Compiling this list was a difficult task. There were many excellent books published during the past ten years, and it’s hard to select twelve as the best. All of the following, though, are outstanding works. They are not listed in any order of merit

1. John Attarian, Social Security: False Consciousness and Crisis. By far the best analysis of Social Security. Attarian argues that the government acts to create a false consciousness that Social Security is insurance; in fact, benefits rest entirely at the discretion of Congress. The author warns against "privatization" plans that will increase government spending.

2. Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln. DiLorenzo shows Lincoln’s crucial role in centralizing government, in pursuit of the economic nationalism of Henry Clay’s American System. Lincoln’s war policies grossly violated civil liberties. DiLorenzo also assails recent historians who praise Reconstruction

3. Robert Higgs, Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society. Higgs brings up-to-date the thesis of his classic Crisis and Leviathan that war allows the state to expand. After peace returns, the state’s size lessens, but not to its pre-war position. Higgs argues that government does more harm than good. The attempt to regulate pharmaceuticals is a prime example: the FDA has delayed many life-saving drugs, or kept them off the market entirely. Governmental action depends on reliable statistics but this is a requirement that cannot be met.

4. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed. Hoppe challenges the almost universally held assumption that democracy is the best form of government. In fact, democracy promotes statism and is much inferior to monarchy. Hoppe also offers an influential, and controversial, analysis of immigration policy in a libertarian society.

5. Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. One of the best intellectual biographies of an economist ever written, based on exhaustive research. Hülsmann stresses Mises’s influence in pre-World War II Europe. A key to Mises’s economics is his insistence that economic calculation requires money: there can be no calculation of subjective values.

6. Robert Murphy, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. Murphy has a remarkable gift for the apt analogy, and he uses this to full advantage in a defense of free trade. He refutes a number of popular objections to the free market, e.g., that the salaries of corporate CEO’s are too high and that the market could not supply large-scale projects like the space program. Murphy asks, why should consumer preferences be thwarted to institute these projects?

7. Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto. Ron Paul’s campaign for the presidency brought libertarian ideas to the public in unprecedented fashion. Here, Dr. Paul shows how libertarian ideas can be grounded in the Constitution. In particular, the executive branch has usurped the war-making powers of Congress. Paul strongly defends the traditional American foreign policy of nonintervention. He also argues that the Constitution mandates sound money.

8. Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas DenUyl, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. The best neo-Aristotelian defense of a libertarian society. Contrary to the belief of many, such a society does not require a subjective theory of the good. Quite the contrary, the correct account of the good mandates freedom.

9. Murray Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States: From the Colonial Era to World War II. Edited by Joseph T. Salerno. A major work by Mises’s foremost successor. Rothbard discusses in great detail the role of the House of Morgan, showing in particular how Morgan interests promoted the Fed. Rothbard’s characteristic blend of Austrian theory and historical insight are well in evidence — as an example, some American businessmen supported a quasi-Leninist theory of imperialism.

10. Murray Rothbard, Rothbard versus the Philosophers. Edited by Roberta Modugno. Rothbard’s prolific published works do not begin to exhaust his contributions. Modugno has rendered a great service through her presentation of some of his unpublished papers. Among the highlights are Rothbard’s assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Leo Strauss and his criticisms of Hayek. Rothbard’s adherence to a libertarian version of natural law is a key theme.

11. David Schmidtz, Elements of Justice. An important philosopher offers stimulating new perspectives on justice. Contrary to John Rawls, Schmidtz contends that those who earn high incomes in the free market owing to their superior talent deserve what they get, so long as they have worked to develop their abilities. Desert does not have to go "all the way down": Rawls is wrong to think the contrary.

12. Thomas Woods, Meltdown. An excellent account of our current economic crisis, showing that Austrian Business Cycle Theory offers a convincing account of what happened and what must be done to avert future crises. Woods uses the rapid recovery from the post-World War I recession to illustrate the virtues of a government “hands-off” policy.

January 1, 2010

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and and a columnist for LRC. He is the author, most recently, of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

The Best of David Gordon

Defenders of this view assail those who contend that government spending simply crowds out private spending, exerting little or no positive effect. Precisely the problem, say Keynesian economists like J. Bradford deLong at UC Berkeley, is that private spending has not sufficed to bring back prosperity. Is not a dollar spent by the government at least as good as a dollar spent by private enterprise? At least as good — because some economists of this persuasion allege a government spending “multiplier.” A dollar spent by the government, the claim goes, generates additional spending by those who receive the money.

Economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek would challenge this argument at its central premise. In the “Austrian” view, what counts is not the level of total spending but how prices are related; in particular, the relation between prices of capital goods and consumption goods is of crucial importance. As Hayek remarks in “The ‘Paradox’ of Savings”: “In principle, therefore, any portion, however small, of the total money stream ought to be sufficient to take up the consumption goods produced with the other portions, so long as, for any reason, the demand for consumption goods does not rise suddenly in relation to the demand for means of production.” This view seems to me entirely convincing; but, unfortunately, explaining it requires a venture into fairly difficult economic theory. And an escape from this venture lies ready at hand.

The key notion in the Obama plan can be exploded in a much simpler way, one independent of Austrian theory, though entirely consistent with it.

According to the “spending” theory, government spending adds to production. It does not crowd out private spending. In a recession, there are hypothetically unemployed resources; and these can be brought into production without causing a loss elsewhere.

As suggested earlier, Austrians would object to speaking of unemployed resources while omitting price. But even on its own terms, the spending argument fails. It wrongly moves from the claim that government spending need not lessen private spending and investing to the much stronger claim that it will not do so.

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April 22, 2009

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

David Gordon Archives

Defenders of Keynes, such as the recent convert Bruce Bartlett, often claim that he supported capitalism. (Bartlett’s The New American Economy has this as a primary theme.) His interventionist measures had as their aim not the replacement of capitalism by socialism or fascism. Rather, it is alleged, Keynes aimed to save the existing order. The unhampered market cannot by itself recover from a severe depression or at best can do so after long years of privation and unemployment. Keynes discovered a way by which the government, through an increase in spending, can restore the economy to prosperity. Only diehard purists could spurn Keynes’s gift to capitalism. Without it, would not revolutionary pressure mount in a severe depression to overturn capitalism and replace it with socialism or fascism?

Hunter Lewis convincingly shows the error of this often heard line of thought. Keynes, far from being the savior of capitalism, aimed to replace free enterprise with a state-controlled economy run by “experts” like him. His prescriptions for recovery from depression do not save capitalism: they derail the price system by which it functions. As one would expect, Keynes lacks sound arguments to support his revolutionary proposals. Quite the contrary, Keynes defied common sense and willfully resorted to paradox.

Indeed, as Lewis points out, the entire Keynesian edifice rests on a central paradox: impeding the central mechanism of the free market will restore prosperity. The free market works by price adjustments. If, e.g., consumers demand more of a product than is currently available, suppliers will raise their prices so that no imbalance exists. As consumers shift their demand from product to product, businesses must adjust their production schedules to meet changing preferences. If firms fail to do so, they face extinction. “If an economy is stumbling, and unemployment is high, it means that some prices are far out of balance with others. . . . Some companies, some industries may be doing well; others may be in desperate straits. What is needed is an adjustment of particular wages and particular prices within and between companies, within and between industries, within and between sectors. These adjustments are not a one-time event. They must be ongoing, as each such change leads to another in a vast feedback loop.” (p. 232).

Keynes’s “remedies” for depression paralyze this process of price adjustment. In a depression, obviously, many businesses fail. When they go under, resources shift into uses that enable the demands of consumers to be satisfied better. If increases in government spending prop these failures up, consumer preferences are thwarted. This is just what Keynes proposed.

Further, Keynes ignored the significance of a fundamental fact. The rate of interest is also a price. It reflects the preferences of consumers for present over future goods: the greater the time preference, the higher the rate of interest. Keynes principal aim in economic policy, not only to combat depressions but more generally, was to keep the rate of interest low: ideally, it should be done away with entirely. To do so flies in the face of consumer preferences. If the rate of interest is forced below what it would have been on the unhampered market, then people are being compelled to invest more than they wish. The point holds altogether apart from the Austrian theory of the business cycle, which Lewis fully accepts. That theory tells us that forcing the rate of interest below the natural rate may lead to an unsustainable boom. But even if this theory were mistaken, interference with interest rates would still distort the economic system. “Businesses depend on prices to give then the information with which to run the economy. If the price system for interest rates is broken, no part of the price system is unaffected. ” (p. 90)

To prevent the price system from functioning hardly seems the course of wisdom: why then did Keynes recommend it? He argued that in a depression, government action is needed to stave off disaster. If businesses are allowed to collapse, then a wave of pessimism will be set off. Entrepreneurs will anticipate yet further declines, and the economy will spiral downward into total disaster.

Lewis has little difficulty in showing that this line of thought is mistaken. Why would not resources shift from collapsing businesses to others better suited to use them, without setting off a general conflagration? Keynes assumed without adequate basis that investors are driven by irrational “animal spirits.” Keynes condemned what he called “casino capitalism.” Investors, in his view, made irrational decisions based on what they guessed others would do. To the contrary, the free market weeds out businessmen who are unable accurately to forecast the wishes of consumers, in favor of those more skilled at this task. During a depression, there is what Rothbard calls a “cluster of entrepreneurial errors”: precisely the task of an adequate business cycle theory is to explain this phenomenon. Keynes did not do so. He appeals to a failure of his “animal spirits”: investors lose confidence in massive proportions. But he does not account for the wave of pessimism.

But even if Keynes does not have an account to offer of why there are swings of optimism and pessimism, does this invalidate his remedy for depression? Keynes does, after all, give a reason for not allowing prices to fall in a depression: to do so will set off a wave of further reductions, leading to a worse situation. Once more, Lewis challenges Keynes: why should lowered prices induce businessmen to expect even further reductions, in a way that sends the economy spiraling to disaster? If the argument is that lower prices, along with lower wages, will lead to expectations of decreased spending, this rests on confusion. “What about the. . .claim that wage cuts will backfire by reducing workers’ buying power, which in turn will reduce business revenue? As Henry Hazlitt noted, Keynes is confusing wage rates with wages earned. . .so long as prices fall faster than wages, real (price-adjusted) worker income may actually rise.” (p. 228)

Lewis brings out fully that Keynes had much more in mind than a cure for depressions. He thought that boom conditions could be permanently maintained by lowering the rate of interest nearly to zero. In that way, the scarcity of capital could be ended. In The General Theory, Keynes said: “The remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the boom to last. The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus leaving us in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.” (pp. 20—21)

Is this not an incredible doctrine? The interest rate is to be lowered by an expansion of credit. But production can increase only through an increase in capital goods. Putting pieces of paper designated “money” into circulation will not by itself increase prosperity, even if all the new money is, as Keynes wished, spent and not hoarded. To think otherwise is to indulge in magical thinking.

Keynes was not satisfied, furthermore, with recommending inflation as the key to promote prosperity. He extended his view into a full-fledged inflationist theory of history. “That the world after several millennia of steady individual saving, is so poor,” Keynes claimed, “is to be explained. . .[by] high rates of interest.” (p. 17) (Incidentally, the French literary figure Georges Bataille developed a similar theory of history. See his The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption.)

Keynes’s program went far beyond monetary expansion. He wanted the government to take control of investment. Wise planners would do much better in guiding the economy than the speculators of “casino capitalism.” He remarks in The General Theory that he favors “a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment.” (p. 56)

Does not this program pose a severe threat to liberty, in a way classically explained by Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom? How can one preserve civil liberties in a state-controlled economy? Of this danger Keynes was well aware, and he praised Hayek for having written “a grand book,” with which he was “morally and philosophically” in agreement. But this did not lead him to abandon his penchant for planning. He thought that the dangers of planning could be averted if matters were left to wise experts — experts including him as a prime example. Keynes’s egotism knew no bounds.

Lewis has presented Keynes as an inflationist, but is not he vulnerable to an objection? Keynes recommended increased spending in bad conditions, but did he not also call for restraint once full employment was reached? In that case, spending would drive up prices, to no good effect. In responding to this objection, Lewis makes one of his most valuable points. True enough, one can find in Keynes’s writings warnings against inflation. But Keynes set such stringent conditions for inflation that it would almost never exist. Specifically, so long as there is some unemployment present, as there invariably is, there is no inflation.

Lewis has exposed with unmatched clarity the lineaments of Keynes’s system and enabled us to see exactly its disabling defects. Keynes defied common sense, unable to sustain the brilliant paradoxes that his fertile intellect constantly devised. Lewis’s book is an ideal guide to Keynes’s dangerous and destructive economics.

December 3, 2009

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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Killing in War. By Jeff McMahan. Oxford University Press, 2009. Xii + 250 pages.

Jeff McMahan has written a genuinely revolutionary book. He has uncovered a flaw in standard just-war theory. The standard view sharply separates the morality of going to war, jus ad bellum, from the morality of warfare, jus in bello. Whether or not a war is just does not affect the morality of how war is to be conducted. Soldiers are forbidden to violate the laws of war; but no greater restrictions are imposed on those who fight in an unjust cause than on those whose cause meets the requirements of jus ad bellum. This is exactly what McMahan rejects. Soldiers in an unjust cause have, for the most part, no right at all to engage in violent action against soldiers in a just cause. Not only do they lack moral standing to engage in aggressive warfare; they cannot legitimately even engage in defensive war, in most circumstances.

McMahan states his basic thesis in this way:

The contention of this book is that common sense beliefs about the morality of killing in war are deeply mistaken. The prevailing view is that in a state of war, the practice of killing is governed by different moral principles from those that govern acts of killing in other contexts. This presupposes that it can make a difference to the moral permissibility of killing another person whether one’s political leaders have declared a state of war with that person’s country. According to the prevailing view, therefore, political leaders can sometimes cause other people’s moral rights to disappear simply by commanding their armies to attack them. When stated in this way, the received view seems obviously absurd. (p. vii)

Once advanced, McMahan’s thesis seems obvious, and it is his considerable philosophical merit to make us realize how obvious it is. Those who fight in an unjust war are, by hypothesis, directing force against people whom they have no right to attack. If, e.g., the United States had no right to invade Iraq in 2003, then American soldiers wrongly used force against Iraqi soldiers. If so, how can one contend that they are morally permitted to do so? Further, do not defenders against such aggression have the right to resist? If they do have this right, then the aggressors may not fight back, even in self-defense. If a policeman legitimately shoots at a suspect, the suspect cannot claim the right to shoot back in self-defense. McMahan holds that matters in this respect do not change in warfare.

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McMahan contends further that his view is of more than merely theoretical importance. Because people accept the incorrect view that soldiers who fight in an unjust war do no wrong, so long as they obey the laws of war, they are more likely to participate in such wars. This makes wars more likely.

[Although] the idea that no one does wrong, or acts impermissibly, merely by fighting in a war that turns out to be unjust … is intended to have a restraining effect on the conduct of war, the widespread acceptance of this idea also makes it easier … to fight in war without qualms about whether the war is unjust. (p. 3)

As mentioned, it seems obvious, once stated, that those engaged in an unjust war have no right to attack others. But is it too severe a doctrine to claim that they have no right to defend themselves, if attacked by just combatants? Quite the contrary, McMahan notes that his view applies a standard position in interpersonal morality to the ethics of war:

For many centuries there has been general agreement that, as a matter of both morality and law, “where attack is justified there can be no lawful defence.” These words were written by Pierino Belli in 1563 and were echoed a little over a century later by John Locke, who claimed that “Force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force.” (p. 14)

McMahan is a very careful philosopher; as soon as he states a thesis, he thinks of qualifications, objections, and rebuttals. He notes an instance where unjust combatants can permissibly use force:

The exception to the claim that just combatants are illegitimate targets in war is when they pursue their just cause by impermissible means. If, for example, just combatants attempt to achieve their just cause by using terrorist tactics — that is, by intentionally killing and attacking innocent people, as the Allies did when they bombed German and Japanese cities in World War II — they make themselves morally liable to defensive attack and become legitimate targets even for unjust combatants. (p. 16)

If McMahan contends that unjust combatants are not morally permitted, in most cases, to use force, has he not placed unreasonable demands on them? They are in many cases conscripted into the armed forces and serve against their will: in fighting, they simply obey the orders of their government. If they refuse to serve, they may face severe criminal penalties. And once enemy troops fire on them, is it not unrealistic to demand that they not fire back?

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June 19, 2009

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

The Best of David Gordon

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal

Robert Murphy demonstrates in this excellent book a penetrating ability to explain the essence of fallacious economic doctrines. As he notes, three theories offer competing explanations of the Great Depression: the Keynesian account, which stresses a lack of aggregate demand; Milton Friedman’s monetarism, which ascribes the severity of the early years of the Depression to a drastic cut in the money supply by the Fed; and, of course, the Austrian theory that Murphy himself favors.

Herbert Hoover, though not under Keynes’s influence, defended a version of the first theory. If wages were not kept high, purchasing power would be insufficient to restore prosperity. Accordingly, Hoover encouraged businesses to refrain from wage cuts.

Murphy quickly exposes the fallacy of this view:

High wages do not cause prosperity, they are rather an indication of prosperity. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many green pieces of paper employers hand out to workers. Unless workers first physically produced the goods (and services), there will be nothing on the store shelves for them to buy when they attempt to spend their big fat paychecks. (p. 35, emphasis in original)

But, it may be countered, is not the level of production and employment determined by aggregate demand? Granted that prosperity requires real goods, will not businessmen decide how much to produce based on what they think they will be able to sell? If so, is not the problem in a depression that, forecasting that future demand will be low, they cut back production?

Murphy once more locates the fundamental fallacy. The problem in a depression is not that production is in general too low; it is rather that resources have not been put to their best uses and need to be shifted:

By focusing on aggregate monetary conditions such as “total wage payments,” Hoover completely overlooked the fact that real, physical resources had to be rearranged in order to correct the imbalances in the economy. It wasn’t that “business” was producing too much, but rather that some sectors were producing too much, while other sectors were producing too little, in light of the economy’s supplies of resources, the skills and desires of its workers, and the tastes of its consumers. (p. 37)

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May 6, 2009

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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Those of us who refuse to accept calls from proponents of global warming for drastic restrictions on production often confront objections like this:

You skeptics, blinded by fanatical devotion to the free market, ignore evidence. True enough, you can trot out a few scientists who agree with you. But the overwhelming majority of climate scientists view man-made global warming as a great threat to the world. The course of inaction you urge on us threatens the earth with disaster.

Christopher Horner’s excellent book provides a convincing response to this all-too-frequent complaint.

But how can it do so? Will not an "anti-global-warming" book of necessity consist of an account of scientists who dissent from the consensus? If so, will it not fall victim to the difficulty raised in our imagined objection? The book will pick a few favored experts to back up a preconceived political agenda.

Horner strikes at the root of this objection: it rests on a false premise. Contrary to what our objection assumes, there is in fact no consensus of scientists behind global-warming alarmism.

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January 9, 2009

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — and What It Means for America Today. By Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Crown Forum. 2008. 245 pages.

After you read the dedication of Hamilton’s Curse, you know that the book is going to be good: "Dedicated to the memory of Professor Murray N. Rothbard, a brilliant scholar and tireless defender of the free society." DiLorenzo proves to be an outstanding practitioner of a Rothbardian brand of history, a fact that should come as no surprise to readers of his earlier books, The Real Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked, and How Capitalism Saved America.

DiLorenzo’s title, 18th century in its expansiveness, succinctly sums up his main theme. Thomas Jefferson supported the American Revolution in order to promote individual liberty. To secure this end, it was essential that the central government be strictly limited in its powers. America, in the Jeffersonian view, was an alliance of sovereign states, and the adoption of the Constitution, though it increased the power of the national government, did not fundamentally change this arrangement.

Alexander Hamilton disagreed. He bemoaned the limited powers given to the central government under the Articles of Confederation and continually agitated for a new scheme of authority. At the Constitutional Convention, it became clear how radical were his plans. He favored a permanent president and senate and wanted the federal government to have the power to appoint state governors.

What was behind this radical plan of centralization, fortunately rejected by the majority of the convention? DiLorenzo follows up the brilliant suggestion of Cecilia Kenyon that Hamilton was the "Rousseau of the Right." Rousseau thought that society should be guided by the "general will," but what exactly that concept entailed has perplexed later commentators. It cannot be equated with what the majority of a certain society wishes: it is only when the people’s decisions properly reflect the common good, untrammeled by faction, that the general will operates. But if the general will need not result from straightforward voting, how is it to be determined? One answer, for which there is some textual support in Rousseau, is that a wise legislator will guide the people toward what they really want. Those who dissent will "be forced to be free."

This was precisely Hamilton’s view. Government, directed by the wise such as himself, would guide the people toward what was good for them. Clinton Rossiter, a Cornell political scientist,

catalogued how some version of "the general will" appears hundreds of times in Hamilton’s speeches, letters, and writings… Hamilton more pointedly than any other political thinker of his time, introduced the concept of the "public good" into American thought. (p. 23, quoting Rossiter)

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January 2, 2009

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. By Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster, 2008. 566 pages.

The neoconservatives are already in hot pursuit of Human Smoke. In the March 2008 issue of Commentary, David Pryce-Jones called it a “mendacious book.” From this review, one might have thought that Nicholson Baker had written a defense of the Third Reich and its Führer. Quite the contrary: no one who reads the book can suspect Baker of the slightest sympathy for Hitler, whose evil deeds receive copious coverage in the book.

Where, then, lies Baker’s offense? Rather than write a standard historical narrative, he presents on each page a separate fact, often taken from contemporary newspaper accounts. A number of these facts show Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in less than a favorable light, and this has proved too much not only for Pryce-Jones but for John Lukacs as well. For Lukacs and his ilk, Churchill is the Schwannritter of the 20th century, and inconvenient truths must not be permitted to jar unwary readers from the veneration properly his due.

However reasonable one may think the Allied cause in World War II, even a just war must be fought in accord with the demands of morality. Direct attacks on noncombatants are strictly forbidden.

The policies pursued by Churchill could not be further from this clear demand of jus in bello. As First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, he supervised the British hunger blockade of Germany. By endeavoring to starve the German population, Churchill hoped to undermine the German war machine from within.

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May 27, 2008

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

David Gordon Archives

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See Part I

After Murray Rothbard and the Cato Institute permanently parted company, in the manner described in Part I, a fundamental issue arose. Would Cato, and the other organizations in the Kochtopus, continue to promote the same ideas as they had previously done? Ostensibly, there had been no ideological split. Rothbard had objected to Cato’s hiring a non-Austrian economist, David Henderson; but he left Cato after a short time. (As I recall, he threw a party to celebrate his own ouster.) Rothbard also objected to the anti-nuclear energy position of Roy Childs and some of his associates at Libertarian Review; but after Rothbard left, little was heard of this strange view. Was the separation between Cato and Rothbard, then, reducible to a dispute between Ed Crane and Rothbard over the best political strategy for the Libertarian Party?

Rothbard did not think so. Cato had been founded to promote Rothbardian ideas. Indeed, Charles Koch’s support for Rothbard long antedated the founding of Cato in 1977. Koch had given money to Rothbard’s Center for Libertarian Studies. Could the ideas remain the same when Rothbard had departed? He predicted that the Kochtopus would, without his guidance, depart from its original program. He joked about "Pabloism without Pablo," referring to a Trostkyist group, once headed by Michel Pablo (the pseudonym of the Greek revolutionary Michalis Raptis), which had dispensed with its founder. Time was soon to prove him right.

Rothbard deemed it of prime importance to advance Austrian economics, of which he was of course a leading exponent. Here, at any rate, the Kochtopus seemed at one with him. Walter Grinder, working from the Koch-dominated Institute for Humane Studies, promised a "Rothbardianism with manners." In his view, Rothbard had been too acerbic; through a policy of suaviter in modo, Austrian views could better gain access to the mainstream. But he did not deviate at all from Rothbardian orthodoxy in his own economic views. At the Eugene, Oregon, Cato conference in June 1979, mentioned in Part I, he gave excellent lectures on Austrian business cycle theory.

His new policy took over an idea from Friedrich Hayek’s famous essay, "The Intellectuals and Socialism," though I doubt that Hayek would have endorsed the IHS application of his ideas. Hayek stressed that new social movements first gain adherents among top-ranking theorists. The majority of intellectuals, the "second-hand dealers in ideas," then popularize and simplify what they have learned from these thinkers, passing the product on to the general public. Grinder and others in leadership posts at IHS concluded that they should concentrate on elite universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in the United States, and Oxford and Cambridge in England. If students could be recruited from these universities or, if already sympathetic, admitted to their programs, success was at hand.

Grinder placed particular emphasis on Tyler Cowen, a brilliant student who had been interested in Austrian economics since his high school days. Cowen enrolled in an Austrian economics program at Rutgers, where he impressed both Joe Salerno and Richard Fink with his extraordinary erudition. When Fink moved to George Mason University, Cowen moved with him; and he completed his undergraduate degree there in 1983. Grinder considered him the next Hayek, the hope of Austrian economics.

In accord with the elite universities policy, Cowen went to Harvard for his graduate degree. There he came under the influence of Thomas Schelling and gave up his belief in Austrian economics.

After he finished his PhD in 1987, Cowen was for a time a professor at the University of California at Irvine, and he used to visit me sometimes in Los Angeles. I was impressed with his remarkable intelligence and enjoyed talking with him. But I remember how surprised I was one day when he told me that he did not regard Ludwig von Mises very highly. Here he fitted in all-too-well with another policy of Richard Fink and the Kochtopus leadership. They regarded Mises as a controversial figure: his "extremism" would interfere with the mission of arousing mainstream interest in the Austrian School. Accordingly, Hayek should be stressed and Mises downplayed. (After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to new interest in Mises’s socialist calculation argument, this policy changed. The mainstream, though of course continuing to reject Mises, now recognized him as a great economist.) The policy was strategic, but Cowen went further — he really didn’t rate Mises highly.

Cowen eventually returned to George Mason University as a Professor of Economics. He is said to be the dominant figure in the department. Because of his close friendship with Richard Fink, who left academic work to become a major executive with Koch Industries and the principal disburser of Koch Foundation funding, Cowen exerts a major influence on grants to his department.

Although he is largely favorable to the free market and believes that the Austrian school has contributed insights, Cowen remains a strong critic of Austrian and Rothbardian views. He has published a book that sharply attacks Austrian business cycle theory, Risk and Business Cycles: New and Old Austrian Perspectives (Routledge, 1997); and in an article written with Fink, "Inconsistent Equilibrium Constructs: The Evenly Rotating Economy of Mises and Rothbard" (American Economic Review, Volume 75, Number 4, September 1985), he argued that a key feature in the economic theory of Mises and Rothbard, the evenly rotating economy, is fundamentally flawed. It was ironic that the hope of Austrian economics, according to Grinder, and the prime ornament of his stress on elite universities, wrote an article for the most prestigious economic journal in the United States critical of the theory Grinder wished to propagate. Cowen has also criticized libertarian anarchism, another fundamental plank in Rothbard’s thought. He has defended government funding of the space program and limited government subsidies for the arts.

One might object to what I have said so far. Although the heavy Koch support for Cowen did not advance Austrian economics, was not a flourishing Austrian program established at George Mason? If so, did not the generous fellowships offered by Koch organizations, such as the Claude Lambe Foundation, play a major role in this happy development? Fellowships were also given to those studying in the Austrian program at NYU.

There is indeed an Austrian program at George Mason, but Rothbard was proved correct. Absent his guidance, the program veered from his ideas. Many of the Austrian sympathizers at George Mason stressed the views of Ludwig Lachmann, in a way that aroused Rothbard’s misgivings. These included Karen Vaughn, who became the department chair. She was very influential in the department, in part owing to her friendship with James Buchanan, a Nobel Laureate who had brought his Center for Public Choice to George Mason. She did not like Rothbard. A few years after receiving her PhD, she had attended the famous South Royalton Conference in 1974 on Austrian economics. Rothbard responded to one of her comments in what she deemed a dismissive fashion, and apparently she never forgave him. I understand that she blocked the tenure of George Selgin, an excellent economist and hardline Austrian.

Rothbard admired Lachmann’s early work in capital theory but believed that his later thought carried to an extreme the valid Austrian point that the future is uncertain. Lachmann used this point, Rothbard contended, to eliminate economic theory altogether. He termed this deviation "Lachmannia."

Rothbard and the George Mason Austrians clashed over another issue. Don Lavoie, a popular teacher and an authority on the socialist calculation debate, became interested in hermeneutics, principally as developed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. The details of this philosophical view are singularly difficult to grasp, but fortunately it is not necessary for our purposes to explain it. Suffice it to say that Lavoie thought that Gadamer’s philosophy would lend support to the Austrian criticism of the scientistic procedures of neoclassical economics.

Rothbard emphatically disagreed. He denounced Gadamer’s philosophy as anti-theoretical. No doubt Gadamer opposed scientism; but, Rothbard claimed, he advanced in its place a relativistic historicism that subverted Mises’s praxeology. (In this battle I played a minor role on Rothbard’s side.) After a few years, interest in hermeneutics subsided. Lavoie fell out of favor with Fink — according to one account, he refused to support the appointment of someone Fink wanted on the faculty — and as a result of the discord this caused, he transferred to another department, the Program on Social and Organizational Learning. He died at the early age of fifty in 2001.

Grinder did not support the interest in hermeneutics displayed by some of the younger Austrians to whom he had served as a mentor. He too aroused Fink’s displeasure, and he lost his influential position.

The current Austrian program at George Mason, headed by Peter Boettke, stresses a combination of Austrian theory with other approaches, especially game theory, public choice, and institutional economics. Since Rothbard was critical of all of these movements, it is safe to say he would not have completely approved of this program.

The activities of the IHS under Walter Grinder and his successors have by no means been confined to support for economics students. Quite the contrary, fellowships and other support have been made available to those in a number of other disciplines. Again, the pseudo-Hayekian policy discussed previously has had results out of keeping with the promotion of classical liberalism, let alone a strict Rothbardian program.

Stephen Macedo perfectly fit that policy. He did graduate work at Princeton, Oxford, and the London School of Economics. It is hardly surprising, then, that he received extensive funding. He now serves as Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

One might at first think that Macedo’s career is a triumph for the elite universities policy. A student who attended some of these schools is now a professor at one of them: what could be better? There is unfortunately one small catch. Macedo does not support classical liberalism. Quite the contrary, in his major work Liberal Virtues (Oxford University Press, 1990), he defends compulsory indoctrination in politically correct values in a way entirely alien to libertarianism. Values he deems to be liberal, such as diversity, must shape the private lives of citizens, as well as their public activities. The principal result of the Koch funding he received was a pamphlet published in 1987 by Cato, The New Right versus the Constitution, an attack on strict construction of the Constitution. John Gray, an Oxford don who later taught at the London School of Economics, was another IHS favorite who abandoned classical liberalism. Gray has made a career of moving from one ideology to another, often at six-month intervals. His current views call to mind a phrase of the "Gloomy Dean," William Ralph Inge: "a rather soppy socialism."

The oddities of IHS were not confined to its funding policy. Roderick Long, a leading libertarian philosopher who for a time worked at IHS, has noted that Charles Koch, who, appropriately enough, wanted results for the money he spent, had a peculiar way of measuring them. After Walter Grinder’s departure, Koch decided to emphasize policy studies over academic work. The size of student seminars increased, and students were given questionnaires at the beginning and end of a week’s program to determine the extent of their political progress. Applications for IHS scholarships were run through a computer to determine how many times the "right" names, e.g., Mises, Hayek, and Bastiat, appeared.

Incidentally, despite his immense wealth, Koch was often ungenerous in his subventions. In her last years, the centenarian Margit von Mises was in failing health, and it was suggested that she move to a rest home. Koch was approached for a contribution, and he responded that he would pay half the cost, if the remainder were raised through a public subscription. Paying for the full cost would have been for him the equivalent of an ordinary person’s spending a cent or two, but evidently this was asking too much of him. Much better, apparently, to turn the whole matter into a public spectacle. In any event, nothing came of the proposal.

Let us return to the Cato Institute, the main part of the Kochtopus with which Rothbard was associated. Rothbard’s prediction that Cato would depart from his views has been eminently fulfilled. He is mentioned in the Cato Home Study Course, but his thought is little more than a sideline. When, in Part I, I claimed that people at Cato often refer to him with hostility and contempt, a former employee wrote to correct me. Rothbard is hardly mentioned at all, he said; and I think he is very largely right. I have been able to turn up only one strongly critical assessment by a leading figure at Cato. This writer, among other things, dismissed Rothbard’s writings on money as those of a crank. (Friedrich Hayek once told me how much he admired the account of the business cycle in Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression, an account that rests on Rothbard’s understanding of monetary theory; and the Nobel laureate Maurice Allais has also praised the book. But what do they know?) For the rest, he is ignored.

Austrian economics, once the mainstay of Cato, is now at best a tolerated minority position. The 24th Annual Monetary Conference of Cato, held in 2006, on the theme "Federal Reserve Policy in the Face of Crises," featured only one Austrian speaker, Larry White. Establishment worthies such as Robert Barro and Anna Schwartz, among many others, dominated the proceedings. The keynote address was, however, delivered by a onetime recipient of Koch funding to study Austrian economics, Randall Kroszner. Far from defending Austrian economics, though, he spoke in his capacity as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Kroszner, who attended Brown as an undergraduate and Harvard as a graduate student, has been another "triumph" of the elite universities policy. Like Cowen, he was a favorite of Grinder and IHS and received extensive funding, but he no longer manifests any interest in Austrian economics.

The 25th Annual Conference included a few more Austrians, on the panel "Remembering Milton Friedman"; this time Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered the keynote address. Ron Paul, despite his expert knowledge of monetary issues and his fame as the leading Congressional spokesman for a free society, has never in twenty-five years been invited to these conferences. He was the subject of Koch and Fink’s displeasure when he refused to convert to a pro-central-banking position.

In foreign policy, Cato no longer adheres strictly to Rothbard’s resolute non-interventionist views. In an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2008, Roger Pilon, who holds the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at Cato, opposed Congressional efforts to enact mild restraints on President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping. Such attempts to "micromanage" the president, he averred, were unconstitutional and threatened America’s security. Others at Cato differed with him, but his grossly anti-libertarian stance was a permissible option for a principal Cato figure. Brink Lindsey, Vice President for Research, is another Cato official who supports the Iraq war.

As mentioned in Part I, the Kochtopus strongly opposes the Mises Institute, which aims to continue the Rothbardian policy of Austrian economics, laissez-faire, and peace that Cato was established to promote. The opposition continues to the present day. Reason, now under Koch patronage, did not react to Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto with the praise one would expect for this best-selling libertarian book. David Weigel, in a post of April 30, 2008 on the Reason website, took the occasion to attack Lew Rockwell and other so-called "paleos." The Kochtopus cannot forgive those who continue to champion Murray Rothbard.

To Be Continued

May 12, 2008

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. By Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R.C. Gutzman. Crown Forum, 2008. Viii + 259 pages.

The question posed by the title of this book raises a further question, as the authors are well aware. If the Constitution is indeed dead, why does this matter? American conservatives have in past days been accused of "Constitution worship": why should we care whether actions of the government conform to this particular legal document? Woods and Gutzman respond that the Constitution provides a way to limit the government. It is far from the best conceivable arrangement; but while we stand under its legal authority, we should use it as a weapon against the state’s continual grasp for power.

They put the point with characteristic force:

To be sure, our federal government has perverted beyond recognition the system that the Founding Fathers created. The chief restraint on government officials is merely their sense of what they can get away with. Nonetheless, the Constitution can still serve a purpose, as it remains a useful bludgeon to employ against government power grabs. By calling attention to what the Constitution really says, we can alert the people to just how consistently and dramatically their fundamental law has been betrayed. (p. 202)

Woods and Gutzman have selected twelve cases to illustrate this disregard of the Constitution. By no means are all of these examples of judicial misconduct; the legislative and executive branches have been as least as guilty as the judicial in seeking to enhance government power.

One instance of what we are up against took place immediately after World War I. In 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act and in the following year, the Sedition Act. These forbade with heavy criminal penalties attempts to interfere with the American war effort, especially with recruitment of troops. Under this harsh legislation, many people were imprisoned, including the famous socialist Eugene V. Debs, who ran for the presidency in 1920 from his jail cell.

The legislation blatantly violated the text of the Constitution. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech"; and as Justice Hugo Black liked to say, "’no law’ means ‘no law’." Congress had earlier violated the First Amendment with the Sedition Act of 1798; but along with the Alien Act of the same year, it was repudiated by Thomas Jefferson and was generally regarded as a disaster. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court said that the Espionage Act was constitutional.

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July 31, 2008

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? Edited by Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan. Ashgate, 2008. Xi + 196 pages. An MP3 audio version of this book review, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available for download.

Libertarians of course believe in the free market; if you find someone who favors the government provision of medical care or education, e.g., you know immediately that he is not a full-fledged libertarian. But how far can one take the free market? Can it handle absolutely all the essential services of society, including defense and justice? Here libertarians split: some, the individualist anarchists, answer yes, but others, often termed minarchists, decline to go this far. (Samuel Konkin coined the term "minarchism," but he is not mentioned in this book.) They contend that these services need to be supplied by a monopoly agency: within a given territory, this agency can forcibly exclude other agencies from competing with it. Often, but not always, as Tibor Machan anxiously reminds us, minarchists favor taxation to pay for these services. Anarchism/Minarchism offers a very useful survey of this controversy, with essays, mostly by philosophers, on both sides.

In one respect, though, the book is surprising. The most frequent criticism of anarchism among economists is that defense and justice are public goods, i.e., goods characterized by jointness of supply and nonexcludability, which the free market cannot efficiently supply. Though Roderick Long briefly mentions the public-goods argument, it receives little attention in the book. Quite the contrary, the principal criticism of anarchism posed by the minarchists here represented is that a free society requires an objective, uniform law code, a demand anarchism cannot satisfy.

The minarchists derive this criticism in large part from Ayn Rand. John Roger Lee (now, I regret to say, deceased) poses the essential point concisely: "Anarchistic libertarianism illegitimately and self-defeatingly presupposes the existence of contract law in its account of how law and its enforcement would come to exist and have an ongoing role in an anarchistic society" (p. 18). Lee’s argument rests on a suppressed and highly contestable premise. Why does the existence of contract law require a state to create it? As we shall see later, the view that the state created contract law is false; but here, it is important to realize that Lee has advanced a much more extreme claim. His assertion is that contract law conceptually requires a state.

Why should one believe such a thing? Suppose people for the most part accept a libertarian scheme of rights — this, by the way, was the only circumstance in which Murray Rothbard considered viable an anarchist polity — would they not have, contrary to Lee, contract law without a state? (The issue, once more, is for now not whether this is likely but whether it is possible.)

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October 30, 2008

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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How Much Money Does an Economy Need? Solving the Central Economic Puzzle of Money, Prices, and Jobs. By Hunter Lewis. Axios Press. Vi + 185 pages.

In Are the Rich Necessary? Hunter Lewis showed himself to be a master of dialectics; and he here applies the same method to monetary theory. Not content to expound his own views, Lewis carefully explains conflicting standpoints as well. Lewis does not disguise his own strong commitment to Austrian economics, but the reader of this book will understand not only this position, but its chief competitors as well.

Lewis begins by asking, what kind of prices do we want? At first, we might think that stable prices are the order of the day. If the price level fluctuates, does this not make economic calculation much more difficult? If the price level is rising, for example, businessmen may think they are making profits when they are in fact losing money. They may neglect to discount their paper profits by the rate of inflation. This position at times won the allegiance of the great monetary economist Irving Fisher, though sometimes, as Lewis notes, Fisher adopted a more inflationist view.

Against the policy of stable prices, though, there are insurmountable objections. In a free-market economy, as production expands, many prices tend to fall. Formerly expensive goods now can be produced in large quantities. This is all to the good, as it makes possible rising standards of living. As Mises long ago noted, capitalism is a system of "mass production for the masses." If these prices fall, then attempts to maintain a stable price level require that other prices be artificially boosted. Will doing this not introduce shortages and discoordination into the economy? Far better to leave things as they are.

The whole point of free markets is to keep reducing prices, so that more and more people can afford to buy. Why, then, should we want overall prices in our economy to remain stable? If most prices fall, as we should hope they will, stable prices overall can only mean that some prices are steeply rising. These rising prices make everyone poorer, but especially retired and poor people… (p. 5)

But, supporters of inflation refuse to accept this conclusion. Even if boosting prices does result in some discoordination, they maintain, the advantages of increasing prices outweigh the disadvantages. This is particularly so in times of depression and unemployment. Those who favor deflation and price coordination through the market will say that if unemployment exists, wages need to be adjusted downwards. Is not such a draconian policy too hard on workers? Far better to deal with unemployment through an expansion of spending. So, at any rate, Lord Keynes contended.

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August 6, 2008

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. By Glenn Greenwald. Working Assets Publishing, 2006. 128 pages.

In this remarkable book, Glenn Greenwald solves a difficult problem. President Bush has for several years authorized the National Security Agency to wiretap telephones within the United States without a judicial warrant. Doing so is illegal, but Bush claims that security against terrorism requires it. Here our puzzle arises. The administration thinks that certain wiretaps are necessary. But under existing law, it can readily obtain a warrant from a special court. When warrants have been requested from this court, they have never been denied. Why, then, do the minions of the Bush administration decline to seek a warrant? The answer cannot be that sudden emergency leaves no time to go to court, since the law allows for an immediate wiretap so long as judicial approval is secured a short time later.

Greenwald cogently sketches the situation:

[P]rior to the December 2005 disclosure that President Bush had violated the law, no one ever suggested that the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] framework impeded necessary eavesdropping. If anything, the FISA court had long been criticized … for being too permissive, for allowing the government whatever eavesdropping powers it requested. Indeed, its reputation for granting every eavesdropping request made by the government is so widespread that it has long been ridiculed as the "Rubber Stamp Court." … The FISA court approved every single request [out of 13,102 submitted between 1978 and 2001] and only modified the requested warrant on a grand total of two occasions. (p. 28)

Why then did the Administration bypass the court? Greenwald responds:

As Congress devised the law, the FISA court plays two critical, independent functions — not just warrant approval but also, more critically, judicial oversight. FISA’s truly meaningful check on abuse in the eavesdropping process is that the president is prevented from engaging in improper eavesdropping because he knows that every instance of eavesdropping he orders will be known to a federal judge — a high level judicial officer who is not subject to the president’s authority … it is precisely that safeguard which President Bush simply abolished by fiat. In effect, President Bush changed the law all by himself, replacing the federal judges with his own employees at the NSA [National Security Agency] and abolishing the approval and warrant process entirely. (p. 37)

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December 4, 2007

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. By Paul Edward Gottfried. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Xviii + 189 pages.

Paul Gottfried’s excellent book lends strong support to a controversial claim of Murray Rothbard’s. In his The Betrayal of the American Right (Mises Institute, 2007), Rothbard argues that the American Old Right could not be considered conservative in the European sense. Quite the contrary, it opposed traditional conservatism as an enemy of liberty. Rothbard states his view with characteristic force. He refers to “the philosophy that has marked genuinely conservative thought, regardless of label, since the ancient days of Oriental despotism: an all-encompassing reverence for ‘Throne-and-Altar,’ for whatever divinely sanctioned State apparatus happened to be in existence.” (Betrayal, p. 1). The Old Right of Nock, Flynn, Garrett, and others, was a classical liberal movement, not a conservative one.

Though he was a close friend of Rothbard’s and often his ally on practical political questions, Gottfried is not a libertarian. This distinguished paleoconservative would not, it is safe to say, share Rothbard’s rejection of European conservatism. Nevertheless, his main argument very usefully supplements Rothbard. Gottfried, though himself sympathetic to European conservatism, maintains that a conservatism of this stripe could not, and did not, exist in the United States. If he is correct, then not only was the Old Right not conservative, as Rothbard says; it could not have been.

But why can European-style conservatism not take root in America? Gottfried thinks that conservatism needs a social basis to flourish. Absent a hierarchical class structure, there is no basis for a viable conservatism; and such a structure did not exist in America. Conservative values do not float freely in abstraction from class. Here Gottfried has been greatly influenced by Karl Mannheim.[1] According to Mannheim, “the conservative Denkweise (way of thinking) emerged as a reaction to bourgeois rationalism as European aristocrats and their theoretical apologists reacted against liberal and revolutionary democratic reformers, and their political designs. In opposition to these reformers, conservative critics on the continent upheld the inalienability of aristocratic estates…” (p. 33). Gottfried very usefully points out that Mannheim’s famous “free-floating intellectuals” do not constitute an exception to his view that values rest on class. The intellectuals are freely floating in that since the Middle Ages, “they have been moving around looking for classes and groups to which they could attach themselves” (p. 34).

Because the appropriate social classes for European conservatism were not to be found in the United States, the attempt by William Buckley and his National Review cohorts to establish a simulacrum of European conservatism in America was doomed to failure. Gottfried finds a large measure of merit in Louis Hartz’s thesis, in his The Liberal Tradition in America, that the sole American tradition has been liberalism, though he does not share Hartz’s enthusiasm about it.

According to Hartz, the United States from its inception was marked by two critical factors that would determine its later course as a political society, namely “absence of feudalism and the presence of the liberal idea” … It is possible, and indeed crucial for the present study, to frame an argument similar to Hartz’s without replicating his polemics or overgeneralizations. (pp. 6–7)

Lacking the necessary social base, intellectuals in search of an American conservatism were reduced to futile expedients. Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind offered a list of supposed conservative principles, but his creed was amorphous and, in new editions of the book, changed with the times. Harry Jaffa endeavored to deduce a principled politics from the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence, but his attempt failed. Not all American conservatives endorsed Jaffa’s sophisms, but his condemnation of moral relativism won wide assent. Absolute values, it was hoped, would provide the needed basis for an American conservative politics.

In what seems to me the most philosophically interesting section of the book, Gottfried rejects this project. He does so not only because he accepts Mannheim’s thesis: if Mannheim is correct, insistence on absolute values will not suffice to create conservatism. He also contends that the attempt to establish absolute values will have disastrous consequences.

Here we must avoid misunderstanding. Gottfried, in his criticism of absolute values, does not claim that all value judgments are subjective. He acknowledges, with Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, that there are objective hierarchies of value:

The value terminology that runs through the discourse of such ethicists as [Eliseo] Vivas, Max Scheler, J.N. Findlay, and the Swedish humanist Claes Ryn refers explicitly to a morally structured universe, one in which ethical judgments have to be made in terms of either a supposedly recognizable order of ascending goods or a single highest good. (p. 99)[2]

Rather, what concerns him is this: Often, political figures endeavor to impose their subjective preferences on everyone else. They do so by contending without reason that their values apply universally. The attempt to impose values in this way results in what Carl Schmitt called the “tyranny of values.”

According to Schmitt, values work as Angiffspunkte, points of attack by which individuals try to impose their wills on each other … By legislating their value preferences, or by otherwise projecting them outwards, they hope to give these preferences wider scope … Like the Kantian ethicist, the asserter of a value desires universal validation for his belief. His “highest value” can be rendered valid only in proportion to how widely he can apply it by forcing its acceptance. (p. 109)

Schmitt blamed such attempts to enforce values for the ideological wars that disfigured the twentieth century.[3]

It seems to me that Schmitt and Gottfried are right that often people do attempt to impose their values on others through spurious pretensions to universality. Certainly, the excesses of Wilsonianism and of contemporary neoconservatism count as prime instances in point. But it does not follow from this that no values are binding on everyone. Kant, after all, had arguments for the categorical imperative; he did not simply postulate it as valid. If Schmitt thinks him wrong, he must refute him. To describe what he takes to be the bad consequences of universalism does not suffice.

Schmitt and Gottfried stand innocent, though, of a charge that may have occurred to some readers. If they fear the destructive effects of universalism, are they not attempting to impose a universal value of their own, namely the avoidance of destructive conflicts of value? Have they here enmeshed themselves in contradiction?

I do not think so. They are best read, not as making a value claim, but rather a factual one. This is what happens, they say, if one attempts to universalize values. It is then up to us whether we view this consequence as so bad that it leads us to reject universalism. If we do so view it, we need not claim that our act of rejection itself expresses a value of universal validity.

But have not Schmitt and Gottfried escaped this snare only to fall before another objection? If they say that their rejection of universalism does not itself claim universal validity, have they not embraced value subjectivism? How then can they appeal to the objective value hierarchies of Scheler and Hartmann? Here I think one must distinguish between objectivity and universality. One can consistently hold that certain values are true independently of personal preference while holding at the same time that these values do not impose binding obligations on all, come what may.

If what I have said so far is right, though, am I not left with a problem of my own? I have said that Schmitt and Gottfried have failed to refute the universalist claims of Kant and others like him. But neither have I refuted their claim that universalism leads to destructive conflicts about values. Am I left in the uncomfortable position, then, of asserting that a system of values that leads to destructive conflicts may nevertheless turn out to be true?

My escape lies in the nature of the values claimed to be universally true. What if these values include the claim that one may not initiate force against others? Would not a system that includes this value be able to sustain itself against the charge of a tyranny of values? Of course, I have not conjured this idea out of my imagination. It is precisely the libertarian ethics defended by Murray Rothbard. I hope that Gottfried will in his future work respond in more detail to the claims of libertarian ethics, as well as develop at length his fascinating remarks about ethical theory.

Regardless of whether one can accept without reservation all that Gottfried says about the tyranny of values, no one can reasonably deny Gottfried’s claim that American values conservatism has been a failure. As our author abundantly shows, neither National Review conservatives nor neoconservatives have been able to sustain a coherent set of values.

Instead, as leftist views have become ever more dominant in public opinion, these supposed defenders of absolute truth have bowed with the wind. They have themselves moved leftward, in an effort to accommodate themselves to the prevailing consensus.

In an example that much concerns Gottfried, Martin Luther King, Jr. is now portrayed by these people as himself virtually a neoconservative. He is held to have favored a strict policy of nondiscrimination and to have spurned special treatment for blacks. In fact, this radically distorts King’s views; and years ago, the National Review conservatives took an entirely different line on him:

In 1983, Human Events and National Review expressed outrage over proposed congressional legislation for a Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday, alleging King’s communist associations, adulterous liaisons, and advocacy of civil disobedience. But within twenty years, the same sources not only played down what until a few years earlier had enflamed their editors, but they were discovering in a once-despised social radical a deeply conservative Christian theologian. (p. 139)

Values conservatism, in this instance as in many others, could not sustain itself.

In his detailed account of the peregrinations of values conservatives, Gottfried indicts not only his customary target, the neoconservatives, but also William Buckley, Jr. As Gottfried shows, Buckley has often played a malign role in purging from conservatism those not in accord with the values he at the time professes. He would not allow Old Rightists such as John T. Flynn access to his magazine to argue against the Cold War statism it was the principal aim of National Review to advance. Buckley continued his nefarious course even as late as 1995, in his shameful obituary of Murray Rothbard. A man of principle who refused to accommodate himself to the current consensus was too much for Buckley to bear.

Conservatism in America manifests the author’s immense erudition, in German, French, and Italian sources, as well as in English ones. It is an indispensable work for understanding what passes for American conservatism in our day.

Notes

[1] Mannheim’s plans for social reconstruction are a principal target of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

[2] I am glad to see that Gottfried mentions J.N. Findlay, an undeservedly neglected thinker. His Axiological Ethics and Values and Intentions are well worth attention.

[3] See his Nomos of the Earth and my review in The Mises Review, Summer 2003.

December 1, 2007

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. By Jörg Guido Hülsmann. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007. Xvi + 1,143 pages.

Guido Hülsmann shows us in this monumental biography that a common view of Mises is mistaken. As even Macaulay’s schoolboy knows, the American economics profession, dominated by Keynesianism, shunted Mises aside when he came to America. He was viewed as a relic, preaching an extremist view of free enterprise; and, as the mainstream had it, his famous calculation argument that showed the impossibility of socialism had been refuted both in theory, by Lange, Taylor et hoc genus omne, and in practice by the immense achievements of Soviet Russia. Private funds paid Mises’s salary at the business school of New York University: no major university economics department could find space for this world-renowned scholar.

The situation had been better for Mises in his native Vienna. His famous seminar attracted visitors from all over the world. He was recognized not only as a famous teacher but also as a theorist of striking originality. But even here, the common picture has it, Mises remained a figure on the margins. He never held the rank of full professor at the University of Vienna.

Hülsmann overturns this picture. Despite his situation at the University of Vienna, Mises was, during the late 1920s and early ’30s, a major presence in European economic thought. Even members of the German Historical School, his chief adversaries, were forced to make concessions to him.

But the real knockout for academic socialism in Germany came at the hands of its own vicar. Heinrich Herkner had succeeded Schmoller in his position at the University of Berlin and as the president of the Verein für Socialpolitik. For practical purposes, this meant he had become Schmoller’s heir as head of the Historical School … Herkner singled out Mises’s Socialism as the single most important work of this liberal resurgence, endorsing virtually all criticisms that Mises had leveled against socialism. (pp. 398—99)

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December 4, 2007

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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The following is a talk given at the LRC Health and Wealth Conference in Foster City, California, December 2, 2006. Almost all the information in the talk, though not my libertarian theme, comes from two books by Robert Proctor: Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard, 1988) and The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, 1999).

Every society must answer a fundamental question about its medical system. Does each person control his own body? If he does, he has the right to decide what type of medical treatment he wants. If people do not own their own bodies, then medical policy need not respect individual decisions, and individuals can be ruthlessly cast aside for the supposed general welfare.

There is no doubt about how the Nazis answered our question. Paul Diepgen, the leading historian of medicine in the Third Reich and also during the preceding Weimar Republic, said in a book that appeared in 1938: "National Socialism means something fundamentally new for medical life. It has overcome an idea that was central to medicine of the recent past: the idea of the right to one’s own body." A key Nazi slogan was "The common good is higher than the individual good."

If individuals do not make the key medical decisions, who does? Inevitably, it is those who control the state. The Nazis denied that they subordinated everything to the state; in contrast to Italian fascism, their propaganda stressed the party rather than the state. But in practice, this did not matter. To them, the welfare of the German people, the Deutsche Volk, was the supreme good; and Hitler, as the Leader of the German people, claimed the right to be the final judge of what best promoted this. In his Berlin Sportspalast speech of January 30, 1941, he declared that he had a democratic mandate and had come to power legally. His will, and the decisions of his chosen subordinates, thus determined medical policy, as it did everything else of significance.

Our conference is concerned with alternative medicine, and so a question naturally arises: How did the Nazis view unorthodox medical systems? One might have expected them to be sympathetic. After all, the Nazi ideology claimed that modern society had become too dominated by urban values. Life was too technologized, and the Nazis said they wanted to return to peasant wisdom. A characteristic book of this period was the novelist and philosopher Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer’s The Philosophy of the Hunting Lodge. Wouldn’t people with such views have an affinity for therapies that promoted natural methods of healing and opposed laboratory medicine? Natural healing was very popular at the time. In November 1934, more than 270,000 people paid for treatment by natural healers, even though they could have received free treatment from government-paid physicians.

At first, the Nazis met our expectations. Gerhard Wagner, the head of the National Socialist Physicians’ League and Leader of German Medicine, favored a unification of standard and alternative medicine. The government provided funds for natural healers, as well as for standard medicine, and the Rudolf Hess Hospital in Dresden specialized in homeopathic medicine.

But, as always, when the state supports something, it takes control. Wagner made clear that alternative healers must be strictly regulated. One major practitioner of alternative medicine found out quickly what this meant. Albert Wolff, the editor of a leading journal of homeopathic medicine, wrote an editorial denouncing compulsory vaccination. (By the way, Herbert Spencer and George Bernard Shaw were also opponents of this practice.) Wolff was threatened with criminal action and his journal had to publish a statement by Wagner forbidding criticism of the government.

The standard doctors strongly opposed natural healing, and their opinion became more and more influential. Alternative medicine still had powerful supporters, including Rudolf Hess, the Deputy-Fhrer; Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS; and Julius Streicher, the editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Strmer and Gauleiter of Franconia. (Streicher’s influence declined after 1940, and he was eventually put under house arrest.) By 1939, a law provided that no one could practice as a healer unless enrolled in a government approved program, and natural healers were gradually to be phased out

Matters became even worse for alternative doctors after Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941. Hess intended to contact the Duke of Hamilton, a leading Scottish peer, whom he somehow believed was an opponent of Winston Churchill. He hoped to negotiate a peace settlement between England and Germany. Some have speculated that Hitler approved Hess’s mission, but the Nazi leadership professed surprise and shock, denouncing Hess as insane. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, strongly opposed those he termed medical quacks, and he used Hess’s flight to urge a crackdown on those who deviated from medical orthodoxy. Since Hess supported alternative medicine, the natural healers had to be punished when he came into disfavor. One of the speakers at our conference is an anthroposophical doctor, and he would not have fared very well under this order: among those arrested after Hess’s flight were anthroposophists. Here we see in action another characteristic of a statist regime. Groups can fall in and out of favor for arbitrary reasons, often with severe consequences for those who belong to them.

The Nazis had comprehensive plans for medicine. To carry out these plans, medicine received extensive funding; and medicine became one of the most popular subjects for university students. Of course, government funding meant government control. Jewish professors of medicine were dismissed. One exception was the Nobel Laureate Otto Warburg, who retained his position as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cell Physiology in Berlin through World War II. Often, they substituted for the ousted professors ideologues of their own stamp, such as experts in "racial hygiene."

The Nazis believed that medical research had been too abstract. They proposed instead to concentrate on more practical measures. They emphasized prevention of illness, as well as cure. Cancer was an especially important area of concern, and the Nazis addressed this illness in their characteristic language. War had to be waged against "Jewish" or "Bolshevist" cancer cells.

But there was more to the Nazi campaign against cancer than odd rhetoric. Massive surveys took place to determine the incidence of cancer, and these proved very useful for later research. Many of the health campaigns we see today have precedents in Nazi policy. Women over thirty were urged to undergo screenings for cancer, and advertising campaigns warned against the dangers of tobacco. Just as today, regulations forbade smoking in certain public places and jobs. And, just as with us, smoking could not be banned completely: smoking was too popular, and the tobacco companies were too powerful.

Many people think that before the 1950s, the evidence that linked smoking and lung cancer was just anecdotal, but in fact a member of the Nazi party, Franz Mueller, established the link in his 1939 dissertation. The research that showed the dangers of asbestos also took place in the Nazi period. Robert Proctor has written an excellent book, The Nazi War on Cancer, which gives full particulars on Nazi research.

The Nazi health campaigns were by no means confined to cancer. People were urged to eat whole grain bread instead of white bread, and there were demands for a final solution for the bread problem. Another campaign urged people to eat vegetables. Hitler had become a vegetarian in 1931, although, like Bernard Shaw, he was not of the strict observance. (Some people have speculated that Richard Wagner, to whose music and writings he was devoted, influenced Hitler here.) But there was no attempt to ban meat altogether. Most of the Nazis were not vegetarians, and such a ban could in any case never have been effective.

Robert Ley, the head of the Labor Front, urged workers to drink tea instead of their traditional beer. His anti-alcohol campaign, though, suffered from the fact that he himself was a notorious drunk who sometimes delivered public speeches while under the influence.

Nazi medical policy of course had a more sinister side than I have so far described. If individuals do not own their own bodies, then people have no right to reproduce. The good of the German Volk, as determined by the ruling authorities, would govern who could have children. A law of October 1933 provided for the sterilization of persons with certain conditions, including feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depression, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and alcoholism. Genetic courts could judge people with these conditions. These consisted of two doctors and a lawyer. Eminent scientists, including Eugen Fischer, who coined the word "genetics" in 1926, served on the tribunals. People could appeal the verdict of the genetics court, but few appeals were successful. About 4000 people per year were sterilized, mostly for feeblemindedness; the total number of people sterilized under this law was about 400,000. Rudolf Ramm, a leading National Socialist medical expert, said that those sterilized were making a sacrifice "in the interests of the good of the Volk."

Here I think we must avoid a mistake. It is easy to say that such a policy could only take place in a dictatorship: a Western democracy could never do such a thing. Quite the contrary, sterilization was very popular in the United States. Twenty-nine states had laws allowing compulsory sterilization, beginning with Indiana in 1907. Oliver Wendell Holmes found these laws constitutional in Buck v. Bell (1927). He declared, "three generations of imbeciles are enough." In fact, the Nazis modeled their policy on the American laws. They were influenced by American racial theorists and eugenicists, such as Lothrop Stoddard. He later visited Germany and described the genetic courts in his book Into the Darkness. European nations such as Denmark also had sterilization laws. Once a nation abandons self-ownership, individual welfare must indeed bow to the general good. The National Socialists carried out more consistently than others an idea that was widespread.

After World War II began on September 3, 1939, the Nazis extended the basic premise of their medical and health policy even further. Demands on resources drastically increase during a war. People who are severely mentally ill use valuable resources but do not contribute to the welfare of the Volk. (The historian Goetz Aly has written extensively on the use of this argument in Nazi racial policy.) If they have no rights to their own bodies, the government is free to get rid of them. They, like everyone else, are viewed as means to an end and not as persons with inherent worth. Hitler issued a secret order that allowed the mentally ill to be killed. Another policy called for killing mentally defective and handicapped children. About 5000 children were killed, and about 65—70,000 mentally ill people were gassed. National Socialist experts estimated that out of every 1,000 people, 10 would need psychiatric treatment. About 5 of this group would need continuous treatment, and 1 would need to be killed.

The program could not be kept fully secret, and people protested against it. These included Bishop (later Cardinal) Klemens von Galen, the "Lion of Muenster," who denounced the killings from the pulpit. As a result of these protests, Hitler ordered the gassing program ended in August 1941, but many of the mentally ill continued to be killed throughout the war, many by lethal injection.

National Socialist medical policy thus offers an excellent case study of what happens if a nation embraces the slogan that the common good is higher than the individual good. Exactly the same mentality can be found today in those, such as Judge Richard Posner and John Yoo, who defend torture if this would promote national security. Once more we have the premise that the rights of individuals must bow before what the government deems best for all. Let us hope that those loyal to freedom will be able to overcome this dangerous view, both in medicine and elsewhere.

December 14, 2006

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. See also his Books on Liberty.

One might have anticipated that a review of Rothbard’s book by Friedman would be very much worth reading. Rothbard contends that Adam Smith, far from being the founder of economics, "contributed nothing of value to economic thought. . . he introduced numerous fallacies, including the labor theory of value, and thereby caused a significant deterioration of economic thought from previous French and British economists of the eighteenth century. (Economic Thought, p.463) In the second volume of his work, Rothbard assails David Ricardo; and, though he sadly did not live to finish a volume on twentieth-century economic thought, it is safe to say that Alfred Marshall would not have fared well in it.

For Friedman, by contrast, Smith, Ricardo, and Marshall are the key figures in the history of economics. Would it not be very useful, then, to have a defense of Smith and Ricardo against Rothbard’s criticisms from an economist of Friedman’s undoubted intelligence and polemical dexterity? Unfortunately, this was not to be; Friedman could not be bothered reading the entire book. "I [Friedman] should add that I have no opinion about the bulk of the book, since I have not read it and it deals with people I know much less about than Smith." What he offers instead are some critical remarks about a few pages in which Rothbard addresses Smith’s departures from laissez-faire and some comments about Richard Cantillon. (He also says that Rothbard wrongly attributes to Smith an "embedded labor theory of exchange value"; but he later says Smith’s value theory is a complicated subject and that establishing Rothbard’s misrepresentation of it "would require more than I [Friedman] intend to write for this post.” Actually, Rothbard thinks that Smith held the cost-of-production theory that Friedman attributes to him side-by-side with the labor theory. He refers interested readers to the Lecture Notes for his History of Economic Thought class.)

The heart of Friedman’s assault on Rothbard concerns what he says about Smith’s departures from laissez-faire. Rothbard, he alleges, is guilty of a "hatchet-job"; in some places he is either "deliberately dishonest" or "he had never really read the book he was criticizing, merely skimmed it for quotes suitable to his purposes."

Friedman’s vehemence is more than a little odd. Rothbard’s contention that Smith did not consistently advocate laissez-faire is much less radical than Friedman insinuates. Readers of Friedman unfamiliar with Rothbard’s book would probably get the impression that Rothbard considers Smith a veritable statist, hardly a defender of liberty at all. Quite the contrary, Rothbard says, "Smith retreated from the absolutist, natural law position that he had set forth in his ethical work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1757). In this book, free interaction of individuals creates a harmonious natural order which government interference can only cripple and distort. In Wealth of Nations, on the other hand, laissez-faire becomes only a qualified presumption rather than a hard-and-fast rule, and the natural order becomes imperfect and to be followed only u2018in most cases’. . . Indeed, the list of exceptions that Smith makes to laissez-faire is surprisingly long." (Economic Thought, p.465) Smith’s deviations from laissez-faire have been a scholarly commonplace since Jacob Viner’s famous paper, "Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire," which was published in 1928. (Rothbard cites this paper in Economic Thought, p.531.)

Are we not confronted by a strange situation? Rothbard advances a revolutionary thesis about Smith: he has made no theoretical contribution to economics. Friedman, who admires Smith and has closely studied The Wealth of Nations, declines to engage with Rothbard’s analysis. Instead, he challenges Rothbard on an issue where, for once, Rothbard is in the scholarly mainstream.

Friedman might respond that he objects not to the thesis that Smith deviated from laissez-faire, but to the details of what Rothbard says. One of his objections concerns Rothbard’s remarks about Smith and the "martial spirit." After quoting a paragraph from Smith, Friedman says: "Smith’s argument for the virtues of a martial spirit is the same as the argument often offered for the right to bear arms. It makes a standing army less necessary, and it means that if a standing army ever tries to take over, the people will be able to stop it. This is very nearly the opposite of what Rothbard implies." After another quotation from Smith, Friedman adds: "This may or may not be correct, but it is at the opposite pole from the position Rothbard is attributing to Smith — in favor of individuals standing up for themselves, not being obedient." It is at this point that he charges Rothbard with either dishonesty or failure to read The Wealth of Nations.

Friedman’s charges are baseless: he has misunderstood Rothbard’s remarks. Rothbard does not say or imply that the reason Smith favors the martial spirit is to make people obedient to the government. On the contrary, he quotes part of the same passage as Friedman does: "the security of every society must always depend, more or less, upon the martial spirit of the great body of the people." Rothbard then goes on: "It was his anxiety to see government foster such a spirit that led Smith into another [emphasis mine] deviation from laissez-faire: his call for government-run education." (Economic Thought, pp.465—66) It is in connection with education in the elements of literacy, not the inculcation of the martial spirit, that Rothbard discusses obedience: they are two separate educational programs, though organized in parallel fashion.

Friedman also thinks that Rothbard’s remarks about education are distortions of Smith; but before turning to this question, I think we should consider further Smith’s remarks about the martial spirit. In his haste to malign Rothbard, Friedman fails to note how radically Smith here departs from a libertarian view. Smith does not just defend the martial spirit; he apparently calls for universal military exercises, in the style of ancient Greece and Rome, to develop this spirit. The ancient institutions were much better than modern militias: "The influence, besides, of the ancient institutions was much more universal. By means of them the whole body of the people was completely instructed in the use of arms. Whereas it is but a very small part of them who can ever be instructed by the regulations of any modern militia; except, perhaps, that of Switzerland." (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Article 2d.) And, of course, support for a standing army is itself a departure from laissez-faire.

Smith was not content with having the government develop the people’s martial spirit. Rothbard quotes the following from The Wealth of Nations: "An instructed and intelligent people besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. They feel themselves, each individually, more respectable, and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors, and they are therefore more disposed to respect those superiors. They are. . . less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government." (Economic Thought, p.466) The "inferior ranks of society," accordingly, must be properly instructed.

Vincent Cook, one of the members of the Internet discussion group, also quoted this passage, and appropriately remarked: "that’s hardly the sort of rhetoric one would expect from a champion of individualism." How did Friedman respond? Here we find a curious circumstance. As anyone who has ever met Friedman knows, he is a debater of extraordinary facility. Before an opponent can finish making a point, he is ready with five or six refutations. As one would expect, for each of Cook’s points he has a response. For each — except one. About the quotation from Smith on obedience, he says nothing at all. The relevance of the quotation to government education, we shall shortly consider. But aside from this issue, the quotation shows that Friedman is wrong to say, "Smith wanted people to stand up for themselves, not to be obedient." Smith did not see the two traits as inconsistent. He thought that if the standing army acted against the constitution, people imbued with the martial spirit would be able to resist. But the "lower ranks," guided by reason and not passion, should obey their lawful superiors.

Rothbard uses the passage as evidence that Smith supported government education, but Friedman finds Rothbard’s view "in part false and in part misleading. To begin with, Smith did not call for government-run education. He offered arguments both for and against government education, and his conclusion, which Rothbard does not mention, was that subsidizing the education of the masses would be a legitimate government activity, but that it would be equally legitimate, and might be better, to leave education entirely private."

Once more it is Friedman and not Rothbard who is mistaken. Friedman is probably relying on a paragraph in The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part IV, Conclusion, of which the remarks just quoted are a paraphrase. He has not taken note that Smith is talking about "the expense of the institutions for education and religious instruction. [emphasis added]" This is a different question from the establishment of the institutions; it concerns how these institutions are to be supported, once they exist.

Once a school is set up, fees or voluntary contributions may suffice to support it. But as to setting up schools, Smith holds that the "public can facilitate this acquisition [by the common people of the most essential elements of education] by establishing in every parish a little school." (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Article 2d)

Friedman would have been saved from his error had he consulted an excellent secondary source. In Friedman’s Lecture Notes on Smith, we find: "Possible public role in the education of the common people: 1. Establish local schools, partly subsidized, but with the master largely paid from fees paid by the parents." He clearly recognizes here the distinction between establishing and financing the schools, exactly the matter he neglects in his criticism of Rothbard.

Friedman directs yet another criticism against Rothbard’s discussion of Smith on education. Rothbard nowhere mentions Turgot’s support for a centralized program of education, far more statist than anything Smith had in mind. Rothbard, Friedman maintains, unfairly plays favorites. He admires Turgot, so he ignores his anti-libertarian measures: Smith, whom he dislikes, gets much more severe treatment.

Rothbard certainly has his likes and dislikes, but Friedman’s criticism ignores the dialectical situation that occasions the discussion about Smith and laissez-faire. After his discussion of Smith’s economics, Rothbard faces a problem. If Smith was as bad an economist as he contends, why was he so influential? One answer he considers is that Smith’s fame stems from his defense of the free market. He thinks there is something to this answer, and quotes several influential passages that support the market, including the most famous of all, the "invisible hand" passage.

Rothbard then remarks: "Despite the undoubted importance of these passages, however, Adam’s Smith’s championing of laissez-faire was scarcely consistent." (Economic Thought, p.465) It is at this point that he begins an extensive discussion of Smith’s departures from laissez-faire. The reason for the discussion, then, is at least in part a response to one possible explanation of Smith’s fame.

In his account of Turgot, Rothbard is almost entirely concerned with his contributions to economic theory. Turgot did not gain fame, as Smith did, as a propagandist for laissez-faire, nor did he write a comprehensive treatise about the proper scope of government. Why then should Rothbard have discussed Turgot’s views about government in as much detail as Smith’s? If he were attempting a pairwise comparison of the virtues and vices of the two thinkers, Turgot’s views on education would certainly be relevant. But this is not his aim.

But suppose I am mistaken, and that Rothbard deliberately accords more favorable treatment to Turgot than to Smith, whom he obviously dislikes. This would not show that Rothbard’s comments about Smith are mistaken: at worst, readers, if inclined to libertarian views, would take away a somewhat more favorable attitude toward Turgot than was justified.

Friedman, relentless in his pursuit of Rothbard, has still another complaint. One of the deviations from laissez-faire that Rothbard attributes to Smith is taxes on the export of raw wool. Our critic pounces: "Rothbard does not mention that at the time Smith was writing the export of wool was a criminal offense, which the government tried to prevent by extensive regulations over the wool trade. What Smith is actually advocating is thus a sharp reduction in government interference with trade, although not a total elimination of it. Rothbard has to have known that, and I do not see any way of interpreting his failure to mention it as due to anything but deliberate dishonesty — the attempt to mislead his readers by omission."

Friedman is himself guilty of omission. He fails to note that under Smith’s proposed reform, the gains to growers through the end of prohibition would be almost entirely taken away through taxes. "A tax of five, or even of ten shillings upon the exportation of every tod [about 28 pounds] of wool, would produce a very considerable revenue to the sovereign. It would hurt the interest of the growers somewhat less than the prohibition, because it would not probably lower the price of wool quite so much." (The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter VIII) Manufacturers would gain, Smith claims; and in any case, the new tax might make it possible to reduce other more burdensome taxes. This hardly strikes one as a "sharp reduction" in government interference; and Friedman’s complaint against Rothbard is as usual devoid of substance.

Friedman raises a more interesting point about the wool tax. Unless one is an anarchist, there must be a source of revenue for the government. Given this fact, why are revenue tariffs beyond the pale? Why is Smith’s wool tax worse than the land tax that Turgot favored?

The question is a good one, but Friedman has not taken adequate account of Rothbard’s aim. Rothbard wishes to show that Smith deviated from laissez-faire in various particulars. The fact, if it is one, that one can give a rationale for some of these measures that does not altogether depart from classical liberal principles is not relevant to the issue Rothbard raises. Of course a single tax on land also violates laissez-faire. So what?

Friedman, to give him credit, manages to catch Rothbard in a minor slip. Rothbard gives public works as an example of Smith’s advocacy of government intervention, "on the rationale that private enterprise would not u2018have the incentive’ to maintain them properly (!?)" Friedman notes that the passage from Smith to which Rothbard refers covers only the maintenance of public works, not their erection; and, in any case, Smith thinks that although private enterprise cannot adequately maintain roads, it can maintain canals better than government agencies.

The defect is easily remedied. Smith says, in a well-known passage: "The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain." (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part 3) Rothbard is entirely correct to enter public works on his list of Smith’s deviations from laissez-faire.

Friedman claims, "Rothbard says that Smith advocated government coinage; he offers no evidence for this claim. So far as I [Friedman] can tell, Smith, like Turgot and Cantillon, mostly took government coinage for granted." But Smith explicitly says that the mint should charge seignorage, rather than mint money for free on precious metals that customers present to it. "The government, therefore, when it defrays the expense of coinage, not only incurs some small expense but loses some small revenue which it might get by a proper duty; and neither the bank nor any other private persons are in the smallest degree benefited by this useless piece of public generosity." (The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter VI) Clearly, he considers government coinage legitimate, just as Rothbard claims.

Amazingly, Friedman questions Rothbard’s claim that Smith supported government operation of the Post Office. "Smith did not advocate it — he merely pointed out that it was the one commercial activity which all kinds of governments seemed to be able to run at a profit.” But Smith says explicitly: "The post office is properly a mercantile project. The government advances the expense of establishing the different offices, and of buying or hiring the necessary horses or carriages, and is repaid with a large profit by the duties upon what is carried." (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II, Part 1) Friedman’s remark is a paraphrase of the next sentence in this passage. Smith thus does not confine himself to the historical observation to which Friedman calls attention. Just as Rothbard alleges, he favors a government Post Office as a way to generate revenue.

Rothbard claims that Smith favored the "outlawing of the practice of paying employees in kind, forcing all payments to be in money." (Economic Thought, p.466) Friedman cannot locate a passage from The Wealth of Nations where Smith says this. He should try this one: "Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, their counselors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters. Thus the law which obliges the masters in several different trades to pay their workmen in money and not in goods, is quite just and equitable." (The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter X) Had Friedman deigned to spend a few minutes with an index, he could easily have found this.

Friedman also has "no idea" why Rothbard attributes to Smith a policy of compulsory registration of mortgages. I think that what Rothbard has in mind is Smith’s support for a scheme of registration of land leases, for tax purposes: "The landlord and tenant, for example, might jointly be obliged to record their lease in a public register. Proper penalties might be enacted against concealing or misrepresenting any of the conditions. . ." (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II, Article 1st) Friedman mentions the point in his own Lecture Notes, which I once more urge him to consult: "(Smith’s proposed system for taxing rent): a. All leases must be publicly registered, with bounties to either landlord or tenant informing on the other."

As mentioned at the start, Friedman also has some remarks about Cantillon, but these, readers will be glad to know, I do not propose to discuss in detail. Friedman generously allows that Rothbard’s remarks about Cantillon are "mildly misleading but not to the point of dishonesty or clear error." His main criticism is that Cantillon was more of a mercantilist than Rothbard alleges. Rothbard was well aware of the issue. About it he says: "There is no point wasting time in fruitless speculation on whether or not Cantillon was a u2018mercantilist’; Eighteenth century writers did not group themselves into such categories." He acknowledges the presence of inconsistencies but suggests that the "entire thrust of Cantillon’s work was in a free trade, laissez-faire direction." (Economic Thought, p.359) For readers interested in pursuing the matter, I recommend the careful and penetrating research of Mark Thornton on Cantillon. This fully vindicates Rothbard’s view.1

To sum up, nothing in Rothbard’s account of Smith justifies Friedman’s intemperate remarks. His insults serve only to show that he cannot control a manifest dislike of a scholar and thinker far above his own level.

1. See, e.g., his "Richard Cantillon and The Origins of Economic Theory" Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines (March, 1998) pp. 61—74 and his lecture "The Cantillon Legacy: Extending Rothbardian Revisionism" available here.

June 14, 2006

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, editor of its Mises Review, and author of Books on Liberty.

If there is such a thing as a good super hawk, Angelo Codevilla is it. He makes many neoconservatives look like pacifists; and he advocates a dangerous course of action, accompanied by quotations from Machiavelli, whom he takes to be an exemplar of political wisdom. As he proceeds to his misguided conclusion, though, he has much of value to teach us.

For one thing, Codevilla will have nothing to do with the neoconservative plans to extend the blessings of democracy to the Middle East. What evidence is there, he inquires, that American-style democracy can be exported to that region? Americans lack the ability to impose our political system on alien ground; why then should we try? Against Norman Podhoretz, a principal advocate of warmed over Wilsonianism, he trenchantly remarks: "Imperialism is a difficult, un-American art. Neither Podhoretz nor I know [sic] of any Americans fit or inclined to imperial service." (p.86)

Applied to Iraq, the neoconservative nostrums have of course failed. "How, indeed, does one government transform the alien culture of a whole region on the other side of the globe?. . . Building viable new governments in foreign lands is extraordinarily difficult, and building wholly new regimes near impossible. Native regimes may change culture over generations, but the notion that foreigners who cannot even speak the language can do it in a few years is a pipedream. Is anything sillier than the notion that American secularists can convince Muslims about what true Islam commands?" (p.viii)

To such skepticism, the neocons respond by adducing the success of the post-World War II reconstruction of Germany and Japan. Did not America transform dangerous totalitarian powers into peace-loving democracies? Codevilla dismisses with disdain this customary view. He notes "the massive damage to local cultures that the u2018best and the brightest’ from our universities wrought when they sold the Germans and the Japanese secular socialism. The rebirth of Germany and Japan occurred because the remnants of Christian Democratic and Taisho democratic culture, respectively, were strong enough. Nevertheless, the Americans almost managed to make Adenauer and Yoshida into discredited puppets which is what the next generation of Americans succeed in doing to Thieu and Ky in Saigon." (p.86)

Codevilla’s doubts about exporting democracy strike home with great force, but his insights here are not distinctive: Few but ideologically driven partisans of the President continue to defend this misguided policy. Our author in another area is much more radical. He questions whether Osama bin Laden and his mysterious al-Qaeda lie behind the attacks of 9/11. "Officially, the [U.S.] government maintains that the mastermind of 9/11 was one Khalid Shaik Mohammed. . .Indeed, the government believes officially that neither Mohammed nor any of his associates were u2018members’ of al-Qaeda (whatever that might mean) before 1996."(p.5) Yet Mohammed and his group "had the idea, the capacity, and the resources to attack the World Trade Center in 1993, and to use airliners as weapons in 1995. . . Factor out bin Laden, and 9/11 still happens."(p.5, emphasis in original)

U.S. intelligence agencies blamed al-Qaeda for the attacks, but Codevilla finds the bulk of "intelligence" against terrorism of scant value: "Roughly, U.S. intelligence brings to bear against terrorism its network of communications intelligence (COMINT) and its network of human collectors. The value of COMMINT with regard to terrorism has never been high and has been diminished by the technical trends of recent decades. . . The gullibility of U.S. intelligence is not merely an intellectual fault. The CIA’s judgment is corrupted by its long-standing commitment to certain policies." (pp.44, 46)

But did not Osama himself claim to be behind the attacks? Codevilla is not convinced. "No reliable source has seen him [Osama] since September 11. I [Codevilla] wrote that the quality and content of a video tape in which he arguably took credit for 9/11 suggested it was a fabrication."(p.9) Codevilla wonders whether Osama is alive; perhaps his associates killed him, lest he fall into American hands.

Such matters are admittedly speculative; but Codevilla next proceeds to a truly radical point that requires no assessment of u2018inside" intelligence data. He throws into question the whole basis of the U.S. war against Afghanistan. Whatever the faults of the Taliban regime, it posed no threat to the United States. "The Taliban are mostly irrelevant to America. Typically Afghan. . . the Taliban have little role in or concern with affairs beyond their land. They provide shelter to various Arabs who have brought them money and armed force against their internal rivals. But Afghans have not bloodied the world."(p.48)

Codevilla finds domestic developments in the "war on terrorism" no more to his liking. Have not measures such as the Patriot Act and meddlesome airport security checks restricted our civil liberties, without enhancing our security? "Unable to stop terrorists, Homeland Security will spend its time cracking down on those who run afoul of its regulations. In Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, for example, a man was taken off an aircraft in handcuffs for having boarded before his row number had been called. . .As Machiavelli points out in his Discourses, security measures that hurt, threaten, or humiliate citizens engender hatred on top of contempt. No civil libertarian, Machiavelli teaches that true security comes from armed citizens to whom the government is bound by mutual trust."(p.41)

Far from aiding genuine security, these measures add to the danger they aim to combat. "Security measures actually magnify the effects of terrorism. The hijackings of September 11 have set in motion security measures that shut down airports on receipt of threats. . . What’s more, any successful attack through, or around, the security systems. . . proves that the government cannot protect us." (p.42)

No libertarian could better Codevilla on the Patriot Act: "The most awesome aspect of Homeland Security is the discretion, untrammeled by fact or reason, with which it wields its vast, permanent powers. President Bush’s statement underlines that the Patriot Act of 2001 penalizes giving aid and comfort to terrorist organizations, but it does not mention that the law also empowers the U.S. government to designate any organization or association as u2018terrorist.’ The law gives no guidelines, and the government does not have to justify its designation to anyone." (p.131)

Codevilla claims that determined terrorists, willing to sacrifice their lives to their cause, have a very good chance of success. No internal measures of security can save us. What then are we to do?

Here our author’s answer may elicit surprise. As I have so far presented Codevilla, he might easily qualify as a leading contributor to LewRockwell.com Why then did I call him a super hawk? Alas, in his positive recommendations he abandons the analytical skill he so abundantly displays in his criticism of current policy.

He has demanded evidence that al-Qaeda lies behind the 9/11 attacks; but he embraces a theory of his own that rests on very little proof. He maintains, apparently because of claims that Iraqi intelligence agents met with the 9/11 plotters, that Iraq sponsored the attacks. In response, the U.S. should destroy the regimes of Iraq, with Syria and the PLO thrown in for good measure.

Before we undertake a systematic policy of upheavals, should we not at least demand strong evidence that these regimes are guilty? Codevilla, as mentioned earlier, is elsewhere doubtful of the value of information gathered by "intelligence" agencies. Yet here he has abandoned his skepticism and stands ready to destroy governments he holds responsible for terrorism — once more, all on mere suspicion. He maintains, without convincing argument, that only a state has the resources to support a terrorist network. Why cannot terrorists successfully act as an independent enterprise? Even if Codevilla’s view is right, though, this does not establish which states bear responsibility for terrorism.

Codevilla does have a response to an obvious objection to his bellicose schemes. Why do not his strictures against Bush’s program of "democratization" apply to his plans as well? After all, he too favors not only invading Iraq but also extending the assault more widely.

He responds that he has in mind no such ambitious goal as changing a country’s social system. All he proposes is to kill the elites that dominate each of the countries on his list. No more than a few thousand people need to be killed: doing this will suffice to end the regimes that threaten us. "Regimes are forms of government, systems of incentives and disincentives, of honors and taboos and habits. Each kind of regime gives prominence to some kinds of people and practices, while pushing others to the margin. . . It follows that killing regimes means killing their members in ways that discredit the kinds of persons they were, the ways they lived, the things and ideas to which they gave prominence, the causes they espoused, and the results of their rule. . . The list of people executed should follow the party-government’s organization chart as clearly as possible." (pp. 53, 55-56)

If it is objected that following this course will leave the affected areas unstable, our author answers, like the Sanhedrin to Judas, "what is that to us?" We have, he contends, no interest in promoting stability in these countries. Our goal should be confined to eliminating our enemies.

If one further objects that the new elites that will eventually emerge may be just as hostile as those we have just dispatched, I suppose Codevilla would reply that we ought to continue the process of killing until a regime arises that no longer sponsors hostile actions against us.

A less bloodthirsty course of conduct offers much better prospects for containing the terrorist threat. Are not the 9/11 attacks a response to America’s interventionist policies in the Middle East? The very invasion of Iraq that was supposed to contain terrorism seems rather to have exacerbated it. If the United States were to adopt a "hands-off" policy toward this troubled region, would we have much to fear from terrorist assaults? When those who claim to be spokesmen for terrorist groups complain about the presence of infidel Americans on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, perhaps we ought to take them at their word and withdraw. In what way does the security of our country depend on an American presence there?

Codevilla might object that the Arab regimes would still sponsor terrorism against even a noninterventionist America. Even if he is right, which I very much doubt, is it not the path of prudence to try nonintervention first, before committing ourselves to a revolutionary program of such vast dimensions as Codevilla wants?

On one policy, though, noninterventionists can come to agreement with Codevilla. As he notes, Saudi Arabia is the principal financial supporter of Wahhabi Islam, and this sect arouses the masses of its followers against the United States. "The Saudi regime is the nursery of the Wahhabi heresy that for two centuries has vied for leadership of Islam. It is also the source of the billions of dollars by which, since the 1970s, the Wahhabis have spread their influence further than ever before. Anti-American terror would hardly be conceivable without widespread Wahhabi influence." (p.139) Why then should the United States extend financial and military support to the Saudis? Defenders of an "Old Right" foreign policy will join Codevilla in his wise suggestion. But why should abandoning aid to Saudi Arabia stand alone? Why not a complete course of nonintervention abroad?

October 29, 2005

David Gordon [send him mail] is author of LRC’s Books on Liberty, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review. This article is from the Summer 2005 issue.

Rothbard was no ivory-tower scholar, interested only in academic controversies. Quite the contrary, he combined Austrian economics with a fervent commitment to individual liberty. He developed a unique synthesis that combined themes from nineteenth-century American individualists such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker with Austrian economics. A new political philosophy was the result, and Rothbard devoted his remarkable intellectual energy, over a period of some forty-five years, to developing and promoting his style of libertarianism. In doing so, he became a major American public intellectual.

Murray Rothbard was born March 2, 1926, the son of David and Rae Rothbard. He was a brilliant student even as a young child; and his academic record at Columbia University, where he majored in mathematics and economics, was stellar. In the Columbia economics department, Rothbard did not receive any instruction in Austrian economics, and Mises was no more than a name to him. In a course on price theory given by George Stigler, however, he encountered arguments against such then popular measures as price and rent control. These arguments greatly appealed to him; and he wrote to the publisher of a pamphlet that Stigler and Milton Friedman had written on rent control.

The publisher in question was the Foundation for Economic Education; and visits to this group’s headquarters led Rothbard to a meeting with Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard was at once attracted to Mises’s laissez-faire economics, and when Mises’s masterwork Human Action appeared in 1949, it made a great impression on him. He was henceforward a praxeologist: here in Mises’s treatise was the consistent and rigorous defense of a free economy for which he had long been in search. He soon became an active member of Mises’s seminar at New York University. Meanwhile, he continued his graduate studies at Columbia, working toward his Ph.D. His mentor was the eminent economic historian Joseph Dorfman, and Rothbard received the degree in 1956, with a thesis on The Panic of 1819 that remains a standard work.

As he deepened his understanding of laissez-faire economics, he confronted a dilemma. The arguments for market provision of goods and services applied across the board. If so, should not even protection and defense be offered on the market rather than supplied by a coercive monopoly? Rothbard realized that he would either have to abandon laissez-faire or embrace individualist anarchy. The choice, arrived at in the winter of 1949, was not difficult.

Rothbard soon attracted the attention of the William Volker Fund, the main group that supported classical liberal scholars in the 1950s and early 1960s. He began a project to write a textbook to explain Human Action in a fashion suitable for college students; a sample chapter he wrote on money and credit won Mises’s approval. As Rothbard continued his work, he transformed the project. The result, Man, Economy, and State (1962), was a central work of Austrian economics.

Rothbard was entirely in accord with Mises’s endeavor to deduce the whole of economics from the axiom of action, combined with a few subsidiary postulates. In much more detail than Mises had done, he carried out the deduction; and in the process, he contributed major theoretical innovations to praxeology. He showed that the socialist calculation argument applies, not only to a governmentally controlled economy, but to a single private firm owning the entire economy as well. It too could not calculate. He also integrated Frank Fetter’s theory of rent with Austrian capital theory; and argued that a monopoly price could not exist on the free market. Further, he offered a brilliant criticism of Keynesian economics, and he anticipated much of the "rational expectations" revolution for which Robert Lucas later won a Nobel Prize.

As Rothbard originally planned Man, Economy, and State, it was to include a final part that presented a comprehensive classification and analysis of types of government intervention. The section also subjected to withering criticism the standard canons of justice in taxation; a brief but brilliant passage refuted in advance the anti-market arguments based on "luck" that were to prove so influential in the later work of John Rawls and his many successors. Unfortunately, the part appeared in the original edition only in a severely truncated form. Its full publication came only in 1972, under the title Power and Market. The complete version of Man, Economy, and State, as Rothbard originally intended it to appear, is now available from the Mises Institute.

This masterly work was far from exhausting Rothbard’s contributions to economic theory. In a major paper, "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics" (1956), he showed that if one takes seriously the fact that utility is ordinal and not cardinal, then the anti-market views of most modern welfare economists must be abandoned. Strict application of demonstrated preference allows one to say that the participants to a voluntary exchange expect ex ante to benefit. Further than this, the economist, so long as he remains value-free, cannot go. His main papers on economic theory are available in the posthumously published two-volume collection The Logic of Action (1997).

Rothbard devoted close attention to monetary theory. Here he emphasized the virtues of the classical gold standard and supported 100% reserve banking. This system, he held, would prevent the credit expansion that, according to the Austrian theory of the business cycle developed by Mises and Friedrich Hayek, led to inevitable depression. He summarized his views for the general public in the often-reprinted pamphlet What Has Government Done to Our Money? (1964) and also wrote a textbook, The Mystery of Banking (1983).

Rothbard showed the illumination that Austrian theory could bring to economic history in America’s Great Depression (1963). Far from being a proof of the failures of unregulated capitalism, the 1929 Depression illustrates rather the dangers of government interference with the economy. The economic collapse came as a necessary correction to the artificial boom induced by the Federal Reserve System’s monetary expansion during the 1920s. The attempts by the government to "cure" the downturn served only to make matters worse.

In making this argument, Rothbard became a pioneer in "Hoover revisionism." Contrary to the myths promoted by Hoover himself and his acolytes, Hoover was not an opponent of big government. Quite the contrary, the economic policies of the " Engineer in Politics" prefigured the New Deal. Rothbard’s view of Hoover is now widely accepted.

For Rothbard, banking policy was a key to American economic history. Like Michelet, he believed that history is a resurrection of the flesh; and his discussions are no dry-as-dust presentations of statistics. He was always concerned to identify the particular actors and interests behind historical decisions. The struggle between the competing Morgan and Rockefeller banking circles figures again and again in his articles in this field, collected in his A History of Money and Banking in the United States (1999).

Rothbard ranged far beyond economics in his historical work. In a four-volume series, Conceived in Liberty, (1975—1979) he presented a detailed account of American colonial history that stressed the libertarian antecedents of the American Revolution. As usual, he challenged mainstream opinion. He had little use for New England Puritanism, and the virtues and military leadership of George Washington did not impress him. For Rothbard, the Articles of Confederation were not an overly weak arrangement that needed to be replaced by the more centrally focused Constitution. Quite the contrary, the Articles themselves allowed too much central control.

Although Rothbard usually found himself in close agreement with Mises, in one area he maintained that Mises was mistaken. Mises contended that ethical judgments were subjective: ultimate ends are not subject to rational assessment. Rothbard dissented, maintaining that an objective ethics could be founded on the requirements of human nature. His approach, based on his study of Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, is presented in his major work The Ethics of Liberty (1982), his major study of political philosophy.

In his system of political ethics, self-ownership is the basic principle. Given a robust conception of self-ownership, a compulsory government monopoly of protective services is illegitimate; and Rothbard endeavors to refute the arguments to the contrary of supporters of a minimal state, Robert Nozick chief among them. He contributes important clarifications to problems of libertarian legal theory, such as the nature of contracts and the appropriate standard of punishment. He explains why Mises’s instrumental argument for the market does not fully succeed, though he finds much of value in it; and he criticizes in careful detail Hayek’s view of the rule of law.

Rothbard modified the famous dictum of Marx: he wished both to understand and change the world. He endeavored to apply the ideas he had developed in his theoretical work to current politics and to bring libertarian views to the attention of the general public. One issue for him stood foremost. Like Randolph Bourne, he maintained that "war is the health of the state"; he accordingly opposed an aggressive foreign policy.

His support for nonintervention in foreign policy led him to champion the Old Right. John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett and other pre-World War II "isolationists" shared Rothbard’s belief in the close connection between state power and bellicose foreign policy.

The situation was quite otherwise with postwar conservatism. Although Rothbard was an early contributor to William Buckley’s National Review, he rejected the aggressive pursuit of the Cold War advocated by Buckley and such members of his editorial staff as James Burnham and Frank S. Meyer. He broke with these self-styled conservatives and thereafter became one of their strongest opponents. For similar reasons, he condemned their neoconservative successors. He followed a pragmatic policy of temporary alliances with whatever groups were, at a given time, opposed to militarism and foreign adventures. He set forward the basis for his political stance in a key essay, "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty." This appeared in an important scholarly journal, Left and Right, which he established. This contained major essays on revisionist history and foreign policy, but unfortunately lasted only from 1965—1968.

In an effort to widen the influence of libertarian thought in the academic world, Rothbard founded the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977. The journal began auspiciously with a symposium on Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Down to the present, it has remained the most important journal hospitable to libertarian ideas.

Rothbard established in 1987 another journal, the Review of Austrian Economics, to provide a scholarly venue for economists and others interested in Austrian theory. It too is the key journal in its area of specialty. It has continued to the present, after 1997 under the new name Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

In his comments on current events, Rothbard displayed an amazing ability to digest vast quantities of information on whatever subject interested him. Whether, e.g., the question was competing factions in Afghanistan or the sources of investment in oil in the Middle East, he would always have the relevant data at his command. A sample of his columns, taken from the Rockwell Rothbard Report, is available in The Irrepressible Rothbard (2000). Another journal that he founded, The Libertarian Forum, provides his topical comments for the period 1969-1984. He presented a comprehensive popular account of libertarianism in For A New Liberty (1973).

One last academic triumph remained for Rothbard, though sadly it appeared only after his death. In two massive volumes, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith and Classical Economics (1995), he presented a minutely detailed and erudite account of the history of economic theory. Adam Smith, contrary to general belief, was not the founder of modern economics. His defense of a labor theory of value, modified and continued by his Ricardian successors, shunted economics onto the wrong path. The heroes of Rothbard’s study were the Spanish scholastics, who long before Smith had developed a subjective theory of value, and such later figures as Cantillon, Turgot, and Say. He dissects the heretical religious thought that prefigured Marxism and gives a mordant portrayal of the personality and thought of John Stuart Mill.

Rothbard was closely associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute from its founding in 1982 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. This organization became the main vehicle for the promotion of his ideas, and he served as its Academic Vice-President.

He taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s; from 1986 to his death on January 7, 1995, he was S.J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The "indispensable framework" for the life and work of this creative genius and polymath was his beloved wife, JoAnn Rothbard. His combination of scholarly achievement and engaged advocacy on behalf of freedom is unmatched.

July 30, 2005

David Gordon [send him mail] is author of LRC’s Books on Liberty, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review.

See also Lew Rockwell’s Murray N. Rothbard: A Legacy of Liberty.

The subject “Judaism and Capitalism” needs to be addressed in two related but separate parts. In one of these, the question up for discussion is, what is the relation between Judaism, taken as a body of religious doctrine, and capitalism? In the other, the issue that confronts us is, what is the relation between Jews, taken as a particular ethnic group, and capitalism? Obviously, the two questions are related. One way of identifying at least some Jews is as those who practice the Jewish religion. Certainly, many of those ethnically Jewish are estranged from their ancestral faith; nevertheless, that there exists a connection between the two parts of our topic is clear. I propose to consider both of these parts in the remarks that follow.

I shall take the “capitalism” in our title as not requiring an extended venture in definition or analysis. By it I intend nothing controversial. I mean the economic system in place over much of the world since the Industrial Revolution, characterized for the most part by private ownership of the means of production.[1]

Theories that endeavor to connect Judaism and capitalism often, though not invariably, spring from distaste for one or both of the paired terms. This was notoriously the case in Karl Marx’s famous essay On the Jewish Question, written in 1844. In this early work, Marx said that capitalism was Jewish, in that both were egoistic. In his important book, Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Muller says: “Were Jews egoistic, as [Bruno] Bauer had charged? Certainly, Marx answered. But in bourgeois society, everyone was egoistic…. Marx embraces all of the traditional negative characterizations of the Jew repeated by Bauer, and for good measure adds a few of his own. But he does so in order to stigmatize market activity as such. For Marx’s strategy is to endorse every negative characterization of market activity that Christians associated with Jews, but to insist that those qualities have now come to characterize society as a whole, very much including Christians.”[2]

Marx’s argument is a simple one. Capitalism is based on the pursuit of profit. Each person is supposed to act to secure his self-interest. This makes universal the trader-ethics characteristic since the Middle Ages of Jewish peddlers and moneylenders. Marx of course did not advance this view as a purely theoretical account. He deplored this sort of society; in it, human beings lived alienated both from one another and their own essence.

Marx expresses his argument in unmistakable terms. Criticizing the right of private property in the French Constitution of 1793, he says: “The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion … without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes everyone see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it.”

It is precisely the attitude toward others described here that, according to Marx, constitutes the essence of Judaism. “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” (Emphasis in original)[3]

How are we to evaluate Marx’s argument? It suffers from two main problems. First, Marx fails to establish a connection between selfish, egoistic behavior and the Jewish religion. Why is egoistic behavior distinctively Jewish? It is no doubt true that Judaism looks favorably on a person’s pursuit of his own interests. In the famous saying of Rabbi Hillel in the first chapter of the Ethics of our Fathers, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

But an approval of self-interest by no means signifies a selfish disregard for the well-being of others. One need only recall the continuation of Hillel’s saying, “If I am only for myself, what am I?”

One could easily amass other citations on the role of regard for others and charity in Judaism, but one more must here suffice. Jewish sources often view the principal sin of Sodom, the city that God destroyed by fire and brimstone, as lack of charity. As Rabbi Meir Tamari notes in his authoritative exposition of Jewish law regarding economics, “The Mishnah [first part of the Talmud] defined one who said . . . ‘What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine’ as an evil man. He who says, ‘What’s yours is yours and what’s mine is yours’ is a righteous person. But ‘What’s yours is yours and what’s mine’ is mine – some say that is the mark of Sodom.”[4]

A defender of Marx might reply by recalling a distinction made earlier. At the outset, I distinguished the claim that Judaism as a body of doctrine is related to capitalism from the claim that Jews as a group are so related. Has the objection just raised to Marx’s account ignored this distinction? Perhaps Marx is not best taken as making a point about Jewish religious doctrine. Rather, is he not claiming that the behavior found in the economic activities of certain Jews, namely the traders and moneylenders, best expresses the essence of capitalism?[5]

If this is what Marx had in mind, it is no more satisfactory than the earlier version of his claim. What is supposed to be specifically Jewish about either selling or lending money? Marx nowhere informs us.

A more deep-seated failing besets Marx’s account of Judaism and capitalism. Marx characterizes both capitalism and Judaism as based on self-interest, practical need, selling, and money. Surely it would be difficult to find throughout recorded history many large-scale and complex societies in which these features did not play a prominent role. Contrary to Marx, neither self-interest nor the pursuit of money is distinctively either capitalist or Jewish.

In seeking to exorcise self-interest as a feature of the human condition Marx is beguiled by a fantasy in which human beings abandon all antagonisms. Murray Rothbard has aptly noted the influence of this fantasy: “To Marx, any differences between men, and, therefore, any specialization in the division of labor, is a ‘contradiction,’ and the communist goal is to replace that contradiction with harmony among all. This means that to the Marxist any individual differences, any diversity among men, are contradictions to be stamped out and replaced by the uniformity of the anthill.”[6]

Jerry Muller has insightfully drawn attention to the importance of Marx’s essay; but in one respect he goes too far. Muller says, “For ‘On the Question of the Jews’ contains, in embryo, most of the subsequent themes of Marx’s critique of capitalism…. If Marx had one big idea, it was that capitalism was the rule of money – itself the expression of greed. The rule of capital was fundamentally immoral because it deprived the vast majority in a capitalist society of their humanity, requiring labor that enriched a few capitalists while impoverishing the workers physically and spiritually.”[7]

Muller here fundamentally misconceives Marxism. Marx in Das Kapital had principally in mind a scientific critique of capitalism, based primarily on the labor theory of value. The book contains fierce moral invective directed against capitalism, some of which make references to Jewish themes; this is rhetoric rather than the core of the book. (One such reference to a Jewish theme, incidentally, occurs in the famous passage of Chapter 24 of Das Kapital, “Accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the prophets.” The Jewish reference here is not only the obvious one, i.e., the mention of Moses. The entire expression “Moses and the prophets” refers to two of the three divisions in the Jewish arrangement of the books of the Bible: Marx is saying that for the capitalists, accumulation is the Bible.) The crucial point that Marx intended his project as science rather than ethics was made long ago by Werner Sombart, whom we shall be discussing later.[8]

Before turning from Marx on capitalism and the Jews, I allow myself one conjecture. Marx said that the essence of capitalism was egoism. Could awareness of this claim have influenced the young Ayn Rand, who after all grew up in Soviet Russia, where the writings of Marx were abundantly available in Russian translation? I ask because she of course also thought that capitalism was in essence egoism, though she embraced exactly what repelled Marx and ignored his identification of Judaism with capitalism.

What lesson should we draw from the failure of Marx’s attempt to link Judaism with capitalism? Should we abandon altogether all inquiries along the same lines as fundamentally misguided? Such a course was urged by Ludwig von Mises. He remarks in Socialism, “Today the Islamic and Jewish religions are dead. They offer their adherents nothing more than a ritual. They know how to prescribe prayers and fasts, certain foods, circumcision and the rest; but that is all. They offer nothing to the mind. Completely despiritualized, all they teach and preach are legal forms and external rule. They lock their follower into a cage of traditional usages, in which he is often hardly able to breathe; but for his inner soul they have no message. They suppress the soul, instead of elevating it and saving it. For many centuries in Islam, for nearly two thousand years in Jewry, there have been no new religious movements. Today the religion of the Jews is just as it was when the Talmud was drawn up.”

I do not think that Mises’s remarks by themselves settle the questions at issue, even if one accepts Mises’s highly dubious characterization of Judaism as pure ritual, devoid of appeal to the mind. Mises’s comments do not exclude the possibility that legal regulations of the kind Mises describes in such unflattering terms influenced the development of capitalism, either by their content or by the qualities of mind and character that people who adhered to the rituals tended to develop. But these are no more than possibilities: whether these regulations in fact had such effects is another question …

Let us turn then to another attempt to connect Judaism and capitalism, and this one the most significant of all, Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism, which appeared in 1911. Sombart conforms to the pattern mentioned earlier that those who ascribe to the Jews primary responsibility to capitalism tend to be hostile to both Judaism and capitalism.

In Sombart’s case this is hardly surprising. Sombart began his academic career as a convinced Marxist. Though he veered to the right, he remained a socialist to the end, albeit of a peculiar kind. Like Marx, he stressed Jewish involvement in trade as the essence of capitalism: The Jews with their trader-ethic had succeeded in transforming the more static values of the Middle Ages. The broad outlines of this theory will already be familiar from our discussion of Marx’s essay; but Sombart developed the position with enormously greater learning in the Jewish sources and in Jewish history. Sombart himself says that Marx, in his essay, “looked deep into the Jewish soul”. After mentioning two other writers, he says, “What has been said about the Jewish spirit since these men (all Jews!) wrote is either a repetition of what they said or a distortion of the truth.” [9]

His favorable reference to Marx’s essay should be sufficient to suggest that Sombart was an unfriendly critic of Judaism, but Milton Friedman dissents. He writes, “Sombart’s book. . . has had in general a highly unfavorable reception. . .and, indeed, something of an aura of anti-Semitism has come to be attributed to it. . .there is nothing in the book itself to justify any charge of anti-Semitism though there certainly is in Sombart’s writing and behavior several decades later, indeed, if anything I interpret the book as philo-Semitic” [10] Friedman has I suggest been deceived by his own strong approval for the behavior and attitudes that Sombart depicts. Sombart was not praising the Jews, e.g., when he ascribed to them the trader’s mentality.

The great strength of his book is that he goes beyond the generalities to be found in Marx’s essay and offers specific evidence from Jewish religious sources and history. He points out, e.g., that though a Jew is forbidden to lend money at interest to another Jew, he is permitted, and according to some opinions required, to do so to non-Jews. Jewish law sees nothing intrinsically wrong with lending at interest: the ban on taking interest from fellow Jews stems from the bonds that ought to link fellow believers. The prohibition on taking interest from a fellow Jew is more than a negative requirement. It is a positive duty to lend money without interest to Jews in need, and free loan societies have long been part of the Jewish community.

Sombart expresses the point about taking interest from non-Jews in typically colorful language:

Now think of the position in which the pious Jew and the pious Christian respectively found themselves in the period in which money-lending first became a need in Europe, and which eventually gave birth to capitalism. The good Christian who had been addicted to usury was filled with remorse as he lay a-dying, ready at the eleventh-hour to cast from him the ill-gotten gains which scorched his soul. And the good Jew? In the evening of his days, he gazed upon his well-filled caskets and coffers, overflowing with sequins of which he had relieved the miserable Christians or Mohammedans. It was a sight which warmed his heart, for every penny was like a sacrifice which he had brought to his Heavenly Father. [11]

Sombart does not see the law regarding interest as standing alone. To the contrary, he maintains that Judaism is a religion of calculative rationality, peculiarly suited to success under capitalism:

The kinship between Judaism and capitalism is further illustrated by the legally regulated relationship – I had almost said the business-like connection, except that the term has a disagreeable connotation – between God and Israel. . .The contract usually sets forth that man is rewarded for duties performed and punished for duties neglected. . .Two consequences must of necessity follow: first, a constant weighing up of the loss and gain which any action needs must bring, and secondly, a complicated scheme of bookkeeping, as it were, for each individual person. [12]

Sombart makes clear his evaluation of Judaism and capitalism, in a passage that evidently escaped Milton Friedman’s attention:

In all its reasoning it [the Jewish religion] appeals to us as a creation of the intellect, a thing of thought and purpose projected into the world of organisms. . .destined to destroy and to conquer Nature’s realm and to reign itself in her stead. Just so does capitalism appear on the scene; like the Jewish religion, an alien element in the midst of the natural, created world; like it, too, something schemed and planned in the midst of teeming life. [13]

What is one to make of all this? The main problem with Sombart’s thesis is obvious. Though he is right that calculative rationality is integral to capitalism, this disposition is by no means peculiar to Jews. If so, capitalism cannot be considered Jewish in essence, though Sombart may well be right that certain traits of mind equipped Jews to prosper under capitalism. Sombart could hardly ignore this point; only a few years before his own book, Max Weber had issued his famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In that book, Weber ascribed some of the same traits that Sombart thought especially Jewish to the Puritans.

It cannot be said that Sombart’s way of coping with this objection is entirely satisfactory. He writes, “I [Sombart] have already mentioned that Max Weber’s study of the importance of Protestantism for the capitalistic system was the impetus that sent me to consider the importance of the Jew. . .Puritanism is Judaism.” [14]

Sombart rightly stressed the importance for capitalism of lending money at interest, but allowing this practice is hardly peculiar to Judaism. In his great An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Rothbard remarks: “Calvin’s main contribution to the usury question was in having the courage to dump the prohibition altogether. . . To Calvin, then, usury is perfectly licit, provided it is not charged in loans to the poor, who would be hurt by such payment.” Rothbard continues about a later Calvinist, “The honor of putting the final boot to the usury prohibition belongs to. . . Claudius Salmasius,. . .who finished off this embarrassing remnant of the mountainous errors of the past. In short, Salmasius pointed out that money-lending was a business like any other, and like other businesses was entitled to charge a market price. . .Salmasius also had the courage to point out that there were no valid arguments against usury, either by divine or natural law.” [15] No doubt Sombart would respond by declaring Calvin and Salmasius to be Jews.

We have so far considered, and found largely wanting, attempts to connect Judaism with capitalism. But we have also to examine the views of those who find a Jewish impetus behind opposition to capitalism. Especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, a common view held that the Bolshevik Revolution was largely a Jewish enterprise.

Winston Churchill wrote in 1920, “There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders.”

Churchill by no means thought that all Jews were Bolsheviks. To the contrary, he contrasted the internationalist Jews behind world revolution with nationalist Jews, e.g., Zionists. “The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and the Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.” [16]

Churchill was but one of many writers of his time with similar views. As he notes in his article, he had read Nesta Webster, a once famous popular historian who studied conspiracy theories of revolution in, among other books, The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy; World Revolution;and Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. (Contrary to general belief, incidentally, she did not endorse the authenticity of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.) She was probably the foremost source for the view that communism was Jewish.

Backers of the theory, like Churchill, appealed to the fact that Jews occupied a high number of positions in the Bolshevik government. The Irish priest Father Denis Fahey published a pamphlet, The Rulers of Russia, containing long lists of Bolsheviks with Jewish-sounding names. In Germany, the Nazi writer Alfred Rosenberg sometimes read out such lists over the radio, leading to the joke that he thought that everybody named “Rosenberg” was Jewish except him. In recent years, the German writer Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein has devoted a long book to the topic, Jewish Bolshevism: Myth and Reality [Der juedische Bolshewismus: Mythos und Realität] [17]

Before we turn to evaluate this theory, it should be noted that it is possible, however unlikely it may seem, for someone to hold this view together with the position we have earlier examined. That is, it is possible to hold Jews responsible both for capitalism and communism, its foremost antagonist. This is more than a bare possibility: Hitler, for one, believed precisely this.

The main failing of the view that connects Judaism and communism is a simple one. It confuses two questions: why, looking at the historical circumstances that led to the Russian Revolution, were many Jews attracted to revolution; and, is there anything intrinsic to Judaism that leads to support of communism?

The first question is readily answered when one recalls the long history of anti-Jewish measures taken by the Tsarist Russian government in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A similar appeal to particular circumstances would I think explain such other instances of Jewish support for socialist revolutionary groups as the historical record discloses. Absent the existence of special circumstances, there is no marked Jewish support for the overthrow of capitalism. Jerry Muller is right when he says: “Milton Friedman’s contention that Jews vilified capitalism while profiting from it is highly distorted. To the extent that Jews identified themselves with socialism, it was largely a phenomenon of eastern European Jews and their immediate descendents in the years from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s.” [18] And even if one is inclined to think the association between Jews and communism greater than Muller allows, it is clear that any such affinity has its limits. Even during the period when Jewish radicalism was at its height, most Jews were not communists, and most communists were not Jews. It would be difficult to consider the Chinese communist movement an instance of Jewish Bolshevism.

To show a close intellectual connection between Judaism and communism would require some derivation of communist ideas from Jewish religious doctrines, and that is not in the offing. True enough, radicals have appealed to Jewish texts to support their views. Michael Walzer has traced the role of the Exodus narrative on revolutionary thought: “I [Walzer] have found the Exodus almost everywhere, often in unexpected places. It is central to the communist theology or antitheology of Ernst Bloch. . . It is the subject of a book, called Moses in Red, by Lincoln Steffens, published in 1926; a detailed account of Israel’s political struggles in the wilderness and a defense of Leninist politics.” [19]Others have found in the Jewish prophets an inspiration for socialist schemes for reform of the world. A once famous book of the 1920s, A Religion of Truth, Justice, and Peace, by Isidor Singer, the editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia, argued that “the world leadership of the social justice movement [is] offered to the Jew.” [20]Singer based his argument on an appeal to the words of Amos, Isaiah, Micah, and other prophets. [21]

Walzer and Singer to the contrary notwithstanding, the claim that Judaism teaches socialism or communism as a general political program cannot succeed. The basic reason such an attempt must fail is the same one that dooms the theories that link Judaism and capitalism. The religious precepts of Judaism are meant to apply only to Jews: they do not constitute an ethical system that prescribes a best social order for all of humanity.

As Meir Tamari says, “For centuries, Jews enjoyed autonomy in many countries and maintained rabbinic codes of law which regulated and governed their economic activity, thereby preserving its specifically Jewish characteristics. The Bible and the homiletical literature established an ethical and moral framework within which Jewish communities operated. . .” I conclude, then, that although Mises radically underrated the intellectual merits of the Jewish sources, he was not far from the truth in thinking that are no direct connections to be drawn between Judaism and capitalism. [22]

Jonah Goldberg has ruined what could have been a valuable book. Goldberg has in the past treated libertarians with disdain, but here he offers an analysis of fascism that libertarians will find familiar. Goldberg has been influenced by John T. Flynn’s comparison of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal with Italian fascism; and he cites Friedrich Hayek with respect. He has learned from Murray Rothbard on the progressives as well. (He at one point remarks, “if libertarianism could account for children and foreign policy, it would be the ideal political philosophy” [p. 344].)

Fascism is usually counted a movement of the Right; but, as Goldberg notes, many leftists viewed Mussolini with sympathy. (Here Goldberg follows the important work of John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America.) H.G. Wells in a speech at Oxford in 1932 called for a “Liberal Fascism”; and Rexford Tugwell, a leading member of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, said in 1934, “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary…. Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has. But he has the press controlled so that they cannot scream lies at him daily” (p. 156).

How is this possible? Leftists wish to reconstruct society along socialistic lines; fascists glorify the nation and militarism. How can leftists favor fascism? Goldberg readily resolves the difficulty. Precisely by importing the war spirit into domestic affairs, leftists hope to reconstruct society. In war, people unite to achieve victory; in doing so, they sacrifice their personal ends to achieve the common goal. The fascists took exactly the same view, and many leftists accordingly recognized the affinity.

The progressives were well aware that war would enable them to advance their ambitious social plans, and they advocated American entry into the First World War for this reason. Herbert Croly, author of the vastly influential The Promise of American Life, “looked forward to many more wars because war was the midwife of progress … Croly’s New Republic was relentless in its push for war” (pp. 99, 107).[1]

The wartime regime of Woodrow Wilson fulfilled the hopes of the progressives.

War socialism under Wilson was an entirely progressive project, and long after the war it remained the liberal ideal…. If we are to believe that “classic” fascism is first and foremost the elevation of martial values and the militarization of government and society under the banner of nationalism, it is very difficult to understand why the Progressive Era was not also the Fascist Era. (p. 119)

Goldberg appropriately calls attention to “the brilliant, bizarre, disfigured genius Randolph Bourne [who] seemed to understand precisely what was going on” (p. 108).

Given the Wilsonian precedent, the affinity of the New Deal with fascism is hardly surprising. Just as the progressives had done under Wilson, the New Dealers demanded collective action by the government to cope with the economic emergency. Indeed, many of the measures they supported reinstituted programs of Wilson’s wartime government. In his discussion of the New Deal, Goldberg draws attention especially to the close parallel between the National Recovery Administration and Mussolini’s corporatism, a fact that was not lost on either the fascists or the New Dealers.[2]

If Goldberg has elaborated and extended the standard libertarian view of fascism, does he not deserve praise? Why then do I claim that he has ruined his book? The fault, as I see it, lies not in various less defensible contentions about fascism that he advances. He seems to me too ready to call any resort to “identity politics” fascist; and while he criticizes the “compassionate conservatism” of George Bush, he turns a blind eye to the effects of Bush’s bellicose foreign policy on the domestic scene. Goldberg himself supports the Iraq war; when one is faced with a “good” war, apparently, the link between war and fascism no longer need be of concern.

However dubious Goldberg’s views on these issues, they are at least matters of opinion. By contrast, he makes a large number of outright errors on historical matters.

He traces fascism to the philosophy of Rousseau, “who properly deserves to be called the father of modern fascism” (p. 38). To see Rousseau as a precursor of totalitarianism is certainly a defensible position; Jacob Talmon classically argued for this view in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. But in his account of Rousseau, Goldberg makes an astonishing claim: “It followed, moreover, that if the people were the new God, there was no room for God Himself…. Loyalty to the state and loyalty to the divine must be seen as the same thing” (p. 39).

Has Goldberg ever examined the “civil religion” of Rousseau, which he claims is enforced “by the all-powerful God-state” (p. 40)? Rousseau gives the dogmas of the civil religion in Book IV of The Social Contract. The first of these is the “existence of a mighty, intelligent, and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence.” Goldberg might also consult with profit the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar in the fourth book of Emile. This defends the view that God can be known from the natural order; it does not identify God and the state.

Goldberg does no better when he turns to the great classical liberal Lord Acton. He tells us,

Lord Acton’s famous observation that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has long been misunderstood. Acton was not arguing that power causes powerful leaders to become corrupt (though he probably believed that, too). Rather, he was noting that historians tend to forgive the powerful for transgressions they would never condone by the weak. (p. 84)

Acton’s comments come in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in April 1887:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases…. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Acton, it is apparent, is saying what Goldberg says that he isn’t: he is contending that the possession of power tends to cause leaders to be corrupt. In a column on National Review Online for October 23, 2002, “Might vs. Right,” Goldberg himself quotes this passage and defends his odd interpretation of it[3]. Goldberg cannot understand a few simple sentences. Are we to take Acton as saying that the spectacle of absolute power absolutely corrupts the historian who writes about it?

Goldberg has not yet touched bottom. The book includes a section, “The Nazi Cult of the Organic” that discusses such matters as vegetarianism, public health, and animal rights. In it, this passage appears:

German historicism had pioneered the organic conception of society and state tied together. The state, wrote Johann Droysen, is “the sum, the united organism, of all the moral partnerships, their common home and harbor, and so far their end.” Nor were these ideas uniquely German. Droysen was Herbert Baxter Adams’s mentor, and Adams was Woodrow Wilson’s. Droysen’s work is cited throughout Wilson’s writings. The law that established our national park system was dubbed the “Organic Act” of 1916. (p. 385)

Does Goldberg seriously think that the organic concept of the state, i.e., the view that the state, like an organism, must be explained by how its parts function together for a common end, has anything to do with a “back to nature” movement? It is hardly surprising, by the way, that Wilson often cites Droysen. He was one of the most famous German historians of the nineteenth century.

Our author does not neglect American philosophers. He gives us a crude caricature of William James on the “will to believe”:

[James] pioneered the notion that all one needs is the “will to believe.” It was James’s benign hope to make room for religion in a burgeoning age of science, by arguing that any religion that worked for the believer was not merely valid but “true.” (p. 37)

Goldberg has either never read James’s essay, “The Will to Believe,” or read it with the same interpretive skills he displayed in his remarks about Acton. James argued that in a restricted number of cases, one has the right to believe something that goes beyond the evidence. The evidence for the view one favors must be no worse than for views that contradict it; and one must be in a situation where a choice cannot be avoided. The options that one faces must be living, momentous, and forced. Though James noted certain cases where believing something can result in its becoming true, e.g., a patient whose belief that he will recover has beneficial effects that help to cure him, he did not advocate the strange position Goldberg here attributes to him. (I do not think it worthwhile to inquire what Goldberg has in mind by the distinction between “valid” and “true.”)

We now come to my favorite passage:

In his infamous rectorial address, [Martin] Heidegger looked forward to the time — hastened by Hitler’s efforts — “when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when the moribund semblance of culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness.” (pp. 174—75)

How can I possibly accuse Goldberg of distortion? Has he done anything more than quote a passage from the rectorial address? Well, let’s have a look. In “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” the address in question, Heidegger calls for teachers and students to will the essence of the German university: this essence is “the will to science as will to the historical spiritual mission of the German people as a people that knows itself in its state.” (I cite from the same translation that Goldberg uses, which appears in Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers [New York: Paragon House, 1990], p. 6.)

This will to science is to be achieved in large part by rethinking the beginnings of Greek philosophy. It is up to us: “Do we, or do we not, will the essence of the German university?” (Neske, p. 13). Heidegger then says, “But no one will even ask us whether we do or do not will, when…” following which is the passage that Goldberg quotes (Neske, p. 13). Goldberg has completely reversed what Heidegger is saying. Heidegger does not look forward to the spiritual collapse of the West. Rather, he warns that we may delay too long in our mission to will the essence of the university. If our culture “caves in,” what we will is irrelevant. Further, although Heidegger criticized the philosophical notion of “values,” he did not contend that “good and evil were childish notions” (p. 174).

Goldberg does not confine his howlers to intellectual history. He refers in one place to “communist Jacobinism (or Jacobin communism, if you prefer), which expropriated property and uprooted institutions in order to remake society from the ground up” (p. 297). The Jacobins were not communists. Although they abandoned the original laissez-faire tenets of the Jacobin Club for interventionism, they remained strong defenders of private property.

It goes on. It is not true that in the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment, “poor black men were allegedly infected with syphilis without their knowledge” (p. 261). Rather, men who already had syphilis were deceived into thinking that they were being treated for their illness. Unity Mitford did not “have to leave the country, incensed that Britain would fight such a progressive leader as Hitler” (p. 460 n. 15). At the time war was declared, she was in Germany. She was so despondent that she shot herself in the head, but her suicide attempt failed. She was then sent back to England, where she lived out the war as an invalid. As all-too-often, Goldberg has things backwards.

I have saved the best for last. He says that Napoleon’s “victories against the Austro-Hungarian Empire prompted the captive nations of the Hapsburgs to greet him as ‘the great liberator.’ He beat back the authority of the Catholic Church, crowning himself Holy Roman Emperor…” (p. 41). No, no, Mr. Goldberg. Emperor Francis II, who had meanwhile become Emperor Francis I of Austria, dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The Austro-Hungarian Empire did not come into existence until 1867, although of course the Habsburgs ruled over both Austria and Hungary throughout the nineteenth century. Goldberg does somewhat better in the index. There is a listing for “Napoleon I, Emperor of France” (p. 479); but this too is wrong. Napoleon was Emperor of the French: the title is important because Napoleon claimed his power emanated from the French people. He was not the successor to the French territorial kings, as the title Emperor of France would have suggested.

Although Liberal Fascism contains much important information, its many mistakes require that it be used with extreme caution. Jonah Goldberg should acquire a more accurate knowledge of history before he presumes to instruct others.

Notes

[1] Goldberg does not mention that Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism and high in the counsels of National Review, ardently admires Croly.

[2] See on this the important book of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals (Metropolitan Books, 2006) and my review in The Mises Review, Fall 2006. Goldberg cites this work.

[3] Goldberg’s remarks in the column do not adequately distinguish between what Acton meant and whether what he said is true. Goldberg points out that some powerful rulers have not been corrupt; he fails to see that this observation does not refute the claim that power tends to corrupt.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

David Gordon Archives

I

Harry Jaffa is one of the most distinguished of the students of Leo Strauss. His Thomism and Aristotelianism was termed “an unduly neglected minor modern classic” by Alasdair MacIntyre1; and Crisis of the House Divided, his interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, occupies a prominent place in the literature on Lincoln. However, as a man not content with academic success, Jaffa has devoted enormous energy to the defense of a unique brand of conservatism.

Jaffa’s political views attracted widespread notice during the 1964 Republican Party Convention. Senator Barry Goldwater, the champion of the resurgent conservative movement, received his party’s nomination for President in the face of opposition from the “Eastern Establishment,” led by Nelson Rockefeller. In a defiant line in his acceptance speech, Goldwater declared: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue.” It was soon disclosed that Jaffa had written the memorable sentence.

Jaffa’s comment expresses correctly an Aristotelian doctrine: unlike such virtues as courage and temperance, justice is not a mean between two vices. But it may be doubted whether a campaign is the best place to expound nuances of ancient thought; and Goldwater’s enemies pounced on the line as evidence of his fanaticism. But if Jaffa had, in the opinion of many, damaged the cause of Goldwater, of one matter there could be no doubt: he himself had arrived.

Jaffa used his influence, polemical talent, and inexhaustible energy to advance his own agenda for the American Right. During the 1950′s and 1960′s, most conservatives opposed the Civil Rights Movement. “Equality” was a veritable curse word to them. For Jaffa, matters were quite otherwise: equality was the key to sound politics. Conservatives should embrace it, not spurn its mere mention. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone of the temple.” Jaffa expounded his position in the course of debates with others on the Right about the significance of Abraham Lincoln. His opponents in these exchanges have included Frank S. Meyer; Clyde Wilson; Thomas Fleming; and, over many years, M. E. Bradford. Whether one agreed with him or not, no conservative could ignore him. Among Jaffa’s admirers is William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review; and Buckley’s support has contributed greatly to Jaffa’s prominence in right wing circles. The financier Henry Salvatori, a major donor to conservative groups, has lavished patronage on Jaffa’s Claremont Institute.

His scholarly work meshes closely with his political activities. On the basis of the former, he expounds and defends a philosophy of freedom that, as he sees matters, underlies the Declaration of Independence and the thought of its foremost interpreter, Abraham Lincoln. Even more ambitiously, Jaffa sets his defense of freedom in a larger setting — an exposition of natural law morality. Although he has not written a full-scale treatise defending his conception of ethics, he has in his provocative “In Defense of the ‘Natural Law Thesis’” and elsewhere discussed the foundations of morality. In view of the importance of Jaffa’s position, and the immense labor he has devoted to its construction and defense, close examination of his central arguments seems warranted.

Jaffa briefly presents his key to sound political philosophy in a recent popular article: “Of Men, Hogs, and Law.”: “The equality of men, pronounced in the Declaration of Independence, affirms that there is no difference between man and man, such as there is between man and beast (on the one hand), or between man and God (on the other) that justifies one man ruling another without the other’s consent."2

It is not altogether clear what Jaffa means by one man ruling another. Someone who enslaves another clearly rules him, but Jaffa wishes his argument to extend further than this. He elsewhere speaks of "ruling despotically” as a target of his argument, and one can govern someone despotically, i.e., arbitrarily and without his consent, without enslaving him. Even more widely, ruling can cover anyone’s exercising any of the functions of government over another. It appears to me most plausible to take Jaffa in the latter, most extended way.

Jaffa states his argument for equality perhaps most fully here: “‘That all men are created equal’ arises from our experience of a class of beings called ‘men.’ We abstract from the experience of a number of individual human beings the common noun ‘man’…. Having performed the act of inductive reasoning by which the common nouns ['man' and 'dog'] are understood, we can articulate attributes which reflection shows were implied in the act of grasping that noun….We distinguish, moreover, the nonhuman that is subhuman from the nonhuman that is superhuman. We conclude…that there is no such difference between man and man, as there is between men and dogs, that makes men by nature the rulers of dogs, and dogs by nature the servants of men."3

Having thus disposed of animals, Jaffa rises higher. “By the power of reason we form the concept of a perfectly reasonable Being, in whom there are no passions to act as impediments to reason.” Whether one can move from the essence of this Being to its existence, Jaffa leaves open; but the idea suffices to show that “man is the in-between being, the being that is neither beast nor God. We understand therefore that the rule of man over man must differ, not only from the rule of man over beast, but from the rule of God over man.”4

I propose to accept for the purpose of argument Jaffa’s starting point, putting to one side a few problems. Jaffa does not explain or justify the claim that abstraction from empirical perception enables us to arrive at knowledge of essence. I do not say he is wrong to think so — in my opinion, quite the contrary. But the step is controversial; if it is right, Hume’s skeptical doubts about induction fall to the ground, since a being with a certain essence necessarily will act in a given way, if it acts at all. Can Hume be dealt with so summarily?

Perhaps he can; but Jaffa’s controversial assumptions have just begun. Suppose that one distinguishes levels of being according to rationality, in the way that Jaffa has suggested. Does it follow without further argument that the more rational being is entitled by nature to rule the less? I cannot see that it does, especially if both are free agents.

Is the basis of the contention this: a species of greater rationality outranks one of less in the “scale of being”: from its superior rank stems its right to rule? The ‘progress’ we have made in advancing this argument is questionable: we now have two unsupported premises. What exactly is meant by the “rank” of a being? Does any desirable property possessed essentially by a species give it superior rank over a species without it, other things being equal? If so, does any such superior rank carry with it the right to rule? Would a species of similar rationality to man, but essentially more beautiful, be entitled to rule human beings? If not, why not? In the guise of an appeal to self-evidence, Jaffa presupposes an entire metaphysics.

All of this is preliminary: although I do not think he has adequately supported the ‘scale of being,’ I have no arguments that justify its rejection. Let us then accept the scale of being and turn at once to an analysis of the political conclusions Jaffa draws from his notion.

I should have thought that the scale leaves entirely open how beings of the same rank ought to deal with one another. Granted that a superior being may rule an inferior, and that an inferior must serve his superior in ontological rank, why does anything at all follow about beings of the same rank? Why is superior rank required for rule?

Is the argument this? It is a principle of rationality that one should deal with entities according to their genuine properties. Thus, someone who seriously thought that his pet dog could converse with him clearly suffers from a defect in rationality. But to treat a man as a beast is to fail to exhibit reason, in an analogous way. Hence no man may rule another without his consent.

This argument fails, since it assumes that to rule over someone is to treat him as a beast, just the contention that the argument purports to establish. Unless we already know that to rule someone implies regarding him as of lesser rank, the question at issue has been begged.

As Jaffa notes in another context, Thomas Aquinas did not think that slavery violated the law of nature.5 But he strongly supported the scale of being to which Jaffa appeals. Was St. Thomas guilty of failure to draw the ‘obvious’ inference from ‘same essence’ to ‘no right to rule without consent’? Further, there is considerable room for doubt that Jaffa fully accepts the principle himself; if so, how then can he claim it to be self-evident that no one may rule another without his consent?

To say that Jaffa himself questions this principle appears surprising, but nevertheless the matter is not much open to question. In reply to a claim by Shadia Drury that Leo Strauss taught the absolute right of the wise to rule without restraint, Jaffa replies: “The absolute rule of the wise is then a theoretical premise, necessary for our understanding of the problem of wise or just rule, but in no sense a practical conclusion…. anyone who advances the claims of wisdom as ground for ruling must be an unwise adventurer, discredited in advance by the fact he has advanced such claims."6 (The context makes clear that Jaffa agrees with Strauss’s view.)

Jaffa here makes a fatal admission. If the wise have the theoretical right to rule, then it cannot be the case that no one may rule another without his consent. That practical circumstances make it almost always inadvisable to exercise this right is beside the point. Jaffa cannot consistently both agree with Strauss that the wise have such a right and at the same time deny any right to rule without consent.

In reply to a critic, a good polemicist such as Jaffa will often be tempted to minimize any concession he must make to an opponent. Jaffa expounded the same point with a different emphasis on one occasion when he did not confront this temptation. In an account of Aristotle’s Politics, he states: “Still, the intrinsic validity of the claim in the case of someone — a someone very unlikely to put the claim forward himself — is not hereby destroyed. Aristotle’s final conclusion appears to be that the argument stands as valid, but as the man who could justly make the claim will not do so, the only argument that can and will be validly advanced will be that in favor of the best laws. Still, in the infinite contingencies of political life, a moment might come when, contrary to every normal expectation, the rule of the best man might have to be advanced in practice as well."7

In his reply to Professor Drury, Jaffa advances a similar claim: “Thus we contemplate extreme actions in defense of the rule of law by wise men whose unfettered wisdom may sometimes be the necessary condition for the establishment or survival of a decent constitutional order."8 In the earlier passage, no such limitation is imposed on rule by the wise.

To avert misunderstanding, I do not contend that it is correct to support the right of the wise to rule. Rather, the issue is that Jaffa cannot consistently teach this and at the same time assert that rule without consent is illegitimate.

Or can he? He does have one escape; but it is to my mind an implausible one. In his discussion of the scale of being, Jaffa averred that God does not require human consent in order to rule: it is absurd to think that “God would need to secure the consent of man in order to exercise His providential government.”9 This seems reasonable: few even of those who disbelieve in God would deny that if he exists, he may rule without consent. (J.S. Mill is perhaps an exception.) In this passage, then, a divine being is contrasted with the “evident limitations" on the perfection of reason that “every man discovers in his own soul.”10

Elsewhere, Jaffa indicates how the notion of divinity may be extended in a way most people today will find unfamiliar. In his Thomism and Aristotelianism, a scholarly work not written for popular consumption, he argues that according to Aristotle, the philosopher lives the contemplative life, not in so far as he is a man, but in so far as there is “something divine in him."11 If the “absolutely wise” have the right to rule, perhaps they possess this right because Jaffa considers them divine. In this way, he can escape contradiction in his argument. But I venture to suggest that many will find this a most repugnant position, at least in the absence of a full defense of the moral psychology that underlies it.12

So far, then, Jaffa’s claim that no one may rule another without his consent stands unsupported; but on another construal, his statement becomes entirely understandable.

Imagine a situation in which a group of people lack any organized society or government. Each person (or family) is concerned with his own preservation, and no one has any moral obligations toward anyone else. In this state of nature, anyone is liable to be killed: unlike the comic-book Superman, no one is immune from assault. Here there is no question of philosophers having a right to rule, in the sense of a duty others must observe, since their activity depends on the prior existence of an organized community. Universal agreement appears a reasonable way for people to extricate themselves from circumstances that are “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Is Jaffa’s argument then to be accepted? I do not think so: why should we think that what people agree to in this state of nature has any moral significance? Merely to say that in such-and-such circumstances, people would do thus-and-so, shows nothing about morality. If I had monopoly control of all food and could fend off all assaults, people might find it advantageous to enslave themselves to me. This hardly suffices to show that I now have a right to enslave anyone. Why then does anything important about rule follow from what people would agree to in the state of nature? The question is all the more pressing in that in the state of nature, people are free to act in grossly immoral ways, judged by ordinary morality.

Jaffa shows himself well aware of the weaknesses of this argument. He contrasts Lincoln’s position, about which he writes with evident sympathy, with the position just described.13 In Locke’s state of nature, men “have no real duties. The embryonic duties which exist in Locke’s state of nature are not genuine duties but only rules which tell us to avoid doing those things which might impel others to injure us."14

This argument can generate only hypothetical imperatives: if you want to get out of the state of nature, do a,b,c…. By contrast, “Lincoln’s was not only hypothetical; it was categorical as well. Because all men by nature have an equal right to justice, all men have an equal duty to do justice, wholly irrespective of calculations as to self-interest. Or, to put it a little differently, our own happiness, our own welfare, cannot be conceived apart from our well-doing, or just action, and this well-doing is not merely the adding to our own security but the benefiting of others."15

Matters now take a surprising turn. One might expect Jaffa to reject the state-of-nature interpretation of the principle that no one has a right to rule. But in fact he does not do so. In a book published several years after Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa included an article that presents exactly the view just discussed. In reply to Felix Oppenheim, a defender of “value non-cognitivism,” Jaffa offered an interpretation of the Declaration of Independence that would show its framers need not have been either deceptive in their language nor false in the inferences that they intended to be drawn from it. The interpretation assumes “that by the right to life and liberty the framers meant the right of self-preservation and all the means necessary thereto. Let us assume that they regarded self-preservation as a right because they regarded it as the strongest human passion…."16 This seems exactly the starting point of the argument that Lincoln criticized. In the same article, Jaffa claims that the “imperatives of natural right have the character of the ‘then’ clause in an ‘if…then’ proposition.” Although in fact everyone does desire happiness, “the command as such is hypothetical, not categorical."17

No one will question the importance of self-preservation. But the point raised earlier remains: why is what men would agree to, in conditions in which they may act without restraint, of any relevance at all for morality?

Before proceeding, a question confronts us: has Jaffa contradicted himself? Has he altered his interpretation of the argument for equality? His emphasis may have changed, but I believe he can be acquitted of contradiction. Jaffa does not reject the hypothetical consent argument in the Lincoln passage.18 The “categorical imperative” there referred to is one that Lincoln felt bound to obey, given the nature of his personality. Jaffa does not claim that a moral rule unconditionally binds everyone, regardless of his ends. Further, the state-of-nature argument is not superseded. Rather, Lincoln’s aim is to supplement it when a government already exists.

In like fashion, Jaffa’s thrusts against Straussians who think that a Declaration of Independence rests on Hobbesian premises leave untouched the state-of-nature argument. He criticizes Walter Berns for “the unproved assumption that Hobbes is the philosophic progenitor of the American founding."19 The morality of natural rights “starts from rights not because rights are prior to duties — or that ‘rights’ is just a polite name for passions….The priority of rights reflects the authority of that Creator whose endowment they respect and who demands respect for them."20 But this is quite consistent with acceptance of the argument based on passion. Once a society based on natural rights has been properly organized, those capable of higher goals than bare self-preservation have a chance to pursue them. Jaffa thus denies that the views of the Declaration’s authors “were merely a compound of Hobbes’s materialism, atheism, and hedonism."21 At the same time, he can consistently assert: “In the American founding, comfortable self-preservation may be said to become the end of limited government."22 Since self-preservation does not replace prayer or thought as ends or principles of human life,"23 the self-preservation argument does not stand or fall with Hobbesian assumptions.

To conclude this part of the discussion, Jaffa advances two defenses of the principle that no person may rule another without his consent: the scale-of-being and the state-of-nature arguments. Neither succeeds.

But Jaffa, ever resourceful, has yet another argument that requires analysis. This argument straddles the border between theology and philosophy. It can best be approached by considering an objection to the scale-of-being argument. Suppose someone said: "Jaffa grants that God has the right to rule without the consent of human beings. If so, can he not delegate part of his power to others? And this delegation is just what I have received, delivered to me by direct revelation from God." How would Jaffa respond to our imagined objector?

He would resolutely reject the objector’s claim. Following Strauss, Jaffa maintains that not all claims to revelation are equal: the Biblical tradition ranks highest. Philosophy cannot show the falsity of religion, which rests on an act of faith. Tested against the Biblical tradition, the objector’s claim fails. The golden rule, a fundamental principle of Christianity, implies the egalitarian principle that Jaffa supports. Far from being at odds with reason, Biblical religion lends at least in this instance additional support to the claim that no one may rule another without his consent.

Each step of this argument is questionable. According to Jaffa, Strauss did not place Biblical revelation on the same level as the “theologies or theogonies of Greek poetry…. When Strauss speaks of revelation, he is speaking of faith founded in the Bible."24 I assume that Jaffa endorses Strauss’s opinion: in another article he criticizes Allan Bloom for believing “without argument that there is any learning ‘comparable’ to the Torah and Talmud."25 The key problem for Strauss (and presumably Jaffa) is that his philosophy gives him no basis to rank religions.

According to Strauss, “[p]hilosophy demands that revelation should establish its claim before the tribunal of human reason, but revelation as such refuses to acknowledge that tribunal."26 This refusal cannot be shown irrational, pending the production of a perfect philosophical system, the existence of which is “at least as improbable as the truth of the Bible."27 (In my view, the claim that philosophical argument shows ordinary religion to be improbable is entirely mistaken. But this is by the way.)

But if acceptance of revelation depends on an act of faith which philosophy cannot disprove, how does philosophy gain the power to rank revelations? How do Strauss and Jaffa know that religions based on the Bible ranks higher than any other religion that believes in an omnipotent God?28 Unless this claim is made good, Jaffa’s argument for equality is fatally flawed. Against assertions that God has ordained particular people to rule, he claims that the Bible teaches equality. But without an argument that Biblical revelation outranks any other, claims to rule based on non-Biblical revelation remain in the field. I assume that the claim of superior rank for the Bible is not intended exclusively as itself the outcome of an act of faith. Otherwise, Jaffa’s argument for equality would rely crucially on an act of faith; and he clearly does not want this. “But our social science, if it is to be of any use, must be addressed to Moslems and Jews as well as to Christians, to Buddhists and Hindus as well as to believers in the Bible. It must, finally, be addressed u2018not only to those who enjoy the blessing and consolation of revealed religion, but also to those who face the exigencies of human destiny alone.’”29

But let us grant the assumption that the Bible is superior to all other revelations: can the remainder of Jaffa’s argument be accepted? He finds support from Christianity for equality: “But if we ask what Jesus’s moral teaching was, we will find nothing more fundamental than the golden rule, the injunction found in Matthew 7:12 that ‘Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.’ Let us ask, however, who is the ‘you’ to whom this admonition is addressed? Is it not all human beings everywhere? Does not Jesus presuppose that with respect to their possession of rights, and their corresponding obligation to respect the rights of others, ‘all men are created equal’? In short, the doctrine of the Declaration is already implied in the Judaeo-Christian ethic. In a sense, it is the ground of that ethic."30

The ‘implication’ that Jaffa finds in the precept seems to have been deduced by other means than logic. The golden rule says nothing at all about whether people have political rights, much less equal rights. If people do have political rights, and everyone wishes others to respect his rights, the golden rule perhaps allows one to conclude that everyone ought to respect the rights of others. But how does one get from here to the claim that everyone has equal rights? I said that the precept “perhaps” allows us to deduce respect for rights because according to many Christians the rule applies only to personal relations, not to politics.31

More fundamentally, the interpretation of the golden rule, and its place within Christian teaching, cannot be determined in isolation. Various denominations have different views about the teaching of the Bible, and each prescribes to its members how the golden rule and other precepts are to be interpreted. Jaffa’s religious opinions are his own business, but he possesses no authority to tell others the meaning of a religion he does not share.32

Even if one thinks that the golden rule does teach the political equality of all men, it does require that no one rule another without his consent. Someone who thought that the Bible prescribed authoritarian government could consistently hold that everyone has an equal right to have such government instituted. By hypothesis, he believes that the regime he favors has been prescribed by God. He can thus now maintain that even if he were to have had some other belief about politics, he would want the true belief to be imposed on him. Thus, the golden rule allows him to impose his views on others.

Jaffa himself recognizes almost the identical point: “A community of Christians (or of a particular denomination of Christians) may ask themselves whether, in compelling non-Christians (or Christians of another denomination) to join their church, they are violating the golden rule not to do unto others what they would not have others do to them. But it is not likely that they will think in Kantian or categorical terms of what it would mean if everyone were at liberty to compel everyone else in matters of religious faith. It is much more likely that, thinking only of their own faith as an unqualified blessing, they would see nothing wrong in itself, or contrary to the golden rule, in using the compulsion for the sake of an end of whose goodness they have no doubt."33 Jaffa provides no refutation of this view of the golden rule. He cannot simply point to the contradiction with his principle of equality, since this would beg the question whether the golden rule implies his principle.

Even if Jaffa’s interpretation of the golden rule were correct, his argument would be incomplete. In order to show that the Biblical religions prescribe equality, Jaffa needs to show that Judaism also teaches this doctrine. But, so far as I am aware, he has not addressed the teaching of Judaism on political rights. He notes that according to the Old Testament, everyone is capable of recognizing “the wisdom and understanding of Israel,” which he takes to support the capacity of human nature, apart from revelation, to recognize wisdom.34 But this leaves the point just raised untouched.

Jaffa however advances an argument of his own against the imposition of religion. He tells us that “[r]eligious liberty is grounded in the metaphysical freedom of the mind. Because of this freedom, coercion in matters of faith is destructive of all merit in professions of faith. Therefore, a man’s civil rights can have no more dependence upon his religious opinions than upon his opinions in physics or geometry."35

What Jaffa means by “metaphysical” freedom is unclear. Elsewhere he speaks of the freedom to choose between good and evil as a condition of responsibility.36 Is this common-sense view the same as “metaphysical” freedom? Does Jaffa mean to endorse what is sometimes called “strong free will,” i.e., the view that one could have chosen otherwise than one actually did, even given precisely similar causal conditions? I do not know. I shall, subject to correction, assume that by metaphysical freedom Jaffa simply means freedom in the ordinary-language sense.

If Jaffa means this by freedom, his argument fails. If people are required under threat of legal penalty to profess belief, their freedom of the mind remains. They will presumably know whether they sincerely accept the established church or merely mouth the prescribed phrases to escape punishment. If they in fact believe what they are required to profess, why do their professions “lose all merit”? Similarly, laws against murder do not destroy the moral merit of respect for the lives of others, so long as one would not have killed even without a law against it.

Further, what if a religion teaches that even coerced belief has merit? Once more, Jaffa attempts without authority to prescribe religious doctrine. And even if he is entirely right that coerced faith has no merit, his argument does not rule out an established church. Suppose the church made no attempt to compel belief, but required people to pay taxes to it? Or suppose the church insisted on a certain form of government which had nothing to do with inducing people to accept the church’s teachings? Suppose, e.g., that a church taught that absolute monarchy with complete religious toleration was the best type of regime. In point of fact, the Parable of the Talents in the New Testament has sometimes been used to support the right of kings to rule. Jaffa’s argument provides no reason for believers to refrain from establishing a monarchy.

Jaffa’s invocation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition by no means indicates that his argument for equality rests on religious assumptions, as previously noted. How then can he claim that our “respect for the rights of others constitutes an essential element of our duty to God, our primary duty, and the duty antecedent to our rights"?37 The answer lies in the idiosyncratic meaning Jaffa gives the word “God.” In an odd passage, he contends: “Although the existence of God is certainly implied by the proposition that all men are created equal, it is not necessarily implied. What is necessarily implied is not the Creator, but Creation.38 Implication between propositions is necessary: whatever can Jaffa mean by “implies” but not “necessarily implies”? Is he appealing to systems of modal logic in which “it is necessary that p” does not entail “it is necessary that it is necessary that p”? More plausibly, does he mean that a Creator is conventionally implied by the proposition, but not logically implied?

I suggest that the 1atter is a close, but not a perfect representation of Jaffa’s meaning. Jaffa does, it seems to me, wish to suggest that belief that men are created equal does not logically require a God distinct from creation. But the belief still does imp1y that God exists, since God need not be seen as distinct from creation. In fine, belief in God simply becomes equated with the acceptance of an objective order of nature.39

This suggestion receives support from another strange passage. Discussing the view that the Declaration of Independence takes of governmental power, Jaffa remarks: “The same God may, under his different aspects…without any conflict of interest arising from a diversity within himself…. The three-personed God…may be distinguished however from the originating Deity denominated as Creator."40 God acquires attributes with the creation; once more God seems to be equated with the order of nature and the Creator apart from nature relegated to the unknowable: he is assigned no diverse aspects.

But if Jaffa does not mean by “God” the God professed by ordinary Jews and Christians, why does he use theological terms so extensively? The answer, it seems to me, is that Jaffa wishes to promote a “civil religion” that will secure popular support for his political doctrine. Jaffa maintains that in the ancient world, people believed that their laws ultimately stemmed from a god peculiar to their city. “Every city either had a god as its lawgiver, or received them [laws] from a legislator who had in turn received them from a god.41 In these conditions, popular consent is not needed. People will obey the laws that they believe their city’s god has instituted. But Christianity substitutes a universal God, with whom people can become related apart from their political arrangements. Consent based on equality must replace the rules of the ancient city.42

Jaffa thus intends his interpretation of Biblical religion to accomplish for the modern world what belief in the city’s gods did for the ancient: obedience by the people to the proper system of law. Jaffa quite rightly notes that Christianity allows persons a relation to God independent of their political community; but as he also well knows, many Christian churches have gained religious control of the state. Hence his constant insistence not only on religious toleration, but on the “fact” that Christianity teaches this. He must at all costs defuse any religious teaching that threatens the political views he holds to be correct.

Jaffa praises Abraham Lincoln for his use of religious rhetoric to advance popular belief in his political principles. Lincoln “incorporated the truths of the Declaration of Independence into a social and ritual canon, making them objects of faith as well as cognition."43 Lincoln taught a “political religion which creates ‘reverence for the laws.’"44 To Lincoln, the law does not command assent to religion; rather, “it is the function of religious doctrine to command assent to the rule of law."45 Political considerations can settle questions of religious dogma: thus Lincoln rejected emphasis on human sinfulness. This threatened the views about human nature he took to be essential to the success of political reform.46

In Jaffa’s interpretation, Lincoln carried the political use of religion to what can only be called extraordinary lengths: “Lincoln acted the role of high priest in the Civil War, a conflict which he interpreted, in his two famous utterances, as a divine affliction, designed to transform a merely political union into a sacramental one."47

If one sees Jaffa as attempting to carry on the path blazed by Lincoln, many of the difficulties we have raised dissolve. Instead of asking: what evidence does Jaffa have for seeing Jesus as a proto-Lincoln, we should instead ask: how does Jaffa wish to use the Bible to advance his own views? The blatant weakness of his arguments, taken as factual claims, emerge in a different light if they form part of a myth elaborated for other ends.

But a new difficulty confronts Jaffa. He strongly supports religious tolerance: but may one openly dissent from the political religion he favors? If he disallows dissent, then his ‘religion’ does not practice the tolerance it preaches; if he allows it, he puts at risk the tutelary ends of his ersatz religion. In a discussion of civil and political rights for political parties which aim to deprive others of equal rights, Jaffa maintains that these groups have no guaranteed liberties. The question of what to do about such groups “must be a prudential one.” Although it may be counterproductive to deny rights to the intolerant, “a free society cannot be neutral towards the morality of citizenship, without being neutral towards itself. And this is absurd."48 I cannot think that open dissent from the principle of equality has a bright future in a society run on Jaffa’s rules.

I do not suggest that in his political view of religion Jaffa is hypocritical; but to explain why not, I fear, requires further resort to speculation. Some writers, such as Shadia Drury, have discovered in Strauss and his school a carefully concealed atheism;49 but I do not think this correct. The political view of religion Jaffa supports is entirely consistent with the theology he and Strauss find most plausible. Jaffa normally writes with pellucid clarity; but one passage in a recent essay is a conspicuous exception: “If it is true, as some say, that God created ex nihilo, then God Himself belonged to the Nothing that was prior to Creation. That is to say, the highest reality is predicated if that Being — God — whose nothingness (uncreatedness) is of the essence of his perfection…. God, as potentiality rather than actuality, is non-being rather than being, at least as non-being and being are understood by merely human intelligence. Moreover, to say that ‘nothing prevents anything from changing or being changed into anything else…’ is to say nothing different than saying that nothing (viz. Nothing) limits the power of God.”50

When I first read this, I was inclined to dismiss it as murky Heideggerian metaphysics; but in fact the remarks are of crucial significance to understanding both Strauss and Jaffa. They express a standard doctrine of several Kabbalists. The foremost historian of Kabbalah (and incidentally Strauss’s friend), Gershom Scholem, clarifies Jaffa’s dark saying: “More daring is the concept of the first step in the manifestation of Ein-Sof [the Infinite] as ayin or afisah (‘nothing,’ ‘nothingness’). Essentially, this nothingness is the barrier confronting the human intellectual faculty when it reaches the limits of its capacity. In other words, it is a subjective statement affirming that there is a realm which no created being can intellectually comprehend, and which, therefore, can only be defined as ‘nothingness.’ This idea is associated also with its opposite concept, namely, that since in reality there is no differentiation in God’s first step toward manifestation, this step…can thus only be described as ‘nothingness’…. its particular importance is seen in the radical transformation of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo into a mystical theory stating the precise opposite of what appears to be the literal meaning of the phrase. The monotheistic meaning of creatio ex nihilo loses its meaning and is completely reversed by the esoteric content of the formula…. This view, however, remained a secret belief and was concealed behind the use of the orthodox formula…”51

In brief, the term Jaffa applies to God suggests that he rejects the usual understanding of creation out of nothing. More generally, Strauss, whom Jaffa follows here as always, interpreted several medieval Jewish and Arab thinkers as teaching a philosophical religion rather than religion as popularly understood. In Strauss’s interpretation, philosophers play a key role: when he refers to “prophets” he means them.

As Scholem suggests in a letter to Walter Benjamin, the beginning of Strauss’s early book Philosophy and Law offers a key to his views on religion. According to Strauss, the foremost Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, held that the “prophet as philosopher-statesman-seer (miracle-worker) in one is the founder of the ideal state…understood according to Plato’s guidance: the prophet is the founder of the Platonic state."52

In this conception, a prophet does not receive a communication from a personal God. Instead, “[p]hilosophical understanding of Revelation and philosophical grounding of the Law thus means the explanation of prophecy out of the nature of man."53 But does not a prophet foretell the future? Here too Strauss takes Maimonides to be making a point about philosophy: “That the prophet…has command over the things of the intellect and over the knowledge of the future thus signifies that the prophet has command over both (perfect) theoretical and practical knowledge."54

The significance of Strauss’s project needs to be underlined. I do not think that he is suggesting that Maimonides advocates irreligion in the guise of religion.55 Rather, if his interpretation is correct, then philosophical teaching is true religion. Maimonides is not “just anybody” but a foremost expounder of medieval Rabbinic Judaism. Thus, if one accepts the perspective of Maimonides, religion is not abandoned: it is correctly understood. As Jaffa has rightly noted, the epigraph to Strauss’s study of Plato’s Laws offers a clue to Strauss’s thought. And this epigraph, taken from the medieval Arab philosopher Avicenna, exactly confirms our view of what Strauss means by prophecy: “The treatment of prophecy and the Divine Law is contained in… the Laws [of Plato]."56

An obvious objection arises. Why should one think that Strauss’s interpretation of another thinker gives his own opinion? An answer may be found in a second key to understanding Strauss: the unabridged version of his “Farabi’s Plato.” Strauss ascribes to al-Farabi, a tenth-century Islamic philosopher of major importance, this principle: “Farabi avails himself then of the specific immunity of the commentator, or of the historian, in order to speak his mind concerning grave matters in his ‘historical works’ rather than in the works setting forth what he presents as his own doctrine."57

Of course it does not follow that Strauss used the same principle in his own work. But fully conceding that I am speculating, I think that he did so. And this very essay, if interpreted in the way I suggest, confirms the view that Strauss’s praise of “religion” depends on the peculiar sense he gives that term. If religion is understood as “essentially the property of a particular community,” then religious speculation is “inferior to grammar and poetry.” Popular religion is not a live option: Farabi “has infinitely more in common with a philosophic materialist than with any non-philosophic believer, however well-intentioned.”58

As one might expect, Farabi did not use “divine” in its customary acceptation. “Farabi’s u2018divine’ does not necessarily refer to the superhuman origin of a passion, e.g., but may simply designate its excellence…. what he called u2018divine’ in the first statement, is finally called by him u2018human.’”59

But what is the point of all this? Why present philosophy in the guise of an interpretation of religion rather than on its own? In part, the answer lies in fear of persecution; but the more basic reason is far from defensive. By their reinterpretation, philosophers can realize a “secret kingship”; without direct attack on popular belief, they nevertheless achieve an “undermining of accepted opinions."60 Thus, both al-Farabi and Maimonides, according to Strauss, do not intend their use of religious terms to be read in a popular sense. This does not imply that they adopt a “non-literal” understanding: they, and Strauss also, take their usage to be the correct sense. As Strauss sums up: “[A]s philosophers they [Maimonides and the Arabic philosophers] must indeed try to understand the given Law. This understanding is made possible for them by Plato and only by Plato."61 And as the last link in the chain, Strauss notes that Maimonides considered al-Farabi the greatest authority in philosophy after Aristotle.62

It is hardly surprising that Gershom Scholem, thoroughly familiar with his friend’s position, considered Strauss an atheist. He complained that Strauss’s open expression of his atheism in Philosophy and Belief prevented Scholem from obtaining for Strauss a position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He comments in a letter of March 26, 1936, to the great critic Walter Benjamin: “The book [Philosophy and Law] begins with an unfeigned and copiously argued if completely ludicrous affirmation of atheism as the most important Jewish watchword."63

Along similar lines, the contemporary philosopher Emmanuel Levinas contends that Strauss sees a “cryptogram in the whole of philosophy…in which Reason secretly fights against religion."64 The views of Scholem and Levinas are right, if by religion one means belief in a personal God; but if one takes ‘religion’ the way Strauss himself does, he is most decidedly not an unbeliever. When, in a perceptive essay, Frederick Wilhelmsen asks why “the school of Leo Strauss” never seriously examines Christian philosophy,65 the answer can be found in the interpretation we have suggested. True religion consists of philosophers in “the quest [for truth] which alone makes life worth living.” To identify a particular human being, and a non-philosopher at that, as God incarnate would for Strauss be the quintessence of superstition. This is not the revelation he is prepared to take seriously.

But if this is what Strauss means by revelation, why does he speak of an opposition between reason and revelation? On the view I have imputed to him, would not they be virtually identical? The solution requires reference once more to Strauss’s characterization of miracle. A “miracle” must I think be taken as a successful effort by philosophers to establish a regime on appropriate principles. Charles McCoy has it exactly right: “u2018God’ is u2018camouflage’ for u2018wise rule.’”66 But philosophy, taken as a rigorous science, cannot show that philosophers will succeed in this endeavor: on the contrary, success is unlikely but not impossible. This constitutes the opposition between reason and faith.

This assessment of what Strauss means by revelation receives support from this significant passage: “[R]evelation is either a brute fact, to which nothing in purely human experience corresponds — in that case it is an oddity of no human importance — or it is a meaningful fact, a fact required by human experience to solve the fundamental problems of man — in that case it may very well be the product of reason, of the human attempt to solve the problem of human life.”67

In the paragraph of “Progress or Return?” which follows, Strauss appears to respond to this suggestion from the standpoint of standard religious revelation, but in fact he does not do so. He notes that revelation is “not meant to be accessible to unassisted reason” and refuses to acknowledge the tribunal of human reason. “But God has said or decided that he wants to dwell in mist.” This leaves entirely untouched Strauss’s assertion in the previous paragraph. He never says that revelation stems from a supernatural personal being. Strauss asserts that “philosophy recognizes only such experience as can be had by all men at all times in broad daylight.”68 Nevertheless, the practice of philosophy is confined to an elite. His "defense" of revelation, then, merely claims that judged by the capacities of which all humans are capable, the wisdom of philosophers appears mysterious.

That Jaffa accepts the position just described I cannot demonstrate; but it is, I suggest, the view of religion he finds most plausible. If so, the “political religion” he finds in the Declaration reflects the religious position he thinks most likely to be correct, if any religion is in fact true. God is immanent in creation and unknowable apart from it. One can now understand how he ranks religions, when at first it appears that philosophy has no credentials to do so. Since true religion is philosophy, Jaffa’s ranking is from his own perspective legitimate.

Strauss’s emphasis on esoteric writing has aroused endless fascination, and many have tried to plumb the "secret of Strauss." I fear that I have been no exception; but even if the line of thought just suggested misses the mark, our less speculative results remain. Jaffa has still not arrived at a sound argument for the principle that no one may rule another without his consent.

But even if one does accept the principle, the conclusions Jaffa draws from it do not follow. Jaffa maintains that each person’s right to rule does not become valuable to him until everyone transfers his right to a government.69 But the government cannot operate by unanimous consent: a majority must therefore act as the representative of the whole. It in turn can delegate its power to another type of government, although it is generally desirable that the government be democratic.70

No doubt people can, if they wish, unanimously form a government; but why is the right of self-government valuable only if an agreement of this kind is made? Suppose that in the state of nature, a minimal state arises in the way discussed by Robert Nozick. Or suppose people establish protection agencies to secure their natural rights, and these agencies in turn settle disputes among themselves by negotiation, as Murray Rothbard and other libertarians have suggested.71 Would the right of self-government be without value in these circumstances? Why?

Further, if people do unanimously agree to form a government, why must power be delegated to a majority? Of course Jaffa is correct that a large group cannot decide all issues unanimously; but many different tradeoffs between the benefits of unanimous consent and the costs of securing agreement are possible.72

Jaffa might respond that rules other than a simple majority do not “make every individual equally the source of legitimate authority."73 But this is first of all false: a rule requiring, say, two-thirds majority for legislation does not pick out particular citizens and lower the value of their votes. Rather, it requires whoever wants to pass a law of a certain kind to secure the required proportion of votes. Approval and disapproval of laws are treated unequally, not citizens. Further, it does not follow from the principle that no one can be governed without his consent that rule must be democratic.74 Why cannot people consent to undemocratic rule? Why, e.g., cannot the citizens transfer their right to rule to a Hobbesian sovereign? If they do so, they are not subject to rule without their consent.

I suspect that Jaffa would object to both libertarianism and Hobbesianism on similar grounds. Against the former, he might contend that: “[b]ecause human kings are not gods, no man is permitted to be a judge in his own cause."75 Rothbard’s system, in particular, allows people directly to punish those who violate their rights: they need not delegate their power of enforcement to others, however prudent it may be to do so.

This objection fails on several counts. Most obviously, it leaves untouched variants of libertarianism which do not allow self-enforcement. Nozick’s minimal state, e.g., considerably restricts self-enforcement through the prohibition of risky decision-procedures. Further, Jaffa himself seems sometimes to recognize the legitimacy of a direct response to a violation of one’s rights: “Everyone knows that he may, if necessary and at any time, take ‘the law into his own hands,’ either to defend himself, or to defend other innocent persons from unlawful violence. No positive law can repeal this natural law."76 How can Jaffa hold this and maintain at the same time that one cannot be a judge in his own cause? If he means something else than a direct response by “judge not in his own cause,” what is it?

More fundamentally, how does man’s not being God imply his inability to judge his own cause? Perhaps the argument is that someone who judges in his own cause will be unable to restrain his passions: not controlled by reason, he will judge unfairly. Certainly this poses a problem; but why does the needed control of one’s passions require superhuman virtue? What if someone is able to overcome bias in his own favor? May he be a judge in his own cause?77

Jaffa might raise a parallel contention against unanimous surrender to a Hobbesian sovereign: “The three powers of government are then symbolically present in the Declaration of Independence as aspects of that God in the Declaration who results from Creation, and who is the pattern and support for government in agreement with the rights of man…. The same God may, under his different aspects or functions, legislate, judge, and execute, without any conflict of interest arising from a diversity within himself. But the people, although by law one, remain a composition of relatively discrete individuals, whose passions…are seldom in harmony with each other. Hence the individual persons who compose the legislative, judicial and the executive powers of human government must (unlike God) be really different."78

This argument rests on a dubious assumption. Since the people unified in a commonwealth retain their separate identities, their form of government must mirror this separation. Otherwise, the person holding all the powers of government will copy powers belonging to God. But why is it wrong to do this? If the answer lies in the inability of a single officeholder to avoid the abuse of power, this may well count strongly against an all-powerful sovereign. But the question is empirical: it has not been shown that every Hobbesian sovereign abuses power.79 Even if one forbids a single person to hold complete power, a system might feature several sovereigns, like the Spartan kings. Jaffa has failed to show that alternatives to his majority rule scheme must be rejected.

Not content with an argument for the form of government, Jaffa deduces details of its construction from the scale of being. “Because mere humans are called upon to judge other humans, …punishments should be neither u2018cruel’ nor u2018unusual.’”80 One may readily acknowledge that punishment ought to be humane; but, once again, how does this moral principle follow from the fact that man is not God? Is it that if we were infallible in judging criminals, we would be able to impose cruel punishment? This seems wrong: cruelty is immoral even if the criminal’s guilt is certain.

In sum, Jaffa’s use of natural theology to support a principle of consent and to derive a form of government appropriate to that principle fails completely.

II

A radical opinion threatens to undermine all of Jaffa’s political philosophy. According to many contemporaries, values reduce to arbitrary preferences. It makes no sense to speak of rational ends: rationality exclusively concerns means. "True" and "false" apply only to statements about the world, but judgments of value are independent of the course of events. As Ernest van den Haag puts it: “For unbelievers and for a secular state, nature merely lets us know possibilities and the consequences of our choices, without telling us what to choose."81

To Jaffa, this view leads to nihilism: its wide popularity has weakened resistance to tyranny and immorality. Further, if morality consists purely of preferences, Jaffa cannot carry on his argument for equal consent. According to subjectivism, Jaffa’s principle reflects his preferences. Others have different preferences, and no reasonable way exists to determine who is right.

Jaffa accordingly regards it as a prime task to vindicate the objectivity of morals. He has especially addressed the issue in his “In Defense of the ‘Natural Law Thesis,’” and I propose to examine his arguments at some length.82 Before doing so, however, I emphasize that my purpose is not to show that morality is subjective. Quite the contrary, I agree with Jaffa that morality is objective. Further, none of my arguments in this or the previous section relies on the assumption that values cannot be derived from facts.

Jaffa begins his defense of natural-law ethics on a dubious note. Felix E. Oppenheim, a “value non-cognitivist,” claims that “[v]alue words do not designate objects, and it is misleading to use nouns such as ‘Justice’ and ‘Goodness’” (p. 191). Jaffa responds by noting the drastic consequences Oppenheim’s suggestion if adopted would have for ordinary language. Jaffa maintains that “grammatical forms are an important index to human consciousness of reality, and the grammar Oppenheim rejects is, so far as I am aware, universal” (p. 191).

Jaffa has wrongly accepted Oppenheim’s dubious argument. Oppenheim and Jaffa agree that if "justice" does not designate an object, the term strictly has no place in language. But to hold that the meaning of a term is always an object to which it refers is a questionable view. Gilbert Ryle memorably satirized “the traditional belief that to ask what does the expression ‘E’ mean is to ask To what ‘E’ stands in the relation in which ‘Fido’ stands to Fido?…the question whether a designator does apply to anything cannot arise until after we know what, if anything, it means. The things it applies to, if any, cannot therefore…be ingredients in what it means."83

Jaffa might disagree and still wish to maintain that meaning is reference. If so, he owes us some argument: he should not assume the truth of a very controversial position. But why must Jaffa defend himself? Even if he is mistaken about language, what has this to do with ethics? It will become apparent below that Jaffa’s assumptions about meaning infect his arguments about values.

Unfortunately, Jaffa has not yet finished with meaning. He informs us that “[s]peech presupposes common experiences. If we speak of our feelings, it is because we believe that others feel what we feel.” (p. 193). Although this belief is essential to communication, we cannot prove it: “We have no way of proving, of being certain beyond doubt, that when we say ‘sweet’ the word conveys the same thing to anyone else in the world…. [but] most people act as if it does, and we think it most improbable that they would so act if they did not experience ‘sweet’ as we do.” (p. 193).

Jaffa makes the “Fido”-Fido theory even worse. Now, terms designate private objects, not meant to be accessible to others. Jaffa’s claim that others probably mean the same thing by "sweet" as I do will not work. In his account, "sweet" designates, and hence means, a private experience. The expression “the same experience as I have when I experience sweet” does not designate anything: each experience of "sweet" is private to the person who has it. No criteria for the use of the expression have been proposed. Since this expression does not point to anything, by Jaffa’s theory it is meaningless.84

The difficulty for Jaffa’s account of language could not be greater. He not only thinks that words like "sweet" designate private objects: he maintains that our perception of physical objects takes place by the application of concepts to sense-data (p. 196). Why does Jaffa assume without argument that we do not directly perceive physical objects? I do not say that he errs in doing so, but the issue requires argument.85 However important this issue, a different problem confronts Jaffa. On his view, we cannot communicate about physical objects at all, since the sense data to which they refer (= mean) are private. Perhaps Jaffa rejects the well-known argument against private language just rehearsed: if so, he owes us an accounting.86

At times, Jaffa appears to recognize that communication requires something other than private objects. “Sensation, or a judgment of the mind utilizing only the data of the senses, is not sufficient to make possible a judgment of fact.” (p. 196) How then do we make such judgments? “Empirical knowledge…is a synthesis of sense data with definitions, universals, in terms of which the sense data are ordered. …What is indisputable, I think, is that every noun, such as ‘chair,’ is entirely subjective in that it is a priori with respect to the sense-data it orders and pre-exists in the mind of the man making the judgment of fact before he makes it. Yet it is objective insofar as it forms a predicate that is inter-subjectively communicable and presupposes an order of things common to the speaker and his actual or potential addressees” (p. 196).

Jaffa rightly sees that language cannot be based exclusively on sense data. He thus wishes a term to mean a combination of a concept and a group of sense-data. But this makes no sense: the concept of something is its meaning. Something’s meaning cannot consist of its meaning plus something else. Perhaps Jaffa means that a perceived object consists of sense-data organized according to a pattern: "table" refers to sense-data grouped in a table-like way. But then, the meaning of "table" once more consists entirely of incommunicable private sensations. (Remember, for Jaffa meaning = designation.) Nor will it help to bring in a world of common objects. If we perceive nothing but sense-data, how do we gain access to the common world? What constitutes referring to a common object? And if one somehow does succeed in referring to “the order of common things,” does each term have two meanings — the common object and the collection of sense-data? Also, what about terms such as "sweet" to which no common object corresponds? Not content with two theories of meaning, Jaffa ventures a third: “The common experience presupposed by speech presupposes in its turn a world of objects common to the speakers. Accordingly, the inter-subjectivity of language presupposes the objectivity and identity of the communicating subjects…. They must be identical, in the sense that the cause of our access to the world of objects must be the same, for the objects to be conceived as being the same” (p. 193).

Here total confusion reigns. Jaffa first claims, as one would expect from his belief that meaning is designation, that common experience presupposes common objects. From this he infers that communicating subjects must have identical ways of grasping the world: thus, a blind man cannot understand what the colors of a sunset designate. But on Jaffa’s account, each person uses his concepts to organize private sense-data: the fact that people have identical mechanisms of perception does not suffice to secure common meaning. Each person still designates (= means, in Jaffa’s idiolect) private objects. Even if one sets this problem aside, the same mechanisms of perception do not assure that communication is possible. Suppose we directly see external objects, but people radically differ in the objects they see. On Jaffa’s view of meaning, how could one grasp the meaning of an external object that only others had seen? Further, why are identical mechanisms necessary for communication? It seems plausible that sharp differences in how people perceive things may impede their ability to communicate: but why is identity needed?

One might well ask why Jaffa has begun an account of ethics with a discussion of language. He attempts by his discussion to lay the basis for a fatal blow against ethical subjectivism. “What is purely subjective, as the value non-cognitivist tells us every intrinsic value judgment is, is incapable of communication” (p. 193).

This argument fares no better than usual for Jaffa. On his theory of language, every term designates, at least in part, a private object incapable of communication to others. Value-terms, as the subjectivist views them, are no worse off than all terms, by Jaffa’s account of meaning. Jaffa himself seems aware of a similar point: “Let me now show why ‘intrinsic value judgments’ and ‘empirical knowledge’ are equally subjective and, for this reason, equally objective” (p. 196). (Jaffa’s point is not identical with mine because he means value judgments as he conceives of them, not as the subjectivist does.) Oddly enough, Jaffa takes the point as telling in favor of value-objectivity. But it does not follow from intrinsic value judgments having as much objectivity as empirical judgments that either is objective.

Jaffa’s contention that subjective value judgments cannot be communicated rests on an even more fundamental error. The “value non-cognitivist” denies that ethical judgments are true or false, independent of preferences. This is what he wishes to convey by calling value judgments subjective: he need not contend that such preferences rest upon ineffable feelings. Likes and dislikes obviously can be communicated: if whenever liver is served I make a face and refuse to eat it, have I not expressed my dislike for it? Jaffa has confused two senses of "subjective": "without truth-value apart from preference" and "incommunicable."

Jaffa also uses his analysis of language to show how we may arrive at objective judgments of value. “If I make the judgment ‘this is a good chair,’ I do not thereby premise any reality different from that assumed to exist in my merely factual statement. I merely affirm that the object before me fulfills adequately or completely the requirements specified in my concept of a chair… .The unqualified term applies only to the perfect object” (pp. 196—197).

Jaffa’s argument rests crucially on his confusion of meaning and referring. He says, in effect: "When I point to a good chair, I am just pointing to a chair: the goodness of the chair adds nothing to it. Since everyone acknowledges that the judgment u2018this is a chair’ is cognitive, so is u2018this is a good chair.’ It adds nothing to the first judgment."

Even if Jaffa were right about the reference of "good chair," his argument that judgments of value are cognitive would fail. A subjectivist could respond: “‘Good chair” has exactly the reference Jaffa thinks it does. Still, to call a chair good means something beyond identifying it as a chair: it expresses our approval of the fact that the chair is not deficient." But is Jaffa correct about the reference of "good chair"? I am inclined to think that the reference of "chair" and "good chair" need not be identical. If I say "I am going to have my chair reupholstered; the stuffing is coming out of the seat," it seems to me that I am referring to a genuine chair, not an analogical one: "it is that chair, that very one over there in the corner, that needs to be fixed." But this is merely my linguistic intuition against Jaffa’s: readers must judge for themselves.

According to Jaffa, the controversy can be resolved through argument. He notes that one can imagine a chair becoming increasingly defective “until we can only say ‘it was a chair.’ Finally, it becomes a mere heap of broken lumber, unrecognizable as bearing any more relation to a chair than to any other possible wooden object. When did it cease to be a chair? Only when it lost all traces of its original form? If it did not cease to be a chair when the first damage was done, it did not cease to be a chair when the last damage was done. What has ceased in even the smallest measure to be a chair is, to that extent, not a chair” (p. 197).

The last sentence of this argument should at once be dismissed from consideration. No doubt something that is not a chair is not a chair: but just the point in dispute is whether a deficient chair is a chair. As to the main argument, why is it the case that if a sufficiently damaged "chair" can no longer be regarded as a chair, then even a slightly imperfect chair is not a chair in the strict sense? Is Jaffa’s argument that there is no non-arbitrary point apart from this to draw the line? But why must there be a point at which a chair ceases to exist? Why should we not rather say that the boundaries of "chair" cannot be exactly determined?

Jaffa’s argument is a variation of the sorites, or paradox of the heap; and although this argument raises complicated logical problems, one can readily see it will wreak havoc if deployed in a simpleminded way. Suppose one removed a single atom from a "perfect" chair. Would it not retain its existence as a chair undiminished? But if the removal of a single atom cannot change a chair into something else, neither will the removal of a single atom from the altered chair. By continuing the argument, one can show that a single atom is a chair. Unless Jaffa wants to involve himself in some very intricate arguments, he had better leave the heap alone.87

Jaffa applies his claim about the meaning of "good object" to morality in this passage: “Judgments of the excellence of objects may become moral judgments when the object under consideration is a man, since moral judgments are judgments of human excellence… We judge a man good in virtue of the presence of humanity in the living organism before us” (pp. 197—198).

Although Jaffa does not here spell out the argument, presumably the contention is that a non-deficient man must be morally virtuous. An immoral man is not fully a man.

This conclusion will by itself not disturb the subjectivist. He can readily admit that someone who lacks a full complement of the Aristotelian virtues is not in the strict sense human. But he may deny that "one ought to approach as closely as possible to strict humanity" is objectively true. Why need it matter to someone if he is in Jaffa’s term deficient? The subjectivist I have conjured up challenges, not Jaffa’s definition of human excellence, but his assertion that “moral judgments are judgments of human excellence.” A moral judgment tells us what we ought to do. And just as it does not follow that whenever we build a chair, we ought to build a perfect chair, it is not a requirement of reason that one morally ought to attempt to become a perfect man. If this appears counterintuitive, perhaps this example will help: If a deficient man is a man only by analogy, then he is strictly something else. We introduce an arbitrary term for this "something else," viz., "*man." A *man is a deficient man, but a man is likewise a deficient *man. Why is one deficiency of greater moral relevance than the other?88

Although Jaffa’s article does not develop his ethics in detail, he offers an argument designed to show that the policy of an “unreconstructed Nazi” who aims at world conquest is irrational. If the argument is right, then the subjectivist is wrong to claim that all moral judgments are mere preferences on the same level. The proof of Nazi irrationality is this: “The Nazi…if he were asked to say why subjecting others to his will was good, would answer that in this he found his greatest satisfaction. Yet in contemplating this satisfaction he would realize (if he thought it through) that this satisfaction would be denied him if he were master of the world surrounded exclusively by slaves. It requires the testimony, not of slaves, but of other masters, to be convinced of one’s mastery” (p. 203).

The argument continues for some length, but let us pause to evaluate this part of it. First, Jaffa relies on an implicit philosophical psychology the conclusions of which he imputes without argument to his imagined Nazi. Jaffa thinks that everyone aims at his own happiness and that recognition by others occupies a key role in securing happiness.89 But what if the Nazi aimed at world conquest because he took this as a moral imperative? Why need something other than the goal itself motivate him? Further, what if he wishes to achieve the goal of conquest and does not care whether others recognize that he has done so? (The latter suggestion allows him to be motivated by his own satisfaction.) If Jaffa replies that both of these possibilities are excluded by a correct account of motivation, he needs to argue for his account, not just state that Aristotle held it (p. 205).

Even if the Nazi does wish recognition, it is not clear why the slaves do not provide it. How can one have better recognition of mastership than having everyone outside one’s own group recognize one as master? Does Jaffa think that the slaves will refuse to acknowledge the Nazi as their master? Or is it that they do not know they are slaves? Neither seems remotely tenable.

Perhaps Jaffa means that since the Nazi holds the slaves in contempt, he will not value their recognition. But there is no reason to think a master must hold his slaves in contempt: perhaps he likes enslaving opponents whose power he respects. (It would not be a good reply here to claim that actual Nazis did hold various groups in contempt: the whole example is one contrived by Jaffa, not dependent on historical accuracy.) And even if he does hold the slaves in contempt, why does this block his winning the recognition of mastery we have assumed him to desire? If what he wants is recognition by those he respects, yet another goal has been postulated by Jaffa. But we have not yet considered the most plausible reason for Jaffa’s view of recognition. This emerges in the argument’s continuation.

The Nazi “depends, at the least, upon the praise and fellowship of fellow master-race members. But, by equal reason, the master race itself cannot know itself to be a master race in a world in which there are only slaves and no enemies. Its sense of its own mastery is dependent upon the possibility of war. If, then, through victory in war, a master race extinguished all actual and potential equals, all enemies, it would have to turn itself…upon itself…. But, in making enemies of his friends, which his commitment to war logically entails, our Nazi would be destroying the basis for the satisfaction he now takes in contemplating victory in war" (pp. 203—204).

This passage might be taken to mean that each Nazi depends on the recognition of potentially equal enemies for recognition: perhaps this is why he cannot be satisfied with recognition by slaves. But Jaffa’s statement itself answers this claim. Each Nazi can receive recognition from “his fellow master-race members.” And, aside from this, we have still not been given a reason why the individual Nazi cannot find the recognition Jaffa postulates that he wishes from slaves.

But what of the new argument about the master-race as a group? This, if anything, has more problems than the first part. Why should one assume that the group as a whole seeks recognition? According to Jaffa, each Nazi wants recognition: but it is a blatant fallacy of composition to conclude from this that the group taken as a collective also seeks recognition. Even if it did, why does the destruction of all actual or potential enemies impede the master-race’s knowledge of its mastership? I should have thought that knowing that one has destroyed all actual or possible enemies is very good evidence indeed of mastery.

Jaffa has confused two types of mastery. In the first, the master defeats, or is capable of defeating, all rivals. In the second, several roughly equal opponents confront one another, one of whom wins or can win. In the latter case, too much of an initial advantage will prevent mastery from being attained: close rivals are needed. If Jaffa has this latter situation in mind, what he says about mastery becomes plausible. But he has not given the slightest reason to think that his Nazi must want this kind of mastery.

But suppose he is right; and, in order to achieve recognition, groups within the master-race must become rivals. How does this undermine the value of friendship? Why could not the members of each new group remain friends? Is the argument that if one group wins, it in turn will have to split, and so on? But why must the process continue until few or none within the group are friends? Would not new rivals be likely to arise? Further, why should one assume that Jaffa’s Nazis value friendship? He notes that the actual Nazis did; but he has forgotten that his case is a philosophical argument rather than a report of historical fact. Why must the members of the master-race who give the Nazi recognition be his friends?

But suppose Jaffa is entirely right in his argument. All he has shown is that in certain conditions a policy of world conquest cannot be maintained over a long period. He has said nothing to rule out groups that aim to dominate smaller areas. What if the Nazis wished to achieve European dominance rather than literal world conquest? Why is pursuit of this goal irrational? And what if the Nazis were to recognize that they cannot permanently gain satisfaction from world conquest? Why could they not aim at conquest for as long as possible? It is not apparent that rationality requires that one have an ultimate goal the pursuit of which can be indefinitely continued.

Jaffa concludes from his argument that the Nazi ought to prefer liberal democracy to Nazism, if he values his own satisfaction. “‘If you would be happy, then you must be virtuous.’” This argument fails also, even if one disregards the obvious point that Jaffa has done nothing to show liberal democracy is required for happiness. Suppose that only a virtuous person can be happy, and that virtue entails commitment to liberal democracy. This does not suffice to show that Jaffa’s Nazi can be happy by attempting to become virtuous. Jaffa began his example with the assumption that the Nazi derives his greatest satisfaction from subduing others to his will. If so, and if only a virtuous person can attain happiness, the proper conclusion appears to be that the Nazi cannot obtain happiness, given his desires. The Nazi, instructed by Jaffa, may think that he would be better off if he were to have different preferences; but perhaps he cannot alter his desires. If so, Jaffa’s argument gives him no reason to prefer liberal democracy, even if the Nazi concedes that his goal is unattainable. He will not get full satisfaction from either Nazism or liberal democracy, but he might be better off under the former system.

Ever fertile with arguments, Jaffa advances yet another thrust against moral subjectivism. The moral non-cognitivist aims to bring about what he considers the best state of affairs, but "the comparative estimate of consequences…is, apart from an objective idea of happiness, impossible, for it leads theoretically to an infinite regress. Consider: I might estimate that course of action A is desirable because it leads to state of affairs A’ which I now consider most desirable. However, the achievement of A’ will cause me to value, not A’, but B’, and my present degree of dissatisfaction will be reduplicated. Unfortunately, I cannot resolve this dilemma by choosing B, since not B but A leads to the preference for B’ — and so forth" (p. 207).90

I find it unclear what Jaffa regards as the difficulty for non-cognitivism. The non-cognitivist will each time choose what he then thinks most desirable. Whatever his choice, he will afterwards think he should have chosen otherwise. But how does his regret pose a problem for the theory? It does not follow from his wish that he had chosen otherwise that he is worse off, or thinks himself worse off, than he was when he made the original choice. He does think that he is not as well off as he might have been had he chosen otherwise, but what is the problem for the theory in this?

To strengthen Jaffa’s example, assume that the person always regards himself as worse off after he chooses than he was before choosing. Once more, why is this a difficulty for the non-cognitivist? The chooser can still aim at each decision to choose what then seems to him best, as the theory requires. No doubt the person has an unfortunate set of preferences, but it is not part of non-cognitivism that anyone who acts in accord with the theory will succeed in raising his level of satisfaction. If the person becomes aware of his self- defeating preferences, he may be at a loss what to do: but this is a problem for him, not for the defender of subjectivism.

Jaffa of course disagrees: he thinks his regress raises a fundamental difficulty for the non-cognitivist. “It is no answer to this to say that such examples are by no means necessary. Neither are any other examples. But the possibilities are demonstrably unlimited, and this fact proves that predictability is a delusion. If there is no basis for predicting the degree of human satisfaction that will result from perfect rationality on non-cognitivist premises, there is no reason whatever for obeying the injunction: u2018Be rational’” (pp.207—208, n. 3).

Jaffa seems to me right that a theory that aims to maximize satisfaction needs a method of estimating satisfaction. But his argument does not show that possibilities are infinite nor offer any other reason against estimates of future satisfaction. Jaffa has at best constructed an example in which satisfaction cannot be increased. How is his case supposed to be relevant to the general problem of estimating satisfaction?

Jaffa may be thinking along the following lines (though this is little better than a guess): In the infinite regress example, there are infinite possibilities. But one cannot rule out that, for any given person, the infinite regress obtains. If so, the possibilities facing an individual may, for all we can tell, be infinite, and predictability is not possible.

But Jaffa’s case involves no infinite regress. At each choice, the person afterwards wishes he had chosen otherwise: this is not a regress at all, much less an infinite one. The number of choices confronting the individual with self-defeating preferences does not increase at all. Even if someone in this situation did face an infinite (indefinite?) number of choices, the possibility of this situation does not suffice to destroy predictability. Why could one not estimate that this situation for a given person was very unlikely to arise? To predict future satisfaction does not require that states of affairs not allowing prediction be ruled out as impossible. Further, even in a situation presuming an infinite number of choices, it need not be the case that prediction of future satisfaction is impossible. Perhaps one holds on good grounds a theory reducing the possibilities that need to be evaluated to a manageable number. And if one settles for an outcome that is “good enough” (what Herbert Simon terms “satisficing rationality”), not all alternatives need to be compared.91

Jaffa has also misidentified the target of his argument; it is not, as he thinks it is, moral non-cognitivism. That position holds that morality depends on preference. But the problem Jaffa advances in his argument is whether satisfaction, if not objectively characterized, is predictable. A non-cognitivist need not maintain this: he can agree with Jaffa that the standards for satisfaction are objective but hold that whether one ought to maximize satisfaction requires personal decision. Also, someone might hold that morality is not dependent on preference but that satisfaction is. And a non-cognitivist need not take satisfaction as a goal. He might think that morality consists of Kantian imperatives, the choice of which rests on preference. Jaffa’s opponent in his article, Felix Oppenheim, adopted a subjective view of both morality and satisfaction; but unless Jaffa intends his comments exclusively as an ad hominem argument, he ought to have considered the cases just discussed.

In the preceding, I have spoken loosely of "preference" and "decision" in the subjectivist position. The first term seems to me the more accurate, since the use of "decision" makes it easy to fall into a misconception, one which Jaffa has not avoided. It does not follow from the subjectivist view that people have to choose their moral principles consciously. All that the view requires is that moral judgments are not true or false independent of preference. Thus, the position need not hold that “we decide what morality” is, as both Jaffa and Ernest van den Haag assume. Someone can be a subjectivist and hold that a person’s preferences are “built into him.” One might think, e.g., that people have certain instinctive likings and aversions which determine their moral choices. As long as one holds that there are no non-subjective criteria by which the preferences can be evaluated, the position still counts as subjectivist.

Whatever one thinks of Jaffa’s arguments, there is no denying that he has taken great care to build a case for the views he holds with such firm conviction. It is thus surprising that he advances one contention that if right would at once invalidate his entire approach. After noting that the “theory of value non-cognitivism is…extremely paradoxical and would drastically revise our conceptions of reality,” he continues: “This of course is no objection to it, for to be a scientist means to submit one’s conceptions to the test of reason” (p. 191).

Jaffa’s argument for moral objectivity, as we have seen, depends on a thesis about the meaning of "good." But this account purports to be about the meaning of "good" in ordinary language. If Jaffa’s just-quoted remark were correct, a value non-cognitivist is free to dismiss Jaffa’s argument as irrelevant. He need not take his theory to be an account of our ordinary conception of morality; and according to Jaffa, its conflict with our ordinary view is no objection to it. Fortunately for Jaffa, he advances only an invalid argument for his contention. If one submits one’s contentions to the test of reason, it does not follow that one cannot consider a theory’s paradoxical content as an objection to it.

Indeed, Jaffa’s best argument in the article depends upon a denial of this contention. He points out that people continue to believe that the external world exists in spite of unrefuted skeptical arguments that this cannot be proved (pp. 194—195). If it is rational to do so, why is it not also rational to retain our convictions that at least some moral judgments are objectively true, despite philosophical problems about “ontological queerness,” verification, etc.?

I hereby confess to a deception. Although I began the argument with a statement Jaffa makes, I continued it in a way that seems to me at least arguably defensible rather than give what Jaffa actually says. I did so because his continuation ruins a promising start.

On his account, recall, value judgments are cognitive judgments. Thus, Jaffa contends, ” u2018intrinsic value judgments’ and u2018empirical knowledge’ are equally subjective, and for this reason, equally objective” (pp. 195—196). But all that Jaffa can obtain from this is that just as we take the world to exist, so we may take moral judgments to be objective. And this is perfectly compatible with a subjectivist view that does not purport to be an analysis of people’s opinions about moral judgments. J. L. Mackie’s error theory, e.g., holds that moral judgments are subjective but that people mistakenly think them objective.92

Have I nothing at all good to say about Jaffa’s arguments? Lest I be charged (of course falsely) with bias against him, I should like to call attention to a point Jaffa makes which seems to me insightful. In a debate with Thomas Rochon, Jaffa noted that some terms, such as “rude,” incorporate both factual and value elements in a way that cannot be disentangled. Whether someone is rude is a factual matter, not one for arbitrary decision; but once we have made the judgment, we seem committed to a prima facie moral judgment. It seems to me that examples of this kind pose a genuine difficulty for a moral subjectivist. The argument, which Jaffa may have learned from Leo Strauss, has aroused a great deal of discussion in recent moral philosophy.93

Jaffa presumably intends the moral theory he has sketched to support the doctrine of political rights discussed in Part I of this essay; and he suggests in the present article an interpretation of the Declaration of Independence (pp. 205—206, n.2). But his moral theory seems at a crucial point inconsistent with the political theory he defends. His key political principle is that no man has the right to rule another without his consent. But he has just argued that only the perfect or non-deficient man is strictly speaking a human being. “When we speak of a poor or defective chair, we are really speaking metaphorically, for the defective chair is not, in the strict sense, a chair” (p. 197). By parallel argument, a defective man is not a man. Why, then, do non-defective men have rights? At best, they have analogies to rights, and the foundation of Jaffa’s politics is destroyed. Similarly, he asks: “How do we decide whether it is better to enslave our fellow men or respect their dignity as human beings, enjoying the same rank in order of nature (or of creation) as ourselves?"94 But on Jaffa’s argument, not all human beings (in the ordinary-language sense) share the same nature: two entities that are analogous rather than members of the identical species do not have a common essence.

What is going on here? I should like to suggest an answer that fits in with the speculative discussion at the end of Part I. If successful, this account will explain why Jaffa refuses to reject the paradoxical view, even though his own argument rests on ordinary language. I suggest that, as before, Jaffa’s official and real doctrine must be distinguished.

He claims that only a non-deficient being is, in the strict sense, human. The question then arises: what is a non-deficient man? Jaffa’s mentor Leo Strauss answers in a surprising way. Referring to “the Platonic-Hegelian assumption that ‘the best’ are somehow ruled by the purely rational, the philosophers…,” he states: “only if the striving for recognition is a veiled form of the striving for full self-consciousness or full rationality, in other words only if a human being, insofar as he is not a philosopher is not really a human being.. .[is] someone who leads a life of action essentially subordinate to the philosopher."95

If this is what Strauss and Jaffa teach, one can readily understand Jaffa’s refusal to reject paradox. Jaffa, one should note, is extremely sensitive to criticism in regard to Straussian teaching about defective human beings. Replying to a citation by Shadia Drury in which Strauss calls non-philosophers “mutilated human beings,” Jaffa comments: “With the exception of Kant, there has never, so far as I know, been anyone who has maintained that morality can stand entirely or simply on its own foundation… . Is it not clear that from the point of view of the man who ‘loves his God with all his heart, and with all his mind, and with all his might,’ the merely moral man must appear a defective human being? The pious man thinks that in obeying the moral law he is obeying and honoring God. To him, a man who is obeying the moral law merely dignifies himself and must appear as less than fully human. Whether from the perspective of Reason or of Revelation, it is the capacity of the human soul to transcend time and participate in eternity that is the ultimate cause of the soul’s dignity."96

Jaffa acts as if he were defending a perfectly ordinary position. But his comments are astonishingly radical in implication. The suggestion that an eternal realm transcends morality, whether one agrees or not, seems perfectly defensible; and so does the view that if there is such a realm, someone not in contact with it is lacking in comparison with someone who is. But surely it is the reverse of commonplace to suggest that non-philosophers are human beings only by analogy. If this does not constitute a radical depreciation of morality, what does?

Jaffa disagrees. Again in response to Drury, he claims that he has always denied that the fact that the intellectual virtues apart from prudence may exist apart from morality implies a radical depreciation of morality. His colleague Harry Neumann maintains that Aristotle teaches this: Jaffa thinks otherwise.97 Professor Jaffa is of course the final authority on what he believes; but if one consults the page in Jaffa’s Thomism and Aristotelianism about which Drury and Jaffa dispute, one will find the following: “Thus we see, by Thomas’ own assertion, that according to the philosophic teaching the highest natural perfection of man is possible without moral virtue. This clearly implies a grave depreciation of morality…[although Aquinas' theological teaching holds otherwise] it remains true, as Thomas explicitly says, that as far as natural morality is concerned, the highest perfection is possible without moral virtue…. But if it is true that the highest human good is possible without moral virtue, then there is no moral obligation to be morally virtuous binding on those who can attain the highest good without moral virtue. Moral virtue would then seem to be obligatory only to those who are capable of nothing more than mere virtue. This, however, would in any case imply a double standard, one for philosophers and one for nonphilosophers."98

It is a little ironic that in the same article in which Jaffa denies that he has ever taught that the Aristotelian view of the intellectual virtues implies a radical depreciation of morality, he reacts with horror to Kant’s contention that absolute honesty is in all circumstances a moral duty. But the founder of the Winston Churchill Association no doubt knows the use of “terminological inexactitude.”

From Jaffa’s teaching, it of course does not follow that philosophers will generally kill and rob those they deem their inferiors. Quite the contrary, Jaffa is anxious to stress that the main situations in which moral rules may be violated involve the safety of society, presumably judged either by philosophers themselves or statesmen acting under philosophic advice.

One may freely concede Jaffa’s point: I do not think either he or Strauss teaches a Nietzschean view in which inferiors are treated at best with pity, at worst with contempt and cruelty.98a But however limited in practice the exceptions to morality are, Jaffa ascribes to Aristotle and gives every indication of holding himself that philosophers are not bound by moral obligation at all.

Even if one confines attention to the exceptions Jaffa has in mind, his views seem radically at variance with ordinary morality. Citing as an example “[s]ome of Lincoln’s actions during the Civil War,” Jaffa asserts: “Thus we contemplate extreme actions in defense of the rule of law by wise men whose unfettered wisdom may sometimes be the necessary condition for the establishment or survival of a decent constitutional order. But these are not justifications of tyranny, or of any immorality…[because] that there are no moral rules to which exceptions might not be found, where ‘the safety and happiness of society’ are at stake, has been recognized by sound moralists at all times.”99

Jaffa conflates two different views. The first is whether moral rules have exceptions built into them. Thus, I think most people would disagree with Kant and hold that one ought not to be truthful to a murderer inquiring about the location of the person he intends to kill. (Jaffa may be surprised to learn that there are eminent contemporary philosophers who do agree with Kant — Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Dummett come to mind.) But this modification of the rule against lying gives us a new moral rule.

A different state of affairs is involved in the circumstances Jaffa delineates. Here morality is suspended altogether: the moral rules do not permit an exception: nevertheless the statesman violates them in order to secure the state. An example, not used by Jaffa, may help to clarify the distinction. Suppose a drowning person comes across another person clinging to a plank of wood. The plank’s size does not allow both to hold on to it. Some people think that in this situation, one may throw the other person off the plank to save one’s own life. But those who think this usually do not claim that this action is morally justified: rather, they think that the emerging situation temporarily suspends morality. (I give this example just for illustration and do not impute its conclusion to Jaffa.)

It seems to me very likely that Jaffa envisions acts that suspend morality rather than allow exceptions to moral rules which remain within morality. He mentions “the question as to whether…a man might justifiably commit murder or adultery as a way of preventing the betrayal of his country or, rather, whether he would be obliged to do so, following the dictates of reason and choosing the lesser evil."100 Someone who believes that one might justifiably do these things (and my impression from the context of the quote is that Jaffa is among them) would not, I think, usually be claiming that it is morally required to commit these crimes. Jaffa himself, as his reference to “being obliged” shows, does not recognize the distinction I have attempted to draw.

Jaffa is indeed correct that whether normal moral rules always bind the statesman is an issue that has been much discussed. But his view that “all sound moralists” endorse his position strikes me as peculiar. Is he adopting a stipulative definition of "sound moralist," according to which anyone who thinks otherwise cannot be sound? Or does he mean that no one who is generally considered a major moral theorist (except Kant) rejects his view?

If he means the latter, his contention is incorrect. His example of murder and adultery allude to a famous discussion by an Aristotelian commentator of unknown name called the Old Scholiast. He held that adultery and murder were permissible to save the state; but Thomas Aquinas expressly rejected his position and held that the moral laws prohibiting these acts may never be violated.101 Does Jaffa consider Aquinas a sound moralist?

As to the question itself, extended discussion would be out of place here. But as Jaffa finds the answer so obvious, I should like to inquire whether to save the state someone may commit rape or incest or may have small children tortured to death. Jaffa claims, further, that the laws of war in the Old Testament support his view. But it is surprising that so careful a student of Scripture does not discuss the most famous place in the Bible where the issue arises. These words are attributed to the High Priest Caiaphas: “that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:50-51 KJV). This argument for the killing of Jesus Christ is not usually considered a paradigm of sound morality.

In course of his argument, Jaffa appeals to support from James Madison. Whether Madison held the view Jaffa attributes to him, I do not know: only someone thoroughly acquainted with this period of American history would have the right to challenge Jaffa’s authority. But the quote that Jaffa offers does not support his enlistment of Madison. The passage he cites from the Federalist says that all such [political] institutions must be sacrificed “to the safety and happiness of society."102 It does not say that all moral rules are likewise subordinate to this end.

Entirely apart from these emergency situations, Jaffa’s account of morality differs in other ways from commonly accepted views. He maintains that morality consists entirely of hypothetical imperatives telling us how to be happy (pp. 204—205). Although he recognizes that some goods, such as friendship, can be pursued both for one’s own welfare and as ends-in-themselves, he does not allow that the harm an action causes to others can by itself provide sufficient reason to refrain from doing it. But are we inclined to think that Stalin’s badness consists of the fact that he chose an irrational method to realize his well-being? I should have thought the evil he did lies in his responsibility for millions of deaths. To require an egoistic argument against his actions as a condition for holding them morally wrong displays a corrupt mind.

I suspect that just the position I attribute to ordinary morality is included in Jaffa’s condemnation of morality as an end in itself. Further, his claim that he knows of no one besides Kant who holds this view seems odd. He elsewhere attributes the same view to Aquinas. “Thomas…treats morality as having actually an independent existence and as being intrinsically rational…"103

To conclude this section, I should like to address Jaffa’s claim to be a defender of natural law. It would be unfair to Jaffa to give this term a restrictive definition and proceed on that basis to challenge his right to be regarded as an advocate of this position. Instead, let us characterize a natural-law position as one that holds that morality is objective. Moral principles may all have exceptions; and all principles may be subordinated to prudence, so long as one holds that at least some moral principles do not depend for their validity on human preference.

Does Jaffa qualify as a defender of natural law by this very relaxed standard? On first glance, he obviously does. He notes that America’s founding fathers held that all human beings ought to have certain rights, in a context that suggests his approval of the claim (p. 206, no.2). Yet we have seen in Part I how little in practice one’s right not to be ruled without consent entails.

If one takes account of Jaffa’s wish to base his argument on the Nicomachean Ethics, matters assume an entirely different cast. Jaffa sharply contrasts Aristotle’s teaching with that of Aquinas. According to Jaffa, Aquinas held, but Aristotle did not, that “the content of natural right is everywhere the same and so…the naturally just framework of every just legal code would have to be the same."104 Aquinas allowed variations in moral precepts to meet local conditions, but for Jaffa, “this is a very rigid conception."105

The doctrine he imputes to Aristotle differs entirely from the Thomistic view. “Thomas’ rigid scheme is inconsistent with Aristotle’s principle that what is just is roughly equated with what is legally just, if what is legally just depends upon the nature of the regime and not upon a code of natural right."106 Aristotle accepts this statement’s conditional clause: he attributes the “variety of legally just things…to the variety of constitutions or regimes and not simply to the application of general rules to particular cases."107

But does not this position still make room for natural law? As long as some regimes are objectively better than others, natural law has not been abandoned. True enough; but this does not take us very far. Jaffa attributes to Aristotle the view that in a very poor regime, the good man must obey the government except in extreme cases. From this, he draws an important conclusion about natural right: “The good man, therefore, defers to the law of imperfect communities, and hence to its moral code; and what the good man does is morally right. In other words, not to obey the law and customs of one’s community is usually unjust, and hence contrary to natural right. As natural right enjoins obedience to any legal justice which may reasonably be said to aim at the common good, it would seem to follow that for the most part, the mutability of natural right follows, pari passu, the mutability of constitutions."108

The odd aspect of this passage for a supposed defender of natural law does not consist of its recommendation to avoid revolt in most circumstances. Rather, it is Jaffa’s virtual identification of natural right with the laws of the community. He does not totally equate them: the identification holds “for the most part.” In that qualification lies the sum and substance of Jaffa’s “defense of the natural 1aw thesis.”

III

Jaffa’s work as a historian and commentator on contemporary politics applies and extends his political philosophy. I do not propose to discuss this area of his work in detail, challenging particular historical views he holds. Rather, I shall discuss a few examples of his method of reaching conclusions.

In his interpretation of Southern goals at the outset of the Civil War, Jaffa places great emphasis on a speech delivered by Alexander Stephens in March 1861. In this speech, Stephens maintained that science supported the doctrine that Negroes were an inferior race. As mentioned above, I do not wish to dispute Jaffa’s assessment of the speech, much less his views on the Civil War. But in the course of his discussion, he advances a bold claim: “Clearly, he [Stephens] had already been influenced by Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859."109

Darwin did not discuss human evolution in the Origin of Species. At the book’s close, he suggests that “light will be shed” on human origins; but his views of this subject became generally known only with the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871. The Origin mentions Negroes only a handful of times in passing, always innocuously.110

I suppose it is possible that Stephens read and digested the Origin within slightly more than one year of its publication; immediately grasped the application of Darwin’s theory to human beings; at once anticipated the use later nineteenth-century writers made of the theory to support doctrines of racial conflict — perhaps he deduced this from the book’s subtitle, “the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life” — ; and, in one culminating insight, saw that all of this could be used to advance the Confederate cause. But I do wish Professor Jaffa would explain his use of “clearly.”

Jaffa’s discussion of Lincoln offers another valuable example of a Straussian philosopher in action. During his debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln made several remarks that have led some historians to think that he shared the anti-Negro prejudices common in his time. Jaffa dissents from this view; he thinks that the statements were carefully qualified and, if analyzed, do not commit Lincoln to belief in Negro inferiority. Once more, I do not propose to argue with his interpretation; those interested may consult his detailed discussion in Crisis of the House Divided.111 What I wish to examine is an argument he offers in support of this interpretation: “In the Lincoln-Douglas debates Lincoln would state many times that he was not and never had been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, or of permitting them to marry with white people. As I pointed out in Crisis he never said that he never would be in favor of such things."112

Now this is quite remarkable! Lincoln advances a certain proposition. But his adherence to it is not complete: rather it is carefully qualified. How do we know this? Because Lincoln did not say that he would continue to believe the proposition in the future. So far as I am aware, Jaffa has never said that he will always maintain in the future the admiration for Lincoln he has often expressed. Obviously, then, he may not genuinely admire Lincoln: his praise for him in a major book and numerous articles has always been carefully qualified. In like manner, Jaffa has not really suggested that Lincoln did not defend racist views: he did nothing but suggest he now holds this interpretation of Lincoln.

Perhaps Jaffa does not wish his hermeneutic principle extended to all statements, but only to those of the form: “I do not now believe, and have never believed.” Before reading Jaffa, I imagined that this phrase indicated emphatic belief; but suitably instructed by superior authority, I have learned the error of my ways. And, as evidence I have reformed, I offer the strongest possible commitment to his view: I do not now and have never adopted it.

Old habits die hard, and error is difficult to avoid. An appendix to one of Jaffa’s own articles is entitled “Are These Truths Now, Or Have They Ever Been, Self-Evident”; and I fear the context makes apparent that he uses the expression in the outmoded manner.113

But enough of the future tense: let us return to the present. In a criticism of Willmore Kendall, Jaffa sharply disagreed with Kendall’s contention that Lincoln’s principle of equality has led to twentieth- century leftist egalitarianism. Quite the contrary, Jaffa claims that Lincoln was a strong defender of private property and the free market.

But during Lincoln’s administration, were there not continual acts of interference with the market by government? Inflated currency, increased taxes, the introduction of an income tax, and a vast expansion of the government come to mind. Jaffa argues that many of these measures were for use only in the war emergency. Moreover, Lincoln himself had little interest in governmentally-directed “national improvements.” His prime concern was the Civil War, and he left the economy largely to Congress. Lincoln “did little, if anything, to expand the power of the federal government per se."114

I am inclined to think this appraisal incorrect, but again I claim no authority to dispute the historical issues with Jaffa. Let us then assume he is right: what follows? He would be justified in claiming that one cannot unconditionally claim that Lincoln opposed the free market. Rather, he was willing to accept interference with it in pursuit of an aim he considered more exigent.

But how does Jaffa get from this thesis to the contention that Lincoln was a great defender of the free market? A supporter of the market usually connotes someone whose policies support it, rather than one who has some excuse for anti-market programs. But, as we have had more than one occasion to see, Jaffa has a language all his own.

Jaffa lavishes compliments on the free market, although I do not know whether he rates himself so stalwart a supporter of it as Lincoln. He offers an excellent defense of private enterprise in medicine and elsewhere champions freedom on contract in employment.115 But because his language at times deviates from standard usage, I think it worthwhile to ask how free a market he actually favors.

That he has in mind a quite limited version of market freedom emerges from his reply to a claim advanced by M. E. Bradford. Jaffa finds “extraordinary” Bradford’s assertion that the policy of equality of opportunity which Jaffa endorses cannot be distinguished from the equality of results he attacks. In reply, Jaffa contrasts a handicap race, aimed ideally to secure an equal finish for all contestants, with an open race. “The purpose of the [open] race is to find out who is the fastest, and this can be done only if the start of the race if fair…. Only an open race is a true race — that is, only a race in which every runner has a chance to compete, can reveal who it is who can run the fastest. And a true race is one in which everyone starts from the same line at the same time, and runs the same distance…. it is precisely when everyone starts together in a fair race that they do not end together."116

Jaffa clearly opposes equal distribution of income, but one wonders how he wishes to ensure a “fair start.” Some people begin their careers with many more advantages than others: large inheritances, easy access to the best schools, etc. In a free market, people do not start with equal opportunity: would Jaffa support changes in this situation to ensure a more equal start? If he does, how far would he go? Does he favor, e.g., the abolition or drastic curtailment of inheritance? Even more important, if he now opposes such measures, does he do so because it would be difficult to gain general consent for them, or does he oppose them in principle?

It is possible that Jaffa intends only the removal of state-imposed discrimination by “equality of opportunity.” If so, his use of the slogan would be entirely consistent with support for the market. But I am strongly inclined to doubt that he wishes to adopt this limited construal. “Fair start” insinuates much more.

So far as I am aware, he has never spelled out in detail the economic policies he supports. But in his introduction to the reissue of Crisis in 1982, he refers to the “great Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.”117 The 1964 Act is not restricted to governmentally-imposed segregation but forbids discrimination in private employment and housing as well.118 On the basis of Jaffa’s statement, I suggested in an earlier draft of this essay that it was odd for Jaffa to favor the act yet still declare himself a strong champion of freedom of contract. But in fairness to Professor Jaffa, he has recently changed his view. He now believes that “the abuses of the anti-discrimination laws are so intimately connected with misconceptions in the laws themselves that any benefits from them will always be far outweighed by the harm they do."118a Even in his new position, though, he does not support freedom of contract as a moral right. Quite the contrary, his argument is purely prudential; the “real interests” of businessmen will end discrimination more effectively than bureaucratic schemes that mandate group rights.

And what does he mean when he says that the choice between the sales tax and income tax is “ultimately a choice between democracy and oligarchy"?119 Usually, those who advance similar views maintain that sales taxes are ‘regressive’: does Jaffa support progressive income taxation? One hopes that somewhere in his future articles or letters to editors he will inform his readers exactly which restrictions on the operation of the free market he endorses. In asking whether Jaffa may rightfully be called a defender of the free market, I do not mean to restrict this term to those who support an unhampered market in the style of Ludwig von Mises; though this is my own view, I have no right to compel others to accept the usage I prefer. But I do not think the term generally applies to those who advocate substantial governmental intervention, as I think Jaffa does. The political theory that Jaffa proposes allows such interference as “prudence” dictates.

At the close of this long review of Jaffa, I confess to a feeling of bafflement. If one reads his interpretation of Aristotle’s Ethics, his discussion of Lincoln’s Lyceum and temperance speeches, and his essay on King Lear, it quickly becomes evident that Jaffa possesses a high degree of ingenuity.120 Yet when he interrupts the explanation of the hidden meaning of his texts to present a philosophical argument, he seems utterly lost.121 John Wild had it exactly right when he suggested that “so much time is spent in devious textual interpretation that there is little left for systematic argument."122

The world of Harry Jaffa is indeed a topsy-turvy one. All men are created equal, except of course for philosophers, who hold divine rank. No one may be ruled without his consent; but everyone must obey all except the most vicious government under whose rule he lives. Morality is an objective science, but none of its precepts is universally valid. The establishment of democracy is our duty to God, who apart from creation is an unknowable Nothing. Oh, what a tangled web we weave!

NOTES

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 278.

2. Harry V. Jaffa, “Of Men, Hogs, and Law, t. National Review, February 3, 1992. Professor Jaffa briefly responded in a letter to comments on him in my “Democracy and the Missing Argument,” This World, No. 27 (Winter, 1992), pp. 8—13. He enclosed with his letter copies of “Of Men, Hogs, and Law,” his “Lincoln’s Character Assassins,” National Review, January 22, 1990, and an unpublished letter to the editor of National Review, dated January 24, 1992, replying to Ernest van den Haag’s response to the former essay. Since he included these items with his reply to me, I have addressed points in each of them in the present essay.

Since his remarks on my article are contained in a letter not addressed to me, I shall refrain from direct quotation of it. In sum, he objected to my claim that his argument “that Lincoln correctly interpreted the Declaration of Independence to support a system of egalitarian democracy seems of purely historical interest.” “Democracy and the Missing Argument,” p. 9. He wrongly claims that I have not read his Crisis of the House Divided, apparently because my remark echoes Willmore Kendall’s review of the book.

In what way does the comment repeat Kendall? Judging by Jaffa’s essay on Kendall’s review, I think he takes my remark on Lincoln to resemble Kendall’s claim that Lincoln “derailed” the American tradition. According to Kendall, Lincoln’s stress on the Declaration’s equality clause paved the way for radical programs of social levelling. Harry V. Jaffa, How to Think About the American Revolution (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1978), pp. 18, 33.

Jaffa has misread my statement. Unlike Kendall, I made no attempt to assess Lincoln’s place in the American tradition. I intended rather to question the relevance to political philosophy of Lincoln’s views and, for that matter, of the Declaration itself. Further, by ‘democracy’ I meant democracy, not the programs of contemporary leftists. I do not doubt that Jaffa is a Reagan Republican and nothing in my article suggests otherwise.

Judging by his comments and enclosures, I think that Jaffa takes my article to be a contribution to the discussion about Lincoln in which he and various Southern partisans, most notably M. E. Bradford, have been engaged for many years. But I did not intend my remarks as an intervention in that controversy. Since Jaffa has raised the question, however, I do think that Bradford, Thomas Fleming, and Frank Meyer have the better case.

If I had repeated Kendall, how would this show that I had not read Crisis? Might I not have read the book and agreed with Kendall? Or arrived at the same position independently?

Jaffa has on other occasions claimed that his critics have not read him. See, e.g., “Crisis of the Strauss Divided,” Social Research, Vol. 54, No.3 (Autumn, 1987), p. 579. Has the possibility occurred to Jaffa that a critic may accurately read him yet remain unconvinced?

If, improbably, anyone wishes to pursue the matter further, Kendall’s review of Crisis is available in his The Conservative Affirmation (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963), pp. 249—252.

3. Harry V. Jaffa, “Equality, Liberty, Wisdom, Morality and Consent in the Idea of Political Freedom,” Interpretation, Vol. 15, No.1 (Jan. 1987), p. 9.

4. Ibid., p. 9.

5. Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 [1959]), p. 75. Jaffa is correct: see R. M. Spiazzi, O.P. ed., In Libros Politicorum Aristotelis Expositio (Turin and Rome, 1951), I, 74,76, pp. 21,2.

6. Harry Jaffa, “II. Dear Professor Drury,” Political Theory, Vol. 15, No.3 (August, 1987), pp. 317—318.

7. Harry V. Jaffa, “Aristotle” in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds., History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1965), p. 116. The parallelism with Jaffa’s account of Strauss’s view in his reply to Drury makes apparent that he accepts the teaching he here describes. This essay is not included in the 1957 edition of Strauss-Cropsey.

8. Jaffa, “Dear Professor Drury,” p. 318.

9. Jaffa, “Equality, Liberty, Wisdom,” p. 9.

10. Ibid., p. 10.

11. Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 154.

12. It might be objected that Jaffa is simply interpreting Aristotle, rather than giving his own opinion. His interpretation rests on the assumption that it “is only the possibility that Aristotle may have known the truth about things that we find baffling that leads us to study him with all seriousness.” Jaffa does not “imply that Aristotle’s teachings are identical with right reason…. this study would not make sense if it were possible to assume that every deviation from Aristotle was a corruption of the truth…” Jaffa, Thomism, p. 197, n.3. The passage thus suggests that Jaffa is willing to entertain as a serious possibility that philosophers are divine. It is for this reason that I say that: “perhaps Jaffa accepts this view.” Very significant here is Jaffa’s statement that the argument for a ground for law “requires for its foundation such an understanding of morality as one finds in the Nicomachean Ethics… The moral rationality of the Nicomachean Ethics and of the Politics, like that of the Declaration of Independence, is grounded in the objectivity of the distinctions between man, beast, and God. ” Harry V. Jaffa, “Seven Answers for Professor Anastaplo,” University of Puget Sound Law Review, Vol. 13. No.2 (Winter, 1990), p. 400. But in Aristotle God has no direct relation with human beings: the relevant distinctions are, in Jaffa’s interpretation, between men of ordinary virtue, magnanimous men, and philosophers.

13. When Jaffa wrote this passage, he evidently regarded Locke’s account of the state of nature as similar to that of Hobbes. I do not myself accept this interpretation. For an excellent criticism of Strauss’s interpretation of Locke, see Eric Mack, “Locke’s Arguments for Natural Rights,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XI, No. 1 (Spring, 1980), pp. 57—60.

14. Jaffa, Crisis, p. 323.

15. Ibid., p. 327.

16. Harry V. Jaffa, “In Defense of the ‘Natural Law Thesis,’” in Equality and Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 206, n.2. Emphasis in original.

17. This essay originally appeared in the American Political Science Review for March, 1957.

18. Ibid., p. 205.

19. “Crisis of the Strauss Divided,” p. 595.

20. Ibid., pp. 595—596.

21. Ibid., p. 602. Although this view of Hobbes is standard among Straussians, it is controversial. For a different view, see S. A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

22. Ibid., p. 595.

23. Ibid., p. 595.

24. Ibid., p. 587.

25. Harry V. Jaffa, “Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts,” Interpretation, Vol. 16, No.1 (Fall, 1988), p. 117.

26. Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return?”, in Hilail Gildin, ed., An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 305.

27. “Crisis of the Strauss Divided,” p. 588, citing Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” L’Homme, 1981, pp. 5—20. Note also the stronger claim in "Progress or Return?”, p. 306: “Now the first alternative — a proof of the non-existence of an omnipotent God — would presuppose that we have perfect knowledge of the whole, so as it were we know all the corners, there is no place for an omnipotent God. In other words, the presupposition is a completed system. We have a solution to all riddles. And then I think we may dismiss this possibility as absurd.”

28. We need to add this qualification in case Strauss argues that philosophy can disprove claims of religion which do not teach the existence of an omnipotent being or at least a being with the power to override natural law.

29. Thomism, p. 193, quoting a speech by Winston Churchill at the MIT Midcentury Convocation, New York Times, April 1, 1949. I assume that Jaffa considers his argument for equality part of social science.

30. "Some Answers for Professor Anastaplo,” p. 426.

31. Cf. the comment of Carl Schmitt on the precept “Love your enemies”: “No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks." The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976), p. 29.

32. Jaffa states in his essay on King Lear: “But great passion, be it that of Lear, of Oedipus, or of Jesus, implmies greatness in the soul of the sufferer. A great passion is always, in some sense, compensation for a great error. As Plato teaches in the Republic, great errors are the work of great souls, souls capable of either great good or great evil.” “The Limits of Politics: King Lear, Act I, Scene I” in Allan Bloom with Henry V. Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 117. I rely on this passage for the assertion in the text about Jaffa’s religious beliefs.

33. “Equality, Liberty, Wisdom,” pp. 22—23.

34. “Seven Answers for Professor Anastaplo,” p. 426.

35. Ibid., p. 393.

36. Harry V. Jaffa, “Letter to the Editor of National Review,” January 24,1992, unpublished, p. 1. Jaffa claims that “if [we] are to be responsible for our choice and actions” we must be free to choose between good and evil. But suppose someone was incapable of temptation to evil. Why could he not be responsible for choice among different good acts? Jaffa’s contention makes it impossible for God to be responsible for his actions, since he cannot choose evil.

37. “Strauss Divided,” p. 596.

38. Harry V. Jaffa, “What Were the Original Intentions of the Framers of the Constitution of the United States?”, University of Puget Sound Law Review, Vol. 10, No.3 (Spring, 1987), Appendix B, p. 417.

39. I readily acknowledge that this suggestion is speculative. But note the comment of Jaffa’s friend Harry Neumann: “It is not sufficient philosophically to declare ‘I hold there is no sin but ignorance,’ unless the man asserting it also has, like Lincoln and Jaffa, an unquestioning (and therefore ‘ignorant’) rootedness in his herd’s confidence that ‘god,’ a true non-arbitrary standard of goodness and right, exists.” Liberalism (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1991), p. 100. The volume contains a foreword by Jaffa and appears in a series he edits. Cf. also Spinoza’s Deus sive natura.

40. Harry V. Jaffa, How to Think About the American Revolution (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1978), pp. 131—132. See also, Lawrence Berns, “Aristotle and the Moderns,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer, The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perscective (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 156.

41. “Equality, Liberty, Wisdom,” pp. 24—25.

42. Ibid., pp. 26—27. Judaism believes in a universal God, but one who is also tied to a particular community.

43. Crisis, p. 229.

44. Ibid., p. 230.

45. Ibid., p. 242.

46. Ibid., p. 263.

47. “The Limits of Politics: King Lear,” p. 138, n.1.

48. “Equality, Liberty, Wisdom,” p. 23.

49. For Drury’s views, see the article by Jaffa cited in n.6 supra. For a good discussion of Strauss’s views on religion, see Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 110 ff.

50. Harry V. Jaffa, “Neumann on Nihilism: The Case for Politics,” in Neumann, Liberalism, p. 68. The argument of Jaffa’s last sentence is a poor one. ‘There is no one in the room’ normally does not mean ‘The entity “No one” is in the room.’

51. Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorset Press, 1987 [1974]), p. 94. For a brief introduction to neo-Platonic doctrines of emanationism, see Richard Sorabji, Time. Creation and the Continuum (Ithaca: Cornell, 1983), pp. 313 ff. On creation out of nothing, see also Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed” in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 182.

52. Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, trans. Fred Baumann (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987 [1935]), p. 105.

53. Ibid., p. 83.

54. Ibid., p. 95.

55. Strauss’s interpretation of Maimonides is frequently characterized in this way. Incidentally, for a much-needed corrective to Strauss’s “esoteric writing” thesis, see Errol Harris, Is There an Esoteric Doctrine in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus?(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978).

56. Leo Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 1.

57. Leo Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume. English Section (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), p. 375. I have omitted diacritical marks in “Farabi.” Hillel Fradkin’s claim that Strauss does not, in “Farabi’s Plato,” identify “the prophet, or the 1egislator, with the philosopher” cannot be accepted as it stands. “Philosophy and Law: Leo Strauss as a Student of Medieval Jewish Thought,” Review of Politics, Vol. 53 (Winter, 1991), p. 50. On the page of “Farabi’s Plato” that follows the one Fradkin has quoted, Strauss notes that “the real remedy employed in Plato is far more radical”: philosophers can live in imperfect cities. (“Farabi’s Plato,” p. 381. Fradkin uses a reprint of Strauss’s essay, so our citations do not correspond in pagination.) As discussed below, the more radical remedy implies rule by philosophers.

58. “Farabi’s Plato,” pp. 373—374, 392.

59. Ibid., p. 392.

60. Ibid., pp. 383—384.

61. Philosophy and Law, p. 110.

62. “Farabi’s Plato,” p. 357.

63. Gershom Scholem, ed., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 256. See also Scholem’s characterization of Strauss as “an atheist,” p. 157. Hannah Arendt, another acquaintance of Strauss in Weimar days, commented on him in a letter to Karl Jaspers: “Leo Strauss…is a convinced orthodox atheist. Very odd. A truly gifted intellect. I don’t like him.” Lotle Kohler and Hans Saner, eds., Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926-1969. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 244, Letter of July 24, 1959. The German original edition of the correspondence was published in 1985.

64. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), p. 111.

65. “Jaffa, Strauss, and the Christian Tradition,” in Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Christianity and Political Philosophy (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1978), p. 223.

66. “On the Revival of Classical Political Philosophy,” in James V. Schall and John J. Schrems, eds., On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy: Essays of Charles N. R. McCoy (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 1989), p. 138, no.34.

67. “Progress or Return?”, p. 304.

68. Ibid., pp. 304—305.

69. “Original Intentions,” Appendix B, p. 419.

70. “Equality, Liberty, Wisdom,” pp. 20—21.

71. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), Part I. Murray Rothbard, Power and Market. (Menlo Park: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970).

72. A classic discussion is James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). Jaffa ought to have analyzed this issue rather than show that he can repeat Locke’s Second Treatise.

73. Harry V. Jaffa, “Natural Right” in David L. Sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1968, Vol. 11, p. 86.

74. See my “Democracy and the Missing Argument,” pp. 11-12.

75. “Of Men, Hogs, and Law,” p. 40.

76. “Equality, Liberty, Wisdom,” p. 17.

77. There is an analogy between this reason to avoid self-enforcement and Nozick’s idea of risky decision procedures. But Nozick does not ban such procedures on the basis of a quasi-theological argument.

78. How to Think About the American Revolution, pp. 135, 131-32, order transposed.

79. On my speculative view of Strauss’s interpretation of religion, this doctrine might mean that non- philosophical rulers should not interfere with a philosopher’s plans. They should not, e.g., upset a philosophically-devised constitution.

80. “Of Men, Hogs, and Law,” p. 40.

81. Ernest van den Haag, Response to “Of Men, Hogs, and Law,” p. 41.

82. All references in this section to “In Defense of the ‘Natural Law Thesis’” will be by page number in parentheses.

83. Gilbert Ryle, “Discussion of Rudolf Carnap: ‘Meaning and Necessity’” in Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers (London: Hutchinson, 1971), pp. 226, 230.

84. This is of course a version of Wittgenstein’s private language argument. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). Of the vast literature generated by this argument, see in particular Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

85. David Kelley, The Evidence of the Senses (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) makes a strong case for direct perception of physical objects. See my review in International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 28 (September, 1988), pp. 337-339. I take it that by ‘sense-data’ Jaffa means private experiences and does not intend the term as a placeholder for whatever it is we perceive.

86. D. M. Armstrong, “Meaning and Communication,” Philosophical Review (October, 1971), pp. 427-447 defends a view of meaning based on Locke that is anti-Wittgensteinian.

87. For a good account of the Sorites, see Roy Sorensen, Blindspots (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 217-252.

88. Even if Jaffa’s argument were completely successful, he would not have succeeded in his goal of proving that value words cannot have normative meaning if they do not have cognitive meaning. All he has argued for is that they do not, since on his account normative meaning is cognitive meaning. But he has not shown that no other account of the normative is possible.

89. “As we learn in Book IX [of the Nicomachean Ethics] all friendship, and all virtue are ultimately based on self-love.” Thomism, p. 125. “[T]he practical virtues find their supreme expression in the political sphere, whose good is the honorable good, with respect to which friends are valued either as instruments in the performance of the activities, or as conditions of our consciousness of the virtuousness of the activities.” (Ibid., p. 130)

90. Derek Parfit has discussed self-defeating theories in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). See also Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Further, to eliminate Jaffa’s problem, one need not resort to natural law. All one needs is the requirement that preferences be consistent.

91. For an application of satisficing rationality to morality, see Michael Slote, Beyond Optimizing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). A classic discussion of the use of probability estimates in ethics is J. M. Keynes, A Treatise on Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 341 ff.

92. J. L. Mackie, Inventing Right and Wrong. (New York: Penguin, 1977).

93. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953): these “phenomena…are, as it were, constituted by value judgments.” Ludwig von Mises criticizes Strauss’s argument in Theory and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 299-300; but I think Strauss emerges unscathed. Strauss anticipated a similar argument by Philippa Foot. See her Virtues and Vices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978). Jaffa’s speeches in his debate with Rochon were issued as a pamphlet, on which I unfortunately cannot now lay my hands. I have had to rely on memory in attributing this contention to Professor Jaffa and apologize if I have misstated his view.

94. Letter to the Editor of National Review, Jan. 24, 1992, p. 2.

95. On Tyranny, p. 238.

96. Dear Professor Drury, pp. 320-321.

97. Ibid., pp. 322-323.

98. Thomism, pp. 31-32. On the next page Jaffa states: “from another point of view the revealed doctrine may be said to depreciate morality, and the philosophic doctrine to elevate it” (Ibid., p. 33). But this point of view does not contradict the earlier point: it concerns whether the prospect of immortal reward is at stake in acting virtuously.

98a. In this respect I differ with the main thesis of Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).

99. Dear Professor Drury, pp. 81-82.

100. Thomism, p. 208, n.84.

101. John Finnis, Moral Absolutes (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), pp. 34-36, is an excellent recent discussion. Aquinas states: “The Commentator is not to be followed on this matter; for one may not commit adultery for any good…” Thomas Aquinas, De malo, q.15a.1ad 5 [4] as cited in Finnis, p. 36.

102. Dear Professor Drury, p. 318, citing the 43rd Federalist, 43.

103. Thomism, p. 143.

104. Ibid., p. 179.

105. Ibid., p. 179.

106. Ibid., p. 181.

107. Ibid., p. 181.

108. Ibid., p. 182.

109. “Lincoln’s Character Assassins,” p. 36. In “Original Intentions of the Framers,” Jaffa states: “It is no accident that this speech [by Stephens] was delivered two years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species,” p. 393. “Two years” is not strictly correct, since the Origin was published in November, 1859. As I have indicated, I do not intend to dispute Jaffa’s interpretation of Stephens’s speech. But I think he ought to have discussed Stephens’s own comments on it in the recollections he wrote while imprisoned after the war: “The order of subordination was nature’s great law; philosophy taught that order as the normal condition of the African amongst European races. Upon this recognized principle of a proper subordination, let it be called slavery or what not, our State institutions were formed and rested. The new Confederation was entered into with this distinct understanding. The principle of the subordination of the inferior to the superior was the ‘corner-stone’ on which it was formed. I used this metaphor merely to illustrate the firm convictions of the framers of the new Constitution that this relation of the black to the white race, which existed in 1787, was not wrong in itself…that it was in conformity to nature and best for both races. I alluded not to the principles of the new Government on this subject, but to public sentiment in regard to these principles. The status of the African race in the new Constitution was left just where it was in the old; I affirmed and meant to affirm nothing else in this Savannah speech.” Myrta Lockett Avary, ed., Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1910), pp. 173-174. Jaffa is certainly entitled to disagree with Stephens, but not to ignore him. Also, I do not think it correct to say that in Stephens’s Constitutional View, the ‘cornerstone’ sinks from sight.” How to Think About the American Revolution, p. 160. Stephens remarks about slavery in that book: “To maintain that slavery is in itself sinful, in the face of all that is said and written in the Bible upon the subject… does seem to me to be a little short of blasphemous.” Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the War Between the States (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1868-1870), p. 83.

110. Paul H. Barrett, et al., eds., A Concordance to Darwin’s Origin of Species. First Edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 509, lists only four references to “Negro” or “Negroes.”

111. Crisis, chapter XVII, “The Meaning of Equality: Abstract and Practical,” pp. 363-386. Jaffa maintains here that “genuine verbal inconsistency may be a requirement of true political consistency,” p. 369.

112. “Lincoln’s Character Assassins,” p. 37. See also Crisis, p. 383.

113. “Original Intentions,” Appendix B, p. 415.

114. How to Think About the American Revolution, p. 26.

115. Even here, Jaffa supports medical licensure; apparently, the criticisms of this policy by Milton Friedman and others have left him unconvinced.

116. How to Think About the American Revolution, p. 149.

117. Crisis, 1973 Introduction, p. 12.

118. The relevant parts of the Act are reprinted in Richard Epstein, Forbidden Grounds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 508-511. Epstein’s book comprehensively analyzes civil rights legislation from a free-market point of view.

118a. Oddly enough, Jaffa’s conversion was announced in a review of Epstein’s Forbidden Grounds, the work cited in the preceding note. See, The Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1992, p. A18. Jaffa’s review fails to confront Epstein’s argument that discrimination is sometimes economically efficient.

119. Thomism, p. 195, n. 2.

120. The eminent Eric Weil praised Thomism and Aristotelianism for showing how a philosophical text should be read. Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale (October-December, 1952), pp. 463-465. In view of Strauss’s opinion of Weil, one wonders how Jaffa regards Weil’s praise. In a letter of August 22, 1948 to Alexandre Kojeve, Strauss said about Weil: “I have seldom seen such an empty human being. You [Kojeve] say: he lacks something. I say: he lacks substance, he is nothing but an idle chatterer.” Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, eds., Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 239. Jaffa’s interpretation of Aristotle ran into considerable criticism from Thomists. Charles J. O’Neil, Imprudence in St. Thomas Aquinas (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1955), pp. 41-42, criticizes Jaffa’s claim that Aristotle, if liberated from Aquinas’s commentary, allows abortion and contraception. O’Neil’s interpretation of prudence in Aristotle and Aquinas should be compared with Jaffa’s. Henry Veatch, in a review of Thomism and Aristotelianism in Speculum 28 (1953), pp. 176-178, criticized “the seeming perversity of Mr. Jaffa’s method of interpretation” (p. 177) and found in the book “captious arguments and injudicious conclusions” (p.178).

121. Two examples from Thomism and Aristotelianism must suffice.

1. Jaffa’s claim that according to St. Thomas “the highest perfection of man is possible without moral virtue” (p. 311) does not follow from the views of St. Thomas which Jaffa cites. Even if intellectual virtue is better than moral virtue and can exist without it, Jaffa is wrong to conclude that the highest natural perfection can exist without morality. To do so, he needs to add the premise: Possession of the best virtue suffices for possession of the highest natural perfection. But why cannot the highest natural perfection require morality as well as intellectual virtue? Jaffa cannot escape by replying that by “highest natural perfection” he just means ‘possession of the best virtue,’ because the question would then arise, is there a better natural state of affairs than possession of the highest natural perfection?

2. Jaffa fails to note the fallacy of this argument, which he imputes to Aristotle: “Now the gods, in granting our requests, must act; and in acting, act for the sake of an end. The end aimed at cannot have been achieved before the action….But every end is a good, and thus if the gods act there must have been a good achievable by action which was not achieved by the gods before each such action. Hence if the gods fulfill prayers they cannot be perfect beings.” (pp. 119-128) This ignores the possibility that the good in question is that a prayer be answered after it is made.

122. John Wild, Philosophical Review, Vol. 62 (1953), p. 448. See also Wild’s challenges to Jaffa’s view of natural perfection in Aquinas (p. 448) and Aristotle on courage (p. 449). Strauss sharply attacked Wild’s interpretation of Plato in “On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy,” Social Research 3 (September, 1946), pp. 326-364. See the discussion of this article in Nathan Tarcov, “On a Certain Critique of ‘Straussianism,’” Review of Politics, Vol. 53, No.1 (Winter, 1991), pp. 3-18.

David Gordon [send him mail] is author of LRC’s Books on Liberty, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review.

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Thesz began his career in the 1930s, and his mastery of wrestling
and amazing speed soon attracted attention. Although even in that
era the results of the matches were prearranged, Thesz's genuine
abilities earned universal recognition. Most experts rate him the
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friend and manager. Thesz revered Lewis as the foremost figure in
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During his long career, Thesz held a claim to the world's heavyweight
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In
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May
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author of LRC’s
Books on Liberty, a senior fellow at the Ludwig
von Mises Institute, and editor of The
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Also
in error is the claim that secession meant that the Southern states
refused to accept the results of a democratic election. Precisely
the opposite is the case. Just because they did accept those results,
they wished to withdraw from the union. They did not deny that Lincoln
was the president.

Mr.
Jaffa, astonishingly, uses the legal principle that one cannot unilaterally
repudiate the terms of a contract as a stick with which to beat
the secessionists. In doing so, he begs the question: to what exactly
did the states commit themselves when they ratified the constitution?
If, as they contended, the terms of the constitution left them free
to withdraw, they did not unilaterally renounce their obligations.

But
did they in this particular read the constitution correctly? Joe
Sobran has pointed to a strong indication that they did: three of
the states in their declarations of ratification explicitly reserved
the right to secede. How then can they be held to have agreed to
an arrangement in which they could not secede?

To
this Mr. Jaffa says that these states only meant to refer to the
right of revolution, not a right legally to depart. But why would
a reminder of an extra-legal power have been inserted in a legal
document? Both Jaffa and his antagonist Sobran are close students
of Shakespeare, who has the perfect phrase for Jaffa's construal:
it is very midsummer madness.

August
3, 2001

David
Gordon [send him mail] is
a senior fellow at the Ludwig von
Mises Institute and editor of The
Mises Review.

Please
note: I welcome suggestions as to other works that should be included;
I am less welcoming to suggestions for exclusion.

Acton,
Lord. Selected
Writings of Lord Acton. Three volumes. Edited by J. Rufus
Fears. A comprehensive collection of essays by a great nineteenth-century
classical liberal. Acton distrusted political power, especially
when used for allegedly moral aims. Volumes include: Essays
in the History of Liberty, Essays
in the Study and Writing of History, and Essays
in Religion, Politics, and Morality.

Adams,
Charles. For
Good and Evil. Adams, in a tour de force, interprets
world history as the story of taxation and resistance to it.

———-.
When
in the Course of Human Events. An excellent defense of the
Southern view of the Civil War. Lincoln does not fare well. The
comparison of Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill on the Civil
War is especially well done.

Anderson,
Benjamin. Economics
and the Public Welfare. Anderson, a free-market economist
who worked for the Chase Manhattan Bank, gives a detailed criticism
of Roosevelt's New Deal. Far from getting the economy out of the
Great Depression, the New Deal made matters worse.

Aristotle.
Ethics.

——-.
Politics.
These basic works set the foundation for all later Western moral
and political thought. Rothbard's natural rights libertarianism
draws heavily on certain Aristotelian themes, while rejecting others.

Barnett,
Randy. The
Structure of Liberty. An important defense of libertarian
legal theory. Barnett argues for libertarian rights on grounds of
knowledge, interest, and power.

Bastiat,
Frédéric. Economic
Sophisms. This includes some of Bastiat's classic satirical
essays attacking protective tariffs and other interventionist measures.
He stresses the unseen results of laws designed to "help"
various groups.

———.
The
Law. Criticizes planners who regard people as material to
be molded into a pattern; Hayek took up this line of thought in
The Road to Serfdom.

Bauer,
Peter T. From
Subsistence to Exchange. Bauer, the foremost free-market
expert on development economics, shows that state planning hurts
economic growth. Planners characteristically ignore small traders,
whose activities are vital.

Belloc,
Hillaire. The
Servile State. A prescient warning against welfare-state
measures that erode individual responsibility.

Benson,
Bruce. The
Enterprise of Law. Almost everyone argues that protection
must be provided by a state that holds a monopoly of force. Benson
subjects this belief to withering assault. Law and protection have
often in history been secured by private means.

Berger,
Raoul. Government
By Judiciary. Strong indictment of the U.S. Supreme Court
for usurpation of power, especially through misreading of the Fourteenth
Amendment. Berger defends original intent in interpretation.

Bethell,
Tom. The
Noblest Triumph. Bethell indicts economics for giving no
adequate account of the nature and significance of property rights.

Böhm-Bawerk,
Eugen von. The
Exploitation Theory of Socialism- Communism. This is an
excerpt from the author's massive three volume Capital
and Interest, which the dedicated may wish to attempt. Böhm-Bawerk
destroys Marx's labor theory of value.

Bradford,
M.E. A
Better Guide Than Reason. Bradford, an outstanding Southern
literary scholar, denies that equality is a basic value in American
history. Offers strong criticism of Lincoln as a leveling dictator.

———–.
The
Reactionary Imperative. A collection of essays that stresses
the influence of rhetoric on politics.

Buchanan,
James M. Cost
and Choice. Buchanan offers a strong argument for the Austrian
subjective view of costs. Buchanan saw in the 1960s, much against
the mainstream, that Mises was correct about socialist calculation.

Burckhardt,
Jacob. Reflections
on History. The great Swiss historian indicts power as evil.
For this he was bitterly criticized by Carl Schmitt and the Nazi
intellectual historian Christoph Steding.

Chesterton,
G.K. What's
Wrong With the World? Chesterton uses his immense gift for
paradox to show the fallacies of those in revolt against the natural
order. He refuted contemporary feminism in advance of its birth.

Conquest,
Robert. The
Great Terror. The gruesome harvest of Stalinism. Communist
mass murders did not deter many Western intellectuals from championing
the "Soviet Experiment".

Constant,
Benjamin. Benjamin
Constant: Political Writings. Ed. by Biancamaria Fontana.
Constant's distinction between ancient and modern liberty is an
essential insight.

Courtoise,
Stephane et al. The
Black Book of Communism. Mass murder is a constant characteristic
of Communist regimes. The comparison of Soviet and Nazi atrocities
was too much for some French bien pensants.

Creveld,
Martin van. The
Rise and Decline of the State. An erudite work by a leading
military historian, who argues that the state is a historically
limited phenomenon that is due to be supplanted.

Danford,
John W. The
Roots of Freedom. An excellent short survey of ideas from
political philosophy that have influenced American constitutional
government.

Denson,
John V., ed., The
Costs of War. An important anthology that shows the disastrous
consequences of America's wars. Ralph Raico's essays on Churchill
and on World War I are especially significant.

Ely,
John Hart. War
and Responsibility. Shows that the war power under the U.
S. Constitution rests exclusively with Congress. Ely, a noted legal
theorist, refutes the argument that Presidential military initiative
is needed to deal with emergencies.

Epstein,
Richard. Forbidden
Grounds. Epstein shows that anti-discrimination laws do
not achieve their aims.

——-.
Takings.
Epstein uses the law of takings to develop an important legal argument
that sharply limits government action.

Fisher,
Louis. Presidential
War Power. Like Ely, Fisher demonstrates who holds the war
power in the U.S. Constitution. Both books supplement each other;
Fisher deals simply and fully with the historical record, while
Ely concentrates on legal arguments.

Flew,
Antony. Equality
in Liberty and Justice. An outstanding British philosopher
associated with the ordinary language school assails egalitarianism
as a perversion of justice.

Flynn,
John T. Forgotten
Lessons. Flynn shows how statist regimes, including Roosevelt's
New Deal, promote militarism and war to distract attention from
economic failure.

———.
The
Roosevelt Myth. Franklin Roosevelt's vanity and lack of
principle led him to dictatorial measures and a world war that advanced
the interests of Soviet Russia.

Friedman,
Milton. Capitalism
and Freedom.

———
and Rose D. Friedman, Free
to Choose. These two books present a Chicago School defense
of a relatively free market. Although Austrians will disagree with
a number of points, the books offer valuable criticisms of licensing
and other interventionist policies.

Funkenstein,
Amos. Theology
and the Scientific Imagination. Vital for the relation of
theology to secular thought in European history. Funkenstein shows
how many political concepts follow a similar logic to key terms
in theology. A work of profound erudition.

Gallaway,
Lowell and Richard Vedder. Out
of Work. The authors offer substantial evidence that wage
rates that are rigid downward lead to unemployment. A valuable application
of economic principles to historical examples.

Garrett,
Garret. The
People's Pottage. America has become an empire, preserving
only the form of a republic. Garrett draws suggestive parallels
between America and Rome in the period when Caesarism replaced the
republic.

Garrison,
Roger. Time
and Money. An excellent presentation of Austrian macroeconomics.
The Mises-Hayek account of the business cycle is contrasted with
Keynesian and monetarist theories.

Gordon,
David, Ed. Secession,
State, and Liberty. An anthology of essays in defense
of the right to secession; the essays by Donald Livingston and Murray
Rothbard, among others, are of major importance.

Gottfried,
Paul. After
Liberalism. Gottfried shows that modern liberals act as
virtual thought police to suppress ideas of which they disapprove.
A perfect illustration of Bastiat's key point in The Law.

Hayek,
Friedrich von, ed. Capitalism
and the Historians. One of the most frequent arguments of
opponents of capitalism is that the Industrial Revolution worsened
the condition of the British working class. Hayek, W.H. Hutt, and
others refute this convincingly.

——-.
The
Constitution of Liberty. A comprehensive analysis of the
rule of law. Hayek makes some surprising statements, e.g., he disapproves
of some of the Supreme Court's anti-New Deal decisions (p.190),
but his immensely erudite book deserves careful study.

——–.
The
Counter-Revolution of Science. Perhaps Hayek's most important
book. Attacks social engineering and defends individualist methodology
in the social sciences.

——–.
Law,
Legislation, and Liberty. Three volumes. Particularly important
is the second volume, The
Mirage of Social Justice, which argues that the concept
of social justice is incoherent. Other volumes are Rules
and Order and The
Political Order of a Free People.

——–.
The
Road to Serfdom. One of the most famous of all defenses
of classical liberalism. Hayek shows that socialist thinkers wish
to impose their values on others. "Advanced" thinkers
led the way to totalitarianism.

Hazlitt,
Henry. Economics
in One Lesson. The lesson, not at all easy for policy makers
to learn, is that interference with the free market has indirect
consequences, usually of a disastrous sort.

——-.
The
Failure of the "New Economics". A chapter-by-chapter
analysis of Keynes's General Theory.

——-.
The
Foundations of Morality. A brilliantly clear presentation
of moral theory. Hazlitt defends the free market on utilitarian
grounds, in the style of Mises.

Herbert,
Auberon. The
Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays.
Herbert, a follower of Herbert Spencer, extends the law of equal
freedom more consistently and radically than his mentor.

Higgs,
Robert. Crisis
and Leviathan. Higgs shows how wars lead to increased state
control. Statism remains in place in peacetime through the ratchet
effect.

Hoppe,
Hans-Hermann. Economics
and Ethics of Private Property. Presents Hoppe's important
attempt to show that rejection of libertarian rights is self-defeating.

Hummel,
Jeffrey R. Emancipating
Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War.
Hummel argues that war was not needed to end slavery and defends
the right of secession.

Hutt,
W. H. The
Keynesian Episode. A devastating criticism of the Keynesian
system, based on wide knowledge of the literature. Though Hutt's
style is difficult, he makes acute points not found elsewhere.

Jasay,
Anthony de. The
State. De Jasay demonstrates, using public choice arguments,
that the state must move in the direction of Leviathan.

Johnson,
Paul. A
History of the American People.

——–.
Modern
Times. These two books provide a good guide to, respectively,
American history and the history of the twentieth century. In both,
Johnson uses Rothbard's analysis to account for the onset of the
Great Depression.

Jones,
Eric. The
European Miracle. Why did Europe develop economically, in
a way unlike any other region before the eighteenth century? Jones
shows that free institutions are a large part of the answer.

Jouvenel,
Bertrand de. On
Power. De Jouvenel traces the growth of the state, showing
that democracy often leads to increased control over the individual.
The treatment of Rousseau is especially good.

Kirzner,
Israel M. Competition
and Entrepreneurship. Kirzner presents his influential account
of entrepreneurship, based on perception of opportunity.

——–.
The
Driving Force of the Market. Kirzner attempts to justify
his coordination of plans standard for welfare economics and gives
a sensitive exposition of Mises and other Austrians.

Knight,
Frank H. Selected
Essays. Two volumes. Although Knight was by no means a supporter
of laissez-faire capitalism, his depth and ability to find problems
with standard arguments for socialism and interventionism make him
must reading. Volumes include Laissez-Faire:
Pro and Con and ‘What
is Truth’ in Economics.

La
Boétie, Etienne de. The
Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.
A sixteenth-century essay by a young friend of Montaigne that has
had great impact on libertarian thought. Government requires a level
of popular support to maintain itself. The edition with Murray Rothbard's
excellent preface is recommended.

Leoni,
Bruno. Freedom
and the Law. Leoni extends Hayek on spontaneous order to
show that judge-made law is often superior to the enactments of
legislatures.

Livingston,
Donald. Philosophical
Melancholy and Delirium. In the course of a comprehensive
study of Hume, Livingston provides the best discussion of the right
to secession that I have read.

Locke,
John. Second
Treatise on Government. The theory of property set forward
here is basic to subsequent classical liberalism.

Lomasky,
Loren. Persons,
Rights, and the Moral Community. An excellent philosophical
argument for classical liberalism, based on the need for persons
to pursue their own projects in life.

Mallock,
W. H. A
Critical Examination of Socialism. Mallock, an outstanding
nineteenth-century British thinker, argues that progress and wealth
depend on allowing scope for the creative individual. Socialism
defies this fact and cannot work.

Martin,
James J. Men
Against the State. The best account of the nineteenth-century
American tradition of individualist anarchism. Tucker, Spooner,
and others are neglected thinkers of major importance.

Masters,
Edgar Lee. Lincoln
the Man. Masters, fed up with Lincoln hagiography, paints
the Great Emancipator as psychologically abnormal.

McDonald,
Forrest. States'
Rights and the Union. McDonald shows that the United States
was established as an association of states. With some dissent,
it was so regarded until Lincoln and the Civil War changed things.

Mencken,
H.L. A
Mencken Chrestomathy. A collection of Mencken's mordantly
funny articles. Thorstein Veblen and other targets were never the
same when Mencken had finished with them.

Menger,
Carl. Principles
of Economics. The founding work of Austrian economics. Menger's
subjectivism revolutionized economic theory.

Milbank,
John. Theology
and Social Theory. Though Milbank is far from a classical
liberal, his book demands attention. He argues that modern social
science rests on dubious theological assumptions. Social science
has as its basic purpose the justification of violence.

Miller,
Fred. Nature,
Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics. Argues, contrary
to Alasdair MacIntyre and many others, that Aristotle had a notion
of individual rights.

Mises,
Ludwig von. Human
Action. The greatest twentieth-century work in the
social sciences. Mises replies convincingly to critics of his socialist
calculation argument, among thousands of other insights.

——-.
Liberalism.
Mises argues that classical liberalism is the path to peace. Conflicts
among nationalities can be resolved in lasting fashion only by rigid
restriction of the scope of the state.

——-.
Omnipotent
Government. A penetrating account of how interventionism
in the German economy led to totalitarianism. Together with Hayek's
Road
to Serfdom, it offers an interpretation of intellectual
tends in pre-World War II Europe of unparalleled depth.

——.
Socialism.
Mises's calculation argument poses a challenge that socialism cannot
meet. Not content with this fatal blow, Mises raises all manner
of other critical points. After he is through, nothing of socialism
is left standing.

——.
Theory and
History. Among other things, the best analysis of the Marxist
theory of history. Hayek regarded this as an unduly neglected book.

——.
The
Theory of Money and Credit. A thorough treatment of monetary
theory. The money regression theorem shows that money must have
begun as a commodity. Mises strongly defends the gold standard as
a means of monetary reconstruction.

Morley,
Felix. Freedom
and Federalism. An outstanding defense of states' rights
and interposition by a veteran journalist.

Nisbet,
Robert. The
Quest for Community. Nisbet argues that the modern state
has worked to destroy all institutions that stand between it and
the individual. Rousseau is a chief villain.

Nock,
Albert Jay Our
Enemy, The State. A brilliantly written demonstration that
the state is an instrument of predation. Nock derived his account
from Franz Oppenheimer, The
State, but Nock's presentation is much clearer.

Nordlinger,
Eric. Isolation
Reconfigured. Nordlinger maintains that the United States
should avoid foreign entanglements. The noninterventionist argument
for American entry into both world wars is strong.

Nozick,
Robert. Anarchy,
State, and Utopia. Defends libertarianism with great philosophical
acuity. Nozick's analysis of Rawls's theory of justice is the best
ever written.

Olson,
Mancur. The
Logic of Collective Action. Essential for any study of the
problem of public goods. Hayek preferred it to Buchanan and Tullock's
Calculus
of Consent.

——-.
Power
and
Prosperity. Olson shows why limitations on government
are necessary for economic growth.

Ortega
y Gasset, José. The
Revolt of the Masses. This criticism of mass man is an indictment
of much of twentieth-century political thought.

Pipes,
Richard. Property
and Freedom. An outstanding historian of Russia argues that
property rights are essential to freedom. Interesting comparison
of Britain and Russia.

Popper,
Karl. The
Poverty of Historicism. Popper argues against the possibility
of laws of historical change. His argument is fatal to Marxism.

Porter,
Bruce. War
and the Rise of the State. Like Higgs, but over a wider
historical span, Porter shows how war leads to growth of state power.

Rahe,
Paul. Republics,
Ancient and Modern. Three volumes. A work of enormous scope
and erudition. Rahe offers an excellent analysis of the influence
of classical ideas on the American republican tradition. Although
his Straussian assumptions are questionable, the book is essential.
Volumes include: Inventions
of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime, New
Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought, and

The Ancient Regime in Classical Greece.

Raimondo,
Justin. Reclaiming
the American Right. Raimondo shows convincingly that William
Buckley and other cold warriors derailed American conservatism,
so far as foreign policy is concerned. The Old Right favored peace
and nonintervention.

Rand,
Ayn. The
Fountainhead.

—–.
Atlas
Shrugged. These two novels strongly defend the view that
ethics is based on rational self-interest. Though much in her thought
is dubious, the "sense of life" on display in these books
is valuable.

Reisman,
George. Capitalism:
A Treatise on Economics. This massive tome attempts to combine
Ricardian and Austrian economics to defend the free market. The
view of capital theory presented is controversial but deserves study.

Röpke,
Wilhelm. A
Humane Economy. The author uses moral arguments against
Keynesian and inflationist policies.

Rothbard,
Murray. America's
Great Depression. Contrary to popular belief, the Great
Depression does not prove the failure of laissez-faire capitalism.
Herbert Hoover was a strong interventionist.

——-.
An
Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Two
volumes. Rothbard's brilliant intellectual history is perhaps his
greatest scholarly contribution. He stresses the Spanish scholastics
and gives an outstanding analysis of the religious presuppositions
of Marxism, among much else. Volumes include Classical
Economics and Economic
Thought Before Adam Smith.

——.
Conceived
in Liberty. Four Volumes. Comprehensive account of the colonial
period and the American Revolution, emphasizing libertarian movements.

——.
The
Ethics of Liberty. Rothbard's fullest statement of his natural
law grounding for rights.

—–.
Man,
Economy, and State. A major treatise that fills out and
extends Misesian economics. Penetrating discussions of monopoly
price, Keynesianism, and myriad other topics.

—–.
Power
and Market. A comprehensive classification and analysis
of all types of interference with the free market. Rothbard originally
intended it to form part of Man, Economy, and State.

—–.
What
Has
Government Done to Our Money? A brilliantly
concise answer to the question posed in the title. Rothbard defends
the gold standard and opposes fractional reserve banking.

Schumpeter,
Joseph. Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpeter gives an unrivalled
demolition of the perfect competition standard for monopoly. His
elitist view of democracy merits attention; his views on socialist
calculation do not.

Schoeck,
Helmut. Envy.
Much of socialism and interventionism is rooted in envy. Schoeck
gives a detailed historical and sociological account of envy's malign
consequences.

Simmons,
A. John. Justification
and Legitimacy.

——–.
The
Lockean Theory of Rights.

——-.
Moral
Principles and Political Obligations.

——-.
On
the Edge of Anarchy. These four books are a neglected resource
for classical liberal thought. Simmons argues that Lockean moral
theory is soundly based. Lockean arguments cannot be used to justify
government; and anarchy, or something close to it, is the proper
upshot of Locke's thought. All major arguments designed to justify
political obligation fail.

Sowell,
Thomas. Knowledge
and Decisions. Sowell's magnum opus. It offers a
detailed account of spontaneous orders; Hayek greatly admired it.

——.
The
Quest for Cosmic Justice. Contemporary leftist thought is
engaged in a futile effort to remodel the world. Economics teaches
us the need to limit our goals, by making us aware that all action
involves choice and cost.

Solzhenitsyn,
Alexander. The
Gulag Archipelago. A riveting discussion of the Soviet concentration
camp system. Communist terror and repression began with Lenin, not
Stalin.

Spencer,
Herbert. The
Man Versus the State. A sharp attack on the "New Toryism"
of the late nineteenth century. Spencer's arguments against the
early manifestations of the welfare state are of far reaching importance.

——-.
The
Principles of Ethics. Volume Two. The definitive statement
of the great British philosopher's political views, though some
prefer his earlier Social Statics. Spencer's argument for
rights is outstanding.

Spooner,
Lysander. The
Lysander Spooner Reader. Spooner, a key nineteenth century
individualist, razes to the ground social contract arguments for
the state.

Steiner,
Hillel. An
Essay on Rights. Steiner argues powerfully for an unusual
variant of libertarianism. A key issue for him is to establish which
rights can consistently exist together.

Stove,
David. Against
the Idols
of the Age. A major argument against modern varieties
of relativism.

Sumner,
W. G. What
Do Social Classes Owe to Each Other? Sumner calls attention
to the "Forgotten Man", who must pay for harebrained schemes
by which some endeavor to " do good" for others.

Trenchard,
John, et al. Cato's
Letters. Ed. By Ronald Hamowy. Four Volumes in Two. An eighteenth-century
defense of libertarian natural rights, which decisively influenced
the American Revolution. Hamowy's scholarly annotations are of great
value in understanding the text.

Tullock,
Gordon. The
Economics of Income Redistribution. Tullock shows that the
actions of supporters of massive redistribution to the poor belie
their words. People are unwilling to redistribute large amounts
of income to their own detriment, and plans to do so usually have
some ulterior end.

Weaver,
Richard. Ideas
Have Consequences. The brilliant defense of property rights
is more important than Weaver's attempt to find the root of modern
evil in medieval nominalism.

Wilson,
Clyde. The
Essential Calhoun. An excellent anthology. Calhoun gave
a penetrating defense of the "concurrent majority" as
a limit to political innovation.

Yeager,
Leland. Ethics
as Social Science. A major defense of rule utilitarian ethics,
in the style of Mises and Hazlitt. Yeager's knowledge of the literature
of ethics is extensive and deep.

——–.
The
Fluttering Veil. An important collection of essays on monetary
disequilibrium and related topics.

March
15, 2001

David
Gordon, book editor of LewRockwell.com and author of The
Mises Review, a quarterly book review, is a senior fellow
at the Mises Institute. He was
educated at UCLA, where he earned his PhD in intellectual history,
and is the author of Resurrecting
Marx; The
Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics; Critics of Marx;
and An
Introduction to Economic Reasoning. He is also editor
of Secession,
State, and Liberty.
Dr. Gordon is also a contributor to such journals as The
Journal of Libertarian Studies
and The
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

DIGG THIS

The
Irrepressible Rothbard:
The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard
Edited by
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Center for Libertarian Studies, 2000
xx + 431 pgs.

This
indispensable selection of articles that Murray Rothbard wrote for
the Rothbard-Rockwell Report contains the most insightful
comment on foreign policy I have ever read. In a few paragraphs,
Rothbard destroys the prevailing doctrine of twentieth-century American
foreign policy.

According
to the Accepted Picture, totalitarian powers twice threatened America
during the past sixty years. Germany, under the maniacal leadership
of Hitler, aimed at world conquest. When the United States and her
allies succeeded in halting the Nazis, a new menace demanded attention.

The
Soviet Union, a militantly expansionist state, had to be contained
during the protracted cold war. At various times throughout the
cold war, and continuing after it to the present, hostile and aggressive
dictators presented America with problems. Saddam Hussein ranks
perhaps as the most notorious of these tyrants.

The
Accepted Picture draws a lesson from all these events. An aggressive
power, almost always led by a dictator, must be dealt with as one
would handle a neighborhood bully. Only firm demands to the dictator
can stave off war.

Since
bullies generally are cowards, dictators will back down if directly
challenged. The Munich Conference, September 29-30, 1938, perfectly
illustrates how not to handle a dictator. Britain and France appeased
Hitler; the result was war one year later. Had Britain and France
acted when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, the Nazis
could have been overthrown virtually without cost.

Rothbard
at once locates the fallacy in this oft-repeated line of thought.
“Answer me this, war hawks: when, in history when, did one State,
faced with belligerent, ultra-tough ultimatums by another, when
did that State ever give up and in effect surrender – before
any war was fought? When?” (p. 170).

Rothbard’s
rhetorical question rests upon a simple point of psychology. The
supposed “bully” cannot surrender to an ultimatum lest he be overthrown.
“No head of State with any pride or self-respect, or who wishes
to keep the respect of his citizens, will surrender to such an ultimatum”
(p. 170).

The
Gulf War perfectly illustrates Rothbard’s contention. Faced with
an overwhelming show of force, Saddam Hussein did not back down.
Rothbard’s apt generalization explains Saddam’s seemingly irrational
response.

But
have we not forgotten something? What about World War II? Does not
the failure to confront Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938 prove
conclusively the thesis of the anti-appeasers?

Our
author’s response illustrates his ability to counter an opposing
argument at its strongest point. “Neither was World War II in Europe
a case where toughness worked. On the contrary, Hitler disregarded
the English guarantee to Poland that brought England and France
into the German-Polish war in September 1939″ (p. 170).

A
belligerent foreign policy, then, will most likely lead to the wars
it professes to deter. But who urges us toward this course? Rothbard
arraigns the social democrats and their successors, the neoconservatives.
These he accuses of support for statism at home and war abroad.

Rothbard
tersely sums up the credo of social democracy in this way: “on all
crucial issues, social democrats stand against liberty and tradition,
and in favor of statism and Big Government. They are more dangerous
in the long run than the communists, not simply because they have
endured, but also because their program and their rhetorical appeals
are far more insidious, since they claim to combine socialism with
the appealing virtues of ‘democracy’ and freedom of inquiry” (p.
23).

For
Rothbard, the State always ranks as the principal enemy. The battle
against the “massive welfare-warfare State” to him was no mere clash
of abstractions. Quite the contrary, he aimed at particular targets
who embodied the statist doctrines he abhorred. Sidney Hook occupied
a place near the summit of his intellectual foes. A precocious communist
in the 1920s, Hook found the Soviet Union insufficiently revolutionary
and soon beat the drums for militant anticommunism, though of a
distinctly socialist cast. Throughout his long life, he called for
war, first against Nazi Germany and then against Comrade Stalin.
According to Rothbard, “one’s attitude toward Sidney Hook . . .
provides a convenient litmus test” (p. 25).

The
struggle against the State needed to be waged on many fronts. Rothbard
saw a disturbing trend among certain left-libertarians. Although
libertarianism quintessentially opposes State power, some doctrinal
deviants allowed the enemy to enter through the back door.

They
did so by holding that public agencies must observe rules of nondiscriminatory
treatment. These rules have nothing to do with the free market,
but everything to do with the slogans of the contemporary Left.
Rothbard expertly locates the central fallacy in the argument of
the libertarian heretics. Since nearly everything nowadays partakes
to a degree of the State, the new doctrine leads to total government
control.

Rothbard
states his point with characteristic panache: “But not only literal
government operations are subject to this egalitarian doctrine.
It also applies to any activities which are tarred with the public
brush, with the use, for example, of government streets, or any
acceptance of taxpayer funds . . . sometimes, libertarians fall
back on the angry argument that, nowadays, you can’t really distinguish
between public and private anyway” (p. 103).

We
have, then, an all out statist attack on liberty. How has this assault
managed to do so well? Rothbard’s answer exposes the philosophical
roots of our problem. No longer does the academic elite believe
in objective morality, grasped by right reason. Lacking a rational
basis for moral values, our supposed intellectual leaders readily
fall prey to statist fallacy.

The
beginning stage of nihilism, Rothbard maintains, occurred in art.
“First, the left-liberals preached l’art pour l’art in aesthetics,
and, as a corollary in ethics, trumpeted the new view that there
is no such thing as a revealed or objective ethics, that all ethics
are ‘subjective,’ that all of life’s choices are only personal,
emotive ‘preferences’” (p. 296).

The
denial of objective standards in the name of freedom led to death
and destruction. Rothbard maintains that ethical nihilism results
in the overthrow of the most basic human rights, including the right
not to be murdered. He has not the slightest sympathy for the rampant
pro-euthanasia movement. “No, the mask is off, and Doctor Assisted
Death and Mr. Liberal Death with Dignity, and all the rest of the
crew turn out to be Doctor or Mister Murder. Watch out Mr. And Ms.
America: liberal humanists, lay and medical, are . . . out to kill
you” (p. 303).

What
can be done to combat statism and nihilism? Rothbard views populism
with great sympathy. As so often in his work, he rethought and deepened
his position. He determined that a common libertarian strategy,
looking to the courts to enforce rights, was mistaken.

Even
in cases in which courts enforce the “correct” position, the imperatives
of local control and states rights should not be overturned. Thus,
Rothbard favored a “pro-choice” position on abortion, but he was
loath to have courts enforce abortion rights against recalcitrant
states.

“No;
libertarians should no longer be complacent about centralization
and national jurisdiction – the equivalent,” he writes, “of
foreign intervention or of reaching for global dictatorship. Kansans
henceforth should take their chances in Kansas; Nevadans in Nevada,
etc. And if women find that abortion clinics are not defended in
Kansas, they can travel to New York or Nevada” (p. 306).

Although
Rothbard found great merit in populism, he did not defend the movement
uncritically. He saw danger in leftist populism: a true populist
movement must not abandon the free market in favor of crackpot panaceas.
In one of the last articles he wrote, he warned Pat Buchanan against
this danger. “In this murky and volatile situation, the important
thing for us paleopopulists is that we find a candidate as soon
as possible who will lead and develop the cause and the movement
of right-wing populism, to raise the standard of the Old, free,
decentralized, and strictly limited Republic” (p. 141).

This
is taken from the Winter 2000 issue of the Mises
Review.

November
6, 2000

David
Gordon [send him mail]
is a senior fellow at the Ludwig
von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises
Review.
See also his Books
on Liberty.

David
Gordon Archives

Recently by David Gordon: Rothbard Against War

Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect American Freedom. By Ron Paul. Grand Central Publishing, 2011. xviii + 328 pages.

This brilliant book collects fifty short essays by Ron Paul on issues that range from abortion and assassination to unions and Zionism. It is no disparate assemblage, though; rather it is unified around a central theme, the vital importance of liberty. Paul's defense of liberty and opposition to its contemporary enemies put him at odds with all establishment politicians, both Republican and Democratic.

As he puts the point with characteristic force: "For more than 100 years, the dominant views that have influenced our politicians have undermined the principles of personal liberty and private property, The tragedy is these bad policies have had strong bipartisan support. There has been no real opposition to the steady increase in the size and scope of government. Democrats are largely and openly for government expansion, and if we were to judge the Republicans by their actions and not their rhetoric, we would come to much the same conclusion about them."(p.20)

What exactly is the liberty that Paul favors? He makes clear at the book's start what he has in mind: "Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others. This means, above all else, keeping government out of our lives." (p.xi) And of course the liberties in question include property rights: a free society rests on a free market economy.

Few if any in American politics will openly avow total opposition to liberty and property, but the mainstream approach toward these values differs entirely from Paul's. As conventional politicians see matters, liberty and property, whatever their importance, must be balanced against other values, such as social justice and security. Is it not reasonable, they say, that the rich should surrender a little of their wealth to help the destitute? Again, does not an absolutist conception of civil liberties ignore the peril of terrorism? Even if we must submit to bothersome surveillance and intrusions, is not the price worth paying if these measures reduce the dangers of a terrorist assault?

It is a principal merit of Liberty Defined to refute these all too common contentions. As Paul trenchantly points out, attempts to surrender a slight amount of liberty in pursuit of competing values lead rapidly to drastic incursions on freedom, if not its virtually complete curtailment. "Granting food stamps benefits to 2 percent of the population in need seems like a reasonable thing to do. But what is not realized is that though only 2 percent get undeserved benefits from the 98 percent, 100 percent of the principle of individual liberty has been sacrificed. . . it was only to be expected that the dependency of 2 percent would grow and spread. . .Here is a good example of how a compromise can lead to chaos. The personal income tax began at 1 percent and applied only to the rich. Just look at the size of the tax code today." (pp.129-30)

Paul's contention should not be set aside as a "slippery-slope" argument. His view is not that it is logically necessary that any incursion on liberty lead on to others. Rather, his contention is twofold: people who favor balancing liberty against other values have failed to arrive at a principled limit on sacrifices of liberty; and experience with such balancing shows that it abandons freedom.

Precisely the same process of incremental surrender takes place over security. "Many Americans believe that it is necessary to sacrifice some freedom for security in order to preserve freedom in the greater sense." (p.253) This belief has at times led to the defense of gravely immoral behavior: "In recent years, especially since 9/11, a majority of the American people have been brainwashed into believing that our national security depends on torture and that it's been effective. The fact is, our Constitution, our laws, international laws, and the code of morality all forbid it. . .The old ruse is to ask what if you knew someone had vital information that, if revealed, would save American lives. . . The question that supporters of torture refuse to even ask is, If one suspects that one individual out of 100 captured has crucial information, and you don't know which one it is, are you justified to torture all 100 to get that information? If we still get a yes answer in support of such torture, I'm afraid our current system of government cannot survive." (pp.290-91)

But if we renounce, in all instances, the use of torture, do we not put our nation at risk? To the contrary, the view that security depends on the state, let alone state-mandated torture, rests on illusion. If a genuine threat to life and liberty is present, people in a free society can deal with it voluntarily: government coercion is superfluous. "In a free society, where depending on government is minimal or absent, any real crisis serves to motivate individuals, families, churches, and communities to come together and work to offset the crisis, whether it comes from natural causes. . .or is man-made." (p.254)

Are threats posed by foreign nations an exception to this contention? Not at all. These alleged threats are grossly exaggerated in order to aggrandize the State's power. The so-called "war on terrorism" perfectly illustrates how the State uses a blown-up crisis to its own advantage: "For a little bit of reassurance — even with all the bad mistakes that contributed to the terrorist dangers — it is more likely that an American will die from being hit by lightning than from a terrorist attack." (p.97)

With great courage for someone seeking the presidency, Paul notes that our misbegotten quest for "security" has led to America's becoming a menace to other nations. "Now many Americans can't even conceive of other countries believing the United States to be a threat. And yet, ours is the only government that will travel to far distant lands to overthrow governments, station troops, and drop bombs on people. The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons against people. And we are surprised that many people in the world regard the United States as a threat?" (p.257)

The policy of American aggression unfortunately did not begin with the Bush and Obama administrations. These presidents followed in the footsteps of many eminent predecessors in office. Not least of these was Franklin Roosevelt, who spoke of "freedom from fear" but was a past master at arousing the very emotion he professed to allay, in order the better to pursue his bellicose scheming: "Roosevelt's motivation and intent [in the Four Freedoms Speech] are unknown to me, but the results of his effort did not serve the cause of freedom in the United States. Within seven months of this speech, Roosevelt stopped all oil shipments to Japan, which helped lead to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. All the while, Roosevelt preached a distorted view of freedom; he was maneuvering us into war." (p.125)

In light of the campaign of contumely to which Ron Paul has of late been subjected, one turns with particular interest to his remarks on racism. He insightfully draws a connection between racism and a war-dominated foreign policy: "Wartime is an environment that breeds wicked forms of racism. This is because governments love to turn existing prejudices into hate in order to mobilize the masses. . . If we hate racism, we must also hate war since it is war that has bred all these malignant types of racism. . .Government-backed racism is designed to shore up government power. The idea is to stir popular opinion that should be directed against one's own government toward some evil foreign enemy."(pp.239, 241)

Paul's struggle against American empire has won him wide notice, but he is equally famous for his campaign for sound money and a free economy. Indeed, the two battles are closely linked, since it is military Keynesianism that supports the extensive government spending that the quest for empire requires. "Military Keynesianism supported by both conservatives and liberals has led to an obscene amount of taxpayer dollars being spent, now surpassing the military spending of all other nations combined. . .Military Keynesianism invites mercantilist policies. Frequently, our armies follow corporate investments around the world, and have for more than a hundred years. . .There's something about military Keynesianism that I dislike even more than domestic economic Keynesianism. Too many times, I've seen how the conservative agenda of cutting government gets overtaken by this ideological attachment to unlimited military spending." (pp.174-76)

Paul does not confine himself to criticism but has a remedy for this dire state of affairs. The government should retire altogether from economic intervention and allow the free economy to work unhindered. In particular, the government should altogether renounce its control over the money supply. His familiar rallying cry "End the Fed" is part of a larger program: "I would like to see a dollar as good as gold. I would like to see the banking system operating as it would under free enterprise, meaning no central bank. I would like to see competitive currencies emerge on the market and be permitted to thrive.. . .Paper money is a drug and Washington is addicted. . .Washington should get out of the way and let another system built on human choice emerge spontaneously." (pp.201-202)

Paul's entire political program rests firmly on moral principles. He movingly sums up what he believes in this way: "What moral system should government follow? The same one individuals follow. Do not steal. Do not murder. Do not bear false witness. Do not covet. Do not foster vice. If governments would merely follow the moral law that all religions recognize, we would live in a world of peace, prosperity, and freedom. The system is called classical liberalism. Liberty is not complicated." (p.211)

Books by David Gordon

January 4, 2012

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for LRC. He is, most recently, the author of The Essential Rothbard and editor of Strictly Confidential: the Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard. See his Books on Liberty. See also his Books on War.

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Recently by David Gordon: Sam Konkin and Libertarian Theory

The War on Terror has been much in the news, and thinking about it makes evident a fundamental fact about the modern state. Its growth is essentially dependent on war and the threat of war. In our time, we see this not only in the battle against al-Qaeda but in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well.

Murray Rothbard exposed the war system with matchless clarity. For most of his working life, the Cold War dominated American foreign policy. Many people sympathetic to the free market claimed that in order to fight the menace of Soviet Communism, we must, albeit temporarily, acquiesce in a powerful state. Rothbard rejected this line of reasoning, arguing that Soviet policy after World War II was largely defensive. A policy of mutual disarmament and a return to the traditional American foreign policy of nonintervention would cause communism eventually to collapse from its inherent economic defects. Unfortunately, American conservatives abandoned the foreign policy of the Old Right isolationists, in good part owing to the propaganda of William F. Buckley, Jr., and his National Review cohorts, aided and abetted by the CIA.

The following books and articles by Rothbard explain and defend his views on the Cold War and its significance. I recommend that "War and Foreign Policy" be read first, but otherwise the items may be read in any order.

"War and Foreign Policy” in For a New Liberty.

Probably the best place to begin for a grasp of Rothbard's views. Gives a general argument to show that collective security against "aggression" differs from individual self-defense. Isolationism is the appropriate foreign policy. Reviews America's wars, from the Spanish-American War to the Vietnam War, and argues that all were unjustifiable. Argues that Soviet foreign policy after World War II was primarily defensive.

“Critique of Frank S. Meyer’s Memorandum,” “For a New Isolationism” in Strictly Confidential

A defense of an isolationist foreign policy, written at the height of the Cold War. Mutual disarmament will make a return to isolationism possible.

“The Foreign Policy of the Old Right“

Discusses the "Old Right": its leading figures were in many cases not conventional conservatives but classical liberals such as Albert Jay Nock and H. L. Mencken, as well independent leftists like John T. Flynn. Their opposition to American wars is discussed. Especially valuable for the portrayal of the last stand of the Old Right, opposition to the Korean War, which the conventional left supported.

The Betrayal of the American Right

Rothbard's most detailed account of the Old Right. Particularly valuable for its insider's look at libertarian foreign policy in the period from 1945 to the 1960s. Rothbard shows that William Buckley and his National Review subverted the peace-loving foreign policy of the Old Right, in pursuit of an Orwellian total war against Soviet communism.

“The Transformation of the American Right“

A 1964 article that gives a succinct presentation of Rothbard's thesis of the betrayal of the Old Right. The irrational nature of the "better dead than red" ideology is stressed. There is no need to accept either alternative.

“Rothbard on Orwell: Two Essays"

Challenges the view that Orwell's 1984 was an anti-Soviet polemic. To the contrary, the novel was a protest against the Cold War system of building the power and dominance of the State through whipping up artificial war-scares.

“Myths of the Cold War“

Contends that the usual justifications for the Cold War are mistaken. Communists have certainly been guilty of many crimes, but this hardly makes them unique. The Soviets do not have a timetable for our destruction, and it would be wrong to risk nuclear holocaust to free nations from Communist rule.

“Nations by Consent; Decomposing the Nation-State“

What attitude should libertarians adopt toward nationalism? Existing boundaries of states are not sacred, and , generally, secession movements merit support. Appropriate immigration policy is discussed, and Rothbard rethinks his former support for completely open borders.

Wall Street Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Indispensable background for understanding twentieth-century American foreign policy. Shows the controlling influence of banking interests on American policy, The Morgan and Rockefeller interests and their pro-war policies are analyzed.

“War, Peace, and the State“

Contrary to statist propaganda , the State does not protect its citizens from foreign aggression. To the contrary, the State needs to suppress revolutions and foreign assaults in order to maintain itself. The State resorts to total mobilization, entirely willing to put the lives and liberties of its subjects at risk, to secure its place in the struggle with other States.

"Libertarians Must Never Warm to the Warfare State"

A 1977 article that criticizes libertarians who reject a non-interventionist foreign policy.

“Harry Elmer Barnes as Revisionist of the Cold War"

Barnes was the leading publicist of World War I and World War II revisionism. He continued his anti-war activities after 1945, and Rothbard offers a detailed account of Barnes's opposition to the Korean War and the Cold War. Like Rothbard, Barnes adopted an anti-Cold War interpretation of Orwell's 1984.

Books by David Gordon

May 10, 2011

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for LRC. He is, most recently, the author of The Essential Rothbard and editor of Strictly Confidential: the Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard. See his Books on Liberty. See also his Books on War.

The Best of David Gordon

The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free u2022 By Christopher A. Preble u2022 Cornell University Press, 2009 Xiii + 212 pages

America, it is frequently urged, cannot return to its traditional foreign policy of nonintervention. We live in a world that constantly exposes us to danger. Unless America acts as a world policeman, a conflagration far distant from us can soon spread and strike at our essential national interests. The lessons of 9-11 must not be forgotten. Fortunately, America is far and away the most powerful nation in the world. We can, if only we maintain a resolute will, act to promote world order: if we do not, no one else can act in our place.

This disastrous line of thought has embroiled us in futile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; now neoconservatives urge us to take drastic action against Iran, lest that nation secure nuclear weapons. Once more, the contention supporting a strike at Iran is that the United States must act as a hegemonic power to maintain a stable world. Christopher Preble provides an outstanding critical analysis of this dangerous doctrine in what must count as one of the best defenses of a restrained and rational foreign policy since Eric Nordlinger’s Isolationism Reconfigured.[1]

Even those inclined to give credence to the siren song of a Pax Americana must confront reality. Though America may be the world’s mightiest nation, it cannot achieve the grandiose goals of the interventionists. America is strong, but not strong enough.

But our military power has come up short in recent years. Although the U.S. military scored decisive victories against those individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq who were foolish enough to stand and fight, it has proved incapable of enforcing a rule of law, or delivering security, in many parts of post-Taliban Afghanistan or post-Saddam Iraq… We know that our men and women in uniform can accomplish remarkable things. But we have also begun to appreciate their limitations, the most important of which being that they cannot be everywhere at once. (pp. 37—8)

If the goal of universal peace under American domination is unrealizable, the attempt to achieve it has imposed heavy costs. Most obviously, the wars undertaken to secure this chimerical goal have caused death, destruction, and resentment against the United States by the people subjected to our assault. In Afghanistan, e.g., the

use of air power to attack suspected insurgent strongholds has enraged Afghan leaders and the local population causing them to question our intentions. Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s "first demand" of Barack Obama was for the President-elect "to put an end to civilian casualties." (pp. 147—48)

The financial burdens of hegemony are difficult to overestimate. America spends more on the military than all other industrialized nations combined. Defenders of our current policy counter by saying that our defense spending is no higher than many other countries as a percentage of GDP, and lower than some. Preble dismisses this as irrelevant:

There are a very few poor countries that spend a larger percentage of their meager GDP, but that translates to far less military capacity in real terms … what a country spends as a share of its GDP doesn’t tells us very much about how much it should spend. (p. 67)

Talk of percentages occludes the immense amount of money the hegemonic policy demands. As an example, the Iraq War, according to an estimate by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, will cost

between $2.7 trillion in direct costs to the federal treasury, to as much as $5 trillion in terms of the total impact of the war on the U.S. economy… Although critics challenged aspects of the Stiglitz/Bilmes research, two of their central arguments are beyond dispute — and they apply not merely to the Iraq War, but to all wars. First, we spend more money on our military when it is at war than when it is at peace. Second, having waged war, we pay more over the lifetimes of those injured and disabled than we would have paid if they had never fought. (p. 39)

Preble’s stress on this point continues the pioneering work of Earl Ravenal, a one-time Robert McNamara "whiz kid" who became a resolute foe of interventionism. He too stressed the extraordinary financial costs of American military policy, in such works as Never Again.

Leftist critics of American policy often call up visions of the utopia that would result were the government to spend its military budget on social programs. Could we not, absent a crushing military budget, easily provide decent healthcare and education for all, not to mention the drastic reduction of poverty, if not its total eradication? Preble trenchantly points out the fallacy. The problem of the military budget does not lie in its crowding out of other government programs. Rather, it prevents people from spending their money as they wish, owing to the high taxes it requires:

Such arguments implicitly assume that money not being spent on a war, or the military more generally, would be spent by the government or on other government programs. That is shortsighted and ultimately counterproductive… [Opportunity] costs apply not just to what the government is spending and where the government might be spending elsewhere, but also [to] what average taxpayers are not able or willing to spend because they are on the hook for paying for an enormous and seemingly permanent military industry, and also for the occasional wars. (pp. 78—9)

The pursuit of hegemony has also adversely affected our system of government. Recent presidents have arrogated to themselves the right to commit America to war, in defiance of the Constitution.

The Founders of our great nation … worried that wars would give rise to an overgrown military establishment that would upset the delicate balance between the three branches of government, and between the government and the people… A government instituted to preserve liberties could swiftly come to subvert them. A gloomy Jefferson opined, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." (p. 80)

Defenders of current policy have a counterargument to all that has been said so far. They will reiterate the dangers that a disordered world presents to us. Even if we cannot completely attain a stable world order controlled by America, and even if the attempt to bring this about has heavy costs, we ought to try to come as close as we can to this goal. Otherwise, a conflagration anywhere on the globe can quickly escalate to an existential threat to us.

One of the best features of Preble’s book is the convincing response it offers to this objection. It is unquestionably true that disorder constantly threatens various areas of the world; but why must a single power act to restore order? If America does not act, will not those nations in the vicinity of a crisis have a strong incentive to cope with it?

In fact, there is little reason to believe the world will descend down this path [to chaos] if the United States hews to a restrained foreign policy focused on preserving its national security and advancing its vital interests. This is because there are other governments in other countries, pursuing similar policies aimed at preserving their security, and regional — much less global — chaos is hardly in their interests. On the contrary, the primary obligation of government is to defend the citizens from threats, both foreign and domestic. (p. 94)[2]

Those anxious to insure that America remains embroiled in the Middle East warn against a particular example of disorder, i.e., the danger to our economy that would result from an interruption in the supply of oil. Must we not act to interdict any threat to this vital resource? Preble points out that this danger is grossly exaggerated:

As oil is the principal source of revenue for the Persian Gulf countries, an explicit attempt to withhold this source of wealth from world markets would certainly be more painful for the perpetrators of such a policy than for their intended victims. (p. 111)

Even those who reject American hegemony sometimes call for American action to meet "humanitarian catastrophes." Are we to stand idly by when mass murder, e.g., in Rwanda and Darfur, is taking place? Preble has a twofold response to this unfortunately influential doctrine of the "responsibility to protect." First, military interventions often fail to achieve their ostensible humanitarian purpose and

[e]ven the best-intended military interventions, those specifically aimed at advancing the cause of peace and justice, can have horrific side-effects, [the] most important of these being the real possibility that innocent bystanders and those the operation seeks to protect may be inadvertently killed or injured.… Those killed leave behind a legacy of bitterness; parents, spouses, children, friends, few of whom may have actively supported the former regime, but all of whom may forget the noble intentions of the invading force and later direct their wrath at those responsible for their misfortune. (pp. 123—24)

The second strand of Preble’s case against humanitarian intervention appeals to the fundamental insight of his book: the limits of American power. To use the American military for humanitarian missions may strain our resources and interfere with the protection of the American people.

The Constitution clearly stipulates the object of the U.S. government is to protect "We the People of the United States." Our government is supposed to act in our common defense, not the defense of others. (p. 131)

Preble has constructed an overwhelming case against our current hegemonic policy. The most valuable insight of the book, though, emerges once one accepts this case. This vital insight answers the question, what must be done to achieve a noninterventionist foreign policy? Preble forcefully contends that we will never be able to limit American overreaching so long as the current imbalance in military power persists. Given America’s overwhelming military superiority to any opponent, the temptation to use that power is well-nigh irresistible. To cope with this problem, our military forces must be drastically reduced. Preble is no pacifist; but only by making the grasp at hegemony impossible, he argues, can we hope for a more limited and saner policy. As Preble aptly remarks, "Reducing our power and thereby constraining our ability to intervene militarily around the globe will limit our propensity to intervene" (p. 138).

Notes

[1] (Princeton, 1995). See my review in The Mises Review Fall 1996.

[2] Preble expertly disposes of the claim that international defense is a public good that will be underproduced if the United States fails to provide it: nations, it is argued, will hope to benefit from efforts by others in their region to cope with threats rather than deal with these threats themselves. Preble counters that defense is not a pure public good. To the extent that it is a public good, though, smaller powers can free ride on American defense efforts.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

May 22, 2010

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for LRC. He is the author, most recently, of The Essential Rothbard. See his Books on Liberty. See also his Books on War.

The Best of David Gordon

Recently by David Gordon: Making Anarchy Believable

This article is excerpted from The Essential Rothbard (2007).

Rothbard modified the famous dictum of Marx: he wished both to understand and change the world. He endeavored to apply the ideas he had developed in his theoretical work to current politics and to bring libertarian views to the attention of the general public. One issue for him stood foremost. Like Randolph Bourne, he maintained that “war is the health of the state”; he accordingly opposed an aggressive foreign policy.

His support for nonintervention in foreign policy led him to champion the Old Right. John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, and other pre-World War II “isolationists” shared Rothbard’s belief in the close connection between state power and bellicose foreign policy.

The situation was quite otherwise with postwar American conservatism. Although Rothbard was an early contributor to William Buckley’s National Review, he rejected the aggressive pursuit of the Cold War advocated by Buckley and such members of his editorial staff as James Burnham and Frank S. Meyer. He broke with these self-styled conservatives and thereafter became one of their strongest opponents. For similar reasons, he condemned their neoconservative successors.

Rothbard made clear the basis of his opposition to National Review foreign policy in an essay, “For a New Isolationism,” written in April 1959; the magazine did not publish it. To those who favored a policy of “liberation” directed against the Communist bloc, Rothbard raised a devastating objection:

In all the reams of material written by the Right in the last decade [1949–1959], there is never any precise spelling-out of what a policy of ultrafirmness or toughness really entails. Let us then fill in this gap by considering what I am sure is the toughest possible policy: an immediate ultimatum to Khrushchev and Co. to resign and disband the whole Communist regime; otherwise we drop the H-bomb on the Kremlin…. What is wrong with this policy? Simply that it would quickly precipitate an H-bomb, bacteriological, chemical, global war which would destroy the United States as well as Russia.[247]

To this dire picture, proponents of “rollback” would of course respond that the Communists would surrender: Rothbard dissents, for reasons that will be discussed in detail later. Suffice it to say here that he thought it obvious that since “the destruction of the United States would follow such an ultimatum, we must strongly oppose such a policy.”[248]

If “liberation” leads to national suicide, what is the alternative? Rothbard suggests a return to “the ancient and traditional American policy of isolationism and neutrality.” But is this not open to a fatal objection? “But, I [Rothbard] will hear from every side, everyone knows that isolationism is obsolete and dead, in this age of H-bombs, guided missiles, etc.”[249] How can America shun involvement in European power politics if Russia has the ability to destroy us? No longer can we retreat to Fortress America.

To this Rothbard has a simple response: “a program of world disarmament up to the point where isolationism again becomes militarily practical.”[250] If this policy were carried out, America would be safe from foreign attack: no longer would we need to involve ourselves in foreign quarrels. Mutual disarmament was in Russia’s interest as well, so a disarmament agreement was entirely feasible.

Ever alert for objections, Rothbard anticipates that critics will charge that a Fortress America would have crushing military expenses and be cut off from world trade. Not at all, he responds:

this argument, never very sensible, is absurd today when we are groaning under the fantastic budgets imposed by our nuclear arms race. Certainly … our arms budget will be less than it is now…. The basis of all trade is benefit to both parties.[251]

Even if a hostile power controlled the rest of the world, why would it not be willing to trade with us? Unfortunately, Rothbard’s arguments did not have any effect on his bellicose antagonists.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Books by David Gordon

November 4, 2011

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for LRC. He is, most recently, the author of The Essential Rothbard and editor of Strictly Confidential: the Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard. See his Books on Liberty. See also his Books on War.

The Best of David Gordon