why, ordinarily it is fairly simple to make one’s way in the American political structure. American political parties could not function without volunteers. Volunteer, and you will be gladly accepted, such as you being urgently needed; you will find, indeed, that a number of your fellow-volunteers are rather peculiar people, almost Outcasts of Poker Flat, but welcome in a local political organization (if not welcome in many other circles) because, whatever their peculiarities, they are willing to work for the common cause.
If you are an intelligent and adept volunteer, you will be made much of by the party leaders and faithful, and will be advanced in your responsibilities. You may be asked to be a delegate, whether elected or appointed. If chosen delegate, arrive early at caucus or convention. When the meeting proper commences, endeavor to sit at the chairman’s right hand; then others may take you for his right-hand man. There are many little arts by which one may gain ascendancy over the minds of one’s political colleagues. But, the great necessity is to have acquired previously a fund of knowledge and some mastery of rhetoric — and honest principles. That is why I sometimes advise undergraduates not to expend their time in street demonstrations, but instead to study. If Karl Marx, instead of reading books within, had spent his days parading round and round the outside of the British museum, a placard “Down with the bourgeois!” tacked to a sandwich- board over his shoulders — why, had he been so foolish, the world would be so much better off today.
Redeem the time, redeem the dream — in ways mundane as well as ways spiritual. If you should resolve really to take a vigorous part in restoring the American Republic, choose your vocation accordingly, so that the work by which you gain your livelihood, and the work by which you help to redeem the time, may coincide. Take to the law — if you can endure the boredom of our law schools nowadays. Or, take to serious journalism — or, for broader and more immediate influence, to television and radio. You may accomplish some reform of the American mind through book-publishing. Or, supposing you possess fortitude sufficient to fight your way through our PC graduate schools, aspire after a college professorship that might enable you to counteract the freaks who appear to dominate the typical campus nowadays. Or take to pedagogy, if you can surmount the dull obstacles to certification as a teacher. If you feel a religious calling — why, in no way might you accomplish more to restore meaning to lives in the twenty-first century. And, the best way to insure a Fourth Generation of intelligent young conservatives is to beget children, and rear them well: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, “We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.” The institution most essential to conserve is the family.
If we aspire to redeem this age of ours, so far gone in decadence — well, we have no time to lose before commencing our endeavors. Fixed to the walls of the entrance hall of my house are masks of the archaic god Cronos, in his role of Time the Devourer; his half-leonine, half-human face bares his fangs, which the ancient Greeks dreaded. Those masks serve to remind me daily that the night cometh when no man shall work, and that I had best turn back to my productive typewriter.
Yet, Time is not a devourer only. With proper use of the life- span that is allotted to us, we may accomplish our part in redeeming our era from its vices, terrors, and catastrophic errors. With Demosthenes, ladies and gentlemen, I beg of you to think. For only if you think soundly at this juncture in your lives will you be enabled to act decisively in those years when you have achieved some influence.
I conclude with an exhortation which Orestes Brownson, that redoubtable conservative reformer, scholar, and journalist, delivered at Dartmouth College in 1843. His topic was “The Scholar’s Mission.” He concluded, as follows, his charge to the rising generation:
Ask not what your age wants, but what it needs, not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and do; and find your reward in the consciousness of having done your duty, and above all in the reflection, that you have been accounted to suffer somewhat for mankind.
In the later ‘Sixties, many of the rising generation thought it amusing to pull down what earlier generations had patiently built up; their zeal extended even to the burning of university libraries. In the early ‘Nineties, I hope and trust, many of the rising generation will find it satisfying to restore and redeem their patrimony from earlier times — and so save the world from suicide. That labor will require cleverness and courage. Some of you present here tonight may choose it for your vocation.
Frank Meyer: The Godfather Of American Conservatism
The Godfather Of American Conservatism
John B. Judis
Story in .rtf
Today, whether the issue is arms control, school prayer, or tax reform, the most heated political battles are being waged among conservatives rather than between conservatives and liberals. There are as many factions of conservatives–new right, old right, neo-conservative, movement conservative, moderate conservative–as there used to be factions on the left. But beneath these divisions does there lurk a common set of assumptions which is conservatism?
The most concerted attempt to discover these assumptions was made by Frank Meyer, an ex-Communist who from 1957 until his death in 1972 was a senior editor of and columnist for National Review. Meyer was the ideological godfather of the conservative organizations and politicians who got their start in the late ’50s and the ’60s, from the Young Americans for Freedom to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Meyer communicated many of his ideas through countless phone calls emanating at all hours of the night from his Woodstock, New York home. But he also tried to create a philosophical synthesis of American conservatism in his writings. Meyer set out, he explained in his book, In Defense of Freedom, to “vindicate on theoretical grounds the native belief of American conservatives.”
In the minds of many conservatives today, Meyer succeeded admirably. Conservative columnist M. Stanton Evans said of his work, “In the perspective of time, we shall rank his libertarian-conservative writing among the principal achievements, not only of modern conservatism, but of political thought in general.”
David Keene, now the chairman of the American Conservative Union and in 1969 the chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), said “YAF and the young conservative movement really looked to Frank Meyer of National Review as their philosophical leader.”
Yet neither Meyer nor his philosophy is known outside the conservative movement.
Meyer was a small, pale, gaunt man with high cheekbones, a long thin nose and protruding lips. Former New Republic editor Michael Straight, who knew Meyer as a Communist in London, described him as looking like “an Aztec priest.” He paid little attention to what he wore, except for his red suspenders, which are now fashionable on the right. He was passionate and excitable: an avid conversationalist and stirring orator. He was also a notable eccentric.
For the last twenty-five years of his life, Meyer lived in Woodstock, in a house dominated by books. Distrustful of the public schools, he and his wife educated their children themselves. Meyer was a night person. He went to sleep at seven in the morning and awoke at two. He would volunteer to perform wakeup calls for his unfortunate friends who had to keep normal hours.
Through the telephone, he kept very close track of national conservative politics. For instance, when Robert Bauman was the head of Young Americans for Freedom in the early ’60s, he recalled hearing from Meyer as many as four or five times a night on the eve of an important board meeting. He also extended coveted invitations to young conservatives to visit him in Woodstock.
Like many prominent right wing intellectuals, Meyer began on the political left. Meyer joined the British Communist Party in 1931 as a student at Oxford, to which he had transferred from Princeton. In 1932, he went to London School of Economics for graduate work and ran successfully for student president as a known Communist. After a blowup with the school’s president in 1934, he was expelled from LSE and deported from England.
Back in the United States, he rose quickly to become Educational Director of the party in the Indiana-Illinois region. Known in party circles as a “Marxist theoretician,” Meyer was responsible for educating party cadre in the latest directives from the leadership and in the most recent interpretation of the Marxist classics. “He was always able to quote what the latest line was,” William Sennett, a party comrade, recalled.
Meyer became an enthusiastic proponent of the party’s pro-New Deal Popular Front policies, epitomized in the slogan “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” Unlike many other Communist intellectuals, he stuck with the party through the Moscow purge trials of the mid 30s and the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. It was only in 1945, when Moscow replaced Communist leader and popular front proponent Earl Browder with hardliner William Z. Foster that Meyer began to draw away from the party.
Meyer never formally resigned from the Communist party, but by 1950, he had become both an ardent anti-Communist and a proponent of free market economics. In the early ’50s, he was an expert government witness at Smith Act trials in New York and Chicago; and he was writing articles condemning the Soviet Union and praising the free market for the American Mercury and The Freeman, the two right-wing journals of the time.
Meyer later credited F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom with turning him to the right, but Hayek’s book cannot account for the speed, intensity, and extent of Meyer’s transformation. Most other former Communists or Trotskyists became liberals. Most of those who became conservatives took their time in doing so and retained, even on the right, elements of their former belief. For instance, James Burnham took almost 15 years to journey from Trotskyism to conservatism. And Wilmoore Kendall and Freda Utley both remained Keynesians.
Meyer’s commitment to communism had been philosophical rather than organizational. He did not seek the security of the party cell, but the metaphysical security of a total system of ideas. When he abandoned communism, he sought certainty in a new American conservatism. “He was the ultimate ideologue,” said John Leonard, who worked with Meyer on National Review.
Meyer’s quest for metaphysical security was borne out by his deathbed conversion from secular Judaism to Catholicism. According to his son Eugene Meyer, his father’s conversion to Catholicism did not reflect an experience of Jesus’ divinity but rather the conviction that the evil of communism had to be balanced by the goodness of Christianity. Like Whittaker Chambers, Meyer had come to identify Christianity with civilization.
As Meyer was dying of lung cancer in 1972, he consumed his last hours feverishly debating whether the Catholic prohibition on suicide and the phrase the “communion of Saints” violated his libertarian ethic. His final conversion to Catholicism consummated his journey from Communism to conservatism.
In 1955, journalist Ralph de Toledano, who had known Meyer on the left, introduced him to William F. Buckley Jr., who was then starting a new magazine. Meyer began writing regularly for National Review, and in 1957 became a senior editor. In his column, “Principles and Heresies,” Meyer began to develop a “correct line” for the conservative movement just as he had once done for Midwestern Communists.
In 1957, however, there was no conservative movement as such, but rather diverse and often fractious movements and organizations, loosely identified with the right by their common opposition to the New Deal, Communism, and federally-imposed racial integration. Nor was there a common intellectual approach associated with the right; instead, there were two principal intellectual currents, individualism and traditionalism, neither of which, in their pure form, had any embodiment in the political realm.
The individualists or libertarians, led by a young economist Murray Rothbard, hearkened back to Albert Jay Nock, the editor of the original Freeman, and to his disciple Frank Chodorov. They were right-wing anarchists who identified freedom with the free market and rejected any government intrusion upon individual rights, whether in the form of antitrust law, social security, or military spending. Many had been isolationists; and after World War II, they became vigorous critics of the America’s burgeoning military budget and Cold War policies.
The traditionalists or conservatives, typified by Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, viewed society as an organic whole the health of which was more important than the health of its individual parts; they regarded the inculcation of virtue rather than freedom as the supreme goal of politics; and in the name of Christianity, Tory England, or the Plantation South, they upheld tradition and prescription over ideology and reason. They abhorred socialism, communism, and liberalism not because they destroyed freedom, but because they encouraged an unnatural egalitarianism. While preferring capitalism to its rivals, they blamed it for the commercialism and materialism rampant in society.
The proponents of individualism and traditionalism had little patience or even respect for each other. Kirk once confessed to historian George Nash that “he, felt closer to socialist Norman Thomas than to anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard.” But Frank Meyer set out in the ’50s to incorporate elements of each philosophy into a new conservative politics that would be not only valid, but also relevant to the emerging movement of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Because Meyer’s new philosophy fused elements of both individualism and traditionalism, it was called “fusionism.”
Meyer shared the individualists’ identification of freedom with the free market. He viewed liberalism, socialism, and communism as steps on a ladder leading to the extinction of any freedom. But Meyer was also a militant anti-Communist who thought nothing should be spared in fighting the international Communist conspiracy, and a man of straight-laced morality who thought virtue rather than happiness or pleasure should be the end of existence. According to Meyer, individualism threatened to sap “the foundations of belief in an organic moral order.”
Meyer maintained that the individualists were correct in positing freedom as the “primary end” of politics, but he rejected the view that freedom was an “absolute end.” “In the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue,” Meyer wrote.
But Meyer was equally, if not more, critical of the traditionalists. In reviewing Russell Kirk’s highly acclaimed The Conservative Mind in 1955, Meyer charged that Kirk, by preferring tradition to reason, had enshrined “the maxim, ‘Whatever is, is right,’ as the first principle of thought about politics and society.” According to Meyer, Kirk’s society that stressed “authority and order” over “freedom” and “status” over “contract” “would only move inevitably toward totalitarianism.”
Meyer maintained that virtue was not possible without freedom. “The simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil,” Meyer wrote.
But if the state could not impose virtue, how could a free society hope to inculcate it? Meyer rested his hope for virtue on a model of society quaintly similar to what the Soviet Communists initially claimed to be their ideal. “A good society is possible only,” Meyer wrote, “when the social and political order guarantees a state of affairs in which men can freely choose, when the intellectual and moral leaders, the ‘creative minority,’ have the understanding and imagination to maintain the prestige of tradition and reason and thus to sustain the intellectual and moral order throughout society.”
Meyer claimed that his ideas not only replicated everyday conservatism, but also the historic beliefs of Americans. Just as Meyer’s political economy dated from Andrew Jackson’s affirmation of the frontier’s free market, his morals reflected Puritan America’s solitary quest for a virtuous polity. The two conceptions belonged, of course, to different eras–the Puritans’ views of government was far closer to that of Kirk than Meyer–but they had co-existed in the American psyche since the early 1800s. Meyer elevated their co-existence from homily to philosophy. And in doing so, he sought not merely to ground conservatism in philosophy, but to ground conservatism in the peculiar philosophy of Americans.
Meyer did succeed in providing at least the appearance of a theoretical underpinning for the conservative movement of his time. Meyer himself wrote or helped write the founding statements of both the American Conservative Union and the New York Conservative Party, and the authors of the Young Americans for Freedom’s founding “Sharon Statement” credited him with that statement’s attempt to combine individualism and traditionalism.
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Frank Meyer |
Meyer used fusionism to justify the political stances of the emerging strands of the conservative movement. Meyer invoked his concept of freedom from government interference on behalf of Southern segregation, as well as Northern resistance to the enlargement of the welfare state. And Meyer’s insistence on virtue as the moral end of existence dovetailed with popular dismay at the drug counterculture and ghetto violence of the ’60s. When Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964, or when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, it was substantially on Meyer’s fusionist platform. The first book of neo-conservative politics, Irving Kristol’s On the Democratic Idea in America, was virtually a gloss on Meyer’s fusionism.
Once he had worked out the central idea of fusionism in the mid-1950s, Meyer himself never budged from it. It occupied the same place in his thought as Stalin’s version of Marxism once had. It became the basis for denouncing suspected deviations from the correct line, from Rothbard’s anti-war stand to the pro-marijuana stance of the Libertarian faction of the Young Americans for Freedom.
Young conservatives found Meyer looking over their shoulder as they plied their trade. “Frank Meyer really was the conscience of the right wing,” recalled David Keene. “If you were a movement conservative, and were in a position somewhere, and were doing something that you knew you shouldn’t be doing, Frank Meyer would know about it, and he would call you on the carpet for it.”
Like Stalin’s Marxism, fusionism also became for Meyer on overarching theory in which even seemingly contradictory facts were fitted. Thus Meyer could defend Southern segregation and become an outspoken apologist for South Africa’s “apartheid” system, praising it as an attempt to develop “the black nations within South Africa to an eventual equal status with the white nation.”
Since Meyer’s death, no alternative philosophy has supplanted fusionism among conservatives. The only attempt to provide an alternative was made by columnist George Will, who in Statecraft and Soulcraft tried to revive Kirk’s traditionalist approach to the state. But Will’s book was rudely received by both National Review and Human Events. Fusionism is still the unofficial philosophy of American conservatives.
The acceptance of fusionism among the great body of conservatives does not, however, validate its theory. Viewed according to the canons of logic rather than according to the requirements of politics, fusionism does not really amount to much as political philosophy.
The most telling critique of fusionism was made two decades ago by traditionalists. In a 1962 essay, Brent Bozell, Meyer’s close friend who later became the editor of the right wing Catholic journal Triumph, challenged Meyer’s root assumptions. Meyer’s argument rested on the premise that freedom was a precondition of virtue, but Bozell demolished this premise simply by noting that a Soviet political prisoner, severely restrained by his government, was as capable of leading a virtuous life as an American businessman. “The freedom necessary to virtue is presumably a freedom no man will ever be without,” Bozell concluded. Meyer’s argument unraveled from there.
For Bozell, who was already moving toward a Franco-inspired authoritarianism, the point was that freedom is not merely irrelevant to virtue, but perhaps even detrimental to its realization. But regardless of his motives, Bozell succeeded in showing that Meyer had not theoretically reconciled freedom and virtue, but merely placed them side-by-side in the same theory. If virtue–and particularly Christian rather than Classical virtue–is the proper goal of humanity, then other justifications for freedom must be sought.
Bozell also objected to Meyer’s contention that economic freedom was a condition of political freedom. Noting the case of Great Britain, which remained a political democracy while nationalizing part of its industry, Bozell argued that its citizens could “exercise their political freedom against their economic freedom.” Meyer could only respond by circularly defining the problem out of existence. Political freedom, Meyer wrote, was “the limitation of the power of the state to the function of preserving a free order.”
Russell Kirk’s objections to Meyer were more down to earth but no less telling. Kirk pointed out that the free market whose preservation Meyer had made the goal of political society could itself encourage vice rather than virtue: whether in the form of suburban shopping malls, prostitution, television advertising, or the hunger for material success. Kirk accused Meyer of simply replacing an uncritical anti-capitalism with an equally uncritical pro-capitalism. “There was a tendency among the ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyists to go from one extreme to the other,” Kirk recalled. “Frank Meyer is the clearest example of that. Having been turned away from ideology they seek another ideology which becomes a kind of ideology of capitalism.”
Bozell’s and Kirk’s objections undercut the philosophical validity of fusionism, but in politics, as James Burnham pointed out in The Machiavellians, the usefulness of a philosophy is not necessarily related to its theoretical soundness. Rather, it is related to the degree to which the philosophy resonates with popular mythologies. Meyer’s philosophy did precisely that: invoking both the frontier free market and John Winthrop’s City on a Hill and reconciling the Chamber of Commerce’s economics with the Sunday sermon against the evils of pornography.
Political movements rarely possess coherent unified world views; instead, they are concatenations of conflicting Weltanschaungs, whose unity is predicated on common but sometimes fleeting fears and interests. Thus, both urban blacks and rural Southern whites were integral to the old Democratic majority; while “country club Republicans,” the “born again Falwellites,” and disillusioned ethnic Democrats conspired to provide Reagan with his two landslides.
The practical unity among these groups is fleeting. For instance, a serious recession under Republican rule could send the disillusioned Democrats in the North and South scurrying back to the fold. But in the absence of long-term practical unity, Meyer’s philosophy provides the appearance of long-term philosophical unity.
Meyer’s fusionism was more rationalization than theory. It is not likely to stand with the works of Jefferson, Calhoun, or Croly in the anthologies of American political thought. Nor is it likely to survive the political coalition that it helped to sustain. But for the moment it does provide a banner in which those interested primarily in school prayer or segregation and those interested in lower taxes and less regulation of their businesses can march together.
©1986 John B. Judis
John B. Judis, senior editor on leave from In These Times, is exploring the development of American conservative politics.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY LEONARD LIGGIO
BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY LEONARD LIGGIO
Human Action, Ludwig von Mises
Socialism, Ludwig von Mises
The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek
Capitalism and the Historians, F. A. Hayek
The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek
Law, Legislation and Liberty, F. A. Hayek
Freedom and the Law, Bruno Leoni
Federalism and Freedom, Felix Morley
Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Nock
The Birth of the Modern, Paul Johnson
Modern Times, Paul Johnson
The Myth of the Good and Bad Nations, Rene Wormser
The Great Powers and Eastern Europe, John Lukacs
Genesis of the World War, Harry Elmer Barnes
America Goes to War, Charles C. Tansill
Back Door to War, Charles C. Tansill
Mohammed and Charlemagne, Henri Pirenne
Economic and Social History of Europe, Henri Pirenne
The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Michael Rostovtzeff
Some Twentieth-Century Historians, S. William Halperin
Six Historians (Thucydides, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Ranke, Henry Adams), Ferdinand Schevill
Visions of Culture (Voltaire, Guizot, Burchkardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset), Karl J. Weintraub
The Dawn of a New Era, 1250-1453, Edward P. Cheyney
The Catholic Reformation, 1560-1610, Robert H. Lord
The Age of the Baroque, 1610-1660, Carl J. Friedrich
The Triumph of Science and Reason, 1660-1685, Frederick L. Nussbaum
A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900, Carlton J. H. Hayes
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Jonathan D. Spence
Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France, Robert R. Palmer
The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Robert R. Palmer
Beyond the Enlightenment, Historians & Folklore in Nineteenth-Century France, Charles Rearick
The Servile State, Hilaire Belloc
The Reformation, Hilaire Belloc
Belloc: A Biographical Anthology, ed. Herbert van Thal
History of the Church of Christ, Henri Daniel-Rops
Making of Europe, Christopher Dawson
Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson
Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy
For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory, Henry B. Veatch
Two Logics, Henry B. Veatch
Thomist Realism & the Critique of Knowledge, Etienne Gilson
Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, Etienne Gilson
God and Philosophy, Etienne Gilson
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Etienne Gilson
The Cypresses Believe in God, Jose Maria Gironella
The Intellectual History of Europe, Frederich Heer
The Road of Science and the Ways of God, Stanley Jaki
Enthusiasm, Ronald Knox
Now I See: Autobiograpy, Sir Arnold Lunn
Integral Humanism, Jacques Maritain
Ethica Thomistica, Ralph McInerny
Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White, Jr.
The Levers of Riches, Joel Mokyr
Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton
We Hold These Truths, John Courtney Murray
Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novack
Natural Law, Heinrich Rommen
Law and Revolution, Harold Berman
The Life of Christ, Fulton J. Sheen
Christianity and History, Herbert Butterfield
War and Human Progress, John U. Nef
Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization, John U. Nef
The Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries, William Thomas Walsh
The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
The Virgin and the Dynamo, Henry Adams
Mont St. Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams
The American Language, H. L. Mencken
Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
Selected Essays, T. S. Elliot
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi
Robert E. Lee, Douglass Southall Freeman
The Twilight of Authority, Robert Nisbet
History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet
The Wisdom of Catholicism, Anton C. Pegis (ed.)
Force and Freedom: Reflections on History, Jacob Burckhardt
Lord Acton, Gertrude Himmelfarb
Lord Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History, William H. McNeill (ed.)
Lord Acton, Essays on Church & State, Douglas Woodruff (ed.)
The Conquest of the United States by Spain, William Graham Sumner
Prophets on the Right, Ronald Radosh
Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking, William F. Buckley (ed.)
Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson
Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone
The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro
American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise (Sumner, Field, Carnegie), Robert Green McCloskey
Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, John Neville Figgis
Reunion and Reaction: Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, C. Vann Woodward
Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses
IC’s Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books
No. 19 – Jose Ortega y Gasset: The Revolt of the Masses
by Dr. Enrico Peppe
20 February 2004
Four clear conceptions of Ortega’s thinking, as reflected by the book under review, can be found in the writings of Albert Jay Nock, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.
Ortega (1883-1955) was born in Madrid within a journalist-political milieu.
His father was a popular newspaperman and novelist. In his mother’s family were many politico-ideologues and ministers of sundry Spanish government agencies.
He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Madrid in 1904, and subsequently continued his studies in Germany, when the philosophic emphasis was Kantian analysis.
Eventually he secured a post at Central University in Madrid. He became an exile during the Spanish Civil War, finding teaching refuge at the University of San Marcos in Lima. After World War II, he returned to Spain where he founded the short-lived Institute of Humanities. He lectured frequently during his later years (including a stint at the Center for the Humanities in Aspen). He died in 1955. At the time of his death, he could quite accurately be described as Spain’s premier thinker.
His genre was the essay. His Castilian was vibrant, and as such he is considered one of the great writers of the 20th century, regardless of language. As a philosopher he is considered neo-Kantian and existentialist.
Professor Mary E. Giles summarizes his conceptions as follows. For Ortega:
Human beings and their circumstances exist in a dynamic interplay (‘Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia’)…How an individual influences his circumstances is his creative action (‘quehacer vital’)…The hero…creates the noble life by exerting his will to go beyond the ordinary…The opposite of the hero, the mass man, is content with his own mediocrity and relies on opinion rather than reason…Though each individual sees truth from a unique perspective, truth itself is absolute.
A synopsis of Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” is in order. This work easily belongs on the IC “Top 25″ list. (For reasons that will become clear later, however, Ortega makes the grade for reasons not in accordance with past ideological emphases as applied to Ortega’s most popular book).
The fifteen chapters are best understood as fifteen essays (Ortega’s thought-pattern tends toward the personal rather than the
thematic).
But a theme emerges nevertheless. Dr Giles sums up part of the Ortegan motif:
(He)…elaborates the theory of two classes, the masses and creative minorities…societies advance…when the creative minority is allowed to govern. Mass man is without direction, self-satisfied, and preoccupied with his own well-being…(he) is identifiable by an attitude opposite of the dynamic man of excellence… (who)…exerts his will in service to values and goals that are larger than himself…
The highly quotable Ortega on themes felt to be the crux of the book:
The multitude has suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society…Before it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now, it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character. There are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus.
We are, in fact, confronted with a radical innovation in human destiny, implanted by the 19th century. A new stage has been mounted for human existence, new both in the physical and the social aspects. Three principles have made possible this new world: liberal democracy, scientific experiment, and industrialism. The two latter may be summed up in one word: technicism.
Ortegan excerpts, out of context, like the brief quotations cited above, serve to place Ortega in the long line of aristocratic-metaphysical-Carlist thinking best expressed in European and American traditional conservatism (Frederick Wilhelmsem, L Brent Bozell, and Russell Kirk, the chief spokesmen). Only a pallid case can be made.
The reviewer interprets Ortega’s grand book within a different frame.
It has been customary to read Ortega in bits and then extrapolate for ideological justification. Even George H. Nash in his classic refers to Ortega as a “traditionalist saint.”
Several Ortega claims must be examined:
1. “Ortega was an existentialist.”
A few years ago the reviewer translated Ortega’s “La Rebelion…” alongside Carmen Laforet’s “Nada” in order to analyze the figurative language in both; alongside the hyper-angst emitting from Laforet, Ortega read like a proposition from Bertrand Russell’s “Principia Mathematica.” Part of the problem rests with his “Meditations on Quixote” whereby Ortega cries, “I am I and my circumstance.” But he rejected the “I.” He did not glorify it. For this Spanish empiricist, the “I” refers to one who lives in the world, and works out circumstances (step-by-step) for positive gains. There is great similarity between Ortega’s stance and Misesian (step-by-step) economic analysis (See my IC review #22).
2. “Ortega was a disciple of Burke.”
Burke wistfully looked back to the day of the aristocracy, of the day before the secular, of the day before “progress.” Ortega’s approach is subtle and different. In his words,
No one can imagine that, in the face of this fabulous seething of the masses, it is the aristocratic attitude to be satisfied with making a supercilious grimace, like a fine gentleman of Versailles – the Versailles of the grimaces – does not represent aristocracy; it is the death and dissolution of a magnificent aristocracy. For this reason, the only element of aristocracy left in such beings was the dignified grace with which their necks received the attention of the guillotine; they accepted it as the tumour accepts the lancet.
3. Ortega was anti-science — a regressivist.
Ortega pays homage to scientific and technical innovation. He is totally aware that the Masses enjoy great gains in personal and social development due to the capabilities of highly intelligent individuals. It’s just that the common man doesn’t get it.
…[the mass man]…finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.
4. Ortega blamed liberal democracy as propounded by early classical liberals for the rise of the masses and the resulting consequences.
The problem here has been that critics have discussed Ortega in terms of the symptoms he wrote about, and have not zoned in on what he considered the root cause.
Not that he hid the fact:
…the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention — the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies…This is what State intervention leads to: the peel are converted into fuel to feed the mere machine which is the State. The skeleton eats up the flesh around it. The scaffolding becomes the owner and tenant of the house.
Capaldi interprets the above statement:
Precisely because mass man does not recognize any sense of personal responsibility and does not care to distinguish between the intended and actual consequences of any action, he acquiesces in the control of all social efforts on the part of the state. Deceived into thinking that he is the state, mass man does not see that he will soon be living for the state (or the government), and not it for him.
Nicholas Capaldi, in his magnificent 1988 piece, “Ortega on the Crisis of Western Civilization,” carefully and accurately explicates Ortega on the “liberal democracy” issue. He makes five points that go a long way toward creating a correct Ortegan hermeneutic.
Point #1 — The modern era, the period of rationalist humanism, saw the rise of technicism. While the ascendancy of such was a favorable process for the welfare of mankind, the philosophy behind it was extended to man qua man.
Man consequently believed than he was the center of all things — that he could discover structure itself.
Capaldi: ”Carried into the social and political realm, rationalistic humanism ultimately leads to political radicalism. Utopian social engineering is the social counterpart of industrial technology.”
Point #2 — John Locke’s original conception of freedom and equality, by natural law, had a clear religious basis. In subsequent history, the religious element died. Rationalist humanism took over.
Capaldi: “…rationalist humanism amounts to the attempt to construct civil and political society from an ethical vacuum…Ortega…stressed that a prior normative context was indispensable.”
Point #3 — As rationalist humanism evolved, the pure, “Lockean” concept of liberal democracy did also, into a negative abyss. A paradox ensued.
Capaldi: “The paradox of liberal democracy is that it destroys the foundations on which it itself exists…The danger faced by the society of mass men is that ‘barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.’”
Point #4 – Liberal democracy must be superceded. It should not be destroyed.
Capaldi: “Liberal democracy emerges in the pages of Ortega as a noble sentiment served by a shallow theory.”
Point #5 — For Ortega, there are no viable alternatives to liberal democracy other than superceding it. Certainly the “isms” of history don’t qualify.
Capaldi: “In a prescient remark Ortega lumps bolshevism and fascism together as retrogressive movements based upon failure to take history seriously. Nationalism is dismissed as a ‘passing phase of self-conceit on the part of the least developed of the nations.’”
Thomas Fitzgerald, in a 1996 “First Things” piece, “The Future of Belief,” offers a beautiful arpeggio. Ortega used the term “creencias” to name embedded certitudes and core convictions mankind takes for granted, stuff under your skin, that needs no discussion or elaboration. In what the reviewer feels is one of the best few words ever written on Our Demise, Fitzgerald writes,
The Enlightenment, in breaking with archaic and biblical forms of understanding, had asserted that things are wholly accessible to scrutiny — and hence could be known, described, and explained in direct, comprehensive, and reliable forms. When narrowed into its instrumental uses, however, rationality…fell into the service of a state apparatus and became a means for designing ‘rationalized’ exploitation of man and nature…Dispossessed of our “creencias,” people are left (as Ortega puts it) with a feeling of ’shipwreck.’…Rushing to make new shrines of the natural environment, or computers, or space travel, or ethnicity, or nationalism, we find only ramshackle, one-owner cosmologies offering poor shelter.
The ongoing policy studies and continuous writings associated with the superceding of liberal democracy today, as understood and advocated by Ortega, are only to be found in the libertarian wing of the conservative movement. Even as recently as 20 years ago, Ortegan formulations could be distinguished on the pages of National Review. As William F. Buckley supped with the Kristols, the Ortegan connection waned, and finally ceased. The reviewer does not hold lightly the enormous contributions both NR and Buckley have given to the movement — it’s just a matter of “la vida politica.”
Four clear conceptions of Ortega’s thinking, as reflected by the book under review, can be found in the writings of Albert Jay Nock, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.
Albert Jay Nock, the “forgotten man of the right,” read Ortega correctly as the anti-statist that he was (for a superb article on Nock, IC readers would do well to read Mises Institute’s Jeffrey A. Tucker’s piece.
In Our Enemy,The State, Nock points out that…the “state . . . whether primitive, feudal, or merchant is the organization of political means.” Nock on Ortega:
…[Ortega]…gives a good idea of what may be expected when a third, economically composite, class takes over the mechanism of the state, as the merchant class took it over from the nobility. Surely no better forecast could be made of what is taking place in this country at the moment than, [in Ortega's words]…’The mass-man in fact believes that he is the state, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working, on whatever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it —
disturbs it in any order of things, in politics, in ideas, in industry.’
Kenneth Hoover, author (with others) of “Ideology and Political Life,” accurately identifies Ortega with Michael Oakeshott, but fails to gauge the ideological spectrum in which both
properly belong:
In traditional conservative thought the mass man was the conceptual opposite of the individual living in a properly constituted society. (Reviewer’s note: Hoover should have distinguished between the Old Right and Traditional conservatism. For more on rightist distinctives, see my IC review #20).
As Michael Oakeshott suggests,(spirited by Ortega), …the mass man is not necessarily ignorant, often he is a member of the so-called intellegentsia; he belongs to a class which corresponds exactly with no other class.
Hoover goes on to synthesize both men of the right as believing that, “The mass man has no character: a nation-state of mass men would fall prey to tyranny because they could not supply order in their own lives. Insensitive to authority, they would become slaves to power.”
Aynist Gregory Johnson, writing in the “Daily Objectivist,” creates a tremendous case for Ortegan influence on the protolibertarian Rand. Johnson displays two paragraphs from Ms. Rand’s journal for May 16, 1934. Having copied passages from the last chapter of “The Revolt of the Masses,” she then writes in two paragraphs:
The new conception of the State that I want to defend is the State as a means, not an end: a means for the convenience of the higher type of man. The State as the only organization. Within it — all have to remain individuals. The state, not as a slave of the great numbers, but precisely the contrary, as the individual’s defense against great numbers. To free man from the tyranny of numbers.”
The fault of liberal democracies: giving full rights to quantity (majorities), they forget the rights of quality, which are much higher rights.
On her notes for The Fountainhead, she writes, “Until man’s ’self’ regains its proper position, life will be what it is now: flat, gray, empty, lacking in all beauty, all fire, all enthusiasm, all meaning, all creative urge. That is the ultimate theme of the book — Howard Roark as the remedy for all modern ills.”
Gregory Johnson: “It is seldom possible to make an airtight case for intellectual influence, but if Rand first conceived the moral project of “The Fountainhead” (and all of her subsequent works) while writing her journal entries for May 15 and 16, 1934, she did so in dialogue with Ortega.”
The late genius-economist Murray Rothbard nails down the Libertarian-Ortegan connection by melding Mises and Ortega on “The Romantic as Primitive” (how this man could work so well, and exhibit such understanding, within interdisciplinary frameworks is a marvel). First Mises:
Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason, as well as the condition under which nature has compelled him to live. The romantic is a daydreamer; he easily manages in imagination to disregard the laws of logic and nature. The thinking and rationally acting man tries to rid himself of the discomfort of unsatisfied wants by economic action and work…The romantic…imagines the pleasures of success, but he does nothing to achieve them…
Then Ortega:
This is what happens in the world which is mere Nature. But it does not happen in the world of civilization which is ours. Civilization is not ‘just there,’ it is not self-supporting. It is artificial…if you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization — you are done.
(The IC reader would do well to read the Rothbard piece in its entirety.)
The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset is a classic in the Old Right-Libertarian-Paleoconservative tradition.
It should be read that way.
Freedom’s forgotten man
Freedom’s forgotten man
By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, December 4, 2004
Albert Jay Nock, a brilliant writer and editor who proudly called himself a “philosophical anarchist” and died in 1945, is revered today as one of America’s giants of individualism.
Links to Nock’s writings — including his 1935 masterwork, “Our Enemy the State” — can be easily found at Internet sites such as lewrockwell.com. But to learn why Nock is still important, I called columnist Sheldon Richman, author of books such as “Separating School & State.”
Richman edits The Freeman magazine, which is published by the Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org), an organization near New York City that exists solely to promote the values Nock held so dear — individual freedom, private property, limited government and free trade. He was at his home in Conway, Ark.
Q: Why should anyone who cares about freedom know about Albert J. Nock?
A: The reason they should know about Albert J. Nock is that he gets to some of the most basic principles that concern the issues of power versus liberty. He was heavily influenced by the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who wrote a book called “The State.” What Nock picked up from that is that there are two ways to organize society, what he called “the political means” and “the economic means.”
The economic means is what we know of as production and trade. The political means is the confiscation or expropriation of economic goods by some superior power. Nock goes back over history and looks at history as a struggle between liberty and power, between the economic means the political means, and that makes a lot of issues very, very clear when you look at things that way.
Q: What’s an example that demonstrates this difference?
A: All of the issues surrounding free trade versus protectionism are examples of this. But open the paper and just about any public issue being discussed can be analyzed this way. What people seem to forget, and this is why Nock is so important, is that anything the government does has to involve the threat of violence in order to take something from somebody who has produced that thing — money, of course, usually — and give it to someone who hasn’t produced it. What Nock does is remind us that the essence of government is the threat of violence. Whether you think government’s necessary and good is a different issue. First of all, let’s get straight about what government is. That’s the first thing Nock does for us.
Q: Can you sum up Nock’s political beliefs — and are they the same as yours?
A: Number one, they’re very much the same as mine. To sum up his belief, he would say that social power — by which he means voluntary cooperation, which is the marketplace — is good, and political power — or what he calls “coercive cooperation,” which really isn’t cooperation when you think about it — is bad. To the extent that society is organized along the lines of social power and voluntary cooperation, you have a good society, and to the extent it’s organized along the opposite principles, you have a bad society.
Q: Do you define this as “libertarianism” or 19th-century “classic liberalism” or what?
A: Classical liberalism and libertarianism are very similar. The way I think of it is that libertarianism is a later evolutionary state of classical liberalism. It’s a much more rigorous philosophy. Classical liberalism is less rigorous, but it certainly is in the same spirit of individualism: that the individual’s life is important, and he ought to be able to run it, and that society more or less runs itself as people run their own lives. Also, that any governance, whether we call it formal government or some other name, ought to have as its only goal, its only function, the keeping of the civil peace, so that free individuals can otherwise go about their business.
Q: Frederick Foer of the New Republic wrote last week that Nock was “a classic conservative who views the values of the past as superior to the present.” Did Foer accurately describe Nock?
A: Some of what he had to say was right about Nock. You need to separate things here. Nock was very concerned about the state of the culture and people’s moral values, and he thought that the New Deal and the growing state had done a lot to erode an older ethic of individualism and self-reliance. I think he was right about that.
He did not call himself a conservative. I think he still thought of himself as a liberal, though he knew that word had been co-opted during the Progressive Era. He called himself an “old liberal.”
Q: William F. Buckley Jr. was heavily influenced by Nock and even knew him. But has Nock been forgotten or repudiated by today’s conservatives, as Foer contends?
A: I think the new generation of conservatives probably don’t even know about him. He would be out of step with the conservative movement as Buckley founded it and as it’s developed. It’s kind of ironic, because in his younger days Buckley regarded himself as an anarchist, which Nock called himself in some places.
Nock wrote an essay called “On Doing the Right Thing,” where he’s very clear that the only way people will gain a moral education is by being free. That is not a very typical American conservative view these days, where they want the state to be the teacher of moral values. Nock would repudiate that. He, I think, would be sick about what’s going on in the name of conservatism.
Q: Is Nock’s greatest legacy “Our Enemy the State”?
A: He wrote some other good things. “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man” is a wonderfully written book and has some beautiful observations about freedom and life. It’s very enjoyable reading. But I think Nock’s monument to political philosophy and history is “Our Enemy the State.”
Q: What would Nock think about the role of government and the mass culture today?
A: I think he would be appalled by the war mongering that’s going on. He would have been appalled by the decades of U.S. meddling in foreign countries, which in my view, has caused us to suffer the problems we have been suffering. He’d be appalled at the size of the state, and that (President) Bush can use the rhetoric of small government while we have seen spending growth unprecedented since the time of Lyndon Johnson. Nock was a pessimist in 1935 and up until the time of his death, and I think he’d really be in the depths of his pessimism today.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s_279542.html
Restraining Democracy
February 15, 2006, 9:49 a.m.
Restraining Democracy
Our love affair with democracy is here and there unrequited. Sixty years ago the essayist Albert Jay Nock remarked that if you freeze a frame on a member of the American clerisy you will find his mouth open having uttered the syllables “demo.” In the second frame, he’ll have closed his mouth on the syllables “cracy.” In a desperate attempt retroactively to challenge the election of January 25, we are now contending that it was not really pure democracy, because voters were confused by the presence of third-party candidates and partnerships, all of which had the effect of augmenting the Hamas vote, etc. etc. etc.
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But the hard fact of the matter is that next Saturday, the new government of Palestine will take charge, and the majority of votes in that Authority’s legislature will be those of Hamas. This is an event of colossal importance in the sinuous path toward livable arrangements in the Near East. Something has to happen. Either Hamas has to be castrated, or it has to be stopped. By military action? God save us, the U.S. and Israel have come up with a military solution in drag.
The idea is to starve the Palestine Authority into undoing the results of its election by declining frontier payments to Palestine from Israel (they yield about $55 million a month). Simultaneously, you suspend all U.S. contributions to Palestine, leaving the Authority with a mere $100,000 in monthly cash from supporters abroad. This is nickels and dimes, and in a matter of weeks, Palestine would not be able to pay the salaries of 140,000 employees critical to the maintenance of civil order.
Where do we go from there?
Well, it just happens that the French and the Russians (they make up two actors in the Quartet of which the U.S. and the UN are members) hove in over the weekend. The rule had been, since the January election, that Hamas would need to reform its charter, which calls for the elimination of Israel. Something less than that, say the French and the Russians: If Hamas will just agree to enter into conversation with the west, without exactly renouncing its pledge to destroy Israel, that will be enough for a start. What we need is jaw jaw, to avert wah wah, as Churchill counseled in 1954.
The hulking monster in the background of all this is Iran. The mullahs there could finance the basic requirements of a Hamas-dominated Palestine with one’s day’s pumping of oil. This development truly horrifies the diplomats. The annexation of the Hamas’s program by the implacably hell-bent Iran would be a long step in the realization of nightmare.
And with only Iraq and Jordan in between, we are in Egypt. And there, lively in the political womb, is a bumptious child bursting to celebrate the birth of democracy in Egypt.
We are dealing with a movement that decades ago was illegalized by the Egyptian government. But the Muslim Brotherhood persisted and in the parliamentary election last fall showed their gathering strength. Accordingly, on the same weekend in which Hamas faced economic ostracism, Mubarak announced a postponement by two years of scheduled local elections. This was a visible sign of fright, that democracy was on the move, and that a religious organization which has engaged in violent activities, and is banned, threatens the plans of Mubarak, which were to hand Egypt over to his son. Observers with minimal liberal sensibilities welcome most moves against Mubarak, but not any move against him, because he has stayed outside the clutches of the Islamic totalists and because his country was the first Mideast power to acknowledge and to respect Israeli independence. The prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood overwhelming Egypt and collaborating with the mullahs’ Iran reminds us of the risks that democracy can bring.
It is a bitter pill to swallow, to see the United States and Israel forthrightly attempting to subvert democracy in Palestine. But the first law in this sermon is that democracy’s fruits sometimes need either to be stillborn or else to be resisted.
Albert Jay Nock news
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The Very Heart and Soul of Conservatism is Libertarianism
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” ~ Ronald Reagan
Read more of Ronald Reagan’s views on Libertarianism from this interview he did in 1975. At that time, Reagan used the term “libertarian-conservative” to describe his political philosophy. Reagan’s record, while generally conservative, was not particularly libertarian, but one’s administrative decisions, constrained as they are by existing laws, institutions, and politics, do not necessarily mirror one’s underlying philosophy (consider Mitt Romney when governing the very liberal state of Massachusetts). This interview gives an interesting glimpse into the real Ronald Reagan.
Another good quote from Ronald Reagan, “I don’t believe in a government that protects us from ourselves.”
Snoring as a Fine Art
Here is that passage that explains why Albert Jay Nock called his book Snoring as a Fine Art:
Snoring should be regarded as a fine art and respected accordingly. If this be admitted, I might suggest further that our civilization does not so regard it, as it should, and gives the practice no encouragement, but rather the contrary.
Consequently one might with reason think that there is too little snoring done—snoring with a purpose to guide it, snoring deliberately directed towards a salutary end which is otherwise unattainable—and that our society would doubtless be better off if the value of the practice were more fully recognized. In our public affairs, for instance, I have of late been much struck by the number of persons who professedly had something. The starry-eyed energumens of the New Deal were perhaps the most conspicuous examples; each and all, they were quite sure they had something. They had a clear premonition of the More Abundant Life into which we were all immediately to enter by the way of a Planned Economy. It now seems, however, that the New Deal is rapidly sinking in the same Slough of Despond which closed over poor Mr. Hoover’s head, and that the More Abundant Life is, if anything, a little more remote than ever before.
I do not disparage their premonition or question it; I simply suggest that the More Abundant Life might now be appreciably nearer if they had put enough confidence in their premonition to do a great deal less thinking, planning, legislating, organizing, and a great deal—oh yes, a very great deal—more snoring.
These essays were first put in book form in 1958.
Others esays include: “Life, Liberty, and …,” “Utopia in Pennsylvania,” “Advertising and Liberal Literature,” “Henry George,” “What the American Votes For,” “The Purpose of Biography,” “The King’s Jester: Modern Style,” “Alas, Poor Yorick,” “If Only,” “Epstean’s Law,” “Sunday in Brussels.”
Albert Jay Nock is one of the 20th century’s great writers and essayists, a thinker of immense power who was also a tremendous advocate of liberty. These essays are among his finest work.
Buckley, Nock, and The Nation
From Victor Navasky’s NYT review of two books by or about William F. Buckley (thanks to Scott Lahti for an early link to the piece):
It is probably no accident, as the old-left journals used to say, that both Buckley and Carey McWilliams, The Nation’s longtime editor, were fans of Albert Jay Nock, who after briefly working at The Nation in the 1920s went on to found his own libertarian magazine called The Freeman (the rights to which Buckley sought unsuccessfully to buy when he began National Review). Nock started out as a left-wing anarchist and bohemian, but he metamorphosed into an anti-egalitarian who believed that journals of opinion were aimed at what he called the Remnant, the enlightened few who would influence the many.
“Bohemian” is a better description of Nock’s one-time American Magazine colleague John Reed; Nock was more of an anti-institutionalist than a party animal, and he remained one to the end (just look at the passages on marriage and organized religion in Memoirs of a Superfluous Man). “Left-wing anarchist” is misleading as well: Nock was an individualist anarchist heavily influenced by Henry George. He was far from being an anarcho-syndicalist, which is what “left-wing anarchist” might be taken to mean. Navasky probably doesn’t mean to suggest that, but the contrast he wants to draw between the the early and the late Nock is not accurate. The sharp contrast is between the Tolstoyan sensibility of the pre-World War I Nock and the partly Cram-inspired pessimistic Nock of later years.
Buckley’s relationship to Nock is pretty well known — WFB Sr. was a friend of AJN, and WFB Jr. often paid homage to Nock — but I had not known about Carey McWilliam’s admiration for him.
Postscript: For what it’s worth — we Nock aficionados can be a punctilious lot — Navasky’s dates are wrong, too. Nock worked for The Nation during World War I, not the 1920s, and even got the magazined censored when he wrote critically about Samuel Gompers. Bad for the labor-business-government war effort, don’t ya know. He launched The Freeman, with Francis Neilson as co-editor (in name, at least), in 1920.
http://toryanarchist.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/nockians-left-and-right/
Albert Jay Nock: Alternative History
Albert Jay Nock and Alternative History
By Joseph R. Stromberg
Joseph Stromberg is a historian and freelance writer.
Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was a leading ideologist of the Old Right, a loose collection of individualist intellectuals, journalists, and a few politicians who opposed the growth of government in the first half of the twentieth century. Nock’s writing appeared in the Nation, the original Freeman (1920–1924), which he founded with Francis Neilson, the American Mercury, Harper’s, and elsewhere.
His books include On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (1928), Jefferson (1926), The Theory of Education in the United States (1931), Our Enemy, the State (1935), Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), and Cogitations (Nockian Society, 1985).
Nock believed that education, properly understood, was not the same as vocational training, and he famously took a dim view of politics. Conservative political scientist George W. Carey has lately (2004) named him as one of “the great conservative thinkers of the twentieth century.”
Perhaps so; but Nock was also profoundly radical. Jefferson and Our Enemy, the State are the keys to understanding Nock’s system, and inquiry into them sheds light on the relationship between Nock and the Old Right to Progressives and Progressivism and other strains of non-Marxist radicalism.
Nock’s Jefferson
Few would doubt that Nock is a pleasure to read. Jefferson packs interesting detail and observation into an admittedly off-center account of its subject. Thomas Jefferson is skillfully etched, foibles and all, and Nock notes favorably that he never speculated in land. Of his many inventions, Jefferson “never patented one” (being what we would now call a “freeware” inventor).
As ambassador to France, Jefferson supposed that country held 19 million paupers. He commented, “[W]herever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural rights. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.” Adding in royal monopolies, Jefferson ascribed to France’s productive classes “all the oppressions which result from the nature of the general government . . . their particular tenures, and . . . the seigneurial [feudal] government to which they are subject.”
In England, Nock writes, Jefferson “saw a population expropriated from the land, and existing at the mercy of industrial employers, with the enormous exactions of monopoly standing as a fixed charge upon the producer.” The English state was essentially the agent of privileged orders. Jefferson commented that while Englishmen were honest, their constitution (see Paine, Shelley), “from its nature, must render their government forever dishonest”; as politically organized, England comprised “a nation of buccaneers . . . seizing to itself the maritime resources and rights of all other nations.”
Republicanism Is Superior, But Not Ideal
Europe’s monarchies bred such evils naturally. Nock writes that Jefferson saw American republicanism as obviously superior. But ours was “not the ideal system”—Native American anarchism was (Nock’s summary). Leaning that direction, Jefferson sometimes theorized a radical decentralization of the states themselves into ward-republics. In decentralized wards the people could, in Jefferson’s words, “crush regularly and peaceably the usurpations of their unfaithful agents.” Here, Nock writes, Virginia might have “set a good example, most of all to New England, which had the system, but was aborting its fruit.” Jefferson attributed Shays’ Rebellion to (in Nock’s words) “an unfair pressure of debt and taxation, applied by collusion. . . .”
Nock observes that the leading Federalist ideologist, Alexander Hamilton, united “certain broad classes of the ‘rich and well-born’ with the interests of the government,” starting with public creditors. As for “the natural-resource monopolist,” his position, Nock says, “was as impregnable under the Constitution as his opportunities were limitless.. . . Hence the association of capital and monopoly would come about automatically. . . .” The Revolution’s ideals had masked concrete economic interests; what really divided the country was the Federalists’ political means to wealth. As for the Alien and Sedition Acts, Nock writes, “Americans were never sticklers for theory; they have been always more concerned with the inconveniences of despotism than with its iniquities.”
Jefferson thought Hamilton’s national debt could be paid in 15 years, but commented: “[W]e can never get rid of his financial system.” He complained to Samuel Adams of “an artificial paper phalanx overruling the agricultural mass. . . .” Nock wryly notes “unaccountable fires among the Treasury records” just before Jefferson’s appointees came in.
Nock is no unreserved admirer of Jefferson. He finds Jefferson’s assessment of the Federalists inexact: “[W]hat really animated and held these people together was a predatory economic interest.” Jefferson suspected English influence but saw only its “external and superficial aspects.” The Federalists, Nock writes, devised their fiscal system “by no means because it was British, but because there was money in it” as “the most effective engine of exploitation by the ‘rich and well-born’ ” (italics added).
Jefferson was slow to see the Constitution “as an economic document of the first order. . . .” “The four great general powers” it granted were over taxes, war, commerce, and control of western lands. Mercer of Maryland, John Taylor of Caroline, and Jackson of Georgia were quicker “to assess the economic implications of Hamilton’s fiscal system.” They were correct, and Hamilton’s funding scheme created new assets amounting to an eighth of the national “wealth” out of nothing and gave them to “a single vested interest.”
In Nock’s opinion, Jefferson’s “legalistic” opposition to Hamilton made him seem “a doctrinaire advocate of State rights and of strict construction; whereas he was really neither.” Nor was he opposed to commerce in general; he understood the difference between everyday banking and public credit. For reasons of trade, Jefferson had supported the new Constitution, provided that “the United States should be a nation abroad, and a confederacy at home.”
Taylor had a superior grasp of free-trade principles and of how taxes are shifted back to productive factors. When Jefferson complains to Taylor about political patronage, Nock writes laconically, “[T]he Constitution was meant to work that way, and it did.” Jefferson’s plan of paying off the public debt by selling western lands served to create “unlimited private land-monopoly.” As for his Louisiana Purchase, “if it was a boon to the agrarian producer, it was a godsend to the speculator.” Jefferson’s unconcern about land monopoly aided the interests created by the Federalists.
Worse, Jefferson had an unfortunate faith in economic warfare—retaliatory tariffs and embargoes.
“He never anticipated,” Nock writes, “the appalling economic consequences brought indirectly upon the country in 1807.” Discussing the background of the War of 1812 (and with 1914–1917 fresh in mind), Nock writes that instead of informing American shippers that they took their own risks in sailing into the Anglo–French naval war zone, Jefferson backed an embargo “wholly subversive of the principle of liberty”—“the most arbitrary, inquisitorial and confiscatory measure formulated in American legislation up to the period of the Civil War. . . .” It made three states solidly Federalist and raised threats of New England secession.
Jefferson also failed to foresee the Federalists’ permanent lock on the Federal courts. In 1800 he predicted that “a single consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on earth,” exclaiming: “What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by the assumption of all the State powers into the hands of the General Government.” Yet Jefferson was not “a doctrinaire enemy of centralization.” He did not see his own constitutionally doubtful actions, as president, as comparable to things his enemies did (in Nock’s words) “for the final purpose of putting the legality of economic exploitation forever beyond the reach” of electoral politics and “official responsibility.”
In a “land of unprecedented monopolist opportunity,” Nock writes, men strove “to get out of the producing class and into the exploiting class as quickly as possible.” Jefferson “never seemed aware that the prospect of getting an unearned dollar is as attractive to an agrarian as it is to a banker. . . .” His Republicans kept their name while resisting “any tendency within the party to impair the system” that made extra-economic profits possible; hence, over time, “the essential identity of the parties.”
Our Enemy, the State
Nock deployed and criticized Jefferson in aid of reinterpreting American history. He made his theoretical ground explicit in Our Enemy, the State. Nock wrote that work in the shadow of the New Deal, which he treated as part of a two-century process of American state-building.
In Nock’s terminology, government serves society. But the state intervenes positively to divide society “into an owning and exploiting class, and a propertyless dependent class.” Only “incompetent observation” from Aristotle to Paine, had obscured this distinction. Franz Oppenheimer found the state’s origin in conquest, making every historical instance “a class-state”; but the state game only paid where economic exploitation could arise. For Nock, access to land was the key to preventing exploitation. Nock cites Turgot, Benjamin Franklin, John Taylor, Theodr Hertzka, and Henry George on the point.
The burden of Nock’s “theorem” is simply that few people with alternative economic means would beat down factory doors for mere “employment”—and at abysmally low wages, under miserable, dangerous conditions and quasi-military “discipline,” and with long, arbitrarily set working hours. The best alternative means was a plot of land and, short of that, access to traditional commons, “wastes,” and so on. These access rights were not especially tragic-because-common, but were in fact collective private rights held by specific persons in well-defined, once-feudal jurisdictions. All England could not show up one day and dissipate these resources. These little rights, however, gave people an edge, a minimal independence useful for avoiding abject dependence on would-be employers. The latter hated these arrangements and duly enrolled the state to destroy them. Nock’s insight is that conquest, land engrossment, and destruction of economic options are not a one-shot deal, done in 1066, but can be repeated as needed, in an ongoing process favoring those with the best access to the state. This is why Nock uses the inflammatory word “exploitation.”
In actual (non-Whig) history, commercial interests gradually refit the state “to their own special interests, and strengthened it immeasurably.” Later, republican forms allowed the individual to imagine “that State action is his action. . . .” Following Oppenheimer, Nock contrasts the economic and political means to wealth. Feudal and merchant states were “higher integrations of the primitive State”; while states as such, “primitive, feudal or merchant [were] the organization of the political means.”
America’s colonial period unfolded in the period in England when merchants and financiers “saw the attractive possibilities of production for profit, with the incidence of exploitation gradually shifting to an industrial proletariat.” This, Nock says, was “the actual inwardness of . . . the Puritan movement. . . .” Growing individualism and social power coexisted with a “weak” state, but one strong enough to oversee “a thorough-going economic exploitation with relatively little apparatus of legislation or of personnel.”
The “Merchant-State”
John Locke justified this new state and sought “to copper-rivet . . . a doctrine of the sacredness of property” blocking state confiscations of the private property of important persons. Under Locke’s Whiggism-with-a-vengeance, the rights of property “took precedence even over those of life and liberty.” Even war powers, Nock writes, were to intrude on men’s lives and liberties “but not on their property” (italics added). Popular sovereignty provided additional leverage “for ousting . . . status to make way for the regime of contract . . . displacing the feudal State and bringing in the merchant-State.” Like everyone else, merchants felt the disutility of labor and wanted a better “access to the political means.” Parliament was their chosen instrument.
In America, colonial states developed from the chartered trading company as “an autonomous State.” Indeed, “the merchant-State was set up complete in New England long before it was set up in Old England.” As a result, “the merchant-State is the only form of State that ever existed in America”—“a purely class State,” benefiting particular commercial interests. (This was also true in Virginia, despite a feudal-patriarchal overlay.)
The merchant-State’s exploits were limited by the above-mentioned theorem that successful exploitation requires prior expropriation of surplus lands. In America, Nock says, the state-system of land tenure—“monopoly of the use-value of land” and “monopoly of the economic rent of land”—provided the expropriation needed. Nock seems to be saying, first, that states tend to grant more land than the title holder can actually use; second, that in such cases, the title holder realizes illegitimate profits from selling or renting the land to those who do use it. His third point would be that by encouraging the existence of large landed estates, the state and its beneficiaries take away from other potential users a livelihood they could otherwise have had. The bourgeois state let “men of all sorts . . . climb into the exploiting class,” and with “a practically limitless field for speculation in rental-values,” Nock writes, “land speculation may be put down as the first major industry established in colonial America.” If land use rather than speculation had determined American settlement, “our western frontier would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River.” Hence all theses on “over-population,” beginning with Malthus, were “utterly incompetent” because deduced from “legal occupancy instead of actual occupancy.”
Pro-English commercial legislation cramped American would-be wielders of the political means to wealth, as did the King’s attempt in 1763 to curb colonial land grabs. Such interference irritated American elites no end. Political independence would provide them with full access to (and control of) state power.
Feudal elites “bequeathed” the idea of the political means to the bourgeoisie. “No other view of the State was ever held in colonial America,” Nock writes. He observes that since English policy limited colonial use of “both the political and economic means” (italics added), the language of natural rights and popular sovereignty had great appeal. The Declaration of Independence spoke to those who wished to combine “unlimited economic pseudo-individualism on the part of the State’s beneficiaries, and a judiciously managed exercise of political self-expression by the electorate.”
After American independence in 1783, Nock writes, “administration of the political means was not centralized in the federation, but in the several units. . . .” The federal level “had no taxing power, and no coercive power,” while each state had its own “bounties, concessions, subsidies,” and more. All 13 states continued the monopolistic state-system of land tenure defined above.
The struggle over a new constitution pitted “speculating, industrial, commercial and creditor interests” against “farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally.” The new plan widened the field of the political means, or of a specific mix of economic and political means. The outcome was free trade inside a bigger tariff zone: “the closer the centralization, the larger the exploitable area.” (This is Nock’s reading, in effect, of Federalist 10.) The classes behind the Constitution wanted “the British system . . . on a nation-wide scale”; they prevailed because mercantile interests were compact and agrarians dispersed—an early Public Choice insight. The Constitution provided republican forms with little democratic content. Under it, “the rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to eviscerating interpretations,” and sometimes “to simple executive disregard.” The point was to serve large property, however gotten, indiscriminately.
The 1789 Judiciary Act tied up the bundle, and with John Marshall’s able help the Supreme Court became “the highest law-making body.” Nock comments on the later “fetiches” of the party system and such “constitutional principles” as “strict construction,” always abandoned in practice. Jefferson’s dubiously constitutional Louisiana Purchase aimed at strengthening “agrarian control of the political means”—an achievement reversed after 1861. Nock scorns the embedded dishonesty of the system, even when defended with slogans involving “states rights” and “rugged individualism.” Over the long haul, business had “most eagerly urged on the State to take . . . the successive single steps that lead directly to collectivism.” Similarly, he says, modern farmers were not family farmers, but manufacturers and speculators typically clamoring for state intervention.
Nock was not optimistic about the future. Characterless “mass-men” were helping the state absorb society. Alongside ideological factors, he remarks on the state’s “overweening physical strength.” In any case, “reforming and revolutionary movements” showed an “incorrigible superficiality,” especially when “the only modification . . . necessary is that the smallest unit should reserve the taxing power strictly to itself.” History’s usual logic went as follows: “Conquest, confiscation, the erection of the State,” and ending, after a regular series of internal developments, with the victory of state power over social power. Social dissolution came last. A few “alien spirits” would record the tale.
Three Strands of Nockian Thought
It will be useful here to note key elements of Nock’s thought. (Unless noted, quotations are from Our Enemy, the State.)
Jeffersonianism. In 1787–1788, Americans chose between 13 predatory organizations and a large one at the center. Nock sided with the defeated parties. Echoing John Taylor, he writes that Federalists “aimed at bringing in the British system of economics, politics and judicial control, on a nation-wide scale.”
Progressive History. Nock dedicated Jefferson to Justice Louis Brandeis and wrote, too, that as “an old friend” of historian Charles Beard, he followed Beard’s interpretation of the politics of the early Republic. To this “economic interpretation,” Nock brought a breadth and resilience sometimes under- or unemployed by his successors (if any). When Nock says that ideological lags sustain institutions, or that the American Whigs of 1776 did not care deeply about popular sovereignty and natural rights, he adopts Progressive views containing considerable truth.
Georgism. Nock did not take Progressive history uncritically, but creatively modified it. His grounding in Henry George gave systematic character to his work. This should not astonish us. Edmund Opitz, long-time FEE staffer and member of the Nockian Society, thought George’s followers were “among the best libertarians we have,” and Murray Rothbard commended Georgists for seeing there is a land question. Georgism gave Nock somewhere to stand outside the existing order. The central claim about primal state allocation of resources gave Nock great theoretical leverage (but does not require belief in George’s single tax).
In Nock’s hands, these three strands afford the basis for startlingly radical historical conclusions. Thus individualism and laissez faire had not produced the “horrors” of English industrialization, “for no such regime ever existed in England.” The horrors arose instead from “the State’s primary intervention,” which expropriated peasant producers and kept land from competing “with industry for labour,” while Adam Smith preached the gospel of “landowners and mill-owners.”
Like Oppenheimer, Nock posits “an original allotment of the political means,” or “original intervention,” in place of Marx’s “primitive accumulation.” So armed, he calls American railroads “speculative enterprises enabled by State intervention.” Transportation was “purely incidental”; the railroads were really about “land-jobbing and subsidy-hunting.” Nock follows the trail of plunder. The French aristocracy, he notes, was “a closed corporation”; but a republic, “by an indefinite expansion of the cohesive power of public plunder, admits a steady accession of outsiders.” This made Britain a predatory republic rather than traditional monarchy (Jefferson).
Seeing the “cohesive power of public plunder” as a near-law of history, Nock anticipates the “mode of predation” analysis pursued by Pierre Bourdieu, Sir Ernest Gellner, Joan Dyste Lind, Rothbard, and others. Here the state becomes “an anti-social institution,” establishing injustice through law, “which the State itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends.”
Nock also attended to ideology, noting that “certain arrangements of words” kept Americans (“the most unphilosophical of beings”) from seeing “how far the conversion of social power into State power has actually gone.” Americans cared nothing for “the theory of things.”
“State” and “Government”
To bare such mysteries, Nock distinguished “state” from “government.” This language probably owes something to late nineteenth-century Hegelian–American political science, but Nock repositions the absolute, totalizing state as a great evil, and takes government as a mere, limited mechanism of local self-rule. The state-concept becomes a critical tool, whose Hegelian content withers under Nock’s surgery. From within Nock’s radicalism, we see the need to understand the system as a whole, where the test of any public measure is, “What effect has this upon the sum-total of State power?” This sets a critical standard of sorts, to say the least.
In the end, our interest lies not merely in the task Nock undertook, but in what we could learn by following his lead.
Additional Bibliography
- Charles A. Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics and Related Essays (1957 [1922]), 192–193.
- George W. Carey, “America’s Founding and Limited Government,” Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2003/Spring 2004.
- William T. Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Phone Company: Why the Nation-State Is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology, April 2004.
- Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution (1947), 78–84.
- Raymond Crotty, When Histories Collide: The Development and Impact of Individualist Capitalism (2001).
- Frank van Dun, “Political Liberalism and the Formal Rechtsstaat,” http://tinyurl.com/66vytd.
- Bruce P. Frohnen, “Individual and Group, Natural and Acquired Rights: On the Need for Unclear Distinctions,” Ave Maria Law Review (2005).
- George Gale, “John Locke on Territoriality,” Political Theory, November 1973.
- David Gross, “Temporality and the Modern State,” Theory and Society (1985).
- Jonathan R. T. Hughes, The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (1977), and American Economic History (1983).
- Walter Karp, Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America (1974).
- Karl Marx, Capital, I (1967 [1887]), Ch. 33.
- José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1957 [1932]).
- Thomas Paine, Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. R. E. Roberts, (1945), 10–12 (English constitution).
- Michael Perelman, Classical Political Economy (1984); Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology (2006).
- Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market (1970).
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Political Writings, ed. R. A. Duerksen (1970), 43–45 (English constitution).
- Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988).
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8368
We Have Yet to Learn
We Have Yet to Learn
By Gregg MacDonald
Mr. MacDonald, a trustee of The Foundation for Economic Education, resides in Issaquah, Washington.
The ideas of man, expressed in one way or another, have come down to us over and over again for the past 50 centuries. As we approach the twenty-first century, it is almost impossible to come up with an original thought. What a great thing Adam had, quipped Mark Twain. When he said something good, he knew nobody else had said it before. One would think we would have learned something after 5,000 years, but it just hasn’t happened. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Hegel observed, What experience and history teach us is that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Hegel was right. People and governments never learn from history, and go on repeating the same mistakes.
If we had learned anything at all from the past, we would know that every economy must sooner or later rely upon some sort of profit-and-loss system to spur groups or individuals to productivity. Slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm have always turned out to be too unproductive, or too expensive—not to mention too immoral.
Prosperity depends on the incentive of profit, but more than that, it depends on freedom. Those who failed to learn this from the past should certainly learn it from the present by looking at the collapse of communism in Russia, the failure of communism 90 miles off our coast in Cuba, or the tragic legacy of communism in China.
What We Can Learn from Rome
When we think of the Roman Empire (and it seems that everybody today tries to draw an analogy between the decline of America and the fall of the Roman Empire), we think of Roman citizens as being free, even though there were a great many slaves in the Empire. Roman politicians lusted after citizens’ votes and support just as politicians do today. Commerce and business thrived in this free economy. Farmers, shoemakers, estate agents, bakers, manufacturers, builders, innkeepers, and a host of other tradesmen and professionals flourished. In the early centuries of the Empire, just as in the early days of the United States, the farmers were the backbone of the nation, providing stability and food as well as strong, free men to defend Rome and fight its battles.
Under the Emperor Diocletian, however, Rome succumbed to outright socialism. Government spending led to inflation and increasing poverty. In A.D. 301, Diocletian issued an Edictum de pretiis, which set maximum prices and wages for all important goods and services. (In today’s world such measures are simply called wage and price controls.) The results were disastrous and set the stage for the fall of the Empire and the beginning of serfdom in the Middle Ages.
Diocletian put extensive public works into operation to boost employment, and food was given to the poor at little or no cost. The government brought nearly all major industries and guilds—unions—under explicit control. Paul-Louis, in his Ancient Rome at Work, tells us that in every large city, the state became a powerful employer . . . standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who were in any case crushed by taxation. Will Durant noted that businessmen predicted ruin, but Diocletian explained that the barbarians were at the gate, and that individual liberty had to be shelved until collective liberty could be made secure.
Diocletian’s expanding, expensive, and corrupt bureaucracy proved to be too much to handle. To support all this government—the army, courts, public works, and welfare—taxes rose so high that men lost the incentive to work or earn. Lawyers kept finding ways to evade taxes, but other lawyers formulated laws to prevent evasion. To escape the tax men, thousands of Romans fled over the frontiers to find refuge with the barbarians Diocletian said were at the walls of Rome. (It makes one wonder why the barbarians wanted to get in.)
In an effort to stem the tide of fleeing citizens, and to facilitate regulations and taxation, the government issued decrees binding the farmers to their fields and the workers to their shops until all their debts and taxes had been paid in full. And, as mentioned, serfdom entered its initial stage.
The Modern Welfare State
Technologically, the modern world, and the Western world especially, are no more like ancient Rome than the moon is like the sun. But, technology and science aside, the civilization of Rome in the time of Diocletian vividly reminds us how much our own government parallels the Roman government that existed then. The welfare state, the huge bureaucracy to run it, stifling government regulations, and exorbitant taxes to pay for it all—is there that much difference between our present-day American government and the regime that prevailed in Diocletian’s Rome? And, again, technology and science aside, ideas and thoughts seem to have changed little.
There can be no lasting, healthy economy without freedom. When we are told by government bureaucrats just what we are allowed to do on our property, told whom we must employ, and where we must send our children for an education—can we honestly say we are free?
The average American worker pays government forty-seven percent out of each dollar he or she earns. This money is taken by the IRS, FICA, local and state taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and on and on. Many people don’t realize this. How can you say you are free if half of everything you earn is taken away from you by government?
A healthy economy, in order to grow and spread and benefit the most people without taking away from others, needs freedom to expand. What we have in the United States today is an economy that has evolved through government control to satisfy self-indulgence and greed. Nor is it an economy embedded in freedom. Somerset Maugham warned us that If any nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
The people of the United States at the end of the twentieth century have certainly placed a high value on comfort and money. Entitlements, golden parachutes, and rich government pensions are just a few of the programs and schemes that are relentlessly driving our economy onto dangerously thin ice. If enormous bureaucracies on the local, state, and federal levels are the price we are willing to pay for government contracts, welfare, and entitlements in order to retain comfort, then can a sick economy be far behind? And is the loss of freedom even closer? []
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3525
The Role of Government
Perspective: The Role of Government in Society
By Perspective: The Role of Government in Society
Some time ago the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), now headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, ran a series of student seminars around the country on the Role of Business in Society (ROBIS). I know, for I ran one at Campbell University in 1978 that featured free-market stalwarts like Walter Williams and the late Arthur Shenfield.
Surely the role of business deserves depiction and discussion. But so does, and I think more so, ROGIS—standing for Role of Government in Society, an acronym coined by Edward A. Prentice of the Mount Hood Society of Portland, Oregon, and Professor Fred Decker of Oregon State University. There are at least three key questions relating to that role:
Precisely what role should the state play in society, including the economy? How should that role tie into America’s concern over individual rights so magnificently framed in 1787 and ratified in 1791 as the Bill of Rights? And what of the principle of federalism embodied in the Tenth Amendment as:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people?
Overarching these questions is, I think, the nature of man and the admonishment of an angry Lord Jehovah who, on banishing sinful Adam and Eve, thundered down on them: By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. For suddenly the Garden of Eden and its boundless plenty were no more. Instead, productive resources, including time, were limited, sharply. The law of scarcity was in, starkly. Adam and Eve and their issue down to this hour faced—face—a life that Thomas Hobbes baldly said in his Leviathan (1651) was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
So man, then and now, is in a fix, caught in a law of trade-offs. He can’t have his bread and eat it too. He must weigh unlimited ends against limited means. So Nature forces him to make hard choices on the correct construct of the state—as society’s protector or provider or both.
Life is about choices. In making economic decisions, individuals must choose among scarce resources that have alternative uses. They must try to conquer or, more accurately, lessen scarcity. But how?
How, indeed, when everyone is choosing from among the same scarce resources? Is this not a recipe for chaos if not bloodshed, the law of the jungle? Particularly in light of the condition of man, which Hobbes, for his part, saw as a condition of war of everyone against everyone?
But man’s lot is not war but peace—if with a proviso of a proper role for government: a system of private property rights, limited government, a state not as a coercive provider of goods and services but as a peaceful protector of life, liberty, and property.
From this construct, based on the original U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, emerged a system of free markets: a price system, capital investment, international trade, positive entrepreneurship. So the Founders unleashed Adam Smith’s mighty Invisible Hand—personal incentives under the rule of law driving this remarkable system of freedom and free enterprise, of social cooperation and international harmony, called capitalism.
Despite capitalism’s success, people often ask: Why is poverty so widespread within the nation and across the world? That’s the wrong question. For, as noted, man is born into scarcity; poverty is his natural condition. Adam Smith raised the right inquiry: Why wealth? Thus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
This inquiry—Smith’s much-overlooked title word—needs economic education, a widespread understanding of ROGIS, of how capitalism and the world work—an understanding, by the way, sought by Leonard E. Read, in a stroke of brilliant entrepreneurship, when he began The Foundation for Economic Education in 1946.
Ludwig von Mises, FEE’s academic adviser for more than 25 years, warned of boomeranging state intervention in Human Action:
All varieties of [state] interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which—from the view of their authors’ and advocates’ valuations—is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter.
The idea of ROGIS then is pivotal. Government is necessary, yes. But, as noted by George Washington: While government can be a helpful servant when limited, it becomes a fearsome master when unlimited.
Overextended government that reaches beyond the rule of law—fostering interventionism and the Welfare State—is an idea whose time never should have come. This issue of The Freeman explores, retrospectively and more so prospectively, government’s proper role.
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3587
Albert Jay Nock: A Gifted Pen for Radical Individualism
Albert Jay Nock: A Gifted Pen for Radical Individualism
By Jim Powell
Mr. Powell is editor of Laissez Faire Books and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, American Heritage, and more than three dozen other publications. Copyright 1997 by Jim Powell.
Thanks to Edmund A. Opitz, Jack Schwartzman, and Robert M. Thornton for helping to secure scarce materials on Nock.
American individualism had virtually died out by the time Mark Twain was buried in 1910. Progressive intellectuals promoted collectivism. Progressive jurists like Oliver Wendell Holmes hammered constitutional restraints as an inconvenient obstacle to expanding government power, supposedly the cure for every social problem. Progressive education theorist John Dewey belittled mere learning and claimed that social reconstruction was the mission of schooling. Progressive hero Theodore Roosevelt glorified imperial conquest. Progressive President Woodrow Wilson maneuvered America into a European war, jailed dissidents, and pushed through the income tax which persists to this day. Great individualists such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were ridiculed, if they were remembered at all.
Yet author Albert Jay Nock dared declare that collectivism was evil. He denounced the use of force to impose one’s will on others. He opposed military intervention in the affairs of other nations. He believed America should stay out of foreign wars that inevitably subvert liberty. He insisted individuals have the unalienable right to pursue happiness as long as they don’t hurt anybody. Murray N. Rothbard called Nock an authentic American radical.
Even though Nock didn’t contribute to mass-circulation magazines and his books had a limited sale, he quietly affirmed individualism as a living creed. He became a name to reckon with as editor and writer for The Freeman (1920-1924). The great antiwar journalist Oswald Garrison Villard called it the best-written weekly yet to appear in the United States, a publication which thoroughly merited a permanent place in American journalism. The influential editor and author H. L. Mencken declared: What publicist among us, indeed, writes better than Nock? His [Freeman] editorials . . . set a mark that no other man of his trade has ever quite managed to reach. They were well informed and sometimes even learned, but there was never the slightest trace of pedantry in them. In even the least of them there were sound writing and solid structure. Nock has an excellent ear . . . he thinks in charming rhythms.
Nock won respect, too, because he was a highly cultured man. As literary critic Van Wyck Brooks explained: He was a formidable scholar and an amateur of music who remembered all the great singers of his day and could trace them through this part or that from Naples to St. Petersburg, London, Brussels, and Vienna. He had known all the great orchestras from Turin to Chicago . . . and he had visited half the universities of Europe from Bonn to Bordeaux, Montpelier, Liege and Ghent. He could pick up at random, with a casual air, almost any point and trace it from Plato through Scaliger to Montaigne or Erasmus, and I can cite chapter and verse for saying that whether in Latin or Greek he could quote any author in reply to any question. I believe he knew as well the Old Testament in Hebrew. American historian Merrill D. Peterson added: He was a finished scholar, a brilliant editor, and a connoisseur of taste and intellect.
Nock’s friend Ruth Robinson recalled, He was a finely constructed man, with small bones, hands, and feet. He was five feet ten inches tall, slight and quick in movement; he kept his excellent figure and carriage throughout life. The salient expressions of his strong face were conveyed through his brilliant blue eyes, which could change instantly, be impenetrable, mischievous, or express great kindliness and sympathy. He had fair skin and high color and during all the years I knew him wore a mustache. . . . Long before his hair turned white, an iron-grey band at the edge of his brown hair was an outstanding characteristic of his appearance.
Nock was an intensely private man. People who worked with him for years had no idea that he had been a clergyman. No one knew even where he lived, noted Van Wyck Brooks, and a pleasantry in the office was that one could reach him by placing a letter under a certain rock in Central Park. Frank Chodorov, a friend during Nock’s last decade, said, It was only after I was appointed administrator of his estate that I learned of the existence of two full-grown and well-educated sons.
Social philosopher Lewis Mumford, who knew Nock early in his career, remembered that: He was the very model of the old-fashioned gentleman, American style: quiet spoken, fond of good food, punctilious in little matters of courtesy, with a fund of good stories, many of them western; never speaking about himself, never revealing anything directly about himself. Added Chodorov, Nock was an individualist.
Beginnings
Albert Jay Nock was born October 13, 1870, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was the only child of Emma Sheldon Jay, who descended from French Protestants. His father, Joseph Albert Nock, was a hot-tempered steelworker and Episcopal clergyman.
Nock grew up in a semirural Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood, and the family had a large garden and fruit trees. According to his account, he learned the alphabet by puzzling over a newspaper and asking questions. He didn’t attend school until he was a teenager, but at home he was surrounded by books, which he explored randomly. He recalled that the first book he focused on was Webster’s Dictionary, probably because it was a fat book on a lower shelf. The dictionary became quite literally my bosom friend, for I lugged it about, clasped it to my breast with both hands, from one place to another where I should not be underfoot, and there I would lay it open on the floor and read it.
When Nock was ten, his father got a job on the upper shore of Lake Huron. There he observed independence, self-respect, self-reliance, dignity, diligence . . . the virtues that once spoke out in the Declaration of Independence. . . . Our life was singularly free; we were so little conscious of arbitrary restraint that we hardly knew government existed. . . . On the whole our society might have served pretty well as a standing advertisement for Mr. Jefferson’s notion that the virtues which he regarded as distinctively American thrive best in the absence of government.
After attending a private preparatory school, Nock entered St. Stephen’s College (later to become Bard College) in 1887. It had fewer than one hundred students. Both institutions stressed a classical curriculum, and Nock relished Greek and Latin literature. He graduated third in his ten-student class. Nock reportedly went on to attend Berkeley Divinity School, Middletown, Connecticut, and although he left after about a year, he was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1897. The following year, he began serving as assistant rector at St. James Church, Titusville, Pennsylvania. He succeeded the rector, who died on New Year’s Day 1899.
It was in Titusville that Nock met Agnes Grumbine, and they were married April 25, 1900. They had two sons: Samuel, born in 1901, and Francis, born in 1905. Nock left his wife soon thereafter, and never remarried. His sons grew up to become college teachers. Meanwhile, Nock was called to Christ Episcopal Church, Blacksburg, Virginia, and then to St. Joseph’s Church in Detroit. In 1909, he seems to have experienced a crisis of faith. My life was detached, untouched and colorless, he later told Ruth Robinson.
Nock embraced ideas of crusading economic reformer Henry George. As a social philosopher, George interested me profoundly, Nock recalled, as a reformer and publicist, he did not interest me. . . . George’s philosophy was the philosophy of human freedom . . . he believed that all mankind are indefinitely improvable, and that the freer they are, the more they will improve. He saw also that they can never become politically or socially free until they have become economically free.
Nock quit the clergy to become an editor of American Magazine, launched by editors and writers who had a falling out with S.S. McClure, the pioneering muckraking publisher. Nock worked at American Magazine for four years. He wrote articles advocating a single tax on land and—it must be confessed—he approved Canada’s policy of having government own vast acreage. He befriended the former Toledo mayor and aspiring scholar Brand Whitlock, who later wrote a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette. He spent time with the likes of muckraking journalists Lincoln Steffens and John Reed. He honed his writing. My stuff is good enough, perhaps, he wrote Ruth Robinson, and surely better than five or six years ago, but it still sounds as though it was written from a seat in the grand stand.
The Players Club
Nock frequented the Players Club, fabled gathering place for people in the arts since it was established by actor Edwin Booth and author Mark Twain. Located at 16 Gramercy Park South, Manhattan, it is a Gothic Revival style five-story house that architect Stanford White transformed into the club in 1888. Out front are a wrought-iron balcony and Renaissance-style gaslights. The Players Club has one of America’s largest libraries on the theatre and portrait paintings by Gilbert Stuart, John Singer Sargent, and Norman Rockwell. Besides Nock, illustrious members have included caricaturist Thomas Nast, theatrical actors John Barrymore and Helen Hayes, screen actors James Cagney and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Nock liked to take mail, eat, and play pool at the Players Club—a portrait of Mark Twain hangs over a fireplace, and one of Twain’s pool cues is on display. Nock’s business card simply said: Albert Jay Nock, Players Club, New York.
Nock absorbed the ideas of German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, whose radical book Der Staat was published in 1908. An English translation, The State, appeared in 1915. Oppenheimer had noted that there were only two fundamental ways of acquiring wealth—work and robbery. He declared that government was based on robbery.
In 1914, cash-short American Magazine was about to be acquired by a publisher intent on avoiding controversy. Nock joined the staff of The Nation, which was owned and edited by Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of antislavery crusader William Lloyd Garrison. Nock came to admire Villard, who courageously opposed President Woodrow Wilson’s scheming to get America into the First World War. One of Nock’s articles, on labor union agitator Samuel Gompers, provoked Wilson’s censors to suppress The Nation.
The Freeman
Nock, however, decided he couldn’t abide Villard’s approval of nationalizing railroads. He resigned from The Nation and, backed by Helen Swift Neilson, daughter of Gustavus Swift and heir to a meatpacking fortune, he became editor of a new magazine of opinion: The Freeman. The first weekly issue appeared March 17, 1920. The magazine measured 8 inches by 12 inches and contained 24 pages of articles and letters about politics, literature, music, and other topics.
Nock’s principal collaborator was Neilson’s English husband, Francis, a former stage director at the London Royal Opera and radical Liberal Member of Parliament who became a leading pacifist. Disgusted by England’s entry in the First World War, Neilson came to the United States and became an American citizen. He provoked controversy with his book How Diplomats Make War, published in 1915 by Benjamin W. Huebsch, who subsequently served as president of The Freeman.
Practically from the beginning, there was rivalry between the collaborators. Will Lissner, a former New York Times writer who knew both Nock and Neilson, recalled that Nock rewrote many of Neilson’s articles in Nock’s own distinctive style, causing the readers to assume that ‘Nock was The Freeman.’ Neilson bitterly resented this assumption. Lewis Mumford reported that Nock couldn’t bear Neilson’s somewhat inflated parliamentary style; and he would quietly put Neilson’s contributions in the drawer of his desk, letting them gather dust. . . . In his memoirs, published after Nock’s death, Neilson claimed Nock had stolen his stuff. Nock was more graceful. I had far less to do with forming or maintaining [The Freeman] than people think I had. My chief associate was . . . one of the ablest men I ever knew, far abler than I, and more experienced.
The editorial staff included Suzanne La Follette. In her mid-twenties, she was the daughter of progressive U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette and a rigorous opponent of government intervention. She was a very beautiful woman, with a hilarious sense of humor, a grammatical stickler . . . a feminist . . . generous and warm-hearted, recalled William F. Buckley Jr., who knew her in later years.
There was an eclectic assortment of contributors, including economic historian Charles Beard, book reviewer Van Wyck Brooks, Soviet critic William Henry Chamberlin, technology critic Lewis Mumford, philosopher Bertrand Russell, muckraker Lincoln Steffens, poet Louis Untermeyer, and economist Thorstein Veblen—The Freeman decidedly wasn’t a hard-core libertarian magazine.
Oswald Garrison Villard hailed The Freeman for, he assumed, joining the ranks of liberal journalism, but Nock replied in the March 31 issue: The Freeman is a radical paper; its place is in the virgin field, or better, the long-neglected and fallow field, of American radicalism.
The liberal believes that the State is essentially social and is all for improving it by political methods so that it may function accordingly to what he believes to be its original intention. Hence, he is interested in politics, takes them seriously, goes at them hopefully, and believes in them as an instrument of social welfare and progress. . . . The radical, on the other hand, believes that the State is fundamentally anti-social and is all for improving it off the face of the earth; not by blowing up office-holders . . . but by the historical process of strengthening, consolidating and enlightening economic organization.
To better understand the roots of freedom, Nock urged Americans to resolutely close their eyes to diplomatic exchanges and official pronouncements, and read Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, Henry George. Nock added that without economic freedom no other freedom is significant or lasting, and that if economic freedom can be attained, no other freedom can be withheld.
Of the consequences of the First World War, Nock wrote: The war immensely fortified a universal faith in violence; it set in motion endless adventures in imperialism, endless nationalist ambitions. Every war does this to a degree roughly corresponding to its magnitude.
Nock wrote more about diplomacy than any other subject for The Freeman, and although he didn’t pore through all the diplomatic documents, he did gain perspective by traveling through Europe. For instance, he witnessed the 1923 German runaway inflation: I crossed from Amsterdam to Berlin with German money in my bill-fold amounting nearly to $1,250,000, pre-war value. Ten years earlier I could have bought out half a German town, lock, stock and barrel, with that much money, but when I left Amsterdam my best hope was that it might cover a decent dinner and a night’s lodging.
Nock turned some of his Freeman articles into his first book: The Myth of a Guilty Nation, which, based on the work of Francis Neilson, debunked the idea that Germany was solely responsible for World War I. Nock insisted all the participants deserved blame for the catastrophe that resulted in some 10 million deaths. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes wrote that The Myth of a Guilty Nation was a brilliant piece of journalistic Revisionism. . . . It took some courage in those days.
Unfortunately, The Freeman never attracted more than about 7,000 subscribers—far from enough to become self-sustaining. Annual losses reportedly exceeded $80,000. The magazine ceased publication after the March 5, 1924, issue. There had been 208 issues, and Nock seems to have contributed 259 pieces. Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick remembered Nock’s Freeman as admirably written, diverting, original, and full of unpredictable quirks. Oswald Garrison Villard expressed grateful thanks that it has existed, and our belief that it would be a misfortune if some other medium were not found to avail itself of Mr. Albert Jay Nock’s exceptional equipment for editorial service.
Nock sailed for Brussels, where he had many fond memories: Her ways and manners, her unpretending grace and charm, her feel of stability and soundness, are all just as you have been impatiently expecting to find them, and her face wears a jolly Flemish smile.
Back in New York, Nock became a good friend of H.L. Mencken, the maverick who edited American Mercury. There is no better companion in the world than Henry, Nock exulted after one Manhattan dinner. I admire him, and have the warmest affection for him. I was impressed afresh by his superb character—immensely able, unselfconscious, sincere, erudite, simple-hearted, kindly, generous, really a noble fellow if ever there was one in the world.
Soon Nock was writing for intellectual magazines like American Mercury, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Saturday Review of Literature, and Scribner’s. American Mercury, for instance, published On Doing the Right Thing. He wrote: The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed. Everything else has been tried, world without end. Going dead against reason and experience, we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.
Three admirers from Philadelphia, Ellen Winsor, Rebecca Winsor Evans, and Edmund C. Evans, provided funds which enabled Nock to pursue his projects—their assistance continued for the rest of his life. In 1924, he gathered together writings of the American humorist and social critic Artemus Ward (1834-1867), who had inspired Mark Twain. Ward had fallen out of fashion, and Nock thought his social criticism could be appreciated by just a small number of unusually civilized and perceptive people whom he called the Remnant—a term that would blossom into one of his better-known ideas a dozen years later.
Mr. Jefferson
Then Nock focused on book-length biographical essays. The first was Mr. Jefferson (1926), which skipped the most famous events of the Founder’s life to focus on the development of his mind. Nock drew extensively on Charles Beard’s The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. Claude Bowers’s Jefferson and Hamilton, published the same year, sold more copies at the time and did more to revive the reputation of Jefferson, who had been a forgotten man since the Civil War. But it is Nock’s book that remains in print. H.L. Mencken wrote that Nock’s book is accurate, it is shrewd, it is well ordered, and above all it is charming. I know of no other book on Jefferson that penetrates so persuasively to the essential substance of the man. Harvard University’s great narrative historian Samuel Eliot Morison hailed the brilliancy of Nock’s Jefferson. Historian Merrill Peterson calls it The most captivating single volume in the Jefferson literature.
Nock loved the sixteenth-century French humanist scholar, extravagant satirist, and maverick individualist Francois Rabelais, and in 1929 he wrote a book about him, collaborating with Oxford-educated researcher Catherine Rose Wilson. Rabelais is one of the world’s great libertarians . . . he has been a stay and support to my spirit for thirty years, and I could not possibly have got through without him. . . . The chief purpose of reading a classic like Rabelais is to prop and stay the spirit, especially in its moments of weakness and enervation, against the stress of life, to elevate it above the reach of commonplace annoyances and degradations, and to purge it of despondency and cynicism. He is to be read as Homer, Sophocles, and the English Bible, are to be read. Five years later, Nock wrote A Journey into Rabelais’s France, a travelogue illustrated by his friend Ruth Robinson (1934).
Nock did a book-length essay on Henry George (1939), drawing substantially on the two-volume biography by Henry George Jr. Nock’s contribution was as an interpreter, downplaying the importance of George’s famous policy proposal—a single tax on land—regretting George’s foray into New York City politics, and emphasizing his contributions as a philosopher of freedom. He was one of the greatest of philosophers, Nock wrote, and the spontaneous concurring voice of all his contemporaries acclaimed him as one of the best of men.
Meanwhile, in March 1930, backed by one Dr. Peter Fireman, Suzanne La Follette and Sheila Hibben had launched the New Freeman, but losses became too big, and it was discontinued after the March 1931 issue. Nock contributed 54 mostly short articles about art, literature, and education. There was little political commentary other than a call for ending Prohibition. His articles were reprinted in The Book of Journeyman (1930).
In The Theory of Education in the United States (1932) and other writings, Nock challenged the American dream of educating everybody. He believed that while most people could be trained to do useful things, only a few could truly cultivate their minds and contribute to civilization.
Nock provided an early warning of collectivist catastrophe. In July 1932, before Hitler came to power, Nock observed: Things in Germany look bad at this distance. The new government, which is making use of Hitler, seems bent on a Napoleonic absolutism.
Nock was decades ahead of most intellectuals in condemning all tyranny. Refrain from using the word Bolshevism, or Fascism, Hitlerism, Marxism, Communism, he noted in November 1933, and you have no trouble getting acceptance for the principle that underlies them all alike—the principle that the State is everything, and the individual nothing.
Nock became an implacable foe of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In May 1934, he wrote: Probably not many realize how the rapid centralization of government in America has fostered a kind of organized pauperism. The big industrial states contribute most of the Federal revenue, and the bureaucracy distributes it in the pauper states wherever it will do the most good in a political way. The same thing takes place within the states themselves. In fostering pauperism it also by necessary consequence fosters corruption. . . . All this is due to the iniquitous theory of taxation with which this country has been so thoroughly indoctrinated—that a man should be taxed according to his ability to pay, instead of according to the value of the privileges he obtains from the government.
Nock embraced the pessimism of the architect Ralph Adams Cram, whose September 1932 American Mercury article Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings declared that most people are barbarians, there are limited prospects for improvement, and the future depends on a few civilized souls. I held to my Jeffersonian doctrine for a long time, meanwhile trying my best to pick holes in Mr. Cram’s theory, Nock recalled, but with no success.
Nock’s friend Bernard Iddings Bell persuaded him to accept a visiting professorship in American history at Bard College, part of Columbia University, and he served there between 1931 and 1933. He delivered a series of lectures which focused on the struggle for liberty. He subsequently massaged the lecture texts into his great radical polemic Our Enemy, the State. He drew from ideas of Franz Oppenheimer, who had written about the violent origins of the state. Nock championed the natural rights vision of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the case for equal freedom articulated by Herbert Spencer. Nock ignored a taboo and spoke kindly of the American Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), the association of states without a central government. He shared American historian Charles Beard’s view that the Constitution reflected a struggle among interest groups.
Our Enemy, the State
Our Enemy, the State appeared in 1935. Nock wrote: There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means . . . the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation.
The State, he continued, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.
Still far ahead of other intellectuals, Nock observed: The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only the one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power. . . . In Russia and Germany, for example, we have lately seen the State moving with great alacrity against infringement of its monopoly by private persons, while at the same time exercising that monopoly with unconscionable ruthlessness.
Nock despaired about individuals who become willing tools of state power: Instead of looking upon the State’s progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share.
Most reviewers ignored Our Enemy, the State, but it won surprising praise from the pro-New Deal New Republic. Editor George Soule ranked Nock among the best essayists and soundest commentators on political history.
“Isaiah’s Job”
In his June 1936 Atlantic Monthly article Isaiah’s Job, Nock explained his view that the future of civilization depended on what he called the Remnant. He told the story of the Biblical prophet Isaiah, called by the Lord to warn people about terrible times coming. Tell them, Nock quoted the Lord, what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. But the Lord acknowledged missionary work wouldn’t yield quick results: The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you, and the masses will not even listen. They will keep on their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.
Why bother? According to Nock, the Lord replied: There is a Remnant. . . . They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.
Speaking to prospective prophets, Nock wrote that Two things you know, and no more: first, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight, and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.
There was yet another revival of The Freeman in 1937. The creative spark was Frank Chodorov, who had met Nock the year before at the Players Club. The eleventh son of Russian immigrants, Chodorov had become director of the recently chartered Henry George School, and The Freeman served as its flagship publication. It was an 18- to 24-page monthly that defended capitalism and opposed American entry in the coming European war. Chodorov published at least eight articles by Nock.
More than ever, Nock rejected claims that government could deal with the monumental problems of the age. In his introduction to Henry Haskins’s 1940 book Meditations in Wall Street, he insisted that the State is the poorest instrument imaginable for improving human society, and that confidence in political institutions and political nostrums is ludicrously misplaced. Social philosophers in every age have been strenuously insisting that all this sort of fatuity is simply putting the cart before the horse; that society cannot be moralized and improved unless and until the individual is moralized and improved.
Nock recognized the futility of violent revolution. For instance, these remarks from his introduction to the 1940 edition of Herbert Spencer’s Man Versus the State: The people would be as thoroughly indoctrinated with Statism after the revolution as they were before, and therefore the revolution would be no revolution, but a coup d’état, by which the citizen would gain nothing but a mere change of oppressors. There have been many revolutions in the last twenty-five years, and thus has been the sum of their history.
Nock was considered a conservative for opposing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who touted big government and schemed to get America into another European war. Yet Nock was among the few thinkers to maintain antiwar views during both world wars. Moreover, having abandoned his early progressive ideas for government intervention, he had actually become more radical. He affirmed his authentic radicalism in many of the 48 articles he wrote between 1932 and 1939 for American Mercury, hotbed of opposition to FDR. The German State is persecuting great masses of its people, he wrote in March 1939, the Russian State is holding a purge, the Italian State is grabbing territory, the Japanese State is buccaneering all along the Asiatic Coast. . . . The weaker the State is, the less power it has to commit crime. Where in Europe today does the State have the best criminal record? Where it is weakest: in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxemburg, Sweden, Monaco, Andorra. . . .
Many now believe that with the rise of the ‘totalitarian’ State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. . . .
So it strikes me that instead of sweating blood over the inequity of foreign states, my fellow-citizens would do a great deal better by themselves to make sure that the American State is not strong enough to carry out the like inequities here. The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations.
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
In the early 1940s Nock turned to writing his last and best-known book—Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. He worked at a house in Canaan, Connecticut. He gracefully chronicled the development of his ideas. He provided insightful commentary about his heroes—like Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. But he omitted most personal details about his life, and he was steeped in pessimism. The American people, he lamented, once had their liberties; they had them all; but apparently they could not rest o’nights until they had turned them over to a prehensile crew of professional politicians.
Nock assailed one of his favorite targets, compulsory government schooling, which promoted superstitious servile reverence for a sacrosanct State. In another view one saw [government schooling] functioning as a sort of sanhedrin, a leveling agency, prescribing uniform modes of thought, belief, conduct, social deportment, diet, recreation, hygiene; and as an inquisitional body for the enforcement of these prescriptions, for nosing out heresies and irregularities and suppressing them. In still another view one saw it functioning as a trade-unionist body, intent on maintaining and augmenting a set of vested interests . . . an extremely well-disciplined and powerful political pressure group.
Harper’s published Memoirs of a Superfluous Man in 1943. Adversaries, predictably, heaped criticism on the book—the New York Times’s Orville Prescott, for instance, blasted Nock for a corrosive, contemptuous cynicism and a profound despair. But some reviewers, like intellectual compatriot Isabel Paterson, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, were charmed by the book.
Nock seems to have had few friends during his last years. He corresponded with his sons Francis and Samuel, with Discovery of Freedom author Rose Wilder Lane, and former American Mercury editor Paul Palmer. He often lunched with Frank Chodorov, who had been forced out of the Henry George School because he opposed American entry in World War II; after 1943, The Freeman became the Henry George News and has continued up to the present. Chodorov recalled his times with Nock: Over a meal—I was usually ready for coffee before he finished his soup—he would regale you with bits of history that threw light on a headline, or quote from the classics a passage currently applicable, or take all the glory out of a ‘name’ character with a pithy statement of fact. He was a library of knowledge and a fount of wisdom, and if you were a kindred spirit you could have your pick of both.
Independent oilman William F. Buckley, Texas-born son of Irish immigrants, saw himself as part of the Remnant Nock cherished. Periodically he invited Nock to lunch at his family’s Great Elm mansion in Sharon, Connecticut—despite Nock’s radical ways. Buckley enjoyed Nock’s individualism and his scholarship, and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man helped spur his son William F. Buckley Jr. to defy the collectivist trends of the time.
Nock’s Last Years
Since no magazine would take Nock’s writing, several friends set up the National Economic Council. Starting on May 15, 1943, it published the Economic Council Review of Books, which he edited. He continued almost two years until failing health led him to bow out. This work was picked up by Rose Wilder Lane.
In 1945, Nock developed lymphatic leukemia, and he gradually ran out of steam. He told his son Francis: If sometimes you begin to think the old man is pretty good, and you feel that maybe you ought to be a bit proud of him . . . realize that he ain’t so much after all. He moved in with his friend Ruth Robinson, who lived in Wakefield, Rhode Island. There he died August 19, 1945. He was 74 and left an estate of about $1,300. Since Nock had wanted to be buried without any fuss, a local Episcopal priest conducted a simple funeral service at Robinson’s house, and he was buried nearby in Riverside Cemetery.
In his quiet way, Nock had remarkable influence. Frank Chodorov championed Nock’s brand of individualism through his books, his monthly newsletter analysis (he didn’t capitalize the first a), and in the weekly newsletter Human Events, where he became an editor. He founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists.
According to Henry Regnery, who published two volumes of Nock’s material after his death, The Freeman was an inspiration for Human Events, launched by newspaperman Frank Hanighen on February 2, 1944. Hanighen and his principal collaborator, former Haverford College president Felix Morley, were principled opponents of American intervention in foreign wars. Not long before his death, Nock had expressed his admiration for the enterprise and agreed to write some articles. Among the early contributors were William Henry Chamberlin, who had written for The Freeman, and Nock’s antiwar comrade Oswald Garrison Villard.
In 1950, Nock’s former editorial associate Suzanne La Follette joined with Life editor John Chamberlain and Newsweek columnist Henry Hazlitt to launch another Freeman—this time, as a biweekly. They were backed by businessman Alfred Kohlberg, Du Pont executive Jasper Crane, and Sun Oil heir Joseph N. Pew, Jr., among others. The distinguished contributors included William F. Buckley Jr., Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Ropke. But by 1954, the editors were split between those (like Henry Hazlitt) who wanted to focus on economic freedom and those (like La Follette and volatile Willi Schlamm) who wanted to make anticommunism the key issue. The latter resigned and joined William F. Buckley Jr.’s new fortnightly, National Review—which, ironically, offered new subscribers a bonus collection of Nock’s essays under the title Snoring as a Fine Art (1958).
Leonard E. Read’s Foundation for Economic Education acquired The Freeman, pumped money into it, went to a monthly schedule, retained Chodorov as its first editor, and has issued it ever since. Freeman articles have been excerpted in the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Reader’s Digest, and dozens of other publications, and The Freeman reaches readers in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and 50 other countries, as well as the United States.
Despite the onslaught of wars and the relentless expansion of government power, individualism endures as a living creed, and Albert Jay Nock deserves considerable credit. He expressed fundamental issues of liberty with blazing clarity. He withstood withering criticism. He defied censors. He helped revive glorious names like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Herbert Spencer. His moral conviction, cosmopolitan scholarship, elegant prose, and steadfast devotion inspired others to join the epic struggle for liberty. []
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3580
What Conservatives Believe
WHAT CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE
By PHIL VALENTINE
August 3, 2008 –Conservatism is not only viable, it’s essential for a free society. The difference between liberalism and conservatism is best summed up in the old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” Liberals have been handing out fish. Conservatives have been handing out fishing poles.
1. Conservatism makes for a productive society. Alexander Tytler said of democracy: “It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.” Liberalism has raided the treasury to take from the producers and give to those less productive, leaving neither side with an incentive to work for either themselves or a nation.
2. Conservatism is compassionate. Liberals measure compassion by how many people are on the government dole. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people are off of it. While liberalism, by its very nature, looks down its nose at the less fortunate, conservatism sees all people as worthy of making it on their own. Conservatism is about preserving one’s dignity, not robbing it.
3. Liberals are pessimists by nature. The currency of liberalism is fear. It trades on the fear that something disastrous will happen unless liberals are there to stop it. Global warming, losing Social Security, banning guns; they all work from the vantage point that if liberals aren’t in charge something horrific will happen. The allure of Ronald Reagan was his positive message. He spoke of America’s greatness. He inspired pride and patriotism instead of trying to tear the country down and blame it for all of the world’s problems as many liberals do.
4. Military strength deters aggression. Peaceniks look upon our military as a war machine, and use any moment of calm as an excuse to cut its budget. It is a peace machine. Each time we fail to back our military, it emboldens those who would undermine our democracy or that of our allies.
5. Belief in God is a cornerstone of our republic. Try as the liberals may to separate them, there is no Constitutional separation of church and state, only a protection of religion from the state. Our founders believed this country was divinely inspired and it was only by remembering our religious roots that we would survive.
6. Conservatism believes in the entrepreneur. People who start companies take huge risks and they deserve everything they get if they succeed. Liberals want to punish entrepreneurs through confiscatory taxes. That’s why the IRS tells us that the top 5 percent of wage-earners pays more than 50 percent of the income tax. If you want to create jobs and, in turn, more money in the treasury, you must lower taxes on the rich and allow more people to take more chances.
7. Political correctness is the liberal version of fascism. Liberals have attempted to control the debate in America by attempting to control the language, and they’ve succeeded to some degree. There’s been no bigger muzzle on free speech than political correctness.
8. Guns are good. Liberals are quick to defend our freedom of speech, press and our right to protest but they ignore our right to bear arms, which figures prominently into our Bill of Rights. These selective constitutionalists will erode all of our constitutional rights if they succeed in being able to cherry pick them when they’re convenient.
9. Quotas are wrong. Society seems oblivious to the obvious solution to discrimination: strict enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. Making innocent people pay for the sins of previous generations runs counter to our fundamental principles and undermines race relations in our society.
10. Conservatism is still relevant today. Both Democrats and Republicans have veered from the basic philosophy of less government and more personal responsibility. Government is these to do only what the private sector won’t, can’t or shouldn’t do. That means the government shouldn’t be subsidizing professional sports or multi-million-dollar corporations any more than it should be subsidizing an able-bodied man who can work but chooses not to. Government must return to the basic conservative philosophy, as Jefferson said, “The government is best which governs least.”
Phil Valentine’s forthcoming book is “The Conservative’s Handbook: Defining the Right Position on Issues from A to Z” (Cumberland House).
The Right Way
THE RIGHT WAY
By JAMES W. CEASER
August 3, 2008 –Kicking someone while they’re down has long been considered bad form – except in politics. Republicans have fallen on hard times of late, trailing Democrats in party identification by 9 points, 27% to 36%, the widest margin in many years. President Bush suffers record low approval ratings (but then, so does Congress), and the GOP’s election prospects look less than rosy.
But their plight has earned them little sympathy from their critics, particularly in journalist Thomas Frank’s delicately titled new book “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.” For those who may have forgotten, Frank published a bestseller shortly before the 2004 election called “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Born and raised in that state, Frank took a sabbatical from his sophisticated Washington world to return home and conduct a little anthropological fieldwork. He found the natives to be a bit, well, slow on the uptake.
Facing economic uncertainty, Kansans should have been voting their real interest, which for Frank clearly meant supporting the Democrats. But here they were, poor souls, clinging to their guns and Christianity and voting conservative. (It was widely believed that Barack Obama’s famous philippic on “bitter” voters, spoken before an ultra chic San Francisco audience, was inspired by Frank’s book.) Much like his acolyte, Frank was accused of condescension, a charge that he met by insisting all the more ardently on his support for the little guy, whom he wished to rescue from, as the Marxists used to say, “false consciousness.” “Kansas” did so well that Frank could not resist a sequel, or more accurately a prequel, since “Wrecking Crew” posits that voting conservative isn’t only wrong now, it was never right.
Frank’s central theme in “Crew”: that “the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita” (enough of the Kansas shtick already!) is not the conservatism of those in government. The former may be silly, but it is decent; the latter is wicked. Conservatism in power is about one thing and one thing only: a defense of “plutocracy.” It is about making the rich richer, nowadays at the expense of the middle class.
Despite what good conservatives “out there” in the country may think, or think that they are thinking, they are being had by the clever and cynical masters who pull the strings in Washington, Frank says. Conservatism in government since Ronald Reagan is about ripping people off, from lowering taxes on the rich to various scams that produce wholesale corruption. All else in conservative ideology is fly paper, designed to entrap the unsuspecting. Conservatism, to Frank, is the state of delusion. Indeed, conservatism in power likes to perform poorly and dishonestly because – here’s part of its genius – this only proves its point that government is bad. They’re failing on purpose.
*
There are more than enough conspiracies in the author’s imagination to fill another “X-Files” movie. But entertainment value aside, does Frank’s emphasis on class – forgetting his tortured account of it – really do justice to the sum and substance of conservative governance?
Of course not. The conservative movement in the past 30 years has defended ideas that almost all other nations in the West are abandoning. Conservatives have stood up for the concept of the nation itself in an age when more and more are sliding vaguely into notions of “global” citizenship; they have stressed the importance of Biblical religion as a background to our culture when other nations have lauded pure secularism; and they have reminded Americans of the truth of natural right positions at a time when Western intellectuals celebrate relativism.
Liberals in America sometimes squirm at the unvarnished proclamation of these ideas, often apologizing to foreigners in private for conservatives’ “bad manners.” But in public, liberals by and large acknowledge the importance of these ideas, albeit more modestly, and accept them. Conservatism has saved American exceptionalism.
The conservative movement also has put its own stamp on national security matters. Going back to the origin of the modern movement in 1980, many conservatives thought their vote for Ronald Reagan bore relation to his staunch anti-communism and promise to launch a defense build up. If they were deluded in this view, as Frank seems to think, then so too were most liberals, for liberals excoriated Reagan for his extremism, derided him for calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, and came pouring out on the streets by the thousands to protest his decision to put missiles into Germany.
Conservatives also backed the first George Bush in his decision to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which they thought was a vital element of national policy that made a point of rebuffing international aggression and of guaranteeing the flow of oil to the West for the next decade.
Liberals too thought this was a crucial decision, only, still firmly in the grip of the Vietnam Syndrome, they took the opposite view and voted to oppose the war.
Indeed, what have the politics of the last six years been about, if not the issue of national security? George W. Bush made the initial critical decision to define the attack of September 11, 2001 as a “war” (a view that many resisted), and he proceeded to prosecute it first by a ground action in Afghanistan, and then, in a far more controversial venture, to follow it up with a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. When that war was going badly and all seemed lost, he doubled down after the 2006 election with the surge. This was conservative governance. Liberals denounced the war, the more so as it went poorly, and overwhelmingly opposed the surge (until it worked).
In assessing “how conservatives rule,” and whether they “wrecked” or secured the nation, an examination of conservative stewardship in foreign affairs must be a central element. Is the record one of error and failure from start to finish (the contemporaneous judgment of liberals at most of the critical junctures along the way), or one that, in retrospect, was mostly right over the early period, but wrong only in the last instance (a view now favored by Barack Obama)? Or is it one that history consistently has proven right? When it comes to questions of national security, perhaps that poor fellow in Wichita was onto something.
*
In area after area, conservative governance has either taken or proposed to take the nation in a different direction than liberals. And, as liberals would readily agree, these are not questions of mere rhetoric, but vital matters that define the character of our civilization. These include conservatives’ get tough stance on crime (something New Yorkers know about) and on terrorism; their opposition to unlimited federal funding of stem cell research; their efforts, however halting, to keep alive the issue of limitation on abortion; their attempt to provide alternatives to public education to inner city students; and their willingness to drill for oil off our coasts and in parts of Alaska.
But even when it comes to Frank’s main target, the arena of economics, just who is deluding whom? Yes, the rich have gotten richer, but have others on average really gotten poorer? Average real wages have varied in short periods, but they have risen substantially in America over the last 30 years.
Frank doesn’t want to admit it, but the lot of the average Kansan is hardly the life of quiet desperation he suggests.
Frank is a writer in the tradition of the muckrackers, down to the point of reviving their quaint old language of “plutocrats,” a class that includes not just the Republican millionaires he excoriates, but also George Soros, John Kerry, John Edwards and, if sales on the current book go as well as expected, perhaps Thomas Frank himself.
Frank was inspired most in this work by the turn of the century author, Lincoln Steffens, from whom he takes his own book’s theme that shrewd politicians can win elections by deliberate delusion and, strange as it may seem, by making people bitter. Steffen’s corrupt Philadelphia politicians were the original “wrecking crew.” But Steffens is known best for his own delusion. It was he who went to the Soviet Union in 1921 and returned with the unforgettable observation: “I’ve seen the future and it works.” The biggest difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives trust people to make their own decisions. John McCain now leads in Kansas polls over Obama by 14 points. Who is better suited to say what means the most to voters in that state than the voters themselves? Perhaps the real question is: What’s the matter with Thomas Frank?
Governing is a difficult activity, one in which even the most adept get as much wrong as they do right. It is closer to being a batter than to shooting free throws. Conservatives in office have made their share of blunders and mistakes, and Frank is at his finest in depicting some of the stunning instances of hypocrisy and idiocy in the period of Republican rule.
One thing is certain, however: conservatism has not repealed the limitations of human nature. But neither, as Frank seems to think, has liberalism. If the contrary were true, there would be no corruption in New Jersey and no public debt in California.
A fair look at the record will show that neither of our isms by itself has wholly wrecked – or saved – the nation. This should be enough to make Americans think twice before handing a complete monopoly to liberals in November.
After all, can three million Kansans really be that wrong?
James W. Ceaser is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of “Nature and History in American Political Development.”
Republicans in the cities
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH NEW YORK CITY?
By JOEL KOTKIN and MARK SCHILL
August 3, 2008 –Ever since the 1930s, most urban areas have leaned Democratic. But in presidential elections, many remained stubbornly competitive between the two parties. As late as 1988, for example, Republican nominees won Dallas County and made strong showings in the core urban counties of Cook (Chicago), Los Angeles and King (Seattle).
Today, America’s urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the “solid South” that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20% or more in most of the largest urban counties.
As a result, places where Republicans such as Ronald Reagan could once win a respectable share of the vote – including San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York City – by 2004 were delivering 80% or more to the Democrats. Even in the losing year of 2004, Democratic nominee John F. Kerry won almost every city of more than 500,000 people.
This fall, Barack Obama, a resident of Chicago, can comfortably expect to triumph in virtually every major urban county, often by ratios of 2-to-1 or more. He can count just as much on cities in decline as he can on those that have been gentrified; he will rack up big margins both in heavily white core counties such as those around Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., as well as overwhelmingly minority Baltimore, Philadelphia and The Bronx.
Race and income levels do not explain the emerging urban monoculture, because the cause lies elsewhere: in the evolution of cities over the past four decades. The shift began in the late 1960s, when urban regions, from financial centers such as New York and Chicago to old industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, began to suffer a massive exodus of predominantly white, middle-class residents.
This left behind an increasingly impoverished, highly minority population with very little proclivity to support conservative or even moderate Republicans.
More recently, some cities – such as New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco – have attracted a population of well-educated, white professionals. Many new urbanites tend to be students or professionals enjoying city life during their first, highly experimental years of adulthood. At this point, they are most open to liberal ideas and causes; they have yet to worry much about taxes and crime, issues that drive people to the center.
Yet if this urban base – roughly 30% of the population – offers Obama a huge edge in the election, he must not identify too much as an urban candidate. There are vocal constituencies who are openly hostile to people in suburbs and small cities. This ideology first emerged in 2004 in John Sperling’s “Retro vs. Metro” thesis, which envisioned the eventual triumph of a sophisticated urban population over backward-seeming rural, small town and suburban constituencies.
An even clearer example of this urbanist ideology came in the wake of Kerry’s 2004 defeat. Editors of The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, pointed out in an article that “if the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide.”
“From here on out, we’re glad red-state rubes live in areas where guns are more powerful and more plentiful, cars are larger and faster, and people are fatter and slower and dumber,” The Stranger proclaimed. Given the editors’ uninhibited sense of superiority, they felt confident that in the emerging Darwinian struggle, the suburban and exurban Neanderthals would be forced to give way to the superiority of the urban Cro-Magnons.
Whatever Obama may believe personally, he would be well-advised to distance himself from such sentiments. For one thing, identifying with people who celebrate the demise of other geographies may offend the majority of Americans who prefer to live in “retro” environments. Suburb- and countryside-bashing may turn on readers of The New York Times, but it hardly constitutes good politics.
http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/08032008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/whats_the_matter_with_new_york_city__122751.htm
