[This
is Chapter Ten of Murphey’s book Understanding the
Modern Predicament.]
We have heard a lot about “alienation” during recent years. Since the term is used wherever there is dissatisfaction or hostility, it is not without ambiguity. "Alienation" is sometimes used, with or without Marxian overtones, to mean a man's dissatisfaction with his work. Not long ago I was on a television panel with two other professors discussing "The Roots of Dissent.” Both spoke at length about the hostility an employee may feel toward his job and, in a broader context, about the frustration a person may feel when he is unable readily to influence the activities of a large organization. These uses are valid enough, but they are different than I will be using in this book.
The term is also sometimes applied to a separation
between a person and his potential -- as that potential is perceived by the
speaker. Several years ago I heard a lecture in which the theme was that “we are
born into a world of alienation from ourselves." "Humanity," the
lecturer said, “is estranged from its potential."l He did not make his intellectual sources explicit, but
there were clear reverberations from Rousseau, Veblen, Freud, Marcuse, and
Maslow, each a thinker who has seen a wide gap between contemporary man and
what he could be if he were to "self-actualize” his "basic human
nature.”
At
other times, "alienation may refer to a specific conflict, such as the
“alienation between the sexes" or between “parent and child."
The different uses of the term were brought home to me a
few years ago by a conversation I had with Professor Stephen Tonsor of the
In this chapter,0 I will discuss the alienation of the
modern intellectual from the great middle class -- the "bourgeoisie.” This
type of alienation has been of particular importance during the past two and a
half centuries, if we date it from Rousseau. There has been an enormous tension
between the intellectual subculture and the predominant type of man within the
larger culture. This tension must be understood if we are to grasp the
competing value systems and “systems of interpretation” within our society.
There is, of course, some embarrassment when we are asked
to define the word "intellectual," even though this term is central
to "the alienation of the intellectual." Nor is there absolute
clarity in speaking of the "bourgeoisie."
We will have to bear with these embarrassments and avoid
any attempt at precise definition. The historic phenomenon with which I will be
concerned is palpable enough that we need not delineate it closely at the
edges. I will often refer to the "intellectual" in a sympathetic
sense as the "thoughtful and sensitive" man, the man of "tender
conscience" in Emerson's phrase, whose life involves an emphasis on
contemplation and theory and a sincere concern for ideas. This is the man of
books and words, often the academic man, who is removed from active life within
the cloister of a protected, cerebral existence. And I will use the term in a
broad sense to include a variety of men and not just the giants of thought (who
in their independence are probably less involved in the mass alienation than
are lesser intellectuals). In doing so, I will be departing from Aquinas'
usage.
It is also worth noting that when I will speak of the
"alienation of the intellectual" I will be making a generalization
that has many exceptions. By no means have all modern intellectuals shared the
alienation. Many have devoted their lives to opposing it, although for many
years these have been in the minority. And there are many outside the
mainstream of articulated social thought who would not want to be numbered
among the alienates: intellectuals, for example, in business, the professions,
or in colleges of business, engineering, etc. These may even compose the
majority numerically on a campus, although in terms of articulated social
commentary they are a very silent minority.
Still further, there is a problem from the snobbery
inherent in the word "intellectual." It isn't just the bookish man
who thinks. Intelligent businessmen sometimes take offense at the entire
concept of an "alienated intellectuality," since they are not willing
to admit that the alienated group has a corner on intellectuality. Ayn Rand has
championed this viewpoint by stressing the extent to which the acting man
brings intelligence to bear on reality.
I agree with this criticism, but in another sense I demur
from it. We need some term to reflect the difference between someone who
devotes himself to ideas and sensibilities and others who do not. Each deserves
credit, but they are not the same. If we can use "intellectual"
without belittling others, it seems the appropriate term to connote sustained
effort in abstract ideas.
Even after these qualifications, we come to yet another
difficulty. When intellectuality goes beyond individual effort and becomes a
group phenomenon, the "intelligentsia" becomes a subculture. But many
who assume the lifestyle and accoutrements of that subculture are in no real
sense "intellectuals" in the more favorable meaning of that term.
Some are mere camp followers. Not everyone in Greenwich Village has been an
intellectual in the fullest sense, but even those who are not are still part of
the subculture. The same is true of the "counter-culture" of the
1960s. It isn't too much to say
that even in universities not all faculty members are "intellectuals"
in the fullest sense. Or if we must say they are, we see how much alloy the
word is permitted.
As to the concept of the "bourgeoisie," I have
already mentioned the difficulty that comes from the fact that the intellectual
actually seems to have been alienated from the entire spectrum of contemporary
men. Even where he bas allied with the have-nots, he intends their ultimate
reformation. The word bourgeoisie is too narrow to denote the true object of
the alienation. If it serves at all, it must be to mean everyone who stands
within the predominant culture. It will not do, at least in this century, to
narrow the meaning to a smaller group with specific characteristics. Even the
substitute term "middle class" isn't fully adequate, since the
alienation also runs against any so-called "upper class" and reaches
in the other direction to include, say, the blue collar worker. The alienation
has been so extensive that it is an alienation against modern Western
civilization itself. But we will be justified in speaking of the alienation as
being against the middle class or bourgeoisie -- both to remain consistent with
the usual way in which it is expressed and because the "middle class"
is so broad today as virtually to cover our entire society anyway. The ideology
expressing the alienation has cast itself in anti-capitalist terms, stressing
its conflict especially with the bourgeoisie.
In the beginning chapters, I mentioned that a thoughtful
and sensitive person might feel very acutely the insanities of his own time. It
may be that alienation is almost an inseparable companion to sensibility.
Sensitive men
have felt unhappiness with the
men around them many times over the centuries.
There could hardly have been a more bitter commentary on
human beings that Jonathan Swift's story of Gulliver's visit to the country of
the Houyhnmnms.2 This
was the most biting of his satires. He told the story of Gulliver's landing on
an island and then meeting a horse (a "Houyhnmnm") who turned out to
be quite intelligent and civilized. For his part, the horse was amazed that
Gulliver (a "Yahoo") was civilized. Gulliver was taken into the
Houyhnmnm's family as a pet, where Gulliver soon observed the barbarity of the
other nearby Yahoos. These were described prophetically by Swift almost as
though he had been in the twentieth century to see some of the more extreme
examples of the old German Youth Movement or the American hippie movement.
Eventually the Houyhnmnm parliament became concerned about a family's having a
Yahoo as a pet, and ordered Gulliver sent back to England. Amusingly but
bitterly, Swift had Gulliver comment at the end that although he had been back
in England for five years he still found it distasteful even to touch the hand
of his wife.
If Swift meant to say anything seriously by this story,
it was to comment on the insanities around him. We would have to classify him,
without derogatory implication, as an alienated intellectual. The same would be
true of Moliere and Stendhal, who at different times commented on the corrosive
hypocrisy of French society. We can even go back almost two thousand years to
the Roman historian Tacitus, who in the age of the Antonines complained
passionately about the "utter poverty of thought" around him.3 The theme of my preceding chapter is reflected in his lament
that "a liking for actors and a passion for gladiators and horses, are all
but conceived in the mother's womb. When these occupy and possess the mind, how
little room has it left for worthy attainments! Few indeed are to be found who
talk of any other subjects in their homes, and whenever we enter a classroom,
what else is the conversation of the youths." A great deal of ancient
philosophy attempted to deal with the individual's relationship with an
unsatisfactory world.
The alienation has been intense in modern European
thought. This lends further support to the observation that the sensitive man
may be alienated in almost any context. The European alienation is also
something which we need to appreciate as background for my discussion of
American intellectual history in the final part of this chapter. I will be
tracing the alienation as it has occurred in American history, but the feeling
in America has related closely to the alienation in Europe.
In later books, I will discuss Burkean conservatism and
the Left. At that time we will see aspects of their thought that will give us a
structured insight into much of the alienation in modern Europe. For the
present, we need to realize that many intellectuals continued to support the
value system of the Middle Ages even after Europe had emerged from that system.
Such men have raised serious objections to commercial culture, industrialism,
secularism, rationalism, individualism and the rise of the multitudes. As with
all other broad viewpoints, this position has had a variety of attitudes within
it; but the aristocratic and faith-oriented critique was necessarily hostile to
the culture of the New Philistines. This has been one of the main sources of
European alienation, especially among the monarchical thinkers on the
continent. This will stand out as we review various of the nineteenth century
German authors. It is also apparent in Burkean conservatism, even though the
English Burkean has usually been much more mild.
The alienation within the Left in Europe has overlapped
with aristocratic thought. Modern socialism has important origins in the
alienation of the aristocrat against commercial culture. This apart, the Left
can virtually be defined as a hostile critique based on an alliance of the
intellectual with the have-nots. This alliance has put the Left in the position
of seldom being in the position to perceive sympathetically even the strengths
of modern society. For example, in Herbert Marcuse's writing the strengths and
beneficent aspects of bourgeois society are interpreted as mere soporifics that
are designed manipulatively to cause people to overlook the shortcomings.4 Socialism, anarchism and fascism were all built around a
hostile critique of middle class, commercial culture.
In modern Europe. It would take quite an enormous
book to illustrate adequately the full range of alienation in modern European
thought. The reader will need to understand that my references here are the
barest sample.
Julien Benda's well-known book The Betrayal of the Intellectuals,
written early in our century [the twentieth century], is an example of both
alienation and opposition to alienation. Benda himself held to an aristocratic
critique of modern man, which means that he was alienated in his own way: he
was deeply hostile to secularism, to the multitudes and the bourgeoisie; and
his own values, although not directly spelled out in the book, were
medievalist. He could speak of "the common herd";5 and although he made perceptive criticisms of modern
thought, he laid the causes of the vicious tone of much contemporary thinking
at the feet precisely of the bourgeoisie and the multitudes. This is evident in
his observation that "these causes arise from certain phenomena which are
most profoundly and generally characteristic of the present age. The political
realism of the 'clerks' (the intellectuals), far from being a superficial fact
due to the caprice of an order of men, seems to me bound up with the very
essence of the modern world.” When I speak of him as alienated, I don't mean
that his criticisms don't have a lot to them. His criticisms have much in
common with the analysis I have made in the preceding chapters. But I would
have us note his alienation and that it is different from my own. It arose out
of a perspective that does not affirm the present age; I basically value
contemporary culture, while at the same time wanting us to heal its divisions
and fill its voids.
Benda's alienation is not, however, the main thing about
his book. It has much to say about the alienation and neuroses within modern
intellectuality. “For twenty centuries," he says, “the ‘clerks’ preached
to the world that the State should be just; now they proclaim that the State
should be strong and should care nothing about being just … This denunciation
of liberalism, notably by the vast majority of contemporary men of letters,
will be one of the things in this age most astonishing to History,
especially on the part of the French.” (Emphasis added) In the modern
intellectual “the soul of Greece has given place to the soul of Prussia among
the educators of mankind.” He noted "the cult of success," by which
“I mean the teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone
gives it a moral tone...This philosophy… is professed by many a modern teacher
in political life (it may be said, by all in Germany since Hegel, and by a
large number in France since de Maistre).” He spoke particularly of Nietzsche,
Barres, Peguy and Sorel.
Benda's account shows that there has been a welter of
confused voices. Instead of affirming liberal values, many have exalted
medievalism, anti-rationalism and aristocracy (in the next volume we will see
that there are among them many who, as supporters of Burkean conservatism, have
done so with high intelligence and gracious civility). Many have preached power
and the State within a context of “might-makes-right." Many have cried out
for nationalism or racialism or class warfare. And many have constructed a
socialist critique. In the midst of this welter, it has been difficult to find
voices who have affirmed our civilization and have sought sympathetically to
serve it. The main exceptions have been classical and neo-classical economics,
which have made up the largest part of classical liberalism.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
discussed important parts of this alienation. Picking up a phrase from
Schopenhauer, he referred to an “age of dishonesty."6 It was Hegel, he
said, who mainly originated the mentality “controlled by the magic of
high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon.” Hegel "became the first
official philosopher of Prussianism."
From Hegel came a left wing that “replaces the war of nations which
appears in Hegel's historicist scheme by a war of classes" and a right
wing that "replaces it by the war of the races.” Popper further
illustrated the point Benda made about an anti-liberal exaltation of power when
he quoted Hegel to the effect that "the State is the Divine Idea as it
exists on earth...We must therefore worship the State....” This led Hegel to
juridical positivism --"the doctrine that might is right.”
It is far too superficial to assign the tendencies of an
age to just one man, but in Hegel we can see an intellectual root for the
totalitarianisms that have so greatly embodied the intellectual and social
pathologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And, too, there are
important inputs into Nazism in Nietzsche's writing, despite many insights
scattered like gems within his writing. Nietzsche denounced liberalism as mere
"herd-animalization"7 and saw democracy as a "form of decline in organizing
power." He spoke of "the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of
by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats.” He
exalted the "will to power" and in The Antichrist he defined
as good "everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will
to power, power itself" and as bad "everything that is born of
weakness." He exposed the depth of his alienation when he wrote that
"there are days when I am afflicted with a feeling blacker than the
blackest melancholy -- contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning
what I despise: it is the man of today." (His emphasis) He was
passionately aristocratic, and affirmed "the order of castes, the order
of rank," which he said "merely formulates the highest law of
life.”
Nietzsche's work contains many valuable insights; the open-minded John Stuart Mill would almost certainly have acknowledged that Nietzsche knew his own corners of the truth. But there should be little trouble in recognizing the monstrous nihilism Nietzsche also represented. Although many authors downplay the notion, I see little reason to hesitate in confirming the connection between his thought and that which later moved Hitler.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler
echoed the anti-bourgeois alienation: "As a young scamp in my wild years,
nothing had so grieved me as having been born at a time which obviously erected
its Halls of Fame only to shopkeepers and government officials...This
development seemed not only to endure but was expected in time (as was
universally recommended) to remodel the whole world into one big department
store in whose vestibules the busts of the shrewdest profiteers and the most
lamblike administrative officials would be garnered for all eternity...Why
couldn't I have been born a hundred years earlier? Say at the time of the Wars
of Liberation when a man, even without a 'business,' was really worth
something?! Thus I had often indulged in angry thoughts concerning my earthly pilgrimage.”8
In Germany the "Storm and Stress" movement a
century earlier had been followed by the Romantic movement. Each was a reaction
against the Enlightenment. Reinhold Aris has written an illuminating history of
German thought from the beginning of the French Revolution to 1815, and it is
worth noting the direction the thinking was taking. Of the Romantics, he says that "all
these thinkers were anti-bourgeois"9 and he tells us that they were deeply opposed to modern
rationalism. He says that "no one clung to the ancient order of society so
uncompromisingly"as Justus Moser; "no one
turned against new ideas more resolutely than he." Despite the superlative
applied to Moser, he says about Herder that "there is no other thinker of
the period in whose works anti-rational tendencies found such strong expression
as in his." He traced Herder's rejection of the Enlightenment into the
thinking of Fichte, Schelling, F. Schlegel and Hegel, where it fertilized both
nationalism and historicism. Alienated against modern society, Herder was one
of the first to seek a rehabilitated view of the Middle Ages.
Aris next tells us of de Maistre, who "lost himself
in mystical speculation and in a passionate attempt to re-establish the
superiority of the highest medieval power in Europe, the Pope." He is
followed in Aris' account by Novalis, "the most important thinker amongst
the early Romantics," who was a "mystic impressionist" and who
joined in the flight from the Enlightenment. Novalis joined many others in
exalting the State.
This was a theme picked
up by Schlegel, and a certain refrain becomes monotonous in the history:
"Here again we meet that distrust of capitalism which is one of the
characteristics of Romantic thought." Schleiermacher in turn deprecated the bourgeois "desire
for personal happiness" and stressed that "to give oneself to the
community becomes an ethical duty." It is with foreboding that I read
Aris' comment that in Schleiermacher we see "the first traces of the
modern racial theory."
Aris' narrative is a good one, but the unavoidable
redundancy of its subject-matter is apparent as he goes on to Adam Muller, who
again was "carried away by an unbridled mysticism, in which the State
becomes the 'totality of life."' This constantly reiterated theme shows
that modern European thought experienced an explosion of philosophies hostile
to the main body of the civilization. The thinkers have often been mystical,
aristocratic, statist; and their writing has run like rivulets into later
thought that has continued the hostility. From a distance it is difficult to
tell the mystical and aristocratic views from much socialist thought, except
that the various socialist models, both Left and Right, have differed from a
purely aristocratic view by seeking mass support. All of them have been
profoundly alienated.
I hardly need to illustrate this with regard to the Left
in modern Europe. The depth of its alienation is so well known that it may be
assumed as a given. It is enough to say that from Rousseau through Babeuf and
Saint-Simon and Fourier and Comte and Proudhon and Marx and Bakunin and
Kropotkin and Sorel and the Webbs and the Coles and Lenin and Trotsky and Che
Guevara -- to mention only a few -- the alienation has blazed ominously. These
thinkers have not formed a homogeneous group, of course; they have had many
differences both about the particular socialist model that should be put in the
place of capitalism and about method. But they have held in common an abiding
conviction that modern society is sick and that in one way or another it must
be set right by a collectivist solution.
In his famous speech about the relationship between the
white and black races in America, Booker T. Washington used the metaphor of the
hand. He said that for some purposes the races were as separate as the fingers
and that for others they were as united as the palm.10 The same could be said about the many forms of
anti-bourgeois thought since Rousseau. They have been separate in concrete
ideology, but they have shared a common impulse. This is well illustrated in
Ludwig von Mises' account of the intellectual migration of Sombart, who in
succession belonged passionately to the anti-capitalist German Historical
School, the Marxists and the Nazis. "The straight line that leads from the
work of the Historical School to Nazism cannot be shown in sketching the
evolution of one of the founders of the School," Mises wrote, "for
the protagonists of the Methodenstreit era had finished the course of
their lives before the defeat of 19l8 and the rise of Hitler. But the life of
the outstanding man among the School's second generation illustrates all the
phases of German university economics in the period from Bismarck to Hitler.
Werner Sombart was by far the most gifted of Schmoller's students. He was only
twenty-five when his master...entrusted him with the job of reviewing and
annihilating Wieser's book, Der naturliche Wert...Twenty years later
Sombart boasted that he had dedicated a good part of his life to fighting for
Marx. When the War broke out in 19l4, Sombart published a book, Handler und Helden (Hucksters
and Heroes). There, in uncouth and foul language, he rejected everything
British or Anglo-Saxon, but above all British philosophy and economics, as a
manifestation of a mean jobber mentality. After the war, Sombart revised his
book on socialism...While the pre-war editions had praised Marxism, the tenth
edition fanatically attacked it, especially on account of its 'proletarian'
character and its lack of patriotism and nationalism...Then, when the Nazis
seized power, he crowned a literary career of forty-five years by a book on
German Socialism. The guiding idea of this work was that the Fuhrer gets his
orders from God."11
The Revolutionary generation. The generation of
the "Founding Fathers" in the United States does not seem to have
been touched by deep cultural alienation. If such a feeling existed, I do not
know of it. It will have occurred outside the intellectual mainstream. There is
nothing in the writings of Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton or Franklin or
Adams that is akin to the alienation we have just reviewed -- or that we will
see in the rest of American history. They argued heatedly among themselves,
showing fierce political partisanship, and they reflected diverse philosophical
approaches; but there was no hostility to the main cultural environment.
American "liberalism" has often tried to debunk
those years, since the legend that has surrounded them in the public mind has
been a major support for classical liberalism. I certainly don't wish to join
in that debunking. But if we are to understand the rest of American history it
is important to take into account the fact that there was considerable division
within Americans at that time. It wasn't the kind of division that involves
cultural alienation, but neither was there a thorough-going consensus. The
foundation wasn't really there to justify Thomas Paine's ecstatic feeling that
Americans could make a completely new beginning: "We have every opportunity
and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on
the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over
again."13
The immense achievement of George Washington was that by
sheer doggedness he was able to succeed despite the apathy and mediocrity of
many of his contemporaries. Beveridge said in his Life of John Marshall
that "throughout the (Revolutionary) war, the neglect and ineffectiveness
of the States, even more than the humiliating powerlessness of Congress, time
and again all but lost the American Cause."14 He reported that in a letter to his nephew Washington wrote
sadly about "great bodies of military in pay that never were in camp;
...immense quantities of provisions drawn by men that never rendered...one
hour's service... I am wearied to death all day... at the conduct of the
militia, whose behavior and want of discipline has done great injury to the
other troops." Washington complained of Pennsylvania's poor support of the
war: "It is a matter of astonishment to every part of the continent, to
hear that Pennsylvania, the most opulent and populous of all the States, has
but twelve hundred militia in the field, at a time when the enemy are
endeavoring to make themselves completely masters of, and to fix their winter
quarters in, her capital." He wrote that the people of that state gave him
little assistance and were either "totally disaffected or in a kind of Lethargy." We see from all this that the success of
the Revolution was not caused by the equal industry and devotion of all
Americans alive at that time.
Even during the years of constructive work after the
Revolution there were bitter personal animosities and a rising party
factionalism. The pamphlets and newspapers of the early years were virulent in
their attacks on public men. Violent disputes sprang up between such men as
Hamilton and Jefferson. We know, of course, that Hamilton was killed in a duel
with Aaron Burr. Burr himself, although he almost won the Presidency in 1800,
was later tried for treason. The Whiskey Rebellion challenged the new
government; foreign interests tried to embroil the United States in the war in
Europe on the side of France; the Alien and Sedition Act produced widespread
anger; and during the War of 1812 there was significant anti-war agitation.
This fragmentation is relevant when we ask why there was
not to be an overpowering classical liberal consensus that would deflect an
incipient cultural alienation and would point toward solutions to the emerging
national issues. But at least we do not see during the years of the Founding
Fathers the type of cultural dissatisfaction we see later. Benjamin Franklin
was older than the rest of the Founding Fathers, but he is an excellent example
of the rough-and-tumble, non-alienated orientation of the leading men of the
eighteenth century. Franklin was an intellectual of the first rank; he was
proclaimed in Europe as one of the leading scientists of the time. But he felt
no sharp sensitivity and no proclivity toward being easily bruised. He lived in
an imperfect world, but he took it in stride and dished out as much as he took.
This is clear in his Autobiography, which should be read in contrast
immediately before or after reading Thoreau' s Walden or Emerson's
essays. Franklin makes clear his own free-wheeling spirit when he tells of
having constantly jeopardized his health by consorting with "low
women."15 He
exhibits no bruises as he tells of friends who borrowed money and never repaid
it, or about his abortive arrangements with Governor William Keith that
stranded him in England without any of the promised letters of credit or of
introduction. Unlike many a later intellectual, he did not spend his time in
England writing a bitter existentialist novel; he simply enjoyed himself to the
hilt and worked to earn enough to buy his passage home. I am amused when he
tells of his courtship of a girl and his refusal to marry her when her parents
wouldn't mortgage their house to get money to pay off the debts on his printing
business. He also tells how he persuaded the legislature to establish a system
of paper money and how he then got the contract to print that money. Benjamin
Franklin is one of history's best examples of a type of unalienated
intellectual who is both in the world and of it and who feels no separation
from his fellows. To a somewhat lesser degree perhaps, this was true of the
other leading men of his time, most of whom were also intellectuals.
No doubt these men were "alienated" from George
The generation of Emerson and Thoreau. Within a
few years a startling change occurred in American intellectuality. An abiding
unhappiness set in. Before the new Republic was given a chance, men with a new
and tender sensitivity began to declare it and the culture upon which it was
based sick. The "soldiery of dissent" came into being.
Henry David Thoreau cultivated beans and his
"radical solitude" beside Walden Pond outside Concord. Just a few
years after the shot was fired that was "heard around the world,"
Thoreau looked out upon Concord society and commented darkly that "most
men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and
mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse
labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them... He has no
time to be anything but a machine."16 We hear a very different voice from Franklin's when the
deeply sensitive Thoreau speaks of a world of "...lying, flattering, voting,
contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an
atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor
to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import
his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something
against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a
stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in a brick bank; no matter
where, no matter how much or how little. I sometimes wonder that we can be so
frivolous." He said that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation."
Accordingly, Thoreau was alienated against the cultural
tone of his time. "What does our Concord culture amount to?" he
asked. "There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for
the best or for very good books even in English literature... Even the college
bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little
or no acquaintanceship with the English classics." After commenting in
question form that "one who has just come from reading perhaps one of the
best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it?"
he adds an observation strikingly similar to the lament I quoted earlier from
Tacitus: "Our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very
low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins."
There is something very different in Thoreau from the
generation of Franklin and the Founding Fathers. He stands apart, a spectator
to the people among whom he lives, profoundly unhappy with his fellows. By his
solitary life at Walden Pond he has withdrawn into a world of his own. This
isn't to say that his is not a valuable world, a world of perceptions and of
love of life and of nature that has been an inspiration to countless readers
since. But it is a world in which his radical solitude senses agonizingly the
trivialization of life around him.
He did not formulate an ideological critique expressing a
theory that embodied the alienation. This came later in American intellectual
history. He was neither a socialist nor a twentieth-century
"liberal." This is apparent in his statements about philanthropy and
poverty that show that he had struck no alliance with the have-not and had not undergone
a change in values to accommodate such an alliance. Unlike a later socialist or
modern liberal, he was able to write that "if I knew for a certainty that
a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I
should run for my life." And he could write of the poor that "often
the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It
is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he
will perhaps buy more rags with it." He could say that "philanthropy
is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it
is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it." He
continued, “Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become
one of the worthies of the world."
Thoreau told of his affinity for "the philosophy of
India." Although this would have created a tendency toward alienation from
his own culture, his alienation came before any sort of socialist theory. His
ideology was not yet anti-capitalist, but the alienation, fed by Thoreau's
intellectual origins, led within a generation to an anti-capitalist rationale.
This suggests that the substantive problems in our culture that I examined in
Chapter 9 and that he stressed in his writing were meaningful contributing
causes to alienation and then to the Left, even though in my opinion there have
been even more important causes. The alienation came first, then socialism; not
socialism and then alienation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a slightly older man, shared
Thoreau's feelings. Again there is a vast change from Benjamin Franklin's
energetic insensitivity. Emerson, like Thoreau, was a man of introversive
sensibility. He was far enough removed from the rough-and-tumble to judge life
and find it wanting. He had formed no doctrinaire anti-capitalist position yet,
either; but nevertheless he saw much that he abhorred: "The young man, on
entering life, finds the way to lucrative employments blocked with abuses. The
ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple to the
borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. The employments of commerce are
not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less genial to his faculties; but these
are now in their general course so vitiated by derelictions and abuses at which
all connive, that it requires more vigor and resources than can be expected of
every young man, to right himself in them; he cannot move hand or foot in them.
Has he genius and virtue? the less does he find them fit for him to grow in...;
he must forget the prayers of his childhood and must take on him the harness of
routine and obsequiousness...The general system of our trade is a system of
selfishness; is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature; is not
measured by the exact law of reciprocity, much less by the sentiments of love
and heroism, but is a system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness,
not of giving but of taking advantage...The sins of our trade belong to no
class, to no individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Everybody
partakes, everybody confesses -- with cap and knee volunteers his confession,
yet none feels himself accountable."17
There is apparent in this passage the same deep
dissatisfaction with the life around him that we saw in Thoreau but did not see
a generation before. And yet, Emerson has refrained from
"scapegoating" the problem; neither he nor Thoreau has divided the
world into good and bad or into classes, blaming one and exonerating the other:
the abuses are abuses "at which all connive." Emerson's
writing does not yet reflect an anti-capitalist opposition to commerce as such:
business, he says, is "not intrinsically unfit for a man." He is
alienated, but is still far short of Marx or Rousseau or Proudhon, say, in his
formulation of ideology. This isn't to deny that he had a deep personal
commitment to a philosophy of Christian simplicity and love, and that some of
his passages yearn for the day when "love would rule" and government
would be unnecessary. Emerson, like Thoreau, had intellectual roots that
predisposed him to alienation. But both were pre-"liberal" and
pre-socialist.
Emerson went beyond simply stating the alienation as it
affected him. He went on to describe the broad intellectual movement that felt
as he and Thoreau did. This movement was a reaction by a good many people who
felt the alienation, withdrew into themselves and then came back into society
with "a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world." The
alienation and withdrawal are both apparent in Emerson's statement that
"it is when your facts and persons grow unreal and fantastic by too much
falsehood, that the scholar flies for refuge to the world of ideas, and aims to
recruit and replenish nature from that source." He said in 1844 that
"there was in all the practical activities of New England for the last
quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the
social organizations. There is observable throughout, the contest between
mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful
and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual f acts."
We can hardly assign anything hard-and-fast to this
dating, but his reference would take us back to 1819. It is at that time that
he says the alienation and withdrawal began.
Emerson went on to say that the "man of tender
conscience," having felt the need to withdraw, came back into American
life with a "great activity of thought and experimenting... appearing in
temperance and nonresistance societies; in movements of abolitionists and of
socialists; and in very significant assemblies called Sabbath and Bible
Conventions; composed of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery
of dissent." He exclaimed: "What a fertility of projects for the salvation
of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming, and another
that no man should buy or sell, that the use of money was the cardinal evil;
another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation...
Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in
farming, and the tyranny of man over brute nature; ...Others attacked the
institution of marriage as the fountain of social evils." Elsewhere he
wrote that "in the history of the world, the doctrine of Reform had never
such scope as at the present hour."
With regard to almost the same period, C.S. Griffin cites
the wide variety of projects about which Emerson spoke: "During the years
from 1830 to 1860 a host of reformers in a variety of reform movements together
examined and attacked every American institution, every idea, every conceivable
sin, evil, or burden of suffering." He points to the movement against
slavery and that against the drinking of liquor; the opposition to
prostitution; the anti-Catholic agitation; the movement to redeem criminals and
help the mentally incompetent; the public school movement; various
communitarian socialist societies; the drive for women's rights; the dietary
movement; the opposition to monogamous marriage; the effort to put a Bible in
every home; and to such "fads and fancies" as “phrenology,
hydropathy, mesmerism,... spiritualism, and free love."18
All of this was widely varied in its forms, but it was,
in a more general sense, a single phenomenon. As such, several observations are
pertinent to it:
The development of ideology. Those who have felt
this alienation have never totally come together. If we are to refer to them
under a common heading, we have to stress their agreements without emphasizing
their differences. But, of course, this is a part of acknowledging the
existence of any ideology; diversity always remains despite a number of shared
elements. We are justified in speaking of the birth of American
"liberalism" (which I will refer to as "modern liberalism"
to distinguish it from classical liberalism). By the end of the nineteenth
century the intellectual community in the United States had developed a
substantial homogeneity that shared the alienation and developed a rationale to
express it.
The coalescence toward a "school" that would
express the alienation is represented by the letter Henry Adams wrote to his
brother Charles Adams in 1862: "What we want is a school. We want a national set of young men
like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only in politics, but in
literature, in law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the
country -- a national school of our own generation. “And that," he
continued, revealing his own alienation, "is what America has no power to
create... It's all random, insulated work, for special and temporary and
personal purposes. And we have no means, power or hope of combined action for
any unselfish end."19
He was wrong, of course. America did have the power to
create such a school. The consensus developed rapidly as the years went by. By
the l890s, the classical liberal sociologist William Graham Sumner at Yale felt
outnumbered by those who shared the alienation. By this time it had produced a
clearly anti-capitalist critique and was going to Europe for its ideas. The
pre-Civil War agitation included several socialist communities. Brook Farm and
several other "Fourierist phalanxes... sprang up in the l840s,"
Griffin says. "In 1851, Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews began
Modern Times, a community of anarchists on Long Island." Elsewhere, "the great goal of the Oneida
leaders was not merely to create a single happy community, but to convert the
world -- or at least the United States -- to social and Christian
perfectionism.” Hopedale, too, “begun in
1841, was an experiment in Christian socialism.”
If we read Uncle Tom’s Cabin not just for its
story or for its relation to the slavery issue, we see that Harriet Beecher
Stowe expressed through her characters a number of anti-capitalist comments
(although they did not all necessarily represent her own view; some, expressed
by Southern characters in the story, repeated the argument that some
pro-slavery thinkers were raising against what they perceived as the “wage
slavery” system of the North) .One character said "I've got just as much
conscience as any man in business can afford to keep, -- just a little, you
know, to swear by, as 'twere." Another commented: “Look at the high and
the low, all the world over, and it's the same story, -- the lower class used
up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper. It is so in England; it is
so everywhere; and yet all Christendom stands aghast, with virtuous
indignation," the Southerner said, "because we do the thing in a
little different shape from what they do it." In an exchange between a
Northerner and a Southerner, Stowe has them agree on the fundamental premise.
The Southerner said that "the slave-owner can whip his refractory slave to
death, -- the capitalist can starve him to death." The Northerner replied
that "it's no kind of apology for slavery, to prove that it isn't worse
than some other bad thing.”20
The following passage spoken by one of the characters in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin is filled with a romantic emotion similar to Marx's
contemporaneous outpouring in the Communist Manifesto: "There is a
mustering among the masses, the world over; and there is a dies irae
coming on, sooner or later. The same thing is working in Europe, in England,
and in this country. My mother used to tell me of a millennium that was coming,
when Christ should reign, and all men should be free and happy. "
Jack London was an American novelist who wrote The
Call of the Wild and many other books. In some of his writing, the
alienation waxed as a violently revolutionary creed. His novel The Iron
Heel looked ahead futuristically to a socialist revolution that was to
occur in the United States in 1912. The revolution was crushed by the
"iron heel of the Plutocracy," but a later revolution succeeded. The
central figure in the novel was a socialist revolutionary hero who was
strikingly similar to the heroic capitalist figures later portrayed by Ayn
Rand. In describing him, London reflected the mixture of elitism and democracy
that has been characteristic of the alliance between the intellectual and the
have-nots; the description also illustrates the relationship even of left-wing
socialism with Nietzschean superiority: "I have said that he was afraid of
nothing. He was a natural aristocrat -- and this in spite of the fact that he
was in the camp of the non-aristocrats. He was a superman, a blond beast such
as Nietzsche has described and in addition he was aflame with democracy."21
About the same time, Edward Bellamy returned from a year
in Germany to write the classic Looking Backward, which now appears in
the Modern Library series. Bellamy's book is partly novel, mainly polemic for a
utopian socialist conception. In it, Bellamy laid the foundation for the
Eastern "Nationalist" wing of the later Populist movement. This wing
espoused socialism and was opposed within Populism by the followers of Henry
George, among others. Bellamy's book tells the story of a man who goes to sleep
in a basement bedroom one night in 1887 only to awaken in the year 2000. His
house had burned down over him during the night and his bedroom had been
covered by ashes. He is discovered there over a century later -- a Rip Van
Winkle of socialist literature. Emerging, he discovers a perfect socialist
society in which communal effort provides for all material needs and there is a
leisured life of the mind. The intellectual is given the highest honors:
"The highest of all honors in the nation, higher than the presidency,
which calls merely for good sense and devotion to duty, is the red ribbon
awarded by the vote of the people to the great authors, artists, engineers,
physicians, and inventors of the generation."22 There is no anti-social behavior, since greed has been made
obsolete. Only goodwill motivates the governors. But looking back, the main
character sees by way of comparison the brutish system of the nineteenth
century when capitalism prevailed. Bellamy's alienation against his own time is
made abundantly clear.
The literature of alienation was growing and expressed a
decidedly anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois rationale. Theodore Dreiser wrote An
American Tragedy expressly for the purpose, he said, of demonstrating
"the evil of capitalism."23 Ayn
Rand describes it as telling the story of "a rotten little weakling who
murders his pregnant sweetheart, a working girl, in order to attempt to marry a
rich heiress." The story is well told, but I agree with Rand when she says
that the story doesn't make a case against capitalism. And yet, as a link in
the intellectual history I am tracing here, it doesn't matter whether it
successfully does this or not. It is enough that Dreiser and many others thought
it did.
It was also during this period that Thorstein Veblen
wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class in which he applied Rousseau 's
analysis to American culture. The essence of his theory is in the passage that
says that "during that primitive phase of social development, when the
community is still habitually peaceable, perhaps sedentary, and without a
developed system of individual ownership, the efficiency of the individual can
be shown chiefly and most consistently in some employment that goes to further
the life of the group...When the community passes from peaceable savagery to a
predatory phase of life...(t)he activity of the men more and more takes on the
character of exploit; and an invidious comparison of one hunter or warrior with
another grows continually easier and more habitual."24 This, of course, harks back to the idea that man's origins
were simple and brotherly, and that he has developed his greed and vanity
because of private property and the competitive system. This is pure Rousseau --
and we may estimate that it has been reiterated tens of thousand of times by
social critics during the past two and a half centuries. Veblen extends the
argument into a sociological critique that surpasses Rousseau's. This in turn
has been elaborated and rendered even more subtle by later followers of
Rousseau -- as, for example, Charles Reich in The Greening of America. Veblen took
every aspect of our national life and through his discussion of "invidious
comparison" and "conspicuous consumption" demonstrated the
impact of competitiveness and social striving. There was, of course, a
value-judgment hostile to such a culture implicit in his discussion. It is
interesting by way of comparison to notice that the classical liberal John
Bright drew just the opposite conclusion. When Bright visited Turkey in the
1830s and saw the filth and degradation there, he commented unfavorably that
"there exists no spirit of emulation amongst them."25 Bright saw emulation
as a necessary motivating force that leads to progress and civilization. To
Veblen, it was the main feature of a warped value system. The climate of opinion intellectually
had come to the point at which in 1894 Henry D. Lloyd was able to speak of
"the host of ills which now form the staple theme of our novelists and
magazinists."26 C. M. Destler's American
Radicalism 1865-1901 tells about a variety of anti-capitalist movements,
along with several others that were not as explicitly favorable to socialism.
"During the late eighties an urban, eastern, American-born socialist
movement attracted interest in the cities and farming areas of the West. Known
as Nationalism, it developed...(from) Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.” Bellamy's movement took its place as a
faction within Populism. Populism involved both socialist and anti-socialist
elements, but on the whole it was "committed to government intervention in
business and to limited experiments with state socialism as a means of
combating... monopoly." At the same time, a series of cooperative
communities continued the striving in that direction that had begun before the
Civil War.
The mixed nature of Populism gives the impression that it
was a people's movement and that its roots were in earlier Jeffersonian
democracy. To a point, these impressions are true: Labor and agrarian elements
gave it a democratic base, and Populism picked up on the Jacksonian distrust of
financial interests that became so strong when Jackson fought against the
re-chartering of the second United States Bank. But in other important ways,
the impressions are false: The role of the alienated intellectual was of major
importance in Populism; and the distrust of financial interests -- if
generalized into a distrust of capitalism and into a call for large-scale
governmental intervention -- was a massive departure from the classical liberal
commitment of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian faith.
Strong elitism appeared in the thinking of Burnette
Haskell, who tried to make the Knights of Labor a revolutionary force. This is
evident in his comments that "we found that the masses of working men were
densely ignorant, cowardly and selfish... Any pretext will do (when the time
comes to strike) that will rouse the people." Such sentiments were not
democratic, but elitist.
Destler says that Henry Demarest Lloyd, a
""Fabian socialist... was the most outstanding intellectual
identified with the American labor movement in the early nineties, with the
possible exception of Henry George." There were indigenous non-socialist
factors in modern liberalism as it developed, but we need to appreciate how
much the alienated intellectual interjected an anti-capitalist critique and
imported socialist ideology from Europe. This occurred even though many
intellectuals chose to work pragmatically within the American political system
without declaring themselves socialist in the way the Fabian Society in England
was doing.
So far, I have referred to an assortment of individuals.
But there was a common "formative experience" taking place that
constitutes the most important factor in American intellectual history. This
consisted of the migration of several thousand American doctoral candidates to
European universities -- mainly in Germany and secondarily in England -- during
the last third of the nineteenth century. This migration finalized the
coalescence toward a strongly anti-capitalist rationale as an overlay for the
already-existing alienation. Because of the influences at work in German
education, it led to the decision by a majority of American intellectuals to follow
a gradualistic, non-violent and non- Marxist course. These were the attributes
of the German Historical School. The Historical School also gave the impulse to
the intensely empirical methods that have been followed by American social
science ever since.
Eric Goldman's Rendezvous With Destiny is an
excellent history of modern liberalism [Note in 2003: This praise is
mitigated by the comments I make about Goldman’s presentation in my later book
on modern liberal thought. But Goldman’s
reporting is certainly on the mark about the aspect being discussed here.] In
it, he reports that "by the Nineties a large proportion of the ambitious
young academics were seeking their Ph.D's in Europe...Some went to England,
where the attack on Spencerianism (the classical liberal views of Herbert
Spencer) was far more advanced than in the United States. Most went to
Germany...The leading German scholars were teaching the 'Historical'
approach."27 He
mentions that in 1914 "Germany, on its part, was sending 'Historical'-minded
Ph.D's back to America by the hundreds," while in England "the sons
of men who had been excited by Ruskin and Morris now had available the still
more heady wine produced by Graham Wallas, George Bernard Shaw, and, above all,
H. G. Wells." In Jurgen Herbst's The German Historical School in
American Scholarship, these observations are reinforced by the statistic
that "between the years 1820 and 1920 nearly nine thousand American
students set sail for Europe to enter the lecture halls, seminars, and laboratories
of German Universities."28 The great bulk went during the ascendancy of the Historical
School. This appears clearly from Herbst's comment that "soon after 1870
American students of the liberal arts and the social sciences began going to
Germany in large numbers." The migration was especially to the University
of Berlin: "It was the University of Berlin to which the largest number of
Americans came during the nineteenth century."
Three major intellectual influences were present in
Germany during the last part of the nineteenth century: the Historical School,
Marxism and the Bismarckian program. Each of these had some influence on
American intellectual development. As to the first, Herbst tells us that
"the extent of the influence of the historical school on the
German-trained social scientist may be seen in the results of an inquiry
conducted by Professor Farnam of Yale shortly after the turn of the century...
Of the more than 80 who specified what they regarded the most important
influence on their thinking, 30 listed the historical school, 23 the scientific
and historical method, 15 the 'point of view,' and 8 the theory of state
intervention." He says fourteen "referred to Professor Bohm-Bawerk's
Vienna School" (the strongly pro-capitalist "Austrian School of
Economics"), but goes on to say that "most of these stressed its
resemblances rather than its contrast to the German school."
I will devote most of my attention to the Historical
School because of the importance of its influence, but so that we don't lose
sight of them it will be well to consider first the Marxist and Bismarckian
influences. Of the Marxists, Ludwig von Mises has written that "the only
serious adversaries whom the Schmoller School (the Historical School) had to
fight in Germany were the Marxists." He was referring to "the Marxian
party of the Social-Democrats." Until 1875 German socialism had been
divided between the followers of Marx and of Lassalle, but in that year the two
factions had united in the Social Democratic Party.29 Schumpeter says that in 1891 the Social-Democrats opted
decisively for Marxism.3O In their anthology of socialist thought,
Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders report that "Germany was to become, in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, the virtual headquarters of the
world-wide socialist movement."31 They add -- and this is especially important for the
intellectual history we are tracing -- that "the rise of socialism in
Germany attracted many intellectuals." Marxism was the most prominent of
these socialist elements. It is perhaps significant that before he obtained his
doctorate at Harvard the Negro intellectual W. E. B. Dubois studied at the
University of Berlin for two years (1892-1894) under Schmoller of the
Historical School.32 He later became a Marxist, as did Sombart,
writing Black Reconstruction, which Goldman has described as so
strong that it "could have been written in Moscow."
The influence of Bismarck provokes disagreement among
those who have studied it as to whether it should be classified as
"socialist." Geoffrey Bruun has argued that "the forceful
Bismarck... had no liking for democracy or socialism" and that he
"determined to destroy the Social Democratic Party before it grew strong
enough to constitute a menace." Bruun summarized Bismarck's program by
saying" his aims were: (1) to cripple the Social Democratic Party by
repressive decrees; (2) to placate the discontented workingmen who voted
Socialist by introducing legislation which would ease their grievances; and (3)
to make the imperial government financially independent of state contributions
by erecting a high protective tariff on imports." With regard to the
social legislation, Bruun said that "it is not without interest to note
that the autocratic and conservative Bismarck anticipated by more than twenty
years the social legislation later enacted by the Liberal-Labor coalition in
Great Britain and by the Republican-Socialist bloc in France." Goldman
makes a similar assessment when he says that "study in Germany also meant
living in a country where Bismarck's anxiety to undermine socialism was
bringing about an exciting series of state-sponsored reforms." We should
pause, though, even while we note Goldman's interpretation of Bismarck as
anti-socialist, to consider that Goldman is almost certainly wrong when he
implies that it was an anti-socialist preemption by Bismarck that captured the
sympathy of the American scholars studying in Germany. We have already seen the
alienation within the American intellectual community. We have also seen that
among the German intellectuals, who presumptively had the greatest influence
upon the students, the overwhelming majority weren't anti-socialist at all.
They were, rather, Historicist, Marxist or Lassallean. It is relevant to notice
that Goldman bases his evaluations on a peculiarly narrow [although commonly
held] definition of "socialism," since he defines it as a program of
the direct state ownership of industry.
Ludwig von Mises, on the other hand, looks on Bismarck
from a classical liberal perspective. He sees him as essentially socialist.
Mises says that "the government of Bismarck began to inaugurate its Sozialpolitik,
the system of interventionist measures such as labor legislation, social
security, pro-union activities, progressive taxation, protective tariffs,
cartels and dumping" and explains that this was in keeping with
Schmoller's thinking. "Schmoller and his friends and disciples advocated
what has been called state socialism; i.e.,
a system of socialism – planning -- in which the top management would be
in the hands of the Junker aristocracy. It was this brand of socialism at which
Bismarck and his successors were aiming." The connection between
Bismarck's administration and the gradualistic socialism of the Historical School
is referred to also by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy when he reports that "ideas and proposals normally came to
the bureaucracy from its teachers at the universities, the 'socialist of the
chair."' These were the professors about whom Herbst has said that
"the members of the Verein as a whole were close enough to the
socialist program to be tagged Kathedarsocialisten
-- professorial socialist -- by friend and foe alike." He says that a
majority of the Verein fur Socialpolitik rejected explicit socialism,
"preferring to base their reforms entirely on science," but that
others "worked at developing a theory of state intervention, and did not
hesitate to call themselves state socialists... In the social legislation of Bismarck
they saw their theory put into practice."
These things make it hard for me to agree that Bismarck
was an anti-socialist influence, especially with regard to his influence on the
American intellectuals who studied under the Historical School. When, as Herbst
says, "the new economists in the American Economic Association echoed the
pronouncements of the Verein fur Socialpolitik," they echoed a
mixture of influences. All the influences were favorable to a high degree of
state intervention merging into gradualistic socialism; and all were touched,
too, by an underlay of intensely anti-bourgeois feeling. This combination of
elements has continued within American liberalism throughout the twentieth
century, although the implicit socialism and alienation finally surfaced, as an
overtly socialist spinoff, in the New Left.
Our discussion of the first two influences -- Marxism and
Bismarck -- has already given us some
awareness of the Historical School itself. The Historical School was the third
and by far the most important influence on the Americans studying in Germany.
We have just seen the connection between the Historical School and Bismarck's
position as commented upon by Mises and Schumpeter. We have seen that many
regarded themselves as socialists, and that all were "close enough"
to the socialist point of view to be called "socialists of the
chair."
The Historical School had
several additional aspects:
The German Historical
School took its place in this enormous controversy over method. It
"insisted on rigorously defined, specialized subject matter, taught by
experts trained in investigation" and "originated the cult of the
monograph and the research journal." It established the positivist tone of
American social science that continues today. Apart from its intense
specialization and empiricism, the School argued that "society was ever in
flux, and could not be caught, as it were, in static formulae." This
involved a commitment to cultural relativism. The School urged that each epoch,
each culture, should be studied in the context of its own mixture of
ingredients. It denied that universal laws of economics or sociology are
discoverable. At the same time, it believed that laws of cultural change -- of
transition from one state of culture to another -- were in fact discoverable.
The relativism gave rise
to a bitter argument with classical liberalism. If we read James Mill's earlier
Essay on Government, we are impressed by how much he believed he was
formulating definite truths about human behavior. The same is true of Frederic
Bastiat's Harmonies of Political Economy. Herbert Spencer could argue
that there is a substratum of realities that legislators should understand
before they legislate.33 To each of these
classical liberals and to others, including the Austrian School with Menger and
Bohm-Bawerk, the laws of life pointed to freedom as the form of social
organization compatible with reality. In our own time, Ludwig von Mises, the
leading member of the Austrian School in the next generation, and Ayn Rand, who
picked up a great deal from Mises, have continued to approach classical liberal
theory in this way.
When the German Historical
School denied the possibility of an economic science, and especially one
leading to laissez-faire capitalism, it did two things: first, it raised
some important and for the most part legitimate criticisms of the existing
classical liberal methodology; and second, it used its cultural relativism as a
debunking instrument. Relativism has often been used by the Left in modern
thought as a method of attack. These two aspects are closely associated, but
should be carefully distinguished: the modern scientific mentality leads to
relativism, and those who view this mentality sympathetically, as I do, see
some important truth in the relativism; but there is nothing about relativism
that, outside the tactical framework of nineteenth and twentieth century political
thought, should any more support anti-capitalist than pro-capitalist views. A
cynical relativism can be a nihilist tool equally against capitalism or
socialism. A more constructive relativism simply leaves them stripped of
dogmatism, which in turn makes them debate values and their implementation.
American scholars
studying in Germany picked up both of these aspects. They adopted a genuinely
scientific approach, even though this has often been abused, leading to what
Hayek has so aptly described as "scientism." But they have often used
relativism, also, as an ideological ploy. American relativist movements can
only be understood if both aspects are kept in mind. As it has come down to us
from the German Historical School, American social science has reflected this
dualism of real science and ideology. It is a combination we have seen in the
behavioral sciences in the recent past. Not long ago, Russell Kirk warned that
behavioral science threatened to become the new ideology; and I can understand
his warning in the context of this intellectual history and of the tone of
behavioral science in, for example, the late 1960s.
It was at this time that
modern American liberalism, which previously had been scattered among countless
movements without a common ideology, became an intellectual consensus. I don't
mean to suggest that a great many differentiated viewpoints didn’t remain
within the consensus; but it is clearly warranted to generalize that modern liberal
ideology made its appearance. The alienation had coalesced into the
"school" for which Henry Adams had yearned. Up to that time, the
thinking of the country had been mostly classical liberal; but this was
reversed, with a modern liberal consensus becoming predominant in the
intellectual community. Modern liberals often argue that their ideology is an
extension of the philosophy of Jefferson and Jackson; but this is true only to
a minor extent. Modern liberalism picked up the Jacksonian hostility to the
marriage of government and high finance (although even this continuity is
somewhat mixed when we consider the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and
Herbert Croly, which called for a marriage of big business, labor and
government). It continued to favor democratic participation (although the
alliance of an elitist intellectual group with the common man is much more tenuous
than the far more sincerely democratic views of the Jacksonian classical
liberals). But despite these continuities, modern liberalism has for the most
part involved a direct hostility to the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian outlook. Eric
Goldman joins in the facile interpretation of modern liberalism as an off-shoot
of classical liberalism, but it is worth noting that he has devoted a chapter
to the modern liberal "attack on the steel chain of ideas." This
attack involved debunking and destroying every aspect of classical liberalism.
Because of this, it makes more sense to trace modern liberalism to the
alienation of the intellectual and to its coalescence into an ideology during
the last half of the nineteenth century.
The anti-bourgeois emphasis of German Historical
School thinking was referred to by Mises when he said that "many of them
were firmly convinced that the foremost task of economists was to aid the
'people' in the war of liberation they were waging against the ‘exploiters.’”
Herbst says John W. Burgess repeated to his students at Amherst the Hegelian
doctrine that the State is "the human organ least likely to do
wrong." Herbst also quotes Richard T. Ely as having said that "it is
a grand thing to serve God in the State." Another Hegelian, Albion Small,
used the Hegelian dialectic, Herbst says, to "supersede individualistic
moral philosophy." Henry Carter Adams reflected the Historical School's
opposition to classical economics when he spoke of "the passing of the laissez-faire
dogma of classical economics." Speaking generally, Herbst says that
"for the new economists the usefulness of statistics only bolstered their
devotion to social reforms. They endorsed Wagner's and Engel's commitment to
legislative efforts, made their own adaptation of the German's advocacy of
state socialism, and proceeded to give these doctrines concrete application
through the American Economic Association." The result was that
"during the first decade of the twentieth century the University of
Wisconsin became a truly state-wide laboratory for testing a German-style union
between academic theory and legislative practice." Herbst says further
that "the American students of the German social science tended... to
regard the humanitarian motives of socialist reformers with approval... (T)hey
contrasted the humane impulse upon which the reformers acted with the
indifference to human suffering they attributed to the 'soulless' captains of
business and industry, and to the economic and social theorists who defended
them."
Early twentieth century liberal
alienation. My purpose isn't to write a complete history of American
liberal ideology. I will discuss its
elements much more fully in my later book on modern liberalism. But at this
juncture it is important to notice the direction the alienation assumed
ideologically as the American intellectual community entered the twentieth
century. (1) The alienation itself continued at a high pitch, repeating the
themes that had been so prominent since Emerson and Thoreau. (2) At the same
time, the ideology, adapting itself to the American political scene, more or
less deliberately obscured its relationship even with gradualistic socialism,
even though underneath the surface, in the literature rather than in the
politics, a significant thread of explicit socialism continued. I hesitate to
state this second point, because I believe John Stuart Mill was right when he
gave magnanimous credit to almost all viewpoints. I don't doubt the sincerity
of those who held liberal views. Nor do I doubt that they saw an important part
of the truth about American life. But it is impossible not to conclude that the
ideology put on a mask. It took on an essentially dishonest posture that
continued until the rise of the New Left in the 1960s.
The book that was perhaps the most
influential during this period was Herbert Croly's The Promise of American
Life. Eric Goldman stresses its importance in his history of American
Liberalism as having exercised a powerful influence over Theodore Roosevelt. It
is this book that illustrates the lack of candor better, perhaps, than any
other. As I read Croly's book, I had a strong impression that he was stating a
socialist theory without doing so openly. To evaluate this, there is no
substitute for reading the book in full. In its endless euphemisms and
circumlocutions there is little that can be quoted, but cumulatively they
convey a consistent pressure toward a collectivist perspective. Typical of both
content and vagueness are his statements that business is worthwhile "just
in so far as industry (becomes) organized under national control for the public
benefit" and that we suffer from "a sterile and demoralizing
Americanism -- the Americanism of national irresponsibility and indiscriminate
individualism."34
Herbst tells us a good deal when he
indicates that the new liberal ideology needed "specific suggestions about
how in America a collectivist theory could be translated into a program of
political action" and says "that task was undertaken in the writings
of Herbert Croly, who as a youth had fallen under the spell of the social
theories of Auguste Comte... The
strongest influences on his thought were those of Comte, James, and the new
economists and other scholars of the ethical school... Thus Croly
trained his guns on 'the automatic harmony of the individual and the public
interest which is the essence of the Jeffersonian democratic creed.’”
Croly was an excellent writer
and an extremely intelligent man. It is correspondingly difficult to suppose
that his euphemistic style was not deliberate. This is especially true when we
keep in mind that the same lack of ideological candor has been typical of
modern liberal writing. We see it, for example, in Dow Votaw's book Modern
Corporations when he advocates a clearly collectivist view in the most
round-about manner by suggesting passingly that "the great corporation may
ultimately itself become a political or electoral unit in a vastly different
governmental structure than we know today."35 Another example is Albert William Levi's chapter in Towle's
Ethics and Standards in American Business. Levi restates R. H. Tawney's
Fabian socialist views almost verbatim without assigning any credit to
Tawney or even footnoting to him.36 This would be impossible to understand if we did not
appreciate just how essential it has been, as a tactical expedient in American
politics, for modern liberals to avoid any labeling of their doctrines as
socialist.
As I glance through my notes from Charles Forcey's The Crossroads of Liberalism, I notice two more examples of the dissimulation. Forcey says that "for the moment the New Republic men inte