Footnote on ‘Statism’

March 3, 1952

In this excellent new book, How to Keep Our Liberty (see Books), my colleague Raymond Moley has a prefatory “Note on Terminology.” Like all of us who try to write sense on economic and political questions today, he is troubled by the strange perversions and reversals that have taken place in recent years in the meaning of words: A ‘liberal’,” as he points out, “was once a person who opposed the intervention of the state in the life and affairs of the individual. Now the word is used as self-description by those who favor such intervention.”

So Moley defines his own chief terms in advance. “Interventionism” accurately describes the trend toward a socialist state, but he thinks a shorter and better word is “statism.” He defines it as “a policy or philosophy that advocates a progressive trend of intervention by government in economic, social, and personal life.”

The term with this meaning fills a long-felt need. Moley’s own book, in fact, is largely devoted to counteracting the danger of statism, and we have to identify and label a trend or a philosophy before we can effectively combat it. But as Moley points out: “Recent use of the term [statism], mainly by opponents of the trend, has anticipated the lexicographers.”

I should like to supplement my colleague’s remarks on the word with a few notes of my own, as I happened to play a part in its adoption. I first became acquainted with the term “etatism” in the writings of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, whose great book Socialism I reviewed in The New York Times in 1937. He used the term to mean “the doctrine of the omnipotence of the state, and, as a policy, the attempt to regulate all mundane affairs by authoritative commandment and prohibition.”

Though Mises probably did more than any other writer to establish the term and the meaning, neither was original with him, as I have since learned, but goes back some half a century. It was originally used by French critics of interventionism (état is the French word for state). A chapter entitled Etatism is to be found as early as 1907 in a French book on individualism by Albert Schatz.

But while a word with the same meaning was essential in English, it seemed to me that etatism would be very difficult to popularize or even naturalize. A simpler solution appeared to be to translate “etat” into “state.” But “state,” in this country, is most often used as opposed to “nation” or “Federal.” “Statism” might be thought to mean states’ rights.

These objections did not seem too serious. But next came the problem of spelling—“stateism” or “statism”? The first involved a redundant vowel; the second ran the danger that the “a” would be pronounced, by analogy, like the first “a” in “statistician.” Consulting the dictionaries, however, I found in my old edition of Webster’s New International: “Statism (from State). Statecraft. Obs.” So it was simply necessary to revive an obsolete word with an established spelling and pronunciation and use it in the new meaning. I began using the word in that sense in this column and then in a book Will Dollars Save the World? published in 1947 and condensed in The Reader’s Digest.

Whether I was anticipated by other writers in using the word in this sense I do not know. But there is an interesting epilogue. John Foster Dulles frequently used the term with this meaning in his New York Senatorial campaign of 1949. In the Political Science Quarterly of December of that year, Prof. Lindsay Rogers, puzzled by this use, looked the word up in the dictionary, found only such obsolete meanings as “statecraft,” and assumed that people must be wrongly using it now because they did not know what it meant!

But if the enemies of liberty are allowed to pervert fine words to base meanings, surely the defenders of liberty have a much better right to develop a new word or meaning to describe and identify the great threat to liberty in our time. That threat is statism, the philosophy behind totalitarianism of every brand.