The Library of Liberty, and the Archives of Evil

0:00Who Rockwell suggested that I talk on the Library of Liberty and Archive of Evil, it put me in two minds. On the one hand, I was very glad to have a chance to talk about books, but on the other hand, from the part of the topic Archive of Evil, I had the impression that he wanted me to say something bad about certain books, I want to begin by contrasting two books, or rather being found in both these books. The first is an excellent book that was mentioned in his talk last night, that is Murray Rothbard's 1982 study, The Ethics of Liberty.

0:50The other book is the most influential modern book in political philosophy, John Rawls' The Theory of Justice, which came out in 1971. Murray Rothbard develops in libertarian political thought and ethics liberty from a very simple principle, that of self-ownership. The Self-Ownership Principle holds that each person is the owner of his or her own body and has the right to do certain things with that body that other people do not have. Other people do not have the same rights over his body. A simple example I can show the plausibility principle. Supposing that someone needs a kidney transplant and decides that since you have two healthy kidneys, you should give him one of your kidneys. You don't care to do that.

1:51Now, supposing the person were to argue, well, look, even though you'll be worse off having one of your kidneys removed, even though you'll be worse off having one of your kidneys removed, after all, you'll still be able to live out a reasonably normal life, whereas if he had this person who needs the kidney, may well die very short, very soon, if he doesn't get the kidney from you. I think most of us would conclude that this isn't sufficient justification for taking away your kidney. It's your body. You don't have to give the kidney to anyone if you don't want to. So far, at least for most people, this is fairly non-controversial.

2:41There is a British political philosopher, John Harris, who argued that there should be a lottery of body parts and that people should be required to give up parts of their body where they would do the most good. But somehow this idea hasn't caught on. But one thing, one fact about human beings is very obvious, is that people differ very much in their abilities and their talents. And if we say that each person has control of his or her own body, then it seems to follow that people may benefit to very different extents from the various abilities they have.

3:26and Rothbard of course finds nothing amiss with this and in fact thinks this is the basis of a free society. I should mention that Hans Hoppe, who is one of our speakers, has developed Rothbard's ideas further in his work and he has a very interesting argument based on the work of his, in part on the work of his teacher Eugen Habermas What does Rawls say about the seemingly obvious idea that each person has the right to control his or her own body?

4:14Well, he says, no, this is not right. Ideally, everyone should have equal assets and abilities. It's wrong that some people benefit or have better lives than others. But in practice, we can't make everyone absolutely equal. So what we should do is allow inequalities, but have these inequalities only so that they're to the advantage of the worst off group in society, so that it's all right if some people are in a good deal more than others, let's say, as long as that to the advantage of the worst off group, otherwise it isn't. Now, how does Rawls reply to the very obvious objection that, well, why should you not be able to control, to have control over your own abilities, after all they are, your abilities aren't they, why should you have to, say, someone of superior ability have to surrender part of his income so that others with less talent can benefit the scenes of his primal facie on a fixed basis, Well, Rawls' argument basically is that people don't deserve their abilities. It's a matter of luck based on their hereditary environment, how they've been brought up, what talents they have, so that in his view people really don't deserve to benefit from the talents they have.

5:52So in effect what he has is really a justification for a system of state slavery. So on the one hand we have the view of Rothbard that each person is the self-owner, then there's the Rawlton view that society is really the owner of everyone's assets and really we should distribute these assets equally as far as possible, allowing inequalities only to the benefit of the worst off. Now, Rawls' idea might strike you, I think, should strike you as an absurd one, but I hope it won't surprise you to learn that of the two books, Rothbard's book is hardly known among conventional political philosophies, whereas Rawls' book has been the source of hundreds if not thousands of books and articles, it's by far the most influential book of its And when one critic of Rawls' book, Robert Nozick, advanced some fairly obvious criticisms of Rawls' principle in his 1974 book, which is one very much worth reading, Energy, State, Utopia, Nozick said, well, look, if we say that the state is redistributing, should redistribute assets in the way Rawls wants, arguing in effect justifying slave labor, we're saying that people of superior ability should have to work for those of inferior ability.

7:25One of the replies to Nozick by a follower of Rawls is also a Harvard political philosopher, Thomas Gammond. But no, no, Rawls is not justifying slave labor because he's not saying people have to work for others, for the poor, for others. He's only saying that if they want to benefit at all from their abilities, then they have to work for others. and I should say this is regarded by most political philosophy as a convincing reputation of no-signal. Now if you disagree that this is a convincing reputation, if you favor the sort of system Rothbard described, I think we have to ask ourselves how did we arrive at so very different a system, a status system that we have today.

8:16And here, I think, principle, what I would consider principle factor in accounting for this has been already discussed by John Denson in his talk this morning, that the role of the state in, the state has grown through constantly engaging in wars and having defense buildups. This has been probably the single most important element in accounting for the rise of the state to virtually total power. And I'd like to recommend in this connection the book edited by John Denton called Costs of War. In supplementing this, there's a very good collection of essays by the famous American journalist and writer on public affairs, Affairs, John T. Flynn, which came out last year under the title, Forgotten Lessons. Some of Flynn's other books are also perhaps a bit harder to get, but they're very good, such as his book, As We Go Marching, and his biography of Franklin Roosevelt, actually two biographies, Franklin Roosevelt, Spruce County.

9:28Alright, now what the basic point Flynn made was that the state, because of wrong economic policies, is often faced with the possibility of depression or recession. So it seeks a quick fix to get out of this by spending vast sums of money. And one way in which you can use it to justify this vast spending of money is to get there, to promote war scares. And so he saw that the, he described in very great detail how the state proceeds to grow through these war scares. This, as John Denson also mentioned, has been an Achilles heel of much of American conservatism.

10:18Many conservatives will tell you, of course we favor a very limited state and believe in free enterprise, but of course we have to have a very large defense budget. And it doesn't really make any difference, or very much difference, whether we call it, say, we have government spending for defense or welfare education. It's still government spending and it leads to the total state. I should say, in understanding this process of how the state promotes wars to achieve more and more centralization, I think it's very important to look at particular case studies. We shouldn't just be satisfied with having some general theory of how this process works, but we need to examine particular cases, as John Denson did in his account of Pearl Harbor.

11:12The French historian Jules Michouet in the 19th century said that history is a resurrection of the flesh. We need to look at particular examples of how the government has promoted war. I'd like to mention just a few books. There are two very good studies by the great American historian Charles Austin Beard. One was called the American Foreign Policy in the Making, and the next one was, which came out I think a couple of years later in 1948, was called President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War in 1941. in 2001. And what Beard showed with great convincing documentation was that Franklin Roosevelt had been elected on a program of non-intervention into foreign affairs, but that he gradually, throughout the thirties, shifted his position completely against his public statements. He continued to make public statements strongly favoring non-intervention. But then somewhere around, say if you look at his Chicago Bridge, and the Chicago Bridge speech, October 9, 37, suddenly shifted and then followed a much more warlike policy.

12:33So I think this gives a very good account of one particular case. And then also I would think it's another example of how you can be very valuable to look at is the origins of World War I. Here, I think much of the recent literature, such as Fritz Fischer's book, Germany's Grasp the World Power, isn't as good as the earlier literature. Too much of the recent literature has tended to demonize one country, namely Germany, and hold them entirely responsible for World War I, The earlier revisionist literature has a much more nuanced account of the origins of war.

13:18I think one book people should certainly have a look at if you're interested in getting in the subject. Sidney Fay's great book, The Origins of the World War, I think it's possible to get the 1930 edition rather than the 1928 one Well, because he made some changes in his conclusions in the second edition, but we now have, I've explained somewhat the basic difference between a libertarian status philosophy, and given an example of what the force posed back in the growth of war, we now have to say, well, given that war is seen, at least, as self-evidently bad, how is it that The many wars why is it the government has exceeded in its aim to centralizing power increasing power through promotion of wars and here I think we have we have to accord primary important significance to the intellectuals there have been and in particular writers who, through their often very astute propaganda, have been able to confuse the public and advance the aims of the state towards total power.

14:47I'd like to mention a couple books in which the process is very well described. There are two books, I think, that came out in the same year. One is 1944. One is extremely well known. Friedrich Hayek's road to serfdom, but the other book is perhaps even better than Hayek's great work, but has attracted less attention. It's Ludwig von Mises's Omnipotent Government. Both of Mises emphasized in Omnipotent Government that that status intellectuals supported measures of economic intervention into the economy in order to strengthen the power of the central government and they deliberately rejected any notion of economic law as wrongly attempting to limit the power of the state.

15:47He shows in this book in very elaborate detail, particularly in the case of German policy in the 30s, that this policy of statist intervention in the economy went hand in glove with the promotion of war and aggressive nationalism. This is, I think, one of the best accounts of the rise of national socialism that is available. Hayek, in Road to Serfdom, had a very similar analysis to Mises, although he perhaps stressed the connection between the intellectuals and the development of the economy to a lesser extent than Mises. He tended to stress that if people had wanted to have a certain plan for society, then given the diversity of people's values, this plan could only be enforced through coercions and people have very different ideas of what's good and what's the best policy.

16:49The comprehensive, the total plan will require, it's incompatible with freedom, and he traced also, giving critical attention to the German example, how this process developed from, especially taking account of certain writers in World War I, such as various German writers, such as Werner Sohnbark and others, showing that their ideas were later are carried out in much more detail by the National Socialists. Now, in considering these intellectuals, I think what I'd like to do now is focus on one intellectual in particular, one of these status intellectuals.

17:35This writer has discussed an essay in the book edited by Costum Ward that I mentioned before. This is Murray Rothbard's outstanding essay, War is Fulfillment, Power in the Intellectual. He discusses the role of the man I'm sure you've heard of, the American philosopher John Dewey. Of Dewey, I think you'll know, probably you've all heard of him as one of the founders of progressive education, but he was much more than that. I'd like to offer some, I'd recommend highly what Rothbard says about Dewey in his essay, but I'd like to offer a few supplementary comments so that we can get some understanding of how the state's intellectual work.

18:28Now, during World War I, Dewey was a prime exemplar of one of the main failings of intellectuals during wartime. As they, what he tried to do was, rather than calm the passions of war, he tried to whip up hatred against the enemy by coming up with a pseudo-intellectual justification for a warlike policy. During the war, he issued a book called German Philosophy and Politics, which strongly denounced German thought in the grip of Prussian autocracy and having as its, at least one of its principal goals, the promotion of German world domination. Dewey's work was quite influential during of War. But as you may know, Dewey lived a very long life. He was born in 1859, I think, died somewhere around 1952 or 1953. And as it seemed likely that America would enter World War II, he decided that it would be a good idea to reissue this book, which he did with a new, in fact, with a new afterward. It wasn't enough for him that he'd helped

19:52get one more started body like to put in his contributions towards doing it again. If it's worth the first time, why not again? I think if we look at the book, I think we can see a deeper underlying motivation than simply hatred of the enemy for his activity. What Dewey criticized, the principle that he criticized in German thought was the thought that the German philosophers, particularly Kant, thought of freedom only as an inner process and thought that according to Dewey, Kant thought that later German thinkers thought that freedom existed only in the mind and that the individuals had to be subject to the state in their actual, in their actions.

20:47This notion of doing opposed because this pet would give a very limited role for intellectuals such as himself if the intellectuals are confined to this very limited mental sphere then everything else is in the hands of the government. and he wanted, he thought intellectuals should play a much greater role in this, the intellectuals should be really running things. I think to do it like many people in the modern university are not satisfied with just being by themselves, being in an isolated position, they want to exercise authority in the public I think sometimes in thinking about modern university, I think of Browning's line on that sad, obscure, sequestered place, which is Roger Garrison's work. Browning, when he wrote that line, was talking about purgatory, but it still applies to university.

22:01Well, now, Dewey, I think, and so I say, Dewey, we look at this book even further when he says the intellectual should not, as the Germans, want to be confined to some inner sphere, but should exercise power. There's an even deeper layer to Dewey's thought, and this is that he repudiated the notion of objective truths altogether. According to Dewey, if we think of truth as something out there in the world as it were, if we say, for example, what are the principles of economics or who really caused the First World War, this is a false approach to knowledge.

22:51It's implying that the thinker is contemplating the world as somewhat apart from the world. I just remembered, similar to his criticism, the Germans were dividing thought between inner and outer, inner thought and outer action, saying we have to take, we shouldn't take thought as apart from the world. This is what he thought, he said this was a quest for certainty, he said this was an aristocratic notion that the ancient Greeks had developed because they disdained physical labor. If we really emphasize the physical labor more and didn't have this aristocratic attitude, then the important thing is our actions on the world, not just our contemplation.

23:36Of course, I'm sure you recognize the similarity here to Marx's thought. Remember that Marx said in the famous eleventh thesis on Ludwig von Mises, The Philosophers of Hitherto only interpreted the Whirlwind Point, however, this change is exactly the same phenomenon in Dewey. The Philosophers' role, the Thinkers' role, is to act on the world, to change it rather than just to study it. This notion, I should say, the parallel between Dewey and Marx was drawn explicitly by a self-described life-long mention that Sidney Hook, who was both a follower of Dewey and Marx, Marxist. He thought that Marx and Dewey really supplemented each other entirely. This has been a very influential strain of American radicalism. So the last book I want to mention actually extends Dewey's notion even further. This is also one I put in my Archive of Evil.

24:50I guess I didn't find it so hard to talk about the bad books after all. This is the very influential book that came out, I believe, in 1979 by Richard Rorty called Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature. Now, Rorty rates John Dewey, one of the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. And what he says is that truth, at least in the social sphere, should not be taken as something that's out there at all. Rather, the important thing is what a particular community holds to be the case.

25:36So as Milton said, there's nothing either true or false, but thinking makes it so. It's something that the community decides what's true or false. It's not limited at all by any requirements of, say, economic law or anything else. I think we can see this notion, which is really pragmatism, the theory of pragmatism carried to its ultimate extreme, fits in very well with statism, because in the face of fairly obvious objections to the status program, It simply disregards these and says there's no such thing as truth at all. Now if you, I think it's one of the great achievements of Mises and Murray Rothbard and those who tried to follow in their footsteps, that they have rejected these notions and have stood up for both economic law and objective truth.

26:38and we can see in the lives of Mises and Rothbard that in Robert Frost's phrase, this is made all but different.