II. Political Theory

1. Are Libertarians “Anarchists”?

(date unknown)

To: Aubrey Herbert

The libertarian who is happily engaged expounding his political philosophy in the full glory of his convictions is almost sure to be brought short by one unfailing gambit of the statist. As the libertarian is denouncing public education or the Post Office, or refers to taxation as legalized robbery, the statist invariably challenges: “Well, then are you an anarchist?” The libertarian is reduced to sputtering “No, no, of course I’m not an anarchist.” “Well, then, what governmental measures do you favor? What type of taxes do you wish to impose?” The statist has irretrievably gained the offensive, and, having no answer to the first question, the libertarian finds himself surrendering his case.

Thus, the libertarian will usually reply: “Well, I believe in a limited government, the government being limited to the defense of the person or property or the individual against invasion by force or fraud.” I have tried to show in my article, “The Real Aggressor” in the April 1954 Faith and Freedom, that this leaves the conservative helpless before the argument “necessary for defense,” when it is used for gigantic measures of statism and bloodshed.

There are other consequences equally or more grave. The statist can pursue the matter further:

If you grant that it is legitimate for people to band together and allow the State to coerce individuals to pay taxes for a certain service—“defense”—why is it not equally moral and legitimate for people to join in a similar way and allow the State the right to provide other services—such as post offices, “welfare,” steel, power, etc.? If a State supported by a majority can morally do one, why not morally do the others?

I confess that I see no answer to this question. If it is proper and legitimate to coerce an unwilling Henry Thoreau into paying taxes for his own “protection” to a coercive state monopoly, I see no reason why it should not be equally proper to force him to pay the State for any other services, whether they be groceries, charity, newspapers, or steel. We are left to conclude that the pure libertarian must advocate a society where an individual may voluntarily support none or any police or judicial agency that he deems to be efficient and worthy of his custom.

I do not here intend to engage in a detailed exposition of this system, but only to answer the question, is this anarchism?

This seemingly simple question is actually a very difficult one to answer in a sentence, or in a brief yes-or-no reply. In the first place, there is no accepted meaning to the word “anarchism” itself. The average person may think he knows what it means, especially that it is bad, but actually he does not. In that sense, the word has become something like the lamented word “liberal,” except that the latter has “good” connotations in the emotions of the average man.

The almost insuperable distortions and confusions have come both from the opponents and the adherents of anarchism. The former have completely distorted anarchist tenets and made various fallacious charges, while the latter have been split into numerous warring camps with political philosophies that are literally as far apart as communism and individualism. The situation is further confused by the fact that, often, the various anarchist groups themselves did not recognize the enormous ideological conflict between them.

One very popular charge against anarchism is that it “means chaos.” Whether a specific type of anarchism would lead to “chaos” is a matter for analysis; no anarchist, however, ever deliberately wanted to bring about chaos. Whatever else he or she may have been, no anarchist has ever deliberately willed chaos or world destruction. Indeed, anarchists have always believed that the establishment of their system would eliminate the chaotic elements now troubling the world. One amusing incident, illuminating this misconception, occurred after the end of the war when a young enthusiast for world government wrote a book entitled One World or Anarchy, and Canada’s leading anarchist shot back with a work entitled Anarchy or Chaos. The major difficulty in any analysis of anarchism is that the term covers extremely conflicting doctrines. The root of the word comes from the term anarchos, meaning opposition to authority or commands. This is broad enough to cover a host of different political doctrines. Generally, these doctrines have been lumped together as “anarchist” because of their common hostility to the existence of the State, the coercive monopolist of force and authority. Anarchism arose in the nineteenth century, and since then the most active and dominant anarchist doctrine has been that of “anarchist communism.” This is an apt term for a doctrine which has also been called “collectivist anarchism,” “anarcho-syndicalism,” and “libertarian communism.” We may term this set of related doctrines “left-wing anarchism.” Anarchist communism is primarily of Russian origin, forged by Prince Peter Kropotkin and Michael Bakunin, and it is this form that has connoted “anarchism” throughout the continent of Europe.

The principal feature of anarchist communism is that it attacks private property just as vigorously as it attacks the State. Capitalism is considered as much of a tyranny “in the economic realm” as the State is in the political realm. The left-wing anarchist hates capitalism and private property with perhaps even more fervor than does the socialist or Communist. Like the Marxists, the left-wing anarchist is convinced that the capitalists exploit and dominate the workers, and also that the landlords invariably are exploiting peasants.

The economic views of the anarchists present them with a crucial dilemma, the pons asinorum of left-wing anarchy: how can capitalism and private property be abolished, while the State is abolished at the same time? The socialists proclaim the glory of the State and the use of the State to abolish private property—for them the dilemma does not exist. The orthodox Marxist Communist, who pays lip service to the ideal of left-wing anarchy, resolves the dilemma by use of the Hegelian dialectic: that mysterious process by which something is converted into its opposite. The Marxists would enlarge the State to the maximum and abolish capitalism, and then sit back confidently to wait upon the State’s “withering away.”

The spurious logic of the dialectic is not open to the left-wing anarchists, who wish to abolish the State and capitalism simultaneously. The nearest those anarchists have come to resolving the problem has been to uphold syndicalism as the ideal. In syndicalism, each group of workers and peasants is supposed to own its means of production in common and plan for itself, while cooperating with other collectives and communes. Logical analysis of these schemes would readily show that the whole program is nonsense. Either of two things would occur: one central agency would plan for and direct the various subgroups, or the collectives themselves would be really autonomous. But the crucial question is whether these agencies would be empowered to use force to put their decisions into effect.

All of the left-wing anarchists have agreed that force is necessary against recalcitrants. But then the first possibility means nothing more nor less than Communism, while the second leads to a real chaos of diverse and clashing communisms, that would probably lead finally to some central Communism after a period of social war. Thus, left-wing anarchism must in practice signify either regular Communism or a true chaos of communistic syndics. In both cases, the actual result must be that the State is reestablished under another name. It is the tragic irony of left-wing anarchism that, despite the hopes of its supporters, it is not really anarchism at all. It is either Communism or chaos.

It is no wonder therefore that the term “anarchism” has received a bad press. The leading anarchists, particularly in Europe, have always been of the left-wing variety, and today the anarchists are exclusively in the left-wing camp. Add to that the tradition of revolutionary violence stemming from European conditions, and it is little wonder that anarchism is discredited. Anarchism was politically very powerful in Spain, and during the Spanish Civil War, anarchists established communes and collectives wielding coercive authority. One of their first steps was to abolish the use of money on the pain of a death penalty. It is obvious that the supposed anarchist hatred of coercion had gone very much awry. The reason was the insoluble contradiction between the antistate and the anti-property tenets of left-wing anarchy.

How is it, then, that despite the fatal logical contradictions in left-wing anarchism, there are a highly influential group of British intellectuals who currently belong to this school, including the art critic Sir Herbert Read and the psychiatrist Alex Comfort? The answer is that anarchists, perhaps unconsciously seeing the hopelessness of their position, have made a point of rejecting logic and reason entirely. They stress spontaneity, emotions, instincts, rather than allegedly cold and inhuman logic. By so doing, they can of course remain blind to the irrationality of their position.

Of economics, which would show them the impossibility of their system, they are completely ignorant, perhaps more so than any other group of political theorists. The dilemma about coercion they attempt to resolve by the absurd theory that crime would simply disappear if the State were abolished, so that no coercion would have to be used.

Irrationality indeed permeates almost all of the views of the left-wing anarchists. They reject industrialism as well as private property, and tend to favor returning to the handicraft and simple peasant conditions or the Middle Ages. They are fanatically in favor of modern art, which they consider “anarchist” art. They have an intense hatred of money and of material improvements. Living a simple peasant existence, in communes, is extolled as “living the anarchist life,” while a civilized person is supposed to be viciously bourgeois and un-anarchist.

Thus, the ideas of the left-wing anarchists have become a nonsensical jumble, far more irrational than that of the Marxists, and deservedly looked upon with contempt by almost everyone as hopelessly “crackpot.” Unfortunately, the result is that the good criticisms that they sometimes make of state tyranny tend to be tarred with the same “crackpot” brush.

Considering the dominant anarchists, it is obvious that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” must be answered unhesitatingly in the negative. We are at completely opposite poles. Confusion enters, however, because of the existence in the past, particularly in the United States, of a small but brilliant group of “individualist anarchists” headed by Benjamin R. Tucker. Here we come to a different breed.

The individualist anarchists have contributed a great deal to libertarian thought. They have provided some of the best statements of individualism and anti-statism that have ever been penned. In the political sphere, the individualist anarchists were generally sound libertarians. They favored private property, extolled free competition, and battled all forms of governmental intervention. Politically, the Tucker anarchists had two principal defects: (1) they failed to advocate defense of private landholdings beyond what the owner used personally; (2) they relied too heavily on juries and failed to see the necessity for a body of constitutional libertarian law which the private courts would have to uphold.

Contrasted to their minor political failings, however, they fell into grievous economic error. They believed that interest and profit were exploitative, due to an allegedly artificial restriction on the money supply. Let the State and its monetary regulations be removed, and free banking be established, they believed, and everyone would print as much money as he needed, and interest and profits would fall to zero.

This hyperinflationist doctrine, acquired from the Frenchman Proudhon, is economic nonsense. We must remember, however, that “respectable” economics, then and now, has been permeated with inflationist errors, and very few economists have grasped the essentials of monetary phenomena. The inflationists simply take the more genteel inflationism of fashionable economics and courageously push it to its logical conclusion.

The irony of this situation was that while the individualist anarchists laid great stress on their nonsensical banking theories, the political order that they advocated would have led to economic results directly contrary to what they believed. They thought that free banking would lead to indefinite expansion of the money supply, whereas the truth is precisely the reverse: it would lead to “hard money” and absence of inflation.

The economic fallacies of the Tuckerites, however, are of a completely different order than those of the collectivist anarchists. The errors of the collectivists led them to advocate virtual political communism, while the economic errors of the individualists still permitted them to advocate a nearly libertarian system. The superficial might easily confuse the two, because the individualists were led to attack “capitalists,” whom they felt were exploiting the workers through State restriction of the money supply.

These “right-wing” anarchists did not take the foolish position that crime would disappear in the anarchist society. Yet they did tend to underestimate the crime problem and as a result never recognized the need for a fixed libertarian constitution. Without such a constitution, the private judicial process might become truly “anarchic” in the popular sense.

The Tucker wing of anarchism flourished in the nineteenth century, but died out by World War I. Many libertarian thinkers in that Golden Age of liberalism were working on doctrines that were similar in many respects. These genuine libertarians never referred to themselves as anarchists, however; probably the main reason was that all the anarchist groups, even the right-wingers, possessed socialistic economic doctrines in common.

Here we should note still a third variety of anarchist thought, one completely different from either the collectivists or individualists. This is the absolute pacifism of Leo Tolstoy. This preaches a society where force would not even be used to defend person and property, whether by State or private organizations. Tolstoy’s program of nonviolence has influenced many alleged pacifists today, mainly through Gandhi, but the latter do not realize that there can be no genuinely complete pacifism unless the State and other defense agencies are eliminated. This type of anarchism, above all others, rests on an excessively idealistic view of human nature. It could only work in a community of saints.

We must conclude that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists and therefore at opposite poles from our position.

We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive.

Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge “are you an anarchist?” is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the “middle of the road” and say, “Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road.”

2. In Defense of Demagogues

(date unknown)

To: Aubrey Herbert

For many years now, demagogues have been in great disfavor. They are not sober; they are not respectable; they are not “gentlemen.” And yet there is a great and growing need for their services.

What, exactly, have been the charges leveled against the demagogues? They are roughly three in number. In the first place, they are disruptive forces in the body politic. They stir things up. Secondly, they supposedly fail to play the game in appealing to the base emotions rather than to cool reason. From this stems the third charge: that they appeal to the unwashed masses with emotional, extreme, and therefore unsound views. Add to this the vice of ungentlemanly enthusiasm, and we have about catalogued the sins of the species demagogue.

The charge of emotionalism is surely an irrelevant one. The problem of an ideology is not whether it is put forth in an emotional, a matter-of-fact, or a dull manner. The question is whether or not the ideology is correct. Almost always, the demagogue is a man who finds that his ideas are held by only a small minority of people, a minority that is apt to be particularly small among the sober and respectable. Convinced of the truth and the importance of his ideas, he sees that the heavy weight of public opinion, and particularly of the respectable molders of this opinion, is either hostile or indifferent to this truth. Is it any wonder that such a situation will make a man emotional?

All demagogues are ideological nonconformists and therefore bound to be emotional about the general and respectable rejection of what they consider to be vital truth. But not all ideological nonconformists become demagogues. The difference is that the demagogue possesses that quality of mass attraction that permits him to use emotion to stir up the masses. In going to the masses, he is going over the heads of the respectable intellectuals who ordinarily guide mass opinion. It is this electric, shortcut appeal, direct to the masses, that gives the demagogue his vital significance and that makes him such a menace to the dominant orthodoxy.

The demagogue is frequently accused by his enemies of being an insincere opportunist, a man who cynically uses certain ideas and emotions in order to gain popularity and power. It is almost impossible, however, to judge a person’s motives, particularly in political life, unless one is a close friend. We have seen that the sincere demagogue is very likely to be emotional himself, while stirring others to emotion. Finally, if a man is really an opportunist, the easiest way to acclaim and power is to play ball with the ruling orthodoxy, and not the opposite. The way of the demagogue is the riskiest and has the least chance of success.

It is the fashionable belief that an idea is wrong in proportion to its “extremism,” and right in proportion as it is a chaotic muddle of contradictory doctrines. To the professional middle-of-the-roader, a species that is always found in abundance, the demagogue invariably comes as a nasty shock. For it is one of the most admirable qualities of the demagogue that he forces men to think, some for the first time in their lives. Out of the muddle of current ideas, fashionable and unfashionable, he extracts some and pushes them to their logical conclusions, i.e., “to extremes.” He thereby forces people either to reject their loosely held views as unsound, or to find them sound and to pursue them to their logical consequences.

Far from being an irrational force, then, the silliest of demagogues is a great servant of reason, even when he is most in the wrong. A typical example is the inflationist demagogue—the “monetary crank.” The vast majority of respectable economists have always scoffed at the cranks, without realizing that they are not really able to answer his arguments. For what the crank has done is to take the inflationism that lies at the core of fashionable economics and push it to its logical conclusion. He asks, “If it is good to have an inflation of money of 10 percent per year, why isn’t it still better to double the money supply every year?” Only a few economists have realized that in order to answer the crank reasonably instead of by ridicule, it is necessary to purge fashionable economics of its inflationist foundations.

Demagogues probably first fell into disrepute in the nineteenth century, when most of them were socialists. But their conservative opposition, as is typical of conservatives in every age, never came to grips with the logic of the demagogues’ position. Instead, they contented themselves with attacking the emotionalism and extremism of the upstarts. Their logic unassailed, the socialist demagogues triumphed, as argument always will conquer pure prejudice in the long run. For it seemed as if the socialists had reason on their side.

Now socialism is the fashionable and respectable ideology. The old passionate arguments of the soapbox have become the tired clichés of the cocktail party and the classroom. Any demagogy, any disruption of the apple cart would almost certainly come from the individualist opposition. Furthermore, the State is now in command, and whenever this condition prevails, the State is anxious to prevent disruption and ideological turmoil. Demagogues would bring in their wake “disunity,” and people might be stirred to think for themselves instead of falling into a universal goosestep behind their anointed leaders. Furthermore, individualist demagogues would be more dangerous than ever, because they could now be equipped with rational arguments to refute the socialist clichés. The respectable statist Left, then, fears and hates the demagogue, and more than ever before he is the object of attack.

It is true that, in the long run, we will never be free until the intellectuals—the natural molders of public opinions—have been converted to the side of freedom. In the short run, however, the only route to liberty is by an appeal to the masses over the heads of the State and its intellectual bodyguard. And this appeal can be made most effectively by the demagogue—the rough, unpolished man of the people, who can present the truth in simple, effective, yes emotional, language. The intellectuals see this clearly, and this is why they constantly attack every indication of libertarian demagoguery as part of a “rising tide of anti-intellectualism.” Of course, it is not anti-intellectualism; it is the saving of mankind from those intellectuals who have betrayed the intellect itself.

3. Willmoore Kendall, Lectures on Democratic Theory at Buck Hill Falls¹

September 1956

Kendall’s lectures may be analyzed in two parts: (1) his discussion of the layman and the expert and (2) his discussion of freedom of thought. (1) Kendall, it should be said from the first, is revealed here as a very keen and stimulating thinker, incisive, and with a sharply radical spirit, i.e., with a propensity to dig to the roots of issues without fear or favor. He has a knack for sharply posing the right questions so that whether you agree or disagree with him, you have learned something from him. (I know it is a cliché that you always learn something from an opponent in argument, but actually you do only rarely, so this, I think, is a tribute.)

At the outset I should mention the charm of Kendall’s picture of the liberal; it is a muted hint of his National Review column on the liberal machine, depicting a smug, quasi-conspiratorial but in a very fashionable way, ruling “power elite” with velvet gloves and democratic rhetoric. It is a description that strikes me as being quite accurate and reflects Kendall’s radical temper.

Kendall’s posing of the critical problem for democracy of the expert vs. the layman and his textual analysis of Mill are excellent. The only seriously misleading picture is the brief implication that Rousseau was a kind of Thomas Jefferson figure—a small-town democrat—ignoring the very vivid totalitarian mystique of Rousseau’s. Be that as it may, Kendall develops very neatly, from Mill and on the basis of Mill’s successors, how the Left has developed the doctrine of rule by an elite of bureaucrat-intellectuals within the form of ultramajority rule. Kendall’s position is essentially that of a prodemocrat who is attacking the usurpation of power by this bureaucratic elite, an elite that has attained this power by virtue of its claim to the privileges of expertise.

There are numerous keen insights given off along the way: the recognition, for example, that the intellectual elite gets away with it by amalgamating values to pure knowledge of existential facts, by forgetting about values and then slipping their own in; the Millian confusion between intellect and morals; the insight that proving that the masses are incompetent does not prove the experts competent, contrary to “liberal” doctrine; the distinction between expertises. On the other hand, I do not go along with all of the criticism of the “roster” technique; it seems to me perfectly legitimate to say that the top few are significantly better than the rest, without worrying about the bottom few who are really terrible.

Still, when all these virtues have been recorded, we are left with the question: what is Kendall’s solution to these problems; what is his alternative to the present system that both he and we consider evil? On the layman-expert issue, there is the hint of alternative solutions. There is an indicated possible preference for the “Rousseauan” route: if the problems of the modern world are so “complex” that bureaucratic rule is needed, then get rid of the complex modern world and get back to simpler rule. Is this a Röpkean call for back-to-handcrafts? Kendall doesn’t say. But right here I would note that Kendall fails to make a crucial distinction: between the complexities necessary to an advanced modern economy and the complexities of government that arise from attempts to regulate and rule this economy. If he made this distinction, he could become a libertarian without calling for peasantry and crafts.

However, for Kendall this is an aside; his major solution seems to be to hammer home the distinction between fact and value, to convince everyone that experts are only experts on facts and scientific laws, while every citizen should choose final policy on the basis of which means will lead to his ends. The majority would then rule because while, admits Kendall, there is an intellectual elite, there is not a moral elite. As he cites Rousseau, the “general will” is right—provided it has all the facts.

Yet Kendall’s attempted solution leaves all the critical questions unanswered and many of them even unasked. He does recognize that he has left unanswered the problem of what to do if the experts deliberately lie to the people in order to manipulate and control them. To this, he calls for experts to rate the experts so that the people will know what’s going on, but he also recognizes that for this task experts themselves are needed, so who will supply this information?

There are other crucial issues that Kendall doesn’t seem to recognize at all. First, he assumes that morally, everyone is equal and therefore the democratic census can decide. Why? Why is there not a “moral roster,” even though a separate one from an “intellectual roster”? In short, Kendall’s own theory of democracy seems to be erroneous because it is a moral one, i.e., he thinks majority rule and census-democracy a good in itself, presumably because of some such moral equality. But this is not justified. As far as I am concerned, both the democratic mass and any sort of an aristocratic elite can be bad. There is very little moral argument for democracy. Second, Kendall does not explore why it is that it is precisely in government that the expert-layman problem becomes important. Why don’t we worry about such problems on the free market? Nobody worries about people being ruined or ruled by their accountants. The answer is that on the market (a) people are free to choose whatever experts they please, and also free to try to run their affairs without experts; experts never rule them, they only sell their services for money; (b) on the free market, laymen have the test of concrete success to help them decide what experts to patronize. The architect that builds the fine, sturdy house is the one who gets the customers flocking to his door. The market provides continuous testing of experts. In government, however, the expert-laymen relation is turned from harmonious cooperation into caste warfare because the experts are permitted to loot the masses and give them orders. And, further, because of this disjunction between position and revenue, from testable merit, there is no reason why these governmental experts should be efficient, i.e., why they should be experts at all. Indeed, they will be efficient not at providing the governmental service, whatever it may be (post office, foreign intercourse, etc.), but at organizing robber gangs to bludgeon the populace into yielding them more money and power—i.e., they will be most efficient at coercion.

Third, there is a critical moral question here not mentioned by Kendall: experts for what? On the free market, every expert is voluntarily paid and performs a service voluntarily desired. But what of the expert criminal? Are we to exalt him just because he is an expert? In short, Kendall fails to make the crucial distinction of what the experts are used for—if they are experts in crime, then we don’t want them around. Further, if some or all governmental activities are really essentially criminal activities, then the less expertly they are conducted, the better off we all are.

I would like to add parenthetically another problem with Kendall’s solution: that it takes high intellectual qualities, which the masses admittedly do not possess, to get them to realize the distinction between fact and value!

As for Kendall’s broader position, he gives only one small clue; early in the work, he says that the current liberals are conducting a revolution against the “traditional philosophy and religion of the West.” Now, here I must register a protest. I am tired of hearing this phrase. What is this “traditional philosophy and religion”? There is no single tradition of the West, and it’s about time we realize this. The history of the “West” (West of what by the way?) is a history of the actions of millions of men and the thoughts of highly diverse thinkers; there is the tradition of the Inquisition and the tradition of the Enlightenment; of feudal warfare and of barbarian invasions; of religious wars to the knife; of the liberal (the true liberal) revolution of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; of the divine right of kings; of mercantilism and of laissez-faire; etc., etc. Religiously, there have been Catholics, Protestants of all sects, Jews, and even atheists and Jacobins. All these are now tradition. All these now-traditions were themselves “revolutions” against the previous order when they were first introduced. So where do we go from here? Nowhere. For if this is Kendall’s positive position, it is no position at all.

(2) Freedom of thought

In this section, on freedom of thought, Kendall does a very curious thing. He very neatly shows that the “clear and present danger” criterion is not at all libertarian, as the leftists imply, but an escape clause that permits the State to punish free expression; and he also shows that the current liberals, while professing (though not as often as he thinks) the “simon-pure doctrine” of absolute free speech, make all sorts of convenient exceptions—pornography, etc. (He might have added segregationists who “incite to riot.”) But instead of attacking current liberal doctrine, he leaves them to pursue a lengthy and savage attack on the simon-pure doctrine, i.e., on pure libertarianism. Of course, he believes that free speech should not be restricted for light and transient causes, but his attack is leveled with relish against personal liberty. In short, Kendall is not, in this part, attacking the liberal machine; he is attacking M.N. Rothbard, R.C. Cornuelle, etc. Naturally, I find it hard to refrain from curses.

In the first place, Kendall is clearly correct about Socrates’s doctrine in the Crito. Socrates is clearly here a statist of the first rank, and any overeager libertarian who may have concluded that the Crito is a libertarian tract could hardly be in greater error.

Next, Kendall scoffs at the “simon-pure liberal” who, while talking about seeking Truth, never believes that man has found it. In short, he assumes that the libertarian case rests on the proposition that truth can never be found, so that we better keep all paths open so that at least error will be minimized. (This is actually the position of H.F. Phillips, which is why I called him Kendall’s alter ego. Actually, while this is the position of modern leftists, positivists, and pragmatists, it is emphatically not my position or that of other simon-purists and it was not the position of Mill in On Liberty, as a careful reading will show. E.g., Mill: “If the [suppressed] opinion is right, [mankind] is deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”² (Actually, while Truth can be and has been attained, it can also be added to and refined as time goes on, but this is not a necessary condition to holding that absolute freedom of opinion should prevail.) Consequently, since belief in Truth is by no means inconsistent with absolute freedom (in fact, in the deepest sense—in the Truth about the conditions necessary to the development of human nature—it is the only consistent system), it is not devastating to be told by Kendall that Socrates was not a positivist-pragmatist.

Whoever wrote the footnotes on page 85 was absolutely correct: Kendall’s statement that Socrates’s death was “inevitable,” according to Plato, because of the chasm between his truth and the other Athenians, is belied by Kendall’s other point about the closeness of the majority who delivered the verdict. (For some obscure reason, Kendall seems to think that it weakens the libertarian argument against the Assembly because it only had a small majority for the sentence.)

Kendall highly overdraws the case when he stresses Socrates as being essentially religious, and that Socrates arrived at truth by revelation and not discovery. It was precisely the difference between the Socratic Revolution and the pre-Socratic philosophers that Socrates asserted that man can find the truth about ethics and the other problems of philosophy by the use of his reason, in contrast to the utilitarian-pragmatist attitude of the Sophists. God is of course mentioned frequently, but not to the extent that Socrates can simply be called a religious prophet.

Now, here I want to shift from commenting on Plato and Kendall’s interpretation, to Kendall’s own position on the Socrates question, which is clearly implied on pages 91 ff. Namely, that the Athenians had three choices to make: (1) eradicate Socrates, which they did; (2) change their way of life, i.e., adopt Socrates’s proposed “revolution;” or (3) “tolerate” him, either because no truth can be known, or because he is harmless. Notice how the dice are loaded, especially on alternative three. There is another ground, completely unmentioned by Kendall, for permitting revolutionaries to speak: the ground that freedom to express and hear opinions, whatever they are, is itself not only good for the nature of man, but the highest political end. Kendall says that the Athenians cannot adopt alternative two. (Actually, of course, alternatives two and three are by no means mutually exclusive; they could adopt both.) Why? Because they believe in their existing way of life. Therefore, they cannot accept the new. But why cannot? Despite Kendall’s obvious horror of revolution—any revolution—revolutions have been successfully conducted in the past, ways of life have been changed. If they have been accomplished from time to time, why not in Athens?

Kendall concludes that it was right for the Assembly to kill Socrates; not only right but their bounden duty. Socrates was subversive; he was influential; and therefore the thing to do was to stop him before he really became a threat. If they had refused to do so, they would have deserted their way of life: “they in effect endorse his revolution.” Now, I submit that this is nonsense and dangerous nonsense at that. If the Athenians were so damn committed to their way of life, they had little to worry about; and if Socrates were really becoming a threat, then they no longer were particularly committed to their way of life. In short, if 90 percent of Athenians were orthodox, and 10 percent Socratic revolutionaries, then, if the 90 percent are deeply committed, they have nothing to worry about, since the “revolution” can only take place if most of their number are converted, and such conversion is hardly likely if they are so passionately committed. On the other hand, if they are worried—and Kendall intimates that they are so worried—because they are afraid that enough of their number will be converted until say, 55 percent of the Athenians will become Socratics (or even more) and the revolution effected, then at least 45 percent of the Athenians must not be passionately committed, must be in danger of seceding to the enemy. But if that is the case, Kendall is not defending the right and duty of the majority to suppress a minority; he is defending the right and duty of an actual minority to suppress a possible majority. If, in sum, there are at the present time 45 percent passionate orthodoxes, 45 percent waverers, and 10 percent Socratics, clearly the waverers won’t want to suppress that which they feel they might someday convert to (and if they do persecute, they are clearly not being responsible—they are instead being irrational, on anybody’s count). Therefore, Kendall, the professed champion of all-out majority rule, in effect, the champion of the duty as well as the right of pure majoritarian despotism over anyone whom it claims challenges its “way of life,” is really advocating minority despotism over the majority. I personally am passionately opposed to all despotism, majority or minority, but Kendall is here hoist with his own particular petard. It should, indeed, be made absolutely clear that Kendall is not simply saying what he is obviously trying to justify—the persecution of Communists and Nazis—he is also saying that any challenge to a way of life should also be treated in the same way. Logically, this would mean, for example, that a society devoted at some point of time to the use of powdered wigs, has the right—and the duty—to put to death anyone who presumes to advocate going without these wigs. For Kendall’s way of life includes not only politics, but also philosophy, and all values. And if some poor Britisher should try to introduce cricket in this country, and he started earning a following—however small—Kendall should logically proclaim the bounden duty of the present passionately committed majority to put to death (literally) the unfortunate cricketer, who is now menacing their passionately held value.

See what is implied here in all of its grisly starkness. Kendall is not only saying that the champions of Truth have the right and duty to suppress Error, lest it threaten them. He is saying much more, though that would be bad enough. He is saying that any majority, so long as it thinks what it believes is true, has the right and duty to suppress any differences, even if these differences are really true. In other words, as long as a majority of men are sincere, they have the duty of annihilating any dissenters. Even, states Kendall expressly and fearlessly, if the dissenter were God himself (p. 94)!

There is no need for me to explain that this philosophy is the reverse of libertarian; it is not only that; it is the philosophy of savage tyranny, baldly and cogently expressed. It is the Enemy.

Setting aside the temptation to wax emotional over this, let us explore some more of Kendall’s inconsistencies—even on his own terms. One problem he has is that if erroneous people also have the right and duty to suppress the Truth, how in the world will the Truth become known? As Mill said, there is no automatic guarantee that Truth will triumph; truth must be discovered, it must be argued, it must be discussed, it must win men’s minds. How will it do so if it is killed at birth? If Socrates represents truth (and let us assume so for our purposes) how will Socraticism ever develop? And how could Christianity ever have developed? Kendall forgets that every major social change came about, and necessarily so, through an ideological revolution. Those things that he now reveres as “tradition” were once themselves revolutionary. Why doesn’t Kendall discuss the Christ question? If he did, he would have to conclude that the Romans should have killed Christ and persecuted the Christians (if Christianity was not subversive of the old order and way of life, what was it?) and that the Romans only erred in not extirpating Christianity thoroughly and ruthlessly enough. Is he prepared to say this? Is he prepared to say that if the Romans had had their Willmoore Kendalls to advise them, Christianity would not now exist, and Willmoore Kendall would have been, and should have been, a Roman pagan and not a Christian?

Not only would a Kendallian society be a savage despotism, with no individual freedom worth mentioning; not only would Truth be suppressed as much as error; but also it would be frozen into a static, completely unchanging mold. Kendall, in short, is the philosopher of the lynch mob. His hand is there to smash the first machines that opened the Industrial Revolution; he is there at the Inquisition; he is there to liquidate all advocates of any change. But see the inconsistency: since every new social change of importance is subversive of the old order and disturbs people’s peace of mind for a while, Kendall must keep going back and back, since every society originated in a social revolution against some preceding society. In short, Kendall’s ethical doctrine must lead straight back to where? To the era of the caveman. Only the most primitive tribes exemplify the Kendallian ideal and they alone; for they remain changeless, ruthlessly suppressive of any dissent, and consequently eternally static. And if all societies in the past were guided by a Willmoore Kendall, that is the level mankind would have remained at—barely above ape level. The first inventor of fire, the first inventor of the wheel would have been torn to pieces, and all succeeding dissenters and disturbers of the peace as well.

If Kendall has set forth the philosophy of tyranny cogently, we see that philosophy leads to the end of civilization and most of the human race—in short, the death principle. That is why I say that the Kendallian doctrine is the Enemy of all that you and I hold dear, and all that is best for the nature of man.

Kendall, of course, does not think of himself in this light, but rather of a sensible savior of democracy from the subversive encroachments of Communists and Nazis. But actually, his principles when logically analyzed, lead straight to what I have described. It is all very well for Kendall to picture himself as adviser to Germany in 1928, as he saves the Weimar Republic by killing Hitler; but he neglects to picture himself adviser in Germany in 1938, a time when his beloved community was passionately pro-Hitler. At that time, he would have had to counsel the duty of Germany to murder all anti-Nazis, who then would have been the subversive revolutionaries against the values of the community. And so we return to the Kendall regression—the eternal exterminating: the anti-Nazis in 1938, the Nazis in 1928, all Republicans in 1922, and so on back to the Visigoths.

(Kendall asks: shall we save Socrates or the Weimar Republic? There is no question how the libertarian will answer—to hell with the Weimar Republic!)

Kendall brilliantly sees that we have been engaged in a vast swindle: that our society has taught freedom of speech to us, but has, in fact, under such phony guises as “clear and present danger,” persecuted opinions which the majority have found uncongenial. He would bring coherence to the situation by eliminating the contradiction. How? By ceasing to teach the merit of free speech. In short, we profess ideals of liberty, but we find that we’re persecutors, so let’s not confuse matters; let’s stand up foursquare for persecution.

Kendall proceeds to add to his other inconsistencies and confusions two further ones. In fact, he commits the very sin he had neatly exposed long ago in Part I: the confusion of fact and value. He makes this confusion in two ways. First, he states that it is an empirical fact that people will simply not tolerate opinions radically different from theirs, and since they will not, it is wicked to teach simon-pure freedom. But even granted this “fact” (and I am very dubious—it seems to me that the persecution of Communists in the postwar years has been caused almost wholly by people believing that the Reds are a clear and present danger, and that, if Kendall convinces them otherwise, they would disappoint him by leaving the Commies alone as they did before World War II when Communist rhetoric was far more radical than today), it is illegitimate for Kendall to infer from this that this condition is good. People may be a bunch of murderers; that is no reason to say therefore murder is good. Second, he states—without any proof—that the simon-pure doctrine is unworkable, unhealthy, insane, etc., because no “society” could work if it practiced it. Every society has a “way of life,” “values,” etc. Here, we have a further confusion. What is this “society”? Like most other political theorists, Kendall offers no definitions. “Society” is not an independently existent entity; it is simply a shorthand label for a certain pattern of interpersonal relations. Now the point is that to have an existent society, no particular set of values, customs, ways of life, etc., are necessary. A society can exist which has an absolute principle: simon-pure liberty. Kendall waves this possibility away, but if such a society did exist, then Kendall or anyone else who attacked free speech would then be attacking a fundamental tenet of that society, and therefore would be doing evil on Kendall’s own grounds. (And note: if our society, as Kendall concedes, teaches the simon-pure doctrine, may we not say that society holds this as one of its values, and therefore that Kendall is himself an evil subverter by coming around to attack it?) For “society” can exist among Christians, atheists, pants-pressers, or libertines. It can exist on old Athenian principles or Socratic principles. There are only two relevant ideal types of social patterns: the pattern of voluntary contractual interrelation, and that of hegemonic, coercive interaction. A can interact with B, in other words, in either of two ways: by free gift or exchange—voluntarily—or by coercion. And these are all the relevant alternatives. Now, if a society is voluntarist and contractual, this freedom will develop the personality of each and permit that great growth of living standards that makes modern civilization possible, that raises us up from the caveman. If the society is markedly coercive, not only will it stunt each individual’s development, it will plunge humankind back to primitive living standards and not permit any maintenance of civilization.

We see that in the profoundest sense, then, liberty is necessary to a viable social order. In that case, Willmoore Kendall’s suggested rule by the bayonet is disintegrative of “society” rather than its salvation. Simon-pure freedom, rather than destroy society, would usher in the best possible type of society. Further, it is not necessary to social relations for A and B to have the same values, as Kendall thinks; they can have as many different views as they want, and trade between them will still be profitable to both.

Kendall’s final analogy between public discussion and the “scientific discipline” of the “academic community” is obvious nonsense. There is no pre-narrowed field, and, above all, the “academic community” is a voluntary club, making its own rules, while the general “community” rules by the bayonet. Further, since when is the “academic” orthodoxy the custodian of truth? We would be in a sorry way indeed if, guild-like, our academic bureaucracy could use force to suppress dissentient economists or political scientists—a sorry state for Truth, and, incidentally, a sorry state for Willmoore Kendall who earlier has inveighed against the “academic bureaucracy.” (One wonders: if you call the academicians a “community,” do they become good and revered, and if you call them a “bureaucracy,” do they become fair targets, and, by the way, what is the difference?) I would also add that Kendall will have a hard time enforcing “good manners” (which don’t always hold in the academic community either) on the public at large, which is not notorious for it; and, by the way, how would Kendall and the few other mannered elite go about imposing these manners by bayonet on the often unmannered masses? Democratically? The best answer on manners comes again from Mill, who points out that it is the majority who has the power, who should be exhorted to good manners, and not the few radical dissidents.

How now do we sum up the political philosophy of Willmoore Kendall? I have been treating it in this overlong memo in some detail because of the cogency of his presentation, the keenness with which he poses basic questions, and the fact of being a seeming star on the right-wing firmament, giving lectures at Buck Hill Falls. I sum up by repeating, advisedly, that Kendall is the philosopher extraordinaire of the lynch mob. As John Stuart Mill put it so well: “The propounder of a new truth, according to this doctrine, should stand, as stood, in the legislation of the Locrians, the proposer of a new law, with a halter round his neck, to be instantly tightened if the public assembly did not, on hearing his reasons, then and there adopt his proposition.”³ Read that great speech in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead as Roark explains that the great creators, the great individualists, were always met with hatred and persecution by their fellow men, who in the end benefited from them. Kendall is the eternal enemy of the Roarks, the enemy of liberty—a brilliant enemy, a cogent enemy, an honest enemy, a swell guy with an enormous capacity for Scotch, but an enemy nevertheless.

We should now face the question: how does Kendall differ, say, from Russell Kirk and the “new conservatives”? Why is he anti-Kirk, as he is reputed to be, even though both of them unite in being opposed to free speech and Mill’s On Liberty? Answer: there is great difference between them. Kirk is the philosopher of old pre-Industrial Revolution, High Anglican England, the land of the squire, the Church, the happy peasant, and the aristocratic bureaucratic caste. He is essentially and basically antidemocratic. Kendall, on the contrary, is, as I have said, the patron of the lynch mob—he is an ur-democrat, a Jacobin impatient of any restraints on his beloved community. He hates bureaucracy, but not as we do, because it is tyrannical; he hates it because it has usurped control from the popular masses. He is the sort of person whom the [Clinton] Rossiter-[Peter] Viereck “new conservatives” are combating, for they are trying to defend the existent rule of the leftist bureaucracy against any populist mass upheaval. So they—the leftists—have shifted from mob whippers to soothing conservatives.

And here we come to the cosmic joke, the final contradiction that is Willmoore Kendall. Kendall’s chief bête noire is revolution, and yet he fails to see that the revolution was. The leftists are in the saddle, have been for over two decades. Therefore, it is Kendall who is now the revolutionary, the disturber of the peace, the guy outside the pale. The community, Kendall’s saint, likes Ike, follows Walter Lippmann, etc. On Kendall’s own premises, Sherman Adams should put Kendall to death this instant. So, Kendall’s philosophy leads not only to death and destruction in general, but to his own death and destruction in great particular!

How is it that Kendall, an astute political analyst and chronicler of the liberal machine, can have made such a whopping mistake? How can he commit the Reece Committee fallacy that his views are in the majority now when this is palpably incorrect?⁴ I submit that Kendall can work his way out of this contradiction in one way. This way is connected with a question that has been cropping up in my mind for a long time: in what way is Kendall a “right-winger”? If he is a Jacobin, a lyncher, a Keynesian, etc., in what way is he a “rightist”? The answer seems to be: in one way only—he wants to kill Communists. Outside of this, I fail to see any “rightist” view. And perhaps he has convinced himself, as other rightists have done, that the “community” wants to kill Communists, here and abroad, and they are being prevented from doing so by the liberal machine. I deny that the majority wants to kill Communists, but at least it is a plausible hypothesis. But I submit that if this is Kendall’s only essential difference from, say, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., I will put my nickel on Schlesinger, for, on net balance, Kendall is less libertarian than he. (It is possible, of course, that there are some libertarian views that Kendall holds, but if so, no one has been able to point them out to me. Of course, he is a Christian, which may increase his “right-wing” credentials, but not his libertarian ones.)

This leads me, at long last, to the question of what has happened to the Right in the last decade. It has grown but it has also decayed in quality by becoming confused, and confusing itself with wicked doctrine. A dramatic contrast can be shown, for example, in taking a very early issue of Plain Talk—I think late 1946—and noting a moving article by Edna Lonigan, “I Taught Economics.” There, at the very beginning of this postwar flowering of the “radical Right,” Lonigan wrote of her experiences as a wartime college teacher. The climax came when she converted some pro-Commies in the class, after arguing with them all term for individual liberty, by giving them Mill’s On Liberty. In those days, the Right was small, but we were libertarian. We all fought for individual liberty, and battled majority as well as elitist tyranny of all types. And now, when we find Mill’s On Liberty discussed today—ostensibly by “rightists” also, what do we find? Kirk and Kendall, each from his own point of view blatantly attacking liberty—and who is there to challenge them on the Right? This is the tragedy of this decade.

How did this change happen to the “Right”? How did they change from pro-liberty to pro-tyranny without noting the difference? I submit because of a change in spirit from being a conscious minority to being almost, at least, in the majority in the country. And this came about from a switch in emphasis in doctrine. It came about from increasing stress on the Right on the twin issues of Communism and Christianity. Since the bulk of the populace has become converted to anti-Communism in this decade, the rightist can give up the burdens of being a lonely minority, by forgetting about libertarianism and stressing only Red-baiting. The same thing happens when the completely irrelevant issue of Christianity crops up; by arrogating to itself the Christian, or more, the theist mantle, the Right can again join a majority. So this is what has happened. The journalists write about the iniquities of Moscow, and the “philosophers” talk about the Christian tradition.

It seems to me that to advance libertarianism, therefore, we should cut ourselves off completely, and even attack the Christian Red-baiting Right, which has become the evil exponent of tyranny that we note today. Red baiting and religion mongering should be exposed for the red herrings that they are, and shelved to concentrate on the prime issue: liberty vs. tyranny.

4. Review of Charles L. Black, Jr., The People and the Court: Judicial Review in a Democracy

March 24, 1961

To: Mr. Kenneth S. Templeton

William Volker Fund

Burlingame, California

Dear Ken:

Charles L. Black, Jr., The People and the Court, Judicial Review in a Democracy (Macmillan, 1960) falls into the category of book that is so biased in a left-wing direction that it is interesting for hitting on some of the crucial problems in its area, problems which most works miss. Black’s jurisprudential views are biased in the left-wing direction on almost every issue: he favors the broadest of broad construction of the powers of government, except on such issues as freedom of speech, warrants for arrest, etc., of the Bill of Rights, where he joins the current “left wing” in favoring strict prohibitions on government.

Professor Black tries to avoid the obvious charges of inconsistency against his position by a clever sophistry: that, in both cases, he really favors broad construction—for he favors broad construction of government powers in the Constitution (e.g., the Commerce Clause, the “necessary and proper” clause, etc.), and also favors broad construction of the specific limitations on government (e.g., the First Amendment).

The complete sophistry of this supposed broad constructionism, however, is fully exposed when we find that Black emphatically does not apply such “broad” limits on government to those parts of the Bill of Rights that deal with property rights, e.g., “due process.” Here, Black calls the late-nineteenth-century laissez-faire interpretation of due process not broad but “wild” and “fantastic.”

Black’s position is all the more self-contradictory when he totally ignores the fact that the broad, absolutist version of the First Amendment, as Professor Leonard W. Levy has shown in his seminal work The Legacy of Suppression, was itself a new construction by the later Jeffersonians (Wortman, St. George Tucker, etc.) and not part of the original meaning of the Founders. If, then, the theory of substantive due process was a totally new construction, then so is the absolutist version of the First Amendment, which ignores the original doctrine of “seditious libel.”

Actually, from a libertarian point of view, broad construction of limits and strict construction of powers of government are perfectly compatible, since both conceive of the Constitution as imposing drastic limits on government power—preferably confining it to defense of person and property. However, the libertarian can make an even stronger case even within the constitutional domain itself.

First, if the Jeffersonian theory of strict construction of powers is adhered to, then there is no need for broad construction of limits since government powers would be drastically limited anyway. And, in my opinion, the Jeffersonian strict construction theory of the “necessary and proper” clause is obviously the meaning most appropriate to the text: “necessary” always means, in logical discourse, those steps that are truly essential and not just what some congressmen think to be conducive to the final result.

Black, of course, simply deprecates the Jeffersonian view. (Also, for example, the power to regulate “commerce” obviously should only be applicable to actual trade, so that, e.g., shipping and navigation are properly exempt from federal regulation, etc.)

Black also tries to uphold the disgraceful Brown v. Board of Education decision as not at all unprecedented; he sneers at states’ rights, praises the New Deal as essential, etc.

So far, there is nothing of intrinsic interest here. The interest comes from Black’s insight into the ambivalent functions of the system of judicial review, which he defends at length against the Frankfurter, etc. doctrine of “judicial restraint.” For Black is perhaps the first since Calhoun to realize that judicial review is not simply a welcome check on government power. More important is the function of judicial review in validating, in legitimatizing, government power, and in inducing the public to accept it.

De Jouvenel, in his On Power, points out in excellent fashion that, in the history of political thought, time after time a concept originally designed to limit and check the State was turned by the State into an instrument to give it legitimacy and moral approval in the eyes of the masses. Thus, the “Divine Right of Kings” was originally designed to limit the power of the king through making him adhere to generally accepted divine law; the kings, of course, turned it into a very convenient divine stamp of approval on every act of the rulers.

Similarly, parliament was originated as a representative organ of the people against the king—to withhold supply until grievances were redressed, etc. Parliament was later turned into an absolute instrument of rule over the people in its own right, etc.

Now, judicial review, beloved by conservatives, can of course fulfill the excellent function of declaring government interventions and tyrannies unconstitutional. But it can also validate and legitimize the government in the eyes of the people by declaring these actions valid and constitutional. Thus, the courts and the Supreme Court become an instrument of spearheading and confirming federal tyranny instead of the reverse. And this is what has happened in America—so that the Constitution itself has been changed from a limiting to an aggrandizing and legitimizing instrument.

Professor Black’s contribution here is to see and understand this process. In effect, he is telling his fellow étatists, “why do you carp and criticize the Supreme Court for its few, and, in the long run, ineffectual, checks on government power? Much more important is the continual process by which the Court, ever since John Marshall, has performed the extremely important function of validating aggrandized government in the eyes of the people.”

Black, of course, hails this process. Black also shows in his historical summary, that not only did this validating process begin with the aggrandizement of John Marshall, but it also continued on in the supposedly restrictive and laissez-faire courts, such as Taney, and the post-Civil War courts where the slow, steady, massive validation of government power proceeded quietly, while public hullabaloo was concentrated on the few occasions when the Court balked. Further, continues Black, these few occasions in themselves were often valuable in giving the public the impression that the Court is an impartial and, therefore, valid legitimizing body.

Black, interestingly, says this about the special American need for legitimization: in a country such as England or France, where parliament reigns supreme and absolute, then there is no question raised in the minds of the masses about legitimacy; everyone simply assumes such legitimacy. But the United States was set up as a limited government, and given the originally sovereign states, etc., it could only have begun as a strictly limited government. But if everyone knows that government is limited, then for every extension of government power, people may believe that the government is acting unconstitutionally and hence illegitimately. It is therefore particularly important, writes Black shrewdly, for a limited government to convince and cajole people that it is acting with legitimacy—so that even the most hostile critics of its actions will, down deep, accept the government itself.

Herein lies the particular function of the Supreme Court. Black recognizes that it is illogical to have the State itself—through its Supreme Court—be recognized as the final and sole judge of its own (State) actions, but, says Black, what is the alternative? The Calhoun alternative? The Calhoun alternative (Calhoun saw this whole problem with beautiful clarity) was nullification, interposition, movements toward unanimity principles, etc., but Black instantly rejects this sort of route as leading to an anarchic negation of the national government itself. Therefore, aside from such ultimately superficial measures as keeping an “independence” or quasi-independence for the judiciary, all this is really only a trapping to convince the public, in almost mystical fashion, that the State has somehow transcended itself as best it can. Professor Black may complacently put his faith in this “something of a miracle” (p. 42) of government being a judge in its own cause (this is reminiscent of Jim Burnham’s reference in his recent book to the “miracle” of government), but others of us may have different ideas.

The book—and the author, therefore—are whole-hearted celebrants of aggrandized national statism. Its interest for me is in discussing the crucial issue of legitimacy, from, however, a biased and distorted point of view. The book emphasizes for me, however, a point that I am making in an article in the forthcoming Modern Age: that the Constitution, regarded as an attempt to limit government, was one of the most noble attempts at limiting government, curbing the State, in human history—but that it has failed, and failed almost ignominiously. One reason for such failure, as Calhoun predicted, is the monopoly Supreme Court. At any rate, this failure points up the necessity of other, new, more stringent means of limiting and curbing government power.

5. Review of Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology

June 20, 1962

Dr. Ivan R. Bierly

William Volker Fund

Dear Ivan:

Dr. Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton University Press, 1961) is an important book on several levels. On a purely “tactical” level, it is refreshing to see the sociologists—the professional debunkers of the ideas of others by reducing them to “ideology” and to other factors—have their own ideas and ideologies turned against them: in short, to see the “sociology of knowledge” turned against the sociologists.

More important is Bramson’s positive critique and historical analysis of the development of modern sociology and its “conservative” antecedents in the first half of the nineteenth century. One of the most important neglected truths in the history of modern political theory is emphasized by Bramson: that modern left-wing and socialistic theories grew out of nineteenth-century conservatism, which adumbrated theories of holism, organicism, the “community,” the group as superior to the individual, statism against laissez-faire, a fixed, hierarchically ordered society, etc.

This doctrine of conservatism originated as a reaction against the ideals of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century liberalism and laissez-faire, which had brought to the world the ideas of liberty, industrial progress, separation of church and state, individualism, reason, equality before the law, etc. It was in reaction to this that the originators of conservatism such as Bonald, de Maistre, Hegel, etc., attacked classical-liberal and industrial society as being “atomistic,” as “disintegrating” the helpless individual, etc., and called for a “reintegration” of the individual in the group and the community, a reestablishment of organicism, the “whole man,” the State, hierarchical order, militarism, mystical irrationalism, etc.

Bramson shows that the original “socialists” were directly derived from this reactionary wave: e.g., Comte and Saint-Simon, who both wished to restore stagnation, hierarchy, and status from the period from which the Enlightenment had dethroned them. Karl Marx was more of an eclectic, as Bramson shows. From the classical liberals, Marx took an at-least-proclaimed devotion to humanism, reason, industry, peace, and the eventual “withering away of the State”; from the conservatives, however, he took much more, including an idealization of the feudal period, an opposition to individualism on behalf of favored classes and the whole collective society, a determinist belief in laws of history, and the charge that liberal division of labor and the free society “alienated” the laborer from his work, “atomized” the individual, etc.

Since these were the founders of sociology, it is no surprise that, as Bramson indicates, sociology in itself, in its inherent concentration on the group or holistic society as against the individual, is innately anti-individualist and anti-(classical) liberal. As Bramson says, “A consideration of the anti-liberal aspect of sociology brings into sharp relief the links between a reactionary like de Maistre, who idealized the feudal order, and a radical like Marx, who visualized a new industrial order.” We can, incidentally, see these links also in the writings of partisans of such links: e.g., Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation or R.H. Tawney.

The second important contribution of Bramson’s work is, in his later chapters, the critique of the current left-wing attack on modern “mass society” or “mass culture,” which Bramson shows to be derived from the nineteenth-century conservative and socialist attacks on “the atomization of the individual” due to modern capitalism and individualism. While the current critics attack not only capitalism but industrialism as well—and thus implicitly call for a return to some sort of agrarian-communal ideal—these critics are basing their theses not, as they claim, on social science, but on their own arbitrary valuations and romanticizing of all other times but the present.

The same criticisms are also present to a large degree in current “conservative” criticisms of mass culture, although the leftists are more explicitly anticapitalist in their absolving of the masses and pinning all the blame on the (capitalistic) mass media, which, through television, advertising, etc., “manipulate” the masses. Bramson has a good defense of mass culture in this respect, showing that even recent sociological work shows that individuals are as much—if not more—influenced by their friends and acquaintances than by mass media, and showing the arbitrary value judgment underlying the criticisms. He cites some apparently very interesting articles on this by Edward Shils and Raymond Bauer.

In his later chapters, Dr. Bramson is not quite as sure-footed as in the earlier. Thus, while in the early chapters, Bramson forthrightly and explicitly defines “liberal” as classical liberal, someone advocating individual liberty, in his later discussion of twentieth-century views, Bramson covertly shifts his meaning to use it in the vague modern sense of people interested in pragmatism, flexibility, openness, etc., which of course allows for a great deal more statism and loss of rigor in opposing it.

Further, he is a little too glib in linking the current conservative and the socialistic critics of “mass culture.” Some of those cited (e.g., Dwight Macdonald) are simply people who dislike the cultural tastes of the masses, and Bramson tends to slide into the position of equating such a “cultural aristocratic” position with a political one: i.e., with charging that the person believes in rule of society by an intellectual elite. Cultural criticism and advocacy of statism are two different things, and Bramson tends to confuse the two too readily.

Bramson’s biggest failure is the deficiency in his positive position, which, inevitably, weakens his criticism of the conservative-socialistic sociology, which he clearly opposes sharply. This is a philosophic failure, for Bramson believes that there is no such thing as social science at all, that there is no such thing as true objectivity in social inquiry, that all statements, even cause-and-effect and factual, rest on philosophical value-premises, and that all value-premises are arbitrary.

In short, Bramson is an ethical relativist, and an epistemological relativist as well.

For (a) it is not true that social science and its conclusions rest on value judgments; much of it does not. Only political or ethical conclusions (and judgments) rest on value judgments. The demonstration that price control causes shortages, for example, rests on no value-premises whatever; but the conclusion that price control should not be imposed is a policy judgment, which rests on ethical theories as well as on the economic law just mentioned. (E.g., the ethical principle that it is bad to cause shortages in this way.)

And (b) it is not true, as Bramson believes, that all value judgments and ultimate ideological positions are as good as any other, and that the choice is purely an arbitrary one. Some ethical doctrines or ideological positions are objectively and rationally good and some are bad. Bramson rejects the pure positivist separation of facts and values, but he also brusquely dismisses the natural-law connections between them; to Bramson, natural law is a static, and therefore antiliberal, search for “order,” although he gives it almost no attention.

Bramson is therefore left with the jettisoning of any social science whatever and with the conclusion that the whole enterprise is an “art” based on arbitrary values. While we may applaud Bramson’s own choice of some sort of vaguely liberal values, we can hardly be convinced of them by this sort of irrationalist procedure.

While Bramson’s positive position is weak and unimportant, however, the value of the book is in his tracing of the strong linkage and affinity between conservative and socialist thought, joining together in the pseudoscience of sociology and in their common hatred and opposition to individualism and laissez-faire. Certainly the weaknesses, and probably also the strengths, of Bramson’s book may be partially attributed to the evident influence on the author of the historian Louis Hartz.

6. Review of Charles Percy Snow, Science and Government

July 23, 1962

Dr. Ivan R. Bierly

William Volker Fund

Dear Ivan:

Charles Percy Snow, Science and Government (Harvard University Press, 1961) is a justly famous little book to which Sir Charles has just written a pamphlet “Appendix” (which I have not read) in answer to his critics. On the surface, the book is simply a chatty, well-written story about a series of conflicts about military science in the English government, before and during World War II, between two formidable protagonists: Sir Henry Tizard and F.A. Lindemann. Snow describes the points at issue and points a few moral lessons. But the book is justly well known because the issues at stake—for many of which Snow unfortunately does not point to the moral—are close to the heart of some of the most important issues of our time.

There is no doubt about the fact that, as far as the concrete instances of the story go, Snow is right: Tizard was consistently right and Lindemann consistently wrong. Tizard—backed up by virtually all the scientists who were let in on the issues involved—was all for the development of radar in air defense; Lindemann rejected this for inane schemes of his own. Tizard and the other scientists favored sharing of radar secrets with the United States before the war; Lindemann, passionate for “security and secrecy,” was opposed. And finally, Lindemann had a great faith in a policy of massive strategic bombing of Germany, while Tizard and some fellow scientists were strongly opposed—and were proved right after the war. Two side morals from these instances are the futility of secrecy in science and the folly (as well as the wickedness) of the policy of strategic bombing in World War II.

Secrecy applies here at several levels. The British military tried fiercely to cling to the “secrets” of radar, when, at the very same time, their counterparts in the United States, Germany, and Soviet Russia were also clinging to their comparable “secrets.” Science is an inherently international and cosmopolitan development, and this cannot be thwarted by censorship and the bayonet. Snow unfortunately does not make the case as strong as he might. He denies—in the face of his own evidence—that secrecy represses the growth of science.

The other important aspect of secrecy is that these decisions—life-and-death decisions for the country and even the world—were made by only a handful of men and made without giving the public a chance to participate. And yet Snow, while recognizing the secrecy and closed-closet nature of these decisions, does not really oppose the system. He is not at all concerned, apparently, with the violation of democracy involved; for how can members of the public make decisions about issues about which their government keeps them deliberately in ignorance? By what right, furthermore, does a government keep secrets from its taxpayers? Yet Snow, too secure a member of the “Establishment,” presumably, to worry about such matters, can think of only the most picayune of reforms—which involve, paradoxically, more scientists in government and more government encouragement of science. (More on this below.)

In the instance of strategic bombing, Snow makes an important contribution to World War II revisionism (despite himself, since he admits that he is and was an ardent believer in the crusade against Germany in World War II). For he shows that the barbaric policy of strategic bombing of civilians was launched by the British (thus confirming [F.J.P.] Veale) when the Germans and the Russians had no interest in strategic bombing whatever; and, further, that this policy was pushed through by Lindemann over the opposition of scientists such as Tizard and [P.M.S.] Blackett, in a wave of patriotic fervor and the emotional denunciation of Tizard as a “defeatist.”

Lindemann, a pseudoscientist with the unquestioning and fanatical devotion and support of Churchill, estimated that strategic bombing would be ten times as effective as it proved to be (even Blackett and Tizard, who opposed the strategic bombing program as military folly, overestimated by 100 percent the extent of bombing damage that would occur).

There is also the interesting revelation that the Lindemann strategic bombing program was not at all interested in selecting military or strategic targets for bombing (it was impossible to select them properly anyway), but was deliberately and solely aimed at killing the maximum number of civilians, and therefore concentrated on the dense and crowded housing of the poor and the working class.

The real moral of the story, which Snow refuses to draw in any such broad terms, is the folly of government intervention in science. One forceful quasi-charlatan gets the ear of a leading politician (Churchill), and the whole scientific policy of the government must swing into line. But it is more than a problem of one man, to which Snow tries to limit the problem. It is the general problem of science distorted and perverted by government—by politicians and by the bureaucracy alike.

The moral that Snow himself tries to draw—in short, more scientists in government and more government promotion of science—is precisely the reverse of the conclusion that emerges from an impartial survey of Snow’s facts. But Snow, who cannot conceive of a world where government and science are separated, cannot draw such conclusions. Withal, this is a highly stimulating book.

7. Report on the Voegelin Panel

(date unknown)

Professor W.F. Albright

My critique of the Voegelin Panel is rather handicapped by the fact that I have not read the three volumes of the Voegelin magnum opus,⁵ especially since much of the debate centered on an interpretation of what Voegelin’s political position is.

Professor Albright’s paper was an interesting and straightforward technical-historical criticism of Voegelin’s work. Voegelin’s philosophic position, said Albright, is a blend of Hegelianism, Lutheran Augustinianism, and existentialism. (If true, this bodes ill, for all three of these philosophies must be looked on askance, especially the first and third.) For Hegel’s Geist, Voegelin substitutes “Order” as the “meaning of history.”

Voegelin is better than Hegel, said Albright, because Hegel’s Geist is realized through the dialectic by the State, whereas for Voegelin, it is not. On the other hand, Voegelin definitely combines the religious and the political in history. For the dialectic, Voegelin substitutes the mysterious concept of the “leap in being,” which is supposed to have occurred in Greece and in Israel, which Albright identifies as a questionable variant of St. Augustine’s “leap of faith.” Albright then cogently attacked existentialism as essentially unhistorical and arbitrary. Then Albright placed Voegelin as a better historian than Toynbee, but I got the distinct impression that this would not necessarily have to be a compliment.

The bulk of Albright’s paper was devoted to a historical critique of Voegelin’s historical and empirical data, of which I am not competent to judge the validity. The gist of the criticisms is that Voegelin is not quite abreast of recent ancient-history scholarship. Specifically, there are three criticisms. First, that Voegelin adopts the “pan-Babylonian” theory of such historians as [Alfred] Jeremias, holding that the early Babylonians had an elaborately developed astrology and cosmology. This, says Albright, has been completely discredited by recent scholars who have shown that Babylonia only had a developed astrology in the second century BC.

Secondly, Voegelin follows the German school of Israel historiography, headed by [Albrecht] Alt, [Martin] Noth, and [Gerhard] von Rad, and neglects the current American and Israeli school based largely on archaeological discoveries and linguistic analysis (e.g., John Bright, History of Israel), all of which, as well as literary analysis, show that monotheism goes back to early Israel. Furthermore, these evidences show that while Israeli literature had monotheist sentiment from the tenth century BC, Northern Syrian literature had monotheism in the fourteenth century BC. Early Hebrew law extends back before Moses (thirteenth century BC), and back, indeed, to fourteenth-century-BC treaties of Syria (see researches of [George E.] Mendenhall.)

Thirdly, Voegelin neglects the findings that Greek science (e.g., Hesiod) was based on earlier Hittite and Phoenician influences, which the Greeks rendered in more systematic and abstract form.

Albright ended with praise, but with the pointed remark that empirical and rational methods are best for the historian, not idealism and existentialism (which Voegelin is supposed to be blending).

Professor Thomas I. Cook

Cook began, as did all other speakers, by praising Voegelin’s erudition. He then said that he was going to devote his paper to attacking Professor Voegelin as “dangerous,” “erroneous,” and “subversive,” and, in fact, as “the great enemy.”

Voegelin argues, said Cook, that a proper political order requires the rule of those who understand and are a “part of” “ultimate reality.” This understanding of ultimate reality can only be achieved by some sort of “leap in being,” after which this understanding of ultimate reality is supposed to be imposed on the rest of society. When this rule is not imposed, society is in decline.

Voegelin adopts Plato’s totalitarian Republic as his model of the political order that can stem a social decline. This is the good rule of the good State. But, said Cook in libertarian fashion, when has there ever been a true and good State? And, furthermore, how are these philosopher-rulers to be selected? How are they to be known? For these rulers are to arrive at their understanding of the required political order, not simply by reason or dialectic, but by some sort of intuition and grace. Voegelin, Cook agrees, is opposed vehemently to any this-worldly elitist order of government (and from this, clearly, stems Voegelin’s opposition to the secular empires and secular states that he sees built by the “gnostic” spirit).

On the other hand, Voegelin does want an elite to rule who “truly know” and “truly understand” by some sort of intuitive, mystic means that transcend human reason. Furthermore, Voegelin implies that everyone, all of us, who do not have this mystic grace are “incompetent,” in error, outside of the pale, not political scientists, and not fit to participate in political decisions.

Cook charges that this sort of doctrine permits no sort of polis to develop, because there can be no real, rational communication between the inspired elite and everyone else. Cook reminds Voegelin that politics is concerned not with the transcendent but with finite man and his relationships, and that the proper method of arriving at a political order is by reason. The basic concern of the State or polis should be, not “the good life,” but good lives—i.e., the emphasis should be individualistic, not on the collective State.

In short, the political order should enable people to achieve the fulfillment of the potential of each individual, without having one ought imposed upon all of them. In this connection, Plato—Voegelin’s model—is the great enemy that political science must combat. Our job, in politics, is to be materialist and empiricist. Our job, in politics (though not necessarily elsewhere, I take it) is to provide the maximum enabling means to allow diverse types of persons to develop their potentialities to their diverse maxima. The emphasis of politics is life on this earth.

As against the emphasis of human reason as used in the world, Voegelin emphasizes the intuition, the “leap in being” of an elite, whose doctrine of a transcendent good must be followed and accepted by the rank and file, else society is lost.

From this paper, I think we can conclude, first, that Professor Cook’s instincts are libertarian, that he favors individual liberty and development of each person in freedom, and that he believes in human reason as the way to arrive at political decisions. He is certainly correct in attacking elitist rule of a group of supposedly inspired prophets, and in attacking the authoritarianism and statism of Plato.

Cook’s own political views, as far as they can be gleaned here, seem to be in the right direction. The only real question, then, is whether his interpretation of Voegelin’s position is correct. There was controversy about this, and the question is in doubt (and we will consider this more closely in our critique of Voegelin himself). To me, however, the fact that Voegelin takes Plato’s Republic as his model is extremely disquieting and certainly lends credence to the “totalitarian” view of Voegelin.

I think it should be mentioned here that Professor Cook’s interpretation of Voegelin is paralleled by that of the great ancient-history scholar Moses Hadas.⁶ By “order,” says Hadas, Voegelin means authority, by “transcendent” he means not only God but a human theocratic elite. History, for Voegelin, means God primarily; the enemy for Voegelin is the Enlightenment. And the inspired, transcendent elite is supposed to rule the rest of society.

Not only Plato’s Republic but also his even more totalitarian Laws are the actual exemplars of Voegelin’s preferred “leap in being.” Hadas asserts that Voegelin praises the “noble lie” or “big lie” of Plato, that this is a proper action for the rulers to use, and that the rulers’ interpretation of eugenic mating is right because “true order of the spirit cannot be realized in community unless supported by eugenic election of right bodies.”⁷ Voegelin praises the Nocturnal Council of the Laws which is to enforce laws against impiety, and since all the laws are sanctioned by religion, this means all laws, period.

Voegelin praises “the life and problems of the polis”—which Hadas interprets, perhaps with exaggeration, as a secret police.⁸ Hadas concludes that Voegelin’s “order” rests upon the rule of a supposedly divinely inspired elite, close to the Hellenistic theory that the ruler is nomos empsychos—“law incarnate.” This was the basis for the authoritarianism of the Roman emperors and combated by the “gnostics” of the eighteenth century. Hadas concludes by saying—again, perhaps with exaggeration—that “leap in being” amounts, in the last analysis, to fascism.

In the discussion period from the floor, I asked Professor Cook whether he deduced Voegelin’s authoritarianism merely from Voegelin’s emphasis on God and the transcendent (as various defenders of Voegelin, including Frank S. Meyer, had intimated) or whether he had other reasons. Cook replied that he had other reasons, and that he himself would like very much for Voegelin to clear up the ambiguities of his work that led Cook to interpret Voegelin in this manner.

Professor Eric Voegelin

In general, I was frankly not very impressed with Voegelin’s ratiocination in discussion. Thus, one of Voegelin’s chief arguments was that assuming the existence of God is the only scientific course for the historian, since so many peoples have believed in God. This seems to me one of the weakest arguments for the existence of God I have heard in a long time. Secondly, his major argument against a secular world empire (or rather an immanentized religio-political empire—i.e., pagan or “gnostic”) is that such an empire can only include in its community the people now living; it cannot include the dead and the unborn, which Christianity can include. This is perhaps the weakest argument against a secular State rule that I have heard in a long time. I fail to see how the dead or the unborn can be fitted into any sort of order in this world, much as they might be a vital force in some other world.

In reply to Albright, Voegelin acknowledged a fundamental difference of opinion. He, Voegelin, believes that each civilization (Greek, Israeli, Babylonian, etc.) was self-built and uninfluenced by the other or earlier civilizations. Any similarity of culture, therefore, was only coincidence and not because of outside influence.

Voegelin asserted that while all men begin equal under God, they are unequal in their accomplishments. This is certainly true, but we are still left with the question of how much power Voegelin would give to his elite. Voegelin pooh-poohed the fears of Cook by saying that the U.S. Constitution hopes to elect people by merit, not by lot (the truly democratic thing), and then has beneficial checks and balances on these rulers. If this is all that Voegelin’s “elitism” amounts to, this would be fine, but I have my doubts. The question is: is Voegelin cloaking his true position before this potentially hostile American audience.

Voegelin denied he was an existentialist and also joined in attacking existentialism as unhistorical. (However, the term “leap in being” is clearly taken from the existentialist Heidegger.)

After Cook had answered my question by saying that he had hoped that Voegelin himself would clarify his political position, Voegelin took the floor to say that he means that the elite should rule by persuasion merely, and that people would follow by being persuaded. Again, if this is true, Voegelin’s political position would be fine (although I would still take grave exception to his exclusive emphasis on the transcendent, on intuition, and his attack on “gnostic” this-worldly emphases). However, I have my doubts, especially in view of Voegelin’s admittedly taking the definitely despotic Plato as his model.

Frank Meyer took the floor to challenge Cook and to defend Voegelin as really laying the groundwork for freedom, in attacking absolute secular rule, and in harmonizing or balancing the transcendent and the real world—which balancing Frank obscurely finds as the only (???)⁹ basis for freedom! Neither Voegelin nor Cook commented on Frank’s statement, however.

There is a tendency on the Right to believe that any political philosopher who repeatedly invokes God and attacks secularism is, ipso facto, some sort of libertarian. I believe that Frank has fallen prey to this fallacy. I think it significant that Voegelin made no comment on Frank’s remarks and did not take the opportunity to say that he really believed in freedom. I never heard Voegelin use the term “freedom” or “liberty” at all.

On the other hand, Frank admitted to me in conversation that Voegelin is a disciple of Plato. Since Plato is clearly pro-despotism, Frank concluded that Voegelin must be mistaken in his interpretation of Plato, that he must think of Plato as some sort of libertarian, etc. I cannot accept this interpretation since surely any eminent scholar such as Voegelin realizes the totalitarianism of Plato’s politics.

The verdict is not conclusively in, but it seems to me that Voegelin must be approached with a great deal of skepticism, until the allegedly libertarian basis of his thought becomes a lot clearer than it is now. His devotion to Plato indicates the exact opposite than libertarian.