“I don't care about the poor, I don't care about the middle class and I don't care about the rich. I care about good people who live virtuous lives, who engage in the world - who are rational, who take responsibility for their own lives." #QotD

“I don't care about the poor, I don't care about the middle class and I don't care about the rich. I care about good people who live virtuous lives, who engage in the world - who are rational, who take responsibility for their own lives. I care about virtue, good people. I know scoundrels in the upper, middle and lower class and I don't care about them. I want the irrational to suffer from their irrationality, I want the lazy to suffer from their laziness and the ones without virtue to suffer from that. Marx came up with the idea of dividing people into classes and now everyone buys into it, left, centre and right. I want hardworking people to benefit from their virtues.”
          ~ Yaron Brook
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Quote of the Day: Rand on the “bourgeois spirit”

 

“It is not the ‘bourgeois spirit’ that creates civilisation, but the rational spirit. It is not trade that is primary here, but production. And the base of production is thought. And the base of productive action is the pursuit of rational values. Before there could be any ‘bourgeois’ there had to be all the enormous philosophical thinking that led to  individualism and private property.”
~ Ayn Rand, commenting on Human Action, as published in her Marginalia [emphasis in the original]

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Quote of the Day: On the demonisation of Israel

 

Today’s long quote is from Joshua Muravchik’s book Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel:

“[Around the world] Jews face mounting peril… [T]he number of places on Earth where Jews can reside in peace and security has been shrinking, and the question of the day is whether the countries of Europe will continue to be among them…
    “It makes little difference which comes first, hatred of Jews or hatred of Israel. The peril does not arise because the hatred is spreading: indeed it may not be spreading. The peril arises because the hatred is growing more lethal.. the attacks grow more frequent and more violent, making it increasingly difficult or impossible for Jews to live in various parts of the Diaspora…
    “[T]he ‘global community’ ha[s] stamped Israel as an outcast. What ha[s] happened [since 1967] to occasion such a dramatic turnaround? On the surface, there were two explanations. First, the Arab cause, reactionary, overtly homicidal in its objectives, and expressed in bluster, had been replaced by the far more sympathetic and “progressive” Palestinian cause. Instead of proclaiming openly their determination to deny the Jews a state, Israel’s enemies now accused the Jews of denying that same right to another people, the Palestinians. Second, Israel no longer seemed endangered…
    “[S]urrounded and outnumbered and, in 1967, with memories of the Holocaust still fresh, nobody felt certain that the Jewish state would survive this more determined threat to its survival. But four decades and several wars later, Israel appeared invulnerable. In a complete reversal of fortune, David seemed to have become Goliath…
    “Another factor … was an ideological transformation that saw the rise of a paradigm of progressive thought that Arab and Muslim advocates helped to develop. It involved multiculturalism or race-consciousness in which the struggle of the third world against the West, or of “people of colour” against the white man, replaced the older Marxist model of proletariat versus bourgeoisie as the central moral drama of world history. In this paradigm, the Arabs, notwithstanding their superiority in resources and number, nor their regressive social and political practices … now, in the guise of the Palestinians [a national grouping that did not exist before 1948] assumed a place among the forces of virtue and progress while the Israelis were consigned to the ranks of villains and reactionaries….
    “[T]he Palestinians executed a strategy that succeeded in yoking the support of almost the entire global Left. That support ran the spectrum from the diverse communist states and parties, with their cynical though formidable political apparatuses, to the idealistic ‘soft Left,’ throbbing with guilt over memories of imperialism and the enduring reality of racism. Championed by the Left’s networks of organisations and intellectuals, a Palestinian state became a kind of Holy Grail to enlightened opinion, even while almost no one gave a fig for the aspirations of the Kurds or Tibetans or numerous other bereft peoples. Whether this state would rise alongside Israel or in place of it was of secondary concern.”

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Q: The modern reason for the season? A: Capitalism.

 

Christmas as we know it? It’s mostly a modern invention – and that’s mostly good.
In this guest post, B.K. Marcus tells a little bit of of the little-known tale of how American capitalism created both the modern Christmas and the market innovation of Peace on Earth.

Rowdy men in colourful rags gather outside the city’s nicer homes, demanding to be let in. Some have disguised themselves with mock-fancy outfits that ridicule their less-than-willing hosts, while others have blackened their faces or dressed up as animals. If you try to keep them out, they will shatter your windows, break down your door, and help themselves to food and drink. If instead you grant the rabble access, your costumed guests will drink your best booze and demand a cash “tip” for slurring a noisy song at your family.
Welcome to a traditional Christmas, as it was celebrated for over a thousand years: from the last days of Rome, through late-medieval London, to 18th-century New York.
No Santa, no Christmas tree, no wreath or holly or mistletoe. And no more sign of the Holy Family than you would have seen at any other season.

“It was all a little like Halloween today,” writes historian Stephen Nissenbaum in The Battle for Christmas, “when, for a single evening, children assume the right to enter the houses of neighbours and even strangers, to demand of their elders a gift (or ‘treat’) and to threaten them, should they fail to provide one, with a punishment.”
    But unlike modern Halloween, the traditional Christmas involved real intimidation: the costumed petitioners were not small children but lower-class young men; they were already drunk and demanding yet more to drink.
    How did this annual ritual of clamour and extortion turn into silent night, holy night?
    Despite centuries of effort by Church authorities, that transformation was not at all a religious conversion from pagan bacchanal to pious observance. The modern, domestic Christmas is younger than the Industrial Revolution, and like that revolution, it was part cause and part consequence of commercial capitalism.

The Clash of Christmas Cultures
Whether it’s Starbucks cups or the ever-popular “Happy Holidays” greeting, every year it seems there is a controversy over Christmas and how it’s celebrated. The most amusing so far this year is the story about Minneapolis’s Mall of America hiring its first black Santa's helper that outraged so many readers of the Minneapolis Star Tribune they had to shut down online comments. As one journalist responded to the controversy, “Nothing says ‘Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men,’ like a tsunami of hatred over a black man honouring the legend of a Turkish bishop, in celebration of the birth of a Palestinian Jew.”
    “The blowback,” she continues, “is yet another chapter of on ongoing saga that a ‘war’ is being waged against Christmas.”
  Whatever official tradition is allegedly being dropped, it has become an unofficial tradition in Europe and North America at least that as the nights grow longer and the temperature drops, there must be a public skirmish in an on-going culture war over the season and its sundry greetings.
    The central winter holiday (claim the protectors of tradition) has grown either too secular or too exclusionary, either too politically correct or too incorrect, and always—always!—they bleat that it’s far too materialistic.
    Implicit in the charges is the idea that unsympathetic forces have corrupted our holiday and degraded our longstanding traditions. We have, it is ever contended, lost track of the true meaning of Christmas.
    But older than most of our modern Christmas traditions is the tradition of fighting over how to celebrate in late December — or whether to celebrate at all. The traditionalists and their many followers seem to believe that a failure to explicitly observe Christmas is an attack on Christianity. But once upon a time, some of the most zealous Christians, especially in America, took precisely the opposite position…

The Traditional Enemies of Christmas
For the first two centuries of European settlement in New England, writes Nissenbaum, there was no official celebration of Christmas at all.

In fact, the holiday was systematically suppressed by Puritans during the colonial period.… It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.

Why such hostility toward Christmas from pious Christians? According to the Puritans, Christmas was not really a Christian holiday at all.

It was only in the fourth century that the Church officially decided to observe Christmas on December 25. And this date was chosen not for religious reasons but simply because it happened to mark the approximate arrival of the winter solstice [and the birth of a  legendary number of pagan gods], an event that was celebrated long before the advent of Christianity. The Puritans were correct when they pointed out — and they pointed it out often — that Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer.

When you consider how Christmas had been celebrated for over a millennium — with drunken misrule, menace, and open invasion of property — it’s easier to understand the Puritan antipathy to the holiday.
    But over time, the opponents of this carnival Christmas found that they couldn’t suppress the celebration.
    Today, “diversity” is a buzzword for the sort of political correctness that traditionalists contend is the enemy of Christmas. But the only era in which Christmas was even partially suppressed was when a homogeneous population of the pious dominated the culture and the government.
    As both Europe and America grew more diverse in backgrounds and beliefs, Christmas reasserted itself.
    The Puritan attempt to ban Christmas was part of a larger campaign to impose a particular understanding of biblical religion on England and America, but it also had a more practical, secular goal: dispersing the crowds that gathered in public to pursue their disorderly version of holiday cheer.
    In the early 19th century, a different group of rich and powerful men tried to re-engineer the holiday for their own social agenda. That their efforts were ultimately so successful has less to do with their specific goals than with how well their invented traditions served the emerging commercial culture of industrial capitalism.


Inventing Tradition
In 1975, a small group of Boston artists were seeking an alternative way to celebrate New Year’s Eve, one that avoided the usual emphasis on drunken revelry. Their solution was called First Night, a gathering of performers and public audiences seeking to welcome the New Year without alcohol. The event was a success, and nearby communities soon adopted it. By the end of the 20th century, it had spread to more than 250 North American cities. By 2006, First Night attracted more than a million visitors.
    A century and a half earlier, wealthy New Yorkers pursued a similar mission: to offer an alternative to the sort of Christmas that historian Susan G. Davis called “riotous disorder, racial violence, and jolly foolery for neighbours and audiences.”
    The combination of “customary Christmas license” and the seasonal unemployment that still occurred in an economy based largely on agriculture, Davis writes in Parades and Power, “made the winter holiday a noisy, drunken, threatening period in the eyes of the respectable.”
    Some of the respectable took it upon themselves to fashion an alternative to the traditional Christmas. The Knickerbockers (the name comes from a pseudonym used by the group’s best-known member, Washington Irving) were “a small group of antiquarian-minded New York gentlemen,” who, according to Nissenbaum, “felt that they belonged to a patrician class whose authority was under siege,” especially during the annual winter riots.
    Like the First Night artists, the Knickerbockers decided that the solution was not to ban the unwanted activity but to offer it some competition. Unlike First Night, the Knickerbockers’ alternative was to celebrate not in public but at home, not among crowds of strangers but rather with immediate family.
    This attempt to invent a newly domestic Christmas took several forms, but the one that captured the public imagination was the family Christmas that centred around small children, Christmas presents, and a new patron saint of gift giving: Saint Nicholas.
    The established wisdom may be that the American Santa Claus, now a global figure, was “a creature of ancient Dutch folklore,” as Nissenbaum puts it, “who made his way to the New World in the company of immigrants from Holland.” But Santa was, in fact, an invention of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and in particular of Clement Clarke Moore, the author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” Better known as “‘Twas the Night before Christmas,” the poem was first published on December 23, 1823, and has become, according to one New York historian, “arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American.”

Reinventing Children
Santa had predecessors, for sure, most notably the historical Saint Nicholas (known in Dutch as Sinterklaas), but before the 19th century there was no widespread tradition in America of Christmas gifts for children — in part because our current idea of childhood is itself a recent invention.

In pre-modern times, most children were treated as proto- or mini-adults — not yet fully formed but otherwise not essentially different from anyone else. There is some disagreement among historians about parents’ affection and attitudes toward their offspring in the eras of high infant mortality, but if we put aside the historically thorny issue of familial tenderness, we can see that the parental duty, commonly understood, was to prepare children for adulthood as directly as possible.
    Only in the early period of capitalism, with the rise of a large, commercial middle class, did the notion arise that children should be segregated from the grown-up world of work — and of bacchanalian carousing. Where Western attitudes toward childrearing had previously focused on a conception of the young as little savages who needed to be civilized, the modern bourgeoisie, influenced by the writings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, came to perceive children as fundamentally innocent — a state that needed to be preserved, protected, and celebrated.
    With the more widespread wealth and increasing privacy brought about by a growing commercial economy, a new divide emerged in the minds of the middle class: a separation between the corrupting public sphere and the protective shelter of the home. The new icon of Santa Claus offered New Yorkers, Americans, and eventually the whole world a figure around whom to ritualise this newfound domesticity and to raise new generations of parents who would come to believe that their childhood memories of Christmas were part of a timeless tradition.

Removing the Price Tag
What was not perceived as timeless was the commercial revolution that made it all possible. Memories of a simpler time were fresh, if not entirely accurate. As industry, urbanisation, and immigration increased, so too did a desire for at least one time of year when we could retreat to a world of preindustrial craftsmanship, nonmonetary exchange, and quiet familial ties. Nissenbaum writes of the tension between the new economy and the new Christmas:

Perhaps the very speed and intensity with which those essentially new rituals were claimed as timeless traditions shows how powerful was the need to keep the relationship between family life and a commercial economy hidden from view — to protect children (and adults, too) from understanding something troublesome about the world they were making.

As merchants recruited ‘Saint Nick’ to promote their shops and mass-produced products, an antithetical image of Santa’s workshop became well established: one with no sign of machinery or modern production, only hand tools and individual craftsmanship. The presents exchanged on December 25 were overwhelmingly store-bought items; but with price tags removed and wrapping paper applied, they were presented as existing outside the commercial nexus.
    Even the Christmas tree, another seemingly ancient folk tradition that was in fact invented in the 19th century, “first entered American culture as a ritual strategy,” writes Nissenbaum, “designed to cope with what was already being seen … as a holiday laden with crass materialism — a holiday that had produced a rising generation of greedy, spoiled children.” The Christmas tree made gift giving less one-sided. The family tree became the locus of not only surprise and gratitude but also of mutual generosity, the hub of a material exchange “forged outside the fevered crucible of market relations.”
    The meaning of Christmas, according to the tree-centred ritual, lies not in material gain but in gratitude and generosity.

The Season of Light
Our current holiday rituals can be seen, then, as a dance between capitalism and an on-going cultural ambivalence to commerce. The world of economic production and exchange produces a need to escape our awareness of the marketplace — and the market itself meets that demand.
    If we need that annual hiatus to be more spiritual, less materialistic, more familial, and less anonymous, the commercial culture will adapt, even with seemingly non-commercial solutions.

Those who want to celebrate the winter solstice as the birth of their saviour[s] have centuries of tradition behind them. But that has never been the way most people celebrated the season, no matter what our selective memory may suggest. Drunken revelry in the streets is now confined to New Year’s Eve [sadly – Ed.], and is a much older tradition, one the Church sought to counter with its celebration of the Nativity. A religious Christmas may be more peaceful, more admirable, and certainly more high-minded, but in the appeal to tradition, it loses out to older and more popular forms of low-minded merrymaking.
     Where religious authorities tried and failed to rein in the noise and menace of the solstice season, modern capitalism succeeded, displacing the winter carnival with its own invented tradition: the domestic Christmas, a 19th-century creation merging Christian and pagan symbols in a celebration centred around two other historical innovations: the modern family and modern childhood.
    For millennia, people have wanted to spend the darkest part of the year celebrating in a way that diverges from the normal rules and routine. In an agricultural age, that meant overindulging in meat and drink. In a rigid social hierarchy, it meant reversing the ranks, making the wealthy serve the poor. In a commercial age, where mom and dad head off to separate jobs while the kids are sent to school, it means spending the holiday together in leisure, practicing a form of mutual generosity that is ritualized to obscure its capitalist origins.
    As long as the demand continues for an annual hiatus from the normal rules, the market will supply whatever is necessary to mark the season, even when what is required is the impression that we have somehow transcended the commercial world that makes our modern Christmas possible.

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B.K. Marcus is editor of the Freeman,
where this post previously appeared.
Santa pic by Prodos

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Mises: Liberty & Property

 

In some ways, says Jeffrey Tucker, “I think this might be the single most inspiring and informative – and profoundly true – essay that Ludwig Von Mises ever wrote. I've read it a hundred times and each time I find more in it. Some examples are dated but not by much. It speaks a profound truth.”

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Liberty and Property
by Ludwig Von Mises

This paper was originally delivered as a lecture at Princeton University, October 1958, at the 9th Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society.

I

AT THE END of the eighteenth century there prevailed two notions of liberty, each of them very different from what we have in mind today referring to liberty and freedom.

The first of these conceptions was purely academic and without any application to the conduct of political affairs. It was an idea derived from the books of the ancient authors, the study of which was then the sum and substance of higher education. In the eyes of these Greek and Roman writers, freedom was not something that had to be granted to all men. It was a privilege of the minority, to be withheld from the majority. What the Greeks called democracy was, in the light of present-day terminology, not what Lincoln called government by the people, but oligarchy, the sovereignty of full-right citizens in a community in which the masses were meteques or slaves. Even this rather limited freedom after the fourth century before Christ was not dealt with by the philosophers, historians, and orators as a practical constitutional institution. As they saw it, it was a feature of the past irretrievably lost. They bemoaned the passing of this golden age, but they did not know any method of returning to it.

The second notion of liberty was no less oligarchic, although it was not inspired by any literary reminiscences. It was the ambition of the landed aristocracy, and sometimes also of urban patricians, to preserve their privileges against the rising power of royal absolutism. In most parts of continental Europe, the princes remained victorious in these conflicts. Only in england and in the Netherlands did the gentry and the urban patricians succeed in defeating the dynasties. But what they won was not freedom for all, but only freedom for an elite, for a minority of the people.

We must not condemn as hypocrites the men who in those ages praised liberty, while they preserved the legal disabilities of the many, even serfdom and slavery. They were faced with a problem which they did not know how to solve satisfactorily. The traditional system of production was too narrow for a continually rising population. The number of people for whom there was, in a full sense of the term, no room left by the pre-capitalistic methods of agriculture and artisanship was increasing. These supernumeraries were starving paupers. They were a menace to the preservation of the existing order of society and, for a long time, nobody could think of another order, a state of affairs, that would feed all of these poor wretches. there could not be any question of granting them full civil rights, still less of giving them a share of the conduct of affairs of state. The only expedient the rulers knew was to keep them quiet by resorting to force.

II

THE PRE-CAPITALISTIC system of production was restrictive. Its historical basis was military conquest. The victorious kings had given the land to their paladins. These aristocrats were lords in the literal meaning of the word, as they did not depend on the patronage of consumers buying or abstaining from buying on a market. On the other hand, they themselves were the main customers of the processing industries which, under the guild system, were organised on a corporative scheme. This scheme was opposed to innovation. It forbade deviation from the traditional methods of production. The number of people for whom there were jobs even in agriculture or in the arts and crafts was limited. Under these conditions, many a man, to use the words of Malthus, had to discover that “at nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him” and that “she tells him to be gone.”¹ But some of these outcasts nevertheless managed to survive, begot children, and made the number of destitute grow hopelessly more and more.

But then came capitalism. It is customary to see the radical innovations that capitalism brought about in the substitution of the mechanical factory for the more primitive and less efficient methods of the artisans’ shops. This is a rather superficial view. The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses. The arts and crafts of the good old days had catered almost exclusively to the wants of the well-to-do. But the factories produced cheap goods for the many. All the early factories turned out was designed to serve the masses, the same strata that worked in the factories. They served them either by supplying them directly or indirectly by exporting and thus providing for them foreign food and raw materials. This principle of marketing was the signature of early capitalism as it is of present-day capitalism. The employees themselves are the customers consuming the much greater part of all goods produced. They are the sovereign customers who are “always right.” Their buying or abstention from buying determines what has to be produced, in what quantity, and of what quality. In buying what suits them best they make some enterprises profit and expand and make other enterprises lose money and shrink.

Thereby they are continually shifting control of the factors of production into the hands of those businessmen who are most successful in filling their wants. Under capitalism private property of the factors of production is a social function. The entrepreneurs, capitalists, and land owners are mandataries, as it were, of the consumers, and their mandate is revocable. In order to be rich, it is not sufficient to have once saved and accumulated capital. It is necessary to invest it again and again in those lines in which it best fills the wants of the consumers. The market process is a daily repeated plebiscite, and it ejects inevitably from the ranks of profitable people those who do not employ their property according to the orders given by the public. But business, the target of fanatical hatred on the part of all contemporary governments and self-styled intellectuals, acquires and preserves bigness only because it works for the masses. The plants that cater to the luxuries of the few never attain big size. The shortcoming of nineteenth-century historians and politicians was that they failed to realise that the workers were the main consumers of the products of industry. In their view, the wage earner was a man toiling for the sole benefit of a parasitic leisure class. They laboured under the delusion that the factories had impaired the lot of the manual workers. If they had paid any attention to statistics they would easily have discovered the fallaciousness of their opinion. Infant mortality dropped, the average length of life was prolonged, the population multiplied, and the average common man enjoyed amenities of which even the well-to-do of earlier ages did not dream.

However this unprecedented enrichment of the masses were merely a by-product of the Industrial Revolution. Its main achievement was the transfer of economic supremacy from the owners of land to the totality of the population. The common man was no longer a drudge who had to be satisfied with the crumbs that fell from the tables of the rich. The three pariah castes which were characteristic of the pre-capitalistic ages—the slaves, the serfs, and those people whom patristic and scholastic authors as well as British legislation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries referred to as the poor—disappeared. Their scions became, in this new setting of business, not only free workers, but also customers. This radical change was reflected in the emphasis laid by business on markets. What business needs first of all is markets and again markets. This was the watch-word of capitalistic enterprise. Markets, that means patrons, buyers, consumers. There is under capitalism one way to wealth: to serve the consumers better and cheaper than other people do.

Within the shop and factory the owner—or in the corporations, the representative of the shareholders, the president—is the boss. But this mastership is merely apparent and conditional. It is subject to the supremacy of the consumers. The consumer is king, is the real boss, and the manufacturer is done for if he does not outstrip his competitors in best serving consumers.

It was this great economic transformation that changed the face of the world. It very soon transferred political power from the hands of a privileged minority into the hands of the people. Adult franchise followed in the wake of industrial enfranchisement. The common man, to whom the market process had given the power to choose the entrepreneur and capitalists, acquired the analogous power in the field of government. He became a voter.

It has been observed by eminent economists, I think first by the late Frank A. Fetter, that the market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. It would be more correct to say that representative government by the people is an attempt to arrange constitutional affairs according to the model of the market, but this design can never be fully achieved. In the political field it is always the will of the majority that prevails, and the minorities must yield to it. It serves also minorities, provided they are not so insignificant in number as to become negligible. The garment industry produces clothes not only for normal people, but also for the stout, and the publishing trade publishes not only westerns and detective stories for the crowd, but also books for discriminating readers.

There is a second important difference. In the political sphere, there is no means for an individual or a small group of individuals to disobey the will of the majority. But in the intellectual field private property makes rebellion possible. The rebel has to pay a price for his independence; there are in this universe no prizes that can be won without sacrifices. But if a man is willing to pay the price, he is free to deviate from the ruling orthodoxy or neo-orthodoxy.

What would conditions have been in the socialist commonwealth for heretics like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Veblen, or Freud? For Monet, Courbet, Walt Whitman, Rilke, or Kafka? In all ages, pioneers of new ways of thinking and acting could work only because private property made contempt of the majority’s ways possible. Only a few of these separatists were themselves economically independent enough to defy the government into the opinions of the majority. But they found in the climate of the free economy among the public people prepared to aid and support them. What would Marx have done without his patron, the manufacturer Friedrich Engels?

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¹ Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed. (London, 1803), p. 531.

III

WHAT VITIATES entirely the socialists’ economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy. They see only hierarchical organisation of the various enterprises and plans, and are at a loss to realise that the profit system forces business to serve the consumers. In their dealings with their employers, the unions proceed as if only malice and greed were to prevent what they call management from paying higher wage rates. Their shortsightedness does not see anything beyond the doors of the factory. They and their henchmen talk about the concentration of economic power, and do not realize that economic power is ultimately vested in the hands of the buying public of which the employees themselves form the immense majority. Their inability to comprehend things as they are is reflected in such inappropriate metaphors as industrial kingdom and dukedoms. They are too dull to see the difference between a sovereign king or duke who could be dispossessed only by a more powerful conqueror and a “chocolate king” who forfeits his “kingdom” as soon as the customers prefer to patronise another supplier.

This distortion is at the bottom of all socialist plans. If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the customers. But they were professional revolutionaries and their only job was to kindle civil war. Lenin’s ideal was to build a nation’s production effort according to the model of the post office, an outfit that does not depend on the consumers, because its deficits are covered by compulsory collection of taxes. “The whole of society,” he said, was to “become one office and one factory.”² He did not see that the very character of the office and the factory is entirely changed when it is alone in the world and no longer grants to people the opportunity to choose among the products and services of various enterprises. Because his blindness made it impossible for him to see the role the market and the consumers play under capitalism, he could not see the difference between freedom and slavery. Because in his eyes the workers were only workers and not also customers, he believed they were already slaves under capitalism, and that one did not change their status when nationalizing all plants and shops. Socialism substitutes the sovereignty of a dictator, or committee of dictators, for the sovereignty of the consumers.

Along with the economic sovereignty of the citizens disappears also their political sovereignty. To the unique production plan that annuls any planning on the part of the consumers corresponds in the constitutional sphere the one-party principle that deprives the citizens of any opportunity to plan the course of public affairs. Freedom is indivisible. He who has not the faculty to choose among various brands of canned food or soap, is also deprived of the power to choose between various political parties and programs and to elect the officeholders. He is no longer a man; he becomes a pawn in the hands of the supreme social engineer. Even his freedom to rear progeny will be taken away by eugenics.

Of course, the socialist leaders occasionally assure us that dictatorial tyranny is to last only for the period of transition from capitalism and representative government to the socialist millennium in which everybody’s wants and wishes will be fully satisfied.³ Once the socialist regime is “sufficiently secure to risk criticism,” Miss Joan Robinson, the eminent representative of the British neo-Cambridge school, is kind enough to promise us, “even independent philharmonic societies” will be allowed to exist.⁴ Thus the liquidation of all dissenters is the condition that will bring us what the communists call freedom. From this point of view we may also understand what another distinguished Englishman, Mr. J.G. Crowther, had in mind when he praised inquisition as “beneficial to science when it protects a rising class.”⁵ The meaning of all this is clear. When all people meekly bow to a dictator, there will no longer be any dissenters left for liquidation. Caligula, Torquemada, Robespierre would have agreed with this solution.

The socialists have engineered a semantic revolution in converting the meaning of terms into their opposite. In the vocabulary of their “Newspeak,” as George Orwell called it, there is a term “the one-party principle.” Now, etymologically, party is derived from the noun part. The brotherless part is no longer different from its antonym, the whole; it is identical with it. A brotherless party is not a party, and the one-party principle is in fact a no-party principle. It is a suppression of any kind of opposition. Freedom implies the right to choose between assent and dissent. But in Newspeak it means the duty to assent unconditionally and strict interdiction of dissent. This reversal of the traditional connotation of all words of the political terminology is not merely a peculiarity of the language of the Russian Communists and their Fascist and Nazi disciples. The social order that in abolishing private property deprives the consumers of their autonomy and independence, and thereby subjects every man to the arbitrary discretion of the central planning board, could not win the support of the masses if they were not to camouflage its main character. The socialists would have never duped the voters if they had openly told them that their ultimate end is to cast them into bondage. For exoteric use they were forced to pay lip-service to the traditional appreciation of liberty.

_________________

² V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, s.d.) p. 84.
³ Karl Marx, Sur Kritik des Sozialdemoskratischen Programms von Gotha, ed. Kreibich (Reichenberg, 1920), p. 23.
⁴ Joan Robinson, Private Enterprise and Public Control (published for the Association for Education in Citzenship by the English Universities Press, Ltd., s.d.), pp. 13–14.
⁵ J.G. Crowther, Social Relations of Science (London, 1941), p. 333.

IV

IT WAS DIFFERENT in the esoteric discussions among the inner circles of the great conspiracy. There the initiated did not dissemble their intentions concerning liberty. Liberty was, in their opinion, certainly a good feature in the past in the frame of bourgeois society because it provided them with the opportunity to embark on their schemes. But once socialism has triumphed, there is no longer any need for free thought and autonomous action on the part of individuals. Any further change can only be a deviation from the perfect state that mankind has attained in reaching the bliss of socialism. Under such conditions, it would be simply lunacy to tolerate dissent.

Liberty, says the Bolshevist, is a bourgeois prejudice. The common man does not have any ideas of his own, he does not write books, does not hatch heresies, and does not invent new methods of production. He just wants to enjoy life. He has no use for the class interests of the intellectuals who make a living as professional dissenters and innovators.

This is certainly the most arrogant disdain of the plain citizen ever devised. There is no need to argue this point. For the question is not whether or not the common man can himself take advantage of the liberty to think, to speak, and to write books. The question is whether or not the sluggish routinist profits from the freedom granted to those who eclipse him in intelligence and will power.

The common man may look with indifference and even contempt upon the dealings of better people. But he is delighted to enjoy all the benefits which the endeavours of the innovators put at his disposal. He has no comprehension of what in his eyes is merely inane hair-splitting. But as soon as these thoughts and theories are utilized by enterprising businessmen for satisfying some of his latent wishes, he hurries to acquire the new products. The common man is without doubt the main beneficiary of all the accomplishments of modern science and technology.

It is true, a man of average intellectual abilities has no chance to rise to the rank of a captain of industry. But the sovereignty that the market assigns to him in economic affairs stimulates technologists and promoters to convert to his use all the achievements of scientific research. Only people whose intellectual horizon does not extend beyond the internal organisation of the factory and who do not realise what makes the businessmen run, fail to notice this fact.

The admirers of the Soviet system tell us again and again that freedom is not the supreme good. It is “not worth having,” if it implies poverty. To sacrifice it in order to attain wealth for the masses, is in their eyes fully justified. But for a few unruly individualists who cannot adjust themselves to the ways of regular fellows, all people in Russia are perfectly happy. We may leave it undecided whether this happiness was also shared by the millions of Ukrainian peasants who died from starvation, by the inmates of the forced labour camps, and by the Marxian leaders who were purged. But we cannot pass over the fact that the standard of living was incomparably higher in the free countries of the West than in the communist East. In giving away liberty as the price to be paid for the acquisition of prosperity, the Russians made a poor bargain. [In Soviet Russial] they now have neither the one nor the other.

V

ROMANTIC philosophy laboured under the illusion that in the early ages of history the individual was free and that the course of historical evolution deprived him of his primordial liberty. As Jean Jacques Rousseau saw it, nature accorded men freedom and society enslaved him. In fact, primeval man was at the mercy of every fellow who was stronger and therefore could snatch away from him the scarce means of subsistence. There is in nature nothing to which the name of liberty could be given. The concept of freedom always refers to social relations between men. True, society cannot realise the illusory concept of the individual’s absolute independence. Within society everyone depends on what other people are prepared to contribute to his well-being in return for his own contribution to their well-being. Society is essentially the mutual exchange of services. As far as individuals have the opportunity to choose, they are free; if they are forced by violence or threat of violence to surrender to the terms of an exchange, no matter how they feel about it, they lack freedom. This slave is unfree precisely because the master assigns him his tasks and determines what he has to receive if he fulfills it.

As regards the social apparatus of repression and coercion, the government, there cannot be any question of freedom. Government is essentially the negation of liberty. It is the recourse to violence or threat of violence in order to make all people obey the orders of the government, whether they like it or not. As far as the government’s jurisdiction extends, there is coercion, not freedom. Government is a necessary institution, the means to make the social system of cooperation work smoothly without being disturbed by violent acts on the part of gangsters whether of domestic or of foreign origin. Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil; it is not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful human coexistence possible. But it is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging. Whatever a government does it is ultimately supported by the actions of armed constables. If the government operates a school or a hospital, the funds required are collected by taxes, i.e., by payments exacted from the citizens.

If we take into account the fact that, as human nature is, there can neither be civilisation nor peace without the functioning of the government apparatus of violent action, we may call government the most beneficial human institution. But the fact remains that government is repression not freedom. Freedom is to be found only in the sphere in which government does not interfere. Liberty is always freedom from the government. It is the restriction of the government’s interference. It prevails only in the fields in which the citizens have the opportunity to choose the way in which they want to proceed. Civil rights are the statutes that precisely circumscribe the sphere in which the men conducting the affairs of state are permitted to restrict the individuals’ freedom to act.

The ultimate end that men aim at by establishing government is to make possible the operation of a definite system of social cooperation under the principle of the division of labor. If the social system which people want to have is socialism (communism, planning) there is no sphere of freedom left. All citizens are in every regard subject to orders of the government. The state is a total state; the regime is totalitarian. The government alone plans and forces everybody to behave according with this unique plan. In the market economy the individuals are free to choose the way in which they want to integrate themselves into the frame of social cooperation. As far as the sphere of market exchange extends, there is spontaneous action on the part of individuals. Under this system that is called laissez-faire, and which Ferdinand Lassalle dubbed as the night-watchman state, there is freedom because there is a field in which individuals are free to plan for themselves.

The socialists must admit there cannot be any freedom under a socialist system. But they try to obliterate the difference between the servile state and economic freedom by denying that there is any freedom in the mutual exchange of commodities and services on the market. Every market exchange is, in the words of a school of pro-socialist lawyers, “a coercion over other people’s liberty.” There is, in their eyes, no difference worth mentioning between a man’s paying a tax or a fine imposed by a magistrate, or his buying a newspaper or admission to a movie. In each of these cases the man is subject to governing power. He’s not free, for, as professor Hale says, a man’s freedom means “the absence of any obstacle to his use of material goods.”⁶ This means: I am not free, because a woman who has knitted a sweater, perhaps as a birthday present for her husband, puts an obstacle to my using it. I myself am restricting all other people’s freedom because I object to their using my toothbrush. In doing this I am, according to this doctrine, exercising private governing power, which is analogous to public government power, the powers that the government exercises in imprisoning a man in Sing Sing.

Those expounding this amazing doctrine consistently conclude that liberty is nowhere to be found. They assert that what they call economic pressures do not essentially differ from the pressures the masters practice with regard to their slaves. They reject what they call private governmental power, but they don’t object to the restriction of liberty by public government power. They want to concentrate all what they call restrictions of liberty in the hands of the government. They attack the institution of private property and the laws that, as they say, stand “ready to enforce property rights—that is, to deny liberty to anyone to act in a way which violates them.”⁷

A generation ago all housewives prepared soup by proceeding in accordance with the recipes that they had got from their mothers or from a cookbook. Today many housewives prefer to buy a canned soup, to warm it and to serve it to their family. But, say our learned doctors, the canning corporation is in a position to restrict the housewife’s freedom because, in asking a price for the tin can, it puts an obstacle to her use of it. People who did not enjoy the privilege of being tutored by these eminent teachers, would say that the canned product was turned out by the cannery, and that the corporation in producing it removed the greatest obstacle to a consumer’s getting and using a can, viz., its nonexistence. The mere essence of a product cannot gratify anybody without its existence. But they are wrong, say the doctors. The corporation dominates the housewife, it destroys by its excessive concentrated power over her individual freedom, and it is the duty of the government to prevent such a gross offense. Corporations, say, under the auspices of the Ford Foundation, another of this group, Professor Berle, must be subjected to the control of the government.⁸

Why does our housewife buy the canned product rather than cling to the methods of her mother and grandmother? No doubt because she thinks this way of acting is more advantageous for her than the traditional custom. Nobody forced her. There were people—they are called jobbers, promoters, capitalists, speculators, stock exchange gamblers—who had the idea of satisfying a latent wish of millions of housewives by investing in the cannery industry. And there are other equally selfish capitalists who, in many hundreds of other corporations, provide consumers with many hundreds of other things. The better a corporation serves the public, the more customers it gets, the bigger it grows. Go into the home of the average American family and you will see for whom the wheels of the machines are turning.

In a free country nobody is prevented from acquiring riches by serving the consumers better than they are served already. What he needs is only brains and hard work. “Modern civilisation, nearly all civilisation,” said Edwin Cannan, the last in a long line of eminent British economists, “is based on the principle of making things pleasant for those who please the market, and unpleasant for those who fail to do so.”⁹ All this talk about the concentration of economic power is vain. The bigger a corporation is, the more people it serves, the more does it depend on pleasing the consumers, the many, the masses. Economic power, in the market economy, is in the hands of the consumers.

Capitalistic business is not perseverance in the once attained state of production. It is rather ceaseless innovation, daily repeated attempts to improve the provision of the consumers by new, better and cheaper products. Any actual state of production activities is merely transitory. There prevails incessantly the tendency to supplant what is already achieved by something that serves the consumers better. There is consequently under capitalism a continuous circulation of elites. What characterises the men whom one calls the captains of industry is the ability to contribute new ideas and to put them to work. However big a corporation must be, it is doomed as soon as it does not succeed in adjusting itself daily anew to the best possible methods of serving the consumers.

But the politicians and other would-be reformers see only the structure of industry as its exists today. They think that they are clever enough to snatch from business control of the plants as they are today, and to manage them by sticking to already established routines. While the ambitious newcomer, who will be the tycoon of tomorrow, is already preparing plans for things unheard of before, all they have in mind is to conduct affairs along tracks already beaten. There is no record of an industrial innovation contrived and put into practice by bureaucrats. If one does not want to plunge into stagnation, a free hand must be left to those today-unknown men who have the ingenuity to lead mankind forward on the way to more and more satisfactory conditions. This is the main problem of a nation’s economic organisation.

Private property of the material factors of production is not a restriction of the freedom of all other people to choose what suits them best. It is, on the contrary, the means that assigns to the common man, in his capacity as a buyer, supremacy in all economic affairs. It is the means to stimulate a nation’s most enterprising men to exert themselves to the best of their abilities in the service of all of the people.

________________

⁶ Robert L. Hale, Freedom Through Law, Public Control of Private Governing Power (New York: Columbia University, 1952), pp. 4 ff.
⁷ Ibid., p. 5.
⁸ A.A. Berle, Jr., Economic Power and the Free Society, a Preliminary Discussion of the Corporation (New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1954).
⁹ Edwin Cannan, An Economist’s Protest (London, 1928), pp. VI ff.

VI

HOWEVER, one does not exhaustively describe the sweeping changes that capitalism brought about in the conditions of the common man if one merely deals with the supremacy he enjoys on the market as a consumer and in the affairs of state as a voter and with the unprecedented improvement of his standard of living. No less important is the fact that capitalism has made it possible for him to save, to accumulate capital and to invest it. The gulf that in the pre-capitalistic status and caste society separated the owners of property from the penniless poor has been narrowed down. In older ages the journeyman had such a low pay that he could hardly lay by something and, if he nevertheless did so, he could only keep his savings by hoarding and hiding a few coins.

Under capitalism his competence makes saving possible, and there are institutions that enable him to invest his funds in business. A not inconsiderable amount of the capital employed in American industries is the counterpart of the savings of employees. In acquiring savings deposits, insurance policies, bonds and also common stock, wage earners and salaried people are themselves earning interest and dividends and thereby, in the terminology of Marxism, are exploiters. The common man is directly interested in the flowering of business not only as a consumer and as an employee, but also as an investor. There prevails a tendency to efface to some extent the once sharp difference between those who own factors of production and those who do not. But, of course, this trend can only develop where the market economy is not sabotaged by allegedly social policies. The welfare state with its methods of easy money, credit expansion and undisguised inflation continually takes bites out of all claims payable in units of the nation’s legal tender.

The self-styled champions of the common man are still guided by the obsolete idea that a policy that favours the debtors at the expense of the creditors is very beneficial to the majority of the people. Their inability to comprehend the essential characteristics of the market economy manifests itself also in their failure to see the obvious fact that those whom they feign to aid are creditors in their capacity as savers, policy holders, and owners of bonds.

VII

THE DISTINCTIVE principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression, the State. All the spiritual and material achievements of Western civilisation were the result of the operation of this idea of liberty.

This doctrine and the policies of individualism and of capitalism, its application to economic matters, do not need any apologists or propagandists. The achievements speak for themselves.

The case for capitalism and private property rests, apart from other considerations, also upon the incomparable efficiency of its productive effort. It is this efficiency that makes it possible for capitalistic business to support a rapidly increasing population at a continually improving standard of living. The resulting progressive prosperity of the masses creates a social environment in which the exceptionally gifted individuals are free to give to their fellow-citizens all they are able to give. The social system of private property and limited government is the only system that tends to debarbarize all those who have the innate capacity to acquire personal culture.

It is a gratuitous pastime to belittle the material achievements of capitalism by observing that there are things that are more essential for mankind than bigger and speedier motorcars, and homes equipped with central heating, air conditioning, refrigerators, washing machines, and television sets. There certainly are such higher and nobler pursuits. But they are higher and nobler precisely because they cannot be aspired to by any external effort, but require the individual’s personal determination and exertion. Those levelling this reproach against capitalism display a rather crude and materialistic view in assuming that moral and spiritual culture could be built either by the government or by the organization of production activities. All that these external factors can achieve in this regard is to bring about an environment and a competence which offers the individuals the opportunity to work at their own personal perfection and edification.

It is not the fault of capitalism that the masses prefer a boxing match to a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone, jazz music to Beethoven symphonies, and comics to poetry. But it is certain that while pre-capitalistic conditions as they still prevail in the much greater part of the world makes these good things accessible only to a small minority of people,capitalism gives to the many a favourable chance of striving after them.

From whatever angle one may look at capitalism there is no reason to lament the passing of the allegedly good old days. Still less is it justified to long for the totalitarian utopias, whether of the Nazi or of the Soviet type.

We are inaugurating tonight the ninth meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. It is fitting to remember on this occasion that meetings of this kind in which opinions opposed to those of the majority of our contemporaries and to those of their governments are advanced and are possible only in the climate of liberty and freedom that is the most precious mark of Western civilisation. Let us hope that this right to dissent will never disappear.

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Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) taught in Vienna and New York and served as a close adviser to the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), where this piece was first published.
He is considered the leading theorist of the Austrian School of the 20th century.
Ayn Rand once suggested the best course for an intelligent student would be to study Aristotle in philosophy, von Mises in economics, Montessori in education,and Victor Hugo in literature – “If student minorities,” she said, “have succeeded in demanding that they be given courses on such subjects as Zen Buddhism, guerrilla warfare, Swahili, and astrology, then an intellectual student minority can succeed in demanding courses on [these giants]. At the very least, such courses would save the students' mind; potentially, they would save the culture.”

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Capitalism Is Good for the Poor

 

Markets beat back poverty, explains Steven Horwitz.

Critics frequently accuse markets and capitalism of making life worse for the poor. This refrain is certainly common in the halls of left-leaning academia as well as in broader intellectual circles. But like so many other criticisms of capitalism, this one ignores the very real, and very available, facts of history.

Nothing has done more to lift humanity out of poverty than the market economy. This claim is true whether we are looking at a time span of decades or of centuries. The number of people worldwide living on less than about two dollars per day today is less than half of what it was in 1990. The biggest gains in the fight against poverty have occurred in countries that have opened up their markets, such as China and India.

If we look over the longer historical period, we can see that the trends today are just the continuation of capitalism’s victories in beating back poverty. For most of human history, we lived in a world of a few haves and lots of have-nots. That slowly began to change with the advent of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. As economic growth took off and spread throughout the population, it created our own world in the West in which there are a whole bunch of haves and a few have-more-and-betters.

For example, the percentage of American households below the poverty line who have basic appliances has grown steadily over the last few decades, with poor families in 2005 being more likely to own things like a clothes dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, or air conditioner than the average household was in 1971. And consumer items that didn’t even exist back then, such as cell phones, were owned by half of poor households in 2005 and are owned by a substantial majority of them today.

Capitalism has also made poor people’s lives far better by reducing infant and child mortality rates, not to mention maternal death rates during childbirth, and by extending life expectancies by decades.

Consider, too, the way capitalism’s engine of growth has enabled the planet to sustain almost 7 billion people, compared to 1 billion in 1800. As Deirdre McCloskey has noted, if you multiply the gains in consumption to the average human by the gain in life expectancy worldwide by 7 (for 7 billion as compared to 1 billion people), humanity as a whole is better off by a factor of around 120. That’s not 120 percent better off, but 120 times better off since 1800.

The competitive market process has also made education, art, and culture available to more and more people. Even the poorest of Americans, not to mention many of the global poor, have access through the Internet and TV to concerts, books, and works of art that were exclusively the province of the wealthy for centuries.

And in the wealthiest countries, the dynamics of capitalism have begun to change the very nature of work. Where once humans toiled for 14 hours per day at backbreaking outdoor labor, now an increasing number of us work inside in climate-controlled comfort. Our workday and workweek have shrunk thanks to the much higher value of labor that comes from working with productive capital. We spend a much smaller percentage of our lives working for pay, whether we’re rich or poor. And even with economic change, the incomes of the poor are much less variable, as they are not linked to the unpredictable changes in weather that are part and parcel of a predominantly agricultural economy long since disappeared.

Think of it this way: the fabulously wealthy kings of old had servants attending to their every need, but an impacted tooth would likely kill them. The poor in largely capitalist countries have access to a quality of medical care and a variety and quality of food that the ancient kings could only dream of.

Consider, too, that the working poor of London 100 years ago were, at best, able to split a pound of meat per week among all of their children, which were greater in number than the two or three of today. In addition, the whole family ate meat once a week on Sunday, the one day the man of the household was home for dinner. That was meat for a whoe week.

[Click for story and interactive chart]

Compare that to today, when we worry that those in poverty are too easily able to afford a meal with a quarter pound of meat in it every single day for less than an hour’s labour. Even if you think that capitalism has made poor people overweight, that’s a major accomplishment compared to the precapitalist norm of constant malnutrition and the struggle even 100 years ago for the working poor to get enough calories.

The reality is that the rich have always lived well historically, as for centuries they could commandeer human labor to attend to their every need. In a precapitalist world, the poor had no hope of upward mobility or of relief from the endless physical drudgery that barely kept them alive.

Today, the poor in capitalist countries live like kings, thanks mostly to the freeing of labour and the ability to accumulate capital that makes that labour more productive and enriches even the poorest. We all have virtually at our fingertips the entire library of the world’s books, music and films.  We can communicate across continents at the cost of just pennies, and fly there in less time and for far less money than was even dreamed of even just decades ago. The falling cost of what were once luxuries and are now necessities, driven by the competitive market and its profit and loss signals, has brought labor-saving machines to the masses. When profit-seeking and innovation became acceptable behavior for the bourgeoisie, the horn of plenty brought forth its bounty, and even the poorest shared in that wealth.

Once people no longer needed permission to innovate, and once the value of new inventions was judged by the improvements they made to the lives of the masses in the form of profit and loss, the poor began to live lives of comfort and dignity.

These changes are not, as some would say, about technology. After all, the Soviets had great scientists but could not channel that knowledge into material comfort for their poor. And it’s not about natural resources, which is obvious today as resource-poor Hong Kong is among the richest countries in the world thanks to capitalism, while Venezuelan socialism has destroyed that resource-rich country.

Inventions only become innovations when the right institutions and sufficient capital exists to allow them to improve the lives of the masses. That is what capitalism did and continues to do every single day. And that’s why capitalism has been so good for the poor.

Consider, finally, what happened when the Soviets decided to show the film version of The Grapes of Wrath as anticapitalist propaganda. In the novel and film, a poor American family is driven from their Depression-era home by the Dust Bowl. They get in their old car and make a horrifying journey in search of a better life in California. The Soviets had to stop showing the film after a short period because the Russian audiences were astonished that poor Americans were able to own a car.

Even anticapitalist propaganda can’t help but provide evidence that contradicts its own argument. The historical truth is clear: nothing has done more for the poor than capitalism.

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Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and the author of Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions.

A version of this post first appeared at FEE.

 

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The "great man" theory of history

 

Trumpeters may have never heard of the "great man" theory of history, or realised the connection with the "strong man" who litters history's most destructive moments, but their latest hero is offering historians new material to document the hypothesis, says Jeffrey Tucker in this Guest Post.

The Founding Father of Fascism
Thomas Carlyle fits the bill in every respect

Have you heard of the “great man” theory of history?

The meaning is obvious from the words. The idea is that history moves in epochal shifts under the leadership of visionary, bold, often ruthless men who marshall the energy of masses of people to push events in radical new directions. Nothing is the same after them.

In their absence, nothing happens that is notable enough to qualify as history: no heroes, no god-like figures who qualify as “great.” In this view, we need such men.  If they do not exist, we create them. They give us purpose. They define the meaning of life. They drive history forward.

Great men, in this view, do not actually have to be fabulous people in their private lives. They need not exercise personal virtue. They need not even be moral. They only need to be perceived as such by the masses, and play this role in the trajectory of history.

Such a view of history shaped much of historiography as it was penned in the late 19th century and early 20th century, until the revisionists of the last several decades saw the error and turned instead to celebrate private life and the achievements of common folk instead. Today the “great man” theory history is dead as regards academic history, and rightly so.

Carlyle the Proto-Fascist

The originator of the great man theory of history is British philosopher Thomas Carlyle(1795-1881), pictured right, one of the most undeservedly revered thinkers of his day. He also coined the expression “dismal science” to describe the economics of his time – which inveighed, to his horror, against slavery. The economists of the day, against whom he constantly inveighed, were almost universally champions of the free market, free trade, and human rights.

His seminal work on “great men” is On Heroes,  Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840). This book was written to distill his entire worldview.

Considering Carlyle’s immense place in the history of 19th century intellectual life, this is a surprisingly nutty book. It can clearly be seen as paving the way for the monster dictators of the 20th century. Reading his description of “great men” literally, there is no sense in which Mao, Stalin, and Hitler -- or any savage dictator from any country you can name -- would not qualify.

Indeed, a good case can be made that Carlyle was the forefather of fascism. He made his appearance in the midst of the age of laissez faire, a time when the UK and the US had already demonstrated the merit of allowing society to take its own course, undirected from the top down. In these times, kings and despots were exercising ever less control and markets ever more. Slavery was on its way out. Women obtained rights equal to men. Class mobility was becoming the norm, as were long lives, universal opportunity, and material progress.

Carlyle would have none of it. He longed for a different age. His literary output was devoted to decrying the rise of equality as a norm and calling for the restoration of a ruling class that would exercise firm and uncontested power for its own sake. In his view, some were meant to rule and others to follow. Society must be organized hierarchically lest his ideal of greatness would never again be realised. He set himself up as the prophet of despotism and the opponent of everything that was then called liberal.

Right Authoritarianism of the 19th Century

Carlyle was not a socialist in an ideological sense. He cared nothing for the common ownership of the means of production. Creating an ideologically driven social ideal did not interest him at all. His writings appeared and circulated alongside those of Karl Marx and his contemporaries, but he was not drawn to them.

Rather than an early “leftist,” he was instead a consistent proponent of power and a raving opponent of classical liberalism, particularly of the legacies of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. If you have the slightest leanings toward liberty, or affections for the impersonal forces of markets, his writings come across as ludicrous. His interest was in power as the central organising principle of society.

Here is his description of the “great men” of the past:

“They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history….
    One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;—in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them. … Could we see them well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's history. How happy, could I but, in any measure, in such times as these, make manifest to you the meanings of Heroism; the divine relation (for I may well call it such) which in all times unites a Great Man to other men…

And so it goes on for hundreds of pages that celebrate “great” events such as the Reign of Terror in the aftermath of the French Revolution (one of the worst holocausts then experienced). Wars, revolutions, upheavals, invasions, and mass collective action, in his view, were the essence of life itself.

By contrast, the merchantcraft of the industrial revolution, the devolution of power, the small lives of the bourgeoisie all struck him as noneventful and essentially irrelevant. These marginal improvements in the social sphere were made by the “silent people” who don’t make headlines and therefore don’t matter much; they are essential at some level but inconsequential in the sweep of things.

To Carlyle, nothing was sillier than Adam Smith’s pin factory: all those regular people intricately organised by impersonal forces to make something practical to improve people’s lives. Why should society’s productive capacity be devoted to making pins instead of making war? Where is the romance in that?

Carlyle established himself as the arch-opponent of liberalism -- heaping an unrelenting and seething disdain on Smith and his disciples. And what should replace liberalism? What ideology? It didn’t matter, so long as it embodied Carlyle’s definition of “greatness.”

No Greatness Like the State

Of course there is no greatness to compare with that of the head of state.  

The Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men. He is practically the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism; Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man, embodies itself here, to command over us, to furnish us with constant practical teaching, to tell us for the day and hour what we are to do. [The lethal combination of the Commander and the Priest, seen throughout history, Ayn Rand was to characterise as the union of Attila and the WitchDoctor.]

Why the state? Because within the state, all that is otherwise considered immoral, illegal, unseemly, and ghastly, can become, as blessed by the law, part of policy, civic virtue, and the forward motion of history. The state baptises rampant immorality with the holy water of consensus. And thus does Napoleon come in for high praise from Carlyle, in addition to the tribal chieftains of Nordic mythology. The point is not what the “great man” does with his power so much as that he exercises it decisively, authoritatively, ruthlessly.

The exercise of such power necessarily requires the primacy of the nation state, and hence the protectionist and nativist impulses of the fascist mindset.

Consider the times in which Carlyle wrote. Power was on the wane, and humankind was in the process of discovering something absolutely remarkable: namely, the less society is controlled from the top, the more the people thrive in their private endeavours. Society needs no management but rather contains within itself the capacity for self organisation, not through the exercise of the human will as such, but by having the right institutions in place. Such was the idea of classical liberalism.

Classical liberalism was always counterintuitive, especially to the unthinking and unseeing. The less society is ordered, the more order emerges spontaneously, from the ground up. The freer people are permitted to be, the happier the people become and the more meaning they find in the course of life itself. The less power that is given to the ruling class, the more wealth is created and dispersed among everyone. The less a nation is directed by conscious design, the more it can provide a model of genuine greatness.

Such teachings emerged from the liberal revolution of the previous two centuries. But some people (mostly academics and would-be rulers) weren’t having it. They preferred their order to be compelled, from the top down. On the one hand, the socialists would not tolerate what they perceived to be the seeming inequality of the emergent commercial society. On the other hand, the advocates of old-fashioned ruling-class control, such as Carlyle and his proto-fascist contemporaries, longed for a restoration of pre-modern despotism, and devoted their writings to extolling a time before the ideal of universal freedom appeared in the world.

They wanted their order to be ordered; and they wanted to be the ones to issue them.

The Dismal Science

One of the noblest achievements of the liberal revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries – in addition to the idea of free trade – was the movement against slavery and its eventual abolition. It should not surprise anyone that Carlyle was both a leading opponent of the abolitionist movement and a thoroughgoing racist. He extolled the rule of one race over another, and especially resented the economists for being champions of universal rights and therefore opponents of slavery.

As David Levy has conclusively demonstrated, the claim that economics was a “dismal science” was first stated in an essay by Carlyle in 1848, an essay in which non-whites were claimed to be non-human and worthy of killing. Blacks were, to his mind, “two-legged cattle,” worthy of servitude for all times.

Carlyle’s objection to economics as a science was very simple: it opposed slavery. Economics imagined that society could consist of people of equal freedoms, a society without masters and slaves. Supply and demand, not dictators, would rule. To him, this was a dismal prospect, a world without “greatness.”

The economists were the leading champions of human liberation from such “greatness.” They understood, through the study of market forces and the close examination of the on-the-ground reality of factories and production structures, that wealth was made by the small actions of men and women acting in their own self interest. Therefore, concluded the economists, people should be free of despotism. They should be free to accumulate wealth. They should pursue their own interests in their own way. They should be let alone.

Carlyle found the whole capitalist worldview disgusting. His loathing foreshadowed the fascism of the 20th century: particularly its opposition to liberal capitalism, universal rights, and progress.

Fascism’s Prophet

Once you get a sense of what capitalism meant and means to humanity -- universal liberation and the turning of social resources toward the service of the common person [leading today to the breathtaking liberation of billions from real poverty]—it is not at all surprising to find reactionary intellectuals opposing it tooth and nail. There were generally two schools of thought that stood in opposition to what it meant to the world: the socialists and the champions of raw power that later came to be known as fascists. In today’s parlance, here is the left and the right, both standing in opposition to simple freedom.

Carlyle came along at just the right time to represent that reactionary brand of power for its own sake. His opposition to emancipation and writings on race would emerge only a few decades later into a complete ideology of eugenics that would later come to heavily inform 20th century fascist experiments. There is a direct line, traversing only a few decades, between Carlyle’s vehement anti-capitalism and the ghettos and gas chambers of the German total state.

Do today’s neo-fascists understand and appreciate their 19th century progenitor? Not likely. The continuum from Carlyle to Mussolini to Franco to Donald Trump is lost on people who do not see beyond the latest political crisis. Not one in ten thousand activists among the European and American “alt-right” who are rallying around would-be strong men who seek power today have a clue about their intellectual heritage.

And it should not be necessary that they do. After all, we have a more recent history of the rise of fascism in the 20th century from which to learn (and it is to their everlasting disgrace that they have refused to learn).

But no one should underestimate the persistence of an idea and its capacity to travel time, leading to results that no one intended directly but are still baked into the fabric of the ideological structure. If you celebrate power for its own sake, herald immorality as a civic ideal, and believe that history rightly consists of nothing more than the brutality of great men with power, you end up with unconscionable results that may not have been consciously intended but which were nonetheless given license by the absence of conscious opposition. 

As time went on, left and right mutated, merge, diverged, and established a revolving door between the camps, disagreeing on the ends they sought but agreeing on the essentials.They would have opposed 19th-century liberalism and its conviction that society should be left alone. Whether they were called socialist or fascists, the theme was the same. Society must be planned from the top down. A great man -- brilliant, powerful, with massive resources at his disposal -- must lead. At some point in the middle of the 20th century, it became difficult to tell the difference but for their cultural style and owned constituencies. Even so, left and right maintained distinctive forms. If Marx was the founding father of the socialist left, Carlyle was his foil on the fascist right. 

Hitler and Carlyle

In his waning days, defeated and surrounded only by loyalists in his bunker, Hitler sought consolation from the literature he admired the most. According to many biographers, the following scene took place. Hitler turned to Goebbels, his trusted assistant, and asked for a final reading. The words he chose to hear before his death were from Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great. Thus did Carlyle himself provide a fitting epitaph to one of the “great” men he so celebrated during his life: alone, disgraced, and dead.

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Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE and CLO of the startup Liberty.me. Author of five books, and many thousands of articles, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.
A version of this post appeared at the FEE website.

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