LewRockwell » Ralph Raico

Universal Church, Tiny States, Private Property

Ralph Raico — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:09:04 +0000

This essay originally appeared as “The Theory of Economic Development and the ‘European Miracle’” in The Collapse of Development Planning, edited by Peter J. Boettke.

Among writers on economic development, P.T. Bauer is noted both for the depth of his historical knowledge, and for his insistence on the indispensability of historical studies in understanding the phenomenon of growth (Walters 1989, 60; see also Dorn 1987). In canvassing the work of other theorists, Bauer has complained of their manifest “amputation of the time dimension”:

The historical background is essential for a worthwhile discussion of economic development, which is an integral part of the historical progress of society. But many of the most widely publicized writings on development effectively disregard both the historical background and the nature of development as a process. (Bauer 1972, 324–25)

Too many writers in the field have succumbed to professional overspecialization combined with a positivist obsession with data that happen to be amenable to mathematical techniques. The result has been models of development with little connection to reality:

Abilities and attitudes, mores and institutions, cannot generally be quantified in an illuminating fashion… Yet they are plainly much more important and relevant to development than such influences as the terms of trade, foreign exchange reserves, capital output ratios, or external economies, topics which fill the pages of the consensus literature. (Ibid., 326)

Even when a writer appears to approach the subject historically, concentration on quantifiable data to the neglect of underlying institutional and social-psychological factors tends to foreshorten the chronological perspective and thus vitiate the result:

It is misleading to refer to the situation in eighteenth -and nineteenth-century Europe as representing initial conditions in development. By then the west was pervaded by the attitudes and institutions appropriate to an exchange economy and a technical age to a far greater extent than south Asia today. These attitudes and institutions had emerged gradually over a period of eight centuries. (Ibid., 219–20)[1]

At the root of the approach criticized by Bauer there appears to be a methodological holism that prefers to manipulate aggregates while ignoring individual human actors and the institutions their actions generate. Yet, “differences in people’s capacities and attitudes and in their institutions are far-reaching and deepseated and largely explain differences in economic performance and in levels and rates of material progress” (Ibid., 313–14; emphasis added).

Bauer’s critique thus draws attention to the need to study both the centuries of European history antedating the Industrial Revolution and “the interrelationships between social, political, and legal institutions” in that period (Ibid., 277).[2] Here his assessment links up with an impressive body of scholarship that has emerged in recent years emphasizing precisely these points.

The “European Miracle”

While it would be wrong to suggest the existence of any monolithic analysis, a number of scholars concerned with the history of European growth have tended to converge on an interpretation highlighting certain distinctive factors. For the sake of convenience, we shall, therefore, speak of them, despite their differences, as forming a school of thought. The viewpoint may be referred to as the “institutional” – or, to use the title of one of the best-known works in the field – the “European miracle” approach.[3]

The “miracle” in question consists in a simple but momentous fact: It was in Europe – and the extensions of Europe, above all, America – that human beings first achieved per capita economic growth over a long period of time. In this way, European society eluded the “Malthusian trap,” enabling new tens of millions to survive and the population as a whole to escape the hopeless misery that had been the lot of the great mass of the human race in earlier times. The question is: why Europe?

One possible answer, which has long enjoyed powerful support in intellectual circles in the West and among officials in underdeveloped countries, was heavily influenced by socialist and even Marxist tenets.[4] It accounted for Europe’s extraordinary growth largely by the more or less spontaneous advance of science, combined with a “primitive accumulation” of capital – through imperialism, slavery and the slave trade, the expropriation of small farmers, and the exploitation of the domestic working class. The conclusion was clear. The extraordinary growth of Europe was at the expense of untold millions of the enslaved and downtrodden, and the European experience should serve decision makers in underdeveloped countries more as a cautionary tale than an exemplar.

The contributors to the newer model, however, reject this venerable legend. Concerned as they are with comparative economic history, they have sought for the origins of European development in what has tended to set Europe apart from other great civilizations, particularly those of China, India, and Islam. To one degree or another, their answer to the question, why Europe? has been: Because Europe enjoyed a relative lack of political constraint. As Jean Baechler, in a pioneering work, pointedly expressed it:

The first condition for the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state…The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison d’être to political anarchy. (Baechler 1975, 77, 113; emphasis in original)

The Uniqueness of Europe

John Hicks partially adumbrated this approach in the late 1960s (Hicks 1969).[5] In A Theory of Economic History, Hicks laid out the “chief needs” of the expanding, mercantile phase of economic development – the protection of property and the enforcement of contracts – and stated:

The Mercantile Economy, in its First Phase, was an escape from political authority – except in so far as it made its own political authority. Then, in the Middle Phase, when it came formally back under the traditional political authority, that authority was not strong enough to control it. (Ibid., 33, 100)

Hicks’s account, however, proved to be much too schematic, besides limiting itself to economic analysis and deliberately ignoring political, religious, scientific, and other factors (see Bauer 1971). Around the same time as Hicks, David Landes was sketching the essentials of the newer outlook. In seeking to answer the question why the industrial breakthrough occurred first in western Europe, he highlighted two factors “that set Europe apart from the rest of the world … the scope and effectiveness of private enterprise, and the high value placed on the rational manipulation of the human and material environment” (Landes 1970, 14–15). “The role of private enterprise in the West,” in Landes’s view, “is perhaps unique: more than any other factor, it made the modern world” (Ibid., 15).

But what was it that permitted private enterprise to flourish? Landes pinpointed the circumstance that would be vital to the new interpretation – Europe’s radical decentralization:

Because of this crucial role as midwife and instrument of power in a context of multiple, competing polities (the contrast is with the all-encompassing empires of the Orient or the Ancient World), private enterprise in the West possessed a social and political vitality without precedent or counterpart. (Ibid.; emphasis in original)

Damaging incursions by government did occur, and the situation in some parts of Europe conditioned a social preference for military values; “on balance, however, the place of private enterprise was secure and improving with time; and this is apparent in the institutional arrangements that governed the getting and spending of wealth” (Ibid.).

A precondition of economic expansion was the definition and defense of property rights against the political authority. This occurred early on in Europe. Landes contrasts the European method of regular taxation (supervised by assemblies representative of the tax-bearing classes) with the system of “extortion” prevalent in “the great Asian empires and the Muslim states of the Middle East … where fines and extortions were not only a source of quick revenue but a means of social control – a device for curbing the pretensions of nouveaux riches and foreigners and blunting their challenge to the established power structure” (Ibid., 16–17).[6]

Landes’s insights, briefly sketched in a few pages of introduction to his Prometheus Unbound, have been vastly elaborated upon by the new school. The upshot is an overall interpretation of Western history that may be stated as follows:

Although geographical factors played a role, the key to western development is to be found in the fact that, while Europe constituted a single civilization – Latin Christendom – it was at the same time radically decentralized.[7] In contrast to other cultures – especially China, India, and the Islamic world – Europe comprised a system of divided and, hence, competing powers and jurisdictions.

After the fall of Rome, no universal empire was able to arise on the Continent. This was of the greatest significance. Drawing on Montesquieu’s dictum, Jean Baechler points out that “every political power tends to reduce everything that is external to it, and powerful objective obstacles are needed to prevent it from succeeding” (Baechler 1975, 79). In Europe, the “objective obstacles” were provided first of all by the competing political authorities. Instead of experiencing the hegemony of a universal empire, Europe developed into a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, ecclesiastical domains, and other political entities.

Within this system, it was highly imprudent for any prince to attempt to infringe property rights in the manner customary elsewhere in the world. In constant rivalry with one another, princes found that outright expropriations, confiscatory taxation, and the blocking of trade did not go unpunished. The punishment was to be compelled to witness the relative economic progress of one’s rivals, often through the movement of capital, and capitalists, to neighboring realms. The possibility of “exit,” facilitated by geographical compactness and, especially, by cultural affinity, acted to transform the state into a “constrained predator” (Anderson 1991, 58).

Decentralization of power also came to mark the domestic arrangements of the various European polities. Here feudalism – which produced a nobility rooted in feudal right rather than in state-service – is thought by a number of scholars to have played an essential role (see, e.g., Baechler 1975, 78). Through the struggle for power within the realms, representative bodies came into being, and princes often found their hands tied by the charters of rights (Magna Carta, for instance) which they were forced to grant their subjects. In the end, even within the relatively small states of Europe, power was dispersed among estates, orders, chartered towns, religious communities, corps, universities, etc., each with its own guaranteed liberties. The rule of law came to be established throughout much of the Continent.

Thus, there is general agreement that crucial to laying the foundations for the European miracle were, in Jones’s words, the “curtailment of predatory government tax behavior” and “the limits to arbitrariness set by a competitive political arena” (Jones 1987, xix, xxi). Over time, property rights – including rights in one’s own person – came to be more sharply defined, permitting owners to capture more of the benefits of investment and improvement (North 1981). With the freer disposition of private property came the possibility of ongoing innovations, tested in the market. Here, too, the rivalrous state system was highly favorable. The nations of Europe functioned “as a set of joint-stock corporations with implicit prospectuses listing resources and freedoms” in such a way as to insure “against the suppression of novelty and unorthodoxy in the system as a whole” (Jones 1987, 119). A new social class arose, consisting of merchants, capitalists, and manufacturers “with immunity from interference by the formidable social forces opposed to change, growth, and innovation” (Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986, 24).

Eventually, the economy achieved a degree of autonomy unknown elsewhere in the world except for brief periods. As Jones puts it:

Economic development in its European form required above all freedom from arbitrary political acts concerning private property. Goods and factors of production had to be free to be traded. Prices had to be set by unconditional exchange if they were to be undistorted signals of what goods and services really were in demand, where and in what quantities. (Jones 1987, 85)

The system protecting the ownership and deployment of private property evolved in Europe by slow degrees – over at least “the eight centuries” mentioned by Bauer. Quite logically, therefore, the economic historians concerned with “how the West grew rich” have directed a great deal of their attention to the medieval period.

The Importance of the Middle Ages

The stereotype of the Middle Ages as “the Dark Ages” fostered by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes has, of course, long since been abandoned by scholars. Still, the “consensus” writers on economic development whom Bauer faults have by and large ignored the importance of the Middle Ages for European growth – something that makes as much sense as beginning the explanation of the economic and cultural successes of European Jewry with the eighteenth century. Economic historians, however, following in the footsteps of the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (Pirenne 1937), have had a quite different estimation of the medieval period. Carlo M. Cipolla asserts that “the origins of the Industrial Revolution go back to that profound change in ideas, social structures, and value systems that accompanied the rise of the urban communes in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries” (Cipolla 1981, 298).

Of Europe from the late tenth to the fourteenth centuries, Robert S. Lopez states:

Here, for the first time in history, an underdeveloped society succeeded in developing itself, mostly by its own efforts … it created the indispensable material and moral conditions for a thousand years of virtually uninterrupted growth; and, in more than one way, it is still with us. (Lopez 1971, vii)

Lopez contrasts the European evolution with that of a neighboring civilization, Islam, where political pressures smothered the potential for an economic upsurge:

The early centuries of Islamic expansion opened large vistas to merchants and tradesmen. But they failed to bring to towns the freedom and power that was indispensable for their progress. Under the tightening grip of military and landed aristocracies the revolution that in the tenth century had been just around the corner lost momentum and failed. (Ibid., 57)

In Europe, as trade and industry expanded, people discovered that “commerce thrives on freedom and runs away from constriction; normally the most prosperous cities were those that adopted the most liberal policies” (Ibid., 90). The “demonstration effect” that has been a constant element in European progress – and which could exist precisely because Europe was a decentralized system of competing jurisdictions – helped spread the liberal policies that brought prosperity to the towns that first ventured to experiment with them.

Scholars like Cipolla and Lopez, attempting to understand European development in the Middle Ages, make constant reference to ideas, value systems, moral conditions, and similar cultural elements.[8] As Bauer has emphasized, this is a part of the distinctive European evolution that cannot be divorced from its institutional history. In regard to the Middle Ages, prime importance, in the view of many writers, attaches to Christianity. Harold J. Berman (Berman 1974)[9] has stressed that with the fall of Rome and the eventual conversion of the Germans, Slavs, Magyars, and so forth, Christian ideas and values suffused the whole blossoming culture of Europe. Christian contributions range from the mitigation of slavery and a greater equality within the family to the concepts of natural law, including the legitimacy of resistance to unjust rulers. The Church’s canon law exercised a decisive influence on Western legal systems: “it was the church that first taught Western man what a modern legal system was like” (Ibid., 59).

Berman, moreover, focuses attention on a critical development that began in the eleventh century: the creation by Pope Gregory VII and his successors of a powerful “corporate, hierarchical church … independent of emperors, kings, and feudal lords,” and thus capable of foiling the power-seeking of temporal authority (Ibid., 56).[10] In this way, Berman bolsters Lord Acton’s analysis of the central role of the Catholic church in generating Western liberty by forestalling any concentration of power such as marked the other great cultures, and thus creating the Europe of divided and conflicting jurisdictions.[11]

In a major synthesis, Law and Revolution, Berman has highlighted the legal facets of the development whose economic, political, and ideological aspects other scholars have examined (Berman 1983): “Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Western legal tradition is the coexistence and competition within the same community of diverse legal systems. It is this plurality of jurisdictions and legal systems that makes the supremacy of law both necessary and possible” (Ibid., 10)[12]

Berman’s work is in the tradition of the great English scholar, A.J. Carlyle, who, at the conclusion of his monumental study of political thought in the Middle Ages, summarized the basic principles of medieval politics: that all – including the king – are bound by law; that a lawless ruler is not a legitimate king, but a tyrant; that where there is no justice there is no commonwealth; that a contract exists between the ruler and his subjects (Carlyle and Carlyle 1950, 503–26).

Other recent scholarship has supported these conclusions. In his last, posthumous work, the distinguished historian of economic thought, Jacob Viner, noted that the references to taxation by St. Thomas Aquinas “treat it as a more or less extraordinary act of a ruler which is as likely as not to be morally illicit” (Viner 1978, 68–69). Viner pointed to the medieval papal bull, In Coena Domini – evidently republished each year into the late eighteenth century – which threatened to excommunicate any ruler “who levied new taxes or increased old ones, except for cases supported by law, or by an express permission from the pope” (Ibid., 69). Throughout the Western world, the Middle Ages gave rise to parliaments, diets, estates-generals, Cortes, etc., which served to limit the powers of the monarch. [13] A.R. Myers notes:

Almost everywhere in Latin Christendom the principle was, at one time or another, accepted by the rulers that, apart from the normal revenues of the prince, no taxes could be imposed without the consent of parliament … By using their power of the purse [the parliaments] often influenced the rulers policies, especially restraining him from military adventures. (Myers 1975 29–30)

In a recent synthesis of modern medievalist scholarship, Norman F. Cantor has summarized the heritage of the European Middle Ages in terms strikingly similar to those employed by the current institutional historians:

In the model of civil society, most good and important things take place below the universal level of the state: the family, the arts, learning, and science; business enterprise and technological process. These are the work of individuals and groups, and the involvement of the state is remote and disengaged. It is the rule of law that screens out the state’s insatiable aggressiveness and corruption and gives freedom to civil society below the level of the state. It so happens that the medieval world was one in which men and women worked out their destinies with little or no involvement of the state most of the time. (Cantor 1991, 416)

One highly important factor in the advance of the West, possibly linked to Christianity, has not, however, been dealt with by the newer economic historians. It is the relative lack of institutionalized envy in Western culture. In a work endorsed by Bauer, the sociologist Helmut Schoeck has drawn attention to the omnipresence of envy in human societies (Schoeck [1969] 1987). Perceived as a grave threat by those at whom it is directed, it typically results in elaborate envy-avoidance behavior: the attempt to ward off the dangers of malicious envy by denying, disguising, or suppressing whatever traits provoked it. The antieconomic consequences of socially permitted – or even encouraged – envy and reactive envy-avoidance scarcely lend themselves to quantification. Nonetheless, they may clearly be highly damaging. Drawing on anthropological studies, Schoeck stresses the harm that institutionalized envy can inflict on the process of economic and technical growth (Ibid., 73). Western culture, according to Schoeck, has somehow been able to inhibit envy to a remarkable degree. Why this is so is less clear. Schoeck links this fact to the Christian faith: “It must have been one of Christianity’s most important, if unintentional, achievements in preparing men for, and rendering them capable of, innovative actions when it provided man for the first time with supernatural beings who, he knew, could neither envy nor ridicule him” (Ibid., 79). Yet the evident variation in socially permitted envy in different Christian societies (e.g., Russia as against western Europe) suggests that the presence of Christian faith alone is not an adequate explanation.

Case Studies of Development

Obviously, all of Europe did not progress at the same rate. In particular, in the modern period the Netherlands and then England became the pacesetters of economic growth, while other countries declined. These facts can also be accounted for by the model.

The Low Countries had long benefited from the legal system inherited from the dukes of Burgundy. These rulers, who governed in collaboration with an active estates-general,[14] had promoted an open commercial and industrial system, based on protection of property rights. In the rise of the “northern Netherlands” (the United Provinces, or “Holland”) we have a near-perfect example of the European miracle in operation. First, the area had been a major participant in European economic, political, social, and cultural developments for centuries. As Cipolla has observed, “The country that in the second half of the sixteenth century rebelled against Spanish imperialism and then rose to the role of Europe’s economically most dynamic nation, was anything but an underdeveloped country from the outset” (Cipolla 1981, 263). Owing its independence to the decentralized state system of Europe, it emerged itself as a decentralized polity, without a king and court – a “headless commonwealth” that combined secure property rights, the rule of law, religious toleration, and intellectual freedom with a degree of prosperity that amounted to an early modern Wirtschaftswunder. It is not surprising that Holland exerted a powerful demonstration effect. As K.W. Swart states:

both foreigners and Dutchmen were apt to believe that the Dutch Republic was unique in permitting an unprecedented degree of freedom in the fields of religion, trade, and politics…. In the eyes of contemporaries it was this combination of freedom and economic predominance that constituted the true miracle of the Dutch Republic. (Swart 1969, 20)

The success of the Dutch experiment was noted with great interest, especially in England, whose soil was already well prepared to accept the idea that prosperity is a reward of freedom. The deep roots of economic individualism, and hence of development, in English medieval history have been emphasized by Alan Macfarlane (Macfarlane 1978 and 1987).[15] In the early modern period, the common law, which had evolved over many centuries, acted as a guarantor of the sanctity of property and free entry to industry and trade against the policies of the early Stuart kings. In the face of authoritarian usurpations, Sir Edward Coke and his fellow jurists acted, in the words of North and Thomas, “to place the creation of property rights beyond the royal whim; to embed existing property rights in a body of impersonal law guarded by the courts” (North and Thomas 1973, 148). Crucial in the case of both the Netherlands and England was the preservation, against attempted royal encroachments, of traditional representative assemblies determined to deny the ruler the right to tax at will. Here the antiauthoritarian side exploited – and further developed – the inherited discourse whose key concepts included “liberties,” “rights,” “the law of nature,” and “constitution.”

The decline of Spain, on the other hand, is also taken into account in the model. Confiscation of the property of Jews and Moors by the Spanish crown was, according to North and Thomas:

only symptomatic of the insecurity of all property rights . . seizure, confiscation, or the unilateral alteration of contracts were recurrent phenomena which ultimately affected every group engaged in commerce or industry as well as agriculture…. As no property was secure, economic retardation was the inevitable consequence. (Ibid., 131)

The economic decay of Spain, in turn, provided a negative demonstration effect that played a potent role in the policy choices of other countries.

The theme of the autonomy of the market and the inhibition of the predator-state as major factors in economic growth is pursued in the examination of non-European cultures. Baechler, for instance, states that “each time China was politically divided, capitalism flourished,” and maintains that Japanese history manifests conditions approximating those of Europe (Baechler 1975, 82–86). Anderson, after surveying economic growth in the history of Sung China and Tokugawa Japan, as well as the Netherlands and England, concludes that the common element is that “they occurred when governmental constraints on economic activity were relaxed” (Anderson 1991, 73–74)[16]

While, needless to say, much more research requires to be done on economic development in the history of non-European civilizations, the evidence so far suggests strong support for the basic thrust of the institutional approach.

Contrast of Europe with Russia

The meaning of the European miracle can be better seen if European developments are contrasted with those in Russia. Colin White lists, as the determining factors of Russian backwardness “a poor resource and hostile risk environment … an unpropitious political tradition and institutional inheritance, ethnic diversity, and the weakness of such key groups limiting state power as the church and landed oligarchy.” (White 1987, 136) After the destruction of Kievan Rus by the Tatars and the rise of Muscovy, Russia was characterized for centuries by the virtual absence of the rule of law, including security for persons and property.

The lawlessness – as well as the poverty – of Muscovite Russia was notorious. When the emissary of Elizabeth I inquired of Ivan the Great the status of his subjects, he was told: “All are slaves” (Besançon, in Baechler, Hall, and Mann 1988, 161). Ivan IV, the Terrible, annihilated the flourishing commercial republics of Novgorod and Pskov, and loosed his Oprichnina (Ivan’s praetorian guard) on the kingdom for a frenzy of butchery that came to stand for what was permissible in the Muscovite state. Alain Besançon remarks dryly, “Of the three legends (Romanian, German, and Russian) that depict, in the guise of Dracula, the reign of Vlad the Impaler, the Russian alone sings the praises of the prince” (Ibid.).

The nobility in Russia was a state-service nobility, lacking any independent base. As White observes: “Russia was never truly feudal in the west European sense of the term” (White 1987, 10). In contrast to Europe and America, the towns, as well, were “simply another arm of the state” (Ibid., 137–38). The differences between Russia and the West can be seen in their respective ideas of “absolutism.” Ivan IV’s concept is well known. It may be compared with that of a political writer in the West who is famous as a defender of royal absolutism, Jean Bodin. Alexander Yanov has pointed out that, for all his faith in absolutism:

Bodin regarded the property of the citizens as their inalienable possession, in the disposition of which they were no less sovereign than was the monarch in ruling his people. To tax citizens of a part of their inalienable property without their voluntary consent was, from Bodin’s point of view, ordinary robbery. (Yanov 1981, 44–45)[17]

In this connection, Yanov reports a telling anecdote. A French diplomat in a conversation with an English colleague affirmed his belief in the principle enunciated by Louis XIV, that the king was ultimate owner of all the property within his kingdom (a principle which even the Sun-King never dared to act upon). The Englishmen retorted: “Did you study public law in Turkey?” (Ibid., 44 n. 17)

The fact that Russia received Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome shaped the entire course of Russia’s history (Pipes 1974, 221–43). In the words of Richard Pipes, the Orthodox church in Russia became, like every other institution, “the servant of the state.” Pipes concludes, regarding the “relations between state and society in pre-1900 Russia”:

None of the economic or social groups of the old regime was either able or willing to stand up to the crown and challenge its monopoly of political power. They were not able to do so because, by enforcing the patrimonial principle, i.e., by effectively asserting its claim to all the territory of the realm as property and all its inhabitants as servants, the crown prevented the formation of pockets of independent wealth or power. (Ibid., 249)

What ideas of liberalism came to Russia came perforce from the West. It was from listening to the lectures on natural law at the University of Leipzig that Alexander Radishchev first learned that limits may be put to the power of the tsar (Clardy 1964, 37–38). The beginnings of the shift to a more market-oriented economic policy before the First World War are traced by Besancon to the fact that the Russian ministers read the liberal economists (Besancon, in Baechler, Hall, and Mann 1988, 166).

The Downfall of Marxist Historiography

The Marxist philosophy of history is filled with manifold, often strategic, contradictions and ambiguities. Yet, if “historical materialism” has any significant content at all it is as a technological interpretation of history (Mises 1957, 106–12; Bober 1962, 3 –). Although Nathan Rosenberg has denied that Marx held that “technological factors are, so to speak, the independent variable in generating social change, which constitutes the dependent variable” (Rosenberg 1982, 36; see also 34–51),[18] the weight of evidence is heavily against him (Cohen 1978, 134–0).

According to Marx, Engels, and the theoreticians of the “Golden Age” of the Second International, history proceeds basically via changes in the “material productive forces” (the technological base), which render obsolete the existing “mode of production” (the property system). Because of technological changes, the mode of production is compelled to change; with it, everything else – the whole legal, political, and ideological “superstructure” of society – is transformed, as well (Marx [1859] 1969b, 8-). As Marx put it aphoristically: “The wind mill yields a society with feudal lords, the steam mill a society with industrial capitalists” (Marx [1847] 1969a, 130).

Marxism has, of course, been subjected for generations to withering rebuttal on many different fronts, not least in regard to its philosophy of history. The newer understanding of European history is particularly destructive of its fundamental claims, however, in that it directs attention to the peculiar shallowness of “historical materialism.” This newer understanding insists that the colossal growth of technology in the Western world in the past millennium must itself be explained, and the explanation it provides is in terms of the institutional and moral matrix that emerged in Europe over many centuries.[19] New and more productive machines did not spring forth mysteriously and spontaneously, nor was the spectacular expansion of technical and scientific knowledge somehow inevitable. As Anderson has summed up the evidence, “the scientific and technical stasis that followed the remarkable achievements of the Song dynasty, or of the flowering of early Islam, indicates that scientific inquiry and technology do not necessarily possess in themselves the dynamism suggested by the European experience” (Anderson 1991, 46). On the contrary, technology and science emerged out of an interrelated set of political, legal, philosophical, religious, and moral elements in what orthodox Marxism has traditionally disparaged as the “superstructure” of society.

Conclusion

According to the Indian development economist R.M. Sundrum, if we are to understand how development can be promoted in the poorer countries today, we must understand the historical process which transformed developed countries in the past, and why this process failed to take place elsewhere (cited in Arndt 1987, 177). This is the position that P.T. Bauer, too, has insisted upon. Rejecting the “timeless approach” to economic development, Bauer has accentuated the many centuries required for economic growth in the Western world, and the interplay of various cultural factors that were its precondition. Most important, in Bauer’s view, is that in the Western world institutions and values evolved that favored private property and the market, set limits to state arbitrariness and predation, and encouraged innovation and the sense that human beings are capable of improving their lot through their actions on the market.

Recently, W.W. Rostow, in a summary of Bauer’s career, chided him for failing “to take adequately into account the extremely large and inescapable role of the state in early phases of development” (Rostow 1990, 386).[20] Such a criticism is not surprising, coming from one of the leaders of what Bauer has for years assailed as the “spurious consensus.” Yet it finds little support in the work of the historians dealt with here. (For some reason, Rostow ignores this whole body of scholarship in his very lengthy history of theories of economic growth; Ibid., passim). While some of these authors would stipulate a significant role for the state in certain areas – particularly in defining and enforcing property rights – this is consistent with Bauer’s viewpoint. Moreover, the overall thrust of their work – which stresses the importance of limits on state action in the development of the West – tends to corroborate Bauer’s position rather than Rostow’s. Peter Burke, for instance, writing on one of the earliest examples of European development – the merchant-states of northern Italy and the Netherlands – describes them as “pro-enterprise cultures in which governments did relatively little to frustrate the designs of merchants or hinder economic growth, a negative characteristic which all the same gave those countries an important advantage over their competitors” (Burke in Baechler, Hall, and Mann 1988, 230). William H. McNeill notes that “within Europe itself, those states that gave the most scope to private capital and entrepreneurship prospered the most, whereas better governed societies in which welfare on the one hand or warfare on the other commanded a larger proportion of available resources tended to lag behind.” As the growth leaders McNeill cites “such conspicuously undergoverned lands as Holland and England” (McNeill 1980, 65). And F.L. Jones takes as a guiding principle in the explanation of growth a famous passage from Adam Smith: “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things” (Jones 1987, 234–35, cited in Stewart [1793] 1966, 68).

The new paradigm generated by the work of these and other scholars has already helped produce further major works of research and synthesis.[21] It goes without saying that a great deal more study is required. Yet it is likely that further research will provide additional substantiation of the viewpoint steadfastly represented by Professor Bauer. As Anderson observes: “The emphasis on release from constraints points to a fruitful direction of research into why some societies experienced economic development and others didn’t” (Anderson 1991, 73–74). In any case, the subject will continue to be of very great theoretical interest to scholars – and to many millions in the underdeveloped world, a matter of life and death.

References

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Anderson, J.L. 1991. Explaining Long-Term Economic Change. London: Macmillan.

Arndt, H.W. 1987. Economic Development: The History of an Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Baechler, Jean, John A. Hall, and Michael Mann, eds. 1988. Europe and the Rise of Capitalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Bauer, P.T. 1971. “Economic History as Theory.” Economica, new series 38, no. 150 (May): 163–79.

– – . 1972. Dissent on Development. Studies and Debates on Development Economics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Berman, Harold J. 1974. “The Influence of Christianity on the Development of Western Law.” In idem, The Interaction of Law and Religion, 49–76. Nashville/New York: Abingdon Press.

– – . 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Besançon, Alain. “The Russian Case.” In Baechler, Hall, and Mann 1988, 159–68.

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Burke, Peter. “Republics of Merchants in Early Modem Europe,” 220–33. In Baechler, Hall, and Mann 1988.

Cantor, Norman F. 1991. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. New York: William Morrow.

Carlyle, R.W., and A.J. Carlyle. 1950. A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West. Vol. 6, Political Theory from 1300 to 1600. Edinburgh: Blackwood.

Chirot, Daniel. 1986. Social Change in the Modem Era. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Cipolla, Carlo M. 1981. Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, 2d ed. London: Methuen.

Clardy, Jesse V. 1964. The Philosophical Ideas of Alexander Radishchev. New York: Astra.

Cohen, G.A. 1978. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Hicks, John. 1969. A Theory of Economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jones, E.L. 1987. The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– – . 1988. Growth Recurring. Economic Change in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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– – . 1987. The Culture of Capitalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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– – . 1990. Wirtschaft, Staat, und Gesel/schaft: Zur Soziologie der kapitalistischen Marktzwirtschaft und der Demokratie. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

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Notes

[1] Cf. Roberts (1985, 75), who writes of “the general liberation of the economy,” which was well on the way to autonomy everywhere in western Europe by 1500, if autonomy means regulation by prices providing undistorted signals of demand and a substantial degree of security for property against arbitrary confiscation by king, lord, or robber.”

[2] Cf. Rosenberg (1976, 286), who raises the question why Western European civilization was able to evolve a uniquely powerful combination of cultural values, incentive systems, and organizational capabilities, and remarks: “Interesting answers to this question are unlikely to come from any single social science discipline.”

[3] Major works in the field include North and Thomas (1973); Baechler (1975); North (1981); Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986); Jones (1987); Baechler, Hall, and Mann (1988), especially the essays by Michael Mann, John A. Hall, Alain Besançon, Karl Ferdinand Werner, and Peter Burke; and Jones (1988). Summaries of some of the scholarship are provided by Anderson (1991); and Weede (1988) and (1990, 40–59). See also Osterfeld (1992, 43–46). The essay by McNeill (1980) makes creative use of the fundamental concepts of the approach.

[4] F.A. Hayek in the 1950s referred to “a socialist interpretation of history which has governed political thinking for the last two or three generations and which consists mainly of a particular view of economic history.” See Hayek (1954, 7).

[5] The idea of a strong connection between the relative freedom of European society and its economic success can, of course, be traced back to much earlier authors, including those in the Whig historical tradition. Here it is being considered in the context of recent, mainly economic, historiography.

[6] A secondary theme (Landes 1970, 21–22) is the character of the European Weltanschauung. Landes points to the emphasis on rationality in European culture, relative to others, fostered by elements in Christianity that ultimately may be traced to Judaism’s disparagement of magic and superstition.

[7] Cf. Baechler (1975, 74): Europe was “a society based upon the same moral and material civilization that never ended up in political unity, in short, in an Empire.”

[8] Cf. Douglass C. North, “Ideology and the Free Rider Problem,” in North (1981, 45–58).

[9] I am grateful to Leonard P. Liggio for calling my attention to this essay.

[10] Cf. Roberts (1985, 67–9), on the Hildebrandine reform, and his comment, 68–69: “The preservation of an idea of liberty and its transmission to the future thus owes an incalculable amount to the quarrels of church and state.”

[11] See Lord Acton’s great essay, “The History of Freedom in Christianity (Acton 1956): To that conflict of four hundred years [between the Church and the temporal rulers] we owe the rise of civil liberty… although liberty was not the end for which they strove, it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy and Germany won their franchises, France got her States-General, and England her Parliament out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it prevented the rise of divine right” (86–87).

[12] Cf. Chirot (1986, 23): “The main reason for the legal rationalization of the West, then, was the long, indecisive, multisided political struggle between king, nobles, the church, and the towns.”

[13] See A.R. Myers (1975, 24), who states of these parliamentary bodies: “they flourished at one time or another in every realm of Latin Christendom. They first emerge clearly towards the end of the twelfth century in the Spanish kingdom of Leon, in the thirteenth century in Castile, Aragon (and also Catalonia and Valencia), Portugal, Sicily, the Empire and some of the constituent states such as Brandenburg and Austria, and in England and Ireland. In the fourteenth century … in France … the Netherlands, Scotland, more of the German and Italian states, and Hungary; in the fifteenth century … in Denmark, Sweden, and Poland.”

[14] Cf. Chirot (1986, 18): “a Burgundian states-general met 160 times from 1464 to 1567, exercising great fiscal powers and defending the rights of towns and merchants.”

[15] Cf. Baechler (1975, 79): “If the general political structure of the West was favorable to economic expansion, it would be the most marked in that country where political power was most limited and tolerated the greatest autonomy of civil society.” That country, according to Baechler, was England.

[16] See also the chapters on Sung China and Japan in Jones 1988.

[17] Compare Carlyle and Carlyle (1950, 512): “And most remarkable is it that Budé, who set out the doctrine of the absolute monarchy in France in the most extravagant terms, should have at the same time felt compelled to draw attention to the fact that the French Kings submitted to the judgment of the Parliament of Paris; and that Bodin should have contended that the judges should be permanent and irremovable, except by process of law, because the kingdom should be governed by laws and not by the mere will of the prince.”

[18] Rosenberg states that the technological interpretation of the Marxist philosophy of history relies upon a few “aphoristic assertions, often tossed out in the heat of debate” (1982, 36). Nowhere in his essay, however, does he allude to the locus classicus of the subject, Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (Marx [1859] 1969b).

[19] Anderson (1991, 41) rejects technical change as an independent variable explaining economic growth: “Technology is more appropriately seen as dependent on the institutional structure and the availability of capital, including ‘human capital’ expressed as an educated, skilled, and healthy workforce. The availability of capital is in turn dependent on a favorable set of institutions.”

[20] Rostow’s dismissive tone in his treatment of Bauer may well have been affected by Bauer’s devastating review of Rostow’s magnum opus, The Stages of Economic Growth. See Bauer (1972: 477–89).

[21] See, for instance, Roberts (1985): Chirot (1986); and Kennedy (1987, 19–20), where the author of this celebrated book writes of the “decentralized, largely unsupervised growth of commerce and merchants and ports and markets [in Europe]… there was no way in which such economic developments could be fully suppressed … there existed no uniform authority in Europe which could effectively halt this or that commercial development; no central government whose change in priorities could cause the rise or fall of a particular industry; no systematic and universal plundering of businessmen and entrepreneurs by tax gatherers, which so retarded the economy of Moghul India.”

Good Guy or Bad?

Ralph Raico — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:56:11 +0000

Churchill as Icon

When, in a very few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question: “Who was the Man of the Century?” there is little doubt that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.

In a way, Churchill as Man of the Century will be appropriate. This has been the century of the State of the rise and hyper-trophic growth of the welfare-warfare state and Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare state. War, of course, was his lifelong passion; and, as an admiring historian has written: “Among his other claims to fame, Winston Churchill ranks as one of the founders of the welfare state.” Thus, while Churchill never had a principle he did not in the end betray, this does not mean that there was no slant to his actions, no systematic bias. There was, and that bias was towards lowering the barriers to state power.

To gain any understanding of Churchill, we must go beyond the heroic images propagated for over half a century. The conventional picture of Churchill, especially of his role in World War II, was first of all the work of Churchill himself, through the distorted histories he composed and rushed into print as soon as the war was over. In more recent decades, the Churchill legend has been adopted by an internationalist establishment for which it furnishes the perfect symbol and an inexhaustible vein of high-toned blather. Churchill has become, in Christopher Hitchens’s phrase, a “totem” of the American establishment, not only the scions of the New Deal, but the neo-conservative apparatus as well politicians like Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle, corporate “knights” and other denizens of the Reagan and Bush Cabinets, the editors and writers of the Wall Street Journal, and a legion of “conservative” columnists led by William Safire and William Buckley. Churchill was, as Hitchens writes, “the human bridge across which the transition was made” between a noninterventionist and a globalist America. In the next century, it is not impossible that his bulldog likeness will feature in the logo of the New World Order.

Let it be freely conceded that in 1940 Churchill played his role superbly. As the military historian, Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, a sharp critic of Churchill’s wartime policies, wrote: “Churchill was a man cast in the heroic mould, a berserker ever ready to lead a forlorn hope or storm a breach, and at his best when things were at their worst. His glamorous rhetoric, his pugnacity, and his insistence on annihilating the enemy appealed to human instincts, and made him an outstanding war leader.” History outdid herself when she cast Churchill as the adversary in the duel with Hitler. It matters not at all that in his most famous speech “we shall fight them on the beaches . . . we shall fight them in the fields and in the streets” he plagiarized Clemenceau at the time of the Ludendorff offensive that there was little real threat of a German invasion or, that, perhaps, there was no reason for the duel to have occurred in the first place. For a few months in 1940, Churchill played his part magnificently and unforgettably.

Opportunism and Rhetoric

Yet before 1940, the word most closely associated with Churchill was “opportunist.” He had twice changed his party affiliation from Conservative to Liberal, and then back again. His move to the Liberals was allegedly on the issue of free trade. But in 1930, he sold out on free trade as well, even tariffs on food, and proclaimed that he had cast off “Cobdenism” forever. As head of the Board of Trade before World War I, he opposed increased armaments; after he became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he pushed for bigger and bigger budgets, spreading wild rumors of the growing strength of the German Navy, just as he did in the 1930s about the buildup of the German Air Force. He attacked socialism before and after World War I, while during the War he promoted war-socialism, calling for nationalization of the railroads, and declaring in a speech: “Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you like the word.” Churchill’s opportunism continued to the end. In the 1945 election, he briefly latched on to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and tried to paint the Labour Party as totalitarian, while it was Churchill himself who, in 1943, had accepted the Beveridge plans for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian management of the economy. Throughout his career his one guiding rule was to climb to power and stay there.

There were two principles that for a long while seemed dear to Churchill’s heart. One was anti-Communism: he was an early and fervent opponent of Bolshevism. For years, he very correctly decried the “bloody baboons” and “foul murderers of Moscow.” His deep early admiration of Benito Mussolini was rooted in his shrewd appreciation of what Mussolini had accomplished (or so he thought). In an Italy teetering on the brink of Leninist revolution, Il Duce had discovered the one formula that could counteract the Leninist appeal: hyper-nationalism with a social slant. Churchill lauded “Fascismo’s triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism,” claiming that “it proved the necessary antidote to the Communist poison.”

Yet the time came when Churchill made his peace with Communism. In 1941, he gave unconditional support to Stalin, welcomed him as an ally, embraced him as a friend. Churchill, as well as Roosevelt, used the affectionate nickname, “Uncle Joe”; as late as the Potsdam conference, he repeatedly announced, of Stalin: “I like that man.” In suppressing the evidence that the Polish officers at Katyn had been murdered by the Soviets, he remarked: “There is no use prowling round the three year old graves of Smolensk.” Obsessed not only with defeating Hitler, but with destroying Germany, Churchill was oblivious to the danger of a Soviet inundation of Europe until it was far too late. The climax of his infatuation came at the November, 1943, Tehran conference, when Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader’s sword. Those who are concerned to define the word “obscenity” may wish to ponder that episode.

Finally, there was what appeared to be the abiding love of his life, the British Empire. If Churchill stood for anything at all, it was the Empire; he famously said that he had not become Prime Minister in order to preside over its liquidation. But that, of course, is precisely what he did, selling out the Empire and everything else for the sake of total victory over Germany.

Besides his opportunism, Churchill was noted for his remarkable rhetorical skill. This talent helped him wield power over men, but it pointed to a fateful failing as well. Throughout his life, many who observed Churchill closely noted a peculiar trait. In 1917, Lord Esher described it in this way:

He handles great subjects in rhythmical language, and becomes quickly enslaved to his own phrases. He deceives himself into the belief that he takes broad views, when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively small aspect of the question.

During World War II, Robert Menzies, who was the Prime Minister of Australia, said of Churchill: “His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.” Another associate wrote: “He is . . . the slave of the words which his mind forms about ideas. . . . And he can convince himself of almost every truth if it is once allowed thus to start on its wild career through his rhetorical machinery.”

But while Winston had no principles, there was one constant in his life: the love of war. It began early. As a child, he had a huge collection of toy soldiers, 1500 of them, and he played with them for many years after most boys turn to other things. They were “all British,” he tells us, and he fought battles with his brother Jack, who “was only allowed to have colored troops; and they were not allowed to have artillery.” He attended Sandhurst, the military academy, instead of the universities, and “from the moment that Churchill left Sandhurst . . . he did his utmost to get into a fight, wherever a war was going on.” All his life he was most excited on the evidence, only really excited by war. He loved war as few modern men ever have he even “loved the bangs,” as he called them, and he was very brave under fire.

In 1925, Churchill wrote: “The story of the human race is war.” This, however, is untrue; potentially, it is disastrously untrue. Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of the social philosophy of classical liberalism. In particular, he never understood that, as Ludwig von Mises explained, the true story of the human race is the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor. Peace, not war, is the father of all things. For Churchill, the years without war offered nothing to him but “the bland skies of peace and platitude.” This was a man, as we shall see, who wished for more wars thanactually happened.

When he was posted to India and began to read avidly, to make up for lost time, Churchill was profoundly impressed by Darwinism. He lost whatever religious faith he may have had through reading Gibbon, he said and took a particular dislike, for some reason, to the Catholic Church, as well as Christian missions. He became, in his own words, “a materialist to the tips of my fingers,” and he fervently upheld the worldview that human life is a struggle for existence, with the outcome the survival of the fittest. This philosophy of life and history Churchill expressed in his one novel, Savrola. That Churchill was a racist goes without saying, yet his racism went deeper than with most of his contemporaries. It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on “great leaders,” Churchill’s worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.

When Churchill was not actually engaged in war, he was reporting on it. He early made a reputation for himself as a war correspondent, in Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan and in the Boer War. In December, 1900, a dinner was given at the Waldorf-Astoria in honor of the young journalist, recently returned from his well-publicized adventures in South Africa. Mark Twain, who introduced him, had already, it seems, caught on to Churchill. In a brief satirical speech, Twain slyly suggested that, with his English father and American mother, Churchill was the perfect representative of Anglo-American cant.

Churchill and the “New Liberalism”

In 1900 Churchill began the career he was evidently fated for. His background as the grandson of a duke and son of a famous Tory politician got him into the House of Commons as a Conservative. At first he seemed to be distinguished only by his restless ambition, remarkable even in parliamentary ranks. But in 1904, he crossed the floor to the Liberals, supposedly on account of his free-trade convictions. However, Robert Rhodes James, one of Churchill’s admirers, wrote: “It was believed [at the time], probably rightly, that if Arthur Balfour had given him office in 1902, Churchill would not have developed such a burning interest in free trade and joined the Liberals.” Clive Ponting notes that: “as he had already admitted to Rosebery, he was looking for an excuse to defect from a party that seemed reluctant to recognise his talents,” and the Liberals would not accept a protectionist.

Tossed by the tides of faddish opinion, with no principles of his own and hungry for power, Churchill soon became an adherent of the “New Liberalism,” an updated version of his father’s “Tory Democracy.” The “new” liberalism differed from the “old” only in the small matter of substituting incessant state activism for laissez-faire.

Although his conservative idolators seem blithely unaware of the fact – for them it is always 1940 – Churchill was one of the chief architects of the welfare state in Britain. The modern welfare state, successor to the welfare state of 18th-century absolutism, began in the 1880s in Germany, under Bismarck. In England, the legislative turning point came when Asquith succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in 1908; his reorganized cabinet included David Lloyd George at the Exchequer and Churchill at the Board of Trade.

Of course, “the electoral dimension of social policy was well to the fore in Churchill’s thinking,” writes a sympathetic historian meaning that Churchill understood it as the way to win votes. He wrote to a friend:

No legislation at present in view interests the democracy. All their minds are turning more and more to the social and economic issue. This revolution is irresistible. They will not tolerate the existing system by which wealth is acquired, shared and employed. . . . They will set their faces like flint against the money power heir of all other powers and tyrannies overthrown and its obvious injustices. And this theoretical repulsion will ultimately extend to any party associated in maintaining the status quo. . . . Minimum standards of wages and comfort, insurance in some effective form or other against sickness, unemployment, old age, these are the questions and the only questions by which parties are going to live in the future. Woe to Liberalism, if they slip through its fingers.

Churchill “had already announced his conversion to a collectivist social policy” before his move to the Board of Trade. His constant theme became “the just precedence” of public over private interests. He took up the fashionable social-engineering clichés of the time, asserting that: “Science, physical and political alike, revolts at the disorganisation which glares at us in so many aspects of modern life,” and that “the nation demands the application of drastic corrective and curative processes.” The state was to acquire canals and railroads, develop certain national industries, provide vastly augmented education, introduce the eight-hour work day, levy progressive taxes, and guarantee a national minimum living standard. It is no wonder that Beatrice Webb noted that Churchill was “definitely casting in his lot with the constructive state action.”

Following a visit to Germany, Lloyd George and Churchill were both converted to the Bismarckian model of social insurance schemes. As Churchill told his constituents: “My heart was filled with admiration of the patient genius which had added these social bulwarks to the many glories of the German race.” He set out, in his words, to “thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our industrial system.” In 1908, Churchill announced in a speech in Dundee: “I am on the side of those who think that a greater collective sentiment should be introduced into the State and the municipalities. I should like to see the State undertaking new functions.” Still, individualism must be respected: “No man can be a collectivist alone or an individualist alone. He must be both an individualist and a collectivist. The nature of man is a dual nature. The character of the organisation of human society is dual.” This, by the way, is a good sample of Churchill as political philosopher: it never gets much better.

But while both “collective organisation” and “individual incentive” must be given their due, Churchill was certain which had gained the upper hand:

The whole tendency of civilisation is, however, towards the multiplication of the collective functions of society. The ever-growing complications of civilisation create for us new services which have to be undertaken by the State, and create for us an expansion of existing services. . . . There is a pretty steady determination . . . to intercept all future unearned increment which may arise from the increase in the speculative value of the land. There will be an ever-widening area of municipal enterprise.

The statist trend met with Churchill’s complete approval. As he added:

I go farther; I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventurous experiments. . . . I am very sorry we have not got the railways of this country in our hands. We may do something better with the canals.

This grandson of a duke and glorifier of his ancestor, the arch-corruptionist Marlborough, was not above pandering to lower-class resentments. Churchill claimed that “the cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions,” while he attacked the Conservatives as “the Party of the rich against the poor, the classes and their dependents against the masses, of the lucky, the wealthy, the happy, and the strong, against the left-out and the shut-out millions of the weak and poor.” Churchill became the perfect hustling political entrepreneur, eager to politicize one area of social life after the other. He berated the Conservatives for lacking even a “single plan of social reform or reconstruction,” while boasting that he and his associates intended to propose “a wide, comprehensive, interdependent scheme of social organisation,” incorporated in “a massive series of legislative proposals and administrative acts.”

At this time, Churchill fell under the influence of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the leaders of the Fabian Society. At one of her famous strategic dinner parties, Beatrice Webb introduced Churchill to a young protégé, William later Lord Beveridge. Churchill brought Beveridge into the Board of Trade as his advisor on social questions, thus starting him on his illustrious career. Besides pushing for a variety of social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system of national labor exchanges: he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith of the need to “spread . . . a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation” over the British labor market. But Churchill entertained much more ambitious goals for the Board of Trade. He proposed a plan whereby:

The Board of Trade was to act as the “intelligence department” of the Government, forecasting trade and employment in the regions so that the Government could allocate contracts to the most deserving areas. At the summit . . . would be a Committee of National Organisation, chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to supervise the economy.

Finally, well aware of the electoral potential of organized labor, Churchill became a champion of the labor unions. He was a leading supporter, for instance, of the Trades Disputes Act of 1906. This Act reversed the Taff Vale and other judicial decisions, which had held unions responsible for torts and wrongs committed on their behalf by their agents. The Act outraged the great liberal legal historian and theorist of the rule of law, A.V. Dicey, who charged that it

confers upon a trade union a freedom from civil liability for the commission of even the most heinous wrong by the union or its servants, and in short confers upon every trade union a privilege and protection not possessed by any other person or body of persons, whether corporate or unincorporate, throughout the United Kingdom. . . . It makes a trade union a privileged body exempted from the ordinary law of the land. No such privileged body has ever before been deliberately created by an English Parliament.

It is ironic that the immense power of the British labor unions, the bête noire of Margaret Thatcher, was brought into being with the enthusiastic help of her great hero, Winston Churchill.

World War I

In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and now was truly in his element. Naturally, he quickly allied himself with the war party, and, during the crises that followed, fanned the flames of war. When the final crisis came, in the summer of 1914, Churchill was the only member of the cabinet who backed war from the start, with all of his accustomed energy. Asquith, his own Prime Minister, wrote of him: “Winston very bellicose and demanding immediate mobilization. . . . Winston, who has got all his war paint on, is longing for a sea fight in the early hours of the morning to result in the sinking of the Goeben. The whole thing fills me with sadness.”

On the afternoon of July 28, three days before the German invasion of Belgium, he mobilized the British Home Fleet, the greatest assemblage of naval power in the history of the world to that time. As Sidney Fay wrote, Churchill ordered that:

The fleet was to proceed during the night at high speed and without lights through the Straits of Dover from Portland to its fighting base at Scapa Flow. Fearing to bring this order before the Cabinet, lest it should be considered a provocative action likely to damage the chances of peace, Mr. Churchill had only informed Mr. Asquith, who at once gave his approval.

No wonder that, when war with Germany broke out, Churchill, in contrast even to the other chiefs of the war party, was all smiles, filled with a “glowing zest.”

From the outset of hostilities, Churchill, as head of the Admiralty, was instrumental in establishing the hunger blockade of Germany. This was probably the most effective weapon employed on either side in the whole conflict. The only problem was that, according to everyone’s interpretation of international law except Britain’s, it was illegal. The blockade was not “close-in,” but depended on scattering mines, and many of the goods deemed contraband for instance, food for civilians had never been so classified before. But, throughout his career, international law and the conventions by which men have tried to limit the horrors of war meant nothing to Churchill. As a German historian has dryly commented, Churchill was ready to break the rules whenever the very existence of his country was at stake, and “for him this was very often the case.”

The hunger blockade had certain rather unpleasant consequences. About 750,000 German civilians succumbed to hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition. The effect on those who survived was perhaps just as frightful in its own way. A historian of the blockade concluded: “the victimized youth [of World War I] were to become the most radical adherents of National Socialism.” It was also complications arising from the British blockade that eventually provided the pretext for Wilson’s decision to go to war in 1917.

Whether Churchill actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, is still unclear. A week before the disaster, he wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” Many highly-placed persons in Britain and America believed that the German sinking of the Lusitania would bring the United States into the war.

The most recent student of the subject is Patrick Beesly, whose Room 40 is a history of British Naval Intelligence in World War I. Beesly’s careful account is all the more persuasive for going against the grain of his own sentiments. He points out that the British Admiralty was aware that German U-boat Command had informed U-boat captains at sea of the sailings of the Lusitania, and that the U-boat responsible for the sinking of two ships in recent days was present in the vicinity of Queenstown, off the southern coast of Ireland, in the path the Lusitania was scheduled to take. There is no surviving record of any specific warning to the Lusitania. No destroyer escort was sent to accompany the ship to port, nor were any of the readily available destroyers instructed to hunt for the submarine. In fact, “no effective steps were taken to protect the Lusitania.” Beesly concludes:

unless and until fresh information comes to light, I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.

In any case, what is certain is that Churchill’s policies made the sinking very likely. The Lusitania was a passenger liner loaded with munitions of war; Churchill had given orders to the captains of merchant ships, including liners, to ram German submarines if they encountered them, and the Germans were aware of this. And, as Churchill stressed in his memoirs of World War I, embroiling neutral countries in hostilities with the enemy was a crucial part of warfare: “There are many kinds of maneuvres in war, some only of which take place on the battlefield. . . . The maneuvre which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle.”

In the midst of bloody conflict, Churchill was energy personified, the source of one brainstorm after another. Sometimes his hunches worked out well – he was the chief promoter of the tank in World War I – sometimes not so well, as at Gallipoli. The notoriety of that disaster, which blackened his name for years, caused him to be temporarily dropped from the Cabinet in 1915. His reaction was typical: To one visitor, he said, pointing to the maps on the wall: “This is what I live for . . . Yes, I am finished in respect of all I care for the waging of war, the defeat of the Germans.”

Between the Wars

For the next few years, Churchill was shuttled from one ministerial post to another. As Minister of War, of Churchill in this position one may say what the revisionist historian Charles Tansill said of Henry Stimson as Secretary of War: no one ever deserved the title more. Churchill promoted a crusade to crush Bolshevism in Russia. As Colonial Secretary, he was ready to involve Britain in war with Turkey over the Chanak incident, but the British envoy to Turkey did not deliver Churchill’s ultimatum, and in the end cooler heads prevailed.

In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservatives and was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. His father, in the same office, was noted for having been puzzled by the decimals: what were “those damned dots”? Winston’s most famous act was to return Britain to the gold standard at the unrealistic pre-war parity, thus severely damaging the export trade and ruining the good name of gold, as was pointed out by Murray N. Rothbard. Hardly anyone today would disagree with the judgment of A.J.P. Taylor: Churchill “did not grasp the economic arguments one way or the other. What determined him was again a devotion to British greatness. The pound would once more ‘look the dollar in the face’; the days of Queen Victoria would be restored.”

So far Churchill had been engaged in politics for 30 years, with not much to show for it except a certain notoriety. His great claim to fame in the modern mythology begins with his hard line against Hitler in the 1930s. But it is important to realize that Churchill had maintained a hard line against Weimar Germany, as well. He denounced all calls for Allied disarmament, even before Hitler came to power. Like other Allied leaders, Churchill was living a protracted fantasy: that Germany would submit forever to what it viewed as the shackles of Versailles. In the end, what Britain and France refused to grant to a democratic Germany they were forced to concede to Hitler. Moreover, if most did not bother to listen when Churchill fulminated on the impending German threat, they had good reason. He had tried to whip up hysteria too often before: for a crusade against Bolshevik Russia, during the General Strike of 1926, on the mortal dangers of Indian independence, in the abdication crisis. Why pay any heed to his latest delusion?

Churchill had been a strong Zionist practically from the start, holding that Zionism would deflect European Jews from social revolution to partnership with European imperialism in the Arab world. Now, in 1936, he forged links with the informal London pressure group known as The Focus, whose purpose was to open the eyes of the British public to the one great menace, Nazi Germany. “The great bulk of its finance came from rich British Jews such as Sir Robert Mond (a director of several chemical firms) and Sir Robert Waley-Cohn, the managing director of Shell, the latter contributing £50,000.” The Focus was to be useful in expanding Churchill’s network of contacts and in pushing for his entry into the Cabinet.

Though a Conservative MP, Churchill began berating the Conservative governments, first Baldwin’s and then Chamberlain’s, for their alleged blindness to the Nazi threat. He vastly exaggerated the extent of German rearmament, formidable as it was, and distorted its purpose by harping on German production of heavy-bombers. This was never a German priority, and Churchill’s fabrications were meant to demonstrate a German design to attack Britain, which was never Hitler’s intention. At this time, Churchill busily promoted the Grand Alliance that was to include Britain, France, Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Since the Poles, having nearly been conquered by the Red Army in 1920, rejected any coalition with the Soviet Union, and since the Soviets’ only access to Germany was through Poland, Churchill’s plan was worthless.

Ironically considering that it was a pillar of his future fame his drumbeating about the German danger was yet another position on which Churchill reneged. In the fall of 1937, he stated:

Three or four years ago I was myself a loud alarmist. . . . In spite of the risks which wait on prophecy, I declare my belief that a major war is not imminent, and I still believe that there is a good chance of no major war taking place in our lifetime. . . . I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism.

For all the claptrap about Churchill’s “far-sightedness” during the 30s in opposing the “appeasers,” in the end the policy of the Chamberlain government to rearm as quickly as possible, while testing the chances for peace with Germany was more realistic than Churchill’s.

The common mythology is so far from historical truth that even an ardent Churchill sympathizer, Gordon Craig, feels obliged to write:

The time is long past when it was possible to see the protracted debate over British foreign policy in the 1930s as a struggle between Churchill, an angel of light, fighting against the velleities of uncomprehending and feeble men in high places. It is reasonably well-known today that Churchill was often ill-informed, that his claims about German strength were exaggerated and his prescriptions impractical, that his emphasis on air power was misplaced.

Moreover, as a British historian has recently noted: “For the record, it is worth recalling that in the 1930s Churchill did not oppose the appeasement of either Italy or Japan.” It is also worth recalling that it was the pre-Churchill British governments that furnished the material with which Churchill was able to win the Battle of Britain. Clive Ponting has observed:

the Baldwin and Chamberlain Governments . . . had ensured that Britain was the first country in the world to deploy a fully integrated system of air defence based on radar detection of incoming aircraft and ground control of fighters . . . Churchill’s contribution had been to pour scorn on radar when he was in opposition in the 1930s.

Embroiling America in War Again

In September, 1939, Britain went to war with Germany, pursuant to the guarantee which Chamberlain had been panicked into extending to Poland in March. Lloyd George had termed the guarantee “hare-brained,” while Churchill had supported it. Nonetheless, in his history of the war Churchill wrote: “Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.” With the war on, Winston was recalled to his old job as First Lord of the Admiralty. Then, in the first month of the war, an astonishing thing happened: the President of the United States initiated a personal correspondence not with the Prime Minister, but with the head of the British Admiralty, by-passing all the ordinary diplomatic channels.

The messages that passed between the President and the First Lord were surrounded by a frantic secrecy, culminating in the affair of Tyler Kent, the American cipher clerk at the U.S. London embassy who was tried and imprisoned by the British authorities. The problem was that some of the messages contained allusions to Roosevelt’s agreement even before the war began to a blatantly unneutral cooperation with a belligerent Britain.

On June 10, 1939, George VI and his wife, Queen Mary, visited the Roosevelts at Hyde Park. In private conversations with the King, Roosevelt promised full support for Britain in case of war. He intended to set up a zone in the Atlantic to be patrolled by the U.S. Navy, and, according to the King’s notes, the President stated that “if he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for the consequences.” The biographer of George VI, Wheeler-Bennett, considered that these conversations “contained the germ of the future Bases-for-Destroyers deal, and also of the Lend-Lease Agreement itself.” In communicating with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Roosevelt was aware that he was in touch with the one member of Chamberlain’s cabinet whose belligerence matched his own.

In 1940, Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough when the Chamberlain government resigned because of the Norwegian fiasco which Churchill, more than anyone else, had helped to bring about. As he had fought against a negotiated peace after the fall of Poland, so he continued to resist any suggestion of negotiations with Hitler. Many of the relevant documents are still sealed after all these years but it is clear that a strong peace party existed in the country and the government. It included Lloyd George in the House of Commons, and Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in the Cabinet. Even after the fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler’s renewed peace overtures. This, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. The British historian John Charmley raised a storm of outraged protest when he suggested that a negotiated peace in 1940 might have been to the advantage of Britain and Europe. A Yale historian, writing in the New York Times Book Review, referred to Charmley’s thesis as “morally sickening.” Yet Charmley’s scholarly and detailed work makes the crucial point that Churchill’s adamant refusal even to listen to peace terms in 1940 doomed what he claimed was dearest to him – the Empire and a Britain that was non-socialist and independent in world affairs. One may add that it probably also doomed European Jewry. It is amazing that half a century after the fact, there are critical theses concerning World War II that are off-limits to historical debate.

Lloyd George, Halifax, and the others were open to a compromise peace because they understood that Britain and the Dominions alone could not defeat Germany. After the fall of France, Churchill’s aim of total victory could be realized only under one condition: that the United States become embroiled in another world war. No wonder that Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring precisely that.

After a talk with Churchill, Joseph Kennedy, American ambassador to Britain, noted: “Every hour will be spent by the British in trying to figure out how we can be gotten in.” When he left from Lisbon on a ship to New York, Kennedy pleaded with the State Department to announce that if the ship should happen to blow up mysteriously in the mid-Atlantic, the United States would not consider it a cause for war with Germany. In his unpublished memoirs, Kennedy wrote: “I thought that would give me some protection against Churchill’s placing a bomb on the ship.”

Kennedy’s fears were perhaps not exaggerated. For, while it had been important for British policy in World War I, involving America was the sine qua non of Churchill’s policy in World War II. In Franklin Roosevelt, he found a ready accomplice.

That Roosevelt, through his actions and private words, evinced a clear design for war before December 7, 1941, has never really been in dispute. Arguments have raged over such questions as his possible foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1948, Thomas A. Bailey, diplomatic historian at Stanford, already put the real pro-Roosevelt case:

Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor. . . . He was like a physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good. . . . The country was overwhelmingly noninterventionist to the very day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a complete defeat of his ultimate aims.

Churchill himself never bothered to conceal Roosevelt’s role as co-conspirator. In January, 1941, Harry Hopkins visited London. Churchill described him as “the most faithful and perfect channel of communication between the President and me . . . the main prop and animator of Roosevelt himself”:

I soon comprehended [Hopkins's] personal dynamism and the outstanding importance of his mission . . . here was an envoy from the President of supreme importance to our life. With gleaming eye and quiet, constrained passion he said: “The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He has sent me here to tell you that all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him there is nothing that he will not do so far as he has human power.” There he sat, slim, frail, ill, but absolutely glowing with refined comprehension of the Cause. It was to be the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims.

In 1976, the public finally learned the story of William Stephenson, the British agent code named “Intrepid,” sent by Churchill to the United States in 1940. Stephenson set up headquarters in Rockefeller Center, with orders to use any means necessary to help bring the United States into the war. With the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, Stephenson and his 300 or so agents “intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered” and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the “isolationists.” Through Stephenson, Churchill was virtually in control of William Donovan’s organization, the embryonic U. S. intelligence service.

Churchill even had a hand in the barrage of pro-British, anti-German propaganda that issued from Hollywood in the years before the United States entered the war. Gore Vidal, in Screening History, perceptively notes that starting around 1937, Americans were subjected to one film after another glorifying England and the warrior heroes who built the Empire. As spectators of these productions, Vidal says: “We served neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis; we served the Crown.” A key Hollywood figure in generating the movies that “were making us all weirdly English” was the Hungarian émigré and friend of Churchill, Alexander Korda. Vidal very aptly writes:

For those who find disagreeable today’s Zionist propaganda, I can only say that gallant little Israel of today must have learned a great deal from the gallant little Englanders of the 1930s. The English kept up a propaganda barrage that was to permeate our entire culture . . . Hollywood was subtly and not so subtly infiltrated by British propagandists.

While the Americans were being worked on, the two confederates consulted on how to arrange for direct hostilities between the United States and Germany. In August, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Atlantic conference. Here they produced the Atlantic Charter, with its “four freedoms,” including “the freedom from want,” a blank-check to spread Anglo American Sozialpolitik around the globe. When Churchill returned to London, he informed the Cabinet of what had been agreed to. Thirty years later, the British documents were released. Here is how the New York Times reported the revelations:

Formerly top secret British Government papers made public today said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August, 1941, that he was looking for an incident to justify opening hostilities against Nazi Germany. . . . On August 19 Churchill reported to the War Cabinet in London on other aspects of the Newfoundland [Atlantic Charter] meeting that were not made public. . . . “He [Roosevelt] obviously was determined that they should come in. If he were to put the issue of peace and war to Congress, they would debate it for months,” the Cabinet minutes added. “The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. . . . Everything was to be done to force an incident.”

On July 15, 1941, Admiral Little, of the British naval delegation in Washington, wrote to Admiral Pound, the First Sea Lord: “the brightest hope for getting America into the war lies in the escorting arrangements to Iceland, and let us hope the Germans will not be slow in attacking them.” Little added, perhaps jokingly: “Otherwise I think it would be best for us to organise an attack by our own submarines and preferably on the escort!” A few weeks earlier, Churchill, looking for a chance to bring America into the war, wrote to Pound regarding the German warship, Prinz Eugen: “It would be better for instance that she should be located by a U.S. ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, thus providing the incident for which the U.S. government would be so grateful.” Incidents in the North Atlantic did occur, increasingly, as the United States approached war with Germany.

But Churchill did not neglect the “back door to war,” embroiling the United States with Japan as a way of bringing America into the conflict with Hitler. Sir Robert Craigie, the British ambassador to Tokyo, like the American ambassador Joseph Grew, was working feverishly to avoid war. Churchill directed his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, to whip Craigie into line:

He should surely be told forthwith that the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan, is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent.

Churchill threw his influence into the balance to harden American policy towards Japan, especially in the last days before the Pearl Harbor attack. A sympathetic critic of Churchill, Richard Lamb, has recently written:

Was [Churchill] justified in trying to provoke Japan to attack the United States? . . . in 1941 Britain had no prospect of defeating Germany without the aid of the USA as an active ally. Churchill believed Congress would never authorize Roosevelt to declare war on Germany. . . . In war, decisions by national leaders must be made according to their effect on the war effort. There is truth in the old adage: “All’s fair in love and war.”

No wonder that, in the House of Commons, on February 15, 1942, Churchill declared, of America’s entry into the war: “This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass.”

Churchill’s devotees by no means hold his role in bringing America into World War II against him. On the contrary, they count it in his favor. Harry Jaffa, in his uninformed and frantic apology, seems to be the last person alive who refuses to believe that the Man of Many Centuries was responsible to any degree for America’s entry into the war: after all, wasn’t it the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor?

But what of the American Republic? What does it mean for us that a President collaborated with a foreign head of government to entangle us in a world war? The question would have mattered little to Churchill. He had no concern with the United States as a sovereign, independent nation, with its own character and place in the scheme of things. For him, Americans were one of “the English-speaking peoples.” He looked forward to a common citizenship for Britons and Americans, a “mixing together,” on the road to Anglo-American world hegemony.

But the Churchill-Roosevelt intrigue should, one might think, matter to Americans. Here, however, criticism is halted before it starts. A moral postulate of our time is that in pursuit of the destruction of Hitler, all things were permissible. Yet why is it self-evident that morality required a crusade against Hitler in 1939 and 1940, and not against Stalin? At that point, Hitler had slain his thousands, but Stalin had already slain his millions. In fact, up to June, 1941, the Soviets behaved far more murderously toward the Poles in their zone of occupation than the Nazis did in theirs. Around 1,500,000 Poles were deported to the Gulag, with about half of them dying within the first two years. As Norman Davies writes: “Stalin was outpacing Hitler in his desire to reduce the Poles to the condition of a slave nation.” Of course, there were balance-of-power considerations that created distinctions between the two dictators. But it has yet to be explained why there should exist a double standard ordaining that compromise with one dictator would have been “morally sickening,” while collaboration with the other was morally irreproachable.

“First Catch Your Hare”

Early in the war, Churchill, declared: “I have only one aim in life, the defeat of Hitler, and this makes things very simple for me.” “Victory, victory at all costs,” understood literally, was his policy practically to the end. This points to Churchill’s fundamental and fatal mistake in World War II: his separation of operational from political strategy. To the first the planning and direction of military campaigns he devoted all of his time and energy; after all, he did so enjoy it. To the second, the fitting of military operations to the larger and much more significant political aims they were supposed to serve, he devoted no effort at all.

Stalin, on the other hand, understood perfectly that the entire purpose of war is to enforce certain political claims. This is the meaning of Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means. On Eden’s visit to Moscow in December, 1941, with the Wehrmacht in the Moscow suburbs, Stalin was ready with his demands: British recognition of Soviet rule over the Baltic states and the territories he had just seized from Finland, Poland, and Romania. (They were eventually granted.) Throughout the war he never lost sight of these and other crucial political goals. But Churchill, despite frequent prodding from Eden, never gave a thought to his, whatever they might be. His approach, he explained, was that of Mrs. Glass’s recipe for Jugged Hare: “First catch your hare.” First beat Hitler, then start thinking of the future of Britain and Europe. Churchill put in so many words: “the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims.”

Tuvia Ben-Moshe has shrewdly pinpointed one of the sources of this grotesque indifference:

Thirty years earlier, Churchill had told Asquith that . . . his life’s ambition was “to command great victorious armies in battle.” During World War II he was determined to take nothing less than full advantage of the opportunity given him, the almost unhampered military management of the great conflict. He was prone to ignore or postpone the treatment of matters likely to detract from that pleasure. . . . In so doing, he deferred, or even shelved altogether, treatment of the issues that he should have dealt with in his capacity as Prime Minister.

Churchill’s policy of all-out support of Stalin foreclosed other, potentially more favorable approaches. The military expert Hanson Baldwin, for instance, stated:

There is no doubt whatsoever that it would have been in the interest of Britain, the United States, and the world to have allowed and indeed, to have encouraged the world’s two great dictatorships to fight each other to a frazzle. Such a struggle, with its resultant weakening of both Communism and Nazism, could not but have aided in the establishment of a more stable peace.

Instead of adopting this approach, or, for example, promoting the overthrow of Hitler by anti-Nazi Germans, instead of even considering such alternatives Churchill from the start threw all of his support to Soviet Russia.

Franklin Roosevelt’s fatuousness towards Joseph Stalin is well known. He looked on Stalin as a fellow “progressive” and an invaluable collaborator in creating the future New World Order. But the neo-conservatives and others who counterpose to Roosevelt’s inanity in this matter Churchill’s Old World cunning and sagacity are sadly in error. Roosevelt’s nauseating flattery of Stalin is easily matched by Churchill’s. Just like Roosevelt, Churchill heaped fulsome praise on the Communist murderer, and was anxious for Stalin’s personal friendship. Moreover, his adulation of Stalin and his version of Communism so different from the repellent “Trotskyite” kind was no different in private than in public. In January, 1944, he was still speaking to Eden of the “deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian state and government, the new confidence which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin.” In a letter to his wife, Clementine, Churchill wrote, following the October, 1944 conference in Moscow: “I have had very nice talks with the old Bear. I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us & I am sure they wish to work with us.” Writers like Isaiah Berlin, who try to give the impression that Churchill hated or despised all dictators, including Stalin, are either ignorant or dishonest.

Churchill’s supporters often claim that, unlike the Americans, the seasoned and crafty British statesman foresaw the danger from the Soviet Union and worked doggedly to thwart it. Churchill’s famous “Mediterranean” strategy to attack Europe through its “soft underbelly,” rather than concentrating on an invasion of northern France is supposed to be the proof of this. But this was an ex post facto defense, concocted by Churchill once the Cold War had started: there is little, if any, contemporary evidence that the desire to beat the Russians to Vienna and Budapest formed any part of Churchill’s motivation in advocating the “soft underbelly” strategy. At the time, Churchill gave purely military reasons for it. As Ben-Moshe states: “The official British historians have ascertained that not until the second half of 1944 and after the Channel crossing did Churchill first begin to consider preempting the Russians in southeastern Europe by military means.” By then, such a move would have been impossible for several reasons. It was another of Churchill’s bizarre military notions, like invading Fortress Europe through Norway, or putting off the invasion of northern France until 1945 by which time the Russians would have reached the Rhine.

Moreover, the American opposition to Churchill’s southern strategy did not stem from blindness to the Communist danger. As General Albert C. Wedemeyer, one of the firmest anti-Communists in the American military, wrote:

if we had invaded the Balkans through the Ljubljana Gap, we might theoretically have beaten the Russians to Vienna and Budapest. But logistics would have been against us there: it would have been next to impossible to supply more than two divisions through the Adriatic ports. . . . The proposal to save the Balkans from communism could never have been made good by a “soft underbelly” invasion, for Churchill himself had already cleared the way for the success of Tito . . . [who] had been firmly ensconced in Yugoslavia with British aid long before Italy itself was conquered.

Wedemeyer’s remarks about Yugoslavia were on the mark. On this issue, Churchill rejected the advice of his own Foreign Office, depending instead on information provided especially by the head of the Cairo office of the SOE the Special Operations branch headed by a Communist agent named James Klugman. Churchill withdrew British support from the Loyalist guerrilla army of General Mihailovic and threw it to the Communist Partisan leader Tito. What a victory for Tito would mean was no secret to Churchill. When Fitzroy Maclean was interviewed by Churchill before being sent as liaison to Tito, Maclean observed that, under Communist leadership, the Partisans’

ultimate aim would undoubtedly be to establish in Jugoslavia a Communist regime closely linked to Moscow. How did His Majesty’s Government view such an eventuality? . . . Mr. Churchill’s reply left me in no doubt as to the answer to my problem. So long, he said, as the whole of Western civilization was threatened by the Nazi menace, we could not afford to let our attention be diverted from the immediate issue by considerations of long-term policy. . . . Politics must be a secondary consideration.

It would be difficult to think of a more frivolous attitude to waging war than considering “politics” to be a “secondary consideration.” As for the “human costs” of Churchill’s policy, when an aide pointed out that Tito intended to transform Yugoslavia into a Communist dictatorship on the Soviet model, Churchill retorted: “Do you intend to live there?”

Churchill’s benign view of Stalin and Russia contrasts sharply with his view of Germany. Behind Hitler, Churchill discerned the old specter of Prussianism, which had caused, allegedly, not only the two world wars, but the Franco Prussian War as well. What he was battling now was “Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism,” the “two main elements in German life which must be absolutely destroyed.” In October, 1944, Churchill was still explaining to Stalin that: “The problem was how to prevent Germany getting on her feet in the lifetime of our grandchildren.” Churchill harbored a “confusion of mind on the subject of the Prussian aristocracy, Nazism, and the sources of German militarist expansionism . . . [his view] was remarkably similar to that entertained by Sir Robert Vansittart and Sir Warren Fisher; that is to say, it arose from a combination of almost racialist antipathy and balance of power calculations.” Churchill’s aim was not simply to save world civilization from the Nazis, but, in his words, the “indefinite prevention of their [the Germans'] rising again as an Armed Power.”

Little wonder, then, that Churchill refused even to listen to the pleas of the anti-Hitler German opposition, which tried repeatedly to establish liaison with the British government. Instead of making every effort to encourage and assist an anti-Nazi coup in Germany, Churchill responded to the feelers sent out by the German resistance with cold silence. Reiterated warnings from Adam von Trott and other resistance leaders of the impending “bolshevization” of Europe made no impression at all on Churchill. A recent historian has written: “by his intransigence and refusal to countenance talks with dissident Germans, Churchill threw away an opportunity to end the war in July 1944.” To add infamy to stupidity, Churchill and his crowd had only words of scorn for the valiant German officers even as they were being slaughtered by the Gestapo.

In place of help, all Churchill offered Germans looking for a way to end the war before the Red Army flooded into central Europe was the slogan ofunconditional surrender. Afterwards, Churchill lied in the House of Commons about his role at Casablanca in connection with Roosevelt’s announcement of the policy of unconditional surrender, and was forced to retract his statements. Eisenhower, among others, strenuously and persistently objected to the unconditional surrender formula as hampering the war effort by raising the morale of the Wehrmacht. In fact, the slogan was seized on by Goebbels, and contributed to the Germans’ holding out to the bitter end.

The pernicious effect of the policy was immeasurably bolstered by the Morgenthau Plan, which gave the Germans a terrifying picture of what “unconditional surrender” would mean. This plan, initialed by Roosevelt and Churchill at Quebec, called for turning Germany into an agricultural and pastoral country; even the coal mines of the Ruhr were to be wrecked. The fact that it would have led to the deaths of tens of millions of Germans made it a perfect analog to Hitler’s schemes for dealing with Russia and the Ukraine.

Churchill was initially averse to the plan. However, he was won over by Professor Lindemann, as maniacal a German-hater as Morgenthau himself. Lindemann stated to Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal physician: “I explained to Winston that the plan would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor. . . . Winston had not thought of it in that way, and he said no more about a cruel threat to the German people.” According to Morgenthau, the wording of the scheme was drafted entirely by Churchill. When Roosevelt returned to Washington, Hull, and Stimson expressed their horror, and quickly disabused the President. Churchill, on the other hand, was unrepentant. When it came time to mention the Morgenthau Plan in his history of the war, he distorted its provisions and, by implication, lied about his role in supporting it.

Beyond the issue of the plan itself, Lord Moran wondered how it had been possible for Churchill to appear at the Quebec conference “without any thought out views on the future of Germany, although she seemed to be on the point of surrender.” The answer was that “he had become so engrossed in the conduct of the war that little time was left to plan for the future”:

Military detail had long fascinated him, while he was frankly bored by the kind of problem which might take up the time of the Peace Conference. . . . The P. M. was frittering away his waning strength on matters which rightly belonged to soldiers. My diary in the autumn of 1942 tells how I talked to Sir Stafford Cripps and found that he shared my cares. He wanted the P. M. to concentrate on the broad strategy of the war and on high policy. . . . No one could make [Churchill] see his errors.

War Crimes Discreetly Veiled

There are a number of episodes during the war revealing of Churchill’s character that deserve to be mentioned. A relatively minor incident was the British attack on the French fleet, at Mers-el-Kebir (Oran), off the coast of Algeria. After the fall of France, Churchill demanded that the French surrender their fleet to Britain. The French declined, promising that they would scuttle the ships before allowing them to fall into German hands. Against the advice of his naval officers, Churchill ordered British ships off the Algerian coast to open fire. About 1500 French sailors were killed. This was obviously a war crime, by anyone’s definition: an unprovoked attack on the forces of an ally without a declaration of war. At Nuremberg, German officers were sentenced to prison for less. Realizing this, Churchill lied about Mers-el-Kebir in his history, and suppressed evidence concerning it in the official British histories of the war. With the attack on the French fleet, Churchill confirmed his position as the prime subverter through two world wars of the system of rules of warfare that had evolved in the West over centuries.

But the great war crime which will be forever linked to Churchill’s name is the terror-bombing of the cities of Germany that in the end cost the lives of around 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000 seriously injured. (Compare this to the roughly 70,000 British lives lost to German air attacks. In fact, there were nearly as many Frenchmen killed by Allied air attacks as there were Englishmen killed by Germans.) The plan was conceived mainly by Churchill’s friend and scientific advisor, Professor Lindemann, and carried out by the head of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris (“Bomber Harris”). Harris stated: “In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing.” Harris and other British airforce leaders boasted that Britain had been the pioneer in the massive use of strategic bombing. J.M. Spaight, former Principal Assistant Secretary of the Air Ministry, noted that while the Germans (and the French) looked on air power as largely an extension of artillery, a support to the armies in the field, the British understood its capacity to destroy the enemy’s home-base. They built their bombers and established Bomber Command accordingly.

Brazenly lying to the House of Commons and the public, Churchill claimed that only military and industrial installations were targeted. In fact, the aim was to kill as many civilians as possible thus, “area” bombing, or “carpet” bombing and in this way to break the morale of the Germans and terrorize them into surrendering.

Harris at least had the courage of his convictions. He urged that the government openly announce that:

the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive . . . should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.

The campaign of murder from the air leveled Germany. A thousand-year-old urban culture was annihilated, as great cities, famed in the annals of science and art, were reduced to heaps of smoldering ruins. There were high points: the bombing of Lübeck, when that ancient Hanseatic town “burned like kindling”; the 1000-bomber raid over Cologne, and the following raids that somehow, miraculously, mostly spared the great Cathedral but destroyed the rest of the city, including thirteen Romanesque churches; the firestorm that consumed Hamburg and killed some 42,000 people. No wonder that, learning of this, a civilized European man like Joseph Schumpeter, at Harvard, was driven to telling “anyone who would listen” that Churchill and Roosevelt were destroying more than Genghis Khan.

The most infamous act was the destruction of Dresden, in February, 1945. According to the official history of the Royal Air Force: “The destruction of Germany was by then on a scale which might have appalled Attila or Genghis Khan.” Dresden, which was the capital of the old kingdom of Saxony, was an indispensable stop on the Grand Tour, the baroque gem of Europe. The war was practically over, the city filled with masses of helpless refugees escaping the advancing Red Army. Still, for three days and nights, from February 13 to 15, Dresden was pounded with bombs. At least 30,000 people were killed, perhaps as many as 135,000 or more. The Zwinger Palace; Our Lady’s Church (die Frauenkirche); the Bruhl Terrace, overlooking the Elbe where, in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Uncle Pavel went to spend his last years; the Semper Opera House, where Richard Strauss conducted the premiere of Rosenkavalier; and practically everything else was incinerated. Churchill had fomented it. But he was shaken by the outcry that followed. While in Georgetown and Hollywood, few had ever heard of Dresden, the city meant something in Stockholm, Zurich, and the Vatican, and even in London. What did our hero do? He sent a memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise, we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. . . . The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. . . . I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives . . . rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

The military chiefs saw through Churchill’s contemptible ploy: realizing that they were being set up, they refused to accept the memorandum. After the war, Churchill casually disclaimed any knowledge of the Dresden bombing, saying: “I thought the Americans did it.”

And still the bombing continued. On March 16, in a period of 20 minutes, Würzburg was razed to the ground. As late as the middle of April, Berlin and Potsdam were bombed yet again, killing another 5,000 civilians. Finally, it stopped; as Bomber Harris noted, there were essentially no more targets to be bombed in Germany. It need hardly be recorded that Churchill supported the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the deaths of another 100,000, or more, civilians. When Truman fabricated the myth of the “500,000 U.S. lives saved” by avoiding an invasion of the Home Islands the highest military estimate had been 46,000. Churchill topped his lie: the atom-bombings had saved 1,200,000 lives, including 1,000,000 Americans, he fantasized.

The eagerness with which Churchill directed or applauded the destruction of cities from the air should raise questions for those who still consider him the great “conservative” of his or perhaps of all time. They would do well to consider the judgment of an authentic conservative like Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who wrote: “Non-Britishers did not matter to Mr. Churchill, who sacrificed human beings their lives, their welfare, their liberty with the same elegant disdain as his colleague in the White House.”

1945: The Dark Side

And so we come to 1945 and the ever-radiant triumph of Absolute Good over Absolute Evil. So potent is the mystique of that year that the insipid welfare states of today’s Europe clutch at it at every opportunity, in search of a few much-needed shreds of glory.

The dark side of that triumph, however, has been all but suppressed. It is the story of the crimes and atrocities of the victors and their protégés. Since Winston Churchill played a central role in the Allied victory, it is the story also of the crimes and atrocities in which Churchill was implicated. These include the forced repatriation of some two million Soviet subjects to the Soviet Union. Among these were tens of thousands who had fought with the Germans against Stalin, under the sponsorship of General Vlasov and his “Russian Army of Liberation.” This is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, inThe Gulag Archipelago:

In their own country, Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious . . . what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin’s hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender.

Most shameful of all was the handing over of the Cossacks. They had never been Soviet citizens, since they had fought against the Red Army in the Civil War and then emigrated. Stalin, understandably, was particularly keen to get hold of them, and the British obliged. Solzhenitsyn wrote, of Winston Churchill:

He turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women, and children. . . . This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths.

The “purge” of alleged collaborators in France was a blood-bath that claimed more victims than the Reign of Terror in the Great Revolution and not just among those who in one way or other had aided the Germans: included were any right-wingers the Communist resistance groups wished to liquidate.

The massacres carried out by Churchill’s protégé, Tito, must be added to this list: tens of thousands of Croats, not simply the Ustasha, but any “class-enemies,” in classical Communist style. There was also the murder of some 20,000 Slovene anti-Communist fighters by Tito and his killing squads. When Tito’s Partisans rampaged in Trieste, which he was attempting to grab in 1945, additional thousands of Italian anti-Communists were massacred.

As the troops of Churchill’s Soviet ally swept through central Europe and the Balkans, the mass deportations began. Some in the British government had qualms, feeling a certain responsibility. Churchill would have none of it. In January, 1945, for instance, he noted to the Foreign Office: “Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Rumania of Saxons [Germans] and others? . . . I cannot see the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand of these people work their passage. . . . I cannot myself consider that it is wrong of the Russians to take Rumanians of any origin they like to work in the Russian coal-fields.” About 500,000 German civilians were deported to work in Soviet Russia, in accordance with Churchill and Roosevelt’s agreement at Yalta that such slave labor constituted a proper form of “reparations.”

Worst of all was the expulsion of some 15 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudetenland. This was done pursuant to the agreements at Tehran, where Churchill proposed that Poland be “moved west,” and to Churchill’s acquiescence in the Czech leader Eduard Benes’s plan for the “ethnic cleansing” of Bohemia and Moravia. Around one-and-a-half to two million German civilians died in this process. As the Hungarian liberal Gaspar Tamas wrote, in driving out the Germans of east-central Europe, “whose ancestors built our cathedrals, monasteries, universities, and railroad stations,” a whole ancient culture was effaced. But why should that mean anything to the Churchill devotees who call themselves “conservatives” in America today?

Then, to top it all, came the Nuremberg Trials, a travesty of justice condemned by the great Senator Robert Taft, where Stalin’s judges and prosecutors, seasoned veterans of the purges of the 30s, participated in another great show-trial.

By 1946, Churchill was complaining in a voice of outrage of the happenings in eastern Europe: “From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended over Europe.” Goebbels had popularized the phrase “iron curtain,” but it was accurate enough.

The European continent now contained a single, hegemonic power. “As the blinkers of war were removed,” John Charmley writes, “Churchill began to perceive the magnitude of the mistake which had been made.” In fact, Churchill’s own expressions of profound self-doubt consort oddly with his admirers’ retrospective triumphalism. After the war, he told Robert Boothby: “Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.” In the preface to the first volume of his history of World War II, Churchill explained why he was so troubled:

The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.

On V-E Day, he had announced the victory of “the cause of freedom in every land.” But to his private secretary, he mused: “What will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?” It was a bit late to raise the question. Really, what are we to make of a statesman who for years ignored the fact that the extinction of Germany as a power in Europe entailed . . . certain consequences? Is this another Bismarck or Metternich we are dealing with here? Or is it a case of a Woodrow Wilson redivivus of another Prince of Fools?

With the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own policy, there was only one recourse open to Churchill: to bring America into Europe permanently. Thus, his anxious expostulations to the Americans, including his Fulton, Missouri “Iron Curtain” speech. Having destroyed Germany as the natural balance to Russia on the continent, he was now forced to try to embroil the United States in yet another war, this time a Cold War, that would last 45 years, and change America fundamentally, and perhaps irrevocably.

The Triumph of the Welfare State

In 1945, general elections were held in Britain, and the Labour Party won a landslide victory. Clement Attlee, and his colleagues took power and created the socialist welfare state. But the socializing of Britain was probably inevitable, given the war. It was a natural outgrowth of the wartime sense of solidarity and collectivist emotion, of the feeling that the experience of war had somehow rendered class structure and hierarchy, normal features of any advanced society, obsolete and indecent. And there was a second factor British society had already been to a large extent socialized in the war years, under Churchill himself. As Ludwig von Mises wrote:

Marching ever further on the way of interventionism, first Germany, then Great Britain and many other European countries have adopted central planning, the Hindenburg pattern of socialism. It is noteworthy that in Germany the deciding measures were not resorted to by the Nazis, but some time before Hitler seized power by Bruning . . . and in Great Britain not by the Labour Party but by the Tory Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill.

While Churchill waged war, he allowed Attlee to head various Cabinet committees on domestic policy and devise proposals on health, unemployment, education, etc. Churchill himself had already accepted the master-blueprint for the welfare state, the Beveridge Report. As he put it in a radio speech:

You must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.

That Mises was correct in his judgment on Churchill’s role is indicated by the conclusion of W. H. Greenleaf, in his monumental study of individualism and collectivism in modern Britain. Greenleaf states that it was Churchill who

during the war years, instructed R. A. Butler to improve the education of the people and who accepted and sponsored the idea of a four-year plan for national development and the commitment to sustain full employment in the post-war period. As well he approved proposals to establish a national insurance scheme, services for housing and health, and was prepared to accept a broadening field of state enterprises. It was because of this coalition policy that Enoch Powell referred to the veritable social revolution which occurred in the years 1942 – 44. Aims of this kind were embodied in the Conservative declaration of policy issued by the Premier before the 1945 election.

When the Tories returned to power in 1951, “Churchill chose a Government which was the least recognizably Conservative in history.” There was no attempt to roll back the welfare state, and the only industry that was really reprivatized was road haulage. Churchill “left the core of its [the Labour government's] work inviolate.” The “Conservative” victory functioned like Republican victories in the United States, from Eisenhower on, to consolidate socialism. Churchill even undertook to make up for “deficiencies” in the welfare programs of the previous Labour government, in housing and public works. Most insidiously of all, he directed his leftist Labour Minister, Walter Monckton, to appease the unions at all costs. Churchill’s surrender to the unions, “dictated by sheer political expediency,” set the stage for the quagmire in labor relations that prevailed in Britain for the next two decades.

Yet, in truth, Churchill never cared a great deal about domestic affairs, even welfarism, except as a means of attaining and keeping office. What he loved was power, and the opportunities power provided to live a life of drama and struggle and endless war.

There is a way of looking at Winston Churchill that is very tempting: that he was a deeply flawed creature, who was summoned at a critical moment to do battle with a uniquely appalling evil, and whose very flaws contributed to a glorious victory in a way, like Merlin, in C.S. Lewis’s great Christian novel, That Hideous Strength. Such a judgment would, I believe, be superficial. A candid examination of his career, I suggest, yields a different conclusion: that, when all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a Man of Blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.

World War I on the Home Front

Ralph Raico — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010)

Historian Hunt Tooley will be teaching World War One: A Revisionist Perspective, a Mises Academy online course, starting October 29.

The changes wrought in America during the First World War were so profound that one scholar has referred to "the Wilsonian Revolution in government."[1] Like other revolutions, it was preceded by an intellectual transformation, as the philosophy of progressivism came to dominate political discourse.[2] Progressive notions – of the obsolescence of laissez-faire and of constitutionally limited government, the urgent need to "organize" society "scientifically," and the superiority of the collective over the individual – were propagated by the most influential sector of the intelligentsia and began to make inroads in the nation’s political life.

As the war furnished Lenin with otherwise unavailable opportunities for realizing his program, so too, on a more modest level, it opened up prospects for American progressives that could never have existed in peacetime. The coterie of intellectuals around the New Republic discovered a heaven-sent chance to advance their agenda. John Dewey praised the "immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war," while Walter Lippmann wrote: "We can dare to hope for things which we never dared to hope for in the past." The magazine itself rejoiced in the war’s possibilities for broadening "social control … subordinating the individual to the group and the group to society," and advocated that the war be used "as a pretext to foist innovations upon the country."[3]

Woodrow Wilson’s readiness to cast off traditional restraints on government power greatly facilitated the "foisting" of such "innovations." The result was a shrinking of American freedoms unrivaled since at least the War Between the States.

It is customary to distinguish "economic liberties" from "civil liberties." But since all rights are rooted in the right to property, starting with the basic right to self-ownership, this distinction is in the last analysis an artificial one.[4] It is maintained here, however, for purposes of exposition.

As regards the economy, Robert Higgs, in his seminal work, Crisis and Leviathan, demonstrated the unprecedented changes in this period, amounting to an American version of Imperial Germany’s Kriegssozialismus. Even before we entered the war, Congress passed the National Defense Act. It gave the president the authority, in time of war "or when war is imminent," to place orders with private firms which would "take precedence over all other orders and contracts." If the manufacturer refused to fill the order at a "reasonable price as determined by the Secretary of War," the government was "authorized to take immediate possession of any such plant [and] … to manufacture therein … such product or material as may be required"; the private owner, meanwhile, would be "deemed guilty of a felony."[5]

Once war was declared, state power grew at a dizzying pace. The Lever Act alone put Washington in charge of the production and distribution of all food and fuel in the United States.

By the time of the armistice, the government had taken over the ocean-shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to business directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces.

Fatuously, Wilson conceded that the powers granted him "are very great, indeed, but they are no greater than it has proved necessary to lodge in the other Governments which are conducting this momentous war."[6] So, according to the president, the United States was simply following the lead of the Old World nations in leaping into war socialism.

Throngs of novice bureaucrats eager to staff the new agencies overran Washington. Many of them came from the progressive intelligentsia. "Never before had so many intellectuals and academicians swarmed into government to help plan, regulate, and mobilize the economic system" – among them Rexford Tugwell, later the key figure in the New Deal Brain Trust.[7] Others who volunteered from the business sector harbored views no different from the statism of the professors. Bernard Baruch, Wall Street financier and now head of the War Industries Board, held that the free market was characterized by anarchy, confusion, and wild fluctuations. Baruch stressed the crucial distinction between consumer wants and consumer needs, making it clear who was authorized to decide which was which. When price controls in agriculture produced their inevitable distortions, Herbert Hoover, formerly a successful engineer and now food administrator of the United States, urged Wilson to institute overall price controls: "The only acceptable remedy [is] a general price-fixing power in yourself or in the Federal Trade Commission." Wilson submitted the appropriate legislation to Congress, which, however, rejected it.[8]

Ratification of the Income Tax Amendment in 1913 paved the way for a massive increase in taxation once America entered the war. Taxes for the lowest bracket tripled, from 2 to 6 percent, while for the highest bracket they went from a maximum of 13 percent to 77 percent. In 1916, less than half a million tax returns had been filed; in 1917, the number was nearly 3.5 million, a figure which doubled by 1920. This was in addition to increases in other federal taxes. Federal tax receipts "would never again be less than a sum five times greater than prewar levels."[9]

But even huge tax increases were not nearly enough to cover the costs of the war. Through the recently established Federal Reserve System, the government created new money to finance its stunning deficits, which by 1918 reached $1 billion a month – more than the total annual federal budget before the war. The debt, which had been less than $1 billion in 1915, rose to $25 billion in 1919. The number of civilian federal employees more than doubled, from 1916 to 1918, to 450,000. After the war, two-thirds of the new jobs were eliminated, leaving a "permanent net gain of 141,000 employees – a 30 percent ‘rachet effect.’"[10]

Readers who might expect that such a colossal extension of state control provoked a fierce resistance from heroic leaders of big business will be sorely disappointed. Instead, businessmen welcomed government intrusions, which brought them guaranteed profits, a "riskless capitalism." Many were particularly happy with the War Finance Corporation, which provided loans for businesses deemed essential to the war effort. On the labor front, the government threw its weight behind union organizing and compulsory collective bargaining. In part, this was a reward to Samuel Gompers for his territorial fight against the nefarious IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, which had ventured to condemn the war on behalf of the working people of the country.[11]

Of the First World War, Murray Rothbard wrote that it was "the critical watershed for the American business system … [a war-collectivism was established] which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the remainder of the century."[12] Many of the administrators and principal functionaries of the new agencies and bureaus reappeared a decade and a half later, when another crisis evoked another great surge of government activism. It should also not be forgotten that Franklin Roosevelt himself was present in Washington, as assistant secretary of the navy, an eager participant in the Wilsonian revolution.

The permanent effect of the war on the mentality of the American people, once famous for their devotion to private enterprise, was summed up by Jonathan Hughes:

The direct legacy of war – the dead, the debt, the inflation, the change in economic and social structure that comes from immense transfers of resources by taxation and money creation – these things are all obvious. What has not been so obvious has been the pervasive yet subtle change in our increasing acceptance of federal nonmarket control, and even our enthusiasm for it, as a result of the experience of war.[13]

Civil liberties fared no better in this war to make the world safe for democracy. In fact, "democracy" was already beginning to mean what it means today – the right of a government legitimized by formal majoritarian processes to dispose at will of the lives, liberty, and property of its subjects. Wilson sounded the keynote for the ruthless suppression of anyone who interfered with his war effort: "Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution." His attorney general Thomas W. Gregory seconded the president, stating, of opponents of the war: "May God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government."[14]

The Espionage Act of 1917, amended the next year by the addition of the Sedition Act, went far beyond punishing spies. Its real target was opinion. It was deployed particularly against socialists and critics of conscription.[15] People were jailed for questioning the constitutionality of the draft and arrested for criticizing the Red Cross. A woman was prosecuted and convicted for telling a women’s group that "the government is for the profiteers." A movie producer was sentenced to three years in prison for a film, The Spirit of ’76, which was deemed anti-British. Eugene V. Debs, who had polled 900,000 votes in 1912 as presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, was sentenced to ten years in prison for criticizing the war at a rally of his party. Vigilantes attacked and on at least one occasion lynched antiwar dissenters. Citizens of German descent and even Lutheran ministers were harassed and spied on by their neighbors as well as by government agents.

The New York Times, then as now the mouthpiece of the powers that be, goaded the authorities to "make short work" of IWW "conspirators" who opposed the war, just as the same paper applauded Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, for "doing his duty" in dismissing faculty members who opposed conscription. The public schools and the universities were turned into conduits for the government line. Postmaster General Albert Burleson censored and prohibited the circulation of newspapers critical of Wilson, the conduct of the war, or the Allies.[16] The nation-wide campaign of repression was spurred on by the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, the US government’s first propaganda agency.

In the cases that reached the Supreme Court the prosecution of dissenters was upheld. It was the great liberal, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who wrote the majority decision confirming the conviction of a man who had questioned the constitutionality of the draft, as he did also in 1919, in the case of Debs, for his antiwar speech.[17] In the Second World War, the Supreme Court of the United States could not, for the life of it, discover anything in the Constitution that might prohibit the rounding up, transportation to the interior, and incarceration of American citizens simply because they were of Japanese descent. In the same way, the Justices, with Holmes leading the pack, now delivered up the civil liberties of the American people to Wilson and his lieutenants.[18] Again, precedents were established that would further undermine the people’s rights in the future. In the words of Bruce Porter, "Though much of the apparatus of wartime repression was dismantled after 1918, World War I left an altered balance of power between state and society that made future assertions of state sovereignty more feasible – beginning with the New Deal."[19]

We have all been made very familiar with the episode known as "McCarthyism," which, however, affected relatively few persons, many of whom were, in fact, Stalinists. Still, this alleged time of terror is endlessly rehashed in schools and media. In contrast, few even among educated Americans have ever heard of the shredding of civil liberties under Wilson’s regime, which was far more intense and affected tens of thousands.

The worst and most obvious infringement of individual rights was conscription. Some wondered why, in the grand crusade against militarism, we were adopting the very emblem of militarism. The Speaker of the House Champ Clark (D-MO) remarked that "in the estimation of Missourians there is precious little difference between a conscript and a convict." The problem was that, while Congress had voted for Wilson’s war, young American males voted with their feet against it. In the first ten days after the war declaration, only 4,355 men enlisted; in the next weeks, the War Department procured only one-sixth of the men required. Yet Wilson’s program demanded that we ship a great army to France, so that American troops were sufficiently "blooded." Otherwise, at the end the president would lack the credentials to play his providential role among the victorious leaders. Ever the deceiver and self-deceiver, Wilson declared that the draft was "in no sense a conscription of the unwilling; it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass."[20]

Wilson, lover of peace and enemy of militarism and autocracy, had no intention of relinquishing the gains in state power once the war was over. He proposed postwar military training for all 18- and 19-year-old males and the creation of a great army and a navy equal to Britain’s, and called for a peacetime sedition act.[21]

Two final episodes, one foreign and one domestic, epitomize the statecraft of Woodrow Wilson.

At the new League of Nations, there was pressure for a US "mandate" (colony) in Armenia, in the Caucasus. The idea appealed to Wilson; Armenia was exactly the sort of "distant dependency" which he had prized 20 years earlier, as conducive to "the greatly increased power" of the president. He sent a secret military mission to scout out the territory. But its report was equivocal, warning that such a mandate would place us in the middle of a centuries-old battleground of imperialism and war, and lead to serious complications with the new regime in Russia. The report was not released. Instead, in May 1920, Wilson requested authority from Congress to establish the mandate, but was turned down.[22] It is interesting to contemplate the likely consequences of our Armenian mandate, comparable to the joy Britain had from its mandate in Palestine, only with constant friction and probable war with Soviet Russia thrown in.

In 1920, the United States – Wilson’s United States – was the only nation involved in the World War that still refused a general amnesty to political prisoners.[23] The most famous political prisoner in the country was the Socialist leader Eugene Debs. In June, 1918, Debs had addressed a Socialist gathering in Canton, Ohio, where he pilloried the war and the US government. There was no call to violence, nor did any violence ensue. A government stenographer took down the speech, and turned in a report to the federal authorities in Cleveland. Debs was indicted under the Sedition Act, tried, and condemned to ten years in federal prison.

In January, 1921, Debs was ailing and many feared for his life. Amazingly, it was Wilson’s rampaging attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer himself who urged the president to commute Debs’s sentence. Wilson wrote across the recommendation the single word, "Denied." He claimed that "while the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines, sniping, attacking, and denouncing them … he will never be pardoned during my administration."[24] Actually, Debs had denounced not "the flower of American youth" but Wilson and the other war-makers who sent them to their deaths in France. It took Warren Harding, one of the "worst" American Presidents according to numerous polls of history professors, to pardon Debs, when Wilson, a "Near-Great," would have let him die a prisoner. Debs and 23 other jailed dissidents were freed on Christmas Day, 1921. To those who praised him for his clemency, Harding replied: "I couldn’t do anything else…. Those fellows didn’t mean any harm. It was a cruel punishment."[25]

An enduring aura of saintliness surrounds Woodrow Wilson, largely generated in the immediate post-World War II period, when his "martyrdom" was used as a club to beat any lingering isolationists. But even setting aside his role in bringing war to America, and his foolish and pathetic floundering at the peace conference – Wilson’s crusade against freedom of speech and the market economy alone should be enough to condemn him in the eyes of any authentic liberal. Yet his incessant invocation of terms like "freedom" and "democracy" continues to mislead those who choose to listen to self-serving words rather than look to actions. What the peoples of the world had in store for them under the reign of Wilsonian "idealism" can best be judged by Wilson’s conduct at home.

Walter Karp, a wise and well-versed student of American history, though not a professor, understood the deep meaning of the regime of Woodrow Wilson:

Today American children are taught in our schools that Wilson was one of our greatest Presidents. That is proof in itself that the American Republic has never recovered from the blow he inflicted on it.[26]

Notes

[1] Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 269.

[2] Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Progressivism in America: A Study of the Era from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974); and Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 113–16. See also Murray N. Rothbard’s essay on "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals," in John V. Denson, ed., The Costs of War, pp. 249–99.

[3] David M. Kennedy, Over There: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 39–40, 44, 246; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 205.

[4] See Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998 [1982]).

[5] Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 128–29.

[6] Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 123, 135.

[7] Murray N. Rothbard, "War Collectivism in World War I," in Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard, eds., A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), pp. 97–98. Tugwell lamented, in Rothbard’s words, that "only the Armistice prevented a great experiment in control of production, control of price, and control of consumption."

[8] Kennedy, Over There, pp. 139–41, 243. Kennedy concluded, p. 141: "under the active prodding of war administrators like Hoover and Baruch, there occurred a marked shift toward corporatism in the nation’s business affairs. Entire industries, even entire economic sectors, as in the case of agriculture, were organized and disciplined as never before, and brought into close and regular relations with counterpart congressional committees, cabinet departments, and Executive agencies." On Hoover, see Murray N. Rothbard, "Herbert Clark Hoover: A Reconsideration," New Individualist Review (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1981), pp. 689–98, reprinted from New Individualist Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (Winter 1966), pp. 1–12.

[9] Kennedy, Over There, p. 112. Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 270.

[10] Jonathan Hughes, The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 135; Kennedy, Over There, pp. 103–13; Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 271.

[11] Kennedy, Over There, pp. 253–58; Hughes, The Governmental Habit, p. 141. Hughes noted that the War Finance Corporation was a permanent residue of the war, continuing under different names to the present day. Moreover, "subsequent administrations of both political parties owed Wilson a great debt for his pioneering ventures into the pseudo-capitalism of the government corporation. It enabled collective enterprise as ‘socialist’ as any Soviet economic enterprise, to remain cloaked in the robes of private enterprise." Rothbard, "War Collectivism in World War I," p. 90, observed that the railroad owners were not at all averse to the government takeover, since they were guaranteed the same level of profits as in 1916–17, two particularly good years for the industry.

[12] Rothbard, "War Collectivism in World War I," p. 66.

[13] Hughes, The Governmental Habit, p. 137. See also Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 150–56.

[14] Quotations from Wilson and Gregory in H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1968 [1957]), p. 14.

[15] Ibid., pp. 30–60, 157–66, and passim.

[16] Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, pp. 217–18; Porter, War and the Rise of the State, pp. 272–74; Kennedy, Over There, pp. 54, 73–78. Kennedy comments, p. 89, that the point was reached where "to criticize the course of the war, or to question American or Allied peace aims, was to risk outright prosecution for treason."

[17] Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949), pp. 383–84. Justice Holmes complained of the "stupid letters of protest" he received following his judgment on Debs: "there was a lot of jaw about free speech," the Justice said. See also Kennedy, Over There, pp. 84–86.

[18] See the brilliant essay by H. L. Mencken, "Mr. Justice Holmes," in idem, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Vintage, 1982 [1949]), pp. 258–65. Mencken concluded: "To call him a Liberal is to make the word meaningless." Kennedy, Over There, pp. 178–79 pointed out Holmes’s mad statements glorifying war. It was only in war that men could pursue "the divine folly of honor." While the experience of combat might be horrible, afterwards "you see that its message was divine." This is reminiscent less of liberalism as traditionally understood than of the world-view of Benito Mussolini.

[19] Porter, War and the Rise of the State, p. 274. On the roots of the national-security state in the World War I period, see Leonard P. Liggio, "American Foreign Policy and National-Security Management," in Radosh and Rothbard, A New History of Leviathan, pp. 224–59.

[20] Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, p. 22; Kennedy, Over There, p. 94; Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 131–32. See also the essay by Robert Higgs, "War and Levithan in Twentieth Century America: Conscription as the Keystone," in Denson, ed., The Costs of War, pp. 375–88.

[21] Kennedy, Over There, p. 87; Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, pp. 223–26.

[22] Carl Brent Swisher, American Constitutional Development, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), pp. 681–82.

[23] Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, p. 234.

[24] Ginger, The Bending Cross, pp. 356–59, 362–76, 405–06.

[25] Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, p. 279.

[26] Karp, The Politics of War, p. 340.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is Professor Emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. His latest book is Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal. You can study the history of civilization under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

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Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Second Personality’

Ralph Raico — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 05:00:00 +0000

This article is excerpted from the chapter "World War I: The Turning Point" in Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010). The chapter is a much expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories (2001).

Wherever blame for the war might lie, for the immense majority of Americans in 1914 it was just another of the European horrors from which our policy of neutrality, set forth by the Founding Fathers of the Republic, had kept us free. Pašić, Sazonov, Conrad, Poincaré, Moltke, Edward Grey, and the rest – these were the men our Fathers had warned us against. No conceivable outcome of the war could threaten an invasion of our vast and solid continental base. We should thank a merciful Providence, which gave us this blessed land and impregnable fortress, that America, at least, would not be drawn into the senseless butchery of the Old World. That was unthinkable.

However, in 1914 the president of the United States was Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

The term most frequently applied to Woodrow Wilson nowadays is “idealist.” In contrast, the expression “power-hungry” is rarely used. Yet a scholar not unfriendly to him has written of Wilson that “he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power.” Musing on the character of the US government while he was still an academic, Wilson wrote: “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.”[1] Even before he entered politics, he was fascinated by the power of the presidency and how it could be augmented by meddling in foreign affairs and dominating overseas territories. The war with Spain and the American acquisition of colonies in the Caribbean and across the Pacific were welcomed by Wilson as productive of salutary changes in our federal system. “The plunge into international politics and into the administration of distant dependencies” had already resulted in “the greatly increased power and opportunity for constructive statesmanship given the President.”

When foreign affairs play a prominent part in the politics and policy of a nation, its Executive must of necessity be its guide: must utter every initial judgment, take every first step of action, supply the information upon which it is to act, suggest and in large measure control its conduct. The President of the United States is now [in 1900], as of course, at the front of affairs…. There is no trouble now about getting the President’s speeches printed and read, every word…. The government of dependencies must be largely in his hands. Interesting things may come of this singular change.

Wilson looked forward to an enduring “new leadership of the Executive,” with even the heads of Cabinet departments exercising “a new influence upon the action of Congress.”[2]

In large part Wilson’s reputation as an idealist is traceable to his incessantly professed love of peace. Yet as soon as he became president, prior to leading the country into the First World War, his actions in Latin America were anything but pacific. Even Arthur S. Link (whom Walter Karp referred to as the keeper of the Wilsonian flame) wrote, of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean: “the years from 1913 to 1921 [Wilson's years in office] witnessed intervention by the State Department and the navy on a scale that had never before been contemplated, even by such alleged imperialists as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.” The protectorate extended over Nicaragua, the military occupation of the Dominican Republic, the invasion and subjugation of Haiti (which cost the lives of some 2,000 Haitians) were landmarks of Wilson’s policy.[3] All was enveloped in the haze of his patented rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and the rights of small nations. The Pan-American Pact which Wilson proposed to our southern neighbors guaranteed the “territorial integrity and political independence” of all the signatories. Considering Wilson’s persistent interference in the affairs of Mexico and other Latin states, this was hypocrisy in the grand style.[4]

The most egregious example of Wilson’s bellicose interventionism before the European war was in Mexico. Here his attempt to manipulate the course of a civil war lead to the fiascoes of Tampico and Vera Cruz.

In April, 1914, a group of American sailors landed their ship in Tampico without permission of the authorities and were arrested. As soon as the Mexican commander heard of the incident, he had the Americans released and sent a personal apology. That would have been the end of the affair “had not the Washington administration been looking for an excuse to provoke a fight,” in order to benefit the side Wilson favored in the civil war. The American admiral in charge demanded from the Mexicans a 21-gun salute to the American flag; Washington backed him up, issuing an ultimatum insisting on the salute, on pain of dire consequences. Naval units were ordered to seize Vera Cruz. The Mexicans resisted, 126 Mexicans were killed, close to 200 wounded (according to the US figures), and, on the American side, 19 were killed and 71 wounded. In Washington, plans were being made for a full-scale war against Mexico, where in the meantime both sides in the civil war denounced Yanqui aggression. Finally, mediation was accepted; in the end, Wilson lost his bid to control Mexican politics.[5]

Two weeks before the assassination of the archduke, Wilson delivered an address on Flag Day. His remarks did not bode well for American abstention in the coming war. Asking what the flag would stand for in the future, Wilson replied: “for the just use of undisputed national power … for self-possession, for dignity, for the assertion of the right of one nation to serve the other nations of the world.” As president, he would “assert the rights of mankind wherever this flag is unfurled.”[6]

Wilson’s alter ego, a major figure in bringing the United States into the European War, was Edward Mandell House. House, who bore the honorific title of “Colonel,” was regarded as something of a “Man of Mystery” by his contemporaries. Never elected to public office, he nonetheless became the second most powerful man in the country in domestic and especially foreign affairs until virtually the end of Wilson’s administration. House began as a businessman in Texas, rose to leadership in the Democratic politics of that state, and then on the national stage. In 1911, he attached himself to Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and an aspiring candidate for president. The two became the closest of collaborators, Wilson going so far as to make the bizarre public statement that: “Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”[7]

Light is cast on the mentality of this “man of mystery” by a futuristic political novel House published in 1912, Philip Dru: Administrator. It is a work that contains odd anticipations of the role the Colonel would help Wilson play.[8] In this peculiar production, the title hero leads a crusade to overthrow the reactionary and oppressive money-power that rules the United States. Dru is a veritable messiah-figure: “He comes panoplied in justice and with the light of reason in his eyes. He comes as the advocate of equal opportunity and he comes with the power to enforce his will.” Assembling a great army, Dru confronts the massed forces of evil in a titanic battle (close to Buffalo, New York): “human liberty has never more surely hung upon the outcome of any conflict than it does upon this.” Naturally, Dru triumphs, and becomes “the Administrator of the Republic,” assuming “the powers of a dictator.” So unquestionably pure is his cause that any attempt to “foster” the reactionary policies of the previous government “would be considered seditious and would be punished by death.” Besides fashioning a new Constitution for the United States and creating a welfare state, Dru joins with leaders of the other great powers to remake the world order, bringing freedom, peace, and justice to all mankind.[9] A peculiar production, suggestive of a very peculiar man, the second most important man in the country.

Wilson utilized House as his personal confidant, advisor, and emissary, bypassing his own appointed and congressionally scrutinized officials. It was somewhat similar to the position that Harry Hopkins would fill for Franklin Roosevelt some 20 years later.

When the war broke out, Wilson implored his fellow citizens to remain neutral even in word and thought. This was somewhat disingenuous, considering that his whole administration, except for the poor baffled secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, was pro-Allied from the start. The president and most of his chief subordinates were dyed-in-the-wool Anglophiles. Love of England and all things English was an intrinsic part of their sense of identity. With England threatened, even the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, Edward D. White, voiced the impulse to leave for Canada to volunteer for the British armed forces. By September 1914, the British ambassador in Washington, Cecil Spring-Rice, was able to assure Edward Grey, that Wilson had an “understanding heart” for England’s problems and difficult position.[10]

This ingrained bias of the American political class and social elite was galvanized by British propaganda. On August 5, 1914, the Royal Navy cut the cables linking the United States and Germany. Now news for America had to be funneled through London, where the censors shaped and trimmed reports for the benefit of their government. Eventually, the British propaganda apparatus in the First World War became the greatest the world had seen to that time; later it was a model for the Nazi Propaganda Minster Josef Goebbels. Philip Knightley noted:

British efforts to bring the United States into the war on the Allied side penetrated every phase of American life…. It was one of the major propaganda efforts of history, and it was conducted so well and so secretly that little about it emerged until the eve of the Second World War, and the full story is yet to be told.

Already in the first weeks of the war, stories were spread of the ghastly “atrocities” the Germans were committing in Belgium.[11] But the Hun, in the view of American supporters of England’s cause, was to show his most hideous face at sea.

Notes

[1] Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 126, 128.

[2] Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973 [1885]), pp. 22–23. These statements date from 1900. Wilson also assailed the Constitutional system of checks and balances as interfering with effective government, pp. 186–87.

[3] Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), pp. 92–106.

[4] Even Link, Woodrow Wilson, p. 106, stated that Wilson and his colleagues were only paying “lip service” to the principle they put forward, and were not prepared to abide by it.

[5] Link, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 122–28; and Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman, The Course of Mexican History, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 531–34.

[6] The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), vol. 30, pp. 184–86. Wilson’s gift of self-deception was already evident. “I sometimes wonder why men even now take this flag and flaunt it. If I am respected, I do not have to demand respect,” he declared. Apparently the Tampico incident of two months earlier had vanished from his mind.

[7] Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 1, pp. 6, 114.

[8] Edward M. House, Philip Dru: Administrator. A Story of Tomorrow, 1920–1935 (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920 [1912]).

[9] Ibid., pp. 93, 130, 150, 152, and passim.

[10] Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes to War (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963 [1938]), pp. 26–28. Cf. the comment by Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 10: “The American aristocracy was distinctly Anglophile.”

[11] Philip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 82, 120–21; Peterson, Propaganda for War; John Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914–1919 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1941); and the classic by Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928). That unflagging apologist for global interventionism, Robert H. Ferrell, in American Diplomacy: A History, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 470–71, could find nothing to object to in the secret propaganda effort to embroil the United States in a world war. It was simply part of “the arts of peaceful persuasion,” of “Public Relations,” he claimed to believe, since “there is nothing wrong with one country representing its cause to another country.” One wonders what Ferrell would have said to a similar campaign by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

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And the War Came

Ralph Raico — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 05:00:00 +0000

The immediate origins of the 1914 war lie in the twisted politics of the Kingdom of Serbia.[1] In June, 1903, Serbian army officers murdered their king and queen in the palace and threw their bodies out a window, at the same time massacring various royal relations, cabinet ministers, and members of the palace guards. It was an act that horrified and disgusted many in the civilized world. The military clique replaced the pro-Austrian Obrenoviƒá dynasty with the anti-Austrian Karageorgevices. The new government pursued a pro-Russian, Pan-Slavist policy, and a network of secret societies sprang up, closely linked to the government, whose goal was the “liberation” of the Serb subjects of Austria (and Turkey), and perhaps the other South Slavs as well.

The man who became prime minister, Nicolas Pašiƒá, aimed at the creation of a Greater Serbia, necessarily at the expense of Austria-Hungary. The Austrians felt, correctly, that the cession of their Serb-inhabited lands, and maybe even the lands inhabited by the other South Slavs, would set off the unraveling of the great multinational Empire. For Austria-Hungary, Serbian designs posed a mortal danger.

The Russian ambassador Hartwig worked closely with Pašiƒá and cultivated connections with some of the secret societies. The upshot of the two Balkan Wars which he promoted was that Serbia more than doubled in size and threatened Austria-Hungary not only politically but militarily as well. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, wrote to Hartwig, “Serbia has only gone through the first stage of her historic road and for the attainment of her goal must still endure a terrible struggle in which her whole existence may be at stake.” Sazonov went on, as indicated above, to direct Serbian expansion to the lands of Austria-Hungary, for which Serbia would have to wage “the future inevitable struggle.”[2]

The nationalist societies stepped up their activities, not only within Serbia, but also in the Austrian provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina. The most radical of these groups was Union or Death, popularly known as the Black Hand. It was led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrieviƒá, called Apis, who also happened to be the head of Royal Serbian Military Intelligence. Apis was a veteran of the slaughter of his own king and queen in 1903, as well as of a number of other political murder plots. “He was quite possibly the foremost European expert in regicide of his time.”[3] One of his close contacts was Colonel Artamonov, the Russian military attaché in Belgrade.

The venerable emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, Franz Josef, who had come to the throne in 1848, clearly had not much longer to live. His nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, was profoundly concerned by the wrenching ethnic problems of the Empire and sought their solution in some great structural reform, either in the direction of federalism for the various national groups, or else “trialism,” the creation of a third, Slavic component of the Empire, alongside the Germans and the Magyars. Since such a concession would mean the ruin of any program for a Greater Serbia, Franz Ferdinand was a natural target for assassination by the Black Hand.[4]

In the spring of 1914, Serbian nationals who were agents of the Black Hand recruited a team of young Bosnian fanatics for the job. The youths were trained in Belgrade and provided with guns, bombs, guides (also Serbian nationals) to help them cross the border, and cyanide for after their mission was accomplished. Prime Minister Pašiƒá learned of the plot, informed his cabinet, and made ineffectual attempts to halt it, including conveying a veiled, virtually meaningless warning to an Austrian official in Vienna. (It is also likely that the Russian attaché Artamonov knew of the plot.[5]) No clear message of the sort that might have prevented the assassination was forwarded to the Austrians. On June 28, 1914, the plot proved a brilliant success, as 19 year old Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in the streets of Sarajevo.

In Serbia, Princip was instantly hailed as a hero, as he was also in post-World War I Yugoslavia, where the anniversary of the murders was celebrated as a national and religious holiday. A marble tablet was dedicated at the house in front of which the killings took place. It was inscribed: “On this historic spot, on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip proclaimed freedom.”[6] In his history of the First World War, Winston Churchill wrote of Princip that “he died in prison, and a monument erected in recent years by his fellow-countrymen records his infamy, and their own.”[7]

In Vienna, in that summer of 1914, the prevalent mood was much less Belgrade’s celebration of the deed than Churchill’s angry contempt. This atrocity was the sixth in less than four years and strong evidence of the worsening Serbian danger, leading the Austrians to conclude that the continued existence of an expansionist Serbia posed an unacceptable threat to the Habsburg monarchy. An ultimatum would be drawn up containing demands that Serbia would be compelled to reject, giving Austria an excuse to attack. In the end, Serbia would be destroyed, probably divided up among its neighbors (Austria, which did not care to have more disaffected South Slavs as subjects, would most likely abstain from the partition). Obviously, Russia might choose to intervene. However, this was a risk the Austrians were prepared to take, especially after they received a “blank check” from Kaiser Wilhelm to proceed with whatever measures they thought necessary. In the past, German support of Austria had forced the Russians to back down.

Scholars have now available to them the diary of Kurt Riezler, private secretary to the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. From this and other documents it becomes clear that Bethmann Hollweg’s position in the July crisis was a complex one. If Austria were to vanish as a power, Germany would be threatened by rampant Pan-Slavism supported by growing Russian power in the east and by French revanchism in the west. By prompting the Austrians to attack Serbia immediately, he hoped that the conflict would be localized and the Serbian menace nullified. The Chancellor, too, understood that the Central Powers were risking a continental war. But he believed that if Austria acted swiftly presenting Europe with “a rapid fait accompli,” the war could be confined to the Balkans, and “the intervention of third parties [avoided] as much as possible.” In this way, the German-Austrian alliance could emerge with a stunning political victory that might split the Entente and crack Germany’s “encirclement.”[8]

But the Austrians procrastinated, and the ultimatum was delivered to Serbia only on July 23. When Sazonov, in St. Petersburg, read it, he burst out: “C’est la guerre européenne!” – “It is the European war!” The Russians felt they could not leave Serbia once again in the lurch, after having failed to prevent the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina or to obtain a seaport for Serbia after the Second Balkan War. Sazonov told a cabinet meeting on July 24 that abandoning Serbia would mean betraying Russia’s “historic mission” as the protector of the South Slavs, and also reduce Russia to the rank of a second-rate power.[9]

On July 25, the Russian leaders decided to institute what was known in their plans as “The period preparatory to war,” the prelude to all-out mobilization. Directed against both of the Central Powers, this “set in train a whole succession of military measures along the Austrian and German frontiers.”[10] Back in the 1920s, Sidney Fay had already cited the testimony of a Serbian military officer, who, in traveling from Germany to Russia on July 28, found no military measures underway on the German side of the border, while in Russian Poland “mobilization steps [were] being taken on a grand scale.” “These secret ‘preparatory measures,’” commented Fay, “enabled Russia, when war came, to surprise the world by the rapidity with which she poured her troops into East Prussia and Galicia.”[11] In Paris, too, the military chiefs began taking preliminary steps to general mobilization as early as July 25.[12]

On July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia. The French ambassador in St. Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue, most likely with the support of Poincaré, urged the Russians on to intransigence and general mobilization. In any case, Poincaré had given the Russians their own “blank check” in 1912, when he assured them that “if Germany supported Austria [in the Balkans], France would march.”[13] Following the (rather ineffectual) Austrian bombardment of Belgrade, the Tsar was finally persuaded on July 30 to authorize general mobilization, to the delight of the Russian generals (the decree was momentarily reversed, but then confirmed, finally). Nicholas II had no doubt as to what that meant: “Think of what awful responsibility you are advising me to take! Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their deaths!”[14] In a very few years the Tsar himself, his family, and his servants would be shot to death by the Bolsheviks.

What had gone wrong? James Joll wrote, “The Austrians had believed that vigorous action against Serbia and a promise of German support would deter Russia; the Russians had believed that a show of strength against Austria would both check the Austrians and deter Germany. In both cases, the bluff had been called.”[15] Russia – and, through its support of Russia, France – as well as Austria and Germany, was quite willing to risk war in July, 1914.

As the conflict appeared more and more inevitable, in all the capitals the generals clamored for their contingency plans to be put into play. The best-known was the Schlieffen Plan, drawn up some years before, which governed German strategy in case of a two-front war. It called for concentrating forces against France for a quick victory in the west, and then transporting the bulk of the army to the eastern front via the excellent German railway system, to meet and vanquish the slow-moving (it was assumed) Russians. Faced with Russian mobilization and the evident intention of attacking Austria, the Germans activated the Schlieffen Plan. It was, as Sazonov had cried out, the European War.[16]

On July 31, the French cabinet, acceding to the demand of the head of the army, General Joffre, authorized general mobilization. The next day, the German ambassador to St. Petersburg, Portalès, called on the Russian Foreign Minister. After asking him four times whether Russia would cancel mobilization and receiving each time a negative reply, Portalès presented Sazonov with Germany’s declaration of war. The German ultimatum to France was a formality. On August 3, Germany declared war on France as well.[17]

The question of “war-guilt” has been endlessly agitated.[18] It can be stated with assurance that Fischer and his followers have in no way proven their case. That, for instance, Helmut Moltke, head of the German Army, like Conrad, his counterpart in Vienna, pressed for a preventive war has long been known. But both military chieftains were kept in check by their superiors. In any case, there is no evidence whatsoever that Germany in 1914 deliberately unleashed a European war which it had been preparing for years – no evidence in the diplomatic and internal political documents, in the military planning, in the activities of the intelligence agencies, or in the relations between the German and Austrian General Staffs.[19]

Karl Dietrich Erdmann, put the issue well:

Peace could have been preserved in 1914, had Berchtold, Sazonov, Bethmann-Hollweg, Poincaré, [British Foreign Secretary] Grey, or one of the governments concerned, so sincerely wanted it that they were willing to sacrifice certain political ideas, traditions, and conceptions, which were not their own personal ones, but those of their peoples and their times.[20]

This sober judgment throws light on the faulty assumptions of sympathizers with the Fischer approach. John W. Langdon, for instance, concedes that any Russian mobilization “would have required an escalatory response from Germany.” He adds, however, that to expect Russia not to mobilize “when faced with an apparent Austrian determination to undermine Serbian sovereignty and alter the Balkan power balance was to expect the impossible.” Thus, Langdon exculpates Russia because Austria “seemed bent on a course of action clearly opposed to Russian interests in eastern Europe.”[21] True enough – but Russia “seemed bent” on using Serbia to oppose Austrian interests (the Austrian interest in survival), and France “seemed bent” on giving full support to Russia, and so on. This is what historians meant when they spoke of shared responsibility for the onset of the First World War.

Britain still has to be accounted for. With the climax of the crisis, Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Secretary Edward Grey were in a quandary. While the Entente cordiale was not a formal alliance, secret military conversations between the general staffs of the two nations had created certain expectations and even definite obligations. Yet, aside from high military circles and, of course, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, no one in Britain was rabid for war. Luckily for the British leaders, the Germans came to their rescue. The success of the attack on France that was the linchpin of the Schlieffen Plan depended above all on speed. This could only be achieved, it was thought, by infringing the neutrality of Belgium. “The obligation to defend Belgian neutrality was incumbent on all the signatories to the 1839 treaty acting collectively, and this had been the view adopted by the [British] cabinet only a few days previously. But now Britain presented itself as Belgium’s sole guarantor” (emphasis added).[22] Ignoring (or perhaps ignorant of) the crucial precondition of collective action among the guarantors, and with the felicity of expression customary among German statesmen of his time, Bethmann Hollweg labeled the Belgian neutrality treaty “a scrap of paper.”[23] Grey, addressing the House of Commons, referred to the invasion of Belgium as “the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history.”[24]

The violation of non-belligerent Belgium’s territory, though deplorable, was scarcely unprecedented in the annals of great powers. In 1807, units of the British navy entered Copenhagen harbor, bombarded the city, and seized the Danish fleet. At the time, Britain was at peace with Denmark, which was a neutral in the Napoleonic wars. The British claimed that Napoleon was about to invade Denmark and seize the fleet himself. As they explained in a manifesto to the people of Copenhagen, Britain was acting not only for its own survival but for the freedom of all peoples.

As the German navy grew in strength, calls were heard in Britain “to Copenhagen” the German fleet, from Sir John Fischer, First Sea Lord, and even from Arthur Lee, First Lord of the Admiralty. They were rejected, and England took the path of outbuilding the Germans in the naval arms race. But the willingness of high British authorities to act without scruple on behalf of perceived vital national interests did not go unnoticed in Germany.[25] When the time came, the Germans acted harshly towards neutral Belgium, though sparing the Belgians lectures on the freedom of mankind. Ironically, by 1916, the king of Greece was protesting the seizure of Greek territories by the Allies; like Belgium, the neutrality of Corfu had been guaranteed by the powers. His protests went unheeded.[26]

The invasion of Belgium was merely a pretext for London.[27] This was clear to John Morley, as he witnessed the machinations of Grey and the war party in the cabinet. In the last act of authentic English liberalism, Lord Morley, biographer of Cobden and Gladstone and author of the tract, On Compromise, upholding moral principles in politics, handed in his resignation.[28]

Britain’s entry into the war was crucial. In more ways than one, it sealed the fate of the Central Powers. Without Britain in the war, the United States would never have gone in.

Notes

[1] For this discussion, see especially Albertini, Origins, vol. 2, pp. 1–119 and Joachim Remak, Sarajevo: The Story of a Political Murder (New York: Criterion, 1959), pp. 43–78 and passim.

[2] Albertini, Origins, vol. 1, p. 486.

[3] Remak, Sarajevo, p. 50.

[4] Albertini, Origins, vol. 2, p. 17: “among Serb nationalists and the Southern Slavs who drew their inspiration from Belgrade he was regarded as their worst enemy.”

[5] Ibid., vol. 2, p. 86.

[6] Ibid., vol. 2, p. 47 n. 2. A Yugoslav historian of the crime, Vladimir Dedijer, strongly sympathized with the assassins, who in his view committed an act of “tyrannicide,” “for the common good, on the basis of the teachings of natural law.” See his The Road to Sarajevo (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 446.

[7] Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 6 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), p. 54.

[8] Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s Calculated Risk, July 1914,” Central European History, vol. 2, no. 1 (March 1969), pp. 60–61; Turner, Origins, p. 98; also Lafore, The Long Fuse, p. 217: “it was hoped and expected that no general European complications would follow, but if they did, Germany was prepared to face them.”

[9] Remak, Origins, p. 135.

[10] L. C. F. Turner, “The Russian Mobilization in 1914,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1968), pp. 75–76.

[11] Fay, Origins, vol. 2, p. 321 n. 98.

[12] Turner, “Russian Mobilization,” p. 82. By 1914 the French general staff had grown optimistic sbout the outcome of a war with Germany. With the French army strengthened and Russian support guaranteed, in French military circles, as in German, “there was a sense that if war was to come to Europe, better now … than later.” Strachan, The First World War. To Arms, p. 93.

[13] Albertini, Origins, vol. 2, pp. 587–89, vol. 3, pp. 80–85; Turner, Origins, p. 41.

[14] Turner, “Russian Mobilization,” pp. 85–86, Turner described this as “perhaps the most important decision taken in the history of Imperial Russia.”

[15] Joll, Origins, p. 23, also pp. 125–26.

[16] L. C. F. Turner, “The Significance of the Schlieffen Plan,” in Paul M. Kennedy, ed., The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), pp. 199–221.

[17] S. L. A. Marshall, World War I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), pp. 39–42

[18] See Remak, Origins, pp. 132–41 for a fairly persuasive allocation of “national responsibility.”

[19] Egmont Zechlin, “July 1914: Reply to a Polemic,” pp. 371–85. Geiss, for instance, in German Foreign Policy, pp. 142–45, wildly misinterpreted the meaning of the German “war council” of December 8, 1912, when he painted it as the initiation of the “plan” that was finally realized with Germany’s “unleashing” of war in 1914. See Erwin Hölzle, Die Entmachtung Europas: Das Experiment des Friedens vor und im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1975), pp. 178–83; also Koch, “Introduction,” pp. 12–13; and Turner, Origins, p. 49. See also the important article by Ulrich Trumpener, “War Premeditated? German Intelligence Operations in July 1914,” Central European History, vol. 9, no. 1 (March 1976), pp. 58–85. Among Trumpener’s findings are that there is no evidence of “any significant changes in the sleepy routine” of the German General Staff even after the German “blank check” to Austria, and that the actions of the German military chiefs until the last week of July suggest that, though war with Russia was considered a possibility, it was regarded as “not really all that likely” (Moltke, as well as the head of military intelligence, did not return to Berlin from their vacations until July 25).

[20] Karl Dietrich Erdmann, “War Guilt 1914 Reconsidered,” p. 369.

[21] Langdon, July 1914, p. 181, emphasis in original.

[22] Strachan, The First World War. To Arms, p. 97.

[23] What Bethmann Hollweg actually told the British ambassador was somewhat less shocking: “Can this neutrality which we violate only out of necessity, fighting for our very existence … really provide the reason for a world war? Compared to the disaster of such a holocaust does not the significance of this neutrality dwindle into a scrap of paper?” Jarausch, “The Illusion of Limited War,” p. 71.

[24] Marshall, World War I, p. 52.

[25] Jonathan Steinberg, “The Copenhagen Complex,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 1, no. 3 (July 1966), pp. 23–46.

[26] H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign Against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939), pp. 45–46.

[27] Joll, Origins, p. 115, attributed Grey’s lying to the public and to Parliament to the British democratic system, which “forces ministers to be devious and disingenuous.” Joll added that more recent examples were Franklin Roosevelt in 1939–41 and Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War. A democratic leader “who is himself convinced that circumstances demand entry into a war, often has to conceal what he is doing from those who have elected him.”

[28] John Morley, Memorandum on Resignation (New York: Macmillan, 1928). In the discussions before the fateful decision was taken, Lord Morley challenged the cabinet: “Have you ever thought what will happen if Russia wins?” Tsarist Russia “will emerge pre-eminent in Europe.” Lloyd George admitted that he had never thought of that.

The Best of Ralph Raico

Prelude to World War I

Ralph Raico — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 05:00:00 +0000

This article is excerpted from chapter 1 of Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010). This chapter is a much expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories (2001).

With the World War mankind got into a crisis with which nothing that happened before in history can be compared…. In the world crisis whose beginning we are experiencing, all peoples of the world are involved…. War has become more fearful because it is waged with all the means of the highly developed technique that the free economy has created…. Never was the individual more tyrannized than since the outbreak of the World War and especially of the world revolution. One cannot escape the police and administrative technique of the present day.

Ludwig von Mises (1919)[1]

The First World War is the turning point of the 20th century. Had the war not occurred, the Prussian Hohenzollerns would most probably have remained heads of Germany, with their panoply of subordinate kings and nobility in charge of the lesser German states. Whatever gains Hitler might have scored in the Reichstag elections, could he have erected his totalitarian, exterminationist dictatorship in the midst of this powerful aristocratic superstructure? Highly unlikely. In Russia, Lenin’s few thousand Communist revolutionaries confronted the immense Imperial Russian Army, the largest in the world. For Lenin to have any chance to succeed, that great army had first to be pulverized, which is what the Germans did. So, a 20th century without the Great War might well have meant a century without Nazis or Communists. Imagine that. It was also a turning point in the history of our American nation, which under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson developed into something radically different from what it had been before. Thus, the importance of the origins of that war, its course, and its aftermath.

Introduction

In 1919, when the carnage at the fronts was at long last over, the victors gathered in Paris to concoct a series of peace treaties. Eventually, these were duly signed by the representatives of four of the five vanquished nations, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria (the final settlement with Turkey came in 1923), each at one of the palaces in the vicinity. The signing of the most important one, the treaty with Germany, took place at the great Palace of Versailles. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles reads:

The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.[2]

It was unprecedented in the history of peace negotiations that those who lost a war should have to admit their guilt for starting it. The fact that the “war-guilt clause” implied German liability for unstated but huge reparations added fuel to the controversy over who was to blame for the outbreak of the war. This immediately became, and has remained, one of the most disputed questions in all of historical writing. When the Bolsheviks seized power, they gleefully opened the Tsarist archives, publishing documents that included some of the secret treaties of the Entente powers to divide up the spoils after the war was over. Their purpose was to embarrass the sanctimonious “capitalist” governments, which had insisted on the virgin purity of their cause. This move contributed to other nations making public many of their own documents at an earlier point than might have been expected.

In the interwar period, a consensus developed among scholars that the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty was historically worthless. Probably the most respected interpretation was that of Sidney Fay, who apportioned major responsibility among Austria, Russia, Serbia, and Germany.[3] In 1952, a committee of prominent French and German historians concluded:

The documents do not permit any attributing, to any government or nation, a premeditated desire for European war in 1914. Distrust was at its highest, and leading groups were dominated by the thought that war was inevitable; everyone thought that the other side was contemplating aggression….[4]

This consensus was shaken in 1961 with the publication of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (“Grab for World Power”). In the final formulation of this interpretation, Fischer and the scholars who followed him maintained that in 1914 the German government deliberately ignited a European war in order to impose its hegemony over Europe.[5] (Would that all historians were as cynical regarding the motives of their own states.) The researches of the Fischer school forced certain minor revisions in the earlier generally accepted view.

But the historiographical pendulum has now swung much too far in the Fischer direction. Foreign historians have tended to accept his analysis wholesale, perhaps because it fit their “image of German history, determined largely by the experience of Hitler’s Germany and the Second World War.”[6] The editors of an American reference work on World War I, for example, state outright that “Kaiser and [the German] Foreign Office … along with the General Staff … purposely used the crisis [caused by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand] to bring about a general European war. Truth is simple, refreshingly simple.”[7]

Well, maybe not so simple. Fritz Stern warned that while the legend propagated in the interwar period by some nationalistic German historians of their government’s total innocence “has been effectively exploded, in some quarters there is a tendency to create a legend in reverse by suggesting Germany’s sole guilt, and thus to perpetuate the legend in a different form.”[8]

Prelude to War

The roots of the First World War reach back to the last decades of the 19th century.[9] After France’s defeat by Prussia, the emergence in 1871 of a great German Empire dramatically altered the balance of forces in Europe. For centuries the German lands had served as a battlefield for the European powers, who exploited the disunity of the territory for their own aggrandizement. Now the political skills of the Prussian minister Otto von Bismarck and the might of the Prussian army had created what was clearly the leading continental power, extending from the French to the Russian borders and from the Baltic to the Alps.

One of the main concerns of Bismarck, who served as Prussian minister and German Chancellor for another two decades, was to preserve the newfound unity of the this, the Second Reich. Above all, war had to be avoided. The Treaty of Frankfurt ending the Franco-Prussian War compelled France to cede Alsace and half of Lorraine, a loss the French would not permanently resign themselves to. In order to isolate France, Bismarck contrived a system of defensive treaties with Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, insuring that France could find no partner for an attack on Germany.

In 1890, the old Chancellor was dismissed by the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II. In the same year, Russia was suddenly freed of the connection with Germany by the expiration and non-renewal of the “Reinsurance Treaty.” Diplomatic moves began in Paris to win over Russia to an alliance which could be used to further French purposes, defensive and possibly offensive as well.[10] Negotiations between the civilian and military leaders of the two countries produced, in 1894, a Franco-Russian military treaty, which remained in effect through the onset of the First World War. At this time it was understood, as General Boisdeffre told Tsar Alexander III, that “mobilization means war.” Even a partial mobilization by Germany, Austria-Hungary, or Italy was to be answered by a total mobilization of France and Russia and the inauguration of hostilities against all three members of the Triple Alliance.[11]

In the years that followed, French diplomacy continued to be, as Laurence Lafore put it, “dazzlingly brilliant.”[12] The Germans, in contrast, stumbled from one blunder to another; the worst of these was the initiation of a naval arms race with Britain. When the latter finally decided to abandon its traditional aversion to peacetime entanglements with other powers, the French devised an Entente cordiale, or “cordial understanding,” between the two nations. In 1907, with France’s friendly encouragement, England and Russia resolved various points of contention, and a Triple Entente came into existence, confronting the Triple Alliance.

The two combinations differed greatly in strength and cohesion, however. Britain, France, and Russia were world powers. But Austria and Italy were the weakest of the European powers; moreover, Italy’s unreliability as an ally was notorious, while Austria-Hungary, composed of numerous feuding nationalities, was held together only by allegiance to the ancient Habsburg dynasty. In an age of rampant nationalism, this allegiance was wearing thin in places, especially among Austria’s Serb subjects. Many of these felt a greater attachment to the Kingdom of Serbia, where, in turn, fervent nationalists looked forward to the creation of a Greater Serbia, or perhaps even a kingdom of all the South Slavs – a “Yugoslavia.”

A series of crises in the years leading up to 1914 solidified the Triple Entente to the point where the Germans felt they faced “encirclement” by superior forces. In 1911, when France moved to complete its subjugation of Morocco, Germany forcefully objected. The ensuing crisis revealed how close together Britain and France had come, as their military chiefs discussed sending a British expeditionary force across the Channel in case of war.[13] In 1913, a secret naval agreement provided that, in the event of hostilities, the Royal Navy would assume responsibility for protecting the French Channel coast while the French stood guard in the Mediterranean. “The Anglo-French entente was now virtually a military alliance.”[14] In democratic Britain, all of this took place without the knowledge of the people, Parliament, or even most of the Cabinet.

The dispute over Morocco was settled by a transfer of African territory to Germany, demonstrating that colonial rivalries, though they produced tensions, were not central enough to lead to war among the powers. But the French move into Morocco set into motion a series of events that brought on war in the Balkans, and then the Great War. According to a previous agreement, if France took over Morocco, Italy had the right to occupy what is today Libya, at the time a possession of the Ottoman Turks. Italy declared war on Turkey, and the Italian victory roused the appetite of the small Balkan states for what remained of Turkey’s European holdings.

Russia, especially after being thwarted in the Far East by Japan in the war of 1904–5, had great ambitions in the Balkans. Nicholas Hartwig, Russia’s highly influential ambassador to Serbia, was an extreme Pan-Slavist, that is, an adherent of the movement to unite the Slavic peoples under Russian leadership. Hartwig orchestrated the formation of the Balkan League, and, in 1912, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece declared war on Turkey. When Bulgaria claimed the lion’s share of the spoils, its erstwhile allies, joined by Romania and Turkey itself, fell upon Bulgaria the next year, in the Second Balkan War.

These wars caused great anxiety in Europe, particularly in Austria, which feared the enlargement of Serbia backed by Russia. In Vienna, the head of the army, Conrad, pushed for a preventive war, but was overruled by the old Emperor, Franz Josef. Serbia emerged from the Balkan conflicts not only with a greatly expanded territory, but also animated by a vaulting nationalism, which Russia was happy to egg on. Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister wrote to Hartwig: “Serbia’s promised land lies in the territory of present-day Hungary,” and instructed him to help prepare the Serbians for “the future inevitable struggle.”[15] By the spring of 1914, the Russians were arranging for another Balkan League, under Russian direction. They received the strong support of France, whose new President, Raymond Poincaré, born in Lorraine, was himself an aggressive nationalist. It was estimated that the new league, headed by Serbia, might provide as many as a million men on Austria’s southern flank, wrecking the military plans of the Central Powers.[16]

Russia’s military buildup was commensurate with its ambitions. Norman Stone has written, of Russia on the eve of the Great War:

The army contained 114½ infantry divisions to Germany’s 96, and contained 6,720 mobile guns to the Germans’ 6,004. Strategic railway-building was such that by 1917 Russia would be able to send nearly a hundred divisions for war with the Central Powers within eighteen days of mobilization – only three days behind Germany in overall readiness. Similarly, Russia became, once more, an important naval power … by 1913–14 she was spending £24,000,000 to the Germans’ £23,000,000.[17]

And this is not even to count France.

The Russian program underway called for even more imposing forces by 1917, when they might well be needed: “Plans were going ahead for seizure by naval coup of Constantinople and the Straits, and a naval convention with Great Britain allowed for co-operation in the Baltic against Germany.”[18]

Russia regarded Germany as an inevitable enemy, because Germany would never consent to Russian seizure of the Straits or to the Russian-led creation of a Balkans front whose object was the demise of Austria-Hungary. The Habsburg monarchy was Germany’s last dependable ally, and its disintegration into a collection of small, mostly Slavic states would open up Germany’s southern front to attack. Germany would be placed in a militarily impossible situation, at the mercy of its continental foes. Austria-Hungary had to be preserved at all costs.

Things had come to such a pass that Colonel Edward House, Woodrow Wilson’s confidant, traveling in Europe to gather information for the President, reported in May, 1914:

The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad…. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies. Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria.[19]

Notes

[1] Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time, Leland B. Yeager, trans. (New York: New York University Press, 1983), pp. 215–16.

[2] Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris, 1919 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 87. The Allied Covering Letter of June 16, 1919 filled in the indictment, accusing Germany of having deliberately unleashed the Great War in order to subjugate Europe, “the greatest crime” ever committed by a supposedly civilized nation. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, “War Guilt 1914 Reconsidered: A Balance of New Research,” in H. W. Koch, ed., The Origins of the First World War: Great Power Rivalries and German War Aims, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 342.

[3] Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War, 2 vols. (New York: Free Press, 1966 [1928]).

[4] Joachim Remak, The Origins of World War I, 1871–1914, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt, Brace, 1995), p. 131.

[5] See Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967 [1961]); idem, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975 [1969]), Marian Jackson, trans.; Imanuel Geiss, July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War, Selected Documents (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1967 [1963–64]); and idem, German Foreign Policy, 1871–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). The work by John W. Langdon, July 1914: The Long Debate, 1918–1990 (New York: Berg, 1991) is a useful historiographical survey, from a Fischerite viewpoint.

[6] H. W. Koch, “Introduction,” in idem, Origins, p. 11.

[7] Holger H. Herwig and Neil M. Heyman, eds., Biographical Dictionary of World War I (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 10.

[8] Fritz Stern, “Bethmann Hollweg and the War: The Limits of Responsibility,” in Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern, eds., The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 254. Cf. H. W. Koch, “Introduction,” p. 9: Fischer “ignores the fundamental readiness of the other European Powers to go to war, but also their excessive war aims which made any form of negotiated peace impossible. What is missing is the comparative yardstick and method.” Also Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1971), p. 22: “Fischer’s treatment is very narrowly on the German side of things, and a wider survey indicates clearly that the Germans were by no means the only people who were prepared to risk a war and who had expansionist programs in their minds.”

[9] The following discussion draws on Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, Isabella M. Massey, trans. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1980 [1952]), 3 vols.; L. C. F. Turner, Origins of the First World War (New York: Norton, 1970); James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed. (Longman: London, 1992); Remak, Origins; and Lafore, The Long Fuse, among other works.

[10] George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 30.

[11] Ibid., pp. 247–52.

[12] Lafore, The Long Fuse, p. 134.

[13] In February, 1912, the chief of the French Army, Joffre, stated: “All the arrangements for the English landing are made, down to the smallest detail so that the English Army can take part in the first big battle.” Turner, Origins, pp. 30–31.

[14] Ibid., p. 25.

[15] Albertini, Origins, vol. 1, p. 486.

[16] Egmont Zechlin, “July 1914: Reply to a Polemic,” in Koch, Origins, p. 372.

[17] Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. 1, To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 30, 63: “In the summer [of 1913] the French government intervened in Russian negotiations on the French stock market for a loan to finance railway construction. The French objective was to bring pressure to bear on the speed of Russian mobilization, so as to coordinate mutually supporting attacks on Germany from east and west….” “By 1914, French loans had enabled the construction of strategic railways so that Russian mobilization could be accelerated and the first troops be into battle within fifteen days.”

[18] Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), p. 18.

[19] Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), vol. 1, p. 249.

The Best of Ralph Raico

The Long War for Liberty

Ralph Raico — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 05:00:00 +0000

Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School. Foreword by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Preface by David Gordon. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012.

Ralph Raico has played a central role in the resurgence of the Austrian School of thought in the last forty years. First and foremost a historian, Professor Raico is an intellectual of enormous flexibility, typically ranging in his writings from history to philosophy to economics to politics, intermingling the standard “disciplines” of our day. Raico studied with Ludwig von Mises in the formative stages of his intellectual development. As Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School demonstrates, he has himself become one of the pillars of the modern Austrian School.

Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School is a collection of nine essays. Each explores, in its own way, the contours of liberalism in the older sense, the ways in which “liberals” departed from the tradition of liberty after the mid-nineteenth century, and the role of the Austrian School in salvaging and expanding classical liberalism. In Raico’s primary field of history alone, he has written on a range of topics that is hard to fathom in this age of positivist specialization. Consider just a few of his topics: American militarism, liberal and Marxist theory, twentieth-century economic history, the specific development of the Austrian School, German political and economic thought, and the anti-market culture of modern intellectuals. The list could go on. In an academic and intellectual world of compartmentalized “specialties,” Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School tells us something vital about the potentialities of the Austrian School approach.

Yet for all its variety, this book turns out to be much more than the sum of its parts. Each of these essays is a significant contribution to Austrian School history in and of itself to be sure. But taken together, the essays give us a brilliant analysis of the long war which the intellectual champions of liberty have been fighting since the emergence of modern Europe and the United States in the eighteenth century.

It has been a wearying struggle, as Raico demonstrates strikingly. Whether facing the old privileged conservative order, the newborn technocratic bureaucracies, the “proletarian” shamans, or the growing state in its changing forms, Raico shows that all the heroes of libertarian thought — from Jefferson to Constant to Bastiat to Richter etc. – have encountered tremendous opposition from interests whose main concern was to plunder the producers of wealth.

Speaking to this point, one of the most wide-ranging and ground-breaking essays is Raico’s outstanding study, “The Conflict of the Classes: Liberal vs. Marxist Theories.” In it, he combines his linguistic and intellectual breadth with a keen sense of theoretical distinctions to trace “class theory” from Marx back to its originators, the French liberals of the early nineteenth century: de Stutt de Tracy, Charles Comte, and especially J. B. Say. Raico shows that the imprecise formulations of Marx concerning “class” were balanced, shakily, on the much more robust theory of class which Say and de Stutt de Tracy had already worked out by 1817. For these early liberals (the “Industrialists” and others), the “class conflict” was represented by a dichotomy which pitted producers of wealth on the one hand against those attempting to plunder the wealth from producers on the other. Hence, as Raico shows, the language of “plunder” used by Frederic Bastiat was rooted in the ideas produced by French liberalism over thirty years before Bastiat’s time. This insight, by the way, was predicated on the reality that the “exploiters” were at times aristocrats and princes who plundered the wealth by laborers and merchants, at times bureaucrats who promoted the interests of the growing state in various functional and practical ways, at times “champions” of the working class who proposed new ways of collecting wealth from individuals in order to redistribute it. Marx’s version of “class conflict,” as Raico demonstrates, was clearly derived from the liberal theory, though the result was a distortion of the original ideas.

This volume of essays is very much related to Raico’s outstanding historical monograph, The Party of Freedom — Studies in the History of German Liberalism (Die Partei der Freiheit — Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus. [Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart 1999]), still, unfortunately, available only in German. Where the earlier work is a detailed scholarly study of German liberalism, the book of essays before us is a study of much greater scope. Still, in the current volume, Raico does make available to those who don’t read German at least some of his encyclopedic knowledge of German liberalism, as in his essay on German liberal Eugen Richter. We see in Richter — a continuing interest of the author’s over the last decades — an important German classical liberal politician of the late nineteenth century German politics. On the subject of German politics before World War I, many Austrian School scholars have ignored the remnant of classical liberals who remained principled after the 1860s. The resulting picture is colored only in the colors of conservatism, ultra-nationalism, or socialism. Resurrecting the career of this hard-fighting liberal figure, Raico has rephrased the potential dialogue on German politics under the Kaisers. Raico points out that one recent German historian has called Richter “the eternal nay-sayer” (p. 305). In Raico’s view, this sobriquet constitutes a compliment. And as more than one Austrian scholar has pointed out since this essay appeared several years ago, this unintentional compliment puts Richter in an category with another liberty-driven nay-sayer, born just a century later (Daniel J. Sanchez, “The Ron Paul of the Second Reich,” http://bastiat.mises.org/2012/03/the-ron-paul-of-the-second-reich/). One might add Richard Cobden and Jacques Turgot, along with Ron Paul and a few others, to the list of brilliant champions of liberty who worked through their political systems to expand and exercise the message of liberty.

It is probably misleading to single out one or two of these essays for comment, since they are all significant contributions. But the temptation is too strong to resist. Raico’s essay “The Centrality of French Liberalism” lays out an important intellectual position in current discussions among Austrian School scholars as well as an important piece of the history of classical liberalism. In “Intellectuals and the Marketplace,” Raico develops an extended historical explanation for the anti-market bias of mainstream intellectuals, in the process updating and extending information and ideas from Hayek’s classic 1954 collection of essays by outstanding liberty-oriented scholars, Capitalism and the Historians. In my opinion, the 1954 collection must henceforth be read alongside Raico’s essay. But rather than naming the virtues of each essay, I should simply say: get the book and read it.

For those who are relatively new to the Austrian School, Raico’s Austrian methodology will be of particular interest. As perhaps the outstanding disciplinary historian in the recent Austrian School, Raico employs standard historiographical method and practice, but his treatment is also informed by the tools of Austrian School methodology as a whole: “radical” (i.e., “going to the roots”) a priori logic, the primacy of human liberty, the rejection of “invasion,” the importance of individual preference, and the like. The book represents a superb example of this Austrian approach. In dealing with ideas, Raico’s real protagonist is liberty — not Mises, not Bastiat, not Richter. For example, in his study of Mises’s book Liberalism, Raico is not trying to protect Mises from criticism (as, for example, in the almost religious mode of Marxists discussing Marx). Indeed, Raico analyzes a series of critiques of Mises thoughtfully and in great detail. More generally, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School integrates the great insights from Rothbard, Hoppe, and other great Austrian School intellectuals of the last thirty years with his own profound understanding of the intellectual history of the modern world to produce an Austrian classic. This book provides at once a framework for understanding the modern Austrian School, a brilliant study of modern intellectual history, and a kind of model for the whole Austrian approach.

One important recommendation: Don’t skip the footnotes! Many publishers today pressure authors to allow the evidentiary citations to be banished to the end of the book, often necessitating some complicated process by which the reader is obliged to mark two or three different spots in the book in order to keep track of the sources. At the same time, many modern editors try to streamline and sterilize the footnote citations, killing off the elegant old “content footnote,” which has largely disappeared in modern books — and totally disappeared in many social science disciplinary writings. In the case before us, the publisher and the author have collaborated to put the footnotes at the bottom of the page, where they belong in a historical work. And Raico, in the classic fashion of the great historians, has filled his notes not only with citations of sources, but also subtle hints and asides about how one might approach the sources, quick references to mini-debates with both living and past writers, added details that enrich the text, and more. The footnotes are a treasure trove. Reading them is both an education and a pleasure.

In sum, the outstanding historical essays collected in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School take on a richness and synergy that is truly remarkable. Ralph Raico’s book on the Austrian School and classical liberalism fits in comfortably among the most important and most advanced works of scholarship of the modern resurgence of the Austrian School. It is a model of the historian’s craft, and it is an instant classic in the great literature of the Austrian School.

Hunt Tooley (send him mail) is Professor of History at Austin College, and the author of numerous books, articles and essays on modern history.

Who Foments War?

Ralph Raico — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 05:00:00 +0000

The task of history, according to historian Ralph Raico, is essentially one of revisionism and especially the undermining of excuses for war. It therefore comes as no surprise that Raico masterfully punctures the inflated reputations of Wilson, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Soviet leadership in his recent book, Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal.

You will probably never see Ralph Raico, professor emeritus of history at Buffalo State College, holding forth on the History Channel surrounded by wide-eyed naïfs eager to improve their mastery of American Establishment gospel. His new book, Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010) shows why. Yet Raico has a well-earned reputation as a classical-liberal historian who has made important contributions to the history of German liberalism, translated Ludwig von Mises’s Liberalism, broadened our knowledge of liberal class-conflict theory, and accomplished much more. There is more to a historian’s achievement than superficial public acclaim.

In a typical Raico essay, the reader finds solid research, detailed knowledge of relevant sources, deft deployment of quotations, and careful interpretation, complemented by wit, devastating understatement, and an occasional outburst that might seem intemperate had he not just written several pages that render the point both inevitable and obvious. The materials in his new book have been published previously, but the first three chapters have been greatly expanded to good effect. Because they amount to 60 percent of the book, I deal mainly with them in this review. Each of these three chapters provides an excellent overview of the main issues of the period under consideration as well as a good introduction to essential historical sources.

Wars, Wars, and Rumors of Wars

With superb moral clarity, Raico states in his introduction that the task of history is essentially one of “revisionism” and especially the undermining of “excuses for war” (p. vii). He notes the declension of Europe’s nineteenth-century liberal parties into “machines for the exploitation of society by the now victorious predatory middle classes” (p. ix, a point also made in the foreword by Robert Higgs). From then to now, it has fallen to consistent and critical liberals such as Richard Cobden, John Bright, William Graham Sumner, Gustave de Molinari, Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, and others to expose the motives of apparently “liberal” wars.

The First European Suicide Attempt, 1914–1918

Raico’s first chapter, “World War I: The Turning Point,” sees the war of 1914–18 as the Great Disaster that set the tone and course of the dreadful twentieth century. Given the mass slaughter, ideological extremism, and sheer state building that accompanied the war, this characterization is no exaggeration. Raico is of course concerned to sketch the war’s impact on American politics and life – none of it good. Here his mastery of the relevant literature and his immunity to encrusted wartime myths, old and new alike, serve us well.

Raico does not shortchange the reader on essential background: the emerging alliance system that pitted Allied Powers against Central Powers, Serbian ambitions, Balkan Wars, Pan-Slavism, and the dangers of mobilization. Neither does he overlook the commitments made to France (and therefore to Russia) by a minority of the British cabinet – a secret (and undemocratic) undertaking that plays hell with the fashionable “democratic peace” theory (p. 6).

Once the European war began in August 1914, the outwardly “neutral” United States found its shipping at the mercy of the warring powers. (Americans had been here before, a century earlier.) Raico spares no details, especially regarding the international law of the case. Britain undertook a hunger blockade (pp. 44–45) to starve the Germans. (Chapter 9, “Starving a People into Submission,” pursues this topic further.) Certain consequences followed, chief among them being German resort to submarine warfare. The U.S. ruling elite could never manage to connect these two things (p. 28, citing Edwin M. Borchard and William P. Lage). They knew much and understood little.

Worse luck for the Americans, between 1914 and 1917 the United States had two war parties and no peace party (p. 27), a condition that by now seems entirely normal. Northeastern Anglophile intellectuals, clergymen, politicians, and big business took England’s side from the start and saw their chief problem as maneuvering the rest of the country into war on the Allied side. Raico accordingly makes acid comments on the US ambassador to Britain, Walter Hines Page, who practically served as a member of the British cabinet, and more particularly on Robert Lansing, William Jennings Bryan’s successor as US secretary of state (Bryan had taken the administration’s “peace” rhetoric entirely too seriously). Raico highlights passages in Lansing’s War Memoirs (1935) that admit that all of his diplomatic notes complaining about British naval practices were meaningless charades that “ensured the continuance of the controversy and left the questions unsettled, which was necessary in order to leave this country free to act and even act illegally when it entered the war” (qtd. on p. 30).

Raico draws the rather straightforward conclusion that such postwar revelations “[explain] the passion of the anti-war movement before the Second World War much better than the imaginary ‘Nazi sympathies’ or ‘anti-Semitism’ nowadays invoked by ignorant interventionist writers” (p. 30 n.).

Villains abound in this chapter, but the Villain in Chief is surely Thomas Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1913 to 1921 – and rightly so, as Raico soon demonstrates. Despite his constant Jeffersonian rhetoric (in which he was even less sincere than Jefferson), Professor Wilson was an ambitious Hamiltonian state builder, “fascinated by the power of the Presidency and how it could be augmented by meddling in foreign affairs and dominating overseas territories” (p. 18). As for Wilson’s “idealism,” Raico concludes that it masked a well-developed need for power.

Read the rest of the article

American Militarism

Ralph Raico — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 05:00:00 +0000

The Best of Ralph Raico

Eugen Richter and the End of German Liberalism

Ralph Raico — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:00:00 +0000

The Best of Ralph Raico

The First Fascist US President

Ralph Raico — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 05:00:00 +0000

The Best of Ralph Raico

The Birth of the American Empire

Ralph Raico — Wed, 25 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

The Best of Ralph Raico

America’s Will To Kill

Ralph Raico — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 05:00:00 +0000

The purpose of Washington’s admonition against entanglements with foreign powers was to minimize the chance of war. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, expressed this understanding when he wrote:

Of all enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

History taught that republics that engaged in frequent wars eventually lost their character as free states. Hence, war was to be undertaken only in defense of our nation against attack. The system of government that the founders were bequeathing to us – with its division of powers, checks and balances, and power concentrated in the states rather than the federal government – depended on peace as the normal condition of our society.

This was the position not only of Washington and Madison but of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the other men who presided over the birth of the United States. For over a century, it was adhered to and elaborated by our leading statesmen. It could be called neutrality, or nonintervention, or America first, or, as its modern enemies dubbed it, isolationism. The great revisionist historian Charles A. Beard called it Continental Americanism. This is how Beard defined it in A Foreign Policy for America, published in 1940:

[It is] a concentration of interest on the continental domain and on building here a civilization in many respects peculiar to American life and the potentials of the American heritage. In concrete terms, the words mean non-intervention in the controversies and wars of Europe and Asia and resistance to the intrusion of European or Asiatic powers, systems, and imperial ambitions into the western hemisphere [as threatening to our security].

An important implication of this principle was that, while we honored the struggle for freedom of other peoples, we would not become a knight-errant, spreading our ideals throughout the world by force of arms. John Quincy Adams, secretary of state to James Monroe and later himself president of the United States, declared in 1821,

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America’s heart, her benedictions, and her prayers. But she does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

John Quincy Adams was the real architect of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. In order to assure our security, we advised European powers to refrain from interfering in the Western Hemisphere. In return, however, we promised not to interfere in the affairs of Europe. The implied contract was broken and the Monroe Doctrine annulled in the early 20th century by Theodore Roosevelt and, above all, Woodrow Wilson.

This noninterventionist America, devoted to solving its own problems and developing its own civilization, became the wonder of the world. The eyes and hopes of freedom-loving peoples were turned to the Great Republic of the West.

But sometimes the leaders of peoples fighting for their independence misunderstood the American point of view. This was the case with the Hungarians, who had fought a losing battle against the Habsburg monarchy and its Russian allies. Their cause was championed by many sectors of American public opinion. When the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth came to America, he was wildly cheered. He was presented to the president and Congress and hailed by the secretary of state, Daniel Webster. But they all refused to help in any concrete way. No public money, no arms, aid, or troops were forthcoming for the Hungarian cause. Kossuth grew bitter and disillusioned. He sought the help of Henry Clay, by then the grand old man of American politics. Clay explained to Kossuth why the American leaders had acted as they did: by giving official support to the Hungarian cause, we would have abandoned "our ancient policy of amity and non-intervention." Clay explained,

By the policy to which we have adhered since the days of Washington … we have done more for the cause of liberty in the world than arms could effect; we have shown to other nations the way to greatness and happiness. … Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and the cause of liberty, that, adhering to our pacific system and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore, as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen and falling republics in Europe.

Similarly, in 1863, when Russia crushed a Polish revolt with great brutality, the French emperor invited us to join in a protest to the Tsar. Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, replied, defending "our policy of non-intervention – straight, absolute, and peculiar as it may seem to other nations,"

The American people must be content to recommend the cause of human progress by the wisdom with which they should exercise the powers of self-government, forbearing at all times, and in every way, from foreign alliances, intervention, and interference.

This policy by no means entailed the "isolation" of the United States. Throughout these decades, trade and cultural exchange flourished, as American civilization progressed and we became an economic powerhouse. The only thing that was prohibited was the kind of intervention in foreign affairs that was likely to embroil us in war.

Towards the end of the 19th century, however, a different philosophy began to emerge. In Europe, the free-trade and noninterventionist ideas of the classical liberals were fading; more and more, the European states went in for imperialism. The establishment of colonies and coaling stations around the globe – and the creation of vast armies and navies to occupy and garrison them – became the order of the day.

In the United States, this imperialism found an echo in the political class. In 1890, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the Naval War College, published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Soon translated into many foreign languages, it was used by imperialists in Britain, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere to intensify the naval arms race and the scramble for colonies. In America, a young politician named Theodore Roosevelt made it his bible.

The great Democratic president Grover Cleveland – strict constitutionalist and champion of the gold standard, free trade, and laissez-faire – held out against the rising tide. But ideas of a "manifest destiny" for America transcending the continent and stretching out to the whole world were taking over the Republican Party. Roosevelt, Mahan, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, and others formed a cabal imbued with the new, proudly imperialist vision. They called their program "the large policy."

To them, America up until then had been too small. As Roosevelt declared, "The trouble with our nation is that we incline to fall into mere animal sloth and ease." Americans lacked the will to plunge into the bracing current of world politics, to court great dangers, and to do great deeds. Instead, they were mired in their own petty and parochial affairs – their families, their work, their communities, their churches, and their schools. In spite of themselves, the American people would have to be dragged to greatness by their leaders.

Often, the imperialists put their case in terms of the allegedly urgent need to find foreign markets and capital outlets for American business. But this was a propaganda ploy, and American business itself was largely skeptical of this appeal. Charles Beard, no great friend of capitalists, wrote, "Loyalty to the facts of the historical record must ascribe the idea of imperial expansion mainly to naval officers and politicians rather than to businessmen." For instance, as the imperialist frenzy spread and began to converge on hostility to Spain and Spanish policy in Cuba, a Boston stockbroker voiced the views of many of his class when he complained to Senator Lodge that what businessmen really wanted was "peace and quiet." He added, with amazing prescience, "If we attempt to regulate the affairs of the whole world we will be in hot water from now until the end of time."

Reprinted from Mises.org.

The Best of Ralph Raico

Buy This Book!

Ralph Raico — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Previously by David T. Beito: Something is Rotten in Montgomery

Anyone who thinks that they know anything about World War I, Harry S. Truman, or Winston Churchill should first read Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal by Ralph Raico. Once they do, they might realize just how little they really know. I have taught and researched American history for a quarter century but there was a lot here that was completely new to me.

In elegant, and often witty, prose, Raico demolishes interpretations that all too many historians, and members of the reading public, take for granted. Few single volumes by any historian pack so much punch, and or have so much breadth.

Raico shows, for example, that historians who accept the Fischer Thesis, which puts the main blame for World War I on Germany, as the "last word" on the subject are sadly mistaken.

Raico pokes apart the standard assumption that Winston Churchill was a far-sighted and principled wartime leader who consistently opposed Communism. Champions of Truman as a great president will find it hard to explain away stunning evidence of the "plucky little man from Missouri’s" habitual resort to emergency powers and politically cynical war scares.

Those of us in need of rich material for lectures in American history, on the other hand, will be able to profit from a treasure trove of revealing quotations, richly illustrative anecdotes, and high-powered interpretation. Ralph Raico has performed a great service in writing this book.

Reprinted with permission from the History News Network.

David T. Beito [send him mail] is a member of the Liberty and Power group blog at the History News Network.

So Much Killing, So Many F

Ralph Raico — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 05:00:00 +0000

The Best of Ralph Raico

Revisionism Is Essential to Peace

Ralph Raico — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Recently by Robert Higgs: It's
Pearl Harbor Day — TrotOut the OfficialFable

Foreword
to Great
Wars and Great Leaders by Ralph Raico (2010)

For many years,
I have described Ralph Raico as "my favorite historian."
When David Theroux and I were making our plans in 1995 for the publication
of a new scholarly quarterly, The Independent Review, and
selecting the scholars we would ask to serve as associate editors,
I knew that I would want one of them to be an excellent historian,
and I knew also that the person I wanted most was Raico. I had complete
confidence that he would bring to our project precisely the combination
of personal integrity, scholarly mastery, and sound judgment I needed
in an associate. In the 15 years since then, I have never regretted
that I prevailed on Ralph to serve in this capacity and that he
graciously accepted my invitation. Three of the marvelous review
essays that appear here were first published in TIR.

Much earlier
I had developed a deep respect for Raico as a scholar and as a person.
I insist that these two qualities cannot be separated without dire
consequences. Some scholars have energy, brilliance, and mastery
of their fields, but they lack personal integrity; hence they bend
easily before the winds of professional fashion and social pressure.
I have always admired Ralph’s amazing command of the wide-ranging
literature related to the topics about which he lectures and writes.
But I have admired even more his courageous capacity for frankly
evaluating the actors and the actions in question, not to mention
the clarity and wit of his humane, levelheaded judgments.

Academic historians,
who long ago came to dominate the writing of serious history in
the United States, have not distinguished themselves as independent
thinkers. All too often, especially in the past 30 or 40 years,
they have surrendered their judgments and even their attention spans
to a combination of hypersensitive multiculturalism and power worship.
They tend to see society as divided between a small group of oppressors
(nearly all of whom are, not coincidentally, straight white males
engaged in or closely associated with corporate business) and a
conglomeration of oppressed groups, among whom nonwhites, women,
homosexuals, and low-wage workers receive prominent attention and
solicitude.

When the historians
write about the economy, they usually view it through quasi-Marxist
lenses, perceiving that investors and employers have been (and remain)
the natural enemies of the workers, who would never have escaped
destitution except for the heroic struggles waged on their behalf
by labor unions and progressive politicians. When they write about
international affairs, they elevate the "democratic" wartime
leaders to godlike status, especially so for Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow
Wilson, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt – politicians
whose public declarations of noble intentions the historians tend
to accept at face value.

Raico, in contrast,
steadfastly refuses to be sucked into this ideological mire. Having
attended Ludwig von Mises’s famous seminar at New York University
and having completed his PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago
under F.A. Hayek’s supervision, he understands classical liberalism
as well as anyone, and his historical judgments reflect this more
solid and humane grounding. For Ralph, it would be not only unseemly
but foolish to quiver obsequiously in the historical presence of
a Churchill, a Roosevelt, or a Truman.

He knows when
he has encountered a politician who lusted after power and public
adulation, and he describes the man accordingly. He does not sweep
under the rug the crimes committed by the most publicly revered
Western political leaders. If they ordered or acceded to the commission
of mass murder, he tells us, without mincing words, that they did
so. The idea that the United States has invariably played the role
of savior or "good guy" in its international relations
Raico recognizes as state propaganda rather than honest history.

Thus, in these
pages, you will find descriptions and accounts of World War I, of
the lead-up to formal US belligerence in World War II, and of Churchill,
Roosevelt, and Truman, among others, that bear little resemblance
to what you were taught in school. Here you will encounter, perhaps
for the first time, compelling evidence of how the British maneuvered
US leaders and tricked the American people prior to the US declarations
of war in 1917 and 1941. You will read about how the British undertook
to starve the Germans – men, women, and children alike –
not only during World War I, but for the greater part of a year
after the armistice. You will be presented with descriptions of
how the communists were deified and the German people demonized
by historians and others who ought to have known better. You will
see painted in truer shades a portrait of the epic confrontation
between the great majority of Americans, who wished to keep their
country at peace in 1939, 1940, and 1941, and the well-placed, unscrupulous
minority who sought to plunge the United States into the European
maelstrom.

Raico’s historical
essays are not for the faint of heart nor for those whose loyalty
to the US or British state outweighs their devotion to truth and
humanity. Yet Ralph did not invent the ugly facts he recounts here,
as his ample documentation attests. Indeed, many historians have
known these facts, but few have been willing to step forward and
defy politically popular and professionally fashionable views in
the forthright, pull-no-punches way that Raico does.

The historians’
principal defect for the most part has not been a failure or refusal
to dig out the relevant facts but rather a tendency to go along
to get along in academia and "respectable" society, a
sphere in which individual honesty and courage generally count against
a writer or teacher, whereas capitulation to trendy nonsense often
brings great rewards and professional acclaim.

Those who have
not read Raico’s essays or listened to his lectures have a feast
in store here. Those who have read some, but not all, of the essays
in this collection may rest assured that the quality remains high
throughout the volume. Any one of the main essays well justifies
the price of the book, and each of the review essays is a jewel
of solid scholarship and excellent judgment. Moreover, in contrast
to the bland, uninspired writing that most academic historians dish
out, Ralph’s clear, vigorous prose serves as a tasty spice for the
meaty substance. Bon appétit.

Reprinted
from Mises.org.

December
9, 2010

Robert
Higgs [send him mail] is
senior fellow in political economy at the Independent
Institute and editor of The
Independent Review. He
is also a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His
most recent book is Neither
Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government.
He is also the author of Depression,
War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence
of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against
Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.

The
Best of Robert Higgs

The Greatest US War Crime Against Japan

Ralph Raico — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 06:00:00 +0000

The most spectacular episode of Harry Truman’s presidency will never be forgotten but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians, including several thousand Korean workers. Twelve US Navy fliers incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also among the dead.[1]

Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings. One thing Truman insisted on from the start was that the decision to use the bombs, and the responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave different, and contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him, Truman responded testily,

Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.[2]

Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of this, so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945, he stated, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."[3]

This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the US Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized.

On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the US Strategic Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the city – and escaped serious damage."[4] The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10, explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didn’t like the idea of killing "all those kids."[5] Wiping out another one hundred thousand people … all those kids.

Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command’s list of the 33 primary targets.[6]

Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency – that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that had been needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.[7] The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll – nearly twice the total of US dead in all theaters in the Second World War – is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George H.W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb "spared millions of American lives."[8]

Still, Truman’s multiple deceptions and self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally understandable that the US occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public.[9] Otherwise, Americans – and the rest of the world – might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.

The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.[10] The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s own chief of staff, was typical:

the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.[11]

The political elite implicated in the atomic bombings feared a backlash that would aid and abet the rebirth of horrid prewar "isolationism." Apologias were rushed into print, lest public disgust at the sickening war crime result in erosion of enthusiasm for the globalist project.[12] No need to worry. A sea change had taken place in the attitudes of the American people. Then and ever after, all surveys have shown that the great majority supported Truman, believing that the bombs were required to end the war and save hundreds of thousands of American lives, or, more likely, not really caring one way or the other.

Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly exercise in cost-benefit analysis – innocent Japanese lives balanced against the lives of Allied servicemen – might reflect on the judgment of the Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe, who insisted on the supremacy of moral rules.[13] When, in June 1956, Truman was awarded an honorary degree by her university, Oxford, Anscombe protested.[14] Truman was a war criminal, she contended, for what is the difference between the US government massacring civilians from the air, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?

Anscombe’s point is worth following up. Suppose that, when we invaded Germany in early 1945, our leaders had believed that executing all the inhabitants of Aachen, or Trier, or some other Rhineland city would finally break the will of the Germans and lead them to surrender. In this way, the war might have ended quickly, saving the lives of many Allied soldiers. Would that then have justified shooting tens of thousands of German civilians, including women and children? Yet how is that different from the atomic bombings?

By early summer 1945, the Japanese fully realized that they were beaten. Why did they nonetheless fight on? As Anscombe wrote, "It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil."[15]

That mad formula was coined by Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference, and, with Churchill’s enthusiastic concurrence, it became the Allied shibboleth. After prolonging the war in Europe, it did its work in the Pacific. At the Potsdam Conference, in July 1945, Truman issued a proclamation to the Japanese, threatening them with the "utter devastation" of their homeland unless they surrendered unconditionally. Among the Allied terms, to which "there are no alternatives," was that there be "eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest [sic]." "Stern justice," the proclamation warned, "would be meted out to all war criminals."[16]

To the Japanese, this meant that the emperor – regarded by them to be divine, the direct descendent of the goddess of the sun – would certainly be dethroned and probably put on trial as a war criminal and hanged, perhaps in front of his palace.[17] It was not, in fact, the US intention to dethrone or punish the emperor. But this implicit modification of unconditional surrender was never communicated to the Japanese. In the end, after Nagasaki, Washington acceded to the Japanese desire to keep the dynasty and even to retain Hirohito as emperor.

For months before, Truman had been pressed to clarify the US position by many high officials within the administration, and outside of it, as well. In May 1945, at the president’s request, Herbert Hoover prepared a memorandum stressing the urgent need to end the war as soon as possible. The Japanese should be informed that we would in no way interfere with the emperor or their chosen form of government. He even raised the possibility that, as part of the terms, Japan might be allowed to hold on to Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea. After meeting with Truman, Hoover dined with Taft and other Republican leaders, and outlined his proposals.[18]

Establishment writers on World War II often like to deal in lurid speculations. For instance, if the United States had not entered the war, then Hitler would have "conquered the world" (a sad undervaluation of the Red Army, it would appear; moreover, wasn’t it Japan that was trying to "conquer the world"?) and killed untold millions. Now, applying conjectural history in this case, assume that the Pacific war had ended in the way wars customarily do – through negotiation of the terms of surrender. And assume the worst – that the Japanese had adamantly insisted on preserving part of their empire, say, Korea and Formosa, even Manchuria. In that event, it is quite possible that Japan would have been in a position to prevent the Communists from coming to power in China. And that could have meant that the 30 or 40 million deaths now attributed to the Maoist regime would not have occurred.

But even remaining within the limits of feasible diplomacy in 1945, it is clear that Truman in no way exhausted the possibilities of ending the war without recourse to the atomic bomb. The Japanese were not informed that they would be the victims of by far the most lethal weapon ever invented (one with "more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam,’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare," as Truman boasted in his announcement of the Hiroshima attack). Nor were they told that the Soviet Union was set to declare war on Japan, an event that shocked some in Tokyo more than the bombings.[19] Pleas by some of the scientists involved in the project to demonstrate the power of the bomb in some uninhabited or evacuated area were rebuffed. All that mattered was to formally preserve the unconditional-surrender formula and save the servicemen’s lives that might have been lost in the effort to enforce it. Yet, as Major General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the century’s great military historians, wrote in connection with the atomic bombings:

Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.[20]

Isn’t this obviously true? And isn’t this the reason that rational and humane men, over generations, developed rules of warfare in the first place?

While the mass media parroted the government line in praising the atomic incinerations, prominent conservatives denounced them as unspeakable war crimes. Felix Morley, constitutional scholar and one of the founders of Human Events, drew attention to the horror of Hiroshima, including the "thousands of children trapped in the thirty-three schools that were destroyed." He called on his compatriots to atone for what had been done in their name, and proposed that groups of Americans be sent to Hiroshima, as Germans were sent to witness what had been done in the Nazi camps.

The Paulist priest, Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and another stalwart of the Old Right, castigated the bombings as "the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law." David Lawrence, conservative owner of US News and World Report, continued to denounce them for years.[21] The distinguished conservative philosopher Richard Weaver was revolted by

the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust … pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Weaver considered such atrocities as deeply "inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built."[22]

Today, self-styled conservatives slander as "anti-American" anyone who is in the least troubled by Truman’s massacre of so many tens of thousands of Japanese innocents from the air. This shows as well as anything the difference between today’s "conservatives" and those who once deserved the name.

Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious truth:

If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.[23]

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.

Notes

[1] On the atomic bombings, see Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995); and idem, "Was Harry Truman a Revisionist on Hiroshima?" Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter 29, no. 2 (June 1998); also Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Vintage, 1977); and Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).

[2] Alperovitz, Decision, p. 563. Truman added: "When you deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true." For similar statements by Truman, see ibid., p. 564. Alperovitz’s monumental work is the end-product of four decades of study of the atomic bombings and is indispensable for comprehending the often complex argumentation on the issue.

[3] Ibid., p. 521.

[4] Ibid., p. 523.

[5] Barton J. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 257. General Carl Spaatz, commander of US strategic bombing operations in the Pacific, was so shaken by the destruction at Hiroshima that he telephoned his superiors in Washington, proposing that the next bomb be dropped on a less populated area, so that it "would not be as devastating to the city and the people." His suggestion was rejected. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 147–48.

[6] This is true also of Nagasaki.

[7] See Barton J. Bernstein, "A Post-War Myth: 500,000 US Lives Saved," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, no. 6 (June/July 1986): pp. 38–40; and idem, "Wrong Numbers," The Independent Monthly (July 1995): pp. 41–44.

[8] J. Samuel Walker, "History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): pp. 320, 323–25. Walker details the frantic evasions of Truman’s biographer, David McCullough, when confronted with the unambiguous record.

[9] Paul Boyer, "Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory," Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): pp. 299. On the fate of the bombings’ victims and the public’s restricted knowledge of them, see John W. Dower, "The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory," in ibid., pp. 275–95.

[10] Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 320–65. On MacArthur and Eisenhower, see ibid., pp. 352 and 355–56.

[11] William D. Leahy, I Was There (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 441. Leahy compared the use of the atomic bomb to the treatment of civilians by Genghis Khan, and termed it "not worthy of Christian man." Ibid., p. 442. Curiously, Truman himself supplied the foreword to Leahy’s book. In a private letter written just before he left the White House, Truman referred to the use of the atomic bomb as "murder," stating that the bomb "is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them wholesale." Barton J. Bernstein, "Origins of the US Biological Warfare Program,’ Preventing a Biological Arms Race, Susan Wright, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 9.

[12] Barton J. Bernstein, "Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Bomb," Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): pp. 35–72.

[13] One writer in no way troubled by the sacrifice of innocent Japanese to save Allied servicemen – indeed, just to save him – is Paul Fussell; see his Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit, 1988). The reason for Fussell’s little Te Deum is, as he states, that he was among those scheduled to take part in the invasion of Japan, and might very well have been killed. It is a mystery why Fussell takes out his easily understandable terror, rather unchivalrously, on Japanese women and children instead of on the men in Washington who conscripted him to fight in the Pacific in the first place.

[14] G.E.M. Anscombe, "Mr. Truman’s Degree," in idem, Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 62–71.

[15] Anscombe, "Mr. Truman’s Degree," p. 62.

[16] Hans Adolf Jacobsen and Arthur S. Smith, Jr., eds., World War II: Policy and Strategy. Selected Documents with Commentary (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1979), pp. 345–46.

[17] For some Japanese leaders, another reason for keeping the emperor was as a bulwark against a possible postwar communist takeover. See also Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 236: "the [Potsdam] proclamation offered the military die-hards in the Japanese government more ammunition to continue the war than it offered their opponents to end it."

[18] Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 44–45.

[19] Cf. Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 254: "it does seem very likely, though certainly not definite, that a synergistic combination of guaranteeing the emperor, awaiting Soviet entry, and continuing the siege strategy would have ended the war in time to avoid the November invasion." Bernstein, an excellent and scrupulously objective scholar, nonetheless disagrees with Alperovitz and the revisionist school on several key points.

[20] J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1939 –45: A Strategical and Tactical History (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948), p. 392. Fuller, who was similarly scathing on the terror-bombing of the German cities, characterized the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "a type of war that would have disgraced Tamerlane." Cf. Barton J. Bernstein, who concludes, in "Understanding the Atomic Bomb," p. 235:

In 1945, American leaders were not seeking to avoid the use of the A-bomb. Its use did not create ethical or political problems for them. Thus, they easily rejected or never considered most of the so-called alternatives to the bomb.

[21] Felix Morley, "The Return to Nothingness," Human Events (August 29, 1945) reprinted in Hiroshima’s Shadow, Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds. (Stony Creek, Conn.: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), pp. 272–74; James Martin Gillis, "Nothing But Nihilism," The Catholic World, September 1945, reprinted in ibid., pp. 278–80; Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 438–40.

[22] Richard M. Weaver, "’A Dialectic on Total War," in idem, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 98–99.

[23] Wainstock, Decision, p. 122.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is Professor Emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. You can study the history of civilization under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

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Anarchy Is the Answer

Ralph Raico — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:00:00 +0000

This article originally appeared in Liberty Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 3 (January 1991)

There is no need to emphasize for this audience the world-historical significance of the changes that are taking place today in east-central Europe and, especially, in the Soviet Union. This great transformation has led many people to reconsider the merits of an ideology once thought to be obsolete — liberalism.

Today I wish to deal with liberalism as it has been understood historically, and to consider its connection with a certain strand of Marxist thought — a strand that may well be much more important now than other elements of Marxism that have been emphasized in the past.

Liberalism has, of course, many meanings. Without arguing the point here, I wish to maintain that the most authentic form of liberalism has been concerned above all with two things: first, the expansion of the free functioning of civil society, and, second, and increasingly, the restriction of the activity of the state. In other words, by liberalism, I will mean laissez-faire, "Manchester" liberalism, also known as "dogmatic," "doctrinaire," and "dog-eat-dog."

Liberalism arose in the 17th and 18th centuries as Europe and America’s response to monarchical absolutism. Where the monarchs by divine right claimed to control and direct all of the life of society, liberalism replied that, by and large, it is best to leave civil society to run itself — in religion, in thought and culture, and not least in economic life. The liberal slogan of laissez-faire, laissez-passer, le monde va de lui-meme ("the world goes by itself") encapsulated this philosophy.

Sometimes through revolution, more often through piecemeal reform, liberalism accomplished much of its program, building, of course, on the inheritance of free institutions and individualist values of earlier centuries. Throughout the Western world a system developed based on freedom of thought, freedom of labor, clear rights of private property, and free exchange. Nowhere — not even in England or America — was this system consistently realized in every aspect of life. Still, as the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises put it, it was enough to change the countenance of the world.

For the first time, mankind was able to escape the Malthusian trap. With the enormous increase in population came a steadily increasing per capita income. What this dry little fact meant in the lives of the many, many millions still awaits its poets and novelists. In reality, the only imaginative writer who has done justice to this vast transformation was the great novelist born in Leningrad, Alicia Rosenbaum, who came to America and wrote under the name of Ayn Rand.

But the bureaucratic-military state that had emerged in Europe in the early-modern period, though excluded from some areas of social life, remained entrenched. Soon it began once more to expand. By the early nineteenth century, independent thinkers all across the political spectrum, from conservatives to anarchists, were alarmed at the growth of the parasitic state. This was a problem that concerned also Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

As has been sometimes noted, Marxism contains two rather different views of the state: most conspicuously, it views the state as the instrument of domination by exploiting classes that are defined by their position within the process of social production, e.g., the capitalists. The state is simply "the executive committee of the ruling class."

Sometimes, however, Marx characterized the state itself as the exploiting agent. You will perhaps excuse me for quoting some passages from the works of Marx and Engels that are doubtless quite familiar to you. A brilliant passage occurs when Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, comes to consider the state as it developed in France, and he refers to

this executive power, with its enormous bureaucracy and military organization, with it ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials. Numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores. … All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.[1]

Some 20 years later, Marx speaks of the Paris Commune aiming at restoring "to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon and clogging the free movement of society." In 1891, Friedrich Engels, referring to the United States, wrote,

We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means for the most corrupt ends — the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.[2]

I am myself far from being a Marxist, but I must confess that I find more truth in this description of the American political scene by Friedrich Engels than I usually find on the editorial page of the New York Times. Thus, the conception of the "parasite state" is clearly enunciated by the founders of Marxism.

Several decades before they wrote, however, an influential group of French liberals had already singled out the parasitic state as the major example in modern society of the plundering and "devouring" spirit. This school of liberalism elaborated a doctrine of the conflict of classes, and in this respect had not only a logical, but also a historical, connection with Marxism — as Marx himself conceded and as was conceded in later years by Engels and the thinkers of the period of the Second International, including Lenin. This earlier liberal school can moreover be taken as virtually the ideal of authentic, radical liberalism.

Let me cite Adolphe Blanqui, from what is probably the first history of economic thought, published in 1837. Blanqui’s words will probably have a familiar ring to them:

In all the revolutions, there have always been but two parties opposing each other; that of the people who wish to live by their own labor, and that of those who would live by the labor of others. … Patricians and plebeians, slaves and freemen, guelphs and ghibellines, red roses and white roses, cavaliers and roundheads, liberals and serviles, are only varieties of the same species.[3]

The school of authentic, radical liberals of which I spoke, and which influenced Blanqui, centered around a few young liberal intellectuals, Charles Dunoyer, Charles Comte, and Augustin Thierry. They can be considered the culmination of the tradition of French liberal thought. In turn, they continued to influence liberal thought up to the time of Herbert Spencer and beyond. They called their doctrine industrialisme.

The industrialists agreed with Jean-Baptiste Say, who held that wealth is comprised of what has value, and that value is based on utility. All those members of society who contribute to the creation of values by engaging in voluntary exchange are deemed productive. This class includes not only workers, peasants, and the scientists and artists who produce for the market, but also includes capitalists who advance funds for productive enterprise (but not rentiers off the government debt). Say awards pride of place, however, to the entrepreneur. J.-B. Say was perhaps the first to realize the boundless possibilities of a free economy, led by creative entrepreneurs.

But there exist classes of persons who merely consume wealth rather than produce it. These unproductive classes include the army, the government, and the state-supported clergy — what could be called the "reactionary" classes, associated by and large with the Old Regime.

However, Say was quite aware that antiproductive and antisocial activity was also possible, indeed altogether common, when otherwise productive elements employed state power to capture privileges.

The industrialist doctrine may be summarized in the statement that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggles between the plundering and the producing classes.

The industrialist writers looked forward to "the extinction of the idle and devouring class" and to the emergence of a social order in which "the fortune of each would be nearly in direct ratio to his merit, that is, to his utility, and almost without exception, none would be destitute except the vicious and useless."

Augustin Thierry — whom Karl Marx later referred to as the "father of class struggle theory in French historical writing" — summarized the industrialist doctrine of strict laissez-faire:

Government should be good for the liberty of the governed, and that is when it governs to the least possible degree. It should be good for the wealth of the nation, and that is when it acts as little as possible upon the labor that produces it and when it consumes as little as possible. It should be good for the public security, and that is when it protects as much as possible, provided that the protection does not cost more than it brings in. … It is in losing their powers of action that governments improve. Each time that the governed gain space, there is progress.[4]

The function of government is simply to ensure security from those who would disturb the liberal social order either from within or from without.

However, as increasing numbers of individuals aspire to government jobs, two tendencies emerge: government power expands, and the burden of government expenditures and taxation grows. In order to satisfy the new hordes of office-seekers, the government extends its scope in all directions; it begins to concern itself with the people’s education, health, intellectual life, and morals, sees to the adequacy of the food supply, and regulates industry, until "soon there will be no means of escape from its action for any activity, any thought, any portion" of the people’s existence. Functionaries have become "a class that is the enemy of the well-being of all the others."

The concept of a conflict of classes linked to the state is one that permeates the history of liberalism, from beginning to end. It was especially conspicuous at the time of the struggle against the old "feudal" powers, but it is by no means limited to the period of that struggle. The most radical and authentic of the liberals perceived the continuing existence of class exploitation by means of the state in the later 19th and in the 20th centuries as well.

As time went on, one area of state exploitation captured their attention more than any other — militarism and imperialism. A very long list of examples could be given of the liberals who opposed their governments’ overseas wars. The appropriation of the wealth created by the producing classes by the state’s military bureaucracy and its capitalist suppliers was the theme of the most "doctrinaire" and consistent liberals for generations. In the same spirit, present-day American writer Ernest Fitzgerald has identified the masses exploited by the military branch of the American state:

[I]t is undoubtedly true that subject population exploitation is a major objective of the military spending coalition. The people marked for exploitation, though, are not the masses of peasants in underdeveloped countries. The exploited masses are United States taxpayers, the most productive and easily managed subject population in the history of the world.[5]

What are the implications of this analysis for contemporary problems?

As the French liberals knew, the expansion of government activity keeps pace with the increase in the number of state functionaries, who must somehow justify their incomes and jobs. And today, throughout the world, in every regime, the number of state functionaries continues to grow. According to reports in the West, most of the relatively few Soviet bureaucrats dismissed under perestroika have been rehired in new intermediate agencies, production or research associations, and so on, sometimes headed by the former minister himself. It is estimated that the number of Soviet bureaucrats has actually increased by 122,000, bringing the total to around 18,000,000.

But the experience of the hydra-headed bureaucracy is by no means limited to the Soviet Union. Administrations elected on platforms demanding the reduction of the legions of functionaries — whether in Brazil or the United States — seem somehow never to be able to realize their original intentions. It was good of Deputy Prime Minister Leonid I. Abalkin to point out that the US Department of Agriculture has more employees than the Soviet State Commission on Procurement and Food. The conclusion to be drawn, however, is hardly the one the deputy prime minister seems to favor — that even a market economy requires great armies of bureaucrats.

Most lucrative for the state has been war and preparations for war. In this connection, I must praise the courageous speech of Mr. Georgi Arbatov at the Second Congress of People’s Deputies, in which he assailed the "huge and fabulously expensive war machine" in the Soviet Union. This is an example that cries out to be emulated by influential commentators in the West.

With the emergence of the welfare state, the opportunities for the state "enmeshing society in a net and choking all its pores" become literally endless. There now flourishes, in every advanced country, a class of state-funded social scientists whose profession consists in discovering and defining — out of the infinite mass of human misery — particular "social problems," which will become the material for further state activity.

The monstrous growth of the state apparatus will not be stopped by those who, ignorant of economics and given to literary-moralistic musings, equate the private-property, market economy with totalitarianism. President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia recently warned against "the stupefying dictatorship of consumerism and of pervasive commercialism."

This "dictatorship," President Havel feels, will tend to produce alienation, and, in the speech in which he discussed this problem, he appealed to German philosophers to help prevent this plunge into alienation by turning to "the service of renewing global human responsibility, the only possible salvation for the contemporary world."

I doubt that we require the help of German philosophers to remedy the "ills" caused by an overemphasis on the rights of the individual. In any case, what is this "dictatorship" of consumerism, this "mindless materialism," of which President Havel — and many other literary intellectuals in east-central Europe — speaks? Is it the provision of compact-disc electronic systems to tens and soon hundreds of millions of people, enabling them to listen to near-concert-hall-perfect versions of the music of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich? Does it consist in making available, in every Western country, well-produced paperback editions of all the great works of literature and philosophy, and of all the modern works as well — especially those that attack the "materialism" of the capitalist system?

In America and other Western countries, there are millions of people who have attained the degree of affluence that permits them to interest themselves, in an amateurish way, in original works of art — in drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Their homes are filled with such works, by local artists for the most part. Is the affluence that permits this middle-class amateurism another example of "materialism"?

Here a touch of the old Marxist skepticism is in order, I think. For whom does President Havel speak when he derides "consumerism" and "commercialism"? Whose interests are served by eclipsing the market economy and the voluntary choices of consumers?

In the former socialist countries of east-central Europe, as elsewhere, there is in place, of course, a stratum of state-subsidized intellectuals, in the media, the arts, the press, and education. There is, moreover, a continuing process of the reproduction of this class. I suggest that their social position requires an ideology to justify the continuance of state funds. Perhaps the task of "renewing [sic] human global responsibility" — whatever that may be — will be at the center of it.

The "vulgar Marxism" that in the past dismissed liberal ideology as "nothing but" the rationalization of the interests of the bourgeoisie cannot stand the test of critical examination.

Moreover, if that notion were true, then there would be no reason for our Soviet friends to be here today, listening to the speeches of the "bourgeois ideologists" collected at this Cato conference.

I have stressed today a dimension of liberal ideology that clearly has great relevance for every nation in the world. A New Zealand scholar, J.C. Davis, has recently reflected on the rise of the Leviathan state during the past four hundred years, a process spanning the globe:

The comprehensive, collective state with its assumption of obligations in every aspect of human life, from health to employment, education to transport, defense to entertainment and leisure, is a feature of every advanced state, whether of the East or the West, and of the aspirations of most Third World governments. Curiously, both revolutionaries and reactionaries, by their demands that the state more closely control social processes, have furthered the growth of Leviathan.[6]

This description is one with which both the great French liberals I have discussed and Karl Marx could have agreed. The question remains, what realistic alternative exists to state parasitism? The answer provided by a contemporary French author, Raymond Ruyer, represents my own point of view, and, I think, that of authentic liberalism:

One must fully recognize a great truth, which rings as a scandalous paradox and a challenge to the beliefs and quasi-religious faith of the intelligentsia, both in the West and the East, namely, that the only choice is between a bureaucratized political State, seeking power and glory in every domain, including those of art and science; and an "anarchical" regime of self-direction in every economic domain first of all, but also in culture. But the heart of the paradox is that it is only the liberal economic order that can promote "the withering away of the State" and of politics — or at least their limitation — it is not centralizing socialism.[7]

Notes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in Three Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), vol. 1, p. 477.

[2] Ibid., vol. 2, p. 188.

[3] Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, Histoire de l’économie politique en Europe depuis les anciens jusque’à nos jours (Paris: Guillaumin, 1837), p. x. (Italics in original.)

[4] Censeur Européen, 7:206 and 205.

[5] A. Ernest Fitzgerald, The High Priests of Waste (New York: Norton, 1972), p. xii.

[6] J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516—1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 8—9.

[7] Raymond Ruyer, Éloge de la société de consommation (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1969), pp. 266—67.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

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The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of Classical Liberalism

Ralph Raico — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Classical liberalism — or simply liberalism, as it was called until around the turn of the century — is the signature political philosophy of Western civilization. Hints and suggestions of the liberal idea can be found in other great cultures. But it was the distinctive society produced in Europe — and in the outposts of Europe, and above all America — that served as the seedbed of liberalism. In turn, that society was decisively shaped by the liberal movement.

Decentralization and the division of power have been the hallmarks of the history of Europe. After the fall of Rome, no empire was ever able to dominate the continent. Instead, Europe became a complex mosaic of competing nations, principalities, and city-states. The various rulers found themselves in competition with each other. If one of them indulged in predatory taxation or arbitrary confiscations of property, he might well lose his most productive citizens, who could "exit," together with their capital. The kings also found powerful rivals in ambitious barons and in religious authorities that were backed by an international Church. Parliaments emerged that limited the taxing power of kings, and free cities arose with special charters that put the merchant elite in charge.

By the Middle Ages, many parts of Europe, especially in the west, had developed a culture friendly to property rights and trade. On the philosophical level, the doctrine of natural law — deriving from the Stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome — taught that the natural order was independent of human design and that rulers were subordinate to the eternal laws of justice. Natural-law doctrine was upheld by the Church and promulgated in the great universities, from Oxford and Salamanca to Prague and Krakow.

As the modern age began, rulers started to shake free of age-old customary constraints on their power. Royal absolutism became the main tendency of the time. The kings of Europe raised a novel claim: they declared that they were appointed by God to be the fountainhead of all life and activity in society. Accordingly, they sought to direct religion, culture, politics, and, especially, the economic life of the people. To support their burgeoning bureaucracies and constant wars, the rulers required ever-increasing quantities of taxes, which they tried to squeeze out of their subjects in ways that were contrary to precedent and custom.

The first people to revolt against this system were the Dutch. After a struggle that lasted for decades, they won their independence from Spain and proceeded to set up a unique polity. The United Provinces, as the radically decentralized state was called, had no king and little power at the federal level. Making money was the passion of these busy manufacturers and traders; they had no time for hunting heretics or suppressing new ideas. Thus de facto religious toleration and a wide-ranging freedom of the press came to prevail. Devoted to industry and trade, the Dutch established a legal system based solidly on the rule of law and the sanctity of property and contract. Taxes were low, and everyone worked. The Dutch "economic miracle" was the wonder of the age. Thoughtful observers throughout Europe noted the Dutch success with great interest.

A society in many ways similar to Holland had developed across the North Sea. In the 17th century, England, too, was threatened by royal absolutism, in the form of the House of Stuart. The response was revolution, civil war, the beheading of one king and the booting out of another. In the course of this tumultuous century, the first movements and thinkers appeared that can be unequivocally identified as liberal.

With the king gone, a group of middle-class radicals emerged called the Levellers. They protested that not even Parliament had the authority to usurp the natural, God-given rights of the people. Religion, they declared, was a matter of individual conscience; it should have no connection with the state. State-granted monopolies were likewise an infringement of natural liberty.

A generation later, John Locke, drawing on the tradition of natural law that had been kept alive and elaborated by the Scholastic theologians, set forth a powerful liberal model of man, society, and state. Every man, he held, is innately endowed with certain natural rights. These consist in his fundamental right to what is his property — that is, his life, liberty, and "estates" (or material goods). Government is formed simply to preserve the right to property. When, instead of protecting the natural rights of the people, a government makes war upon them, the people may alter or abolish it. The Lockean philosophy continued to exert influence in England for generations to come. In time, its greatest impact would be in the English-speaking colonies in North America.

The society that emerged in England after the victory over absolutism began to score astonishing successes in economic and cultural life. Thinkers from the continent, especially in France, grew interested. Some, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, came to see for themselves. Just as Holland had acted as a model before, now the example of England began to influence foreign philosophers and statesmen. The decentralization that has always marked Europe allowed the English "experiment" to take place and its success to act as a spur to other nations.

In the 18th century, thinkers were discovering a momentous fact about social life: given a situation where men enjoyed their natural rights, society more or less ran itself. In Scotland, a succession of brilliant writers that included David Hume and Adam Smith outlined the theory of the spontaneous evolution of social institutions. They demonstrated how immensely complex and vitally useful institutions — language, morality, the common law, and above all the market — originate and develop not as the product of the designing minds of social engineers, but as the result of the interactions of all the members of society pursuing their individual goals.

In France, economists were coming to similar conclusions. The greatest of them, A.R.J. Turgot, set forth the rationale for the free market:

The policy to pursue, therefore, is to follow the course of nature, without pretending to direct it. For, in order to direct trade and commerce it would be necessary to be able to have knowledge of all of the variations of needs, interests, and human industry in such detail as is physically impossible to obtain even by the most able, active, and circumstantial government. And even if a government did possess such a multitude of detailed knowledge, the result would be to let things go precisely as they do of themselves, by the sole action of the interests of men prompted by free competition.

The French economists coined a term for the policy of freedom in economic life — they called it laissez-faire. Meanwhile, starting in the early 17th century, colonists coming mainly from England had established a new society on the eastern shores of North America. Under the influence of the ideas that the colonists brought with them and the institutions they developed, a unique way of life came into being. There was no aristocracy and very little government of any kind. Instead of aspiring to political power, the colonists worked to carve out a decent existence for themselves and their families.

Fiercely independent, they were equally committed to the peaceful — and profitable — exchange of goods. A complex network of trade sprang up, and by the mid-18th century the colonists were already more affluent than any other commoners in the world. Self-help was the guiding star in the realm of spiritual values as well. Churches, colleges, lending libraries, newspapers, lecture institutes, and cultural societies flourished through the voluntary cooperation of the citizens.

When events led to a war for independence, the prevailing view of society was that it basically ran itself. As Tom Paine declared,

Formal government makes but a small part of civilized life. It is to the great and fundamental principles of society and civilization — to the unceasing circulation of interest, which passing through its million channels, invigorates the whole mass of civilized man — it is to these, infinitely more than to anything which even the best instituted government can perform that the safety and prosperity of the individual and the whole depend. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government. Government is no further necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent.

In time, the new society formed on the philosophy of natural rights would serve as an even more luminous exemplar of liberalism to the world than had Holland and England before it.

As the 19th century began, classical liberalism — or just liberalism, as the philosophy of freedom was then known — was the specter haunting Europe — and the world. In every advanced country the liberal movement was active.

Drawn mainly from the middle classes, it included people from widely contrasting religious and philosophical backgrounds. Christians, Jews, deists, agnostics, utilitarians, believers in natural rights, freethinkers, and traditionalists all found it possible to work towards one fundamental goal: expanding the area of the free functioning of society and diminishing the area of coercion and the state.

Emphases varied with the circumstances of different countries. Sometimes, as in central and eastern Europe, the liberals demanded the rollback of the absolutist state and even the residues of feudalism. Accordingly, the struggle centered on full private-property rights in land, religious liberty, and the abolition of serfdom. In western Europe, the liberals often had to fight for free trade, full freedom of the press, and the rule of law as sovereign over state functionaries.

In America, the liberal country par excellence, the chief aim was to fend off incursions of government power pushed by Alexander Hamilton and his centralizing successors, and, eventually, somehow, to deal with the great stain on American freedom — Negro slavery.

From the standpoint of liberalism, the United States was remarkably lucky from the start. Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading liberal thinkers of his time, composed its founding document, the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration radiated the vision of society as consisting of individuals enjoying their natural rights and pursuing their self-determined goals. In the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Founders created a system where power would be divided, limited, and hemmed in by multiple constraints, while individuals could go about the quest for fulfillment through work, family, friends, self-cultivation, and the dense network of voluntary associations. In this new land, government — as European travelers noted with awe — could hardly be said to exist at all. This was the America that became a model to the world.

One perpetuator of the Jeffersonian tradition in the early 19th century was William Leggett, a New York journalist and antislavery, Jacksonian Democrat. Leggett declared,

All governments are instituted for the protection of person and property; and the people only delegate to their rulers such powers as are indispensable to these objects. The people want no government to regulate their private concerns, or to prescribe the course and mete out the profits of their industry. Protect their persons and property, and all the rest they can do for themselves.

This laissez-faire philosophy became the bedrock creed of countless Americans of all classes. In the generations to come, it found an echo in the work of liberal writers like E.L. Godkin, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov, and Leonard Read. To the rest of the world, this was the distinctively, characteristically American outlook.

Meanwhile, the economic advance that had been slowly gaining momentum in the Western world burst out in a great leap forward. First in Britain, then in America and western Europe, the Industrial Revolution transformed the life of man as nothing had since the Neolithic age. Now it became possible for the vast majority of mankind to escape the immemorial misery they had grown to accept as their unalterable lot. Now tens of millions who would have perished in the inefficient economy of the old order were able to survive. As the populations of Europe and America swelled to unprecedented levels, the new masses gradually achieved living standards unimaginable for working people before.

The birth of the industrial order was accompanied by economic dislocations. How could it have been otherwise? The free-market economists preached the solution: security of property and hard money to encourage capital formation, free trade to maximize efficiency in production, and a clear field for entrepreneurs eager to innovate. But conservatives, threatened in their age-old status, initiated a literary assault on the new system, giving the Industrial Revolution a bad name from which it never fully recovered. Soon the attack was gleefully taken up by groups of socialist intellectuals that began to emerge.

Still, by midcentury the liberals went from one victory to another. Constitutions with guarantees of basic rights were adopted, legal systems firmly anchoring the rule of law and property rights were put in place, and free trade was spreading, giving birth to a world economy based on the gold standard.

There were advances on the intellectual front as well. After spearheading the campaign to abolish the British Corn Laws, Richard Cobden developed the theory of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries as a foundation for peace. Frédéric Bastiat put the case for free trade, nonintervention, and peace in a classic form. Liberal historians like Thomas Macaulay and Augustin Thierry uncovered the roots of freedom in the West. Later in the century, the economic theory of the free market was placed on a secure scientific footing with the rise of the Austrian School, inaugurated by Carl Menger.

The relation of liberalism and religion presented a special problem. In continental Europe and Latin America, freethinking liberals sometimes used the state power to curtail the influence of the Catholic Church, while some Catholic leaders clung to obsolete ideas of theocratic control. But liberal thinkers like Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Lord Acton saw beyond such futile disputes. They stressed the crucial role that religion, separated from government power, could play in stemming the growth of the centralized state. In this way, they prepared the ground for the reconciliation of liberty and religious faith.

Then, for reasons still unclear, the tide began to turn against the liberals. Part of the reason is surely the rise of the new class of intellectuals that proliferated everywhere. That they owed their very existence to the wealth generated by the capitalist system did not prevent most of them from incessantly gnawing away at capitalism, indicting it for every problem they could point to in modern society.

At the same time, voluntary solutions to these problems were preempted by state functionaries anxious to expand their domain. The rise of democracy may well have contributed to liberalism’s decline by aggravating an age-old feature of politics — the scramble for special privilege. Businesses, labor unions, farmers, bureaucrats, and other interest groups vied for state privileges — and found intellectual demagogues to rationalize their depredations. The area of state control grew, at the expense, as William Graham Sumner pointed out, of "the forgotten man" — the quiet, productive individual who asks no favor of government and, through his work, keeps the whole system going.

By the end of the 19th century, liberalism was being battered on all sides. Nationalists and imperialists condemned it for promoting an insipid peace instead of a virile and bracing belligerency among the nations. Socialists attacked it for upholding the "anarchical" free-market system instead of "scientific" central planning. Even church leaders disparaged liberalism for its alleged egotism and materialism.

In America and Britain, social reformers around the dawn of the 20th century conceived a particularly clever gambit. Anywhere else the supporters of state intervention and coercive labor-unionism would have been called "socialists" or "social democrats." But since the English-speaking peoples appeared for some reason to have an aversion to those labels, they hijacked the term "liberal."

Though they fought on to the end, a mood of despondency settled on the last of the great authentic liberals. When Herbert Spencer began writing in the 1840s, he had looked forward to an age of universal progress in which the coercive state apparatus would practically disappear. By 1884, Spencer could pen an essay entitled "The Coming Slavery." In 1898, William Graham Sumner, American Spencerian, free-trader, and gold-standard advocate, looked with dismay as America started on the road to imperialism and global entanglement in the Spanish-American War; he titled his response to that war, grimly, "The Conquest of the United States by Spain."

Everywhere in Europe there was a reversion to the policies of the absolutist state, as government bureaucracies expanded. At the same time, jealous rivalries among the Great Powers led to a frenzied arms race and sharpened the threat of war. In 1914, a Serb assassin threw a spark onto the heaped-up animosity and suspicion, and the result was the most destructive war in history to that point. In 1917, an American president keen to create a New World Order led his country into the murderous conflict.

"War is the health of the state," warned the radical writer Randolph Bourne. And so it proved to be. By the time the butchery ended, many believed that liberalism in its classical sense was dead.

The First World War was the watershed of the 20th century. Itself the product of antiliberal ideas and policies, such as militarism and protectionism, the Great War fostered statism in every form. In Europe and America, the trend towards state intervention accelerated, as governments conscripted, censored, inflated, ran up mountains of debts, co-opted business and labor, and seized control of the economy. Everywhere "progressive" intellectuals saw their dreams coming true. The old laissez-faire liberalism was dead, they gloated, and the future belonged to collectivism. The only question seemed to be, which kind of collectivism?

In Russia, the chaos of the war permitted a small group of Marxist revolutionaries to grab power and establish a field headquarters for world revolution. In the 19th century, Karl Marx had concocted a secular religion with a potent appeal. It held out the promise of the final liberation of man through replacing the complex, often baffling world of the market economy by conscious, "scientific" control.

Put into practice by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Russia, the Marxist economic experiment resulted in catastrophe. For the next seventy years, Red rulers lurched from one patchwork expedient to another. But terror kept them firmly in charge, and the most colossal propaganda effort in history convinced intellectuals both in the West and in the emerging Third World that Communism was, indeed, "the radiant future of all mankind."

The peace treaties cobbled together by President Woodrow Wilson and the other Allied leaders left Europe a seething cauldron of resentment and hate. Seduced by nationalist demagogues and terrified of the Communist threat, millions of Europeans turned to the forms of state worship called fascism and National Socialism, or Nazism. Though riddled with economic error, these doctrines promised prosperity and national power through integral state control of society, while fomenting more and greater wars.

In the democratic countries, milder forms of statism were the rule. Most insidious of all was the form that had been invented in the 1880s, in Germany. There Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, devised a series of old-age, disability, accident, and sickness insurance schemes, run by the state. The German liberals of the time argued that such plans were simply a reversion to the paternalism of the absolutist monarchies. Bismarck won out, and his invention — the welfare state — was eventually copied everywhere in Europe, including the totalitarian countries. With the New Deal, the welfare state came to America.

Still, private property and free exchange continued as the basic organizing principles of Western economies. Competition, the profit motive, the steady accumulation of capital (including human capital), free trade, the perfecting of markets, increased specialization — all worked to promote efficiency and technical progress and with them higher living standards for the people. So powerful and resilient did this capitalist engine of productivity prove to be that widespread state intervention, coercive labor-unionism, even government-generated depressions and wars could not check economic growth in the long run.

The 1920s and ’30s represent the nadir of the classical-liberal movement in the 20th century. Especially after government meddling with the monetary system led to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, dominant opinion held that history had closed the books on competitive capitalism, and with it the liberal philosophy.

If a date were to be put on the rebirth of classical liberalism, it would be 1922, the year of the publication of Socialism, by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. One of the most remarkable thinkers of the century, Mises was also a man of unflinching courage. In Socialism, he threw down the gauntlet to the enemies of capitalism. In effect, he said, "You accuse the system of private property of causing all social evils, which only socialism can cure. Fine. But would you now kindly do something you have never deigned to do before: would you explain how a complex economic system will be able to operate in the absence of markets, and hence prices, for capital goods?" Mises demonstrated that economic calculation without private property was impossible, and exposed socialism for the passionate illusion it was.

Mises’s challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy opened the minds of thinkers in Europe and America. F.A. Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, and Lionel Robbins were among those whom Mises converted to the free market. And, throughout his very long career, Mises elaborated and refined his economic theory and social philosophy, becoming the acknowledged premier classical-liberal thinker of the 20th century.

In Europe and particularly in the United States, scattered individuals and groups kept something of the old liberalism alive. At the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, academics could be found, even in the 1930s and ’40s, who defended at least the basic validity of the free-enterprise idea.

In America, an embattled brigade of brilliant writers, mainly journalists, survived. Now known as the "Old Right," they included Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, H.L. Mencken, Felix Morley, and John T. Flynn. Spurred to action by the totalitarian implications of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, these writers reiterated the traditional American creed of individual freedom and scornful distrust of government. They were equally opposed to Roosevelt’s policy of global meddling as subversive of the American Republic. Supported by a few courageous publishers and businessmen, the "Old Right" nursed the flame of Jeffersonian ideals through the darkest days of the New Deal and the Second World War.

With the end of that war, what can be called a movement came into being. Small at first, it was fed by multiplying streams. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, alerted many thousands to the reality that, in pursuing socialist policies, the West was risking the loss of its traditional free civilization.

In 1946, Leonard Read established The Foundation for Economic Education, in Irvington, New York, publishing the works of Henry Hazlitt and other champions of the free market. Mises and Hayek, now both in the United States, continued their work. Hayek led in founding the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of classical-liberal scholars, activists, and businessmen from all over the world. Mises, unsurpassed as a teacher, set up a seminar at New York University, attracting such students as Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. Rothbard went on to wed the insights of Austrian economics to the teachings of natural law to produce a powerful synthesis that appealed to many of the young. At the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Aaron Director led a group of classical-liberal economists whose specialty was exposing the defects of government action. The gifted novelist Ayn Rand incorporated emphatically libertarian themes in her well-crafted bestsellers, and even founded a school of philosophy.

The reaction to the renewal of authentic liberalism on the part of the left — "liberals" — more accurately, the social-democrat establishment — was predictable, and ferocious. In 1954, for instance, Hayek edited a volume entitled Capitalism and the Historians, a collection of essays by distinguished scholars arguing against the prevailing socialist interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. A scholarly journal permitted Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Harvard professor and New Deal hack, to savage the book in these terms: "Americans have enough trouble with home-grown McCarthys without importing Viennese professors to add academic luster to the process."

Other works the establishment tried to kill by silence. As late as 1962, not a single prominent magazine or newspaper chose to review Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Still, the writers and activists who led the revival of classical liberalism found a growing resonance among the public. Millions of Americans in all walks of life had all along quietly cherished the values of the free market and private property. The growing presence of a solid corps of intellectual leaders now gave many of these citizens the heart to stand up for the ideas they had held dear for so long.

In the 1970s and ’80s, with the evident failure of socialist planning and interventionist programs, classical liberalism became a worldwide movement. In Western countries, and then, incredibly, in the nations of the former Warsaw Pact, political leaders even declared themselves disciples of Hayek and Friedman. As the end of the century approached, the old, authentic liberalism was alive and well, stronger than it had been for a hundred years.

And yet, in Western countries, the state keeps on relentlessly expanding, colonizing one area of social life after the other. In America, the Republic is fast becoming a fading memory, as federal bureaucrats and global planners divert more and more power to the center. So the struggle continues, as it must. Two centuries ago, when liberalism was young, Jefferson had already informed us of the price of liberty.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

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What Is Classical Liberalism?

Ralph Raico — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 05:00:00 +0000

This article originally appeared in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, edited by Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2006), pp. 498—502.

"Classical liberalism" is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism. The qualifying "classical" is now usually necessary, in English-speaking countries at least (but not, for instance, in France), because liberalism has come to be associated with wide-ranging interferences with private property and the market on behalf of egalitarian goals. This version of liberalism — if such it can still be called — is sometimes designated as "social," or (erroneously) "modern" or the "new," liberalism. Here we shall use liberalism to signify the classical variety.

Although its fundamental claims are universalist, liberalism must be understood first of all as a doctrine and movement that grew out of a distinctive culture and particular historical circumstances. That culture — as Lord Acton recognized most clearly — was the West, the Europe that was or had been in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Its womb, in other words, was the particular human society that underwent "the European miracle" (in E.L. Jones’s phrase). The historical circumstances were the confrontation of the free institutions and values inherited from the Middle Ages with the pretensions of the absolutist state of the 16th and 17th centuries.

From the struggle of the Dutch against the absolutism of the Spanish Hapsburgs issued a polity that manifested basically liberal traits: the rule of law, including especially a firm adherence to property rights; de facto religious toleration; considerable freedom of expression; and a central government of severely limited powers. The astonishing success of the Dutch experiment exerted a "demonstration effect" on European social thought and, gradually, political practice. This was even truer of the later example of England. Throughout the history of liberalism, theory and social reality interacted, with theory stimulated and refined through the observation of practice, and attempts to reform practice undertaken with reference to more accurate theory.

In the English constitutional struggles of the 17th century a number of individuals and groups displayed significant liberal traits. One stands out, however, as the first recognizably liberal party in European history: the Levellers. Led by John Lilburne and Richard Overton, this movement of middle-class radicals demanded freedom of trade and an end to state monopolies, separation of church and state, popular representation, and strict limits even to parliamentary authority. Their emphasis on property, beginning with the individual’s ownership of himself, and their hostility to state power show that the amalgamation of the Levellers to the presocialist Diggers was mere enemy propaganda. Although failures in their time, the Levellers furnished the prototype of a middle-class radical liberalism that has been a feature of the politics of English-speaking peoples ever since. Later in the century, John Locke framed the doctrine of the natural rights to life, liberty, and estate — which he collectively termed "property" — in the form that would be passed down, through the Real Whigs of the 18th century, to the generation of the American Revolution.

America became the model liberal nation, and, after England, the exemplar of liberalism to the world. Through much of the 19th century it was in many respects a society in which the state could hardly be said to exist, as European observers noted with awe. Radical liberal ideas were manifested and applied by groups such as the Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, abolitionists, and late-19th-century anti-imperialists.

Until well into the 20th century, however, the most significant liberal theory continued to be produced in Europe. The 18th century was particularly rich in this regard. A landmark was the work of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart. They developed an analysis that explained "the origin of complex social structures without the need to posit the existence of a directing intelligence" (in Ronald Hamowy’s summary). The Scottish theory of spontaneous order was a crucial contribution to the model of a basically self-generating and self-regulating civil society that required state action only to defend against violent intrusion into the individual’s rights-protected sphere. As Dugald Steward put it in his Biographical Memoir of Adam Smith (1811), "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and the tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." The Physiocratic formula, Laissez-faire, laissez-passer, le monde va de lui-mme ("the world goes by itself"), suggests both the liberal program and the social philosophy upon which it rests. The theory of spontaneous order was elaborated by later liberal thinkers, notably Herbert Spencer and Carl Menger in the 19th century and F.A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi in the twentieth.

One argument between liberals and Burkean and other conservatives who in important respects stand close to liberalism is related to this central liberal conception. While liberals typically expect the market in the widest sense — the network of voluntary exchanges — to generate a system of institutions and mores conducive to its continuance, conservatives insist that the indispensable underpinning must be provided by the state beyond the simple protection of life, liberty, and property, including especially state support of religion.

With the onset of industrialization, a major area of conflict opened up between liberalism and conservatism. Conservative elites and their spokesmen, particularly in Britain, often exploited the circumstances of early industrialism to tarnish the liberal escutcheon of their middle-class and Nonconformist opponents. In historical perspective, it is clear that what is known as the Industrial Revolution was Europe’s (and America’s) way of dealing with an otherwise intractable population explosion. Some conservatives went on to forge a critique of the market order based on its alleged materialism, soullessness, and anarchy.

To the extent that liberals associated conservatism with militarism and imperialism, another source of conflict arose. While a strand of Whiggish liberalism was not averse to wars (beyond self-defense) for liberal ends, and while wars of national unification provided a major exception to the rule, by and large liberalism was associated with the cause of peace. The ideal type of antiwar and anti-imperialist liberalism was provided by the Manchester School and its leaders Richard Cobden and John Bright. Cobden, particularly, developed a sophisticated analysis of the motives and machinations of states leading to war. The panacea proposed by the Manchesterites was international free trade. Developing these ideas, Frdric Bastiat proposed an especially pure form of the liberal doctrine that enjoyed a certain appeal on the Continent and, later, in the United States.

Liberalism’s adherents were not always consistent. This was the case when they turned to the state to promote their own values. In France, for instance, liberals used state-funded schools and institutes to promote secularism under the Directory, and they supported anticlerical legislation during the Third Republic, while in Bismarck’s Germany they spearheaded the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. These efforts, however, can be seen as betrayals of liberal principles and in fact were eschewed by those acknowledged to be the most consistent and doctrinaire in their liberalism.

The basis for a possible reconciliation of liberalism and antistatist conservatism emerged after the experience of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Its best exponent was Benjamin Constant, who may be viewed as the representative figure of mature liberalism. Faced with the new dangers of unlimited state power based on manipulation of the democratic masses, Constant looked for social buffers and ideological allies wherever they might be found. Religious faith, localism, and the voluntary traditions of a people were valued as sources of strength against the state. In the next generation, Alexis de Tocqueville elaborated this Constantian approach, becoming the great analyst and opponent of the rising omnipresent, bureaucratic state.

In English-speaking countries the hostility of antistatist conservatives has been exacerbated by an extreme emphasis on the role of Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals in the history of liberalism. J.S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859) actually deviated from the central line of liberal thought by counterposing the individual and his liberty not simply to the state but to "society" as well. Whereas the liberalism of the early Wilhelm von Humboldt and of Constant, for example, saw voluntary intermediate bodies as the natural outgrowth of individual action and as welcome barriers to state aggrandizement, Mill aimed at stripping the individual of any connection to spontaneously generated social tradition and freely accepted authority — as, for instance, in his statement in On Liberty that the Jesuit is a "slave" of his order.

It is the socialist state that classical liberalism has opposed most vigorously. The Austro-American Ludwig von Mises, for example, demonstrated the impossibility of rational central planning. Prolific for more than fifty years, Mises restated liberal social philosophy after its eclipse of several decades; he became the acknowledged spokesman for liberal ideology in the 20th century. Among the many students on whom Mises exercised a remarkable influence was Murray N. Rothbard, who wedded Austrian economic theory to the doctrine of natural rights to produce a form of individualist anarchism, or "anarchocapitalism." By extending the realm of civil society to the point of extinguishing the state, Rothbard’s view appears as the limiting case of authentic liberalism.

Classical liberalism is often contrasted with a new social liberalism, which is supposed to have developed out of the classical variety around 1900. But social liberalism deviates fundamentally from its namesake at its theoretical root in that it denies the self-regulatory capacity of society: the state is called on to redress social imbalance in increasingly ramified ways. The plea that it intends to preserve the end of individual freedom, modifying only the means, is to classical liberals hardly to the point — as much could be claimed for most varieties of socialism. In fact, social liberalism can scarcely be distinguished, theoretically and practically, from revisionist socialism. Furthermore, it can be argued that this school of thought did not develop out of classical liberalism around the turn of the century — when, for instance, the alleged fraudulence of freedom of contract in the labor market is supposed to have been discovered. Social liberalism existed full-blown at least from the time of Sismondi, and elements of it (welfarism) can be found even in great classical-liberal writers such as Condorcet and Thomas Paine.

With the end of the classical-socialist project, classical liberals and antistatist conservatives may agree that it is contemporary social liberalism that now stands as the great adversary of civil society. The political preoccupation of classical liberals is, of necessity, to counteract the current now leading the world toward what Macaulay called "the all-devouring state" — the nightmare that haunted Burke no less than Constant, Tocqueville, and Herbert Spencer. As older quarrels grow increasingly obsolete, liberals and antistatist conservatives may well discover that they have more in common than their forebears ever understood.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

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Premature Nazi

Ralph Raico — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Leon Trotsky • By Irving Howe • Viking Press, 1978 • 214 pages. This review originally appeared in Libertarian Review, March 1979.

Leon Trotsky has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked. The reasons for this are clear enough. He was a writer, an occasional literary critic — according to Irving Howe, a very good one — and an historian (of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917). He had an interest in psychoanalysis and modern developments in physics, and, even when in power, suggested that the new Communist thought-controllers shouldn’t be too harsh on writers with such ideas — not exactly a Nat Hentoff position on freedom of expression, but about as good as one can expect among Communists.

Above all, Trotsky was himself an intellectual, and one who played a great part in what many of that breed have considered to be the real world — the world of revolutionary bloodshed and terror. He was second only to Lenin in 1917; in the Civil War he was the leader of the Red Army and the Organizer of Victory. As Howe says, "For intellectuals throughout the world there was something fascinating about the spectacle of a man of words transforming himself through sheer will into a man of deeds."

Trotsky lost out to Stalin in the power struggle of the 1920s, and in exile became a severe and knowledgeable critic of his great antagonist; thus, for intellectuals with no access to other critics of Stalinism — classical liberal, anarchist, or conservative — Trotsky’s writings in the 1930s opened their eyes to some aspects at least of the charnel-house that was Stalin’s Russia. During the period of the Great Purge and the Moscow show trials, Trotsky was placed at the center of the myth of treason and collaboration with Germany and Japan that Stalin spun as a pretext for eliminating his old comrades. In 1940, an agent of the Soviet secret police, Ramon Mercador, sought Trotsky out at his home in Mexico City and killed him with an ice ax to the head.

Irving Howe, the distinguished literary critic and editor of Dissent, tells the story of this interesting life with great lucidity, economy, and grace. The emphasis is on Trotsky’s thought, with which Howe has concerned himself for almost the past 40 years. As a young man, he states, "I came for a brief time under Trotsky’s influence, and since then, even though or perhaps because I have remained a socialist, I have found myself moving farther and farther away from his ideas."

Howe is in fact considerably more critical of Trotsky than I had expected. He identifies many of Trotsky’s crucial errors, and uses them to cast light on the flaws in Marxism, Leninism, and the Soviet regime that Trotsky contributed so much to creating. And yet there is a curious ambivalence in the book. Somehow the ignorance and evil in Trotsky’s life are never allowed their full weight in the balance, and, in the end, he turns out to be, in Howe’s view, a hero and "titan" of the 20th century. It’s as if Howe had chosen not to think out fully the moral implications of what it means to have said and done the things that Trotsky said and did.

We can take as our first example Howe’s discussion of the final outcome of Trotsky’s political labors: the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet regime. Throughout this book Howe makes cogent points regarding the real class character of this regime and other Communist governments — which, he notes, manifested itself very early on:

A new social stratum — it had sprung up the very morning of the revolution — began to consolidate itself: the party-state bureaucracy which found its support in the technical intelligentsia, the factory managers, the military officials, and, above all, the party functionaries…. To speak of a party-state bureaucracy in a country where industry has been nationalized means to speak of a new ruling elite, perhaps a new ruling class, which parasitically fastened itself upon every institution of Russian life. [emphasis in original]

Howe goes on to say that it was not to be expected that the Bolsheviks themselves would realize what they had done and what class they had actually raised to power: "It was a historical novelty for which little provision had been made in the Marxist scheme of things, except perhaps in some occasional passages to be found in Marx’s writings about the distinctive social character of Oriental despotism."

This is not entirely correct. Howe himself shows how Trotsky, in his book 1905 (a history of the Russian revolution of that year), had had a glimpse of this form of society, one in which the state bureaucracy was itself the ruling class. In analyzing the Tsarist regime, Trotsky had picked up on the strand of Marxist thought that saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production. This was a view that Marx expressed, for instance, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

More importantly, the class character of Marxism itself — as well as the probable consequences of the coming to power of a Marxist Party — had been identified well before Trotsky’s time. The great 19th-century anarchist Michael Bakunin — whose name does not even appear in Howe’s book, just as not a single other anarchist is even mentioned anywhere in it — had already subjected Marxism to critical scrutiny in the 1870s. In the course of this, Bakunin had uncovered the dirty little secret of the future Marxist state:

The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class…. But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all … but there will be a government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many "heads overflowing with brains" in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars. [Emphasis added.]

This perspective was taken up somewhat later by the Polish-Russian revolutionist, Waclaw Machajski, who held, in the words of Max Nomad, that — "nineteenth century socialism was not the expression of the interests of the manual workers but the ideology of the impecunious, malcontent, lower middle-class intellectual workers … behind the socialist ‘ideal’ was a new form of exploitation for the benefit of the officeholders and managers of the socialized state."

Thus, that Marxism in power would mean the rule of state functionaries was not merely intrinsically probable — given the massive increment of state power envisaged by Marxists, what else could it be? — but it had also been predicted by writers well known to a revolutionary like Trotsky. Trotsky, however, had not permitted himself to take this analysis seriously before committing himself to the Marxist revolutionary enterprise. More than that: "To the end of his days," as Howe writes, he "held that Stalinist Russia should still be designated as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ because it preserved the nationalized property forms that were a ‘conquest’ of the Russian Revolution" — as if nationalized property and the planned economy were not the very instruments of rule of the new class in Soviet Russia!

It remained for some of Trotsky’s more critical disciples, especially Max Shachtman in the United States, to point out to their master what had actually happened in Russia: that the Revolution had not produced a "workers’ State," nor was there any danger that "capitalism" would be restored, as Trotsky continued to fret it would. Instead, there had come into an existence in Russia a "bureaucratic collectivism" even more reactionary and oppressive than what had gone before.

Trotsky rejected this interpretation. In fact he had no choice. For, as Howe states, the dissidents "called into question the entire revolutionary perspective upon which [Trotsky] continued to base his politics…. There was the further possibility, if Trotsky’s critics were right, that the whole perspective of socialism might have to be revised." Indeed.

To his credit, Howe recognizes that a key period for understanding Bolshevism, including the thought of Trotsky, is the period of war communism, from 1918 to 1921. As he describes it, "Industry was almost completely nationalized. Private trade was banned. Party squads were sent into the countryside to requisition food from the peasants." The results were tragic on a vast scale. The economic system simply broke down, with all the immense suffering and all the countless deaths from starvation that such a small statement implies. As Trotsky himself later put it, "The collapse of the productive forces surpassed anything of the kind that history had ever seen. The country, and the government with it, were at the very edge of the abyss."

How had this come about? Here Howe follows the orthodox interpretation: War communism was merely the product of emergency conditions, created by the Revolution and the Civil War. It was a system of "extreme measures [which the Bolsheviks] had never dreamt of in their earlier programs."

Now, this last may be, strictly speaking, correct. It may well be, that is, that the Bolsheviks had never had the slightest idea of what their aims would mean concretely for the economic life of Russia, how those aims would of necessity have to be implemented, or what the consequences would be.

But war communism was no mere "improvisation," whose horrors are to be chalked up to the chaos in Russia at the time. The system was willed and itself helped produce that chaos. As Paul Craig Roberts has argued in his brilliant book Alienation and the Soviet Economy, war communism was an attempt to translate into "Reality" the Marxist ideal: the abolition of "commodity production," of the price system and the market.

This, as Roberts demonstrates, was what Marxism was all about. This is what the end of "alienation" and the final liberation of mankind consisted in. Why should it be surprising that when self-confident and determined Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky seized power in a great nation, they tried to put into effect the very policy that was their whole reason for being?

As evidence for this interpretation, Roberts quotes Trotsky himself (ironically, from a book of Trotsky’s writings edited by Irving Howe):

[T]he period of so-called "war communism" [was a period when] economic life was wholly subjected to the needs of the front … it is necessary to acknowledge, however, that in its original conception it pursued broader aims. The Soviet government hoped and strove to develop these methods of regimentation directly into a system of planned economy in distribution as well as production. In other words, from "war communism" it hoped gradually, but without destroying the system, to arrive at genuine communism … reality, however, came into increasing conflict with the program of "war communism." Production continually declined, and not only because of the destructive action of the war.

Roberts goes on to quote Victor Serge: "The social system of those years was later called ‘War Communism.’ At the time it was called simply ‘Communism’ … Trotsky had just written that this system would last over decades if the transition to a genuine, unfettered Socialism was to be assured. Bukharin … considered the present mode of production to be final."

One slight obstacle was encountered, however, on the road to the abolition of the price system and the market: "Reality," as Trotsky noted, "came into increasing conflict" with the economic "system" that the Bolshevik rulers had fastened on Russia. After a few years of misery and famine for the Russian masses — there is no record of any Bolshevik leader having died of starvation in this period — the rulers thought again, and a New Economic Policy (NEP) — including elements of private ownership and allowing for market transactions — was decreed.

The significance of all this cannot be exaggerated. What we have with Trotsky and his comrades in the Great October Revolution is the spectacle of a few literary-philosophical intellectuals seizing power in a great country with the aim of overturning the whole economic system — but without the slightest idea of how an economic system works. In State and Revolution, written just before he took power, Lenin wrote,

The accounting and control necessary [for the operation of a national economy] have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.

With this piece of cretinism Trotsky doubtless agreed. And why wouldn’t he? Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest had all their lives been professional revolutionaries, with no connection at all to the process of production and, except for Bukharin, little interest in the real workings of an economic system. Their concerns had been the strategy and tactics of revolution and the perpetual, monkish exegesis of the holy books of Marxism.

The nitty-gritty of how an economic system functions — how, in our world, men and women work, produce, exchange, and survive — was something from which they prudishly averted their eyes, as pertaining to the nether-regions. These "materialists" and "scientific socialists" lived in a mental world where understanding Hegel, Feuerbach, and the hideousness of Eugen Duehring’s philosophical errors was infinitely more important than understanding what might be the meaning of a price.

Of the actual operations of social production and exchange they had about the same appreciation as John Henry Newman or, indeed, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. This is a common enough circumstance among intellectuals; the tragedy here is that the Bolsheviks came to rule over millions of real workers, real peasants, and real businessmen.

Howe puts the matter rather too sweetly: once in power, he says, "Trotsky was trying to think his way through difficulties no Russian Marxist had quite foreseen." And what did the brilliant intellectual propose as a solution to the problems Russia now faced? "In December 1919 Trotsky put forward a series of ‘theses’ [sic] before the party’s Central Committee in which he argued for compulsory work and labor armies ruled through military discipline…."

So, forced labor, and not just for political opponents, but for the Russian working class. Let Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, the left-anarchists from the May days of 1968 in Paris, take up the argument:

"Was it so true," Trotsky asked, "that compulsory labor was always unproductive?" He denounced this view as "wretched and miserable liberal prejudice," learnedly pointing out that "chattel slavery, too, was productive" and that compulsory serf labor was in its times "a progressive phenomenon." He told the unions [at the Third Congress of Trade Unions] that "coercion, regimentation, and militarization of labor were no mere emergency measures and that the workers’ State normally had the right to coerce any citizen to perform any work at any place of its choosing."

And why not? Hadn’t Marx and Engels, in their ten-point program for revolutionary government in The Communist Manifesto, demanded as point eight, "Equal liability for all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture"? Neither Marx nor Engels ever disavowed their claim that those in charge of "the workers’ state" had the right to enslave the workers and peasants whenever the need might arise. Now, having annihilated the hated market, the Bolsheviks found that the need for enslavement had, indeed, arisen. And of all the Bolshevik leaders, the most ardent and aggressive advocate of forced labor was Leon Trotsky.

There are other areas in which Howe’s critique of Trotsky is not penetrating enough, in which it turns out to be altogether too soft-focused and oblique. For instance, he taxes Trotsky with certain philosophical contradictions stemming from his belief in "historical materialism." All through his life, Howe asserts, Trotsky employed "moral criteria by no means simply derived from or reducible to class interest. He would speak of honor, courage, and truth as if these were known constants, for somewhere in the orthodox Marxist there survived a streak of nineteenth century Russian ethicism, earnest and romantic."

Let us leave aside the silly implication that there is something "romantic" about belief in ethical values, as against the "scientific" character of orthodox Marxism. In this passage, Howe seems to be saying that adherence to certain commonly accepted values is, among Marxists, a rare kind of atavism on Trotsky’s part. Not at all.

Of course historical materialism dismisses ethical rules as nothing more than the "expression," or "reflection," or whatever, of "underlying class relationships" and, ultimately, of "the material productive forces." But no Marxist has ever taken this seriously, except as pretext for breaking ethical rules (as when Lenin and Trotsky argued in justification of their terror). Even Marx and Engels, in their "Inaugural Address of the First International," wrote that the International’s foreign policy would be to "vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice [sic] which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations."

That Trotsky admired honor, courage, and truth is not something that cries out for explanation by reference to Russian tradition of "ethicism" (whatever that might be). The admiration of those values is a part of the common heritage of us all. To think that there is a problem here that needs explaining is to take "historical materialism" much too seriously to begin with.

Similarly with other contradictions Howe thinks he has discovered between Trotsky’s Marxist philosophy and certain statements Trotsky made in commenting on real political events. Of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, Trotsky says that it would have taken place even if he had not been in Petrograd, "on condition that Lenin was present and in command." Howe asks, "What happens to historical materialism?" The point Howe is making, of course, is that in the Marxist view individuals are not allowed to play any critical role in shaping really important historical events, let alone in determining whether or not they occur.

But the answer to Howe’s question is that, when Trotsky commits a blunder like this, nothing happens. Nothing happens, because "historical materialism" was pretentious nonsense from the beginning, a political strategy rather than a philosophical position. Occasionally, in daubing in some of the light patches of sky that are intended to make up for the dark ones in Trotsky’s life, Howe comes perilously close to slipping into a fantasy world.

He says that in the struggle with Stalin, Trotsky was at a disadvantage, because he "fought on the terrain of the enemy, accepting the damaging assumption of a Bolshevik monopoly of power." But why is this assumption located on the enemy’s terrain? Trotsky shared that view with Stalin. He no more believed that a supporter of capitalism had a right to propagate his ideas than a medieval inquisitor believed in a witch’s right to her own personal style. And as for the rights even of other socialists — Trotsky in 1921 had led the attack on the Kronstadt rebels, who merely demanded freedom for socialists other than the Bolsheviks. At the time, Trotsky boasted that the rebels would be shot "like partridges" — as, pursuant to his orders, they were.

Howe even stoops to trying a touch of pathos. In sketching the tactics Stalin used in the struggle with Trotsky, he speaks of "the organized harassment to which Trotskyist leaders, distinguished Old Bolsheviks, were subjected by hooligans in the employ of the party apparatus, the severe threats made against all within the party…." Really now — is it political violence used against Leon Trotsky and his "distinguished" followers that is supposed to make our blood run cold? No: if there was ever a satisfying case of poetic justice, the "harassment" and "persecution" of Trotsky — down to and including the ice ax incident — is surely it.

The best example of Howe’s strange gentleness toward Trotsky I have saved for the last. What, when all is said and done, was Trotsky’s picture of the Communist society of the future? Howe does quote from Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution the famous, and ridiculous, last lines: "The average human type [Trotsky wrote] will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise." He doesn’t, however, tell us what precedes these lines — Trotsky’s sketch of the future society, his passionate dream. Under Communism, Trotsky states, Man will

reconstruct society and himself in accordance with his own plan…. The imperceptible, ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to generation, will give way to the titanic construction of city-villages, with map and compass in hand…. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built up consciously, will be erected and corrected…. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training…. [It will be] possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life…. The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the laws of heredity and sexual selection! … Man will make it his purpose … to create a higher social biological type, or, if you please, a superman.

"Man … his own plan … his purpose… his own hands." When Trotsky promoted the formation of worker-slave armies in industry, he believed that his own will was the will of the Proletarian Man. It is easy to guess whose will would stand in for that of Communist Man when the time came to direct the collective experiments on the physiological life, the complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physiological training, the reconstruction of the traditional family, the substitution of "something else" for blind sexual selection in the reproduction of human beings, and the creation of the superhuman.

This, then, is Trotsky’s final goal: a world where mankind is "free" in the sense that Marxism understands the term — where all of human life, starting from the economics, but going on to embrace everything, even the most private and intimate parts of human existence — is consciously planned by "society," which is assumed to have a single will. And it is this — this disgusting positivist nightmare — that, for him, made all the enslavement and killings acceptable!

Surely, this was another dirty little secret that Howe had an obligation to let us in on.

Howe ends by saying of Trotsky that "the example of his energy and heroism is likely to grip the imagination of generations to come," adding that, "even those of us who cannot heed his word may recognize that Leon Trotsky, in his power and his fall, is one of the titans of our century."

This is the kind of writing that covers the great issues of right and wrong in human affairs with a blanket of historicist snow. The fact is that Trotsky used his talents to take power in order to impose his willful dream — the abolition of the market, private property, and the bourgeoisie. His actions brought untold misery and death to his country.

Yet, to the end of his life, he tried in every way he could to bring the Marxist revolution to other peoples — to the French, the Germans, the Italians — with what probable consequences, he, better than anyone else, had reason to know. He was a champion of thought-control, prison camps, and the firing squad for his opponents, and of forced labor for ordinary, nonbrilliant working people. He openly defended chattel slavery — which, even in our century, must surely put him into a quite select company.

He was an intellectual who never asked himself such a simple question as: "What reason do I have to believe that the economic condition of workers under socialism will be better than under capitalism?" To the last, he never permitted himself to glimpse the possibility that the bloody, bureaucratic tyranny over which Stalin presided might never have come into existence but for his own efforts.

A hero? Well, no thank you — I’ll find my own heroes somewhere else. A titan of the 20th century? In a sense, yes. At least Leon Trotsky shares with the other "titans" of our century this characteristic: it would have been better if he had never been born.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

The Best of Ralph Raico

The Class That Exploits Us

Ralph Raico — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 05:00:00 +0000

The original version of this paper was delivered at the Second Annual Libertarian Scholars’ Conference, New York City, October 26, 1974, as a response to a paper by Leonard Liggio.

In the popular academic mind, the doctrine of class conflict seems to be inextricably linked to the particular Marxist version of the idea. Lip service is often paid — especially by those eager to diminish the claims to originality of Marx and Engels — to the fact that these writers had precursors in this approach to social reality.

Frequently a certain "French school," preceding Marx and Engels and influencing their views, is alluded to; Guizot, Thierry, Saint-Simon, and a few others are sometimes mentioned in this connection. But what that earlier perspective consisted in, and how it might differ from the more familiar Marxist model, is rarely if ever broached. And yet this earlier view is not only more correct and faithful to socioeconomic reality than the Marxist version (a point which must be assumed here, since there is no space to demonstrate it) but may well account for a discrepancy and contradiction within Marxism that has been noticed and commented upon but never explained.

When Marx says that the bourgeoisie is the main exploiting and parasitic class in modern society, "bourgeoisie" may be understood in two different ways. In England and the United States, it has tended to suggest the class of capitalists and entrepreneurs that makes its living by buying and selling on the (more or less) free market. The mechanism of this exploitation would involve the classical Marxist conceptual apparatus of the labor theory of value, the appropriation of surplus value by the employer, and so on.

On the Continent, however, the term "bourgeoisie" has no such necessary connection with the market. It can just as easily mean the class of "civil servants" and rentiers off the public debt as the class of businessmen involved in the process of social production.[1] That these former classes and their allies are engaged in the systematic exploitation of society was a commonplace of 19th-century social thought, somehow mysteriously lost sight of as these same classes have risen to greater prominence in the English-speaking nations.

Tocqueville, for instance, in his Recollections, states of "the middle-class," which historians tell us came to power in 1830 under the "bourgeois monarchy" of Louis Philippe: "It entrenched itself in every vacant place, prodigiously augmented the number of places and accustomed itself to live almost as much upon the Treasury as upon its own industry."[2] Similar statements can be found in many later writers, such as Gustave Le Bon and Hippolyte Taine.

Now, the reader is invited to consider the following longish quotation (the description is of France in the third quarter of the 19th century):

This executive power, with its enormous bureaucracy and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy. The Legitimist monarchy and the July monarchy added nothing but a greater division of labor, growing in the same measure as the division of labor within bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new material for state administration. Every common interest was straightway severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher general interest, snatched from the activity of society’s members themselves and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the communal property of a village community to the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France…. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor … under the second Bonaparte [Napoleon III] … the state [seems] to have made itself completely independent. As against civil society, the state machine has consolidated its position … thoroughly.[3]

This long quotation is from Marx’s pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, dealing with Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 1851. I think the contrast between the viewpoint presented here and the more customary Marxist view of the state as a weapon to enforce extrapolitical, economic exploitation — of the state as merely "the executive committee of the ruling class" — is evident. And this statement by no means stands alone in the corpus of Marxism: In The Civil War in France, Marx touches on the same perspective, when he speaks, for instance, of the Paris Commune’s aiming at restoring "to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of society."[4] And Engels, in his 1891 preface to The Civil War in France, expresses himself in absolutely unambiguous terms:

Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests…. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society…. Nowhere do "politicians" form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America [i.e., the United States]. There, each of the two major parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics…. It is in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society … we find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends — the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.[5]

We may in passing take note of the beautiful irony of the fact that, unlike a libertarian analysis of the period of American history under discussion, Engels’s analysis here completely ignores the massive use of state power by segments of the capitalist class, and limits itself to the exploitative activities of those directly in control of the state apparatus. Why Engels should care to whitewash the capitalists in this way, I really cannot say.

It seems, therefore, that there are two theories of the state (as well as, correspondingly, two theories of exploitation) within Marxism. There is the customarily discussed and very familiar one, of the state as the instrument of the ruling class (and the concomitant theory which locates exploitation within the production process). And there is the theory of the state which pits it against "society" and "nation" (two surprising and significant terms to find in this context in writers who were supremely conscious of the class divisions within society and the nation). Moreover, it would seem suggestive that it is the second theory that predominates in those writings of Marx which, because of their nuanced and sophisticated treatment of concrete and immediate political reality, many commentators have found to be the best expositions of the Marxist historical analysis.

Now, although it would be difficult to demonstrate, it appears highly probable that the second theory of the state (linking it with parasitism and exploitation) must surely have been influenced by the classical-liberal writers. The view that exploitation of and parasitism upon society were attributes of the nonmarket classes, of the classes that stood outside of the production process, was a very widespread one in the early and middle 19th century. It is the basis of Saint-Simon’s famous Parable (itself a residue from earlier liberal influences on that writer). It is the real meaning, it seems to me, of the celebrated typology of "military" vs. "industrial" societies — a typology founded on the distinction between market and nonmarket forces. (This dichotomy was employed by both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer — often considered the founders of sociology — and in different terms, and earlier, by Benjamin Constant.[6])

The degree to which one finds the concepts of classes and class conflict used in this sense in 18th- and 19th-century liberalism, once one looks for it, is astonishing. To take two examples: this is clearly what Tom Paine is talking about in The Rights of Man, when he speaks of governments making war in order to increase expenditures; and what William Cobbett is getting at when he terms gold the poor man’s money, since inflation is a device utilized by certain knowledgeable and influential financial circles.

These concepts, in particular, permeate the writings of Richard Cobden and John Bright, who conceived of themselves as waging a struggle on behalf of the producing classes of Britain against the aristocracy, which supported expansive government. Of the Anti-Corn Law agitation, Bright said: "I doubt that it can have any other character [than that of] … a war of classes. I believe this to be a movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the Lords and the great proprietors of the soil."[7] The "tax-eating" vs. the "tax-paying" class was a contrast which Bright especially was fond of using. Both men saw class-conflict everywhere in the Britain — and Ireland — of their time: in protectionism and monopolization of land, of course, but also in such policies as heavy taxes on newsprint, Church tithes, and limitation of the franchise, and most particularly in expenditures for war preparation and in a belligerent foreign policy and imperialism. As Bright put it:

The more you examine the matter the more you will come to the conclusion which I have arrived at, that this foreign policy, this regard for "the liberties of Europe," this care at one time for "the Protestant interests," this excessive love for the "balance of power," is neither more nor less than a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain."[8]

Later in the century, Bright identified other classes as the promoters of imperialism. In the case of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, Bright (who resigned from the cabinet on account of it) believed that the City of London (i.e., financial interests) were at work, and, according to his biographer, "he did not think that we ought to involve ourselves in a series of wars to collect the debts of bondholders or find new lands for commercial exploitation."[9] He agreed with his friend Goldwin Smith, the classical-liberal historian and anti-imperialist, who wrote him that it was simply a "stock-jobbers’ war."[10] This was long after Cobden had died, but the latter would doubtless have agreed. He once wrote: "We shall offer no excuses for so frequently resolving questions of state policy into matters of pecuniary calculation. Nearly all the revolutions and great changes in the modern world have a financial origin."[11]

Reading passages such as these, one wonders how the contemporary social scientist — bereft of the libertarian theory of class conflict — would have to interpret such views. The analysis would have to be that there are "unexpected Marxian elements" present even in the thought of leading liberals. Or, more probably, in view of the Manchesterites having looked askance at the influence of financial interest on government policy, there would be an analysis along the lines of "early petty-bourgeois proto-Fascism"!

In this connection we should consider the changeover of certain French liberals — such as Charles Dunoyer — from Anglomania to Anglophobia. This transformation, mentioned by Professor Liggio, is very interesting when counterposed to the Manchester School’s perception of British society, foreign policy, and imperialism. Cobden and Bright were harping critics of the status quo in Britain and Ireland, constant naggers, especially of those who ran the foreign affairs of the country. (Bright has the great line: "What are we to say of a nation which lives under the perpetual delusion that it is about to be attacked?"[12])

Contemporary conservative poseurs would unquestionably agree with the founder of their breed, Benjamin Disraeli, that the men of Manchester were simply not fun-people. Rather, they were incessant complainers who found themselves unable just to sit back and enjoy the fantasies and tinsel-symbols of British world power (the ability to enjoy society as it is, a well-known American conservative publicist informs us, is a chief hallmark of the conservative mind). Cobden, Bright and their allies were, on the contrary, engaged in a deadly serious, ongoing, and deeply radical critique of British society and Britain’s world-role. The following, for instance, is a typical example of Cobden’s attitude toward that role:

The peace party … will never rouse the conscience of the people so long as they allow them to indulge the comforting delusion that they have been a peace-loving people. We have been the most combative and aggressive community that has existed since the days of the Roman dominion. Since the Revolution of 1688 we have expended more than 15 hundred millions of money upon wars, not one of which has been upon our own shores, or in defense of our hearths and homes.[13]

Cobden speaks of "our insatiable love of territorial aggrandizement," of the fact that "in the insolence of our might, and without waiting for the assaults of envious enemies, we have sallied forth in search of conquest or rapine, and carried bloodshed into every quarter of the globe."[14] In a pamphlet with the really beautiful title, "How Wars Are Got Up in India," (as Paul Goodman said of Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm, it is a classic even by virtue of its title alone), Cobden warns that England must make "timely atonement and reparation" and "put an end to the deeds of violence and injustice which have marked every step of our progress in India," or else face the inevitable providential "punishment for imperial crimes."[15]

There would be those, one supposes, who would want to speak of a certain "masochism" and "self-flagellation" in these descriptions of the policies pursued by the ruling class of his own country; but that would be peculiarly out of place with such a vigorous and enormously vital personality as Richard Cobden.

(There is, incidentally, a direct line of analysis of the evils and the class-character of imperialism, running from Cobden and Bright through J.A. Hobson — who wrote an interesting exposition of Cobden’s foreign policy views, Richard Cobden: International Man — to Lenin, who, as is well known, was heavily influenced by Hobson; and this genealogy of ideas certainly merits being closely examined by some libertarian scholar.)

Now, Hayek says somewhere that a writer’s attitude toward England can be taken as highly indicative of his liberalism: if he was pro-English, it is likely that he was friendly to liberalism and the open society; if anti-English, then the reverse. But in light of the "anti-English" attitude of the Manchesterites, one would have to qualify this in an important respect — i.e., there would be a basis for "Anglophobia," grounded, not in opposition to the relative liberalism of England, but to its persisting aristocratic and imperialistic government throughout the 19th century.

Thus, I think that Professor Liggio has performed a very valuable service in directing attention to a formative place and period of the classical-liberal exploitation theory: France during the Restoration and the July Monarchy, and particularly to the thought of Charles Comte and Dunoyer. (Of Charles Comte, a writer as knowledgeable in the history of sociology as Stanislav Andreski has said that he is "one of the great founders of sociology, unjustly overshadowed by his namesake Auguste."[16])

The period was one of great richness of political and sociological speculation, well reflected in the paper we have just heard. The three great currents of modern political thought — the primary colors from which virtually every political position thereafter may be composed — are already clearly delineated: conservatism and the various schools of socialism, with their frequently overlapping critiques of the emerging capitalist order, and individualist liberalism, equidistant from both of the first two. (The influence of theocratic conservatives like de Maistre on the thinking of Saint-Simon, and of the Saint-Simonians and Auguste Comte, is well known.)

A number of Professor Liggio’s points regarding the interconnections among these three currents are very illuminating and stimulating: for instance, in regards to the inner, political meaning of Say’s law of markets, and the significance of the facts that the Saint-Simonian "pope," Enfantin, supported Ricardo as against Say on this subject; or Dunoyer’s attack on Saint-Simon’s intellectual authoritarianism on grounds that are usually associated with Mill’s On Liberty, which, of course, came substantially later. A few remarks are in order concerning another topic, viz., Dunoyer’s argument with Benjamin Constant on the "enervating" effects of a developing and increasingly sophisticated civilization.

What is involved here in Constant’s thought is a confrontation among the ideas of liberalism, romanticism, and utilitarianism. Briefly, Constant’s view (not exclusively, but most of the time) is this: the predominance of the commercial or industrial spirit over the military spirit or the spirit of conquest implies a relatively prosperous state of society, that is to say, a state where pleasure and creature comforts will be augmented and more widely distributed than ever before.

In fact, this is presumably the utilitarian ideal. Now, such a state will in the long run tend to militate against the free society, because the defense of freedom will frequently require sacrifices on the part of the individual, sometimes even the risk of losing one’s life against an armed tyrant. But the willingness to sacrifice one’s pleasures or to risk one’s life for a superindividual cause is a trait associated with earlier and more primitive forms of society. Thus, there is a certain inner contradiction in the free society, which can only be compensated for by bringing into play antiutilitarian forces, such as religious faith (this was practically a lifelong study of Constant’s).[17]

Constant’s "critique” of civilization also has a nonpolitical aspect: he tended to identify civilization with sophisticated intellectuality, with the spirit of the 18th century and the Enlightenment. This was the milieu in which he was reared, and like many intellectuals, especially those touched by Rousseau’s Romanticism, he was sick of it, and sick of the part of himself that reflected that spirit. It had the effect, he thought, of excluding spontaneous feelings, real warmth of affection and human closeness, substituting a shallow brilliance and perfection of outward, artificial social graces. Heroism and poetry were annihilated by Voltairean irony and skepticism, he believed, and were more likely to be found in earlier and more primitive societies — he was a great lover of ancient Greece — than in more complex ones.

Tocqueville, incidentally, built on both of these notions of Constant’s — the problem of the compatibility of utilitarianism and the free society, and the mediocrity of modern life — and helped to spread them.[18] The second idea, particularly, has become very widely shared; it is, for example, the kernel of Max Weber’s concept of the increasing routinization and bureaucratization of the modern world; and Irving Kristol seems to be making a reputation for himself by bringing a few of Constant’s and Tocqueville’s ideas somewhat up to date and presenting them to those who have never read Democracy in America.

Lastly, Professor Liggio performs a great scholarly service by continuing to mine the rich vein of classical-liberal social theory, in so many respects so disgracefully neglected by establishment academics. We ourselves having witnessed the shabby treatment meted out to the great Mises — based on the almost universal assumption that a Galbraith, a Harold Laski, or even a Walter Lippmann was a more significant social philosopher — have some idea why the establishment should act as if Saint-Simon or Auguste Comte had infinitely more to tell us about how society works than did Charles Comte, Benjamin Constant, or Jean-Baptiste Say. The kind of work represented by Professor Liggio’s paper will help redress the balance.

Notes

[1] Cf. Raymond Ruyer, Eloge de la société de consommation (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1969), pp. 144—145.

[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 2—3.

[3] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1968), pp. 170—171.

[4] Ibid, p. 293. He adds: "The [Paris] Commune [of 1871] made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure — the standing army and State functionarism."

[5] Ibid., p. 261.

[6] Cf. his De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation, in Oeuvres, Alfred Roulin, ed. (Paris: Pleiade, 1957).

[7] George Macaulay Trevelyan. The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 141.

[8] "Speech at Birmingham, 29 October 1858," in Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock, eds., The Liberal Tradition: From Fox to Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 88—89.

[9] Trevelyan, op. cit., pp. 433—434.

[10] Ibid., p. 434.

[11] The Political Writings of Richard Cobden (New York: Garland, 1973) I, p. 238.

[12] Loc. cit., p. 89.

[13] Op. cit., II, p. 376.

[14] Ibid., p. 455.

[15] Ibid., p. 458.

[16] Stanislav Andreski, Parasitism and Subversion: The Case of Latin America (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 12—13.

[17] Cf. Ralph Raico, The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville and Lord Acton (unpublished PhD thesis, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago), pp. 1—68.

[18] Ibid., pp. 69—128, 178—183.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

The Best of Ralph Raico

Our Greatest Presidents?

Ralph Raico — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 05:00:00 +0000

And so it goes. It is clear that Commager’s favorite is FDR. Here are some of History’s conclusions about FDR: Among his qualities were

honesty, resolution, fortitude, compassion, a sense of justice …. How right Franklin Roosevelt was when he said: "The Presidency is preeminently a place of moral leadership."

Roosevelt was "prepared to put principle above politics — and above popularity." The way Commager phrases the outstanding example of Roosevelt’s loyalty to "principle" is interesting: he "risked the loss of the 1940 election by stretching the Constitution to its permissible limits in order to aid beleaguered Britain" against Germany (emphasis added). "History," Commager adds, "has vindicated him well."

This is the famous historian’s little way of getting around a fact that, since the golden age of presidential glorification, has become common knowledge: namely, that Roosevelt committed the United States to war against Germany — through his promises to foreign leaders and his directives to the American armed forces — in 1940 (at the latest), without even the knowledge of Congress, and in direct contravention of his assurances to the American people, whom he treated as fools. By now, this much is established: as C. Boothe Luce put it for all time, "he lied us into war."

For sure — honesty, as Commager assures us, was one of FDR’s great virtues. And Eleanor’s mind was a model of Cartesian clarity. But what is the use? Commager’s out-of-date nonsense, masquerading as historical wisdom, is what they are going to teach little children in the government’s schools. After Vietnam and Nixon, the professional custodians of the tarnished symbols of the American state are panicky. They do what they can to patch things over — old pimps to an old whore dressed up as history. But how much longer?

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

The Best of Ralph Raico

The Taboo Against the Truth

Ralph Raico — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 05:00:00 +0000

"Speaking truth to power" is not easy when you support that power. Perhaps this is the reason why so few Western historians are willing to tell the whole truth about state crimes during this century.

Last fall the Moscow News reported the discovery by two archaeologist-historians of mass graves at Kuropaty, near Minsk, in the Soviet republic of Byelorussia.[1] The scholars at first estimated that the victims numbered around 102,000, a figure that was later revised to 250—300,000.[2] Interviews with older inhabitants of the village revealed that, from 1937 until June 1941, when the Germans invaded, the killings never stopped. "For five years, we couldn’t sleep at night because of all the shooting," one witness said.

Then in March, a Soviet commission finally conceded that the mass graves at Bykovnia, outside of Kiev, were the result not of the Nazis’ work, as formerly was maintained, but of the industry of Stalin’s secret police. Some 200—300,000 persons were killed at Bykovnia, according to unofficial estimates.[3]

These graves represent a small fraction of the human sacrifice that an elite of revolutionary Marxists offered up to their ideological fetish. How many died under Stalin alone, from the shootings, the terror famine, and the forced-labor camps, is uncertain. Writing in a Moscow journal, Roy Medvedev, the dissident Soviet Marxist, put the number at around 20 million, a figure the sovietologist Stephen F. Cohen views as conservative.[4] Robert Conquest’s estimate is between 20 million and 30 million, or more,[5] while Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko suggests 41 million deaths between 1930 and 1941.[6]

By everyone’s account, most of the victims were killed before the United States and Britain welcomed the Soviet Union as their ally, in June 1941. Yet by then, the evidence concerning at least very widespread Communist killings was available to anyone willing to listen.

If glasnost proceeds and if the whole truth about the Lenin and Stalin eras comes to light, educated opinion in the West will be forced to reassess some of its most deeply cherished views. On a minor note, Stalinist sympathizers like Lillian Hellman, Frieda Kirchwey, and Owen Lattimore will perhaps not be lionized quite as much as before. More important, there will have to be a reevaluation of what it meant for the British and American governments to have befriended Soviet Russia in the Second World War and heaped fulsome praise on its leader. That war will inevitably lose some of its glory as the pristinely pure crusade led by the larger-than-life heroes Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Inevitably, too, comparisons with what is commonly known as the Holocaust will emerge.

The "Dispute of Historians"

Such comparisons have been at the center of the raging controversy in the Federal Republic of Germany that has been labeled the Historikerstreit, or dispute of historians, and has now become an international cause célèbre. It erupted primarily because of the work of Ernst Nolte, of the Free University of Berlin, author of the highly acclaimed Three Faces of Fascism, published in the United States in 1966. In several important essays, in a large book published in 1987, The European Civil War, 1917—1945, and in a volume of responses to his critics,[7] Nolte declined to treat the Nazi massacre of the Jews in the conventional fashion.

He refused, that is, to deal with it metaphysically, as a unique object of evil, existing there in a small segment of history, in a nearly perfect vacuum, with at most merely ideological links to racist and Social Darwinist thought of the preceding century. Instead, without denying the importance of ideology, he attempted to set the Holocaust in the context of the history of Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. His aim was in no way to excuse the mass murder of the Jews, or to diminish the guilt of the Nazis for this crime dreadful beyond words. But he insisted that this mass murder must not lead us to forget others, particularly those that might stand in a causal relationship to it.

Briefly, Nolte’s thesis is that it was the Communists who introduced into modern Europe the awful fact and terrifying threat of the killing of civilians on a vast scale, implying the extermination of whole categories of persons. (One Old Bolshevik, Zinoviev, spoke openly as early as 1918 of the need to eliminate 10,000,000 of the people of Russia.) In the years and decades following the Russian Revolution, middle-class, upper-class, Catholic, and other Europeans were well aware of this fact, and for them especially the threat was a very real one. This helps to account for the violent hatred shown to their own domestic Communists in the various European countries by Catholics, conservatives, fascists, and even Social Democrats.

Nolte’s thesis continues: those who became the Nazi elite were well-informed regarding events in Russia, via White Russian and Baltic German émigrés (who even exaggerated the extent of the first, Leninist atrocities). In their minds, as in those of right-wingers generally, the Bolshevik acts were transformed, irrationally, into Jewish acts, a transformation helped along by the existence of a high proportion of Jews among the early Bolshevik leaders. (Inclined to anti-Semitism from the start, the rightists ignored the fact that, as Nolte points out, the proportion among the Mensheviks was higher, and, of course, the great majority of the European Jews were never Communists.) A similar, ideologically mandated displacement, however, occurred among the Communists themselves: after the assassination of Uritsky and the attempted assassination of Lenin by Social Revolutionaries, for instance, hundreds of "bourgeois" hostages were executed.

The Communists never ceased proclaiming that all of their enemies were tools of a single conspiracy of the "world bourgeoisie."

The facts regarding the Ukrainian terror famine of the early 1930s and the Stalinist gulag were also known in broad outline in European right-wing circles. When all is said and done, Nolte concludes, "the Gulag came before Auschwitz." If it had not been for what happened in Soviet Russia, European fascism, especially Nazism and the Nazi massacre of the Jews,[8] would most probably not have been what they were.

The Onslaught on Nolte

Nolte’s previous work on the history of socialism could hardly have made him persona grata with leftist intellectuals in his own country. Among other things, he had emphasized the archaic, reactionary character of Marxism and the anti-Semitism of many of the early socialists, and had referred to "liberal capitalism" or "economic freedom," rather than socialism, as "the real and modernizing revolution."

The attack on Nolte was launched by the leftist philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who took issue not with Nolte’s historiography — his essays showed that Habermas was in no position to judge this — but with what he viewed as its ideological implications. Habermas also targeted a couple of other German historians, and added other points, like the plan to establish museums of German history in West Berlin and in Bonn, to the indictment. But Nolte and his thesis have continued to be at the center of the Historikerstreit. He was accused of "historicizing" and "relativizing" the Holocaust and chided for questioning its "uniqueness."

Several of the biggest names among academic historians in the Federal Republic, and then in Britain and America as well, joined in the hunt, gleefully seizing upon some of Nolte’s less felicitous expressions and weaker minor points. In Berlin, radicals set fire to his car; at Oxford, Wolfson College withdrew an invitation to deliver a lecture, after pressure was applied, just as a major German organization dispensing research grants rescinded a commitment to Nolte under Israeli pressure. In the American press, ignorant editors, who couldn’t care less anyway, now routinely permit Nolte to be represented as an apologist for Nazism.

It cannot be said that Nolte has demonstrated the truth of his thesis — his achievement is rather to have pointed out important themes that call for further research — and his presentation is in some respects flawed. Still, one might well wonder what there is in his basic account to justify such a frenzy. The comparison between Nazi and Soviet atrocities has often been drawn by respected scholars. Robert Conquest, for instance, states,

For Russians — and it is surely right that this should become true for the world as a whole — Kolyma [one part of the Gulag] is a word of horror wholly comparable to Auschwitz … it did indeed kill some three million people, a figure well in the range of that of the victims of the Final Solution.[9]

Others have gone on to assert a causal connection. Paul Johnson maintains that important elements of the Soviet forced-labor camps system were copied by the Nazis, and posits a link between the Ukrainian famine and the Holocaust:

The camps system was imported by the Nazis from Russia…. Just as the Roehm atrocities goaded Stalin into imitation, so in turn the scale of his mass atrocities encouraged Hitler in his wartime schemes to change the entire demography of Eastern Europe … Hitler’s "final solution" for the Jews had its origins not only in his own fevered mind but in the collectivization of the Soviet peasantry.[10]

Nick Eberstadt, an expert on Soviet demography, concludes that "the Soviet Union is not only the original killer state, but the model one."[11] As for the tendency among European rightists after 1917 to identify the Bolshevik regime with the Jews, there is no end of evidence.[12] Indeed, it was an immensely tragic error to which even many outside of right-wing circles were liable. In 1920, after a visit to Russia, Bertrand Russell wrote to Lady Ottoline Morell:

Bolshevism is a closed tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar’s, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews.[13]

But, despite the existence of a supporting scholarly context for Nolte’s position, he remains beleaguered in his native land, with only isolated individuals, like Joachim Fest, coming to his defense. If recent English-language publications are a reliable indication, his situation will not improve as the controversy spreads to other countries.

Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?

The recent work by Arno J. Mayer, of Princeton, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?[14] is in some respects informative;[15] above all, however, it is a perfect illustration of why Nolte’s work was so badly needed.

We can leave aside Mayer’s approach to the origins of the "Judeocide" (as he calls it), which is "functionalist" rather than "intentionalist," in the current jargon, and which provoked a savage review.[16] What is pertinent here is his presentation of the killing of the European Jews as an outgrowth of the fierce hatred of "Judeobolshevism" that allegedly permeated all of German and European ”bourgeois” society after 1917, reaching its culmination in the Nazi movement and government. This approach lends support to Nolte’s thesis.

The problem, however, is that Mayer offers no real grounds for the bitter hatred that so many harbored for Bolshevism, aside from the threat that Bolshevism abstractly posed to their narrow and retrograde "class interests." Virtually the only major Soviet atrocity even alluded to in the 449 pages of text (there are, oddly and inexcusably, no notes)[17] is the deportation of some 400,000 Jews from the territories annexed after the Hitler-Stalin pact. Even here, however, Mayer hastens to reassure us that the policy was "not specifically anti-Semitic and did not preclude assimilated and secularized Jews from continuing to secure important positions in civil and political society … a disproportionate number of Jews came to hold posts in the secret police and to serve as political commissars in the armed service." Well, mazel tov.

The fear and loathing of Communism that Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians, for instance, felt in the interwar period, strongly endorsed by their national churches, is qualified by Mayer as an "obsession." With Mayer, fear of Communism is always "obsessional" and limited to the "ruling classes," prey to an anti-Bolshevik "demonology." But the recourse to clinical and theological terms is no substitute for historical understanding, and Mayer’s account — Soviet Communism with the murders left out — precludes such understanding.

Consider the case of Clemens August Count von Galen, Archbishop of Munster.

As Mayer notes, Galen led the Catholic bishops of Germany in 1941 in publicly protesting the Nazi policy of murdering mental patients. The protest was shrewdly crafted and proved successful: Hitler suspended the killings. Yet, as Mayer further notes, Archbishop Galen (deplorably) "consecrated" the war against Soviet Russia. Why?

To cite another example: Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, was an opponent of murdering the Jews and attempted, within his limited means, to save the Jews of Budapest. Yet he continued to have his troops fight against the Soviet and alongside the Germans long after the coming defeat was obvious. Why? Could it possibly be that, in both cases, the previous bloody history of Soviet Communism had something to do their attitude? in Mayer’s retelling, Crusader murders in Jerusalem in the year 1096 are an important part of the story, but not Bolshevik murders in the 1920s and ’30s.

Allegations of Soviet crimes do appear in Mayer’s book. But they are put in the mouths of Hitler and Goebbels, with no comment from Mayer, thereby signaling their "fanatical" and "obsessional" character, e. g., "the führer ranted about bolshevism wading deeper in blood than tsarism" (actually, Hitler’s claim here is hardly controversial).

In fact, it seems likely that Mayer simply does not believe that there were anything approaching tens of millions of victims of the Soviet regime. He writes, for instance, of "an iron nexus between absolute war and large-scale political murder in eastern Europe." But most of the large-scale Stalinist political murders occurred when the Soviet Union was at peace. The massive upheavals, with their accompanying terror and mass killings, that characterized Soviet history in the 1920s and 30s, Mayer refers to in almost unbelievably anodyne terms as "the general transformation of political and civil society." In other words, Mayer gives every evidence of being a Ukrainian famine, Great Terror, and gulag "revisionist." This is an aspect of Mayer’s book that the reviewers in the mainstream press had an obligation to point out but omitted to do so.

Mayer has no patience with any suggestion that great crimes may have been committed against Germans in the Second World War and its aftermath. Here he joins the vast majority of his contemporaries, professional and lay alike, as well as the Nuremberg Tribunal itself.

Taboo War Crimes — the Allies’

If Soviet mass atrocities provide a historical context for Nazi crimes, so does a set of crimes that few, inside or outside the Federal Republic, seem willing to bring into the debate: the ones perpetrated, planned, or conspired to by the Western Allies.

There was, first of all, the policy of terror bombing of the cities of Germany, begun by the British in 1942. The Principal Assistant Secretary of the Air Ministry later boasted of the British initiative in the wholesale massacring of civilians from the air.[18] Altogether, the RAF and US Army Air Corps killed around 600,000 German civilians,[19] whose deaths were aptly characterized by the British military historian and Major-General J.F.C. Fuller as "appalling slaughterings, which would have disgraced Attila."[20] A recent British military historian has concluded: "The cost of the bomber offensive in life, treasure, and moral superiority over the enemy tragically outstripped the results that it achieved."[21]

The planned, but aborted, Allied atrocity was the Morgenthau Plan, concocted by the US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and initialed by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference, in September 1944. The Plan aimed to transform postwar Germany into an agricultural and pastoral country, incapable of waging war because it would have no industry. Even the coal mines of the Ruhr were to be flooded. Of course, in the process tens of millions of Germans would have died. The inherent insanity of the plan very quickly led Roosevelt’s other advisors to press him into abandoning it, but not before it had become public (as its abandonment did not).

Following upon the policy of "unconditional surrender" announced in early 1943, the Morgenthau Plan stoked the Nazi rage. "Goebbels and the controlled Nazi press had a field day … ‘Roosevelt and Churchill agree at Quebec to the Jewish Murder Plan,’ and ‘Details of the Devilish Plan of Destruction: Morgenthau the Spokesman of World Judaism.’"[22]

There are two further massive crimes involving the Allied governments that deserve mention (limiting ourselves to the European theater). Today it is fairly well-known that, when the war was over, British and American political and military leaders directed the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Soviet subjects (and the surrender of some, like the Cossacks, who had never been subjects of the Soviet state). Many were executed, most were channeled into the gulag. Solzhenitsyn had bitter words for the Western leaders who handed over to Stalin the remnants of Vlasov’s Russian Army of Liberation:

In their own country, Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious … what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin’s hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender.[23]

Of Winston Churchill, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:

He turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women, and children…. This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths.[24]

The great crime that is today virtually forgotten was the expulsion starting in 1945 of the Germans from their centuries-old homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland, and elsewhere. About 16 million persons were displaced, with about 2 million of them dying in the process.[25] This is a fact, which, as the American legal scholar Alfred de Zayas dryly notes, "has somehow escaped the attention it deserves."[26] While those directly guilty were principally the Soviets, Poles, and Czechs (the last led by the celebrated democrat and humanist, Eduard Benes), British and American leaders early on authorized the principle of expulsion of the Germans and thus set the stage for what occurred at the war’s end. Anne O’Hare McCormick, the New York Times correspondent who witnessed the exodus of the Germans, reported in 1946:

The scale of this resettlement and the conditions in which it takes place are without precedent in history. No one seeing its horrors firsthand can doubt that it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution.

McCormick added: "We share responsibility for horrors only comparable to Nazi cruelties."[27]

Bringing All State Terrorists to Account

In the Federal Republic today, to mention any of these Allied — or even Soviet — crimes in the same breath with the Nazis is to invite the devastating charge of attempting an Aufrechnen — an offsetting, or balancing against. The implication is that one is somehow seeking to diminish the Nazis’ undying guilt for the Holocaust by pointing to the guilt of other governments for other crimes. This seems to me to be a thoroughly warped perspective.

All mass murderers — all of the state terrorists on a grand scale, whatever their ethnicity or that of their victims — must be arraigned before the court of history. It is impermissible to let some of them off the hook, even if the acts of others may be characterized as unique in their brazen embrace of evil and their sickening horror. As Lord Acton said, the historian should be a hanging judge, for the muse of history is not Clio, but Rhadamanthus, the avenger of innocent blood.

There was a time in America when well-known writers felt an obligation to remind their fellow citizens of the criminal misdeeds of their government, even against Germans. Thus, the courageous radical Dwight Macdonald indicted the air war against German civilians during the war itself.[28] On the other side of the spectrum, the respected conservative journalist William Henry Chamberlin, in a book published by Henry Regnery, assailed the genocidal Morgenthau Plan and labeled the expulsion of the eastern Germans "one of the most barbarous actions in European history."[29]

Nowadays the only publication that seems to care about these old wrongs is the Spectator (the real one, of course), which happens also to be the best-edited political magazine in English. The Spectator has published articles by British writers honorably admitting the shame they felt upon viewing what remains of the great cities of Germany, once famed in the annals of science and art. Other contributors have pointed out the meaning of the loss of the old German populations of the area that is today again being fashionably referred to as Mitteleuropa. A Hungarian writer, G.M. Tamas, recently wrote,

The Jews were murdered and mourned…. But who has mourned the Germans? Who feels any guilt for the millions expelled from Silesia and Moravia and the Volga region, slaughtered during their long trek, starved, put into camps, raped, frightened, humiliated?… Who dares to remember that the expulsion of the Germans made the communist parties quite popular in the 1940s? Who is revolted because the few Germans left behind, whose ancestors built our cathedrals, monasteries, universities, and railway stations, today cannot have a primary school in their own language? The world expects Germany and Austria to "come to terms" with their past. But no one will admonish us, Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians, to do the same. Eastern Europe’s dark secret remains a secret. A universe of culture was destroyed.[30]

More remarkably still, Auberon Waugh drew attention to the fervid support given by British leaders to the Nigerian generals during the Civil War (1967—70), at a time "when the International Red Cross assured us that 10,000 Biafrans a day were dying of starvation," victims of a conscious, calculated policy.[31] His observation was a propos of the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the nearly universal execration of the Chinese leaders; it was a telling one.

The Wider Context

In fact, both the Soviet and Nazi mass murders must be placed in a wider context. Just as it is unlikely that Nazi racist ideology of itself can account for the murder of the Jews — and so many others — so Leninist amoralism is probably not enough to account for Bolshevik crimes. The crucial intervening historical fact may well be the mass killings of the First World War — of millions of soldiers, but also of thousands of civilians on the high seas by German submarines and of hundreds of thousands of civilians in central Europe by the British hunger blockade.[32] Arno Mayer makes the important point in regard to World War I that "this immense bloodletting … contributed to inuring Europe to the mass killings of the future." He means this in connection with the Nazis, but it probably also holds for the Communists themselves, witnesses to the results of a war brought about by "capitalist imperialism." None of this, of course, excuses any of the subsequent state criminals.

In fact, all great states in this century have been killer states, to a greater or lesser degree. Naturally, the "degree" matters — sometimes very much. But it makes no sense to isolate one mass atrocity, historically and morally, and then to concentrate on it to the virtual exclusion of all others. The result of such a perverted moralism can only be to elevate to the status of hero leaders who badly wanted hanging, and to bolster the sham rectitude of states that will be all the more prone to murder since history "proves" that they are the "good" states.

Notes

[1] Washington Post, Oct. 23, 1988.

[2] Robert Conquest in The Independent (London), Dec. 5, 1988.

[3] New York Times, March 25, 1989.

[4] New York Times, Feb. 4, 1989. Stephen F. Cohen, "The Survivor as Historian: Introduction," in Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin: A Portrait in Tyranny, trans. George Saunders (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. vii.

[5] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (Macmillan: London, 1968), p. 533. See also note 2.

[6] Ibid., 213.

[7] Nolte’s first essay to draw fire appeared originally in English: "Between Myth and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s," in an important volume edited by H.W. Koch, Aspects of the Third Reich (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 17—39. Some of Nolte’s contributions to the debate, as well as those of many other writers, appear in the useful collection, "Historikerstreit": Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987). Nolte’s Der europaeische Buergerkrieg, 1917—1945. Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt/ Main: Propylen, 1987) has not yet been translated. His rebuttals to some of the attacks are contained in his Das Vergehen der Vergangenheit. Antwort an meine Kritiker im sogenannten Historikerstreit (2nd. ed., Ullstein: Berlin, 1988).

[8] The Nazis were responsible, of course, for the deaths of millions of non-Jews, especially Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. The Jewish genocide, however, has been the focus of discussion.

[9] Robert Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (New York: Viking, 1978), pp. 15—16.

[10] Paul Johnson, Modern Times (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 304—305. Johnson does not, however, provide any relevant sources for this claim.

[11] Nick Eberstadt, Introduction to Iosif G. Dyadkin, Unnatural Deaths in the U.S.S.R., 1928—1954 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1983), 4.

[12] See Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988), passim.

[13] Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, II, 1914—1944 (Boston: Uttle, Brown, 1968), p. 172.

[14] See note 12.

[15] Mayer concludes that Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union was not intended as a step toward "world domination," but was the culmination of his plans to provide Germany with the Lebensraum, or living-space, which he, in his archaic way, believed was a prerequisite for German survival and prosperity.

[16] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "False Witness," The New Republic, April 17, 1989, pp. 39—44. A fair statement of the differences between intentionalist and functionalists can be found in Saul Friedlander’s introduction to Gerald Fleming’s Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

[17] Notes would, presumably, have added to the book’s length, but the author could have compensated by omitting his rehashings of well-known political and military history in the period.

[18] J. M. Spaight, cited in J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1939—45. A Strategical and Tactical History (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954), p. 222.

[19] Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: Dial, 1979), p. 352.

[20] Fuller, The Second World War, p. 228.

[21] Hastings, Bomber Command. The best short introduction to the subject is the review of Hastings’s book by the gifted London journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Spectator, Sept. 29, 1979, reprinted in Inquiry, Dec. 24, 1979. It was the only review Inquiry ever reprinted.

[22] Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender. The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War 11 (1961; repro. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974), p. 76. On the Morgenthau Plan, see ibid., pp. 68—77. For the text of the plan, see Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam. The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans. Background, Execution, and Consequences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 229—232.

[23] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918—1956. An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 259n.

[24] Ibid., pp. 259—260.

[25] Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. xix.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., p. 123.

[28] Many of Dwight Macdonald’s essays critical of the Allies’ conduct of the war were collected in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957).

[29] William Henry Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950), pp. 304, 310, 312.

[30] G.M. Tamas, "The Vanishing Germans," The Spectator, May 6, 1989.

[31] The Spectator, June 10, 1989.

[32] On the British hunger blockade and its likely effect in helping shape Nazi brutality, see my contribution, "The Politics of Hunger: A Review," The Review of Austrian Economics, III (1988), pp. 253—259.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

The Best of Ralph Raico

The Secret Truth About Government and Politics

Ralph Raico — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:00:00 +0000

First published as "Murray Rothbard on His Semicentennial" in the Libertarian Review, 1976

Having been asked to write a brief appreciation of Murray Rothbard on the occasion of his 50th (!) birthday, I find myself in some embarrassment. In a sense, nothing could be easier. I have known Murray for nearly 20 years — since we met at the NYU seminar of his mentor, the great Ludwig von Mises — so there is certainly enough material for a few hundred words. It is the wealth of the material and the complexity of the subject that are the problem. But I will try to communicate to you something of his scholarly accomplishments as well as of his character and personality.

Years ago, Murray had already made great contributions to economics. Most formidable of all is Man, Economy, and State, his economic magnum opus, of which Mises wrote: "… an epochal contribution.… Henceforth all essential studies … will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard."

In Mises’s view, the outstanding virtue of the work, distinguishing it from the efforts of nearly all other writers, was its powerful systematization of the whole field of economic action, drawing out the theoretical structure from the basic axioms of the discipline. With Man, Economy, and State, Mises concluded, "Rothbard joins the ranks of the eminent economists."

Tackling the field of American economic history, Murray went on to analyze important milestones with the Panic of 1819 and America’s Great Depression.

More recently he has devoted himself to a profound study of colonial America (the second of four completed volumes has just been published), and this work has been praised by Arthur Ekirch, the eminent historian. Rounding out his major works — so far — are Power and Market, a systematic presentation of individualist anarchism, and For a New Liberty, the comprehensive case for libertarianism.

Although he has not contributed directly to revisionist studies regarding the origin and conduct of the wars waged by the American state, Murray has a wide knowledge of the field. In fact, he is the main reason that revisionism has become a crucial part of the whole libertarian position. It was Murray’s achievement to combine the data and interpretation of revisionism with an updated libertarian analysis of the state, thus to furnish us with a realistic account of 20th-century history.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that a major virtue of Murray’s position — as contrasted even to that of earlier libertarian scholars — has been its bracing realism regarding the nature of politics and the state. In his view, politicians are not the keepers of "the sacred res publica"; nor are they well-intentioned men who somehow chance to go wrong consistently and often diabolically (more or less the conservative and "liberal" views, respectively).

Rather, as Murray — more than anyone else — has led us to see, it can be said of the state rulers what Gloucester in Lear says of the gods.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.

It was because Murray took the conclusions of revisionism quite seriously and meditated on the meaning of war and imperialism that he was able to come upon this deep truth concerning that "earthly god," the state.

The realistic quality of his political analysis is evident also in the increasing use he is making of the concepts of "class" and "class conflict" (not in the wrongheaded and superficial Marxist sense) as explanatory devices in approaching modern history.

Finally, Murray is also largely responsible for the whole analysis of contemporary American politics revolving around the concepts of "Old Right" and "New Right," without which, I think, it would be impossible to make sense of what has happened to the United States politically in the last 40 years, or to locate the current libertarian movement in its proper context.

Having produced what is arguably the culmination of the whole classical-liberal and libertarian tradition, Murray is a professor at the New York Polytechnic Institute — by no means academic Siberia — but Princeton it’s not.

The reasons for this surprising circumstance are that he belongs to the currently minority faction of the economics profession that is Austrian, that he is lacking in Ivy League caution, and that he is — how shall I put it? — fairly outspoken. Thus he has not been accorded the kind of recognition that his work would seem to demand. But this happened to the great Mises himself, and ultimately it’s no big deal.

To counterbalance this, there is the satisfaction of knowing that the Austrian school is increasingly attracting the interest and attention of bright young economists and is clearly on the upswing.

Passing from theory to practice, it is due to Murray more than anyone else that libertarianism is today not simply a political philosophy but a movement. For decades, liberty has been as vital to him — in the most personal spiritual way — as great systems of political thought have always been to those who have elaborated them and meant to see them prevail.

Thus, he has devoted his time and financial resources, as well as his evidently inexhaustible intellectual energy, to our ideas throughout his adult life. His devotion has shown itself in the seeking out and cultivation of younger scholars; in the publication of his own libertarian journals, Left and Right and now Libertarian Forum; in his commitment to the burgeoning Libertarian Party; and in his creation with friends and associates of the new Center for Libertarian Studies.

These are only the highpoints of a lifetime of promoting our ideas, however. I will mention only two other instances, which will have to stand for dozens: his constant encouragement in every way of New Individualist Review in the early and middle 60s, and his helping to ingerminate the rather fertile mind of Robert Nozick (for which the latter gives him generous credit in his distinguished book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia).

Along with his scholarship and activism there is — who could miss it? — a charming and fascinating personality. What is open to the observer even on first acquaintance is a system of traits, habits, and idiosyncrasies so interesting you might have thought it was invented on purpose. A central part of this is certainly his great wit. But with him, wit and humor, given or received, are not simply pleasant addenda to living but a style of life. (This quality of being perpetually challenged by the world’s absurdity, and responding with a continuing satiric stance suggests, one speculates, a disillusioned romantic.)

There is also the aspect of Murray the man that one might term a kind of old-fashioned bohemianism, a sort of proud down-at-the-heels-ness, bringing to mind earlier New York Jewish intellectuals such as Frank Chodorov and Paul Goodman. Image meant less than nothing to this sort of man. He was, after all, about more important business. The meaning of life is the struggle for the Good Cause — who has time for nonsense about "image," or worrying about what people will think of you? Such men, of course, are the salt of the earth.

Now, naturally, one cannot agree with everything that Murray writes and says (I, for instance, disagree with him on women’s liberation). But that has no effect on what he has done and is.

He is a man of great achievement and immense scholarship; an indefatigable worker; a political theorist of a very high order indeed, with a genius for synthesis and discerning the big picture; the most significant living anarchist writer; the most significant name in the whole noble history of individualist anarchism; and, all in all — in my opinion and in the opinion of a number of others — from the viewpoint of the prospects for human liberty quite simply the most important intellectual in the world today.

Happy birthday, Murray.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

The Best of Ralph Raico

Time To Stop Blaming the Germans

Ralph Raico — Tue, 18 May 2010 05:00:00 +0000

This talk was delivered at the 1996 Rothbard-Rockwell Report conference in San Mateo, California, and was first published in the January 1997 issue of Chronicles.

Not long ago a German friend remarked to me, jokingly, that he imagined the only things American college students were apt to associate with Germany nowadays were beer, Lederhosen, and the Nazis. I replied that, basically, there was only one thing that Americans, whether college students or not, associated with Germany. When the Germans are mentioned, it is Nazism that first springs to mind; whatever else may occur to one later will be colored and contaminated by thoughts of the Nazis. When Molly Ivins (described by Justin Raimondo, in his book, Colin Powell and the Power Elite, as a u201Cliberal columnist and known plagiaristu201D) remarked, of Pat Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican convention, u201Cit sounded better in the original German,u201D everyone instantly knew what she meant. The casual slander was picked up by William Safire and others, and made the rounds. A constant din from Hollywood and the major media has helped instruct us on what u201CGermanu201D really stands for.

And yet, as some Germans plaintively insist, there are a thousand years of history u201Con the other sideu201D of the Third Reich. In cultural terms, it is a not unimpressive record (in which the Austrians must be counted; at least until 1866, Austria was as much a part of the German lands as Bavaria or Saxony). From printing to the automobile to the jet engine to the creation of whole branches of science, the German contribution to European civilization has been, one might say, rather significant. Albertus Magnus, Luther, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Humboldt, Ranke, Nietzsche, Carl Menger, Max Weber-these are not negligible figures in the history of thought. And then, of course, there’s the music.

The German role over centuries in transmitting advanced culture to the peoples to the east and south was critical at certain stages of their development. The Hungarian liberal, Gaspar M. Tamas, speaking for his own people, the Czechs, and others, wrote of the Germans who had lived among them and were driven out in 1945, that their u201Cancestors built our cathedrals, monasteries, universities, and railway stations.u201D As for our country, the highly laudatory chapter that Thomas Sowell devotes to the German immigrants in Ethnic America is one of the best in a fascinating book. More than five million Germans came to the United States in the nineteenth century alone (according to recent census figures, around fifty-seven million Americans now claim to be of German heritage). Together with the descendants of the immigrants from the British Isles, the Germans form the basic American stock. They were highly valued as neighbors, and their ways were woven into the fabric of American life — the Christmas tree and u201CSilent Night,u201D for instance, and the family-centered Sunday, with its u201Cjovial yet orderly activities,u201D as an admiring contemporary put it. Is there any doubt that when Germans composed the leading population in hundreds of American cities and towns, these were happier places to live in than many of them are today?

Yet the air is filled with incessant harping on an interval of twelve years in the annals of this ancient European race. In the normal course of things, one would expect a countervailing defense to emanate from Germany itself. But it is precisely there, among the left intelligentsia, that many of the prime German-haters are to be found. The reasons for this are fairly clear.

Over the last decades, these intellectuals have grown increasingly frustrated at their own people, who remain firmly bourgeois and order-loving, with little interest in neo-Marxist transformations of their way of life. Increasingly, too, that frustration has been vented in hatred and contempt for everything German. Most of all, the Germans were condemned for their hopelessly misguided past and bourgeois social structure, which supposedly produced Nazism. Anguished complaints like that from the conservative historian Michael Stuermer, that u201Cwe cannot live while continually pulverizing ourselves and our own history into nothing, while we make that history into a permanent source of infinite feelings of guilt,u201D were merely further evidence that the Germans stood in dire need of radical reeducation. A large segment of the left intelligentsia made no bones of its sympathy for the u201CGerman Democratic Republic,u201D which at least did not enslave its subjects to consumerism and the u201Celbow societyu201D prevalent in the west. Naturally, there were certain excesses, but these could be explained by the pressures issuing from Bonn and Washington. For these intellectuals, the GDR dictatorship — kept in existence by Soviet tanks and forced to resort to building a wall to keep its subjects in — was a u201Cnormal stateu201D; they denounced any attempts to u201Cdestabilizeu201D it, even by the forthright expression of anti-Communist opinion (u201Cprimitive anti-Communism,u201D it was called). They spoke warmly of Communism’s u201Chumanistic valuesu201D and u201Cpositive core,u201D which sharply distinguished it from National Socialism. In this way, they exhibited a characteristic failing of intellectuals: preferring to look to theory rather than reality.

The German left’s u201Cmarch through the institutionsu201D after 1968 was spectacularly successful in the media, schools and universities, churches, and more and more in politics. Its control of the cultural infrastructure produced a situation where the public declaration of any pro-German attitude was viewed as evidence of Rechtsradikalismus. Some thirty years ago, when Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, at a dinner in Jerusalem, expressed to Konrad Adenauer his confidence that u201Cunder your leadership the German people will return to the community of civilized peoples,u201D the old Chancellor retorted: u201CMr. Prime Minister, what you think is of no concern to me…I represent the German people. You have insulted them, and so tomorrow morning I shall depart.u201D It is impossible to imagine any recent German leader, in particular, the lickspittle former Federal President Richard von Weizsaecker, responding with such unabashed patriotism, especially to an Israeli.

Then came 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and signs that the Germans might still harbor some sense of national pride. The conservative historian and publicist Rainer Zitelmann writes that u201Cthe left experienced the reunification [of Germany] and the collapse of socialism as a defeat,u201D a grave setback that had to be made good, lest a u201Cturnu201D occur and the left lose its power to control political debate. The perfect opportunity presented itself when a few half-wits started firebombing the homes and asylums of foreign residents. (These incidents were strategically exploited in the same way as the Oklahoma City bombing has been exploited in the United States.) Now came an all-out campaign against allegedly deep-seated German u201Cracismu201D and u201Chostility to foreigners,u201D accompanied, naturally, by hysterical warnings of a u201CNazi resurgenceu201D and endless allusions to the affinities between Nazism and bourgeois Germany. Thus, the normal human desire to live in one’s own country among one’s own kind was equated with the will to annihilate other peoples manifested by Hitler and his butchers.

The latest spasm of German abuse and German self-hatred occurred with the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Launched with a remarkable publicity barrage by Knopf, absurdly acclaimed by the author’s Harvard friends, it was touted by Abe Rosenthal in the New York Times for packing the emotional equivalent of a first visit to Auschwitz. The thesis of this work, which won an award from the American Political Science Association, is that the Judeocide is easily explained: for centuries the Germans had been u201Celiminationist anti-Semites, and under the Nazis, they became openly and enthusiastically u201Cexterminationist.u201D Suffice it to say that in public debates recognized Holocaust scholars demolished the crooked methodology and preposterous claims of this academic hustler.

The best review appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine and the excellent German conservative magazine Criticon, by Alfred de Zayas, an American historian and jurist and respected authority on international law.

Whenever anti-Semitic attitudes or acts are mentioned, de Zayas observes, Goldhagen speaks of u201Cthe Germansu201D — not u201Cthe Nazis,u201D or even u201Cmany Germansu201D — offering no justification at all; it is simply a polemical trick. He neglects to mention well-known facts, e.g., that everyone connected with the killing of the Jews was bound by Fhrer Order No. 1, as well as by special orders from Himmler, mandating the strictest silence, under penalty of death. So it should not be surprising that, for example, the former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, during the war a Luftwaffe officer, testified that he had never heard or known anything of the annihilation of the Jews; or that Countess Doenhoff, publisher of the liberal paper, Die Zeit, should state that, despite her connections to many key people during the war, she knew nothing of the mass-killings in the camps, and that u201CI heard the name u2018Auschwitz’ for the first time after the war.u201D Goldhagen simply disregards major standard works that contradict his thesis. He claims, for example, that the German people approved of and joined in the Kristallnacht in a kind of nationwide Volksfest. Yet Sarah Gordon, in her authoritative Hitler, Germans, and the u201CJewish Questionu201D wrote: u201Cthere was a torrent of reports indicating public disapproval of Kristallnacht … [whatever the motivation] what is not in doubt, however, is the fact that the majority did disapprove … after Kristallnacht, the Nazis deliberately tried to conceal their measures against the Jews.u201D

None of the scholarly critics made much of an impression on audiences that witnessed the debates in the United States or during Goldhagen’s tour of Germany late last summer, and certainly not on sales of the book. In any case, most of them, except for de Zayas, overlooked the function performed by a work such as Goldhagen’s. While he indicts the Germans as uniquely, pathologically anti-Semitic and while some of his critics retort that, no, all of Christendom, indeed, Christianity itself, is implicated in the Jewish genocide, attention is kept fixed on the supposed single great crime of the recent past, if not of all of human history to the virtual exclusion of all others. In particular, the misdeeds of Communist regimes are unduly neglected.

A decade ago, Ernst Nolte, then of the Free University of Berlin, ignited the Historikerstreit, or dispute of historians, and became the target of a campaign of defamation led by Juergen Habermas, by asking: u201CDidn’t the u2018Gulag Archipelago’ come before Auschwitz? Wasn’t the u2018class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual resupposition of the u2018race murder’ of the National Socialists?u201D These are still good questions. In fact, Stalinist — and Maoist — offenses, while acknowledged, are generally downplayed and have achieved nothing remotely approaching the publicity of the Nazi massacre of the Jews. In the United States, it is likely that a person who keeps abreast of the news media will encounter references to the Holocaust literally every day of his life. Yet who has heard of Kolyma, where more people were done to death than the present official count for Auschwitz? The figures for the victims of Maoist rule that are starting to come out of China suggest a total in the range of 30 or 40 million, or more. Do these facts even make a dent in public consciousness?

Moreover, there is an aspect of Stalinist atrocities that is very pertinent to the u201CGoldhagen Debate.u201D In their history of the Soviet Union, Utopia in Power, Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich touch on the issue of whether the German people had full knowledge of the Nazi crimes. They state no opinion. But regarding the Soviets’ murderous war on the peasantry, including the Ukrainian terror-famine, they write:

There is no question that the Soviet city people knew about the massacre in the countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal it. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could see the thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages and were dying of hunger. Kulaks, u201Cdekulakized persons,u201D and u201Ckulak henchmenu201D died alike. They were not considered human.

There has been no outcry for the Russian people to seek atonement and no one speaks of their u201Ceternal guilt.u201D It goes without saying that the misdeeds of Communism, in Russia, China, or elsewhere, are never debited to internationalism and egalitarianism as those of Nazism are to nationalism and racism.

Pointing to Communist crimes is not meant to u201Ctrivializeu201D the destruction of European Jewry, nor can it do so. The massacre of the Jews was one of the worst things that ever happened. But even supposing that it was the worst thing that ever happened, couldn’t some arrangement be worked out whereby Communist mass-murders are mentioned once for every ten times (or hundred times?) the Holocaust is brought up? Perhaps also, if we must have publicly-financed museums commemorating the foreign victims of foreign regimes, some memorial to the victims of Communism might be considered, not on the Mall itself, of course, but maybe in a low-rent area of Washington?

If the crimes of Communism go relatively unmentioned, what are we to say of crimes committed against Germans? One of the most pernicious legacies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao is that any political leader responsible for less than, say, three or four million deaths is let off the hook. This hardly seems right, and it was not always so. In fact — the reader may find this incredible — there was a time when American conservatives took the lead in publicizing Allied, and especially American, atrocities against Germans. High-level journalists like William Henry Chamberlin, in America’s Second Crusade, and Freda Utley, in The High Cost of Vengeance, pilloried those who had committed what Utley called u201Cour crimes against humanityu201D — the men who directed the terror-bombing of the German cities, conspired in the expulsion of some fifteen million Germans from their ancestral lands in the east (in the course of which about two million died — see de Zayas’s Nemesis at Potsdam), and plotted the u201Cfinal solution of the German questionu201D through the Morgenthau plan. Utley even exposed the sham u201CDachau trialsu201D of German soldiers and civilians in the first years of the Allied occupation, detailing the use of methods u201Cworthy of the GPU, the Gestapo, and the SSu201D to extort confessions. She insisted that the same ethical standards had to be applied to victors and vanquished alike. If not, then we were declaring that u201CHitler was justified in his belief that u2018might makes right.’u201D Both books were brought out by the late Henry Regnery, the last of the Old Right greats, whose house was the bastion of post—World War II revisionism, publishing works like Charles Callan Tansill’s classic, Back Door to War.

Keeping the Nazi period constantly before our eyes serves the ideological interests of a number of influential groups. That it benefits the Zionist cause, at least as many Zionists see it, is obvious. It is highly useful also to the advocates of a globalist America. Hitler and the crying need for the great crusade to destroy him are the chief exhibits in their case against any form of American u201Cisolationism,u201D past or present. Any suggestion that our Soviet ally in that crusade was guilty of even greater offenses than Nazi Germany, that the United States government itself was incriminated in barbarous acts during and in the aftermath of that war, must be downplayed or suppressed, lest the historical picture grow too complex.

The obsession with the never-ending guilt of the Germans also advances the ends of those who look forward to the extinction of the nation-state and national identity, at least for the West. As the philosopher Robert Maurer argues, it inculcates in the Germans u201Ca permanent bad conscience, and keeps them from developing any normal national self-awareness.u201D In this way, it functions u201Cas a model for the cosmopolitan supersession of every nationalism,u201D which many today are striving towards. Ernst Nolte has recently suggested another strategy at work, aiming at the same goal. Nothing is clearer than that we are in the midst of a vast campaign to delegitimize western civilization. In this campaign, Nolte writes, radical feminism joins with Third World anti-Occidentalism and multiculturalism within the western nations u201Cto instrumentalize to the highest degree the u2018murder of six millions Jews by the Germans,’ and to place it in the larger context of the genocides by the predatory and conquering West, so that u2018homo hitlerensis’ ultimately appears as merely a special case of u2018homo occidentalis.’u201D The purpose is to strike at u201Cthe cultural and linguistic homogeneity of the national states, achieved over centuries, and open the gates to a massive immigration,u201D so that in the end the nations of the West should cease to exist.

There seem to be cultural dynamics operating that will intensify rather than abate the present fixation. Michael Wolffsohn, an Israeli-born Jew who teaches modern history in Germany, has warned that Judaism is being emptied of its religious content and linked solely to the tribulations of the Jews through history, above all, the Holocaust. More than one commentator has noted that as the West loses any sense of morality rooted in reason, tradition, or faith, yet still feels the need for some secure moral direction, it increasingly finds it in the one acknowledged u201Cabsolute evil,u201D the Holocaust. If these claims are true, then the growing secularization of Judaism and moral disarray of our culture will continue to make victims of the Germans and all the peoples of the West.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

The Best of Ralph Raico

Just How Evil Was Keynes?

Ralph Raico — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 +0000

From The Independent Review, v. 13, n. 2, Fall 2008, pp. 165—188.

Keynes and Neomercantilism

It is now common practice to rank John Maynard Keynes as one of modern history’s outstanding liberals, perhaps the most recent "great" in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson.[1]

Like these men, it is generally held, Keynes was a sincere — indeed, exemplary — believer in the free society. If he differed from the "classical" liberals in a few obvious and important ways, it was simply because he tried to update the essential liberal idea to suit the economic conditions of a new age.

There is no doubt that throughout his life Keynes endorsed various broad cultural values, such as tolerance and rationality, that are often referred to as "liberal," and, of course, he always called himself a liberal (as well as a Liberal — that is, a supporter of the British Liberal Party). But none of this carries great weight when it comes to classifying Keynes’s political thought.[2]

Prima facie, Keynes as model liberal is already paradoxical on account of his embrace of mercantilist doctrine. When The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes 1973b) appeared in 1936, W.H. Hutt was about to send his Economists and the Public (1936) to press. In later years, Hutt would subject Keynes’s system to detailed and withering criticism (Hutt 1963, 1979), but at this point he could only hurriedly insert some initial observations. What struck him most of all was that this renowned economist "would have us believe that the Mercantilists were right and their Classical critics were wrong" (a position expounded in chapter 23 of the General Theory) (Hutt 1936, p. 245).

Hutt was writing from the standpoint of economic science. Here we are dealing with the integrity of liberalism as a social philosophy. If, as I have argued elsewhere (Raico 1989, 1992, 1999, pp. 1—22), the liberal doctrine is characterized historically by a repudiation of the paternalism of the absolutist welfare state, it is characterized even more so by its rejection of the mercantilist component in 18th-century absolutism. How, then, can a writer who tried to rehabilitate mercantilism be counted among the liberal greats?[3]

In defense of Keynes, Maurice Cranston contends that no one would deny John Locke inclusion in the liberal ranks in spite of his adherence to mercantilism (1978, p. 111). Whether Locke espoused mercantilism is debatable; Karen Vaughn (1980) has furnished grounds for believing otherwise. But even if he had been a mercantilist, that fact would lend no support to Cranston’s argument. Locke is rightly viewed as a liberal great not because of his views on economic theory and policy, whatever they may have been, but by virtue of his libertarian account of natural rights and what he believed followed from that account.[4]

The Keynesian System

According to his supporters and himself, Keynes’s turn to neomercantilism was necessitated by his discovery of fundamental flaws in classic economics. The classical theory, the claim goes, proved impotent to explain the causes of either Britain’s chronic high unemployment in the 1920s or the Great Depression, whereas in The General Theory Keynes did both. He accomplished this feat by exposing the inherent gross defects of the undirected market economy, thereby effecting a "revolution" in economic thought.

Yet the particular crises to which Keynes reacted were themselves the products of misguided government policies. The persistence of high unemployment in Great Britain is traceable in part to Winston Churchill’s decision as chancellor of the exchequer to return to gold at the unrealistic prewar parity and in part to the high unemployment benefits (relative to wages) available after 1920. The Great Depression resulted primarily from government monetary management, in particular by the Federal Reserve System in the United States. Both of these crises are amenable to explanation by means of "orthodox" economic analysis, requiring no theoretical "revolution" (Rothbard 1963; Johnson 1975, pp. 109—12; Benjamin and Kochin 1979; Buchanan, Wagner, and Burton 1991).[5]

As Hutt noted, Keynes in The General Theory turned his back on all the recognized authorities, from Hume and Smith to Menger, Jevons, and Marshall, and on to Wicksell and Wicksteed. Those thinkers, whatever the degree of their adherence to strict laissez-faire, at least held that the market economy contained self-correcting forces that rendered business depressions temporary. Keynes, discarding his "orthodox" predecessors (and contemporaries), aligned himself with what he himself dubbed that "brave army of heretics," Silvio Gesell, J.A. Hobson, and other social-reformist and socialist critics of capitalism whom mainstream economists had dismissed as crackpots (Friedman 1997, p. 7).

In a popular essay in 1934, Keynes had already ranged himself on the side of these "heretics," the writers "who reject the idea that the existing economic system is, in any significant sense, self-adjusting…. The system is not self-adjusting, and, without purposive direction, it is incapable of translating our actual poverty into our potential plenty" (1973a, pp. 487, 489, 491). The General Theory was intended to provide the analytical framework to justify this position.

Changes in prices, wages, and interest rates, according to Keynes, do not fulfill the function ascribed to them in standard economic theory — tending to generate a full-employment equilibrium. The level of wages has no substantial effect on the volume of employment; the interest rate does not serve to equilibrate saving and investment; aggregate demand is normally insufficient to produce full employment; and so on. The false assumptions, conceptual incoherencies, and non sequiturs that vitiate these extravagant claims have been frequently exposed (for example, in Hazlitt 1959, [1960] 1995; Rothbard 1962, p. 2;: passim; Reisman 1998, pp. 862—94).[6] As James Buchanan sums up the issue, "There is simply no evidence to suggest that market economies are inherently unstable" (Buchanan, Wagner, and Burton 1991, p. 109).

In any case, not every system that retains elements of the private-property market order can reasonably be considered liberal. In modern history, there was, famously, a system that included private property and permitted markets to operate in a restricted and limited way. Its overseers insisted, however, on the state’s overriding role, without which, they believed, economic life would collapse into anarchy. Economic liberalism arose as a reaction against this system, which is called mercantilism.

Equally crucial to the question at issue are the ways in which Keynes’s errors undermined confidence in the free-market order and opened the way for the colossal growth of state power.

Murray Rothbard notes that Keynes posited a world in which consumers are ignorant robots and investors are systematically irrational, driven by their blind "animal spirits," and that he concluded that the overall volume of investment had to be entrusted to a deus ex machina, a "class external to the market … the state apparatus" (Rothbard 1992, pp. 189—91). Keynes refers to this process as "the socialization of investment." As he declares in The General Theory, "I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments" (1973b, p. 164). He argued for the creation of a National Investment Board. As late as 1943, he estimated that such an authority would directly influence "two-thirds or three-quarters of total investment" (Seccareccia 1994, p. 377).[7]

Robert Skidelsky insists that in these instances Keynes did not have in mind the state in the sense of a central government (1988, pp. 17—18), but rather those "semiautonomous bodies within the State" of which he spoke in 1924, "bodies whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public good as they understand it, and from whose deliberations motives of private advantage are excluded" (Keynes 1972, pp. 288—89). Skidelsky, however, appears oblivious to the problems of this high-sounding conception.

Keynes never specified how such bodies were to operate, never gave any reason to believe they would be in a position to calculate the "marginal efficiency of capital" (a thoroughly confused concept, in any case; see Hazlitt 1959, pp. 156—70; Anderson [1949] 1995, pp. 200—205), and never indicated by what subtle means they would be kept untainted by motives of private (including personal ideological) advantage.[8] Moreover, because Keynes granted that these "semi-autonomous bodies" would be "subject in the last resort to the sovereignty of the democracy as expressed through Parliament" (1972, pp. 288—89), how could they be prevented from effectively becoming agencies of the central state?

If liberalism’s core doctrine is that, given institutional adherence to the rights of life, liberty, and property, civil society can be counted on by and large to run itself, and if the showcase example in liberalism’s brief is the undirected market economy’s capacity to function satisfactorily, then the "Keynesian Revolution" signaled the abandonment of liberalism.

Within a very few years, Keynesianism triumphed among economists prominent in the academy and government, becoming after World War II the official doctrine in advanced countries. The administrators of the Marshall Plan and their allies in the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe mandated it, as did the administrators of the European Recovery Program. Italy, for example, "was constantly urged to reflate by both these agencies" (de Cecco 1989, pp. 219—21).[9]

Although West Germany, under the leadership of Ludwig Erhard and advised by economists such as Wilhelm Röpke, resisted, in Britain both major parties championed Keynesian demand management as the means to full employment, now the principal goal. In the United States, the Employment Act of 1946 recognized the federal government’s primary role in ensuring maximum employment through fiscal operations. The results of this revolution were disastrous.

Prior to Keynes, budget balancing had been the goal of the governments, of civilized countries at least. Keynesianism reversed this "fiscal constitution." By making governments responsible for "countercyclical" fiscal policy and by ignoring shortsighted politicians’ tendency to accumulate deficits, it set the stage for the unprecedented increases of taxation and public debt of the decades following World War II (Buchanan 1987; Rowley 1987b; Buchanan, Wagner, and Burton 1991).

It is sometimes maintained that Keynes was "not a Keynesian" in the sense that he cannot be held responsible for his followers’ applications of his theory. Yet, with what other "great" or "model" liberal do we have a coterie of highly influential acolytes who interpret him in a sharply antiliberal sense? As Michael Heilperin observes sardonically, "If [Keynes] was a liberal, then he was that extraordinary kind of liberal whose practical recommendations consistently promote collectivism" (1960, p. 125).

Rules or "Discretion"?

In contrast to earlier absolutist and later collectivist ideologies, liberalism is characterized by its insistence on rules in political life as in economic life (cf. Hayek 1973, pp. 56—59). The rule of law as the foundation of the Rechtsstaat is an obvious example, as is the doctrine of laissez-faire, to which even John Stuart Mill felt obliged to pay lip service as a (readily defensible) principle ("Laissez-faire, in short, should be the general practice"). Maximum flexibility and leeway in the exercise of power are not traits that commend themselves to liberals. "A government of laws, not of men," is a well-known liberal slogan.[10]

Murray Rothbard noted that Keynes was, as it were, opposed to principle on principle (1992, 177).[11] It is no exaggeration to say that Keynes was constitutionally averse to rules, or "dogmas," as he often called them. This attitude dominated his thinking throughout his life. In 1923, he declared: "when great decisions are to be made, the State is a sovereign body of which the purpose is to promote the greatest good of the whole. When, therefore, we enter the realm of State action, everything is to be considered and weighed on its merits" (1971a, pp. 56—57).

In his last years, Keynes found "much wisdom" in the proposition that the state should "fill the vacant post of entrepreneur-in-chief," "interfering with the ownership or management of particular businesses … [only] on the merits of the case and not at the behest of dogma" (1980, p. 324). In a letter to F.A. Hayek, apropos of Hayek’s recently published book The Road to Serfdom, Keynes chided him for not realizing that "dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly" (1980, pp. 387—88).

This opposition to acting strictly on principle, Robert Skidelsky claims, is the heart of Keynes’s "second revival of liberalism" (after the earlier "New Liberalism" of the Hobhouse school): Keynes aimed to "superimpose a managerial philosophy … a philosophy of ad hoc intervention based on disinterested thought" (1988, p. 15). Alec Cairncross states,: "He hated enslavement by rules. He wanted governments to have discretion and he wanted economists to come to their assistance in the exercise of that discretion" (1978, pp. 47—48). Yet it is precisely the ad hoc nature of Keynes’s approach, his faith in a strangely disembodied "disinterested thought," and his predilection for government "discretion" unencumbered by principled limits that run straight against the grain of the liberal doctrine.[12]

Authentic liberalism has traditionally harbored a deep distrust of state agents, on the grounds that they lack competence or detachment or both. Keynes’s airy reliance on economic experts whose sage advice would be put into effect by self-denying politicians flies in the face of this wholly warranted suspicion and all of the historical and theoretical evidence supporting it. In contemporary terms, it contradicts the teachings associated with the school of public choice.[13]

Keynes’s Utopia

Keynes was often given to ruminations on the nature of the future society. Because his writings are rife with inconsistencies,[14] it has been possible for some of his followers to contend that what he basically wanted was merely "to wed full employment to classical liberalism," that "his model was very much ‘capitalism plus full employment,’ and he was relatively sanguine about the feasibility of macro-control" (Corry 1978, pp. 25, 28).

Throughout Keynes’s career, however, clear indications appear of his longing for a much more radical social order — in his words, a "New Jerusalem" (O’Donnell 1989, pp. 294, 378 n. 27). He confessed that he had played in his mind "with the possibilities of greater social changes than come within the present philosophies" even of thinkers such as Sidney Webb. "The republic of my imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space," he mused (1972, p. 309). Numerous statements strewn over decades shed light on this somewhat obscure avowal. Taken together, they confirm Joseph Salerno’s (1992) argument that Keynes was a millennialist — a thinker who viewed social evolution as pursuing a preordained course to what he conceived to be a happy ending: a utopia (O’Donnell 1989, pp. 288—94).

Keynes looked forward to a condition of "equality of contentment amongst all" (whatever that might conceivably mean) (1980, p. 369), where the problem facing the average person will be "how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely, agreeably, and well" (1972, p. 328). Technological progress, fueled by socialized investment, will automatically guarantee adequate consumer goods for all. At that point, the serious questions of living will arise: "The natural evolution should be towards a decent level of consumption for everyone; and, when that is high enough, towards the occupation of our energies in the non-economic interests of our lives. Thus we need to be slowly reconstructing our social system with these ends in view" (1982a, p. 393).

Leaving aside the question of who will decide when the level of consumption is high enough, we have to ask, What techniques did Keynes imagine existed to bring about such a restructuring of society? As always when he pondered the future, specifics are nonexistent.[15] What is clear is that in the future utopia, the state will be the incontestable leader.[16] Putting an end to "economic anarchy," the new "régime [will be one] which deliberately aims at controlling and directing economic forces in the interests of social justice and social stability" (1972, p. 305).[17]

The state, according to Keynes, will even decide on the optimal level of population. Regarding eugenics, Keynes at times gave the appearance of indecision: "the time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members" (1972, p. 292; see also Salerno 1992, pp. 13—14). At other times, he was quite definite: "The great transition in human history" will begin "when civilized man endeavors to assume conscious control in his own hands, away from the blind instinct of mere predominant survival" (1983, p. 859).[18] So the state — in its guise as "civilized man" — will channel and oversee the reproduction of the human race as well.

In all these matters, the state will be guided, in turn, by wise and far-seeing intellectuals of Keynes’s own sort.[19] How could it be otherwise? Left to their own devices, the great majority of people are virtually helpless. As Keynes declared, "Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these" (1972, p. 288). Because he held that in economic questions "the right solution will involve intellectual and scientific elements which must be above the heads of the vast mass of more or less illiterate voters" (1972, p. 295), one wonders how much of "the sovereignty of the democracy" would continue to exist in his utopia.

Naturally enough, given his own tastes, the arts played a central role in his vision. He complained of the niggardliness of state subsidies to the arts that was defended by "the sub-human denizens of the Treasury." Such a policy was incompatible with any loftier conception of "the duty and purpose, the honor and glory [sic] of the State." Art subsidies were a means for the State to fulfill its duty to elevate "the common man," to lead him to feel himself "finer, more gifted, more splendid, more carefree" (quoted in Moggridge 1974, pp. 34—35).

During World War II, Keynes served as a leading spokesman for what afterwards became the Arts Council. "Death to Hollywood" was his slogan. He was immensely gratified to be able to report that three thousand English factory workers in the Midlands had reacted with "wild delight" to a ballet performance (quoted in Moggridge 1974, pp. 41, 48). In the future, besides state subsidies, there would be inculcation of art appreciation in the schools: going to plays and visiting art galleries "will be a living element in everyone’s upbringing, and regular attendance at the theatre and concerts a part of organized education" (1982b, p. 371). The utter banality of this state-sponsored crusade for aesthetic uplift — a key to the realization of Keynes’s utopia — is exceeded only by its spirit-crushing dreariness.

Keynes and the Totalitarian "Experiments"

Further grounds for doubting Keynes’s liberalism pertain to his attitude in the 1920s and 1930s toward the continental "experiments" in planned economy. At times, he displayed an outlook on German National Socialist and Italian Fascist economic policy that is surprising in a supposed model liberal thinker. Two texts are at issue here: the preface to the German edition of The General Theory (Keynes 1973b, pp. xxv—xxvii) and the essay "National Self-Sufficiency" (Keynes 1933; also given in Keynes 1982a, pp. 233—46).

In the preface, Keynes observes that he is deviating from "the English classical (or orthodox) tradition," which, he notes, never totally dominated German thought. "The Manchester School and Marxism both derive ultimately from Ricardo.… But in Germany there has always existed a large section of opinion which has adhered neither to the one nor to the other…. Perhaps, therefore, I may expect less resistance from German than from English readers in offering a theory of employment and output as a whole, which departs in important respects from the orthodox tradition" (1973b, pp. xxv—xxvi). To entice his readers in National Socialist Germany even further, Keynes adds: "Much of the following book is illustrated and expounded mainly with reference to the conditions existing in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-fair" (1973b, p. xxvi).

Roy Harrod does not mention this preface at all in his earlier biography (1951).[20] Robert Skidelsky refers to it as "unfortunately worded" and leaves it at that (1992, p. 581). Alan Peacock writes of the passage (without quoting it) that Keynes indicated "that the then German (Nazi) government would be more sympathetic to his ideas on the employment-creating effects of public works than the British government" (1993, p. 7). This view, however, runs contrary to the clear meaning of the text: it is not that the Nazi leaders chanced to be more sympathetic to one of Keynes’s particular proposals, but that, in Keynes’s view, his theory "is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state." Peacock adds that "there is some dispute over whether or not the preface was accurately translated." But that issue in no way affects the excerpt quoted here, which is from Keynes’s English manuscript.[21]

Nazi economic thinkers sometimes used references to Keynes to support the explicitly antiliberal economic policies of National Socialism. Otto Wagener, who headed a Nazi economics-research bureau before the seizure of power, gave Hitler a copy of Keynes’s book on money because it was "a very interesting treatise," conveying the feeling that the author was "far on the road to us, without being familiar with us and our viewpoint" (quoted in Barkai 1977, pp. 55, 57, 156, my translation). Publication of the German edition of The General Theory received critical reviews from publications that had managed to keep their distance from official Nazi economic policies, whereas a Nazi apologist at Heidelberg welcomed it "as a vindication of National Socialism." Keynes himself remarked that the German authorities had permitted publication "on paper [that was] rather better than usual, and the price was not much higher than usual" (both quotations in Skidelsky 1992, pp. 581, 583).

A weightier instance of the difficulty of classifying Keynes as a liberal is his essay "National Self-Sufficiency" (Keynes 1933, 1982b, pp. 233—46).[22] Here, laissez-faire and free trade are treated with characteristic Bloomsbury derision. In the dismal past, they had been viewed "almost as a part of the moral law," a component of the "bundle of obsolete habiliments one’s mind drags round" (Keynes 1933, p. 755). Very different, however, is Keynes’s posture toward the doctrines that were all the rage as he wrote. "Each year it becomes more obvious that the world is embarking on a variety of politico-economic experiments" as the presumptions of 19th-century free trade are abandoned. What are these "experiments"? They are those under way in Russia, Italy, Ireland (sic), and Germany. Even Britain and America are striving for "a new plan" (p. 761).

Keynes is oddly agnostic on the chances for success of these various projects: "We do not know what will be the outcome. We are — all of us, I expect — about to make many mistakes. No one can tell which of the new systems will prove itself best.… We each have our own fancy. Not believing that we are saved already [sic], we each should like to have a try at working out our own salvation" (pp. 761—62).

He concedes that "in matters of economic detail, as distinct from the central controls," he favors "retaining as much private judgment and initiative and enterprise as possible" (p. 762). But "we all need to be as free possible of interference from economic changes elsewhere, in order to make our own favorite experiments towards the ideal social republic of the future" (p. 763).

At the time Keynes wrote this article, the doctrine of "national self-sufficiency" he was preaching was often identified with National Socialism and fascism. When Franklin Roosevelt "torpedoed" the London economic conference of June 1933, the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, smugly told the Völkischer Beobachter (the official newspaper of the Nazi Party) that the American leader had adopted the economic philosophy of Hitler and Mussolini: "Take your economic fate in your own hand and you will help not only yourself but the whole world" (Garraty 1973, p. 922).

Keynes admits that many errors are being committed in all the contemporary essays in planning. Although Mussolini may be "acquiring wisdom teeth," "Germany is at the mercy of unchained irresponsibles — though it is too soon to judge her."[23] He reserves his harshest criticism for Stalin’s Russia, perhaps a historically unprecedented example of "administrative incompetence and of the sacrifice of almost everything that makes life worth living to wooden heads" (p. 766). "Let Stalin be a terrifying example to all who seek to make experiments," Keynes declares (p. 769).

Yet his critique of Stalin — who had just condemned millions to death in the terror-famine and was filling Lenin’s gulag with additional millions — is curiously oblique and off-center. What the Soviet and the other socioeconomic experiments require above all is "bold, free, and remorseless criticism." But

"Stalin has eliminated every independent, critical mind, even those sympathetic in general outlook. He has produced an environment in which the processes of mind are atrophied. The soft convolutions of the brain are turned to wood. The multiplied bray of the loud-speaker replaces the soft inflections of the human voice. The bleat of propaganda bores even the birds and the beasts of the field into stupefaction." (p. 769)

"Wooden heads … brains turned to wood … bores … into stupefaction." The reader may judge for himself whether this critique — redolent of John Stuart Mill’s harping on the all-importance of endless discussion and debate — is adequate to the deeds of Stalin and of Soviet power as of 1933.

Finally, one passage in this essay as it appeared in its first version in the Yale Review is omitted from The Collected Writings:[24] "But I bring my criticisms to bear, as one whose heart is friendly and sympathetic to the desperate experiments of the contemporary world, who wishes them well and would like them to succeed, who has his own experiments in view, and who in the last resort prefers anything on earth to what the financial reports are wont to call ‘the best opinion in Wall Street’" (Keynes 1933, p. 766).[25]

Skidelsky’s comment on this essay is brief and bland: "As Keynes noted in his ‘National Self-Sufficiency’ articles [the essay appeared in two parts in The New Statesman and Nation], social experiments were in fashion; all of them, whatever their political provenance, envisaged a much enlarged role for government, and a greatly restricted role for free commerce" (1992, p. 483). This description hardly seems sufficient.

The question at this point is: How can someone who expressed a wistful sympathy for the "experiments" of the Nazis, Fascists, and Stalinist Communists, and whose threadbare Bloomsbury mockery was reserved for the freely functioning society of laissez-faire be considered a clear-cut example of a liberal or any liberal at all?[26]

Soviet Communism

The tone and substance of some of Keynes’s more extended remarks on Soviet communism also raise questions. Following a trip to the Soviet Union in 1925, he published A Short View of Russia (1972, pp. 253—71). Skidelsky, with astonishing implausibility, calls this essay "one of the most searing attacks on Soviet communism ever penned" (1994, p. 235).

It is true that Keynes perceives some grave flaws in the Soviet regime, especially the persecution of dissenters and the general oppressiveness. But these flaws he holds to be in part the fruit of revolution and the result of "some beastliness in the Russian nature — or in the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied." They form "one face" of the "superb seriousness of Red Russia." Such seriousness can be dour, "crude and stupid and boring in the extreme," witness the Methodists (1972, p. 270) — another Bloomsbury touch.

Keynes gives no sign that despotism might be the natural consequence, the entirely predictable result, of such a concentration of power in the state as the Bolsheviks had effected in Russia. This latter view has been a mainstay of liberal thought from at least the time of Montesquieu and Madison, through Mises and Hayek, and on to the present day. One would expect a liberal to highlight this point.

Instead, Keynes gushes over the Soviets’ will to engage in bold "experiments" in social engineering. In Russia, "the method of trial-and-error is unreservedly employed. No one has ever been more frankly experimentalist than Lenin." As for the catastrophically failed "experiments" of the first years of Bolshevik rule, which had compelled the shift from "war communism" to the then-current system of the New Economic Policy (NEP), Keynes describes them in the most anodyne terms: earlier "errors" had now been corrected and "confusions" dissipated (p. 262).[27] Keynes is dazzled by the regime’s character as "the laboratory of life" and concludes that Soviet communism has "just a chance" of success. He asserts in this "searing attack" that "even a chance gives to what is happening in Russia more importance than what is happening (let us say) in the United States of America" (p. 270).[28]

What lay at the root of Keynes’s sympathy for the Soviet experiment? A hint appears at the beginning of his essay, where he playfully suggests that the archbishop of Canterbury might deserve to be called a Bolshevist "if he seriously pursues the Gospel precepts." (Jesus Christ as the first Chekist?) What moves Keynes most deeply is the "religious" element in Leninism, whose "emotional and ethical essence centers about the individual’s and the community’s attitude towards the love of money" (p. 259, emphasis in original). The Communists have transcended "materialistic egotism" and brought about "a real change in the predominant attitude towards money…. A society of which this is even partially true is a tremendous innovation": "in the Russia of the future it is intended that the career of money-making, as such, will simply not occur to a respectable young man as a possible opening, any more than the career of a gentleman burglar or acquiring skill in forgery or embezzlement.… Everyone should work for the community — the new creed runs — and, if he does his duty, the community will uphold him" (pp. 260—61).

In contrast to this inspiring religiosity, "modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious," lacking in any sense of solidarity and public spirit: "it seems clearer every day that the moral problem of our age is concerned with the love of money, with the habitual appeal of the money motive in nine-tenths of the activities of life, with the universal striving after individual economic security as the prime object of endeavor, with the social approbation of money as the measure of constructive success, with the social appeal to the hoarding instinct as the foundation of the necessary provision for the family and for the future" (268—29). This preference for communist over capitalist morality was to remain with Keynes for years.

In 1928, he paid a second visit to Russia, which produced a less favorable assessment. Even though Skidelsky assures us that "the romance was clearly over" (1992, pp. 235—236), this judgment is not correct. The romance continued at least to 1936, with Keynes’s review of Soviet Communism by his friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb. None of those who argue for Keynes’s liberalism has frankly confronted his quite unambiguous pronouncement[29] included in a brief radio talk delivered for the BBC in June 1936 in the Books and Authors series (1982b, pp. 333—34).

The only work that Keynes dealt with at any length was the Webbs’ recently published massive tome Soviet Communism. (The first edition carried the subtitle A New Civilisation? but the question mark was dropped in later editions.) As leaders of the Fabian Society, the Webbs had toiled for decades to bring about socialism in Britain. In the 1930s, they turned into ardent propagandists for the new regime in Communist Russia — in Beatrice’s words, they had "fallen in love with Soviet Communism" (quoted in Muggeridge and Adam 1968, p. 245). (What she called "love," their nephew-by-marriage Malcolm Muggeridge labeled "besotted adulation" [1973, 72].)

During the Webbs’ three-week visit to Russia, where, Sidney boasted, they were treated like "a new type of royalty," the Soviet authorities supplied them with the alleged facts and figures for their book (Cole 1946, 194; Muggeridge and Adam 1968, 245). The Stalinist apparatchiki were well satisfied with the final result. In Russia itself, Soviet Communism was translated, published, and promoted by the regime; as Beatrice declared: "Sidney and I have become ikons in the Soviet Union" (quoted in Muggeridge 1973, p. 206).[30]

Ever since Soviet Communism first appeared, it has been seen as probably the prime example of the aid and comfort that literary fellow travelers lavished on the Stalinist terror state. If Keynes had been a liberal and a lover of the free society, one would expect his review of the book, despite his friendship with the authors, to be a scathing denunciation, but the opposite is the case. As Beatrice was pleased to note in her diary, Maynard, "in his attractive way, boomed our book in his recent radio talk" (Webb 1985, p. 370).

In fact, Keynes advised the British public that Soviet Communism was a work "which every serious citizen will do well to look into."

Until recently events in Russia were moving too fast and the gap between paper professions and actual achievements was too wide for a proper account to be possible. But the new system is now sufficiently crystallized to be reviewed. The result is impressive. The Russian innovators have passed, not only from the revolutionary stage, but also from the doctrinaire stage. There is little or nothing left which bears any special relation to Marx and Marxism as distinguished from other systems of socialism. They are engaged in the vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully over a territory so extensive that it covers one sixth of the land surface of the world. (1982b, p. 333)

There is, yet again, fulsome praise for Soviet "experimentation": "Methods are still changing rapidly in response to experience. The largest scale empiricism and experimentalism which has ever been attempted by disinterested administrators is in operation. Meanwhile the Webbs have enabled us to see the direction in which things appear to be moving and how far they have got" (1982b, p. 334).

Britain, Keynes feels, has much to learn from the Webbs’ work: "It leaves me with a strong desire and hope that we in this country may discover how to combine an unlimited readiness to experiment with changes in political and economic methods and institutions, whilst preserving traditionalism and a sort of careful conservatism, thrifty of everything which has human experience behind it, in every branch of feeling and of action" (p. 334). In this passage, as in many others, one is struck by the studied backtracking and basic confusion typical of much of Keynes’s social philosophizing — an "unlimited readiness to experiment" is somehow to be combined with "traditionalism" and "careful conservatism."

By 1936, no one had to depend on the Webbs’ deceitful propaganda for information on the Stalinist system. Eugene Lyons; William Henry Chamberlin; Malcolm Muggeridge himself; the world’s conservative, Catholic, and left-anarchist press; and others had revealed the grim truth about the charnel house presided over by Keynes’s "innovators" and "disinterested administrators."[31] Anyone willing to listen could learn the facts regarding the terror-famine of the early 1930s, the vast system of slave-labor camps, and the near-universal misery that followed the abolition of private property. For those not blinded by "love," the evidence was unmistakable that Stalin was perfecting the model killer state of the 20th century.

The Hatred of Money

What explains Keynes’s praise of the Webbs’ book and the Soviet system? There can be little doubt that the major reason is, once again, his deep-seated aversion to profit seeking and moneymaking, an attitude the Fabian couple shared.

According to their friend and fellow Fabian Margaret Cole, the Webbs looked on Soviet Russia as morally and spiritually "the hope of the world" (1946, p. 198). For them, "most exciting" of all was the role of the Communist Party, which, Beatrice held, was a "religious order," engaged in creating a "Communist Conscience." By 1932, Beatrice could announce, "It is because I believe that the day has arrived for the changeover from egotism to altruism — as the mainspring of human life — that I am a Communist" (quoted in Nord 1985, pp. 242—44).

In Soviet Communism, the Webbs gush over the replacement of monetary incentives by the rituals of "shaming the delinquent" and Communist self-criticism (Webb and Webb 1936, pp. 761—62). Up to the very end of her life in 1943, Beatrice was still lauding the Soviet Union for "its multiform democracy, its sex, class, and racial equality, its planned production for community consumption, and above all its penalization of the profit-making motive" (Webb 1948, p. 491). After her death, Keynes lauded her as "the greatest woman of the generation which is now passing."[32]

Like the Webbs, Keynes identified religiosity with the individual’s self-abnegation for the good of the group. In economic terms, this view translated into working for nonpecuniary rewards, in this way transcending the sordid motivation of "nine-tenths of the activities of life" in capitalist societies. For Keynes, as for the Webbs, this transcendence was the essence of the "religious" and "moral" element they detected and admired in communism.

In his passion to malign moneymaking, Keynes even resorted to calling on psychoanalysis for support. Fascinated by the work of Sigmund Freud, as most members of the Bloomsbury circle were, Keynes valued it above all for the "intuitions" that paralleled his own, especially on the significance of the love of money. In his Treatise on Money, he refers to a passage in a 1908 paper in which Freud writes of the "connections which exist between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation" and the unconscious "identification of gold with faeces" (Freud 1924, pp. 49—50; Keynes 1971b, p. 258 and n. 1, and Skidelsky 1992, 188, pp. 234, 237, 414).[33] This psychoanalytical "finding" permitted Keynes to assert that love of money was condemned not only by religion, but by "science," as well. Thus, besides constituting "the central ethical problem of modern society" (O’Donnell 1989, 377 n. 14), the preoccupation with money was also a fit subject for the alienist.

Keynes looked forward to the time when the love of money as mere possession "will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease" (1972, p. 329). Sad to say, Keynes does not elaborate on the treatment he anticipates that such specialists will mete out to the deranged persons diagnosed as suffering from this mental affliction.

In Keynes’s pro-Soviet remarks and in the lack of any concern about them among his devotees, we find once again the grotesque double standard that continues to be nearly universal (Applebaum 1997; Courtois 1999; Malia 1999). If in the mid-1930s a celebrated writer had expressed himself toward Nazi Germany in the occasionally benevolent terms Keynes used for the Soviet Union, he would have been pilloried, and his name would reek to this day. Yet, as evil as the Nazis were to become, in 1936 their victims amounted to only a small fraction of the Soviet regime’s victims.[34]

In fact, the case of Keynes is worse than that of someone who merely praised Hitler for, say, alleged successes in curing the unemployment problem or restoring German self-respect or bringing about whatever other "achievements" National Socialism might have claimed. The real analogue to Keynes, in his mixture of criticism and sympathy in regard to Soviet Communism, would be a writer who decried the persecutions and suppression of freedom of thought under the Nazis, while at the same time praising them for their "awareness" of the "racial question," from which we might derive some hope for the future. For the very thing that Keynes found admirable in Soviet Russia — the will to suppress moneymaking and the profit motive — was the main source of the horrors.

As adherents of a variant of Marxism, Lenin and, after him, Stalin shared Marx’s loathing of money. Communism sought to abolish money, along with profit seeking and private exchange — the whole market system — that money made possible. Soviet communism selected its prey chiefly from among those marked by their supposed love of money and profits: the bourgeoisie and the landlords of the old regime; the "speculators" and "hoarders" of the years of "war communism" and the first Red Terror; then the NEP men and "kulaks" of the period of collectivization and the introduction of the plans (Leggett 1981; Conquest 1986; Malia 1994, pp. 129—33). How could Keynes have overlooked the link between the targeting of individual wealth seeking and the state-inflicted torment that was the rule in Soviet Russia — particularly considering that in the book he reviewed in his radio address, the authors glorify Stalin’s decision to proceed to "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class" (Webb and Webb 1936, pp. 561—72)?

A notable feature of Keynes’s complimentary comments on the Soviet system here and elsewhere is their total lack of any economic analysis. Keynes seems blithely unaware that a problem of rational economic calculation might exist under socialism. This question had already occupied continental scholars for some time and was the focus of lively discussion at the London School of Economics.

The year before Keynes’s radio address, a volume edited by F.A. Hayek had appeared in English, Collectivist Economic Planning (Hayek 1935), which featured a translation of the seminal 1920 Ludwig von Mises essay "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." At the London School starting in 1933—34, Hayek was already giving a course titled "The Problems of a Collectivist Economy." A seminar directed by Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Arnold Plant, devoted chiefly to the same subject, had been offered in 1932—33 (Moggridge 2004).

Keynes gave no indication he was at all cognizant of the debate or even interested in the question.[35] Instead, what mattered for Keynes was the excitement of the Soviet experiment (was there ever any other economist — or liberal thinker — who so often invoked "excitement" and "boredom" as criteria for judging social systems?), the awe-inspiring scope of the social changes directed by those "disinterested administrators," and the path-breaking ethical advance of abolishing the profit motive.

Does this evidence mean that Keynes was at any point ever a Communist? Of course not. But his clearly expressed sympathy with the Soviet system (as well as, to a much lesser extent, with other totalitarian states), when added to his state-furthering economic theory and his state-dominated utopian vision, should give pause to those who so unhesitatingly enlist him in the liberal ranks. Viewing Keynes as perhaps "the model liberal of the twentieth century," or as any authentic liberal at all, can only render an indispensable historical concept incoherent.

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Notes

[1] See the anthology edited by Bullock and Shock (1956). Numerous other scholars, such as E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish (1978) treat Keynes as a major 20th-century (and hence presumably more relevant) representative of the sequence that begins with the Levellers or Locke. Locke’s biographer, Maurice Cranston, categorizes Keynes, like Locke, as a liberal (1978, 101). Bernard Corry goes so far as to term Keynes "essentially an economic liberal arguing for specific non-liberal measures solely in periods of unemployment" (1978, 26). Douglas Den Uyl and Stuart Warner include Keynes in their list of "clear-cut" liberals, along with Smith, Turgot, Constant, and others (1987, 263). John Gray insists that Keynes’s position is one that must be accommodated in defining the creed (1986, xi). Logically enough, Gray’s definition of liberalism omits any mention of belief in private property. Anthony Arblaster, however, remarks that although Keynes was a "convinced Liberal," "it was, in the end, social democracy which inherited the legacy of his thought" (1984, 292).

[2] In his logically rigorous terminological schema, Karl Brunner concludes that Keynes’s "rejection of the liberal solution" is readily discoverable because "[h]e finds the severe limitation imposed on government unacceptable. The matter requires, in his judgment, a thoroughly fresh approach" (1987, 28).

[3] Charles Rowley writes that Keynes promoted "a belief in a fundamentally flawed, non-self-correcting market economy, continually in need of government intervention if it was not to degenerate into chaos…. Neomercantilism once again was waging war against the invisible hand, much as it had in pre-Smithian England" (1987b, 154).

[4] Despite the statement cited in note 1, Cranston implicitly surrendered on the question of Keynes’s fundamental liberalism: "Keynes really belonged with Francis Bacon, and the philosophes, and the utilitarians and the Fabians, to that class of intellectual which believes that intellectuals should rule" (1978, 113). A number of more or less classical-liberal writers have also held that Keynes could not be denied the title liberal; see, for example, Haberler 1946, 193.

[5] On the disastrous consequences of the exchange-rate error, Harry Johnson states: "Had the exchange value of the pound been fixed realistically in the 1920s—a prescription fully in accord with orthodox economic theory—there would have been no need for mass unemployment, hence no need for a revolutionary new theory to explain it, and no triggering force for much subsequent British political and economic history…. Britain has paid a heavy long-run price for the transient glory of the Keynesian Revolution, in terms both of the corruption of standards of scientific work in economics and encouragement to the indulgence of the belief of the political process that economic policy can transcend the laws of economics with the aid of sufficient economic cleverness" (1975, 100, 122). Regarding unemployment benefits, Daniel Benjamin and Levis Kochin point out that Edwin Cannan was one of the few contemporaries to understand the part the dole played in creating excess unemployment (1979, 468—72). Keynesian writers such as Donald Winch continue to condemn Cannan, for his pains, as hard-hearted and lacking in compassion (1989, 468 n. 40).

[6] Some of the key errors were rooted in Keynes’s methodology—for example, his conclusion that an unmanaged market economy was incapable of achieving intertemporal coordination. In Roger Garrison’s (1985) view, Keynes’s operating with higher levels of aggregation concealed the mechanisms by which such coordination is in fact brought about by market processes, even while Hayek set forth the real coordinating processes. Hayek himself believed that Keynes’s most basic mistake was methodological, pursuing the "pseudo-exactness" of apparently measurable magnitudes, while disregarding the real interconnections of the economic system. According to Hayek, Keynes’s approach rested on the assumption that constant functional relationships exist between total demand, investment, output, and so forth. In this way, it tended "to conceal nearly all that really matters," leading to the "obliteration of many important insights which we had already achieved and which we shall then have painfully to regain" (1995, 246—47).

[7] Mario Seccareccia (1993) rebuts the common view of Keynes as a would-be or actual savior of capitalism.

[8] "None of [Keynes's] essays ever elaborates in the slightest the content of this proposal [to socialize investment]. We do not know in what form the socialization should be implemented. The institutional choices are never examined … [and we have no way] to assess the consequences of such socialization" (Brunner 1987, 47).

[9] Concerning the role of the Christian Democrats for decades, de Cecco adds that they "helped the technocrats maintain their hold over the economy. They became the arch-defenders of the IRI," the vast state holding company that was by far the largest firm in Italy (1989, 222).

[10] It is another, theoretically perhaps more important, question whether these liberal goals could ever have been compatible with the continued existence of an institution based on monopoly power and the authority to tax — that is, the state. On this question, see the pioneering work of Hans Hermann Hoppe (2001, especially 229—34).

[11] "Keynes was famous, and not just among economists, for changing his mind. Indeed, mutability was part and parcel of his public persona" (Caldwell 1995, 41).

[12] In an appreciation of Keynes, The Economist perversely declared that "a theme that recurs in his work is a preference (echoing Hayek, please note, whose work he praised) for rules over discretion in economic policy" ("The Search for Keynes" 1993, 110).

[13] Rowley describes Keynes as being "about as far away from the approach of modern public choice as an individual conceivably could be" and accuses him of ignoring "the dangerous discretion that his theories had placed in the hands of vote-seeking politicians" (1987a, 119, 123). Donald Winch, who defends Keynes against the charge of statism, seems to concede that the logic of Keynesian thought leads in a statist direction: "When the technocratic interpretation of state capacity associated with Keynes himself is mixed with politics, can Keynes’ own minimalist position be sustained? Are not left-Keynesians (and their monetarist opponents for that matter) correct in believing that the logic of Keynesianism leads to greater intervention, such that what may have begun as macroeconomic management requires extension into microeconomic intervention to ensure success?" (1989, 124).

[14] See Thomas Balogh’s peculiar judgment on Keynes: "His strength and infinite, yet tantalizing, charm lay in being able to discard views (and people) at the drop of a hat" (1978, 67). This view does not seem far from Rothbard’s characterization of Keynes as an intellectual "buccaneer."

[15] Keynes’s approach here is characteristic of critics of the market economy. As Roger Garrison observes: "His failure to explain in any detail just how this ideal system would work is consistent with socialist thought in general, which has always focused on the perceived failings of the actual system rather than on the allegedly superior workings of the imagined one" (1993, 478).

[16] "At bottom, Keynes’s prescription was that the state should act as the guardian, supervisor, and promoter of civilized society…. [I]t was an active supervisor with an ethically directed program of gradual evolutionary change, including modification of the rules of the game" (O’Donnell 1989, 299—300).

[17] In this same famous essay, "Am I a Liberal?" Keynes also asserts, with his usual muddle when it comes to his social philosophy, that he is merely striving for "novel measures for safeguarding capitalism" (1972, 299).

[18] On another occasion, Keynes reiterated the need to confront the problem of overpopulation "with schemes conceived by the mind in place of the undesigned outcome of instinct and individual advantage…. It is many generations since men as individuals began to substitute moral and rational motive as their spring of action in the place of blind instinct. They must now do the same thing collectively" (1977, 453). Around the same time, Leon Trotsky expressed similar eugenic views on the "great transition" to the future utopia, although in a more "Promethean" spirit: "The human species, the coagulated homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his [sic] own hands will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training…. The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings, and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection!" ([1924] 1960, 254—55).

[19] See Corry’s comment: "Politicians were seen by Bloomsbury as an uneasy mix of fools, opportunists, and knaves; so what are we left with to steer the country? Some sort of intellectual establishment, closely allied to academia (or rather a small part of it with Cambridge roots!), who could give dispassionate, expert advice and control…. Keynes had a Bloomsbury belief in the power and duty of the intelligentsia to advise and control events" (1993, 37—38).

[20] Michael Heilperin, in a long footnote, comments on the absence of any reference to this preface in Roy Harrod’s (1951) work, the major biography of Keynes at the time Heilperin wrote. In view of the suppression of academic and other freedoms in Nazi Germany, Heilperin calls Keynes’s ingratiating text "an indelible blot on his record as a liberal" (1960, 127 n. 48).

[21] The dispute involves some sentences that appear in the German edition, but not in Keynes’s manuscript; but these sentences do not seem to inculpate Keynes any further, except for the use of the phrase "pronounced national leadership [Führung]" with a positive connotation. In any case, it seems likely that Keynes approved of the additions. See Schefold 1980.

[22] The version in The Collected Writings is from The New Statesman and Nation, July 8 and 15, 1933. The essay was first published, however, in the Yale Review. Quotations here are from the latter version, Keynes 1933. Heilperin states that this essay "can well be regarded, for all its brevity, as one of Keynes’s most significant writings" and observes that Keynes downplays the totalitarian character of the regimes he discusses: "They were experimenting — that was the wonderful thing about it!" (1960, 111). Here, Heilperin captures the essential spirit of this piece and of Keynes’s thought over several years.

[23] This and similar criticisms of Nazi Germany were omitted in the German translation of the essay, evidently with Keynes’s permission; see Borchardt 1988. Although Borchardt is aware of the Yale Review version, he cites the essay from The Collected Writings and thus overestimates its liberal tenor.

[24] This passage should have appeared in The Collected Writings after "For I must not be supposed to be endorsing all those things which are being done in the political world today in the name of economic nationalism. Far from it" (Keynes 1982b, 244). The version in The Collected Writings likewise omits a few other passages, of negligible importance, that appear in the Yale Review. The editor of this volume in no way indicates that the version included differs from the one published in the Yale Review; moreover, he incorrectly gives the issue of the Yale Review in question as "Summer 1933."

[25] Keynes reiteration during the 1920s and 1930s of the wonderfulness of social engineering "experiments" finally becomes almost laughable. Another example appears in The End of Laissez-Faire, where he wrote: "I criticize doctrinaire State Socialism, not because it seeks to engage men’s altruistic impulses in the service of society, or because it departs from laissez-faire, or because it takes away from man’s natural liberty to make a million, or because it has courage for bold experiments. All these things I applaud" (1972, 290, emphasis added).

[26] Throughout his career, Keynes was a relentless critic of the laissez-faire principle. The End of Laissez-Faire (Keynes 1972, 272—294) is perhaps his most famous polemical essay. It was reviewed at the time (1926) by the Italian (by no means "doctrinaire") liberal economist Luigi Einaudi, who noted that the pamphlet was not at all original or particularly significant: the notion that it represented some kind of historical turning point was "a pure fantasy" by hurried reviewers. Einaudi asks why Keynes, "having once again placed the rule of laissez-faire hors de combat as a scientific principle, did not add some additional page examining the present importance of that rule as a practical norm of conduct?… Has the practical importance of the laissez-faire rule for the conduct of men really diminished?" Granting that the tasks of government have become more numerous, this concession does not yet "prove the decadence of the laissez-faire rule, since it may well be that, contemporaneous with the extension of public activity and interference in some branches of economic life, there has been a much greater increase of new kinds of activity where the old rule of laissez-faire retains its value intact" (1926, 573).

[27] Errors and confusions seem hardly adequate terms for what a recent historian of Soviet communism has characterized as "the titanic descent into chaos" of those years; see the chapter "War Communism: A Regime Is Born, 1918—1921," in Malia 1994, 109—39; see also the illuminating analysis in "’War Communism’ — Product of Marxian Ideas" (Roberts 1971, 20—47).

[28] Keynes adds that Soviet Russia is very much to be preferred to tsarist Russia, from which "nothing could ever emerge" (271). This statement is an extraordinary judgment, especially in view of Keynes’s love of the arts. Old Russia can, of course, boast of great achievements in many fields, including music, dance, and, above all, literature.

[29] Logically, Skidelsky should have discussed this radio talk in volume two of his biography, which covers the period to 1937. Although he mentions the Webbs’ Soviet Communism, he does not touch on Keynes’s radio review (Skidelsky 1994, 488). It seems passing strange that nowhere in his immense, three-volume biography of Keynes does Skidelsky find space even to mention this highly problematic piece. It is also absent from his essay on Keynes and the Fabians (Skidelsky 1999). The radio talk is mentioned in O’Donnell 1989, 377 n. 13.

[30] Even Beatrice’s friend and biographer Margaret Cole states that the book, though containing some criticisms, was "in some sense, an enormous propaganda pamphlet, defending and praising the Soviet Union" (1946, 199). This remark was not meant as a criticism because Cole, as is evident from her biography, shared the Webbs’ admiration of Stalinism.

[31] For Lyons’s comments on the Webbs’ admiration of the "strong faith" and "resolute will" of those who carried out the liquidation of the kulaks, see Lyons 1937, 284. See also the remarks by Robert Conquest (1986, 317—18, 321). In his novel Winter in Moscow, Malcolm Muggeridge (1934) describes the world of the foreign fellow traveler who visited the Soviet Union; it was more often "New Liberals" and Fabians, rather than non-Communist socialists, who were duped by the Soviet regime, he observed.

[32] Written in a letter to George Bernard Shaw (given in Skidelsky 2001, 168). Skidelsky adds, somewhat cryptically, that although Keynes had arranged for an admiring obituary of Beatrice, he "still hankered after an appreciation of her economics" (2001, 527 n. 76). One wonders what an "appreciation" of Beatrice Webb’s economic thought would consist in.

[33] Obviously, if one were to proceed as Keynes did, one would have to probe Keynes’s own unconscious mind for the disreputable sources both of his involvement with the subject of money throughout his professional career and of his intense, affect-laden rejection of the money motive.

[34] In a letter to Upton Sinclair dated May 2, 1936, H. L. Mencken, who was often as astute politically as he was witty in general, wrote: "I am against the violation of civil rights by Hitler and Mussolini as much as you are, and well you know it…. You protest, and with justice, every time Hitler jails an opponent, but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist" (1961, 403). I am grateful to Paul Boytinck for drawing my attention to this passage.

[35] As late as 1944, in a letter to Hayek commenting on The Road to Serfdom, Keynes stated: "The line of argument you yourself take depends on the very doubtful assumption that planning is not more efficient. Quite likely from the purely economic point of view it is efficient" (Keynes 1980, 386). That Keynes could have referred to this view as an "assumption" indicates that he never became aware of the great debate over economic calculation under socialism. The total lack of economic analysis in his reports from Soviet Russia brings to mind Karl Brunner’s conclusion on Keynes’s notions of social reform: "One would hardly guess from the material of the essays that a social scientist, even economist, had written [them]. Any social dreamer of the intelligentsia could have produced them. Crucial questions … are never faced or explored" (1987, 47). Perhaps there is some truth in his good friend Beatrice Webb’s judgment in 1936: "Keynes is not serious about economic problems; he plays a game of chess with it [sic] in his leisure hours. The only serious cult with him is aesthetics" (1985, 371). For an evaluation of Keynes as "the consummate artist," aside from the scientific implications of his theory, see Buchanan 1987.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

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Dick Francis

Ralph Raico — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:00:00 +0000

The thriller writer and former champion jockey Dick Francis has died at the age of 89.

I’ve read a dozen or more of his 40 novels. All of them were enthralling, though for mysteries they contained little violence. Usually, instead of murders there were beatings and tortures — of his heroes — who never gave in.

I have the strong impression that, politically, he was a conservative, in the British sense. He displayed admiration for rich men who gained their wealth honestly.

Francis "left school at 15 with no qualifications," in the words of the fine obituary in the Telegraph. He worked hard all his life, as a jockey and a writer, and became a millionaire many times over.

I remember a great appearance of Francis and his wife, the love of his life, and like him, English of the English, on the Today Show. He’d just published a novel about horse racing (naturally) combined as usual with some other theme, in this case wine making.

The interviewer was Jane Pauley. Mrs. Francis was present, small and soft spoken, like her husband.

The American TV "personality," making millions a year (Garry Trudeau’s wife, by the way), asked, ingratiatingly smiling, "So, where does the best champagne come from?" Mrs. Francis, who was not a "personality" and did not make millions a year, replied, "Why, from Champagne, dear. It’s a part of France."

The camera quickly turned away from Pauley, whose momentary panic was painful to see.

UK Daily Telegraph
14 Feb 2010

Dick Francis

Dick Francis, who died on February 14 aged 89, began his career as a professional jockey, becoming Champion National Hunt Jockey in 1953—54, and famously rode in Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s colours in the Grand National of 1956; after retiring from the Turf, he became a successful writer of 42 thrillers, topping the best-seller lists for more than 40 years, with worldwide sales of well over 60 million.

As a National Hunt jockey, Francis had ridden in 2,305 races and ridden 345 winners. He became part of racing folklore when, in March 1956, he rode the Queen Mother’s horse, Devon Loch, in the Grand National.

Francis and Devon Loch had just jumped the last fence, well clear of the rest of the field and set to break the previous record time, when suddenly, 30 yards from the winning post, with the race commentators screaming "Francis wins!", Devon Loch sank on his hindquarters, his front legs sprawling; having pulled a muscle in doing so, he could not recover to win the race.

The cause of his collapse provoked intense speculation and spawned theories that would not have been out of place in a Dick Francis thriller. One Aintree vet felt that the horse must have had a sudden attack of cramp; another identified a blot clot in the hind leg. Other theories suggested that, as the accident had happened alongside a water jump, the horse, sensing the reflection, had attempted to leap a non-existent obstacle; or that an underground cable had shorted on the horse’s racing plates.

Francis, however, preferred two more likely, if more prosaic, possibilities — either that the horse had slipped, or that he had been unnerved by the noise of anticipation of a Royal win. Whatever the cause, Francis’s failure to win the Grand National remained the great sorrow of his life, though it was his determination not to be labelled for all time as "the man who lost the Grand National" that spurred him on to become a writer.

He had more than his fair share of accidents and breakages, which he liked to recount with pride mixed with a certain gory relish. He reckoned to fall off once every 11 or 12 races: "I’ve had a fractured skull, six broken collar bones, five broken noses, no end of ribs. Well, you simply stop countin’."

He injured his shoulder so badly that for the rest of his life he had to go to bed with his arm strapped up to prevent it from dislocating. Once, he recalled, "a horse put his foot right through my face, slicing my nose open. I had 32 stitches from above my eye to the end of my nose. The doctor was delighted because he could show the inside of a nose to all his students."

This was typical Francis and, like their author, his fictional heroes endure all manner of pain and physical and mental torment with exemplary patience and composure. Thirtyish, usually dark-haired, sallow-skinned, mild-mannered and self-deprecating, the typical Francis hero is as intrepid and resourceful and as vigorously heterosexual as James Bond; but unlike the caddish Bond they are also decent and chivalrous, and the reader knows they will turn into faithful, passionate husbands: "What it comes to," Francis liked to say, "is that I never ask my main character to do anything I wouldn’t do myself."

Where other thriller writers probed the darker crannies of the soul, Francis reaffirmed the values of human decency and the struggle between the man of good against the forces of lust for power, dishonesty and greed. Heroes can expect to be chained, beaten, burned or flayed two or three times per book — but good always triumphs in the end.

Francis possessed all the traditional tools of the thriller writer’s trade — narrative urgency and a subtlety in intellectual problem-solving — but he combined these with an emotional realism which had eluded writers like Agatha Christie. No one could convey as well as he what it felt like to be drowned, hanged, crushed by a horse or soaked in icy water and left dangling, gagged and bound from a hook in the middle of a Norfolk winter’s night.

He also had a minute eye for detail and an ability to take even the most un-horsey of readers into his world. He was as convincing in his portrayal of the Spartan existence of the stable lad as he was in that of the sybaritic lifestyle of the manipulating owner in his home counties pad: "Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses," remarked one reviewer in Newsweek, "is like not reading Dostoyevsky because you don’t believe in God."

Like his heroes, Francis was a man of stern self-discipline. From 1962, when his first novel, Dead Cert, was published, he produced a book a year, starting to write on January 1 and delivering the typescript to his publishers by April 8 for publication in September. Only once, when his wife was ill, did he deliver two weeks late.

He would personally take the first copy of each of his books round to Clarence House, and soon transmuted from the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s favourite jockey to her favourite author. It was, he confessed, partly to spare her blushes that he never included scenes of explicit sex, though he once observed: "I’d be no good at that kind of thing anyway."

Few British novelists were as successful or held in greater affection by their readers than Francis. Among countless accolades, he won three Dagger Awards (including the Cartier Diamond Dagger, for his life’s work) from the British Crime Writers’ Association. He also won three Edgar Allen Poe Awards for Best Novel, and a Grand Master title for his life’s work from the Mystery Writers of America. He had admirers in all parts of the world; races were named in his honour and films were made of his books as far afield as Russia.

He had his admirers in more highbrow circles as well. Philip Larkin praised the "absolute sureness of his settings, the freshness of his characters, the terrifying climaxes of violence, the literate jauntiness of style, the unfailing intelligent compassion." CP Snow described him as "a writer with qualities and gifts which few novelists begin to possess." John Mortimer noted: "He has the true writer’s knack of making you want to turn the page, no matter how agonising you may find the operation when stretched out on a slab of Aegean rock."

Richard Stanley Francis was born into the saddle on October 31 1920 in Pembrokeshire, Wales — his grandfather and great-uncle had been two of the best amateur riders of their generation. Before the First World War, his father had been a steeplechase jockey and after the war ran a hunting stable. Dick and his brother learned to ride before they could read.

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A Little Perspective, Please

Ralph Raico — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

In a recent article on LRC, the author ascribes to Ayn Rand an epithet directed at Ludwig von Mises: "bastard." If anyone should take this as her basic attitude to Mises, it would be a very serious mistake.

In the 1950s and 60s Ayn and, following her, the Randian group, strongly endorsed and promoted Mises in print and lectures. She must have introduced the great Austrian to thousands of new readers. In the few years I had personal contact with her, I never heard Ayn refer to Mises with anything but respect. Two recollections come to mind: once Barbara Branden, in her persona as a half-educated grand inquisitor, was attacking Mises for being a utilitarian. Ayn retorted, “Leave him alone. He’s done enough.” One time she attended the NYU seminar and sweet old Mises went off topic to comment on how important creative writing was for spreading our ideas. Then he said something like, "I mention this because we happen to have present a great creative novelist." Ayn looked around, all huge smiles and bursting with pride. It was so cute. The lady loved flattery, most especially from someone of the stature of Mises.

I am dismayed that with the new books on her, there is all this personal gossip about Rand making the rounds on the net. A little perspective, please.

She was a refugee to America from the Bolshevik terror-state, and loved her new country from first to last. For years, she worked her way through menial jobs, and had her first great novel, The Fountainhead, rejected by some dozen publishers. Finally, Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis came out with it. The Fountainhead was a runaway best seller and made into a movie, and Ayn became a millionaire. She’d married the man of her dreams, Frank O’Connor, who was true to her to the end. She worked for years on the magnificent Atlas Shrugged, the title of which I am certain was inspired by the statue in Rockefeller Center of Atlas holding up the world. (It’s right on Fifth Avenue — opposite St. Patrick’s!). Living in midtown Manhattan, she must have passed it many dozens of times.

Rand was self-centered and had a complex emotional life, not unusual in great writers and other geniuses. When she broke with Branden, true to his nature he behaved as the cad he was. This nonentity, who was nothing without her and her ideas, repaid her by revealing intimate details of their relationship. Ayn was deeply hurt, and, characteristically and understandably, she lashed back.

Yes, she had quirky opinions, vastly preferring Rachmaninoff to Mozart and calling Beethoven "the Tolstoy of music" — meaning it as insult to both. Nobody but her zombified acolytes took them seriously. I thought they were funny.

Fifty or 100 years from now do you think any of that junk will be remembered? What will remain of this great woman are her writings and her contributions to making the libertarian movement what it is today and what it is on the road to becoming.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of liberty under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

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Rethinking Churchill

Ralph Raico — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:00:00 +0000

This essay originally appears in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, edited with an introduction by John V. Denson.

Churchill as Icon

When, in a very few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question: "Who was the Man of the Century?" there is little doubt that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.

In a way, Churchill as Man of the Century will be appropriate. This has been the century of the State — of the rise and hypertrophic growth of the welfare-warfare state — and Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare state. War, of course, was his lifelong passion; and, as an admiring historian has written: "Among his other claims to fame, Winston Churchill ranks as one of the founders of the welfare state." Thus, while Churchill never had a principle he did not in the end betray, this does not mean that there was no slant to his actions, no systematic bias. There was, and that bias was towards lowering the barriers to state power.

To gain any understanding of Churchill, we must go beyond the heroic images propagated for over half a century. The conventional picture of Churchill, especially of his role in World War II, was first of all the work of Churchill himself, through the distorted histories he composed and rushed into print as soon as the war was over. In more recent decades, the Churchill legend has been adopted by an internationalist establishment for which it furnishes the perfect symbol and an inexhaustible vein of high-toned blather. Churchill has become, in Christopher Hitchens’s phrase, a "totem" of the American establishment, not only the scions of the New Deal, but the neo-conservative apparatus as well — politicians like Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle, corporate "knights" and other denizens of the Reagan and Bush Cabinets, the editors and writers of the Wall Street Journal, and a legion of "conservative" columnists led by William Safire and William Buckley. Churchill was, as Hitchens writes, "the human bridge across which the transition was made" between a noninterventionist and a globalist America. In the next century, it is not impossible that his bulldog likeness will feature in the logo of the New World Order.

Let it be freely conceded that in 1940 Churchill played his role superbly. As the military historian, Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, a sharp critic of Churchill’s wartime policies, wrote: "Churchill was a man cast in the heroic mould, a berserker ever ready to lead a forlorn hope or storm a breach, and at his best when things were at their worst. His glamorous rhetoric, his pugnacity, and his insistence on annihilating the enemy appealed to human instincts, and made him an outstanding war leader." History outdid herself when she cast Churchill as the adversary in the duel with Hitler. It matters not at all that in his most famous speech — "we shall fight them on the beaches … we shall fight them in the fields and in the streets" — he plagiarized Clemenceau at the time of the Ludendorff offensive, that there was little real threat of a German invasion or, that, perhaps, there was no reason for the duel to have occurred in the first place. For a few months in 1940, Churchill played his part magnificently and unforgettably.

Opportunism and Rhetoric

Yet before 1940, the word most closely associated with Churchill was "opportunist." He had twice changed his party affiliation — from Conservative to Liberal, and then back again. His move to the Liberals was allegedly on the issue of free trade. But in 1930, he sold out on free trade as well, even tariffs on food, and proclaimed that he had cast off "Cobdenism" forever. As head of the Board of Trade before World War I, he opposed increased armaments; after he became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he pushed for bigger and bigger budgets, spreading wild rumors of the growing strength of the German Navy, just as he did in the 1930s about the buildup of the German Air Force. He attacked socialism before and after World War I, while during the War he promoted war-socialism, calling for nationalization of the railroads, and declaring in a speech: "Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you like the word." Churchill’s opportunism continued to the end. In the 1945 election, he briefly latched on to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and tried to paint the Labour Party as totalitarian, while it was Churchill himself who, in 1943, had accepted the Beveridge plans for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian management of the economy. Throughout his career his one guiding rule was to climb to power and stay there.

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