I have been reading Jacques Barzun’s FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE, his cultural history of the West over the last 500 years. It is a fascinating book simply because there is so much in it (for example, Europe was full of socialist ideas several decades before Marx put pen to paper).
In his section on the early 19th century, Barzun writes:
What should not pass unnoticed is that the start of social legislation [in England], beginning with the new Poor Law and going on to the control of labor conditions, required two devices that must be called epoch-making, not to say ominous: inspectors and statistics. The modern individual has been emancipated from subjection to rank and has exchanged it for “inspection” over the range of life’s activities. This control takes the form of permit, license, and stated limitation, as well as actual inspection. At the same time, state agencies and private researchers gather totals by kind and publish numbers. Most often the purpose is to show why there is a cause to foster or restrain an activity. The concerned citizen develops the habit of living by statistics. He may be said to live a Stat Life. [Barzun, p. 535]
Barzun goes on to say these developments were unavoidable — in my view (not Barzun’s), an inevitable consequence of industrialism because human beings were involved. The socialism that took hold among European intellectuals (and also many Americans) in the first few decades of the 19th century — and tried to take power in the failed (but later successful) Revolutions of 1848 — promised an economy that was politically accountable. This is the promise of social democracy, and you do not have politics without it.
The question is are human beings any freer subject to “the state” as opposed to when they are subject to aristocracy and hierarchy? Especially if aristocracy and hierarchy are natural human constructs, things human beings make naturally and automatically?
Political control over production, prices and distribution was not new to the 19th century — it is as old as humanity. The desire, then, to control the economy is as old as humanity, and will never end. Sad a realization as that is. What is imperative is to remind the world that even though an economic action appears to make economic or moral sense (bailouts for banks and auto makers, subsidies for home loans), all actions has consequences that are usually the oppose of what is intended. Again, because human beings are involved.
Ours, then, is a never-ending fight. As long as sinful men live and form communities, as long as men produce and trade, we will always have a gospel to preach and people to preach to.
9:54 am on January 3, 2009
