State power does not diminish

OUR ENEMY, THE STATE by Albert Jay Nock. Discussing literary provocateur Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens once wrote, it is essential “to know how conservative as well as how radical he can be.” A leading critic of America's military-industrial-complex, Vidal is a self-described “patriot of the Old Republic,” a phrase which must discomfort some of the progressives in his audience. Nonetheless, Vidal’s salvos against Bush II, neo-conservatism, and the Iraq war are widely read on the left and his subtly titled Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated are both international bestsellers. Vidal is best known, however, for his historical novels exploring the figures and events that gave these States their imperial flavor: Hamilton and the Federalists' centralization of power, Lincoln's war to preserve the Union, Roosevelt I and his “white man's burden,” etc.

There is something particularly American about such deeply intertwined radicalism and conservatism. Jefferson personified it; Mark Twain possessed it in spades. Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), the Old Right journalist, critic, and author who is at once the heir to both the republicanism of Jefferson and the individualist anarchism of Lysander Spooner, fits the bill perfectly as well.

Published in 1935 in the midst of New Deal collectivism, Our Enemy, The State is Nock's brilliant attempt to get at the true nature of statism. He distinguishes between “Government,” which is the legitimate protector of individual rights (“beyond this it does not go”), and “State,” which originates in conquest and confiscation and, “by way of innumerable and most onerous positive interventions,” legally advantages some at the expense of others.

State power does not diminish, Nock observes, and every enhancement of State power necessarily comes at the expense of social power. Furthermore, as Nock quotes from James Madison, the State incessantly utilizes “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government.” Consider the Orwellian language and scandalous passage of the USA PATRIOT Act for a recent example.

Some readers will no doubt be surprised at Nock's extensive reliance on Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, a much-debated book arguing that the naked economic interests of the Framers produced the Constitution. This brings us back to the Vidal principium: that deep mix of radicalism and conservatism that blurs tidy political labels. I leave Beard's conclusions, which have been substantially challenged and undermined, particularly by Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, for another time.

The State, Nock writes, “is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the name of things, is best adapted to such service.” We would have far better breeds of both radicalism and conservatism if more young radicals and conservatives kept this fundamental insight in mind.

Happy Birthday Isabel Paterson

Isabel Paterson, one of the “three furies of libertarianism,” was born on this day in 1886 on a small island in the middle of Lake Huron, Canada.

In 1943, Isabel Paterson, Ayn Rand, and Rose Wilder Lane published three founding texts of modern libertarianism: Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rand's novel The Fountainhead, and Lane's The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (Lane was the daughter of, and possibly ghostwriter for, Little House on the Prairie scribe Laura Ingalls Wilder.). Rand, who, as Brian Doherty memorably put it in the pages of Reason, was “not usually one to acknowledge intellectual debts to anyone but Aristotle,” praised The God of the Machine in the highest possible terms, consistently recommending it to her many admirers. Even after their friendship ended in bitterness in the late 1940s (a common event for both of these spirited women), Rand continued to champion Paterson's work.

A critic, bestselling novelist, and historian, Isabel Paterson was a true original. In the words of Stephen Cox, author of the splendid new biography, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America, Paterson maintained “a belief in absolute individual rights and minimal (not just limited) government; advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism and an individualist and 'subjective' approach to economic theory; and opposition to social planning, victimless crime legislation, and any form of 'class' or 'status' society.” Paterson, Cox argues, is the earliest proponent of libertarianism as we currently know it. She died on January 10, 1960; her ideas live on.

The Conservative Mind

“In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion and arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules. Since he is essentially opportunist and lacks principles, his main hope must be that the wise and good will rule—not merely by example, as we all must wish, but by authority given to them and enforced by them. Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the values he holds on other people.”—F.A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” epilogue to The Constitution of Liberty

“'Well…, I'm just so proud of the way he handled 9/11—I mean, that was…amazing!' Dot Richardson-Pinto told me as we sat together near the podium. When I'd asked why she supported the President, she had had to search a moment for an answer, and not entirely because she couldn't understand how it could be that anyone wouldn't. She'd had to think for a moment, I came to realize, because her ardor had so much more to do with who he was than with what he did. And who he was could be summarized by those four giant words looming over the stage [strength, leadership, character, integrity].”—Mark Danner, “How Bush Really Won,” The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2005

Notes on Marx, Hayek, and globalization

MARX'S REVENGE: THE RESURGENCE OF CAPITALISM AND THE DEATH OF STATIST SOCIALISM by Meghnad Desai. “In the triumphant resurgence of capitalism-and, indeed, its global reach—the one thinker who is vindicated is Karl Marx. Not only that. The demise of the socialist experiment inaugurated by October 1917 would not distress but cheer Karl Marx if, as an atheist, he occupies any part of Hell, Purgatory or Heaven. Indeed, if it came to a choice between whether the market or the state should rule the economy, modern libertarians would be as shocked as modern socialists (social democrats et al.) to find Marx on the side of the market.”

So writes Meghnad Desai in Marx's Revenge, one of the sharpest, most engaging books I've had the pleasure of reading in years. Desai, the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, offers a brilliant history of Marx and Marxism, detailing the much revered (and reviled) thinker's intellectual roots, his critics, revisionists, and disciples, and his decidedly positive view of the phenomenon we now call globalization.

In essence, Desai makes the case for “classical Marxism,” the nineteenth century variety that studied Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, championed free trade, and opposed tariffs and other economic controls. Capitalism, Marx argued, will not end until it has exhausted its progressive potential. Given the tremendous growth now occurring in India and China, the end appears far from imminent. “The continuing dynamism of capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century,” Desai writes, “is Marx's revenge on the Marxists—on all those who, in his name, lied and cheated and murdered, and offered false hope.”

For Desai, today's globalization is a revival of capitalism's late nineteenth century phase, which was increasingly global until it was brought to a screeching and bloody halt by the horrors of the Great War and the rise of “capitalism in one country” (USA) and “socialism in one country” (USSR). Desai traces these developments, offering an economic history of the past one hundred and fifty years. Early chapters provide concise, illuminating overviews of Smith and Hegel, while in later pages Desai draws vivid intellectual portraits of some of capitalism's keenest students, including Rosa Luxemburg, V.I. Lenin, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, and John Maynard Keynes.

Notably, Desai shows real interest in the ideas of F.A. Hayek, particularly Hayek's emphasis on spontaneous order, unintended consequences, the signaling function of prices, and the division of knowledge. In an earlier essay, in fact, Desai skillfully distinguishes between neo-liberalism, which he considers a right-wing variant of twentieth-century central planning, and libertarianism, which he describes as “organicist,” or holding the nineteenth century idea of the economy as a self-organizing system: the result of human action not human design.

Thus, we find many of today's conservatives (neo-liberals) advocating control of the money supply (via a central bank, one of the hallmarks of the command economy), protectionism for “vital” industries (consider Bush's tariffs on steel and shrimp), and massive subsidies for corporations and agribusinesses. Libertarians, on the other hand, advocate universal free trade precisely because it is so progressive, undermining the privileges, hierarchies, and traditions beloved by both the left and right—a process Schumpeter likened to a “gale of creative destruction.”

Or, as Hayek writes in “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” the epilogue to his book The Constitution of Liberty: “So far as much of current governmental action is concerned, there is in the present world very little reason for the liberal [Hayek's preferred term for libertarian] to wish to preserve things as they are. It would seem to the liberal, indeed, that what is most urgently needed in most parts of the world is a thorough sweeping away of the obstacles to free growth.”

As Desai shows, Marx would have agreed with Hayek on this point and a few others besides.

"I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive"

Hank Williams, the legendary honky-tonk singer and songwriter, died on this day in 1953 in the backseat of a Cadillac, en route to a performance in Canton, Ohio. Born in Mount Olive, Alabama on September 17, 1923, Williams shaped the American musical landscape with his haunting, high lonesome voice and vivid lyrical depictions of love, loss, sin, and salvation. The author of numerous hit songs, including classics such as “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Move It On Over,” and “Cold, Cold Heart,” Hank influenced singers as different as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, and Mike Ness. No history of American popular culture should be considered complete unless it recognizes his importance as both a performer and a songwriter.

For a lengthier discussion of these tangled and forgotten roots of country music, particularly the fascinating connections between Hank Williams and the blackface minstrel singer Emmett Miller, you can read my review essay “Hidden Country” in the October 2002 issue of Reason.