Each week, Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger and Misean economist Richard M. Ebeling discuss the hot topics of the day. A few months ago, Jacob and Richard discussed the disaster of progressivism. I cannot stress enough the importance of this dialog. This 30 minute conversation encapsulates the most brilliant and enlightening synthesis of ideas and history concerning the origins and roots of this pernicious intellectual movement, both at home and abroad. Ebeling concisely traces these concepts from their 19th century Marxian notions of the dynamic class struggle of history, that history, according to Karl Marx, inevitably moved in a “progressive” direction from primitive pre-industrial societies, to a feudal order, to industrial capitalism, will move onward towards socialism (and the dictatorship of the proletariat), finally to the ultimate stage of history, communism. Any movement away from this cyclical direction was “reactionary” or regressive. In perhaps the highlight of his remarks, he builds upon the pioneering insights of Murray Rothbard and others in focusing upon the crucial development of the welfare-warfare state in Germany under chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and Bismarck’s co-opting of the collectivist program of the Marxian Social Democrats into a Bismarxian hybrid to enhance state power and control. Again,as Rothbard elucidated, generations of key American graduate students attended German universities during this period, returning to the US transformed by these statist ideas they had absorbed. These persons, such as Richard T. Ely, became the first generation of progressive intellectuals and cogs within the state apparatus that moved America away from a classical liberal (libertarian) direction towards this collectivist hybrid known as progressivism. Hornberger cogently points out the key role of the judiciary in the erosion of the constitutional safeguards against interventionism, and the pivotal model of Woodrow Wilson in establishing the matrix for all that followed.

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