Summer Reading
Although this all too brief commentary cannot do full justice to the three works that recently arrived in my mail, it should provide useful information about each of them. The first that came to my hand Wandlungen des Neoliberalismus (Stuttgart: Lucius, 2008), by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung-economic editor, Philip Plickert, was submitted in an earlier form as a doctoral study at the University of Tübingen. It is a spacious, elegantly framed study of the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of free-market professors, journalists, and political officials who came together on a Swiss mountain in 1947, to found an international organization that would combat socialism and fight for deregulated economies and international free trade. Plickert offers detailed accounts of the comings and goings of its members and of the interest in this star-studded organization shown by Ludwig Erhard, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and some of the chief economic advisors to the Thatcher-administration. Plickert’s intensive research can be seen in the detail offered about the disputes and addresses that went on at yearly meetings in different locations across the world. He even cites an address I myself delivered at a Mont Pelerin meeting in St. Andrews, Scotland in 1976, a speech that I subsequently forgot that I had given.
What Plickert demonstrates, much to his own regret, is that the ideals that the Society intended to promote are even less implemented today than they were in the post-World War Two-era. Bureaucratic centralization, government involvement in the market and in the workplace and in Europe, the construction of a massive public sector have all come to shape the “democratic” political landscape. Plickert views the 1980s as a point in recent history, one in which the Thatcher administration was around in England, German chancellor Helmut Kohl was talking about a market economy, and Reagan was praising free enterprise, when something might have been done “to change the signals (die Weichen zu stellen).” Unfortunately no significant structural reduction of the welfare state took place in that decade, even if Thatcher stood up to Communist-infiltrated trade unions, institutions that would soon become dinosaurs on the way to extinction in a postindustrial economy.
An ideal Plickert holds up, “neoliberalism,” might not have the same connotation to Americans as it does to Europeans. It is like the term “neoconservative,” which Jürgen Habermas ascribes disparagingly to the German nationalist Right, but which signifies a different, more leftist movement in our country. “Neoliberal” refers in the European context to those who favor reducing the modern welfare state and the present popular dependence on that drug. The term would also embrace those monetarists who, like the late Milton Friedman, called for a strictly controlled monetary supply in order to allow capitalism to function with a sound currency. Finally, “neoliberal” in the German context almost always refers to dedicated Atlanticists, who fatefully look to the U.S. for political and moral leadership.
This “America-centeredness may be an endemic weakness of German neoliberalism. Its already dated ideology hearkens back to the era and sensibility of the Cold War, while pointedly ignoring the force of German nationalist feeling. It is also a hard doctrine to sustain, when those who have advocated (or at least seem to) a free-market economy in the Anglosphere, like Thatcher and the American neoconservatives, detest the Germans, whom they are still dumping on for the First World War and even for Bismarck’s unification of the Second Empire. Moreover, if the US moves toward a European socialist economy and more extensive welfare state, which seems likely to happen after the next presidential election, continental European neoliberals will have less and less of an American capitalist example to celebrate. Unless it can be given a more specifically German identity, neoliberalism in Plickert’s homeland will likely continue to be the value-preference of Atlanticist elites.
The Old Life is Dead: L’ancienne vie est morte is a bilingual work of poetry by Xenia Bakran Sunic, a multilingual Croatian poetess who holds a degree in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since the English and French poems are both decorated with long blurbs of mine and since I have know Xenia and her husband Tomislav for more than twenty years, I cannot claim to have received this slim volume entirely by surprise. Almost all of the poetry reminds me of the French symbolists in its building of intertwined associations. It is also marked by a pervasive melancholy that is skillfully rendered in verse but is never entirely escaped. The poetess lost a daughter in a set of circumstances that I find it too painful to go into. From the first poem “To Livia” through some of the later verse like “You and I” (the entire work seems to have been completed in about a year), the shadow of a maternal tragedy seems to be spread heavily over some of the poetry. Nonetheless, Xenia also offers exultant poems, about falling in love, the Greek demigod Pan, and the pleasure of reading English poetry. Her book abounds in a rich variety of nature scenes, which vary according to season and place. It also includes the translations of an obviously gifted French stylist of Croatian descent, Antoine Pinterovic, who resides in Brussels and became a close friend of the Sunics, when Tom was working for the Croatian embassy in the Belgian capital in the 1990s. An undoubted advantage of these bilingual poems is that one can read here two different poets, both of whom are gifted but writing in different languages.
The final work I should mention is the biography of the nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) Lire Bastiat (Paris, 2008) by the University of Ottawa sociologist Robert Leroux. A concisely constructed work, this study is the first Bastiat-biography that I have encountered. In view of his influence on such post-World War Two American advocates of free enterprise as Murray Rothbard, Ralph Raico, and Leonard Liggio, and in view of the frequent complimentary references to Bastiat in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, I thought I should learn more about this maître à penser for post-War libertarians. LeRoux’s biography has amply filled my educational gap but failed to attract me to his subject. But let me clarify this judgment. I can certainly understand the merits of Bastiat’s polemics against the socialists on his left. He also performed a useful pedagogic function by emphasizing the possibility of a harmoniously operating free enterprise system, a point that Adam Smith had already developed to some degree in his observations about social economy.
Moreover, Bastiat went beyond English free market economists like Malthus and Ricardo, by moving away from the questions of excess population or scarce natural resources to focus on the exchange of services. He attached value not to products and the cost of manufacturing but to what individuals could provide each other in an economy based on the division of labor. Therefore he could imagine the expanding economy that was then developing rather than assume the unchanging nature of particular conflicts of interest that English economists and later Marx were then highlighting, e.g. between producers and resource-holders or among suppliers of labor with a fixed number of jobs.
Alas, however, Bastiat also suffered from the defects of other nineteenth-century left-liberals. Like his contemporaries John Bright and Richard Cobban, he believed almost superstitiously in inevitable human Progress, a process that would supposedly lead to individualism, world republicanism, and the reign of Science. Like other left liberals of the period, Bastiat seemed to think that universal suffrage and the abolition of monarchy would bring free enterprise and enshrine private property. Although socialism was certainly a well-established idea in France by 1848, Bastiat could not bring himself to believe that the masses would be swayed by anything so meretricious, given the appeal of a market economy and the possibility of a night-watchman government.
One of his most frequent polemical targets was classical education, a subject that Bastiat explored in one of his last articles “Baccalauréat et socialisme.” By studying too closely the Greeks and Romans, Bastiat argued, young Frenchman would be blinded to the needs of the present hour, and particularly to science, individualism, and democratic values. They might even come to believe that servile labor was acceptable, because the Greek and Roman leisure classes depended heavily on this reactionary institution.
Karl Marx hit the ceiling when he encountered Bastiat’s temper tantrum against classical learning. Marx, who each year would recite with his daughters in Greek scenes from Aeschylus’s Eumenides, was properly appalled by Bastiat’s philistine attack on humanistic education, a practice that I still regularly hear at my “hands-on learning” college. But Marx’s anger was directed not only against Bastiat’s limited notion of value-education. In Capital he also vents his spleen on the “dwarf Bastiat” who while celebrating “salaried labor” in the modern period “could not imagine why the philosopher Aristotle would have been so mistaken in his evaluation of slave labor.”
Marx points out perceptively that servile labor was not, contrary to Bastiat’s words, merely the “result of rapine” and upper-class Greco-Roman idleness. It was the only possible productive form in the materially primitive conditions that gave rise to slave labor. But Marx also noticed, beside the prevalence of opus servile in the ancient world, the radiant splendor of classical civilization, a development he himself could not adequately explain by applying his historical materialism. While Marx operated with at least some of the same blind spots as the French economist, and particularly in his materialist interpretation of history, his redeeming side was his excellent humanistic education. Unlike Bastiat, Marx would not have welcomed a world in which college studies were cleansed of their classical taint and reduced to voctech.
Comments
Paul,
Thanks for the book ideas. While I’ve never been a fan of Bastiat’s “doctrinaire”
19th century liberalism, the other titles sound fascinating.
Let me recommend two, as well: first, a volume (translated) published actually about
six years ago: Abbe Augustin Barruel’s MEMOIRS ILLUSTRATING THE HISTORY OF JACOBINISM
(Real-View-Books, Pinckney, MI), with an outstanding introduction by Stanley L. Jaki.
This, of course, is the classic counter-revolutionary attack on the French Revolution,
its principles, and its conspiracy, originally published in France about 1822. It exerted
major influences on French Counter-revolutionary thought, on Donoso Cortes, and later on
the author of my second book choice, Augustin Cochin. A selection of his writings has
now been released (in translation) by Chronicles and is reviewed by George Carey in the latest issue. For
those who read French, I also recommend his volume: LES SOCIETES SECRETES ET LA DEMOCRATIE
MODERNE.
Reading both Cochin and Barruel is a good introduction to Claes Ryn’s excellent studies
on “the Jacobin heritage,” that now finds its leading exposition in neo-conservatism.
Now, I hope someone will translate Cretineau-Joly’s classic HISTOIRE DE JACOBINISM....
Regards,
Boyd Cathey
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Paul, I wish I had gone on to become a graduate student at the university, and perhaps I
might have if i’d encountered a professor like you. Instead I only have a “B.S.” in
voctech. I believe higher education if anyone is actually serious about it should
emphasize as I think the Greeks did and so did the Essenes the value of having a mentor.
Here’s the quote of your last paragraph above: “Marx points out perceptively that servile labor was not, contrary to Bastiat’s words, merely the “result of rapine” and upper-class Greco-Roman idleness. It was the only possible productive form in the materially primitive conditions that gave rise to slave labor. But Marx also noticed, beside the prevalence of opus servile in the ancient world, the radiant splendor of classical civilization, a development he himself could not adequately explain by applying his historical materialism. While Marx operated with at least some of the same blind spots as the French economist, and particularly in his materialist interpretation of history, his redeeming side was his excellent humanistic education. Unlike Bastiat, Marx would not have welcomed a world in which college studies were cleansed of their classical taint and reduced to
voctech.” (end quote) From what I’ve read Aristotle tackled the reality of truth while
also accepting that neither he nor any other of the Greeks (thus no one else in the
world) had sufficiently developed an entire or whole construct about it. Thus what
remained so far was truth is ‘like’ this or like such and such in other words fragments
of truth or derivatives of truth each one when placed in the spotlight posing or masquerading
especially if ‘new’ or newly focused upon ‘as if’ truth, and not just a part of it. That
philosophy in the west and thus everywhere is yet incomplete is why in my opinion that
when the highly educated like marx etc. come up with yet another derivative of the truth
they too (presumably) believe their own act, like Bastiat etc. In this regard, no-?-he
like marx too were dwarfs. With my “B.S.” I fall back and quote Randy Newman: “short
people got not reason.” Worse probably than derivatives (when the zealots take over) is
when something itself is believed to be the whole truth like for example torah, or later
Jesus or Islam. They are true in what believing in them encourages and subsequently
manifests but not the whole truth. In the abscence of the target or truth religion itself
has always happily stepped into the void and offerred the ‘bull’s eye.’ I suppose G-d knows
it’s a tragedy when the zealots think they know how to hit it or have. God knows, unless
the Being of us beings is not a being per se, but the truth?! I’d bet on the latter
frankly speaking, though not be surprised if it’s ‘both’?! IN the meantime, I believe!
And I like mentors, like Paul.
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Wow, from an essay on computer war games to an endorsement of Paris Hilton for President..... to this. Nobody can say this site is one-dimensional.
I wonder when we’ll be favored with an analysis of the perversions of the so called Free Market System in the modern era. The Global Corporation appears to be the new Socialism and once again, the individual must carry this load and bow down in tribute to the glories of the edifice. I doubt we’ve had a Free Market since Gronk hit Broonk over the head with a large Mastodon thigh bone after the horse meat he bought turned out to be tainted possum flank. If you question this assertion, read U.S. Agricultural Policy and then ponder for a moment the rather totalitarian efficiencies of corporate-industrial food production and it’s long term effects on the health of the populace. Free Market? , I think not.
No wonder the Neo-Cons are such champions of the “American Way” produced by the American Corporation in direct opposition to the legacy of the Framers. It isn’t that Corporations are inherently bad, it’s simply that their version of a free market starts and ends with themselves and they’ve purchased a used government now or formerly known as the United States of America. Any discussion of “Free Trade” in this context demands quotation marks.....no matter how many times Mr. Friedman extolled the virtues of a tight money supply.
Marx extolling Aeschylus....now thats something I would have liked to see.
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Being a double major philosophy/classics student at the University of the people’s republic of British columbia, i can completely sympathize with Marx’s head-on critiques of ‘progressive’ and ‘scientific’ education.
Modern undergraduates find themselves barraged with pseudo-scientific cirricula designed to minimize any sort of cross-disciplinary communication. The more atomized the departments, the easier to assert doctrinal control over them. While most undergrads are somewhat familiar with a so-called philosopher ‘Nietszche’ but few have the intellectual and conceptual background to even attempt to understand his various ‘archaeologies’ or the like. At least in early - mid 19th century germany, the socialists and reactionaries had common ground - their experience of the classical world - with which to dialogue.
It would be no exaggeration to say that most modern undergrads know more about primitive ugandan native tribes than the classical world; the classical world is, as most classics students would agree, the rosetta stone to understanding all subsequent European thought and culture (try reading Fear and Trembling without a rudimentary knowledge of Roman history and Greek drama).
One longs for the days when the socialists were as well-educated as Marx, who, if my memory is correct, wrote a dissertation on the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus. Far easier to respect them, and in turn be respected, than today.
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United States of Nike? Again a question of inches & degrees in the imperfect world?
Markets were ‘more’ free at least in the U.S. prior to the federal reserve act and the never
ratified 16th Amendment that allowed the grubberment to tax our incomes. That just meant
‘*state-captialism’ or the unholy wedding of big biz & big Govt. with us all as we are
underwriting it, all marx inspired. Marx took one derivative of truth capitalism and
countered it with an opposite derivative communism. Then they screwed and lived happily
ever after on the backs of the vorking man, and the rest of us lower down than on the very
apex of the pyramid. Bring back Pharaoh!? No. At least - Please don’t tell me any more
moses stories like marx, & zionism. Ouch. What next, the rebuilding of the temple and
the moronic zealots can self-destruct again like they did in the past and blamed rome?
HA-HA very humorous indeed. All on the backs of the average Joes & the average Mohammeds
but what goes around comes around-then-it’s on the backs again of the average Marvins.
Very funny! Let’s not make it all too ‘intellectual’ which is another derivative of
how it actually is. The mind [alone] is no ‘out’ - just another ivory tower. Right?
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Boyd may be on to something about the sources of Bastiat’s progressivist ideology,
which sounds like that of Condorcet, who was indeed influenced by
Masonic millennarianism. Of course by the time one encounters the same nonsense in the
WSJ, there is no need to look for a real ideology behind it. What we are looking at is
journalistic fluff. But in JS Mill, Comte, Bastiat,and in a less vulgar form Marx, this
materialistic,pseudo-scientific meliorism does seem to be coming from an older worldview.
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Paul,
You’re on the right track. Indeed, as Barruel points out, there is a fundamental millenarian
and perfectionist foundation in “revolutionary” thought, that indeed carries over into those
19th century classical liberals such as Bastiat and J.S. Mill. While French counter-revolutionaries
like Villeneuve-Bargemont (and later La Tour du Pin) saw it clearly, it was Juan Donoso Cortes
in Spain (1849) who drew a stark, almost apocalyptic, picture of the results of the triumph
of classical liberalism, socially and culturally, in traditional society. Classical liberalism,
the offspring of Masonic (read="societes de pensees") millenarianism and perfectionism,
reduced in fin society and its traditional patchwork of subsidiary guilds, “corporate bodies”
(including the family, communities, educational bodies, and other interposing organs) to
what is considered “rational” and “logical categories.” Superstition, custom, inherited ways
of doing things, intermediate bodies between the “individual” and the “state” had to be away
with. All this in the name of “democracy” and the “rule of the majority,” in a new society
in which ironclad “laws” of classical economics now obtained and governed with an iron had.
In countries like Spain (where the Church held up to 1/3 of lands until the infamous desamortization
of the 1830s) and Bavaria (which continued with its intermediate guilds and organization
until the 1860s), the seizure by the central liberal government of church lands meant
that the poorer peasantry who had enjoyed the right to graze their herds of sheep and cattle on
those lands, would no longer have that right. The lands seized by the Mendizabal regime in
Spain were quickly “sold” off to classical liberal friends of the government, who then
dispossessed the poorer peasantry, who then migrated in the thousands to cities like Barcelona
and Bilbao, to work in the new factories at slave wages...and become subject to socialist
and marxist propaganda. Mendizabal’s enabling laws against the Church and monastic lands
(that provided sustenance for much of the peasantry), plus laws against the traditional
Spanish guilds, the Church, and intricate network of intermediate bodies, in favor of a “rational’
classical liberal system, were in so many words the fuse that created the climate and foundation
for the eventual rise of socialism and revolution in Spain. And I say this with contempt
for modern-day classical liberals: your views, your perfectionism and idea of progress, your’
reductionist millenarianism, destroyed traditional society and the historic bonds that had
created our civilization, enabling the rize of the “ism” of the 20th century: socialism,
communism, marxsism, and even Naziism.
From a religious and theological viewpoint (but with direct socio-cultural implications) Pope Gregory XVI
condemned classical liberalism in his encyclical Mirari vos, and, despite the scorn and ridicule
of much of 19th “liberal” opinion, Pius IX solemnized the traditional critique in Quanta cura
and the Syllabus. Leo XII followed with several more encyclicals condemning liberalism,
direct democracy, laicist government and education, and finally, upholding (in Rerum novarum)
the right of workingmen to a working, family wage. Pius XI, in Quadragesimo anno, went so
far as to explicitly advocate the reorganization of society based on traditional, corporativist
bodies.
It seems that traditional conservatives in the USA have pretty much made their peace with
classical liberalism. Certainly, WF Buckley’s NR tried, in the early days, to bring together
strands of thought, not so much because of what they were FOR, but rather on a basis of what
they were AGAINST. Thus, the unlikely “marriage” of Benthamites and strict classical liberliams
with the epigones of Russell Kirk and Frederick Wilhelmsen. That alliance has always been
a bit uneasy. Kirk, for whom I served as assistant during 1971-72 and knew for almost 30
years, despised classical liberalism and termed libertarians, more than once, as “chirping
sectaries.” On the other hand, he had hope for the influence of Wilhelm Ropke [but no
doubt RK would be horrified at the auto-destruction of the CDU/CSU in Germany today...he
would undoubtedly see that the so-called “christian democratic” option has failed utterly,
not only Germany, but in Italy, France, and yes, in Spain]. Kirk deeply suspected that the
melding of classical liberalism and traditionalism might fail, and indeed that was why he
urged me to read Hilaire Belloc, Fr. Heinrich Pesch (and the Solidarist Catholic writers),
and why he appreciated attempts at integrating the moral suasion and teachings of the Church
into economic and social life.
Traditional conservatives would do well to go back and read Kirk’s second major volume, title
A PROGRAM FOR CONSERVATIVES, in which he outlines his attacks on traditional liberalism and
his views of a “humane” society and economy. I would add that re-reading the old Southern
Agrarians (e.g. WHO OWNS AMERICA), essays out of Seward Collins’ THE AMERICAN REVIEW, Belloc’s
various works on Distributivism (now happily reprinted by IHS Press), and other items in
like mold, would serve us better as we continue headlong into this foreboding 21st century.
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Paul and Boyd very informing discussion between you. I’d say in a nutshell classical
liberalism is a bit of a facade purporting that people have rights, while knowing really
and obviously we only have powers as it were to Do this or that. However the facade is useful
precisely for one group or the state to hide behind ‘as if’ it were the case, in order to
accrue MORE powers to itself/themselves. I think tradition which builds up over thousands
of years in terms of what actually more than less works takes into consideration the reality
we all only have powers, as it were. But you see it in the 30 years prior to the French
Revolution these ‘societies’ or the first sort of ‘think tanks’ except with clout got
together to do find a ‘speculative truth for it’s own sake.’ And their express purpose
was to also do thinking for its own sake without any criterior or test for its merit in
the world. But largely influenced by one another’s opinions in their peer groups; and then
had the temerity to go out and hammer established authorities and goverment itself with
their bogus narratives until they themselves were in power much like the neocons
recently and the communists before them. It’s the human factor I suppose. We’re conceptual
creatures and so I suppose the flapping of the lips will always have as much or more power
than the flapping of the sails? On the other hand I have defined a thought for myself as
opposed to a belief, as something complete in itself and something we can Do. So of course
it has to be tested first for its merit in the world. But here’s the rub, the actual thought
then behind classical liberalism is : ‘we’ll B.S. the rubes about how wonderful and equal
they are and from behind that cover accumulate our own power or enhance it.’ Now you see
that itself is a thought - but not the B.S. that constitutes their Facade or shield in
implementing their thought. As for the rank and file in these movements they actually believe
the B.S. they too actually believe the Facade, which works just as well. But I suppose it
will always be that way or for the forseeable future due to the human factor. We flap
our lips and we use money, it’s what separates us from the animals? As Paul suggests it
goes back in time farther than that to an older worldview stemming from ancient Greece
and out of the ‘holy land’ which I have called the Platonic/Semitic Facades, which
function as a practical matter in the exact same manner as does classical liberalism. But
again they ‘fly’ as it were due to the fact that we i.e. mankind has not yet evolved beyond
such facade, and as I’ve wondered to myself, perhaps shouldn’t? I don’t know, obviously.
Who does. Such ‘beliefs’ (again as opposed to actual thoughts) do get the masses’
endorphins flowing (our dopamine) the brain’s natural painkillers, while actual thinking,
writing and reading tends to do that for us, once these ‘beliefs’ become too ludicrous to
work for us in that biological regard. The reality for human beings is that we are both
trapped, and liberated by our biology.
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Come on - ‘fellows’ - isn’t this conversation rife for continuing… ? Has it gotten to
in this ‘oligarchical’ reality of fascistic anarcho-terrorism from within the state (posed
as “democracy") to the point we can’t even converse online without our careers being put
in jeopardy by the Israel-United States-England version of the axis of evil? Is it to
the point where we’ll be put in the u.s. on the watchlist of 1 million?! And or blacklisted
like during the mcCarthy era? HUH? Even with only a B.S. in vortech I know that ain’t
“america” - I know that much. Huh? Say what?! I guess I’ll quote Randy Newman then: “In
America, we get food to eat - don’t have to run through the jungle and scuff-Up our
feet.” ...
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