National Security and the Loss of Innocence
Chapter 3 (Part 4 of 4) of the book
The Discovery of First Principles, Volume 3
Edward J. Dodson
Cooperative Individualism
The Long Road Back
Once communism lost its lure as the reform ideology, its former
adherents in the U.S. and other social democracies either sounded loud
warnings or disappeared into the wilderness to await the passage of
time and of the Stalinist era. At the same time, a window of
opportunity seemed to open, if only so slightly, for those who
espoused the principles of cooperative individualism. These few
determined souls did what they could to warn against the emerging
national security state and of attacks on liberty. Oswald Garrison
Villard, now solidly associated with those who continued to raise the
banner of cooperative individualism, argued that in the longer run the
Soviets could never hope to compete with
the Democracy, provided the lessons of history were recognized
and acted upon by Americans:
It is not yielding to sensationalism or being unduly
alarmed by the Communist menace to stress the gravity of the
domestic situation as evidenced by the lack of leadership and of few
clear-cut economic or labor policies in Washington, the drift toward
collectivism in our labor movement, the rise of the treasonable
belief in some quarters that "only a strong man can get us out
of this mess," and that "the days of free competition in
America are numbered." The price paid for the war in the
destruction of more than five hundred thousand small businesses, and
the increased power of the great corporations, trusts and monopolies
because of their enlarged resources and equipment and their general
superiority to their competitors where there are any, threaten the
future development of our industrial machinery and our social
advancement along the historic American line. If it is not countered
by greater and greater freedom of action whenever that is possible,
then the movement toward totalitarianism is certain to be
accelerated and stimulated. The enemies of democracy will declare
that this Republic cannot govern itself in these days of an ever
more intricate and interwoven industrial system, especially in the
face of the tremendous rise in the power of labor; that halfway
government controls of agriculture and industry, the commodity
markets, and numerous other forms of private enterprise have failed.
...Only one country really rivals us in the variety and richness of
its natural resources, and that is Russia. But, is it not
preposterous to assert that we shall have to defend ourselves by
tariff barriers against the products of that great people, shackled
and impoverished as they are by their own system, confined within
their own boundaries except when sent en masse to kill, deprived of
a free press, and devoid of all knowledge as to what is really going
on in the world, riddled with corruption, and harassed, according to
their own leaders, by traitorous practices within government and
industry which can only be stopped by almost regularly recurring
bloody purges? ...[91]
...The remedy is ... to maintain every possible economic freedom
even in the face of the ever-present pressure for greater and
greater government control of the lives of individuals, their
movements and their businesses. Of these liberties none is more
important than freedom to trade in the lowest priced markets and to
sell in the highest available. ...The abolition of tariffs would
mean notable progress back to individual self-reliance and
self-respect, to business independence. For this it is hard to think
of a price too high. The only requisite is that the process of
readjustment be made deliberately and as painlessly as possible when
the United States fulfills its duty to itself.[92]
How ironic that among the nations destined to develop into the most
highly organized of industrial societies in competition with the U.S.
were Germany and Japan. The Germans had the advantages of accumulated
scientific knowledge and technological skills, along with reasonably
adequate natural resources to draw on. The Japanese initially lacked
depth in the first two and few natural resources; what they benefited
from was MacArthur's constitutional prohibition against a military
rebirth and a national determination to become a powerful producing
nation. In the U.S., Liberalism was already narrowing the range of
issues over which the mainstream political parties debated. Government
intervention in society and the economy was already considerable and
growing. Liberalism, however, downplayed the need for central planning
in favor of measures to redistribute purchasing power (although the
actual effect more often than not was to do so from those who produced
wealth to those who did not). To be sure, a safety net of sorts was
being constructed for those prevented from or otherwise unable to
produce wealth by their labor. Far more was being spent by government
in ways that benefited the already wealthy and powerful at the expense
of the middle income taxpayers and the working poor. Billions of tax
dollars spent on highway construction brought unearned gains to those
who possessed land on the fringes of every major urban center in the
United States. This was a transfer of purchasing power unprecedented
in history that went largely unreported and unchallenged, other than
by those who found their core moral principles in the writings of
Henry George, the most prominent of whom remained Harry Gunnison
Brown.
Henry Wallace's campaign for the Presidency represented a last gasp
effort at substantial restructuring of the socio-political order in
the U.S. Had he used his prestige as one of Franklin Roosevelt's
closest advisers to champion the cause of cooperative individualism,
he might have accomplished something. He was, unfortunately, so
dangerously out of sync with the concerns of most Americans that he
left the thoughtful little choice but to oppose him. When in 1947
Wallace attacked U.S. and British foreign policies as imperialistic,
while defending Soviet aggression as a natural desire for secure
borders, Oswald Garrison Villard joined Adolf Berle, Norman Thomas,
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Sidney Hook and other old-line
anti-communist Liberals in signing a letter sent to Ernest Bevin, the
British Foreign Secretary, denouncing Wallace's views. The door was
now open wide to the advance of Liberalism. Activism on behalf of true
and penetrating reform of existing socio-political arrangements and
institutions yielded to a dangerous but deliberate shift toward the
national security state, accompanied by an accepted loss of liberty in
thought and action. From the intellectual wilderness, Francis Neilson
took time to reflect on what to him was this rather odd turn in
events:
One of the most curious phenomena observed in the party
politics of this generation is that which has brought about the new
use of old labels. Those of us who are old enough to remember the
straightforward political struggles of more than forty years ago
find ourselves living in a strange world. ...It might be said that
there are only two old labels that have not been put to misuse:
Toryism and Whigism. But even Toryism has not quite escaped, for now
it is frequently applied to the capitalist class, whereas a hundred
years ago it was applied exclusively to the landlords. ...
...Today, if the names of the candidates were suppressed and only
the party platforms presented to him he would scarcely be able to
choose the place where he would put his mark upon the ballot paper.
For all parties vie with one another as to the attractiveness of the
bribe that will draw the voter to the poll. ...[93]
The bribe, of course, was the use of the regulatory and taxing powers
of the State to mitigate the extreme harms resulting from entrenched
privilege and monopoly license. And, once the average person acquired
a healthy fear of Stalinist methods, interventionists within the
political and intellectual leadership ranks of the social democracies
had more or less a free hand in guiding their societies into the
apparent security of Liberalism. All the while, warnings were being
raised by individualists of various stripes within the Remnant.
Individualists were slow to examine the inconsistencies of their own
ideals - to distinguish as Mortimer Adler did between what fell within
the realm of liberty and what needed to recognized as license.
Even in the midst of the Second World War, a small cadre of
intellectuals, almost exclusively in the English-speaking societies,
had rallied round economist Friedrich Hayek's critique of state
socialism, The Road to Serfdom.[94] Looking primarily at the
British experience and the growing commitment to social engineering as
public policy, Hayek examined the tradeoffs arising when the quest for
broad economic security supplanted the commitment to principles of
individual responsibility. Guarantees of employment and income to some
result in "privilege at the expense of others whose security
is thereby necessarily diminished,"[95] reasoned Hayek. He
preferred to place his faith in competition and markets -- markets in
which competition is maintained by the rule of law and purged of
monopoly privilege. Although attacked by British socialists, Hayek's
methodical analysis was difficult to ignore. Harold Macmillan later
credited Hayek's book with having influenced Winston Churchill to go
on the offensive against state socialism. The book reached a broad and
general audience in the United States by virtue of its publication in
condensed form by Reader's Digest. Even from the individualist
corner, however, not all reviewers hailed Hayek as a beacon light.
Lancaster M. Greene, a dedicated admirer of Henry George writing in
the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, warned that "Hayek's
criticism of the Marxists and their ilk suffers fundamentally from his
failure to understand that the trouble with our economic system is
precisely what Marx said it was, the private appropriation of land and
other natural resources. It is this that set us on the road to
serfdom, and the collectivism he deplores is its inevitable outcome."[96]
This was criticism of a different sort, from a corner of the
Remnant itself considered to be clinging to old and poorly
reasoned ideas but still working to capture the hearts and minds of
those not yet lulled into complacency by the conventional wisdoms of
Liberalism or Libertarianism (of which Hayek emerged as a founding
father).
Hayek had left Britain (and the London School of Economics) soon
after publication of The Road to Serfdom, eventually joining
the faculty at the University of Chicago. Despite the war and the
drift of universities toward corporate and government-directed
research, the University of Chicago remained under the leadership of
Robert M. Hutchins one of the last bastions of a classic liberal
education. Hutchins, along with Mortimer Adler and Mark Van Doran, had
fought to preserve the university as a place where knowledge could be
acquired, discovered and shared. In his own writing and teaching Adler
had embarked on a campaign to resurrect the place of moral philosophy,
of objectively proven moral principles, in the deliberations over
public policies and socio-political arrangements. Less disciplined and
rigorous in his thinking, economics professors Frank Knight
(1885-1961) and Henry C. Simons (1899-1946) championed the cause of
the market system. Knight recognized the dangers of unbridled freedom
and warned that "its excess can have disastrous consequences."[97]
Yet he feared the expansion of statist power even to preserve what the
Physiocrats and Henry George had called "a fair field with no
favors." Broad participation in governing would create an
environment in which "the self-evidence of a harmony of
interests in free relationships, excluding force and fraud and
presupposing mutual respect for the freedom and the competence of
[others]"[98] would thrive. Some individuals would, to be
sure, attempt to secure privileges and monopoly licenses. The more
direct the process of democracy, the fewer the administrative (as
distinct from judicial) powers of government the less chance there
would be for corruption and the advance of special interest. Knight
and Simons were joined at Chicago in 1946 by Milton Friedman (fresh
from completing his doctorate program at Columbia University).
Hutchins had also attracted Richard Weaver, a southerner who yearned
for a return of agrarian values, into Chicago's midst. Weaver's major
contribution to the intellectual struggle appeared in 1948 with the
publication of Ideas Have Consequences. This book traced the
decline of Western civilization to the adoption of moral relativism in
the Old World. Political scientist Leo Strauss, a Jewish escapee from
Nazi Germany, also arrived in 1949, after ten years at the New School
of Social Research in New York.
New York City became home to a rather more diverse group of
self-styled successors to the neo-anarchism of Albert Jay Nock. Frank
Chodorov we have already discussed. Nock and Chodorov, personally and
as mentors, appealed to a younger generation of anti-Liberals that
included Murray Rothbard and William F. Buckley, Jr. Felix Morley (who
in 1945 had stepped down from a college presidency to become editor of
Human Events to offer his own probing insights into what had
gone wrong with the Democracy and what needed to be done). Morley's
book The Power in the People was published in 1949, adding to
individualism's latent base of moral insights. Morley had called upon
Bertrand de Jouvenel,[99] among his circle of friends, to give his
manuscript a critical reading before publication. At
Irvington-on-Hudson, not far from New York City, Leonard E. Read
established the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Read invited
Ludwig von Mises to join the faculty, and over the years after 1946
virtually every ranking intellectual within the individualist movement
rubbed shoulders with Read. In 1950, FEE began publishing The
Freeman. Journalist John Chamberlain and economist Henry Hazlitt
stepped forward to take on editorial responsibilities. Chodorov would
take over as editor in 1954, but in the meantime he continued his
quest to influence the thinking of a gradually expanding core of
individualists. By this time, Chodorov was convinced that more than
any other tool acquired and employed by the State, the power to
confiscate income earned from production and commerce ate away at the
Democracy:
Were the disposition of the current crop of Americans
comparable to that of their forebears, a new revolution, to regain
the profit of the first one, would be in order. There is far more
justification for it now than there was in 1776. But, people do not
do what reason dictates; they do what their disposition impels them
to do. And the American disposition of the 1950s is flaccidly
placid, obsequious and completely without a sense of freedom; it has
been molded into that condition by the proceeds of the Sixteenth
Amendment. We are Americans geographically, not in the tradition. In
the circumstances, a return to the Constitutional immunities must
wait for a miracle.[100]
In the process of working to rekindle an attitude of self-reliance
among Americans, Chodorov was always the willing teacher and mentor.
He recognized in William F. Buckley a determined spirit and did what
he could to nurture his individualist inclinations. God and Man at
Yale, published in 1951 by Henry Regnery, catapulted Buckley into
the vanguard of a resurgent conservative movement within the
national security state. After four years as an undergraduate student
at Yale, Buckley emerged feeling that the university had been captured
by the orthodoxy of interventionism. Felix Morley affirmed Buckley's
sentiments in a review that appeared in Barrons. That same
year and in 1952, Robert M. Hutchins delivered a series of lectures at
the Universities of Uppsala and Toronto that appeared in 1953 in book
form. After thirty years as a teacher and administrator, Hutchins told
his audience that "the decay of philosophy has taken place on
a world-wide scale; but the effects of this decay on education have
for many reasons been more immediate and pronounced in America than
anywhere else."[101] Buckley's generation was enduring the
consequences. Hutchins' generation of intellectuals had allowed the
dialogue to narrow, a process that now threatened the very existence
of the intellectual educated in the liberal tradition. "Almost
by definition," declared Hutchins, "nobody can know
anything except a specialist, and he can know nothing outside his
specialty."[102] The result was grave danger for
participatory government dependent upon an educated citizenry. The
educational establishments of virtually every society had been
captured by either pragmatism, positivism or Marxism, all of which had
in common a repudiation of the past as a source of knowledge (i.e., of
truth) and an exaggerated dependency on the experimental sciences. In
point of fact, the responsibility for education of the young had been
turned over to a bureaucracy, run in some instances by the State and
in others by private concerns. Where were there examples of teachers
coming together because of a shared philosophy of education to form
schools, hire administrators to handle the mundane aspects of
operations, offer their services in an open market and survive or not
based on their ability to attract and retain students? Almost nowhere
were the trustees of privately-endowed schools elected from the
faculty. Teachers were forming unions to fight for higher wages and
better working conditions. University professors formed associations
to restrict competition and brought socialism into their profession in
the guise of tenure. Chodorov as well had found that even the Henry
George School of Social Science, where he had served as director,
could not overcome the burden of a governing body only peripherally
involved in teaching. Bureaucrats and boards of trustees tend to be
far more concerned with finances and their own influence than with
actual success in affecting people's lives. Chodorov's answer was to
initiate the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), and he
recruited Buckley to become its first president.
The character of the Remnant was now beginning to change, to
become organized but less and less cohesive in adherence to
socio-political principles. Individualists selected for themselves
labels they felt most comfortable with: anarchist, libertarian,
communitarian or classic liberal. Others gravitated to the more
familiar conservative and its more or less laissez-faire
property-centric traditions.
Anti-communism and the quest to forge a strong national security
state imposed a heavy cost on the individualist commitment to
decentralized, minimal government. Held in common was a conviction
that human progress depended upon an understanding of and adherence to
a moral code, what some continued to equate with natural law.
And, here rested the great debate, over what ought to be
versus what is. "[T]he very concept of natural
law means that those who hold it believe that the gap between the
real and the ideal, between what we have and what we want, is no
abyss, not actually a gap, but a relation,"[103]
observed historian Crane Brinton. Our survival depended on our ability
to live cooperatively with one another, which in turn was closely
linked to the nurturing of our instinctive moral sense of right and
wrong. Some looked to philosophy, others to religion for guidance.
There now began a period of rapid development of the privately-endowed
educational foundations whose members set out to challenge or defend
conventional wisdoms. Hutchins and Adler were among the more ambitious
and open-ended in their pursuit of knowledge, as Adler recalls:
Bob Hutchins left the University of Chicago in 1951 to
become vice-president of the Ford Foundation... My departure from
academic life followed, in 1952, after more than thirty years, ten
at Columbia University and twenty-two at the University of Chicago.
Neither of us regarded our separation from the academy as an
abandonment of the intellectual life. On the contrary, we made that
move in order to initiate and carry on intellectual undertakings
that had little chance of prospering within the confines of a
university.[104]
With a Ford Foundation grant, Adler established the Institute for
Philosophical Research. He also became involved in the creation of the
Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, which began conducting
moderated seminars on the great ideas of Western civilization.
Hutchins also enlisted Adler's assistance in several conferences
designed to be a preliminary to a new type of global academy. Their
efforts proved extremely difficult, for, as Adler later wrote, "I
learned ... how undisciplined are even the very best minds in the
world when they turn from the solitary tasks of thinking and writing
to the collaborative task of discussion."[105] Their quest
for open, intellectual inquiry into the crucial issues affecting
civilization was about to be challenged in a direct way by the
national security state and its proponents, some of whom came from
within the inner circle of the Remnant. Anti-communism and the
challenge of Soviet military adventurism tested the convictions of
those who had found direction in the individualism of Albert Jay Nock.
Chodorov had long ago declared his position, and late in 1950 he
restated in analysis what were for him the clear lessons of
history:
When we look into the nature and substance of peace, and
make comparison with the business of politics, we see how silly is
this faith in the superstate. ...Just as primitive man sought the
answers to all his questions in the totem pole, so does modern man
look to political power to solve the problems of life. In both cases
we have the same flight from self-reliance, the same escape from
individual responsibility, the same mother complex.[106]
Chodorov's editorship of The Freeman under the auspices of
FEE lasted only a year. During that time, Chodorov embarked on a last
gasp effort to retrieve the Remnant from the depths of
statism. For his troubles he attracted only scorn from the new conservative
ranks. Russell Kirk, whose The Conservative Mind (published in
1953) was hailed by old guard Republicans and pre-Roosevelt Democrats
as their call to arms, relegated Chodorov to the philosophical
wilderness. For Kirk and those who found comfort in many of the early
twentieth century's conventional wisdoms, Chodorov was "a
philosophical anarchist who declares that government is an unnecessary
evil and that radicals are the salt of the earth,"[107] in
short, a utopian dreamer who had nothing to offer the true
conservative in an age of superpower confrontation.
For a few fleeting years, Chodorov had held in his grasp the torch of
cooperative individualism that dropped from the hands of Henry George
a half century before. More than most others in the Georgist
community, he had understood that the Democracy was as seriously
threatened by accelerating interventionism as the monopolization of
nature by a privileged few. Privilege had to be attacked on a broad
front, he believed, so that our moral sense of right and wrong could
be nurtured by education into right action. After his departure from
the Henry George School, Chodorov's commitment to the core ideas of
Henry Geroge fell nearly silent. The School continued on during the
Second World War under the direction of a Canadian Georgist, Margaret
Bateman. Anna George de Mille, the last surviving child of Henry
George, held the presidency of the board of trustees until her death
in 1947. Margaret Bateman stayed until the war ended, then resigned.
Robert Clancy, who had studied under Oscar Geiger and worked and
taught at the School until called to serve in the military, was made
Acting Director in 1946 and then Director. After the death of Anna
George de Mille in 1948, industrialist John C. Lincoln became
President of the Board of Trustees. Under Robert Clancy, the School
was now firmly in the hands of someone whose Georgism was wholly
orthodox. Enrollment improved with each year, and the School reached
an impressive number of people through classroom instruction,
correspondence courses and its speakers bureau. Nearly 3,000 students
were enrolled in classes during 1947 (although the completion rate was
less than half). An equal number began the correspondence courses;
but, here, the dropout rate was nearly 90 percent. Extensions and
affiliates of the School operated in Chicago,[108] Los Angeles, St.
Louis, Boston, Newark, Philadelphia, Montreal and several other
cities. Georgists were neither a real political nor a recognized
intellectual force, but they were keeping alive the philosophy of
cooperative individualism Henry George had espoused. The following
year (1948) brought Lawson Purdy, president of the Robert Schalkenbach
Foundation, to the School's faculty. Economist Harry Gunnison Brown
also made an appearance to speak at the School's annual banquet.
The end of war also brought a renewed effort by Georgists to forge a
global movement. They came together under a reinvigorated
International Union for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade,
headquartered in London. Land and Liberty, the Union's monthly
periodical continued with A.W. Madsen as editor. Membership, though
limited, extended throughout the world. Delegates from twelve
countries met during August of 1949 in Swanwick, England to assess
their strength and develop a coordinated international thrust. The
Georgist ranks included many dedicated activists and effective
educators. Outside of Raymond Moley and John Dewey (still the honorary
president of the Henry George School), however, there were no
individuals with name recognition beyond the rather small community of
intellectuals who bothered to read one another's socio-political
writings. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology
continued in the late 1940s to highlight the writing of Francis
Neilson and Harry Gunnison Brown. Mortimer Adler, interestingly,
served with Brown on the American Journal's Board of Editors.
Despite all this activity, the Georgist cause languished, overtaken by
the Cold War and the broader struggle between those who desired to
maintain or overturn the status quo. Cooperative individualism was to
experience a deepened loss of mainstream support, left to be preserved
by a very few, a remnant within the Remnant who struggled to keep
alive a socio-political philosophy and economic analysis traced to
Thomas Paine and brought ever so close to public acceptance by Henry
George.
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