Allen Porter Mendenhall

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abolitionism, Andrew Jackson, Arguing About Slavery, “the common man”, District of Columbia, Elizur Wright Jr., Franklin Pierce, Henry Laurens Pinckney, James Henry Hammond, James K. Polk, John C. Calhoun, John Fairfield, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Slavery, The gag rule, The Great Battle in the United States Congress, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, William Lee Miller, William Lloyd Garrison

Book Synopsis: Miller, William Lee. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Historicism, History, Humanities, Law, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Scholarship, Slavery, Southern History, The South on October 30, 2013 at 8:45 am

This is the story of America’s struggle to end slavery without destroying the union. The book deliberately focuses on the rhetoric of white male politicians and thus does not purport to tell the “whole” story, but only that part of the story which is most recoverable and hence most knowable. Many early 19th century politicians averred that the Northern textile industry, which was roughly as powerful as today’s oil industry, depended on Southern slavery. An industry with such power and control over the financial interests of the country can, Miller argues, cause social changes to come about more slowly. When talking about slavery, Miller submits, American politicians of the time had to deal with inherent contradictions in the American tradition: a nation that celebrated equality and the virtues of the “common man” had to come to terms with the fact that African slaves, officially excluded from citizenry, embodied the “common man” ideal but were not permitted to climb the social and economic ladder. Most politicians did not believe slavery could end abruptly but would end gradually as economic dependence turned elsewhere. Slavery went against all the principles and rhetoric of America’s founding documents, and yet there it was, a thriving and ubiquitous industry.

The book begins in 1835, when Congress deliberated over petitions to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Congress took on these petitions reluctantly, unwilling to address a contentious and divisive issue that would disrupt congressional and governmental harmony. Congress wished the issue would just go away—but realized that it could not. During this congressional session, most of the speechmaking came from proslavery Southerners, since Northern politicians were, generally, too afraid to take a stand one way or the other.

Major figures from this session include the following:

President Andrew Jackson

John Fairfield: Congressman from Vermont who introduces the petitions to abolish slavery in D.C.

Franklin Pierce: Eventually the fourteenth President, he is, at this time, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a Northerner with Southern sympathies.

James Henry Hammond: Congressman from South Carolina who opposed Fairfield and Adams.

John Quincy Adams: A former president (the nation’s sixth), he is, at this time, a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts.

Henry Laurens Pinckney: A Congressman from South Carolina who opposed Fairfield and Adams but who also did not get along with John C. Calhoun.

John C. Calhoun: A U.S. Senator from South Carolina, having resigned from the Vice Presidency.

Martin Van Buren: Eventually a U.S. President (the nation’s eighth), he is, at this time, the Vice President under Andrew Jackson.

James K. Polk: Eventually a U.S. President (the nation’s eleventh), he is, at this time, a member of the U.S. House from the State of Tennessee.

The debates in Congress were fueled by abolitionist literature (written by people like John Greenleaf Whittier, William Lloyd Garrison, and Elizur Wright, Jr.) and oration that maintained not only that slavery was wrong (as people had maintained for decades) but also that its demise was the nation’s highest priority. Congress could not “sit on its hands” while abolitionists protested and demanded change; it had to respond, albeit reluctantly, to an institution that many congressmen assumed was already doomed. The demise of slavery was supposed to be inevitable, according to the common logic, yet it persisted; therefore, the abolitionists forced Congress to address slavery, the demise of which, the abolitionists argued, was not as inevitable as people supposed.

The Senate also faced petitions. Senator Calhoun became the most colorful and powerful figure opposing these positions. Calhoun and his followers often employed “liberal” rhetoric on the Senate floor. Henry Laurens Pinckney authored the gag rule, which was an attempt to stop citizens from submitting antislavery petitions. (Calhoun despised Pinckney so much that he endorsed unionist candidates to take over Pinckney’s Congressional seat.) The gag rule was adopted by a 117-68 vote, thus suggesting that the nation was more united on the issue of slavery than popular thought maintains. The gag rule required congressmen to set aside slavery petitions immediately, without so much as printing them. John Quincy Adams would spend the following years in Congress battling the so-called gag rule.

At this point in the book, Adams becomes the central figure. Adams, then a distinguished ex-president, was in his 60s and 70s as he fought against the gag order. He maintained that not only abolitionists but also slaves could petition. Miller argues that this position shows the extent to which Adams was willing to risk his reputation and what was left of his career in order to stand up to the Southern gag order. Other congresspersons were slow to join Adams in his fight. During these debates, very little was said of African Americans, and most of the debates focused on the rights and roles of government and ignored the human persons that that government was supposed to serve and protect.

After Martin Van Buren became president, succeeding Andrew Jackson, he announced that he would veto any bill involving the issue of slavery in D.C. or the slave states. Nevertheless, the petitions continued to pour in. Adams himself began submitting petitions. The gag resolutions had to be passed each session, but a gag rule was announced in 1840 that, in essence, made the “gagging” permanent. Adams led the effort to rescind this rule. He grew closer and closer to the abolitionists as he precipitated disarray in the House. He also made several speeches despite threats against his life. Adams’s opponents tried to get the entire House to censure him, but they failed. Adams used the censure trials as an occasion to bring slavery to the forefront of Congressional debate. In 1844, Adams succeeded in having the gag rule abolished.

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And Wait for the Night, Another World, “Are Southerners Different?”, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Capitol, Centenary College, Charles Bukowski, Cleanth Brooks, Decoration Day, Donald E. Stanford, Eric Voeglin, Friedrich von Hayek, General Hospital, I am Legend, James Dickey, James Elkins, John William Corrington, Joyce Corrington, Lewis P. Simpson, Lines to the South and Other Poems, Louisiana State University, Mark Royden Winchell, Mel Bradford, Memphis, One Life to Live, Rice University, Robert Heilman, Robert Penn Warren, Stanford University, Superior Court, Tennessee, Texas, The Bombardier, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The Unvanquished, The Upper Hand, West Virginia University College of Law, William Faulkner

John William Corrington, A Literary Conservative

In American History, Arts & Letters, Conservatism, Creative Writing, Essays, Fiction, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, Joyce Corrington, Law, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, Southern History, Southern Literature, Television, Television Writing, The Novel, The South, Western Philosophy, Writing on October 23, 2013 at 8:45 am

An earlier version of this essay appeared here at Fronch Porch Republic.

Remember the printed prose is always

half a lie: that fleas plagued patriots,

that greatness is an afterthought

affixed by gracious victors to their kin.

—John William Corrington

It was the spring of 2009. I was in a class called Lawyers & Literature. My professor, Jim Elkins, a short-thin man with long-white hair, gained the podium. Wearing what might be called a suit—with Elkins one never could tell—he recited lines from a novella, Decoration Day. I had heard of the author, John William Corrington, but only in passing.

“Paneled walnut and thick carpets,” Elkins beamed, gesturing toward the blank-white wall behind him, “row after row of uniform tan volumes containing between their buckram covers a serial dumb show of human folly and greed and cruelty.” The students, uncomfortable, began to look at each other, registering doubt. In law school, professors didn’t wax poetic. But this Elkins—he was different. With swelling confidence, he pressed on: “The Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, Supreme Court Reports. Two hundred years of our collective disagreements and wranglings from Jay and Marshall through Taney and Holmes and Black and Frankfurter—the pathetic often ill-conceived attempts to resolve what we have done to one another.”

Elkins paused. The room went still. Awkwardly profound, or else profoundly awkward, the silence was like an uninvited guest at a dinner party—intrusive, unexpected, and there, all too there. No one knew how to respond. Law students, most of them, can rattle off fact-patterns or black-letter-law whenever they’re called on. But this? What were we to do with this?

What I did was find out more about John Willliam Corrington. Having studied literature for two years in graduate school, I was surprised to hear this name—Corrington—in law school. I booted up my laptop, right where I was sitting, and, thanks to Google, found a few biographical sketches of this man, who, it turned out, was perplexing, riddled with contradictions: a Southerner from the North, a philosopher in cowboy boots, a conservative literature professor, a lawyer poet. This introduction to Corrington led to more books, more articles, more research. Before long, I’d spent over $300 on Amazon.com. And I’m not done yet.

***

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 28, 1932, Corrington—or Bill, as his friends and family called him—passed as a born-and-bred Southerner all of his life. As well he might, for he lived most of his life below the Mason-Dixon line, and his parents were from Memphis and had moved north for work during the Depression. He moved to the South (to Shreveport, Louisiana) at the age of 10, although his academic CV put out that he was, like his parents, born in Memphis, Tennessee. Raised Catholic, he attended a Jesuit high school in Louisiana but was expelled for “having the wrong attitude.” The Jesuit influence, however, would remain with him always. At the beginning of his books, he wrote, “AMDG,” which stands for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam—“for the greater glory of God.” “It’s just something that I was taught when I was just learning to write,” he explained in an interview in 1985, “taught by the Jesuits to put at the head of all my papers.”

Bill was, like the late Mark Royden Winchell, a Copperhead at heart, and during his career he authored or edited, or in some cases co-edited, twenty books of varying genres. He earned a B.A. from Centenary College and M.A. in Renaissance literature from Rice University, where he met his wife, Joyce, whom he married on February 6, 1960. In September of that year, he and Joyce moved to Baton Rouge, where Bill became an instructor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University (LSU). At that time, LSU’s English department was known above all for The Southern Review (TSR), the brainchild of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, but also for such literary luminaries as Robert Heilman, who would become Bill’s friend.

In the early 1960s, Bill pushed for TSR to feature fiction and poetry and not just literary criticism. He butted heads with then-editors Donald E. Stanford and Lewis P. Simpson, who thought of the journal as scholarly, not creative, as if journals couldn’t be both scholarly and creative. A year after joining the LSU faculty, Bill published his first book of poetry, Where We Are. With only 18 poems and 225 first edition printings, the book hardly established Bill’s reputation as Southern man of letters. But it invested his name with recognition and gave him confidence to complete his first novel, And Wait for the Night (1964).

Bill and Joyce spent the 1963-64 academic year in Sussex, England, where Bill took the D.Phil. from the University of Sussex in 1965. In the summer of 1966, at a conference at Northwestern State College, Mel Bradford, that Dean of Southern Letters, pulled Bill aside and told him, enthusiastically, that And Wait for the Night (1964) shared some of the themes and approaches of William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Bill agreed. And happily.

***

Of Bill and Miller Williams, Bill’s colleague at LSU, Jo LeCoeur, poet and literature professor, once submitted, “Both men had run into a Northern bias against what was perceived as the culturally backward South. While at LSU they fought back against this snub, editing two anthologies of Southern writing and lecturing on ‘The Dominance of Southern Writers.’ Controversial as a refutation of the anti-intellectual Southern stereotype, their joint lecture was so popular [that] the two took it on the road to area colleges.”

In this respect, Bill was something of a latter-day Southern Fugitive—a thinker in the tradition of Donald Davidson, Allan Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and John Crowe Ransom. Bill, too, took his stand. And his feelings about the South were strong and passionate, as evidenced by his essay in The Southern Partisan, “Are Southerners Different?” (1984). Bill’s feelings about the South, however, often seemed mixed. “[T]he South was an enigma,” Bill wrote to poet Charles Bukowski, “a race of giants, individualists, deists, brainy and gutsy: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson (Andy), Davis, Calhoun, Lee, and on and on. And yet the stain of human slavery on them.” As the epigraph (above) suggests, Bill was not interested in hagiographic renderings of Southern figures. He was interested in the complexities of Southern people and experience. In the end, though, there was no doubt where his allegiances lay. “You strike me as the most unreconstructed of all the Southern novelists I know anything about,” said one interviewer to Bill. “I consider that just about the greatest compliment anyone could give,” Bill responded.

While on tour with Williams, Bill declared, “We are told that the Southerner lives in the past. He does not. The past lives in him, and there is a difference.” The Southerner, for Bill, “knows where he came from, and who his fathers were.” The Southerner “knows still that he came from the soil, and that the soil and its people once had a name.” The Southerner “knows that is true, and he knows it is a myth.” And the Southerner “knows the soil belonged to the black hands that turned it as well as it ever could belong to any hand.” In short, the Southerner knows that his history is tainted but that it retains virtues worth sustaining—that a fraught past is not reducible to sound bites or political abstractions but is vast and contains multitudes.

***

In 1966, Bill and Joyce moved to New Orleans, where the English Department at Loyola University, housed in a grand Victorian mansion on St. Charles Avenue, offered him a chairmanship. Joyce earned the M.S. in chemistry from LSU that same year. By this time, Bill had written four additional books of poetry, the last of which, Lines to the South and Other Poems (1965), benefited from Bukowski’s influence. Bill’s poetry earned a few favorable reviews but not as much attention as his novels—And Wait for the Night (1964), The Upper Hand (1967), and The Bombardier (1970). Writing in The Massachusetts Review, Beat poet and critic Josephine Miles approvingly noted two of Bill’s poems from Lines, “Lucifer Means Light” and “Algerien Reveur,” alongside poetry by James Dickey, but her comments were more in passing than in depth. Dickey himself, it should be noted, admired Bill’s writing, saying, “A more forthright, bold, adventurous writer than John William Corrington would be very hard to find.”

Joyce earned her PhD in chemistry from Tulane in 1968. Her thesis, which she wrote under the direction of L. C. Cusachs, was titled, “Effects of Neighboring Atoms in Molecular Orbital Theory.” She began teaching chemistry at Xavier University, and her knowledge of the hard sciences brought about engaging conservations, between her and Bill, about the New Physics. “Even though Bill only passed high school algebra,” Joyce would later say, “his grounding in Platonic idealism made him more capable of understanding the implications of quantum theory than many with more adequate educations.”

By the mid-70s, Bill had become fascinated by Eric Voeglin. A German historian, philosopher, and émigré who had fled the Third Reich, Voegelin taught in LSU’s history department and lectured for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he was a Salvatori Fellow. Voeglin’s philosophy, which drew from Friedrich von Hayek and other conservative thinkers, inspired Bill. In fact, Voegelin made such a lasting impression that, at the time of Bill’s death, Bill was working on an edition of Voegelin’s The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings. (After Bill’s death, two men—Robert Anthony Pascal and James Lee Babin—finished what Bill had begun. The completed edition appeared in 1991.)

By 1975, the year he earned his law degree from Tulane, Bill had penned three novels, a short story collection, two editions (anthologies), and four books of poetry. But his writings earned little money. He also had become increasingly disenchanted with the political correctness on campus:

By 1972, though I’d become chair of an English department and offered a full professorship, I’d had enough of academia. You may remember that in the late sixties and early seventies, the academic world was hysterically attempting to respond to student thugs who, in their wisdom, claimed that serious subjects seriously taught were “irrelevant.” The Ivy League gutted its curriculum, deans and faculty engaged in “teach-ins,” spouting Marxist-Leninist slogans, and sat quietly watching while half-witted draft-dodgers and degenerates of various sorts held them captive in their offices. Oddly enough, even as this was going on, there was a concerted effort to crush the academic freedom of almost anyone whose opinions differed from that of the mob or their college-administrator accessories. It seemed a good time to get out and leave the classroom to idiots who couldn’t learn and didn’t know better, and imbeciles who couldn’t teach and should have known better.

Bill joined the law firm of Plotkin & Bradley, a small personal injury practice in New Orleans, and continued to publish in such journals as The Sewanee Review and The Southern Review, and in such conservative periodicals as The Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age. His stories took on a legal bent, peopled as they were with judges and attorneys. But neither law nor legal fiction brought him fame or fortune.

So he turned to screenplays—and, at last, earned the profits he desired. Viewers of the recent film I am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith, might be surprised to learn that Bill and Joyce wrote the screenplay for the earlier version, Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. And viewers of Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) might be surprised to learn that Bill wrote the film’s screenplay while still a law student. All told, Bill and Joyce wrote five screenplays and one television movie. Free from the constraints of university bureaucracy, Bill collaborated with Joyce on various television daytime dramas, including Search for Tomorrow, Another World, Texas, Capitol, One Life to Live, Superior Court, and, most notably, General Hospital. These ventures gained the favor of Hollywood stars, and Bill and Joyce eventually moved to Malibu.

Bill constantly molded and remolded his image, embracing Southern signifiers while altering their various expressions. His early photos suggest a pensive, put-together gentleman wearing ties and sport coats and smoking pipes. Later photos depict a rugged man clad in western wear. Still later photos conjure up the likes of Roy Orbison, what with Bill’s greased hair, cigarettes, and dark sunglasses.

Whatever his looks, Bill was a stark, provocative, and profoundly sensitive writer. His impressive oeuvre has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves. That scholars of conservatism, to say nothing of scholars of Southern literature, have ignored this man is almost inconceivable. There are no doubt many aspects of Bill’s life and literature left to be discovered. As Bill’s friend William Mills put it, “I believe there is a critique of modernity throughout [Bill’s] writing that will continue to deserve serious attentiveness and response.”

On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1988, Bill suffered a heart attack and died. He was 56. His last words, echoing Stonewall Jackson, were, “it’s all right.”

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Allen Mendenhall, computer forensics, E-discovery, Hacking, Pacific Standard, Pen Registers and Trap and Trace Devices Statute, privacy, Scholarship, Stored Wired and Electronic Communication Act, Wiretap Act

Is Hacking the Future of Scholarship?

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Humanities, Information Design, Law, Legal Research & Writing, Scholarship, Writing on October 16, 2013 at 7:45 am

This article appeared here in Pacific Standard.

Most attorneys are familiar with e-discovery, a method for obtaining computer and electronic information during litigation. E-discovery has been around a long time. It has grown more complex and controversial, however, with the rise of new technologies and the growing awareness that just about anything you do online or with your devices can be made available to the public. Emails, search histories, voicemails, instant messages, text messages, call history, music playlists, private Facebook conversations (not just wall posts)—if relevant to a lawsuit, these and other latent evidence, for better or worse, can be exposed, even if you think they’ve been hidden or discarded.

Anyone who has conducted or been involved with e-discovery realizes how much personal, privileged, and confidential information is stored on our devices. When you “delete” files and documents from your computer, they do not go away. They remain embedded in the hard drive; they may become difficult to find, but they’re there. Odds are, someone can access them. Even encrypted files can be traced back to the very encryption keys that created them.

E-discovery has been used to uncover registries and cache data showing that murderers had been planning their crimes, spouses had been cheating, perverts had been downloading illegal images, and employees had been stealing or compromising sensitive company data or destroying intellectual property. Computer forensics were even used to reveal medical documents from Dr. Conrad Murray’s computer during the so-called “Michael Jackson death trial.”

Computer forensics can teach you a lot about a person: the websites he visits, the people he chats with, the rough drafts he abandons, the videos he watches, the advertisements he clicks, the magazines he reads, the news networks he prefers, the places he shops, the profiles he views, the songs he listens to, and so on. It is fair to say that given a laptop hard drive, a forensic expert could nearly piece together an individual’s personality and perhaps come to know more about that person—secret fetishes, guilty pleasures, and criminal activities—than his friends and family do.

In light of this potential access to people’s most private activities, one wonders how long it will be until academics turn to computer forensics for research purposes. This is already being done in scientific and technology fields, which is not surprising because the subject matter is the machine and not the human, but imagine what it would mean for the humanities? If Jefferson had used a computer, perhaps we would know the details of his relationship with Sally Hemings. If we could get ahold of Shakespeare’s iPad, we could learn whether he wrote all those plays by himself. By analyzing da Vinci’s browsing history, we might know which images he studied and which people he interacted with before and during his work on the Mona Lisa—and thus might discover her identity.

There are, of course, government safeguards in place to prevent the abuse of, and unauthorized access to, computer and electronic data: the Wiretap Act, the Pen Registers and Trap and Trace Devices Statute, and the Stored Wired and Electronic Communication Act come to mind. Not just anyone can access everything on another person’s computer, at least not without some form of authorization. But what if researchers could obtain authorization to mine computer and electronic data for the personal and sensitive information of historical figures? What if computer forensics could be used in controlled settings and with the consent of the individual whose electronic data are being analyzed?

Consent, to me, is crucial: It is not controversial to turn up information on a person if he voluntarily authorized you to go snooping, never mind that you might turn up something he did not expect you to find. But under what circumstances could computer forensics be employed on a non-consensual basis? And what sort of integrity does computer or electronic information require and deserve? Is extracting data from a person’s laptop akin to drilling through a precious fresco to search for lost paintings, to excavating tombs for evidence that might challenge the foundations of organized religion and modern civilization, or to exhuming the bodies of dead presidents? Surely not. But why not?

We have been combing through letters by our dead predecessors for some time. Even these, however, were meant for transmission and had, to that end, intended audiences. E-discovery, by contrast, provides access to things never meant to be received, let alone preserved or recorded. It is the tool that comes closest to revealing what an individual actually thinks, not just what he says he thinks, or for that matter, how and why he says he thinks it. Imagine retracing the Internet browsing history of President Obama, Billy Graham, Kenneth Branagh, Martha Nussbaum, Salmon Rushdie, Nancy Pelosi, Richard Dawkins, Toni Morrison, Ai Weiwei, or Harold Bloom. Imagine reading the private emails of Bruno Latour, Ron Paul, Pope Francis, Noam Chomsky, Lady Gaga, Roger Scruton, Paul Krugman, Justice Scalia, or Queen Elizabeth II. What would you find out about your favorite novelists, poets, musicians, politicians, theologians, academics, actors, pastors, judges, and playwrights if you could expose what they did when no one else was around, when no audience was anticipated, or when they believed that the details of their activity were limited to their person?

This is another reason why computer and electronic data mining is not like sifting through the notes and letters of a deceased person: having written the notes and letters, a person is aware of their content and can, before death, destroy or revise what might appear unseemly or counter to the legacy he wants to promote. Computer and electronic data, however, contain information that the person probably doesn’t know exists.

More information is good; it helps us to understand our universe and the people in it. The tracking and amassing of computer and electronic data are inevitable; the extent and details of their operation, however, cannot yet be known. We should embrace—although we don’t have to celebrate—the technologies that enable us to produce this wealth of knowledge previously unattainable to scholars, even if they mean, in the end, that our heroes, idols, and mentors are demystified, their flaws and prejudices and conceits brought to light.

The question is, when will we have crossed the line? How much snooping goes too far and breaches standards of decency and respect? It is one thing for a person to leave behind a will that says, in essence, “Here’s my computer. Do what you want with it. Find anything you can and tell your narrative however you wish.” It is quite another thing for a person never to consent to such a search and then to pass away and have his computer scanned for revealing or incriminating data.

It’s hard to say what crosses the line because it’s hard to know where the line should be drawn. As Justice Potter Stewart said of hard-core pornography, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” Once scholars begin—and the day is coming—hacking devices to find out more about influential people, the courts and the academic community will be faced with privacy decisions to make. We will have to ask if computer and electronic data are substantially similar to private correspondence such as letters, to balance the need for information with the desire for privacy, to define what information is “private” or “public,” and to honor the requests of those savvy enough to anticipate the consequences of this coming age of research.

Amid this ambiguity, one thing will be certain: Soon we can all join with Princess Margaret in proclaiming, “I have as much privacy as a goldfish in a bowl.” That is good and bad news.

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Academic Questions, Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Humanities, Law Review, Peer Review, Texas Review of Law & Politics, The Law Review Model as a Check against Bias?

The Law Review Model as a Check against Bias?

In Academia, Arts & Letters, Essays, Humanities, Law, Scholarship, Writing on October 9, 2013 at 7:45 am

A version of this essay appeared in Academic Questions.

Could peer-reviewed humanities journals benefit by having student editors, as is the practice for law reviews? Are student editors valuable because they are less likely than peer reviewers to be biased against certain contributors and viewpoints? I begin with a qualifier: What I am about to say is based on research, anecdotes, and experience rather than empirical data that I have compiled on my own. I do not know for sure whether student editors are more or less biased than professional academics, and I hesitate to displace concerns for expertise and experience with anxiety about editorial bias. There may be situations in which students can make meaningful contributions to reviewing and editing scholarship—and to scholarship itself—but to establish them as scholarly peers is, I think, a distortion and probably a disservice to them and their fields.

Student editors of and contributors to law reviews may seem to be the notable exception, but legal scholarship is different from humanities scholarship in ways I address below, and law reviews suffer from biases similar to those endemic to peer-reviewed journals. Nevertheless, law review submission and editing probably have less systemic bias than peer-reviewed journals, but not because students edit them. Rather, law review submission and editing make it more difficult for bias to occur. The system, not the students, facilitates editorial neutrality.

There are several factors about this system that preclude bias. Because editors are students in their second and third year of law school, editorial turnover is rapid. Every year a law review has a new editorial team composed of students with varied interests and priorities. What interested a journal last year will be different this year. Therefore, law reviews are not likely to have uniform, long-lasting standards for what and whom to publish—at least not with regard to ideology, political persuasion, or worldview.

Law review editors are chosen based on grades and a write-on competition, not because they are likeminded or pursuing similar interests. Therefore, law reviews are bound to have more ideological and topical diversity than peer-reviewed journals, which are premised upon mutual interest, and many of which betray the academic side of cronyism: friends and friends of friends become editors of peer-reviewed journals notwithstanding a record of scholarship. The composition of law review editorial boards is, by contrast, based upon merit determined through heated competition.

Once on board, law review student editors continue to compete with one another, seeking higher ranks within editorial hierarchies.[1] Being the editor-in-chief or senior articles editor improves one’s résumé and looks better to potential employers than being, say, the notes editor. Voting or evaluations of academic performance establish the hierarchies. Moreover, each year only a few student articles are published, so editors are competing with one another to secure that special place for their writing.[2] Finally, student editors usually receive grades for their performance on law review. The result of all of this competition is that law review editors are less able than peer reviewers to facilitate ideological uniformity or to become complacent in their duties—and law reviews will exhibit greater ideological diversity and publish more quickly and efficiently than peer-reviewed journals.

Because of the ample funding available to law schools, scores of specialized journals have proliferated to rival the more traditional law reviews. Many specialized law reviews were designed to compensate for alleged bias. There are journals devoted to women’s issues, racial issues, law and literature, law and society, critical legal studies, and so on. There are also journals aimed principally at conservatives: Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Texas Review of Law & Politics, and Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, to name three. Specialized journals give students and scholars a forum for the likeminded. On the other hand, such journals call for specialization, which students are unlikely to possess.[3]

For these reasons, I believe that bias is less prevalent among law reviews than among peer-reviewed journals. Part of the difficulty in determining bias, however, is that data collection depends upon the compliance of law review editors, who receive and weed through thousands of submissions per submission period and have neither the time nor the energy to compile and report data about each submission. Moreover, these editors, perhaps in preparation for likely careers as attorneys, are often required to maintain strict confidentiality regarding authors and submissions, thereby making “outside” studies of law reviews extremely difficult to conduct.

And then there is the problem of writing about bias at all: everyone can find bias in the system. I suspect that institutionalized bias against conservative legal scholars exists, but nonconservatives also complain about bias. Minna J. Kotkin has suggested that law reviews are biased against female submitters.[4] Rachel J. Anderson has suggested that law reviews are biased against “dissent scholarship,” which, she says, includes “civil rights scholarship, critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminist theory, public choice theory, queer theory, various ‘law ands’ scholarship that employs quantitative or humanistic methodologies, and other scholarship that, at one point in time or another, is not aligned with ideologies or methodologies that the reader values or considers legitimate.”[5] Finally, Jordan Leibman and James White discovered bias favoring authors with credentials, publication records, or experience.[6]

Law student bias seems, from my perspective, more likely to be weighted toward credentials and reputation rather than political persuasion.[7] An established professor with an endowed chair is therefore more likely to receive a publication offer from a law review than an unknown, young, or adjunct professor; and the name recognition of an author—regardless of personal politics—is more likely to guarantee that author a publication slot in a law review. One downside to this is that student editors will accept half-written or ill-formed articles simply because the author is, for want of a better word, renowned. It is common in these situations for students to then ghostwrite vast portions of the article for the author. Another more obvious downside is that professors from select institutions and with certain reputations will be published over authors who have submitted better scholarship. This is the primary reason why I advocate for a hybrid law review/peer review approach to editing.[8]

I’ve mentioned that legal scholarship differs from humanities scholarship. What makes it different is its attention to doctrinal matters, i.e., to the application of law to facts or the clarifying of legal principles and canons. After their first year of law school, students are equipped to study these sorts of matters. They are not unlike lawyers who approach a legal issue for the first time and must learn to analyze the applicable law in light of the given facts. Although the breadth and scope of legal scholarship have changed to reduce the amount of doctrinal scholarship produced and to incorporate interdisciplinary studies, doctrinal scholarship remains the traditional standard and the conventional norm.

Law students have the facility to edit doctrinal scholarship, but not to edit interdisciplinary articles.[9] This point is not necessarily to advance my argument about bias being less inherent in law review editing; rather, it is to circle back to my initial position that inexperienced and inexpert students should not be empowered to make major editorial decisions or to control the editing. As I have suggested, student editors are biased, just as professional peer reviewers are biased—the problem is that students are less prepared and qualified to make sound editorial judgments. If what is needed is an editorial system that diminishes bias, then student editors are not the solution. Law review editing, however, provides a clarifying model for offsetting widespread bias.

It would be difficult if not impossible to implement law review editing among humanities peer-reviewed journals for the disappointing reason that law reviews enjoy ample funding from institutions, alumni, and the legal profession whereas humanities journals struggle to budget and fight for funding. Therefore, I will not venture to say that peer-reviewed journals ought to do something about their bias problems by mimicking law review editing. Such a solution would not be practical. But by pointing out the benefits of law review editing—i.e., the result of less bias due to such factors as competition and turnover in editorial positions—I hope that more creative minds than mine will discover ways to reform peer-reviewed journals to minimize bias.

[1]I consider editor selection flawed for some of the reasons Christian C. Day describes in “The Case for Professionally-Edited Law Reviews,” Ohio Northern University Law Review 33 (2007): 570–74.

[2]How this competition works differs from journal to journal. In some cases, the students select which student articles to publish based on an elaborate voting process supposedly tied to blind review and authorial anonymity. In other cases, faculty decide.

[3]“Many scholars feel that student editors of law review articles, while they were perhaps once competent to evaluate the merit of scholarly articles owing to the much narrower range of topics, have for the last few decades had great difficulty grappling with nondoctrinal scholarship (that is, scholarship dealing with the intersection of law and other disciplines). The authors of law journal articles now increasingly draw from areas such as economics, gender studies, literary theory, sociology, mathematics, philosophy, political theory, and so on, making the enterprise much too difficult for a group of generally young people, who are not only not specialists, but have barely entered the field of law.” Nancy McCormack, “Peer Review and Legal Publishing: What Law Librarians Need to Know about Open, Single-Blind, and Double-Blind Reviewing,” Law Library Journal 101, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 61–62.

[4]Minna J. Kotkin, “Of Authorship and Audacity: An Empirical Study of Gender Disparity and Privilege in the ‘Top Ten’ Law Reviews,” Women’s Rights Law Reporter 35 (Spring 2009).

[5]Rachel J. Anderson, “From Imperial Scholar to Imperial Student: Minimizing Bias in Article Evaluation by Law Reviews,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 20, no. 2 (2009): 206.

[6]Jordan H. Leibman and James P. White, “How the Student-Edited Law Journals Make Their Publication Decisions,” Journal of Legal Education 39, no. 3 (September 1989): 396, 404.

[7]Many others share this view: “It appears to be generally assumed that, to a significant degree, Articles Editors use an author’s credentials as a proxy for the quality of her scholarship.” Jason P. Nance and Dylan J. Steinberg, “The Law Review Article Selection Process: Results from a National Study,” Albany Law Review 71, no. 2 (2008): 571.

[8]See my Spring 2013 Academic Questions article, “The Law Review Approach: What the Humanities Can Learn.” I am not alone on this score. Day suggests that “this bias can be defeated by blind submissions or having faculty members read the abstracts and articles of blind-submitted articles where the quality is unknown. The names and other identifying information should be obscured, which is common in other disciplines. This is easy to do with electronic submissions. It should be the rule in law reviews, at least at the initial stage of article selection.” “Case for Law Reviews,” 577.

[9]Hence Richard Posner’s suggestion that law reviews “should give serious consideration to having every plausible submission of a nondoctrinal piece refereed anonymously by one or preferably two scholars who specialize in the field to which the submission purports to contribute.” “The Future of the Student-Edited Law Review,” Stanford Law Review 47 (Summer 1995): 1136.

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"Economic Control and Totalitarianism”, Austrian Economics, “The Great Utopia”, Capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, Krugman, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Marx, planned economy, Rousseau, Slade Mendenhall, Stiglitz, Sunstein, The Road to Serfdom

Thoughts on ‘The Road to Serfdom’: Chapter 7, “Economic Controls and Totalitarianism”

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Conservatism, Economics, Epistemology, Essays, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Justice, Law, Libertarianism, Literature, Philosophy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on October 2, 2013 at 8:45 am

Slade Mendenhall is an M.Sc. candidate in Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics, with specializations in conflict and Middle Eastern affairs. He holds degrees in Economics and Mass Media Arts from the University of Georgia and writes for The Objective Standard and themendenhall.com, where he is also editor.

The following is part of a series of chapter-by-chapter analyses of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, conducted as part of The Mendenhall’s expanding Capitalist Reader’s Guide project. Previous entries can be found here: Introduction, Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

In “Economic Control and Totalitarianism”, the subject of Hayek’s seventh chapter, we find him at his best, with a clarity and reason that we have not seen since chapter two, “The Great Utopia.” In chapter seven, Hayek expounds upon numerous themes within the titular subject: the inextricability of dictatorial control and economic planning, the fallacy of believing that economic controls can be separated from broader political controls, the inevitability in a planned economy of controls extending to individuals’ choice of profession, and the interrelation of economic and political freedom. What aspects of the chapter we might find to criticize arise either from a desire for him to take his line of thinking a step further than he does or already established mistakes carried over from previous chapters. Despite a few minor missteps, however, Hayek’s chapter is, overall, an exceedingly positive contribution.

He begins by stating what is, to many self-deceiving advocates of socialism, a jarring observation: that planned economies, following their natural course, ultimately always require dictatorial rule. “Most planners who have seriously considered the practical aspects of their task,” Hayek writes, “have little doubt that a directed economy must be run on more or less dictatorial lines” (66). Without fully restating the argument here, Hayek implicitly rests upon the description of this tendency that he spelled out in chapter 5, “Planning and Democracy”: power in a planned system gradually consolidates into a central committee or single dictator as a matter of organizational efficiency, with a decisive central leadership winning out over the gridlock and inefficiencies of a democratic body. The point is as valid and well made here as it was then.

Where Hayek expounds upon this is in refuting one of the false promises often made by planners as they reach for the reins of a country’s economy: “the consolation… that this authoritarian direction will apply ‘only’ to economic matters” (66). Contrary to the suggestion that controls will be limited to economic affairs, Hayek asserts that economic controls in the absence of broader political controls are not simply unlikely, but impossible. Rather than simply detailing in a typical way the interrelationship of economic and other activities, Hayek acknowledges the inseparability of the two, writing, “It is largely a consequence of the erroneous belief that there are purely economic ends separate from the other ends of life” (66). He later elaborates:

“The authority directing all economic activity would control not merely the part of our lives which is concerned with inferior things; it would control the allocation of the limited means for all our ends. And whoever controls all economic activity controls the means for all our ends, and must therefore decide which are to be satisfied and which not. This is really the crux of the matter. Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends” (68).

Hayek’s point is, in the context of modern economic education, a largely underappreciated and mishandled one. Economics instructors have, with time, lost the important skill of contextualizing economic interests within the broader scope of other human pursuits, instead treating them either as abstract ideas toyed with in a vacuum without real-world ramifications or preaching the ‘economics is everything’ doctrine to the exclusion of other analytical tools and frameworks.

Hayek, whether by virtue of writing at a time less bound by such false dichotomization of the field or simply due to his exceptional qualities as an economic thinker, successfully avoids both traps. “Strictly speaking,” he writes,

“there is no ‘economic motive’ but only economic factors conditioning our striving for other ends. What in ordinary language is misleadingly called the ‘economic motive’ means merely the desire for general opportunity, the desire for power to achieve unspecified ends. If we strive for money it is because it offers us the widest choice in enjoying the fruits of our efforts” (67).

Hayek rightly acknowledges money as a profoundly empowering economic good, calling it “one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man” that “opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man, a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy” (67).

Chapter seven goes on to briefly characterize the pervasiveness of central planning, and its propensity to spread to all areas of a society. Hayek recognizes that the much-eluded question of socialism-versus-capitalism is not simply one of which decisions individuals are to make for their lives, but whether the decision is to be theirs at all:

“The question raised by economic planning is, therefore, not merely whether we shall be able to satisfy what we regard as our more or less important needs in the way we prefer. It is whether it shall be we who decide what is more, and what is less, important for us, or whether this is to be decided by the planner” (68).

Those on both sides of the aisle in the United States today, who fail in so many matters to appreciate the distinction between individuals choosing the right thing for their lives and a government official imposing their choice (be it right or wrong) upon them, would do well to heed Hayek’s warning. Modern American political thinking, caught between an increasingly authoritarian left (taken directly from Marx and Rousseau, or updated via modern incarnations like Krugman, Sunstein, and Stiglitz) and a right that has yet to extend its limited government spirit to all areas of economics—much less censorship and social issues—has a great deal to learn from an Austrian economist’s words written some seventy years ago.

One element of central planning that utopian-minded young socialist idealists evade is that labor, being an input, must, in a controlled economy be as controlled as any other good—if not more so. This does not mean simply the control of wages or the maintenance of union. Ultimately, it means government control over the quantity of individuals in a given profession, conducted in the interest of keeping wages in a given field high and ensuring that there is an adequate supply of expertise to meet all of the economy’s needs. This means at some point dictating who can and cannot enter a given field of work.

Hayek writes,

“Most planners, it is true, promise that in the new planned world free choice of occupation will be scrupulously preserved or even increased. But there they promise more than they can possibly fulfill. If they want to plan they must control the entry into the different trades and occupations, or the terms of remuneration, or both” (71).

How many young socialists on college campuses across the country would not object to being torn from their chosen course of study and compelled to study for degrees in which they had no interest, to spend their lives in careers they did not love? That is the fate that they ask for, whether they recognize it as such or not. Would they accept it willingly? Would they “become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as the ‘social welfare’ or the ‘good of the community’” (72), bowing their heads subserviently to spend a life on a path that was chosen for them, for the good of society? Perhaps some. And perhaps others would recognize the nature of what they profess to believe in and renounce it. Either way, it is a reality that should be presented to them in those terms by those who see socialism for what it is.

Towards the end of the chapter, Hayek makes several key observations that would prove all the more true in the decades after his writing. He notes the decline of references by advocates of socialism to the functional superiority of socialism. Gradually witnessing their system being discredited, but doubling-down on their dogma, the socialists of the mid-20^th century came to look less and less like those of the early 20^th century, who believed in the system as a technically superior model for society. Instead, their arguments turned egalitarian in nature, “advocat[ing] planning no longer because of its superior productivity but because it will enable us to secure a more just and equitable distribution of wealth” (74). Little did Hayek know how far that trend would go with the rise of the New Left and its legacies, stretching up to the present and the current American administration.

Finally, in another point that has proven all the more true since the time of his writing, Hayek recognizes that the extent of planning proposed by socialism, empowered by modern modes of control, is that much greater than the control and subjugation that occurred under the days of monarchy and feudalism. In reading it, one is brought to wonder how much greater that mechanism of control is today, with NSA surveillance, a growing regulatory state, and ever more executive agencies maintaining armed units to impose their rules, than at Hayek’s writing in 1943.

Hayek’s seventh chapter is a valuable and, for the same reasons, saddening one for the way that it makes us reflect upon the applicability of his words and ideas to our current political environment. Though our current condition is far from totalitarian in nature, the same principles apply, to a lesser extent, in all areas where government intrudes to control markets, alter incentives, or provide special advantages to some at the expense of others.

Human beings are rational animals. We respond to the incentives around us. In the presence of a government that seems increasingly, explicitly willing to toy with those incentives to alter our behavior to suit models and ideals for our lives that are not our own, how much do we lose that we never knew we had? In what ways are our options limited? Need it be by a government edict that tells a young man who would study to be a doctor that doctors are no longer needed, and he should apply to be an engineer instead? No. It may be as subtle as inflating the price of his education through government loan programs, regulating the field he seeks to enter, and subjecting him to entitlement programs that tell him that his life’s work is not his own; that he works and exists in the service of society as a whole. And at that point, the difference between our condition and the ill fate that Hayek describes becomes one not of kind, but of degree.

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Austrian Economics, ‘substantive rules’, “Planning and the Rule of Law”, Bill of Rights, Capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, intrinsicism, legislation, Liberalism, Libertarianism, limited government, planned economy, Rule of Law, Slade Mendenhall, society, subjectivism, The Ayn Rand Column, The Road to Serfdom, themendenhall.com

Thoughts on ‘The Road to Serfdom’: Chapter 6, “Planning and the Rule of Law”

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Economics, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on September 25, 2013 at 7:45 am

The following is the seventh installment in a series of chapter-by-chapter analyses of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Previous entries are available here: Introduction, Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Hayek’s sixth chapter, “Planning and the Rule of Law” sets out to establish two fundamentally different legal frameworks. The first, characteristic of a free society, is what Hayek refers to as a ‘Rule of Law’ approach. The term itself is inadequate, but not incidental; it arises from Hayek’s more fundamental philosophy, and this analysis will address why the lack of a better term is inevitable for Hayek based on his earlier premises. The second type of law described by Hayek is the sort of arbitrary system of decrees inherent to a planned economy.

In the course of contrasting the two and explaining the superiority of the former, Hayek hits many valid points and makes some worthwhile analyses—he even surprises us with the first mention of rights in the whole book! True: in the process, he again falls victim to the sorts of improper philosophical analyses, badly defined concepts, flawed defenses of freedom, and errant policy endorsements we have come to expect. Nonetheless, the essence and guiding message of Chapter VI introduces a valuable subject for thought and further discussion—even if that thought consists of dispelling Hayek’s arguments in favor of stronger, more objective ones.

Hayek’s characterization of each of the two systems—the ‘Rule of Law’ and what he calls ‘substantive rules’—is valid in a limited sense. He writes,

“The Rule of Law thus implies limits to the scope of legislation: it restricts it to the kind of general rules known as formal law, and excludes legislation either directly aimed at particular people, or at enabling anybody to use the coercive power of the state for the purpose of such discrimination. It means, not that everything is regulated by law, but, on the contrary, that the coercive power of the state can be used only in cases defined in advance by the law and in such a way that it can be foreseen how it will be used” (62).

In this description, Hayek hits many necessary points well: it limits legislation, establishes formal and general rules, and limits the use of coercive power to purposes defined in advance by the law. Likewise, with respect to ‘substantive rules’, his description is accurate: “It cannot tie itself down in advance to general and formal rules which prevent arbitrariness. It must provide for the actual needs of people as they arise and then choose deliberately between them” (55).

With similar acuity, he describes such a system’s coercive restructuring of the plans and long-range thinking of individuals,

“[W]here the precise effects of government policy on particular people are known, where the government aims directly at such particular effects, it cannot help knowing these effects, and therefore it cannot be impartial. It must, of necessity, take sides, impose its valuations upon people and, instead of assisting them in the advancement of their own ends, choose the ends for them” (57).

And, finally, its privileging of some parties over others: “There can be no doubt that planning necessarily involves deliberate discrimination between particular needs of different people, and allowing one man to do what another must be prevented from doing” (58-59).

His characterizations of both systems—‘Rule of Law’ and ‘substantive rules’—are correct on the above points. Where these descriptions lack is not in their truth, but in their completeness. Hayek’s description of both the ‘Rule of Law’ and ‘substantive rule’ approaches neglect the fundamental difference between liberal and statist law: whether the state is vested with the privilege of initiating force against the individual. This point cannot be left obfuscated or marginalized; it is nothing less than the definitive difference between the two systems and must be highlighted as such. Generality, non-discrimination, and established pre-requisites for legal action are important features within this framework, but they are ultimately supporting or consequential features of this more fundamental point.

This definition by essentials—of liberal law as that which forbids the violation of individual rights by government force, and of statist law as that which has no such prohibitions—points to the fundamental crux of liberal law: objectivity.

As Harry Binswanger describes it,

“An objectively derived law is one stemming not from the whim of legislators or bureaucrats but from a rational application of the principle of individual rights. Rights tie law to reality, because they are a recognition of a basic, unalterable fact [–the requirements of man’s life]… As the law must be objective in its source, so it must be objective in its form: objective laws are clearly defined, consistent, unambiguous, stable, and as straightforward and simple as possible… The ideal is to make the laws of man like the laws of nature: firm, stable impersonal absolutes.”

Thus, what Hayek describes as the ‘Rule of Law’ is better conceptualized as objective law—law that is based on a clearly defined, rationally derived standard. Conversely, the ‘substantive rule’ approach can be thought of as simply non-objective law.* That Hayek has not properly defined the two is consistent with his argument thus far, which in previous analyses has been shown to be largely based on a subjectivist-skepticist epistemology. This does not make his endorsement of the ‘Rule of Law’ any less genuine, but it does explain his admitted discomfort with his own descriptions in this chapter and why he was unable to correct them.

(For a fuller description of objective law, see Binswanger’s full article on the subject here.)

Hayek impressively illustrates the dangers of ‘substantive rules’ (we shall continue to use his term for accuracy, despite its inadequacy) with a discussion of policies that use the force of government to achieve egalitarian ends. He decries the increasing frequency under socialism of legal discussions as to what is ‘fair’ or ‘reasonable’, with ultimate discretion in such matters left to the subjective whim of a judge or regulator.

“Formal equality before the law [Hayek writes] is in conflict, and in fact incompatible, with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and that any policy directly aiming at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law.” (59)

Tangential to this discussion of the displacement of justice in the law by distorted notions of ‘fairness’ and ‘reasonability’ is a short but powerful challenge to the concept of ‘privilege’ that Hayek observes to be animating such cases. ‘Privilege’, he writes, is a valid description of those instances in which “landed property [was] reserved to members of the nobility” and property was understood to be held not by right but at the discretion of the monarch and its state (60). It is likewise privilege where “the right to produce or sell particular things is reserved to particular people designated by authority.” It is an inaccurate and unjust characterization, however, that treats the possession of property by right as ‘privilege.’ To do so “depriv[es] the word privilege of its meaning” (60).

In a landmark moment, Hayek even mentions the concept of rights for the first time. “[R]ecognised limitations of the powers of legislation,” he writes, “imply the recognition of the inalienable right of the individual, inviolable rights of man.” He goes on to write “How a formal recognition of individual rights, or of the equal rights of minorities, loses all significance in a state [sic] which embarks on a complete control of economic life, has been amply demonstrated by the experience of the various Central European countries” (64). Both instances are valid discussions of the concept. Whether this signals the introduction of a more enduring concept throughout the remainder of the work, or whether it is simply a passing mention not to be invoked again, time and further chapters will reveal.

Amidst these positive points, however, the chapter is not without severely detrimental flaws, beginning with Hayek’s further elaborations upon the ‘Rule of Law.’ Hayek unduly and inexplicably concedes ground to capitalism’s detractors, writing, “It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality—all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way” (59). That such a grave error should be committed on the very topic—economics—in which he has thus far been relatively solid and which is, in fact, his stock-in-trade is exasperating.

The ‘Rule of Law’, even in Hayek’s loose and non-essential definition of it, does not produce inequality—neither in means nor in outcomes. He has devoted much of the chapter to explaining its superiority to ‘substantive rules’, largely on the grounds that it does not privilege one party over another. Thus, he cannot be thought to be saying it produces an inequality of means. He can only be understood as saying that it produces an inequality of outcomes. This, however, is patently false.

Inequality in a laissez-faire society is simply a reflection of the differing achievements of individual men. It arises from man’s nature—the fact that he is rational and capable of immeasurable creativity, but that his consciousness is volitional. In such a society, man is left free—restricted only by the limits of his own faculties.

A limited government honoring individual rights, refusing to intervene in an economy or in any way initiate force against its citizens, does not produce anything except a system of justice and a circumstance in which force is prohibited from human relationships. Where inequality of achievement results between different men—whether competing in the same field or pursuing unrelated economic ventures—it is neither produced by the law nor prevented by it. It is a fact of nature.

Hayek makes similarly baffling assertions as to what the ultimate aim of law should be, and it is here that we come to see the difference between Hayek’s ‘Rule of Law’ and objective law as we defined it above. Where objective law references a particular standard—the requirements of man’s life—as the ultimate value to be gained and kept, Hayek’s looser ‘Rule of Law’ seeks to preserve not a concrete value, but a state of randomness.

“[T]hat we do not know their concrete effect, that we do not know what particular ends these rules will further, or which particular people they will assist, that they are merely given the form most likely on the whole to benefit all the people affected by them, is the most important criterion of formal rules in the sense in which we here use the term” (56). [Emphasis mine.]

Thus, the unpredictability of outcomes is treated as an intrinsic value. True: Hayek is correct that an objective legal system in no way predicts or influences which parties in a society will be successful and which might fail. However, lest one remain adamant that Hayek is simply describing what will happen in such a system, rather than arguing why such a system should be instituted, a subsequent passage leaves no room for doubt:

“[I]t may appear paradoxical to claim as a virtue that under one system we shall know less about the particular effect of the measures the state takes than would be true under most other systems and that a method of social control should be deemed superior because of our ignorance of its precise results. Yet this consideration is in fact the rationale of the great liberal principle of the Rule of Law” (56). [Emphasis mine.]

Should this passage not suffice to bring back memories of Hayek’s abhorrent defense of liberty in Chapter IV, Hayek further abuses the concept and paves the road for anarchist libertarians to come by suggesting that law itself is a violation of liberty. He writes that, “While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means [sic] which people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action” (54).

To suggest that every law—even objectively derived and defined laws that prohibit the initiation of force between individuals—constitutes a restriction of individual freedom is to suggest, conversely, that there exists a freedom to initiate force—that is: a freedom to restrict freedoms. Implicit in it is the suggestion that freedoms clash, and that the pursuit of ever-greater freedoms requires a conflict of interest between men. For a succinct refutation of this idea, an entry from Ayn Rand’s column, “Textbook of Americanism” puts it best:

“Do not be misled . . . by an old collectivist trick which goes like this: there is no absolute freedom anyway, since you are not free to murder; society limits your freedom when it does not permit you to kill; therefore, society holds the right to limit your freedom in any manner it sees fit; therefore, drop the delusion of freedom—freedom is whatever society decides it is. It is not society, nor any social right, that forbids you to kill—but the inalienable individual right of another man to live. This is not a “compromise” between two rights—but a line of division that preserves both rights untouched. The division is not derived from an edict of society—but from your own inalienable individual right. The definition of this limit is not set arbitrarily by society—but is implicit in the definition of your own right. Within the sphere of your own rights, your freedom is absolute.”**

Other passing errors punctuate the chapter—a collectivist invocation of “society as a whole” as the good to be considered, an acceptance of there being no negligible difference between an explicit and codified Bill of Rights versus a tradition-based common law, and a parting endorsement of “factory laws” (the destructive effects of which have been thoroughly argued by historian Robert Hessen).

There are again passages that sound hauntingly familiar in today’s world. His description of the bureaucratization of government—“[b]y giving the government unlimited powers the most arbitrary rule can be made legal: and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable”—sounds much like a description of today’s regulatory state. A description of The Economist as a half-hearted defender of capitalism with an inflated liberal reputation completes the picture and demonstrates that many things have not changed since Hayek’s time.

The subject of Chapter VI, the abuses perpetrated by socialism on the legal system and the ways in which law is transformed by it from a shield into a weapon, is an important one for capitalism’s defenders to understand. Certainly the ongoing antitrust abuses being carried out at the time of this writing make its continued relevance vividly clear. But the fact that the subject demands greater understanding does not mean that Hayek’s argument against it can or should be incorporated as part of that understanding—and certainly not as part of capitalism’s defense. It—and we—deserve better.

* I specifically use the term “non-objective” here, as opposed to the more conventional “subjective”, as in this context it includes law based both in subjectivism and intrinsicism.

** “Textbook of Americanism”, The Ayn Rand Column, pg. 85

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"Planning and Democracy", Austrian Economics, “Planning and the Rule of Law”, Capitalism, central planning, collectivism, democracy, force, Friedrich Hayek, Individualism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, morality, Slade Mendenhall, The Road to Serfdom, themendenhall.com

Thoughts on ‘The Road to Serfdom’: Chapter 5, “Planning and Democracy”

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Economics, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on September 20, 2013 at 7:45 am

This article is the sixth entry in a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Previous chapter analyses can be found here: Introduction, Chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The fifth chapter in Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom looks at the reciprocal relationship between economic planning and democracy, detailing the institutional and ideological interaction of the two, the ways in which democratic socialism leads to the further centralization of power in committees and dictators, and the ways in which even partial attempts at planning necessitate further and further interventions until, unless opposed, a totalitarian system arises. In the process, Hayek makes many worthwhile points about these institutional trends, describing and explaining their trajectory. He again offers the sort of brief and destructive detour into moral philosophy that we have learned to expect from the book thus far, but in this sense the author shows us nothing new. Finally, he addresses the subject of democracy itself and the misconceptions surrounding it, with observations that sound conspicuously familiar to today’s political and academic culture.

Hayek’s argument against planning is again an inadequate one that relies upon a functional, pragmatic approach. His case, however, still affords us some valuable insights—most notably regarding what can be referred to as the ‘knowledge problem’ of central planning. “It would be impossible,” he writes,

“for any mind to comprehend the infinite variety of different needs of different people which compete for the availability of resources and to attach a definite weight to each… it is impossible for any man to survey more than a limited field, to be aware of the urgency of more than a limited number of needs” (44).

Thus, he writes, efforts by central planners to coordinate the economic activity of a whole society are fundamentally flawed and doomed from the start. The limitations of planners’ knowledge and their inability to reconcile conflicting wants among different groups within society leads both to plans based on insufficient (and, furthermore, unattainable) knowledge of individuals’ and groups’ values and a system that necessitates the sacrifice of some parties to others. To this extent, Hayek notes the problem well.

In support of this, however, he offers an argument that both fails to challenge the collectivists’ ethical premise and reaffirms the skepticist moral approach observed in his earlier chapters. In reference to the collectivist moral premise, Hayek writes,

“The ‘social goal’ or ‘common purpose’ for which society is to be organised, is usually vaguely described as the ‘common good’, or the ‘general welfare’, or the ‘general interest’. It does not need much reflection to see that these terms have no sufficiently definite meaning to determine a particular course of action” (42).

Hayek is correct in acknowledging that the terms are non-objective. What he fails to do is to challenge their validity as ethical concepts, repudiating the very notion of a “common good” or of the “general interest.” An objective, rational defense of individualism is not made by simply proclaiming the functional superiority of individualism over collectivism, as that superiority has been made clear throughout history, and avowed collectivists have long-since proven themselves disinterested in actual consequences and results. The ultimate defense of individualism must challenge the very existence of any alleged collective good that is apart from and contrary to the good of the individuals who constitute it.

Hayek’s only moral challenge to collectivism, rather than refuting the notion of the “common good”, is to challenge the possibility of any complete system of values. To be clear: Hayek does not challenge the imposition by force of a complete system of values; he challenges instead that one can even exist:

“The conception of a complete ethical code is unfamiliar and it requires some effort of imagination to see what it involves. We are not in the habit of thinking of moral codes as more or less complete. The fact that we are constantly choosing between different values without a social code prescribing how we ought to choose, does not surprise us, and does not suggest to us that our moral code is incomplete… The essential point for us is that no such complete ethical code exists. The attempt to direct all economic activity according to a single plan would raise innumerable questions to which the answer could be provided only by a moral rule, but to which existing morals have no answer and where there exists no agreed view on what ought to be done” (43).

Thus, for Hayek, the problem with central planning is a problem of moral absolutism. Failing to condemn the collectivists’ reliance upon force to achieve their ends or their violations of individual rights (a concept he has yet to mention for five chapters and counting), he instead asserts that the fallacy of their schemes arises from the assumption that all people share the same hierarchy of values and a “complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place” (43).

Hayek’s words can be taken either of two ways. In the first, he could be suggesting that collectivists are wrong for assuming unanimity in values throughout a society, that all individuals share the same ethics. Alternatively, he could mean that collectivist beliefs are misguided for normatively believing in a set hierarchy of values and ethical code that should be applied throughout a society. His meaning is unclear. What is clear, however, is that whichever way Hayek intends these words, they are a flawed explanation for the evils of collectivism.

As to the first meaning: one would be hard-pressed to find any collectivist, modern or historic, who asserts that all individuals in society share the same values and ethical code. For the amount of effort totalitarian regimes devote to suppressing resistance and dissent, it is impossible to believe otherwise. Collectivism does not rest on the assumption that all parties in a society share the same values, but that the individual minds that hold such values are inconsequential fodder in their grand design. It is not evil for assuming that a set of values is unanimously held throughout society, but rather for its utter disregard and disdain for the rights and freedoms of individuals to choose their own values.

The second interpretation of Hayek’s statement—that collectivism is wrong for maintaining a set hierarchy of beliefs that should be applied throughout society—goes beyond the historiographical error of the first interpretation. It suggests that the error of collectivism arises from its attempt to uphold a universal code incorporating and prioritizing man’s values. This interpretation is more in keeping with Hayek’s skeptical, subjectivist moral views (as well as those of other libertarians) explored in earlier chapters. It implies that the belief in an absolute morality leads directly to the forcible imposition of that morality on society in general and, conversely, that peace and freedom rest on a subjectivist morality of self-doubt and proclaiming the impossibility of acquiring absolute moral truth. In essence, it suggests that the natural consequence of upholding a set system of values is to forcibly impose it, and that the only means by which we restrain ourselves from such forcible imposition is through the belief that there are no certain moral truths.

That such a morally subjectivist view should precede a faulty defense of individualism is to be expected. The fact that, as Hayek wrote earlier, “it is impossible for any man to survey more than a limited field, to be aware of the urgency of more than a limited number of needs” establishes, according him,

“the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish, or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of value exist, scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s, that within these spheres the individual’s system of ends should be supreme and not subject to any dictation by others” (44) [Emphasis mine.]

Having established in the last chapter his flawed view that the basis for freedom arises from the need to leave room for unexpected growth, Hayek now states his defense for individualism as based on man’s non-omniscience. That is: individuals are the primary unit of political consideration not because they have any natural rights, but because the attempt suppress and control them is forever limited by the knowledge problem of their would-be masters.

Conversely, one can assume that if such masters were able to attain perfect knowledge, he would have no arguments with which to oppose their collectivist system. The battle between individualism and collectivism is thus, for Hayek, reduced to a pragmatic debate between those who doubt the efficacy of totalitarian systems and those who claim that, despite the history of failure in socialist systems, this time they have the right answers.

Certainly, parting words by Hayek to the effect that “[i]t is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions, that forms the essence of the individualist position” (44) sound promising, and invite us to support and be inspired by his argument. However, when placed in the context of what he says elsewhere, such language is revealed to mean less than we would have hoped. Hayek is not defending individualism based on the right of man to judge his own values and ends, but rather on the basis that incomplete information as to individuals’ values and the inability of planners to reconcile conflicting values between individuals leads to a conflicted, inefficient system. Yet again, Hayek is passing off a pragmatic, unprincipled defense of freedom in bold, triumphant language.

Hayek is thus unable to offer us a sufficient defense against oppression. He might, however, provide us some valuable descriptive insights into how the process of establishing socialist systems is conducted and how socialist democracies drift toward dictatorship. “[P]lanning,” he writes, “leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals” (52). The trend, as Hayek describes it, arises from the fact that once socialist policymakers presume to control a society, the profundity of that task is highlighted and exacerbated by democratic inefficiency. This spurs a drive toward consolidation of power into committees and, ultimately, into a single dictator capable of taking decisive action. He writes,

“The inability of democratic assemblies to carry out what seems to be a clear mandate of the people will inevitably cause dissatisfaction with democratic institutions. Parliaments come to be regarded as ineffective ‘talking shops’, unable or incompetent to carry out the tasks for which they have been chosen. The conviction grows that if efficient planning is to be done, the direction must be ‘taken out of politics’ and placed in the hands of experts, permanent officials or independent autonomous bodies” (46).

Many democratic socialists would, no doubt, challenge the determinism of this trend by touting the goodwill of legislators and their commitment to enacting solutions. But “[t]he fault,” Hayek observes, “is neither with the individual representatives nor with parliamentary institutions as such, but with the contradictions inherent in the task with which they are charged” (47). The immensity of the task and its contradiction of man’s nature and means of acquiring and applying knowledge forbid such a system from ever successfully matching the successes of a capitalist system.

Certainly a belief to the contrary is not unique to Hayek’s time, but pervades modern political thought. When Hayek writes, “The belief is becoming more and more widespread that, if things are to get done, the responsible authorities must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure” (50), any observer of modern American regulatory culture and the expansion of executive branch power will undoubtedly note some parallels.

Another parallel to be observed between Hayek’s portrayal of his time and today’s political environment is in his depiction of the cultural preoccupation with the idea of “democracy” and the popular tendency to attribute to it an intrinsicist admiration, as if the institution of democratic systems and procedures was, in and of itself, a guarantee or safeguard of freedom. Hayek is not susceptible to such illogical leaps, however.

“Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain… and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship” (52).

Hayek is not without his own misconceptions as to the true nature of democracy, though, nor the relationship between democracy and capitalism: “If ‘capitalism’ means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important to realise that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself” (52).

To say that democracy is possible only within “a competitive system based on free disposal over private property” ignores the fundamental nature of democracy. Despite the typical usage of the term today, democracy in its pure sense entails no protection or recognition of rights whatsoever. As it was designed, democracy is a system of unlimited majority rule.

Capitalism does rely upon certain legal and political necessities such as individual rights and objective law. What is perceived as the hallmark of democracy—the ability to vote—is not, however, sufficient to secure democracy and may, in the absence of the other two features, destroy it. True, there exist milder democracies throughout the world today that do recognize rights, but their regard for rights does not derive from their nature as democracies. The recognition of rights is only an adjunct to—and, furthermore, a limitation on—the democratic system. The more that alleged “democracies” alter their nature to accommodate individual rights, objective law, and the principles of capitalism, the more they shed their democratic nature and acquire the qualities of a representative system suited to capitalism: a republic.

Though he fails to properly define and conceive of democracy, Hayek does acknowledge the rampant, dangerous popular preoccupation with it and the propensity for those consumed with the idea to invite a tyranny of the majority clothed in democratic language and ideas.

“It may well be true that our generation talks and thinks too much of democracy and too little of the values which it serves… The fashionable concentration on democracy as the main value threatened is not without danger. It is largely responsible for the misleading and unfounded belief that so long as the ultimate source of power is the will of the majority, the power cannot be arbitrary. The false assurance which many people derive from this belief is an important cause of the general unawareness of the dangers which we face” (52).

Hayek’s “Planning and Democracy” is thus an average of what we have seen thus far from him: poor ethics and incomplete defenses of liberty mixed with some valuable insights as to changing political processes and the reciprocal relationship between a socialist state and society as the state seeks to deliberately mold the activities of its population, but finds itself transformed in the process. As much can be expected in our next analysis as Hayek addresses the subject of “Planning and the Rule of Law” in Chapter VI.

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Thoughts on ‘The Road to Serfdom’: Chapter 4, “The ‘Inevitability’ of Planning”

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Britain, Economics, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on September 18, 2013 at 7:45 am

The following is part of a series of chapter-by-chapter analyses of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Other installments in the series can be found here: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3.

In Chapter IV of The Road to Serfdom, entitled “The ‘Inevitability’ of Planning”, Hayek sets out to dispel the claim by advocates of socialist planning that controls are a necessary part of an advanced, modern economy and that without them the economy would cease to function. He recognizes that socialist claims as to the inevitability of planning can be broadly categorized into three types of argument, then proceeds to refute each. He does so thoroughly and effectively. In the course of reading his arguments, however, we unfortunately find more of the same sorts of errors that have punctuated previous chapters. Though these errors are not as numerous as those we have already seen from Hayek, they are fatal to the cause of liberty. Hayek’s flaws here confirm our earlier assertion that his view of the argument for freedom is so firmly rooted in an economic, cost/benefit framework as to make him unsuited to presenting the comprehensive defense that capitalism as a system of individual rights needs and deserves.

Hayek begins by accurately describing a circumstance quite familiar to us today: politicians who advocate central planning doing so on the claim that circumstances somehow demand controls, and that it is not a choice but a necessity that the government intervene if we are to retain a functioning economy. The familiarity one finds in reading his characterization of this mode of thinking reveals how constant and unchanging such arguments are across generations and throughout the Western world. The arguments he describes, though drawn from England in the 1940s, are replayed in the halls of the US Congress week after week, year after year to the detriment of the rights and success of private businesses, their vendors, customers, employees, investors, and all who share in the economy with them.

Distinguishing the various arguments used to support this insistence upon the need for planning, Hayek finds three purported bases for their claims: technological advancement, societal complexity, and the need for coercive monopoly.

Argument I: Technological Advancement

As to the first, he writes, “Of the various argument employed to demonstrate the inevitability of planning, the one most frequently heard is that technological changes have made competition impossible in a constantly increasing number of fields, and that the only choice left to us is between control of production by private monopolies and direction by the government” (32). The preeminence of this argument above the others may not hold the number one position that it did in Hayek’s day, as other arguments for market regulation have debatably become more prevalent, but it certainly remains one of the leading lines of thought in antitrust.

Hayek characterizes such arguments as resting largely on deterministic conceptions of economic progress, ones that in the early 20^th century viewed Germany, with its coincidence of economic planning, a strong industrial sector, and large companies operating in collusion with the national government as the vanguard of human progress. He points to the roots of this thinking in Germans’ misconceptions of their own system: “It is largely due to the influence of German socialist theoreticians, particularly Sombart, generalising from the experience of their country, that the inevitable development of the competitive system into ‘monopoly capitalism’ became widely accepted” (34), Hayek offers several valid economic and historical arguments against this, refuting the suggestion by many that a free economy naturally, inevitably congeals into small number of sprawling monopolies.

Hayek points out that monopolies arising purely from efficiency and natural market forces are rare and very difficult to sustain, thus making competitive arguments the norm in a free economy. He acknowledges that most monopolies arise from government favors and protection—constituting what can best be termed coercive monopolies. “Not only the instrument of protection, but direct inducements and ultimately compulsion, were used by the governments to further the creation of monopolies for the regulation of prices and sales” (34).

He makes clear that the progress of the German economy was not such that monopolies resulted naturally and were subsequently checked by government controls, but rather that the companies in question attained their monopoly status through that very culture of political collusion. He points to the same mechanism of political influence and pull-peddling in the establishment of protectionist policies and the formation of inefficient, monopolized industries in the United States and Great Britain as well.

“That [in Germany] the suppression of competition was a matter of deliberate policy, that it was undertaken in the service of the ideal which we now call planning, there can be no doubt. In the progressive advance towards a completely planned society the Germans, and all the people who are imitating their example, are merely following the course which nineteenth-century thinkers, particularly Germans, have mapped out for them. The intellectual history of the last sixty or eighty years is indeed a perfect illustration of the truth that in social evolution nothing is inevitable but thinking makes it so” (35).

Making this and other points as to the origins of large monopolies, Hayek establishes a strong historical case against the belief that unchecked market forces lead naturally to the creation of monopolized industries. What he does not do, however, is take a stand in defense of naturally occurring, non-coercive monopolies when and where they do occur. This is to be expected. Influenced by ideas dominant in the field of economics both then and now, Hayek has already established briefly in previous chapters his support for employing antitrust policies to facilitate competition.

What Hayek and others of this persuasion fail to note, however, is the two-fold case for free market monopolies: the profound economic value they offer and the protection of individual rights. As rare as these monopolies are, they do occur. When they arise, they do so because a company has achieved such a profound degree of efficiency that no other company is able to compete in the same market and must exit the market place.

Such monopolies have not attained their status through force or the rule of law, but through so consistently providing the best product for the money that their appeal in a market overwhelms all potential competitors. It may not conform to the idealized, Platonic notion of ‘competitive markets’ to which modern economics has become so hidebound, but that is a paltry explanation to offer people as an apology for why the company they patronize had to be divested of its assets for offering them too much value, and for why they are now better off having to pay higher prices for the same goods and services. To the contrary: the achievement of the kind of superlative efficiency that defines free market monopolies, from which the customers and general population gain as surely as the company itself, should not be condemned but praised.

More than this, the proper defense of free market monopolies is based in the property rights of the owners of the company—be they the operators themselves, or shareholders of a publicly traded company. No matter the extent to which their operations do or do not conform to economists’ notions of which market forms are to be favored, neither they nor policymakers nor the general public have the right to take from them that which is rightfully theirs in the name of creating a more efficient allocation of resources.

In today’s debates, a derivative line of thinking from the technology argument usually takes the form, ‘If one company gains such a technological advantage as to offer its goods and services at a price and quality with which no other company can compete, shouldn’t the government intervene?’ Faced with such a question, any defender of liberalism—that is, anyone who value’s man’s life and individual rights above subservience to some ill-defined collective ‘good’—should offer a resounding “Absolutely not!” As in his earlier chapters, though, Hayek makes no mention of rights here and is thus unable to offer this kind of principled defense—or, for that matter, any defense.

Argument II: Societal Complexity

The second argument for the inevitability of planning addressed by Hayek is loosely related to the first, with an added macroeconomic dimension. He writes,

“The assertion that modern technological progress makes planning inevitable can also be interpreted in a different manner. It may mean that the complexity of our modern industrial civilisation creates new problems with which we cannot hope to deal effectively except by central planning” (35) [Emphasis mine].

This argument should be strikingly familiar to those in modern America, ringing from both right and left as both sides of the political spectrum apologize for our massive regulatory system with vague, arbitrary claims to the effect that there exists some unnamed, undefined essential quality to today’s economy that so fundamentally differentiates it from that of earlier periods as to require the forcible regulation of trade. What is this fundamental difference? How and at what point did it emerge? What about the complexity of the economy negates the organizational virtues of the price system? Blank out. The apologists have no causal explanation, only inherited and unchallenged bromides.

“What they generally suggest is that the increasing difficulty of obtaining a coherent picture of the complete economic process makes it indispensable that things should be coordinated by some central agency if social life is not to dissolve in chaos” (36).

Such unsubstantiated conjectures and baseless arguments never require much to be toppled, but fortunately Hayek provides a more than adequate shove, making the case that greater complexity in an economy is not an argument in favor of central planning, but rather an argument against it. The more complex an economic system, the more valuable it becomes that each party, knowing their own costs and values, conducts their own planning, achieving order through the natural coordination of prices, each communicating information as to the supply and demand of resources in an open economy.

Argument III: The Need for Coercive Monopoly

The last argument in favor of planning somewhat reverses the trend of the first two, justifying planning as a means of imposing monopolies rather than preventing them, and revealing the crux of the statists’ argument to be not the protection of competition throughout the economy, but the socialist planner’s ability to pick and choose when and in what sectors competition will prevail.

“There is yet another theory which connects the growth of monopolies with technological progress, and which uses arguments almost opposite to those we have just considered; though not often clearly stated, it has also exercised considerable influence. It contends, not that modern technique destroys competition, but that, on the contrary, it will be impossible to make use of many of the new technological possibilities unless protection against competition is granted, i.e., a monopoly is conferred” (37).

This particular argument for government planning is less common, as its applications are less frequent throughout economies. The most notable circumstance in which this argument is presented is with respect to so-called ‘natural monopolies’ (a term used by economists that ambiguates other kinds of natural monopolies produced in a free market, as we described earlier) in the utilities sectors of modern economies. Large-scale enterprises such as electric companies that require heavy, permanent or semi-permanent installations of infrastructure such as power grids are described by those who teach this model of the ‘natural monopoly’ as incapable of making such investments without a guarantee from the local government that all competition will be prohibited within the municipality.

The history of the electric power industry in the Unites States, however, shows a different story—one in which the major driver of the ‘natural monopoly’ model was not the inefficiency of competitive markets, but rather the political collusion between state legislatures and early power industry executives who were, in many cases, given no choice but to keep legislators happy with rewards and employment or face losing the investments they had already made.

Intriguingly, however, Hayek makes only a passing mention of this obvious and most frequent application of the ‘natural monopoly’ argument. He opts instead to dismiss most instances of its application (rightfully) as “a form of special pleading by interested parties” (37), then to proceed into a bizarre hypothetical about England allowing only one make of automobile if it meant lower prices on all automobiles. He presents this as a potentially valid application of the idea, arguing only that such cases are “certainly not instances where it could be legitimately claimed that technological progress makes central direction inevitable. They would merely make it necessary to choose between gaining a particular advantage by compulsion and not obtaining it—or, in most instances, obtaining it a little later, when further technical advance has overcome the particular difficulties” (38).

Hayek the economist seems to consider such an interventionist policy at least plausible, if debatably desirable. But what of Hayek the liberal political theorist? Under what conditions would he find such a policy acceptable? Would the strict prohibition of initiating force, so frequently invoked among libertarians, be the standard? Not quite. “[I]t must be admitted,” Hayek writes, “that it is possible that by compulsory standardisation or the prohibition of variety beyond a certain degree, abundance might be increased in some fields more than sufficiently to compensate for the restriction of the choice of the consumer” (38) [Emphasis mine.].

Let us ask: what level of abundance would you require to surrender your right to choose how you wish to dispose of your income? What is the exchange rate between degrees of efficiency and the right to trade freely? And for producers: how compensated will you feel at the knowledge your automobile is less expensive when your business is being shut down by the government for offering customers too much diversity in the marketplace? Many who read this in today’s mixed economy will likely have similarly mixed feelings and mixed premises in their responses to these questions. Thus, let us reframe the issue to put it in stark relief.

Imagine that you live in a society that enacts such a policy of homogenizing the nation’s automobiles. The government is left to decide who will remain in the automobile business in the ways it usually decides such matters. The last businessmen to grovel will be the first to go. There is no more choice in make or model. Competition in quality and unique features is gone. You, however, are left with a less expensive automobile, your neighbors are left with less expensive automobiles, and the supply of them to the general public skyrockets. (This is a fantasy, remember, so you’ll forgive me if I pretend a government program is successful even if only in the short term.)

Now imagine that instead of automobiles, the product is healthcare.

How much are you willing to trade of your rights for greater efficiency? What is your price? And how strong a defender of economic freedom is Mr. Hayek? The answer is clear and tragic.

Hayek establishes here firmly and conclusively that he is not, in fact, much of a political theorist. He is ultimately a dryly calculating economist plotting your rights on a utility curve. Though many of Hayek’s admirers will no doubt reject this assessment, it is difficult to argue with his own words as he lays out his fundamental basis for liberalism as such. “[T]he argument for freedom,” according to Hayek, “is precisely that we ought to leave room for the unforeseeable free growth” (38).

To anyone who values man’s fundamental rights; who believes that those rights are derived from his nature and not subject to popular will; who thinks that freedom is rightfully his; who rejects force as a necessary or proper ingredient in human social relationships; who recognizes that the history of human innovation and progress has rested on the freedom of man’s mind to study and master the world around him; who claims the prerogative to pursue his own self-interest; who retains his self-esteem; who holds his own happiness as the purpose of his life: the only proper answer, the only moral answer is “Absolutely not!”

The argument for freedom, Mr. Hayek, is the assertion of man’s right to his own life, a life that is its own justification. Nothing else is required and nothing else will do.

Hayek’s fourth chapter, “The ‘Inevitability’ of Planning”, thus leaves us back at the low-point of Chapter I. It is impossible, based on the philosophical framework established in the introduction and first four chapters, that Hayek could at this point offer a proper defense of liberalism. Though I hesitated to make the comparison earlier, hoping he might redeem himself, it is fair to say now that Hayek is scarcely better than many of the pragmatist politicians today who argue for capitalism as a practical benefit, make no mention of its moral values, and ultimately treat principles as loosely-held guiding ideas with little more substance than campaign slogans. He may be much farther toward the liberal end of the spectrum than many of them; it would be inaccurate to say otherwise. Ultimately, though, half-hearted, half-formed defenses of freedom by advocates who lack the tenacity to defend their professed values only facilitate their destruction.

The real Road to Serfdom is paved with incomplete defenses of liberty, and once one has allowed them to serve as the foundation for the defense of a free society, matters of degree are only matters of time.

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"Individualism and Collectivism", Austrian Economics, Ayn Rand, competition, Friedrich Hayek, laissez-faire capitalism, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Slade Mendenhall, standards of value, Statism, The Road to Serfdom, themendenhall.com

Thoughts on ‘The Road to Serfdom’: Chapter 3, “Individualism and Collectivism”

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Economics, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on September 16, 2013 at 7:45 am

This analysis is the fourth installment in a series of chapter analyses of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The previous analysis of Hayek’s introduction, Chapter I, and Chapter II can be found here, here, and here, respectively.

Hayek’s third chapter, “Individualism and Collectivism,” proves to be what our earlier analyses had anticipated: good on recognizing the economic benefits of liberalism, skilled at pointing out the flawed concepts and illogical thinking that facilitate and perpetuate socialism, and effective in arguing for certain basic fundamentals such as the necessity of an effective legal system, but slightly inadequate in its offering of better concepts, lacking in its defense of capitalism, and guilty of a borderline intrinsicist endorsement of ‘competition’, without treating that endorsement as premised upon the benefit rendered to man as an individual or, for that matter, any other more fundamental value.

The chapter begins with a valuable point as to the extent to which socialism has succeeded by distorting and disguising its own nature, with each socialist faction clinging to its chosen group or alleged beneficiary—a race, party, or class—and proclaiming that by virtue of its superficial differences in approach it is somehow different from all other varieties of statism. It thus exaggerates concrete matters of application, treating them as differences in fundamentals. Hayek repudiates this approach, pointing out that, regardless of the group they claim to represent, “the methods which [the socialists] shall have to employ are the same as those which could ensure an equalitarian distribution” (25). He goes on to acknowledge that “nearly all the points which are disputed between socialists and liberals concern the methods common to all forms of collectivism and not the particular ends for which socialists want to use them” (24), establishing that the basic objection of liberals to socialist policies apply to all socialist policies, not those of a certain type, as the conflict is fundamentally between individualism and collectivism.

Hayek’s shift of focus from political ideologies to the more fundamental dichotomy in all political theory is valid and much-needed in a world that so rarely thinks in terms of fundamentals anymore—both at the time of writing and today. What is lacking in this effort, however, is an explicit definition of ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism.’ He implies, though does not expound upon, the idea that the collectivism is best thought of as a set of “methods which can be used for a great variety of ends,” seeing socialism “as a species of that genus” (25). While he is correct in viewing socialism as a subtype within a broader category of collectivist politics, collectivism itself is not fundamentally definable as a set of methods, but as an ideological framework.

The question that divides the two political philosophies of individualism and collectivism is one of standards of value. It asks, ‘Which is the primary unit for consideration in judging what is politically ‘good’?” Hayek’s failure to define the two concepts and their difference misses the opportunity to dispel the socialist misrepresentation of that dichotomy. Socialists, rather than seeing the question as one of standards of value and units for consideration, mischaracterize human affairs as a perpetual conflict between the individual and collective, accepting conflict as a necessary ingredient in social relationships, and, therefore, self-interest as fundamentally anti-social. They therefore view the question of individualism and collectivism as one of loyalty: “Individuals or the collective: whose side are you on?” Many defenders of socialism, having accepted this false notion of man’s life as perpetually in conflict, thus accept the morality of altruism that preaches that someone’s sacrifice is necessary and good for society to function, and accordingly defer to socialism for fear of being an enemy of an alleged ‘greater good.’

Other flaws punctuate Hayek’s challenge of socialism. The first is his failure to challenge socialists’ ends as goods to strive for. He describes their ends as a desire for “social justice, greater equality, and security” (24), but then sets upon his argument as to the impossibility of separating socialists’ means from the system itself, implicitly suggesting by his omission that their ends are indeed desirable. He writes, “There are many people who call themselves socialists although they care only about [the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security], who fervently believe in those ultimate aims of socialism but neither care nor understand how they can be achieved, and who are merely certain that they must be achieved, whatever the cost” (24). The error in their reasoning that Hayek seems to imply lies in socialists’ disregard for the means by which they hope to achieve their ends. He does not, however, challenge the ends as such.

Hayek fails to challenge the concepts offered by socialists or to insist that they properly define their terms—what they mean by the bromides they use: social justice—by what standard of justice? equality—of rights or of results? security—from force, or from the facts of reality? Hayek leaves these questions unasked, thus leaving the socialists’ values uncontested and the socialists themselves with more apparent justification than they could ever deserve.

In tandem with this omission, he describes it as “unfair to use the term socialism to describe its methods rather than its aims, to use for a particular method a term which for many people stands for an ultimate ideal” (25). Though he does not elaborate upon this, it can easily be interpreted as a suggestion that some more peaceable socialists’ ends are well-intended—at least “for many people,” but that it is their means which are flawed. Despite his earlier insistence upon the essential connection between different apparent varieties of socialist, he apparently further accommodates the socialists’ ultimate values without challenge.

Hayek’s approach to the subject of planning offers some valuable insights that go to the heart of modern mainstream misunderstandings of liberal thought. “’Planning’”, he writes,

“owes its popularity largely to the fact that everybody desires, of course, that we should handle our common problems as rationally as possible, and that in so doing we should use as much foresight as we can command. In this sense everybody who is not a complete fatalist is a planner, every political act is (or ought to be) an act of planning, and there can be differences only between good and bad, between wise and foresighted and foolish and short-sighted planning” (26).

This distinction—that liberal policies advising against intervention are no less a deliberate form of planning than interventionism and no less based in a conscientious logic—is an important one in today’s world, as libertarian and capitalist ideas are moving more into the mainstream, being discussed more frequently in publications throughout the Western world, but still remain largely misunderstood by those who see liberals’ insistence upon letting the market work as some mysticist assumption ungrounded in empirical observation. Hayek highlights that they are indeed based in a strategic logic, but one that maintains a belief in the ability of markets to provide man’s needs.

From there, however, Hayek proceeds down a shakier path, again criticizing those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism and defining liberalism along strictly economic lines, making no reference to the fundamental values of liberals and showing his own liberalism as based primarily on a pragmatic approach. He writes,

“It is important not to confuse opposition against this kind of planning with a dogmatic laissez-faire attitude. The liberal argument is in favor of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of co-ordinating human efforts, not an argument for leaving things just as they are. It is based on the conviction that where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other” (27).

He further argues that “where it is impossible to create the conditions necessary to make competition effective, we must resort to other methods of guiding economic activity” (27), supporting our understanding of his earlier defense of antitrust regulations. His warning of the dangers of a mixed economy and the destructive effects of trying to combine liberalism and socialism is valid. However, he doesn’t clearly or adequately address the fact that the destructiveness of a mixed economy stems from its statist, coercive elements, and that while the leaders of private industry may use the coercive power of government to enrich themselves in such an economy, it is ultimately the force of government and the political principles it follows that allow the system to exist, enabling such injustices.

Instead, he poorly allocates the ultimate responsibility for a mixed economy, writing that

“the universal struggle against competition promises to produce in the first instance something in many respects even worse, a state of affairs which can satisfy neither planners nor liberals: a sort of syndicalist or ‘corporative’ organisation of industry, in which competition is more or less suppressed but planning is left in the hands of the independent monopolies of the separate industries… By destroying competition in industry after industry, this policy puts the consumer at the mercy of the joint monopolist action of capitalists and workers in the best organized industries” (30).

True though this description may be in some respects, its emphasis on private businessmen as the primary drivers of the process evades the fact of which side makes the whole collusion possible. Private businessmen of a certain kind—the kind that thrives not on productivity but on political pull—can and do act as the accelerants and perpetuators of a mixed economy. They cannot, however, bring it into being. The responsibility for that lies with a country’s political officials, whether in the legislative, executive, or judicial branch. It is through an abandonment of the legal principles of capitalism that businessmen and legislators have either the occasion or the cause to collude.

Hayek goes on to make several statements that will likely surprise strict adherents of liberalism, writing “Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services—so long as the organisation of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields” (28), and endorsing the idea of naturally occurring market failures. “The functioning of competition,” he writes, “not only requires adequate organisation of certain institutions like money, markets, and channels of information—some of which can never be adequately provided by private enterprise“ (28), suggesting that such instances must be met by governments practicing “the very necessary planning which is required to make competition as effective and beneficial as possible” (31).

Ironically in the context of later debates between classical liberals and mainstream political culture, Hayek argues that roads offer an example of a good that cannot be provided by market forces. Thus, every liberal who has endorsed the potential for market provision of transportation services only to hear political moderates suddenly become crusaders for the transportation sector, passionately demanding “What about the roads?!” has Hayek to credit for endorsing this line of thinking.

Hayek goes on to even endorse broader regulations, with the sole cited criterion for judgment being whether the regulation distorts the market by treating producers differently, or whether it equally infringes upon all:

“Any attempt to control prices or quantities of particular commodities deprives competition of its power of bringing about an effective coordination of individual efforts, because price changes then cease to register all the relevant changes in circumstances and no longer provide a reliable guide for the individual’s actions. This is not necessarily true, however, of measures merely restricting the allowed methods of production, so long as these restrictions affect all potential producers equally and are not used as an indirect way of controlling prices and quantities” (27).

True, policies that apply equally across the board at least have the benefit of not being narrowly discriminatory in their oppression, but they also have the distinction of violating the rights of all producers. If an intrinsicist notion of “competition” and not rights, however, is the standard to be maintained, it is not surprising that Hayek lands at this conclusion.

If it can then be said, following the logic of Hayek, that some regulations are necessary, what is the standard for determining the conditions under which it is proper? He gives us an indication:

“Economic liberalism is opposed, however, to competition being supplanted by inferior methods of co-ordinating individual efforts. And it regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known, but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority” (27) [emphasis mine].

In this passage, Hayek reveals his defense of competition (and, thus, of economic freedom) as based on a belief in its superior abilities in coordination, its efficiency, and, almost tautologically, the fact that it does not involve coercive action. The last condition is an act of circular reasoning, as Hayek states, to word it differently, that a system not guided by coercive action is superior because it is not guided by coercive action, without referencing any particular standard of the good that would make such an argument functional. His other expressed standards, however, tell us something of his political values.

Elsewhere, he writes of the need for regulations “[t]o prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances, or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements,” arguing that such use of preventive law “is fully compatible with the preservation of competition.” One is then brought to wonder: if a regulation or any other use of preventive law can be said to promote competition, is there some other standard that it must meet, some other moral test it must pass to merit enforcement? Hayek would tell us there is not, writing that “The only question here is whether in the particular instance the advantages gained are greater than the social costs which they impose” (28) [emphasis mine].

We can thus see Hayek’s defense of liberalism as a largely pragmatic, utilitarian one and not one based soundly or primarily in a moral argument. In line with this, he pursues what can be interpreted as an intrinsicist approach to valuing “competition” and policies that promote it. Certainly, competition is a value agreed upon by all who value freedom in economics, but the failure to tie it back to what competition offers individuals and to root the defense of it in the political freedom and material well being it provides gives us only half a defense.

Competition is, after all, not a value in and of itself, but a process by which men can pursue their own self-interest, hindered only by their own limitations. In the words of Ayn Rand, “Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal.” Elsewhere, she elaborates

“The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. It means: forcing people to be free at the point of a gun. It means: protecting people’s freedom by the arbitrary rule of unanswerable bureaucratic edicts… There is no way to legislate competition; there are no standards by which one could define who should compete with whom, how many competitors should exist in any given field, what should be their relative strength or their so-called “relevant markets,” what prices they should charge, what methods of competition are “fair” or “unfair.” None of these can be answered, because these precisely are the questions that can be answered only by the mechanism of a free market.”

Alan Greenspan, writing in his early years, makes a similar observation on the subject that may point out from where Hayek is deriving this emphasis on “competition”:

“Competition” is an active, not a passive, noun. It applies to the entire sphere of economic activity, not merely to production, but also to trade; it implies the necessity of taking action to affect the conditions of the market in one’s own favor.

“The error of the nineteenth-century observers was that they restricted a wide abstraction—competition—to a narrow set of particulars, to the “passive” competition projected by their own interpretation of classical economics. As a result, they concluded that the alleged “failure” of this fictitious “passive competition” negated the entire theoretical structure of classical economics, including the demonstration of the fact that laissez-faire is the most efficient and productive of all possible economic systems. They concluded that a free market, by its nature, leads to its own destruction—and they came to the grotesque contradiction of attempting to preserve the freedom of the market by government controls, i.e., to preserve the benefits of laissez-faire by abrogating it.” (“Antitrust”)

Whether this is in fact the context of Hayek’s focus on “competition” as the ultimate goal to be pursued is uncertain, but it reveals both a misplaced focus and, yet again, the propensity to look at matters of political ideology through the lens of economic reasoning, failing to adopt the necessary concepts to make an effective, complete defense of capitalism.

Along those same lines, even in those instances where Hayek seems to be on the right track, there is a conspicuous absence of concepts that one would expect from a defender of liberalism. For instance, he offers a valid argument on the need for legal structure in functioning capitalist systems, writing that competition “depends above all on the existence of an appropriate legal system, a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible” (28). As true as this is, what is striking is that his assertion of the need for appropriate laws rests entirely upon the question of competition and effective operation, and not on any more fundamental principles or political values of a higher order.

Such navigating around the task of making principled arguments appears to be a recurring theme in The Road to Serfdom thus far. It is intriguing and disappointing that after an introduction and three chapters of Hayek, dealing with questions and issues as fundamental as the intervention of government in economics, individualism versus collectivism, and the dangers of socialism to a society, we have not once read the word “rights” in any of Hayek’s arguments. It is difficult to fathom how one could effectively address subjects that deal with such fundamental questions without even mentioning what are and are not man’s rights.

That Hayek has not even mentioned rights once suggests that the notion is so far outside of his intellectual framework as to not have occurred to him (doubtful), or that he has some aversion to a rights-based argument to freedom, or does not have a certain view himself as to what man’s rights are. Indeed, were he to be consistent as a skeptic, Hayek would be unable to maintain a consistent and objective notion of man’s rights, and would thus have to either advocate rights as floating abstractions not grounded in man’s nature, or resort to arguing that rights are debatable and subjective.

Hayek’s third chapter proves to be roughly what we expected: stronger and less contradictory than chapter one, but not as successful as chapter two. He occasionally makes valid points that we can translate into the present day. “The dispute about socialism,” he writes, in a passage that could be applied as truly to the statist elements of both parties in the United States in 2013 as to England in the 1940s, “has thus become largely a dispute about means and not about ends” (24). However, the pragmatic, utilitarian approach Hayek takes to counter it sounds much more like the moderate defenders of capitalism in the US today, Republicans who argue for “free markets” because they “work” without the slightest mention of their ethical superiority, than like the paragon of liberal intellectual thought that Hayek is portrayed to be. Whatever Hayek’s abilities as an economist supporting liberal economic policies—and they are remarkable—his force as a political theorist and defender of liberalism is lacking. In tandem with the author’s reputation as an economist, this deficiency threatens to encourage those who seek to defend liberty to invest too heavily in the wrong kind of argument, potentially crowding out more worthwhile ones. Just as in monetary economics “the bad money chases out the good”, so in political philosophy a chiseled, fool’s gold defense of freedom stands the risk of jeopardizing that which it seeks to uphold.

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Thoughts on ‘The Road to Serfdom’: Chapter 2, “The Great Utopia”

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Britain, Economics, Historicism, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on September 13, 2013 at 7:45 am

This article is the third installment of a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Analyses of Hayek’s introduction and Chapter I can be found here and here, respectively.

Hayek’s second chapter opens with several important reminders about the nature and history of socialism: that its rise was achieved not by the West having forgotten liberal ideas or the historical consequences of collectivism, but by an active campaign of persuasion against liberalism as an ideal; that it has roots in the French Revolution as an authoritarian answer to that movement’s more individualistic elements; and that only through the democratic influences of the revolutions of 1848 did socialism shed its authoritarian origins and assume a democratic veneer.

From there, it proves somewhat of a novelty to one accustomed to today’s concrete-bound, anti-conceptual political rhetoric. The chapter is, fundamentally, a brief lesson in political epistemology, dealing with the historical abuse of concepts that facilitated the popular adoption of socialist ideas.

Chief among the distortions Hayek notes is the socialist reconfiguration of the notion of liberty itself. The alleged “new freedom” introduced by socialists “was to bring ‘economic freedom’ without which the political freedom already gained was ‘not worth having’” (19). Hayek astutely describes this distortion of the concept of freedom:

“To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a supervisor to whom he was attached. The new freedom promised, however, was to be freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others. Before man could be truly free, the ‘despotism of physical want’ had to be broken, the ‘restraints of the economic system’ relaxed… The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth” (19).

Hayek recognizes the epistemological methods by which socialists attained power, consisting largely of equivocation and anti-conceptual thinking, lumping together disparate concretes and attaching to them a single label—“freedom”—in order to pass off an intellectual package-deal on the general public, persuading them to embrace a contradiction. Though he does not go into this kind of detailed description of the process, Hayek at least acknowledges that the methods by which such intellectual smuggling is carried out form too large a subject to be discussed in the context of the chapter, and does not claim to have thoroughly explained it as a philosophical process but only as a historical one.

He proceeds to assess more recent, twentieth century distortions of the concept of socialism itself and how it has become muddled and confused by “progressives” who view fascism and communism as fundamental opposites, failing to recognize that both are merely species of the same genus. The processes of evasion and distortion, fueled by an excessive focus on concrete particulars at the expense of fundamentals, are thus seen to wreak as much havoc in the thinking of those twentieth-century advocates of socialism in their understandings of themselves and relations to one another as they did in the minds of nineteenth-century liberals who were persuaded to adopt socialist ideas. That statists are as much the victims of their own illogic as those they seek to oppress soon becomes clear.

In what might be one of the greatest compliments one could offer to liberalism, Hayek then points out, both in his own words and quotes by socialists themselves, how history and socialists’ experiences have shown time and again that despite their alleged fundamental opposition to one another, fascists and communists are known by the other to be prime targets for recruiting, fueling and perpetuating the hatred between them as each views the other as a competitor for the same pool of minds, but both are well aware of the immunity of true liberals to the propaganda of either. Liberals are viewed as resistant to their persuasions and unsuitable for the culture of perpetual compromise that characterizes socialist politics.

Again, in the end, Hayek effectively ties the subject back to contemporary Britain and how these same ideas, once prevalent in Germany between the two wars, are alive and well across the channel. “[I]n this country,” he writes, “the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined… So little is the problem yet seen, so easily do the most irreconcilable ideals still live together, that we can still hear such contradictions in terms as ‘individualist socialism’ seriously discussed” (23).

Perhaps the only flaw in this second chapter consists of Hayek’s uncritical acceptance of the term “democracy” as being in any way synonymous with freedom or liberalism—a common error (even more so in today’s world!), and not one that deprives the chapter more generally of valuable insights, but one that it could have benefited from correcting. Hayek writes admiringly of Alexis de Tocqueville’s work, “Nobody saw more clearly than de Tocqueville that democracy as an essentially individualist institution stood in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism” (18).

Democracy, however, is not an essentially individualist institution. It is, in fact, not essentially anything except inclusive of a political process that allows for the popular, institutional expression of political preference and ideas. Democracy allows people to vote. Whether that vote is limited by a founding document protecting individual rights or any other principle is not inherent to democracy itself, and to think it so leads to many of the befuddled responses of policymakers today when they observe the imposition of democratic processes having failed to ensure peace, justice, or any other virtue of great political societies.

Let it not be forgotten that the first democracy in human history, that from which the concept derived and upon which its essentials rest, was Ancient Greece, where the life of a man such as Socrates could be voted away on grounds no more substantial than his having propagated ideas unwelcomed by the majority.

Democracy is thus neutral with respect to individualism, only upholding it when the republican qualities of a constitution, bill of rights, and limitations on the majority will are imposed. This leaves the phenomenon of democratic socialism, which Hayek sees as an oxymoronic distortion, rather justified in formal logic, if not in any rational morality or political ethic.

Overall, Hayek’s second chapter, “The Great Utopia”, is a dramatic improvement from his first. It sets out with a direct purpose to illustrate the epistemological errors that have aided the rise of socialism, and, with skilled application of political concepts and supporting evidence, it succeeds in that task. Whether this upward trajectory continues into his next chapter, “Individualism and Collectivism”, as he addresses subjects at somewhat of a conceptual middle-range between those of his first and second chapters, we shall see in the next installment.

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