The Mises Review -- Spring 1995
The Mises Review -- Spring 1995
The Mises Review
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1 - SPRING 1995
A Quarterly Review of Books, by David Gordon
The Banker's Cartel
THE CASE AGAINST THE FED
Murray N. Rothbard
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994
Is It Rhetoric, or Is It Nonsense?
KNOWLEDGE AND PERSUASION
IN ECONOMICS
Donald N. McCloskey
Cambridge University Press, 1994
Up From Buckleyism
CATHOLIC INTELLECTUALS AND
CONSERVATIVE POLITICS
IN AMERICA, 1950-1985
Patrick Allitt
Cornell University Press, 1993
The Conscience of a Canadian
DEAD RIGHT
David Frum
Basic Books, 1994
What Should Anti-Economists Do?
THE MARKET PROCESS:
ESSAYS IN CONTEMPORARY
AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS
Edited by Peter J. Boettke and David Prychitko
Edward Elgar, 1994
Big Money, Small Thinkers
"WHY INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM DIED"
Michael Lind
Dissent, Winter 1995, pp. 42-47
Donald N. McCloskey
Cambridge University Press. xviii +
445 pgs.
This is a most peculiar book. As a glance at McCloskey's
enormous
bibliography suffices to reveal, our author appears to have read
everything.
And he isn't faking. As the text shows, McCloskey can refer
learnedly to
Wallace Stevens's poetry, James Gibson's psychology of
perception, the Gettier
problem, the strong program in the philosophy of science, and
Saussure's
linguistics, all this aside from mastery of the literature of
most branches of
economics. Is there anything McCloskey does not know?
And yet the book leaves me with an uneasy feeling, preventing
me from giving
it a standard review. I take the most important part of a review
to be a
summary of a book's main arguments. Here precisely my difficulty
arises.
McCloskey obviously thinks rhetoric of vital significance and
wishes economists
to study it closely. Yet beyond this he appears singularly
elusive and I cannot
attribute to him any further substantive theses at all. He
brings to mind the
literary criticism of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Lascelles
Abercrombie. Like
them, he writes pleasantly and knows a great deal; but after
reading them, one
is puzzled: what, if anything, have they said?
Perhaps my failure to understand McCloskey stems from my own
deficiencies:
I learn from him that I have "difficulty understanding books
outside
[my]....circle" (p. 314). [See endnote] Well, I have
certainly have had
great difficulty understanding him! No doubt uncharitably, I am
inclined to
think my incompetence an insufficient explanation. Much of
McCloskey's
elusiveness stems from his constant efforts to make philosophical
points while
not having the least idea what he is talking about. He has a tin
ear for
philosophical argument, and his book is a veritable handbook of
fallacies.
As Macaulay's schoolboy would know, McCloskey is a leading
opponent of
positivism, and his interest in methodology developed in part
from arguments
with some of his rigidly "scientific" colleagues at the
University of
Chicago. What sort of points did he make against them? He tells
us that he
challenged George Stigler, who supported "behaviorist
theories of voting,
in which people are said to vote according to their
pocketbooks" (p. 14).
Against him, McCloskey raised the point that voting appears
irrational,
since a single voter has almost no chance of affecting the
outcome. "The
voter therefore appeared to have shown by entering the voting
booth that he was
nuts (by the economistic definition of nuttiness) and it would be
strange if he
voted according to his pocketbook with strict rationality after
he closed the
certain" (p. 14). In reply, Stigler was "abusively
positivistic,"
only the observable implications of the theory mattered, he
said.
Here, for once, the abusive positivist was perfectly correct.
Unless the
behavioral theorists contended that people vote their pocketbooks
because it is
rational to do so, McCloskey's invocation of the irrationality of
voting is not
to the point. (It's irrelevant anyway, but never mind.) And
McCloskey also
went astray in an argument with another Chicago positivist, Gary
Baker. Against
Baker, who claimed that one execution appears to deter seven
murders, McCloskey
"remarked that an execution was not the same as murder. . .
. Execution .
. . .is an elevation of the State to life-and-death power,
whereas a murder is
an individual's act. The two are not morally comparable"
(p. 15).
Assuming that Baker was arguing in defense of the death penalty,
his point was
presumably that the penalty's deterrent effect gives reason to
support it. How
does this argument depend on the assumption that murder and
execution are the
same? Imprisonment is also not "the same as" murder.
So what? If
McCloskey means that deterrence does not settle the death penalty
issue, he has
a much better argument; but he has utterly failed to express
himself in a
connected way.
McCloskey rightly criticizes what he calls "the chocolate
ice cream
theory, namely, that opinions about morality are mere
preferences, like an
uncriticizable preference for chocolate ice cream" (p. 96).
But he deploys
a bad argument against it. Emotivism, the view that evaluative
judgments are
nothing but expressions of emotion, "is of course
self-contradictory; the
sneer at evaluation applies to the evaluation of evaluation"
(p. 97). But
of course the statements that comprise the emotivist theory are
not themselves
evaluations; McCloskey has not grasped the elementary
distinction between an
evaluative statement and a statement about evaluation.
Although McCloskey has here attempted an argument from self-
contradiction,
he normally adopts a quite critical attitude to what he calls
"the
Philosopher's Friend, the rhetorical device of catching someone
being committed
to X at the very moment of arguing against X" (p. 200). He
notes that
philosophers often use this type of argument against relativism,
but he is not
impressed. "Even the admirable Hilary Putnam relies on it.
`What
relativist really thinks,' he asks indignantly `that relativism
is only true-
for-my subculture?'. . . .the answer, Professor Putnam, is all of
them, and
consistently" (p. 200).
McCloskey fails to see the point behind Putnam's question; a
relativist who
confines himself to saying that his group accepted relativism
poses no objection
at all to absolute truth. "Some people believe the earth is
flat"
leaves entirely untouched the issue of the earth's shape. And
why must
anti-relativists "confront, however, another tu
quoque; that you,
oh philosopher, are in turn arguing rhetorically. Gotcha
yourself" (p.
200). Why should anyone be reluctant to acknowledge that he is
arguing
rhetorically, when McCloskey has characterized rhetoric so that
it embraces all
forms of communication?
For some reason unknown to me, McCloskey returns again and
again to the
theory of knowledge. He is interested in Gettier cases, a
central topic of
contemporary epistemology. In a Gettier case, one has a
justified belief in a
true proposition but doesn't know the proposition. McCloskey
calls Gettier
cases "an unresolved technical problem with the problem of
justifying true
belief " (p. 190), which is just wrong. The cases appear to
show, rather,
that justified true belief is insufficient for knowledge, as
McCloskey himself
recognizes later in his paragraph. Our rhetorician proceeds to
offer an "economic
version" of a Gettier example but muffs it, since his case
involves an
unjustified true belief. McCloskey has yet another argument to
direct against
critics of relativism. Relying on the French sociologist of
science Bruno
Latour, McCloskey tells us that "there does not exist a safe
metalinguistic
level." Unfortunately, he tells us neither what a
"safe
metalinguistic level" is, why he thinks anti-relativist
arguments depend on
one, nor how he knows one doesn't exist.
After so much fuss and feathers denying relativism the reader
is startled to
find this: "Rules of argument, even something as
fundamental as the law of
excluded middle (which is rationally set aside in some forms of
logic and
mathematics) are instituted by rhetorical agreement. That a
statement must be
either true or false and not both or neither is something we
accept because it
is agreed to be useful in certain classes of disputes between
people. . . . it
is not written in the stars" (p. 241).
McCloskey is on perfectly solid ground in asserting that some
forms of logic
and mathematics set aside the law of excluded middle;
intuitionist logic is a
leading example. But how does it follow that whether we accept
the law is
conventional? And why does he jumble together the law of
excluded middle with
the law of non-contradiction? (Perhaps McCloskey will reply by
citing the work
of Routley and Priest on para-inconsistent logical systems). Is
the adoption
of the law of non-contradiction supposed to be conventional, too?
Whatever
McCloskey is doing, it isn't philosophy.
NOTE
1. McCloskey gives as an instance of my misunderstanding that
I think that
he accepts the positivist criterion of meaning. But what I
imagined I had
suggested was that McCloskey thought that positivism was the only
"literalist"
alternative to his advocacy of metaphor. In doing so, as it then
seemed to me,
he remained locked in positivist categories. If McCloskey took
me to be
claiming that he himself accepted positivist views, I must have
expressed myself
very badly. Similarly, the remark about metaphor which he is
kind enough to
quote (p. 42), I intended to represent his views, not my own. I
ought to have
clearly indicated that the line of thought I suggested was a
conjecture about
what lay behind his anti- positivism. I have now learned my
lesson and will not
again attempt to attribute a coherent position to him.
Murray N. Rothbard
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994, 158
pgs.
Murray Rothbard begins this outstanding book by calling
attention to a
paradox. The Federal Reserve System enjoys virtual immunity from
Congressional
investigation. The few who propose to subject the Fed to even
minimal scrutiny,
such as Henry Gonzales of Texas, at once find a consensus arrayed
against them
(Pp. 1 ff.). They threaten the stability of the market; since,
it is alleged,
only the Fed's independence blocks the onset of uncontrollable
inflation.
Here lies the paradox. Inflation results from the infusion of
new money
into the economy, and it is the Fed that is responsible for its
creation. "The
culprit solely responsible for inflation, the Federal Reserve, is
continually
engaged in raising a hue-and- cry about `inflation' for which
virtually everyone
else in society seems to be responsible" (p. 11). How did
this odd
situation come about?
As one would expect from a top flight economist, Rothbard
responds by
tracing the problem to its roots. He briefly and clearly
explains how money
originated in a barter economy. Some commodities are much easier
to market than
others, and "[o]nce any particular commodity starts to be
used as a medium,
this very process has a spiraling or snowballing effect" (p.
13). Soon one
or two commodities emerge into general use as a medium of
exchange. And this,
precisely, is money. Gold and silver have almost always been the
commodities
that win the competition for marketability. "Accordingly,
every modern
currency unit originated as a unit of weight of gold or
silver" (p. 17).
Why has Rothbard gone to such pains to describe a historical
process that
seems very remote from the Fed? By beginning with a simple case
he can
elucidate the basic mechanism that underlies the Fed's operation.
To explain a
complex event by starting with a simple method and gradually
complicating it is
a basic procedure of modern science. Galileo termed this
"resoluto-compositive"
method and Descartes described it at length. Once one grasps how
money has
emerged, the key to understanding the mysteries of the Fed lies
at hand.
We already can answer the following question; what is the
optimum quantity
of money? If one has understood the explanation of money's
genesis, the answer
is apparent. An increase in the supply of money does not
increase real wealth,
since money is used only in exchange. (The exception owing to
non-monetary uses
of gold and silver can for our purposes be ignored) "Any
quantity of money
in society is `optimal' "(p. 20). And, to add one
complication, the answer
remains the same when paper money has been introduced.
A problem now arises for the analysis so far presented. If an
increase in
the supply of money does not increase real wealth, why have
governments
continually resorted to inflation? Rothbard's response involves
another
fundamental insight of Austrian economics. Inflation does not
affect everyone
equally; quite the contrary, those who first obtain new money
gain a great
advantage, since they can purchase goods and services before most
people become
aware that the purchasing power of money has fallen. Inflation
in is thus a
form of counterfeiting (pp. 27-29).
But it is not the only form; another type of counterfeiting
arose out of
deposit banking. Because of the inconvenience of carrying gold
and silver,
people often deposited the metals in banks, obtaining in return a
receipt.
These receipts, since they are promises to pay gold or silver,
soon began to
circulate as money substitutes. But a temptation presented
itself to the
bankers. The receipts normally did not specify particular gold
or silver coins
to be returned to the depositor; they were rather entitlements
to specified
amounts of the money commodity. (Rothbard notes that the great
nineteenth-century economist W. S. Jevons warned against these
"general
deposit warrants" [p. 37]). Since they need only return
the amount of
money specified in the receipt, bankers might give out more
receipts than they
had gold or silver on hand, trusting that not all depositors
would demand
redemption at the same time. For those willing to assume this
risk, the
prospect of vast profits called appealingly.
But is not this practice a blatant instance of fraud? So it
would appear,
and so Rothbard firmly avers that it is. Unfortunately, several
nineteenth
century British legal decisions held otherwise, and these
verdicts were adopted
by the American courts as well. Rothbard describes the legal
situation with the
sure hand of a master historian (pp. 42-44).
Our banker-counterfeiter, one might assume, can now proceed
happily on his
way to illicit fortune. But an obstacle confronts him; should
he issue more
receipts than he can redeem, the clients of other banks may ruin
him through
demands for payment that he cannot make good. The solution is
obvious; by
unifying the banks in a centralized system, this check to
fraudulent wealth
creation would be ended. Hence the movement for a central
banking system, whose
history in Britain and the United States Rothbard deftly
summarizes.
The Federal Reserve System, as Rothbard makes crystal clear,
was the
culmination of efforts that continued throughout the nineteenth
century to
centralize banking. "By the 1890s, the leading Wall Street
bankers were
becoming disgruntled with their own creation, the National
Banking System. . .
.while the banking system was partially centralized under their
leadership, it
was not centralized enough" (p. 79). As he describes the
movement to
cartelize banking, Rothbard introduces a dominant theme in his
interpretation of
twentieth-century American history; the struggle of competing
groups of bankers
for power. "From the 1890s until World War II, much of
American political
history. . .can be interpreted not so much as `Democrat' versus
`Republican' but
as the interaction or conflict between the Morgans and their
allies on the one
hand, and the Rockefeller-Harriman-Kuhn, Loeb alliance on the
other" (p.
92).
In the agitation to establish the Fed, the House of Morgan was
in the
ascendant; and Rothbard stresses the importance of the conference
held at Jekyll
Island, Georgia, in November, 1910, under Morgan control (pp. 114
ff). The
entire section of the book (pp. 79-118) that deals with the
origin of the Fed
shows Rothbard's incredibly detailed historical knowledge.
Though he was too
modest to do so, he could had he wished have echoed the boast of
Fustel de
Coulanges: "It is not I who speak, but history who speaks
through me."
Rothbard brings the historical section of the book to a close
with a discussion
of the Fed's early years in which the Governor of the New York
Fed, Benjamin
Strong, guaranteed Morgan control (pp. 124-129). Only with the
coming of the
New Deal were the Morgan interests relegated to a lesser role, as
the
Rockefellers assumed leadership of the Eastern Establishment.
Rothbard draws
attention to the research of Thomas Ferguson, who has interpreted
the New Deal
as an anti-Morgan coup (p. 131, n. 40).
"Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point
however is to
change it." For once, Rothbard agreed with his ideological
antipodes, Karl
Marx; and the present work is not only an academic study but a
plan for action.
And the plan in question is a radical one. If Rothbard is
correct, the entire
basis of modern deposit banking, the fractional reserve system,
is a type of
counterfeiting that must be abolished. Under present
arrangements, "the
Fed has the well-nigh absolute power to determine the money
supply if it so
wishes" (p. 144). In response, the Federal Reserve System
must be
liquidated and the gold standard restored "at one
stroke" (p. 146).
Again and again, the reader will be struck by the way in which
Rothbard's
grasp of fundamental economic principles enables him to overturn
conventional
thinking. A brilliant example of this is his unmasking of the
fallacy involved
in deposit insurance (pp. 134- 137). Wittgenstein says in the
Tractatus, "Whatever
can be said, can be said clearly;" but few have been able to
live up to his
exacting dictum. Murray Rothbard's writing always displayed the
clarity of a
first-rate mind. Those who wish to see this mind in action, as
well as learn
from someone in total control of the literature of American
economic history,
should immediately secure of The Case Against the Fed.
by David Frum
Basic Books, 1994, x + 230 pgs.
David Frum has identified a central problem affecting much of
the American
Right. But because he himself supports the Leviathan State to a
greater extent
than some of those he so readily condemns, he can offer nothing
in the way of a
solution. For the one group that does offer a way out, Frum has
nothing but
contempt and calumny.
The difficulty with the Right which Frum has trenchantly
identified is this:
during the Reagan administration, conservatives reneged on their
commitment to
scaling-down, if not eliminating altogether, the welfare state.
"About
morality and nationality, conservatives have a lot to say. But
their fervor for
eliminating the progressive income tax and the redistribution of
wealth via
Washington has cooled when it has not disappeared
altogether." (p. 2)
Programs such as Social Security and Medicare have behind them
powerful
constituencies. Much better then, for the politician who wishes
to keep office
to shift to other issues. For awhile, the supply-side economics
of Arthur
Laffer, Jude Wanniski, and Paul Craig Roberts offered an escape.
By reducing
federal tax rates, much of the crushing burden imposed by the
government would
be lifted; but miraculously, revenues would not fall, thus
averting the
distasteful assault on the welfare state. The plan, which seemed
to promise
something-for-nothing, had behind it a simple rationale-people
able to keep a
greater share of their income will be more productive and thus
generate
increased tax revenue. Frum himself views the supply-side remedy
with favor - "If
federal spending had risen no faster than inflation between 1979
and 1984, the
United States could have spent every dollar it did on defense and
enjoyed all
the Reagan tax cuts and would have still run a federal budget
surplus big enough
to pay either for the repeal of the corporate income tax or a
one-third cut in
everyone's Social Security payroll taxes." (p. 32; see also,
pp. 208-209,
n=l for supporting data.)
But salvation did not come from this corner Federal spending
continued to
rise, and the much vaunted Reagan revolution drastically
increased the budget
deficit. No major conservative group, Frum avers was willing to
struggle for
the classic rightist program of limited government. (As we shall
soon see, it
is just here that Frum's analysis starts to misfire.) Absent
their traditional
program, what were conservative to do? Frum distinguishes three
principal
factions, each of which he finds unsatisfactory; hence the
"dead right"
of his title.
The first two groups may be dismissed quickly from
consideration. The
optimists, epitomized by Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich, maintain
that the
application of a few supposedly market notions, such as
enterprise zones and
vouchers will cure the major social ills of America Frum treats
the optimists'
tinkering with commendable skepticism their programs are in
point-of-fact
inimical to the free market Frum handles the issue of vouches
particularly well:
"But with school choice. . . . the optimistic conservatives
reached the
deal end in their ideology. In the modern regulatory state,
there is no escape
from disagreement over right and wrong by retreating from the
public to the
private sphere - the exits are all cut off." (p. 93) Murray
Rothbard and
others among the paleo alliance made this point some time ago,
but Frum does not
acknowledge them. Nevertheless, he is perfectly on target:
schools accepting
vouchers would be fully subject to federal regulation.
Frum advances some effective criticism of his second faction,
the moralists.
The members of this group do not place primary stress on the
free market.
Instead, they see the loss of virtuous habits of behavior as the
main cause of
contemporary social problems. They propose a very activist
federal government,
with the prime mission of moral education of the populace. As
Frum notes, the
plans for educational reform of Charles Finn, a leading moralist,
"would
grant the central political authorities unprecedented control
over the character
formation of the America public," such measures fly in the
face anything
remotely resembling a right wing policy; besides the recent
recipients of office
in the federal government hardly seem fitted to be moral
exemplars. So far,
Frum's argument has seemed convincing but it is just at this
point that doubt
arises. When Tom Fleming, the editor of Chronicles called Finn's
plan "total
education for the total state" one would expect Frum's
enthusiastic
agreement. Instead, he dismisses the remark as
"demented" (p. 115)
How can he fail to see that Fleming's comment is on precisely the
same lines as
his own analysis of Finn's scheme?
Frum's comment exposes a serious blind spot in his view of the
contemporary
Right. A peculiar animus against the paleoconservatives
disfigures his
treatment of them. His main charge against them is that they too
betray the
free market and limited government. Pat Buchanan and Sam
Francis, for instance,
wish to restrict immigration and look upon free trade with less
that complete
favor. Do not their plans require a powerful state? Further,
the nationalism
of the paleos is but a variant of the multiculturalism against
which they often
fulminate. Like their opponents, they take race as primary.
"The
nationalists may take their descent, as they say, from the oldest
strain of
American conservatism. At the same time, however, they are truly
multiculturalism's children" (p. 158).
Frum's bitter indictment has little substance. Why does
control of
immigration require a powerful state? Adequately patrolled
borders seem enough.
To see Buchanan's vigorous patriotism as part of the
"necessary connection
between nationalism and statism" (p. 141) strikes one as
overdrawn, all the
more so as Frum himself acknowledges the increasingly heavy costs
of welfare
programs for immigrants (p. 144) Much of paleoconservative
opposition to free
trade consists of criticism of measures such as NAFTA and GATT,
attempts to
bring the United States' economy under the control of foreign
powers.
In his attempt to smear the paleos as statists, he ignores a
glaringly
obvious point. The Chronicles group, and Pat Buchanan as well,
have in recent
years been heavily influenced by the free market beliefs of
Murray Rothbard.
Frum ranges far afield in coming up with odd parallels with the
paleos,
including Leopold Maxse and Charles Maurras, but he does not
think worthy of
mention that his alleged "statists" were close allies
of the foremost
American advocate of individual liberty.
Frum has no discussion of Rothbard's views at all he is
merely dismissed
for "extreme 1; bartarianism and vilified for a critical
remark about
Martin Luther King (p. 148). Do we not have here an odd
circumstance? Frum
lambastes the entire American Right for abandoning the free
market but
studiously avoids discussion of a key rightist whose devotion to
the free market
far surpassed Frum's. Our author appears uninterested in
evidence that
contravenes his thesis.
Equally questionable is Frum's strange assimilation of the
paleos and
multiculturalists. He states "Buchanan, Fleming, Francis,
Rockwell,
Rothbard and their circle believe: what Donna Shalala and David
Dinkins and
Henry Louis Gates believe - that America. . . .is - or is coming
to be
characterized by a `diversity' that cannot be reduced to a common
Americanism of
recognizably English origin." (p. 148)
Taken just as it stand Frum's statement is trivial.
Presumably any sane
person, not just the eight mentioned by Frum, will recognize that
America is now
ethnically diverse: who would deny it? But the paleos and
multiculturalists
hardly adopt the same attitude to this diversity. By similar
reasoning, one
could "argue" that supporters of capitalism and
socialism really hold
identical beliefs, since both share an interest in the
economy.
Perhaps what Frum his in mind is that the paleos, like their
multiculturalist opponents, elevate race to greater importance
than he considers
acceptable. But it hardly follows that the paleos have taken
over their
emphasis on race from their opponents. Frum's claim begs the
question against
them; paleos such as Francis maintain that their concern with
ethnic heritage is
true to the intentions of the Founding Fathers. And even if the
paleos' views
did mirror those of the multiculturalists, this would not show
them mistaken.
In his zeal to condemn the hated paleos, Frum leaves himself
open to attack.
He has condemned nearly every major figure on the Right as an
advocate of big
government. But Frum himself ardently supports a militaristic
and warmongering
state. Although he recognizes that many neoconservatives engaged
in "excessive
rhetoric about Third World Democracy" (p. 152), he mocks
opposition to the
1990 Gulf War. The unwillingness of paleos to endorse a war
that, in the event,
achieved nothing at all puts Frum in mind of the "reckless
folly of America
First" in the years before World War II (p. 154)
Here we have a striking paradox. Frum poses as the great
champion of the
free market and a limited state. Yet he enthusiastically
supports the war that
led to an unprecedented expansion of the state. The arguments of
the America
First movement against intervention receive no consideration: how
much easier to
condemn its members as lunatics! And Frum's statism is by no
means confined to
the foreign policy front. Do not civil rights laws require close
monitoring of
virtually all business transactions and private affairs by a
powerful state?
Frum shows himself well aware that civil rights laws represent
"an enormous
expansion of the coercive power of the state," (p. 63) but
he does not
condemn them. Their intrusiveness it appears, must be balanced
against the
perils of "majoritarian morality." The professed
anti-statist Frum
appears anxious to call in the Thought Police to deal with those
insufficiently
enamored of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Frum laces his book with a wide array of scholarly allusion,
but his
comments do not always inspire confidence. He rightly notes that
John Stuart
Mill wished to protect individuals from both intrusive government
and social
conformity. But he thinks that to do this poses a dilemma that
Mill, among
others, found unsolvable; "he ended his days a
socialist" (p. 162).
But Mill did not regard protecting people from both as a dilemma;
on the
contrary, he thought that the task could be achieved though the
principles he
advanced in On Liberty (1859). These he never abandoned; his
cooperative brand
of socialism most certainty did not mean that Mill thought big
government
necessary to cope with social tyranny. Frum, in his bizarre
comparison of Pat
Buchanan with Charles Maurras, introduces the latter as a
"nineteenth-century
authoritarian" (p. 151). Maurras was principally a
twentieth- century
figure; but I suppose it would be too much to expect precision in
a book of this
sort.
by Michael Lind
Dissent, Winter, 1995, pp. 42-47
Michael Lind maintains that intellectual conservatism
collapsed over the
past decade. Before the collapse, the two main varieties of
mainstream
conservatism "from the founding of National Review in 1955
to the
disastrous Houston Convention of 1992 were Buckley style
fusionism" and
neoconservatism, the former mainly Catholic and the latter Jewish
(p. 43).
William Buckley and his allies "effectively wiped out the
major rival for
the leadership of conservative white Protestant Americans"
through a
campaign against the John Birch Society (p. 43).
Alas, Protestant fundamentalists did not accept tutelage from
those whom
Lind deems their intellectual betters. With the onset of the
Christian
Coalition in 1988, the "institutions and the leaders of the
older Catholic
and Jewish conservatives suddenly became superfluous" (p.
43). In
response, the intellectual right surrendered. They have sold out
to the
fundamentalists, abandoning the path of reason. Instead they act
as "image
consultants for Protestants fundamentalists" (p. 44).
Standards have been
abandoned, as intellectuals much as William Bennett and William
Kristol become "middlemen
between the uncouth fire-and-brimstone Protestant evangelicals
and the world of
serious journalism, policy, and scholarship" (p. 44).
Lind's analysis contains much of value, but the biased terms
in which he
encases it need to be pared away. Lind is clearly on target when
he notes that
the National Review crowd and neoconservatives no longer
dominates the right.
But why is this a mark of intellectual decline? Lind obviously
holds certain
views in contempt; only a "pointy-hand" would dare to
criticize
Darwin, for instance. But the intellectual stature of a group
ought not to be
rated by whether its opinions meet with Lind's approval. The
academic
credentials of the paleos at Chronicles, e.g. Tom Fleming, Sam
Francis, and Paul
Gottfried, easily outweigh those of Buckley and the Kristols.
Nor is the right
wing movement confined to Protestant fundamentalists - I do not
think either Pat
Buchanan or Murray Rothbard could be so described. And Pat
Robertson hardly
seems the central figure Lind make him out to be.
If one ignores Lind's value loaded descriptions, a striking
point emerges.
He has correctly seen that most American conservatives are fed
up with the
leadership that has been foisted on them. "The complaint of
`paleo-conservatives' that their movement was being taken over by
opportunistic
(and in many cases weird) foreigners was not completely without
foundation"
(p. 47) Lind also notes another vital point. " One by one,
every leading
conservative publication or think tank over the past decades has
come to depend
on money from a few foundations - Olin, Smith- Richardson,
Bradley, Scaife"
(p. 46). Lind errs in thinking that these foundations have
promoted a movement
toward the so-called far right, but the judgment of someone who
thinks that the
natural home of conservatism after 1955 was the Democratic Party
is hardly to be
trusted.
by Patrick Allitt
Cornell University Press, 1993, xiii +
315 pgs
Patrick Allitt's excellent book may be approached at two
levels. On the
one hand, Allitt has produced a old-fashioned narrative history,
and his book is
none the worse for that. He offers a detailed account of most of
the leading
American Catholic conservatives of the past forty years, and his
extensive
research has uncovered much valuable material about them. One
the other hand,
he has a thesis to advance.
I propose to concentrate on the former of these levels,
"where the
bodies are buried," if you will I do so not because his
central argument is
false or uninteresting - quite the contrary. Allitt's thesis is
that during the
1950s American Catholic conservatives generally held a cohesive
position, based
on natural law. In politics, Catholic rightists favored a
strongly anti
Communist foreign policy and defended capitalism, although not in
the pure form
professed by libertarians. This group succeeded during the 1950s
and early
1960s in securing for themselves a distinct place in American
politics.
But then disaster struck. The Second Vatican Council, with
its attendant
upheavals, fragmented American Catholicism. Accordingly, in the
1960s and 1970s
the united front among Catholic conservative broke apart.
Allitt's contention
strikes me as well argued and important, but at one point he
seems to me
mistaken. He criticizes natural law ethics on the ground that
"natural law
principles can in fact be made to yield multiple solutions to
each problem,
depending on which of the many available principles is granted
salience for the
particular issue under scrutiny" (p.8). But all this says
is that there
are competing arguments. This is a situation true in innumerable
areas,
historical interpretation not least among them. Allitt probably
would not wish
to ague that because others differ with his views of Catholic
intellectuals, all
he says is thrown into doubt. Likewise various natural law
"solutions"
do not invalidate natural law. Allitt might reply that not only
do
interpretations of natural law differ; there is no means of
rationally deciding
among them. But to show that requires much more argument then
Allitt attempts.
But Allitt's brief surrender to relativism is at worst a minor
blemish that
does not much affect his discussion, which offers illuminating
accounts of
central figures. No doubt the most famous Catholic conservative
during Allitt's
period was William F. Buckley Jr.; but after reading Allitt, one
can only marvel
at how little of substance underlay his reputation. The two main
planks of
Buckley's political outlook, anti-Communism and pro-capitalism,
were well in
place on the Catholic right long before Buckley arrived on the
scene. Allitt
places particular emphasis on the historian Ross J. S. Hoffman
and the political
scientist Francis Graham Wilson, both converts to Catholicism,
who in the 1940s
and 1950s articulated the vision that Buckley later propagandized
"Ross
Hoffman had by 1950 expressed many of the convictions that were
to guide the
Catholic new conservatives in the coming decades." (p. 57)
Hoffman and
Wilson maintained that behind Communism lay a spirit of
revolutionary
utopianism, sharply at variance with the Christian doctrine of
original sin.
Politics guided by prudence, in the spirit of Edmund Burke, was
the order of the
day, and an economy based on private property an indispensable
adjunct in the
struggle. (I think, however, that Allitt overstates Wilson's
commitment to
capitalism in The Case for Conservatism [pp 58-59].)
If Buckley contributed nothing of intellectual substance to
Catholic
conservatism, he effectively popularized its principal tenets.
In his defense
of the Right, Buckley sometimes adopted positions with which he
would today
hardly be associated. He published several article in National
Review that
defended segregation, and in 1959, "Buckley himself opined
that the
disfranchisement of blacks in the South could be justified on
grounds of their
lack of education and civilization." (p. 114)
Allitt's discussion of Buckley helps clear up a mystery. In
Buckley's
venomous obituary notice of Murray Rothbard, many readers will
have found
puzzling Buckley's stress on Khrushchev's visit to the United
States in 1959.
Why did Buckley dredge up this minor event of thirty-five years
ago? As Allitt
makes clear, the struggle against Khrushchev's visit had the
status of a crusade
for Buckley and his National Review associates: to them Western
Civilization was
at stake (pp. 67-70). That Buckley became at the time
overwrought is perhaps
understandable; what is harder to fathom is that this
"venture in
triviality" remains for him a major incident in his life so
many years
later. Allitt also points out that Buckley's opposition to
Rothbard was of
longstanding: Buckley never supported laissez-faire capitalism
in Rothbard's
resolute fashion.
Allitt devotes much of his book to writers who, if less well
known than
Buckley, have much more intrinsic significance. Among these is
Buckley's
brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell. Bozell felt himself to be in
Buckley's shadow
during his years as a National Review editor (p. 142), but he was
in fact the
more substantial figure. His The Warren Revolution holds up
after nearly thirty
years as a major, though neglected, contribution to
constitutional scholarship.
Here Allitt goes astray, for one of the few times in the book.
He presents
Bozell's book as if it were simply a protest against the
usurpations of the
Warren Court. Quite the contrary, much of the book is a full
scale historical
investigation of judicial review, with radically revisionist
findings.
(Unfortunately, he published only one volume of what was intended
as a longer
study). Allitt gives a valuable account of Bozell's founding of
Triumph, his
split with Buckley and his journal's collapse.
Allitt has astutely seen that Frederick Wilhelmsen, Bozell's
collaborator at
Triumph, had "a brilliantly acute intellect and [an]
internally consistent
vision" (p. 145). Wilhelmsen, like Bozell, reflected the
breakup in the
solid front of 1950s Catholicism. Unlike Buckley, who moved ever
closer to the
American Establishment, Wilhelmsen doubted the ultimate stability
of the secular
American state. Instead, he looked to Spain, becoming a
supporter of the
Carlists, a dissident monarchist group. Allitt rightly
emphasizes the
importance for Wilhelmsen of his work in philosophy; but when he
says that
Wilhelmsen denied "the legitimacy of the idea of objective
knowledge"
(p. 147), he conveys a misleading impression. Wilhelmsen did
indeed deny that
we can have knowledge without personal involvement; and Allitt,
taken strictly,
says no more than this. But I fear that his wording may convey
to the unwary
reader the suggestion that Wilhelmsen doubted that human beings
can obtain
knowledge of the world as it really is. This is the very reverse
of the truth:
Wilhelmsen ardently defended realism and wrote a laudatory
preface to the
English translation of Wilson's classic attack on idealist
epistemology.
Allitt's sure touch for those outside the mainstream emerges
clearly in his
chapter on those two remarkable Hungarians, John Lukacs and
Thomas Molnar.
Molnar especially seems to me a writer of great intellectual
power. He found
most American intellectuals far inferior to their European
counterparts. But
the latter also were not all they should be; and in The Decline
of the
Intellectual (1961), he traced the decadence of the Western mind
to the
overthrow of the scholastic synthesis by the nominalists. As
Allitt point out,
Richard Weaver took the same line [in Ideas Have Consequences,
1945] [p. 226, n.
84]). Molnar rejected received political wisdom in similarly
radical fashion;
he admired European counter-revolutionaries such as Franco and
Salazar and
spurned the American political system. Allitt might have pointed
out, however,
that Decline of the Intellectual includes a highly critical
chapter on
reactionary intellectuals. Allitt I suspect finds the historian
John Lukacs
more congenial; he presents a brilliant description of Lukacs's
historical
writing (pp. 211 ff.).
Although neither Garry Wills nor Michael Novak compare in
intellectual power
with Wilhelmsen, Lukacs, and Molnar, the former duo have received
much more
public attention; and in a very useful chapter, Allitt compares
and contrasts
them. Most commentators on Wills see him as breaking sharply
with his one-time
conservatism. The former critic of Martin Luther King became the
defender not
only of King but of the Berrigan brothers as well. But Allitt,
with the insight
of a good intellectual historian, see continuity between early
and late Wills.
In all phases of his intellectual career, Wills has opposed
individualism. In
Nixon Agonistes, for example, "Wills's main target was the
idea of
`markets', central to liberalism since the days of Adam Smith and
Jeremy Bentham"
. (p. 267) Wills instead advocated a "convenient
state" whose
governing virtue was not justice but prudence. I think that
Allitt, clearly an
admirer of Wills, overrates the plausibility of his position.
Does Wills's
convenient state really comport well with the "prophetic
figures,"
such as King and Arthur Waskow, whom he admires? (p. 281.) And
Allitt's praise
for the "vast analytical range and power" of Inventing
America seems
hard to maintain in the face of Ronald Hamowy's devastating
assessment in the
William and Mary Quarterly.
Although Michael Novak has also made a big splash, he comes
off in Allitt's
portrayal as very much inferior to Wills. After abandoning his
study for the
priesthood, he enrolled in the Harvard Philosophy Department.
Unfortunately,
he twice failed his Ph.D. general exams, a fact that did not
prevent his
securing prestigious teaching positions at Stanford and elsewhere
(p. 255).
Novak's prolific output, in both theology and politics, was often
marred by
wildly overstated and implausible claims. In his early
theological works, "he
criticized traditional Catholic exclusivist claims with the
abrupt assertion
that in the `secular city' of the 1960s the differences between
the believer and
the unbeliever, let alone Protestant and Catholic, were
negligible." (p.
256) In his 1978 Guns of Lattimer, Novak argued that a
"sacrament of blood"
had been necessary to produce reconciliation between immigrant
Pennsylvania coal
miners and their WASP neighbors. Novak now champions
"democratic
capitalism", a peculiar amalgam that he has endeavored
unsuccessfully to
explain in numerous books. Though Allitt never criticizes Novak
directly, he
brings out the slapdash quality of Novak's thought to devastating
effect. I do
think, though, that he should have given Novak credit for an
interesting early
piece on substance in Aristotle.
I wish that Allitt had said more about Erik von Kuehnelt-
Leddihn, Willmoore
Kendall and Joe Sobran; but on the whole he has written a
comprehensive,
balanced, and satisfying book.
Edited by Peter J. Boettke and David L. Prychitko
Edward
Elgar, 1994.
XV + 304 pgs.
Tertullian famously asked, what has other to do with
Jerusalem?" After
reading The Market Process one can but inquire, "What has
had philosophy to
do with Austrain economics? As Don Lavoie makes clear in his
informative
preface the scholars at the Market Process Center" (p. x) of
George Mason
University came to view themselves as the architects of a radical
new research
program within Austrain economics. One of the two main
theoretical innovations
of the group during the 1980s directly involves philosophy.
"A group of
graduate students and professors began studying hermeneutics,
especially the
work of the German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and became
very excited
about the implication of this approach for market process
economics." (p.
x) (The other innovation, a type of computer programming, is not
discussed in
the book) So agog with excitement were our innovators that they
have
transcended economics altogether and have now formed a new
department, the
Program on Social and Organizational Learning, in which they can
pursue "their
radically new way of thinking about society and
organizations" (p. xi).
To inform a waiting would of the results of their inquiries,
the Center
began to issue the journal Market Process in 1983; and the
present volume
collects a number of significant articles from that, periodical.
So successful
and well-received was Market Process that the Center suspended
publication of it
in 1990. "The Market Process stopped publishing Market
Process just when
it was arguably at its peak. The decision was made that it was
time to turn
publication efforts out into the many new scholarly communities
which market
process scholars had located, both written and outside the
economics profession"
(p. xii).
Those wishing a bird's-eye of the revolution can do no better
than to begin
with "A Political Philosophy for the Market Process,"
by the
presiding genius of the school. In it, Professor Lavoie informs
us that
classical liberalism has hitherto been defended in an improper
way. "The
older form of classical liberation relied on a natural-rights
approached based
on metaphysical arguments concerning such things as the 'essence'
of man. This
portion which essentially takes the rule of law to be imposed by
God from
outside of human society leaves no room for democracy for the
participation by
the members of society in the setting and revising of rules. It
thus belongs
naturally to conservatism. The later utilitarian version had its
own
difficulties, not lead of which was the questionableness of its
claim to be a
value-free way of declining with value-leader policy issues.
Utilitarianism
takes thus sets no limits to democracy. It belongs naturally to
socialism (p.
276)."
I have quoted this passage at some length, as it demonstrates
Professor
Lavoie's utter incompetence in political philosophy. If an
natural law position
derives rules from the essence of man, how can it a the same time
view these
laws as imposed by God? Does Lavoie know the difference between
a natural law
and a divine command theory of ethics? Why does a natural law
position require
that people play no role in making rules? What if one of the
natural laws just
is that people do have such a role? And if there are natural
laws immune from
democratic revision, what is the matter with that? Rarely have I
had to defend
utilitarianism, but Lavoie forces me to it. Utilitarianism is
not a value-free
way of dealing with policy - it is of course a theory of ethics
whose adherents
presumably stand committed to the values it promotes.
Utilitarians need not
favor democracy, let alone unrestricted democracy; the political
system a
utilitarian supports will depend upon his appraisal of what best
promotes
happiness. I wonder what Mises and Hazlitt, both utilitarians,
would make of
Lavoie's claim that their ethical position belongs to socialism.
He has found in the work of Gary Madison, a student of Paul
Ricoeur, the way
to a proper market-process. Defense of classical liberation as
Madison
realizes, humans have no access to absolute truth - instead,
truth is agreement.
"[I]t is the discussion process among subjective minds
itself which
constitutes the standard, no some absolute, final target of
objective truth
toward which this process is supposed to be tending." (p.
279)
One might at first fear that this leads to nihilism: does it
not count as
true whatever people whose to think true? But Lavoie, well aware
of the
difficulty, is quick to offer a remedy. "Truth isn't
`nothing but
agreement' because agreement isn't really `nothing but
agreement.' Agreement in
this sense refers not just to whatever people actually agree to,
but what the
can come to a reasonable agreement together about." (p. 279)
And if you
find that clears matters up, you qualify for a position in the
Program on Social
and Organizational Learning.
Unfortunately, amateurist philosophy beguiles not only the
presiding genius
but some of his acolytes as well. David Prychitko finds the root
of socialist
evil in Rene Descartes. "Descartes Rene to attain pure
reason." (p.
264) Accordingly, he rejected custom and tradition (did he?);
all institutions
must be constructed afresh, according to national principals.
And this is
exactly what socialists believe about the economy. They wish to
subject the
economy to a comprehensive plan, and here lies their undoing.
The knowledge
required to run a modern economy is dispersed coming
entrepreneurs and much of
it in "tacit," incapable of being encapsulated into
exact rules.
Simply by attending to philosophical fundamental, we have
obtained a quick
refutation of socialism. Away with much Cartesian nonsense!
Unfortunately, this will not do at all. A socialist will
reply that he also
proposes to use the tacit knowledge of economic actors - why need
he advance his
plan as specifying all knowledge? To refute him, a detailed
economic argument
is required, along the lines laid don classically by Mises. It
seems to me "fundamental
misapprehension that one can simply mouth a philosophical slogan,
such as "tacit
knowledge" or "spontaneous order" and expect it to
do the work of
rigorous argument.
The eminent economic historian Donald McCloskey also appears
guilty of
philosophizing by slogan. On his "Splenetic
Rationalism," is anxious
to counter Hans Hoppe's claim that he is a relativist who denies
differences
between truth with a small "t" and truth with a capital
"T."
"Small `t' truth is what we use every day to get across the
street or to
detect another a subatomic particle. By contrast Big-T truth is
a philosopher's
construct, justified true belief. . . .well, there is such a
thing as objective
truth, the agreement we all make for purposes of navigating the
world and
society. . . .The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any
way of knowing
whether we have hold of Objective Truth, capital-O, capital T.
It's presence or
absence would seem to be knowable only to God." (p. 192)
Here we have it. Truth with a capital-T is justified true
belief; thus, the
upshot of McCloskey's; perfervid defense of rhetoric is that we
have no
justified true beliefs, since it is precisely truth with a
capital-T to which he
denies no access. Or is his position that even if we do have
justified true
belief, we cannot know that we do? Why not? And in his thinking
to that effect
itself meant as a justified true belief? If so, by his own
contention, he
cannot know it. Or is an instance of small-t truth? If so, who
agrees with it?
Hoppe clearly does not.
To press McCloskey with elementary worries of this sort in
futile. He has
seized upon a phrase that attracts him and has neglected to
explicate what he
means by it. I doubt that he knows himself - his
"definition" of
capital-T truth is in fact no a phone phrase about truth but
rather the classic
criterion of knowledge, now abandoned by most contemporary
philosophers.
McCloskey has something in mind as an object of attack by
declines to specify
what he means. Instead, he waits for writes such as Hoppe to
guess his thesis
and then reproves then for missing the point.
It is not enough for our market process crew to concoct a
slapshot theory of
knowledge. To attract Austrians to their program, they suggest
an unimpeachable
Austrian pedigree for their ideas. According to Professors
Boettke, Horwitz,
and Prychitko Misses himself stands among their precursors in
epistemology!
True, they acknowledge, he often sounded distressingly Euclidean,
but at times
he saw the light.
Mises, they aver, "defends praxeology on pragmatic
grounds"; they
proceed to cite a passage from Human Action that appears
to do just
that. But, taken in context, the passage does not signify
Mises's adoption of a
pragmatic stance; rather, he argues, "the champions of
mechanicalism"
defend science on pragmatic grounds. And it on these same
grounds that "the
emptiness of the panphysicalist dogma becomes manifest."
(Mises, Human
Action, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 23-24)
Mises is thus
arguing that his opponents premise refute itself, not stating his
own position.
The problems of The Market Process are by no means
confined to
articles that address methodology. A particularly unfortunate
piece is Steven
Horwitz's "Misreading the `Myth' : Rothbard on the Theory
and History of
Free Banking." As he notes, Rothbard challenged Larry
White's claim "that
Scottish banking from 1721 to 1845 was a successful example of an
actual free
banking system." (p. 166) But Horwitz proceeds to impute to
Rothbard an
incredible syllogism the purport of which is that if Scotland was
"not much
of a free banking system," then free banking theory is
invalidated (p.
127).
Horwitz asks why the failure of one example refutes the theory
and accuses
Rothbard of ignoring the distinction between theory and history.
But of course
Rothbard nowhere adopts the reasoning Horwitz finds
"implicit" in his
review of White. Rather, he confines himself to an evaluation of
White's
historical claims.
One further example of questionable argument will have to
suffice. In "Beyond
Equilibrium Economics," Boettke, Horwitz, and Prychitko
suggest that
equilibrium consists simply of the repeated declaration that the
concept is a "mechanical
metaphor" (p. 65). Rather than rigorous argument, they offer
slogans. I
suppose then that one must at least give them credit for a
consistent approval
to both philosophy and economics.
Not all the articles in this book are bad. Quite the
contrary, several
raise issues eminently worth pursuing. But the meritorious
pieces (which I
shall not single out for mention) are in bad company. Boettke,
Horwitz, and
Prychitko state about the market process group, "No one is
denying
objective reality or truth." (p. 71, n. 1). As the Duke of
Wellington once
said, if you can believe that, you can believe anything.
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